Today (well, technically tomorrow) is Columbus day, the day when residents of the New World used to celebrate the onset of colonization, and the formation of the dozens of nations that have peopled North and South America for the past half-millennium with their bronzed, clean-limbed, healthy living, civilized ways; the …
Of the complicated pile of…legacy…that we have to untangle from the cultural madness we Americans indulged in during the Naughties (that’s the ’00 decade, where pretty much every public figure engaged with politics, public policy, economics, social action, environmentalism, culture wars, and foreign policy acted impulsively, childishly, and shamefully), perhaps …
In my post on the Entitlement Mentality I quoted Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who once said “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” The last several election cycles in America have made it shockingly clear that Americans no longer know the difference between opinion and facts …
Now, let’s go on over to the Republican side of the fence and do some more sacred cow tipping. I could pick on them for their mirror-image myopia on the same issues of environmental stewardship, but let’s go for something more fun. Let’s take the classic Republican relationship with tradition …
It’s ironic, really. America has been the science and technology innovation engine of the world since the days of Thomas Edison, being joined in supremacy by Japan by the last decade of the 20th century. And yet, despite an amazingly vibrant tech industry (whose growth remains fairly unhindered despite the …
This year’s Beyond Belief conference is up, and it looks like it’s gonna be a doozy. This year, in honor of another very bitter election season in the midst of a number of medium-sized crises, the cadre of scientists and philosophers have trained their sights on public policy. For those …
