It is so depressing to discuss labor issues or labor unions with the typical American worker. One after another come the same inane clichés that everyone has been taught, which they've never examined, but which they spout as if they'd thought them up.

It is not uncommon for the Bush administration to be caught in a lie. It is interesting to see how veterans respond to being blind sided by the very leaders they thought were most on their side.

A good friend of mine has a bumper sticker that says, "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." This illustrates a problem with funding social programs - the cost of the cure shows up on the current budget, but many of the costs and consequences of not funding the cure don't show up until today's office-holders have retired.

What is the true measure of a nation? Gandhi said that you could measure the moral condition of a nation by looking at how it treated its poorest and weakest citizens. Cicero said that the nation lives through its deeds not its words. Jefferson said that the moral integrity of a people is shown by the place in the world to which its people aspire. I wonder what posterity will make of the legacy we prepare for them.

Our country is full of disconnects. More and more, the left hand has no clue what the right hand is doing. It's sad and it's also dangerous to be so incompetent, nationally.

The University of Coloardo at Boulder has fired Professor Ward Churchill for his unorthodox views. They did it very carfully, with substantial documentation. It is a further source of irony that this act of institutional castration patterns so well its intellectual predecessors in method as well as mindset.

The telecommunications industry is lobbying hard to transform the Information Superhighway into a series of Information Turnpikes, all under the polite lie of reducing government regulation. What will this mean to the Internet?

Traveling by air is definitely not what it once was: it has been transformed into a disagreeable activity undertaken only from necessity. It is a result of our pay-as-you go culture and we are reaping the consequences.

It's hard to turn on talk radio without hearing somebody talking about the crisis in health care in this country. This is the only first-world country without universal health care. But the thing that astounds me is that everyone is talking about health insurance, and practically nobody is talking about health care.

There is currently a heated debate in many states about the right of pharmacists to limit the medications they dispense because of their own personal ethics. What is all this fuss about?

Isn't it interesting how we tolerate secrecy in our government? We admit that politics and honesty are mutually incompatible, but we defend the right of the admittedly successful politicos to define what it is that we should never know. Talk about putting the burglar in charge at the bank!

People mean a lot of different things by the term "charity." Understanding what other people mean by charity can be difficult.

There is some component of who we are that comes from what we are: medium sized mammals. The rest of who we are, both as human beings and as human societies is learned. Why don't we consider this when we're looking at the world's problems?

Among the most discreditable of practices is "Astroturfing" - a process where a special interest group pays people to create a fake grass-roots movement for or against something. The good folks at Wal-Mart are currently trying to reinvent blogging, transforming it from a free method of information exchange into mere advertising.

We used to be a nation of laws. People all over the world might criticize us for this or that, but they always had to admit that we were a nation committed to law and order. This is regrettably no longer true. We are all affected - tarred with unspeakable crimes and unpardonable offenses - for which we and our children will be held responsible.

Ethics and Morality - what is the difference between these two things, or are they essentially the same, but treated differently by reason of some person's own internal prejudices?