Stupidity: Our Worst Enemy

by Madeleine Kando

“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than evil”

wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 1943. He was a German pastor known for his staunch resistance to the Nazi dictatorship, for which he was imprisoned and later hanged. In prison, he wrote ‘Prisoners of War’, later published as ‘letters and papers from prison’, in which he tried to understand how Germany had entered such dark times.

Thinking about the nature of evil, he came to the conclusion it was not evil itself that was the most dangerous enemy of the good. It was stupidity.
“You can fight evil” he said. “It always makes men uncomfortable, if nothing worse. Evil carries with itself the seeds of its own destruction. To prevent willful malice, you can always erect barriers to stop its spread.”

“But against stupidity we have no defense. Neither protests nor force can touch it. Reasoning is of no use. Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved — indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions. So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied. In fact, they can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make them aggressive. To persuade the stupid person with reason is senseless and dangerous.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Bonhoeffer points out three important facts about stupidity:

First, it is a moral rather than an intellectual defect. ‘There are men of great intellect who are fools and men of low intellect who are anything but fools’. If you know that something is evil, but choose to ignore it because others ignore it, you are not only stupid but you are also immoral.

Second, stupidity is acquired rather than congenital. ‘The power of one needs the folly of the other. It is apparent that a very strong upsurge of power is so terrific that it deprives men of an independent judgment, and they give up trying […] to assess the new state of affairs for themselves. […] One feels, somehow, especially in conversation with him, that it is impossible to talk to the man himself […]. Instead, one is confronted with a series of slogans, watchwords, and the like, which have acquired power over him. He is under a curse, he is blinded, his very humanity is being prostituted and exploited.’ — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

And third, it is less common in the unsociable or the solitary than in individuals who are inclined to sociability. It is a sociological problem rather than psychological.

    

If stupidity is applied to an individual, that’s one thing. I would qualify some of my neighbors as stupid. The one who cut down a 250 year old white pine because he didn’t want to bother raking pine needles in the fall. Or another neighbor who almost burnt down his own house because he started burning brush on an extremely windy day. But when a group of people starts acting stupid, believing that the Covid vaccine is the government’s way of implanting chips in your brain, it affects me and others in society.

Read more...

Whose New Year Is It, Anyway?

by Madeleine Kando

Since my mother died, two days shy of her 104th birthday, I have thought a lot about the passing of time. 
But why do I think of time as ‘passing’? Is it like a train passing by as I stand on a platform? That’s not possible since I am on the train.

And why does the train only go in one direction? According to experts, the reason for the arrow of time is the second law of thermodynamics (the law of entropy). There was only one way my mother existed and putting her back together again would violate the second law of thermodynamics. That’s why she no longer exists as my mother.

Nobody really knows what time is, but it doesn’t prevent us from experiencing it. According to Aristotle, this is interlinked with our capacity to perceive change. If I were sitting in a dark room for a week without outside references, how would I know a week had passed? 

But what constitutes ‘change’?

Environmentalist Bill McKibben points out that our inability to respond to climate change is because we perceive change on a ‘human’ level, but cannot perceive change in the sphere of nature. We are ‘fatally confused’ about the nature of time. (Fatally Confused: Telling the Time in the Midst of Ecological Crises, by Michelle Bastian). Our notion of time is specific to our species, for better of for worse.

If you were a mayfly, you wouldn’t be celebrating New Year’s Eve. You wouldn’t even celebrate New Day’s Eve because mayflies in their adult form, don’t live more than one day. They spend two years as larvae immersed in water, but then their one-day clock starts ticking. They swarm to find a mate, fly around a bit, lay their eggs on the surface of ponds and then die, all in a 24 hour span of time. They don’t even have time to eat, which is just as well, since mayflies don’t have a mouth. Does that mean mayflies appreciate their time more than we do? After all, we live about 30,000 times longer!

A fruit fly could potentially celebrate New Week’s Eve, since they live for two weeks. They still have to spend their precious time laying eggs, eat as much rotten fruit as possible and hope they don’t get squashed before their number is up.

A housefly lives a generous two months, which is four times longer than a fruit fly and sixty times longer than a mayfly. It’s like a one year old mayfly meeting a senior citizen housefly.

Mammals are guaranteed a much longer life span than insects. And the bigger a mammal you are, the longer you live. Field mice live about a year or two. They could potentially celebrate New Year’s Eve and make a resolution to eat less cheese, but what’s the point of losing weight when you don’t live to see the benefits?

Elephants live up to 60 years, bowhead whales live 200 years and the Greenland shark can live up 400 years. They should celebrate New Century’s Eve, but remembering a resolution you made a hundred years ago might not be so easy.

One of the longest living beings on earth is the ‘Ming clam’. It can live up to 500 years. Can you imagine having 500 years to live? When a Ming clam is a mere 8 years old, we already spent most of our useful life, at age 48. At the height of the Ming clam’s puberty, we are all long dead and buried. And to vaunt its superiority, the lucky devil keeps on living for another 485 years! 

Who cares about time, when you have so much of it? You can cruise along, violate the minimum speed limit, with not a care in the world. Did you forget about your best friend’s birthday? No harm done, there will be so many more. A Ming clam lives 200,000 times longer than a mayfly. But do they appreciate all that extra time, or do they take it for granted? Unfortunately, the last surviving Ming clam was killed by scientists trying to work out how old he was.

Read more...

Cosmic Symphony

by Madeleine Kando


I am obsessed with the stars. Really obsessed. It’s not healthy. How can you love something that doesn’t love you back? Not just that, but stars don’t even know about my existence. It’s like being obsessed with the air, the ocean, the Siberian Tundra. That’s what we do, us humans: we become infatuated with things like that because it makes us feel more important than we are. If Jupiter and Mars are out there for us to see, doesn’t that mean that we somehow are part of it? Part of the vastness of space?

That obsession led to a conversation with my nine-year old grandson, Marshall. I told him that black holes sing. Not only do they sing, but they sing in B flat. It’s true. Go here, if you don’t believe me. Marshall and I had to first figure out what B flat sounded like. It sounds like this.

Black holes can generate enormous sound waves. They spew out vast amounts of material traveling at close to the speed of light. When that material slams into the hot gas that pervades the galaxy it is in, they beat a 'galactic drum'. The jet acts as the "stick," whereas the surface of the gas is the "drum”.

The problem is, that a black hole sings 52 octaves below middle C, or one million, billion times lower than the lowest sound audible to the human ear! But even if there were such a super-duper baritone-detecting creature, it would have to wait 10 million years between each sound wave (tone) to reach it. It would be a very slow symphony in B flat. (For a better explanation, see: Strange but True: Black Holes Sing).

We are so used to looking up at the night sky and marvel at the magic of it all. It is amazing how far our eyes can see. We see the moon at 239,000 miles. We have no trouble seeing the sun, at 93 million miles. Saturn, at 746 million miles, is visible in the night sky, and we can even see the entire Andromeda Galaxy, which is 2.5 million light-years away.

The Hubble Deep Field (HDF) image taken by the Hubble Telescope, shows galaxies so far away, that it allows us to travel back in time. It shows us the universe the way it was in the very beginning. Still, Hubble needs assistance to transpose those parts of the light spectrum that our naked eye can not detect, to give us a full picture of these stellar objects. Even the visual images we see, are always rendered in full color—converted from invisible X-rays or radio waves to visible light so we can see the universe in all its splendor. They might be a lot more boring if we limited ourselves to the visible range. Read more...

A Review of ‘Citadels of Pride: Sexual Assault, Accountability and Reconciliation’

by Madeleine Kando

The American philosopher Martha Nussbaum has written many books on the subject of Justice and Morality. The title of her book ‘Citadels of Pride’ made me curious, not only because of its subject, but the title itself. What does the word Pride mean in the Context of Sexual Violence?

As Nussbaum explains, pride, which is actually the first of the seven deadly sins in Christianity, (followed by greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth) is the inability to see others as real, because you feel you are above them. There are many kinds of pride: class pride, race pride, national pride and gender pride. Gender pride is so deeply baked into our society, that we are not even aware of it.

The central features of what makes for a ‘full human being’, are autonomy and subjectivity. Autonomy means that you can make your own choices in life. Until recently, women were denied voting rights, choice in marriage and access to education. Subjectivity means that everyone has a right to their own inner experience, their own way of looking at the world. That is why we have Freedom of Religion, Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Association.

When it comes to sexual assault and harassment both of these essential ingredients are violated. The victim is treated as an object and their autonomy is denied. Their feelings and emotions are treated as irrelevant compared to the need for gratification of the aggressor.

Not only do women suffer when their autonomy and subjectivity are denied, this denial has the power to transform a person’s self-image. If you never experience autonomy, how can you even know of its existence? If your subjectivity is constantly denied, would you not think that it really shouldn’t exist? It prevents a woman from ‘wanting’ anything more than what she has, like the fox in famous fable. The fox, unable to get at the grapes, finally decides that he didn’t want the grapes to begin with.

In many (if not most) societies, being born a male already guarantees your claim to an unearned privilege over half of the world’s population. You are proud of something that you did not achieve on your own merit. Isn’t that the worst kind of pride? Read more...

Nature-Nurture: Are we born Intelligent or Stupid?

by Tom Kando

 The September 13, 2021 issue of the New Yorker has an interesting article titled “Force of Nature” by Gideon Lewis-Kraus. 

It describes the work of Kathryn Paige Harden, a University of Texas psychologist. Harden’s research is about the importance of genetic inheritability of intelligence. In other words, she addresses the age-old “nature-vs.- nurture” question: Are our behavior, our personality and our achievements the result of the environment and socialization (nurture), or are they the product of inborn and inherited genes (nature)? 

 As a sociologist, I have dealt with this issue in many of my classes. That nurture is more important than nature has always been axiomatic to sociologists. How successful you are in life depends much more on environment than on heredity. However, biological determinism (nature) has gained a lot of ground in recent years. Psychology’s holy grail is the identification of the PHYSICAL location of mental faculties, whether in the brain or in one’s genetic make-up. 

There appears every decade or so research that challenges the conventional wisdom that nurture counts for much more than nature. This research suggests that genetic inheritability of things like intelligence plays a much bigger role than we are willing to admit. 

For example, in 1969, Berkeley psychologist Arthur Jensen published an article in the Harvard Educational Review   in which he argued that there is an I.Q. gap between the races, and the reason for this is at least partly genetic. Nobel laureate William Shockley agreed with this, stating that “my research leads me inescapably to the opinion that the major cause of the American Negro's intellectual and social deficits is hereditary and racially genetic in origin and, thus, not remediable... by practical improvements in the environment.”  Read more...

The Prisoners’ Dilemma of Covid 19 ••

by Madeleine Kando

The Prisoner’s dilemma is a concept in game theory that demonstrates how two prisoners acting in their own self interest both end up with a worse outcome than if they had coordinated their behavior.

This applies to the current situation and it maybe explains why the infection (and death) rate is so high the United States.

In the game, two bank robbers have been arrested. They cannot communicate with each other. The police have no proof of a major crime, but can convict them on a lesser charge. They have two options: to confess or to remain silent. If both remain silent, they each get a 2-year sentence for the lesser charge. If one confesses and the other one remains silent, the confesser gets a 1-year sentence and the other gets an 8-year sentence. And vice versa. If both confess, both receive a 5-year sentence.

The optimal decision would be for both prisoners to remain silent, but they are out to get the least amount of prison time, and do not care about the other prisoner.

If we replace the 2 prisoners with 2 states (California and Arizona), we can see why there is no incentive on the part of the Governors to keep their state on lockdown. (see next illustration).

The blue square is obviously the best option. The states cooperate with each other and will be able to reopen safely.

In the green square, Arizona tries to stop the virus by locking down, but California, which is open, transmits the virus. Arizona does not get the benefit from locking down, so reopens the state. This is called the Nash Equilibrium. If the states coordinated their strategy of moderate reopening, both would have been better off. Read more...

The World's Universities Ranked and Located; An Update

by Tom Kando

Once in a while, I  play  with statistics that list and  rank the world’s major universities. At this time, such a game may be a welcome distraction from   the  double nightmare of Covid-19 and Trump’s attempted Coup d’Etat.

 My source is the Shanghai Jiao Tong University. http://www.shanghairanking.com/ARWU2020.html  The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) was created  in 2003.  It uses six  indicators, including the number of  Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, number of highly cited researchers, number of articles published in scholarly journals, number of articles indexed in Science Citation Index, and per capita performance of a university. More than 1800 universities are ranked every year and the best 1000 are published. I don’t know whether their methodology is the best, but they have good credibility, and  at least they can’t be suspected of pro-America bias.

I last wrote such an article about three years ago.  I now offer you an update, with some interesting factoids. All calculations are mine. I hope that  you enjoy perusing these.  I focus first on the top 100 and then on the top 500 universities of the world. 

Table 1. Top Universities of the world. By Region

Region	Top 100	101-500	Total 500	%
Europe	36	147	183	36.6
North America	45	108	153	30.6
Asia	11	100	111	22.2
Australia-New Zea.	7	19	26	5.2
Middle East	1	11	12	2.4
Latin America	0	9	9	1.8
Africa	0	6	6	1.2
Anglo Countries	60	157	217	43.4%

 Table 1 shows that a disproportionate number of quality universities are located in  Europe and in  North America - primarily the US -  with North America especially dominant in the “elite” category (top 100). Read more...

Liberals and Conservatives; Kind or not, Smart or Not?

Tom Kando

This is a game: I take 3 variables, I cross-tab them, and I formulate some hypotheses about their correlation (or lack thereof).
The variables are:

1. Conservatism vs. Liberalism

2. Kindness or not

3. Being well-informed or not

In other words, an individual can be conservative or liberal; he/she can be a by and large  nice person or what we could call an a...hole; and she/he can be well-educated and intelligently informed or not.

For the sake of simplicity, the three variables are dichotomous. Also, let’s not quibble about the true meaning and nature of being ”nice” as opposed to being an “a...hole”  This is just an experiment, maybe  a fun one, and most of us know an a...hole when we meet one... Also, for the purposes of this experiment, I use a total sample of 200.

If we cross tab these 3 variables, we get 2 x 2 x 2 = 8 possibilities Read more...

Temporal Myopia

by Madeleine Kando

Temporal myopia is like visual myopia, except it causes clarity to decrease in time rather than in space. When you suffer from visual myopia and a wolf approaches, you might think that the blur you see is your best friend in a fur coat.

With temporal myopia, if your doctor told you that you will die tomorrow, you would probably faint on the spot, but if he told you that you will die fifty years from now, you might think nothing of it.

Temporal myopia, rather than making us more cautious, makes us reduce the importance of a future event. It’s called ‘hyperbolic discounting’. Even though I know that abstaining from eating chocolate cake will extend my life in the future, I choose to discount the importance of that fact. The short-term gain of tasting the chocolate melt on my tongue is far more important.

'Temporal myopia is the archenemy of delayed gratification'. (Click to Tweet)

When I wake up in the morning, half dead, I cannot wait for my first cup of coffee. If the gratification of caffeine rushing through my veins gets delayed, there is a good chance that I will become dangerous to the people around me. I am temporarily myopic to the knowledge that I’ll feel like a wet rag a few hours later, a typical side-effect of caffeine.

But sometimes delayed gratification wins the battle over temporal myopia. I met this man in the therapy pool yesterday, who started to yell at me because I had positioned myself in his ‘lane’ (how you can swim laps in an exercise pool not much larger than a good sized bathtub is beyond me). He was so loud and verbally abusive that I started to laugh. This didn’t sit well with him. He called me arrogant and told me he would swim right over me if I didn’t move. I wanted to give him a kick in the you know what, but knowing enough about physics to realize that water does not help you in your kicking efforts, I preferred to bide my time. I devised a plan to get back at him with all the might of my delayed gratification technique. I called the manager and revel in the knowledge that this man will pay for his crime by being officially reprimanded. In this case I preferred to wait for my vengeance and make it taste that much sweeter. Read more...

To Strip or not to Strip: The Naked Truth about Nudity

by Madeleine Kando


An article in the New York Times about present day nudism, got me thinking about why it is that wearing clothes is such a natural part of our existence. Right now it is 90 degrees here in sweaty Boston, and as I am sitting here writing about being naked, my shirt is clinging to my body. Why? Why don’t I just type away naked? I am not a prude, I have nothing against naked bodies, including my own. Wearing clothes is just something I do, like breathing or eating.

It hasn‘t always been like that, you know. In many cultures throughout history, the norm was to go about naked. The Greeks, the Egyptians, they didn’t see the point of covering their bodies. Why create a fertile habitat for lice and other unpleasant parasites? Even some present day primitive tribes do not like covering themselves unnecessarily. Who can blame them? Aren’t clothes making life extra complicated?

If I could, I would travel back in time, step out of a time machine in 5th century BC Athens, go up to a local Greek Adonis and shake his hand, me fully dressed in jeans, t-shirt and sneakers. ‘Hi, my name is Madeleine, I am doing research on your dress code.’

My Adonis would be wearing nothing but a loin cloth, or maybe a toga fastened at one shoulder with a clasp. With a flick of his finger he would undo that clasp and the whole shebang would drop at his feet, exposing his Adonis body before I could say ‘booh’. Then he would cross his arms, look at me as if to say: ‘Now, your turn’.

I would have to unlace my sneakers, fumble with my fly and worm my way out of my skinny jeans, roll my T-shirt up my torso, pull it over my head, all the while trying not to look too much like a scarecrow, undo my bra, and take off my underpants. My Adonis would be standing there, tapping his foot, looking impatiently at the sundial, pick up his toga, sling it over his shoulder, clasp it with another flick of his finger and walk away, thinking ‘What a nut ball’. Read more...

My Monarch Caterpillar Adventure (Continued)

by Madeleine Kando

I resigned myself to the agony of waiting for 14 days before Julie and Max would emerge from their chrysalis.

A week passed, but on the morning of the 7th day, Julie disappeared, chrysalis and all. I suspected foul play, since the adult butterfly does not eat the empty chrysalis, and there was nothing hanging from the underside of the milkweed leaf.

You have no idea how long I spent scrutinizing every inch of the large plant. I was devastated. Max was still there, with golden droplets encircling the upper end of the cocoon, like a golden necklace. The breeze shook him gently back and forth, but he was strongly anchored by his two pro legs.

How naive had I been, thinking that by the time a caterpillar turns into a cocoon, predators wouldn’t be interested. A chrysalis looks so much like a hanging green leaf.

‘Ok. That’s it’, I thought. ‘This is too much for my blood pressure.’ I decided to take matters in my own hands and quickly set up a terrarium in my sunny living room. I know, its not kosher to interfere with nature, but by now Julie and Max had not only taken up a special spot in my garden, they had morphed into semi-pets. Wouldn’t you do anything to protect your cat from marauding predators?

Max, whether he liked it or not, was gently transported on the leaf and branch that he was attached to. I stuck the branch in a vase, filled it with water and covered the whole thing with mosquito netting. Just because he was now indoors, didn’t mean that some house spider wouldn’t try to turn him into lunch.



Another agonizing week went by. I read somewhere that moving is more stressful than divorce. Max wasn't married, so I wouldn't have blamed him if he had not survived. It was hard to tell what he was up to, being wrapped up like that. I was nervously looking for signs of discoloration, which would mean that some parasite got hold of the chrysalis. Read more...

My Monarch Caterpillar Adventure

by Madeleine Kando

When I did the usual rounds of my vegetable garden this morning, I saw one of the stems of my milkweed plant covered with tiny yellow spots. They were moving. I know nothing about yellow moving spots, so I googled it and found out that they were aphids, known to damage milkweed plants. I cut off the stem and put the whole thing in a bowl of water. Aphids do not qualify for equal rights protection, in my book.

My milkweed plants are sacred territory. I planted them for the sole purpose of attracting monarch butterflies, which are fast disappearing. If you don't know this, monarchs can only live off of milkweed. The plant provides all the nourishment the monarch needs to transform the caterpillar into the adult butterfly.

Lo and an behold, I saw a magnificent yellow and black striped caterpillar on one of the leaves. And a few feet away, hidden under a leaf was another one. I named them Julie and Max. Maybe Julie is a boy and Max is a girl, but that’s ok. Now, every day, I check on them.

Yesterday Max disappeared. I checked the underside of leaves, the stems, the tops. No Max. Maybe a bird had taken him? Maybe he didn’t like his residence and had moved on, although I doubt he could have traveled far, even with all his legs.

Today, as I was watering my pepper plants, I saw Max lying curled up in a spiral on one of the leaves. He wasn’t moving, so I thought he must be dead. Just to be sure, I snipped the leaf and gently slid Max back on one of the milkweed leaves. Almost immediately his antennae wiggled, his head popped up and he began to crawl up and down, making constant U-turns. What was he doing? Did the fall cause brain-damage? Did he loose his sense of direction?

He then found a milk-weed pod and started to scrape off the skin until some milk came out which he started to drink. ‘Good old Max, you sure gave me a fright’, I thought.

Julie is no trouble at all. Since I discovered her, she hasn’t moved much from her original spot. She eats, sleeps and poops a lot. When one leaf is half eaten, she moves on to the next, then takes a nap. Maybe I am imagining it, but it looks like she is gaining weight. I read that a caterpillar’s skin doesn’t grow or stretch, so it has to go through 5 moultings before it turns into a chrysalis. Cannot wait for that to happen. Read more...

Why do we Age? *

by Madeleine Kando

According to Hemingway, getting older happens two ways: Slowly over a stretch of time and then all at once. He compared it to bankruptcy, but I like to compare it to falling asleep, since I am an insomniac.

The slow way is what gets you. There are no signs on the road of life marked ‘hazardous period ahead’ or ‘bumpy stretch of road’. Then, out of the blue, you find yourself on a road with a large ‘dead end’ sign looming in the distance.

You see, most life stages give you clear warning signs that changes are ahead. It is no longer acceptable to suck your thumb and you need to recluse yourself in a small room instead of staying put, when you have to pee. You start growing boobs and get your period, clear signs that things will be different. Pregnancy gives you 9 months to recover from the shocking realization that you are not the most important person in the world and although raising kids is too time consuming to worry about what comes next, just watching your kids grow is clear evidence that things are about to change.

Kids gone, free at last, you think. But that’s when the trouble starts, because once you are done reproducing, the road signs are few and far between. Who cares about those few wrinkles? It makes you look exotic. Prescription glasses? No problem. Don’t young kids have them too? Grey hair is in these days, isn’t it? Life is good! Until one day, it isn’t. Read more...

Pourquoi Doit-elle Dormir sur le Trottoir, et moi pas?

by Tom Kando

Il ya quelques jours, j’ai rencontré un personnage qui m’a bouleversé. Je rentrai chez moi du supermarché, roulant lentement dans mon quartier. Quoique nous habitons dans une banlieue assez chic, depuis quelques années il y de plus en plus de clochards, même près de chez nous. C’est un signe directe de l’accroissement rapide de l’injustice, l’inégalité et la pauvreté partout en Amérique.

Or, quand je tourne a droite a un croisement, j’aperçois une femme sur le trottoir, avec son petit chariot de supermarché, avec quelques sacs et valises là-dedans, et aussi un tas d’habits entassés pêle-mêle. J’estime que son âge n’est pas très loin du mien, au tour de soixante-dix ans. Elle est bien habillée, ses cheveux blancs sont bien peignés, et elle a l’air bien propre, donc je me demande si elle est une clocharde et une mendiante ou pas. Ce qui me frappe le plus c’est la grande beauté de son visage. Elle est entrain de ranger ses affaires, soulevant péniblement ses valises pour mieux les remettre. Read more...

Did the Ancient Greeks Invent Beauty?

by Madeleine Kando

I went to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston the other day. It is rated as the second best Fine Arts Museum in the country, so it is a mystery why I don’t go more often.

Amongst their many galleries, they have an incredible Ancient World collection of 85,000 works of art. There are rooms full of Greek and Roman statues, pottery, coins and jewelry and one feels somewhat overwhelmed. As Greek and Roman statues usually are, they are large, white and the ones that are full bodied are mostly of muscular, extremely well-built men. This period in history and art was totally devoted to the human form. And how do you portray the human form best? Naked of course.

It is an orgy of male beauty, not female beauty. Women are conspicuously absent in these rooms. It is ALL about men. Men eating, fighting, disk throwing, killing lions, making love (to other men)… The concept of beauty was the domain of men, not women. Greeks and Romans adored the human body, but it was the male body that they went bonkers over.

Another hallmark of these ideal nude statues, is the small size of their penises. It is as if the sculptor got so tired after chiseling these powerful bodies, that he didn’t bother spending time on their private parts. But in fact, small penises were considered classy in those days. A sign of moderation and self-control, virtues that formed the Romans’ view of ideal masculinity. Isn’t that refreshing? Aristophanes summed up the ideal traits of his male peers as “a gleaming chest, bright skin, broad shoulders, tiny tongue, strong buttocks, and a little prick.” Heroes, gods and nude athletes had small penises. Erect, large penises were reserved for Satyrs and various other non-ideal men, men of the lower class. Read more...

Kando's Dogma - Part Two

by Tom Kando

 About a year ago, I posted a piece called. Kando’s Dogma. I now add some further beliefs which I hold to be true:

1. All people are created equal (Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson). There are no inherent differences in intellectual aptitude between the races and between the genders. The science of psychology has not discovered any. Differences in wealth are the result, to a small extent, of aptitude and effort, but much more the result of social class, family wealth and above all: luck.

2. There is no (anthropomorphic) deity, no super-brain which decided at some point in the past to create a world. The universe is a physical reality in which life and mental processes develop. In other words, the universe becomes aware of itself. It is a psycho-physical reality.

3. The nature and processes of the universe are best discovered and understood through science.

4. Science distinguishes between truth and error, and through it, knowledge increases. Humans progress by increasing their knowledge. The total amount of knowledge is infinite.

5. In addition to science, there is philosophy and there is religion (Auguste Comte’s three stages). Philosophy discusses metaphysical questions. These are questions beyond those pertaining to the physical world. Positivist science cannot answer them. Answers to such questions cannot be proved or disproved empirically. Read more...

Why Cannot I be a Turkey?

by Madeleine Kando

Turkeys have invaded our backyard. Two mothers, one with eight babies, the other one with a lonely slightly bigger baby. The eight dwindled down to six, then to four as the spring went by, but finally mother nature settled on a number and the 5 of them have been steadily coming, always accompanied by the second mother and her lonely juvenile.

They used to be these adorable little fluff balls, but now I cannot tell who is who. Is it a mother or a baby? Is it a juvenile? I have to count them to make sure I am looking at the same group that we have been feeding throughout the spring and summer, against the advice of the ‘professionals’.

There is nothing ‘cute’ about them any more. They fight, chase each other, spread their large wings to scare each other off, and once in a while you see one fly into a tree, when they have had enough of the sibling rivalry. Yes, turkeys can fly. Not well, but enough to give the others the finger: ‘Fuck you, I am outa here’.

Now I am wondering: are they really the same turkeys as these cute little balls of feathers that first appeared in our yard? If they are like humans, new cells have replaced every single cell in their body multiple times. Just like new ‘Madeleine’ cells have replaced my cells at least 10 times, depending on which type of cells we are talking about. Except my brain cells; they have never been replaced. If you wonder about the poor quality of my writing, it is because I am writing with the same old brain cells that I was born with 75 years ago. Read more...

Boys will be Boy and Girls will Self-Objectify

by Madeleine Kando

Today was the lengthy Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in which both the accuser, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and the accused, Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh give testimony about Ford’s sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh.

What makes a high schooler think that he has the right to lure a girl into a bedroom, lock the door, turn up the music and, as his inebriated buddy eggs him on, tries to take off her clothes and have intercourse with her against her will?

Some commentators reacted to the Kavanaugh case with the old ‘Boys will be boys’ excuse. Really? Boys might be rough or break things, but as far as I know, the definition does not include trying to rape a girl.

Kavanaugh’s nauseating actions, if they are true, are the result of what some of Kavanaugh’s high school peers described as ‘a widespread culture of sexual objectification of women’ at the all-male prep school that Kavanaugh attended. But before you can sexually objectify a person, don’t you need to objectify her first, to treat her like an object?

Objectification *

According to my favorite philosopher, Dr. Martha Nussbaum, there are several ways to treat a person as a thing:

The first type Nussbaum calls ‘instrumentality’, i.e. treating a person as a tool for someone else’s purpose. The second type is called ‘inertness’ , which means that a person lacks autonomy and self-determination, so you can do what you want with her, like one of those sex dolls. Another way to objectify is to treat someone as interchangeable with someone else of the same type, like models on a runway. Read more...

For Happier and Healthier Human Beings

by Tom Kando

 My sister Madeleine wrote a very intelligent piece about the “dangers of spirituality.” In her review of Kramer and Alstad’s book The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power, the failure of Buddhism and Hinduism is explained. Many good points are made by the book’s authors and by Madeleine.

I have wanted to write an alternative piece related to the same topic. First, I had to spend three weeks in Hawaii, so I am only now getting around to this.

Since I know little about Buddhism and Hinduism, I dot not intend to defend those perspectives here, or other Eastern spiritual philosophies in the “Zen” tradition, or other “New Age” trends.

However, it is important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There is today a convergence among many strands of modern psychology towards certain principles. Following these principles may help humans to become happier and psychologically healthier. And in my view, they appear to be empirically true.

The common thread I see in the emerging paradigm includes the following elements:

1. Humans experience life through interpretation. The world is not given to us. We make the world in which we live.
2. Thus, we experience life “from within to without,” not the other way around, as is claimed for example by Behaviorism (“we respond to stimuli”).
3. We have minds, we think, and we have consciousness.
4. All human experience occurs in the present - NOW. No one has ever experienced anything in the past or in the future. We can only THINK about the past and the future. We cannot live in those realms.
5. Thinking tends to be verbal.
6. Thoughts produce feelings.
7. We are the totality of our thoughts and our feelings. Read more...

The Worlds Universities, Ranked and Located

by Tom Kando

Preface: Once in a while, I take a look at the University of Shanghai’s Annual Ranking of the World's 800 Major Universities.

You  may find this an empty exercise. However, I enjoy lists, and I have spent my life in  academe. The Shanghai rankings have good credibility. The criteria are the usual ones - the quality of education, research output, Nobel laureates, etc There is of course always room for improvement. For now, I present to you some of the interesting factoids I came across. I hope you enjoy perusing these. I’ll focus on the top 100, then 200, and (briefly) 500 universities listed.

Countries and Regions:
Of the top 200 universities, 77 are located in North America. That is almost 39%.   Actually, North American preponderance is even more notable among the top 100 universities, of which over half of  are in the US and Canada. The United States has 70, or 35%,  of the top 200 universities, and 48 of the top one hundred.

Read more...