Critical Thoughts

The Covid pandemic is fading, and hopefully it will stay faded, but the pernicious and baleful medical, scientific, political, and social ef...

On the virus origin: There is little to no doubt that the US NIH funded research at a Wuhan virus lab that created the man-made Wuhan SARS...

The willing, ongoing sacrifice of liberty to authoritarian governors, whose dictates have at times been illegal, the brazenly stolen electio...

Rossini’s The Barber of Seville certainly is a popular opera.   Since Lyric Opera of Chicago’s 1954 inception, the comedy has been perf...

Here’s a belated note about two wonderful operas we saw, moreover heard, this past winter (which only ended the day before yesterday, h...

In Britain in recent years there have been a number of horrific scandals in which police and community leaders ignored organized, continuou...

John Ford I’ve loved movies from as far back as I can remember, and my favorites growing up were filled with action and adventure.  Wh...

Key West "Maine" Memorial As I huddle indoors enduring the latest polar vortex that has brought record sub-zero temperatures t...

About one year ago I first commented on the great frame-up of Donald Trump, then after more than a year of unfruitful FBI and Department o...

On Christmas Eve two days ago I posted ( link ) a photo of the beautiful Caravaggio painting of the Nativity that was stolen from a Palermo...

Caravaggio’s Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence is a warm scene of dramatic moment composed with his typical striking use of light...

Today is the 40th anniversary of the incredibly-successful, infamous Lufthansa heist by New York City mobsters.   It paradoxically led, th...

The Lyric offered up a solid production of Cendrillon , French composer Massenet’s version of the Cinderella story.   This is the opera’s ...

Earlier this Fall, the Lyric Opera of Chicago suffered through a short musicians’ strike that caused the cancellation of a few performanc...

Il Trovatore is an operatic treat, musically and visually, and the missus and I were delighted to take it all in the other day at the Lyr...

This day marks the one hundredth anniversary of the armistice that paused, for about twenty years, the senseless slaughter of World War One...

Today would have been the 70th birthday of the late, great Chicago singer-songwriter Steve Goodman.  For anyone who saw him perform, it wa...

Chicago’s Lyric Opera has a striking new production of Faust , Gounod’s most popular opera whose story is loosely based on Goethe’s most f...

Today is the anniversary of the birth, in 1809, of Abraham Lincoln.  My small collection of books specifically on his life include the fi...

By all appearances now, Hillary Clinton and the Democrat Party and their corrupt high-level operatives in the FBI and the Justice Departmen...