My life story nearly had an early ending when, at the age of 18, I was in Israel, traveling on my own and often visiting ancient ruins. One was of a Crusader castle, many of which were built during the centuries after the First Crusade, which had succeeded in capturing, or re-capturing Jerusalem from the […]
How can we use behavior science to persuade people to solve the Climate Crisis? I recently attended a UCSB Psychology talk on this subject. To me, facts and evidence should be enough. It takes a lot more than that for most people. It turns out that people who are most environmentally aware are often worse […]
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It’s not always easy to believe in a particular religion, even – or especially – one you were brought up in. And, from there, it’s not such a big step to disbelieve all the conventional religions. But that doesn’t mean to turn up your nose at them. After all, religion serves a major role in […]
Atheists and god believers often debate whether any gods exist. God believers actually mostly agree with atheists without realizing it. Most god believers reject 99.9% of gods as being fictitious. They only believe in their god or gods. Atheists just take it to 100%. But I think there is a more interesting debate: If there […]
What makes a person a hero? In our culture we regard heroic deeds as those which involve courage and self-sacrifice for a worthy goal, such as rescuing another person or even an animal. It usually requires modesty. He or she did not intend to gain any reward, nor any other kind of glory. “I couldn’t […]
In its attempt to reconcile General Relativity with the quantum mechanical environment, supergravity places an upper limit on the number of dimensions at 11. Crazy sounding? You betcha. What we really want to avoid, though, is that not-uncommon confusion that believes Supergravity has some meaningful intersection with the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model. Yeah, as IF. […]
When people hear that I have created and copyrighted ten thousand epigrams, none of which is longer than seventeen words, they often ask me which was Number One. Of course, I can and do tell them – but when I wrote it, I had no idea of what it was going to be the First […]
“We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it.” This menacing threat came from Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts. This is in reference to their Project 2025. Last year I wrote “Conspiracy Theories Not What They Used to Be?” contrasting real conspiracies with muddled paranoid […]
In the 1980s I was Action Coordinator for the Central America Response Network. We were a small group of very dedicated volunteers who worked to stop Reagan’s terror campaign of rape, torture and murder in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Honduras. We did direct aid to the victims, public education, political lobbying, organizing rallies and […]
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In a once-popular song, written in 1935 and attributed to Billie Holiday, these words occur: “You came, you saw, you conquered me.” I doubt very much if whoever wrote the lyrics realized that they were quoting, or misquoting, a message originally said to have been written, 2,000 years earlier, by none other than Julius Caesar. […]
Among the many books my wife had brought back from her travels, which I’d never looked at until recently, was one I thought I might enjoy. It is a supposedly amusing collection of signs and other short messages written in English by Japanese people not totally familiar with our language. But I did not find […]
The U.S. is all about freedom and the automobile is a key symbol of that freedom. “See the USA in your Chevrolet” was sung by Dinah Shore on our old RCA TV. In reality, Americans spend hundreds of hours a year stuck in traffic. Very little driving involves seeing the Rockies or wheat fields that […]
You have probably heard it said that “Confession is good for the soul.” I myself don’t have much to confess nowadays – but in my “growing up” years, I had tremendous feelings of guilt, especially in connection with sex – and particularly masturbation. When a psychiatrist I went to asked me about it, I actually […]
What is it about the human psyche that makes so many of us want to collect things? Does it go back to our animal ancestry, in which many creatures’ survival depended on their collecting materials to eat, or from which to construct their homes? Maybe, but I think it also reflects our very human desire […]
