Living in peace is a skill that most of the modern world has not developed to any significant degree. Yet that doesn’t mean it can’t happen.
Category: Sustainability
Kurt Vonnegut Was Among the Best of Us
If I were to name the ten most intelligent and morally wholesome people who ever lived, Vonnegut would be on the list. At left is my reasoning.
Music that Transports Us Can Be “About” Something
In my own less-than-sophisticated words I would say that program music is music that is about something. From Wikipedia: Program music or programmatic music is a type of instrumental art music that attempts to musically render an extramusical narrative. The narrative itself might be offered to …
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Tagged with: Music that Transports Us
Our “Indecent Society”
It’s hard to know exactly what Kurt Vonnegut was referring to when he used the word “indecent” here. Maybe it’s just an amorphous combination of war, poverty, denial of healthcare, lack of clean water, and injustice. He was also a …
Tagged with: indecent society
Silence
When my kids were in elementary school, I loved to volunteer as a chaperone on their field trips, and I remember with great fondness one of my daughter’s favorite teachers, Englishman Martin Cook, whom she had for 5th Grade. Mr. …
Tagged with: silence
Quick Post on Grammar
A reader asks: When you say “He’s not as happy as ______” do you say “me” or “I?” Because the verb “to be” never takes an object, the correct answer is “I”; this is called a “predicate nominative.” The problem …
Tagged with: predicate nominative
The Word “Very”
A reader asks: We seem to overuse the word “very.” Can you comment on that? Sure. Excellent point. It’s because most people’s vocabularies are limited and they’re too lazy to look for the proper word. For most adjectives, say “large,” …
Tagged with: vocabulary
Religion: Hundreds of Paths Up the Mountain
It would be interesting to know what percentage of religious people think according to the Hindu proverb at left. To take a guess: Of the Eastern religions like Buddhism, Hinduism, Shinto, and Jainism, it’s probably fairly high, possibly close to …
Young People and the Environment
A couple of comments: Fortunately, “thousands” is off by several (probably five) orders of magnitude. There are approximately 2.3 billion people on this planet between the ages of 15 and 30. If 10% of them are “stepping up” in any …
Tagged with: drill baby drill, in half a century at the rate we're going this planet will be a hellish place to live, it's hard to know what fraction of young people are concerned about and getting involved in environmental stewardship, propaganda of Big Oil and the far right, the significant levels of support we see for Trump among young people, Young People and the Environment
No Intelligent Species Would …..
Several people commented on the meme here to the effect that perhaps we’re not really intelligent. I offer this: Humankind is plenty intelligent, but we have other characteristics that impede our capacity to use this intelligence to our benefit. Greed, …
