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Here in Massachusetts the Great and General Court passed and the governor signed into law a law that will permit three “resort-casinos” in the Commonwealth. I don’t think much of casino gambling at all. I regard casinos as businesses designed to take money from individuals and fill the pockets of the casino owners, much like insurance companies. I doubt that I will ever visit any of those casinos, if they will be built, but the small, limited number of casinos annoys me. In effect the State government ...

I recently saw posters looking for canvassers to collect money for Clean Water Action. I suspect that this is a scam, because in the U.S.A. surface water is cleaner now than it was before Europeans started to settle here. There are a few particular places where the water is polluted, but just fifty years ago much of the surface water was polluted. I still wouldn’t drink from most streams, but that’s because I know what giardia is, and there are problems around farms and after rain storms, but there ...

I recently learned that the old chestnut about a hole in the ozone layer over the South Polar Region is still believed by some people. Please rest assured that there is nothing to worry about. Yes, there is a hole every year, and there has been a hole every year for a very long time, but it has nothing to do with Freon or chloride ions.

Mechanics of the Ozone Process
In the atmosphere there is a continual process, or set of processes, that create then breakdown ozone molecules. ...

Genocide: the policy of deliberately killing a nationality or ethnic group.

As a follow-up to my post about ethnic cleansing I want to look at genocide. I started by looking at definitions, such as the one from dictionary.com that makes up the title. Then there’s: Genocide is the systematic destruction of all or part of a racial, ethnic, religious or national group via the (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately ...

Nasty though humans often are, they aren’t very efficient when it comes to getting rid of enemies or others who are in the way. I don’t recall what brought it to mind, perhaps Amherst and the Indians again, but I started trying to think of examples of ethnic cleansing or genocide that did anything positive for anyone. Typically, ethnic cleansings have resulted in some, or most, of one people being chucked out of one area, while the people who did the chucking gained the eternal hatred of those who ...