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April 1, 2021

DIY rain gardens are beautiful way to have a more sustainable yard

Rain gardens are a great way to both have an attractive landscape feature and also enhance water quality in the drizzly Pacific Northwest. Forests and soils act as a filter for rainwater, cleaning it and releasing it slowly into creeks, streams, wetlands, lakes and eventually the ocean. Rain that falls on solid surfaces such as sidewalks, roads and roofs, collects the pollutants on these surfaces, bypassing the natural filter process, and carries them directly into waterways such as the Columbia river.

March 25, 2021

Keeping semiconductor edge is paramount

Surprisingly, there is something United States presidents agree on — America’s economic and national security hinge upon maintaining our technology edge in semiconductors.

March 4, 2021

‘Gun nut’ has a warning

When I was a young man growing up in rural Oregon, there was a term for people like me: “gun nut.”

February 25, 2021

We are all in this together, whether we know it or not

Feb. 19 marked the day the United States of America officially rejoined the Paris Climate Agreement and is back in the global fight against climate chaos, which is inevitable if we follow business as usual, now termed RCP (representative concentration pathway) 8.5.

February 18, 2021

East County Fire & Rescue State of the District 2020: A year for the history books

Back in February 2020, we were hearing some rumblings of a disease that had started in China, was coming across Europe and had entered into the United States. We were told that it was highly contagious, but the case numbers were still low. Things changed swiftly when it appeared Seattle was one of the major places where people were being exposed.

February 11, 2021

Super Bowl ads are super expensive, super perplexing

Why would any company spend $5.5 million for a 30-second Super Bowl ad which leaves viewers perplexed as some glitzy and abstract commercials did? After production costs are tacked on, you’d think advertisers would want their messages clearly understood especially in difficult times.

February 4, 2021

Deceptive speech repeated ‘Big Lie’

Much has been made recently of the concept of the “Big Lie,” or repeating a falsehood so many times that it becomes plausible to many. Cognitive psychologists refer to this phenomenon as the “illusory truth effect,” and President Joe Biden weighed in on the phenomenon himself when condemning senators who supported Donald Trump’s assertion that he (Trump) won the 2020 election by a landslide. Biden declared, “You keep repeating the lie … the degree to which it becomes corrosive is in direct proportion to the number of people who say it.”

January 21, 2021

How do we heal now?

President Joe Biden frequently calls for “healing the soul of our country.” Lincoln wrote of “binding up the nation’s wounds.” Has the current exposure of our nation’s brokenness revealed an opportunity to give these words new meaning? Can we stop the bloodshed, diagnose symptoms, treat root causes?