Author Archives: floegel

Learning to Pay Attention

6/19/2008 – 4:17 pm

The walls are closing in or, if not the walls, then the groundwood sheets of newsprint, the pixilated screens of the news that never stops. Maybe this is the way we should feel at the end of eight years of presidency/puberty. It’s bad enough having teenagers in the house, but when the house is the […]

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What They Say About Paybacks

6/12/2008 – 10:21 am

“Well, you know what they say about paybacks….” That’s not the kind of payback I have in mind, the payback that line refers to is more appropriately called revenge and is a dish best served cold. I’ve been thinking about other paybacks this week. Tuesday, Senate Republicans blocked a bill that would have taken away […]

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Ghost Town

6/5/2008 – 10:20 am

There’s a difference, some parapsychologists say, between ghosts and spirits. Ghosts are the incorporeal essence of people who either don’t know they’re dead (which is why they often seem irritable) or who do know they’re dead, but cannot rest (perhaps due to some promise unfulfilled during life or because their bodies have not been properly […]

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The State of the Police State

5/29/2008 – 10:04 am

Tuesday’s New York Times reported an outbreak of corruption among border guards along the U.S.-Mexican border. Although most of the corruption reported involves the smuggling of illegal aliens, similar corruption could introduce drugs, weapons and/or terrorists to the U.S. In short, the corrupt border agents do the opposite of what they were hired to do. […]

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M&M Enterprises

5/22/2008 – 8:35 am

When I was a young man, I read (as every young person should) Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22,” a novel about the absurd bureaucracy of war and the misery it wreaks on those caught within it. The most absurd character in the book is Milo Minderbinder, who – at least initially – runs the mess hall. A […]

Posted in Civil Liberty, Commentary, September 11th | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Things I Never Learned in School

5/15/2008 – 11:41 am

History question: In what year did an American woman first cast a vote for president? The standard answer is 1920, after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution granted suffrage to American women. But it’s wrong. The first presidential ballot was cast by a woman in the election of 1872. The woman, unsurprisingly, […]

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Still Doubting?

5/8/2008 – 10:14 am

One of my more frequent and controversial topics of comment is peak oil. It was nine years ago this week that I first wrote of the phenomenon. For those of you who may have missed all those commentaries, here’s a quick recap. “Peak oil” is the term used to describe the situation that will occur […]

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