Talking with idiots
How do you reason with "complete idiots"? In this issue of SFGate, Mark Morford tells you how.
How do you reason with "complete idiots"? In this issue of SFGate, Mark Morford tells you how.
Should you ever talk to the police to exonerate yourself? Professor James Duane explains why you should never talk to the police. Ever. Even if you are completely innocent. Sounds like good advice to me. It's not just a clever defense lawyer tactic. It's a Constitutional right that has been upheld repeatedly by the U.S. Supreme Court.
In this TED talk, Eve Ensler (who wrote "The Vagina Monologues") addresses the question, "What is security?" According to Ensler, security is elusive and impossible, and that's the good news, "unless your whole life is about being secure." If you're one of those people who obsess about security, you will become a cultural and intellectual recluse. You will become a frozen and numbed to the possibility of change/growth and you will perceive enemies to be everywhere. All you'll have time for is to worry about protecting yourself. The talk then moves to engaging stories about women who have created real versions of security. Real security is "hungering for connection rather than power."
Corn ethanol is a terribly costly and damaging joke that has been inflicted on us by politicians looking for something that looks like a fix, rather than doing the much harder work to find real solutions to our energy problems. I've posted on corn ethanol before, and it's now time…
In this 2006 lecture at TED, philosopher Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell) takes on the "brilliant" contemporary redesign of religion by Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life. After acknowledging that Warren's book is, indeed, "brilliant" (it has sold 30 million copies and motivated comparable numbers of people), Dennett…