By Joel Bowman, on February 5th, 2018% I have borrowed the title of this blog from Shakespeare’s play, Richard III. Richard III was not a nice man, although the real Richard was probably not as evil as Shakespeare and others have made him out to be. He was the last king of England to actually lead his troops into battle and died in the Battle of Bosworth Field. Shakespeare portrays him as evil, and he may well have been. Medieval kings had a tendency to be corrupt and cruel, and someone I have quoted before, Lord Acton, famously said, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts . . . → Read More: Winter of Our Discontent
By Joel Bowman, on January 13th, 2018% An English poet, Thomas Grey, ended his 1742 poem, Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College, with what has become a well-known aphorism: “where ignorance is bliss, / ‘Tis folly to be wise.” The part that’s quoted most often is, “Ignorance is bliss.” Considering ignorance bliss has a long history. One of the central stories of both Judaism and Christianity is Eve’s being tempted by Satan to eat the fruit of knowledge and then persuading Adam to do the same.
The theme has been important to me for a long time. The title of my 1974 Ph.D. dissertation . . . → Read More: Ignorance Is Bliss
By Joel Bowman, on December 17th, 2016% T.S. Eliot ends his poem, . . . → Read More: Not with a Bang But a Whimper
By Joel Bowman, on June 4th, 2016% My last blog post was about the so-called ancient Chinese curse of “living in interesting times.” All the problems I cited in that post are not only still with us, but also have been amplified. Donald Trump is now the presumptive Republican nominee for President of the US. Although the nominee for the Democrats has not been finally decided yet, Hilary Clinton is the likely candidate. Although I am still paying attention to US politics, I am doing so with an increasingly heavy heart. Even so, some other things have caught my attention, including website advertising, LGBT concerns and legislation, . . . → Read More: Paying Attention
By Joel Bowman, on November 11th, 2015% With apologies to Paul McCartney, the winding road I have in mind for this blog is not to your door but to the 2016 elections in the US. For one reason or another, we seem to be off to an earlier and stranger start than is usually the case. The impetus for this blog post was an article in Salon by Heather Cox Richardson about the intellectual battle for the soul of the Republican Party. The article caught my attention because I started my political life as an “Eisenhower Republican” while I was still too young to vote. I liked . . . → Read More: The Long and Winding Road
By Joel Bowman, on June 23rd, 2015% One of the problems with peeing in the pool (not that you would do it, of course) is that the pee goes everywhere. Humans, and perhaps other animals as well, tend to be short-sighted and do things for their own convenience. For however long humans have been on planet Earth, we have been metaphorically peeing in the pool and then moving to the other end. Whether we have finally discovered that there is no “other end” remains to be seen. The principal impetus for this blog entry is not some new information about the way humans have been damaging the . . . → Read More: Ecosystems: The “No Peeing” End of the Pool
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