At the Risk of Contradicting Mahatma Gandhi
I’m not so sure about what Gandhi said here. It seems like history features waves of good and evil leaders, yet perhaps the metaphor of the pendulum that oscillates between two extremes is better.
Ancient Rome had a great number of terrible emperors, and the last 1600 years since has seen an uncountable number of tyrants.
Now we have Putin, Jong-un, Ping, Erdogan, Duterte, Orbán, Bolsonaro, and probably 50 other dictators whose names few of us would recognize. And don’t forget that Trump is not yet gone from political power.
It’s true that nothing, regardless of its moral value, lasts forever, but it’s hard to believe that things are improving.
Re: my post of scientists’ logos, a reader says, “I really don’t know the three that are above Borlaug.”
What a terrible shame. Betrayal is such a sad affair.
Not much good can be said about Coca Cola. Its main product is poison, sold in planet-destroying plastic containers that go 93% unrecycled, targeting neighborhoods with poor school districts, because well educated people tend to take better care of themselves.
Yesterday, a (sarcastic) reader asked: If we all lived in mud huts for 103 years would it put the ice back?
His political opponents are making life very tough for Biden, but it’s quite clear that, by the time he leaves office, he will have accomplished a great deal on behalf of the common American.
Conservative intellectuals like George Will were a hard sell on Trump from the beginning. They saw that this package of lies, racism, and buffoonery was a catastrophe in the making, causing some, like Will himself, to leave the Republican party altogether.
Let’s take a few moments to read what President Eisenhower told us about the growth of the U.S. military in peacetime when he left office in 1961.
We all need to admit that there are extremely intelligent people at both ends of the political spectrum. George Will, archconservative is about as far to the right as a person can be. American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, and “father of modern linguistics” Noam Chomsky is very close to the opposite end.
