Ward on Words

I am reading "The Snow Leopard" by Peter Matthiessen, a highly acclaimed, award-winning travel book and I'm having a very hard time with it because the author's wife died the year before this trip and Matthiessen left behind his 8-year-old motherless boy to go on this adventure. From early in the book: "Later I dreamed about my beautiful eight-year-old boy, whose mother died of cancer just last year. In the dream, I paid a visit to a dark cagelike shelter, where he was being kept with other children...." Sounds like a tormented nightmare of a man who knew what he did was terrible, if you ask me. When I was a girl, my mother died of cancer and I cannot imagine what it would be like if my father had left myself and my sisters for nearly a year right after that. It would have been very bad for all three of us. But this is what men can do, abandon their motherless children for the sake of their own personal quest and ambition. In the introduction to the book, Pi...

Trump has been in office for less than 100 days and it is an unmitigated disaster. He's plunged the world into chaos and hired a federal contractor, Elon Musk, whose companies rake in billions in federal contracts, to shed jobs and contracts and leases from the federal government, all of which were funded in budgets passed by Congress. Many of Musk's decisions are being challenged in court. Federal lawyers refuse to say who heads up DOGE (the poorly named Department of Governmental Efficiency, named to honor Musk's favorite cybercurrency .) It's not a new department - it's not even a department, which, as I understand it, needs to be created by an act of Congress. Trump via executive order has temporarily renamed the United States Digital Service as DOGE. Oddly enough, the USDS website is still up and running . None of it makes any sense.  The actions of DOGE have included firing thousands and thousands of federal employees, most involved in social services or huma...