Musings of a Middle Aged Man

My thirty-plus years as a soccer referee make me uniquely qualified to address this question. It was a role requiring me to be not only the judge and jury, but also the executioner when severe breaches of the Laws of the Game (LOTG) occurred. The brilliance contained in the LOTG is the unwritten law, known as Law 18, that says referees must use common sense when applying the LOTG. This allows the...

Inner peace, aka peace of mind, is generally defined as a state of psychological or spiritual calm that is maintained despite the presence of external stressors. External stressors are events or situations that originate from your environment rather than from your own internal thoughts or beliefs. Let's face it. Bad shit beyond our control happens to us. We cannot control external stressors, b...

The earliest identified purposeful burial site dates back 300,000 years ago in South Africa by our hominid ancestors, Homo Naledi, an extinct relative of Homo Sapiens, our species. The Naledi were cave dwellers with a timeline overlapping early Homo Sapiens. The Neanderthals, contemporaries of the Naledi, were buried with grave goods, including flowers. They included behaviors of covering bodies o...

There are no known organisms that live on nothing. All must engage in some sort of food consumption to sustain their lives. Predators either hunt and kill or scavenge off the deceased. Grazers mow green plants until they are nubs, then move on to greener pastures. Photosynthetic organisms, such as plants, consume light, water, and carbon dioxide to synthesize the sugars necessary for their surviva...

I grew up in the racially charged South Side of Chicago, an area with definitive lines separating white from black. Many of the families in my suburb fled the city neighborhoods in which they grew up because they feared living in an integrated neighborhood, believing they would be under siege from those "colored" people. The exodus was called white flight. It was exacerbated by unscrupul...

The belief that humans have free will is the basis for the modern laws governing crime and punishment is foundational to most, if not all, modern societies. Those that don't tend to be firmly embedded in Determinism, the belief that all events, including human actions, are determined by prior causes. Modern laws include caveats to lessen or eliminate punishment if a person is deemed either too...

The implicit implication when saying something needs to be fixed is that the thing is broken. A stick can be snapped, as can a human bone, when pressure is exerted with sufficient force. Machines can stop running because a crucial part becomes defective, taking down an entire system. Earth is a highly complex system with checks and balances, but I don't envision Earth being broken, considering...

The USA in which I grew up is but a faint mirage of the USA in which I am now living, despite my living in the same city area for nearly all of my soon-to-be 65 years on earth. Some, increased empathy, individual awareness of their rights, a growing appreciation of diversity, and less outright segregation have been for the betterment of society and individuals. Others, the resurgence of blatant di...

That someone would need to seek out the significance of silence tells me they are likely an incessant babbler compelled to fill the silence they fear with nonsensical words, the way a baby craves a favorite blankey or self soothes by sucking their thumbs. So powerful is the silence vacuum, the police frequently use silence as an interrogation technique because they know silence is a black hole voi...

There are five question renderings beginning with the letter 'W': What, when, where, why, and who. Coupled with two tiny words, 'am' and 'I', they span queries from empirical to existential. What I am, when I am, and where I am can pretty much be answered unequivocally by observation. In my case, I am a human living in 2025 Chicago. 'Why am I?' requires delving deep...

indness, a false equivalency. In this instance, presented as a false dichotomy, attempting to imply that morality and kindness exist in a causal relationship when they are, at best, tangentially related. This question presupposes morality is inherently about kindness, whereas reality is nothing more than the code of conduct a person chooses to adopt and cultivate from within themselves. Kindness i...

There was a time in my arrogant youth that I viewed art, narrowly defined as drawing and painting, as a colossal waste of time and artists as people unable to survive the rigors of a classical education focusing on maths and the hard sciences. It was an attitude probably fostered by my complete lack of ability to draw anything other than lopsided stick figures and a desire to be more like my hero,...

Humanity's fledgling mind was sharpened on the vast plains and rough steppes in the heart of Africa, long before there was a name for the elephant-headed continent, into a finely honed instrument capable of experiencing the material side of reality. The honing experienced exponential growth once they achieved hunting and gathering prowess, giving them the leisure time necessary to turn inward....

I must start off with a caveat (or two). I have two compelling emotional biases when it comes to the ethical question of depriving animals of their liberty and putting them on display for gawkers. On the other hand, I have been an avid gawker visiting zoos for the sheer joy of seeing those magnificent beings in living flesh, blood, and mind. This, despite some of those minds being turned to mush b...

There is a hidden presupposition in this question designed to skew the answer toward either of two implied outcomes. The question seeks to elicit a binary answer of either right or wrong. This tendency in challenging questions ignores the equally possible answers of maybe or irrelevant because a false dichotomy is being imposed. That presupposition encoded is that right and wrong objectively exist...

Sound waves are mechanical vibrations that travel through a medium such as solids, liquids, or gases, carrying energy as oscillations of pressure and particle displacement. Sound waves exist in a wide range of frequencies. For humans, the audible range is 20 Hz (cycles per second) up to 20 kHz. Many animals are sensitive to other frequency ranges. Elephants are sensitive to infrasound, those vibra...

Another question seeking to impose a dichotomy where none exists. It doesn't even consider there may be a middle ground where both can be true or neither reflects a truth. It makes me wonder if the question was generated by a politician attempting to deploy a self-serving law that will line their pockets with Judas Gold mined on the breaking and broken...

The dictionary defines consciousness as the state of being aware of one's existence, feelings, and surroundings. Consciousness encompasses the totality of one's thoughts, perceptions, and sensations, both internal and external. The word is often used to mean the state of being awake, not asleep, as in the ability to regain consciousness after fainting or recovering from general anesthesia....

Equality is the state of being equal in status, rights, and opportunities. It means each individual or group of people is given the same resources and opportunities regardless of their circumstances. One pertinent example is paying the same pay for males, females, or others performing the same job. So important was equality to the Founding Fathers, the Declaration of Independence includes the phra...

Another query designed to create a false dichotomy. A question designed not to derive a thoughtful answer that could fall easily on either side of an imaginary divide, but rather to elicit a response supporting the questioner's view by implying an answer. Psychology calls this a suggestive question, phrased in a way that presumes or encourages a particular answer, often employed in a manipulat...

Right or wrong is an entirely manmade concept that changes depending upon the spurious claims of religions and their ever-changing morality, or on a set of laws codified by government and is subject to a continually evolving understanding of the law's intent by the judiciary, themselves influenced by their religious affiliations. Ultimately, every person picks and chooses their moral foundatio...

Every parent of more than one child is acutely aware of the tear-filled cry of "That's not fair!" when one child has or gets something while the other doesn't. It can be as simple as one child being invited to a classmate's party while the sibling who is in a different class is not invited. Parents must make decisions for the child until they are old enough to pick and choose...

This question is anathema to minds honed on Western ideologies. A stinging bee exploding the fragile ego bubble of people who believe the world was built for humans and revolves around human needs. An arrogance so all-consuming that land, plants, and nonhuman animals were put upon the earth solely to satiate humanity's desires, irrespective of the impact on the natural world that, unironically...

Globalization, to be clear, is a process by which businesses and other organizations develop international influence or operate on an international scale. The world becomes more interconnected with economies, cultures, and populations linked by cross-border trade, technology, and the flow of goods, services, people, and ideas. In simple terms, it is the integration of countries and businesses acro...

Love, in its many splendored forms, has been a primary force in art, especially poetry and its close cousin, musical lyrics, for as long as both emerged from consciousness to express the desperate longings of humanity. Morrissey expressed it with his typical angst in his lyrics, " I am human and I need to be loved, just like everybody else does." The definition of love has as many nuance...