Lego teaches children how to play with guns

I love basic the concept of Lego. It’s a very clever set of blocks with which you can build almost anything. But going to a Lego store is also a peek into the kind of country America has become.  We are a country of warmongers.

I took each of these photos in the Lego Store on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, Illinois. For starters, I do want to recognize that Lego makes simple kits that you can use for building anything you want. For instance, here’s a basic starter pack that doesn’t include any guns:

basic lego set

If 280 pieces isn’t enough for you, you can graduate to this 700 piece set. Look at Dad, acting as though he is content building little houses. I know what Dad really wants. He wants his kids to get a little older so that they can build things with guns!

non violent lego set

Here’s a hot rod car. But what’s a mere car to a kid?

non violent car lego

We need to be inspired by people we see on TV. Hence, Spongebob Squarepants makes a joint appearance with Legos. Now . . . if we only had a gun . . .

spongebob lego

A GUN!!! Are you crazy? Why would you need a gun? Because that’s what so many Lego kits include. Guns of all shapes and sizes! Notice the guard in the tower. He has his own Lego gun. I suppose he has it so that he can shoot that guy trying to make an escape. I wonder why they don’t show …

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The silver lining offered by a no-growth economy.

Many people with whom I speak are somewhere between scared and terrified about the economic meltdown. They are wondering how it would be possible to get by with less. Their budgets are already at bare bones. It’s long past time to start considering, in detail, how we can deal with…

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Where are we getting all of that money that is saving us from our massive debts?

I see that there continue to be many new commitments to pour huge amounts of government money into the economy, most recently, by spending hundreds of billions of dollars to purchase stock in private banks. It's amazing to me that no politician is willing to talk about how we're going…

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What it means to feel certain: review of “On Being Certain”

Consider these words of George W. Bush, spoken in Rome, in 2001

“I know what I believe. I will continue to articulate what I believe and what I believe — I believe what I believe is right.”

This is not an isolated case. These sorts of fact-free assertions occur all the time. Consider another example, this one a hypothetical. Assume that you overhear some guy claiming that homeopathic medicine [or fill in the blank with your own favorite snake oil treatment] is effective and powerful. Because you suspect that he doesn’t have his facts right or that his reasoning is unreliable or invalid, you speak up and question his statement. He responds by saying something like the following:

I’m certain I am correct. I’m absolutely sure that I’m right. I have no doubts about this.

Despite the many claims of certainty that we hear, we often remain unconvinced, and for good reason. There’s a saying, “Show, don’t tell.” Show me the facts so that I myself can see whether I am certain. Don’t just tell me that you’re certain. Nonetheless, people constantly make claims that are based on inner feels of certainty, quite often wild and unsubstantiated claims about politics and religion, as well as claims about science, history or just about everything else.

People often use such claims that they have a “feeling of certainty” as bootstraps to convince themselves that they are even more certain than they actually are, thereby completely dispensing for the need for meticulous …

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