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.
Newsletter
Subscribe now Part of the challenge facing humanity in the 21st century is the loss of old ideas that united us. Many of these concepts, whether myths, historical traditions, religions, or political values defined distinct cultures limited by geography. However, despite numerous superficial differences, many of these ideas held deeper
Newsletter
Subscribe now Yesterday, it was good to see the Wall Street Journal push down their warmongering, if only briefly, and put the money beat on top. After all, the Fed raising rates and promising to keep pushing up the rest of the year is big news. Except for a couple
Newsletter
Subscribe now With the caveat of if allowed, when the future looks back on our era, political failure will be its defining characteristic. Historians will cite numerous reasons for this deficiency, none unprecedented in scope or degree. As always, there will be intriguing specific differences, along with the not so
Newsletter
Subscribe now Unfortunately, I just discovered Lee “Scratch” Perry died last summer. Not sure how I missed it, but he deserves recognition. Perry is responsible as any other single person for the sound of much music heard today. He was madly influential in developing reggae and then what became rap,
Newsletter
Webster: robust adjective 1D: capable of performing without failure under a wide range of conditions In the last few years, we found, and now seemingly look to explore to the point of exhaustion, the present corporate globalization system is not very robust. Centrally controlled and structured systems, dependent on certain
Newsletter
Subscribe now Oil hit a $100 a barrel last week, touching a $140 last night. The price of oil first hit a $100 in 2007, preceding and in some ways precipitating the financial crisis of 2008. When oil hit a hundred, the US economy went into recession in the last
Newsletter
For some reason FT's is doing these Turner black & white colorizations of Ukraine photos: Had to do a double take: This is Husker Du's 1984 Zen Arcade and that's Saint Paul, Minneapolis not 2022 Russian bombed Ukraine. A very, very fine collection of
Newsletter
Subscribe now In the last decades, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s life has been pigeonholed in a way precluding a true understanding of his legacy. A radical, thoughtful, and purposeful life of action has been whittled down to one or two statements from one speech. This is not simply
Newsletter
Life in the 21st Century is a reader-supported publication. It needs your monetary support and help in distribution to others to continue. The loss of history has been a major blow for any useful politics. For millennia, human culture was largely defined by our history. Ancestors actions, the past was
Newsletter
Subscribe now Historian Gore Vidal conveys from the writings of Dean Acheson, the US Secretary of State in 1950, State officials figured the average American might think about world affairs, “For ten minutes in any given day.” That’s extremely generous. Whatever small number it is has allowed 75 years
Newsletter
Subscribe now There are numerous advantages to republican systems, however, they have never proved more peaceable than dictatorships or monarchies, maybe even less so. Renaissance Italy saw unending strife amongst her city-state republics. While Rome, and its modern US successor, militarily created two of history's greatest empires. In
Newsletter
Subscribe now It's sort of interesting with the brouhaha the US National Security State helped instigate in Eastern Europe, there's been little talk of atomic weapons. After all, it was the key ingredient in all Cold War fear mongering. Any action could quickly spark nuclear apocalypse,