Far too many professional politicians perceive the Trump presidency as a purely political issue. It is not. It is a constitutional issue. There is an increasingly rapid growing threat afoot to undermine American democracy. Under Donald Trump, we are all witnessing the USA turning into a dictatorship. However, too many of us are too distracted by the daily news cycle to admit that alarming truth. We are becoming a Russia, a China, a Syria, a Turkey, a Philippines, or a Venezuela. Yet we steadfastly ignore the obvious trend because of our daily distractions and our cowardly timidity. How can we exit this potentially if not actually catastrophic situation?

“The essential is [of one with a Narcissistic] Personality Disorder in which there are grandiose sense of self-importance or uniqueness; preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success; exhibitionistic need for constant attention and admiration; characteristic responses to threats of self-esteem; and characteristic disturbances in interpersonal relationships, such as feelings of entitlement, interpersonal exploitativeness, relations that alternate between the extremes of over-idealization and devaluation, and lack of empathy. The exaggerated sense of self-importance may be manifested as extreme self-centeredness and self-absorption.” No one familiar to any American citizen could more completely fit that description than the President of the United States of America. Donald J. Trump has a serious personality disorder. He exhibits it on a daily, often on an hourly, basis. His actions are classic examples of narcissism.

Every day many billions of communications are hurled out into cyberspace on social media. That is billions with a “b.” There are seven-plus billion people in the world. Does that mean every single earthling is using social media to reach every other earthling? Obviously not, thankfully. Perhaps a mere two or three billion are hooked up to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and the like. But many millions of those billions are “booking” and “tweeting” and “gramming” and “snapping” many times each day to other millions. In a day it all adds up to billions.

That has always been the fatal flaw of American health care. Good health care for all citizens cannot be based on private health care or on private insurance to guarantee good health care. Since the end of World War II, every other advanced nation has clearly realized that the only way to provide universal health care to all citizens at a reasonable cost is to have a government-sponsored single-payer national health service of some kind.

Countless Americans are gravely concerned about the behavior of our President. The longer they remain silent, the more likely it is that behavior shall continue unabated. Political caution may incur incalculable damage as long as caution is the national modus operandi. How long will it take, and how much time should he be given?

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was one of the most famous justices ever to serve on the United States Supreme Court. In 1927 he wrote a dissenting opinion in a case which came before the Court. In his dissent, he said, among other things, “Taxes are the price we pay for civilization. I like to pay taxes. They buy me democracy.” To reiterate his point, he said, “Taxes are the price we pay for civilized society.”

My purpose here is not to delve into who made us. The Psalm writer believed God created us. It is possible, however, as many have suggested, that we “just happened.” However we came into being, we are; we exist. And our existence as created and/or evolved beings is astonishingly complex. Human bodies and minds are exceedingly intricately put together. To deny that is to ignore biological and psychological reality. But it is solely on the mind that you are being asked to focus now.

There is an undeniable burden, as well as a blessing, in being born American. But to understand how and why that that burden exists, let us consider how, in prior times, it was a particular burden to be born a citizen of other nations. In so doing, we may better comprehend why it is a burden to be born American at the present time. Whoever has the misfortune to be born in any country that is a world power at any given period of history is going to pay personally for their accident of birth in one way or another. Let us examine how that came to pass in centuries gone by.

For decades Congress has periodically, but also rarely, discussed legislation to require employers to pay a particular minimum wage. The process by which this discussion comes up is determined by many factors: the economic climate at the time the discussion takes place; which political party is in power in both houses of Congress; who is the President at a given time; what is the mood of the electorate (are they feeling benevolent or are they tight-fisted?); is prosperity or is paucity more prevalent in the national psyche when the politicians summon up courage to debate a minimum wage, and so on.

Will Rogers once famously observed, “I am not a member of an organized political party; I’m a Democrat.” Today, nearly a century after the Oklahoma writer and entertainer made his sardonic statement, the Democratic Party is still distressingly disorganized. It has few widely-publicized and affirmed core principles which most of its politicians or members are willing strongly to support.

It has revolutionized life for nearly every inhabitant of Planet Earth. The only people who may be completely unaffected by it live in geographical places which are extremely remote from the rest of the world, such as people in the upper reaches of the Amazon River in Brazil or Peru, people in the thickest jungles of New Guinea, people on isolated islands in the Arctic or the South Pacific or in the hidden valleys of Africa. Otherwise, all the rest of us have been enormously affected by its ubiquitous movement into virtually every aspect of contemporary 21st century life.

In late 18th century England, a group of workers in the textile industry furtively and then boldly began to destroy the machines they thought would take away their jobs. They conspired to sabotage the mechanical devices they knew produced cloth more quickly and at a much cheaper cost, but they also assumed they eventually would lose their employment as a result of the amazing technological devices which revolutionized the textile business. In the end they were correct in their assumption.

"A mind is a terrible thing to waste." And yet all of us waste our minds occasionally, if not frequently. When we allow anxiety or material things or irresolvable conflicts or any particular issue or grievance to take control of us, we misuse our minds. When anger seethes within us, when resentment becomes uppermost to us, when enjoyment or fun or happiness become the most important factors in our lives, we lay waste to our minds. The mind is the storehouse of the memory, and if our storehouse is filled with the wrong kinds of things, we will damage the protoplasmic vessel which alone can contain whatever we have thought or are thinking.

Is the tension between one’s work and the rest of one’s life fundamentally different for men than for women? In some respects yes, but in others no. And in any case, everyone who was ever employed by anybody doing anything always has to try to find the golden mean between work and everything else in life. The nature of the trade-offs have changed immensely as the centuries have rolled on, but the essence of the challenge hasn’t changed at all. Is my work my life, or is my life my life? Both sexes and all individuals have to answer that for themselves, and no one can avoid it.

One of Sir Winston’s most famous declarations was what he said about democracy. “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the other forms that have been tried from time to time.” That is the idea we shall be exploring in this lecture.

On the basis of less than six months, almost no interested and informed observers of Francis I would consider him to be very similar to Benedict XVI, John Paul II, or Paul VI. If anything, we may be observing another John XXIII in the making.

Long ago, which is to say 50+ years ago or so, a drone was a male bee which hung around the hive for a while and didn’t do much. Then he had the decency to die off, along with all the other drones, in a kind of mass suicide pact. Apparently it is an apiary necessity. Later, drones became pilot-less planes operated by radio signals which the Air Force or Navy shot down with piloted planes or guides missiles to practice their technological marksmanship...

When I was a student in college, I had a part-time job feeding IBM cards into a computer at the University of Wisconsin. The cards were about 3 inches wide and 6 inches long, and they had a bunch of mysterious perforations in them. I had no idea what the holes meant, or what the computer would do with them, but I dutifully fed them into the enormous piece of equipment, which filled a very large room...

If we, the people, continue to affirm and to accept the world’s most dangerous and egregious gun culture, we deserve all the carnage which such a society inevitably produces. But if we concluded that for the health and well being of our country, we must seriously start to cut back on the number of guns we possess, we would also begin to have far fewer gun-related homicides and suicides.

There is an enormous problem with a one-state solution. If it were constituted immediately inside any proposed set of borders, there would be almost as many Palestinians as there are Jews. Furthermore, because of a much higher birthrate among Palestinians, very soon there would be more Palestinians in this newly formed nation. So the question naturally arises, would such a state be a Jewish nation, or would it be a secular democracy in which Jews, Muslims, Christians, and secular citizens all have equal status? And if there were more Muslims than Jews, would Muslims control the government? And because Israel was established precisely because it was to be a Jewish state, how could it be Jewish with a minority of Jews living within its borders? In 2013, what does it mean that Israel exists as a Jewish state?