Roe v. Wade appears to be on its last legs. The current, radical Supreme Court sits poised to riddle Roe with Texas-sized exceptions or to overturn it all together. Ever since Roe was handed down on January 22, 1973, the press has been full of, and our national politics traumatized by, charges and countercharges concerning […]
Last week’s column (September 30) dealt with Santa Barbara’s worsening water shortage issues – August was the driest year in the last 127 years for which we have good records! All 423,895 of us in Santa Barbara County moved past “Extreme” drought to the worst of the National Weather Service’s five categories of drought: “Exceptional.” […]
You may recall the 18th century poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It is an incredible story of one man’s abuse of nature causing devastation all around him. In the tale, the Ancient Mariner is the navigator of the vessel on which he sailed, and after some misadventures, his ship […]
Credit for today’s headline goes to MSNBC commentator Chris Hayes who used the phrase a couple of weeks ago on his nightly broadcast to describe the threat Kevin McCarthy leveled at the business community that week. In case you missed it, McCarthy as the Minority Leader in the House proclaimed that the Republican party, as […]
The latest August 2021 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) identifies methane as one of the worst greenhouse gases contributing to climate change. This IPCC report is one of many signs that climate change is accelerating, and already producing considerably graver impacts than has been forecasted by all the leading scientific consensus […]
By now anyone who follows the news knows Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas contracted COVID-19 even though he has had both the regular two vaccine injections, and to almost everyone’s surprise, has already received a third booster shot. He received the extra shot despite possibly not being in a category authorized to receive it yet. […]
A common refrain that has echoed around American society for the last 70 years or so goes like this: “Nothing in life is certain, except death and taxes!” Cute, and up until recently a truism that could be counted on. No longer. It turns out there is one other thing that is certain, is inescapable, […]
As almost everyone in the U.S. is now aware, Georgia’s Republican legislators passed legislation to: a) actively suppress voter turnout, making it significantly harder for minorities to vote by adding new vote-by-mail identification requirements, limiting drop boxes, and an assortment of other measures designed to resuscitate “Jim Crow” voting in the state; and, b) provide […]
The “Sedition Caucus” is defined as those members of the House of Representatives who, after the January 6 insurrection was brought to a halt, voted to stop counting Electoral College votes in the hopes of overturning the 2020 presidential election. Counting these Electoral Ballots is the final legal act prior to initiating the “Peaceful Transfer […]
What on earth is going on in Miami? A 40-year-old, 12-story building named the Champlain Towers South (the “Towers”) collapsed into a heap of rubble without any advance warning, a mile from Miami Beach in Surfside, Florida. At this writing, there are at least 11 fatalities, many injuries, and more than 150 people still missing. […]
This column is being written on Father’s Day — as the humorist Jim Gaffigan observed, “the government mandated day of paternal gratitude.” By now, everything conventional that needs to be written already has been. What motivates this column is to look behind the conventional nostrums of the day to the more basic, the more archetypal, […]
We all were able to witness a television treat last week when we saw three centenarians (folks over 100) appear on camera to share the horror of their childhoods as they witnessed, in person, the Tulsa Race Riots which President Biden more correctly labeled a “massacre.” Those brave individuals who shared their stories spoke to […]
Cruise ships are lined up and ready to sail… maybe. Yes, last week the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued new guidance that permits cruise ships to sail from U.S. ports provided that at least 95% of guests and 98% of crew have been vaccinated. This drops the requirement for test voyages without […]
Last year 40,000,000 human beings were uprooted from their homes and became international refugees. You read that correctly. Forty million people. The vast majority of these people flooding other countries out of a desperate attempt to improve their lives to the point of achieving subsistence living were climate refugees. People driven from their ancestral lands […]
This column is sort of an “apology” to President Joe Biden. I became a bit critical of President Biden last Wednesday, June 19 as the shelling in the Middle East continued unabated. I spoke to Congressman Salud Carbajal to express my frustration that Biden, who had been doing fairly well in my view up until […]
James Carville famously coined this phrase in 1992 as candidate Bill Clinton campaigned for president. He hung it (together with two other “targeting” phrases) in the Clinton “War Room” where that campaign was planned and executed. It turned out that the recession of 1992 was just the boost that Clinton needed to unseat then-President George […]
Yeah! Sounds like a great way to celebrate California achieving the status two weeks ago of the state with the lowest background infection rate of all 50 (still true as of this writing). How about a party to celebrate how much fun it is to meet friends and neighbors on Coast Village Road and State […]
Brown Hydrogen, Grey Hydrogen, Blue Hydrogen, Green Hydrogen. Who knew hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe (76 percent of all molecules in the universe are hydrogen), came in so many colors! Actually, it doesn’t. Those color references relate to how hydrogen (“H2”) is made. If the source of electricity for electrolyzing H2 from […]
Wow! Hard to believe we’ve celebrated 51 Earth Days and the environmental battles we are fighting are worse than ever. Looking back, we delight in the history of Earth Day, in part catalyzed by the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969. Earth Day was officially launched in 1970 by Senator Gaylord Nelson and Congressman Pete […]
Deepak Chopra has the precocious habit of asking the most prescient questions. On one occasion 12 years ago he asked what it would take to cause “Wall Street,” and/or large businesses generally, to cease being forces of social destruction and instead become positive forces for societal change? We had a conversation about how we could […]
In 1991, the late Jeremy Tarcher, a renowned publisher and dear friend, invited me to spend a day discussing the World Business Academy’s sense of the emerging business principles with his “Tech Group” in Los Angeles. At the end of the day, Jeremy took me aside and said, “That’s a book you just dictated. Would […]
Deepak Chopra, my dear friend for more than 25 years, and a Fellow of the World Business Academy for all that time, is a very wise man with an eclectic view of religions. While a Hindu himself, like Aldous Huxley in his watershed book The Perennial Wisdom, Deepak has spent his adult life looking at […]
Tesla led the world in electric vehicle (“EV”) sales during 2020 with a total of 499,511 (pure electric vehicles) followed by Volkswagen at 424,729 (if you count plug-in electrics) sold. The three closest competitors after that, all legacy car manufacturers, were in the low 200,000 to 250,000 range of units sold. In the U.S., the […]
How did Vladimir Putin fail? January 6, 2021 must have been the biggest surprise and disappointment of his entire life. He worked diligently in 2016 to sew dissension amongst Americans to undermine our democratic institutions. He used all his skills, his deceit, and his incredibly powerful “asymmetric warfare” apparatus in the FSB (formerly the KGB), […]
At the very least, travelling will be lot easier and safer with your “soon to be issued” vaccine passport. Crystal Cruises has already announced it will not accommodate any future passengers who cannot provide proof of vaccination at the time of departure. And, even then you also have to provide a current negative COVID-19 test […]
Joe Scarborough was a conservative US Congressman until 2001. He represented Florida’s 1st Congressional District, which Scarborough affectionately refers to as “The Red Neck Riviera.” He also occasionally calls it “LA” for “lower Alabama” as the extremely conservative District is in Florida’s Panhandle just below Alabama. He currently hosts an extremely popular daily cable news […]
The February 18 edition of this column carried an impassioned plea for the two political parties, which together represent less than 50 percent of the voters, to let our people go! To let us pass into real democracy from the shared monopoly in U.S. politics that the Democrats and Republicans jointly control to their advantage, […]
Angelenos think of “gridlock” as that which happens on the Interstate 405 every day, as well as on many other freeways around town. In this week’s column, we’re focusing on how the electrical grid in California helps start wildfires. (Governor Newsom says he sees this going on for more than a decade as the state […]
The Old Testament Book of Exodus describes how Moses and Aaron went in to see Pharaoh and, speaking on behalf of the Jewish God of Israel, instructed Pharaoh to release the Jewish people from bondage where they lacked the ability to influence their own futures. They were born as slaves, held as slaves, and would […]
Ah yes… Valentine’s Day is here. Commercially, it’s a very successful day because merchants have historically used this “hearts and flowers” day to sell lots of sugary red hearts and flowers. And, having grown up as a Catholic, I’ve always experienced a certain sadness from learning how St. Valentine was beheaded for sending a note […]
What does “voter suppression” even mean? What does it look like in real life? How bad is it? How much worse can it get? How can we ever enjoy a true democracy when citizens who are people of color, students, or ex-felons are not allowed to vote at all? In 2018, then Georgia Secretary of […]
What kind of a word is “filibuster,” how did we get stuck with it, and what the heck does it mean? Those of us old enough to remember seeing the 1939 classic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, starring the legendary Jimmy Stewart, grew up with a badly distorted view of what the filibuster actually is […]
One hundred and thirty-nine members of the U.S. House of Representatives voted, after the insurrection (which sacked the Capitol building and took five lives), to support the mob’s demands to overturn the results of the recent presidential election. An election found, after sixty meritless legal challenges, to have been a free and fair exercise in […]
Senator Mitt Romney succinctly summarized the events of last Wednesday in one sentence: “What happened here today was an insurrection incited by the President of the United States.” Former President George W. Bush also used “insurrection” to describe the attack on the U.S. Capitol, felt by many to be “the center and sacred symbol of […]
Do we, as the people of the United States of America, want to be a democracy? This is the fundamental question behind the several articles being grouped under the title “Escaping Minority Rule.” Historically we know the founders wanted to create minority rule and they went to great lengths to ensure that some people (primarily […]
The phrase above originates from the King James Version of the Gospel of Luke, and although gender specific, was meant to refer to all humankind. Hence, a better way to trumpet this phrase is “Peace on Earth Good Will to All.” This week is the most appropriate time of the year to pause and recall […]
What do people, especially the news media, mean by “Minority Rule”? Let’s be clear that it doesn’t mean “minority government,” a term used to describe how a national political party (e.g., United Kingdom, France, Israel, etc.) can govern without an absolute majority vote. A minority government in a multi-party system is allowed to form coalitions […]
This COVID dominated period our global human society is going through gives me a partial sense of what it must have been like during one of the six great prior plagues humanity has endured and survived. The “good news” is that we have the opportunity to choose to put this terrible human tragedy behind us. […]
A truly astounding event occurred this past week. It was both unanticipated and shocking at the same time. It was totally “out of left field,” and yet I believe it is an unfortunate harbinger of things to come. What was this incredible decision? It was the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down New York’s restrictions […]
The cover of the November 14 issue of The Economist is a picture of a curving tunnel with bright light at the end emanating from a hypodermic syringe. The words below the image state simply “Suddenly, hope.” It is a powerful image with a dramatic headline. You can’t miss the message: recently released data on […]