Category Archives: Uncategorized

There’s a folk tale, variously attributed to India, China and Africa, about blind men describing an elephant. One feels the trunk and says the animal is like a snake. Another feels the leg, and describes the elephant as like a tree. And so on. The varying emphases of recent articles about for-profit higher education reminded me of that story. Continue reading →

Quartz.com has an infographic that sums up the Senate immigration bill’s provisions for a “path to citizenship”. It’s pretty depressing. According to the analysis, the path to citizenship for most immigrants currently in the United States without legal status would be a minimum of 13 years. Doesn’t sound too bad? Wait — there’s more. Continue reading →

Think the end of the drought means no water problems? Think again. In lots of places, we are over-using groundwater, and the situation is getting worse by the year, if not by the month. That means more disappearing lakes and shorelines and, potentially, shortages in drinking water ahead, even in water-rich Minnesota. Continue reading →

Dr. Oz leads the pack. He’s a real doctor, with a real Harvard degree, who endorses fake medicine all over the airwaves. A recent article on Slate debunked some of his more fantastic recent claims, presented on his TV shows, and promptly amplified by manufacturers of products like “garcinia extract.” The authors write: Continue reading →

Map from U.S. EPA website

Which one scares you more — a bomber or a fertilizer plant? Continue reading →

My friend wrote: “So is he in any respect the President people supporting him in 2008 and 2012 expected? What did you expect from O’B in 2008 and 2012?”

I am not sure how to answer these questions. Continue reading →

April 20, 2013 – Last night and this morning, everybody’s talking about Miranda rights and why the feds did or didn’t, should or shouldn’t read them to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 19-year-old arrested as one of the Boston Marathon bombers. Some of my Facebook friends, and a lot of others, think that it’s outrageous that the feds are “denying him his Miranda rights.” Not so. Continue reading →

Get suspended in ninth grade, and your chances of dropping out of school double, according to a report issued this week by the UCLA Civil Rights Project. That’s true even though “the vast majority of suspensions are for minor infractions of school rules, such as  disrupting class, tardiness, and dress code violations, rather than for serious violent or criminal behavior.” Forty years ago, suspension rates for African American students were almost double the rates for white students — and the disparity has gotten much worse since then. Continue reading →

“Third major oil spill in a week: Shell pipeline breaks in Texas” trumpeted the headline that several friends posted to my Facebook page. My first reaction was outrage, but my second was skepticism. Who is this source called RT? Why haven’t I heard about a major oil spill from any of the myriad other news organizations that I follow? And which of the figures in the short report was accurate — 700 barrels, 50 barrels, 60 barrels or “no evidence”? Continue reading →

“The land belongs to itself. If anything we belong to it…we borrow our lives from it.” Planting in the Dust

More than 25 years ago, I drove around Minnesota with Laura Clark, as she performed “Planting in the Dust.” The play, written by Nancy Paddock, focused on a young couple at the beginning of their career struggling with an ethical dilemma: whether to adopt agricultural conservation practices that would preserve the land, but at the risk of losing money needed to keep the farm.  Continue reading →