Chick-fil-A Backing Up to the Pay Table

When Chick-fil-A (CFA) stood up for Christian values and stood up to the secular and democratic socialist governments, social justice warriors and LGBT groups, CFA was my hero. Things have changed--they caved to the dollar!

Nope, I'm not religious, certainly not anti-gay, and not opposed to singe-sex marriages, although I do have my doubts about how the whole transgender thing is supposed to work, I am strongly opposed to abortions, and I think the whole social justice thing is silly. No, I just believe that we all have the right to live all aspects of our lives according to our own values as long as they don't actively interfere with the rights of others and I have great respect for small and large companies that operate according to an unerring set of announced values that involve morality and ethics in addition to "maximizing profits." CFA started out as one of those companies then the pressure from LGBTQ groups and secular European governments won out.

Ceasing donations to Christian groups like the Salvation Army and donating to groups that practice non-Christian values is not necessarily "bad" depending on your perspective. What is bad is trying to appease both sides with a deceiving compromise attempt. I predict that the LGBTQ community, for the most part, will continue to boycott CFA and that practicing Christians will quietly satisfy their chicken cravings elsewhere. And CFA's bottom line will continue to grow as they expand into markets that don't give a hoot one way or the other.

Anyway, I'm disappointed. There are very few heroes left. Full disclosure: I've never been to a Chick-fil-A.

Consciousness

The human realization that we are self-aware has
plagued humans ever since they became, well, conscious. Humans realize that we
realize. Why? One answer, more scientific and mechanical than philosophical or
epistemological, is simply because all the elements that make up our brains
talk to each other, thus creating the mind. And the mind is conscious. It's a
neuronal thing according to Francis Crick in his book, Astonishing
Hypothesis. This explains nothing regarding how and why we are conscious.
It only verifies that our brains are made up of various and many tiny things
that in combination allow our brains, and by reference, us, to know stuff.

Another proposed solution is a philosophical one: that
we simply aren't smart enough to ever understand our minds (Christof Koch, The
Feeling of Life Itself). Seems to me that that begs the question unless
one believes that the evidence that we don't understand our minds IS the
evidence that we don't understand our minds.

One that truly baffles me is a book by Donald D.
Hoffman titled The Case Against Reality. Basically we all are in a
computer game that hides (protects?) us from reality--on purpose. Sort of like,
"You couldn't handle the truth." What we perceive to be real, really
isn't. And then, somehow, this all relates to "fitness". This is
justified reasoning because Kant and Plato suggested something similar a very
long time ago. And we all know that if ancients thought it, it must be true.

Michael S.A. Graziano’s book Rethinking
Consciousness is on target to be even more silly than Hoffman's. The idea
in his "attention schema theory" is that when we (pay attention, we
model the world. This supposedly occurred some 350 million years ago.

There are many more more reasonable theories of
consciousness that also don't answer the question, "How do we know that we
know?" It's a hot topic within the scientific community looking for an
atheistical answer that maybe can only be answered by God.

(I would also be interested in researching a bit into
whether other living things might also have a degree of consciousness and what
the possibilities are for consciousness in machines.)

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman

Lieutenant Colonel Vindman reportedly stated during closed-door testimony before a congressional committee that he was "concerned" or "disturbed" by the content of President Trump's phone call with the Ukrainian president. To hold such an opinion is his right, to voice it is beyond presumptuousness and militarily inappropriate, possibly even a violation of the Article 88 of the Uniformed Code of Military Justice (UCMJ): "Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Transportation, or the Governor or legislature of any State, Territory, Commonwealth, or possession in which he is on duty or present shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.”

I retired as a Lieutenant Colonel from the U.S. Army after many years of active service having risen through the enlisted ranks. I can say without a doubt that to verbally disagree with the Commander and Chief of the United States Armed Forces on matters pertaining to foreign policy, a presidential prerogative in accordance with the nation's constitution, would in my time have resulted in the perpetrator facing a General Courts-Martial. Not sure, however, that expressing an opinion that a president was wrong would be found by the court to be "contemptuous". I guess an implication of contemptuousness could be argued successfully.

For the sake of the uniform and Lieutenant Colonel Vindman's years of honorable service, I only hope that the transcript of his testimony shows that he was not presuming to question the rightness of the President's private discussion with a foreign leader. For to do so would be to express a lack of respect.