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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Subscribe now Elections are necessary for democracy. To carry the weight of effective democratic governance, elections need to be considered credible, that is free and fair by all participants. At times, all democracies struggle with election processes. Over the last couple decades, the din from all sides questioning the soundness
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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. It is extremely difficult for any person born into industrial society to understand any alternative. Pre-industrial life is now labeled poverty, certainly no one wants poverty. Industrial life
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Thank you for reading Life in the 21st Century. This post is public so feel free to share it. A number of years ago for a Christmas gift, I gave two of my young nieces E.O. Wilson's encyclopedic, The Ants. A few years ago, I was talking
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Subscribe now While the pyramids of Egypt are not the oldest human structures, they do capture the historical imagination like few others. Egypt was one of the greatest agrarian, or farming cultures. Birthed by the Nile River, the civilization of the Pharaohs lasted several thousand years, longer that is from
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If you grew up in Chicago many years ago, there was a daily morning television show called Ray Rayner and His Friends. It was sort of like Good Morning America with old Warner Brother cartoons, though depending what you think of the animated antics of the hosts and guests of
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Subscribe now It's sort of funny, if funny is the word, how Afghanistan has remained in the headlines. One assumed once the US finally left, coverage would fall to at least the imperceptible level it was during the 20 year occupation. More likely, it would fall to the
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Subscribe now In 1980, the New Deal Coalition, which controlled much of American politics for almost a half-century collapsed, never, like Humpty Dumpty, to be put back together again. It was replaced by a more direct corporate rule, maybe best described as unfettered corporate rule, with sprinklings of various elements
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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. “But since the institutions of the state, which were no longer good amidst the corruption, remained fixed, these renewed laws were not sufficient to keep people good, but
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Subscribe now Webster defines corruption as: a: dishonest or illegal behavior especially by powerful people b: inducement to wrong by improper or unlawful means c: a departure from the original or from what is pure or correct d: decay or decomposition In regards to politics, corruption is word heard all
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The FT has a piece on a spouse of a Rupert Murdoch kid pushing democratic reform. There's a long tradition of disreputably gained wealth's philanthropic efforts to leave a shinier legacy. A most recent example is convicted monopolist Bill Gates, though Chairman Bill's charity
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Subscribe now The Covid virus revealed much about the American healthcare system. The pandemic is, fortunately, a not common, though certainly massive event. When such events occur, they test established processes and institutions, laying bare their faults and deficiencies. These can be either acknowledged and reformed or ignored and papered
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Subscribe now Viruses are interesting little things. Some say they aren't even alive, though seems more logical to expand our definition of life. Viruses have been around for a long long time, billions of years. There are bits and pieces of viruses in our cells from way before