BOOMERS ANONYMOUS -- Care or Quit?

Play it safe. A brief review --  Part 1. Conscience is annoying.  Jiminy Cricket represented that part of an incomplete persona, the part that relentlessly tweaks our moral compass. He irritates our inchoate spirits, urging us, never stopping until that moment you take a chance, opening your heart to being "real." Conscience is self-knowledge. With it, you objectify yourself, and you recognize the possibility that, " Hey, maybe I can expend some energy thinking a thought, maybe two, maybe more - discerning whether certain propositions, certain thoughts, words, and actions are inherently right - or wrong. " Part 2. Culture , on the other hand, is one of the primary exogenous forces that shapes the thoughts, feelings, and to be sure, significant opinions affecting humanity. It lends credence to the rules under which we choose to live.   To minimize the impact of art, music, literature, architecture, animation, language, sports, etc., on human experience, will lead i...

Start here . Welcome back, and thanks for tuning in.  To review Part 1 ( link ), you may recall it ended with a bit of time travel. You were led to an obscure Commentary written 38 years ago in a law school newspaper. The writer spoke from the past about how Roe v. Wade had weak, and more likely non-existent, constitutional underpinnings. He asserted that Conscience is the true final arbiter of moral questions that society attempts to answer through legal sophistry. That writer has been doing honest homework on those issues, sustained by a steady diet of locusts and honey, so plentiful in the wilderness of legal unemployment.  Such is the price for honest legal opinion.  Such is the price for sticking to your guns. But today, it is, finally, water under the bridge.  The river has run its course. As Thomas Paine put it, "Time Make More Converts Than Reason." Fortunately, you have not been triggered by my past comments enough to have me assassinated, just because I t...

Start here . I'll admit it. Three months is really too long of a break between blog posts.  Or has it been only two? It feels like a lot more than a trimester has passed since we last ventured into these post-Muskian Twitter Senior Citizen Cyber-rants. And another thing, why "a trimester?" It just seems so random.  Nothing is random. Hello Boomers and friends of boomers. ( Technically, I am NOT a boomer, but that is another issue for another time .) It's A Mestery Do you remember when trimesters were only a quarter? (Shutup, Dad) . On this day in 1973, legal use of the term "trimester" began costing us innocent lives, silenced hearts, and tiny ripped limbs. Until last summer's ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization Center for Reproductive Health 597 U.S. ___(2022) , the number of human embryos aborted surpassed 63 million.   63,000,000 is a lot of dead babies.  : ( sad face They coined that word -- trimester -- to serve as the skele...

Start here . Some of us boomers who studied Psychology should easily recall a towering figure from this discipline, a German academic named Carl Gustav Jung. I always thought Jung's work was best understood in the context of his older contemporary, Sigmund Freud.  Where the more celebrated Freud is recognized as the foundational thinker in the area of psychoanalysis, Jung's legacy is somewhat broader, and in my opinion, more far-reaching than Freud's in that it has had substantial impact on other fields besides psychiatry, such as anthropology, archaeology, literature, and my major field of study, philosophy. This is a MANDALA. It's been six months since I've shared this internet space with -- well, nobody in particular and everybody in general -- and you -- out there in the inter-webs.  There's one question a writer should always be able to answer ... who is your audience? Be patient. I'll get to "Mandela and the Ugly American in a second."  Just ...

Start here . Hello again, Boomers, Jonesers, and Non-Boomers alike. Nothing to talk about lately? What do we Americans do when the temperature starts climbing above 80, and the lawn needs mowing?  Well, for the last couple of centuries, there was this thing called Our National Pastime. Notice the word  "pastime" suggests an activity unabashedly and unequivocally meant to be an acceptable and civil  way to pass time . I would even go so far to say, pre-Internet distraction, there was a tapestry. a weaving of the fabric of your cultural character in sport, a mythos, conjured and nurtured for the benefit of inter-generational respect and  civility. Heck, even affection. Love you, dad. Alas, locusts and honey will have to suffice anymore "Oh, there you go again Roy, being literal, and trying to find out what words mean." I suppose so. Unfortunately, in my blogging experience, if you are a fan of scholarly etymology and  reasonable contextual usage, with a dash of tr...

Start here . For you lawyers, do you recall this classic case study from Torts class?  Palsgraf vs. Long Island Railroad Co. 248 N.Y. 339, 162 N.E. 99 (1928) is legendary because Judge Cardozo's analysis of proximate cause reinforced one of the basic elements required in order to plead a valid cause of action for liability on the grounds of negligence. But back to my point, since I refuse to walk back into those weeds planted in my brain during those hellish indoctrination rituals called "law school" and "bar exam."  Let it suffice to say that chasing Truth down rabbit holes is a journey full of surprises, and you never know where gritty, honest research will lead you. The Newtonian paradigm is gone. Quantum Mechanics and the Butterfly Effect are real things. Dark Matter and String Theory rule science.  For now. I simply wanted to discuss the problem of Factions in a large republic ( link here! ).  But, in a momentary lapse of reason, during the course of my s...

A pilot, you racist. Jokes aside, spring has sprung. Can you hear the music ? For me, there's warmth and sustenance in the manna from Bobby Jones's little toonamint which starts in less than two weeks. Golf's big boys will kiss the King's ring in Orlando, swing through Houston, and re-assemble at the Cathedral of Golf that is Augusta National . Way before I became a curmudgeonly ex-lawyer and cyber-entrepreneur, there was, and there remains, an epic quality to the Masters which I will admit holds me spellbound, if not because of the ethereal atmosphere created by their meticulous greenskeeping, then only for the theater of human folly which is golf, placed on emerald pedestals amid the looming yellow pines, bright azaleas, and wound around the depths of Rae's Creek. The Masters mythology lives in the same realms as the World Series, the Super Bowl, the Kentucky Derby, Daytona, Indy, and, okay, sometimes the Stanley Cup. In spite of the degr...

I 💓WRITING   Start here . “By a faction , I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” James Madison Break it down, nerds.  If not, we will know how it feels to be thick as a brick.  So I had a nice two-week travel break, thanks.  I got to see the kids. I got to visit one of the oldest lighthouses in United States -- Beavertail. I also got to revisit a "road not taken" by taking pictures at the gate of the Naval Academy in Annapolis.  And last but not least, I found another topic that interests me. These next few weeks, I will talk about the heavy conflicts in the political realm, circa 2022. Social life is so fractured, yet, it isn't as if great minds haven't thought of these social problems before. It may be good to review the...

Start here . Welcome to Part 3, The Series Finale.  Part 1 and Part 2 did surely go by quickly.  Time flies when sorting through the lies. Where were we?  That's right! The subject was cheat codes, and the linguistic fuckery that is more than prevalent in MSM, so much so that Hunter's Laptop was "Russian Disinformation" only until the crime boss could begin pretending to lead the United States. In less upright sectors of the legal profession, it is called "terms of art." The lies we have uncovered (together) are too numerous to review. Their deceptions create dragons, imagined and real, munching mushroom clouds on the world stage. Their stratospheric falsehoods wear legal trappings, sheepskin garbed, traps to hypnotize, pervert, and enslave our sad, opiated, and most of all, unthinking fellow human beings. I have no doubt that you folks, you, the rational, and the rest who cannot care less about political agendas, have long disspelled the notion that legac...