crazy old coder

just a quick post today; i have found a blog whose writer is an american of whom i am proud to be a fellow citizen.  redpilljew dot blogspot dot com is subtitled " Musings from a capital-C Conservative American Jew," and is the blog of a man who understands that in the main, the State is a dangerous organization which must have constant oversight by free people in order to keep it under control.  he noted in one post (http://redpilljew.blogspot.com/2018/01/civilizational-collapse-and-brain.html) that " a lack of stimulation of a brain structure in infancy and developmental years often leads to deficiencies in performance of that structure in adulthood," then goes on to present an idea which i had not considered before, which i will present in his own words:  Any advanced and thriving civilization has large numbers of people – especially at the top of the pile – who are comfortable and safe, and are so for generations.  This lack of meaningful threats, from bi...

some time back, i wrote a quick post on my googal plus (as in "goolag") account about the way we (the human race) generate energy.  for our entire existence on this planet, we have needed energy, and for the larger part of that existence, our need for energy has been critical, in that lacking an energy source, even temporarily, would cause our demise.  within the past few thousand years (a blip, geologically speaking), we have created cooperative social structures that taken together, we can call civilization; because of the specializations of people living in civilization, our ability to find and generate energy has grown by orders of magnitude.  now, some say that our generation and use of energy is threatening the very stability of the environment, potentially even causing it to go into thermal runaway and end up at a new equilibrium point at the melting point of some metals, much like that of the planet venus.  that's as may be, although i have my doubts; it ...