From the category archives:

The Second Edition

Let’s Be Serious

February 27, 2009

by Richard Thieme It is getting dark early, and although it’s almost spring, it feels like late autumn, less and less light each day, cold winds biting our faces as we turn instinctively from the wind … when we ought to be looking into the wind, looking for clues to how to trim our sails [...]

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The Betrayal of the Commons

December 19, 2008

by Richard Thieme The cornerstone of capitalism, it has been said, is a handshake. The legal embellishments that constitute the law books lining the shelves of lawyers, those laws are footnotes to the many ways people have betrayed trust, betrayed the letter of the law, the spirit of the contract, the meaning of the handshake. [...]

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Context is Content

December 17, 2008

by Richard Thieme December 17, 2008 Especially during hard times, it is easy for the little things in the foreground to be the biggest things we see. They loom large and even monstrous, scaring the bejeezus out of even stalwart hearts. Symptoms of anxiety – deep breathing, light heads, and irrational consuming fear – seem [...]

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Regression to the Mean

October 16, 2008

by Richard Thieme October 16, 2008 Boy, I sure don’t want to sound moralistic, surveying the current wreckage and feeling the chill winds of anxiety and fear every time I turn on the TV, but I do want to affirm some basic truths I think I know. Let’s assume, first of all, that however protracted [...]

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Autumn Thoughts

October 10, 2008

By Richard Thieme It is raining, leaves are falling, and the sky is dark, oh, dark. A friend, despairing over the heart of corruption beating visibly through the skin inside the current financial meltdown, wrote: “And things will only get worse, not better. I don’t even want to go on a rant regarding how Washington [...]

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The Spiritual Journey

October 6, 2008

by Richard Thieme October 6, 2008 A young man experienced an altered state and emailed to ask about its relationship to orthodox modes of spirituality and religious experience. I thought it might be of value to others who are asking the same question to share my response. I replied: I have used all sorts of [...]

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Breadcrumbs in the Forest

April 10, 2008

by Richard Thieme April 10, 2008 I was recently at Purdue University to teach a graduate seminar at the CERIAS center for information assurance and security – http://www.cerias.purdue.edu/ – hosted by Gene Spafford and Victor Raskin, two lively and hospitable gents. Another professor had recently returned from a meeting at which researchers presented a paper [...]

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Habits of Thought

December 29, 2007

By Richard Thieme When we wish to look deeply into a subject, it is essential to turn context into content, invisible assumptions into visible structures, background into foreground while illuminating the frame of the picture as well. Security professional Matt Blaze said, the weakest link in the security chain is often the definition of the [...]

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What is it About UFOs?

November 28, 2007

by Richard Thieme “When you think about it – I mean, really step back and think about it – the reaction, I mean, to Dennis Kucinich’s statement the other night during the Democratic debate, about seeing an aerial vehicle, a large dark triangle, something reported by many people in this and other countries and probably [...]

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A Review of Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense By Jonathan D. Moreno

June 22, 2007

Dana Press (The Dana Foundation: New York and Washington DC) 2006 Richard Thieme “What we don’t know is so much bigger than we are.” — A Haitian Proverb Oh, how I wish that reviewing a book like this were simple and straightforward! That would mean we live in a world of transparency, government accountability to [...]

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But to What Purpose?

March 20, 1999

A scientist writes that the way we humans evolved as hunter-gatherers is how we are still built. Another writes about the “intelligence of vision,” noting that seeing takes up nearly half our brain and generates the structure of the world we take for granted. Another struggles to imagine how alien species might interpret our civilization, [...]

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What the Platypus Dreamed

January 3, 1998

[This edition of "Islands in the Clickstream" is a revision of the daily reflections, "Imaginary Gardens," December 29-30-31, 1997] The paradigm or model of reality according to which we operate determines the questions we can ask and therefore the answers we can hear. My extended family includes people from four or five major religious traditions [...]

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