An Addict's Story
Don't let this happen to you!!!
It started out innocently enough. I began to think at parties now and then - to loosen up. Inevitably, though, one thought led to another, and soon I was more than just a social thinker.
I began to think alone -- "to relax," I told myself -- but I knew it wasn't true. Thinking became more and more important to me, and finally I was thinking all the time.
That was when things began to sour at home. One evening I had turned off the TV and asked my wife about the meaning of life. She spent that night at her mother's.
I began to think on the job. I knew that thinking and employment don't mix, but I couldn't stop myself.
I began to avoid friends at lunchtime so I could read Thoreau and Kafka. I would return to the office dizzied and confused, asking, "What is it exactly we are doing here?"
One day the boss called me in. He said, "Listen, I like you, and it hurts me to say this, but your thinking has become a real problem. If you don't stop thinking on the job, you'll have to find another job." This gave me a lot to think about.
I came home early after my conversation with the boss. "Honey," I confessed, "I've been thinking..."
"I know you've been thinking," she said, "and I want a divorce!"
"But Honey, surely it's not that serious."
"It is serious," she said, lower lip aquiver. "You think as much as college professors, and college professors don't make any money, so if you keep on thinking, we won't have any money!"
"That's a faulty syllogism," I said impatiently. She exploded in tears of rage and frustration, but I was in no mood to deal with the emotional drama.
"I'm going to the library," I snarled as I stomped out the door. I headed for the library, in the mood for some Nietzsche. I roared into the parking lot with NPR on the radio and ran up to the big glass doors ... They didn't open. The library was closed.
To this day, I believe that a Higher Power was looking out for me that night. Leaning on the unfeeling glass, whimpering for Zarathustra, a poster caught my eye, "Friend, is heavy thinking ruining your life?" it asked. You probably recognize that line. It comes from the standard Thinker's Anonymous poster.
Which is why I am what I am today: a recovering thinker.
I never miss a TA meeting. At each meeting we watch a non-educational video; last week it was "Porky's." Then we share experiences about how we avoided thinking since the last meeting.
I still have my job, and things are a lot better at home. Life just seemed... easier, somehow, as soon as I stopped thinking. I think the road to recovery is nearly complete for me.
*.*
Never hit a man when he's down . . .
Kick him, it's easier.
*.*
What interesting property do these words have in common:
body
day
how
one
place
thing
time
what
where?
Each forms a new word when appended to the word "some."
*.*
"Say," said the smooth operator in a confidential tone to the host of the party, "there's a lot of hot babes at this party. If I find one that's ready to grab a quick one, would you mind if I used your extra bedroom?"
"What about your wife?"
"Oh, I won't be gone that long. She'll never miss me."
"No, I'm sure she won't miss you, she borrowed the extra bedroom."
*.*
Definitions and cool meanings
Cigarette: A pinch of tobacco rolled in paper with fire at one end and a fool at the other.
Conference: The confusion of one man multiplied by the number present.
Conference Room: A place where everybody talks, nobody listens & everybody disagrees on later.
Compromise: The art of dividing a cake in such a way that each person believes he got the biggest piece.
Office: A place where you can relax after your strenuous home life.
Yawn: The only time some married men ever get to open their mouths.
Etc.: A sign to make others believe that you know more than you actually do.
Philosopher: A fool who torments himself during life, to be spoken of when dead.
Opportunist: A person who starts taking a bath if he accidentally falls into a river.
Optimist: A person who, while falling from the Eiffel Tower, says midway, "See? I am not injured yet."
Pessimist: A person who says that O is the last letter in ZERO, instead of the first letter in OPPORTUNITY.
Boss: Someone who is early when you are late and late when you are early.
Politician: One who shakes your hand before elections and your confidence afterwards.
Issue of the Times;
Philip K. Dick On Fine-Tuning Your B.S.-Meter To Spot "Pseudo-Realities" by Charlie Jane Anders
How can you tell what's real, in a world where huge industries, governments and religions are all trying to force-feed you manufactured realities? Philip K. Dick sums up the challenges of detecting reality in a world that resembles Disneyland, in this great 1978 quote:
It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories which asked the question "What is reality?", to someday get an answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, too. Years passed. I wrote over thirty novels and over a hundred stories, and still I could not figure out what was real. One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." That's all I could come up with. That was back in 1972. Since then I haven't been able to define reality any more lucidly.
But the problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener. Sometimes when I watch my eleven-year-old daughter watch TV, I wonder what she is being taught. The problem of miscuing; consider that. A TV program produced for adults is viewed by a small child. Half of what is said and done in the TV drama is probably misunderstood by the child. Maybe it's all misunderstood. And the thing is, Just how authentic is the information anyhow, even if the child correctly understood it? What is the relationship between the average TV situation comedy to reality? What about the cop shows? Cars are continually swerving out of control, crashing, and catching fire. The police are always good and they always win. Do not ignore that point: The police always win. What a lesson that is. You should not fight authority, and even if you do, you will lose. The message here is, Be passive. And—cooperate. If Officer Baretta asks you for information, give it to him, because Officer Beratta is a good man and to be trusted. He loves you, and you should love him.
So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.
Of course, I would say this, because I live near Disneyland, and they are always adding new rides and destroying old ones. Disneyland is an evolving organism. For years they had the Lincoln Simulacrum, like Lincoln himself, was only a temporary form which matter and energy take and then lose. The same is true of each of us, like it or not.
Quote of the Times;
“It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.” – Voltaire
Link of the Times;
http://elitedaily.com/
Pseudo?
Defining?
A new survey found that 27 percent of airline passengers don't like making small talk with the person sitting next to them.
Or so the guy in the seat next to me brought up three times...
*.*
After welcoming his replacement and showing the usual courtesies that protocol decreed, the retiring colonel said, "You must meet my Adjutant, Captain Smithers. He's my right-hand man; he's really the strength of this office. His talent is simply boundless."
Smithers was summoned and introduced to the new CO, who was surprised to meet a humpbacked, one eyed, toothless, hairless, scabbed and pockmarked specimen of humanity, a particularly unattractive man less than three feet tall. "Smithers, old man, tell your new CO about yourself."
"Well, sir, I graduated with honors from Sandhurst, joined the regiment and won the Military Cross and Bar after three expeditions behind enemy lines. I've represented Great Britain in equestrian events, and won a Silver Medal in the middleweight division of the Olympics. I have researched the history of....."
Here the colonel interrupted, "Yes, yes, never mind those Smithers, he can find all that in your file. Tell him about the day you told the witch doctor to fuck off."
*.*
This Friday was "Take your Dog to Work Day.”
This of course, makes Monday "Apologize to the boss for what your dog did in his office on Friday" Day.
*.*
Doug goes to a doctor and says:
"Doctor, my wife recently has lost her voice. What should I do to help her get it back?"
The doctor replies, "Try coming home at 3 in the morning!"
*.*
Starbucks has announced that they're raising prices on some of their drinks.
I haven't been this shocked since the last time.
I guess they just wanted to get back into the habit.
Issue of the Times;
Defining Civilization: Women and Children First by John C. Wright
A civilization whose citizens have lost the ability to admire its virtues, beauties, benefits and strengths is one whose citizens are losing the ability to defend that civilization. Before we pull stone from stone to dismantle the wall that separates civilized life from the chaotic bloodshed, cruelty, and misery of barbarism outside, it behooves us to examine the wall, and ask three questions of it: What is Civilization? How is it maintained? What can undo it?
To define civilization is like defining an elephant: the thing is too big to take it at a glance. Nonetheless, by imagining its absence (for example by watching a Mad Max movie) we can see what it provides.
In the absence of civilization, there is no law hence no property, ergo no man has any reason to check any craving for the land currently occupied by another, any fruitful plot or pleasant hunting ground, if he has strength enough to dispossess him. Personal chattel or cattle are even less secure, because a trespasser can carry them away without the effort of assaulting or, once in possession, holding the envied real estate.
Where there is no law hence no rights, any stranger has just as good a claim to lands and chattel as the first possessor, if his strength is the same; and if the stranger be weaker, it is prudent to destroy him ere he grow stronger. The inhuman calculus of prudence says that it improves one’s safety to have a reputation for strength and brutality, so that potential threats might seek elsewhere for prey, and so that indecisive neighbors become allies or clients.
Hence in this state of nature without manmade laws, your equals will invade to despoil you because they covet; the weaker because they fear you; the stronger because they do not fear you, for glory, or the mere pleasure of bloodshed.
In such a state, labor is vain, because whatever is built or made may be taken; cultivating the earth is vain, because an invader may harvest what you sow, and drink the wine of your grapes; there is no trade nor travel by sea, because there is nothing to transport; no machines for moving or removing great weights; no works of canals, bridges, walls, fortress, dams; no draining of swamps, nor clearing of forest; no knowledge of distant places; no reckoning of times and season; no lasting nor reliable record of years past, hence no accumulation of lore and learning between generations; no medicine, no letters, no arts; and, above all, men live wretched and impoverished lives, and brief.
Now, with all due respect to Thomas Hobbes, this description of perfect desolation in nature is inaccurate. The one thing missing from this picture is that real barbarians, past and present, enjoy the company, comradeship and protection of their family, clan and tribe. Real barbarians do not fear and mistrust every man as potential robbers and murderers, but only strangers outside their kin. For their mutual protection, the families have strong reason for brothers to gather with their fathers, uncles, nephews, and cousins in forming hunting parties and war bands, and, in tribes who live without letters or written law, oral lore, chants and epics, long-held customs, and the wisdom of grandfathers suffices to give the tribe the unity needed to survive against other tribes.
Such lore will stave off the perfect desolation of nature, as brother will respect the chattel and cattle, wives and wigwam of his brother, and in return will share as need and seniority dictates. And over time simple crafts and skills, rites and decorative arts will be learned and passed down.
There is no assurance, no invisible law of evolution, which says that tribal lore and custom must always accumulate and never lose these gradual, hard-won gains. There are peoples in Australia whom anthropologists believe once had knowledge of the bone needle, the art of sewing, the napping of flint and the making of spearheads, and lost them all.
Once a tribe learns the art of husbandry, and learns that in order to enjoy the fruit of their tillage, houses of stone, or, better yet, a wall to enclose a stronghold, can be erected, and smithies to smelt the gleaming bronze of sword and spear, wealth unimaginable heretofore pours into their coffers: sheep and oxen, donkeys and hunting dogs, gleaming arrowheads, slaves and wives, and all fashion of pottery and fabric. With this wealth, there is leisure, and specialization of labor. Where before all men in the tribe were at once warriors and hunters and herdsmen, slavers and tillermen, now emerges the figures we see already established when history first puts stylus to clay: the king and his fighting men, the priesthood, the merchant counting his coins, the peasant tilling the soil, the slave toiling in fields or mines or canals.
The priest can count the days and seasons, and watch the stars, and calculate the acreage of fields, and measure where boundary stones lie. Writing is theirs: not without reason that the word clerk means both man of the cloth and man of the pen.
The easy sharing of goods with brothers in need seen in tribal life is less because there is less need of it. The laws can be written, and, whenever the day comes when the priest tells the king that the king is also bound by the laws he enforces, then civilization exists.
This check on the lawlessness of the king is the last stone set in place to erect the wall of civilization; and since he is the force of law in the land, it must be a spiritual idea, a cult or faith or article of philosophy, and invisible and impalpable idea, which makes the king mortar that stone in place.
So to remove that last stone, first one must erode the mortar of the idea. This requires a treason of your clerks. Your priests have to undermine and undercut the legitimacy of the idea of civilization in the mind of your king to make that stone wobble and fall. This can best be done by having the priests outlaw from the public agora whatever gods support the city and uphold civilization, and instead introduce gods of irrationality, barbarism, and chaos. Such priests eliminate their own priesthood first of all.
If you don’t have priests, the treason can issue from whoever or whatever it is to whom you entrusted your common intellectual and spiritual heritage, such as your academics, media, singers of songs and tellers of tales, the press and philosophers.
The treason of the philosophers begins when they teach philosophy is pointless, truth is relative, and all words are meaningless.
The treason of the press is complete once journalism is dead, and instead of a fair, truthful or balanced version of world and local events, you hear nothing but lies, lies, lies and shameless and damnable lies. The press makes real the vision of the philosophers of a world without truth.
Likewise when the treason of the singers is complete, exchanging love songs for song about bitches and whores and shooting cops, for then all songs are ugly.
When the storytellers all tell tales wherein your civilization is always depicted as wicked, worthless, hypocritical, vile, they the imagination of the people is filled with a gray and murky disgust for the wall of civilization.
All that the lying academic need say at this point is that something better and brighter than civilization is on the other side of the wall, for example, the People’s Republic of Utopia, and that therefore the allegedly protective wall is instead prison wall.
If enough people and if the King believe it, then the first stone to go is the last one put in place. Everyone is told that the King must be granted a plethora of unlawful powers in the name of breaking down the wall blocking the way to Utopia. Once this first stone trembles, once it falls, civilization begins to crumble at an ever increasing rate.
Do not be deceived: a tyranny like that seen in Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s China is as barbaric and wretched as Hobbes’ state of nature, despite that the state is totalitarian. A king with no check on his power is an anarchist, and he savages the people under his alleged protection no less than the dangerous strangers marauding through the bloody landscape of the Hobbes.
Hobbes and many enlightenment writers had the insight that civilization was a social contract. They did not literally mean that every soul before birth signed a bit of paper on which the mutually agreed terms defining civilization were written in black ink. The writers meant that there was an organic and mutual reciprocity between subject and sovereign. Hobbes thought that the king could violate this reciprocity with immunity; Locke and other writers, including those inspiring our Founding Fathers, held that a sufficiently damaging and permanent violation freed the other party to the deal, the people, from any continued obligation of fealty or allegiance.
So, the first thing that can start the dissolution of civilization, and place our foot on the long, blood-soaked, sad path toward that aboriginal tribe that has forgotten how to make needles or sew, is the treason of the clerks.
One the king is convinced (or in these more degenerate and democratic times, the parliaments and congresscreatures who have kingly duties but no sense of a higher power to whom they are obligated) that he has authority to overrule the laws of civilization, perhaps to make the pathway clear to the alleged utopia that the priests said surely will arise once anarchy is unleashed, then the legitimacy of his state is gone, and he is merely a raving beast like a mad man-eating lion.
The first thing the lion eats is the sense of honor that keeps his fighting men in check. His fighting men includes what in the modern day is both the military and the police. The police are made more and more militaristic; they are cast as the enemy of the people; and the military is degenerated from its ancient precepts of honor and courage, and instead becomes sensitive and friendly to womenfolk or sodomites.
Now, to be clear, in a modern bureaucratic state, anyone who has the power to enforce the law and harass the people is, for all practical purposes, a policeman, a soldier, a fighting man of the king. We would call these bureaucrats, everyone from the tax man to the clerk on a planning and zoning board enforcing an irrational eco-nutbag regulation.
The sense of honor needed to keep soldiers and civil servants in check evaporates as the lawlessness of the anarchic King spreads down the wall to the next row, and the soldiers, police, and civil servants become young lions, red in tooth and claw.
Once the fighting men are corrupted, next oldest support of civilization vanishes: the burghers, the townsmen, the bourgeoisie, the merchants, the shopkeeper and tradesman, and middle class. Their corruption is far easier and far quicker, because trade and possession depends on a faith in objective law and evenhanded enforcement of contracts, not to mention the soundness of coin or currency. The middle class can be taxed out of existence, as they were in ancient Rome, which collapsed the Western Empire in one generation, and kept the Eastern Empire in a state of servitude and poverty for the remainder of its millennium.
The merchants who turn to the King to make a sweetheart deal create crony capitalism, which is also, more correctly, called fascism. The industries, such as are left, become organs of the state and are protected by increasingly one-sided and nakedly unfair taxations and regulations.
The important point to note is that the treason of the merchants undermines the unspoken social contract which allows trade and manufacture, or even guilds and small shops, to exist: that is, namely, the unspoken social contract provides that spoken contracts shall be upheld, and trade be fair and free. This idea is laughed into nonexistence, and the merchants are no longer merchants, but become jackals slinking and slouching in the shadows of the lions consuming the people, greedy for scraps.
But no civilization of this is possible without the brotherhood of family and clan. And that is not possible without marriage and an institution of paternity.
So the final course of stones to go is the social contract, the bargain, between fathers and mothers, between male and female. The deal is that, in return for the bearing the burden of bearing children, the womanfolk will be protected and cherished. When the barbarians attack, the women and children go first to the stronghold, and the men man the walls; the iceberg strikes, the women and children go into the lifeboats, and the men go to death in the icy water. In return, the women preserve and reproduce the race.
In barbaric ages and nations, this was done by polygamy, where the women were chattel, and in Christian civilization, by monogamy, where the women could not be divorced nor put aside except for fornication.
To prevent the menfolk from killing each other, or slaying the bastards fathered by other men on their wives, the women uphold modesty and chastity. Modesty deters unwanted extramarital or premarital sex; the chastity confirms the paternity of offspring, and expels a cold marriage of convenience in favor of a warm and romantic Christian marriage.
The first crack in this base course of the wall of civilization was the legalization of no-fault divorce, which was widened by contraception, and then a free-love sexual free-for-all which has, for all practical purposes abolished marriage among our urban poor.
The crack was widened again by feministic hypocrisy and insanity, which somehow demands all the burden of paternity be bourn by the father, even though he can be divorced at any time, and cast away; but that men take care not to offend women, no, not by so small a trifle as wearing a loud shirt or using the wrong pronoun; whereas women can do as they please, and whore around.
Such harlots seek to become the chattel of the strongest young lion or the richest sniveling jackal, and the idea of a modest matron raising children becomes as laughable to the corrupt harlot’s mind as an honorable soldier or an honest merchant.
Obviously no one believes that women can both be equal to men in facing all danger, and yet at the same time must be protected by trigger warnings lest they faint away. No one believes it, feminists least of all. This rampant hypocrisy has been clear ever since the days they rallied around Clinton, the Adulterer-in-Chief, and with their silence damned to hell all the women mutilated, enslaved, humiliated, falsely accused, and slain by Shariah Law.
In the same way the priests betray and eliminate the idea of the sacred, and the kings betray and eliminate the idea of legitimate authority, and fighting men and public servants betray and eliminate the idea of honor and duty and faithful executions of the laws, and the merchants destroy the idea of a fair deal, the feminists destroy the mystical concept of womanhood.
The feminists hatred for the feminine is accomplished, and their treason is complete, when motherhood is as purely despised as maidenhood, and women are once again possessions of the strongest.
It is noteworthy that, in the current day, all the courses of the stone wall, from lowest to highest, are cracking, creaking, and tumbling, and the loudest traitors cry that the stones are oppression, blocking and hindering us from skipping down the road of yellow bricks; they scream that the Emerald City of Oz is just outside the gate, which we must throw open to welcome the Wonderful Wizard who will grant all our contradictory and childish wishes.
And the bloodthirsty lions and jackals awaiting without are never mentioned.
Whether the traitors are blind but sincere, or merely suicidal and malign, makes no difference to the end result.
Quote of the Times;
“Show men endless images of beautiful models and actresses and singers, show them endless images of beautiful, slim, women engaging in sex with enthusiasm, tell them that a world of uncommitted and marriageless sex is the norm — then, for reasons they don’t understand, slam the door in their face. This is not a prescription for long term stability.” - The Possibility of an Island - Houellebecq
Link of the Times;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4GGAtLYppw
Or so the guy in the seat next to me brought up three times...
*.*
After welcoming his replacement and showing the usual courtesies that protocol decreed, the retiring colonel said, "You must meet my Adjutant, Captain Smithers. He's my right-hand man; he's really the strength of this office. His talent is simply boundless."
Smithers was summoned and introduced to the new CO, who was surprised to meet a humpbacked, one eyed, toothless, hairless, scabbed and pockmarked specimen of humanity, a particularly unattractive man less than three feet tall. "Smithers, old man, tell your new CO about yourself."
"Well, sir, I graduated with honors from Sandhurst, joined the regiment and won the Military Cross and Bar after three expeditions behind enemy lines. I've represented Great Britain in equestrian events, and won a Silver Medal in the middleweight division of the Olympics. I have researched the history of....."
Here the colonel interrupted, "Yes, yes, never mind those Smithers, he can find all that in your file. Tell him about the day you told the witch doctor to fuck off."
*.*
This Friday was "Take your Dog to Work Day.”
This of course, makes Monday "Apologize to the boss for what your dog did in his office on Friday" Day.
*.*
Doug goes to a doctor and says:
"Doctor, my wife recently has lost her voice. What should I do to help her get it back?"
The doctor replies, "Try coming home at 3 in the morning!"
*.*
Starbucks has announced that they're raising prices on some of their drinks.
I haven't been this shocked since the last time.
I guess they just wanted to get back into the habit.
Issue of the Times;
Defining Civilization: Women and Children First by John C. Wright
A civilization whose citizens have lost the ability to admire its virtues, beauties, benefits and strengths is one whose citizens are losing the ability to defend that civilization. Before we pull stone from stone to dismantle the wall that separates civilized life from the chaotic bloodshed, cruelty, and misery of barbarism outside, it behooves us to examine the wall, and ask three questions of it: What is Civilization? How is it maintained? What can undo it?
To define civilization is like defining an elephant: the thing is too big to take it at a glance. Nonetheless, by imagining its absence (for example by watching a Mad Max movie) we can see what it provides.
In the absence of civilization, there is no law hence no property, ergo no man has any reason to check any craving for the land currently occupied by another, any fruitful plot or pleasant hunting ground, if he has strength enough to dispossess him. Personal chattel or cattle are even less secure, because a trespasser can carry them away without the effort of assaulting or, once in possession, holding the envied real estate.
Where there is no law hence no rights, any stranger has just as good a claim to lands and chattel as the first possessor, if his strength is the same; and if the stranger be weaker, it is prudent to destroy him ere he grow stronger. The inhuman calculus of prudence says that it improves one’s safety to have a reputation for strength and brutality, so that potential threats might seek elsewhere for prey, and so that indecisive neighbors become allies or clients.
Hence in this state of nature without manmade laws, your equals will invade to despoil you because they covet; the weaker because they fear you; the stronger because they do not fear you, for glory, or the mere pleasure of bloodshed.
In such a state, labor is vain, because whatever is built or made may be taken; cultivating the earth is vain, because an invader may harvest what you sow, and drink the wine of your grapes; there is no trade nor travel by sea, because there is nothing to transport; no machines for moving or removing great weights; no works of canals, bridges, walls, fortress, dams; no draining of swamps, nor clearing of forest; no knowledge of distant places; no reckoning of times and season; no lasting nor reliable record of years past, hence no accumulation of lore and learning between generations; no medicine, no letters, no arts; and, above all, men live wretched and impoverished lives, and brief.
Now, with all due respect to Thomas Hobbes, this description of perfect desolation in nature is inaccurate. The one thing missing from this picture is that real barbarians, past and present, enjoy the company, comradeship and protection of their family, clan and tribe. Real barbarians do not fear and mistrust every man as potential robbers and murderers, but only strangers outside their kin. For their mutual protection, the families have strong reason for brothers to gather with their fathers, uncles, nephews, and cousins in forming hunting parties and war bands, and, in tribes who live without letters or written law, oral lore, chants and epics, long-held customs, and the wisdom of grandfathers suffices to give the tribe the unity needed to survive against other tribes.
Such lore will stave off the perfect desolation of nature, as brother will respect the chattel and cattle, wives and wigwam of his brother, and in return will share as need and seniority dictates. And over time simple crafts and skills, rites and decorative arts will be learned and passed down.
There is no assurance, no invisible law of evolution, which says that tribal lore and custom must always accumulate and never lose these gradual, hard-won gains. There are peoples in Australia whom anthropologists believe once had knowledge of the bone needle, the art of sewing, the napping of flint and the making of spearheads, and lost them all.
Once a tribe learns the art of husbandry, and learns that in order to enjoy the fruit of their tillage, houses of stone, or, better yet, a wall to enclose a stronghold, can be erected, and smithies to smelt the gleaming bronze of sword and spear, wealth unimaginable heretofore pours into their coffers: sheep and oxen, donkeys and hunting dogs, gleaming arrowheads, slaves and wives, and all fashion of pottery and fabric. With this wealth, there is leisure, and specialization of labor. Where before all men in the tribe were at once warriors and hunters and herdsmen, slavers and tillermen, now emerges the figures we see already established when history first puts stylus to clay: the king and his fighting men, the priesthood, the merchant counting his coins, the peasant tilling the soil, the slave toiling in fields or mines or canals.
The priest can count the days and seasons, and watch the stars, and calculate the acreage of fields, and measure where boundary stones lie. Writing is theirs: not without reason that the word clerk means both man of the cloth and man of the pen.
The easy sharing of goods with brothers in need seen in tribal life is less because there is less need of it. The laws can be written, and, whenever the day comes when the priest tells the king that the king is also bound by the laws he enforces, then civilization exists.
This check on the lawlessness of the king is the last stone set in place to erect the wall of civilization; and since he is the force of law in the land, it must be a spiritual idea, a cult or faith or article of philosophy, and invisible and impalpable idea, which makes the king mortar that stone in place.
So to remove that last stone, first one must erode the mortar of the idea. This requires a treason of your clerks. Your priests have to undermine and undercut the legitimacy of the idea of civilization in the mind of your king to make that stone wobble and fall. This can best be done by having the priests outlaw from the public agora whatever gods support the city and uphold civilization, and instead introduce gods of irrationality, barbarism, and chaos. Such priests eliminate their own priesthood first of all.
If you don’t have priests, the treason can issue from whoever or whatever it is to whom you entrusted your common intellectual and spiritual heritage, such as your academics, media, singers of songs and tellers of tales, the press and philosophers.
The treason of the philosophers begins when they teach philosophy is pointless, truth is relative, and all words are meaningless.
The treason of the press is complete once journalism is dead, and instead of a fair, truthful or balanced version of world and local events, you hear nothing but lies, lies, lies and shameless and damnable lies. The press makes real the vision of the philosophers of a world without truth.
Likewise when the treason of the singers is complete, exchanging love songs for song about bitches and whores and shooting cops, for then all songs are ugly.
When the storytellers all tell tales wherein your civilization is always depicted as wicked, worthless, hypocritical, vile, they the imagination of the people is filled with a gray and murky disgust for the wall of civilization.
All that the lying academic need say at this point is that something better and brighter than civilization is on the other side of the wall, for example, the People’s Republic of Utopia, and that therefore the allegedly protective wall is instead prison wall.
If enough people and if the King believe it, then the first stone to go is the last one put in place. Everyone is told that the King must be granted a plethora of unlawful powers in the name of breaking down the wall blocking the way to Utopia. Once this first stone trembles, once it falls, civilization begins to crumble at an ever increasing rate.
Do not be deceived: a tyranny like that seen in Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s China is as barbaric and wretched as Hobbes’ state of nature, despite that the state is totalitarian. A king with no check on his power is an anarchist, and he savages the people under his alleged protection no less than the dangerous strangers marauding through the bloody landscape of the Hobbes.
Hobbes and many enlightenment writers had the insight that civilization was a social contract. They did not literally mean that every soul before birth signed a bit of paper on which the mutually agreed terms defining civilization were written in black ink. The writers meant that there was an organic and mutual reciprocity between subject and sovereign. Hobbes thought that the king could violate this reciprocity with immunity; Locke and other writers, including those inspiring our Founding Fathers, held that a sufficiently damaging and permanent violation freed the other party to the deal, the people, from any continued obligation of fealty or allegiance.
So, the first thing that can start the dissolution of civilization, and place our foot on the long, blood-soaked, sad path toward that aboriginal tribe that has forgotten how to make needles or sew, is the treason of the clerks.
One the king is convinced (or in these more degenerate and democratic times, the parliaments and congresscreatures who have kingly duties but no sense of a higher power to whom they are obligated) that he has authority to overrule the laws of civilization, perhaps to make the pathway clear to the alleged utopia that the priests said surely will arise once anarchy is unleashed, then the legitimacy of his state is gone, and he is merely a raving beast like a mad man-eating lion.
The first thing the lion eats is the sense of honor that keeps his fighting men in check. His fighting men includes what in the modern day is both the military and the police. The police are made more and more militaristic; they are cast as the enemy of the people; and the military is degenerated from its ancient precepts of honor and courage, and instead becomes sensitive and friendly to womenfolk or sodomites.
Now, to be clear, in a modern bureaucratic state, anyone who has the power to enforce the law and harass the people is, for all practical purposes, a policeman, a soldier, a fighting man of the king. We would call these bureaucrats, everyone from the tax man to the clerk on a planning and zoning board enforcing an irrational eco-nutbag regulation.
The sense of honor needed to keep soldiers and civil servants in check evaporates as the lawlessness of the anarchic King spreads down the wall to the next row, and the soldiers, police, and civil servants become young lions, red in tooth and claw.
Once the fighting men are corrupted, next oldest support of civilization vanishes: the burghers, the townsmen, the bourgeoisie, the merchants, the shopkeeper and tradesman, and middle class. Their corruption is far easier and far quicker, because trade and possession depends on a faith in objective law and evenhanded enforcement of contracts, not to mention the soundness of coin or currency. The middle class can be taxed out of existence, as they were in ancient Rome, which collapsed the Western Empire in one generation, and kept the Eastern Empire in a state of servitude and poverty for the remainder of its millennium.
The merchants who turn to the King to make a sweetheart deal create crony capitalism, which is also, more correctly, called fascism. The industries, such as are left, become organs of the state and are protected by increasingly one-sided and nakedly unfair taxations and regulations.
The important point to note is that the treason of the merchants undermines the unspoken social contract which allows trade and manufacture, or even guilds and small shops, to exist: that is, namely, the unspoken social contract provides that spoken contracts shall be upheld, and trade be fair and free. This idea is laughed into nonexistence, and the merchants are no longer merchants, but become jackals slinking and slouching in the shadows of the lions consuming the people, greedy for scraps.
But no civilization of this is possible without the brotherhood of family and clan. And that is not possible without marriage and an institution of paternity.
So the final course of stones to go is the social contract, the bargain, between fathers and mothers, between male and female. The deal is that, in return for the bearing the burden of bearing children, the womanfolk will be protected and cherished. When the barbarians attack, the women and children go first to the stronghold, and the men man the walls; the iceberg strikes, the women and children go into the lifeboats, and the men go to death in the icy water. In return, the women preserve and reproduce the race.
In barbaric ages and nations, this was done by polygamy, where the women were chattel, and in Christian civilization, by monogamy, where the women could not be divorced nor put aside except for fornication.
To prevent the menfolk from killing each other, or slaying the bastards fathered by other men on their wives, the women uphold modesty and chastity. Modesty deters unwanted extramarital or premarital sex; the chastity confirms the paternity of offspring, and expels a cold marriage of convenience in favor of a warm and romantic Christian marriage.
The first crack in this base course of the wall of civilization was the legalization of no-fault divorce, which was widened by contraception, and then a free-love sexual free-for-all which has, for all practical purposes abolished marriage among our urban poor.
The crack was widened again by feministic hypocrisy and insanity, which somehow demands all the burden of paternity be bourn by the father, even though he can be divorced at any time, and cast away; but that men take care not to offend women, no, not by so small a trifle as wearing a loud shirt or using the wrong pronoun; whereas women can do as they please, and whore around.
Such harlots seek to become the chattel of the strongest young lion or the richest sniveling jackal, and the idea of a modest matron raising children becomes as laughable to the corrupt harlot’s mind as an honorable soldier or an honest merchant.
Obviously no one believes that women can both be equal to men in facing all danger, and yet at the same time must be protected by trigger warnings lest they faint away. No one believes it, feminists least of all. This rampant hypocrisy has been clear ever since the days they rallied around Clinton, the Adulterer-in-Chief, and with their silence damned to hell all the women mutilated, enslaved, humiliated, falsely accused, and slain by Shariah Law.
In the same way the priests betray and eliminate the idea of the sacred, and the kings betray and eliminate the idea of legitimate authority, and fighting men and public servants betray and eliminate the idea of honor and duty and faithful executions of the laws, and the merchants destroy the idea of a fair deal, the feminists destroy the mystical concept of womanhood.
The feminists hatred for the feminine is accomplished, and their treason is complete, when motherhood is as purely despised as maidenhood, and women are once again possessions of the strongest.
It is noteworthy that, in the current day, all the courses of the stone wall, from lowest to highest, are cracking, creaking, and tumbling, and the loudest traitors cry that the stones are oppression, blocking and hindering us from skipping down the road of yellow bricks; they scream that the Emerald City of Oz is just outside the gate, which we must throw open to welcome the Wonderful Wizard who will grant all our contradictory and childish wishes.
And the bloodthirsty lions and jackals awaiting without are never mentioned.
Whether the traitors are blind but sincere, or merely suicidal and malign, makes no difference to the end result.
Quote of the Times;
“Show men endless images of beautiful models and actresses and singers, show them endless images of beautiful, slim, women engaging in sex with enthusiasm, tell them that a world of uncommitted and marriageless sex is the norm — then, for reasons they don’t understand, slam the door in their face. This is not a prescription for long term stability.” - The Possibility of an Island - Houellebecq
Link of the Times;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4GGAtLYppw
Likely?
Q. What's the difference between an aerobics instructor and a dentist?
A. A dentist lets you sit down while he hurts you.
*.*
A customer was continually bothering the waiter in a restaurant; first, he'd asked that the air conditioning be turned up because he was too hot, then he asked it be turned down cause he was too cold, and so on for about half an hour. Surprisingly, the waiter was very patient, he walked back and forth and never once got angry.
So finally, a second customer asked him why he didn't throw out the pest.
"Oh I don't care." said the waiter with a smile. "We don't even have an air conditioner."
*.*
Katy Perry has offered to write a theme song for Hillary Clinton if she runs for President in 2016.
The tough part: finding a word that rhymes with Benghazi.
*.*
The Army Airborne major was used to harassment from Air Force fliers about crazy Army paratroopers jumping out of perfectly good aircraft. "Obviously the Air Force knows there's no such thing as a 'perfectly good aircraft,'" the irritated officer finally countered one afternoon, "because they pay you bastards four times as much to stay in one as the Army pays its men to jump."
"You've got it all wrong, Major," an Air Force sergeant replied. "The Army figures anyone stupid enough to jump out of an airplane voluntarily is gonna be too dumb to bitch about the salary."
*.*
Many say illegal immigration is a major issue in Texas.
Well, at least, Doctors Without Borders can stay home this year.
Issue of the Times;
The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think
o
It is now one hundred years since drugs were first banned -- and all through this long century of waging war on drugs, we have been told a story about addiction by our teachers and by our governments. This story is so deeply ingrained in our minds that we take it for granted. It seems obvious. It seems manifestly true. Until I set off three and a half years ago on a 30,000-mile journey for my new book, Chasing The Scream: The First And Last Days of the War on Drugs, to figure out what is really driving the drug war, I believed it too. But what I learned on the road is that almost everything we have been told about addiction is wrong -- and there is a very different story waiting for us, if only we are ready to hear it. If we truly absorb this new story, we will have to change a lot more than the drug war. We will have to change ourselves.
I learned it from an extraordinary mixture of people I met on my travels. From the surviving friends of Billie Holiday, who helped me to learn how the founder of the war on drugs stalked and helped to kill her. From a Jewish doctor who was smuggled out of the Budapest ghetto as a baby, only to unlock the secrets of addiction as a grown man. From a transsexual crack dealer in Brooklyn who was conceived when his mother, a crack-addict, was raped by his father, an NYPD officer. From a man who was kept at the bottom of a well for two years by a torturing dictatorship, only to emerge to be elected President of Uruguay and to begin the last days of the war on drugs.
I had a quite personal reason to set out for these answers. One of my earliest memories as a kid is trying to wake up one of my relatives, and not being able to. Ever since then, I have been turning over the essential mystery of addiction in my mind -- what causes some people to become fixated on a drug or a behavior until they can't stop? How do we help those people to come back to us? As I got older, another of my close relatives developed a cocaine addiction, and I fell into a relationship with a heroin addict. I guess addiction felt like home to me.
If you had asked me what causes drug addiction at the start, I would have looked at you as if you were an idiot, and said: "Drugs. Duh." It's not difficult to grasp. I thought I had seen it in my own life. We can all explain it. Imagine if you and I and the next twenty people to pass us on the street take a really potent drug for twenty days. There are strong chemical hooks in these drugs, so if we stopped on day twenty-one, our bodies would need the chemical. We would have a ferocious craving. We would be addicted. That's what addiction means.
One of the ways this theory was first established is through rat experiments -- ones that were injected into the American psyche in the 1980s, in a famous advert by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. You may remember it. The experiment is simple. Put a rat in a cage, alone, with two water bottles. One is just water. The other is water laced with heroin or cocaine. Almost every time you run this experiment, the rat will become obsessed with the drugged water, and keep coming back for more and more, until it kills itself.
The advert explains: "Only one drug is so addictive, nine out of ten laboratory rats will use it. And use it. And use it. Until dead. It's called cocaine. And it can do the same thing to you."
But in the 1970s, a professor of Psychology in Vancouver called Bruce Alexander noticed something odd about this experiment. The rat is put in the cage all alone. It has nothing to do but take the drugs. What would happen, he wondered, if we tried this differently? So Professor Alexander built Rat Park. It is a lush cage where the rats would have colored balls and the best rat-food and tunnels to scamper down and plenty of friends: everything a rat about town could want. What, Alexander wanted to know, will happen then? In Rat Park, all the rats obviously tried both water bottles, because they didn't know what was in them. But what happened next was startling.
The rats with good lives didn't like the drugged water. They mostly shunned it, consuming less than a quarter of the drugs the isolated rats used. None of them died. While all the rats who were alone and unhappy became heavy users, none of the rats who had a happy environment did.
At first, I thought this was merely a quirk of rats, until I discovered that there was -- at the same time as the Rat Park experiment -- a helpful human equivalent taking place. It was called the Vietnam War. Time magazine reported using heroin was "as common as chewing gum" among U.S. soldiers, and there is solid evidence to back this up: some 20 percent of U.S. soldiers had become addicted to heroin there, according to a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Many people were understandably terrified; they believed a huge number of addicts were about to head home when the war ended.
But in fact some 95 percent of the addicted soldiers -- according to the same study -- simply stopped. Very few had rehab. They shifted from a terrifying cage back to a pleasant one, so didn't want the drug any more.
Professor Alexander argues this discovery is a profound challenge both to the right-wing view that addiction is a moral failing caused by too much hedonistic partying, and the liberal view that addiction is a disease taking place in a chemically hijacked brain. In fact, he argues, addiction is an adaptation. It's not you. It's your cage.
After the first phase of Rat Park, Professor Alexander then took this test further. He reran the early experiments, where the rats were left alone, and became compulsive users of the drug. He let them use for fifty-seven days -- if anything can hook you, it's that. Then he took them out of isolation, and placed them in Rat Park. He wanted to know, if you fall into that state of addiction, is your brain hijacked, so you can't recover? Do the drugs take you over? What happened is -- again -- striking. The rats seemed to have a few twitches of withdrawal, but they soon stopped their heavy use, and went back to having a normal life. The good cage saved them. (The full references to all the studies I am discussing are in the book.)
When I first learned about this, I was puzzled. How can this be? This new theory is such a radical assault on what we have been told that it felt like it could not be true. But the more scientists I interviewed, and the more I looked at their studies, the more I discovered things that don't seem to make sense -- unless you take account of this new approach.
Here's one example of an experiment that is happening all around you, and may well happen to you one day. If you get run over today and you break your hip, you will probably be given diamorphine, the medical name for heroin. In the hospital around you, there will be plenty of people also given heroin for long periods, for pain relief. The heroin you will get from the doctor will have a much higher purity and potency than the heroin being used by street-addicts, who have to buy from criminals who adulterate it. So if the old theory of addiction is right -- it's the drugs that cause it; they make your body need them -- then it's obvious what should happen. Loads of people should leave the hospital and try to score smack on the streets to meet their habit.
But here's the strange thing: It virtually never happens. As the Canadian doctor Gabor Mate was the first to explain to me, medical users just stop, despite months of use. The same drug, used for the same length of time, turns street-users into desperate addicts and leaves medical patients unaffected.
If you still believe -- as I used to -- that addiction is caused by chemical hooks, this makes no sense. But if you believe Bruce Alexander's theory, the picture falls into place. The street-addict is like the rats in the first cage, isolated, alone, with only one source of solace to turn to. The medical patient is like the rats in the second cage. She is going home to a life where she is surrounded by the people she loves. The drug is the same, but the environment is different.
This gives us an insight that goes much deeper than the need to understand addicts. Professor Peter Cohen argues that human beings have a deep need to bond and form connections. It's how we get our satisfaction. If we can't connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can find -- the whirr of a roulette wheel or the prick of a syringe. He says we should stop talking about 'addiction' altogether, and instead call it 'bonding.' A heroin addict has bonded with heroin because she couldn't bond as fully with anything else.
So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection.
When I learned all this, I found it slowly persuading me, but I still couldn't shake off a nagging doubt. Are these scientists saying chemical hooks make no difference? It was explained to me -- you can become addicted to gambling, and nobody thinks you inject a pack of cards into your veins. You can have all the addiction, and none of the chemical hooks. I went to a Gamblers' Anonymous meeting in Las Vegas (with the permission of everyone present, who knew I was there to observe) and they were as plainly addicted as the cocaine and heroin addicts I have known in my life. Yet there are no chemical hooks on a craps table.
But still, surely, I asked, there is some role for the chemicals? It turns out there is an experiment which gives us the answer to this in quite precise terms, which I learned about in Richard DeGrandpre's book The Cult of Pharmacology.
Everyone agrees cigarette smoking is one of the most addictive processes around. The chemical hooks in tobacco come from a drug inside it called nicotine. So when nicotine patches were developed in the early 1990s, there was a huge surge of optimism -- cigarette smokers could get all of their chemical hooks, without the other filthy (and deadly) effects of cigarette smoking. They would be freed.
But the Office of the Surgeon General has found that just 17.7 percent of cigarette smokers are able to stop using nicotine patches. That's not nothing. If the chemicals drive 17.7 percent of addiction, as this shows, that's still millions of lives ruined globally. But what it reveals again is that the story we have been taught about The Cause of Addiction lying with chemical hooks is, in fact, real, but only a minor part of a much bigger picture.
This has huge implications for the one-hundred-year-old war on drugs. This massive war -- which, as I saw, kills people from the malls of Mexico to the streets of Liverpool -- is based on the claim that we need to physically eradicate a whole array of chemicals because they hijack people's brains and cause addiction. But if drugs aren't the driver of addiction -- if, in fact, it is disconnection that drives addiction -- then this makes no sense.
Ironically, the war on drugs actually increases all those larger drivers of addiction. For example, I went to a prison in Arizona -- 'Tent City' -- where inmates are detained in tiny stone isolation cages ('The Hole') for weeks and weeks on end to punish them for drug use. It is as close to a human recreation of the cages that guaranteed deadly addiction in rats as I can imagine. And when those prisoners get out, they will be unemployable because of their criminal record -- guaranteeing they with be cut off even more. I watched this playing out in the human stories I met across the world.
There is an alternative. You can build a system that is designed to help drug addicts to reconnect with the world -- and so leave behind their addictions.
This isn't theoretical. It is happening. I have seen it. Nearly fifteen years ago, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe, with 1 percent of the population addicted to heroin. They had tried a drug war, and the problem just kept getting worse. So they decided to do something radically different. They resolved to decriminalize all drugs, and transfer all the money they used to spend on arresting and jailing drug addicts, and spend it instead on reconnecting them -- to their own feelings, and to the wider society. The most crucial step is to get them secure housing, and subsidized jobs so they have a purpose in life, and something to get out of bed for. I watched as they are helped, in warm and welcoming clinics, to learn how to reconnect with their feelings, after years of trauma and stunning them into silence with drugs.
One example I learned about was a group of addicts who were given a loan to set up a removals firm. Suddenly, they were a group, all bonded to each other, and to the society, and responsible for each other's care.
The results of all this are now in. An independent study by the British Journal of Criminology found that since total decriminalization, addiction has fallen, and injecting drug use is down by 50 percent. I'll repeat that: injecting drug use is down by 50 percent.
Decriminalization has been such a manifest success that very few people in Portugal want to go back to the old system. The main campaigner against the decriminalization back in 2000 was Joao Figueira, the country's top drug cop. He offered all the dire warnings that we would expect from the Daily Mail or Fox News. But when we sat together in Lisbon, he told me that everything he predicted had not come to pass -- and he now hopes the whole world will follow Portugal's example.
This isn't only relevant to the addicts I love. It is relevant to all of us, because it forces us to think differently about ourselves. Human beings are bonding animals. We need to connect and love. The wisest sentence of the twentieth century was E.M. Forster's -- "only connect." But we have created an environment and a culture that cut us off from connection, or offer only the parody of it offered by the Internet. The rise of addiction is a symptom of a deeper sickness in the way we live -- constantly directing our gaze towards the next shiny object we should buy, rather than the human beings all around us.
The writer George Monbiot has called this "the age of loneliness." We have created human societies where it is easier for people to become cut off from all human connections than ever before. Bruce Alexander -- the creator of Rat Park -- told me that for too long, we have talked exclusively about individual recovery from addiction. We need now to talk about social recovery -- how we all recover, together, from the sickness of isolation that is sinking on us like a thick fog. But this new evidence isn't just a challenge to us politically. It doesn't just force us to change our minds. It forces us to change our hearts.
Loving an addict is really hard. When I looked at the addicts I love, it was always tempting to follow the tough love advice doled out by reality shows like Intervention -- tell the addict to shape up, or cut them off. Their message is that an addict who won't stop should be shunned. It's the logic of the drug war, imported into our private lives. But in fact, I learned, that will only deepen their addiction -- and you may lose them altogether. I came home determined to tie the addicts in my life closer to me than ever -- to let them know I love them unconditionally, whether they stop, or whether they can't.
When I returned from my long journey, I looked at my ex-boyfriend, in withdrawal, trembling on my spare bed, and I thought about him differently. For a century now, we have been singing war songs about addicts. It occurred to me as I wiped his brow, we should have been singing love songs to them all along.
The full story of Johann Hari's journey -- told through the stories of the people he met -- can be read in Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, published by Bloomsbury. The book has been praised by everyone from Elton John to Glenn Greenwald to Naomi Klein. You can buy it at all good bookstores and read more at www.chasingthescream.com.
Quote of the Times;
Walk with those seeking Truth. Run from those who think they've found it. - Chopra
Link of the Times;
http://www.jtl.org/auster/PNS.pdf
A. A dentist lets you sit down while he hurts you.
*.*
A customer was continually bothering the waiter in a restaurant; first, he'd asked that the air conditioning be turned up because he was too hot, then he asked it be turned down cause he was too cold, and so on for about half an hour. Surprisingly, the waiter was very patient, he walked back and forth and never once got angry.
So finally, a second customer asked him why he didn't throw out the pest.
"Oh I don't care." said the waiter with a smile. "We don't even have an air conditioner."
*.*
Katy Perry has offered to write a theme song for Hillary Clinton if she runs for President in 2016.
The tough part: finding a word that rhymes with Benghazi.
*.*
The Army Airborne major was used to harassment from Air Force fliers about crazy Army paratroopers jumping out of perfectly good aircraft. "Obviously the Air Force knows there's no such thing as a 'perfectly good aircraft,'" the irritated officer finally countered one afternoon, "because they pay you bastards four times as much to stay in one as the Army pays its men to jump."
"You've got it all wrong, Major," an Air Force sergeant replied. "The Army figures anyone stupid enough to jump out of an airplane voluntarily is gonna be too dumb to bitch about the salary."
*.*
Many say illegal immigration is a major issue in Texas.
Well, at least, Doctors Without Borders can stay home this year.
Issue of the Times;
The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think
o
It is now one hundred years since drugs were first banned -- and all through this long century of waging war on drugs, we have been told a story about addiction by our teachers and by our governments. This story is so deeply ingrained in our minds that we take it for granted. It seems obvious. It seems manifestly true. Until I set off three and a half years ago on a 30,000-mile journey for my new book, Chasing The Scream: The First And Last Days of the War on Drugs, to figure out what is really driving the drug war, I believed it too. But what I learned on the road is that almost everything we have been told about addiction is wrong -- and there is a very different story waiting for us, if only we are ready to hear it. If we truly absorb this new story, we will have to change a lot more than the drug war. We will have to change ourselves.
I learned it from an extraordinary mixture of people I met on my travels. From the surviving friends of Billie Holiday, who helped me to learn how the founder of the war on drugs stalked and helped to kill her. From a Jewish doctor who was smuggled out of the Budapest ghetto as a baby, only to unlock the secrets of addiction as a grown man. From a transsexual crack dealer in Brooklyn who was conceived when his mother, a crack-addict, was raped by his father, an NYPD officer. From a man who was kept at the bottom of a well for two years by a torturing dictatorship, only to emerge to be elected President of Uruguay and to begin the last days of the war on drugs.
I had a quite personal reason to set out for these answers. One of my earliest memories as a kid is trying to wake up one of my relatives, and not being able to. Ever since then, I have been turning over the essential mystery of addiction in my mind -- what causes some people to become fixated on a drug or a behavior until they can't stop? How do we help those people to come back to us? As I got older, another of my close relatives developed a cocaine addiction, and I fell into a relationship with a heroin addict. I guess addiction felt like home to me.
If you had asked me what causes drug addiction at the start, I would have looked at you as if you were an idiot, and said: "Drugs. Duh." It's not difficult to grasp. I thought I had seen it in my own life. We can all explain it. Imagine if you and I and the next twenty people to pass us on the street take a really potent drug for twenty days. There are strong chemical hooks in these drugs, so if we stopped on day twenty-one, our bodies would need the chemical. We would have a ferocious craving. We would be addicted. That's what addiction means.
One of the ways this theory was first established is through rat experiments -- ones that were injected into the American psyche in the 1980s, in a famous advert by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. You may remember it. The experiment is simple. Put a rat in a cage, alone, with two water bottles. One is just water. The other is water laced with heroin or cocaine. Almost every time you run this experiment, the rat will become obsessed with the drugged water, and keep coming back for more and more, until it kills itself.
The advert explains: "Only one drug is so addictive, nine out of ten laboratory rats will use it. And use it. And use it. Until dead. It's called cocaine. And it can do the same thing to you."
But in the 1970s, a professor of Psychology in Vancouver called Bruce Alexander noticed something odd about this experiment. The rat is put in the cage all alone. It has nothing to do but take the drugs. What would happen, he wondered, if we tried this differently? So Professor Alexander built Rat Park. It is a lush cage where the rats would have colored balls and the best rat-food and tunnels to scamper down and plenty of friends: everything a rat about town could want. What, Alexander wanted to know, will happen then? In Rat Park, all the rats obviously tried both water bottles, because they didn't know what was in them. But what happened next was startling.
The rats with good lives didn't like the drugged water. They mostly shunned it, consuming less than a quarter of the drugs the isolated rats used. None of them died. While all the rats who were alone and unhappy became heavy users, none of the rats who had a happy environment did.
At first, I thought this was merely a quirk of rats, until I discovered that there was -- at the same time as the Rat Park experiment -- a helpful human equivalent taking place. It was called the Vietnam War. Time magazine reported using heroin was "as common as chewing gum" among U.S. soldiers, and there is solid evidence to back this up: some 20 percent of U.S. soldiers had become addicted to heroin there, according to a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Many people were understandably terrified; they believed a huge number of addicts were about to head home when the war ended.
But in fact some 95 percent of the addicted soldiers -- according to the same study -- simply stopped. Very few had rehab. They shifted from a terrifying cage back to a pleasant one, so didn't want the drug any more.
Professor Alexander argues this discovery is a profound challenge both to the right-wing view that addiction is a moral failing caused by too much hedonistic partying, and the liberal view that addiction is a disease taking place in a chemically hijacked brain. In fact, he argues, addiction is an adaptation. It's not you. It's your cage.
After the first phase of Rat Park, Professor Alexander then took this test further. He reran the early experiments, where the rats were left alone, and became compulsive users of the drug. He let them use for fifty-seven days -- if anything can hook you, it's that. Then he took them out of isolation, and placed them in Rat Park. He wanted to know, if you fall into that state of addiction, is your brain hijacked, so you can't recover? Do the drugs take you over? What happened is -- again -- striking. The rats seemed to have a few twitches of withdrawal, but they soon stopped their heavy use, and went back to having a normal life. The good cage saved them. (The full references to all the studies I am discussing are in the book.)
When I first learned about this, I was puzzled. How can this be? This new theory is such a radical assault on what we have been told that it felt like it could not be true. But the more scientists I interviewed, and the more I looked at their studies, the more I discovered things that don't seem to make sense -- unless you take account of this new approach.
Here's one example of an experiment that is happening all around you, and may well happen to you one day. If you get run over today and you break your hip, you will probably be given diamorphine, the medical name for heroin. In the hospital around you, there will be plenty of people also given heroin for long periods, for pain relief. The heroin you will get from the doctor will have a much higher purity and potency than the heroin being used by street-addicts, who have to buy from criminals who adulterate it. So if the old theory of addiction is right -- it's the drugs that cause it; they make your body need them -- then it's obvious what should happen. Loads of people should leave the hospital and try to score smack on the streets to meet their habit.
But here's the strange thing: It virtually never happens. As the Canadian doctor Gabor Mate was the first to explain to me, medical users just stop, despite months of use. The same drug, used for the same length of time, turns street-users into desperate addicts and leaves medical patients unaffected.
If you still believe -- as I used to -- that addiction is caused by chemical hooks, this makes no sense. But if you believe Bruce Alexander's theory, the picture falls into place. The street-addict is like the rats in the first cage, isolated, alone, with only one source of solace to turn to. The medical patient is like the rats in the second cage. She is going home to a life where she is surrounded by the people she loves. The drug is the same, but the environment is different.
This gives us an insight that goes much deeper than the need to understand addicts. Professor Peter Cohen argues that human beings have a deep need to bond and form connections. It's how we get our satisfaction. If we can't connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can find -- the whirr of a roulette wheel or the prick of a syringe. He says we should stop talking about 'addiction' altogether, and instead call it 'bonding.' A heroin addict has bonded with heroin because she couldn't bond as fully with anything else.
So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection.
When I learned all this, I found it slowly persuading me, but I still couldn't shake off a nagging doubt. Are these scientists saying chemical hooks make no difference? It was explained to me -- you can become addicted to gambling, and nobody thinks you inject a pack of cards into your veins. You can have all the addiction, and none of the chemical hooks. I went to a Gamblers' Anonymous meeting in Las Vegas (with the permission of everyone present, who knew I was there to observe) and they were as plainly addicted as the cocaine and heroin addicts I have known in my life. Yet there are no chemical hooks on a craps table.
But still, surely, I asked, there is some role for the chemicals? It turns out there is an experiment which gives us the answer to this in quite precise terms, which I learned about in Richard DeGrandpre's book The Cult of Pharmacology.
Everyone agrees cigarette smoking is one of the most addictive processes around. The chemical hooks in tobacco come from a drug inside it called nicotine. So when nicotine patches were developed in the early 1990s, there was a huge surge of optimism -- cigarette smokers could get all of their chemical hooks, without the other filthy (and deadly) effects of cigarette smoking. They would be freed.
But the Office of the Surgeon General has found that just 17.7 percent of cigarette smokers are able to stop using nicotine patches. That's not nothing. If the chemicals drive 17.7 percent of addiction, as this shows, that's still millions of lives ruined globally. But what it reveals again is that the story we have been taught about The Cause of Addiction lying with chemical hooks is, in fact, real, but only a minor part of a much bigger picture.
This has huge implications for the one-hundred-year-old war on drugs. This massive war -- which, as I saw, kills people from the malls of Mexico to the streets of Liverpool -- is based on the claim that we need to physically eradicate a whole array of chemicals because they hijack people's brains and cause addiction. But if drugs aren't the driver of addiction -- if, in fact, it is disconnection that drives addiction -- then this makes no sense.
Ironically, the war on drugs actually increases all those larger drivers of addiction. For example, I went to a prison in Arizona -- 'Tent City' -- where inmates are detained in tiny stone isolation cages ('The Hole') for weeks and weeks on end to punish them for drug use. It is as close to a human recreation of the cages that guaranteed deadly addiction in rats as I can imagine. And when those prisoners get out, they will be unemployable because of their criminal record -- guaranteeing they with be cut off even more. I watched this playing out in the human stories I met across the world.
There is an alternative. You can build a system that is designed to help drug addicts to reconnect with the world -- and so leave behind their addictions.
This isn't theoretical. It is happening. I have seen it. Nearly fifteen years ago, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe, with 1 percent of the population addicted to heroin. They had tried a drug war, and the problem just kept getting worse. So they decided to do something radically different. They resolved to decriminalize all drugs, and transfer all the money they used to spend on arresting and jailing drug addicts, and spend it instead on reconnecting them -- to their own feelings, and to the wider society. The most crucial step is to get them secure housing, and subsidized jobs so they have a purpose in life, and something to get out of bed for. I watched as they are helped, in warm and welcoming clinics, to learn how to reconnect with their feelings, after years of trauma and stunning them into silence with drugs.
One example I learned about was a group of addicts who were given a loan to set up a removals firm. Suddenly, they were a group, all bonded to each other, and to the society, and responsible for each other's care.
The results of all this are now in. An independent study by the British Journal of Criminology found that since total decriminalization, addiction has fallen, and injecting drug use is down by 50 percent. I'll repeat that: injecting drug use is down by 50 percent.
Decriminalization has been such a manifest success that very few people in Portugal want to go back to the old system. The main campaigner against the decriminalization back in 2000 was Joao Figueira, the country's top drug cop. He offered all the dire warnings that we would expect from the Daily Mail or Fox News. But when we sat together in Lisbon, he told me that everything he predicted had not come to pass -- and he now hopes the whole world will follow Portugal's example.
This isn't only relevant to the addicts I love. It is relevant to all of us, because it forces us to think differently about ourselves. Human beings are bonding animals. We need to connect and love. The wisest sentence of the twentieth century was E.M. Forster's -- "only connect." But we have created an environment and a culture that cut us off from connection, or offer only the parody of it offered by the Internet. The rise of addiction is a symptom of a deeper sickness in the way we live -- constantly directing our gaze towards the next shiny object we should buy, rather than the human beings all around us.
The writer George Monbiot has called this "the age of loneliness." We have created human societies where it is easier for people to become cut off from all human connections than ever before. Bruce Alexander -- the creator of Rat Park -- told me that for too long, we have talked exclusively about individual recovery from addiction. We need now to talk about social recovery -- how we all recover, together, from the sickness of isolation that is sinking on us like a thick fog. But this new evidence isn't just a challenge to us politically. It doesn't just force us to change our minds. It forces us to change our hearts.
Loving an addict is really hard. When I looked at the addicts I love, it was always tempting to follow the tough love advice doled out by reality shows like Intervention -- tell the addict to shape up, or cut them off. Their message is that an addict who won't stop should be shunned. It's the logic of the drug war, imported into our private lives. But in fact, I learned, that will only deepen their addiction -- and you may lose them altogether. I came home determined to tie the addicts in my life closer to me than ever -- to let them know I love them unconditionally, whether they stop, or whether they can't.
When I returned from my long journey, I looked at my ex-boyfriend, in withdrawal, trembling on my spare bed, and I thought about him differently. For a century now, we have been singing war songs about addicts. It occurred to me as I wiped his brow, we should have been singing love songs to them all along.
The full story of Johann Hari's journey -- told through the stories of the people he met -- can be read in Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, published by Bloomsbury. The book has been praised by everyone from Elton John to Glenn Greenwald to Naomi Klein. You can buy it at all good bookstores and read more at www.chasingthescream.com.
Quote of the Times;
Walk with those seeking Truth. Run from those who think they've found it. - Chopra
Link of the Times;
http://www.jtl.org/auster/PNS.pdf
Football?
In a family of psychotics, it's a relief to be the insomniac.
*.*
KEY WEST, Fla. — The U.S. Army has quietly forced the Special Forces Underwater Operations School to change its unit motto of ‘I Can’t Breathe’ after fifteen years.
“To drown-proof combat divers, we make them pass out underwater from lack of air,” said Master Sgt. Chuck Tandory, an instructor at the school. “Mentally, it’s the most important part of the SCUBA course. ‘I Can’t Breathe’ sums it all up.”
Since the same motto has now been adopted by supporters of Eric Garner and civil rights activists, Army leadership has directed the Dive School to step aside to avoid criticism.
“Dive School had it first,” noted Sgt. 1st Class James McMillan, also an instructor. “Civil rights activists should be forced to change their motto. Our guys just went through the same slogan battle with Combatives school last year.”
“Don’t forget about the Chem unit that tried stealing it,” added Tandory.
“We already have a bunch of sweet unit PT gear with that motto, too,” McMillan exclaimed, throwing a sweatshirt printed with skulls and sharks into the swimming pool. “I have a dream that one day, higher won’t be so damn politically correct.”
*.*
One afternoon at the San Francisco Zoo in 1968, drunken 59-year-old Amos Watson climbed the low fence that surrounded the lion grotto and tumbled to the bottom of the dry moat. Fully caught up in his perceived role as the mighty bwana, he issued his challenge to Tommy, a 5-year-old African lion: "Come here, come here!"
Before a crowd of stunned onlookers, Tommy came. Watson, preparing to do battle as he knew best, waved his wine bottle several times and assumed the classic boxing stance. Tommy, somewhat puzzled, merely sniffed around. Watson seized the opportunity and took several ineffective swings. Then, with a ferocious roar, Tommy retaliated and quickly demonstrated that the sweet science, even when backed up by a wine bottle, is no match for keen claws and sharp fangs.
Unfortunately, triumph would not be Tommy's on this day. A hastily summoned keeper managed to drop Tommy with a single bullet between the eyes even as he had Watson by the neck. Watson would survive, but with an unforgettable lesson about the perils of mixing alcohol with animals. His souvenirs included two broken legs, numerous slash and puncture wounds, and a deep gash to the chest.
*.*
Scientists say that hair samples from what people claim are Bigfoot are found to be mostly from bears, wolves and Russell Brand.
*.*
Dan married one of a pair of identical twin girls. Less than a year later, he was in court filing for a divorce.
"OK," the judge said, "Tell the court why you want a divorce."
"Well, your honor," Dan started, "Every once in a while my sister in law would come over for a visit, and because she and my wife are so identical looking, every once in a while I'd end up making love to her by mistake."
"Surely there must be some difference between the two women," the judge said.
"You'd better believe there is a difference, your honor. That's why I want the divorce," he replied.
Issue of the Times;
Football Is No Longer A Masculine Pastime by Mark Dixon
Another male ritual destroyed by feminism
A funny thing happened on the way to the Seattle Seahawks’ victory over the Green Bay Packers on January 18.
My mother was the only person in the house watching the game.
My dad, an avid runner and cyclist, found the local trails more alluring than the hype surrounding the NFC championship. My older brother had initially come to make dinner for them later that night, but in the meantime had gone to work out, uninterested in the outcome of the game (my younger brother is an avid football fan and most certainly was watching it in his home).
Meanwhile, I’m the only man left in the house, albeit I’m pecking away at my laptop trying to get some work done.
At one point I got yet another call from my lonely mother asking if I’ll watch the game with her. I stopped and asked myself, What is going on here? Why am I, a man, not watching the game while my mother, who normally watches the Hallmark Channel, can’t take her eyes off of it?
To watch or not to watch
The answer wasn’t immediately obvious. While I enjoy a good football game as much as the next man and actually ended up watching the fourth quarter, I had a higher level of emotional investment in my work, something I was directly involved in and had control over.
It’s not that I don’t like the Seahawks. If I met Russell Wilson, I’d be searching for a football for him to sign. It just that I’m not obsessed.
But that wasn’t it.
I’ve also grown tired of the Seahawks worship. For those of you who aren’t from the area, it’s become the dominant religion. It’s hard to claim I’m exaggerating when the churches cancel or change their services times to accommodate game schedules, while they openly encourage the “faithful” to wear a Richard Sherman jersey as they worship Jesus. For a Christian like myself, wanting to go worship God without hearing any mention of the Seahawks during the sermon means staying home and listening to sermons online.
Still, that wasn’t it. It wasn’t until my brother came back from working out that I realized why.
Watching Sunday football just isn’t a masculine thing to do anymore.
Maybe I am alone in this sentiment. I have a strange feeling, however, I’m not.
How Sunday football spectating has been feminized
That a man might even contemplate this possibility demonstrates the effort to feminize American football has been a total success. Although the game itself is as violent and alpha-male dominated as ever, the marketing panders to and placates women.
Six years ago, a story like the one I described above would have never happened. Even in the 1990s, the height of feminism, Sunday football was one of the few remaining vestiges of masculinity.
Yes, there were women who enjoyed high school or even college football, but they were the token gal among the boys. And there was something different about Sunday football. It was when average men gathered together to drink beer and eat junk food while their wives or girlfriends made some offhand remark about them all being Neanderthals. It was Home Improvement’s Tim Taylor’s time to bond with his sons while his wife Jill is busy telling them not to get “too involved in that.”
Now, these women are huddled up next to their hubbies on the couch, adorned from head to toe in their respective football team’s apparel they bought en masse at a sporting goods store in an attempt to conform to latest social trend. Older woman who in a previous generation would have rolled their eyes amusingly at men cheering a QB sack now screech and scream like they’re back in high school cheer squad and talk about how cute they think their favorite player’s hair is or how they enjoy watching them during their cuddle — I mean huddle.
For a lot of men, the change in atmosphere and environment is unbearable.
To be fair, much of this phenomenon in the Seattle area can be attributed to the recent success of the Seahawks. My mother, like 90 percent of the women here, had absolutely zero interest in football until their 2005 appearance at the Super Bowl, the first in their history. The excitement then disappeared for another seven years until the “Russell Wilson” effect had women swooning as they flocked to the living room to join their husbands in what once was a masculine refuge of solitude.
But it’s not just the Seahawks’ success. You can see it in the way in which domestic violence, against women, of course, dominates the discussion during football games, the effeminate pink sweatbands players wear for breast cancer awareness.
Bob Costa’s anti-gun rant in 2012 during a live football game showed women have finally taken over. Had he said something that dumb when the primary audience was men who still wore the pants in the family….well, never mind, he wouldn’t have been that dumb.
Women in the world of men
What’s happened is the women have finally penetrated—trigger warning—one of the final bastions of male-dominated rituals, the spectating of the Sunday football game. Like everything else that once gave men a sense of community or bonding, women have barged their way in, and like all others they now control the conversation.
It’s why you have football players featured in commercials condemning domestic violence committed against women by men but none on how men make up 40 percent of domestic violence victims. It’s why you don’t hear about how 85 percent of the time women are awarded child custody during a divorce, nor the suicide rate disparity between men and women following divorce. It’s why you don’t hear about paternity fraud or see a segment on how “deadbeat dads” might actually be real human beings who love their children but can’t see them ever because they work two full-time jobs to pay for alimony and/or child support.
These are relevant men’s issues. Back when football was a masculine man’s world and women were merely guests in it at best, these topics might have gotten a fair hearing. Comedian Bill Burr nailed it when he told Conan O’Brien why women took over football. Because it was started by men for men. And they can’t have that, especially in a country that has its balls in the feminists’ purse.
Notice that men don’t seek out female-dominated pastimes and attempt to intrude. Men are content with women doing their own thing among themselves and have no interest changing the arrangement. For feminists, however, there is an instinctive resentment of anything male-oriented or exclusively male. Honestly, how many women actually watch football because they personally enjoy it? How many would watch it if all of their girlfriends thought it was “weird”?
There is also a subversive side to the whole thing. As Fred Reed observed, it is difficult for men to have certain conversations while a woman is present. When women become a significant portion of the group, these conversations become impossible. Much of what men enjoy about male-exclusive activities is the ability to segregate themselves from women, to be alone with men so they can speak plainly and openly about things.
Feminists know this. To them, it is critical these conversations don’t happen on a large scale in order to maintain control.
That’s why men like myself find ourselves doing other things on Sunday. It’s no longer a time for men to chat with other men about things men care about without censoring ourselves for the sake of the women in the room. Watching football is slowly becoming an experience akin to watching a soap opera with a bunch of stay-at-home moms.
Yes, the players are men, the coaches are men, the commentators are men, and the team owners are men, but like the modern Christian church in America, the NFL is now an institution run by men for women.
Again, I might be alone on this, but the comment below made by a rueful husband in a recent Seattle Times story in regard to his wife’s newly-found obsession with the sport says I’m not: “I’ve created a monster.”
Quote of the Times;
“It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites.” – Sowell
Link of the Times;
http://therationalmale.com/
*.*
KEY WEST, Fla. — The U.S. Army has quietly forced the Special Forces Underwater Operations School to change its unit motto of ‘I Can’t Breathe’ after fifteen years.
“To drown-proof combat divers, we make them pass out underwater from lack of air,” said Master Sgt. Chuck Tandory, an instructor at the school. “Mentally, it’s the most important part of the SCUBA course. ‘I Can’t Breathe’ sums it all up.”
Since the same motto has now been adopted by supporters of Eric Garner and civil rights activists, Army leadership has directed the Dive School to step aside to avoid criticism.
“Dive School had it first,” noted Sgt. 1st Class James McMillan, also an instructor. “Civil rights activists should be forced to change their motto. Our guys just went through the same slogan battle with Combatives school last year.”
“Don’t forget about the Chem unit that tried stealing it,” added Tandory.
“We already have a bunch of sweet unit PT gear with that motto, too,” McMillan exclaimed, throwing a sweatshirt printed with skulls and sharks into the swimming pool. “I have a dream that one day, higher won’t be so damn politically correct.”
*.*
One afternoon at the San Francisco Zoo in 1968, drunken 59-year-old Amos Watson climbed the low fence that surrounded the lion grotto and tumbled to the bottom of the dry moat. Fully caught up in his perceived role as the mighty bwana, he issued his challenge to Tommy, a 5-year-old African lion: "Come here, come here!"
Before a crowd of stunned onlookers, Tommy came. Watson, preparing to do battle as he knew best, waved his wine bottle several times and assumed the classic boxing stance. Tommy, somewhat puzzled, merely sniffed around. Watson seized the opportunity and took several ineffective swings. Then, with a ferocious roar, Tommy retaliated and quickly demonstrated that the sweet science, even when backed up by a wine bottle, is no match for keen claws and sharp fangs.
Unfortunately, triumph would not be Tommy's on this day. A hastily summoned keeper managed to drop Tommy with a single bullet between the eyes even as he had Watson by the neck. Watson would survive, but with an unforgettable lesson about the perils of mixing alcohol with animals. His souvenirs included two broken legs, numerous slash and puncture wounds, and a deep gash to the chest.
*.*
Scientists say that hair samples from what people claim are Bigfoot are found to be mostly from bears, wolves and Russell Brand.
*.*
Dan married one of a pair of identical twin girls. Less than a year later, he was in court filing for a divorce.
"OK," the judge said, "Tell the court why you want a divorce."
"Well, your honor," Dan started, "Every once in a while my sister in law would come over for a visit, and because she and my wife are so identical looking, every once in a while I'd end up making love to her by mistake."
"Surely there must be some difference between the two women," the judge said.
"You'd better believe there is a difference, your honor. That's why I want the divorce," he replied.
Issue of the Times;
Football Is No Longer A Masculine Pastime by Mark Dixon
Another male ritual destroyed by feminism
A funny thing happened on the way to the Seattle Seahawks’ victory over the Green Bay Packers on January 18.
My mother was the only person in the house watching the game.
My dad, an avid runner and cyclist, found the local trails more alluring than the hype surrounding the NFC championship. My older brother had initially come to make dinner for them later that night, but in the meantime had gone to work out, uninterested in the outcome of the game (my younger brother is an avid football fan and most certainly was watching it in his home).
Meanwhile, I’m the only man left in the house, albeit I’m pecking away at my laptop trying to get some work done.
At one point I got yet another call from my lonely mother asking if I’ll watch the game with her. I stopped and asked myself, What is going on here? Why am I, a man, not watching the game while my mother, who normally watches the Hallmark Channel, can’t take her eyes off of it?
To watch or not to watch
The answer wasn’t immediately obvious. While I enjoy a good football game as much as the next man and actually ended up watching the fourth quarter, I had a higher level of emotional investment in my work, something I was directly involved in and had control over.
It’s not that I don’t like the Seahawks. If I met Russell Wilson, I’d be searching for a football for him to sign. It just that I’m not obsessed.
But that wasn’t it.
I’ve also grown tired of the Seahawks worship. For those of you who aren’t from the area, it’s become the dominant religion. It’s hard to claim I’m exaggerating when the churches cancel or change their services times to accommodate game schedules, while they openly encourage the “faithful” to wear a Richard Sherman jersey as they worship Jesus. For a Christian like myself, wanting to go worship God without hearing any mention of the Seahawks during the sermon means staying home and listening to sermons online.
Still, that wasn’t it. It wasn’t until my brother came back from working out that I realized why.
Watching Sunday football just isn’t a masculine thing to do anymore.
Maybe I am alone in this sentiment. I have a strange feeling, however, I’m not.
How Sunday football spectating has been feminized
That a man might even contemplate this possibility demonstrates the effort to feminize American football has been a total success. Although the game itself is as violent and alpha-male dominated as ever, the marketing panders to and placates women.
Six years ago, a story like the one I described above would have never happened. Even in the 1990s, the height of feminism, Sunday football was one of the few remaining vestiges of masculinity.
Yes, there were women who enjoyed high school or even college football, but they were the token gal among the boys. And there was something different about Sunday football. It was when average men gathered together to drink beer and eat junk food while their wives or girlfriends made some offhand remark about them all being Neanderthals. It was Home Improvement’s Tim Taylor’s time to bond with his sons while his wife Jill is busy telling them not to get “too involved in that.”
Now, these women are huddled up next to their hubbies on the couch, adorned from head to toe in their respective football team’s apparel they bought en masse at a sporting goods store in an attempt to conform to latest social trend. Older woman who in a previous generation would have rolled their eyes amusingly at men cheering a QB sack now screech and scream like they’re back in high school cheer squad and talk about how cute they think their favorite player’s hair is or how they enjoy watching them during their cuddle — I mean huddle.
For a lot of men, the change in atmosphere and environment is unbearable.
To be fair, much of this phenomenon in the Seattle area can be attributed to the recent success of the Seahawks. My mother, like 90 percent of the women here, had absolutely zero interest in football until their 2005 appearance at the Super Bowl, the first in their history. The excitement then disappeared for another seven years until the “Russell Wilson” effect had women swooning as they flocked to the living room to join their husbands in what once was a masculine refuge of solitude.
But it’s not just the Seahawks’ success. You can see it in the way in which domestic violence, against women, of course, dominates the discussion during football games, the effeminate pink sweatbands players wear for breast cancer awareness.
Bob Costa’s anti-gun rant in 2012 during a live football game showed women have finally taken over. Had he said something that dumb when the primary audience was men who still wore the pants in the family….well, never mind, he wouldn’t have been that dumb.
Women in the world of men
What’s happened is the women have finally penetrated—trigger warning—one of the final bastions of male-dominated rituals, the spectating of the Sunday football game. Like everything else that once gave men a sense of community or bonding, women have barged their way in, and like all others they now control the conversation.
It’s why you have football players featured in commercials condemning domestic violence committed against women by men but none on how men make up 40 percent of domestic violence victims. It’s why you don’t hear about how 85 percent of the time women are awarded child custody during a divorce, nor the suicide rate disparity between men and women following divorce. It’s why you don’t hear about paternity fraud or see a segment on how “deadbeat dads” might actually be real human beings who love their children but can’t see them ever because they work two full-time jobs to pay for alimony and/or child support.
These are relevant men’s issues. Back when football was a masculine man’s world and women were merely guests in it at best, these topics might have gotten a fair hearing. Comedian Bill Burr nailed it when he told Conan O’Brien why women took over football. Because it was started by men for men. And they can’t have that, especially in a country that has its balls in the feminists’ purse.
Notice that men don’t seek out female-dominated pastimes and attempt to intrude. Men are content with women doing their own thing among themselves and have no interest changing the arrangement. For feminists, however, there is an instinctive resentment of anything male-oriented or exclusively male. Honestly, how many women actually watch football because they personally enjoy it? How many would watch it if all of their girlfriends thought it was “weird”?
There is also a subversive side to the whole thing. As Fred Reed observed, it is difficult for men to have certain conversations while a woman is present. When women become a significant portion of the group, these conversations become impossible. Much of what men enjoy about male-exclusive activities is the ability to segregate themselves from women, to be alone with men so they can speak plainly and openly about things.
Feminists know this. To them, it is critical these conversations don’t happen on a large scale in order to maintain control.
That’s why men like myself find ourselves doing other things on Sunday. It’s no longer a time for men to chat with other men about things men care about without censoring ourselves for the sake of the women in the room. Watching football is slowly becoming an experience akin to watching a soap opera with a bunch of stay-at-home moms.
Yes, the players are men, the coaches are men, the commentators are men, and the team owners are men, but like the modern Christian church in America, the NFL is now an institution run by men for women.
Again, I might be alone on this, but the comment below made by a rueful husband in a recent Seattle Times story in regard to his wife’s newly-found obsession with the sport says I’m not: “I’ve created a monster.”
Quote of the Times;
“It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites.” – Sowell
Link of the Times;
http://therationalmale.com/
Fermi?
Scott and Peter had applied for jobs at a large company and had to take an intelligence test. Though both of them found the test a breeze, except that they admitted to being momentarily stumped by the final question:
"Name a 14 letter word for someone in charge of a plant."
"How did you answer that last one?" asked Scott. "I thought it was tough at first... then I thought of Superintendent."
"I think I got it right too," Pete said. "But I wrote down Horticulturist."
*.*
The newly wed wife said to her husband when he returned from work: "I have great news for you. Pretty soon we're going to be three in this house instead of two. "The husband started glowing with happiness and kissing his wife said: "Oh darling, I'm the happiest man in the world."
But then she said: "I'm glad that you feel this way because tomorrow morning my mother moves in with us."
*.*
I remember back when "Jaws" came out and, after seeing the movie, I was afraid to go to the beach?
Now, after "Sharknado 2," I'm afraid someone will find out I watched it.
*.*
In Sweden, someone found IKEA bags with 80 skeletons inside.
The worst part - they were all unassembled.
*.*
Buffalo is getting ready to host the National Scrabble Championship this weekend.
I think it's great when Scrabble fans get together for a spell.
Issue of the Times;
The Weirdest Solutions to the Fermi Paradox by George Dvorsky
Most people take it for granted that we have yet to make contact with an extraterrestrial civilization. Trouble is, the numbers don’t add up. Our Galaxy is so old that every corner of it should have been visited many, many times over by now. No theory to date has satisfactorily explained away this Great Silence, so it’s time to think outside the box. Here are eleven of the weirdest solutions to the Fermi Paradox.
There's no shortage of solutions to the Fermi Paradox. The standard ones are fairly well known, and we’re not going to examine them here, but they include the Rare Earth Hypothesis (the suggestion that life is exceptionally rare), the notion that space travel is too difficult, or the distances too vast, the Great Filter Hypothesis (the idea that all sufficiently advanced civilizations destroy themselves before going intergalactic), or that we’re simply not interesting enough.
But for the purposes of this discussion, we’re going to look at some of the more bizarre and arcane solutions to the Fermi Paradox. Because sometimes it takes a weird explanation to answer a weird question. So, as Enrico Fermi famously asked, “Where is everybody?”
1. The Zoo Hypothesis
Though it sounds like something from a Twilight Zone episode, it’s quite possible that we’re stuck inside some kind of celestial cage. ETI’s may have stumbled upon our tiny blue marble a long time ago, but, for whatever reason, they’re observing us from afar. It might be that we’re entertainment for them (like watching monkeys in the zoo), or that they’re studying us for scientific purposes. Regardless, they’ve invoked a hand’s off policy and they’re leaving us alone.
This idea was first proposed by John Ball in 1973, who argued that extraterrestrial intelligent life may be almost ubiquitous, but that the “apparent failure of such life to interact with us may be understood in terms of the hypothesis that they have set us aside as part of a wilderness area or zoo.” We could be part of a vast nature preserve that has been set off limits, free to grow unperturbed by intelligent life. It’s an idea that somewhat related to Star Trek’s Prime Directive in which civilizations are left alone until they attain a certain technology capacity. It’s also an idea that UFOlogists are partial to — the suggestion that aliens are essentially here, but observing us from a distance.
2. Self-Imposed Quarantine
This is pretty much the opposite of the zoo hypothesis. Extraterrestrials have the potential to be dangerous. Like, extremely dangerous. So rather than fart around the Galaxy in spaceships and hope that everyone’s super friendly, ETI’s may have collectively and independently decided to stay the hell at home and not draw attention to themselves.
And why not? It would be perfectly reasonable to conclude, especially in light of the Fermi Paradox, that the cosmos is filled with perils — whether it be an imperialistic civilization on the march, or a wave of berserker probes set to sterilize everything in its wake. And to ensure that nobody bothers them, advanced ETIs could set up a perimeter of Sandberg probes (self-replicating policing probes) to make sure that nobody gets in.
3. The Whack-a-Mole Hypothesis
Imagine if there’s a kind of Prime Directive in effect, but that ETIs are hovering over us with a giant hammer ready to smack it down should it suddenly not like what it sees. These ETI’s would be like Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still, intent on preserving the galactic peace. "There's no limit to what Gort could do,” said Klaatu, “He could destroy the Earth." So what is Gort or other advanced ETIs waiting for, exactly? One possibility is the technological Singularity. In the space of possible survivable Singularities, a sizeable portion of them might result in an extremely dangerous artificial superintelligence (SAI). The kind of SAI that could set about the destruction of the entire Galaxy. So, in order to prevent the bad ones from emerging — while giving the good ones a fair chance to get started — the Galactic Club keeps watch.
4. We’re Made Out of Meat
From the Nebula Award-nominated short story, “They’re Made Out of Meat” by Terry Bisson:
"They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"Meat. They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"There's no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."
"That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?"
"They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."
"So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."
"They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."
"That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."
"I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in that sector and they're made out of meat."
A little while later:
"They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?"
"Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat."
"I thought you just told me they used radio."
"They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat, it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."
"Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?"
"Officially or unofficially?"
"Both."
"Officially, we are required to contact, welcome and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in this quadrant of the Universe, without prejudice, fear or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing."
"I was hoping you would say that."
"It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?"
"I agree one hundred percent. What's there to say? 'Hello, meat. How's it going?'
5. The Simulation Hypothesis
We haven’t been visited by anyone because we’re living inside a computer simulation — and the simulation isn’t generating any extraterrestrial companions for us.
If true, this could imply one of three things. First, the bastards — I mean Gods — running the simulation have rigged it such that we’re the only civilization in the entire Galaxy (or even the Universe). Or, there really isn’t a true universe out there, it just appears that way to us within our simulated bubble (It’s a ‘If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?’ type thing).
Another more bizarre possibility is that the simulation is being run by a posthuman civilization in search of an answer to the Fermi Paradox, or some other scientific question. Maybe, in an attempt to entertain various hypotheses (perhaps even preemptively in consideration of some proposed action), they’re running a billion different ancestor simulations to determine how many of them produce spacefaring civilizations, or even post-Singularity stage civilizations like themselves.
6. Radio Silence
This one is similar to the quarantine hypothesis, but it’s not quite as paranoid. But it’s still pretty paranoid. It’s possible that everyone is listening, but no one is transmitting.
And for very good reason. David Brin has argued that the practice of Active SETI would be like shouting out into the jungle (Active SETI is the deliberate transmission of high-powered radio signals to candidate star systems). Michael Michaud has made a similar case: “Let’s be clear about this,” he has written, “Active SETI is not scientific research. It is a deliberate attempt to provoke a response by an alien civilization whose capabilities, intentions, and distance are not known to us. That makes it a policy issue.” The concern, of course, is that we may draw undue attention to ourselves prematurely. It’s conceivable, therefore, that our collective governments may some day decide to shut down all Active SETI efforts. We should just be content to listen. But what if every civilization in the cosmos were to adopt the same policy? That would imply that everyone has gone radio silent.
As an aside, it could also be dangerous to listen: SETI may be at risk of downloading a malicious virus from outer space.
7. All Aliens Are Homebodies
This one isn’t so much weird as it might actually be possible. An advanced ETI, upon graduating to a Kardashev II scale civilization, could lose all galactic-scale ambitions. Once a Dyson sphere orMatrioshka Brain is set up, an alien civilization would have more action and adventure in its local area than it knows what to do with. Massive supercomputers would be able to simulate universes within universes, and lifetimes within lifetimes — and at speeds and variations far removed from what’s exhibited in the tired old analog world. By comparison, the rest of the galaxy would seem like a boring and desolate place. Space could very much be in the rear view mirror.
8. We Can’t Read the Signs
Now, it’s totally possible that the signs of ETIs are all around us, but we just can’t see them. Either we’re too stupid to notice, or we still need to develop our technologies to detect the signals. According to the current SETI approach, we should be listening for radio signatures. But a civilization far more advanced than our own might be using a different technique entirely. They could be signaling with lasers, for example. Lasers are good because they’re tightly focused beams with excellent informational bandwidth. They’re also able to penetrate our galaxy’s dusty interstellar medium.
Or, ETIs could use “calling cards” by exploiting the transmit method of detection(e.g. by constructing a massive perfectly geometrical structure, like a triangle or a square, and put in orbit around their host star).
And and as Stephen Webb has pointed out, there’s also the potential for electromagnetic signals, gravitational signals, particle signals, tachyon signals, or something completely beyond our understanding of physics. It’s also quite possible that they are in fact using radio signals, but we don’t know which frequency to tune into (the EM spectrum is extremely broad). More conceptually, we may eventually find a message buried in a place where we least expect it — like within the code of our DNA.
9. They’re All Hanging Out At the Edge of the Galaxy
This interesting solution to the Fermi Paradox was posited by Milan M. Ćirković and Robert Bradbury.
“We suggest that the outer regions of the Galactic disk are the most likely locations for advanced SETI targets,” they wrote. The reason for this is that sophisticated intelligent communities will tend to migrate outward through the Galaxy as their capacities of information-processing increase. Why? Because machine-based civilizations, with their massive supercomputers, will have huge problems managing their heat waste. They'll have to set up camp where it’s super cool. And the outer rim of the Galaxy is exactly that.
Subsequently, there may be a different galactic habitable zone for post-Singularity ETIs than for meat-based life. By consequence, advanced ETIs have no interest in exploring the bio-friendly habitable zone. Which means we’re looking for ET in the wrong place. Interestingly, Stephen Wolfram once told me that heat-free computing will someday be possible, so he doesn’t think this is a plausible solution to the Fermi Paradox.
10. Directed Panspermia
Or maybe we haven’t made contact with ETI’s because we’re the aliens. Or least, they’re our ancestors. According to this theory, which was first posited by Francis Crick (yes, that Francis Crick), aliens spark life on other planets (like sending spores to potentially fertile planets), and then bugger off. Forever. Or maybe they eventually come back.
This idea has been tackled extensively in scifi, including the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, “The Chase” in which the uber-generic humanoid Salome Jens explains that its species is responsible for all life in the Alpha Quadrant, or Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, in which an alien can be seen seeding the primordial Earth with life. Even Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 is a take on this idea, with the monoliths instigating massive evolutionary leaps.
11. The Phase Transition Hypothesis
This one is similar to the Rare Earth hypothesis, but it suggests that the universe is still evolving and changing. Subsequently, the conditions to support advanced intelligence have only recently fallen into place. This is what cosmologist James Annis refers to as the phase transition model of the universe — what he feels is an astrophysical explanation for the Great Silence.
According to Annis, a possible regulatory mechanism that can account for this is the frequency of gamma-ray bursts — super-cataclysmic events that can literally sterilize large swaths of the galaxy.
“If one assumes that they are in fact lethal to land based life throughout the galaxy,” he wrote, “one has a mechanism that prevents the rise of intelligence until the mean time between bursts is comparable to the timescale for the evolution of intelligence.” In other words, gamma-ray bursts are too frequent, and intelligent life is constantly getting wiped out before it develops the capacity to go interstellar. Looking to the future, however, given that gamma-ray bursts are decreasing in frequency, things are set to change. “The Galaxy is currently undergoing a phase transition between an equilibrium state devoid of intelligent life to a different equilibrium state where it is full of intelligent life,” says Annis.
Which would actually be good news.
Quote of the Times;
“Each day it becomes easier to know what we ought to despise: what modern man admires and journalism praises.” - Gómez
Link of the Times;
http://happyacres.tumblr.com/
"Name a 14 letter word for someone in charge of a plant."
"How did you answer that last one?" asked Scott. "I thought it was tough at first... then I thought of Superintendent."
"I think I got it right too," Pete said. "But I wrote down Horticulturist."
*.*
The newly wed wife said to her husband when he returned from work: "I have great news for you. Pretty soon we're going to be three in this house instead of two. "The husband started glowing with happiness and kissing his wife said: "Oh darling, I'm the happiest man in the world."
But then she said: "I'm glad that you feel this way because tomorrow morning my mother moves in with us."
*.*
I remember back when "Jaws" came out and, after seeing the movie, I was afraid to go to the beach?
Now, after "Sharknado 2," I'm afraid someone will find out I watched it.
*.*
In Sweden, someone found IKEA bags with 80 skeletons inside.
The worst part - they were all unassembled.
*.*
Buffalo is getting ready to host the National Scrabble Championship this weekend.
I think it's great when Scrabble fans get together for a spell.
Issue of the Times;
The Weirdest Solutions to the Fermi Paradox by George Dvorsky
Most people take it for granted that we have yet to make contact with an extraterrestrial civilization. Trouble is, the numbers don’t add up. Our Galaxy is so old that every corner of it should have been visited many, many times over by now. No theory to date has satisfactorily explained away this Great Silence, so it’s time to think outside the box. Here are eleven of the weirdest solutions to the Fermi Paradox.
There's no shortage of solutions to the Fermi Paradox. The standard ones are fairly well known, and we’re not going to examine them here, but they include the Rare Earth Hypothesis (the suggestion that life is exceptionally rare), the notion that space travel is too difficult, or the distances too vast, the Great Filter Hypothesis (the idea that all sufficiently advanced civilizations destroy themselves before going intergalactic), or that we’re simply not interesting enough.
But for the purposes of this discussion, we’re going to look at some of the more bizarre and arcane solutions to the Fermi Paradox. Because sometimes it takes a weird explanation to answer a weird question. So, as Enrico Fermi famously asked, “Where is everybody?”
1. The Zoo Hypothesis
Though it sounds like something from a Twilight Zone episode, it’s quite possible that we’re stuck inside some kind of celestial cage. ETI’s may have stumbled upon our tiny blue marble a long time ago, but, for whatever reason, they’re observing us from afar. It might be that we’re entertainment for them (like watching monkeys in the zoo), or that they’re studying us for scientific purposes. Regardless, they’ve invoked a hand’s off policy and they’re leaving us alone.
This idea was first proposed by John Ball in 1973, who argued that extraterrestrial intelligent life may be almost ubiquitous, but that the “apparent failure of such life to interact with us may be understood in terms of the hypothesis that they have set us aside as part of a wilderness area or zoo.” We could be part of a vast nature preserve that has been set off limits, free to grow unperturbed by intelligent life. It’s an idea that somewhat related to Star Trek’s Prime Directive in which civilizations are left alone until they attain a certain technology capacity. It’s also an idea that UFOlogists are partial to — the suggestion that aliens are essentially here, but observing us from a distance.
2. Self-Imposed Quarantine
This is pretty much the opposite of the zoo hypothesis. Extraterrestrials have the potential to be dangerous. Like, extremely dangerous. So rather than fart around the Galaxy in spaceships and hope that everyone’s super friendly, ETI’s may have collectively and independently decided to stay the hell at home and not draw attention to themselves.
And why not? It would be perfectly reasonable to conclude, especially in light of the Fermi Paradox, that the cosmos is filled with perils — whether it be an imperialistic civilization on the march, or a wave of berserker probes set to sterilize everything in its wake. And to ensure that nobody bothers them, advanced ETIs could set up a perimeter of Sandberg probes (self-replicating policing probes) to make sure that nobody gets in.
3. The Whack-a-Mole Hypothesis
Imagine if there’s a kind of Prime Directive in effect, but that ETIs are hovering over us with a giant hammer ready to smack it down should it suddenly not like what it sees. These ETI’s would be like Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still, intent on preserving the galactic peace. "There's no limit to what Gort could do,” said Klaatu, “He could destroy the Earth." So what is Gort or other advanced ETIs waiting for, exactly? One possibility is the technological Singularity. In the space of possible survivable Singularities, a sizeable portion of them might result in an extremely dangerous artificial superintelligence (SAI). The kind of SAI that could set about the destruction of the entire Galaxy. So, in order to prevent the bad ones from emerging — while giving the good ones a fair chance to get started — the Galactic Club keeps watch.
4. We’re Made Out of Meat
From the Nebula Award-nominated short story, “They’re Made Out of Meat” by Terry Bisson:
"They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"Meat. They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"There's no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."
"That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?"
"They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."
"So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."
"They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."
"That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."
"I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in that sector and they're made out of meat."
A little while later:
"They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?"
"Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat."
"I thought you just told me they used radio."
"They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat, it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."
"Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?"
"Officially or unofficially?"
"Both."
"Officially, we are required to contact, welcome and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in this quadrant of the Universe, without prejudice, fear or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing."
"I was hoping you would say that."
"It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?"
"I agree one hundred percent. What's there to say? 'Hello, meat. How's it going?'
5. The Simulation Hypothesis
We haven’t been visited by anyone because we’re living inside a computer simulation — and the simulation isn’t generating any extraterrestrial companions for us.
If true, this could imply one of three things. First, the bastards — I mean Gods — running the simulation have rigged it such that we’re the only civilization in the entire Galaxy (or even the Universe). Or, there really isn’t a true universe out there, it just appears that way to us within our simulated bubble (It’s a ‘If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?’ type thing).
Another more bizarre possibility is that the simulation is being run by a posthuman civilization in search of an answer to the Fermi Paradox, or some other scientific question. Maybe, in an attempt to entertain various hypotheses (perhaps even preemptively in consideration of some proposed action), they’re running a billion different ancestor simulations to determine how many of them produce spacefaring civilizations, or even post-Singularity stage civilizations like themselves.
6. Radio Silence
This one is similar to the quarantine hypothesis, but it’s not quite as paranoid. But it’s still pretty paranoid. It’s possible that everyone is listening, but no one is transmitting.
And for very good reason. David Brin has argued that the practice of Active SETI would be like shouting out into the jungle (Active SETI is the deliberate transmission of high-powered radio signals to candidate star systems). Michael Michaud has made a similar case: “Let’s be clear about this,” he has written, “Active SETI is not scientific research. It is a deliberate attempt to provoke a response by an alien civilization whose capabilities, intentions, and distance are not known to us. That makes it a policy issue.” The concern, of course, is that we may draw undue attention to ourselves prematurely. It’s conceivable, therefore, that our collective governments may some day decide to shut down all Active SETI efforts. We should just be content to listen. But what if every civilization in the cosmos were to adopt the same policy? That would imply that everyone has gone radio silent.
As an aside, it could also be dangerous to listen: SETI may be at risk of downloading a malicious virus from outer space.
7. All Aliens Are Homebodies
This one isn’t so much weird as it might actually be possible. An advanced ETI, upon graduating to a Kardashev II scale civilization, could lose all galactic-scale ambitions. Once a Dyson sphere orMatrioshka Brain is set up, an alien civilization would have more action and adventure in its local area than it knows what to do with. Massive supercomputers would be able to simulate universes within universes, and lifetimes within lifetimes — and at speeds and variations far removed from what’s exhibited in the tired old analog world. By comparison, the rest of the galaxy would seem like a boring and desolate place. Space could very much be in the rear view mirror.
8. We Can’t Read the Signs
Now, it’s totally possible that the signs of ETIs are all around us, but we just can’t see them. Either we’re too stupid to notice, or we still need to develop our technologies to detect the signals. According to the current SETI approach, we should be listening for radio signatures. But a civilization far more advanced than our own might be using a different technique entirely. They could be signaling with lasers, for example. Lasers are good because they’re tightly focused beams with excellent informational bandwidth. They’re also able to penetrate our galaxy’s dusty interstellar medium.
Or, ETIs could use “calling cards” by exploiting the transmit method of detection(e.g. by constructing a massive perfectly geometrical structure, like a triangle or a square, and put in orbit around their host star).
And and as Stephen Webb has pointed out, there’s also the potential for electromagnetic signals, gravitational signals, particle signals, tachyon signals, or something completely beyond our understanding of physics. It’s also quite possible that they are in fact using radio signals, but we don’t know which frequency to tune into (the EM spectrum is extremely broad). More conceptually, we may eventually find a message buried in a place where we least expect it — like within the code of our DNA.
9. They’re All Hanging Out At the Edge of the Galaxy
This interesting solution to the Fermi Paradox was posited by Milan M. Ćirković and Robert Bradbury.
“We suggest that the outer regions of the Galactic disk are the most likely locations for advanced SETI targets,” they wrote. The reason for this is that sophisticated intelligent communities will tend to migrate outward through the Galaxy as their capacities of information-processing increase. Why? Because machine-based civilizations, with their massive supercomputers, will have huge problems managing their heat waste. They'll have to set up camp where it’s super cool. And the outer rim of the Galaxy is exactly that.
Subsequently, there may be a different galactic habitable zone for post-Singularity ETIs than for meat-based life. By consequence, advanced ETIs have no interest in exploring the bio-friendly habitable zone. Which means we’re looking for ET in the wrong place. Interestingly, Stephen Wolfram once told me that heat-free computing will someday be possible, so he doesn’t think this is a plausible solution to the Fermi Paradox.
10. Directed Panspermia
Or maybe we haven’t made contact with ETI’s because we’re the aliens. Or least, they’re our ancestors. According to this theory, which was first posited by Francis Crick (yes, that Francis Crick), aliens spark life on other planets (like sending spores to potentially fertile planets), and then bugger off. Forever. Or maybe they eventually come back.
This idea has been tackled extensively in scifi, including the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, “The Chase” in which the uber-generic humanoid Salome Jens explains that its species is responsible for all life in the Alpha Quadrant, or Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, in which an alien can be seen seeding the primordial Earth with life. Even Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 is a take on this idea, with the monoliths instigating massive evolutionary leaps.
11. The Phase Transition Hypothesis
This one is similar to the Rare Earth hypothesis, but it suggests that the universe is still evolving and changing. Subsequently, the conditions to support advanced intelligence have only recently fallen into place. This is what cosmologist James Annis refers to as the phase transition model of the universe — what he feels is an astrophysical explanation for the Great Silence.
According to Annis, a possible regulatory mechanism that can account for this is the frequency of gamma-ray bursts — super-cataclysmic events that can literally sterilize large swaths of the galaxy.
“If one assumes that they are in fact lethal to land based life throughout the galaxy,” he wrote, “one has a mechanism that prevents the rise of intelligence until the mean time between bursts is comparable to the timescale for the evolution of intelligence.” In other words, gamma-ray bursts are too frequent, and intelligent life is constantly getting wiped out before it develops the capacity to go interstellar. Looking to the future, however, given that gamma-ray bursts are decreasing in frequency, things are set to change. “The Galaxy is currently undergoing a phase transition between an equilibrium state devoid of intelligent life to a different equilibrium state where it is full of intelligent life,” says Annis.
Which would actually be good news.
Quote of the Times;
“Each day it becomes easier to know what we ought to despise: what modern man admires and journalism praises.” - Gómez
Link of the Times;
http://happyacres.tumblr.com/
Several animals were savagely beaten in the making of this page, including but not limited to; kittens, rabbits, zebu, skunks, puppies, and platypus. Also several monkeys where force fed crack to improve their typing skills.
And someone shot a duck.
An Images & Ideas, Inc. Service.
No Vegans were harmed in the making of this site. We're looking for a new provider.
And someone shot a duck.
An Images & Ideas, Inc. Service.
No Vegans were harmed in the making of this site. We're looking for a new provider.