From where I sit, the world is getting narrower. It’s a given that the longer you live the longer your list becomes of colleagues, friends, and relatives who are gone. My sister-in-law is at the top of that list this week, having died on Monday.

Memorials and mementos are not salves, but they are nice and often meaningful. I want to remember what was said and written by or about someone who has died and to be able to look at their photographs. I’m proud of the way The Star has handled and written obituaries over the years, have edited hundreds, and written many. I’ve learned that the closer you were the harder the task.

Will the words and pictures we’ve always saved be lost to the digital revolution? Or will they remain somewhere in the ether forever? Will the next generation reject what we still hold onto physically as they wander in cyberspace?

My brother died more than five years ago, and his children — my niece and nephew — have posted many pictures of him and members of their extended family (including a young me) on Facebook; they have also unearthed what my nephew described as reel-to-reel audiotapes, which in the ’60s and ’70s the family used to mail back and forth between the East and West Coasts. My tech-savvy nephew must have had them digitized, because last week he sent a number of us a batch of these exchanges: conversations, poems, songs, stories. 

They arrived through Dropbox, an Internet file-sharing service, and even a somewhat computer-phobic person like me was able to figure out how to access one of the files. Imagine what a surprise it was to hear my niece, as a child in the early 1960s, saying she had just lost a tooth! She’s a grown woman now — and a grandmother. 

My brother and his wife were in the habit of storing lots of things, so it wasn’t surprising that the tapes were there to be found when their house was emptied after its sale. We are lucky to have them.

Which brings me back home to the myriad cartons and cabinets my husband and I have stowed away in the Rattray family house, but, thank goodness, not in the oldest part of the barn, which the East Hampton Historical Society is going to move to the Mulford Farm and restore. The historians call it the Hedges barn because a Hedges had it built in the mid-18th century, and it was later moved by my late mother-in-law’s father to its present site.

I’ve watched as friends have aged and begun to divest themselves of possessions (from souvenirs gathered on travels to furnishings and treasured mementos, not to mention real estate). Listening to my niece on that audiotape this week makes me realize that maybe, just maybe, the technology of the 21st century is making it possible to retain those words and mementos in a way that better values the past than putting them away in a box in some dark corner.

It is Mozart’s birthday as I write this, and that reminds me of what the late Steve Sigler said in an interview I did with him in March 1996, to wit, that Mozart was “all about reconciliation, total reconciliation — no wonder he died at 35.”

I did not feel very reconciled the day of the storm. Mary, in a different frame of mind, a better frame of mind, had said we should just relax and enjoy it, accept the fact that there was nothing we could do, nowhere to go, but I could not be cajoled into a good humor, much less into even partial reconciliation. 

Time was flying, the snow was mounting, and things I’d counted on doing, such as playing tennis, or writing about, such as the canceled league track meets, were vanishing. 

Beset by purposefulness, then, I could not still my mind, as Mary had, and as, I gather, many here did. 

“I’m not used to being housebound,” I said to Rebecca Rubenstein at the tennis club the next day. “At the very least, I like the thought of being able to go out onto the road and getting stuck. Your dad said if I didn’t have four-wheel-drive I shouldn’t come. . . .”

“I loved being housebound,” she said cheerily.

As the wind and snow were blowing outside, I was blowing it inside, flitting from one thing to another, self-absorbed, antsy, and absenting myself, psychically at any rate, from the person with whom I’m usually always the closest.

I was not myself, oddly desperate — a feeling that was momentarily allayed in the late afternoon sun when three guys alit from a truck and asked if I needed help in shoveling out the cars that we’d parked one behind the other near the street. In a jiffy they did it, and, with my thanks, and with the cash I’d fetched, were on their way. 

Trying to reconnect, I asked Mary that night when we went to bed to read to me from “The Art of Fielding,” a book, she says, that is about much more than baseball. After asking where we’d left off, she read in a soft cadence about Henry, the gifted shortstop, and I listened. 

I asked Russell Bennett on Monday morning, who I thought said it best in the remembrances of Rusty Drumm The Star printed two weeks ago, if he minded being snowed-in. Not at all, he said. There was nothing he could do. He’d enjoyed it.

Listen, Jack, listen.

My husband and I have been married for 43 years and have spent 44 years celebrating Valentine’s Day. Over the years it has become less of a celebration and more of an acknowledgment. We really don’t eat much candy, but I always get a store-bought bouquet of flowers and a heart-shaped box of chocolates, and always scratch-off lottery tickets. Because, just like Bruno Mars sings in the song that probably made him one, “I wanna be a billionaire so freaking bad.”

Valentine’s Day is the second most card-sending holiday after Christmas. Now isn’t that a waste of money? I stopped buying cards of any kind when I saw a card I had spent $4.99 on in the garbage of the recipient the next day. It was as if someone, who shall remain nameless, had just thrown a $5 bill in the garbage, and that’s no way for me to become a billionaire.

I don’t want to be a cherubic Scrooge here, but I do think Valentine’s Day should be abolished. Little kids get their feelings hurt if others in their classes receive Valentine’s cards and they don’t. Those without a partner get depressed if they’re alone and the liquor stores have long lines to get in to. But this year Valentine’s Day is on a Sunday, which should take the sting out of it for kids in school and office mates watching as big bouquets of flowers are delivered to others’ desks. 

Single women and some men feel pressured to participate in a holiday that, according to Google lore, was created by an order of Roman priests who would sacrifice a sheep and cut its hide into strips, dip them in blood, and then gently slap women with the bloodied strips to boost their fertility — in February, the worst month of the year, when I’m sure a lot of babies are conceived.

Could you imagine something like that happening in modern times? Women would turn right around and beat the hell out of the priests hitting them with bloodied sheep hides. It would be a sight to behold out here in winter, when not much else is going on. 

If I ever am to become a billionaire or even a millionaire, I have big plans. I don’t know that I’d quit my job, because I like being involved in the community. The community should consider itself lucky that my job requires that I keep my mouth shut and remain objective. If I were given a platform, I would have a lot to say about what’s going on out here in Montauk during the summer, and, trust me, the hospitality businesses would not be happy with me. And the Army Corps of Engineers would have to run for their lives.

If I were to quit my job, I might even consider a position on the town board. Under my rule there would be no peeing in Fort Pond. I would put up big signs warning of snapping turtles looking to snap at any male appendage they happen to come upon. Young men consider their maleness sacred so that would put an end to that.

If I were in charge, those who were falling down drunk in the street at night would be locked up in a portable jail right on the green for all to see the following morning and then made to do the walk of shame through the downtown area. 

Loud music in residential areas at night would not be allowed. I’m not going to mention any business by name but if you drive by certain ones that have opened recently you might notice, as I have, that the surrounding homes have for sale signs on them. How sad and unfair is that?

I’d put up money to get the playhouse pool constructed and, of course, give a large donation to the two churches. “Are you listening, God? It’s me, Janis. Let me win the lottery and I’ll take care of your homes in Montauk.”

And finally, I’d get hair extensions, long, beautiful hair extensions that would take the curl out of my curly hair. Because with the exception of Oprah, not many millionaires have wild curly hair. I think it’s a thing, part of the billionaires club. And I want to be a billionaire so freaking bad!

Janis Hewitt is a senior writer for The Star.

There’s nothing better than soup when you’re snowed in for two days — or when you expect to be. The weather forecasts were dire on Saturday morning, but the larder was full and I was ready to cook.

I’ve made lots of soup in my time and don’t really have to use recipes, but I enjoy expanding the repertoire and my attention had been drawn to a bag of fancy dried red lentils that had been sitting on a shelf in the pantry for longer than I cared to remember. I decided to give it a try.

Thumbing through cookbooks and imagining all kinds of tasty combinations is fun, and I sat down to browse through them for inspiration. The lentil soups I came across were all a bit too conventional, so I went to the computer, where I found recipes specifically for red lentils, but none seemed quite right for the soup I had in mind. Did you know that red lentils are different than the common brown ones, in part because they soften quickly and turn yellow when cooked? 

Eventually, I grew impatient and decided to wing it (as I usually do). How could carrots, garlic, and turkey broth go wrong? Most of the red-lentil recipes I’d seen online called for tomatoes and cumin, so I decided to toss them in, as well. 

Winter weather is soup weather, and not just because of the cold and snow: In January, our freezer is usually jammed with stock left over from Thanksgiving and Christmas. I am not one to let a good carcass go to waste! In addition to turkey stock, ours held more than a quart of stock from a poached bass, as well as a couple of containers of goose broth from a Christmas Eve roast, and some good goose fat, too. 

Earlier in the week, I had made what I thought was a yummy fish soup using the poached bass stock. I bought some monkfish and cod and added a fennel bulb, which I had hoarded, to the other vegetables.

The red, then yellow, lentil soup turned out fine, and, as testimony, Chris didn’t even suggest adding balsamic vinegar, to which he has become addicted. (As certain children relate to ketchup, Chris relates to balsamic: It makes everything better.) I made too much of the lentil soup, however, and by the time the storm was over we were bored with it and had to put what remained in the freezer.

There was a time when Star staffers brought in soup to share on Wednesday nights when the paper was being put to bed. They were usually leftover, but occasionally someone made soup especially for the occasion. 

The paper goes to bed before suppertime nowadays, which is a good thing, but I do miss those good broths. When the weather moderated this week, I was a little sorry. There was no longer a good excuse for staying home and indulging in one of life’s simple pleasures: making soup.

Five years ago, the Supreme Court’s 5-to-4 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission threw campaign finance reform out the window. 

Unlimited spending on campaigns by super PACs and secrecy about who is contributing the money has become the norm. In fund-raising for the presidential election, super PAC money accounted for 33 percent of all federal election funds by the first half of 2015, up from 4 percent in 2012. And 75 percent of all super  PAC money during that period came from 500 donors who gave at least $100,000. The statistics cast a chill over our democracy.

The day after the Iowa caucuses, and after Bernie Sanders said his results constituted a political revolution, I did some searching on the Internet to see where the candidates’ money had come from. (The figures I gleaned and use here offer a general picture rather than a precise one, although they come from legitimate sources.)

As we know, the caucuses ended in a virtual tie between Senator Sanders and Hillary Clinton. Senator Sanders is proud that his money comes from small donors who make their contributions online. The average contribution was reported to be $30 earlier in the campaign. At the beginning of this month, Mr. Sanders had raised $74,344,210 from individuals and only about $25,000 from two super PACs, while the Clinton campaign brought in $112,020,908, with super PACs contributing a whopping amount more. One source described the money from outside the campaign as $20,292,009, but that apparently does not include money from what are known as Carey political action committees, which totaled $46,156,691.

I also compared these Democratic figures to what the Republican frontrunner in the caucuses, Ted Cruz, had in his coffers this week. His SuperPacs came through with $38,793,703, but his campaign donations, $46,853,515, lagged far behind the Democratic campaigns. 

As for Jeb Bush, who finished sixth in Iowa, just ahead of Carly Fiorina and just below Rand Paul, his campaign and SuperPac funds and Mrs. Clinton’s were topsy-turvy. His campaign reported $31,817,860; his SuperPacs $103,222,384. Chris Christie’s support from SuperPacs was about twice what his campaign took in, more than $14,000,000 to just over $7,100,000.

The Supreme Court website describes its Citizens United decision in these lofty terms:

“Political spending is a form of protected speech under the First Amendment, and the government may not keep corporations or unions from spending money to support or denounce individual candidates in elections. While corporations or unions may not give money directly to campaigns, they may seek to persuade the voting public through other means, including ads, especially where these ads were not broadcast.”

But Donald Trump is playing a very different game, and Citizens United didn’t matter one way or the other to him in Iowa. While he received $131,623 from SuperPac contributions, the personal money he put into his campaign was $19,308,000. I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

At the Republican debate on Aug. 6, Donald Trump spoke about campaign finance. “I will tell you that our system is broken. I gave to many people. Before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman. I gave to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. And that’s a broken system.”

Like everything Mr. Trump says, this statement reduces something exceedingly complex to bare, simplistic terms. But he put the head on the nail. Could it be the Trump phenomenon is a ray of hope for campaign finance reform?

Don’t shoot the messenger: It’s a cliché worth remembering. We are, all of us, too liable to cast blame on whoever or whatever delivers unpleasant information. 

But the opposite is also true, and I think of it often during an election year:  My current cautionary catchphrase is “don’t credit the messenger,” just because you like what you are hearing.

I’m looking at you, Senator Bernie Sanders. The senator calls for many initiatives I would indeed like to see come to pass, but he has a tendency to reheat old-familiar, tried-and-true progressive platform points and repeat them to the point that they sound formulaic if not outright musty. 

For example, in a campaign email this week Mr. Sanders asked supporters to consider what life in this country would be like if he became president for eight years. He wrote: “The minimum wage is a living wage and students are graduating college without the crushing debt stifling their ability to pursue the career of their dreams. Health care is recognized as a right for every man, woman, and child, and the United States is leading the world in fighting climate change. There is no bank that is too big to fail, no banker too powerful to jail, and we’ve leveled the playing field so that the billionaire class is no longer able to buy and sell our candidates and elections.”

So far, so good (and so boilerplate). 

Senator Sanders strikes a populist vein by attacking “political elites and billionaire super PACs” — attributing to them everything wrong with the election process, if not the entire country. 

Well, sure, I agree with much of what he says. And, yes, it is indeed exciting to witness so many young potential voters joining Mr. Sanders’s “political revolution” in much the same way President Obama drew voters to his message of hope in 2008. Sometimes, however, I wonder if the reason all these college kids are “feeling the Bern” quite so fervently is because they haven’t heard all of this a million times before (as someone my age has). 

Also, I find it unfortunate that Senator Sanders’s simplistic assessment of Mrs. Clinton as someone who favors corporations over people and the Washington establishment over democracy is being echoed by the Bernie faithful, as it was in a letter to the editor of this paper last week. 

I was among those who switched allegiance from Mrs. Clinton to Mr. Obama in 2008, but I am not about to follow suit by supporting the hard-not-to-like Mr. Sanders this time. After eight years of the Obama administration’s struggles with America’s increasingly confounding right wing — and with an increasingly dangerous world — the best hope I can muster is for the election of Hillary Clinton. 

Did you see her face her interrogators over the Benghazi tragedy? Good Lord, she has the intelligence and fortitude to stand up to outrageous distortions of her record and the basest name-calling. I am sorry that she is not able to arouse the emotional fervor Mr. Sanders does, and also am concerned that his support by the young, and in particular young unmarried women, may sway the primaries. How do we all feel about Bernie versus Trump? Or Bernie versus Ted Cruz?

 Research shows that in addition to capturing the youth vote in 2008, Mr. Obama was re-elected in 2012 in large part because millions of single and reasonably young women, including women of color, backed him. By contrast, in 2012, a majority of white married women voted for Mitt Romney. Just what that might mean for next November is unclear.

  I don’t know Mrs. Clinton (although I shook her hand once when she was campaigning on the South Fork with her husband). Those who call her a friend say she is indeed caring and empathetic, qualities the pundits say are essential, but that she doesn’t seem able to project on television. I will, however, take issue with those who find her lacking as a human being of integrity, and will never forget her eulogy for East Hampton’s Tom Twomey after his untimely death in 2014.

Holding notes, but hardly referring to them, she showed extraordinary depth as she spoke about his personal qualities and professional accomplishments with emotion and, to me, surprising understanding of his place in Bonac. I was impressed. Mrs. Clinton is the best we’ve got going, and she will have my vote when the time comes.

It is a simple entry in the 1780 town trustee records: “Ned negro to ring the bel for 30/,” and yet it says so much.  

Until recently, all that was known today about Ned was that he was a free black man whose grave marker was in a backyard off Morris Park Lane in East Hampton. Last year, through the efforts of quite a number of people, it became clear that he had been buried near his own home on land either sold or given to him by a member of the Osborn family, to whom he may have been either an indentured servant or a slave previous to gaining his freedom.

Ned’s story, now that it is beginning to come to light, is important because it adds a fresh dimension of understanding about East Hampton around the time of the American Revolution and about the country as a whole. In him we recognize that the communities that would become the new United States were a lot more complicated than the almost all-white versions of history we might have learned in grade school.

Hugh King had phoned me on Monday to say that Rosanne Barons had found Ned in the East Hampton Trustee records 28 times between 1780 and 1816, hired annually for varying sums to ring the town church bell.

Several weeks ago, after an article I had written about Ned and the search to learn who he was appeared in The Star, Ms. Barons, looking through the trustee records for something else, noticed his name. 

He appears in the 1784 record as “Jeremiah Osborn’s Ned” agreeing to ring the bell for one year for 24 shillings and so on in the ensuing years’ records. In a church membership roster for 1799 that Ms. Barons directed me to on Tuesday, he is listed as a “freeman.”

The church where Ned rang the bell for as many as 36 years stood directly across Main Street from where the Star office is today. The site now contains Guild Hall’s nondescript north wing. It was a tall, shingled building, with two doors facing the street and at least two dozen 30-light pane windows. A square bell tower rose above its broad, sloped roof, and above that was a six-sided steeple topped by a mast and, finally, a weathervane.

More than one might assume still remains of the 1717 church. The clock face, a black and white-painted wooden square about six feet across, is in the East Hampton Historical Society collection and was exhibited last year. The weathervane is preserved at Clinton Academy.

April 8, 1816, is the last time that Ned’s name appears in the copy of the trustee records we keep at The Star. On that day, he again agreed to ring the bell for one year, and, by then, was to be paid in dollars — four. The names of the people hired to tend the bell in the years following his death in 1817 are not recorded.

The two women hurried south, coats pressed to bodies as the wind picked up on Third Avenue. 

“It’s not the end of the world. It’s just. . . .”

“I know.” 

That was all I heard, hurrying north to the Jitney, but I knew, too. It’s just . . . that this winter of discontent has been overrun by unambiguous signs of impermanence, many in the world of my obsession, music. It’s become something of a downpour, and I’m drenched and trembling under the weight of it.

Wes, a friend and former co-worker who left Billboard to make the rock ‘n’ roll documentaries “Lemmy” and “The Damned: Don’t You Wish That We Were Dead,” was properly crestfallen when Lemmy Kilmister died on Dec. 28. Wes posted, on social media, very eloquent tributes to the subject of his first film, to whom he had obviously grown close over several years. 

Then, on New Year’s Eve, Natalie Cole was dead at 65. And then, in the morning of Jan. 10, a shockwave from the radio: David Bowie was dead. It seemed impossible, a stunt, maybe, to promote the album released on the artist’s birthday, just two days earlier. But no, we learned. He had been ill for some time. 

The universe brightened, briefly, on the weekend, and we took an early bus to Manhattan to see the Complete Unknowns in a matinee performance at the B.B. King Blues Club and Grill. It was great fun, getting away for a day and immersing ourselves in the hustle and flow of the city. 

After the show and congratulatory hugs and handshakes, we went downtown to Pete’s for a drink. A stop at the restaurant and tavern frequented by O. Henry remains a pilgrimage, one I hate to miss now that such ventures are few.

As it happened, a couple was standing to leave and we took the corner seats at the bar, crowded in the late afternoon, and sipped wine and talked about music and the city and us and the long journey home. 

A few years ago, I recounted a visit to Pete’s and its dim-yet-eternal place in early childhood’s memories. “It was good to see José in the back, under the gas-lit chandelier at the cashier cage,” I wrote. “José was at Pete’s way back then, and he’s still there. All the others — Mr. Frawley, Dottie — had died years ago.”

I couldn’t see to the cashier cage, at the opposite end of the bar, and it was time to go home. The bartender approached as we stood to leave. 

“Is José still here?” I asked. 

“José died one year ago today. He left here that night, and everything was fine. He died in his sleep.” 

It was a slow, uncomfortable ride as the exits wore on. As the Jitney neared Manorville, I took out the iPhone, for the 13th time, and called up The Star’s website. That was when I learned that Rusty Drumm, too, was gone.

I didn’t meet Rusty until 2012. Though we both lived in Montauk in the ’70s, I didn’t know him then, of course; I was a kid, he a young adult having the time of his life. Later, in the office, he shared incredible tales of Montauk in that glorious decade: of the Rolling Stones, crashing at Andy Warhol’s estate as they rehearsed for a tour; or tending bar at Shagwong, a notoriously raucous establishment, particularly back then. 

And there was the big one, a thrill we had both known: meeting John Lennon, who, in those idyllic summer months of 1976, seemed to have finally found peace of mind in his newfound freedom from celebrity. Like life, that freedom would prove ephemeral. 

The hits keep on coming, on that Great Radio Station in the Sky, in this winter of discontent. On Jan. 18, Glenn Frey of the Eagles. Ten days later, Paul Kantner and Signe Toly Anderson — not one, but two members of Jefferson Airplane. 

On Saturday, we drove to Montauk. As the Manor was our destination, I thought we should pause at Fort Hill Cemetery, where Rusty lies. Ten minutes later, though, we were still rolling up one street and down another, each as unfamiliar as the last. Where was that confounded cemetery? Another time, perhaps. 

On the way out of town, we stopped at the overlook on the Old Highway. The sun and surf were high and the day was mild as the ocean ferociously, insistently pushed against the land, just as it did in my earliest memory, just as it would forever. 

This was a better place to contemplate Lemmy and Natalie and David and Mr. Frawley and Dottie and José and John, and Rusty, and the transitory nature of things. It’s not the end of the world. It’s just . . . you know. 

Christopher Walsh is a reporter at The Star.

So I was in New York City briefly last Thursday for an opening at my friend Eric Firestone’s gallery loft on Great Jones Street. New York is a big place, and the chance of bumping into someone I know from Amagansett is pretty low. 

There were a few people I knew at the opening, a retrospective of work from the 1970s and ’80s by the late Miriam Schapiro, but I had to get to Midtown to catch the 10:15 bus back to East Hampton and did not stick around for the after-party. My wife, Lisa, says some of our readers enjoy a little name-dropping from time to time, so I indulge. 

Why anyone at all cares about celebrities is a mystery to me; I’ve often wondered if it were not some kind of primal instinct handed down from when our forebearers’ species evolved, a deep-seated desire to get close to the alpha male, the big silverback ape, for social and biological reasons. Today, though, we might put a signed photograph, of, say, the president, up on the wall instead. 

Leaving the gallery, I walked up Lafayette Place, passing the Public Theater, and heard a man’s voice that sounded really familiar. Now I’ve never seen his show, but Jerry Seinfeld and his wife, Jessica, passed diagonally in front of me and got in the back of a black Mercedes sedan. 

“Odd,” I thought, “We have houses no more than a couple of miles apart in Amagansett, and I cross paths with them in the city.” 

Heading north with a little time to kill, I crossed over to Broadway and stopped to get a cup of tea. Taking a seat by a window, I saw Alec Baldwin, another part-time Amagansett resident, outside in a jacket and tie. He had two small dogs on a leash and was in what looked like brief conversation with a passer-by. I resisted the temptation to knock on the glass. 

Alec and I know each other well enough from around; I have not encountered the Seinfelds here, except once when he was tearing down Cranberry Hole Road, where I live, in one of his many fine sports cars and another time when I passed his kids’ infamous outlaw lemonade stand last summer.

The South Fork is fairly lousy with film and television people these days. One of my close friends, an actor with a house in Sag Harbor, was in a Super Bowl commercial, and in the fall I ran into another famous actor I know hanging out in the Tackle Shop in Amagansett. 

The Tackle Shop is run by Harvey Bennett, apropos of name-dropping, and he is the bigger silverback, so to speak, as far as I am concerned. Mr. Seinfeld? Alec? Get in line.

Goethe thought solipsism was the worst sin, and while I think he may have a point there, it is my birthday, and what else can I do but revel in the fact. 

And in the fact that you-know-who lost in the Iowa caucuses (to the carpet bomber!) and that Bernie and Hillary ended up in a virtual tie, with the young supporting Sanders and with the old farts — women and men — going for Clinton.

Much is said about her experience in foreign policy, and yet when it came to the salient question of our age, whether or not to invade Iraq in 2003, she caved (prefacing her announcement, as I recall, with a lot of good reasons not to). The Times in its endorsement editorial of her last week made no mention of that, but it is still a question that, curiously, no one seems to have posed; namely, Why did you do it? What was your reasoning at the time? Surely there were others faced with the same “information” who made the wise choice, Sanders being one. But the Cheney-Bush juggernaut was well under way by then, and, presumably, Clinton did not want to seem soft when it came to gore. 

Sanders has said that the Iraq invasion was our worst mistake ever — though, of course, Vietnam is right up there too. It opened up a Pandora’s box of ancient sectarian hatreds that has made the world a bloody mess.

(I might add that sectarianism such as you have nowadays is scary, and when I say that I’m not just thinking of jihadi suicide bombers and beheaders, and massacring fanatics, but also of fire-and-brimstone Christian evangelicals, and true believers of all sorts. How can we say we are free when we are in thrall to ideologies of any sort, whether they be religious or ethnic or nationalistic? Dogma’s throwing us to the dogs.)

Sanders would like to break up the banks, though the time for that worthy goal may have passed. At the least, I hope he goes after the unpatriotic offshorers of money. Repatriate that capital and he would probably be able to rescue capitalism from the oligarchs without much fiscal pain. 

Well, I’ve got to go now and continue, as solipsistic as ever, my quest to find the Fountain of Middle Age.