WHO IS BILL MARES? SEE FOR YOURSELF. COME, TASTE HIS WARES.
COMPILATION BY LUCY WARNER
FEBRUARY 10, 2018


BILL MARES IS AN NPR VIDEO COMMENTATOR FROM VERMONT, HOME OF SOME FINE DEMOCRATS AND PROGRESSIVES. HIS VIDEOS, BELOW, ARE EXTREMELY GOOD. HERE IS A PRECIOUS VERBAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL JEWEL: “MARK TWAIN ONCE WROTE ‘THE TRUTH IS A PRECIOUS COMMODITY, AND YOU MUST USE IT SPARINGLY!’”

HERE IS JUST ONE LARGE GROUP OF MARES’ LITTLE SPEECHES. FOR MORE, GO TO THE NPR WEBSITE: HTTP://DIGITAL.VPR.NET/PEOPLE/BILL-MARES#STREAM/0.


http://digital.vpr.net/people/bill-mares#stream/0
Bill Mares
COMMENTATOR
Writer Bill Mares of Burlington is also a former teacher and state legislator. His most recent book is a collection of his VPR commentaries, titled "3:14 And Out."

Mares: Churchill's Legacy
By BILL MARES • JAN 24, 2018

Orwell and Churchill were two of my boyhood heroes. Both men regarded politics, not as dirty work, but as an honorable calling, capable of changing the affairs of people for the better and protecting both the individual and free speech. In fact, Churchill once declared that "A state of society where men may not speak their minds cannot long endure."

Mares: Community Centers Of The Mind
By BILL MARES • JAN 10, 2018
Listen Listening...2:38
I was lucky. I grew up in a house full of books and often heard my mother say that "Books are the next best thing to friends."

Mares: Critical Thinking
By BILL MARES • DEC 15, 2017
Listen Listening...2:57
For 20 years, my license plate read THINK as an injunction to both my students and the general public.

Mares: Smart Phone
By BILL MARES • NOV 2, 2017
Listen Listening...2:36
On a recent trip to France, my cell phone died. I didn't quite experience the five stages of grief, but I was more than merely annoyed, and then annoyed that I was annoyed.

Mares: Vietnam Era Memories
By BILL MARES • SEP 29, 2017
Listen Listening...2:39
During the excruciating military, political and social tumult of the Vietnam War era, I experienced an intellectual and emotional arc that was probably not unusual.

Mares: Hurricane Lessons
By BILL MARES • SEP 15, 2017
Listen Listening...2:47
I watched the house I grew up in become inundated by four feet of water as Houston, the city of my youth, endured 50 inches of rainfall – and was reminded that years ago I myself volunteered on a National Guard amphibious vehicle in one hundred mile per hour winds to rescue people from another September hurricane.

Mares: Revitalized Community
By BILL MARES • SEP 5, 2017
Listen Listening...2:47
Thirty years ago I was a State Representative when I met with a small group of Burlingtonians intent on the revitalization of Pine Street, a long panhandle of businesses and studios in the city's South End.

Mares: Swimming Safety
By BILL MARES • JUL 31, 2017
Listen Listening...2:35
Two refugee youths from Africa drowned recently in separate accidents in Burlington. One was Ali Muhina from Somalia, the other Christian Kibabu of the Republic of Congo.

Mares: Bees And Farming
By BILL MARES • JUN 30, 2017
Listen Listening...2:44
The facts of Vermont beekeeping are quickly told: beekeepers number between eight hundred and one thousand; annual honey production from two to three hundred thousand pounds of honey, with a retail value of two million dollars.

Mares: Drivers Of Economic Leveling
By BILL MARES • APR 17, 2017
Listen Listening...2:30
Walter Scheidel, a Stanford humanities professor, builds on Joseph Stiglitz's and Thomas Piketty's work on economic inequality with his own book, The Great Leveler, Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-first Century.

Mares: The Palmer Raids
By BILL MARES • APR 3, 2017
Listen Listening...2:50
During World War One, a crisis in civil liberties began brewing as Germanophobia combined with anti-union sentiment and resistance to immigration from southern and Eastern Europe to ignite widespread fear of political radicals and anarchists.

Mares: Shared Sacrifice
By BILL MARES • MAR 17, 2017
Listen Listening...2:32
The election of President Trump has reminded me of Elizabeth Kűbler-Ross' five stages of grief. The first is denial – as in how could 63 million people be so wrong? After that comes anger, followed by bargaining, depression and finally acceptance.

Mares: ESOPs
By BILL MARES • FEB 22, 2017
Listen Listening...2:40
Switchback Brewing, with a thirty thousand barrel production capacity and 30 employees now joins half a dozen other breweries around the country that have established ESOPs - or Employee Stock Ownership Plans. More than six thousand other U.S. firms are now ESOPs, with a total employment of more than fourteen million workers.

Mares: Healthy Aging in Vermont
By BILL MARES • JAN 25, 2017
Listen Listening...2:44
I’ve recently had a good reason to take an interest in programs designed to improve senior physical and mental well-being - and along the way, perhaps even reduce Medicare costs.

Mares: Truth
By BILL MARES • SEP 30, 2016
Listen Listening...2:54
Mark Twain once wrote "The Truth is a precious commodity, and you must use it sparingly!"

Mares: Immigration
By BILL MARES • AUG 30, 2016
Listen Listening...2:55
I’m on the board of the Vermont Council on World Affairs, a 65-year old group founded by, among others, Vermont Sen. Warren G. Austin the first American ambassador to the U.N.

Mares: Hail Caesar
By BILL MARES • AUG 15, 2016
Listen Listening...2:47
There I was in UVM’s Royall Tyler Theater watching a performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar when I became aware that, for me at least, the evening was turning into a mash-up of ideas, memories and politics.

Mares: Hosting Russian Cartoonists
By BILL MARES • JUL 27, 2016
Listen Listening...2:48
The news from and about Russia hasn’t been good lately – what with Olympic doping punishments and suspicious hacking into Democratic party records. But this past week, as a member of the board of the Vermont Council of World Affairs, I got a different perspective.

Mares: Alvin Toffler's Future Shock
By BILL MARES • JUL 5, 2016
Listen Listening...2:51
Alvin Toffler, who died last week at age 87, was a self-taught social scientist, writer, and futurist - that is, one who engaged in wide interdisciplinary and systems thinking on such matters as diverse global trends, and possible scenarios. Toffler taught one of the first college course in futurism at the New School in New York City. But Toffler was no remote ivy-tower academic. He began his career as a welder in a Cleveland factory, and wrote: My wife and I spent five years working on assembly lines. We came to fully understand the criticisms of the industrial age, in which you are an appendage of a machine.

Mares: Donald Cook
By BILL MARES • JUN 8, 2016
Listen Listening...2:40
Just a few weeks ago in the Eastern Baltic off the coast of the Russian outpost, Kaliningrad, Russian fighter planes buzzed a US guided missile destroyer - with one plane flying within 100 feet of the ship. It was just another one of the probings and provocations that have gone on for several years as Russia and NATO members joust for maritime rights in what many describe a New Cold War. So I wasn’t especially surprised when I heard about the confrontation in the news. But what did catch my eye was the name of the ship: the Donald G. Cook.

Mares: Pollinators
By BILL MARES • MAR 24, 2016
Listen Listening...2:54
Vermont has just held its first ever conference on beetles, bees and butterflies, to consider the threats that all pollinators face in Vermont. The conference was a response to President Obama’s directive to create a national strategy to promote the health of honey bees and other pollinators.

GO TO WEBSITE FOR MORE OF THESE. HE’S A PROLIFIC VIDEOGRAPHER FOR VERMONT PUBLIC RADIO, WITH A VERY WIDE RANGE OF INTERESTS. GO TO HTTP://DIGITAL.VPR.NET/PEOPLE/BILL-MARES#STREAM/0.


https://www.facebook.com/events/1894970807490672/
“BILL MARES: THE FULL VERMONTY”

THERE’S GOOD STUFF WRITTEN HERE, PLUS A WICKEDLY FUNNY CARTOON.