Thought

Octavia E. Butler

Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation.
Octavia E. Butler, The Parable of the Sower (1993), Chapter 10.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

What the Media Misses
SharingThe big news story last week became the media’s non-coverage …
Their Power
SharingBoo hoo. Thirty-three hifalutin members of Colorado’s political elite — state legislators, …
Money, Money, Money
SharingMoney. Politicians like to spend it. People — especially special interests — like to …
Know Your BS
Sharing“Help me get my B.S. in the voters pamphlet,” read …
Grinding Down Democracy
SharingCalifornia’s Democratic legislative majority is anything but lazy. On July …

Abolish. Or Set in Stone
November 13, 2024
Paul Jacob knows what to do with hypocrisy on at …Read More »
Destroying Dane Farming
November 12, 2024
Paul Jacob on Europe’s ongoing suicide over “greenhouse gases.”Read More »
Disaster Relief Pass-Over
November 11, 2024
Paul Jacob on partisanship at FEMA.Read More »
Exemplary Rejections
November 8, 2024
Paul Jacob celebrates voters in three states who protected their …Read More »
Not Now
November 7, 2024
Paul Jacob on political lessons to be learned — or …Read More »

Land of Limited Terms
SharingIt’s baaaaaack. The issue that won’t go away: Term limits. I …
Voters Need Not Apply
SharingColorado politicians have hatched a scheme, Senate Concurrent Amendment 1, that …
Missouri Shows Article V Action
SharingThere’s good news and there’s good news from the Show …
Brexit 1776 – 2017
SharingThese united States* got their start, officially, on July 2, 1776. …
THRO
SharingWhat can one person do? I wish Jack Gargan were here …

Gloating Time?
Sharing“The freak-out was something to behold,” I wrote two years ago. Newly …
How Socialism Kills
Sharing3 Ways That Socialism Kills: state enforced redistribution requires violence (even if some …
The Hilarity of a Serious Threat
SharingIs today’s politics tragic or comic? Take the current Democratic Party …
After Them, the Deluge
SharingOne might be forgiven for finding Sen. Kamala Harris the …
Leave Those Kids Alone
SharingCongress created The National Commission on Military, National, and Public …

On this day in 1833, Denison Olmsted was alerted by his neighbors to something truly amazing, a night sky filled with shooting stars.

Not just a one or two or a dozen or a hundred: 72,000 or more per hour. Though recognizing where among the constellations meteors came from was ancient knowledge, it had not been recorded by modern-era scientists, at least in this case. What Olmsted noticed was that the meteors were coming from one point in the sky, the constellation Leo. This regular meteor event is now called the Leonid meteor stream.

In the morning, Olmsted wrote a brief report on the meteor storm for the New Haven Daily Herald newspaper, which elicited correspondence from around the country, thus beginning a social storm, in a sense: crowd-sourced science.