Science and philosophy – 2

I just finished reading “dreams of a final theory” by Steven Weinberg. The book is somewhat less technical than I had expected. Despite having a chapter titled “Against Philosophy”, Weinberg deals with several issues that have more to do with the methodology of science than with its content, such as reductionism, “aesthetics” in science, positivism, belief in [...]

Is TARP criminal?

Donald Luskin asks “Is TARP a criminal enterprise?” and goes on to describe a number of dubious details such as:
…it was disclosed that “nearly 20 preliminary and full criminal investigations” are underway, including “large corporate and securities fraud matters affecting TARP investments, tax matters, insider trading, public corruption, and mortgage-modification fraud.”
…Perhaps this refers to the [...]

Ayn Rand’s novels

For some time, I have been thinking of writing a series of posts on “Atlas Shrugged”. What I took away from it, why I was so influenced by it, why I enjoyed it. So I was delighted to discover the comment thread on Aristotle The Geek’s post Dry Humor that featured an excerpt from “The [...]

Science and philosophy – 1

A couple of days back, in a comment on this video, I wrote
Unfortunately because of the philosophy of logical positivism, most scientists today are afraid or unwilling to accept the necessity of metaphysics at all.
Today, I started reading a book “dreams of a final theory” by Steven Weinberg. Early on in the book, he writes
Speaking [...]

A spiritual experience

Today, I went to a meeting in a certain company to promote a product. And I was treated to about 40 minutes of a talk on “spirituality” by the representative of the company. This person has been visiting some camp for about a month every year for the past five years. The goal of the [...]

Government and education

A while back I came across this infuriating story (via A Little Lower than The Angels) of a man who did not send his children to a public school against the law of his state and so was shot dead by the agents of the state. Since I have written a bit lately on the moral and political implications [...]

Charity

Just as I began writing this post, I saw this short piece by Kendall J.
There is an idea that I’ve heard repeated at various times in my life, that there is not enough charitable feeling in naturally “self-centered” man to be of meaningful help to those in need. When I respond that there is ample benevolence [...]

If you make x private…

T.R. asks a question that begins with “If you make education private”
The question should be the other way round, “if you make education <i>public</i>…”
Education is just a service rendered by some people (teachers, school administrators) for others (students). Like any other service, it has to be paid for in some form. The default is (should [...]

More on propaganda

Via this piece at True Sailing Is Dead, I came across this post:
 The curious case of 200 nearly identical MSM headlines
The following headlines have appeared in newspapers within the last 24 hours. This is not an inclusive list.
• Third of Illinoisans went without health insurance in last 2 years: Sun-Times
• Report: 2.5M in Michigan lacked health [...]

A flawed system

In a conversation over snacks, a colleague commented that our current political system is flawed. He suggested some remedies. Among them were having a constitutional review every x years so that the constitution can keep up with the times, requiring that a winning candidate has a minimum percentage of the votes from his constituency by conducting a multi-stage polling [...]