TheEncogitationer

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Unseen,

Fair questions all.  Since trust depends on the efforts of other human beings, trust is certainly not a right and those who want it, no matter what their profession or who they are, have to earn that trust, again, by showing their homework, and doing it in a way that the intelligent lay audience can understand.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Reg,

An interesting, thought-provoking line-up of stories as always.

What gets me is why in the Hell are those already vaccinated now being demanded to wear the mask anyway, even though the upcoming booster shot is supposed to offset the Delta strain of COVID-19?

Doesn’t this new call for the vaccinated to mask up just feed into the paranoia of Q-Anonners and the Rev. Rick Wileses of the world?  And are we going to have to endure months more of masks that say: “God Is Good” and “Faith Not Fear?”

And would the COVID-19 have had time to mutate if bureaucratic regulations not stopped the production and sale of early tests, PPE, and sanitizer?  And would the virus have had time to mutate if the WHO, CDC, Dr. Fauchi, and others just got on the same page on what citizens should do in the wake of the crisis???

All of this has made me mad enough to want to double down on Emperor Xi and The Butchers of Beijing for the cover-up and unleashing of this crud upon the rest of the world.  (Whether it was engineered or not does not relieve the government of responsibility for the cover-up and murder of Doctors who identified the infection.)

And what is up with the water in Fort Lauderdale, Florida?  On one hand you have Coral Ridge Ministries rightly accused of anti-LGBTQ hatred by The Southern Poverty Law Center (a.k.a. “The lady doth protest too much, methinks” who has it’s own problems of bias and discrimination.)  Yet the Gay Mayor of Fort Lauderdale Dean Trantalis wants to honor Coral Ridge Ministries???

Ft. Lauderdale’s out mayor will honor an anti-LGBTQ hate group because it’s time to “let go”

https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2021/03/ft-lauderdales-mayor-will-honor-anti-lgbtq-hate-group-time-let-go/

Why don’t Coral Ridge Ministries, the SPLC, and Mayor Trantalis all just get together in one big circle jerk orgy and get it all out of their systems?  You know they all probably want to in their heart of hearts and cup of cups!

I guess Florida Man’s gonna Florida Man, no matter how he swings!

 

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Fellow Unbelievers,

A little musical encouragement in these trying times:

Eddie Lawrence–“The Old Philosopher”

Rosemary Clooney– “Swinging on a Star”

Donald Fagen “IGY (What A Beautiful World”)

Michael McDonald “I Gotta Try”

 

 

• This reply was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by  TheEncogitationer. Reason: Correcting a link

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Reg,

Ooooh, Reg!  That is heavy! 😎

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Davis, Jake, and Unseen,

Best of thoughts to you on your procedure, Davis…and thoughts are at least a step-up from prayer.  I sure hope there’s no wait involved wherever you are.

Jake, I’m glad you and your girlfriend got out of that predicament alive and with humor intact.  Always good to be able to laugh at adversity.

A little perspective for everybody:  So far, 100 percent of life has a 100 percent chance of eventual death.

However, that has never stopped our Extropian and Transhuman co-ir-religionists from wanting to swing on a star, carry Moonbeams home in a jar, be better off than they are, and seek that Fountain of Eternal Youth like the Ant with that Rubber Tree Plant.

 

• This reply was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by  TheEncogitationer. Reason: Addendum. Hopefully video accompaniment is coming soon

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Unseen,

Now and then, the question comes up “I wonder what death is like?”

Do you ask that out of the blue when you see panhandlers approaching?  😉

That period between being put under and waking up is as close as you’ll get to a knowledge of what death is like. It’s effectively brain death. It’s not the unconsciousness of sleep where a sharp or unfamiliar sound might break it. It’s a profound unconsciousness in which a human being, in a sense, no longer exists. They are, for the duration of the procedure basically a living contradiction, a living corpse.

Miraculously (in the hyperbole sense not the religious sense) modern medicine is able to bring you back, knowing who you are and with all of your memories and mental faculties. Most of the time, actually.

I would say even that is not fully comparable to death, since your brain cells and other bodily cells still maintain their locomotive and replicative abilities and functions.  And your memories and personality are typically there in place when you regain consciousness.  In actual death, all of that at some point ceases.

Post Note: My surgery today was to biopsy something on a vocal cord that might be worth looking into. I’ll know the result of that in a few days. Hopefully, it will be nothing to worry about because “It is benign 90% of the time,” my ear/nose/throat specialist told me.

Glad you came out on the other side of the ether or whatever they use.  And the odds look ever in your favor, judging not just from your Doctor’s probabilities, but from the many living statistics I see every day.

They are so defiant and resilient, they actually have T-shirts that say: “Fuck Cancer!”  And contrary to Biblical superstition, even bald heads don’t take away from strength or the <i>real</i> “crowning glory” that is <i>inside</i> the head!

I wouldn’t play Russian roulette with a 9 in 10 odds of surviving. Would you, even if you might win $1 million? So, yes, I do worry.

Your odds are much better than Russian Roulette.  Last time I checked, they only make revolvers with 6 round cylinders. 👍

You hang in there, let us know how you’re doing, and like Rona Barrett always said: “Keep thinking the good thoughts!”

 

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Robert,

The Science Notebook does gives a list of lab supplies and lab safety procedures, so it is a very good primer for a future Nobel.  I’m sure if the Notebooks had Music as a subject, a future Amadeus could be in the making too.  In both cases, immersion and practice are crucial.

Oh, and there are exercises for each chapter, so exploring minds can test themselves right from the start.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by  TheEncogitationer. Reason: Addendum

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Simon,

The Notebooks are not intended to be exhaustive (no credible book really is) and they recommend you to take your own notes if the teacher mentions something that’s not inside.  However, I learned new things just thumbing through them.

For example, I learned that Atomic Mass in The Periodic Table of Elements is just an average number of Protons and Neutron in a Nucleus  (which makes sense if you’re accounting for Ionization and isotopes.)

I also learned that humans crossed The Bering Strait ice sheet (called Beringa) 40,000 years ago instead of the range of 14,000-20,000 years ago I learned earlier.  Obviously new findings have changed the date.

These new discoveries alone sold me on getting them off the shelf.  I could have just stuck with Wikipedia and DuckDuckGo, but the solid feel of a hard-copy book was also a good lure.

Oh, and the writing is concise and has no jargon that is not also paired with a definition.  The illustrations are amusing too.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by  TheEncogitationer. Reason: Addendum

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Reg,

Of all the emergency provisions and tools I  have or have ever had, a “dousing rod” has never been among them, nor have I heard of “dousing” advocated in survival manuals as a valid means of finding water, potable or otherwise.  I sure wouldn’t bet my life on it.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Reg and Fellow Unbelievers,

I checked the shelf again and saw the English Language Arts Notebook.  It is every bit as promising as the other Notebooks.  It includes Parts of Speech, Rules of Grammar, Greek and Latin prefixes and Suffixes, Etymology, Reading Fiction, Reading Non-Fiction, Writing and Composition, and many more specific topics!

Something like this series in the home of every student could serve as an excellent homeschool curriculum!  With a series like this, who needs the NEA and AFT?

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Reg and Fellow Unbelievers,

Since the Sunday School always has book recommendations and since it is approaching back-to-school time for a lot of people at least, I’d like to recommend a series of books I just recently discovered on the store shelves:

Everything You Need to Ace (Fill In The Blank Subject) in One Big Fat Notebook. The series has five subjects, Science, Math, American History, World History, and English Language Arts.

The Science Notebook goes into the method of scientific inquiry; the difference between the hypothesis, theory, and natural law; units of measure; Physical, Earth, and Life Sciences; The Periodic Table of Elements; types of rocks and minerals; taxonomy and groupings of living things; and so much more!

Cosmology, Evolution, Natural Selection, Sexual Reproduction, and ages of the Earth and the Universe are all covered fully and candidly without reference to Creationism, “Intelligent Design,” or religious delusions and hang-ups.

The Math Notebook, in addition to standard Mathematics, Geometry, and Coordinate Plane and Functions, also covers the critical thinking-related and worldly subjects of Statistics, Probabilities, and Calculating Simple Interest.  Anyone who masters these is both unassailable and dangerous in a good way.

The American History and World History Notebooks both cover their respective subjects with the years ending “B.C.E.” and “C.E.” so you know from the jump that the Notebooks are Secular in perspective.

Religion in history is treated in a Secular and objective manner, recording religion founders, dates of their founding, tenets and practices, and how they affected historical events, with no endorsement of any viewpoint and no hesitancy to acknowledge horrors done in the name of specific religions.  The Caste System, The Crusades, The Inquisition, Witch-Hunts, Pogroms, Persecutions, Jihads, Sha’ria, and the 9/11 Terrorist Attacks are covered as religious acts, not deviations from a peaceful norm.

Ancient Despotisms and modern Totalitarianisms and Collectivisms are covered with no ideological bias, as are pivotal technological innovations and social improvements.

Some things the History Notebooks don’t deal in are Political Correctness, Historical Revisionism, Wokeness, “Equity” or Critical Race Theory.  And Thank The Void that they don’t!

The sense you get from the History Notebooks is not: “Shame on you, Cis Hetero Wy P Po! Take a knee!  Weep and Repent!” but rather: “Americans in particular and humans in general have done both wonderful things and terrible things. Be like the good guys, don’t be like the bad guys!  Learn from history and do better without repeating it!”

I haven’t yet seen the English Language Arts Notebook, but based on the other Notebooks, it sounds promising. More to come when I find it on the shelves.

I give the Everything You Need to Ace (Fill In The Blank Subject) in One Big Fat Notebook series my highest endorsement for both young students and adults who want to update knowledge and revive a passion in learning long suppressed by Gummint Skoolz and Parochial Pedo-Gags!

• This reply was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by  TheEncogitationer. Reason: Italicizing and addendum of sentiments

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Reg,

I shed no tears whatsoever for the decline of the Christian Right and only regret that it hasn’t happened faster in my own community.  I can’t count the numbers of times people come into the store giving out bible tracts and wearing T-Shirts with thoughtless scriptures like: “Iron sharpens Iron” from Proverbs 27:17.  (Uh, no.  It’s harder, more abrasive metals and minerals that sharpen softer metals like Iron.  The ancients just didn’t know that Iron could also contain Carbon, which did make it harder and thus able to sharpen purer, softer Iron.)

That said, the author misunderstands the rational, Secular reason for opposing Critical Race Theory (C.R.T.)

There ia nothing a rational person should disagree with in studying the existence of racism, discrimination, slavery, and genocide in either Local, State, U.S., or World history.

What is objectionable is to say that people living today are responsible for these horrors that happened prior to their birth, to say that some people are guilty of these horrors just by virtue of their immutable traits, and especially to teach that to children who have no hand in anything.

A person is only responsible for what he or she says or does at the age of accountability forward, nothing before and certainly nothing prior to birth in antiquity.

And no one is responsible for any debt not willfully assumed.  We have an entire identity theft protection industry dedicated to fighting to keep people free from incurring debts they don’t owe.   That industry and the people it serves do not need staving off ancient grievance shake-down artists added to their list of concerns.

And the Christian Right could learn something from this opposition too.  If people are not guilty of racism, discrimination, slavery, and genocide by birth, they certainly aren’t guilty of anything else by birth either.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Davis,

As for Enco I’ve seen these tropes a thousand times. Response: You don’t save western civilisation by supporting policies like racial profiling which run counter to the values you are trying to save, especially when those advocating for this also hold misogynist and or racist and or homophobic views which run counter to the general ideals of equality in Western civilisation worth saving.

And where did I say I supported any of those things?

Not believing rape/harassment victims and thinking that a trip to the police station will have an even small chance of charges being filed is both typical of rape-culture enabling and a naive view of how rape justice works (or actually doesn’t work).

Going where evidence leads and not going on mere say-so is how any problem ever gets addressed, including crimes such as rape, sexual assault, and harassment.

While armed citizens have done their share to help prevent these crimes, not even the most well-armed citizen can be everywhere nor does the most well-armed citizen keep a CSI lab in his Ford F-150 or his bunker.  For that we need to defer to law enforcement.

While some crime labs of major cities have backlogs of rape kits that need testing and that is an inexcusable travesty, it is light-years ahead of CHAZ/CHOP in Portland, Oregon and Occupiers in cities throughout the 2010s who all handled accusations of rape and sexual assaults as “internal matters.”

And CSI labs are light-years ahead of how Catholic, Protestant, and other religious bodies handle problems of rape and sexual assault.

Yes, law enforcement and the courts need vast improvement, but they are ultimately the only game in town for addressing crime.  Wokeism, SJWism, and Misandrist Radical Feminism have been absolutely no help in this regard.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Reg, Davis, and Fellow Unbelievers,

I’ve said before that if a bloodthirsty Autism-spectrum child could write, The Qu’ran would probably be what it would look like.  And that’s no slam against the overwhelmingly friendly children on the spectrum, of course, just acknowledgement of how they often repeat themselves.

The Qu’ran cribbed a lot from both the Christian Holy Bible and the Jewish Torah, but The Great Flood story of Noah was cribbed from The Epic of Gilgamesh, which, in turn, was preceded by three previous flood stories.  Most likely, the other parts of these scriptures came from previous stories of blood and gore from other peoples.

These scriptures are just reflections and embodiments of man’s inhumanity to man, and cruel men made for cruel gods and worshipping those cruel gods made for more cruel men, in a feedback loop of misery, tyranny, and death.  We’re just now starting to splice the tape to break the cycle.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Unseen and Fellow Unbelievers,

My first thought on this is that none of the people Phil Torres writes about identifies as part of a “New Atheist” movement, though Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens, and Dennett did gladly claim the label “The Four Horsemen.”   Giving people labels with which they don’t identify themselves shows that Phil Torres has at least partially shot his wad on credibility.

Two, disagreeing with a viewpoint does not make the one you disagree with a “grifter,” “Far Right,” or any other ad hominem.  I share tbe Atheism of all of these people without necessarily agreeing with them on anything else without tarring them with any brush.

I, in fact, strongly disagreed with Hitchens on Iraq and with all of The Four Horsemen on human volition, though I think Hitchens was a smart fellow who would have changed his mind on Iraq had he lived to see that the invasion created a power vacuum which turned Iraq into a playground for Al-Qaeda, the Ayatollahs of Iran, and ISIS.

Three, as for these #MeToo/#TimesUp allegations, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:  Evidence or it might as well have never happened and either have investigations, arrests, indictments, and trials or GTFO.

Four, defending Western Civilization does not equal “dog-whistling” for White Supremacy.  (And if someone calls something a “dog-whistle,” they obviously must have heard something.)  Goodness knows, Ex-Muslim Secularist Ibn Warraq never heard this “dog-whistle” and the CRT/Wokeists could bear to learn something from him:

 

 

[Author]

Posts