About Chris Dick

Chris rides on his digital sway-backed donkey tilting his lance, quixotically at all sorts of causes -- some hopeless, some perhaps -- not. I enjoy your feedback. Long live rational debate.

A Glass Darkly

By |2023-08-09T15:43:04-04:00March 15th, 2023|Categories: Featured Ourselves|Tags: , , |

Timing really may be everything, and I’m not too happy about it. Human life expectancy has been steadily increasing courtesy of medical science for many decades now. We’ve blown past the biblical three-score-and ten, and there are more than a few reasonably healthy centenarians around these days. If we don’t mess up the efficacy of antibiotics with promiscuous overuse, and if we keep progressing in the antiviral area, we will soon say goodbye to mankind's’ oldest and most ubiquitous killer -- infectious disease. (Do I think COVID is a hiccup in this evolution -- yes I do.) I’d like [...]

The End of Roe v Wade

By |2022-07-04T21:10:50-04:00July 3rd, 2022|Categories: Featured Society|Tags: , , , |

Well, they went and did it! By a five-to-four majority decision the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, kicking legislative responsibility for reproductive rights law back down to the state level. Why and what does it all mean? Will that much change and for how long? Time will decide much.

Why We Believe

By |2022-01-27T13:09:48-05:00January 27th, 2022|Categories: Ourselves|Tags: , , , , |

In our journey upriver to wisdom, we are confronted with the shoals and shallows of bias, authority, emotion, fallacy and conventional wisdom. To navigate these potential perils and credibly argue our positions, it is important to understand four pillars upon which our beliefs are built -- authority, intuition, results, reason.

A Little Blurry

By |2022-01-25T14:58:51-05:00March 15th, 2021|Categories: Culture|Tags: , , |

“Blurry’ is not the first documentary to deal with the perils of a rapid ascent to super-stardom. It is the first created by an award-winning filmmaker that deals with fame in the social media age. Paul McCartney was famous, Bono was famous, Kurt Cobain was famous, but none of these icons had 77-million Instagram followers and 40-million YouTube subscribers ready to pounce on everything they said and did.

Meditation on Happiness

By |2022-01-25T15:50:41-05:00February 23rd, 2021|Categories: Ourselves|Tags: , , |

A Meditation on Happiness Vital Powers. Excellence. Scope. I have always believed that happiness will elude you if you seek it too directly, too face-on. It seems to me that ‘happiness’ is a by-product of meaningful activity, acquired the way the British acquired their Empire - in a fit of absence of mind. Let’s go through the side door and define ‘meaningful activity,’ a somewhat less slippery concept than happiness. My favorite words on this subject come from those ancient Greeks, and they loosely translate as follows, “The Good Life requires the [...]