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Life in the 21st Century is a reader-supported publication. It needs your monetary support and help in distribution to others to continue. The loss of history has been a major blow for any useful politics. For millennia, human culture was largely defined by our history. Ancestors actions, the past was
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Subscribe now Historian Gore Vidal conveys from the writings of Dean Acheson, the US Secretary of State in 1950, State officials figured the average American might think about world affairs, “For ten minutes in any given day.” That’s extremely generous. Whatever small number it is has allowed 75 years
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Subscribe now There are numerous advantages to republican systems, however, they have never proved more peaceable than dictatorships or monarchies, maybe even less so. Renaissance Italy saw unending strife amongst her city-state republics. While Rome, and its modern US successor, militarily created two of history's greatest empires. In
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Subscribe now It's sort of interesting with the brouhaha the US National Security State helped instigate in Eastern Europe, there's been little talk of atomic weapons. After all, it was the key ingredient in all Cold War fear mongering. Any action could quickly spark nuclear apocalypse,
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Subscribe now Half-century ago, technology historian Marshall McLuhan said the computer was creating information storage and retrieval capabilities far beyond anything humanity has ever known. He was right. I was searching around for some electricity numbers and came across this, the International Energy Agency’s, “World Energy Investment 2020” with
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Subscribe now I practice self-deception by patting myself on the back about no longer following the unentertaining circus that is American politics. Occasionally, when I am honest with myself, I realize I pay a lot more attention than the average American. This especially comes home after reading, for the first
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Subscribe now I forgot about this collaboration with Misters Zevon and Springsteen. Disorder in the house Reptile wisdom Zombies on the lawn staggering around Disorder in the house There's a flaw in the system And the fly in the ointment's gonna bring the whole thing down
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Subscribe now In the 1920s, Wolfgang Pauli was one of a handful of young physicists who helped overturn our understanding of the physical world with the development of quantum physics. This knowledge quickly beget radical technologies, first the atomic bomb, immediately followed by the transistor. Known for his acerbic commentary,
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Subscribe now I recently finished two books on the same topic written a century apart. The first was written at the end of the 19th century by Russian aristocrat turned revolutionary Peter Kropotkin, entitled Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902). The second written last year by English psychologist, Nichola
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With a very great people, Tanzania is an extraordinarily beautiful country in East Africa. It is most famous for some of the planet's last great wildlife populations, including the magnificent Serengeti savanna and Gombe, the forest home of the chimps made famous by ecologist Jane Goodall. In the
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Subscribe now There's a nauseating sense of deja vu permeating the land this side of the Atlantic. In 1981, the Reagan Revolution arrived in DC. The military budget doubled in his first term, passed by a Democratic Congress. The always inane Cold War rhetoric was pushed up decibel
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Subscribe now “Young people especially have been angry, depressed, or just apathetic because, they’ve told me, we have compromised their future and they feel there is nothing we can do about it. But while it is true that we have not just compromised but stolen their future as we