This is an election year and there are plenty of people who at this point realize that the US President is largely a figurehead, as are pretty much all the others, and who will tell you that it really doesn’t matter who is elected, the outcome, essentially speaking, is largely the same. The same, in [...]
A few years ago I wrote a letter to the editor of Bioscience Hypotheses, a journal in which, shortly before, I had published an article speculating on the cause of Bee Colony Collapse. One of the reasons I chose that forum for my editorial was that it seemed to me (and it still does) that [...]
2012 has begun. You may be prepared for disaster, but are you prepared for good fortune?
Okay, so the title of this post isn’t exactly correct. I’m not going to discuss the marketing of establishment propaganda per se. I am going to discuss one of the methods used to maintain it, however. Recently, a friend of mine, knowing that I run with an “alternative” crowd sent me a post by author [...]
The concepts of rights is confusing to a lot of people. You can’t see them, you can’t feel them, and they are very often violated. As far as most people are concerned they simply don’t exist. Or, if they do, they are only something that the government “grants” and as such they can be “taken [...]
There are quite a few so-called “libertarian” groups touting so-called “anarcho-capitalism”. To my mind this term is nothing but an oxymoron that serves to confuse people who have otherwise correct instincts. This might be because one of the apparent proponents of the idea was none other than Murray Rothbard. It’s possible, then, that this is [...]
On the path to enlightenment there are a lot of people who, for whatever reason, want to keep you from the truth and they have a few ingenious techniques for doing so. One of these goes like this: Present a little bit of truth along with a lot of falsehood and the truth will easily [...]
From my high school years to the years I spent at Rutgers University studying biology, I have been told that “evolution has no direction.” At first, I accepted this notion, although I always felt that there was something wrong with it. While it’s true that beings do not evolve to a specific end, they most [...]
This is very well done and it will definitely get you thinking about our place in the universe. I have no doubt there are civilizations galore out there. To me this is simple statistics. Seeing all of these galaxies out there is very humbling and I think it serves well as a step in the [...]
This is such a positively priceless blunder, one has to wonder… can it really be a coincidence? For those of you who might not get it, here is the relevant scene from the Matrix. It’s true, you have to see it for yourself.
This is a just pet-peeve of mine. I sometimes hear arguments regarding the ‘consent’ clause of the Declaration of Independence that seem to imply that one must consent to a just government and from that follows the idea that anything goes as long as one consents. I have to weigh in on this. In a [...]
From The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Prior Certainty of Consciousness: Descartes began with the basic epistemological premise of every Witch Doctor (a premise he shared explicitly with Augustine): “the prior certainty of consciousness,” the belief that the existence of an external world is not self-evident, but must be proved by deduction from the contents of one’s [...]
Recently I wrote a post called Pondering the Universe in which I laid out some ideas regarding consciousness and metaphysics that I have been examining. In that post, I mention Descartes’ views about the nature of consciousness or the ‘soul’. To get a better idea of exactly what his views are on this topic, I [...]
The Freeman is a magazine published by the Foundation for Economic Education, a non-profit organization founded by Leonard Read in 1946. I’ve attended lectures at the Foundation’s mansion in Irvington-on-Hudson, NY since 2002. Lately, however, I have been a little bit disappointed with some of the things I’ve been reading in the Freeman. I’m not [...]
The death of a loved one can send you into a metaphysical tailspin, so to speak. You want so much to believe that you will one day see them again. At the same time, if you’re like me, you want to puzzle it out with reason. But this is a question that is pretty close [...]