The Nature of Things

Since the massacre of tiny children and their teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut on December 14, the country has sustained its sense of outrage and grief over those senseless killings. There is a lot of talk about and impetus toward new action on trying to restrict the availability of military-style weapons to a public which has no business owning them. Their only purpose is to kill people. Their only valid use is in the military where killing the enemy is, in fact, the point. Vice President Biden is working with his group to try to get legislation written and passed through the Congress. God knows it won't be easy with the legislative clowns he has to deal with, but he's done it before, with the assault weapon ban back in the '90s. Perhaps he can do it again. Meanwhile, as Biden and his group work and the pundits pontificate and the gun nuts expostulate about how hammers are more dangerous than guns , (Yes, they really do say that!) the death count con...

There are a lot of things about Houston that those of us who live in the city or its outskirts love to complain about. It is a huge, sprawling place and sometimes it seems almost impossible to get there from here. The streets always seem to be full of potholes and always under construction. The traffic jams can be monumental. The pollution is awful, although some small progress has been made in that area in recent years. The politics are often reactionary and divorced from reality. In many areas of life, the good ole boy network is still intact and that pretty much excludes the good ole girls. And then, of course, there is the weather which is hot and humid and pretty unbearable at least six months out of the year. Sometimes eight. But there is one thing here that you won't hear me complaining about - the medical care. The quality of medical care that is available here is state of the art. If you or a loved one is sick or hurt, there are few better places in the world tha...

Politicians and pundits are tripping over each other to pronounce themselves shocked, shocked over the attempted assassination of an elected Member of Congress and the killing and wounding of several of her constituents at a public event in Tucson yesterday. Why should they be shocked? This is just the natural consequence of the irrational hate speech that is the prevalent means of communication in a certain quarter of our political landscape these days. If you are in any doubt as to which quarter I am referring to, it is the far, far right - those people whose heroes are folks like Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and the multi-billionaires like the Koch brothers who finance and manipulate the tea partiers. When these people constantly urge their followers "don't retreat, reload," or admonish them to take "Second Amendment remedies," or say things like, "If ballots don't work, bullets will!", what exactly did they exp...