The idea that animals should have the same rights as humans extends back to the 9th century BCE, along with the principle in Eastern religions of ahimsā, non-violence toward all living beings, advocating for kindness and non-cruelty expressed daily by a vegetarian diet. I guess they did not believe growing, breathing plants were living. An odd prejudice, one arising because humans are unable to hear plants screaming in agony when being cut, plucked, or extracted from nourishing soil. I wonder how much the trees wail when the fruit, a parallel with chicken eggs, they lovingly bear are removed from their mother plant, and the seeds are consumed...

When thinking about the lasting impact of decisions or responsible planning, the impact on the future must be taken into account. Businesses typically have monthly, quarterly, and annual targets guided by a five-year plan and longer-term ambitions. A couple looking to start a family will, when buying a home, seek out a location that will suit their future needs. They look as far out as the schooling needs for the youngest of their brood, maybe beyond, and the potential for turning a profit when selling their empty nest to downsize and travel. The cowardly fools in government look at impacts only to the next election cycle, driving short-term, supposed benefit, while ignoring long-term impacts to people, environment, or budget, such as Cheetolini's bill...

As humans with only our singular, first-person experience as a reference, we assume everyone experiences the world the exact same way we do. My red is your red, despite the color triggering emotional responses based on unique genetics and divergent experiences. My sadness feels like your sadness, irrespective of the truism that each person grieves in their own way. My conscious experience is identical to your experience with consciousness, even though there is no empirical way to test that assumption and prove either convergence or divergence.

For as far back as I can recollect, I have been fascinated by religion, by man's attempt to connect what they view as the ultimate power and the many masks those deities wielding that power wear. I had already set aside the religion of my birth due to conflicting texts and hypocrisy of both the hierarchy and followers when I became captivated by the enthralling PBS series, "Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth." It was the first time I was exposed in a systematic way to the role of religious mythologies used in societies, including the many commonalities and underlying themes in supposedly disparate religious traditions. The motif of a virgin birth, a central tenet of Christianity, has roots in the future birth of the savior Saoshyant in Zoroastrianism, the original monotheistic faith, Hinduism with Krishna, Hinduism with Ganesha and Durga, ancient Egypt with Horus, Perseus in Greek mythology, Mars in the Roman pantheon, and many other cultures and religions.

If I were forced to choose between being intelligent or exuding wisdom, I would opt for the latter. Make no mistake, I prize intelligence, love when I learn things, I can add to my knowledge database, I've been cultivating for some 64 odd years. I define it as the ability to grasp abstract concepts quickly, recall information readily, and solve problems. The problem, though, intelligence can result in poor decisions when reasoning is disconnected from deeper understanding, giving rise to the caricature of the brilliant scientist with a total lack of common sense. We see this in federal politicians who tend to be lawyers, a profession requiring enough intelligence to earn a law degree, but who routinely make horrendous decisions when proposing or passing bills into law because they cannot connect short-term decisions with longer-term consequences. A great example...

One of the funniest things I've ever seen on TV involved a neo-Nazi, white supremacist seeking to create an all white enclave in North Dakota. To be clear, I do not condone in any way, shape, or form white supremacist ideology or any other reason one can conjure to prejudge another human being. He was ranting about nonwhites being inferior and raging against what he termed the ethnic impurity when races interbreed...vile shit in general. On this show, he agreed to a DNA test to prove his own racial purity, only to discover before a live audience that he carried 14% sub-Saharan African ancestry. In the span of a few minutes, he rolled through the first three stages of grief, shock, then denial, claiming the numbers were the result of noise in the system, therefore inaccurate, soon followed by storming off the stage in anger. All the while, the laughing audience jeered loudly.

The intrepid crew members of the Star Trek Enterprise bravely signed up for a five-year mission to explore life, seek out new planets, and survive. Unbeknownst to them, it was unlikely the red shirts would explore beyond one episode, a fact that may have altered their choice to join the crew, were they informed when they enlisted. I wonder if that would have altered their choice? In the Foundation Series by Isaac Asimov, the explorers had a 1,000-year plan, meaning the original colonists would never again return to their home planet and reunite with those left behind. I took a two year contract to work and live halfway around the world in a culture virtually unknown to me...

I have dabbled with being disciplined frequently over the course of my 60-plus years and counting. By discipline, I do not refer to hiring a prostitute to dress up as a nun who paddles my pasty ass to get aroused before having my body ravaged by wild intercourse. Nope. I mean self-discipline, training myself to do something in a controlled and habitual way to achieve a goal, such as when I attended university and set aside significant swatches of time for exercise, studying, and working, ensuring I could keep pace with my chosen curriculum. I was a commuter student traveling to and fro for a few hours every day. Any available time had to be sliced and diced...

The concept of permanence with respect to humans can be interpreted in at least two different ways. One permanence implies the person in soul form, a soul which God has foreknowledge prior to existence, enters the physical realm at birth in the form of a body, exists at death to persist in an afterlife divided into a pleasant place and a not so pleasant place. The final destination is dependent upon the karma of a lived life. Good karma means...

Independence is the ability to function autonomously and make decisions for oneself, while interdependence is the state of relying on and being relied on by others, often in mutually beneficial relationships. Symbiosis is an extreme form of interdependence wherein one species cannot exist independently of another, such as with the Pronuba moth and the Yucca plant. The female Pronuba moth pollinates the Yucca flowers, which is crucial because the morphology of Yucca flowers makes self-pollination nearly impossible. In return, the moth...