1.     Private vs. Socialized Healthcare   Two women are diagnosed in the same week at the same hospital with the same, aggressive cancer.    One woman happens to be very wealthy with a great, executive position in a top corporation.  Her health care covers every form of treatment available, for as long as she needs it.  Thanks to a comprehensive combination of radiation, chemo, and immuno-therapy treatments, she goes into remediation and lives a normal life for many years. 

Between the rise of explicit, celebratory, toxic masculinity online, the buy-in of the Republican party to a MAGA version of the same, and then the Epstein nightmare, it certainly makes sense that I’m seeing a lot of posts trying to get people to see that our root problem is patriarchy. I only take issue with how the posts conflate misogyny with all of patriarchy.  Misogyny is definitely an outcome of patriarchy, but conflating the two under-reports the patriarchal values wh

Way out here in Walla Walla, Washington, we have a town dispute. There's this guy who goes through town chalking right wing slogans. He has support from one of the local, evangelical churches plus he is cheered on by folks on the right. His chalking is opposed by moderates and folks on the Left, since what he writes is often directed specifically against immigrants, women, and LGBTQ+ people. Supporters frame it as free speech, opponents frame it as hate speech. To try to

In a posted review of Ken Burns’ Revolution documentary, the author expressed how disappointed he was in his high school history class.  His reasoning was if Ken Burns could make this so interesting and enlightening, why couldn't school?  I could write my next book just answering that question. 

Here’s something Trump said last week: “We won World War II, we won World War I, we won everything before that and in between…”. He went on to say that changing the name of the Department of War to the Department of Defense was “woke” and implies that this is why we lost subsequent conflicts. The idea that we clearly and simply won every war we’d fought before the 1960’s is the propagandized version of our history that has been traditionally taught in our schools. Being broug

Current events are providing some vital learning moments about how power really works in the world and how it does not.  Scholars in political science, economics, and game theory will have a lot to work with in the coming years based upon what is happening now.  Most of us are not scholars in any of those fields, so cannot claim to provide explanations which resolve into coherent theories.  This should not prevent any of us from expressing our understanding to the best of our

Serendipity is the main reason for most people’s choice of style, no matter how they rationalize it later. I started my classical training in Motobu-ha Shito-Ryu, and it was a fine direction. When I moved to Minnesota, what was available in the same quality category was Yamashita-ha Shorin-Ryu, so that is what I committed to, and it has been a gratifying journey. It has been so gratifying for the decade I lived in Chicago, I traveled to the honbu dojo in Milwaukee two and a h

Even with all of the McDonalds martial arts available out there (that are to martial arts what McDonalds is to real food) eliminated from the mix, there is still quality kung-fu, jiu-jitsu, aikido, and taekwondo (although so many halls exist in this art that finding a good one is like finding a particular needle in a haystack-sized stack of needles), not to mention arts from South Asia, or even, once in a while, western arts like wrestling, fencing, or boxing (these are usual

I know an excellent karate instructor who has developed a theory about the relation of money to karate. He has determined that he will never give any of what he knows for free, because the knowledge is a precious commodity for which he paid and trained over many years. He asserts that if someone else is unwilling to contribute money to learn it, they are saying that they do not value it properly, for money is so unequivocally the representation of value in our society. In

For fifteen years of training and practice I have felt little beyond mechanical improvement, and given constant reminders to myself:...

There are, in our country, martial arts from just about every place in the world, taught in a bewildering variety of ways. They include...

What is a teacher?  Is it the same as an instructor or a trainer? I believe these terms are not synonymous.  An instructor or a trainer...

The primacy of the individual, the great accomplishment of Western thought, is almost over. If we look at Eastern thought, the interest...

(Ms. Green’s article about the Classical School Movement)   Dear Editor:   It makes me glad that we get articles exploring what is going...

{We are in a courtroom – judge, jury, prosecuting attorney, defense attorney, defendant, bailiff, a few people in the gallery.}   Judge –...

Wm. Gregory Harman                                                    Politico, admittedly a Left-leaning source, reported in early March...