History is a labyrinth circling back on itself. This explains a metamorphosis in America that has sent the country reeling into intellectual dystopia, the national mind untethered from objective reality and cast into a nothingness of its own devising.
Mountain State residents are sensing that our U.S. senators have ascended to ethereal altitudes from which the folks back home appear to be mere dots, tiny specks without discernible needs.
Confession: I used to be a Republican. I briefly became one years ago while living amongst the ultrawoke on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Their authoritarian diktats drove me crazy. And their narrow definition of economic interests as the rich versus the poor — with the middle class almost in…
I understand Sen. Joe Manchin’s aggravation with fellow Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., authoring an op-ed in the Gazette-Mail urging Manchin to get on board with the Biden administration’s $3.5 trillion Build Back Better Act.
Here’s how TV news works: What is just an annoyance becomes a concern. A concern turns into a serious worry. And a serious worry is elevated into a crisis. Stoking anxiety is how they keep the public glued.
The opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference. The opposite of freedom is not tyranny, it is order, as pure freedom is chaos.
Sins in the realm of the insular principally extend from the singular offense of being an auslander, a foreigner, a Not One of Us. To this group, Us, which means Not You if you are Not One of Us, few crimes disturb so greatly as that of Outsiders setting foot in the realm, a violation declar…
Republican leaders, their feet mired in Trumpism’s quicksand, have become incapacitated. They stand in a stagnant swamp that is essentially of their own making, unable to direct well-deserved outrage at events that threaten our democracy. Instead, they aim darts at imaginary “attacks on free…
There isn’t a person in this country right now who doesn’t have an opinion on the words and actions of Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va.
There’s a drug war on TV. It has nothing to do with cocaine or heroin but does involve an addiction — the pharmaceutical industry’s compulsion to charge Americans an average 3.4 times more for brand-name drugs than people in other countries pay. Step 1 in the rehab program is to let Medicare…
We should know, or nearly know, the boundaries of our 100 single-member legislative delegate districts by now. And that brings to mind the words of former newscaster and political consultant Ralph Murphine, who said, “Never underestimate the intelligence of the electorate nor overestimate th…
What Napoleon Bonaparte envisioned, Ferdinand de Lesseps achieved, constructing a canal across the isthmus of Suez, linking the Red Sea and the Mediterranean and opening an avenue for Europe to fortunes in East Asia.
Abortion opponents applaud the new Texas law that effectively outlaws the procedure at six weeks. But consider the plight of a frightened Texas high school student who discovers that she is two months pregnant and fears being shunned by her toxically backward parents.
Occasionally, when I’m visiting with friends or family out of town, or even when a stranger from another part of the country finds out what I do for a living, they’ll ask, “So, what’s the deal with Joe Manchin?”
You might have noticed that Charleston’s minor league baseball team changed its name to the Charleston Dirty Birds last week, causing a minor outrage among those unaware that cheekiness in minor league baseball not only is the rage but is purposeful to sell team merchandise.
Late last week, President Joe Biden signed a bill to keep the federal government operating through Dec. 3, averting a looming government shutdown.
Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee, little known to those who surf the net rather than scrutinize its origins, is the inventor of the World Wide Web, the match the newspaper industry used to set itself on fire. This analogy is, of course, ridiculous, not because of the result it depicts but becaus…
Psychiatric diagnoses typically do not imply the causes of strange behavior, although they at least provide us with a means of communicating our observations of it.
My wife and I recently watched the four-part documentary, “LuLaRich,” on Amazon Prime, chronicling the wild rise and fall of the multi-level-marketing company, LuLaRoe, that had at least one person you know selling women’s leggings on Facebook Live sometime over the past seven years.
No matter what happens in Congress over the next few days, the one thing even President Joe Biden’s harshest critics cannot say is that his administration’s accomplishments are inconsequential. This is a White House that does big things at home and abroad.
Set aside the specter of overflowing intensive care units in Idaho — or that the state’s emergency rooms are now choosing which COVID-19 patients to save and which ones to give up on. The situation is so bad that desperate patients are crossing the border into Washington state to find hospit…
Don’t worry. Congress will increase the federal debt ceiling, our government won’t shut down and we’ll avoid economic calamity. Least that’s my hope. Why? Because the debt ceiling doesn’t matter.
Cliches carry many hazards extending beyond the one most visible, their lack of originality. Some cliches are a product of corrosion, their constant use rendering banal that which once was profound.
About France and its submarines: Australia’s decision to cancel a $60 billion contract to buy them and purchase American nuclear subs instead had to hurt. In response, France’s foreign minister called the U.S.-backed move a “stab in the back,” and President Emmanuel Macron recalled his ambas…
When I was a kid, I was obsessed with UFOs, then known as “flying saucers.”
Rapper Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s friend developed swollen testicles after getting vaccinated for COVID-19, we are told. Thus, Minaj weighs a confusing equivalence. In deciding whether to get vaccinated, does she go with the vast body of research done by medical professionals, or with her cousin…
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s massive victory in California’s recall election should spray some water on overheated predictions that Democrats will lose big in the 2022 midterm elections. And that’s not the only source of hope for the Democratic Party.
Conspiracists say Dr. Anthony Fauci’s wife, Dr. Christine Grady, who also works for the National Institutes of Health, has approval over the vaccines he promotes, or some version of that. She doesn’t, but that doesn’t stop nefarious plots about the couple. Here’s the truth about Mrs. Fauci a…
Before Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Reddit, Whatsapp, Pinterest, YouTube and every other platform for the promulgation of drivel, there was Gorgias.
There has been much discussion about voting rights and the need to ensure democracy in the United States. Important expenditure initiatives are also on the table as an effort to shore up the country’s basic infrastructure and provide essential social services.
Federal lawmakers are considering the “human infrastructure” bill that would revamp Medicare by lowering the eligibility age to 60 and by adding coverage for vision, dental and hearing costs.
One of my favorite things about living in Charleston is that the city has a minor league baseball team, the West Virginia Power (apparently soon to be renamed the Charleston Dirty Birds, which has fans in an uproar).
Let’s be clear: No one has to get the vaccine. As the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states: “The federal government does not mandate (require) vaccination for people.”
It’s no secret that West Virginia is facing some pretty serious demographic problems, even aside from our spiking COVID-19 spread.
A friend swears that ivermectin helped her defeat COVID-19 and promotes it regularly on Facebook. You might know ivermectin as the anti-parasitic de-wormer for animals. However, she says it works on COVID-19. Hmm. That’s not a claim even promoters make. Let’s look closer.
Divining wisdom in social media is an enterprise akin to seeking nutrition from Twinkies. A similar analogy could be applied to gaining conventional insight from the late Carl Sagan, whose fervent belief in extraterrestrial life and UFOs might have been linked to his marijuana advocacy.
It was a day 20 years ago that I drove to Marshall University to teach a 9:30 a.m. class, first stopping to mail a care package to my son, Dan, 25, at his Marine Corps base in California. The class over, I walked to my department’s office, where I saw a group of faculty members and students …
I remember very clearly where I was, what I saw and how I felt as the events of Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, unfolded. I remember the confusion, horror, panic, sadness and anger that came as the day’s events were pieced together.
Rudolph Giuliani was always somewhat off-center, even in his glory days as New York City mayor. But people who recall him then were stunned by his decline into a conspiracy-mongering swamp creature of Trump world. The 20th anniversary of Sept. 11 lets us remember that, on that day of horror,…
COVID-19 has killed 648,935 in the United States, led to mental health declines, increased work demands and heightened feelings of loneliness.
Neither Jim Justice nor any of the governor’s men want you to know the costs of the Executive Mansion, the taxpayer-funded building designated as the living and working quarters for this state’s chief executive. Governors before him have shared this information when asked. But not Justice.
If looking back at events of 20 years ago tells us anything, it is that the passage of time brings clarity to the tragedy of 9/11. In the coming week, much will be said about that day. But before we do that, let us briefly pause to speculate on the world as it might appear 20 years from now.
You know things are off the wall when even the FDA can’t keep a straight face. What could the U.S. Food and Drug Administration say to Americans who refuse to get a coronavirus vaccine administered by medical professionals but instead go to a livestock supply house for a drug designed to dew…
As of Wednesday, West Virginia had 109 COVID-19 patients on ventilators, more than at any point prior during the pandemic.
Lawyers don’t have the freedom to assert just anything in federal court, especially if it is not true. You would have thought they would have learned that in law school. Apparently not.
Among sundry deep questions with which Oscar Wilde wrestled was whether life imitated art, or art imitated life. He came down on the side of the former.
Poor Coach Jim Justice. He didn’t get the job coaching the Greenbrier East High School boys basketball team. He’s finding out how tough the gig economy is.
Beyond the human price of COVID-19 is the financial toll of treating the sick. Back in the day, conservatives touted fiscal responsibility — that is, keeping the cost of government in check.
The images from Kabul airport as American forces departed were heartbreaking. But there was no glorious way for the U.S. to pull out of Afghanistan.
Many West Virginians, and I’ve been among them, extol the virtues of the people here as one of the state’s best assets. Unfortunately, chunks of those assets keep leaving, especially our young people.
