On February 11th, 2008, over 1000 people from over 70 countries, all of whom now live in the state of Washington, visited Olympia (our state capitol) for the second annual Refugee and Immigrant Legislative Day. I decided to take a day off work and attend. Here are some observations from the day:

The city that I live in (Shoreline, a suburb just north of Seattle) closed two elementary schools this year, and the city of Seattle has also been talking about closing schools, in both cases because the number of children enrolled in school has declined. Yet the population of both Seattle and Shoreline must be increasing, as houses are replaced by condo buildings and apartments, so I had been somewhat confused about this...

I finally saw Michael Moore's film Sicko. It's very scary. The main point of the film is that in the U.S., even if you have "good" health insurance, you have no guarantee that you will get good health care. This is because hospitals and doctors make health care decisions based on what your insurance company will pay them, rather than what is good for you, and the insurance companies base their decisions on what is good for their stockholders, not what is good for you.

Lately, I have been hearing a lot of politicians promoting biofuels, mainly biodiesel and bioethanol. They seem to believe that biofuels are going to play a major role in solving our upcoming energy crisis, but logic and science do not support that idea. I gave a few reasons in my earlier article on the coming energy crisis, and an article I just read in Science News adds even more. Here are some thoughts:

I finally finished reading Chalmers Johnson's book Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, which prompted me to think about the differences between the United States that our founding fathers envisioned, and wrote into the Constitution, and the United States we are living in today. Here are some thoughts.

We hear a lot about global warming, technology, and energy in the news, but it's hard to get an overall picture of our energy situation. So, I decided it was time to do some research, and I've collected below some information about the present and projected future of energy production and usage by the world's people. But before I present the supporting facts, let me present my conclusions: