Magnetic Personality...

I put very little stock in the "fortunes" in so-called fortune cookies. They do, however, at times provide amusement... And at times provide interesting food go thought. So I like them, and I take them, when offered.

One was offered to me today, in an indirect sort of way (a bin of them left out at a business I frequent), so I took one. It tells me:

"You have a magnetic personality."

It has a little picture of a rose, with leaves (seemingly still on the living plant) next to it.

A magnetic personality, huh?

So what happens if two people with magnetic personalities meet? I guess it would depend on which poles were facing which directions, wouldn't it? Maybe they'd attract, super strongly. Maybe they'd repel each other.

Or maybe they'd start with the former, and then somehow a pole would flip, and they'd repel. Is that what it is? Is that how it works?

Or maybe the metaphor is just bunk, since I'm not really so very magnetic as all that.

Just random musings.

Palo Alto and Mountain View...

Random Observation: CalTrain #324, an express train southbound from San Francisco to San Jose, was quite full when I boarded, at the Hillsdale station this morning (2013-06-19). In Palo Alto, I think more than half the train cleared out. In Mountain View, almost everyone else left. There are now two people, besides me, in the visible seating (about 5/12ths) of the car I'm in, whose only other stop is San Jose.

From this, it seems to me, one of two things can be inferred - though it's possible it's a mix of these, and likely that I'm missing some possibilities:

(1) Living in San Francisco is desirable enough to commute down to high-paying silicon valley jobs, and/or:

(2) a bunch of people who work in Palo Alto can't afford to live in Palo Alto.

Just randomly thought that was an interesting thought. I wonder what the reality is, behind why people were on that train.

An onymous rambling...

I suppose the title carries a false construction.  I care, but not enough to find a better title.  Hopefully my meaning comes through: It's a named rambling... not anonymous, but onymous... were that a word.

And what am I rambling about today?  Well, I'll start with the idea of anonymity.  I was thinking of starting an anonymous blog today... because I have some things to say that I'd prefer to keep anonymous.  And yet, I figure the NSA would know quickly enough who was writing it.  And google would, too.  I'd have to go to great lengths to keep my writing truly anonymous.  I might not even be able to at all.  So why bother?  Not to mention, it's been proven to me before that my way of writing is unique enough that people who know me can recognize me, just by my words.  So even if I managed to allude any technical ways of uncovering my identity in the world of digital identity (writing things offline, uploading them on some library or Internet cafe computer or something), I'd still be identifiable. So what's the point?

So I'm writing today under my usual identity, fully revealed, totally unconcealed.  Will I write the same words this way?  Probably not.  But I don't know what I'm going to write, just yet, I'm simply writing.  I probably will touch on at least some of it.

For example, I think I'll go ahead and write publicly (for good or for ill) about a certain experience I have sometimes... one I had this morning, upon my first waking, though it's certainly not new.  I sensed a bit of pain in my chest... high up, a little to the left.  Was it my heart?  Perhaps.  Perhaps it was just gas (I certainly have some, sometimes... as those who have spent nights with me will know), though, pressing on a nerve that also serves that region.  Or perhaps it was anxiety.  Who knows?  I don't.  I do know that I specifically have not sought medical attention for it.  I have, at times, checked my pulse, and it's seemed quite normal and calm in those moments.  And it's not yet amounted to anything.  And when I have gotten blood pressure taken, as a matter of course for other medical attention (regular check-ups, whatever), it's been quite normal.  Not that there couldn't be some erratic condition, I suppose.  But here's the thing: In these moments... and really, even as I write these words... I wish for there to be something wrong.  I wish for my heart to fail.  For I do not wish to live in this world anymore, and yet I do not wish to take my own life.

There.  I said it.  "Out loud", for the world to be able to read.  Will I regret it?  Oh, who knows.  I doubt that many will read this... and the few who do will probably already have known that, at least to some degree.  Perhaps I'll get other readers, though, who simply know what it's like to want to die, yet want to avoid suicide.

You see, suicide is an act that's seen by many as cowardly.  Frankly, I disagree, and maybe I'll go into that at some point.  For now, though, just knowing that that's how its seen is enough to "puzzle the will", as Hamlet put it.  And not even because I care so very much about being deemed a coward.  I am one, after all, to not face up to this opinion and do what I please.  No, that's not it.  Instead, it's that I fear that my departure would go mis-understood, and in doing so, lose some of my chance for having some useful impact on the world.  Not to mention the shortening of my life, to use my own words.  Which I guess is why I'm here.  I do want to have some impact on the world, somehow... to show people that things could be better than they are, in myriad ways.  More than myriad, for that's too countable a sum.  And the population of humans, too uncountable.

There are simply too many of us.  We need to reduce our numbers.  And by "need" I truly mean that it is a necessity - one that will be carried out for us, if we don't do it ourselves.  And that's a great fear of mine... that we won't do enough to reduce our numbers ourselves, through conscious, intentioned act, and that it will then be done for us - by our own actions, but not our intent, per se.  We'll create climatic disruptions, or other such things, that will disrupt our ability to feed the 7,039,670,585+ of us humans that currently are estimated to live on this earth.  And then there'll be increased hunger.  And increased hunger will increase anger, and thus fighting, and thus deaths... and thus decrease population.  Probably, the way I figure it, by a lot.

We could probably avoid the fighting, though, if we'd simply stop growing our population.  For growth cannot go on forever.  That hamster is impossible, as hopefully a few of you already know.  (And if you don't understand the math behind this, don't take it from me - take it from Al Bartlett, and his explanation of the exponential function.)

But I'm getting off topic, in a way.  This is all relevant to my personal feelings about things, but it's only one factor, and my intention was to talk about me, here.  Not that I'm trying to be a narcissist or something.  Rather, that I believe expressions of personal experience are important, somehow.  People resonate with personal stories... so I'll tell you a little of mine, to help you see the...

Err, sorry.  Massive interruption of my flow.  More later.  Maybe.  Urgh, I was in such a good flow when I typed 90% of this yesterday... Now...... not so much.  Sorry to be vague, but I'm just not prepared to type about the current situations.

Back in the U. S. of A.

Well, it's been over a week now, I guess it's time to finally write about it.  I'm back in Seattle.  Not entirely by choice, and it certainly wasn't my plan, though there are also certainly good aspects to this.

Hmm, is it story time?  I was imagining writing out a long account of the story, and sharing it here.  Part of me wonders how much of the story really ought to be told in public, though, so I'm feeling shy about it.  Here's the short version, anyway, just so anyone following (do I have followers?  I seem to get some page views... not sure where from, though) has some idea, at least.

So, I was in Berlin.  Feeling pretty happy there, though I was starting to get the travel bug again, off and on.  Anyway, my application for an Artist Visa was denied.  This was early March. I was told by the person I brought with me to the Ausländerbehörde (their immigration office) to help me translate, that I could submit some letters of support, and maybe it would get re-considered.  The actual paperwork, though, only gave me an option for a flat-out appeal, in the courts.  Well, the former seemed accessible, and I tried it... and was instructed that no, it had to go to the court.  I wasn't feeling particularly prepared to engage at that level, so, I opted to follow the instructions and leave by April 2nd.

So, I booked a flight to London, for March 31st.  And I did my Abmeldung (de-registration of residence), and I took the papers to the passport control (where there was some misunderstanding, but that's for the detailed version, if/when I ever give it -  I think it was basically OK... I hope it was basically OK), and all that, and got on a plane to the UK.

On that plane, they gave me an immigration form, and then at Heathrow, I waited in the line, and then handed it over to the border control officer there.

Well, apparently saying that my stay would be "3-6 months" on the little form was a bit... question-inducing, because she started asking me a bunch of questions.  And ultimately, detained me (and my passport, separately).

And there's a whole long story there, that I was thinking of sharing.  Maybe I will sometime.  Suffice it for the moment to say that it involved lots of waiting in a waiting room in the airport, lots of searches, of me (luckily, nothing too invasive, unless you count the fingerprinting as invasive) and my stuff (much more invasive, especially the part where they seemed to be reading through, and eventually took for a while, my private notebook), some paddy-wagon-like van rides, to and from a place called Colnbrook, where I had a bed (luckily, in a room to myself) for a few hours (only about 5, only some of which were spent sleeping), and then was put on a flight back to somewhere I'd be guaranteed entry... the U.S.  Specifically, Seattle.

I was finally given my passport back only after I was on the ground at SeaTac airport.  Luckily, I breezed right through the US border checkpoint in SeaTac.  And now, here I am.  Wondering what's next.

Part of me wants to re-group in Seattle.  Part of me wants to dump off a bunch of stuff, go lighter-weight on my travels, and just up and wander around the states for a while... maybe try to hit all 50 or something...  hmm, a week in each state, for a year's activity?  Just thought of that as I was typing... could be interesting.

Part of me wants to fly off to Laos or the Dominican Republic or somewhere inexpensive.

Part of me wants to...  well, I'm going to leave that part out of the public record.  I know for a fact (really, I have paperwork to prove it) that some things I say on the Internet can get seen later by decision-makers in various places (insurance companies, governments, what have you), and... somehow, that's part of what's making me shy to write freely.  Which sucks.  And maybe someday I'll say fuck it, and just write my experience.  But...

For now, I'll just let people know that I'm state-side again... with mixed feelings about it... and looking for places to stay, in Seattle or elsewhere... rent-free would be lovely, though not necessarily required.  If you've got a place I could crash - for a day or a year, or anywhere in between, get in touch and let me know.  Meanwhile, I'll be finding things, somewhere.  And posting photos on my flickr stream now and again.  From somewhere.  Flickr even makes a map of my recent photos, if you want more updates than are likely to happen here.

Do we have free will?

I find myself watching a video of Sam Harris, talking about Free Will.  It's an interesting topic... and he basically makes the claim that "free will is illusory" - a statement I think I'm more-or-less prepared to accept.  But along the way, he makes some statements that I'm really unsure about.  Here's the video, in case you want to stop and see for yourself first (note: it's long - over an hour):

I haven't (yet) read his book on the topic, so maybe he explains things more carefully there, but as presented in the video, I have some uncertainty about whether his logic is sound.

For example, he says (a little over 31 minutes in):

The truth is we feel or presume an authorship over our own thoughts and actions that is illusory.  If I could detect all of your conscious thoughts and intentions and subsequent behaviors with a brain scanner some moments before you were aware of them, you would be rightly shocked, because it would undermine your sense that you are the prime mover of your inner life.  How can we be free, as conscious agents, if everything we consciously intend, was caused by events in our brain, which we did not intend, and over which we had no control.  We can't.  So what does this mean?

And in particular, let me pick a particular phrase which I take issue with: "over which we had no control".  Here's the thing:

To say that a conscious thought was caused by events in our brain, which we did not intend is not the same as saying we have no control.  And I assert that we may have some control.  In particular, it seems to me that if we have any choice at all (and perhaps he argues that we don't, but he does go on to say that choices do matter), then one choice we have is to use the principles (whether consciously or otherwise) of reinforcement to shape the unconscious inputs into our still-illusory notion of choice.  In a sense, we can become our own causes for future choices.  So while we may indeed not be able to fully control any individual choice, do we perhaps have a way to influence future choices?  If so, then his statement that our choices are something "over which we [have] no control" is erroneous, even if his broader statement that our notion of choice is illusory.

It surely warrants study... or perhaps the study has already been done, and I just need to read more.  If nothing else, though, I humbly request that Mr. Harris make more acknowledgement of the distinction between the two arguments that our thoughts are controlled by prior causes, and that we have no control over them.  Because these are, to my mind, different statements, and yet he seems to lump them together in one.

Perhaps I'll have more to say as I finish the video, and/or get the book and read it.

Bible Problems, installment the first

Bible Problems: Wherein, the Bible is read; and wherein, problems I find with it are reported (and hopefully explained).

What problems?  Why?

Well, problems of conscience, mostly - I find many things in the bible that I deem to be morally reprehensible to teach someone - especially as being the word of a deity, or otherwise words to live by.

Why?  Why go through this exercise?  Well, two main reasons:

1. because various people over the years have recommended (to me, or to a general audience) reading it, if only for the literary experience and the cultural references... or for the "good stories"; and
2. because any document that's read by so very many people, and preached from, and held up as being some glorious (even infallible) document... well... I figure it's useful to know what's in it.

So, I've actually tried a few times to read it in the past, and not gotten very far before I was so disgusted I couldn't continue.  Now, I figure I'll try once more, but with the added intention of documenting the things I find in it that I find problematic in one way or another.  Maybe, too, I'll get further through it, and have a broader base of knowledge about this cultural artifact.  Or maybe I won't.  Either way, I'll be sharing a bit of my experience with the world, in hopes that others find it useful to see my perspective on things.

I thought about putting this on my other blog (What Could Be Better), but I think it belongs here.  It's a personal experience, a journey, and sure to be a bit fractured, as I respond to various things.  Perhaps it'll end up generating some posts there over time, too, though.  Or, perhaps I again won't get through Genesis, and the long-scope project that I imagine this to be will be cut short.  Then again, I'll have a record of where I left off, in case I care to pick it back up some day.

Anyway, shall we begin?

Oh wait...

About my sources:

I suppose it's first and foremost important to declare my source, since there are so many versions of "the" bible out there.  Through whatever set of influences (I honestly don't know), I've come to a general notion that the King James Version (KJV) is... the best version???  Something.  Anyway, at least it's one well-read version... or really, I suppose there are several versions of KJV even, so I suppose it's several well-read versions.  Oy.  But, according to the above-linked source, it's public domain (in the U.S., anyway - not that I'm in the U.S. right now), so...  hoping there won't be any copyright problems or anything.  Whatever my reasons, it's what I'm using, for better or worse.  (If and when I compare notes with other versions, I'll talk about that... but probably I'll just stick to KJV.)

Also, I want to point out that I'm not necessarily going to try to point out every possible flaw along the way - in fact, I'm going to do rather the opposite.  I'm going to attempt to read this as just literature, and ignore the problems... and then only report the ones that are so grating to me as to seriously interrupt that flow.

OK...

Now, truly, I'll begin:

The first problem I had that met this threshold was right there in Chapter 1 of Genesis - the first chapter of the first book.  Verse 26 (so Genesis 1:26) (paraphrasing to emphasize my objection; more on that later):

"God said... let ['man' - i.e. humans? or is it just men?] have dominion ... over all the earth"

Ugh.  OK, granted, we've done a pretty good job of following this particular edict (though I consider it to be an edict from... well, let's just say a source other than a deity), which may in some ways actually blind us to the meaning of it - it's so present around us all the time, that we rarely notice that it's there.  Like air - every once in a while, we rejoice in it, but mostly, we don't even notice.  But I notice (less often than I could, I'm sure), and I see it as something not to rejoice about.

To take dominion over something... well, one definition is "absolute ownership".  Ownership?  Really?  We own the earth?  We certainly pretend to - if only in (more or less) small chunks at a time. But really?  Absolute ownership over the whole earth?  What does that even mean?  Well, I suppose there are various types of ownership... among them, slavery.  So, the earth is our slave?  Well, we certainly treat it that way sometimes - like it's there only for our benefit, and we can do whatever we want to it without any concern for the consequences.  But since any one of us usually only "owns" (at most) a small piece of it, we end up with "The Tragedy of the Commons", wherein we trash the planet, to the detriment of all of us.

Hmm, I genuinely wonder if my readers will be making the connections I'm making here (or at least following the ones I'm expressing).  If you think you might not be, I encourage you to read a book called Ishmael (which can be found (insert shameless commercial plugging) at Powell's, Amazon, and probably your favorite local book retailer or library (ok, there's a little shame in it, so I'm tempering it a bit)).  I honestly found the writing style to be a bit annoying at times (in particular, I found the protagonist (well, one of two, I suppose, and I don't mean the eponymous one) to be a bit of a dolt – though, perhaps that's important to the storytelling, I don't know - I do imagine it to be intentional).  But it's one of those books that's profoundly influenced the way I see certain things, and I really would like it if more people would read it (and/or its follow-ups, The Story of B [Powell's, Amazon] and My Ishmael [Powell's, Amazon]).

At any rate, I think the idea that humans (and especially if you take it as only men) "own the earth" is hugely problematic, and I think one major place that people in society get this idea is through the above and other similar passages from the bible.  I'm sure I'll report on more of them, as I find them.

Oh, hey, look... it didn't take very long.  Two lines later (so I guess it could be argued it's part of the same passage?), we have this (this time quoted fully - not so much to avoid quoting out of context (I believe that if I'm making any distortions, it's only a distortion of emphasis, not of intended meaning, and anyway I'm linking to context), but rather because I think pretty much the whole thing is worth exploring):

"And God blessed them [the humans], and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth."

OK, so, breaking it down, since there are so many problems here:

1. "be fruitful and multiply" - Yes, this is arguably good for our species.  Certainly, reproduction is a part of surviving as a species.  Still, when said this way, it puts it into the form of an absolute, which it may not be.  There are times when some species specifically don't multiply (e.g. "Some animal species seem to ... refrain from mating when they find themselves in a crowded environment"), because, well, there's this concept called carrying capacity which describes the limits that an environment (e.g. our earth) has to provide resources for a population.  (Somewhat of an aside, but I personally expect that humans have far exceeded the long-term carrying capacity of our planet, and that we'll be experiencing a severe population crash, likely within my lifetime.  I'm looking forward to that... with dread.)
2. "replenish" - meaning what, exactly?  What replenishing is needed, here?  Within the context of the story, these were the first humans, so do they mean to plenish?  Or are the fruitful humans meant to replace stocks of other animals?  Were other animals lacking?? The problem I have here, at its core, is the notion that I see as implicit in this that humans would become the main living thing on earth.  Which... well, I refer you again to Ishmael, and shan't recount all the reasons why this is a problem here.  Perhaps in some future post.
3. "subdue [the earth]"...  Again with the dominance thing.  Also, to subdue something is to be in combat with it.  To be in combat with the thing upon  which your very life depends strikes me as... well, shall I be polite and simply say a misguided choice?
4. "have dominion ... over every living thing".  See the previous item.  Ugh.

And I even skipped mention of the part about blessing, because, well... because until more of these other arguments are clear to my readers, it's too hard to explain why I have a problem with that.

So, reading on...

Well, I have some problems with the "good" that this God fellow purports to see in all of this, having to do with a false dichotomy between good and evil that is another whole chapter to be written in this blog series (or go read about it in Ishmael).  But I'm hungry, and I'm tired of writing, so I'm going to take a break and go get myself some food.  Because, you know, "food is good".  (Or rather, food is useful for countering hunger, and for providing energy to the brain, etc.  Hmm, should I eat only herbs and fruits, as my meat?)

More later, I hope.

Hello out there...

To anyone who sees this... And, importantly, to a lot of people who mostly probably won't: Hello!

I'm thinking this morning of the many people who've touched my life in various ways... From the family I was born into, to some people I've recently started to think of as almost like family... From old friends to recent acquaintances... I've thought of a lot of you individually this morning. And I'm sure there are others that I'd be ashamed to have missed, if I tried to make a list.

Well, and I did try to make a list, in a way... I was going to send out an email... Maybe I still will, later. For now, though, I've decided (for reasons I don't have adequate words to make clear, so I simply won't explain) to abandon that plan, and just write something here. Something... That feels a little hollow, I fear, in its absence of specific content.... But which I hope you'll believe is full with emotion and thought behind the scenes somewhere.

So hello. Love and happiness to you all. Whether I spoke with you yesterday, or it's been years, or anywhere in between: You are missed.

Be well.