First Blog

It is remarkable how much the Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) book, "Walden" has imposed on this world.  He expressed in many ways a utopia of the mind.  He rejected the common desiderata of the day to conform and enjoy the fruits of industrialization.  His book is considered a great work.  And why not? Thoreau was raised in affluence. He attended Harvard and did well.  He studied natural and moral philosophy. He was familiar with Kant and Plato.   He taught for a little while but concluded that when teaching one did not learn much.  Unsatisfactory to him.  He was eccentric, as considered by his colleagues. Like Socrates, he sought the truth, an absolute truth.  This has been a theme over the ages.  Redemption, a type of finding the truth, is a theme of our day. But can you can say if you have been saved, you are ok and on the true path? Thoreau spoke against conformity in an age when the United States was feeling it muscle. It was moving to be the greatest nation on e

Just like sin, hate is easy to sell.    Hate is intense dislike.   Hate is with us always.   In many ways hate is the opposite of “love.” Forms of hate include but are not limited to racism, class warfare, ethnicity, religion, power, spousal, parental, climate, politics, beliefs, and anything contrary to one of the senses, e.g. smell, music.   Probably there are more.     What are your preferences?   Politicians of hate, often called demagogues, are everywhere at every time, in every place. For some, it is a career. Hate is used frequently in our language.   In the database from the “Word Frequencies in Written and Spoken English”   based on the 100,000,000 word electronic databank sampled from both spoken and written English   British National Corpus   at http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/bncfreq/flists.html   we obtain the work frequency analysis for nouns, verbs, adjectives, and other parts of speech.     We exclude articles of speech, pronouns, prepositions, and the like.