Word: backwardation
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...prop a smirking skull. This is the text in a Sunday splash from 1943: "A brawny arm is hurled forward! With the speed of lightning, a leather thong wraps itself around the detective's neck - he chokes. His hands struggle toward his throat. His body is yanked backward. The pain is excruciating! The whip butt rises and descends as all senses leave the brain of detective Dick Tracy...
...military, or the prestige game. The second curve is industrialization, or the wealth game. The current curve is the wisdom game-information technology. We have to compete in the wisdom game; we should not be competing in the prestige game. But [the junta] wants to bring the country backward. That is not good. You should take the country forward...
Animals learn by trial and error, and the smarter they are, the fewer trials they need. Traveling backward buys us many trials for the price of one, but traveling forward allows us to dispense with trials entirely. Just as pilots practice flying in flight simulators, the rest of us practice living in life simulators, and our ability to simulate future courses of action and preview their consequences enables us to learn from mistakes without making them. We don't need to bake a liver cupcake to find out that it is a stunningly bad idea; simply imagining it is punishment...
...VIEW IS THAT THIS IS backward: the biology of consciousness offers a sounder basis for morality than the unprovable dogma of an immortal soul. It's not just that an understanding of the physiology of consciousness will reduce human suffering through new treatments for pain and depression. That understanding can also force us to recognize the interests of other beings--the core of morality...
...poet like Owen leading trench charges in World War I seems no more senseless than paratroopers leading humvee convoys in Iraq. But as we look backward at our lost 3,000, it's worth hoping one more time that the ending stanza for the paratroopers today will be better than Owen's. He was killed in action trying to take a canal from German defenses, just one week before the Armistice ended the war for good. He never saw his verse published in a book. War can make poets and war can kill them...