Tag: coffee
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On Dealing with a World Gone Crazy
There’s a story, which may or may not be true, that an old Chinese curse was “May your children be born in interesting times.” The curse was because, goes the story, the yearly chronicles included things like earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, peasant rebellions, invasions, plagues and so on. So it meant that may your children suffer disaster. We live in…
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Andrew and Rachel Jackson
If you’re looking for great American love stories, Andrew and Rachel Jackson might seem a bit odd. Images of Rachel show a stout middle-aged woman who liked to smoke a pipe, not the beautiful young woman who’s the usual image in a love story. Images of Jackson from his presidency show a somewhat gaunt, aging man looking alert, wary and suspicious, like…
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Stand Watie, the Cherokee Confederate General
The last Confederate general to surrender in the American Civil War did so on June 23, 1865. He was brigadier general Stand Watie, a member of the Cherokee tribe. Watie’s story is remarkable. He was born in the ancient Cherokee homeland in the mountains in Georgia. The Cherokee were a powerful tribe, considered one of the “Five Civilized Tribes.” Those were…
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Rupert’s Land
One of the British North American colonies is usually forgotten about. It had a very small population, it was remote, it was closed off much of the year because of winter ice. It was huge, larger than the whole United States east of the Mississippi River. It was Rupert’s Land. You never heard of it. So who was Rupert and where…
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Working Through Suicidal Thoughts
It’s likely that a sizable fraction of people reading this have had suicidal thoughts. That doesn’t mean you are weird or have a mental problem. It means that at some point, things just no longer made sense. Resigning from life may seem to make sense. It’s been a while since I was a young man. When I was, Iwas smart,…