(Just a little update for December 2020:  I have been following the election debate about corruption, and unlike most media mouth-breathers, have actually been listening to testimony and looking at evidence.  I will need to be expressing myself, and it will show in these pages.  Below is what I had planned for this site.)

I am J.D.Richter, proprietor of The Stirred Pot.  My original note for “About” went like this:  Here I reserve the right to comment on whatever has stirred my ire or caught my fancy, but it is also my goal here to touch on subjects considered untouchable, or that I consider need another look or a different take.

But then I stalled, and the web site sat for quite a while. Stalled not because of subjects and topics, but rather, how to say it, how to put it all together. And how to do it without just being another angry person, which was, perhaps, the toughest.  Like so many projects, this site seemed like a simple task until I lifted the cover.

Each time I turn around, listen to a conversation, hear the latest, I can’t help but correlate the newest with all that’s come before. That stirs up something–a relationship seen, a connection made, or new questions to ask. I’m not alone in this. I think we all do exactly this. But the point of a blog is to put it down, write it out and get it posted. Yet if the subjects come in on the breeze, how the devil does one organize them?

That’s been a good part of my quandary. According to the rules, a blog should have a topic; it should be targeted. So should I do one blog and keep it reined in, or do five? Or ten?

So what is my–or what are my–topics? I find myself concerned about politics, the economy, the mutation of our civilization, and the slide of our society toward a technological barbarism. I think about where our society has been and where it should be. The truth is that my topic is life. Life as she is lived, could be lived, might be lived, twisted until it’s not life, perverted, bent, sent all wrong, and how it might be brought right.

Though more specifically, it is how society is shaped, who does the molding and why. In my observations and in my studies, I am and have been continually faced with discoveries of underlying motives and underlying actors. There are such factors as climate and population–but how people react to those factors–there we find the issues of ethics, morals, profit and loss, lies, propaganda, and more rarely, truth.

It is not an esoteric subject, not at all, and I don’t’ see it that way. Forces at work in our country and in our world are shaping the society that our children will inherit. Different societies in different places have found different answers to these same questions. Some had better results and some had worse. The bottom line is that we can do something about the shape and nature of that world-to-come.

This is a topic with many genres and categories.

My goal is to dig a little deeper, try to find the underlying current, try to sort out the players. To look below the noise at the noisemakers. There are identifiable forces and players coming from every direction, but in the end it’s one topic, one subject. So that’s how I’m going to treat it–at least until some better way to organize comes along.

If the posts seem a bit scattered, I’m hoping you’ll take the extra moment to look for the pattern, the weave, the way the posts gather around that central theme. For my part, I will do my best to organize and categorize and point out the pattern.

Well, that’s the plan, such as it is. For now, I think it will do.