The View From The Top

Civil society is messy, disorganized, chaotic, spontaneous and unpredictable. This is our own personal experience of life lived in the real world, with people who work for a living and struggle to make a better life for themselves and their children. This was life as experienced in Taksim Square, a tangle of plazas, streets and […]

Business as Usual or Revolution?

Liberals want to bring about a range of progressive goals for the poor and underprivileged, while Republican Tea Party types argue that, rather than trying to carve out larger slices of the pie for these groups, we would all be much better off relying on free markets to make the pie bigger for everyone. I […]

A Traitor At The Court Of Global Warming

I was recently invited to participate in a workshop to discuss climate change. However, looking at the workshop’s website it became obvious that, despite the genuineness and warmth of the invitation, I would probably, soon after my arrival, become the most unpopular participant there. The following quotation taken from the workshop’s website was one of […]

Sexuality, Sanitation and Civilization

The other week I attended three events and each of them left me in a very different mental state. The first was a Bay Area regional dance competition for children featuring most of the leading local dance studios, and styles ranging from hip-hop to ballet and everything in between. Most of the children had trained hard […]

What’s Your Legacy?

In John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem  A Legacy it’s clear that he wants to be remembered for his friendship, although, together with his mentor, William Lloyd Garrison, he spent a large part of his life fighting against slavery and is remembered today more for his poetry than for anything else. If, as Lucretius said more than […]

Roll Back The Regulators

I have spent countless hours during the past few weeks on what soldiers in the second world war called ‘chickenshit’ i.e. bureaucratic regulations so silly and so trifling that they don’t even measure up to the level of ‘bullshit’. Nowadays ‘chickenshit’ is everywhere. Virtually every occupation has a government and/or state licensing board and a bureaucracy […]

Imagine Your Children Are Dead

Imagining the loss of your children was one of the recommendations of the Stoic school of philosophy which included among its members Epictetus (55 AD – 135 AD), Marcus Aurelius (121 AD -180 AD), Seneca (4 BC – 65 AD) and Musonius Rufus (1st century AD). Stoicism is the western equivalent of Zen Buddhism minus the […]

In Praise of Depression

I have never understood the American obsession with happiness. It is not happiness that etches us with character but sadness. John Keats (1795-1821), the English poet, understood this. In 1819, suffering from depression, he wrote a poem in praise of it, which he called an Ode on Melancholy. No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist […]

Eccentrics, Those Very Peculiar People

Extreme ironing is a peculiarly British activity involving ironing clothes in remote and strange locations. That this activity originated in Britain should be no surprise, as the British have a reputation for producing world class eccentrics such as Oscar Wilde, who was known for taking his pet lobster for a walk on a leash, and Sir […]

These are the times that try men’s souls.

I recently spent some time in a flyover state and had some surprising discussions with people who, despite their extreme views, appeared in every other respect to represent the solid heartland of America. By that I mean they were not rednecks, but rather, enterprising, middle class, church going citizens with strong family values. They included […]