Click here to support the Daily Grail for as little as $US1 per month on Patreon

News Briefs 08-07-2016

Be nice to as many people as you possibly can. Lord knows, we all need it…

Quote of the Day:

The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy; instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it…Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Editor
  1. Rational Nation Notion
    The old adage, “know thyself,” is perhaps unachievable on an individual or collective/societal basis. Once you start measuring something, you change the thing being measured. Also, all complex entities typically resist change to an “equilibrium”. We spend little or no resources evaluating society in any meaningful/impactful (non-exploitative) way. Society even seems to depend on ignorance/denial in order to continue functioning.

    Those “chosen few” that have the ability to manipulate society aren’t motivated to share that power with the rest of us, and they have their own massive blind spots. On an individual basis we can only cope with so much information. To maintain a sense of purpose and stability we have to accept some form of tunnel vision. At best, we find our niche in the Matrix and just grind our little lives away!

    P.S. Regarding acts of violence, I’m actually surprised that there isn’t more of it in the world than there is. The vast majority of us simply accept our fate in life and tolerate whatever abuse comes our way. We are mostly survivors rather than activists. But, again the Matrix depends on passivity to function. Only state-sanctioned violence (wars, etc.) can be tolerated.

    P.S.S. Recent events indicate that nations are less concerned about leaks of sensitive/classified information to other nations than leaks of state secrets to its own citizens!

    1. There’s No Free Lunch
      I’m not convinced there is a viable test for determining if free will is extant or not. The article above certainly makes no convincing case one way or the other. Meanwhile, genetically identical twins may share some determinisms, but they don’t partake of identical destinies in toto at all. And just for chuckles let us consider one often heard explanation by ET’s as to why they try not to meddle too blatantly in human affairs. They say it’s because the cosmic mandate is to minimize interfering in human free will.

      I vote that free will is “provisional” which is to say that we are not always as free to decide as we think we are, but we are often enough as to be able to say that free will does exist.

      1. The Free Willies
        We can chose to work with the system (even though it is corrupt), or we can try to “beat the system,” or we can attempt to subvert the system. Free will is over-rated, because none of these options is a picnic.

        “By the time we’re made, we’re spent.” -Forbes

  2. Women Priests
    Women, and particularly royal women, were heavily involved in emerging Christianity. Osiris had Isis. Jesus had his royal female patrons. Paul had Priscilla (among others).

    And I concede that the Vatican is an authority on “sensational fairy tales” (haha)!

  3. Lying about Juno?
    The piece which claims NASA has lied about Juno, the Jupiter orbiting probe, totally misses the point of the mission. Sure, ‘Galileo’ dropped a descent probe into the atmosphere, but Juno is probing deeper into the structure of the planet via studying Jupiter’ gravitational field, which is the chief way we can infer anything about the interiors of planets. Density variations within a planet change a satellite’s orbit away from a simple ellipse – so long as it’s not orbiting in the equatorial plane. By studying those perturbations we’ll learn more about the guts of Jupiter than Galileo (the probe) ever could learn because it was confined to orbit in the equatorial plane, to encounter the inner moons multiple times. An inclined orbit probe is the chief purpose of Juno.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Mobile menu - fractal