A system of values and beliefs that organize a society and result in various practices and artifacts that are associated with the general characteristics of that society.
For some time now, I have been unable to escape the conclusion that the way to find a path to stop the heating of the planet is not by developing new technologies to compensate for the ever-increasing carbon emissions produced by economic growth. All you have to do is think about how entangled everyone is … More Beyond the Yellow Brick Road*: Saving the Planet from Eco Modernism
Ideas can get away from us, even take control of our lives. Sometimes, a great idea can become destructive when taken to its most extreme form. Life is full of ambiguities and imperfections. If we take our great ideas out of this context, they can become dysfunctional, stupid, and even dangerous. So it is with … More Freedom, Responsibility, and the Absurdity of Autocracy
“Risk on” and “Risk Off” are terms heard among stock market traders, analysts, and investment advisors. They indicate whether the speaker feels that risk is high or low for investing in markets or in a particular stock. Risk is always a matter of degree, except under conditions of certainty—and when does that happen? Yet, “risk … More Risk On Risk Off: Likely or Unlikely, Catastrophic or Not
I am tired of all the convenient talk of “more training” and other improvements in the formal management of police practices, as if they were a mere problem of technical engineering. They are not. The most important quality of police officers is not the skills they take from the academy to the precinct. It is … More Taser, Gun, and Character: What You Cannot Train
Now that I have read President Biden’s “fact sheet” on his infrastructure plan, dubbed the American Jobs Plan, I have to wonder whether it will devolve into an “upgrade” to “modernize” business-as-usual. What we need is a genuine emergency response to the converging crises of climate, a crumbling main street economy, and the continued enrichment … More Building Back Better: Deferred Maintenance vs. Emergency Response
Ugo Bardi is an Italian scientist who studied hydrogen energy technology while on a post-doctoral assignment at the University of California, Berkeley. After his research with the team at Berkeley revealed the seemingly intractable problems of converting hydrogen energy to electricity in any practical way, Bardi moved on to other topics of research back home … More Living in Ugo Bardi’s Seneca Effect
HERE IS AN INSIGHTFUL HYPOTHETICAL DIALOG BETWEEN ECONOMISTS AND ECOLOGISTS OVER SEVERAL DECADES, WHICH EXEMPLIFIES THE CULTURAL STALEMATE BETWEEN IDEOLOGY AND SCIENCE. THAT IS WHAT STIFLES PROGRESS IN FACING OUR CLIMATE/ECOLOGICAL/EXISTENTIAL CRISIS TODAY. (I inserted a few links for reference.) A completely made up story about the history of economics and ecology By Katy Shields … More Here is Why Economists Cannot Hear Ecologists
The tension between Democratic and Republican politicians is greater than at any time I can remember. The Republicans have no policy agenda; they just focus on obstruction just as they did to the Black President about whom they preferred to remain in complete denial. At least Joe Biden seems to have learned the lesson of … More To Filibuster Democracy, or Not
Last Saturday we decided to take a hike in the beautiful Frijoles Canyon of the Bandelier National Monument near Los Alamos National Laboratory “up the hill” from Santa Fe. I had not experienced the pandemic claustrophobia that has caused so much anxiety; I guess I was just too busy. Anyway, it was a lovely cool … More Mask over Civility: The Indifference of Americans to Public Health
I don’t remember where I read the “Allegory of the Best Farmer and Community Corn,” but it made enough of an impression that I saved it. I guess it was the contrast with our modernist illusions that got my attention. We live in a world that is culturally detached from the factual world of physical, … More The Allegory of the Best Farmer and Community Corn versus the Modernist Dilemma
