The New York state abortion law
Here’s my quick take on the law just passed on abortion in New York state. My first observation is that it’s an attempt to get a law in place that will set state rules for abortions if Roe v. Wade … Continue reading →
Category Archives: Getting philosophical: life, love, the universe
Covington and the politics of aggressive standing
The starting point for this post was one of NBC’s Savannah Guthrie’s remarks to Nick Sandmann in her recent interview with the teenager: There’s something aggressive about standing there. Standing your ground. You both stood your ground. Both? Actually, Nathan … Continue reading →
Frankovich’s “apology” and the Atlantic’s attempt at a corrective on the nature of truth
Nicholas Frankovich wrote a scathing piece in National Review on the Covington teenagers entitled “The Covington Students Might as Well Have Just Spit on the Cross.” I mentioned it in an earlier post, noting that I’d read his article when … Continue reading →
My UFO
As part of a previous discussion about UFOs, commenter “huxley” wrote: I must say, if one sees a UFO and takes it seriously, it’s a crisis. One asks, or at least I did, what is reality, how do we know … Continue reading →
The Dutch way of voluntary death
This is a long and very chilling report on how legalized euthanasia operates in the Netherlands. I’ve read about the phenomenon before, but not in as much depth. The suffering that can occur, particularly at the end of life, can … Continue reading →
So, was it aliens?
And not the “illegal alien” kind—the extraterrestrial kind. Avi Loeb, chair of Harvard’s astronomy department, thinks it just might have been: On October 19, 2017, astronomers at the University of Hawaii spotted a strange object travelling through our solar system, … Continue reading →
The young-old—or is it the old-young?
Did you ever notice that young people sometimes write and/or perform as though they’re old? Some do it very successfully; the best example that comes to mind is T. S. Eliot—who perhaps was born old—who began writing his masterpiece “The … Continue reading →
Another theory on why time seems to go more quickly as we get older
This: Time is happening in the mind’s eye. It is related to the number of mental images the brain encounters and organizes and the state of our brains as we age. When we get older, the rate at which changes … Continue reading →
Charisma in politics, charisma in life
I think I may have first heard the word “charisma” in connection with JFK. He had it. I could tell. I recognized it and I even felt it. But of course back then I was a kid. Have I ever … Continue reading →
Yuval Noah Harari predicts the future—sort of
The name of Yuval Noah Harari came up recently in a conversation I had over the holidays. He seems to have become some sort of guru to a lot of people, and yet I know practically nothing about him or … Continue reading →
The lengthy history of the liberalism of urban dwellers
Commenter “CatoRenasci” writes: Consider that urban areas have been more ‘liberal’ or ‘progressive’ or ‘radical’ (pick an adjective) since time immemorial – at least as far as we have any sort of reliable history: classical writers, both Greek and (especially) … Continue reading →
The 5 worst things about getting older
John Hawkins has a piece at PJ Media entitled “The 5 Worst Things About Getting Older.” It caught my eye for obvious reasons, but as with many such articles I started chuckling right at the start on learning that Hawkins … Continue reading →