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Showing posts from March, 2017

The Mailbox is in the Ditch

Last week I received a call at work from Jennifer stating that the mail box had been knocked over. She said the box itself was fine but that the 4x4 wooden post was "split."  I didn't know exactly what that meant so I cancelled an upcoming appointment at work and drove home to check things out.   The post snapped off in a diagonal fashion about one-third of the way up.  It was sitting next to my neighbor's mailbox which was also clipped off only his was about two-thirds of the way up.  How this happened I could not tell.  There were no skid or tread marks.  No dents or marks on the actual posts themselves other than the breaks.  The only piece missing was my neighbor's mailbox door.   It took more than a casual force to cause such damage, maybe a piece of farm equipment swiped them as it came through. Regardless of the cause, I had to either get a new post or repair the old one.  I picked up the mailbox and saw that it would fit back together is I could find s

Trump, the EPA, and Your Toxic Future

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As I pointed out previously , the first Industrial Revolution almost occurred in China several hundred years before it happened in Europe. There were various reasons why this did not occur, not the least of which was an invasion by Genghis Khan . But before that happened, the Chinese city of Kaifeng became the largest urban area on the planet.  It housed more than one million residents.  It was the global hub for science and development and a fledgling iron works industry.   Remembering Kaifeng is useful today because it seems many among us have forgotten a simple, undeniable historic fact. Wherever unregulated human beings prosper economically it is always at the expense of the environment to the degree that it poses a threat to human life itself.  The region around Kaifeng was heavily forested but within a few decades the landscape became completely denuded.  Vital wood and other materials had to transported from many miles away.  The industry suffered but so did those livin