Acupuncture, Martin Sheen and the Rosary

As I completed my income taxes over the weekend – not convinced that I should have after recently re-reading Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau – I noted that one can claim acupuncture fees as a medical deduction. I reflected on the successful acupuncture sessions I completed with Dr. Liu at Sunshine Acupuncture in River …

Diamonds from Dunghills

This morning, I read an interesting – and disturbing – essay in the January/February 2019 issue of Foreign Affairs Magazine: “Deepfakes and the New Disinformation War, The Coming Age of Post-Truth Geopolitics” by Robert Chesney and Danielle Citron. While I have heard the term “fake news” tossed and bandied about, I was unfamiliar with the …

America Needs a Statesman

I cannot ignore the impending catastrophe our bipartisan political system has placed in our path. It is more crippling and unavoidable than any physical wall anyone could ever build…. Yesterday, I read a thought-provoking OpEd that appears in “The Atlantic” magazine, “The Suicide of a Great Democracy” by staff writer George Packer. I would have …

Observe with Passion

  I’ve not read Mary Oliver’s 1984 Pulitzer Prize winning collection of poems American Primitive. Ms. Oliver is often compared to Emily Dickinson and her work frequently focuses on the natural world. In 2016, I read her collection of essays Upstream in which she reflects on her willingness to lose herself within the beauty and …