“Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.” — Jack Kerouac More than fifty years after his novel was first published (in 1957), a movie has finally been…
Posts published in “Essays”
One time many years ago Augie, Frank and I were hunting in Trinity County. We started north of the small place named Xenia but there wasn't much in the way of deer. It was after…
'Tis the season for mass murder, fa la la. Nuts and loons go on full auto with weaponry the Founders would not likely have approved of, particularly now that the Supreme Court has read the…
Then came the letdown, a huge letdown, a shocking letdown, as the 49ers lost to the Seattle Seahawks in a near blowout 42-13.
Dave Smith’s invaluable Ukiah Blog Live pointed me to a sobering presentation by Guy MacPherson on YouTube entitled Twin Sides of the Fossil Fuel Coin. MacPherson is a prominent conservation biologist who argues clearly and concisely that the only hope for the survival of humans beyond another couple of decades is the complete collapse of our global industrial society right now, today, and even that probably won’t be soon enough to stave off fast-approaching human extinction and the extinction of virtually all living things due to increasingly rapid global warming.
It’s Boxing Day, the day for servants and the working class to receive presents from their employers. That centuries-old tradition sounds a lot like the 1% vs. 99% divide we face in the present. Boxing…
An armchair psychologist might say it could only be a December baby born in the Great Depression who could have devised a song so devastatingly critical of the contradictions between consumerist Christmas and Christian charity…
Last year during the crux of pre-Christmas consumption, I ventured into the greatest musical basement east of the Village Vanguard: the classical CD section of Dussman’s Cultural Department Store in the heart of Berlin. One…
At the Redding listening session in 2008, several board members wondered aloud how to “get young people interested in farming.” Since I am a bona fide young farmer, fresh out of ag university, I am…