Many remember 9/11, but some of us view the events in a different light. In order to discuss it, I’d like to start with some baseline information and move on from there.
The official story: On 11 September, 2001, two commercial airliners impacted the main towers of the World Trade Center on the island of Manhattan in New York City. Thousands of people (more…)
Not too long ago, a good friend of mine was looking at Facebook when he suddenly exclaimed, “Good God! Don’t tell me people still believe that $#!+!”
Because we’re talking Facebook, I had to ask for a bit of clarification. I mean, really — there’s a lot of $#!+ out there, after all. And so I asked, “To which particular bit of $#!+ do you refer?” (more…)
Bombings in Egypt and Lebanon. Shootings in Paris and California. Terror attack after terror attack after terror attack.
Folks, we’re in the situation we’re in because people are ignorant and easily deluded. I refer both to terrorists, exploited and manipulated into committing their ghastly acts, and to you the reader. In order to oppose this, (more…)
(NOTE: This article has been revised again; the pros and cons listed have been kept up to date, even though the intro is vintage campaign.)
Major media outlets are full of reactions to recent announcements that the President will be asking to increase the ceiling on Syrian refugee acceptance for next year. Unsurprisingly, the stories are largely focused on the reaction to the announcement; contention drives the media profit mill, and so it would be unusual to see any other form of response from them.
Since it’s the height of the upcoming Presidential election cycle, it’s also not surprising that every hopeful candidate has (more…)
We all know the quote “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” It’s a paraphrase from a work by Karl Marx. Most of us have no idea of the context or his intended meaning.
“…Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion (more…)
The first step toward a solution is to know what the problem is.
Healthcare in this country has been the subject of widespread and highly politicized debate in recent years. Most of us agree that there’s something wrong, but we tend to disagree on what, exactly, that might be. It’s little wonder that the solutions that we try are subject to controversy — and that controversy includes widespread civil disobedience, of a type and breadth not seen since the civil rights era of the 1960s and 70s.
The trouble is, we don’t know what precisely is wrong. We haven’t diagnosed it. So… (more…)
“Morality is a biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth. Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. I appreciate that when somebody says “love thy neighbor as thyself,” they think they are referring above and beyond themselves. Nevertheless, such reference (more…)
There is more than one valid and effective solution to our problems. Unfortunately, the political parties in our strongly divided system are far more concerned with blaming one another than in getting anything done. This is hardly a purely American phenomenon, of course; that’s just a handy example.
The evident solution is NOT to discard parties and then recreate the process from the ground up. Instead, it’s to get (more…)
For background, please read the post that inspired me out on Steven Brust’s blog, plus the original article he linked in his post. If you already think Amazon is evil, you might want to skip these; alternately, if you read them both, you’ll be able to feel more justified in your indignation. If, on the other (third?) hand, you feel that all corporations everywhere are evil… (more…)
How provoking! This website wants me to compose a tagline, thus: “In a few words, tell us what this page is about.”
Look, mate — if I knew what the frigging page was about already, I wouldn’t need to write it, now would I? Bloody cheek!
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All right; most of you who are reading this probably don’t have a clue what that’s supposed to mean, why that simple little request has me (more…)
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