First Blog

Bill de Blasio . It used to be that college students would imitate adults.  Wearing suits and elegant attire, they would act as mature as they could. Nowadays, it is the reverse.  Adults are imitating college students, supporting all manner of youthful positions, mostly extreme uncompromising views – the typical fair of sophomores.  Case-in-point.  With NY City in grief over the loss of a police officer to assassination, the mayor jets off to Europe to hang with a bunch of protesters with seeming goal simply to protest. The man seems to be singularly immature, usually a recoverable illness, but not in his case. --------------------- Presidents . Clinton was bogged down a lot by personal issues. Bush was bogged down by wars in the Middle East. Obama was bogged down by trying to remake the US and the world into a globally unified enterprise.   The question is: Who’s taking care of our country?  This includes the bridges and roadways, the waterways and schools, the power plan

Politicabobia - fear of politics* Simplicitivism - theory that the simple is often the best approach**   O ne needs to be careful with "ism" and “ phobia ” words. They often have loose meanings, strict meanings, and sometimes multiple meanings. In almost every endeavor, psychology, philosophy, science, biology, and the full list of topics, there are many, hundreds if not thousands. In politics, they are easy to apply. The are effective conveying to the listener what is personally imagined. Their greatest application comprise a form of demagoguery, whether through concern or fear.   We have communism, conservativism, progressivism, liberalism, racism, feminism, environmentalism, anarchism, nationalism, capitalism, colonialism, nationalism, and socialism, to name a few.   Of course, there is the anti -version of each.   Where an “ism” is not appropriate, the alternative “phobia” is used such as in homophobia and islamophobia, where cut away is any vestige of the

We are a nation of heaps.  We live in heaps.  We respond only to issues when they become heaps - and then rarely.  So, what’s a heap? The heap paradox comes from rather vague predicates.  You’ve often heard of a heap of sand or a heap of trouble.  What this means is roughly we cannot distinguish individuals (such as grains of sand from a pile) from the others.  In fact, it is more complicated.  The ancient interpretation of this paradox (also called the sorites paradox ) is to resolve the question as to when, by removal of individual grains of sand, it is no longer a heap?  In this note, we look at heaps from the reverse perspective.  For example, when we add grains of sand to a collection, when does the collection cease being a collection and becomes a heap?  Of course, this paradox has no real resolution, but the word “heap” does seem to apply to many issues of the day. The (reverse) heap paradox is a key social and political situation in the USA.  At