This Post This post was written in the spring and summer of 2022. I stopped working on it, subject to corrections, August 19, 2022. Covid-19 The Pandemic The SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) pandemic, is a mass infectious disease, caused by repeated mass infections with SARS-CoV-2 viruses. The name means The virus causes sudden acute respiratory syndrome, a …
The United States of America was founded as republic. It does not recognize that members of a hereditary aristocracy have formal legal power to make laws or command other persons, or any personal legal rights and privileges. America has social classes, based on wealth and income. Sociologists recognize 6 classes: Upper Class or the SuperRich; …
A Wulfrunian 1A Wulfrunian is not a member of an alien people in a video game. Draconian was the name of a video game in the 1980s. Some lawyers, tired of the trope and hyperbole of comparing modern laws to Draconian laws, have joked that the Draconians were hostile aliens in an episode of Star …
Energy Transitions by Vaclav Smil, published in 2010, is short. Reading it took time. The book is a narrative survey of some studies of changes in the way humans have used energy to perform work. Humans and animals convert biological mass (food) and heat and light from the sun into chemicals that grow into muscles …
Rupert Sheldrake still believes in and writes about parapsychology. Mr. Sheldrake had an experience in the late 1970s and became convinced that he had recognized something important about the relationship between ideas and reality. At points, Sheldrake takes the posture of a pragmatist like William James. But where James was soft on conversion expeiences and …
Joe Bageant was a journalist who wrote about how America misunderstood its white working class. He said in an inteview with the BBC in 2008 that white working class “rednecks” have political power, and were tending to conservative populism. Bageant’s comment on the financial crisis of 2008, Waltzing at the Doomsday Ball almost predicted the …
In the Marginal Revolutions blog, the economist Tyler Cowen mentioned American nations : a history of the eleven rival regional cultures of North America as a partial explanation for support for the candidacy of Donald Trump among American working class and middle class voters in the midwest in the 2016 American elections. I found a …
Jennie Bristow, reviewing Sarah Moore’s Ribbon Culture for Spiked, nails the self-obsessed culture of advertising one’s moral quality by fashion accessories. Her review is called Untying the ‘ribbon culture’. The moral virtue of wearing ribbons is to show awareness or solidarity with a group of victims. Being a victim has become a way of attracting …
The National Post has been publishing a series of articles titled “Beyond Belief”. A piece by Charles Lewis or Charlie Lewis (not the Charles Lewis of 60 Minutes and the Center for Public Integrity) titled “The Trouble with Mary”, featured at AL Daily, discussed the psychology and semantics of “belief” and “faith”. Lewis found a …
The Golden Compass has been criticized for its negative presentation of organized religion. Its principal critic its the American Catholic League, a conservative body that speaks for conservative and traditional elements in the Catholic Church in America. The League says that the movie, like the books, promotes atheism, but their grievance appears to me to …