Monday, November 4, 2019
The Cult of Trump
What we have here is a cult. It begins at the center and spreads, this wave of delusion and absurdity, demolishing the ability to question, to think straight, to distinguish truth from lies or reality from fantasy... It overwhelms any ability for critical thinking, any logic and common sense in its...
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Saturday, October 26, 2019
Counting the costs...
I have taken a step back from commenting on Facebook and other social media platforms--even here, sometimes. It isn't that I am not reactive to some of the stuff that gets posted there, or that I don't disagree strongly, or don't see an opening for a really clever comeback. But I have taken another...
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Thursday, October 10, 2019
Just sayin'
The colonial powers paved the surface and built on shallow foundations, trying to negate and overcome the Earth. They have plowed down a few inches, they have shaved off the forests, they have killed off what they found troublesome and inconvenient. They believed they needed nothing and no one but...
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Saturday, October 5, 2019
Al Franken speaks
Al Franken last night, at the Paramount Theater in Seattle... Not only heartening to hear a political speaker making sense, but to see the enthusiasm for him and the size of his audience was also very encouraging. I particularly like his suggestion that they should give Trump the nuclear codes--but...
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Thursday, September 26, 2019
Yay for money!
Money is a battery for storing the energies produced by human work. It's a transformer, too, changing human work into stuff. When the potter trades pottery for the farmer's grain, it is a device for equalizing any difference in the relative values for the goods generated by the work. In itself, it...
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Friday, September 13, 2019
What can we learn from debates?
Not much, I say. We already know what most of them will say, we already understand that their 'talking points' are prepared well ahead of time to deal with any question by turning it back to those points, and that those points are planned strategically to influence the most voters, especially...
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Thursday, September 12, 2019
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up...
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Wednesday, September 11, 2019
In Memorium...
On this day 18 years later, it is time to repeat what rational people have always known: Terrorism does not work. Every goal it accomplishes is counter to its intentions. It makes everything worse for the people it is meant to promote. Terrorism is narcissistic and delusional, thinking itself...
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Thursday, September 5, 2019
Consider...
Communities are entities and their inhabitants belong to them, not the other way around. They are composed of everyone in them, they are rich in life and art, in ideas and motions and sounds and smells. Power and wealth create illusions of ownership, but all illusions dissolve in time: lives come...
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Sunday, August 25, 2019
Thinking About Problems and solutions
All problems started as solutions. When considering new solutions, it's useful to start with considering the problem to be solved, specifically, what problem was this intended as the solution for? As a writing coach, I tell writers, before you go breaking the rules, understand what problem the rules...
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