Creatively Advancing into Novelty
Don’t talk to me about spirit. Without me, you’re just a couple of hippies on welfare. I’m the one who gives you credibility, all right? You’re ready, Gene? Get snapping. –Sister Ingalls The above quote comes from season 2 of the great Netflix show Orange Is the New Black. The episode is titled “Take a…
I’ve been really busy lately, mostly with being a Dad (as natural as walking on grass!), but Some of the stuff I’ve been doing is design related too. Hopefully I’ll be posting some of that work soon. Speaking of design, I’m even thinking of redesigning this site. So that will be cool. I’ve also been…
The rhetoric of Americans being the good guys and of all the bad guys being out there made me suspicious. I grew suspicious, not only by the irony of Christian calls to war, but by studying. Studying sociology, I learned of the startling Zimbardo prison experiment at Stanford, wherin a dozen students, prescreened for mental…
This was originally published on Matthew Barlow’s blog on December 27, 2012. … Since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary I’ve had a few back and forth duels on facebook about gun control, mostly sparked over a few things that I posted. I didn’t necessarily mean for these posts to be inflammatory or controversial, it…
“This becomes clear if only you pry a little more deeply into the N.R.A.’s logic behind an armed society. An armed society is polite, by their thinking, precisely because guns would compel everyone to tamp down eccentric behavior, and refrain from actions that might seem threatening. The suggestion is that guns liberally interspersed throughout society…
Broadly defined, the government intervenes economically by regulating the economic interactions among and between enterprises and individuals. It does this by taxing their activities (earning income, owning wealth, spending money, and so on) and by making rules governing those activities. However, the real contents and effects of government regulations depend on the interests that govern their design and implementation….
Regarding all this talk of the U.S. being divided, I heard on NPR this morning that Obama got the Latino vote, the African-American vote, the Asian vote, the female vote, the young people vote, the Catholic vote and the urban vote. The categories he was lacking? Older White Men of “certain incomes” and certain southern geographic areas….
I watched the above video recently, and I have to be honest, It creeps me out a little bit. OK, a lot. The religious rituals, the secrecy, the knocking, the passwords, the spacey outfits, totally bizarre to me. And this is coming from someone who is not unfamiliar to Amish and Mennonite culture! A couple…
Part of the problem with the current economic crisis is that economics is based on an odd sort of faith, expressed tongue in cheek by the term “money-theism,” which has been popularized by comedian Stephen Colbert. There are a few big faith claims, like the ideas that economic deregulation always promotes growth, that tax cuts for powerful corporations…
So what’s left to us is the task of interpretation. Or, to frame it as a question, Can I reject the Bible’s metaphysics without rejecting its message? That’s a bridge too far for many of your fellow atheists (although they have no problem accepting Plato’s wisdom while rejecting platonic metaphysics). But it’s not a bridge…