Tove Jansson’s book Sun City takes place in St. Petersburg, FL, a place I’ve had some dealings with through my parents’ retirement there. It got me reminiscing and then thinking about my own retirement.
Following an election there’s always a post mortem analysis by the losers about why they lost. The analysts need to find the flaws. And there are several places to look. At the candidates, the party, the voters, the messaging, or just because the time wasn’t right. .
The West Virginia Senate in the 2025 legislative session posted a bill to rescind a provision in a state law that prohibits industrial drilling in state parks. This is in the interest of allowing carbon sequestration in the parks.
What are the goals, probable benefits, and tactics for setting up a messaging campaign for a progressive political organization?
An appreciation of Howard Norman’s novel The Bird Artist with a side note or two of additional appreciation for the real artists of Change Islands, Newfoundland, where I lived idyllically for a while.
The Trump administration is playing fast and loose with the global friendships the United States has created and maintained for decades. What will be the effect of the U.S. losing those friends? Does the U.S. need friends anyway?
Anne Enright’s book The Wren, The Wren is a tale of modern Ireland’s evolution from a country under the heavy thumb of the Catholic church to its current secular culture. She tells the story through the lives of a loving dysfunctional family.
When is the best time to start engaging with the next following election? And a related question, when is the best time to try and convince someone to vote for your side?
The 2024 presidential election creates a scary picture of the future of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) for US democracy. We can speculate about what’s coming, but first the MAGA movement has to rebrand itself to something less scary.
West Virginia is losing its youth and becoming a state of older people. Our state, though, is actively trying to keep people out who could help reverse the outflow.
Claims made using superlative language can be convincing to some, while to others they are the mark of the snake oil salesman. It’s the old story of don’t believe what you know, believe what I say.
Book review of Tana French’s first Dublin Murder Squad series. A good read that offers up more than you’d expect from a murder mystery.
The Nobelist Kazuo Ishiguro pegged his book When We Were Orphans as not his best book. The jacket blurbs though were heaped with praise. It was an interesting difference of opinion to explore.
John Steinbeck published The Winter of Our Discontent in 1961. Like all his novels, it was rooted in the environment and in the time period in which he wrote it. It still speaks accurately, though, to the world of the mid 2020’s.
Black History Month has a half century history, since Gerald Ford inaugurated the celebration in 1976. Until 2025 the month was actively celebrated by our government. That has changed now in the emerging Trump dictatorship.
The accumulating wreckage of the second Trump administration and how his thoroughbred billionaires are abetting the devastation.
Diversity used to be a good word. It expressed ideas of openness, acceptance, fairness. It was something you wanted to support. It was something that defined America. But now diversity is under attack by the Republican party and is actively being legislated against in red states. It’s good vibes are being subverted and replaced by negative connotations.
People are guided in their voting choices by their underlying belief systems. Assuming that most people’s guides are kindly motivated, let’s assume that these guides are angels. What would be the difference, though, between a good Left bending angel politically versus one on the Right?
Billionaires, even though there are relatively few of them, are accumulating more and more wealth at the expense of the “little people” all 7 billion of them. They are increasingly getting involved politically for no good reason except to become trillionaires. Mother Earth is not pleased.
The intelligence of people who have a lot of it, maybe too much, is often applied in ways that sacrifice empathy. A case in point, the scientists of Los Alamos, who created the atom bomb. Another, the political scientists who created Project 2025.
Politics is a brain game in which the opposing players have to come up with strategies to persuade and convince voters. The game is played to a great extent with language wrapped up in signs and speeches. Social scientists understand more and more how to craft that language to be effective.
A fictional account of a restaurant owner who thinks much of his menu and disparages his competition. The tale is related through the person of a potential customer.
Bullying is widespread, even endemic, in American society. It’s a behavior that many of the powerful segments of society, including politicians, engage in.
Criticism of Governor Jim Justice blaming the Biden Administration for delays in highway construction in West Virginia.
A response to a local politician critical of US immigration policy, even though immigration would be a plus for West Virginia’s declining population.
With the advent of artificial intelligence, Medium, the writers’ collective is getting a lot of writers submitting articles using AI. This article explains why I don’t use AI to do my writing for me.
A history of the long process of coming out to my mother and the reasons she had to fear accepting me.
A thought exercise about where the differences between older and younger generations lie, with a focus on the situation in red state West Virginia.
An analysis (from a leftist perspective) of what the letters in the MAGA acronym stand for.
Douglas Murray’s book The madness of crowds is an antagonistic conservative reaction to identity politics, including gay men. This response is a consideration of why adopting a strong identity is necessary for groups to create strongly grounded individuals.
Democracy is becoming something of a dirty word among Christian conservatives, who would put their trust in the future of America as a theocracy. They are getting closer to achieving that goal in recent actions by certain courts. This attitude is becoming also a major platform plank of the Republican party.
Democracy has had a rough ride here in the U.S. In the hundred years from World War I to today, it has increased and declined. The misgivings that H.L. Mencken had about the workings of democracy as he saw it 50 years after the Civil War are still with us today.
The difference between conservatives and progressives or liberal and their electoral success or not is complicated. Lakoff attributes this to messaging and Haidt to moral differences.
Thinking about how our divided politics, which is so mixed up and tangled, that it looks similar to the kind of tangling that physicists and biologists deal with.
When is the right time to tell someone you’re gay? Two instances of when it was too late.
How do conservatives look at the concerns of progressive people? From the book The Madness of Crowds by Douglas Murray, like a bunch of complainers who don’t know how good they have it.
The stereotype of the gay man fated to be lonely and alone has with the gay rights movement gotten less true. There’s still a gay life after 40 or at least there can be.
Some thoughts on truth and believability, which are not the same thing. Truth can be slippery and discerning it can take some effort on the reader’s or listener’s part. It’s as easy to be deceived as to be enlightened.
Mark Twain had no trust or love for majority rule, but since our country is supposedly democratic, how does that mistrust of majority rule align with what kind of country the US wants to be? There’s a lot of anti-democratic feelings boiling up in the country now.
Beekeeping is an important, though small activity in Jefferson County. The people who do raise bees and harvest honey are closely attuned to their environment.
Making friends from strangers has never been easy. The reasons I’ve analyzed in my own case are tied to who I am as a personality, but also who I chose to be.
John McWhorter is a Black man who rejects the idea that Black people have any right to criticize their present station in life. He argues that staying woke in the face of racism and the attention given by white people to anti-racism is demeaning of Black people. This in spite of the fact that the term woke and the reality of racism reflects the experience and testimony of Black people themselves.
Learning continuously is important in aging well. Learning a language is shown to be especially beneficial.
A personal account of how and why I became comfortable with telling others, including strangers, that I’m gay.
I love where I live and this is the story of how that came to be. The story is also an appreciation of one of Barry Lopez’s essays about connection to place.
Going from one later decade of life into another. Looking back, looking forward.
Countering anti-abortion protests with a helping hand Published in Ellemeno, Oct. 14, 2023 (https://medium.com/ellemeno/the-quiet-methods-of-abortion-clinic-escorts-1a6a1cf4a668) The political signs for next year’s presidential and congressional elections point to abortion being a trigger issue for voters — again. Both anti-abortion and pro-choice people will be campaigning heatedly. Both sides will angle for the high ground, arguing on the general points of morality, fairness,
Shepherd University in West Virginia is a designated age-friendly university, meaning it is sensitive and responsive not just to its students, but to the wider community.
Does the institution of charity and the practice of charitable giving come from our human nature or is it actively promoted by businesses and governments who are trying to deflect their responsibility to prevent the need for charity.
Coming out as a gay male in the 1060’s was a lonely process. This is a story about how I arrived at the decision to come out and why it was necessary.