President Obama sent his budget for fiscal 2011 (starting next October) to Congress today. As you’ve probably heard, his budget proposes to spend about $1.3 trillion more than will be collected in taxes, and this less than a week after his State of the Union pledge to freeze spending and do… Read full post »

I am declaring the unofficial start of the 2012 presidential campaign right here in li'l ol' Grand Rapids, Michigan. Sarah Palin kicked things off yesterday by starting her book tour here.  The book, of course, is her critical dissection of the 2008 campaign, "Going Rogue," in which she explains… Read full post »

In the past, once you had completed your first novel, you had three options. You could rely on your well-known name to get a deal, you could submit your book to dozens of agents and editors and hope for lightning to strike, or you could put the manuscript in your desk… Read full post »

We live in a sufficiently small world, with sufficiently liberal prerequisites for fame, that most of us have had a brush with a famous person at least once in our lives. I have had at least three near misses myself. Only recently I discovered my name was in a book of… Read full post »

The cupboard is in its proverbially bare state. (There are always a few dried spices and the remnants of a box of Wheat Chex from the last time someone made party mix, but you know what I mean.) I can think of no excuse to get me out of heading to… Read full post »

Delve into the topic of health care reform a bit and you realize it is two issues standing underneath one umbrella: universal health care insurance and uncontrolled health care costs. The Obama administration, with its can-do attitude, is trying to move quickly to do something about the first, while… Read full post »

I had a name to find on the Vietnam Memorial: Hilliard Wilbanks. Captain Wilbanks and my father had the same job in Vietnam: both were Forward Air Controllers. Both were the same age. Captain Wilbanks worked for the 21^st Tactical Air Support Squadron. My father worked for the 22^nd. As best… Read full post »

As we were taxiing in to the gate at Washington National earlier this week, a cell phone version of Dixie played somewhere in the front of the cabin, reminding me that the residents of Maryland and Virginia don’t often miss an opportunity to remind others of their southern heritage. Growing up… Read full post »

I grew up in Washington, D.C. More precisely, I lived there during the late 60’s and early 70’s until I moved at 13. Considering that was the era of Vietnam and Watergate, it certainly felt like I was growing up.

At any rate, for the first time since we left, I am going… Read full post »

Brenda (my wife) decided it was time to clean out the pantry. By the time she had finished, we had five large trash bags filled with stuff, enough to fill our entire 96 gallon trash can, with several days to go until pick up day. My first inclination is to feel… Read full post »

Our friend Jane had to put her dog to sleep yesterday. Who wouldn’t deeply mourn the death of a family member willing to give that much unconditional love, who only asked in return to be fed and forgiven for the occasional accident on the carpet? Brady had been Jane’s constant companion… Read full post »

Among the disturbing possibilities arising out of the recent anti-abortion related murder of Dr. George Tiller is that the murderer may achieve through violence what he and others could not achieve through civil discourse. According to a 2008 article in the New York Times, Dr. Tiller’s clinic w… Read full post »

If Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court goes off the rails, it won’t be due to her position on abortion, which must be assumed to be pro choice by both the left and the right. But even though the debate is unlikely to be moved in either direction by her… Read full post »

As I am a reductionist at heart, I am a fan of those pithy adages which try to sum up our experiences in a single sentence, as in Murphy’s famous law, and the bazillions of corollaries which have sprung from it. (Such as Hofstadter’s Law: “It always takes longer than you… Read full post »

Two weeks ago a good friend of mine friend got sick. I was pretty sure it was the swine flu. In addition to our profession, we share the same predilection for acquiring life-threatening illnesses with alarming frequency, only to have them resolve mysteriously and completely. (Our spouses insist on la… Read full post »

            In part I of this post I described how our individual sense of reality is a product of our biological brain, specifically, parts of our brain we have inherited from our mammalian ancestors. Our personal reality is created by deep brain structures wh… Read full post »

I was called to see an intensive care patient who believed his food was being poisoned. Say what you want about hospital food, but I don’t believe anyone is actually putting poison in it.  Patients say goofy things in the ICU. Most of the time the nurses are fairly tolerant/… Read full post »

Depending on your perspective, viruses are the most primitive organisms on the earth, or the most single-minded. They are nothing more than nano-sized gene replicators: they possess just enough genetic instructions to create a copy of themselves, and are dependent on the machinery inside the cells of… Read full post »

            Michael Hayden, President Bush’s last CIA chief, appeared on Fox News Sunday today (April 19) to claim that the Obama administration has compromised the safety of America by releasing the CIA’s “enhanced interrogatio/… Read full post »

     Good science fiction, like the recently retired remake of Battlestar Galactica on the Sci Fi channel, is good not because of its imagined technology or oddly shaped species, but because it stimulates us to think about how we relate to our own technology and civilization. The/… Read full post »