The city is falling apart all at once, 60 years of infrastructure neglect coming to crisis, while its debt capacity is exhausted. City officials were real with legislators and they were real back.
Continuing my discussion of our turn towards individual points of view to the exclusion of larger concerns, I propose that in the last half century, American education has focused on student subjectivity pushing the culture towards individuation rather than cohesion.
So far, good-ole-boy government is enabling Mayor Forrister to remain above the law. The 30 animal-control violations against her and her husband, which include animal cruelty, were not considered in P&Z deliberations and the current kennel law was thrown out the window.
There will be no sunshine on the possible sale of the city's electric utility. If it happens, it will be a private sale to Sierra Electric Cooperative.
Continuing the series "Assaying Entropy," I continue to develop a description of how the original idea of democracy in America was altered due to the influence of undemocratic structures. The last essay dealt with corporate hierarchy. In the present piece, I discuss the military influence, militarism, and the frontier mentality.
The Constitution created a government around the arguments about democracy, but it did not resolve those conflicts. The resulting ambiguity allowed traditional hierarchical, undemocratic structures, institutions, and values to inform American life. Those hierarchical ideas still dominate American social thinking today resulting in a complex and often self-contradictory identity.
Some aspects of American society might make us more prone to what psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls fast thinking and thus more prone to make mistakes in judgment when it comes to complex issues like Covid.
Hooray. Fairness under the city's zoning code was in evidence at the Dec. 14 city commission meeting, thanks to Mayor Pro Tem Rolf Hechler. He went through his findings of fact before ruling, as required by law, eschewing opinion.
The next city manager must hold to a course correction, reversing 60 years of water, wastewater and electric infrastructure neglect--Bruce Swingle is leaving in May.
Some limits on our ability to think when we want to think about Covid.
Is our perception of death and of human life changing because of the Covid-19 pandemic?
I am introducing a series of articles in which I view and weigh our present world in light of the concept of entropy, and in this first essay, I explain what entropy is and how it allows us to see the effects of everything that we do.