Stories By Van

HELLO LOYAL READERS! All 7 or 8 of you if I'm not mistaken. Thank you for continuing to read my blog every day for the last 310 days! Or, if you've just clicked on the links without reading the articles, that's also okay because it still shows up as if you did read it, so thanks for even clicking the links at all. I'm sure they were getting annoying after around day 50. Good thing I went on for another 260! So, I've been thinking about this move for a while now, and I think today is the perfect day to do it. While, yes, this will be the last post on this specific platform, it will NOT be the last you hear of me chucking my random interests into your faces. In fact, I like to think of this as an upgrade. An upgrade that will benefit all of us! Now that I've finally figured out how Patreon works, THAT will be where any blog posts, interesting articles, short stories and general updates on what's going on in my life will be posted. This way I can...

With the Mueller report deposited (if not yet released), the right has set its sights on rooting out the “deep state” agents behind the alleged conspiracy to take down President Trump. They look for collusion behind the investigation of collusion. They dig for an illicit report buried even deeper than the report we cannot yet see. The idea of a deep state has been a hallmark of the Trump administration. But the ideas peddled by conservative outlets — including Fox News Channel’s insistence on purging a disloyal federal bureaucracy and Trump’s charge that the Justice Department is filled with “angry Democrats” — are not new. In the Nixon White House, ruminating about the threat of a deep state was common fodder. President Richard Nixon’s team sought to discredit, even destroy, political opponents, inside government and out, by pursuing them as un-American traitors. Nixon’s deep-statism illustrated the self-destructiveness undergirding conspiracism, and ultimately led to his res...

Imagine yourself at your 10-year high school reunion, a long anticipated get-together for you and all your old friends. You haven’t seen many of them since graduation day, and naturally everyone is comparing notes on the lives they have lived since then. This puts you in a reflective mood, but not in a good way. Life has been unkind to you—compared to the lives of your friends, who have all been spared your travails. For days after the reunion, you can’t focus on anything but your difficulties, and the unfairness of it all. If you’re a brooder, that is. Someone else might have the same reunion experience, yet come away with a very different interpretation. Every life has its ups and downs, and yours is not unusually good or bad. That’s life. Brooding is a particularly toxic kind of rumination, and it’s strongly associated with clinical depression. Brooders see their own problems as debilitating, and this self-focus sabotages any real effort to make things better. It leads...