Send Covid masks to India NOW

New cases of COVID-19 are exploding in India, and there isn’t any way to prevent everyone there from being exposed. There are not enough Covid vaccines available to vaccinate over a billion people in India, and it will be months before enough vaccines will be manufactured even to become available. The medical facilities are already running out of oxygen to treat infected people. What is available won’t come close to serving the huge numbers of people who will soon be infected and need oxygen to keep them alive. What is the obvious solution?

Good quality face masks are the one proven thing that is available and can be delivered to all of those people in a few days. Large quantities of face masks already exist around the world. India probably does have face masks right now, but not nearly enough to cope with the coming surge in cases. American adults who have already had the Covid vaccine shots and have extra face masks will no longer be needing them and could give those masks to people in India who desperately need them. There are commercial airplane flights to India from US airports that take less than 24 hours to make the trip, and we could fly many masks to India before the surge peaks. The masks are available here, but they don’t become effective until the moment they are worn over there. Sufficient Covid vaccines are not available in India. They don’t become effective for two weeks or more and not fully effective for a month until after the second shot. Even if a person gets the Covid vaccine shot today, it won’t be fully effective until the present Covid surge has grown to horrible dimensions.

Masks now sitting unneeded here in the US today could be on people’s faces tomorrow in India. The collection of them and the distribution of them is only a question of American people doing it. That problem is easily resolved by people in the media presenting the problem and the solution to the public. 

The US government could purchase the existing supply of masks and ship them immediately to the government in India. The people of America could take their unused masks to the Covid vaccine distribution centers where the communications are already in place distributing Covid vaccines and send the masks back through those communication lines. 

Even easier, an individual could take their unused masks and send them through existing mail to hospitals in India. Here is the Google search for Hospitals in India. 

You could have the satisfaction of sending your masks to specific places and actually see pictures of people wearing the masks you gave them.

Covid Log Chart March 5, 2021, with projections!

Look at the top thick blue line of total world cases posted every five days here on Probaway. Since April 1, 2020, it has been curving slightly downward, and that’s good. However, look at the thick black line of world deaths; it has been very straight since April, and that is very bad. It represents moving from 239,514 deaths to 2,592,128 in ten months, and that looks like it will rise to 3,000,000 by April 15, 2021.

Here in the US there will be about 70% vaccinations by July 30, 2021, and that should slow the pandemic, but it won’t totally eliminate it even here because many people will refuse the shot. Also, the Texas governor has removed all restrictions on the public restrictions. Unfortunately, most people of the world won’t even get the chance to have the vaccine while the pandemic still rages. By the time it reaches its natural ending and becomes an annual event like the common cold, the vaccine might become available, but will cost real money and won’t be given to everyone worldwide.

The good news is that the scientists working on these types of pandemics are getting the experience to suppress new diseases quickly. If a similar disease to Covid arose in a year, it might be suppressed by surrounding the infected people with vaccinated people, and those moving from one country to another, by airplane, or ship, or crossing a border would be vaccinated while traveling. Also, as most people now have cellphones, those traveling could be monitored for two weeks for symptoms, and when they appeared their trail of travel could be vaccinated.

Never do anything for the first time.

Tags

Arctic survival

I just finished reading Neil Shubin’s book The Universe Within, Discovering the Common History of Rocks, Planets, and People.

When beginning my second reading, on page 7, a statement leaped out at me and clicked!

Never do anything for the first time.

“I learned plenty of lessons that first year in Greenland, ones that were to become useful when I began running my own Arctic expeditions eleven years later. By bringing leaky leather boots, a small used tent, and a huge flashlight to the land of mud, ice, and the midnight sun, I made so many bad choices that first year that I remained smiling only by reciting my own motto, ‘Never do anything for the first time.'”

That sentence which I read a few days ago had been forgotten until, when reading it again, it took on a much deeper meaning for me.

I feel like everything I do is being done for the first time, and it is to be expected that a new thing won’t work properly in the first embodiment. Whatever it is that I’m doing is not right from the beginning and must be reworked.

For example, the Covid face mask based on a 1.75-liter plastic bottle has been modified at least a hundred times with significant improvements. They were tiny improvements but significant. And, usually, each improvement is overwritten with a slightly better solution and that one is reworked too.

I am not a perfectionist! I just want things to work well enough for a first-time user to get the expected results.

On deconstructing this concept, it became obvious that to get something to work right requires experience with the component actions. Any new thing will require some learning, and if it’s a totally new thing, that means learning a new set of skills. And then weaving these sometimes contradictory skills into a functioning pattern of habits. Then when the totally new thing is worked on, it is with similar skills to what you have already developed, and the task isn’t totally new.

All of this is obvious when it is picked apart, so when you are aware that you are beginning something new, you should discover the separate skills needed and get experience using the equipment to be used in the wilderness, where there is no backup, in similar situations where a problem is easily rectified.

When Shubin was dropped off an airplane for a few weeks in the high Arctic wilderness to do archeology, he was wearing leaky boots and was trying to sleep in a cheap second-hand tent in 24-hour sunlight. It didn’t work out well.

“Be prepared!” is the Boy Scout motto, but being prepared means having a good idea of the problems that will be encountered and having the right equipment and the well-practiced skills to use it properly.

Getting things right the first time requires preparation.

The survival kit #10 for COVID-19 – Covid – Coronavirus = How to cure Covid..

Tags

Coronavirus, Covid, COVID-19, How to cure Coronavirus, How to cure Covid, The survival kit

Every responsible medical site says the same thing … There is no cure for COVID-19. They then go on with the same litany of what you should do, such as drink plenty of water (that should include a teaspoon of salt, nine teaspoons of sugar per quart), get plenty of rest (avoid other people while resting), seek medical help if you are having trouble breathing (that is, the disease has gotten to your lungs and your risk of dying is high).

Hasn’t medical science advanced one bit in a hundred years? That advice isn’t substantially different from what my grandmother would have told me about the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, back in 1939 when I had a cold. That epidemic killed between 17 and 100 million people of a world population of 1,900 million, or as much as 1 in 19 people. Back then we didn’t have the massive tourist mixing of people worldwide as we do now, at least not the swift mixing provided by jet airplanes.

Here are some personal preventatives that might work, and the whys.

For a couple of days, while you are healthy, check your under-the-tongue temperature every hour and write those numbers down so you will quickly know when you are getting a fever. If you are up a degree and feeling a bit sick in the nose, immediately take a warm bath and raise your body temperature to 101.0°F for five minutes and then get out of the tub and cool off normally. The intention of this voluntary fever is to cooperate with your body’s fever mechanism, which is its method for warning your disease-fighting mechanisms to get to work. If in a couple of days you are still mildly sick, in the nose, do the warm bath two times per day for several more days, until you are sure you are okay.

Covid-19 usually begins in the nose, probably in the nostrils, because that is where contact is most frequently made between a person’s fingers and their mucus membranes. Therefore, mentally practice not touching your nose. Think about your nose itching and then resisting and not touching your face and especially your nose. Meditators think about their breathing and all sorts of other physical bodily stuff and this practice might save their lives and yours.

Put capsaicin on your fingertips. It is an over-the-counter arthritis topical analgesic available at drug stores. When you touch your nose, lips, and eyelids with these capsaicin-laden fingers, it will burn for a while and remind you not to do that.

When Covid-19 is in your community, tie a string around your wrists and attach it to your stomach belt. That will mechanically prevent you from touching your nose, lips, and eyelids.

Here are some cures that might work, and the whys.

Covid-19 is mild when it is confined to the nose, and if it remains there it may not be noticed by the infected person, and they would develop an immunity. But even in the mild stage, it can unknowingly be transmitted to other people. If the virus doesn’t move to the throat and down to the lungs, the person will probably develop resistance to further infections from that disease. But, if the virus establishes itself in the lungs, death is a real possibility.

Make every effort to prevent the Covid-19 from moving from the nose to the lungs. If you can do that for a week, in a month you will probably get well and because of your Covid resistance, you will be a perfect person to volunteer to help those people who are desperately sick.

When you have some snot in your nose and sinuses, blow-out and absolutely don’t snort-in. Sometimes snort is called sniff or sniffle. When you suck in snot and swallow it, as many males do, and few females do, it is pulling some of the Covid-19 viruses into the throat and possibly the lungs. Also, don’t snort in snot and spit it out into public places, because that spit is contagious for a while. Put sick spit where it belongs, in the toilet or down the sink.

While the Covid-19 is confined to the nose and sinuses, it might be impeded from going into the throat and lungs. Use a mouth rinse frequently such as Listerine, Cepacol, Aesop, Peroxyl, or CloSYS. Perhaps taking a half-teaspoon of whiskey straight every half hour, while sick, and holding it in the mouth as long as possible would help. It might impede the disease. I don’t imply more than an ounce or two of whiskey per day, as that would probably be counter-productive.

Using a nose gel such as NasoGEL helps create a flow of mucus out of the nasal passages and sinus, but the fluids might go down the throat as easily as out the nose. Be careful to get the snot out not in.

When you are sick in bed it is probably best not to lie on your back because that makes it easier for fluids to flow into the lungs. It is better to lie on one’s left side or face down with a pillow arranged to make these positions comfortable.

Cultivate the ability to do a deep throat slow vibration huffing sound to help pull stuff up and out of the lungs.

I speculate that these suggestions will help, and it’s better than what is being suggested elsewhere.

 

 

What is your personal responsibility to humanity?

Tags

humanities survival, Personal responsibility

I don’t remember ever thinking about my responsibility to humanity before becoming responsible for H-bombs. My thoughts while in US Air Force flight school were about attending to what I was required to learn and do. The issues were when on duty to perform as well as possible and to relax when off duty in a way that would improve our performance when on duty. The personal goal was to graduate from flight school, and secondarily to graduate as high as possible within our class because the higher we scored the more choice we had as to the kinds of airplanes we would fly. I graduated at the top of my class in everything and that was seventy percent of our total score. Unfortunately, I didn’t display the kind of military enthusiasm expected of me and was rated poorest on that measured quality, and therefore instead of being at first choice for assignments I was sixth out of the local portion of our entire class. That was about one-hundred graduating pilots.

An aside comment, on our first day introductory at flight school, while still in an auditorium with the whole Air Force Class 1959H, the introductory speaker said, “Look around, half of you won’t make it through flight school!”

Charles Scamahorn in 1959 when jet pilot in USAF.

I did graduate near the top of my class, but as it turned out I lost my bet to become a fighter pilot because there were only five fighter assignments, and I was sixth in my class and pushed into the bottom of the assignment choice list into B-47 bombers. And that is where this story really begins. Because with this assignment, instead of defending our country and our government against all enemies, foreign and domestic, I was to fly around with H-bombs and threaten the whole world with extermination.

For me, the question then became, “What is my personal responsibility to humanity?” My life goal wasn’t, and still isn’t, to destroy humanity; it was to be a law-abiding citizen and defend my country. But the problem was that if I performed my job perfectly, it would bring the end of civilization, and possibly all humanity. My action would precipitate our enemies to retaliate with everything they had, and of course, we would retaliate with everything we had too. That was the United States’ plan and official Air Force policy. It was aptly named Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).

Here is the current state of MADNESS from Wikipedia, The current list of states with nuclear weapons: “From a high of 70,300 active weapons in 1986, as of 2019, there are approximately 3,750 active nuclear warheads and 13,890 total nuclear warheads in the world. Many of the decommissioned weapons were simply stored or partially dismantled, not destroyed”

This problem came up for me because I began talking about Charles Galton Darwin’s book, “The Next Million Years.”

 

Significant places that formed my personality.

Tags

Life and death experiences, Traumatic events

One of my friends challenged me and a few others present to list the significant places in our lives that had a transforming effect on our behavior. It was a serious question and meant to be taken seriously, and I have been thinking seriously about what those places were for me.

First I’ll list the things that came to mind. Traumatic things where I was compelled by the personal situation to make a decision came first. In historical order: About age two, when I was barely walking, I remember being in a department store and being separated out of sight from my mother for what was probably less than a few seconds and realizing at that moment how important she was to me. A second moral event was coming out of my apartment house and seeing two of my buddies beating up on another of my friends. I asked why, and they replied, in all seriousness, “Because he lives next door.” That has puzzled me for years. A third thing happened when I was five and on a teeter-totter, during school recess in Homedale, Idaho; my friend told me to grip the board from the back edge, and then he stepped off of his end when he was at ground level and I was several feet off the ground. As I came down I caught my body weight with my legs, but having a grip on the board at the back meant my fingers were bashed against the ground. I still have the scars eighty years later. There are lots of those kinds of events and I suppose they made an impact that isn’t as visible to me as those scars.

When I was a sophomore at WSC in Pullman, Washington, I went to a dance over in Potlatch, Idaho. I drove over expecting a big party but there were some thirty guys and only a couple of girls. I listened to the song “Live hard, love hard, die young, and leave a beautiful memory,” and I sang that song while driving back to Pullman thinking, what would happen if I drove fast and got killed … would my friends remember me fondly, as in the song? The way I remember that moment now, “Hey, did you hear Chuck wrecked his car and got killed last night? … No, too bad. … What’s for breakfast.” Because of that moment, age eighteen, driving back and thinking ahead about the consequences of senseless risky actions, I have probably backed off at some moments and avoided some serious incidents.

The flip side of my response of that event was a review of my pilot performance by an Air Force check pilot. I had been a student flying T-28s for five months and was about to move on to T-33 jets in a week. I was assigned to Captain Chard, who had just failed seven of my classmates, and my buddies, said, “Goodbye, Charlie!” I went out to the assigned plane and did a preflight inspection, but Captain Chard wasn’t there so I snuggled up to a wheel with my parachute and dozed off. After a while, I felt the plane jiggling, looked around and saw this guy trying to rip the propeller off the plane. He had a captain’s insignia on his shoulders, so I assumed it was Captain Chard. Then he tried to rip the ailerons off, but no luck, so he went back to the more delicate tail control surfaces and tried to rip them off. Seriously, he tried to rip them off.

“Did you preflight this airplane?” “Yes, sir.” “Take me up to ten thousand feet.” Not another word was spoken and in a few minutes, I was at 10,000 feet over Cape Girardeau, Missouri, on the Mississippi River. “Put your head between your knees.” “What?” “Put your head between your knees!” “What??” “Put your head between your knees!!!” I did, and immediately he pulled back on the stick and with the G forces I was pinned into that crouch. He wrenched the plane around into a vertical rotating straight down dive, and I was able to sit up and watch the world spinning around, and the airspeed indicator move right on past the red line for top speed allowed for this airplane.

Down we went and up went the airspeed and soon we were a hundred miles per hour over the red line, and Captain Chard, screams something like, “Oh, shit, the wings are coming off, you got it!” At this point, my former classmates were probably getting a bit nervous. Anyway, I straightened up the plane, zoomed back up to a higher altitude, did the crash landing procedures, and picked out a likely place to land, gear up. That was the gear position for a crash landing for this plane, to keep the center of gravity as low as possible.

Air Force policy was for the command pilot to call out, “I’ve got the airplane,” and for the student to give the control of the airplane over to him. However, Captain Chard didn’t say anything, and soon I was holding the plane a couple of feet above the ground while the airspeed fell away. We probably had about five seconds before the plane would have landed on its belly when I pushed in the power. Captain Chard then yelled obscenities at me about how he was in charge of when we were to head back up. That went on until we were a hundred feet above the ground and then he stopped.

I assumed I had failed as had my classmates and said, “Captain Chard, if you want to come out here and crash land this airplane, do it without me in it.” “You’re done! Take me home.”

I passed. And he failed several more of my buddies. They did get another second chance with a second test pilot.

I learned that I could face death and still think.

An obvious invention for olive oil stability

The Monday afternoon group challenged me seven weeks ago to invent something every day. They probably thought I would be stymied by the next week’s meeting to come up with anything, and they would have a quiet little laugh at my expense. Unfortunately for them, I have been presenting them with seven new inventions every week, and they are quite bored with the game.

Anyway, … the centenarian crowd has convinced me that olive oil is a good ingredient for long life and for what is now called healthspan. On page 101 of Borrowed Time by Sue Armstrong, there is a report on the recent findings on healthspan compared to lifespan:

“Thus, on average, the proportion of their lives spent with serious incapacity was 9.4 percent for those who died in the late nineties; 9 percent for those who died between the ages of 100 and 104 years; 8.9 percent among those who died aged 105-109; and only 5.2 percent for the oldest old, those who died between the ages of 110 and 119. In fact, 10 of the 104 supercentenarians escaped serious disease right up until the last three months of their lives. By contrast, the controls whose lifespans were not considered exceptional suffered chronic ill health on average for 17.9 percent of their lives.”

It is common knowledge that olive oil, a significant component of the Mediterranean diet, is associated with living to be 100 years old. Since I am now eighty-three and three-quarters years old it is time to pay attention to my health and stop flying Air Force jets around, and hanging around the center of Berkeley radical activists and being pursued out of third story windows by police. Now my physical problem is avoiding the crazy activities of old people here in Bend, Oregon. Mountain bike riding, which brought a friend huge bruises on his chest; riding bikes on winter ice which brought on a dislocated shoulder and elbow; canoeing down a river rapid which led to serious bruises and the death of the other occupant; … skateboarding through traffic, freestyle-rock-climbing Smith Rock, looping an airplane starting at ground level which didn’t work out well at all. I didn’t do that back when I was flying T-28s, but did do some nearly as risky stuff, and many more such things I don’t do anymore. So, now I’m moving on to an olive oil-enriched diet.

It turns out to be important that the olive oil is kept fresh to maintain its effectiveness for generating centenarians. Part of the maintenance in storage and in the retail sales bottle is keeping the olive oil in total darkness. Apparently, even a little direct sunlight on a bottle of olive oil begins its life of ruin.

So what’s my problem? The olive oil is sold in bottles. The bottles are made of glass and glass is transparent to light. Therefore, the olive oil industry packages their olive oil in dark green bottles which will cut down the intensity of the light hitting the olive oil and apparently helps to ease the rate of deterioration. That’s probably okay, but a further fix would bring the olive oil into near total darkness and would cost nothing whatsoever except for the artwork on the label and reprinting the labels.

Print wraparound labels made of the kind of metallic coating found on almost every packaged item these days. I have held some of these up to the sun, and they are perfectly opaque. Wrapping the olive oil bottles all the way around the bottle the way some other products are already being treated would solve the problem. A small vertical opening between the edges of the wrapping could be left so the height of the contents could be seen. A shoulder cap could be added to the top of the bottle, for further protection, and it would look cute.

This post is proof I can get a long story out of almost nothing.

The next hundred years as C G Darwin might see it.

In the book The Next Million Years, Charles Galton Darwin explores the basic drivers of the species we know as Homo sapiens … us. On page 151 there are three principles listed: 1. Our species obeys the laws of natural selection and thus we will change slowly in a million years. 2. We are not domesticated animals but obey the laws of wild animals. 3. We do not inherit the wisdom of our forefathers but must learn our own wisdom. In 1952 there wasn’t any directed genetic manipulation but now we have GMO (genetically modified organisms). Thus, #1 is no longer applicable even in the short run. And regarding #2, as the human DNA becomes manipulated, the possibility and long term likelihood is that our species will become as domesticated as our tame animals have been. #3, We may not inherit our ancestors’ wisdom, but because of high tech information transfer, it becomes possible to have deep wisdom much more easily if we choose to that. We already live in the early stages of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and once that is stabilized for a few decades people will love it. Well, not people as we know them, but people who have been genetically perfected.

However, before basic drivers become operable, there are changes in our current human world that in many ways will revert to earlier conditions. A primary change will be in our access to physical energy. We presently get almost all the energy supplies that make our way of life possible directly, or indirectly, from coal and oil. Human population has grown from about half a billion people in 1625 to about eight billion in 2025. That is sixteen times more people alive today than when public buildings like the Vatican in Rome were already a hundred years old. When humans learned how to gather energy from natural sources like wind, then coal, and then oil, falling water, and uranium, it became possible to grow more food. A large proportion of all those forms of energy ends up being transformed into the energy in our food. That is fine and works quite well for us, but it is being consumed, there is a limited supply of it, and when it runs out it is gone forever. We will have vast amounts of energy from wind farms and solar panels, but not nearly as much as we now get in a usable form from coal and oil. We can create energy to run cars, airplanes, and tractors, and create fertilizers, but it will cost a lot more money and human effort. Much of that will be supplied by artificial means such as robots; all the same, we humans will continue to need food.

C G Darwin maintains that ultimately human population will expand to the limits of its food supply. When that limit is reached there will be a starving margin of people who because of excess reproduction will consist of a class of people who are just barely surviving when society is thriving but who actually starve to death when there is some kind of problem. When there is bad weather creating a bad harvest, or a war, or a popular new creedal system coming into being, the marginal people will starve to death. That is the natural state of all species in the long run, but in the short run that applies nearly all the time, these people will get by living at a subsistence level.

Notice in the population chart below that the world population usually took a thousand years to double, even though the total number of people was quite small. However, the massive world population present today is doubling in fifty years because we have learned to exploit the one-time-use fossil fuels. Because the land has been so overused, when the fossil energy runs out, the population may quickly drop back to 1CE levels.

World Population history estimates from 70,000 years ago until 2025.

The world population took off when the stored power of the earth became available for creating food but that fossil energy is almost gone.

Out of contact with reality.

Tags

Berkeley now seems sane., I'm crazy. My friends are crazy. Everyone in Bend is crazy.

It seems that everyone I observe is out of contact with reality. Perhaps I’m the worst! There was a saying even when I was a child, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” How right they were and I knew it from the beginning. I had numerous opportunities to make big money, but it always seemed like a distraction. To be a commercial airline pilot would have been a top-dollar job, and with my Air Force pilot training all I had to do to get that job was say … yes. But after flying cool airplanes I didn’t want to be a bus driver in the sky. I could have kept my job as a college teacher, and probably moved up the salary scale, but one of my lunch companions who was older and teaching different but similar subjects was bored stiff. I didn’t want to go where he was and moved on. Then I had a business in downtown San Francisco and knew some of the right people, but that wasn’t for me either. A few of my 1960s buddies became wealthy in the tech world, and a few famous too. Nah.

And much more. As I look back on it my problem was that my interests were too esoteric. Who would waste years trying to save the world from the H-bomb, or years trying to be unquestionably peaceful in my affiliations with the Unitarian folks and Channing Club? Ah yes, in the radical 60s the goal was peace, and almost all the protesters were amazingly peaceful even in riots. I did have my run-ins with the Berkeley police, but after my various associations with the City Council, the Chief of Police actually had the political pull to get me into Boalt Hall law school and a political career. I don’t think I could have handled that, but the opportunity was there to get started if I had said yes.

I spent a huge amount of time pursuing Sir Francis Drake’s relationship with the West coast which led to the Drake Plate of Brass hoax. After I figured out that the hoax was perpetrated by Conan Doyle it precipitated a couple of years of successful pursuit of his many other crimes. That was engaging of my mental facilities. Pursuing the most famous writer of all time—he has more movies and TV shows of his works by far than Shakespeare—gave me opportunities for intellectual fun that no other human has ever experienced. I have fond memories of several ah-ha moments … the exact time and place, and the instant realization that I was right about some peculiar thing. That is how I used my time and life.

Among the people I know, some this morning were talking about their near-death experiences mountain climbing, climbing vertical sheets of ice hundreds of feet up, surfing in dangerous waves, others whose children have followed in their path and were repeatedly so badly injured that they were unconscious for over a month. Here in Bend, there are lots of people into extreme sports, and other bizarre things too. It appears to me that if you are not doing something appallingly dangerous or stupid you are not considered as living. Mention someplace, anyplace in the world, while in a group and someone will instantly pipe up with the incredibly dangerous experience they had there.

Of course, I’m the stupid one because if I made money I could have done those things too.

We kick truth around again.

Tags

Should I trust old or new religions?, Survival of self, truth, What is Truth?, Who can you trust?

We had eleven people at tonight’s Socrates Cafe meeting and the chosen subject was; How do we know what is true? Most of the basic things were covered so I will mention only a few that were not quite so basic.

Truth is a word and like all words, it only means what it means in the context of its usage in the current context. Only physical reality of some sort is amenable to scientific style testing, and those kinds of things are available to our senses, which includes real-world extensions of our senses like telescopes. Those things that are wholly within our minds are not directly accessible to external observation although things going on inside of our brains are the essence of our personal reality. What is going on in other people’s minds can never be known accurately to us outside observers. We can only have a partial understanding of what it is they are trying to communicate to us, and so we will inevitably be partially misunderstanding what they say. Their mental truth is forever internal and directly unknowable by us, and thus the statements we hear from others are potentially nonsense.

Our personal truth is inevitably filtered through our need to support our previous conceptions of reality. Because there isn’t the rigor of the scientific feedback system in place in our minds, it is inevitable that there will be misconceptions and thus inappropriate reactions to our own real-world situations. I proposed to J that if we have another SAC meeting where we play the “Question Game” my question will be; What do I believe that is clearly untrue? Really, false!” The basic rule of that game is that each person writes down a question, and when their turn comes reads it out loud. Then the other participants are limited to asking questions and only the subject gives declarative statements. The people who submitted to this game claimed they got real help from the inquisition.

One idea came up that was simple but intrigued me. Would you rather fly in a Boeing 777 that was built and operated by experts or fly in a homebuilt airplane operated by an amateur pilot? The answer, if you value your life, is to choose the 777. Now, apply that same logic to religion. Would you rather place your faith in the trustworthiness of an old and reality-tested religion operated by people with years of professional training or place your life with a local guy who created his own religion and has only his own personal experience for guiding you?

Our trust must always come back to the filters of our personal experience.