But I didn't come here to talk to you about McCain's misogyny or homophobia or corruption or role in destroying reasoned political discourse. I came to talk to you about the blood on his hands. Anytime there was talk of bombing or invading another nation you could bet ol' Maverick McCain would be beating the war drums. Read more
We have no good definition of what "consciousness" is. If we're invoking science, whatever "consciousness" is must be an objectively observable phenomenon -- because that's the domain of science. Read more
I’ll be posting more about what this year’s Starwood meant to me personally. Meanwhile, I was able to get a little video from Starwood attendees -- including Ian Corrigan and Oberon Zell -- telling you why you should join us next year. Read more
Who's going to find what we need? The wild ones. The experimenters. The spiritual mad scientists. The mutants and freaks. The explorers of consciousness. The Pagans, a name taken because it suggested both a link to the past and a rebelliousness and disreputableness, a rejection of the mainstream -- a name to which we often prepend "Neo", new, to show that we are looking forward as well as back. Read more
To answer the question “Do the gods and goddesses exist?” we need to answer two questions, just two trivial little matters: • What is a god? • What does it mean to exist? We have here two fundamental questions of theology and ontology that have had philosophers arguing since the days of ancient Athens! We have here two fundamental questions of theology and ontology that have had philosophers arguing since the days of ancient Athens! Read more
And wood for a bow is a lot easier to come by than bronze, iron, or steel for a sword. In some places -- especially England -- the bow became a weapon of the common people, an equalizer against armored feudal enforcers. Read more
And so every year I have to throw a little plastic flag into the trash. What else am I supposed to to with them? Keep them until I die for someone else to throw out? I can't even respectfully burn them, as one is supposed to do when ritually disposing of a damaged flag; burning plastic is toxic. Read more
At some point in your life, you may have had a job like this: you showed up your first day, and your supervisor showed you around and told you a bunch of rules and procedures. To get anything out of the supply cabinet, you need to file a written request with Alice; requests for vacation time need to go to Bob; for petty cash for small purchases, see Charlie. But in the first few weeks, you learned how things really... Read more
Looking for consistent application of principles in American politics is perhaps like Diogenes’s famous quest for an honest man: good luck with it. But to someone whose political mantra for the past few decades has been “maybe we shouldn’t be putting people in cages over that”, the outrage over the separation of migrant families who enter the country illegally is interesting. This may be an important teachable moment: criminal laws put people in cages, and in so doing separate families.... Read more
I spent last week at my twentieth Free Spirit Gathering. I was reminded of the anniversary a few days before the festival by noticing the “FSG 1998” tent tag that hangs on my rear-view mirror along with a collection of other charms. (For the mathematically inclined: I do not have a fencepost error here, I skipped one year for reasons that don’t concern us here. So the twentieth anniversary is also the twentieth event.) And Friday at FSG — the... Read more
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