Homo Sapiens - by Harari

I bought this  2014 book two years ago.  I started it, reading maybe a third before I put it down. I liked it enough.I’d read H.G. Wells, History of the World as a teen. Later I’d be moved by Future Shock and Culture of Narcissism. It was that kind of read.  Seminal, they’d say, in history circles. Yet I’d found the author at times pedantic, opinionated, and even pompous.  I didn’t feel this eway about Guns, Germs and Steel by Diamond or Niall Ferguson’s Ascent of Wealth, a Financial History of the World,  or Paul Johnso’s  Modern Times, great read I’d so enjoyed.  It was that sort of Omnibus Read.  But I’d put it down. I was reading a History of Christianity at the time and I’d bogged down reading that too. I often have several reads on the go and with work I have to read increasing amounts of drivel and nonsense.

But a friend commented on Homo Sapiens. She’d really enjoyed Harari and I'd almost unfairlly damned him with faint praise.  The truth is I’d not finished his book and it really was well written and quite brilliant at the time. He certainly was erudite.  I’d wearied of marketting and saless, all that propaganda nonsense that passes as subtlety but irritates me in my advancing years. I realized I’d been unfair to Harari.  It was in the midst of Covid, being bludgeoned by misinformation and disinformation, lies and corruptions, Anitida uprising and Capitol hill mobs,  creating an overwheming stench when I picked Homo Sapiens up again. We quite well might be on the verge of something. War and Rumors of War.  Did Harari have an answer?

I was jealous of Harari, I realized.  It was clear in his thinking he knew something. With Rolling Stones singing Living in a Ghost Town, lockdowns and hysteria, I’d fallern to  reading westerns and erotic romance for escapism, binging watching Netflix tv. Animal Kingdom, the Crown, Tombstone, Flea Bag. It was getting me through the day.  So much despair and loss, depression and anxiety.  i’d just read Kate Lister’s a Curious History of Sex and could hardly put it down. it well research but also so wittingly written.  I considered Harrari more substantial.  He did make history appealling though like a Druidic Story teller he wove patterns with words.  He cast a spell.  I settled down to listen.  I am glad I did.

I was younger when I read the great omnibus reads and less opinionated and judgemental myself. I wouldn’t have noticed that when Harrari was critical of Christianity he didn’t mention Judaism and was almost gentle with Islam. He barely commented on Hinduism but almost sang the praises of Leonard Cohen’s Buddhism, his knowledge apparently deep yet almost superficial and very biased all the while he presented as unbiased in that deeply offensive way that the politically correct do. I kept asking who his audience was and realized he was writing to appease or appeal to his masters. Now who did he see these were I kept asking?  

Marx said Money is the God of the Jews. Harari certainly made a case for the religion of materialism and secularism.   I was half way through when I looked him up, finding he taught at the University of Jerusalem. I’d actually thought he was Persian at one point. I did though like how he included the Armenians and Georgians.  Later I’d really like how he brought in South America and Africa. He’d been focussing so much on ancient China and Europe. Yet his ideas were magical. Great swaths of data gathered and woven into this masterful tapestry.  

I actually grew to like him.  Halfway through the book I looked forward to reading it, not quite like a war thriller, or a Clancy.. He wasn’t Khalla or Coban. But there reaally was a Jurassic Park quality in the writing. He was truly brilliant. History as fiction. The whole notion that we have the imaginative scenarios and we prop them up with a whole lot of ritual. He gave us ancient history but he really got into his stride in modern times making sense of the Corprate power that toppled governments and the scientific advances that were so recent , mere hundreds of years or daring after  hundreds of thousands of caution.  I actually loved his explanation of exploration and colonialism and was delighted with his discussion of the ideas of religions and ideology, the confusion created by different words with similiar meanings.  He really was extremely erudite. 

I felt like I’d attended a lecture by a master. I’d signed up for a lecture by psychologist Jordan Peterson a year ago, cancelled by Covid, only because I’d loved  the way Peterson debated,more like a supreme court judge than an academic. I’d loved Steven Hicks lectures on philosophy yet here was this giant of literature and history, Harari,  entertaining me with his wit. He had a wealth of knowledge but his skill was selection.  

As I progressed I really did like his comments on behaviourist Harlow.  He mentioned Freud but didn’t give Victor Frankl his due though he was clearly a student of Seligman discussing happiness in modern times versus happines in medieval times. It was my area of expertise and I frankly thought he did a magnificent overview. Which is what he was doing with history. Overviews of economics, anthropology, culture, sociology, ethics and religions. I’d read Fields of Blood a marvellous work of history exploring whether religion or politics caused war.  There was the same selection bias and yet I couldn’t help but rememer the great talking head flick of all time, Dinner with Andre. The more I read Harari the more I felt like I was at a retreat with one of the spiritual masters, like Richard Rohr or Trungpa.   He told stories of facts like Jesus or the Dubliners. There was that quality of being given insights like the classic Spirituality of Imperfections gave to the wisdom teaching. More political and still with talk of war but nonetheless he included the bio engineering of a phosphorescent green bunny. He talked of the cyborg future and gave whole chapters  each of which could be a Ted’s talk on it’s own  

Crime overall is declining. War overall is declining. The life epectancy is increaing. Gigameth is a project of immortality. Science is religion.  Yet as different as life and death. There’s a novelty in the notion of today and yesterday, our perception of then so coloured by our immersion in now. Harari hints at this but doesn’t quite laugh at himself as one might imagine Kate Lister laughing at herself.  There’s a vanity to man and by the end of this great read I was actually amused by the human Harari.  He could admit to be lost as well as the next but there was an amusement to his predictament.  A reason for carrying on.  

I suppose I was arrogant when I first read Harrari, before Covid, before the disillusionment with politics and academics.  Yet I am so glad I picked him up after she said how much she liked him. It was in fact a gift of a read, an omnibus account of life, little weak on music and art but with a whole lot of the stuff that we learned with dates and numbers and names of self important people marketted by the powerful..  History is always written by the winners. Men but even nthe occasional woman gains  fame. Harari does well to mention Georgia, and talk of the little guys and gals suffering under the kings and queens, bankers and generals.   It was a serious work. There was a bit of tantalising porn for the intellectual, even some bits of Australian wankerism at times.

It didn’t leave me feeling like Waiting for Godot but again it gave me hope.  Slouching towards Bethlehem or Baghdad for that matter, Beijing or Washtington, London or Rio de Janeira I felt there was something special in a monkey sent to outer space. I suspect that Adams of Hitchker’s Guide to the Gaxay fame or Mr. Bean might well enjoy Harrari as much as Obama or Reagan. It might even appeal to a Saudi Prince though I doubt that Xi Jinping would care for it.  There are always those who read for dominance and would never like a DH Lawerence account of love.  Harari loves history, his subject and clearly us Homo Sapiens. That was what redeemed the work.  He is truly interested in all of us, the big guy and the little guy, the girls and the boys, the babies and the greats. It’s that kind of read. It was the Economist and New Yorker written with a view to the person who would like to listen to the BBC or watch PBS but not be above reading a People magazine waiting in line at the supermarket..  

Death Cafes

I heard on the radio of a new old idea. People are getting together for coffee to discuss death. It might sound macabre at first but it’s philosophically ancient and uplifting. In Medieval days there was even the notion of a 'good death'.  This was before 'physician assisted suicide'.  A 'good death' was about the completion of a 'good life' . This was before the age of amorality.  Relative truth was not a thing of the day and death was considered an absolute.
So many people live today ‘lives of quiet desperation’.  So much depends on our perspective.  The first path of the Noble Truth 8 fold path of Buddhism is 'right view.'  There is a certainty about the relativity of perspective. But there is also the perspective  of the future too.  No one knows.  The pseudoscientists and materialists ever loud as children would have you believe as they do.  But death has no simple answer and each view has it’s own unique reward and loss.
I believe in death as a time of transition.  There is ‘afterlife’ for me just as there is ‘morning after’ when I go to sleep. So far I’ve not ‘died in my sleep.’  Not that I know of.  Not that I would know either. This is 'belief'.  This is an 'idea'.  Even the great Houdini apparently didn't 'escape death' as he said he would.
The epistemology of knowing is itself frought with constant hazard.  Naturally knowing death, a purely private and subjective matter distinct from the public and objective event is too.  I’ve held the dying and felt the end of the body with relative certainty.  The works of Psychiatrist Dr. Moody about Near Death Phenomena and later works quoted by Neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander in Proof of Heaven even challenge the notion of the ‘time’ of death.  As physicians we once used the idea of the death of the heart and loss of pulse and EKG reading, but with EEG advances Brain Death, where available,  has been used as ‘best time of death’ practice.
This is a long way from the days when one felt air around the nostrils and if it wasn’t moving declared a person dead.  Fakirs and yogis long ago developed methods of slowing breathing and heart to the point of ‘appearing’ dead with the subsequent apparent miracle of reanimation.  However even today there are those who have ‘revived’ after being declared ‘brain dead’ and that certainly challenges our ‘cutting edge’ perceptions of the simple ‘timing’ of death.  Science continues to expand our knowledge of the ‘event phenomena’.
What counts most is whether one believes death is a permanent or temporary end.  Is consciousness tied to the body and brain. Is there instead as Socrates believed a distinct body and soul separation, the joining of which occurs in this life whereas death releases the prisoner soul to rise or travel on.  Neuroscientist Dr. Mario de Beuregaard in his book Spiritual Brain does a superb job of debunking the prevailing myths of consumer society and the propaganda of "he who has the most toys wins".  He studied Carmelite Nuns meditating with PET Scans and showed the extreme ecstatic capacity inherent in the process which defies the reductionist egotism of the ultimately fearful.
Time is even a working principle but something which studied more in depth becomes the thing of Einstien and the perception of the "now'.
The Mathematician philosopher Pascal postulated a gamblers approach to belief in god which might well apply to belief in afterlife.  He said that if there was no god and one believed in God there was indeed no loss. However if there was a God and one believed in God there was a potential considerable win.  Not believing in an infinite possibility would by Pascals reasoning be an overwhelming loss.  "Pascal’s Wager" has gone down in history as one of the simplest approaches to positive thinking.
It’s challenged however by the Neitziean Superman complex who would do acts in life for which they’d not want potential consequence in afterlife. The very idea of a relationship between present life and after life is a posit itself.  The Superman who makes his own rules and lives without the restraint of the world might still be hampered by the ‘still small voice’ which somehow disturbs the sleep of the Caligula’s of the world.  Addicts and alcoholics who have done ‘monstrous’ things and tried to ‘numb’ themselves and overcome the ‘anxiety’ and ‘insomnia’ and ‘nightmares’ which accompany the obscene and offensive, don’t seem to find enough ‘sedation’ and seem haunted desperately desiring a subjective certain end to their own miserable existence. It’s not surprising that many world leaders even today involve themselves in philanthropy in later life not just for tax havens but rather to expiate guilt about earlier transgressions.  The Mob was notorious for it’s support of children’s hospitals.
Death being an end would appeal most to those most guilty whereas those most worthy might well have nothing to fear of an afterlife. Prevailing theories commonly might reflect the morality of an individual as much as unbiased observation.
Certainly world leaders and the elite might fear the afterlife and hoarding wealth this life seek immortality by any medical means.  The advances in stem cell research and body part transplants is not driven by the young as much as it is by the old and wealthy whose behaviour might in this life time be considered suspect.  They do not seem to wish to meet their maker quickly in the eyes of those who lack wealth or such choice.
Amazing Grace, the great testimony, written by a hardened slave dealer contains the memorable phrase, "I once was lost but now I”m found.'  The end of life 'conversion' is so common as to be a thing of movies and stories.
 The young have been given visions of glory and virgins with death to entice them to do the will of the old who cling to life fearing death.  Do they know more or by the way that they lived missed out on the life that sees some walk peacefully to their ends as if fulfilled. Thomas wrote the great poem for his father, "do not go gentle into that still night."  
How one lives superficially, fearfully or in depth, passionately, might well ‘fill’ one with respect to life that one is ‘ready’ for death whereas another might be ‘frantic’ and ‘lost’ at the prospect.  So many people live lives like ‘happy cabbages’ not ‘aware’ and seemingly distracted repeatedly say before death ‘if I’d only known”.
Jesus taught ‘be watchful’.  His parable of keeping the lamps lit speaks to the same message as the Buddha's which was to "be awake" .  Today's image of the 'zombie " is a contrast to the spiritual direction of the wisdom teachers.  Richard Rohr describes the wisdom fathers as generally teaching that this world is one of people asleep, sleep walker.   Dr. Scott Peck described it as a kindergarten for the soul.
What metaphor rules ones life, i.e. that life is a journey, a bowl of cherries, a place of suffering, a waiting for Godot, whatever,  defines the ultimate meaning one gives to death and may well create the nature of existence itself. The Secret and the Law of Attraction suggests that there comes a time where our very thoughts manifest our actual reality. This isn’t necessarily so or without discipline of mind but might well be an explanation for death.  Is one ever ‘ready’ for death.
Talking with a WWI vet who survived the trenches and countless opportunities for death, he told me once quite simply, " we all knew ’the bullet must have our name on it.'”  There’s the whole issue of ‘freewill versus fate’. The shallow 21st century opportunist speaks eloquently of genetics and ‘determinism’ but cranks out ‘selfies’ like the next one. The 'selfie' is the ultimate facile seeking of some form of timelessness or immortality.
The idea that ‘no praise, and no blame’ goes with fate is alien to this millennial culture which wants ‘all praise, and no blame’ no different from my OO7 culture which wanted a ‘license’ to kill because we all have ‘freedom’ to kill but don’t wish the ‘consequences’ that come with 'freedom'.  Death is a consequence.  Hence the success of the insurance agencies and all the silliness of individuals to sacrifice so many rights and freedoms for ‘safety’ as an ultimately illusory goal.
Life is temporal.
But is death different?  Again is it temporal or permanent?
I applaud the return of ‘death cafes’ . Can one truly celebrate life without discussion of death.  The whole cultural art forms of the zombie, vampire and the living dead suggest we cannot.  Might we not in kind embrace the angels if we shed some light on death rather than leave it to the nether regions.

A Week of Worry in the Cloud of Unknowing

If one has to whine, worry and kafetch one should be a master of it. To demonstrate professional capacity in this regard I have chosen to review the week for those who are mere amateurs at complaining and moaning and doom saying.
1) We are all going to die.  This temporal physical slow energy moving mass life is terminal.  No matter what vegetarian gluten free probiotic diet you ascribe to you will still die.  It will be like falling asleep and if you believe you will most likely wake up in a new life. If you don’t believe then this may be all you get.  If you are guilty then the laws of karma may well apply to those believers in after life who by their thoughts and actions want a personal hell.  I don’t think anyone can tell you what you’re going to get.  There’s no religion that has certain vision of the future.  I loved the book, “Cloud of Unknowing’.  It’s a mystery.  But I believe.  I also believe that it will be good, this afterlife journey.  I know it’s easy to see the negatives and that all children know when things are crap and cry and whine and whimper and sometimes take the fetal position. While this is happening the adults in the immediate vicinity are addressing the crap and trying to make the best of a bad lot.  This has been going on for 80,000 plus years from when our worst fear were large cats and thugs to today when it’s still environmental dangers including occasional large cats escaped from zoos and thugs.  That said most cats are small and most people are fairly good.  Otherwise we wouldn’t have survived on this planet en mass and risen to be the prime protagonist.
2) Aliens have landed. They may be controlling the minds of our politicians.  They may be the ultra rich people no one sees. They may be Saudi, Chinese or American.  They no doubt have stealth technology to conceal their vampire like features or their second heads. They may be nanodes in our intestinal tracks.  They may be cats.  Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson were likely aliens.  Miley Cyrus is definitely an alien and Justin Beiber is a wannabe alien.  They may or may not be friendly. They may indeed be computer keyboards that take their energy from our fingertips.  They are not going to do what Hollywood says.  Hollywood is a disinformation centre.
3) Vaccines cured the world of smallpox.  Small pox killed a half million annually going back to 10,000 BC.  Probably killed more people than all the wars put together.  Medical science has reduced suffering and extended life.  Science has contributed to allowing 8 billion people to live on a planet that was thought to be over crowded when Columbus left Europe in 1692.  I am a scientist. I’m also an artist. I’m also a minister of divinity.  You can believe in God and Science and Art and that’s okay because it just makes you trinitarian.
4) Feminists are sexist.
5)  Racism is an attack on white people. White people are dominant. When Blacks are dominant we get to call them racist.  You can only call other people racists. Racists never admit to being racists.  Except me, I’m freckled. I’m racist against white, and brown and black and yellow and red. Spotted people united. Throw off your chains.  Fight for your fellow spotted folk!!  Our first instinct is survival and our next is to form a group of ‘us’.  This is family then it’s a trash euro american biker gang in the west or an eastern militarist junta gang in the east.  Guns and sex and drugs are the principal money makers in the world.  Food and commodity transfers are basic and rather boring in general compared to the sexiness and excitement in the sale of guns, sex slave and mood altering drugs.  There is white collar crime and blue collar crime.  There are white collar gangs and blue collar gangs.  Much of the confusion in the world is comparing apples to oranges.
6) Last week the Chinese market crashed.  I believe that it didn’t founder as much as the Western world’s did a few years back because the bankers are learning how to manage the mass amounts of money that have surpassed any previous time in history. As an analogy when the world had TNT it was initially surprised but could handle it in time but then the Atom Bomb came and there was a stiff learning curve to management of nuclear weapons. We’re learning how to handle biological weapons of mass destruction, gene manipulation, and all manner of skyrocketing hyper accelerated learning. The bankers were never the brightest in the group. Most people who go into money management are pedestrian. Salesman, like those on commodity floors, they’re the nutbars. I’ve seen salesman selling family members overseas. They’re sell anything. Salesman and gamblers are two sides of the same coin. They’re the rabbits.  They're pushing the edge everywhere.  By contrast bankers and accountants are the tortoises.  I think it’s simply possible that the whole bank thing got a head of them like nuclear weapons got ahead of the equal slow witted generals.
Now it’s also possible that diabolical demon infested bankers, people with the mentality of the media ascribed to Bush and Clinton equally , the way the media describes these otherwise mediocre entertainers in the political circuit, that these kind of folks, learned how to steal obscene amounts of money from the world collectively with truly ugly evil devices for which God and Murphy will castrate the sons of bitches and all their putrid insectoid spawn because they think they got away with it. Evil loses, goodness wins.  In the long run.  That’s why psychopaths like to deny the afterlife.  Sprinters always want to win the race in the short run.  The life expectancy of assholes is decades less than the life expectancy of the mediocre.   The assholes in the east are the Fanny Mae and Goldman Sachs groups.  Better still, the unnamed folk jealous.  Sjealoo having done this and almost got away with it but got sort of caught by excessive gouging, they made the the imitative Chinese Totalitarian dictators jealous. Known for their collective stupidity and lack of innovation as communists the world over are, however having great chameleon lizards skills ,and the brain of a thieving squirrel they stole the ideas from the west.  Their slut girlfriends wanted more cocaine and jewelry. And paranoid they want bigger guns and better security systems.  So they are trying to steal mass amounts of money by manipulating their stock exchange  for personal benefit without getting caught.
It’s really matter of perception.
7) I’m from Vancouver, British Columbia Canada.  The Vancouver Stock Exchange lost it’s license because the Vancouver businessmen were worse than Goldman Sacks and the Chinese military put together. . Their low level of scummyness is unprecedented in the world. I just mention that because I wouldn’t want to point fingers without admitting that my city and province and country are the greatest of all scoundrels when it comes to white collar crime.
8) The Chinese market stabilized but again we were collectively threatened by the government controlled mainstream media with economic poverty.  This threat is pre election here in Canada and Greece remains our object lesson. The ’System” requires there to be a lot of really ugly losers and a very few very beautiful winners.  The losers can’t afford augmentation mammoplasty, penile reconstruction and liposuction and face lifts.  That’s all that makes the rich look good.  Lots of expensive medicine. And Betty Ford clinics.  By contrast the poor are given places to shoot up heroin, drug pubs, that don’t interfere in the profit of the blue collar gangs, like the Hells Angels.

9) Anyone can be cynical.  Nihilism is simply weak thinking.  It takes genius and adulthood to remain happy in face of dying daily.
10) We are on a planet spinning around a sun in the armpit of a distant galaxy and don’t even know where we are except by some kind of relative consideration. There are no absolutes. Except maybe God.  But most peoples God is too small. So it’s a mini me God and not the absolute God.
11) My job is to maximize my pleasure and joy in life without directly harming others.  I’m not concerned about all the urban activists getting on about big things like Climate Change  and Montsanto or oil spills or highways or television.  These are adolescent considerations. Adolescents know as well as mainstream media how to solve all the world’s problems but they have hemorrhoids and because of their hemorrhoids makes the world around them seem shitty.  They can’t wipe their butts clean.  Consequently they have a skewed outlook on the world and are always looking for someone else to blame.  Preferably a corporation or another country or an ideology.  They carry a stinky smell about them.
12) I don’t like abortions.  I don’t like radical feminists because most of those I’ve known have been monsters of the likes of Eva Brawn. I believe radical feminists hate men and lack a sense of humour and are the cause of so much of the world’s political problems these last decades. By contrast I love women and I have even admired Hilliary Clinton at times despite her man aping ways. Warren by contrast is one smart lady. But then I loved my mother and my mother and father together were an economic unit.  Individualism is a ‘construct’ that allows ‘corporations’ before the horrendously incestuous pedophilic laws to maintain me and a multi million company are equal except I can’t afford a lawyer.  And as the judges are only there to ensure that the people in power remain in power I at most can hope for crumbs.  The rich are above sexism and racism and only interested in money and power. These ‘divisiions’ of “political correctness’ better called ‘social communism’ have ensured that the courts can at any time arrest someone if they are at any time a real threat to the status quo.  All the activists who whine and complain are the ‘paid government critics’.  If a person is telling the truth in our society they will have been in jail or a psychiatric asylum or bankrupt unless they are Warren Buffet or Soros and they can ‘make whatever truth they want’ because the media is the spoke engine for the powerful.
Ultimately I have to ask my self the question am I really talking about this plane of existence or arguing with God.  Is God , the all powerful, to be loved  or feared.  Is religion the opiate of the masses or is politics the true opiate and spirituality the salvation that stupid wrong Marx simply couldn’t see because he hated Isaiah and Moses so much.  Identification with the Aggressor has always been a real bitch for the Jews. Thanks to Freud we know about identification with the aggressor and I may well worship God because She’s been such a bitch putting me in this ‘life of suffering’.
Anxiety is a measure of my distance from God. And if I see God as evil then I will see the biggest government and biggest corporation and the wealthiest as evil.  But I’m not at the bottom of the food chain. There are those below me and as I see those above me so those below me will likely see me because "as above so below".  So the paranoid fears those above and below.  The activist believes naively that they are representing the proletariat as they fight the czar or warlords or modern corporations. The rebels have been worse than those they deposed.  I’m just trying to get through this day.  No bombs have fallen on my head but I’ve heard about bombs falling on peoples heads all my life. I have been bullied and extorted by the media with news that is chosen to create the maximum fear and subservience in me and those around me.
Meanwhile I’m living in the world at one of the greatest times of innovation and progress with people living, the billions more on the planet in relative wealth and for decades longer than their forebears, with really neat love stories and incredible science fiction type toys. We’ve motorized wheel chairs which no one had for 99% of the life of man on this planet. Last week they developed a bionic eye for those who suffer from macular degeneration.  We’re living in  a sacred and amazing world.   But I must take my head out of my ass to celebrate the wonder of my fellow man and creation. I am so thankful for this moment being here, witness to this all.
Now that is how a professional whines, moans and kafetches after a week of worry.    

Moscow Morning Reflections

If anyone had asked me truthfully what I thought Moscow would be like, I’d have said the buildings would be more utilitarian and block like rather than the ornamentally crafted sculptured architecture that draws from Greece and Rome and French eras in design. I found one sculpture worn and old on a side of a heavy feeling building of workers looking to the sky with their arms upraised. State idealism enforced by design.  I remembered an exhibit of Soviet paintings I saw in Canada being toured around the world. All the plump and hearty looking peasants had the happy looks of the mentally retarded.  Everyone was ‘brain washed’ with that look only ‘cult’ followers about to take their ‘coolaid death drink’ might have.  I had so long heard how all opposition was removed.
Communism was Aetheism’s first political expression as the western world of mixed capitalism and socialism was Christianity’s political expression.  Aetheists had killed more millions in a hundred years than theists collectively had killed in thousands.  I was truly afraid of the forces of fear and conformity that this killing of ones own people represented. Even today I am made thoroughly anxious by American imprisonment of so many of its citizens competing mildly with the history of the Gulag. But these aren’t work camps or Auschwitz but still, though far removed from outright death, worrying nonetheless. No people is free from the collective inanities that have plagued the lowest and highest of civilizations. The very elite of Europe, sophisticated and privileged beyond record gave us WWI and Gallipoli. Mass slaughter houses for the young.
I was a member of Physicians for Social Responsibility and International Physicians against Nuclear War back when I belonged to the Canadian Civil Rights Association and Psychiatrists Against Political Abuse of Psychiatry. Yet I saw the worst abuses of psychiatry and politics in my home town and thought organizations were coopted when they refused to look inward as well as outward.  The same is true in military today where ‘friendly fire’ accounts for as many deaths and ‘enemy fire’ yet the paranoids always want to look outward and ignore the enemy within.  So more and more I’ve withdrawn from the insanity of those in politics about, less quick to judge, more respectful of snakes and anthills.  A friend knowing me gave me a lapel pin that said, “beware of stupid people in groups’.  One step ahead of the crowd you are a leader, two steps ahead, a martyr.
I enjoy the churches here.  A history of idealism weighted with politics and yet producing the greatest art of all times. I enjoy looking through the icons to the faces of hope twisted by gravity and real politics.  There are young everywhere and I am thankful for their enthusiasm, even more their laughter. Yet in the church, I see the outward and inner search for meaning in an apparently meaningless world. The only real shrine is the grocery store where ever one goes.  The frivolous is found in the fashion boutiques.  People eat, drink, sleep and mate then live the distractions of children until they can once again face their own irrelevance saved from thinking by the outward demands of their gods on earth, work, children, family, friends. Today these manifest in computers, cars and Facebook.
I was not prepared for all the corporate world fashion and food cultures to be so prominent here in Moscow. I have seen their homogenization the world over.  They were most evident in the Galleria of the Northern Mariana Islands.     Chanel, MacDonalds, Japanese chains, the GUM mall right on Red Square, Tiffany’s,  Salvatore, all the evidence of international corporate efficiency and distributions. These are the lucky charms of the jet setter culture.
In the time of St. Paul, the tent maker, it was no doubt the fabric of your tent and especially one made by that master craftsman artist, “Saul, no Paul, Paul of Tarsis?” “ I  can give you the name of my hair dresser too.  He goes on about this new religion ‘one world religion’, or was it Paul who does that. They’re both very good at what they do. I wouldn’t listen to what they say. Servants are always going on about this and that.”
The motorcycles are Kawazaki, BMW, Honda and Vespas but I even saw a Harley Davidson.  Seeing my own motorcycle represented, despite the immanence of the Germans I felt that Russians did have taste. We always think people who share our tastes, have ’taste’.  I’d expected to see more local Russian motorcycles.  I’d owned a Russian, if only because Canada is more known for its body armour that its getaway vehicles. We’re a stoic slow to mobilize people more defensive in our hockey game than some of the more offensive nations.   My favourite hockey memories of all time have been games between the Canadians and Russians.  There was so much evidence of skill and strategy rather than the all too common brash and brawn.
I had  expected more local manufacturers. I appreciate the unique and delightful  local foods I’ve savoured.  I’ve very much enjoyed  startling touches of ingenuity of dress the Moscow women add to old universal motifs of clothing.  A Moscow woman at night in a ‘little black affair’ does wonders with silk and gold accessories and the almost universal 4 inch heeled even shoes that will ensure podiatrists years of future business.   There is so much creativity and novelty here.   I’d actually expected more  conformity.  The Russia of my youth was boring to say the least.  There was so much that was  grim.  I guess I expected more military presence, fewer long haired men, more women weightlifters on steroids,  maybe a  tank or two in the streets.  it’s so easy to forget that Troudeau in my very own Canada had tanks deployed in our cities as every intellectual secretly desires.   There is an element of cold war in the rhetoric.  Yet today the war is economic and oil.  Ideology is trumped by Samsung phones and Peugeot. It’s really hard to imagine that I was checking the Canadian ’travel bulletins’ to see if it was ’safe’ to travel to Moscow given the international posturing and sable rattling going on amongst the world leaders. Yet, there has always been ‘war and rumours of war’.  I’m so glad I came.  
I am bored nearly to tears to hear the Quebec white hairs talk of “Separatism’ still.  Now the radical Feminists in my country are demanding equal distribution by gender.  There must be an equal number of women on every board and physicists must wear skirts whether they are male or female if they expect to get tenure anymore.  Tokenism has replaced meritocracy and if you have a cousin who is stupid as toast but the right ‘flavour of the month’ then they can be  tomorrows brain surgeon without any demand for training or irritating consideration of such irrelevant details as old fashioned ‘competence’.   Meanwhile the racists demand equal distribution by race. No one cares anymore if anyone can do anything just so long as they ’spout’ the right slogans.  Canada is more communist today than Russia was perhaps at its worst and more and more people, especially men, are being shunted off in Canada for ‘political correctness re education.”   Meanwhile the rich and powerful get richer and more powerful encouraging  the divisionary  tribalism fueled by anyone who can profit by promissory materialism and the idea of ’symbolic specialness’.  Denial reigns all over as we collectively forget about death and disease and hope the latest MRI will be available soon for a whole new range of Selfies. Euthanasia is fine just so long as we can share it on Facebook. We deal with our anxiety about insignificance in Andy Warhol 20 minitism. I confess, quietly of course, that I prefer the Bible to the Kardashian Twins and American Reality TV.
I see no difference here in the people and the world as if all has gone ‘global’ and ‘local’ is lost in the ‘one world order’ some hybrid communist capitalist hegemony of corporate power and elite family wealth.  All is so far beyond my pay grade.   I love that I can enjoy a boat ride down a Moscow canal looking at exotic sights in the company of a beautiful girl.  Sufficient is this day.  I am reminded of Arjuna in Bhagadvagita who says to Krishna that it is  his own family that is fighting on either side in this war.  He knows not what to do. Krishna responds that there will always be war but the question is not which side to join but rather whether to participate or not.
So many young people and old are alienated today.  They are lost in a variety of addictions, such a variety of choices. We are increasingly facing the hazards of abundance while the old people still struggle from a position of scarcity . People die of ‘lifestyle’ diseases more than starvation.  Everywhere there are ‘food banks’ when more and more we need the Third World skinnies to offer international ‘work aid’ for western fatties.  I am aware of my own middle age ponch so at home in America whereas here, obesity is present, it’s not as ubiquitous as mid west America.  Fast food has yet to be the scourge but mostly it’s the everywhere present smoking that shortens the local life while maintaining the appearance of health. Where once there was only politics or soccer,  there is so much variety. Perhaps in future wars people will fight over which video game is dominate. It’s amazing we have been able as a species to accommodate PC and Apple operating systems.  This gives me hope.
 I remember hearing that Communist stores had bare shelves because central planning in 5 year intellectual ‘bits’ could not keep up with the winds of change.  Today that now is dealt with by ‘on line’ shopping and on demand delivery and production.  Times have changed but not as one would think, rather from years to minutes, seconds to nano seconds. There are those on the margins but in the centre there is light speed.  The rat race is now a race of great danes and panthers.  One might think the lumbering bear and lofty eagle just couldn’t keep up with the anonymous hare.
I saw horses, sabres and rifles in the Kremlin today.  I love the ancient display.  I reflected how Churchill rode a horse into Sudan and later faced German unmanned missiles shot across the canal. It is an age of smart guns and smart drones and star wars.
But all this is still  a side show to the universal call of spring. Romance was so evident last evening in Red Square.  Couples walked hand in hand, stopping openly to embrace and kiss. They were surprisingly interested in what each other saying, completely unaware that their very attentiveness was driven by reproductive hormones.  We cry ‘freedom’ when we are most enslaved by biological urges.  I noticed a lack of public washrooms and made a point of remembering as my now deceased aunt once said, “never miss the opportunity to use a washroom when you see one.”   Older I’m more amused today than ever I was in my life before. I have  a comic strip representation running through my mind today so much more appreciative of tragicomedy where once there was only the seriousness of tragedy.    People who cannot laugh are social explosions looking for an excuse for drama.  I was once considered an “intellectual’ and view those days the same as when I was merely drunk on red wine.  There’s even more humility in the latter than the former intoxication.
Life is a muddle and may always have been.  The more certain I am the more aware of uncertainty I become.  There is such diversity now that perhaps we are saved by the multiplicity.  Political writers have said that the old dichotomy is splitting into a new regionalism.  I could not overlook the whiteness of this place. The brown face so rare, the yellow skin quite absent compared to my own Hongcouver Canada. .  I heard that gypsies were a concern and thought of our own “Occupy Movements’.  I was a hippy myself for a summer and wore flowers in my hair in the streets of San Francisco. But we were all about love and shouted ‘make peace not war’. Activism today is so much more about anger and selfies.
I don’t know really.. There is always only vagueness. The Moscow I envisioned was gone perhaps with the fall of the Berlin Wall. America itself died in a way when it lost the love hate romance it had with it’s drab dance partner of so many years.  There is so little evidence of the Moscow we still hear of in our news still.  Yet we hear of military rule in Thailand and millions in the street at the same time a friend has sent me a picture of himself and other I know enjoying their time in a Thailand beach village apparently unaffected by the ‘colour coded movements raging in the media and the cities always so easily full of themselves while country folk would rather picnic more often than not.  “Chill”.
Personally, culturally, socially, fashionably this could be another fashionable neighbourhood in a far eastern Canada.  Somewhere even more different than Quebec.  Russia is just another place in that sense  where they have a funny way of talking and a particularly difficult alphabet.   I just learned the Ethiopians have their own alphabet as well.  I was a little irritated when studying Hebrew I had to learn another alphabet and was particularly incensed by the Greeks when I rented a car and found that their traffic signs were all equally illegible.  How dare people not consult me on such a basic matter as alphabet. Don’t they appreciate that while I learned latin, english, french and some spanish I’m tired after all the science and medicine and legalese and beaurocratese I’ve had to learn that others would think not to include me in their very formation of letters and sounds.   I feel I can tolerate diversity a lot but alphabets are just going too far for me personally.  I want to draw a line , put my foot down, surrender, scream I give up. I need the babble fish now from that classic Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
Each person has their breaking point.  It was the same in Greece where I was irritated that words didn’t sound at all the way I thought they looked. It’s at the level of alphabet one approaches the rabbit hole of Alice in Wonderland. There is this vast illusion in ‘one world order’ and superficial similarities that overlooks the vast differences that can only be held together by a vast measure of love, maturity and tolerance.  I am reminded of a tourist I met in Germany frustrated by ‘currency’ shouting at a bank teller, “I don’t want any more of this coloured money, give me the real green stuff.” I thought he was an ‘ugly american’ but later learned he was just an overwhelmed Canadian from Toronto on the last leg of a many month travel binge thorough Europe.  I find myself that the desires of the Hobbit are increasingly my own despite the many adventures I have had and the spiritual travels I’ve had with my own Gandolf.  I miss smoking a pipe but still enjoy putting my feet up in my own home after I have closed the days.  I look forward to being reunited with my little dog yet I am only days into this differences and alieness. I really think that indoor plumbing, fresh water, clean air, and electricity are under appreciated.
Here the wifi has been intermittent.  I’m mildly irritated by the lack of constant coverage globally with ‘space age’ technology.  Does no one consider me.  I want my WIFI now.  I don’t want to walk next door  to the WIFI cafe.  Really, Beam me up Scotty!  I  take so much for granted and overlook the heated shower I have every day.
Each place has struggled to improve the lot of life for its individuals. This history has shown in it’s superb museums the world over. This desire for improvements  has been associated with war and all its varied tools, the development of increasing creature comforts from hot springs to engraved hair brushes, intellectual achievements in books and art and scientific and technological advances in transportation and construction and search for meaning in churches where questions of contemplation are engaged. There are libraries and factories the world over. I always feel it is a good place where there are more libraries than arsenals.
I love that this is the centre of empire with so much of the highest achievements apparent. Each power centre, all the empires of the world over have their undercarriage of slavery and addiction , but they also have their glorious works of human endeavour, their architectural wonders, their high speed public transport, their space era technologies.  I’ve been to Crete, Athens, Jerusalem, Rome, all the major cities of Europe, Bombay, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Mexico City, and London and Washington, following the development of dominance through chariots and cannon and calvary and naval and ultimate air power and then space age communication and satellite surveillance increasingly in an age of robots and drones.  It’s an amazing history of external development.  This is one of those greatest of great achievements and places where people came together in common for purpose only to later reflect and change direction, always slouching towards bethlehem, always moving closer to perfection whatever that might be.  It was still thousands of years ago that the world over the greatests nations concluded that the ‘golden rule’ was ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’.  Jesus added ‘pluck the log out of your own eye before trying to take the sliver out of your neighbours.”  Not that anyone listens so each generations we learn again what the previous one knew, and each empire begets another and that one learns all over again. Only now the years are nano seconds.
I am humbled here. That is good.  I’m away from the routines that dictate my life. I’m nobody among strangers.  I only must guard my passport, wallet and knapsack, with computer, iPhone and satellite phone.  I’m reduced to minimalist concerns. There’s a lightness of being. I’m Joni Mitchell’s “Free Man in Paris’. Here, in Moscow,  the  word freedom comes from a different alphabet.    




 

Underground Solution to Global Warming, Environment Change and Population

All the concerns of the ‘doom saying’ environmentalists and population explosion propagandists can be solved by admitting the principal ‘problem’ is the ‘above ground cities’.
I was recently called a ‘denier’ by a  colleague scientist and was annoyed.  I don’t deny the need for change on earth but I do deny the validity of any of the silly and short sighted expensive and usually self serving solutions presented today by urban academic activist environmentalists.  They are almost all critics who live and work in the city or university and their solutions usually involve everyone else, not themselves, making the first sacrifice.  I don’t like that.
It’s is a simple fact that administration and government are hundreds of years behind the advances of scientists and science.  The lack of education of the masses is despicable.  The evidence of the mass stupidity of the planet is the nature of political debates and the presentations of the media especially the ‘talking heads’ portions.  The news commentaries are little better than the sports commentaries and now the weather man has rebranded himself as an environmentalists so we’ve yet another ‘entertainment’ device masquerading as intelligence.
In the quiet north, not the vocal south, people have been increasingly building their cities underground to solve the problems of wasteful heating and harsh environment.
The greatest risk to the planet would be a solar flare.  Skip the need for bunkers when we all felt a Superpower temper tantrum would incinerate us.
The technology is available for building mines and oil wells and amazing underground cities of the likes that Buckminister Fuller among others have envisioned for oceans and seas and lakes. Our mining engineers, the trolls of Texas, and diggers of the north, have been honing their skills in search for gold and oil. It's time to put these tracking folk to a true test.  Have them build holes to house cities.
There is room on the planet for billions more even without sending the young explorers off the planet (Columbus et al did it) leaving the ‘known’ world and going interplanetary and intergalactic.  The potential and hope for human expansion is unlimited no matter how the fearful and angry would "deny' it.  L'Chaim.  Life!!  To be or not to be!
The problem though is right now we have parking lots and roads and cities on our very very best market garden, forest, pasture land.  Where I live in Vancouver, all the best farm land and forest land of the lower mainland is now utilized for urban housing, mostly of bureaucrats and executives and office buildings all of which could be better placed underground.
There is technology today for light and air shafts and wonderful underground living even a politician would find acceptable. It is far superior to the living space on the space station that Colonel Hadfield thrived in.  Underground dwelling is not a space station. It's indeed back to our roots. We began as cave dwellers.
Our ‘hot house gas’ problem would be solved with this highly ‘green’ solution.  Put MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Yale, and all the newer universities underground.  I think there's a place for saving Oxford, already a mental museum, and sites like Jerusalem but Tel Aviv can go underground as could Cambridge.  Build a forest onto these.  Leave the White House and Lincoln Monument but put the Pentagon and all the office buildings and even the museums underground.  The Kennedy Centre's acoustics would improve underground.  
In Old England , the ‘commons’ was the area where everyone could use the ‘wilderness’ space above ground for whatever.  Instead of Central Park being a few blocks of space in miles of above ground buildings of New York,  there would be a few building and miles of Central Park.
To achieve this end, we’d simply require that no new buildings above ground be accepted in urban areas.  Every new complex would have to be underground and a forest and pastureland or commons above land would be incorporated into the city planning.  We have various city ordnances, like nuclear weapons free zones, or the ‘bike lanes of Vancouver’.  So what’s wrong with ‘no above ground building’.  No ‘sky scrapers’.  And when sky scrapers come down, a 20 or 40 story underground development goes in.  Even if we replaced the 2 and 3 level above ground accommodations with 3 or 4 level below ground accommodation the capacity of the city would multiply exponentially.
Further, all existing ‘parking lots’ would be required to have trees planted around them turning this horrible eyesore and waste into a marvellous solution, until they were placed underground and surrounded by mushroom farms.  Joni Mitchell’s song, “they paved paradise and put up a parking lot’ would be history.
No more sky rails but underground subways everywhere.   Subways built with the consideration of earthquakes and tsunamis if we really are concerned about ‘climate change’.
From this day forth, I will not listen to a ‘environmentalist’ who hasn’t converted his urban high rise office or academic building with a ‘view’ ,into a basement suite. Everyone should boycott above ground environmentalists and "deny" listening to any 'weatherman' (rebranded environmentalist) if he is not broadcasting from below ground with free range chickens running above his head.
People living in basement suites today are the true saints and heroes..  Rural dwellers also to be applauded.
Once the city becomes pasture and farmland the cost of transporting all the food from the hinterland to these obese consumer ‘critics’ would be solved. They’d get their ‘ greens’ and euthanasia fanatics hankering after 'solyent greens' would be silenced.
Even space aliens would be confounded by this beautiful planet, it's cities fully camouflaged with forest and farm lands,  without the horrible acne infestation above ground cities and suburbs. Ban the above ground urbanites and suburbanites!!!

All those people who have done horrible damage to the planet and planetary resources so they could get a ‘view’ , so their apartments and offices could sit on ‘prime real-estate’ where a farm belonged or a sheep herd,  would no longer go to environmentalist hell. Instead of shovelling shit they could shovel the earth and build a home for themselves rather than continuing to proselytize doom and gloom.  Each of us is dying but the human race has never been more alive. The world's future has never been brighter if we could only get bankers to get their heads down where their asses are and wake to the earth's potential.

And those in LA and New York and Paris and Madrid would only have to come to Winnipeg or Edmonton to learn how to live ‘naturally’ with true 'respect' for the environment.

I love David Suzuki for all he has done for Vancouver, creating jobs and building an empire but I’m not going to listen to another word until he puts his money where his mouth is and moves into a basement suite.  It’s hard to believe, but in contrast to the evolutionary advanced Edmontonians there are,  in supposedly hip and green Vancouver,  worse in Seattle and San Francisco,  actual houses that don't even have a basement.  What a horrible self centred waste. I'm not saying the owners of these obscenities should be lined up and shot ,but I do think that all houses without basements should be the first to be bull dozed to make room for the underground future.

9-11 was a wake up call. The era of the skyscraper is over. As the great poet writer of Ironjohn said , the skyscraper was the final epitome of patriarchy, it’s time for the true ‘womb’ like experience of the safe secure ,environmentally respectful , ecologically advanced underground city with the potential of countless billions more living in earth. As spiritualists have been telling us all along. The answer is 'within'. The present day womb like shopping mall may as well be underground for all the light it sheds.

Urban and suburban above ground dwellers, especially the bureaucrats, executives and academics must change in face of this concern for the environment.  They must set an example by giving up the high rise executive offices, haciendas, dachas and above ground mansions with swimming pools.

The first tax should be on executive suites.  Basement dwellers should be awarded compensation for their adventurous demonstration to their lesser evolved suburbanites that underground living is good for the human race. It has long spawned students and artists and the greatest creative minds.  When people, have risen with the Peter Principle, they have usually been given higher and higher offices where there are more and more like  ‘air heads’.  They have all manner of power but rarely think with the gravity and genius those do who live in basement suites.

Mostly we need the universities and government buildings to be buried to save the planet. Free range chickens, goat herds, vegetable lots, forests,and cows where campuses, government offices and parking lots once were.

Brain, Mind, Soul, and Self

There is a 'reductionism' a foot which says that we are merely our brains. We are the neurosynapses and the chemical reactions of bits of neurotissue.
The difficulty with 'reductionism' is it's so appealing to the lazy, perverse and stupid.  It denies 'reality' and is fundamentally psychotic but it's happy as only a good cabbage can be.  Dumb down all messages and they appeal to the masses. The oldest propaganda is 'reductionism'.
The brain is a truly amazing organ.  Lizards have them and the lizard brain manages eating, sleeping, fighting and fornicating all with very rudimentary capacity.  The functions of the lizard brain are well demonstrated in the range of 98% by computer programs.  Even mammalian rat brains can be reduced to fight or flight, reproduction and pleasure seeking, pain avoidance.  Similiarly computer programs can match most of what rats might do.  But rats and monkeys and higher animals aren't so 'simple' as we might think. Every day we learn of vaster implications of the minds of monkeys in grioups and dolphins and whales.  Who would have guessed the profound power and complexity of whale communication and 'song'.
How does utilitarian reductionism explain the 'art' of animals and the 'play' of advanced life forms, let alone the genius of man.
Keep it simple, stupid can so easily become Keep it Stupid, simpleton.  We believe our own explanations because rationalization and intellectualization likes to winnow away conflicting arguments and focus on the 'evidence' that supports a 'limited' perspective.  We overlook the 'whole' for the parts.
So here we are with brains that neuroscience now shows has as many neurons as imaginable with an infinitely higher number of connections between these neurons.  These interconnections include an on and off and slow or fast switch to each of them.  Couple this with the idea of anatomy where we learn that there are indeed 'areas' of the brain where mostly certain things happen.  Unfortunately for the reductionist the evidence is now overriding that this is like saying that French people are in France without considering all the French people that exist around the world. Add to this the idea of neuroplasty and we see that the brain, say 'feeling disgusted about something' can have that located in a 'broca' geographical location but if there is damage to that location, or just profundity,  then the 'function' of 'feeing disgusted about something' may be outsourced to another area.
A 16 year old who lost half his brain, by 25 was functionally normally as the heterogeneity of the rest of his brain took over the lost functions previously lateralized.  This is not as easily done, sadly, for the old brain which has been 'pruned' by age and choice.  The capacity exists which is why the future holds such promise for stem cell research and regenerative cures.
Now the brain is further a soup of hormones, proteins and sugars.  The overall functioning of any part of the brain is superbly modulated by the master chefs 'sauce' that surrounds and permeates all aspects of the brain.  Amazing, isn't it?  Truly miraculous!
The potentiality of this 'creation' is so astounding that knowing the exact time of 'big bang' from physics and the actual length of man's existence on earth we can with certaintly say that 'evolution' by all known explanations could not possibly in the time allotted have created as much as the 'idea' of humanity let alone the extraordinary complexity and synchronicity of the brain.
Just as there are fixed geographical anatomical areas and neuropathways with chemical communications at synapses modulated by the soup of  communicators, there is further a 'grid' electrical phenomena that results in quantum change potentiality.  This 'grid' is 'aura like' and the evidence of the electrical nature of the brain is seen in the Electron encephalogram. Further this electrical grid is modified even more by the magnetic grid which is seen by way of the fMRI, functional Magetic resonance instruments.  So there's the forces of electricity and magnetism combined with issues of locational and geographical specialization but also generalizations.  These areas of specialization and generalizations are themselves sky scrapers of communication tissue layers with their own set of nodal junctions in the superhighways of the brain coupled to a 'google earth' like display of every other interconnecting track.  To date we're only getting an idea on the 'superhighway's and haven't a clue about the countless deer track communication channels that parallel these freeways we have a vague inkling about.
There are 50 neurotransmitters which we know. Every day we learn more.  Dopamine alone is associated with receptors which are named , D1, D2, D3 and still counting.
So 'reductionism' is a product of the paranoid delusions of those arrogant in their fear as to actually think we can know the 'whole' from the parts.  This we can, in part,  but only in so much as we appreciate the holographic 4 dimensional chess game nature of this thing we're considering.
The humble have long ago accepted the idea of a 'higher power'.  This is where the notion of 'mind' arises.
We have an organ, the brain, but that organ is akin to a hand or foot.  The organ doesn't create the 'intention' or 'plan' or 'strategy'.  The organ is not 'self aware'.  The brain is by no means the mind.  What fool would think the 'foot' is the source of all the play and significance in the game of football, soccer or rugby.
The emperor has no clothes. Very devious cunning men and women have been selling you particularly a bag of goods which is to say the least, 'bull shit' or to the politically correct, "cow shit".   The brain is not the mind and it's certainly not the self and it's no more the soul than the foot is a soccer match.
Wake up.
The Mind is understood to be interconnected with the community and reality internally and externally to which the brain exists in.  A marvellous science fiction thriller had an evil scientist removing the brain of a lover,  putting it in a petrie dish and connected by leads to a feed back loop.  There was this poor 'creature' thinking thoughts of love and living in the memories while the girlfriend looks on at the petrie dish and wonders how ever they'll be able to get the 'brain' back into a 'body' so that the 'mind' will be connected to reality.  It was evident she still loved him and he her.  The brain can't love in that sense since it only lusts at best.
We have countless evidences now of 'brain death' with electrical discontinuation and the persistence of the 'mind' and 'awareness' and 'memory' and 'experience' while in a state of 'coma'.  I dream when I sleep. I'm not 'turned off' even though my brain is turned off.
The Soul is the spiritual hypothesis of a connection between the self, individually and the multiplicity of selves and souls and greater souls and multiverse souls and all that other 'collective' nonsensical potential of mystery and ecstasy which gives rise to the sense of awe. It's the sacred and the "aha". It's the novelty beyond the 'limits' of reductionism' and stupidity. It's the essence of creativity and laughter and joy and celebration and wonder.  It's true art and true science.  It's beyond my adolescent understanding of everything that is and will be.  I am but a part in a whole and as such I can only see to the extent my eyes are open.
So my world is limited by my pride. The greater my pride the smaller the potential for all else.  The humbler I am the greater potential for miracle and wonder.
Reductionists are lying to you because they're either stupid, paranoid or deviously taking advantage of others by selling  a crock of politically correct ,non gendered, 'Shit".  They're like terrorists who says 'kill the other guys' and life will be a bowl of cherries.  We' ve been killing the other guy for tens of thousands of years and life has never be a bowl of cherries for everyman.
There is infinite possibility in even the brain, and the mind is a true wonderland beyond that while the self and soul are beyond infinity, time and all that really matters.
Wake up.  

John Rauls and Academic Fame

My friend is a philosopher who lectures college students.  She gave me a copy of John Rauls decades back. I duly read it, mostly because she is extremely beautiful and worried she'd quizz me about it at sometime in the future.  When I'm not reading about neurochemistry and Higgin's particles I'm more often than not reading theology.  I liked that Rauls said to paraphrase, justice is to social institutions what truth is to the individual.'  I've always liked the 'as above, so below' connection between macrocosm and microcosom. I just didn't realize that John Rauls, Theory of Social Justice would become so important. It was written in the 70's and I read it in the 90's and today I learned it's one of the most cited of social philosophers.
I've had this experience with individuals before. I read Harvard's, George Vaillant's book on the Grant Study, wrote to him a very appreciative letter in the 70's long before I knew he was one of the 'grand men' of our age.  I was just delighted that he corresponded with me and later I had the opportunity to meet him, a truly wise and remarkable man, a few years ago.  I read Thomas Kuhn's, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' a few years after it was published in the early 60's .  Today paradigm is a garden variety word thanks mostly to his book.  I read Turing early in my interest in computer programming when I was writing in Basic and MS Dos long before I cursed program language realizing I could speak swahili, punjabi, mandarin and spanish if I had devoted my attention to learning living rather than techno language. I still enjoy learning spanish but will likely die before I ever  learn swahili. There is simply not enough time for learning all one wants to and so much interference in the study of what really matters.  
Recently I read Jared Diamond's first books and happened to share the tastes of the world as that great genius has also gone on to acclaim he deserves.
When I travelled I used to carry a copy of the Bible and I also had a copy of Plato. I enjoyed in my 20's  reading the discussions  of Socrates.  Over the years I'd routinely read three texts, one about some aspect of sociocultural world, from the  arts , a scientific text, which might be from any aspect of science, medicine or psychiatry, and finally a novel which commonly discussed matters of importance in the other fields.  I've loved the writings of physician writers like Michael Creighton and recently Daniel Kalla.
I loved Love in the Ruins and the Joshua Tree.  I've loved those books that spoke to our times and culture, like Robertson Davies trilogy.  Obviously reading Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain was an insight into asylums, tuberculosis and the human spirit just as that other nobel prize winner Magister Ludi caused consideration of meaning as much as Victor Frankl's writing does.  Recently I was reading an economics text, a physics text and an evangelical theology text side by side getting relief from them by reading the antics of Flashman by Macdonald as he boisterously raced through the hot spots of history.  Most of the ideas of science fiction a hundred years ago and even only 50 have come to pass.  I laughed because several of my patients were called insane for thinking exactly the same way as  characters out of a William Gibson's novel.  I thought meeting these exotic creatures some of my colleagues should get out more.  Not at all insane by global standards but definitely beyond the mindset of Georgia and Howe.  
An old friend, the father of my dear friend, before he died told us how he'd supported himself in the latter years. He'd had very little or modest returns from all the best stocks and investments. However he chose to invest in an obscure company because he thought what they were up to was rather brilliant. This man was a scientist in chemistry himself but chose to buy stock in this obscure little start up.  "It was called IBM. It's provided more returns than all the other blue stocking stocks put together and allowed us to live as we did after retirement." he told his son.
I feel like I've invested well intellectually.  There's a kind of 'social justice' in that.  It's the truth.  John Rauls was a good read even if my brilliant and beautiful friend never asked me about it later.  But today as his name has achieved an even greater popularity I am thankful to her too for recognising gold in the dross.

Dr. Tamar Gendler and Open Learning Yale University

I downloaded the applications iTunesU for my iphone.  The selection of choices for the app in itunes was slim except for this truly remarkable presentation "Philosophy and Science of Human Nature" by philosopher Tamar Gendler.  Philosophy can be dry but Dr. Gendler enlivens it with present day relevance.  She uses the stories of Vietnam war politically decided 'point' soldier experiences to explore morality as discussed by Plato and Aristotle. She describes Milgram's experiments on decision making exploring the horrors of Nazi Germany with Aristotles learning of habits.  Happiness and pleasure are compared while in the midst of these discussions she gives delightful comments about her husband's experience at MIT, a bar mitzvah event or the education of her own children in comparison with the teaching of male philosophers who implicitly are not mothers.
For the last 2 weeks I've had the true pleasure of hearing a Dr. Gendler lecture each morning on the way to work in my car or returning home.
I am very thankful to Dr. Gendler for her erudition and exciting teaching capacity and itunes and Yale for enlivening my commute.  Thank you.

Morality for Appearances and the Ring of Gyges

In Plato, Republic Book II, the Ring of Gyges is a mythical artefact that allows the wearer to be invisible.  With invisibility granted by this ringer the wearer acted in an immoral way.  This was an example for the argument that people act morality not for an intrinsic morality but rather the appearance of morality as it instrumentally served them.
Psychologist Daniel Batson of University of Kansas did a series of empirical studies showing that students would 80% of the time be self serving and rate their morality in such cases as 4 on a scale of 1-10.  However if they were allowed to flip a coin and then do a self serving deed, this appearance of being 'reasonable' ie flipping a coin, resulted still in them acting selfishly 80% of the time but because they had taken the time to flip a coin, even though they ignored the results, this resulted in them seeing themselves as acting reasonably and justly, and rating themselves 6-9 out of 10 on the scale.
If a simple action such as putting a mirror facing them on in another experiment putting a pair of eyes was introduced people act less selfishly and more fairly.  The evidence is that most people act morally out of fear of shame.
I'm interested in the 20% who indeed appear to act morally from some more deeply seated sense.
However this speaks to the need for transparency in the courts and certainly supports the idea of television cameras in the court room at least for the masses.  We do this in parliament and despite back room deals this openess probably promotes greater morality.

Doubt, the play

What incredible acting! What a brilliant play!.  I'd loved the movie so was actually looking forward to the play if only for comparison. I didn't really think I could like it better than the movie, given Meryl Streep's performance. Yet here I was tonight loving the play even better.
Doubt, a Parable, by John Patrick Shanley was performed at the Pacific Theatre at Hemlock and 12th Vancouver.  Ron Reed was the director.  Sister Aloysius was played by Erla Faye Forsyth.  She's such a fine character actor I found myself hating her and loving her almost at the same time. I missed the depth of thought and spirit that went into the writing in the movie. But as she, as principal, spoke to the beautiful and innoscent Sister James, played by Kailtlin Williams I was truly moved by the finely delivered phrasing of profound concepts of modernity and postmodernity.
Your heart must be warm but your wit cold if you are to achieve the balance you need to teach, to paraphrase, she warned Sister James. Kaitlin was pure delight when she spoke with all the enthusiam of heart felt youth inspiring and moving.  The expressions on her face as the conflicting emotions that played through her caught as she was between Sister Aloysious and Father Flynn was thing to behold.
Father Flynn, played by Giovanni Mocibob, was either falsely accused or rightly accused.  The damage either way was elucidated clearly in his humorous and sarcastic sermons and touching defence.  I found myself caught in his dilemna, one accused who might only have the sin of long fingernails but the very accusation was such to condemn and ruin his life.  Yet to protest invariably results in the further accusation , the lady protested too much. His truly touching and yet quite possibly demonic  defence of his actions raised questions about the very core of our society.
A plant on the stage was metaphor and the Principal listening to the radio stolen from a student obsessively tainted by the 'news' was a furthe clue. Yet the Kennedy era was just before the disclosures and there is so much doubt.  But the mother of the child, Mrs. Muller, played so realistically and feelingly by Leslie Lewis Sword spoke to the essence of suffering in the long history of black America.
As usual Pacific Theatre has again outdone itself with a truly inspiring and uplifting play that cuts to the core of culture and asks the most difficult questions.  Love and judgement, old testament and new.  The new age and new world order.  All of it entwined in a superbly crafted play, neatly directed and finely executed by the very best of performers.  Thank you. Ron Reed and Pacific Theatre for a night to remember!

Scientific Method, Bias and Politics

Science is distinct from religion and philosophy.  In religion one begins from the position of received 'truth'.  God speaks to Moses and tells him to tell the Pharaoh, "let my people go".  Beginning with God's word the outcome is a product of the level of obedience to the projected plan by the individual.  In philosophy one arrives at truth through reasoning, predominantly deductive or inductive.
In science, truth is not known, but an hypothesis is assumed. An hypothesis is an unproven, but an experiment is devised to prove the hypothesis, thereby arriving at 'not absolute truth' but rather a "prevailing hypothesis".
In religion increasing truth about the world comes from God's sharing this information but in science it comes from human endeavour, that is the accumulation of 'proofs' regarding some aspect of creation. Whereas religion and philosophy delve into the greater meaning of the universe, the why's and wherefore's of creation, science is predominantly interested in the how.
So an hypothesis might well be that the light always returns after darkness.  A study is designed where two people wait through the night and sure enough the light comes with the sun in the morning.  Eventually the hypothesis that explains this and suggests this is prevailing experience is the astronomical recognition with aid of telescopes and other paraphernalia that the earth revolves around the sun.  Even watching the moon in its orbit around the earth one can see in eclipses the lightness and darkness confirming the original idea that the light follows the dark.
Experimentation is therefore central to science and why science students have 'lab' assignments in addition to regular class assignments.  In the arts a literature student doesn't require an extra lab class doing experiments with explosives or highly dangerous chemicals. A literature student will listen in class, hear ideas and go away, read books, discuss the ideas and write papers about the ideas.  In science classes the students are required to do the original critical experiments that defined the accumulated knowledge that forms the prevailing hypothesis in that field.
In scientific experimentation to better arrived at truth there are a number of variables which are identified and limitted.  These 'variables' , aspects of experimental design and work which can influence an experiment unfairly, are generally limitted in elegant experiment because they introduce bias into the experiment. Experiments are like a game in that there are usually two principal outcomes, either the experiment prooves your hypothesis right or it proves your hypothesis wrong. If you are right you get grant money and advancement whereas if you are wrong you can be advised to get an arts degree or perhaps physical education.
Scientists are competitive and science is a competition in this sense.
The first bias to consider is 'selection bias'. In social sciences if you wanted to say "all men are good dancers" you could unfairly prove your 'hypothesis' true by choosing to select only from Negro and Latino men preferably from US inner city. If on the other hand you chose 'white male judges' you'd find that your hypothesis was wrong since everyone knows 'white male judges' can't dance whereas Latino and Black men can.  Indeed, this fact alone, to scientists has often explained the 'legal' bias against Black and Latino men by the predominantly white judicial system. However without funding the experiments haven't been done to confirm this obvious example of how envy influences the judicial system scientifically.
Random selection is the way one avoids such obvious bias.  Therefore by random selection you stand on a street corner in New York and observe the rythym of every second male regardless of their race thereby removing the 'selection bias' component.
Commonly experiments have at least two study groups. Often in biological sciences the study group is considered the group that something is being done to whereas the 'control' group is the group that is being left wild.  In this way, if I wanted to study the sexual behaviour of women under the influence of alcohol, my hypothesis being that alcohol makes women women more sexual I'd have my control group drink coffee in a bar one night whereas I'd subject my study group of women to the influence of alcohol.   My experimental design might be the more sexual encounters in 24 hours is the criteria for proof in my experiment.
If I wanted to make the experiment even more 'stringent' I'd introduce "blind" factors. Blinding in scientific method is causing either experimenter or those in the experiment not to know what is being done. In 'double' blind experiments the subject and the experiment is unaware of who is the control and who is the experimental group.  In drug research commonly 'blinding' is done with 'placebo pills' such as sugar pills.  So one group of students is given LSD and another is given placebo. The experiment design is set up to study whether students on LSD act abnormally. The experimenters rating the behaviour don't know which group took the LSD and the students themselves don't.
Other biases in research include "effects", such as the "halo effects'.  In physics it was found that electrons being looked at acted differently from electrons not being looked at. This was the same in social sciences where people who are in an 'experiment' act differently than those not in an experiment.
Alot of 'field work' in anthropology and zoology was developed because in social sciences the very 'context' of the experiment had a biasing effect.  Observation in the 'wild' showed that animals for instance acted different than animals in the zoo the same way that humans in night clubs act differently from the same humans in church.
An example of this was a colleague who was so uptight he made a normal Austrian gestapo look left of Democrat. He wore his white lab coat pressed and cleaned each day and had his hair brushed exquisitely.  He carried a clip board and didn't talk to people unless he thought they were serious. No one knew this man to laugh and when his sense of humor was questioned he denied the claim insisting that he had a sense of humor most angrily.  He did experiments on students showing that LSD caused paranoia by sitting in a locked white room with student who had taken LSD and observing the student while avoiding interacting with him. The subjects became paranoid in his presence and he failed to consider that his own paranoia was the cause of their associative paranoia however his published results made him considerable amounts of money. Another researcher observed students at a frat party taking LSD and did notice that a subset of LSD users became paranoid while others became ecstatic.  When he reported his results the original researcher began a political campaign to have him discreditted.
Scientific method with experimentation is a means whereby a study design is set up much like a cookbook recipe with the outcome predicted based on the study. Using the rigors of scientific methods, a scientist knows that if he adds the right ingredients as say Newton or Einstein, he will most likely get chilli rather than curry  Subsequently the study is repeated enough times to establish it's 'reliability'. Then it's subjected to analysis to assess 'inter rater reliability'.  Over time a 'body' of evidence is achieved whereby a 'theory' becomes established.
Gravity is one such theory.
In social sciences the idea that the disparate complex nature of social behaviour can be simplified in some instances by the recognition that predominant motivational factors for men and women are sex and power.  With out this knowledge an arts student with a very beautiful wife and a whole lot of money might not understand the potential behaviour of his somewhat poor single ugly weazel like neighbour who works all day in his laboratory making a bomb.  The first man having some general knowledge of theories concerning human behaviour might well show some concern when the neighbour scientist invites him to see how his bomb works.
Bias is the inclination to hold a partial perspective at the expense of alternatives which might be equally valid is what science attempts to exclude to get a closer look at truth.
However, something as simple as 'funding bias' will politically grossly effect science. This is well understood in science and talked about all the time however in the courts even the suggestion of 'funding bias' can cause one to be held in 'contempt of court' since questioning 'funding bias' is indeed 'fighting city hall'.  In law one can't question funding bias but in politics it's what the media does however it was the 'funding bias' of the Nazis that was said to have affected the ethics of the Pope early in WWII when he didn't question the politics of Hitler.
Today if a person develops an experiment to 'disprove'  the 'prevailing hypothesis' that 'global warming is bad for the planet" and especially bad for "rich powerful humans living in previous temperate climates now faced with real estate price affecting climate change", since the universities are funded predominantly by people who have an invested interest in keeping their real estate prices high, they might well not get any funding for such an experiment.
This was seen all the time in research on marijuana when the US was on the  mission for police acquisition of tanks and helicopters called 'the war on drugs', all research that said 'marijuana might have beneficial medicinal effects' went unfunded. Indeed a researcher suggesting such a matter of research might well find himself in jail or at very least refused tenure and kept under surveillance for years. In contrast if a researcher found marijuana was unhealthy for budgigars, because the second hand smoke affected the quality of their bird song as judged by several choir masters and symphony conductors this researcher was likely get untold millions in grant money and likely become the next president of the university.
Politics, economics, and legal considerations are all such principal biases to day that grossly effect science.  Science was once a 'search for truth' in a rather intellectual and joyful pursuit principally by very wealthy bored white folk like Edison and Jefferson.  Increasingly  science seems  predominantly 'applied science' where the proposed use of the scientific product is already decided. Scientists are designated to 'reverse engineer' a product that arrives at the political or even religious or legal truth.  This is no longer science aimed at finding 'truth' but in fact science held hostage by bullies with guns in fact.  The question is whether this hasn't been the case most often.  Da Vinci is known for his air machines but not as well known as the man who developed the best armaments of the day. Indeed it seems that the day job of most scientists is working for the 'man' and only in the night job can they practice their 'science'. It's much like musicians who put out elevator music cover songs in their day job and write their own experimental music alone at night.
Some might indeed argue that all is politics. Then the field  "political science" would really just be a euphemism better named 'scientific politics' as in 'scientific warfare'.
As an example I would suggest that noone today is being funded to produce a gun that will make the shooter and the one shot fall in love and want to never kill humans again. No private industry or university is conducting experiments in this or funding researchers to make love guns.  Just an example. I'll believe science is once again free from politics, religion and law when I learn that a 'cupid gun' is in the works, especially if it is going to be provided as 'freeware'. But then I'd know that it must be something else, conspiracy theories being so seductive.
In reading research on the internet I'm amazed at how the untrained are routinely being duped by what is usually called 'pseudoscience'.
An example of questionable scientific  'validity' would  be  my saying 'buy black beans, I'm a scientist, and black beans are my preferred beans for quality farts'.  This is 'anecdotal evidence' and doesn't involve the traditional experimentation with groups and hypothesis and inter rater reliability. However because I am a 'scientist' and you don't know that 'black bean producers of Canada' is giving me awesome kick backs for my promotional books, then you will no doubt believe that there is 'scientific proof that' black beans are superior to brown beans or white beans in the production of 'quality' farts. All manner of 'celebrities' have been used to promote all manner of things when a celebrities usual only superior trait is the achievement of 'celebrity' and 'celebrity' status.
Indeed you might well not even know that the word 'quality' is a political and not a 'scientific' words. There are such unscientific 'words'.  I personally think my farts smell best so as a measurer of quality of product I will be 'biased' in this regard as each human might and my dog for sure is.
The study of science is the basis for living in what is today a scientific world.  Understanding the 'arguments' about products and people and ideas and political platforms is indeed difficult and precarious without  scientific training.  As one of countless examples marketting agencies have duped the world into believing that many products are 'organic' without realizing that an unholy alliance between marketting spin doctors lawyers and mass food producers came up with the most miniumum criteria for the labelling of a food 'organic'. Even the Canadian Food Certification system which is one of the world's best scientific studies of food source and provision isn't widely understood or known by the average shopper who is commonly duped by the word 'organic' when they should instead be looking for the Canadian Food Certification label.
Indeed if I were to produce a mass destructive instrument today and name it as was done in the 60's and 70's I would n't call it just the 'peace missile' . Instead I'd call it an "organic peace missile' and put some yogurt in it guaranteeing I'd get at least a million or more votes in favour of this overr my competitors 'killer flying bomb' applied science product. Indeed listening to my marketting agency I would have got the funding for the production of my 'organic peace missile' containing yoghurt by insisting that it would be 'guaranteed' to 'prevent global warming'.
It is therefore important to study 'biases' in 'scientific experiments', understand how science and religion and politics and philosophy are distinctive, understand that 'fallacies' in logic are similiar to the 'effects' that can influence experiments and really understand economics and funding to comprehend the limits of the telling of the 'truth' by 'science'.