To faith healers, the uncertainties found within quantum theory opens a window for mind over matter.  Self-improvement groups and new age philosophers have run off with the subject taking things like entanglement to mean that you can draw whatever reality you dream up in your head to you just by believing in it resolutely.

I was watching a film made by Richard Dawkins called Enemies Of Reason, and in it you find this clip:

Reading through the video’s YouTube comments, its just very frustrating to me.  I can guarantee you that hardly anyone commenting on this video has ever studied true quantum mechanics – the type of physics studied by physicists.  It requires very complex mathematics and years of preparation and study before you’re even prepared to begin studying it.

I’m not really in the mood to write a long essay on all of this today.  Suffice it to say that I think a deeper understanding of quantum mechanics leads to the exact opposite conclusion.  It leads to a philosophy where the bedrock of reality, the very atoms and principles which govern them, operate on rules which are unintuitive and on a very fundamental level in-deterministic and blurry.  It leads to unpredictability, not intuitive certainties.  It places a fundamental limit on the extent and scope of mankind’s knowledge.

What’s unknown is unknown.  What we know is “out there”, not inside of you.  Truth and knowledge is a sort of complex process by which information is brought into your brain and then sorts itself into a sort of coherence with the state of affairs in the universe outside your body.  It allows you to predict what will happen based on the actions you choose to do.  Its a sort of accurate prediction on what you will experience in the future.  It also applies to things not present before your senses at the moment.  Quantum physics says that knowledge of this sort will always be limited and constrained within the confines of the uncertainty principle.

Those commenting on the video assault Dawkins like he’s arrogant and praise Chopra for smiling and not getting angry.  They think Dawkins is the bad guy.  It’s the complete opposite.  Chopra is the one clearly in the wrong here. Chopra is the guy promoting quantum jargon, exploiting people and celebrities for money, feeding them superstition, and keeping them in ignorance.  Then Chopra claims physicists have hijacked his word?  Physicists don’t have right to exclusively use the word in the proper context they themselves invented for it?

It irks me.  I think Richard Dawkins is right for being angry.  I too get tired of people like Chopra undermining reason and science.  The problem is, people think maturity is keeping a smile on your face at all times, even while people like Chopra are undermining physics and a deep understanding of the universe.  Peoples’ problem is they do not respect the truth.

Below I’m going to provide a video by a mathematician and eminent scientist who understands quantum mechanics.  He comes at it from the proper angle: the limits of mankind’s knowledge and the search for certainty.

I like how he begins this program.  He talks about different wavelengths of radiation, its interaction with matter and how precise an image can be built based on the different wavelengths of radiation.  Its a shame the program is so old because he doesn’t have access to a lot of computer-effects and high quality infra-red cameras, which are readily available today.

You see, our brain works by first receiving impressions from the eyes, which receive their impressions from the light flying through space.  Those light photons vary in wavelength, and depending on the wavelength of the photon, our eyes will interact and see colors.  Other wavelengths are invisible to us.  They’re not part of the visible spectrum.

Since light has wave-like dynamics, you get diffraction and interference effects, which create a sort of maximum “zoom” and level of detail you can build into say a microscope for example.  Telescopes can face similar sorts of problems.  Radio telescopes have to have huge base spans, many of them spanning huge rows of multiple dishes, because a small dish doesn’t work well due to the long wavelengths of radio waves.  Our eyes are basically small telescopes which focus the light waves of the visible spectrum onto the back sides of our eyes.  They have the same sorts of limitations.

When you really examine how those photons behave as they “fly across” space, how they can exist in multiple paths at once, and so on, you come to strange conclusions.  The atoms of our world behave strangely as well.  You can’t know both their position and momentum at the same time.  Atoms are a very blurry sort of thing where it seems at the most fundamental level, knowing everything about them is impossible.

I was actually listening to a lecture by a quantum physicist just recently.  The professor was Dr. Benjamin Schumacher, who is an eminent physicist in the field of quantum information theory.  He was talking about entropy and most discussions related to the subject talk about the disorder of a system.  Entropy is a measurement of disorder.  That definition has always been a bit puzzling to me, but then in his lecture on Maxwell’s demon he described the entropy of a system as the amount of information that we lack about its detailed microscopic state.  In other words, the more orderly a system is, the less information we lack.  If its ordered, we understand its microscopic structure and motions more.  Disordered systems with random chaotic motions are not as much understood, and if we go to understand them we by necessity modify the system with our measurements.  To try to measure the motion of something as small as a subatomic particle we’re forced to modify its trajectory so much with the measurement that we can’t get the information that we need.  To lock down the particle’s position and know it with a high degree of certainty, we have to destroy the information related to its momentum.  Likewise, measurements related to momentum necessarily leave uncertainties in the position.

You can know one or the other, but not both together with full precision.  To know some of both leaves you with a sort of blurred smudge through space.  You know it’s moving somewhere between this and that velocity and its location is generally somewhere in there.

What quantum mechanics really says is that we can’t fully know what’s going on at the atomic level with absolute certainty.  We’re forced to approximate our knowledge within certain limits, but those limits are very precisely and mathematically defined.

I think other conceptions of quantum mechanics are dangerous, and really quite ridiculous when you think about it.  If people could change their world just by hopeful thinking, the pre-scientific world certainly wouldn’t have been filled with so much suffering and toil.  Mankind would’ve thought all kinds of things and drew to themselves a better life.  The fact is, they thought up every sort of god and philosophy to cope with this very difficult world.  None of it worked.  Science on the other hand, with its deep root in observation, logic, and mutually verifiable evidence, led to a slow climb in our knowledge and control of nature.

When you turn back to philosophies like that of Deepak Chopra, religion, or new age gurus, you’re going back to  pre-scientific mindsets and those things simply don’t work.

Mankind has faced so many problems in the past because people have felt they could believe in their intuitions dogmatically.  Truth was not based on observation and evidence, but instead was based upon what they felt was the truth.  Its quite fascinating that Dr. Bronowski ends his program talking not so much about the great achievements of science but about how dangerous it is when people believe they know things when they really do not.

Quoting him:

“Its said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That’s false. Tragically false.  Look for yourself.  This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz.  This is where people were turned into numbers.  Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people.  And that was not done by gas.  It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge with no test in reality this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.  Science is a very human form of knowledge.  We are always at the brink of the known.  We always feel forward for what is to be hoped.  Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal.  Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible.  In the end the words were said by Olvier Cromwell, “I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”  I owe it as a scientist to my friend Leo Lezand. I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died here, to stand here as a survivor and a witness.  We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power.  We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act.  We have to touch people.”

- Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent Of Man

This world doesn’t operate off wishful thinking.  I wish it did.  Instead we find ourselves in a rather harsh and dangerous world.  We have to stay on our toes.

The study of quantum physics will definitely leave you in awe.  We live in a mysterious universe.  The thing is, you can’t immediately run with those uncertainties and jump back into wishful thinking.  Men have always wanted those sorts of ideas to be true.  They’ve always hoped that things like prayer can change reality.  Today people no longer put their faith in God, but instead put faith in the weird aspects of quantum physics.  Neither will answer your prayers, unfortunately.

People have always searched for the secrets of mind over matter.  The thing is, you won’t learn anything about this reality by creating a self-referential loop with your imagination.  You’ll have to keep probing the universe for answers searching out there, not inside yourself.  The answers are waiting for you out there.

Your imagination was given to you by evolution to help you envision possible scenarios that haven’t happened yet.  It’s a form of imperfect planning.  It allows you to picture outcomes in your head before they happen, and hopefully accurately predict what will happen in the future.   When you attempt to understand reality using this system, you only create a loop back to yourself and can’t possibly learn anything about the world as it really is.  You’re forced to churn over your past experiences and link them up in new and arbitrary ways.  Religions and conspiracy theories are so crazy, mostly due to this very reason.

Now, who said the following? “My prediction is that politicians will eventually be tempted to resolve the [fiscal] crisis the way irresponsible governments usually do: by printing money, both to pay current bills and to inflate away debt. And as that temptation becomes obvious, interest rates will soar.”

Seems pretty reasonable to me. The surprising thing is that this was none other than Paul Krugman, the high priest of Keynesianism, writing back in March 2003. A year and a half later he was comparing the U.S. deficit with Argentina’s (at a time when it was 4.5 percent of GDP). Has the economic situation really changed so drastically that now the same Krugman believes it was “deficits that saved us,” and wants to see an even larger deficit next year? Perhaps. But it might just be that the party in power has changed.

Niall Ferguson, An Empire At Risk, writing for Newsweek.

The New York Times is filled with inconsistencies like this.  They warn us that deficits are terrible and will destroy us economically – that is, until democrats are in power, then they become the key to our economic prosperity and recovery.  It’s a totally inconsistent economic perspective and it’s just more of the same left/right partisan bullshit, pitting us off against one another.  I’d have more respect for Krugman if he were consistent, but he’s not.

What happens when Republicans are in power?  Wars, eroding civil liberties, increasing presidential power, bailouts to big corporations and banks, and the rich getting richer while the poor get poorer.  What happens when Democrats are in power?  Wars, eroding civil liberties, increasing presidential power, bailouts… It’s the same.

Professor Ferguson just recently gave a lecture in Aspen talking about these issues.  The article is found here.

Harvard professor and prolific author Niall Ferguson opened the 2010 Aspen Ideas Festival Monday with a stark warning about the increasing prospect of the American “empire” suddenly collapsing due to the country’s rising debt level.

“I think this is a problem that is going to go live really soon,” Ferguson said. “In that sense, I mean within the next two years. Because the whole thing, fiscally and other ways, is very near the edge of chaos. And we’ve seen already in Greece what happens when the bond market loses faith in your fiscal policy.”

Ferguson said empires — such as the former Soviet Union and the Roman empire — can collapse quite quickly and the tipping point is often when the cost of servicing an empire’s debt is larger than the cost of its defense budget.

“That has not been the case I think at any point in U.S. history,” Ferguson said. “It will be the case in the next five years.”

….

The affable British scholar tried to keep it light. He used a stage whisper to tell the Aspen Institute audience, “I know you’re not comfortable with the word ‘empire,’ especially just after the Fourth of July, but you are the Redcoats now.”

He said the U.S. is now deeply in the red as a country because of a combination of the Great Recession, the resulting federal stimulus and financial bailout programs, two wars, the Bush tax cuts, and a growth in social entitlement programs.

“By combating our crisis of private debt with an extraordinary expansion of public debt, we inevitably are going to reduce the resources available for national security in the years ahead,” Ferguson said. “Because as a debt grows, so the interest payments you have to make on it grow, even if interest rates stay low. And on current projections, the federal debt is going to be absorbing around 20 percent — a fifth of all the taxes you pay — within just a few years.

….

Ferguson said the financial crisis that started in 2007 has “has accelerated a fundamental shift in the balance of power,” with the U.S. shedding power and China absorbing it.

“I’ve just come back from China — a two-week trip there — and the thing I heard most often was, ‘You can’t lecture us about the superiority of your system anymore. We don’t need to learn anything from you about financial institutions and forget about democracy. We see where it has got you.’”

….

In what he called his “light moment,” Ferguson said, “I think there is a way out for the United States. I don’t think its over. But it all hinges on whether you can re-energize the real mainsprings of American power. And those two things are technological innovation and entrepreneurship.

I’ve been saying the same things on here for a long time.  Our situation is eerily similar to Greece.  As Professor Ferguson points out, the looming crises will jump out of nowhere the second the costs to borrow more money increase due to fears of ballooning debts and deficits.  And that sort of thing happens in an instant.  That’ll set off a chain reaction and destroy this economy driven by borrowed funds.  This is exactly what Alan Greenspan is telling us as well.

This is scary stuff.  Sure scares me.  The recession we’re in now is bad enough, but a much bigger depression around the corner?  Even more unemployed?  The Fed has told us they have no more guns to stimulate the economy.  Interest rates are already at the floor. Ugh.

*Sigh*.  And you guys wants some more bad news?  I’m sure that’s just what you want. 

Japan is in a financial mess just like we are.  Guess who they just recently elected into their House of Councillors?  A pop idol, Junko Mihara.  Here she is.  She’s a lovely lady.  I don’t know much about her music, but I’m sure she’s talented.  I have nothing against her other than, uh… she’s unqualified for a position in government?

You know, imagine if you ran a big corporation which you’d built from the ground up.  You’re wanting to step down to focus on other things.  So you’re assembling a team to manage the company in your absence.  When interviewing potential applicants for key managerial positions, who would you hire?  I doubt you’d hire a woman like this.  You’d say, “There’s nothing here in her resume to indicate that she knows how to run a company.  She’s never studied business.  She doesn’t have an MBA.  She’s never took an economics course in her life.  She has no experience in this sort of thing.”  You’d kindly tell her she’s unqualified and say, “Next!”

But when it comes to those who run our country, we don’t think of it that way.  We look for people we feel we relate to.  We want someone we could sit down at the bar and have a drink with.  Well, would you want your friend at the bar running the country?  Probably not.  But people have all sorts of strange contradictory ideas running through their heads.

From what I can tell, their thought process runs something along the lines, “Celebrities like Junko Mihara have money, so they can’t be bribed off.  They seem to care more than the crooked elites running things now.”  And maybe that’s true, but there’s a lot more to these things than just caring.  They have to know what they’re doing as well.

Well, maybe people understand these situations.  Voting someone like her into office is probably an act of desperation.

Greg and I have a business concept we like to use called the “miracle man.”  When your company is performing poorly, and things aren’t going well, you always look for a miracle man.  Every failing entrepreneur we’ve ever met was always searching for a miracle man.  If only they could get their product into the hands of the right distributor, then it’d all work out and they’d make a ton of money.  If only the right investors found their plan.  If only they could find component staff.  If only… If only… The burden of responsibility and hope was always shifted onto someone other than themselves.  Needless to say, they never progressed.

Miracle men are always an act of desperation.  You’ve given up all hope in yourself and are slowly falling to the ground, arms extended hoping someone will take your hands, lift up you into the skies, and then fly away with you into bliss everlasting.

Miracle men come in all shapes and sizes.  Sometimes they’re religious deities.  Sometimes they’re a real or even an imagined romantic lover.  Sometimes they’re politicians.  What they all have in common is that people place all their hopes and dreams in them.  They also tend to blame them for everything that goes wrong in their lives.

Maybe sometimes we need a little prop and brace when we’re about to fall over.  It’s also nice to have someone help us back on our feet when we’ve fallen down.  But I don’t think we can ever ask someone else to carry us.  Each person has to live his or her own life.

When it comes to politics, people always tend to forget that they’re the ones with all the power, not the politicians.  Problem is, they don’t unite.  Their enemy is the Republicans or the Democrats instead of the banking elites.

Take when I open up my email inbox.  I receive all kinds of conspiracy related emails, most of which I read for entertainment.

That’s so awesome… lol.  Or how about this?

I get all kinds of conspiracy stuff in my email.   Some of it comes from David Icke so I was watching a video of his.  As I listened I just thought to myself, “David, what is this?  You’re drifting further and further from reality.”  And that’s what everyone seems to do – drift in their mind somewhere far far from this reality.  Very few people are actually knowledgeable about this world or how it operates.

Here’s the video I was watching:

As you listen to him go on and on about “consciousness”, reptilian beings who live under the Earth’s crust, how the moon is actually a space-base similar to the Death Star in Star Wars (George Lucas of course knowing all of this because he’s an ‘insider’), you can’t help but think, “What evidence do you have to prove all these claims?”  He repeatedly says, “This is just what I’m feeling.”  I think in this video he talks about his experiences with a psychic he visited.  I can’t remember.

He feels the human race was created by the reptilians 30,000 or so years ago.  They’ve modified our brains so they could transmit their thoughts into us in order to make us slaves of theirs and so that they can harvest some sort of low vibrational energy from our emotional cycles.  It’s pretty out there.

I’ll refute all this very quickly.  The pressure under the Earth’s surface is so great there’s no way there can be tunnels or a hollow Earth.  Such structures would be crushed immediately.  But if that’s not convincing enough, we have very sensitive detectors placed all along plate boundaries of our crust and every time an earthquake happens we measure all the waves and how they propagate.  We’ve modeled the interior of the Earth, and it’s not hollow.

If you read say a textbook in biological anthropology you can see all the detailed fossil record evidence showing our evolution.  And as for the brain structures which the reptilians supposedly implanted into us, neuroscience textbooks, as well as studying comparative neural anatomy of say that of chimps, show no signs for any of that.

But you know, people would say, “Yeah, well that guy’s just nuts.”  But how would you classify “nuts?”  How would you define insanity?  Insane people lose touch with reality.  If that’s the case most everyone I know is insane.

Take the fourth of July, when I went to a family picnic with relatives.  My family is very religious and at the park where we all gathered many church folks were invited as well.  Some of the musicians got out their guitars and started singing worship songs.  There they went singing about how they love the Lord, and how they’re clay in His hands, and on and on and on.  I just thought, “Who is this ‘Lord’?”  … “It’s faith brother.  You have to believe.”

I can see people saying David Icke’s crazy talking about reptilian aliens. I mean, what evidence do we have for such creatures?  Well, what evidence do we have for the ‘Lord’?  If you think about it, it all falls in the same category.  I love these people, but I mean, isn’t the stuff in the Bible just as crazy?  God is pure love, but creates a rather hellish universe, forces us to endure all kinds of hardships, then comes down and embodies himself in Jesus to undergo a suicide mission, nails himself to the cross in a bloody crucifixion to forgive people of their sins so they’re not given to Satan (a demon with horns) to be thrown into a pit of fire for all eternity… But God is pure love… yet if you do one small little sin, even the smallest sin, you’ll be tortured without end.

The leaders who run our world believe that.  Here’s Richard Dawkins talking with Ted Haggard who has been a top advisor to many of the world’s leaders, such George Bush, Tony Blair, and Ariel Sharon.

I don’t even know how you talk to someone like that.  He certainly isn’t interested in Potassium-Argon dating methods.  How would Haggard explain the fossil record?  Dinosaur bones?  How these tests date these fossils back millions of years?  What about cosmology and the redshift of galaxies receding away from us?  What about the cosmic background radiation seen at the outermost edges of the universe – that fog from 400,000 years after the big bang?  I mean, you can’t deny irrefutable evidence.  How can you just ignore DNA?  Does he know that the sun will eventually burn out?

All you have to do is just start asking questions and look around you.  But their problem is they don’t look around.  They’re disconnected from reality.  They’re plugged into a self-referential loop with their imagination.  They’re not plugged into the universe around them.  Reality is what the television, their political party, or their holy book tells them is reality.

I oftentimes like to tell people that’s it’s easy to devote your life to something and go out preaching your beliefs to people.  It’s much harder to know whether your beliefs are worthwhile and true.  Pastor Haggard spends so much time giving sermons and running all over the place teaching people all this stuff, when really he’d be better off if he just stopped for a while, locked himself up in a room and read some biology, cosmology, anthropology, astronomy, neuroscience, and other textbooks.  I think if he did this he’d quickly realize that what he’s been teaching is not the truth and he’d think, “Oh my gosh.  I’ve been teaching people all these mistaken beliefs for so long.”  He’d then resign.  But as you can see, you can’t even talk to him.  But to be fair, Dr. Dawkins isn’t exactly the most tactful individual out there.

But strange thing is, if you try to confront people with reality they say you’re arrogant.  They come at you with the strangest arguments.  I don’t think there’s anything you can do.  It’s like the situation Galileo was in.  He tries to tell them, “Just look out of this telescope.”  But people won’t look through the telescope.  They’re not interested in the world as it is.

Religious beliefs are just as crazy as talk of reptilian aliens.  I mean, there is a giant talking snake in Genesis, and people believe that literally.

There’s no limits to the amount of craziness people can dream up.  You have to keep your mind sharp and precise, constantly sifting through all the bullshit people come up with, always demanding evidence.  It’s the only way to stay sane in this insane world.  If you don’t, you’ll quickly drift off to who knows where.

It’s not just religion or conspiracy theories.  Just read the news.

Why are we at war in the middle east?  Do you know?  Does anybody know?  Is it about nuclear weapons?  They’ve done searched and there wasn’t any.  Is it about the Taliban and Al’Qaeda?  They’re no longer in Afghanistan… yet we’re still there.  Iraq?  Who knows.  But young men and women in uniform march out there to fight a war.  Why?  Don’t they ask that simple question?  They could die out there, and for what?  “Fighting against these crazos who hate our freedom!”  *Shakes head*

If insanity is people being disconnected from reality, then I’d say over 99% of people are totally insane.  They have no clue about human origins, the origins of the Earth, the formation of our solar system, what causes the seasons and weather, climate change, the consequences of their actions, the galaxy… hell, most of them can’t even identify their country on a map, must less anyone else’s.  They’re clueless about any culture other than their own, and most of the things they do they’ve never thought about.  They don’t know how their body processes the food they eat, or even why they eat.  They don’t understand animals or insects or why they’re there.  They don’t understand money nor the economy.  They don’t know the history of human civilization or what that even is.  They don’t understand science or remotely comprehend how all the technology around them operates.

I sometimes just want to run outside grabbing people saying, “Why is this grass here?  Do you know?  Why are all these bugs here?  Have these bugs always been crawling on the ground?  Why is our body made out of mostly water?  Why do you go to your job everyday?  Have there always been birds?  Plants?  Trees?  Has the sky always been blue?  What causes the weather?  Why does the wind blow?  Why is the sun orange?  Why does it hurt your eyes to look at it?  What is light?”

My younger brother used to work with a guy who did things like this to his coworkers.  He’d grab them and ask, “What are the three branches of our government?”  Sadly, hardly anyone could ever answer his simple questions.

Saying people are insane is bit harsh though.  Living in a box might be a nicer way to put it.

What people do know is the details of the consumer culture.  What most people consider social awareness is really an intricate knowledge of the bubble.  They know all about mass consumerism and the bubble reality created for them by the big corporations.  They know about movies that are coming out.  They know the latest sports statistics.  They know all about the celebrities and the big bands and when their new cd will come out.  They know the menu at the big chain restaurants they eat at.  They know about new TV show lineups.

Maybe that’s what happiness is for a lot of folks.  Who am I to infringe on people’s lives?  But I feel that people would find it much more fulfilling learning about the amazing, incredibly vast universe we all live in.

But you guys want to know a secret of mine?  It’s not known to anyone but my closest friends, but really I have this big thing for the Black Eyed Peas.  Yeah.  When I hear they’re going to be in concert near where I live I think, “Are you KIDDING ME!  I’m SO there.”

Sometimes they open with that one.

Let’s get retarded in here

And the bass keeps running, running
And running, running
And running, running
And running, running
And running, running
And running, running
And running, running
And running, running
And-

In this context there’s no disrespect
So when I bust my rhyme you break your necks
We got 5 minutes for us to disconnect
From all intellect and the let rhythm effect

To lose the inhibition, follow your intuition
Free your inner soul and break away from tradition
Cause when we beat out, girl it’s pulling without
You wouldn’t believe how we wil’ shit out!
Burn it til it’s burned out
Turn it til it’s turned out
Actin’ up from north ,west, east, south

Everybody! (Yeah?)
Everybody! (Yeah?)
Let’s get into it! (Yeah!)
Get stupid(Come on!)
Get retarded! (Come on!)
Get retarded! (Yeah!)
Get retarded!

Let’s get retarded ha!
Let’s get retarded in here!
Let’s get retarded ha!
Let’s get retarded in here!
Let’s get retarded ha!
Let’s get retarded in here!
Let’s get retarded ha!
Let’s get retarded in here!

….

Let’s get ill that’s the deal
Out the gate, we will bring a punked Eye thrill (Just)
Lose your mind this is the time
Y’all can’t sit still just to bang your spine (Just)
)))))))))))))Bob your head, like Epilepsy ((((((((((((((((((((((
Up inside your club or in your Bentley
Get messy
Loud and sick
Your mind past normal on another head trip
So, come dumb now do not correct it
Let’s get ignant
Let’s get hectic

….

- Black Eyed Peas – Let’s Get Retarded

This is my guilty pleasure.  I disconnect from all intellect, follow my intuition, and get retarded in here! I like to punk an eye thrill (wtf?) then bang my spine and bob my head like I have epilepsy up in the club!  lmao.

Ok, I wasn’t serious, but you guys probably guessed that.  Yeah, and they’re making millions while school teachers struggle to get by.   That’s where the truth is people.  Intuition and disconnecting from your intellect.  Whatever your mind thinks up, go with it.  Imagination is reality!

The other day I was with my father and we went to a rural hardware store.  Beside the big “Cowgirl Up” and “Welcome To Our Barn” wooden signs there was a shelf of refrigerator magnets.  One had a little kitten, all cute and cuddly, and it said “I trust my instincts.”  So did George Bush when he sent us into Iraq, after his phone call with Pastor Haggard who probably confirmed that his intuitive feelings were a good idea.  Hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis dead, thousands of our own men and women in uniform lost, trillions of dollars wasted in a needless quagmire… *brushes hands together* “Job well done guys.”

Let’s get retarded.  HAH.  Let’s get retarded in here!

Let’s see.  Are there any other wise sages out there telling us the follow our intuition?  Sarah Palin tells us time and time again about living by faith and following your inner convictions.  Or how about Rush Limbaugh?  Start watching at time 6:00.

“Also for those of you in the drive by media watching, I have not needed a teleprompter for anything I’ve said. *Pumps fist*  And nor do any of us need a teleprompter because our beliefs are not the results of calculations and contrivances.  Our beliefs are not the result of a deranged psychology.  Our beliefs are our core.  *Points to heart*  Our beliefs are our hearts. We don’t have to make notes about what we believe.  We don’t have to write down, ‘Oh gee’  *scribbles on podium*  We can tell people what we believe off the top of our heads, and we can do it with passion, and we can do it with clarity, and we can do it persuasively.”

- Rush Limbaugh, CPAC 2009

There’s no need for notes because there’s no need for things like facts and statistics, or worrying about accuracy.  It’s all in your heart!  Don’t worry about critical thinking, questioning your beliefs, or consistency.  Speak your mind with passion and tell people what you intuitively know is the truth!  And notice the certainty that all opposing views are instances of ‘deranged psychology’.  The world is black and white.  You’re good and they’re bad.  You’re perfection, and they’re completely evil, on all counts.

This would be a good time to que up the Black Eyed Peas song and play it at full volume while listening to Limbaugh’s speech.  “Our beliefs are not the results of calculations and contrivances.  LET’S GET RETARDED  Our beliefs are our core.  LET’S GET STUPID Our beliefs are our hearts  LET’S GET RETARDED IN HERE!”

The more time that goes by, I really don’t belong in this place.  I come across a sane person here and there in this rather difficult life of ours, but they’re few and far between.

I’m sorry everyone.  I love you all.  If you believe in aliens ruling the world, or are religious, or think the war in Iraq was to defend our freedom, I still love you.   Come over here, give me a hug.  I don’t hate you.  I really do love everyone out there.  I really do care.  It’s just from my perspective, I’m seeing people waste away in needless wars, wasting their lives serving imaginary deities, and conjuring up conspiracies of aliens and it’s all such a tragedy. I hope I can help share the truth with some people and help them see the world as it is, so we can then get on the same page and start fixing the problems we face.  If I can help even just a handful of people realize their folly, and keep them from falling into these traps, that’s good enough for me.

So Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, the Black Eyed Peas, Pastor Ted Haggard, the conspiracy theorist telling you about aliens ruling the world, and the good ol’ boys at the country store tell you to follow your instincts and believe what’s in your heart with unwavering faith.  What would someone like Albert Einstein say?

“The important thing is not to stop questioning”

“Question everything”

“A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be.”

“To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.”

“Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.”

- Various quotes by Albert Einstein

Do you notice the difference?  Remember to question everything, be critical of everything, think about everything, and never believe anything without sufficient evidence.  That’s how you stay sane and connect with the world around you.  And if you feel everyone’s crazy, you’re not alone.  Einstein felt the same way:

A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?

- Albert Einstein

Andre,

I’m in agreement with you that the way we’re living today is destructive both to ourselves and to our planet.  Whether it be our forms of government or our philosophies toward life and the Earth, our planet is taking a serious beating.

I’ve wondered why our leaders do the terrible things that they do.  Maybe it is because they primarily concern themselves with reelection and pandering to the dumbest members of society.  Maybe it is because they’re just not very smart.  Or maybe it’s greed and since they’re only a temporary caretaker, they try to exploit the people and the country to their own personal benefit.  Whatever the reason, I wonder if we can continue on the path we’re on without killing ourselves.

With nuclear missiles pointed at every inch of civilization, I sometimes lose sleeping wondering when a missile will fall into the wrong hands and KABOOM, the Earth goes up in a mushroom cloud.

We’re currently ravaging the Earth and destroying the biosphere.  Within the next century nearly half of all living species will be killed off as there’s no room for their habitats.

Global warming is a huge threat and could lead to massive crop failures in the future, not to mention massive changes to the environment.

Our views on economics are certainly bad.  Unmitigated capitalism leads to large inequalities in wealth, and a class of parasitic mega-rich who sit at the top, doing nothing productive at all.  Communism is politically repressive, as the central government enforces equality on a sea of diversity.  Can freedom and equality go together?  That seems to be the question.

Both economic systems keep people from being all they can be.  When politically repressed and forced to be “equal” to their neighbor, they’re not allowed to express and fulfill their own individuality and self-passions.  Yet when given freedom in our current economic systems, a small group of greedy bastards control all the money and the average person isn’t able to get his or her hands on enough money to do much of anything worthwhile.  They become slaves to money until they eventually die, stuck in the rat-race.  Most of them rarely get a chance to live out their true inner passions and dreams.  The wealth lingers up in the stratosphere of the mega-rich and never makes it back down to Earth.

The wealthy also then have incentives to keep the status quo in order to keep bringing in their profits. They gain control over the media and stop any meaningful social reforms from taking place.  They have incentives to keep the public conversations dumbed down, because a smart public would demand changes in society – changes which would ruin and destroy their power structure. They spread propaganda from all corners of the globe, confusing everyone in a sea of rigged studies and bad data.  As everyone who has studied Statistics knows, statistics and data can be rigged to say anything. Percentages and data, without proper randomized controls for example, lead to misleading results.  All sorts of poll numbers and “studies” are being quoted, and most of them conflict with one another.  People struggle to make sense of all the information they drown in within this “information” age.

This oil spill is a disaster.  This is yet another instance of the Earth taking a beating.  How long is it before all our drinking water is filled with pesticides?  Before all the fish are contaminated with small bits of plastic and other chemicals?  Before our modified crops start to cause us all kinds of health problems?

I think we have too many people living on this planet and we’re living on borrowed time, hoping scientists will find cures to the problems we’re creating.  But the more people who live on this planet, the more food we’ll need to produce, and that means more destruction of natural habitats as well as genetically modified crops to produce higher yields.  And as the third world further industrializes, without clean energy sources they’ll continue burning fossil fuels contributing to massive warming on the planet.  They’ll also become worse polluters as their corporations search for ways to save money, and start wrapping their products in plastic, etc.

I recently watched some films by David Attenborough and his ending to his ‘Life Of Mammals’ series was quite powerful.

I think scientists would be able to create new technology to fix these problems, but, as you said, our politicians and leaders waste money building weapons instead of helping the planet.  It’s a shame that the brightest members of our society, our scientists and engineers, are subject to some of the dumbest people on our planet — elected officials.  If you look at the election process in any detail you see that it’s a complete joke.  They stick a few signs up in people’s yards with their name on it, and quote a few party one-liners and pit a mob of mostly uneducated common-folk against one another based on shallow political rhetoric. Also, unless you have millions of dollars for mass media exposure, you’re unlikely to win a powerful seat in our government.  This leads to the rich ruling us, mostly to their own benefit. The winners of this political contest then control the funds to our scientists, and they use it for all the wrong things.  They use it to build weapons to defend their empires.  They use it to steal from and exploit foreigners. They use it to rig the economy further in their favor.  And for those who try to fix things, most of them are unqualified and do not understand all the complications involved.  They don’t know what they’re doing.

As the power of the state expands, these rather stupid and greedy elected officials are given greater and great control over our lives.  In the origins of the United States the government was far less powerful, and life was more simplistic.  Most people were farmers and the economy was self-regulating under a laissez-faire model.  Now things are much more complicated and we have unqualified and evil people setting the rules for immigration laws, tariffs, taxes, banking regulation, currency supplies, healthcare systems, and other complex economic policies which they do not understand or will exploit nefariously.

But having a completely hands off approach, with very little government at all, doesn’t fix things either.  As already mentioned, pure laissez-faire capitalism doesn’t lead to a beautiful world. Corporate greed knows little bounds and they’ll ravage the planet and exploit their workers without any thoughts of long term consequences.  They’ll dump their waste in our streams. They’ll exploit their workers until they’re too weak to work and then throw them aside and hire someone else instead. And if the workers unionize to fight for better wages and better working conditions, the rich and powerful will pass new laws allowing poor immigrants into the country to work for them, or even better, they’ll just relocate to an impoverished country and exploit their citizens instead.  They’ll work children in hot warehouses exposed to dangerous machinery, and when they’re injured, won’t even provide for medical costs.

Have we outgrown our political and economic systems?  I think so. Technology can save us, but with our terrible social systems, it may well destroy us instead.  With all these new problems brought into play by our new technology, our social systems are getting falling dangerously far behind, and that’s a serious problem.

Einstein saw these problems.  Quoting him:

* The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor — not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules.

* I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.

* Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember that a planned economy is not yet socialism. A planned economy as such may be accompanied by the complete enslavement of the individual. The achievement of socialism requires the solution of some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it possible, in view of the far-reaching centralisation of political and economic power, to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?

- Albert Einstein, ‘Why Socialism’ writing for the Monthly Review
http://www.monthlyreview.org/598einstein.php

I’m in agreement with Einstein that some new economic system needs to be in place.  We need a system which removes all the competition among ourselves, yet still provides outlets for growth and self-determination.  It needs to utilize scientific mass production techniques, and share the rewards with all.  But communism, as implemented all over the world such as East Germany, Russia, and China, have not created paradises.  It’s been a nightmare for a lot of people who have lived under such regimes.  And liberal capitalism was implemented in India, leading to a class of rich entrepreneurs, yet the general population is still living in poverty. Some nations such as Japan have taken a “soft authoritarian” approach, using a mixture of liberal capitalism gently directed by a central authority. It’s worked well for them yet at the same time, their economy is hurting right now too.  Their scholars today are debating whether they’ve outgrown their current setup.

Most scientists I meet share comments on these issues and talk about a world where we all share things and work together.  Problem is, how do you actually implement a society like that?  Once you get into the technical specifics it gets really difficult.  I personally feel that our best bet is to somehow use the computer and the internet to distribute our resources.  A lot of the problems money solved was the fact that transactions could be done and people could efficiently exchange goods with one another, yet nobody had to understand what was going on in the big picture in order to do business.  Central planning has always failed because it all gets too complicated far too quickly.  Things become inefficient and wasteful because the human mind is too fragile and weak to plan such a complicated system.  It also falls prey to greed and corruption.

But if somehow computers could do it.  If everyone was constantly inputting their situation into a computer, and it was managing the resources of society.  If programmed correctly, maybe it could distribute the goods in an efficient manner, and never overlook the poor and impoverished, who are struggling.  Political leaders can get too busy and overwhelmed, but a computer would have time to notice every individual.

It’s just a thought. I’ve been thinking how such a system may work, but it will take a lot of research.

I agree with you that our philosophical views on the world, going all the way back to the Greeks, have been wrong. I think we view both ourselves, and the way we relate to the planet in the wrong ways.  We try to dominate nature instead of living in harmony with it.  We think using our reptile brain, hoping to achieve some sort of hierarchical dominance, instead of trying to be one with nature and the universe. When we see ourselves in the mirror we don’t understand what it is we’re looking at.  That’s why people even to this day believe in religions of all sorts.  They’re so busy working jobs that they haven’t been educated in all the new scientific knowledge which is out there.

Not too long ago I had a Jehovah’s Witness confront me while I was out getting a pizza.  She handed me a book called, ‘What Does The Bible Really Teach’, and within it it tells how when I die I will inherit my own planet, which I will populate and rule over for all eternity.  It says that when I get angry, demons are flowing into my body causing me to do evil.  And on and on it goes, filling people’s minds with complete nonsense.

And what about those who have learned all the science of our day?  I feel they face a crisis of meaning. Everything is advancing so fast that people don’t know what direction the world is going. Where will this technology take us?  They see sheep being cloned, talk of genetically modifying the human body, mixing our brain with micro-processors, nano-chips controlling DNA assemblage, the possible colonization of Mars… and it’s all too much.  They see how dumb we are as humans, and yet science has given us such incredible powers.  Are we even ready to handle such responsibilities?

As our science progresses we’re going to have to change how our society works.  We can’t continue business as usual.  And people are going to have to become aware of all the technology around them, because it’s dangerous to have stupid people living in a high-tech world.  It’s fine to be stupid when all you have is a spear, running around chasing grazing animals.  It’s not ok to be stupid and have control of nuclear weapons.

- Jason

From: Andre Gaudwin
Sent: Tuesday, June 22, 2010 5:20 PM
To: jason@jasonsummers.org
Subject: “YES WE CAN.”????

“YES WE CAN.”????

Of course we can, but we won’t do anything about it until we understand what is really happening to us. And we don’t, since none of the professionals in all sectors of society ―who should lead us into doing it, and who all together know everything there is to know about our particular problems― is remotely fit to understand the nature of the global problem presently affecting the whole of humanity. And this, because of a mistaken premise about their dominant status, which, when analyzed from an evolutionary psychological point of view, becomes an evident logical fallacy.

And it is not the first time that such a fundamentally false premise opens up an unbreachable space between our ability to know and our capacity to understand.  In Ancient Greece, astronomers knew everything there is to know about the behavior of the stars and the planets that they were observing in the heavens. However, they were incapable of understanding their true nature and the nature of the irregularities among them, because of their belief that the earth was fixed at the center of the universe. The same is true today for our intellectual elites, who know everything there is to know to dominate their own sectors of society, but who cannot understand the true nature of our problems, because of this generally accepted logical fallacy.

If such a close parallel can be made between the Ancient Geek astronomers’ incapacity to understand the true nature of the stars, and our elites’ incapacity to understand the true nature of the problem that we are facing, it is because that the two false premises causing these limitations stem from the same fundamental natural phenomenon: inertia.

For the Greeks, it was their ignorance of physical inertia ―still today interfering with our sense of motion― that was keeping them from understanding the true nature of the Heavens.  For our present day elites, it is their intellectual inertia created by the mass of knowledge that they have assiduously accumulated on a few subjects during their years of formation as specialists ―they all are― that is interfering with their sense of responsibility, and which is preventing them from understanding that they are integrated part of  the global problem that they have themselves contributed to create, and which is being dramatically worsen by their ignorance of the fallacy on which their dominant behavior is grounded.

It is because of my understanding of this fallacy―which became clear to me, after forty years of independent and “single-minded” academic inquiry on the subject―that I came to perceived “them” (humanity’s elites) as “degenerated baboons,” who, in time of dangers, have forgotten how to step ahead on the first lines of defense to protect us, as dominant baboons do to protect their troupes, which initially gave them  their dominant standings for this reason alone. Of course, our elites are still driven by the same urge to protect and defend, and they do it well. However, because of our assumed dominance over nature, they have to constantly create new enemies to satisfy these urges and the needs of the technologies that they are using to wage their wars from afar, “to save lives.” Ignoring the fact, thus, that the real enemies of our species are not among ourselves, but still in nature, on the forms of catastrophic events, as floods, droughts, famines, severe weather conditions, epidemics, earthquakes, volcanic irruptions, and today the Oil Spill from the guts of the earth in the Gulf of Mexico. All of which we would be well equipped to overcome, if we were not using all the resources that we are presently using to wage irrelevant wars.

Simply put: Our war economy need to be “converted” into a peace economy, to defend all of us against our true enemies, the furies of the elements and the aging of the world infrastructures. If this happened, we would be able to double the “defense budgets” of the whole word and put everybody to work at the maintenance of our home planet, for the good of all.

* * *

To illustrate the ground of my argument, let me tell you what happened the other day when I met a new acquaintance of mine for the first time after the Gulf of Mexico Disaster.

During our conversation, I eventually came to tell him how offended I was to see that the “hundreds of trillions” (sic) of dollars floating around in the world markets were not used in a way or another to do something about the Spill. He look at me, stunned, as if I didn’t know what I was talking about, and told me: “But…but… that is “investment money.”

What he was telling me was that this money cannot be used to overcome such man-made catastrophes as the one presently threatening the whole Gulf of Mexico, but that it is money exclusively used to  “make money.”

I hope to show you that this is the essence of the invalid argument made about our social power, which is the type of arguments that the market dwellers make all the time, on different forms, and which is directly based on this fallacy that I am talking about.

Regarding investment specialists, who claim to “play the role of God” in the economy, and who are the ones benefiting the most from this virtual wealth that they are “managing,” —if not ultimately the only ones benefiting— this type of reflections made about material “security” is exactly the same type of reflections that clergymen were making before the Reformation, about money to buy indulgences for “spiritual” security. Indeed, the  present days  investments in “security” will be as irrelevant for our survival as a species, as the investments in “indulgences” were for individual salvation.

To come back to my conversation on this subject with my new acquaintance, it stopped immediately after his mention about “investment money.”  It would have taken me too long, since what I was thinking about was too much in the line of a “mobilization” of all our resources against  the oil invasion’s of the Gulf of Mexico, as FDR did to counter the German invasion.

It is not our freedom that is at stake at the moment, but the health of of the North Atlantic and eventually the whole Earth, if we don’t succeed in stopping these oil leaks soon.  Doesn’t it call for the mobilization of all our resources? For this, though, we need political leadership, but, as I already realized many years ago, “political leadership” has become an oxymoron, since today’s politicians have only one preoccupation, there own reelection. And, it happened that the Gulf of Mexico oil Spill has followed  Murphy’s law to the letter, by happening at the worst of time, during a year of US election.

* * *

I say “single academic inquiry” above, since the only reason that kept me going for all these years was the need to find out what was this “mistake” that I have always believed we made as a rational species, somewhere in the course of our evolution.  After forty years, I have finally found it. If you want to know what it is, stick with me, if you can!  It won’t be an easy realization for anybody, believe me, since it has to do with a misunderstanding that happened tens of thousands of years ago, before the Ancient Greek, when we first acquired a proto-consciousness of our social nature.  And, since the Greeks philosophers didn’t know about this misunderstanding, it happens that it has imbued all of our philosophies of life, and that it will be a lot tougher to accept, especially for the “high priests” of finance, than heliocentrism was for the clergy of the time.

First, though, I have to explain the context in which my findings came about. (Work in Progress)

Jason, it is done and coming after your comments on this email

When I look at all other species on this planet, their lives consist of gathering food, eating, sleeping, having sex, migrating back and forth during the seasons, building simple shelters, having children, and raising their children.  A lot of species differ as to their details but that’s the gist of it.

Now look at us.  What’s the end goal of all our technology?  What happens when we have machines which create our food for us by compressing energy?  What happens when our children are created in the laboratory by stringing together DNA?

What happens when we no longer have to cook, clean, do the dishes, take out the trash, work jobs, or do much of anything for that matter?  What will we do with ourselves?  Leisure and study?

I don’t picture school and learning to be around for much more than a few hundred years.  By then they’ll implant micro-processors into our brains which can store memories, enhance our thinking abilities, calculate things, etc.  It will probably be like the Matrix movies.  They’ll plug you in and you’ll download whatever you need to know.   Actually, it’ll probably be wireless and automatically update without you even thinking.  Technology may well get so advanced that the second you’re popping out of the womb you already know all human knowledge in existence.

A large degree of our happiness today comes from learning new things, exploring, and self-development.  In the new age, instead of developing individually we’ll all develop together.  Everyone will be sharing a common mind so to speak.

At this point will the goal of life be happiness and fun?  I don’t know what that will mean to the coming age.  Neuroscience is already telling us the biochemical and electrical processes which give us happiness.  They’ll probably learn how to surgically alter our brains.  At that point, what does happiness even mean?

I have a hard time swallowing that kind of power.  Take what I find beautiful.  Right now, when I look out of my own eyes, I find women beautiful, I like good food, landscapes, sunsets, the night sky… But to think I could make myself feel those same feelings about anything?  I could reprogram myself to have those same blissful feelings when stamping papers for an insurance company?

I don’t know.  The areas of our brain which perform logic and discover truth are separate from our emotional and moral systems.  That’s why people’s emotional reactions to the same facts can differ so much.  Even now, as I interpret this information, I may well attribute emotional significance to it all, but then again, I don’t know if how I feel about it all even matters.  I don’t even feel qualified to have feelings about it.

But how to explain my feelings.  Well, I feel violated.  I feel so malleable that I don’t even have a solid existence at all.  My current life is not only temporary and ephemeral but completely ductile.

Our whole philosophical tradition going back to the Greeks is based around finding happiness in a difficult world.  With scientific progress I guess we’ve not only solved the problem, but have taken complete control of it.  With time we’ll be able to reprogram our brains to find happiness in anything.

And what happens to the individual?  Modern society is all about being an individual, and living to find happiness and fulfillment in your dreams.  What happens when you can reprogram your brain and live happily doing anything whatsoever?

This new age we’re moving into is unlike anything we’ve ever even dreamt of.  I think we’ll figure out how the brain communicates with consciousness and we’ll be capable of living in any body we construct.  Bodies may well become playthings similar to what they are when we play video games.  We’ll construct “characters” and live lives based on whatever we choose.  We won’t play online RPGs hacking each other with swords; we’ll just create real bodies and remove the painful sensations from the brains and then battle one another.

Even so, using my present mind and feelings to interpret these things is futile.  Once the brain is enhanced with micro-chips to make us think faster, we’ll come up with scientific theories and knowledge at a pace that’s currently unfathomable.  At that point, what we find entertaining will probably be a lot different.  Education does have a tendency to change how a person spends their time.

I don’t think there will be such a thing as a ’specialist’ because everyone will know everything.  We’ll probably no longer age, and our bodies will be near completely artificial.  We’ll be time-lords who can wormhole in and out of parallel realities and build play universes for our leisure (and even construct what we find to be entertaining).

But what does this mean?  I can’t even comprehend building separate bodies and living multiple lives at once, possibly even as completely different species.  I can’t comprehend navigating parallel worlds.

I get the feeling that this game of “life” which we’re all living today is almost finished.  Some sort of weird game has been playing out and now the game is coming to a close.  A few thousand more years of civilization and progress (maybe a lot less, scientific knowledge does increase exponentially) and we’ll have “beaten” this universe.   We’ll be “done”.  The struggle for existence, of life, finding happiness, being pushed around by nature… all a thing of the past.

That’s not to say we’ll be “dead”.  We just won’t even resemble humans as we know them.  That’s why I’m not even qualified to comment.   What we call “life” and the discussions of it found in biology textbooks will be obsolete.

I don’t say these things as science fiction.  This stuff is very real.  I read neuroscience textbooks and modern physics and it’s crazy what’s beyond the door.  Just read Nature and Discover magazine.  Crazy stuff is going on.  Scientists are working on technology that would blow most people’s minds.

Maybe this new era will be amazing.  Maybe people will have such control over their lives that they’ll all live blissfully.  But I don’t know.  This is all too much.  For now I’ll just keep studying science wondering about quantum mechanics.  I’ll surely be dead before these issues become mainstream problems.  Even so, they’re really not too far off; that is, if we don’t blow ourselves up or kill ourselves off in our own stupidity.

“Sunday’s NYT, gearing up for Memorial Day, carries a leading front-page story direct from the Afghan front, complete with photos. Does it tell of the 1000 Americans who have perished there in America’s longest war or the unknown number of innocent Afghanis to fall or the many more on both sides to be gruesomely injured or the devastation visited on the poor and backward regions of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan by the firepower of the mightiest war machine the world has yet to produce? Absolutely not.

Instead we are treated to a feel-good story about female Marines “bonding” with their Afghan sisters, under the heading “In Camouflage or Veil, a Fragile Bond.” Did a NYT writer dream up that sappy headline or did it come from a basement office in the Pentagon or Langley where prowar psyops against the U.S. citizenry are concocted? Or can such a distinction even be drawn, with journalistic ambition and careerism run wild? In my edition of the paper of record the story was adorned with a photo of a young Marine woman holding an Afghan toddler. How nice these warriors are. No killing for them. Just handing out ibuprofen, “giggling” (sic) with Afghan women and playing with kids.

….

Out West, the LA Times commissioned a piece by a returned Iraqi vet who writes about a fallen comrade after reminding us why they were sent to that ravaged country, namely to “work on projects aimed at rebuilding Iraq and winning hearts and minds … to rebuild schools, repair the power grid and pass out Beanie Babies.” No mention of who caused the destruction in the first place or the lies that were fed to soldiers and citizens alike to con them into that ugly war. No, just humanitarian efforts by well-meaning Americans. And so it goes. There will be more of the same tomorrow from the NYT to NPR, which has a special affinity for this kind of stuff, no doubt because its clientele is more open to imperialism of the humanitarian variety. And although there is an enormous percentage of our citizenry opposed to these wars, on both Left and Right and in the middle, expect none of them to gain access to the mainstream media to voice their opposition, much less rage at the death and destruction wrought by the Empire to preserve its hegemony.

Many say that the media hides the wars now waged by the U.S. in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. But it is worse than that. While hiding the death and destruction and certainly blotting out any graphic images of it, our poor excuse for journalism is awash with feel-good stories about the wars.

….

But our rulers learned their lesson well. No more graphic images come to us from the battlefield. They are censored by being cut off at their source. Worse, the war is systematically prettified by the media. Such is the function of the servile journalism of the Empire.”

When it comes to armies and war, I agree with Albert Einstein:

“He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once.”

“Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.”

– Albert Einstein

I don’t want to hear any more sappy stories about the troops and how we’re so good, and they’re so bad.  Blow up their schools and destroy their cities, then walk in and smile for the camera holding some toddlers.  Give me a break.

Sometimes I wonder how people can be like this; how they are unable to think of things from the perspective of those in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Well, psychologists are telling us that we’ve lost our sense of empathy.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/college-life/todays-college-students-less-e.html

Quoting from the article:

A new University of Michigan study shows that since 2000, college students have become less empathetic  than before.

Compared to college kids of the late 1970s, the study said, today’s are less likely to agree with statements such as “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective” and “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me.”

…

“We found the biggest drop in empathy after the year 2000,” said Konrath, who is also affiliated with the University of Rochester Department of Psychiatry. “College kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago, as measured by standard tests of this personality trait.”

Why is empathy declining among young adults?

…

“In terms of media content, this generation of college students grew up with video games, and a growing body of research, including work done by my colleagues at Michigan, is establishing that exposure to violent media numbs people to the pain of others.”

Social media may also play a role, O’Brien said.

“The ease of having ‘friends’ online might make people more likely to just tune out when they don’t feel like responding to others’ problems, a behavior that could carry over offline,” he said.

Add in the hyper-competitive atmosphere and inflated expectations of success, borne of celebrity “reality shows,” and you have a social environment that works against slowing down and listening to someone who needs a bit of sympathy, he said.

“College students today may be so busy worrying about themselves and their own issues that they don’t have time to spend empathizing with others, or at least perceive such time to be limited,” O’Brien said.

We expose ourselves to so much violence in video games, movies, and mass-culture in general, that we can’t even identify killing and destruction when we see it.  Our minds have been numbed.  To top it all off, we’re so busy working two or three jobs, paying off the huge debts we’re buried in, that we don’t have time to think of anyone but ourselves.  And just like the online world, when things become troubling we just want to click the ‘Close’ button in the corner.  Well, before you click ‘Close’ on your web-browser, I ask you not to just think about our troops who have died, but all the innocent Afghans and Iraqis as well.  A lot more of them have died than our troops.

I listened to him for hours as he went into all kinds of processes.  He talked about the structure of the Earth, the elements it’s made out of, how magma makes it way to the surface, how it cools and depending on how long it has to cool forms different sorts of rocks.

You see, when a rock crystalizes various elements have propensities to stick together.  These elements try to meld together but their random atomic vibrations due to the temperature knocks lose all bonds not strong enough to keep together.  At the right temperature and pressure, rock is a liquid and various dynamics happen after its pumped to the surface and cools.  Because it’s a liquid, denser elements sink to the bottom.  As the iron-oxygen-magnesium-silicon soup begins to clump together based on atomic properties, the denser clumps make their way to the bottom, and lighter clumps to the top.

So if the magma has sufficient time to cool, the rock forms one way, whereas if it cools very quickly it forms another.  If it cools very quickly you get a black glass.  If it has a long time to cool you get distinct layering, each layer being a different color and compound.  If it has a middle-range amount of time you get what’s called igneous rocks.  In igneous rocks the rock had sufficient time to form into distinct little clumps during the cooling process, but the clumps didn’t have time to sink to the bottom, so everything’s all mixed together.

Who would’ve guessed that molten rock and how it cools could be such an intricate process?  I’d seen all those rocks in the creek, with all their variations and colors, but I’d never once thought as to why they are the way they are.

It’s weird when you live in a state of ignorance.  It’s strange how you can live your entire life and never ask why things are they way they are.  I honestly had never once thought about the rocks.  I just never did.  As a kid I spent countless hours wading through the creek waters, catching craw-dads, fishing for bluegill, and skipping rocks across the pond… never once considered why this rock was orange, that rock brown, or how a sandstone became a sandstone.

Then he showed cliff sides and their layers, demonstrating all he was discussing.  There’s so much to learn.  I’ve barely just begun to understand it.

And even those elements out of which the Earth is primarily made, that is not random either.  When you study the evolution of stars you see that the elements the Earth is made out of is no accident.  There’s very precise Physics behind it all – iron, oxygen, silicon, magnesium, and the others.  They’re formed in abundance during nuclear fusion in stars.

Nothing is random.  Every one of those rocks in the creek has a story as to its age, origin, and how it ended up there.  The more I learn the more I get to quietly live my life as Sherlock Holmes, living in this strange and mysterious world, slowly unlocking its mysteries.  No, I’m not solving a murder case, but I wouldn’t want to do that anyway.  I prefer just looking around me and seeing beyond what I’m looking at.

But rocks aren’t the only things with a story to tell.  Each plant leaf has a detailed design and structure behind it.  I was learning today how many forms of plant leaves utilize strategies to discard falling rain water so it doesn’t block their air holes, which breathe in CO2.

Many leaves utilize complex guttering systems which take the water and run it off to the tip, which is often pointed.  I then looked at some leaves and marveled, “You know, I never noticed that all these leaves have points at their ends.  That’s to discard falling rain water.  That’s neat.”  The shape of every leaf carries with it distinct survival advantages.

Then I was studying trees and how they intake water and pump it to the top.  I actually sat back amazed.  Take the sycamore tree in my backyard.  It can pump hundreds of gallons of water up to its leaves every hour (yes every HOUR), 70 feet up in the air, and when you think about it, that’s no small feet.  When you study physics and water pumps you immediately begin to ask yourself, “How in the world can this tree pump all that water up in the air yet make no noise?  How does it pump?”  Talk about wonderfully crafted.  And it can pump up a hundred gallons in an hour.  100 gallons!  That’s a lot of water.  And if that doesn’t amaze you, how about you go and build a pump that brings hundreds of gallons of water out of the ground every hour, up 70 feet in the air, all powered by sunlight.  For us to do the same would require a noisy engine, powered by the burning of fossil fuels, but they do it silently, with great efficiency, in complete silence and give off no pollution.  That’s a marvel and sycamore trees are all around us.

As engineers nature still has a lot to teach us.

Or take the little yellow spots found on many leaves.  I remember when I was little seeing tree leaves with little yellow bumps on them and wondering, “What are these?”  I’d sometimes pick them off.   But like most things, there’s nothing random about that.  Those are intended to deceive butterflies who lay yellow eggs.  The plant hopes the butterflies will decide to lay eggs elsewhere where there won’t be as much competition.

Or do any of you guys have mimosa trees?  My yard is filled with them.  They’re beautiful with their flowers.  I never knew that if you touch one of them their leaves will clasp shut and if you touch them again they will flop down.  Why in the world would they do that?  Well that’s to protect them from insects like grasshoppers.  They climb up on the limb which then sets off little triggers, the leaves then shut up, the grasshopper then can’t eat them, and as it’s walking away disappointed it’s dumped to the ground.

Or how about another seemingly random fact.  Why do tropical rainforests have many plants with huge leaves, whereas say here in the United States the trees and plants have much smaller leaves?  Is that random?  Not at all.  Big plant leaves are made so big by pumping large amounts of water into them expanding the cell walls.  The rainforests never experience winter, so it never freezes there.  If our plants did that here our cold winds would dry out the huge leaves and when the weather dropped below freezing the water in the leaf would expand causing the cell walls to rupture.  Besides all this, there’s more water in the rainforests, and leaves tend to lose 90% of the moisture pumped into them through evaporation.

Nothing’s random.  There’s a reason behind everything.

I never knew that plants were so complicated and intricate.  They have all sorts of ferocious spines, thorny stings, poisonous saps, and hiding techniques.  Some plants can even disguise themselves to look like inanimate objects, like rocks!

Or you look at a hillside somewhere and see the plants are in perfect condition, with no holes in the leaves.  Then you look at the trees nearby and they look moth eaten.  Random?  Nope.  That hillside plant may well have cyanide in its leaves.  Don’t you dare eat it either.  There’s a reason nothing else touches it.  You eat that plant and you’re likely to go blind.  As counter-intuitive as it may sound, your brain will be telling you, “Eat that healthy looking plant.”  In reality, you want to eat the moth-eaten plant, as it’s edible and is less likely to hurt you.

But we can’t digest leaves very well anyway.  Leaves are packed with nutrients, carbohydrates and sugars, but it’s all stored in thick cell walls which the bacteria in our stomachs can’t break down.  You can shovel in the leaves but you won’t get much out of it.  Species that do eat the leaves have special bacteria in their guts which can break the cellulose down, but even they struggle to do so.  They have to spend hours each day eating the leaves, and then sit around for hours letting their guts work on the leaves.  They’re not easy food.

There’s so much I could talk about, but it’s late.  I love learning all this and then taking a walk outdoors.  I feel like I become one with the universe and nature.  Everything ties together into a network of interconnectedness.  There’s not only the aesthetic appeal and coherence, but all the interconnected processes, all beautifully arranged and laid out.  It’s taken nature billions of years to come up with its current balance.  We need to appreciate it more and not hack it all down.

The other day I promised to make some comments related to truth, after reading a discussion you had on a forum.  Instead of discussing that nature of truth however, I want to talk about the search for truth.

If you set out to find the truth be aware of one thing — you’re not going to like what you find.  In fact, I think it will make you very depressed.  Mark Twain was considered a genius, and when he began to sum up his findings in quotations what did he have to say?

“Be good and you will be lonesome.”

“Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.”

“No sane man can be happy, for to him life is real, and he sees what a fearful thing it is. Only the mad can be happy, and not many of those.”

“Both marriage and death ought to be welcome: the one promises happiness, doubtless the other assures it.”

– Various quotations of Mark Twain

I know you’re a big fan of H.G. Wells.  He has many quotes along the same lines:

“Heresies are experiments in man’s unsatisfied search for truth.”

“If we don’t end war, war will end us.”

“Man is the unnatural animal, the rebel child of nature, and more and more does he turn himself against the harsh and fitful hand that reared him.”

“Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.”

“Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.”

“The path of least resistance is the path of the loser.”

“The path of social advancement is, and must be, strewn with broken friendships.”

– Various quotations of H.G. Wells

I could go on and on quoting various great thinkers, and you’ll be amazed to find common threads of thought among them all.  Most of them share a common pessimism.

But to me, the search for truth embodies something vary noble, even with all the suffering you have to face.   I went on that quest some years ago.  What have I found out so far?   Where to even start…

I was raised in a Christian home and taught all kinds of warm fuzzy things.  God loved me and was watching over me.  This wonderful Father in heaven had built me a mansion made of gold and diamonds and when I died I’d reunite with all my past loved ones there for eternity.  The wicked will all be judged and punished for all their evil doings on Earth.

God himself, the creator of everything, had his attention almost solely focused around the affairs of mankind.  Everything we did mattered.  Our history was a set of trials and tests to determine who God would appoint and reward governance of the entire universe.

Little Jason had a mission to combat the devil and the evil enemies that went against mankind.  I could cure diseases if I only had faith and believed God.  I could perform miracles even greater than those done by Jesus in the Bible.

My head was in the clouds and I admit I was a much happier and nicer person than I am today.   But I began to have all sorts of questions — questions that weren’t being answered.

If the Earth was only a few thousand years old, then what were the dinosaur bones, and how could they be millions of years old?  Why would God create mosquitoes, ticks, and chiggers?   If mankind all came from Adam and Eve, and say they were both white, how did we ever end up with different races?  Not to be racist or anything, but I’ve never seen two white parents have a black baby.

What could possibly be God’s purpose in earthquakes, tornadoes, and tsunamis?  Why did the wicked in the world seem to prosper?  Why would Jesus being nailed to a cross forgive sins?  Why was God so bent up against certain sins which seemed to do no harm to anyone?  How could the God of the Old Testament advocate war and violence, then Jesus, the physical embodiment of the same deity, advocate pacifism and love?

Many years later studying science, philosophy, and just in general thinking about life led me to realize that I had believed nonsense my entire life.  Just complete and utter bullshit.   My mind had to do a complete 360.  I was very pissed off.  I was mad at my parents and everyone I knew who told me all that crap.

I was mad thinking about a conversation I had with one of my friends many many years ago.  I remember going on and on about the devil, and God, and how Jesus would save our souls… My friend, who knew it was all garbage even then must’ve thought to himself, “Jason, how can you believe all that?”  But he was too nice to say that to me.  To be honest, thinking about it is really embarrassing.

The truth you find is kind of like what Neo found out when Morpheus gave him that little pill in the movie The Matrix.  Morpheus only offered the truth, nothing more.  Neo took the pill and we all saw what happened.  The world he lived in was a complete illusion and reality was nothing like what he thought it was.

When Neo became self-aware, woke up in that weird vat of liquid, tubes all over his body, and then found himself flushing down some sort of drain like structure, only to wake up in poverty and misery onboard Morpheus’ ship, cold, eating slimy slop, that about explains my experience as well.

There was that one character, I forget his name, who talked about going back to the Matrix.  He wanted the agents to plug him back in and erase his memory.  “The matrix is more real than this place!”  But somehow, once you learn the truths of this world, you really can’t go back, even if they make you miserable knowing them.

So what have I learned?  Well, I can’t quickly go over such a huge list of things I’ve learned, but I’ll try to make some highlights:

First off the economic system.  Business and money were my first things to study as I’ve been living as an entrepreneur ever since I graduated high school, and you pretty much have to understand money in order to make it out there.  What did I learn?

The system is rigged.  A lot of people guess that it’s rigged but don’t know the mechanisms.  I spent years and years pillaging through huge economics texts, reading and reading.  Then I applied that knowledge and man oh man.  I still can’t believe what I see.

One Christmas eve I was with my cousin and we were talking at the kitchen table.  He said, “I bet there’s so much corruption in Washington we wouldn’t believe it if we saw it.”  He’s exactly right, and the more you learn the more horrified you become.  It’s WORSE than you thought.  Worse than you ever could have thought.  It takes brilliant criminal minds to come up with these schemes.

And the propaganda they use is so good that even when people think they’re fighting against the system, enacting reforms, most of the time they’re just putting on more and more chains.

To make matters worse, if you DO start to criticize it, and DO try to tell people about it, you look like the BAD GUY.  Their propaganda is that good.   That’s part of what Mark Twain meant when he said, “Be good and you will be lonesome.”  You speak out against what’s going on and you’re just thought to be a psycho, imbalanced and not knowing what you’re talking about.

Just to give a common example in economics.  Say a politician gets on the TV and says, “We need to start special programs to help subsidize homes for the poor.  Everyone in America should own a home.”  I’m the guy who stands up yelling, “No.  NOOOOOO.  Nooooo.  He lies.  This doesn’t work.  It’s never worked.  Nooooo.”  Then security drags me out of the town hall.

All the cute girls there say, “Man look at that sick human being.  All he thinks about is himself.  He doesn’t care about the poor.  I hate people like him.”  So guys like me go for walks alone through the park, and the free-love hipsters wearing their t-shirts and sandals hold their girl’s hand, smile at one another, and think they’re saving the world.  Then they volunteer at the homeless shelter not even knowing that the main reason there’s so many homeless is because of the economic policies they just helped get passed.

But when you examine economic policies, every time such things have been enacted you vastly INCREASE homeless rates and end up with ghettos everywhere you imposed price controls.

Homes are a rare commodity, and anything that is scarce is governed by prices.   Once prices are artificially set low by price controls imposed by the government, you’ve screwed up demand.  In the beginning you get a group of college students moving into a large apartment together, sharing space and splitting the rent.  But afterward some of them graduate and move off leaving a single tenant in the huge apartment.   Normally the high prices would send the student off to find a cheaper, smaller place he can more easily afford. But since prices are so low he decides he’ll just stay.

The end result?  You get under-utilized apartments and homes.  Normally homes are reserved for full families who have graduated from college, have secure jobs, and have kids.  Now you have single college students living in an entire home by themselves.  This leads to homelessness in the area, and people struggling to find a place to live.  Families can’t find homes to live in.

And besides this, landlords also lose their incentives.  This is how the ghettos appear.  If the government simply pays outright for poor people’s rents, you always get ghettos.  That’s because the landlord gets paid no matter what happens, and like he cares.  They’re just a paycheck to him, and he gets paid the same no matter what he does.   Price controls also have the same effect.  With the profit motive gone, landlords quit putting effort into their properties.  They don’t even bother competing for business, because they’re always full — remember, they’re underutilized.

So everything goes to hell, and the person who warns against the upcoming fiasco is branded a greedy, selfish bastard with no sympathy for the poor.  That’s just one of thousands of lessons you learn.  When bad things happen they’re all taken by surprise and because they have no clue what’s going on they blame all the wrong things, and make it out to be a moral issue.  “Those greedy businessmen.  Landlords exploiting their renters.  God look at them.  They won’t even put anything into their properties.  Too greedy.”

But the ones who are greedy are THEM.  They’re the ones hijacking personal property and telling others to house the poor in them for cheap.  They’re the ones imposing price controls, telling others what to do with their property.  And THEY’RE the reason why things have went south, because businessmen can’t even earn enough money off the properties to buy new things to put in them.  So then they want businessmen to invest MORE money into them, sinking the investment further into the red.

Ideas have consequences and most ideas have bad consequences.  Unless they’re very well thought out, and scientifically qualified, they almost always end badly.  Things that sound good are often terrible when more closely scrutinized.

Another example would be the government getting involved in student loans.  Any time money is made cheap and more abundant, in any industry, prices immediately get distorted.  The problem is the colleges don’t just continue along their same trajectory, even though they have more money.  No, they begin to add more and more services to provide a better “experience” for students.  So they start building ice skating rinks, new gymnasiums, and expensive computer labs.

I’m not against any of those things, but these universities have a tendency to increase costs to match their revenues.  In other words, as long as they can get students to pay for the bills they impose, regardless of how they’re paying for it, their costs continue to increase to match.  As long as the money is there, those costs keep going up.  It’s an economic law.  The more abundant money is the more inefficiency and waste come into the picture.

So government programs intended to help kids afford college by giving them discounted loans and other programs have the exact opposite effect.  But when you come against government involvement in such things people think, “What?  Are you against helping kids go through college?  Are you that selfish?  Don’t you realize that everyone these days needs a college degree to get a decent job?  We should be helping these kids.”

Socialist programs always have this problem.  Under socialism there is no way to negotiate price.  Once the government intervenes in areas, immediately you get price distortions and misallocation of economic resources.  If the free market isn’t in operation, there is no way to determine a price, as Ludwig von Mises points out.

But once the prices get distorted and shoot through the roof, the people begin to say, “Look at these corporations!  They’re gouging the government for money.  We need regulations to impose price controls so they quit ripping the tax payer raw.”

So they impose price controls and regulations and we continue on a downward spiral of inefficiency and waste.  It’s well intentioned most of the time, but it all ends badly because people don’t get how these economic principles work.

You have to implement policies correctly or you get disaster, and many policies which people think help society really hurt it.  I heard a song the other day and the lyrics went something like, “There’s so many ways to move yet go nowhere.”  That about sums up this life.  There’s very few paths which take you forward.  And even when you walk those paths, you’ll be ridiculed the entire way.

Are there other instances of this?  You bet!

If you tell the world they’re destroying the environment, and that we need to learn how to respect the Earth more, you get ridiculed.  You may even get death threats.  My own grandpa one Sunday looked right at me and said, “I have nothing but contempt for environmentalists.  They’re destroying this nation.  Tree huggers and all of them.”   Obviously he intended to let me know what he thought of me.  Most of the time I don’t even talk with my family.  They’re so closed minded you can’t even discuss anything with them.

Warn them about CO2 emissions, pollution, deforestation… you get reactions like what I receive from my own family.  People who never touch books and haven’t read anything for 20 years will tell you how stupid you are to think such things.  It doesn’t even matter if it’s backed by top scientists and it’s almost uncontested.  It’s a big conspiracy and just another ploy of the government.

Many scientists say global warming could literally trash the planet and make it uninhabitable.  Hurricanes and floods will increase in ferocity.  Ice caps will melt causing sea levels to rise putting coastal cities underwater.  New York, New Orleans, and London may end up completely submerged.  The tropical rainforests may turn to desert.

You stare at all these things and think, “This isn’t something to play around with.”  And literally mobs of idiots are chasing you with pitchforks having “nothing but contempt” for you.

You’d think my family would be proud of me for learning all these things, but it’s the exact opposite.  I’m treated terribly, and made an outsider.  My grandpa loves to tell me every Sunday how I’m going to go to hell when I die because I don’t go to church.  He wonders why I never visit him.

If you speak against religion you’re viewed as an immoral, terrible person.  Even if terrible things go on everyday in the name of religion.  It’s only just recently that you can speak about evolution.  Past generations would practically stone you to death for bringing up the topic.

Tell them about the sexual dimorphism of the brain, its development during early growth, and how sexuality isn’t a choice, and they hate you.  They hate gays, and they hate people like you who defend their rights.  Why?  Gays are different, and people who are different need to go away.

These sorts of things are why the world gets worse and worse day by day.  People fight against one another for causes which won’t change anything, no matter which side wins.  They throw big celebrations every time a new politician is elected.  “So and so will change everything.”  But nothing changes.  The people in power sit back laughing, manipulating puppets on one side or the other.  But don’t look at the man behind the curtain!  Most people don’t know the curtain even exists.

The search for truth leads to a horrid alienation from everyone around you.  You learn things and try to tell others about it but they want no part of you.

Speak against problems with outsourcing all our jobs overseas?  You’re a racist!  When really you’re just telling how the big corporations are exploiting foreigners for cheap wages because they don’t want to pay benefits and the high wage rates to American workers.  But once again, you’re the bad guy.

People don’t want the truth — they want their paradigm of lies.  It comforts them and tells them everything will be ok, when it won’t.

You tell them to disarm the nuclear weapons and the Sarah Palins come out of the crowds screaming, “You wussy.  What do you want to do, sing kum-bay-yah with the enemy?  These missiles are the only thing keeping us safe.”  No they’re not.  They’re putting us all in danger.  Some false alarm and a bit of fear and the world is disintegrated.  We have nuclear bombs aimed at every square inch of civilization.  All it would take is a few button presses and the world is destroyed.

Where does the search for truth lead you?  You find out the sun is compressed hydrogen and helium.  These atoms gets crunched together by gravity and begin to fuse together into denser elements and give up radiation in the process, which we see as sunlight.

Our planet is a rock, and its material originated in ancient star supernovas which exploded billions of years ago.

Life evolved from simple compounds on our surface and over billions of years formed beings of varying complexity.  What do these lifeforms do?  Well, their activity patterns vary greatly but David Attenborough summed up all their behavior as follows:

“If you watch animals objectively for any length of time you’re driven to the conclusion that their main aim in life is to pass on their genes to the next generation.  Most do so directly by breeding.  In the few examples which don’t do so by design they do it indirectly by helping a relative with whom they share a great number of their genes.  And inasmuch as the legacy that human beings pass onto the next generation is not only genetic but to a unique degree cultural, we do the same.  So animals and ourselves to continue the line will endure all kinds of hardship, overcome all kinds of difficulties, and eventually the next generation appears.”
- David Attenborough, The Trials Of Life

That comes from a man who has studied animals his entire life.  That’s the conclusion I too have drawn from all life on this planet, including ourselves.

Most all this life on the planet will be killed off soon enough as we make room for our “civilization”.  There’s no room for anyone or anything but us.

Our civilization is at odds with our nature, which comes from our development as apes in the African forests over millions of years.  Six to seven million years to be exact.  That’s why wars will continue on for some time, if we don’t kill ourselves off first with our weapons.  It’s our evolutionary baggage.

As Immanuel Kant said, we’re forced to construct our society with the crooked timbers of human nature.  Trying to impose neat and orderly societies with such crooked material immediately poses problems.

Men care primarily about eating, securing a home, having sex, hatching out kids, and securing a modest livelihood.  They care little about the big picture of life, what’s going on, the universe, the economy, politics, human society, large scale implications of their actions, or anything of the sort.  I don’t blame them either.  There’s nothing but misery thinking on all these problems and I don’t think half of them are intelligent enough to understand the problems anyway.  They’re too busy working jobs and wouldn’t have enough time to devote to the studies.

Most people live lives in a bubble reality of sort, believing in a reality which doesn’t exist.  Such bubbles include religion and political views.  If a person believes something that hasn’t been discovered through science, and verified through science, it’s pretty much guaranteed to be wrong.

Most everything man has believed in the past has been wrong.  Mostly likely everything we now believe to be true is also wrong, or at the very least, very primitive.  I’m sure future generations, if the human species lives on long enough, will view us as witch doctors as well, just as we do the ancients.

The vast percentage of our energy comes from burning fossil fuels, which is destroying our environment with global warming.  It’s very possible that if we don’t come up with new technology and change our ways, our entire planet may become uninhabitable in a few hundred years.

As mentioned earlier, our money system is rigged by the bankers to bury people in debts they can’t possibly pay off.  They print money out of thin air and bury us in these debts.  Just like the stock market which can supposedly drop 1000 points, people losing vast sums of their retirements, just from a “fat finger”.  Who believes that?

As for the questions bigger than life, such as the universe, I’d say I’m not yet qualified to answer.  The universe seems to have originated in a big bang of sorts, where energy flowed in from a point and spread out into space, “cooling” and forming the first atoms, which are hydrogen and helium.   Space is a complicated multi-dimensional thing which I still don’t fully understand.  It’s not three dimensional.  Time also doesn’t flow from moment to moment as we think.  It’s much more complicated.

All the stars originate from these hydrogen and helium atoms being pulled together by gravity and starting the fusion process.  Let there be light!

The atoms of which we’re made follow crazy quantum mechanical laws which are almost incomprehensible.  I shouldn’t say almost – they ARE incomprehensible.  But strange puzzles intrigue people like us, who need something to do with our lives.

I read books by eminent physicists talking about black holes and how we can travel forward and backward in time, and even move into parallel universes.  The stuff becomes so sci-fi’ish that it doesn’t seem real.

Apparently if we start to move at speeds close to the speed of light stuff starts to bend and behave strangely.  Time slows down, space bends, and colors of things begin to change.

Gravity is not fully understood.  It’s a sort of rogue force evading our understanding.  It doesn’t tie into the other forces.

Only a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of 1% of humanity has an appreciation for this sort of science, or sees its implications.  They think NASA is a waste of money and that space research is a hinderance to mankind.  In reality it’s nothing compared to the Federal Reserve and the bankers, but understanding that requires economics.  Really it’s one of the few things moving our species forward.

I spend most of my days studying mathematics and physics, though I read a lot of other books as well.  It’s something that takes years to even begin to understand it.  Advanced physics takes a lifetime of research.  I’m already getting to a place where the things I study are so complicated, and require such a background in mathematics, that I don’t even bother talking about it to anyone.   I wrote a simple entry on the basics of quantum electro-dynamics, and talked about light, but that was very basic.  You can find that entry in the ‘Physics’ section.

Whenever I talk to people about these things they just find me strange, and don’t seem to care anyway.  They get to talking about the sports game, or the weather, or something else which I have no interest in.

As for the Earth itself, it’s a rock with an iron metal core.  It originates in a bunch of rocks slamming into one another in space over quite a long period of time.  This all took place at the same time the sun was forming.  Our planet’s surface is constantly shifting around, being pulled under and new rock coming to the surface.  It’s really not so much a solid as it is a very viscous fluid.  Even the continents move around centimeters a years.  Over millions of years the surface changes dramatically.

The plates of the Earth’s surface move all about, continents slamming together forming mountain ranges.  Then the rain erodes them over millions of years, tearing them all back down.  This movement causes Earthquakes.  Similar sorts of processes give rise to islands and new land masses.

The Earth will eventually be incinerated when the sun becomes a red giant.  It seems to be a temporary stage of life to exist.

Consciousness, which seems to exist in higher life forms, originates in certain neural structures which are called Brodmann areas.  The neurons take on certain characteristics, and somehow they radiate energy at some frequency which responds to our consciousness.  Or something.  I don’t really know.

Our bodies aren’t really a solid “thing”.  They’re mostly empty space, and even so, it’s not like we’re a single living entity.  Our skin is covered in mites.  Our stomach and digestion system is filled with bacteria.  We’re moreso a swarm of micro-organisms.  A huge portion of “us” isn’t “us”.  Or maybe those little critters can be considered “us” as well?  There’s no sharp line to be drawn where we begin and where we end.

The more science you study the more things become one.  The self sort of disappears, or at least its role becomes less and less dominant.  Mankind’s place in the universe shifts farther and farther from the center of things, becoming insignificant in the big scheme of things.

Even so, consciousness brings us back to the center, and in four-dimensional space all of us share a common center.  So whee, there is no center.  Then again, no absolute up, down, left or right either.  So no absolute space!  We instead get a shifting bending craziness which I’ll hopefully grasp years from now.  Woohoo!

Reality is stranger than fiction.  That’s where the search for truth takes you.  I think it was Einstein who said he’d have nothing to live for if it wasn’t for physics.  For me, I’d have to say the same.

Now I really like Bill Maher, but when I heard that I thought,  “No Bill, you can’t do that.  I agree with the policies you want enacted, but that approach doesn’t work.”  Then Conan responded and said, “Well, I personally feel you need a bi-partisan effort in these things.”  Maher seemed a bit disgusted, but I was very impressed.  I really shouldn’t be too surprised though.  Conan graduated with honors from Harvard, and his major was history.  His good sense shows.   That’s part of why I really like him.  Even though he’s goofy, doing his string dance with a masturbating bear behind him, he’s a very intelligent guy.

Here’s a quotation from Human Action:

“Liberal social doctrine, based on the teachings of utilitarian ethics and economics, sees the problem of the relation between the government and those ruled from a different angle than universalism and collectivism. Liberalism realizes that the rulers, who are always a minority, cannot lastingly remain in office if not supported by the consent of the majority of those ruled. Whatever the system of government may be, the foundation upon which it is built and rests is always the opinion of those ruled that to obey and to be loyal to this government better serves their own interests than insurrection and the establishment of another regime. The majority has the power to do away with an unpopular government and uses this power whenever it becomes convinced that its own welfare requires it. Civil war and revolution are the means by which the discontented majorities overthrow rulers and methods of government which do not suit them. For the sake of domestic peace liberalism aims at democratic government. Democracy is therefore not a revolutionary institution. On the contrary, it is the very means of preventing revolutions and civil wars. It provides a method for the peaceful adjustment of government to the will of the majority. When the men in office and their policies no longer please the majority of the nation, they will—in the next election—be eliminated and replaced by other men espousing different policies.

The principle of majority rule or government by the people as recommended by liberalism does not aim at the supremacy of the mean, of the lowbred, of the domestic barbarians. The liberals too believe that a nation should be ruled by those best fitted for this task. But they believe that a man’s ability to rule proves itself better by convincing his fellow-citizens than by using force upon them. There is, of course, no guarantee that the voters will entrust office to the most competent candidate. But no other system could offer such a guarantee. If the majority of the nation is committed to unsound principles and prefers unworthy office-seekers, there is no remedy other than to try to change their mind by expounding more reasonable principles and recommending better men. A minority will never win lasting success by other means.“

To change the world you have to change the hearts and minds of people, one person at a time.  We live in a society with a lot of other people who believe a lot of different things.  If you want to change the way society works you have to convince them as well.

I always like to think of everything in terms of farming analogies.  Growing up I used to help my Dad in the garden.  You can’t reap a harvest unless you first plant the seeds.  Everything in life works this way.  You have to plant the seeds, watch over them, water the plants, fertilize them, and then after months of work you finally reap the rewards of your labor.

Everyone wants to ignore the planting, weeding, and watering stages.  We have a fast food culture.  But our country isn’t like that.  It’s more like a garden.  If you come at the people with political ideas they’re unfamiliar with you have to start off by planting the seeds.   You introduce them to the topic and discuss it with them.  Next you have pull up weeds before they choke out what you planted.  This includes things like not letting liars spread lies.  You say, “No, that’s not how it works.  Here’s the facts.”  Then you continue to water, and fertilize, which is further educating them.  Then when you’ve finally completed the steps you reap the harvest.  The people let you pass new laws and change society.

Try to ignore this process and all hell will break lose.  It’s frustrating how society moves and changes so slowly, but that’s just the way it is.  It’s also frustrating when established industries spend fortunes in disinformation campaigns, flooding the internet and the news with lies and bad statistics.  They’re hoping to choke out all progress before it has time to grow.  Anyone who has ever tended a garden knows that it’s no fun to pull weeds.

There are cases of political leaders who step into office and bring vast changes almost overnight, everything going smoothly.  But when that happens there’s already been a lot of time and effort invested behind the scenes.  It took the work of a lot of people laboring to educate and inform the masses.  The leader just came in and reaped the harvest, taking all the credit.  But no major societal change happens out of nowhere.  Movements have to build.  Seeds are being planted, and it’s important that we pull out the weeds and only let the right ideas grow.  The most effective methods of change happen when we change those within our sphere of influence, sharing our ideas with them.  It’s a one person at a time process.

A society and its leaders typically reflect the intelligence of its constituent members.  It’s a bottom-up process, not top-down.  Dumb people elect dumb leaders.  Corporations provide products based on what people buy.  Most stores will stock their shelves with literally anything.  They’re there to make money.  So if you walk into the stores and see mindless garbage all around you, that’s a reflection of the mainstream culture.  It’s not Wal-Mart and the corporate CEOs imposing a mindless culture on the people, it’s a mindless people demanding worthless things.

You can never change society from the top down.  It doesn’t work that way.  You might get a dictator slide in, capitalizing on a downcast society, promising them all sorts of things then pursuing a cruel agenda once in power, but those people never last.

The prevailing view among scientists today is that the brain size increase that occurred in great apes and was extended into hominids resulted from the premium that natural selection placed on individuals that were socially clever. This theory, often called social intelligence or Machiavellian intelligence, argues that the primary evolutionary benefit of large brain size was that it allowed apes and hominids to cope with and even exploit increasingly complex social relations.  In large social groups, each individual must remember the network of alliances, rivalries, debts, and credits that exist among group members.  This is not so different from the politics of our own day-to-day lives.  Frans de Waal (1982) has observed that chimpanzees seem to engage in a “service economy” in which they barter alliances and other forms of support with one another.

The individuals best able to exploit this web of social relationships would have reaped more mating success than their group mates. Richard Byrne and Andrew Whiten(1988a, b) point out that the ability to subtly manipulate others is a fundamental aspect of group life.  Robin Dunbar (1992) argues that as average group size increased, the cerebrum, or neocortex, of the primate brain increased in size to handle the additional input of social information, in much the same way that a switchbaord would be enlarged to handle added telephone traffic.  This effect holds true even when we take into account the evolved patterns of social grouping.  Dunbar observes that small-brained primates, such as strepsirhines, typically live alone or in smaller groups than do most monkeys and apes.

Richard Byrne and Andrew Whiten (1988b) collected examples of potential lying in nonhuman primates and concluded that this behavior showed and evolutionary trend, one that was more widespread in higher primates.  Great apes seem to be skilled at deceiving one another, whereas lemurs rarely if ever engage in tactical deception.  Cheney and Seyfarth found that vervet monkeys engage in tactical deception, or lying.  In Cheney and Seyfarth’s study, a vervet gave a predator alarm call as the group fed in a desired fruit tree.  As other group members fled from the “predator,” the call-giver capitalized on its lie by feeding aggressively in their absence.  Great apes are characterized by their clever use of deception to get what they want.  Craig Stanford once watched a low-ranking Gombe male chimpanzee named Beethoven mate with a female, despite the presence of the alpha male Wilkie, by using tactical deception.  As a party of chimpanzees sat in a forest clearing, Beethoven did a charging display through the middle of the group.  Because Beethoven was a low-ranking male, this was taken by the alpha Wilkie as an act of insubordination.  As Beethoven charged past Wilkie and into dense thickets, Wilkie pursued and launched into his own display.  With Wilkie absorbed in his display of dominance, Beethoven furtively made his way back to the clearing and mated with an eagerly awaiting female.

Why do primate researchers think that deception is at the heart of understanding the roots of human cognition?  The reason lies in the nature of intentional deception.  In order to lie to someone, you must possess a theory of mind.  That is, you must be able to place yourself in the mind of another, to understand the other’s mental states.  The ability to lie, to imitate, and to teach all rely on the assumption that the object of your actions thinks as you do. Whether nonhuman primates possess a human-like theory of mind is a subject of intense debate.  Small children develop a theory of mind as they grow up, but not until they are past the age of about 2 years.  Of course, to some extent the ability to impute mental states to others around you is a fundamental prerequisite to living in a complex social group.  Among primates social dynamics are complex enough that a theory of mind becomes a critical issue.

It seems lying and deception go way back.  It’s nothing new.  Our intelligence itself has evolved because we could skillfully lie and exploit the others around us.  But looking on the bright side, if alpha males are hording all the food and females, you have to resort to deception and cleverness in order to survive.   I say good for Beethoven.

If this is a core process of evolution we should probably be wary of aliens as they’re just as likely to be liars as we are.