Philosophy

The classic American novel about the shades of grey of human nature grasping at free will while striving toward the future.

The book opens with a moving description of the Salinas Valley, California from the era when it was a frontier of North America being settled by pioneering folk.

Spoiler alert: I'm going to synopsize the whole story arc here so you may want to go finish the book first.

Book Review: The Ethical Sociopath's Guide to Living in the Idiocracy of Modernity

For those unacquainted, this novel is a vehicle to explain the philosophy and practical application of objectivism...

Book Review: Why You Can’t Fly on The Concorde...

Have you ever wondered why you can't fly from New York to London on the supersonic Concorde? Why didn't we go back to the moon or colonize Mars?

This book makes the case that it's because we've hit peak intelligence as a civilization, that we're losing our wits and lack the smarts to accomplish anything really noteworthy.

The authors write...

Why? Why is it that we used to be able to fly from the USA to London in less than 4 hours but now we can’t? Why is it that we used to be able to put people on the Moon but now, it seems, we can’t? The answer is surprisingly simple. We are no longer intelligent enough to be able to do these things. We have become too stupid to keep Concorde in flight; let alone go back to the Moon.

It's Christmas - the winter solstice.

A holiday that pre-dates Christianity celebrated in Europe for thousands of years to mark the halfway point of the winter season. In modernity, winter is merely an inconvenience, thanks to our well-insulated homes and central heating, but for thousands of years, winter was a different animal. A deadly animal. The cold was an ever-present existential threat. Food was scarce. A winter injury or illness could be a death sentence. And winter was boring, there wasn't much farming or labor that could be done. It was a lot of downtime isolated with one's thoughts, hopes, anxieties, and regrets. The winter solstice holiday was a much-needed, heartening, reminder that they were half-way through the cold, dark winter.

Book Review: Atlantis existed.

Graham Hancock’s Magicians of the Gods presents a very methodical argument for a lost civilization.

I’ll summarize what I think is Hancock’s strongest argument for Atlantis:

Around the globe; from the pyramids of Egypt and Göbekli Tepe in Turkey to the ruins in the high mountains of Peru we find extraordinary megalithic architecture that could only be created by an advanced civilization. Remarkably, what we DON’T find in the archaeological record of these places is evolution of the craft of megalithic building.

This is a major dog that does not bark. We don’t find smaller, shoddier, crappier pyramids that the Egyptian engineers cut their teeth building before they figured out how to create the spectacular pyramids that have stood for thousands of years.

I certainly hope not, but if Deep Impact in real life were to happen in our lifetimes, I’d bet on the next 7 days…

Every year between September 10th and November 20th, the Earth crosses the northern Taurid Meteor Stream in space. During this time, astronomers sleep fitfully as all seven billion of us are metaphorically dashing blindfolded across a 4-lane freeway.

I've had a real change of mind on Transhumanists.

I was once quite enamored with transhumanism. I thought... 

Technology is awesome. Biohacking health and antiaging is awesome. Religion sucks and death really sucks! So transhumanism is the way forward! Let's get brain uploading already!

I’ll share with you here a philosophical insight that I gleaned from the evidence presented in the book America Before by Graham Hancock that is especially relevant to THIS moment in history…

I returned to one of my favorite activities; public philosophical debate. I debated the subject of transhumanism and human gene editing.

Here's the crux of the debate as I see it; gene editing could do all these fantastic things for society; defeating genetic diseases and mitigating mental illness, increasing the IQs and general intelligence of humans along with eliminating genes like the MAOA warrior gene that many violent criminals have — it could mitigate quite a bit of human suffering. How long will it take humanity to start colonizing the solar system if we have +200 IQ babies being born every day?

Book Review: Disseminating a dangerous degree of freedom

This book is a hybrid between a manifesto and a memoir of this young Texan who invented the 3D-printed gun. I liked this book because it lays bare the unique American philosophy, this review will comment on that philosophy and make it concrete in the context of a politically tectonic event, the site of which I’m not far from at the moment.