As we round the corner toward the Christmas holiday, I find myself revisiting an old conundrum presented by our seasonal symbols. I’m thinking specifically of the gift-giving bearded guy and the equally benevolent bunny. My children are grown now, but at one time, I seriously entertained the idea of not promoting those legends in my household. ...

In 1585, English settlers attempted to establish a colony on Roanoke Island in what is now North Carolina. The colony failed, but a second attempt was undertaken in 1587. Poorly supplied and troubled by ill relations with the native populations, the colony was found abandoned in 1590. ...

Elections and occasional irregularity The saga continues. Left-leaning media are fond of saying that the administration’s claims of election irregularities are unfounded, but there is plenty of smoke. The several allegations being thrown at the current projection of a Biden/Harris victory range from ridiculous to the sublime, and a few have already been struck down by the courts. ...

I understand that the recent appointment of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett is a controversial one, from both an ideological standpoint, as well as a procedural issue. The role of Supreme Court Justices, in my opinion, is widely misunderstood and unappreciated. ...

As we approach what will surely be a contentious election, and one that won’t quickly be decided, I am entertained by the stories of elections past that tested the limits of our constitution. The presidential election of 2000 between George W. Bush (AKA “43”) and Al Gore is fresh in the minds of most of us and a bureaucratic mess that involved recounts, hanging chads, armies of attorneys, and no small amount of partisan bickering. ...

In the midst of all the COVID-19 madness and the several false narratives circulating around the upcoming election, I have been reading that aircraft from the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (AKA China) have been making increasingly provocative incursions into Taiwan’s airspace. ...

Did everyone have a chance to watch the televised decline of western civilization on Tuesday night? If you aren’t one of the estimated 72 million people who watched the presidential debate, I’m sure you have heard about it. President Trump, former Vice President Biden, and Fox News anchor Chris Wallace put on a show that reminded me of one that I would watch on Saturday mornings as a child. I’m not entirely sure which ones would play the part of Larry or Curly, but Trump was definitely Moe...

I am inspired by Dick Trail’s tribute to Bill Elliot on his retirement. That guy deserves gallons of ink, as do all of our city and county employees. Bill, in particular, saved my bacon once when my son and I were experimenting with Estes rocket designs. We became a bit too creative and blackened one of the lower baseball fields. Were it not for Bill and his crew from the rural fire department, it could have spread further south...

Following politics as closely as I do is about as sure prescription for depression and anxiety as one might find. As a general rule, I don’t recommend it. For at least once, and for this week alone, we may be able to say that politics isn’t always a drag. The United States played a pivotal role in the official recognition of Israel by the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain...

Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “I would rather sit in a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion.” Along with the typical accouterments of my fourth-grade classroom; a US flag, an alphabet posted above the blackboard (upper and lower case, in cursive), and a rotary pencil sharpener mounted to the wall, my matronly, gray bunned and skirted stereotypical school-marm teacher posted a few famous quotes above the green letters of the alphabet. ...

Having watched both the GOP and DNC primaries in the past two weeks, to the extent that I could stomach them, I walked away with a firm grip on what one party is against (or more appropriately, who one party is against), but no clear idea of what either party was for. The DNC intensely dislikes Donald Trump. That memo has been received loud and clear, and they have no particular affection for middle-America either...

Occasionally, the Sunday-morning talking heads wax eloquent about our divisive times and compare ours to the period leading up to the civil war. I always find that to be a bit of a stretch, but comparisons with 1968 are hard to avoid. We have civil unrest in our cities where, alongside a handful of peaceful protesters, lawless mobs burn, vandalize and loot. ...

According to our National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Sunrise/Sunset calculator, the “apparent” sunrise and sunset at the flagpole on Norris Avenue (40°12’10.13”N, 100°37’32.79”W) will be 7 a.m. and 8:30 p.m. respectively on Friday, August 21. ...

This week, we finally received a break from the 24-hour coverage of the Juice-Boxer Rebellion in Portland with the announcement of Kamala Harris as the Democratic Vice Presidential candidate. I called that one several months ago, but I won’t take too deep a bow. It was simple electoral math in a party that places a high value on identity politics. Besides, predictions can be a cruel mistress. Think back to Y2K, or look around for flying cars...

In my lifetime, I don’t recall vice presidential picks being such a big deal since the Nixon administration. That’s reaching back a bit. For those of you too young to remember, Spiro Agnew was Nixon’s vice president and resigned, just as Nixon was looking down the barrel of the Watergate scandal...

It’s been quite a week. Between the Barr hearing, Dr. Stella, and mystery seeds from China, well, there’s never a dull moment. The much-publicized and broadcast, four-hour hearing of Attorney General Bill Barr looked more like a Stalinist kangaroo court than what should be a product of our system of government, but those are the times we live in. ...

I had a conversation with a family member this week that was thought-provoking. We were talking about new masking requirements in retail spaces and I was bemoaning the degree to which the issue has become politicized. I’m sincerely troubled by that. As much as I can be a political animal, some things should be off-limits to political spin, but that’s not the world we live in...

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. We live in difficult times. By the time you read this, it will be a few days old, but today I am thinking about Bastille Day. The holiday is on July 14, which has great meaning to me both on a historic plane, and as a personal memory. I’ll start with the important stuff...

As I watch the recent street violence unfold and listen to the partisan punditry surrounding it I find myself amazed by the amount of time and energy we spend agonizing over symbolism. I’m not referring to the literary device or the 19th Century European artistic movement, but the endless wave of nationalistic symbols being violently attacked and passionately defended in our nightly news...

Yankee Doodle went to town, Riding on a pony, Stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni. It was a pejorative song about unsophisticated, provincial Americans sung by pre-revolutionary British. You know how we reacted to it? We adopted it as our own. We owned it. We sang it back to them. How American is that?...

As I piece together dates and places from the past, my best guess is that it was the Christmas of 1969 when I was given my first shortwave radio. We were at Sheppard Air Force Base that year, and Santa brought me an ICP Nine Band-Portable that he probably picked up at the on-base Air Force Post Exchange. Santa didn’t like to pay sales tax...

Reparations and white privilege As I watch the current racial tensions play out and reminders of the Confederacy being toppled, my mind goes back to the reparations issue that was tossed around lightheartedly during the Democratic primary. I find it odd that it has been seriously considered this many generations after the fact, but self-interest being what it is, it grabbed the attention of a good many voters...

There are a series of memes circulating on social media, mostly by my conservative friends that say, “We the people say NO to vote-by-mail. This should be shared enough that it goes viral.” Naturally, there are many variations to the message, but they all seem to offer very little detail and insist that the declaration be shared...

Back in 1971, the United States Navy paid a Stanford University professor, Dr. Phillip Zimbardo, a substantial sum of money to research the social dynamics between guards and prisoners of the Navy and Marines (AKA the brig). You have probably heard of it. Zimbardo’s research has been the subject of several books, a movie, numerous documentaries, and a cautionary tale recounted in a broad variety of academic works...

Look out your window. It looks peaceful, doesn’t it? It’s spring. At my house, we have a pair of baby rabbits in our yard, and birds chirping. The squirrels are running around as busy as always, and the grass is green. Kids are playing and shouting in the block behind us, and my dog, wanting to play along, echoes their shrieks with a few barks of her own. Seems nice, doesn’t it? Here’s what’s really going on...

Somewhere in my formal education, I’m not sure exactly when or where, I was exposed to what is perhaps the most poorly named, yet critical behavioral concept. It’s called “Fundamental Attribution Error.” With a handle like that, it could be anything, right?...

I went to church on Sunday, sort of. I have admitted within these pages that I’m not the most religious guy you’ll ever meet, but I had a chance to sit in on a service, my first in two about two years, under circumstances that would not have taken place, but for the COVID-19 Virus...

I can’t pretend to know more about food supply issues than the readers of this publication. I have lived in McCook for more than 25 years now, have had a modicum of contact with the ag sector. I have absorbed what I can, but I am still a city guy. I’ll leave production issues to the big boys...

Well, we didn’t have a great week, did we? When the list of states most likely to qualify for the administration’s three-tier recovery plan was released, there was a notably absent hole in the middle of the map. It was us. Nebraska. Like all densely populated areas, our friends in Lincoln and Omaha are predictably having problems, but our nearer neighbors in Grand Island are having even more difficulties...

As we live through these historic times, I think of the many seminal moments in US History that, some of us, depending on our age might remember. We always hear people say that they remember where they were when they first heard about Pearl Harbor, or when JFK was killed, or on September 11, 2001. The inescapable humor will be that when asked where we were during COVID-19, many of us will predictably answer, “stuck at home.”...

Well, this is the third week in a row that I have tried to write about something other than COVID-19. We could all use a break from it, but what else defines our times and occupies our discourse as much as a global Pandemic? It’s hard to top. I am afraid that the toughest part of this journey is still ahead of us. ...

Well, forgive me for whistling past the graveyard. We all have our way of dealing with stress, and mine is to make fun of what scares me. So naturally, I’m finding no shortage of dark humor in Washington DC’s most recent assessment of our battle against the coronavirus...

So, how are we holding up? Are you dug in? Working out of the house? Trying to be productive while watching the kids? Do you provide an essential service and have to brave the threat of illness head-on? Or are you in a high-risk group and even more wary of exposure than the rest of us?...

This week, my wife mentioned that a coworker of hers uses the word “normalcy” when speculating about the prospect of someday ending our current closure of schools, restaurants, churches and other social gatherings. Although the grammatical construction is a bit suspect, the word couldn’t possibly be more appropriate for our times...

I was reminded this week of an old saying that is known alternately as the “Chinese Curse” or sometimes, the “Chamberlain Curse.” As the Chinese Curse, it is believed to be an English translation of an expression found in Chinese literature dating back to the 17th century. ...

Well, folks, we have had another busy week. Consequently, there are a few housekeeping items to be addressed. I should begin with an apology to my friends in the aviation community. As you are aware, the 737 Max is Boeing’s problematic “stretch” airliner. The term, “Supermax,” on the other hand, is a slang term for a super-maximum security prison. The 737 Supermax that I so cleverly referenced in last week’s article is, as they say, “not a thing.”...

Well folks, it’s been quite a week. The contradictions and surprises just keep coming. Last week ended with Joe Biden on the ropes and predictions that Bernie Sanders would sweep Super Tuesday. That didn’t happen. As expected, Biden had a good showing in South Carolina, but he got to work cutting deals with Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar to drop out and endorse him. ...

In the German language, there is a wonderful word that, until recently, I thought had no equivalent in English. “Schadenfreude” (shaa·duhn·froy·duh) is described in the Oxford dictionary as “pleasure derived by someone from another person’s misfortune.” As it turns out, we do have an English equivalent in “epicaricacy,” but that’s just not as catchy. ...

This week, the Boy Scouts of America filed a Chapter 11 petition in the Delaware bankruptcy court under the saddest of circumstances. The bankruptcy applies to the national organization and not to local councils, and although official statements from the organization insist that they intend to continue operations, national recruitment numbers have been down...

I haven’t been feeling well this week, so I’ll keep this one short. This article will come out on Valentine’s day, and I want to seize the opportunity to say a few things that need to be said. The holiday, in theory, is named for a third-century Roman priest who distinguished himself by ministering to persecuted Christians. He is remembered for paying a significant price for that political mischoice, was sainted, and a feast day was established in his name...

Hey folks. It’s been a busy week. We had the Superbowl on Sunday, the Iowa Primary on Monday, the State of the Union on Tuesday and the impeachment vote on Wednesday. It’s really too much material to work with, so instead, I would like to address something that our friend Dick Trail addressed in these pages on Tuesday...

There has been much discussion in the business press lately about “Fintech,” or the rapidly emerging financial technology sector. Fintech describes a broad, loosely defined spectrum of financial services, all of which are offered over the Internet. Basic banking services like loans, credit, and debit card accounts and peer-to-peer point-of-sale payment processing are offered along with traditional ancillaries like insurance products, brokerage accounts, and advisors. ...

I have an awkward relationship with social media. On one hand, it helps me stay in contact with friends and family from different parts of the world, and from other times of my life. At the same time, I am convinced that social media doesn’t always bring out the best of us. ...

Vaping: On December 20 of last year, the minimum legal age to buy and use tobacco products, by smoking, chewing or using one the newer e-cigarette vapor products, was raised from 18 to 21 by the US Congress and signed into law. The popular reaction on social media was generally negative. ...

Senator Arthur Vandenberg, who was the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the Truman administration once famously said that “Politics stops at the water’s edge.” If recent events are any indication, those words deserve to be inscribed on the side of a mountain, right next to bigfoot and the Easter Bunny...

As much as we might expect a lull in the news cycle during the holidays, it’s been a tough week. An incursion into our embassy in Iraq, a rash of antisemitic attacks in New York and a thwarted mass shooting in Texas have still failed to drown out continued bickering in the impeachment saga. The light spot in the news has been the unexplained drone show taking place in the midwest, but now that’s beginning to upset people too...

So, everyone reading this article must fit into one of two options: Either you accept the doomsday predictions of Greta Thunberg and Al Gore, or you are a “climate denier.” Those are your choices. I’ll wait…. Well, I don’t care for those options. First, I believe that the climate is changing. The NOAA Global Climate Report for 2019 tells us that the ten warmest years on record have taken place since `1998, and thus far this century, our average surface temperatures are up 1.7 degrees from that of the 20th century. As government bureaucracies go, I like NOAA. I trust them, so yes, I agree that as a general rule, the climate is warming. I think that the second criterion for being a “denier” is a belief that human activity can’t affect climate. I’m no climatologist, but I have spent hot summer nights in both the city and in the country, and I know that concrete and asphalt retain heat, which makes the cities a few degrees warmer. If we humans are good at anything, it’s pouring concrete, so based on that alone I would conclude that we have made at least some impact on climate. Please scratch me off on your denier list. Does that make me a Green New Deal guy? Let’s hope not. I prefer “Open Minded Skeptic.” When Al Gore released his slideshow movie back in 2006, I watched it as any dutiful citizen should, and I took notice of the slide which graphed evidence of carbon dioxide (CO2 ) in the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial revolution against rising temperatures. I’m an old econ student and got it immediately. Carbon went up the graph at a 45-degree angle, and so did the temperature. It doesn’t get more clear cut than that, right? Anyone who managed to sleep through sixth-grade science class and escape with a passing grade knows that correlation is not cause. Suntan lotion sales peak in the months of June, July and August. So do shark attacks. Think about it. As an old ham radio guy, I am also aware that the sun works on 11-year cycles of peaks and valleys, and throws fits from time to time. Mr. Gore’s graph didn't mention the sun. Nor did it consider seismic activity (remember that hot ball of molten metal that we are all standing on?). The graph didn’t complicate things. It was just two jagged lines side by side. Not too hard for us to figure out. Mr. Gore’s graph left out a few other things that I think I understand, like the jet stream, ocean currents and moving fault lines He also left out some stuff that I wouldn’t begin to understand. Are you aware that Wichita Eisenhower airport changed its runway designation because of a shift in magnetic north? You are probably aware that the moon’s gravity influences tides, but did you know that it is moving 3.78 cm away from us every year? I was a kid in the 1970s. I can remember when folks used to toss fast food trash out of moving cars without much thought. Then we had this great, iconic television commercial featuring a native American with a teardrop leaking down his cheek. The reference was to fast food trash, but the real victim was cigarette butts. Until then, cigarette butts were recognized as nature’s bounty; an excusable but a necessary evil. Not trash, just something we step over without notice (sort of like dryer sheets in my house). For the environmentalist movement overall, I would say this: There is a famous line in the movie “Jerry Maguire” where Rene Zellwigger looks at Tom Cruise and says, “You had me at Hello.” Well folks, you had me at clean water and clean air. You didn’t need to invent a crisis to get me on your side.. I don’t need a contrived emergency to motivate me. Let’s put in INCENTIVES to further develop renewable energies to a point where they are economically competitive without penalizing currently successful business models. I have never played with wind power. I helped my son with a science fair project where we split water into hydrogen on a small scale. That was cool, but I have had the privilege of sitting at a campsite in a national park and listening to the radio on solar power. That’s cool. That’s magic. I did that 30 years ago. We aren’t ready to scale renewable fuels up yet. We just aren’t there yet, but someday we will be. Until then, I think it’s in our best interest to offer tax advantages to those who wish to research and develop renewable fuels, but penalizing existing successful and necessary business models is ridiculous. Sorry, Al and Greta. I’m no climatologist, but I damned well know a political agenda when I see one. I care about the environment, but I’m not going to allow you to define what that means to me

This week, the U.S. House and Senate passed a bipartisan bill and sent it to the President for signature. I could stop right there and we would have the proverbial “man bites dog” story, but I’ll continue. The “2020 National Defense Authorization Act” covers appropriations you might expect, like ships and aircraft, construction costs, operating expenses, military personnel, and healthcare. ...

I once made the mistake of referring to my political views in a social media post as being “centrist.” That was a mistake I won’t make again. Centrist is, I now know, not a nice word. According to my peers, a centrist is a wishy-washy invertebrate; an indecisive person without purpose; a weak cup of coffee who wishes to please everyone. In short, centrists are not well regarded...

As Christmas nears, and we prepare for the flurry of activity that surrounds it, a couple of random, holiday thoughts come to mind. Gift giving is both a joy and a burden. In some cases, budgetary restraints prevent us from giving as much as we would like and at other times, we find that the loved ones we value the most want for nothing. Sometimes, the selection of an appropriate gift at any price can present a challenge...

Santa Clarita, Duncan, Oklahoma, Fresno…. With several dead, and hurting, law enforcement officials are still in the process of unfolding the why and the how. So far, speculation supports crimes of passion, possible gang activity and the angst of a grieving teenager. ...