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Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate but unequal.” No, this is not a recent statement. One year after the 1967 riots, then President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed the Kerner Commission, which issued a report including these memorable words. It is sad to note that the statement is as accurate today […]
Roy Cohn was a well-known New York attorney who had the reputation of being ruthless and vicious toward adversaries. Cohn and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump met by chance at a club in 1973 where Trump sought Cohn’s advice on a legal matter. That started a long-lasting association. Cohn counseled Trump in many legal and […]
What many thought would be impossible has already happened. Except the formality of official nomination at the Republican convention in July, for all practical purposes, Donald Trump is the presidential nominee of the Republican Party. It happened despite denouncements from the GOP establishment and the decision by a group of generous benefactors of the party […]
The gun-control debate has mostly revolved around interpretation of the Second Amendment. It would be more productive, instead, to focus on societal ramifications of the prevalence of guns. The Violence Policy Center analyzed the data compiled by the Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics for a five-year period (2007-2011). It revealed that average annual “defensive” gun […]
Undoubtedly, the climate change is a grave phenomenon due to its devastating impact on the planet Earth. Nevertheless, the climate change is only one of a host of symptoms from a much greater problem hardly being discussed—the population explosion. Without it, we would not have a multitude of serious challenges facing humans and all other […]
State Sens. Bill Monning (D-Carmel, whose district includes San Luis Obispo County), and Lois Wolk (D-Solano) introduced Senate Bill 128, the End of Life Option Act, in January 2015. Popularly known as “death with dignity,” the bill sailed through the state Senate. However, the lack of support from a majority of the Assembly Health Committee […]
Editor’s note: Included in this commentary are numbers associated with agricultural water use. That information was sourced from a variety of sources: Worldwatch Institute, The New York Times, the Grace Communications Institute, the Water Foundation Network, National Geographic, Mother Jones, the Pacific Institute, and medium.com. We know that we have a mega drought in California. […]
Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were misguided exercises in haughty presumptions and ineptitude. The result was enormous destruction, fertile environments for terrorism, mass violence, and insurgency. The only beneficiary was the military-industrial complex. Beside deaths and bodily harm, the war caused severe psychological damage to service members in a variety of forms: post-traumatic stress disorder […]
