It's a Snake! No, It's a Rope!

By -
Listening to news stories on the radio, I sometimes feel like one of the blind men who's trying to figure out he's next to an elephant by touching just the trunk or tail. They have so little time for each story that they leave a lot out.

Like today, I hear about some seal that traveled from Canada to New Jersey. (Left out was how anyone knew the seal had done that.) Then, last night, it was killed by a car while crossing the road in Jersey. The announcer concluded, "Police are investingating to make sure it really was an accident."

Say what?! They think it might have been planned? "Yo, Frankie, this is Tony di Salva. We hear da seal gonna be crossing 9th St. about half past six. You know what to do, Frankie -- make sure he don't talk!"

Comments

  1. Anonymous8:42 AM

    How is it so that there is suddenly a 9th street in New Jersey?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more