Opinion

Today is the 117th day of 2023 and the 39th day of spring. TODAY’S HISTORY: In 1521, explorer Ferdinand Magellan was killed in the Philippines.

What separates humans from other species, the late William F. Buckley Jr. once told an interviewer, is “the ability to make distinctions.” Not every human has that ability, of course, and certain issues are so susceptible to distortion that even those with the ability to make distinctions don’t necessarily make them.

Dear Annie: How can my husband, “Steven,” make new friends in retirement? He is medically retired (blind) from work. He is a non-smoker and non-drinker.

The Biden era is turning America’s youngest voters, the “Zoomers,” into doomers. They’re depressed and fearful -- and their confidence in the nation’s institutions, from the police to the Supreme Court, is weakening.

Something about China encourages grandiose predictions. Just a few years ago, the U.S. Intelligence Community forecast China would emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic economically and politically stronger than the United States.

Dear Annie: You recently wrote a column about a woman who was concerned because a fellow waitress was still smoking while pregnant. You recommended that she check the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website, which has good information on the subject.

It’s a heady time for the badly disguised Democrats in the “objective media,” seeing Fox News settle a fake news lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems over wild and unproven claims of mass voting machine fraud. But a new book excerpt from “BuzzFeed Ben” Smith should remind everyone that the same “Truth matters” cheerleaders accepted wild and unproven claims about former President Donald Trump willy-nilly.

Dear Annie: My roommate, who is also my ex-boyfriend, was involved in a car accident a few months ago. His car was totaled in the process, but he is OK and was not seriously injured. He had to quit his job but has recently found a new one that pays a lot better than his last.

The late Irish poet Eavan Boland paid famous homage to the daughters and sons of Ireland who, beginning in the early part of the 19th century, endured the trauma of uprooting themselves from their homeland and traveling to the strange, forbidding land that was America. “What they survived we could not even live,” she wrote in her poem “The Emigrant Irish.” “Now it is time to imagine how they stood there, what they stood with. Their hardships parceled in them. Patience. Fortitude. Long-suffering in the bruise-colored dusk of the New World.”

Are we watching a replay of King Canute commanding the waves to recede? That thought occurred to me while reading about the Biden administration’s latest step in advancing the president’s 2021 goal of having half of all new autos be electric by 2030.