• Kennedy’s Vision (4) The Race to the Moon

    Did you ever wonder why Kennedy proposed a race to the moon? Oh, we wanted to win what was called “the space race.” There was worry about the relative prestige of the communist and non-communist worlds. Communist societies had been thought to be hopelessly backward – until the Sputnik satellites of October and November, 1957,…

  • Some things don’t change

    Wordsworth, in the early 19th century, quoted by Will Durant in the late 20th century, and still timely in the early 21st century:   “The world is running mad with its notion that its evils are to be relieved by political changes, political remedies, political nostrums, whereas the great evils – civilization, bondage, misery –…

  • The guys upstairs on crop circles

    My good friend Michael Langevin asks me what crop circles might mean (after I send him a photo of a Brazilian crop circle that I found on facebook) and I sent him this, from my book The Sphere and the Hologram. It was nice to be reminded of the information, which came in about a…

  • Do you have these traits common to creative people?

    I recognized myself in this description, and perhaps you will recognize yourself as well: http://www.matthewschuler.co/why-creative-people-sometimes-make-no-sense/  

  • In Flanders Fields

    Somebody posted this about the poem In Flanders Fields, only one and a half minutes long, and very moving. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6BlOkpdkg8 But that isn’t the whole story, is it? When i was a boy, i responded to this poem in the way that the author meant us to respond. But that was when i was very…

  • How to be miserable

    Whew! This one is brutally honest. No sugar-coating, no bullshit, no soft-pedaling. I didn’t even have to really read it; skimming the points was enough, because everything in it was straightforward and right to the point. (Ask me how I know this is true. Ask me how I recognize the things we do to sabotage…

  • Grief

    Historian Arnold Toynbee, who escaped service in World War I only because he had contracted typhoid fever in Greece before the war began, saw that war kill most of his college contemporaries. Much later, toward the far end of his long life, he wrote that his grief and indignation at the sacrifice of so many…

  • Why it’s worthwhile to be friends with failure

    This is GREAT, and painless, and brief. What more do you want? http://doodlealley.com/2012/10/10/be-friends-with-failure/ When I find things like this, I mourn my lost newsnet.

  • Pope Francis on today’s golden calf

  • Pope Francis Rips Trickle-down Economics

    Found via SchwartzReport. SR Editor SAS says: “The more I read about this Pope the more I like him. It is going to be interesting to watch how the Theocratic Rightist Bishops and Cardinals appointed by his recent predecessors, who seem more at home with Anyn Rand’s teachings than those of Jesus, are going to…