Judgmentalism

It is judgmental to think others are being judgmental.

Assessing Trump

That Trump takes racist, sexist, jingoist (hate of foreigners) and so on positions is plain enough.  He says what the racists, sexists, and jingoists want to hear, so his audiences tend to be less educated white folk from rural areas.

However, Trump supporters say he isn't those things.  Personally I don't think Trump has any solidly formed views (he seems to not think very clearly -- "mushy brain syndrome").  He has sexist attitudes, that is plain from his history of demeaning wives and other women, but the rest of him is hypocritical, dishonest manipulation, saying whatever keeps his voters happy, but not necessarily carrying them out.  He will betray a lot of people. 

What makes him dangerous is that he is basically a con artist, narcissist and sociopath (no real conscience).  It is his ego, not his desire to do things for the country, that moves him.

Of course these sorts of things can be said about any politician -- but some are worse than others, and he is just about the worst to have appeared in a very long time.

Population management

I think efforts to control population via law are counterproductive and are surrounded by biological and ethical problems.  The real "secret" to controlling the population is a combination of personal freedom, and woman equality in marriage, and widely available and legal birth control, and low infant death rates.  Any look around the world and where the population is growing rapidly and where it is barely growing, or even shrinking, shows this.

Skepticism and testimony

Skepticism is the wisdom to refrain from belief of odd or unusual or unexpected things until there is good evidence, not just some evidence but enough to overcome reasonable doubt.  Testimony is not valid.  People testify to all sorts of things, and if we believed all of it we would be a mess.

Plank space-time and motion

Some time ago, speculating on what makes motion (changes in distance between objects over time) possible, I realized that if space/time is as continuous, as, say, the mathematicians' number line (where between any two points, no matter how close, there is always an unlimited or infinite number of points between them), then motion would not be possible.

 At some point there has to be a unit of un-divisibility (I wouldn't say "indivisibility"), where space-time is quantized, meaning that there are no "points" between two points that are only separated by this unit -- "travel" between units at this level would be a matter of one unit of time and units of space being movement -- in jumps where there is no jump involved (confusing, I know -- just ceasing to exist in one spot and beginning to exist in another).

It seems likely that this unit would be the Plank space-time.  In true nothingness, where there is no space-time, there would be no motion, no distance, no time (so saying such a thing "exists" is incorrect -- the concept of before and between would be meaningless).  There was no "before" space-time," nothing "outside" space time (even if space-time is finite), and nothingness between the units of space-time.

Experiencing the paranormal

Beliefs depend a lot on how we have been taught to think, and if we grew up in a superstitious environment, we will probably be superstitious.

When things go bump in the night (that is, I hear or see or feel things I can't explain), the first choice is just to say, "I don''t know" rather than jump to unwarranted conclusions.    It is better, even, to conclude hallucination than be so arrogant as to think one's brain always tells the truth.

I know personally that hallucinations can be convincing and scary, as I have had them from time to time throughout my life.  I have come to see them as a quirk that doesn't quite work right in my mind, often internal talking to oneself that gets misidentified as incoming sounds and converted by the brain into the experience (qualia) of hearing voices.

Just remember that it is not necessary to believe everything one hears.

Minimum Wage Laws

I think the minimum wage issue is just politics.  Wages are set by the laws of economics (mainly supply and demand) just as are all other prices, and when you price your product too high people don't buy (they go elsewhere, find substitutes, or do without).

That said, they have on occasion been found useful to deal with situations of exploitation (such as modern manifestations of slavery -- where the law doesn't have to prove abuses when all it has to do is enforce a minimum wage.  This, however, is a rare application and there are always other ways to handle it.

The idea of enforcing a "living wage" by this means is likely to be self-defeating, unless the minimum is set lower than what would have been payed anyway, as jobs are lost, automation is encouraged, businesses move elsewhere or lose out to competition not subject to the law, and the community as a whole becomes a little less economically sound.  The problem is, this sort of thing, as with rent control, usually takes years to do its damage  Frankly, I think most politicians understand all this, but they are politicians and tend to be more interested in votes than reality.

If I could afford it I would live in Vancouver, and Toronto, in spite of the bleak winters, ain't too bad either (certainly better than Buffalo or Detroit).

I once had Toronto explained to me as the most "American" city in North America, in spite of all the pictures of the Queen.  It has ethnic neighborhoods, lots of immigrants and second and third generation types, subways (pretty good ones too), skyscrapers, condos, billboards, freeways, lots of cars, American English (I can't tell the difference), and largely American labor and business cultures.  Canada doesn't seem to have as all the guns, including Toronto.

I think the problem of God and suffering goes deeper than just our ignorance of God's purposes.  Regardless of God's purposes, when you are an ethical God, the end never justifies the means, and if you are all powerful, then this God can accomplish his ends regardless, and does not need to resort to unethical things such as permitting suffering.

Rebirth (the Buddhist and Hindu word for what in the West is often called "reincarnation") would not, it seems to me, provide a way to grow unless there is good memory of past lives, which manifestly there is not.  Both Hindus and Buddhists agree it is a manifestation of the immortality of the life spirit, but they disagree on whether it is a form of immortality of the person.  Hindus, if I understand correctly, do, but Buddhists do not.  The process of Samsara (birth, life, death, rebirth, over and over) is seen by Buddhists as at best a trap wherein one is condemned by the natural force known as karma combined with our instinctual desire to live (animal grasping onto life), to be born over and over in one life after another, sometimes for the better, sometimes not, but all including large dollops of suffering.

The idea in Theravada Buddhism, though, is that the new baby is not the person who died, but just the life spirit, with few if any past memories, just the karmic status.  The new baby has its own genes and its own life experiences and is in fact a new person.  When one dies one is dead, nothing lasts forever.

I don't know and don't venture to guess whether this view reflects reality or not (at best any such picture could only be a reflection).  Instead, while I can see where evolution fits within such a picture much better than the Wester theist ideas, I can also see where it is more likely these ideas of afterlife derive from wishful thinking and the reality is much more bleak and we live in a universe that happened entirely by natural processes without any purpose.  The first goal of wisdom is to learn to accept the universe as we find it, not as we would like it to be.

Did God use evolution to create?

No one can deny this as a possibility, but to be an acceptable scientific theory one need to apply a little more rigor -- like by thinking through the logical implications of what we should see in the fossil record is 

God used natural processes such as those of evolution to do his creation.

First, though, let me point out that the idea that God used evolution removes the need for God, and makes him an unnecessary complication in evolutionary theory, and therefore a violation of the scientific rule of avoiding the addition of unnecessary complications.

How could we tell the difference between a fully "natural" process and one that happens under divine direction?  

One might be with the demonstration of something that happened in the history of life that could not possibly have happened naturally.  Many possible such events suggest themselves, but there is always the problem that simply because we don't know exactly what happened does not mean it did not happen naturally.   The evolution of flight or of the eye have been in the past mentioned as such events, but now the evolution of these things is well understood.  In other words, such an approach raises the danger of resort to the "God of the gaps," resorting to God when all that really can be said is, "We don't know." It is like those who resort to alien visits to "explain" UFOs.  

More important, there is the problem that the history of life looks for all the world like a sequence of chance events that after many slips and falls finally resulted in us.  (This is looking at it from the normal creationist anthro-chauvinist perspective.)  Life is a history of extinctions, mainly, with few species having living progeny.  Such imperfection does not fit well with God's perfection, although of  course the problem can be rationalized.

The biggest problem I have is that involving God achieves nothing to help the biologist, and is in fact merely a sop to traditional ideas that date from pre-scientific times.

Nausea.  That's the word, nausea.
Trump, Putin, Syria, nausea.

Contaminating Mars

Should we find traces of life on Mars of a significantly different sort from what we have here, that will be the really important thing, because two occurrences of independent life origination would indicate life is common everywhere.  The coincidence would otherwise be huge.

However, if what we find uses DNA or even the RNA code or is otherwise like us, then we will have issues to sort out  before reaching conclusions.

It is entirely possible that life evolved first on Mars, as Mars would have reached inhabitable status sooner than the earth, being smaller and cooler, and then got transported to the earth via meteors.

I think that unlikely and that it is more likely that there never was life on Mars and life originated on Earth.

Still, if we find traces of life on Mars, we want to be able to say which was the case.  If the life is very much like the life on Earth, does that tell us the first scenario (above) is true or that we managed to contaminate the traces or perhaps we can expect life everywhere to use the same chemistry?  I would think it extremely important that every precaution against contamination be taken.

Am I happy?  No.
Am I unhappy? No.
I just am, and that is enough.

How is it that mankind came to the idea of God?  I think I would like to speculate, with the understanding that whatever it was it happened in prehistory so there is no way we can really know.

I don't buy the "awe" theory nor the "seeking for explanations" theory.  I think these entered the story after the fact.

When we are in high school biology, the second or third chapter of our textbook tries to define what "life" is, and draws the distinction between life and non-life.  This is so ingrained into our culture that we take it for granted.  But it is a scientific observation, and prior to the eighteenth and nineteenth century the line was nowhere near so clear, so we had maggots appearing from non-life spontaneously, and so on.

Of course, we are also more than just "alive." We are also sentient (experience rather than just detect and measure) the outside world and our insides (sensations such as hunger), and, further, we experience feelings and desires (often driven by instincts, such as fear or anger).  Beyond being sentient, we are also conscious -- we "know" we exist and we know what we sense and we can infer all sorts of things.

We also assume pretty much automatically that everyone we know is similar to us, being alive, sentient, and conscious.  Why should we not draw a similar conclusion about the external world?  Why should we not just assume that other animals, and things like mountains and rivers and trees and forests and clouds and so on are like us?  To be sure they look different, and generally don't behave as humans do, but then each person is different too.

So, it would seem to me it behooves me, at a minimum, to try to get along with all these living, sentient, conscious things in our environment.  We have behaviors that indicate politeness, so be polite to the big tree and greet it properly, and when you kill an animal, ask its spirit for forgiveness.  Just as other humans we hurt can get revenge, the mountain may do so also (in it's mountain way) if we insult it or neglect it.  It may be slow witted, and may be very patient, but, regardless, it is in our interest to try to get along.

There is a passage in Cato's ancient book on agriculture about what to do if you have to remove a stand of trees -- it is important that the spirit or spirits of that stand be propitiated and taken care of.  For this he describes a set of rituals.

Now the Romans were not animists in the more "primitive" sort of way -- they had an organized pantheon of deities, but they also still had this assumption that there is consciousness out there other than just in ourselves.  A pantheon of deities with specialties would, with this frame of mind, arrive quite soon in human development -- things like the sky, the weather, the oceans, and so on, are universal and not local, and would naturally be seen to be far more important than the spirits of a stand of trees.

Then there would be speculation about where all this consciousness comes from, and inevitably the more introspective would consider a single "high god," not part of the world but its creator or sustainer.  In short, from the very first, human religion would be animist, "pagan," and monotheistic going in.  

My bedroom is cool, dark, and quiet
My bladder is well behaved
I do not snore or even breathe with any difficulty
I sleep well

Happiness from stupidity and delusion

Life is a prison.  Some of the bars are gravity, time (mainly aging), space, instincts, needs, sensations, past experiences, beliefs, the language we happen to be native to, our culture, our desires, brain chemicals, buzzing flies.

One does not escape most of these, and can only learn to handle and manage some of them, and even then happiness is not a reachable goal, only acceptance.  I think to be happy one must be both stupid and highly deluded.

Over a week and no rain
I can see the tops of the rocks at the bottom of the cistern
The crops are dying and the trees are stressed
Things are going to have to change