Loosely Speaking

By Ciel - About Me - E-mail this page - Add to My Favorites - Add to Blog List - See other blogs in Everything Else

Thursday, October 15, 2015

The Democrats take the stage...

...and they had a debate! They spent no time smacking each other down, and with some pretty direct questions from Anderson Cooper, moderating, issues were discussed and character explored. A couple of thoughts occurred to me: There were five on stage, only two of whom can really be hoping for the nomination. Why do the others bother? My theory is that they are jockeying for position, for the VP side of the ticket. So... what about a Sanders/Clinton ticket? Very possible, maybe even likely, and... Sign in to see full entry.

Thursday, October 8, 2015

Winning with compassion

So much is changing in the world in the ways we think of ourselves in relationship to others, both of human and non-humankind. It lifts my heart every time I see a report of new public policy embracing compassion and acknowledging our role as Earth's stewards where it has all been about exploitation for all the millennia since civilization began. But I think we should also view with compassion the human lives forced to change to keep up. For many, priorities have been about caring for their... Sign in to see full entry.

Wednesday, October 7, 2015

Bambi vs The Big Bad Wolf

https://www.facebook.com/atchuup/videos/1456047227995347/?fref=nf I sure hope this video gets to the people who most need to see it: the ranchers who decry the destructiveness of wolves in an environment, for instance, and the legislators in Alaska who think massive wolf-hunts from helicopters are a good idea. Society has been so Disneyfied over the past several generations, so Bambioozled into thinking that deer, slender and graceful and... well, doe-eyed, that they must be cherished like... Sign in to see full entry.

Tuesday, September 22, 2015

This speaks for itself...

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/sep/18/ig-nobel-prizes-2015 The biggest point to be respected here is that even apparently silly science can have great serious science implications. Sign in to see full entry.

Monday, September 21, 2015

With a hat-tip to Naut, who also loves history!

History is such a fragile thing. It's all very well to say, no, it is what happened, it's indelible, it is actual... So it is, an event, an action, plays out its options and leads to its conclusion. But that isn't history. History is the story of what happened, and that is prey to any agenda, any perceptual filtering, angle of witness, sense of importance and imperative. This is why we cannot truly know what happened, and the closest we can get to the actuality of the occasio n is by getting as... Sign in to see full entry.

Saturday, September 19, 2015

Proposed: The opposite of Social Democracy is Social Darwinism

The trouble with social Darwinism is that Society is not quite like Nature. In Nature, the fittest survive to reproduce, keeping their more-fit genes in the gene pool of their species. The unfit die off without reproducing. But in human society, those who are not the most fit do not die off, removing themselves from the landscape and their genes from the gene pool. Those that can't compete economically with the most successful accumulators of wealth, resource, and power--all of which attract... Sign in to see full entry.

Friday, September 18, 2015

Bernie Sanders: What I like, and don't like

What I like about Bernie: He is vocally, adamantly, furiously the champion of Americans who are not the Upper 1%, possibly even the Upper 5% or 10%. He understands who We, the People are, and sees very clearly who is using Us for their own power and wealth accumulation. He has swum for years among the sharks of DC, deftly avoiding being eaten. Gotta admire that! He has the integrity to turn his back on PAC monies, and to refuse to engage in personal attack campaigning. He has always shown his... Sign in to see full entry.

Thursday, September 17, 2015

Hillary: What I like and what I don't like

What I like about Hillary: She knows her way around the Establishment of American politics, and she is herself established around the world. What I don't like about Hillary: She is part of the Washington Establishment, plays by the same old rules; She also is one of a self-entitling segment of a generation who makes their own rules, and exempts themselves from the rules everyone else has to play by, thinking that being so much smarter than everyone else, she can talk/lie her way out of any... Sign in to see full entry.

Saturday, September 12, 2015

It's now.

Personally, I don't care how much of the evident, data-supported global climate changes are caused by human activity. Change is upon us, and we need to be planning how we will live when the world we got used to is not the one we have now. If we don't or won't, then we are done. We will need to know how to grow some of our own food. We will need to put in place ways to deal with extremes of heat, cold, and storm. We will have to make accommodation--literally, places for people to live--when... Sign in to see full entry.

Wednesday, September 9, 2015

Forget it.

Forget it. Really. Whatever awful thing happened, forget it. Forget the Alamo, forget the Maine. If it was over and done a hundred years ago, if all the participants are long dead and dust, let it go and move forward. You can't until you do. Over and done... Sure, there are many terrible things out of the past that are not over and done, battles still being fought though maybe under other masks and rationales. Slavery, for instance. Gender equality in the Free World. But the Maine? No. There was... Sign in to see full entry.

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