Articles

Welcome to the blog page. Here's all the articles. Like the tag line for the web site says, I write about a lot of different subjects. Well, at least, when I write at all. It still haven't gotten over being disheartened by losing years and years of content to WordPress hackers. I guess I still need to work that out. In any event, here's what I've managed to slap together so far.

AI Doesn't Exist

November 15, 2023

Angela Collier is a PhD theoretical physicist with an engaging YouTube channel. Her videos concentrate on science communication. She's interesting, witty, and fun to watch.

What Is To Be Done?

November 11, 2023

Well, I guess we gotta talk about commies again. If you thought that the collapse of the USSR in 1991 would put the last nail in the coffin of Marxism, you'd be wrong. As I pointed out previously, the commies, now calling themselves Progressives, are still with us.

Precursors of Genocide

November 10, 2023

Karl Marx was the father of socialism, and co-authored The Communist Manifesto with Friedrich Engels. Central to the thesis of socialism was the class struggle, which is to say the conflict between the working class (the proletariat) and the ruling class (the bourgeoisie). In Marx's view this struggle was inevitably violent.

There Are No Solutions

September 18, 2023

Alcohol consumption is a problem. According to Boston University's Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth, the availability of alcohol is directly associated with increased violence and death. For instance: Each year in the US, there are 7,756 homicides attributable to (assumed to be caused by) alcohol.

The Death of Expertise

July 22, 2023

Tom Nichols PhD was professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College for 25 years. In 2018, he published The Death of Expertise, a book in which he argued that "the increasingly democratic dissemination of information, rather than producing an educated public, has instead created an army of ill informed [sic] and angry citizens who denounce intellectual achievement".

The Map to Reality

July 21, 2023

Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was a Ukrainian agronomist who lived in the Soviet Union. By 1928, he had rejected both Darwin's theory of natural selection and Mendel's theory of genetics. Neither, he declared, were compatible with the tenets of Marxism-Leninism.

Meaning and Socialization in the Information Age

July 18, 2023

I noticed today that Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy introduced new legislation: "The National Strategy for Social Connection Act". The Act purports to solve the issue of "loneliness and isolation". Let's leave aside whether we should run screaming in terror at the very idea of the government imposing "nutrition, sleep, and physical activity" guidelines on the general population.

The Transition of Ages

July 13, 2023

With this article, I offer a world-historical hypothesis about why we’re going through such turmoil. I've written this as a companion to the video presentation I linked earlier. Of course, you might not want to sit through an hour and a half of me talking (or rambling) about this.

Book Age Business Models

July 12, 2023

I want to continue my examination of the death of the Book Age by looking at the newspaper business model; specifically how unsuited it is for the Information Age. This old business model is killing the newspaper industry. But it also goes beyond that.