This post includes links to great podcasts. I encourage you to follow the links to the podcasts. They are much more informative than anything I have to say about them. ------------------- As COVID deaths in the US exceed 700,000, I continue my search for the source of widespread stupidity. To state the obvious, stupidity sells. I encountered  this  CBC podcast on the subject of "Conspirituality" - lovely term embracing the dog's breakfast of ideas promoted for commercial reasons that treat "mainstream" health measures (such as vaccines) as a kind of conspiracy against the individual who, instead, should be buying magic crystals, retaining semen or following some arcane practice rather than submitting to the awkward fact that good intentions and independent thinking will not save you from having a more or less run of the mill body and life. Another lovely term from this podcast is "privatized religion". This refers to the fact that anybody with a measur...

Jacob Chansley (with The Horns) Got 41 Months in Prison Totally Repudiated Q-Anon Etc It is a total mystery why some people refuse to get vaccinated or why an entire political party seems to be living in an alternate reality. As I write, thousands of health care workers in New York have refused to get the first jab in order to go back to work. And the "audits" keep coming. What the f*k is going on? To understand human behavior, you must stand back. Compassion must always be the starting point. There, but for the grace of God, go I. Through long effort, I reduced my own FI (f*g idiot) score from 9 (MAGA hat) to 5 (seriously confused). Along the way, I have had bizarre ideas about "reality" and acted on them. Sometimes with tragic results. Anti-vaxxers don't have a monopoly on stupidity. When I was about 5 years old, I grew skeptical of the stories everyone seemed to believe about some fat guy at the North Pole delivering presents for all the children of the world...