All Blog Entries

I sometimes find myself wondering why someone isn’t minding his or her own business. And I usually to do that, but The Valley Advocate got me to do otherwise. This preference hasn’t shown up in my blog often, but blogs are for people to vent their opinions. The Feature Article in the paper was about physician assisted suicide, which is an excellent example of people taking responsibility for themselves. Then when I opened the paper the first heading I saw was an opinion piece about “healthy food ...

For some reason, earlier today I recalled a couple of events that have already been edited out of the history of the 21st century. Unfortunately, I do not have archival information about either event, so many people won’t believe that they happened. In the end, I found that these items haven’t been deleted, just ignored and pushed out of the generally available record.

Neither item was widely reported when it happened, but there were reports online. The first one was when in the Summer ...

Debtors love inflation. The more they owe, the more inflation they want. That is because inflated dollars cost less, so the debtors can repay the same nominal amount for a lower value. That works whether you are a real estate developer or the U.S.A. The U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve Bank have been encouraging high inflation for a long time, so that the Treasury can pay off bonds with cheaper dollars. If inflation is running at average rate of 2.68% per annum, thirty year bonds can be paid ...

During most of my life so far I lived in rather safe areas, places where the general populace was well-behaved, and there was a local police force that was adequate. Unfortunately, the place where I presently live is becoming progressively less safe. Eight years ago, I moved back to Amherst; unfortunately, Amherst has gone from being a pleasant and friendly place to a place where people are in fear of violent crime, and with good reason, a significant part of the town’s population has become unreliable, ...

Humans have been consuming alcohol for at least as long as there have been humans, and there are good reasons to believe that the desire for more alcohol was the driving force behind the development of agriculture. Humans probably got their first tastes of alcohol from fallen fruit that naturally fermented. There's no way to tell for sure, but there are signs of ale, sort of, having been made from seeds about twenty-five thousand years ago, and it is generally accepted that agriculture developed ...