News by Nature

In an exercise of irony only available in a country which declared all men equal if they are white, the present regime has made clear cheating your fellow man is the ultimate expression of freedom (please see Executive Order 13957). But hey, in the good ‘ol USA we’re freedom loving capitalists and damn proud of… Continue reading Cheating, An American Success Story

A 4-minute read. Shortly after Joe Biden was elected, I received a Facebook message from a friend I’d not heard from since high school. Without so much as a howdy-do, he jumped right in, accusing me of calling half of all Americans morons in one of my less-guarded Trump-bashing posts. While he never struck me… Continue reading Tough-guy Tautologies: A Unifying Theory Of MAGA

“Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” When the then-former governor Ronald Reagan casually dropped this well-versed line on Johnny Carson, it set the stage for 50 years of growing vilification of public service. Now, this legacy culminates in everyone’s favorite immigrant indiscriminately firing half the federal government as millions… Continue reading Public Service: From Reagan to Musk

Before becoming the world’s most hated oligarch, Elon Musk was at the cutting edge of some very civic-minded technologies: renewable energy storage to combat climate change, launching 7,000 satellites to bring the information age to developing countries, building mind/machine interfaces so people can parse vastly more of that information. He even said, shortly before he… Continue reading (Not) Preparing for an Unemployment Apocalypse

03.02.25 Just got done hearing the talking heads blathering on about how the nation’s moral compass has been reset. Really? Since WWII, the US has been guilty of a half-century string of government meddling in commercial and political interests abroad which has cost the lives of hundreds of thousands. One hundred years before that, half… Continue reading A Moral Reset or Business as Usual

Forty four years ago, I heard this rather unsettling half-poem in the pipe-tobacco-infused offices of Emil Wolfgang Menzel, primatologist emeritus at New York’s Stony Brook University. It went something like this. “Higamous hogamous, women are monogamous. Higamous pigamous, men are polygamous.” In layman terms it means: Women want to have babies with only one partner… Continue reading What’s Love Got to do With It? Or Sadness, Anger, Fear, Surprise, or Happiness?

Remember handkerchiefs? For our younger readers, there was a time when, if you had to blow your nose, you used an ornate square of cloth kept in your purse or pocket. Here’s the weird part: you didn’t throw it out. You tucked your “snot rag” away to use over again until it was deemed dirty.… Continue reading Wasting Time Wasting Energy

Misshapen spires of cumulonimbus clouds plopped randomly across the moon-lit sky lurked like sullen sentries in our path. “Squalls,” mumbled the skipper of the Santa Cruz 50, a fiberglass missile of a sailboat which had been my home since leaving the security of California’s coast for one of yachting’s most storied races. Pondering those ominous… Continue reading Transpac: The Call of the Squall

NBN so clearly remembers waking up Nov. 4, 2016 with a new-found sense that we’re saps. Not simply because our country had just elected a president completely opposed to all our hopes and dreams for humanity. Rather, it was the discovery that so many don’t share those hopes and dreams including, as it would turn… Continue reading The Bubba Bros: Fraternity in Fanaticism

With a lot of help from an out-dated electoral process, and a little push from those who would do us harm, the United States finds itself today being ruled by the unruly. George Orwell called them Proles and Hillary Clinton called them deplorables. Sarah Palin called them Soccer Mom and Jon McCain called them Joe… Continue reading The Siren’s Song of Idiot America