The One Technology That Will Save Us All

THERE ARE certain individuals and organizations who do not support universal access to the one technology that will save humanity.  Possibly without realizing it, these people are therefore also supporting the following:

• Poverty
• Crime
• Hunger
• Oppression of women
• Disease
• Human trafficking
• Violence and conflict
• Environmental degradation and climate disruption
• Famine
• Increased vulnerability to natural disasters
• Overcrowding and congestion in cities
• Yet more disease, crime, violence and suffering
• Inflation, devaluation of wealth
• Scarcity of vital resources
• Many, many dead and dying children

Population growth is always one step ahead of humanity's ability to feed and house its global population, and science has continually struggled to keep up.  But as soon as one problem is solved, the population surges ahead to create the next crisis.  Where disease was once dragging on the rate of population growth and keeping it from getting out of hand too quickly, science has fixed that and the population zoomed ahead.  Where lack of food has previously limited the population by starving some of us to death, science has developed better, higher-yielding and more resilient crops, allowing us to have the same problem again, but at a much higher level of population.  Rather than reduce suffering in the world, all our best efforts have apparently only increased the scale and magnitude of human suffering.

There is one technology, however, that is capable of breaking this deadly cycle - capable of vastly reducing if not entirely eliminating most of the problems listed above.  Yet, for superstitious, ignorant and irrational reasons, many people resist the use of this technology and prefer to put all their faith in Science's ability to keep saving us again and again.

They pretend that their refusal to support the widespread use of this technology is based on "moral" grounds.  Perhaps it is time to re-evaluate the definition of morality and measure it according to some more objective criteria.  I propose that the number of dead, starving and suffering children in the world offers one such reliable quantitative measure of Morality, with increasing numbers of course corresponding to lower overall levels of morality.

All Hail, Our New Yabbie Overlords

Corporate Religianity today is self-absorbed, hypocritical, politically and financially motivated, superstitious, and ultimately immoral in its refusal to support universal access to Contraception and Abortion.  It expects the world to suffer all of the above calamities just for the sake of its own tiny superstitions, traditions, philosophies and dogmas.

If humans possess the technology to save themselves, save all other life on this planet and the planet itself from destruction and yet refuse to use it, then when we are all gone in a few hundred years' time, Evolution will have to start all over.  Next time, I hope it chooses an intelligent species.

I'm guessing it will be Yabbies.


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Side Note:

If you have a problem with Abortion (and it's something that I, too, would rather didn't happen if at all possible), then there is one thing you can do about it.  One of the most effective forms of contraception that drastically reduces the incidence of unwanted pregnancies, teen pregnancies, and pregnancies in households lacking the means to give a child anything but misery, is the following:

Education for girls and women.

If you don't support that, then you clearly love Satan and enjoy child-murder.  Enough said.

A Brief History Of Marriage

In recent times good people everywhere are being urged to step forward and protect Marriage.  But what exactly would we be protecting?   The 1950's definition of marriage?  The 1920's definition?  The 1360's definition?  The paleolithic definition? One reason why the public debate over marriage sounds nonsensical with neither side able to understand the other is because everyone talking about marriage is talking about a different thing.

Therefore in the public interest I herewith undertake to present to you a brief history of Marriage.

Modern humans have been around for somewhere between 200,000 and 1,000,000 years.  So this problem with marriage isn't exactly a new thing.  Humans have these genes that have one goal and one purpose: to reproduce; to perpetuate themselves; to carry on.  Those genes are not by nature monogamous, but they are by nature highly jealous.  "MY genes are being perpetuated here, not YOURS.  So get your paleolithic paws off my woman!  That one, too.  And that one."

This tended to lead to a lot more clubbing and stoning than was strictly necessary, and so in the best interests of our reproducing genes humans formed societies.  These societies solved the problem of jealousy-related manslaughter and other reproductive misunderstandings by pairing off and marking spouses in some way as off-limits to others.  Not that that ever really stopped any mischief from happening; it merely set down the ground rules, indicating where extra discretion was needed, and providing a framework for dispute-resolution.

So we have the earliest definition of marriage, consisting of socially-recognized reproductive partners as a way of heading off potentially deadly disputes among your basic cave-man types.

Much later as societies became incredibly complex, it became increasingly difficult for an individual to determine one's actual place in society.  In European cultures and others it became usual for people to belong to classes or categories, and for certain categories to exist under the protection of more powerful ones which they served.  Marriage paralleled this arrangement by placing women socially under protection of men whose status offered them a position in society.  Marriage in this type of feudal society became then a contract between a man and his father-in-law in which property was exchanged; namely a woman.  In every legal sense she was considered property, first that of her father, and then that of her husband.   A woman simply had no status without being legally deeded to some man or another, and the definition of marriage in such societies was the arrangement by which a man extended some of his legal, social status to a woman in exchange for subservience and offspring. This is the origin of the legal definition of marriage that people defend so vociferously today.

Much, much later we witness shifts in society leading to more enlightened concepts such as human rights, freedom and democracy.  Just for men, initially, but eventually for women as well.  In most countries this has only happened within the last 100 years or so; in some countries it has not even happened yet. With that change, marriage quietly changes as well.

Since women no longer need a man's legal status in order to own property, to be recognized under the law, to have rights etc., what is marriage now for?  Well, the law conveniently provided another reason for marriage by outlawing fornication and adultery.  By inserting itself into the bedroom, government held onto its medieval authority over the family, and marriage became basically a license to have legal sex.

In the last 50 years or so in most jurisdictions, "blue laws" have been struck down as impractical, unnecessary, backwards, unenforceable, inhumane, and generally stupid.  So where does that leave marriage?  Unwilling to surrender power in any domain, the law gradually and sneakily found a way to keep the marital handcuffs on:  Insurance.  Taxation.  Property.  Identity.  Each of these areas in our complex lives are affected by one's marital status.  When a relationship breaks down, it leaves a path of legal destruction a mile wide which supports a thriving industry all its own.

Not only that, the law as it stands discriminates and disadvantages people who for any number of reasons cannot or will not participate in traditional marriage.  The law in regard to marriage is increasingly being recognized as deeply unjust, outdated, destructive, and pointless.  Children?  There have long been adequate laws on the books which protect the rights and enforce the responsibilities of biological mothers and fathers.  Laws regarding marriage are more often an obstacle and a distraction to paternity/maternity laws being fairly and evenly enforced.

What should the future of legal marriage hold?  None.  Nothing whatsoever.  It is far past time to dissolve any and all legal definitions of marriage, whether it be:

• Ownership of women;
• Legalized sex;
• Eligibility for citizenship, insurance, education, or any other specific benefit;
• Inheritance and property;
• "Next of kin" recognition.

If two (or more) people choose to say they are married, then they are the only people eligible to define what exactly that means.  The Law, to be fair and just, must restrict itself to recognizing individuals only, and must accept that individuals will at times be in relationships with each other.  And when those relationships dissolve, the Law does not need to become involved.

Will this be better or worse for children and families?   I assert that it will be better.  My reasoning is as follows:

A marriage is often regarded as an extant thing apart from the individuals, as some gold-plated unassailable fortress of permanence.  If that illusion were not reinforced with legalistic documents, elaborate state-issued certificates and the like, then perhaps more attention would be given to the fragile, ever-changing and ethereal thing called a relationship.

Without the legal fiction of Marriage to muddy the waters and distract everyone, substantive legal concepts such as property and paternity could be dealt with rationally and in the best interests of all involved including and particularly children.

Without a legal definition to consider, individuals would be free to consider their decision to marry entirely within the context of their particular religious faith should they have one, or entirely in the context of their relationship.  This would seem to present a clearer, more focused idea of just what it is they are choosing for themselves, and in my opinion would lead to stronger families less likely to be torn apart by financial, employment, religious, social or legal considerations, well-meaning though they may be.

Therefore the question of gay marriage is the wrong question entirely.  We should not be asking whether gay marriage is legal, but why the Law has anything at all to say about our most intimate, personal relationships in the first place.

The government is neither our parent nor our priest.  We are not feudal serfs, nor cave-men.  It is time to establish the preeminence of human rights and freedom, and to eliminate any reference to marriage in the Law.

Economics Explained

(so that even a moron can understand it)

When an inventor comes to me for help with a totally new idea for an internal combustion engine that he promises will save the planet while producing emissions no more harmful than ice cream sundaes, I immediately know for a fact that this individual knows less about internal combustion engines than my belly-button lint does.

The same is true when some naive intellectual comes up with a new economic system that he claims is more "fair," meaning that people like him with absolutely no useful skills will not have to work for a living.  The arrogance of ignorance knows no bounds.

Taking economics lessons from someone who has no money and no clue about what it is, where it comes from or what it's for is like asking my grandma to fix the internet.  It can only lead to one place:  the emergency room.

So, if you're one of those smug hippies who think they know better how to organize everybody's lives for them, then put down your goddamned bongos for half a goddamned minute and learn how economics really works.

Economics is all based on Human Rights.  Yes, you read that right.  It is all about the most basic, fundamental and universal human right there is:  the right of the individual to self-determination.  In other words, it is the individuals' right to chose his own actions rather than being compelled in his actions by force.  In the most basic terms, this means that people have the right not to be the slaves or the property of other people, even of the State.

This further means that the most fundamental human right is the right to ownership over one's own labor, and by extension, the results of one's labor.  If you go out and gather, kill, make or grow some food, then you and you alone have the right to eat that food or to decide who besides you eats that food.

Whether to feed yourself, your spouse, your offspring, your parents, your neighbor's kids or the guy who in exchange gives you some of his nice dry firewood is entirely 100% your own personal individual right to determine.   Your labor and the products of your labor (which I call stored labor) belong to you and to no one else - not your parents, not the community, not the State, not even the almighty Flying Spaghetti Monster or any other mythological being.  

Does this mean that all taxation is theft and slavery?  No, silly.  Only that all excessive taxation without democratic consent and without a return to the taxpayer of goods or services of commensurate value is theft and slavery.  There is a legitimate role for the state, but politicians seem never content to limit their power to the small handful of legitimate areas of government involvement.

Equality does not mean that people have equal assets.  There is no requirement for or benefit from that kind of fairy tale.  Equality means every person has the equal right to ownership over his or her own labor and stored labor (property).  Besides, everybody has assets whether they understand them or not.

Your time is your most basic asset and property, and it is your human right to decide what to do with that asset.  Many people will choose to apply that asset to their best interests by utilizing it for the urgent matter of survival - food, shelter, clothing and security.  But if people chose to do otherwise, you can't suddenly revoke their human rights just because it's not exactly what you would have done.

Other assets that people own for themselves include innate talents, learned skills, tools, and property that meets a person's basic needs (apparel, housing, personal care implements, weapons for self-defense,  implements for communication, tokens of identity or status.)  To in any way deprive a person of his personal property is a violation of his human rights.

But what if someone appears to own far more than they actually need?

Oh?  Who gets to decide that?  You just worry about yourself and let other people worry about what they need.  To do otherwise is the height of arrogance - thinking that you know better what someone else's needs are.

Whether it is a hovel on half an acre or an estate on a thousand square miles, a person's property is a person's stored labor and therefore his life, and no one besides her has any right or claim over it.  That is even true if it was her great-great-grandfather's stored labor and not hers personally.  If you grow food (store labor) and bestow it upon your children, then it becomes their life and their right to do with as they determine.  If they exchange it for something else, then that article takes the place of stored labor and remains their right.  Because your time, tools or acreage makes it possible for you produce food, then that property is as much your human right as the sustenance you produce therewith, and bestows on you the right and duty to determine how that sustenance is disposed of.

Why is that in any way "fair" to people who don't have the same assets?  A) because "fair" is a subjective and imaginary concept that is pointless to bring up, since it involves making invalid comparisons between nonequivalent entities, and B) the basic human right to control one's labor and stored labor, if denied to anybody, is very soon denied to everybody.  If it is the poor (people suffering deprivation) you are so concerned about, then know that it is the poor who are always the first to suffer and suffer the hardest whenever this has been tried.  Equality does not mean that everyone has the same assets.  It means that everyone, without exception, has the same basic human rights - the right to ownership over one's own labor and stored labor.

With the sanctity of property explained, let's talk about wealth and where it comes from.  But let's not be confused by the concept of money, because money is not wealth.  Cash currency is at best a temporary storage container for wealth that facilitates exchange of value; nothing more.  Wealth is the ability to create things that meet one's own ongoing needs and the needs of one's dependents.  Thus, money is not wealth, and giving money to the poor does not make them un-poor.  By "needs" I refer to both the physiological needs of any human (food, water, shelter, energy, security) as well as the often paradoxical psychological needs (uniqueness and conformity, novelty and sameness).

Wealth consists of the assets I mentioned previously and occurs in the following four categories in the following order:

0.  Time and labor, which may be exchanged by agreement for basic needs;
1.  Talents and acquired marketable skills, which may be exchanged by agreement for basic needs and/or other assets;
2.  Tools which may be used to produce valuable articles for exchange;
3.  Productive property that enables the creation of desirable goods and sustenance.  Farmland,  factories, dwellings, businesses, or shares thereof.

Everybody has the zeroth asset category from birth, but not all in equal measure. Some people are stronger, some people live longer.  Get used to it.

Most people acquire some assets of the first and second categories by the time they reach adulthood. Anybody can eventually acquire the third asset category these days, since previous illegal restrictions on ownership (affecting women and minorities mainly) have been mostly abolished as a gross violation of human rights.

Wealth is created in two steps.  First, when an individual gets busy and uses any of the above assets to produce something of value, wealth appears as if out of thin air.  Assets are valueless unless they are used to provide for ones needs; but when they are used, that's called wealth.  Second, every time a willing informed exchange takes place, wealth increases.  How does that work?

If two people have dissimilar articles and willingly agree to an exchange, it is because each of them would rather have the other article.  In other words each person values the other article more than they value their own item.  Therefore the exchange of articles makes sense and actually increases the total value of the two articles.

If a seller has an article and a buyer agrees to purchase the article in exchange for an agreed amount of currency, then it is because the buyer values the article more than that amount of currency, and the seller values that amount of currency more than they do the article.  Again, value increases and wealth grows.

But, for this to work the exchange must be without compulsion, and the exchange must be informed, i.e. each party knows exactly what they are giving and getting.  Those are two pretty big if's, admittedly, and both account for a large measure of how the poor often act against their own best interests.  They buy stuff that is of no value for too much money, and sell their time (usually their only asset) for too little.  They also fail to acquire assets, frequently out of ignorance or due to cultural conditioning.

The other problem often encountered by the poor is being in a skewed market, which also happens out of ignorance or irrational human behavior.  Remaining in a labor market that is too far skewed in favor of the employer is not rational and not informed.  Move somewhere else, for Frodo's sake.  Or get out of the labor market and get into something more suitable by acquiring some category 1 or 2 assets.

We are now prepared to speak intelligently about price.  It takes two people to set a price:  the seller and the buyer.  Together they set the price of things by simply agreeing to the exchange, and it is nobody's business but theirs.

It may seem stupidly obvious that the number of items bought is always equal to the number of items sold, but this is a very important fact to keep in mind.  In an open and informed market, a large number of transactions for the same item can establish an average price point that may fluctuate from time to time.  But at any given time, the price being offered and accepted for an item is the price at which an exactly equal number of buyers and sellers agree is the exactly correct price for the number of items transacted.  Think about it:  at higher prices, more sellers would agree, but fewer buyers.  At a lower price, more buyers but fewer sellers would be willing to transact.  Therefore any murmuring about the price of an item not being "fair" is nonsense.

Often, people who don't understand economics propose the artificial setting of prices by non-involved third parties whose business it is none of.  The government, for example.  Also trade unions, produce cartels, monopolies, criminal gangs and the like.  Good company, apparently.  Things that have been or are being artificially price controlled in various markets include rent, gasoline, medicine, wages, electricity, and potatoes. (I am NOT making this up!  Western Australia has an all-powerful potato cartel that fixes the price of spuds.  Or tries to.)

The effect of setting a maximum price for things like gasoline, rent or potatoes is that there are fewer sellers willing to exchange items at that artificially low price and too many buyers eager to buy at that price.  In other words, shortages.  Long lines.  Black markets.  Poverty, crime and deprivation ensue.

The effect of setting a minimum price for things like wages is the opposite:  too many sellers entering the market with too few buyers interested in paying an artificially high price for something that is in plentiful supply.  The result is unemployment, slow economic growth, and fewer goods and services being made available to the population. In either case, meddling with private transactions between two informed parties wrecks everything and infringes on people's basic human rights to deal with their own property, labor and lives as they see fit.

There is nothing to be gained by lamenting the prices of things, as though the power to set prices was some magic belonging only to the rich and powerful.  Or something that politicians do.  Such woolly-headed paucity of reason distracts from the real issues of availability and desirability.  Supply and demand.   It is not a man-made system or an arbitrary rule someone made up: it is just the natural way that things work.  When you try to meddle with it, things always go wrong.

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Worrying about other people's problems is a popular pastime these days, and so there are many theories about what to do about those people who can't seem to provide for themselves - the poor.  why is that my problem?  Because the poor in desperation turn to crime, and crime ain't good for nobody.

Here too price becomes a pointless distraction and leads to more harm than good.  Some people propose to "solve" poverty by forcing prices to be low enough for poor people to buy what they need.  This results in supply shortages and nobody getting anything.  Except the resourceful rich, who always know how to get what they need.  This benefits only extra-resourceful people who know how to supply the rich with what they want, and the poor continue to be poorer still.

The other solution is to just give currency to poor people.  This has a number of interesting effects, none of which helps the poor in any way.  A) It devalues the currency.  B) It increases the demand on goods.  C) A + B = prices go up, so that the poor are no better off.  D) It creates dependency while punishing resourcefulness, leading to an entire culture of people who are incapable of providing for themselves. Most programs to help the poor accomplish only two things:  They assuage middle-class guilt while assuring the continuing existence of poverty and suffering.

If it's the relief of suffering you're actually interested in, there's nothing stopping you but lack of generosity.  If someone is hungry or sick, give them food or medicine, no questions asked.  No paperwork to make sure they qualify under federal regulations, no cash payments.  Just relief of suffering.  Doing it that way is much cheaper than paying an army of bureaucrats to work out who gets it and who doesn't.  "But someone might take advantage of our generosity!"  So?  A truly generous person doesn't give a shit about quibbles like that.

In the battle against poverty, wealth is the only thing that has ever prevaled.  By affirming individuals' right to their own labor and stored-labor, by providing education and opportunity as well as non-cash relief of immediate suffering, the poor (and everyone else) get to choose whether to be poor or resourceful.  On a practical level, we do this by ceasing to bog small businesses down in regulation and double-taxation.  This allows previously poor people (newly educated about how economics actually works) to create their own jobs and jobs for each other rather than waiting around for a corporation to move in and flood the labor market with low-wage jobs.


The Big Secret to money is this:

Always have plenty of it.  



If for any reason you don't have plenty of it, then do these three things:

1.  Realize what money is: just a temporary storage media of value that facilitates exchange of stored-labor for productive assets.  Money is never the problem, so stop blaming it for your situation.  (And if you wish to accumulate wealth, do not accumulate currency.  Accumulate assets instead.)
2.  Start creating more value every day.  If you live somewhere where this is not possible, THEN MOVE!
3.  Manage your resources better.  Stop buying worthless crap and start acquiring value-producing assets, starting with category 1 assets such as education and skills.

Certainty or Self-Deception

Everybody wants proof for their beliefs.  They want it so much that consciously and unconsciously they fabricate all the proof they need.  Needless to say, this sort of self-deception does not lead anywhere good.

People with religious beliefs which they are unable to distinguish from objective fact become a real pain in the ass for the rest of humanity.  They see non-believers not as people who simply see things differently, but as people who maliciously deny self-evident facts for nefarious ends.  They see non-believers as the enemy in a war; and not always just an ideological war - all too often it is a real shooting, stabbing, kicking, punching, biting, hurting and killing kind of war.

"Oh, I would never do that," you say.  Really?

Many religious people see it as self-evident that humans have souls and are quite apart from the rest of Animalia or even Mammalia on this planet - this planet that is increasingly recognized as not unique at all in the galaxy.

Consciously or unconsciously, they accept as proof of their deistic beliefs a supernatural explanation for human existence, behavior, consciousness, emotions, and perceptions.  As long as there is currently no natural explanation for these things, then religion is unquestioned and unassailable.  And everyone has to do as they, the keepers of the religion, say.

Proof of the existence of Clouds.

However, this is exactly like saying, "there is certainly a God, because  - clouds!  How could there be clouds if not for God?"  And that very argument used to carry weight, before we figured out atmospheric thermo-hydrodynamics.  Today, the recipe for clouds, curiously, includes no supernatural forces at all.

So it is with human consciousness - the recipe no longer calls for anything beyond the reach of empirical science, experiment or observation.  Consciousness, self-awareness, the ability to solve complex logic problems (i.e. to reason), the ability to imagine, to create, to count, to be self-aware and to feel emotions are increasingly recognized as neither unique to humans nor in any way supernatural.

To continue to defend one's deistic beliefs by appealing to human uniqueness is a losing battle, and was never necessary to begin with.  Beliefs, unless they are to be misused for control, power, or economic advantage, do not ever have to be defended.  If you are not seeking any earthly advantage over your fellow Man, then you do not ever have to defend, justify or prove your personal beliefs.

However, many deists will fiercely defend beliefs about human uniqueness even in the face of mounting empirical evidence to the contrary.  The well-known refusal to even acknowledge the oceans of proof that exist for the principle of Evolution has its roots in people simply trying to hold onto their belief that the existence of humans is proof of the existence of God.  What other objection to it can they possibly have?

While some deists who style themselves as Enlightened will smugly accept a form of "guided evolution," they can still be heard issuing opinions on the uniqueness of humans.  "What separates us from the animals is ___;"  (fill in the blank with anything whatsoever - politics, penmanship, pornography, peritonitis, petroleum, or possibly even things not beginning with 'p'.)

And every time they do that, science comes along and wipes out the statement with an empirical result showing that in fact, no, humans are not unique in that particular respect.  Better at it, perhaps, than other organisms, but not fundamentally unique.

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Love is an interesting example which I personally have had occasion to contemplate from time to time.  (Though no one has ever accused me of being a romantic.)

What exactly is it?  Is it uniquely human?  Is it God?  Is it my "soul" doing something detectable in the physical realm?  Probably not.  Do other animals love?  In all respects except for being able to tap into another organism's internal experience, the external markers have all been confirmed observationally.  If we say that a dog does not love simply because we cannot know what it is thinking or feeling internally, we must also conclude that other humans do not love.

But what is love?  We know that to experience anything outside of ourselves, the mind has to model that object in order to project it onto the "screen" of our consciousness.  Sensory awareness alone is not sufficient - even a computer can do that much.  The mind collects sensory information about the object in order to build that model, which is essentially a simulation of the object held in the mind.  The mind draws on all past experience (indicative or not, relevant or not), beliefs, assumptions and desires in order to fill in whatever the senses are unable to provide.  It then associates that model with emotions that are the basis of all behavior.

A human is one object that the mind has evolved to model particularly well.  And this is no small feat - humans are particularly complex objects. Creating an internal simulation of another human in the mind - necessary in order to have any conscious awareness of the human - requires most of the brain's structures, and the same structures it requires to be aware of itself.

My hypothesis is that when the mind attempts to model a particular human which matches that mind's own, shall we say, patterns or parameters, then something unexpected happens.  These patterns or parameters, for lack of better language, may be in the form of unconscious values, beliefs, ideals, positive associations, positive recollections, or experiences.  And also the genetically-mandated urgent imperative need to propagate one's genes.  One cannot forget that.

The unexpected thing that happens when the mind models another human under those conditions is the following according to my hypothesis:  the mind experiences a pleasure response to the very act of modeling, i.e. thinking about or being aware of, that person.  In my experience at least, and that of others who have shared their experiences, even being aware of certain people causes a pleasure response within the brain (transmitted no doubt by various neurotransmitters and hormones, e.g. dopamine and endorphines) that I have usually interpreted, according to the cultural conditioning and language conditioning of my mind, as Love.

There are certain people that give me pleasure by doing absolutely nothing other than existing!

At the risk of rambling, I can't leave the topic without warning of the dark side of love: pathological love, upon which I hope to elaborate in the future.  The mind can sometimes fall in love with not a real person, but with the mind's own creation based loosely on a real person, much to the suffering of everyone involved.  Also, the ill-conditioned mind often connects love too closely with what I call its disreputable siblings, Need and Desire.

Many people mistakenly assume that the pleasure of love emanates from the person they love, and not from within their own brains as is actually the case.  This causes them to feel compelled to own, control, possess, and manipulate the person they love in a misguided attempt to secure the source of their pleasurable internal experience.  This is what I call Need, and it leads to all sorts of behavioral pathology and misery.

The other disreputable sibling of Love I call Desire.  But it's not all bad, really.  As long as one recognizes that it is not necessary to attempt to sexually reproduce with every human or object for whom one feels any sort of Love.  A well-conditioned mind can separate the two and be the master of desire.  It wasn't for naught that the Buddha declared Desire to be the author of Suffering.

In fact it is the mind that is the creator of both.  Fix the mind, and you fix everything.  Control the mind and you control your entire experience in this existence.

As for proof of the existence of God or a supernatural world:  stop looking.  It's both bad religion and bad science.

More Reasons Why Politics Is Stupid and Other Disconnected Ramblings

I am less often attacked by self-righteous liberals who see me as a conservative than by scared ignorant conservatives who think I am a liberal, or by libertarians who brand me a monarchist.  Monarchists of course assume I am an anarchist, because that's how their particular little world is divided.  I have never met a true anarchist, so I don't know what they think of me.  Anyway, the weather cares little for the opinions of people, so why should I?

The cost of being original and thinking for one's self is that you never have any allies.

Being an egalitarian, I am equally critical of conservatives and liberals, and for that matter of all politicals.  They all make the same stupid mistakes.  They attack each other for being what they are, merely for the labels they carry, and not for anything of substance.  They see only what they wish to see in order to confirm their own limited fantasies.  Politicals try hard to make sure there is only ever one side (their side) to every question; while workable solutions to problems require that all aspects be acknowledged and addressed.  Therefore politicals are incapable of solving anything and they never produce anything of value.

The major flaw in Conservatism (the thing, not the people) is that it fails to acknowledge new facts, new realities, and is incapable of responding to changes intelligently.  It only knows what USED to be true.  Example: Man-made global warming is a verified, proven fact and by far the most dangerous thing happening in the world now.  Conservatives refuse to open their eyes to empirical truth and will therefore fail to act until it is too late.  And then they will blame someone else for their xenocidal intransigence.

The major flaw in Liberalism is that it fails to acknowledge what has always been true that continues to be.  It thinks it is more clever than a thousand generations of humans; and its strange theories, when tested, fail again and again.  Example: Wealth is the only thing that has ever prevailed against poverty, suffering, injustice, and environmental degradation.  The natural facts of how wealth comes about (i.e. through individuals acting with individual freedom) and the natural human right to retain one's own property and direct one's own labor are fundamental to life itself, and not merely a fungible "system" that can be re-engineered to suit some arrogant, self-righteous academic theory.

The major flaw in Libertarianism is that government and community actually do have legitimate roles in the world.  Generally speaking those roles are in concentrating capital for purposes that benefit the broadest categories of people rather than those narrower needs best served by for-profit enterprises.  There are certain things we will always do better as a city, as a nation or as a planet than we do as individuals or as self-selected corporate entities with a necessarily limited focus.

The major flaw in Totalitarianism is that the State rarely innovates and quickly stagnates without risk-taking individuals creating wealth to begin with.  It collapses in on itself leaving mass suffering in its wake, or like any purported perpetual-motion machine, it runs down and stops unless there is a continuous artificial outside subsidy.  The State can never hope to successfully provide all things to all people, nor should it ever be thought of as having that responsibility.

This flaw is only slightly ahead of the equally fatal flaw of being a complete violation of basic human rights, particularly the right to ownership over one's own labor or stored-labor (wealth). In other words the state that controls everything is essentially mass-slavery. Unfortunately there are many forms of Totalitarianism, and it lies at the valley of every slippery slope upon which both liberals and conservatives vigorously dance.  All politicals, right, left or center, crave power and any quantity of it is never enough for them.

The key to a balanced, prosperous and healthy world is keeping the politicals strictly in check; limiting their power and insisting instead that power reside within a necessarily small, efficient set of equitable laws.  It lies in actively resisting the impulse which assumes that more and stricter laws are always the answer to every question, the solution to every problem.   It lies in not valuing security over liberty and human rights; in accepting risk in the world and not fearfully clinging to notions of control over "the other people."  It lies in abandoning the futility of subduing enemies with force while avoiding any meaningful engagement, but instead engaging with them as peers and relinquishing control to at least the extent that they have some kind of recourse other than death (yours or theirs).  It means allowing individuals to retain and exercise meaningful power, and accepting the consequences of that necessity - being that people will not always act as you would wish, and sometimes your rights may be encroached upon.

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.  Everyone needs freedom, though a few may experience some inconvenience to themselves as a result. Only slaves are 100% secure; free people must accept and bear the risks of freedom. That means that the people you are afraid of will not be under your control.

One consequence of freedom as a basic human right is that those who mentally cannot endure racial, gender, cultural or religious integration are free to separate themselves and form enclaves in which they can fantasize about the world without interruption and without inconvenient facts being laid before them.  I do not recommend this at all since it damns them to a state of stagnation, intellectual in-breeding, idiocy and poverty.  But they remain free to do so, and we, rather than make enemies of them, must be mature enough to treat with them as peers, understand what they want and why, and be open to exchanges in our mutual best-interests.  Exporting ideology is nobody's legitimate business.

And that's why politics today is stupid: it is an overt attempt to export ideology and impose it upon others rather than seeking to understand others and treat with them.  The constant vilification of "the other guys" is the main reason that I loudly denounce Conservatives as stupid, Liberals as stupid, Libertarians as stupid, Socialists as stupid, Greens as stupid, Communists as stupid, Islamists as stupid, Christian Fundamentalists as stupid, Monarchists, Oligarchists, Militarists, Separatists, Aryans, Racists, Gays, Homophobes, Feminists or any of these smug artificial identities as stupid.  Any such identity is fundamentally based on a false assumption that "the other people" unlike you are your main problem.

And that just isn't so.  Your main problem is always you.  My main problem is always me.

So It's Religion You Want?

In spite of the dire predictions of doomsayers about the inevitable effects of allowing things like Science, Democracy, Teaching Women to Read and Racial Integration to carry on, religion today seems more popular than ever.

Religion's greatest strength is the fact that notions about god and an existence outside the knowable physical universe (e.g. life after death) are unprovable, and therefore un-disprovable.  Many religious people don't seem to grasp the importance of that, and go around trying to generate proof for these notions by all sorts of means, some honest and some, hypocritically, less so.  Being unable to be proven and unable to be disproven are two sides of the same coin, and so making your god-hypothesis a provable concept also risks making it a disprovable concept.  Being disproven and discredited is what normally happens to it next.

The hypothesis of the existence of a transcendent being or beings not bound by ordinary natural constraints is in its essence an unfalsifiable hypothesis.  I prefer the word "untestable" since it provides a clue about what you're supposed to do with hypotheses generally.  When your proposition is untestable, then you do not have to listen to anyone who claims to know that your proposition is not strictly true.  You are free to believe in it implicitly, because for all practical purposes it is true, being indistinguishable from the truth by any means available.  Like Russell's Teapot, it is untestable.

If it's religion you want, then you really want your religious propositions to all be of the untestable sort.  That way you do not ever have to surrender them to the force of evidence, reason, proof, or fact.

A strict Empiricist such as myself might question the utility of even having such beliefs; but I am well aware that no human activity, science included, is possible without an irrational, unempirical, intuitive belief in the value of creative actions taken before evidence of their benefit can possibly be known.  Therefore we do not dismiss untestable religious beliefs out of sheer arrogance, but choose instead to "live and let live."

However (and you knew this was coming, didn't you) . . . religion is too frequently not content with untestable beliefs about their god.  They foolishly begin inventing doctrine, creeds, and stories with which to adorn their god and which are often quite readily testable.  It is these adulterations that I adjure you to accept only conditionally.

Many religious movements want you to accept god as Omnipotent, that is, possessing all power.  At the same time, they want you to feel obligated to certain performances, which this "omnipotent" god somehow "needs" you to perform.  Your skepticism of these requests is well-founded.

The only sort of god that needs you to fight, give money, vote a certain way, hate someone, commit crimes or generally make a nuisance of yourself is either a non-existent god invented by cynical humans to manipulate weaker-minded humans, or is not an all-powerful god at all.

For instance, politics is all about the acquisition of power.  An omnipotent god already has all power, and therefore has no use for politics.  Therefore anyone trying to get you to be political on behalf of an omnipotent god is obviously full of shit.

Any real god would not be in the least bit inconvenienced by the existence of infidels, their expressions of blasphemy or heresy, or by people not wearing the right clothes on the right day of the week.  The agenda of any real god, if he even has an agenda at all (being eternal, why would he need one?) would be impossible for any mere human to subvert by anything whatsoever that we could possibly do or not do.

But if religion is still what you are after, then consider this.  Wodan, Master of the Wild Hunt, God of the Saxons, God of Poetry, God of Wednesday (and god knows Wednesday needs one), God of Beards and the God of Men (meaning males specifically), does not care who you vote for or what you wear.  While he may not be omnipotent, omniscient or omni-anything (OK - we'll leave the door open for Omnivorous), Wodan is comfortable enough with his godhood to be rather amused by blasphemy, if he takes any notice of it at all.  Just a suggestion - do with it what you will.

A voice in my head objects, saying "It is a worthless religion that does not require something of you."  Fine - we'll address that.  Since Wodan or any other god will get on perfectly well with or without you, the question is not how you can help or serve god.  The real question is what you can do yourself.  The size of your vision limits the size of your actions, which limit the size of your life.  Your life is to be your religion, serving the vision that you create.  It isn't going to live itself; it needs you.  You are fully empowered and fully authorized by the consciousness with which the universe has endowed you, specifically, and you are the only means in existence through which the matter of this universe can experience what it would be like to live your life.

So get out there and start livin' it.

Genetic Defect

I have a genetic defect which renders me incapable of seeing dirt. Scientists call this gene mutation the "Y-chromosome."

This is usually not a problem.  However, each year when it is time to vacuum the floors and carpets, I can't tell which parts of the floor or carpet have already been vacuumed and which haven't.  This can lead to misunderstandings of a domestic character. But I have solved this problem, and am willing to share the solution with others who may be suffering from a similar genetic deformity.


Step 1.  Get everyone who is not you out of the house for one hour. If the internet is working, make that an hour and twenty minutes.

Step 2.  Access the hole puncher and take out all the holes that have been punched over the last 12 months.  If there are not enough holes, punch some more.

Step 3.  Spread the hole-punch holes uniformly over the carpet to be vacuumed.

Step 4.  Vacuum up all the hole-punch holes.


Voila!  Every individual carpet fiber has now been vacuumed and the other humans in your domestic situation will have no grounds for their complaints and accusations.  Moral superiority is now yours for the next forty-three seconds.  Revel in it!

The Secret of Hovering

No, I said HOVERING.
As in "Levitating."

Not to be confused with the secret of Hoovering, which pretty much any idiot can figure out.


This is THE secret that has eluded humankind for thousands of years.  Transcendental meditationists, yogic flyers (aka butt-hoppers), ninja masters, medieval alchemists, druidic high elders, and Harry Potter fans have all searched in vain for this ONE THING you need to know about hovering.

This one essential truth is the finish-line in your life-long quest to float free of this planet's relentless downward pull.

This knowledge is the final cumulative result of mankind's thirst for hovering awareness and our ten-thousand year journey towards levitation enlightenment.

This fundamental fact has been painstakingly distilled from the fabric of the Cosmos, groped after between the cushions of Reality and plucked from the very sofa-crack of Existence.

Yet, here it is, free of charge, and your reward for doing nothing more than stumbling upon this humble blog from the far remote wastelands of Australia.

However, if this astonishing insight is going to be too much for you and cause you to have some kind of a spiritual break-down, embarrassing fit, or maybe a bladder control issue, then please read no further.


But for those of you who are worthy and have truly prepared yourselves:

Here is the ONE THING that tells you ALL THERE IS TO KNOW about levitating in the air without any technological assistance:






. . .








You can't.

If It Isn't Baroque, Don't Fix It.

The Shed as a retreat is extremely versatile.  For example, it has recently enabled me to run away to Leipzig in the first half of the 18th century.  That's the time and place to which JS Bach belonged.

I did not accomplish this through anything fantastical like time travel nor by anything too mundane like downloading some tracks to my mobile phone.  My escape was not mere passive consumption.  It was achieved through attempting to re-create some of Bach's music in a manner that I consider fit and proper.

Yes, I could have simply listened to the CDs again.  But to be honest, some of the re-interpretations and so-called performances of Bach's preludes and fugues make me want to - well, not quite burn my ears off with acid.  Certainly, at least, they make me want to listen to something else.

That's why I take it upon myself to arrange and produce my own recordings of Bach's most astonishing works.  In not just the history of keyboard instruments, but in all human history, the Preludes and Fugues are among Mankind's greatest achievements.

Yes, Baroque music may be considered quaint and primitive in comparison to mind-blowing experiences like Rachmaninoff or Jimi Hendrix.  But closer inspection of these pieces reveals a depth and complexity that would make any century proud to claim them.

True, Baroque music is extremely simple rhythmically.  Four evenly-spaced beats repeated, then divided equally in half, then divided equally again and again.  Nothing can be simpler, and our entire system of music notation is based on the temporal simplicity of that age.  But that simplicity is more than made up for in its harmonic complexity.  There are harmonies of harmonies, or meta-harmonies.  Bach's harmonic systems exhibit almost fractal divisibility.


But, there's no use talking about it.  Enjoy the fruits of my efforts:  the D-Major Prelude and Fugue, BWV 532.  Being in a major key, it's relatively up-beat and cheerful.  But not so much as to forget one's dignity.


So sit back, put on headphones, and leave the 21st Century for the next 10 minutes and 34 seconds.

The End of Neurosis

During days of quiet reflection at the Shed, one of the most powerful insights that comes back to me time and again is that you can never change other people.  They will stay crazy right up until they decide to change all by themselves.

Oh, sorry, did I use a non-PC word there?  Crazy?  You are correct: therapists strongly dislike the word "crazy."  It makes it sound like any fool can become a therapist without years of medical, scientific and psychiatric study and training.  Now, that actually is the situation, but they still don't like it to be generally known.  That is why they prefer to call crazy people by a another name that makes it sound as though they knew something meaningful about it:

Borderline Personality Disorder

Therapists also do not like to work with crazy - uh, I mean individuals exhibiting Borderline Personality Disorder, because they know that there is nothing they can do to "cure" them.  Because you can't change other people; people can only change themselves when they decide to.

Stop Whining about the noise and sparks,
and let Angle Grinder Man cut your chains off.

And crazy people (just get over it, ok?  It takes less time to write and amounts to the same thing) never, ever change because part of being crazy is that they are utterly convinced that they are not the ones with the problem.

I don't have to define crazy (or BPD) because you know it when you see it.  Everyone knows someone with wild swings of emotion, likely to bite the head off of anyone at the slightest whiff of what they believe to be an attack on their self image, or people that get mad at you and sulk for weeks over something you don't remember doing or saying.  We label them drama queens, rage-a-holics,  people with issues, narcissistic, co-dependent and so forth.  But really, they're just plain-old straight-up Crazy.

(I'd like you to immediately, right now, buy and read this book: Stop Walking on Eggshells: Taking Your Life Back When Someone You Care About Has Borderline Personality Disorder.  Do it now.)

The most important thing you can do now to ensure that your life is not infected with crazy is to stop hanging around crazy people.  You'll be glad you took this step, and the sooner, the better.  (I know a good divorce attorney if you need one.)

The next step is to swallow the bitter pill and look in the mirror.  How does a person who consciously chooses to no longer be crazy actually make the change?  Perhaps you're not full-on bat-shit crazy, but just, say, a little on the neurotic side.  Maybe there's just a touch of some social phobia, anxiety, anger, brooding over past bullying or trauma, or a wee bout of addictive tendency.  If that's the case, then you're actually pretty normal.  Therapists love people like you!

Crazy people never question for a moment the existence or meaning of their emotions.  They have intense emotions set to explode on a hair-trigger.  Ordinary neurotics have less intense emotions that underpin their various behaviors, and the trigger isn't as sensitive, but in principle, it's all one of a muchness.

The whole thing, the entire spectrum of human irrationality, suffering, self-sabotage and discontent, hangs on just one thing.

The one thing that allows all of this stuff to exist is your unquestioning belief in and unwavering devotion to the illusion of consciousness.

Break that illusion, that spell, that waking, life-long trance of the mind, and all forms of neurosis vanish like smoke.  If you can crack that facade even just a little, you can begin to do things that make an enormous difference to your happiness, success, suitability as a marriage partner, sense of fulfillment in life and rankings on Google.

For example, you can begin to understand that emotions are not actually real.  This admits the possibility of questioning your emotions.  As the observer of the mind, whenever you discover an emotion forming within you, always ask this question:

"What would a person have to believe in order to actually choose this emotion?"

You can also begin to question the validity of your experiences and the people that inhabit them.  Your mind, based on what it senses and what it unconsciously believes and assumes, pieces together the objective world around you and the people within it and projects a simulation of this onto your consciousness.  That is in fact the only possible way for a conscious being to experience anything at all.  While there most definitely is an underlying objective reality outside you, you only ever experience a subjective, carefully-filtered and not-100%-accurate simulation of that reality.  That is why people in your reality sometimes say, do or think things that they did not actually say, do or think.  Crazy people fly off at shadows and imagined threats; non-crazy people discipline their mind not to make those assumptions without first considering the illusory nature of consciousness.

When people moan and say they can't change, that means they are still 100% convinced by the illusion of their own mind. Pain still exists, insults still cut deep, fear and past trauma keep the unformed future and the unchanging past alive within them at all times. Suffering goes marching on.

But as soon as you know how the magic trick is done, the show is over.  The veil is lifted and it is the End of All Neuroses.

New Music for your Dancing and Dining Pleasure

I thought I'd give Audacity another try.  The last time I tried it was about five years ago, and the sound quality was hopeless.  The laptop I was using at the time may have had something to do with it, but recordings using other software on the same machine sounded much better.

This time the sound is pretty good, if you can overcome the latency problems that cause tracks to be shifted out of sync with each other.  I've decided to blame all the problems and mistakes in these two numbers on that issue.  However, once again the hardware has a lot to do with it.

On my older XP machine I could play the keyboard instrument straight through the soundcard and out the speakers.  With this newer, larger and more expensive computer running Win7, the latency is so bad that I cannot even play a few notes: the delay between playing a note and hearing the note drove me bonkers.  The issue was so bad that I bought a second pair of speakers just to avoid ever experiencing it again.  When I play the Nord (which being a stage performance instrument has no built-in speakers) into the computer, I must disable the computer speakers and monitor myself through the second pair.

And so, when Audacity is playing and recording at the same time, the resulting tracks are so far out of sync it sounds like there are two different songs playing over each other.  I had to manually, meticulously nudge them back and forth until they matched.  Of course that was impossible, because my playing never matches from one track to the next, so the best a mathematically-minded musician can to is to minimize the error in the least-squares sense.

Or just keep fiddling with it until it sounds OK.  Yeah, that's actually easier.  It helped to magnify the waveforms and line them up visually.


In any case, the first song takes advantage of the fantastic backing accompaniment available on the Roland FP-80 instrument.  The three piano parts you can hear are me in live performance.  Just not performed all at the same time.

This is a Gospel-style blues that makes abundant use of 6, 9 and 11 chords.






The second, conceived and recorded all about a half an hour after finishing the previous track, was meant to be a showcase for the amazing and deeply satisfying Nord electric stage piano sounds that I have been enjoying privately for some months now.  There are three piano parts, no drum or backing track, and it's all me.

I've known since about 1986 that simply dashing off a musical number and committing it to a recording in multiple tracks is not as easy as it sounds, particularly when it's being improvised on the spur of the moment.  And if your sense of rhythm and tempo are as abysmal as mine.  Virtually non-existent.  Plus, each time you rewind and lay on another track, you have to remember exactly what you did previously and when exactly you did it.

I didn't accomplish that perfectly this time, but I really enjoyed giving it a go!




Let me know what you think.