One major threat from nuclear weapons that isn't talked about much is the "nothing can go wrong" problem. Actually, things did go wrong fairly often. ...
I agree: We aren't willing to fight the kind of war that might make a difference in the Middle East. Having said what we are not willing to do, let me...
I like a bit of horseradish in coarse mustard, and straight with a few things like roast beef. The black bread and pickles would help. I've tried to l...
Horseradish vodka. The Crown Fountain in winter is definitely less festive than in summer, but still effective on a cold, windy night, but in a differ...
Clearly nuclear weapons should be outlawed. They are a menace to all creatures great and small. Maybe nuclear war is survivable. Whether one would wan...
I've been to the bean and seen the bean and was mystically drawn up into the omphalos. I was in Chicago on a late 19th century building pilgrimage las...
Whether one is a pessimist, optimist, or flat affect, what information one has available matters. One might be very optimistic about one's financial s...
Tiff: Arizona is in the high side of gun ownership and gun deaths, but not an outlier. Wouldn't you rather live in a state with outlier stats like Haw...
A gun, especially a hand gun one can carry on one's person--concealed or displayed openly--is IN ITSELF a powerful influence coloring one's view of th...
Yes, of course anything and everything might be right today and proved wrong tomorrow, but walking around with all that uncertainty is just toooo pain...
An armed society is cautious, wary, and nervous. If someone in your armed society wants to hurt you, they will simply be more careful, cautious, and w...
Granted. However, it isn't the gun itself that instigates the shootings. Guns, in themselves, once given unnatural symbolic loadings and fetishist val...
I was actually surprised (honestly) that something wasn't done about the pressure cooker menace. I can see where one could probably not board a plane ...
Skinny Skinny teenagers are, in themselves, something of a problem. So are very, very fat ones. Why can't teenagers be "just right". Don't they know a...
We need every trick in the book to get through life without acting in utterly appalling and thoroughly reprehensible ways. We have reason but we are a...
How do we separate "beliefs" (confidence in the existence of events or entities for which there is no evidence) from other kinds of estimations of the...
About 1/3 of Americans own guns. In the 1970s it was around 1/2 of the adult population. Lets say there are 200 million adults (there are, roughly). A...
For the chicken, I would get "Smart Chicken" - a brand name. Smart chicken is air-cooled after being gutted, rather than being dropped into a vat of b...
Nobody has anything to gain, really, by China failing. I do wonder, though, whether the predictions about their future may be overly optimistic. The m...
Science: from Old French, from Latin scientia, from scire ‘know.’ and Philosophy: from Old French philosophie, via Latin from Greek philosophia ‘love ...
What is needed is a reasonably steady income that over time meets, but does not greatly exceed, the cost of operation. Too much money at one time pres...
Just about everything divides into three broad camps. Some people are vegans, some people eat only meat, and most people are somewhere in between. We ...
We know quite a bit about how the Manhattan Project was conceived and how it was executed. It cost about $2 billion plus 1945 dollars -- a small share...
Intellectual masturbation doesn't measure up to the real thing, so I'd advise against too much of it, just in terms of pleasure received per erg of la...
With all due respect to you, TGW--a thoughtful philosopher, this particular statement about scientists is kind of close to hogwash. (Hogwash is not a ...
The % of the 1.3 billion dollar Minneapolis budget that is spent on police is about 12%. Public Works and Capital Improvements are about 40%, give or ...
The relationship among "progress", "economic growth", and "increased consumption" needs to be clarified. If growth means more material consumption (mo...
"My postillion has been struck by lightning" was, for some odd reason, a favored sentence in French phrase books for beginners, like late 1800s, early...
I don't have the original hanging over my couch, (his stuff sells in the multiples of millions $$$) but as far as I know, the image in the OP is of th...
A road going downhill is at the same time going up hill. The old PF is both descending and ascending and always has been. Per Hera's Clitoris (AKA Her...
i agree with soylent that pessimism and optimism are "character predispositions" or personality features, and for which individuals can neither be bla...
I suspect that for abstract expressionists, and people like Pollock in particular, it's "doing the art" that is the crux of the matter -- and that par...
"Spirituality" is not a problem if one is conventionally religious. Maybe a billion of us are not conventionally religious, or are not religious at al...
What were dreams like before television and film? Ask Sigmund Freud. The Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1899, before either one. EVERYTHING...
I care about future generations, even though I haven't done a damn thing to provide my own share of progeny. (Gay boys generally don't.) But still, I ...
But realistic figurative work continued after 1920... Have you sampled "magic realism"? Here's a sample by Paul Cadmus, Fleets In, 1934. It was commis...
And what have you got against urinals? I'm not sure when or if I experienced such a reaction to art, but... take yourself back to 1917 to the New York...
The 'critic' whom you quote may have missed something. Out of the 'mountain of despair" a 'stone of hope' has been hewed -- it's not King, it's the op...
This sums it up for me pretty well. And of course ART isn't just painting. Beside the representational and plastic arts there are music, poetry, ficti...
Sure, art can be described, defined, judged, bought, sold, appreciated, depreciated, etc. Mostly, though, "art" is inextricably tied to experience. So...
No doubt about it, he'd be dead pretty damn quick. The police fall back on a few basic principles: 1. Don't back down. 2. Do not tolerate resistance. ...
"Well, it seems to me that you are willing to call quite a few people idiots: Epictetus, Seneca, Spinoza, Epicurus, etc." You are right -- reckless ac...
OK, I'm Humid. I don't count Reason as a Passion (emotion) because I subscribe to the biological account of brain activity. Reason is situated in the ...
The world may or may not be entering a post post-westphalian era, and even if it is, no one has the slightest idea how long s complete transition migh...
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