I remember sitting in Mrs. Gorin’s history class in 1988 hearing about the time a POTUS won in the Electoral College even though he lost the popular vote. I remember DISTINCTLY thinking, with the smugness only a Reagan-loving American teenager durring the Cold War achieve, that I was glad that wouldn’t happen again. It was… Read more Why the Electoral College Needs an Overhaul
Happy Halloween! We are now only a couple of weeks away from the US Presidential Election, which the whole world is watching with genuine terror lest Donald Trump become POTUS and get access to the nuclear codes. Since little is more horrifying than monsters and politicians, today is an excellent day to discuss the zeitgeist… Read more Monstrous Politics
Netflix has released a new documentary entitled Audrie and Daisy that is an “unflinching account of high-school sexual assault and trial by social media”. This documentary was important to me for several reasons, including because I have written about these young rape victims in my book The Jezebel Effect. In the book I explained that:… Read more Audrie and Daisy and Slut Shaming
Whenever anyone makes the argument that “science” is some sort of untainted, unbiased, monolith of “truth” I want to raise my eyebrow like Spock and say, “Fascinating.” Why? Because while data can be factual, anything interpreted or analyzed by humans is subject to errors or distortions or outright lies … including science. For example, the… Read more Sweet Poison
All languages have taboo words (the so-called dirty words for example) and all languages will lose innocent words that sound a little too much like a taboo word. No one uses the worded niggardly any more, even though it simply means “miserly”, because it has a very bad word indeed in it. It has no… Read more Feckful and Feckless
Time to begin exploring the history and culture of Wales! And where better to do that than the free, open-air, 40 acre walk though the Welsh past that is St. Fagan’s national history museum? It’s lush, it is! It is in a beautiful park and woodland nature paths between the buildings, which have been meticulously… Read more St. Fagan’s National Museum
On 18 July 1290 King Edward I issued an Edict of Expulsion decreeing the forcible removal of all Jews from England. The expulsion edict was the law of the land for the next 360-odd years, until 1657, when Oliver Cromwell (of all people!) permitted Jews to return to England. Cromwell only let Jewish people return… Read more Edict of Expulsion 1290
Countries with a lot of inequality are unstable countries. Without economic stability and security for the populace, countries are prone to unrest and political extremism. Nothing good EVER comes from political extremism. Whether it is fascism in Hitler’s Germany or the communism in Stalin’s Russia, it sucks. Not only does it suck … it ALWAYS… Read more Which Way Forward?
I’ve always been intrigued by the Tunguska event. For those of you not in the know (i.e. anyone who isn’t a big ol’ geek like me), the Tunguska event was huge explosion on 30 June 1908 (Western calendar) in the skies just above the Stony Tunguska River, in Yeniseysk Governorate (now Krasnoyarsk Krai) Russia. We’re… Read more KaBoom
Apparently, people are startled and horrified that the UK will be leaving the EU even though they voted to Leave … especially since they found out within hours that the promises the Leave camp had made were a tissue of lies and propaganda. Now they are full of regret. Then why did they vote Leave… Read more #Regrexit