~NuDog

Listen, Occam's Razor: the simplest solution is most often the right one. Be rational and logical rather than emotional and default to the non-thought heuristic of superstitious beliefs - humans suffer from both cognitive and logical biases we all need to recognise and mitigate within ourselves - these filter our perceptions and blind us to perceiving reality in objective terms, as do our EMOTIONS.

We stupid humans seem to have to death-grip cling to the false belief that there MUST be a cause to everything, a first mover, a reason, a justification. This desire for searching for and finding a reason, a purpose, a justification for something happening is flawed because it does not allow us to accept the FACT that most things, HAPPEN FOR NO REASON whatsoever - they just happen.

There must be a cause, but what cause caused that cause? It is turtles all the way down!

Take a page from the works of Franz Kafka and Albert Camus: life is both unjust and absurd; it is neither ordained or ashed on the forehead with either meaning or purpose, and in the zero sum of death: nothing matters. Now, this may sound cynical and defeatist but it is not, rather it is the mature, adult acceptance of the true nature of the reality of existence and also the acceptance that we have little or no power to affect any meaningful change over anything in this world, or control our lives beyond the superficial parametric decisions given to us to make every day.

The illusion of choice.

Can you stop that oil refinery in the city in Louisiana, where your family has always lived, from spewing metric tons of toxic chemicals into the air giving the population "allegedly" thirty kinds of cancer that will kill everyone: no.

Except to move. Living and dying in America...

But I digress.

The Trump assassination attempt occurred PRECISELY because of systemic failures in both procedure and human stupidity - it is just THAT SIMPLE! No grassy knoll, no magic bullet, just systemic failures in procedure due to a perfect storm of human error. Human stupidity is the genuflecting false belief in the titanically unsinkable robustness of any established procedural system in its ability not to fail - that is ignorant arrogant presumptuous assumption - also known as blind faith.

Fidelity to failure! Goose-stepping towards the future indefinite to the banal disco beat of Schlager music!

Entropy, in simplistic terms, is the study of how systems break down - involving disorder, randomness, and uncertainty. And despite the predictive brilliance of mathematics we still cannot see the future but, "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale." History is the furtive Waterloo of scorched earth battlegrounds to determine who gets to decide how we see the past in the future. Pyrrhic victories at best, our collective ship of fools broken upon the rocks sending out messages in bottles in the vain hope of rescue someday.

When in doubt, blame failure on human error or stupidity. On the rare occasion I go to McDonald's to ingest poison in the guise of food, my order - entered precisely from the big LCD ordering stations gets FKd up 50% of the time.

Do I care, no. Why bother expending the effort when I get poppy seed bagel instead of a sesame seed one. It did not ruin my day, but me making an issue of it would ruin someone else's. Why bother, why feel so undeservedly entitled to be so offended by nothing? Why create pain? Poppies, Poppies will make them sleep!

And this daily human error is demonstrative in explaining exactly why the assassination attempt occurred. Stop tilting at windmills, and chasing foolish beliefs without evidence. If McDonald's with its merciless efficiency rivalling both the Robert McNamara’s Vietnam calculus of Kill Ratios and, all the heartless, evil efficiency that led to all of those trains being sent eastward to Poland in the 1940s, and still in 2024 cannot get the type of bagel correct! We live in a world here assassinations can happen, were things happen for no reason, they just happen.

To deny this reality is to be Emperor Nero executing a slave for accidentally dropping and breaking glasses, because Nero must have believed in a world where glass did not break!

Accept the absurdity of reality; stop feeling you are justified in getting enraged at nothing that matters. You were born into the grave, you will die like all of us, and none of it will ever matter. Our existence is statistically and infinitely improbable, us achieving consciousness to, even more infinitely improbable.

At my time of life, I'd rather be happy than right. I humbly suggest everyone else do the same while actively resisting the temptation towards stupidity.

In his Letters from Prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran theologian and moral philosopher wrote his theory of stupidity, while imprisoned in a German concentration camp for his Anti-Nazi dissidence:

"Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenceless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgement simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous."

He was executed at Flossenbürg concentration camp on April 9, 1945 just before the Americans liberated the camp.

Life, is unjust and absurd. But, worth living.