BC

In the 1880s some thought it a miracle drug -- something that would give one an extra big bounce in one's step. It was legal to use. Wasn't he addicte...

- Recreational drugs, including gin and tonic, may produce a frame of wind which is "conducive to insight" but so might other things. - Religious ritu...

No, It is one of the new Rorschach test images, re-engineered to capture modern consumer psychopathies. https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/b896a4deb0004cc...

I did not remember the project name: it's the Jesus Seminar. Thanks to @"wayfarer"

Whether you "could debauch and murder through life and get to an eternal paradise via deathbed conversion" is not something one can attribute to Jesus...

There are, indeed, so many points on which one can / should wonder about the veracity of the gospels. After all, the gospel writers were separated fro...

The seeds of what became Christianity were first scattered among the Jews by a Jew -- Jesus Christ. We are told that Jesus preached, healed, and perfo...

It isn't clear to me how deep human morality is, a good share of the time, never mind morality among non-humans. Some animals are capable of making ju...

Thanks for the reference to the Doug Henley piece. The song DIRTY LAUNDRY did appear in 1982, and it was #1 on the Billboard charts for a while. Don't...

Your lack of theological understanding (unsubtle thick-headed, never a nuance thinking) might be of zero importance. It depends. What is most importan...

Maybe people always aired their dirty laundry, but it was using the expression IN PRINT that was taboo. Round about the end of the 1970s, what with wo...

According to Google Ngram, the expression "air dirty laundry" rarely appeared in print until about 1980. What happened in 1979 that resulted in laundr...

That's a very cogent question. Which is the best route to social change: inside agitators or outside agitators? Edit: It might depend on how much filt...

I heard that crime does not pay.

@"karl stone" When I read the Communist Manifesto, I don't find any inspiration or justification for the gulags, purges, mass executions, genocides, e...

Good OP and thread. The red brick school house use to be in charge of shaping citizen / worker behavior and thinking. In that role, schools did a fair...

I just discovered COPS episodes on YouTube. An old stand-by.

The problem with writing engineering solutions on toilet walls is that the bandwidth is so narrow, and you have to get into the right toilets in the f...

Question: Are you banging on in the right places? TPF is a good place to bat around ideas, but as a starting point for industrial change, it's a terri...

Stupid, idiotic proposals are made and actions taken that defy human reason. As H. L. Mencken said (allegedly) "No one ever went broke underestimating...

It is as good as a rhetorical question, and it depends on various factors. You know that. Read enough history and sociology and you will see patterns ...

You shut up.

How much hypocrisy can one maintain without being rotten to the core? Everyone is a hypocrite to some degree (excepting thee and me, of course), so ar...

If architects are so smart, how come the Millennium Tower in San Francisco is sinking and tilting?

Karl, I've agreed several times that geothermal (magma) is a good idea. I'm convinced. What I have been laying out is an explanation for why the rest ...

I beg to differ. I've written dumber things. Yes, the government does do some R&D investment. Out of the US Federal budget of 2.3 Trillion Dollars, 10...

Capitalism, as Karl Marx pointed out, is chock full of contradictions. You don't have to be a Marxist to see that. Humans, with rare exceptions, are t...

Sorry you missed the big meeting where all of this was decided. Your gold plated invitation and all-expense-paid ultra-luxury hotel reservation must h...

No, they don't. Not in Washington, nor in most capitols. It isn't that they are so much opposed to geo-thermal as they are opposed to risking their ec...

It's conceivable that someone might have put a piece of left-over lobster in a hunk of bread and fed it to you. I haven't lived there for 50 years, so...

I never ate beans in Boston. Or Boston Creme Pie. I was too poor for such luxury items as beans and Boston cream pie. Much better were the rare roast ...

History of "Bean Town" Apparently the appellation relates to bean pots than beans alone, or tons of beans consumed. a) In modern times, Boston became ...

I've never been in France, but Strasbourg Cathedral is pretty impressive.

There used to be the Combat Zone just a couple of blocks from Boston Commons, but I'm afraid they pasteurized the rich mix of sailors, sleazy bars, wh...

The subjunctive form is "if I were you". Right -- pedantic pricks always making picayune corrections.

Personally, I'd give the whole American south a pass, unless you are doing a tour of of social problems. Why would you go to Florida if you haven't se...

Do they even have alligators in Spain?

PoMo didn't invent relativism, of course, but to whatever extent relativism is a feature of PoMo, I find it useful. Different groups of people hold di...

If anything is permissible, then God is dead? per Jack Karamazov's brother, Ivan.

Preopus, postopus, peropus: the best times to have sex with respect to work.

I thought that was called "interdicktion". "It's like sex. When it's good, it's great; when it isn't good, it's still not that bad." Seinfeld.

nomorrow - end of the world

The 'magic' isn't in the basic technology. There's no 'magic' in the physics and chemistry of using hydrogen instead of hydrocarbons. The 'magic' lies...

"Magical thinking" is from Kunstler's book, "Too Much Magic". Kunstler and Smil both warn us away from solutions which require 'magic' of some sort to...

I nunc intellegite.

Quomodo stultus pertinax sapiens efficitur?

oops, too obscure. But surely you've heard of "glittering generalities"? "A glittering generality or glowing generality is an emotionally appealing ph...

That's a scriptural generality: "Anyone who is among the living has hope —even a live dog is better off than a dead lion!" Ecclesiastes 9:4 Are "glitt...

Congratulations. You are the first person to post this Latin phrase.

I have a pessimistic, fatalistic streak, I suppose. I am more confident of pessimistic predictions than optimistic ones. Maybe it's genetic. Some peop...