Occasionally I come across ideas so profoundly shocking, that I would simply reject them as being batshit craziness, except that due to their rigorously scientific, falsifiable nature, and due to the academic reputation of the researchers involved, I can’t. Perhaps the most intuitively ‘obvious” notion that most people possess is that time flows from past to future. The arrow of causality inexorably flows in one direction only: From past to future. << MORE >>

One of the most interesting aspects of writing and posting an article is reading and responding to the commentary about it submitted by readers. This was certainly true for my recent essay “In Defense of Civilization” posted on OpEdNews.com. One reader, Daniel Geary, made the very good point that to effectively discuss “civilization” it needs to be defined. What, precisely, does the author mean by “civilization?” Mr. Geary noted that this term is about as loosely defined as is, say, “God.”<< MORE >>

In recent times I have found there to be a profound sense of disillusionment with civilization among a small but growing cohort of the educated population. I do not mean that this group is disaffected with WESTERN civilization, or any other specific form of civilization. Rather, I mean that they are disaffected with the very idea of human civilization at all.

The single most prominent advocate of this view is writer ...

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June 4^th, 2010 may someday be remembered as being the day that the future changed. On this date, the privately built and financed Falcon-9 rocket was launched from Cape Canaveral. Why is event of such great significance?

To understand this we first need to consider where we—human civilization—are at as of mid-2010. Our global political economy is based upon hydrocarbon energy:  coal, natural gas, and most especially, oil. Yet oil planetary production has likely peaked. Oil discoveries peaked in the mid-1960’s, ...

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By Mike Byron

It is now mid-2010. Global oil production has been essentially flat since mid-2004:

 

Year after year the U.S. Energy Information Agency has had to downwardly adjust its oil production projections which always initially depict increasing production, and then are “retrodicted” to correspond with reality. It seems that it is vitally important to maintain the belief that ever increasing supplies of oil ...

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RAMONA’S RECIPE FOR HOME-MADE DIRT:  THE LONG-AWAITED SEQUEL

 

 

Mike has been nagging me for weeks about doing a sequel to “Ramona’s Recipe for Home-Made Dirt.”  He keeps saying, “The world is waiting.”  Obviously, as one who was raised Roman Catholic, ...<< MORE >>

America, more than any other nation, was founded on an ideal of exceptionalism. Limits were for the “Old World.” Here in the New World, as the saying went, “the sky is the limit.” For nearly 300 year—from Jamestown in 1607, until the disappearance of the frontier at the end of the 19^th century—the country expanded physically.

The Civil War of the 1860’s made the nation an industrial power. The expansion of railroads across all of North American, in conjunction with the defeat of the South’s agrarian ...<< MORE >>