(Looking for black and white answers in a kaleidoscopic world) “All we want are the facts, ma’am,” the television police detective Joe Friday used to demand from witnesses of crimes. He just wanted the facts to get at the truth about a crime he was investigating. We’ve all seen television shows in which a lawyer is pressing […]
Category: Contemporary Issues
(Or, What the Sackler family and the Haitian refugees have in common) What do the Sackler family and the Haitian refugees have in common? They are both using every resource they have to survive. The Sackler family has armies of highly-paid lawyers and tax specialists, unenlightened elitist judges, ubiquitous myth-manufacturing media, money-oriented medical professionals, and lobbied subservient politicians to […]
Dinosaurs became rulers of the world about 201 million years ago after a mass extinction eliminated their major survival competitors. About 66 million years ago the dinosaurs, themselves, ceased to exist along with three-quarters of all life on earth because of another mass extinction. Dinosaurs had been the most powerfully successful creatures in history before their sudden exit. The […]
Introduction Aesthetic distance is the ability to consciously remember that the murder scene in a performance we are watching is not “real” even though we are emotionally caught up in the drama. That way, we don’t yell “Watch out!” when our favorite character is about to be shot in the back. Our emotions do not […]
“The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them.”—George Bernard Shaw I was driving home when I saw a dead deer lying in the grass on the side of the road. Oklahoma City covers a lot of ground with enough room to be the “home” of […]
Recently, Jon Stewart appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and talked at length about his thoughts on science in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Most of his energy was spent entertainingly arguing for the Wuhan Lab Leak Theory. However, what caught my attention and made me think Jon really gets why our current […]
Speed and Efficiency Two values that American culture (officially) holds in high esteem are speed and efficiency. We agree that speed and efficiency are vitally important goals to have for the hospital emergency room, the fire department, and other first responders. But how do they work for the rest of us in our everyday lives? […]
If we look at the conflicts between people reported today in the news and recorded in world history books, we might be able to create a fairly long list of causes. Interestingly, for every cause there is an opposite and equal “re-cause.” Like the song Everyday People says, many people will always look for an […]
(We Make the World Better) There is an essential point that may sometimes get lost in our many examples of the harm caused by behaving from a pre-Human mind: throughout evolution and human history, we are moving toward becoming more loving and better people; i.e., more Human-minded. The quadrune mind model is a melioristic model, […]
(A Human-Minded Practice) Becoming more Human-minded is ultimately a process of becoming more aware and mindful of our behaviors and how we can change them so that our choices positively impact the world around us instead of intentionally or unintentionally harming it. Similar to eating and procreating, consumption is a “survival” activity that is often […]