Hitler’s actions surprised people, though he had revealed his views in Mein Kampf. Perhaps people were surprised not so much because his aims were hidden, but because they were unthinkable. President Trump has proposed a $54 billion increase in defense…
The Realistic Idealist
The Realistic Idealist is a new publication on Medium that will publish articles related to the current situation and future prospects of humanity, giving preference to those offering creative ideas about what can be done to improve the future. We…
Practical Java
PracticalJava
Technological Unemployment
Sue Halpern’s How Robots & Algorithms Are Taking Over (New York Review of Books, April 2, 2015) provides a good update on the threat of technological unemployment. Some excerpts: In September 2013, about a year before Nicholas Carr published The…
America’s Brainless Government
Lee Drutman and Steven Teles, in A New Agenda for Political Reform (Washington Monthly, March/April/May 2015), explain how, while the complexity of issues facing America has increased, the ability of Congress to understand and cope with them has decreased. Some…
College Freshmen Find Life Increasingly Depressing
In a recent large survey of American college freshmen, the fraction reporting they had frequently felt depressed during the past year was 56% greater than the corresponding fraction 5 years earlier. In other words, the fraction reporting frequently feeling depressed rose from…
Sugar Addiction
Today’s high levels of sugar consumption are dangerous, and sugar has much in common with addictive drugs, according to a New York Times article by James DiNicolantonio and Sean Lucan. Today added sugar is everywhere, used in approximately 75 percent…
Today’s Insanity
Democracy in the Donetsk People’s Republic Reporting on the lack of any serious opposition to separatist leader Aleksandr Zakharchenko in the current eastern Ukrainian election, Andrew Kramer provided the following commentary from a Russian newspaper editor: Aleksandr A. Prokhanov, the…
The Stupidity of Experts
If ordinary people in America and elsewhere are insufficiently intelligent to understand and fix major problems of the modern world, that might be tolerable provided there are enough brighter people available smart enough to solve them. But what if the…
American Weakness
It often seems America is increasingly sclerotic, with a diminishing capacity to cope with challenges it faces. For instance, apropos of the inept security that enabled a deranged knife-wielding Iraq War veteran to make his way deep within the White…