Crime and/or Punishment

Last night, one of my colleagues brought up the story of an Indiana daycare director who was recently sentenced to 6 months for dosing melatonin to children in her care without the knowledge or consent of the children’s parents. He and another of my coworkers then proceeded to voice the opinion that jail time for […]

It’s Not You. . . It’s Us

Who is to blame for the planet’s increasingly inevitable ecological collapse? I am not asking whether climate change is a product of human action or not (of course it is) — what I am asking is whether the crisis is being driven largely by corporate greed and government corruption or if we (i.e. the consumers […]

Just Because You Can…

It can be difficult reading articles that highlight shortcomings and failures within systems you, on the whole, endorse and support. This difficulty presented upon reading Harold Braswell’s editorial in The Washington Post commenting on alleged abuses suffered by disabled Canadian citizens. As someone with family connections to Canada and as a proponent of universal healthcare […]

In Response – 5 July 2019

In the Summer 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs, the late Samuel P. Huntington published an essay titled “The Clash of Civilizations?”. The essay’s thesis has maintained an extraordinarily high value over the ensuing decades. In many ways, it became the dominant narrative among certain elements of the political right, particularly in the years immediately following […]