Kitchen Sink Omelet

  Why we NEED to study History Historian Mary Beard contends that  Rome became a de facto empire due to territorial expansion too vast to be effectively governed by a democratic republic So the territorial empire created the first emperors to fill a political void IMO This is frightening  the USA is rapidly expanding its holdings  (military installations) satellite nations We cannot decide how to effectively administer them Could this be why we are facing the threat of Emperor Donald Trump I? IMO This upcoming election is not whether the USA will become an empire or a republic But rather what direction the Empire of the United States will take. Or to put it more bluntly: The 1% want their empire and will stop at nothing to get it. Prediction: Tyrant Trump will fail He insists on doing everything himself Nothing happens without Trump's approval. He will drown in the details.

"Anti-woke is just another way of saying white supremacy." P. Z. Myers Sarah Huckabee Sanders is the governor of Arkansas now

I've written about Stephen Pinker in my other blog, MythMagMar . This is an interview on the New York Times website by Carl Zimmer: Human Nature's Pathologist. ...He came to Harvard after graduating from McGill University in 1976. At the time, he was convinced that a life in psychology would allow him to ask the big questions about the mind and answer them with scientific rigor. “It was the sweet spot for me in trying to understand human nature,” he said... ...This research [with children] helped to convince Dr. Pinker that language has deep biological roots. Some linguists argued that language simply emerged as a byproduct of an increasingly sophisticated brain, but he rejected that idea. “Language is so woven into what makes humans human,” he said, “that it struck me as inconceivable that it was just an accident.”... ...In a way, “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” is a response to this kind of critique. He says the idea for the book took root in his mind around the ti...

Fascinating post on Bldg Blog on how chemical analysis of plants can point to buried ruins: "The brief article goes on to tell the story of two archaeologists, who, in collecting plants in Greenland, made the chemical discovery: 'Some of their samples were unusually rich in nitrogen-15, and subsequent digs revealed that these plants had been growing above long-abandoned Norse farmsteads.'"