Steven M. Moore's Blog, page 200
May 29, 2012
Thrill seekers and thrillers…
From a line of hundreds of people trying to climb Mt. Everest or die trying, to an eighty-year-old taking a birthday parachute jump and getting more than she bargained for, to a young man that thinks that kayaks were made to go over huge waterfalls, our news media does an excellent job of portraying the active thrill seekers in our society and the world. These recent events show that humans’ thirst for thrills and adventure is still around albeit not as common as it used to be. After all, we...
May 28, 2012
The casualties of war…
2012…a presidential election year…Memorial Day…a time for reflection…. At my age, I’ve lost friends and relatives, some from sickness, others from accidents, and still others in service to our country. I value everyone that has served our country, from infantryperson to Peace Corps volunteer, infinitely more than the good old boys and girls sitting in the nation’s capital, those politicos who scheme and manipulate and put these volunteers in harm’s way.
My father was a pacifist. He was a gentl...
May 25, 2012
News and Notices from the Writing Trenches #27…
#153: Last gasp for relevance or a really neat idea? Esquire Magazine recently announced that it will start publishing eBooks devoted to “men’s fiction.” Besides the question in my subtitle, there are two other questions that jump to my mind here: (1) Why in the world would an author want to (a) bury his struggle for name recognition in the shrouds of an irrelevant magazine and (b) let them rake off the profits to earn the measly royalty percentages that big publishers pay? (2) What the hell...
May 24, 2012
Austerity and capitalism…
GOP ideologues are full of contradictions. They will lament how socialistic the country has become, yet ride on public transportation. They will ride roughshod on illegal immigrants, yet exploit them for cheap labor. They will cut social benefits that provide a safety net for millions, yet give tax cuts and provide loopholes to themselves and their rich cronies. They will starve Obamacare for funds, a program that means life to many, yet feed the agents of death and destruction by adding to t...
May 22, 2012
American royalty…
George Washington did many good things in spite of being a Virginia slave owner. One very important thing was to refuse to be crowned king. Nevertheless, America has had its royalty. Powerful families have often dominated U.S. business and politics. Rockefeller, Dulles, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Bush, Gore, and Romney are family names that immediately come to mind—families that have wielded old-fashioned royal power, families where more than one member has been in the political spotlight. Americans...
May 17, 2012
The time-warp back to 2008…
Yogi Berra had a folksy gift for giving new life to clichés. His “déjà vu all over again” is apropos to the $2+ billion loss that J P Morgan Chase recently announced. I feel that I’m in a time-warp like the one that carried Jean Luc Picard back to help the inventor of the warp drive. This, however, is not a sci-fi thriller—it’s a real life insult to the American public.
You will recall that in 2008 that there were two bank lists. There were the banks that were “too big to fail” like J P Morgan...
May 15, 2012
Amateur ideologues…
Many readers of this blog probably think I’m one. While I consider myself a progressive and independent, and more and more this means being anti-GOP in general and anti-Tea Party in particular, I lack the one qualification necessary to be an ideologue—fundamentalist thinking. The latter is that brand of thinking where (1) the person believes he is right even though he often lives a life of contradictions, and (2) the person congregates with, befriends, and supports only those who agree with h...
May 10, 2012
Lugar pays for his willingness to compromise…
We can add Indiana and North Carolina to the list of states moving back towards the Dark Ages. In the first case, the Tea Party candidate, Richard Mourdock, squeaked out a primary win over six-term moderate Republican Richard Lugar. In the second case, the Tarheel State joined thirty other states in passing a constitutional ban on gay marriage. This ban will even prohibit civil unions between gays, trouncing on the rights of same-sex couples who should flee that state as soon as they can.
Whil...
May 8, 2012
A land where not even Jack Hanna has clout…
Ah, Ohio, that rust-belt decider of American elections. John Kerry must remember it with affection. It just might be Barack Obama’s Waterloo too, although, if you believe the numbers game, he should be a shoo-in because the average unemployment level is below the national average and much improved over 2008. Kerry’s loss, though, was due to the GOP putting gay marriage on the ballot. Riding in on the shirt-tails of that debacle, was Fox News commentator John Kasich, who became governor in 201...
May 4, 2012
News and Notices from the Writing Trenches #26…
#149: Those readers who have read my Soldiers of God and, to a lesser extent, some of my other books, know I’m concerned with both kinds of terrorism, home-grown and imported. In fact, Soldiers portrayed the dangers of the home-grown kind long before the DHS made it a priority. In that book and elsewhere (including the articles in this blog), I have discussed the distinction between spirituality and fundamentalism.
Many people, from U.S. presidents to megachurch ministers, claim to talk to God...
