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Mark Leviton has determined that, due to a typographical error, he will celebrate his seventeenth birthday this year, not his seventieth. He lives in Nevada City, California.
The way Americans interact with each other now has made it clear that the Constitution was perhaps never deserving of all the praise it’s gotten.
Seeing and hearing are selective. We register what is needed at the moment and unconsciously ignore other input. It may seem that our eyes are like a camera and our ears are like microphones, objectively recording everything, but . . . our senses are not at all like those devices.
Cannabis is legal in Canada for both adult and medicinal use. Mexico could legalize cannabis by the end of this year. The United States is going to be squeezed on both sides, with Americans vacationing in Cabo San Lucas and Montreal, using legal cannabis, and perhaps wondering why their own country isn’t moving forward with similar policies.
Fungi are decentralized. They’re able to coordinate their behavior without anything resembling a brain. They can connect perception and action without having a special place to do so. The coordination somehow takes place everywhere at once, and also nowhere in particular.
I wish the Democratic Party would put more resources into these communities instead of waiting until shortly before an election and parachuting in a few campaign workers to do some half-assed Latino-turnout work. Latinos are not automatically the firewall for the Democratic Party.
With the coronavirus we have another interesting issue: how we eat wildlife. Ecologists and conservationists have been saying for fifty years that we shouldn’t be eating everything on the planet.
It’s important to compare things that are pretty alike, like humans and chimps, with their evolutionary ties, but when you find similarities between things that are ordinarily seen as very different, like humans and ants — that’s where the new ideas come from.
We are more comfortable in our culture talking about the distant past. We love black history; it’s black people we don’t like.
It’s a mistake to think of each episode of police misconduct as an isolated incident that might have gone another way if different officers had been involved. It’s not about individuals. The problem is a political imperative toward overpolicing.
To see the full picture of Indians — as people who have had a continuing, complex relationship with all aspects of American culture — is just too much for some people. They want to put Indians in a box.
I’m not saying that race is a natural division of human beings that can lead to unjust hierarchies. I’m saying that the very concept of race was invented to create and enforce such hierarchies.
White supremacy is not just Nazis marching in the street. In the U.S. it’s always been a part of the economic and social system.