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Are we losing our democracy?

A guest editorial in the NYT yesterday, May 8th,   How Will We Know when We Have Lost Our Democracy ? by Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way and Daniel Ziblatt is enough to rattle anyone's cage. On Wednesday, May 6th I woke up to make coffee, get breakfast and while that was brewing I took my blood pressure.  I have hypertension, take a daily medication that has not been that great at controlling it. My internist requested that I take my BP a couple of times a week for a more thorough check.  On Wednesday morning it was so high, I panicked.  I started out looking for a same day appointment - none available, then I made an appointment for June 18th.  That wasn't going to do much when my blood pressure was shockingly high this minute.  Finally, I had an extended telephone conversation with a triage nurse who was able to both calm me down and get a note to my doctor for the additional medication we had discussed.  I picked up this medication on Wednesday evening a...
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The Truth about AI? Sounds about right to me

This week I was introduced to Ed Zitron.  Read below.  This is the comment, with minor edits to make sense in this space, that I posted after reading Ed's essay, The Slop Society , for his January 17th newsletter. I've never had a Facebook account.  I've had an unused Instagram account and, as I was reading Ed's newsletter, I deleted Instagram from my phone.  For some reason, perhaps my natural distrust of some things (I'm not necessarily proud of this), I have had a chip on my shoulder against Silicon Valley and their products and, just generally. their way of being.  The tech industry has destroyed San Francisco (at one time an astonishingly beautiful city - feel free to disagree - unfortunately, I also remember the hippy era).  I also believe that Silicon Valley and the tech industry is the foundation of the grotesque inequality we have in our country.  I believe Donald Trump and his tech oligarchs like Zuckerberg, Altman, Bezos, Musk, et.al. use il...
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No. 1 seed goes down ... bad

The title comes from the New York Times Athletic headline this morning; that is, Sunday, January 19th.      Last night, as I could not sleep and my head was swimming with thoughts and sentences, I knew I had to write something. Our football team, the Detroit Lions, lost to the Washington Commanders 45-31 while playing at home, in Detroit, and after winning 15 games during their regular NFL football season.  I turned the game off in the early minutes of the 4th quarter just after the Lions threw their third interception in the game while trying to run one of the trick plays for which they have become famous.  They didn't need to run that trick play.  Rather, in my view, they should have got down to their workman-style signature play.  Ten yard pick-up pass here, twelve yard pick-up there, an eight yard run ... and so on.  They were behind in the score, but they still had time.  Washington was playing other worldly football but there was still ...
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Autocracy, Inc. by Anne Applebaum

Today is October 19, 2024.  Today also marks eighteen days to the date of the US presidential election on Tuesday, November 5, 2024.  More or less, I have stopped watching the news.  For 300 million people, again more or less, this is a severe anxiety producing time and watching the news worsens anxiety tenfold.  As I write this, there is no way to know who will win the election.  The polls, which I don't read or watch, have the election split 50-50.  Despite the even odds split, many are going into the election with great confidence; that is, their candidate will win this election.  I'm not one of those people.  So I have stopped watching or reading much of the news.  Not everything, of course.  It's impossible to avoid everything. Yesterday, October 18, 2024, I read Adam Gopnik's essay in the most recent print-edition of The New Yorker , October 21, 2024, titled Reflections:  As Bad As All That, Donald Trump and the unmaking of Am...
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Dear Ethicist

This began as a letter to the weekly New York Times column Letter to the Ethicist .  I subscribe to The   Ethicist  and receive it in my email.  Sometimes I read it, sometimes I don't.  When I came upon last week's letter, I read the letter, but not the reply.  Sometimes it's like that, especially with things in my email.  For approximately the past two weeks, off and on, I had been too much in my head about my own Ethicist question, although I wasn't yet thinking of it that way.  When I read the current Letter to the Ethicist , I began to think that the Ethicist was exactly what I needed.  I scrolled to the bottom to the Contact the Ethicist and clicked on the link.  A blank page came up and I began to write.  When I finished, I hit the send button.  This is my letter.  It contains four individuals as follows: 1.  I am a character in my own ethical dilemma. 2.  The main character, my friend Helen (not her rea...
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Wrongly Investigated, Wrongfully Convicted - Three Cases

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This essay started out as a New Yorker Letter to the Editor.  Not that I had any belief my letter would be published, but I wrote it with a length and with details that made it unpublishable.  I just had more to write than any Letter to the Editor can accommodate, especially with regard to the Lucy Letby case.  When I hit the send button I knew that there was still more to write.  Here it is. To really appreciate what I am writing about, it is best to read the essays.  For sure, they are long but in each the authors make sure to keep you reading.  For non-readers, insights into the display of mean-spirited and corrupt investigations and prosecutions by the British criminal justice system may be seen by watching the four episode Masterpiece Theater docudrama  Mr. Bates vs. The Post Office ,  available on several streaming services.   Mr. Bates vs. The Post Office is closely based on actual events that began in the early 2000s, and have n...
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Book Review: The (Big) Year That Flew By

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The (Big) Year That Flew By:  Twelve Months, Six Continents and the Ultimate Birding Record by Arjan Dwarshuis, translated by Els Vanbrabant.  English translation copyright 2023 published by Chelsea Green Publishing.   This book includes a forward by Mark Obmascik, author of The Big Year:  A Tale of Man, Nature and Fowl Obsession  published February 5, 2005  Many readers are likely to have read Mark Obmascik's book or at least have seen the movie. I've read all three of the most recent big year books that I am aware of.   I published my review of Dorian Anderson's Birding Under the Influence on November 24, 2023 and linked my reviews of Noah Strycker's Birding Without Borders (December 2017) and his earlier book The Thing with Feathers (September 2017) at the end of Dorian's book review.  When I recently purchased a couple of new field guides (Flycatchers of NA and Terns of NA), I noticed Arjan Dwarshuis's big year book in the same link and thoug...
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