Inquirers and Denyers -Two Attitudes of Mind
Mental flexibility and rigidity is a crucial matter. Either one is usually both an attitude and a habit. Yesterday as I was reading posts about the polar vortex's possible contributions to the January 2014 extreme colds and storms in the Eastern U.S., (and much less publicized, climate scientists' opinions that it may also be causing the blocking high pressure area off northern California that has given the usually rainy and foggy winters of the redwood country less rain in the last year than...
Fracking: “Trade Secrets” vs. Health — Fixing a Law that’s Upside Down
Some laws that regulate extractive mineral operations are just plain upside down. Take fracking. Companies that use the process don't have to tell ANYONE what's in the cocktails of chemicals they use because it's a "trade secret" that the laws exempt from disclosure. Even when some of the substances in those cocktails are known carcinogens, or known to be otherwise poisonous or harmful to the health of humans and animals, and even though some of that fluid often ends up in the water supply for...
The Perils of Self-Righteousness
We all have our pet peeves. One of mine is self-righteousness. "I am good and righteous and just and you are bad and maybe even wicked and evil." Not that I never fall into it myself, but I try to notice it and pull out when I do. What are the earmarks? The self-righteous person fancies himself or herself better than others who think or act differently, or who look or sound different. If it's one of your own tendencies, the chances are you don't much notice it. You think you're just in touch...
Barry Goldwater Was a Champion of Reproductive Rights
In Texas and numerous other states middle-aged white men who claim to want to get government off people's backs are climbing onto women's backs and causing great unnecessary suffering. What did some of the great Republicans of the past think? BARRY GOLDWATER said, “A lot of so-called conservatives think I’ve turned liberal because I believe a woman has a right to an abortion. That’s a decision that’s up to a pregnant woman, not up to the pope or some do-gooders on the religious right.” BARRY...
What the U.S. Should Not Be Doing: Using Depleted Uranium Weapons
I see in the news that Obama says Assad has "crossed the red line" in Iran by using nerve gas against the revolutionaries, and that in response, the U.S. will begin sending weapons to the insurgents. This may be a good thing. Assad is certifiably evil (with evil defined as doing intentional and avoidable great harm to others to serve one's own selfish interests). How wise is it for the U.S. to get involved? I can't say, because all I know is what the mainstream media prints, and that's usually...
Mists of mystification: The confusing words “conservative” and “liberal” often mean the opposite of what they seem to.
"The enemy isn’t conservatism. The enemy isn’t liberalism. The enemy is bullshit." Lars-Erik Nelson There is a major political divide between those who commonly label themselves “conservatives” and “liberals.” Barry Goldwater had a fairly clear vision of conservatism that has been largely lost. He defined it as “economic, social, and political practices based on the successes of the past.” He wrote that the conscience of a conservative was “pricked by anyone who would debase the dignity of the...
Libertarian — What does it actually mean?
Benjamin Franklin declared that “Every natural right not expressly given up, or, from the nature of a compact, necessarily ceded, remains." In the mid-twentieth century Barry Goldwater echoed his sentiments in his statement that "Politics is the art of achieving the maximum amount of freedom for individuals that is consistent with the maintenance of social order.” Both these are clear statements of an individual libertarian view. Applied broadly and evenhandedly, This applies to where you...
The next stage of civilization
We have already entered the Great Transition from the world we have known into the next stage of human history. Actually it is even more than that. We are moving into nothing less than the next era in human history, biohistory, and geohistory all rolled into one. The central feature of this great next step is obvious to anyone who has the eyes and ears to see what is happening all around the world today. We have to place caring for our local ecospheres and the world's ecosphere at the very...