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Recent Stories

1. ROBERT PRICE: Survival of the poet in the age of Zuckerberg

   By Robert Price

   Saturday, Jun 15 2013 11:00 PM

   For a couple of years now, I have been anguishing over two diverging developments. On one hand, expertise in the digital arts is becoming more important by the day. By some estimations, our collective level of knowledge doubles every two years. Or is it two months? We shed old technologies like gopher snakes shed their skin. As a consequence, new college graduates preparing to enter the workforce need be not only technologically competent but also emotionally resilient. Change will forever be their cubicle-mate.

   At the same time, I've been watching my daughter negotiate college life. Jill has the social thing down pretty well, it would seem, and her grades are good. But -- and this has to rank right up there on the hierarchy of fathers'...

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2. ROBERT PRICE: 'Brain drain' slowed a bit this month

   You've heard the shorthand description: Brain drain. It refers to the tendency of this (or any) town's best and brightest to get out of Dodge at the first opportunity and make a life far from the backward provinces of their youth. As a...
3. 

   ROBERT PRICE: I've got some campaign advice for Vidak and Perez

   One of the benefits of participation in an off-year special election is that political candidates don't have to share the stage with a lot of other people. That also happens to be one of the chief drawbacks. Without all the background...
4. 

   ROBERT PRICE: Infallibility has some real drawbacks

   Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood slapped down critics of his department with such confident certainty at last week's news conference addressing David Sal Silva's fatal skirmish with officers, he may not want to hear this. He so...

5. ROBERT PRICE: Ralph Bailey's radio fiction

   If you caught Ralph Bailey's May 22 show on KERN-AM 1180 in which he ripped yours truly for having supposedly acquiesced to the unreasonable demands of a politician and ordered the removal of radio/webcast host Scott Cox from his own show,...
6. 

   ROBERT PRICE: Has good-ol'-boy corruption seized the Kern County Sheriff's Office?

   The Kern County Sheriff's Office is out of control. That's one conclusion many people will draw based on the events of the past two weeks and in the context of recent years. We won't know whether that's a fair characterization until we get...
7. 

   ROBERT PRICE: GOP's 'Batman' says victory is a matter of attention to semantics

   The Republican Party's self-flagellation tour, entering its sixth month, came through Bakersfield last week. The campaign's missteps were dutifully enumerated one by one, but when the guest of honor offered a solution, boy, could you hear...

9. ROBERT PRICE: Why do we grow lawns in this desert?

   It has taken a year, but I am finally in contention for best lawn on my block in the mow-it-yourself division. I'd surrender all of that glory in a second, however, if I could figure out a better use for my little patch of earth that didn't...

10. ROBERT PRICE: Should the DA have opted out of carrot-hauler's hit-and-run case?

    Those who are adept at reading between the lines may have noticed an awkward and unanswered question in Steven Mayer's April 14 article, "Death in a crosswalk." Several people I know did. Mayer told the story of two women, a mother and her...
11. 

    ROBERT PRICE: Amid Boston's tragedy, an unscripted eloquence

    When events like those in Boston seize our attention, the nuance of real life gives way to black and white moral polarities: unspeakable evil and heroic gallantry. Little room exists for supporting roles.    But occasionally we glimpse...
12. 

    ROBERT PRICE: Does Congress really want to cut spending? Not if its rebuke of US Postal Service is any indication

    How addicted to spending is Congress? So addicted it'll actually force a government agency to squander $2 billion a year that the agency would very much like to save. I refer to the U.S. Postal Service's plan, announced in February, to...

13. ROBERT PRICE: Paranoid, yes, but we've got good reason

    Barack Obama is doing a miserable job as the Antichrist. His acts of overt evil haven't been nearly as blatant as one would expect of such an auspicious figure in human history. But that's what second terms are for. Now that the voters have...

14. ROBERT PRICE: 'Will of the people' blows with the wind

    It's as predictable as the arrival of cherry blossoms on the National Mall in early spring: the U.S. Supreme Court weighs the constitutionality of a new law that has substantial popular support and wary proponents of that law start...