Risk and Wealth

I have been thinking a lot recently about the nature of wealth and what is fair taxation, etc. I heard Bill O’Reilly talking the other night and accusing Obama of wanting to do wealth redistribution. This got me thinking: “this is something people think of as negative because it means taking something hard-earned from those [...]

Green

There’s a really good article about green movements and issues in the Sunday Times. I think some of the things mentioned in the article could be applied in other areas of the country and world, like Eau Claire, WI. Click to the link.

Protected: There Will Be Blood

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Fasting Again

I will be fasting for thirty hours again to raise money for hunger relief next weekend. If you want to contribute to this cause you can send a check made out to World Vision to my home address. Any gesture is appreciated and will be put to good use.

Steven Pinker

Pinker has a quite good article in the NY Times. There isn’t too much new there, but it offers a good overview of some of the ideas of Moral Psychology and relates them to issues of the environment at the end. I’m glad that he brings up Peter Singer’s idea of the expanding circle of [...]

A Book from 2007

I’m wondering why I am posting this, but for some reason feel compelled. Since I have been on the couch or in bed lately, I managed to read a bit. I just finished The Dream Life of Shukhanov by Olga Grushin. It was a terribly engaging book that takes place in real time over three [...]

Cropwalk

I am doing Cropwalk this year again for anyone interested in supporting that cause you can write a check to Cropwalk and send it to us at 2028 8th Street, Eau Claire, WI. I have been sick twice this semester already, once with the stomach flu and once with the traditional flu. It’s made it [...]

Thirty-Three

I have been contemplating this place and time in life–being 33. It is an interesting but hard to define stage. I have particularly been trying to explore the concept of the Jesus Year, as Jesus was supposedly 33 for the bulk of his ministry, betrayal, and death. The concept is that by the age of [...]

The Moral Animal and a Question for Toby… or Free At Last.

I finished the Moral Animal. It is a great book, and I recommed it to any of the Hollow Men that want to tackle a broad survey of evolution, psychology, and philosophy. I definitely admonish people to do what Shotts apparently had to do with the HP books and persevere through lengthy exposition (except in [...]

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (the movie)

Sara and I had our only date in five months tonight. We ate dinner and saw HP and the Order. It was of course my choice of movie, but she enjoyed it almost as much as I did. We both liked it. I recently read an article which talked about Rowling’s insistence that the themes [...]

“Participate if you want.”

“…when groups of people – especially males – spend much time together, some sort of hierarchy , if implicit and subtle, is pretty sure to appear. Whether we know it or not, we tend naturally to rank one another, and we signify the ranking through patterns of attention, agreement, and deference – whom we pay [...]

Reviving a Dead Horse and Kidder Quotes

With the HP fervor going around, perhaps there is no one out there to read this anyway. I have been haunted by a few things from a discussion we had on this blog months ago now, especially after reading Mountains Beyond Mountains. The first was Peters statement that everyting we do, we do to serve [...]

Petrochina and Sinopec

I spent the better part of last Thursday and Friday (when I should of been painting my illustrations) digging into my State of WI retirement fund to change where my money is being invested. I recently learned that Fidelity Mutual Funds Company is a heavy investor in the two chinese oil companies Sinopec and Petrochina. [...]

Herein Lies the Problem…

“The U.S. has about 50 percent of the world’s wealth and about 6.3 percent of its population. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity [...]