This age. Bizarre. Part of the bizarreness rests in how much we actually know about it. We swim in a deepening sea of information. How to cope? We compartmentalize. So, though, do those providing us the information, and therein lies another problem, which is a question of integration. Recently at…
Okay, ladies too. But I was going for a "Sunday, Sun-nday Sunda-ay" feel with the headline. I've always liked this Watterson throwaway reply to Karl Marx from 1987-ish. But, after reading some of the firestorm of responses to Erich's post about Misquoting Jesus, maybe religion hasn't really lost any ground.…
What kinds of voters are we? It’s hard to tell by looking what kind of candidates we elect. After all, we usually only have two viable choices; we often hold our noses and vote for the “lesser of two evils.” Many potential candidates never appear on the ballot, thanks to our horrifically corrupt political system, a system that requires a candidate to have corporate money in order to seen as viable by the corporate-owned media. It is a ludicrous and vicious circle.
Even acknowledging the severely limited choices we have at the polls, how well do we vote? Do we prepare ourselves carefully before entering the voting booth? Do we work hard to expose ourselves to a wide range of perspectives before voting or do we fall prey to the availability heuristic, voting on the basis of highly suspect political ads and intellectually vapid local “news”? Do most voters take time to carefully deliberate on the long-term risks and benefits of the political positions touted by the candidates? Apparently not, based upon the ubiquity misleading attack ads that invite unreflective scorn rather than a deliberate consideration of the issues.
Another bit of evidence suggesting that many of us vote without enough preparation occurs whenever citizens vote for lesser known candidates and issues. On numerous occasions, people have admitted to me that they voted for or against a particular candidate (or issue) about whom (which) they knew nothing at all. In Missouri, this happens all the time when circuit judges seeking …
You can learn the following things and much more in this article by New York Magazine: He’s the eleventh of eleven children. Every night, he would listen to “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” before going to bed and it would make him cry. He studied philosophy in college. His favorite…
The U.S. consumes 400 million gallons of gasoline every day. That amounts to almost 5,000 gallons every second. More than half of that oil is imported. Everything we do is affected by oil. In addition to keeping us warm and transporting us, we eat oil. Not literally, but the average American meal travels an about 1500 miles to get from farm to plate. If there were an interruption in the oil supply, we would look to the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve. That much-cited U.S. reserve, however, holds only a 60-day supply of oil. It is official U.S. policy, then, that We the People shall always remain only small one incident from a major oil crisis.