This is a six-minute video of several of the Hubble telescope's great accomplishments. Who said scientists can't be inspirational? [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcBV-cXVWFw[/youtube]
We've heard a lot about the alleged attack on Christmas (and Christianity), especially from Bill O'Reilly. Here's a site that suggests what it would really be like if there were a war on Chistianity in the U.S.
Check out this compelling photo.
Americans work a lot. According to this chart, we work 400 hours more per year than workers in many European countries. In fact, we work the equivalent of 10 workweeks per year more. What would you say if your boss walked into your office and asked you whether you would like to have an additional 10 weeks of vacation per year?
According to Juliet Schor, author of the overworked American (1991), American productivity has more than doubled since 1948. We could thus produce our 1948 standard of living in less than half the time that it took in 1948. The average worker could now be taking off every other year with pay. We do not use any of this increase in productivity to reduce our hours, however. Instead, we have continued to work harder and harder (many of us work two jobs) in order to have or maintain higher material standard of living.
Schor raises this question: “what if satisfaction depends, not on absolute levels of consumption, but on one’s level relative to others?” She suggests that our “consumerist treadmill” and hour-long our jobs have combined to form in “insidious cycle of work and spend.”
We often work hard only after commuting long distances. And we have to pay for those expensive cars and the fuel goes in them. The net result is another decrease in leisure time. According to Schor, between 1960 and 1986, the time parents actually had available to do with children fell at least 10 hours …
Dangerous idea, that.
If you were in charge–if you were King–what would do? What would fix? What would you ignore?
The Socratic ideal is the philosopher king, whose first act upon accession to the throne is to abdicate. The idea being that a truly ethical thinker would refuse to accept the responsibility to rule a nation.
Pity the world doesn’t work that way.
The problem with such systems–and there are many, including those proposed by certain self-proclaimed Libertarians–is that human nature refuses to cooperate. There’s a kind of Malthusian coefficient involved–population growth always outstrips the potential for ideal behavior. All such utopian systems are based on one fallacy that keeps gumming up all the works of any system anyone cares to name.
The fallacy is that We’re All Alike.
It’s a widely touted formula–the things that we have in common outnumber those that divide us; underneath we’re all the same; people are people. The Libertarians believe as an article of faith that if government got out of everybody’s way, we’d all be fine because people basically know what’s best for themselves and their immediate circle of intimates. Socialists believe (mostly) that without class structures, everyone would get along quite nicely. Communists like to assume avarice is an aberration that can somehow be bred out of the species.
If only.
It’s not so much that we’re so very different–but that we’re alike in such individualized ways.
The fact is, we come in all shapes, sizes, talents, capacities, points of view, …