Originally posted February 3rd, 2013
By Michael Konik
Guns are not the problem. People are not the problem. Young people are the problem.
They don’t listen. They play awful video game simulations of mass murder. They shoot six-year-olds.
And no amount of background checks or ammo-clip restrictions will change that. There’s only one way to solve the gun situation, one way to bring peace and civility back to our public areas while also not trampling on our inalienable American right to bear arms (as outlined with great clarity in the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America).
The maintenance of civil order in our fragile society rests on a rock solid foundation of family discipline. A child who disrespects his parents must be removed from society. Permanently. So that other children will see the importance of respecting their parents.
Originally posted January 27th, 2013
By Michael Konik
Books are far too long, right? Who has time for 300-pages of blabbering on about nothing? Do you know how many tweets you can read in the amount of time it takes to slog through one stupid novel?
A lot. And they’re usually way funnier. And unlike books they’ve got hashtags, like #betterthanactuallyreading.
Still, in their own weird way books can still be useful. Especially if they’re short. Especially if they’re short and they answer some niggling question you’ve been having, a question maybe you couldn’t answer to your satisfaction just by searching the Web.
We’ve published several of the old-fashioned boring kind of books. No one is interested in that. So now we’re pledging to get with the times and start publishing modern fun kind of books. Very short books. You don’t have to download them, or pay for them or anything. You can just read . . . → Read More: Very Short Books
Originally posted January 20th, 2013
By Michael Konik
Certain amorphous concepts exist only in the theoretical realm: truth, justice, beauty. Time. Yet we “know” (or think we know) they’re there. Indeed, we’re the ones who manifest them. By observing, say, a ravishing Southern California sunset, or the blossoms of a cherry tree, or our lover’s face, we feel quite sure that Beauty is not merely an amorphous concept but something tangible and present. And in those moments it surely is.
Quantum physics suggests that this thing we call consciousness exists only in our Mind Reality, where we observe – and categorize and quantify – what seems to be the passage of time, our hurtling journey through space. In the Cosmic Reality, time does not trudge forward (or slip backwards). It just is.
Stress is one of these strange phenomena. It doesn’t really exist in any measurable form. We only know it’s there when someone tells . . . → Read More: Stress
Originally posted January 6th, 2013
By Michael Konik
If you wish to align yourself with a mindset that no one will dispute and most will acclaim, proclaim yourself a paragon of “family values.” Earn a reputation as a “family man.” Put “family” before self. Found a right-wing Christian political bribery machine and call it “Focus on the Family.” Do whatever it is you want to do with your life, but remind everyone that whatever it is you do with your life it’s all about the family.
Repeat the word. Family. Say it clearly and often. Family.
Is there anything better? Is there any concept more sacrosanct? Ah, how we love our children and how we love our parents. They’re more important than anyone or anything in the universe.
Family: the folks we can trust and love, celebrate and forgive, rescue and remember, support and adore and abide. Family is the greatest.
Originally posted December 9th, 2012
By Michael Konik
I helped an old man load his groceries into the trunk of his car, which was parked curbside near the entrance to a 99-Cent store. He walked with a cane and seemed to have trouble handling his bags. A watermelon had fallen to the sidewalk, somehow escaping unblemished. But things didn’t look as though they would end well.
Do they ever? According to the old man, they do not. He thanked me profusely for assisting, and then he seemed to want to explain why he needed help, and then he sensed that this was already understood by both of us. He shook his bald head, covered by a baseball cap. Then he said, “Don’t ever get old. Stay the way you are now. Getting old. It’s no good.”
At a birthday party for an elegant lady turning 100, the centarian’s daughter toasted her . . . → Read More: Bad Endings
Originally posted September 16th, 2012
By Michael Konik
Dear God,
Having witnessed recently the horrible ramifications of causing offense, we’re hyper-aware of not offending anyone, You especially. So if “God” is an inappropriate form of address, we humbly ask forgiveness of You and Your agents here on Earth, the ones who steadfastly protect Your name and reputation.
We settled on “God,” because that seemed the most general name to call You. But if what You really prefer is “Allah,” “Yaweh,” “Elohenu,” “Jesus,” or something newer and more specific, we trust You’ll let us know. Give us some sort of sign – if You’re into that kind of thing these days.
So, assuming we’re cool with the name business, may we ask You in Your infinite wisdom to help us understand something?
No, not what happens after death! Or what we’ve got to do here in this life to join You in the . . . → Read More: An Open Letter to God
Originally posted September 3rd, 2012
By Michael Konik
Pick your favorite platitude: You can only do so much. You’re not going to change the way everybody else behaves (or thinks). You’re only one person.
Comforting, aren’t they? You are hereby excused from culpability in the grand disaster that is human civilization. May your acquittal be an abiding relief from that weird sense of responsibility we all feel intermittently, mostly in the moments when we’ve been distracted from our distractions and have a moment to think about silly old concepts that are more fun to talk about than enact. Such as the one that posits each of us ought to leave the planet an infinitesimally better place than how we found it.
We all do what we can. The problem is most of us decide that what we can do is absolutely nothing.
Originally posted August 26th, 2012
By Michael Konik
The phrase “legitimate rape” is now a part of the American lexicon thanks to William Todd Akin, a U.S. Representative from Missouri. Todd, as he prefers to be called, has served in Congress since 2001, and this year he won the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate seat in a crowded field of similarly qualified candidates.
In a show of civic pride, folks in Missouri are discussing a change of the state motto from “Show me!” to “We’ll vote for anyone!”
Todd Akin is actually a lot smarter than most people think. He shrewdly calculated that by espousing his astonishing ignorance of biology, anatomy and physiology he could deflect attention from his comb-over.
It worked. Now everyone’s talking about the legitimate rape phenomenon and not Akin’s hair.
What no one is discussing is that Akin’s views on abortion, which mirrors the Republican Party’s . . . → Read More: Legitimate Rape, Legitimate Abortion
Originally posted August 5th, 2012
By Michael Konik
I was young like you once. Don’t laugh. It seems impossible, I know. An old codger like me of 77! You probably can’t picture when I was only 47 and healthy, with all my own teeth and a libido that didn’t yet require boner pills.
Sure, that was three decades ago, and I look a lot different, what with the thinning hair, sloping shoulders, and cute little pot belly. But my memory is still sharp, even with all the weed I smoked. I remember perfectly what we were like 30 years ago, back in ’12, and I’m glad your professor asked you to do this project. I’m glad you’re talking to the older generation. Folks like me know what America was like back then, back in the time of Obama. The USA was different.
Originally posted June 24th, 2012
By Michael Konik
The purpose of life is to work.
The purpose of life is to play.
Or, there is no purpose to life.
These are schools of thought that you may or may not subscribe to. You might have been in one camp and moved to another. You may change your mind every time something good happens and change it again when your boyfriend leaves you for some skank with a tattoo on her ankle.
The purpose of life is…
To make children. To support a family. To leave something behind. Something or someone who’ll carry on the species, the genes, the distant memory of You.
That’s another school of thought.
Then there’s one that encourages every person to improve this world incrementally, leaving it an infinitesimally slightly better place than he found it. The definition of “better” is open to interpretation, . . . → Read More: The Grand Illusion
Luckily for Barack Obama, news of improper shenanigans at the IRS stole attention from the week’s biggest story: that the President’s Justice Department had secretly seized call information from at least 20 phone lines belonging to Associated Press reporters, including personal cell phones and the main switchboard of the AP’s Washington bureau. While Obama thundered on about “inexcusable behavior” at the IRS, he said he would “make no apology” for his latest foray into Nixonian…
News comes from Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, that a disastrous fire swept through a garment factory there, killing eight people. A factory fire in November killed more than 100.
The garment industry in Bangladesh is euphemistically called “loosely regulated,” so, regrettably, these things (fires and so forth) tend…
Were you aware that bottled water is “bad for the environment,” “bad for public water sources,” and “bad for your wallet”?
Neither were we! It’s pretty funny to think of something so obviously good – so amazing, when you think about it – as inherently evil, or something. Bottled water…
The commonly understood reason why terrorists wish to kill and maim Americans is because they hate our freedoms. That’s what’s behind all the civilian violence: they hate our freedoms. You can go ahead and enumerate all the freedoms the terrorists hate, but it doesn’t really matter which ones –freedom to…
The whole world is worried about North Korea. We’re not. We think locally. The area around which we can walk or ride our bike is our concern. We’re civic-minded that way.
Hollywood Boulevard is nearby. We walk on its sidewalks almost every day, often to access the subway, which serves…
Author James Goodale was chief counsel for the New York Times during the Nixon era. His new book, “Fighting for the Press: The Inside Story of the Pentagon Papers and Other Battles,” outlines our government’s pernicious (and ongoing) threat to media freedom. Some prescient authors get all the luck: Every morning it seems we’re greeted to [...]
