It is well-established that mystical experiences have historically played a pivotal role in indigenous shamanism and world religions (the miracles surrounding Moses’ Ten Commandments and Jesus’ baptism by John). What is less well-known and quite unexpected is the discovery that mystical experiences are the catalyst for healing in contemporary psychedelic research. Both the Johns Hopkins […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]