Alternate News Alert

In an alternate universe far away
Ruled by Princess Kellyanne Conway
Where right is wrong and wrong is right
Where night is day and day is night,
Where science is a left-wing scheme
A massacre occurred in Bowling Green

Shallow Mind

Fiorella doesn't care if Bruce Jenner gets himself emasculated.  She doesn't care if Rachel Dolezal has been passing for black.  She doesn't care if The Donald announces runs for president--although she does find that one hilarious.

What she's following are the spectacles: Mama BooBoo making an ass out of herself, and Michele and Jim Bob trying to crawl out of the giant hole they dug themselves into.

Oh, she also follows science news--if it's brief.

The Robot World

Fiorella heard on the news last night that robots are being developed which "we won't be able to tell from ourselves if we passed them in the hall."  A gaggle of people were protesting the announcement--as if that ever helped--and a suave suit reassured the television reporter that robots would cooperate with humans and open a new world of scientific and medical advancement.

Fio realizes that there's no way to stop or even slow down "progress," but she also know that advances are mixed blessings.  The computer, which was ballyhooed as the salvation of mankind, providing education and enlightenment for all, is now the greatest purveyor of porn the world has ever known.

Robots may be pure of heart and mind, but humans aren't.

Attraction

Fiorella firmly believes that like attracts like regarding not only people, but things.  If she loses one earring, for instance, all she has to do is buy new ones and the truant will reappear.

The whole idea is a variation of one of the a fundamental beliefs of magic, that one can affect something through an image of it, but Fiorella prefers to think of the exercise as fundamental physics.

The Human Question

Why are people born with talents in art and music?  Why are people driven to create stories great and small?  Why are people curious about how the universe works?  Why do people decorate themselves and everything around them?  Why do they kill each other?  Why do they perform heroic deeds of self-sacrifice?

And why does Fiorella ask questions like this rather than chomp on a tasty piece of grass out there in the meadow?

Still Deep

Cause and effect is prime to everything. It's the concept, the truism, that all the sciences, hard and soft, are based on. But there's no logical reason for the existence of predictability. We could just as well live in a totally random universe such as Fiorella encountered in her drug-addled hallucinations.

It's a matter of control--if cause and effect exists, we can predict what will happen next. If we know what will happen next, we can alter the future.

But always with the wild card of free will thrown in.

Fio's Road to Damascus

Put on your waders.  Fio is going deep.

I think she told you about the problems she had with meds after her hip operation.  The hydrocodone, which had never previously given her anything but pain relief, caused disorientation and hallucinations.  Maybe it was the strength of the pills--four times what she was accustomed to--or maybe it was the oxycontin added on top of them, but nothing made sense to her. Everything was random, everything threatening--cause and effect didn't exist.    Fiorella didn't know how to cope with a scenario like this, and she didn't want to exist in a world like this.  There was no balance, no God.

Yesterday Fio peeked back at those dark days and was overwhelmed by a wave of desolation.  Then suddenly she realized that scientific research has proved her hallucinations wrong, that everything does make sense, that all things relate, that there is order in the universe.

That there is a God.