Former shelf-stocker, monkey-tester, plant worker, English teacher, community youth worker, and disability adjudicator. In retirement, thoroughly enjoying celebrating life and learning. Loves reading a broad variety of nonfiction, dancing with his wife Judy, playing tennis, baseball, cooking/baking, grunt gardening, leaving a miniscule carbon footprint, sunny days.
Bob Bates — When Jack Ruby died in prison on January 3, 1967, barely three years after he ended Lee Harvey Oswald’s life with one fatal shot to his gut, any [...]
Bob Bates — Daniel Ellsberg is universally known as the “man behind the Pentagon Papers.” However, with the publication of his new book, The Doomsday [...]
Bob Bates — In 1896, Swedish Nobel laureate Svante Arrhenius calculated that increases of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Earth’s atmosphere contributed to the [...]
Bob Bates — Over a century ago physicist Max Planck, functionally an intellectual mentor of Albert Einstein in making scientific breakthroughs with prodigious consequences, [...]
Bob Bates — In his book Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil (2013), Paul Bloom, psychology professor at Yale University, reports on the work he has conducted [...]
Bob Bates — Mark Richardson’s moving essay entitled “My Mom, Baseball, and Me,” published previously on Wise Guys, is my motivation for posting this [...]
Bob Bates — The age of our universe is about 13.8 billion years old. Our solar system began forming about 4.5 billion years ago, with planet Earth being a part of this [...]
Bob Bates — In his epic tour de force, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams has his all-knowing, all-wise Grand Computer named Deep Thought delve [...]
Bob Bates — One of the most provocative books I’ve read that deals with religion is Richard Elliot Friedman’s The Disappearance of God: A Divine Mystery (1995). [...]
Bob Bates — Sociologist Matthew Desmond’s widely acclaimed book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016), a study of the city of Milwaukee, pounds [...]
Bob Bates — Most thinking humans for a long time have known an effective societal problem-solving process: (1) identify needs, (2) identify ways these can be met, (3) [...]