Fireworks and Hurricanes

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Into and out of training

Well, yesterday after work I finally rode my new bike to the train and then from the train back to the house.  I don’t know if it’s because it’s a single gear bike or because of the smaller tires or both, or if some other factors might be involved, but it was a lot of work to ride compared to my other bike.  It’s just five miles from the train station to the house where I live, but I had to get off and walk the bike for a while twice.

Still, it was doable.  This morning, however, I decided to take a slower mode and I walked to the train.  It certainly takes quite a bit longer to walk five miles than to bike, but at least I’m not completely wiped out.  Also, I don’t think I have any new blisters, which is always preferable to the alternative.  I also don’t have any old blisters, just to be clear.  I do have a slight cut on my right outer heel near the Achilles tendon, but I have that nicely protected with one of those big fat Band-Aids.

I love those big fat Band-Aids.

Anyway, I have a slight further walk when I get to my destination, but it’s only about three-quarters of a mile.  Also, I will rest on the train for a while.  And it will be good to have already gotten in some relatively serious exercise at the beginning of the day.  The figurative momentum will probably not last for long, but at least I have a bit for the moment.

I tried very hard to force myself to do something yesterday, so I got out my office guitar and strummed and sang Nothing Compares 2 U , recording it with two different devices, then merged them into a single Audacity file (though I have not merged the tracks, just aligned them to play simultaneously).  I had to do a lot of background noise reduction, and that made the sound a little dead, but I can try to tweak it a bit.  If it becomes anything worth hearing, I may share it here.

I used to have a pretty decent USB condenser mic, and sound recording was better with that, but I threw it away when we were getting ready to move office a while back.  I hadn’t used it in a long time, and also, I more than half intended to die around that time, so I didn’t see the point in keeping it.  I threw away some other things then, and “gave” my black Strat to my boss, and really was not excited about keeping much of anything.  It just goes to show you, I guess‒though I’m not sure what it just goes to show.

***

I’m on the train now.  As I suspected would be the case, this car is quite chilly, but I brought a second shirt to put on over the sweaty one (and I have done so) so I don’t get too cold.  We’re currently sitting at the station while, apparently, they deal with an “unruly passenger”.

I don’t blame this on the fact that I’m on a later train than usual‒that would be ridiculous.  It’s the sort of thing that can happen at any time, given how utterly pathetic so many humans are.  Honestly, I wish that I (or someone) had the power Michael had in Stranger in a Strange Land, just to send people sideways in spacetime, or whatever he did, so we could just make such unruly passengers go away if they refused to stop being unruly and/or to exit the train.  Maybe that might seem a bit extreme, but it was, according to the book, a painless cessation of existence.

***

Okay, well…now we just got started moving and suddenly the train stopped and the lights and everything all went out.  I wonder if the unruly passenger had some supernatural powers that he (I consider a male to be more likely to be unruly in such cases) used to get his vengeance.  I know, that’s not what happened.  But at least it would be more interesting that this merely being a case of incompetent maintenance of equipment.

***

And the train is dead, and the following train is now stuck on the tracks approaching the station, so I’m getting an Uber to work.  It was that or go back to the house, but honestly, I’m no more comfortable there than at the office.  I might as well be productive.  At least I’m not stuck, like the people on the following train.

If I were inclined toward magical thinking, I might imagine that “the universe is sending me a message not to walk to the train in the morning” but that is, of course, stupid.  The only message the universe is sending (and it’s by no means sending that message to me specifically) is that sometimes things break down, largely because of the second law of thermodynamics, and they don’t do so with regards to anyone’s convenience.  

To be fair, though, my Uber driver was a very lovely and pleasant lady, and though traffic was pretty bad, when we were getting off the freeway, I saw a rainbow.  So there are pleasant surprises as well.

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  I know this has probably been terribly boring, even though there is misfortune involved.  I guess that’s necessary but not sufficient to make for a gripping tale.

I hope you all (or y’all if you prefer) are having a more convenient day so far than I am, and that you continue to do so.

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“Wednesday morning, papers didn’t come.  Thursday night, your stockings needed mending*.”

Well, it’s Wednesday, and I’m feeling a bit better than I have so far this week.  Perhaps I really did have a virus of some type that my body has been fighting.  If so, it triggered/worsened symptoms of already existing pathologies in my body—in my back and hips and shoulders and other joints, and so on—in addition to making me feel achy and feverish, though without the actual fever.

I can’t really blame my psychopathology on a virus, unless it’s some form of mental virus**, or more likely some lifelong accumulation thereof.  Such “viruses” are rarely acute and self-limited, though they could be, I suppose.  What, after all, is a momentary fad or brief obsession, perhaps with a song, or the spread of a particularly funny new joke, that goes away before long?

I don’t really think my mental issues are primarily caused by acute memetic infection, if you will.  They started a long time ago.  In any case, my brain is apparently of an atypical type, at least based on my autism diagnosis, and that creates a substrate on which supervening inputs can become prone to cause certain forms of pathology.  Depression and anxiety are two of those things that are very common in those with ASD—significantly more so than in the general population***.  The statistics on autism indicate that suicidal ideation and attempted and successful**** suicide are much more common in people with ASD than in so-called neurotypicals.

I often think of depression—at least in some of its forms—as a sort of weather-pattern in the mind that becomes self-sustaining in the right circumstances, rather like a hurricane or other massive storm system.  One doesn’t find hurricanes in environments that are not conducive to them—Siberia and the like, for instance—but in minds that are the metaphorical equivalent of the tropics, such mental storm systems may be much more common, and sometimes very destructive.

Who knows, maybe ECT treatment for severe and recalcitrant depression is something akin to the (ill-advised) notion of dropping large nukes in the middle of a hurricane to disrupt its pattern.  If hurricanes occasionally had the tendency to obliterate all or even most life on Earth, we might be willing to try something as extreme as dropping nuclear weapons in a developing tropical storm system to disrupt it, if we could find no other solution.

I wonder if even the large storm cells that occur over places like the great plains of North America could be considered something like episodes of depression (the fact that some weather systems are called “depressions” relates to the barometric pressure, and should not be construed as in any way related to psychiatric depression, other than etymologically).  To what would a “super cell” that produces massive tornados be analogous?

Of course, there need be no actual analogy, because the weather concept is a metaphor, really.  But it is not completely a metaphor, so I don’t think it’s too frivolous to push the notion further in order to trigger some thoughts.  Complex systems like the brain and the weather, with internal feedbacks and feedforwards and “feedsidewayses” that can lead to vicious and/or virtuous cycles can have actual attributes in common if looked at in the right way.

It’s a bit akin to how the motion of a pendulum and the oscillation of a circuit and the “probability waves” of quantum mechanics can be described by very similar mathematics.  Also, the relations between pressure, flow, and friction in fluid dynamics with voltage, current, and resistance in electric circuits are almost spookily alike.

This probably demonstrates something rather fundamental in the nature of reality.  Perhaps it’s distantly related to the fact that geometry seems to have a deeper influence on the workings of reality than one might at first think, as evidenced by the ubiquity of Pythagorean relations and the appearance of Pi (π) in often surprising places.

This is all speculative stuff, and I’m not being very rigorous in my thoughts, though I’m trying not to be too frivolous.  But I think this is a good place to wrap up this post for today.  I hope you all are doing well and that you continue to do well, and even better, that you improve at least a little bit, in at least some way, every day.  You might as well.

*Has anyone reading ever actually mended their stockings (or darned their socks, as in another Beatles song, Eleanor Rigby)?  I have mended a sock at least once in my life, and probably more than once, but nowadays socks are so readily available that I tend just to throw them away when a hole develops.  I guess that’s a testament to how “spoiled” we are in the modern world.  Incidentally, I added the Thursday part of Lady Madonna to this quote-based title because I realized that I’m never likely to use it on an actual Thursday blog post, because for those I use mutated quotes from Shakespeare.

**In his classic book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” as a replicator of the mind, and it has become a useful scientific term, in addition to being a slightly imprecise shorthand for usually humorous pictures of various kinds shared online.  Such memes can become highly potent self-replicators in various senses, and they can combine in ways that make them more prone to spread, in “meme-plexes” of various kinds.  Some are useful for the organism, and so could be considered beneficial viruses (memetic rather than genetic) while others can become terribly destructive, at least in certain circumstances.  Certainly the mind-virus(es) associated with the Jim Jones cult was/were lethal to most of those who were infected.  Likewise with the Heaven’s Gate viruses.  Some of such comparisons can be a bit glib, but others are robust and can be subject to rigorous study.

***I’m not referring to a prison-based “general population”, though at times the metaphor of modern society as a prison is truly warranted, especially for those of us with atypical brains.

****There are times when I would think of a completed suicide as indeed a thoroughgoing success, i.e., a positive thing overall, but here I’m just using the term “successful” to mean “having completed what was intended, as intended”.

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What shall we do now?

Well, it’s Wednesday now, and since I have no appointments for X-rays or anything similar, I am heading on in to the office.  It’s continued to be a hectic time, and today is supposed to be the day on which we finally begin to do business in the new office, though many things have been moved during the day over the last few days.  I would have thought that the uprooting and shifting would have made working more difficult, but we’ve had very big days, especially yesterday.

It’s good I guess, but it’s annoying, because it means I’m very stressed out by more than one thing.

I’m still quite beat, by which I mean I’m so very tired and worn down and exhausted.  I told the boss yesterday that this last week plus had been one of the top five hardest weeks of my life‒and I pointed out the various other horrible weeks I’ve had so I could try to put it in perspective for him‒but I really don’t think he quite got the point.

I think my inability to convey how I feel, or the tendency for it not to show, as well as my own inherent tendency toward a kind of nihilistic stoicism, means that people don’t really know or at least don’t understand when I’m feeling truly horrible.  I’ve said before that this is why the line from Pink Floyd’s Brain Damage resonates with me so much:  “And if the cloudbursts thunder in your ear, you shout and no one seems to hear…”

I don’t even feel I’m at some breaking point anymore; I think I’m already broken, but I’m hobbling along because of inertia, holding the remnants of me together with paperclips and twine and baling wire.

Anyway, I’m exhausted.  I wish I could get back into writing or drawing or creating songs and doing music or studying more science and math, but though I have had passion for all those things at various times, there is only so much one can do to produce creative things in a vacuum, with nearly no feedback or appreciation, before one gives up.

Van Gogh had a similar situation, I guess (not that I am comparing my ability with his) in that he produced many brilliant works of art, but only one was bought by anyone in his lifetime and no one but his sibling appreciated his ability.  And, of course, finally, he shot himself in the torso and died from the wound not long after.  I can sympathize very much, even with his choice to shoot himself in a way that would not be immediately lethal.  It’s both a fear thing‒a lethal shot is scary to do‒and a form of self-punishment and self-hatred‒one doesn’t feel that one deserves an easy death.

I don’t know what I, myself, am going to do.  I’m just too exhausted from my current situation, and from the feeling that I need to use the bathroom 24 hours a day.

Okay, well, that’s enough for today.  I’m very tired, as I said, and it’s only early morning.  But, of course, my sleep is even worse than usual because of the whole bathroom urgency and flank pain thing.  Ah, whataya gonna do?

I hop that what you will do is have a good day.

***

Addendum:  Well, I’m at the office, and even though the Wi-Fi was supposed to be still active this morning in the office, it seems the movers, such as they are, took the router over with them.  My phone’s mobile hotspot function doesn’t get good enough reception here, and so far the public Xfinity Wi-Fi doesn’t seem to have any ability to do adequate data, so I cannot get anything done at the office.

Why did I bother to come in?  Well, of course, that was largely because I couldn’t sleep and there was no air conditioning at the house, but I also like to get a head start on office stuff.  I’ve even finished the last of the series’ of “light novels” with which I was trying to distract myself, so I can’t even count on any reading to help me.

I apparently will not have a closed area in the new office where I will be able to be at least partly cut off from the noise and all.  I wish I had just stayed at the house today, and maybe never left again.  I don’t even have a guitar here anymore, because I gave away my black Strat.  That action was one of those “gesture” things, to be honest, and I was hoping someone would pick up on the point of it, but either they didn’t recognize it, or‒more likely‒they don’t really much care.

I shouldn’t be surprised.  There are very few people for whom it would actually matter if I die.

I’ve finally been able to get the Xfinity thing working a bit, so I should be able to post this.  After that, I don’t know.  There’s just too much for me to deal with right now.  I wish I could just go to sleep and stay that way.  I hate this life.

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New week, still weak

It’s Monday, and although I am not particularly happy to be starting a new work week, I am definitely glad that last week is over.  Last week was a very bad week indeed.  At a first estimate (and a second one as well) last week was among the five hardest weeks of my life.  And that includes the week of my open-heart surgery when I was 18 (1 week after which I went back to start my second year at university) and the week of my back surgery, and the week of my divorce and of my arrest and all that crap.  I’ve also been in residency, during one November of which I had worked 19 days without break, had a day off, then worked another seven or eight days.  I had one on-call time in the ICU when I literally did not sit down for about 30 hours.  I am not exaggerating.

There was also the week when I was in university and, thanks to some very serious issues between my then-fiancée and my parents, my parents cut me off from support for room and board (not just for a week‒we didn’t speak for about 8 years).  I was on a full scholarship, but I had to scramble to be able to pay for housing and food and books and so on.  That was a hell of a thing.  We got past it eventually, but it was pretty rough 

Anyway, my point is, I’ve been through some shit in my life, but last week, between the pain and the stress of moving, and the horrible rest (even for me), and the more pain, and the schedule that was incoherent for the move at work, and the unexpected (by me) work this weekend and so on, was one of the most difficult and unpleasant weeks I’ve known, both objectively and subjectively.  It had a huge silver lining, of course, in the person of Ezra, my youngest, and I cannot easily exaggerate how wonderful that was.  If not for Ezra, last week might have been the hardest week of my life.  I am, after all, older and much less healthy (especially mentally) than I was when dealing with some of my earlier issues.

It’s probably stupid to try to rank or categorize such life events.  After all, the weighting I give now is colored by my current state of mind, and of course, there are many axes* along which one can measure the “difficulty” of a week, and criteria by which one may judge them at any given time.  Reality isn’t even linear, let alone binary.

My point is, last week was one fucking rough week, and in addition to my physical stress, I came very close to a full-on mental breakdown.  And it’s not as though I have fully recovered; I’ve had all of 1 day of comparative rest, and now I’m heading back to battle.  It’s a mark of how physically exhausted I am that I was able to nap for about two hours straight yesterday afternoon.  But as you may know, I often start off on Monday mornings with relative energy, even sometimes with slightly ambitious plans, but by the end of the first day of the week, I am often already completely wiped out.

I’m certainly not starting this week from a place of enthusiasm and energy, even relatively speaking, really.  So I guess I’ll see how it goes.  It would be absurd, magical thinking to expect that I’ll feel better at the end of the day because I’m starting the morning from a relative low, since that would be a sort of “opposite” pattern.  It would be nice if things worked that way, but as far as I can tell, they don’t.

I hope all of you had a good weekend, and I thank you for putting up with my antics, or whatever you might want to call them.  It’s greatly appreciated.

*By which I mean, the axes of a Cartesian style graph, e.g., the x-axis, the y-axis, not as in “more than one sharp, wedge-based tool such as are used for chopping wood”.

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Therefore the Moon, the governess of blogs, pale in her anger washes all the air

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the first of May*, the beginning of yet another stupid month.  They just keep coming, on and on and on, so irritatingly relentless that I find myself wishing for the elimination of the Moon and the destabilization of the Earth’s rotation and orbit just to break the tedium.

I know that would inconvenience a great many other people, though, so I’m not going to try to make it happen.  To be fair, it would be much “easier” to alter the Earth’s rotation than to shift the Moon.  A decent-sized asteroid collision at the right angle could alter both the rate of Earth’s rotation and its angle to the ecliptic.

Of course, such an impact would have devastating consequences for almost everything and everyone on the planet’s surface.  So that’s a win-win scenario!

I’m kidding.  But I often fantasize about wiping out all life as we know it, because none of it is truly benign and it’s all futile and will always be marked broadly by fear and pain and other suffering, because all those things are evolutionarily vital (in the literal sense).  I shouldn’t choose that for other people, though, so I probably would never do such a thing even if I could.

Thinking back to earlier, though, I’ve been pondering the question of just how one would move the Moon in its orbit, and I thought about the reflectors up there in the old Apollo landing sites, still used (last I checked, anyway) to measure the distance to the moon with great precision.

There have long been discussions about how to alter the course of an asteroid that looked to be prone to intercept the Earth.  One way might be to vaporize a portion of the asteroid, causing its “outgassing” to act almost as a rocket propellant, and by Newton’s third law (or, equally valid, by the law of conservation of momentum) the asteroid would shift its trajectory in the direction away from the artificial outgassing.

Well, what if one were to train powerful lasers at one site on the surface of the Moon**?   The fact that the moon is tidally locked with Earth means it’s constantly showing the same face to us, so one could keep focusing on the same portion of the surface.  One could study the albedo and absorption characteristics of the surface of the Moon to try to pick the best wavelength for causing “outgassing” of that surface, and that outgassing would propel the moon away.

It would be a slow process, since the Moon is big, and shifting its orbit significantly would require the delivery of quite a bit of energy, but that’s okay.  One could set up a single laser (or pair of them on opposite sides of the Earth, or more if one desired faster effects) perhaps solar powered and using ordinary telescope-style tracking equipment and software, to train the lasers always on the same point on the surface of the moon.

Gradually, the Moon would shift away from Earth (you’d need to keep adjusting your aim a bit), more quickly than it currently is, and eventually:  lunar liberation!

Of course, even given the abysmal state of science on Earth (and particularly in the US right now), people would eventually notice the Moon moving, and they might even notice the “outgassing”.  But a lot could be done before then.

If one wanted to have a much quicker effect, or rather, a more instantaneous effect, one could develop a large depot of antimatter, which we know how to make in particle accelerators.  Storing antimatter is challenging, of course; it must be kept within electromagnetic fields in high vacuum, since it will annihilate if it encounters its matter counterpart.

Still, with enough time and patience and care (and money), one could gradually accumulate a large stockpile of antiprotons and positrons, perhaps stored adjacent to each other so their mutual electrical attraction makes containment slightly easier.  Then, when one had gathered enough, one could launch it toward the moon in a fairly standard rocket‒it wouldn’t need to be manned, and it certainly wouldn’t need to return to Earth.

Release your tons (I would guess) of antimatter onto the surface of the Moon, perhaps at the center of “mass” of its face that points toward Earth, and watch the fireworks!  There would be complete annihilation of matter-antimatter in a release of energy far more extreme than any mere nuclear weapons could produce.  Heck, if you wanted to bypass the whole Moon process, you could just accumulate your antimatter here on Earth over time, maybe near some damage-multiplier like the ice caps or near a super volcano or something, and release the containment when you’re ready.

In a typical nuclear explosion, less than one percent of the mass involved in the reaction is “converted to energy”***.  In an anti-matter reaction, ALL of it would be converted.  Imagine releasing hundreds of times more energy per kilogram than the most powerful nuclear weapons.

Of course, antimatter is absurdly expensive to make, but economies of scale might help that.  It’s not as though one would be expecting a profit‒unless one went the Bond villain route and used one’s anti-matter bomb to hold the Earth for ransom, which is a thought.

That’s enough of that madness for now.

Speaking of madness, today begins “Mental Health Awareness Month”.  I would say that I’m already aware of mental health in a general sense, I just don’t have much personal familiarity with it.  Mental illness, mental dysfunction, mental dysregulation, these are things with which I am more personally acquainted.  I’m only too aware of them.  Physical health falls into a similar position.

All right, well, before I discuss more ideas about how to alter or eliminate all life as we know it‒I’ve many such ideas, I’m afraid‒I should draw to a close for the day.  In case you can’t tell, I’m not right in the head, am I?  So this is a sort of appropriate month for me, especially coming as it does right after Autism Awareness Month.  Batman only knows what will happen next.

TTFN

*Also known as May Day.  I wonder how that came to be used as a distress call, as in, “Mayday, mayday, we are going down!”

**Alternatively, one could, in principle, use a very large array of adjustable mirrors on Earth, and they could be shifted to reflect sunlight and focus the reflections on one spot on the moon, but to get a strong effect would require a worldwide collaboration or at least acceptance of these mirrors.  It’s hard to see that happening.

***I used “scare” quotes because technically it’s all energy to begin with, it’s just changing form.

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That one might read the blog of fate, and see the revolution of the times

Hello and good morning.  This is my Thursday blog post.  There are many other blogs out there, but this one is mine.

That’s about all I have to say about that, honestly.  I don’t have any other clue.  If anyone has seen a stylized cartoon paw print anywhere, please let me know*.

I don’t know.  What should I write?  I don’t really want to deal with politics right now‒not even political philosophy, which I sometimes find quite interesting.  But watching the world now, it just seems clear that humans are pathetic and, at least when two or more are gathered together in the name of something, their net IQ seems to be the lowest one of all those present divided by the number of people present.

That’s probably harsher than reality‒by that measure, two people each with an IQ of 150 would together have an IQ of 75.  But I don’t have the patience to work out some more likely formula, which would probably involve natural logarithms and the like.  And how would one test such a thing?  The point is, as Tommy Lee Jones’s character in Men In Black pointed out, a person can be smart, but people are stupid.

If humans destroy themselves (whether or not they take the rest of the world with them) it will be a well and truly earned destruction.  It will be a shame, of course, since there is also great potential there.  But then again, in all the hydrogen atoms of the universe there lies the potential for fusion into larger elements and then the creation of beings and civilizations and technology and art and love and even the capacity to produce civilizations that could not only last well into the livable duration of the cosmos but could possibly even alter or steer the fate of the universe itself, doing cosmic engineering.

But of course, almost no hydrogen atoms will ever be part of such a thing.  Perhaps none of them will be.  Certainly, if humans survive and eventually become cosmically relevant, it will be entirely because of luck.  It will not be deserved.

Actually, I’m not even sure what “deserve” really means most of the time.  When people say things like “you deserve love” or “you deserve to be happy” I don’t see the logic**.  How does one come to deserve love or happiness?  Does one come to deserve them just by being born?

That may be a nice idea, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense.  How can one earn some reward by doing nothing?  One can have rights of course, but most real rights are rights not to have others interfere with you.  If you can be said to have a right to something that is in limited supply and to which there is no possible guarantee, then that “right” is pointless.  I might as well say that each person has a right to two unicorns and a wyvern.

All that aside, I suspect that the vast majority of humans are literally no more likely to make any significant contribution to becoming a cosmically relevant civilization than are typical nematodes.  The current (and past) political climate of the world provides strong evidence for that much.

And now that we have thoroughly unqualified public appointees calling for registries of the disabled‒very much like the governments of certain well known and rightly despised 20th century regimes did‒I return to thoughts that “neurodivergent” people should take a Magneto/brotherhood of mutants approach to things and rise up and throw off the control of the so-called neurotypical people.

Neurodivergent people are far less likely‒or so it certainly seems‒to succumb to mob mentality and populism.  I suspect they (we) are far more likely to make a cosmically relevant civilization than the troglodytes are.

As I’ve said before‒in some recent post on this blog, I think‒neurodivergent people are more like Vulcans, and the rest of humanity is like the Romulans.  Whom would you rather have guiding the future of your civilization?

Well, that’s all extremely nerdy and probably silly, but it’s nevertheless probably not wrong.  Maybe we can convince most of the morons to refuse to be vaccinated, and then encourage them all to live close together so they’re not “contaminated” by people who have been vaccinated, and then let the viruses fall where they may.

Whatever.  This is all stupid.  Everything is stupid.  Everyone is uncountably infinitely stupid.  And I am surely among the stupidest of all for even bothering, for even trying to do anything.

TTFN

*This is a reference to the kids’ show Blue’s Clues, which my kids (and I) really enjoyed when they were little.

**Probably because there is none.

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“But more when envy breeds unkind division: There comes the ruin, there begins confusion.”

Hello.  Good morning.  It’s Thursday, which you could have guessed from my salutation if you’re familiar with my ways.

I’m sorry I’ve been such a downer lately (though anyone who reads my stuff regularly should not be surprised).  I started the week on a relatively optimistic note, or at least on an energetic one.  I suspect that was because I basically sedated myself on Friday night and Saturday night, and thereby got as much as five or so hours of uninterrupted sleep on those nights.  I also pretty much vegetated during the day on the weekend (other than doing my laundry) which was made all but obligatory by the residual effects of the sedation.  But the benefits didn’t last long.

I don’t know what to write, today.  I feel rudderless and with very little wind in my sails (to combine pleasingly nautical metaphors).  Maybe I’ll discuss a little bit about current events.  It’s been another weird week, as has almost every week since the beginning of the year.

Of course, the weirdness didn’t start there.  In the US at least, a lot of the weirdness really got going after 9-11, when everyone became overly paranoid about potential terrorism (especially involving planes) and security theater made everyone feel more afraid rather than less*.  Yet, as far as we know, most of it has saved no lives and it has immiserated countless people.

As part of the consequences of our neurotic response to the 9-11 attacks, what had been the longest unpatrolled border in the world (between the US and Canada, which did not even require passports to go between the two countries) became less amicable, marking the beginning of a feeling of separateness between what had been possibly the two closest allies and friendliest neighbors in the world.

Newt Gingrich helped with the radicalization of the Republican Party even before that, and through his slimy, slippery, poikilothermic mentality, he took what had been a party with principles down the beginning of its road to being the mockery of its former self that it has become.  Don’t get me wrong, the Democrats have responded in kind, in their own way, though their approaches are different**.

I think one of the biggest weaknesses that has led to the decline of global politics and especially of politics in the US is the indulgence of the tendency to demonize those who disagree with one, especially about anything that comprises a tenet of one’s political (and other) faith.  Speaking as a non-human, this is one of the attributes that makes humans so mutually self-destructive, and it is a tragedy.

This is the process that leads to the dehumanization of the “other”, which frees one to commit atrocities, because one does not see the other as having the same rights, or even the same consciousness, the same “soul”, as oneself.

It’s a particularly pathetic, utterly blinkered and myopic view, since all humans are infinitely ignorant and impotent in the final analysis.  While I do agree with Ayn Rand that humility—in the sense of presuming oneself inherently and inescapably worthless and valueless—is not a virtue, intellectual humility is always appropriate, because every person, every mind, no matter how brilliant, is as far from being infinite—and thus as far being incapable of error—as is the simplest flatworm, or indeed, the crudest virus.

One can only work on self-improvement if one actually recognizes and owns the fact that one has room for it.  This is one of the best lessons taught by Jesus in the Gospels (which I have read often, though I am no Christian).  It’s the one where he says, “Why lookest thou to the mote in thy neighbor’s eye, but considerest not the beam in thine own?  Thou hypocrite.  First take out the beam from out thine own eye, and then thou wilt see clearly to help thy neighbor with the mote in his eye.”  It goes something like that, anyway; I’m paraphrasing, but then again, so was King James’s editorial staff, since the original writing is, I think, in Greek, and if Jesus was a real person, he probably spoke Aramaic or something along those lines.

Anyway, his message was good.  If it were told in the modern world, it would probably be something like “the parable of the airplane oxygen masks”, i.e., make sure to secure your own mask before helping those who have difficulty securing theirs, because if you pass out and are incapacitated because you were focused only on others’ failings, then you’re no use to anyone.

This is plainly nothing new—after all, even though all the words attributed to Jesus were written decades to centuries after his crucifixion (if even that happened) and he may be entirely fictional, this message was considered important at least two millennia ago.

And warnings of the dangers of nationalism and blind loyalty to an “ethos” based largely on xenophobia and other rather pathetic fears have not been heeded by modern humans, though there were ample and terrible lessons about it throughout the last century.

Of course, Rupert Murdoch and his spawn helped spur this deterioration of discourse along—not out of any apparent sense of even misplaced idealism, but rather out of a seeming desire for ever greater profit and power.

Barnum’s Law still applies:  There’s a sucker born every minute, and two to take him.

This would seem to imply twice as many “takers” as “suckers”, but the two categories are not mutually exclusive (and of course, we have no word on the nature and character of all the other people born every minute).  Suckers can also be grifters; humans (and other people) don’t come neatly sorted and compartmentalized.  Even truly great people can have terrible flaws, but that doesn’t erase their greatness.  And seemingly unremarkable people can be (and do deeds that are) utterly inspiring.

The only time anyone goes beyond potential improvement or redemption is when they die.  That’s also the only time anyone becomes free of error.  It’s all very unsatisfactory, of course, but then, the Buddha long ago recognized that such is the nature of life itself.

All suffering is born of desire—but then again, so is all action.

I don’t know what my final point is; perhaps there can never be any single ultimate point, no “terminal goal” to use AI/decision theory terminology, not in minds that evolved with many, often competing, drives.  But at least I’ve been able to avoid just talking about my pain and depression and desire for self-erasure today.  You’re welcome.

TTFN

*Congratulations, Osama bin Laden and the rest of Al Qaeda.  You won.

**For instance, those on the “left” are big proponents of (and self-congratulators about their own) empathy.  For the most part empathy is useful, though Paul Bloom has quite reasonably pointed out some of its shortcomings.  Still, one place where the “left’s” empathy conspicuously and consistently fails them is in trying to empathize with or even to consider the points of view of those on the “right”, of “conservatives”.  It’s worth a bit of reflection.

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No one else here will save you

It’s Saturday, and I’m writing another blog post.  You can’t say I didn’t warn you.

Well, actually, you can say that‒nothing is stopping you from enunciating those words‒but if you do, you’ll either be mistaken or lying.  And it would be hard to excuse you making that mistake, since I’m right here, reminding you that I did warn you, and I’m even putting a link in* to the post in which I warned you.

As for topics about which to write, well, I don’t know.  The world is such a boring place right now.  There’s nothing interesting or troubling or unusual happening at all.

I was being tongue-in-cheek there, as I hope was obvious (though social media and the internet more generally have shown us that this can never be taken for granted).  However, it’s also true that the tragicomedy of current politics is not really very interesting, any more than is any other set of primate dominance conflicts.  To the primates themselves, and perhaps to those who study them, it might be interesting, but to everything else in the universe‒including yours truly‒it’s just a bunch of noisy, smelly, stupid animals making a mess while jockeying for positions in a contest that only matters to them (and not even to all of them).

But it is still a potentially violent process, and there tend to be brutal injuries and fatalities, so I’ll repeat my admonition:  it’s fun to repeat the slogan “punch a Nazi” but it’s important to recognize that that is just a slogan, like “catch the wave:  Coke” or “nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee”**.

The actual Nazis‒you know, the real ones from 30s-40s Germany, not just the people you call Nazis the same way some might say “your mama”‒were stopped by people with real weapons, and it required real violence and personal danger.  Passive or verbal (or even fist-based) resistance works against relatively civilized opponents, like the colonial British in India, but would not work against actual Nazis, actual fascists, or against other actual totalitarians like the Soviets or Pol Pot or Chairman Mao and his successors, or the various smaller-scale dictators, authoritarians, totalitarians, and just generally other bully types throughout history.

Such people are not civilized‒not completely‒and they will use force against those who oppose them, or just against those whom they don’t like, or of whom they don’t approve 

You can say “punch a Nazi” when you’re talking about people who just act like Nazis, or who seem to sympathize with such ideologies, but when it comes to actual “Nazis”, the slogan should be more along the lines of the Joker’s three favorite things‒dynamite, and gunpowder, and gasoline.

Or, as Chris Cornell sang in his Casino Royale Bond song:  “Arm yourself, because no one else here will save you.”

The political right in the US has long been the group of people who are most fervent about defending the 2nd Amendment, but the right has betrayed so many of its former ideals already, and totalitarians (and would-be ones) will generally do their best to disarm a populace they want to control or oppress or simply to kill.  So, if you’re at all serious in thinking that those on the current “right” are akin to Nazis‒and this is not necessarily wrong‒I say again, get weapons and train yourself to use them well.  Learn the arts of sabotage and improvised munitions.  Take a bartending class and learn to make a Molotov Cocktail***.  Heck, buy a flamethrower; they’re legal (and ironically, they don’t count as firearms).

Of course, in fighting against oppressors, it is essential to remember Nietzsche’s admonition about fighting monsters and gazing into abysses.  Learn from the examples of the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Chinese Communist Revolution; “revolutionary” ideologies tend to turn into paranoid self-policers, but not necessarily in a good way.  Remember, many of the initiators of the French Revolution ended up meeting the Guillotine themselves at the hands of their own co-revolutionaries.

Remember Robespierre.  Remember Trotsky.  Don’t become just as evil as the people you oppose.  Also, remember the presumption of innocence (even for people you hate) except in true, immediate danger to life and limb.  Just because you don’t like someone doesn’t mean they are evil (and just because you like them doesn’t mean they are not).  Just because you are fighting against “bad guys” doesn’t mean you are necessarily a “good guy”.  To be a “good guy” requires self-reflection and self-criticism and devotion to the concept of fallibilism.  Remember, Stalin fought against Hitler and helped defeat him, but he was most assuredly not a good guy.

On that cheery set of notes, I wish you a happy weekend.  Wishes may be useless, of course, as ineffectual as “thoughts and prayers”, but they are real, nonetheless.

*Not referring to the website/social media platform LinkedIn.

**I know these slogans are really old, but none that were more recent popped into my head, and I couldn’t be bothered to try to think of one.

***Yes, I know, it’s not a real drink.

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I don’t have the energy to do a Shakespeare quote title

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and this is technically the 4th blog post of the week, though yesterday’s post felt a bit disjointed and erratic.  I didn’t edit it much, and frankly, I’m not sure I had anything to say 

I did, though, get the “inspiration”, or perhaps the geas, to throw together that little slide-show-style video to the tune of Another Brick in the Wall Part 3 that I shared yesterday.  I did the whole thing in the morning before I posted, and threw it up on here and on Instagram.  I didn’t share a version of it to YouTube, because I figured it might get blocked.  I know it wouldn’t be monetized, but my channel isn’t monetized, anyway.

I don’t know if anyone really caught the meaning I was conveying.  Basically it’s a montage of pictures from my former life, of the people I love whom I no longer see, some of whom are dead, and basically all of whom are gone from my life.  Early on, the pictures are dominated by, or at least include, people who are dead.  Then there are loads of shots of my kids, some including my ex-wife and even me, then some of my coworkers and so on, switching from one to the next to the beat of the song.  Then, at the end, there’s a massively altered picture of me that looks just a bit like I’m made out of bricks:

The point is that, as the song sings, “I don’t need no arms around me…”  It’s showing all the people whose arms are not around me* and probably never will be again, and so on.  It’s appropriate and it is just, though; I’m not a person who is worth embracing.

Anyway, those last two songs on the first album of The Wall have always meant a lot to me, albeit in a very dark way.  They’re basically about giving up, about recognizing that you’re alone and you’re always going to be alone, and that’s just the way it is.  Also, relationships are perilous, especially if you’re the sort of person people tend to end up leaving.  To quote a different song that I’ve already covered, “Everyone I know goes away in the end.”  How can you not want to build a wall?

Some of us come with some sort of pre-built wall that requires active and sustained effort to lower, and which spontaneously regenerates even as you try to break it down.  It gets terribly exhausting.

Of course, it’s the following song from The Wall that’s most prominent to me, and I am going to start working on a video for that, but it won’t be a one morning thing made in a sort of compulsive fever dream state like this last one was.

Yesterday I was so wound up by the time I posted my “video” I had to close my little office door before work because I couldn’t stop crying for a while.  It wasn’t anything extravagant; I wasn’t sobbing or anything.  I was just sort of quietly crying, but it didn’t want to stop, and I didn’t want the people in the office to see me when they arrived.

I’m beginning the final novel of the light novel series I mentioned before, after which I’ll be pretty much done with every book I can find any interest in reading.  I cannot even sustain my interest in the e-book version I found of Susan Kay’s Phantom, which is one of my favorite books.

None of the hundreds of fiction or nonfiction books in my Kindle library catch my attention; they all seem boring.  And none of the books on Amazon seem interesting at all.  Many of them seem just frankly moronic.  To quote another song from The Wall, “…nothing is very much fun anymore.  And I…can…feel…one of my turns coming on.”

I haven’t played any guitar so far this week.  I certainly haven’t written any fiction.  I haven’t drawn anything apart from a weird doodle of a sort of demonic cartoon caterpillar on the top of one of our deal sheets.

I used to do that sort of thing all the time.  In undergrad and in med school, though I always brought a notebook and tried to take notes, that’s never really been the way I learn things.  So, my college and medical school notebooks are a smorgasbord of doodles‒some comical, some dark, some frankly horrifying, some very rough and some rather artistic.  I don’t know what has happened to any of them.

I feel as though I’m approaching the end of all this.  And so, I intend to make a sort of video to the song Goodbye, Cruel World, the last song on the first album of The Wall, and maybe release it as a message.  It’s not an iff** sort of statement.  For instance, I might not finish or post a video and yet still kill myself.  I came pretty close yesterday.  But no one seems to have noticed.

And, of course, even if I post it, it doesn’t necessarily mean that I will kill myself or have killed myself.  I might fail, even if I try.  And someone might even stop me.

Ha ha, just kidding.  That last scenario is definitely not gonna happen.

Anyway, that’s it for today.  I hope (and trust) that almost all of you are feeling much better than I am.

TTFN

*Actually, technically, if I were to show pictures of everyone whose arms are not around me and will not be, I’d have to show pictures of everyone in the world, which would take too much time.

**That’s mathematics-speak for “if and only if”.

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Sticks and stones…

I don’t really know what to write about that’s personal at the moment, so I thought I’d weigh in on a matter that’s occasionally been popping to my mind.

Those who believe that we are marching toward fascism in the United State—and I’m not saying they are necessarily wrong—need to start availing themselves of their 2nd Amendment Constitutional rights, if they haven’t already done so.

Many have long held that the 2nd Amendment did not secure the right to keep and bear arms as protection against ordinary criminals or terrorists or even mad people like school shooters and the like.  They maintain that it is a measure put in place to protect the citizens against the potential depredations of an oppressive government (such as the one against which the founders had recently revolted).

I’m not Constitutional scholar enough to know for certain what the definitive intention of the writers of the 2nd Amendment was, and given how disparate the interpretations thereof are, I would suspect that no one is.  But we don’t really need to dwell too much on that, since we are the ones interpreting the Constitution now.  Here are the words:  “A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.”

The argument can be made that the 2nd Amendment is a straightforward compound sentence with two separate subjects.  The first part basically says that we all know that any free state of any kind is going to have to have some kind of military.  It’s a necessity.  But the second half says that because of the fact stated in the first part, the right of the people—not the militia— to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

The point, I am led to understand, of this interpretation of the 2nd Amendment is that since the government is always going to have a militia—and since over time, governments may become tempted to use those militias against their own citizens—the citizens should be armed, so that they can at least fight back.

In any case, whether you buy that interpretation of the 2nd Amendment or not, it’s a good point to consider now.  If you honestly think that the current government is really striving to enact a form of fascism in the United States, and that it will oppress innocent people and use force against them—and how are laws enforced other than through the threat of literal violence by the police or the military?—then you need to be prepared for active resistance, not just rhetoric.  When name-calling fails (impossible as that might seem), what are you going to do to resist unlawful encroachment by those who seek to use the offices of government to further their own selfish ends?

Thomas Jefferson had his faults, of course, some of which are difficult to understand, but he did almost solely write the founding document of the United States of America*.  He was also, based on some of his writings, a bit of a radical recurrent revolutionary, at least in principle.  He famously wrote that he thought there should be an armed revolution as often as every twenty years if people wanted to remain free.  “What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?  Let them take arms…the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.  It is it’s natural manure.”

I don’t know how tongue-in-cheek he might have been when he wrote that, but it doesn’t really matter, because the message is the message, and it stands or falls on its own, regardless of who said it or why.

If you hate oppressive, authoritarian, or totalitarian regimes, it’s hard to blame you.  But while the slogan “punch a Nazi” is funny, and seems vaguely tough and “cool” to people who’ve never been in a serious fight in their lives, the Nazis—the real Nazis, the originals—were not defeated by people punching them.  They were not defeated by protests.  And though words helped, they were not finally defeated with words, certainly not the sort of words we find tossed about on social media.  They were fought, they were captured—and when nothing else could be done, they were killed—by other armed people.

I cannot recommend going out and killing people you don’t like just based on political differences.  That’s catastrophic, cosmic-level idiocy.  But if life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are actually under immediate threat carried out by armed individuals, then such people must be resisted with arms, if one wants to have any chance of success.

Imagine how hard the Warsaw Ghetto would have been even to make happen, let alone for the people there to be gradually massacred, if most or even just some of the original 400,000 Jews who had been put there had been armed and had recognized that their lives were in danger.

Imagine if all the Jews and Gypsies and gay and handicapped people in Germany and Austria and Poland and France and Czechoslovakia and so on had all possessed personal firearms.

There are, last I heard, more guns in private hands than there are citizens in the US.  Whether or not one sees this as a good thing depends very much upon one’s criteria for goodness in this matter, but it is true that it is much harder for the Thought Police to kick in people’s doors to enforce conformity if a good percentage of those people are armed and know how to use their weapons to fight** in defense of their lives and those of their families.

Anyway, I thought this was an important point to make; at least it’s one that nags at me.  It’s very easy, and relatively safe, to argue with people on social media, calling them names from the other side of the country or the other side of the planet.  But when would-be oppressors from any part of the political spectrum come to enforce their ideas violently upon others, clever online memes are unlikely to stop them.

I don’t condone armed attacks against people who aren’t in the muscle end of the family, so to speak, and in any case, such things often backfire.  But if the SS or the KGB or the DHS or any other manner of secret police are coming for you and those you love, though you have committed no actual crime, and if you aren’t sure what they’re going to do if they capture you/them, it seems perfectly reasonable to shoot as many of them in the head as you can.  You can at least make their job both difficult and dangerous.

Words may never hurt me, but sticks and stones can break my bones, even if I don’t choose to use them.  So, if I honestly think such things are coming, I really should pick up my own sticks and stones.  It’s vastly better to use reason and discussion and politics to settle differences, to arrive at compromise, to make things work as well and as honorably as we can for everyone, but when faced with a literal and immediate threat of deadly force, it is perfectly moral to defend oneself with deadly force.

*That’s the Declaration of Independence, in case you were wondering.

**This is crucial.  Guns are not magic talismans, and if you’re going to get one, you should learn how to use it.  You should train and indoctrinate yourself in gun safety, and—equally important—you should practice so that, when necessary, you can use your weapon very unsafely.