I’m a Captain Kirk Trekkie. I did enjoy the Next Generation, but Kirk is a far better captain than Picard. I’m also far more Trekkie than Star Wars fan. Don’t get me wrong – I’ll gleefully plop down to watch the original trilogy in a heartbeat. I’ll watch the second trilogy if I’m in the right mood. And I love the Star Wars of my youth enough to never even consider watching the travesty that was the third trilogy. But … Continue reading “The Hero’s Journey – Kirk to Enterprise”

We can protect Granny without tearing up the Constitution. Let’s do that instead.

In the hubbub of today’s news about Andrew Cuomo’s inability to keep his hands to himself and whether or not he’ll resign (spoiler: he won’t) a little bit of news came out. No doubt it is welcome news to the few folks who weren’t eligible for unemployment and didn’t move to where they could work as well as to the idiots that collected that money and didn’t bother to pay their rent. It comes as a hard blow to those … Continue reading “Congratulations, US Supreme Court – You’ve Achieved Irrelevance”

There are quite a few stories of people encountering something frightening in the woods. Loud footsteps, weird screams, bad smells and ominous feelings of impending doom – followed by a swift retreat minus camping/fishing gear. A few so scared that they never went back for their stuff. It’s funny (well, not to them) if it turns out that they got scared off by a rutting deer or a determined raccoon. A little less so when we can’t explain the events. … Continue reading “But We Got Scared”

Over the last eighteen months or so, you’ve probably learned more about public health policy and practice than you ever thought about wanting to know. Of course, you’ve learned most of it from the media which is only slightly less competent than Wikipedia for technical information. To be fair, there are separate law books just for public health – I’ve seen them and even used them – so it’s not exactly simple stuff. My expertise is in sexually transmitted disease … Continue reading “The Nuts and Bolts of Public Health (Mostly Nuts)”

Quick quiz: Name ten movie stars. Ten musicians. Ten comedians. Ten football or basketball stars. Odds are, you made a 100 on that quiz just from off the top of your head. But the odds also say you probably don’t know who your state representative is, your Federal representative or the Speaker of the House. Some of you don’t even know what the Speaker of the House is – but you’ve heard the term before. It’s not because you’re dumb … Continue reading “The High Cost of Apathy”

Americans are strange birds – we may as well own up to it. Americans donate to charities and causes in massive amounts. The weird part is that a sizable amount of that is ordinary people who will not even keep the receipt, let alone claim the deduction on their taxes. Most Americans support at least some foreign aid and virtually everyone supports humanitarian aid – and we pay for it with our tax dollars, with or without deductions. Many of … Continue reading “The Persistence Principle”

May 18, 1896 – I’ll almost bet that virtually no one knows without looking it up what happened on this date. One of the worst travesties of justice ever handed down by the US Supreme Court, Plessy v Ferguson, was decided. It enshrined the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’. May 17, 1954 – Almost fifty-eight years to the day later, the US Supreme Court corrected its mistake in Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. It threw ‘separate but … Continue reading “It’s Not Hopeless”

So, why don’t you take action? I don’t know how. This is usually a cop out – you had 12 years of free education like all the rest of us – so what is it really that you don’t know how to do? Write? No one’s asking for an essay and since you got past fourth grade, you do know how to write a paragraph. Write one of those – and if there’s still more you think is important to … Continue reading “But, But, But…”

Political Scientists sometimes argue over whether the US is a republic or a democratic republic. I lean toward the latter. What we don’t argue over is whether or not the US is a true democracy – it’s not. Democracy requires that the public itself make all the decisions. We don’t do that – and nothing larger than a city-state ever has. Frankly, no one really wants a true democracy – the evidence is in the huge number of people who … Continue reading “Armchair Activism”