Threat assessment: doing the math

Here is another example of trying to shift the debate away from meaningful action on climate change. The author, very influential in WV, takes Secretary of State John Kerry to task for comparing the dangers of climate change to those of terrorism. Actually, as awful as terrorism is, the climate threat is much more dangerous. One estimate from 2012 suggested that around 400,000 die annually worldwide from climate change, while in 2013 the death toll from terrorism was around 18,000. More on that here.

By the way, in case you missed it, my friend Pastor Matthew J. Watts had a great op-ed in the Gazette-Mail calling for a "Marshall plan" to help poor white and black communities.

Prison nation

On the latest Front Porch program/podcast, we spoke with my friend Pastor Matthew Watts of Grace Bible Church and Hope Community Development on Charleston WV's west side. This is a heavily edited version of a long conversation we had about prisons, race, mass incarceration, social changes and more.

WISDOM BOOKS. Regular readers of this blog know I'm a sucker for ancient Greek and Roman classics. Right now, I've made a decent start at rereading three classics that I plan on going through again and again: Plutarch's Lives, Herodotus' Histories and Thucydides' Peloponnesian War. (I'm about 320 pages through the first and just finished the life of Timoleon, the Corinthian leader who liberated Sicily from the rule of tyrants.) So it's no wonder that this Gazette-Mail op-ed on Thucydides caught my eye.

SAD SIGN OF THE TIMES. It's no secret that WV has a drug overdose problem and that my county of Cabell is ground zero. It was really sad for me to read that school nurses in that county are preparing to administer naxolone for opioid overdoses.