– The carbon footprint of roses from Holland – which are almost always grown in heated greenhouses _ is six times the footprint of those shipped from Kenya. – Watching a plasma TV for three hours every day contributes 250 kilograms of carbon to the atmosphere each year, but an LCD TV is responsible for …
It is a given that an important part of being an Epicurean is consideration for others, imagination and empathy. So may I risk boring readers with my current struggle? I bet you can quite easily guess that it involves a computer! Yes, software degrades (why? by now they should have the technology to make it …
Immanuel Kant taught that enlightenment was a process, not a state, namely the process of thinking for oneself, and therefore living autonomously without submitting yourself to group-think and conformity with all those around you. Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another…..Sapere Aude! …
Grow accustomed to the belief that death is nothing to us, since every good and evil lie in sensation. However, death is the deprivation of sensation. Therefore, correct understanding that death is nothing to us makes a mortal life enjoyable, not by adding an endless span of time but by taking away the longing for …
>???????? ????? ???????? Milton said that “a meet and happy conversation is the chief and noblest end of marriage,” by which he meant that physical love is all well and good but true marriage is a meeting of the minds. He knew whereof he spoke because after he married her he discovered that his attractive …
Republicans in Missouri are trying to prevent 240,000 (mostly black) voters from voting by insisting on identity cards at polling stations. In order to get a card you have to have a birth certificate. Statement from Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan: “As Missouri’s chief elections official, it’s my job to ensure fair elections, and …
Continue reading ‘The price of democracy is eternal vigilance’ »
The 15th Century Aztec poet, Ayocuan Cuetzpaltzin, suggested that there is a time when humankind can touch the enduring truths that underlie our fleeting lives. That time is the moment of artistic creation. “From whence come the flowers (the artistic creations) that enrapture man?†asks the poet. “The songs that intoxicate, the lovely songs?†And …
This from Greta Akpeneye, head teacher and a former “loony Left” Lambeth councillor: IQ and other test identify not ability but rather the level of socialization and indoctrination into limited notions of desirable knowledge and ways of understanding the world, which can be typified as “middle class”. Access to this “culture” enables access to academia …
4.5 million Americans suffer from severe mental illness, of which 1.8 million are receiving no treatment on any given day. The results? Homelessness, incarceration and a high level of violence (schizophrenics and manic-depressives commit 1000 murders every year). When de-institutionalization began in the U.S in 1955 the States were responsible for the mentally ill, most …
Continue reading ‘Caring for the mentally ill (no, don’t tune out!)’ »
“Americans are in serious intellectual trouble, in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations. (Susan Jacobs, The Week, February 29th, 2008). Ignorant about science, art, history and geography, Americans are generally proud of their ignorance, labeling anyone who has a command of the English language, …
Published in April 2008 in “The Humanist” but the following is as Epicurean as it is Humanist: Do not kill: – No nation shall go to war against another nation unless first attacked in a clear act of aggression. No state shall join in a war except when authorized to do so by responsible global …
Rabbi Haim Kanyevsky told yeshiva administrators, “We are war with them [Arabs],” therefore “according to Jewish law it is prohibited to hire them,” according to Yom Chadash. Yeshiva administrators, after the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva attack, asked Kanyevsky whether they should fire their Arab employees. Kanyevsky, who expressed surprise that Arab workers were preferred to Jews, …
The spiritual leader of Israel’s ultra-orthodox Shas party, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, has provoked outrage with a sermon calling for the annihilation of Arabs. “It is forbidden to be merciful to them. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable,” he was quoted as saying in a sermon delivered to …
More than 900,000 names are on America’s terrorist watch list, including at one time Senator Edward Kennedy (now grievously sick). I demand to know: am I on the watch list? If not, why not? Â I should be because I wrote a play called DubyaBaba and the Forty Thieves, the apogee of a wildly successful …
A soldier called Jeremy Hall has filed a lawsuit alleging that he’s been harassed and his constitutional rights have been violated because he doesn’t believe in God. The suit names Defense Secretary Robert Gates. “I’m not in it for cash,” Hall said. “I want no one else to go what I went through.” Known as …
