I picked up a book from the library recently called “Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life” by Hector Garcia and Francesc Miralles. The copyright date is 2016, which makes it almost a decade old. However, I wish it had been published much earlier, like the late 1980s or early 1990s. You see, it was during that period that I read all kinds of self-help books trying to divine my purpose…
This morning, Erik and I headed out to join the Hands Off protest happening at the Minnesota State Capitol. With Donald Trump, Elon Musk, their sycophantic cabinet members, and Republican enablers in Congress and on the Supreme Court rapidly dismantling the U.S. Constitution and democracy, we wanted to push back and peacefully show how opposed we are to their destructive actions. The Hands Off protest has been weeks in the making, following many smaller protests…
In January, I started Janet Vertesi’s Opt Out Project Cyber Cleanse. (Refer to my blog post for links to the Cyber Cleanse.) The Cyber Cleanse is meant to help you reclaim some of your online privacy. If you’re active at all online, you give up your privacy, simply by being there. Even if you attempt to do everything anonymously with tools to hide your location, computer forensics specialists can track you down eventually. The only…
I have seen the term “5-alarm fire” used multiple times to describe the destruction the Trump administration and Musk’s DOGE are wreaking against the U.S. Constitution and democracy. I’ve used the term myself, in fact. At this point, with the administration imprisoning immigrants and visitors from other countries with little to no evidence against them, forcing giant law firms and universities to capitulate to Trump’s whims, attacking organizations that promote diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility,…
Wow, it’s been a helluva six weeks, hasn’t it? Elon Musk and Donald Trump, along with their enablers, are shredding U.S. democracy and the federal government at a pace so rapid it makes my head spin. I thought there were more safeguards in place, what with the whole three-branches-of-government-separation-of-powers thing. But, the Framers of the Constitution apparently didn’t foresee one political party acting in bad faith (gerrymandering, preventing people from voting, stacking the Supreme Court,…