Columnists

BC Cook MARK Twain felt very strongly against the jury system and spoke out about it every chance he got.  Take the following, for example: “I remember one of those sorrowful farces, in Virginia which we call a jury trial. A noted desperado killed Mr. B., a good citizen, in the most wanton and cold…

DANIEL Kahneman, a Princeton University psychology professor and winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, died on March 27. He was 90. According to the Wall Street Journal, Kahneman and his friend Amos Tversky, who died in 1996, “upended traditional economic assumptions that people consistently act …

BC Cook I RECENTLY read a news story with the headline, “China may be using Sea to Hide its Submarines.”  Well, yes.  Where else would they hide them?  Certainly not in the mountains.  It got a few of us talking about some of the wildest headlines we have seen, so I thought I would share a little o…

I’VE read the text of the speeches delivered by governor and the lieutenant governor at last week’s economic summit, and oh boy. Like most everything else involving the CNMI government, there is nothing new about holding an economic summit (federally funded usually) during an economic crisis (the l…

Christopher Concepcion A FEW years ago, the Marianas Visitors Authority conducted an exit survey of visitors leaving the islands. One of the important questions we asked them was, what was the #1 activity they had expected to undertake during their visit to the Marianas? Overwhelming, the answer wa…

BC Cook IF you ask scuba divers where the best wreck diving in the world is you only get one answer: Chuuk lagoon.  Chuuk has all of the things going for it that other islands do when it comes to scuba diving: coral reefs, a great variety of fish and aquatic plants, warm waters.  But it also has so…

YOU can tell it’s election season already when you hear politicians say things that have been said in previous election seasons. Politicians today are, more or less, talking about the same old issues. And it seems that not a lot of us recall that in election after election, previous politicians — i…

FORTY years ago, the then-12-year-old Marianas Variety reported that “House of Reps closes, fires 82 employees.” The local economy would take off before the end of the decade, but in 1984 it was still struggling to generate enough revenue to meet the financial obligations of the six-year-old Common…

BC Cook FOUR young school teachers looked out the window to view the strange behavior of the sea.  A few moments later only one of them was alive.  This is her story. An earthquake occurred in the ocean near Alaska in 1946, and while the quake caused little damage, it unleashed a tsunami that sprea…

YOU will be vilified, ridiculed, denounced, unfairly criticized if not “defamed” by your political opponents and their supporters. And there is nothing new about that in the history of politics. It was much worse in the past. (Julius Caesar’s political opponents did not even try to debate him. They…