Author Archives: Bob Welbaum

Changing Politics With The Dignity Index

“Are you frustrated by the hate and negativity? You’re not alone. That’s why we developed The Dignity Index, an eight-point scale that scores speech on its power to unite or divide.” We have a problem. In the past five years, threats against members of Congress have increased ten times. According to Rachel Kleinfeld, senior fellow at

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The Evils of Stupidity

I’ve always thought Congress would do a lot of good if it would simply make stupid behavior illegal. In that spirit, have you ever heard of Dietrich Bonhoeffer? Bonhoeffer was a German theologian and dissident during the Nazi era who, when viewing what was happening around him, decided that stupidity is worse than evil. Think

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Escaping in Plain Sight

I’ve always claimed so much of our past never makes it into the history books. This is especially true for stories about slavery. This being Black History Month, a recently published book gives another example of the ingenuity of slaves. William and Ellen Craft were a married couple, enslaved in Georgia but determined to escape

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Helping the Blind to Swim

Ever since I saw a man in a wheelchair at a urinal in an airport restroom, I have never begrudged accommodations for people with special needs. This is also why some recent news from Egypt caught my eye. What if you like to swim, but your vision is severely limited? Last July, the local government

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Another Mystery of Life

From the fertile minds of scientists comes another off-the-wall question: Exactly what is the nature of the universe? Or even more out of this world: Could we really be living in a hologram? This topic has come up due to a recent experiment. Physicists used Google’s Sycamore 2 quantum computer to create a “baby” wormhole. The

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Plussing the Vietnam Memorial

Every generation has its war. My dad’s was World War II; mine was Vietnam. I was in Southeast Asia (mostly Thailand) from the summer of 1972 to the summer of 1973. It was the kind of experience you never forget. We lost more than 58,000 of our finest youth during the Vietnam era. Appropriately, they

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Thoughts on New Year’s Resolutions

This is a little late; I’m sure most resolutions have already been tossed aside. If that’s true for you (personally, I don’t even bother), maybe it’s time for a new approach. The Sunday, January 8, 2023 issue of the Dayton Daily News explained one such approach. Columnist Meredith Moss wrote about a woman in Centerville,

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In Search of Happiness

What is your approach to happiness? This subject came to my attention recently thanks to the cover article in the Jan 16-23 issue of Time magazine. This special section, entitled “The Happiness Revival Guide,” includes a brief article “Catastrophizing Doesn’t Have to Be Catastrophic” by Martin Seligman, a University of Pennsylvania professor and coauthor of

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On Wasting Time

The older I get, the more time becomes important. (This leads to some interesting discussions with middle school students when I think they are wasting their time, but that’s another subject.) So I was intrigued by the article “The Biggest Wastes Of Time We Regret When We Get Older” by Kristin Wong (https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-biggest-wastes-of-time-we-regret-when-we-get-older?). It sounded

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