Tuesday, September 27, 2016

Hillary won the debate, but did Trump win the election?

I have never seen anything like this before.  A rather conservative Catholic Priest, Fr. Dwight Longenecker , and a person I consider to be a functional atheist, Scott Adams, both well schooled in human behavior from two extremely opposed philosophical viewpoints on the dignity of the human person (Fr. Longenecker, of course, is coming from the Catholic philosophical viewpoint of free will; where Scott Adams claims that, among other experiences he has had, this election proves his Moist Robot theory that no human being is truly rational and we're all just a collection of predetermined genetic actions) but come to the same conclusion on last night's debate:

While Hillary was winning the debate, Trump was losing on purpose to win the election.  Or at least so goes the theory.  Two totally different rationale for this behavior- from the Catholic standpoint, Trump was virtue signaling those men and women who do not buy into Clinton's radical feminism.  From the Persuader point of view, we were looking for Trump to show that he'd be a safe vote.  We got both.

As many of you know, I don't really have a dog left in this race; there are no good pro-life choices from a personhood standpoint.  But what do you think of the tactic of winning to lose?

Thursday, September 22, 2016

Are we entering the Anthropocene Epoch?

A curious article in The Guardian suggests that we are entering a new geologic age and that our own species (long known to archaeologists to be veritable litterbugs- in earlier ages leaving shards of pottery and glass everywhere, now leaving shards of plastic, and always, chicken bones) has now affected the environment so much with nuclear and carbon pollution, that we are causing a "sixth extinction" point.

Not so fast, says conservationist Stewart Brand- we are being arrogant and pessimistic to assume that this is an extinction level event.  What mankind messes up, mankind can clean up, and local efforts can make a huge difference for species such as the Giant Panda, who are limited in their range and were recently taken OFF the endangered species list.

Monday, September 5, 2016

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Oustside The Asylum by Ted Seeber is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at http://outsidetheaustisticasylum.blogspot.com.