Think for yourself. You are not a copy.

Funny how humans are. There are too many ways we reinforce one part of us by strengthening another.

For example, exercising to increase happiness. That’s not a route to dopamine any junkie will believe. More common and perhaps more complex is when we believe something because we think it might increase our status. For example, Ronald Reagan said:

“I have always believed that this anointed land was set apart in an uncommon way, that a divine plan placed this great continent here between the oceans to be found by people from every corner of the Earth who had a special love of faith and freedom. Our pioneers asked that He would work His will in our daily lives so America would be a land of morality, fairness, and freedom.”

Will these words help us feel special? Is our nation elevated if we choose to believe these words? Do you feel a mere smidge or an entire allotment of status? Nazis did.

In the iron march that drew millions to serve Hitler, “Gott mitt uns” is a phrase at the foundation [wiki]. Germany was an ‘anointed land‘. Uncommonly, Germany was set apart. Nazi Germany indeed was a land of morality. Nazi pioneers enlisted with a special love for Germany’s divine plan. “Let’s work so hard and fight so fiercely that God cannot refuse to hand the victory palm to Germany.” God was with them. He would work His will. These beliefs thundered into the daily lives of people in every corner of the Earth.

Do these words now revolt us?

Does belief both love and kill? Bob Dylan sang,

When the Second World War
Came to an end
We forgave the Germans
And we were friends
Though they murdered six million
In the ovens they fried
The Germans now too
Have God on their side.

There’s much to think about.

Does the world respect what Ronald Reagan said is our “special love of faith and freedom”? What are Europeans saying about America’s love affair with itself?

One says, “I’m seriously afraid that the “Gott mitt uns” idea seems to have caught on in the USA.”

Another says, “We DON’T hate the US, or it’s people, but some of us find the ‘fundagelicals’ only fractionally less scary than the Muslim loonies.”

What happens in America is very much at the heart of God’s purpose for humanity. “A myth.”, says the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams [wiki], “America is no ‘chosen nation’.”

For further reading, piercing insights from PsyBlog.
Why We do Dumb or Irrational Things: 10 Brilliant Social Psychology Studies

In Canada, they ask,

“Who is the enemy? Who is the United States fighting in Iraq? And what’s the objective?

“Nearly five years into the war, the answers to these basic questions should be obvious.

“In the Alice in Wonderland-like wilderness of mirrors that is Iraq, though, they’re anything but.”

In Canada, they say,

Among slogans brigands parade to collect our vote,

less government.
but now the most large;
less spending,
but now the greatest of all time;
and shamefully, prosperity
but for the rich,
and laughingly, a renewal of morals,
but an era of corruption and pain;
and not to forget, Tort Reform,
the witty trick to shame our lawyers,
here’s a reminder about how we can use our law:

Where do the blind want to hear?
For more than ten years, a blind lawyer fought a Transit Commission over its refusal to make its staff call out stops. [link] [link]

The bus system fought this case. He won.
Now at every stop the staff will say so.

But he’s going to court again. The Transit managers spent about a half million to fight against telling the blind where they were. He wants to know why???

There’s a new horizon though.

Networks are exploding.

Maybe the transit staff can be mute again.

Things will talk to the blind.

She’s 24 with a two year old daughter, Saskia.

How can she brush Saskia’s teeth?

Rowena Mead invented the Bug Brush, a toothbrush for toddlers and kids.

The Bug Brush has bristles everywhere – a mouthful of bristles.

Can this be? There’s no ‘wrong end’. Like a Gumbi, the brush is soft and ‘bendy’. It’s safer than hard toothbrush handles. If toddlers fall, the Bug Brush is only a millipede mouthful of soft bristles.

A soft bendy millipede of bristles? Exactly.

. . . the enormous size cannot be explained
. . . during wars and between them
. . . already excess

the corporate chiefs have captured the technological innovation, accumulated the existing great fortunes as well as much lesser, scattered wealth, and capitalized the future.

. . . we don’t live in a free market

We simply do not understand the chain of exposure and who owns what.

Many managers are incompetent,
yet the 26 leading managers earned $363 million each.

. . . pilots of a machine
. . . a decadent elite

We have a new type of rule now.
There will be no more Stalins, no more Hitlers capable of what they control.

I first learned of systems when NASA launched Apollo. It was called cybernetics. [wiki]

I’ve not become an expert, I’ve spoken with a few, and grateful for it, and I’ve developed a radar that tells me when Napoleon comes to dinner and we’re not sufficiently pondering.

This is a neat statement:

And this:

Is that too obscure? Of course. On stage during a lecture, Buckminster Fuller leaned heavily into an imaginary wall. He said, “When you go like this, you push the earth.” Does that clear things up?

Back when Republicans were drunk but not insane?

Example 409b:

“The ultimate goal of the anti-religious elites is to transform America into a completely secular nation, a nation that is legally and culturally biased against Christianity.” – Ron Paul

There might be no way to use touchpads on a laptop or use a new fangled iPhone if you don’t have a finger.

Suck UK has a stylus made of ‘special space age’ silicone material that exactly mimics the electrical resistance and dexterity of a human finger. It might work with PDAs, laptops and iPhones. But you need a hand to hold a stylus.

Phone Fingers offers a finger-sleeve that will activate the sensors in a touchpad, but it doesn’t work without inserting a fleshy finger.

I check this blog only twice per year, but this a post that pulls my heart. Any solutions? There’s already a pedometer for the iPhone. Nothing for the fingerless.

Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property.

Crimes are those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another.

Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property.

In vices, the very essence of crime – that is, the design to injure the person or property of another – is wanting.

It is a maxim of the law that there can be no crime without a criminal intent; that is, without the intent to invade the person or property of another. But no one ever practises a vice with any such criminal intent. He practices his vice for his own happiness solely, and not from any malice toward others.

Unless this clear distinction between vices and crimes be made and recognized by the laws, there can be on earth no such thing as individual right, liberty, or property, and the corresponding and coequal rights of another man to the control of his own person and property.

For a government to declare a vice to be a crime, and to punish it as such, is an attempt to falsify the very nature of things. It is as absurd as it would be to declare truth to be falsehood, or falsehood truth.

The remainder at DailyGrowler. For example:

We all come into the world in ignorance of ourselves, and of everything around us. By a fundamental law of our natures we are all constantly impelled by the desire of happiness, and the fear of pain. But we have everything to learn, as to what will give us happiness, and save us from pain. No two of us are wholly alike, either physically, mentally, or emotionally; or, consequently, in our physical, mental, or emotional requirements for the acquisition of happiness, and the avoidance of unhappiness. No one of us, therefore can learn this indispensable lesson of happiness and unhappiness, of virtue and vice, for another. Each must learn it for himself.

Worse than any conscience can allow, our prisons fail to intervene either crime or vice. Rarely are cages solutions.

While in my late thirties, a 73 year old business partner said to me,

“Old men do things that young men think there is not enough time for.”

Isn’t that the very best and often true?

Notice the word “homosexual” written on the armband?

The regional government of Tuscany, Italy, is teaching people that, because homosexuality is not a choice, gays and lesbians should not have to face discrimination.

Because a heterosexual has no choice, they enjoy freedom from discrimination. We know a homosexual has no choice and so may also enjoy freedom from discrimination. Gender identity isn’t chosen either.

But this is not enough. The premise may not be sufficiently demanding our humanity.

Insisting upon tolerance, equality and freedom for each other need not be justified.

Whether or not heterosexuals scorn homosexuality, their dominance is irrelevant and their duty to any minority is clear. Whether a choice or not a choice, sexual orientation is not a condition that either enhances or reduces our freedom or equality. The fashion or nature of our culture, or any dominant class or majority belief, cannot dilute the tenet of our law.

We will not exhume the graves of the dead that gave us freedom to audit if their sexual orientation excludes their effort. Their blood demands a greater argument. We will not reduce our equality to a matter of sexual orientation.

BelowTheBelt asks who others are excluded?

The “no-choice” strategy represents an attempt by various elements within the GLBT community (and “well-meaning” left-liberal politicians) to afford homosexuality the same privileged discursive status as heterosexuality: as an unquestioned, bio-psychological given.

The dissemination of the “knowledge” that homosexuality is not a choice attempts to empower gays and lesbians by placing it on the same semantic level as heterosexuality. Unfortunately, under such a framework, the attainment of rights and fair treatment become dependent on the fixity of one’s sexual aim: all those who do not demonstrate such a “stable” sexuality are then implicitly excluded from the nexus of rights and privileges.

I see no exclusions, none, from our duty to assure rights and privileges. This is the task of citizenship. Assuring that each of us are equal under the law is the minimum service to our Nation. Can even a strict Constitutionalist disagree?

Via FoucaultBlog

Billionaires, the elite, and politicians use government chiefly as a means to get their hands on our country’s resources – to enrich themselves.

In South America have they finally awaken? Is it true? Daniel Hannan writing for The Telegraph concedes,

“The free-market parties that ran the region in the 1990s had their chance and failed.

“Rightists have been the chief authors of their own pulverisation.

“For, across Latin America, people were not so much voting for the autocrats as against the old elites.

“Even now, conservatives in South America don’t seem to grasp the scale of their defeat.

“Too many of them still see politics in Leftist terms as a class war. Their concern is to look after ‘their’ people rather than to construct an ideology capable of attracting genuine popular support.”

Alas…

“Party democracy was seen to have failed, so people turned to strongmen.

When they, too, fail, where will their voters go?”

Propaganda costs money too.

“Mother Jones magazine is reporting a hawkish advocacy group connected to the White House has hired a Virginia company to begin test-marketing language [my bold] [my big bold] that could be used to sell a war with Iran.

“The group Freedom’s Watch first made headlines this summer when it launched a $15 million ad campaign in support of the surge of American troops in Iraq.

“The group’s leadership includes former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer and Bradley Blakeman, a former deputy assistant to President Bush. Freedom Group recently hired the company Martin Focus Groups in Alexandria, Virginia.

“One participant who was paid to be part of a focus group told Mother Jones: “The whole basis of the whole thing was, “we’re going to go into Iran and what do we have to do to get you guys to along with it.”

via Improprities

To repeat, through to 2006, the Bush administration spent at least $1.6 billion on public relations and advertising campaigns in just over 30 months.

The green ‘spiky things’ are stereocilia on the top of inner hair cells of the human ear.

Sound waves through the ear canal and vibrating our bones cause these tiny sensors to react, sending a polarity shift to the neurons colored red below.

If sound is too loud, these stereocilia and tiny hair cells will be damaged.

As time goes on, excess volume will deform enough stereocilia that our hearing will be greatly reduced.

This photo of the sensory cells of the ear by Dr. Sonja Pyott is a winner of an Olympus digital competition. More superb imagery at Science blog’s RetroSpectacle by Shelley Batts.

The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. – Thomas Jefferson