the normalizing of huge lies & injustices just to get on with life… The Social Contract of any society is based in trust and reliance on the sources of truth. In these times, trust is one of the chiefest of casualties: We have been lied to in large and little ways our entire lives, all …
Category Archives: social/political commentary
America Dreaming
Well, here we are in the United States: living in a time of the ascendance of a social order that glorifies greed and selfishness, that revels in ignorance and defies science in favor of clever but inane conspiracy theories. It is a time of Dunning-Kruger exemplars gleefully, self-righteously preparing to lay their agendas on all …
Over-Thinking About Thinking
It’s not anthropomorphism to believe that animals think & feel like us. It’s assuming they think & feel the same ways about the same things as we do. Misreading physical cues like facial expressions or body language leads to totally mistaken interpretations of what an animal has on its mind, what it intends or wants. …
Who Are We Really?
“…humans have fought each other throughout their existence. Such a waste of the gift of life on our planet.” I am so tired of those who make such cynical assertions about how useless, hopeless, selfish and finally self-defeatingly monstrous are human beings. People have also loved and created and protected and cherished each other and …
Calm Down, Dems!
The intensity of the Dems freaking out over Biden’s poor performance on the ‘debate’ stage is directly related to the intensity of fear and loathing they–and many of us–feel at the possibility of the Republicans’ succeeding in the culmination of their long-game authoritarian take-over of America. They’ve been working in the shadows, and not very …
Surrender Is Not an Option
I was thinking about the writers of the US Constitution. They didn’t have everything right, like not actually recognizing that women and people of color are actually whole human beings, and they were mostly all slave-holders. But they were the most educated men of their time. They were philosophically sophisticated, very broad-minded for their time. …
Global Warming and Snowball Earth
Ironically, the warming of the Earth bringing about melting of polar ice–which decreases the salinity of polar waters thereby slowing and possibly even halting the North Atlantic Conveyer current which brings the warm Gulf of Mexico waters up past the British Isles–sets up the British Isles for winters lasting through the year, for years, as …
Money
Money is a battery for storing the energies produced by human work. It’s a transformer, too, changing human work into stuff. When the potter trades pottery for the farmer’s grain, it is a device for equalizing any difference in the relative values for the goods generated by the work. In itself, it has no value, …
Everyone Writes the Histories
History is such a fragile, mutable, conditional thing: History is ineffable. It’s all very well to say, no, it is what happened, it’s indelible, it is actual… So it is, an event, an action, plays out its options and leads to its conclusion. But that isn’t history. History is the story of what happened, and …
When We Abandoned Eden…
I have written about the ‘abandonment of Eden’ as the time in which our developing, evolving human intellect outpaced and replaced animal instinct as our primary means of interacting with the world around us, particularly the physical world. I have suggested that choosing intellect and self-reliance was something to be celebrated, not to be ashamed …
LOOSELY SPEAKING... 