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Life in the 21st Century is a reader-supported publication. Please becoming a paid subscriber. 20 years ago with the internet fully accelerating, anti-social media just on the horizon, and Microsoft licking their wounds as convicted monopolists, it would have been hard to imagine Microsoft today would be one of the
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Jerusalem, can you hear the Banshee’s wail? I ended up in San Diego at the beginning of the '88 primary season. It was a pretty sordid group of candidates for president. I introduced myself to the San Diego Rainbow Coalition and offered services as an informal advisor/organizer.
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Life in the 21st Century is a reader-supported publication. Please become a paid subscriber. Bloomberg has a piece on Nigerian energy. They report, “Generators are everywhere in Lagos, used by almost everyone in the Nigerian megacity to counteract crippling power outages.” “While they vary in style and capability, the worst
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Life in the 21st Century is a reader-supported publication. Please become a paid subscriber. And/Or I didn’t know there were 13,000 years old trees, a 13,000 years old oak tree, a 13,000 years old oak tree in Riverside County, California. Southern California has some wonderful
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Talk about cash money, dollar bills y’all Ok, another apology. I try very hard not to be clever. Funny yes, clever no, though I do worry with the seriousness of my humor people miss the punchlines. I don’t wish to spend a lot of time, none at all
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Excuse me while I puke this out. Phew, writing in anyway sensibly about what goes for American politics is impossible. Writing nonsensically, well that is American politics. Case and point is the new Speaker of the House of Representatives. If you remember, it was only a couple of weeks ago,
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In a wonderful speech from 1961 at the University of Colorado, J. Robert Oppenheimer, physicist and atomic bomb creator, talked about human perception. He noted, “In every extension of knowledge we're involved in action and in every action we're involved in choice and in every choice
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the day the Dream went right back to base there’s blood on the ground blood on the sand blood all around Minnie and Mickey Brer and Pluto secretly prayed there was no doubt at all no maybe about it was the day Disney's Dream debased You grow
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I recently received an email from a friend that included this money chart created by a financial firm called TrendCompass: Using Fed numbers, this is just a great graphic charting the last decades financialization of the economy. The top black line is “credit,” aka debt, while the bottom line is
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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,