The Coriolis Effect: September 2008

Monday, September 29, 2008

Socialism for Corporations

"Bailout bill fails; Dow plunges"

What now? In the capitalist spirit, the damn corporations need to "pick themselves up by the bootstraps," rather than relying on government intervention. After all, that's what we the people have been doing. (No one helped me pay for my doctor's visits when I didn't have health insurance.) What an absurd, stupid, irrational, infuriating, illogical, inconsistent, profit-over-people, business-first-people-last double standard!

Links and other fun stuffs...

Humans are unique in Animalia for many reasons. For example, we use natural language to communicate, construct moral codes, theorize about the universe, invent religions and—neither last nor least—use clever recursive procedures to built artifacts from built artifacts, thereby yielding the complex sociotechnical systems of today. While these facts might be (and often are) adduced to support the thesis that humans are smart, my personal view is that Homo sapiens sapiens is quite possibly the stupidest species in evolutionary history—what other species, for example, has created the conditions necessary for the total annihilation of life on earth? (Indeed, the binomen 'Homo sapiens' is a complete misnomer!) Erich Fromm sums it up: We have the "know-how," but not the "know-why" or "know-what-for." The following links—a list that will grow as I come across interesting and relevant articles—support my view that humans are supremely stupid:

- Study reporting that NOT procreating brings happiness!

- On pharmaceuticals in public tap water

- On nuclear missiles being accidentally flown over the U.S.

- On a huge island of trash in the Pacific

- On lead paint and violence

- On the Holocene extinction event

- An excellent book by Christopher Williams on EMID