Current News You Can Use

In our last meeting, a Councilor asked where huge hostels have been done.   This Councilor asked some time ago where any city has restored the rate system that for fifty years kept water and sewer rates throughout the world low and stable.   To some public servants, any new idea that has been tried somewhere else is a good idea whether it works or not, but old tried and true ideas from their own constituents cannot be good. Huge, cheap places to sleep are not new; they are an old business that is occasionally mentioned in song and historical fiction.   They were called flophouses.   They were not comfortable, private, or safe, but their customers were out of the weather for a nickel or a dime. Flophouses disappeared in the first half of the Twentieth Century with the advent of cheap used cars that people could sleep in.   In the eighties, states started mandatory car insurance, which kicked a lot of people out of their cars and into doorways, alleys, and bus...

              Rogue Retreat is not ready to take on an urban campground.   Maybe the City should build a real solution for the homeless that will satisfy the federal judge that has put our city under an injunction to allow sleeping through the night in the parks because the city lacks low-barrier shelters that can handle all comers.   You don’t need a non-profit to do this.             None of the solutions you have considered is adequate to cover the problem, helping too few people and having too high of a barrier for most.   Non-profits are not willing to do anything big, and they want to help only those who pass muster.   We have a homeless population that is around a thousand.   As long as we have too few shelter beds, or are too picky about who gets them, we will have people sleeping in our parks.   Tiny houses and urban campgrounds take...

            Too many people have told us lately that breathing through masks is bad for us, carbon dioxide supposedly being bodily waste.   Our bodies have several organs that expel waste: the urinary system; the lower intestine; and sweat glands.   Lungs do not expel toxic waste, mostly just unused air, carbon dioxide and water.   Carbon dioxide should not be maligned as waste; it plays a vital role in the body’s ability to get oxygen to its tissues.   Hemoglobin grabs and holds oxygen tightly to carry it through the body.   It can’t let go of oxygen until the blood is sufficiently acid with carbon dioxide.   This is how oxygen gets to where it is most needed. Sinuses regulate how much air goes in and out with erectile tissues that inflate and narrow the airways when they detect too much smoke and dust.   They filter out pollutants and germs with mucus that is swept down to the throat to be swallowed.   Th...

  An open letter to Oregon’s Democrat Caucus                Oregon’s 23 Republican state Representatives have signed a statement castigating state Republican Party officials for passing a resolution condemning Congressional Republicans who voted to impeach President Trump and calling the attack on our federal Capitol Buildings a “false flag” operation.   They cannot take Oregon’s Republican Party leadership seriously any longer and should not support this or any political party with their membership.   Democrats should not feel thrilled about this.   There are many Democrats who have their own problems with the choices of their party, and more people than in either party who are so disgusted with the two major parties that they refuse to join either one.   A legislative supermajority invites extreme legislation that gets many people to vote against the party in power. Donald Trump has caused a lot of problems for our...

  An open letter to Oregon’s Republican Caucus             Oregon’s 23 Republican state Representatives have signed a statement castigating state Republican Party officials for passing a resolution condemning Congressional Republicans who voted to impeach President Trump and calling the attack on our federal Capitol Buildings a “false flag” operation.  You cannot take Oregon’s Republican Party leadership seriously any longer and should not support this or any political party with your membership.               It is time for all-non-partisan elections in Oregon.   Write a constitutional amendment to no longer allow party nominations and to take all party labels off all ballots for any office, from President on down.   Allow only the top two candidates from primary elections to move on to the general election.          ...

Once again, someone has asked me what my credentials are to argue about #TraceGasWarming theory. "What kind of advanced science degree do you have?" he asks. This is a question one gets from those who have no science degree and probably took few science classes. They take on faith whatever is said by "scientists," except when scientists run up against one of their prejudices, like GMOs or Roundup. This is the fallacy of arguing from authority, and I run into it also from spokespeople for the theory that trace gases are destroying our climate, when I challenge their science. The last one said that she believes what the climate scientists tell us, a common response. One of the most famous of these non-credentialed activists, Bill McKibben, told me, "Carbon dioxide is the difference between Venus and Mars!" That's a funny claim, considering that they both have around 96-97% CO2 in their atmospheres. Venus just happens to be a lot closer to the sun tha...