Some of you may remember that several years ago I put together “A Brief History of Memorial Day”. In that post, I discussed the calling for a national day “for the purpose of strewing with flowers, or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and […]
“Take every Christian definition you can think of. Then redefine it with a super spiritual metamystigorical definition. There. Now you have New Thought.” — Melissa Dougherty, Happy Lies I hadn’t originally planned on doing another post citing Dougherty’s book this week, but… that’s how it turned out. Funny thing is, this section actually comes from […]
“Nobody can ‘live their truth’ for long. Everyone knows this.” — Melissa Dougherty, Happy Lies I have addressed the issue of relativism in the past. But, it’s always good to have a reminder of the causes and consequences of this faulty mindset. The citation below comes from the new book, Happy Lies, by Melissa Dougherty. […]
Slippery-slopes are all around us, and they can be dangerous. But, the appeal to a slippery-slope fallacy is not always legitimate. To be fair, most people (myself included) are unclear on the types of slippery-slopes and what may or may not make their use a fallacy. On an episode of the STR podcast last year, […]
To my readers, I apologize for the disruption in my regular, weekly posts, which began last week (12/1/2024). I had been getting increasingly sick in the preceding weeks and finally ended up in the hospital early Thanksgiving morning (11/28/2024). Without going into detail, they kept me there for a week until they got a handle […]
“That’s insane!” — Jared Dirac, Special Forces soldier The following conversation — technically just half of a conversation — is an excerpt from the science-fiction novel The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi. Normally, I would be more likely to share something like this on my “Heroes and Aliens” blog. But, this section (and the book […]
I’m gonna go somewhat off-topic for the Xmas holidays. I know, I know. Some people (maybe you?) strongly dislike these songs for one reason or another. But, I like ’em. Such songs can trigger nostalgic feelings or memories from one’s childhood or some other event, and sometimes they just add a nice bit of Christmas […]
Kanye West — I refuse to call him ‘Ye’ — gets a lot of grief. This has been especially true in recent years, now that he has adopted a largely conservative political view and become a Christian (of some sort). As with Donald Trump, some of the criticism is fair, thanks to his big ego […]
“We’re kind of the chimpanzee ‘fighting’ civilization. Some other civilization just may have a basically more peaceful personality, like bonobos do.” — Stuart Taylor, SETI astrophysicist The technology to send it isn’t in place yet, but JPL astrophysicist Jonathan Jiang and other researchers have already drafted a new message to broadcast to any alien intelligences […]
In case you are wondering, the titular question (or some form of it) is one of those that historic mythbusters like to test regular folk with. I don’t typically count myself as a “mythbuster”, but I do like trivia, and I thought this topic appropriate to address as we Americans celebrate Independence Day. Before answering […]
