Press "Enter" to skip to content

Posts published in “Essays”

Fracking’s Many Threats

The gas and petroleum industries have already invaded California with an extremely destructive technology, hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking. Fracking is used by oil and gas companies to rework aging or abandoned oil wells.…

Dig This, Man

Back in the murky pre-history of San Francisco's fabled Haight-Ashbury, even before the fabled “Summer of Love” in 1967, let alone the ever-evolving touristic version of it, were the Diggers. Not the “Digger Indians” or…

Dr. Bull’s Musical Alchemy

The intemperate genius John Bull was born in either 1562 or 1563. Let’s choose the later of these two possibilities and duly celebrate 2013 as Bull’s 450th. In contrast to the archetypal Englishman John Bull,…

What Really Happened?

The very first course that Norman O. Brown taught when he arrived at UC Santa Cruz in 1968 was Myth & History and I was among the lucky people to hear him deliver that series of lectures. I was also privileged to meet with Norman in his office on two occasions to talk about various things, notably the fifty-page manuscript I composed in response to his lectures.

Starving The Postal Service

On March 18, U.S. Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe spoke at a National Postal Forum in San Francisco, prompting picketing by rank and file postal employees and their supporters. Protestors opposed Donahoe’s support for post office…

Realignment Is Working

Public safety realignment — the state’s new approach to dealing with felony criminals — is being met with skepticism but its potential for reducing recidivism has been emphasized by Humboldt County’s chief probation officer. Realignment…

Dispatch From Denver

Met up with old friend Tom Woods yesterday for lunch, the only old Sausalito waterfronter in Colorado I know of since Jack the Fluke died. Tom came to with a bad hangover in Denver while…

Sane Man Walking

"Solvitur ambulando, St. Jerome was fond of saying. To solve a problem, walk around.” — Gregory McNamee After a severely stressful year of extreme physical challenges finally resolved by two successful surgeries, I am once…

Money Worries

Of course, everybody should have been worried a lot sooner than last week because the basic operating system of global banking is accounting fraud, and has become that stealthily, insidiously, for about 15 years now.…

-