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Turkey, Mooresville and Hydrail
It’s going on ten years since Jim Bowman (an Ingersoll-Rand engineering wizard), former Mooresville Mayor Bill Thunberg and I first launched our quest to route the rails through our town toward a railway traction revolution.
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What if South Carolina secedes (from the polling racket)?
In South Carolina, as they were in Iowa and New Hampshire, voters are about to be approached by pollsters who will use them to help feed and fund a system that turns the First Amendment against itself for profit, rendering the election process banal and redundant.
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Snippets in time
Kurt Vonnegut opens his darkling novel, Slaughterhouse Five, with the words, “I have come unstuck in time…” At this festive season of the year, I’ve been reflecting on some odd takes on time. If they seem bizarre and unstuck, you are perceptive.
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The Train in Spain and Mooresville
Mooresville, N.C. and Pravia, Asturias (Spain) have in common that each has set about to pioneer hydrail (hydrogen fuel cell rail) passenger technology. Mooresville conceived the idea about ten years ago. In 2012, Pravia puts a real hydrogen train on the track and will start selling tickets to paying passengers.
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I'm no 'Roads Scholar'
Not by any stretch of the imagination could I be considered an expert on roads.
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Libya: A cracked mirror
Moammar Gadhafi was pulled from a pipe as Saddam Hussein was pulled from a trap-door hole in the ground, each having gone home to play out his final act.
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Prometheus with a mouse
This column is being written -- like everything I’ve written since 1984 -- on a Macintosh computer. More precisely, it is being written in collaboration with a Macintosh computer.
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What would Socrates do?
As of this writing Greece is wobbling like the number one domino in the long chain that is the world economy.
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Corporate income tax: a political hoax
Seven years after I first broke the sensational 2004 story that “The Easter Bunny doesn’t pay taxes,” POTUS (the President of The United States) is apparently still not convinced that Paul Bunyan, Ebenezer Scrooge and Daddy Warbucks should be purged from the tax rolls just because they are fictional.
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Inside a Scottish drama
To make your way from the mainland of Scotland to the Isle of Skye in 1968 you had first to meander along a sparsely traveled coastal road to the village of Kyle of Lochalsh, where the ferry had its modest boarding ramp.
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Toward more pastel politics
These columns have not been serialized in the past but the financial tumult last week may justify an exception.
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The lure of the edge
Earlier this month, when I read the tragic account of three young people being swept to their deaths over Yosemite’s Vernal Falls, a vivid image from Boy Scout days jolted my memory. It’s summer. My troop is camped on the Davidson River near Brevard, N.C.
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Measuring history in pixels
We live in a world where tiny samples let us know a thing exists without our knowing much at all about it. The good news is that the little canapés served at the party of Life provide us a chance to recognize, choose and consume the dinner-sized portions. The bad thing is that we’re called upon to make judgments on so many things that, as individuals, we couldn’t get enough of them right.
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Fatal fusion
Previously I’ve written about the attractiveness of expanding the Federal “separation of powers” -- that balance and oversight of functions among the Executive, Judicial and Legislative branches that keeps any of the three from running too far amok.
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Not the border type
One of the happier associations of my recent years has been the World Affairs Council of Charlotte. Per their national web site, the various World Affairs Councils, including Charlotte’s, are “dedicated to educating, inspiring and engaging Americans in international affairs and the critical global issues of our times.”
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A house divided
America is divided into two camps: those who bemoan the excessive partisanship now slapping the tiller of the Ship of State back and forth between excesses of Left and Right and those who have not yet figured out that—while remarkably seaworthy—our national vessel can endure only so much rock and roll without foundering.
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Nobody's Hat
A lot of folks are said to “wear many hats” but over the past few years I’ve noticed that nobody is in charge of leading the world. There’s nothing ironic in saying this; it’s a literal fact.
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A 1770s no-sail zone
"I wish the king would quit dithering and just go ahead and declare a no-sail zone around Boston Harbor and maybe one around Charleston, too," said Marie-René Boudreaux over the Paris newspaper her husband had deployed to shield himself from another round of their running argument.
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There's hydrogen in the air
A Tribune article last month about Sam Parks' hydrogen balloon flight reminded me that I have been wrong in thinking aviation will be one of the last applications for hydrogen in transportation. A couple of things have made me rethink that.
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Oil: The anti-elixir
In the days before alchemy evolved into chemistry, one of its main projects was the search for an "elixir of life" which could transmute base metals such as lead into gold.
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A general improvement
The reflexive American response to news that the military has assumed governance of a country is "uh-oh." That was the media's brow-furrowing take when it was announced that the Egyptian military chiefs will be taking care of business until a constitution providing for replaceable leaders can be cobbled together.
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Out of Egypt
Out of Egypt's present agony may come, if they and we are fortunate, something as modern and dynamic as the pyramids are ancient and static.
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Rattlesnakes and barbeque
There's something fundamentally honest about a rattlesnake. It has spent millions of years evolving an audible means to avoid conflict.
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Gas again
Once again, dire predictions fill the news: The pump price of gasoline is headed for $4 a gallon. Believe it, but take with a grain of salt the various dates being bandied about.
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China and hydrail: finders, keepers
In the last couple of weeks two news items made modest ripples on the Internet pond but probably didn't make newsprint anywhere in the U.S. or Canada -- both of which seriously needed to understand their portent.
Deal of the Day
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