There’s a quote I heard recently that was represented as Taoist, but I can’t confirm its origin. It certainly sounds like something Lao Tzu could have said. It goes: “A man who desires to be miserable will find plenty of reasons to support his cause.”
This quote perfectly represents for me the current state of politics within the Republican Party in America. Donald Trump panders to people who desire misery through his platform of pessimism and gloom. Continue reading “The Politics of Pessimism”
For no particular reason I’ve been thinking about gadgets lately. Those inventions that claim to “make life easier.” If a gadget could truly make the trials and tribulations of life easier, then I’d be all for it. But I’ve never seen a gadget that could mend a broken heart, or deal with the horrible attitude of a surly employee on a Monday morning. If only there was a gadget that would pay my mortgage, that would make my life easier.
Here are five examples of inventions that I could live without: Continue reading “Most Useless Inventions”
I keep pondering the issue of life. What it means. Life on earth. We know that life on earth has existed for around 3.5 billion years, and that the sun will grow in intensity until it makes the earth uninhabitable to life in somewhere between 1.75 and 3.25 billion years from now.
Time is running out. Life on earth is somewhere in a late mid-life crisis. Continue reading “The Final Frontier”
No one likes an armchair quarterback. The amateur know-it-all. The person who is convinced that he knows how to do something better than a person who has spent years attaining specialized education and training, someone who has toiled for years in his career to learn the ins and outs of his area of expertise.
I don’t pay a visit to my doctor and then say “listen, Doc, I was googling the symptoms and it seems to me that you’ve got this diagnosis completely wrong. And not only that, but I just feel it’s the wrong diagnosis.” Continue reading “This ain’t no Disney movie”
If you live in the DC area, you’ve no doubt heard the overly-dramatic voice of Ronnie Mervis on the radio urging you to buy your woman’s love with one of his expensive diamonds. Milking his South African accent for all it’s worth, despite having lived in the US for decades, Ronnie implores customers to spend the average price of $8700 for a diamond engagement ring in order to show how much you love your lady in the most shallow and commercial way possible. Continue reading “You Lie, Mervis!”
We live in an era of outrage. And frankly I’m tired of it. You might say that I’m outraged by all the outrage. Everyone is pissed off about something all the time, and everyone is constantly telling each other that they should be pissed off, too. Righteous indignation is the new normal. The internet is the perfect medium for spreading outrage. Twitter is tailor-made for angry people with short attention spans with its 140-character outrage nuggets. Continue reading “Can Everyone Please Just Chill the Hell Out?”
The 1984 film Terminator, and its subsequent sequels, explores a dystopian world in which the machines have become our masters. Sadly, that world is no longer one of science fiction. While the nightmarish scenario of a single-minded T-800 Terminator cyborg relentlessly pursuing its pre-programmed prey (Sarah Connor? I’ll be back) has thankfully not come to fruition, we have indeed become slaves to our machines in many ways. Continue reading “The machines have already taken over”
At risk of sounding curmudgeonly, the world is speeding up and I don’t like it.
Our human ancestors walked out of Africa, and eventually walked all over the entire planet. Or built boats and floated to the parts they couldn’t reach on foot. Granted, it wasn’t one continuous trip, it took millenia. But they were in no particular hurry. Those bipedal hominids’ feet were made for walking. And that’s just what they did. Today we express surprise when someone walks a 10K race for charity. Yet our earliest ancestors did nothing but walk. They had no alternative. Continue reading “How Soon is Now?”
Tomorrow is International Women’s Day. And I’ve been thinking about the sexism that is still pervasive all around us. One of the most visible examples I’ve seen in recent news headlines is the way the media are covering the so called “jihadi brides” story. Which is both sexist and xenophobic. If you’re not familiar, here’s one particularly egregious example from the British press. “Desperate women” who are “besotted” with love for handsome jihadi fighters are flooding the internet with marriage proposals in their desire to marry a potential martyr. It’s nauseating. Continue reading “Some thoughts on sexism, xenophobia and the media”
So there’s been a buzz lately about Idris Elba potentially portraying James Bond at some point in the future. And today there’s been a stir because the always-buffoonish Rush Limbaugh once again said something stupid. You can easily tell when Rush is saying something stupid, because it happens whenever his lips are moving. Continue reading “The Unbearable Whiteness of Being”
Upscale Shack 