From the first time I saw him perform I loved the deadpan comedy of Steven Wright. His view of life is coldly objective and sometimes skewed, but always funny. Here are a few of my favorite one-liners, some of which are relevant to the ongoing conversations here at DI. Last…
I'm currently reading Rob Walker's 2008 book, Buying in: the Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are. I'm finding Walker's chapter on "Hello Kitty" especially interesting in its own right and also because his description of the success of Hello Kitty has helped me to understand Sarah…
Discussions in the comment sections of many posts on this site chaotically tend toward the strange attractor of one generally off-topic issue: Why does Creation/Evolution seem correct to you? It is usually a discussion between Creationists who believe that the scientific conclusions are based on faith, and Naturalists who believe that the Scientific Method is best tool ever invented to extract sense from chaos.
In the beginning, Natural Philosophers (now called Scientists) in the West all believed in the Bible. Bishop Ussher gave the final word on the age of the universe according to the Bible in the early 1600’s, and the Church had all the answers. But then the idea emerged that one can actually test Aristotelian conclusions (purely rational and based on “what everybody knows”) with observations. Copernicus demonstrated with careful observation and applied math around 1600 that only the moon itself orbited the Earth, and all the other planets circled the Sun. The church accepted this, as a philosophical observation, irrelevant to the place of Man in the Universe. Then Galileo made a gadfly of himself by publishing popular books mocking the Pope for publicly continuing in the preaching of Geocentrism when it was clear, with the aid of a telescope, that not only did the planets orbit the sun, but that some of those planets had moons of their own. Many moons, placed where Man couldn’t even see them without modern technology.
Well, it just snowballed from there. Newton, a devout Christian, developed math in …
Richard Heinberg, a Senior Fellow of Post Carbon Institute, knows that energy-from-oil is connected to everything else that we do. That is why we are facing a monumental change in our economy within the next few years. And we are not prepared in the least. What can we expect? Here's…
Wick Allison was Editor in Chief of The National Review from 1990 through 1993. Allison donated a lot of money to John McCain during the primaries, but he is now endorsing Barack Obama to be the next President of the United States: Barack Obama is not my ideal candidate for…