Month: April 2025

In Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” in Act 1,  a guard says, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” expressing his suspicion and concern about the moral corruption within the kingdom.

Now that can certainly be said about the United Kingdom. There’s something rotten, and that rot has to do with a particular kind of immigrants who follow a particular religion, and what they are doing to the British kingdom. More accurately, what those immigrants are allowed to get away with: wholesale organized rape, murder and other assorted crimes.

[Did you recognize the image at the top of the post was the flag of England?]

I am an Anglophile. I admire British history, culture, and language. Their contributions in every field of human endeavor — philosophy, politics, administration, governance, mathematics, science, engineering, technology, music, literature, etc. — is unmatched. Just a few generations ago, the sun never set on the British Empire.

All that is gone now.  Continue reading “England”

“My Dinner with Andre” is a 1981 American drama film set at a restaurant in Manhattan.  It’s a dinner conversation between two old friends, Wallace Shawn and André Gregory. Shawn, a playwright and actor, reluctantly agrees to meet his former colleague Gregory, a theater director.

Gregory had abandoned his career to travel the world in search of enlightenment. They explore contrasting philosophical themes: Gregory’s spiritual journey and Shawn’s pragmatic worldview.

Over their dinner, Gregory recounts extraordinary experiences in his quest to break free from the mechanical habits of modern life. Shawn listens skeptically while defending the value of ordinary pleasures like coffee or an electric blanket. By the end of the evening, both men, though convinced of their positions, leave with much to ponder.

I still recall the movie even though I’d watched it over forty years ago. The entire movie was just a conversation between two friends over dinner. It had no romance, no explosions, no action and (would you believe it?) no CGI. It was just two guys talking. Which is what makes it so special. Continue reading “Bill’s Dinner with Donald”

For people to be able to ask important questions, they have to have the capacity to seek, find and comprehend the answers themselves. That is, the answers are almost but not quite within their reach. The Zen proverb — when the student is ready, the teacher appears — is a version of that. 

A corollary to that is the fact that one cannot learn something from a book that is not implicitly almost known already. To have a chance to gather even the low-hanging fruits, you have to be close to the tree; if you are far enough away from the tree, you can’t even see what fruits it bears.

The less one’s knowledge of a subject, the less aware one is of one’s ignorance. It’s almost paradoxical that the more you know, the more your knowledge of your ignorance grows. Ignorance of one’s ignorance is meta-ignorance. Knowledge of one’s ignorance is meta-knowledge. Continue reading “Knowledge and Ignorance”

Unless one is a hermit or is marooned on an uninhabited island, trade is what everyone does. Even children voluntarily trade cards, marbles, toys, etc., with other children. As grownups, we produce stuff to sell and that allows us to buy stuff that we consume but couldn’t produce. Most of us sell our labor in exchange for wages, and buy stuff we want. Even within a household exchange is ubiquitous even though it is not mediated using money.

If we couldn’t or wouldn’t trade, we’d be forced to consume only what we produce. That would be an all-round disaster; we’d all be desperately poor. Self-sufficiency is a recipe for poverty. Mohandas Gandhi was the prophet of the self-sufficiency religion, and we know how that worked out. Continue reading “On Trade and Trump’s Tariffs – Part 3”