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...

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...

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...

**I hate " trigger warnings ," but some of what I discuss in this post could be potentially troubling to you . I want to share a theory I think may shake you up a bit. Readers be warned. (I know... the one or two of you are tough enough... You probably even get a bit more intrigued to read stuff prefaced with such warnings, you wonderful souls, you...)** Sometimes Darth Grampus wishes he could simply enjoy hours and hours of cat videos or some other meaningless, trivial pursuit of mental soma. If you're reading a post about Humanoid Robotics and the Anti-Christ, then perhaps you share a similar affliction to my own. Let's get into it.  Some caveats first: this is a hypothetical and theoretical discussion involving spirituality and technology. For the purposes of this discussion we must take as true that: 1.) Jesus Christ, and the devil, as told of in the Bible are real (2.) that bodies can be inhabited by spiritual entities (3.) The Revelation of the Apocalypse by St....