Wayne Allensworth has a frighteningly interesting commentary on virtual reality, an addictive abuse of technology which might generate still more problems than what we’re seeing from our better established abuses of technology (`ordinary’ video games, cellphones for 4 to 104, etc), Disconnected: Our Virtual Unreality, where he writes near the end: Alistair Charlton of the … [Read more…]
Once again, I’ll state a standard Jewish and Christian view of man: man can be usefully and truthfully seen as a creature made of mind and heart and hands. This points to state of unity which is not achieved by men in this mortal realm but might be achieved by the resurrected who share the … [Read more…]
I had exquisite timing this summer, was well prepared to think in a rational, fact-based way about Europe’s crisis with immigrants as well as with the slower moving crisis in the United States. For the umpteenth time, I was also reminded of one of my high school history teachers: a somewhat eccentric man who was … [Read more…]
Fred Reed is still working away at his vocation of recent years: speaking to a mostly deaf American public about the more serious and fundamental problems confronting Americans or all of mankind in these early decades of the 21st century. That he takes himself, and his writing, less seriously than do many of our sages … [Read more…]
I’ve uploaded a new novel, The Simple Life. It’s the story of some men and women and children gathering together in New England to form a community and take care of the vulnerable and the abandoned. After they start to form that community, the climate turned a little ice-age cold. Many have moved down to … [Read more…]
By “liberalism,” I mean a closely related set of systems of freedoms of a specific sort, those emphasizing and even `enforcing’ an individualism which in its moderate form is compatible with the traits of many northwestern Europeans and fewer other Europeans and—for the most part—far fewer others. [An example of enforcing individualism would be changes … [Read more…]
An article published in March by Steven Wasserman, In Defense of Difficulty and subtitled A phony populism is denying Americans the joys of serious thought., begins: It is a commonplace to bemoan the vanishing of serious criticism in our popular culture. The past, it is said, was a golden age. More than 25 years ago, … [Read more…]
With most of my books packed away and not easily accessible, I’m going to let my sometimes misfiring memory have a partially free rein. I remember that Hannah Arendt had once asserted—I believe in Life of the Mind—that Americans (by circa 1970) had already made political decisions which would force us to a crisis point … [Read more…]
Fred Reed is a smart and insightful man. Courageous as well, caring more for truth than for conventional opinions and public myths. And a friendly, neighborly sort of fellow so that just “Fred” is usually sufficient. In the recent article, The 145 Solution: Sapience, not Sentience, Fred writes: If fourteen percent [of American voters] are … [Read more…]
Albert Jay Nock wrote of a friend of his who had spent some years in the United States and was returning to Europe. This friend spoke of his admiration of many American characteristics, but said he was disturbed on realizing that Americans are the first people in history to pass directly from barbarism to decadence … [Read more…]