An anagram
“Those #@%! Nazis!” I switched off my neural news feed in disgust.My young granddaughter turned her hover chair around to face me. “Grandpa, what’s a Nazi?”The question caught me completely off guard. What is the AI teaching these children? I started to formulate a response in my head, about racism, populism, nationalism, and millions of […]
An often overlooked feature of the Star Trek universe, starting particularly with Star Trek: The Next Generation, is the socialist economy. The words “socialism” and “communism” are never used, and the stories are rarely about economic systems, so most members of the audience have failed to catch on, even with the contrast of the hyper-capitalist […]
What the actual fuck? I get that Trump wants to be as cool as Vladimir Putin. I get that Trump does a lot of rambling. I get that Trump would like to be an emperor. I get that Trump is very stupid. But why is he still talking about this? Using military force to retake […]
Someone should write a book or something about how to raise your children to be politicians. It seems that all of the best politicians and political leaders were raised in politically active families. There’s a reason the United States has a few political “dynasties”. It should be fairly straightforward to write a plan for preparing […]
It’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that all the world’s political and social problems could be solved if we could just somehow correct the lack of thinking that is all too common. Progressives talk about education. Conservatives talk about religion. So many strive and strategize to make their voice heard above others, […]
[Disclaimer: This is not, of course, a suggestion that we should try to avoid having a female President. Rather, it is an attempt to see the future.] The election of Barack Obama to the office of President was a huge win for Black Americans. However, it had an unforeseen side effect. The insult to racist […]
The recent Hamas/Israel events, and the world’s reaction to them, really perplex me. I have more than a basic understanding of the ages long Israel/Palestinian conflict, so I don’t think it’s my ignorance of the complexity surrounding it. I think it’s just that people are behaving in ways that don’t make sense. Beginning with the […]
I am currently reading Forever Peace, by Joe Haldeman. It is science-fiction, centered on an interface technology, surgically installed in the brain, that enables users to communicate mentally with machines and with each other. An effect of this technology is that users who “jack in” together are able to know each other fully. There are […]
I am a cyclist, but I do not own, nor have I ever ridden, an e-bike. I find the e-bike concept and technology to be interesting, but e-bikes do not align with my cycling goals. Perhaps when I am older, it will make sense for me. An ad from REI popped up on FB, suggesting […]
I debate with myself about whether “progress” is a real phenomenon or an illusion. As much as our culture may seem to progress, it is at least partly nailed down by human nature, which is genetic and does not change, except at the much slower pace of evolution. The competing forces of cultural progress and […]
