Wendy, respectfully, your own comment says that "she lost by so few votes that anything could have tipped the scales the other way" so how can that sync with "the mistakes she made were probably not enough to cost her the win"?

I mean, sure, I think any presidential candidate who loses a tight race is going to feel bitter about aspects of it, especially if one feels the other side used below-the-belt methods, but I'm also a person who played competitive sports and when our team lost a close game, our coaches always taught us NOT to focus on calls that didn't go our way from the umpires, but rather to look at the mistakes we made and to learn and GROW from them so we can become better.

Thanks for taking the time to dig into this and writing about it, as well as sharing links to back up your comments and for us to follow up should we chose to do so.

As for what can be done, on the personal level, yes more commitment to critical thinking seems first and foremost, as does more of an "I don't know" humble approach to life and an "I need not be able to explain everything with one theory" orientation. I know I'm working on this in myself.

Second, I would like to point out that we DO need…

These trees were three of my best friends in 2020.

No matter which way I was blown by my life or tossed by the stormy seas of social media, these trees were there for me.

Standing tall, their limbs stretching over the bike path not far from my house in central Japan, shading me on hot summer days, soothing me when my soul most needed it, I could count on them.

They were there.

And then…

One day in late November 2020 they weren’t.

On what felt like the worst possible day for it to happen, the trees were gone.

In my college years in the early 1990s, I had a summer job as a grounds crew/maintenance guy at my former junior high and I’d pass most of the day listening to the radio. Mostly, I stuck with classic rock FM stations, but as a budding journalist majoring in political science, sometimes I’d venture to the AM dials where news and talk radio hung out and I’d find myself listening to this guy named Rush Limbaugh.

As a liberal (then and now), I didn’t do this because I was like the tens of millions of “Dittoheads” that made up Rush’s…

Tonya was my first love
A foster-kid,
one of many
who stole — and broke — my heart
with her innocence
and purity

I took her to McDonald’s
and she was so happy
to get a Happy Meal
yet we were both 21
that’s how young she was

I felt guilt
guilt that she didn’t have parents like I did,
parents who took her to those Golden Arches
parents who patiently waited as I begged
for a drink without “the fizz”

Guilt that she loved me for taking her there because I was thinking of how evil McDonald’s was for…

Note: This post was inspired by one of my favorite YouTubers, Rick Beato, and this recent live stream, which you should check out.

August 1991

I’m 18, sitting in the backseat of my dad’s car and Led Zeppelin’s epic “Kashmir” is caravaning through my headphones off the mixtape in my Walkman and I’m getting excited. We are about to ascend off the floor of California’s boring, sunny San Joaquin Valley into the mountains that mark the psychological northern boundary of one of the world’s great cities.

Los Angeles. Home for the next four years. College. Who knows what will happen?

…

When I moved to Japan from the Seattle area in July 2004, I was a 31-year-old news junkie and I had to get out of America.

Like now, post-9/11 America was a heavy time filled with lies and mistruths, many of them coming from the Bush Administration and then spread throughout most of the media.

As a journalism and political science major in college, I spent way too much time consuming, and being consumed by, media. …

Episode 2 finds me rambling very broadly on the topic of censorship, where I try to put into context the recent actions of social media companies deleting accounts in the wake of the January 6th Storming of the Capitol event in Washington D.C..

I speak about how such purges are aimed at outsiders, not just people on one side of the political spectrum or the other, and why this concerns me.

While I recognize there are limits to free speech, I’m ultimately someone who feels we must err on the side of free speech and this episode explains why.

That…