I’m just not spiritual by nature – no soul, no god, no realm beyond the physical – though I believe that physical existence extends in ways we’re not close to understanding.
The true scientist, to my mind, is one who sees the world as generated, operated, and maintained by physical law, and sees this as amazing and wonderful. I find that beautiful in much the same way, I suspect, as those with a more spiritual side see the beauty of the ineffable.
Yes, I’m anti-religion – religion of any sort – but could it be I’m promoting science as a religion? I hope not. I think of science as a continual unfolding – then again, that may be how many religious see their form of the “truth.”
So: All that we encounter in existence can be fully explained by scientific law, there is nothing more, and the final “why” can never be answered only because the final question lies outside what is being questioned, which in this case is all reality. There is no “spiritual” side whatsoever unless you personally define it as such.
If clairvoyance and similar experiences are “real,” then they have a mechanical base. What’s taken as “spiritual” is still subject to the laws of physics as we either know them or will discover them. If there’s something out there that travels from mind to mind, or circumstance to mind, then at some point it will be uncovered, defined, and explained.
I don’t know if you followed the hooha about the discovery of Higgs boson a few years ago, but it filled in a hole in the basic outline of fundamental physics. That is, it was predicted but had escaped every former attempt at discovery. Most reports covering its discovery didn’t mention that it actually proved the existence of the Higgs field, which is supposedly responsible for the existence of mass in matter (I have no real understanding of what that actually means). So might there also be a “spiritual field” that will be discovered and quantified? I don’t think so, personally, but it’s conceivable.
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What people are willing to pay for makes no sense. Some asshole spent 2.2 million to buy a pair of discontinued Michael Jordan sneakers. Proving, again, that having money is in no way correlated with having brains.
There were hits recently on Roy Lichtenstein for appropriating comic-book art, for which the original inker was paid sub-minimum wage, while Lichtenstein got $65m for his ripoff.
I always did think pop art was a scam, and the idea that Any Warhol got something like $145 million for a piece of his Marilyn Monroe crap – higher than anything paid for a Picasso?
I’m not personally a big Picasso fan (except for his blue period, which almost everyone else pretty much ignores), but he obviously changed the face of art. Warhol copied Campbell’s soup boxes. That didn’t even change the flavor of Campbell’s soup.
But I find it pretty funny that some dumbass Arab sheik payed half a billion for a student copy of Leonardo’s lost (or never completed) Salvator Mundi. All you had to do was look at the hands in the painting. When did Leonardo ever paint such limp, lifeless hands?
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I don’t think I’ve ever seen a drag show (live or online), don’t particularly recall being around any place that held one.
So my first question: When did drag grow beyond a niche form of entertainment?
Second question: When did drag performers start reading books to kids at story hours – and why?
I’m not complaining or worried about anyone’s morals, just don’t understand how drag came to move in such directions and seemingly rapidly. Maybe as an analogy to clown shows or minstrel shows or musical comedy?
But of course the real question is: Why are rightwingers, especially half-assed politicians, scared shitless of drag? Do they really find their own lives so precarious that the mere sight of a man in lingerie and high heels terrifies something deep in their souls?
Poor bastards.
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Odd that I’ve always hated brushing my teeth and almost never floss because flossing somehow disgusts me, yet I’m not much bothered by needles and actively enjoyed being awake while stents were wormed through my veins – a process that would drive most people holy flaming M-A-A-D.
There’s little prediction of and absolutely no “meaning” to the eccentricities that pervade each human life.
lickhaven 