When we are all lying about without much to do, we always get into conversations. Sometimes we talk about a feast you would find at Harris’ Restaurant in San Francisco, California USA. You know, bread with real butter, rich chowders, acclaimed dry aged steaks as thick as a man’s arm served in a posh, wood-paneled dining room, with live jazz in the bar, cakes and pie and doughnuts, coffee with fresh cream, good bourbon. Please excuse the droplets on this paper; I seem to be drooling. As much as I would love to gorge on this much-anticipated feast (and perhaps work off the meal in a bit of exercise with aforementioned best friends), and I am on diet and stuck being a vegetarian right now. I also have to choose a career path of life, and I would love to return to England and perhaps become a professor. I have seen enough maiming and injury here to turn me off from wanting to practice medicine. Really, thought, it is all balloon juice. None of it means anything. It is fine and good to talk up what you will do when you get out of this, but the talk is just hot air until you do get out of this. We could talk about our future today and then lose those futures tomorrow. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6

Outside the sphere of deductive reasoning, we can speak of fallacies only in an extended sense. For example, we can contrast a genuine confirmation of hypotheses with something that is mistaken for it, probable arguments that give some support to their conclusions with one that do not, and in general, techniques and procedures that tend to give correct results with ones that tend to produce error. However, it would be pointless and misleading to call it a piece of inductive reasoning, say, fallacious merely because its conclusion turned out to be false. Conditional expressions are often similarly indeterminate. “You will succeed if you make an effort is not necessarily true. Some people have spent years trying to succeed and have put in more effort than most have in a lifetime and get nowhere in life, and it is sometimes because there are groups of people oppressing them on purpose and taking credit for their work. Life for these people becomes so hard that it increases their faith in God because they realize no matter how much effort I put in, I will never be recognized, so I just have to turn to a supernatural power and have faith that something will work out for me. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6

Even when you help other people sometimes, they will do nothing but take advantage of you and never do anything to give back. You can fool a lot of people some of the time, means that there are times at which the whole populace can be deceived. The neglect of the requirements of significance is another fallacy. Even when there is good statistical evidence for a causal connection between two features A and B, it is a mistake to conclude immediately that one, say A, is the cause of the other without having considered and excluded the possibilities that B may tend to produce A, that A and B may be joint effects of some other cause, and that there may be causation in more than one direction. For example, a positive correlation between poverty and ill health might be due to the fact that ill health diminishes earning capacity and wastes resources, to the fact that stupidity, idleness, or drunkenness tends to produce both poverty and ill health, or to combination of more than one of these casual tendencies. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6

More generally still, we can recognize a fallacy of prejudice, which consists in believing without evidence, in adopting or adhering to views on any subject without any relevant reasoning. There was recently a study on the news that said to earn more money, you may want to get more sleep, instead of a second job because the researcher found a group of people who slept eight hours a night and got paid well. Chances are these people were all well-off and highly educated, which allowed them to get the proper amount of sleep they needed. However, as you and I both know, by sleeping more that is not going to help you when you cannot afford to pay the rent nor put food on the table. Regularly judging the rightness of actions by their utility is tantamount to adopting the principle that whatever maximizes utility is right; and, again, regularly to argue that because a statement cannot be verified, it is meaningless or true, is tantamount to adopting a verifiability theory of meaning. This is a particularly easy way of committing the fallacy of prejudice. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6

Ignoratio elenchid is the fallacy of missing the point, in arguing for something other than what is to be proved. Cases in which the authority appealed to can be independently shown to be an authority in the sense of being likely to be well-informed about the point at issues are exceptions. Irrelevancy shades into prejudice; we may readily accept the doctrines of our party and reject those of the enemy. In this, there may also be present a fallacy of confusion, in that we treat factual beliefs as if they were items of another category—principles to which we can adhere or subscribe, or which we can reject, by choice. Another form of irrelevance is the tu quoque, or two wrongs technique. If some action or view of one’s own is criticized, one may replay by attacking some action or view of one’s critic that is equally hard to defend. The argument ad hominem is similar—we reject what someone says on the irrelevant ground that he or she is in no position to say it. However, an argumentum ad hominem may quite properly point to inconsistency, and may validly establish the limited conclusion that may be of special interest in a moral discussion, where the problem may well be that of finding a policy which is both coherent and acceptable. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6

The truth is that very few people care. The reason is that the confusing of real life and role of life is now a fixture of business and politics as much as entertainment. However, we all face challenges, but it is not the size of the problem that is important, it is our perception of that problem; it is how big or small we make it in our minds. All our difficulties are only platforms for the manifestation of God’s grace, power, and love. Adversity cases some people to break; others to break records. A cause necessarily produces an effect, but only in the sense that it would not be called a cause if it did not. Father, thank you that I am a child of the Most High God, anointed, equipped, and well able to overcome. I am not weak, defeated, or powerless. I will not be intimidated, shrink back and think my problems are too big. The same power that raised Christ from the dead lives on the inside of me. You are greater than anything that is against me, and you control my destiny. No weapon formed against me will prosper. I believe that it is just a matter of time before I break through to a new level. You will turn whatever calamity that has happened to me into a blessing for God. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6