Much of the time the tragedies that occur in our world remain abstractions. Once in a while, though, these events come close to home. A relative is diagnosed with cancer. A friend’s house burns to the ground. A coworker is arrested for a felony. Suddenly these occurrences aren’t news items, but flesh and blood before…

I am verging on hiding the news feeds of all my Facebook friends who continue to put hashtags (the pound sign) in their posts. I could rant about it, or I could just copy and paste this excellent, and completely correct, analysis from Maddox: And just an aside: hashtags are pointless, hashtag jokes are stupid…

1. Myth: religion is not a real problem. Fact: religion is a real and serious condition. It is no different than diabetes or heart disease in its ability to impact someone’s life. It can have both emotional and physical symptoms and make life very difficult for those who have it. The medical community has acknowledged…

“Anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I’m telling you, you’re not my brother and you’re not my sister.” -Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley, January 2011

Alternate title: Dogs Preserve Dreams. I got up at 4:30 this morning to feed the dogs. I got back in bed and laid awake for 15 minutes memorizing the following dream: We were in my Grandmother Barron’s back bedroom, the one where Nicole and I used to stay when we were kids, when we noticed…

We have all seen and heard the use of insults as arguments. Instead of actually debating an issue, one of the debaters will retreat to name calling, badgering, and belittling, and often claiming your point of view is just ridiculous without attempting to say why. We hear it a lot on talk radio. The technique…

Update, February 2012: When I first posted this entry, I received some compelling comments, some hostile comments, and two comments which actually threatened me. I didn’t approve the hostile or threatening comments, but I now see that as a mistake, since hostile comments in fact adjudicate my thinking by illustrating how genuinely terrifying this kind…

As the former guardian of a teenage boy, and as an adult family man, I presently look at the world from a maturing perspective. From my point of view, characteristics such as responsibility and honesty trump characteristics like impetuousness, laziness, and rebellion. Every teenager, from my own self those decades ago, to the one who was…

Someone at my office today casually announced that “blogging is passé.” Of course, I beg to differ, in some cases. The truth is that overall, blogging was dead before it started, since it was shallow, annoying, incomplete and uncreative in the first place. So yes, bad blogging is passé. If we are to believe in…

Here are a few bullet points from a notepad in my car… Radio ad: “Tell congress to do its job and pass the new wiretapping bill to keep us all safe.” After hearing this ad in favor of continuing to allow warrantless electronic eavesdropping on American citizens, and thinking how much it sounded like the…

Some issues. Discuss. * Dependence on Oil I recognized this problem in 1973 when I was 10. I couldn’t solve it then, and I can’t solve it now, because the American people are too greedy, short-sighted and ultimately stupid to elect leaders who will stand up to global oil and say we’ve had enough, while…

Recently Abby and I were doing chores and piddling, and Abby had the TV on to her favorite network, HGTV. Occasionally I sat down to tell her something or bring her a drink, and listened for a few minutes to the program. Three things came to mind immediately: The “G” in HGTV stood for garden…

I found this posted on a forum I frequent: “Why Doesn’t Healthy Food Taste Good? I have a theory on this. Satan works hard every day to deceive us. Infiltrating our food supply with foods swimming in calories, fat, sodium, and sugar is a subtle yet powerful way to get us down. Fruits, vegetables, and…

Friday night, Nov. 2, 2007, the Ada Cougars, a football team that for 25 years has made a playoff appearance, lost to their traditional rival, the McAlester Buffaloes, in a contest that featured the most points scored in any game at ECU’s Norris Field, 101 (final score 59-42). The loss meant that for the first…

The state’s police training facility, located here in Ada, CLEET, called recently and told me that all their students were being let out of class today to drive north to Seminole in a convoy of nearly 100 vehicles, to attend the funeral of two Seminole County deputies who were killed in the line of duty…

I was scanning my Yahoo! News a few minutes ago and read an article about weight loss. Maybe I should say yet another article about weight loss. In it, I read this paragraph: And yet obesity figures have risen dramatically in the same period: a third of Americans are obese, and another third count as…

I know two people right now who are seriously ill with cancer. I can only imagine their pain and fear. All I can say to them is that every breath is precious, and that we are all, one day, of the earth. I smile and hold them in my thoughts. Every moment. Every breath. This…

The entirety of mainstream politics and media in America continues to refer to certain terrorists throughout the world as “Radical Islamists” or “Islamic Fundamentalists,” as if to intellectually divorce Islam from the terror perpetrated in its name. It is not the responsibility of the United States and its military or intelligence community to apprehend fundamental…

It must be very reassuing to believe in a life after death. I don’t believe in life after death because I don’t believe in death. Death itself is a transformation. Now I am a human. Tomorrow I may be dust. But all that I am remains. Maybe I am the sand in the desert. Maybe…