By Joel Bowman, on April 1st, 2018% In one way or another, everyone thinks, “God’s on our side.” This has always been the case. In the religious wars between Protestants and Catholics in the Middle Ages, both sides thought that God was on their side. In the U.S. Civil War, both Tap water catches fire and earthquakes multiply. As a rule, those who own and run oil and gas companies do not explore for fossil fuels in their own backyards.
Is it worth ruining our environment to exploit fossil fuels when we are currently able to get the power we need from wind and solar energy? . . . → Read More: God’s On Our Side
By Joel Bowman, on March 7th, 2018% What would people do without clichés? One of the current favorites is, “at the end of the day,” which seems to be a replacement for “When all is said and done” or the more academic, “In the final analysis….” Most people speak—and think—in clichés most of the time. That has two advantages: it’s easier to spout a cliché than to find a new way of expressing the idea, and everyone knows what it means. Your friends will forgive you for using clichés and probably won’t even know that you are using them. Clichés, however, at best indicate lazy thinking and . . . → Read More: At The End of the Day
By Joel Bowman, on February 28th, 2018% Steven Pinker’s new book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress is a beacon of hope in what I have been considering “dark times.” If you’ve been reading my blog awhile, you know that I haven’t been happy about Trump’s presidency. Pinker’s book has convinced me that there’s a lot more “ointment” than there is “fly.” Things in general will continue to get better in spite of Trump’s efforts to return us to the “dark ages.” Progress is not guaranteed, of course, but the long-term trend of history is increasing well-being for humans based on advances in . . . → Read More: Enlightenment Now
By Joel Bowman, on July 29th, 2017% All major human conflicts are essentially what Jonathan Swift called the war between the “Big Endians” and the “Little Endians” in Gulliver’s Travels. In Swift’s novel, Lilliput and Blefuscu are island nations ruled by emperors. Those from Lilliput broke boiled eggs on the larger end, while those from Blefuscu broke their’s on the smaller end. Swift’s readers at the time would have recognized that his metaphor suggested that the British political parties at the time, the Whigs and Torys, were fighting a war based on minuscule and inconsequential differences. That appears to be a common theme in human history: Most . . . → Read More: The Faces of Humanity
By Joel Bowman, on February 26th, 2016% I knew that it had been a while since my last posting, but I had no idea how long it had been. John Lennon is usually given credit for saying that “life is what happens while you are making other plans,” which is included in the lyrics for Beautiful Boy, written for his son, Sean. Since my last blog, we’ve had two major holidays (Christmas and New Year’s), and more than a month has slipped away while I was busy making other plans. And shoveling snow. It is, after all, winter in Michigan….
We have had some winter weather . . . → Read More: Time Flies
By Joel Bowman, on May 9th, 2015% By now, you undoubtedly know about the devastating earthquake in Nepal. You may not have heard, however, about the earthquake in SW Michigan. Earthquakes come in all sizes, from the huge and deadly to the minor shake-ups. Michigan’s earthquake was a minor shake-up. When I was growing up in California, we had numerous minor quakes. Even though they always came as a surprise, we learned to recognize them for what they were. After I had grown up and left, California experienced at least two serious quakes with extensive damage and some deaths, one in northern California and one in southern . . . → Read More: Earthquakes
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