Not long ago, I posted an essay, Is Power for the Sake of Power the Same as Power Earned by Productive Achievements? where I responded to a study which found: [T]hat individuals in roles that possess power but lack status have a tendency to engage in activities that demean others. According to the study, “The … [Read more…]
I’ve been reading Albert J. Nock’s biography of Thomas Jefferson which is available for free download at Ludwig von Mises Institute. In that book, Nock deals with lines of thought in Jefferson and his colleague, friend of his younger and older years, John Adams. Jefferson (almost) saw the American Constitution as having been engineered to … [Read more…]
Slowly do I move forward in my efforts to develop words and grammatical structures and concepts adequate to describing the social and moral setting of man as he learns to shape himself, his societies, his technologies, to better reflect and take advantage of the richness and complexity of God’s Creation. This richness and complexity can … [Read more…]
We’re flooded with information on the bad things which can happen to the brain and with some advice, or at least implied advice, on how to avoid many of them. For example, we Americans are obsessed with sports in which violence has become the main point of it all. We also send a significant percentage … [Read more…]
A recent article, Female Minorities Are More Affected by Racism Than Sexism, Research Suggests, speaks of a study showing that Oriental women who are members of immigrant communities in the United States are upset in a deep and emotional way by racial prejudice but are dispassionate about prejudice against them as women, taking that as … [Read more…]
The so-called World War I, was actually the beginning of a war not yet over in this year of 2011, though now consisting of the hugely expensive American military bumbling about in a number of countries as our political leaders dance and speak their chosen roles of blood-soaked buffoons. That first phase of the ongoing … [Read more…]
Let me propose a new definition of a liberal: A liberal is one who values will greatly and thus is inclined to exaggerate his power over the thing-like world, over his own nature and the nature of other human beings, over a merely factual world, and — maybe — over truths. This seems strange in … [Read more…]
See Astronomers Reveal a Cosmic ‘Axis of Evil’ to learn: Astronomers are puzzled by the announcement that the masses of the largest objects in the universe appear to depend on which method is used to weigh them. … Clusters of galaxies are the largest gravitationally bound objects in the universe containing thousands of galaxies like … [Read more…]
Are conspiracies self-organizing, at least in part? In general: yes. There is no centrally-controlled conspiracy run by Satanic servants or omnipotent bureaucrats. There are networks of those who inherited wealth and power and those networks are sometimes refreshed by new blood of the ambitious and talented. There are also tightly organized operations with a specific … [Read more…]
I’ve just finished reading Norman F. Cantor’s Medieval History: The Life and Death of a Civilization and the ending pages on the decay of the High Middle Ages brought a few ideas into focus. He spoke of the destruction of the Thomistic “cathedral” of thought by the Franciscan radicals, perhaps outright heretics, led by Duns … [Read more…]