Columnists

AS we come together to celebrate Earth Day this year 2024, we must focus on one of the most pressing environmental issues of our time: the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This massive pile of floating waste, located between California and Hawaii, is not just a collection of garbage; it’s a stark…

BC Cook ALAIN Gerbault sailed around the world a hundred years ago.  After serving in the French air force in First World War and watching all his friends die around him, he grew disillusioned with civilization and took to the sea. Fortunately for us, he kept meticulous logs and wrote about his exp…

HERE’S my take on some of the startling assertions — set in italics — that were made by the governor in his FY 2025 budget transmittal letter. As mandated by the Constitution, the budget submitted herein is balanced such that the total amount of proposed expenditures does not exceed the total estim…

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…