Health care expenses make up a large part of the debt in the US. They can and have bankrupted many people, which is horrible. People have broken the bank trying to save their lives. Sometimes, sick people have refused to go to the hospital due to the expense. With a pandemic out there, this cannot […]

It’s been a while since I’ve done a blog post. I was thinking last night about compassion. There’s been a lot going on recently with the COVID Delta variant coming back. I had someone on my Facebook question whether wearing a mask was really necessary if you were healthy, and that got me thinking about […]

Almost no one will swim in a pool that has a corpse in it. I don’t have numbers to support that. I just assume it is true knowing how human beings work. Yet people flock to the oceans all the time, even though it is full of corpses. What’s the difference? Both of them are […]

I was arguing on the Internet today (a bad habit of mine) and ran across someone who seemed to be taking the position that without a god figure, there could be no morality. This irritated me because it’s a stand I’ve seen religious people make before and it boggles my mind. So I expressed that […]

We are going to talk about something extremely important today, and that’s America’s obsession with punishment and vengeance. But before we do that, we’re going to talk about stories. In particular, fairy tales. As every little kid knows, all good fairy tales follow a pattern. They start with “Once upon a time”, and they end […]

Had a discussion with Alan last night. Among other things, we talked about what we would do in a situation like, say, a mass shooting. Of course, until we are there, we can’t really know what we would do, but we determined that if we could, we’d run TOWARDS the shooting, rather than away. Not […]

There is a famous quote attributed to the Buddha that compares holding onto anger as holding onto a hot coal with the intent to throw it at someone else. You’re the only one that gets burned. There is a lot of anger around these days. That’s no surprise. There’s a lot that one could be […]

Recently Alan and I were discussing game theory. This is not an uncommon occurrence but in this case, it got me thinking about some of the problems we face as a society. In this case, the problem(s) I got to thinking about were those related to hoarding. Specifically, resource hoarding. Even more specifically, billionaires. The […]

“An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field.” The famed physicist Niels Bohr said this. It is one of my favorite definitions of an expert and really sums up the process of becoming one, in my opinion.  As a beginner, you make a lot […]

2020 is almost over. In just two days, it will be 2021. It has been a rough year on a number of levels. In the US, we had the most contentious election in decades, not to mention protests and violence over a number of issues. And that’s before we factor in a worldwide pandemic. $O$ […]