Bali (Indonesia): An English visionary, his dedicated staff, and a rural community tackle poverty and soil erosion

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July 6, 2024: The Debate Debacle – Your Responses

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I am heartened that, so far, 180 people have looked at my July 4 blog post (Blogger shows me how many people read each post but not their identities).   I also have received some great responses via email from various sides of the political spectrum.   I would like to share these with you, identifying the writers by their first names and where they live.   I’ve “cleaned up” some of the grammar, punctuation, etc. but I’m not going to comment on these emails although you are free to do so or send me more emails for future publication on the blog. By the way, I’ve decided to scrap my idea of visiting Colorado politicians’ offices in person.   I discussed this idea briefly with a friend who has experience lobbying Congress.   “Should I make an appointment to speak to staffers or just show up at their offices?”   I asked.   “You need an appointment but they are unlikely to give you one,” he replied.   This snapped me into reality:   Why bother making all the effort to speak for 2 minutes wi
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Addendum, November 19-22 and Beyond: Getting My Heart Back to Normal

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I don’t want to bore my readers with a lot of medical mumbo-jumbo so I’ll keep this simple, and you’ll understand why my heart problems doomed my South American trip from the start. One of the first items of business after returning home was manually downloading the data from my tiny, implanted heart monitor to a phone-like device on my nightstand which then transmits the data to my cardiologist’s office.   The monitor records the rate and nature of my heart beats, and an electro-cardiologist can study the readout to determine what’s happening electrically in my aging “blood pump”.   Normally, the downloads and transmissions automatically happen once a day, but I wanted to be sure my doctor had all the latest data from my trip when I called his office which I did first thing on Monday morning. I have a tiny recorder implanted under the skin next to my heart which records my heartbeats.  I’ve had two of them – their batteries die after 3-5 years and the one in my hand was the first on
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