Punishment

 What purpose do prisons serve?

When you lock someone up for life do they still contribute to society?

What is the difference between a private resort and a prison?

Should prisons show the destruction resulting from crimes?

Should prisons be punishment?

Should prisons include treatment for mental problems?

Should any prison sentence be greater than 30 years?

Can people change?

Are prisons used to keep dangerous people isolated from society?

Would early released prisoners try to get even with those that put them in prison?

Is the threat of prison enough to prevent crime?

Would asking people nicely to not do bad things stop them?

Should there be more police to catch more criminals?

Should prisoners have an option of greater punishment in exchange for shorter sentences?

A few points from an article posted by U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice on https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/five-things-about-deterrence 

1. The certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful deterrent than the punishment.

2. Sending an individual convicted of a crime to prison isn’t a very effective way to deter crime.

3. Police deter crime by increasing the perception that criminals will be caught and punished.

4. Increasing the severity of punishment does little to deter crime.

5. There is no proof that the death penalty deters criminals.

Does it seem that this article only refers to deterring new crime or new criminals?

How much crime does a person in prison commit?

What would a similar list be for preventing repeating of crimes?

Bathrooms

Why do we have separate boys and girls bathrooms?

Is it for privacy of private body parts or is it emotional?

Do most people just want to do their business and get out of bathrooms?

Do boys and girls use different facilities in a bathroom?

What is transgender?

Does a boy feel they are a girl because:

• They feel they have small feet?
• They feel they have a long neck?
• They like chocolate?
• They make decisions based on emotion?
• They are less pragmatic?
• They want empathy more than solutions to problems?
• They like bright color clothing?
• They are more nurturing?
• They like to talk more?
• They like being on the bottom?
• They like caring for others?
• They like to cook?
• They like to sew?
• They like dolls more than trucks?
• They do not like sports?
• They like a clean and neat house?

Are all girls emotionally similar?

Are all boys emotionally similar?

Is it discrimination to control access to bathrooms based on body parts?

Is it discrimination to allow bathroom access based on emotions or feelings?

Is it discrimination to prohibit biological boys from competing as biological girls in sports?

Is it discrimination to allow biological boys to compete as biological girls in sports?

Does it mater that people can surgically have their gender parts changed?

Should government pay for someone having their gender parts changed?

Faith Healing

 Double blind trials.

A double blind trial for a drug or treatment, is where the real drug is given to half the people in the study and a fake sugar pill is given to the other half.  This is because some people get healed when given the sugar pill.  They have faith they will be healed and they are healed.

Why are double blind trials necessary to prove a drug or treatment works?

Why is it that the medical community does not in general believe faith can heal, but require statistics that a treatment works better than faith alone before it is approved?

How many people suffer in a trial by not receiving a real treatment?

Should trials compare among viable treatments instead of fake treatments?

Can faith that God will heal be as strong as faith that a sugar pill can heal?

Most proven treatments do not statically heal all patients so how much better are they than faith alone?

How much does a medical treatment cost versus a faith treatment?

Can doctors heal all patients?

Can faith heal all illnesses?

Do doctors help people even with their limited knowledge? 

Economics

 Capitalism vs Socialism vs Communism

Which economic system 

• Provides incentive to work hard
• Provides incentive to study hard
• Provides incentive to protest
• Provides incentive to complain
• Provides incentive to innovate
• Provides money to invest
• Reduces wealth
• Gives government more control
• Gives bureaucrats more control
• Balances supply and demand
• Encourages people to study difficult areas
• Encourages taking risk
• Provides optimism for the future
• Is less competitive
• Is globally less competitive
• Traps people in a mediocre life
• Reduces prosperity
• Has less poor people
• Provides more jobs
• Provides better jobs

Can a blended economic system exists where a low floor is set to protect people from absolute poverty while allowing and encouraging people to work to succeed?

How low should the protective floor be set?

Should all citizens have air conditioning and a color tv?

Should the sojourner be provided as much as contributing citizens?

Who pays for the care of the poor?

Do the poor need more than food, shelter and opportunity?

Should the provided care be paid voluntarily or forced?

The footnote

 In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting.

In most of the Christianity does the Holy Spirit seam to be a footnote to the trinity?

So just what is the Holy Spirit?

Could it be related to a spirit of holiness?

²⁸ “Truly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the children of man, and whatever blasphemies they utter, ²⁹ but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”, Mark 3:28-29

Why is blasphemes against the Holy Spirit so bad?

What is a blaspheme against the Holy Spirit?

Are the other names for the Holy Spirit useful?

• Teacher
• Helper
• Comforter
• Guide

Is the Holy Spirit what we receive when we accept Christ gift of forgiveness?

Does receiving the Holy Spirit move us from self centered control?

Does striving for wealth, possessions, power, or pleasure bring peace or love?

Is a spirit of peace and love really heaven?

Does obedience give peace?

Is hell a lack of peace and love?

Is hell really addiction to wealth, possessions, power, or pleasure?

“In the beginning, man’s spirit was the dominant force in the world. When he sinned, his mind became dominant. Sin dethroned the spirit and crowned the intellect. But grace is restoring the spirit to its place of dominion. When man comes to realize this, he will live in the realm of the supernatural without effort.” John G. Lake, The Power of the Name

Blame

What is the cause of systemic poverty?

Why is systemic poverty called systemic racism?

Why do people seam to blame others for their situation?

Does a lack of hope for a prosperous future promote :

• violence?
• crime?
• drug use?
• sexual immorality?
• hatred?
• jealousy?
• protest?

Does fear of the future promote any of the above?

Does a feeling of not being heard promote violence?

Does blaming someone else for your situation relieve your responsibilities?

Why is hatred so easy to share?

Can blaming someone else motivate you to work to succeed?

Can all difficulties be overcome with trust in God?

Does faith in God give hope?

Is it easy to escape from poverty?

Is it harder to escape from poverty if you blame someone else for it?

Love or Hate

Is it love or is it hate?

• Does all criticism seem like hate to the recipient?
• Is all criticism give in hate?
• Can criticism be given in love and received as hate?
• Can criticism be received constructively?
• Is punishment a type of criticism?
• Can punishment encourage people to stop harmful actions?
• What are harmful actions?
• Are they harmful to the person doing them?
• Are they harmful to society?
• Can punishment be given in love?
• Can punishment be given in anger?

And if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off.  It is better for you to enter life crippled than with two hands to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire. Mark 9:43

• So what is a sin and why is it so bad?
• Does a sin distance you from God?
• Does a sin distance you from other people?
• Can not doing something be a sin?
• Is sin relative or absolute?
  So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.  James 4:17
• Can sinful actions be listed as in Galatians 5:19-21?
  Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.
• If someone sins are they a bad person?
  For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it.  James 2:10
  For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,  Romans 3:23

How do you separate training to discourage sin from hate?

Is encouraging people to not become addicted to "the works of the flesh", love or hate?

Is punishment for sinful actions, love or hate?

Value

 What makes a person valuable?

Do people judge others so that they can say they are more valuable than others?

Do any of these make a person more valuable?

• Past crimes
• Stealing
• Killing
• Wealth
• Hardships endured
• Skin color
• Sexual preferences 
• Great works
• Love of others
• Love of money
• Beliefs like ours
• Opinions like ours
• Love of God
• Great faith
• Height
• Strength
• Speed
• Service to others
• Legalistic views
• Loved by God
• Old age
• Experience
• Birth
• Self importance
• High positions
• Memories
• Ancestry
• Nationality
• Member of a group
• Job
• Grace
• Martyrdom

Can the value of a person be linked to any of the following characteristics

• Integrity
• Courageousness
• Sense of Humor
• Intelligence, Education and Common Sense
• Emotionally Open
• Kindness
• Self-Confidence
• Discipline
• Generosity
• Self-Awareness
• Humility
• The ability to learn
• Responsibility
• Resilience
• Compassion for others
• Respect for others
• Big vision
• Inspiring others
• Self improvement
• Music talent 
• Art talent
• Math talent
• Dance talent
• Sports talent

Do all people have something valuable to add to our human existence?

On a scale from 0 to perfection is anybody anywhere near perfection?

On a scale from 0 to perfection is anybody an absolute zero?

Does being loved by God give us value?

If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing. 1 Corinthians 13:1-3

Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law: for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified. Galatians 2:16

For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast. Ephesians 2:8-9

Bash Slideshow Widget

On my desktop one indispensable widget/plasmoid is the photo slideshow picture frame. I was a long time user of OpenSuse KDE and really liked the desktop picture frame. It showed my family pictures in random order, you could move back to a previous image, you could open the image in an editor to rotate or touch-up the picture.

I have been trying Linux Mint because more applications are supported on the Ubuntu base.  I had read good reviews for Cinnamon desktop. The Cinnamon photo frame had some shortcomings.  It did not allow navigation to prior images or editing.  The desktop widgets did not allow locking and were often moved when clicking on windows above them.  The windows above were difficult to resize because you could not grab the border over a desktop widget.

I checked on line and it looked like the Mate version had a better widget so when I updated to version 20 I chose the Mate desktop.  After installation I find out the desktop widgets were removed.  I am a little cautious about blindly following online application download instructions.  So I ended up writing a simple bash script to use ImageMagick Display as a slideshow.

Most all of the pictures are jpeg or png.  After some tweaking and trial and error this is the script.

#!/bin/bash
cd $HOME/Pictures
while true; do
find . -iregex ".*\.\(jpg\|gif\|png\|jpeg\)" -print0 | shuf -z | xargs -0 display -delay 1000 -resize 1200x900 -geometry 1200x900-10-40
done

This works reasonably well and is independent of desktop environment.  It only requires ImageMagick be installed.  A summary of the commands:

#!/bin/bash   #   Indicate to use the bash shell to run this command

cd $HOME/Pictures   #   Change to the top directory/folder where your pictures are stored

while true; do    #   continue to repeat the commands before "done", This is optional. 

find . -iregex ".*\.\(jpg\|gif\|png\|jpeg\|bmp\)" -print0   #   search for files ending in one of the listed extensions and output them separated by null characters '\0'.  The -print0 allows spaces in file names.  You could optionally pipe an ls -R * output to a file command and use sed to select image files but this is slow.

 | shuf -z    #  send the find output to a command to shuffle the order randomly separated by '\0'

 | xargs -0 display ...   #   send the output of shuf to the display command, again separated by null characters

display -delay 1000 -resize 1200x900 -geometry 1200x900-10-40   #   Display the images with a delay of 10 seconds, resized to fit in a 1200 by 900 pixel rectangle,  placed in a window 1200 by 900 pixels located 10 pixels from the right edge and 40 pixels from the bottom of the screen. 

done   #  end of the commands to be repeated

Now the image file name is displayed on the title bar.  A left click will bring up a menu where you can go back to a previous image with File --> Former.  Then you can Transform-->Rotate Right or Transform-->Rotate Left or Transform-->Crop.  Then quickly File-->Save.  Unfortunately you need to find the file to overwrite it.

An alternative is to right click "Image Info"  which will give you the full path to the file which you can edit in another program.  The picture will hold until you close the information window.

Another advantage of this over a widget/plasmoid is you can pop the picture the the front without having to "show desktop" by clicking on it.

Recipe

 Recipe to reduce poverty.

Are Violence, Crime, Drugs, Gangs, and Mobs the primary causes of systemic poverty?

Can these suggestions act to reduce poverty?

• Work together with police to reduce violence
• Work together with police to reduce drug use
• Work together with police to reduce crime
• Work together with police to breakup gangs
• Do not cry everything is racially motivated
• Build strong traditional families
• Teach the value of education
• Learn English and American history
• Learn a trade
• Organize community clean ups and work days
• Help your neighbor
• Integrate churches
• Encourage investment in local businesses
• Share resources
• Accept some bias and move on
• Do not become dependent on government
• Do not take from others
• Teach hard work and persistence makes wealth
• Do not waste money

What can government do to help reduce systemic poverty?

Is the NATIONAL NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH a beneficial program?

Would reducing police funding help reduce poverty?

Would giving money to poor neighborhoods be an efficient way to reduce poverty?

Would giving money to poor neighborhoods increase crime (embezzlement)?

The 10th

 You shall not covet your neighbor's house. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor. (Exodus 20:17)

A more modern equivalent phrase could be Keeping up with the Jones' .

Why did God save this commandment to be the last one?

Is this commandment a cause of evil actions?

Is this commandment based on internal thought more than actions?

Can you covet and be satisfied with what you posses?

Are you happy if you are not satisfied with what you posses?

Is it a sin to be wealthy?

Is it a sin to be greedy?

Should someone who works hard obtain more possessions?

Can working hard all of the time improve your satisfaction with life?

Can coveting create hatred for those with more possessions than us?

When do you have enough?

How do you judge if you have enough to be satisfied?

Can a focus on God reduce reliance on possessions?

Can a focus on serving others reduce desire for possessions?

Do more possessions make you a better person?

Do possessions make you happier?

Can sharing possessions allow people to posses less for themselves?

News

Why are TV news reports so politically biased?

Do news media need to make the mundane seem extraordinary to increase ratings?

Do news media need to keep presentation at a grade school level for the audience to understand?

Should the news media report Who, What, When and Where and let people decide whether it was good or bad?

Do news reports consider outcomes of their coverage?

Do news reports dig to get the news?

Do news reports give only superficial coverage of issues?

Do news media repeat news significantly?  

Do news media believe that if you say something enough people will believe it?

Do news media report surveys about whether people believe their views?

Do reporters tend to take a simplistic view of the world?

Should news media 'educate' their audience in their opinions?

Can news reporters tell the difference between an opinion and news?

Do news media give more time to one side of an issue?

Do news media show preference for one side of an issue?

How do you tell if a news report is biased?

• Headlines indicate opinion
• Suggest they know the motivation for actions
• They make claims without support
• Focus on a word or two from a long speech
• Call people liars
• Call people racist a lot
• Incite hatred based on views
• Can politicians change news headlines

Do news media have an obligation to just report the news without extra commentary?

Education

For the first third of your life learn all you can and make learning a lifelong endeavor.

Is learning enjoyable?

Do you feel accomplishment when you learn something?

Does education make you a more valuable employee?

Can you benefit from a good education?

Does education start at home?

Do most teachers say the home maters most for student learning?

Does claiming education is racially biased promote learning?

Does schooling help provide skills?

Does cheating help you learn?

Does looking up answers on the internet help you learn?

Is a teacher rewarded when students learn new skills or concepts?

Is a teacher the most noble profession?

Does teaching help society?

Should politics play a large roll in what is taught or not taught in schools?

Due successful students become successful in life?

Is overcoming stress a part of education?

Should education always be easy?

Should morality be taught in schools?

Should religion be allowed in schools?

Should educators present all sides of issues?

What is the true value of an education?

Should opinions be silenced in education?

Should history be rewritten to support certain political views?

Should we teach people to think on there own?

Is education a way out of poverty?

Teach you children well

Crosby, Stills & Nash

Teach Your Children

Corporate Taxes

Corporation : a company or group of people authorized to act as a single entity (legally a person) and recognized as such in law.

Should corporations be taxed?

Do corporations have votes?

Could this be taxation without representation?

It often cost billions of dollars to build and open a factory, if you highly tax corporations would they have money to invest in job creation?

Is the main purpose of a corporation to provide jobs?

Is the main purpose for corporations to provide returns for investors?

Is the main purpose for corporations to produce inexpensive products?

Is the main purpose for corporations to produce safe products?

Is the main purpose for corporations to compensate people fairly?

Is the main purpose for corporations to provide advertising support of entertainment?

Is the main purpose for corporations to have something responsible for cleaning up messes?

Is the main purpose for corporations to unite people?

Would providing a double or triple tax deduction for social security and medicare taxes provide incentive to hire more people?

Should a corporation that makes money without providing jobs be taxed more than a corporation that provides jobs?

Should a corporation pay for public infrastructure used by the corporation?

Do corporations help reduce poverty?