Musings

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©1996-2012 Roedy Green, Canadian Mind Products

Regional Accents

• Why do some black people drop the l is help but not other words.
• Why do some black people pronounce the word feel as fill, but don’t transform similar words.
• Why did England go r-less, e.g. cah instead of car, but none of the colonies.
• How do new regional accents start, as a teenage affectation like valley speak?
• What holds accents distinct even when people live in close proximity?
• Under what conditions do people mimic upper class accents for social climbing? This can be as minor as avoiding double negatives, ain’t and substituting them for those.
• Texans and nearby people drop the g in words like looking. Why only them?
• Americans are gradually substituting d for t, as in wadder for water. Doesn’t this make it harder to comprehend speech without the distinction?
• Why do vowels drift?
• Does the Internet and TV tend to homogenise accents or does it speed up the introduction of regionalisms?
• I would like to listen to conversation in English in 1200, 1300… 2100 where 2100 is a best guess of where the language is headed.
• How did the nasal Bronx accent come about? It is unlike anything else I have heard. Is it the result of immigrants speaking some foreign language attempting to pronounce English?
• How many accents can be accounted for by admixture with some non-English language or group of languages.
• Do languages besides English have the same sort of regional accent structure?

Mothers’ Robots

Cosmic Dandelions

Depairate Thinking

• I might as well eat this cream puff. One cream puff won’t make any difference to my weight.
• There is no point in voting. My vote won’t tip the balance.
• There is no point in recycling. There are so many other people, what I do doesn’t matter.
• There is no point in protesting war. The system likes war; you can’t beat city hall.
• There is no point in going to the gym. Missing one session won’t make any difference.

1. If it truly does not matter, that it just as much an excuse for doing something as not doing it. You might as well do thing that feels right. You might as well do the thing that has some tiny hope of creating the change you want rather than something that has no hope.
2. Kant suggested you should base your actions on how wise they would be if everyone did them. For example, if everyone voted, it would be a good thing. It no one voted, it would be a bad thing, so vote! You are inching the world toward the good.

   Act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.
   ~ Immanuel Kant (born: 1724-04-22 died: 1804-02-12 at age: 79)

3. Individual acts may not count for much, but they build lifetime habit patterns. Over a lifetime, habitual actions add up to significance.
4. Imagine a school bus stuck in the snow. Each despairing man who walks by says, “Nothing I acting alone could do could free that bus. I might as well do nothing.” and drives on. Happily, some less egotistical men and women come by too and say, “I could contribute 3% of the effort of freeing the bus. Until more people show up to help, I wonder what I could do that will be useful?” Just your presence helps attract more helpers.
5. When I was faced with the extreme prejudice against gays in 1969 (where murder of gays was condoned, and all other gays I knew of were in the closet), making any sort of dent in this bigotry was clearly impossible. I decided to tackle it anyway, just because it felt better to tackle it than to despair. I calculated it would take centuries to affect the change needed with the lectures, radio and TV appearances I was doing. Yet to my utter astonishment within 4 years we had the first human rights legislation protecting gays here in BC. You never know if you could succeed until you try. That gays can now marry would have sounded absolutely silly back then.
6. Most people don’t ever break new ground. However, they love jumping on bandwagons. When you tackle the impossible, you create the bandwagons of the future. You inspire others. Consider Gandhi.

   Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.
   ~ Mahatma Gandhi (born: 1869-10-02 died: 1948-01-30 at age: 78)

Now Is The End

Looking Back

1. I would have taken my time at university more seriously. I got only that one chance in my life to spend years doing nothing but learning in the best possible environment. I would focus more on taking advantage of a chance to learn the material for a lifetime, not just doing well on an exam.
2. I would have not been so shy about asking for sex when the other party seemed to be interested.

White Hat/Black Hat

Woo Woo

I also think it all but certain there is other intelligent life in the universe, though it may only arise in brief sparks so that even one-way remote contact between separate species may be exceedingly rare. Intelligence arose very quickly on earth once mammals arose, and in several species, and, on a geological timescale, looks headed for almost immediate extinction.

I think there is some sort of extra sensory perception that allows remote communication between people and communication from the people in the future. I personally had a prophetic dream about 9/11 as did many other people. I suspect somehow millions of people focussing over and over on those same images of the planes flying into the towers broadcast them so powerfully they could even be sensed backward in time. I don’t mean something supernatural, just some weakly evolved ability we don’t understand yet.

Finally, I suspect we each live in our own private universe, loosely connected to everyone else’s. This might just be that minds hallucinate their own version of reality, or it may be deeper, that we actually live in different quantum worlds where the events truly are different from other people’s versions, but resonant with those of others, so they roughly match, though not in the details. I explore this further in my Reality is a Hallucination essay.

We have all seen the amazing power of stage hypnotists to fool people into seeing things that are not there, but we tend to trust too easily reports of people who were subject to hypnosis in other contexts, most commonly in religious revival services, seances and political rallies. Even the healthy human mind has incredible power to generate dramatic life-like hallucinations. It is much more difficult to sort out what is real and what is imagined than we presume.

Mandatory Freakishness

In a less rarefied sphere, contrary to everyday intuition, uncommon events are far from impossible. They are all but mandatory. Consider this experiment. Every time you sit next to someone, ask the person if today is their birthday. The odds in any given instance of asking and getting a yes (presuming people tell the truth) are only 1 in 365.25 (some people are born on 02-29). If you do this 1000 times, your odds of never sitting beside someone on their birthday are 1 in 1 / Math.pow( 1 - 1/365.5, 1000 ) = 1 in 15.48. In other words, uncommon events are expected to happen every once in a while. Something would be amiss if they did not happen.

Lay people don’t understand this. When an uncommon event (a coincidence) happens, they imagine some sky god must have arranged it, or fate, or magic or luck. They don’t accept that the coincidence is part of the day-to-day workings of the universe, nothing special at all. This leads to pigeon superstition.

Atheist Spirituals

Midsomer Murders

I also suspect Jessica Fletcher of Murder She Wrote of being a serial murderer. The odds of somebody being murdered every time she comes to visit happening purely by coincidence are astronomical. Anyone in their right mind should immediately hang up the phone when they get a call announcing her arrival. She is like the grim reaper.

While I am at it, there is something extremely fishy Ben Matlock and Perry Mason, expensive attorneys, who only manage to attract innocent clients who have been ingeniously framed.

I am Humbled

Dream Sharers

Japanese Wasps

M*A*S*H

Life After Death

I speculate sometimes that maybe after you die you are forced to reincarnate as the being/species you despise most. I give a little shiver. Why do I do it? Probably for the same reason some people like to go to horror movies.

What is behind this Christian fairy tale of after-death judgement?

• So you can imagine that all those who wronged you and got away with it will be finally unmercifully punished.
• It helps you belief in eternal life, — it may be horrible, but it is still life. It makes it more plausible. It is more like ordinary life in terms of average wonderfulness.
• It lets you fantasise about some cosmic surprise party awaiting you where all your secret desires will be fulfilled. Children call it daydreaming.
• Since the rules are much better for winning a lottery than entering heaven, everyone who entertains the notion knows in their heart of hearts they are hell-bound. If most people were convinced they were already heaven bound, they would not let preachers drag them about by the nose. If you read the bible literally, you will learn you have no chance at all. This makes even the most miserable life quite pleasant compared with what is to come.

Being Dumped III

Cut Flowers

Routine

• Getting your self cleaned and groomed in the morning.
• Cleaning the dishes.
• Making various edits to documents.

Continuity of Consciousness

1. They presume it must be something else, something less mysterious, perhaps a kind of energy, electric field etc. I think it would be more productive to presume, for now, that consciousness is its own thing, as different from an electric field as time is, and start studying its properties.
2. They presume it either exists all or nothing. I think it exists to different degrees, within different people, within different species, or even within the same person at different times. This difference admits the possibility of measuring degrees of consciousness or at least measuring something highly correlated with it. We might discover how to measure consciousness by looking for things that correlate to a subjective measure of wakefulness. Only once you can measure something can you do much serious theorising about it. Then boldly apply those correlates to other species to estimate their degrees of consciousness. I think we will discover consciousness exists in some form almost everywhere in the tree of life. We have been blinded to it primarily by religiously induced species chauvinism.
3. They are overly influenced by the ancient religious soul theory of consciousness, where a sort of vapourous homunculus parasite resides behind the eyes, and moves from body to body transcending death. The illusion of continuity of consciousness comes from the continuity of neural patterns and the all-is-familiar signals the brain gives to consciousness. As far as I can tell, when I come out of anaesthesia, I am newly minted. Granted I have memories of life before going under, but I just seemed to pop into existence out of nothing. Similarly my consciousness seems to gradually fade out of existence when I go under anaesthesia. You might think of consciousness as like incarnations of an operating system between boots on the same hardware. There is similarity between incarnations but no continuity. The operating system RAM (Random Access Memory) image does not go anywhere between boots, There is nothing analogous of the soul hovering around awaiting a suitable newly booting machine to infest. The OS (Operating System) image disappears and is newly created on each boot.
4. Because consciousness has proved so slippery to study, people like to just ignore it and pretend it is not important.

   Consciousness in the most important ontological question. After all, if we truly imagine a world in where there is no subjective experience (a world in which these is swirling stuff but no conscious entity to experience it,) that world may as well not exist. In some philosophical traditions, both Eastern (certain schools of Buddhist thought, for example), and Western (specifically, observer-based interpretations of quantum mechanics), that is exactly how such a world in regarded.
   ~ Ray Kurzweil (born: 1948-02-12 age: 64)  The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology page 380

Mammalists

Ray Kurzweil

The Fermi Paradox Revisited

• Efficiently encoded data is utterly indistinguishable from random noise. We may be awash is a sea of intelligent radio and light communications, but without the technology to detect, decode or decrypt them.
• We presume that advanced species will use radio transmissions. Advanced civilisations may consider radio hopelessly primitive. They may not want to use it for transmission since it would interfere with galactic observation, much as astronomers want a light-free skyline or for aesthetic reasons. The cosmic FCC (Federal Communications Commission) quickly shuts down transmitters. We might be expecting a call any time now.
• The birth of an intelligent species may be a relatively rare event. They don’t want to disturb us so they can study the process. Their technology would be millions of years more advanced than ours. If they did not want us to see them, we wouldn’t.
• We are the butt of a cosmic joke. We are so conceited that we imagine we are the most intelligent species the universe even though we have only looked on one other planet. Scientists estimate there are a billion earth-like planets in our galaxy alone. This is so funny to more advanced species that no wants to let us in on the truth that we are one of billions of intelligent species, nothing out of the ordinary at all. In fact we are not even the brightest species on earth, just the most technologically adept.
• As I suggested earlier, technology inevitably destroys its creator within a century or two. We indeed are the only intelligent species in the galaxy, but by no means the first.
• Virtual reality and artificial intelligence speeds up thinking and hence slows down the experience of reality. To advanced civilisations, reality moves far too slowly to hold any interest. All intelligent species have turned inward. They are not interested in communication with dullards like us when sentences communicated take eons of subjective time to exchange. We are ignored for the same reason college student tend to ignore first graders.
• The universe is indeed a dangerous place. Like forest creatures in the night, wise civilisations camouflage themselves and maintain silence.
• Tourists rarely go to Sudan. It is just too depressing. Earth’s barbarism, which we decry, would be utterly unbearable to an advanced civilisation that had never witnessed any form of violence. We are so revolting, that even the idea of exchanging radio signals would be nauseating.
• Then there is the Kurzweil hypothesis that we are indeed the very first intelligent civilisation. Somebody had to do it, just as somebody has to win the lottery, even though there is nothing all that special about them. This still smacks of religious jingoism and the religious view that the earth in the center of the universe, the apple of God’s eye. I think it the least likely explanation, even if on the face of it is seems the most obvious.

Sentimental Males

Male Happiness

Stress

The Nose Ring

Give Up

Hand Guns

1. The materialist ethic is so strong that protecting property trumps protecting the life of children.
2. American men fantasise about murdering their wives and children. When they finally do kill then, they want the ready excuse that they thought they were burglars.

And Never the Twains Shall Meet

Hush

Children

Aging

We Are not Alone

• We have broadcast our presence for only about 70 years, barely enough time to notify the closest stars.
• For the same reason tourism to Zimbabwe is unpopular.
• For the same reason people don’t travel to the other side of the world to see a strip mall. Our sort of world may be as common as cosmic grass, not worth exploring.
• Because Einstein was right, and the speed of light effectively enforces non-interference.
• Because like biologists, visitors do their utmost to remain hidden so they can watch the natural behaviour of earth’s inhabitants.
• Visitors send probes not physical bodies. They might send nanobots or other forms we would not recognise as life.
• They may well visit. However, if anyone reports seeing an alien life form, we dismiss that person as a kook, even when there are tens of thousands of such people. This ridicule discourages people from reporting encounters, reinforcing the notion that only nutcases ever have such encounters. It becomes impossible to scientifically research the topic without being dismissed as crazy.
• Intelligent life inevitably destroys itself with war before it develops the technology to explore the stars. So newly emerged intelligent life almost never finds neighbours.

What a Different A Word Makes

Similarly not many of us would dream of drinking the liquid secretions of the sweat glands of domesticated antelopes, but don’t blink an eye when we call it milk and serve it in a non-recyclable plastic jug.

Most of us find the thought of chowing down on the arthropods (spiders, scorpions, insects) quite revolting, yet most of us feast happily on crabs, lobsters and shrimp which are simply the marine members of the phylum. It is as illogical as eating salmon but refusing to eat trout on the grounds they are too disgusting.

Wealth Imagination

• Bill Gates: eliminating malaria and AIDS (Acquired Immuno-Deficiency Syndrome).
• Andrew Carnegie: building libraries in all the major urban centers of his time.
• George Soros: taking down George Bush.
• Building unique homes, particularly ones that have minimal impact on the environment.
• a middle-aged cosmetic dentist whose name I cannot recall in Montréal: setting up a music studio for the use of the poor youth of Montréal North.

• lavish parties.
• drugs and alcohol.
• designer clothing.
• excessively large homes.
• yachts that just sit at dock.
• expensive cars.
• excessive food.
• buying off people to pretend to be friends.

Why Americans Hate the Government

• The bureaucracy. The United States is a much older country. It was formed by the coming together of independent states, each with its own unique bureaucratic style, that lives on to this day, foiling attempts to this day at computerised streamlining. For example, in Louisiana, sales tax collection is farmed out to a private businessman in each parish who publishes his own website explaining the rules and rates. There is no table consolidating this information for the entire state. In contrast, in Canada all a cash register needs to know is two numbers, the federal GST (Goods and Services Tax) rate, and the provincial PST (Provincial Sales Tax) rate of the home province. All you need to know about sales tax for all of Canada can be summed up in a table of a dozen numbers. The equivalent information for the USA is available as a subscription from a service bureau for $900.00 USD per year.

  I once met an American at a New Year’s eve party. It turned out we were both writing tenders for roughly million dollar computer systems for quasi governmental bodies. We both complained about all the required the legalese and government regulations. We decided to swap tenders to see who had it worse. His was ten times thicker. It even had clauses about washrooms.

  Then there is the matter of medical billing — something that requires rooms full of clerks in every American hospital, carefully tracking every aspirin. In Canada there are no such staff. Since there is a single payer, it is all electronic and greatly stripped down. Dealing with a broken leg might require 15 keystrokes at most. A hospital admission takes about 5 seconds.

• The USA has ten times the population of Canada. That means the bureaucracies are more than ten times bigger with even more layers to grind to a halt.
• The USA has elected judges who face periodic reelection. Canada has appointed judges who cannot be removed except for gross misconduct. That means the judicial system in the USA tends to do what is currently popular, even if unjust to a currently unpopular minority.
• The Canadian parliamentary party-discipline system generates periodic sweeps where every politician in the government is swept from power. In the USA, changes are usually incremental. Even a politician in an American minority party is still powerful and still worth bribing. An American thus feels he has less power to punish and control his politicians.
• The USA has a huge military and uses it to dominate the world in a rather roughshod way. This creates enemies and leads to paranoia such as the Joe McCarthy Commie-under-the-bed era or the currently fashionable fear of Muslims. This leads to reckless abandonment of civil liberties and constitutional safeguards. Canada is too small to pose much of a threat internationally, though its oil wealth could lead it astray in future. The result in American government tends to be paranoid and manic-depressive and the Canadian phlegmatic.

The Approval Drug

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
~ George Bernard Shaw (born: 1856-07-26 died: 1950-11-02 at age: 94)

Salmon Run

Teaching Sadism

• Punch and Judy shows where whacking a baby with a sticks is presented as amusing.
• America’s Funniest Videos where people having accidents are presented with silly voices and zany music to teach children to see others in pain as entertainment.
• Video games where children kill by the score and defecate on the corpses.
• Cartoons where characters attempt to kill each other in the most painful way possible.
• Pro wrestling matches where actors pretend to permanently injure one another and pretend to be in unbearable pain.
• Fights leading to permanent brain injury as part of pro sports, especially hockey.
• Extended kung fu and other extreme fight scenes, which in real life would have resulted in fatalities, in nearly every TV drama.

The aim of military training is not just to prepare men for battle, but to make them long for it.
~ Louis Simpson (born: 1923-03-27 age: 89)

Lasting Relationships

• Make sure you give your partner some physical pleasure every day, in the form they like. It might be a literal back scratch, a foot massage, a hug or coffee in bed.
• Be at least as polite as you would be to a stranger.
• Listen to their petty complaints about you. If they ever leave you, that will be the real reason why.

Humiliation Rituals

• Donald Trump and “You’re fired!”.
• American Idol where the week’s loser is publicly shamed then kicked off the show with the camera glued to his face to catch every nuance of distress.
• The Jerry Springer Show where couples tell the nation every embarrassing fact (or fiction) they can come up with about their ex.
• The Maury Povich Show where young women are humiliated when their promiscuity is exposed in detail to the nation as DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid) test after DNA test fails to find the father of their child.
• The frequent use of the terms kick ass and kick butt.
• Giving college students ten times more work than they can possibly complete, then shaming those who crack under the pressure and drop out.
• America invades tiny third world countries and grinds them under its heel.

Forgetfulness of Money

The immense convenience of the invention of money allowed even total strangers to safely do business. When a man walks into a country club and asks to join, money erases the history how he came by it. He may be a faith healer, swindler, gambler, speculator, monopolist, advertising executive, embezzler, Ken Lay, Dick Cheney, Conrad Black, drug dealer, arms dealer, thief, bribe taker, blackmailer etc. someone who came by the money without providing a service to others. Or he made have toiled producing food, goods, services, inventing, entertaining, managing in any one of millions of ways of serving his fellow beings or his planet. What is most peculiar is even when we know how a person came by his money, we tend to treat all equally, honouring the wealthy crooks with just as much respect as the wealthy Nobel prize winners. Before the invention of money, we would have ostracised the crooks, not idolised them.

Mosquitos

Desecrating Graves

If you are Dumped

• Getting dumped happens to nearly everyone. It is just others handle it better than you and are better at concealing their hurt.
• Don’t expect others to be particularly solicitous. To them, the dumper’s flaws are blatantly obvious. They don’t feel your insane attraction. To everyone else, the solution is obvious, move on; forget the past. The dumper is not worth wasting any more emotional energy on.
• No matter how attractive the person who dumped you appears to you now, they are not the only person for you.
• You probably feel totally blindsided. With time, you will gradually recognise the many forewarnings they gave you.
• The dumper had mixed feelings about leaving you. That is why they had to convince themselves you were an ogre, to cement their resolve.
• The dumper is not your one and only true love. Your true love would not treat you that badly.
• When someone tells you they hate asparagus, does that provide information about them or about asparagus? When your lover dumps you and says they hate you with a ferocious intensity and always have, is that an accurate, unbiased evaluation of you and your future relationship potential with all others? Of course not! It is a heat-of-the-moment venting.
• Before you get involved with someone, find out if they make a habit of suddenly cutting off old lovers, friends or acquaintances. If they do, you will eventually be on the list.
• A dumper is someone too immature to take the time to dissolve a relationship gracefully, with consideration for the feelings of all concerned. It requires kindness and patience. Being dumped is a bit like taking a spoonful of oatmeal in the eye flung by a two-year old. Don’t take it seriously!!!
• Watch the Jerry Springer, Steve Wilkos, Montel Williams and Maury Povich daytime trashy TV shows. You will see dumpers from hell beating up on exes who usually do not deserve such abuse. You don’t deserve it either. Note how in every case the dumpee is well to be rid of such a shrew/slut/bully/sadist. The same applies to you!

Sci Fi Anomalies

• On Star Hunter, the holographic communications have more interference than ’50s TV through rabbit ears.
• On Star Trek Next Generation, the new species they encounter always use compatible cell phones and speak 20th century American English.
• On the original Star Trek, the advanced communication system did not include a caller id feature.
• The replicators can’t create spare parts for the engines or medicines.
• Fireballs from explosions move in slow motion making it possible to outrun them.
• In Star Wars, no one has yet invented automatic target lockon, or computer controlled navigation.
• Humans, a recently evolved intelligent species, are always able to outsmart any other species they encounter.
• When Spock announces a probability of survival to 4 decimal places, no matter how close to 0, you know all the regular actors will survive intact for the next episode or sequel.

Deja Vu

Relative Cosmetology

The Cosmic Etch-A-Sketch

The Devolution of Competition

Ecosystems that have not been disturbed for long periods of time (whether by humans or natural disasters) tend to read a state of dynamic equilibrium which ecologists call a climax phase, meaning that organisms have adapted themselves to one another in such a way as to avoid direct competition, to keep energy flow-through to a minimum, and to recycle energy flow and nutrients as completely as possible. They have formed, to use an anthropomorphic term, a community.
~ Richard Heinberg (born: 1950-10-21 age: 61)

	recommend book⇒Party’s Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies
	by:	Richard Heinberg	978-0-86571-529-5	paperback
		(born: 1950-10-21 age: 61)	978-0-613-92089-6	hardcover
	publisher:	New Society Publishers	978-1-55092-334-6	ebook
	published:	2005-06-01	B004FPZ3DK	kindle
Oil is peaking. The supply is getting smaller each year. Just what are the implications? Heinberg sees the only viable option as a global program of resource conservation and sharing. Predicting chaos unless the U.S. — the world’s foremost oil consumer — is willing to join with other countries to implement a global program of resource conservation and sharing, he also recommends a “managed collapse”, that might make way for a slower-paced, low-energy, sustainable society in the future. website. The opening chapters of the book give a lucid, simple, but not simplistic recap of the basic physics, biology, history and ecology you need to know as background to understand the energy crunch. When I was reading this section, it dawned on me that most Americans are completely ignorant of this basic science. That is why they approach the energy and global warming problem is such a superstitious and irrational way.
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Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock

	recommend book⇒The Evolution of Cooperation
	by:	Robert M. Axelrod	978-0-14-012495-8	paperback
		(born: 1939 age: 72)	978-0-465-02122-2	hardcover
	publisher:	Penguin
	published:	1990-04-26
The science of cooperation. How cooperation develops among the selfish and even between warring parties. The key is long term association with the same group. Not all cooperation is good. Oligopolies form by the same mechanism. It explains why strict tit for tat is a sound strategy. It is about the mathematics/strategies that generate revenge spirals and spirals of co-operation. Somebody must have read this book when Britain decided to stop taking two eyes for every eye in Northern Ireland, which eventually lead to bringing terrorism under control. Using computer modeling Axelrod discovers the power of a simple tit for tat strategy in dealing with others. He also discovers the mathematical conditions under which people co-operate, collude, compete, aid each other or refuse to offer reasonable assistance. He also explains the mathematics of why corporations tend toward price-fixing and other co-operative behaviour with their competitors.
abe books anz abe books.co.uk abe books.de amazon.co.uk amazon.de abe books.ca iberlibro.com amazon.ca amazon.es Chapters Indigo abe books.fr abe books.com amazon.fr amazon.com abe books.it Barnes & Noble amazon.it Powells O’Reilly Safari Sony e-books Kobo
Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock

Atrocities

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.
~ George Orwell (born: 1903-06-25 died: 1950-01-21 at age: 46)

War as a Game

Unscrupulous leaders like John McCain, Dick Cheney and George Bush exploit this naïvety and urge their fellows on to greater illegal mayhem, simply for national pride and the supposed shame of losing/withdrawing/calling off the attack. They trick their fellows into expensive wars, with no prizes to be gained from pursuing them. McCain, Cheney, Bush and their backers reap hundreds of billions in war profits. Their dupes reap a lifetime of sorrow and guilt.

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.
~ George Orwell (born: 1903-06-25 died: 1950-01-21 at age: 46)

Respect

Naming

Nostalgia

Fairness

Industriousness

Oops, maybe industriousness is not such a virtue any more.

A Tibetan and an Amazon river basin tribesman were each asked what they thought of western civilisation. Oddly, they gave identical answers. They replied, “What is the matter with your women? They are supposed to stop the men. Everyone knows when you let men cut down trees, they don’t know when to stop.”

We need new values.

• It is good to leave a light ecological footprint.
• It good to live comfortably consuming the least amount energy and goods.
• It is good to discourage others from wasteful habits.

Idea Contagion

Small Minded Cruelty

Ambiguity

1. no current need

   I don’t want a taxi just now. I am not going anywhere.

2. no need

   I live on a tiny island. What on earth would I do with a car?

3. no lack

   I don’t want for a car. I am fully satisfied in the car department. I have 3 vehicles already.

4. would prefer something else

   Dear sugar daddy, I want diamonds, not a Rolls.

5. active rejection

   I detest cars. They pollute and the repair people are all crooks. I wouldn’t take one if you gave it to me.

Intuition

Anyone not shocked by quantum mechanics has not yet understood it.
~ Niels Bohr (born: 1885-10-07 died: 1962-11-18 at age: 77)

Impotence

Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.
~ Mahatma Gandhi (born: 1869-10-02 died: 1948-01-30 at age: 78)

It’s the action, not the fruit of the action, that’s important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there’ll be any fruit. But that doesn’t mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.
~ Mahatma Gandhi (born: 1869-10-02 died: 1948-01-30 at age: 78)

Admiring Bodies

Enjoyment

1. Learn to get off on little things, like the pleasant feeling of a brush on your scalp, or warm water on your back in the bath.
2. Do what you like doing. So many people slave away at pointless jobs they detest.
3. When trivial stuff upsets you, ask yourself, if we were about to be nuked in 10 minutes, would this matter? Where does this fit in the hierarchy of cosmic significance?

Wealth

Even worse, when these people commit conspicuous consumption or conspicuous waste, they are committing an environmental crime; they are deliberately despoiling the environment. When they overconsume, others have to go without. What is admirable about that? Even at the height of the famine in 1985, Ethiopian farmers were growing strawberries for the breakfast tables of the world’s wealthy.

UFO (Unidentified Flying Object) s

Last Days

Cash Back

• You pay more sales tax than had they just reduced the price.
• When you have to mail in the rebate request, you find you need copies of receipts, packing boxes, and anything they can think of you might have discarded to void the offer.
• Most of the time the company refuses to pay the rebate, claiming it is expired. They will just sit on your application for 6 months to make sure.
• You won’t get your money until many months later if ever.
• They are counting on the process of getting your rebate will be so onerous you won’t bother.
• The handling costs the company much more than just reducing the price. They are screwing you out of that difference. This is also true of preferred customer cards that add to processing costs and make checkout lines longer.

Leadership

Games

• dolls: care of children.
• board games: strategy, keeping track of money.
• basketball: teamwork
• music videos: sexual flirtation
• listening to music: drugs, crime
• hockey: fighting, revenge
• video games: killing, raping, stealing
• football: war, turning an arbitrary goal into a life or death pursuit.

9/10 Empty

• To deceive you into thinking you were getting more product that you were.
• To make the product take up more shelf space so that you would me more likely to notice it.
• To provide more surface area on the package for advertising images.

Hell

• Refuse to allow those in unbearable suffering to die in peace in the manner they wish. We would never dream of such cruelty to a terminally ill puppy.
• Kill, torture, maim, rape or steal from each other in war and claim we do it for altruistic motives.
• Wage all out war on nature trying to kill off every last species. We happily steal the food supply or habitat of any other species, even for the most trifling convenience (e.g. for fashion).
• Fight to the death with each other over made up stories about an all-loving deity.
• Honour military serial killers with medals and treat with utmost disdain those who take pleasure from anything but the most humdrum sex.
• Claw each other for more wealth to the point of harming ourselves with overconsumption, denying others life, and destroying the ecosystem that sustains us all.

Whipped

Maya Angelou

Planetary Despair

• There are 6 billion people on earth. Properly your share of the enormous task of saving planet earth is only 1/6 billionth of the job. Since most people are deadbeats or actively evil, your share increases to perhaps 1 billionth of the job. Do you think you can bear a burden that heavy?
• You don’t have to do everything. You can pick out tiny part of the problem. Other people will handle the rest.
• The earth has had multiple mass extinctions in past. Life recovered after about 10 million years. That sounds a very long time to a human, but is not that much in geologic time.
• Humans are just another animal. When locusts, lemmings or tent caterpillars overpopulate and strip their environment, we don’t weep when their populations crash back down to sustainable levels. We are mildly relieved. Why should we react to a human population explosion and crash any differently? Look at this not as a human, but from the perspective of all life on earth. Life will give a collective gasp of relief when humans are humbled.
• Humans surpassed the sustainable population about the time of the American civil war when the world population was 1 billion. The 5 billion we have added since then have been only temporarily sustained by the cheap energy of non-renewable fossil fuel.
• We expect far too much of our fellow humans. Even though humans can rationally predict the consequences of their actions, they are still motivated by ancient drives for power, sex, food, territory just like other animals. We humans are incapable of acting in our own best interest, even when we are aware of what we are doing to hurt ourselves. We get in trouble because our technology magnifies our power to endlessly satisfy unslakable lusts. Imagine humans as monkeys playing with guns, cars, explosives or an assembly line pumping out an endless and overwhelming supply of bananas. Humans too, are driven by their standard monkey motivations. It can be comic.
• Let us presume we are doomed. It truly is hopeless. We are all going to die, and take most of the species of earth with us in any one of a dozen plausible scenarios. In the meantime, will you feel better wallowing in despair or taking action on the off chance it might make things better? I started gay lib back in 1969 when everyone was opposed to me, even the gays. People were so opposed that about 300 of them called to shower me with abuse each day, and about three of them each day threatened my life. (To put it in perspective, Martin Luther King got 40 death threats a day.) I did it just because it felt right to protest the injustice. Never in my wildest dreams did I think my actions would make any difference. Yet within two years we had the first gay rights legislation. You never know. People are herd animals. They can turn on a dime, even after centuries of bovine stupidity.

• Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.
  ~ Mahatma Gandhi (born: 1869-10-02 died: 1948-01-30 at age: 78)

• Many years ago I asked my Dad why he sometimes bought lottery tickets. I said, “Surely you now the expected value of the ticket is less than half the ticket price. On average you lose money.” He replied that he did not see lottery tickets as an investment, but as entertainment. With the ticket you could imagine how fun it would be to win. Without a ticket you could not. Saving the world works the same way.
• There was once a priest who prayed every day for 50 years to win the lottery. He wailed at God that an upright fellow such as he surely deserved the prize. God in frustration finally thundered back, “You could at least have made it a little easier for me by buying a ticket.” Saving the world works the same way. And I mean saving it literally, preventing its utter destruction.
• Scientists tell us there are trillions of planets in the universe. Weeping over the failure of earth to thrive is like gnashing over your teeth over the failure of a single dandelion seedling.

• One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
  ~ Woody Allen (born: 1935-12-01 age: 76)

Good Deeds

Learning Tools

Freedom

Americans use the word quite differently. They imagine people are free only when the think like Americans, believe in Jesus and work primarily for American interests.

Conformity

The Great Error

Predictions

• It will be mandatory to wear a helmet on public transportation.
• It will be illegal to drive cars on city streets for reasons of safety, speed, fuel economy and traffic density. Cars will be driven by automation.
• Taxis will outnumber private vehicles for economic reasons. They don’t need parking and they don’t lose value sitting in a garage rusting. They work full time.
• China and the USA will hold a war in a hapless third country, ostensibly over green house gas emissions and other pollutants. However, the actual reason will be the usual excuse for war, economic hegemony.

Economics of Fashion

Humanity’s Rites of Passage

1. We have developed weapons terrible enough to destroy all of humanity if not all higher life forms. We must individually develop the wisdom not to use them.
2. We are drastically altering the planet with our economic activities. We must co-operate with everyone else on the planet to refrain from damaging the eco-systems and causing massive including rapid climate change.
3. The earth reverses magnetic polarity about every 200,000 years on average. The last time was 780,000 years ago. We are in the process of a flip right now. Though it is a somewhat random event, most likely in about 300 more years, the earth’s magnetic field will temporarily disappear, to be restored in about another 1000 years. So what you say? Who will even notice but a few boy scouts? The earth’s magnetic field is protects us like a force field from cosmic radiation. We will unprotected from particle bombardment from space and from the sun, causing additional cancers and disruptions of satellite communications. To deal with this lesser threat we will have the even more difficult task of co-operating actively to deal with the problem.
4. The resources of earth are finite. We must learn to share them fairly and to avoid bearing more children than the planet can currently sustain. This requires overcoming our deepest biological urge — to survive and populate at the expense of others.

You do not have to change: survival is not mandatory.
~ Dr. W. (William) Edwards Deming (born: 1900-10-14 died: 1993-12-20 at age: 93) On Overcoming Resistance to Change

Punish The Crime

Gullibility

Insurance

Chiropractors

Housework

Instead, treat it as a game, where the goal is maximum efficiency — to keep your place as clean as possible with the least effort. You constantly work at finding ever more efficient ways to do things. This keeps your interest up. I discovered that for example, by treating the kitchen floor as if it were a work surface, and giving it a quick wipe with Lysol all purpose spray cleaner each day, it never needs to be washed, and it is always sparkling clean, though I do rinse it with water from time to time. This also keeps any dropped food from being ground into the floor. I found that letting the dishes soak in a pan outside the sink keeps the sink free for other uses. I found that oven cleaner will instantly clean anything with baked on grease, not just ovens, especially white ovenware. Experiment with different cleaning tools and chemicals to find the ones optimal for each job. If you live with someone else, you will find they automatically are less likely to leave messes than before.

Silicon Sociopaths

Blind Obedience

Pornography

The Biggest Mistake of My Life

1. I assumed that since he knew me better than anyone, his assessment must be accurate.
2. I was well aware of my faults, but I was baffled that he could go instantly from 100% positive to 100% negative. I figured it required some extraordinary explanation such as drugs, devil-worshipping cult or some sort of hypnotic possession.

I soon learned he had found someone else, but I still could not see why that would explain his sudden change in attitude to me. In retrospect, I had seen him dump friends suddenly for unknown reasons. I also discovered there was a drug component.

My vigil went on for about a dozen years, then gradually dwindled in intensity for the next twenty. However, I never again let myself trust anyone. I always held back. It was like a constant note of sadness in my life. Later partners were irritated knowing I was still pining for him. I had put so much pain into this vigil, it was hard to give it up.

Oddly, watching the Jerry Springer Show was the most healing. I watched women surprising their boyfriends or husbands with the news they were dumping them for other men, then proceeded to humiliate and insult their old boyfriends on national TV. It had never dawned on me this was anywhere near normal behaviour for the human species.

I think the mechanism goes like this. The dumper feels guilty at leaving, so decides to vilify the dumpee in her/his mind in order to justify it. It may also be that the dumper has accumulated a pile of unexpressed resentments. They finally get the courage to state them only after deciding to leave.

The important thing is, don’t pine! If your lover doesn’t want you any more, you are not a good match. They won’t be happy even if you do get back together. Move on!

Toilet Seats

I Am An Idea

Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.
~ George Orwell (born: 1903-06-25 died: 1950-01-21 at age: 46)

Fruit Baskets

Lotteries

The age life on the earth is about 3.5 billion years. If you had been playing since the first microorganisms formed, you would have won about 2100 times.

The age of the earth is about 4.5 billion years. If you had been playing since the formation of the earth, you would have won about 2700 times.

The universe is 13.7 billion years old. If you had been playing since the dawn of time, you would have won about 8220 times.

Kindness

1. I perform an act of kindness.
2. Someone performs an act of kindness for me.
3. I witness someone performing an act of kindness for another.

Get Goal of War

• Stop attacking you.
• Hand over his land.
• Hand over his resources.
• Convert to your religion.

Commerce has a different ethic. Nobody signs a deal unless both parties believe they are better off for it, even when one party is benefitting much more than the other.

Grim Optimism

I work as hard as I can, given my limited energy, on all fronts simultaneously. It is hard to notice any beneficial effect at all. What is so frustrating is there are so many well-funded people working diligently against me to promote global warming, war, pollution, cruelty, greed, exploitation, overpopulation etc. As you might expect, I become deeply depressed over this situation.

This is how I pull myself out of it. I go down to the beach, and look out over the water toward Port Angeles. Then I imagine what this scene will look like when man manages to wipe himself out, and possibly much of life on earth along with him. The lights of Port Angeles will be gone, but the stars will be there, exactly as before. The clouds will still there. The wind will be there, perhaps whipping a lot harder. There will still be some rain and the ocean. Once in earth’s history, the land was completely barren, and bit by bit plant life colonised it. No matter how scorched, poisoned or denuded the continents, plants will eventually work their patient miracle again. Life on earth has already survived 30 mass extinctions that wiped out more than half the life on earth. There many not be another technological species for a long while, but that is not such a terrible thing. We humans sadistically tormented the earth and all its creatures. We are one of the very few creatures who leave the environment less inviting to our offspring than we found it.

However, I can’t help but notice that I too am a human with a chimp’s motivations. I wish I could kill those who oppose me. I am deeply ashamed of being a human, a member of a failed and insanely self-centered species.

I see only one plausible rescue, coming from artificial intelligence, smarter than man, capable of saving us from our own stupidity. That’s why I have put so much effort into the Java glossary.

It is not nearly the Hail Mary you might imagine. I wrote a FØRTRAN program myself back in the 1970s for BC Hydro to design high voltage transmission lines called Optow, that was more intelligent than humans. One day it was laughably stupid. The next, with just a tiny bit more tinkering, it was 10% smarter than a person, and instantly put 50 engineers with masters degrees and PhDs out of work.

	recommend book⇒The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence
	by:	Ray Kurzweil	978-0-14-028202-3	paperback
		(born: 1948-02-12 age: 64)	978-0-670-88217-5	hardcover
	publisher:	Penguin	978-1-101-07788-7	ebook
	published:	2000-01-01	978-0-14-086888-3	audio
			B002CIY8JW	kindle
A fascinating book giving the evidence why computers exceeding human intelligence are imminent.
abe books anz abe books.co.uk abe books.de amazon.co.uk amazon.de abe books.ca iberlibro.com amazon.ca amazon.es Chapters Indigo abe books.fr abe books.com amazon.fr amazon.com abe books.it Barnes & Noble amazon.it Powells O’Reilly Safari Sony e-books Kobo
Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock

Abstinence Education

I would imagine any impressionable boy viewing this spectacle would never want to touch a girl, much less screw her, knowing in nine months she could turn into such a fiend from hell, and he could be tied financially to this venom-spitting hellcat for 20 years. If I had any choice in the matter I would stick to gay sex or sex with very low risk for pregnancy.

Yet even the best abstinence education does not work. It actually increases risk of HIV transmission. You have to teach people safe sex. You can’t contain hormones, just direct them.

Crop Circles

Just who is/are the artist(s)? Circa 1990, a couple of men claimed to have created over 1000 of them in three months, but never demonstrated producing even one. For many, this closed the mystery. My partner figures the artist is a team of talented young people working for the British military testing out secret technology. Others believe the designers are not human. The circles are well above the quality of graffiti or pranks. Whomever is doing them is an artist of the highest order. Just looking at them induces a mild euphoria. According to that documentary, the crop circles appear suddenly in the middle of the night, apparently in as little as five minutes, yet even though there have been over ten thousand of them, no one has managed to photograph one being formed. One other odd feature is the stalks are not broken, but bent, and the wheat or other grain continues to grow unharmed. There is a new religion growing around them believing them to be messages from a benign alien species.

I don’t know who made them. I am not about to make up my mind from only one video made by true believers. However, as artistic works, they impressed the heck out of me. There are not your grandfather’s crop circles. This is something you want to see on a big screen.

Turbojam Scam

FOX sued in the supreme court for the right to make up the news. They argued and won that it is entertainment and need not have any connection to reality. Yet people, out of old habits, still watch FOX news imagining they are hearing some approximation to the truth.

There was a time when scamming was the province of door to door salesmen and con artists. Today it is standard business practice. Royal Roads business college teaches students how to be unethical in business. There is no longer even a pretense of honesty.

This is not all that new. I had my first taste of corporate scamming when I was five and saved up $0.50 (four weeks allowance) for a submarine that “dives and plunges” The picture on the back of the Kellogg’s cornflakes box showed it to be at least a foot long producing a prodigious wake with two astonished children in the background for scale. When it finally arrived it was about four inches long, and did not plunge at all. It would tilt on its side and emit a bubble like a tiny fart. Undaunted, some years later I sent a dollar to Kellogg’s for a pumped water rocket that would go 100 feet in the air. This time they kept my dollar and said “Sorry, we don’t deliver to Canada.” even though I got the offer off a box of Canadian Kellogg’s corn flakes. I still have not forgiven them. I always buy some other brand.

Free Will

Whenever I look back on my life, it seems to me my choices were inevitable given what I knew at the time and what my hormones were doing.

I have a sense of confinement if somebody or something stops me from doing what I believe would work out best. My freedom is not in the least impinged if the correct course of action is blindingly obvious, when it is something I definitely want to do, no matter how inevitable my choice. The word free has too many meanings and has too many emotional connotations. It befuddles people. When you have a free choice it really means the right to take the option you want, not whether there was some doubt about the choice.

My Mom used to say “if only” are the two saddest words in the English language. The words represent a vain wishful thinking that you knew back then what you know now. You didn’t. You couldn’t. If you went back in time limited by the same knowledge you had back then, you would do the exact same stupid things all over again. The purpose of regret is to remind you avoid repeating mistakes, not to torture you endlessly for ones you already made.

What if you and a friend watched a rerun of a game show on TV. You have seen the rerun; your friend has not. The contestant has to make a random choice, box A gets him a car, box B gets him a cabbage. You watch him constrained to pick box B. Your friend sees him making a free choice. So free will is in the eye of the beholder. It depends on how much knowledge of the future you have.

Death

I am told people often die smiling, as though the moment of death is a pleasant release from the pains and indignities of sickness or old age.

To me, life is like a roller coaster ride. The hypothesis that it might be never-ending is a nightmare. I find it odd that other people like to make up the most elaborate and fanciful stories about death where they are rewarded for every good deed and their enemies ferociously punished for every transgression. What is even odder is they treat these conjectures as literal truth with nothing at all to base them on. The impenetrable wall that death creates allows wishful speculation to have a free reign and create iron-clad certainty.

Sensory Reality

House

Tanking

Me In a Nutshell

Red Light Sheep

Even pigeons do it in lab experiments. They peck for pellets and one time one happens to be standing on one leg when its get some food. Thereafter it stands on one leg to peck for pellets, like a superstitious gambler.

Sustainability

1. Corporate thinking: the next quarter profit is more important than long term survival.
2. Religious wishful thinking: imagining that if man plays helpless, God will eventually take pity and make it all better.
3. Selfishness: people are unwilling to make any sacrifices of immediate pleasure for their children’s or even their own survival. All that matters is immediate gratification.
4. Secular wishful thinking: ignoring the best science and believing any crank or corporate shill who will tell you there is nothing to worry about.

We’re All Going To Die

The Last Lap

Dealing With Bullies

The Man-Eating Clam

Remembered Sex

Zen

Have you noticed how Madison Avenue has embraced Zen. They use the word so sell everything from bath salts to office furniture. Have you noticed how when advertisers want to show a spiritually enlightened person, they pick a Buddhist monk. Buddhism symbolise rationality, calm and beneficence. Isn’t it odd that a culture has abandoned the symbols of virtue of its own religion.

Restaurant Theatre

• Stare stunned as if you had been asked a profound philosophical question. Pause then reply, “I don’t know… Do you?”
• Look puzzled. Reflect a second. Say “I don’t know how you cook eggs. Ask the chef. Surely he must know.”
• Look mildly panicked and embarrassed, as if you were an alien and have just been uncovered not understanding some facet of human culture every human should know. Say “please enumerate some plausible possible answers”, then do a Starman gesture and pick boiled, and add after a pause, “in water, please”.

It’s Tuesday, this must be Belgium

A New Colour

Imagine someone growing up in an environment where everyone protected him from ever seeing the colour red. Then in some special ceremony, it would be presented for the first time.

Emperors of old tried to impress their subjects that way. British royalty forbade anyone but themselves from wearing purple. Chinese emperors forbade anyone but themselves from wearing yellow.

Olives

War Grace

Turning Women On

Big Picture Math

The Purpose of Life

Bushmen

Screensavers

Dandelion Faith

It’s the action, not the fruit of the action, that’s important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there’ll be any fruit. But that doesn’t mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.
~ Mahatma Gandhi (born: 1869-10-02 died: 1948-01-30 at age: 78)

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
~ Mahatma Gandhi (born: 1869-10-02 died: 1948-01-30 at age: 78)

Life

On Kudzu

A Riddle

Wishful Thinking

Similarly, it is hard not to lie to reassure a child crying over the loss of loved relative, friend or pet.

These are not innocent lies. They rob the young of realising how precious those short years of youth are.

Animal Cruelty

I think; therefore I am.
~ René Descartes (born: 1596 died: 1650 at age: 54)

What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month old. But suppose they were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being? The time will come when humanity will extend its mantle over everything which breathes…
~ Jeremy Bentham (born: 1748-02-05 died: 1832-06-06 at age: 84) Principles of Morals and Legislation

Of course neither of these authors were aware that crows, parrots and dolphins could do mathematical reasoning.

Past Lives

If I Had To Live My Life Over

• Preschool was reasonably pleasant, except for my Mom’s violence and sitting at the dinner table with a strap forcing me to eat things I found disgusting like milk, carrots and turnips, gagging them down.
• My school years were a nightmare dealing with gangs of bullies at school and my Mom’s unpredictable violence at home. One day she smashed in all my fish tanks with a coke bottle. I counted the days until I was old enough to leave home.
• Age 15 to 21 I made myself miserable fretting that I was gay, and doing nothing about it. I was head over heals with my straight friend.
• Age 21 to 27 was the golden age of my life when I came out, made tons of friends, did my gay lib and became relatively famous. I remember thinking that my life was perfect and I could not imagine anything better.
• The next years were hell as I pined, and pined, and pined for my lover Jimmy who dumped me. I pined even when I was involved again. I also worried about him because his personality had changed so drastically overnight.
• When I was 38 I had another short golden age as new love for Shannon made me temporarily forget Jimmy.
• Then from age 39 to 64, HIV has overshadowed my life.

So what would I do differently?

• I would have phoned the operator and asked for help with my Mom. She would have been "mortified". At the time I was too afraid of reprisals.
• I did manage to get two bullies off my back by hurting them so badly they never touched me again. I would plot to get each one alone and similarly hurt them.
• I would have smuggled some ordinary clothes to school to avoid the "monkey suit" (a British boarding school uniform) that was at the root of most of the ridicule.
• I could have tried to find other gay people my own age rather than staying so fixed on my straight friend.
• The biggie is realizing when a lover leaves it means he is not the one. Find someone who is more compatible. Even if the guy who jilted me came back, there would be endless tension. There is absolutely no point going after someone who does not show interest in return. Even if you were successful, it would take constant effort to keep the relationship going. I also learned that it is completely normal for an ex to change suddenly from loving to totally rejecting. It is not a sign of pathology. No pining! would be the watchword of my second try at life.
• When I was in San Francisco I should have checked out whatever HIV education was available. I dismissed AIDS as hysteria or the result of drug and alcohol abuse since the VD (Venereal Disease) officials in Canada had ignored it.
• Life is so much shorter than I imagined. The passage of time accelerates as you get older. I would have done a lot more world traveling when I was young. My adventures in Europe and Indonesia seem to fill about 10% of my life memories even though they took only a few weeks of my life.

Hanging On

Natural Punishment

Consider, for example, what happens to soldiers who enlist to kill people:

• They are first stripped of their will in boot camp.
• They live under harsh conditions.
• They are shot at and perhaps killed, maimed or tortured.

• They can’t trust anyone. Anyone nice to them is probably just scheming to take their money.
• They live in fear of attack, blackmail or kidnapping.

Parents Never Sleep

Cuban Missile Crisis

Circa 1967, I thought to myself, what if this happens for real? Do I want to be tormenting myself with thoughts of why I did not do anything to at least try to prevent the nuclear war. I decided to do something that would be sufficiently drastic that I would be able to content myself with the thought I had all that could reasonably be expected. So I gave  $100.00 CAD to the fledgling Greenpeace for their anti-nuclear protests. This was a large sum for a kid putting himself through university in the days when room and board were  $40.00 CAD a month. I got a letter back telling me it was the largest donation they had ever received. I has occurred to me since that my donation might have been the horseshoe nail that made the difference between Greenpeace fading away or becoming what it is today.

For want of a nail a shoe was lost,
for want of a shoe a horse was lost,
for want of a horse a rider was lost,
for want of a rider an army was lost,
for want of an army a battle was lost,
for want of a battle the war was lost,
for want of the war the kingdom was lost,
and all for the want of a little horseshoe nail.
~ Benjamin Franklin (born: 1706-01-17 died: 1790-04-17 at age: 84)

Baumhertzig

You must behave as if your every act, even the smallest, impacted a thousand people for a hundred generations. Because it does.
~ Gottfried Johannes Müller (born: 1914-04-10 died: 2009-09-26 at age: 95)

Courage

Relationships

• We are primates. Primates groom each other as their primary social interaction. Nothing beats a good back scratch or massage.
• Give your partner what he/she asks for, not what you think they ought to want.
• If your partner asks you not to do something, refrain from doing it, even if you think it is inconsequential. They are deadly serious.
• Don’t criticise.

Denial

The Fermi Paradox

It may be very unusual for technological civilisations to evolve. Whales, dolphins and elephants have brains larger than ours. Squids have brains 20 times larger. They evolved superior intelligence to ours, but lacked the hands necessary to let them evolve technology.

I think the answer is simple. Mankind evolved too much power too fast. We will soon destroy ourselves in one of a thousand ways with that power. See my essay on mankind’s extinction. Technology develops too easily and brings on changes too quickly. Any species going down that route soon destroys itself and takes most of a planet with it.

Nobody Knows You Are a Dog

In 1993, Peter Steiner did a famous cartoon for the New Yorker of a dog sitting at a computer terminal, saying to his friend "On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog." It’s true. Unless you tell them, people don’t know how old you are, how good looking you are, how sexy your voice is, where you are from or even your gender. I discovered something disturbing. In person, people usually treat me with exaggerated respect. On the Internet, they treat me with contempt. It dawned on me that respect the may be largely because of my great height, which is not visible on the net.

Where Are You?

Cosmic Assumption

Religious Tolerance

The Wisdom of Old Age

The Human Family

Measuring Success

Yet now it is clear to everyone, he shaped Canada more than any other politician. Without him Canada would not have universal medical care, old age pensions or children’s allowance. Canadian identity is based around these social programs that see everyone is cared for.

Democracy

Prayer Portions

1. Some Christians pray with fingers tightly intertwined. This says "I beg of you. I beseech you. Do things my way. I really do know better than you what is best for all concerned."
2. Some Christians pray with palms together. This says "I am holier than my fellows, therefore you God, owe it to me to do things my way."
3. Some new agers pray with palms up. This says "I am entitled to your bounty God. Give me my due."
4. Muslims grovel to pray. This says "Please don’t beat me. I claim you are merciful with my tongue, but in my heart I believe you are cruel."
5. In my dreams, white-frocked nuns pray with hands up and palms forward. This says "I surrender. Let me be not so clueless and do it your way."

The Fundamental Sadness

• One day I will go to feed him and will discover he is dead.
• One day I won’t come to feed him because I am dead.
• One day we will both be killed simultaneously.

Suicide

Only intelligent species whales, dolphins and humans suicide. There need to be three factors for a human suicide:

1. Desperation or acute intolerable mental pain sufficient to overcome fear. It takes an act of courage comparable to jumping out of an airplane without a parachute. This is why antidepressants can trigger suicide. They give people the energy to carry through. Death is a great unknown, and cultural myths promise terrible supernatural torments. Those fears must be overcome to suicide.
2. A belief that conditions could not possibly change sufficiently to make life tolerable.
3. A belief that others would be better off, or would not particularly object if the suicide were accomplished.

Persistence

1. The lives of great people are filled with even more emotional distress than mine.
2. Every famous person was at some point ridiculed by those in authority. Yet they persisted anyway. They did not have the good sense to give up.

Appropriate Programming

Mirrors

The top of the image is aligned with the top of your body. The left side of the image is aligned with to the left side of your body. So, the mirror is not reversing left and right. Yet it is reversing the writing on your T-shirt, left and right, but not top and bottom.

You can think of mirrors as letting you see the writing from inside the tee shirt. Yet, why should that reverse left and right, but not top and bottom?

Imagine a T-shirt with writing in various orientations. The writing always reverses. So it is not a left-right thing after all, but the handedness of the entire image that flips.

The Matrix

The Internet is the red pill. TV is the blue bill.

Extra Terrestrials

The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.
~ Dr. Stephen Jay Gould (born: 1941-09-10 died: 2002-05-20 at age: 60)

Starting Over

Fear of Dying

It is not death, it is dying that alarms me.
~ Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (born: 1533 died: 1592 at age: 59)

Why should I fear death? If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which cannot exist when I do?
~ Epicurus (born: 341 BC died: 270 BC at age: 71)

The Future

In the future, I will be able to wake up a totally different person if I choose.

In the future, I will wonder how all the people back in 2002 managed to endure the primitive technology, especially medicine.

In the future, I will be so intimately connected to everyone else, the boundaries between me, us and them will blur.

In the future, I will wonder why it took so long to abolish war, hunger, pollution, poverty, disease, overpopulation, superstition, torture, cruelty to other species and slavery, when it was so abundantly clear how undesirable these things were to nearly everyone.

Mother Theresa and The Billionaire

Being Gifted

Going Downhill

The Cause of Alcoholism

Decisions Decisions

Ending Hunger

Ending hunger, protecting the environment and eliminating war are big problems. Logically you should need to shoulder only 1/6,500,000,000th of the problem. However, because so many people are so discouraged, they are doing nothing at all, you will have to shoulder 20/6,500,000,000th of the problem. Do you think you can handle it?

The Stock Market

• The stock market is a 3-card Monte, buffalo jump, zero-sum game.
• Remain calm; buy low; sell high.
• Take advantage of your opponents’ weakness at estimating.
• Tip your advisors.

Not To Worry

Rainforests

Definition of Extinction

Definition of Love

Love is giving someone the power to break your heart, and trusting they will not use it.
Joyce Cousins

Being Alone

Channeling

Being Dumped

The Secret of The Universe

Environmental Tax Subsidy

Heaven

In Heaven, there are more trees than people.

Perceptivity of Genius

Orca FM

Something For Laurie

Re-Publicans

Definition of Cosmic Consciousness

Definition of God

Dolphin’s Eye View

School for Celebrity

Rubbing It In

The Curare Mistake

The Last Day of My Biology Career

That was the last day of my biology career and my first day of animal rights advocacy.

I am telling this story from memory, so don’t take those quotations absolutely literally. The recollections of the other two present may differ.

Capital Punishment For Animals

• Lethal injection
• Helium
• soporific pill

• Electrocution
• Shooting
• scalding
• beheading

Humans Have Trouble With Estimates

Humans overestimate what they can do in the short term and underestimate what they can accomplish in the long run.

Humans accurately estimate the intelligence of fellow humans and underestimate the wisdom of everything else.

The Definition of Truth

The Delphinic Word for Human

The Purpose of Evolution

Inoculation

Geological Point of View

Losing Weight

Why Men Are More Romantic Than Women

Men refuse to abandon tattered old clothes because of all the loving associations they have.

Top Secret

Red Light At 3 AM

Tell The Truth

Animal Propaganda

Definition of The Universe

The universe is everything, including whoever or whatever created it.

Animal Rights

Tips To Authors

1. Imagine in your audience is the being you most respect. Don’t waste time. Get to the point immediately.
2. If it does not make even you laugh or cry out loud, it won’t have any impact on the audience.
3. Reserve very for special occasions.
4. Avoid my. Rephrase avoiding it. To a lesser extent, avoid I; consider i. Then avoid me or any other possessive.
5. You is not interested in I, but may be concerned about me.
6. W E is more important than you.
7. Don’t ask questions.
8. Read your work aloud.
9. Imagine your work will be read by every being on earth.

The Power of A Clear Question

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed it is the only thing that ever has.
~ Margaret Mead (born: 1901-12-16 died: 1978-11-15 at age: 76)

Tips To Dieters

1. Think how much better it will taste if you wait until you are good and hungry.
2. Graph your weight accurate to a tenth of a kilogram. Also graph your 15-day moving average weight to see the big picture. Just watch the graph. Note what you did when it goes up. Note what you did when it goes down. Note what you did when it stays level. Don’t try to make it move. After a few weeks you will have learned weight control. The hard part is over. Now, take your weight down and level off. When you are gaining weight, weigh daily. When you are losing weight, weigh less often.
3. The time to resist temptation is while shopping, not while staring down a key lime pie in your fridge. Don’t shop hungry.
4. Get a juicer that takes a long time to clean, like the Braun MP-80.
5. To learn self control, carry a bag of unopened Frito Lay potato chips with you to give to a homeless person.
6. Don’t be a tyrant. Coast (not gorge) to celebrate after each success.
7. Stare at yourself and notice even tiny improvements.
8. Think about the well-tested eating patterns of your great, great, great, great… ancestors. Move in that direction. When you are hungry, eat. When you are not, don’t. When you are thirsty, drink. Don’t confuse hunger and thirst. When you are tired, rest. When you are sleepy, sleep. If a food makes you feel good, eat it again. If makes you feel bad, don’t.
9. Sleep with fewer blankets and the furnace/air conditioner off.
10. If you eat every last scrap on your plate, there will be less for the starving microbes in your garbage can.
11. Contemplate that everything has to eat something else to stay alive.
12. Ask God to tell you when and what to eat.
13. It is ok to save some for later.
14. Take exercise breaks. Even walking will do.
15. It is important to establish the habit of regularly going to the gym. What you do there, at first, is unimportant.
16. Imagine you are going to be on Oprah soon for some reason that is not quite clear at the moment. You just have to look your best.
17. Candy is not food. Don’t treat it as if it were. Savor it very slowly.
18. Protein powders also taste sweet.
19. Only when all else fails, try the aversion diet. Give a substantial sum of money to a politician/evangelist you detest in the unlikely event you should fail to meet your weight goal.
20. Be gentle with yourself.
21. Eat food you don’t particularly like.
22. Think of food as fuel, not as pleasure.

Saving the World

The Nature of Reality

Bumper Stickers

Taking Credit

A Business Model

The purpose of a company is both:

1. To make money.
2. To render service.

Internet Etiquette

1. Don’t steal time with perfunctory thank-yous.
2. Don’t imply that response is obligatory.

Green Eyed Monsters

1. If my lover is the sexiest person in the world, it is selfish to keep them all to myself.
2. If I want my lover to have maximal fun, I must let them boink a supercutie from time to time.

On Abortion

On The Second Amendment

Psychotic break

Car Names

Location, Location, Location

Consider the possibility that heaven truly is right beside you.

Search and Replace

Costs of War

• It is ironic that in a war to defend freedom of speech, freedom of religion and democracy, those are the first three things to go.
• Fanaticism induces fanaticism in its enemies.
• Posturing leaders forget they are slashing to death hundreds of their countrymen with every, single, word.

• "You are either with us or you are with the terrorists."
  ~ George W. Bush (born: 1946-07-06 age: 65)
  Neutrality is not an option.

Relative Sinning

• to be jealous of a vibrator
• to be envious of a dildo

Electronic Etiquette

1. wantonly wastes time.
2. cares little for your convenience.
3. insists you understand it deeply.

Conan’s Pleasure

Thanks For The Memories

SPAM and Locks

The Best Things In Life

Loans

Housekeeping 101

1. If you don’t use it frequently, it does not belong in your most frequent drawer.
2. Counters, desktops, bookshelves and eye-level cupboards are une espèce de (a species of) most frequent drawer.
3. If it is temporarily most frequent, it is ok to put it in your most frequent drawer, temporarily.
4. File recently-read books at the left end of your most frequent bookshelf. If they won’t fit, remove books from the right end.
5. While you are waiting, do something else.
6. If you see something out of place, and you are going to its proper place anyway, take it with you.
7. Cleaning your home is a gift to your future self.
8. Interior design is where you can have it your way without annoying the neighbours.
9. Leave the work uncompleted.
   P.S. You can’t do otherwise.
10. Tackle the most annoying mess you can first.
11. Decide on a proper place for each item.
12. It’s ok to have a junk drawer, so long as you only keep junk in it.
13. Do a little bit each day.
14. The easiest time to deal with a mess is before and just after you make it.
15. Label the proper places for things.

Defragging

Celebration

• A special occasion is more special if it is not marked on the calendar.
• The more the merrier; the less the looser.
• Celebrate the success of others.

Telephone Etiquette

On Ambiguity

Suicide Prevention

Too Obvious To Mention

Forbidden Fruit

God Bless America

Compassion

Signs of Devilry

• No live Christmas trees permitted in the building.
  (Presumably only cut ones with dried-out needles.)
• We are not responsible for lost articles.
  (I wasn’t accusing you.)
• Buses do not pick up passengers after they have left the stop.
  (How could they?)
• The pull cord on a bus means "Please let me off at the next stop"; the pull cord on the Skytrain means "Emergency! Stop the train, now!"
• Windows copy won’t tell you how many floppies you will need.
• Norton LiveUpdate doesn’t share with other workstations.
• In Granville Square is an art piece that looks like a jungle gym. There is a sign on it that reads "Climbing this structure is forbidden by law".
• We have fully self-cleaning ovens but only partially self-cleaning toilets.

Signs of Angelry

• You are here
• ONE WAY
  (not the only way)
• YIELD
• STOP
• WALK
• SLOW
• CAUTION
• VIEWPOINT AHEAD
• Obey your thirst
• The coin slot on a coke machine is camouflaged.
• Candy bars come wrapped in untearable paper.

Was It Heaven or Hell?

• Each prisoner has his own personal bed, one meter long.
• Each prisoner has his own personal salt or pepper shaker.
• Each prisoner has the key to someone else’s cell.

Consider the possibility that you are already dead.

Magic

Tips For Debaters

1. Your opponent can’t argue with the facts, a question, an unstated premise or a quotation.
2. The goals are to discover truth and to get your opponent to shift his position, not to humiliate your opponent.
3. No ad hominems.
4. Agree with thine adversary quickly.
5. Lay traps for your adversary so that whether he agrees with you or not, he still has to shift his position.
6. The more neutral you appear, the more persuasive you are.

Sins

The only envy is self envy.

Gluttony is taking more than your fair share of anything. Anorexia is refusing to take your fair share. Both gluttony and anorexia deny that you are inextricably part of the universe.

Lust is treating a person as an object, as is revulsion. Sex need not be involved. Both lust and revulsion deny that you are inextricably part of the universe.

Thieves are sleepwalkers who steal from their own pockets.

Sloth is wealth without work.

Screaming the name of a deity whenever you hit your finger is like dialling 911 and hanging up.

Honour your father and mother, even posthumously, with the greatest gift.

Verbs

God’s Problem

Religious Report Card

Most religions err in thinking only humans have souls.

Definitions of Interest Loans

1. Usury.
2. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
3. Stealing from your future self.

Definition of Sacrifice

1. Gandhian: Doing an onerous task, such as studying, that will reap long term rewards.
2. Judeo-Christian: Wringing a dove’s neck and wasting the meat in the vain hope it will make you feel better.

What Women Want

1. In some languages there are no separate words for dance and fuck.
2. What turns women on most looks very boring to a guy. Trust her when she tells you what it is.
3. Expensive chocolate, extra thickness.
4. Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.
5. A massage

Learning Carpentry

The master carpenter grips your hands to show you how to control the saw. Don’t worry; this won’t always be necessary.

The Good Intentions of Bullies

Worship

The problem with all the world’s great religions is that they were, despite appearances, largely designed by men for men. No other species had much input.

The Plants’ Complaints

1. Please, be careful with any form of bridge, e.g. aircraft. Species were not meant to fly that fast.
2. For millennia the insects have designed us. Your designs, in comparison, are, er, one-dimensional.

The Dolphins’ Complaints

• Eaten is all the food on land; now take ours and waste it!
• Please, gifts of cologne, no longer!

Love Thy Enemies

• keep people debating the existence of God.
• are the wrecking crew and renovation team for obsoleted religions.
• love the Truth more than their comfort.
• will work for good without threats, bribes or pay.

Hints To Suitors

The Truth Hurts

Gautama Buddha was called honey tongued because he had the skill to tell people unpleasant truths without insulting them.

Fighting Objectives

hitting: pain.

screaming: damage hearing.

shouting: change mind.

killing: stop all actions.

vaporizing: annihilating the soul.

Definitions of Planet Earth

1. a spherical park floating in space
2. Mandelbrot’s blue green period
3. fur feather fin phloem forming field

Weaponry

• The penis is mightier than the sword.
• Be too interesting to dismiss.
• Fight creatively.
• Tell the absolute truth.

Complementarity

Measuring Consciousness

Blinded By Science

Definition of Money

On Pontificating

Tips To the Paranoid

• If someone is spying on you, do something to really freak them out.
• Get off your high horse! The CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) has too many bigger threats to be bothered fighting with you.
• All great programmers are paranoid.
• Every moment, you are on stage, with God, in the audience.

Future Baldness

It is somewhat disconcerting that the concept to represent the future universally used in advertising is a bald mechanised soldier on steroids.

Rubbermaid Disk Pans

It can’t be literally true, but is seems the thing I do most, other than sit at my computer, is wash dishes. I wash them in a Rubbermaid™ tub (aka dishpan) that fits in the kitchen sink. Unfortunately, the bottom of the tub fits flush against the bottom of the sink keeping the sink from draining. I got the brilliant idea of buying four square rubbery feet each about 1 cm (0.39 in) tall and about 2 cm (0.79 in) across and gluing them with epoxy to the four corners of the underside of the tub. This raised the tub off the bottom of the sink and allowed the sink to drain even with the tub in place. It worked splendidly.

I then emailed Rubbermaid™ suggesting they build feet into the tubs they sell, either by gluing on feet as I did, or by moulding feet as part of the tub itself. I also suggested they offer a wider range of colours, particularly ones that did not show stains as much. They wrote back saying they did not understand what I was talking about. I despaired for the future of humanity.

Links

• quotations: concentrated wisdom. Wisdom 101 : the Cliff Notes
• Things I wish I had learned when I was younger
• Raincoast Proverbs
• Enlightenment
• Living Love Proverbs

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