I looked for and found beauty at home while chaos and madness seemed to be the order of the day elsewhere in the world. I fixed a camera to a tripod and waited for my hummingbird mother to come with food for her chicks.  I still had time for something short of an actual rant

NPR broadcast a report on research done partly to determine why so many people who had declined/refused to vaccinate their children before the current outbreak of measles are still reluctant to do so even when they are presented with research data "proving" that vaccines do not cause autism or any other problem for developing children. Preexisting conditions which require specific medication may lead physicians to recommend not getting the vaccine; but for normally healthy individuals, research shows that vaccines pose no threat whatsoever.   The research indicates that people in all cultures tend to hold onto previous biases and ideologically based behaviors even after they have learned that those beliefs and behaviors have no basis in fact.  The best guess is that through many thousands of years of human evolution, individuals who conformed to the biases and beliefs of a group or tribe stood the best chance of survival. Conforming gave them significant protection. We have a built in propensity to believe what the group believes. We continue to hang on to behaviors and responses to signal our membership in tribes and communities even after our basic knowledge and intellectual development have changed our understanding of reality.  

Politics and religion are probably the clearest examples of hard-to-give-up responses even after we have learned that the ideologies of political and religious institutions are built around notions that don't hold up to reason. Why else do so many people act and even vote against their own interest?  

Catechisms (from Greek: κατηχέω, to teach orally), oaths of allegiance, learned chants and cheers are specifically designed to reinforce what we have a natural tendency to do; and we often continue to express loyalty by participating mindlessly even after we no longer literally believe to be true what we affirm in unison or in concert with others of our group or tribe. 

Republicans in Congress voted again this week to repeal the Affordable Care Act.  They went through the motions again chanting in unison to their political base their disapproval of President Obama and of his administration and repeating exactly what they were saying before the program actually began but proved to offer real help to millions of Americans who didn’t have health insurance before the program began.  Republicans have again taken up their chant against “Obama Care” without offering programs of their own to address the critical need for health care for all Americans, especially for those most at risk and least able to afford basic medical attention when they need it.  Their mantra always includes the idea that "the market" should be left free from governmental interference to create programs to meet the health-care needs of Americans... as if "The Market" were a creature with conscience.

Republicans and Democrats and Socialists and Communists are tribes... and the list goes on: Baptists and Methodists and Mormons and Roman Catholics and Anglican Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians and Jehovah’s Witnesses and Muslims and Jews and Buddhists and many other distinct groups of devotees to some faith-based religion are essentially tribes. Members of any of those tribes are expected to believe and to behave in specific ways approved by the group.  For example, a Methodist kid may grow up not knowing that his denomination's Book of Discipline, against all logic, declares that homosexuals are not pleasing to the Methodist god; but the professional Christians, those who earn a living by working for a Methodist Church, know what the prohibitions are and they know the implications of their religion’s exclusion of LGBT persons from full participation in the rites and sacraments of the religion. Even after they learn that neither heterosexuality nor homosexuality as sexual orientation is chosen by individuals, most are reluctant to take a stand against a doctrine that clearly discriminates against and hurts real people, individuals whom they know and otherwise approve in their communities. The Methodist tribe is made up of communities of various sizes all over the world. The leaders of those groups routinely accept the gifts of time, talent, and money given in service to the religious organization by LGBT individuals; but the leaders manage even in a “faith-based” community to live with an illogical disconnect and go on with their practices of exclusion.  In a world that is dangerously overpopulated, the Roman Catholic Church continues to declare that contraceptive practices are forbidden by the Catholic god.  Southern Baptists continue to teach children that absolutely everything in their Holy Bible is the true word and law of their Baptist god. They claim to believe everything in the Universe was declared into existence by a supreme being approximately six thousand years ago, that the first human beings were a man named Adam and a woman named Eve, that a big fish swallowed Jonah, that the Red Sea parted so a path on the sea floor was exposed to let Moses lead a group of people out of Egypt into the land of Israel, and that Jesus walked on water.