Hal Morris grew up in Huntington WV, a sort of freelance suburb, and has since mostly lived in NJ. He has been a Math Ph.D. dropout, Bell Labs systems programmer and Amdahl UNIX kernel hacker. He is a historian of broad interests, including always, and long before the book by Acemoglu and Robinson, "why nations fail", with focus on the USSR, Nazi Germany, China; also why cultures have such tragicomic misunderstandings (represented in works like Stilwell and the American Experience in China and A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam). Also, in later years, how nations do OK and muddle through to something like democracy, with strongest focus on the early 19c US. He is now most interested in why relatively successful nations start falling apart. For the last 8 years he has been obsessed with the alternate realities inhabited by fans of the right wing media, and has published a series of mostly unnoticed blogs: The Ontological Comedian, The Eisenhower Socialist, "What Was the Cold War", The Real Truth Project (he was was trying to be ironic with the "Real" bit but nobody got it), Smart-ALEC (for ridiculous legislative proposals), Truthology 101. He has schooled himself pretty deeply in social epistemology, cultural evolution, evolutionary psychology, anthropology, primatology, linguistics and evo-devo, and made much progress in mastering the Ribbonfarm Canon. The first Ribbonfarm Longform blogging class may (time will tell) have given him a new voice figuring out and writing about possibly sound ideas rather than wrestling with crazy ones
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