Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from October, 2021

Last Chance to Prevent a Hellish Future for Humanity and the Earth

  1831 Frontispiece of Mary Shelley's 1816 Frankenstein novel. Frontispiece by Theodore von Holst, 1810-1844. Courtesy Wikipedia.   I am not a climatologist, but I have been writing about the dangers of anthropogenic climate change since 1989. It’s like I sense the danger.    In love with nature   I love the natural world, a love I inherited from reading Aristotle who crafted the science of zoology and kept praising “perfect” nature that does nothing in vain.    I studied zoology at the University of Illinois, but not much of that study stayed with me. Earning a living on Capitol Hill and the US Environmental Protection Agency in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s pretty much shut me down, and almost scared the living daylights out of me.   Ideas and policies   You can go on trying to do good for so long. Without support from enough colleagues or friends, one dries up like a plant in a drought.    Ideas become policies only when ther...

The Beautiful and the Good

Young Athenian woman, paradigm of kalon k' agathon, the beautiful and the good. About 500 BCE. Courtesy Acropolis Museum, Athens, Greece. By Evaggelos Vallianatos   My early hopes of finding long-term happiness in America were illusions of a young man who knew nothing about the United States, save for giving opportunities to immigrants from Greece.     The crisis of America   In 2021, American politics and  Constitution  are on the verge of civil war. The Democrats and Republicans are irreconcilable. The Democratic Party represents for the most part the white middle class, including non-white minorities. The Republican Party, a subsidiary of Trump, fights for the interests of an oligarchy of rich and powerful whites.   Behind both of these gigantic parties, and the national political divisions they generate, there lurk the few billionaires that pull the policy strings, including those of the January 6, 2021 insurrection. The Republicans obey ...

The Antikythera Mechanism, a computer of genius from the Greeks

Cover of The Antikythera Mechanism by Evaggelos G. Vallianatos, Universal Publishers, 2021.  I also add a very brief video in which I explain why I wrote this book: https://youtu.be/_Hnk_uVirTk