Engaging Life with Courage and Intelligence
This short video is the last in a series about how Americans react to obvious, provable deception, lies, and gaslighting by politicians and others. This video summarizes the many mind games we all play on others and ourselves. While these games are hardwired into our brains, they can become debilitating and ruinous if we, individually…
I continue to be puzzled by America’s collective failure to uphold the values embedded in our Constitution. Virtually all Americans once believed in the rule of law, the separation of powers, the separation of church and state, and other foundational assumptions. This post introduces the fundamental question: “Why and how are we destroying ourselves?” and…
As our President finds new ways to divide and diminish our nation, it is essential to think about how his MAGA crowd does this. In fact, we are confronted daily by a barrage of disinformation and propaganda. Unfortunately, most Americans fall for the reality distortions or remain quiescent. A new video has been added to…
Neural networks…that sounds pretty geeky! It may sound geeky, but it is at the heart of how the universe works, particularly for all humans. Around 1984, a physics professor at Brooklyn College told me I should study “neural networks.” I was then an associate vice president responsible for academic and administrative computing, and I thought…
In honor of the memory of one of the world’s greatest primatologists, Jane Goodall, we examine the creatures that have been watching us for hundreds of thousands of years. Dr. Goodall devoted her entire adult life to studying and promoting the preservation of life on this planet. Her particular expertise was in the study of…
The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt was a Wall Street Journal Top 10 Book of 2024. His book describes what he calls the transition from the “play-based” childhood to the “phone-based” childhood. He discusses the reengineering of the brains of America’s children by Silicon Valley’s social media. He asserts that the dopamine-reward systems of social…
Hubris is the great sin of the tragic hero, the flaw that brings about their downfall. [Britannica] Origin of the word hubris: From the ancient Greek word hybris, which initially meant wanton violence, insolence, or outrage. Over 2,400 years ago, several playwrights, including Sophocles, wrote Greek tragedies about the catastrophic outcome resulting from excessive pride,…
Many of us, either continually or occasionally, regard the “strange” actions of others as being stupid, evil, or uninformed. There is no need to provide examples of “strange” actions since America is now so fractured that it would be harder to find examples of shared “solid” understandings. In light of the chaos in the public…
Is reality overrated? To some, it appears that a new, better reality is the fake one. Most young people will get the video below; however, many of the older generation will exclaim, “What?” “Wait a minute!” The following video was generated by Google’s Gemini video generator, powered by Veo3. Every frame in the video is…
This will be a brief discussion of LIMOs. LIMO is an acronym for “Less Is More”. Commonsense LIMO While MIMO (More is More) is often a better outcome than LIMO, sometimes pursuing LIMO is better. Poor dietary habits and MIMO food quantities result in obesity, and LIMO is a way to ameliorate the problem. Poor…