Blog 57. Energiewende – We should try it

Energiewende is the appellation for Germany’s transition toward a sustainable energy supply.  George Maue, first secretary for energy and climate at the German Embassy in Washington, D.C., described the transition in his editorial published in the Nov-Dec 2013 issue of Solar Today magazine.  Continue reading

Blog 54. Money, McCutcheon, and the Supreme Court

What happened?

On Wednesday, April 2, 2014, the Supreme Court issued its decision on the McCutcheon case, in which Alabama businessman Shaun McCutcheon and the Republican National Committee claimed that the Federal Election Campaign Act restricted his freedom of speech.  In a 5-to-4 decision, the Court agreed that limitation of political spending limits personal speech. Continue reading

Blog 53. Educable or corrigible?

Almost every individual person is educable.  I’ll define educable as being capable of learning from the mistakes of others.  Likewise, almost every individual is corrigible.  Corrigible means capable of learning from one’s own mistakes.  Institutions, like individuals, are educable.  Continue reading

Blog 47. The elephant in the room

Of the economically developed countries of the world, the U.S. has the most dysfunctional society—that is, we have depression despite material goods, materialism without community, more teen and single parents, less trust, more impoverishment, higher infant mortality, more drugs, obesity, school bullying and school shootings. Continue reading