The Book of the Shadows

I was on my lunch break when I found out about the downing of Malaysia flight MH-17 over Ukraine last week. I and one of my co-workers had mistakenly thought at first they were reporting news about MH-370, the flight that disappeared several months ago. Hearing that the plane was shot down, my co-worker asked the question, "why do humans kill other humans".

Yesterday was the big kickoff for this year's Electronics Entertainment Expo, the video-game-palooza netter known as E3. And by "big kickoff" I really mean started... just started.

Baseball may be going through an epidemic right now. Does the trouble in America's pastime tell us anything about our nation as a whole?

One of the most bandied about terms you'll hear, particularly in politics, is "accountability". As such, I pose a simple pair of questions; what is accountability, and do we need to rethink what we consider accountability to be?

"Perhaps we just shouldn't be killing people". A guest on a news program said that. Are they right?

Slowly, the most powerful and important democracy in history is turning from the power and influence of the people in general to the power and influence of a select few – from a real democracy into an oligarchy.

A new kind of infrastructure project - Should the government step up and get to work on the information super-highway?

The day is fast approaching where we as a human species will make ourselves obsolete. How will we function in that new epoch?

Most anime don't start as anime. Most anime start as manga, or games, or novels. Should that balance be changed around? Or is it what it is?

The State of the Union is a Constitutional mandated report card the Executive Branch must deliver to the Legislative Branch once every year. It is an update of what accomplishments and failures the nations has had, where the nation needs to go, what it needs to focus on. Often times it is also a “to do” list from the Executive Branch for legislation it wants the Congress to complete in the next year and lays out not just the president’s agenda, but a roadmap of potential compromise and contention.

I came across an interesting story on Monday and it just struck me as a little odd. It just made me wonder how far we will allow technology to go before we decide its influence on our lives is too much.

The test scores are out and guess what... the U.S isn't doing all that hot. The question is, should we start to panic, or is it time to take a step back and look again at what's going on.

I’m back, and today I’ll be divining into the issue of personal responsibility. As you might imagine, I will frame this discussion against the backdrop of the holiday season.

Yesterday I started this discussion by pointing out that there are about two segments of media - the mainstream and the citizen. The extent to which we rely on one over the other has changed with time, eroding the perceived dominance of the mainstream across the last century plus. However, times have changed, though not completely in a good way.

I'm going to talk about the media today. I have talked about the media a little in the past, but to be clear I will be speaking about the "mainstream" media.

Sorry I missed my post on Friday, family stuff got in the way, but as you can see, I’m back and everything’s alright. So, back to the matter I left off with; my final estimation of the future of energy in the United States and around the world.

Continuing the discussion from yesterday, we’ve established the fact that nuclear energy is powerful. However, the current tech for it is highly controversial, and not terribly clean. And the potential for the “better” nuclear technology is still a matter of practical engineering challenge.

The most salient issue of our future as it relates to technology has to be the creation, collection, storage, transmission, and use of energy. It informs, if not directs, everything we would hope to do in the future, the same as it has in our past. So is there any revolution out there?

This is a very simple, very direct topic. Doesn’t take much to get through this topic, and I honestly think most imagination on the subject is overblown. How will we fight aliens if they come to destroy us?

I always try to provide useful information and perspective to the various topics which I have some knowledge and interest in. I don't always have the time to cover everything. And sometimes there are more developments on stuff I've talked about already. Today I'll hit up some of those topics.