Audio I was interviewed for The Refreshment Center's radio show on Friday, 1 February 2013. The interview is embedded here, although most of my interview was lost to a techno-disaster. I'm scheduled for another visit in a few weeks. ______________…
Quoting Carl Sagan, I begin some presentations with this line: "It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." But in the wake of a recent trip to…
American writer Tracy Kidder points out: "In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange." We ignore ominous warning signs at our own peril. But ignore them we will,…
I suppose the king of Norway could endow me with the Nobel Prize for Medicine. After all, I’ve done no harm, thereby adhering to the first rule of medical practice. As a consequence, I demonstrate great promise.
But of course there would be no political reason to hand me a Nobel Prize. The Nobel committee is nothing if not political, and there is no more political act than awarding the Nobel Peace Prize.
I spent much of my afternoon participating in an exercise in mental masturbation at the local offices of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. We discussed the latest projections for build-out of the suburban area around Tucson within 100 years, with significant construction activity to begin in 20 years. Fortunately, we’ll be well into the post-industrial stone age by that time. But it’s a little disappointing when even a majority of the “environmentalists” in the room think we’re stealing a huge victory from developers by limiting paved surfaces to merely half the Tucson basin. We just keep trying to sustain the unsustainable suburbanization of the desert southwest, long after it’s clearly failed as a viable living arrangement for the entire industrialized world.
I managed to tolerate the demoralizing intellectual clusterfuck only because I’d received a bit of good news immediately before the meeting began. The local morning daily declined to run my latest op-ed, but the local counter-culture weekly rag will be running it within the next few weeks. When they do, I’ll post a link to the piece at my “News” page. You get to see the latest draft before the masses. For regular visitors to this blog, there’s nothing new here. I’m just writing for one of the primary reasons Orwell wrote: sheer egoism. Hey, if it was good enough for him ….
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