It is my hope that the doctrine of deep personal disempowerment which has most recently emerged as Trumpism — its leader continually citing his victimization by institutions from the media to the IRS — its followers blaming immigrants, democrats, & nonwhites, will now give way to a healthier narrative instead of re-calcifying under a theory of unfair treatment through a ‘stolen’ election.

Life is too short, and opportunity too prevalent, to waste one’s life in search of external justifications for not achieving goals. The only freedom available to any of us is in choosing a narrative that places us, and…

Why must we choose the worst tendencies of each vs. the best each has to offer?

I come from a mixed (blue-collar / white-collar) background. Fathers side: educators & engineering. Mother’s side: military & farmers. I speak both languages. The most disappointing social outcome is that I’m generally expected to choose the worst (rather than best) tendencies of each.

I’ve done road work, construction work, and automotive work. …

One of my favorite artists, if one can have such things, hated (according to his obituary in The Guardian) the idea of his work going for money. He despised the gallery system, the world of art dealers and critics, promotional magazines, and collecting by the wealthy — who he would routinely run off when they asked to make a purchase. …

Our bodies start trying to murder us at some point. Eventually, they’ll succeed. If outside forces don’t get us first, the inside ones inevitably will. Mine has finally come for me, and my response is: “I’ve been waiting. What took you so long?”

There’s this “mass” in an unwelcome area of my body, and a lot of corresponding chaos suggesting its intentions are not friendly. We’ll take a closer look, to make sure it’s not a trick of the lens, but it sounds like I’m going under the knife. This is the first volley.

You’re better off facing the scalpel…

We do things when we’re young we wouldn’t do later. We do things later, we wouldn’t do again. The biggest mistakes I’ve ever made were personal — relationships and vocation. I think it’s safe to say we’re capable of those until we die. The second biggest, however, have been religious and political, specifically the religion and politics of my youth (by which I mean pretty much everything before I was 30).

For roughly the period from 1991–1996 (with a year or two of transition on either side) I was a conservative and, initially, a religious conservative.

Those were the years…

Plausibility is how we lie to ourselves. We like to point the finger at the other guy for swallowing a ‘whopper’, but most of us have empty wrappers from plausible fictions scattered all over the closets of our minds.

When I was a kid, I got fired from a job. I explained to my father why—the employer said I just didn’t seem to get it (they were right). Dad’s theory: it had to have been more than that—they just weren’t telling me. His idea had no evidence but felt more plausible. “That’s how the world works.”

Around the same age…

The Theocracy of Monotheism Would Enslave Us All

As I watch Pence and the other envangelico-republicans operating in lockstep and ironically saying they’ve prayed about their decisions and gotten the answers from “God” and are acting accordingly, I can’t help but contrast that with my people’s tradition. Simply put, asking Our Lord what we should do in every situation (should I buy a roomba; should my couch be blue or some other color; should I vote for Hillary or Donald) isn’t Orthodox. For these reasons:

1) We have incredible free will, and subordinating that at a granular level—not just aligning it in principle—effectively neutralizes it. It debases and…

Healthcare is making phenomenal strides. Your heart could go bad, and we could still save you. Your lungs could get diseased, and we might still save you. Your brain might get a tumor, and there’s a shot at saving you. But if you have a cancer that goes from localized to regional to systemic—making it to stage 4 (spreading through all of these organs), that’s it. You’re terminal.

In the 1980s, we passed some irreversible thresholds for climate. Passed them—meaning now the world WILL be different than it would have been, in fact worse than it would have been. In…