Oh, and one final point - unilateral action has always been exceptional among the Elites - it's generally dangerous to act unilaterally in any way because any unilateral action is likely to be perceived as an act of war. In the world of the Elites, there's simply no such thing as reneging on an agreement. To do so is far too dangerous. Hence, they have generally either worked hand-in-hand (though grudgingly) or they have secretly worked to create a front group to take the blame for unilateral action. It's all about plausible deniability.
Governments, corporations, NGO's, social movements, and so on... are all perfect "fronts" for this kind of thing. And wherever they do directly deal with each other, they try to word-smith each other to death. This is what "diplomacy" really is. Either that, or they meet face-to-face and shake hands... but they're loathe to do that because that's the kind of agreement that there is no backing out of. Reneging is so unthinkable as to be impossible.
In other words, the picture I'm trying to paint of the Establishment is that it operates according to rules that are entirely alien to the average person yet, on some level, it's a lot more "orderly"... people doing crazy shit like telling everyone to go to hell and all deals are off... it just never happens. Not anymore. Those people were all weeded out a long time ago.
Clayton -
Sure, use drugs. Watch porn. Gamble your money. Meanwhile, they'll be carefully recording your every act and stashing it
What I'd like to know is to what end are they doing this? I personally don't give a damn who knows what kind of porn I've been browsing or what kinds of drugs I've bought. What are they planning to do, shame us all into obedience to a world-state? Give me a break.
Clayton, I wonder if you've ever been to www.montalk.net? You should go browse around that site for a while, check out his Gnosis/Polar Mythology series, and see what you think of it all. Maybe check out some stuff about the Cassiopaean transcripts too (I think he has a page about it somewhere on there). It's all pretty... interesting.
What are they planning to do, shame us all into obedience to a world-state? Give me a break.
It's not necessarily your shame that matters, it's the tsk-tsking of your peers and the usefulness that may have in legal proceedings or other forms of pressure (job eligibility, and so on).
After a quick glance at montalk... not my cup of tea.
Fair enough. It just seems to me that - and I say this with all due respect - you've hit a wall in your thinking about the "big picture," and might do well to begin to consider some of the more further out ideas available. I sense in your latest few posts in this thread a train of slowly building cynicism, stemming from a great deal of concern with what this montalk fellow would deem the "3D conspiracy," ie, the shadow government and secret societies of this world. I'm not trying to convince you to believe in reptilians and whatnot, but only to consider that our existence is more miraculous, and our minds and souls more powerful and important, than most folks would have us understand.
I also put this out there for your and anyone else's consideration. An internalizing of the first three principles on PKD's list there can shed some majorly powerful light on what seems like an incredibly hopeless situation here on planet Earth.
It just seems to me that - and I say this with all due respect - you've hit a wall in your thinking about the "big picture," and might do well to begin to consider some of the more further out ideas available. I sense in your latest few posts in this thread a train of slowly building cynicism, stemming from a great deal of concern with what this montalk fellow would deem the "3D conspiracy," ie, the shadow government and secret societies of this world.
Building cynicism? I think my cynicism maxed out years ago.
I'm not trying to convince you to believe in reptilians and whatnot, but only to consider that our existence is more miraculous, and our minds and souls more powerful and important, than most folks would have us understand.
If you are suggesting the miraculous or supernatural, I consider such suggestions nothing more than line-noise. Cf Hume on miracles. If you are suggesting that the Universe is more marvelous than I know or than I can even begin to conceive, I'm already persuaded.
As I said, I glanced over the materials and it's not my cup of tea. I could rip apart a dozen different bullet items on a single page.
I don't think I've hit any wall... I'm open to every possibility, even ideas more bizarre than anything on montalk which I've not gotten into on this thread and likely will not (people will begin to genuinely doubt my sanity and I do work a day job, after all).
In any case, the problems in our social order are entirely of human origin. All talk of UFOs, aliens, repitiles and other "far-out" stuff that is peddled by intelligence agency disinfo agents is so much drivel meant either to instill fear and despair at the superhuman connections of our rulers or to shift the blame. Our very human rulers are solely responsible for all the wars and messes they are creating here on our planet; and they are the elites of excuse-making, fear-monger, intimidation and so on. They get no free passes on religious, alienistic, transhumanistic or any other grounds.
Clayton, I assure you that reptiles exist.
LOL, nice one.
So do UFOs and aliens when you think about it... :-P
Daniel Muffinburg:I have been wondering how much was known by TPTB before it was known by the masses, and for how long. It seems as if TPTB have been using their better understanding of the universe and "corrupting" knowledge to their favor, and that this has been one of the reasons they have been able to maintain their status. For example, food. I forget where heard about this, but essentially that, tradionally, grains have been feed to slaves and laborers while the royals ate meats and fats.
For example, food. I forget where heard about this, but essentially that, tradionally, grains have been feed to slaves and laborers while the royals ate meats and fats.
Yeah, I read where someone asked David Rockefeller what view of economics he was most sympathetic to, and he responded it would be Austrian economics. Blew me out of the water. By the way, he went to London School of Economics and actually studied with/under Hayek for awhile. A lot of central-banking critiques operate on the presumption that the highest officials are actually clueless about ABCT, for example. But I think a subtler view is that - while the rank-and-file are indoctrinated in mainstream, Keynesian economics - the tip of the pyramid must understand ABCT if by no other means than sheer experience. The first central bank was established back in the late-17th century! And they've been debasing currencies for at least a dozen centuries prior to that. So, the idea that they are clueless, babe-in-the-woods naive about the general effects of central banking and inflation on the economy is simply ridiculous. (On a related note, I also don't think they were "confused" about the viability of communism.)
Food, as you mentioned, is another one of these. I think a lot of the mind-control stuff, too... it's not scientific and yet it is. They know that human minds can be manipulated and tricked and mass-propagandized because they've been doing it since the dawn of history. I think the MKULTRA-variety of experimentation is not so much "is mind-control possible?" - as the History channel would have you believe - as "let's see how far we can take this using the latest tools of modern science."
What is really bothering me lately is this plasma cosmology stuff. The orthodox cosmology is so grotesquely horrible and wrong that it smells of the same kind of "indoctrination-by-PhD"... just flood the research community with grant money that only points in a certain direction then nurture a battalion of PhDs that all hold exactly the same view: Big Bang, black holes, Dark Matter, Dark Energy, (WTF!!!?! is this a trading card game???), etc. etc.
And even more suspicious is that plasma cosmology is actually ridiculed. I haven't found any mainstream astrophysicists or cosmologists who have openly ridiculed it, but if you look at online forums, you will see that the self-appointed Einstein-relativity buffs consistently ridicule plasma cosmology as on a par with Young-Earth Creationism or something. Whenever you see that, you know immediately that these guys picked it up from their time in college - their professors either didn't talk about it at all (which means it must be quack) or they were dropping snide remarks whenever the topic came up. Why is plasma cosmology ridiculous? I cannot find a single ridiculous thing about it. Velikovsky is pretty wild but even he isn't ridiculous. And then Birkeland, Alfven, Peratt???? Come on!
I have two hypotheses. One I will state. The other is too insane to be stated in public. ;-)
I have written earlier in the thread that I suspect that nuclear bombs are a Big Lie. My reasons (in brief) are: a) There's nothing in the footage that couldn't be faked, b) some governments' footage (e.g. China) is obviously fake, c) release of radioactivity by "test firings" could easily be accomplished by "dirty bomb" methods, d) the Moon landings were faked; going to the Moon had been written about by a famous fictionalist (Verne), e) the "atomic bomb" was a term first used by fictionalist HG Wells... decades before the actual nuclear bomb, f) the Manhattan project has the same aura of "impossibly perfect" about it that the Moon landings do, g) both occurred after the arrival of central-banking to America (the possibility of funding monumentally expensive "fake-out" projects), h) the science of radioactivity is bizarrely incongruous with other sciences... of course radioactivity exists but why is it simply posited that matter can "decay" into energy?... and what does that even mean... "matter is energy"... not it's not, matter is matter, energy is the latent propensity within matter to move, i) related to this, there are a variety of serious metaphysical bungles in the foundations of modern philosophy of science related to the meaning of time, energy, causality and even existence, j) radioactive particles could alternatively be understood as "transducers" of some kind that capture energy at one frequency and emit it at another... in other words, radioactive particles could be atomic-scale radio circuits that degrade over time (thus explaining radioactive decay) and this gives us a theory of radioactivity that does not violate conservation of mass/energy nor require us to say such absurd things as "matter and energy are the same thing", k) variation in the purportedly "constant" radioactive decay rates of a handful of elements has been discovered (and virtually covered up, hand-waved away)... turns out their decay rates move up and down in synch with the Solar sunspot cycle.
This last point is a real doozy. It suggests that there could be a connection between the Solar environment and radioactivity itself. These points combined suggest that perhaps the purpose of steering the scientific community away from plasma cosmology is that a focus on the electrical nature of the Earth and the Solar environment will lead to a cascade of discoveries that would rewrite the physics of radioactivity. Which would take all the air out of their Big Lie which is one of the tools being used to create a world government (HG Wells specifically wrote on this point... he even posited the suitcase-nuke scenario as an insuperable rationale for world government!)
Just curious what you think of existence of nuclear reactors. Are they fake?
@Andris: There are some websites that suggest exactly that. But note that radioactivity itself is an empirically established phenomenon. If you stand next to a big block of enriched Uranium-235, you will die. It is conceivable that the metaphysical idealizations of radioactive processes (such as atom-splitting, neutron-bombardment, etc.) are simply wrong in the right way. That is, neutron-bombardment might be a fanciful description of the microscopic phenomena that, however, happens to have macroscopic correlation with the energy release of radioactive materials.
To put it in simplified terms, nuclear reactors operate on the principle that when you put a bunch of radioactive material in close proximity (fuel rods), the release of energy is increased. I see no necessary reason why the orthodox description of the microscopic phenomena (neutrons breaking apart atoms) is the only conceivable description that is consistent with this behavior, nor do I see that it necessarily follows that if you compress radioactive material into a tiny, spherical ball, that its energy output must rise to the levels that nuclear weapons are supposed to achieve.
Perhaps what radioactive materials are doing is down-converting energy from an extremely high-frequency range - way outside the range we have been able to probe with particle reactors - into a lower frequency range which we observe as the release of radioactive energy (particles). If this is true, then radioactive materials are not "converting matter into energy", they are simply converting energy from one form (unobservable) to another (observable). In every other field of science, this an ordinary and mundane behavior of the natural world as we understand it (e.g. think of how a radio circuit converts insensible radio-frequency waves to sensible audio waves that our ears can perceive).
Stunning X-class solar flare today:
Look at this. Now tell me that the Elites have not shifted the global economy to Asia.
You've got some very interesting theories, Clayton. I've read up to about page 5 or 6 and skimmed after that.
What do you think of modern psychology? It's a young science. What do you think we know about the brain and what do you think is wrong?
You've mentioned somewhere that you think the brain is a computer. What kind? A digital computer?
Aam
I would add to the previous question: do we have any evidence that brain actually "produces" mind, as opposed to being a mere conduit to some kind of "soul"?
I have yet to read anything by Thomas Szasz that I disagree with. Modern psychiatry is a tool of social and political manipulation. Other branches of psychology are collecting interesting data (e.g. the fMRI stuff) but of dubious value. Daniel Dennett remarks on fMRI research showing that apparently wistful decisions are predictable as much as 10 seconds before they occur (paraphrase): What does this tell us about free will? Well, nothing. But don't play rock-paper-scissors for money with the authors of this research when they have your head hooked into an fMRI machine!
The brain is at least a computer. It turns out that it doesn't matter (from a computability perspective) what kind of computer the brain is. Every kind of (Turing complete) computer can simulate every other kind of computer.
Clearly, the brain is a neural-net computer - the whole concept of neural-net computing comes from brain science. I believe it's still an open question, at this point, why Nature chose neural networks... what is so natural about a neural network? I think that it comes down to efficient use of parallelism but there's not a lot of theoretical understanding of this issue at this time (automatic parallelization of algorithms is still a very thorny subject). Of course, Nature works the exact opposite of the way we do - we write down a recipe (solution to a problem) and then try to figure out how to parallelize it. Nature begins with parallelism (cells, nervous systems) and then recipes (behaviors) emerge from the competition between these inherently parallel algorithms.
Also, note that the neural-net structure of the brain is only its "highest level" structure. Underneath, it turns out that our entire body is computing... every single cell is computing. Cells, in fact, are self-reproducing computer hardware. So, the "brain/body" dichotomy is dangerous - clearly, most of the computing goes on in the cranium but a great deal of computing also goes on throughout the rest of the body. Perhaps this part of it is indispensable to understanding what consciousness really is.
do we have any evidence that brain actually "produces" mind, as opposed to being a mere conduit to some kind of "soul"?
Does there have to be a distinction? This is how I think of it. Imagine a human inside of a glass box. The question is: is there anything outside the box that is influencing his consciousness? You can say, well, light is. OK, so paint the box black. What else? Well, sound. OK, so evacuate an area around the glass box so sound cannot reach the box or his ears. What else? Heat (insulation), electro-magnetic waves (Faraday cage), and so on. Once you've finished, there will still be the local atmosphere of the box itself and the mysterious "vacuum energy density" which nobody really has any idea what the hell that is.
But I think we can safely say that all the causal factors that we understand can be eliminated without injury to consciousness. Hence, there is no causal dependency on any of those causal factors - with respect to all of known physics, consciousness exists exclusively within the cranium. There is still the vacuum energy and all we can say in respect to this is we don't know if there is a causal relationship between that and consciousness because we have no way to isolate a conscious being (or anything, for that matter) from it.
I think a more philosophical way to answer the question is to start morphologically. Clearly, what we mean by consciousness - what is special about it - is something that is not enjoyed by a rock, even if it were to turn out that the spiritualists were not just uttering mumbo-jumbo when they say "the world is spirit". That is, even supposing "everything is conscious", in whatever sense a rock is conscious, we are conscious in a different, more special way and it is that "alertness" or "awakeness" that we are interested in. But we can just look at a human brain and note that its shape must be playing a causal role in the fact that it - and not a rock - is alert/awake/conscious. And this is clearly not exclusively true of human brains - however much lower the conscious awareness of other animals is, it is not zero. But how far down does it go? Are spiders conscious? I just flushed one down the shower drain this morning... I didn't squish him because I figured I'd let him have a fighting chance. But he was invading my shower! Anyway, even if you said insects are conscious - are amoeba conscious? Are protein chains conscious? At some point, you have to draw a line and say "these things are conscious in the special, 'alert/awake' way that these other things are not."
Any line we draw is arbitrary because we cannot go inside the head of a spider and "see what it's like to be a spider", for example. So, I draw the line at central-nervous system. I don't think anything that doesn't have a CNS can be conscious in the special, alert/awake sense that we are, even a little bit. In terms of consciousness, there is no difference between a rock and a protein chain. There is no difference between a gear-box and an amoeba. There is no difference between a pile of dirt and a tree. These entities are "isoconscious", to invent a word.
So, having excluded everything that does not have a CNS, that still leaves a big chunk of the animal world, including ourselves. Let's suppose that everything with a CNS is conscious in the special, alert/awake way that we are, it just expresses itself differently. In this case, we can ask a simple question: what is it about the morphology of a CNS that causes it to be capable of alert/awake consciousness? And I think this is where the "neural correlates of consciousness" folks are coming from. However, I think they have an unduly stunted conception of physical possibility. Given how little we know about physics, I think we need to adopt a mantle of greater humility towards the possible springs of consciousness. Perhaps the CNS simply has a morphology that happens to be able to "tune in" to some kind of "consciousness broadcast" from somewhere else in the galaxy that is mediated through forces that operate in the vacuum, which we don't understand. Or, perhaps it manufactures the entire theatre of consciousness within itself (this is the orthodox view). Either way, we should still be able to narrow our search by considering the morphological characteristics that differentiate a CNS from a non-CNS entity.
To put into perspective what I mean by humility, I was just browsing YT videos about pulsars. The crab pulsar, for example, emits an 11 cycles/sec. signal clearly audible in the X-ray spectrum. It's amazing. But there are some pulsars that are in the millisecond range - the astrophysicists believe these things are literally spinning at that rate. The plasma cosmologists laugh at this... the surface of the highest frequency known pulsar must be rotating at a rate 1/7th the speed of light. Um. The plasma-cosmological view is that pulsars are simply resonances in stellar plasma. But the fact is that we can't resolve this question by looking at objects 100's of thousands of light-years distant. You have to "build your way out" as we did for setting the scale structure of the Universe by first calculating the distances to the planets and then to the nearest stars - through parallax - and so on.
The lack of humility is what drives this search for bigger, faster, more incredible things. It's a scientific pissing contest. Why not try to understand how our local environment actually works? There are clearly electromagnetic resonances and energy exchanges happening between the Sun and its planets. Why not try to build a solid understanding of this before speculating about X-ray emitting objects that are zillions of times more distant?
This same arrogance is present in neurology. Everybody's looking for that 'big breakthrough' that 'explains it all' when every indication is that a) the human brain is not special (animal brains do everything the human brain does in the basic terms of alertness/awakeness which is the central puzzle here), b) brains consist of a rat's nest of purpose-built "modules" that solve particular problems, just like the heart solves a particular problem and the liver solves a particular problem, c) "general-purpose reasoning" isn't... it's just the capacity for language. Rather than looking for the big breakthrough that explains it all, why not start with explaining what we have in front of us? There are some folks who are doing this, with amazing results. Basically, it's just a matter of reverse-engineering the damn thing.
Clayton,
I thought you might be interested in this article by Roderick Long: http://c4ss.org/content/11146
He essentially argues that spontaneous order mechanisms can reinforce and maintain state systems so that "conspiracy theory" type explanations aren't altogether necessary for understanding how states maintain themselves.
they said we would have an unfair fun advantage
@mika: I agree with Long - the State is indeed a result of "invisible hand" forces, that is, it is emergent. This is why I reject Rothbard's account of government as solely the creation of propaganda... a big mental trick that, once exposed, would immediately collapse. Mental tricks are a big part of it, but it's not the whole thing.
In my conspiracy theories, I speculate on a) concrete manifestations of State power that are overlooked or trivialized and b) specific methods by which the Elites extract resources from the public and try to cobble together a bigger, more powerful government cartel. How are they maintaining centralization? To the extent their schemes work, I guess we have no option but to say "it is as Nature intended".
But that doesn't mean we can't examine its mechanism and render predictions on its future. For example, unlike many libertarians, I do not believe that world government is a serious possibility. The evidence for world government is the steady, inexorable reduction in the number of sovereigns that has been occurring over the process of centuries. But I think this is a case of missing the unseen by focusing on the seen - the fact is that this is not just a "magical" process, sovereigns have always been taken out and subjected by other sovereigns. As this process continues, there is a "weeding out" and, thus, an intensification of the competition.
It's like the difference between the first round chess tournaments versus world chess tournament. As you work your way up the process of elimination, the average aptitude of the contenders steadily increases. The world government theory basically boils down to the assertion that there is a ruling dynasty that is so irresistable that, in the long run, they will topple all others because no one else is even close to as competent at ruling. I don't buy it.
But you have to be a "conspiracy theorist" to see why this is the case - ruling is an inherently non-linear business. There's always more than one way to skin the cat, as they say, and the greatest ruling powers in the world today are incredibly flexible and creative in applying whatever means necessary to achieving their ends. If you just read the orthodox history books, you won't really see this. It's like the difference between getting an education in biology from watching Bambi versus looking through a microscope at real living organisms. The history books are filled with heros, villains, suckers and shysters. In reality, there's just a bunch of very clever, avaricious, power-mad people who are constantly fighting amongst each other in thousands of direct or indirect methods, most of which never make the news because the news people simply don't have the information required to connect the dots.
Damn.
Don't watch this if you've just eaten. Informative, though.
I believe this man has captured the essence of the entirety of my philosophy. And I'm not being snarky, I'm completely serious.
To be moral is to make correct choices. What is a correct choice? It cannot be anything other than what makes you happy, that is, what satisfies you. What is satisfying? Well, the answer to this question is strictly particularistic - it depends on who you are at the moment the question is asked and the answer is only valid for you at that moment. The sincerity of your answer is not determined by fervor but by your actions... what you actually choose to do. But the question still remains - what, in general, is satisfying? Is there not one, overriding end - or a small number of overriding ends - that far and away can be said to be the end?
I think the answer is, clearly, yes. There is an overriding end and that end is reproduction. It is higher than reason, higher than virtue, higher than philosophy, higher than science, higher than war and empire, higher than theology, cosmology or any other aspect of human experience. This is not merely an opinion or a prejudice, it is a fact of human nature easily deduced a priori from the logic of biological continuation (reproduction is necessarily the most important telos of any living organism) as well as easily confirmed by the observation of the behavior of any living organism, including humans.
What this means, in practical terms, is that almost every* individual - if he wants to be wise, that is live morally - will order his or her life in line with this fact of his nature. No, that doesn't mean "everyone should do what Ed Houben is doing"... of course not. For the vast majority of people, it will mean settling down and having a family in the traditional sense. If you don't have a family, preparing yourself for it is your overriding purpose. It is your summum bonum.
The misanthropes in the video hating on Houben are oozing this anti-human mentality. "He's doing it for the sex". Well, OK, would it be more moral if he experienced excruciating pain during the orgasm? This is just a cheap ad hominem. The parting shot is a bit of unsolicited psychoanalysis - he's doing it for the immortality without intimacy. Why should a particularly conception of intimacy be the cover charge for reproduction ("immortality"). Once again, it's just another cheap ad hominem.
Houben himself admits, (paraphrase) if you dig into it, yes, you will find ego-maniacs but he is not one. And, clearly, he is not. But he has found his "center", the ultimate expression of who he truly is inside. Perhaps he isn't good with intimacy and that's what made him a good fit for this particular role in the natural order. But my thesis stands: the highest end is reproduction.
To extend the thought even further, we can see that there is a very large mismatch between the social order as-it-is and this "prime directive", as it were. You only need to look at some of Houben's customers: lesbians, a bisexual woman and single mothers. He has also assisted traditional couples (including via the natural method!) but the point is that demand for his services is higher than it otherwise would be by virtue of the up-ending of social mores as a result of State subsidy of "alternative" lifestyles, especially single motherhood. Also, state interference in adoption increases demand (lesbian couples have difficulty adopting in Germany).
The deepest cause, I believe, is monogamy. Well, not monogamy... anti-polygamy. In particular, anti-polygyny. In a polygamous society, the demand for Ed's services would be smaller. Why get pregnant by Ed when you can marry a wealthy, desirable man who already has multiple wives?
At this point, we have to delve into evolutionary psychology to strip the reproductive exchange down to its barest terms - women reproduce with men in exchange for material support. This is true whether women work, whether society is feministic, whether prostitution is legal or illegal; it is true regardless of the legal superstructure that is placed on top of the natural order. It turns out that humans have always been polygynous (not polyandrous). It is part of human nature. And while the plurality of men who reproduce do so with only one woman, the fact of polygyny completely alters the meaning of reproduction for men versus women. Both men and women share in common the preference for a more genetically excellent partner over a less genetically excellent partner. But men have a much wider "range of success or failure" than women do - that is, many more men will die without children than women will die without children. That's because men are "disposable" from Nature's point-of-view... sperm is cheap (not costless, but still cheap). And, on the flip side, men can be much more reproductively successful than women can be (no woman could ever have 85 children as Ed has done, at least, it's only barely become possible in the modern era and would be fantastically expensive).
One of the greatest ills of the modern social order is the demonization of the desire to reproduce outside of certain parameters. Sex has been decontextualized from its end and has been made into an end-in-itself. That's what Cosmopolitan and racy Super Bowl ads (and most pornography) is all about. Sex for the sake of sex. But if you engage in a little introspection on the nature of sexual pleasure, you will discover that sexual experience is pleasurable in direct proportion to its suitability for reproduction. Stated as bluntly as possible: any form of birth-control makes sex less pleasurable, ceteris paribus.
“What we do in life ripples through eternity” - Marcus Aurelius
And you thought I couldn't possibly get any further out... ;-)
*There are people for whom it is clear that reproduction cannot be their highest end, namely, people who cannot reproduce whether for genetic, developmental or even psychological/emotional reasons.
**ceteris paribus... i.e. I'm not comparing it to cancer.
if a genetic uncle foregos having one child and thereby enables his sibling to have 2 or more children, this behavior can be selected for by Nature
Just to nit-pick: aren't siblings related with degree 2 (roughly speaking, 1/4 of common genetic material)? This would mean the sibling in question should have more than 4 marginal kids as a result of the uncle's losing one kid in order for this to be advantageous for the uncle. Am I missing something?
Andris: Yes, you're right - I think 2 is for grandparents.... if a grandparent forgoes having one child and enables one of his or her children to have 2 or more, then it's at least a break-even. Good catch.
Also, I want to point out that I'm not advocating some kind of "alternative lifestyle revolution" - quite the opposite. In fact, I'm arguing that the natalism of traditional religions is not too far off the mark. You will be happiest living your life as part of a family to produce a family, or even contributing to it in less direct methods, for example, providing care for children to help those with families, e.g. the "happy uncle". It is the deepest satisfaction that any person can attain.
The point in posting Ed Houben's story is to demonstrate the "extreme" ways in which this can manifest itself. For the vast majority of people, it just means settling down and having a family. But I'm trying to get at something bigger than just rubber-stamping natalism... I'm trying to point out that the essential evil of all propaganda that is contrary to human liberty, human dignity and wise living is that it is attempting to persuade the individual to oppose his own highest ends, to become a traitor to himself and to his kin.
This effect is particularly pronounced in men. Stated as bluntly as possible, it is in the interests of "genetic imperialists" to persuade other men to simply not reproduce at all. Imagine that Ed Houben not only does what he does, but heads a cult of other men who do what he does. In addition, this cult supports every population control organization and promotes propaganda for birth-control and so on - propaganda that they themselves roundly ignore. That is a simplified description of what the "genetic imperialist" memes are, in fact, doing.
Finally, what of population control? Ten thousand years ago, feeding another child was a very costly choice. Many more children never made it to adulthood at that time than today (even 150 years ago, a staggering number of children would not make it to adulthood). Starvation of the children or the parents was a very real risk. The answer, here, is that families had to engage in birth control once they reached a certain size. Nature took care of most of it... if you had 7 children, odds were that only a few of them would make it to adulthood. But if you could only feed three children, a fourth could spell disaster.
Before the invention of modern birth-control methods, people used a combination of abstinence, withdrawal (this merely slows the rate of pregnancies and will not stop them altogether) and non-vaginal sex to achieve birth-control. But how did they know to engage in birth-control? My theory is that this is what old people are for... they're the ones who know about how much it costs to raise a child to adulthood (because they've done it) and they can help younger people know when it is time to call it quits. But I think it generally worked not through elders saying 'enough' but rather the opposite... they cheered it on until it was enough. Compare the glee of new grandparents at their first grandchild to that of subsequent grandchildren. It goes down with increasing children. The same for parents, too. There's a "maringal utility" effect here, I think. ;-)
The modern social order breaks down these kinds of calculations by dispersing and isolating families. Social Security pays to keep gramps and grammy in the nursing home, safely away from where they can encourage their children to reproduce or even to call it quits. Irresponsible people have many children and no one is there to say "what the hell are you thinking??"... conversely, many responsible, intelligent people have their obligatory 1 or 2 children and then stop. Watch Mike Judge's Idiocracy for an entertaining take on this. Also, I recommend watching this Hoppe lecture for more insight.
Andris Birkmanis:1/4 of common genetic material
Also, I want to point out that this is 1/4 of unique genetic material in common. Humans share almost all their DNA in common with one another (I can't seem to find the percentage online, but it must be north of 99.9%). We even share a great deal of DNA in common with many animals, which I think explains why love for animals is so strong within humans. I'm pointing this out to say that the unique-genetics-only view (family heredity view) is overly narrow. People who cannot reproduce themselves for whatever reason may orient their life towards helping others in their family or, if not that, then other strangers or, if not that, even animals and plants to live, thrive and reproduce. This "life orientation" is not about making Life an end-in-itself... you don't need to do that, Life will look out for itself no matter what you do... it's about finding ataraxia - satisfaction - by aligning your action with your highest end.
Yes, you're right - I think 2 is for grandparents.... if a grandparent forgoes having one child and enables one of his or her children to have 2 or more, then it's at least a break-even. Good catch.
Oops, actually I think I was confused by degrees of relatedness as defined by law (at least in the countries where I know this law). It defines both grandparents and siblings as 2nd degree relatives. Combinatorically, though, siblings should share 50% of genetic material (on average, and assuming their father and mother do not share genetic material at all). For grandparents this should be 25%. This occurred to me while walking with the kids after I posted my initial nit-picking comment. I also mused on whether the fact that father and mother in fact share a lot of material makes almost irrelevant the calculation at all - helping grandson or nephew is practically as beneficial for you as helping your son.
helping grandson or nephew is practically as beneficial for you as helping your son
There are a lot of effects that all play into it - for example, if you have a child and you help your nephew or niece, it is more likely that - in the future - that nephew or niece may be in a position to help your child (since they are cousins). In other words, kin loyalty is a general survival-enhancing mechanism. But I do think that genetics are surprisingly fine-pointed - just look at sibling rivalry, for example. Despite the fact that siblings share fully 50% of DNA with one another, they are still at each other's throats due to the competition over family resources. Also, the "Oedipus complex" shows that there can even be antipathy in the most intimate genetic relationship of all (besides identical twins): the parent-child relationship.
Wow, I didn't realize how much envy and malice has been directed at Gunther von Hagens (creator of Body Worlds). His only crime is that he is a consummate entrepreneur and a visionary. The world is filled with so many people who never accomplish anything of their own ability and discipline except to find others who have and attempt to shake them down.
The ocean is electrically conductive. The ocean is more saline and warmer (thus, more conductive) near the equator than near the poles. Does this relate in any way to telluric currents? Also, I'm thinking about the Moon's effects on the tides... mechanically rotating an electrically condutive fluid must have a magnetic side effect.
Wow, look at that. This source says, "The character of the diurnal variation during the winter solstice (particularly January and February) is found to be quite different from that observed during the rest of the year. Evidence is presented to support the hypothesis that the major source of the telluric current field near the magnetic equator is the equatorial electrojet." Holy crap!
mechanically rotating an electrically condutive fluid must have a magnetic side effect.
Why?
Moving a conductor in a magnetic field may produce electric current, and a conductor carrying current in a magnetic field will be subject to a mechanical force, but you must have meant something else?
Moving a conductor in a magnetic field may produce electric current
Precisely.
LOL, I was looking at that Wiki article on the IMF again and realized that the Plasma cosmology folks are so right in their criticisms of mainstream representations of electricity in space: "Since the solar wind is a plasma, it has the characteristics of a plasma, rather than a simple gas. For example, it is highly electrically conductive so that magnetic field lines from the Sun are carried along with the wind."
The highlighted portion is actually incorrect on several counts. First of all, there are no such thing as "magnetic field lines". The magnetic field fills space, it is not restricted to certain "lines". Second, the magnetic field does not depend on any medium... the words "so that", above, imply that the Sun's magnetic field would not be extended in space if it were not for the plasma. Finally, the wind itself doesn't "carry along" the magnetic field - as noted already, the field would extend into a vacuum. Rather, the Sun's magnetic field affects the Solar wind because it is a plasma, that is, charged particles are influenced by the magnetic field. In this sense, the effect of the Sun's mangetic field can be seen to be "propagated" along through the Solar wind but it's a gross misinterpretation to suggest that the Sun's magnetic influence would not otherwise be extended into space if it were surrounded by a vacuum.
I've heard a bit about Plasma cosmology, where should one go to read more about it? There are a lot of things in mainstream cosmology that seem more like assumptions, not science.
And I want to read debates between them and mainstream people, preferably.
the Plasma cosmology folks are so right in their criticisms of mainstream representations of electricity in space
Is it fair to treat a popularized article by some random guy on Wikipedia as the mainstream representation?
@Andris: I think it is representative in this case. Factual/grammatical problems tend to at least get flagged on Wiki surprisingly quickly.
The problem with Wikipedia is you never know how many William Connolley's lurk beneath the surface (not that there's anything untoward about the Interplanetary Magentic Field page though - it looks fine).
@hk: Just google it ("plasma cosmology" "electric universe" "hannes alfven" "kristian birkeland" "anthony peratt").That's how I've found whatever I've read.
Clayton: @hk: Just google it ("plasma cosmology" "electric universe" "hannes alfven" "kristian birkeland" "anthony peratt").That's how I've found whatever I've read. Clayton -
The problem is Mainstream physcists attack plasma cosmology, saying it doesn't have enough "equations". Equations are silly in economics but they mean more in Physics.
Also Standard Model people say that P.C. has not been developed much since the 1990's. Those are some of the (paraphrasing them) arguments made against Plasma Cosmology. It doesn't seem to be as popular as the School of Austrian economics for example, so it seems less developed scientifically.