Category: Random

Many years ago I believed that if people could just discuss issues calmly that they could resolve them. I no longer believe that. I now think that the best one can reasonably shoot for is that everybody will agree that the other people are not idiots. The basic problem is that people don’t change their…

The theory of homeopathy is that the adding something to pure water gives it a pattern of some sort. That pattern remains when more water is added. Thus diluting the solution does not change its effect. This is, of course, nonsense, although homeopathic remedies are sold in every drugstore and supermarket. If we believe the…

These are things I wonder about Iraq these days. Things are clearly improving in that fewer people are being killed. How much of that is due to completion of religious cleansing of neighborhoods? How many mixed neighborhoods remain? How many people are returning to Iraq from abroad? At one time millions of Iraqis had left.…

My father’s father bought a new car every year. He and my grandmother had two cars. Every year he traded in the older one and bought a new one. There were two car dealerships in town, and he alternated each year. One measure of the wealth of a society is what it can afford to…

All the major U.S. airlines, other than Southwest, are losing money, mainly because of high oil prices (Southwest is an exception because they cleverly hedged their oil purchases). The airlines have been cost cutting for years; I assume that they can’t run their services significantly more cheaply than they do today. Therefore, on routes which…