Happy Independence Day

It is, of course, the Fourth day of July. After several years of tension, and many attempts by various colony-side groups to get the British parliament to listen to basic grievances, conflict arose. The Colonists and the British Army started shooting on 19 April 1775 at Lexington - just outside of Boston. On 11 June 1776, more than a year after the war had begun, the delegates to the Continental Congress appointed a committee of five, and they got started on the serious work of making a formal declaration of Independence....

4 Jul 2008 · 2 min · Gary Allen Vollink

SmokeStack Gone : The Video

So, here is the video that I took of the St Paul Smoke Stack falling... Wait for it to load - Action starts during minute 5, so forward to there (half-way point). I haven't had a chance to edit it down.

28 Jun 2008 · 1 min · Gary Allen Vollink

SmokeStack Gone.

Well -- it was a crazy minute, but the Smoke Stack at the Mississippi River at the St. Paul High Bridge came falling down. It was described in the article as an implosion, but the way the video is shown, it seems very likely that they meant for it to tumble like a felled tree, as it did. The smoke stack held a falcon box for several years, but that box was removed in January before the falcons returned from their winter journey....

28 Jun 2008 · 1 min · Gary Allen Vollink

Remembering the Silent Majority

Concerning my previous blog post: Why Most Politics Is Radical I had been thinking for the last several months about Nixon's "Silent Majority" [1] [2]. The silent majority is usually described as the "mostly conservative" bulk of people who are not easily swayed by politics. Some discussions have suggested that this majority is simply gone, that it doesn't exist. However, I take it that - even while Nixon called them a "...

27 Jun 2008 · 1 min · Gary Allen Vollink