Engaging Life with Courage and Intelligence
All humans fall along a behavioral spectrum of friendliness and hostility. This spectrum is learned and usually transmitted from one generation to another. It would be pure speculation to associate this spectrum with different modes of living. One could say that the hunter-gatherers of 3000 BCE would be more aggressive and unfriendly to outsiders, while…
This historical snippet begins with the blood lust of duels over 200 years ago. The most famous duel between Alexander Hamilton Sr and Aaron Burr Jr was presaged by a duel between Hamilton’s son, Philip Schuyler Hamilton, and George Eacker in 1801. The 19-year-old Philip died in the duel. It was not a good omen…
While the past is immutable, our recollections can fade and be twisted by those who purposefully distort the facts. One example of those currently distorting the facts is the legion of anti-vaxxers. Who needs a vaccine when we can drink a magic drink or hope for the best? While researching a branch of my ancestry,…
Just when so many are worried about transgenderization, we are witnessing the transnationalization of the USA. The USA was founded on democracy, freedom, and liberty for ALL. However, America is being transformed into a country based on autocracy, enslavement, and subjugation controlled by an oligarchy. This has been a slow, silent transformation that seeks to…
I remember when conservatives were against criminal drug operations and stood for law and order. However, it appears that conservatives have wittingly or unwittingly rewired their brains to embrace a lawless leader in exchange for what? I would like to understand the morality of their new allegiance to criminality. Democrats and Independent politicians have committed…
Preface While contemplating the divided states of America, I discovered an interesting theory of political behavior called the horseshoe theory. This horseshoe thesis helps explain why American centrists have lost political battles to fringe fanatics over the last 25 years, although 60 to 80 percent of Americans are centrists. I will attempt to place this…
What do these two Renaissance gentlemen have in common besides their ruffled white collars and facial hair? Although one was a politician and the other a scientist, they both studied and experimented with the forces of alignment, repulsion, and attraction. Introduction Are magnetism and politics analogous? We have all watched a magnet “magically” attract metal…
Let’s forget politics for a moment and think about physics. William Gilbert and Galileo Galilei are regarded as the two founders of experimental physical science. The common scholarship of their time was largely non-experimental. Scholars read Greek and Latin texts (including the Bible) to discover the ancient “truth” by logic and inference. “Truth” was considered…
Political figures and movements seek to attract others to get them to support their movement. They seek to rally compliant followers to their political magnetic pole just as the poles of Gilbert’s magnets force compliant metal objects to align their electrons in the same direction. An effective political leader or movement persuades agreeable and susceptible…
The French philosopher Jean Pierre Faye was the first to develop the horseshoe magnet theory of politics in 2002. He proposed that the extreme left and extreme right were not on opposite ends of the political continuum. He called our attention to the fact that both poles were equally far from the political center but…