2 events today

 Today on my 54th birthday we saw the Trump Plaza and Casino in Atlantic City, NJ demolished. A big Yay! for its symbolism. And poor Rush Limbaugh died. Which I don't care about one way or another.

?Trauma and Religion

 Quick psychology/religion question that needs attention:

We know that harm inflicted by other people is more traumatic than similar harm inflicted by nature and blind circumstances. There's no agency involved in tornadoes & earthquakes, disease and cancer. However, does belief in an omnipotent God in charge of everything change that? There's the perception of agency, of intention in everything. Complicating whatever answer can be derived is the belief in an afterlife or new world that will wipe out all effects of harm suffered in this life. 

Fuck autocoreaut xxxxx autocorrect I can't even shut the goddamn thing off!

Why knowledge of evolution?

 Why should everyone learn about the facts of evolution? Why is it so important?

Because it is personal. It gets to the heart of what we are, of who we are.

Yes, evolution is deeply personal, and damn anybody seeking to replace that knowledge with fairy tales.

Too cold! Or not?!

 It's below freezing outside and it's going to be colder in the days ahead. I feel like, "It's not supposed to be this cold outside!!" My mind responds with, "Sez who??" I grew up in New Hampshire, I'm supposed to be okay with this!! But then there were a few years in Arizona, another few on Florida... And now I'm here. At 54 years old I can't tolerate what I used to.

Instead of permitting aversion to color my experience, just experience. That's how I was able to find the freezing cold _interesting._ It had been many years since my hands were frozen to the point of being useless. That was a fascinating experience. 

I came home from running errands feeling energized. All because I replaced aversion with experience.

The Dark Line

 On those parts of the world where cliffs expose the eras of the past, specifically the end of the Mesozoic (dinosaurs) and the start of the Cenozoic (rise of mammals) one can spot a dark line that separates those two eras. That line was created by the global fires resulting from that fateful asteroid impact 66 million years ago.

Correction: It wasn't fateful, fate wasn't involved (as far as we can tell). The only force guiding that asteroid was physics, orbital dynamics. If the path of that rock was any different, if its trajectory a year previously had differed in any direction by a fraction of an arc-second of a degree then this planet would still be dominated by nonavian dinosaurs. As far as we know, no one budged that asnteroid toward our spaceship Earth. Anyway....

Imagine the immense, endless tragedy and suffering that line marks. Imagine the brand new possibilities, the amazing new life that came about in those lines above that dark one. Then ponder the astounding... 'miracle' I almost want to say, of one species attaining the capacity to apprehend all this. I can easily picture myself standing in one spot for over an hour in tears, moved at the deepest level by what that dark line means.

An immense tragedy of a different kind is to have millions of people believe that this planet, this universe was created in days. To them, this dark line means nothing. All they can do, all they are capable of doing is looking at that line with all the others, say "That's pretty!" and move on.

If there is a god, some creator-deity or deities that did budge that rock to help make possible the human race, I believe they'd want us to be able to read those lines in the rock. And lines in the genetic codes of every animal plant and microorganism we can get our hands on because all of that dna shows us history as well as those rocks do.

And that knowledge changes us as much as that one line in the rock changed all life on Earth.

Incompetent Patriotism

 Many years ago a contestant on one of those TV talent shows attempted the National Anthem. I was at work when I heard it from the break room. I thought it was some comedian doing a terrific job at being such a terrible singer. He certainly had people in the room laughing. A little too much laughter I thought because it couldn't be that funny. But no, I saw when I walked in that he was a serious contestant doing his very best. This poor shmuck sincerely believed he was good and that's what made it so comical. I laughed too but I was also in shock. I mean, whoever convinced him he had a shot on national TV needs to go to jail, I thought.

This morning I imagined that same guy wearing a MAGA hat just outside the U.S. capitol on January 6. The kind of "patriotism" the insurrectionists displayed that day was just as hopelessly incompetent.