LifeItself

Scientifically speaking,  stupid  people harm themselves while also harming others. In addition, stupid people are irrational and erratic, and are very dangerous to others. After discussing the destructive role of the stupid in any society whatsoever, I will focus on the delicate interplay of actions of intelligent and helpless people, who in balance make or break a functioning democracy.  Unless things change fast in the US, we can kiss our democracy goodbye for decades. If you want to see how a virulent ascent of the stupid looks up close, and what implications it has for our fight against social injustice and climate change, please watch the brilliant " Don't Look Up " movie. Unvaccinated people demonstrating in Los Angeles. There are tens of millions of the raving mad and/or angry, stupid people in the US and other developed countries. Source: New York Times , 12/25/2021. I overlapped at UC Berkeley with Professor Carlo M. Cipolla for a decade, until his death in t...

I have not written for a year, because I did not want to infect you with my depression.  The climate is warming up like never before in all human history, the polar ice is melting at the fastest rate in 120,000 years, the hurricanes, fires and droughts are ever stronger, and people went mad, most of them all at once.  At this time of epochal change, the global superorganism of which we are tiny parts, keeps on pretending that nothing will prevent its eternal growth.  People in power are borrowing ever more money and drawing the seemingly logical plans of eternal economic expansion, when only drastic contraction can save us. America, my dream country and my state of mind, has been withering and burning through geological deposits of good will around the world.  And just two days ago, we heard a scarred-for-life, direct and gentle woman, whose credible testimony was ignored by the old cynical white men on the right hand side of the room. Then came the raison d'etre...

Two years ago, almost to the day, I wrote a blog, The Bird of Dawn , full of hope for the indomitable human spirit which can transcend and erode all repression, whether religious or political. A year ago, in The Way We Were , I connected the liberal Western Civilization, where my soul and body reside, to its ancient Greek roots. Both pieces have been wildly popular with the readers around the world, because they spelled out hope for humanity and its future. Today we are in Cefalù in Sicily, immersed again in a simpler world of the past, the world which graces us only occasionally when we leave our thoroughly modern, connected academic cocoon, powered by a high-rate throughput of fossil fuels that appear mostly as research funding, electricity, computers, and airplane tickets. Compared with Cefalù’s Arab fortress of 1063, and the Norman cathedral with the magnificent twelfth century mosaics our world is truly ephemeral. It cannot last for longer than a few more decades. Yet, this...