In case you missed it, the March For Science is taking place today. Thousands have gathered on the National Mall, tens of thousands in other cities across the country and around the world. Some came to protest the President’s policies, others to demonstrate in favor of science. Each goal is laudable; protests are a vital portion of the societal dialogue, and positive demonstrations are if anything more valuable because they are so rare.
And yet, I’m not marching. (more…)
This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill — the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill — you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.
-Morpheus, “The Matrix”
What is The Matrix?
A lot of people have no idea.
The original movie, “The Matrix”, was released seventeen years ago, in 1999. Today’s college graduates were still in diapers, and many of them are completely ignorant not only of the story arc, the mythology, and the characters in the cinematic cycle, but also of the philosophical allusions and ramifications of the ideas presented therein.
They’re not alone; most of the film’s viewers don’t get it either. To us, it’s a classic sci-fi (more…)
The United States is one of the most heavily armed places on Earth, measured per capita. There are places that have been in civil war for long enough that all noncombatants have fled; they are less heavily armed than we. And we see the results on the news on a daily basis, it seems; just the other night there was another mass shooting, an apparent ambush at a backyard barbecue.
So gun control appears to be a logical necessity. Why is there even debate on the subject?
I’ve examined some statistics that may give us an answer, as well as a possible course going forward. I’ll warn you now, though: The answers I arrived at are vastly different than the ones I at first expected. (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…)
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…)
