Notes From A Bear's Journey

    With vaccines and reverse technology in the news so much, it can be difficult to keep up with who and what is leading the pack regarding the fight against this novel coronavirus and the search for a vaccine; and yes, there is a LOT of bad information out there mixed in with the good.  As  The Conversation warned: It’s an increasingly important skill to identify between reliable and unreliable sources.  Social media is often superficial and prone to spreading misinformation.  On the other hand, journal articles and clinical trial registries can be hard to interpret for anyone except specialists... Seek out publications with editorial oversight and a track record of reliable scientific and medical reporting.  Reading more than one interpretation can help you get a balanced view.   It’s also important to ask where a journalist found the information they are reporting on.  Referencing results published in peer-reviewed journals is a goo...

     First off, my admission is that I know next to nothing about nuns, or priests for that matter.  I couldn't explain the difference between a priest and a minister, or a preacher and a clergyman (or clergywoman).  And if you enter the field of pujari and imam . well forget it.  Come to think of it, I would likely confuse the teachings of Greek mythology with those of Roman mythology, and do the same with Chinese Buddhism and Japanese Buddhism; the Ancient History Encyclopedia said this about Buddhism: Although Buddha himself is said to have requested that, following his death, no leader was to be chosen to lead anything like a school, this was ignored and his disciples seem to have fairly quickly institutionalized Buddhist thought with rules, regulations, and a hierarchy.  At first, there may have been a unified vision of what Buddha had taught but, in time, disagreements over what constituted the “true teaching” resulted in fragmentation and the ...

    Clearing out more things was easy in the beginning, old tax receipts and records, even old patent applications and items I knew that were now even less likely to come to fruition...books I had planned to write, screenplays I actually did write but never pursued (after my initial one was turned down, but then I was only in my late-20s and easily discouraged), a folder full of "award-winning" ideas (again, I was young and full of ambition).  Of course, there was a lot of shredding due to so many of the receipts and papers having things such as bank numbers or information that hackers might dig through if they somehow got to my trash bin in the middle of the night (okay, perhaps I'm watching a few too many detective movies where crooks rummage through the garbage).  But after several trips of dumping both the stuff that I could recycle and the now-shredded dots of papers, there had actually been little progress.  It was once again a reminder to me of just how m...