To paraphrase an old quip: Groups come and groups go; stupidity remains.

Before their culture was contaminated by the Masters of Violence (that's us), the Gebusi tribe of Papua New Guinea had settled into an interesting cultural routine. The tribe was small, consisting of only about 400 people. Whenever someone...

It's a mistake to think that child-rearing is independent of time and place. The way we rear children has changed through history and it differs from one place to another. What also changes are views about child neglect. Is it child neglect to swaddle an infant in a tight cloth...

With so many media people manifesting amazement at the revelations about political corruption and Wall Street scams, one wonders if the media are really amazed or is the surprise just one more example of the fakery endemic in American society.

Is the apparent surprise merely a device to maintain the...

What's happening at the moment in America is borderline panic and madness. Some money experts in Wall Street have apparently succeeded in skimming enough money out of the system to ensure themselves and their families maharaja dynasties for at least several generations. They accomplished this by searching out vulnerabilities in...

It's unfortunate that too many people in America are confused about the place of religion in a democracy. The tradition of this country, and one of the basics of its foundation, is religious freedom. What that means precisely is that each individual is free to practice his or her own...

In my memory, the last time we had anything like this was at the end of World War II, first VE Day and then VJ day, our celebration with tears as we felt we had at last come out of the darkness.

So now we celebrate again.

For this old...

I hear rumblings that Sarah Palin believes in the existence of witches, which leads me to wonder what people are smoking up there in Alaska.

Most people don't know much about witches, and rightly so. Witches have not been bothering us for more than three hundred years and they are...

One of the fantasies promulgated by conservative wingnuts is that suburban Americans are mostly conservatives who believe in "convention and respectability" and who have "a strong reaction against anything that threatens to undermine the stability of the established order."

The conservative fantasy is that such people do not want change.

What seems evident now is that for the time being Sarah Palin is the face and voice of the Republican Party. Not the stumbling old man who in another life was a Vietnam War POW who finally came out of Hanoi to begin a political career. McCain is done. If...

Forty-four years later we're back to Barry Goldwater, threatening Russia, the only other major nuclear power in the world, as if a nuclear war (not nucular, Sarah) would be just another game in the White House Situation Room.

No, thank you. We don't want a war with Russia. We don't...

America may be nearing the end of its free history as it makes a transition from a republic to an empire of Yahoos. As the joker said, stuff happens. Even if we can't figure out what it is, history has its own agenda as it rolls on like a mindless...

Our way of life in America is apparently simple: hardly anything in the public interest gets done unless someone makes money at it.

The verdict about whether our way of life leads to happiness or self-destruction hasn't been written by history yet, but meanwhile there's plenty of misery to go...

The term "gaslighting" derives from an old film called Gaslight, a story of insidious psychological manipulation of a vulnerable woman by her psychopathic husband. The basis of gaslighting is the production of confusion in the victim to the point where the victim is unable to recognize reality, unable to differentiate...

Let's call him Junior. He's ten years old, a bright boy, eyes open on the world, the youngest in a family quartet in one of those clean affluent suburbs outside a large city. Pick your city. Pick your suburb. Pick your family. Four people: Father, Mother, Sister, and Junior.

At...

Apparently as a counterweight to its centrist liberalism, the New York Times keeps a few "house" conservatives writing on its Op-Ed pages. One of these conservatives, David Brooks, occasionally reports on the "human condition" from a conservative viewpoint. In a recent column (July 15, 2008) Mr. Brooks gives us ample...

You can't blame the rightist post-Renaissance political philosophers for their ignorance about politics any more than you can blame the post-Old-Stone-Age Bible writers for their ignorance about biology and life on Earth. Everyone's view of reality is constrained by the knowledge and culture of their time. If you think that...

The American word "baloney" derives from the city of Bologna in Italy, where they call a fine-ground pork sausage "mortadella" -- although in America baloney can also derive from chicken, turkey, or beef.

In English slang, baloney is bunk, bilge, and bosh -- any untruth from an exaggeration to an...

The story of tetra-ethyl lead is a cautionary tale, an example of how allowing the "market" and politics to determine protection standards can bring tragedy to the public.

Leaded gasoline was used in America from the 1920s to the 1980s, and it's still sold overseas by the major oil companies.

The May 27, 2008 editorial column in the New York Times contains a six paragraph ditty entitled, "It's the Genes, Stupid."

Since the New York Times bills itself as the "newspaper of record", you look, you read, your head shakes in disbelief.

According to the editorial, "there is tempting...

Some people, including the New York Times columnist David Brooks, like looking backwards in history with nostalgia and a few sniffles of regret. They go to fine colleges, study history, and imagine they're in love with a perfect time of order and decorum and regularity. (See the Brooks column.)