Sexuality, Sanitation and Civilization

The other week I attended three events and each of them left me in a very different mental state. The first was a Bay Area regional dance competition for children featuring most of the leading local dance studios, and styles ranging from hip-hop to ballet and everything in between. Most of the children had trained hard […]

What’s Your Legacy?

In John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem  A Legacy it’s clear that he wants to be remembered for his friendship, although, together with his mentor, William Lloyd Garrison, he spent a large part of his life fighting against slavery and is remembered today more for his poetry than for anything else. If, as Lucretius said more than […]

Roll Back The Regulators

I have spent countless hours during the past few weeks on what soldiers in the second world war called ‘chickenshit’ i.e. bureaucratic regulations so silly and so trifling that they don’t even measure up to the level of ‘bullshit’. Nowadays ‘chickenshit’ is everywhere. Virtually every occupation has a government and/or state licensing board and a bureaucracy […]

Imagine Your Children Are Dead

Imagining the loss of your children was one of the recommendations of the Stoic school of philosophy which included among its members Epictetus (55 AD – 135 AD), Marcus Aurelius (121 AD -180 AD), Seneca (4 BC – 65 AD) and Musonius Rufus (1st century AD). Stoicism is the western equivalent of Zen Buddhism minus the […]