Columns

Philosopher Bertrand Russell spent much of his long life as a public thinker exploring what we now call cognitive dissonance, the tendency to replace unsavory contradictions in ourselves with more palatable fictions, or outright self-deceptions, or inner lies. As a British Lord who witnessed four ferocious wars ending with Vietnam, Russell was particularly interested in […]

We learned last week that a major player in the now infamous proposed Santolina development on the southwest mesa put up scads of bucks to defame Albuquerque mayoral candidate and State Auditor Tim Keller with a disgusting and utterly bogus TV attack ad accusing him of supporting sex offenders over children. As was noted last […]

This can be an awful dirty little world. But sometimes what I call the Trump Impulse – to smatter everything with caca – doesn’t have its desired effect. It can even backfire on the smatterers. We’ve had some pretty brutal caca moments in New Mexico recently. While the southeast Atlantic Coast and the Caribbean have […]

You probably saw that the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority (ABCWUA) released its new 100-year plan called WATER 2120: Securing Our Water Future.  It came to most of us in the form of a four-page flier full of amorphous high hopes and a few generically good ideas. The flier’s headline reads “Water for the […]

Getting tough on crime. It’s an election promise not unlike a city councilor running on a platform of whipping inflation. Both promises are hollow. One promises to do something that no one person can do. The other implies results that most likely will never materialize. In the 1940s and early 1950s inflation in the United […]