It’s so easy to slip into Us vs. Them thinking. That’s how we got so screwed up with this question of jurisdictions.  At first white contact it might have been possible to defend the idea that tribal people were fundamentally different from Euro-whites, because the former had been here for enough millenia for the land to shape them, both genes and memes.  But the...

THE INGREDIENTS OF HEALTH REFORM, DEFICIT REDUCTION, ECONOMIC RECOVERY, AND MEDICARE SALVAGING, IN ONE EASY LESSON Depression predisposes to a laundry list of infectious, autoimmune, cardiovascular and neurodegenerative disorders, and to cancer.  Relatively recent additions include diabetes mellitus, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s diseases, seizure disorders,...

The elephant has pockets.  I’m thinking about Republicans but also about that parable we hear everywhere now, the one about the blind men trying to figure out the beast, each of them finding something different:  a rope, a tree, a fan, a garden hose.    But there are pockets that the blind men’s seeking hands never touch.  Even so small a village as this one...

An old Blackfeet lady (my age), well-educated, once in religious orders, sophisticated, a mother, a person who has lived in major cities, called me late at night for a bit of reassurance. She said she thought I was the only one likely to be awake at that hour and she was right. She is feeling ill, broke, put-down and bereft. She’s right about that, too. She thought I...

Prostaglandins are ephemeral, infinitesimal, and powerful molecules regulating every physiological process and microanatomical structure of every cell; when up regulated, physiology becomes pathology, the variations determined by genes. Prostaglandins are composed primarily of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen, with a configuration resembling a hairpin.    Enter, “prostaglandins”...

Depression predisposes to infectious, autoimmune, cardiovascular and neurodegenerative disorders, to high blood pressure, atherosclerosis, and heart attacks, to dying from heart attacks, strokes, and congestive heart failure, to multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s diseases, and seizure disorders. It often predates chronic obstructive...