The brilliant but dangerous Phil Spector and the wonderfully talented Harry Nilsson wrote this song. It was recorded in 1965 by the Modern Folk Quartet. I was going to post Brian Wilson’s cover from 1995, which appeared on a Nilsson tribute album, but I think I prefer the original. It’s one of the last gasps of the Wall of Sound.
Hell, I’ll post both of them, even though this version is pretty much a carbon copy (maybe he thought the original was perfect as is, and WordPress won’t mind).
Many philosophers, maybe most philosophers, think that consciousness is a very difficult problem, possibly the hardest philosophical problem of all. How can something physical (our brains) give rise to something that seems to be non-physical (consciousness)? And why are we conscious at all? Couldn’t we do everything we do without being conscious?
I once told a professor that I didn’t understand why consciousness is thought to be such a hard problem. He said I hadn’t talked to the right people.
Because confession is supposedly good for the soul (and our consciousness?), and because I bought a webcam, I have now confessed my shame at:
According to a Gallup poll from last year, 62% of very religious white Americans are Republicans, while 27% are Democrats. In Gallup’s words: “A white American’s degree of religiousness … is a strong predictor of that person’s political orientation”.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/150443/Religious-Whites-Identify-GOP.aspx
Yet it isn’t obvious why this is the case. It certainly isn’t obvious that Jesus’s teachings are more consistent with right-wing politics than left-wing politics (and certainly not by a margin of more than 2 to 1).
No doubt there are many reasons why this state of affairs has come to pass here in America. While doing some casual reading on the internet, however, I came upon an article called “Would Jesus Vote Republican?” on a site called RaptureReady.com. Perhaps this article isn’t representative, but the author strongly recommends voting for Republicans, even though they are the lesser of two evils:
“The Republican Party brings to the legislative table in America a much safer, more sound course of governing, in our view. The GOP, for the most part, opposes abortion, legitimizing homosexuality as equal to heterosexual relationships, and huge programs that create and perpetuate destructive, mammoth social programs…. That party is, by and large, in favor of a strong national defense, national sovereignty, and keeping God’s name at the heart of our national character”.
http://www.raptureready.com/republican.html
One thing we might all agree on concerning the paragraph above: it doesn’t have a lot to do with Jesus.
A company called Boston Dynamics is developing a robot “Alpha Dog” for the military. It’s supposed to be used as a pack animal for the infantry, so it might better be called a robot burro.
It’s also known as the LS3, or Legged Squad Support System. Whatever they call it, it’s kind of creepy.
The historian Henry Adams, grandson of John Adams, wrote this around 1905, looking back over his life:
“Science now lay in a plane where scarcely one hundred or two hundred minds in the world could follow its mathematical processes; but bombs educate vigorously, and even wireless telegraphy and air-ships might require the reconstruction of society…. At the rate of progress since 1800, every American who lived into the year 2000 would know how to control unlimited power. He would think in complexities unimaginable to an earlier mind. He would deal with problems altogether beyond the range of earlier society. To him the 19th century would stand on the same plane as the 4th — equally childlike” (Chapter 34, The Education of Henry Adams).
It’s remarkable how the future always turns out to be stranger than we could imagine in some ways and not so different in other ways.
Whereof One Can Speak 🇺🇦 
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