American Spring

Many Hollywood Sci-fi dystopias are wrong in that they are not fictional. They reflect present-day realities.  In America, for example,  most people today are cyborgs, a mass of cyborgs.   By"cyborg" I mean the dictionary definition: a person whose physiological functioning is aided by or dependent upon a machine. This machine is the car.  By the term "masses" I mean the common majority.  I also mean to reference John Sloan's 1911 magazine "The Masses."   I also reference the daily ocean of cars surrounding us all-- a mass of metal machines. Imagine a dystopia where humans are confined to metal pods for most of their lives, of which they must pay for every day, or civil and social rights will be restricted. These pods take you to all the important locations of your day-to-day existence. They are not fast. They are expensive, difficult to maintain, emitting toxic fumes, but inside they are comfortable, fitted with cup-holders, air-conditioning, ...

Corruption is another factor of the opioid crisis, a lesson suffered by the Qing dynasty of China in the mid 19 th century. No matter what limit is imposed upon an addictive product, there will be a corrupt official stationed at the midpoint, enriching himself. This brief essay intends to demonstrate the logical chain-of-events that occur when an addictive medicine undergoes prohibition. The American opioid crisis is different from the crack epidemic in one essential respect, unacknowledged by Trump’s administration in the August 8 th press conference: opium is a medicine, whereas crack is not. No one needs crack to survive, therefore: the administration’s approach to the opioid crisis is incomplete. Full press conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCL_FLdukPA             What about people with chronic pain? There is a culture of suspicion surrounding opiates and the treating of patients as suspects. Doctors and pharma...

August 14th, 2017 For this first post, I hope to set the overall tone of this blog, American Spring. "Freedom of speech" is "on the ropes" these days---to borrow two well-worn cliches---and Google is Muhammad Ali. At a time when google is demonetizing political content on YouTube and subtly promoting censorship, making a news-website for free is a political act. To report on the news and to spread one's own ideas, no matter what they are--these actions alone constitute a meaningful statement. A ny literate person can be an influence. What follows relies on the quality of one's content, and this act of sharing content demonstrates free speech. Now is a revolutionary time for free speech in America.  For men and women of zeroes and ones, like the men-of-letters of the renaissance, the content-creators of today's internet have tremendous support from and influence on the masses. Anyone with an internet-device can be part of it anonymously. More t...