Religion and scientific inquiry were bred out of our compulsion to explain the world. Whereas science challenges dogma and welcomes questioning, faith thrives when reason fails. Fortunately, neither is relevant at this moment. Or necessary when you’re having a laugh.
So when an Australian reporter came upon a piece of wood laying on top of an Antarctic iceberg, miles from nowhere, someone suggested it was a take on the black monolith Stanley Kubrick used in his “2001 – A Space Odissey” to illustrate mankind’s progress.
A coffin. A door to a magical world. Debris from a shipwreck. Or a rudimentary penguin surfboard were some of the theories Continue reading →
———————— The Earth Shook & Burn But The World Only Moved Sideways ————————
A year of extremes but no breakthroughs. Records of the wrong kind (U.S.’s longest armed conflict in Afghanistan and worst environmental disaster ever, highest temperature indexes in several regions of the world, increased infection diseases mortality rates in the Caribbean and Africa, and staggering drug trafficking casualties in Latin America) plagued the world, with the additional bonus of a certified freak: a snowstorm in the middle of the Australian summer.
But there was no progress in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks; no curbs on Iranian and North Korean authoritarian antics or scary nuclear ambitions; no meaningful proposals to solve political impasses in the Ivory Coast, Sudan, Rwanda, Nigeria or Zimbabwe.
Disturbing tactics did get deployed, though, by the world’s superpowers but with the only intention of curbing whistle blowers and freedom of information acts such as WikiLeaks. It gave civil rights activists of every stripe a chilling pause to see Continue reading →
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