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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quoting him:

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

- Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent Of Man

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

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

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

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

If you’re like most people you’re probably thinking, shadow government?  What is that?  I don’t claim to know it all, but just by reading and gathering as much information as I can, I see that this stuff is very real.  If you’re not aware of it already I’ll try to help pull your head out of the sand. The Washington Post just did a huge investigation and wrote an outstanding piece called Top Secret America: A Hidden World, Growing Beyond Control.  They’ve been investigating all of the programs George Bush implemented after 9/11 and it’s insane.  All this screams Big Brother.

First watch this video from Frontline:

The article begins:

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

….

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings – about 17 million square feet of space.

Just days after 9/11, a sort of blueprint began execution constructing over a thousand different organizations, located in over 10,000 different locations across the country, most of them top-secret.  There’s even some near where I live. Enormous budgets were and are being spent on this stuff.  Clandestine operations are going on all over the place, and I fear they’re not just spying on the terrorists overseas but on you and me as well.

In an Arlington County office building, the lobby directory doesn’t include the Air Force’s mysteriously named XOIWS unit, but there’s a big “Welcome!” sign in the hallway greeting visitors who know to step off the elevator on the third floor. In Elkridge, Md., a clandestine program hides in a tall concrete structure fitted with false windows to look like a normal office building. In Arnold, Mo., the location is across the street from a Target and a Home Depot. In St. Petersburg, Fla., it’s in a modest brick bungalow in a run-down business park.

….

As a Michaels craft store and a Books-A-Million give way to the military intelligence giants Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, find the off-ramp and turn left. Those two shimmering-blue five-story ice cubes belong to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which analyzes images and mapping data of the Earth’s geography. A small sign obscured by a boxwood hedge says so.

Across the street, in the chocolate-brown blocks, is Carahsoft, an intelligence agency contractor specializing in mapping, speech analysis and data harvesting. Nearby is the government’s Underground Facility Analysis Center. It identifies overseas underground command centers associated with weapons of mass destruction and terrorist groups, and advises the military on how to destroy them.

You’re just minding your business, buying some screws and boards in Home Depot to repair your back deck, and just across the street is a clandestine military-type operation and you don’t even know it!  Underground there’s military bases running covert information gathering!

These places are locked down with the best security systems available.  These buildings aren’t located on maps.  If you get near them the men in black are all over you.  They may well gun you down.

Outside a gated subdivision of mansions in McLean, a line of cars idles every weekday morning as a new day in Top Secret America gets underway. The drivers wait patiently to turn left, then crawl up a hill and around a bend to a destination that is not on any public map and not announced by any street sign.

Liberty Crossing tries hard to hide from view. But in the winter, leafless trees can’t conceal a mountain of cement and windows the size of five Wal-Mart stores stacked on top of one another rising behind a grassy berm. One step too close without the right badge, and men in black jump out of nowhere, guns at the ready.

Past the armed guards and the hydraulic steel barriers, at least 1,700 federal employees and 1,200 private contractors work at Liberty Crossing, the nickname for the two headquarters of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and its National Counterterrorism Center. The two share a police force, a canine unit and thousands of parking spaces.

Liberty Crossing is at the center of the collection of U.S. government agencies and corporate contractors that mushroomed after the 2001 attacks. But it is not nearly the biggest, the most costly or even the most secretive part of the 9/11 enterprise.

….

Every day across the United States, 854,000 civil servants, military personnel and private contractors with top-secret security clearances are scanned into offices protected by electromagnetic locks, retinal cameras and fortified walls that eavesdropping equipment cannot penetrate

….

In all, at least 263 organizations have been created or reorganized as a response to 9/11. Each has required more people, and those people have required more administrative and logistic support: phone operators, secretaries, librarians, architects, carpenters, construction workers, air-conditioning mechanics and, because of where they work, even janitors with top-secret clearances.

….

It’s not only the number of buildings that suggests the size and cost of this expansion, it’s also what is inside: banks of television monitors. “Escort-required” badges. X-ray machines and lockers to store cellphones and pagers. Keypad door locks that open special rooms encased in metal or permanent dry wall, impenetrable to eavesdropping tools and protected by alarms and a security force capable of responding within 15 minutes. Every one of these buildings has at least one of these rooms, known as a SCIF, for sensitive compartmented information facility. Some are as small as a closet; others are four times the size of a football field.

From what everyone’s saying, most of our elected representatives aren’t even given clearance to half of this stuff.  That means we’re all in the dark as this shadow government conducts its operations, and they’re given billions and billions of dollars.  They can’t afford to pay for your healthcare, but they sure find money to spy on you and god knows what else.

At least 20 percent of the government organizations that exist to fend off terrorist threats were established or refashioned in the wake of 9/11. Many that existed before the attacks grew to historic proportions as the Bush administration and Congress gave agencies more money than they were capable of responsibly spending

….

The Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, for example, has gone from 7,500 employees in 2002 to 16,500 today. The budget of the National Security Agency, which conducts electronic eavesdropping, doubled. Thirty-five FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces became 106. It was phenomenal growth that began almost as soon as the Sept. 11 attacks ended.

Nine days after the attacks, Congress committed $40 billion beyond what was in the federal budget to fortify domestic defenses and to launch a global offensive against al-Qaeda. It followed that up with an additional $36.5 billion in 2002 and $44 billion in 2003. That was only a beginning.

Supposedly they’re gathering intelligence on Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.  You want to know why I don’t believe that?  They couldn’t stop the underwear bomber whose father literally called them up warning he’s an extremist.  His father! Then they don’t even deter the man from getting on the plane; but they make sure submit all of us to x-ray scans before getting on our flights!

But improvements have been overtaken by volume at the ODNI, as the increased flow of intelligence data overwhelms the system’s ability to analyze and use it. Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications. The NSA sorts a fraction of those into 70 separate databases. The same problem bedevils every other intelligence agency, none of which have enough analysts and translators for all this work.

….

Among the most important people inside the SCIFs are the low-paid employees carrying their lunches to work to save money. They are the analysts, the 20- and 30-year-olds making $41,000 to $65,000 a year, whose job is at the core of everything Top Secret America tries to do.

At its best, analysis melds cultural understanding with snippets of conversations, coded dialogue, anonymous tips, even scraps of trash, turning them into clues that lead to individuals and groups trying to harm the United States.

What was really suspicious is how half of the analysts who are supposedly gathering all this intelligence in the Middle East can’t even speak the languages over there.

That cries out to be investigated.  I feel there’s a serious threat looming on the horizon.  If the government were to begin recording all our cell phone conversations, monitoring our emails, analyzing our text messages, and intercepting our IM conversations, our personal liberty would greatly be a stake.  Who knows, maybe they’re doing so already.  How would we know?  What I do is know is the Patriot Act tells ISPs to send the government everything we’re doing online if they request it.  They may well be requesting it all without us knowing, logging it all away.

If all of this isn’t going on now, the threat that it could potentially happen is something we need to think about and prepare for.  I fear they will be doing all this before too long if we don’t stop them.

There’s all this talk about “cyber-warfare”.  I think that amounts to them suppressing and controlling the information found on the internet.  Apparently it’s the “hot and sexy” thing to work on these days in the CIA.

And all the major intelligence agencies and at least two major military commands claim a major role in cyber-warfare, the newest and least-defined frontier.

“Frankly, it hasn’t been brought together in a unified approach,” CIA Director Panetta said of the many agencies now involved in cyber-warfare.

“Cyber is tremendously difficult” to coordinate, said Benjamin A. Powell, who served as general counsel for three directors of national intelligence until he left the government last year. “Sometimes there was an unfortunate attitude of bring your knives, your guns, your fists and be fully prepared to defend your turf.” Why? “Because it’s funded, it’s hot and it’s sexy.”

And just like any nefarious operation, it all operates on a “need to know” basis.  Even four star generals are often kept out of the loop.  It’s all fractured, people only knowing what pertains to them and their operation, not understanding the big picture.

One military officer involved in one such program said he was ordered to sign a document prohibiting him from disclosing it to his four-star commander, with whom he worked closely every day, because the commander was not authorized to know about it. Another senior defense official recalls the day he tried to find out about a program in his budget, only to be rebuffed by a peer. “What do you mean you can’t tell me? I pay for the program,” he recalled saying in a heated exchange.

Am I just being paranoid?  Maybe.  But I’m thinking we need to get a lot more paranoid.  This smells a lot like the beginnings of a police state to me.  I don’t like it one bit. If the economy goes sour and we sink into a major depression, people start rioting and protesting, and all of this stuff ramps up in intensity… I don’t like it at all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

….

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

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

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

….

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

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

….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t have to tell anyone her story.  We all hear about it everyday. Whether it be from the front page of the New York Times, the special report on Fox News, or progressive’s own Huffington Post, everyone wants in on some LiLo action.  Take some article headlines:

“Lindsay Lohan checks into rehab in LA”

“Lindsay Lohan quotes 50 cent, ‘Watch Yo Mouth’”

“Michael Lohan refuses to Believe Lindsay Lohan Stopped Taking Prescription Drugs”

“Lindsay Lohan gets punched in the face for her birthday”

I have no idea what Mel Gibson did, but for whatever reason it seems the media’s angry with him.  So what do they do?  They put his name in the same headline as Lohan. Believe me, you do not want that to happen.  That immediately associates you with trash, drugs, and whore’ishness.  She’s become a sort of media weapon that they’ve built up and use on whatever target they want to nail.

“Mel in threeway with Oksana and Gloria Allred?  Where’s Lindsay Lohan?”

“Lindsay Lohan has a rocky birthday; more vulgarities from Mel Gibson?”

“What Lindsay Lohan can learn from Mel Gibson and other lawbreakers”

“Week In Review: Lindsay Lohan, Mel Gibson Get A Big “FU” Right Back”

I can picture it now.  There’s some rich capitalist scumbags meeting in secret puffing cigars, the lights dim, and a screen comes down showing Mel Gibson.  Silence comes over the room, a big bald fat guy leans back, exhales a plume of smoke, crosses his arms and says, “He’s become a problem hasn’t he.  Unleash LiLo on him.”

This may well have to do with our innate desire to gossip.  As we become more and more isolated within our homes, living in the dream world of our television and computer screens, we’re becoming more and more disconnected from our own lives and communities.  We fascinate on these celebrity figures and get in on the gossip.

“More Believable: Lindsay Lohan Dead Or Houston Finally Getting A Disney World?”

“Lindsay Lohan ordered to answer drug-use questions in civil case”

“Lindsay Lohan on ‘Double Exposure’: Always Wipe down your stripper pole”

“Lindsay Lohan Corrupted By Lesbian Jews”

“Don’t Take Away Lindsay’s Pills!  (All at once, That is)”

“Scoop: Waitress denies hitting LiLo – but wants to”

“Lindsay Lohan’s Spray Tan Could Set Off SCRAM”

“Lindsay Lohan in court; how we got here”

That last article comes from the Washington Post.  Their top journalists are on it!  They’re going to research it all out and give you the breakdown!  Tell you what’s going on with the war in Pakistan? … yeah, they’ll have to get back with you on that.

There’s always a reason for everything and there’s something going on with this Lindsay Lohan stuff.  Maybe it’s as simple as the elites wanting to dumb us down and think about trash?  Maybe it’s to make us feel better about ourselves?  Maybe people really click on these headlines and read them?

I don’t know.  If any of you guys out there can explain this to me, I’d love to hear your take on the Lohan phenomena.

Andre,

Your paper talks about the dangers our society faces as we specialize further and further and lose sight of the big picture. Quoting you directly:

“In the late 60s I became convinced, mainly because of the obvious insanity of wars and the apparent saneness of those who believe in it, that “we must have made a mistake somewhere throughout of our evolution.”  In the 70s, I also became thoroughly convinced, influenced by many French writers and by Buckminster Fuller, that the extreme specialization of our elites was leading humanity toward a crisis of an unprecedented nature.”

“As for specialization being the ultimate cause of this state of affairs, it is the hypothesis that I have adopted at the time and which I intended to test with my own formation as a generalist after reading Buckminster Fuller’s  Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, in which he observes that : “Of course, our failures are a consequence of many factors, but possibly one of the most important is the fact that society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking.”

- Andre Gaudwin, Errare Humanum Est

I have a few comments to share.  Unfortunately, I don’t think they’re really of much use in solving this problem.

I’d like to start by asking us to look at life from the largest possible perspective; how does life begin?  Floating in the oceans carbon and other atoms congeal onto themselves into clumps and strands eventually leading to the first cells.  Over billions of years these cells die and replicate and clump together forming into larger and more complex units, in time becoming all the different forms of life we see on the Earth today.  Humanity is quite a latecomer when you look at things from this far back.  We’ve only been around for a few million years, whereas life on this planet goes back billions of years.

So as I stroll through my backyard admiring the breeze as it rustles the tree leaves, or watch the little ant scurry around the leaf litter, or spy on the water spider from above as it skips across the creek water, I find myself immersed in an ecological system of massive and immense complexity.  This environment I observe is so old I can’t even comprehend it.  Over billions of years everything from the grass, to the bushes, to the flies, to the beetles, and everything else have all formed into an interdependent system of unimaginable complexity.

We as humans evolved in the forests and plains in Africa starting a few millions years ago and are nothing but hairless great apes.  One of the distinctive features setting us apart from other species is our skill in memory, analytical abilities, our hands allowing us to use tools effectively, and our ability to learn and pass on our knowledge through mimicry and language.

What has “knowledge” been for the vast majority of human existence?  It’s been a hands on lesson from our father on how to use a spear.  It’s been remembering the locations of fruit trees and caves.  It’s been various learned motor abilities developed and acquired as we hunted and outsmarted the prey and animals we found around us.

All in all, our brains have been used for relatively simple things for the vast majority of our existence.  We’ve been a rather sparse species and it’s only very recently that our numbers have increased to anything appreciable.  We’ve formed the society and your papers deal with issues we face in that society.

Society… It’s a very novel thing to us humans.  Around 30,000 years ago (rough estimate) we begin to domesticate animals and farm our food.  We learned that we can somewhat control the environment to secure a guaranteed meal.  We start clearing away the forests to make room for farmland and in conjunction with domesticated animals we’re able to build permanent homes.  As we get better at doing this, we start to get some free time and rise above bare bones subsistence.

At this point we begin producing extra things and trading these things one with another.  This eventually leads to cities and the economy as we know it today.

When you trace out the story you see mankind slowly trying to control nature more and more.  At first it’s not very difficult.  Not much brain power is required to farm plants.  You just stick the seeds in the ground, make sure they get water, and voila.  Later you learn they can be fertilized and such, but all in all it’s far from rocket science.  Managing domestic animals isn’t much more difficult.  But we became more and more ambitious as time progressed.

Really the vast majority of the complications are very recent.  They’re rooted in the past few hundred years or so.  Back when we started this little journey of ours we had no idea what we were getting into.  People found themselves in this reality on planet Earth back before all our modern technology.  They were hungry, suffering from diseases and plagues of every sort, constantly being raided by foreigners who would steal everything they’ve worked so hard to build up, and they did what they thought was the best thing to do.  They tried to secure meals for themselves and their children, to provide shelter and security, and look out for those precious to them in a very hostile world.  We owe everything to these people.

What are the principles we learned that led to our modern technology?  Leaving out a lot of details, we first had the Egyptians and Greeks laying out the laws of geometry.  The Arabs I believe invented Algebra.  A lot of these techniques were birthed because of economic transactions through indirect exchange using money, and also the need to calculate things like property taxes.

The first major breakthrough was Newton as he laid out the laws of motion in his Principia.  Later we discovered thermodynamic processes which allowed to us build steam engines.  We also started to master electro-magnetism culminating in Maxwell’s laws.  In the early twentieth century we had the discovery of general relativity and quantum mechanics, the foundations of our modern scientific technology.

As someone who has studied these subjects to a relatively high degree of mastery, I can tell you that they’re far from simple.  Calculus, differential equations, Maxwell’s laws, statistical mechanics, quantum physics, general relativity… these aren’t the most simplistic things on Earth.

But even though these things are so complicated, mankind has striven to reach higher and higher.  But today, as you point out, things are getting almost out of hand.  The division of labor has led to massive specialization.  With all of us working within such a narrow focus we seem to be losing the big picture.  I’d like to talk a little about that.

I can see the problem, but I also see no way around it.  To control this world, which is very complicated and subtle, we are required to specialize.  The human brain is too weak to achieve mastery in every subject.  There’s no way around specialization.  It’s simply impossible for a normal human being to be a master engineer, a doctor, a lawyer, and several other occupations, all at the same time.  The knowledge and skill required are too much.

As time goes on, and our collective knowledge of this universe increases, absent some sort of major biological change to our brains, specialization will become a requirement.  That definitely is a problem from an administrative sense, as you point out.

I personally don’t think any sort of social reorganization or planning can fix this problem.  I don’t think it’s even a problem with our leaders not being educated enough (even though our leaders are far too often idiots).  As much as I like the idea of generalists and attempting to master as much as possible, as time progresses a generalist will be impossible.  There will be too much to know and you’ll be required to skim over everything at such a superficial level it won’t be of any use.

We’re coming awful close to outgrowing our means of communicating knowledge to one another.  Right now we’re still relying on that time old method of mimicry.  We watch someone else do things and learn by example.  Other methods of learning include audible speech and books (or reading from a computer screen), and school lectures from professors and teachers, which are far too slow.  The amount of time we spend in school is getting to be too long.  It already requires say a doctor to be in school for over twenty years before he starts treating patients.  (K-12 plus university training plus apprenticeship) That’s a huge percentage of our entire life span!  As our knowledge increases the time required to teach it all will only increase.

Our next stage of progress will come as we integrate ourselves with our computer technology.  It comes down to this:  nature is complicated and our brains are frail, slow, and not very powerful.  We need to upgrade our brains.

I foresee us transcending speech and books.  I don’t think we’ll have to “learn” things in the future.  We won’t have to rely on education or read books.  Today we’re born with instinctive reflexes which evolution has given us to survive within the environment we’ve lived in for millions of years.  Most of those “skills” nowadays are considered evolutionary baggage and make our social life difficult.  I think that’s all about to change.  We’re entering a new epoch.

Once we learn how to reprogram our brains, and enhance their capabilities with nano-technology, people will be born knowing everything.  New information will be wirelessly uploaded to their minds.  Every man, woman, and child will be fully equipped to deal with life.  You won’t have to worry about whether or not your father taught you how to deal with life emotionally, or read psychologists articles on how to properly console a depressed friend, or go to a trade school to know how to fix an appliance.  You’ll just know these and when you need to do it, it will come as naturally to you as a young boy being attracted to a pretty girl.  The newly created artificial instincts will be there all ready to go.  And just like our computers, we’ll be able to reprogram ourselves to adapt to our ever changing world.

This scares some people.  Honestly, I don’t know if I really care.  I don’t feel we have all that much to lose.  I’ve spent too much time reading books and looking at this place for what it is.  Life is fragile and filled with every sort of trouble imaginable.  You, just like me, have been born into this hell, and most everything we face is because evolution and this cruel universe pushed it on all of us.  I say we go for it.

Yeah, we’ll probably make a lot of mistakes as we go about altering our genetics, reward systems and brains.  We may screw up big time.  We’ll have to be careful because our mama universe is real bitch and she doesn’t give a damn about us.  But we need to go for it.  We’ll probably also end up destroying all the other life on this planet in this “civilization” project of ours.  Even so, life for our ancestors wasn’t a picnic.  It was absolute misery and hell.  The whole struggle for survival model, everyone fighting for food is ridiculous.  We certainly don’t want to go back.  That being the case, there’s only one direction to take — forward.

I think this integration with technology is the only way forward.  There is no philosophy which will fix things.  There is no religion or belief system which will cure things.  There is no economic system which can be designed to fix it.  If people tried to love one another, and we had a more decent economic system without all the corruption, sure it’d be better, but still nothing great.  There’s only one way for us to achieve a universe where people truly are happy and prosperous.  We’ll have to improve our brains and technology which will allow us to be conscious of one another’s situations, have empathy for everyone, not just our immediate family, and gain vastly more control over the forces of nature.

As for right now, we’ve went to control this universe and its required such a degree of specialization that it seems we’ve once again lost sight of our initial goals.  I don’t think this is true however.  It’s a real battle to tie down this bull.  This Earth wants to buck us off like a bad habit.  One little screw up and we’re done for.  It’ll throw us off and won’t think a thing about it.  The fossil record shows that 99% of all other species which have ever lived — extinct.

I feel people like us are here to try to keep the ignorant masses from killing themselves.  That seems to be the current stage of history.  Our scientists are laboring away to fix these problems as fast as they can and they’re making progress.  Problem is, the vast majority of this world is filled with complete idiots.  I mean absolute morons.  They’re destroying everything around them, killing themselves, and imposing misery on themselves and everyone else.  Like a herd of mindless cattle, we have to round them up so they don’t run off the edge.  We have to be the few sane people who get on the television and tell people the truth, warning and protecting them.

When I think about our economy, no matter how much economics I study, I see it surrounded by a dark impenetrable fog.  All the tinkering our government and politicians do operates at a very high superficial level.  They work with these vague statistical aggregates and hope by throwing money around they can fix problems which are beyond anyone’s comprehension.

Take physics for example.  Study some quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics.  Just try to model a gas cloud and a few basic laws of interaction between them.  All the atoms follow relatively simple laws, all behaving in exactly the same way, yet it’s hell to statistically model it.  You end up pages and pages of equations and need computers to predict what’s going on.  Now imagine if every one of those atoms followed its own laws and did its own thing.  Then you have the economy.

Our success economically depends on all the individual actions done by billions of people.  We’re all on this ship together.  If people are dumb, corrupt and do stupid things, the Fed’s not going to be able to fix it by lowering the interest rate and throwing some cheap money around.  Major economic problems hit everyone out of nowhere.  There’s detailed and complicated forces at work which I believe are impossible to predict.  Those with some really good foresight can sometimes see an upcoming disaster, but they’re few and far between.

It’s like chaos theory.  In chaos theory a butterfly flaps its wings in the rainforest and we end up with tornadoes in Kansas.  Economically, we have some guy going in the store buying a candybar and later we end up with an economic meltdown.  Unfortunately, unlike the weather which we can predict for at least a few weeks in advance, our economists can’t even see a disaster two feet in front of us.

The only people I’ve found with some decent insight into this are the Austrian economists.  They don’t pretend that the economy can be so easily modeled and their view on the business cycle seems to me to work.  It’s just my rather amateur opinion.  If it isn’t apparent already, I don’t think very highly of economics in general.  But from my own research it seems that when the central bank starts lowering the interest rate too low the cheap credit starts flowing, that money starts pumping up some bubbles, and then they pop and we have trouble.  There’s ups and downs in the cycle regardless of intervention.  It just seems the government can sweep the problems under the rug temporarily by infusing the economy with cheap money, and over time this builds up until you have a major disaster.  Their interventions can so easily make things worse.  Occasional drug use can bring temporary happiness and mask over your problems for the time being, but it’s addictive and can destroy you quick.  Cheap money is the same.  I think it’d be better if we faced each small economic downturn as it came instead of letting the bubble build up into a mountain and then it erupts like a volcano destroying everything in its path.

That’s not to say I’m against all regulation.  There’s a lot of places for regulation, like the Glass-Steagall regulations for example.  I’m just saying we have to keep an eye on these bankers and cheap credit.  We need to watch out when they have control over the money supply.  They screw us.

I’m sorry to hear about your poor reception with colleagues.  It’s a personal flaw of mine, but I don’t think very highly of people in general.  I don’t know your life and situation, but in my own trying times nobody has ever given a damn.  It’s just how it is.  You just slug it out and keep moving.

I’ve written business plans, laboring away for years on things, trying to raise capital and get things moving.  I’d submit my plan to these investment companies and not hear anything.  Sometimes I’d get one of those auto-responder emails that says, “Thank you for submitting your plan, but … blah blah.”   Try to contact them asking, “What’s wrong with my plan?  Can you give me some feedback?” … Nothing.  Worse yet some of these investment companies charge you like $150 to submit your plan.  Then they won’t even so much as speak with you.  Talk about assholes.  I’d submit my plan to hundreds of places and not hear anything.  (Fortunately they don’t all charge money.  What would be the purpose of raising capital if it costed you a million dollars just to attempt to raise funds?  Who could afford it?)

I don’t know about you, but the sheer and utter frustration of having the biggest thing in your life, what everything your life depends on is based, being completely ignored … oh, makes me angry.  Real angry.  Sure can make you bitter about life in general.  I try to stay positive but I have to say, it can really get to me.

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

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

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

Here’s the video I was watching:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes they open with that one.

Let’s get retarded in here

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

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

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

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

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

….

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

….

- Black Eyed Peas – Let’s Get Retarded

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Rush Limbaugh, CPAC 2009

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

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

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

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

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

“The important thing is not to stop questioning”

“Question everything”

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

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

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

- Various quotes by Albert Einstein

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

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

- Albert Einstein

Beef:

Pork and Bacon:

Chicken:

This is why we have to eat organic food, or even better, become vegetarians.  If you eat the normal beef, chicken, and pork found in your supermarket, you’re guilty of supporting this cruel and terrible industry.  Sad thing is, without these cruel techniques a significant portion of our population would starve.  Food prices would go way up and most couldn’t afford them.  As David Attenborough said at the end of his Life Of Mammals series, it’s time for us to control our population to save the environment.  The more humans we hatch out, the more this sort of thing will go on.

If we continue business as usual, the only species which will survive are our pets and these domesticated farm animals who endure this harsh and terrible treatment.  Natural habitats are being ravaged and destroyed all to make room for farms like these and to build us more homes.

I had to turn my head when they jammed that blade into the animals’ necks as they hung there then suffocated on their own blood.  I can’t imagine what that feels like.  Then that pig fell to the ground squirming around, bleeding to death.  At the start of the first film you see that cow being castrated, no pain killers, just whacking off its testicles.  It’s trapped in those bars writhing in pain.

It’s so strange that we have animal cruelty laws regarding our pets, such as dogs and cats, but then treatment such as this is completely ignored and brushed away.  This is far worse than anything most dogs and cats endure.  Thing is, there’s money in beef, pork, and chicken sales.  Since that’s the case, this sort of thing is ignored.

Just watch the films.  They’re so gruesome I don’t even want to talk about them.

When I study neuroscience, it’s amazing that you find the same sorts of brain structures in animals as we have in humans.  In us, our outer 6 mm of neo-cortex is where consciousness resides.  It’s where we see, feel, taste, smell, and so on.  Read my introduction to the subject here.  Those pigs and cattle have the same structures.  I’m not sure about chickens as I’ve never examined their brains. I assume they have some of them as well.  When you’re jamming that blade in their necks, there’s consciousness residing in those animals.   They’re just as alive as us humans.  There’s a living being there, suffering and in pain.

Animals are just as alive as we are.  It’s only our mistaken beliefs, many originating in our superstitious religious systems, that disconnect us from the true nature of life.  We can’t allow this sort of treatment to continue.  This is just as important an issue as torture and human rights.  These are crimes against life itself.

These cows are unable to move freely, stuck in metal cages.  Giant hoses spray their little concrete cages to clean out the manure.  Disease can be rampant as there’s so many animals unnaturally crammed so close together.  These animals have to be pumped with all kinds of antibiotics just to be able to live in these conditions.  All the manure is shipped off to waste lagoons which are disease breeding grounds.  Millions and millions of flies gather breeding in the nastiness.

These cows produce 23x the waste of a human being.  Combined, the amount of waste involved in one mega-farm is equivalent to that of a city with 186,000+ people.  Yet, unlike a city where the waste is treated in sewage plants, this waste is just thrown out onto the countryside as fertilizer.

Soil tests around the mega-farms surrounding area show dense concentrations of e. coli, salmonella, listeria, cryptosporidium, and other pathogens, all of which are disease causing pathogens.

And you want to know how they kill these cows?  They herd them up in a line and then lead them into this room with a swinging iron bar, which is sort of like a pendulum.  Then they bash the cow’s head against the wall, crushing its skull and splattering its brains all over the wall.  It saves them the cost of a bullet.

Cows aren’t the only animals treated this way.  Chickens and pigs are subjected to similar treatment.

Families who live near these places complain about the hydrogen sulphide, which is a gas given off by these places.  It causes nausea, neurological damage, and unbearable odor.  You’ll hear stories about families where the children keep getting sick and they visit the doctor.  The doctor then tells them they need to move because the child’s immune system can’t handle living near the mega-farm.  When these farms move in, everyone who lives in the area tries to move off as the air becomes unbreatheable, but they’re never able to sell their homes.

But you want to know the bigger problem?  There’s too many people on this planet.  Where do you think all those Hardees cheeseburgers and McDonald’s chicken nuggets come from?  This is where all that cheap meat and chicken comes from.  Hardly anyone buys organic food, so where does the non-organic stuff come from?  The majority of it comes from mega-farms. We couldn’t even support our population without using these cruel and terrible techniques.

And you know what’s so ironic?  I’ve planned never to have children because I feel ethically convicted about the Earth’s over-population.  But, I was with family over the fourth of July holiday and I was talking with some family friends and relatives.  One guy was talking about a distant nephew of his who has seven children.  SEVEN.

Sometimes I just want to throw my hands up in the air and just yell out, “Whatever…” and walk off.   Honestly, I feel like I’m living in that movie Idiocracy.

I spent today watching a series of lectures on the physics of the impossible.  Some of the lectures were on chaos theory and talked about how difficult it is to predict the future.  Even in a deterministic universe, just small degree of imprecision in starting condition measurements can lead to major inaccuracies in distant predictions.  Predicting the future becomes impossible because we can never measure our starting conditions with infinite accuracy.  You get things like the infamous ‘butterfly effect’, where a butterfly flaps its wings in a jungle somewhere in Brazil, which eventually leads to tornadoes in Texas.  Other lectures were on quantum mechanical effects experienced at absolute zero.  Another lecture was on statistical mechanics and the extraction of energy from heat engines and reflections on whether it’s possible to beat the efficiency of a Carnot engine.

Then I go out for a walk to exercise and listen to economics lectures and history.  Then I come back inside and study some Cosmology.  I feel connected and one with the universe, reflecting on it all.  The problems of this world become clearer and clearer to me each day, even though I still have a lot to learn.

Then I start to get too tired to study further.  I open up Firefox and start reading the news, or looking around YouTube or go out shopping.  Everything around me is mindless.  When you go to the store, whether it be the books or the magazines or the newspapers… it’s all dumbed down for people with an IQ of 20.

This world is absolutely insane.  People are blowing each other up over religious superstition.  They’re watching UFC fights on their television for entertainment.  They listen to mindless propaganda, hatred and racism from the mainstream media.  They go to the movies and it’s all violence and blowing things up.

Our culture is just depraved and empty and no matter how hard I try I can’t escape it.  I’ll be in the waiting room someplace for an appointment, or out buying groceries and I hear music like this:

Shawty had them apple bottom jeans (jeans)
Boots with the fur (with the fur)
The whole club was looking at her
She hit the floor (she hit the floor)
Next thing you know
Shawty got low, low, low, low, low, low, low, low
Them baggy sweat pants
And the Reebok’s with the straps (with the straps)
She turned around and gave that big booty a smack (hey)
She hit the floor (she hit the floor)
Next thing you know
Shawty got low, low, low, low, low, low, low, low

I ain’t never seen something that’ll make me go
This crazy all night spending my doe
Had the million dollar vibe and a body to go
Them birthday cakes they stole the show
So sexual
She was flexible professional
Drinking X&O
Hold up, wait a minute, do I see what I think? Whoa

….

- FLO Rida feat T-Pain, Low

I feel like a prude, but man, this music belongs in a dumpster somewhere and doesn’t need to be polluting young people’s ears.  It certainly doesn’t belong in waiting rooms.  Whatever happened to say John Lennon’s Stand By Me, or Fat Domino’s Blueberry Hill.  What happened to popular music?  It’s degenerated into mindless trash.  Just compare that video to popular music not too long ago.

When the night has come
And the land is dark
And the moon is the only light we see
No I won’t be afraid
No I won’t be afraid
Just as long as you stand, stand by me

And darling, darling stand by me
Oh, now, now, stand by me
Stand by me, stand by me

…

John Lennon, Stand By Me

I found my thrill
On Blueberry Hill
On Blueberry Hill
When I found you

The moon stood still
On Blueberry Hill
And lingered until
My dream came true

The wind in the willow played
Love’s sweet melody
But all of those vows you made
Were never to be

Though we’re apart
You’re part of me still
For you were my thrill
On Blueberry Hill

- Fats Domino, Blueberry Hill

The last movie I watched, just to try to stay somewhat in touch with society, was Iron Man.  It was terrible, especially compared to a much better film like H.G. Wells The Time Machine, the 1960 adaptation.  Iron Man is mindless action, no thought, and all special effects.  The Time Machine delves deep into the problems mankind faces.

In The Time Machine, similar to Iron Man, the story focuses around a brilliant inventor.  Unlike Iron Man however, where Tony Stark is an egotistical idiot, the main character of The Time Machine is a concerned scientist disgusted with war and the age in which he lives.  The government is trying to enlist him to create weapons and he just wants to live in a world where humanity lives in peace and harmony.  So he plans to build himself a time machine and warp out of there.  He then warps himself 20 years into the future, to 1920.  There’s more wars and destruction.  He then warps to 1960.  He finds atom bombs and wars.  So he keeps warping further and further into the future, hoping to escape humanity’s madness.  Eventually he ends up in the year 800,000 AD.  I won’t ruin the plot.  You’ll have to watch it for yourself.

And I can see people now, “Oh Jason, you just don’t know how to have a good time…”  No.  Humanity is messed up in the head.  I’m not the one messed up.  I entertain myself peacefully, reflecting on quantum mechanics, thinking about time travel, wormholes, the origins of the universe, and other meaningful things.  I hope to help contribute toward research in clean energy and superconductors.  I don’t watch violent films and don’t think about violent things.  You shouldn’t either.  There’s better ways to entertain yourself that don’t require violence.

I did see one film which had a good theme behind it – Avatar.  It was pretty good.  I just saw it the other day.  It actually somewhat reflected on the things modern neuroscience is pointing to.  I think nervous systems of animals can be linked together, just like in that film.

I really get depressed thinking on all of this.  I’ve had a lot of ambitions in my life, wanting to accomplish this and that, but nowadays my primary concern is advancing science and just helping bring awareness of the dangers we face in the future.  These mega-farms just being one of many things we need to change, not to mention a restoration of decency and basic morality.

We must disarm nuclear missiles.  We have to stop using these pesticides on our crops.  We can’t keep using these antibiotics and other chemicals which we’re pumping into our livestock.  CO2 emissions have to cut back dramatically or we’ll be facing massive crop failures with climate change.  We have to stop deforestation of the Earth, and stop burning coal, which acidifies the oceans killing the plankton.  Well, that’s not the only thing killing the plankton.  They also face increased UV exposure with decreased ozone and oil spills.  Without the greenery, the trees and the plankton we all suffocate.  Keep that in mind guys.

We have all heard the myth that we humans use only 10% of our brains.  Indeed, it is apparent that not only have many people heard it but they believe it.  Psychologist Barry Beyerstein (1999) has spent many years researching the origins of this mistaken idea.  Although he cannot pinpoint its origins with precision, he has shown that it has been around for quite some time.  One of the first groups that latched onto and spread the myth was the early self-improvement (“positive thinking”) industry.  For example, a 1929 advertisement states that “scientists and psychologists tell us that we use only about TEN PERCENT of our brain power” and that by enrolling in the course being advertised, a person might tap some of that brain that is not being used.  The advertisement uses the 10% figure as though it were common knowledge.  This indicates that the origins of the myth must date to significantly earlier than 1929.  Although Beyerstein has tried to identify the “scientists and psychologists” who may have said something like this, he has so far failed to find any specific reference to it in the literature.

Even if the 10% figure came from a scientist working at the turn of the twentieth century, the state of the art of neuroscience was not particularly advanced at that time.  Most people would agree that any sweeping scientific pronouncement, based on little empirical research, is eventually due for some reconsideration.  Indeed, there is plenty of evidence from neurology and psychology that the 10% figure is wholly untenable; it is basically neuro-nonsense.

One of the most compelling arguments against the 10% myth comes from the perspective of energy and evolution.  The brain uses a lot of energy.  In humans, it accounts for about 2% of the body mass but uses about 10-20% of the total energy and oxygen consumed by the body.  It is an “expensive tissue” (Aiello and Wheeler, 1995).  The brain cannot store significant energy reserves, and is extremely vulnerable if the oxygen supply is cut off.

From an evolutionary standpoint, maintaining such an expensive organ only to use 10% of it does not make any sense.  When you consider that there are other costs associated with large brain size (such as birth difficulties; see Chapter 17), if we used only 10% of the brain, there would have been substantial fitness benefits in reducing the brain to a more efficient and less costly size.  This did not happen, of course, as brain expansion has characterized evolution in genus Homo.

Leslie Aiello and Peter Wheeler point out that the brain is not the only expensive tissue in the body.  The heart, kidney, liver, and gastrointestinal tract consume at least as much energy as the brain.  Human bodies use energy at about the rate that would be expected of a mammal our size.  Given that our brains are much larger than would be expected for a mammal our size, how do we maintain the expected energy consumption rate?  Aiello and Wheeler argue that a tradeoff with one of the other expensive tissues has occurred.  Specifically, at the same time as the brain has increased in size in human evolution, it appears that the stomach and intestines have decreased in size.  These size reductions presumably have been accompanied by a reduction in energy use.  The smaller gastrointestinal tract also indicates a reliance on higher-quality, easier-to-digest foods (such as meat).

The complex relationship between behavior, brain size, diet, and gut size is one of the most fascinating problems in the study of human evolution.  Although it is tempting to see brain size and gut size as engaged in a neat tradeoff, the situation probably was a bit more complex than that.  Nonetheless, Aiello and Wheeler make clear that we have to pay for what we have:  a large, energy-hungry brain.  And a brain that wastes 90% of its volume could never have evolved.

When I woke up I laid in bed for a moment and was thinking about these problems some more.  Then funny enough, as I went for my normal walk outdoors I was listening to Ludwig von Mises Human Action on my mp3 player.  I just happened to come to his chapter on the market economy and within it there is a section dedicated to economic competition.  I thought, “What great timing!”  He discusses the same issues and makes some great points.  I figured it’d be a great thing to just reproduce the contents of that chapter here and bold various important points.  So, here it is.

5. Competition

In nature there prevail irreconcilable conflicts of interests. The means of subsistence are scarce. Proliferation tends to outrun subsistence. Only the fittest plants and animals survive. The antagonism between an animal starving to death and another that snatches the food away from it is implacable.

Social cooperation under the division of labor removes such antagonisms. It substitutes partnership and mutuality for hostility. The members of society are united in a common venture.

The term competition as applied to the conditions of animal life signifies the rivalry between animals which manifests itself in their search for food. We may call this phenomenon biological competition. Biological competition must not be confused with social competition, i.e., the striving of individuals to attain the most favorable position in the system of social cooperation. As there will always be positions which men value more highly than others, people will strive for them and try to outdo rivals. Social competition is consequently present in every conceivable mode of social organization. If we want to think of a state of affairs in which there is no social competition, we must construct the image of a socialist system in which the chief in his endeavors to assign to everybody his place and task in society is not aided by any ambition on the part of his subjects. The individuals are entirely indifferent and do not apply for special appointments. They behave like the stud horses which do not try to put themselves in a favorable light when the owner picks out the stallion to impregnate his best brood mare. But such people would no longer be acting men.

Catallactic competition is emulation between people who want to surpass one another. It is not a fight, although it is usual to apply to it in a metaphorical sense the terminology of war and internecine conflict, of attack and defense, of strategy and tactics. Those who fail are not annihilated; they are removed to a place in the social system that is more modest, but more adequate to their achievements than that which they had planned to attain.

In a totalitarian system, social competition manifests itself in the endeavors of people to court the favor of those in power. In the market economy, competition manifests itself in the fact that the sellers must outdo one another by offering better or cheaper goods and services, and that the buyers must outdo one another by offering higher prices. In dealing with this variety of social competition which may be called catallactic competition, we must guard ourselves against various popular fallacies.

The classical economists favored the abolition of all trade barriers preventing people from competing on the market. Such restrictive laws, they explained, result in shifting production from those places in which natural conditions of production are more favorable to places in which they are less favorable. They protect the less efficient man against his more efficient rival. They tend to perpetuate backward technological methods of production. In short they curtail production and thus lower the standard of living. In order to make all people more prosperous, the economists argued, competition should be free to everybody. In this sense they used the term free competition. There was nothing metaphysical in their employment of the term free. They advocated the nullification of privileges barring people from access to certain trades and markets. All the sophisticated lucubrations caviling at the metaphysical connotations of the adjective free as applied to competition are spurious; they have no reference whatever to the catallactic problem of competition.

As far as natural conditions come into play, competition can only be “free” with regard to those factors of production which are not scarce and therefore not objects of human action. In the catallactic field competition is always restricted by the inexorable scarcity of the economic goods and services. Even in the absence of institutional barriers erected to restrict the number of those competing, the state of affairs is never such as to enable everyone to compete in all sectors of the market. In each sector only comparatively small groups can engage in competition.

Catallactic competition, one of the characteristic features of the market economy, is a social  phenomenon. It is not a right, guaranteed by the state and the laws, that would make it possible for every individual to choose ad libitum the place in the structure of the division of labor he likes best. To assign to everybody his proper place in society is the task of the consumers. Their buying and abstention from buying is instrumental in determining each individual’s social position. Their supremacy is not impaired by any privileges granted to the individuals qua producers. Entrance into a definite branch of industry is virtually free to newcomers only as far as the consumers approve of this branch’s expansion or as far as the newcomers succeed in supplanting those already occupied in it by filling better or more cheaply the demands of the consumers. Additional investment is reasonable only to the extent that it fills the most urgent among the not yet satisfied needs of the consumers. If the existing plants are sufficient, it would be wasteful to invest more capital in the same industry. The structure of market prices pushes the new investors into other branches.

It is necessary to emphasize this point because the failure to grasp it is at the root of many popular complaints about the impossibility of competition. Some sixty years ago people used to declare: You cannot compete with the railroad companies; it is impossible to challenge their position by starting competing lines; in the field of land transportation there is no longer competition. The truth was that at that time the already operating lines were by and large sufficient. For additional capital investment the prospects were more favorable in improving the serviceableness of the already operating lines and in other branches of business than in the construction of new railroads. However, this did not interfere with further technological progress in transportation technique. The bigness and the economic “power” of the railroad companies did not impede the emergence of the motor car and the airplane.

Today people assert the same with regard to various branches of big business: You cannot challenge their position, they are too big and too powerful. But competition does not mean that anybody can prosper by simply imitating what other people do. It means the opportunity to serve the consumers in a better or cheaper way without being restrained by privileges granted to those whose vested interests the innovation hurts. What a newcomer who wants to defy the vested interests of the old established firms needs most is brains and ideas. If his project is fit to fill the most urgent of the unsatisfied needs of the consumers or to purvey them at a cheaper price than their old purveyors, he will succeed in spite of the much talked of bigness and power of the old firms.

Catallactic competition must not be confused with prize fights and beauty contests. The purpose of such fights and contests is to discover who is the best boxer or the prettiest girl. The social function of catallactic competition is, to be sure, not to establish who is the smartest boy and to reward the winner by a title and medals. Its function is to safeguard the best satisfaction of the consumers attainable under the given state of the economic data.

Equality of opportunity is a factor neither in prize fights and beauty contests nor in any other field of competition, whether biological or social. The immense majority of people are by the physiological structure of their bodies deprived of a chance to attain the honors of a boxing champion or a beauty queen. Only very few people can compete on the labor market as opera singers and movie stars. The most favorable opportunity to compete in the field of scientific achievement is provided to the university professors. Yet, thousands and thousands of professors pass away without leaving any trace in the history of ideas and scientific progress, while many of the handicapped outsiders win glory through marvelous contributions.

It is usual to find fault with the fact that catallactic competition is not open to everybody in the same way. The start is much more difficult for a poor boy than for the son of a wealthy man. But the consumers are not concerned about the problem of whether or not the men who shall serve them start their careers under equal conditions. Their only interest is to secure the best possible satisfaction of their needs. As the system of hereditary property is more efficient in this regard, they prefer it to other less efficient systems. They look at the matter from the point of view of social expediency and social welfare, not from the point of view of an alleged, imaginary, and unrealizable “natural” right of every individual to compete with equal opportunity. The realization of such a right would require placing at a disadvantage those born with better intelligence and greater will power than the average man. It is obvious that this would be absurd.

When you look at nature, everything is always diverse and different.  It’s a survival technique.  For example, every one of us has a slightly different DNA sequence, slightly different immune system, different temperaments and personalities, and so on.  Evolution tries out all kinds of combinations and those best suited to survival live on.  I think our social system is also based around this diversity.  Our species is evolving (albeit very slowly) into a complex social structure, with different people preparing for different roles; kind of like how termites have a soldier class which defends, whereas others are workers and take care of the queen.  I think in time our social structure will have a biological underpinning where each person enjoys his or her role in society and wouldn’t have it any other way.  Society is just such a new thing for mankind that the complex system has yet to fully evolve and develop.

Economic competition as opposed to central planning takes advantage of this same diversification strategy.  If you’re living under a regime of central planning, and those plans enforced fail, all hell breaks lose.  Take when the Soviets implemented unorthodox farming techniques, hoping to make their seeds survive the cold by freezing them.  Some of their quackpot scientists theorized that they’d be more likely to endure harsh weather and didn’t want to believe genetic research going on at the time.  This led to massive crop failures and starvation.  But if they’d had a more “anarchic” farming model, with each farmer doing his own thing, that diversity would’ve protected them from this.

I think people’s personalities are different so that society can progress in this way.  Adventurous types would have been willing to try the new farming model and would’ve failed.  More cautious personalities would’ve looked at it all with skepticism demanding proof before attempting it.  That being the case, their crops would’ve came out just fine and society could fall back on them for food.  This diversity allows society to try new things yet not be destroyed when something fails.

So whatever type of person you are, embrace your uniqueness.  Love who you see in the mirror, regardless of how you look, your personality type, your dreams, etc.  It’s ok to be you.  I think nature made us the way we are for a reason, even though most of us are too shallow minded to see beyond our own personality type.

We live in a world where everyone’s divided.  You’re less of a person if you don’t hold a college degree.  Anyone who doesn’t believe our religious inclinations is a “heathen” and immoral.  We’re scared of people with different sexual preferences and ethnicities.  We need to let go of all that.

Mises points out that the free market tends to push us into positions where we’re better suited to serve the consumer.  Each of us being unique, we’re each better suited to serve one area of the economy than another.  Even though in this model we’re pushed around by consumer demand, I’d far prefer this to state planning with the government telling me where to work and what to do.

As for the arguments I made about difficult barriers to entry, Mises believes this tends to push investment and capital resources into new areas which would be more productive to society.   Unfortunately, as he also points out, creating something new requires “brains and ideas”.