April Fool’s!! ________ What’s interesting, I mean really interesting, about money is that it has no value, except that which we project onto it. No creature or element arrives to our view with a price tag; we apply it. Printed words on paper: there’s no big differences between the dollar and monopoly money, except those [...]
In fact, nobody has seen much recently of [Masataka Shimizu] the president of Tokyo Electric Power Co., or Tepco, owner of a haywire nuclear power plant just 150 miles from the Japanese capital. He is the most invisible — and also most reviled — chief executive in Japan. What should we think about Shimizu’s vanishing [...]
Here are the readings for our discussion in the Watson Room @ Northampton’s Forbes Library on Weds. night from 7—8:30 PM, Jefferson’s Roots: Stoicism, Deism and “the laws of nature and of nature’s god”; I believe it will take two or three hours to complete them. Click all links! To understand what Jefferson meant by [...]
We live in an age when willful ignorance hurts many innocent people. I think of President Bush and all of his confident deceits: ”Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.” No doubt! I think of [...]
Do you perceive then, that errors in acting arise through this very ignorance, namely, in a person thinking he knows, when he does not know? Socrates To conceal ignorance is to increase it. Mahatma Gandhi Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. Martin Luther King, Jr. _________________________________ Ever [...]
A lot on everybody’s mind right now as evidence piles that we have entered a new state of WTF. I don’t want this to be a bummer post, but I’ve got to acknowledge the facts as they are if I am to write anything worth reading. The Fukushima reactor meltdowns have become a sort of [...]
If the news has not yet reached you: the Vermont Yankee has the same brandname (GE) and model # (MK1) as the Fukushima reactors that are melting down. Exactly a year ago, I visited Japan with my family to learn about the culture of the Japanese: my wife focusing on the ceramic arts, my daughters [...]
of being much bigger than you ever expected
Congressman Henry Waxman, ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said this yesterday: “The Republicans in Congress have become the party of science deniers, and that is profoundly dangerous.” Jefferson expressed a similar observation to John Adams. Almost 200 years ago he noted how Adams’ old party, the Federalists, was antagonistic to science, [...]
