Kline settlement hastens death of the town

So the Kline house controversy is finally settled. For $3 million the new owners will get to live in the house after all, whenever they happen to be in town. According to the “Banner” story, “most of the selectmen appeared to have agonized over the decision.” The town had already spent a lot in legal […]

Read More →

December 10, 2016 – 6:43 pm | By Brent | Posted in Posts | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

WHAT WILL HAPPEN? WHAT WILL WE DO?

Has ever a president-elect been held in such contempt by such a large portion of the electorate? These feel like dangerous times. Those signs protesting “F**k Trump” and “Not My President”–suddenly it seems not unreasonable to ask: are we becoming one of the many countries whose violence, instability and inability to govern themselves we’ve always […]

Read More →

December 7, 2016 – 12:44 pm | By Brent | Posted in Columns | Tagged , | Comments (0)

“Community”: a shallow premise for planning

A few days after the election, 80 or so of the most civic-minded Wellfleetians took time out from anguishing over the Future According to Trump to take up what seems a more manageable topic, the future of our own town. The idea was to crowdsource ideas to be incorporated in the latest update of our […]

Read More →

November 29, 2016 – 6:27 pm | By Brent | Posted in Columns | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

AI : thinking about the end of the human era

Don’t look now, but while our attention is being distracted by all the media focus on climate change, there’s a much more ominous threat on the horizon: artificial intelligence ( AI). Unlike climate change, AI is not an unintended consequence of technology but something fellow humans are working hard to bring about. The goal the […]

Read More →

November 26, 2016 – 2:48 pm | By Brent | Posted in Columns | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

7.4 MILLION DOLLAR POLICE STATION OUT OF PROPORTION

The 7.4 million dollar re-build of the Wellfleet police station that is about to be rubber-stamped at a Special Town Meeting Tuesday is a quantum leap in police station infrastructure in a town whose population has for 15 years or so plateaued. All indications are that, if anything, the population will not rise in the […]

Read More →

November 13, 2016 – 2:42 pm | By Brent | Posted in Posts | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Capitalism: burning down the house to roast a pig.

Inequality, one of capitalism’s chief products, has become in recent years the elephant in the room. But capitalism is the room itself and tends to be invisible. Largely thanks to Bernie Sanders and the undemonizing of “democratic socialism,” that may be changing. Capitalism reminds me of Charles Lamb’s apocryphal story about the discovery of roast […]

Read More →

November 11, 2016 – 12:28 pm | By Brent | Posted in Columns | Tagged | Comments (0)

Vote Cyr if you want Pilgrim closed ASAP and decommissioned property.

If you’re undecided between Julian Cyr and Anthony Schiavi, a more-reasonable-than-many- Republicans Republican, compare them on the issue of the closure of Pilgrim. There is no more pressing issue at this time than the need to close the decrepit Pilgrim now, rather than risk two more years of increasing dysfunction. (Not to mention the risk […]

Read More →

October 28, 2016 – 3:11 pm | By Brent | Posted in Posts | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

DEMOCRATS: WHEN IN DOUBT, VOTE THE BRAND

I see from a recent poll that more millennials would rather see an asteroid wipe out the planet than either of the candidates get elected. Seems a little extreme. We hope that’s just the younguns’ way of saying what a lot of us are saying about voting holding our noses. A lot of us can […]

Read More →

October 22, 2016 – 10:55 am | By Brent | Posted in Posts | Tagged | Comments (0)

NEEDED: SINGER-SONGWRITER NOBEL

Life was Dylan-flavored in the mid-’60s, at least in the Bay Area where I lived at the time. Everywhere you went, it seemed, there was “Bringing It All Back Home” and then “Highway 66” on the turntable, or their songs on the radio, refusing to conform to the usual 2-3 minute-per-song format of the time. […]

Read More →

October 17, 2016 – 1:36 pm | By Brent | Posted in Posts | Tagged , | Comments (0)

HURRICANE TRUMP

Yet another revelation of a Trump nastiness. Another debate that in an ordinary election would  doom a candidate as certainly as if he had shown up drunk.  How does Trump shoot himself in the foot? Let us count the ways. Is it the complete lack of substance behind the inane bragging that he’s great, that […]

Read More →

October 10, 2016 – 1:26 pm | By Brent | Posted in Posts | Tagged , | Comments (0)