About


After several years of blogging here and elsewhere, I just discovered (was it always available, or is it a new feature?) that I can have tabbed pages. So here's a first attempt, beginning with a couple of obvious points:
  • I have no illusions (allusions, regularly; illusions, hardly) about this blog: it's neither widely read nor, more importantly, affecting the world in any way. Still, I find myself barely able to take the deterioration of our political process, and writing from time to time is, at least, some sort of defusing. So I do.
  • I'm probably not as flamingly liberal as I sound here: I find much with which to disagree about the Democratic Party, particularly as constituted in Congress. However, in the current climate, where outrageous idiocy, fueled by nameless hatred, is a constant of the right side of the political scene, a counter to it -- however ineffectual -- is called for.
  • My credentials as a political blogger are only that I read a lot, am deeply interested, and genuinely believe that the issues facing us in the dawn of the twenty-first century are the most existentially important ever. And that how (or, as it appears, IF) we handle them will determine whether we survive as a nation. It doesn't look good.
In more important life, I am (was, actually) a surgeon. For thirty years, more or less, that's pretty much all I did. And I began blogging with "Surgeonsblog," undoubtedly a more important and useful enterprise; one which actually garnered a certain amount of recognition in its prime, and the remnants of which still seem to be searched by and helpful to numbers of people. For that, I'm glad. For this one, I'm sometimes embarrassed. Which is not to say I'll stop, necessarily.

Now retired to a corner of the Pacific Northwest, with a view of Puget Sound I barely had time to notice, much less appreciate, before quitting work, I'm entering dotterage and ditherhood with certain regrets. From time to time, I write about them.

Other than that, the background stuff: born in Portland Oregon, college at Amherst College, med school at Case-Western Reserve University in Cleveland, surgical training at UCSF. Drafted into the military, spent a year in Vietnam as a flight surgeon. Began practice in Salem, OR, spending a mere five years there before moving north. Married, as of this writing, for 39 years. Which proves something, but I don't know what.

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