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International Need to Know, as the name indicates, is focused on the rest of the world. We leave the United States, including its politics, to other analysts and commentators of which there is no shortage. But when in the course of human events we elect a president doing and saying things that our current one […]
Last weekend we attended a gathering of Washington, D.C. refugees. That is, a group of us who once worked in Washington, D.C. but now live in the more beautiful, successful Washington in the Pacific Northwest. Just as back when we worked in D.C., the gathering included people from both Republican and Democrat congressional offices. When […]
Seattle is hot this week. Not Seattle-hot where Seattleites complain it’s 80 degrees and the rest of the country snickers. No, it’s in the mid to high 90s and may reach triple digits. A legitimate heatwave. Making it more difficult, most people do not have air conditioning. Making it personally difficult, the International Need to […]
The most independent we ever felt was in our early, early twenties walking home from our job in Washington, D.C. to our new apartment, picking up a beer, crackers and cheese log. We sat on the floor of our apartment (we hadn’t yet purchased furniture), drank the beer and dipped the crackers into the cheese […]
Our cat’s allergies remind us this week what a strange and unfair universe we live in. Putter would very much like to go outside on a frequent basis. But it turns out he has allergies to innumerable plants and grass. When he goes out he becomes very sick and unhappy. But to remain inside makes […]
Perhaps you’ve noticed the news is often dispiriting these days. We are hammered by the bad, the corrupt, the idiotic and the just malevolently silly on a daily basis. This makes it easy to forget the good, courageous people all around us and we had the joy of hanging with a few of them this […]
On the second afternoon of the Directed Energy Conference we attended last week in Washington, DC, we kept an eye on an old man wearing a seersucker jacket. The day before he had been dressed equally nattily and somewhat extravagantly. But it wasn’t his sartorial style that caught our attention, it was his nametag informing […]
We write this as we prepare to head to Washington, D.C. for both our Uncle’s 80th birthday celebration (happy birthday, John!) and later to attend a conference on Directed Energy Weapons (i.e., really cool ways to blow things up). Many years ago we lived in the nation’s capital at a time when it was one […]
Incentives are a funny thing. They drive so much in our world and yet often have unintended consequences. A few years ago, like many in our socio-economic demographic, we bought a Fitbit to measure our exercise, sleep and other such metrics. We lost it fairly quickly but then our wife gave us another one as […]
Perhaps there is no greater mystery in the universe than intelligence and consciousness. The latter is, in fact, impossible to define and test scientifically. We were reminded of this not just from our current political world but also from the work of an evolutionary biologist who asserts that spiders store information in their webs. He claims “that […]