Publications Collections Remember when you were a kid and the carnival came to town for a hot summer weekend? You couldn’t wait to go, you begged your parents until the big day arrived, cotton candy, the shooting gallery for a teddy bear, and, most exciting of all, the merry go round. You wanted to ride a horse without your Dad holding you, he wanted you to ride in one of these weird carriages that looked like a fancy restaurant booth with stuffed benches, weird but safer than the horse. Life is or should be, like the horse that goes up and down and moves around at the same time. Slow at first, but gradually faster as the carney steps on the throttle. Our emotions are like that, they move up and down in a continuous circle that accelerates in youth, peaks out in middle age, and slows down with maturity. I haven’t figured out the mystery of life, why we’re here, why we’re born into given circumstances why we live, love, and hate as we do? All I know is that this merry go round of life i...

  We all saw it, we all had a favorite, we all chose a winner. We're all wrong. The winner of last night's debate was the Commission On Presidential Debates, their revised format, and the calm insistence of moderator Kristen Welker.  Trump gained ground, Biden held his own, and we, the audience, finally saw and heard some intelligent dialogue on issues of substance. If the truth be known these are media events masquerading as debates. In a real debate, a single subject is chosen with two opposing sides, affirmative and negative, and a chairperson who enforces the rules. Student handout 8.2: Rules for debating Ok, I get it, these media events serve a purpose, they give us an opportunity to see and hear our candidate perform under pressure which, after all, is a primary requirement of the POTUS. The pressure of a TV produced media event is not the same as political reality. Some candidates are skilled TV actors while others are skilled politicians. The notion of using the word p...

  There have been many important dates that have changed life for millions and set history on a new course. Election day 2020 in the USA will be one of those days. The country has been dragged through the mud for four years by media saturation centered on one man and his warped view of our future. History will show that year 2020 was a turning point for the United States and by extension much of the free world. The US electorate showed us in 2016 that they were ready for a change, ready to step away from governance as usual and elect a leader who would form a government for the people, not for the politicians, i.e. "drain the swamp". The idea was right but as is so often the case, the execution was a shit-show.  So here we are, convinced we made a mistake and struggling with our conscience as we realize governance in a Democracy is, by definition, messy and inefficient but as history tells us infinitely more permanent.  The monarchists in Europe learned this lesson the ha...

  As I surf through the news each morning I continue to be stunned by the headlines. It's four years, including the Republican nomination period, that Trump and his accomplices in the media have violated our emotions. Whether we love him or hate him we can't get away from him. Whether it's TV, Social Media, Radio, newspapers, or magazines it's all about Trump and the media bubble he has created for himself.  Not even the pandemic could interfere, this guy is a master of media manipulation he can take an expository headline about global health and turn it into a fictional essay about Donald Trump and he does it over, and over and over with encouragement from those media representing both extremes, Murdock news outlets on the right, Fox and the WSJ and independents on the left, CNN and the NYT. This isn't about politics, it's about the press and how they sell their editorial soul for a pound of market share flesh. It's about the first amendment of our constitu...