Category Archives: Commentary

So Long, Hong Kong

6/19/1997 – 3:57 pm

I’ve been wanting to speak for a few weeks about the upcoming change of government in Hong Kong, but I’ve been struggling with it, unsure of what to say. Like many things that confront us in the late 20th century, there are no clear and easy answers. In less than two weeks, Great Britain will […]

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Theories of Relativity

6/12/1997 – 3:56 pm

Albert Einstein once explained relativity like this: “If you sit with a pretty girl for an hour, you think it’s only a minute. If you sit on a hot stove for a minute, you think it’s an hour. That’s relativity.” I’ve been thinking about relativity lately in connection to British Columbia. Like all Americans thinking […]

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Take Me Out to the Backlash

6/5/1997 – 3:54 pm

Now that it’s June, I want to take a moment to speak about our national pastime. I know many of you think I spoke about it last week, but no. I mean baseball. The lead article in Sunday’s sports section here in Seattle was about the hometown Mariners getting booed – at home. The Seattle […]

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Our Most Idle Pastime

5/29/1997 – 3:53 pm

A few weeks ago, in New Orleans, I heard Paul Hawken speak about consumption of resources. He had a video with him, which showed a map of the world. On the map were white dots, each dot representing one million people. The video timeline began in the year One, A.D. and ran forward. It was […]

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The Numbers Game

5/22/1997 – 3:52 pm

I’m on the road this week, calling in from Houston, Texas. I won’t try to hide my dislike of Houston – it seems to have taken all our bad ideas and run them out to ridiculous extremes. Strip malls and overpriced prefab houses, everything drenched in lawn chemicals. Freeways and tollways, everyone hurtling toward the […]

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Helter Shelter

5/15/1997 – 3:50 pm

The more I read the newspapers, the more I keep coming back to the same question: If agricultural chemicals are so safe, why do members of anti-government militias keep using them to make bombs? If it’s not a report from the McVeigh trial, then it’s the Republic of Texas or another clutch of wackos here […]

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Costs of Free Trade

5/8/1997 – 3:49 pm

If you’re one of those people who follow Congress, you know our elected representatives will soon debate whether we should extend the current most-favored-nation trading status to the People’s Republic of China. Deng Xiaoping is dead but little has changed in China; anyone who has the courage to publicly disagree with the government is dragged […]

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