I wanted to do something a bit different this week so I thought it would be fun to look at bit of irony, that, depending on your point of view, you may find amusing or even go so far as to enjoy a bit of schadenfreude. We’re all aware of what’s going on with Bud Light...
Butch Mazzuca
Our Changing Culture
Epistemology is the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope. In essence, epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion. And a great place to examine epistemological theory is to look at...
Newspeak for you!
Language is an incredibly powerful thing. And perhaps none said it better than Ludwig Wittgenstein who was perhaps the greatest analytical philosopher of the 20th century, who encapsulated the power of language with the words, “The limits of my language are the...
Income Inequality Revisited
Recently a longtime friend sent me an invitation to an Online 14-week UC Berkeley course about income inequality in America. The course is taught by former Clinton administration Labor Secretary, Robert Reich. After watching the first class (and the last I might...
Thinking out loud
50 years from now historians will cite the three most influential presidents in American history as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Barack Obama – Without Washington our nation would have been aborted before it was born; Lincoln through his singular wisdom and...
An Unintended Consequences (we should have seen coming.)
In the mid-1800s thousands of European rabbits were introduced into Australia for the purposes of sport-hunting. But rabbit populations expand exponentially, and soon the botanical composition of the areas where the rabbits were introduced was altered. Because those...
The 97% Lie Explained”
No one is immune to falsehoods, in part because of how our cognition is built and how misinformation exploits it. We use mental shortcuts, or heuristics, to make many of our judgments, which benefit us. At the same time however, our cognitive tendencies can make us...
When Sally became Harry
My wife tells me I write too much about climate change - perhaps, but it just galls me to no end how the left (with the aid of a complicit media) has highjacked a legitimate medical issue and turned it into a political one - but hey, she' probably correct, I have...
A Parable for Today
Once upon a time, six old blind men lived in a village in India. Because they could not see the world for themselves, they had to imagine many of its wonders and listened carefully to the stories told by travelers to learn what they could about life outside the...
The Wehrmacht, the Red Army and US
I am far from a political scientist, but I have a good grasp of history and have long argued that the differences between communism and fascism were minor in comparison to their similarities. Consider, both 20th-century ideologies promised a utopian vision of the...