It’s a curious thing to write about a time that is now 45 years in the past. Autre temps, autre moeurs, as they say, other times, other customs. Looking back, it was an innocent time, the start of the Seventies. And I was young and foolish, as I suspect I’ve amply demonstrated in the first…
I’ve detailed the periphrastic and circuitous path that led me to Makawao in three posts, One, Two, and Three. When I left off, Dave and I had just finished building a boat, I was living in the projection room of an old theater, I was making good money as a cabinetmaker, and I was set…
As promised, my path to the LSD-assisted psychotherapy community was long and circuitous. This is part three. I wrote about the first part here, and the second part here. As that second part ended, in 1971 I was 24 and living on Makena Beach, a nude beach on the island of Maui. Hey, a young…
There is a lovely Latin phrase, “Cui bono?”, that helps to unravel crimes and other situations in our lives. “Cui bono?” means “Who benefits?”. If you are looking at a crime, someone benefits from it. And if you can figure out who that is, it points you in the direction of understanding what’s going on.…
Christmas here, a lovely clear day. Dinner with the inlaws and outlaws. And since I can’t be bothered to write something on such an easygoing holiday as this, I’ll post up another tale from another time. People sometimes ask how I learned so much about coral atolls and islands. It’s because for three years in…
Well, it’s a slow day here at Chez Nous, weekend before Chrismas. Family is here, life is good, so rather than write something new, I thought I’d post a story I wrote a while ago. I got to talking and laughing with my lovely lady today about old Billy Bennett. Billy was a rascal and…
On Twitter, there’s a hashtag called #ExMuslimBecause, where folks talk about why they left Islam. In response to someone saying that they didn’t understand why ex-Muslims had left Islam and that they were wrong for doing so, and it was only bad or deluded Muslims that left Islam, I tweeted the following: Many ex-Muslims left…
Cross-posted from Watts Up With That, where I publish my scientific work. After my recent post on the futility of the US cutting down on CO2 emissions, I got to thinking about what is called the “social cost of carbon”. (In passing, even the name is a lie. It’s actually the supposed cost of carbon DIOXIDE, not…
I had a most curious dream the other night, deeply moving. In the dream, my gorgeous ex-fiancee, my dear lady wife of forty years, had been told that she only had a week to live. So we flew to Fiji, where we lived for years. We rented a room in that most historic of buildings,…
I use Google Maps on my iPhone a lot when I travel. It lets me figure out how far I have to go, and how long it’s going to take me to get there. Not only that, but it can estimate travel times and distances for a variety of modes of transport—car, public transport, taxi,…
Michelle Obama is in the news this week because of the publication of her book, “Becoming”. In the book, she makes the statement that she will “never forgive” Donald Trump because he pushed the “birther conspiracy”. For those wondering, that was the claim that Obama was actually born in Kenya. It’s clear from the context…
Well, it appears that these days Europe is not just welcoming Islam. It is bending over and bowing to Islam … the latest case in point: BERLIN (AP) — The European Court of Human Rights says an Austrian woman’s conviction for calling the prophet of Islam a pedophile didn’t breach her freedom of speech. The…
