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The Energy Elephant

According to a recent article [paywalled; excerpts in link] in the South China Morning Post, China is “at risk of missing its [climate] goals” unless it reins in its ambitious coal-fired power plant building program. This assumes, of course, that China was sincere when it promised to scale back it’s carbon output. Color me dubious. Its pledge to the Paris […]

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American Samizdat

Back in the bad old days of the Soviet Union, there were two principal state-owned publications, Pravda (“truth”) and Izvestia (“news.”) Russians, terminal cynics, would habitually joke “There is no pravda in Izvestia and no izvestia in Pravda.” But they read them anyway, hoping to glean whatever nuggets of truth might be found lurking between the lines. The Soviet Union […]

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A Case of Reckless Endangerment

I was headed southbound, homebound, on Mopac about 10 pm yesterday. Traffic was light, visibility unlimited. Defcon 5. Put it on cruise and let the mind wander as the miles pass. I was a little past the 35th street exit, just south of Camp Mabry, doing a bit under under 70 in the middle lane, slowly passing another car in […]

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Back in the Saddle Again. Sort of.

I am back at the office after nearly a month of recovery, following major abdominal surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. This surgery was necessary to correct damage caused by earlier surgeries, and to quash a stubborn and injurious infection left over from those earlier interventions. Many thanks to Alicia for holding down the fort while I was out […]

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Hard Choices

Had an interesting week, punctuated by an extended back and forth with Dr. Cima at the Mayo Clinic, my surgeon, through the Mayo Patient Portal. I had been unclear about some of the details of the upcoming operation, so I asked some hard questions. The answers were unexpected and not what I wanted to hear. In brief: To eradicate the […]

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Less than Zero

Claudine Gay, President of Harvard, who appeared before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on December 5, drew harsh criticism, mostly from the right, mostly for her wishy-washy response to the question “Do calls for genocide against Jews violate Harvard rules of conduct?” Ultimately, she answered in the affirmative, but only after some serious waffling and squirming, in […]

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Creative License

Not all that many years ago, when I still had energy and drive and my brain had not yet turned to mush, I wrote music on occasion. Not a lot, but enough to have compiled a modest repertoire. To date I have roughly fifty finished pieces; a bunch more are unfinished. A couple count as “professional,” works because I was […]

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Good News, Bad News

A couple of days ago I returned from a scheduled visit to the Mayo Clinic for a consultation. Following the principle of lemons-lemonade, I had elected to drive there, rather than fly, because I greatly enjoy road trips, and because I had never seen that part of the country before from ground level. The journey began rather inauspiciously. Which should […]

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Yet Another Milestone

Today marks the twentieth anniversary of Computer Medic as a brick-and-mortar business. By 2003, I had been working out of my house for several years. But you can only go so far with that arrangement. People don’t take you seriously unless and until you have a physical location. So I was looking to take it up a notch. A lady […]

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A Very Long Year Indeed

Today, February 21, marks the first anniversary of my cancer diagnosis. An eventful year, as you might imagine. It’s all better now, but for a while it very much wasn’t. For some folks, a cancer diagnosis is a bombshell, a bolt from the blue. Mine was more like the confirmation of a nagging suspicion, following years of minor but mostly […]

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Fun Times Ahead

Back in the bad old days of the Cold War, when Russia was the USSR, its government was a black box, and the country was run by old-guard communists not kleptocrats, there was a class of experts, called Kremlinologists, whose job it was to figure out what was really happening behind the scenes, using whatever cryptic clues were visible to […]

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Forward to the Past

Everything has an upside, even the decline that comes with aging. For example, thanks to slipping testosterone levels, I have developed an appreciation for musical theater. Well in fairness, it’s always been there to some degree, but I no longer bother to hide it. Anyway the girlfriend and I watched the recent remake of West Side Story over the long […]

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Too Close for Comfort

Today marks exactly five months since I faced emergency surgery to address a case of sepsis. Eight days earlier, I had undergone a routine procedure to remove a stage 1 cancerous tumor from my lower GI tract. The excision was successful, and all traces of cancer are gone. But the sutures in my colon failed for reasons not entirely clear, […]

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Opportunity Lost

I was on the way home from the girlfriend’s house this morning, a routine trip I have made literally thousands of times. As I was merging from southbound Mopac onto Loop 360, a long sweeping left-hand curve between high roadcuts, a small movement caught my eye. Nearly hidden in the tall grass by the roadside was a young puppy, black […]

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Three Little Words

A few weeks ago, someone said to me those three little words. No, no, not those. The words everyone hopes never to hear: “You have cancer.” The person saying them was my doctor, following up on an abnormal finding on an otherwise routine colonoscopy. In all honesty, I was not surprised. I have had issues, minor and low-grade, in that […]

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