Month: March 2015

I thought this a decent film.  My only thought I’m likely to share is that that Star Trek episode kept going through my mind in which one group with–humor me if I’m backwards–black on the right of their face and white on the left were persecuting those with black on the LEFT of their face and white on the right.

Can anyone who is being serious, contemplative, argue that Christ died for the right of people to hate and kill in His name, over exactly how his brilliant creed of love should be ceremonially expressed?  How is it that people who grow up ONE BLOCK from one another feel the need to torture and kill one another in the name of their version of Jesus?

This sort of thing causes me to understand the emotional background which seemingly informs the world view of many atheists.

Yes, I get history, and that identities beyond the religious play an important role.  I know the British treated the Irish worse, arguably, than we treated the American Indians.  As I have recently posted, they enslaved a very large number of them, and killed  great many outright.  They banned their languages, and put huge barriers on things like land ownership and other rights.

Still, both sides go to church at least weekly and read a document which talks about little but love and forgiveness.

This is worth the periodic repost and reread.

Google seemingly removed this from their search engine.  I wonder why that would be?  Or why they thought that would slow me down.

You people are smart.  Why are you being so fucking stupid?  Will life be better as robots?  Do you believe this?  Do you think meaning and purpose and human connection are unimportant, or that crass left-wing politics are the method to anything but emotional alienation, grotesque economic distortions and eventual collapse, and the loss of the capacities both for reason and honesty?

http://www.claremont.org/article/all-the-leaves-are-brown/#.VRbZa_zF-So

Trotting out this 97-98% number is a bit like asking people “is your current work useful or useless, and if useless, why are you doing it?”

The number of people researching the tooth fairy is likely quite small, but I think we can assume a high percentage–something close to 100%–think she is real.  Otherwise, why do the work?  Why go on snark hunts if you don’t believe in snarks?

If you want to work in “climate science” there is one Big Boy in town, and you either agree with him, or you don’t work.  Very simple.

And moving farther upstream, everyone knows this.  You don’t go into “climate science” in the first place if you don’t already think it is actually science, and not an abusive farce, which is what I think it is.

So we can assume with considerable confidence that 98%+ of the people ENTERING the field of “climate science” START as true believers.

And actually, researching this, the story is even worse: http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2012/07/17/that-scientific-global-warming-consensus-not/

Since 1998, more than 31,000 American scientists from diverse climate-related disciplines, including more than 9,000 with Ph.D.s, have signed a public petition announcing their belief that “…there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.” Included are atmospheric physicists, botanists, geologists, oceanographers, and meteorologists.

So where did that famous “consensus” claim that “98% of all scientists believe in global warming” come from? It originated from an endlessly reported 2009 American Geophysical Union (AGU) survey consisting of an intentionally brief two-minute, two question online survey sent to 10,257 earth scientists by two researchers at the University of Illinois. Of the about 3.000 who responded, 82% answered “yes” to the second question, which like the first, most people I know would also have agreed with.

Then of those, only a small subset, just 77 who had been successful in getting more than half of their papers recently accepted by peer-reviewed climate science journals, were considered in their survey statistic. That “98% all scientists” referred to a laughably puny number of 75 of those 77 who answered “yes”.

But the fact remains that we just had a record cold winter, that the maximum ice extent on both poles has grown over the past few years, and that cold and hot are two different things.

The most pernicious element of modern education is teaching obedience to authority.  Even people who think they are anti-authoritarian will abandon all reason if the right person is speaking.

The locus of perception is the individual.  It cannot be otherwise.  Some individuals have more “knowledge” than others, but if they are unable to treat it dispassionately and with the skillful application of critical reason, they can be taught to “know” countless things that just aren’t so, to paraphrase Reagan.

And to buy into any cult is to abdicate the personal responsibility we all have, in my view, to engage with the world as sovereign and interesting individuals.  Sovereign::interesting as conformist:: dull.

And counter-cultural cults are still cults. This should be obvious, but it seemingly isn’t.

I’ve said this, roughly, many times, but am feeling a bit sorry for myself and want to reject it by praising myself publicly.

My IQ is roughly 150.  This is decent, and I think I could probably get a 160 if I studied the test.  There are methods for raising measured IQ.

But I have started my email campaign again to reform our financial system, and am likely dealing with economists with 170 and even 180 IQ’s.  That field attracts really, really smart people.

My proposal is simple: we can eliminate unemployment and poverty, achieve a uniformly high standard of living, and do it working LESS than we are today.  All this, and we make our system more just and equitable.  The only people who lose are the predators, and no one, on the Right or the Left, favors the actual predators, at least rhetorically.  In practice, of course, they take large sums of money from them in every election cycle.

All I do is apply dispassionate logic to commonly available facts.  Money creation has no inherent economic use.  It creates a claim on actual economic wealth.  Ergo it is theft.

It can be reversed through the simple expedient of recognizing that money is not real, and that what has once been granted to the banks can be taken from them.

These are exquisitely simple ideas.  I think one could and should argue that the entire profession of economics consists mainly in trying to iron out the troubles created by banks and government interference in the private sector.  Businesspeople don’t need economists–or wouldn’t–in an actually intelligent, actually just financial order.

This is the problem I run into, though: most people fear being alone.  They fear social isolation.  They fear mockery and public shaming.

And this is how stupid shit happens over long periods of time.  Nobody wants to be the first adopter.  Nobody wants to go first.  And ESPECIALLY no one wants to admit that they have missed fundamental and vastly important truths across the course of their lifetimes, despite huge educational achievements, very high measured intelligence, and prodigious work output.

My goal is to send out 500 emails this year.  If I can get one person to rethink things, I will count myself very lucky.  Vanity has few limits.

And here is the core point I wanted to make: what makes me different is not a uniquely high IQ or capacity for information processing.  What makes me different is a willingness to tell the truth FIRST, and only secondarily figure out the social consequences of that belief.  I am able and willing to tolerate solitude, vast solitude.  I don’t like it, but it is essential to me being me, and I have no desire to be anyone else.  I like who I am, even if it is often difficult.

I’ll angle my way into this.

Two points I wanted to make immediately:

1) All I felt in Fear and Loathing was rage, rage they suppressed by using every drug they knew of, rage which they likely claimed was in response to something or other–Nixon of course being a prime candidate–but which was much deeper than that.

His attorney was almost certainly a rapist, and I wonder what stories he left out of his account. Moralizing seems not to have been something he did much of.  His problems were always practical, viz how to get away with it.  I counted three women they seriously abused: Lucy, Alice, and the waitress, who had a knife pulled on her.  All three started with his attorney, but they all included him, and he never seemed to care.

Remind me: what do you call someone with superficial charm, an innate and prodigious capacity for self and other deception, an inordinate appetite for thrills, and a seeming lack of conscience?  That’s more or less a textbook definition, isn’t it?

2) “Gonzo” journalism isn’t journalism at all.

What he craved, but which had not yet been created, was a reality show, of which he was the star.  He would have enjoyed watching himself on TV.  He would have worked hard to out-Ozzy Ozzy.

The deeper point, of course, is his relationship with “the Sixties”.  I will get to that eventually, but will note simply in passing that just about every treatment of him calls him either a counter-cultural icon or hero.

Here is what I think is the root of self sabotage, at least for me: it is a clinging to the past, in a childish hope that all the needs that were not met then will somehow, miraculously, magically, be met now, if only one does not transition fully from that emotional state one was in then.  It is a sort of unconsciously chosen anti-adulthood which, within its own logic, is very rational.  You did not get what you needed.  Those needs were quite real, and quite appropriate.  Therefore the world owes us this, and the way to get it is to wait.  Just wait.  It will come.  It’s always coming. Perhaps Samuel Beckett felt something like this.

The way out is through death.  One must accept the death of that self, the death of those dreams, the death of those hopes.  The world is not on its way.  Those needs cannot be met, now, in the way you needed them to be, then.  Something new can be invented; there are pathways forward.  But only after a bonfire–a cremation–of a past life that needs to die.

I saw a flag–a pennant really–for myself in one of my visualizations.  It consists in a green background, covered with skulls, and the number 9 on it.  9, in many Asian cultures, is considered sacred.  This pennant represents, roughly, “Life and perfection through death.”

I am literally going to make it–I have the materials and simply have not made the time–and literally going to put it on a flagpole in my room.  I am going to bring death into my room, and to the extent of my courage and capacity, embrace it.

“International Coalition of Emotionally Disaffected and Alienated Individuals finding solace and comfort in shared daily anger, directed at whatever target presents itself.”

I think we could also shorten this to “Wolf Pack”.  Those who hunt together, stay together.  And why hunt?  The pack is formed in the chase, and of course one must eat.   The sense of gnawing on tasty bones and emotional satiety is something we all crave, no?  It is simply the case that better and worse solutions exist.

Given the primitive emotional need upon which such politics rest, it is small wonder they break everything they touch, and consistently empower precisely those they claim to hate.  No intellectual candor or rigor can survive such grotesque emotional need.

I was talking with a friend I met at one of my inner work sessions, who related that “I don’t like things”.  I don’t have “I like”.  This person had previously confided to me that when they were young they also had colic, and their mother chose to hold them underwater to make them shut up.  Trauma.

I will wonder again how much undiagnosed trauma is floating around out there from before age 2.  Nobody can remember it, except in their bodies.   Somebody has to tell you, or you have to do primitive archeological work on yourself, never knowing for sure exactly what you are getting and where it actually came from.

But here is where I wound up: enthusiasm is something animals also have.  My dogs get very enthusiastic every time I crinkle plastic poop bags or put my shoes on in the morning.  This means it exists at a lower level than the social level, than the frontal cortex, than language.

Why not place it, too, in the gut?  If curiosity is the opposite of trauma, then I would suggest enthusiasm is the opposite of depression.  We need positive poles.  It is not enough to say “I don’t want to be depressed.”  What is needed is what EXCITES you, what gets you going, what . . .gets your juices flowing. . .your blood pumping. . . what makes you salivate at the thought of it.

And why not place the conditioned response in the gut as well?  All this neuroanatomy is in its infancy.  They just discovered the “gut brain” within the last 20 years or so, or at least its significance.

Could we not speak of trauma as a conditioned response?  Isn’t it?  It is with me.  Certain thoughts, certain actions, and it is like a cloud descends and I get this feeling of impending doom.  I can and of course have walked right through the cloud and the fear countless times–pretty much every day of my life.  This is why I don’t fear the same way many people do. If you have to deal with fear all day every day, things that would normally frighten most people aren’t any harder for me at all.  Public speaking, risk of death, failure: I fear all of these.  I also fear shopping malls, cars, people, dogs, cats, birds, the sky, and grass.  It’s part of being me.  Nonetheless, I function normally to all outward appearances.  It just takes a lot more work for me to do apparently simple things.

But I really think there is some very interesting work that could be done on this topic.  I doubt I will ever wind up in an academic setting again (I’ll paraphrase Greg Glassman: the magic is in the discovery; only the explanation is in the science), but if I did, I think it would be a Ph.D in neuroscience/neuroanatomy.

I know seratonin is something many drugs target.  No doubt there are other neurotransmitters that get targeted too.  But what if you surgically altered the pathways from the gut to the brain?  I think what you would get would be people without instincts, and without enthusiasm.  What if you could find a way to alternately turn them on and off, so people could feel the difference, and learn to detect and process the input of the gut?  What if you could figure out a way to sedate only the gut, or to slow the quantity and speed of the transmissions?

Finally: I wonder if fasting is an ancestral way of dealing with the “gut problem”.  

May I find peace, that I may share it.

I cannot resist adding that so many people share invisible clothes.

I have finally learned how to be an adequate pirate captain.  I got the Elite Ram, after some difficulty, and have taken on some ships even the game told me not to. I’m pretty much a big deal.

And I had to laugh today when it hit me that I can’t self sabotage myself now.  Unlike life, The game only goes forward.  I would have to start a new game, and the whole deal with self sabotage is it has to be plausibly deniable.  No one says “OK, now I’m going to fuck things up royally.”  No, they just DO it, then either wonder what the fuck just happened, or KNOW what the fuck just happened, depending on their self awareness.

Then I got to thinking about Complexity Theory and Dancing landscapes.  Here is the thing with life: you have never “made it”.  You could be the blanking-est, blanking-est, and blanking-est (pick what you want: richest, most powerful, sexiest, most handsome, coolest) person in the world, and you will still die.  You will still lose, or at least undergo, to my understanding, a phase transition.

And of course most of us are never blanking-est anything.  And I look and see that the only way I can plan to avoid self sabotage is to develop the contrary habit of daily growth. It is not enough to try and avoid it.  I have to get at the roots of it, and the way to do that is to GO THROUGH all the things that stand in the way of planned growth; to learn to walk steadily and confidently in a direction I have actually consciously chosen.

More generally, it seems to me if you are not growing, you are being left behind.  That is the lesson of the Dancing Landscape.  And I don’t mean economically, or at least not only.  I simply mean that you are falling behind the learning that COULD have happened if you had chosen it as a daily activity.

If you are not growing, you are shrinking.  I think that is a useful principle.

The other deep lesson of Assassin’s Creed is this: as a pirate in the Caribbean in the early 18th century I deal with a lot of British and Spanish.  The game is quite violent, and most ships I take wind up being sunk, and all aboard, with few exceptions, implicitly killed.  Believe it or not, it sometimes makes me sad, watching all the carnage, because I know these things really happened.

But more generally it got me to thinking that there really was no moral difference between the pirates and the conquistadors and imperialists.  What does a pirate do?  He shows up, shoots everyone who resists, and steals your stuff.  What did the British do in their colonies?  They showed up with guns, shot everyone who resisted, and said they were in charge and you now owe us taxes.  They took slaves for a long time.  In 1710 or so (I think that’s where we are in the story) they were still shipping Irish slaves to the Caribbean and “breeding” them with African slaves to make the children more valuable.  I’m sure you can imagine what those scenes might have been like.  These were the British, the ones we like to think of as the good guys, who all have charming accents and a marvelous and droll sense of humor.

And I think that none of these people were innocent.  Very few, at any rate.  Pirates were perhaps the most honest ones.

I do feel as well, though, that one must be very careful with this whole hypocrisy argument.  I recently listened to Hunter Stockton Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”, and felt strongly that what I was listening to was Cultural Sadeism, and it caused me to make some alterations to my theories.  I’m still processing and will post on that later.

For now, I wanted to point out that Thompson no doubt rationalized his sundry crimes as “at least not hypocritical”.  They were honest crimes, and he admits to them.  Sade, too, found the only crime to be hypocrisy.  What is the moral value of the charge of hypocrisy for such people?

It is this: they can distract others from their crimes by accusing everyone else of them, without ever articulating a morality.  Saul Alinsky, of course, was a Cultural Sadeist and palled around with literal gangsters (remember Mackie Messer/Mack the Knife winds up allying with the protagonists in the Three Penny Opera).  Everyone else was awful, he said.  Why?  They were HYPOCRITES.

Bait and switch, that is all.  Look over there, he says, while he picks your pocket.  Nothing meaningful has been said, and awful things left unjustified because unjustifiable.

One more thing: I think the phrase “psychologically harmful” could be substituted usefully for “immoral”.  This is the crux of my argument.  And there is no need to add “socially harmful”.  If an individual knows something is socially harmful and does it anyway, this is psychologically harmful, even if that person is so far gone the added injury is invisible.