The Hard Reset Button for Humans

... is death and reproduction.  The contents of our minds comes from two sources, one being genes and the other being the environment.  When we have children, the genes get mixed around, but generally there are two people who are RE-presented to the environment, but the new mind lives in a brain and body that has to RE-assimilate that environment.

In a recent youtube video recommended to me by Francis Burns, I watched Ken Wilber speak for a while, and then read some comments.  One of the comments suggested that we can use the term "awareness" to refer to something that is shared by all sentient beings, and more shared when those beings are in close proximity.  Awareness is not unique to the creature experiencing it.  What is unique to the creature experiencing it is "consciousness" which is a relationship between a piece of physical reality and intention.  The physical reality, in a macroscopic way, obeys rules deterministically.  This is the "Newtonian physics" we learn, and which needs "Quantum Physics" to work in a microscopic (or, let's say nanoscopic or picoscopic) way.  It is at that level where intention can act, as far as I can tell.

I just heard Brett Veinotte mention the idea of living forever because he was telling his podcast audience about an upcoming discussion wherein the implications of living forever would be discussed.  It got me thinking "well maybe I have been."

In the bible, there is a story of a guy named Abraham who told people that "God" told Abraham his name, and it was "I am". To me, this story is hinting at what I described above as "awareness."  It's not just humans.  It's every physical system sensitive enough to have intention (which might be every physical system).  That sensitivity gives such a system awareness, and if it also has consciousness, then intention can be realized in it.

The game the universe is playing is to see how quickly intention can be realized.  You know that sometimes you have an intention but it doesn't happen until you actually do it.  I like to play this game in bed sometimes.  "I'm getting up now... Ready, here I go!" but I don't actually get up.  I'm playing with the intention but not actually realizing it because that takes more effort.  Also, feeling like I had the intention but nothing happened seems funny.  I hope I don't get Parkinson's Disease (See the movie "Awakenings" about Dr. Oliver Sachs if you're curious). Executing the intention will destroy some things (chemical bonds, probably some microbes, etc.), but it will create new ones.  So I think the whole universe is playing that game.  But what is the point?

The Landmark Forum showed me that life is empty and meaningless.  There is no point. But it's fun.  Why do we tell jokes?  So if the universe is trying to see how quickly its physical contents can be organized into systems sensitive enough to have and realize intention, then why don't we play along?  I don't think we can avoid plyaing along, but recognizing that that's what we're doing is certainly more enjoyable than feeling like life just keeps kicking us.

Given the world as it is, there are some intentions you can immediately realize (like reading the next sentence), and some that require some steps, the first of which is an intention of the first kind.  That's really all there is when we are conscious and aware, but we often let that light go out and we go onto auto-pilot.  Maybe you just did that while reading.  If so, I recommend going back and letting these words get a little deeper into yourself so that maybe our awareness can be shared across time and space and you and I can be together right now, trying to understand each other a bit more.  If you imagine what I'm going through, just from the evidence of the writing you're reading, you might like it.  You might feel like we have been living forever too.

A message to United Global Shift

I sent the following message to United Global Shift after reading that their mission is very much aligned with my own.

I heard about you through Landmark.  I share your goals.  I'm aware of information that has been hidden.  You may be familiar with the occulting of information, or the omission of important information.  These passively deceptive strategies have been at work since our species began communicating.  They are getting harder to employ (YAY!) but that is because people are talking about them and communicating about them, and sharing information they have discovered that is being suppressed.  So I wanted to do that.

What I learned that's important in the context of this message, I learned from Peter Hendrickson.  He wrote a book about the law ("Title 26, Internal Revenue Code") that created the designation "501(c)(3)" called "Cracking the Code."  The U.S. Department of Justice was asked twice by the IRS to ban the book or issue an injunction against it, and the DOJ declined both times.  The point of the book is to show that most people and businesses (and probably United Global Shift) are deceived into believing that the U.S. federal government has some kind of claim on the money they get.  If that is a deception, then there is a vast amount of wealth available to do things like prevent war, but that wealth is being given to the U.S. federal government and a significant portion of it is being used in a way that encourages war.  "War is the health of the state."

It is in the interest of United Global Shift itself, but also very much aligned with its mission, to discover the deception and work toward diverting the vast amount of wealth currently being used to encourage war into our efforts to discourage it instead.

Do you dare question authority?  Landmark Forum suggests to me that either you do, or you will.  I'm here to encourage you.

An Inventory of Brain Functions

In an earlier post, I mentioned that my body makes too many platelets.  These are the tiny particles in our blood that create clots when there is a hole in our circulatory system.  Having too many of these has some odd but not dangerous effects, like your spleen can grow larger.  Our spleens store up a bunch of platelets, presumably so that they can be released to help seal off the holes so we don't bleed out if we suffer a really bloody injury.  Another symptom is numbness or a tingling sensation in our extremities - fingertips, toes, hands, and feet.  My spleen has never been enlarged, but I think have felt the paresthesia in my fingertips, but I have proven to myself that the feeling can be psychosomatic.

There is a dangerous effect of having too many platelets, and that is the risk of ischemic stroke.  A stroke is the medical term for depriving brain cells of energy, either by creating static pools of blood ("hemorrhagic") or by preventing blood from getting there ("ischemic") by blocking an artery.  Of course, if your blood vessels are too weak, blocking them can lead to a hemorrhage "upstream" from the clot, and then you have both kinds of stroke.  Since I have too many platelets, I'm concerned about getting a clot that prevents blood from getting to where it's needed.

I decided it would be a good idea to create for myself an inventory of brain functions.  According to Wikipedia, brain tissue ceases to function after being deprived of oxygen for sixty to ninety seconds.  Of course, that doesn't mean the tissue is dying, but without oxygen, it will eventually die.  Meanwhile, if that tissue would normally help me restore oxygen to itself, I have only 60 - 90 seconds to use that help.  So I want to be able to run through some mental tests quickly.

There is already a well known acronym that everyone can use to recognize when a person is having a stroke, and that is FAST.  The letters stand for "Facial drooping, Arm weakness, Speech difficulties, and Time."  So, look in the mirror to see if you look funny.  Well, I always look funny because the left side of my mouth is about half a millimeter lower than the right.  Pretty slight, but the guy who made a portrait of me in art class 25 years ago noticed.  Then close your eyes and raise your arms so they're straight out, and then look to see if they're really straight out.  Then say to someone "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" or something else (maybe "I think I might be having a stroke, how do I sound to you?" might be better). You can say it to yourself first, but we have powerful ways to mask our outward failures, so getting an external opinion would be useful here, especially if you really are having a stroke.  Finally, find the second hand on a clock, or memorize the seconds from your watch, close your eyes, and count off ten seconds and check if you are about right.

That is easy enough for me, but I have more concerns.  I've noticed late at night sometimes that my ability to think is off kilter.  Maybe it would be noticing motion in my field of vision, or naming a color, or doing math, getting a joke, remembering something I just said or something I've always known, or having a reasonable emotional response to something.  I attribute these peculiarities of cognition in myself to parts of my brain going to sleep.  I think "late night humor" is a good example to which most people can relate.  I imagine the same kind of thing could happen if some of my brain tissue ceased to function because it wasn't getting enough oxygen.  So I want to do more than look in the mirror, raise my arms, talk to someone, and look at my watch.  Here's what else I'll do:

• Find the square of some number over 12.  I have most of them up to 20 memorized, so I can also compare the explicit mental multiplication to the memory, if the memory is there.
• Remember my mom's name.
• Read something.
• Stand on one foot.
• Be curious about something.
• Sense something with each of my five senses.
• Fold my fingers together, right thumb on top (normal, for me) and then left thumb on top to make sure it feels weird.
  
• Sense other things with each of my five senses and compare the previous thing to the new one.

That's it.  Now the question is, if I'm having a stroke, how the hell am I going to find this blog post?

School is Like a Drug

I made this claim to my youngest daughter a few years ago because I had grown concerned about the effects of government indoctrination.  According to a few different schoolteachers (Brett Veinotte, John Taylor Gatto, and Alexander Inglis), school has six main functions, which, to be blunt, are 1) Remove judgement and opinion, 2) Fashion students to be obedient, 3) Sort students into normalized groups, 4) Create a ruling class, 5) Cut off students who don't fit the desired mold, and 6) Control the students.  I can see these things happening to all students who speak openly enough about their school experience, though they may not be able to see it themselves.

It's possible that I've taken the words of these three teachers too seriously and allowed their views to pollute my thinking, but all my efforts to verify that as the case have failed abysmally.  I conclude that they are correct, and that school tends to create unthinking "yes men."  It also, at least in the case of my own children, attracts many of its victims to itself.

Seeing the damage being done and the victims maintaining a desire for its source, I gave a few minutes of thought to finding a good analogy, and heroin is what I came up with.  Something makes school feel good enough, and the damage it does is subtle enough to prevent some of its victims from rejecting it.  It is my hope and, indeed, my expectation that, just as I did, my children will also eventually think their own way out of the habits that make most people into unthinking yes men.  I can't help but feel that my own relationships with them provide them ample opportunities to judge, have opinions, obey their consciences rather than anyone else, remain the beautiful distinct creatures my wife and I created, disavow power over others as I have, embrace the marginalized, and defy those who attempt to control them.

There are some other elements of drug use which have analogs to school too.  My friend Roslyn Ross shared the insight that what makes something a drug in the psychological sense is that it allows us to "numb out."  She writes that we also use substances as spices (to enhance whatever we're enjoying) and as medicine (to help change what needs to change). 

School demands that we do homework, listen, sit still, raise our hands to pee, and other things which cause a lot of psychological pain, but it numbs us to that pain also.  Gold stars, letters near the beginning of the alphabet, aka "high marks", and certificates of achievement help to salve the damage to our intrinsic motivation.

School forces us to associate with a lot of people our own age with whom we wouldn't normally interact.  It also provides group projects, activities, and sometimes actual discussions in which we get to interact with those whom we do enjoy.  We are wired to remember and appreciate the good things in life, and the togetherness of similarly aged children provides episodes both good and bad.  School magnifies the experience of being a child, and in that sense, it provides an enhancement.

Importantly, school teaches that government is good, which is an altered perception. As we age, our trust in government falls.  Teenage rebellion is a kind of rejection of authority that is natural in cultures that value and teach authority - the coercive kind, not the expertise kind.  It is also only through school that the Rite of Passage goes backwards, pushing students away from their own consciences and back toward authorities as the guides for their lives.  This is the necessary change from the point of view of (coercive) authority, obviously.

I thank Anne Stirling Hastings for motivating me to write this post. I recommend her and her work to anyone with an appreciation and love for humankind.

A Think Tank Game

Would you pay for good little pieces of data?  Would you like to get paid for creating good little pieces of data?  My answer to both is YES, and I bet yours is too.  I will be reaching out to everyone I know because Brett Veinotte has inspired me.  We all share information all the time, and sometimes we thank each other for it.  If we set it up well, as I think Brett has done, we even, sometimes, pay each other for it.  I have, in fact, paid Brett a few times because of all the great information he has provided to me and everyone else who might benefit from it.

The goal of this blog post, I hope, will be met in one of the next few paragraphs.  It will be a few sentences that will catch your eye and uncork your mind.  You will look forward to sitting at your computer, or on your phone, just as you are now, reading and writing.  A seed will be planted in your subconscious driving you to research and brainstorm how you might benefit from or encourage the input of others.

One of my favorite things to do is respond to comments on the Internet. You can browse my comments on Disqus or what I've written on Quora to see what I have to say.  In my experience, most other people don't comment very much, if at all.  It makes me sad.  Most people are good, and that goodness would show up in comments if they were to make them.  Do you comment on the Internet much?

Of course, our foolishness also shows up if we are lazy when we write comments.  Because school teaches us to, we might parrot a claim we read somewhere but which we never bothered to examine, and a response might come back providing us with strong evidence that the claim is wrong.  That hurts because we have presented the claim as our own.

If you do examine my comments on Disqus, you'll see my strategies to avoid that pain.  Most folks who comment a lot follow such strategies, and they tend to improve critical thinking and communications skills.  Either you already know this, or else, since I've (hopefully) planted a seed, you will come to know it soon, and that will make you a great contributor to my "think tank game."

I will soon announce a date for the commencement of the "think tank game."  If all goes well, it will go on for a few days or, if it goes really well, indefinitely.  During that time, you'll visit memeracing.net every now and then to answer or ask questions and maybe invest a few dollars worth of bitcoin.  If you write something good, you'll get an email asking you to visit the site and check out what six other people had to say in the same context.  You'll put these six blurbs, along with your own, in order by quality.  Perhaps you will put yours first, even if you think someone else's was better, or perhaps you'll be more honest.  Either way, you and those six other people will combine your judgements to find the best of the seven things, and bitcoin will be redistributed as encouragement.

That's what I have to offer.  Well, one of the things I have to offer.  I look forward to your suggestions and ideas.

I have some more background information for those who decided to keep reading this far.  Many people, once they understand what memeracing.net is trying to do, say that it's a great idea.  The problem is that a "great idea" is only great until it's old, which takes a few days or weeks.  After that, it's either useful or forgotten.  Memeracing.net has been forgotten by many people who recognized its value.  One might say they are just waiting for it to become useful.  I'm pretty sure that the usefulness will come from the density of traffic, so I wanted to get a lot of people on board for a kind of event on memeracing.

Do you think I should identify some particular topic for this "think tank game" event?  I do.  The link above ("suggestions and ideas") goes to a page where you can enter whatever topic you think would work well.  One of the answers already has about $30 backing it, but it isn't the one I think is best.

Thanks for reading, and I look forward to comments as well as input on memeracing.net.

Let's Educate the new IRS Agents

It seems to me that turnover at our favorite government entity is quite high.  In the interest of helping the newbies there learn how to navigate between the mistakes of their coworkers as well as the folks who need to pay taxes or receive refunds and the requirements of the law, I propose that we "in the know" leverage our experiences.

If you have ever gotten the IRS to correct its records regarding:

1. Whether or not you qualify as an "employee" according to USC 26,
   
2. Whether or not you earn "wages" according to USC 26,
   
3. Whether or not you have received "income" as it is used in USC 26,
4. Whether or not something you sent to the IRS was frivolous,
5. Whether or not you sent something early enough according to whatever "statute of limitations" applies,
   
6. Whether or not your submission has been received or processed, or ...

...then you might enjoy calling them back to chat about how it went.  You would do this in the interest of helping the IRS more efficiently administer the tax laws.  During your chat, you could bring up one, some, or even all of the following items for the benefit of myself and everyone else who understands what Peter Hendrickson's Cracking the Code teaches about the income tax laws of the United States:

1. As someone who has found it necessary to contact the IRS, I am aware that some IRS employees are given verbal instructions, and that by following these instructions, they put themselves in danger of violating laws or people's rights, or even simple internal rules, so it's best for the employee to request that all instructions be provided in written form so that they can be passed on to any victim of such accidental violations.
2. When folks call in, it is helpful to let them know that things do not always happen in the order one would expect.  For example, mailing something to the IRS may have no effect until the sender calls the IRS to find out whether or not the mailed item has been processed.
3. Others who have called the IRS have learned that something they sent in was handled a certain way, but often the notes do not identify the something well enough for the caller to know what it was that was handled.  We urge IRS employees taking notes on items received in the mail to identify them in the notes with the date and title (if it has one) of the document for the convenience of anyone who reads those notes.  If the document was mailed with a tracking number, type that in too.
4. It is often very helpful to ask up front if a person is a federal employee, or since the tax administered by the IRS falls only upon activities that involve the exercise of federal privilege, whether or not the caller uses any federal privilege to earn his or her living.
5. Many in the "Tax Honesty" movement have found that employees of the IRS often don't understand nearly as much as those in the movement understand.  Thus, any efforts to narrow that gap would be very helpful.  Let's encourage IRS agents to examine Peter Hendrickson's website and discuss it among themselves.  Suggest that refutations of the material there be made in writing so that information can be vetted and anyone spreading misinformation can be stopped.

From the perspective of IRS employees, it may be the case that the IRS is collecting too much money, or too little.  There are, of course, cases on both sides.  Regardless of who believes it's too much and who believes it's too little, getting it closer to what congress designed it to be is in the best interested of everyone.  It is to that end that I make the suggestions above.  If our nation collected the correct amount of taxes, then we would see positive effects in many areas:

Public education would be significantly improved, not only because the "right" amount of money would be available to schools from the federal government, but also because people would be interested in following through on their promises and obligations, making sure those promises and obligations are clearly delineated, and recognizing and exposing all manner of deception that not only infects the pocketbooks of everyone involved, but also damages the minds of the young people who are exposed to the system.

The national defense apparatus would be resized to an ideal size, not too big, and not too small.  While some may argue that it is already too big and others may argue that it's still too small, the best path forward is for everyone to follow through on their promises and obligations, and make sure those promises and obligations are clearly delineated.

When the proper amount of tax is collected from the people of this country, the welfare of its inhabitants will be optimized.  This means that welfare programs that rest on the backs of the taxpayers would be lighter or heavier, whichever is the case according to what we get when everyone follows through on their promises and obligations, and makes sure those promises and obligations are clearly delineated.

U.S. Government Quotations

During "discovery" in the case where the United States Postal Inspection Service is attempting to steal my money from me (16-01166-DSF), the government had these things to say.  I figured it was important to publish them:

1. "[The question] implies that the decisions of any United States District Judge or United States Magistrate Judge are influenced by the source of their salaries."  The question was "Do you pay the salaries of judges Dale S. Fischer and Kenly Kiya Kato?"
   
2. "[T]he defendant in this action is currency and is not entitled to legal representation."
3. "To the extent claimant asserts that he is an innocent owner of the defendant currency, the assertion is without merit because there is no evidence currently available to the government suggesting that claimant exercised due diligence in obtaining any information about the person to whom he sold the bitcoins, or in determining whether the defendant currency was derived from a legal or legitimate source."
4. "[T]he burden of proof is on claimant in this action to establish that he is the innocent owner of the defendant currency."

I submit that there is a conflict of interest exposed in the first quotation.  Do you see that?  Would you be willing to provide me with a video of yourself stating that if #1 above is real, then you see a conflict of interest?

The government of the United States has admitted that it is using the term "defendant" to describe something that is not a person.  How do we solve that problem?

The government suggests that a person's assertion of innocence is without merit unless that person "obtains information about the person to whom they" are selling or "determines whether the payment was derived" legally or legitimately.  I submit that agents working for the U.S. government are guiltier than I am in this respect because of the corruption of that organization and those agents' sale of their own efforts to it.  I do not think it is fair to blame them, but the government is attempting to blame me.