In my latest Epoch Times column I call growing skepticism about vaccination a logical if deplorable consequence of governments trampling our rights while insulting our intelligence over COVID.
“The bungles, delays and disaster associated with space travel indicate that the people concerned with it may, indeed, be exercising creative incompetence. I emphasize ‘may’ because the test of real creative incompetence is that an observer cannot certainly tell whether the incompetence is deliberate or not.”
Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull, The Peter Principle
“SORRY ABOUT THE TRAFFIC / I HAVE TO GO TO WORK TO GET ON VIDEO CALLS”
Bumper sticker on car in front of me November 21, 2024
“Have you heard this line? ‘Now that we know about brain physiology, it’s obvious that there could be no such thing as free will.’ That’s like saying that the circuitry of a cellphone determines the conversations which takes place on it.”
J. Budziszewski “The Underground Thomist” August 26, 2024 [https://www.undergroundthomist.org/telephones-and-free-will].
“Francis Bacon's acute methodological dictum: ‘Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.’”
Thomas S. Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition
“the scientist who looks at a swinging stone can have no experience that is in principle more elementary than seeing a pendulum. The alternative is not some hypothetical ‘fixed’ vision, but vision through another paradigm, one which makes the swinging stone something else.”
Thomas S. Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition
In my latest Epoch Times column I say instead of worrying about polls asking whether we think the decline in trust might mysteriously reverse itself, we should concentrate on reversing it by making sure we’re trustworthy. I know it sounds weird but it just might work.
“At dinner he [Nero Wolfe] started on automation. He has always been anti-machine, and on automation his position was that it would soon make life an absurdity. It was already bad enough; on a cold and windy March day he was eating his evening meal in comfortable warmth, and he had no personal connection whatever with the production of the warmth. The check that paid the oil bill was connected, but he wasn’t. Soon, with automation, no one would have any connection with the processes and phenomena that make it possible to stay alive. We would all be parasites, living not on some other living organisms but on machines, arrived at the ultimate ignominy. I tried to put up a stiff argument, but he knows more words.”
Archie Goodwin’s internal monologue in Rex Stout A Right to Die