A culture cannot lie down with dogs and not become utterly infested with fleas. The dogs, in this case, are the mongrel media and the corporate overlords who have grown fat on manufactured controversy and fear mongering.

A nation is not a budget, no matter how much ideologues want it to be so.

We have as a nation been duped by those who use our guilt about how we treated the innocent pawns in the Vietnam War game - the soldiers - into missing the point once again about the utter senselessness that is war.

We fight wars from progressively great heights and distances, the blessings of technology steadily removing the personal human element from what was historically an extremely personal experience.

The flaw in, say, austerity, is that its success is predicated on the relative exactitude of math rather than the shifting, liquid imperfection of peoples lives.

I know it's sappy, but I bet there's a market for civility and niceness out there that, while probably not as titillating as a junkyard scrap between shirtless adversaries, it'd sure be healthier.

Social media has created a legion of social delinquents, billions of people speaking not their minds but their spleens, venting everything from the gum-cracking snark befitting a hair-twisting mallrat to the froth-flecked rage of a bell tower marksman.