Time to Think

Ready For Another Presidential Campaign?       #262 By Hank Silverberg  I wrote a novel in 2015 about a fictional political campaign. It has a complex plot about a female vice-president getting ready to challenge an aging president who has health issues. The story centers on the reporters covering the election campaign with some sidebar plot twists that include a terrorist, and dirty tricks.  At the time I wrote it, I thought it was a pretty plausible story, far enough away from reality to make it a fun read without stretching things into bizarre territory.    Then along came the 2016 presidential race, and by the time the novel was first published in 2017, the truth became stranger than my fiction.  But I have hesitated to write a sequel because it could not compete with the unpredictable and destructive nature of real American politics right now.  Let's look at it as if it were the plot to a novel. You have a former defeated president who is now seeking the job again despite bein

Is There Hope?                                                                    #261 By Hank Silverberg                                                            The scenes out of Turkey and Syria following that massive earthquake and aftershocks are horrific. The death toll has topped 25,000 and may keep going up for days as they continue to dig out the rubble. Unlike war or famine, there really is nothing that can be done to prevent earthquakes, though there is already some indication that buildings in the earthquake-prone areas of the region were not constructed strongly enough to withstand even a modest quake (this one was big at 7.8). What is encouraging though, is the international response to the quake. Thirty-eight countries have joined the International Red Cross/Red Crescent, the U-N, and NATO in supplying either big monetary donations or rescue teams to both Turkey and Syria.  You are not going to find the Iranian team and the Israeli team working side-by-side, but they