Let’s go back to the old custom of making heroes of our doers: engineers, scientists, teachers, and leaders. For some reason, we confuse our actors, a fine profession, with those people, so a doctor who plays one on television is often a better salesman for a dubious product than the family GP is for real care. This is our fault and we can stop making the mistake. Let’s remember Dr. William Gorgas who lived an adventurous life on the frontier... Read more
Rest in peace, Debbie Reynolds. She was actually a Reynolds and there aren’t many famous Reynolds (at least as pop culture goes). She even had the hair and skin coloring of many of the women in my family and so she seemed a bit like kin. That might have been one reason I liked her, but there was Singing in the Rain and that was a reason to love her. Yet the first film I thought of when I heard that... Read more
Terrifying to be lost as a child . . . looking up in the mall and realizing my parents are gone. Where to go? What to do? Bliss when Mom and Dad found me! I once was lost and now I am found. The Bible uses that image a good bit and it works for me. Jesus saves. However, there is another sense of “lost” that GPS saves us from where we lose by being saved. When Hope and I... Read more
The Trump administration is stillborn if he does not change his plans for his business. He is morally unfit for the office he holds, but a narrow majority of electors gave him the job. He is my President, but he is not one bit less the roue and misogynist than he was before the election. Yet all patriots pray for his success, because nobody wishes a constitutional crisis. Sadly, our President Elect has set up a plan that will produce... Read more
Jesus said a smart thing: 24 “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. 25 And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. 26 And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built... Read more
At the start of the year, I take a look at the world and make my best guesses about what will happen. Here is last year, so you know I am not infallible. Still reasonable guesses are the best a rational person can do. I still think it was not reasonable to think Trump would win against Clinton . . . but he did. That doesn’t mean betting against him was stupid, weird things happen, but generally they don’t keep happening. Contrary to my... Read more
Today Columbus, the sailor and not the city, had a disappointing day. The report says: On the previous day, when the Admiral went to the Rio del Oro, he saw three mermaids, which rose well out of the sea; though they are not so beautiful as they are painted, though to some extent they have the form of a human face. Is anybody surprised? Columbus (probably) saw a sea cow, a manatee, All my youth a mermaid was my idea of... Read more
Reason is a harsh corrective to fantasies and dreams. Some dreams cannot be. No matter how much we might hope that death is an exit from all our problems, reason and human experience suggests death is no escape. Instead, dying gives way to life. Life (as the Phaedo demonstrates) never ends. We must live by reason to be human, but not reason alone. I follow the directions of my GPS (GPS saves!), but I don’t drive for my GPS. Instead, I drive to... Read more
Don’t let her down, Mr. Trump. I listened to my wife talk to a very hardworking bright woman about her views on the nation. It was not an education, statistics could have given me a good guess about what would be said, but it was a revelation. You could know a thing, but it is different to hear a truth with all the feelings behind that truth. Traveling lets me talk to people I would not meet otherwise. Quite a... Read more
If you’ve ever been really thirsty, and found something to drink, that is the wrong time for a kind person to remind you of the problems with water bottled in plastic. I am sure such problems exist, and even wish that plastic water bottles would vanish, but at that very moment I am thirsty. It is hard to hear the voice of reason when dying of thirst. If you are in a group or movement dominated by fear or opposition to... Read more
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