“The Nazi and the Psychiatrist“, Scientific American Mind, by Jack El-Hai, Jan/Feb 2011 The highest ranking captive of the Nazi leadership, Reich Marshal Hermann Göring, Commander of the Luftwaffe, was evaluated at Nuremberg by Major Douglas M. Kelley, MD, from Truckee, California, Chief Psychiatrist of the U.S. Medical Corp. He found Göring to be forthright, […]
1.5 million years ago, pre-modern hominids moved out of Africa, migrated across the Levant, into the Caucasus, past the Carpathian Mountains, north of the Danube, and on to the great vast “mammoth” steppe of grasslands, and great herds of animals. This is where the big brain hominids could hunt and eat the big stomach mammals […]
“Like most people, I think that there is something real out there, entirely independent of us and our models, as the earth is independent of our maps. But this is because I can’t help believing in an objective reality, not because I have good arguments for it.” Steven Weinberg, New York Review of Books, […]
Seth Kantor was a news correspondent in Dallas the day JFK was killed, and he knew Jack Ruby. At Parkland Hospital, just after the assassination, Ruby tapped Kantor on the back, and said hello. Kantor is absolutely sure of this. Later, Ruby denied ever being there. “What would make Jack Ruby seek out a news […]
When criminals take over . . . “The utopias in summer 1941 had been four: a lightning victory that would destroy the Soviet Union in weeks; a Hunger Plan that would starve thirty million people in months; a Final Solution that would eliminate European Jews after the war; and a General Plan Ost that would […]
In 1914, Petr Durnovo, police chief and interior minister of Russia, wrote a letter to Tsar Nicholas II. He foresaw the disaster that World War I would be for Russia, and he urged the Tsar to change course. It was not meant to be. In the early 1900’s, in America and in Europe and Russia, […]
“. . a building has to start in the unmeasurable aura and go through the measurable to be accomplished. . . . the only way to get it into being is through the measurable. . . . in the end when the building becomes part of living it evokes unmeasurable qualities.” Louis Kahn Aesthetic […]
Before globalization, there was Romanization. In 42 B.C.E., Octavius, the nephew of Julius Caesar, became Emperor Augustus. Until his death in 14 C.E., as the deity of Imperial Rome, he Romanized the known Mediterranean world, and launched modern history. In the lands of Galilee and Jerusalum and Jericho, between Sinai and Phoenicia and Syria, on […]
In February 2011, Watson the IBM computer beat two humans in the game of Jeopardy!. Watson was programmed with massive information – some 200 million pages, 15 terabytes. He can process 500 million books per second. He ‘listens’ for key words in a clue, then matches them with clusters in his memory, then cross checks […]
“The private ego is the most precious thing we each have, and it is far more vulnerable now than ever before” Tomorrow’s People, Susan Greenfield, 2003 Modern Madness, by Louis Sass, 1992, explores the disordered self of schizophrenia to illuminate the nature of normal psychology. The self, it seems, is not a self, but is […]
