It is a source of great frustration having an interest in indigenous affairs coming to realise how ineffective we are at making a difference. Recently the annual “Closing the Gap” report was published highlighting the usual disappointments in trying to reduce the disadvantage of indigenous Australians. The only statistic we seem to have been meeting […]
Actualities seem to float in a wide sea of possibilities from out of which they were chosen; and somewhere, indeterminism says such possibilities exist and form part of the truth. William James As you will have deduced from my blog essays, I am an avid reader and enjoy a wide range of genres including history, […]
I have often told my readers how important I believe myths and parables are to our understanding of the world. Unfortunately we sometimes suffer greatly when these pointers to the truth are taken literally. (I recently came across a clue as to why parables are so popular. According to research quoted by David Di Salvo […]
To most of us the climate signals are rather confusing. Whilst the press has often provided stories of shrinking ice-caps with commentary from global warming alarmists insisting this is evidence that increasing level of atmospheric CO2 , the same folk seem rather bewildered by the record cold conditions now blanketing North America. If the truth […]
Our democracy seems to me to be floundering. Our politicians seem too keen to embrace populist issues without sufficient concern for the long-term. Serious reform which underpinned our economic success in the late twentieth century seems now impossible because voters can’t be convinced to make short-term sacrifices in order to access long-term benefits. Our two […]
I celebrate myself, and I sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good as belongs to you. Walt Whitman, (American poet and humanist.) In some sense man is a microcosm of the universe; therefore what man is, is a clue to the universe. David Bohm, […]
The Universe is both mysterious and awesome (and I use “awesome” with its classical meaning and not in the debased way it is used colloquially today). As we have seen in past essays humankind has two principal instruments with which it attempts to fathom the Universe, viz. Logos which relies on our faculty of reason, […]
When I was a teenager in a State High School in a regional town, I only knew one person in the classes that preceded mine that had gone to University. I knew quite a few who had gone to be trained as teachers at Teachers Training College. In those days Universities did not train teachers. […]
In my last essay I tried to make the case that delaying gratification was essentially good for us. Foregoing an immediate pleasure helped build our moral fibre, improving our resilience and ultimately our satisfaction with life. [Psychologists call our ability to delay gratification in this way our intertemporal utility function. I have often wondered whether […]
I seldom watch TV, but whenever I have recently, it seems I get bombarded with ads cajoling me to take out short term loans. The ads usually portray someone, seemingly not very well-off, who just must have something (appliance, laptop, building renovation or repair) immediately. No doubt the targeted customers have little economic literacy and […]