January 21st and January 28th

1) Here are some books that have been brought up in the past few meetings:

• Bill Bryson's At Home - 19th century English country rectors contributed heavily to scientific discovery because of the preponderance of free time that they had to pursue everything from architecture to biology.

• Nasim Taleb's Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder - He actually references the previous information, in the previous book, but he also brings up a point about education that I wish I had had the presence of mind to bring up today, and that is this: education tends to spring from wealth, rather than the other way around. People who are in the middle class tend to be able to stay in the middle class because they can afford to go to college. Many of the current educational systems that are viewed in a positive light were created after said country achieved wealth, not the other way around. It's an interesting point.

• Atul Gawande's Being Mortal - Michael has brought this up, I've added it to my "to read" list, and I felt it worth a mention here. 

2) The link for the FAACT store:
https://www.zazzle.com/faact_shop

3) This week, we batted around a lot of topics, but (perhaps I was paying more attention because of how close to home this is) I felt that at least one of the largest chunks of our discussion centered around education. We talked about the level of education and employment among parents and what potential effects that can have on children. We also talked about the evolution of American society into one where people lack critical reasoning ability and a few of the causes of that. We also talked about the conflicting and potentially outdated goals of educational systems. If society simply needs fewer people working because of automation, what will happen to people at the lowest strata of socioeconomics? What happens to the people at its topmost echelons?


4) For next week's discussion, I'd say that this topic is as controversial as it is important. We're going to talk about legislating morality. To wit, I think all of us would agree that refusing to make a cake for a gay couple is wrong. But if the Westboro Baptist church wanted you to make a cake for one of their events, most of us would probably like the right to refuse that. I know that our group tends to be very left leaning, but I would really, really like to encourage some of the independent or right leaning FAACT members to chime in here. I bring up this topic specifically because I don't believe that it is easy to talk about. Come! Discuss! Argue! I hope to see you on Sunday the 28th!