James Kenneth Rogers

I’ve been reading Robert Heinein’s 1959 military science fiction masterpiece,  Starship Troopers. I found interesting this discussion about value (during a flashback to a high school): ​“‘Value’has no meaning other than in relation to living beings. The value of a thing is always relative to a particular person, is completely personal and different in quantity for each living human—‘market value’ is a fiction, merely a rough guess at the average of personal values, all of which must be quantitatively different…

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I got a very good  grade in Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School. It was an intensive yearlong class taught by Charles Fried, a distinguished constitutional law expert and former Solicitor General of the United States. So, I speak with a fair degree of confidence when I say that poems inscribed on statues have no legal or precedential value in the American legal system. That one side in a major national debate continually runs to a poetry quotation as one…

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I’ve previously written that Religion is an inescapable part of human nature—it has been a part of all human cultures everywhere and at all times. Religion serves important functions by providing, among other things: 1) a way to make parts of our lives sacred and allow us to commune with God (or some higher power); 2) moral guidelines and answers to deep life questions; 3) ceremonies and rites marking major life events; 4) a sense of community and solidarity with…

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The authors of a recent article in The Lancet found nine “potentially modifiable” risk factors that appear to account for 35% of dementia: Our results suggest that around 35% of dementia is attributable to a combination of the following nine risk factors: education to a maximum of age 11–12 years, midlife hypertension, midlife obesity, hearing loss, late-life depression, diabetes, physical inactivity, smoking, and social isolation. I suspect that genetic factors may affect these risk factors as well, so making behavior…

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“We are a nation of pioneers….We have but little room for the timid, the irresolute, and the idle.” -Theodore Roosevelt America used to see itself as a nation of pioneers. We need to start seeing ourselves that way again.

The rhetorical claim that America is a “nation of immigrants” is so common that it is taken for granted. This propagandistic notion is beaten into our heads from childhood. But is this how the American nation traditionally saw itself? I’ll look at quantitative data from Google engrams in a subsequent post. Here, we look something more qualitative: a speech from Theodore Roosevelt at the Minnesota State Fair on September 2, 1901. Roosevelt gave this speech less than two weeks before…

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