I know this is early or late, depending on your perspective. The occupant of the White House was chosen person of the year 2016. I am getting a jump on the 2017 pick. With every new year, it’s a new contest. Nothing rules out anyone getting the nod. A past recipient may become a…
On August 20, 2017 Andrew Young was interviewed on NBC News Meet The Press . Here are excerpts verbatim of what he had to say. This is a longish post but worth reading, maybe more than once. On the Klan types Well, it’s a week of misunderstandings. We originally sought to redeem the soul…
The poem haunts me. I receive one poem a day via email from the poetry foundation. Most I read once and discard due to my inability to resonate with the words. This one gets to me. It describes the speakers encounter with a “crazy” street preacher, Brother Rickey, while waiting for the pedestrian crosswalk…
A gear-head since my high school days, I go out of my way to admire an old muscle car, or a race car. An early memory remains of standing outside the fence at the State Fair at Raleigh as the open wheeled dirt track midget cars screamed around the track. After the race I…
It’s early Monday morning. The sun glows a fiery ball behind overcast clouds. Around 1 PM a eclipse of the sun by the moon is to occur, but we are unlikely to see it. The solar system continues to move in orbital regularity as it has for a very long time, by human time…
Not every false belief is a mistake. What is the difference between a mistake and a mental disturbance? A mistake does not only have a cause, it also has a ground. The truth of my statements is the test of my understanding of these statements. The truth of certain empirical propositions belongs to…
My slave holding people of the mid 1800s who lived in the South deserve more consideration for their brutal attitudes toward blacks, —than do we for our racism toward people of color. The slave trade, referred to by Southeners as “our peculiar institution” was the fading, dying residue of an ancient institution. The Slavery…
Sometimes you have to say it out loud in order for the truth to penetrate, to register, to enter the heart. If you are able, for whatever reason or rationalization, to support the president after Charlottesville and the pronouncement following several days later about the “good people” among the alt-right demonstrators,–you are a racist. …
Just read an essay culled from Philosophy Now magazine. The piece is an interview with Professor Maurizio Ferraris, University of Turin, a proponent of New Realism. Here are some phrases that captured my imagination, vectors for exploration. The transformation of reality: revolution is possible and necessary. But it requires real action and not mere…
Wow! What a discussion. There is nothing more ordinary than “reality” and nothing more controversial. When we seriously think about what we mean by “reality” we encounter levels, horizontal slices of a cake. Which slice is desired, pointed to—involves the vocabulary and the syntax that you must use to describe that segment of reality. …
