We are compelled to talk about free will and determinism--we have no choice in the matter. The keystone in our mental structure is either free will or...
If a criminal can not avoid committing criminal acts (say, arson, rape, and/or bloody murder), would that not be an excellent reason to lock him or he...
Don't know what the retail price is, but it is hard, these days, to find slop for less than $5.99 a lb. But you are absolutely right -- they weren't e...
How do you define "enlightenment"? How would you know that you were "enlightened"? Would anyone else recognize your "enlightenment"? This kind of seve...
OK, then. Just take that delicious vegan risotto back to the kitchen. We'll have it tomorrow. Sure. But as you know, morality and ethics are not simpl...
A good principle is to return meat to the status it occupied for many centuries in western culture: Meat was 'feast food'. One ate it on celebratory o...
That's why I am not a vegan. The exploitation of animals is an essential human trait that extends back into era of Homo erectus and earlier. We evolve...
It's my specialty. Yes, true. However... Deviant food choices have been a vehicle for personal expression, personal exceptionalism, and personal valid...
The JW will not orbit the earth; it will orbit the sun in the comfort and luxury provided by La Grange Point 2. Read all about it here. For an animati...
There wasn't much to 'see' in the Big Bang, because for the first 240,000 - 300,000 years, there was no light. Don't know about other radiation in the...
The essay does not deserve credit for not having syntactic mistakes; logical fallacies; plagiarism. I would expect any fairly good essay to be clear a...
I apparently do not know what I am talking about. "They" say the universe is 13 billion years old, give or take 15 minutes. check. "They" also say the...
Allow me to alert you to the fact that there is no dark side of the moon. The side we do not see faces the sun as much as the side we do see. Also, th...
All my fingers and all of my toes are crossed (cramping has already set in) on behalf of the James Webb. What could go wrong? Alas, it is one more unw...
I had pan-cooked pancakes yesterday. No baking, no lingonberries. Kropsua would be good were some Finn to make it authentic. The Finnish kitchen calva...
I give Don't Look Up from Netflix two thumbs up, but maybe I'm easy. It's a painful comedy. it IS nominally about the end of the world (not a spoiler)...
As far as Minnesota is from an ocean, eating stewed fresh oysters on Christmas Eve is a thing. Major, sacrament, actually. As Flannery O'Connor said a...
Well, it's 3:30 pm, CST, in the outback here. it's 41ºF, with falling temperatures and snow expected. I'm going to a traditional Xmas Eve communion se...
The matter of equality / inequality seems more like an obsession among millions of people, rather than a taboo. What is taboo is the claim that geneti...
If "the only war is the class war" then we already have a civil war in progress, It is of long duration but quiet. The very wealthy and the very power...
You ask about dead threads when many threads reference philosophers and philosophic question that have been decidedly dead for 2500 years, How do we k...
I think of vegans as people who really don't like food very much. They gain significant nourishment from their membership in a club of people who pref...
Sadly, I can't work "arachnophobia" into the metrical rhyme scheme. Little miss Muffet sat on a tuffet, eating her curds and whey Along came a spider ...
@"Banno", @"Hanover", & @"ArguingWAristotleTiff" -- I require the fireman's services a lot more than Tiff does. Anybody would pant after such a stud w...
That's great! Here's a song about it -- Anna Netrebko singing "My Lips Kiss With Such a Fire" at a Last Night at the Proms concert a few years back. T...
They didn't "somehow slip into central Europe"; they did it the old-fashioned, time-tested time-honored way--they invaded Europe, starting in the 9th ...
For some odd reason, my interest in etymology didn't catch fire until I was in my 40s, and working in an AIDS prevention project that had absolutely n...
Languages are changeable and inconsistent. I'm fine with contractions in speech and text alike. There's neither virtue nor fault in them, it's just co...
Not so far, but it is a disgusting cosmetics brand: https://64.media.tumblr.com/3233aae5eedb4e322991355b70851841/b0185d2c362af977-82/s1280x1920/fa1e69...
Etymology. The common name walnut derives from Old English wealhhnutu, literally 'foreign nut' (from wealh 'foreign' + hnutu 'nut'), because it was in...
No, my source wasn't that good -- it was an unattributed opinion provided by Google. Google is good for some but not all things. And I did caution the...
Won't is a contraction of woll not. The "woll" spelling isn't as old as I thought it was -- 16th/17th centuries. Why bother with contractions? It migh...
This NYT ad makes no sense whatsoever. https://64.media.tumblr.com/cc177b8358bb2f900869e36cbfe5d4eb/ac0c89ce2634bb07-4e/s1280x1920/9a99b5ac86f1fd499bd...
People have the right to privately make decisions about their own bodies. One of the evils of "pro-life" militants is to load both abortion and miscar...
One thing a tape worm can do for you that a fetus can't is suppress allergy symptoms by reducing the sensitivity of the immune system. Personally, I p...
True, 'totally screwed' might be overly pessimistic. How about 'largely screwed'? One form of carbon recapture that is on the shelf, proven, and ready...
Or "Hegemony would occur when a law adopts prevailing majority social values instead of a minority dissenting views"? According to this poll, the abor...
Cool people don't start slang, they are the first ones to get noticed for using it. I've never been cool. Maybe 'apoplectic" or some such. Apoplectic ...
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