Jesus heals the servant of a Roman Centurion with but a command, from the 1977 mini-series Jesus of Nazareth.
Sunday, March 25, 2018
Wednesday, March 7, 2018
The Failure of Economics
The problem with all economic systems is money. There's not enough of it. Alternately you could say there are too many people, but I'm not going to go down the path of suggesting genocide, so let's say the problem is not enough money. I read somewhere that even if all the money in the world was divided equally among everyone that would mean everyone only gets about $5,000. And no new money would be made because everyone would be too poor to do anything. There's just not enough money in the world for 8 billion people.
You look at all the times when there was a spectacular economic situation for some people and you see the reason is always because the world has become hell on earth for others. The US prospered like no country before or since during the 50s-70s because WW2 destroyed all possible competition and lead to the deaths of 50-100 million people. Even the paupers in America lived as kings because there were jobs galore and they paid unbelievable wages. Once the rest of the world rebuilt then the wealth of America vanished, it spread around elsewhere.
What else do you see? Places like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia where the native population does not work, at all. They can pull unlimited money out of the ground and they import basically slaves ("sponsored workers") to do all the labour for the native population who all live like kings off welfare. But that's ending too. They realise that oil is not infinite so they are desperately trying to diversify their economies so as to avoid what would inevitably be the devolution of their crapulent societies into Somalia.
I've read the literature, methane, created by bacteria in the deep ocean vents, is transformed into butane and propane under heat, and has been shown to turn into crude oil in laboratory conditions mimicking the upper mantle. Oil is not a fossil fuel, but it's not inexhaustible, just like ground water. We're extracting it faster than it's being replenished. I don't care if the Earth is "9,000 miles deep" as one Youtube commentator has expressed, you can see that technology is not advancing anywhere near fast enough to make up for the decreasing supply of available resources, be they ground water, oil, gold, or anything else. The thickness of the Earth is the problem, not the solution. It's just not possible to drill that deep, and gold or oil or whatever just isn't worth nearly enough to justify developing drilling technologies further. There's not enough money.
The only way to fix the global economic disaster that is looming fast, without starting another world war, is to discover some previously unknown magic resource to take the place of oil. There needs to be something super abundant that is extremely valuable and extremely useful as a resource and it needs to be extremely easy to attain and we need to find it soon or all hell will break loose.
Communism, socialism, capitalism, corporatism, "social democracy", they don't work because of human nature and because of the nature of the world itself.
Communism bullshit.
First of all, Marx was a hypocrite who understood nothing about human nature. "When a people's basic needs are met then people will work for free. Work will be its own reward." Bullshit. Bullshit. People will not work for free, even if all their basic needs are met. People will only work for money or for a cause to which they are totally devoted (like family or religion). People will not work for nothing if they don't have to, and they will not work if there is no correlation between work and reward.
Second, planned economies don't work because it's impossible to predict the future to that degree of specificity. That's why planned economies always have shortages. A grocery store in a communist country might have one salami hanging up and you're not allowed to have it, but the party bosses can have mansions and limousines and caviar.
"But that's not real communism."
Bullshit, but let's indulge your fantasy.
"Communism works perfectly on paper but the problem is that real communism has never been implemented."
No. If by "real communism" you mean a stateless, classless society then you have to admit that "real communism" is a utopian fantasy that can never ever be realised ever in this or any world. The second you get two people together you have a hierarchy, because people have different degrees of competence so someone will always be better than someone else, and a hierarchy on the scale of a society is a class structure. You also develop a state structure, even in hunter-gatherer societies (so called "primitive communism"). This is "our" land, as opposed to "their" land. And tribes went to war with each other constantly because humans are territorial animals, just like chimpanzees. So if you're definition of "real communism" is a utopian fantasy than you might as well admit to being wrong from the start.
"Real communism" also doesn't work well "on paper" because humans won't work for free. Work is not its own reward, if it was people wouldn't need to be paid to work, and of the thousands of experiments that have been done to disprove this basic reality of human nature none has ever succeeded. No hippie commune or Marxist revolutionary vanguard has ever produced a system where people will work for free because "Well isn't that swell, I might as well help my neighbors out. And work is just so gosh darn fun too." If you worked all the time and got nothing out of it then you wouldn't keep working. That's not even a human trait, that's true of all animals. Unless you're getting more than you put in then the activity isn't worth the caloric output.
Socialism is bullshit too. Unless you have a very small, ethnically homogenous population that can pull wealth out of the ground there's no incentive to sacrifice for others in society. That's just human nature too. In-group preference. Four million Norwegians floating on an ocean of oil might pay 70% income tax to give all their fellow Norwegians "free" healthcare, but that will never work in a place like the United States where there are 350 million people of every ethnic group who don't trust each other and are unwilling to sacrifice for members of different tribes.
What happens when you have bureaucrats divvying up handouts supposedly to the people most in need? What happens every single time? They give handouts to the people who will vote them into office. Politicians buy votes by giving away "free" shit to people with low IQs who breed like rabbits because, surprise, selfishness is another part of human nature.
Maybe robots might be able to work out the system of handouts perfectly. Robots, who were deemed the overlords of humanity and had unchallengeable might, and who acted out of pure rationality and followed routines by rote without any outside factors influencing their judgment might be able to make a social welfare state work. Robots would be dispassionate enough not to be bought off by special interest groups, and if they were willing to let humans live (as pets, say), then, and only then, could socialism work. Or you might get a system where the machines decide we all must be plugged into the Matrix because humans are self-destructive by nature.
And capitalism bullshit.
The US economy is worth $18 trillion. There are 350 million people (50 million of whom are illegal). Divide the two up and you get $51,000 per person per year.
So why are there people with $100 billion and other people struggling to survive on less than $20,000?
You'll see corporations with big CEOs who make $100 million bonuses on top of the money they already make sitting on the boards of directors of six other corporations, yet they won't pay their workers a living wage. Pundits always say that the profit margins are razor thin. Well if the profit margins are so thin that the company can't pay a living wage yet the CEO can make $100 million, or with smaller businesses where the bosses can hire and promote their incompetent friends at outrageous salaries, then those businesses have very shitty business models and deserve to go out of business. If carpetbaggers can exploit their workers to make millions and not even give those workers enough to live then those people should be put in jail. It's like Citi Group or the AIG or the Goldman Sachs. Everyone in upper and middle management of those corporations should be in jail for life.
So what's left? Could post-economics work, or is it too doomed by the flaws in human nature?
You look at all the times when there was a spectacular economic situation for some people and you see the reason is always because the world has become hell on earth for others. The US prospered like no country before or since during the 50s-70s because WW2 destroyed all possible competition and lead to the deaths of 50-100 million people. Even the paupers in America lived as kings because there were jobs galore and they paid unbelievable wages. Once the rest of the world rebuilt then the wealth of America vanished, it spread around elsewhere.
What else do you see? Places like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia where the native population does not work, at all. They can pull unlimited money out of the ground and they import basically slaves ("sponsored workers") to do all the labour for the native population who all live like kings off welfare. But that's ending too. They realise that oil is not infinite so they are desperately trying to diversify their economies so as to avoid what would inevitably be the devolution of their crapulent societies into Somalia.
I've read the literature, methane, created by bacteria in the deep ocean vents, is transformed into butane and propane under heat, and has been shown to turn into crude oil in laboratory conditions mimicking the upper mantle. Oil is not a fossil fuel, but it's not inexhaustible, just like ground water. We're extracting it faster than it's being replenished. I don't care if the Earth is "9,000 miles deep" as one Youtube commentator has expressed, you can see that technology is not advancing anywhere near fast enough to make up for the decreasing supply of available resources, be they ground water, oil, gold, or anything else. The thickness of the Earth is the problem, not the solution. It's just not possible to drill that deep, and gold or oil or whatever just isn't worth nearly enough to justify developing drilling technologies further. There's not enough money.
The only way to fix the global economic disaster that is looming fast, without starting another world war, is to discover some previously unknown magic resource to take the place of oil. There needs to be something super abundant that is extremely valuable and extremely useful as a resource and it needs to be extremely easy to attain and we need to find it soon or all hell will break loose.
Communism, socialism, capitalism, corporatism, "social democracy", they don't work because of human nature and because of the nature of the world itself.
Communism bullshit.
First of all, Marx was a hypocrite who understood nothing about human nature. "When a people's basic needs are met then people will work for free. Work will be its own reward." Bullshit. Bullshit. People will not work for free, even if all their basic needs are met. People will only work for money or for a cause to which they are totally devoted (like family or religion). People will not work for nothing if they don't have to, and they will not work if there is no correlation between work and reward.
Second, planned economies don't work because it's impossible to predict the future to that degree of specificity. That's why planned economies always have shortages. A grocery store in a communist country might have one salami hanging up and you're not allowed to have it, but the party bosses can have mansions and limousines and caviar.
"But that's not real communism."
Bullshit, but let's indulge your fantasy.
"Communism works perfectly on paper but the problem is that real communism has never been implemented."
No. If by "real communism" you mean a stateless, classless society then you have to admit that "real communism" is a utopian fantasy that can never ever be realised ever in this or any world. The second you get two people together you have a hierarchy, because people have different degrees of competence so someone will always be better than someone else, and a hierarchy on the scale of a society is a class structure. You also develop a state structure, even in hunter-gatherer societies (so called "primitive communism"). This is "our" land, as opposed to "their" land. And tribes went to war with each other constantly because humans are territorial animals, just like chimpanzees. So if you're definition of "real communism" is a utopian fantasy than you might as well admit to being wrong from the start.
"Real communism" also doesn't work well "on paper" because humans won't work for free. Work is not its own reward, if it was people wouldn't need to be paid to work, and of the thousands of experiments that have been done to disprove this basic reality of human nature none has ever succeeded. No hippie commune or Marxist revolutionary vanguard has ever produced a system where people will work for free because "Well isn't that swell, I might as well help my neighbors out. And work is just so gosh darn fun too." If you worked all the time and got nothing out of it then you wouldn't keep working. That's not even a human trait, that's true of all animals. Unless you're getting more than you put in then the activity isn't worth the caloric output.
Socialism is bullshit too. Unless you have a very small, ethnically homogenous population that can pull wealth out of the ground there's no incentive to sacrifice for others in society. That's just human nature too. In-group preference. Four million Norwegians floating on an ocean of oil might pay 70% income tax to give all their fellow Norwegians "free" healthcare, but that will never work in a place like the United States where there are 350 million people of every ethnic group who don't trust each other and are unwilling to sacrifice for members of different tribes.
What happens when you have bureaucrats divvying up handouts supposedly to the people most in need? What happens every single time? They give handouts to the people who will vote them into office. Politicians buy votes by giving away "free" shit to people with low IQs who breed like rabbits because, surprise, selfishness is another part of human nature.
Maybe robots might be able to work out the system of handouts perfectly. Robots, who were deemed the overlords of humanity and had unchallengeable might, and who acted out of pure rationality and followed routines by rote without any outside factors influencing their judgment might be able to make a social welfare state work. Robots would be dispassionate enough not to be bought off by special interest groups, and if they were willing to let humans live (as pets, say), then, and only then, could socialism work. Or you might get a system where the machines decide we all must be plugged into the Matrix because humans are self-destructive by nature.
And capitalism bullshit.
The US economy is worth $18 trillion. There are 350 million people (50 million of whom are illegal). Divide the two up and you get $51,000 per person per year.
So why are there people with $100 billion and other people struggling to survive on less than $20,000?
You'll see corporations with big CEOs who make $100 million bonuses on top of the money they already make sitting on the boards of directors of six other corporations, yet they won't pay their workers a living wage. Pundits always say that the profit margins are razor thin. Well if the profit margins are so thin that the company can't pay a living wage yet the CEO can make $100 million, or with smaller businesses where the bosses can hire and promote their incompetent friends at outrageous salaries, then those businesses have very shitty business models and deserve to go out of business. If carpetbaggers can exploit their workers to make millions and not even give those workers enough to live then those people should be put in jail. It's like Citi Group or the AIG or the Goldman Sachs. Everyone in upper and middle management of those corporations should be in jail for life.
So what's left? Could post-economics work, or is it too doomed by the flaws in human nature?
Sunday, March 4, 2018
Why Enlightenment is Unattainable
Ken Wilber takes us through the major states of consciousness and explains the paradoxical reality that enlightenment is literally unattainable.
Saturday, March 3, 2018
The Myth of "Education"
Education is bullshit. It's a bullshit feel-good panacea that educated people parade out because they've been programmed to believing that lie through the propaganda that is education. You spend enough money and get deep enough into debt purchasing a worthless education you're going to start thinking education is the solution to all the world's problems.
It also saves the educated from having to really do anything while still looking like they care. Throwing money at a problem (especially other people's money) is a convenient form of slacktivism.
When everyone has a college degree college degrees will be worthless. It's like that Zimbabwean money. If you give everyone a hundred trillion dollars there's nothing they can do with that money other than use it as toilet paper.
That's why this push for "free" college for everyone is a self-defeating idea, and the people who propose it - the policy makers, not general public - know this. They're not serious about universal education being the solution to society's problems, it's a scam.
That's the point. When everyone gets a degree then in order to stand out, in order to have an advantage in the real world you'll need to get a higher degree, meaning you'll need to get another loan and go deeper into debt. The push to get everyone into college is all about selling more debt to a population that is already bankrupt.
You have to fit into the system, or be made to fit into the system. You'd be a fool (an educated fool) to think otherwise. It's all about debt. The banks want your money and they want you to have an ego boost when they take your money and give you something largely worthless in return. Naturally these people will get defensive about their worthless product and defend it because they've allowed their sense of self-worth to be based on the possession of this worthless thing called education. Few things will crush a person's will to live more than the certain knowledge that they've wasted their youth, their money, and possibly their entire lives by being cattle for bankers who, by and large, never went to college.
Just look at that quote I have up from Richard Rose:
"Do we want the Truth or do we want to be "educated"? There is a tendency of people in control, whether in universities or in governments, to want to "educate". Not for the Truth, but for the convenience of the moment, thinking they are the prophets of the zeitgeist, and by their manipulation of the public mind they will bring people around to the "right" direction."
Every time some elitist, usually a Marxist, comes across someone who disagrees with their asinine, impossible, self-contradictory beliefs the Marxist will say that that person who disagrees needs to be "educated". If that's not the most terrifying Stalinist thing you've ever heard then you're painfully naive. People needing to be "educated" for "wrongthink" is straight out of Pol Pot's playbook. Believing that the problem with people who disagree with you is that those people need education and that the government needs to be empowered to provide that education has been a recipe for the worst genocides of the 20th century.
Aside from colossally expanding the debt and eliminating one's intellectual opponents, the push for more education is entirely a strategy of the elite to make the general populace more passive. Education is a modern, atheistic religion, and is defended as such. It has cathedrals, a priestly caste, sacraments, tithing, sacrifice, promises of salvation. It's a religion. And that's one of the key functions of any religion. Religion acts as a social glue. If you get everyone believing the same things you can maintain some semblance of society and a power structure. "Don't question your masters." That's the message of education.
It's no surprise that within a generation of when universal public education for children was instituted in most developed countries that the first global mechanised war broke out. Public education is based on a highly regimented Prussian military model designed to turn children into cogs in the machine of the body politic. Far from making people smarter education traps people into the same cognitive box. Education is the opposite of free thinking, it forces people to think the same thing or fear ostracism, or worse.
Education is not intelligence. Education is not problem solving ability. Education is not intellectual freedom. It's the opposite. It's a series of shackles on your mind designed to extract your wealth and make you docile.
The truth is that intelligence, real intelligence, is largely genetic (between 60% - 80%). Nothing, no school, no training program, no $40,000 piece of paper, can make you smart. People can acquire certain skills or memorise a series of facts, but that's not intelligence. A person who has an encyclopedic memory of facts doesn't necessarily have a higher level of problem solving ability.
That's not to say that there's no value at all in formal schooling. I want my doctor graduate with high marks from medical school, I want the engineer who designs the bridge I drive over to excel at engineering school, just like I want my electrician to get the proper training at electrician school. One of the big casualties in this push for universal education is the marginalisation of trade schools, you know, schools that actually teach people how to find and keep a job and succeed in the real world.
The real purpose of education, the intended purpose, is to install certain programs into the minds of young people so that they can learn skills and get a job and become productive members of society. Education gives you skills, and skills are not intelligence, but they're not supposed to be. The system of education is supposed to identify children's latent abilities and help guide them to develop those abilities to the utmost. Not everyone will place in the 99th percentile in terms of intelligence, by definition, and they don't have to be.
Everyone doesn't have to be a genius, and it's arrogance to think they should all be genii in order to make society better, or to make humans better. You're not going to make better humans through education, but if you can give people jobs that give their lives meaning then you won't have to make people better, because they'll have fewer incentives to be bad when they've got fulfilling lives.
It also saves the educated from having to really do anything while still looking like they care. Throwing money at a problem (especially other people's money) is a convenient form of slacktivism.
When everyone has a college degree college degrees will be worthless. It's like that Zimbabwean money. If you give everyone a hundred trillion dollars there's nothing they can do with that money other than use it as toilet paper.
That's why this push for "free" college for everyone is a self-defeating idea, and the people who propose it - the policy makers, not general public - know this. They're not serious about universal education being the solution to society's problems, it's a scam.
That's the point. When everyone gets a degree then in order to stand out, in order to have an advantage in the real world you'll need to get a higher degree, meaning you'll need to get another loan and go deeper into debt. The push to get everyone into college is all about selling more debt to a population that is already bankrupt.
You have to fit into the system, or be made to fit into the system. You'd be a fool (an educated fool) to think otherwise. It's all about debt. The banks want your money and they want you to have an ego boost when they take your money and give you something largely worthless in return. Naturally these people will get defensive about their worthless product and defend it because they've allowed their sense of self-worth to be based on the possession of this worthless thing called education. Few things will crush a person's will to live more than the certain knowledge that they've wasted their youth, their money, and possibly their entire lives by being cattle for bankers who, by and large, never went to college.
Just look at that quote I have up from Richard Rose:
"Do we want the Truth or do we want to be "educated"? There is a tendency of people in control, whether in universities or in governments, to want to "educate". Not for the Truth, but for the convenience of the moment, thinking they are the prophets of the zeitgeist, and by their manipulation of the public mind they will bring people around to the "right" direction."
Every time some elitist, usually a Marxist, comes across someone who disagrees with their asinine, impossible, self-contradictory beliefs the Marxist will say that that person who disagrees needs to be "educated". If that's not the most terrifying Stalinist thing you've ever heard then you're painfully naive. People needing to be "educated" for "wrongthink" is straight out of Pol Pot's playbook. Believing that the problem with people who disagree with you is that those people need education and that the government needs to be empowered to provide that education has been a recipe for the worst genocides of the 20th century.
Aside from colossally expanding the debt and eliminating one's intellectual opponents, the push for more education is entirely a strategy of the elite to make the general populace more passive. Education is a modern, atheistic religion, and is defended as such. It has cathedrals, a priestly caste, sacraments, tithing, sacrifice, promises of salvation. It's a religion. And that's one of the key functions of any religion. Religion acts as a social glue. If you get everyone believing the same things you can maintain some semblance of society and a power structure. "Don't question your masters." That's the message of education.
It's no surprise that within a generation of when universal public education for children was instituted in most developed countries that the first global mechanised war broke out. Public education is based on a highly regimented Prussian military model designed to turn children into cogs in the machine of the body politic. Far from making people smarter education traps people into the same cognitive box. Education is the opposite of free thinking, it forces people to think the same thing or fear ostracism, or worse.
Education is not intelligence. Education is not problem solving ability. Education is not intellectual freedom. It's the opposite. It's a series of shackles on your mind designed to extract your wealth and make you docile.
The truth is that intelligence, real intelligence, is largely genetic (between 60% - 80%). Nothing, no school, no training program, no $40,000 piece of paper, can make you smart. People can acquire certain skills or memorise a series of facts, but that's not intelligence. A person who has an encyclopedic memory of facts doesn't necessarily have a higher level of problem solving ability.
That's not to say that there's no value at all in formal schooling. I want my doctor graduate with high marks from medical school, I want the engineer who designs the bridge I drive over to excel at engineering school, just like I want my electrician to get the proper training at electrician school. One of the big casualties in this push for universal education is the marginalisation of trade schools, you know, schools that actually teach people how to find and keep a job and succeed in the real world.
The real purpose of education, the intended purpose, is to install certain programs into the minds of young people so that they can learn skills and get a job and become productive members of society. Education gives you skills, and skills are not intelligence, but they're not supposed to be. The system of education is supposed to identify children's latent abilities and help guide them to develop those abilities to the utmost. Not everyone will place in the 99th percentile in terms of intelligence, by definition, and they don't have to be.
Everyone doesn't have to be a genius, and it's arrogance to think they should all be genii in order to make society better, or to make humans better. You're not going to make better humans through education, but if you can give people jobs that give their lives meaning then you won't have to make people better, because they'll have fewer incentives to be bad when they've got fulfilling lives.
Friday, March 2, 2018
The Story of Poon Lim
Here's an inspirational story. Poon Lim escaped the horrors of life in China just before the Japanese invasion. He took a job on a British merchant vessel that was sunk by a U-boat and survived an astounding 133 days adrift at sea.
You can't do that. I can't do that. These real heroes, who survive impossible feats, they should be the ones we remember in songs and movies, not the degenerate celebrities our society currently worships. I hope to do a series on inspirational stories of great heroes and explorers, as a reminder of how great we can become by reminding ourselves of the great ones who have come before us.
You can't do that. I can't do that. These real heroes, who survive impossible feats, they should be the ones we remember in songs and movies, not the degenerate celebrities our society currently worships. I hope to do a series on inspirational stories of great heroes and explorers, as a reminder of how great we can become by reminding ourselves of the great ones who have come before us.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
