I started thinking about this post after I saw a PBS Special about Gunner Myrdal entitled “American Denial”. Myrdal was a famous Swedish sociologist that in the 1940s was asked by the Carnegie Foundation to study the “negro problem” in the U.S. He had a long and deep admiration of the United States and particularly the American creeds of equal chance, equal opportunity and equal justice.  He spent several years investigating before he published his foundational report.  Here is a little from Wiki about the man and his work: Myrdal believed he saw a vicious cycle in which whites oppressed negroes, and … Continue reading The American Creed..

I’m not sure what this piece of equipment is but I think it is a seeder. Whenever I look at these century old things I now marvel at the American ingenuity that it took to create it. Continue reading American Ingenuity…

I’ve heard it said the best way for Washington to create peace in the Middle East is to stop providing U.N. cover for Israel and eliminate the U.S. money that fuels Israel’s defiant behavior (more than $20.5 billion given just during the Obama administration). In effect, it’s Parenting 101: Make Israel responsible for its actions…. Toward the end of his diatribe to the GOP, Bibi offered up a simple remedy:“If Iran wants to be treated like a normal country, let it act like a normal country.”Presumably, that would include following international law. Great plan, Bibi. Heed it. SOURCE: War, War, and More War … Continue reading Parenting 101

I know jelly fish in the wild is something you don’t want to tangle with but those I encountered in the San Francisco Aquarium were very surreal… Continue reading Surreal..

I have seen two vastly different examples of American justice in the last few months. Example 1 – Five months ago it was discovered that an elected official in our county has been stealing funds from us for the last ten years. Since that time she has been free to do whatever she want while the evidence has been gathered. It seems that over the last ten years she has stolen about $400,000 in our very small county mainly by charging totally personal things like food, vacations, TVs to a county credit card. She was finally indicted this week and the trial … Continue reading The Inequality of the Current Justice System…

Those GOP yahoos have tried 50+ times to repeal it. I kinda of think it is just too late for that.  They will have to put it along side Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid as one of the”socialist” things to eliminate in the future. That is if they ever have a friend in the White House again.   Continue reading Hurry, Hurry Repeal It….

    One thing I like about my lifetime study of American history is that as Solomon said “there is nothing new under the sun”. Almost everything happening today has some corollary in the past. The John Kennedy quotes from more than fifty years ago could have just as easily been made today. It is hard for me to imagine that Kennedy was born almost a century ago.  As standards go he was a very young president much like our current one. I, like so many of my generation, will always remember him as a young man cut down in … Continue reading Looking Back to See a Path Forward…