Frugality is an underrated virtue, especially for people who aren't already rich. And for those who are really really rich, there is no amount of weal...
Full disclosure: I don't much care how you, or someone else, defines "action". However, as a confessed uninterested party, I would make this suggestio...
Hmmm, never looked it up. Well... never too late. Yes, people do make money trading insubstantial derivatives. I don't really understand how this work...
The last Tzar of Russia, Nicholas II, was worth an estimated $300-400 billion in current money. Well worth the Bolsheviks' time to liquidate his fortu...
Except for those 1 percenters who make their money by trading in currencies and the like, most of the Uber-rich, super-rich, and merely rich make thei...
What you say sounds a lot closer to what people understand as Chomsky's approach. It makes sense to me that the capacity and operation of language wou...
It would be artificial and it would be inordinately inelegant. However complete the Old English corpus of words might have been in 800 a.d., it has be...
I like looking up those inordinately obscure words, and I keep a list of them--pearls snatched from the jaws of swine. I have a (now retired) interest...
The mods will punish Oliver5 for writing reckless declarative sentences. Or Xtrix, once the most faulty declarative statement has been determined. I'm...
I have not found linguistics of much interest, but thanks for the historical piece. Google Translate is useful --no doubt about that. Google Translate...
I totally agree. We could make a list of individuals who are responsible for the number of guns that exist. First, there is the list of individuals wh...
One of the things that adults and philosophers tell us is that "We should not believe everything we read." Childhood is overrated by adults. Do childr...
Who could imagine what could possibly go wrong with our attempt to "liberate Thailand" or Hong Kong? Or Cuba--or Monaco--for that matter. If and when ...
Was there a Yelp review of the experience? Did the women like it? Did human women merit the angelic effort? How did human women give birth to the gian...
I propose that books of the Old Testament were granted canonical status by Jewish communities on the basis of then-current use and and usefulness. Dif...
The critical ingredient missing from utopian schemes is a population of utopians. Lacking an appropriate population, utopias remain unoccupied. That s...
It's what you got, so you'll just have to make do with it. "Life" built up these senses (and the additional ones that @"Banno" listed) over the preced...
Individuals and society interpenetrate There is no individual outside of society, and no society without individuals. Our complex culture is transmitt...
I doubt if imperialism (meaning, colonies under the control of the 'mother country') didn't make sense economically. On the one hand, the colonies ser...
The majority of Americans have not seen massive improvements in their standard of living during the last 40 years. Inflation and wage stagnation--two ...
It fell to Truman ("The buck stops here") to give final approval, but Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and another city had been left unbombed by design to provid...
In a response I was writing in another thread I was going to compare Stalin, Churchill, Hitler, and Roosevelt, drawing the conclusion that Hitler was ...
The human species began as neither good nor evil. Good and evil were nothing until we thought of them. Because we have set out "good" and "evil" as te...
Great read: "Leiningen Versus the Ants" by Carl Stephenson -- a classic short story published in the December 1938 Esquire. Here's a reading of it on ...
I think there is such a thing as "human nature" but it isn't rigidly consistent from person to person, situation to situation. There is a fair amount ...
I consider your observation to be a creative insight. Up until the time when recorded music became at least fairly good, plentiful, cheap, and easily ...
Where were you thinking Felonia should be? Depending on one's politics, Manhattan? Georgia? Los Angeles? Puerto Rico? North Dakota? Isle Royale (its i...
So what evidence do we have that corporeal punishment (beating, whipping, caning, shock, etc.) works as a deterrent to crime, and what are the psychol...
We need secure prisons for dangerous criminals who are likely to pose a serious threat to society. How many would that be? Far less than the present p...
I think your guess is pretty much spot on. English didn't become a world language on the merits of the language itself. The British Empire projected E...
Old English wasn't simple, but it was the Germanic language of an agrarian people who decamped from Western Europe and took up life in England. The An...
Maybe that "he" is the English default for person. He, mankind, men... She, womankind, woman just isn't the default. If a writer says, "all womankind"...
OK, forget fearsome. I was thinking of a phrase from the Psalms, "Blessed are they who fear the Lord and walk in His ways". The blessed are not scared...
God knows what I said about the matter at hand; I don't remember. Hopefully it was nice, It's not the "correct" adjective, it's merely the current adj...
Universities do not operate as missions of enlightenment to the proletariat. One thing universities do is train people (including some proles) to reac...
Certainly another term would have enabled him to worsen the malignancies he found or started. Whether it would be the end of democracy, I don't know.....
A lot of us Americans never doubted that America lives, even if the chief executive of the nation (along with a substantial following) was disgraceful...
I am very glad to see Donald Trump on the way out. Joe and Kamala will put on a more dignified show, which by itself will be a relief, but let's not g...
Here's a play you might want to read sometime when you have nothing better to do -- The Bacchae by Euripides. The tragedy features Dionysus and his mo...
At the present time, there seems to be an opposition between the philosopher, boundary-behaving Apollonian type and more experiential boundary-violati...
Everything you said in your post pretty much matches my understanding. And you are right about the utopias appealing to their authors. Two interesting...
For my money, the major flaw of BLM is that they have not articulated any plan that would have any effect on black-on-black violence. And they should,...
OK, thanks for the encouragement. On closer examination, my arithmetic applied to the New York Times map shows Biden winning by a hair or two. But aga...
Apparently 'the situation' of individuals in closely contested states precludes accurate polling. In states which are predominantly liberal or conserv...
Where you happen to reside is neither a virtue you can claim nor a vice you can be convicted of. Unless, of course, you chose to live in a shit hole c...
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