Musings
by Roedy Green ©1996-2008 Canadian Mind Products
These are random thoughts, that don’t
fit anywhere else. Perhaps some day I may develop some of them into full blown
essays. I hope they work both as Deep ThoughtTM humour, and sometimes
to prang your brain into thinking afresh.
M*A*S*H
In the many years M*A*S*H was on TV, never once did any character notice that
the wounded Korean war soldiers the doctors were patching up were killers
themselves, mindlessly killing for no reason. Never once did any character
notice that he was aiding and abetting that killing by patching up soldiers so
they could go back to killing people who had done nothing to the USA. They
portrayed the soldiers only as innocent victims, never once as people who chose
to play the war game who got hurt as a logical consequence of their own malice.
Life After Death
I don’t think modern day Christians truly believe in life after death. I
think they entertain it as an unlikely possibility. If they were serious, they
would behave much more like the devout in the middle ages.
I speculate sometimes that maybe after you die you are forced to reincarnate as
the being/species you despise most. I give a little shivver. Why do I do it?
Probably for the same reason some people like to go to horror movies.
What is behind this Christian fairy tale of after-death judgement?
- So you can imagine that all those who wronged you and got away with it will be
finally unmercifully punished.
- It helps you belief in eternal life, — it may be horrible, but it is still
life. It makes it more plausible. It is more like ordinary life in terms of
average wonderfullness.
- It lets you fantasise about some cosmic surprise party awaitng you where all
your secret desires will be fulfilled. Children call it daydreaming.
- Since the rules are much better for winning a lottery than entering heaven,
everyone who entertains the notion knows in their heart of hearts they are hell-bound.
If most people were convinced they were already heaven bound, they would not let
preachers drag them about by the nose. If you read the bible literally, you will
learn you have no chance at all. This makes even the most miserable life quite
pleasant compared with what is to come.
Being Dumped III
All animals, male and female, including human, look for mates with the highest
status/fitness. It is the Darwinian imperative to ensure survival of the
offspring. So when you are dumped, unless your bad behaviour is obvious, it is
not as though you were left, but rather that your mate found someone more
attractive whom they believed they had a chance of landing. There is no great
shame in this. It is utterly unrealistic to expect that you would be the highest
status person on the planet whom your mate figures he or she would have a chance
with. Some people imagine they would even have a chance with Brad Pitt or Sandra
Bullock.
Cut Flowers
Whenever I see a beautiful young person, or either sex, I feel a terrible
sadness, similar to the feeling I have beholding a vase of cut flowers, knowing
the freshness will last but days. I know how brutally quickly that beauty will
fade. The young person is completely unaware that old age will descend with the
suddenness of a car accident.
Routine
Most people resent routine repetitive tasks like house cleaning. Computer
scientists have a different way of looking at it. Computers are masters of
routine — repeating the same steps billions of times a second. The more
something is repeated, the more it pays off to figure out how to do it perfectly.
You can think of a routine activity as a second and third, and … chance
to correct your mistakes. Consider making a game of some routine tasks such as:
- Getting your self cleaned and groomed in the morning.
- Cleaning the dishes.
- Making various edits to documents.
See if you can get it down so that your movements flow like a cat without a
wasted movement.
Continuity Of Consciousness
When people tackle the thorny problem of consciousness I think they make four
errors.
- They presume it must be something else, something less mysterious, perhaps a
kind of energy, electric field etc. I think it would be more productive to
presume, for now, that consciousness is its own thing, as different from an
electric field as time is, and start studying its properties.
- They presume it either exists all or nothing. I think it exists to different
degrees, within different people, within different species, or even within the
same person at different times. This difference admits the possibility of
measuring degrees of consciousness or at least measuring something highly
correlated with it. We might discover how to measure consciousness by looking
for things that correlate to a subjective measure of wakefulness. Only once you
can measure something can you do much serious theorising about it. Then boldly
apply those correlates to other species to estimate their degrees of
consciousness. I think we will discover consciousness exists in some form almost
everywhere in the tree of life. We have been blinded to it primarily by
religiously induced species chauvinism.
- They are overly influenced by the ancient religious soul theory of consciousness,
where a sort of vapourous homunculus parasite resides behind the eyes, and moves
from body to body transcending death. The illusion of continuity of
consciousness comes from the continuity of neural patterns and the all-is-familiar
signals the brain gives to consciousness. As far as I can tell, when I come out
of anaesthesia, I am newly minted. Granted I have memories of life before going
under, but I just seemed to pop into existence out of nothing. Similarly my
consciousness seems to gradually fade out of existence when I go under
anaesthesia. You might think of consciousness as like incarnations of a
operating system between boots on the same hardware. There is similarity between
incarnations but no continuity. The operating system RAM image does not go
anywhere between boots, There is nothing analogous of the soul hovering around
awaiting a suitable newly booting machine to infest. The OS image disappears and
is newly created on each boot.
- Because consciousness has proved so slippery to study, people like to just
ignore it and pretend it is not important.
Consciousness in the most important ontogolical question. After all, if we truly
imagine a world in where there is no subjective experience (a world in which
these is swirling stuff but no conscious entity to experience it,) that world
may as well not exist. In some philosophical traditions, both Eastern (certain
schools of Buddhist thought, for example), and Western (specifically, observer-based
interpretations of quantum mechanics), that is exactly how such a world in
regarded.
~ Ray Kurzweil The Singularity Is Near
page 380
Mammalists
You have probably noticed that people care far more about horrible things
happening to those in their own country than they do when they happen to people
on the other side of the world. People have a similar bias toward mammals.
Consider the reaction to a man putting sharp hooks in balls of cat food, feeding
them to kittens and jerking them into the air for amusment, or farmers pouring
scalding water on horses to kill them, or teens running over puppies in their
cars to see how many they can squish. We think absolutely nothing of these same
acts of deliberate cruelty when the victims are fish, chickens or frogs. My eyes
tell me the amount of pain is no different. I studied zoology is high school,
and dissected many animals. All these animals have advanced nervous systems. I
see no reason to believe they are experiencing any less pain than they appear to
be.
Ray Kurzweil
In his book The Singularity is Near futurist Ray Kurzweil suggests
the purpose of humanity is to spread its culture, faster than the speed of light
if possible, to fully occupy the entire universe. To me this smacks of the
desire of a young tom cat to mark its territory by peeing on it.
The Fermi Paradox Revisited
The famous physicist Fermi noted that if there were even the slimmest chance of
a technological civilisation evolving, their presence should be visible
throughout the universe. Instead there is nothing but a great silence. What are
we to make of that? Here are some possible explanations:
- Efficiently encoded data is utterly indistinguishable from random noise. We may
be awash is a sea of intelligent radio and light communications, but without the
technology to detect, decode or decrypt them.
- We presume that advanced species will use radio transmissions. Advanced
civilisations may consider radio hopelessly primitive. They may not want to use
it for transmission since it would interfere with galactic observation, much as
astronomers want a light-free skyline or for aesthetic reasons. The cosmic FCC
quickly shuts down transmitters. We might be expecting a call any time now.
- The birth of an intelligent species may be a relatively rare event. They don’t
want to disturb us so they can study the process. Their technology would be
millions of years more advanced than ours. If they did not want us to see them,
we wouldn’t.
- We are the butt of a cosmic joke. We are so conceited that we imagine we are the
most intelligent species the universe even though we have only looked on one
other planet. This is so funny to more advanced species that no wants to let us
in on the truth that we are one of billions of intelligent species, nothing out
of the ordinary at all. In fact we are not even the brightest species on earth,
just the most technologically adept.
- As I suggested earlier, technology inevitably destroys its creator within a
century or two. We indeed are the only intelligent species in the galaxy, but by
no means the first.
- Virtual reality and artificial intelligence speeds up thinking and hence slows
down the experience of reality. To advanced civilisations, reality moves far too
slowly to hold any interest. All intelligent species have turned inward. They
are not interested in communication with dullards like us when sentences
communicated take eons of subjective time to exchange. We are ignored for the
same reason college student tend to ignore first graders.
- The universe is indeed a dangerous place. Like forest creatures in the night,
wise civilisations camouflage themselves and maintain silence.
- Tourists rarely go to Sudan. It is just too depressing. Earth’s barbarism,
which we decry, would be utterly unbearable to an advanced civilisation that had
never witnessed any form of violence. We are so revolting, that even the idea of
exchanging radio signals would be nauseating.
- Then there is the Kurzweil hypothesis that we are indeed the very first
intelligent civilisation. Somebody had to do it, just as somebody has to win the
lottery, even though there is nothing all that special about them. This still
smacks of religious jingoism and the religious view that the earth in the center
of the universe, the apple of God’s eye. I think it the least likely
explanation, even if on the face of it is seems the most obvious.
Sentimental Males
Women scorn shabbily dressed males, or men who drive old cars. They fail to
understand that men are sentimental about clothes and cars. These objects record
the memories of good times past. They fail to understand that men who are so
sentimental that they won’t discard a shirt, just because because it is
worn, likely won’t cast aside a partner just because her looks fade.
Male Happiness
One advantage of being a human male is that the requirements for happiness are
greatly simplified. 90% of what s needed is to get your penis in your
favoured type of hole a sort of organic golf.
Stress
Some people’s lives are so boring they feel the need to stimulate
themselves by artificially creating frustration and stress through game playing.
What would happen if instead of diverting themselves with pointless trivia, they
upped the difficulty of real-world problems they tackled?
The Nose Ring
There are not many things to be said in favour of old age, but one of them is an
acute awareness of how you have been dragged around all your life by a ring in
your nose — your hormones. It is amazing that you can getting anything
done at all in youth with that powerful distraction. We have thrown only the
thinnest veil of hypocrisy over our ruttings. Viewed from the relative
tranquility of old age, that thralldom appears somewhat disgusting, primitive,
irritating, juvenile, yet also the pulse of life that provides the motivation
for everything. The nostalgia for it can be unbearable.
Give Up
Give up! Don’t waste another millisecond trying to get love or parenting
from someone who doesn’t love you or want to parent you. It doesn’t
matter if they logically should want to or should feel morally
obligated to or have done so in the past. Immediately look elsewhere for a new
source of your psychological needs. Most people can barely scrape by making
their own lives work. They have little energy left over for the needs of others.
If you put your life on hold until you have rehabilitated basket-case parents
sufficiently they will be capable of running their own lives successfully and
parenting you, you are making the task of making your own life work
unnecessarily difficult.
Hand Guns
On 2008-06-26 the Supreme Court of the United States
ruled that Americans had a constitutional right to leave unlocked, loaded
handguns in their homes for “self defense” (even though the
constitution talked only of their use in a state militia). The defining feature
of an American is his intense desire to keep a gun at hand to kill people in his
home. Few other cultures, save the Nazis, were that attached to their guns.
Americans are well aware that handguns kill far more children than burglars.
What is the source of the intense attachment? I can think of two reasons:
- The materialist ethic is so strong that protecting property trumps protecting
the life of children.
- American men fantasise about murdering their wives and children. When they
finally do kill then, they want the ready excuse that they thought they were
burglars.
And Never the Twains Shall Meet
Metaphorically speaking, God played a cosmic joke on straight people. Men and
women have completely different tastes in decor, activities, food, music,
entertainment, vacations, tidiness, movies, hygiene, ways of spending money…
Yet they are still passionately attracted to each other. Even while they are
madly in love, they bitterly complain about the fundamental incompatibility.
Tribal and Muslim societies acknowledge the problem by largely segregating the
sexes, even after marriage. Again metaphorically speaking, God also played a
cosmic joke on gay people. The old are fatally attracted to the young who treat
them with contempt.
Hush
Animals are often highly territorial and aggressive to smaller creatures. It
seems prudent to presume other life in the galaxy is similar, and other
intelligent life could also be hostile like man. Yet we broadcast our existence
and our vulnerabilities to the galaxy with radio and TV signals, and with the
explosive emission of greenhouse gases. Even termites are smart enough to stay
hidden.
Children
One of the most delightful things about children is none of them have ever voted
Republican.
Aging
One of the most distressing events of getting old is waking up one morning and
noticing, that in the night, aliens have replaced your hands with some elderly
persons’.
We Are not Alone
Given the trillions of planets in the universe, and how life appeared almost the
instant the earth cooled, and how, man, a brand new species, reached the moon in
a twinkling of evolutionary time, I find it the Christian notion that we are
alone in the universe almost inconceivable. Why then don’t we see visitors?
- We have broadcast our presence for only about 70 years, barely enough time to
notify the closest stars.
- For the same reason tourism to Zimbabwe is unpopular.
- For the same reason people don’t travel to the other side of the world to
see a strip mall. Our sort of world may be as common as cosmic grass, not worth
exploring.
- Because Einstein was right, and the speed of light effectively enforces non-interference.
- Because like biologists, visitors do their utmost to remain hidden so they can
watch the natural behaviour of earth’s inhabitants.
- Visitors send probes not physical bodies. They might send nanobots or other
forms we would not recognise as life.
- They may well visit. However, if anyone reports seeing an alien life form, we
dismiss that person as a kook, even when there are tens of thousands of such
people. This ridicule discourages people from reporting encounters, reinforcing
the notion that only nutcases ever have such encounters. It becomes impossible
to scientifically research the topic without being dismissed as crazy.
- Intelligent life inevitably destroys itself with war before it develops the
technology to explore the stars. So newly emerged intelligent life almost never
finds neighbours.
What a Different A Word Makes
If a wolf kills a young caribou, and a crow comes by and feasts on the corpse,
we say the crow dines on carrion. This is especially
true if the wolf has left and the corpse has rotted a bit. Yet when a butcher
kills a castrated bull, and allows the meat to “age” (tenderise by
bacterial breakdown) for a month or two, before somone else eats it, we would
not likely term that “eating carrion”
Similarly not many of us would dream of drinking the liquid secretions of the
sweat glands of domesticated antelopes, but don’t blink an eye when we
call it “milk” and serve it in a non-recyclable plastic jug.
Most of us find the thought of chowing down on the arthropods (spiders,
scorpions, insects) quite revolting, yet most of us feast happily on crabs,
lobsters and shrimp which are simply the marine members of the phylum. It is as
illogical as eating salmon but refusing to eat trout on the grounds they are too
disgusting.
Wealth Imagination
There are a few people, who on gaining great wealth, show some corresponding
imagination in spending it. I include:
- Bill Gates: eliminating malaria and AIDS.
- Andrew Carnegie: building libraries in all the major urban centers of his time.
- George Soros: taking down George Bush.
- Building unique homes, particularly ones that have minimal impact on the
environment.
- a middle-aged cosmetic dentist whose name I cannot recall in Montréal:
setting up a music studio for the use of the poor youth of Montréal North.
Most spend it on conspicuous consumption with no more intelligence than a high
school drop out:
- lavish parties.
- drugs and alcohol.
- designer clothing.
- excessively large homes.
- yachts that just sit at dock.
- expensive cars.
- excessive food.
- buying off people to pretend to be friends.
Why Americans Hate the Government
When we Canadians hear Americans fulminating against the evil of “the
govmint”, we imagine they are a bit crazy. However, the American
government is not the same sort of animal as the Canadian government.
There are good reasons for people to hate and fear it.
- The bureaucracy. The United States is a much older country. It was formed by the
coming together of independent states, each with its own unique bureaucratic
style, that lives on to this day, foiling attempts to this day at computerised
streamlining. For example, in Louisiana, sales
tax collection is farmed out to a private businessman in each parish who
publishes his own website explaining the rules and rates. There is no table
consolidating this information for the entire state. In contrast, in Canada all
a cash register needs to know is two numbers, the federal GST rate, and the
provincial PST rate of the home province. All you need to know about sales tax
for all of Canada can be summed up in a table of a dozen numbers. The equivalent
information for the USA is available as a subscription from a service bureau for
per year.
I once met an American at a New Year’s eve party. It turned out we were
both writing tenders for roughly million dollar computer systems for quasi
governmental bodies. We both complained about all the required the legalese and
government regulations. We decided to swap tenders to see who had it worse. His
was ten times thicker. It even had clauses about washrooms.
Then there is the matter of medical billing — something that requires
rooms full of clerks in every American hospital, carfefully tracking every
aspirin. In Canada there are no such staff. Since there is a single payer, it is
all electronic and greatly stripped down. Dealing with a broken leg might
require 15 keystrokes at most. A hospital admission takes about 5 seconds.
- The USA has ten times the population of Canada. That means the bureaucracies are
more than ten times bigger with even more layers to grind to a halt.
- The USA has elected judges who face periodic reelection. Canada has appointed
judges who cannot be removed except for gross misconduct. That means the
judicial system in the USA tends to do what is currently popular, even if unjust
to a currently unpopular minority.
- The Canadian parliamentary party-discipline system generates periodic sweeps
where every politician in the government is swept from power. In the USA,
changes are usually incremental. Even a politician in an American minority party
is still powerful and still worth bribing. An American thus feels he has less
power to punish and control his politicians.
- The USA has a huge military and uses it to dominate the world in a rather
roughshod way. This creates enemies and leads to paranoia such as the Joe
McCarthy Commie-under-the-bed era or the currently fashionable fear of Muslims.
This leads to reckless abandonment of civil liberties and constitutional
safeguards. Canada is too small to pose much of a threat internationally, though
its oil wealth could lead it astray in future. The result in American government
tends to be paranoid and manic-depressive and the Canadian phlegmatic.
The Approval Drug
One of the fastest routes to misery is seeking public approval. No matter what
you do, somebody out there will consider you an utter bounder for it and phone
in a death threat. You have to give yourself approval. In former times,
people called this “doing the will of God” as opposed to succumbing
to worldly temptations. But even then, there were 10,000 jealous gods commanding
dreadful acts of cruelty, so even then you could not win. Today we might call it “doing
the right thing”. The alternative is to become a slave to those who hand
out the approval, or to cower like a mouse, afraid to do anything of note,
trying deperately to camouflage yourself out of existence.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress
depends on the unreasonable man.”
~ George Bernard Shaw
Salmon Run
Consider the gauntlet that salmon endure to spawn. They have to make it past
seals, orcas and commercial fisherman in the ocean. There are the sports
fishermen, bears, eagles, native spear fishers, nets… There is the
pollution, torrents, waterfalls and mud. Only an elite few make it few, battered
to spawn the entire next generation. The whole process reminds be of third
worlders seeking to immigrate to the rich countries. They have to accumulate
sufficient money for the journey working in a country where daily wages are
measured in pennies. They must survive police, guards, dogs, deserts, snakeheads,
gangs, robbers… They have to somehow make it to the promised land, find
under-the-table work, aquire id, camouflage themselves as legitimate immigrants
and never get caught. Only the very strongest and smartest make it.
Teaching Sadism
Think of the ways we try to stomp the natural compassion out of children, how we
teach them to enjoy the suffering of others.
- Punch and Judy shows where whacking a baby with a sticks is presented as amusing.
- America’s Funniest Videos where people having accidents are
presented with silly voices and zany music to teach children to see others in
pain as entertainment.
- Video games where children kill by the score and defecate on the corpses.
- Cartoons where characters attempt to kill each other in the most painful way
possible.
- Pro wrestling matches where actors pretend to permanently injure one another and
pretend to be in unbearable pain.
- Fights leading to permanent brain injury as part of pro sports, especially
hockey.
- Extended kung fu and other extreme fight scenes, which in real life would have
resulted in fatalities, in nearly every TV drama.
Violence as entertainment is so pervasive in our society, we don’t even
notice what we are teaching our kids.
“The aim of military training is not just to prepare men for battle, but
to make them long for it.”
~ Louis Simpson
Lasting Relationships
Here is my advice on how to have a lasting relationship. I have said this in
similar words before, but it bares repeating:
- Make sure you give your partner some physical pleasure every day, in the form they
like. It might be a literal back scratch, a foot massage, a hug or coffee in bed.
- Be at least as polite as you would be to a stranger.
- Listen to their petty complaints about you. If they ever leave you, that will be
the real reason why.
Humiliation Rituals
Have you noticed how humiliation has become the national sport of America? Some
examples include:
- Donald Trump and “You’re fired!”.
- American Idol where the week’s loser is publicly shamed then kicked off
the show with the camera glued to his face to catch every nuance of distress.
- The Jerry Springer Show where couples tell the nation every embarrassing fact (or
fiction) they can come up with about their ex.
- The Maury Povich Show where young women are humiliated when their promiscuity is
exposed in detail to the nation as DNA test after DNA test fails to find the
father of their child.
- The frequent use of the terms kick ass and kick butt.
- Giving college students ten times more work than they can possibly complete,
then shaming those who crack under the pressure and drop out.
- America invades tiny third world countries and grinds them under its heel.
Forgetfulness of Money
What did people do before the invention of money? They tracked who had done whom
a favour. They made allowance for disability and unusual capability to
contribute. In general, people helped each other, unless they couldn’t.
Everyone knew how much each was contributing and and how much each was consuming,
and used social pressure to keep this in reasonable balance. People did not move
far from where they were born, so everyone knew everyone else quite well. There
was no way to pull a dirty trick or to do an unusually good turn without
everyone knowing about it. Reputation was thus more important then than today.
The immense convenience of the invention of money allowed even total strangers
to safely do business. When a man walks into a country club and asks to join,
money erases the history how he came by it. He may be a faith healer, swindler,
gambler, speculator, monopolist, advertising executive, embezzler, Ken Lay, Dick
Cheney, Conrad Black, drug dealer, arms dealer, thief, bribe taker, blackmailer
etc. someone who came by the money without providing a service to others. Or he
made have toiled producing food, goods, services, inventing, entertaining,
managing in any one of millions of ways of serving his fellow beings or his
planet. What is most peculiar is even when we know how a person came by his
money, we tend to treat all equally, honouring the wealthy crooks with just as
much respect as the wealthy Nobel prize winners. Before the invention of money,
we would have ostracised the crooks, not idolised them.
Mosquitos
From the point of view of a mosquito, the universe is a banquet laid out by God
for their exclusive use. The sole purpose of humans is to supply blood to
mosquitos. They are much like Nazis or Americans who imagine planet earth’s
resources are for their exclusive use and they have the right to take them by
force or treachery from anyone.
Desecrating Graves
On 2008-04-26, somebody wrote the letters FLQ (Front
de libération du Québec) the name of a defunct separatist group,
on the mausoleum of Pierre Trudeau, a former prime minister of Canada. The
country is up in arms. I find this a gross overreaction, ironically giving the
vandal just what he wanted. Had the vandal written this on Mr. Trudeau’s
door while Trudeau were still alive, it would not even have made the local
papers. There is weird superstition that insulting the dead is somehow more
hurtful than insulting the living. Nobody felt the least compulsion to refrain
from insulting or criticising Mr. Trudeau while he was alive. In a similar way,
Americans were far more upset that the Iraqi resistance dragged the corpses of
American soldiers behind a truck than had the Iraqis done so while the soldiers
were still alive. A number of people threatened to kill me when I criticised the
actions of Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan. Yet they are only mildly
disgruntled when I criticise the actions of living ones. It does not seem to
matter that the dead soldiers never even heard my condemnation of their deeds.
Dead people are no more saintly than living ones. It is a goofy Kristian
superstition that the dead feel pain both physical and emotional and require
special protection we don’t extend to the living.
If you are Dumped
Especially if you have issues with the abandonment lifetrap,
likely the most painful thing that will ever happen to you in your life is you
will be dumped suddenly. Oddly, in your entire education, your teachers never
spent so much as an hour on how to deal with this blow. Here is a crash course:
- Getting dumped happens to nearly everyone. It is just others handle it better
than you and are better at concealing their hurt.
- Don’t expect others to be particularly solicitous. To them, the dumper’s
flaws are blatantly obvious. They don’t feel your insane attraction. To
everyone else, the solution is obvious, move on; forget the past. The dumper is
not worth wasting any more emotional energy on.
- No matter how attractive the person who dumped you appears to you now, they are
not the only person for you.
- You probably feel totally blindsided. With time, you will gradually recognise
the many forewarnings they gave you.
- The dumper had mixed feelings about leaving you. That is why they had to
convince themselves you were an ogre, to cement their resolve.
- The dumper is not your one and only true love. Your true love would not
treat you that badly.
- When someone tells you they hate asparagus, does that provide information about
them or about asparagus? When your lover dumps you and says they hate you with a
ferocious intensity and always have, is that an accurate, unbiased evaluation of
you and your future relationship potential with all others? Of course not! It is
a heat-of-the-moment venting.
- Before you get involved with someone, find out if they make a habit of suddenly
cutting off old lovers, friends or acquaintances. If they do, you will
eventually be on the list.
- A dumper is someone too immature to take the time to dissolve a relationship
gracefully, with consideration for the feelings of all concerned. It requires
kindness and patience. Being dumped is a bit like taking a spoonful of oatmeal
in the eye flung by a two-year old. Don’t take it seriously!!!
- Watch the Jerry Springer, Steve Wilkos, Montel Williams and Maury Povich daytime
trashy TV shows. You will see dumpers from hell beating up on exes who usually
do not deserve such abuse. You don’t deserve it either. Note how in every
case the dumpee is well to be rid of such a shrew/slut/bully/sadist. The same
applies to you!
Sci Fi Anomalies
Science fiction so often jars me with its logical inconsistency. For example:
- On Star Hunter, the holographic communications have more
interference than ’50s TV through rabbit ears.
- On Star Trek Next Generation, the new species they encounter always
use compatible cell-phones and speak 20th century American English.
- On the original Star Trek, the advanced communication system did
not include a caller id feature.
- The replicators can’t create spare parts for the engines or medicines.
- Fireballs from explosions move in slow motion making it possible to outrun them.
- In Star Wars, no one has yet invented automatic target lockon, or
computer controlled navigation.
- Humans, a recently evolved intelligent species, are always able to outsmart any
other species they encounter.
- When Spock announces a probability of survival to 4 decimal places, no matter
how close to 0, you know all the regular actors will survive intact for the next
episode or sequel.
Deja Vu
I am astounded how rapidly technology advanced once the notion of it got started.
Even ancient societies seemed to rapidly develop such technologies as astronomy
and masonry. It looks as if our technological civilisation will self-destruct
within a another hundred years. Technology seems like a century plant that lies
dormant and then every once in many, many decades blooms for a night. This led
me to wonder if a technological civilisation like ours, with an understanding of
quantum mechanics and electronics, has ever evolved then quickly self-destructed,
so thoroughly that it erased its tracks. I have seen some tantalising hints in
global mythology. I asked a paleontologist friend what paleontologists far in
the future might find remaining of our civilisation to mark its passing. She
replied “bricks”.
Relative Cosmetology
Other than the Geishas of early Japan, there is a group that engages in tooth darkening
cosmetology. They treat their teeth with a scalding hot dark brown dye up to ten
times a day. Some resort to burning the brown leaves of a toxic plant and
inhaling the sticky tars to stain their teeth. This tribe are commonly known as
Americans.
The Cosmic Etch-A-Sketch
The history of life on earth is like a cosmic Etch-A-Sketch. Life doodles theme
and variations in abundance, then something comes to shake the earth to all but
erase the profusion, be it an astroid hitting, or a species too intelligent for
its own good. Then, after a brief recovery period of 10 million years or so, it
starts doodling in earnest again, but with slightly less exuberance than before.
We arrogant humans imagine the that extinction of man is synonymous with the
extinction of life.
The Devolution of Competition
“Ecosystems that have not been disturbed for long periods of time (whether
by humans or natural disasters) tend to read a state of dynamic equilibrium
which ecologists call a climax phase, meaning that
organisms have adapted themselves to one another in such a way as to avoid
direct competition, to keep energy flow-through to a minimum, and to recycle
energy flow and nutrients as completely as possible. They have formed, to use an
anthropomorphic term, a community.”
~ Richard Heinberg
 |
recommend book⇒Party’s Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies |
| | paperback |
|---|
| ISBN13: | 978-0-86571-529-5 |
|---|
| ISBN10: | 0-86571-529-7 |
|---|
| publisher: | New Society Publishers |
|---|
| published: | 2005-06-01 |
|---|
| by: | Richard Heinberg |
|---|
| Predicting chaos unless the U.S. — the world’s foremost oil consumer — is willing to join with other countries to implement a global program of resource conservation and sharing, he also recommends a “managed collapse”, that might make way for a slower-paced, low-energy, sustainable society in the future. website. The opening chapters of the book give a lucid, simple, but not simplistic recap of the basic physics, biology, history and ecology you need to know as background to understand the energy crunch. When I was reading this section, it dawned on me that most Americans are completely ignorant of this basic science. That is why they approach the energy and global warming problem is such a superstitious and irrational way. |
|
In
other words, animals over time learn to avoid direct competition, because
competing wastes too much energy. Animals evolve to avoid competition by
specialising to stay out of each others’s way. In a similar way, bloody
battles for mates eventually evolve into dancing competitions. Even human
executives do this. Competition between corporations gradually tends over time
to devolve into informal co-operation and price fixing and only ritual
competitivness. Competition in a capitalist system must be fostered. It does not
maintain itself naturally.
 |
recommend book⇒Evolution of Cooperation |
| | paperback | hardcover |
|---|
| ISBN13: | 978-0-14-012495-8 | 978-0-465-02122-2 |
|---|
| ISBN10: | 0-14-012495-0 | 0-465-02122-0 |
|---|
| publisher: | Penguin |
|---|
| published: | 1990-04-26 |
|---|
| by: | Robert M. Axelrod |
|---|
| Using computer modeling Axelrod discovers the power of a simple tit for tat strategy in dealing with others. He also discovers the mathematical conditions under which people co-operate, collude, compete, aid each other or refuse to offer reasonable assistance. He also explains the mathematics of why corporations tend toward price-fixing and other co-operative behaviour with their competitors. |
|
Atrocities
The atrocities of the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan are nothing new. They
are a direct consequence of imbalance of power. Americans overwhelm their
victims in technology and wealth. That power necessarily corrupts. Humans, not
just Americans, are hard wired to abuse excessive power over others. It took 500
years for the atrocities of the Spanish Conquistadors to become widely known.
Spaniards, Nazis, Russians, Americans… like all humans, are deeply in
denial of their own atrocities. They work hard to keep them hidden and to attack
those who expose them.
“The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by
his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”
~ George Orwell (1903-06-25—
1950-01-21)
War as a Game
When animals fight, it is over territory. They also have ritual battles to
determine whose genes will sire the next generation, but rarely are the
combatants seriously injured. When human leaders fight, it is over territory,
natural resources and national prestige. When ordinary humans fight it is much
like a football game. They fight to the death simply because their side is
fighting. They root for the home team, no matter how badly the home team has
behaved. Even Nazi mothers were proud of their sons. Even the mothers of serial
killers (both civilian and military) insist that their sons are innocent of any
wrongdoing. In humans, team loyalty nearly always trumps justice.
Unscrupulous leaders like John McCain, Dick Cheney and George Bush exploit this
naivety and urge their fellows on to greater illegal mayhem, simply for national
pride and the supposed shame of losing/withdrawing/calling off the attack. They
trick their fellows into expensive wars, with no prizes to be gained from
pursuing them. McCain, Cheney, Bush and their backers reap hundreds of billions
in war profits. Their dupes reap a lifetime of sorrow and guilt.
“The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by
his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”
~ George Orwell (1903-06-25—
1950-01-21)
Respect
It quite enough to expect that we tolerate each other and our various
customs. It is wrong to demand we pretend to respect each other’s
delusions, which includes all religions and cults.
Naming
How could you name children in a gender-equal way? In Canada where I live, a
child receives the surname of his or her father. In Iceland, a child receives
the surname of his or her mother. In old Norse, a child received the surname of
his father’s given name, e.g. Lief Eric’s-son. Politically correct
couples try to solve the problem by concatenating the mother and father’s
surnames, e.g. Blumé-Temoin This solution won’ work for successive
generations since the length of surnames would double with each generation. So
here is my proposed solution modeled on the Spanish convention. When a person
marries, they acquire a second surname. So, for example, when Mary Smith marries
John Jones, she becomes Mary Smith de Jones, and he become John Jones de Smith.
A female child takes the surname of her mother, e.g. Smith. A male child the
surname of his father, e.g. Jones. If the father is unknown, a male child takes
the surname of his mother. The naming system parallels the way it is possible to
trace the purely matrilineal line, mother of mother of mother, or the pure
patrilineal line using DNA, but it much harder to trace the mixed ancestors.
Nostalgia
Scientists tell us they are on the brink of extending life to 200+ years. I don’t
think I could bear it. The nostaglia would be far too intense. Actuaries tell us
that even with medical technologly allowing an infinite lifespan, the average
age of death would be only 200 — from death by misadventure. As a result,
we would become too fanatically concerned with safety to enjoy our lives,
putting on helmets to climb the stairs.
Fairness
Life is fundamentally unfair. Some people are better looking, healthier and
wealthier even when they put no more effort into it than anyone else. Others
have to bear poverty, ill health, deformity, disease or minority status through
no fault of their own. You can make yourself unnecessarily miserable or even
crazy if you deny this fundamental fact of life. Christians are wont to denial
on the grounds of wishful thinking or logical consistency — how could a
loving God possibly have created such an unfair universe? Hindus rationalise it
with their notion of reincarnation. Christians imagine misfortune is caused by
God punishing secret sins. Acknowledging the unfairness is not to say you accept
it or approve of it. You can’t do anything about a problem until you stop
pretending it does not exist.
Industriousness
Before the industrial revolution, man depended on manual labour for agriculture.
Everyone had to work hard from dawn till dark, or people would literally starve
to death. Industrious was prized at the most important virtue. Sloth and
idleness were serious sins. Today we still highly value industriousness.
Conservatives still advocate leaving to die those who are not sufficiently
productive. We reward with billion dollar salaries the CEOs whose companies most
industriously produce goods, mine minerals, consume energy, promote consumption,
gobble resources, pollute the air, soil and water, erode the soil, log and pave
the forests, pump greenhouse gasses into the air, and that holiest of all
activities — “stimulate” the economy (i.e. increase optional
consumption). We most admire the rich and famous who excel at flamboyant, novel
and conspicuous waste. The planet is reeling from the onslaught of these type A
individuals.
Oops, maybe industriousness is not such a virtue any more.
A Tibetan and an Amazon river basin tribesman were each asked what they thought
of western civilisation. Oddly, they gave identical answers. They replied, “What
is the matter with your women? They are supposed to stop the men. Everyone knows
when you let men cut down trees, they don’t know when to stop.”
We need new values.
- It is good to leave a light ecological footprint.
- It good to live comfortably consuming the least amount energy and goods.
- It is good to discourage others from wasteful habits.
We need to start throwing virtual tomatoes at the dinosaurs who are still
frantically working hard to destroy the planet.
Idea Contagion
I have often wondered how a truly nutty idea like Naziism, Christianity or
fanatical Islam can take hold of a population. Notice that such ideas get little
traction in areas where there are only a few adherents. Yet when the idea
reaches critical mass, it takes over the entire population, even including
people who ought to know better. Man has sheep genes. He does not like to be at
odds with his fellows in his beliefs.
Small Minded Cruelty
There is something so petty, small-minded and cruel about a society that forbids
sex only to those in the stage of life who want it most badly.
Ambiguity
English is so ambiguous, e.g. “I don’t want a car.” can have
at least five meanings:
no current need
I don’t want a taxi just now. I am not going anywhere.no need
I live on an tiny island. What on earth would I do with a car?no lack
I don’t want for a car. I am fully satisfied in the car department. I have
3 vehicles already.would prefer something else
Dear sugar daddy, I want diamonds, not a Rolls.active rejection
I detest cars. They pollute and the repair people are all crooks. I wouldn’t
take one if you gave it to me.
Since I think in English, this muddied ambiguity infects my thinking too. It is
not necessarily clear even to myself when I say “I don’t want a car.”.
Intuition
“Anyone not shocked by quantum mechanics has not yet understood it.”
~ Niels Bohr
Many people seem to think our scientific theories of the very small and very
large cannot be true because our intuition rejects them as absurd. Ask the
question the other way around. Why does our intuition work so well on the mid
size? We evolved in a 3D, mid-sized world, dominated by a tiny frequency band of
sunlight and nasty predators. We needed a brain with computational shortcuts for
dealing with it. We never had the need to evolve the intuition “modules”
to deal instantly with a broader world, the quantum small, the cosmic large or
4D. We can deal with them, but only with the ponderous tools of mathematics.
Conceivably within a century, you might be able to get such intuition modules
installed. This could lead to a period of rapid breakthrough since the behaviour
of the mico and macroscropic universe would become obvious.
Impotence
I think most people give up too easily to work for world peace, end world hunger
or save the environment because they have preposterously high expectations. They
imagine if they work for a few days then the world should noticeably
change, as if they were some sort of deity. You are one of 6 billion people. If
you manage to have any more than 1/6,000,000,000 of the total human effect on
how the planet runs, you are doing better than average. Pat yourself on the back,
even if you can’t see the effect.
“Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you
do it.”
~ Mahatma Gandhi
The oceans were created one raindrop at a time. The pyramids were built one
stone at a time. Be glad there are so many millions of others working on your
project too so that the end result will be far more magnificent than anything
you could possibly have accomplished alone.
“It’s the action, not the fruit of the action, that’s
important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not
be in your time, that there’ll be any fruit. But that doesn’t mean
you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your
action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.”
~ Mahatma Gandhi
Admiring Bodies
Admiring bodies is like admiring butterflies or flowers. You must do it purely
for the moment.
Enjoyment
Here are three tricks to enjoying your life:
- Learn to get off on little things, like the pleasant feeling of a brush on your
scalp, or warm water on your back in the bath.
- Do what you like doing. So many people slave away at pointless jobs they detest.
- When trivial stuff upsets you, ask yourself, if we were about to be nuked in 10
minutes, would this matter? Where does this fit in the hierarchy of cosmic
significance?
Wealth
I am continually baffled why people who hog 500 times the normal size of slice
of the world resource pie are considered admirable. Surely they should be
ostracised as gluttons, thieves or con men. There is no way anyone
deserves a 500 times bigger slice of the pie than others. There is no
conceivable amount of labour they could perform to justify that. When someone
accumulates that kind of money, they had to cheat. They either got away
with some criminal act such as theft, gouging, confidence games or monopoly or
they found some legal loophole in the monetary system to trick others into
giving without compensating return.
Even worse, when these people commit conspicuous consumption or conspicuous
waste, they are committing an environmental crime; they are deliberately
despoiling the environment. When they overconsume, others have to go without.
What is admirable about that? Even at the height of the famine in 1985,
Ethiopian farmers were growing strawberries for the breakfast tables of the
world’s wealthy.
UFOs
I find it strange when people tell me they don’t believe in UFOs (Unidentified
Flying Objects). What do they believe? That every flying object
has been identified? That every flying object not identified was a hallucination?
That there are no new types of flying objects to be discovered? Surely not.
Last Days
Unless you die suddenly of a heart attack, you will probably end your days in
bed unable to do anything much but read or watch TV. Yet many people paddle
furiously all their lives to amass a fortune they won’t ever need. You won’t
have any need at all for a big house, a big car, lavish meals, a private jet or
jewelry. Perhaps it would make more sense to enjoy life with all its varied
activities while you still have your health, especially exploratory travel.
Cash Back
I avoid any company that offers me cash back. They are
trying to pull a fast one, and this is just the first of many ways they will
attempt to screw me. A cash back scheme has six disadvantages:
- You pay more sales tax than had they just reduced the price.
- When you have to mail in the rebate request, you find you need copies of
receipts, packing boxes, and anything they can think of you might have discarded
to void the offer.
- Most of the time the company refuses to pay the rebate, claiming it is expired.
They will just sit on your application for 6 months to make sure.
- You won’t get your money until many months later if ever.
- They are counting on the process of getting your rebate will be so onerous you
won’t bother.
- The handling costs the company much more than just reducing the price. They are
screwing you out of that difference. This is also true of preferred customer
cards that add to processing costs and make checkout lines longer.
Leadership
Society overvalues leadership. A society of egotists each dead set on dragging
everyone along their way won’t get anywhere. On the other paw, a
society of sheep is vulnerable to an evil or incompetent leader, like Hitler or
Bush, whom they blindly follow simply because he is the designated leader. What
you need are people who will fully co-operate so long as the leader is going in
roughly the right direction, but who will dig in their heels when they believe
he is taking them in a foolish direction. There is a superfluity of would-be
leaders motivated mainly by desire for limelight. The true power is in the
seconder, who selects the best approach and champions it.
Games
When baby animals play, it is obvious to us they are rehearsing adult activity.
It has a serious purpose. Likewise, when we arrange activities for young humans,
we are teaching them to rehearse adult activities, for example:
- dolls: care of children.
- board games: strategy, keeping track of money.
- basketball: teamwork
- music videos: sexual flirtation
- listening to music: drugs, crime
- hockey: fighting, revenge
- video games: killing, raping, stealing
- football: war, turning an arbitrary goal into a life or death pursuit.
I am surprised parents are so careless about the lessons they give their
children.
9/10 Empty
Have you ever opened a package to discover it was 9/10 empty. Why did the
manufacturer do that?
- To deceive you into thinking you were getting more product that you were.
- To make the product take up more shelf space so that you would me more likely to
notice it.
- To provide more surface area on the package for advertising images.
Manufacturers continue these unethical and wasteful practices because they are
more competitive. They won’t stop to consider the ethical or environmental
effects until there are honest and frugal packaging laws. Such laws won’t
harm manufacturers, so long as there is a level playing field. Such laws will
actually make them more profitable since they won’t need to waste so much
money on excess packaging.
Hell
I have no experience with other life in other parts of the universe to compare.
Statistically, earth is probably just average. However, I can’t help but
feel in my gut that earth is one of the more hellish planets. What on earth
possesses us humans to do such things as:
- Refuse to allow those in unbearable suffering to die in peace in the manner they
wish. We would never dream of such cruelty to a terminally ill puppy.
- Kill, torture, maim, rape or steal from each other in war and claim we do it for
altruistic motives.
- Wage all out war on nature trying to kill off every last species. We happily
steal the food supply or habitat of any other species, even for the most
trifling convenience (e.g. for fashion).
- Fight to the death with each other over made up stories about an all-loving
deity.
- Honour military serial killers with medals and treat with utmost disdain those
who take pleasure from anything but the most humdrum sex.
- Claw each other for more wealth to the point of harming ourselves with
overconsumption, denying others life, and destroying the ecosystem that sustains
us all.
Perhaps it is for the best that we humans are destroying the ecosystem that
sustains us. Perhaps sacrificing even a whole planet is a worthwhile sacrifice
to prevent us humans from spreading like a cancer throughout the galaxy. Earth
will recover from the blow we inflicted in another 10 million years, an eye
blink in geological time. You could think of man as failing a difficult test,
one a species must pass before proving himself worthy to colonise space. He must
get into space without destroying his home world first.
Whipped
As a gay man, I feel sorry for straight men. They are so pathetically needy for
sex and the approval of women they will twist themselves into all manner of
unnatural shapes hoping women will approve. Unfortunately, most women don’t
like men the way they come out the box. They can’t stand men unless they
pretend to be tame, domestic and completely monogamous, quite unlike the way men
are naturally. They guilt trip them into thinking there is something wrong with
being male. Eventually a man who contorts himself this way rebels, and ends up
hating his female partner for tricking him into wasting his years as a mere
shadow of his authentic self. She is baffled. She had no idea of her
transforming power over him.
Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou has one of the great voices of the planet. It feels like warm water
poured over my back in the bath. Somehow just listening to her say ordinary
things with her beautiful precision restores my faith in humanity. A religious
person might explain it as like being in the presence of a saint. Some of the
other delightful voices include Barbara Jefford, Peter O’Toole, Michael
Yorke, James Earl Jones, Christopher Plummer, Sean Connery, Kelly LeBrock,
Leonard Cohen, Roberta Flack, Judy Collins, Felicity Kendal, Michael Caine and
Sebastian Spence.
Planetary Despair
Especially after viewing a documentary like What
A Way To Go: life at the end of empire it is hard not to despair at how our
fellow humans are so dead set on destroying the planet and with it all or nearly
all of human kind. Here are some ways to cushion the emotional blow:
- There are 6 billion people on earth. Properly your share of the enormous task of
saving planet earth is only 1/6 billionth of the job. Since most people are
deadbeats or actively evil, your share increases to perhaps 1 billionth of the
job. Do you think you can bear a burden that heavy?
- You don’t have to do everything. You can pick out tiny part of the problem.
Other people will handle the rest.
- The earth has had multiple mass extinctions in past. Life recovered after about
10 million years. That sounds a very long time to a human, but is not that much
in geologic time.
- Humans are just another animal. When locusts, lemmings or tent caterpillars
overpopulate and strip their environment, we don’t weep when their
populations crash back down to sustainable levels. We are mildly relieved. Why
should we react to a human population explosion and crash any differently? Look
at this not as a human, but from the perspective of all life on earth. Life will
give a collective gasp of relief when humans are humbled.
- Humans surpassed the sustainable population about the time of the American civil
war when the world population was 1 billion. The 5 billion we have added since
then have been only temporarily sustained by the cheap energy of non-renewable
fossil fuel.
- We expect far too much of our fellow humans. Even though humans can rationally
predict the consequences of their actions, they are still motivated by ancient
drives for power, sex, food, territory just like other animals. We humans are
incapable of acting in our own best interest, even when we are aware of what we
are doing to hurt ourselves. We get in trouble because our technology magnifies
our power to endlessly satisfy unslakable lusts. Imagine humans as monkeys
playing with guns, cars, explosives or an assembly line pumping out an endless
and overwhelming supply of bananas. Humans too, are driven by their standard
monkey motivations. It can be comic.
- Let us presume we are doomed. It truly is hopeless. We are all going to die, and
take most of the species of earth with us in any one of a dozen plausible
scenarios. In the meantime, will you feel better wallowing in despair or taking
action on the off chance it might make things better? I started gay lib back in
1969 when everyone was opposed to me, even the gays. People were so opposed that
about 300 of them called to shower me with abuse each day, and about three of
them each day threatened my life. (To put it in perspective, Martin Luther King
got 40 death threats a day.) I did it just because it felt right to protest the
injustice. Never in my wildest dreams did I think my actions would make any
difference. Yet within two years we had the first gay rights legislation. You
never know. People are herd animals. They can turn on a dime, even after
centuries of bovine stupidity.
“Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you
do it.”
~ Mahatma Gandhi
- Many years ago I asked my Dad why he sometimes bought lottery tickets. I said, “Surely
you now the exected value of the ticket is less than half the ticket price. On
average you lose money.” He replied that he did not see lottery tickets as
an investment, but as entertainment. With the ticket you could imagine how fun
it would be to win. Without a ticket you could not. Saving the world works the
same way.
- There was once a priest who prayed every day for 50 years to win the lottery. He
wailed at God that an upright fellow such as he surely deserved the prize. God
in frustration finally thundered back, “You could at least have made it a
little easier for me by buying a ticket.” Saving the world works the same
way. And I mean saving it literally, preventing its utter destruction.
- Scientists tell us there are trillions of planets in the universe. Weeping over
the failure of earth to thrive is like gnashing over your teeth over the failure
of a single dandelion seedling.
“One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total
extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”
~ Woody Allen
Good Deeds
The cleanest, easiest high is doing something nice for someone else. Given how
little effort is required, how intensely pleasant the high is, and how there is
no hangover, just a nice glow that can last for years, it is amazing how rarely
people use this method purely to make themselves feel good.
Learning Tools
Since children are sponges absorbing new behaviours from whatever they see, you
can consider anything you expose them to as a learning tool. There is no such
thing as simple entertainment. What are you intending to teach them when you
give them a video game like Microsoft Halo or Grand Theft Auto or taking them to
see a preacher milking the crowd by threatening hellfire or taking them to a
movie like Death Wish?
Freedom
The word freedom means the right to conduct your own private affairs
without outside meddling and concomitantly allowing others to do things, that
don’t concern you, that you don’t like, without interference.
Americans use the word quite differently. They imagine people are free only when
the think like Americans, believe in Jesus and work primarily for American
interests.
Conformity
People happily rebel in ways that don’t matter. For example they will wear
a ring in their tongue, get a tattoo, shave their head, design an eccentric
beard, or wear some highly uncomfortable clothing. They will refuse to
standardize on computer function keys or MIME
types. They will refuse to conform to naming
conventions with programming computers. Yet when it comes to rebelling in a
way that matters e.g. expressing unpopular religious or political beliefs,
people turn into perfect sheep. They are too afraid to say what is in their
hearts, even when what they have to say is blindingly obvious, e.g. that war is
bad for children and other living things or that the rich are screwing the poor.
The Great Error
Nothing causes more suffering than this great error. A great love of your life
rejects you or dumps you. You are seduced by some of their positive qualities
into thinking they are the one, and now life cannot continue without them.
However, there were not your true love. Your true love would never treat
you that way. The dumper was an imposter.
Predictions
Like predictions in the bible, these predictions are undated. You can thus never
prove them wrong. At worst, you can have a false alarm.
- It will be mandatory to wear a helmet on public transportation.
- It will be illegal to drive cars on city streets for reasons of safety, speed,
fuel economy and traffic density. Cars will be driven by automation.
- Taxis will outnumber private vehicles for economic reasons. They don’t
need parking and they don’t lose value sitting in a garage rusting. They
work full time.
- China and the USA will hold a war in a hapless third country, ostensibly over
green house gas emissions and other pollutants. However, the actual reason will
be the usual excuse for war, economic hegemony.
Economics of Fashion
Consider how economics drives fashion. The general principle is whatever is
fashionable requires affluence. Fashion is primarily an affluence display. For
example, in cave man times being fat was in because food was hard to come by.
Consider the Rubenesque Venus statues of the period. Today, the poor balloon up
on Kraft Dinner, and wealthy require personal trainers and expensive diets of
fresh organic foods to stay slim. In India today, rich women still roll their
enormous bellies voluptuously, rubbing it in to the undernourished general
populace. In medieval times, a pasty complexion was in. Serfs were tanned from
field labour while wealthy women could stay inside and avoid such coarse labour.
Today the poor toil in sunless offices while the wealthy tan on Caribbean
beaches. In days when it took hours of servant labour to starch and iron your
clothes, wrinkles in clothes were a disgrace. Today they are in, since they
require more expensive natural fibres. In days when people wore their clothes
until they wore out, tattered clothes were shameful. Today they are in because
it takes so much labour to create the tattered look and new mass manufactured
clothes are so cheap. Diamonds and gold are preferred as personal decoration to
African beads, not because they are more colourful or beautiful, but simply
because they are rarer and hence more expensive. The results of plastic surgery
are bizarre: bloated pitted lips, wind swept faces, bug eyes…, yet
because the procedures are expensive and hence inaccessible to the average
citizen, the results are considered fashionable. Similarly expensive makeup and
nauseating perfumes prevail over pleasant inexpensive alternatives. Males
traditionally participated even more in fashion that women, though today women
seem to drive fashion. You saw men adopting digital watches when they first came
out and were very expensive. Now they are going back to less accurate, more
expensive analog watches, simply because everyone can now afford an accurate
digital watch. They will buy a pair of socks for five times the going rate
simply because of a bold designer logo that shouts “This guy is so rich he
can waste money on overpriced socks”.
Humanity’s Rites of Passage
Like a young man sent on a dangerous vision quest to prove his mettle to be
considered a man in the tribe, humanity is beset with four increasingly
difficult rites of passage.
- We have developed weapons terrible
enough to destroy all of humanity if not all higher life forms. We must
individually develop the wisdom not to use them.
- We are drastically altering the planet with our economic activities. We must co-operate
with everyone else on the planet to refrain from damaging the eco-systems and
causing massive including rapid climate
change.
- The earth reverses
magnetic polarity about every 200,000 years on average. The last time was
780,000 years ago. We are in the process of a flip right now. Though it is a
somewhat random event, most likely in about 300 more years, the earth’s
magnetic field will temporarily disappear, to be restored in about another 1000
years. So what you say? Who will even notice but a few boy scouts? The earth’s
magnetic field is protects us like a force field from cosmic radiation. We will
unprotected from particle bombardment from space and from the sun, causing
additional cancers and disruptions of satellite communications. To deal with
this lesser threat we will have the even more difficult task of co-operating
actively to deal with the problem.
- The resources of earth are finite. We must learn to share them fairly and to
avoid bearing more children than the planet can currently sustain. This requires
overcoming our deepest biological urge — to survive and populate
at the expense of others.
So we must pass from individual restraint, to passive collective co-operation,
to active collective co-operation, to overcoming our genetic nature —
quite a challenge.
“You do not have to change: survival is not mandatory.”
~ Dr. W. (William) Edwards Deming, (1900-10-14—
1993-12-20) On Overcoming Resistance to Change
Punish The Crime
I often see a judge throwing the book at someone who has had an accident while
driving drunk. Similarly I see a judge harsh with someone who has an accident
because they did not properly maintain their vehicle. But the crime is not
having an accident. It is driving drunk or failing to maintain a vehicle.
Whether there is an accident is irrelevant. The punishment should be the same
for driving drunk whether or not there is an accident. Judges are too harsh with
those who have an accident and not harsh enough with those who don’t.
Gullibility
When people go to a David Copperfield magic show they will see the impossible.
Yet no one presumes a miracle was involved even if for the life of them they can’t
figure out any possible way Mr. Copperfield could have pulled the illusion off.
Yet when most people hear of some rather minor children’s magic, like
changing the colour of a liquid, third or fourth hand, even via anonymous
reporters, even when there are no details, even when the alleged magic happened
hundreds or thousands of years ago, they are absolutely certain a true miracle
occurred. Such is the immense power of wishful thinking.
Insurance
Insurance is deceptively advertised as if it magically protected you from harm.
It does no such thing. It merely gives you legal right to wrestle with the
insurance company for some money long after the unpleasant event. It would make
more sense to spend some money on prevention, e.g. air bags in your car, or a
high crash test safety rating vehicle, or having your house wiring and heating
updated. You might move away from an area prone to tsunamis, floods, wars,
earthquakes or industrial accidents. That will actually protect you from harm.
Chiropractors
I have often wondered why chiropractors, the people to correct bone alignment,
have a reputation for quackery. Here in BC where all manner of medicine is
covered by universal health insurance, chiropractors are excluded. No other type
of medicine can instantly relieve pain. Perhaps professional envy is the root.
Housework
Most people treat housework as drudgery. They postpone it and suffer the
consequences of living in dirt and less than ideal sanitation, getting a
reputation as a slob not to mention the Herculean task of getting the house
ready for guests. When they do it, all they can think about it what a waste of
time it is, and how they would rather be doing something else.
Instead, treat it as a game, where the goal is maximum efficiency — to
keep your place as clean as possible with the least effort. You constantly work
at finding ever more efficient ways to do things. This keeps your interest up. I
discovered that for example, by treating the kitchen floor as if it were a work
surface, and giving it a quick wipe with Lysol all purpose spray cleaner each
day, it never needs to be washed, and it is always sparkling clean, though I do
rinse it with water from time to time. This also keeps any dropped food from
being ground into the floor. I found that letting the dishes soak in a pan
outside the sink keeps the sink free for other uses. I found that oven cleaner
will instantly clean anything with baked on grease, not just ovens, especially
white ovenware. Experiment with different cleaning tools and chemicals to find
the ones optimal for each job. If you live with someone else, you will find they
automatically are less likely to leave messes than before.
Silicon Sociopaths
A sociopath is someone who carefully monitors his victim and does and says
whatever it takes to please them as a preliminary to manipulating them. He is
not constrained by morality, social convention or inhibition. This sounds much
like what we could expect from an artificially intelligent silicon companion.
Blind Obedience
The greatest of all sins is blind obedience. Without it, the power of an evil
man to cause harm is limited to killing perhaps 100 people. With even a million
blind followers, he can kill and torture by the tens of millions. Blind
obedience allows not particularly malicious men to commit the most hideous
atrocities, and feel profoundly virtuous about them.
Pornography
The elderly like to tsk tsk at the young over pornography because, even in
fantasy, they find it too absurd to imagine coupling with the perfect specimens
it portrays.
The Biggest Mistake Of My Life
I am telling you his story in the hopes it will help you avoid making the same
mistake. It cast a pall over my whole life, even bigger than contracting HIV. In
the early 70s I lived with my lover whom I was head over heels in love with. I
remember thinking to myself with a mild tinge of regret that I had reached the
pinnacle of happiness. It could not get any better than this. Then one day, out
of the blue, he told me that he hated me, had always hated me, had only
pretended to love me the last few years, and that I was so horrible that I
should never get involved with anyone else again. I made two errors:
- I assumed that since he knew me better than anyone, his assessment must be
accurate.
- I was well aware of my faults, but I was baffled that he could go instantly from
100% positive to 100% negative. I figured it required some extraordinary
explanation such as drugs, devil-worshipping cult or some sort of hypnotic
possession.
His personality change was so drastic I told myself that I should put my life on
hold until he returned to normal. I should dedicate my life to his recovery. I
should patiently wait for him to come back or later resume the same sort of
friendly relations I had with other ex’s. Unfortunately, with a couple of
exceptions, he refused all communication. I had to get all information on how he
was doing third hand.
I soon learned he had found someone else, but I still could not see why that
would explain his sudden change in attitude to me. In retrospect, I had seen him
dump friends suddenly for unknown reasons. I also discovered there was a drug
component.
My vigil went on for about a dozen years, then gradually dwindled in intensity
for the next twenty. However, I never again let myself trust anyone. I always
held back. It was like a constant note of sadness in my life. Later partners
were irritated knowing I was still pining for him. I had put so much pain into
this vigil, it was hard to give it up.
Oddly, watching the Jerry Springer Show was the most healing. I watched women
surprising their boyfriends or husbands with the news they were dumping them for
other men, then proceeded to humiliate and insult their old boyfriends on
national TV. It had never dawned on me this was anywhere near normal behaviour
for the human species.
I think the mechanism goes like this. The dumper feels guilty at leaving, so
decides to vilify the dumpee in her/his mind in order to justify it. It may also
be that the dumper has accumulated a pile of unexpressed resentments. They
finally get the courage to state them only after deciding to leave.
The important thing is, don’t pine! If your lover doesn’t
want you any more, you are not a good match. They won’t be happy even if
you do get back together. Move on!
Toilet Seats
Why is it women get upset if you leave the toilet seat up, but don’t mind
a bit if you leave the lid down?
I Am An Idea
“Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the
obvious.”
~ George Orwell (1903-06-25—
1950-01-21)
We now know that you do not directly experience reality. In a manner something
like a computer’s, you process the little electrical signals coming up
your nerves into your brain. Your brain creates a dream/hallucination loosely
based on this digitally encoded information. Everything you subjectively
experience is an idea/dream/hallucination. So even when you think about yourself,
it is still just an idea. Thus, what you subjectively experience as “yourself”
is just an idea. It flits in and out of your consciousness just like any other
idea. I expound on this in my essay Experience
is a Hallucination.
Fruit Baskets
Why do we humans bring fruit baskets and flowers to people in hospital? A
primitive human has genetic programming that says “When I am deathly ill,
and food is scarce, it is best that I die and thus save food for my kin who will
carry on my genes. If I drag on, we will all end up dying.” To turn off
this programming, you must convince the subconscious of the ill person that it
is summer and food is abundant, so there is no need for his sacrifice, hence the
fruit basket and the flowers, which will work even if he does not eat the fruit.
The gifts also say “We would rather you lived; we feel in no danger from
you consuming food if you continue your life.”
Lotteries
Let us say you buy a $1 lottery ticket each month
for a prize of $10 million. To offer that prize,
there must be ab
