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Thanks Reg!

An American friend once told me a story.
She was in a classroom around age twelve, and the class was required to  write the one word they felt typified Americans.  Everyone else wrote “Individuality”, and she wrote “Conformity” 🙂

This isn’t a country that celebrates individualism. We would be looking at the conformists to introduce new educati…[Read more]

Thanks, Reg!!!

Empathy is informed sympathy

Someone has told me they are an Empath. What is an Empath? Is there a Sympath as well?

@Unseen you made the exact point that I also thought. Empathy is the feeling when you can relate to an injury or event because you have been through similar events and you  feel knowledgable sympathy. You do not feel anyone else’s experience.

You hear people all the time saying their empathy forces them to feel everything (usually bad things) fr…[Read more]

I read this article this morning. In my head, I can’t trace the route from cell consciousness as described, to the almost non-sequitur of changing reality.

Basically they’re proposing that our cells have a consciousness and actually make decisions – and then somehow that affects reality and we’re reshaping our future.

Opinions would be super…[Read more]

Thanks Reg!!

Another embed test.

TheEncogitationer wrote:

The last times I went to a library, it had loud, noisy kids who chased each other in the library and librarians and “security” who didn’t have the brass to throw them out, and the fleas from someone’s comfort/familiar animal attacked me and practically chased me out. One library had signs telling people not to bring f…

[Read more]

@Unseen – beating his own previous record, I imagine.

Thanks, Reg!!

Authoritarianism goes so well with the religious societies. A belief in a god or ‘superior’ entity and a belief in Dear Leader are really not all that far apart. If you’re already worshipping a god, it’s not a huge pivot to worshipping a leader.

With respect to the regime without any rights, I am hard pressed to see that as something different than that which the current administration aims for.

Unseen wrote:

Trump lies to see who’s loyal to him. Who’s in his cult.

L. Ron Hubbard, creator of Scientology was a science fiction author, who eventually made claims like he was a (nuclear?) physicist, Buddha in a past life, and he kept writing the most unbelievable origin stories and how people can nurture their superpowers, even learning to…[Read more]

Simon Paynton wrote:

Or, more than one dimension.  All the dimensions maybe.

In string theory they speak of 10 or 11 dimensions (I forget which). I’ll never understand the theories, but the most convincing argument to me is about how entanglement of two particles can be broken instantly, even when those particles are separated by a distance that…[Read more]

Enco, I’ve always found “unnatural” to suffice.

TheEncogitationer wrote:

However, I still have many questions: If we assume a single Natural Universe with nothing before it or beyond it, with all energy, all matter, all space, all time, wouldn’t this mean there can be no “balloon,” no “surface,” no “outside,” no force to expand space “inside” the “balloon?”

And if Relativity doesn’t ap…

[Read more]

Thanks Reg!

TheEncogitationer wrote:

And, of course, the part of Donald Trump’s brain that pauses between thought and speech and speech and action doesn’t work at all.

This is spot on, of course. But I’m worried, in spite of the obvious harm of Project 2025 (“P2025”) as it is executed, that perhaps irrepairable harm is the goal of wannabee oligarchs. Or, may…[Read more]