Now that Peregrine is in the water and safely tied to her mooring I can get back to some writing.

The recent earthquake in Turkey that took the lives of 83 children and the Tornadoes in the midwest remind us that we are here at the mercy of much larger forces. Our existence can be fleeting and we need to make the best of every minute.

I hope you all caught the Dixie Chicks cover on Entertainment Weekly. Seems the “Chicks” haven’t lost any fans after saying they were embarrassed by President Bush. The cover shows everything they were called during the flap. They had a lot to lose and they continued to speak their mind hoping their fans would stick with them well the tour looks to be a success. That they managed to compete with the wars headline is a testament to the strange mix of reality and entertainment that fills the media.

After fifty years the secret papers of Senator Joseph McCarthy have been released. It’s a period in U.S. history that continued to undermine the democracy here until the end of the Viet Nam war. The xenophobic fear of communism that led to the cold war and our entering the Viet Nam war is still with us. The 58,000 dead American soldiers and the countless Vietnamese killed came straight out of the madness that McCarthy embodied when he was allowed to destroy U.S. citizens. Not until that last helicopter left the roof of the U.S. embassy in Siagon was the era over. Why did it take fifty years to get these papers out in the open? We have know for decades that the “McCarthy era” was an evil and a mar on our democracy. These papers should be part of every high school civics class.