NSA INC. Dear Editor: Edward Snowden, who deserves a medal for exposing NSA's big brother surveillance on American citizens, is discovering the life of a whistleblower can be a very unpleasant life. In particular, the…
Posts published in July 2013
Like most people, Billy came to prison scared and with good reason. See, this wasn't some “Camp Snoopy” joint where wanna-be tough guys dried out from their last meth run. Not a place where you just laid around for 8 months, swapped lies and told bullshit war stories until you paroled.
Sixty years ago this week the “forgotten war” came to an inconclusive end. The Korean war was perfectly mistimed for me. On 25 June 1950, the day I graduated from the University of California, Los…
With the exception of a few heat waves in mid July that never lasted more than a couple days in the mid nineties, the unusually cool summer continues in the Ohio valley. Sterile clouds sail…
Greetings one and all. If you are sitting comfortably then I shall begin. So there is a new Royal Baby! An event that was part historical “happening,” part nativity play, part soap opera, and one…
THIS JUST IN: Coast fishermen report lots of big salmon but ominously few little salmon. No babies would seem to mean that good as this salmon season is, next year's probably won't be very good…
We’ve slid down a long, slippery slope since the days of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley and mainstream reporters like Dan Rather turning President Nixon’s own words around to sarcastically imply that the leader of the free world was running from grand jury and congressional investigations.
We have a large old plum tree growing on the north side of our house, and in this first year of our residency the tree has gifted us with several hundred sweet red plums, which are ambrosia to deer, appealing to squirrels, and irresistible to a trio of baby foxes who visit the tree daily.
Having gorged unsustainably on the public sector of Michigan’s largest city for decades, having left empty schools, libraries, and office buildings like gnawed bones scattered about a massacre, having erased whole city services leaving only…