His name doesn’t even appear in the book. But make no mistake. “Hillbilly Elegy,” the new best-seller by J.D. Vance, is, in a very real sense, about Donald Trump. More to the point, it’s about the people who have made his unlikely run for the presidency possible. It is also, not coincidentally, a book about […]
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Searching for life elsewhere; preserving live here on Earth
An international team of astronomers recently grabbed headlines by announcing the discovery of a planet circling Earth’s nearest neighbor star in its “Goldilocks” zone, not too hot, not too cold. It is only 4.22 light years from Earth. Stephen Hawking and other science and business leaders recently announced Breakthrough Starshot, a project designed to send […]
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Republicans took charge of legislation
During the past two years, the Maine State Legislature has been operating in a divided government. The Senate was controlled by Republicans, the House by Democrats, and Gov. Paul LePage is a Republican. Every piece of legislation has to be handled by all three of these entities, and that means the past two years had […]
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Academic liberalism seeks to diminish humaness
“He created them male and female and blessed them. And he named them “Mankind” when they were created. (Genesis 5:2 NIV) Poor God. He, or maybe I should say, “It,” was so behind the times. If the deity had only gone to Princeton University and had its consciousness raised… Princeton, that once great school whose […]
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Corruption becomes the standard for politicians
WASHINGTON — Bernie Sanders never understood the epic quality of the Clinton scandals. In his first debate, he famously dismissed the email issue, it being beneath the dignity of a great revolutionary to deal in things so tawdry and straightforward. Sanders failed to understand that Clinton scandals are sprawling, multilayered, complex things. They defy time […]
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Where are the religious intellectuals?
WASHINGTON — Through the past several decades, those who view religion with respect regularly come back to the same question: What has happened to the religious intellectuals, the thinkers taken seriously by nonbelievers as well as believers? In this increasingly secular time, a natural follow-up question ratifies the point of the original query: Who cares? […]
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Middle-wage occupations make a comeback
WASHINGTON — One of the economy’s bright spots is the job market — and it may be even brighter than it seems. Not only are there more jobs (1.3 million so far in 2016), but they may be better-paying, according to a new analysis by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The […]
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Trump utilizing ‘stab in the back’ myth
At the time Germany signed the armistice ending World War I, no battles had been fought on its territory and no foreign army had invaded it. The German people suffered greatly — food shortages and the like — but defeat to many did not seem to come from the battlefield in front but from traitorous […]
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Terrorist guilty of destroying Mali’s cultural sites
Timbuktu, located in Mali, is a classic idiom for nowhere. However, the great caravan city the southern Sahara was — and still is — a cultural somewhere rich in Arab, Berber and sub-Saharan African historical structures and cultural artifacts. In 2012, the al-Qaida-aligned Islamic terrorist group, Ansar Dine, intentionally attacked Timbuktu’s historic trove. Its thugs […]
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Conservative pundits helped destroy reality
Ordinarily, I might gloat. Last week, a prominent conservative pundit conceded a point yours truly and countless others have been making for a long time. Namely, that in their constant assaults on mainstream news media, conservatives have wrecked the very idea of objective, knowable fact. In effect, they broke reality. And Donald Trump came oozing […]