Most of you have all heard the saying or its paraphrase, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” words actually written by George Santayana. This concept has a special meaning now when special interests – those with an agenda – try to guide us in…
The 90s: twenty mass power outages a year, Today we have a hundred, I fear. Extreme weather events, while Congress snores, And down a proverbial rat hole, some $50 billion pours. A century ago, we funded progress and beyond, And laid power grid foundations -- now Congress yawns…
Planet Earth is inhabited by a Type 0 civilization, one which gorges on fossil fuels for energy, ideologically wants to retreat to the past, and fearfully searches for threatening shadows. We are stumbling toward a Type I civilization, considering the use of solar power, wind power, and other renewable…
I shouldn’t get so bent out of shape over a politician’s or a political party’s lack of intelligent decision-making, decisions which ignore past behavior of those you need to deal with. Harry Reid ‘s decision not to pursue real filibuster reform is such a naïve, self-serving decision. It is…
Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union’s ruthless ruler before WWII, said, “I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how, but what is extremely important is this – who will count the votes, and how.” Republicans have tried the voting angle, limiting voting for the opponents,…
You may have read Les Misérables in school or have seen the movie, thinking that Jean Valjean, a man imprisoned for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his family, is a fictional character in the distant past, at a time when being poor was a criminal matter and…
Are John “Quiverlip” Boehner and Mitch “Multichin” McConnell vying for the title of Vile Misanthrope? Even “misanthrope” isn’t enough; you must put vile in front of it. But one has to mention that Boehner’s Ohio district and the state of Kentucky must bear some blame for electing such miscreants…
The Sandy Hook massacre, a happening too grim and heart-rendering to allow ourselves to even fleetingly dwell on, is the 62nd multiple slaying since 1982 (Mother Jones). As the most tragic, it will replace all other massacres we have maintained in our memories. For Sandy Hook, our reflexive question…
By OcJim Americans have been purposefully exposed to such a protracted campaign of pure bullshit for so long that we might not even smell it. The current media-fed fantasy of the “fiscal cliff” is such a case. The metaphor of an immediate, irreversible fall over a precipice of unalterable…
We all see gravity at work when we take a step, throw something across the room, see rain fall, or leaves float to the ground. For something so common in our lives, it is still a mystery. We have two tested theories, not very recent theories at that: Newton’s…