Here are the most salient of the 16 characteristics of sociopathy referenced in the Psychology Today article: (my emphasis)

Superficial charm and good intelligence
Absence of delusions and other signs of irrational thinking
Absence of nervousness or neurotic manifestations

In other words, evangelicals who display sociopathic features are not outright 'crazies'

These seem quite significant:

Pathologic egocentricity and incapacity for love
Specific loss of insight
General poverty in major affective reactions
Untruthfulness and insincerity
Lack of remorse and shame

Would you elaborate a bit on this, please.

I don't think it's illusory tout courte, but that its reality is inextricably bound up with your perception of it. — Wayfarer

I accept (and have articulated in the old forum) the idea that "the real physical world" which we perceive is one step removed (at least) and the reality which we construct in our minds, might not be exactly as we think the real world is. It could be somewhat different, but all animal constructions of reality, including ours, have to correspond enough to the real world. Too far from enough, and sensory perception would have failed at the beginning a few billion years ago.

Organisms have to pick up good information to find food and mates, defend themselves, and (sometimes) build a nest, a burrow, or a house. Older and simpler brains evolved to do this. Mechanisms developed to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel. Some animals sense magnetic signals; migrating birds, for instance. Homing pigeons have fairly straight forward mechanisms; one of the two methods employs tiny bits of magnetite in part of their brain. They can sense the pull of very weak magnetic fields. Some bacteria also have this feature, which enables them to align their movement to magnetic fields.

That brains have developed complex mechanisms to accomplish necessary means for the end of survival bothers some people. Upon learning that the brain uses chemicals to effect certain feelings, like love, they jump to the conclusion that the mechanism of oxytocin IS love. Ah, so, just snort a dose of oxytocin and you'll suddenly love... whoever happens to be handy.

The object of one's affection, and the affection and desire, usually come first. The baby is born, the mother takes him in her arms; the baby sucks her breast. Oxytocin floods both their brains, and the father's too if he is on hand. Oxytocin isn't what is happening, it is how it is happening. (and it isn't a forever thing, either.)

I think the more radical point is that 'exterior' is also a perception. I hasten to add, I think it's a veridical perception. But when we do see 'reflected light from a surface' - there's no actual light inside the cranium; light doesn't actually penetrate. The sensory organs process sensations including smell, touch, hearing, and combine them by the process called 'apperception' into cognitive wholes. But these are cognitive events, still. — Wayfarer

Of course there is no light in the cranium. I don't think I suggested that light penetrates into the back of the brain (or for that matter, the front).

... his analogy is that the objects we see around us are like the way we 'interface' with reality, but that they're no more intrinsically real than icons on the desktop of a computer, — Wayfarer

I get confused here. Is he saying that the objects that we perceive are no more than pixels on a screen that appear to resemble file folders--but are not?

So if I hear a bell, see a tree, feel a thistle, smell a flower, taste a grape, I am not experiencing bells, trees, thistles, flowers, grapes? I'm just getting good vibrations, per the Beach Boys, and my clever little brain puts together something it chooses to name bell, tree, thistle, flower, and grape? It's possible that I could think I was eating a grape when I was actually eating his red tomato, previously located 1 meter from his eyeball.

If we think there are subatomic particles composing the parts of the atom, and that these parts and the atoms themselves contain forces, and that atoms attach to one another in systematic ways to form molecules, and molecules and atoms line up to form crystals, and so on up to sequoias and whales, are we then to say... that all the stuff is illusory?

Animals (we'll do plants another time) that do not deal in desktop illusions, have to see the real world to survive. The beetles landing on the brown, slightly bumpy, glossy beer bottles are actually seeing brown, bump, and gloss which is what they evolved to see. Flowers that look like like a female pollinator have to really look like one (and smell like it too) or the male bee wouldn't try to mate with it and in so doing, pollinate it.

People do not get bitten by snakes and eaten by alligators in Houston as much as they would if their perceptions and estimations of shape and movement weren't fairly good. (When perception and estimation of shape and movement isn't good, and one is standing in a swamp, one is likely to undergo death in a strikingly unpleasant way -- none of it illusory.)

Why not just be eaten by the tiger so we can become part of the tiger? — MikeL

The tiger eats you to enhance its fitness to reproduce.

There isn't any "reason" for any creature to reproduce, other than sex feels good and eggs get in the way of the sperm race. Reproduction results.

Yes. Timely observation.

An avocado tree could just as well wrap bread around a skinless fruit and put the chicken where the otherwise useless pit is.

Sandwiches on trees isn't such a new idea. The Norwegian immigrant song sings about Oleanna -- not to be confused with the David Mammet play -- something like Minnesota - where roasted piggies walk around asking if you'd like a slice of ham. We used to sing this in grade school. It warped my view of reality. There's a large statue of Ole Bull, the author, on the Minnesota State Capital grounds.

Then there's the hobo's Big Rock Candy Mountain

Seeing is believing, or is it "believing is seeing"?

Does it make a difference in one's reception and comprehension of Hoffman's talk that he talks only about vision? Does his theory work as well when we take the other senses -- hearing, touch, smell, and taste? Is there a difference in seeing a train, and hearing, touching, smelling, even tasting the train? Are smell, taste, touch (including feeling the vibrations of the train), and hearing more immediate, less mediated/interpreted? Certain pollinators can be fooled into 'mating' with a certain orchid because it looks like, and more important, smells like a female.

It can be difficult to explain to a rank novice that the icon on the desktop (screen) is and is not a file. The file is in the box under the desk, and it is just a long string of numbers located on a spinning disk. Before the WYSIWYG interface, people used DOS and there was no illusion that a "file" was sitting "on the desktop". The file was clearly in the box. It was clear that you were asking the computer to fetch it up and display the characters of the file on the screen. (The screen always looked the same, however the print version would look.)

Another situation where "the medium is the message"?

I agree, though I do not at all like it, that "what we sense" (eyes, ears, nose, mouth, skin, body) is not reality itself. Objects are exterior, and especially when we look at them, we are only seeing reflected light from a surface. However, if you hit an object with a stick, it makes a noise which you hear. Then you bite it and you learn more about it's nature--how hard or soft is it, is it gooey, stringy, or solid? You taste it; you smell it; you feel it. If you eat it and immediately vomit, you have learned something more about it. When our brains combine all of our senses to render it's representation, we have come closer to the reality of the object.

Eating the tomato is not like using a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) computer interface.

Are TED talks having the same effect on people's thinking that PowerPoint is thought to have? All theories are presented in short, sweet punchy form. Jill Bolte Taylor's TED Talk about her massive stroke is quite moving. However, in the book she explained that her experience of having the stroke (which she presented in her TED Talk) wasn't available to her. She reconstructed what it was like with the help of neurologists, psychologists, et al.

Quite understandable. I don't feel defrauded at all. The real story is her 8 year rehabilitation program that enabled her to overcome the massive damage and return to Harvard as a Neuro-anatamist. The punchiness of her talk is, none the less, slightly misleading.

I won't elaborate more because I'd like it to be answered in all ways you can think of without being affected by anything I say, or maybe other people's comment. — Cynical Eye

Have you not affected what people will say by asking the question? Put up or shut up: What do you think the world lacks? (But it is an absurdly open-ended question. Perhaps it is the case that the world lacks nothing. How can 'the world' which is a box of every thing be missing any thing?)

Why do you want to know? Are you missing something?

You're not Mike? Sorry, somehow I must have overlapped who I was talking too — MikeL

And you're trying to unravel the mystery of God? X-)

The whole project of defining God or god(s), convincing scientists (anybody, really) that God exists, (or contra believers, doesn't exist) is doomed. It's doomed because God's existence or absence just isn't provable. There is nothing that can be said about God that rests on objective proof.

Is God a human creation -- maybe our greatest one, maybe not -- but can either of us prove it? No.

Billions of believers seem to have no difficulty accepting God's existence, which is not evidence of course, but it does suggest that faith provides evidence. Billions of people have not believed in God, (or believed in the One True God or Pantheon of Several True Gods), and for them disbelief seems to provide all the evidence necessary.

Individuals just have to await for the Gift of clear belief or certain disbelief. Maybe God provides both.

People don't combine alcohol with ice cream enough.

In the short video clips that were linked after the one from Love and Death, Dick Cavett is interviewing Woody Allen on his show. Dick invites Woody to talk about his legal problems.

"Yes, my wife is suing me because I made a humorous comment about her. My wife lives on the Upper West Side, and one night she was coming home and was "violated". That's the way the newspapers phrased it, "she was violated." I was asked by a reporter if I had any comment on my wife. I said, 'Knowing my wife, it probably wasn't a moving violation.' So she's suing me."

Debs + Guevara = you must be a socialist?

I haven't read that much about Debs, though I do have a couple of books about him that are on my list (along with a few dozen others). I've read some Marx, and DeLeon (Socialist Labor Party). I belonged to a group of DeLeonist socialists who split off from the SLP--they found it just too stuck in its own bureaucracy. We met and published a paper for... 25 years?--give or take a few, and had weekly discussion groups for that long, too. It was a revolving door group -- people came and went, a few stayed. People read the little monthly paper and said they liked it. Eventually the group got too old and literally started to die off. But I always thought the principles of the group were sound.

DeLeon believed that workers within a democracy had a real opportunity to try to gain power through labor organizing coupled with political organizing. I think that is true. It's also true that capital is quite capable of using the same system to suppress labor, which it has done. ("The labor movement didn't fade out; it was murdered.")

I like the flavor of the IWW too, though it is not much of a force these days.

What does this statement mean?: "Jesus taught that we should forgive people 7 x 70 times." Is there some significance to the numbers 7 X 70, or was it just his way of saying we should ALWAYS forgive? — David Blomstrom

Jesus had just been asked something along the lines of "Isn't the standard 7 enough times to forgive somebody?" Yes, the up shot is that one should be very forgiving - 490 is a lot more than 7. "7" is one of several numbers that have sort of 'magical' or traditional narrative value in the Bible. 3 and 12 also. (Lots of fairy tales involve 3, like 3 wishes, 3 little pigs, 3 bears, Billy Goats Gruff (3 of them) and so on. Weren't there 3 witches in Macbeth? Two witches or four witches just isn't done!

Che Guevara was sort of my hero back in the late 60s. I didn't know much about him, (still don't) but I liked the button with his likeness on it (so much for radical philosophy). Castro, Guevara, et al were fighting the good fight. They took a much higher road than the Cuban dictator Batista.

I don't think hate is necessarily a bad thing. I have hated the petty administrators and supervisors in school districts, nonprofits, state offices, and so forth quite heartily. I think hate is reasonable IF there is a reasonable foundation of just cause and thinking behind the hate, it's externalized (not turned inward), and doesn't include arson, rape, and bloody murder as a solution.

Hate is different than free-floating hostility which feels like justified hatred, and can lead to one going overboard. Been there a couple of times.

Sin and forgiveness doesn't figure largely into secular values, but it does figure into secular psychotherapy. It is beneficial to "dismiss the charges we hold against others" in order to get beyond the rut of perseverating about wrongs done to us, especially if we won't or can't do anything about them. It's also essential that we be able to forgive our own deficiencies, rather than dwelling on our shortcomings.

There are many people who are very admirable in their actions, and it is very worthwhile to learn about them. Ralph Nader, Cezar Chavez (United Farm Workers), Eugene Debs, Che Guevara, Karen Silkwood, and a few thousand others.

It looks like and smells like and is convincing enough to trick the insect into believing it is the other sex. — MikeL

That's an interesting view of sex you have, there.

There are a few flowers (one is an orchid, if I remember correctly) that resemble an insect's mate. For the most part, though, flowers attract pollinators for their own devious vegetative purposes. And insects look to flowers not for mates, but for food. It's a quid pro quo. Pollen and nectar are nutritious bait for the buzzing bees to spread plant pollen from the stamens to the stigmas.



Yes, I did remember correctly

Why does a cell want to preserve itself? — MikeL

As Jake Tarragon said, "It just so happens that the behavior it engages in DOES so." But sometimes a cell doesn't preserve itself. Apoptosis (a Greek word meaning 'falling off'. applied to a cell process in the 1970s) occurs when a cell's coded instructions tell it to die. Deliberate cell death is essential to healthy organisms. Warn out cells need to go, as do cells that have become abnormal. One of the ways organisms avoid disease is through programmed cell death, aka apoptosis.

This isn't conscious; it's more like a mousetrap that has been set to snap shut when its bait has been nibbled.

Does it have a higher purpose? — MikeL

In a sense, yes. Physical, chemical, and biological principles make organisms possible. The complex organism (a paramecium, a plant, an insect, an animal, a human person) is, in a sense, a fulfillment of more basic rules that hold everything together over space and time. But... "only in a sense".

The cell performs functions that are characteristic of life. They replicate, they grow, they consume their environment, build some internal stuff and then excrete what they can't use, and they respond to their environment.This may be a good test to determine if something is alive or not, but it does not explain what life is. — MikeL

It's not just a test; life IS what life DOES. Take away what life does, and life disappears. Life is a process, not a fixed definition.

I dislike Donald Trump immensely (just for there record). Trump is part of larger problems, not merely a problem in himself. As Richard Feynman says, "nothing is mere". Trump isn't performing the style of "presidential" very well, but he is doing what he said he would do if elected (cut programs, reduce government regulation, and such).

Larger problems:

One is that it is difficult for many people to identify what kinds of social and economic policies are in their best interests. The difficulty is the result of many changes in American business practice, industry, demographics, and politics.

Another is that politics should clearly represent the interests of its constituencies. This may never have been true, but it certainly is not true now. Instead, politics (parties, candidates, conventions, campaigns, official and unofficial congressional activities, etc.) misrepresent and subvert its constituencies' interests.

The average citizen can not readily lay his hands on accurate, relevant information. Reading the daily newspaper, the regular broadcast news, or news feeds amount to an intake of flak designed to distract and misdirect. Politicians of every stripe are able to surf over the waves of uncertainty, misinformation, non-information, and conflicting information.

Trump could be switched with any number of other politicians without producing noticeable differences.

If you look at yourself as an wronged individual (without reference to what has happened to other people) you may see forgiveness of the wrong-doer as your responsibility within your ethical system. (Jesus taught that we should forgive people 7 x 70 times.) If you have been taught that forgiveness is good for yourself, and good for the wrong-doer, then it makes sense.

Whatever you believe about forgiveness, you describe a situation where wrong has been done to you, to others, and will likely continue to be done. You describe an issue of systematic wrongdoing that demands not forgiveness, but correction. It's a matter of obtaining justice. (And in organizations, The problems are usually stacked up several layers deep.)

Should you hate? I don't know. It depends how well hate works for you, I guess. If it serves as a motivator what sustains you through a long and difficult campaign to gain justice, it might be useful. Usually, though, hate eats people up and ends up undermining their capacity, rather than increasing it. Hate leads us astray quite often.

A burning desire for justice is better than hate from a psycho-social POV. Burning desire helps one maintain a head of steam without destroying one's self.

Myself -- I don't care that much about what the great philosophers would say. You say that it's about
a) self respect b) accountability and c) moral obligation to others. I'd say you are on the right track.

Now a question: Did the situation you describe really happen to you? (such things do happen. Lots of people get fucked over in organizations that harbor malevolent agents (which is many of them).

"Right" and "wrong" are determined collectively, and over time, by society. "Right" and "wrong" are not handed down from on high, unless one lives under an absolute pisspot who is in a position to decree right and wrong.

"Right" and "wrong" are both moral and legal concepts having different consequences when they are enacted by persons. One can be morally wrong and legally safe. Masturbation might be considered morally wrong, but legally indifferent.

People are sometimes called upon, in very difficult situations, to act in a way that would, under benign conditions, be "wrong" but in dire straits, are "right". In times of social breakdown and famine, theft of food from a rich person to feed children would be judged morally right but one might be found legally in the wrong.

A democrat has no interest in the long term well being of the country. — Agustino

Neither democracy, nor dictatorship, nor benevolent pisspot can effectively plan for a future beyond the human horizon -- which is, generally, not very distant. There are some examples of long range planning:

The Dutch plan for the long run because their existence as a nation in a bowl (20' below sea level in some places, with the ocean lapping up against their bowl) absolutely requires them to think about long-term trends. Maybe they think in terms of a century.

A few people plant hardwoods. A maple, an oak, a walnut, a butternut, a birch, all take at least 60 years to produce nice wood. 80 more likely. In those 60 years, some attention needs to be paid to the trees.

Weedy conifers mature in maybe 30 years -- fast enough to replant clear cut forests with re-harvest in mind (for paper, oriented strand-board, etc.) Even greedy companies can manage that.

Outside of examples like that, we do not--maybe can not--look down the road much more than a quarter century.

Well yeah, no doubt it is at minimum also venal. But then the question here is if there are people who were actually harmed by it. — Agustino

People would be harmed. The drug is used in other countries to treat malaria (rare in the US at this point) and other parasitical diseases.

Under the kind of capitalism we have--somewhat regulated, somewhat moderated, somewhat limited in greed--companies are not entitled to unreasonable profits -- like profits from uninhibited gouging.

Right, I need to clarify.

Billions of people have found fulfillment in not just reproducing, but nurturing their children and bringing them up to become happy successful adults. That's all to the good, and when taken seriously is a fine purpose for any life. I think most people in the world approach marriage and family in that way, if they have a choice (some don't have much choice in the matter).

What isn't so fine is casual reproduction where someone thinks having a baby will make their life better (the baby becomes a means to an end) or where someone has a baby they don't want, and resents it.

what about plants? They also have to deal with gravity. What was the range in plant size at the time of the dinosaurs?

Also, mammals were not very big at this time -- they were generally quite small. If gravity was less, back then, why wouldn't they be bigger too?

A third: After T R & Co ran out of steam, didn't animals start getting smaller? If gravity was less back then, wouldn't animals have continued to be XXXL?

Fourth: Their bones, muscles, and connecting tissues were proportionate to their size. Why couldn't very big muscles attached to very big bones with big connective tissue (tendons, ligaments, cartilage, etc.)? Maybe there were large ganglions located in the lower back to help coordinate tail and leg movement?

Five: How fast did T Rex & Co move? Presumably they didn't have to catch velociraptors for lunch; they probably looked around for a grazer and simple waddled up to it and bit it's head off.

If you look at alligators and crocodilia, none of them look like they'd be able to move very fast. But alligators manage to eat a few humans and their pets every now and then, some of them captured (by the gators) on dry land. There are alligators swimming around the flood waters of Houston right now, just waiting for some fat, luscious human to come bouncing along... SNAP!

Did I stutter? — Harry Hindu

Come again? What do you mean, "did i stutter?"????

Nah. Just ridiculously antigay — Rich

I didn't take it as anti-gay, particularly, but I find the idea of people having children in order to find a purpose in life a little disturbing. It's asking a lot of one's children to make your (parental) life purposeful.

Some of the ideas of Marx and other socialists are very good ideas, indeed. "Marx", "Socialism", "Communism", etc. are all very loaded words, of course. What you mean by "communism" might not be quite the same meaning that I would give to it.

as in, "one ring to find them, One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them" -- that sort of thing?

Reproduction is the purpose of life?

Once upon a time, there was a silly young girl who didn't know what the purpose of her life was. She thought about it all the time, but nothing occurred to her. She was, you see, very empty headed and there was little between her ears.

One day a mysterious stranger walked past the dreary little trailer park where the silly young girl lived. The foolish young thing happened to be standing by the pothole-filled road, waiting for the postman to deliver her mother's welfare check. The mysterious stranger looked her in the eye and said, "You, stupid girl, don't have the vaguest notion of what your purpose in life is, do you."

The silly, foolish, stupid, young girl opened her mouth and said, "Golly, gee, mister. I sure don't. I don't know shit from shine ola, as a matter of fact. Everybody says so."

"Just as I suspected." the slightly menacing mysterious male stranger said. "I will give you the means for you to discover what your purposes in life is," he said. With that, he whipped out a box that was 8 1/2 inches wide and 11 inches long. He thrust the box into her hands (she was quite taken aback by this sudden action) and said, "Follow the directions inside and you shall find your purpose in life."

And then he disappeared into thin air.

Eventually the postman finally arrived with her mother's welfare check--quite a bit later than usual. She asked him, "Where have you been, Mr. Postman; you were supposed to be here an hour and a half ago." He narrowed his eyes at her and said, "You wouldn't believe the weather I've been through today -- howling winds, darkness of night, hail, snow, rain. It's a miracle I got here at all, you little twit." He handed her a letter which had WELFARE DEPARTMENT printed on it. She took the letter to her mother dear who opened it, read it, read it again, read it a third time, then fainted. The silly, foolish, stupid, young twit of a girl picked up the letter and was sore distressed to read: "You are cut off welfare forever. Donald Trump needs the cash."

While she was waiting for her mother to recover from the shock of being kicked off the dole, it occurred to her that her mother dear had been on welfare for a long time. So had her grandmother, great grandmother, and great great grandmother. "Hmmm," she thought, "looks like the culture of poverty is going to get more interesting pretty quick."

Then she remembered the box the slightly menacing mysterious male disappearing stranger had given her. She went to her depressing little bedroom in the squalid trailer and closed the door. In the box she discovered some blank paper and several cheap ink pens. A small pieces of paper was on top of the paper. "DIRECTIONS" It said.

"Write down everything that you think could be a purpose for your life. Keep doing this. someday I'll return for you."

So she did.

The End.

The moral of the story is that it's up to you to decide what your purpose in life is.

One of the problems that MIGHT (I don't know) be in the way of an understanding of T Rex & Company's size is the paucity of fossil evidence. We only have those fossils which we happened to stumble on in weathered stone. We don't strip mine to find fossils. So the sequence of animals from the precambrian up to (pick a date, any date) is fragmentary.

We can't trace the long-term (over millions of years) increase of T Rex & Co.'s size. Then too, we don't have any DNA from T R & Co. Presumably they had genes which enabled them to get that big.

Look at dogs: they range from teacup miniatures to Great Danes and bigger. Only a few genes account for all of the dog differences. A horse that the Vikings used and spread around Europe ambles. It's walk is very smooth and even. Nice to ride. It has the odd habit of picking up it's front feet when it walks--like it was doing an exaggerated prance. 1 gene mutation granted this horse the ability to walk that way. Other horses can't do it.

Maybe T R & C had the good fortune to start out relatively large, bigger than whatever small prey they preyed upon. Maybe there was a lot of food, and they could afford to get bigger. Getting bigger just to starve doesn't have much point, after all.

Here's an article from this week's New York Times Magazine:

FROM THE MAGAZINE
How to Get Rich in Trump’s Washington
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE
His presidency has changed the rules of influence in the nation’s capital — and spawned a new breed of lobbyist on K Street.
167 Comments — NICHOLAS CONFESSORE

Whether one uses the term democracy, republic, federation, or whatever, there is form and then there is substance. The US is perhaps a representative democracy in which the government is elected by the people, who then play no role in enactments. (Except they pay taxes to support whatever the government decides to do -- like invade Iraq.)

In the US, and elsewhere, there is critical but informal representation of large monied interests in the lobbies of the Senate and House (not quite literally). The informal representatives, arriving with briefcases full of money, are called "lobbyists". They help representatives write legislation that affects their business areas (like health care), and they underwrite the elected representatives next election -- or the last one, if it isn't paid for yet.

There is also the permanent government -- which isn't elected. It's the various administrative and military branches of government that continue uninterrupted decade to decade.

The official system, elected representative government, is more or less pure and wholesome. The unofficial system where money buys policy is a system of deep corruption. Since it is conducted under the table, people do not receive daily reports on its activities. Besides being conducted under the table, the meetings are not open to people who are not playing the game. It's very much a "pay to play" system.

The unofficial system of government in the US is the foundation and cause of our extremely expensive health care system.

That's the substance. Never mind the form.

This animation shows the manner in which Boston filled in the bay to achieve the present (mostly by 1900) size/shape of the city.

What if world peace is only achievable without free will?

Would it be safe to assume that if there was only one ideology that the population lived by, that this question would prove true? One religion, one political system, — Bryce

As the Mad Fool noted, zero free-will is self defeating.

World peace, where everyone is satisfied by their share of the good, requires a static environment where nothing changes. New desires can not arise, new resources can not be found, new ideas can not be thought -- because anything new might destabilize the perfect balance. Population, production, distribution, and consumption would all have to be rigidly controlled.

Since we do not, and will not have a static environment (in fact we have a dynamic and unstable environment) we can expect that conflict will arise indefinitely. That's the price of existence as we know it. It's not good or bad, IT IS WHAT IT IS.

Are all things actually happening at once? — Mike Adams

No. Time is nature's way of preventing everything from happening at once.

Portland has done some good things like their bicycle promotion, light rail and traffic management. They also (I've heard, never been there) avoided building more freeways. Minnesota was at one time an example of good planning. The legislature chartered the Metropolitan Council to conduct the boundary crossing affairs of 2 large, 10 medium, and a dozen small towns in the metro area, plus 5 counties. Water, sewers, sewage treatment, and mass transit are their bailiwicks. It does give them leverage, but over the several decades it has existed, it seems to have lost some of its clout. Metro Twin Cities may not be quite as scattered as Houston--there just aren't nearly as many people here. Back in the 80s the bicycle clubs always said "every year you have to ride another mile to get out of town" and that seems to have held true since then.

I have been reading the history of Boston and New York City Mass Transit, and the middle-history of Boston --1850-1920. I was a bit relieved to discover that 150 years ago the cities took about as long to get projects off the ground and completed as they do today--5, 10, 20, 30, sometimes 50 years. Plans were drawn up, everybody's support was marshaled, legislature approval was gotten, then at the last minute the coalitions would fall apart, and another decade or two would pass.

And once they finally got going, it took them about as long as it does now--certainly not much longer. New York laid their first subway (20 miles worth) in about 3 years, if I remember. That was in 1904, +/-. Most of it was cut and cover, and some of it was blasting through tough or dangerous rock. And, once it was finished, it worked -- and it's still working. The problem now is that it is old and working harder to move ever larger numbers of people.

I was particularly interested in how small Boston was originally -- not population wise, but acreage wise. So much of the central part of the city is reclaimed bay. That started in the 1700s. "Boston" (also known as Shawmut) was originally a small square patch of land in the bay connected by a long narrow neck of land. Once rail became available (1840s?) they started infilling in earnest, hauling gravel in from a fair distance (at the time) and dumping it into the bay. The Beacon Hill above Boston Commons where the State House sits, was a once much higher hill and was cut down a great deal, and the rubble was dumped into a piece of what would become the Public Gardens. Later it was decidedly the toniest of neighborhoods when the filing in was finished. Beacon Street runs on top of what was a very wide dam across the bay -- they were going to use the bay for water power -- didn't work out.

It just amazes me what energetic and effective civil engineers they had back then.

Houston was a mess before the flood, but lots of cities have failed to do any strategic planning for their growth. For instance, large developments generally won't get built if the city says, "No, we are not putting water and sewer 10 miles into rural countryside." Instead, they just lay the lines wherever some developer wants them, whether it's on top of an earthquake fault, in a flood plain, below unstable mountain sides, or next to a poorly managed high-level radioactive waste dump. Liars, thieves, knaves, and scoundrels all.

Has the Enlightenment/modernity resolved anything?

it is a simple question — WISDOMfromPO-MO

I don't think it is a simple question.

Doesn't sound like anything close to a resolution to me. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

You were expecting the epiphany, perhaps?

Maybe it is just my own subjective experience, but this is predictable: spend a lot of time acquainting one's self with intellectual history and the latest ideas, think that you have found an answer, and somebody else who has acquainted him/herself with intellectual history and the latest ideas will tell you that that answer is false. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Yes, of course. Were you to speak at a symposium and announce that the sky is blue, some scholarly person would rise to angrily dispute your totally erroneous idea. Is this not a consequence, even a definitive one, of the enlightenment? There is no authority who can now finally and for all time decree that the sky is blue.

There is a joke, wrongly assigned to the late Chou Enlai, who was the first Premier of the People's Republic of China, serving from October 1949 until his death in January 1976. A scholar asked the very patient Chou whether the French Revolution was a good thing. Chou said, "It is too early to tell." People take a long time to digest epochs. Clearly the Enlightenment is still "in progress" and is still producing it's conclusions.

Lots of people have, at least temporarily, sworn off taking the Pope's, or the Chief Rabbi's, a Mullah's, or the Dalai Lama's word for anything. People feel free in some parts of the world to believe pretty much whatever they damn well please. Isn't that an Enlightenment Thing?

But, as it happens, there are also people reacting to the "whatever they damn well please" practice by reasserting the primacy of earlier "values". Family values, Bible Values, Koran values, ancient values... We don't usually burn people at the stake (at this time), but the disputes are definitely heating up.

First, you have to think about the motives of Shkreli raising the price. Did he have information that other companies would soon have access to the drug? Was the usage of the drug decreasing so he would have to raise the price to make up for the last profit? T — Jeff

The drug was introduced in 1953. It's patent would have expired several times over. It has been, by definition, generic for quite a while. The demand for the drug was probably stable, (with increasing demand in the 1980s and 90s because of AIDS. But then, after 1995, the demand would have declined again).

there should be research to produce better drugs — Agustino

There should. Sure. But one of the problems with diseases like toxoplasmosis, fungal diseases in particular, and some others is that the biology of the disease agents (fungi, for example) are just too similar to our own to be wiped out easily. Any drug that kills an internal fungal infection is likely to make the patient sicker, at least for a time, because what the drug is aiming for in the fungus also operates in all of our cells.

The drug that can kill a virus, a cancer, a bacteria, a fungus, or something else selectively, without screwing up everything else, is really wonderful. Penicillin, for instance, kills the syphilis bacteria with out bothering us. (It used to do the same thing for gonorrhea, but now Neisseria gonorrhoeae is resistant to several different types of antibiotics, and is occasional untreatable.)