People used to understand how things worked by looking at the moving parts. Not in the information age. Jack Risko ponders the impact of technological evolution on the American character. This insightful essay contains a number of gems, such as:...the microchip culture we have now, where miraculous tiny things just somehow work, without moving parts, has produced a form of magical thinking in our country. (We also blame the Hollywood Utopians for this too - their creations often seek, not to mirror or enhance reality, but to create rather harmful alternative realities, but that is another matter.) Americans complain about gas prices, but they don't like refineries, and they oppose oil drilling in godforsaken wastelands; yet somehow the gas is supposed to be readily available at low prices: this is but one example of a sort of magical thinking that seems to us very unlike the way Americans thought in 1854 or 1947.(Read Full Post)