March 23, 2025

Getting Back to Serving Humanity

When the Brahmins of Boston and Concord declared Christianity unfit for human consumption, well over a century ago in New England, they remade mankind into creatures of innate goodness and light, believing that — as Ben Franklin had put it ...

March 2, 2025

Frank Talk on Post-Christian Times

We call these times “post-Christian” because Christ’s Gospel was abandoned over the last many decades by, of all people, pastors with weak faith. Such feeble shepherds of the flock have confused social reform pushed by Godless polit...

February 9, 2025

Reaching for the Source of Meaning and Certitude

According to Macbeth, “Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing” [Shakespeare, Mac...

January 12, 2025

Meditation On a Poetic Incident

A moment in my life that returns to me as a kind of blessing is connected in an odd but wonderful way to a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In “The Day is Done” he speaks of simple, heartfelt  poems – he calls them  ...

December 29, 2024

Liberation Fever

“. . . and a time to be vigilant”          [cf. Ecclesiastes 3] The liberation fever that triggered the French and Russian revolutions evolved into an epidemic that turned many churches into cen...

November 24, 2024

Do Math and Science Add Up to Reality?

My best friend, a retired math teacher, once asked: If there were no one around, would the theorems of mathematics still exist? It is the sort of metaphysical question that he and I like to kick around: nothing simple, no topic too big. I jump in ...

November 3, 2024

The Real Purpose of Fake Liberals

The following is not intended to criticize anyone truly liberal or who keeps an open mind. It is aimed at those who pretend to be liberal but are in fact allies of the Left, which makes them Marxists. Quotation marks on the word “liberal”...

October 6, 2024

When the Left Got Its Foot in the Door to America

The current crop of leftists were accurately described over fifty years ago in a dictionary of philosophy, no less. Under “Individualism,” Oswald von Nell-Breuning, a contributor to the Philosophical Dictionary of Walter Brugger/Kenneth B...

September 22, 2024

The War With No Official Name

In 1953, I was 30 miles from Nagasaki, in the port city of Sasebo, Japan, on the way to Korea during the war there to keep communism from trampling every corner of Asia. I did not know it at the time, but Nagasaki, the second city to be A-bombed i...

September 1, 2024

Of Mysteries That Challenge the Mind, and Mysteries That Reflect Mental Incapacity

The “mindset” of those I knew in the years of my youth, when there were no computers and smartphones, may be gleaned from conversations we had in those “simpler” days. The moral clarity that prevailed in America before 1960 mu...

August 18, 2024

Faking Reality is A Bad Idea

The idea that the nature of the world can be grasped in its fullness with a purely rational method, as many a physicist and scientist believes, always makes me wonder how those who seriously take this as fact are not in some way deluding themselves (...

August 4, 2024

An American Who Became an Alien

This is a true story. It was reduced in length to a “thumbnail size” some time ago as an exercise in brevity. Such extreme reduction of a story without blurring its essential character was, I think, good practice in limiting my usua...

July 21, 2024

A 'Livable America' According to Radical Leftists

A number of celebrities and VIPs of the radical left, including one who betrayed our Vietnam veterans while they were putting their lives on the line for this country, have been warning that if President Trump returns to office, life in America will ...

July 7, 2024

Can Reason Change Reality?

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, The courage to change the things I can, And the wisdom to know the difference. – Reinhold Niebuhr Scrawled upon a college blackboard before the start of class, back around...

June 9, 2024

A Gift From God

“The Internet is a gift from God,” said my brother once, “that will save mankind from tyranny and injustice. The people now have a power to reckon with.” I think my wise old brother had forgotten that those in power control...

May 27, 2024

Memorial Remembrance

“Sacrifice is meaningless without remembrance.”               – Duane Samiento, Commander-in-Chief, VFW   In remembrance of our fallen comrades in arms, my salute and the following pl...

May 19, 2024

The Deep State and Globalism

Theodore Roosevelt spoke of an invisible government in his presidency (1901-1909). He was alluding to a hidden power behind the visible government that today is referred to as “the deep state.” It is the unofficial target of blame for act...

April 21, 2024

Voices For a Return to God

The need for a return to God is clearly evident in today’s deranged and dysfunctional world. It is a need, exceeding all others, that must be fulfilled in order to keep enemies of God from interfering with human life. Among them are men and wom...

March 31, 2024

Why is Our Culture Getting Wasted on Sleaze?

(The following is dedicated to the glory of music and the greater glory of God, whose gift it is.) I was once accused of “being negative” for downplaying goodies of pop culture. My defense, then and now, remains: how else to consider i...

March 10, 2024

A Case of Europhobia

The bias against Europeans, their descendants, and the culture they begot and advanced has been intensifying since American politics turned sharply left in the last few decades. A PBS documentary I watched in 1992 made me write the following, pre...

March 3, 2024

Message From a 'Different Planet'

Older survivors of the 20th century sometimes speak of the “different planet” that they come from. Being one myself, I can speak of what makes us “aliens” say this. The boys I hanged out with in the 1940s didn’t know ...

February 18, 2024

A Hard Look At Post-Christian Times

The Christian faith has been under attack for centuries. In the time of many still living, the war against Christianity has intensified to the level of bringing about the “post-Christian times.” Who and what Christians today need to f...

January 21, 2024

Church Leaders, Open Your Eyes!

What level of confusion, turbulence, and violence must there be in the world before church leaders who profess to be Christian, but don’t heed what Christ taught, “get it”? What does it take for them to understand that what the...

January 7, 2024

A Lesson I Got When JFK was Assassinated

In 1963, I was an intern in a Department of  Defense program that trained qualified applicants for jobs in the surging new technology then called “automatic data processing.” During the training, held at Rock Island, Illinois, I rent...

December 24, 2023

Truth Versus Words

Living through most of the 20th century has made me acquainted with the power of words to distort reality, twist the truth, and make people do what in their right mind they would not do, including things that could harm them, often tragically. Was...

December 3, 2023

Is Brainpower Equal to the Task of Creating a Better Society?

Impressed by the power of the brain to solve hard problems, intellec­tuals with credits in thinking and deficits in morality have for centuries deceived themselves and others that humans can remake themselves into better creatures than those desi...

November 19, 2023

Social Justice Bullets

From time to time some in positions of power who claim to know better than all the rest of us act aggressively to silence those who hold to the truth, as to life itself. (The two, need it be said yet again, are vitally related.) Among such power-wiel...

October 29, 2023

A View of the Creative Process Through a Musical Lens

Being a musician has made me aware of the two major ways that musical tones are ordered in the Western traditions of composition. The more common of the two refers tones to an organizing center or key, in what is called harmony, while the less pr...

October 15, 2023

Are We Better Than Our Ancestors?

Are we better (not just better off) than our ancestors? I believe it is delusional to think so. The record of history to date says no. That we are wiser, nobler, gentler, smarter people than our ancestors is hard to maintain, given recent history. Th...

October 1, 2023

Cooling the Heat on Climate

Warming and cooling, warming and cooling, warming and cooling has been a repeating pattern of earth’s climate in the tens of thousands of years of recent geologic history. I learned of these cycles and of the interglacial periods between th...

September 24, 2023

The Culture War and I

I trace the origin of my connection to the culture war to the attacks on America from self-righteous, hot-headed revolutionary leftist rebels during the 1960s, a war on this side of the Pacific Ocean while one on the other side raged in Vietnam. ...

August 27, 2023

Reality: Starting Place of Progress

Whoever swerves from the path of reality is irrevocably lost in the emptiness of illusions. – Zoltan Kodaly Radical progressives – not all of them are leftists – can’t admit, even to themselves, that beneath their profes...

July 23, 2023

'Feeling Right' About Morality

“The seat of knowledge,” said William Hazlitt (1778-1830), “is in the head, of wisdom in the heart. We are sure to judge wrong, if we do not feel right.” What can “feeling right” about knowledge mean in a head ...

July 2, 2023

Preaching in the News: An Old Tradition

“I believe that in this country the press exerts a greater and a more pernicious influence than the church...’’ wrote Thoreau in 1851. “We do not much care for, we do not read the Bible, but we do care for and we do read t...

June 11, 2023

The Effect of Utopian Fever on the Future

Whoever walked the grounds of the 1939 World’s Fair saw a new vision of the future that was a showpiece of science, engineering, and art in mutual embrace of progress. “The World of Tomorrow” was a model world of smooth efficienc...

May 28, 2023

‘Earth’s Holocaust,’ a Global Bonfire to Reckon With

“Earth’s Holocaust” is a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) that delivers enough déjà vu to make one say loudly “what else is new”? This is not another “I told you so” tale but a dee...

May 14, 2023

Death by Abortion

If the product of procreation is without value, how can anyone be sure that the postnatal child is not correspondingly devalued? If a woman has no qualm about terminating the developing child within her, is she not at risk of withholding the empat...

April 30, 2023

Varying the Constants

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. (Reinhold Niebuhr.) When I remarked, at a family gathering, that even the Catholic Church was follow...

April 2, 2023

Why Are Traditional Christians Under Attack?

The assault on traditional Christians by the pope, of all leaders, and lately by the FBI, of all agencies, calls for an honest explanation. Why is the pope turning his back on his own Church? Why is the FBI violating the guaranteed right of Ameri...

March 5, 2023

Our Moral Heritage

My brother Salvatore, a World War II veteran (deceased), was asked in 1974 to speak at a National Prayer Breakfast held at an Army supply facility where he worked. Sal was a gifted speaker who in 1982 ran for New York state senate on the Right to L...

February 26, 2023

Homily For Straying Lambs

When, on a Sunday morning, our children balked at going to church one time too many, the time had come for decisive action. They would not become junk culture addicts if we could help it. To counter the negative influence of school and media, it was ...

February 12, 2023

Where Brainpower Ends

In his essay “Spirit in the Sanctuary,” George Santayana pressed a key nerve in the relation between reality and what we can know about it: Our ideas are signs, not portions, of what exists beyond us, and it is only when experiment a...

January 22, 2023

Progress Toward Terminal Dumbness

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States [that] has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge....

December 22, 2022

The Impaired Vision of World Remakers

The natural desire of good men is knowledge. – Leonardo da Vinci The free-wheeling, self-directed explorations of my childhood, including untutored studies of nature, yielded a wealth of information about the world that I would not have rece...

December 11, 2022

Remember What it Was Like to Get a New T.V. in 1949?

One may smile, and smile, and be a villain. – Shakespeare, Hamlet T.V. was the biggest stay-at-home amusement in the late 1940s through the early '50s.  Who could believe, before then, that such a sci-fi device would on...

November 20, 2022

Music… and Life

“The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils.” – Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice I once wrote: “There is more of life in a Chopin maz...

November 11, 2022

Poisoning relations between Trump and DeSantis

Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis are allies, not rivals. Portraying them as political opponents is yet another twisted mistake in judgment that gives political gamesters something to add to their tactics for dividing America. The Trump versus DeSantis g...

October 30, 2022

Enemies of Humanity

I remember a boast from Carl Sagan, many years ago, that it would only be a matter of time that science would have everything about the world explained. He considered “spiritual” explanations “baloney” (his word). Countless ot...

September 11, 2022

Education: The End Game of Progressive Dumbing Down

The principal of my junior high school in 1940s New York was conspicuously a modern woman. She went through the hallways and presided at assemblies with stylish dresses and a smile that had to compete for attention with the sparkling sequins on her c...

August 28, 2022

Thoughts About War, Starting From a Different Era

When the “War to End All Wars” (World War I) broke out in 1914, my Sicilian father had already served in the Italian Army, had been honorably discharged, and had left his then-impoverished country to find a life in America. He wo...

August 14, 2022

Toward a Saner Government

The number of men in women “in charge of things” who grew up obsessed with “changing the world” is beyond calculation. This fixation, common among agenda activists, journalists, and assorted “reformers,” attach...

July 29, 2022

Making Sense of Our Crazy Times

You don’t have to be an old-timer to see how yesterday’s “conspiracy theories” have become today’s realities – how what was “unthinkable” yesterday has become law today. The list of flip-flops between w...

July 17, 2022

Rocking the Culture

“Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.” – Jacob Bronowski in Science and Human Values I offer the following with apologies for anything in it that might offend s...

June 26, 2022

Praise and thanks to God

In 1973 I wrote: How in heaven’s name – I COULD NOT BELIEVE IT – could the Supreme Court yield to the pressure of moral degenerates and allow the murder of children by declaring abortion legitimate and legal in Roe v. Wade...

June 19, 2022

Living Under Nazi Dictatorship

Before the COVID invasion, a story appeared in a magazine called “Military,” no longer published, about an Austrian woman who grew up under Hitler’s Nazi regime. I saved it and, in reexamining it, found that its relevan...

June 2, 2022

'Official Murder'

Some 120,000 men, women, babies, girls, and boys evaporated from the surface of the earth during the atomic blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the summer of 1945. That was the last year of the Second World War. Eight years later, during Thanksgi...

May 25, 2022

Wars and Rumors of Wars

Uncle Sam sent me to South Korea in 1953 during its war of survival against communist North Korea. Rumbles of yet another war while I was there – that would in time explode into war in Vietnam – made some of my comrades believe that a...

May 8, 2022

Roe v. Wade, a self-aborting decision

In 1973, regarding the Roe v. Wade decision, I wrote: “How in heaven’s name – I could not believe it – could the Supreme Court yield to the pressure of moral degenerates and allow the murder of children by declaring abort...

May 7, 2022

Progress by Betrayal

Totally blind to their illiberality, false “liberals” have for many decades made it their business to convince (hoodwink?) Americans into believing that in order for America to “move forward” we need to dump what it was establ...

April 10, 2022

A War You Don’t Hear About

An old hymn that religious progressives deleted from their hymnals was “Onward Christian Soldiers.” The war it called upon was not against other nations, as in the Left’s campaigns for “regime change,” but against spirit...

March 20, 2022

Planning an Exit From Reality

Global planners aiming to remake the world in their image are in fact, it seems to me, trying to reinvent reality and repeat mistakes of the past on a grand scale – mistakes that thwart efforts for a better life for the world’s inhabitant...

March 6, 2022

Sanity for Humanity

Ask any old-timer if there has been a better time for people than we’re in today, for a hint of what is possible regarding sanity for humanity. The fact is, there have been better times in the past, even before any of us were born. What ...

February 13, 2022

The War Against Humanity

Virgil famously remarked, well over 2,000 years ago: “The descent to hell is easy.” The aura of truth in that phrase persists to this day, as the latest generations of humanity continue to travel down that path. It is hard to believe ...

January 2, 2022

Homily for a Jaded America

I was a teenager during World War II, a soldier in the Korean War, a witness to America’s mid-century social storms, and a participant in the culture war that erupted thereafter and has heated to a flash-point in the current century. It might b...

December 19, 2021

Transcendent Truth

“What is Truth?” asked Pilate. [Bible, John 18:38] “Why must we search for the Truth,” asked John Cage, “why don’t we have it?" [John Cage, 1957 Darmstadt lecture on “Communication”] Truth, i...

December 1, 2021

Wreck It, then Build It Back Better

In a 1940s school in New York City . . . In the margin notes to an assignment I had turned in on my interests and hobbies, a high school teacher indicated her pleasure and approval of my interests in music, art, and “philosophizing” bu...

November 12, 2021

The Mindless Attempt to Remake America

The history and consequences of the attempt to take down America and take charge of everybody’s life has been told (some of it here, here and here), but the damning evidence has been kept from the public. There is time here only for a peek at t...

October 23, 2021

The Often-Overlooked Facts About Covid-19

Understanding of the Covid pandemic is impeded when essential facts about it are kept from the public and too many violations against common sense are committed by government and corporate officials intent on “ensuring safety.” Essential ...

October 10, 2021

Why Christianity is Here to Stay

Daily we sense the attacks multiplying of those who want to destroy the very basis of society: the natural family, respect for human life, love of country, freedom of education and business. We see heads of nations and religious leaders pandering to ...

September 12, 2021

A Sleeping Pill Called Heresy

My late brother, a World War II veteran, had a talent for getting at the heart of things and a knack for expressing his thoughts forcefully on his feet. In the Brooklyn, New York of the 1930s, he could boast that he argued with priests and took them ...

August 22, 2021

Church and State − Not Church versus State

Whenever false liberals and allied progressives were cornered with the facts about their de facto subversion of Christianity (this was before “woke times”) they countered with egalitarian clichés like “who is to say” an...

July 24, 2021

Slouching Toward Dictatorship

  “Were [our forefathers] so blind as not to perceive that the destruction of a myriad of individuals is only so much positive advantage to the mass!” − Edgar Allan Poe*   “Progressives” need to opp...

June 24, 2021

Wake-up Calls for Today from Yesterday

Before the culture war heated to a boil during the 1980s and 90s, many of us were aware that change agents were infiltrating media, school, pulpit, and entertainment. (I had been awake since my return from the war in Korea in 1955). What was going on...

June 13, 2021

The Age of Reason and the Abuse of Reason

Entering a college classroom in 1950, I noticed some pre-class graffiti on the chalkboard that read: “Damn the Absolute!” This cry of a soul lashing out at evil in the world struck a sympathetic chord. Alas, it also struck a false note. F...

May 23, 2021

A rose is not a rose is not a rose

The new trowel I used to mix a batch of potting soil had a musical ring when tapped. Nice balance, too. And the handle felt good in the hand. As I snickered over the ridiculous sale price of 99¢, thinking of clunky trowels that had cost me many ...

May 4, 2021

For the Love of Children

Through lack of understanding they remained sane. − George Orwell, 1984 An illusion of sanity prevails among the “woke” and among “great reset” specialists, including the brightest and best among corporate brain t...

April 4, 2021

Watching Big Brother

My brother served in World War 2. In 2017 he “checked out of the grand hotel,” a phrase he coined for leaving this world, having left his “kid brother” (me) a wealth of good counsel, encouragement, and files enough to fill a b...

March 11, 2021

The Choice to Trash Human Life

Is it possible that a woman who can terminate the life in her womb with no qualm or regret is at risk of withholding the love and empathy needed by the life she allows to come into the world? It may be hard to believe that there are such women, until...

February 5, 2021

The ‘Democratic’ Transformation of America

While Americans sang songs like “Pennies from Heaven” in the 1930s, John Dewey, founder of Progressive Education, was humming a tune he composed many years before: “The political and governmental phase of democracy,” his ...

December 9, 2020

Testing Positive for Coronavirus

Does anyone stop to ask what “testing positive for coronavirus” means?  To be fair about it − something not forthcoming from mainstream media – the test, if positive, shows evidence of a variant of the virus that causes t...

November 22, 2020

Equality in Freedom or Equality in Slavery?

A distinguished visitor to America in its formative years had much to say about democracy and socialism.  "Democracy," he said, "extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it.  Democracy attaches ...

October 18, 2020

A Brooklynite’s Story of America

A boy from Brooklyn who almost didn’t survive his birth made it into the world when the Empire State Building first opened its doors and Frankenstein and Dracula made their screen debuts. He grew up speaking Italian and English. Named after an ...

September 27, 2020

Music on Hold

A childhood “wannabee” of mine was that of being a composer. Life took me elsewhere however, but a strong interest in music made me a musician and kept me abreast of the progress of musical composition. During the middle of the 20...

August 23, 2020

The Neglected Matter of Reality

In an iconic song of the 1980s, Madonna tells us that “...we are living in a material world and I am a material girl...,” the chorus of the song repeating “...a material, a material, a material, a material world...” The messag...

August 2, 2020

The Unhinging of America

Since my return from the war in Korea (1950-53) I have witnessed America sink into a state of insanity unknown in its history: Kids shooting classmates at school, people like zombies gazing at little screens while they walk, stand, sit, shop, talk...

June 24, 2020

Coronavirus Derangement Syndrome

Today's yellow brick road to a coronavirus-free world is as phony as the one Dorothy took to find her way back home (in The Wizard of Oz).  Too many are acting as though they were characters in a fantasy instead of real human beings in ...

June 14, 2020

We Didn’t Fight for a Marxist America

When I returned from the war in Korea (1950-1953), fought to keep communist North Korea from taking over South Korea, our nation was a freer and better place to live in than today. But that would soon change despite the increasing benefits of technol...

May 31, 2020

A Musician’s Take on America’s Culture

Criticism of today’s pop culture has been received by some as evidence of being “negative.” But how, I must ask, can anyone be “positive” in the midst of a subculture that drops reality, truth, and beauty from minds and ...

May 14, 2020

The Scientism Virus

The perception that science is an “objective and verifiable” approach to knowledge, free of bias and beholden to no philosophy is flawed. That scientists have a firm grip on the physical world is not in dispute. But just what it is they a...

March 11, 2020

Music Abuse

Prominent among the things I’ve learned as a life-long student of music is that the “cutting edge” of the art of music has grown dull. This hit me quite hard some time ago when I tuned into a campus radio station and heard a couple ...

February 16, 2020

My High School’s Drift from Excellence Reflects the Progressives’ Corruption of Public Education

The public high school in Brooklyn, New York that I attended in the late 1940s had a student population of 10% black and 90% white from families of Italian, Irish, German, Jewish, Polish, British and other ethnic origin. Attendance and graduation exc...

January 25, 2020

A Peek at America before 1950 and the Assault by the Left

Picture a neighborhood composed of low and middle income families, each with two parents, no homeless people, no street drugs, safe to walk the streets at night. Is this the figment of an overactive imagination? Well, it is in fact a peek at a neighb...

January 1, 2020

Progressive Disorder and Injustice

It escapes too many observers that the remedy for the highly visible deficit in social progress is not government.  Government deals with the facts of life and reality; it does not alter or reinvent them. The curative is not the heart, too easil...

November 24, 2019

Dies Irae – Day of Wrath

I played Rachmaninoff’s Vocalise at the organ some years ago, as prelude music for a church service in Maine. It was conducted by a guest minister whose mix of Liberation Theology and feminism shaped her sermon, and she did not hesitate to take...

November 12, 2019

Making what difference?

"Make a difference" heads my list of vacuous popular phrases.  I pick on it because it is a conspicuously empty sound bite that serves no real purpose and tends to dull minds.  A big difference — read: improve...

October 27, 2019

The Developing Dystopia of Dumbed-down America

A song called “Lost My Marbles” by Pixie Lower & Friends (British, I believe, current around 1987), was a hint of the condition of the mainstream, approaching the turn of the century. It was a cute number with the line “Too much...

September 22, 2019

New World Odor

I once waded through an article on the coming new world order that read like a final exam essay written against the clock for a Hail Mary passing grade[i]. I mention this because of its continuing relevance to shallow thinking regarding matters of gr...

September 1, 2019

Reaching for Enlightenment

Explorer and aviator Richard E. Byrd noted how surprising it is, “approaching the final enlightenment, how little one really has to know or feel sure about...” [Alone, 1938]. Tardiness in discerning first and final things points to a c...

July 28, 2019

Abortion is an evil choice

When seeds you plant come up and there are more seedlings than you can use, it is convenient to discard the excess in favor of the number of plants you plan to care for. Some carry this weeding-out option into the domain of human population. Among...

July 12, 2019

Love of Music

A 9-year-old boy, recently taken by his grandfather to a concert of the Boston Symphony, shouted “Wow!” at the conclusion of a performance of music by Mozart, causing an audible stir in the audience. It’s the kind of musical “...

June 30, 2019

America's Detour from Sanity

My parents immigrated to an America whose economy boomed, then busted in 1929. Pop worked in the docks of New York City as a stevedore before the big crash. Mom was as passionate about raising a good family, regardless of difficulties, as she was abo...

June 8, 2019

The Marxist ‘Liberation’ Hoax

For at least a hundred years, Marxists and secular humanists have been redoing society and “making the world better” in ways that would never have worked had their scheming been known to the general public. Secretly, with foxlike stealth,...

May 12, 2019

The Need for a Moral Backbone

The sense of a vital connection to a divine Creator has apparently left many who, “wise in their own mind,” pretend to outwit their Creator. Hitler, Stalin, Mao and other monsters of history were stalwarts of that persuasion, proving how ...

April 7, 2019

America’s Road to Dystopia

Since my return to civilian life from service in Korea during the war over sixty years ago, I have witnessed America shift off its foundation. Then and now are like antipodes between two worlds, one touted “innocent” by post-60s media, ye...

March 31, 2019

What Justice Depends on - a Crash Course

With no apology to relativists for such a brazen title, I offer an important insight on justice gleaned over a great many years of observation. First off, two major problems need to be highlighted: Big Problem Number One: The human being is nat...

March 17, 2019

An Unheralded Prophet

The writing on the wall came most clearly, I think, in 1994 when Randall A. Terry said: “In 1959 it would have been unthinkable to the average American – whether Democrat, Republican or Independent – that children would be mur...

February 20, 2019

The pro-choice license to kill

What we all knew all the time has been publicly acknowledged by its former deniers — namely, that what is in a pregnant woman's womb is a child.  That child's right to live — given him by the One who made his b...

January 30, 2019

Technology cuts two ways

The explosion of an experimental nuclear bomb in New Mexico in 1945 made it blindingly clear that the Industrial Age was over.  This event showed with terrifying clarity that scientific knowledge, mathematical skill, and engineering pr...

January 13, 2019

Progressive Indoctrination in Church

I became aware that the "Head Start" program for preschool children is not simply preparation for elementary school work when this federally funded program trickled into a church in Maine during Sunday School.  I was mus...

December 23, 2018

Progress Is Not Enough

A major risk in any effort to advance progress, however defined, is not adequately considering the possible adverse consequences to the people it will affect. The worst mistake that can be made is ignoring the morality of the undertaking, direct evid...

December 5, 2018

The News Media: A Hazardous Product With No Warning Label

To be most useful, information must be accurate, straight and uncolored. This applies to news reporting as well as to any other form of communication involving the transfer of information, whether it be street directions, how to assemble a knocked-do...

December 1, 2018

Modern Intellectuals' Affinity for Nonsense

It’s a truism that things are not always what they appear to be, often making it difficult to acquire needed information and knowledge. Why then do many who could help us – such as academics, intellectuals, even artists – frequently...

November 14, 2018

Hijacked Science

Commenting on the abuse of science, the late John Silber, a former president of Boston University, stated (1988): Scientific programs that are powerfully effective in understanding and controlling largely isolated data in such fields as physic...

November 1, 2018

Progress Down a Slope

For the undecided or confused, the young, or anyone with scant knowledge of the past, it is important, I think, before voting, to see an A:B comparison between America before and after it changed during the past century.  The following ...

October 19, 2018

Being Human and the Abuse of Science

The question, Hamlet, is not "to be or not to be" or even "to act or not to act."  It is "to believe or not to believe." Human being calls for living according to a set of beliefs that come from the source o...

October 7, 2018

Marxism and Education

At Columbia University's Teachers College, in the early years of the 20th century, a handful of men inspired by "laws of social evolution" gathered to presume a "science" of education linked with a "science" of ...

September 25, 2018

The 'lording mentality'

Action opposed to human nature by design or naïveté wanders from essential differences and natural talents among people – variations that enrich the life of the community – to a serious defect in the politics of equality....

September 21, 2018

Wars, Patriots, and Traitors: Recalling Korea and Vietnam

I was released from the Army reserve in January 1961, having served in Korea during the war. The timing was lucky for me, but not for the next generation of draft-age men because it was the year that a simmering stew in Vietnam was boiling over into ...

September 2, 2018

Toxic Humanism

"Making the world better" with no direction or assistance from God is a faith that rests on the belief that science and reason can deliver humanity from evil.  It is a faith that spawned a "humanism" that for over two hu...

August 1, 2018

Time for America to get through the fog and wake up

It's harder than ever to know what's going on in today's messed up world, thanks to the flood of misinformation and the political censorship of mainstream news and social media.  It seems at times best to shut out the noise, put...

June 18, 2018

They're green, all right!

Maine, my adopted state, is the first to catch the sunrise.  The Pine Tree State is noted for its "downeast" twang, Civil War hero Joshua Chamberlain, horror mogul Stephen King, shipbuilding, forestry, lobster, and much more....

May 22, 2018

The left’s war on wisdom from the past

Why is literature that gives us insight into reality spurned by the left and pulled from school curricula?  Is it because such literature threatens their agendas and campaigns to change people and the world in impossible ways? The reluct...

May 6, 2018

How Americans Got Hoodwinked

"It gives us a very special, secret pleasure to see how unaware the people around us are of what is really happening to them."  When he said this, Hitler could have been speaking about America today.  The "secret...

April 15, 2018

Playing God doesn't work

Intellectuals that today we call “liberal” rely on the old myth that “man is the measure of all things” and cling to the notion that human brainpower alone can solve every problem and give us a better world. This rationalist c...

March 14, 2018

Better days ahead

As an American, as a veteran, I worry about what America has become.  I keep asking, "Is this what millions of heroes – civilian and military – struggled, sacrificed, fought, and died for?" Where to begin with the d...

February 13, 2018

The rule of what law?

"Liberal" leaders and influencers seem to have forgotten the human cost in their calculations for progress.  It makes us wonder if their absence of concern for that is a sign of intellectual or moral weakness – perhaps both?...

January 21, 2018

Religious leaders and 'the times' versus God

Americans of every race, origin, and culture once observed the universal wisdom that informed them that the lack of morality causes serious trouble, suffering, and worse.  Has the knowledge vanished completely from our midst – that to...

December 29, 2017

What gives with the climate?

My take on global warming is perhaps not worth much in these days of "scientific" claims.  But I have not heard or read anyone else say what I am about to say, so let me set it down here. As a gardener, I have always kept a keen eye...

November 18, 2017

What (almost) nobody wants to know about sex

In 1935, English novelist David Lodge reflected: "Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children.  Life is the other way round."  Today, the role of sex is still twisted.  Ask Google "what sex i...

September 24, 2017

The Political Abuse of Science

It has always bothered me that while science cannot explain things like hate and love, good and bad, and many of the most important things in human life, it is used as “authority” for meddling in human affairs. The impulse to explain ever...

August 20, 2017

Are We There Yet?

“Are we there yet?” asks Ernie, standing at the top of a chain-of-evolution sequence from sea creature to human being (in an old “Frank & Ernest” cartoon by Thaves). I’ve asked the same rhetorical question, wondering...

August 2, 2017

The Road to Global Oz

"Watchdogs or pit bulls?" I was asking over 30 years ago, as TV newsrooms were turning into kangaroo courts and bully pulpits for journalists of the left, waging war on Western culture.  I wished that an electronic virus could flash a ...

June 19, 2017

A lemon for the teacher

"What would you do if your child came home from school with an assignment to write an essay titled 'Why I Am Ashamed to Be White'?" Shocking issues like this during the 1990s, as the culture war switched from cold to hot, made me an...

May 17, 2017

Education: When the Dare's on to Build a New Social Order

"Progressive Education” came to my school when I was a student at Halsey Junior High School in the 1940s (P.S. 85, Brooklyn, N.Y,).  Principal Stella Sweeting was thrilled as a little girl getting a doll house for Christmas, but the r...