0423) It seems to me that proper travel — the kind of travel that involves stepping off the cruise ship excursion itinerary, adventuring beyond the hotel courtyard, or dining outside the familiar menus of franchised fast food — and visiting places both new and different from one’s own day-to-day reality is an almost perfect metaphor for cognitive dissonance. After all, isn’t overcoming culture shock an exercise in rationally reconciling what we see with what we thought we knew?

0372) It seems to me that exercise and fitness are not rational things. By this I mostly mean that they are seemingly rational solutions to completely irrational problems. Why do we create such imbalances between our lives and our bodies that we need to allocate units of time, energy, and resources to try to correct those imbalances?

0002) It seems to me that many the Skeptics and other critical thinkers I’ve met are generally disappointed at the lack of credible evidence for paranormal, magical, alien, or the otherwise inexplicable phenomena of the world. These are not people who turn up their noses at the thought of such things. Instead, many Skeptics — while far too logical to accept what they’ve seen on the evidence they’ve been given — seem anxious to witness something altogether awesome and simultaneously provable.

0811) It seems to me that true democracy, while still one of the best systems we as a society have devised to date, remains something of an exercise in irrational political risk, at least so much as the individual is concerned. True, the alternatives offer little better in that respect. But it is something of a gamble, after all, to suppose that the will of the many will always represent the best interest of the many.

0572) It seems to me that there is a lot of literature, both fiction and fact, devoted to telling the story of otherwise peaceful folks driven to violence through logic and stepwise rational decisions.

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