The great Mancos boom
Senator emeritus Pete Domenici and I are getting all charged up about oil giant BP and their industry buddies moving in on New Mexico to take part in the Great Mancos Shale Oil and Gas Boom.
I don’t know about you, but personally, I can hardly wait. These oil and gas folks have their own little sense of cosmically uproarious practical humor...
Brutal and subtle violence
Vice President Biden was right when he said that the issue of violence against women transcends politics. It was Biden, himself the master politician, however,who authored the l994 Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), and who spurred its reauthorization by Congress last month...
Small-scale chicken-keeping in New Mexico
I knew I wanted a coop and flock the very first time I read about Albuquerque’s zoning codes for poultry. For most of the city, this policy equates to “don’t have a rooster, thanks”— making residents of central New Mexico luckier than suburban dwellers in many an elsewhere, where residents battle city codes prohibiting even the smallest farm animals...
Weekly Poem: A day in the life of Las Cruces
The heat of Las Cruces begins
somewhere
deep in the bones underground,
out near Mt. Robledo and ends
south of the border in the desierto looking
for a
better life.
Backtracking
The Central New Mexico Community Collage (CNM) administration must have realized that its impulsive and, as its sister publication the Daily Lobo called it, “authoritarian” censorship and closure of its student newspaper, the Chronicle, had caused them a tsunami of negative PR. It backtracked and reversed itself in a day, returning the confiscated “Sex” edition, reopening the paper for business, and waxing on about how student journalists had to be better trained and overseen.
Our national nuclear mausoleum
The National Museum of Nuclear Science & History presides in isolation over a barren field half a dozen blocks south of Eubank Boulevard in Albuquerque. On each side of the gray, utilitarian building a rocket stands guard. Behind the building a score of military aircraft and missiles fill a 30-acre dirt lot. At the entrance to the museum building, the only ornament is a huge model of a beryllium atom...
Guns
Those who deny the inherent danger of firearms are in the same category as those who deny human impact on climate change or the link between tobacco and cancer.
Things That Want to Be Counted
Someone on earth is counting—
night stars,
rooms in a honeycomb,
snow geese descending, wild
lilies, grain spilled from a bushel basket,
bubbles rising up from the Blue Hole.
U.S. drones come home to roost
The pushback against drone strikes on presumed enemies of the United States is to be encouraged considering the inherent legal, moral, and even strategic questions involved in remote-controlled killing within nation states not officially at war with this country.
Kirtland Spill: Get Serious
With the Kirtland Air Force Base jet fuel spill now estimated at 24 million gallons, it’s time for New Mexico’s U.S. Senators to get serious about cleaning it up. Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich need to come to Albuquerque, hold formal hearings with their power of subpoena, and require all associated parties to testify under oath about how such a calamity could happen, and what can be done to make that massive amount of polluted water drinkable again.