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.
Tuesday, September 22, 2015
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.
Tuesday, August 11, 2015
The New American Revolution
When the world went into a frenzy of updating old repressive regimes, I began to consider why that happens there, but is not likely to happen here in America. I concluded that it's because repressive regimes stifle free expression of true thoughts and feelings: the angers, fears, resentments and ideas are locked down until they build to an explosion of passions that change the world. In a world with freedom of expression, these pressures build to blow off now and then, but never to the point of... Sign in to see full entry.
Wednesday, July 29, 2015
A lion dies, a goat lives...
I stopped at Facebook on my way here this morning, and saw several articles there, as is usually the case, that both saddened and encouraged me. By now, maybe you've already heard of the American dentist who, with the assistance of a local 'guide,' lured the lion out of the national park in Zimbabwe and killed, beheaded and skinned one of the parks most loved and most people-friendly inhabitants, Cecil.... Sign in to see full entry.
Monday, July 27, 2015
"Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth."
I'm not sure who to attribute the quote to, but it is repeated in word and deed so often that the lie must be self-evident: "Calling a sheep's tail a leg doesn't make it one." The Nazi propaganda machine played the lie for all they could get from it: "It is easier to convince people with a big lie than a little lie." We are lied to constantly, on all sides all the time. As consumers and constituents, our beliefs and attitudes, and thereby, our actions are fueled by big and little lies, by lies... Sign in to see full entry.