Area Writer Takes on Universe

On a phone no thicker than my pinky, I have instant access to the entirety of human knowledge.  I can watch, ad infinitum, every television show, every movie, every idea, at any time, at any place.  I can access news from around the world, in any language I want.  I can read the works of Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine, Chaucer, and Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.  One could spend a lifetime in this black hole and gain nothing from it.  Today, I watched the FCC end the Rules of Net Neutrality, with full grasp of the irony.  But this post is not about that fight. I believe, in the interest of full disclosure, that we, as a society, are experiencing seismic changes, growing pains, if you will.  It is becoming increasingly difficult for our ancient laws and institutions to keep pace with these changes.  The very presence of the President of the United States on Twitter has proven itself to be an incredible agent of chaos both in the Unite...

This past weekend we marked ninety nine years since the end of the war to end all wars, an act, which in hind sight seems presumptuous at best. If the past century has taught us any lesson about war it is that the we, as a species have a gritted determination to overcome any peace and seek out new weapons of conflict; using our incredible ability to improvise and adapt to create new ways of destroying each other, a fact of conflict that was thrust into the modern consciousness in the violence of the First World War.  It was there that centuries old tactics met the modern genius of the industrial revolution. With the addition of massive artillery, poison gas, machine driven firepower, tanks, airplanes, the world saw first hand the true horror of which we as a civilization are capable. The suffering we inflicted on each other and ourselves was immense and even today, those muddy, blood soaked and gas covered fields still evoke from us, a generation far removed from the violenc...