Am I taking the contrarian view in saying Ebola is a tempest in a teapot? Compared with what I call major league infectious diseases, like TB, measles, malaria even dengue, it’s a drop in the ocean. By that I mean history is littered with  thousands of infectious mini-demics dead of their own accord. That is…

  Written as I’m reading that some 3500 US troops are winging their way to West Africa. Not all scourges require aggressive action. I got to thinking about this being exposed to organizations like the Cato Institute from one of my conservative acquaintances, advocating nil to minimal government intervention. The Ebola bug (EVD) exploded into…

  I’d nearly forgotten how much courage it takes to ask a woman out. Today we are told men and women are the same  but in former times, men attracted women partly on their brashness, not always physical attractiveness or current financial success. Everyone has noticed young men and women failing to tie the knot,…

How much of available information is true, and good? Historical Crisis, a science fiction novelette by Donald Kingsbury, is about how psycho-historian “Pscholars” rule worlds far into the future. Pscholars have the corner on statistical esoterica of probable behaviors and historical outcomes. They are forbidden to publish their findings as knowledge of behavioral probabilities will…

The ancient Egyptians mummified the dead to preserve the physical body. The body was needed in the Afterworld. While the Egyptians seemed to have concept of the animating facility as provided by a soul, the soul for them resided in the heart, famously weighed against a feather, to determine if the heart was freighted with…

I had the pleasure of driving to the Berkshires in MA with the Road Scholars this Summer. Over the course of about a week I was privileged to see live dance, theatre, and orchestral performance at a concentration of venues, Jacob’s Pillow, Berkshire Theatre and Tanglewood, Summer home the Boston Symphony. I came to appreciate how dedicated are…

On one hand we have no instance where there has been any conscious interaction or communication without the aid of a living body. As the body, especially the brain, becomes affected, there always seems to more impaired interaction with the environment. Also all interaction ceases after the death of the body, so it seems clear…

I was talking with a colleague who’d come to the US for training, about the Malaysian passenger plane over the Ukraine. Nothing seemed more obvious to me than the deliberate downing of a civilian airplane causing nearly three hundred innocent deaths is far beneath any standard of human behavior. I was particularly incensed as I…

Sex and Death promote diversity, the basis of life. A woman in her 60s brought in her mother with frequent falls. Her mom was increasingly debilitated and not able to walk without falling and was confused in her thinking and verbal expression. Drilling down on the history, the patient had stereotypical epileptic seizures preceded by…

After delivering graduation speech as principal of a Catholic school a woman I examined thought something so terribly wrong that she petitioned the Monsignor to give her last rights before coming to the hospital. She confessed to him three separate times not recalling she’d already done so.   She felt disoriented. She is an intelligent…