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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Life in the 21st Century is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Nigeria's Premium Times has a nice article on Nigerians struggling with oil’s toxic legacy. It's difficult to say the last six decades of
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Subscribe now Recently walking through the Barnes and Nobles in Mishawaka, Indiana, I was pleasantly surprised to run across three different books by the Good Doctor Hunter S. Thompson, stocked under Current Affairs no less! Such are times when you briefly think... well, it makes you smile anyway, some people
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Subscribe now Created by fossil fuels and industrialism, modernity induced great social anxiety, an ambient anxiousness. Fossil fuels sped up life, creating ever greater need for motion, an incessant need for action, a perpetual busyness. Being in motion, doing something, alleviated some modern anxiety. One look at the American populous,
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Subscribe now In our memory deprived world, very few remember or understand anything about inflation. In the old industrial world, you have to go back 40 years to the last inflationary era, which basically means no one under 55 has any conception. This includes people in institutions, especially financial and
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Subscribe now Joe Biden continued a half-century tradition of American presidents making a hajj to Riyadh to ask the House of Saud to keep the oil taps fully open. It's sort of pathetic, but then don't let Hollywood or rock and roll convince you otherwise, junkies
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Subscribe now Yesterday's NYT write up on their most recent poll is an attempt to put lipstick on a pig. It used to be, back when I paid more attention to such things, in a generic question on who should control the Congress, the Dems needed a five
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Subscribe now As part of my politics of the absurd, I haven't owned a car for over a quarter century. I've been telling Americans for decades we needed to become less car reliant, but saying that to people in a culture built around the automobile, well,
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Subscribe now Mesdames et Messieurs, Bon Soir, this is Joan of Arc, Tonio has asked me to personally deliver a rather special message. He say he just cannot get enough of my 15th-century wisdom. After many a Saturday night of doing ze funky western civilization together I know for a
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It’s important that unlike Afghanistan, the National Security State’s recent 20 year misadventure, Ukraine not be allowed to slip from the American mind, though most likely we will not have that luxury. Since this travesty began, if you’ve read the NYT, Post, all other text media, watched
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A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, San Diego, 1990 to be precise, I ran a Congressional campaign in the Democratic primary. My candidate, Byron Georgiou, checked all the boxes of a good Democrat of the time, including being Pro-Choice. However, he was an extreme outlier in
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Subscribe now Pliny the Elder was a Roman writer from the first century. His voluminous Natural History is his one surviving work. It concerns the science of life, such that it was understood at the time. Pliny wrote, parva si non fiant quotidie, loosely translated; things that would be trivial
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Subscribe now Anger is an energy, so said Mr. Lydon. That's absolutely true. Anger is a very important emotion with deep roots in the human animal. Instinctively social animals, a sense of fairness is hardwired within us. Anger bubbles up for a number of reasons, maybe most importantly