Men Like Gods is a 1923 Utopian novel by H. G. Wells, which I was delighted to come across by accident in the library as a teen. An ordinary Englishman is swept up by scientific accident, along with a cleric and other countrymen, to a parallel world where all of our Earthly problems have been […]
Some years ago, I helped an engineer friend get a job at our company. Soon after she started, I invited her to attend a Science and Engineering Council meeting with me. I was shocked when she told me she had to miss the meeting because the new owners of the company were requiring her to […]
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Do you want to be rich? To live really well? Then you will want to live in a society with high trust. Our World in Data detailed this in an article “Trust” by Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Max Roser. Much of the data comes from the World Value Survey. The World Value Survey plotted per capita […]
President Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) delivered his famous “Four Freedoms” speech 11 months before Pearl Harbor took us into WWII. These four freedoms? Freedom of speech; Freedom of worship;Freedom from want;Freedom from fear. This mural of the Four Freedoms (pictured) used to be on the County Human Resources Department. Note that the first two are negative […]
Some topics are still taboo to discuss and this may be one. Are you an “animal lover”? What does that mean to you? If you say you don’t like dogs, people are quick to ask if you like cats. Are those the only choices? There are 10-30 million species of animals on Earth. The exact […]
Over 20 years ago I attended a talk on Madagascar at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. It was one long rant about how the ecosystems of Madagascar had been almost totally destroyed. How there were no indigenous organizations for outside conservation groups to work with. And how the Pope had gone there to […]
Last year I lost a dear friend I will call “Susan” when she was on a high-altitude hiking adventure. She had spent most of her life in a fundamentalist Christian religion. But in recent years she had come to realize that religion is “just a bunch of made up stories.” When she died far too […]
It is well known that most industrialized countries have universal healthcare, good public transit, and free public college education. Why doesn’t the U.S. have these things? A hundred years ago socialism was seen positively in much of the world as a way to share in the productivity of modern industrialization. President Franklin Roosevelt and his […]
Our system of government was deliberately set up to make change and action very difficult. Unfortunately, reality does not care about our inability to govern. Notably, the Climate Crisis marches on, with action urgently needed to avert unprecedented disaster on a global scale. The President, House of Representatives, and Senate are rarely in alignment. And, […]
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How do you know you are not dreaming right now? “I had to pinch myself to be sure I was not dreaming” is an expression. But it is mistaken. It is perfectly possible to pinch yourself in a dream and think you are awake. Would you believe that in fact there is no foolproof test […]
“We live in the greatest country on Earth!” So said a caller on Bill Maher’s Real Time on the eve of the unprovoked U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Maher asked the caller how he knew this. “Because I have lived in the U.S. my entire life.” Maher tried to explain the illogic of this, […]
“When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” This was the conclusion of a Princeton University study by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: […]
Normalizing Atheism is an active Facebook page I recently joined. It is a surprisingly respectful forum for atheists to “come out” and for religious people to ask questions of atheists. On April 13, someone named Brian C. made this post: “I’ve been pondering something lately: Is it possible to live without meaning or purpose? If […]
I want to continue my review of the book Humankind, which I started in my previous article. Author Rutger Bregman showed that many of the best and worst aspects of human behavior stem from a common desire to be “helpful.” Just as wolves domesticated themselves to be able to live among humans, humans domesticated themselves […]
