The Holocrons of Darth Grampus

As a youngling I often heard that, to avoid controversy and strife, don't talk about politics and religion. Naturally, Darth Grampus said a whole lot about both. When I started though, social media was becoming a thing. I could pick "friends" by common interest, so most of my "friends" shared my views closely enough that we didn't tend to argue much. So I often engaged in lengthy debates with others about things I cared about. That's where I learned about annoying things like trolling and a funny acronym: FRAT... or F*ck reading all that.  I could get wordy, even as a youngling. Some things never change.  Speaking of politics and religion though, I'm seeing a bunch of posts asking if states within the US should ban Sharia Law. Though the exact percentage (or reliable estimate) isn't available, Pew Research guesses the percentage of Muslims in the US who want Sharia Law is near 0 . Taking that into account, one wonders why the hell it's even ...

In the information age, how do we know if what we read or hear is true? What if the most capable of AI models of today reflect prejudices?  Did you ever wonder why we don't remind ourselves that history, for example, is written by the winners? This isn't to disparage the work done by historians, or the efforts made to discern the truth from the tales told by those winners. Still, we often forget that history is written by the winners and take the information provided about history, generally speaking, as fact or close to factual. We don't think often about the biases present in our history. A cursory examination of academic literature proves that biases are present. That's of greater importance now than, perhaps, it has ever been.  Upfront I'll admit that I don't have the data, but I suspect that the overwhelming majority of academic writing and research during the 1960s aligned with progressive political ideology. Additionally, the overwhelming majority of acad...

Socrates is credited with saying, "I know only that I don't know." Socratic ignorance, it's called. Now I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, but Darth Grampus considers that claim, to know only that you don't know, to be about the most honest self-reflection ever made. Today, there seems to be little to no value found in that kind of honesty.  Perhaps the purpose of this dichotomy is to keep one from straddling a fence. Consider: the algorithms we all work for? The ones that provide suggestions to our YouTube, Insta and other social media feeds? There is a definite bias against the "middle of the road" content in these algorithms.  For example, if one is, say, super Pro-Trump, the algorithm loves their content. If one is super anti-Trump, the algorithm loves their content. But the middle riders? Pssh... you're not likely to see their content on your feed. That's just a 1s and 0s example of what I'm talking about, but it mirrors the broa...

A conversation I had today reminded me of an adage: people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. Though I can read through my posts, my subjective view isn't solid-enough proof that I've tried to articulate how much I care over so much of what I think I know. So, and in effort to create that proof, I thought I'd write about the reasons I care. Perhaps knowing that is worth much more than knowing how much I (think I) know. My first grand baby came into the world almost a year ago. Such an easy one, right? Of COURSE I care about my grand baby, all his future cousins, and my kids! But intricately woven into the sincerity of my caring for them is care for all of you and yours, too.  Why? Darth Grampus Cares Because... Because your good is potentially their good. If more good comes to more of you, the impact will undoubtedly affect those I love most. I can't claim to have all this hope, or that I care so much for their futures if I don't hav...

We all navigate our trips from the cradle to the grave deaf and blind in important ways. Some of these ways are obvious, if we have some humility. Others require taking a long look into the ugly mirror of human experience.  How do we know? How we do sift truth from narratives and agendas? None of us have enough time to chase down everything, do all the experiments, or check the backgrounds of the talking head we listen to the most. We're all affected by carefully crafted planes of possibility, and we're all conditioned to dismiss claims that venture beyond those planes.  CNN and Fox report on the same incidents, but their rhetoric presents them entirely differently. One says this about the event, the other says that. Both claim to be telling the truth, so... how do we know which is truth and which is lie? We don't. We choose what to believe and commit to it. We commit to it so strongly that we will regurgitate what we hear on our channel of choice as though it's the gos...

A while back, the earth decided to move in a big way under the ground of Myanmar. My missus and I were maybe 480 miles or so away, but we still saw some lights in the place we ate our late lunch shaking just a wee bit when it happened. A building fell down on itself in Bangkok, some 400 miles away from the epicenter. The carnage was on the world news, and more than 1,000 people (if memory serves) lost their lives in the natural disaster.  Now I'd bet not one of those people who died that day thought they would. Not before that earthquake. In that way, the day was just like any of the other days they got to live through before that one. They woke up that morning, as they had on every other thinking they'd see their wife or husband, their children, their family and friends again. Despite the many times God, or nature, or whatever you want to call it has shown us that our next breaths are not guaranteed, all of us take a whole lot of the moments we enjoy for granted.  It may read...

Happy Songkran! It's the Thai New Year and it is a very big deal here in the Land of Smiles. They celebrate it with something like a nationwide water gun fight. People will drive around with 55 gallon drums of water in the bed of their trucks with people using bowls to sling water at you. Everyone's blasting music of different artists, adults and kids will soak you with their water gun. People spread this very thin and fragrant mud-like substance on each other's faces saying (translated) "Sawasdee bpee mai (Happy New Year)." This mud is  din sor pong, or  ดินสอพอง - a type of natural marl powder mixed with water and sometimes fragrance (Thanks, Gemini). And you're not "safe" anywhere! Families in rural areas will sit in chairs near the road with their own barrels full of water, bowls, water guns. If you drive by, your car is getting a bit of a bath. And if you're on a motorcycle? Better wear a rain coat.  Bangkok is completely crazy downtown on S...

In my early retirement, Darth Grampus spends a lot of time listening, reading and trying to learn. Sometimes I engage in conversation with people about this or that hoping to have my own perspective expanded and, when possible, to expand the perspectives of others.  But today is a bit of a... I dunno... some circus combination of "Ripley's Believe it or Not," lies, damn lies, propaganda and half-truths. We are inundated at all times, and everywhere we look, with different takes on similar events, highly suggestive and powerful arguments, framing and reframing, religious and social pressures surrounding particular ideas and narratives, and all of us, Darth Grampus included, is susceptible to being fooled. Big Numbers and Impossibilities I saw a video the other day of a young man talking about a megalithic structure built into a mountain where he claimed that 400,000 tons of rock and dirt was removed over the purported 18 year construction period of the structure. He made a...

Today makes 11 months you've been in the world, Number One. Grampus looked back and realized it had been far too long since I wrote anything about that. I'm sorry kid. I got caught up in some realizations about my eyesight and the future.  335 days, my grandson. Not quite a year, but that's coming even faster than either of us can really understand. Time is this strange facet of our existence. Right now it's passing slowly for you, but faster than you'd ever believe for your parents and other adults who love you.  If you're not walking yet, that's coming any day now. And in a blink after that, you'll be running. And you'll run everywhere, just like your Dad did when he was young. I remember watching him at playgrounds, wondering where in the world his boundless energy came from. He and your Uncle D would run from the merry-go-round to the swings, to the slide... both of them utterly lost in the enjoyment of the moment. When your Uncle B joined us, th...

What does it mean to be human? Its actually a very uncomfortable question, in my opinion. In as little as ten minutes we can easily find and view evidence of human cruelty and kindness, of human hatred and love, of our despair and our hope. We can watch hubris unfold and gather pearls of deep wisdom. We can marvel at just how smart our ancestors were. Whether we're looking at marvels of engineering like the pyramids in Egypt, or the Socratic dialogues, the evidence of our ancestors' intelligence is abundant. It seems only fitting that we'd still find so many examples of human ignorance today.  Positive Negatives With little effort we can discover the seeming paradox of being meat bags with powerful biological imperatives, but also with the capacity (at least) for deep moral conviction. We read stories of people who cannibalized fellow humans in order to survive (The Donner Party, or the true story of airplane crash survivors covered in the film "Alive"). Neuroscie...