The word “serendipity” stems from the ancient Persian tale, Serendipity and The Three Princes. It’s sometimes called The Three Princes of Serendip.* It was translated in 1557 into Italian as The Peregrinaggio. It is a tale of “the gift for discovery by accident and sagacity of things . . . not in quest of [it].”… [read more]
Crap! A Friday Extra
One of the features of watching a YouTube video is the line up of additional videos presented to tantalize us. YouTube captures what we’ve watched before and provides links to videos with some similarity to them in order to keep us watching. As you know, what commonly results is an enormous time suck. I haven’t… [read more]
If It Feels Right
This is a special time. It is a time when magical thinking has washed over the land, drowning our world in hyperbole, fiction and venom, and leaving so very little grounded in the observable. The waste of the neocortex imperils the people like oxygen deprivation, with hypoxia choking the rational. Left behind is rigorous critical… [read more]
Proper Names
Ed Note: This post begins in a dark way, because there is substantial darkness over our democracy. But keep your hopes alive, because we may be at the start of a new day. Read to the end for the unmistakable rays of sunlight of the dawn. ————————————— Trump has gotten away with an enormous dung… [read more]
The Oldest Bigotry
Anti-Semitism is the world’s oldest bigotry. Go ahead – see if you can come up with an example that’s older than thousands of years. It rises and falls in frequency and in severity, but it always shows up. Here’s a dramatically condensed version of history to put this in context, a story which you might… [read more]
This Continues To Be True
A while back I wrote: It’s easy to pin that clear and present danger on Trump, but it’s critical that you see him as the embodiment of the forces of absolutism running hellishly in our society. Trump is both the repugnant inciter of rage and a tool of the brutal, angry mob. He wouldn’t be… [read more]
Have A Nice Memorial Day
From Giovanni Russonello’s article in the New York Times: “QAnon Now as Popular in U.S. as Some Major Religions, Poll Suggests . “But it’s not just the notion that the election was stolen that [QAnon] caught on with the former president’s supporters. QAnon, an outlandish and ever-evolving conspiracy theory spread by some of Trump’s most… [read more]
Relativism and National CPR
Relativism: The idea that nothing is any more correct or true than anything else. . I know, it sounds preposterous, but that is the prevailing assumption about reality in much of our society. Example: Kellyanne Conway did an interview from the White House lawn shortly after Donald Trump moved in. She was defending a false… [read more]
Are You Seeing a Pattern? Ug!
We humans are predisposed to look for causes for what we see, relationships to explain the way things work and patterns of events to help us predict the future. For example, if caveman Ug leaves his cave, turns left and runs into no danger, and if this happens the next day and the next, Ug… [read more]
What? Sane Republicans?
Yes, really. I’ll prove it with just a few clicks. There is little policy on which Liz Cheney and I agree. I cannot call her a hero when the bar is so low that simply honoring her oath of office and telling the obvious truth is all she’s done. On the other hand, she’s told… [read more]
