Columns

(This week, a poem during a brief column hiatus.)   CHASTITY The clean of heart are not absent of any taint, nor free of rage, nor loosed from wanton teetering into what temptation really is — doing what you know you would not want to do when you know who you really are. The chaste, […]

Charles Darwin read John Milton’s Paradise Lost four or five times as he journeyed around the southern hemisphere on the HMS Beagle gathering insights that would lead to his theory of evolution. It was inspiring for me to read of Darwin’s great adventure again at the start of the mayoral election runoff in Albuquerque between […]

What is the patriarchy? It is, in part, a set of ruling class privileges reserved solely for the male of the species. Women in power roles do not share the inner sense of entitlement that goes with the supreme fiction of the “God-given rights” of males, which are the final extension of the moral abyss […]

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 […]