Utopian America

2011-10-10T07:55:00.001-07:00

2011-07-12T21:49:00.000-07:00

The following is copy-pasted verbatim from: from http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/7x78v/what_do_modern_men_want_in_women/c07omtc?context=3

[–]ladytrompetista 24 points 2 years ago

[–]Whisper 26 points 2 years ago

[–]ladytrompetista 8 points 2 years ago

[–]Whisper 520 points 2 years ago*

Well, then, since it is not immediately obvious, allow me to explain.

Women have much more power in relationships than men do. Not just by social convention (which, believe me, is power enough), not just because others are more sympathetic to their side of any story (which, believe me, is also more than power enough), but via the full weight and majesty of the law.

Let us construct, in our heads, a hypothetical scenario. I shall use you and I as examples, just give some sense of the impact of these events on people's lives.

Let us suppose that we meet, by chance, in some gathering place in some city where, at some time in the future, we both reside. I am tall, handsome, muscular, well-dressed, and confident; you are pretty, intelligent, charming, and you get my jokes.

Nature takes its course.

About a year later, you decide that I am a good catch, the best of your available options, and you would like to be married. You drop hints, but I demur. I like you well enough, but you want children and I do not. Not to mention that I am still considering my options and am unready to enter into any sort of lifelong pact.

(This is the branch point. This is where we tell the story of what you could legally do, were you so inclined.)

You simply stop taking your birth control pills, without a word to me. This is not a crime, because legally, I have no right to know. They are your pills, and it is your body.

After a couple of attempts which I did not know were attempts, you become pregnant. You may have attempted with other men as well. Let's leave that matter unresolved for the moment.

You do not tell me until you start to show. This is also perfectly legal.

Once I figure things out, I offer to pay for half the termination procedure. You decline to undergo one. This, too, is legal. The law allows you the "right to choose". I, however, have no such right.

I do a little snooping, and discover unused quantities of birth control pills in the bathroom cabinet. Since they come in those neatly dated little wheel-things, I am easily able to deduce the exactly day you stopped. I terminate our sexual relationship post-haste.

You are angry and accuse me of putting you in this delicate situation and then abandoning you. I demur, arguing that you placed yourself in this situation. Negotiations deteriorate.

I demand a paternity test, not feeling very trusting at this point. You refuse. You can do that. You have the legal right, it's your body, I cannot force you to undergo amniocentesis.

You give birth to a daughter, and name her Zoe. I am named on the birth certificate as the father, simply because mine was the name you gave when they asked. I was not even there.

Now, I have refused to marry you. I still have that right, in most situations. (Look up "common-law" marriage, a law that allows a woman to force a man to marry her.)

So you legally demand that I provide you with the benefits of marriage anyway, to wit, a large portion of my income. You have the legal right to do this. It's called "child support".

In court, I demand a paternity test, but am denied one. You see, because I offered to pay for an abortion, I acknowledged the child as mine. And my name is on the certificate. And, most important of all, the very court that is ruling on the matter receives a cut of all child support payments. (Bet you didn't know that, did you?)

Legally, the money is for Zoe, but the checks come to you, in your name. You can spend them however you like, with no oversight whatsoever.

I'm not even sure Zoe is mine.

Now I'm in a bad situation. But the story does not end here.

The tanking economy causes budget cuts, and my cushy job as an engineer at a major defense contractor is lost. The only thing thing I can find to replace it is a job hawking cell-phones in one of those mall kiosks. This is not, however, grounds for reducing my child-support payments. The initial amount of them was determined by my income at the time, but legally, they are a right belonging to Zoe, and determined by Zoe's need, so my income is not a factor.

Now I cannot pay. I am a "deadbeat dad", according to society. And the newspaper my photo is published in. And the website my picture is posted on.

My failure to pay tanks my credit rating, too, with all its attendant woes.

The economy loosens up a bit, and I reapply to my old firm. They're keen to hire me, but they can't. With a record of delinquent child support payments, I cannot pass the background check. Now my career is blighted, too.

Many years have passed at this point, and I'm in deep trouble. Broke, no career prospects, poor credit, spotty criminal record (failure to pay child support is a misdemeanor in some jurisdictions), depressed, no means or confidence to attract another woman even if I could ever trust one again.

But the story doesn't end here.

Desperate, I manage to find some pretext to visit you, and I steal some of Zoe's hair from her hairbrush in the bathroom. I pay for a lab test out of my meager remaining resources.

Zoe isn't mine.

I take you to court, and lose. Yes, lose. Because I had already been paying child support, I am the publicly acknowledged father. (If you do not believe this could possibly happen, I sympathize. It's crazy. But google "joseph michael ocasio" and prepare to be shocked.)

Okay, end of scenario.

Look where we are. My life is indeed ruined. At no point did I have any power to stop it (except by remaining celibate my entire life). At every point, what you did, you had the legal right to do. You didn't have to "get away" with anything. You could write a book about it, and nothing would change, because it was all legal.

The only thing protecting most men from this fate is nothing but women's lack of inclination to do this. They are entirely in her power.

Would you accept being in an 1700's-style marriage, where your husband owned everything, and had the legal right to beat you, simply because he was a "nice guy and wouldn't do that"?

That is precisely what men are being asked, no, expected, to accept.

Is it any wonder we are distrustful and suspicious to the point of paranoia? It's our only defense. The law will not protect us. The law is against us, straight down the line.

Think about it. Try to imagine how that might feel.

tl;dr: When a man rapes a woman, it is against the law. When a woman rapes a man, the law is the instrument she uses.

some stuff about guilt

2010-05-06T16:51:00.001-07:00

You deserve to be loved, respected, admired, and even a little feared (but only by those with malice in their heart).

What you need to develop, if I might be so brash and prescriptive, is the habit of recognizing when someone is not treating you well, and the consistent discipline to respond to their treatment in kind, all the while communicating your policy. You hit me with a cruise missile I hit you with a cruise missile. You raise your voice at me I raise my voice at you. You open yourself to me, I open myself to you.

Trusting someone comes from comparing their stated intentions to their actions and seeing a consistently high overlap.

Abusers feel safe when they know they can trust the other person not to retaliate or break the connection.

If someone is sending you viruses it's time to cut the hard line. The first packet of malicious data should be evaluated against the total value of the data in your downloads folder. Trust can be built or eroded. No matter how long the account has been open, if the balance hits zero something is wrong and inaction will not be productive.

This is the hostile-environment policy for developing peace. In more friendly relations, the calculus does not need to have such high precision.

Refusing to accept data/input/interactions which are harmful/stressful/damaging/disparaging is a form of security.

Self-respect is the state of recognizing and fully believing that you are fully in the right to uphold such a firewall. "Fully in the right" means that by upholding such a policy you are NOT accruing guilt, neither societally-recognized guilt, nor psychologically-felt guilt.

Guilt builds up. You deserve none, but when others abuse you it is guilt which weakens your defenses. Unconscious pheremone-driven intermonkey justice-instinct guilt. Some of it comes from not defending yourself when you should have.

A zen master once told me "Luke, if somebody hits you, hit them back." I think what he meant was that was the absolute fastest way to cancel whatever karma was generated in the initial attack.

Zen and other spiritual/religious practices have among their intended outcomes an ongoing reduction of negative karma. Guilt, anger, resentment, mistrust, and relationships who use these as their glue, are all forms of negative karma.

Watching people's faces light up, and knowing you are responsible, is the unconscious monkey-pheremone way to cancel guilt.

Reading Ayn Rand is the conscious human-meme way to nullify guilt. I recommend (a) reading some Ayn Rand, and (b) going against everything Ayn Rand stood for and put in some time tutoring little kids or better yet handing food to hungry people at a homeless shelter.

Your psychological health is not something you should entrust to a field whose progress is rate-limited by technology's ability to form mathematical model/parameterization of a biological, memetic, social, chaotic system such as yourself.

If Sergei Brin had been forced to prove his model before he simply let his code loose on real-world data, Google would be a failed rough draft of a research paper instead of the world's newest nuclear power.

Something I said deserves clarification:
I said "Guilt builds up. You deserve none, but when others abuse you it is guilt which weakens your defenses."

I should have said:

Guilt builds up like cigarette tar in your being (body/mind/soul). Its presence weakens you and reduces your sense of entitlement. Chronic acceptance and generation of guilt leads to a large stock of guilt being contained in different manifestations in these vessels.

When a person attacks you, the energy with which you defend and retaliate will be inversely proportional to the amount of guilt you carry. For example, if you accrue enough guilt you will stoop and accept any beating without raising a finger.

Methods of reducing and eliminating guilt are varied in effectiveness and strategy. Manifestations of this thing called 'guilt' are different in different realms. Guilt does not always accrue or dissolve by the means you might think necessary.

For example, accepting an attack without retaliating is actually a means of accruing guilt. This is, I believe, explainable by the theory of cognitive dissonance. If two competing realities exist (a) "I am worth defending" and (b) "I just neglected to defend myself", cognitive dissonance theory predicts your next step is either to start defending yourself or to stop believing you are worth defending. Because of the heavy cultural conditioning we have to NOT defend ourselves when attacked (which actually manifests as our being convinced that it is the act of defense which accrues guilt), most often people will go with the other route and instead (subconsciously) believe they deserved it. In other words, instead of continuing to believe they let an injustice happen, they believe they disciplined themselves to not interfere with justice.

Justice is not merely a meme which originated in the fertile crescent. It is a biologically-supported instinctual behavior which tends to reduce the payoff of aggression and hence strengthen groups.

That's why when you hurt one of your friends as a child, the "free hit" you give them actually makes you feel better, even if your jaw hurts a little afterward. Your animal brain knows it no longer owes animal pain to the other animal, and it lets your animal pride keep flowing.

Other people stealing free hits on you, however, does not build up animal pride but, by cognitive dissonance, leads to ever-increasing subconscious self-schema as a "villain".

We're all villains to some degree or another, and as privacy slowly disappears we're all going to need to learn to accept ever-increasing awareness of others' sins.

Um, I think I totally forgot what I was trying to say originally. Hope this helps

beginner + mushrooms = go master

2010-05-03T17:24:00.000-07:00

After playing go for about three years, I was beaten by a complete beginner who was tripping on mushrooms.

Go is not a game in which a beginner beats even someone of modest skill. Between two players of perhaps 2 or 3 kyu difference, the better player will win close to 100% of the time. In that system, I was at least ten kyu above this guy.

But he ate his mushrooms, waited about twenty minutes, sat down, learned the rules, and proceeded to mop the board with me.

While this is anecdotal to the max, it implies that mushrooms do not merely "distort" perception, but unlock powerful intelligence which is usually unaccessible to the human mind.

The best non-alien, non-god explanation I can think of for this is that the human brain is capable of feats of intelligence much greater than normal, but it is severely inhibited by a safety mechanism or something, and that mushrooms produce their "crazy ass" imagery by disabling these safety mechanisms.

Two questions:
1. Do mushrooms enhance performance?
2. If that's the case, then what? Should we practice our alien diplomacy protocols by speaking with people who are tripping (i.e. because they are intelligent beings who only loosely resemble normal humanity)? Should we use psychedelics to solve problems in science and engineering? Should we make psychedelics illegal because of the potential damage caused by activating superhuman intelligence?

a man with good spinal posture

2010-03-16T21:23:00.001-07:00

a good hand posture for zazen

2010-03-16T21:19:00.001-07:00

2010-03-16T21:15:00.000-07:00

Ugg and Ogg

2010-03-15T13:04:00.001-07:00

The only difference between inner conflict and outer conflict is that we draw a line somewhere and call things on one side of that line "inner" and on the other side "outer".

With a little modeling of the other, and communication, peace could be achieved, and pleasure maximized, between Ugg and Ogg:
Ogg "I value my harem"
Ugg "And I value mine"
Ogg "I think I'll take yours, too"
Ugg "If you try that, I'll bash your skull in"
Ogg "Not if I bash yours first"
Ugg "So attack me then. You might get my harem, you might die. The law of diminishing returns says my harem won't bring you as much pleasure as you stand to lose if you lose yours. The NPV of your war is, for you, negative."
Ogg "Wow, you're right. Truce?"
Ugg "Truce"

So maybe Ogg "wants to bash Ugg's skull in" but in reality he doesn't want to TRY. Ogg doesn't have freedom to choose whether he bashes Ugg's skull in, but rather he has the freedom to choose whether he TRIES to bash Ugg's skull in.

When navigating a reality in which you can be thwarted, others' pleasure is your pleasure, no matter how "selfish" you are.

Intersubjective selfishness, when combined with communication and policy modeling, becomes objective group-pleasure maximization.

Given years and years and years of this sort of interaction, perhaps Ogg (if he wasn't born with it) would start to develop an innate sense of "goodness" arising from his belief that Ugg would be benefiting from a situation. It's a form of caching, really. Instead of having that same conversation each time, by now Ogg understands that Ugg understands that Ogg understands that Ugg understands that Ogg understands that Ugg aint' takin' no shit laying down. Eventually, all repeated thought processes become unconscious. So eventually the only conscious content of Ogg's mind is:

Ogg: "I bash Ugg's head in an take his harem!"
Ogg; "But that would be bad for Ugg"
Ogg: "Better not then"

Reality with a capital R

2010-03-01T22:23:00.000-08:00

There's a lot of abstraction that takes place even at a preconscious level. For instance, in the visual cortex groups of individual "pixels" (for lack of a better term) are analyzed to see which pattern they exhibit strongest. If it's found that such-and-such 50 pixels are showing, say, a diagonal edge, then what is passed on to the next level is a single piece of more "meaningful" information: there is a diagonal edge at this point. The trick, is to realize what happened here: 50 points of a certain nature became one point of a different nature: lots of useless information was boiled down into a small amount of useful information.

This happens all OVER the place in the brain, all the time: lots and lots and lots of data is sifted through and sifted through and just a little tiny bit is passed on, like an accountant who looks at all the transactions, all the financial data of a company, and then gives a quick "highlights" report to the CEO.

What we think of as reality is really just a very narrow collection of the things that "matter" to us. If the refrigerator is kicks on, we hear it, and then almost immediately stop hearing it because basically our brains/minds (software/hardware/is there a difference?) decide it's not really relevant and that it's more important to spend time processing, for instance, thoughts and opinions about the Obama campaign, or when our bills are due, or something.

Right here in the room, there are literally millions of little "truths" that may seem rather mundane, such as "the rug is 2 inches from the wall", "the cat is licking itself", "the plume of smoke coming off the incense just started creating steady ripples", "the light is making a light buzzing sound", "a dog just barked", "I'm exhaling", "when I inhale, there's a slight difficulty when I'm about 70% of the way through the inhale", "I can smell the soda in the glass on my desk; it's lemon-lime".

They may be "mundane", and they may be "meaningless", in that they don't contribute to the great goals of your life such as building a stock portfolio or determining whether the universe will eventually collapse into an enormous black hole or whether this is the first and only universe or whatever else. But they are true, as true as anything can be, even more true, more undeniably and unarguably true, than "we are in a recession", "global warming is happening", "wal-mart is a bad company", "I should finish my homework". All of these, of the second set, are the sorts of things we present to ourselves as rock-solid truths, when in reality their firmness, even the extent to which they actually have a fixed meaning, pales in comparison to the truth of "my knees hurt".

To come back to the moment is to play in the realm of certainty, in the rock-solid foundation of Reality. All the other stuff is like a big game of pretend when compared to "there are goosebumps on my left arm".

We have two things going on. We are at once immersed in a sea of this Reality at every moment, and we are also swapping and trading language memes about "atoms" and "politics" and "society" and "commerce" and "the news" and "vehicle safety" and "the war in iraq" and "global warming" and "my retirement fund". To spend all our attention and energy on the immediate Reality is basically to become useless to society, to have nothing to say, to be a non-person. And the spend all our attention on the language memes is basically to become useless to our sensual consciousness. Balancing the two starts with recognizing the difference between them.

2009-12-05T21:48:00.000-08:00

Each of us should cherish moments like this. This the first shockwaves of a massive cultural shift.

Consider these facts:

1. Stress is memetic, i.e. is contagious. When one person is stressed they give off waves of it and it travels through the car, through the room, through the population. So are other states of mind.

2. Drugs are great, but so far in our (people under 60) lives, drug use has come with an ever-present threat of horrific consequences. We all know someone, or know someone who knows someone, who's been hauled away and lost YEARS of their lives in a cold, hard concrete box ... for smoking up. Even though we resist it, we are used to marijuana being about as dangerous (artificially) as playing with a cobra. This fact has been an enormous source of stress for generations of people.

3. The artificial climate of danger surrounding pot is ending. No longer will you have to sneak past armed men who will hunt you down, take away your rights, and lock you up in a tiny room if they catch you.

4. When any mind is less stressed, new levels of creativity are opened up. Mental processes which are put on hold when in fight-or-flight mode are reactivated. Our entire view of reality is altered based on stress levels.
Think about those things together. Think of the causal chains we're embarking on. Pot legal, stoners stop being paranoid, everyone who knows a stoner knows a person who is less stressed, less in danger. Hence everyone who knows a stoner is less stressed. Average population shift: 2% less stress. Creative resources freed up to solve other problems. Relationships smooth out. Blood pressure calms down. Less defensiveness, less threatened-ness. The 18-year-old son of a biochemist stays home instead of going to prison. That biochemist cleans his lab. Someone else gets more work done because they don't spend 30 minutes looking for the HCl. Cancer gets cured. Etc etc etc.

Less stress ALL AROUND. We are at a momentous point in history. We're in the first chapter of a science fiction novel. Hop on, everyone.

Mister Brin - look him up

2009-10-09T13:38:00.001-07:00

AWESOME story by a science fiction writer I recently discovered, name David Brin:

http://www.davidbrin.com/aficionado.htm

length: about 7 pages when converted to 12 pt Times New Roman

This guy's doing what I want to do: he's writing about a beautiful future. Of course it's not perfect, but in this story he envisions life as being substantially BETTER.

Way to go, David. You are acting as a fine antenna. That term is from Terence McKenna, who also said this:

"The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet and it's only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we still have the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse. If you go to Bosnia or Somalia or Peru or much of the third-world then it appears that the apocalypse has already arrived."

vision number 1

2009-09-20T21:51:00.000-07:00

So I recently re-read the originating post of this blog and it reminded me I'd given myself a specific format to work with: visions of the future.

Therefore let me attempt to describe, in present-tense, one or two pleasant facts that can be true if we decide we want them.

It is the year 2020 - eleven years after this blog post is written.

Nonprofit organizations have succeeded in creating open-source reputation systems that clearly connect selfish entities like corporations with their responsibilities in ways the marketplace fails to go. It was an enormous uphill climb, battling against the ideology of money-as-bottom-line.

To be sure, human psychology has not changed, or has barely changed if at all. Every person is capable of behaving generously, lovingly, hatingly, stingily. There are still some whose primary source of motivation is monetary gain, and these people still hold quite a bit of power (because they tend to amass it in the form of currency).

In other words, the desire to give to others has not been diminished or increased. But rather the path toward giving to others has been made easier by the development of free, easily-accessible technology. Knowledge is power, knowledge is intelligence, knowledge is effectiveness. Tools like CitizensMarket.com and Vanno.com paved the way for this integration of knowledge, and slowly, imperceptibly at first, corporations started finding it more difficult, more costly to cover up their mistakes and misdeeds.

After those tools were released, more and more new pieces were added to the toolset. Trustability algorithms evolved and changed and complexified and nestled themselves into tight niches or expanded and exploded across the world as standards and began chewing the data.

No amount of public relations footwork could compete with the steady, calm aggregation of data.

Finally it was just too much for the old systems to handle. Here and there, in localized pockets of the corporate world, investors were beginning to scowl when CEOs talked about their growing PR/propaganda budgets. In a few cases emails turned up with variations on the same question: "wouldn't it just be cheaper to clean the bloody problem up instead?"

The average decided to dedicate 1% of his or her money to supporting companies who went beyond providing good products and also could boast that their very existence was helping twenty thousand people keep their stomachs full.

1% was only the average. Some true zealots went so far as to vow to spend 100% of their expenses on companies that boasted grade-A report cards in the new accountability systems. It wasn't even difficult, really. Snap a photo of your grocery cart, and your sustainability coach could tell you that your grocery karma had improved by 5%. Tried and true crowdsourced conversion indexes could tell you this was the equivalent of providing shelter to seven people on an ongoing basis, for as long as your shopping habits stayed this way.

All of this technological progress, and the resulting trickle of compassion through the hitherto-clogged pipes, created the conditions to shift 5% of weapons industry revenue away from the production of consumable munitions (bullets, bombs, missiles, etc). Considering that one dollar's worth of consumable munitions translates into fifty dollars worth of damage to existing infrastructure ...

The net balance (less money spent on weapons, less money spent on repairs) meant that effectively 250% of the 2009 global expenditure on consumable munitions was diverted to production of food-distribution services, ending world hunger.

The weapons industry was certainly one of the hardest hit (because of its tight association with low-scoring companies in the reputation matrix). Newspapers proclaimed that by 2015, approximately 2% of automotive industry revenues were now directly funding the construction of windmills.

Of course the system's decisions were the collective decisions of its individual members. A second invisible hand, swayed not just by point-of-sale production efficiency but also global-totality production desirability. So when we say that the accountability system decided that windmill production was an acceptable way to earn passing marks in the world society, we really mean that a critical mass of its users showed a tendency to bump that company up a notch in their voting, if they saw that the company had a good windmill program going.

We can also say that when the accountability system (AS) decided to push windmills, the corporate system listened because the AS spoke in money, the only language the corporate system could parse and act upon. And it changed.

And the massive manufacturing capability and mechanical genius of the auto industry was partially refocused on creating the machines to turn wind into energy.

Everyone agrees things feel pretty good now that everyone's fed and we're only 40 years away from having enough wind power generation capability to cover all our needs.

Best of all, those pesky, guilt-tripping sponsor-a-starving-child-in-Sudan ads are long gone. But on the other hand, and more annoyingly, when our kids don't eat their peas we sigh, remembering how easy it was for our parents to say "you eat that, there are starving children in Africa who would love to have that."

Hunger

2009-09-18T14:14:00.000-07:00

originally posted as a comment on Digg:

----------------------------------------------------

So I'm an American white male, graduated from an ivy-league university with an engineering degree, and I would consider myself to be incredibly lucky.

This summer, for reasons too complicated (or too simple?) to get into here, I found myself broke and homeless, living on the street. It was the first time in my life I experienced being hungry and not being able to leave that state. I have fasted before (for only 24 hours - some people go much longer) but that was nothing compared to this sensation. I would say at no point did I go more than three days without eating, but that was enough to totally blow my fucking mind.

Why do I say blow my mind? Well because it made me realize that the whole model I've had pretty much all my life of the "relativeness" of happiness - hedonic treadmill, what-have-you - is only valid when your basic needs are covered. In other words, when you experience hunger everything changes. Here are some of the things I noticed:

1. Intense hunger feels like addiction, like withdrawal. If you've ever been addicted to cigarettes, or cocaine, or heroin, and then QUIT, you've felt withdrawal. There's a kind of pain that comes up by degree in your entire body, slowly and subtly but steadily rising in your body. There's a feeling of wrong-ness. I'm not saying it's SIMILAR. I'm saying it's EXACTLY THE SAME FEELING. Basically I realized that addictive substances are actually co-opting the natural sensation of intense hunger to motivate you to seek them out. Hunger is like withdrawal symptoms that never end. You cannot break your addiction to food.

2. Hunger MOTIVATES like crazy. I'm trying to say that word without the usual positive connotation of "movtiation". I've never been a violent person, but I can easily, VERY easily see how a person could commit violent crime in order to get fed. Here in America we have the image (planted in us by the news of the early 90s) of a junkie holding up a gas station to get drug money. I was ready and willing to do anything to get food. Luckily I discovered that I could sit on the street and meditate with a sign that says "food only please" and tons of people would give me food. That's because I'm in America, where there's plenty of food. But before I figured that out, I was ready to shoplift, scam people, pickpocket, whatever I could do to get food in my stomach. My whole life, I've been quite a lazy person, I've always had trouble with motivating myself to do things. Not so when hungry. You cannot ignore it. You cannot deny it. You cannot stop moving, struggling, searching, trying. I would sit and obsess over plans. If I failed at some trick to get food, I'd sit and figure EVERY mistake out and re-plan and try again. There was no definition of failure, only have-not-succeeded-yet. It feels horrible, but at the same time it's an incredibly activating thing.

3. It overruled my composure. At one point I was taken in by someone who (quite correctly) perceived that I was lacking protein and plopped a roasted chicken down in front of me. This was at the dinner table, with their family. I'm a very polite person, even to the point of being socially awkward by trying to ensure I've crossed every T and dotted every I of manners. Basically the thing to do here was to wait for everyone to sit down before I dug in. Wasn't happening. I literally could not control myself - I dove into that thing like I was going to die if I didn't fill my stomach in record time.

4. Do not fuck with a person who is hungry. I'm a pushover, I'll admit it. You know the type: make it moderately difficult for me to get what I deserve and I'll roll over instead of making a scene. NOT SO WHEN HUNGRY. I was sitting and meditating and I hadn't eaten for a little over a day, and some guy gave me a can of beef stew. (Oh yeah, did I mention I'm vegetarian? NOT SO WHEN HUNGRY). Bless his heart, it was nice of him, but who gives a homeless person canned goods? So I had a few bucks on me, like a total of $5 to my name. I went to a nearby convenience store and bought a can opener. The thing was, it sucked. It punctured a few small holes in the can's top and mangled and bent the can and I couldn't get it to open the can. Normally I would have been like "well, whatever" and thrown both the can and the opener away, taking it as a loss and a "lesson". Not this time. I walked back in to the convenience store (quite busy) and I said to the clerk: "You labeled this piece of shit as a can opener, but it won't open this can. I want my money back."
him: "where's the receipt?"
me: "I don't need a receipt. I just bought this, from you, not five minutes ago. If you choose to forget that I'll call the police and I can use the security camera to prove I bought it here."
Him: "where is the packaging? I can't let you return it without the packaging."
me: "it's right out front in a trash can. I'll go get it if I can return this." (don't want to lose my place in line until i get a promise from him)
him: (stonewalling, delaying) "Sir, I can't let you return that without the original packaging. Where is the packaging?"
me: "It's outside in a trash can. If I go get it will you let me return it?"
him: "I can't let you return it unless you have the packaging. Why do you not have the packaging?"
me: "I TOLD YOU, IT'S OUTSIDE IN THE TRASH CAN. I answered your question, now you answer mine!"
him: "what's your question?"
me: "IF I go get the packaging and come back here, WILL YOU let me return this?" (There was a line behind me of about ten people. I wasn't leaving until he said yes)
him: "yes, I will"

So I went and got the packaging and came back in. Waited in line, got back up to this guy. I handed him the packaging and the bullshit can opener and he started ringing up the return. He handed me a gift card.
me: "what is this?"
him: "I can only give you store credit, sir"
me: "no, you have to give me cash"
him: "that's not our policy"
me: "I don't give a fuck what your policy is. I need cash so I can go somewhere ELSE and buy a can opener. This food is in this can and not in my stomach and that sucks balls. Give me cash"
him: "Why you getting to excited?"
me: "because I'm HUNGRY motherfucker. You ever been HUNGRY before? It's VERY *exciting*"
We stared at each other for a few seconds. The poor guy was doing his best. Finally he opened the cash drawer and gave me the cash.

He short-changed me by a few cents, but I didn't realize that until I'd left. I didn't bother to push it, because I had the money to get the can opener I needed. I was going to eat, thank god.

Moral of the story is: don't under-estimate Hunger as a motivating force. In fact, having felt it, and how much more intense it is than "meaninglessness", "boredom", "sickness", "hatred", "guilt", "loneliness", "worry", "resentment" or any of the other "horrible" things we go through in this civilized nation, I have changed my worldview in the following way:

I now believe that hunger is the primary cause of basically ALL strife in the world. Somewhere, somehow, you are connected by less than 6 degrees of separation from someone who is desperately hungry, and who will do ANYTHING to fill their stomach. What they do to their neighbors is probably horrid, and what their well-fed neighbor does in response is only a reaction. It's difficult to get this image out. Basically Hunger creates the initial stress wave, and then that STRESS passes through the population in different forms. A hungry person steals your groceries, so you snap at your daughter. Your daughter gets snapped at, so she doesn't give her full attention to her friend who's going through a hard break-up. Her friend has a hard break-up with less than optimal support, so she doesn't sleep as well and doesn't get the grades to get into grad school, etc etc. Basically I think that hunger is one of the most massively-producing sources of pain and stress in the world. Our angst is merely a transformed reflection of their pain.

Let's solve hunger, people. Then we can worry about living "fulfilling" lives. My hypothesis: if we simply put food in everyone's stomachs, ALL our lives will improve because we won't be sharing mind-space with people who are in permanent withdrawal.

basic meditation instructions

2009-08-23T07:10:00.001-07:00

Okay, so it is kind of ridiculous that the internet doesn't have meditation instructions shorter than an article in the New Yorker. So here they are. (The steps are re-listed in short form at the very bottom of this article). Your first time print these or read them from your computer, and do them one at a time. Eventually you'll memorize it. Here you go:

1. Sit with your back straight and your legs "crossed" (see bullet points). First put a cushion under your butt. I just fold a firm pillow in half. This makes your knees come down at a slight angle from your pelvis, which is very helpful for your spine. You're going for "indian style", like cross-legged but with specific feet/lower-leg positions. Options for your lower legs include:

burmese posture: just put one leg in front of the other; legs not actually crossed (picture)
half-lotus: one foot comes up to the inside of the opposite thigh; the other goes underneath (picture). Note if you do this or the next one be sure to switch which leg goes on top. I know it's difficult but it's very important for your health later in life
full-lotus: both feet come up to the inside of the opposite thighs (picture). Once again, PLEASE switch sides from one day to the next, for your health.

2. The point is for your spine to be like a stack of coins - i.e. balanced simply and easily, with absolutely minimal effort from the muscles on your back AND your front to hold you up. Think of a buddha statue, nice and easy (picture). Also, here's a picture of a guy with good spinal posture.

3. Layer your hands over one another in your lap, with the palms facing UP. Doing this opens your shoulders to allow for easy, deep breath. The back of the left fingers resting on the front of the right fingers. Thumbs touch each other gently, so that you could hold a sheet of paper with the thumbs, but loose enough that someone could pluck the paper out easily (picture). Maintain this light touch throughout your sit.

4. Rest your skull on your neck, minimal neck muscles, and gaze softly at the ground in front of you, about 3 feet out. Don't close your eyes, keep them OPEN. Pick a spot and point your eyes there, don't look around. But open your gaze up. Absorb your peripheral vision; see the whole picture at once.

Now you have a discipline for your body. Next is the mental component.

5. Breathe natural, at a relaxed pace, and pay attention to the sensation of breathing. A good mental anchor is to count your breaths. As you inhale don't do anything in particular, just watch the air coming into your lungs. Let your belly expand. As you EXHALE, mentally say a number. Start with "one". Next breath, "two", and so on. Go up to "ten" and then start over at "one". And just repeat that sequence.

6. Empty your mind of all thought, and pay attention to your BREATH. As thoughts come up, simply drop them and RETURN to the breath. You will do this millions of times. The thoughts will bubble up endlessly, that's okay. Just keep dropping them and re-pointing your attention to the breath. If you need to, use each number like a sword to cut through the thought. Having your attention lapse does NOT mean you're failing. It is the act of RE-POINTING your attention that is meditation.

7. Set a TIMER. Always meditate for a specific amount of time; not until you feel "done"; for a specific, amount of time. A good starting amount is 5 minutes. Do 5 minutes each day for a week. If you feel like it, go up to 10 minutes. Maybe 12.

Commentary:

I'm not gonna talk about benefits. DO IT. Meditation is not knowledge; it is exercise. In exactly the same way that lifting weights is not knowledge; it is exercise. Also keep in mind it's a skill, like saying the alphabet backwards. First time it's awkward and difficult. You'll get better with practice. Your goal when you start should be to spend as much time as possible with your attention on your breath; not on what you're going to have for dinner, or the argument with your bartender, or what time you should get up tomorrow, or whatever else. The average beginner will get maybe 10 seconds TOTAL out of 5 minutes of sitting. So don't worry about it if your mind is jumping around like a monkey. That's normal. Just calmly bring it back, again and again and again. When the timer goes off, get up and go about your day as normal. Tomorrow, come back and do it again.

As promised, here are the steps in super-short form once again:

1. Sit with your back straight and your legs "crossed"

2. The point is for your spine to be like a stack of coins - i.e. balanced simply and easily.

3. Layer your hands over one another in your lap, with the palms facing UP.

4. Rest your skull on your neck, minimal neck muscles, and gaze softly at the ground in front of you, about 3 feet out.

5. Breathe natural, at a relaxed pace, and pay attention to the sensation of breathing.

6. Empty your mind of all thought, and pay attention to your BREATH. As thoughts come up, simply drop them and RETURN to the breath.

7. Set a TIMER. Always meditate for a specific amount of time; not until you feel "done"; for a specific, amount of time.

initial post

2009-01-24T14:04:00.000-08:00

This is the christening entry for Utopian America. Here I intend to publish optimistic visions of the future of this country.

If we play our cards right, we can live in the dream world our ancestors have always longed for. This requires us to totally, entirely believe that we deserve to live the lives we feel pulling us.

I have no real beef with the state of the world right now. Sure, there's an infinite variety of pain and suffering, but we're really not that much worse off that at any other point in the past. Human effectiveness overall steadily increases, and our moment in history is no different in that respect. At the same time, our technological power is greater than it has ever been before.

By harnessing our desire to be happy - if that really exists - we can create the circumstances we deserve. Each of us, every day, has the opportunity to guide the evolution of life around us. How we use that power, in every moment, is a function of the contents of our minds. Hence by properly designing the shape and content of our minds we design the reality we live in.

This is not just an argument for being at peace with what is (which is a necessary step on the road to utopia). It's a fact about our external circumstances.

That's what this blog is all about. Here will be my rough sketches of life in a beautiful future. At some point soon, I would like to add a wiki to give others the opportunity to express their visions. By envisioning the future, we create it. Nothing you can do in this moment affects your future more than observing, understanding, and then reaching in an adjusting the mental movie that we all agree to call "the future".

The future isn't "out there" the same way your computer screen is. It's all in your head, literally. The same is true of the past, but at least with the past our images are based somewhat on experience. Our images of "the future", "my future", "later tonight", "2045" are different though. They need not be constrained by what we've seen so far. We look and we think that we are "perceiving" the future; but instead we are directly participating in the first stage of its creation.

Does that make sense? More later.