Education and Culture
If You Are Depressed by the Cesspool Quality of America’s Political Leadership — Get a Boost from Switzerland’s Solar Powered Airplane Flight across the United States — the Solar Impulse Across America Project (05 May 2013)
How a Canadian Legitimately Sees Hysterical America — Excerpts from His Insightful Article — and My Supporting Comment (24 April 2013)
Bob Garfield, a Media Expert, Summarized the Laughable BS that Constitutes Cable News at Major Events — Like the Boston Marathon Bombing and Aftermath— His Brief Article Is Worth Reading (19 April 2013)
Not a Peep from the Lamestream Media, when the Obama Administration Leased California BLM Land for Oil Fracking — without Proper Environmental Review (10 April 2013)
A Study of More than 600 Corporate Board Directors Finds That Female Decision Makers Do a Fairer Minded Job than Men — which, the Authors Conclude, Seems to Explain Previous Findings that Having a Higher Proportion of Women on Corporate Boards Results in More Profitable Company Performances (27 March 2013)
Journalist Chris Hedges Is Arguably too Vitriolic a Critic of Corporatist Culture to Gain a Foothold in Our Attention — but He Is Consistently Right (25 March 2013)
Writer Joshua Holland Asks whether Americans Are too Stupid for Democracy — He Says No, but His Facts all Point the Other Way — and Supporting Examples Provided by Our Leaders’ Foolishly Incomplete Discussions about Iraq’s Once Suspected WMDs, Iran’s Suspected Bomb-Building, and Syria’s Alleged Chemical Weapons Use (20 March 2013)
Psychotherapist Phillippa Perry Linked Lying about Alcohol Intake to Culturally Accepted Narcissism — and My Comment about Narcissism’s Spiritual Self-Destruction (28 February 2013)
Professional Honor — No Better Embodied than by Surgeon General C. Everett Koop — too Bad There Has Been So Little Public Reflection on His Passing (27 February 2013)
A Must Read for Wannabe Lawyers — Tucker Max on Why You Should Not Go to Law School — and Comments regarding My Own Statistically Unlikely Experience in Law (19 February 2013)
Collusion among New York Times, Washington Post, and the CIA — to Keep a Drone Base Location Secret — a Comment on the Decline of the Function of the Fourth Estate (07 February 2013)
An Ohio State Study — Demonstrated that Providing People with Immediately Corrected Information Does Not Reliably Change their Mistaken Minds — the Finding Corroborates Suspicion that Determined Stupidity Is Our Lot in Life — which May Account for American Politics’ Frequently Stubborn Resistance to Facing Facts (06 February 2013)
High Art in Advertising — a German Television Commercial for Mercedes Uses almost No Words and Virtually No Car — and Hits a Homerun that Even Its Competitors Will Admire — a Model for “Wannabe” Influencers (16 January 2013)
Bruce Alberts — Editor in Chief of Science — Made an Excellent Suggestion for Improving American Science Education — but Policy Makers Will Probably Ignore It — because So Many Do Not Understand How Science and Critical Thinking Work (14 January 2013)
Reflexive American Bigotry Makes an International Fool of Itself — Time Warner Dumped Current TV, apparently in Part because Al Jazeera Bought It — and Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly Thoughtlessly Followed Up by Slamming Al Gore — All without Looking at Al Jazeera English’s Actual Doings (04 January 2013)
If It Is “Them” Voters’ Fault — Can We Help by Improving their Knowledge Base? — Probably Not, Say the Findings from a Clever Political Science Experiment (03 January 2013)
A Quotation from Dr. Mary-Claire King — President of the American Society of Human Genetics — Advocates for Scientists’ Duty to Speak Up in a Culture Drowning in Lies and Ignorance — but Her Words Illustrate the Chasm between Thoughtful Evidence-Seekers and the Majority of the Population (and Its Often Intentionally Misleading Leaders) (08 December 2012)
The Jovan Belcher, Kasandra Perkins Murder-Suicide Sadness — Unhelpful (but Representative) Idiocy from Wayne LaPierre, CEO of the National Rifle Association (07 December 2012)
How to Ad Lib a Speech from Notes, Eloquently — Vice President Biden’s Quietly Insightful Eulogy of Senator Warren Rudman (30 November 2012)
Escaping the Herd Mentality — Climate Progress Points Out that Accurate Climate Change Reporting Would Blend the Existing Scientific Consensus with More Extreme Modeling Predictions — Rather than Erroneously Tempering Science with Anti-Scientific Denial — and My Related Comment about the Inertia of Ignorance and Its Grip on Science Journalism and the Public (27 November 2012)
A World of Lies — Evidence about Lance Armstrong’s Multi-Year Tour de France Doping Operation Is Saddening — Not So Much because of the Cheating, but because of His Apparent Witness Intimidations (11 October 2012)
On the Serendipity of Aggressive Imbecility — the Chain of Causation that Led to the Sad Deaths of American Ambassador Christopher Stevens and Colleagues in Libya (12-13 September 2012)
Each Anniversary’s Replay of Video of the 11 September (2001) Terrorist Attack Is Psychologically and Spiritually Damaging — The President and First Lady’s Televised Moment of Silence Is a More Healing Way to Commemorate the Losses (11 September 2012)
Is Everyone Acting Like an Ethically Challenged Rat? — Fareed Zakaria’s Time Magazine and CNN Suspensions for Too-Closely Copying another Person’s Paragraphs (10 August 2012)
Western Whining about the Alleged Harshness of China’s Olympics Training — Misses the Point (10 August 2012)
Parade of Homes as an Introduction to Cultural Oddities — Ridiculously Tall Ceilings, Blatantly Wasted Space and Charging Rhinoceros Materialism — and a Comment on the Invitation to Filth Posed by Wall-to-Wall Carpeting (09 August 2012)
America’s Bad Behavior Spawning Machine Took it on the Chin this Week — though I Doubt that Anyone Noticed — and That’s the Spiritual and Social Point (07 August 2012)
Perhaps the Most Appropriate Tribute to Gore Vidal Was Restricted to Quoting Him — See The Telegraph (01 August 2012)
Right Wing Denial and Too-Frequent Liberal Silliness Prevent Clear Talk — about Reducing Gun Violence within the Confines of the Second Amendment (24 July 2012)
Team Sky and this Year’s Tour de France — Presented an Uplifting Contrast to the Behavior that Characterizes the World’s Political and Financial Elite (22 July 2012)
Howard Fineman’s Essay, Partly Contrasting Romney Father and Son, Hints about Unfavorably Changing Times, as Well (20 July 2012)
President Obama and Columnist Rich Lowry Inadvertently Proved the Merit of Op Ed Writer Kathleen Parker’s Observation that — “Dumbness permeates every aspect of our lives” (18 July 2012)
Lance Armstrong’s Dishonorable Court Tactic Decreased His Credibility in My Eyes — Perhaps We Are Now Seeing the Man for Who He Really Is (10 July 2012)
Does the Impression that the Condition of Highways and Rest Areas Leaves on Out-of-State Travelers Matter? — A Short Comment on Crumbling Transportation Infrastructures (07 July 2012)
The Power of Sculpture — an Example from Comerica Park, Home of the Detroit Tigers — Statue Depicting Charlie Gehringer — by Julie Amrany, Omni Amrany, and Gary Tillery (03 July 2012)
Bill Moyer’s Comment about Thomas Jefferson’s Failure to Live His Equality Writings Reminds Us of Our Parallel Love Affair with Similarly Deep Hypocrisy — Greed Is the Common Theme (02 July 2012)
Regarding Revived Doping Allegations against Lance Armstrong — Given the Administrative Format, There May Be More Damaging Substance Here than One Might Suspect — which Takes this Go-Round Out of the Context of Poorly Founded Malicious Gossip (16 June 2012)
An Outrageous Idea, or Not? — Stephan Richter’s Thought that Europe’s Monetary Union Should Have Been Restricted to Cultures that Split from Catholicism during the 16th Century’s Protestant Reformation (16 May 2012)
The Inevitability of Moral Error, Aging’s Subsequent Chance at Redemption, and Established Religion’s Complacence in Drawing on the Power of the Latter — Chris Hedge’s Account of Bishop George Packard’s Second Civil Disobedience Arrest (07 May 2012)
Rex W. Huppke’s Creatively Clever Chicago Tribune Obituary for “Facts” — His Essay Encapsulates American Culture’s Descent into Reality-Irrelevant Vacuity (04 May 2012)
Stirrings of Alarm at Greed’s Rising Distortion of the Scientific Process — (a) The Institute of Medicine’s Warning about Unsubstantiated Medical “Omics” Tests and (b) Academic Psychology’s Courageous Recognition that Some of Its Studies Require Reproducibility Confirmation (16 April 2012)
Clever Anti-Science Yahoos in Tennessee — Making Monkeys Out of the Smarter Portion of the State’s Citizenry (15 April 2012)
A New Way to Think about Teaching 1st through 12th Grade Science — 8+1 Fundamental Science Concepts from the PROM/SE Project (10 April 2012)
When Political Liberals Are Correct — Two Well-Communicated Essays Worthy of Becoming a Fiery Lawyer’s Closing Arguments — Comments on the Communicative Value of Reason-Able, but “Conclusory” Arguments (06 April 2012)
The Lamestream Media Knowingly Misrepresented the President’s Comments regarding the Supreme Court’s Review of ObamaCare (03 April 2012)
The Life-Enhancing Grace of a Few Imagination-Provoking Words — in a Culture Filled Mostly with Amplified Superficiality and Deadening Dross (27 March 2012)
Elon Musk and SpaceX — 60 Minutes’ Interview with an Inspiring Man — and the Contrast Musk’s Example Presents in regard to the Rest of America’s Pipsqueak Political and Economic Leadership (19 March 2012)
Outstanding Science Writing about Gravity and Climate from Germany — This Is the Way Science Communications Ought to Be Done in the United States (17 March 2012)
Bush Piloting 70-Year-Old DC-3s in and out of the Amazon Jungle — Al Jazeera’s Video Shows the Risks that Poverty and Primitive Conditions Bring with Them (07 March 2012)
Two Dissimilar Washington Post Articles Show Us the Fantasy World that We Are Living in — Columnist E. J. Dionne Jr. on Unrealistic Politics and Dr. Craig Bowron on Delusional Expectations about Dying — Where Has the Strength of American Realism Gone? (20 February 2012)
One Obvious Indicator of Why the United States Trails other Developed Nations in Science Education — the American Mentality that Opposes Adoption of the International System of Units — and Our Continuing National Stupidity in Not Fixing this Mistake (18 February 2012)
A Canada-Related Headline Illustrates the Difficulty of Focusing Attention where Alertness Is Most Required — Would Most People Pay Attention to a News Piece Entitled, “Tories Put Pipeline Ahead of Phytoplankton”? — Probably Not, and that’s the Point (10 February 2012)
Good Science Writing Compared to Bad — an Excellent National Science Foundation Press Release Compared to the Opaque Abstract that it Is Based on — regarding an Ellesmere Island Study of the Permian-Triassic Boundary Extinction (09 February 2012)
Professor Diane Ravitch’s Smart Questions about American Education — a “Must Read” for People Who Care (07 February 2012)
Arizona Governor Jan Brewer’s Pointing Finger — on the Difficulty of Sorting Prejudice from Legitimate Criticism in Regard to President Obama — and How Bigotry Creates Talented Social Survivors but Simultaneously Forces their Boat-Rocking Strength into Hiding (16 February 2012)
Newscasters Frequently Twist Truth in a Democracy-Damaging Way — an Example regarding Governor Mitt Romney’s Alleged “Gaffe” about Poor People (03 February 2012)
An Effective Animation of Global Temperature Change over the Last Century from the Goddard Institute of Space Studies — and Comments on the Art of Graphic and Animated Science Data Presentation in an Anti-Scientific Culture (28 January 2012)
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Reporter, John Fauber, Uncovered the Appearance of Blatant Corruption at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Medicine and Public Health — another Instance of the Medical-Industrial Complex’s Distortion of Objectively Delivered Medicine (06 January 2012)
An Example of Poorly Phrased Communication in Atmospheric Science and Oceanography — Empathy for Those Who Distrust “Experts” (05 January 2012)
An Inspiring Way to Begin 2012 — Levi Lavalle and Robbie Maddison Set Motorized Jump Records in Red Bull’s No Limits Event during 2011’s Last Hours (01 January 2012)
Education and Culture (2010-2011)
