Yes. The most corrupt behave abominably. But fretting over trivial infractions (and confusing etiquette with morality) isn't healthy either. Endless f...
Paul says a lot of things I don't much like. I like the idea that one's good deeds should outnumber one's bad deeds. That is something we flawed creat...
Whether by official definitions of sin, or my own expectations for moral behavior, I'm a sinner. I have sinned. Just guessing, but all 8 billion of us...
The 1980s were a downer, for sure. The 60's and 70s had been a time of great music and liberation with a contrasting crappy war, presidential assassin...
CDs don't really have a groove, they have the digital pox. So yes, CD's decreased grooviness. Another major factor was the election of the very non-gr...
More Groovy Details EVEN MORE GROOVY DETAILS!!! Recent scholarship makes it clear that sound recording was invented twice: First by inventor Edouard-L...
Google Ngram calculates the frequency of word usage based on its very large corpus of scanned printed matter. "Groovy" was in use for all of the 20th ...
I believe people are more alike than they are different. We are all subjected to competing influences as children -- on into adulthood -- that become ...
The Trolley Problem is a question of the 'greatest good for the greatest number of people". Somebody is going to die, one way or another. It's interes...
Wait a minute. You've 'clarified' the matter out of existence. IF they are not attacking you, then there is no justification for an attack in self-def...
Exactly. The reason why "self-defense" in the moment of imminent or ensuing harm is acceptable is that the central nervous system does not allow refle...
One Art Elizabeth Bishop 1911 – 1979 The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is ...
Having spent days... months... years... in a state of delusion or deep misinformation about all sorts of things -- all of which seemed perfectly clear...
My theory is that dogs hear the same music we hear. Dogs appear to have zero interest, however, in these sounds, presumably because they have no capac...
Nature isn't "the peaceable kingdom", but it isn't entirely "red in tooth and claw" either. Take a lion and a herd of grazers. The grazers can tell if...
The good old days... double decker street cars https://64.media.tumblr.com/d9c3c27f80e0d67cf681b5e429a4413f/0589f859bc081b35-4c/s500x750/2766a0e8615e7...
As you observed, it is surprising how two people separated by thousands of miles, age, and background may both be thinking tangentially to everything ...
From a macro-perspective on college education, I think there is a fairly large discontinuity between what colleges advertise, what prospective student...
Sadly, China no longer manufactures those room-sized porcelain cups where one could rest on an over-stuffed sofa while taking one's morning coffee sur...
Note: Philosophy majors were too destitute to show up on the list at all. I'm thankful I didn't go in for art history -- I'd be on skid row for sure. ...
There is a passage late in Bernstein's Mass where the priest drops the glass goblet of wine. The soloist sings about "how easily things get broken". A...
New tools (like fMRI), new studies (like the microbiome), and so on illuminate the previously unknown or vaguely known. New studies give people new re...
Certainly there are many meaningful and meaning-giving endeavors which we can undertake. But for better or for worse, we are made by our relationships...
On the one hand, you could spend the rest of your long life sorting out just some of the issues tangled up in the theology and history of Judaism and ...
And what is the essence of religion, which I assume you have tracked down? I totally agree. This world is all we know, and all we can know, however mu...
And, sometimes, the church is against members who deviate too far from the tenets of the faith. These days, people are usually not thrown out of main ...
I'm not spiritual. What I have is a very conflicted relationship with religion, church, and God, who I am fairly certain does not exist. I like formal...
Like the police chief, you are comically shocked--SHOCKED!--to find contradictions, inconsistencies, and hypocrisy in the institutions and practice of...
Relatively conservative and liberal values slosh back and forth in the bucket of mainstream American Christian politics. Sometimes some Protestants ha...
The pope seems to be having difficulty running his own shop, never mind the U.S. But Christian Nationalism is a real and present danger. Its main feat...
I watched a pretty good 90 minute show on Netflix yesterday -- Leaving the World Behind -- something like that. It was full of mostly unrealized menac...
"Mind the gap!" Biblical studies are fascinating, partly because there is a critical gap between the content of the New Testament and the events which...
This is quite true. Self-directed learning can turn out very lopsided, just owing to the lack of direction and resistance from other students or teach...
Question: Does education enable children to exceed their parents' economic performance? Answer: Yes, IF the parents' economic performance has been ver...
At 77, it's been a long time since I was in school, but I've been professionally interested in education. Schools have several functions: teaching bas...
Exactly!!!! One of my elderly sisters, a fundamentalist and Trumper, maintains all sorts of illogical, unreasonable ideas about religion and politics....
Those were around in the early 1950s. Wiedenhaft's Grocery had them. They were disgusting, Ditto for the other items n the list. Especially candy corn...
Which our dear leaders might just do. The thing is, "the system" we find ourselves in escapes our control from the beginning. We can't even be precise...
You put your finger on one of our (humanity's) great problems. We have never known how o direct and control change in a way that benefits the largest ...
One line of American leftist theory is "industrial democracy". The idea is that workers own, control, and operate the productive business of society. ...
Comments