expanding to higher realms

NON-FICTION: Loyalty to a Higher Power - Get Down From There!

2011-06-22T06:26:00.000-07:00

I'm listening to The Book of Mormon, which is a joyous musical, and thinking about how Mormon missions are chosen for particular missionaries. I see a a stage or ampitheatre where the stout, snubbed nose white guy feels all proud of himself as he looks over a standing crowd of scrubbed young man, all with no hint of facial hair.

When I thought about what authority these guys use to choose missions, like maybe they have different departments, each devoted to a region, and when the team over at the Southern Caucasus bureau sends out emails all over the place, and whoever answers the first gets more god cred.

However they choose to do it, they always got to be appealing to the authority of their god. And how are you going to know if you should give a fuck what it says?

Two ways, obviously. One, you get loyal to him just because you feel it's the thing to do. Two, you realize you better freaking trust him, cause he can mess you the hell up.

But what if Jesus and all the other gods can't take us. What if they're all bullshitters? It's a real dilemma. You don't want to get your ass kicked, but you don't want to the risk of having to suppress your self for this guy. Anybody like that, they're gonna go off on you anyways, sooner or later.

You don't want to suppress that feeling that says that this is right, because its a real feeling, and it makes you feel safe, loved, and accountable.

But how are you going to trust anyone if they don't tolerate criticism?

At some point in our domestic life, he's standing there in the kitchen in a faded sweater with a picture of some mountain he went to on vacation, and he's holding his hand up, waving it as he explains all the shit your doing wrong. "You need to stop the free bread they give you at Italian restaurants. That's really why you've been gaining all that weight in your face."

Or he/it/she is telling us what we gotta think. They tell us to get the hell out of the kitchen.

But if you even questioned one damn thing they were doing, they would just stop and slowly glare at you. Can you even imagine what they'd do if you told them to get the hell out, that they were getting fat in the face?

So if god is up there, being perfect, and he can't have a conversation with me. He can't here me say "I love you god, but I cannot believe you would say anything as nonsensical as that shit about you making all the universe. Do you know even know what gravity is?"

The Mormon guy who reads out the mission assignments, in the auditorium I have imagined, shouldn't be handing anything out. He should be receiving, at least. At least receiving the thoughts and preferences of all those pure young men. But if you were to walk up to that man when he was sitting at his desk, and put your hand on his shoulder, squeeze it, and say "Hey. Are you okay? You look tired, man. Take a break.," he would get his blood up worrying that you were trying to take his power. He'd have to get and go take a piss, meditating on the best strategy for any future takeover attempts.

Why didn't Jesus go around listening to people, instead of just cracking jokes, moralizing, and boasting his greatness?

And if god came down today, and demanded that we all have faith, that we all feel that he is everything he's supposed be, feel that we have to believe it, and believe that it has to be true, then we'd have be able to have an actual conversation with him.

We'd have to tell him that if he was going to act like he has some special power privilege, than we wouldn't want to work with him.

And if god said "Okay. I'm sorry. I'll come down and just talk about what I feel for awhile." then we'd be better off just listening, and giving the option of being weak, being stupid, being petty, and being arrogant.

And if we don't give it to him, than how can he give it to us. Love goes both ways, and so does obedience. The man who feels his wife controls him, is denying her the right to be nuanced, to do things that have unintended consequences, and denying her the right to be equal.

God wants to deny it's equality with us. Some of us want to be equal with it, some of us want it to be greater than us. So, lets let it be both.

Let god come down once in awhile and explain itself. Hang out, so we can all get to know each other.

On the other hand, any asshole that claims to represent our interests without our input or control over his or her decisions needs to be stopped.

When someone is throwing bottles at you, you don't need to decide whether or not they are essentially good or bad, whether or not they have the right reasons for what they're doing.

You just need to stop them from hurting you, and from hurting other people. Later on, when they're settled down, or maybe way after that, they can come on down with the rest of us, and stop acting like a tough guy.

bamwhatsupnowstophammertime!!!!!!!

Stay Out of Vegas

2010-09-21T10:56:00.000-07:00

What the problem is is that just now I was walking back across campus and past a dormitory and I saw a sign welcoming back students with the slogan: "What happens at Whittier, stays at Whittier."

Though I always love slogans and aphorisms when they're employed in a way that enhances the general curriculum of a school, like stuff from Shakespeare and some of the more intellectual-type celebrities, like Mr. Rogers, this particular form of slogan makes me want to vomit.

It's all covered up in the filth of Bourgois/Christian culture, where lust is an ephemeral substance that can be unleashed and closed off. When it's unleashed, this usually occurs in wicked and permissive dens of iniquity, cut off from the good part of the world, in order to conceal the filthy behavior of it's inhabitants. Why do they want the filth inside these evil places? One, you gotta keep the evil in cause if it gets out it will jack people up, so if you're gonna release it, do so in an appropriately closed-off area. Two, the good thing about sin and filth is that, even though your rulers say it's evil, they've also made sure that you want it desperately.

If what happens in Vegas really does stay there, than why not live there? You wouldn't want to, because sin must be indulged in moderately, with bourgouis restraint.

Gambling, prostitution, adultery, abnormal sexual inclinations are all products of evil, which is also a substance moving around in the world. Rather than evil, many people now prefer the substance of 'good/bad choices' and 'appropriateness.'

Living in this world of different forces pulling, pushing and embracing you. Even though when you step aside you can only feel the wind, which rarely gets strong enough to do anything to you but make you feel a little fresh or cold.

NON-FICTION: A Mystery of Eternal Revulsion

2010-08-12T11:31:00.000-07:00

In keeping with fair standards of conversation, I can tell you that Cartoon Yourself websites allow the users to experiment with their self understanding and their perception of other people.

But this just creeps the shit out of me, no matter how many times I see it:

Look at the faces, one by one. What I feel is revulsion, physical, my heart rate and blood pressure seem to elevate, preparing for battle against this moral threat.

I remember going to the carnivals, or beachside boardwalks and piers, and seeing those guys who would cartoon you for a couple bucks. It was disturbing then as well, and I was just strongly afraid that someone I was with would want to do one, or that the 'artist' would look at me and talk to me.

Why is this? How can something so seemingly popular be absolutely vile, evil, and generally repugnant to me?

Is it a projection of my own insecurities? Is it that I would like to be able to recreate myself but am stuck on emphasizing the negative aspects of myself, as an antidote to the possibility of self-delusion?

Is it just that a certain percentage of the population has sensory perception that makes this yuckiness more visually appealing? Something about the way they perceive color?

It just seems like people want to escape their mundane or common character, simply by covering up reality.

You know, as I type this, I keep looking back at these pictures to try and find the secret key to my revulsion, but I can't.

Please give me your explanation. Look at the top row of cartoons, the lady from 30 Rock, or is that Sarah Palin?, and Bill Murray, and Whoopi Goldberg are so disturbing!!!!

Please give me your view on this.

IDEA: The Message They Left for Us

2010-08-08T01:52:00.000-07:00

I thought I had left a mess on the floor, nudged the cats' bowl with my foot while hurrying out of the house. But the message was there. I just didn't want to see it.

We've all gotten so used to seeing things in the world as it is presently, on levels 6 through lobby and parking garage.

What I found on the floor was no mess. It was a word spelled out in cat food.

Think about it, the roads we traveled home on tonight, the theater we watched the 'movie' in. All made by ideas, ideas. Why is it that we happen to have people among us whose expertise is fiction? And why is Jaime an architect? He certainly has built no buildings. So, just what has he built?

The cat food on my kitchen floor spelled this: Catbox

That's where my secret subconscious safe box was. And inside was the message that would unravel everything for me: Pool. Obviously it meant that I had to get to Jaime's safe, hidden at the bottom of his childhood pool, his first den of safety. I confirmed the message with Bakunin, and noticed something strange about the word spelled out in cat food: it was cc'ed to .... none other than....

Luka!!!!

I had Bakunin sprout magic dream wings and fly to Cerritos where Luka, pipe in mouth, waited patiently.

And what did I retrieve from the safety box underneath the chlorine suffused waters?

Our original mission. The mission we've all forgotten The mission we still have to finish.

Angela Dickinson, code named Mercy, was recruited by Jack Stockingsworth, codename Jaimen.

Jaimen had one last job to do, and he needed some extra help. That's when he broke me, Garreth Hydelberg, out of the nuthouse.

Jaimen, the world's most wanted dream architect, built this place, inspired by a movie he had just seen, starring Johnny Depp as a man who dies and goes to heaven only to find out that Heaven is his childhood, and his childhood has become full of vampires and zombies, who he has to fight.

Stockingsworth, AKA Jaimen, constructed this world in order to infiltrate the mind of Leonardo Dicaprio, a drug crazed actor-turned-politician who now threatens war with Chile, back in the really real world, where nothing spins forever. We need to inceive the idea in Dicaprio's mind that All You Need is Love.

Click to Kick

Jaimen knew it would be hard, so he built in reminders, and had us all start a book club, to keep us in touch with the real world. That's why all the books we've read for our book club are actually events from the really real world, that Stockingsworth instructed Gareth Hydelberg, me, and Angela Dickinson, Mercy, to put in novel form.

I know this answers so many precious questions for us. But there's one more: Who is the dreamer of this world that Jaimen has led us in constructing? Of course, that's why Bakunin left me the message, because.....

dun dun dun! We're really all projections of Bakunin's subconscious, and Luka is his security guard extractor guy.

Or is it? One things for sure, the architect of this world, Jaimen, has built in a kick that will bring us back up to the really real world, where dogs and cats may or may not rule humanity.

The kick is complicated, but it involves something approximating a circle jerk onto a two headed lamb (in the dreamworld, the female members of our task force can just magic out the necessary apparatus to co-jerk with us.)

And that's the other secret. Who is the other female? The Emma character, someone who just happens to have the mind of a rapacious, business obsessed tycoon. Why, she's the one who hired us.. oh should I say. dun dun dun! HE!!!

Emma is none other than Donald Trump, who originally blackmailed the architect, Stockingsworth, into designing this strip mall, sprawling world.

The pre-kick kick should be embedded in this post, if not, I've been dunking my head in the toilet and I really feel that it's working.

soon....

NON-FICTION: Obama's Ignorant Education

2010-07-30T14:40:00.000-07:00

Every teacher I know says the problem with their classes is not enough resources, too much focus on teaching to tests, and too many students per class.

And I heard Obama on the radio today talking about his Race to the Top plan, where schools compete to show their compliance with standards to get money from the federal government. Obama said we need accountability from teachers. His plan amounts to a test, with a list of requirements and a total score possible for each item. Making education funding a priority gets ten points at the most, sufficiently focusing on private and charter schools is worth forty points. There's all kinds of crap to get scored on. This is what they call stimulating improvement, about four billion dollars to stimulate education by top down standards.

We do want accountability. We need it from our spouses, our police officers, our employers, our employees, our landlords, and our neighbors.

And with accountability there is one who does the accounting, and that which is accounted for.

Race to the Top, aside from bringing to mind the undignified scramble to a single, coveted position, by desperate and grasping teachers, also brings to mind the pyramidal, top down nature of our school system, which is precisely what's jacking it up.

Back in good old Red China, I was able to give my students a competitive edge in learning English by working equally with the parent and education administrators. Everyone had slightly divergent interests, but we all had a common goal, getting these children to speak the best English possible.

This is what I focused on. I had seen other teachers always blaming the students, or the culture, or anyone else beside themselves. And I knew that I couldn't do this. I also knew that the people hiring me didn't know how to get Chinese students speaking fluently, since this was the biggest problem in English education at the time, and still is.

So rather than looking for people to blame, I took responsibility for my own students' success. They were not responsible for their success, for they had not chosen to be there, and had no choice in how they spent most of their time. The parents were not responsible, because their English levels were inferior to my own. The school administrators were interested in general parent and student satisfaction.

But, in order to help my students, I also had to be free to change what I needed to change and learn what I needed to learn.

I would have had a much more painful time of things if I had been teaching in an American public school. The teachers I work with now are hindered by paperwork, overloaded with students who blend into a vague crowd control issue, and isolated form the people making the decisions on how their classrooms are run. When new research catches the administration's or principal's interest, new rules get laid down over the teachers.

Before stressing accountability for teachers, Obama also made kind remarks about our Nations teachers. But this appreciation didn't extend as far as granting more power to educators in determining educational policy. Instead, he's lumped teachers into a big pile called "schools", and said that if the "schools" fail, it's the teachers fault.

Thus, teachers will continue to suffer for things they can't control, and be blamed for it, not just by ignorant politicians and right wing blame-the-lowest-first windbags, but by the president himself.

The accounting Obama wants with his new policy is accounting for standardized tests, which themselves are unaccountable to teachers and students. What Obama wants is for bureaucrats to do the accounting, and these bureaucrats are unaccountable to the teachers and students. Teachers and students can make no demands on their superiors, the students cannot direct their own education, and the teachers cannot direct the educational policy they work under. Whatever methods currently claimed to allow such direction are invalidated by Obama's ignorant policy. If he had asked public schools teacher vote on it, or asked a wide spectrum, they would have said no way.

Obama of course, is quite educated, as was his mother. I doubt if his education is comparable to that of middle and lower middle class American children, herded in and out of underfunded classrooms, and ignored and dehumanized in favor of abstract standards developed by administrators who ignore and dehumanize teachers. And as for the input of parents, where I work, among preschool children, many parents are unable to speak much English and likely disadvantaged when it comes to shaping educational policy.

The pain and suffering, dreams and hopes, personalities and talents, of America's students and teachers, will continue to be ignored.

NEXT DIMENSION EDITORIAL: Is the Radical Left's Attack on Lynching Rights Anti-American?

2010-07-14T10:35:00.000-07:00

What you are not likely to hear from Carey Mcwilliams is an outcry against the murder of white men carried out by radical Mexican insurgents.

He spends an awful lot of time laying out a tale of infamy in which the starring villain role is played by none other than Anglo-Saxons. He refers to the God given plan of Anglo-Saxon domination of this continent as empire, but says nothing of the corrupt, excessively demotic Mexican radicals from whom we rescued these lands.

Would Mr. Mcwilliams (who writes for the radically Marxist The Nation) prefer that we had left the free white Americans who lawfully inhabited the lands west of Oklahoma at the mercy of the mestizo hordes?

Like many advocates of mob rule, negro emancipation, and every other sundry cause that hinders the free development of the American spirit, Mr. Mcwilliams regards lynching as a tool best kept out of the hands of White Christians.

And this is where the democratic hypocrisy of people like Mcwilliams reveals itself quite plainly: While appealing to populist, mob-rule rhetoric, he also seeks to disarm white folk of the one tool they have against crazed Mexicans and other unchristian races: Lynching.

Lynching is a process of communal justice, in keeping with the laws of our republic, and the spirit of law bequeathed to us by those great patricians that sloughed off the yolk of mad King George.

And now mob-rule supporters, like Michael Moore and Sean Penn, deny the right of self defense to white, free men, while supporting the anarchy of the Mexican race, whose incessant attacks on white settlers are second in vehemence only to those perpetrated by the red savage.

Is this charitable populism? Is this the demotic spirit that our republic needs?

And what is lynching? They will tell you it's racist, but, in fact, free white men are lynched too. And this is utterly flawed reasoning, since the greater likelihood of vice and evil is with those races who are in fact more often lynched.

Do not blame lynching of Mexican greasers, who have attacked and raped, on the white men who enact justice.

And the ultimate irony is that lovers of the mob like Mcwilliams are really after government intervention into the western territories. What they really want is for the Hamiltonians to have their day and the continent to be subdued by those distant powers of the capitol.

All across our Republic, northern libertines and other radicals are proposing the dissolution of our way of life. Negro emancipation to destroy the southern economy and right to property, women's suffrage to allow easily misguided women (who are perfectly happy as it is) the power to tyrannize their fathers and husbands, and now they want to take our right to execute justice in defense of our communities.

They want federal judges, controlled by the president and congress, to be sent out into the western territories to interfere with the liberty and free development of sovereign Americans.

We cannot let this stand. We cannot sit by, as our liberties are ripped from our hands, as the lesser sex and lesser races our given the whip over us.

We know what becomes of causes initiated in the name of lesser peoples: the tyranny of the French Revolution and the Bolsheviks.

If you, Americans, let them wrest the lynching rope from your hands, than you might as well give them the rest of your belongings, and your very life, for if they can take away the communal justice of lynching, than there is, truly, no stopping them.

Fiction: Darrens Perilous Journey Page 586 I Feel Me Up

2010-07-11T12:34:00.000-07:00

Even though this chick was some kind of fascist, and her face was kind of mannish, she was still a woman, and she was pretty thin. Plus, I hadn't been laid since I was like, well like a long time ago.

So I went at it, got all up on me, rubbing and kneading and poking. After a few minutes, I was naked and glistening, rolling all over the floor. My eyes were closed to the world, heedless of what might happen when I wasn't looking.

As in keeping with my heedlessness, induced by my misguided ecstatic indulgence, I was unawares of what the deal was as the crashing of the door shook me into opening my eyes to see what had made the sound.

Arthur stood there, with his sword out, straight pointing at me. He looked all mad, like he was all like "I'm a kill you!" I threw my hands from this borrowed body and was all "It's me, your liege, don't stab me!"

When I heard my voice, I realize that I totally sounded like a bitch! How would he know it was me? I had to rack my brains thinking about that.

I had to tell him things that he would know it was me. But then, all suddenly, he was clear about what the deal was. He had gotten the big picture. Seeing the note on the table next to him, he read and said "This fascist wench has taketh thy form and figure! Then you must be, indeed, my chosen hagriographer."

Oh what a relief. I got some tissues from that chicks purse, and wiped all the stuff off myself. Then, I said "Check it out, my bro. Here's what she was like putting out there about whats like happening and what not"

As Arthur listened, he looked really pissed. He took his sword and stabbed through the scientific-ish equipment all around the room, frenzying around in fury.

When all the stuff in the room was bashed beyond recognitions, he sheathed his sword in its holder, and wearily shook his head, from side to side. "Them that broughteth me thusly hath ever been struggling to desodomize my soul."

I felt so sorry, cause I had been all getting it twisted, in regards to the plot and like you know.

He forgave me and said "We must be off from here. At last, the time has come to begin your hagriophical mission, foretold in times past by men bold in rooms grand!"

Finally, I thought. But then I was all, Am I ready? I mean, I'm like, not really good at essays. But it was finally time to do the do, be I ready or not.

"Rand Coultier wants your body to take to the fair and wondrous, yet thoroughly corrupt with corporate gold, Freedom Peoples Congress of Common Folk, sequestered on the Zarcon planet, and now contesting the august issue of Gay Space Exploration."

Uh-oh, I thought. I wasn't a homophobe or nothing, but wasn't that gonna change the definition of Space Exploration, which was for straight people and aliens only?

But, then, I thought, maybe I've had enough of all this. My family taught me to stay out of politics. But then, on the other hand, I knew a lot about politics from games, like the massive multi-players they used to have when I was but a lad, whiling away the innocence of my childhood days, games like "Parley Mount", and "You Knighted States". I still had a cent a mental attachment to these games of yore.

Athur was looking at me, intensely, and that was freaky, cause he was like six feet four and all mythically buff looking. "And what lies still unbeknownst to those minted, gilded parishoners of that church whose sole edifice is the cross of corruption, is the persistence, the utter, dogged persistence of mine own heroism, ever recurrent amid the tremulation of history, to arise against the tide of injustice, in the name of the people, yearning in their huddled masses for that salvation which I bringeth unto them."

I felt the tears running down my cheeks. It was such a powerful message! And I looked down and - Oh no, I was still naked, I looked at this pale naked body and felt a little sickened, it was totally time to get back to my own body, although I liked the idea of being thinner, since a lot of chicks didn't like me cause of my little sum'in sum'in i had going on round my waist.

The only clothes I had to wear was the red dress she had left on her body before jacking mine. "Sir," I said, keeping my spitting it in appropriateness to his majesty. "Doth ye think that hereabouts might be sequestered garments and/or rainments befitting this ghastly form which I doth inhabit presently?"

He went out the room and briefly came back with a folded bundle of sweats and t-shirts. Thanks a million, I thought, now at least I can get a little comfy going on. I got dressed while he went and got me some socks and shoes, equally comfy.

Then I was all like, thinking how we gon' get out here if ain't got Merlyn to bust us out magical style?"

He winked at me, "The email hath already been loosed and replied to."

Just then, a burst of magic exploded beside me, while at the same time, the little jelly roll figure rolled up behind Arthur, with a gun, a 67-fenmeister zeppelin to be exact. "We tried to help you, you damn faggot."

But Merlyn instantly zapped him. Rushbo screamed, jiggling all over and flapping his hands around, as the drool continued to flow out of his mouth.

As he collapsed to the ground, he managed to be all like "The kids body is toast, I mean, like to the max! Rand Coultier is gonna chop his thing off if you guys try to interfere your homonazi crap on the space congress hearings."

Merlyn zapped him again, and he shut up. He was all "Me thinks thou has had too much of commotion for the nonce, be it suitable to my liege, I should want you to divert your attentions for the while."

Oh what? They gonna let me rest for awhile with all this stuff going on? We gotta get my body back, and I gotta get the hagriography written like quick like.

Page 23232 I go to rest, and feel up me again.
Page 42 I take a break and just chill
Page 5343 No, let's get out of here!

FICTION:Darren's Perilous Journey: page 365 I pull the gun on Merlyn.

2010-06-28T14:43:00.000-07:00

Like, I had been up in this game for barely a minute and already the life and death decisions had been thrust upon me. I looked up at the swirling black, maroon and green clouds overhead, flashing with balls of electricity. Could I really be about to kill the most hated fascist in the solar system? Did I have the right? Was the right to kill one I possessed, after all, since I was frail?

Then I was struck by a sudden, unexpected and jolting realization about the state of affairs as they had played out since, five days ago, I had been walking down the docks, listening to that Messican music, and expecting the purchase of my dream boat. What I realized was that, Merlyn was the one consistent theme throughout the adventure, he had been there from start to progression. He had been pushing me on, luring me on, seducing me into danger at every turn. Was it him? Was he the secret. Could I afford to risk the death of this fool who was all like hating on everyone, even the blacks?

Or did i have it twisted? Was I blind to the righteousness of Merlyn?

El Rushbo was sitting behind his desk, chewing on a slobbery cigar, pills mushed and mixed into the slobber. "What's it gonna be? You think you got the juice?"

"Act with haste!" We must rescue Arthur before the teeming minions of this puss filled monstrosity are allowed to acquire sciencia of our movements!"

I turned, slowly, pausing for effect in mid-turn, as a wisp of hair folded over my eye, which was itself emitting a star shaped shine, "Naw dog, I don't even trip on that! All this time, you been stringing me along, like a two bits of money, as if I was the dumbest fool in the hood!"

"And that's what trips me out the most", I said, keeping it real, "It's like, you totally know what the deal was, you totally know where I was coming from, and what I've been through, but you just, like, totally disregarded, like, my whole emotions." I shook my head, in disappointment rather than involuntary tic.

The grand old wizard slowly shook his own head, but not like me, in disappointment, but rather in amazement. "You've been beguiled." As he said this, i felt something moist and slimy on my chin. I touched the fingers of my not holding a gun hand to my chin and pulled it away, to within the sight of my eyes. What i beheld practically caused me to stumble loosely, shocked in amazement. It was the same sort of slobber emanating from el Rushbo's mouth.

I really had been poisoned, duped, flummoxed. They had gotten to me faster than a Tijuana whore on a blue-light special!

I exhaled a squeak, like as if I was all like some kind of all jacked up, freaky, like monster from Freddy or something.

Then, unsaranmoniously, I fainted.

The first think I saw on my awakening were the coldest pair of blue yes I'd ever seen. The second thing was the frame of blond hair that enclosed the area of my face. The eyes came closer to me. "You know what, you little punk? You're so totally lucky about what's about to happen!"

"Wha- What-?" I asked, barely able to make a sentence. I was scared out of my league. The old wizard had told me that the guys here were into Aryans, and then I had seen the Rushbo, who was all KKK times ten, and now this other one, total white chick. I was like, damn what's up with the scenario going down for real!

"Where's Merlyn?", I befuddedly asked. She shook her head and leaned back, her hair flinging over her shoulder. "Un, okay, you really need to realized something here. Umm, you've been rescued! And you must be really be brainwashed if you don't deeply appreciate the way I put my life on the line to protect you're freedom back there!" Unh-hunh! And I thought Blondes just wanna have fun, okay!

Then, she explained all the plot information that I had previously been unaware of, seeing as I hadn't known about it.

She said that actually, Arthur had wanted to come to this place, to get help, to get counseling for him being a gay. They said that the people in power back on Earth, AKA, the System, was trying to stop Arthur from getting cured, cause if he was gay, than that would destroy the historical mythos of Anglo-Saxon heroic leadership and complete the domination of the gays and minorities. Wuh wuh? That was about me? Didn't she know that I was a minority too. So, instead of just thinking it out like that, I asked her straight up front.

She's all "That's why you'll make the perfect vessel! For when I infiltrate the system to free the Aryans from the death grip of that foreigner controlling America!"

Oh, so that was it, they were gonna pretend to be me, but she was taller than me, and thinner, and she was a chick. Then I saw what she was getting at, she started doing that face off thing, like in the movie: "Face.... off!" Was she gonna take my face off and give me hers?

"No.", she excacerbated, "I just mean that I'm gonna look like you and you're gonna look like me. Moron!"

"Wait a sec." A thought came to me, unbidden by my conscious mind, almost bubbling up from my unconsciousness, where who knew what bubbly broths stewed. "Where's Merlyn?"

"He cut and run, like the typical radical liberal Marxist elitist that he is would do. After we rescued Merlyn."

Then she walked over to a wall full of little levers, not like light switches, but more like the toggles on old machines, the kind that they have in movies from the good old days.

Then I felt woozy, and the glimmer of hope I had had that this freaky lady was going to lead me to the Authur, the object of hagriophyical interest to me, was further dashed, dashed out of my mind and thoughts, and dashed against the rocks of my infamy, as I swooned into unconsciousness, hearing the words: "Face.......off!"

I woke up feeling really good, like I'd just had a long sleep. As usual upon waking, I reach down to rub my junk, some of which was usually engorged. But my junk, all three of them, wasn't there!!!

I looked around. I was in the same room, but nobody was there. On a table near the door was a red, leather purse, the straps were entwined with a gold chain. I looked inside and pulled out a wallet. Inside was a driver's license with the white chick's picture on it.

Then, I pulled out a silver round thing with a little button on it. I pushed the button and the thing opened. It was a mirror. And in the mirror, to my horror, and not quite astonishment, I saw the white chick!

I put my hand back in the purse, looking for some more information that would tell me that this was some sort of trick. But all I found was some lipstick, a switchblade, mascara, and a small envelope, with a lace bow on the front. I opened it and took out the card, which had a picture of a fat bulldog, raising his paw. Written over this was the message: They're switching off Arthur's gay gene. He should be straight in about an hour or so. Enjoy this superior body. Don't get mad and abuse it, or masturbate, or I will retaliate on your body.
God Bless, Rand Coultier.

Well, I'll be damned!!!! What was I gonna do now, just sit here and wait? Was it right to ungay Arthur, what about the ethical implications that would arise from such a procedure? And, how was she gonna know what touching I did to her body with her hands? Was there hidden cameras in here?

page 586, feel me up
page 6791, Find Arthur
page 8, look for Merlyn

NON-FICTION: Two Stupid Arguments: Faith is like belief, God=Argument for Morality

2010-03-02T21:56:00.000-08:00

George Michael was the only guy who could make me believe in it

Faith is either a distinct faculty of experience, or a special term for a certain type of belief.

The reason people want to say it is a kind of belief, or equivalent to some kinds of belief, is because there are in fact many things we believe without actually knowing why we believe them, or being able to prove them with utter certainty.

A common sort of reasoning goes like this: I've never seen Australia, but I believe it's there, therefore I can believe in god without seeing it.

Of course, like the stupid man-made watch implies man made design, therefore tree implies design argument, this sort of reasoning ignores the definition of god. I learned this from Ayn Rand years ago, and it is about the only useful bit of philosophy I still have from her.

Australia is proposed as an observable phenomena, it is a country like other countries, a place like other places, on the same planet as us, known through other people by empirical evidence.

What the theist will do is obfuscate this by referring to direct experience, and something like degrees of trust: People have direct experience of Australia, people have direct experience of god.

But direct experience is also what people have of their delusions. I have had direct experience of delusions, or beliefs that completely contradicted what I understood about reality, and they would have remained if I had not rigorously analyzed and critique them.

Empirical evidence, however, is what we can demonstrate to each other. I can take you to Australia, I can show you pictures, or I can just tell you that I saw it.

God, on the other hand, is not strictly delineated. You can't photograph god, you can't falsify god, you can't smell god.

This is where faith comes in! You have to just trust that there is something there.

And what are you trusting? That there is something that you can't see, can't demonstrate, can't point at, can't catch, can't go to, and can't touch. And if you can't do any of that, than where did you get the information to have the belief, and how did you come to believe it?

The answer is you got the idea from someone else. And that faith/trust/belief is really trust that someone else had a good reason to believe, and then you develop your own reasons to believe.

Since god is all belief, it has nothing to hold itself out of the grip of human will. This is why it is not surprising to find that faith in god resolves nothing unless you already prescribe to the same beliefs (which you arrived at through some reasoning in a limited social context.) If we are the same kind of Christian, than we have a framework within which to get along.

If your faith is too different from mine, than you and I, at best, can agree to disagree, at worst, we can dehumanize each other for not recognizing the through god, and at most tiresome, we can just argue about evidence, history, and all the other things we expect to sway others with, even though are faith renders us immune to them.

When we get to the point of trying to pretend that god is a universally agreed upon concept, we near the sad reasoning of modern believers like William Lane Craig, and Rabbi Wolpe, who both debated Christopher Hitchens.

God they say, or Religion, which they conflate, because it all comes down to knowing other religions through viewing them as versions of their own religion, is the only basis for objective moral values.

They love to quote Smerdyakov (I think it was him because he was the jerk) in The Brothers Karamazov: If there's no god, anything goes.

Dear god what nonsense, as Hithcens pointed out, If there is a god, anything goes.

If there is a god, than people can rape pre-pubescent girls, massacre aborigines, stab pregnant women and rip out their fetuses with bayonets, send young men to their deaths, organize genocide, and drop a couple nukes on Japan after they surrendered. .

If there is a god, than that's what goes in it's/their world.

As for objective moral values, this is where they confuse their own insulated world with all the others that seem close enough to their own, as long as they don't understand these other religions from an insider perspective. So of course they can be made to seem equivalent.

Religions don't share any more objective values than religious people do with non-religious people.

Both Craig and Wolpe think that if you don't have a just universe!!! than you cannot just base your morality on expedient context-based guidelines.

Imagine a just universe, where moral codes for humans were built into the universe That's the language Wolpe used!

Physicists, astrophysicists, and astronomers have all failed to find these moral laws. And that's where faith comes in.

And this is what distinguishes faith as a distinct experience. No matter what fails to verify your belief, or no matter what contradicts your belief, you still know it's true.

And this is the objectivity of the theists, the totality of the absolute monarch and dictatorship. Amongst other theologians and theists, they talk about mutual appreciation, but in their godly hearts, they know that there way is the only way, and those who don't share their faith, are doomed to suffer.

This is their certainty. And to sustain it, they use faith.

NON-FICTION: Crap Band Shows Marketing In The Christian Soul Never Dies

2010-02-21T21:59:00.000-08:00

Ken Macleod linked to this corny song. It's lame, but it makes me smile, because it's all about gene regulation. What a cool topic! That's what I want hear, that's what I want to dance too. Stuff that tells me something meaningful, rather than just infantile pubescent fantasies.

I keep stopping this writing to watch it again. But the point is that it contrasts well with another corny song, done without apparent irony, and produced with much more effort and, I assume, money.

This second video is by Superchick.
Dan sent it to me, to distract me from the three Child Development assignment I have to do, and the reading from David Hume, and the studying for my Chinese Quiz tomorrow.

How do you know a song is Christian when it doesn't mention Christianity. Well, there are no fullproof rules, but here are some guidelines.

-It Sucks.

-The lyrics don't say anything that Christians aren't allowed to, but still bump into the boundaries of acceptable Christian-Talk as much as possible (like talking about rebelling, but never against religion or your parents, talking about love but never physical love, talking about not conforming, but never telling you what to do instead, until they get to the God part)

This is the dominant face of the Christian-as-Shameless Salesman. As Mencken, noted, underneath every preacher lies a failed salesman.

Like the Capitalist culture industry, Christianity has gutted the soul of dissent and replicated forms of expression originally brought about by America's cultural revolution in the sixties and seventies.

Popular political music goes back farther, but it was during the whole obsession with youthful discontent that these styles became more central and exciting in American culture.

Rock and Roll became political, and then we got from that political punk and then political rap. But music doesn't have to be political or apolitical. As long as it's nice to listen to, it can attract people.

The content of music, usually the lyrics, is always important. And the content doesn't have to stick to any one style.

That's why it's so easy for the Culture Industry to completely absorb the energy of dissent and turn it into lifestyle capitalism, and why it's so easy for the Christian Culture Industry to then take the styles produced by Lifestyle Capitalism and then empty out the particular content and stuff in their own bullcrap.

The progression is as follows: Drop out of the System! Be an Individual ---> Hey Individual, you're not a part of the herd! That's why you enjoy the refreshing taste of Coca-Cola (or the feel of Levi 501's, taste of Budweiser, etc.) You're an individual, that's why you buy your individuality exclusively from PepsiCo. -----> Hey, all you guys love that Secular lifestyle, but you don't have to get out there, in The World, you can get from us, and our's is better, cause we're all part of Jesus!

But I shouldn't knock these true artists, merely expressing their sincere feelings... I can't even type that without giggling.

You cannot make good art when you have to reign in your thinking to that extent, when you're gently censored by everyone around you. The very world you live in is dangerous, in that you might think the wrong thing. You might think ungodly thoughts, or go too far in your speculation regarding other religions. Meditation can let in demons. In short, it's a dangerous world we live in, especially the mental world, full of possible deviation from Right Think.

But, let me try again with sympathy. I know they are...

Sorry... I honestly can't do it without laughing.

I'm not just religion-bashing on them. Johnny Cash did an album of hymns that I love. Outkast has that song "Church" on Speakerboxx. I love that song. It picks me up and gets me moving.

But it's just hard to make good music when you're task is ideological persuasion. Socialists have the same problem. The difference is, we have Rage Against the Machine. Those guys made good music, and they didn't have to live in a secluded, guarded world of constant ideological reinforcement. The Coup is pretty good too, as are Dilated Peoples ("If more than half the budget goes to military spending, than less than half goes to whatever it's defending.")

So ideological bias doesn't have to stifle your creativity, but check out Superchick. They're talking about being a rebel, crossing the line, standing out from the crowd! How can you be one of these born again Christian Culture Industry partisans and get that through your head and out of your mouth?

The whole thing becomes an artifice. They set out to produce music that reinforces the mental regime that is reinforced all around them, and then they produce music that reinforces conformity by imitating the music they can't listen to, and music that reinforces conformity by imitating the messages they can't listen to.

The song says: Revolutions start when someone crosses the line
They want us to lie down, give into the lie
Nothing has to change, and no one has to die
That's not the secret, but I know what is:
Everybody dies, but not everyone lives

It neglects to mention that by revolution they mean conformity to the Christian Culture Industry and a culture that has to constantly insulate itself from the world, which is to say it has to constantly concern itself with enforcing conformity, lest it's members stray into the open world, and the hell below it.

'Give into the lie' brings to mind Zoroastrianism. Zoroaster was fighting The Great Lie before little baby Jesus was born without sperm. 'Nothing has to change', reveals the most valuable message they can send to their target audience.

We ought to sympathize, even with self-blinding Christians like these guys. We all want to escape. Escape our limitations, escape death, escape loneliness. Someday, I hope they will take their places among the rest of humanity. In love, solidarity, and comfort.

Bless them all.

p.s. Here is an example of ideologically driven lyrics that are sincere, and part of a good song. This song touches me every time I hear it and gives me chills of hope and love.

(From The Coup, Heaven Tonite)
I used to think about infinity
And how my memory is finna be
Invisibly slim in that vicinity
And though the stars are magnificent
Whisky and the midnight sky can make you feel insignificant
The revolution in this tune and verse
Is a bid for my love to touch the universe
Strugglin' over wages and funds
Let the movement get contagious and run
Through the end when it's gauges and guns
And if we win in the ages to come
We'll have a chapter where the history pages are from
They won't never know our name or face
But feel our soul in free food they taste
Feel our passion when they heat they house
When they got power on the streets
And the police don't beat 'em about
Let's make health care centers on every block
Let's give everybody homes and a garden plot
Let's give all the schools books
Ten kids a class
And give 'em truth for their pencils and pads
Retail clerk - "love ballads" where you place this song
Let's make heaven right here
Just in case they wrong

TRANSLATION: On The Ground, 扔在地上

2010-02-03T10:50:00.000-08:00

English Lyrics here

在地上

我在城市里走走路
有人让我尝尝最新的运动饮料
跑快了跳高了
MAN！！！
我不会让你毒害我！
我拿着就扔在地上了。

你跟我开玩笑吧
我不会参加你这个社会！
你去给别人喝你的垃圾

我去我最喜欢的热狗店
老板说：你是长来的客户
我今天送你一个
我说 man!
你好像认为我是个乞丐呀

我拿着，
就扔在地上了。
我不需要你的慈善！
我是个成人呀
你不会请我吃热狗 man!

我在菜场陪着我所谓的女朋友
她给我她的手机
说是我爸
我说 Man 这不是我爸！
这是手机！

我扔在地上了
你觉得我是个啥子吗
我不是参加这个社会
我爸爸不是个手机
duh!

笨蛋在生日宴会中给我一块儿蛋糕
给我这个东西要干啥？吃吗？
祝地上生日快了
你不懂真实的世界，傻瓜！
我把全蛋糕都扔了

这么多东西可以扔在地上
比如说那个和这个，和那个，还有这个
我是个成人呀！

两个哈莱坞骗子要给我签名
地上！！
没有人要你签名
骗子！

让后骗子就起来
有一个带了泰瑟枪
就打了我的屁眼儿
我摔了下来
但他们没有停止
用抢打了我的屁眼儿
不停地打，
我叫喊了，蠕动了
烧了我的屁眼儿
这个故事的寓意是：
不要相信社会！

NON-FICTION: I'm so freaked out over financial aid.

2010-02-03T09:52:00.000-08:00

I'm supposed to hear back today from Whittier College about whether or not I can get sufficient financial aid to attend, now that I've been accepted.
I'm anticipating rejection, and I can't talk myself out of it. The only thing I can do is to tell myself to accept not getting enough financial aid, and have Emma help me to see the productive path ahead if I don't get it. I can still continue working towards my teaching credential, still focus on writing, still keep working, and still study the things I want to study.

I have ideas, but I'm not completely sure why I've regressed to this fear of rejection because nobody likes me phase.

Like Emma said, there is a lot of money involved in this, $30,000, so I shouldn't be surprised that they make it somewhat hard to get.

But I keep thinking that they should just know that I am really in need of financial aid. We're barely breaking even. I'm considering food stamps, low income auto insurance, and we're selling my car for something more fuel efficient.

I think I should make an appointment to see the school psychologist this week. One session could've already cleared this up.

Let it go, let it go, let it go. Deal with the situation. Don't let your anxieties alter your perception of reality. Be nice and understanding. Be humble. Like I've told Emma so many times, I have to put my worry energy into planning energy.

But I still feel sad.

On the other hand, all this Blank Slate/Genetic Determinism nonsense is taking up much of my other thinking energy.

I will spend an hour on each of my online classes today, and one hour writing fiction.

god bless you all

p.s. I've been working on a Chinese version of Andy Samberg's Threw It On The Ground I'm going to post the translated lyrics now.

NON-FICTION: SNEAKING IN GENETIC DETERMINISM

2010-01-27T22:27:00.000-08:00

The article is about how Caucuasians and Asians see faces differently.

The very statement reveals several analytically pathetic assumptions:

One. Caucasians have a common way of viewing the face.
Two. Caucasians are a race or group with common features.
Three. Asians have a common way of viewing the face.
Four. Asians are a race or group with common features.
Five. Asians are a group different from Caucasians.
Six. The designation of Asian and Caucasian need not be differentiated as to culture and ethnicity. That is, you don't have to specify someone whose ancestry is Asian as opposed to somebody whose culture is Asian.

This study would seem to imply that all the land from Indonesia, Korea, and from India to the Phillipines is inhabited by a single group.

What does it actually mean to say Caucasians and Asians? Most likely, yellow people and white people.

The clever bit about this piece is that it fits the simplistic ideas of cultural homogeneity and exclusivity, where different cultures inhabit different realities, and it also fits the evolutionary psychology oversimplifications, wherein, Caucasians and Asians have a separate phylogeny and therefore the needs of face recognition evolved differently.

I can't help but feel that such all-inclusive talk of Asians is never far from the Confucian Culture nonsense, and, perhaps, to some explanation of how they're all conformists because of their collective emphasis in facial recognition.

Good god. Take Chinese people for example. Try to get them to collectivize in the name of Confucian values. Or just talk to one about their experience working for or with other Chinese people, and compare what you find with The Analects.

NON-FICTION: Sciene: The information vs. The metaphors

2010-01-23T13:52:00.000-08:00

The hard part of science is the information. Getting the information, retaining it, and and evaluating it.

I was tutoring a woman who had applied to Yale as some sort of post graduate something or rather. Her specialty was Microbiology-Biochemistry. She was studying all the different kinds of things that make proteins. She knew the differences between them and she explained to me the research she had doing to name identify the different protein stuff. I cannot remember it, I keep trying, even as I'm writing this, but it's gone.

What would have been easier to remember was something like: The amino acids are like letters, and the words they spell are proteins.

But I wouldn't want to know this, not before I had grasped the actual amino acids and the actual proteins.

The metaphors can help us understand the information, but they are also highly likely to warp our understanding of the information, as the metaphors excludes certain content of the targeted information and relates it more to that which it is being compared to.

How many science lectures have I heard that started with a suggestion to "Think of X as a computer". Think of the universe as giant machine. Think of the brain as a giant information system. Think of ants as soldiers.

What inevitably happens is that the analogies dominate the information. We end up arguing over mechanism and vitalism, nature and nurture, dynamism and reductionalism, nominalism and realism.

In fact, direct reference to the book of nature, that is, empirical understanding, are what allows us to transcend imposing metaphors.

The more we know about the brain, the more we can see that it, in fact is like a big chemical soup, is like a computer, is like an organ, is like a hormone factory, is like a big machine, is like a soul, etc.

The more we know about the brain, the more we can stop thinking of is like and deal just with the actual neurons, actual structures, actual astrocytes, glial cells, dendritic branches, and all that.

I recently watched a discussion between Richard Dawkins and Steven Rose wherein the issues of disagreement were not so much clear to either party, but there was a hint that Rose felt Dawkins and the socio-biology type scientists over simplified DNA and genes, isolating the gene as the point of everything, and excluding the emphasis on the whole biochemical environment. Dawkins response was something like "Yes it's all very complicated, but..."

Dawkins insists that the code is the one thing that goes on and that's the key to natural selection.

But, I think naked contemplation of the processes is still more valuable than such metaphors of keys.

The metaphors we develop or that occur to us, are just ways to grasp the phenomena in different schemes of organization or causaality. But, in the end, unless we are constantly referring to the phenomena without metaphors and analogies, than we run the risk of subordinating the information to the analogy.

It is at this point that we diverge from science. Each scientific paradigm grows overreaches itself, denies information and is replaced by another paradigm.

What is left is information about processes. The animalcules identified by Van Looewnhoek were real, the problems faced by early French evolutionists were real, though much of their conclusions were wrong. The practical uses of electricity were understood faster than the actual phenomena underlying it.

What piles up over the decades and centuries is information, information regarding processes. Whatever metaphor we find useful to give this information a certain structure in a given age should never be taken as more significant than the information. Metaphors, such as the selfish gene, the brain-computer, the god center in the brain, and a gay gene should understood as a way of getting fresh perspective on vast processes, not as some final conclusions that subsume those processes.

PURE SCIENCE: A Genocide Gene?

2010-01-23T12:27:00.000-08:00

For years and years we have been assaulted with dogmatic assertions that genocide is purely a cultural phenomena, that is to be blamed on super-structural features of a society, like, patriarchy, racism, slavery. Some have claimed that it is a misfiring of our natural tendency towards in-group/out-group patterns of orientation.

But the thrilling new discoveries of scientific methaphorology and statistical correlation have already shed light on how alot of stuff is really all about natural selection. Just as the rape gene is soon to be discovered, likely adjacent to the allele that causes sodomy, so too will the day come when we can realize that the critics of society who demand radical restructurings and think the world is open wide for whatever wild blueprints they devise have, all this time, really just been criticizing the genes.

First, for those of you who are not scientifically initiated, let me lay out the basics of human behavior, so that you might get a glimpse at what's really going on.

Genes evolved a long time ago. And all a gene wants to do is make more copies of itself. This is what you are for. Your genes just want to make a copy of themselves through reproduction. This also explains why so many people are interested in cloning, as your genes also want to make a perfect copy of themselves, rather than gambling for dominance with the genes of the person you have sex with.

So the genes will use any means they can to reproduce. The genes also compete against each other, so that one gene in your body wants to get rid of the other genes, so it can just reproduce itself and leave the other genes in your body behind. But this topic is too much for our present essay.

Getting back to the point, wiping out a whole gene pool, whether it be an actual gene pool or a perceived pool, is a great way for your genes to wittle down the competition.

Now, it is quite possible that our ancestor Homo Habilis was motivated by this same impulse to genocide the Neanderthals.

From the gene's point of view, getting rid of other groups of genes makes sense, since that leaves more resources for themselves. Also, they'd much rather deal with genes similar to themselves, since there is a shared interest among similar genes in assisting each other in achieving reproduction. This is called the Kinship Rule.

Now, it is quite likely that there are many more genocide genes than actual genocides. But usually, these genes are kept in check by social norms (AKA social norm genes.) In rare instances, you might get a predominance, or a certain critical mass of these genocide genes, and that's when genocidal plans start getting carried out.

So, we see that genes want to do all sorts of things that the Social Norm Gene don't want to happen. Thus we realize that human nature is everywhere bound by the Social Norms Gene, but never permanently bound.

The view that elimination of genocide is merely a matter of reorganizing societal norms or dealing with socio-economic factors, is thus found to be unnatural.

Much closer to the truth are the notions of SIN and ID. Sin is the nature that we are tempted to do things against our sense of good/god, but evil factors. This, really was early man's first intimation of the struggle of genes against other genes. More recently, Freud understood this genetic conflict in his division of the psyche into Id, Ego, Superego. The id genes want sex with out mothers, but the Social Norm Gene AKA Superego, holds back the mother-sex genes.

I have faith that some day we might isolate this genocide gene, perhaps by genetic screening among relevant populations (some in Africa, some in South Asia.)

Also, in the meantime, I think it is important that we avoid undue provocation of these genocide genes, such as ethnic solidarity or stimulation of anxiety through promoting the rights of minorities. Many groups of Americans, at present are precipitously beset by feelings that their group is threatened, by gay marriage, Hispanic immigrants, and other problem groups. If these threatened groups have a higher than average percentage of genocide genes, then it is simply irresponsible to needlessly provoke the genes in people that they didn't choose to be born with, and which we haven't developed the sufficient technology (allelle extraction) to deal with.

MOVIE REVIEW: Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Lovely Bones.

2010-01-21T11:49:00.000-08:00

I have often thought that Robert Downey Jr. was a bit too cool, a bit of a dick, who, though ever charming and witty, lacked a certain maturity or social awareness. But, I loved him in Sherlock Holmes. I gave in to his charm in the first five minutes of the film.

I didn't really want to see this film, since I thought it would be just the usual period piece fetishism, and because they had marred Jude Law's beauty with a mustache.

But, as soon as the movie started, I realized this was about debunking mystical bullshit. Sherlock Holmes has to deal with an entire society taken in by mystical, religious, nonsense, and him and Holmes have to kick ass and show how it's all based on the bastardization of science and technology.

I was shocked. This is exactly the movie that we need at this point, when we are distracted from our real living conditions by the false debate over healthcare reform, (which has, unsurprisingly, turned out to be a pay out to the rich,) distracted the false debate over gay marriage, which is theologically and culturally irrrelevant, and all the other fictional dramas presented to us as crucial to the fate of our nation.

What we need to be doing is getting past the popular illusions and seeing the real mechanisms and interests behind them.

This is what Holmes does. As London and greater England are beset by the prospect of an evil, magical villain rising from the dead and taking over the country's most powerful secret society, and then the country itself, Sherlock Holmes and Watson figure out how each miracle was faked, and how the real danger was of a power hungry murderer taking advantage of the credulity of both the masses and the nations ruling class.

In these times, the message of Holmes, aside from drug use (at least in the books), is: Get to the bottom of it. Find out the real causes and through them address the danger.

This is why Holmes should have been hanging out in The Lovely Bones. This piece of crap film has a different message for a country in the midst of all kinds of fear and danger: Fuck it, we're all going to heaven.

Got no money? Don't sit around working out what you're going to do about it. Fuck it, you're going to paradise when you die.

Did your beautiful blue eyed daughter get murdered and cut up by your neighbor? Open your eyes to the bigger picture!!! Enjoy your remaining family time. Getting trapped, murdered, and butchered like a pig was merely a minor issue in your daughter's life, after which she spends eternity in a beautiful, wheat field Heaven! Hallelujah, amen!

Suppose on the other hand, if you're an unenlightened, sad little skeptic deluding yourself into thinking that this life is all we got. Then you might start seeing the murder of fourteen year old girls, by a serial killer, as the main problem presented in this film.

If you're so thick headed as to imagine that these seventy years or so are all you're going to get, so you better cherish it, and cherish the lives of your friends and pets, suck every last bit of experience you can out of life, because that's all we got-if you're this negative about things, you might start thinking that serial killers are a real big deal, and we should be spending time figuring out how to neutralize these monsters, instead of reconciling ourselves to our impotence in this world.

But that's the sweet beauty of The Lovely Bones: even the butchered bones of a fourteen year old girl are something you just have to let go of, and cherish the remaining connections you have. And if another of them gets killed, you still have a couple more left, so give them a hug. And if some other innocent is dragged from her car, strangled, raped and slashed across the face with a razor, than don't sweat it, because there's karma to take care of everything.

And by Karma I mean the westernized idea marketed to and parroted among the lower classes and dissociated types, that imagines there's some special justice that gives good shit to good people and bad shit to bad people.

In The Lovely Bones, this comes at the end of the movie. After the serial killer gets away, probably killing again, and after we are left with no answers about what to do about serial killers, only then does Jesus-Karma mete out cosmic justice by having the aged serial killer slip off a hill and die.

Sherlock Holmes would have figured out who the killer was. And, since he doesn't exist, and serial killers often go unpunished, dying with all their cherished memories of slaughter intact, than perhaps I might offer the following responses to serial murder.

Off the top of my head: Psychological Profiling and Analysis. Sociological Factors found to be relevant in cases of serial murder. Biological Factors. Ways to teach your children to avoid and/or fight dangerous adults. Ways to organize your neighborhood to avoid the anonymity and secrecy that serial killers avoid.

God forbid I should ever have a child who is murdered, and, in the midst of my unending agony, give in to some kind of religious bullshit. I could then just stay in my fantasy and pray to someone and ask them to say hello to my child, all while more murders are planned and carried out. And when I ran into parents whose children had been murdered by the same person that killed my child, I could wisely shake my head, dismissing evidence, prevention, and joint action, and say: Golly, jeez, the good Lord sure does work in mysterious ways, butchering kids and stuff. But, you know, think about, it, now that they're up in Heaven, they're happier and smarter than us, so, really it all worked out, and it was really a good opportunity for those kids to get all cut up and buried in a corn field.

NON-FICTION: Excavating the mind from Depression: Hard Core inhibition as a lifestyle

2010-01-19T16:56:00.000-08:00

That old metaphor, which I heard a couple years ago, buzzed, on a bus around xujiahui, and the huangpu river, maybe going down to the meiluo cheng, about the one part of the brain, the cortex, inhibiting the thalamus, or a simlar brain area, as the cause of, our neurological correlate to depression stays with me. Before that, I recall some similar notion, native to my own speculations, about the roots of our depression. I mean me and my brother's depression. And maybe I can say me and my uncle and my brother. And maybe this applies to the satelite of people I know who were abused, violently, and in anger.

The thing is, however, I'm depressed. The self-pityying, unaccountable, vague connotations of that term are such as I wish to avoid. So I'm immobile, in such a way that I think this would be described as low grade chronic depression.

I don't know where to start or which way to go in telling you this. But let me start where I'm at where I am now. I'm sitting in front of the kitchen window, sitting straight up and typing. I have earplugs in and a sleeping mask on. the door is open and the cats are wandering in and out, after being in all day due to the rain.

The reason I need to blind myself and deafen myself is because this is the only way I can feel comfortable to type most of the time. The only way I can block out....

Whatever I'm blocking out. The immanent distractions, the will inside of me that is constatly veering off in any which direction, that cannot put itself into any one thing that I deem productive or necessary.

To do anything, generally speaking, I need a gimmick. This gimmick is unsusually some audio lectures, books, music, or caffeine, anger, or lateness..

The blindfold and earplugs started last year 2009 or so in Shanghai. In the apartment off of zhanghyang lu, with the tiny dining room. I would blindfold myself and try to cover my ears enough, since i didn't have earplugs. Towards the end of our stay in Shanghai, I would do this while Emma's parents were milling around the house, and often I had takien some of the little balls of hash from the small plastic gum containers that I used to store my hash in.

Bakuin and susan, my cats were with me then as now. I often had one of my glass jars that i like to use as cups. I would have a big glasss jar of tea or coffee, or chocolate made by melting eighty percent choclate with some water and creamer.

The blindfold and the earplugs leave me alone, allow me to be in here, free from the outrside. It's the outside that I can't hanle, that leaves me dead. The outside me leaves without any identity, without any being. It leaves me at the mercy whims, the urge to gratification, pleasure , and the urge to consume.

In the middle of that sentence, i reacted to the wine i heard through my earplugs and pulled one out. It was nothing in my immediate zone of interest, something form outside, a neighbor using some machine to cut or weld maybe. But I decided it was an acceptable time to get up and try being in the world. I checked the mail. No mail.

My attention is waning now, got stuck on gimmicks, the idea of gimmicks.

I have alot of gimmicks. The idea of god is a gimmick, sometimes i've felt a presece in my mind that I associate with god, what other people know as god. This was a different prescence than the conversations I'm always having. I have those too. A typical example is the one I had last ight with my therapist. It was in the midst of another conversation I was having in my head. I realized I was doing it, and thought of telling my therapist. Then I was having a conversation with him about it. Then I was telling him that even thinking about telling him would make me have a conversation with him about it.

About the conversations.

Than I thought about how this extraordinary bent in me ought, in some conventional biography of a great man, lead to the production of some skill, some advantage. This would work if I was some trial lawyer, or a politician, or an interviewre on tv. Or if I was a writer, hahaha. [While editing this I notice that what I was thinking at this time, last night, was also that I couldn't utilize the conversations as a skill, and this was a difference between me and the great men in the imagined biographies.]

So is that it now? Am I clear?

What do I want to do? Work on the Beast book. That's the one I want to to work on, but I don't feel it.

I guess now writing this post has become a gimmick

The other gimmicks I can think of right now are other people helping me, and schedules. The schedules are what I have the most trust in now, as escaping the bad parts of other gimmicks. As for other people helping me, sometimes I have sort of a daydream about a motherly figure helping me to write, setting out the implements, like notepaper and a laptop, a special laptop just for writing that I think of getting, and sitting these down on the table just so. And it's on a special writing table, and taking my hadn and guiding me to the table. That's embarrasing, but I think it's a clear reflection of the lack of a motherly figure in my life.

It's embarrasing but even so it's so strong, a motherly figure,a white lady would be nice, and so would a black lady, in her late thirties to fifties, maybe a little plump, and neat in appearance. It's embarrasing, but every time I think of it, the desire is real.

Oh yes, a life of gimmicks. Is that what I've been trying to get around? Whith all the Brcue Lee, Daoist, Buddhist fascination I used to have? Is that what all the self help and psychology is about? No, it's primarliy about understanding, about extravating myself from the unseen influences that abound in my mind. It's about making sese of the lives we lead, of the spectum of minds that make up my social world.

Where do i go from here? I wnat to stop writing now, as if this blog served a purpose and I'm ready to move on.
Where do I go? Stand up. If I stand up, this may be dissapoiting in that it leads nowehre? I don't like the idea of finishing this blog, since I need to edit it, which requires taking off the sleeping mask and letting the light and the objects aroud me in. I dont want anymore auditory visual stimulus going on.

I don't want to hear Phil Hendrie or Christopher Hitchens or any of that stuff I liten to all day and night. The only thing I can think to do is bring the blaket from the couch and put it over my head and the computer, so I can limit the range of intrusion and edit this blog, publish it and.... I don't know what comes next.

I can't really say I want any of those gimmicks, or that the absence of gimmicks is the solution. For any solution is in itself a gimmick, I sense.

I have to go the bathroom.

I will get up, and them i will come back witht he blanket and edit this blog ad publish it. I want somethig to listen to while I'm up and about. I will lisen to soemthing. I will take off my sleeping mask and use the other cpomputer to listen to something. I'm using Emmas computer, and my computer is at the other end of the aprrtment, buy the door, on a chair.

I'm back, but I'm not using the blanket. Maybe I'll go get it in a minute or so. I'm eating strawberries. This is a gimmick, as it gives me a sense of doing something healthy. Eating potatoes is a gimmick, as food impulse keep me going. I'm going to cut up a potato and fry up the pieces. I wish I had ketchup or eggs to go with it. This is my second potato of the day.

NON-FICTION: SCIENCE, OTHER KNOWLEDGE, FAMILY THEORY OF IDEOLOGY AND PERSONALITY TYPES

2010-01-16T15:45:00.000-08:00

1. I just heard Ricard Dawkins on the "Late Late Show" in Ireland. A priest mentioned that Science is not the only way to know things. The tacit implication is that this makes believing in god without proof okay.

It makes sense that people would want to regard Science as a monolith in order to regard it as isolated and incomplete, and thus allowing for baseless belief in god.

It also makes sense to say that since all the bible or all the main doctrines of someone's Christianity have to be right in order of Christianity to be true, all claims of science have to be right or science is wrong.

What is interesting is that this discussion between Atheist Scientists and theists implies an odd spectrum of epistemology. From Religion to science?

This has nothing to do with actual existence as we experience it, nothing to do with our lives. The scientific method is a set of procedures for empirical discovery and verification.

Religion's special knowledge acquisition is done through faith, which is a feeling most often backed up by the threat of force, often directly.

But why have I not heard anyone mentioning the fact there are entire works dedicated to epistemology? Why is the question of how we know limited to Science versus faith? Am I the only one who is disgusted by the implications?

The reason that we have this incomplete, false dichotomy is because of the ignorance or inexperience of scientists and the petty stratagems of theists.

Experience and logical processes are what we all use to decide most questions. The scientific method is no more universal or fundamental to human experience than a recipe for hummus.

The main reason why we have questions like "Does science answer everything?" or "Is science the only way to know the universe?" is because religious types fear the implications of plain old logic. It is better to have something outside of their everyday experience and those of potential converts. It is better to argue against a presumed monolith than the everyday logic that causes to trust somethings and not others.

Our own experience might eventually lead us to a germ theory of disease, but never to the resurrection. It might tell us that people seem to be gone after death, but not that the people have souls inside them that fly out of them at death.

I want to write something more extensive on this subject, perhaps a review of epistemic theories and experiential perspectives of knowledge for atheists.

2. George Lakoff believes that political affiliation has more to do with our sense of familial affiliation than doctrinal procession. That is, when you see people who believe in gun control our also much more likely to be pro-choice, this is not because one belief suggests the other, or because both arise from a common principle, but because experience a sense of community and identify with a community of believers (this is my own interpretation of Lakoff.)

I have noticed for a long time that much communication among more orthodox believers, be they anarchists, anarcho-capitalists, liberals, or Limbaugh-types, has to do with in-group morality.

There is much less rational assessment of goals and consequences in general. Anarchists, despite their inspirational emphasis on consensus decision making, which entails a focus on mutually determined goals whether than enforcement of dogman, still can be seen denouncing others as not being real anarchists, being statists, being leftists, etc.

So it makes sense that once we come to identify with a certain perceived community of belief, we then project the doctrines, premises, and tendencies of that community onto the rest of our world.

Fear of losing authentic group identity can be seen, usually, in some sort of slippery slope arguments, such as, if you accept such and such premise, you are on your way to become a leftist. It is also seen in absurd definitional arguments, such as what constitutes a real anarchist, or real conservative. It is all too common to hear someone say. All those guys calling themselves X are not really X.

Whereas, ideologies (including the mythological embrace AKA Religion) generally have efficacious aims, such as the betterment of society, liberation, the end to capitalist oppression, it is hard not to stray to tribal business. Thus, we have factions, splits, heretics, and dogma.

Solutions to problems. Putting forth a common goal that transcends doctrinal differences is liberating. It frees us from the problem of loyalty to a community of ideas and puts back in the control seat. It also breaks down walls that keep us apart from other people.

As to personality. Given that our ideologies have much, perhaps mostly, to do with our sense of family, our neurological structures that correspond to our social reality, it is further likely that some people are more inclined to have stronger or weaker tendencies to adhere strictly to a particular community of belief.

This is what is called the True Believer phenomena.

It seems that some people are definitely more focused on the psychology of other people and some are less focused. This function may or may not intersect with a greater tendency to ideology. When it does, it then may coincide with a loyalty to ones immediate social ties, a rejection of those ties in favor of the ideology, or a rejection of the ideology in favor of ones social ties.

BOOK CLUB: Book Club Spits Out Four Books

2010-01-12T13:51:00.000-08:00

Book Club: I got a question: Why they Hatin' on me?

Book Club: The collective has consumed three novels since it's inception earlier this year. You may have missed it.

You may have lingered, over there, in your fear of Book Club. In your incomprehension at the intangible but binding web of lust that is Book Club.

But Book Club loves and wants you to understand what Book Club has done. You do not know of Nethereland, by Joseph O'neill. You have not tasted of Bandits, by Elmore Leonard. You have not yet sullied yourself with the pretense of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. You have dreamed of but never read the words of The Road by Cormac Mccarthy

But you want Book Club. This, Book Club knows, before you even think it, before the thought makes its way up from the bottom depths of your psyche.

So, Book Club will give you these Books as they have become inside of Book Club.

Book Club helps. Book Club Reveals Below a story for those of you outside of Book Club.

Read it, and Read on. Book Club Presents: The Underground Society of Darker Types Who Do the Crime in a Postmodern Nightmare, by Book Club.

                        OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Jack Skillet laughed at the empty concrete streets in front of the corporation. The streets were manufactured by technology, but they were desolate of life.

The boy said "Those streets?"

"Yeah, I reckon."

He took the dusty old Iphone out from his frayed pocket to check the google maps app. It made him think of Juanita, who had showed him the wild side of life, with wondrous fragrances of mate, pisco sour, and Ma Po Doufu. Juanita, who took away the point of his existence, and replaced it with another.

The door to the corporation's office was about several yards in the distance. The clouds overhead had nothing to say to them, in this dark world.

The boy shuffled his feet nervously. "They gonna rape us up somethin' awful, I 'spect."

"They ain't gon' do nothin'"

"They ain't?"

"They ain't."

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"Okay."

He went on up the path. The tangles of vines along the walls of the corporation's office twisted all over the place, unable to work out a choerent message,in a world devoid of meaning.

Next to him, he moved the bicycle along the path. His strong hands gripped the handlebars as his long, model-like body moved sinuously towards the door.

Juanita had left him and the boy, left them to keep going down the path.   It had been on a cold night, when the camp fire sent smoke up into the godless sky, that answered no prayers.

She had come to him, in a womanly way, with her mocha brown skin fraying his nordic restraint. And after, as they lay in a barren land, listening to the drinking songs of cannibals, as they drank the blood of their children, she had whispered to him.

"Me voy."

"Why?"

"Jewelry heist."

"Who?"

"The guy at the computer company."

"Which one?"

"The one that symolizes the dislocation of modernity."

"How?"

"Loose cannon help. Web of contravening plots."

"Motivation?"

"For who?"

"For you, loose cannon,me."

"Hard to tell."

And that was the way it was. Things were hard to tell, when you got down to it. Things were just hard to tell nowadays.

They proceded along the path. He could make out more detail of the corporation's office now.

There was a click behind him and he froze.

The boy froze too. "That a gun?"

"Uh hunh."

"Somebody hurt me?"

"Nobody hurt you."

The man with the gun asked them to to turn around. Jack Skillet could tell by the sound of the man with the gun's voice that he was crazy and unstable.

As he turned, he thought of his life before the fall, he thought of the big city, all the crazy characters. He was just a futures analyst back them, prioritizing amortization tables for international financiers who dabbled in the funds derivatives assets.

He had been just another tall, stiff, blond, European type. With eyes of blue that expressed no emotion or unpleasant social truth.

Then he had met Juanita. At the top of the empire state building, she had been so excited at her arrival in the land of dreams, as all immigrants were, that she had danced a native, festive dance. He had seen her as she swirled her dress, hoop earrings dangling wildly, with spicy passion.

And she had shown him the other side of the city. A world of hustlers and cheats, dreamers and womanizers. Free of the chains of morality and decency that trapped Jack.

He finished turning and faced the wild eyed man with the gun. There was a look of desperation in his eyes. He was drunk, and his clothes were brown with dirt, and hung in tatters over his skinny shoulders.

"Ain't gon' do it." He told them.

"Ain't gon' what?"

"Ain't gon' steal jewelries first, 'fore Juanita does it."

"Why?"

"'Cause i 'gon' get it."

"How?"

"Point gun, not let you go."

"Who are you?"

"Erasmus Deleterius, part of secret society."

"What it do, sercret society?"

"Can't tell. Read book: Plays of Aeschylus. Go civc center, see performance."

"You gonna shoot me, mister?"

"No."

He motioned for them to move behind him. They did. As they moved behind him, Jack could see the grass clippings on the side of the lawn. Juanita had been a gardener. The clippings lay dead on the dead concrete, cut off from their life, killed for encroaching on the man-made world.

Erasmus Deleterius ran to the door and went inside.

The boy too thought of Juanita. "She my momma?"

"Mm."

"Momma come home?"

"Mm nnh."

Jack knew he had to get to the door and open it up. he would do anything to keep the boy safe, and get back the mother the boy had lost.

He went on up the path and arrived at the door.

From inside there were loud yells and gunshots. He shoved the boy to the side, yanked open the door, and rushed in.

Erasmus Deleterius lay dead. Juanita was on the desk, shot, jibbering in her native tongue, praying to pagan gods.

He looked around the office, a bunch of desks laid out, where people spent most of their lives.

He saw the man with the jewelry. He saw the pirate who had tried to get the jewelry, dead and hung on the wall with his own hooked hand. He felt nothing. He looked atJuanita.

"Get the nekclace."

"No. Help you."

Then the man with the jewelry shot him. The boy came in. The man with the jewelry said "I take care of you?"

The boy said to Jack "You die now?"

"Unh."

"I go with other man?"

"Unh."

Jack skillet a man made by secular philosophy, technology and Sartre, looked up at the ceiling as the dark red pool of blood spread over his chest. The boy had a new dad, but would he do a better job? Was there any progress? Or was it all just decadence.

"Hope good." he said.

"Yeah." Juanita said.

They both died. The man with the jewelry put the necklace over the boy's head and they headed back outside, back down the path.

NON-FICTION: Steven Pinker and the Over Reach of the SocioBio Paradigm

2010-01-12T10:22:00.000-08:00

I'm listening to Steven Pinker lay out his arguments from The Blank Slate on a TVO podcast, Big Ideas.

I've been thinking for awhile about the annoying but inevitable overreach of this genetics-makes-society paradigm that started with E.O. Wilson, and Chomsky, and the rest.

I think Pinker is an example of a preacher for this paradigm. I read The Blank Slate when it first came out eight or so years ago. I was interested due to it's rejection of the anti-human nature character that I understood to be a phenomena of the outdated academic left, as well as a flaw of socialism, and a key to the evil of twentieth century dictators.

Of course, the idea now is that since before the social sciences got to the point where many said that culture makes everything, we are now getting back to the point where human nature, now genetics, makes everything.

Pinker ties an argument by Steven Jay Gould and Lowentin that claimed that attribution of behavior/culture to genetics was used to maintain existing, and that Social Biology was a continuation of this, with the doctrine of the Blank Slate.

A little later on, he ties in racial prejudice and pogroms against successful racial minorities, whose cultures led them to greater success, with the doctrine of the Blank Slate. The idea that everybody is the same is the idea that allowed this persecution, since it indicates that, among equally Blank Slates, those who get more are greedy.

This is odd. Persecution against Hindu minorities, Chinese minorities, and the Igbo had to do with religion and in-group morality, not social science trends.

As to in-group morality, Pinker paraphrases Singer, who says that this is the default switch of human nature. Pinker goes on to explain that we have had centuries of culture to teach against this. This is odd as well, as we can more simply say that children are taught to regard other people as either acceptable or unacceptable. There is much ambiguity in the way that children, and the adults they become, view their groupings. There is also a whole lot of subtlety. As with modern Chinese, who like us, have distinct, intersecting rings of social networks, including family, in-laws, region-group, coworkers, bosses, classmates (very big for them), and friends.

Little children in these primitive tribes may or may not hate reflexively dehumanize other tribes. And here, we get a taste of the commonality that the new Genotypic Social Sciences have with the previous excesses of culture and system: The avoidance of psychology and avoidance of the complexity of personal experience.

But when we look at those savages, regarded as our recent cultural ancestors, perhaps the way 'we' were before the Holocene, we are supposed to see a simpler version of ourselves, which reflects our true human nature (universal genetic tendency.)

I just had a Physical Anthropology professor who's thesis showed that men's pickiness in female selection evolved because it promoted status and greater access to sexual resources.

It might also be that we just feel attracted to the most sexually viable woman in the set available to our perception, or the woman who has exaggerated examples of features that connote fertility among woman. But this answer is not suitable to the trend now, and so seems facile, and unfruitful.

For Pinker, growing up around all that culture makes everything excess, like rape is all about cultural patriarchy, or crime comes from racism and poverty, it is natural that his swing to the other side would be excessive.

For my Phys Anth professor, though, the situation is different. Now that this perspective dominates, it is heading into it's phase of over application. And, for a young academic, there is need to produce work that understands the truth of human nature as the leading minds understand it. Respecting your professors, wanting to get their approval, wanting to succeed in that academic endeavor that you are unlikely to contemplate at a structural level, and wanting to smash the false idols of the receding generation all lead to reproducing the latest big idea that the mainstream of academia is grasped by.

Into the big idea, the universe must be crammed. The renaissance saw a lot of new machines and tecnhology, and gave us the start of Mechanism, around the time of the disovery of electricity and modern chemistry, we got vitalism. Then, Hegel, Marx, and Bentham started thinking about how the big thing determines the small thing, and that led, eventually, to the Blank Slate.

Now we are back to human nature again, and this time the argument is leaning towards a positive view of human nature.

I don't think we will see everyone adopting the obvious implication of evolution by natural selection: what we call good is just what was once adaptive. The choice is only to inhibit or encourage tendencies brought about by our evolution. There is no final morality, no safety in human nature. Sometimes dolphins might rescue humans, but it is more common for us humans to slaughter dolphins. That is our nature. Charity is also human nature. We can choose life affirming values, but we are nowhere compelled to do so.

Biological and genetic data is useful. Constructing our evolutionary heritage is a noble endeavor, and the results fill me with awe. But, Pinker and the rest will not get away with merely fighting for a respect of the actual evolved tendencies of humans. They will not escape the expanding canvas of the big idea.

Our evolved society and social intelligence will not allow this. The tendency in human nature to go too far with an idea, never realizing that it is just one way that we grasp existence, and the tendency to get caught by metaphors, rather than spreading out the data before us, and letting their implications branch out from them in all directions, is a bit hard for us. Especially when we cannot distinguish between research, revelation of causal processes, and the paradigm we imagine to be inherent in them.

Just as the early phrenologists left behind good neurological insights, so too will the present academic fashion queens continue to produce mountains of brilliant explanations and data.

Let's hope they can get to a point where the prevalence of metaphor, it's evolution, and it's non-binding, limited character can be found in the workings of Social Biological brains. Let us get to the point where we can grab the big idea by the root and pin it down in our neurological processes, rather then just letting it morph and carry us away elsewhere.

Further, I hope we can get to the day when we replace Sociobiology with Biological Socialism.

Sociobiology will inevitably lead to prescriptive forces, both among academics and the intermediary levels of society, ending in popular culture. It has already done so. But I hope that they are able to grasp the ultimately structurally prescriptive character of their endeavor.

Likely, they will just continue to teach the naturalistic fallacy and miss it's application to their metaphor hijacked minds.

But back to my recent Physical Anthropology class, we learned of a theory that says rape is among us because it allowed some people to impregnate woman. This coincides with the idea that behaviors are adaptations, and thus must have contributed to our survival, since we exhibit them.

It cannot be only me that automatically senses the proximity to tautology that this line of reasoning indicates.

Can you see the flaws in this?

Well, lets break down it a little:

Behaviors that are persistent among humans have persisted, therefore they must have helped in our evolution. If they hadn't helped us reproduce, those humans that had them would have failed to pass on their genes and would have died out. Every behavior? What does each behavior correspond to? A set of genetic expressions of proteins that comprise muscle, neural, glandular tissue?

Well, since we haven't quite worked all that out, we must instead rely on statistical correlation. And statistical correlation in regards to human behavior, and it's underlying psychological manifestation, is hard to be anything other than over simplification. There are so many factors to correlate with so many other factors, that you are better off delving into the messy, hard to access human mind.

Rape, of course, might be caused by any number of factors, but when you spend all your time discussing behavior in terms of natural selection, neglecting to account for any behavior through natural selection is likely to make you uncomfortable.

It is perfectly reasonable to assume that some behaviors were not adaptive and just results of other adaptations, or what Richard Dawkins calls 'misfires', where one tendency results in another tendency that is not adaptive.

According to the rape as adaptive idea, we want to rape people because our ancestors evolved this trait, which then made them more successive at reproducing.

But what I noticed about the authors of the rape book, and my professor, is that they seemed utterly ignorant and unaware of the issue of psycology in regards to rapists. If you are dealing with a rapist and want to know why he did it, you have to imagine what it's like to be him. And that's an imperfect endeavor, and it's accuracy is hard to guage.

But we can at least see that to violate someone's will in such a blatant manner requires a lack of empathy and, likely, a process of dehumanization of the victim.

When you are hurting someone, particularly when they are physically and verbally imploring you to stop, you have to justify continuing. Moreover, in rape, you see patterns of going after victims who are perceived as weak. The rapist, who is said in that book to be genetically predisposed as part of his drive to procreate, is likely to be full of rationalizations.

I doubt you will find anyone familiar with rapists, and rape cases who has come to the conclusion that "These men are basically normal guys with just this one abnormal disposition."

Rape coincides with some pretty messed up psychology. And when you have guys come along, who are experts in genetics, evolution, and biology, who just happen to have come to the conclusion that there own pigeon hole is where the real answer lies, you have to wonder if they've ever really imagined what it would be like to be a rapist, or looked at profiles and case studies that show the minds of rapists.

And, this is somewhat tangential to the rape-is-in-the-genes guys. They are primarily reacting against the rape-is-in-the-society guys. I remember hearing the 'rape is not about sex' line when I was a teenager. For me, it was obvious that this was some sort of rhetorical device, and that what it must really mean is that rape is mostly about violence.

It is disconcerting to find that these old people, full of knowledge and infused with the will to dominate through research, are so flat in their thinking.

Between genes and behavior there is a wide space called the mind, which is full of layers upon layers of meaning.

Between culture and behavior there is a wide space called subjective experience, which is likewise full of myriad messages, signals, leanings, and decisions.

I cannot help but suspect that these Genes/Society determinists have been divided from their own mind's by the needs of public debate, the demands of scientific-type evidence, and academic authority.

Rather than enjoying the indefinite contemplation of their galaxies of internal being, they identify to closely with the exactness of scientific method, and imagine themselves to be simple and determined by evidence.

Nonetheless, I look forward to the future revelations of the current paradigm. I like Pinker's The Language Instinct. I am less satisfied with The Blank Slate and what I have heard from Dennet about Breaking the Spell, but it's important to understand and process his arguments. I love everything by Dawkins. I really want to read The Art Instinct by Denis Dutton.

Hopefully, as neurology advances, we may eventually get to psychology.

NON-FICTION: The Hindrance of Categorization: Capitalism and Socialism

2010-01-09T12:13:00.000-08:00

I have just read through five pages/articles, 1 2 3 4 5 , on whether or not Sweden is Socialist.

And, anyone who reads this is likely already inclined to an answer, and ready to choose a category.

The funny thing is that so much analysis of Sweden, that I've seen, appears to use the facts of Sweden's legal and economic systems to argue for its exclusion from or inclusion into ill defined categories: Capitalism and Socialism.

The principle that puts observation and comprehension before assessment of value is one that humans generally have a hard time keeping to. Thus, we often tend to merely jump to categories, and away from the actual complexity of the phenomena we are referring to.

Moreover, these categories are daily employed in a manner that unconsciously obfuscates their prescriptive and descriptive variants, their doctrinal variants, and their taxonomic variants.

When a Trotskyist argues for socialism, she likely has a clear definition of what she means by that. She is likely arguing that it is a good thing for a party of people to acquire power over the economy and government in the name of the proletariat/workers. But when she talks of capitalism, she is more likely to regard the proposals for economic systems put forth by Carl Menger, by Adam Smith, by Mitlon Friedman, by Wilfredo Pareto , by Friedrich Hayek, by Ayn Rand,or the actual policies enacted by administrators of the various capitalist systems as all more or less the same thing, and unworthy of separate consideration.

Conversely, proponents of capitalism, particularly the anti-analytical, shaken up sheep that one sees all over the t.v. denouncing Obama as a socialist are generally ignorant of both the classification and particulars of the policies they oppose as well as the conceptual delineations and history of the ideas they propose.

What in the world does it mean to describe countries as socialist or capitalist and on this basis argue for the superiority of either supposed system?

I have, for the last few years increasingly felt that, at the base of our crumbling ideological fortresses are merely actual policies and facts of our existence, which would be much more intelligible without the convoluted artifices that we construct around them.

I have also noticed that a fundamental flaw in the debates over political ideology carried out in our culture on the small level as well as in the popular media is that it aims at little efficacious consequence, and is almost entirely carried out for the purpose of rhetorical victory.

The ideologues and faction lovers that comprise much of the discussion of what to do on the national level are often entirely lacking in the drive towards achieving mutually agreeable outcomes.

Such agreement is also considered disloyal to the ideologies. It is perhaps a legacy of the our great Christian tradition that we consider allegiance to wide conceptual schemes, constructed to guide our behavior, more important than the success of that behavior.

It is not enough for the ideologue and enlightened person to find mutually desirable outcomes. It is not enough to agree on mutually desired goals, as anarchists and therapists recommend.

For many of us, the important thing is allegiance to ideas. This is why a discussion of how to provide poor people with medical care becomes a grand debate between competing visions of the universe. (The opponents said, "We all want everyone to have healthcare, but...." A teenage student of mine once told me "In Chinese, when you say 'something, something, but...' That means everything you said before but is nonsense." ) What most people are incapable of is saying. I want health care, you want health care, let's start from there, and be open to revision at each step of the way. If this inability to deal rationally with each other at the national level is obvious, you should then wonder why you still cannot fix it.

The vast array of politicians, the vast array of powerless commentators, and the vast array of financial interests could not simply agree on a common goal. Rather, the public was given the choice between Government Takeover and Health care For All. We were asked to choose between these alternative perspectives.

The actual problem of providing health care to poor people was inaccessible in the popular dialogue.

But something was accomplished. In all the fighting and confusion, there was a group who united together in natural solidarity. That group was the health care lobby. Many of the aides who helped shaped the health care legislation were registered health care lobbyists, and the the health care industry gave generously to most everyone involved in the debate.

And, in the end, it seems that the healt hcare industry was most successful. People who own stock in HMO's are also getting something from this, as HMO stocks have been doing quite well.

There is no irony in this. Our economic system, as well as our society creates a framework in which manipulation of the government for financial gain is utterly reasonable. It was so with Hamilton's crew, and Jefferson's crew, and all who came after them.

I know of many proponents of Capitalism that oppose this, and all opponents of Capitalism also oppose this. Nonetheless, it is a constant feature of our country, and most countries, that has been with us throughout our short history.

Rich people have disproportionate power over the government. And, generally, bosses have more power than employees.

Now, this is something that people would benefit from talking about. Should rich people have more influence over the government? Many, perhaps most of those among the first generation of our Nation believed that they should.

Likewise, there are still many people that believe it is fair for the employer to have more decision making power in the company than the employees. There are also many who support unions.

And, as for the desired political ideology, we ought to take a break, for at least twenty years, and instead focus on profitable questions.

There is no Real Capitalism in existence today. If you doubt this, go to misses.org. Proponents of capitalism argue for systems that don't exist, and have never existed. The same goes for proponents of socialism.

There are some people who thought the Soviet Union was the best system imaginable, or who thought the British system was the best, or the Dutch, or the French, or, of course, the American.

But, generally, the people who grasp the system for what it is and work with it are regarded as unprincipled, wishy-washy, and unscrupulous. Many of them are. There are also those, who really do want to effect positive changes in the lives of their fellow citizens. There are people who want to make others healthier, happier, more comfortable, and more educated.

These people are much more valuable than socialists denouncing false-trotskyists, marxists villifying corporations, O'Reilly denouncing Oberman, etc.

At the very least, we ought to preach to each the other the doctrine of first delineating the varieties of the beliefs we oppose, even, god forbid, when that extends to theology.

NON-FICTION: Zizek on Trotsky, and The Qualitative Shift from Capitalism

2010-01-06T13:42:00.000-08:00

The main point I've gotten from Slavoj Zizek Presents Trotsky: Terrorism and Commumism is that there is an important problem to be solved regarding the transition from a capitalist to a socialist/communist/Marxist society.

The classic presentation of this problem can be stated in terms of the recent health care debate.

The most intelligent, reasonable president, obligated to the rich and powerful that funded and backed his campaign, was elected after the last one was perceived as a total fuck up.

And what was Obama met with, after winning out over Mccain? A sense of renewal, of hope, and covering up of the public's complicity in the previous regime's crimes. And on the other side, we had a mobilization of politically ignorant, marginalized bastards of John Birch, who were manipulated into viewing this utter gentleman and steward of capitalism, who was willing to reform it so that it might last longer and hurt less it's participants, as a socialist, antichrist, muslim, savage, atheist, and non-citizen.

Some on the left called Bush a fascist, but that wasn't quite the party line of the democrats. And Bush did take steps, along with Cheney and others they hired into their administration, to violate the rights of people they decided were bad, and the rights of Americans in general. They advocated torture. None of this is necessarily Fascistic. The appeal to the nation as something which must be defended at the cost of individual rights is rather Fascistic, but, again, this wasn't the main designation of the mainstream left for GW.

Attributing to Obama every sort of evil feared by their white, upper to lower class Americans that the Republicans want to keep with them, is, however, the tactic of the right.

Again, we are talking about an upper class capitalist, well integrated into the ruling class and beholden to numerous capitalist lobbies. He professes Christianity and the importance of our vast military. He believes in wage slavery and the preeminence of America.

But among the opposition, the merging of corporate backed Republicans, with vaguely ideological conservatives, and half-libertarians has resulted in a muddled ideology of anti-government sentiment that faithfully supports the governments wars and abuse of people it calls bad, believes the solution is to return to a past whose inventors they've never heard of, and thinks that a free economy, separated from the government, has something to with American history or the constitution.

But see what this moderate advocate of the modern Welfare State has become.

For proposing national healthcare, which other first world capitalist countries have, he is called a socialist, for not sharing the Left-Behind, Born-Again, Stay in the Closet, Defend Defintions, theology of that sect of Baptist Christianity which has, of late, enjoyed the patronage of the highest levels of government, for all this he is declared to be a fake Christian, an antichrist, and a Muslim.

The hammer and sickle are now, for much of the right, symbolic of Obama. He is compared to Pol Pot, Mao Ze Dong, Stalin, and Hitler.

This is how much of the wealthiest factions of capitalism responds to minor reforms.

They organize the mob, work them up to the point where they utterly believe that they are fighting for there very lives, and set them loose.

A lot of them are ready to see Obama dead. If he did die, a lot of people would shrug and say something like "Well, what did you expect? People can't be expected to just take this laying down."

When the Kennedy brothers were killed, a whole lot of people were happy. Right wingers knew that the Kennedys weren't real Americans. They knew that they were pope worshippers, commie-sypmathizers, nigger lovers, and all the rest.

And now you see these freaks with guns, and the tree of liberty crap, that was written in defense of poor people unable to pay taxes (who were under attack by the rich.)

This is where Trotsky comes in. Trotsky had a debate with Kautsky on representational government.

Trotsky's answer to the allegation that the Bolsheviks had invalidated themselves by throwing away parliamentary democracy was to say that parliamentary democracy was a vehicle by which the capitalists retained power and prevented any sort of proletarian empowerment.

And that's pretty much what's happened. The poor and disadvantaged get more alms, while most of the money still goes to domination of other countries, and campaign contributions and the like to dominate this country.

Unions are scattered, disregarded, and seen as a hindrance to progress in the mainstream.

But Trotsky was accused of terrorism, and he acknowledged that terrorism was exactly what he was engaged in.

The major powers of the world united against the Bolsheviks early on, and the White Guard inside Russia was ready to do whatever they could to kill and wipe out the workers uprising.

So Trotsky said terrorism was needed against the the capitalists, and royalists and the rest.

And he was partially right. They got rid of the enemies, and they also got rid of the power of the soviets.

They spoke for the proletariat, then seized power in the name of the workers, and then maintained power in the name of the soviets, and then killed all kinds of people and set up their party as the sole power.

And in all this, the power of the soviets was kicked aside in the name of the power of the bolsheviks, and the party hierarchy. Then Stalin got control of this,closed off the revolution for good, and dedicated Soviet Intelligence to killing it abroad.

Meanwhile, leftists, socialists, and even anarchists tried their best to believe in this image of Socailism, the closest thing they had yet seen to a victory of the proletariat over the domination and oppression of the capitalists.

And what they got for it was the association of party dictatorship and savage cruelty with their ideals.

And when the Spanish Civil War came around, Stalin was their to organize the worlds socialists (by which I mean those that signed up for communism, as well as anarchists) against any part of that uprising that would compete with the Soviet Union for revolutionary status.

And the capitalist enemies of liberation were completely satisfied with Lenin's right wing deviation, and agreed that he and Stalin were in fact, the truest Marxists one could ever imagine.

So, on the one hand, Trotsky's defense of state terrorism is valid in the context of revolution, but when that party has no mechanism of accountability to those it claims to represent,you end up with just the party speaking to itself and accountable only to whoever can seize power.

And the Bolsheviks domination of the socialist movement took away the power of the people and, simultaneously, gave the defenders of capitalist oppression an effortless method of hunting down and completely discrediting socialists: linking them with Russia. Many socialists were in fact linked up with the comintern or Russia.

And down to the present day, the idea that having an impoverished class is caused by the economic/power structure we live in is immediately and conveniently dismissed as Communism, Socialism, and Marxism, all of which were ideas seized by the Soviet Union and ruined for those who seek liberation for the poor.

But, the problem of liberation is that among the rich, as seen with the moderate attempts of Obama, there will always be those who must wipe out anything that grants power to that class which they rely on for their profits.

Terrorism and seizure of the state is not the solution. Terrorism encourages more of the same, as well as bitter enemies who never forgive the regime for its crimes. Seizing state power has lead to preservation of the state at the cost of revolution.

But reform through popular politics is also ineffectual. Millions of dollars went into making Obama president, and millions of dollars went into fighting healthcare reform, and billions of dollars went into keeping up moribund companies who stifle the economy, and billions of dollars are going to Afghanistan, and Iraq, and the thousands of soldiers in military bases our government maintains throughout the world.

To reform the state through it's mechanisms leads both to the villification of a moderate like Obama and too the state tyranny of the Soviet Union.

All this bad mouthing, I hope, serves to illustrate my lack of practical solutions. The most beneficial solutions that I can see in our society, are the consensus model among anarchists, unions, consensus as promoted by therapists in familial relations, and the promotion of atheism against the few sects trying to seize power in this country.

That's enough for this morning.

NON-Fiction: HIgh Notes. January Fourth

2010-01-05T15:56:00.000-08:00

-What is the full range of somatic effects of THC?

-A good way to resolve and expand on "The Marked" plotline in The 4400 would have been to attribute the success of The Marked to someone's or some peoples' 4400 ability. It would turn out that the faction supporting the The Marked were marginal in influence, but bolstered, intentionally or unintentionally strengthening them. Then, this could turn into a hunt for the person/people whose powers are doing this, and various dilemma's, like should they kill to stop the persons powers, or should they restrict promycin lest it encourage more powers like these.

-Becoming aware of a thought develops or inhibits it's progression.

-Areas of the brain inhibited/excited/aggravated by THC as expressed in their exhibition perception and experience, such as:

-Light, Long Term Memory, Short Term Memory, Imagination, Language, Humor

-Differing linguistic tendencies might in some proportion, correspond to genotypic differentiation.

Some people might be better in communication based on their genotype. Some people are better at converstaion and, when this extends to conversations with the self, I wonder what sort of advantages/disadvantagtes in regards to figuiring out things, or controlling oneself there are. Are there people wiht markedly less ability to converse with themselves, and what do they do isntead?

Is this a lot of what prayers are about. What exactly is involved in the statements like "So, I said to myself...." How much talking to oneself is actually going on, and what does talking to oneself indicate about Wernicke's/Broca's area?

NON-FICTION: High Notes-New Years Eve

2009-12-31T18:33:00.000-08:00

1.The reactive emotive response might be capable of inspiring, or creating to some extent the explanation for it, by manipulating our conceptual capacity, which may then only affirm post hoc, and only then, possibly doubt it.

2.Enhanced linguistic/analytic capability, in addition to possibly being solely influenced by increased blood flow to brain, or manipulation of the thalamus, it may also be a sole response to the relaxation caused by THC working outside the CNS.

3.The dreamlike visual experience while high is similar to dream and must involve the same sort of accessing/limiting of the visual experience that is involved in reproducing visual stimuli while dreaming.

4.The moon tonight looks like an expressionist, or Munch painting. It could also be a comic book in the lighting and coloring. The blue of the moon was of a certain softness that seemed to be generally reserved for the appearance of paint or ink.

NON-FICTION: Further notes on the Force of Faith

2009-12-27T12:31:00.000-08:00

The dominant religions of our world cannot exist apart from continuously reinforced ingorance, fear of the outsiders, condemnation of the world available to us through free enquiry, and pressure to believe, starting at youth.

The majority of people in the world who adhere to Zoroastrianism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism have been introduced to their faith primarily by the awesome power of their parents.

The parents bring the child it's first role model, hierarchical system, and instructions on how to think. The parents are the witnesses to the validity of faith. They immerse the child in presumptions that need not be independently verified by the child. The child's belief in any nonsense that the parent spouts, such as the tooth fairy or Santa Claus is easily taken for granted by the child. And when the child doubts these presumptions, he or she is inclined to obey the parents admonitions against doubting. And when this doubt is portrayed to the child as fundamentally dangerous, fundamentally bad, and straight up evil, the child will invest great amounts of energy into suppressing this doubt and reworking his or her thinking in order to conform with these doubtful presumptions.

More than just parents are needed, however, to reinforce the suspicious presumptions. The child of a lone nut or cult member must be kept away from other kids in the neighborhood as much as possible, lest the child be corrupted by other views, and led astray by the desire to fit in to his or her peer group. And the child of a Christian living in a Christian neighborhood, or living in a country where Christianity is prevalent, still must be guarded, against the non-Christian elements of society, which tempt the child all it's life. This defense of the child's inculcation into an indefensible world view is not something the parent can do alone. It takes the whole neighborhood. It takes a group effort.

In addition, then to the force of the parents in inculcating faith, we further need the constant reinforcement of the wider group. Uncles, aunts, neighbors, grandparents, teachers and principals need to scare the child away from doubting doubtful assertions of miracles and magic. When the child of strong faith enters into a world where that faith is not taken for granted, it hardly survives. In an environment where assertions of god, battles between gods, resurrection, original sin, the illusory character of the self, contracts between a god and certain ethnic groups, or the communication between god and certain historical figures are generally tolerated, but often looked down upon for their irrationality or dismissal of the need for evidence, there is little hope for the full retention of the faith of one's childhood.

In such situations, the hope of faith lies in fear and incoherence. The parent and other authorities attach a strict fear of punishment, rejection, and hopelessness to the questionable doctrines they force onto children.

When the time comes that the child's reasoning contradicts the myths of his parents and community, the threats against non-believers come into play. You're life will be meaningless, if you sustain thought processes that invalidate your faith. You will be lost, afloat in the universe in a sea of chaos. You will go to hell, where everything you fear will be inflicted upon you ceaselessly. You will be a savage, a non-human, at the mercy of your base desires.

And, for children who reject this intimidation, a personal use may be fashioned out of the anti-definition, anti-verification doctrines of god that have been forced on them.

For these children, the entry into adolescence and adulthood may bring the realization that a positive internal experience of the other can be a source of comfort and power.

When we are alone in ourselves, there is that sense of otherness, perhaps it really is some independent entity, or perhaps it is just the corresponding brain mechanism that allows us to latch onto our parents at birth, or maybe it is some creation inspired by our sociality, or tendency to reach out to others in times of distress, to beg for help from the people available to us. But it is there in me, and I assume that it is there in many people. I have other presences in me too, some I call myself and some I reject. Some are paranoid, petty and violent, and some allow me to conform to a standard of behavior that I believe in.

When we are alone in ourselves, we are never alone. Our selves are a jumble of tendencies and drives and noise and processes. The anomalous nature of the god that we are forbidden from categorizing, defining, analysing, editing, correcting, or facing with cold logic becomes something ever more capable of survival for it's vagueness. And it is in this form that it survives within a great deal of adults, especially those in communities where no particular relgious dogma is enforced by the state, peer-pressure, or the clergy.

If you arm a child with tools of reasoning, evidence, testing, verification, and indepedendence of thought, you need not fear too much that the child will be turned toward Catholicism, Mormonism, or the Moonie cult.

But to go the other way, to arm the child with fear of disbelief in your own particular dogma, to constantly reinforce this fear with the participation of the greater community, and to erase from the child's mind any possibility of other beliefs is the true calling and goal of the fellowship of belief, be it in Saudi Arabia, 14th century Europe, Hindu Nationalist areas in India, the former theocracy of Tibet, the former theocracy of China, the former theocracy of Japan, or the desired theocracy of fundamentalist Christians in the U.S.A.

In the secular forums they speak for equal time, such as in the attempt to combat evolution by theists in my own country. In societies generated by plurality and a belief in the goodness of equality among different peoples, they demand fairness and respect, such as in the case of moderate Muslims during the Danish cartoon incident.

But in their realms, at Jesus Camp, in the countries where Isalmic clergy holds power superior or comparable to the state, and in other contexts where religion dominates, they let go of the secular appeals to respect, fairness, and tolerance. In their own worlds, they are free to ban, to kill heretics, to burn books, smash cd's, intimidate their children, subjugate woman, subjugate the poor, punish the victim, and generally deny the tenets of toleration, reason, discussion, evidence, and doubt.

After hundreds of years in Western Civilization of certain factions and camps fighting for ever greater inclusiveness, fairness, and better living for an ever greater portion of society, these Faithful, once again, are reacting against freedom and tolerance.

They fight against the system by appealing to the rules they spit upon. Christians who deny evidence, deny even the possibility of testing their central beliefs, argue for open-minded science, and embracing a plurality of beliefs. Their open mindedness extends only to those of their theories that have been rejected by scientists, and their plurality extends to and ends with their singular view of the world and our place in it. They fight against free speech by utilizing their rights to protest and publish. Muslims in Britain protest against the system that refuses to condemn them for their beliefs, and they do so in the hopes that they can spread Islam throughout the world, silencing and eliminating secular government and the reviled embrace of pluralism.

All this they call faith. There is no major, peace loving, fellow-human loving, beuatiful paen to humanity type of Faith around today that was not spread by force, by the threat of death, or some other punishment.

And when idiots promote their religion by appealing to the prevalence of religion, they are also endorsing the continued coercing of children into belief that is the endeavor of many of their co-religionists and a vital issue in their theology.

It is only in the modern times of rejection of religion that they embrace toleration of other religions. It is only because we skeptics, we heretics, we godless killjoys have had so much influence that religious leaders tentatively accept a society where our rights are protected. But, for the most part, those leaders only accept this secular society insofar as it serves the end of spreading their own dogma. For the dominance of the dogma is the general aim of religious leaders. Not a simple recognition of rights and practices, regardless of personal belief, but obedience to their chosen dogmas. Just as they were coerced into belief, so must others be coerced into the true belief, either by attacking evolution, democracy, and rational thought, or by attacking the people that don't agree with them, such as non-Muslisms, non-Christians,communists, abortion doctors, apostates, and, of course, the gays.

There will always be plenty of people ready to accept their own beliefs as something that others need not accept. There will always be people who prefer good social ties and equitable relationships over adherence to unprovable dogma. But these people don't get to be religous leaders very often, and if they do happen to attain influence, like Marting Luther King, they are slandered and reviled as untrue to their faith.

The religous leaders that hold out, espeicially when simply keeping one's religion to oneself is so banal, are the ones who have a fight, who stand out against the general society in their nonsensical intepretations of their religion (usually they claim to need no interpretation, which is impossible.)

These are the people that threaten our freedom, the progress of our civilizations, and the enjoyment of our lives.

Faith, one of the most revered artifacts of humanity, is nothing more than repetition of dogma backed by the towering authority of the parent, the threat of exclusion from one's community, the threat of physical harm, the internal threat of betraying the only truth one feels validated in accepting, and the kings and armies of history.

The reverence for faith is a reverence misunderstood and obfuscated by those who profess it. It is a feeling of obedience and loyalty made into a faculty in it's own right, that no one can find and that no one ought even to look for.

NON-FICTION: View of my recent self

2009-12-09T14:34:00.003-08:00

美术历史 Art History

I really excelled in this class, in just the way I really want to. In just the way that can validate my sense of myself and my aspirations in writing and learning.

Significant aspects of success were a responsive, enthusiastic teacher who believed in what she was teaching, the emphasis on attribution of theoretical category as the main subject of the class, and my pre-existing familiarity with the history of western painting, western aesthetics, aesthetic theory, and western history in general.

The fact that so much of the motivation was antagonistic and rebellious helped to give me a structure within which to fill out the descriptions.

If only ever class was like this. I didn’t have to worry about learning anything for the most part. I just listened, and read, and thought. Everything was easily absorbed.

人类体格学 Phys. Anthropology

Son of a bitch. Here my creativity and serious treatment of the subject was useless, and perhaps worked slightly against me, either by encouraging a reaction against my arrogance or expecting more based on my writing syle.

That bastard was perfectly reasonable within the confines of his narrow mechanistic approach.

I didn’t study much or really give the time necessary to fully understand every thing he wanted us to memorize.

It brings to mind again the issue of submission as the key to success. My struggle with my fierce independence and the demands of being a student. 恶性死我

My sincere contemplation of the material was insufficient in demonstrating a familiarity and comprehension of the subject matter.

Any son of a bitch that faults for not explaining nature nurture or any other petty distinctions deserves the contempt of the angel as well as the gate keepers of hell.

Any fool that would read my writing and presume ignorance of things I deem insufficient in terms of explanatory power, and ignore the superiority of the explanations offered, or ignore the debate which they imply, or ignore the attempt to replace the check list data which shows an implicit understanding of that same data, grants to that fool the prize of god’s contempt, and the contemptuous smirk of little baby jesus.

My rhetoric was insufficient in dissuading this evil dictatorial banal student!!! from leaving me with at least a C.

Once decided, the grade is worthy only of defense, with the smug indifference of authority, and a single minded devotion to righteousness, lest the typical, unavoidable ambiguity in student assessment be revealed.

This cruel, cruel man required me to jump into a straight jacket, into a check list.

This is check listing, reducing education to list of things to be checked off.

中文Chinese

This was the easiest and most tearing. I didn’t devote enough time, particularly early on. So I felt embarrassed and guilty about the teacher. I felt like I half assed it too much and didn’t give her the courtesy of trying enough.

The class was full of half assers. Bunch of high school kids who thought there limp tongued, broken Mandarin needed no adjustment. Their cultural identity, mostly separate now from China, and clinging to the impressions that little island that thought it owned the mainland, dissuades them from even trying the standard pronunciation, probably feeling to do so would be “gay” or dumb.

Again, I feel indebted to the teacher, she was kind and engaging.

人类体格学。lab Phsy Anthropolgy -lab

I forgive you Padua. In this perhaps I reveal my weakness for woman (lost mother figures) or a sympathy with your lesbian-like appearance and my bi-days.

I learned everything, I got everything. But I still will wind up with a D. It hurts and hurts and hurts.

At least twice in that class I just wanted to put my head down and cry.

All the information would have been great if presented in a series of Sunday visits, free, ungraded lecture/activities, or lessons given for anything other than short term memory retention.

I could very easily have sat down and studied, asked the teacher exaclty what we needed, and she would told me simply and clearly, and then I could have studied accordingy.

My time issues played a role. I came to class on the day the class project was due with no awareness that it was due, and no awareness that I should have gone to the zoo, at least, in the previous week. That’s when I really wanted to cry.

孩子发展 Child Development, Early Childhood Education

I think that in this class, I missed out on the largest amount of useful information. I’d like to purchase the book, which I might then never look at. The stuff on different types of preschools, elementary schools was the most useful. There was stuff on head start and first five, that I’m working in now.

With this class, I can’t tell how the teacher was grading. I got a’s on all the assignments. I didn’t do the last exam, because of time issues, the opinion that I couldn’t do it anyways without the book, the sense that I already had enough points to get an a or a b, and the sense that maybe since I had already contacted the teacher in a cordial manner about resetting the exam for me (since my browser had closed before I could finish/half ass it), that maybe she would think I made a mistake and take pity on me.

I did make a mistake. I accidentally closed the tab. That’s when I gave up, rather than emaling her again. That’s when I came up with the idea that maybe she would assume I didn’t know that I had done that and give me a second chance after the day it was due.

This class allowed to reflect a lot on my own teaching, and prepare for what it will be like when I go back to teaching.

It made me realize that I’ve been using a lot of modern, progressive methods in teaching, and that, perhaps, learning the terminology and categories of teaching that are used in modern pedagogy, I can categorize and organize my own teaching.

弟弟

I want to finish going over the script and rewrite a portion for him.

This is one of those things where my thinking is that this is a chance to make rogress in my career as a writer, but the perspective that has his thought is a spectator, watching from the future, condemning my hesitance to embrace this opportunity, it tells me that this is what I want, what will help me, which is a lifeline in the monsoon.

哥哥

该咋说? I just want to find a way to interact with him, show him I care, without risking the eruption of his resentment or my defense against that resentment. At this point, he won’t accept concessions, but there might be something short of a full admission that can satisfy him.

I want to bring him some gifts for Christmas and his birthday. Maybe something like a cd, dvd, external memory. gift card, clothing, cologne…

老婆

If I can just keep her from leaving, or keep from leaving her, until I get my writing career (reflexive shame) going, than things will be okay, or what? Things will be stable? No. Things will be sturdy. Or at least I feel she won’t leave me, or she won’t feel so much despair, or at least not so very much, or slightly less.

I just want to be good to her, but there’s some things I don’t want to do, some things I feel like I can’t do. I don’t think I could just go out and get a job at starbucks on the weekend. I don’t know why I can’t resists feeling bad about that, feeling wrong.

海哥

Just emailed me to make sure I could go, and offred to loan me money, said it he hoped was a money issue, and not an emma issue.

我们还有一些矛盾，他的几句话让我不开心。有机会我要跟他白白地谈.

读书俱乐部 Book Club

Need to make emma feel both okay that she’s not into it and encourage her in a way that acknowledges her minimal interest.

My next choice, would be nice if it could be my finished Drama of the Christian Science Teachers.

啊根体那 Argentina

Go to the bookstores, buy some Yum Yum booksYum Yum. See the city, have resentful fantasizes about ditching emma and not coming back.

出版书 publish books

Revise beast resigns, and finish Christian scienc teachers (good title) check price of ucla bookfair booth

多写 Write more

Take writing classes (I am) and see every opportunity to write as an opportunity to show your skill.

Try to gain more clarity and acceptance of your situation and feelings. See without thoughts, meditate, pray..

叔叔

Wait till the opportunity comes to email/call, or till he contacts. Think over his possible motivations/disposition, or just stop worrying about them and just pay attention to him when you see him.

下学期的伸河课程 Next semesters rio hondo classes

Buy the textbooks in advance, circle, highlight, study all the key words, categories, chapters, people.

什么书想读 What books do I want to read?

Simple and direct, the spiritual in art, zizek/Trotsky, wenyanduben, mala ondo, years of salt rice-chinese, sciabarras hayek/marx, Chinese history, linguistics, neuroscience text.

Psych-situation

心理情狂

Feel sad, and feel like emma won’t let me feel happy, like I can’t feel happy without her consent that things are okay, or acceptable, or tolerable. Don’t feel in control of my life, like a slightly removed spectator, because, probably, that’s the area of my brain summarizing the day to day to action to action part.

进大学 Getting into university

Guess it will be okay, not be able to go if accepted because of money, might not be able to go unless I get student loans.

大学课程Unversity classes

OBEY!!!!! SUBMIT!!!! Doesn’t sound like anything too hard. I think I can do it with minimal submission.

钱，多上班。。。Money, work more...

I can take more classes in the next few days, before I leave, I can work every day. I can also work continuously until/if I can start classes at whittier college.

思想／理论的话题 Thinking/Theoretical topics

Origins of the brain,

Revolution as a evolutionary-hominid structure, academia, the revolution-party as dominance hierarchy, the dominant trend in scientific interpretations/humanities: biological mechanism, reintrepting everything as impulse-control again, falling back to reactionary morals sometimes, and, of course, providing powerful new ways of knowing the world and our connectedness too it.

The contstructive political endeavor.

The fight against faith

Being a thinker like zizek (gets to say whatever interesting stuff he thinks about, doesn’t stick to topic.)

The way to see Trotsky.

The totalitarian approach to qualitative change

The problem of inherent class resistance to transcending capitalism.

NON-FICTION: Get to the freaking point: Theism/Atheism, Factual Assertions=True/False

2009-12-07T23:33:00.000-08:00

How many pathetic centuries of obfuscation have been wasted avoiding this simple truth. A claim has to be defended, proven, doubted, explained, to be judged either true or false or possible.

The millions of theists, particularly those of the intellectual class, who obfuscate the issue of trust and belief by using a Latinate term, faith, are both unwilling and disinterested in clarifying the issue.

Faith, they say is a higher faculty, or "That's why they call it faith." As if the assertion can avoid any process of logic by it's common acceptance, as if the atheist could be cowed by ad populum (an argument that is said to be true because a lot of people believe it).

And, in fact, that is where faith really comes from, not from the appeal to the authority of the people, but rather to the appeal of some people: Those in Charge.

It use to be the case that there was a group of True Christians who hunted out the many heresies. There was noone to stomp out heresy with a police force or armies, so there were many groups with different Christianities. They listed and condemned the men and woman who deviated from their views.

But, for them, this was a matter of arguments about the state of the world. There was no controversy between science, because they believed the gods were forces that intervened in their world. God was something real, and He kept the world going and punished the people who messed around with him.

But when did Christianity spread? When it became the main authority. The western Roman Empire became the Catholic Church and that's when it became mandatory to believe in god. That's when the repression, the torture, the exploitation, and the wiping out of various cultures took the name of salvation rather than mere conquering.

And it is that same authority that confronts us to today.

Christianity was spread by the impulse to empire, the impulse to conquer. Islam was spread in this way as well. King Ashoka spread buddhism througout the Indian subcontinent and the nearby regions. The Tang emperor adapted it for China, and enforced it on the masses, and the Tibetan rulers adopted it in Tibet.

That is where faith gets it's authority from.

When the Christians, theists, and atheists denounce the strident, arrogant new atheists, like Dawkins and Hitchens, what they really mean is that anyone who could so assuredly and bluntly reject theism, must be arrogant.

But what does that presuppose? That there is something to be humble about. A topic to be humble before.

And just as the ancient Jewish god was akin to the despots of early Egypt or near eastern civilizations, so too is the faith that they refuse to question, and use as a refusal to question anything but why you don't agree with them, so too is this faith a loyalty to belief, a belief that they must believe.

This faith is the faith of the totalitarian state. It says "We shall do whatever it takes to get you to submit, for everyone must submit. And we shall never give up our loyalty to these ideas and lords, for to do so would be do to commit evil."

When you are confronted by the imperative to believe, which has to be reinforced constantly, remember that this is now embedded in our cultures because at one time it was picked up by an army, and made into the state ideology.

The only thing you ever need to do with a factual assertion, like "Jesus was killed and came back to life.", or "David didn't burn in the flames." is discuss whether or not it is true, why it might be true, and what would have to confirm or deny it.

If you say it must be assessed by faith, then you are saying it must be assessed by the second thing that faith refers: inner states of feeling. Assessing a claim by using faith means seeing what you feel about it.

But, between people, feelings must be explained and justified when they contradict.

But Christians don't do that. They say they you've got to have faith, which means they intentionally trust a set of ideas, and commit themselves to changing the mind of everyone, everywhere, while believing that to change their own minds would be a sin, or unholy, and, therefore, unthinkable.

If you say Jesus did something, that is an assertion on your part. If you wan't me to believe, than let's talk about it with the awareness that it might be true, and it might be nonsense, and both of us are completely to change our mights without negative consequences.

If, instead you fall back on faith, and recommend it to me, that what this means, is you are falling back on trust of certain ideas, and you seek to convince me to trust these ideas by telling me to trust.

Look at the following example:

A.Every piece of evidence I have and you have doesn't make the possibility of god very likely.

B. Evidence. Huh huh huh. That's why they call it faith.

And, since faith means a feeling of trust, despite what the apologists and deep thinkers want to maintain, this statement is equal to: I don't have enough evidence to believie in god? That's why they call it belief! Cause you have to blieive it.

And what we end up is with something the person can't understand because they believe it is something that cannot be understood.

And to you the idiot stupid enough to expect things we believe to understandable and subject to confirmation or denial, there is nothing that can be done except to tell you that there is no understanding to be had, only acceptance.

Relgion has been eaten away and replaced to such a great extent in our world, that the modern exponents of religion have no idea that they have inherited a past set of technologies, claims about reality, explanations of weather and illness, and explanations of government.

中国会不会安排一个避免资本的未来。

2009-12-04T19:12:00.000-08:00

伟大的领导都告诉我们他们还没有抛弃社会主义。这种说法，在海外没有任何人相信。各种社会主义者，共产主义者，和无政府主义者都认为国际资本已经侵略了中国。这样的人都认为邓小平已经把中国的共产时代推翻了。

世界上其他马克思主义者和反对资本人也都这样人围。另外，世界上反对社会主义和支持资本主义者都认为中国政府还是个红色的中国，还是反对自由。

这么多人觉得中国政府是个邪恶的政府，那怎么同事也有这么多觉得中国是世界下一个超级大国家，像以前苏联，八十年代的日本，或现在的美国。

为什么中国政府不能受到支持分子的赞美呢。就是因为世界打多数只是分子都没有适合的方式能够说明现实政治体系。

特别是在美国。对一办政治家和主流只是分子都只有三种经济：社会主义，资本主义，与混合主义，与两种政府：民主的政府和专政的政府。

但是最大的问题都是每一国家的政府与大部分的人民都没有想他们的国家会有什么样的未来。

除了发财，挑战和长大，国家都没有实际的未来计划。

世界各国都往哪儿开？

NON-FICTION: My Culture Gap with Middle Class Americans

2009-11-23T08:00:00.000-08:00

Last night a friend was recounting a few episodes of my offensive behavior in a typical manner.

What has always perplexed me is the certainty his voice when he regards these statements as obviously offenseive.

On the way home, I realized that the problem is that I didn't grow up in a middle class environment, and most of my socialization, outside of school and my peers, took place among Vietnamese people.

The socialization that took place among my peers involved interacting with lower class cutlture that I was able to identify with more, and middle class (to me they were all upper class/wealthy) friends, in whose homes I always felt a little bit guilty or ashamed.

The middle class culture that I am now deemed offensive in is one that regards it as a given that there's certain things you don't say. And I'm included in this 'you'!

The difference between this and my own cultural precedents is that among my Vietnamese relatives, I was the only white guy and they were used to living in a culture where things went differently than their own, so there was no presumption of unspoken, binding codes of social decorum placed on me.

My step-mom would tell me how to behave around her relatives and I would just go along with it.

So, there was an inbuilt tolerance for diversity, my aunts and uncles were immigrants and so accepted the American culture they had to function in from day to day, and I accepted what aspects of their culture I was exposed to by just doing what I was told (sometimes.)

One time I took a girlfriend, a middle class white girl from a very nice, waspish family to Vietnamese New Year at my uncle's house. There were about thirty people there, and we were the only white people.

She ended up crying that night, from being around all those strange people. Everying was laughing and speaking a strange language, and the attempts to bring her into the family involved teasing, joking, and letting her alone.

It must have seemed chaotic and threatening to her. For me, it was like "What are you stupid? These people are going out of their way to be friendly. This is my life, don't be so small-minded."

But when I think of her own family's social functions, I can see that they were all in English, all with 'regular' white people, and much quieter. Introductions were made formally, people were greeted as they arrived, and introductory conversations were boring and informational.

When I was around her family, I felt uncomfortable as well.

But I never thought of anything in terms, of 'people just don't do that', or 'that's just rude!'

Another thing I was told in regards to violations of cultural norms is that I don't put a filter on what I say!

Someone who is hyper-verbal and hyper-analytical, who has worked as a translator and English instructor.... How could I not filter what I say?

I have a million different filters and sculpting tools to polish or refine what I say.

Again, the actual indication is not that I don't think about what I say, but that what I say violates those middle cultural norms that are so foreign to me. Not thinking is equal to not knowing what shouldn't be said. The presumption is that what shouldn't be said is utterly obvious, so transgressions must be due to a carefree, tell it like it is mentality (now I'm the colorful black lady).

And that is another crucial aspect of this middle class culture that I can scarcely refer to with sufficiently comprehensive categorization, this culture presumes that there is an exclusive way to behave around others. There is little awareness of other cultural norms and thus a default presumption of exclusivity.

So, there are three cultural situations I see here. One is the lower class culture, that also has a presumption of exclusivity, but is one I'm both familiar with and one that I rejected easily. Generally speaking, this is the proper thing to do according most people, including those in the lower classes.

Since lower class culture is denigrated, among it's own members there is a sense that it might be better to escape. So for people like me, who educate themselves and form their own identities, their is more likely to be admiration among my lower class peers for abandoning this culture. It's good to violate the norms of lower class culture, smart people like me are expected to.

The two other cultural situations are the middle class culture and the multi-cultural culture.

The middle class culture is the most restricing, and the most foreign to me. It presumes that it is the only right way to be, that it is the norm. It is composed of people who grow up in a mono-culture, where there are likely to be other members of this culture, of various ethnicities or backgrounds, who likewise conform to the same norms.

This is kind of an international bourgois culture. And it's actually not just middle classes, but more upper middle class and just straight upper classes.

The multi-cultural situation is one whose members are used to differences in customs, communication styles, languages, accents, smells, foods, etc.

For people that are used to being foreigners among foreigners, and retaining there own culture among others that do the same, there is a familiarity with and acceptance of culturally abnormal behavior, and a presumption that effort might be necessary to figure out what the other person means by their behavior.

So, what I have concluded is that my cultural background hasn't prepared me well for being around the mono-culture middle class people.

This also means that, in my dealing with these sorts of people, I may have also missed the chance to understand them in their own context.

Sometimes my ethnic or national similarities with these people has made me presume that I should try to have something in common with them, instead of just recognizing the fact that I need to observe them as I would any other new group of foreigners I meet, and try to learn and respect their customs.

I get along okay with my Vietnamese relatives, though I don't see them more than once a year, and I felt comfortable with everyone in China.

Now, I guess, I have the option of learning to sit around with people who seem dull, disingenuous and narrow minded and try to imitate their culture.

I think I have to understand what a niece said to me at my dad's funeral. It was a Buddhist funeral, and pretty normal, for me. We spent a lot time praying to Buddha and praying for Buddha to help my father move on from this life. There was one table that served as an altar for my father, with food and tea for him. And another alter for the Buddha, and food and tea for it as well. This is pretty standard, 'everyone' knows that that's how you do it.

A Buddhist funeral is different from a Catholic funeral, which is also perfectly normal to me.

What my niece asked was "Why don't you have a regular funeral?"

I answered something like "Where do you think you live? You live in a place full of Vietnamese, Guatemalans, Filipino's, various Arabs, Persians, Cambodians, Indians, etc. How can you still think like that?"

I guess that's what's meant by normal.

Yuck!

NON-FICTION: AHISTORICAL THEISTS: WHY VS. HOW

2009-10-21T08:38:00.000-07:00

As usual, the South Park guys put their reasonable assessment in Stan's mouth. In response to Richard Dawkins, he calmly utters the how/why dichotomy, that, in it's very utterance, displays both a disgusting ignorance of history and of epistemology.

Christianity and all other religions arose as HOW answers. How did the plagues befall Pharaohs people? God's will. How did humans lose their innocence? Adam and Eve? How did the fossils get deposited? God made the flood. How did various semitic populations die to the benefit of the ancient Jews? God killed them.

But, as empirical evidence has increasingly been favored over metahporic reasoning, and imperatives of the past, Religion's explanatory role has been further and further eroded to the point where it desperately clings to any gap that scientists have not yet explained.

Why questions are questions based in empirical reality, and debatable and answerable by reference to empirical reality.

The bible and all other myths were propositions of how things happened and what people ought to do in their lives. As such, it is subject to the same faculties of reasoning that the prospect of murder and fixing a car are subject to: empirical observation, falsification, and demonstrable evidence.

How VS Why? As if this atheism-theism just arose twenty years ago? Pathetic.

NON-FICTION: Vidal on Obama and Me on Vidal

2009-10-13T16:02:00.001-07:00

He's right that Obama is twice the intellectual that Kennedy, and, I suspect right that Obama is too delicate.

On the idea that he won't be reelected. I don't think that's likely, yet.

He also said Obama didn't have Kennedy's naval experience and thus doesn't know what it's like to have the enemy's anger directed at you and generals lying to you.

But I guess Obama must know that the military commanders are not all in agreement and not all to be trusted.

The real issue for Obama's success is whether he can get out from under the barrage he's under and step out in front as the leader.

That brings to mind another point. When I see Obama shrugging off the lies that the right is spreading, it is sufficient for me. But Vidal may be right that Obama is overestimating his audience. Although the constant fear angle has made a lot of Americans a little cynical of the kind of drama that the right is promoting, it seems to have an effect on stalling the Democrats on anything close to a public option. So maybe Obama should have been treating the congress more like the easily intimidated benefactors of coroporate patrons that they are.

Hopefully, when the bases we have all over the world start closing down, and we start becoming a country only capable of high-tech and tourism, the Rush Limbaughs and Cheney's will be relegated to minority fascist groups, or all emigrate to the military superpower.

NON-FICTION: Obama=Reasonable, Therefore, Bad

2009-10-09T15:32:00.000-07:00

Some of the blame is rightly put upon my own freckled shoulders, and the surrounding fatty areas. If I spent more time riding my bike instead of being unemployed, in my boxers, in front of the computer, than I would have less occasion to watch the news channels.

But, since I am already in this situation, I cannot avoid frustration at the freakish treatment of Barack Obama.

When Bush did anything reasonable, we were surprised, even if we hated him, we felt a little bit of something like pride, like when a homeless guy you always see turns up one day with an mp3 player. You can't help but think "That's not bad. Guess he lucked out."

But with Barack Obama, every thing he does occasions the question "Is the honeymoon over?" or "Is Obama's star quality fading?"

Today, everyone is talking about how bad receiving a NOBEL fucking peace PRIZE will hurt him!

He came to power and the rest of the world had a better attitude towards our country, and this creates a less hostile world, and perhaps, less hostility might someday, if the advanced technology to asess this ever becomes available through alien distribution, be equivalent to peace.

That's what Obama did, whether or not he's really evil and full of shit and overrated. He came to power through preaching unity and the betterment of people of this country. He preached that America needed more diplomacy, a little bit of humbleness, and a lot of hope.

That makes people feel better. Not only did he get rid of the whole "What ya gonna' do about it, bitch?" approach to public relations that the Bush Administration loved, he gave us a better model.

But god those freaks just gotta fucking talk. So all day they've had guys on talking about should Obama ignore it, should he accept it in person. Maybe he should have the nobel comittee renditioned and bomb the ceremonies to show that he's not arrogant enough to accept a prize.

And, for other white people, I know there has to be something else going on in their heads when they see this black guy up there and everybody likes him and he sounds like a highly reasonable and confident leader.

But, to review, the question today is: How much of a dickhead is Obama for getting an award?

A better question would be, when the fuck are we get a public option.

If we do, all this fear mongering, pseudo-fiscal assessments will whither away in fifteen years or so, and the next time some other evildoer wants to provide more security of life for the poor and disadvantaged, reactionaries will put out commercials telling people on the public option that the new reforms will take away their healthcare.

反动派被打倒，社会主义没来更糟糕

FICTION: Darren's Perilous Journey: P.329, I try to revive Merlin.

2009-10-08T16:21:00.000-07:00

How could I blame America, when it had done so much for me, like educated me and shown me the dreams I would someday have of boats?

This Merlin fool couldn't be down for the count. After all, was he not this fabled and legended man of magic and mystery that had withstood the tests of time and sorcery?

So I dashed back to the lounging room and grabbed him by the shoulders.

"Come on, thy liege! You still got a spark or two left inside of you yet!"

Then, just like that, without warning, he suddenly lept up pushing me back off the cushioned seat and causing me to fall over.

"Oh dear!, he sclaimed. "What sort of predicament hath we been waylaid by now? The grand Arthur abducted, and for what? and for by whom? Methinks I already know of where to for he has been grabbed away!"

He paused and swirled his wizened finger high in the air, then brought it down quickly, pointing at the ground: "The Blue Foxes!"

I did a second take, and flinched in incomprehension? What the hell was he talking about?

And then, as if he was reading my mind, he iterated the long descent into hellishness that was being spurred on by the very dastardly band that had, moments ago, absconded with the would be subject of my hagriography.

"It's like this." he explained. "The Blue Foxes are a chillingly mysterious order, shrouded in ignorance and vehemence, whose codes and rules are few. Mainly, they seek the overthrow of Arthur, and the imprisonment of all Sodomites, and those who oppose the crusades.

"My all seeing Eye tells me that they are now, at this very moment, ensconced in a hideout, way out on the far edge of the galaxy, on a planet inhabited by freaky reptiles, who lust after nothing more than the very blood of true Aryans, the light of hair and blue of eye."

"If you need no other preparation, and if you lack the cowards hesitation, than off we be, my young sire."

Aww, doulbe schnaaap! Now, after all this mayhem and callous disregard for linear progression, I was fonna check out how they hang up in space, and come face to face with a bunch of bad guys.

But, then, when all was said and done, what was I to do? What choice had I ever had in all this. In my dreams of the boat incomparable, had I not already wagered my life against the snobbish hands of fate?

A life I had, to be lost, but a boat I had, to be gained.

I gave Merlyn a dominant male sort of wink, with a sharp downward nod of my head. and he needed no further permission. He waved his wand and a shower of sprinkling stardust befell us.

No sooner had the shower descended than were we ensconced in another world, a world of empty terrain, that we looked out upon from the confines of a blue dome.

But we were not alone. There was someone else in the room. he sat behind us, at a desk. He was smoking a cigar and bouncing a bottle of pills up and down in his hand.

Merlyn said "Commander Rushbo, I presume."

What the F yo!! Did he really mean all that? Could it really be true what he was saying and shit?

I couldn't believe it. Was this fat little dude the real El Rushbo? But he had supposedly been rounded up and exo-cutted for taking part in the attack on Obama.

I was freaked out. But, you know what? I didn't even have time to stay freaked out. Cause just then Commander Rushbo lept up with ferocious energy, like a vicious animal in attack mode, and pointed an AK gloccer at us.

Merlyn didn't even flinch. With a dainty flick of his wand, El Rushbo was suddenly entwined in a Wonder Woman rope.

Then, surprisingly, at least I was surprised, I mean, he used his wand to send the gun over to me.

He gave me a look of utter inhumanity, as if suddenly he were something different.

"Do it!" he commanded. "Put the little pig out of his misery. He's the guy that's planning to kill your hagriographical subject. And, he's a racist!"

What could I do. I was sure that if I didn't peel a cap in this fool, than Merlyn was totally gone open up all over me with a can of beat down.

But did I have it in me? And, was murder ever justified? The dilemmas were many. But, whatever I was to decide, I'd better do it quick!

page 645, kill the pig.
page 331, pull the gun on Merlyn
page 32, talk Merlyn down.

Fiction: Finally, they were divorced. pt 1 a choose My own Adventure Tragedy

2009-10-08T15:33:00.000-07:00

After some delay due to jealousy on the part of rivals such as Wallis, Jimmy's Decipheration of Speech, Pre-School Edition was published.

Conversations, thoughts, and scheduling related to publication often coincided with him discovering and figuring out how to excise little bits of Rayleen from the apartment.

When his friend called to ask him to come a party where the agent who might be interested in representing would be available to receive a good impression, Jimmy had happened to glance down behind the toilet, where the rust and barely spatters of urine gathered, to see a black hair clip. With insect wings and long curved teeth that opened on close on one's hair.

She had left so many hair clips, or scrunchees or bands. And bras too. Under the sofa of the cushion, he found the padded black one that she had brought in a state of emergency discomfort. They had been in Yiwu, going from factory to factory, with all the other vendors, buying mass produced tourist junk that would become, at it's final point of sale, a hand made craft reflecting a towns heart and soul.

One of the products they had gotten there, were little, crappy wooden swords that they had sold to an hunched old lady in communist era blue shirt and pants, up on a mountain village near Hangzhou, where you could hike through wet green leaves and clear water running down all around your feet, scurrying to the lake at the bottom.

He had tossed the wooden sword into the pile of stuff that was mostly Rayleen's. He was either going to try to contact her, wait till she contacted him and then tell her she needed to pick this stuff up, just throw it away and lete he bitch. She wouldn't really care about this stuff. she didn't care enough to take it with her.

He could just throw it away, cleaning up. Now that it was accumulated in a convenient piel. H could just bring in a large plastic bag and it would ready for the big trash barrel outside in under two minutes.

The bras were hidden around in corners, under books, behind the t.v., like they were part of an Easter egg hunt.

At the though of this, of getting rid of the last bits of Rayleen, the dull sens of loss moved around in him, like a vase teetering over a tile floor. And it made him want to turn his pain into violence. It made him feel like this was the reasonable progression from this dull pain. To swing out and kick at the legs of the table, knocking them out of their joints. To bring his fist down on the table top, fracturing, transmitting his pain onto something real, given it life.

But he just couldn't rationalize any violence. It was too late. For so long he had retained this constant need to let loose his violence. But there just weren't any deserving targets. He couldn't pretend that people deserved to be hit, or that destroying his table, sofa and refrigerator would make him better off. But he still wanted it. Wanted the simplicity of breaking, of ruined piles that could only then be thrown out, not discussed and repaired.

What do I do?

continue to mull over nature of my sadness, page 21
call Rayleen , page 322
throw her stuff out, 422

NON-FICTION: STUPID CLAIMS ABOUT COMMUNISM-FAILURE, SINGULARITY

2009-09-22T22:31:00.000-07:00

Cromwells death heralded monarchical Triumphalism. The lies of so called republicans, who were really nothing more than mob loving democrats were revealed.

When the French Revolution turned bad, the pretensions of radical equality, dissolving the time tested social gradations among the populace, government by citizens rather than the elite class, were all revealed to be disastrous rules for any nation.

The French revolutionaries and Cromwell's Parliamentarian fellow travelers all ended with tyranny, while starting out on the road to a better, more just world.

This was the failure of egalitarianism. The failure of the mobs right to disobey and question their social betters.

Many was the idiot who concluded that the many forms of Republican or representational government advocated in the 17th to 19th centuries were revealed to be nothing more than the lies of men who sought to use the passions of the mob to their own ends.

Now, the idiots proclaim the victory of capitalism over communism.

The Corn Laws were capitalist, but objected to by proponents of free trade. Jefferson set up state banks, which is inconsistent with the truly free market envisioned by Libertarian types.

The East Indian Tea Company, as well as many English colonies in North America, were both private companies and governmental agencies, insofar as they carried out many functions of a state, existed solely on the authority of the state, and existed primarily for their own financial profit through the control of trade.

This was Capitalism, but not what anyone calls free trade.

And just as only an idiot would seek to confuse the prescriptive and descriptive variants of Capitalism, so too would one have to be functioning with a beaten down analytic capacity to make repeated declarations regarding Communism, without acknowledging the fact that the term refers to an entirely obvious and diverse set of doctrines and systems.

The Russian Soviet System failed, as did the British Imperial System, back when it was an Empire. The early American government failed, and it become a modern, militaristic semi-welfare state.

But from the common leap from the collapse of the Soviet System to the ideological bankruptcy of the myriad strands of Socialism, Anarchism and Communism is a non-sequitur that you one obliged to believe solely in the absence of any thought of your own, without any consideration of who you are referring you to, and the context these ideas exist in.

Those in European countries who fought long and hard, losing their lives and their privileges for the cause of the freedom of men (lighter toned men) and then for the right of all people in general to participate in their own government were, at every step, ridiculed and met with indignation by many protectors of grand old tradition.

So too now are those who want the working class to take control of their own destiny, end economic exploitation of anybody-who-can against anybody-who-can't, and continue in the tradition of the political progress that ended entrenched royalty's domination of Europe, bring about a more just society-so too are these sorts now derided as dreamers of the impossible, as dangerous panderers to the easily beguiled masses, and as, above all, secret tyrants.

To fight the clarity of history's next reasonable step, the theological doctrine of Rights is thrown up as a barricade to protect the hierarchies of rich and poor. And rights, in reality, are intentions in our mind, and recognized codes of behavior, which we decide and debate.

So too is our system of economics and government subject to our intent, subject to our will, subject to the power of mind, which both perpetuates it and obstructs it.

Again, our system, founded on Rights, is a left over of Natural Theology, that God has an order that we're obligated to follow.

But as Marx, Bakunin, and all the others who Republicans and other geniuses consider to be close theoretical peers of Barack Obama realized, we make society, by our work, and we are at the same time, boxed in, pushed and pulled by the system we perpetuate without even intending to. We make it, and we can break it.

The history of recent European History (since the start of the common era) shows that progress to ever greater equality, and ever greater beneficial inclusion of more members of society is possible and desirable.

But stupid accusations of Socialism are still made by experts and the educated who themselves have no clear grasp on what they refer to, other than some simplistic categorization made up by those who oppose it (like a Satanist writing the dictionary entry for "Christian".)

Socialism, including Anarchism, Marxism, and Communism, are rich theoretical traditions that offer us new ways to think, and to live.

Socialism brings us to a clear view of our system, explanation for the persistence of poverty, of war, of exploitation, of betrayal of democracy.

Socialism is not some idealistic wishful thinking, it is a series of theoretical perspectives that give us a way to advance into the future, to advance over our present stage of history, and to get past such theological notions as our present understanding of "government," "rights", and "capitalism."

And in contrast, we have another future: The unplanned, the shrugged shoulders of American rulers.

NEXT-DIMENSION EDITORIAL: Obama's 'Emancipation' Actually Threatens Middle Class

2009-09-22T21:54:00.000-07:00

Swept to power on a wave of self-conscious shame at the patriotism aroused in the face of Al Qaeda's vicious blow at the heart of our Christian nation, Barack Obama has gotten away with quite a lot in his first eight months.

Not only has he implemented his radical leftist agenda of Government domination of our free market, he has also appointed countless czars, to override the traditional powers held by various parts of our national government, as intended by our founding fathers.

It is not enough that he has single handedly quadrupled the power and size of government, now he has revealed the strictly radical Marxist character of his political philosophy.

"Free the slaves!", he snarls. "We can't just continue down the same road!"

And the liberals who control the media applaud and place their hands over the hearts in a million schoolyard crushes, all directed at this demagogue, who seeks in a few years to abolish our noble traditions.

As a negro, it is natural that Mr. Obama would follow his tribal instinct, particularly, since he was born and raised in the deepest Jungles of Africa, and not in America, as Real Americans are born.

But, to 'emancipate' the slaves, as everyone conveniently fails to mention, will bring utter devastation to the economy, cripple the middle class, give this tyrant a ready army of his fellow Africans, and utterly destroy the principle of Private Property.

What is to stop the government from seizing any man's house, horse, or machine, if thousands of legally owned assets are ripped out of the hands of law abiding citizens by Obama's decree?

Who will be there to stop him when he emancipates the property of any white man who opposes his experimental socialist policies?

And if Real Americans should, at a later date, be shaken out of their slumber, how will they be able to fight off the mobs of 'free' negroes, who, in their basic simple nature, are so easily swayed by Obama's hatred of the White Race?

Now to the crux of this so called 'emancipation.' What the Muslim-lovers in the media will not tell you is that the hardest hit by this imperious decree will, in fact, be the small businessman. The mom and pop enterprise, who barely get buy month to month with the work of his meager collection of slaves.

They tell you its the rich they are going after, the large plantations, the tobacoo and cotton giants. But, in fact, it has always been the goal of the Abolitionist movement to take away the power of the little man to earn his keep and provide for his family.

This so called emancipation is nothing more than plain theft, theft by the government, theft of property, theft of our heritage, and, most of all, theft our Country.

Let us pray that Obama fails, and fails miserably. Let us pray night and day for this African's failure, foregoing eat and sleep if it gives us more time to pray for his downfall.

Amen.

Modernization: Zou Ji & Customer Service

2009-09-09T13:19:00.001-07:00

Original Text:邹忌修八尺有馀，身体昳丽。朝服衣冠窥镜，谓其妻曰：“我孰与城北徐公美？”其妻曰：“君美甚，徐公何能及公也！”城北徐公，齐国之美丽者也。忌不自信，而复问其妾曰：“吾孰与徐公美？”妾曰：“徐公何能及君也！”旦日客从外来，与坐谈，问之客曰：“吾与徐公孰美？”客曰：“徐公不若君之美也！”明日，徐公来。孰视之，自以为不如；窥镜而自视，又弗如远甚。暮，寝而思之曰：“吾妻之美我者，私我也；妾之美我者，畏我也；客之美我者，欲有求于我也。”于是入朝见威王曰：“臣诚知不如徐公美，臣之妻私臣，臣之妾畏臣，臣之客欲有求于臣，皆以美于徐公。今齐地方千里，百二十城，宫妇左右，莫不私王；朝廷之臣，莫不畏王；四境之内，莫不有求于王。由此观之，王之蔽甚矣！”王曰：“善。”乃下令：“群臣吏民，能面刺寡人之过者，受上赏；上书谏寡人者，受中赏；能谤议于市朝，闻寡人之耳者，受下赏。”令初下，群臣进谏，门庭若市。数月之后，时时而间进。期年之后，虽欲言，无可进者。燕、赵、韩、魏闻之，皆朝于齐。此所谓战胜于朝廷。

Zou Ji was afraid of honesty and criticism, he intimidated everyone around him into flattering him and pretending to love everything he said.

One day, he began to fear that Xu Gong, a man in a neighboring country, was hotter than him.

Zou Ji himself was gorgeous, tall, slender, and elegant, with long hair and a fluttering mustache.

But, everyone was talking about Xu Gong now, he was on all the covers of the teen mags, next to Prince William, and all the hotties from the Disney Channel.

Zou Ji began to grow weak after a few weeks, not eating because just thinking of Xu Gong made him fell fat.

He asked his wife who was prettier, him or Xu Gong, his wife said that he, Zou Ji, was wayyyy hotter than Xu Gong.

Zou Ji didn't trust her, so he asked his mistress, who said the same thing, than he asked all of his staff, including the interns, who said the same thing.

But he just couldn't trust all these people who felt obligated to tell him what he wanted to hear. He grew weaker, living on one protein bar a day.

Than a visitor from another country came, and Zou Ji, tried again with the question. The visitor said the same thing as everyone else. Zou Ji decided that the visitor was just flattering him because the visitor wanted something from him.

Finally he went to the prime minister and said, "Everyone says I'm hotter than Xu Gong, but they're all just doing it to keep me on their good side."

The Prime Minister nodded wisely, "An important matter, a most urgent dilemma."

Than, Zou Ji decided that he would institute a year long policy of open criticism free from prosecution or negative consequences.

All the people of Zou Ji's country came forth and voiced their criticism, and Zou Ji found that they had no interest in his or Xu Gong's appearance, rather, they wanted improvement in their living conditions, public infrastructure, economic development, and educational opportunities.

Zou Ji just let them vent, and after five months, they were done. Now they felt like they had got something, and the Prime Minister didn't need to really deal much with their complaints, or worry about them revolting because of unaddressed grievances.

All the neighboring kingdoms realized this was a way of placating the populace without dealing with their problems, it allowed them to do things the way they always had, pacify the people, and look magnanimous. Eventually, all the neighboring set up special complaint hotlines, were their complaints and problems were listened to and disregarded.

NON-FICTION: TAIWAN'S PATHETIC INDEPENDENCE

2009-08-31T20:01:00.000-07:00

I had always heard about how China wanted to control Taiwan.

It's the kind of thing that we know dictatorships do. At least four generations of Americans have spent their lives knowing China to be a gigantic mob of evil bent on storming our shores and extinguishing our leading light of liberty.

The American media generally focuses on China's claims towards Taiwan. But they don't portray this policy as what it actually is, a continuation and imitation of Taiwan's policy toward the Mainland back when it was The China.

Before Nixon and Carter shifted recognition towards the Peoples of Republic of China, and the ruling Communist Party, most western countries regarded The Republic of China as the legitimate government of China. This map shows the territory that the ROC (Taiwan) claimed control over.

The one China Policy is consistent with the Chinese system as recognized by the US and other western countries, there were not two separate countries until the US was forced to recognize the PRC, which had been ruling China, except Macao, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

The idea now that Taiwan is not part of China is hypocritical and indicative of the sort of mystical thinking reserved for the nobility of Nationhood.

Taiwan's main Languages, both the national language, guoyu, or Mandarin, and Taiwanese, Minnanhua, which has close relatives across the way on the Mainland province Fujian, are undeniably Chinese languages, part of the system that includes all the varieties of Cantonese, the different types of Shanghainese, and the hundreds of other dialect groups.

The ruling class in Taiwan came from all over the Mainland, the food is Chinese, the culture is Chinese, and I can't think of many aspects of Taiwan that are not closely tied to the rest of China.

I know there are differences, linguistically and culturally, but they are not likely to be that much more than those between people from Shanghai and Beijing, from Shandong and Guangxi, from Emigre Chinese communities and the mainland.

The perspective that dominates the most prevalent discussion of China-Taiwan relations is that of possible victim with possible victimizer, the question to be argued for or against being: Is the US government not being hard enough on China for it's aggressive, domineering posture towards Taiwan?

This is not to say that the similarity between Taiwan's and China's rulers are denied or covered up, but the dominant perspective is generally aggressor versus aggressee.

The democratic perspective would see that both Countries, for that is what they have been from the time the Guomindang/KMT fled the mainland, are governed by authoritarian regimes, where Taiwan's One Party Rule has recently given way to a less autocratic state, and both Countries achieved rapid economic growth and industrial modernization under One Party, dictatorial governments.

But the democratic perspective in American popular discourse is used more for criticizing bad guys, usually those who we are supposed to be condemning, or whom our government supports, rather than seeking an accurate objective description of the political affairs of other nations.

The simple, stupid fact is that two places that have different ruling bodies, and correspondingly different legal and economic systems, are, in fact, different countries.

Spain and Portugal are different countries, but Catalan, though linguistically and culturally different from the rest of the country, is part of Spain. Portugal is closer linguistically and culturally than the Basque region, but Portugal is a separate country. Kurdish Iraq is separate linguistically and culturally, but still part of the Country Iraq. What kind of idiots would debate whether or not the Kurdish region 'belongs' to Iraq? What sort of magical possession exceeds both physicality, observability, and delineation?

The idiots who would even debate the question of whether or not Taiwan is a separate country are so incredibly stupid that they would neglect the very definition of 'country.'

Instead they throw around conflations of politics and culture, replacing description; i.e. is Taiwan in fact a separate political entity, with prescriptions, i.e. should Taiwan be independent, or should it 'return' to China, and evaluations of similarity, i.e. are Mainlanders and Taiwanese culturally the same, ethnically the same.

Again, if the ubiquitous outrage at antidemocratic regimes and practices were to actually correspond with actual analysis from a presumption of the validity of democratic government, than we would merely say that Taiwan is a separate country insofar as the people in Taiwan choose so, and then we would face the discomforting prospect of applying that same logic to Texas.

The idea that we can decide if it is part of China, and if China should have it, or, god forbid, whether either country is good or bad, is just another manifestation of the dominant trend in our intellectual realms to conflate description and prescription, our opinions with the will of some other country's citizens, and the context of history.

The pathetic thing about the current Taiwanese independence is that it coincides with the failure of the ROC. When the theologians of The State decided that China was not Taiwan, and the rest of the world forgot that it ever had been, the Taiwanese government set off on a hobble towards independence, with policies like the "Four Wants, One Without," "Special State to State Relation," "Taiwanization," and the "Four Stages of Taiwan" All of these are rationalizations of the failure of Taiwan as a political entity.

Set up by Japan and the US to counter the will of the Chinese people, who wanted a communist revolution, and in order to counter that revolution with militaristic Nationalism, Taiwan now clings to the opposite zeitgeist, the primacy of democratic ideals.

NON-FICTION: Higher Power Example 1: Foreign Language

2009-08-21T10:35:00.000-07:00

Believing in a higher power to restore sanity involves admitting that you are not control, that you cannot do it on your own.

This can give us both relief and hope. Relief to find out there is someone or something out there that understands the problem that plagues us and/or has the answer.

It also gives us a feeling of empowerment that allows to be humble at the same time, since we are giving over power in our lives to something outside of ourselves, we are giving up power, and submitting to something else, foregoing safety and our need to maintain walls that we think keep our ego's safe.

As for learning another language, we must also give up control and the pretense of independence.

If our actions do not conform to the standard, we are wrong, we have failed, and we can only try harder to conform.

At the same time, we know that all we have to do is wipe away the reactions and reflexes of our native language, and allow our minds to receive the new sounds and patterns.

To learn the language of other people, we can do nothing but imitate them, and accept that they're sentences are right, if they make them, and ours are wrong, if we make them without first relying on imitation.

The sounds we make in a foreign language are dependent on imitation of others. If we insist against all the speakers of French, that our American pronunciation of their words is correct, than we only maintain error for the benefit of a false ego.

The more we hold onto to our native habits of grammar, pronunciation and connotation, the more we reveal the illusion of independence.

Learning a new language means giving yourself over to it, allowing your mind to edit out your own language, wipe away your linguistic reactions and classifications, and submit to a new system.

Each time we go through this denial of our established habits, and thoroughly submit to the new grammar, writing, sounds, and patterns, we then come out stronger, finding that our old habits, laid into our minds as children, are completely undamaged.

The unproven, unaccounted for neurological impediments to learning a new language are so annoying in that they never take into account the primacy of denial in learning a language, that is, the primacy of denying our linguistic reactions.

When we see a incomprehensible page of text, we must allow our mind to absorb and tune out the reaction that tells us: "This is foreign, this is not understandable."

That reaction, that anxious sense of alien-ness, is, in my experience, the greatest impediment to learning a new language.

So too with alcoholism is there a reliance on one's native habits, habits of coping through mood alteration, shutting people out to maintain your independence, your freedom from the control of others, your freedom to ruin your life.

To start dealing with alcoholism, you have to give it up. Give it up to Jesus if you want. Give up to the people who have been through this. Give up to your family, to the ghost of your dead relatives, to your children.

But you have to give up the pretense of control. As trivial as it may seem, the same goes for language.

In learning a new language, you are not in control, you are going to constantly make mistakes, feel helpless, stupid, and imagine or hear yourself laughed at.

But this is the way through to fluency. And giving up the illusion of control, of the ability to do it your own way all the time and still succeed, is also essential to finding the tools and means to replace alcohol with a healthy ego.

FICTION: Darrens Perilous Journey Part 5 (a choose my own adventure)

2009-08-20T20:35:00.000-07:00

P.324. I lie and betray my god.

Well after all, according to Evolution, there's not even any god at all anyways to be seen at all! Plus, that dream boat that I was gonna be hooked up with after I did my thing on Hagriographing King Arthur totally the shizzles, unlike an antiquated system of rites and theological perspectives, which had long been outmoded by Science!

So, I'm all looking at these knights of the round table. And there just mad dogging me like theres no tomorrow. And I'm all, like, I'm thinking, dawg, if you don't back off right just bout now, I'm gonna start to bouwta bouwta, yeah!

But I just spit my meaning, like "Naw man, it's a'ight. I'meth a Christian, as be you'ens. It's just, like, some fool castething a spell all up on me!"

Then, the assembled Knights of the Table, laughed uproariously, since they had befuddled by so simple a mistake of understanding.

I was relieved, though on the inside, my thoughts were different. I couldn't help just feeling a slight twinge of guilt, and the more I tried to shake it off, the deeper it twinged, and it was still twinging away when I was interrupted out of my thoughts by Merlyns disruptive voice.

"My young sire, pleaseth thee to have a seat and enjoy of the Kings bounty, such as the beer and fresh Chicken."

I sat and down and dug in.

After the meal, the King and Merlyn spirited me away to the the lounge area where we actually did, lie, totally lounge, all casually an' shit. And the king began to tell me of where he had desired to be hagriographed.

The lounge area was circular, and one circular sofa adorned the wall, all the way round the room, in an 'o' formation that left occupants with sense of something like an oval.

As we reclined, and servants tossed peeled grapes into our mouths, the King finally got down to brass tags, and spilled the dirt. "I want thou to knowest most certainly as to the reason wherefore I beith askingeth you to set down my glorious record of feats. You see, a Sodomite beith I."

Whoa Whoa, and double schnap! I knew that word from the bible! This guy was gay, what a faggot!

But I sure as hell wasn't gonna spit that in front of him. But damn, dawg, how you gonna say something like, it's all, just like bam, just putting it out there. I mean, that's like, I guess, like keeping it real, but I'm all like, that;s just so, so gay!

I could barely even hear the King as he was continuing to say his words. "So, all the fables told that beith of mine life, haveth not the true spark, for they harbor a Eurocentric lust that forbiddeth my hidden desire."

But as I tried to focus on the King who was kinding mumbling and dribbling grape juice while he talked, Merlyn loudly interjectd with exclaim "They're here, by the gods, they areth here!"

Booms and noises loudly came to me, as I heard the sound of something exploding and people fighting.

Here we go again, I thought, and smiled at the concentrated echo of all my movie heroes.

Just then a squadron of estrange warriors burst into the lounge area, causing all three of us to sit, boltly upright.

The warriors were rippled with muscles, and of hard exteriors forms. They looked dangerous, and had on armor, with scary pictures of pure intimidation on it.

One of them popped a cap at Merlyn, before the revered old grand wizard did so much as shake a stick of his wand, and a bullet pierced his wise, bewrinkled forehead.

I could not even shed my tear before they grabbed King Arthur and teleported out of there, pronto style.

I quickly shot up to my feet, and shot out of the room as fast as I could muster.

In the hall where I had just grubbed on, the Knights of the round table lay dead, and murdered, killed, I surmised, by the rascallious bandits who had abducted the one man that stood between me, my hagriographies, and the boat of my dreams.

My face grimaced, hard-core style, and I wore a look of grim determination.

I would get the King back, and I would totally own those dastardly mercenaries who got in the way of my plans.

But how could I do it?

P.329, I try to revive Merlin.
P.98, I call up my posse.
P 43, I give up and blame America.

NON-FICTION:Isolated, Weak Conservatives

2009-08-10T15:42:00.000-07:00

Obama's statement of American arrogance in foreign relations, and Bill Clinton's conciliatory statements regarding the journalists imprisoned by North Korea have inspired outrage and indignation among scared little conservatives.

When you know a person who consistently says: "I don't see why I have to apologize, I didn't even do anything!!!", you can then verify certain facts of their personality:

1. Low capacity for Objectivity:
Not knowing that your own certitude and emotionally intense internal experiences occur independently of the truth or falsity of any particular thoughts you have.

2. Low EQ:
Not understanding that these emotions are equivalent to other peoples' emotions, and they don't come from the truth or righteousness of any particular thought.

3. Low SQ:
Not understanding that everyone goes through this experience, this is why we have arguments and why techniques for resolving disputes are necessary, and that these techniques often require us to suspend our emotions, choosing the psychological and material benefits of interpersonal relationships over internal feelings.

As I noted in the post on Health Care, the dominant theme of conservatives now is fear of the Other.

This same fear is stimulated now by the idea that the top Democrats are weakening this country by apologizing. Pat Buchanan said, on MSNBC, that Clinton's conciliation with Kim Jong Il gave this dictator a lot of power in Asia.

If you the reader find that a credible statement, it might benefit you to get to know the rest of the world, if just a little bit.

The excitement of Buchanan and other conservatives about the grave weakening of America's image is contrasted nicely with the popular ideas about Clinton and Obama in China. Some of the reasons that these two appeasers are well liked in China is that they are considered very intelligent, reasonable, and friendly. Bush, on the other hand, was mostly regarded as dangerous and stupid.

In most countries, a country that believes in avoiding apologies and claiming to be the strongest, or most righteous nation in the world, is not fondly thought of, and may often be thought of as threatening.

North Korea is a nothing country, that everyone looks down on, pities, or regards as dangerous.

What do we think of dictators that constantly talk up the threat of everyone else? What do we think of people in our personal lives who regard apology as losing, giving someone power over them, or shaming themselves?

Conservatives have spent plenty of time talking up threats and freaking out over apologies, which may or may not have occurred.

On a Chinese news report I saw, it was reported that Kim Jong Il actually apologized to Clinton.

I know many times when I have lacked the strength to be humble, the strength to suspend my moral certitude, the strength to regard others as equals rather than hostile threats or fellow partisans in a struggle against the oppressive others.

But having the strength to apologize, to give in to another persons view of yourself, is part of growing, healing, and achieving and maintaining personal, romantic, professional and diplomatic relationships.

Conservatives like Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, and O'Reilly are afraid to give in to the perception that they are flawed, or that the country they love might not exist, but might only be a collection of semi-intelligent, mostly inherited, prejudices and simplifications of history.

Oberman and Maddow over at MSNBC might not be that different in respect to their commitment to their ideology. However, right now I am much more sympathetic with their side, than with the opponents of universal health care, or whatever malnourished version of that which congress finally manages to pass.

A sad mockery of universal healthcare is, at least, a start.

While the scared little conservatives go through the other-hate, labeling Obama as a non-Christian, non-American, hater of White Culture, etc., I hope the Democrats finally have the balls to make some real change.

In the long run, Americans will support them. FDR and Truman were widely condemned as Communists, sliding us down a slippery slope to Moscow, for advocating services such as Medicare, Disability, Unemployment, and Social Security.

Now, no one really opposes this. (of course, I know the pseudo free market types and Libertarian-Austri-Objectivists do) And no one really will oppose government provided Health Insurance for people who can't get it themselves once its been in place for a decade or two.

The conservatives, now conserving nothing more than the empty rhetoric of fifties and sixties era libertarians and red-crazy patriots, will try as much as they can to scare everyone, just as Regan did at the prospect of Socialized Medicine back during that same time period.

I can only hope they will lose. But hope often has little direct efficacy.

FICTION:宴子新版

2009-08-08T14:02:00.000-07:00

宴子要到上海代表广西省商会。准备跟上海市长约会，但是到了市长办公室，保安不让他进去，说宴子可以发个信息给市长。宴子也听保安讲：山下人。宴子说，那你们狗屁小人可以发个信息！别瞧不起外地人，他妈的！这里人都是崇洋媚外。

突然，市长出门了看到三个人吵架。市长问了保安怎么回事，保安说：没事，没事。伊捣浆糊。宴子打断了：市长，我叫宴子，我的秘书已经跟你的秘书约好时间。

市长明白了：对勿起, 对勿起。就请宴子进来会议厅。两人做好，工作人员上了咖啡茶。市长问宴子：搿么，广西不是很穷吗

宴子回答：咋说穷呀？我省将要变成大海港唯一！什么穷啊？今天在广西刚开了一百家沃尔玛特。我们老百姓早上都开着奔驰去吃早饭，周末休息就开着f-1法拉利车去玩儿。

市长笑了笑，讲：侬真是捣浆糊。

下次，宴子要来拜访市长，市长问了他的住手：怎么对付宴子，我要侮辱他，他一直要说他省这么好！

助手讲：那这样吧。他来了就让保安抓过来一个外地人，在宴子跟前，保安要说抓的人是贼，让后你问他，做啥?, 保安就说，这个来自广西的坏人刚刚在外面福州路陪着一帮新疆人偷钱包。

到时候，市长请宴子和几杯屋里厢。保安来了，带了一个人，根据计划就讲了。讲完后，市长问：广西那么好怎么有这么多小偷！

宴子说：烧饼往北方就变成馍馍，河粉到别的城市就变成米线，蛋糕会变成洋饼。我的老乡来到你这个城市，就变成贼，那是什么引起的。

市长笑了大笑说：侬老会讲！

日记：郁闷与学习还学不成，吾欲弃矣！

2009-07-31T12:54:00.001-07:00

又忘了一个考试日期。今早刚发现。昨晚到半夜写一个文章，到期日是昨天，文章是要描述一个博物馆。昨天刚发现是要在昨天完成，所以我昨天去了博物馆。前天我发现我的生活发展课section five测试和作业的到日期是昨天。

所以现在我在写美国历史课的博物馆文章，然后要做生活发展的作业。我忘了考试是地理学。

我对自己的记忆好不可思议。咋会每周忘了重要的日期？咋会天天想不起是几日，几年？

子欲学。人学难以乎？

老婆打我电话，我和她说“你应该安慰我。” 她不愿意，觉得我很烦。

现在真没劲。。。

REVIEW: Transformers 2: George Bush is an Autobot

2009-07-22T16:05:00.000-07:00

The political message of Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen became clear to me with the introduction of Galloway, the officious bureaucrat who barges into the headquarters of NEST, the joint military-Autobot combat force that is the only thing standing between soft, hapless humans and the metallic, destruction filled Decepticons.

Galloway walks right into this gang of secret military/transformers and starts insulting everybody and blaming the Decepticon (terrorist) attacks on the very Heroes who are fighting these evil robots!

And who would you imagine would be to blame for the granting of authority to this physically weak, possibly Jewish, clearly liberal blame-the Autobots-firster?

The New President! Although they don't have the balls to name Obama until halfway through the movie.

Optimus prime tries to ignore Galloway's intrusion. He is in the middle of briefing the pentagon on new intelligence that suggests that the Decepticons are planning an even greater attack on Earth.

Galloway has no interest in hearing the truth of imminent robo-terrorist attack that the robot/military heroes at NEST are risking their lives to prevent. He says to Optimus Prime "They are hunting you!" Just like Michael Moore and Chalmers Johnson, they think that the robo-terrorist Decepticons are an example of blowback resulting from the policies of the goodguys.

The unsung and hidden defenders of freedom are now maligned as enemies of freedom. And they are told that the president might decide that the best thing to do is for the Autobots to leave Earth (as the Republicans were ousted from power after preventing ten thousand more 9-11's.)

Of course, we the audience (the public) know that this is bullshit! The Autobots (Bush-Neocons) are the ones that have been saving our asses from those who have no higher goal than our destruction.

But Optimus Prime (Bush-Militarists) is no tyrant. Unlike the hasty, blame-Autobot-First clique currently in public, Optimus is honorable and must accept the will of Obama (still unnamed at this point in the movie)

The soldiers of NEST hate this overcritical, pompous bureaucrat. The harshest criticism is expressed, safely, by a black soldier, who after being told by this oppressive Obama lacky that his job is to shoot not talk, the black soldier expresses a desire to shoot this obnoxious Obama appointee. Having a black guy criticize Obama's blame America first foreign policy does two things: makes white people feel sympathetic, and lets white people get past the fear of being, or being thought of as a racist.

As the new, ignorant administration is shutting down the fight for humanity, the pure American family, the Witwickys, are getting ready for the hero's (Sam Witwicky's) passage into adulthood: going away to College.

His mother is unable to control her emotions, while his way too hot girlfriend is girlishly fretting over his refusal to say “I love you.”, and whether or not they will able to sustain a long term relationship.

Unfortunately, the normal lives of real Americans are about to be interrupted by the Decpticons lust for the power they need to continue their destruciton. Destruction being, of course, their primary goal, rather than, say, ideological, religous, political, or socio-economic changes.

Sam finds a sliver of The Cube, a source of Tranformer power that is explained throught the film as something scientifically equivalent to a mushroom in Super Mario Bros. The cube sliver that slips out of his hand, burns through a couple layers of his house and energizes his moms kitchen appliacnes into Decepticons who launch an attack on Sam and his family. The lovable, loyal bumblebee comes to Sam's rescue, in the proecess destroying a good deal of Sams house.

Bumblebee is the Jar Jar Binks/Lassie/stupid-but-loyal Native character. Unlike the rest of the Autobots, cannot talk. He demonstrates a rather foolish devotion to his chosen master, Sam Witwicke. His vast computer intelligence apparently doesn't include any complexity of desire, like robot sex, reading, traveling, or Autobot autoerticism.

The Witwicky parents need not lament the destruction of their home, since the existence of all the Transfomers is kept hidden from the public oas a matter of National Security, their damages will be fully compensated, and then some! State secrets really do benefit the little guy!

While Sam is setting off for college, the Decepticons are planning the ressurection of Megatron, the leader of the Decepticons. And we find out the Megatron, the dead villain of the first Transformers movie, is not the worst of the decpepticons, he has a master, The Fallen for the whom the sequel is named.

The Obama administrations clsing down of the NEST program leaves the other magic Cube fragment unguarded and the Decepticons jack it.

Then a super hot decepticon, in the form of a wetdream college co-ed is dispatched to Sam's college campus.

Sam's roommate at college is a conspiracy theorist who ends up seeing how stupid he was to malign the government for keeping secrets from the public, after all, we gotta fight the Decepticons.

During the big Decepticon attack on Earth, Megatron releases a Bin Laden style video where he tells the humans "You're governments have lied to you!" What does that make someone who agrees with him, like Jon Stewart?

Then comes the only mention of Obama. As the world falls to the Decepticon attacks that his arrogant meddling paved the way for, a news program announces that he is being flown by helicopter to a hidden location. That is, he is flying away to hide while the robo-terrorists attack.

The harassed and mistreated soldiers, the men giving their lives for our freedom, confront the Obama-ite about the clear cut need to fight! Fight! Fight! Amazingly, this scoundrel barks at the soldiers that the president wants a comprehensive military plan, not some stupid fight. He is even considering all options, including diplomatic channels!

The soldier explains to us exactly what 'diplomacy' means. He asks the man if this means that the president is ready to give in to the Decepticons demands and hand over the hero, Sam, to these thugs!

The man reiterates that all options are being considered! So we discover the lie behind Obama's high-fallutin' ramblings. He is an appeaser. Ready to appease the Decepticons, who are bent on destruction, not just of America, not just of the Earth, but of the very universe!

Obama is revealed as a man who knows nothing of the fight he quits, or the enemies he appeases!

The soldiers Nest must take their fight against evil underground. After the cowardly Decepticons gang up on Optimus, he dies. But Sam has a plan to revive him.

To carry out this plan, he needs the cooperation of the NEST soldiers. They agree, but must first get rid of the Obama jerk. They try to trick him into jumping out of a plane over Egypt. But the idiot can't even follow the simple instructions in opening a parachute. So the Obama-appointed dummy pulls his cord in the plane and is sucked out into the wide open sky.

Thakfully, the forces of good win in the end. The mealy mouthed appeasers in the White House are unsuccesful in sabotaging the good guys. After a showdown in Egypt, our soldiers achieve a vitory in the desert.

But we couldn't do it alone. The Jordanians, our long time ally in the Muslim, dictatorship dominated middle-east, come to our aid in the fight agaisnt the Decepticons.

Aside from them, there are three other depictions of non-Americans in the film. Sam's parents vacation in Paris, only to find annoying mimes, and 'nast' escargot.

The heroes are stopped at a checkpoint in Egypt, where a diminutive Arab is dealt with by the mention of the awe-inspiring New York.

When the heroes get to Egypt, they get to visit, a typical Egyptian town, apparently influenced by the parodied Arabic town in Team America.

I got used to so much anti-Bush sentiment, from American, other expats and Chinese people, while living in Shanghai, that I was rather shocked to see this bit of apologetics being snuck into the popular culture. But it sure fits in line with the general trend of contemporary Republicans: Use Base Fear and Hero Mythology to sell your bullshit.

That's how you get O'reilly going from Entertainment news to Honest Americanism, and the Fox Network in harmony with Fox News.

2009-07-21T14:13:00.001-07:00

NON-FICTION: Healthcare, get it over with!

2009-07-20T15:09:00.000-07:00

I am so sick of the irrelevant arguments traded back and forth over the issue of health reform. Nobody likes HMO's. They were an artificial creation facilitated by the government under Richard Nixon.

Nobody denies that they make profits by denying healthcare and nobody can deny that most people are not satisfied with the current system.

Some conservatives are taking the "I agree theirs a problem, but that's just not the way to solve it." angle, which is entirely disingenuous.

The mainstream conservative angle for the past eight years has been fear of foreigners, be they from south of the border, north of Korea, or east of Africa.

And they still pursue those issues on Fox News. About the only time they give a damn about healthcare is when they are trying to scare people away from accepting government run healthcare or inventing horror stories of the all the countries that have some sort of socialized healthcare.

They find one or two Candians to tell us ignorant Americans the nightmare north of us. Just like they found Iraqis who were begging us to invade, gays who want to be saved, and Iranians who desperately seek the intervention of the great United States.

Their story is the same old story warmongers and advocates of tyranny never tire of telling, fear of the Others.

Fox news might as well hire Ana-Lucia as a prime time host and have her kill an Other every night on air.

And now, when this country is suffering another bout of economic diarrhea, unable to hold down any financial nourishment in the lower parts of it's system (and after binging on food unwilling to meet any standards of safety,) now they come back with more fear, fear of health care for everyone.

Back in the nineties they demonized Hillary with the 'government between you and your doctor' line and now they repeat it every time they face the camera.

They imagine that now we have direct contact with 'our' doctor. As if this were the imagined fifties old timey down home Andy Griffith Show bullshit they remember to ward off the actuality of corruption, racism, and the ever present poor.

Who the hell has 'a doctor' nowadays? More and more of us our unemployed, and our insurance provides us with very little long term one on one contact with 'a doctor.'

At the same time, most people I know over forty have to pay a large portion of their income in prescription bills.

The insurance money they pay goes to guaranteeing them more and more medical costs as they get older, and closer to retiring, and not earning an income.

This is the system the Republicans are defending. Their system.

It's a tired analogy to make, but essential to keep in mind: Libraries. I'm sitting in one. I come here to use the internet and check out books.

I could go to Borders and buy or browse new copies of the books I have checked out now (two on statistics, three on Kepler, two on writing, and a novel "Netherland")

But I get it free here. I can research and learn, all for free! It's magical.

And yet, our pro-freedom, traditional liberty-loving conservatives prefer that I drive over to a privately owned bookstore and pay for every little page I turn.

That's the freedom of the free market. The freedom to pay for everything, the freedom for your bookstore, or your doctors managers, to charge you more and more, as much as they can get away with at each point, so that they can continue to grow.

What a splendid freedom to have to buy books that are cheaper to provide for the cost of a library card and funds provided by taxes.

What a glorious, god-given freedom to pay for medicine and doctor's visits that other countries get for free.

What an even more blessed freedom to not even have to worry about scheduling a doctor's appointment, because you can't find a full time job, you're too much of a risk, or you fit into any of the other free-from-medicine categories.

The fact is that it is more efficient to organize essential services collectively. Production in bulk is cheaper, providing services that you know everyone will need or use is better done on the scale that it is going to effect: the large scale: the national scale.

That's why the conservatives poo themselves at the thought of the federal government not increasing military funding enough, cutting that funding, or not giving certain aspects of our federal government enough power, like the CIA, NSA, FBI.

People that have jobs and pay taxes make more and better service available for those of us who are poor, come from lower socio-economic backgrounds, and can't find work.

All this talk of rights and socialism and slippery slopes is a stupid, pedantic distraction from the fact that everyone needs health care, medicine, and access to doctors. The question of how to provide it is one that we can answer as a community, a nation, a people, or as citizens of our private, ideologically formed alienation, wherein we each exist free of systemic cause and effect.

And that is the ultimate freedom conservatives that motivates conservatives to think of every Freddy Krueger nightmare they can to scare; the freedom to ignore the dialectic character of reality, the simultaneity of causation, the dependence of big upon small, poor upon rich, and the history upon the individual, the individual on law, one human on the next.

Next Dimension Editorial: Whither Ad-Archy?

2009-07-17T13:22:00.000-07:00

Whither Ad-Archy?

When time, guided by the hand of the almighty, accretes such a layer of institutions atop the debris of generations of chaos and misrule that the entirety of the commonwealth is granted the convenience of being directed in desire and action, towards the ever greater emancipation of their undeserving desires, there cannot but be a reflexive, envious opposition to such a system, an opposition led by the usual malcontents of society, all masquerading under varied guises, but all, nonethelss serving the same end; mere anarchy.

And that is just the place that our world has arrived at. So many of the beneficiaries of Ad-archy would, in an instant, banish the ties of organization that bind together the genius of marketing conglomerates, ad-agencies, content providers, and every conceivable enterprise, all smoothly interlocked to serve the masses by providing us with both will and vision.

This is the real plan of the anarchists. Talk of cooperation, of freedom from the alleged tyranny of consumerism, supposed allegiance to the earth; all these are ad hoc justifications that have risen in the mind of these anarchists, one by one, in response to foolishness of their hatred when it is pointed out to them.

Instead of taking a nuanced view, wherein the faults of our system, which none of us deny, might be redressed, they revert to the simplicity of hostility and youth, and thereby imperil the very masses they purport to liberate.

Ad-archy, they say, manipulates the innocent public. They conjure up monoliths of greed and disaffection, where in fact none exist.

Who is this public that is exploited? Are not ad-designers part of the public? And at what point do the administrators and more successful marketing technicians suddenly get themselves extracted from the public and cease being one of us?

If such a question seem unfair, it is even more so because they would have no answer for it.

They, as all of their apologetics attest, do not even wish to differentiate between the vast majority of lawful and moral advertisement technicians, and the few that run astray.

To them, it is just one large ball of undifferentiated evil.

But, for the sake of a chivalry which they would rather not grant us, let us consider the main tenets of anarchism, as it relates to the desire of destruction for Ad-archy.

Commercials, to the them, are not guides, but fists aimed at smashing the masses into submission.

Likewise, those peoples in developing economies with markedly less sophisticated ad-technology are considered to be under siege from international corporations bent on 'rape and pillaging' natives who lack the sophistication of these educated anarchists.

Wherever in the world, or in time, you find the technicians of Ad-Archy developing the simplistic savagery of native peoples into the comforts and sophistication of modernity, so to will you find the beneficiaries of Ad-Archy denouncing it for not supplying the meaning that these malcontents are too lazy to create themselves.

Non-Fiction: 有PHD的老师不用好好得教学生

2009-06-29T10:41:00.000-07:00

近早上上课休息的时候，用丹丹的Ipod上网察看我生活发展学老师网络上的一些信息。有个网页是专门让学生批准老师们。我看了很多学生对她非常不满意。跟我一样觉得她太固执、骄傲，看不起人。

有这么多学生抱怨她，她还没有改变，就是因为他学生的看法和他的职位没有什么关系。她有一个PHD, 所以学校就认为她肯定有足够的资格。

我觉得以前的公司，乐宁学校，比现在Rio Hondo批准老师的方法好多了。我在乐宁当老师，每天看几个外交觉得他们自己很有教育，所以教课是，遇到什么问题就会怪别人。

这种外交会说：Fucking Chinese! Fucking LEC! Fucking Teenagers! 但是从来不会把那个'fucking' 形容自己，而不能白白的承认他们自己的理解不够。

老师教不成二十个学生，还说因为学生有错，就像医生不能治好二十个病客的毛病，还说是因为病客不健康。

人不健康是医生与病客彼此的问题。学习是老师与学生两部的问题。

每次学生遇到难学的内容，就有发展进步的机会。老师每次见到学慢的学生，就有发展进步的机会。

如果两部都说“不是我的问题, 才是你的问题."的话,那只有保护自我的机会.

Non-Fiction: 朋友少，无银子，课烦, 字没打

2009-06-25T14:30:00.000-07:00

网上上课该如何

我现在理解为什么上正常课程对我更方便.

网络课程就看不到老师,不知该怎么对付他,该用什么话拍马屁, 也没人经常提醒我啥事儿要啥时作.

有个老师扣我学分因为我没有好好的谈白板概念,原罪,原善, 遗传和环境都对我养孩子的想法有什么影响!!!! 我一看到这些简简单单废话我很不可思议. 让我回答这些呆呆的问题就像他问我加菲猫会不会影响我买那一猫粮牌子!!!!!!!

这个星期估计每天过了四个时搞三个网络课程.

我学习还是可以, 其实自己不赚钱是现在最难受的问题. 因为不赚钱老婆就绝望要回中国. 因为自己没有工作, 我也绝望, 就变成绝望之house husband.

企不了my业也不最大问题,只是最难受. 最大的问题就是这几个月故事都没写.

谭琛等了好久恢复我email, 后来打电话给我说call me back, 但没有给我留他的号码. 她在中国, 号码没有在手机出现!!!

我要回家收拾房子, 否则丹丹主人会不舒服

FICTION: Wire Class Destructed part one

2009-04-29T12:46:00.000-07:00

This one fool was all online making his website for class, and it was only two days to go till our group, which included me, him, Sarah and Tilly, had to do the presentation for Wire 114, which was half of our grade for the whole frickin' semester.

I put my hand inside the screen of his laptop and waved it back and forth. The hand icon on the screen appeared and got his attention.

From inside, he ejected himself out of the laptop and back on to the chair, next to me, in the science building.

"How much longer is taht website gonna take you?"

He answered "Regardless of how long it's gonna take me, I still have no idea what to do for the project. It's a whole lot more sound of a plan if you just go ahead and do it with Tilly. You guys are the one taking the lead and trying to dominate."

I didn't want to get stuck in arguing about who was or wasn't expressing dominance; and I did know what he was getting at. But it's just that I'm focused on getting this done and making sure we reference every source for this Wire project.

"Just tell me what have you left for the website."

He leaned his head back. "Converting some of the old XML and HTML to 3d, writing the genes for the pigs and flowers, and figuring out how to increase interactivity for the other students."

"Okay, I can help with that, I think. So, did you go to the outline I made on the class site?"

"I went by it yesterday, on the way to my email. But it's still kind of vague to me."

Of course. That's what we all do. Instead of aggressively attacking the subject, breaking it down piece by piece, we just get deflected and cruise on by to something already accessible. I pictured him, in his laptop, walking past the outline and giving up so easily, and then checking his email to see what new places had been sent to him. Probably the kind of second to second updates to social network parks and cities that those other people spent their time with.

I said to Luke, still anxious to dive back into his laptop, "Anyways, the first thing we have to do is to go see examples of wires, in person."

So obvious, and what everyone tried to work their little brains around. Just going and seeing the damn things we were supposed to be learning about in Class.

But again, it was vague, and there was no readily accessible connection to wires for most students, so they just glazed over and retreated to the familiar.

I didn't like Wire class either. They were stupid little pieces of metal and copper. Minor points of technology in the vast and ecerp expanding univers. little bits of dust that had accumulated on the library of universal knowledge.

But I had to get through the class, had to attack the subject and break it down until my brain diegested every bit and I could own the subject.

I realized Luke had just said "Okay, where's the closest hard site with a wire exhibit."

I had already looked it up. "There's one in Carson. You live in Long Beach, right? That's on the way."

I put took all my books and shoved them back into my laptop and said "Let's go."

Translation: A bit of Han Fei Zi

2009-03-17T14:37:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago I was lucky to find a wonderful book on classical Chinese in the dollar bookstore in Lakewood. Each chapter has short selections from classical texts followed by a brief description of their origin, then a list of classical Chinese words with modern Mandarin explanations. There are also a set of questions for comprehension and a contrasting simplified to traditional character list.

Here are three selections from the author Han Fei Zi, from a couple hundred years B.C.

ONE. Shoe Size

鄭人有且置履者，先自度其足而置之其坐，至之市而忘操之，已得履，乃曰：“吾忘持度。”反歸取之，及反，市罷，遂不得履，人曰：“何不試之以足？”曰：“寧信度，無自信也。”

A man from Zheng was going to buy shoes, so first he meausured his feet. He set the measurement down. He went to the market to buy the shoes, and realized he forgot his measurement. He said "I forgot to bring the meausurement."

So, Instead of buying his shoes, he went back to get the measurement he had made. But, by the time he got back to the market, it was already closed. Someone asked him "Why didn't you just try the shoes on to see if they fit?"

He said "I trust measurements, not myself."

TWO. Waiting for Rabbits

宋人有耕田者，田中有株，兔走，觸株折頸而死，因釋其耒而守株，冀復得兔，兔不可復得，而身為宋國笑。今欲以先王之政，治當世之民，皆守株之類也。

There was farmer of the Song Kingdom. In the middle of his field was a tree.

He saw a rabbit run right into that tree and break its neck.

He was so excited at the idea of getting free rabbit meat, that he threw down his plow and sat all day and night by that tree.

The people of Song all laughed at this farmer.

So too does the government of today seek to rule us through the policies of emperors past, all like that farmer guarding his tree.

Three. Spears and Shields (In modern Mandarin, these two words mean 'Contradiction'. This usage comes from this very same story.)

楚人有鬻楯與矛者，譽之曰：‘吾楯之堅，莫能陷也。’又譽其矛曰：‘吾矛之利，於物無不陷也。’或曰：‘以子之矛陷子之楯，何如？’其人弗能應也。夫不可陷之楯與無不陷之矛，不可同世而立。

The was a man of the Chu Kingdom who was selling spears and shields. He boasted of them, saying "My shield is strong, there is nothing that can pierce it!" Again, he boasted of his spear, saying "My spear is charmed, there is nothing it cannot pierce!" Among those listening, one asked "Can your spear, then, pierce your shield?" The man had nothing to say in reply. An unbreakable shield and all powerful spear cannot both exist in one world.

Studying Classical Chinese is laborious, as it requires constant checking of archaic usages, but, for anyone wanting to be fluent in Mandarin, it is rather urgent, because for Chinese people, this is stuff kids already know around the time they enter puberty.

As hard as it is, the only time being able to read this two-three thousand year old stuff is gonna be cool, is when your around people who don't speak Chinese.

Contra: Tim Wise's Tiresome Racism

2009-01-28T17:25:00.000-08:00

What is the difference between grouping individuals into races and other comparatively homogeneous groups and disliking individuals based on their supposed group affiliation?

Generally speaking, Americans, regardless of race, creed or color, tend to view ascription of racial characteristics to any individuals as racist, although this is usually not the case when members of a given race make proclamations of the properties of their race.

When I heard Tim Wise on NPR today talking about how white people were 'really' still racist and that racism hadn't gone away, my first thought, after "No shit", was that this was the kind of view that only someone immersed in an all white community, or academia (the two would tend to coincide) would hold.

People like Tim Wise don't reflect on the difference between ill treatment of individuals based on group membership ascribed to them and characterizing individuals based on their supposed group affiliation.

For instance, Tim Wise maintains that white folks want to deny their racism. This, of course, is a negative statement about a race of people.

In another article, Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama and the Unacceptability of Truth: Of National Lies and Racial America, whose title promises a rant written by one who lacks confidence in anyone listening to him, we are told that indignation does not suit white folks.

Although it is just a device to delve into his main article, this is also a characterization, if not a stereotype, of a race.

I, who am on the lighter side of whiteness, am quite suited towards indignation, not to mention outrage and bitchy sniping.

What I have noticed about many Americans, is that we are extra ordinarily focused on race, and are also all part of the same culture.

The children and grandchildren of immigrants here become irreversibly Americanized. My Vietnamese cousins, who came here as teenagers or younger, do not very much resemble contemporary Vietnamese, in anything but facial features and skin tone. The Koreans, Indians, Chicanos and Chinese kids I grew up with never confused people born here with recent immigrants. The recent immigrants were often mocked and made the subject of many funny stories. In high school, they were called fobs, which stood for Fresh Off the Boat.

White Americans, like me and Tim Wise, have all sorts of things in common. Like, we both probably need sunblock more often than black people.

But me and any given person of any given shade, from albinos to the darkest Africans, might have all kinds of things in common.

One thing all humans, regardless of race have in common, is a lazy tendency, due to brain limitations probably, to fail to distinguish between groups and individuals, large scale commonalities and specific instances.

For academics like Tim Wise, the important things is getting up a convenient group label with which to display their aggression, rather than using objective analysis to get things done.

Selections From The Epiphalaries of D. Mckenzie Taylor

2009-01-07T05:34:00.000-08:00

How can a man sit down to rewrite, without a steady source of drink ready, be it honey-ginger tea, milk tea, coffee, chrysanthemum tea, or even green tea, which gives me a tummy ache?

To have a good morning crap, while friends or guests dwell about, requires more inner comfort than standing up to a gang of angry men.

When a thing is made an enemy, it thereby acquires allies.

A million things together form a mirror, when you want to reveal someone, throw them a thousand different cues.

expanding to higher realms

2009-01-07T05:21:00.001-08:00

REVIEW: Distress by Greg Egan

2008-12-18T00:34:00.000-08:00

I was so ready to condem Greg Egan, in his novel Distress, of manipulating all these intersting cosmological discussions into just another “it's all in our subjective experience” type of metaphysical doctrines.

But, he managed to create a philosophically intersting theory of cosmology. But,one thing I can feel safe in disliking is modern intellectuals' continued elevation of “information” to a metaphysical status.

Modeling our understanding on metaphors or analogies has never been more than a temporary advantage, allowing us to see phenomena in a new perspective, emphasize a new aspect, and thus give us and increasingly integrated, and dynamic view of existence.

The problem is that intellectuals confuse the metaphor for the phenomena it describes. This is what produces such ideas as The Universe is Information. In Distress, this causes the theory that humans can 'mix with information.'

Thinking of 'information' more than the actual phenomena, that is, discussing the category 'information' as a set referent, almost as a substance, encourages people to forget that they are actually describing discrete occurrences of discrete entities. Thus the category is emphasized and over emphasized, until a new model attains popularity.

The over-emphasis on the category is what causes it's overthrow. For example, Meachanism came about around the time when machines started gaining prevalence in Europe.

Then, and on through the Industrial Revolution, it became more and more interesting and useful to talk of the body as a machine, the natural world as a machine, the cosmos as a machine, with great wheels and pullies, with each part doing its part for the greater process.

But, in its way, this also led to the excesses of Behaviorism, which tried to reduce human behavior to something comparable to the simple machines our species produced in the last five hundred years or so.

But, Behaviorism, and the Vitalism-Mechanism debate, along with Bergson, our no longer much thought of.

Now, all the denial of consciousness and innate cognitive functions has created the new paradigm, which is often modeled on the new, dominant machine: the computer.

Anyways, the universe is not a huge information system. It is a bunch of different things which we can sometimes regard as single and sometimes as several.

But, aside from Egan's causing me to rant on the above topic, he made me happy with Distress.

The cool things are as follows:

-He puts the distress illness up front and then gets the reader focused on the final theory of everything being debated at a T.O.E. Conference, and the plot to attack the most prominent theorist.

There's a bunch of back story too, then, after all this theory and action, he ties in Distress with all these silly radical physics/mystical groups, and the T.O.E.

-He didn't make the anarchist utopia aspect two prominent. Once in a while, I go back and read The Disposessed to partake of that beautiful hierarchy free society, or The Cassini Division with the even better abundance-economy based on an anarcho-capitalism gotten from egoist-materialist philosophy.

But, usually I'm more concerned with new ways of seeing things, and understanding new ideas. So, for me, authors don't need to do the Bellamy trip. And I think most serious readers don't need to be pitched on the benefits of utopia. It's more comfortable to deal with the problems with one's own ideas (that is what's good about Macleods Fall Revolution series.)

Thats what Egan gets right in this one. I tried another one of his books, in audio form, but I couldn't get into it. I forgot the name, but the beginning had a glossary. It was all on .mp3 file, so I had to skip past it and when I got to the actual story, it was a bit confusing.

-This book helped me to get a better sense about what might be the significant part of modern physics. Usually, it's hard for me to get into strings and all that, and I just think: Structurally, we are no further than Democritus and Zoroaster, in as much as we still down to the ultimate substance of reality being smaller smaller composite elements (atoms, strings) or a bigger version of us (god).

NON-FICTION: I want to be Michael Chabon, not a Phillip Roth.

2008-12-16T21:37:00.000-08:00

I thought of a great analogy/method of overcoming my writing problems, particularly narrative and description.

Stephen King is like Shannon, Michael Chabon is like Tim/Misael/Jerry

What Stephen does that I can't is, like Shannon, he decorates better than me.

Every time I write something, there is always insufficient information, and with this novel I've been revising, now that I've added more description and plot information, it still doesn't seem very good.

It's like now I've prettied up my novel, but it's still unimpressive, something I invite all my friends over to see, and then console myself by saying “The place is still awkwardly put together, and uninspired, but it's good for Darren.” and thinking that it's because my other strengths that they still like me, inspite of the house I live in, when my friends fail to show anything but polite agreement.

It's not because I'm lazy, as the common folk might say. 'Lazy' is a concept only meaningful in coexistence with 'duty'. Otherwise, all you have is a desire not to do something, which then may conflict with a desire to do something.

But I am not 'lazy' about not wanting to go outside naked, I am 'lazy' about the things I don't think of or don't want to do. And, with decorating my house, I am just not aware enough.

I think this is because I am either dissociated due to my abuse trauma, or a natural tendency towards particular perceptual orientations, or both.

As it turns out, you can have fun coming to my house for the conversation, but it's not comfy, and not somewhere where you want to live.

I can't just let go and give the reader all the information they might need, I'm too condescending.

Like, just now, I thought “Should I indicate to the reader of this post that I am talking about my house to describe my story?” And the answer was “If they stupid enough not to get it, I might need to offer a little hint!”

So, in an attempt to overcome, to some extent, my sparse stories, I will try to figure out how I would compete with Shannon, Tim, Jerry, and Misael, if I had to have a few friends over and make them think that hanging out, and staying the weekend or longer was more fun at my place then at other people's places.

Let's look at the bowl I just took a bit out of. I made a 'soup' by butting bananas in a little boiling water and then peeling oranges and putting them in one wedge at a time.

I didn't plan it out ahead of time, I just repeated what I did yesterday. I didn't use the same amount of each fruit, nor did I consider the idea of using the same proportions.

And in my house, there are too many things, which I am not good at organizing.

So, if guys were coming over to my house, I would best to clean two days before they came, and then again, the day they came.

I would have to clean the kitchen extra well, and I would have to make the bowls, spices, vinegar, soy sauce, and every else non-essential to what they need to see in a kitchen. I would also, if I had them, put some flowers over the sink in the window.

So far, not at all creative.

One thing I would do, which I usually don't, is pay attention to my personal appearance when my friends came over. I would shave, shower, where nice, clean clothes, make sure I didn't have too many ingrown hairs, and that my hair wasn't too meessy.

Oh, I would have to think about where they were gonna be sitting, how far apart from each other, what they would be sitting on, what they would have to choose from, in turns of comfort versus utility. I would also think about what they were going to looking at while they were sitting.

I would do well to hide all but a few, nice looking, cosmetic bottles and tubes, maybe leave out the tube of light velvet lotion, or the dark red chanel perfume bottle.

If it was Jerry, Misael, or Tim, I'm sure they would like to have something fancy, like a special kind of beef for dinner, fancy silverware, a cigar, or wine.

Shannon would like to have something somewhat novel, exotic, or something very traditional and authentic.

I would like prepare something light, and with treats, like cakes, pies, or fruit. I would also give them tea rather than wine, or coffee. I might also offer them to get high, to enhance our experience.

Well, let's see what lessons I have so far:

King does traditional story types better than I do, he likes the exotic, but not too exotic, like Douglas Adams, Mieville, or Egan.

Chabon wants to dazzle his readers, and the last time I had guests over, I just made jokes, let them choose a dvd to watch, and made sarcastic comments. I was wearing my thermals and my purple Eagle Point, Oregon sweater that I've had for ten years but won't throw away because it's so comfy.

NON-FICTION: The Conservatives Linguistic turn.

2008-12-16T04:15:00.001-08:00

I just saw the new keypoint in the Republican's anti-Gay marriage campaign: The end to future etymologies. I saw it on one of the new daily shows that Steve downloaded.

After trying to say that gay marriage would mean the redefining of the venerable old institution of marriage, which has always been about men and women, they have now decided that the meaning of marriage is not as crucial as how it's struggle relates to the greater struggle against lexiconic progression.

In the course of Daily Show, Mike Huckabee, who was advocating this position, used several words the course of the interview which have in the recent century been assaulted by the mutations of language evolution.

And just as the Republicans are promoting an ideology that denies biological evolution, so too have they acquired sufficient intellectual consistency to deny the theory that claims it 'natural' for the meaning of words to expand, or for any word, like 'matter' to randomly evolve into a different word, through altered meaning, pronunciation, or writing.

Instead, they are advocating the respect for unwavering, eternal language, and, as with Plato, they know that the only eternal language is in the mind of God.

While God may have changed his own meaning of marriage to suit the present times, this is not the work for the polluted will of humanity. Leave it to God to change the definition of marriage!

As Huckabee said, 'word's matter' and you can't just go changing words all over the place.

Now that it is uncool to say that homosexuality is a disease, perversion, or choice, it is much wiser to retreat from the standpoint of evaluating homosexuals, the individuals who want to get married, and focus your renewed attack on linguistic theory and it's evolutionary bias.

You can't be called a homophobe for holding a platonic view of concepts. And that is as it should be, philosophy, and all other voluntary behaviors that cause no harm to others should be allowed by the citizens of any nation.

Movie Review: Zack and Miri Make a Porno The path of comedy fails to move on, but shuffles it's feat a bit.

2008-12-10T01:14:00.000-08:00

When I started watching this movie, I didn't know who had made it. I was happy to see that they gave Darrel from The Office more dialogue. I was suspicious right away that his opening 'nigger' joke was written by a white person, indulging in what he considered to be a bold, politically incorrect depiction of how things really are.

I didn't make the connection from this clue, nor from the fact that the story was taking place in a coffee shop where people spent more time speaking in sentences structured on the witty banter of screwball comedies, noir, and hitchcock, than cleaning the counters, stocking, or looking busy.

When it got to the first crucial plot point: Seth Rogen convinces the Miri chick to make a porno, I was impressed at the believability of Rogen's rationalization, but not at the fact that he actually convinced her.

Then, it gets interesting when they start to make the first porno, because that's something you don't see friends doing in these movies. (Of which sort 'these' refers to, I will get to in a minute.)

Then, they jack it up with more self indulgence. In addition to the Star Wars (a knight/samurai/cowboy film with a sci-fi look) obsession evident in the porno itself, they add a horrible song, apparently made by Alvin and the Chipmunks after they got out of rehab and were trying to make a comeback.

The song was offensive because of the indulgence of the song's lyrics, which were about Star Wars, but also because the music and vocals sucked shit. When I found out who the director was, this made sense, but at the time, I thought, perhaps, that this embracing of the stereotyped nerd culture was spreading.

I forgot to mention that this movie follows that same tired plot which, I understand, the director learned from the guy who made the Breakfast Club (excuse my ignorance of his name, I'm not sophisticated enough to pay attention to the fine art of semi-literates)

Some friends, who turn out to be soul mates, get into a jam and come up with a scheme, unlikely friends soon form a group of solidarity, and it all works out.

The innovation in this film was that the porno never actually got made. But, then after a spell, the male heroine finds that his estranged, true love is still there waiting for him, with her vagina unsoiled by other males.

Guy flicks have undifferentiated, hot women, whom the protagonists never really understand, although Kevin Smith tries a lot harder than other directors, and the Miri Chick wasn't without substance, while chick flicks, have hot, undifferentiated guys, who only want to do the right thing, in the end, and are always willing to tolerate those unlikeable quirks of the stereotyped woman.

Does Kevin Smith spend more time thinking up justifications for this unremarkable film, or does he spend more time idealizing things of the past instead of looking for things of the future?

The Passion of Mao: Countries are much simpler when you analyze them simplistically.

2008-12-10T00:50:00.001-08:00

What do the Chinese think about Mao? Or to be more specific, what do a billion people think about Mao? My guess would be, a lot of different things.

But, Lee Feigon has made things easier by taking the traditional American, anti-communist, Mao Is Bad position and countering with, Mao was a great and brilliant leader (though heavily flawed.)

This is okay and I was eager to hear a defense of Mao. I got that defense and it has made me reassess my view of him, in some ways. Like, I'm open to the idea that he had a positive influence on the economy of the fifties and sixties, and that he was in favor, in word only, of democracy and opening up.

But, the unforgivable element of this documentary, is that it tries to represent the views of those billion or so people by selecting only three or four that agree with the guy's positive view of Mao and the Cultural Revolution.

Lee Feigon is a professor of Chinese History. I, on the other hand, am nothing more than a high school graduate who has lived and worked with Chinese people for the last six years. I'm also fluent in Mandarin and I read the newspapers (very slowly) and watch the T.V. here regularly.

The most common view encountered is that Mao is a hero for his liberation of China from the clutches of the KMT (GuoMinDang) 国民党and the Japanese.

People don't say “I love him because he was a Communist.” They admire him like Americans admire the founding fathers, as distant figures who preached good things that we appeal to but never follow. A couple weeks ago, I asked my mother-in-law about what it was like when she was a kid, which was around the start of the cultural revolution. Her family were dirt poor farmers.

She said they didn't have anything to eat or anything else. Some people wood go into the woods, or to the mountains, to dig up plants for medicine, but they would do it in secret or at night. If they got caught, they would be accused of being capitalists. Also, people would meet in secret at night to trade things, since this was also capitalistic.

She said the teachers sucked in those days, and when the cultural revolution started, nobody cared about school anymore.

She said a lot of people went to ChuanLian 串联, to unite and go do the work of communism.

She said a lot, but she never reflected on the ideology of any of it. She didn't like not having anything, but she didn't conclude that Communism or Maoism were failed ideologies, or that capitalist democracy was the way to go. Nor did she have much good to say about it.

A woman who works at a mandarin training center where I teach (English), said it was a 灾难 disaster. But she said she was from a wealthy family, and that she didn't like Mao at all. She said her family was destroyed by communism.

What you will be hard pressed to find here, are people who admire Mao because they are socialists or communists.

Feigon says that Chinese people have moved on, while westerners stay fixated on the communist era. He doesn't mention is that there is no free press here, and a lot of older people don't easily talk about it with their children.

He also doesn't mention the fact. That what Chinese people have moved on from, is that thing that Mao was trying to do, but never practiced in his own life: Communism.

You will find people in China who have all kinds of views on everything, much as it is with the rest of the world. I've heard people say they love Bush Jr., they love Hussein, they hate Americans, they love Jesus, they hate Japanese, they study Japanese. But what you don't hear, and what I have tried in vain to find for the last six years, are Chinese socialists/communists who admire Mao as a socialist/communist hero.

This is something easily found in most western countries. And there is no freedom of speech here, so it's fair to argue that the real problem is that people are afraid to speak up. But, if you spend long enough with people, you will here all kinds of illegal talk, like “America should attack China”, “I really want to know more about TianAnMen square, but the government won't let us.” “I think Hu Jintao is a criminal.” “The Communist Party is bullshit.”: and so forth.

I have heard many people here say “I am capitalist” and a few say “I'm a socialist”, but none say “We really have to fight these bosses and mobilize the poor people to strike and seize power” What you do hear, everywhere, from children to t.v. shows, is “I want to be a boss.” and “I want to start my own business.” In fact, I think the frequently expressed desire to have one's own business is just about as high on my Annoying Things I'm Tired of In China as all the business books I see, translated from English and featuring white guys with ties on the covers.

But, as I am tired of having to repeat, there are no socialists/communists here to be found.

The last two things.

How can you represent Mao, by using the sympathetic testimony of four Chinese people? If you don't have contrary views, than you are implying that these people represent the views of The Chinese, and that is the view that most viewers will take away. Never speak for a country, unless your damn sure you know what they think. Otherwise, you cause confusion and make yourself look dishonest.

The other thing is, this movie really made me realize that Mao was born into a upper peasant family, became a student (his tuition paid for by his father), then became a businessman and a principal, then a military leader, then an emperor. But never did he live as a classless citizen, a struggling proletarian, or a worker under the rule of the Comunist Party. He was, in the end, after power.

That is something he has in common with most of history's great leaders. And in this sense, Feigon's defense of Mao is worthy of it's attempt, for it shows that he really was not so different from any other leader, preferring hierarchy over god, country, socialism, and the rest.

BOOK REVIEW: Apologetics instead of Exploration

2008-12-10T00:50:00.000-08:00

I don't know if the authors of The Spiritual Brain are Christians, but their methodology of advancing their ideas is close enough to Creation science. I'm on cd5 now and so far all I have heard are attacks on materialist ideas of the brain; accusations of dogmatism, the angry attacks on heretics by materialists, intolerance and persecution of pure hearted, well intended, scientific explorers of the soul.

The less than amusing feature of this method is that, so far, I have yet to hear any new ideas about the spiritual brain.

In all honesty, I recall feeling stimulated by a few points, but they are buried in my mind by the inundation of anti-materialist science rhetoric.

Actually, I do remember one bit mentioned a couple of chapters ago, Karl Popper said that there is something called 'promisory materialism' and this sounds like a very interesting critique of certain tendencies in science, especially considering Popper's reputation as a skeptic interested in epistemology.

But that's not from the authors of the book, they just employ the quote in the process of showing that atheists and people who explain god through neurological phenomena are, suprise suprise, the real practitioners of faith.

The earliest I can recall hearing this “So you believe in science! Ah hah! You have faith in science!” was from the head of the Christian club at Cerritos High School. Science is a religion! Well, there goes my denial of the Christ's, who is the same substance as god, according to experts, came back to life and ascended to heaven. In actually, my response then is still more than sufficient for me: The concept of god as I it is generally defined is self-contradictory, and it's proponents say as such, thus it has no clear meaning, or way of evaluating it's validity. Therefore, as a metaphysical proposition, it's nonsense.

I'm listening to the book now, and I just heard another tired point: that materialist explanations of god take away right and wrong, and leave only our base desires. A bit after that comes the logical conclusion of scientific explanations, who all we atheists know and love: Pol Pot.

Pol Pot dehumanized his victims, and do you know why? Not because of some analytic interpretation of the workings of his mind. Not because people, on the whole, are equally capable of helping and hurting each other. Of course, the reason is that Pol Pot didn't have a spiritual view of the soul and morality.

Religion, on the other hand, upholds the value of each life, except for when the gods kill us in their wars, or when the Judeo Christian God is offended and floods the planet or tells his star pupil Joshua to kill his disobedient neighbors.

Christianity, whose anti-science apologetics this book resembles, has many strands that claim that man is unworthy of redemption, unworthy of God's forgiveness, but only saved through the grace, the charity, the whimsical forgiveness of God. Why are we unworthy? Because, we disobeyed!

I think the God family needs counseling.

Anyways, this book is still going on about how materialism is wrong. I was really interested in hearing scientific evidence for a non-materialist view of the mind, but apparently these guys have been too busy crouching under the assault of Dennet, Dawkins, Ramachandran, and all the other unscientific adherents of the religion of materialism.

This is why the authors of the Spiritual Brain have, halfway through the book, declined to mention one single testable hypothesis.

It's the same old shit: You guys can't PROVE we are wrong, so therefore... you know, stop being mean.

Meanwhile, the scientifically rigorous advocates of the, apparently scientific content-less Spiritual Brain continue to attack scientists who take the brain as being identical with the mind.

I thought he was going to get to some evidence just now, but he's just going off again on how scientists who claim to have identified neural correlates of consciousness, at various times, have been shown to be wrong, or drawing false conclusions from their experiments.

He's talking about OCD now, and the cingulate, ganglia, and neuronal plasticity. Let's see... I'm guessing something's coming about how the scientists who thought they could fix OCD by identifying the NCC's of OCD failed, and therefore, the default implication is god!

I have recently listened to the audiobooks Unweaving the Rainbow and Ancestor's Tale.

(Now he's arguing for free will......I assume that's what his opponents are denying and what can only be located in the non-material spirit)

Anyways, in the two Dawkins books, he didn't spend his time attacking non-materialist views of biological diversity. On the contrary, he talked about the topics indicated by the title of each book. He also spent a fare amount of time criticizing certain aspects of thinking among scientists. He spends even less time attacking religion.

Of course, there is a book in which Dawkins attacks all religion. That is The God Delusion. Here again, the book is about the title. And, although he does, at times, make strong, declarative statements against religion and it's adherents, he is also reasoned and precise in his description of what he opposes and why he opposes it.

I became an atheist for philosophical, primary epistemological reasons, back when I was into Ayn Rand and Objectivism, so I was always inwardly dismissive of scientists speaking on the issue of God.

It was, for me, what it still is: an issue to be analyzed on the grounds of it's assertions, which are fundamentally and eternally non-empirical. Thus, the whole discussion of religion in conjunction with the realm of science is offensive and shameful, unless they are finally going to say. “We think God is real, this experiment will test it. If the data conclusively holds up in contradiction of our god hypothesis, we will give it up.” Theists don't think this and, insofar as they discuss or revere Science in conjunction with religion, they are nothing but frauds.

But, after hearing Dawkins, I forget where I first heard him, I was impressed by his way of talking and listened to the The God Delusion. I was even more impressed by the lovely, beautiful diction and accuracy with which he discussed everything. As far as the content, he dealt with many accusations against evolution and science by religious people in a way that I hadn't thought of.

I ve listened to hours and hours of anti-evolution, Christian lectures.

(this guy on the book just said something to the effect of In the decade of the brain, it had already been shown that the Mind can significantly influence the Brain!!!! That's fucking great. On one hand, we have an idea that what we experience is actually a phenomena of the brain. On the other hand, we have this guy saying that the brain is not the mind, and he demonstrates that by showing errors of scientists. Oh dear, while I was typing the previous few sentences, he has been showing how much medical treatment of psychological conditions are placebo effects! Mind over matter. That hasn't been working as indiscriminately as our African ancestors must have had faith it would, when they were faced with death, the neanderthals closing off the northern border of the continent, or any of the little shit that we still face every day. Insofar as it has been verified, it has been verified by quantitative measurement, and empirical observations. Once again, it reminds of me Dawkins, when he says that if a headline announcing that scientists had proof of God appeared tomorrow, you can be sure that the vast majority of theologians would be trumpeting it to their flocks, but, otherwise, they will deny the right of science to evaluate religious claims.)

Anyways, listening to all that Christian Anti-evolution, even though I was listening to it out of enjoyment of ideological apologetics of all kinds, started to grow on me, and I began to think Evolution was insignificant. But I had never thought of it as significant anyways. Now I have really begun to see the beauty and intellectual pleasure of contemplating the complexity of the natural world. But how would I have acquired this if I believed that the most important source of understanding of the world is faith, which, is not demonstrable or experienced as anything other than an emotion or feeling?

(he's still on the placebo effect!)

Alright I'm tired of this now. I want to find a text version of this book so I can scan it to see if there are any interesting conjectures about the actual spiritual nature of the brain. These assholes opened the book with a promise to tell me about the brain in conjunction with it's spiritual nature. But, now it seems to be the typical, oh so typical boasts of those who oppose science in the name of defending ideas they have no intention of giving up, and for which they declare the impossibility of reason to deny.

The fucked up thing is that I am really, sincerely interested in God, that was my first topic on this Blog. But I cannot stand to be cheated with the promise of scientific discussion of a spiritual brain when I'm all I'm getting is stale, logically embarrassing, criticisms of various scientists.

If the authors had said that's what they were going to do for half, or all of the book, then I might still be interested, since it is always useful to go over old criticisms of the things that seem correct to me. I have a bunch of new Advanced HSK books in front of me. I shall let them comfort me. There are also Greg Egan's Distress, which has finally dragged me in, and the Mandarin version of The Yellow Lighted Bookshop to fall back on if studying fails me.

books for sale 2

2008-11-27T21:19:00.001-08:00

books for sale

2008-11-27T21:16:00.000-08:00

Ficiton: Bro Taylor on Anti-Christ Arrived.

2008-11-14T04:22:00.000-08:00

Around the time when the radical leftist so called 'free media' in the US was carrying out the farcical debate of whether Hillary or Obama was going to get nominated, i told my brother (a non-believer, and stubborn enough to resist ten years of my witnessing) that if this Obama was elected, the Christians would be saying he was the Antichrist. Anyone who has studied the Scriptures and the Left Behind series like they should be, would have seen it coming a mile away.

So I made myself a google alert for 'obama antichrist' and, sure enough, there were all kinds of links everyday.

Also like I expected, now that he is going to be president, the elitists in the Christian movement have intimidated everyone to back off, lest they intimidate the new leader.

This, plus all the accusations, which are laughed at in the extremist, liberal media, of Obama being a secret this and a secret that, are setting the stage for the greatest hoodwinking the world has ever seen: The ascension of the antichrist as the man in charge of the world's greatest nation.

The problem is that nobody bothered discussing the real 'secret' Obama: The secret Satanist.

I don't want to bore my readers, so I won't go into the copious documentation and evidence of Obama's Satanic affiliation. Do the research, its all there in the public records.

The powers that be in the Satanic Illuminati are going to bring in the next phase of their 'New World Order' as predicted by former president, George Bush.

His son was the one who paved the way for Obama. But something about being around all those Christians rubbed off on Little Bush, who is a fake Christian.

Bush got just a little bit of light, even though he isn't really saved. And that little bit caused him to rebel against the globalist Agenda, by doing things like foregoing restrictions on torture, set forth by the Geneva Accords, (which only hamper moral nations like us, since the terrorists don't give a damn about any accords!.)

This is why Bush Jr. has been so thoroughly vilified in the Zionist/Socialist controlled American Media.

Recently, an even more shocking event has taken place in that same Media that vilified Bush Jr. for his disobedience.

Like it or not, we are all familiar with the Daily Show, a show that as fellow radical lefty and illegal immigration advocate, Geraldo, put it "Makes fun of old woman falling down the stairs."

Well, the boys at the Daily Show had a ball lying and scolding George W. for his occasional honesty.

Now it seems that this "liberal salon" (as Brian Williams called it,) is reaping the reward of supporting Antichrist Obama.

During the special Colbert Report/Daily Show coverage of the presidential elections, two black members of the show openly announced that they were taking control of the show. Now that there supposedly peace loving and bi-racial hero was taking power, they were being rewarded for their support of the great racist.

The two non-black hosts pretended that it was a joke. Unsurprisingly, one of them, Colbert, is a Catholic (probably Opus Dei) and the other is an atheist Jew, married to a Catholic (probably overseeing the two shows for the higher ups in the illuminati.)

Although they tried to play off the hijacking of their propaganda ridden shows, it was all to clear that the too black extremists were not at all joking.

This is all the more evident in the lack of humor in the bits performed by Colbert and Stewart. The funny bits are all being done by Jason Jones, John Oliver and Wyatt Cenak. The first two are white and have no doubt been inspired by Obama's promise to let them stay on the show after the other whites are exiled. The other Wyatt, is black and will be the new host of the Colbert Report, a show which is solely there to take unfair shots at a false conservative, Bill O'reilly. If O'reilly was as much of a conservative as he claimed, he wouldn't support the Papacy and he wouldn't cover up the obvious Illuminati conspiracy going on.

The two soon to be racially cleansed hosts, Colbert and Stewart are not so funny anymore now that their fate is so close and hovering over their godless heads.

The powers that be will be letting the accusations of Obama's well documented Satanism come up pretty soon, but they will be laughed at by the cynical press, brought and paid for by the Anti-Israel self-hating Zionists that control Hollywood and the entire country's media.

Stay tuned. Stay Saved.

Brother Taylor out.

FICTION: OF ALL THEY COULD'VE LEFT US

2008-10-15T05:28:00.000-07:00

First someone would have to find the clue. Under all that dirt in the desert, is one little piece of technology. But that little piece is far from where anyone comes. Nobody comes there, but it wasn't planned to be this way. It's just that nobody happened to set up any residence near the area in the two million years since they went away.

And now, it's far from any inhabited areas in Nevada or California. If anyone found it, and could reverse engineer it, there would surely be at least five or six reasonable scientists who debated that it was a human made object. The creation scientists would use this as an argument for intelligent design, its structure right on the line between organic and inorganic.

That's because the material used to build it closely resembles the behavior and biology of slime moulds. This was because the people who had invented it based it on slime moulds. They lived in a world, much as we do, surrounded by ingenious mechanisms proceeding through history blind to anything but eating fighting reproducing and dying. They were as blind to the world they lived as was the history that had produced them.

But those people were not blind. They saw far clearer than we have, and they saw it a lot sooner.

The reason for this was, in principle, the same reason that the slime mould achieved such novelty. They called it history, we called it evolution.

Their history is mostly the same as ours. Right up until a group of hominids, south coast of Africa, started spending more time in water than their neighbors. They were the victims of psychological warfare. Over a few millenia, their neighbors were producing an ever greater number of individuals who could contort their faces in ways that frightened the hominids living near the beach. These guys were superior swimmers.

Whenever these face contorters would spring out of the forest, screaming and making the scariest of faces, these guys would swim out far enough and wait for their attackers to leave.

Sometimes the face guys would attack at night. Many of the water guys were sleeping, and thus easily killed. But the ones who weren't sleeping and the ones who woke up fast enough fought back. And since it was dark they couldn't see the frightening faces of their enemies. The face guys, being used to their advantage, would be unprepared and were easily killed by the water guys. When morning came around and the water guys would see the dead enemy, they realized that fighting at night was the way to win.

This meant that the individuals who could stay up later, or sleep only in small naps and be ready to wake up faster had a greater chance of reproducing.

So, these two groups reached a little balance for awhile, the face guys became trickier in attacking the water guys, and the water guys became more nocturnal, better fishers, and better swimmers.

But, as the face guys became better at chasing the water guys into deeper and deeper waters, the water guys started dealing with the predators on their other side, mostly sharks and, sometimes, killer whales.

More and more they were sandwiched into shallow waters. They became fatter and fatter in comparison to their freaky faced neighbors. Their females got used to giving birth in the ocean.
They water guys also became stronger, as spending most of their time in the water required more muscle.

This process continued until they lived almost exclusively in the water. Their enemies had gotten much smarter, and much better at articulating their facial muscles. They lived farther from their water dwelling neighbors, now, moving into the grasslands and out of the forest.

NON-FICTION: SUN IN TAURUS, A FRIEND, HITLER, JACK JOHNSON

2008-09-25T07:04:00.000-07:00

I know astrology's bullshit, but just consider the following similarities and see if you can't, at least, see the value it offers us in regards to analyzing personality components.

This old buddy of mine has alot in common with me, though our astrology doesn't have much in common.

We both have chronic paranoia, a tendency to think in terms of deceptive strategies to guarantee our security in relationship with others. We both are highly analytical and prefer directness when dealing with problems. We both have a sense of victimization sustained in childhood which causes us at times to forget that we are now formidable and intimidating, and this in turn causes us to come off as monsters.

But this friend of mine, Jar Jar, has a sun in taurus and a moon in leo. And he always somethings in common with famous taurus's like Hitler, cromwell, saddam, hussein, tony blair, lenin, and marx.

The goals of my life revolve around encompassing the world through understanding, resolving erroneous thinking and theoretical excessiveness, and creating harmonious relationships.

Jar Jar, on the otherhand, is always struggling between creativity and the quest for power.
Like Hitler and lenin, he posesses a highly calculating and austere attitude to his role in society, he sees himself as singled out by destiny for power. He does not openly second guess himself too much, 0r admit weakness. He is personally cynical of ideology, but nonetheless feels an excitement at the sight of uniforms and crowds of humans organized under the same banner, with one mind and one leader. He admires the hegemony of communist china and the soviet union, even if he hasnt ever conscioulsy thought so.

He thinks the key to power over others is the form of the organization, and the proper influencing of the organizations methods.

Like all the aforementioned, he is unlikely to understand or dwell on whats really going on in his psyche, rather, he constantly reinterprets other peoples ideas and ideology into justifications for his own will to power.

Like cromwell and the rest, he values loyalty and therefore sees betrayal everywhere imminent, except when committed by himself.

The other day I saw Tony Blair on the daily Show, and I was reminded of Jar Jar. Particularly, in the way that Blair resisted openly disagreeing with John Stewart, trying instead to charm by being reasonable and calm, while at the same time showing no admission of error or regret, and sneaking in the implication that the invasion of Iraq was justified by the current prescence of terrorists there, which showed that the war on terror was a pan middle east epidemic which we should engage on that scale.

Jar Jar is also constantly worried about sanitation and his own health, like Hitler. Another commonality is a lack of sexuality. It's nice to have a friend who doesn't constantly make dirty comments, not that i have many friends who do. But, beyond that, Jar Jar has never exhibited a typical male obsessions with sex, never showed any interest in porn, never commented on a girls boobs or ass, and never showed any interest in men. In this regards, he reminds me of Morrissey.

Well, this is not comprehensive, but we do see paranoia, interpretation of relationships in terms of strategic plays for power, a lack of self awareness, a disinclination toward regret and expression of apology, and a single will and determination to achieve organizational power.

NON-FICTION: COMMENTARIES ON TWO EXCERPTS ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

2008-09-21T05:24:00.000-07:00

Nietzsche's excerpt: The greatest weight. What, if some day or night a demon were to steal you in your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing more new in it, 'Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?"

This is a great case for the futility of time machines. Further, if i were to know this recurrence but have no chance to alter, thus becoming a ghost in my own conscious, that would be both trippy and frustrating.

As for an actual corollary to this eternal recurrence, I have been present to it many times. Feeling my body begin to hit someone, feeling my thoughts work themselves up into provoking an argument, feeling myself go back on my prohibition of cigarettes and food.

At this times I am a consciousness trapped in a time loop, and at times I do feel apart from myself, alienated. I don't think this is existential however, but neurological. I have endured sufficient trauma to give my consciousness an reason to distant itself from its own process and those of my body.

And to regard the eternal recurrences of history as inevitable would be just as justified as to regard the personal type as inevitable, and for all the wars and massacres that are happening even now as 'we' think of 'ourselves' as beyond our primitive past, and for all the resignation that the brilliant and the ignorant both throw up at the disgusting things that permeate our societies, I can only reply with the sort of thing I often tell myself and my wife: It's good to know our problems and complain about them when we need to alleviate pressure, but if we are to acknowledge that it is in fact a problem, we must eventually come to the question of what to do about it.

I sometimes get the feeling that Nietzsche liked the excuse provided, by the awesome tragedy he created out of his brilliant words and ideas, not to deal with the petty problems of his common tragedies, such as poor health, rejection and shame.

For these he would have had to write a self help book, without any oppurtunity to describe things as tragic, fearsome, awesome, trembling, etc. You know Nietzsche, I too live in the land of high plateaus and caves, but, at the same time, somehow, and with fearful inexplicability, i live in a little apartment which I cannot organize, and in a body that is not tall enough, and has surplus stores of fat. I also have often feared my sexual and romantic inadequacy. I also have suffered migraines and have asthma. These are problems that do not go away with the comprehension of idolatry, the dawning of psychological genealogies, or getting at the heart of rationalism. Is it left to the future man, the being free of the chains put upon him by the apollonian moralists, to solve the very last of our problems, and has the overcoming of man in the spirit not yet surpassed the utility of cardio vascular exercise and a lesbians tips on oral sex? Whoa onto me.

Hayden White's Excerpt:
In my view, a historiographical style represents a particular combination of modes of emplotment, argument, and idelogical implication. [He then goes to describe that the elements of these categories have exclusive bondings and are imcompatible with other sets Like Romantic Mode of Emplotment implies the Formist mode of argument, and the Anarchist mode of idelogical implementation.

I like this categorical, abstract mode of theorizing, because I too have employed it. But, I think his mode of exclusion leads to an embarassing mode of consequence.

Another thing that is interesting in White's chart is that he associates comic, with organicist, and conservative. The organicist and conservative we can see in conservatives of the edmund burke or hayek variety. As for the comic, we can see it's accuracy when contrasted with what he posits for liberal, that is, contextualist and satirical. The four mode of emplotments are romantic, tragic, comic and satirical.

As a test of this, lets look at shows that are only incidentally historical.

What are the best expamples of satire in America? Real Americans know that they are the daily show, the Colbert Report, the Simpsons, and South Park.

South Park is more Libertarian, but tries to be apolitical. The Daily show and colbert report are liberal, and the Simpsons.

But why no good Conservative satire? I guess its because White's conception of Historical styel holds true for t.v. Did you see the Fox news parody of the Daily show, the half hour news hour or something, it was so sad. It made me feel shame, even though I'm an anarchist.

As for historical style, lets look at some people I'm familiar with: Vidal, Zinn, and Bakunin. Zinn and Bakunin are anarchists. Zinn I can see as Romantic, as White maintains is implied by the Anarchist Mode of Ideological Impication. Bakunin, though, seems more tragic, at least in God and the State. He doesnt spend a lot of time building dreams, and he employs a dialectical or Hegelian style of reasoning. Vidal is a liberal, and, at the same time, a Conservative. But he is rather formist in his Mode of Argument, constantly referencing the inconsistency of American history with it's original principles, but he's also supposed to be socialist. His mode of emplotment, in his historical novels, is comic, if a little satirical.

Well, the more I think about these categories, the more interesting they are to me, as possibilities of actual tendencies of correlation. But as for the general necessary combination of these forms, you will find that many will use whatever mode of emplotment they can to advocate their cause. It's often called branding or marketing today. And it is not outside historical narrative.

I have to say though that, while most contemporary anarchists are overly romantic, they are less likely to be romantic about anarchist history, and there approach is definitely organic. I think we will find that as anarchists develop more stable approaches to history, they will and (and do) find the formist mode of argument less compelling.

NON-FICTION: FOUNDING FATHERS AND BENEFIT OF "NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TWO PARTIES"

2008-09-18T22:03:00.000-07:00

I was listening to a series of lectures on American party history put out by what might be becoming the largest provider of secondary education, thanks to public spirited websites like BTjunkie and mininova: The Teaching Company.

The thing that caught my attention was a discussion of the problems of factions in the plans and thinking of the founding fathers. I remembered hearing about this in reading standard us history and gore vidal. But i hadn't thought of the fact that the constant complaint of third party, non-mainstream and many other Americans is that the two parties accentuate their differences but end up advocating equivalent systems of government.

From the point of the view of some of the founding fathers, this is exactly the thing we want.

When we look at the understanding of Rome and Greece that Europeans have formed in recent centuries, we see that factions are quite dangerous to Republics. They forfeit and oppose the general interests of liberty and the good of the citizen in favor of power struggles with other cliques.

On the other hand, Obama and Mccain need to get a majority of voters to accept them, and, more importantly, they need a broad coalition of support from industry and all levels of government. Thus, they cannot alienate themselves by advocating ideas or proposals which are too extreme, or of interest to small cliques (unless those cliques make up for their lack of people with a surplus of dollars.)

So, the two party system that must use individuals with more ideologically consistent strains of political nonsense to mask their fundamental kinship as massive organizations of control, or stewardship, as Bakunin might say, is actually close to what some of our founding fathers had in mind.

Perhaps the main difference would be that some of them, like Jefferson and Clinton, presumed to dissaprove of the massive, plutocratic Empire that the United States has become.

But, then, I like the idea that Hamilton was the plebeian in fact, and Jefferson the plebeian in theory, and both men's love of their opposites led to their ideologies.

In line with this reasoning, perhaps Obama will outlaw interracial mingling and successfully reshape the middle east into secular democracies through bomb therapy.

NON-FICTION: AN ALTERNATIVE TO THE 'FUNDAMENTAL CONSTITUENT' NOTION OF THE UNIVERSE

2008-09-04T23:12:00.002-07:00

What if the universe is like a two headed cone, with disparate phenomena on the micro and macro scale and cohesion and uniformity mainly at some middle point?

Humans are up in the macro, and, perhaps the particle zoo is down in the micro.

How has the standard model, or string theory, escaped the infinite regress?

NON-FICTION: IS BIG AN ILLUSION?

2008-09-04T22:13:00.000-07:00

Why humans see solidity

According to the contemporary scientific consensus, we see solidity because our eyes have evolved among organisms of a certain size, a range between whales and fleas.

I also think it is relevant to consider the size of the composite organisms and molecules that make up our sensory organism.

Could a complex nervous system have evolved on a sub-cellular scale?

What we 'really' see?

It's an old oddity by now that what we see as solid is 'actually' just the aggregate effect of billions of atoms whose fields are in contact with each other.

Everything you are looking at now, these words, are just aggregates of molecules that cannot be said to be physically touching.

The new age cliche about how everything is 'really just' energy is based on this idea. The difference is that the new age conception uses the outdated conception of energy, which existed contrast to solidity, which is outmoded by modern physics. So, to say that everything is energy means that the solidity we normally perceive is also energy, and therefore not so permeable and mutable as the new age wish-fulfillment conception would have it.

But the energy that comprises everything is said to be comprised of still smaller, ultimately uniform constituents. So that, according to the general idea of strings, the universe proceeds from tiny uniformity to larger and larger disparity.

So, what we perceive as objects are actually aggregations of molecules, and those molecules are composed of elements, and those elements are 'really' atoms, and those atoms are really all kinds of different sub-atomic particle, and those particles are really just strings, than we are really dealing with an ultimate, irreducible reality. Imagine having these strings, and they are somehow observable by super super imaging devices, and we can render them as solid-like objects, but we can't divide them, can't identify them as composed of different sections.

That is incomprehensible. Every thing is divisible, every thing science has ever verified as existing is divisible. Can you imagine these little rings or strings being observable but not having a top or bottom? If they had a top or bottom, or left side or right side, than we could break them up, if only analytically, and it would therefore be a composite entity.

As a composite entity, we would then have to break it down to it's constituent parts, and what would they be?

The problem seems to be with the very phenomena of 'object.'

Anytime we can perceive an object, we can then cut it up, again, even if only analytically.

NON-FICTION: MCDONALDS ON THE ROAD TO ANARCHISM

2008-08-26T21:15:00.000-07:00

One might tell Alexander, Patton, Sunzi, and the CIA, Mcdonald's conquers too. They conquer by enticing people, meeting their needs and shaping their needs through propaganda/marketing.

The phenomena of a fast food company achieving such global eminence is not at all extraordinary, but one might compare it to the East India trading company or the merchants of the dutch empire. Domination is still tied in with nationalism and military power, but today, everywhere, those in power are ever more in the thrall of public opinion.

Very few rulers can claim divine right or succession. Everyone, especially the dictators and butcherers claim the betterment of the people, the racial, national or social interest. (the big exception is in sharia based countries)

The present trend of the world, or one trend, is to attain power based on the will of the people. Here in Red Communist China, the government also placates the public through fear and impressing everyone with their mighty economic achievemnts and glorious spectacles, like the the three gorges dam and the olympics.

We can say that the state of freedom, in asia, europe, america and south america, is all jacked up because there is no real democracy and people are still dominated inevitably by the twin tyrannies of state and market.

Bakunin said, long ago, that though Europe was progressing to an era of republics instead of monarchies, the people would be no less enslaved, for they would now be children guided along by the enlightened supervision of our parliamentarian leaders. If we replace the 'republics' with the modern usage 'democracies' we can see the relevance.

Most people in democracies and people considering democracies see government as a sstem of management, like a company you hire to take care of your landscaping.

This is not the exclusive content of the term as it is thought of now. There is still sufficient admixture of the nasty ideas of the government as an extension of the nation, but these are preexisting notions. What is new is the idea of government as manager, without any justification superseding it's responsibility of carrying out the betterment and protection of the people.

Justification of rule through the doctrine of will of the people is not too far the good of the commonwealth. The doctrine of the kin's sovereignty being necessary for the good of the realm or commonwealth was key in undermining the kings dvine right and divine succession.

Just as the good of the people superseded the divine status of kingship, so too might the management of the nation supersede the will of the people, and the will of the people supersede the management of the nation.

Contrasting countries like America, China, Burma, the case can be made for efficient management versus explicit democracy. Most people, at the current stage of historical development, can be satisfied with an adequate income, a chance for progression of social status, a chance to better their kids, and a chance watch tv and get online

Any dictator could get a long way on this basis. The problem is that most dictators cant do this, because to make a lot of people work together, you need at least the illusion of consent.

Now that we exist in a attitude that emphasizes the role of the state as manager on behalf of the people, adn expression of the will of the people, we can perhaps see that progress has been made in many countries.

For China, the end of the Qing Dynasty could have brought about a democratic, rule of law society, or a succession of petty militaristic dictatorships. Now we have a party dictatorship that has tried to use stability and economic growth to placate the masses. And, to a great extent its working. But the point is that they base their will on deomocracy, appeal to the masses, not the landed class, no the wealthy, but the popular sentiment and the common people.

This is unprecedented in Chinese History. Instead of complaining of the fact that real freedom has not arrived here, we should not the significance of the fact that now we have entered a period where democracy is the standard.

Mcdonalds depends on placating and manipulating its masses, so do the governments of most advanced nations.

For those of us enamored of a non-authoritarian future, where we can run things without starvation, coercion, acontextual authority, and mistrust, we might see this as a potentially positive change.

In the argument for greater cooperation and consent based interaction, the will of the people is much better point from which to start to justify anarchism than the spirit of the nation or the divine right of kings as granted by Adam.

Slippery slope arguments are not logically compelling, not because they are impossible, but because they are not inevitable.

Using pot is not likely to lead to other drugs. I haven't seen it do that to many people.

But, if you wanted a slippery slope, if you were trying to get someone hooked on heroin, than you might try a lot of things, and getting them high might be a good start.

So too if you want to make a fascist state, you might scare people with terrorism and then keep things getting freakier and freakier. But, this might also make people more interested in diplomacy and protecting freedom, and it might make them dislike your anti terrorist agenda.

But, if we want to promote freedom, we can point to the effectiveness in corporations and governments that have tailored their pitch to the masses and not just to some abstract authority (god race) and argue that this shows a greater expansions of the doctrine of consent.
If we see this as an historical trend, it may be a good sign.

NON-FICTION: BECOMING NON-HUMAN AND THE END OF MAN

2008-08-26T20:28:00.001-07:00

So often visions of heaven, or technological marvels envisioned by scifi, are just extensions of existing human properties into a larger function. Like, telepathy, peace, AI, immortality, teleportation and instant matter generators.

But what doe this really do to change who we are? It just gives us greater fulfillment of our passions and desires.

An interesting question is how do we assess the choice to do away with these values or desires from a perspective that assumes them? How do we do away with love, like altering a brain's production of neurotransmitter.

An easier decision is the decision to tinker with our minds and bodies to accentuate certain values over others, like alter our aggressive behavior so that we no longer attain such a disproportionate pleasure from joint male aggression against other males. This is an easy decision insofar as it favors values we already have and just lets some values win out against others.

What if we decided to change our brains, so that they cared not about sex, not about social interaction, not about learning, not about violence, but only about something weird like maximizing the ant population. How would we then decide from that point to alter our brains back to the original state or to alter it in still other ways.

Maybe Christians should pay more attention to neuroscience and research regarding neurotransmitter behavior. That way they can get started on making the perfect christian mind, and even better,the mind of the Christian in heaven. Th could make similar minds for animals, so a lion and lamb can lay together, and carnivores never kill.

Even better would be artificial insemination and taking the lust function of the brain, replacing it with an ecstatic sens of worship.

NON-FICTION: 2 FUTURE USES OF PLANT CELLS.

2008-08-26T20:08:00.000-07:00

Plant cells seem better at making houses than animal cells. Especially wood.

TREE SPACESHIP
Picture a oval tree surrounded by a transparent or partially transparent outer oval. The outer oval is made of some sort of plastic polymer and maybe blocks out certain radiation, maybe has solar power cells. The inner oval of the tree encloses a living space for humans. On the outside of the tree, leaves and flowers blossom, on the inside, the root system is fed with nutrients, each root is held in a tube where the appropriate nutrients are fed to it.

This particular tree we have engineered into a spaceship is a fruit bearing tree. The sugar it produces can be synthesized into all manner of foods, through processes that imitate cow or other herbivore digestion (Hopefully in machines and not biological semi-machines, semi-organs)

Other nutrients can be obtained from photosynthetic, electron capturing processes. (the attainment of vitamins and minerals is the weak part here)

Anyways, there might be something about plant cells that make them a good self sustaining building material. There is the problem of density of cells, but i think the basic is useful as a thought experiment. In plant cells, we have an energy producing, self-healing building material.

EMBEDDING DATA IN PLANT CELLS
Tear a leaf up and the cells are still intact, eat a leaf and you expel it with the cells intact (or so I've heard) then imagine if you had all the daily shows, ttc lectures, and pron you've downloaded through bit torrent saved on a leaf.

If the if the constituents of the plant cell could be altered in some slight way so as to form a combinatorial system (binary, trinary, so on.) than we could save 'bits' into plant cells, into the cell walls.

So, get to work on that. I want to give my wife a trip to the moon. I know she'll wine at first, and say, why the hell do i care about that boring shit, but once we escape the atmosphere, she'll be in awe.

NON-FICTION: STEREOTYPICAL UIGHUR ACCENT BECOMES STEREOTYPICAL FOREIGNER ACCENT

2008-08-26T03:01:00.000-07:00

Imagine if you were a Chinese or Asian looking person going to teach a bunch of kids that had never met an Asian looking person. And when they saw you, they said "Hey Meestah Ching Chona sayonara, why's a you no bring a the chop suey?" and then, you asked them in perfect English "What are you supposed to be imitating?" and they said "Oh this is how you guys talk. I learned it from listening to you all."

That's kind of like what I've been experiencing in the last two or three months. I'm a white American teaching English in Shanghai

Imagine again for me, if you would, that instead of being an Asian looking guy, you're a black guy teaching Hispanic and white kids who don't know any blacks or Asians. Then you say "Why are you guys mocking me in some other groups stereotypical accent? Don't you watch t.v.? Can't you say something like "Damn dawg, I ain't fonna trip on dat shit y'all."
.

And the kids answer back "This is how you talk. We learned it from listening to you." And no matter who you ask, everyone says something along the lines of "We learned it from you." It's like some creepy phrase from the Twilight Zone that the little girl doll keeps repeating as the out of work salesman goes crazy in his house. "We learned it from you. We learned it from you."

That's closer to what I'm experiencing. But it's not just mockery. Some Chinese, around here, seem to have mysteriously developed a stereotypical 'foreigner' accent based on an ethnicity which is supposed to be Chinese.

That ethnicity is Uyghur. I admit that I made fun of Uyghurs, and mimicked the stereotypical accent, like 我没有偷东西。

But, then, a couple months ago, I finished a class at the Pudong campus and i went into the little break/testing area to get my stuff. I saw a tall Han guy standing in the little path from the break/testing area to the door. He asked me where I'm from and we started into the basic meet a foreigner who speaks Chinese conversation: How long you been studying? Where you From? Chinese is hard to learn, right? Do you eat Chinese food?

But the thing that made me nervous this time was that the guy had a very strong Uyghur accent.

Now, you never see a Uyghur in a regular place in China. I mean, I assume that's true for everywhere but Xinjiang. You usually only see them in a Uyghur restaraunt, selling kababs, selling hash, or walking around in packs picking pockets. I live near a mosque, on Yuanshen road, and you also see Uyghurs around for Friday prayers.

So, I was thinking that this Han looking Uyghur had come in to our little campus to talk to me. Maybe he was breaking through the cultural barrier and trying to act like a regular person, like a Han.

Or maybe he was playing a new angle on stealing shit, maybe now Uyghur thiefs were gonna start dressing up like regular Han middle class and going into offices and training centers to steal stuff.

I was thinking I should be open and not just nervous about this guy. If he was reaching out, trying to show he was a person too and not just a member of the underclass in the Han hegemony. Or maybe he was here to tell me, a foreigner, of political injustices in Xinjiang, or human rights violations here in Shanghai.

But he did look Han. So after he left I asked the receptionists and other Chinese co-workers if a Uyghur had just come in. They said no.

I realized that the guy who had just been speaking Mandarin to me in that stereotypical Uyghur accent.

Now, there are of course, Han people in Xinjiang and the surrounding areas. The accent they have when speaking their dialects or when speaking Mandarin is not the same. The accent of the Uyghur's speaking Mandarin comes from their own also called Uyghur.

Later on, a friend of my wife, a Shanghainese girl, started speaking Mandarin to me with this accent.

My wife told me it was her friend's attempt at imitating a foreign accent.

Now, as for imitating the accent of an American or a Brit, all you gotta do is imitate like you would normally do in whatever your first language is, but speak Mandarin instead.

I can do this with my own Accent. I can hear it sometimes. And I can use a very pronounced, emphatic accent of Mandarin to sound like a student.

This Uyghur accent does not sound like an American one at all. the only thing it has in common is the absence of tone variation, a trait shared by the majority of languages with English.

But you can hear people's accent in Mandarin just like every other language. I can imitate a Shanghai accent, Bejing accent, Cantonese accent and Hanzhong accent when speaking Mandarin. There are worlds of subtle differents between different accents.

So, the mystery is how this Uyghur accent became the dominant stereotypical accent of the foreigner speaking Mandarin. Has it been like this before and I just somehow didn't notice? Is it only in Shanghai or spread throughout China? Where did it start? How flawless does one's Mandarin pronunciation have to be before one is immune from mockery? How do you get over the embarrassment of having dinner with friends who think its cool or polite to speak Mandarin to you with a Uyghur accent?