garyconkling

[garyconkling]

Climate Change Impacts Getting Harder to Ignore

Climate Change Deniers Should Visit with Disaster Victims For Americans directly impacted by hurricanes, floods, tornados, wildfires, heat waves and droughts, the handiwork of climate change is getting painfully harder to ignore. According to NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), the number of billion-dollar natural disasters per year in America is rapidly increasing.…

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Arming Classroom Teachers for Student Success

Business-Education Compact Championed Teacher-Led Change Living long enough provides the satisfying opportunity to savor past success. For me, one of the richest memories is my involvement with the Business-Education Compact led by Tamra Busch-Johnsen. Created during an earlier period of intense criticism of public education, the Compact was conceived as an avenue for collaboration to allow…

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Defunding U.S. Research Is Bonafide Bonehead

Newly Unemployed Researchers Recruited to Relocate Overseas In his lifetime, Donald Trump has come up with many bonehead ideas – a for-profit college, a namesake steak and a professional football team. His latest brainchild may be his dumbest yet. The Trump administration has slit the throat of medical research in America by proposing to cut $18 billion from the National Institutes of Health…

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Trump, Lies and Shameless Fabulism

“Truthful Hyperbole – Innocent Exaggeration; Effective Form of Promotion” Many people scratch their heads wondering how Donald Trump casts a spell on so many Americans. One credible explanation is that he is a fabulous fabulist. Political fabulism involves creating alternative realities to promote an agenda or underscore scare tactics. Boundaries between fiction and reality are blurred to…

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Where Did All Those American Jobs Really Go?

Tariffs Won’t Reshore Many U.S. Jobs Because They Never Left The premise for high tariffs embraced by William McKinley and more recently by Donald Trump is to bring back manufacturing jobs that were shipped abroad. Writing for The Washington Post, Associate Professor Gary Winslett argues many of the “lost” jobs lost in the Rust Belt didn’t go overseas. They moved to the Sun Belt. “The Rust…

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Living Life in Europe for Eight Weeks

We Saw Notre Dame, David, Picassos, a Recovered Viking Ship and a Five-Mile-Long Bridge Spending eight weeks in Europe from Florence to Stockholm provided plenty of perspective on European food, culture, street life and how to get eight solid hours of sleep per night. We flew on planes, rode a train, travelled on a 5-mile bridge/tunnel, navigated subways and drove a large SUV on narrow, curvy…

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Our First-Hand Report on the State of Denmark

Danes Respect Social Welfare, Equality Not Guns and Bullies Among President Trump’s first announced goals was annexing/buying/taking over Greenland. After Greenland rejected the idea, Trump dispatched Vice President JD Vance to fly to the island and bad mouth Denmark. His “tour” on a U.S. air base lasted less than two hours. My wife and I had already planned a visit to Denmark on our European…

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U.S. Could Lose a Trade War with China

Trade War Could Be Another Vietnam Quagmire and a Macroeconomic Nightmare Criticism of President Trump’s tariff policies is widespread from major corporations, small businesses, consumer groups and economists. None have more brutal than criticism by Adam S. Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics.  “The Trump administration is embarking on an economic equivalent…

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Torpedo Bat Ushers in Stream of Homers

New Type of Bat Allows Lowly Infielders to Mash Homeruns The Yankee second baseman hits three homers in three games. The shortstop hits two dingers in three games. What’s Major League Baseball come to? Apparently, an innovation called the torpedo bat. Even the most diehard baseball fans never heard of the torpedo bat before the New York Yankees launched nine homeruns in their season opener…

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Canadians Still Unconvinced of Becoming Americans

Benjamin Franklin Failed. Donald Trump Will Likely Fail, Too. Donald Trump isn’t the first American who tried to convince Canada to join the United States. Benjamin Franklin made a similar pitch in 1776. Give Canadians credit for consistency over 250 years in rejecting becoming the 51st state and the 14th colony. There is a historical irony on why Canada rejected American entreaties. In…

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The Nazi ‘Degenerate Art’ Exhibition Still Exists

Hitler’s Effort to Cleanse Museums Popularized Modernist Art The Pablo Picasso Museum in Paris features many of the 2,000 paintings and 11,000 drawings the trailblazing modern artist had retained as a personal collection in his studio when he died in 1973. On our visit, the museum also featured a traveling exhibit featuring the “Degenerate Art” that Hitler censored. Most of the Picasso…

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T. Boone Pickens never got the chance to bring his corporate raiders to Tektronix. I may have had something to do with that.

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Early Trump Actions Lead to Political Land of Oz

Trump Embraces McKinley, Tariffs, Musk and the Russians Life in America in the first weeks of President Trump’s second term has been like being swept up by a perpetual cyclone. Americans braced for a fast start, but no one could have foretold being thrust into the political Land of Oz by the Tariff Man. Agencies have been disbanded, federal workers fired, grant payments suspended, undocumented…

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Christian Nationalists: Maybe Sincere, Definitely Wrong

Self-professed Christian nationalists continue to accumulate power to pursue their goal of making America a Christian state. They may be since, but they are definitely wrong.

Self-professed Christian nationalists continue to accumulate power in the U.S. government with Mike Johnson as House Speaker and Russell Vought in charge of the Office of Management and Budget. Very likely there are more apostles of Christian nationalism in Congress, courts and administrative offices. Their growing presence and influence begs the question of what they stand for and what they…

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Imagining New Directions for Dejected Democrats

Vanity Fair Illustration by Brian Stauffer  Democrats looking to escape the political dumpster could find inspiration and instruction in the commentary section of The Sunday New York Times. Three recent commentaries shine a light on forward-looking policies that Democrats should embrace in their political agenda to regain public trust and relevance while retaining their values. The commentaries…

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Perfectly Designed Creatures Fit for God’s Living Room

In Christopher Marley’s Exquisite Creatures exhibit, art and science become inseparable, as naturally as in nature. If you hurry, you can for see yourself at OMSI where his exhibit remains on display until February 17. It’s worth the price of admission “Michelangelo” of natural art Marley, who grew up in Salem and maintains a studio there, is part artist and part naturalist. His collection of…

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Bird Flu and Men in Masks

In a sign of our time, the theft of 100,000 eggs worth $40,000 from a Pennsylvania truck became headline news. A clever headline writer said the heist is a “whodunit that police haven’t cracked.” While we don’t know who stole the eggs, we definitely know why. The egg has become the symbol of the pain inflicted by Covid-caused inflation that refuses to fade away. That pain played a role in voters…