Linda Lyon was a blogger until two years ago. She stopped because she realized the country was too divided to listen to different views. Fake news proliferated. A military veteran, she decided to step back for a while. This is her return column. She was a school board member and president of the Arizona School Boards Association.

She writes:

Hello. Let me reintroduce myself. Linda Lyon. Retired Air Force Colonel, school board member, very happily married to my best friend, who is also a woman. Previously married to a great guy. Enthusiastic fly fisher, own a gun, love to camp. A patriot who believes in our Constitution and progressive policies but also that our system works best when we have a balance of power between two parties so they must compromise to get things done. In other words, please don’t write me off with just one label. You’d be…

“It was very English to call it ‘the Demo,’ and no wonder the pet name stuck, conjuring up a specter of ‘demos,’ the people (sometimes pejorative), but on the other hand ‘democracy’ (good), which withstood the test of the demonstration. Small family-style states are fond of making up diminutives, whose effect is to diminish, domesticate; compare ‘the telly’ to big gross American ‘TV.’ Yet the peculiar fact about the October 27 dual march was that it was organized and directed by aliens in competition with each other: Tariq Ali, a young mustached Pakistani, leading the way to Downing Street, and Abhimanya Manchanda, a middle-aged clean-shaven Indian, to Grosvenor Square. For the English, these rival pied pipers were difficult to swallow, let alone assimilate. A well-fleshed, plaintive humorist of a police sergeant sought to explain his obscure sense of injury relating to the Demo, which in principle he did…

Star journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones has decided not to accept a chair in the Hussman School of Journalism after the Board of UNC first denied her tenure, then reversed their decision after widespread protests. Hannah-Jones has accepted a journalism chair at historically black Howard University instead, along with author Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Journalists Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ta-Nehisi Coates are joining Howard University’s faculty, school officials announced Tuesday in a major recruiting victory for the private institution in the nation’s capital. It was a simultaneous setback for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to lose Hannah-Jones after a long and remarkably contentious effort to recruit her.

The surprising development came less than a week after trustees for UNC-Chapel Hill voted to award tenure to Hannah-Jones. Initially, the public university hired her as a professor without the job-protection status. But its board of trustees approved tenure for her on Wednesday, after faculty…

I wrote the following article for the opinion section of the New York Daily News. According to Education Week, “As of June 29, 26 states have introduced bills or taken other steps that would restrict teaching critical race theory or limit how teachers can discuss racism and sexism, according to an Education Week analysis. Nine states have enacted these bans, either through legislation or other avenues.” During his last year in office, Trump denounced critical race theory and the New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning “The 1619 Project” and said that anyone who taught these materials was “indoctrinating” their students and turning them against America. He called for “patriotic education.”

I wrote the following:

Republican-led states across the country, including Texas, Idaho, Oklahoma, Iowa and New Hampshire, have passed laws to ban the teaching of “critical race theory”; CRT is an academic concept that was first…

Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery as a young man. He became a celebrated abolitionist. In 1852, he was invited to speak at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, to commemorate the 4th of July.

This is an early example of critical race theory.

Here is an excerpt of his powerful and eloquent speech:

Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men, too great enough to give frame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they…

Ferlingetti’s Confetti
by Joan McNerney

How long have I been waiting and I am
still waiting for America to wake up
for women to be celebrated, for endless wars
to self-destruct, for the old guard to
become obsolete, for holy rollers
to roll off, somewhere far away

I am always waiting for this country to become sane
still waiting for Americans to put down their guns
and take up books. For education to be our strength
I am waiting for stupid catch phrases of politicians
to cause them to gag and retch. Always all the time
STILL waiting for America to grow up

I am waiting for the miracle of Ferlingetti’s
confetti to descend all over this planet descending
magically in all imaginable colors of the universe
dissolving hatred bringing a new world filled
with joy wonder happiness supreme frolicking
kissing hugging cavorting all in the stillness of this
moment…

This is a realistic and frightening analysis of the paralysis in Washington, D.C. on climate change. President Biden proposed an ambitious agenda to act against the pernicious causes abd effects of climate change. The Republicans refused to support Biden’s plans and they refuse to tax the rich, the billionaires whose gold will be useless on a dead planet.

Michael Grunwald of Politico writes:

CRUEL SUMMER— The heat wave that fricasseed the Pacific Northwest this week, along with the evocatively named Lava Fire in northern California, has inspired a lot of rhetoric about a “climate emergency.” But the newest inconvenient truth is that climate change isn’t the kind of emergency that inspires emergency action in Washington.

Most of President Joe Biden’s ambitious climate proposals were stripped out of the bipartisan infrastructure billthat he’s urging Congress to pass. And it’s not even clear whether Congress will comply.

This is partly…

“Please to See the King is the second album by Steeleye Span, released in 1971. A major personnel change following their previous effort, Hark! The Village Wait, brought about a substantial change in their overall sound, including a lack of drums and the replacement of one female vocalist with a male vocalist. The band even reprised a song from their debut, “The Blacksmith”, with a strikingly different arrangement making extensive use of syncopation. Re-recording songs would be a minor theme in Steeleye’s output over the years, with the band eventually releasing an entire album of reprises, Present – The Very Best of Steeleye Span. The title of the album is derived from the ‘Cutty Wren’ ceremony. A wren in a cage is paraded as if it were a king. This rite was carried out on 26 December, Saint Stephen‘s Day, and is connected to…