This past Tuesday, 13September2016, I attended an interview at a private forum held by The Daily News (TDN) at their facility in Longview.  The purpose of the forum was to vet Mike Karnofski and me with the ultimate goal of the editorial board deciding on whom to endorse.  Mike Karnofski, Rick Parrish, Marianne Chambers, Hayat Norimine, and I were the only persons in the room.

Rick Parrish managed the meeting well and both...

More than two days of moving our household to Kalama has left me behind on all tasks, including still finishing up with the house we are leaving behind…

TDN reports that most commissioner candidates are in favor of hiring a county administrator.  The arguments in opposition to a county administrator probably indicate a core difference between the two camps.  One camp, apparently the incumbent camp, sees more government as the s...

I spent a couple of hours at the Millennium meeting on Tuesday, May 24.  That was long enough for me to see that the event clearly was only political and not scientific, and that made me sad as I ran through my mind the great harm that populism and populist science can do.  We don’t burn people at the stake, like we did when true scientific inquiry contradicted the “experts” of the day, but we do scorn the “deniers” and do wha...

In the news today are pictures of the serious troubles in the collapsing country of Venezuela.  For most of us, Venezuela will seem to have little to no importance for us, but, in fact, it is a superb teaching moment … if only we will set aside our false notions and look at the data of the last 5,000 years of human history, or, more narrowly the data of a Chavista Venezuela.

Venezuela, on a per capita basis, compares favo...

The last Tuesday morning commissioners meeting once again illustrated just how wrong the process is.

For starters, there were 21 people in the gallery, 7 of whom were private citizens.  The rest were county employees or people with direct financial interests in the outcome of votes.

The idea of the Tuesday meetings is to present to the public issues of substance, presumably for public comment, before a vote is taken.  Presumab...

Tuesday the 19th I attended the weekly commissioner’s meeting.  There were few people there (maybe fewer than 12), and many of those seemed to be part of county government.

On the agenda was the vote to pass/approve the Cowlitz County Strategic Plan 2016-2020. When that came up, I spoke and requested that the commissioners delay passage of the plan until it could be reviewed further.  Specifically, I mentioned that I had not s...