On the first day of 2019, the Washington Post printed a story summarizing the numerous extreme signs of climate change in 2018. The list of extreme hurricanes, floods, wildfires, droughts and heat waves around the world of unprecedented intensity, impressed even the most cautious scientists. Most climate scientists are unwilling to attribute a particular event … More Power of Propaganda in the Face of Facts
Two years after the 2016 presidential election, the Fascist Reality Show now emanating from the White House is very real. Yet, too many “liberals” and moderate Americans are complacent, if bemused. Most Americans see it in one of two ways. First, the “moderate” liberals especially enjoy scoffing with Rachael Maddow at the absurd and bombastic … More Fascist Reality Show: It’s Real
“I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” ~ Anonymous When does authority end? Well, authority ends when people believe that it no longer exists. That is because authority is not a thing one possesses; authority is a relationship in which the members of a system acknowledge the holder of power as legitimate. Power … More The End of Authority
The GOP Pimps are playing Trollop Trump, like no other patsy in history. In that sense, you could say that they are colluding with the Russians. They still despise him but hide it since he has become their cash cow. But Trump is a double patsy, after all. The Russians have played him ever since … More Patsy Trollop Trumpery
One way to gain control over institutions and violate laws is to take unprecedented actions to generate societal chaos. Demagogues know that chaos is contagious and susceptible to manipulation through fear and hatred. We tend to think that a stable society results from the existence of laws and their enforcement by police. The facts are … More Chaos, Contagion, Hatred and Compassion
On a flight home from Los Angeles, I sat next to a young woman, a millennial apparently, who busied herself the whole flight reading a very slick fashion magazine. I notice a book in the back-of-the-seat pouch in front of her. The title was Buddha’s Brain. I had seen that title somewhere, but could not … More Suffer the Children for the Politics of Evil
What’s a lipidologist? Well, immediately we can see that the term’s Latin roots indicate that a lipidologist is someone who studies lipids. Ah, lipids: the dreaded cholesterol, et al. That seemed simple enough. A friend told me that a lipidologist practiced in Santa Fe, the only one in the whole state of New Mexico. Okay, … More The Eccentric Lipidologist Revealed
It had been a shock to be told a few years ago that I had so much plaque in my coronary arteries that I was in imminent danger of a heart attack or stroke. The cardiologist told me that I must immediately follow the protocols of the “standard of care” in cardiology and begin a … More The “Standard of Care” and Facts of Life
About ten years after being diagnosed with a non-aggressive prostate cancer and narrowly escaping the surgeon’s knife by finding a real prostate oncologist who shared all the treatment alternatives with me, then undergoing non-invasive yet pretty darn effective treatment, something entirely unrelated happened, or so it seemed. Self-Serving Medical Practice I recall the urologist who … More Seeking Sanity in Science within the Medical Establishment
Is the rise of Trumplandia the reflection of a “new normal” in American politics? Or, does it rise, as Rebecca Solnit suggests in a remarkable new piece on the Literary Hub website, to the level of a de facto coup that has already occurred? Has the Trump gang already, if not so skillfully, moved to … More The New Normal and the Boisterously Silent Coup
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 