While I continue to believe that the United States can survive anything, there are times when that faith is sorely tested.  We survived the sundering Civil War and two world wars, as well as a decades-long nuclear face-off with the Soviet Union – so what could possibly pose a threat now? I feel that threat.  Some recent news items seem to echo Orwell's classic novel, 1984, a dark fiction of a world governed by a triad of malicious world dictatorships, the chief weapons of which are mass deception and draconian punishments for the slightest perceived dissent from the official version of truth. These news items include the Covington Catholic High School incident at the Lincoln Memorial and Democrat Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's rant that the planet has only a dozen more years before an apocalyptic disaster. These items are of particular concern because they cap a lifetime of increasingly bizarre social trends.  It always...(Read Full Post)