Expand Your Mind: This and That
by Miki Saxon
I was looking through my articles to see what I would offer you and I realized that I had five I wanted to share, but they didn’t fit into a nice, neat category. I decided I didn’t care that it was an illogical collection, it fits my mood and an irrational dose of spring fever I’m enjoying along with the weather.
First up is a little story to make you think. I write a lot about accountability; I read this years ago and forgot all about it until I saw it again in a post from Dan McCarthy. Share it as often as possible; it sinks in far faster than anything else I’ve found.
This is a story of four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody.
There was an important job to be done and Everybody was asked to do it.
Everybody was sure Somebody would do it.
Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it.
Somebody got angry about that because it was Everybody‘s job.
Everybody thought Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn‘t do it.
It ended that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done.
Anyone who follows this blog knows that brain research fascinates me and this one is no different. Seems that laughter isn’t about funny, it’s a form of communication.
Laughing is primal, our first way of communicating. Apes laugh. So do dogs and rats. Babies laugh long before they speak.
Every week or so I receive an invitation to join Facebook that I politely refuse, explaining that I don’t do anything except LinkedIn. Many times they write back and ask why, so I thought it would be faster to post a link than to write every time and explain that I’m a digital dinosaur who still believes in an old fashioned concept called privacy—which seems to be disappearing whether by hook, crook or glitch.
On Wednesday, users discovered a glitch that gave them access to supposedly private information in the accounts of their Facebook friends, like chat conversations.
This one may offend some of my readers, but you don’t have to click the link. Again, long time readers are probably aware that I am vehemently opposed to the teaching of “intelligent design” or any other faith-based content, so I found the idea of someone evangelizing evolution through rap brilliant.
For Baba Brinkman has taken Darwin’s exhortation seriously. He is a man on a mission to spread the word about evolution — how it works, what it means for our view of the world, and why it is something to be celebrated rather than feared. To this end, he has concocted a set of mini-lectures disguised as rap songs.
Finally, a superbly intelligent explanation that, for me, answers the question of why the health care bill brought forth so much strong negative emotion. What do you think?
To find a prototype for the overheated reaction to the health care bill, you have to look a year before Medicare, to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But it was only the civil rights bill that made some Americans run off the rails. That’s because it was the one that signaled an inexorable and immutable change in the very identity of America, not just its governance.
Flickr photo credit to: pedroCarvalho on flickr
