streaming consciousness…

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  hardie karges 7:19 am on May 27, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

  71% of the earth’s surface is covered in alcohol, drug of choice, creature of fate. 

  Did some early hominid win the Nobel Prize for his discovery of alcohol?  Is this what separates us from our gorilla and chimp cousins?  We’ve been shit-faced at most of the great moments of history and many of the lesser ones.  Is alcohol the agent of mutation that gave us the DNA that makes us human?  At the very least natural selection seems to have given the drunken apes a better chance of survival than the others.  You don’t argue with Mother Nature.  I don’t see too many Amish elders in the ranks of dot.com movers and shakers.  I see a lot of semi-reformed slackers raised on reefer and bathed in beer.  I doubt that the ranks of science and intellectuals are all that much different, just a bit more bookish and near-sighted.  I know the ranks of artists aren’t.  Imagination seeks its own catalysts in its quest for freedom and creativity.  Talk is cheap, but a little buzz doesn’t cost much more.  We humans are capable of more than just turning carbohydrates into hydrocarbons in the short span of individual and collective existence.  Somehow somewhere a consciousness was born and the world changed, for better or worse.

   

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  hardie karges 7:42 pm on May 24, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

  The long loving arms of entertainment conquer all. 

  Who would’ve thought that a computer would become little more than an Internet machine in the space of ten years?  Who realizes that neither will be much more than mass entertainment in another ten?  Many kids don’t even realize that computers had a previous life as number crunchers and word processors.  Entertainment is the only business left in a world where food production is a foregone conclusion and consumption has reached the point of saturation.

   
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  hardie karges 10:39 am on May 24, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

  Plato, Jesus, and Einstein are my big three thinkers of all time. 

  They transcended the ordinary.  Plato’s myths, Jesus’ parables, and Einstein’s thought experiments all come from the same place, played the same role, and accomplished very nearly the same things in society.  They all make you see the world in a way that maybe you didn’t see it before, in a way maybe you COULDN’T see it before.  They all teach by analogy, operating in that not-so-gray area of your brain where the precise logic of language becomes the precise logic of mathematics and the phenomena of existence all of a sudden look different.  Plato’s myth of the cave shook me to my socks thirty years ago, illustrating just how easy it is to get trapped in the fallacy of common sense, which prevents you from seeing the forest because of all the trees in the way.  Einstein does something similar, only more modern and mathematical, with his thought experiments on acceleration and inertia relative to frames of reference.  Both allude to a dimension of light, which by modern definition includes magnetism and electricity.  A dimension of gravity might be inferred also, given its apparent irreconcilability as a force.  Jesus took things more to heart and stomach, but still the logic was impeccable, and the idea that brotherly love can transform the world, makes it capable of just that.  He only made one mistake that I can see.  I’m quite sure that birds do ask where they will sleep and what they will eat, albeit in some mental language.  I doubt they do much else, but this is minor quibbling.  All had a glimpse of that larger world of which this slow cool world is a part, and they articulated it in a way that breathes spirit into the dead letter file.

   
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  hardie karges 6:45 am on May 21, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

  Information is currency, worth its weight in gold, 

  bought and sold in black markets and five-and-dimes at a face value inflated.  Day-traders talk up the price of oil while gamblers place their bets on the outcome of troop movements in the Mid-East.  Futures markets are sluggish on all fronts, while the past trades briskly in all media.  Lovers engage in wild speculation on their possibilities, while remembering to wear protection in the heat of battle.  You know we’re in trouble when suicide becomes the leading cause of death.  Capitalism is a confidence game that folds up early if the main players throw in their towels.

   
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  hardie karges 6:48 am on April 26, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: consciousness ( 30 )   

  How do different plants of the same kind know to bloom all at the same time, 

  no matter at what stage of development they happen to be? This happens regardless of whether plants are in close proximity and subject to direct communication through pollen exchange or something similar. There must be some kind of genetic memory intrinsic to organic reproduction. If a plant that I’ve transplanted loses leaves so that it’s out of balance, it’ll shut back, still producing new leaves and branches, but keeping them very close to the trunk, lest it accelerate its own demise. There may be more to Platonic forms than verbal plateaus, something like visual programming.

   
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  hardie karges 11:58 am on April 20, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: America ( 59 )   

  America-bashing is reaching new heights in the Iraq War aftermath. 

  I know why people hate America. That’s obvious, because she’s arrogant. What I’d like to know is: why is everybody, particularly Europeans, so interested in poking around in America’s closet? The national debt, the savings rate, obesity levels, whatever, it’s like foreigners are keeping score or placing bets or something, mostly betting that America will lose, I assume. Americans are in the game also, though they tend to be conspiracy theorists rather than outright anti-American. Conspiracy theorists look for sinister plots and causal connections to explain the evil running rampant in the world. These they will definitely find, though more likely originating in their own imagination, than in some deep dark archives. Get lives, people! Admittedly America has lost her leadership position in the world, but this doesn’t mean everybody gets to take cheap shots whenever they want. Who cares what America’s debt is? If America had no debt, then the rest of the world would have no dollars! It’s not a perfect system, capitalism. Most systems aren’t. The European attitude is obviously disingenuous if not outright jealous. They had their chance to fuck up the world, of course, and did quite a grand job of it, before almost self-destructing in the World Wars. The United States sacrificed her radical roots to police the world and save Europe from the bear grip of Communism from which it might never have emerged. The world is looking increasingly multi-polar with America, China, and Europe jockeying for first rights. Islam is making a play, but I doubt that the world is ready for a new Dark Age. Life’s just too good for most people, giving the lie to conspiracy, and many can still remember the last Dark Age. Of course, it may happen whether we like it or not, literally, if the lights go out when the oil is all gone.

   
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  hardie karges 9:44 am on April 19, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: determinism ( 4 ), free will ( 7 )   

  Free will is one of the conundrums of human existence. 

  Are we really free-lance actors in an experimental theatre or is someone, indeed, ‘pulling the strings’? Has it ‘all been written’ so that a fortune-teller or psychic reader can merely decipher the text? Certainly, much has been written in the book of DNA handed everyone at birth, and much has been written in the culture one is socialized into. Nevertheless, there are many opportunities for independent action. One can only play the hand one is given, but one can certainly play that hand any number of ways. On the extrapolated level of nations and races, much can be made of the advantages ‘given’ the West by virtue of its descent from cultures of the Mid-east and the cereal grains inherited, as put for in ‘Guns, Germs, and Steel’. No, that’s not a rock group, but a brilliant tome, if flawed ultimately. Human history is largely one of cultural evolution, including food production, not nutritional evolution. The argument is self-defeating. Food production beyond mere subsistence can be achieved quite naturally in any number of ways, depending on the geographic and historical, including cultural, milieu. Once accomplished, culture is free to plot the future of its race to the finish. That is the true story of history, as I see it.

   
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  hardie karges 11:08 am on April 18, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: conspiracy theory ( 10 )   

  Free will in human activity is not only possible, but it is essential. 

  This is the problem with Conspiracy, of course, that it postulates some abstract ‘them’ as responsible for all the world’s problems throughout history without ever specifying who ‘they’ are, and making our own actions irrelevant. No doubt there are hundreds of little conspiracies going on all the time. I just don’t believe in the Big C. Without free will there are no ethics, no morals, no courts, and no basketballs, just chrome-plated hardened balls in pinball machines bouncing off cushions and landing on pins in a mad search for rubbers, lights flashing and bells ringing, like your worst Las Vegas nightmare. There is no reason to apologize and blame some abstract determinism for the sad state of human affairs, because in reality, it’s never been so good. There is no reason to apologize for one region’s apparent superiority over the others because such views fail to take into account that such ‘superiority’ might be the death of us all. We might all be rushing to Africa one day to look for something we forgot or some DNA we’re missing to make us real humans again. They’re the real thing, after all; Asians and Caucasians are the mutant freaks. Our best visions are still myopic and ethnocentric. The future is pure mathematical probability and the present is too dynamic to be taken in perspective. Like evolution, you can only look back and see who’s been more successful.

   
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  hardie karges 8:45 pm on April 17, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: conspiracy theory ( 10 )   

  The prettiest flowers grow in the ugliest plots, 

  like latter-day hippies taking pink fuzzy comfort in the long loving arms of Conspiracy. Ignorance finds fertile ground in the ashes of a once vigorous culture now gone to seed in an era of uncertainty and self-recrimination. It feels good to know that THEY have caused all the world’s problems, not US. It feels good to know that we’ve got the goods on the hoods and that the day of reckoning will be followed by another long day of supposing, followed by another long day of figuring. It’s your move. Buy a vowel and try to solve the puzzle before it’s too late. Ignorance will surely save us from the excesses of our own intelligence one way or another, by hook or crook. The crooks have got the home-court advantage, but they don’t own the ball. The ball is in someone else’s court now. It took barbarians with battle-axes to save us from the golden age of Greek and Roman slavery. It’ll take some bozos with cell phones and laptops to save us from the silicon age of European and American industrialization.

   
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  hardie karges 5:34 am on April 13, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: conspiracy theory ( 10 )   

  Conspiracy invokes the glow of religion in the faces of its disciples. 

  Maybe this is not surprising in a world in which ‘God is dead’. Obviously religions have existed primarily to serve our psychological needs, not our biological ones. Of course if there’s a ‘God’ gene, then it’s got to be fed, one way or another, whether religion, drugs, or meditation, the need for abstraction. Just like you have to go through the motions of reproduction whether you intend to produce children or not. Biologically all we have to do as a species is survive individually, on average, long enough to reproduce. That’s it. Do that and the tree keeps growing. Conspiracy theory serves another need, psychologically, for its practitioners, but also serves as a weathervane for society and culture. Once the battles have all been won and the struggle is gone from daily existence, then what? Once your wealthiest citizens can purchase a round-trip ticket to the space station and return with an armful of souvenirs, then what? Does consciousness eventually turn against itself, rejecting the very things it fought so hard to accomplish? Consciousness is something that has to be fed. If it has nothing to eat, then it will bite the hand that feeds it.