When I was 25 years old, I proudly served on the USS Virginia as a Junior Officer. Looking back now, 50 years later, it was one of the best years of my life. I qualified as Officer of The Day Underway, I was taught to sail by Master Chief Fred Wright, and probably most importantly, […]
The adage amongst both conservative and progressive political operatives is that “politics follows culture”. That is often times stated as a fact without understanding the cause. When cultural changes create new demands on governments, before they react to the changes, it is incumbent upon serious people to examine the causes. Like GLOBAL WARMING, EVOLUTION, and […]
Politics reflects our own human nature. There are stories about President Reagan and Tip O’Neal sharing a cocktail after they had excoriated each other politically—not personally, earlier in the day. Former District Judge Mike Wetherall told me the story about Senator Frank Church warning Barry Goldwater as they were eating lunch together in the Senate […]
We process information, discern complicated solutions to sometimes simple problems in different ways. Sitting around the coffee table several mornings ago with a group of professional men and women in Seattle—doctors, lawyers, educators, journalists, and a labor organizer, I was asked what informs my decision-making process. Most of the people sitting around the table had […]
Federalist Number 10 written by James Madison famously warned about THE VIOLENCE OF FACTION. Madison defined “faction” as being a number of citizens either in a minority or a majority that were united in a common interest adverse to the rights of others or to the wellbeing of the “common good”. This violence doesn’t need […]
I have never received more e-mail and phone requests from readers of The Gem State Patriot, than I have received regarding articles I have written in the past about civil and government corruption. In the coming weeks, I will write about specific events that have occurred in Boise, and Garden City. In this article, I […]
There are certain basic principles and ideas that form the moral predicates upon which all societies in all parts of the world are grounded. In the Western World these “pillars” upon which societies have been built have been progressively subjugated and are no longer part of the curriculum in public and many private—even Christian schools. […]
The country club class and The Chamber of Commerce Class may own our country, but they don’t run our country. For almost 50 years they did. After World War II, an entire system of recapitalization of our economy grew from the model of what President Eisenhower called the MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX. Instead of demand signaling […]
A recent article in both PLOS ONE and NEWSWEEK reported on a study, noting a correlation between political ideology and self-reported mental health. My 47 years of practicing medicine and surgery included only 3 months of formal psychiatric training as a medical student, but those 47 years did give me what I think is a […]
Life goes on in the Plantation. We are dealing with an issue that many of you have written to me about and our situation is happening all over Idaho in large and small communities. Our quite peaceful neighborhood is soon to become a construction site and dump for a new “project” of high-density housing that […]
Over the past several years I have written about the evolving changes in medicine that have occurred with the replacement of traditional medical ethics—think the Hippocratic Oath for example that is almost never used anymore at Medical School graduations, with a secular humanistic ethic that early in the nineteen sixties evolved into medical consumerism and […]
I received an e-mail today from a friend that was very critical of Benjamin Netanyahu. Here are some of his words: He tried to “Make himself an essential war-time leader, in order to put off facing criminal charges? That has a familiar ring to it.” Here is my response: The Netanyahu family has served the […]