united states

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I’m still  choosing to be coy about where fate landed me after I left North Carolina almost four years ago.  Even so, I still keep an eye on my old home state, and I’ll forever be proud to have been a son of the Tarheel State (even if my basketball proclivities lay toward Duke, but I digress…).

Right now I’m sitting in some abject disbelief at North Carolina’s governor Roy Cooper insisting on keeping the state closed for all intents and purposes.  Neighboring states like Georgia are slamming the doors wide open for businesses large and small.  South Carolina places of worship have begun to crank up for regular services.  So far none of these places have recorded a rise in COVID-19 cases.  If anything the infection rate is dropping.

There is good reason for that.  We are definitely on the back side of the coronavirus situation.  “Shelter in ...

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Some are almost rubbing their hands in glee at coronavirus: holding to the notion that this is an obvious sign of the Second Coming because Pestilence is loosed upon the land. Though adherent that I aspire to be, my eyes cannot but roll in disbelief. Pandemics are almost as reliable as Old Faithful and will remain so until the end of time. The average span between worldwide outbreaks is around a hundred years. And coronavirus is hot on the centennial of the Spanish Influenza.

No, it is not the time for overzealous fervor to grasp rational thought. But with respect to my fellow Christians, coronavirus is at last the “Come to Jesus” meeting that the United States is long overdue for.

Let’s consider what must certainly be the most serious issue about what coronavirus is now teaching us. We have a woeful, immoral and almost criminal over-reliance on China for ...

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Just think: a few years later chunks of that wall were being sold at K-Mart. 

Friends, I have a secret to tell.  I’ve waited decades… decades… for the chance to use the word “perestroika” in a written piece.  Not even during college and my senior history thesis – about the Russian space program and how it had tracked with that country’s politics since Nicholas II’s reign – did “perestroika” get to be employed.

I guess “perestroika” on some weird level is for me, what “smock” was to Hobbes:
Credit: the peculiar genius of Bill Watterson
Anyway, the considerate curators of conservative-ish contemplation at American Thinker have published a second article from me in as many days, and I am extremely thankful for that.  “The Fall of the Deep State and 1989’s Fall of Communism” relates some parallels between the events that transpired across Eastern Europe thirty years ago
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Hearing the news that Ross Perot had died earlier today was like feeling a punch to the gut of that persistent eighteen-year old in my personal nature.  Maybe it had to do with the memory of working the local Perot campaign headquarters in those heady days of fall 1992.  Located in rented space on a small shopping strip in Eden, North Carolina, at first glance it wasn’t what I was expecting.  There was a shabbiness to the place.  But whatever it lacked in looks, it more than made up for it in frenetic energy.  There was a sense of unstoppable enthusiasm among all those good and wacky characters, and I must have worked at least forty hours there making phone calls on Perot’s behalf, assembling yard signs, picking up bumper stickers to hand out…

I forget how much of a percentage Rockingham County went for Perot, but it was a
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“Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force!  You are about to embark upon a great crusade, toward which we have striven these many months.  The eyes of the world are upon you.  The hopes and prayers of liberty loving people everywhere march with you.  In company with our brave Allies and brothers in arms on other fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.


“Your task will not be an easy one.  Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle hardened.  He will fight savagely.

“But this is the year 1944!  Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41.  The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man to man.  Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength
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Hmmm… let’s see…

This past week has seen the writing of my second-ever work of short story fiction (while stranded in a motel room along with Tammy the Pup during Hurricane Florence) after trying for decades to crack that art, work begun on a one-act play, finally started plotting a children’s book(?!?). And now, it’s article #5 written for American Thinker!

Has the Muse roared back from her exile, or what? For awhile I thought she had gone sailing off the cliff in a convertible accompanied by Dignity a’la Thelma and Louise, but anyhoo…

“There’s Poisoning the Well, and Then There’s Borking the Well” is my take on the Brett Kavanaugh nomination for the United States Supreme Court. However, that’s just the peripheral matter of a way bigger issue: that for sake of partisan power there are some – and I’m looking at you in particular, Senator Feinstein ...

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Several months ago, following a mass shooting incident and some remarks he had made about mental illness, I composed a letter to The Honorable Donald J. Trump, President of the United States.  In the letter I shared some understanding that I, as a person with bipolar disorder, have come to discover.  Namely, that mental illness is a condition of the mind, and not the heart.  Over much of the past year especially I have worked alongside many who also have varying types of mental illness.  Not one of them is a person I would ever consider to be a danger to others.  But I also do realize that there is a stigma, and maybe it will be with us for a long time still.  And I suppose there is little that just one guy with a blog can do about that.

Even so: bipolar disorder has wrecked havoc with my ...

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Visiting the Reagan Presidential Library over a year ago impressed upon me the Gipper’s charm and cordiality toward Gorbachev.  Yet Reagan was also fiercely resolute in his conviction that people desire to forge their own destinies.  It was the two Cold War leaders riding horses together as much as it was Reagan’s defiance at the Brandenburg Gate that ended the threat of communism in Europe.

It was a fine example of the “neo-noblesse oblige” that had been the template since World War II.  Countless perished in that conflict due in no small amount to the failure of “gentleman diplomacy” on the part of the upper crust.  But for its time, that was sanity.  And then a new sanity dawned with the rising of a false sun over Hiroshima.

Yet Ronald Reagan… was insane.  Or so we were told by pundits and academics.

Speaking of peace while drastically building up the ...

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So this is not only the first video blog post I’ve made in… well a VERY long time.  It’s also the absolutely FIRST blog post that I’ve made about now-President Donald Trump ever!


To be fair though, it’s not about Trump himself.  It’s about what I’ve seen waaaaay too much of in the way of hatred toward the guy.  It’s not warranted and it’s not worth it.  Anyhoo, roll the clip!

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Some musings on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act now on the books in Indiana and that so many are in a tizzy about…

The act does not discriminate.

The act is not “anti-gay, anti-lesbian, anti-bisexual, anti-transexual” or anti-anything at all. Nowhere in the text of the legislation is there found a clause stipulating that any one or any group in particular is to be given any less protection under the law.

The act simply reasserts something that Amendment One of the Bill of Rights has codified for well over two hundred years: that there is a right to assembly and association. This also means that there is just as much a right to NON-association.

The act simply does as its title indicates: it allows for individuals and businesses to not provide a service if doing so violates the religious beliefs of that individual or business.

There are many people ...

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