Going Home for Christmas to Coal Mining Country

See more "misty mountain" photos from my trip here   These communities rely almost solely on the dying coal industry that operates mines in the Appalachia mountains throughout Kentucky, Southern Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. Not only do these areas struggle with economic depression, and an aging population, the heroin epidemic has hit these communities

A Rock and a Hard Place: Pain Patients Suffer from Heroin Laws Fallout

See also: An Open Letter to Dr. Kolodny, The Truth About the Opioid Crisis, and Strangulation on Medicine Good, law-abiding people are suffering severely in the fallout from recent state and federal laws. Designed to curb heroin addiction, these laws and prevailing societal views all begin with the false assumption that prescription pain pills like

History Repeats Itself: Yellow Journalism in a “Modern” Age

Yellow journalism is a term that describes the sensationalist, money-generating "news" of what was supposed to be a by-gone era: 1895-1898. As we've seen in the recent presidential election, yellow journalism hasn't gone away, it's just become digitized. Today we know it as "fake news" or "click-bait", and its only purpose is to entice readers

Bringing Back Child Labor?

An international friend brought a horrifying article to my attention over the weekend. It did not involve terrorism, Syria, the Standing Rock fiasco, or even Harambe. It was far more subtle a subject, far more insidious, and based on many misconceptions and quiet propaganda. The article was originally called, Bring Back Child Labor, until the

On Snowflakes

Conservative political supporters have come up with a new, derogatory name for those who disagree with them: Snowflakes. Conservatives view dissenters as “weak” and easily broken. Because of their “delicate” nature, they are likened to snowflakes. As if being “strong” (which never lasts) is the be-all, end-all of life. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYbYMMR2R4I As if looking and sounding