Time was when being able to read and write was good enough to meet the demands of industry. After a while, workers needed to have an eighth grade, then a high school education to be of much value. That was then, back before the world became complicated. Today, in order to understand what is going […]
An iconic American wilderness turns 150, National Geographic A “paradox of the cultivated wild.” That’s how National Geographic Explorer David Quammen characterized Yellowstone National Park in a celebrated edition of National Geographic. In that issue, an epic ecosystem – it’s the biggest complex of mostly untamed landscape and wildlife within the lower 48 states – received epic […]
There is the forbidden, there is the given, the meek, and the powerful, sustenance all the same. Biblically, the laws of kashrut were rather explicit, has scales, no kids in mothers’ milk, cloven hooves, well, there is a debate. How does it eat? The kosher laws were crafted initially as a code of conduct not for […]
Expressions that pass from hand to hand like sealed containers… In Herbert Marcuse and Planned Obsolescence I undertook to develop a theoretical foundation for ‘planned obsolescence’ from Georg Simmel’s analysis of the “preponderance of objective culture over subjective culture that developed during the nineteenth century.” My intuition has proved to be uncannily prescient. Besides the indirect influence […]
Student Loan Cancellation will not Benefit the Wealthy, Alan Collinge, Student Loan Justice Org. Alan Collinge History In 1972, allegations about students abusing bankruptcy3 courts were beginning to make headlines. Major newspapers were publishing anecdotes about students who took out large college loans. Supposedly then, young graduates or students quickly declared bankruptcy to avoid paying them off. The […]
History is the study of the past. We can not undo the past; but we can make use of knowledge of the past to help us understand what is going on now so as to make the right choices, to take the right actions for issues of the present now; and to better our odds […]
How intelligence was distributed among the animals Illustration by Tom Seidmann-Freud In the beginning, none of the animals was endowed with intelligence. When they saw a hunter coming towards them who wanted to kill them, they stopped, looked at him, and were shot. So our Lord sent someone who put all the senses in a […]
(Dan here…I am reading more examples of this trend of local censorship) From Diane Ravitche’s blog comes this posting: (Quote) Peter Greene tells the ignominious story of the Spottsylvania, Virginia, school board. One of the school board members, Kirk Twigg, is a conservative Christian who is very fearful of books that might have any sexual content. He […]
Prof. Joel Eissenberg, Upfront Blog For Christmas 2021, Linda gave me a copy of “The St. Louis Commune of 1877: Communism in the Heartland” by Mark Kruger. The title certainly grabbed my attention. Having read it, there’s somewhat less than meets the eye here. The reason I never heard of this before is that the […]
Alan Collinge’s Student Loan Justice Facebook page. I keep talking about how the consolidation fees, late fees, forbearance interest, etc. and the interest on the previous adds up over time. Pretty soon, it surpasses the original loan balance. There are probably worse examples of this occurring. As it is, the non-principal payments are more than […]