The NRA is at it again. They want the Supreme Court to read the Constitution the way they do, to agree that the Second Amendment permits minors to carry guns outside the home. The story reads, in part: The Second Amendment, at its core, spells out not one, but two, rights when it protects “the…
O gentlemen, the time of life is short; To spend that shortness basely were too long, If life did ride upon a dial’s point, Still ending at the arrival of an hour. Shakespeare: Henry IV Jacques Barzun, the great humanist and winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2003, told us more than 50…
As much as I hate to admit it, there are some who would disagree with my take on the sad state of affairs in the world of American education. Indeed, there are a great many people — some of whom write books and many others who teach in that world — who insist that things…
I have always been skeptical about the claims of the technophiles regarding the educational value of computers and other electronic devices. It seems to me that these devices are terrific for gathering information but unless people could assimilate, coordinate, evaluate and assort the information, separating the relevant from the irrelevant, they might prove useless. But…
As the wealthy accrue more and more power, the middle class disappears, and the number of poor and homeless increases there are those that still cling to the myth that we live in a capitalistic economy that rewards those with grit and determination. The poor are poor because they lack gumption: they are so by…
“The entire modern deification of survival per se, survival returning to itself, survival naked and abstract, with the denial of any substantive excellence in what survives, except the capacity for more survival still, is surely the strangest intellectual stopping place ever proposed by one man to another.” William James It has become a commonplace to…
There are still those among us who deny that scientific truth has any sort of hold on free minds. We can believe anything we want and call “true” anything we find comfortable they maintain. But while we can certainly believe anything we want to — there are those among us who think the earth is…
My name is Hugh and I am a football junkie fan. I am fully aware that there is an overwhelming stench of corruption at the collegiate level and an alarming number of the players at both the pro and college levels are borderline felons — some of them over the borderline. I also know many…
It is hard to believe that in this day and age there are still people who deny the fact of climate change brought on by global warming, despite virtual unanimity among scientists regarding not only the fact of global warming but also the fact that humans are at least partly responsible. But a recent study…
One of the more disturbing consequences of the growth of capitalism and the attendant world view that insists on measuring success in terms of income and possessions is the dissolution of the family. This may seem a strange claim to make, but when one considers the factors involved it will hold up to scrutiny. In…