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Subscribe now Nec vitia nostra nec remedia pati possumus.* – Titus Livius Civilization is memory, social memory. If each human generation began with no societal memory, there would be no civilization. We would still, maybe, inhabit a small bit of land somewhere on the African savanna. Civilization comprises the knowledge, practices,
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They got Charles Darwin trapped out there on Highway Five Judge says to the High Sheriff, “I want him dead or alive Either one, I don’t care” High water everywhere Subscribe now My news intake has shrunk in the last few years. I once considered closely following the news
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Subscribe now They said, I should learn to speak a little bit of English Don’t be scared of a suit and tie Learn to walk in the dreams of the foreigner I am a third world child In the US, awareness of India is always on the periphery, unless
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Subscribe now (Continued from I) Can we devise complex social systems, better reflecting both the complexity of nature and our rapidly developing contemporary technologies? Most specifically, can we evolve governance? This is a question mostly ignored for the past century, outside brief flirtations with a sort of neo-Incan, industrial communism.
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Subscribe now “The great wall of vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass of trunks, branches, leaves, boughs, festoons, motionless in the moonlight, was like a rioting invasion of soundless life, a rolling wave of plants, piled up, crested, ready to topple over the creek, to sweep every little man of
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Subscribe now It has been our misfortune the information technology revolution, it is nothing short of a revolution, has to this point been overwhelmingly measured by the values of industrialism. For example, it is no coincidence the major revenue source for Google, Facebook, and Twitter is advertising. The value of
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Subscribe now The politics of debt have changed extraordinarily over the last century. In the 1930s, when the new national industrial economies collapsed in unison, the unorthodox idea of deficit spending to counter the collapse emerged. In the US, the New Deal Coalition adopted the practice to counter the Depression’
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Subscribe now I recently had a brief, always, always as short as possible these days, discussion about America’s reality TV politics. I concluded if someone gave me good enough odds, I might bet pretty heavily Joe Biden will not be reelected. Since in two and half centuries, only 11
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Subscribe now Ruth Gordon's excellent, The Domestic Revolution: How the Introduction of Coal into Victorian Homes Changed Everything is a wonderful account of the history and politics of technology. Gordon documents the adoption of burning coal in English homes and its eventual impact on the houses, diet, culture,
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Life in the 21st Century is a reader-supported publication. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber. "Accelerated change invokes the gyroscopic or principles of rigidity. Also, to high-speed change no adjustment is possible. We become spectators only, and must escape into understanding. This may be why the conservative has an
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Subscribe now Continued from (I) In answering this question it's helpful to begin with historian Fernand Braudel's understanding of geography's essential role in shaping the history of Homo sapiens — “humanity's relation with the inanimate.” Additionally, this can be understood as the relationship
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Subscribe now Modern republicanism is failing. Initiated two centuries ago with the founding of the United States, modern republicanism resurfaced ancient ideas and institutions of democratic self-government. In word, if not always in deed, republicanism swept the globe. At the end of the 18th century, monarchies were in place across