Wall Street Broker Becomes A Monk

"A former Wall Street broker has swapped Manhattan for a monastery in Bulgaria to become an Orthodox monk. . . .

America: The Next Agentina?

The parallels are instructive and interesting.  We have no crystal ball. We have been in deep economic hurt with legions of the unemployed and house foreclosures. Some people look at government policies, past, present, and possibly future, and worry that we are seeing only the tip of a tidal wave to hit us in this century. Consider this:

Your Great-grandmother's Fear of Storks Helped Shape Your Biology

Back in the dawn of evolutionary theory Lamarck argued that the giraffe got its long neck by stretching to reach trees, its length from "the inherited effects of the increased use of parts." If you daily turn book pages with your big toe, will your future generations also do it? Lamarck and giraffe necks, like Freud and penis envy, is passé. Or is it?

Sleeping In Mud With The Kalishnikov

Hiram Maxim's invention, the Maxim Gun, portable, fully automatic, led to WWI trench warfare and the machine gun could level whole platoons, even decimate battalions, as they climbed over the top to charge into No Man's Land. Like a scythe, it could cut them down at the knees. In 1882 when in Vienna, Maxim met an American who reportedly told him, "If you want to make a pile of money, invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each others' throats with greater facility." A fine killing machine his gun was, and while an American, Maxim was knighted by the British.