Into the Void

“…Look, without humor we would all have committed suicide. We made fun of everything. What I’m actually saying is that that helped us remain human, even under hard conditions.”
– Holocaust survivor, quoted by Dr. Chaya Ostrower, PhD of Beit Berl College, Israel
in Humor as a defense mechanism in the Holocaust

The article above is about the victims of the death camps using humor to stay sane in an inhuman, insane situation. Humor is a great coping mechanism. If it worked for people who lived in the shadow of a crematorium, it can certainly work for us.

I came across the above quote this morning while checking the Pendulum listing on dmoz.org. Holocaust humor? WHAT????

No, there was nothing funny about the Holocaust. There is nothing funny about genocide. There is nothing funny about a thing that goes beyond hate, that stigmatizes, dehumanizes, and then brings formerly rational human beings to methodically exterminate their next-door neighbors.

“Holocaust” means “complete burning.” The word Holocaust is technically used to refer to the six million Jewish victims. The goal was to exterminate an entire race just because they weren’t Christian. Ok, well, there were other factors, but nobody had to wear an “successful” badge. They had to wear a Judenfleck.

I am misusing the word to include three million other victims. Feel free to comment.

My personal interest in the Holocaust focuses on the “Aktion T 4,” the Nazi euthanasia program to eliminate “life unworthy of life”. The Nazis tuned up the Death Machine on mental patients before grinding through the other 9,000,000 victims.

Nine Million. Can you even get your brain around such a number? That is like murdering the inhabitants of SIX Philadelphia, PAs. (Philadelphia population is from the Census Bureau’s State & County QuickFacts.)

“The murder of the lunatics contains the key to the Pogrom of the Jews…”
– Max Horkheimer (1895-1973)
quoted in The Cynical Republic, “Haus des Eigensinns – House of maddening beauty”

I’ll be talking about this some more.

Technorati: suicide Nazi holocaust T+4+Aktion mental+illness Judenfleck

“Vocatus atque non vocatus… deus aderit
Called or not called , GOD will be present.”
– Inscription on Gravestone of Professor Dr. Carl G. Jung, Kusnacht, Switzerland
Quoted from Heaven’s Register

Have you read any Jung? Jung was a medical doctor whose father was a philospher and pastor. Jung believed that God is not “out there” but is inside us all. God is our subconscious mind! You feel deep down what is right, now don’t you?

Jung pointed out that God evolved morally over the course of biblical history. That’s right, God got better and better. He had to, to keep up with his children’s moral evolution.

Being the firstborn is a curse for a lot of reasons, and it didn’t start with that whole “Dad forgot to paint the lintels” thing.

It can be deduced from the concept of a morally evolving God that Jesus Christ was the manifestation of this evolution. the “God made flesh.” God hoped that a physical manifestation would convince the Pharisees, the NT version of the Religious Right, to evolve too. It didn’t work, though. The Pharisees, like any hierarchical structure heavenly or temporal, were notoriously inflexible. Anything the Pharisees disagreed with was a sin, Evil, abomination. As a child Jesus was almost stoned for breaking one of the old rules.

If God is within us, then the fight between good and evil is going on inside us too. In Jung’s words, “from the psychological point of view demons are nothing other than intruders from the unconscious, spontaneous irruptions of unconscious complexes into the continuity of the conscious process.”

Here’s a simplification derived from Alan Watts‘ Tribute to Carl Jung. Satan isn’t in me, it can’t be, because I am Good. The Evil and the hate must be over there in you! (That’s the non-self-aware speaking, the one with Blind Faith and no reason.)

Look in your heart. Both good and evil are right there inside your own subconscious, making you act out their presence. Like a projector you are shining your own ugly thoughts onto the blank screens of the A-theists. This is the psychology of evil.

And until you discover your self-contradictions, you will always hate anyone who disagrees with you.

As for me, I’m not afraid of the guru. I’m afraid of the people who threaten me with eternal torture in his name.

I have to give a speech on evolution…help? - Yahoo! Answers

My nephew would tell you that a shark doesn’t turn into a chair.

Darwin and Wallace were the first guys to write about evolution.

Darwin got his ideas while traveling around the world and seeing all kinds of animals. The ship was called the “Beagle.” You’ll want to talk about Galapagos Island, where he saw different species of birds in a place so far from the continent that they had to have all come from one ancestor. He thought that their beaks were shaped by what food their ancestors ate. Seeds vs. berries vs. bugs, etc. Don’t forget the tortoises.

There are different theories of how evolution occurs.

**Lamarck** said that species evolve because acquired traits are passed down through the generations. Like giraffes stretching their necks up to get leaves makes their offspring have longer necks. (not true)

Darwin believed that evolution was a slow process of population drifting in response to the environment. The average height of a giraffe changes each generation because the short ones all died. (closer, but not quite)

Basically, evolution occurs when something in the environment - Nature - kills off certain animals and let others live. So if the short-necked giraffes always died there would only be taller giraffes left to reproduce. But the next valley over the trees might be really short so the tall giraffes have trouble reaching down and after a couple of generations only short giraffes are left. So now there are two different animals. This is called “Natural Selection.”

Darwin, like most people of his time, believed that offspring were a blend of their parents traits, like a black cat and a white cat have grey kittens and after that all kittens are grey. (not true) He had trouble believing his own theory, and waited many years to publish it. Actually, he published it only after he found out that Wallace had the same ideas.

**Mendel** came up with modern genetics, where there are dominant and recessive genes. So black cats can have white kittens, orange tabby kittens, and black kittens.

Another theory is that small mutations - like birth defects - might make an animal better suited. Maybe a horse had a long-necked colt that could eat from taller trees so it survived. After enough generations the mutations add up until the horse looks like a giraffe. Obviously some mutations don’t help at all, or even kill. It’s random. Some folks can’t handle randomness - everything has to be planned in advance or they freak out.

Still another theory is that small changes aren’t good enough - there had to be a miracle to change one species to another. They always say that the eye had to be a miracle because it’s so complex, but they forget to tell you about lizards with light-sensing patches in their skin instead of eyeballs, or about lower mammals whose species can’t see colors yet. ANY eye is an evolutionary advantage over no eyes at all, even if it’s only a light-sensing patch.

The main thing is that to be scientific, you have to be willing to change your theory to match what you observe. It’s not enough for some scientist to tell you “THIS IS TRUE.” You get to go out and prove it for yourself - or even disprove it! Anybody who doesn’t let you question their theory is trying to control your mind. And that, my young friend, is politics.

Darwin loves you, man.

Technorati: Charles+Darwin evolution LaMarck Galagapos+Island Origin+of+Species acquired+traits mutations natural+selection Gregor+Mendel genetics scientific+theory

In WWII the Germans ran into Russia killing everyone they found. They destroyed entire villages, an entire way of life. In some parts of Russia 1 in 4 people died. Every family was affected.

However, the Germans awakened a sleeping giant. And when U.S. General George Patton realized just how big Russia was, he wanted our army to march right through Germany and into Russia to get at them while they were still recovering from Germany’s predations. There was a big antisemitic component to this that I don’t wish to go into at this time.

Remember that at the same time we were taking back Europe, we were also fighting in the Pacific theater. Japan was throwing Mitsubishi Zeros at us - yup, made by the same company that makes cars and Three Diamonds tuna. The kamakazi pilots literally committed suicide by ramming our ships with planes. They had already been at war with China for years before Pearl Harbor and they were pretty much tapped out.

Kamakazi means “divine wind” after a Chinese attack that was thwarted by high winds in the Sea of Japan.

Despite the fact that we had pretty much won against Japan, in 1949 we dropped atomic bombs on two important cities. Not on the Mitsubishi plant where Zeros were manufactured but a few miles away on a city full of civilians.

Why???

To impress the Russians that we were technologically superior.

The Russians hurried up to create their own atomic bomb. We upgraded to hydrogen bombs, which use an atomic bomb as an igniter. Russia upgraded.

The government created a big Communism scare to get the American people to fund this massive effort. We used smaller nations as proxies to test our technology against other countries that acted as Russia’s proxies.

We engaged in a “space race” that started with Russia’s Sputnik satellite in 1957 and culminated in our first steps on the moon in 1969.

Both of us developed Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Systems (ICBMs) to deliver nukes. We both developed sophisticated anti-nuke systems to shoot down ICBMs. We had enough missiles to destroy each other 30 times over - this is called “overkill.”

In 1962, JFK had a standoff with Russia’s Khrushchev over missile sites in Cuba, just 90 miles away from the US. The Cuban Missile Crisis was the closest we ever came to Thermonuclear Armageddon.

In the 1980’s President Reagan wanted to fill the sky with killer satellites. My favorite idea was “Rods of God,” in which satellites would carry up huge titanium rods that they could drop out of the sky on our enemies. These people were so wrapped up in it that they’d destroy the world if they had to.

Needless to say, we had a worldwide spy network to keep tabs on all this.

Fortunately for us, and devastatingly for the citizens of the USSR, they ran out of money before we did. I guess that means we won, but winning put the US so far in debt to foreign investors that we’ll still be paying it for another generation.

War, even a Cold War, is expensive.

That’s the cold war, the technological rivalry. We never actually fired a shot at each other, but we spent 40 years trying to prove our cajones were bigger than theirs.

Putin seems to trying to reconstitute the old Soviet Union. This time around, we’ve already thrown billions of dollars at the non-war in the Middle East and it is crumbling our economy. I don’t know where it will go.

Technorati: Kamakazi divine+wind Mitsubishi+Zero Three+Diamonds WWI atomic+bomb cold+war Nazi General+Patton Hiroshima Nagasaki sputnik Intercontinental+Ballistic+Missile ICBM communism+scare space+race Soviet+Union

Recently an acquaintance tried to convince me that the Witch Trials were totally due to social forces. Of course there were social forces at work, but in the end the Evils that occurred during that time frame were the final chapter in the Church’s 600-year war on Serpent Knowledge. She had been completely blinded to some very important concepts.

First, this was Christians murdering people, not “social forces” in the abstract. Read the Malleus Maleficarum, the infamous “Hammer of Witches” that the Inquisitors used to determine whether a person was a witch and what to do when the Inquisitors found out they were. It was written by two Dominican priests.

In predomininantly Catholic areas, the Inquisitors killed Protestants. In countries that were about equally Catholic and Protestant, they killed Jews. There was a huge collaboration between kings and the Church to get rid of anyone who was inconvenient. This is a good argument for the separation of church and state.

The witchcraft scare followed 600 years of torture and murder in the name of Love. You’ve probably heard of the Inquisition. It wasn’t until around the 16th century that they were burning more witches than heretics.

England was Anglican by the time the witch-burnings rolled around, by the way.

The first victims of the Inquisition were not witches but scientists, usually Christian. The Inquisition was used to suppress scientific advancement. Church dogma mandated belief in a flat earth and in Creationism. Galileo Galilei, the famous Italian astronomer and physicist, was one of those tried for heresy. He recanted his scientific views in order to avoid being murdered by his own Church.

The Pope issued an apology in 2002 for “errors of his church for the last 2000 years.” So, yes, religion was an important part of it.

A lot of cultists are re-writing history, probably in preparation for a new generation of Inquisitors. Next they’ll be burning the Harry Potter books.

As for the social forces, the switch from heresy to witchcraft started with some cults with strict behavioral requirements. They used the witchcraft accusation to get rid of people who didn’t meet their prudish standards, then started throwing in dissidents, subversive herbalists and the occasional adulterer just for kicks. Fortunately there was already a tradition of torture and murder so they hitched a ride on that.

There’s an interesting article about misogeny and homophobia and witch burning called “The Kindling Effect.” It explains why we call homosexuals “bundles of sticks.”

Technorati: Witch+Trials social+forces Hammer+of+Witches Catholic heretics Creationism Galileo The+Pope homophobia faggot

The long awaited Manic-Depressive Illness: Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression, Second Edition, by Frederick K. Goodwin and Kay Redfield Jamison is finally in stores.

Hopefully you have the first edition. It is *the* reference book for bipolar disorder. Over the years many of the hypotheses set forth in the first edition have been proven out. It’s all there. Phototherapy, circadian rhythms, bipolar creativity. The effects of lithium on the suicide rate. Why we must avoid unopposed antidepressants. And that’s what I saw just riffling the pages! I can’t wait to sit down and read the medical roadmap that Drs. Goodwin and Jamison set out for the next 15 years.

A sample chapter is available for download from the Oxford University Press.

If you apply for the Amazon.com Visa when you make the purchase you can get a hefty rebate. Yippee!

Technorati: antidepressants lithium bipolar+disorder manic+depression circadian+rhythms Depression Kay+Redfield+Jamison Manic+Depressive+Illness Phototherapy suicide

“Cosmic Love is absolutely Ruthless and Highly Indifferent: it teaches its lessons whether you like/dislike them or not.”
– Dr. John C. Lilly, “The Dyadic Cyclone”

quoted on John C. Lilly Homepage

Technorati: John+C+Lilly cosmic+love John+Lilly

I’ve been thinking about parasites.

Not the “earworm” sort of thing where you hear a bit of a song and can’t get it out of your head for the rest of the day. Not even the everyday suck-on-your-intestines nasties. I’m thinking about the kind of parasites that get into your mind and control your thoughts and actions.

For the record, I know *of* these parasites but I’m looking up the names online as I go along. Damn it, Jim, I’m an engineer not a biologist.

The sensitive and the squeamish may want to stop reading this now.

Really.

Ok, now that we’ve shaken off the fleas…

There’s a parasite that infects rodents, Toxoplasm gondii. It makes them all hyper and weird and THAT makes them easier for cats to catch. Where it
gets interesting is that the life cycle of this parasite requires that it pass through the stomach and intestinal tract of… wait for it… a cat! How convenient!

I have occasionally wondered whether the active phase of the infestation makes humans more attractive to cats. Something like 40% of the population has antibodies to T. gondii. Maybe “the rat race” isn’t so far off, eh?

The psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey - whose sister is or was schizophrenic and is probably somewhat affected himself - is promoting the paranoid delusion that cat shit causes schizophrenia. He always hated the family pets, so when his sister got sick he blamed Fluffy. This, my friends, is a major researcher into bipolar disorder at the prestigious Stanley Foundation. We are SO f*cked.

Oh. In other countries with the same rate of antibodies to T. gondii in the population, there is less schizophrenia and the prognosis is better. Personally I think schizophrenia is a product of industrialization and I wish Dr. Torrey would quit wasting valuable time digging in the cat box.

There are many other parasites that affect the behavior of the host. Three
more follow:

Sacculina infects crabs. If by “infects” you mean “castrates and takes over the mind and body.” This is the stuff of nightmares. Succulina injects itself into a crack in the exoskeleton and quickly grows out through the entire nervous system. Crabs that are infected can’t breed, can’t regenerate limbs, and spend the rest of their lives doing nothing but feeding and caring for the parasite. They even stroke and clean the monster, which in the female crab lives in the compartment where she usually holds her unhatched eggs.

Can you imagine having some THING living inside you, changing your brain so that the thing becomes the focus of your entire life? This is the stuff of nightmares.

The lancet fluke has a fairly complicated life cycle, but the interesting part is where it infects an ant. An infected ant acts like a regular ant by day, but at night she climbs up a blade of grass and waits at the top. The next stage of the parasite’s life cycle is to become a liver fluke in a cow. How better to be eaten by a cow than to have your host sit on the top of a blade of grass at dawn!

Another fluke infects fish - the young flukes migrate to the fish’s brain and crowd around it like pigs at a trough. Fish who are infected periodically stop what they’re doing and flail about at the surface of the water. Shorebirds find the flailing fish easy to catch, and yep, the birds are part of the life cycle too. The parasites boost the bird population by making more food available, but the fact that they kill their fish hosts puts limits on how much of the fish population can be infested. Again, a very convenient situation.

Hopefully you all are getting where I’m going with this - that parasites can make you do things you might not have done if it didn’t benefit the parasite. A parasite that flat out ate us alive would be found and eradicated like the screwfly was. Most of them are merely a nuisance.

Humans are, for the most part, repulsed by parasites. I’m sure there are some parasites somewhere that are status symbols, but I sure can’t think of
any. Usually we want to avoid parasites if we can, and expel or exterminate them when we can’t.

It would be more adaptive if the parasite made humans enjoy being infested. I’ve read sci-fi stories about this sort of thing, and I remember at least one Star Trek episode where the infested feel **enriched** by the parasite and are absolutely delighted to forcefully spread it to others.

If you believe the writer William S. Bourroughs, language itself is a virus. Certainly memes, often called “mind viruses,” have some quality that helps them spread. Does anyone remember Laurie Anderson’s “Language is a Virus” from the “Home of the Brave” video?

Oh, he did a really nice book about the co-evolution of cats and people called “The Cat Inside” or something similar. I highly recommend it for the cat-infested.

Next section of this article will be on how *ideas* influence our thinking and behavior in the same way that parasites do.

Technorati: parasites medicine medical mind schizophreniam T+gondii cat+shit William+S+Bourroughs memes

Any day that starts with an email from someone named “Bad Alice” simply has to be a great day!

Bad Alice is the acoustic duo formed by Suzy Johnston (author of The Naked Bird Watcher - the positive account of developing and learning to manage a serious psychiatric disorder that included depression, psychosis and self-harm)

Leslie interjects: The other half of the duo is Lindsay Robertson. So far as I can tell, she is horribly normal except when she gets a hold of a box of crayons.

The CD by Bad Alice is now available.

Titled ‘Walk in my Shoes’ it is a further positive and reflective message on mental illness, self-harm and the issues that face the young of today.

The CD is available on the Bad Alice website where individual tracks can also be downloaded. http://www.badalicemusic.com

The hope is that the music will help people to feel less isolated and offer reassurance that they can get through this. It is also meant to raise further awareness, understanding and - hey - people might even like the songs!

Cheers,

Bad Alice
http://www.badalicemusic.com/
http://www.thecairn.com/

Excellent CD. It’s only number two in my 6-disc changer, but Bad Alice would have to play tuned chain saws to get ahead of Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters - classic Jazz Fusion c. 1972.

I hope to get to Scotland on my next trip to Liverpool. If luck is with me, Bad Alice will have a gig when I’m there.

Suzy’s mum Jean is a great mum, I’m told, and a very cool lady. She even wrote her own book, To Walk on Eggshells, about her experiences helping her daughter navigate the dire straits of the mental health system in the UK. Family involvement is a big positive in handling bipolar disorder effectively.

The CD costs £6.50 postpaid in the UK. Not sure about the rest of the world, but it’s also available as mp3s. Buy it with PayPal and download it on the spot.

Technorati: bad+alice suzy+johnston indie depression psychosis self+harm The+Naked+Bird+Watcher mp3

Rethinking personal evolution.

Post-modernism is about creating a synthesis encompassing, integrating, and synergizing the existing, mutually exclusive domains of religion and science. A new spiritual paradigm, if you like buzz-words. Most of us have evolved far beyond the pre-industrial, that is, agrarian, monotheistic religions. Blind faith stopped being relevant before WWII, so you practically have to drop out of modern society to avoid moving to the next level. But don’t tell the poor devils unless you want a bloody Crusade right here in the US.

The atheists would claim that we have a god-shaped hole in our heads that we must fill with something, and this may be true. Now all the geeks don’t know what to do with this need for spirituality - or even exactly what it is that they’re needing!

KW has some great ideas, but he expressed an opinion in an interview that evolution is a sudden transformation rather than a process of gradual adaptation to the environment. I don’t agree that intermediate, incomplete forms are necessarily incompatible with survival. The universe doesn’t need miracles, *we* do.

To me, this idea that the Universe will bring you whatever you want if you are spiritual sounds a whole lot like the Protestant Work Ethic. If you work hard enough or if you believe hard enough, God will grant you grace. And all of your basest desires.

Look around you. There are a very few beacons shining above a sea of ignorance. Check out SoundsTrue. There are some excellent materials there - you just have to separate the wheat from the chaff.

In my opinion, we will achieve enlightenment only when humanity physically evolves enough to provide us with appropriate organs for it. I’m just burning karma until then.

Darwin loves you, man.

Technorati: post-modernism protestant+work+ethic blind+faith atheist transformation law+of+attraction burning+karma sea+of+ignorance spiritual monotheism pre-industrial darwin