dkSez : : : : : : Don Kahle’s blog

Taking apart a Volkswagen engine may be satisfying, but unless you can put the parts back together, it won’t take you anywhere. If we want to get someplace new, we must return somehow to the whole, the unity. This brings us back to Obama’s style of consilience.

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Hang the Olympic Trials. Eugene should begin the work now to bid for the 2020 Summer Olympics. We won’t really get our act together here until we know there are visitors coming, so why not shoot for the whole meal deal? Phil Knight will be in his mid-80s by then and Nike will be a [...]

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This 4th of July, do we know what we’re celebrating? Is it unity or diversity? It had better be both. Historians will tell you what biologists can now confirm. Diversity is the surest defense against both internal threats — viruses, genetic deficiencies — and external threats — predators, climate change. Diversity in the moment is [...]

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A group of citizens from all walks of life have been meeting for the past 18 months to build a sturdy solution to the traffic snarl that is west Eugene. Next week they are offering a series of open houses to give the community a progress report. But don’t expect a road solution. They don’t [...]

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Associate professor of landscape architecture and urban design Mark Gillem has written a brilliant book about how America designs communities. If you’ve been in this conversation about urban design and sprawl in particular, you know the arguments. Developers are giving customers what they want. Bankers determine what will qualify for a mortgage. Roads are built [...]

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First a little housekeeping, for insiders. (You can skip this paragraph and suffer no consequences.) I’ve fallen off the wagon for the past month or so, not posting rough ideas and really not posting anything to the site. This is partly because a redesign of the site broke a couple of things, which led to [...]

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I started in on a piece about the closing of Willamette Rep, and I planned to begin with that famous line we all know from “Julius Caesar.” Marc Antony begins his funeral speech with “I come not to bury Caesar, but the praise him,” right? Well, no. He pulls a fast one on Brutus by [...]

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We’re heading into summer blockbuster season, and there will be plenty of talk about product placement. It’s all the rage in movies and TV, placing national brands into the story line, and being paid by those companies for the exposure. As is so often the case, I’m interested in the other side of that coin. [...]

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Campaign strategists hate Oregon, because we play by different rules. We don’t have a polling day. We have a polling fortnight. People vote from their kitchen tables and they vote at all different times, and that means you can’t send a last minute message to Oregonians, because each of us count our minutes differently. On [...]

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Here’s an idea for the Eugene Marathon that could make it as fun as it is successful. It could draw more runners, and it would put an almost unique stamp on the race. It’s an idea borrowed from a smaller and much different race in Port Townsend, a place once described as “a drinking town [...]

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