Charles W. Moore

This explains it

McCain is the word of death in the current Executive Branch of government. In my Vietnam growing up period, I always admired McCain but I do not think the White House shares my opinion.

The U.S. special envoy to Ukraine, reportedly stepped down from his position on Friday. An official at Arizona State University, where Kurt Volker serves as executive director of the McCain Institute for International Leadership, reportedly confirmed Kurt Volker’s resignation from the State Department to the State Press

Who is a patriot these days? Lots of people claim that title but few are worthy. I am sad and disillusioned these days. And, I suppose, many are happy that I am sad.

Impeachment: A path fought with perils

Cartoon: Li’l Don Trump and how the cookie crumbles

500 generations to Us

500 generations isn’t enough time for evolution to do too much. So the Primitive Mind—a hardwired part of us—is still stuck in the world of 11,000 BC. Which means we’re all like computers running on the highly unimpressive Windows 11000 BC operating system, and there’s no way to do a software update.

But humans have something else going on as well—cognitive superpowers that combine together into an enhanced center of consciousness we’re calling the Higher Mind.

The Higher Mind and his magical thinking abilities helped the human species transform their typical animal hunter-gatherer world into undoubtedly the strangest of all animal habitats: an advanced civilization. The Higher Mind’s heightened awareness allows him to see the world with clear eyes, behave rationally in any environment, and adjust to changes in real time.

So while our Primitive Minds are still somewhere in 11,000 BC, our Higher Minds are living right here with us in 2019. Which is why, even though both minds are just trying to do their jobs, they’re in a fight most of the time.

Sometimes, the fights are about what’s best for us—a practical conflict.

The full story can be found here

What does this mean??

Gaslighting is a term often used by mental health professionals (I am not one) to describe manipulative behavior used to confuse people into thinking their reactions are so far off base that they’re crazy.

The term comes from the 1944 MGM film, Gaslight, starring Ingrid Bergman. Bergman’s husband in the film, played by Charles Boyer, wants to get his hands on her jewelry. He realizes he can accomplish this by having her certified as insane and hauled off to a mental institution. To pull off this task, he intentionally sets the gaslights in their home to flicker off and on, and every time Bergman’s character reacts to it, he tells her she’s just seeing things. In this setting, a gaslighter is someone who presents false information to alter the victim’s perception of him or herself.

Whataboutism gives a clue to its meaning in its name. It is not merely the changing of a subject (“What about the economy?”) to deflect away from an earlier subject as a political strategy; it’s essentially a reversal of accusation, arguing that an opponent is guilty of an offense just as egregious or worse than what the original party was accused of doing, however unconnected the offenses may be.

The tactic behind whataboutism has been around for a long time. Rhetoricians generally consider it to be a form of tu quoque, which means “you too” in Latin and involves charging your accuser with whatever it is you’ve just been accused of rather than refuting the truth of the accusation made against you. Tu quoque is considered to be a logical fallacy, because whether or not the original accuser is likewise guilty of an offense has no bearing on the truth value of the original accusation.

Whataboutism adds a twist to tu quoque by directing its energies into establishing an equivalence between two or more disparate actions, thereby defaming the accuser with the insinuation that their priorities are backward.

Email 2 Me: From Firefox

Climate Crisis Illustrated.

by SIERRA Staff

Ahab straddles the tip of a gliding whale. A lone fisherman sits on a bed of dissolving ice. Into an endless sea of bobbling plastic, a young boy casts out a line into a suffocated sliver of water. These are just some of the disturbing climate renderings from Barcelona-based street artist Pejac. In these provocative drawings, human and natural worlds collide with absurd and destructive consequences that reveal an all-too-inexorable truth: The Anthropocene will spell the unraveling of both if we don’t act now.

By Charlie: There is Yin – Yang that can help one visualize as well. This is one for those that lack imagination or are in denial. Or how about “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”.

Nihilism

What is nihilism any way?  Well, simply put it is a negative view of life.

• ni·hil·ism
• the rejection of all religious and moral principles, in the belief that life is meaningless.
  synonyms: negativity, cynicism, pessimism; More
  rejection, repudiation, renunciation, denial, abnegation;
  disbelief, nonbelief, unbelief, scepticism, lack of conviction, absence of moral values, agnosticism, atheism, nontheism
  “he could not accept Bacon’s nihilism, his insistence that man is a futile being”
  Philosophy
  extreme skepticism maintaining that nothing in the world has a real existence.
  historical
  the doctrine of an extreme Russian revolutionary party c. 1900 which found nothing to approve of in the established social order.

For the record, I do not adhere to Nihilism. I do, on occasion, dispair and then Acts 4:29-31 applies.

RVillage RV Repair Group

How We Live

I do not support this Idea and it is here just as a reminder to myself so as not to forget.

QUOTE:

Boas was trained as a physicist. His student work was in psychophysics, the science that measures things like sensory thresholds, and his dissertation was an effort to determine the degree to which light must increase in intensity for people to perceive a change in the color of water. This might seem an utterly sterile topic for research, but Boas reached an unorthodox conclusion: it depends. Our perception of color is a function of circumstances. Different observers have different perceptions depending on their expectations and experiences, and those differences are not innate. They are, consciously or unconsciously, learned. It made no sense, Boas decided, to talk about a general law of sensory thresholds.

It’s an academic adage that a scholar’s career consists of footnotes to the dissertation, and, in a way, this was true for Boas. He was an empiricist: he collected facts, and he was not inclined to theoretical speculation. But he thought that the basic fact about human beings is that the facts about them change, because circumstances change. Our lives may be determined, by some combination of genes, environment, and culture, but they are not predetermined.

Boas’s revolutionary work was a study, undertaken for a congressional committee and published in 1911, on the bodily form—head size, height, hair color, age at pubescence—of the children of recent European immigrants. The impetus was public anxiety that immigrants from southern and eastern Europe would, through intermarriage, dilute the racial stock (sometimes identified as “Nordic”). Boas’s finding, which was that the cranial index of children born in America differed from that of children of the same background born in Europe, rocked the field. It upset long-believed claims that racial differences, including what we would now call ethnic differences, are immutable. The evidence proved, Boas said, “the plasticity of human types.” It also showed that variations within groups are greater than variations between groups.

In 1911, this was not what most white scientists and politicians wanted to hear. Boas’s career spanned an exceptionally active period of Aryan supremacy. Boas witnessed the legalization of Jim Crow; the widespread acceptance of social Darwinism and eugenics; imperial expansion, including the American occupation of the Philippines; drastic restrictions on immigration; the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan; and the coming to power of Adolf Hitler. (Boas was Jewish.) Often, science was invoked as a justification for colonization, segregation, discrimination, exclusion, sterilization, or extermination. Boas devoted his life to showing people that the science they were relying on was bad science. “He believed the world must be made safe for differences,” Ruth Benedict wrote when Boas died. END QUOTE.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/26/how-cultural-anthropologists-redefined-humanity?utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Daily_082019&utm_medium=email&bxid=5c439ffccff06b42ec7f1c84&cndid=55982516&esrc=&utm_term=TNY_Daily