A View From the Edge

Many Americans do not understand the CIA. The primary role of the CIA is to gather information, conduct analysis and evaluation, and, always, provide leaders with background information necessary to govern around the world.

The commercial aviation community is at a crossroads and has turned to NASA research and industry leaders to find a way forward.

Did you know that spreading rock dust on a farmer’s field helps capture carbon into the soil and helps farmers use less (synthetic, oil-derived) fertilizers? It all starts with the fact that there is more carbon, including CO2, locked up in the soil than in the entire atmosphere. Plants depend on carbon in the soil as their building blocks.

The long-term cause and effect of this pandemic is now reaching into one of the world’s most unique and precious treasures: the giant Sequoia forests in California. Financial pressure across the nation has caused both cutbacks as well as staffing issues. 

The past 18 months have seen the economy take a hiatus across many industries. Less commerce, less tax revenue, more government spending needed to keep the population going, means more borrowing. But let’s put some of this into context, historical context. It is not, thankfully, as bad as you may think.

It has been years now that we all seem to be lurching from one crisis to another. On the anniversary of 9/11 we have a painful look back at that calamity and, if you stop and think about it, those scars, feelings and dread are bubbling away in your everyday life — how many of us wonder if a similar event is just around the corner?

Poor people probably pay about 25% or more of their earning in tax. In America, and most of Europe, the lowest 10% of the population pay disproportionately more tax than the richest 90%, family by family, taxpayer by taxpayer. How is that possible I can hear you ask?

They say as you get older, you know more people, have more connections. And, yes, that’s true. What catches up to you, every once in a while, is just how common events and facts may be — so common that you suddenly find yourself knowing so many similar events when you never expected even one.