NO, THIS ISN’T ABOUT SEX. It’s about carbon footprints — yours, mine and that of just about every other living creature that walks, crawls or flies over the face of God’s green Earth. Once the California Legislature passed America’s first full-blown cap-and-trade law, we Californians all became very hot stuff indeed! I know because I […]

AT ITS PEAK, ANCIENT ROME ruled an area roughly equivalent to the total land area of the United States. The borders of the Empire stretched from northern Britain to southern Egypt, from modern-day Morocco east to modern-day Iran. For hundreds of years, Roman civilization was an incredibly resilient thing. Its most serious threat was perhaps […]

THE CITY OF BENICIA ENTERED ITS THIRD YEAR OF REVIEW for Valero’s proposed Crude by Rail Project having spent the bulk of this time working with independent experts to draft a mitigated negative declaration and an Environmental Impact Report (EIR). In February, the city announced plans to edit sections of the draft EIR and recirculate […]

THOMAS HOBBES, THE GREAT 16TH-CENTURY British political philosopher, wrote in “Leviathan” that humans living without legitimate government would eventually dissolve into a “state of nature.” This state of nature was brutish with violent chaos, evil discord and civil war. Legitimate government, Hobbes believed, had a “social contract” to wield power and authority. Hobbes’ vision that […]

I HAVE A CONFESSION TO MAKE. I may have to give up my membership in the Democratic Party to say this, but I will no longer live with the secret shame: I think the pre-Oil Crisis cars made by American car companies up until the late 1970s were just wonderful. I know — they were […]

AFTER A COUPLE OF WEEKS of being obliged to deal with minor — but extremely annoying, persistent and impossible to ignore — physical nuisances, I am put in mind of Zeus, the father of the Gods and the shenanigans of King Sisyphus. You know the punchline in the story of Sisyphus: He’s the guy Zeus […]

GIVEN THE IMMENSE SACRIFICES of our military men and women over the last 14 years, it is customary for civilians, both prominent and ordinary, to say “thank you for your service.” It is fitting and proper that we should do so. The sacrifices they have made, in blood, pain and sanity, ought to entitle them […]

I MENTIONED LAST WEEK THAT I have begun writing a book about my experiences growing up in the Bay Area. Part of the reason for that decision was that I was recently laid off from the tech company I worked for in San Francisco (they were very good to me in terms of severance, so […]

THE MID-1960S WERE HEADY DAYS in the United States. The Civil Rights Act had passed in 1964 and been signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson, and the following year President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. Medicare and Medicaid provided medical care to (respectively) the aged and the indigent. President Johnson’s State of the […]

BACK IN JUNE OF 2013, I was alarmed to discover that Valero had plans to make me and all of Benicia complicit in the massive destruction taking place in the pristine forests of Alberta, Canada. With city Planning Commission approval, Valero planned to purchase crude oil taken from strip mines in Canada that are the […]