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...

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...