Seeing the pristine in a tainted Great Plains
As I prepared for my trek to the Northeast across the Great Plains this summer, I quietly resented that I would have to endure the mind-numbing, soul-sucking road trip I was directly and indirectly advised not to take for years, but, in my head, the justification of all the trouble existed in the destinations I would experience and the people I would visit. The road of nothingness was just the medium for time and space travel.
After watching the prairie for hours with predetermined discontent, I saw something beyond the straight roads, dividing fences, and regular telephone poles. I remember it was somewhere in Nebraska where I saw the grass move like the sea’s waves...
Paranoia
I see a plot in the New Mexico Medical Board's rule to make medicinal marijuana prescriptions hard to write for patients. This is nothing but big pharma applying pressure to the Docs to make it hard to prescribe the low cost and effective herb to patients that qualify. I mean if a few brownies take the place of outrageously expensive drugs then corporate profits will slide. How much longer do we need to put up with this corporate manipulation of everything in our lives? Am I being paranoid? Or is having the munchies a threat to our way of life?...
Tom Udall’s Campaign Against Global Warming
When I saw videos of two feet of hail in the streets of Santa Rosa in early July, and felt the power 10 days ago of the most intense wind and rain storm Albuquerque has ever seen, I thought of Senator Tom Udall’s line, “If anyone still denies that climate change is real, I invite them to come to New Mexico.”
Having seen the predictions of climate change scientists come to life, it’s heartening to know that New Mexico’s senior senator is among the most outspoken politicians in the country when it comes to confronting the reality of our changing atmosphere...
Right To Lifers on UNM Campus Spark Counter-protest
During the noon hour on Monday right to lifers put up twenty by ten ft. color pictures of mutilated and aborted fetuses along Central to convince students and faculty on UNM’s main campus that abortion is wrong. The protestors, who were mostly teenage girls, got a surprise, however, when ten adamant fetuses bearing their own placards descended on them...
Sex and red herrings
The very discussion of the ability to obtain an abortion in American is a “red herring”. A topic put out to distract us from real issues. We are fighting about shutting down abortion clinics when we should be talking about why we need them.
Approximately 20,000 American girls, under the age of 15, become pregnant each year. Shouldn’t we be talking about who is having sexual intercourse with our 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 year old girls?...
Harry Truman and the decision to drop the bomb
On the eve of the 68th anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, historians are still unable to answer the most basic questions: Who decided to drop the bombs, why were they dropped, why were they even built?
On Aug. 6, 1945, the U.S. dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and three days later on Nagasaki. In the decades since, the mysteries about the decisions have only multiplied the more researchers have delved into documents and the memories of those involved...
Weekly Poem: In Hobbs
Monday morning sunrise – Hobbs, New Mexico, October 25, 2010
Already the west winds blow, relentless
Rocking the pickup we huddle inside
The dogs and I
“In Hobbs,” granddaughter Lily shrugs her two-year old
Shoulders and remembers the summer green Ruidoso mountains
I am on the edge of town
Down a gravel road that runs by the ruins of a
World War II Quartermaster’s depot
Abandoned now, only concrete borders and cactus around...
Extreme weather events are the new normal, are we prepared?
I’m happy to believe that the astounding, 89-mph wind that roared through the city last Friday was a once-in-a-lifetime event. National Weather Service meteorologist Clay Anderson told the Journal: “The storm was so anomalous that the chances are that everyone in Albuquerque that’s alive will not see a wind gust like again in their lifetime in Albuquerque associated with thunderstorms.”
Reassured? Don’t be. Notice that Anderson isn’t excluding winds that don’t come with thunderstorms. “I think we need to be prepared for 79-mile-an-hour and 69-mile-an-hour windstorms,” Anderson told me. “They can do damage too"...
Loving our children means educating them
What does it mean to say we love our children, or that we believe they are our future? What does it mean when our elected officials tell us that education is important, or that the US has the best educational system in the world (a lie we hear frequently, from our president down to the gullible man or woman on the street)?
The country that glibly considers itself to be the most advanced, the most developed, the most powerful in the world, spends just 5.5 percent of its GDP educating its children. According to UN 2011 statistics, the United States is first in the world in military spending, designating 4.7 percent of its GDP to its armed forces...
The other welfare: Oil and gas royalties
It may come as a surprise to some that the royalty rate charged to companies extracting oil and gas from federal lands is the same today as it was in the 1920s, when Woodrow Wilson was president.
Oil and gas found on federal lands belong to the taxpayers, who should be fairly compensated for the extraction of public resources. Updating the federal rate to match state rates would ensure a fair return by closing a gap that costs taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars each year...