Maybe it was from seeing so many Smokey Bear commercials, but I always thought that the Forest Service protected the forests, and the other various federal agencies named after other precious natural resources also attempted to husband these things that, really, belonged to We The People, and our neatly uniformed federal employees dutifully spent their [...]
I was pretty young when first I heard about Murphy’s Law, but a lifetime of experience has shown me that it is as inescapable as, say, gravity, and the only way one can ever manage complex tasks is to always plan for the worst case scenario; it’s one’s only hope that it might not occur. [...]
One of the things that prepared me for life as a liberal Democrat was growing up with my crazy grandmother Etta around. Though she was crazy and everyone knew it, for some reason we were taught to put up with it, and whenever possible give her her way, since even though her ideas were always [...]
As I’ve no doubt mentioned before, my somewhat less terrible than average local rag, The Oregonian, has this weird tendency to adopt unpopular, right-wing causes, and stick to them even in the most humiliating defeat, which always culminates in a scolding editorial about how they were, dammit, right and it was the whole world that [...]
One thing I won’t miss about my formerly frequent visits to Los Angeles is the disheartening experience of reading its sad and depleted newspaper, the Times, to which I used to look forward so much when I lived there briefly in the early 90′s. The final death knell came in 2003 , when they got [...]
In the dog years of the media, the “good old days” were back in 2001,when one and all wore flak jackets, talked tough, and blathered on in the most maudlin yet bloodthirsty way, and despite the fact that they were providing such ghastly television and worse journalism, everybody watched. They mattered, which is important if [...]
Perhaps the most pernicious myth about the wonderful “free market” is how a person of conscience, in the obvious absence of viable alternatives, can supposedly “vote” with their dollars, thus magically driving out bad actors without the overweening schoolmarm of government sending anybody to detention. The trouble with this notion is that consumer choice is [...]