Cascade Courier - Your trusted local news source since 1910

The Earth rotates at 1,037 mph. The Earth orbits the Sun at 67,000 mph. Our solar system whirls around the center of the galaxy at 490,000 mph. The speed at which our galaxy is moving through the...

Every political season people suggest we ought to institute some other political system, usually they say we should have a parliamentary system. Yes, parliamentary systems do have some advantages but...

If someone asked, “What color are leaves?” I’m sure I would respond, “Green”, while looking at the person as if they were a bit crazy unless they asked about this time of year. But, I recently...

When I was in real estate I got the kind of call folks dream about. It was a professional couple who had just moved to Great Falls and wanted to buy a house. They both had good incomes and knew exactl...

There have been, evidently, three times in human history when humanity was in danger of extinction. About 900,000 years ago the population was down to about 1,280 individuals and that number did not...

There are vast numbers of articles and books dealing with loneliness. It’s an odd epidemic. We are more connected than ever. We have “friends” on social media with whom we can connect anytime. And y...

It's been popular for self-help and spiritually oriented books for years to borrow a concept from Asian, particularly Buddhist, thinking. We’re supposed to live in the present, don’t think about what...

Virtually all human endeavor is, one way or another, connected to the quest for, or use of energy. Scientists and engineers have spent lifetimes in search of better, more efficient, methods for...

Weather and time permitting, I let my dog, The Mighty Shmooie, choose the route we walk every morning. We have five basic routes and, with the exception of going into people’s yards, he gets to choose...

Sometimes we assume we have all the answers and folks from the distant past have nothing to teach us. That’s especially true when we have to distill the meaning from unfamiliar language and e...

I have read ways in which mosquitoes are beneficial to the environment but I don’t know anyone who actually likes them. The one good thing is, they are fragile. Suppose they were like beetles and h...

The speed with which the world is changing means we cannot possibly hope to teach our young folks how to deal with it all. The speed of climate change, the advent of Artificial Intelligence, the...

A child comes in, “Can I have a popsicle?” Adult who is fixing dinner, “No, dinner is in fifteen minutes.” Two minutes later, “Is dinner ready?” “No, I said fifteen minutes.” Two minutes later, “Is di...

Scientists, philosophers, theologians, and regular folks like you and me all search for truth, for absolutes. However, science is not simply a matter of collecting facts. Science is a method of...

Since the advent of 24 hour per day, 365 days per year news cycle we’ve become accustomed to being inundated with so much news that we easily ignore news of great importance to someone else but d...

Human interactions can, generally speaking, be reduced to either force or mutuality of respect. Arguments can be made as to where we draw that line but we behave in certain ways either because we...

Sometimes it seems as if humanity lurches from disaster to disaster with brief periods of enlightenment in between. As we look back through history we learn about the so-called great conquerors. We...

A friend is taking music lessons from a talented teacher. She’s in Japan, he’s in New York. That, by itself, is utterly astonishing to many of us older folks. She assigned him a piece of music whi...

My mother was born on May 19th, 1913. When she was born 110 years ago, World War I hadn’t happened, the Civil War was a recent memory for many. There were ex-slaves who still worked in the family f...

When Rabbi Harold S. Kushner died last month my mind went back some 40 years to the publication of his book, “When Bad Things Happen to Good People”. It remains, to me, one of the very best books eve...

I saw a clip from the old show All in the Family. Meathead is putting on his socks and shoes. He puts on one sock then puts on that shoe. Archie, who is watching, goes ballistic because he believes...

A friend put in a request for a column addressing a sensitive subject. Over the years numerous folks have expressed similar emotions and there’s always guilt in their voices when they’ve told me abo...

A reader, who clearly didn't care for columns devoted to science, said, "You know, science gets things wrong." She was, of course, correct. Science does get things wrong sometimes. The difference...