January 2019 We've long been in need of some new blood in the U.S. political landscape and it looks like we've got it now: the Democratic Socialists have arrived. Let's say hi and see what they're up to. First of all, let's deal with the "S" word: socialist. If you happen to live in Western Europe it's a word you're familiar with because it's been around for donkey's years. When I lived in Germany in the [...]
January 2019 The standard division of reason into two aspects -- instrumental and value -- has seen us humans beat around quite a few philosophical bushes over the centuries. I've recently done some research to get a handle on current strains of thought on the subject. As I worked through the material I realized that my thinking has moved toward a different division of the aspects of reason, one that found no reflection in the [...]
September 2018 Yesterday I got the Kindle version of a book I read a few years ago, The Sixth Extinction: an Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert. It made a very strong impression on me when I first read it and many bits of information I gathered from it stayed with me over the years since the first read. Recent research I've done on the Sixth Mass Extinction (hereafter SME for short) brought me back into contact [...]
January 2019 In this post I'm going to pretend I'm on HGTV with my own show. I have a niche nobody ever thought of before: taking foreign recipes and making them look like they came from your American grandma. Why would I do a sneaky thing like that? Because most Americans in my ambit -- and in yours, too, I'll bet dollars to donuts -- jump up from the table at the first mention of [...]
January 2019 You expect an English author to be English, but not all English authors are dripping with Englishness. Those who are form a select crowd. What makes them creditable purveyors of Englishness elicits hot debate among their compatriots, surprisingly enough -- who'd have thought Englishness would be a matter of such contention? As an outsider I observe these goings-on with a mixture of amusement and raised eyebrows when somebody lets fly with a [...]