Boardmembers of the North Coast Railroad Authority (NCRA) are hearing an ongoing debate about converting the agency’s rail lines into trails, but they’ve taken no stances on it and aren’t sure about how it would…
Posts published in “Essays”
Less than a decade after the United States visited a nuclear iki-jigoku (“hell on earth”) upon the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki, instantaneously killing at least 150,000 and delivering countless more Japanese people to the…
None other than the US Secretary of State herself, Hillary Clinton, paid fulsome tribute to Al Jazeera last Wednesday, March 2. Appearing before a US Foreign Policy Priorities committee, she was asked by Senator Richard…
My earliest memory is a hazy but lasting one. I was around five years old at most, with my father, fishing on the beach where we so luckily lived. He caught one, a big silver…
Historical facts. Hmm. When I was attending UC Santa Cruz in the late 1960’s (and I really did do that) Norman O. Brown came to teach at our newborn college. His course Myth & History was open to undergrads, so I signed up to hear what the famous man had to say.
A lawsuit filed by local commercial fishermen may not stop what plaintiffs see as a corporate scheme to privatize the ocean and eliminate small-boat fishermen from the water. On Jan. 13, a new fishery management…
My heroes have always been union organizers. Mom and Dad were labor organizers, as were my cousins, Bernie (printing trades), Charlie (shipbuilders) and Joe (auto workers). If we had a religion, it was One Big…
Think back all of a week or less — an eternity as measured by the ADHD chronometers of pop culture — to the conclusion of the Oscar pageant in the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood last…
Jews harps, kazoos, and accordions. The county’s biggest oak dance floor and the world’s smallest cow. A Medicare-eligible woman hanging upside down from the ceiling and pre-pubescent divas with broken hearts. Bearded ballerinas. A show…