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What If Our Society Valued Civics as It Does Entertainment?

A teacher once said to me: “A society pays for what it values.” If so, our society values commercial entertainment, including spectator sports, orders of magnitude more than it values civics defined as the rights and duties exercised by citizens in a democracy. What if we lived in a society that valued both equally? 1. […]
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Fame vs Celebrity

Orientation Questions about fame and celebrity What does it mean to be famous? Does being famous go all the way back to hunter-gatherers or does it have an origin later in history? What does it mean to be a celebrity? Is it common in all societies or do celebrities emerge at a certain point in […]
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We Need to Reverse the Culture of Decay and March on the Street for a Culture of Humanity
Michael Armitage (Kenya), The Promised Land, 2019. The final months of 2023 pierced our sense of hope and threw us into a kind of mortal sadness. Israel’s escalating violence has killed more than twenty thousand Palestinians to date, wiping out entire generations of families. Horrifying images and testimonies from Palestine have flooded all forms of […]
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Sacred Tree or Paradise Tree? The Christmas Tree and Nature

A red bauble on a Christmas tree (a symbol of apples?) The ancient Egyptians, Chinese, and Hebrews used evergreen wreaths, garlands, and trees to symbolise their respect for nature and their belief in eternal life. The pagan Europeans worshipped trees and had the custom of decorating their houses and barns with evergreens, or erecting a […]
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Does It Really Matter Who Sits on the Throne?

by T.P. Wilkinson There have been recent elections in numerous principalities. The constellations by which governments — the outward and visible signs of obscured and conspiratorial power — have been formed since 2020 are not in themselves unique but have occurred with an intensity — I like here the German term Verdichtung, i.e. thickening or […]
