In his recent book Taking Religion Seriously [2025], Charles Murray discusses his gradual conversion from religious skeptic to believing in God and then (partly influenced by CS Lewis) accepting the truth of Christianity as established in the New Testament. Part of the evidence he presents for the existence of a soul as something separate from the physical brain and neurochemistry is this resurgence of lucidity. He cites doctors reporting that this observation extends to people who have been in a deep coma and/or have sufficient brain damage that the medical opinion is these patients cannot be using their brain to provide this lucidity. Therefore it must be their separate soul providing this short term capability.

He is not dogmatic about any of this, offering only his personal history, and the set of several dozen books and sources he has read over the last few decades that helped him come to his final religious acceptance, and therefore they might also influence nonbelieving skeptics.

I have not yet been convinced by his discussion, but I have to admit this (new to me) “evidence” around lucidity is worthy of deeper consideration concerning the nature of spirituality and consciousness.

The real problems and issues coming from our intermixing become more visible when we look at the red/blue counties and the red/blue precinct maps. There are very few truly “red” cities and a core blue urban area can expand into purple and then blue suburbs, as physicsguy alludes with fears for FL or TX or other mostly red “states”. The examples of OR, WA, CO, and perhaps AZ and now GA and MS(??) are already acknowledged. Presumably these venues still contain substantial numbers of red leaning folks who are now too often overridden on the laws and state constitutional measures they might favor.

AesopFan’s references to Robert Conquest require serious thought as to how we counter that tendency. It will probably require concentrated campaigns of “if you left a blue state to get away from their failures, don’t bring that thinking into our red state, county, and precincts.” Ron DeSantis provides some examples with his policy and issue pushing, but he is still only one man.

People seem to get their news from social media. Talk about “low information voters”! And if they are getting their information from social media, they think it is all the Republicans fault for not capitulating to Democrat demands — that would, they believe, be the “reasonable” thing to do. Therefore, the Republicans are unreasonable and at fault.

One facebook friend from NYC who is Jewish voted for Mandami. He believes that all the all the Mamdani stuff about his being anti-Jewish is made up. He counts himself well-informed, but he only reads the NY Times. And social media.

Subject-verb disagreement really bugs me, and I go ahead and do it myself.

1) a relatively small office race, Public Service Commisioner, in GA goes to the Ds. OK, GA is shifting purple, but this should be a warning to the GOP.

2) The already in-progress flight of major wealth from NYC to FL. I’m not sure how to interpret this. Good, that a lot of Mamdani’s tax base is fleeing, Bad, in that like what happened to Colorado, those NYC’ers will probably bring their leftist politics with them.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/media/nyc-election-fears-drive-100m-florida-real-estate-surge-nervous-new-yorkers-flee-south

All, in all, the GOP should take heed.

https://thehill.com/homenews/5589670-gop-incumbents-lose-seats/

https://www.newsweek.com/democrats-mississippi-vote-gop-supermajority-10994762

The TV told them to blame Trump. I live in Northern Virginia and there are no shortage of people who are otherwise intelligent, but accept uncritically everything the news media have to say. It’s quite the bubble up here.

With 90% of votes in, Mamdani has over 50% of them. All boroughs are about 90% in, so Staten Island (the only one where Cuomo had a majority) is not riding to the rescue.

So far looks like the polls hugely overestimated the support for Sliwa, and underestimated Cuomo and Mamdani by about the same amount.