Mass Produced Creativity

Think about it.

We are passing through a rare economic shift, says Charles Hugh Smith. He summarizes Peter Drucker’s Post-Capitalist Society. Taking his thesis, you suddenly realize that we no longer need mass capital to advance technology and production of goods. The potential is there. Let’s assume for a moment you actually paid attention in high school. You can purchase some raw materials and go to any modern machine shop with information you found on the Internet and produce a custom made high technology firearm. Part of it can be produced in your own home on a 3D printer. It would cost you maybe a week’s wages, and the costs are falling precipitously. Pretty soon you won’t need the machine shop. What happens when you can print your own computer mother board at home, bake your own chips? What will it do to the telephone oligopoly when homemade cellphones can network spontaneously across long distances without towers? People are already writing the software for that.

We are just about there. Anyone could theoretically produce anything for the cost of materials and their own time.

What does that do to our society? It’s not just the economics, which Smith emphasizes in the opening to his investment seminar. He’ll get some suckers. People who can actually think realize the future of investing will change dramatically, and people like Smith will have to find some other way to make a living. Artificial Intelligence will obviate the need for that kind of knowledge.

The arrival of word processors and decent home printers has very nearly killed the paper publishing business. People still want stuff on paper, but one guy can do most of by himself, replacing a vast army of typesetting technicians and press operators. For less than the cost of a new car, you can purchase a fully self-contained printing shop that fits in your office. Meanwhile, more and more work is done without paper and really cheap used laptops can produce ebooks to current standards. The only people making money in that industry are the specialist middlemen, those who connect content producers with those who mass market to consumers.

Similar story with the drafting industry. CAD has killed that already. Software houses have been pairing engineering software with CAD. Only government regulation keeps us from having our own full engineering software package for home use so that any literate Joe Sixpack can design his own home. He can already order the pre-built modules delivered to the assembly site for far less than current home building costs. Same story with motor vehicles and a lot of other things people use every day. From spacecraft all the way down to subatomic particles, the engineering decisions based on known tolerances are just about farmed out to AI. I rather believe DNA engineering will take a little longer simply because we have way too far to go with learning the tolerances. That sort of thing reaches out and touches entirely too many other life forms in coexistence, but in theory, it’s there. Yet, medical AI is already running off and leaving physicians behind.

At what point can we rely on AI to extrapolate choices to which the human mind tends to be blind? I’m not sure I want to be around for some of it, but it’s coming nonetheless. It’s not Science Fiction any more. Did you ever wonder why Fantasy is eclipsing SF? I think it’s more than mere vagaries of fashion. Too much of what we dream up is on top of us as science fact, not fiction. We have to branch out into directions we cannot go to find entertainment. I wonder what fiction types will sell most when even some of the fantasy crap becomes possible.

Still, mankind will remain fallen and reality broken. Spiritual awareness is the one thing you can’t farm out to AI. That, brothers and sisters, is the future “market” for us.

The Creator, Not Creation

I lost count how many times the Bible says we must worship the Creator, not Creation.

Biblical religion does not reverence Mother Earth. That does not excuse profligate pollution and other abuses, because those are unjust in God’s view. What it does do is recognize the earth is a living thing, that just like you and I, it can tolerate a certain amount of suffering and sorrow and recover because God heals things all the time.

The issue rests upon His Justice, AKA His Laws. It’s not simply the mechanics of how we do things with nature and the ecology. God is watching over His Word to actively enforce it. He keeps His hand on Creation so it doesn’t dissolve into its constituent parts. You’ll never find a scientific answer why matter doesn’t explode as the positive and negative particles separate because the answer is God Almighty invasively reaching into His Creation and taking care of things. At the point He decides it’s done, He lets go and it all disappears. His revelation defines our part in this whole picture and is God’s guarantee things will keep working as He designed them.

Do we still have rainbows in the sky? Then the Law of Noah remains in effect.

The focus of the Law of Noah is keeping social stability. In turn, God will maintain natural stability. That was the promise. We might remain aware of how our activities affect nature, but the focus is justice among humans. Humans are not a virus infesting the earth; they are fundamental to the purpose of Creation itself. God’s Justice among humans will always take precedence over our perceptions of what might be good environmental science. If we cling to His Justice, He’ll take care of the earth according to His plans. It works like magic, if you will.

If your activities place an unnecessary burden on others — such as pollution — then you are doing evil. Not because it’s an attack on nature, but you are attacking God’s justice. Don’t leave a mess someone else has to clean up before they can live. That applies to land, sea and air. If your actions are consistent with God’s demands, you have nothing to fear.

We worship the Creator, not His Creation, nor any element of it.

Recovery of Rez 14

For all his primitive act, Henry was a formidable exobiologist. From a small desk near the back door, he picked up a computer display device roughly twice the size of those most people carried. A couple of strokes and he presented Rez a data dump showing an unusual nutritional profile for the berries. A human could survive on them alone for a while without suffering any harm. When Rez looked up with a nod, Henry stroked the screen again and a new note of pride came over his face. The display showed the berries also possessed some surprising rare medicinal qualities, too.

He grinned at Rez and spoke softly, “Think what an extract of them berries would offer to someone trying to colonize a marginal planet.” Rez saw it immediately. Those berries would easily pay a year’s keep for the entire Randell Colony with just a couple of metric tons.

Rez couldn’t suppress the smile. “Henry, what would it take to collect a ton of them?”

The old man slapped himself on side of his thigh. “We done got a quarter ton by ourselves in the past two weeks! That shed nearest the house is full of `em. They don’t hardly go bad and we’ve had time to dry a whole bunch, make preserves, juice, everything. They grow so thick we ain’t had to move out of that first draw yet, but we can see `em running plumb up the next ridge.”

As gently as he could, Rez suggested, “You should have told someone, Henry. We’d have been glad to help and get some samples sent out for confirmation of your findings.”

Henry looked just a bit abashed. “That’s probably the one thing I never learned too well. I always kinda kept to myself. If Ma hadn’t latched onto me herself, I’d probably never got hitched. I jest get so wrapped up in what I’m doing, I almost forget why I’m doing it.” He paused a moment, then added, “You don’t seem to have no trouble communicating, though.”

Rez tried to be reassuring. “No harm done, Henry, and thanks. Frankly, everyone else in the colony is busy, too. Had I not volunteered to come out, you might not see anyone face to face for another few months or so. Let me take some of the berries and a copy of your data. We’ll organize the exploitation of this stuff pronto!”

With that, Henry called for his girls to come help him get “a right good sample” ready for Rez to haul back to the administration building. Rez noticed there was one young boy watching, and three older daughters doing the work. None of them were especially pretty at first glance. Rez busied himself making sure his personal device had a copy of the data, then looked up to discover the eldest girl was holding a small knapsack out for him. In the background, Henry announced, “This here’s Delia.”

He reached out for it with a smile, but almost froze. Delia might have been a rather plain girl, but her eyes were extraordinary. Best of all, Rez was utterly certain she had a very deep soul flourishing behind those eyes. He held her gaze until she blushed and turned her face downward with a smile. Yet she did not move until he thanked her verbally.

On his hike back, the aroma of fresh baked pastries made from the berries pestered him all the way home. For Rez, the most valuable prize was not the berries, nor any of the baked goods made from them. Something stirred which he had feared might have died long ago.

Recovery of Rez 13

There were other jobs, and none of them were half so complicated as his first. He ended up spending a lot of time working ship and equipment recovery. Things could be uncomfortable working with difficult people on some of the longer assignments, but nothing compared to the fembot. Still, it was good for his own sanity he was able to go right back and face the same monster within him which nearly devoured him the first time. It helped him learn to be much more careful about subtle cues which could send the wrong message.

Recovery work was time intensive only in the sense it tied up the entire team of specialists, each member doing relatively little in short spurts, and everyone had to be on-site the whole time. Rez found himself volunteering to assist anyone whose job held up everyone else, and learned a great deal about the whole recovery process. He also had a knack for moderating squabbles. Despite his utter lack of ambition, he was often treated as de facto team leader on missions, where he was typically the youngest member of the team.

At the end of three standard years, his devotion to recovery missions left him financially set for a visit home. He signed on as standby crew for the first ship headed toward his home planet. To his utter surprise, the steward escorted him past crew quarters to the junior officer’s cabins. When he turned to ask if the crew quarters were full, the steward was gone. Once inside his cabin, he checked over the routine messages most people ignore and discovered the Recovery Operations Chief on his last job had added an Operations Management cert to his file. He echoed out loud one of the most commonly heard refrains: “A management cert opens a million doors.” There was also an efficiency bonus added to his earnings account.

Upon arriving home, Rez found Randell Colony had changed some, as the charter was contingent on turning a profit. Where humans could live without any actual wholesale modifications to the ecosphere were planets which could also support agriculture of one kind or another. There had been an increase in demand for “real food” sources and Randell was a fish and land animal producer initially. The colony was built on a coastal shelf with lots of native grassland supporting something resembling earth cows and fish which had been found edible, if requiring a bit of processing. Meanwhile, testing for the possibilities of raising more favored animal species brought in from elsewhere was almost complete.

However, the social life of the colony was pretty much the same, though there were more people, both locally born and immigrating from elsewhere. One family was starting from scratch out on the edge of the currently occupied area, having more or less escaped another colony where things had fallen apart. They had escaped a situation where some conflicts which had devolved into a bloody feud. The family seemed quite happy being isolated for their first few months, and everybody understood that well enough. Rez added a supporting voice to the administration’s decision to leave them alone while keeping an eye out for their safety. Besides, there was too much work at hand without poking around in other people’s lives.

Still, it was time for this new household to report progress toward something profitable. Rez volunteered to go, for which everyone else was grateful.

He quite enjoyed the long hike across the rolling grasslands. The native animals didn’t herd together at all. They seemed to prefer isolation from each other, yet at the same time appeared to totally ignore humans. As he walked closely past a few here and there, he could have been a mere gust of wind for all the reaction he got. At the edge of the rising hills, he could see a covering of some sort of scrub vegetation. The family in question had been exploring these hills and cataloging the flora and fauna for future testing as food sources. Rez had been told the man was a PhD in one of the life sciences.

Taking a look around the place as he approached, Rez spotted an exposed framework with thin lines strung throughout. Hung from the lines were the carcasses of several different kinds of animals, as far as he could tell. Some distance away was a similar structure with various types of vegetation drying in the wind. As he drew closer to the dome which most families used as living quarters, he saw other types of testing equipment standing on the other side: an incinerator, a greenhouse, several cages and pens, and a couple of enclosed small buildings.

He stopped some distance away in the open, waiting to see if anyone would spot him and signal or greet him in any way. A message had been sent to their communication device, but there had been no response.

Some movement off to one side caught his eye. Coming down off the slope, threading the brush, were a half-dozen figures. They were carrying tall slender objects, which turned out to be baskets, apparently woven from the local grasses. They must have spotted him, as the largest of the figures handed off a basket and came toward Rez, while the others disappeared behind the dome.

Rez had never seen a man who appeared more rustic. Even the videos and images of ancient history back on earth could not prepare him for a man who looked weathered and brown, wearing overalls of blue fabric and a button front shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Rez had learned by now to suppress any visual reaction, and simply offered his right hand, hoping it would be grasped in the standard form of greeting.

Sure enough, the man stopped a full stride away, smiled and leaned forward with his own hand. They shook and Rez introduced himself as a wandering son returned for a visit home. The man answered with a dialect which matched his appearance. “Nice to meecha, Rez. I’m Henry Checkers.”

The man seemed to sense Rez’s unasked questions and began explaining they had discovered edible berries in season just over the other side of the nearest ridge line. He tried, but decided he could not explain the taste to someone who lacked a common background in fruits of other worlds. So he invited Rez to follow him and taste for himself.

Rez was amused to see they had added a covered porch on the back side of the dome. It was made of local materials — scrub wood lashed together with woven grasses in a fairly random pattern rather like an ornate blind on each side, and open on the side facing out from the dome. The roof seemed made of grass matting. The baskets stood in a row, each nearly full. Rez sampled a few and agreed it was impossible to describe, familiar and alien at the same time. Nonetheless, they were utterly captivating in taste, and he had to restrain himself to keep from eating any more.

Henry laughed when he saw Rez’s reaction. He drawled, “That right there could make a lot of money!”

Recovery of Rez 4

However, The Boundary did not prevent advancements in implant technology in directions other than linking directly to human intelligence. Indeed, their primary function was purely medical. While no one forgot the awful lessons from the human monstrosities produced in those early efforts at genetic engineering, the advancements in biotechnology allowed mankind to discover how to turn off certain unfortunate responses in the body and end things like the common cold and a lot of allergies. Implants could instruct the body to ignore and refuse to feed any number of biological intrusions, and simply package them and kick them out of the body one way or another.

But while medical specialists might tread lightly around certain recognized limits to implant technology, it didn’t stop them pushing ahead in every other way.

Thus, virtually everyone in those days had some kind of implant for enhancements, various means for adding to the normal range of human talent. Most common, of course, were the memory implants enabling people to keep better track of the vast galaxies of increasing human knowledge alone. The blending of man and machine had ebbed and flowed over the centuries, and most everything was done via computers inside people talking to computers inside various devices and pieces of equipment because, as Big TD taught them, some things simply could not be reduced to an algorithm.

Though programming of the various computational implants was, of course, now handled by other computing devices, and there was almost no such thing as “software” any more, there were still “hackers” who studied the various bottlenecks in computational theory. As soon as they could describe their insights, some device was already running tests for feasibility and implementation. So on the one hand, there were far fewer of such people needed, and only a precious few were genius enough to actually gain a paid position in such research. On the other hand, there were a much larger group who imagined themselves competent enough, and causing trouble.

One fellow in particular was just too convinced he was a genius. While the system had relegated him to being a rather low level lab technician preparing various routine implants, he was obsessive and stayed past his working time poking around with the old simulators still used in the classrooms in the lab building.

Who’s to say whether he did or didn’t actually stumble on something useful? Instead of running it through the normal channels, he impatiently added it to one of the routine implants. It was an algorithm for enhancing eye-hand coordination. Many were the failures in this area of interest littering the landscape of implant technology. He was simply too sure of his idea, and managed to slip it into that one unit which was destined for the newborns on another planet. It looked the same and acted exactly the same, but at some moment in the future, it would load a different collection of instructions which welded the devices into the human nervous system. Somebody somewhere was going to live with a slight advantage, or so he believed.

When he discovered the batch of implants had been diverted to a colony hospital, he nearly went into convulsions. Not for fear of discovery, but fear he would never be able to track the results. All that work over several years, and he would never know how it turned out. He was sick for days, but tried to keep working. When his agitation became impossible to hide, he was sent for treatment. It was the sort of treatment which subjected him to involuntary assessment of his own memory core so his crime was discovered. But it was too late, as the implant was already transferred to a colony ship which was nearly impossible to track down before it was too late.

Somewhere out there, a male infant bore an untested implant.

Ephemeral Earth

Perhaps you’ll be entertained by this:

What you should take away is not so much belief in some of the wild theories out there, but the overwhelming assurance human science is so pitiful against the vast unknowns. Also, what we could know is actively hidden by those who do know, because those who have the power and wealth are determined to keep us ignorant. It’s not hard for them to do, since we have been thoroughly conditioned by the system under which we live. So thorough is the compromise, just try mentioning something not in the common orthodoxy of our world and see how people respond. Only if you have a very high charisma factor can you even get them to listen.

My point is not digging up the secret knowledge of the universe hidden under the propaganda, but simply the act of questioning common orthodoxy. I certainly don’t pretend to know the answers, but I’m absolutely certain the majority of mankind knows only a bunch of lies, and refuses to ask the questions.

In my devotion to the Bible, I note precious little is written of truly catastrophic events. Check out Peleg, whose name celebrates a rapid shift in the tectonic plates of the earth. Some previous great singular land mass was broken up during his life time. Yet somehow, people survived and humanity continued. What’s coming is unlikely to be The End itself. I say that in the sense we cannot possibly know or guess intelligently when that might be. It could come before I finish typing this, but it serves zero purpose to speculate. The point is we can’t know, so pretending all these events signal something of that sort is wasted effort.

Here we encounter the substance of Christian faith: We aren’t worried about it. Having established thoroughly on this blog how this plane of existence is inherently ephemeral, and it is wholly sanguinary yet proper to dismiss much of what passes for worldly concerns, we face these dramatic threats with equanimity. Not in the sense we don’t care millions will suffer and die; we aren’t at all happy about that. Rather, we know better than to think we’ll understand why, much less how to help. That is, except to help people understand death is merely the end of this existence, and there’s more on the other side, more than we could possibly know.

Because too many people take so seriously the things of this realm, we tend to over-dramatize in our minds expectations of how to face all this. That is, if I were to use the term “Elder Craft” instead of eldercraft, it would draw an entirely different range of interest. People would be checking to see what esoteric arts I am discussing, and seeking some advantage through various kinds of magic. In my mind, there is no real difference, except in the common associations people make, the mental baggage clinging to the terminology. What I see as the proper handling of the inexplicable in this world is the most elder craft, but there’s really not that much drama from where we sit today. I do from time to time spice things up a bit with parabolic language, trying to express things which can’t be put in human terms we recognize. Honestly, folks, the miracles and powers of the Age to Come are all there in my discussion of moral fabric and Spirit Realm. However, our interaction with such things will typically appear pretty mundane. But the secret to Methuselah’s near millennium of human life, while partly a result of a wholly different situation in terms of what the earth was like, is as much tied up in his clinging to God’s Laws as anything else.

No fictional portrayal, with all the special effects you’ve seen in the movies, will come close to the truth. It will overemphasize the manifestations of such things, but miss the whole point and undershoot the real drama because it’s beyond the human mind. Fighting for the opportunity to cling to the moral fabric is about as much adventure as I can really stand. As things go downhill fast in our American society, and the police state becomes smothering, I may well see some truly miraculous things as God’s power under His Laws defends my calling and witness. If not, my ability to resist whatever they try to wring from me will suffice. And if I simply die in the effort, that’s my ticket Home. In other words, I don’t get to choose most of that. What I do get to choose is the power to see that moral fabric, something invisible to mere human eyes, but shining brightly in my soul through spiritual vision.

I don’t fear the shift in the magnetic poles, nor any of the events connected to it on a cosmic scale. Should be quite entertaining to watch.

Biblical Cosmology

In preparation for future projects, I wanted to offer a brief formal examination of the cosmology underlying the Bible.

We are fully aware of space and time. We experience them as limitations, and rightly so. Despite how utterly massive and extensive it seems our universe may be, it remains a relatively small bubble within a far larger reality we cannot comprehend. Outside our tiny bubble, there are no such limitations as time and space. God is fully aware of time and space, but does not experience it as we do. For Him, time is no constraint at all. He sees all time as a single entity before Him, and we cannot possibly imagine it.

Most of the bold statements in the Hebrew Scripture which seem to express a cosmology should not be taken with any degree of literalness. The Hebrew people may not have known whether the world was spherical, but they didn’t care. It didn’t matter and the technology to find out didn’t exist for them. So they used common expressions which captured what they did experience at their level of science and technology. It’s not as if God composed the Bible word-for-word because science was not a critical aspect. No, there is no falsehood or error in the Bible, but there sure seems to be a lot of it in the minds of folks reading it with too much false piety. Hebrew language and culture is mystical in nature, and it was more figure of speech than literal.

Digging to find expressions in the Old Testament which might possibly be rendered with some modern scientific accuracy is an abomination.

How about we simply strive to understand the context of what was said, and embrace the moral implications? That there is a vast invisible moral element in this world is the whole point of having those ancient texts carried into modern times. Get the context right and the moral demands on us today become more obvious. I take the Bible seriously, and study daily to understand what it meant to the people who wrote it and published it. They made no attempt to understand much of anything outside the context of their existence. For modern critics to point out perceived errors simply shows their ignorance, and for “faith defenders” to fight them shows more ignorance. That sort of back and forth simply surrenders the ground to a false epistemology. God created all things and has never felt compelled to answer our questions about mechanisms and methods. However, we are most certainly accountable to Him for what He demands of us, His creatures.

God is not to be understood, but obeyed. That is, nothing we humans possess can touch God, except what He gave us in the first place. We have all we need to obey and reap the harvest of whatever best this world has to offer. On top of that, we can discover that there is something far better than this world, and He is all too eager to have us join Him. How that works out is totally individual, because He knows each of us better than any other entity can know. All we could possibly know or understand of Him as humans is what He requires of us. Any other communion has to come from His hand.

So while His Laws do make a kind of sense, it requires assuming from the first He has done all things necessary to reveal Himself to us. We have to embrace that revelation. The written form presumes an intellectual ground to which our modern Western civilization is hostile. When you understand you have to embrace His revelation wholly, including the intellectual assumptions, too, you can begin to understand how He operates in this realm. Until you understand what you experience here is largely a false shadow of Reality, you aren’t going to ever really understand what God requires. What we have here is broken, false, a prison; it bears little resemblance to what we were made for. You won’t get out of this prison alive, but once you are out of it, no part of you will be willing to come back.

Whatever other dimensions of existence are out there, no part of what you are now can want to go there. That is, unless He places something of His Life inside you. Then you will struggle daily to leave this mess and go to that other realm. That is as much as we can understand about biblical cosmology.

Attention Deficit and Adaptation

Over the past decade we see an increasing number of people who suggest Attention Deficit (both ADD and ADHD) may be the early stages of an evolutionary adaptation.

For those who must know, I don’t deny evolution as a fact of biology in the now, but dispute even the mere possibility of using it to explain how we got here. While we experience evolution as a daily fact of life, there is no logical justification for extrapolating it beyond actual evidence. The business of juggling archaeological finds takes entirely too much unknown for granted.

The current tiny incremental changes which we measure as adaptations which seem to affect the whole population of a given species in any particular context are easily found all over the place. If we posit the context is a very high volume data world for humans, there are elements of ADD and ADHD which indicate an adaptive advantage. While you can find research into this going all the way back to the earliest formulations of Attention Deficit as a concrete diagnosis, the terminology has shifted a great deal. It’s easy to find articles addressing some of this research from an adaptive viewpoint:

Born to Explore, 1997
ZDNet/Huffington Post, 2007
The Human Imprint, 2008
Psychology Today, 2010 (rather long)
The Telegraph (UK), 2012

and most recently, a much more speculative, less careful discussion at the Activist Post the past few days.

All of this hits dangerously close to home because I have been diagnosed with the milder ADD (specifically, Adult ADD) as was my son. I find the actual hyperactive version (ADHD) is probably an overshot, missing the putative advantages by going too far. The milder form I have, particularly as an adult, is probably closer to what the articles together suggest.

I’ve noted before, the smallest natural unit of cognition for me is the paragraph. I don’t do well memorizing text as words the way most people do. On the other hand, just about any paragraph of which I can make any sense will likely find a peg in my memory in terms of content. So, for example, I can recall easily the import of the linked articles, though it required some bit of research to recover where and when I found them. I extract and internalize the content but struggle to keep track of the linkages.

More precisely, Adult ADD is a recall disability, not a learning disability. It’s easy for precise bits of data to get lost. I know I know it, but can’t find the path to it’s storage in my brain. However, if the item in question is a larger block of data, it’s always easy to recall. Further, I can make creative linkages across multiple disciplines without much effort. I see parallels more quickly than most people, though quite often those parallels are flawed by incomplete data. I may not know a lot about something, but I recognize trends easily, even if they are inaccurate. It’s how I process and store things.

The central claim is something in this change from the previous norm of human learning and cognition grants an advantage in this modern age of huge volumes of data. Instead of being overwhelmed by too much information, it’s all absorbed as structure, and more of the content is kept that way. Once the structure is in place, it’s easier to keep more of the content, and the structure is detected — or inferred — intuitively. It’s the trademark of intuition itself.

Concrete example: Regular readers know I am fanatical about the Bible, in terms of the effort I expend working with it. In one sense, I’m completely crippled from retention because it takes a monumental effort to rote memorize even small portions of text. In another sense, I’ve already memorized the whole thing. Once I gained ground in the effort to think like a Hebrew, the underlying structure become almost painfully obvious, poking at my mind, as it were. I can recall what the Bible seems to say about almost anything, even if I struggle to offer locations within the text. Naturally, I memorize the content according to my own best understanding, but I have a high degree of confidence in my ability to parse the logic and meaning.

The liability is I can’t easily limit inputs. There’s a paradox: either everything in my context gets in, or almost nothing gets in because I’m too deeply absorbed by something specific. Regarding my previous post about the hypnotic effect of video, I can get utterly lost in the presentation, or find myself deeply annoyed by the distraction. Because I am very conscious of the effects, I react internally with anger to the presence of a TV screen running wherever I am. It makes me very uncomfortable, and I strive to find ways to block them. You can imagine I hate waiting rooms, where it seems they are ubiquitous. Another example of liability is when I drive more than six or eight hours, particularly routes I don’t see often, I have to stop and sleep so my brain can process all the massive visual stimulation I’ve absorbed. Otherwise it leaks back out and I start hallucinating, and enter that half-sleep state which gets people killed in auto crashes. On an average day of reading and Net surfing, I always take a nap mid-day.

So long as our high-tech environment holds, this is fine. Oddly, those years when I played at military maneuvers, I did rather well for noticing odd details even when physically tired, so long as there was no great lull in activity. I’m pretty much useless at waiting alert when I’m tired.

But I want you to notice how the political and institutional trends of public education is fighting all this tooth and nail. Easily 90% of staff attention is given to behavior management, and only some 10% is actual learning. That 90% is contrary to the rising tide of children doing their best to be ready for the massive flood of information, adaptations harshly contrary to what educators demand kids do physically in class. It’s education which needs to adapt, now. Kids simply do not have to sit still and be quiet to learn, because while they squirm and make noise, they are still absorbing from learning activities tailored to allow such activity. I’ve seen this first hand as a teacher.

At any rate, even if we could teach teachers to change their student behavioral expectations, getting closer to reality, I find the adaptive value of Attention Deficit is hit-and-miss.

TV and Video Hypnosis (Short Explanation)

There are whole shelves full of books explaining the details of this. Still, most people aren’t fully aware of it. Those most susceptible to it are those who argue loudest against the facts.

Whether originally intended that way or not, there is all too much proof the electronic representation of moving images on a screen is hypnotic. That is, using any video or TV type presentation, it is possible to change long term the fundamental thought patterns of people and some animals. It opens them to suggestion.

1. Who hasn’t experienced the mesmerizing effect of a TV playing in any room? You walk in and if what’s showing is the least bit interesting at all, it grabs some measure of your attention. If you sit down and actually watch, conversation will fade, and people coming and going may recede outside your consciousness. If you don’t recall the experience, chances are it’s more powerful than average on you.

2. Institutions have discovered there is nothing offering more bang for the buck than TV when it comes to controlling behavior in large populations. Prison management uses TV for that very purpose, and it even works on gorillas. I’ve observed this effect first hand working in various types of institutions, and it’s almost like an addictive drug.

3. In scientific terms, you are just short of an altered state when hypnotized. In the case of TV and video, you are not fully hypnotized unless you actually want it. That TV and video are somewhat hypnotic to one degree or another on almost everyone is simply established fact (linked article is a bit long, but about the best explanation available).

Research by Professor Herbert Krugman found that within 30 seconds of turning on the television, our brain becomes neurologically less able to make judgements about what we see and hear on the screen. Our brain treats incoming information uncritically. Our brain waves switch to predominantly alpha waves, indicating an unfocused, receptive lack of attention.

The details have to do with alpha waves in the brain and righ-left hemisphere differentiation.

So why does all this matter? It takes only one example to understand it is being used intentionally, with full malice and intent, to destroy the world.

As with hypnosis, watching television enhances your capacity for receiving ideas without all the bother of reality-testing. Suspending our disbelief, television slips under our neurological and intellectual radar. Watching a television screen is akin to putting yourself in the hands of an unqualified hypnotherapist whose main interest is to keep you coming back to him for longer and longer sessions, a form of ratings-driven professional conduct.

It’s not just keeping you on the hook, but changing how you think.

I would like to believe this is enough to make people wary of TV and video, but it doesn’t work. The research piece says:

Researchers at Keele University investigated the third-person effect — the belief that others are more influenced than ourselves by media messages. They found that while we are fairly accurate at estimating how much others are persuaded by media messages, we’re in denial about our own autonomy. We report that attitude change occurs in others, but not in ourselves.

Still, I keep hoping people get the message: Teach yourself to hate and distrust all TV and video presentation. Teach yourself to turn away, leave the room, etc. Be strong, or surrender and never think independently again.

Scientists Are Not God

Scientists, and other people who represent the cream of human intelligence and wisdom, should not be trusted any more than the psychopaths who rule in governments.

There are good reasons for this:

1. Scientists, by the very nature of their pursuit, exclude God and spiritual concerns. Sure, the better ones recognize there may be motives for choices which aren’t exactly good science, but they tend to be dismissive and pressure you to do what their particular science god demands. There is a serious error in logic here, assuming whatever it is science can discover about observable and measurable processes is somehow the most important factor in deciding. Since when does it make you insane to choose one form of death over another? The very best of behavioral science still can’t answer the most basic question of why we bother to study human behavior. If we give the answer, “to improve human life,” you still haven’t answered, “by what morality.” That there is a consensus among fools does not make their answer any better.

2. Scientists lie. They are people, and have a vested interest in something they are doing. A few admit they simply want to discover something which will make them rich and/or famous. Science is simply the path to standard human ambition. Others lie to themselves worse than anyone else, presuming they can somehow actually be objective. For all it’s high moral objectivity, in that proper scientific method is striving to disprove your own theory, most of the time they aren’t humble enough to really put it to the test. They want to be right and competent, or at least appear to be, if only to themselves. With the huge number of verifiable frauds in just the past decade in the field of academic publication and medical journals, you’d be a fool to consider science any more trustworthy than any other activity which involves humans in groups with an agenda — politics.

3. Scientists are used. They don’t have to be aware of it for it to serve the manipulator’s purpose. There is a very short list of scientists who rejected funding or support because the source of it wanted to steer things just a bit, few enough to be literally remarkable. How many scientists can pursue their work without funding? And how often is it funded by anything other than a government, or some corporate grant agency? When did money ever come without strings attached? Not in this world.

Global Warming? Pure, unadulterated political hoax, easily shot down by real science. Worse, a provable effort to hide their awareness it was all fake, even as they promoted it by all these expensive fake studies.

Peak oil? Check the actual stats; the world is awash in excess petroleum which can’t be sold fast enough. The only reason prices remain high is through propaganda about a shortage, plus pushing it all through extra handling to raise costs. Here in the US, oil from offshore platforms is shipped out into international waters, then brought back to shore as an import, which the government duly taxes as such.

Vaccines? Check the actual track record; most are a bigger threat than what they pretend to treat. The human body was not designed to process stuff injected directly into the blood stream. Ordinary sanitation measures have done more to extend life all across the world than any measure of vaccination. Given the vast commercial and political interest behind the promotion of vaccines, it’s the last thing you should be willing to consider. Your doctor is a specialized politician and vendor.

Fluoridation of public water supplies? Proven to be quite the opposite of what they claim, it is a serious threat to your teeth. The whole thing originated with some industrial magnate trying to find a way to sell a nasty waste product, so he paid some scientist with a good reputation to lie for him. This stuff is hopelessly toxic.

Food Pyramid versus Paleo “Cave Man” Diet? Both are wrong. The first problem is cultural conditioning; infants cut loose in a full range buffet typically eat less junk food and prefer stuff lightly seasoned. There’s a real scientific tests for you! If we could simply remove the industrial toxins used by food companies to pad their profits, all in absolute secrecy because they are actively hostile to our wishes, we would have no trouble finding a proper selection of food simply by following our own instincts, selecting from what’s available. People who make “bad” decisions may be simply hearing a different drummer, not burdened with your particular morals and motivations.

Finally, this whole thing is deeply and utterly perverted by one factor: The State seeks increasing control. And how hard is it to understand the State’s only interest is economics? Not the general economic interest, but the economics of those who rule. If everyone is doing the same thing, regardless of right or wrong, it’s simpler and cheaper in terms of bureaucratic costs to maintain the system of control and taxation. All this crap about your health is really an issue of costs to the bureaucracy. Every other stated or implied motive of human welfare is pure sewage, and some of them know it. If you could make all your neighbors turn off their A/C so electric rates could drop and make it cheaper to run your A/C, would you do it? Probably not, but once someone’s head is pulled inside the bureaucracy, that sense of decency disappears.

And those who manage and direct those bureaucracies would gladly watch us all drop alive into a meat grinder, would push us into it themselves, if it made them a little wealthier and more luxurious in this world. At the same time, there is some perverted pride in “accomplishment” and “greatness.” This is what kind of morality rises to top of government and corporations, and is what’s behind virtually every pronouncement of “science in your interest.”