January 3, 2022 What China is now doing concerning Taiwan is very disheartening. It insists that Taiwan is part of mainland China and that it will never give up this belief, going to war with the U.S. if necessary to keep Taiwan from “seceding.” It’s as if China has abandoned its tradition of cooperation and […]
January 1, 2022 Maya Lin, a 21 year old college student, designed the Viet Nam Memorial, and we are now paying the price for her genius. She drew attention to the importance of the individual, replacing emphasis on the ideology of statues—for example of Robert E. Lee or George Washington. But now the individual is […]
January 1, 2022 Central Park (or Nordstrom) Tower rises 1,550 feet in the air, and is the tallest primarily residential building in the world. It was begun in 2014 and completed last year at a cost of $3 billion. The impact on the environment is almost unimaginable; at one point 19 trucks carrying concrete were […]
December 20, 2021 It would be a good thing if the Second Amendment to the Constitution was repealed, but the outcome is unpredictable. (It should be noted that the United States is worse than Third World countries; those countries at least make ownership of guns illegal.) It could certainly happen that the U.S. would descend […]
November 2021 Alan Paton finds himself “no longer able to aspire to the highest with one part of himself and to deny it with another.” It’s tempting for most people to identify with that problem, believing that they too strive towards the highest but are too weak to reach it, and so they torture themselves […]
When two neurons whose action potentials travel one way come in contact traveling in opposite directions, they create a brief electromagnetic radiation that travels to adjoining neuron clusters or ganglia. That is telepathy in the brains of two people. It occurs only when they are looking at each other. When it happens, however, they are […]
It’s a common expression: “I know what you’re thinking.” I think, in fact, there is a neural basis for that idea. A neural event is a fragment of a sensation—it transmits as an electro-magnetic radiation. Enough of these coming together will convey a thought. That is why we believe when looking at someone we think […]
The government of China is structured in such a way that the will of the people is expressed; the government of the United States is not. In China, a country of 1.5 billion people, the people’s will is expressed through discussion and argument in earlier childhood on up to membership in the Communist Party, and […]
A few minutes ago I was looking at the branches of a tree outside my window and thought of the line from Shakespeare’s Sonnet number 73: “bare ruined choirs.” The metaphor has always struck me as remarkable, but I never tried to think out why. The branches are just now beginning to bud and in […]
China is better structured for decision making than the U.S. There is no question about that. With 5-year plans it has time to change or adjust its decisions, abandon them and start all over with new ones. The U.S. has no such time because every two years politicians must decide on the decisions made two […]