With Memorial Day Weekend here, many Americans have hit the road early to avoid traffic to their favorite holiday destinations, or catch a Thursday flight to make a weekend stay at Grandma’s less rushed. For some German families, who celebrated a three-day weekend last week, taking their kids out of school to get a jumpstart on the holiday ended with police airport interrogations and looming fines.
Tag: lying
The Public Face of the Rulers
They get up every morning and take a warm shower. They dress in clean business suits and ties. They speak — most of the time — in calm, measured, seemingly reasonable tones. They appear to be normal, respectable people.
Don’t Let Loved Ones Become Cops
They may have been a good person before they became a cop, but they can’t be good once they are a cop. A cop in the family is nothing to be proud of– almost anything else (including a crackhead or a $5 hooker) is better.
Freedom, Not Force, Creates Lifelong Learners
As author Ray Bradbury famously said: “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” If we want an educated and engaged citizenry, with a passion for reading and knowledge and ongoing self-improvement, then perhaps “free choice” should be the norm rather than the exception.
Band-Aid Solutions Are Lame and Nature is the Answer
The violations that plague us don’t come out of thin air one day. It is the result of the culmination of traumas inflicted onto us from day one (and actually before, while we are still in the womb) of entering into a world that profits and runs off of others people’s trauma. We literally live and operate in a place that is rooted in trauma and carries out traumatizing rituals on its most vulnerable people. So long as we passively accept these cultural narratives and practices, we cannot and should not expect better from our society.
Bullies, Outrageous Laws, Libertarian Unpopularity and Failures (29m) – Editor’s Break 081
Editor’s Break 081 has Skyler giving his commentary on the following topics: bullying our children into standing up for themselves toward bullies; when laws become totally outrageous and we’re no longer willing to support them; why libertarianism is unpopular; how libertarianism fails and why that’s really a bad question to begin with; and more.
Explanation and Truth
Truth that is covered by many layers of explanation is useful, but the truth may be that the explanations are false. A thing which has no explanation may, nevertheless, be true. Only explanations that can be tested, that clearly show their underlying truth, that do not have confounding associations and byproducts can be connected directly to the truth.
Government: The God of Statism
AronRa, a popular outspoken atelatheist, whose work (in general) I love, defines a religion as “a faith-based belief system, including the notion that some element of self, be it memories or consciousness …a soul, perhaps… continues beyond the death of the physical body; transcends and survives that…”. I see no mention of belief in a god being a requirement for something to be a religion. But, do they really not believe in a god?
The Myth of Institutionalized Learning
This weekend conversation exposes the deep, underlying myth in our culture that children cannot learn unless they are systematically taught. Whether in school or school-at-home, children can only learn when they are directed by an adult, when they follow an established curriculum, when they are prodded and assessed. How could a child possibly know how to identify plants if it wasn’t part of a school-like lesson?
Jobs and AI
I am a survivor of the Expert Systems rage of the mid-80s. Every trade journal of every industry that even had a trickle of data processing was touting the next coming of Expert Systems. ES were premised on taking the most experienced, most expert of your business’s humans, then making a killer app with your tiny desktop computers that would cross-examine your clerks to make sure they answered all of the questions that your top guru would ask.