Temple of Reason 2/2

At the foot of the mountain, pure water flowed from a spring, falling by various cascades; twelve men dressed as mountaineers, armed with pikes and with civic crowns on their heads, were hidden in caverns in the mountain; as the procession arrived, singing the last couplet of the Marseillaise, the mountaineers quietly came out of their caverns without fully revealing themselves, and when “Aux armes, citoyens” was sung, they ran to get axes to defend their retreat, posted themselves on di...

 Eisenhower's Ability to "Sneer" a Powerful Motivator

By the time Dwight David Eisenhower was first elected president in 1952, he was already 62 years old. Despite this, he had had a relatively unremarkable health history. A 1923 appendectomy left him with a predilection to develop lesions between the lining of the abdominal cavity and the scar. In 1949, his doctor told him to cut down on his four-pack-a-day smoking habit. Eisenhower, after just a few days of limiting his cigarettes, quit cold turkey and never smoked again. He attributed his suc...

 Kayfabe

Although the etymology of the word is a matter of debate, for at least 50 years “kayfabe” has referred to the unspoken contract between wrestlers and spectators: We’ll present you something clearly fake under the insistence that it’s real, and you will experience genuine emotion. Neither party acknowledges the bargain, or else the magic is ruined. [...] The aesthetic of World Wrestling Entertainment seems to be spreading from the ring to the world stage. Ask an average Trump support...

 Gamification Hand Mechanic

Mr. Hedges realizes that this technique could neatly simulate the complexity of the Iowa caucuses. He creates a deck of cards to represent Democratic and Republican candidates and all of the different kinds of factions and perspectives that might influence how voters behave in their individual caucus sites. He has one of his classes play a Democratic caucus and the other play a Republican one. The game he creates is played over three turns (coffee hour, early evening, evening). Players are as...

 Trump Antagonizes China

Trump is not behaving as a president who will become master of the White House in a month. He bears no sense of how to lead a superpower. Even the US military did not use the term "steal" to describe the move by the Chinese navy. Trump's second tweet makes people worry that he will treat China-US relations as child's play. Now people don't know if Trump is engaged in a psychological war with China or he is just unprofessional, even though he will be sworn in soon. Regarding the Sino-US relat...