Links of Possible Relevance, Part 14

The Fall of Venezuela. Prepare Yourself Accordingly. – Surprise! A socialist nation turns into a sick, broke, starving, boiling-hot dystopia.

What Are the Dreams of Blind People Like?

FDA Claims the Power to Define Words

What the Hell? – “The language you speak is the language you think, and the language can seriously hold you back from thinking the way God designed us to think.”

Plants may form memories using mad cow disease proteins – Someone get Orson Scott Card on the phone.

How to compress language

Sheryl Sandberg Admits Its Hard For Single Moms to Lean In – “Leaning in” is only possible for women who have lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of money.

Plus-Size Male Model Opens Up About Body Image Struggle – Ugh. Not the guys, too.

Another “science guy says the universe is an illusion” story – Why should I trust his conclusions?

BABYMETAL REACTS TO YOUTUBERS REACT TO BABYMETAL – Reaction videos are terrible; reaction to reaction videos, even more so. But this is the cutest thing you’ll see this week.

On despising politics – “The 10,000 citizen association that Aristotle was thinking of when he spoke of man as a political animal, or the Friary or 300 member parish that St. Thomas had in mind when speaking of the common good as the highest good can’t be scaled up six orders of magnitude to the 300,000,000+ modern USA.”

4 Comments

  • Ed Hurst says:

    The cognitive scientists amuse me because they uniformly deny any higher faculties in the human soul. I don’t struggle at all with human perception as broadly self-deceptive, but they never go anywhere important with it. And the realization that political ideals never scale well is ancient; we are designed to live in small communities. The wisest emperors in history kept a great distance from the subjects, mostly just taxing them a little and using them as buffers for their home kingdom.

    • Jay DiNitto says:

      “I don’t struggle at all with human perception as broadly self-deceptive, but they never go anywhere important with it.”

      I agree, although if you’re talking about “senses,” I wouldn’t call it deceptive, just very limited in scope yet very powerful inside that scope. If you’re the kind to believe in macro-evolution of humans, it’s pretty much our bread and butter, since we evolved to survive by our senses 99% of the time.

  • Jill says:

    This is one of the best lists you’ve put together.

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