June 17, 2021 
It’s been a while.
UPDATE:
I’m moving the content that focuses on the pandemic to my other blog, The Politics Lass, and will keep this space for discussions of the climate wars, which I anticipate will heat up so to speak over the coming months. Lots of interesting developments to ponder.
We’re still in the thick of the pandemic, but at least the vaccines have been rolling out in most of the industrial world, and things just might return to some kind of new normal this year, or at least, at the start of 2022. While I am trying to remain optimistic, I don’t think the pandemic will be over soon. Given the vast populations who have not had access to vaccination or modern medical care, there is the potential for more and more mutation in the COVID-19 virus and the need for a prolonged response. We may be wearing masks and getting boosters for a couple of years before this is completely over.
I’ve been busy starting a new career as a published author, writing crime fiction with some success, and while that has been a lifelong dream of mine, I can’t not think about larger science, social and political issues and now want to return to commenting on them. Writing crime fiction is fun, a dream, enjoyable, and profitable, but there is more to life than that. I am growing more and more concerned about civilization and the directions it is taking in several realms. Politics, Science, and Culture.
The pandemic and the political and cultural response encapsulates so much of what is wrong with modernity. Old political divides have been exacerbated by the pandemic such that people are now refusing to get vaccinated because they suspect the “globalist agenda of baby-eating pedophiles have put microchips into the vaccine to track and control us for the great replacement” — or variations on that theme.
What has struck me the most about this past four and a half years is how much more fervent the war on science and the war over science has become. It’s become a cultural and moral battle as in “If you believe this, you are a reprobate/heretic/stupid”.
It’s very discouraging to someone in the last quarter of my life. While I embrace the digital age and the access to readers and knowledge that the internet provides, it is at the same time a potential vortex and whirlpool that can drag people into its more cesspool-like depths.
So restarting this blog is a way for me to try to give this voice and figure it out as best I can. I welcome your thoughts, those of you who follow this blog or find me.
My overarching belief is that we need civilized discussion and discourse to figure this out. I am willing to talk to anyone outside of obvious trolls and shitposters. I know that I have been wrong in the past about things and will be wrong in the future. If I hope that people will be generous to me and that I can be generous to them. Good-faith debate is the goal.
I think the overarching premise of my blog from this point forward is that there has been a larger failure of our ability to agree on what is a fact and what is truth. Not that we ever have reached such a lofty goal, but I think we are even farther from that than ever before. We are so divided by wealth, power and politics that we can barely even talk to each other except in the language of bread and circuses. McDonalds and the NFL are the only things we actually can agree on.
As the great Carl Sagan lamented, “We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”
I’d say the match of political enmity is far too close to the powder keg. This blog will be my attempt to understand how we got here, why, and how can we go forward without lighting the match.
The Policy Lass 
Delighted to see you returning.
Hi, Hank — good to see you again! Glad to be back.
Excellent to see you both!
Also been contemplating taking keyboard again in hand
Speaking of crime fiction, may I recommend:
Rapoport, Nancy B.; Van Niel, Jeffrey D.; and Dharan, Bala G., “Enron and Other Corporate Fiascos: The Corporate Scandal Reader” (2009). Books. 14.
https://scholars.law.unlv.edu/books/14
(There is now a third edition titled “Corporate Scandals and Their Implications”)
(I was a proofreader/editor at one of the big law firms where attorney author Rapoport worked, long ago. She also plays herself in the movie ” Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005)”)
The book looks at human nature and how self-deception as well as, er, corporate fiction work in the business world. Multi-million-dollar fraud is an interesting and underserved form of crime fiction, perhaps because it’s so hard to make a movie out of the story. And because the punishments are so light and do so little damage to perpetrators’ status.
Just an example:
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/enron-ceo-jeffrey-skilling-houston-business-15367662.php
So glad you’re back.
Good to see you’re posting again.
I can’t find “The Politics Lass” — can we have a link?
Oh, never mind, I see the link in the first line of text above. I need to make my link colors more contrasty.
Odd that ‘oogle never found The Politics Lass for me.
Oh, noes!