Are you speaking of pleasure? — intrapersona

Not primarily. Though, getting out of a cold, raw wind is a real pleasure. No, more like love, warmth, good routines, giving, receiving, comfort, nurture... Being taken care of when you are sick isn't a "pleasure", it's a comfort. Getting rid of a bad headache isn't a pleasure, it's a relief. Giving kind attention to an unhappy child isn't a pleasure, it's nurture.

I mean in a sense I am really asking why even live at all? — intrapersona

Bare, mean existence isn't going to shell out an answer for you. Your "imagination and ingenuity" are ready, at your service. So... make an answer to your question, 'why even live at all' and make it 'good'. The same imagination, intellect, ingenuity, persistence, and so on that led you to "Why even live at all" is capable of far more.

Does existence have a reason? No. I am not living for something. I didn't self-create. I live, I don't live for... Existence is a gift not requested.

I find 'naked existence' too austere, too arid, too bleak to let it remain uncovered. I try to overlay the raw fact of my existence with purpose, or divine direction. "I am here to..." "God made me because..." and so on. I find an infinity of ways to amuse, distract, or overcome raw, purposeless existence during my short turn here.

It is, perhaps, extremely presumptuous to speak for everyone, but I think we are, in fact, all in the same boat. That's how I look at it. Some people, of course, don't -- but that's their problem, not mine.

Despair is by no means the inevitable, obvious, necessary, or certain result of recognizing that existence is nakedness in a cold, damp wind. We can seek existential shelter by dint of our imagination and ingenuity, which we almost invariably succeed in doing.

Existential shelter" is no guarantee that we will always be happy, cheerful, pleasant, content, etc. Such states can not be guaranteed. We do well to obtain enough happiness, cheer, pleasing, contentment, and if we don't, well, we endure until conditions improve. Sometimes people experience great love, joy and delight, even ecstasy. And soon enough existence will evaporate for us, one by one.

Of course it's possible to be a gay politician, even a successful gay politician. The key is to be a gay politician from the get go. Revealing the crocodile in the closet later, or worse--having the crocodile brought out by somebody else, is the fatal error. Accusing someone of faggotry fails as a destructive strategy if one has already announced one's faggot status, and is neutralized even more if the faggot adds "and proud of it".

Terrapin Station stole my Frank thunder, but there is more. Larry Craig, a presumptive heterosexual Senator from Idaho was arrested for suggesting to an undercover cop that sex might be an amusing interlude in a toilet stall at the Minneapolis airport. Based on my experience of the Minneapolis Airport's sterility, I would say that a quickie in a toilet stall beats most of the time-passing options available there. Whose budget was sufficiently plush that they could afford to have cops suppressing cock sucking, don't know.

Senator Craig, martyr to the cause



Here is a list from Wikipedia of gay congressmen currently or gently serving in the US Congress:

Kyrsten Sinema
Mark Pocan
Mark Takano
Sean Patrick Maloney
David Cicilline
Jared Polis
Mike Michaud
Mark Foley
Michael Huffington
Jim Kolbe
im Kolbe
Steve Gunderson
Barney Frank
Jon Hinson
Gerry Studds
Robert Bauman
Stewart McKinney
Tammy Baldwin
Harris Wofford

The Wiki article also notes that gay politicians serve in all 50 states, in one capacity or another.

Sorry, "feel" is not the word of 2016: post-truth is.

I agree with your response. "Felt uncomfortable" is the new "been molested".

Election Result Data Map from the New York Times

Clinton's America



Trump's America

it's just a natural disposition, similar to loving desert landscapes — Terrapin Station

Desert landscapes is exactly what comes to mind when I am approached by serious philosophy.

Well, with regard to Palestine — Heister Eggcart

The point I was making is that the creation of Israel (first by Zionist settlers early on, then by British and UN action later) was the beginning of Palestinian's dislocation. Nothing can top that, from the Palestinian point of view.

Good fences make for fewer terrorist attacks within Israel. — Bitter Crank

This must be Trump's logic. — Heister Eggcart

Nothing to do with Trump. Israel has controlled suicide and conventional terrorist bombing and other kinds of attacks by securing its big ugly concrete border. Yes, it is a heavy burden on Palestinians who do or want to work in Israel--the daily security gate checks, and so on. But it also enables Israelis and Palestinian citizens of Israel to live together amicably

Israel won its existence? — Heister Eggcart

Sure it did. It was attacked from the getgo by Arabs who wanted Israel to disappear. Like Israel or loathe it, it has won its existence.

Other countries in the region can say the same, yet somehow Israel is held to be vastly different. — Heister Eggcart

Arab countries (like Syria before its civil war), Egypt, Iran (which is Persian) or Turkey (which isn't Arab either) all have cultural, scientific, government, military, commercial elites; Israel has a bigger elite per capita. That's the main difference.

Regarding multiculturalism: Take the former Yugoslavia, made up of Croats, Gypsies, Serbs, Slovenes, Bosnians, Montenegrins, Christians, Moslems, Atheists, Communists, fascists, and more. How did they all live together if multiculturalism doesn't work?

Because Tito's communist regime would not tolerate inter-ethnic squabbling. One would end up in very deep doo doo with the Party if you made ethnic or religious political trouble. Before Tito there were other controllers: the Ottomans and the Hapsburgs. After Tito's regime came to an end around the end of the 1980s, with the post-communist up-heavals all over Europe, all sides deserted multiculturalism with a vengeance.

I would guess that most multicultural regimes have been enforced, rather than embraced by enlightened peasants who just naturally love every conflicting customs they come across.

The US is enforcing multiculturalism now as it has in the past. It uses a variety of strategies to keep a lid on conflicts. The strategies of inter-ethnic control sometimes become issues in themselves, as segregation of blacks did. In the 19th century the immigration gates were opened and all sorts of people came in until WWI. Open borders is enforced multiculturalism.

The State Department decides which populations overseas are going to be granted entry. It might be Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, Indians, Somalians, West Africans... whoever. They arrive, usually with the discretely contracted help of local service providers (Catholic Charities, Lutheran Social Services, etc.) No one is asked if they want the latest batch, they just arrive, and the local population is, in effect, told to get used to it.

Some people opt for extremely mixed multicultural settings. Most people don't.

Israel isn't going to go away. The Palestinians are going to go away. — Bitter Crank

The second sentence should read "the Palestinians are NOT going to go away."

Israel only serves to highlight the fact that nation states should not be ethnic or culturally based — Heister Eggcart

I could not disagree more and in fact find this view to be quite dangerous. — Thorongil

The more ethnically and culturally homogeneous a nation state is, the less crime, violence, etc there is in it. We see in Europe the complete and utter failure of multiculturalism, — Thorongil

Israeli culture is superior to Palestinian culture. — Thorongil

Secondly, Western culture is superior to many other cultures — Thorongil

Pssst. No so loud, Thorongil. The thought police are going to be on your case for uttering such heresies as "Israeli culture is superior to Palestinian culture". You'll be in the stocks by morning with a sign around your neck "racist, sexist, xenophobic, islamophobic, homophobic, elitist, imperialist, cultural hegemonist, genocidal oppressor", and worse, possibly.

And to actually write "Western culture is superior to many other cultures" -- that's just going to send the PC Brain Washers into a frenzy.

You might want to decamp to Breitbart for a week or two, till the furor dies down.

self-defense — Heister Eggcart

human rights abuses — Heister Eggcart

belligerent border policing — Heister Eggcart

nothing to be particularly proud of in Israel — Heister Eggcart

• Is it not the case that Israel has has been existentially opposed by several Arab/Islamic states since its founding? Of course they are defensive.
• If there are human rights abuses in Israel, they certainly didn't just begin recently. The creation of Israel no doubt seemed like one big civil rights abuse by the resident Palestinians.
• Good fences make for fewer terrorist attacks within Israel.
• Oh come now, most people are proud of their country. Israel won it's existence, it is militarily strong, it has a lively cultural and economic life, and so on. What's not to be proud of if one is an Israeli?

most of the world finds it prudent that Israel be a sovereign state — Heister Eggcart

Israel owes it's creation to at least 3 major factors:

The first is that a vision of a modern state of Israel had been circulating in Jewish circles for decades before WWII.
The second is that the Holocaust was so awful, something compensatory had to be done.
The third thing is that while the territory was lived in by Palestinians, it's status was soft -- that is, it was part of the deceased Ottoman Empire, which had come under British and French control. Palestine wasn't an independent nation.

Now that it is exists as a power in the region, many nations think it prudent that it stay that way.

A solution to the displaced Palestinians should certainly have been deployed at the time of Israel's creation. Their status was allowed to remain indefinite. The original residents of the refugee camps now have grandchildren in the "camps". Israel clearly plans to occupy all the West Bank eventually, and has chosen for an independent Palestine a death by a thousand tiny cuts, rather than just getting it over with all at once.

Israel isn't going to go away. The Palestinians are going to go away. The US (and others) like having Israel where and what it is. That doesn't leave many options for future progress...

Geez, if you think I'm young I'm guessing you're maybe in your 70s? — Terrapin Station

I am in my 70s. How old are you?

Don't take it personally. The feeling that young people (say, under 30) aren't quite the proficient digitalists that media claim they are didn't start with you. People learn to use the Internet and other resources by using the Internet and other resources regularly.

My apologies, by the way. I Googled Bannon and I didn't find as much as I thought I would either. Hence, the post explaining why maybe he hadn't left much of a quote trail.

you must facilitate others to do it for you. — Benkei

Exactly. And Trump is putting people in place who will do it for him. Nothing new in that -- presidents put people in place who will initiate and execute certain kinds of policy.

We don't have to go looking for extensive quotes to think Bannon will act in a general way. Proof will or won't follow in due course.

It may be that there are not more quotes readily available for Steven Bannon because he has been a business executive and not an on-air, on-line, or in-print personality. (Wikipedia says he hosts/hosted a show on Sirius XM. Never heard it.)

Being a business executive, of course, doesn't tell us much about his politics, but it explains why there isn't more of a scat trail behind him: He wasn't a "personality". You might loathe the New York Times, but you probably won't find a lot of editorial comments from Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., the publisher of the Times. However, Sulzberger and Bannon couldn't change places at Breitbart and the Times without affecting the product.

I thought young people were supposed to be just instinctively savvy about how to find things on the web. Anyway, here are 3 quotes:

“Are there racist people involved in the alt-right? Absolutely,” he told Mother Jones at this year’s Republican National Convention. “Look, are there some people that are white nationalists that are attracted to some of the philosophies of the alt-right? Maybe. Are there some people that are anti-Semitic that are attracted? Maybe. Right? Maybe some people are attracted to the alt-right that are homophobes, right? But that’s just like, there are certain elements of the progressive left and the hard left that attract certain elements.” — Steven Bannon

“That’s one of the unintended consequences of the women’s liberation movement––that, in fact, the women that would lead this country would be feminine, they would be pro-family, they would have husbands, they would love their children. They wouldn’t be a bunch of dykes that came from the 7 Sisters schools.”

“They’re either a victim of race. They’re victim of their sexual preference. They’re a victim of gender. All about victimhood and the United States is the great oppressor, not the great liberator.”

But one has to read carefully. This quote is by his wife during (apparently) a divorce proceeding:

“...the biggest problem he had with Archer [School for Girls] is the number of Jews that attend. He said that he doesn’t like Jews and that he doesn’t like the way they raise their kids to be ‘whiney brats’ and that he didn't want the girls going to school with Jews."

One has to sift: here is a quote from the "Bustle" site:

“Hollywood does not understand Middle America, and it certainly does not understand and, in fact, despises, the core values of the country,” Bannon said in a 2010 radio interview. Pushing that divide between "real" America and Hollywood is so perturbing because it's hard not to view it as a dog-whistle to anti-Semites. Hollywood is so often code for "Jewish" and the subject of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories as under Jewish or Zionist control that Bannon's framing of Hollywood as the enmy is irksome.

First we have a quote: "Hollywood does not understand Middle America" and then the exegesis:

Pushing that divide between "real" America and Hollywood is so perturbing because it's hard not to view it as a dog-whistle to anti-Semites. Hollywood is so often code for "Jewish" and the subject of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories as under Jewish or Zionist control that Bannon's framing of Hollywood as the enmy is irksome. — Bustle writer

It seems like there has been a surge and a special usage of "dog whistle" just in the last few years. It's a handy term because "dog-whistle" is itself code. So we have coded allusions to coded allusions. One can get away with a lot that way--on both sides of the political spectrum.

Also good song for this early stage of the Trump Triumph. It's always in order actually, like the re-usable bumper sticker, "Stop the Bombing"

A song about the River of Shit, appropriate for this post election season of hogwash.

I'm listing to French songs, mostly from the 60s or a bit earlier.

You goddamn communist. I knew it. — Thorongil

Bingo. The veil has been ripped away. I'm exposed.

Do you have references for either of your assertions: — Cavacava

I am going by the article in the New York Times referenced in about the 3rd post: The author was Ruchir Sharma, author of “The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World,” is chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley Investment Management.

Does Sharma know shit from shinola? I don't know; I'm supposing that the New York Times editors judged him worthy of an opinion piece (which the piece in the NYT was). Of course, the NYT editors also thought that Hilary Clinton was certain to win the election. One may want to have a grain of salt on hand.

It seemed to me he had a plausible theory. Paul Krugman noted today that major changes aren't always obvious. For instance, it's quite possible that the economy during the Trump administration will be robust. That this may also contribute to bringing about uncontrolled global warming is also a possibility but won't be clearly obvious in of 2017 or 2018.

I thought De-globalization made the Great Depression more understandable. We couldn't produce or sell our way back into prosperity because nobody was growing (except the 2 main fascist states). Japan depended on global trade, and one of their motivations in WWII was gaining control of vital resources that they wouldn't have to then trade for with the British, Americans, et al. At some point in the 30s we cut off shipments of scrap iron, for instance. Germany also wanted to control more resources -- like oil.

If China decides to produce and consume much more product internally, that is by no means a hostile action, but it has the effect of reducing trade. Ditto for India, or any other large country, including the US or EU.

Then you should be able to tell us what the Chinese received in exchange for the silk. — Mongrel

Gold? Incense? Left over Jews? Don't know, but I do know that Egyptian women wove cotton and linen cloth that was of very high quality (high thread count). Maybe they traded plant-fiber fabric?

You could argue that Brexit is actually a pro-global move. I don't know. Time will tell.

But... One of the characteristics of the de-globalization was recession in many economies around the world. this fed upon itself. As countries economies shrunk (shrank?), they were less inclined to spend, thus shrinking trade. That had a lot to do with de-globalization. It wasn't all overt decisions by X to not trade A, B, and C.

If Britain's economy shrinks as a result of Brexit, that would be more a de-globalizing event.

Bear in mind, please -- I'm not arguing for de-globalization as a good thing.

Assuming we need a meaning in life. — Kazuma

Trust me: we need meaning in life.

Hope sounds very desperate to me. It seems to be a comfortable approach to problems that would eventually end up without any solution. — Kazuma

I hope you won't always view life negatively.

Sure, sometimes life presents us with desperate situations and we can only hope for the best while fully expecting the worst. But not all of life is miserable and not all hope is desperate. We hope for everything from the trivial to the sublime.

We can hope that the bakery has not sold all the cinnamon rolls. We can hope to find someone to love and marry. We can hope to do well in life. We can hope for the resurrection. We can hope to get through the day without going crazy. We can hope that death will come quickly. We can hope the person calling us is not our super-annoying sister-in-law. We can hope that even one out of 100 publishers will accept our manuscript. We can hope that that it snows on Christmas Eve.

Hope sounds very desperate to me. — Kazuma

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -

I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.

Emily Dickinson 1830-1886

This is oxymoronic. If they earned their wealth, then they didn't steal it and so cannot be called robbers. — Thorongil

Don't be dull. "Earned" is a term of art, not a fact reflecting any actual work. Labor produces all wealth, the bourgeoisie "earn" it through theft.

What if I can only know that I don't know what I should do, and therefore I can't be sure whether I should hope at all? — Kazuma

We are not born knowing the answers to the Kant's three questions, or Camus' challenge, and therefore we have to labor over these questions if we are going to find any answers. That is what life is about, is it not?

We answer these questions through study and thoughtful living. Maybe the answers come from the way we live.

The "know" question is about the certainty you can place in your knowledge. The "do" question is about ethics. You have to decide what it is right and proper for you to do. If we live our lives deliberately, study and learn, think about the kind of people we think we ought to be, we may answer the first two questions reasonably well.

What you can hope for perhaps derives from what you can know and what you should do.

How could he impart the concept of hope in the ultimate questions if the questions haven't been answered yet? — Kazuma

Did Kant intend to impart hope in his three questions?

Good parenting sets children on the path of learning, proper behavior, and hope. Later in life the child-become-adult has to decide whether what he learned, what was proper, and what could be hoped for is now adequate. Maybe the parents taught that the child should hope for eternal life in heaven or a fortunate reincarnation. The adult may decide that he can not know about heaven or reincarnation, and toss that hope out the window. Maybe the adult concludes that there is no hope for human progress, or conversely, that there is much hope. What people think they can know, what they should do, what they may hope often changes over time. The child may have been taught that he should make a lot of money. The adult may decide that he should not do that.

I hope pursuing these questions makes like meaningful.

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. — Camus

This is the important sentence. Elsewhere Kant argues that all philosophy ultimately aims at answering these three questions: “What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope?” I have no idea whether Camus was familiar with Kant's "ultimate question" formulation.

These are games; one must first answer. — Kazuma

I agree with Camus: A great deal of philosophy is kind of a game, and will not lead to a confrontation with ultimate questions about life or anything else. "Is life worth living or not?" and phrased another way, “What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope?”

Men must decide how to live their lives; we are specially burdened by that requirement. Most people do not opt for suicide, but that does not mean that most have made their life worth living by examining it, or by pursuing the most meaningful course they could take for themselves. We generally don't ask "What should I do?" We ask "What's next on the list?"

Camus' and Kant's questions are a pain to answer, because there is always the risk that we will find reasons to stop living the way we do, and instead live some other way; and then there will probably be hell to pay. Others in our lives may not appreciate our discovery that our lives are kind of empty meaningless affairs. What does that say about their lives?

You seem contradictory.. Acknowledging that trade barriers are good for developing countries but then saying it is bad because of its possible slower growth in first world countries. What is the goal here of trade barriers? It is to protect jobs for one's own country right? However, those jobs just aren't there anymore due to mechanization. — schopenhauer1

Whether and to whom tariffs are a useful tool would depend on the level of a country's economic development. Tariffs may result in retaliation; the barrier-erecting nation has to have something to bargain with, or it might get shout out of its export markets. Small weak developing nations generally have limited bargaining power. What works for the US or the EU won't work for Paraguay.

De-globalization isn't anyone's goal. It happens because conditions change and nations find that their self interests no longer appear to be linked to everyone else's. Trade is generally win-win, but it's not a guaranteed situation. If sellers of raw materials can't get enough for their ore, timber, fish, etc., then they can't buy as many finished goods from manufacturing countries. That hurts manufacturers in developed countries. If low-wage developing countries can undercut wages in developed countries, they can "steal" jobs. Over time this can impoverish a significant share of the developed nation's population. Economies start to shrink.

Severe economic contractions (like the one in 2008) aggravate the tendency to protect one's own national interests.

I agree.

China faces grave environmental threats, some of its own making (dumping too many toxins in rivers) and some the consequence of Euro-American coal burning that took place well before China began industrializing.

China is drying up and it doesn't appear that the trend will change in the near future. India faces similar problems of demand for electricity, water, municipal services of several kinds, cleaner air, and so on -- and the necessity of burning more coal to produce power.

I am not in favor of de-globalization. Neither is Ruchir Sharma, author of “The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World." He is chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley Investment Management.

The point he was making in his NYT opinion piece is that "The global movement of goods, money and people is likely to continue slowing. The lesson of the past is that just as night follows day, de-globalization follows globalization — and can last just as long." The piece was much more a warning about de-globalization, than a welcome.

Of course it would be more dangerous if no one had immunity. Had I suggested otherwise?

So what would be equivalent to "You shouldn't have been out at night!" in this situation? — schopenhauer1

"My poor dear deflowered little daisy! Pickled lambs like you are likely to be eaten alive if you hang around bars until the wolves are all drunk. So sorry."

"New" diseases are a problem. Whether AFM is totally new, or newly recognized, don't know. The CDC page I looked at listed well known viruses as the cause.

Epidemiologists have predicted (correctly or not, don't know) that we will see more new diseases over time, as a result of increased human/wild animal contact in rain forests, and so on. Ebola is an example of a new disease emerging from human/animal contact. In addition old diseases are getting moved around more -- like West Nile Virus's jump to North America, or Zika virus's appearance in South America.

The other thing is that as old diseases fade into the background (mostly not disappearing) diseases which might have been similar to epidemic diseases (like polio) might become identifiable. Cancer, for instance, is more common now because more people live long enough to develop it. Prostate cancer, for instance, probably wasn't a common problem until many men started living long enough to develop serious symptoms and metastases.

You don't know what the external physical world looks like... — dukkha

I think you misuse the word "see". According to common usage, we see objects. We do not see the light which reaches our eyes, that's not a conventional use of the word "see". — Metaphysician Undercover

I would argue that we don't see objects. We see shapes and colors, which are merely representations of objects. — Harry Hindu

According to Hank Williams, we do see light:

Now I'm so happy no sorrow in sight
Praise the Lord I saw the light

It is interesting to hear reports about the world from someone who has had damage in the visual cortex. A friend had had a stroke. Most of her visual field was missing, and the way her brain processed signals from the retina was disrupted.

What she was "seeing" in her hospital room were horizontal lines, and not much else. As far as I could tell, her room had ordinary painted walls; no posters, pictures, shadows... just plain walls and the usual furnishings. The window in her room was not visible to her. Apparently her brain was no longer able to assemble an image that had vertical lines, shapes, color, brightness, and so on. Of course this was very upsetting to her.

My understanding is that our brains don't receive "pictures", they receive information about vertical, horizontal, diagonal, and circular lines; edges, solid planes, color, movement, and so forth. Some animals receive a good deal less. Frog vision, for instance, is tuned to movement and edge lines--just enough to coordinate a long sticky tongue.

The brain assembles edges, solids, lines, colors, and so forth. "We" do not "see" this process; "We" receive the finished image--at least until something goes haywire.

Apparently brains have evolved to do this without much training. Newly hatched chicks "imprint" on the first animal they see which in a natural setting is their mother. Babies start recognizing their parents very soon (of course other senses are involved in this recognition). We don't have to teach babies how to see. (Teaching people "how to see" usually happens years later in art classes, when students are challenged to look at the world as if they had not seen it before.)

Learning how to photograph is a lesson in seeing, as is a drawing class. The film or digital receptors sometimes capture the world in unfamiliar ways. Many people (me, for instance) find it very difficult to capture an image of any sort with a pencil and paper.

It is the brain which interprets all the different neuronal impulses and builds this experience of depth. — dukkha

How would the brain do that if the only neuronal impulses it had EVER received were 2-D? This is like supposing that we have only ONE EAR and the brain presents us with stereo sound that it creates. How would it know what stereo sounded like if it had the input of only 1 single ear?

So take colour for example, physicalists don't generally believe physical things actually 'look' yellow or red in the physical world (and our brain internally generates a representation of how the objects 'look' which for us are colour experiences. — dukkha

I have here a lump of 24 caret gold, a ruby, a sapphire, and an emerald. the lump is yellow, the ruby is red, the sapphire blue, and the emerald is green. If these 4 objects have no color, how do they reflect light at a particular wave length? If sun light passes through the emerald, how do the molecules composed of 4 or 5 elements absorb and re-emit green light that lands on your retina and triggers neuronal impulses that your brain decides is green IF there is no color there to start with?

One of the elements you are leaving out of your scheme is "experience". From experience we know that there is something behind the glass (milk, the yard, the road, fish, etc.), whereas there is nothing behind the television set except wires and dust which don't look anything like what is on the screen.

Also, how does the brain generate color? It's never "seen a color" it just get's impulses. How does it know that a ruby is red and a sapphire is blue?

(I didn't and won't read your post on the brain not being in its brain pan. In 25 words or less, where is it hanging out?

How sensory input arrives at the outer doors of the brain, and is then passed inside is one issue. What the brain does with sensory input is something else altogether.

Personally, I just don't see images on the surface of glass windows. Maybe you see things that way. If you do, and it works for you, fine.

I don't think there is any one here who supposes that his brain is in direct contact with objects. The brain has no direct contact with any object or the sensing of it (though the sense of smell is pretty close to direct contact). The brain isn't in direct contact with the world outside the skull.

The brain constructs a complex model of the world that accounts for things like windows, twigs that appear bent in the water but are not, and so on. The process of model building starts in infancy, and progresses throughout life. If the model is wrong, we may get hurt, embarrass ourselves, or damage something. Feedback tells us whether our model of the world is right or wrong.

The world seems real to me, though what it would actually look like if we were in direct mental contact with the world I do not know. Our senses are limited, and though we have experience to help, some things we can not sense. I can not hear the high pitches of a bat. Bats are silent, as far as I am concerned. Some people say they can hear them.

Towards the end of the campaign, small pox was not eliminated by vaccinating everybody in a country. If somebody got sick with small pox, all the people that might have come into contact with the infected person during the previous 2 weeks or so were vaccinated. This prevented the virus from spreading beyond that person. At this point, most people were never vaccinated against smallpox. As the cases became more and more isolated, there was less and less reason to vaccinate large numbers of people. Eventually there was one last case, then no more -- for over 35 years, now. I'm 70; the last time I was vaccinated against small pox was 1964.

The same strategy is being used on polio, except that polio is shed by the gut, which means fecal contamination can transmit the virus. So, when a case occurs, everyone in a village, county, or city needs to be vaccinated, whether they had contact with the person or not. Polio has been eliminated from the western hemisphere, most of Asia (excepting Pakistan, and maybe a few other small areas), Europe, and much of Africa.

You said, "If vaccination rates drop below 95% in a community it's well on the way to being as dangerous as no vaccinations at all." — Terrapin Station

"Herd immunity" would certainly apply at 94%. By and large, the "herd" is protected. If the 6% get sick, that could be a significant--even dangerous--loss, but that would depend on who got sick. Unless the 6% unvaccinated all live together, they aren't likely to all become infected.

<50% vaccination rates don't produce much herd immunity. It's important that "vectors" of disease get vaccinated. For instance, if you have only enough measles vaccine for 30% of the population, give it to the most socially active children (they being the ones most likely to mix and spread the virus). Isolated children living with immune parents aren't likely to get infected -- until they come in contact with an infectious child. If 90% of socially active children are immunized against measles, for instance, there would be a good chance that no large epidemic would occur.

Its critical to get health care workers vaccinated against a readily contagious disease that will bring people into hospitals. They might compose only 5% of the population, but health care workers make a great vector for transmitting influenza.