Grumpypilgrim is a writer and management consultant living in Madison, WI. He has several scientific degrees, including a recent master’s degree from MIT. He has also held several professional career positions, none of which has been in a field in which he ever took a university course. Grumps is an avid cyclist and, for many years now, has traveled more annual miles by bicycle than by car…and he wishes more people (for the health of both themselves and our planet) would do the same. Grumps is an enthusiastic advocate of life-long learning, healthy living and political awareness. He is single, and provides a loving home for abused and abandoned bicycles. Grumpy’s email: grumpypilgrim(AT)@gmail(DOT).com [Erich’s note: Grumpy asked that his email be encrypted this way to deter spam. If you want to write to him, drop out the parentheticals in the above address].
Did you notice how eagerly the McCain camp scaled back the Republican National Convention on account of Hurricane Gustav? And did you notice how quickly Bush and Cheney backed out of their scheduled attendance? Even after the hurricane was downgraded from Class 4 to Class 2, and then to a tropical storm, Convention [...]
Although John McCain hails his running mate as a model of ethical behavior in office, the State of Alaska would apparently disagree: it is investigating Palin for abuse of power in office. Palin, without explanation, recently fired a state employee, who now claims that Palin pressured him to fire a state trooper who [...]
McCain’s campaign ads on television spend a great deal of time talking about his experience. Things such as getting shot down in Viet Nam, being bayoneted and tortured, and then spending 5 years in a POW camp seem to rank very high on McCain’s list of what he believes are his qualifications for being [...]
I thought this was interesting…while America drowns in red ink from a combination of Bush tax cuts and the money pit known as Iraq, Iraq has been racking up nice profits from selling all that oil they have. This year’s spike in oil prices has been especially good for Iraq — according to this [...]
In America, many Republican politicians, including presidential candidate John McCain, are using the recent spike in oil prices to call for increased domestic production, including opening wildlife refuges to oil drilling. In response, opponents are arguing that increased production will merely perpetuate America’s addiction to oil, worsening environmental damage and global warming. Unfortunately, [...]
Let’s do a simple thought experiment. Let’s imagine you are the CEO of a company and you need to hire a manager to supervise some segment of your business. To keep things simple, let’s assume only two people apply for the job and that you interview both of them.
The first candidate [...]
Every barrel of oil taken out of our planet has a cost associated with its extraction. This cost-per-barrel varies for different oil fields and also varies over time for a given oil field, which means some barrels are costlier to extract than others. When the market price for a given barrel of oil [...]
In his earlier post, Erich pointed out the justifiable contempt we should all have for guys like McClellan & Powell, who repeatedly lied to the American people about the Iraq threat and helped lead our nation into an unnecessary and horribly costly invasion. However, I believe McClellan’s revelations expose a much deeper problem. [...]
We all understand that Bush’s ‘economic stimulus’ check is nothing more than an excuse for Washington politicians to try to buy your vote, just as Bush did so effectively in his 2000 campaign. The ’stimulus’ has received bipartisan support, likely because incumbents on both sides of the aisle are concerned about joining the ranks [...]
Earlier this week, George Bush had a press conference to discuss the problem of high gasoline prices in the U.S. Amazingly, or predictably depending on how you look at it, Bush blamed the (Democrat-controlled) U.S. Congress. Topping his list of idiotic suggestions was that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge should be opened to [...]
Imagine you were to come home from work one day and discover an inch of standing water in your living room — soaking your carpeting and staining all your furniture. Would you calmly stand there sifting through your mail, or would you stop whatever you were doing and try to stop the flood in [...]
Bush sure has a talent for driving up the retail price of oil (and, thus, oil company profits). This week, with gasoline hitting all-time high prices, Bush directed the U.S. DoE’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve to *buy* gasoline — a move that enriches oil companies both directly (i.e., by making long-range purchases when prices are [...]
…this would be one of my questions: if, as you claim, God expects unmarried people to practice sexual abstinence, and expects teenagers to benefit from abstinence-only sex “education,” then why can’t your own ordained Catholic priests manage to practice it? Isn’t your demand for abstinence a bit like declaring that God expects people [...]
