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.
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.
