Henry David Thoreau wrote an essay with the above title sometime prior to the Civil War. His act of civil disobedience was to withhold part of his yearly taxes due to the state of Massachusetts where he lived. Why not pay your taxes? He did it as a mostly...

Miguel de Unamuno y Yugo was a Spanish linguist and philosopher who died in 1936, at the very beginning of the Spanish Civil War. He was a prolific essayist, novelist and poet, as well as rector of the Universidad de Salamanca not far from Madrid. His...

Donald Trump has said he would consider dropping a nuclear bomb on Isis. He may be megalomaniac enough to do it. Most people born after the 60's, I believe, are pretty unfamiliar with the devastation that nuclear weapons can create. From what I've heard,...

Langston Hughes was an African-American poet born in 1902 and died in 1967. He was a remarkable man. His poetry was often very political. He witnessed discrimination and hatred against blacks. He saw rampant poverty during the Depression of the 1930's,...

So many times I look for answers. But I've been learning that questions are much more important than answers. Scientists know this. So do philosophers. "Question Authority" is a bumper sticker you used to see on cars. Answers are easy to come up with....

I listened to a program today on KGNU on Pete Seeger, folk singer and banjo player extrordinaire. Pete died about a year ago; he was born in 1919. What's so extra ordinary about Pete? Many things: he had been a student at Harvard; his dad Charles S. had...

I've been reading up on civil disobedience and non-violent resistance, a la Thoreau, Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr. (Of the 3, only King gets his own day, Jan. 21 I think.) (Hence the above title.) King really studied and put into practice the notions...

I saw "Jungle Book", the movie based on the story by Rudyard Kipling. The boy Mowgli is the only non-computer enhanced character in the movie. Of course, the visuals were amazing. What struck me was that a movie can now be made totally in a studio and...

The term Nativism has been bandied about recently, thanks to Donald Trump and his desire to arouse animosity among American citizens. Nativism is just that - the belief that native (Americans in this case) are better than immigrants, belong here more...

I just read Elie Wiesel's story "Night" about a 16 year old boy enslaved in SS-run Nazi concentration camps like Buchenwald, Auschwitz and Buma for a year. The 16 year old was him. I remember films on T.V. of the allies liberating such camps in the spring...