Archive for October, 2008
What are the Legitimate Functions of Government?
Thursday, October 30th, 2008What are the legitimate functions of government, and how do we know for sure?
How can we determine good politics from bad, smart political candidates from ignorant?
The answer: by defining our terms.
Governments are the body politic that have the power to make and implement the laws of the land, and humans are the only species [...]
Barack Obama: more figment than fact
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008The following data comes to us from one Terry Anderson, a black LA radio host, who recently ran down a list of things that Barack Obama has said but which, it turns out, are not exactly accurate:
1.) Selma March Got Me Born - NOT EXACTLY, your parents felt safe enough to have you in 1961 [...]
Drilling For Oil and Building Highways: more energy efficient (by far) than bicycles
Sunday, October 26th, 2008Based upon mountains of faulty data, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and its many off-shoots advocate now as a “solution to the fossil fuel problem” the return to so-called “carbohydrate economies.”
This sort of economy essentially consists of families, communes, or small groups doing their own farming; re-enacting, to some extent, the barter system; high [...]
Postmodernism: the destruction of thought
Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008Postmodernism, in all its vicious variations, is a term devoid of any real content, and for this reason dictionaries and philosophy dictionaries offer very little help in defining it.
And yet postmodernism has today become almost universally embraced as the dominant philosophy of science — which is the primary reason that science crumbles before our [...]
Charity or Love: an etymological perspective
Tuesday, October 21st, 2008The translators of the earliest English bibles were monks utterly immersed in Latin. This is important to remember since they were translating directly from Greek, and agape, the Greek word from which charite ultimately derives, is in Latin caritas, meaning “To esteem highly.”
Caritas never really denoted what charity denotes today: namely, giving things away for [...]
How Do I Improve My Memory?
Saturday, October 18th, 2008A reader writes:
Dear Thinking Man: It never fails. I’m introduced to someone, and ten seconds later I can’t remember the person’s name. This is not an age issue — I know because I’m not all that old yet (36), and also I’ve always been like this. What can I do to improve my memory?
Johnny Mnemonic
Dear [...]
Does Exercise Really Promote Weight Loss?
Thursday, October 16th, 2008There’s an old joke lumberjacks still love to tell:
“Why did the train stop?”
Answer: “To let the lumberjack off.”
This quip was coined around the same time that a famous study was conducted. It was a study that measured the caloric intake of lumberjacks, whose appetites are about as notorious as the size of their logs.
It [...]
Melting Glaciers?
Monday, October 13th, 2008About a decade ago, Doctor R.J. Braithwaite wrote an article that appeared in Progress in Physical Geography.
In that article, which was peer-reviewed, Doctor Braithwaite tells us how he analyzed 246 glaciers, sampled from both hemispheres and latitudes, between the years 1946 and 1995. This “mass balance analysis” he conducted found that “some glaciers [...]
Organic Food and the Price You Pay
Friday, October 10th, 2008The organic food industry is the biggest scam going, almost. It borders on the criminal, the fraudulent, the insane.
“Since 1989, when organic-food activists raised a [bunked] nationwide scare over the pesticide alar in apples, many scientists have seethed quietly at what they perceive as a campaign of scare tactics, innuendo and shoddy science perpetrated by [...]
Bailout
Wednesday, October 8th, 2008Mercantilism is the system of securing special economic favors from government.
Capitalism is the system of private ownership of the means of production and the primacy of the individual over the group.
Mercantilism is in every significant way the exact opposite of laissez-faire capitalism.
Most businessmen today are not capitalists — insofar as they seek, demand, and [...]
Godless Constitution
Monday, October 6th, 2008There is, among rightwingers predominantly, though not exclusively, a rather persistent misconception that the United States is at its roots a religious nation.
This is demonstrably false, and rather easy to verify, as we shall see in a moment; but first, let us note that this subject is significant not because of any particular issue [...]
The Sickening Truth About Sierra Club
Friday, October 3rd, 2008Sierra Club is the oldest environmental group in the nation. It was founded in 1892 by a Scottish immigrant named John Muir, whose stated goal was “to make the mountains glad.” In many ways, that puerile policy compendiates perfectly the essence of Sierra Club.
Among other things, John Muir was an unapologetic racist, writing in [...]