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One of the most enjoyable thing about Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass is the detailed sketches of John Tenniel whose exaggerated images of normal items highlighted how ridiculous everyday life could be.  Those exaggerated images perfectly serviced the manner in which Lewis Carroll twisted the logic of so many of everyday social norms such that between the two of them, a mirror was held up to insanity of Victorian English society and government. Positions would be reversed, turned on their head, and be turned backwards so that the positions would be rendered meaningless. I hate to say this, but the United States of America has become a Wonderland, where values held by certain political parties or by political positions have been twisted, turned around, flipped, so that they have become meaningless.  Amongst all the deformity, I have come to find myself empathizing with Alice, caught in a strange world, wanting to wake up from the nightmare or the portal

I think at times I am a horrible person, and, I mean horrible.  Just recently Hurricane Harvey barreled through a number of Texas coastal cities, including Houston, causing devastation amounting to billions of dollars of damage and years of clean-up and reconstruction.  Twenty-one people have already died. The first response that a normal person ought to have is empathy and sympathy for those who are suffering.  I have a brother-in-law who lives in Houston who is right now in limbo about whether or not he even has a home to come back to.  My wife and I have reached out to him and extended our offerings of help, to clean-up his house, to watch his beloved pet cat, to have him stay with us while the way home is blocked.  I have sympathy for him, and it hurts to for me to see him hurt so much.  I can sense the helplessness in his voice when I talk to him over the phone. There is also a certain amount of appreciation of the blessing that Hurricane Harvey did not change direction and hit my

I wonder if its worth having an opinion anymore. Basic supply/demand economics indicates that a commodity’s worth depends upon the demand for such a commodity. The higher the demand, the more the commodity is worth. The inverse is true; the less demand, the less the commodity is worth. To a certain extent, opinions are commodities. They have value. Professions are founded on the sole basis of the value of the opinion. Doctors are often paid to provide an opinion on the proper diagnosis and treatment. Attorneys are paid for to provide an opinion on the merits, or lack thereof, of a certain case or a certain course of action. Politicians are paid for an opinion on the proper course or direction of our great nation. But, it appears that the value of an opinion has lost its value. The only reasonable explanation for the devaluation of the opinion is the decrease in the demand for opinions. In the infancy of television cable, CNN came to be channel synonymous with news. Programming centered

I am a provocateur of arguments, a perceiver of personally held beliefs, the erosion of which can cause the most violent reaction, the raising of voices and blood pressure, the defense tensing of minds, the arrangement of apologetic excuses for why one side is wrong and the other right.  I think that people should not be too comfortable with themselves.  I target those most sure and certain of their own world view as it is those people whose idealism and moral high ground is despicable, a perception that there is a right way to view an issue and a wrong way to view an issue without consideration of the complexities of the general issue as well as how perspective shifts when wearing the shoes of someone else. My wife and I recently watched the documentary called the Red Pill which explores the Men's Rights Movement on Hulu.  A local theatre has planned to screen the film in the next week, but curiosity got the best of me, and I decided to view it earlier.  I could explore in detail

  I. Ronald sat cross-legged in the middle of the coliseum on a floor of sand and blood, bone and tattered clothing. Above him stretched a black night pinpricked with tiny yellow-white twinkles. ‘Around one of those twinkles spins Earth,’ he thought. Around the top of the coliseum, a set of mellowed lights hummed a low intensity blue providing just enough illumination to show a crowd of humanoids of various shapes and sizes. They rumbled in a foreign language, something Ronald believed to be a hybrid of Chinese and bear. In addition to the language, they all shared similar skin tone, a pale yellow akin to sun-bleached daisy petal, large eyes which fell deep into their misshapen skulls, and long thin digits attached to a pair of meaty palms. Although most of the beings had hair, it grew in odd places and in odd ways. Some had long tails, for that is the way that Ronald thought of them, growing from the hollowed cheeks and from the thin arms. The hue of the tails varied in every shad