Marvin‘s put up some interesting links on atheism and the twisted way religion affects court appointments in America.
Tag: politics
Innovation, WMD, and the Pressure Cooker Effect
Sometimes people think I am idealistic. I think, actually, most human beings are just easily caught in inertia. Although most people attribute the quote to Plato, it apparently was Philo or Alexandria who urged us to be kind to everyone we meet, “because everyone is fighting a harder battle.” It might seem funny to some of you that I am thought idealistic, but remember that idealistic doesn’t mean the same as optimistic. The most diehard pessimists usually have a history of idealism which reality never managed to live up to. This, in fact, is not so far from the case …
This week’s F5
I don’t know why, but I cannot load Rob’s F5 question blog at my home. I mean, I can do it with an anonymous proxy like unipeak, but not without one. I cannot imagine why Hanaro Telecom would choose to block Rob’s site, so I’m guessing it’s some glitch in another blockage, which I can’t do much about. But anyway, I’ve had trouble connecting there and I’ve also been dreadfully busy, which is why I haven’t posted anything lately under the Friday Five section of the blog. But today, I’m picking up with the most recent question, a headache of …
Turing Monkeywrench
This is an essay I began a very long time ago. It still rambles, but I wil get around to printing it out and revising it. I’d like to take the language a notch down, and address it to normal people, but at the same time, normal people don’t really read things like this, so maybe it’s not worth losing the language to reach an unreachable audience. I think it may count as preaching to the converted, but sometimes that’s all one can do… leave a footprint behind to later generations so they know there were people in the past …
Book #27 of my Lunar New Year: No Logo
No Logo: Taking Aim at The Brand Bullies by Naomi Klein (Picador, 2002 edition with new Afterword) I have this vague memory of a man from the Friends of the Lubicon who came to my high school to give us a talk about consumer activism. I remember thinking, “Yeah, that’s cool, but… like, do you really think you’re changing the world? You got some companies to stop buying paper bags from the paper company that was harvesting lumber from disputed lands. Big deal.” Now, I’m a fair bit older, and I see that, in a very simply and clear way, …