Tonight we will have a second discussion session on the topic of time. The Raymond Tallis essay was brief, a well expressed overview of the uses and the limitations of the language of time. Tallis made reference to the maxim that “time is what prevents everything from happening all at once.” Time and change…
The Saudi visit began with a traditional sword dance. The photo reminds me of a “ladies choice” dance at a high school prom. Yesterday the President gave a speech in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. I listened to some of his speech broadcast on NPR. After a few minutes I could take no more of the…
Spring in the mid-west is unsettled. Every day one gets to draw blind, a card from the deck. One turns over the card to find one has drawn an Ace or the Joker. I remember a Memorial Day many years ago at Great Lakes Drag Strip. The afternoon was raw. I shivered, wrapped in…
Leave it to a philosopher of science to nudge us to think seriously about something that we never expected to think about. As one of our group succinctly stated: “Time, what’s the big deal.” Granted most of us, philosophers excepted, have no reason to worry over the status of time, the reality or the…
As a younger man I thought that Mother’s Day was a perfunctory holiday. It seemed a formal obligation with minimalist, relatively unstructured requirement to express appreciation to one’s mom, and to motherhood in general. As the years have passed, Mother’s day as grown in my estimation. Now I view it as a sacred time,…
Life continues apace, society adjusts, acclimates to the idiosyncratic dismissal of the FBI chief. This was a out-of-nowhere Surd for us Americans. We’ve not had anyone in the White House who assumed tyrannical powers, since the Civil War. Lincoln was accused of arrogation of power when he suspended the writ of habeas corpus. But…
RECIPE FOR REMAKING A WORLD Ingredients: ugliness, unfairness, suffering, poverty, terror, rage, sadness, etc. Most of which is no one’s fault, the cause being diffuse, shared, distributed, so that blame cannot be focally assigned. A majority of us are touched by these circumstances, and feel that there is nothing we can do, no one…
First agenda item of the day: breakfast at Taste of Paris. Its a favorite Cafe and we look forward to the weekly visit. The waitstaff are always welcoming, familiar faces due to our patronage of many months. France has been much on my mind. Today they are holding a national election. At stake is…
Yesterday Thorsday, when the news feed came across that the House had passed the Obamacare replacement act, I was palpably nauseated. Predictably the Tribune front page of this morning featured a picture of the President flanked by his fawning palace guard, applauding the event in the White House Rose Garden. Emotionally this seems like…
