“I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.” -Thomas Paine in The Age of Reason Earlier…
Seldom in life is something so blatantly true that a person can make an authoritative statement and believe it right beyond a shadow of a doubt. Some people admittedly do think themselves as always right, but this does not prove their genius—rather, it marks them instead as ignorant of the human experience. Thus, acknowledging the…
Seemingly lost last week amid coronavirus fears and the senseless murder of George Floyd were reports circulating that President Trump was weighing options to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by November in time for the general election. These reports contradicted the earlier agreement that the Trump administration made with the Taliban in February, which…
My father loves to tell jokes. Most of them are horrendously stupid and not funny. To make matters worse, he loves to repeat them, much to my chagrin. Because of this, I became fond of the phrase, “don’t beat a dead horse”, to rebut any attempt he would make to retell these terrible jokes. This…
Of all the arguments against a strong autocratic ruling system Thomas Paine makes in his seminal pamphlet “Common Sense”, none have resonated more with me than his appeal to the Old Testament. In the work, Paine references both Gideon, one of the judges of Israel, and Samuel, a prophet for the Israelites. Gideon was a…
The state of clemency in Missouri is in total disarray. Recently, the Kansas City Star reported that Governor Mike Parson is sitting on a backlog of over 3,500 petitions for clemency from Missouri’s prison population. Since taking office in May of 2018, Parson has acted on just one of these cases. But Parson does not…