Thx Mike. I am moving towards retirement on May 1. Will be relieved of my docket of abuse dependency and neglect cases. I will be happy to sleep without waking up numerous times wondering if I made the right call. Will be celebrating my youngest son's graduation and wedding to a wonderful woman as they move on to their residencies.
While I had never appreciated your wry dismissive, condecending, and unbridled sarcastic comments over the decades I do enjoy your writing and your choice of posted articles. There are those you will never convert! A fellow OSU journalism grad who was a North High classmate of your father also had enjoyed your writing. She found your article in the Lantern on the health center writer to be worthy of inclusion in the Sundial.
My recent and purposefully rare comment on this forum was motivated by our dextera manu classmates who have far more concern for petroleum supplies that are allegefly being stymied by mr. biden regardless of the fact we don't have - God help us- socialized petroleum and hundreds of permits for drilling not being used by private enterprise. To the good Jacksonian Dr. Hamilton, do you really think the oil industry would piss away million on oil drilling permits if they didn't thoroughly assess the area for the extent of the oil reserves? Really?
To those schocked by overtures to Maduro you have a blind ignorance to the realities of diplomacy. You talk with anyone who can help whether it be for oil or or "falling in love" with a top three world despot.
To Mr South Carolina my Huey piloting neighbor moved to the Seattle area to terrorize his grandchildren and sent his regards. While you both are aware of my differing views of the propriety of our involvement in the war I do appreciate what you endured. Needless to say I refrain from bloviating on my anti-war position particularly to my son's future father in law who spent three years in a vietnamese "reeducation camp". So for now I will return to being a web site gawker. I have got to get ready to fill in my NCAA bracket sheet. After watching the Zips beat the Golden Flashes in Cleveland last night it was refreshing to know that since I attended both I couldnt lose. Oh yeah Go Bucks beat Denver! So there Dave in your face!!
I just want to forward Two separate articles about the gas/oil. First though I want to ask a question. Was the Keystone Pipeline that was bringing Coal Tar Sands Oil from Canada, through Sacered Native American lands, going to refineries for use in the United States, or was it intented for shipment, by the Canadians, for overseas sales?
Dan that is a fabulous riff. I bow down to you and give you the props you deserve and I am humbled, I say humbled and cast down forever as an underachieving pissant amateur in the snarkopolis department compared to the likes of you.
And thanks, Joe, for the articles on the realities on oil -- both ethical and economic.
Sorry to hear the news about Kathy – hope she can recover.
And, Joe, thanks for the thoughtful and nuanced Barron’s article on oil – the perfect antidote for the woefully simplistic and politicized tale the right is telling.
I have read several other articles that agree with one of the points in the Barron’s article - U.S. oil companies are not exactly eager to expand production because they and their investors actually like the high prices and they are emphasizing quality of production over quantity. “Quality” means they only want to exploit the richest and most promising assets which offer lower cost of production and higher profits.
“When we’re having this discussion, it’s important to dispel some of those who say, well it’s the government spending. No, it isn’t. The government spending is doing the exact reverse, reducing the national debt. It is not inflationary.” Nancy Pelosi 3/12/22
If I ran my family's household budget on this belief, I would eventually lose everything I once valued. Nancy Pelosi and her cohorts are doing this to an entire nation.
"Prior to capitalism, the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering and enslaving their fellow man. Capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving your fellow man." Walter E. Williams
Thanks, MM, for the address request. Kathy's daughter has shared that Kathy has been suffering from dementia for the last year or two. The family has made the decision to put her in a hospice/palliative care.
Kathy Wintering Nagy
28W710 Indian Knoll Road
West Chicago IL 60185
Do you all recall that very first day at Watterson? We all stood outside the front doors in our grade school buddy groups and glanced back and forth at the other people. Most of the girls had a "Flip" hairdo. Some huge ones in the crowd. But when I looked over and saw Kathy Wintering for the first time, I thought she had the most attractive face in the crowd and the perfect "Flip".
I am so sorry to hear what has happened to poor Kathy. I can't say I had any connection with her back in our high school days, but thanks to our 50th reunion and this forum, I did get to know her a little bit during this time. She was very supportive of my writing attempts, especially ones with historical settings and characters, and would give me much valued feedback. She told me that she would have liked to have been a history teacher, but the market was saturated at the time when she was starting out, so she opted for teaching second grade instead, which, as it turned out, was a good choice. She loved teaching kids that age. I guess it has been a few years since we last communicated. I had no idea that she was struggling with the onset of dementia. What a shame.
I sure hope Kathy's injuries from her brief encounter with gravity are minor. Here's to a speedy recovery from such misfortune. Hopefully no ladders were used in the mishap.
I don't think we will go kablooie, perhaps because I am being logical or perhaps because I just can't conjur the cajones to even imagine that happening.
One outcome that is more likely is that Russia will annex all or part of the Ukraine at the cost of being isolated from most of the rest of the world for decades and diminishing its economic and political international standing and influence.
That will profoundly change the global balance.
Along those lines, how China handles this whole thing will be the determining factor. As all the pundits are noting, they could emerge as the bully on the block in the aftermath of this dust-up.
And of course our identity as the leader of the free world and poster child of democracy, which has already been jeopardized by the election scandal and our internal divisiveness, will either be diminished or re-established.
To put priorities in order: I just hope the Buckeyes beat that team up north next year.
Ok, ‘tis the eve of the holiest day and I have to post a song by Deanta, one of my favorite Irish groups. Carol and I saw this group perform in the ballroom of a small hotel in Ballymena in Northern Ireland in the mid-90’s when Protestant-Catholic tensions were just starting to settle down but things were still pretty tense. And Ballymena was known as a town where there was a lot of violence during “marching season” in the summer - when Protestant groups would parade (especially through Catholic neighborhoods) to celebrate important victories in the long history of Protestant England coming to dominate all of Britain (including Wales and Scotland) and Ireland.
Fortunately, we were not in Ballymena during marching season and everyone was on their best behavior and the songs performed were the usual traditional stuff with non-controversial subjects. But the band members were Catholic and although they didn’t dare sing about the current “Troubles” they sang one of their own songs, “Culloden’s Harvest”, about the battle of Culloden in Scotland in 1745 in which a much larger Protestant army finally routed the ragtag Catholic forces that were seeking to install Edward Stuart (a Catholic) as the English king. It was the last serious battle fought on English soil and assured Protestant domination of all of Britain.
The song is sneaky - although the band could hardly address the current situation in Northern Ireland (at the time there was plenty of violence to go around on both sides but Catholics were still second class citizens), but they got away with singing about a tragedy 250 years earlier - the "harvest" of Culloden, which was several thousand dead Catholic soldiers.
As you can see, the band is (almost) all women. The lead singer’s name was Mary Dillon and I still remember that she prefaced her introduction of the sole male band member saying “Blessed art thou among women…”
If you like Deanta, two of their albums are on iTunes, and both albums stream for free with Amazon Prime.
To commemorate the day itself, I offer Mary Black’s “Song for Ireland”. She performs almost exclusively songs by contemporary Irish songwriters and is, with the possible exception of U2’s Bono, Ireland’s most famous singer over the past 40-50 years. On my first trip to Ireland (a business trip in 1993) when I turned my rental car radio on, the first song I heard was one of hers.
The video has some nice shots of Ireland’s spectacular west coast and the song itself is self-explanatory.
