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Awash in a sea of information we are drowning under the weight of ignorance.

The 'Shirky Principle' claims that organizations formed to solve a problem often resist efforts to solve it since their funding and very existence depends on the problem remaining unsolved.

There is a phenomenon, referred to as the 'ratchet effect' which applies most appropriately to government.

Essentially it occurs when governments create a crisis, and then they convince the general public that they need to increase their power and authority to address the crisis.

They increase said power and authority by a factor of 10. When the crisis is over they reduce their power to 3 or 4, not returning to the levels prior to the crisis.

Thus governmental power and authority is always...

When we are aware of the cause of our anxiety (a job interview for example) we can be anxious about just one thing, but when we cannot face the truth, the anxiety spreads to become more general. This is referred to as 'free floating' anxiety and is the reason so many Americans are on antidepressants.

While I agree that the drift from morality to cupidity is lamentable, it only exacerbates the problem to blame that which is blameless in the matter.

The issue is that of blaming the tool for the use someone puts it to. This is a more serious intellectual error than may at first blush be imagined.

The tool I have in mind is 'Capitalism'. Capitalism is the best tool ever stumbled upon for improving man's situation here on planet earth. Blaming Capitalism for the lamentable migration to...

There is something truly dysfunctional about a society where people feel compelled to apologize for things they never did. This is the whole white guilt trip in a nutshell.

Ironically, these same misguided souls are often the most reluctant to take responsibility for things which they have done.

Most people are quite ignorant regarding energy, and all that relates to it. For example, ask a room full of people, 'What is the safest and least expensive form of energy available to man?' Most won't know and you can bet every dim bulb Democrat will claim solar or wind.

The answer, obvious to anyone not ideologically inoculated against the facts and truth, is nuclear.

Cafeteria Christians are those who pick and choose what they will believe and obey as if they were ordering from an ala carte menu.

What I was calling for in the previous post is what I refer to as 'deliberate consumption'. Essentially, it means to deliberate on and be deliberate regarding that which we consume intellectually. There has never been a time when this was more important.

I find it interesting and more than a little disturbing to consider how many people are conscientious about their diet, but indiscriminately consume information and news without filtering out the toxic and harmful.

You and I live in a time when we are being bombarded by information and images every second of every waking hour. One moment we are watching images of violence and war, and the next we are shopping online.

All of this serves to form a collage which is difficult to disentangle. This accounts for a good deal of the anxiety people experience today.

I am happy to say that I have never hated anyone. It has always struck me as a toxic emotion and one that harms the hater and not the hated. Actually, I consider people who hate others as very immature, exhibiting clear signs of emotional retardation.

Hatred skews the judgment away from clarity and factuality and towards obscurity and unreality.

I feel sorry for those who hate, and those whom their hatred infects.

Be careful what you wish for, not only because you may get it and regret it, but because of what you may become in pursuing it.

Tolerance is a noble and desirable trait. A problem arises however when we attempt to ascertain just how much tolerance we ought to show to the intolerant.

If we tolerate intolerance, will it spread like a harmful virus?

This is no easy dilemma to resolve.

People who claim to be nonjudgmental almost always do so with a smug satisfaction regarding their superiority.

The truth is they are either quite deluded or quite dishonest.

Everyone judges.

People often sit idly by waiting for an opportunity to do some great good. All the while, myriad opportunities to do small goods are all around them.

These are the opportunities which we must seize.

No one is completely right in their apprehension of reality, and no one is completely wrong either.

To find those truths most certain, observe where opponents agree.

Even from those opinions with which we adamantly disagree, there is something to be learned.

Those opinions which we find lacking in evidence are still worthy of our consideration since they must contain at the very least a morsel of truth to have convinced others of their veracity.

I have always considered pacifism a self defeating ideology. That which is worth defending demands defending.

If a people deem their culture morally indefensible, they are not long for this earth.

By far the worst display of disarmament in our time is the moral disarmament of the west.