Memories of the 28th Century

We all know that the advertising and marketing businesses sell the worst things to the people who are least capable of understanding that they are being robbed. There is nothing new about convincing people to pay for things that will do them no good at all. Socrates ranted against useless products twenty five hundred years, and in thanks, the leaders of Athens ordered him to drink a poison hemlock brew. In the end, Socrates was dead, and written language, for one thing, was more entrenched. The ...

I was conversing with a woman who is a university senior in premed, n d it came out that she has never studied either Latin or Greek. I can understand that lack for business majors, but people in the sciences need to have a fair knowledge of Latin and at least some Greek. It wasn’t long ago, when one could not be admitted to college without a working knowledge of both languages. The requirement for knowledge of Greek was dropped in the late nineteenth century, when colleges were overwhelmed by men ...

Today is Labor Day, and I think that holidays are mostly a waste of time. I think that workers would be better off if they got another week or two of vacation time is stead of holidays.
Another problem with holidays is that they are dedicated to something, and not everyone likes that something or wants to honor it. Some holidays are dedicated to religious holidays, and here in the U.S.A. things that tend toward the establishment of religion are forbidden in the Constitution. That would throw ...

In the last few days, I have seen articles about scientists saying that California may be in for a “mega flood”. I find such things mildly interesting but not useful. And I wonder why people write such things and why those articles get published ab\s something scientific. It’s like back in the 1970’s, when there were articles in the science magazines about the impending floods from the West Ice Shield of Antarctica sliding into the Pacific Ocean. It still hasn’t happened, but there still are articles ...

Today, July 22, 2022, I ran into another example of someone(s) trying to control how people thought about something by controlling the data. Specifically, it was in regard to the Cambrian Explosion. The manipulator of facts had a set of conclusions and edited the facts to get there, and other opinions be damned. That was how news media in the Soviet Union turned opinion toward the government, and it is how the U.S. Government tries to turn opinion in its favor. That method is easiest to see in regard ...