Global warming: compared to the baseline data from 1951 to 1980, the year 2015 was the warmest. Ten 2016 was warmer than 2015. NASA / Noaa. Public domain. The meteor of Al Gore Al Gore was very ambitious. Following on the footsteps of his father, he entered politics and served as a Congressman and Senator from Tennessee. At the same time, he grasped the importance of climate change and he wrote a book about the political implications of rising global temperature.  Gore knew Bill Clinton, a shrewd politician from Arkansas. Together, the two young southern politicians, formed an alliance and captured the White House: Al Gore served as the vice president of the Clinton administration, 1993-2001. Gore facilitated the establishment of the country’s collecting data on climate change, in effect, activating the Global Change Research Act of 1990. This law mandated, first, the reporting of  climate change in the United States and the world and, second, the study of the potenti

Plato's Allegory of the Cave by Jan Saenredam, 1604, Albertine, Vienna. Courtesy Wikipedia. The allegory of the Cave Some 2,500 years ago, Plato warned us of the invisible chains tying us to a distorted world of deception, ignorance and powerlessness.  In the beginning of book 7 of  The Republic , Plato explains how people chained to the dark floor of a Cave can only look ahead of them. They cannot turn around. There is a lighted fire, a narrow path, and a stone wall behind them. The chained Cave dwellers see shadows of what is going on behind them. Those broken and disorienting images become the truth and reality of their world.  Some outsiders entered the Cave. They cut the chains of a prisoner in order to enable him to see who manipulated the images behind him. The liberators  then dragged him out of the Cave to the Sun-bathed surface of the land. The exciting challenge, Plato said, was for the enlightened and free Cave dweller to return to the Cave to convince

Palaistra: School for the education of young men in reading, writing, Homer, music, history, mathematics, astronomy and training in wrestling and boxing. Olympia, Peloponnesos, Greece. Photo: Evaggelos Vallianatos Tourist Greece For a tourist, Greece is a dream destination. Here’s a country in the heart of Europe with long history and a civilization second to none. Hellas, the name Greeks-Hellenes know their country, shaped the West and, to some degree, the world.  Evidence of antiquity is all over Greece, with museums full of beautiful marble and fewer bronze sculpture of mostly naked men, women, heroes, and gods; ceramic pots painted with scenes from everyday life, athletic competition, mythology, and war; and jewelry of gold and silver.  In Athens, there are two ancient temples still standing: the bombed, looted, gutted and restored Parthenon on the Acropolis, and the temple of Athena and Hephaistos below the Acropolis in the agora-market of ancient Athens. In

Patriarch Theophilos of Alexandria, Egypt, in 391, standing on the ruins of the 700-year old Serapeion Temple housing Serapis, a god fusing Egyptian and Greek culture, and a substantial collection of books from the Great Library of Alexandria. The destruction of Serapeion in all likelihood was the aftermath of the burning of the Great Library by Patriarch Theophilos. 5th century papyrus, Courtesy Wikipedia.   A beneficial consequence of studying ancient, medieval, and modern Greek history was my rethinking of Christianity, which ancient Greeks and Romans basically ignored for nearly 400 years.   Fear of the gods,  deisidaimonia The Greeks accused the Christians of  deisidaimonia , superstition, because of their fear of the gods. Yet, in the fourth century, the Roman Emperor Constantine made Christianity the state religion.  Once in power, Christianity revealed its true colors. It set aside its public relations message of “love” and went straight for the jugular. It d