When I was in fourth grade at the Babcock Elementary school in Silver Creek, I can remember our teacher telling us we had a new gym class instructor. Apparently he was fresh out of college (22 years old) and everyone was very excited to meet him! As it turned out, Mr. Curt Raymond would ...
Ebola in Africa. Hantavirus on a cruise ship. A measles outbreak kills 560 children in Bangladesh, sickens 60,000. Major diseases are making the news. We ask ourselves, is this the next big one? Maybe. We are certainly doing everything possible to make ourselves vulnerable. President Donald Trump pulled us out of the World Health Organization.They are the source of the most valuable information. Who is spreading what and how? He also canceled billions of dollars in research grants to universities. Anything we might have been ahead of we are behind now. Hundreds of scientists have ...
Let’s pick up where we left off 12 weeks ago. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was before the U.S. Supreme Court again, this time in Louisiana v. Callais. * * * Writing for the six-justice majority, Justice Samuel Alito ...
At a time when our need for electricity is growing rapidly, why are we creating a system based on intermittent wind and solar generated power? In 2025 U.S. spending on renewable energy generation primarily wind and solar was $108.7 billion. Unfortunately in the same period the U.S. spent a paltry $2.64 billion on power generation by nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion is the same process that powers the sun and all other stars. It is a process where two light hydrogen atoms under extreme temperatures and pressure combine to form a single helium atom releasing massive amounts of ...
Editor’s note: Marcy O’Brien is in New England with family graduation festivities. Parts of this column have appeared previously. Memorial Day was a particularly important day of remembrance for my mother. Every year, she made sure we wore commemorative red poppies to honor her youngest brother, the family hero. Kenneth Arthur MacMillan was the youngest of four children. When their mother died, my mother, Alberta, was 6 and the siblings were 4, 2 and baby Kenny was months old. He never knew his mother who spent the last months of her life in a tuberculosis sanitorium. Alberta ...
A threat lurks in our world. It is bigger than our culture. It is bigger than our economy, but will include them both. From the beginning, humans have used technology to replace us: human labor cut short by a machine that did the job. It was convenient. It was economical. By this means, humans created civilization, but we have never been in control of this process, and it was an illusion that humans ever were. Technology is a thing that happens to us. The machine will use us up, and we will expend bodies and resources. So long as the progress continues, no cost will appear too high. ...
