Category Archives: Commentary

Missing the Connection

3/29/2012 – 1:26 pm

What if I wasn’t me?  How would the world look?  I guess it would depend on whichever skin other than my own I stand in. I’ll give you an example.  The other day, remembering my youth, I realized synagogues – Temple Beth David and Temple Emanu-El – stood on two of the four corners of […]

By floegel | Also posted in Civil Liberty | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Still the Story of America

3/22/2012 – 12:49 pm

The story of America is the story of race.  It has been since a couple Germans grafted the name of an Italian navigator onto the continents in the middle of the last millenium.  That it is still the story of America (especially the United States of) is evidenced by two stories in the news this […]

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How to Lose Five Dollars

3/15/2012 – 2:02 pm

Beware the Ides of March.  I just thought I’d say that.  How often do a) the Ides of March fall on a Thursday, the day I usually post here and b) I actually remember it’s the Ides of March? Less than a week until the end of winter and it’s warm and sunny, supposed to […]

By floegel | Also posted in Economy | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

A Quorum of Crows

3/8/2012 – 3:13 pm

The collective noun “school of fish” comes from a corruption of the term “shoal of fish,” which seems like a fairly accurate means of quantifying fish in the days before GPS. This led to an unfortunate anthropomorphic trend of naming aggregations of animals based on some perceived quality – a “pride of lions, a gaggle […]

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In Like a Lion?

3/1/2012 – 3:47 pm

February and March are (traditionally) the heaviest snow months in Vermont, although not the February that ended yesterday, extra day notwithstanding.  It did snow last Friday.  We were all duly warned about a winter storm and got maybe an inch and a half.  The snow did, however – more or less – stay on the […]

By floegel | Also posted in Global Warming | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Poisoning Continues, Now with Government Approval

2/23/2012 – 4:37 pm

Twenty years ago, as a young(er) toxics campaigner, I and many others worked to limit the effects of the industrial uses of chlorine.  Short version: when we put chlorine in the front end, we get a host of pollutants out the back end that persist in the environment and cause cancer, birth defects and reproductive […]

By floegel | Also posted in Toxics | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

The Stalking Horse

2/16/2012 – 5:17 pm

A stalking horse, for hunters, is something of a moving blind.  The idea is that the prey – often birds – would be startled by the appearance of a human, but not a horse or cow, so the hunter uses the stalking horse (“stalking cow” doesn’t have the same ring) to approach unseen, until the […]

By floegel | Also posted in Civil Liberty, Economy, Global Warming | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)