Joe Costello has decades experience in politics, energy, environment, and communications. Traveled and worked across the planet. Long a student of democracy, its demise, possible revitalization.
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Kevin Phillips died last week. Phillips gained fame or infamy depending on one's perspective for his 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority. In the years following, Phillips was blamed for the Republicans' strategy of playing on White fear and ignorance over the enfranchisement of Black America. However,
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Subscribe now The Exxon takeover of Pioneer had me take a little closer look at oil numbers, something I haven't done for a number of years. From its peak in 1970, traditional US oil production declined for the next four decades from 9.6 million barrels a day
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Continued from I The Ogre does what ogres can, Deeds quite impossible for Man, But one prize is beyond his reach, The Ogre cannot master Speech: About a subjugated plain, Among its desperate and slain, The Ogre stalks with hands on hips, While drivel gushes from his lips. — August, 1968,
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Subscribe now Well, Exxon purchased Pioneer not for $50, but $60 billion. Phew! The price of oil goes up ever quicker these days. The WSJ has a ridiculous propagandist editorial that starts with, “The way to read the deal is as a bet on U.S. shale fracking and hedge
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“I'm gonna put on a iron shirt and chase the devil out of earth I'm gonna send him to outa space to find another race” There's a much overlooked, amazingly schizophrenic bit of presidential rhetoric that represents the tragic direction of American politics over
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Two in one day, you lucky or poor bastards. What value for $75 a year! Subscribe now The headlines blare Exxon to buy shale pioneer, Pioneer. Now, being quite clever here, if the deal goes through that would officially mark the peak of shale, certainly it’d be the counter-revolution
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Subscribe now They found some footprints in the New Mexican desert that place the peopling of Americas at 21,000 - 23,000 years ago, which is a good five or six thousand years before previously accepted dates. The Laetoli Footprints discovered by Mary Leakey in Tanzania are 3.6
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Subscribe now Say a word for Jimmy Brown he ain't got nuthin’ at all Not the shirt right off his back he ain't got nuthin’ at all And say a word for Ginger Brown walks with his head down to the ground Took the shoes right
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Subscribe now Phew, DC is just aflutter! The first Speaker in history was voted out by the Congress that voted him in. Best part, he wasn’t voted out by his majority party, the Republicans, but the Democrats, the minority party. Only 8 Reps voted for his ouster along with
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Upon reaching the Missouri’s great falls, the Corps of Discovery delayed a month preparing to portage the river’s impassable obstacles. Here at the top of the plains, they were met with numerous tumultuous summer storms with hefty sized hail that bruised and battered exposed expedition members. Lewis writes
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Subscribe now “Our conventional response to all media (technology), namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot.” Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964 The Artificial Intelligence (AI) hype-boom now in full flower can best be simply understood as the next generation
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Life in the 21st Century is a reader-supported publication. Please become a paid subscriber. For many years, I thought with all the patriotic bluster of Americans, they would not let their great experiment in democracy simply decline and disappear. At some point they'd stand up and declare “enough”