Why do I do this?

Yesterday I was working on several documents on my computer and so there were several windows open as I shifted my attention from one to another. The overlapping open windows were scattered across the screen so that I could make any one of them ‘live’ by just clicking on it. I noticed at one point that if the document I was going to work on was at the right end of the screen, I would first move it to the left end before working on it.
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A pacifist minister on how the antifa saved him from a beating

I ruminated recently on how the issue of violence has got more problematic recently with neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and religious extremists using the language of violence to incite their followers. The group that has come to be known as ‘antifa’ consist of anonymous people, sometimes dressed in black, who have arrived ready to combat these groups with violence if necessary and have become part of counter-protests that have sometimes turned violent. The people on the left have been ambivalent about how to deal with the antifa, some seeing them as allies in the cause though not agreeing with the tactics they adopt.
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The US media love to hype US government war threats

One thing the US media loves to do is hype the threat of wars, even highly dangerous ones with the potential use of nuclear weapons such as in the long-standing dispute between North Korea and the US. I am not accusing them of actually wanting to see the outbreak of nuclear war because that would be truly insane but they tend to talk of the situation as one of being on the brink of such a war with no solution in sight, even though there has been one for a long time.
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That’s a good apology, even if insincere

Louise Linton, the wife of Steve Mnuchin, Donald Trump’s secretary of the treasury who is a former investment banker at Goldman Sachs and immensely wealthy, came in for some well-deserved and harsh criticisms for the flaunting of her wealth while emerging from a government helicopter, because of her drawing attention to the brand names of the expensive clothing items she wore as if she were a paid spokesperson for them. She then lashed out at an Oregon woman who had the temerity to criticize her for it, replying thusly on her Instagram account.
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What makes a person do something like this?

The Trump presidency has seen a rise in bigotry as white nationalists and neo-Nazis come out into the open to ‘take back their country’ from those whom they see as not authentic Americans, by which they mean white people and not the indigenous ones that the whites systematically sought to exterminate. Hence news reports such as this one back in February about Andrew King, a resident of Schenectady, NY, have become all too common.
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How psychics and mediums ply their trade

I recently had two separate interesting discussions with some other expatriate Sri Lankan friends who did not know each other. Each independently recounted their experiences with what is called a ‘light reader’ in Sri Lanka or a psychic or a medium in the US. They both talked about the same person named Hendo Hamy who lived in a village. People would go to him with various problems and he would be able to deduce why they had come to see him, what the problem was, and the resolution of the problem. Both were highly impressed by his abilities.
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Believers might be better served by NOT trying to prove god’s existence

Although he was born into a god-fearing family and had a typical Christian upbringing, the philosopher David Hume began to have doubts about god as early as in his teenage years, and throughout his adult life was very much a skeptic. I will later provide a review of the book The Infidel and the Professor by Dennis C. Rasmussen that is an intellectual biography of the friendship between David Hume and Adam Smith, but I wanted to pass along this passage that I just read that made me laugh out loud.
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