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Advice For Sorting Through Paperwork

Question: What advice can you offer for sorting through paperwork? Answer: We all have different comfort levels with paperwork. Some of us save everything, others shred everything. The advice I would give is somewhere in between. For personal mail, like letters, cards, e-mails with no private or protected information on them, it is your decision. I have a box I put all that stuff in each year. With the start of the new year, I tape up the old box, label it with the year, and start a new box. Why do I do that? My husband asks all the time. Someday I may want to revisit those old ...

Piercing Illusion Of ‘Immigration Ban’

President Donald Trump unleashed his “April surprise” on Monday night, sending shock waves from the Beltway Swamp to Silicon Valley with a long-overdue announcement: “In light of the attack from the Invisible Enemy, as well as the need to protect the jobs of our GREAT American Citizens,” he declared, “I will be signing an Executive Order to temporarily suspend immigration into the United States!” The usual suspects inveighed against the still-unseen proposal early Tuesday morning. My inbox was flooded with twitching and moaning from Americans for Prosperity, the Koch ...

The Virus Before The Coronavirus

With Americans hunkering down at home in the throes of the coronavirus pandemic, it can sometimes feel like the end of days. However, for an unseen number of our countrymen, today’s struggle is hardly different from a miserable day-to-day existence. If you work in the school system or as a teacher, then you know who I am talking about. The kid who comes to class with incomplete homework, a bad attitude and no respect for authority. His mother — these days the dads are hardly ever in the picture — is not engaged in her child’s life or schooling. In fact, if you were to go to her ...

A Socialistic Future Always Seems To Sound Good

Eugen Richter, a German liberal politician and journalist at the turn of the previous century, published “Pictures of the Socialistic Future” in 1893. As a work in the public domain, the ebook version can be downloaded for free. The novel describes a family anticipating the wonderful things to come from the new socialist program in their home country, Germany. Written several decades before the atrocities of the Soviet Union, Richter foretold the events in chilling detail, almost as though it was a script. It starts out with a great celebration and the rhetoric of Bernie Sanders ...

Coronavirus And The Red-Blue Flu

It’s safe to say we’ve been living in a totally different world these past weeks, and been forced to change many “normal” things we used to do, many of those things we took for granted. We’re now doing things, following new restrictions, and making sacrifices, to help stop the spread of COVID-19, and do whatever else we can for the good of all in this situation. Suffice it to say, the normal we’ve been used to, will no longer exist when this is over. It’s believed we’ll establish new normals when this ends, but will all the “normals” change, or will some things ...

Shovels Or Sun, Spring Fails Us Every Year

I checked. In March, spring arrived on time. The sun crossed the equator around March 20, heralding the arrival of the new season. That was more than a month ago, but it’s like this every year: life becomes a giant ketchup commercial, as we sit in anticipation of spring actually stepping up to the plate. It is the most rebellious of seasons, the frustrating toddler who won’t be strapped into his car seat, for months. I remember volunteering for a Girl Scout camping trip for my daughter’s troop. They set the date for June 15, and I spent the night in a tent in six layers ...