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Politics Will Make You Dumber 0
- Culture
- January 24, 2017
Hunter S. Thompson is one of my favorite authors and one of the smartest humorists of the last hundred years. He also shot himself in the head once he reached his mid-sixties. I don’t think he viewed himself as a humorist per se. Maybe I don’t fully understand the implications of that descriptor. I think of
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Most People Today Want to be Propagandized 0
- Culture
- January 24, 2017
There’s a principle in hypnotism that goes like this: A person cannot be hypnotized against his will. He must be a willing subject. He must be fully cooperative. So it goes with propaganda. For propaganda to be effective, it requires submissive subjects. As Professor Nicholas O’Shaughnessy wrote, propaganda is a “co-production in which we are
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What the Holes in the Fossil Record Can Tell Us 0
- Philosophy
- January 24, 2017
The coelacanths are an ancient group of lobe-finned fishes, with weird appendages that take the form of bony, fleshy, muscular stalks. They’re well-represented in the fossil record all the way back to the Devonian period, some 390 million years ago. However, about 66 million years ago – the time of the dinosaurs’ demise – coelacanths
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Edward Snowden Welcomes Trump Press Secretary with Blistering Tweet 0
- Politics
- January 24, 2017
If you thought Edward Snowden was going to play nice with the Trump White House in hopes of receiving a pardon, you were sorely mistaken. In case you missed it, the new White House is finding itself on the losing end of a petty squabble with the press regarding the size of, ahem, Trump’s inauguration
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Is Respect Vanishing from Society?0
- Culture
- January 24, 2017
Last summer, when Pokémon Go was the latest rage, the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. made a special request for visitors to stop playing the game within the museum. Doing so, the museum explained, brought a new level of disrespect to those who had lost their lives to the prejudices of Hitler and his followers.
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Odysseus’ Voyage: What We Can Learn From Homer’s Everyman 0
- Culture
- January 24, 2017
Lovers of Monty Python will recall the scene in The Life of Brian in which John Cleese, Eric Idle and Michael Palin discuss the contribution of the Romans to civilization: “What have the Romans ever done for us?” In today’s supercilious culture we tend to believe that we owe nothing to the past in general
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