Self

Self is an idea. It is no thing we can find. Self is the idea that there is a
separation between what is part of us and what is not.

Self is not abstract like a word on this page. It's the feeling of your skin
right now, the love you feel, the pain of rejection, whatever directly touches
your self. What you find touching is touching your self.

Self can include other selves. When we see ourselves in others, their pain hurts
us too. We feel sympathy, compassion. When we don't see ourselves in them, we
don't feel their pain. Their self is separate from our self. It becomes easy to
steal from them, to kill them, and in the case of animals, to eat them.

Love is seeing others as self. What we love is what we are. A mother sees her
self so much in her child that she would suffer any pain to spare that pain from
her child. Marriage is a man and a woman declaring self to be in their union.

Pain is another idea. Pain is the idea of less self. Sensations are not painful
unless threatening to the line we have drawn defining our selves. To be rejected
by those we love is worse than physical pain.

Because self is an idea, self can change. We can fall in or out of love. We can
become more or less fixated on our names, our bodies, sex, and money. We can
make friends and enemies, putting them on this or that side of the line of self.

We like those who are like us. We are kind to our own kind. But who are our
kind, really? Our family, our nation, our religion, but there also is a more
fundamental kind of self. All who can suffer are our kind. In the one way that
counts, they are just like us. They have the idea of self. This includes all
animals, maybe even plants.

Understanding that self is an idea leads to solutions to life's problems. When
we wish others well, our own fears fade. We can leave jealousies and resentments
behind. We know that this body and mind are just one among many.

It becomes easy and natural to be kind to all, and it makes us happy. It becomes
difficult to harm others, because we feel their pain. We love our neighbor as
our self. We do unto others as we would have them do unto us.

When we understand, we can die when our time is up and not worry about it. We
know that life goes on, and it's the same life that we got to live for a while.


Separation

The word "self" has the same origin as the word "separate".

Separation of self from other is the first requirement for life.

Your immune systems must separate self from other in your bloodstream, or you
die of infection. Your immune system has the idea of self built in.

Were we all to share one bloodstream, we would all die from shared infections.

The internet is a shared knowledge-stream carrying infectious mental illnesses.
Maybe we will die from them, or maybe we will recognize and reject them.

Food must be kept separate from shit, or we become sick.

Separation of blood from shit in our intestines fails in dysentery, and we die.

Cleanliness is next to godliness because it separates us from disease and death.

The whore is not separate, not clean. She has mixed herself with many men.

"True eye contact would be quite disgusting."

We separate everyone into "our people" and "other people". The problem always
seems to be other people.

Self is a matter of degree. Self is partly defined by relationships.

"Me and my brother against our cousin, me and my cousin against the outsider."

What is noble is known, separate from the masses. From Latin gnoscere, to know.

What mixes loses its identity. What is separate retains its identity. It takes
energy to remain separate. The chaos of the universe impinges on all sides.

The Hebrew word for holy, kadosh, also means separate, priestly, set apart.

Separation is holiness for the Jews. Separation preserves the Jews.

The fastest way to destroy anything is to halve it repeatedly, which is what we
do to our genes in reproduction. Endogamy draws a line between "us and them".


Perception

Self is too close to be seen. Self is what sees.

Self-interest distorts perception. We easily see what we hope to see.

Facts are filtered by their implications. Unpleasant facts are filtered out.

No one perceives the world directly. We see only an internal image constructed
by selective perception. Others do not see quite what we see.

We never see the world in all its glory, only the thin slice of our visual
spectrum. It's the difference between a movie projected on a screen and the
world itself. We see only the reflection from the screen, never reality itself.

We perceive categories which do not exist outside of our thoughts.

The color spectrum is parsed differently in Irish. Native speakers of Irish
distinguish colors that English does not.

Russian has two words for different shades of blue, obvious to Russians.

The mind maps physical spaces to mental spaces. We forget upon walking through a
doorway because it's a different mental space.

Looking into someone's window at night is like looking into his or her brain.

We notice the rare coincidences, but not the trillions of possible coincidences
which did not happen.

We perceive the narrative world of stories more than we perceive the bland real
world of facts. We see what our accepted stories tell us that we should see.

Whoever controls our stories controls our thoughts, and so controls what we do.

To control the media is to control the public through selective reporting.

Every religion is a story which ends with a request for a real cash donation.

Your body is capable of pains and pleasures you've never felt, at least not yet.

"Worship your idols from a distance. Contact withers them." - Jacques Necker


Consciousness

Consciousness is its own category, sui generis. It is like nothing else.
Consciousness is a loop in our neurons, the perception of perception.
Consciousness is self-perception, where object and subject are the same.
Consciousness is a story that tells itself.

Without the idea of self, there is no consciousness.

Self has a model of the world with the self in it. Self is where logic breaks
down, a hall of mirrors.

A video camera pointed at its own output monitor recurses down the rabbit hole.
Consciousness is the point of recursion in our perception.
Recursion: see Recursion

A de-brained cockroach can still scurry away from light. There is no one home,
only a light perception machine connected directly to legs with no mental model
in between. Consciousness requires only the extra step of perception of that
perception.

Once conscious, we still don't see the real world, but only our model of it.

Consciousness is division, the separation of the world into self and other.

Computers are not yet conscious because they have no idea of self. Without a
self, they cannot feel emotion either.

Consciousness arises in nature, a form that comes and goes, a vortex of
recursive perception. It is part of nature, not supernatural.

In the womb, a child gains consciousness. An egg has none.

Even houseflies have consciousness. They have fears and desires. They gather
around one of their own who is injured.

The universe is filled with the consciousness of myriad beings. They are born
and die creating and erasing consciousness continuously.

We can remember across lifetimes by writing in one life and reading in the next.


Thought

First thoughts in life:
This is like that.
This is one of those, because it is like that.
This is the same person I saw before.

Our consciousness lives in a room with walls painted by our senses.

It has access to the facility of thought, but thought is not consciousness.

It has access to memories, but memory is not consciousness.

It has access to language, but language is not consciousness.

Consciousness has the thought of self, but that thought is not consciousness.

Consciousness can exist without thought, memories, or language.

Consciousness is too obvious for words. This is why Buddhist enlightenment
cannot be achieved by rational thought.

Buddha said: "Manopubbangama dhamma." Mind creates the world.

Perhaps scientists discover nothing, but invent nature by looking at it.


Ideas

To understand means to have a valid mental model, one which reflects reality.

To have an idea is to see with our minds. The word "idea" is derived from the
Greek word eido, meaning "I see". To imagine is to create a mental image.

The thought is not the thing.

The world we see is not the world. The map is not the territory.

We do violence to the world by cutting it up into little ideas.

The world we see is only a reflection, a mental model built from the limited
input of our senses and many assumptions. Our minds create the world we see.

Bats can hear ultrasonic sounds. Bees can see ultraviolet light. Pigeons can see
magnetic fields. The worlds they know are not quite our world.

Our senses can be fooled, and our ideas are often wrong, reflecting our accepted
stories and our desires instead of reality. What we see may not be real.

A false idea can continue, as long as it promotes survival and reproduction.

Self is the center of our model of the world. Look at your hand, your arm, and
up towards the center of yourself. You cannot see it. Self is a blind spot.

Self sees, but cannot be seen. Self is the eye which can see everything except
itself - unless it looks in a mirror.

When we look in a mirror, our own eyes are always looking at us.

What is the mirror for self? Others.

Buddhists claim to see the self directly, and to see that it is an illusion.

"Nothing is always absolutely so." - Theodore Sturgeon


Abstraction

Thought separates the world into this and that, self and other, us and them.

There is neither enough time to learn everything nor enough mental space to
remember it. So we compress reality by creating a few categories which we
can remember, and then classifying what we see into those categories.

To classify anything is to force it into a class, ignoring all other details.
Classification is data compression. We take a plethora of details and reduce it
to a single word. "This is a chair." Classification obscures truth.

Whatever is counted is classified as the same kind of thing as all the others.

We must create abstractions to have useful thoughts, but we also obscure reality
merely by thinking about it. Each neuron abstracts away detail and classifies
many input details into a single yes or no.

As we physically near any thing, it becomes less abstract and more real.

Reality is subtle, complex, and infinitely detailed. What is true or false is
always subject to doubtful cases. Yes and no are never entirely correct.

When we see a chair, we see the details, and then the abstract idea of a chair.
When we read a story, we reverse the process, mapping the word to the details.
In reading a novel, we conjure images in our minds, generating a colorful
reality from black marks on a white page.

Nothing is a matter of principle. Everything is a matter of degree. What is the
difference between a book and a hammer? We can pound in a nail with a book, and
We can read words from the handle of a hammer. They are similar in that way.

What is the difference between self and other? The idea of separation.

Abstraction is itself an abstraction.

Abstractions are imaginary, yet as consequential as a credit rating.

Real comes from Latin res, thing. To call something real is to call it a thing.

Zero divided by zero is 1, even if mathematicians refuse to define the obvious.
To create something from nothing requires infinity of nothing.


Reality

Reality is just arrangements of things, forms. So reality is information, like
words, and like the forms in your brain.

The line between real and imaginary is not distinct.

Imagining anything creates a version of that reality in your brain.

When you perceive something, an external form is reflected into your brain.
The form is copied like a remote web page is copied into your browser's cache.

When you imagine something, the form is created in your brain, and may be
reflected externally if you do the work to implement it. You can imagine and
then build a house.

Things move between imagination and reality.

Self is an idea, the idea that we are distinct from the rest of the world. "This
is me. That is not me." That idea is also an image in your brain.

Consciousness arises from recursive perception, the perception of perception
itself. When you point a video camera at its own output and it spins down the
rabbit hole, some kind of consciousness may be created in that instant.

We can't find consciousness because we are looking for it within the idea of
consciousness itself, and that idea is just a model, not the real thing.

It was evolutionarily useful for animals to perceive "self" among the
other things in the world. You can de-brain a cockroach and it will
still scurry away from light. The photoreceptors drive the legs without any
model of self. But once you have a model of self included in perception, then
it can consider potential scenarios relevant to survival.

We are stories we tell ourselves.

Form is an arrangement.

The letters of a word have no meaning in themselves, but do when arranged.

The meaning of a sentence is greater than the meaning of each word.
The meaning of a sentence cannot be reduced to the meanings of each word.


Information

Information gives form to matter, creating reality. Form is only an arrangement.
Ideas pass in and out of reality by being formed and dissolved. A thought
can become real. Reality can become thoughts.

Take four sticks. Arrange them in a square. Is there a square? There is. Gather
up the sticks in a bundle. Is there a square? There is not. Where did it go? You
have moved an idea into and out of reality.

Creating and destroying a square of sticks shows that information is what is.
The sticks were not the square. Their arrangement was the square. A square
is an idea, like self.

To set bits in order in a memory chip is also to set a small amount of reality
in order. A real painting is an order of atoms. A virtual painting is an order
of electrons in computer memory. They mirror each other. They have the same
information.

The world continuously loses information, preserving only what is able to copy
itself, or to inspire others to copy it. Copying is expensive. Bibles reproduce
themselves with the help of willing humans. The Bible is a meme.

Cities have a wealth of ideas. Forests have few. No books, no one to talk to,
unless there is an internet connection.

A tiny amount of information can be extremely valuable. The winning lottery
number. The combination to the lock. The name of the right drug for the disease.

To move ideas around the world by internet is to move reality around the world.

All forms which propagate themselves include enough redundancy to maintain
coherence in this noisy world. Claude Shannon explained this.

Forms are selected for by conditions. The conditions include other forms, giving
recursion of forms. Wheat uses people to make more people who plant wheat.

A billboard filters incident light to reflect a form someone wants us to see.

We also consume information within food, not just energy. The arrangement of the
material in the food matters.


Communication

Communication is the copying of a mental model, a signal, from here to there.

Signals decay during transmission without redundancy to correct errors. They
become noisy. Informational entropy mirrors physical entropy. The same
equations describe both.

Information obeys the laws of entropy because the causes are the same. There are
many more states of disorder than order. Disorder is much more probable.

The integrity of any transmitted information can be guaranteed by sufficient
redundancy to compensate for noise in the channel. Claude Shannon showed this at
Bell Labs in 1947.

Each arriving bit resolves uncertainty. It tells us what we did not know,
cutting the remaining possibilities in half. Dividing by half is the fastest way
to arrive at the answer.

Computer files can be compressed by removing their redundancy. Not all files can
be compressed without loss. If all files were compressible, then every file
could be compressed down to a single bit, and then even that bit, which is
absurd. Only files with redundancy can be compressed.

A compressed file is a fragile file. Without redundancy, errors cannot be
corrected.

Redundancy is the cure for entropy. We are signals. Our children are the
redundancy of those signals. The cure for death is children.

"If you wish to live forever, plant a tree, write a book, or have a child."

"All social interaction is manipulation. All communication aims to make you do
or not do something, in a certain way inside a specific time-frame." -Rikard


Memory

Memory is communication through time.

Your future self is watching you right now through memories.

Transmission of information through time is analogous to transmission of
information through space.

Copying from now to then is like copying from here to there. The same error
correction algorithms can be used.

Digital information can be copied with perfect fidelity forever, given enough
redundancy to compensate for noise in the channel, yet is ephemeral because it
depends on being hosted on computers and media which rapidly become obsolete.

Books are difficult to copy, but do not require batteries. Books can last for
thousands of years in the right conditions. The most important information
should always be printed, or better, carved in stone multiple times and the the
copies dispersed widely to make it more difficult to destroy them all.

Copy this book if you feel it is useful.

People have a forgettery which is as important as their memory. To remember
everything would be hell.

"Those not yet born will be forgotten by those that follow them." - Ecclesiastes

A sufficiently clear memory happens again in the present by remembering it.

Memories are subtly altered by remembering them.

Feelings are easier to remember than facts.

"You may not remember what someone said, but you will remember how he made you
feel."

It is important that no one can clearly and intensely remember being in love, or
they would do nothing but sit and remember.


Memes

A meme is a virus, a bit of information which manipulates us to spread itself
to others. Memes pass from others, through us, to yet others.

Memes grow on other memes. All order and energy will be exploited by some meme.

The first goal of every religion is to keep itself going.

Bibles reproduce themselves by convincing people to print bibles.

Christians try to save others by converting them to Christianity.

If a meme can inspire rage, it can propagate itself well.

The "silence is violence" meme is a rage meme demanding that we propagate rage
or be attacked ourselves for not propagating rage.

Islam is also a rage meme. Islam demands that Muslims join the jihad to spread
Islam, or be attacked themselves for failing to do so.

Weaker memes not making such demands do not survive as well in the sea of ideas.

When we see the mechanism by which a meme is manipulating us to propagate
itself, the meme loses power. So memes which inspire blindness to their own
mechanisms survive better.

Political memes have great power because of their high information density and
emotional impact. They are quick to read and more effective than slow, reasoned
argument. Political memes take advantage of widely known tropes to impart quick
understanding of the current situation.


Truth

Truth is filtered by self-interest. What is good for me is easily accepted.

What is good for me seems true to me, and what is good for you seems true to
you. Arguments about "truth" are arguments about self-interest.

What is good for our teachers and our owners is taught as truth in school.

Critical thought means looking for mistaks in what we are taught.

Critical thought questions authority.

Neither our teachers nor our owners like to be questioned.

Nor do we enjoy questioning our own beliefs. It is embarrassing to be wrong.

We do not look at facts and then draw conclusions. We desire certain conclusions
and then select supporting facts. New "facts" will be hallucinated into
existence if required for comfort. Other facts will be invisible when they lead
to embarrassing conclusions. Subliminal pleasures and pains direct our thoughts.

If we have been fooled long enough, we are no longer interested in finding out
the truth. It would be too painful, too humiliating.

"Please give us a simple answer, so that we don't have to think, because if we
think, we might find answers that don't fit the way we want the world to be."
- Terry Pratchett

To deny a truth "for the greater good" creates a greater evil.

Money conspires against truth.

The real estate agent who tells the truth about a house will lose her job.

When people feel threatened, they can neither listen nor change their minds.

"When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen."
-Ernest Hemingway

Most people find belonging more valuable than truth. They are willing to deny
any truth to keep their friends and relatives talking to them.


Energy

All life and all information must gather energy to repair and reproduce itself.

Money paid to a worker is convertible not only to food and goods, but also to
energy, measurable in calories or kilowatts, contained in the food he eats, or
the electricity he uses in his house.

A worker could convert all of his money to electricity. At 10 cents per
kilowatt-hour, a $20,000 income would buy 200,000 kilowatt-hours, enough to send
a reasonable thunderbolt down the street.

The energy consumed in the beating of his heart and the motion of his limbs
must, however, first be deducted from this 200,000 kilowatt-hours or he will
not be alive to enjoy the spectacle.

As a worker works, he helps to free this 200,000 kilowatt-hours from oil for
his use.

Actually, he makes more than 200,000 kilowatt-hours available. Otherwise his
boss would not make a profit and the worker would not be employed.

For any given product, we can translate the price into kilowatt-hours and be
sure that it took about that much energy to create.


Entropy

Entropy is a measure of the disorder of a system. Without energy to maintain a
particular unlikely order in an organism, life becomes random, disordered, dead.

Life obeys the same thermodynamic laws that inanimate matter does. A living
being becomes disordered and dies without the input of energy from food.

Economics and pollution are also explicable in terms of entropy. An economic
system takes in energy and generates pollution to produce goods from raw land.

All creations of value are ordered and not random. They have a specific
transient form useful to our selves. They have a limited time to exist before
disorder overtakes them again. "Things fall apart; The centre cannot hold."
- Yeats

Capital is all the creations of men, low-entropy goods.
"Ninety percent of everything is crap." - Sturgeon's law

Cash, energy, and low-entropy goods (aka capital) are all inter-convertible.

A ceramic dish has an orderly form useful to people. To say that a dish has a
useful structure is to say that its entropy is low. Throw a dish on the floor.
As it shatters and becomes random, its entropy rises as its value falls.

Conversely, in the creation of the dish, some amount of energy has to be
expended and some amount of pollution created, say smoke from the kiln.

A dish has few useful forms, only those that hold contents. The same dish has a
vastly larger number of broken forms. There are trillions of ways to break it
into shards, and eventually into powder. The valuable forms are few, and the
random forms are many. Disorder is much more probable.

It is easier to destroy than to create because most orders of matter are not
useful. To destroy is to change something from useful to not useful.

To create, one has to find and implement one of the few useful orders. It takes
time to build a house of cards. This careful and pleasing arrangement is rare
among the many possible stable orderings of the cards. Most orderings are just
another pile of cards.

We describe the amount of entropy of a good by translating into money.


Ecology

Water is constant on earth. We do not run out of water. It simply moves from one
place to another, or perhaps gets mixed with salt in the ocean.


Nature

Men love straight lines, but nature does not.

Nature has many business analogs. The fruit is advertising for the seed.

Plants may have thorns or poison, but rarely both. They don't need both.

The hawk feels shivers of joy as the squirrel screams, bleeds, quivers, and
dies. Time to eat!

Bees have no doubt about their purpose. Their self is the hive. They feel
joy in collecting nectar from flowers in the sun and bringing it home.

The lamb cries "Mama! Mama!" as it is dragged to have its throat cut. The ewe
looks on in panic and can do nothing.

A mother duck will sometimes peck her weakest baby to death. The duckling pecked
to death by its mother is the saddest creature on earth in those moments,
without even a mother to protect it.

Prey must flee from predators or be eaten and turned into shit. The prey's self
is lost, the predator's self increases.

Predators need greater intelligence than their prey, or they will never catch
their food. Predators must also lack sympathy for their prey, or they won't eat.

The wolf has no sympathy for the deer. The kindly wolf would quickly starve.

Commercially-minded ethnic minorities require greater intelligence than the
majority they sell to, and a lack of sympathy for them, or they will fail.

Over evolutionary time, we can see animal groups grow fangs and claws and split
to live off the flesh of its cousins. Hawks eat other birds. Lions eat other
mammals. Given enough time and strict endogamy, human ethnic groups would do the
same.

The dinosaurs are not dead. Every bird is a direct descendant of dinosaurs.

Deer should form a union and kill mountain lions. They have the numbers.

If we ever meet aliens, they will also have the concept of self.


Life

All life distinguishes self from other.
Life defends itself. Inanimate matter does not defend itself.
Life begins as sequences of DNA which create proteins which assemble to defend
the sequence of DNA it came from.

Animal life is a slow fire of sugar and fat, creating warmth.
Fires need to breathe oxygen just like we do.
Fires spread to burn available fuel. Animals reproduce to eat available food.

The form of food is destroyed by the animal which eats it, and it used to
maintain the form of the animal. Forms compete for existence.

Food is eaten every day, yet more food gets produced. It is necessarily so.

There may be life on the sun. To that life, the earth would be a cold and barren
planet where nothing seems to move. Starfish have active but slow social lives,
moving over the sea floor at a glacial pace, visible in time-lapse photography.

Human lives are not infinitely valuable economically. Lives have a dollar value
which is calculated when deciding how much money to spend on highway
construction, for example. It could not be otherwise, or we would spend all of
our resources saving the last few minutes of the lives of dying people, and we
ourselves would then die from using all our resources in this futile battle.

Any food which is very nutritious spoils quickly because it is as nutritious to
mold and bacteria as it is to us.

Money attracts lawsuits, scammers, and thieves the way grain attracts rats.

Women and food are closely connected. Our first food is our mother's milk.

Food is inherited on the maternal line, because mothers cook much more than
fathers. We grow up on the food our mothers made for us, and find it comforting.

"The genome of any organism is a repository of information about the world
gathered in small bits over time through the process of evolution. The
repository includes information on everything we could possibly need to know,
such as how to convert sugar into energy, how to evade a predator on the
savannah, and, most critically for evolution, how to reproduce or
self-replicate." - Chris Adami


Shit

Shit is inevitable with all animal existence.

Food has form, but shit is formless, broken down. Food's order has been stolen.

Disgust keeps us alive. Shit is disgusting to keep us from eating it.

The foods you avoid are more important than the foods you eat.

We detest shit and separate it from ourselves because it spreads disease.

Shit is food to flies.

Flies prefer some shit to others, and rejoice upon finding fresh shit.

Some dinosaur shit has been fossilized.

Yeast shit alcohol.

Pigs and dogs eat shit, which makes them unclean to Jews and Muslims. Those
religions have a good reason for this, because eating shit propagates parasites.

"Shit happens" expresses the second law of thermodynamics in concise form.

One fundamental fact of life on earth is above vs below. Gravity holds us down.

Shit falls lower. Rain falls from the sky, washing salt into the ocean.

Heaven is above, hell is below. We seek to rise.

Rain cleans the world, rising though the energy of sunlight.

Yet the bottom of the ocean may be full of gold.


Pollution

To create order necessarily creates disorder as well.

Whenever a useful product is created, useless or outright toxic byproducts are
also created.

Pollution is the shit of factories and transport.

Look at the air above industrial countries. More production, dirtier air.

Diesel is the smell of death. Diesel particles are just the right size to stick
in human alveoli and cause cancer.

Pollution is a kind of theft. Every time a diesel truck drives by and we choke
on the fumes, consider that the pollution in our air is the entropy increase
which must occur for the owner of the truck to make money, an entropy decrease
for him.

Before we curse him, however, consider that we also save money when the owner
sells the goods from the truck to us at a better price because he saved money by
using a more polluting fuel.

In a way it's ourselves who are saving money by polluting. Was it worth it? If
not, what would we think of polluting someone else's air and still saving the
money? That is outsourcing to China.

Nature is not a zero sum game, because unlike the oil we use, more energy in the
form of sunlight arrives on the earth every day. Life uses this energy to
recycle its own waste, so nature stays reasonably clean without people around.

A dead body may be revolting and spread disease, but it won't last long.
Pollution created by industry lasts much longer.

As eons of rain washed salt from rocks into the ocean, the ocean became polluted
with salt. Marine life then adapted to the salt.

As plants gave off oxygen as a result of photosynthesis, the air became polluted
with oxygen. Land life then adapted to the oxygen.


Bodies

We are large tubular worms with limbs. We are naked tailless apes.

We are compact machines designed by selection for survival and reproduction.
Everything has to work in a small space. There is little room for error.

We smell like our ancestors did at our age.

We think we are in control, but we are not. Our bodies are in control. We will
lose our temper when provoked enough. We will get tired. We will fail to do
what we intend to do. We are subject to forces stronger than ourselves.

Eating causes pleasure at maintenance of self.
Shitting causes embarrassment at the incompetent self.
Fucking causes pleasure at joining our self with another self.
Mourning is pain at the loss of part of our self.

Our bodies make us desire food with nutrients we lack. This is especially true
for pregnant women. Your body knows more than you do.

Fasting for a day gives insight into our brains. Thoughts of food sneak in.

Do not eat except from noon to 8pm every day for a longer healthier life.

Eunuchs live longer than men with testicles, but it's a bad deal.

On average, humans have one testicle.

We see red well because it is important to know when we are bleeding.

The alert dot for a new text looks like a blood spot to get our attention.

All languages have a word for red, but not necessarily for other colors.

Our bodies are weak compared to those of most wild animals.

Knives and forks are better teeth than we naturally have.

Clothes make better fur than we naturally have.

"Humans can live underwater. Just not for very long."


Brains

Your brain runs your body remarkably well even when you are not conscious.

When you are conscious, your brain runs a loop of:
I am here now.
I need to do this next thing.

The left and right hemispheres talk, but they are not the same person. The two
halves of our brains are two distinct people. They communicate via the corpus
callosum. Instead of individuals, we should be called dividuals.

The limits of our brains are obvious when we try to multiply large numbers in
our heads. Doing math problems without writing is the mental equivalent of
lifting weights. We get stronger with exercise.

People don't do math well. Math is hard.

The brain is made of nerves but feels no pain when cut. Whom would it tell?

Our brains can operate without us. We can read a children's book out loud with
the right intonation while our mind wanders.

Listen to your intuition. When you're uncomfortable, pay attention and try to
understand why.

When you notice a drop of sweat on yourself, you might be nervous, yet not
consciously aware of it. Trust your gut.

We are thinking thoughts that we are not directly aware of.

Men feel the presence of a beautiful woman before the thought becomes conscious.
Women are also acutely aware of the beauty of other women, the competition.


Dreams

The dreaming self is the same person as the awake self.

Dreams are stories the brain tells itself.

Awake thought is not far from dreaming. "Life is but a dream."

We fill in our dreams to fit our feelings and physical sensations.

When awake, we alter our perceptions to fit our model of reality.

Whatever we did, we assume we wanted to do, and then create a motive to explain
our own actions, even in dreams.

Ask yourself a question before going to sleep. Your brain will work on it.

While we sleep, our brain focuses on unresolved problems.

We may come to valid conclusions and new insights in dreams.

Sex in dreams is always hot, never tepid.


Intelligence

We are not all created equal. Some are smarter than others from birth.

Intelligence is extremely heritable. Identical twins raised apart have an 80%
correlation in IQ scores. This scientific fact of life makes many idealists sad.

Intelligence has many dimensions. Attention, insight, memory, mental models. We
may be blessed in one dimension and cursed in another.

One's IQ varies during the day, and with coffee or alcohol.

Great intelligence is required to write a compelling story.
Intelligence is required to see the motives of others, and to fool them.

Merchants must be smarter than their customers for the same reason that
predators must be smarter than their prey.

Funny people are usually intelligent.
Intelligent people tend to drink more.
Intelligent people usually have quick reflexes in addition to quick wit.

People afflicted with dystonias tend to be exceptionally smart. Twitchy nerves.
Dystonias are unusually frequent among Jews.

Even idiots have a native language, but the ability to learn a foreign language
as an adult is proof of intelligence.

It is surprising that we all speak at about the same speed in spite of some
being smarter than others.

Even flawed mental models can lead to correct predictions. One may think that
electronic devices run on smoke. When they overheat, the smoke comes out.

Education is acquiring a useful mental model of the world. An educated mind is a
capital good created through study and practice, It has a limited duration like
any other capital good, because reality changes, and because people eventually
die. When we pay a doctor or a lawyer, we are renting this good.

Ask questions until you understand others, even if it starts to annoy them.

Gloss over nothing. Understand all the details. Read all the manuals.


Reason

All reasoning is subconsciously motivated by self-interest.

We do not start from evidence and then reach conclusions.

We start from desired conclusions and then look for supporting evidence.

Once any action is performed, the mind automatically comes up with reasons to
justify it, the way that the mind incorporates external stimuli into dreams. The
mechanism can be useful to alter one's own attitude. Smiling makes us happy.

The brain justifies what the body does. We assume we must like someone we did a
favor for, so to get someone to like you, ask him to do you a small favor.
Benjamin Franklin documented this effect in his autobiography.

We enjoy believing ourselves, even when we know we are wrong.

"If you don't understand how someone could possibly believe something as stupid
as they do, this is more likely a failure of understanding on your part than a
failure of reason on theirs." - Scott Alexander

"The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he
has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made
clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows
already." - Leo Tolstoy

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on
not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

"People will do anything for those who encourage their dreams, justify their
failures, allay their fears, confirm their suspicions and help them throw rocks
at their enemies." - Blair Warren

Every thought has subtle emotion woven into it.

Cocaine users instantly become insincere when they know someone is holding. All
their actions and speech are motivate solely by the promise of that high.

Men become insincere when strongly motivated by the imminent potential of sex.


Meditation

Meditation increases awareness of brain automation.

The brain is an excellent toy, always with us.

Every moment stuck waiting is an opportunity to meditate.

Count your breaths, note when your mind wanders.
Bring your mind back and start over.
One improves with practice.

Thoughts present themselves, usually thoughts about uncertainties.

Meditation for health is good exercise.
Meditation for enlightenment is selfish, and therefore pointless.

To seek our own enlightenment is to guarantee we will not find it.
To realize that our own enlightenment is unimportant is to find it.

Attention is a wave synchronized with our heartbeat. To see the lapse in
attention requires attention, which is not present at that moment.

Sit quietly and listen to a clock's second hand. The tick of the second hand
will drop out when it happens to hit that lapse in attention.

The waveform shape of attention becomes visible when we are high on marijuana.

Attention is a flashlight in a dark room. When we shine it in one place, the
other places lose their illumination.

Every sentence on a page competes for attention with all the other sentences.

Enjoy doing all necessary daily actions like tooth brushing in a zen-like way.

When dealing with any set of items like bills or recipe ingredients, put them
all on the left to start. As you deal with them, move them to the right. The
ones on the right are all right. The ones on the left are still left.


Drugs

Drug companies spend only about 15% of their revenue on drug research, but more
on advertising and even more in taking profits.

Drug research should be publicly funded and published for free use globally
without royalty payments. Taxpayers would end up paying less with public drug
research. But drug companies would be opposed, and lobby against it.

The elderly have time. They could stand out in front of pharmacies with signs to
apply political pressure against rent-seeking. They need only to be organized.

All addictive drugs inspire rituals.
Wine is drunk on the Sabbath.
People like their coffee just so.

Caffeine and alcohol can both inspire irrational anger.

Caffeine and nicotine evolved as insecticides. Bugs eat the leaves of coffee
bushes or tobacco plants and die.

Caffeine is extremely soluble in hot water. The few drops into the coffee pot
contain most of the caffeine.

Drugs are like the combination to a lock. Enormous energy might be expended in
discovering what the combination is, but the combination itself is a simple
thing. Quinine helps malaria and is not expensive, but the knowledge was unknown
to Europeans until an American Indian pointed out the bark of the cinchona tree.

Illegal marijuana growers are found by their power usage. They need to power
indoor lights to grow marijuana. Eventually, excessive consumption of CPU power
will be an even bigger red flag that someone is creating illegal drugs.

Opiates happen to fit into pleasure receptors of the brain. The poppy evolved as
a pleasure poison. Any animal that eats enough poppy will fall into a happy
sleep and stop eating.

Heroin addicts are usually impotent.

Your spice cabinet is full of drugs, as medieval monks knew well. You can
damage your liver just by having turmeric and pepper each day.


Alcohol

A small amount of alcohol daily improves health and increases longevity.
A large amount of alcohol daily harms health and reduces longevity.

People who enjoyed the effects of alcohol lived longer and left more children.

Red wine increases longevity more than other alcoholic drinks do.

Roman soldiers added wine to their water to disinfect it on campaign.

The Irish tend toward alcoholism because they enjoy alcohol more than others do.

"One martini is just right, two is too many, and three is not enough."

"When I read about the evils of drinking, it makes me want to stop reading."

"My grandmother is 90 and doesn't need glasses. Drinks right from the bottle."

"I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy."

"You can't stop drinking if you never start."

"I don't drink anymore. I don't drink any less, either."

"Two Irishmen walk out of a bar."


Cannabis

No one dies from THC, but millions die from alcohol every year.

The ratio of lethal to effective dose is 15 for alcohol. 15 drinks may kill you.

The ratio of lethal to effective does is extremely high for cannabis.
You can take 1000x the effective dose of cannabis and still not die.

The harm of cannabis is mostly limited to lung damage and increased
forgetfulness. No one should drive stoned, but the drug itself is mostly safe.

Cannabis may trigger permanent paranoia in susceptible people.

Prison guard unions lobby against marijuana legalization because they depend on
having plenty of prisoners for their income. Alcohol distributors lobby against
legalization because they fear the competition.

Mexican drug cartel violence is half driven by marijuana profits. Violence would
be greatly reduced by national legalization, as it was when prohibition on
alcohol ended.

Cannabis triggers the same color of emotion as being in love, only fainter.

Cannabis is an aphrodisiac, which is one reason it's illegal. Too much fun.

The words hemp, cannabis, and canvas are all derived from the same ancient word.

"I'm not as think as you stoned I am."


Motivations

"Not for love or money" summarizes human motivations.

Love is seeing anther as part of self.
Money is seeing another as useful to self.

Anything we would sell to a stranger, we would give free to our children.

Anything done for love is superior to anything done for money.
Anything done for money is superior to anything done by government monopoly.

Countries can run on the love of money alone, but such countries do little for
their citizens, because the citizens don't love each other.

With strangers, reason from motives. Follow the money.

We can predict the actions of others by knowing their motives.

"Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome." - Charlie Munger

Doctors and dentists have a large incentive to administer unnecessary treatmnts.

A positive motivation sustains better than a negative motivation. Give people
something to look forward to, something big. "Make no small plans." - D. Burnham

The rich are motivated by approval from their peers, not by yet more money. This
is why modern art museums are full of shit. Underlings dare not tell the truth
about The Emperor's New Art.

To say you don't care is to show you do care enough to say that you don't.

If you don't care, why would you even try? But if you do care, you risk losing.

Cynics say that everything is done for selfish reasons, that even a mother loves
her child for selfish reasons, but this is wrong. The right way to think about
love is one self including another.

Action creates the motive as much as motive creates the action.
When you help someone, you assume you must like him or her.
When you smile, you assume you are happy.


Emotion

Emotion is not a form, evoked by but somehow outside the world of forms.

Emotions can be written down as music and poetry.

Music and poetry give an idea of the range of human emotion.

Music is always a voice, even when there are no words.

There are many unnamed emotions in English:
The feeling from a glance one second too long, implying interest.
The desire to exaggerate to make a better story.
Joy at another's misfortune.

Joy at another's misfortune is a named emotion in German: Schadenfreude.

The stupid, the ugly, and the elderly feel as deeply as anyone else, yet their
feelings are discounted because there is little that they can do for us.

Why wouldn't animals also feel deep emotions? Many animals appreciate music.

The pain of feeling stupid is powerful and pervasive.

Plain gray ordinary thoughts cannot understand the vivid colors of intense
emotions. Those in love cannot be understood by those who are not, except in the
most abstract and pointless way. Soldiers who have killed and seen friends
killed cannot be understood by those who have not been there.

The deepest emotions are about love and death. Love means more self, death means
the end of this self. The death of one's children is the deepest pain, greater
even than the death of one's own body.

Without sexual attraction, love of one's children, and fear of death, your genes
do not survive to pass on those emotions. Emotions rule us of necessity.

Sex and death have layers of emotions to them, so that failure of motivation at
any one layer be can compensated for by other layers. There is not only one kind
of sexual attraction or fear of death. There are many.

Heaven and hell are both emotions.


Hate

Hate requires fear. We don't hate what we don't fear.

"The opposite of love is not hate. It is indifference."

The world is indifferent to our existence. It doesn't even bother to hate us.

The embarrassment of failure engenders hate for the winner. The Jews say "Esau
hates Jacob" to explain anti-Semitism. But in truth, Esau loved Jacob.

Judiasm deliberately alienates all non-Jews as a way of maintaining group
solidarity and resisting assimilation. Hate creates the necessary barrier.

Embarrassment is the most powerful unspoken force in politics.

"The embarrassment wherein he finds himself produces in him the most unjust and
criminal passions imaginable, for he conceives a mortal hatred against that
truth which blames him and convinces him of his faults." - Pascal

"If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself.
What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us." - Hermann Hesse

We seek a good understanding of motives up until the point where that
understanding is embarrassing to ourselves.

It is sometimes necessary to kill, but it is never necessary to humiliate.
Deliberate humiliation creates more hate, perpetuating violence.

"Praise in public, criticize in private."

A wise old black man: "White people don't hate us, they're just afraid of us."

"Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned."

"Hate can't injure the person hated. But it destroys the hater."

Much evil is perpetrated as revenge for perceived humiliation.

The most frustrated are the most vicious. When American Indians captured and
tortured prisoners from other tribes, it was the old women who were the most
brutal, gouging out eyes, flaying skin, and burning prisoners alive.


Fear

Fear is anticipation of loss of self, the most primal feeling of all.

All true horror is necessarily short, as horror is reaction to great loss, and
there is a limit to how much we can lose.

Fear motivates more than money, status, helpfulness, or fairness.

Fear gets attention, which can be sold to advertisers.

The mainstream media are fear-mongers, causing deliberate distress for profit.

Authorities accumulate power by using fear to get us to abandon our rights.

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary
Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - Benjamin Franklin

"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the
country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the
people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament,
or a communist dictatorship. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they
are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and
exposing the country to greater danger." - Hermann Goering

Even if we ourselves are not afraid, our neighbors will suppress our rights out
of their own fear.

In 2020, the US government, with Chinese help, deliberately stoked psychotic
levels of public fear about a weak virus. When people are afraid, they willingly
give up their freedom and turn against their fellow citizens, Goering-style.

The body's response to stress saves our lives right now at the cost of long-term
damage. The moment of terror before impact saves lives. Adrenaline constricts
blood vessels, we feel less pain, and our heart races. But if we are chronically
stressed, we die younger. The media and the government kill many through fear.

Fear breeds superstition. The less control we have, the more we invent rituals.

Being kind quells our own fears, because we see beyond ourselves.

Fear is the opposite of hope.


Shame

"Society has so narrowed the path of acceptable behavior, speech, and thought
that no one can stay on the path. No one. it's impossible because the
thread-thin path is constantly shifting.

In Kaczynski's view, this leads people, especially men, to feel extreme shame.
They come to believe they are defective, and that's exactly what society wants -
people who feel ashamed of themselves and unworthy of making their own
decisions.

Fear of injury and isolation drive women, while avoidance of shame (or failure)
drives men.

What women have an even harder time understanding is this: For the average male,
relationships are not a reliable source of comfort. A man's greatest pain comes
from shame, due to the inadequacy he feels in relationships; therefore, going to
the relationship for comfort is like seeking solace from the enemy. Talking
about the relationship, which is guaranteed to remind him of his inadequacy, is
the last method he would use for comfort, in the same category as choosing a bed
of nails for a good night's sleep.

Anger and aggression ward off shame by numbing its pain and filling the void of
energy it depletes. All you have to do to make a man verbally or physically
aggressive is threaten him with shame: "You're a wimp, a loser, a dud, and you
have a small penis!" As they used to say in the Westerns that men love so much,
"Them's fightin' words!"

Men in America in 2022 are struck by fighting words every moment of every day.
The war on men began, in earnest, in the 1970s when men, especially fathers,
were portrayed as idiots, misogynists, and racists in television, books, movies,
and commercials.

In other words, our culture has bombarded three generations of boys and men with
“You're a wimp, a loser, a dud, and you have a small penis!” Twenty-four hours a
day, seven days a week. This message comes from teachers, mothers, girlfriends,
priests, Hollywood action stars, pop music, politicians, and the evening news.

Yet, we're surprised when the occasional male grabs a machete and tears through
a suburban mall." - Bill Hennessy


Anger

Chronically angry people are angry at their own failures.

Passive aggression satisfies because causing anger causes pain in others.

Rage gives strength. An enraged rat will chase a startled cat down the street.

Rage is a pleasure that leaves a bad hangover.

The morning after a fit of rage, we wake up with even more problems.

Angry words bill you later.

Anger keeps sadness going.

"Anger is a feast at which we ourselves are the main course."

The wise are not baited into responding.

Anger comes from a sense of weakness rather than from a sense of strength.

If you're angry, then the argument is about status and your feeling humiliated,
and no one cares about that. The visibly angry automatically lose the argument.

To forgive can be inspired by love, or can be just another way of winning.

In every family, there are those who are not speaking to each other. Refusing
to speak to relatives is always a mistake. There are no exceptions to this rule.


Resistance

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like
if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had
been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his
family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when
they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in
their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at
every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose
and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people
with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very
quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding
all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!
- Sozhenitsyn


Pleasure

Pleasure and pain keep our selves alive. They tell us of more or less self.

Without the ability to feel pain, we would quickly die. There is a disease which
prevents feeling pain. Those with that disease do not live long.

Our bodies seek to keep us in the middle, between too much and too little.

The search for pleasure directs everything we do, even the unconscious scratch
of an itch, even reading this very line of this book.

Watch people waiting in line - every shift of foot, each scratch moves them
away from discomfort towards more comfort. They cannot remain perfectly still.

The end of pain is also a pleasure.

All actions are motivated by some pleasure or pain. Like fish in a river, we
constantly try to swim upstream. Upstream is pleasure, downstream is pain.

Our internal calculus is not always accurate. We may desire something which
then causes us no pleasure, or causes us pain. We forget about hangovers.

There is no motion without emotion. Emotion moves us.

Look at all the cars on the highway going in both directions. Each side wants to
be where the other is. Why can't both sides be happy where they are?

Constant pleasure-seeking does not maximize our enjoyment of life
Constant pain avoidance is bad for our health. No pain, no gain!

Discipline can never defeat pleasure. Discipline is only seeking a long-term
pleasure greater than the short-term pleasure.
To solve procrastination, either make the pain of inaction > pain of action,
or make the pleasure of action > pleasure of inaction.
Put pain between the self and the short-term pleasure.
For those who are dieting, never have candy in the house.

Willpower is a limited resource. Use it sparingly.

How was Thich Quang Duc able to burn himself alive to protest the Vietnam war?
Buddhists claim to be able to defeat pleasure and pain by overcoming self.


Mania

In the manic phase, the self touches the source of all pleasure. Then you know:
every motion is driven by this source. When you need to rest, it makes you rest.
When you need to rise, it makes you restless. It was always there, unrecognized.

A manic episode, romantic love, and hard drugs all touch the same nerve. We will
spend all our money and damage our relationships and our work to get more, the
classic signs of a problem needing treatment.

An electrifying chord plays all day. All women are beautiful. It would not be
surprising to find yourself levitating. Nothing is wrong! Everything is fine.
Thoughts are clear, fluid, and racing. It is hard to slow down enough to speak.

Vivid dreams startle and delight, as real as daytime.

It is pointless to reason with ourselves, or for anyone else to reason with us.
They have nothing to offer which could possibly compete. Were we able to convey
the feeling, they would drop their own pathetic reliance on reason and join us
in our insanity.

Anyone who has touched that source knows what is possible, and can no longer be
happy with what is. This is the tree of knowledge of good and evil. If we eat
from it, we will die. "Neither shall you touch it." - Genesis 3:3

As the tide recedes, we chase it. The addict lying in his shit in the gutter
can never get up. He has eaten the forbidden fruit, and knows what heights are
possible. Ordinary life holds no interest for him anymore. He will die.

It is similar for those who have been deeply in romantic love. They know what is
possible. The longing to get back to that place follows them constantly.

Were we to clearly remember the joy of being in love, we would do nothing else,
and eventually die. And so we cannot remember it, but only a shadow of it. All
addictions are the same addiction. There is only one pleasure circuit.

To defeat an addiction, you must find more joy in abstaining than partaking.
This is unlikely. The only possibility is in being loved by family and friends.

The insane and the addicted approach the limits of what is possible to think.


Melancholy

We repeat the same routines each day, as if we never get them right.

When nothing new is coming out of our minds, something new should be going in.
Read all books, listen to all music, travel, try new food, meet new people.

Years of children's lives are wasted in boring classes. Decades of adults' lives
are wasted in boring jobs. That loss of human life puts any genocide to shame.

It is not easy to have fun. Real fun takes serious preparation.

It is not possible to maintain constancy of mood.

Nothing is more contagious than a bad mood.

A thousand tiny annoyances weigh on our moods each day. Pay attention, make them
conscious, solve them or eliminate their cause.

A tiny problem multiplied by every day of life is well worth fixing.

Oil the squeaky hinge, or better, remove the whole door.

There should be a legal penalty for invisibly locking one door of double doors.

Worry has a purpose. The worried brain scans possible options both while
sleeping and awake, mentally trying out solutions, and may find the right one.

Worry expands to fill our capacity to worry.

Real problems displace mundane worries instantly.
Real problems make us long for our old boredom.

"May you live in interesting times" is an old Chinese insult.

More options are always better than fewer, but choice is also a burden.

Many would prefer freedom from choice over freedom of choice.

Sometimes there are no good options.

Yet if we are loved, all sufferings can be borne.


Depression

Depression is an adaptation. Depression evolved to get us to do nothing for a
while in a bad situation, until circumstances perhaps change themselves.

Depression is a good sedative. There is no will to do anything but sleep.

"All things are wearisome, more than one can say." - Ecclesiastes 1:8

The cure for the relentless succession of days is to create, to build, so that
today is different from yesterday. Something good is growing. Even a small
accomplishment each day asserts control and hope.

It's easier to get up every morning when making progress towards a goal.

To work at the limit of human knowledge and leave behind a bit of published
progress brings at least a feeling of accomplishment. There are problems to
solve, diseases to cure, and there is corruption to expose.

Some make money until the end because they can't think of anything interesting.

We can always find something we should have done better.

Regret is only a motive to apologize or to try again, otherwise a waste of time.

Do something for someone else, to see once again that there are others, and that
they can use our help.

Office workers feel the sadness of zoo animals when they've given up looking for
an escape, waiting to die. What keeps people at work? Debt, mostly.

Suicide is shortsighted. Can you be certain the future will be so bad?

Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Why not flee to Tahiti?

Some apathy is healthful. Do not care too much. Save your energy for things that
matter. Don't give a fuck too easily. "Fucks don't grow on trees." - Mark Manson

"Depression hits losers the hardest."

Even the dying can still find something to be grateful for.


Disease

Illnesses are called disorders because the self is in one of the many unwanted
orders and not in one of the few wanted orders.

Infectious diseases spread when we fail to separate the clean and the unclean.

Every infectious disease must move from older to younger people, or die out.

The Wuhan Virus was the greatest fraud in human history, abusing fear for power
and profit. Had we not been told to fear it, we would not even have noticed it.

Venereal disease has an efficient path for transmission with the exchange of
bodily fluids. Without sex, we die out. With sex, a pathogen can ride along. The
human solution to venereal disease is monogamy.

Many religious rules evolved in response to observation of cause and disease.

Even the worst illnesses have a saw-tooth shape to them, where the patient seems
to be getting better for a while.

People who die of cancer don't go straight downhill. There are remissions.

Sharing needles to inject heroin shares a bloodstream and so spreads AIDS.

Anal sex is a different kind of injection with same result. Anal sex breaks tiny
blood vessels and literally opens one up to disease. Semen carries immune
suppressants designed to get sperm past vaginal defense systems. Vaginal sex
does not break blood vessels, thus vaginal sex does not spread AIDS nearly as
efficiently as anal sex.

Pretending that male homosexuality is innate is like pretending that heroin
addiction is innate.

There are opioid proteins in semen. They are addictive, making the comparison of
being gay with being a heroin addict even closer.

Sharing needles and anal sex are both violations of bodily integrity.


Aging

Aging is an anti-cancer device. We get small cancers frequently, but the
telomere mechanism usually limits the harm. Each cell chops a bit of DNA off of
the ends of a chromosome on each division. If a cell tries to reproduce out
of control then it will normally hit this limit, the Hayflick limit, and stop.

A division limit for cancer cells also means a division limit for healthy cells.
Cells hit the Hayflick limit and stop dividing. Then we die. Without the
Hayflick limit, we'd die of some cancer before having children. With the
Hayflick limit, we're unlikely to die young, but guaranteed to die of old age.

The biggest determinant of longevity is belonging to people who care about us.
It is in our own interest to build close families and close communities.

Those who drink a little live longer than those who never drink.

Daily flossing contributes to longevity. Or even just using a toothpick.

The elderly cannot live alone when they cannot shit alone. Then it is up to
their relatives to take care of them and wipe their asses, or the elderly become
fodder for nursing homes, where median survival time is three months.

Incontinence reduces one's status back to that of a small child.

The young lack money. The old lack time. The older you get, the more it makes
sense to spend money to save time.

We age and die by a thousand random cuts as one thing after another goes wrong
with our bodies. Seeing one's own body age and get diseases leads the elderly
toward pessimism about civilization itself. It has always been this way.

As we age, insights fade into view. To a child, the paint on a house seems
permanent, having been there his whole life. But the adult sees that the paint
eventually peels, and remembers when it was applied. All human actions and
thoughts reveal themselves as repetitive. We live the same lives over and over.

The luminaries of antiquity become local as we age, and not so amazing.

The job of the elderly is to not complain. It is better to get old than not to.

It is sad but true that the death of elderly parents liberates their children.


Cancer

Carcinogens mutate our DNA. Random mutations happen all the time in our bodies
from radiation, smoke, chemicals, and molds. We can reduce our exposure to
carcinogens, but there will always be some.

When a computer program gets hung it's because the program is in a loop which
precludes servicing user input, using up resources like CPU. This failure is
very predictable. If you keep altering random bytes in memory, the program will
eventually get stuck in a loop of instructions. If the loop contains the
instruction to create a new process, we rapidly fill up the computer's memory
with useless self-replicating processes. The only treatment is to reboot.

This is similar to cancer. Cancers are caused by altering a few random letters
in the DNA of a single cell. The alteration is done by carcinogens. When the
instructions both defeat the cell division limit and get into a loop that causes
cell division, we have a cancer. The first cancer cell splits, and then those
new cells split, and so on, until our bodies run out of resources and die.
People have no reboot option.

Apache web server processes kill themselves after a certain amount of time,
because it is simpler than trying to write code which is guaranteed not to have
memory leaks. This is like the Hayflick limit, the limit on cell division.

Chemotherapy is like aging. It harms rapidly dividing cells more than healthy
cells, but it does harm all cells. The bad effects of chemotherapy are from
harming rapidly dividing cells: hair follicles, digestive tract.

Cancers which defeat the telomere mechanism are immortal. Cancer cells from
Henrietta Lacks are still growing well 50 years after her death. Germ-line cells
which produce eggs and sperm are also immortal.

Asexual organisms have no limit on cell division. They are immortal.

Sexual organisms age and die. The original sin of sex kills them.

Fasting helps to cure cancer. Cancer cells require a lot of sugar.
Cancer patients don't get hungry because their body knows. Do not make them eat.

Cancer is inevitable, if we only live long enough.

Cancer rates are higher downwind of gas stations.


Death

To be born is to be condemned to death. The living are the pre-dead.

The dead rejoin the earth, no longer separate. "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust."

Death is the end of only part of ourselves. People we love live on.
People also create "immortality projects" of some kind of work to live on.

When we are dying, our good and bad deeds come back to comfort and torment us.

The problem is not that we will die. The problem is that it upsets us.

It is comforting that others die as well.

One's own death is incomprehensible. Self cannot imagine non-self because self
must first be present to imagine. After death, self is not present to imagine.

All lives end badly, but the end is only a small portion of life. People die in
as many different ways as they live, some better than others.

The feeling of impending death is dreamlike, buzzing, dizzying, ill.
However bad dying may be, it doesn't go on for long.

The ego is a fragile bubble, briefly floating by.
Near death, the ego is defeated. There are no more games to be played.
Death is like birth. There is pain and wailing, then peace and quiet.

Life goes out like a candle goes out. When a flame goes out, where does it go?

The dead are safe. Nothing can hurt them. All their problems are solved.

The dying often accomplish feats of strength in the silence of their last
moments which even Olympic athletes cannot.

Witnessing a death, we see for a moment that all is vanity. "A chasing after
the wind." The person's life is put in boxes, stored, sold off, forgotten.

It is embarrassing to be dead. Bodies deflate and flatten as they desiccate.

There is a distinct neural pathway triggered upon the death of a parent. The
cliff is before us now. Grief triggers sexual thoughts, to replace the parent.


Eggs

"Eggs are expensive, sperm is cheap." This fact explains the dating marketplace.

Women are born with all the eggs they will ever have, but men continuously
create more sperm.

Men can have thousands of children. Women can have few, about 20 at most. This
explains why men are indiscriminate about sex. They have little to lose and much
to gain. Women, on the other hand, have much to lose and little to gain. They
make huge investments in pregnancy and infant care. They must choose wisely.

"Hogamus higamus, men are polygamous. Higamus hogamus, women monogamous."

Rich and powerful men left many more children than others. We are all their
descendants.

The double standard is not in judging men and women differently for the same
action, but in judging them the same when the rules are inherently different.

There must be meaning in the fact that women's periods follow the cycle of the
moon. It would make more sense to have 13 months in our year than 12.

One can remember the start of a woman's period by remembering the phase of the
moon. She will then ovulate at the opposite phase of the moon and get slightly
giddy and horny. She may not even be aware of it.

A woman's reaction to the same action by a man varies with her time of the
month. This confuses men.

The cuckoo abuses other birds' sense of self to steal time and energy from them.


Gender

The division into male and female at least a billion years old.

Pigeon mating: male flies up to female and struts. She flies off, unimpressed.

The binary gender of all mammals is scientific fact. The idea that gender is
socially constructed was itself socially constructed, a rationalization.

Gender is fixed at birth. True transgender people are only those with severe
and very rare birth defects. Most transgenderism is fashionable self-delusion.

Women want to feed and treat all the children equally. Women are born socialists.
Men want to defend borders and thrive in hierarchies. Men are born capitalists.

Women are desired for what they are. Men are valued for what they do.
Women are desired but not valued. Men are valued but not desired.
A woman's job is to recognize a quality man. A man's job is to be a quality man.
Men get money in order to have sex. Women have sex in order to get money.

The female instinct to minimize risk regardless of cost is a huge risk itself.

When we have a child of the opposite sex, we start to understand that point of
view. We now see the interests of the opposite sex for what they really are,
not what we are told we must think they are by someone with an ax to grind.

A man wants his a daughter to get good genes, and don't care too much if she
cuckolds her husband with a famous and powerful man.

A woman wants her son to get a loyal wife, to know her grandchild is really her
own. A woman forgives her own past indiscretions, but not her daughter-in-law's.

Women with sons are more inclined to defend national borders, so that their sons
are not killed in an invasion. Such invasions and slaughters were normal human
history for millennia, and the knowledge of this remain encoded in our brains.

Without boy scouts, a strictly heterosexual male military, and men's clubs,
whole countries grow ripe for invasion by stronger men. When the invasion
starts, the war is already lost. The God of Biomechanics does not negotiate.

Traditional sex roles brought us down to the present day. When those roles are
violated, we die out and are replaced by people with more respect for tradition.


Chickens

Chickens' sex roles are innate. Why should one think differently of humans?

Chickens are not automata. They have distinct "chickenalities". They are
individuals with idiosyncrasies.

The rooster has no penis. He rubs the semen in. He does not need to remove the
previous cock's semen by pumping with a penis, because he keeps all the hens
under strict control. Human females are not under control. Less control means
the need for a penis to pump out the competing sperm.

Human penis and testicle size evolved in proportion with female promiscuity.
Asian women are the least promiscuous, and Asian men have the smallest penises
and testicles. Black women are the most promiscuous, and black men have the
largest penises and testicles.

If only one rooster gets to mate with all the hens, then why are half of baby
chicks roosters? The answer is that the rooster is expendable. He is the hens'
defense force. The loss in genetic diversity from having one father of many is
offset by the fact that that father has proven himself competent at fighting off
the other roosters and predators. He has good genes.

Cocks collect hens, and the defeated cocks wait on the periphery. Roosters don't
last long in nature. While they're dominant, they father lots of chicks, but
they are dominant only a short time, soon dying in a fight with a predator.
Eventually most of the roosters get their turn, in order of dominance.

Roosters crow to signal to rivals that they are still around. When they die
protecting the hens, there is silence the next morning, and the next rooster
moves in.


Men

We are all the descendants of kings, because women offer themselves to kings.
Women know that the most powerful men can protect their children the most.

Men's vices are also their virtues.

Men take risks because when then win, they win big.

Recklessness, greed, and lust resulted in a small number of Spaniards replacing
almost all of the native Y chromosome in Latin America. Evolution continues.

Genetic studies show that half of all men in the last million years did not get
to reproduce, but almost all women did. The upper half of men must have averaged
two women each.

Men are inherently more aggressive than women because of high testosterone. This
aggression is necessary for men to successfully compete with each other.

The men that won women propagated the genes that helped them win.

Growing a beard and developing upper body strength makes men more conservative.

There is a distance between a man who can do ten pull-ups and one who cannot.

"A man will chase women, until one of them finally catches him."

Men would be more productive in women-free workplaces, communicating with women
online only. There would be more attention to work.

It is hard to work for a former peer who has been promoted to be your boss. It
is a proof of your lower status.

The older a man gets, the more he finds older women attractive - but only those
younger than himself.

Men have midlife crises when their wives hit menopause. It's an adaptation.

Woman cannot procreate much themselves, but they can have sons who spread their
genes around the world. "May you be the mother of many sons." - Indian proverb


Women

Women do not fall in love with men who are already in love with them, because
women do not value themselves. "If he were a truly valuable man, why would he be
in love with me?" Women tend to fall in love men who do not love them back.

Women love men that many other women love, because the other women are a proof.

Female gorillas fall in love with the male who kills her baby, because he has
proven he is more dominant than her current mate who failed to protect her baby.

Female humans fall in love with the invader who rapes them, because he has
proven that he is more dominant than her current mate who failed to protect her.

"The pattern of women of defeated tribes quickly acquiescing to the ruler-ship
and sexual privilege of the conquering men who slew the women's brothers and
fathers and husbands is seen all over the world. It evolved to preserve the
female reproductive prerogative. Treacherous disloyalty of convenience is an
inseparable part of female psychology." - Heartiste

Most women have had rape fantasies. Most men have not.

Women love dominant men because the child of a dominant man is likely to spread
her genes widely. When other men bow to her man, she knows she has a winner.

Women dress up to intimidate other women as much as to impress any man.

It is a common mistake for a man to tell all his thoughts to his girlfriend.
Women don't do that, because they are smarter. "A woman wants you to be honest
about your feelings the same way the IRS wants you to be honest about your
income."

She may be able to figure out your physical strength and wealth by looking, but
she needs to test you to find out if you have the necessary confidence.

Remain amused no matter what she does. Her goal is to get you to betray your
real feelings so that she can judge you, and perhaps reject you.

Women must be slightly smarter than men to catch them and to get enough devotion
and resources to raise the next generation. The monogamous man loses alternate
opportunities but wins in higher quality offspring because both parents are
present and paying attention.


Dimorphism

Men's and women's minds are as different as their bodies.

Men are larger than women on average, as is typical of polygamous species.

Some women are stronger than some men. Most men are stronger than most women.
All of the strongest men are stronger than any of the strongest women.

Boys and girls think differently from birth, as any parent of both can tell you.
Boys have more trouble paying attention, and far more interest in war games.
Boys have a harder time understanding social games than girls do.
Girls are more attentive and obedient, less aggressive, and more social.

Women are more inclined to consensus building because they cannot defend
themselves as well as men can. They need to worry more about what others think.

Young women suddenly acquire great power in their teen years. Young men do not.

Men are always hungry, living among walking talking cheesecakes.
Women are always nervous. They suspect men's motives, and rightly so.

Men want women. Women want men to want them.
Women fear men. Men fear women will reject them.

Women are bait. Men are willing to enter a relationship to have sex.
Men are not bait. There is little inherent value to a man's body.

Men pay for prostitutes because they have to.
Women never pay for sex, because they don't have to.

Men dealt with life and death situations such as war much more than women did.
Direct clear speech was essential to men's survival. Not so for women.

Women consistently underestimate how much men want sex.
"It's the difference between throwing a bullet and shooting it out of a gun."

There is a vast porn industry for men, all visual.
There is a vast porn industry for women, all romance novels.

If a man cheats on his wife, she has no risk of raising another woman's child.
If a woman cheats on her husband, he may well pay to raise another man's child.


Variability

Women vary less than men do in all respects: height, weight, intelligence,
aptitudes, and inclinations.

"All women are the same woman" is more true than "all men are the same man".

There are more male idiots and geniuses than female idiots and geniuses.

Women have a high but fixed value to men, one obvious by looking.

Men have a wildly variable value to women, one which cannot be determined simply
by looking. So women must test men.

Technically, men are more closely related to male apes than to human women,
because males have only one X chromosome, while females have two.

James Damore pointed out that the usual disingenuous reply to the obvious
reality of sex differences is to "misrepresent and shame". The reply
misrepresents the argument as being "all women are here" and "all men are there"
in some dimension, when the argument is actually two overlapping bell curves.

"People are as ingenious at misrepresenting you when you say something they
don't want to hear as they are at coming up with rationalizations for things
they want to do but know they shouldn't." - Paul Graham


Fertility

All aspects of feminine hotness advertise fertility: youth, clear skin, long
hair, facial symmetry, large symmetric breasts, wide hips.

Men are strongly attracted to these signs of fertility and health in women, such
as long hair. Long hair proves the woman has been healthy enough to keep her
hair for a few years at least. The care of long hair is also difficult, so clean
well-kept long hair is a proof of competence. Unkempt hair may be a sign of
mental illness or other illness.

The angle of "swayback" men most prefer is exactly that which correlates with
the fewest problems in giving birth.

A beautiful young woman walking alone is carrying a small fortune in potential
reproduction. To rape her is to rob her of the time and effort in gestating and
caring for a child. She should be as paranoid as if she were carrying around
several years wages.

Heaven is a beautiful woman. She is the gateway to more self and eternal life,
genetically speaking. Women develop like fruit: unripe, ripe, overripe.

Women age faster than men. It is a common to see a couple of the same age where
she looks older than he does. Women have a shorter time to bear children, about
20 years, but men can be fathers for about 60 years.

Women require the reaction of men to know how beautiful they are. Even then,
they make mistakes. Some beautiful women think they are ugly, and some ugly
women think they are beautiful. Men never make these mistakes about women.

All women are insecure about their beauty. All men are insecure about their
penises. This is tragic, because most women are in fact beautiful enough to
attract a suitable man, and most men are well enough endowed.

Men will do what young women want, in the usually vain hope of a sexual reward.
Adult women discover at about the age of 35 that the power they enjoyed over men
has begun to dissipate. This reflects older women's declining fertility.

Women do not care much that men are fertile in the way that the signs of
fertility make women attractive to men. There is no shortage of fertile men.

The limit to population growth is the number of fertile women.


Beauty

Female beauty is objective fact, not cultural. Men of all cultures strongly
agree on female beauty, primarily youth and health.

In all cultures, most men find fairer women more feminine and thus more
attractive. The word "fair" itself means both beautiful and light. Since rich
men get more choice in women, the upper classes in all cultures become lighter
than the lower classes as rich men choose fair women. Blondes actually do
have more fun. Even if all people were to intermarry, the same process would
immediately begin the separation again.

Even in ancient Roman and Egyptian art, women were painted as having lighter
skin, and men as having darker skin. Light skin was perceived as being more
feminine in every era.

Female beauty is a vision of more life. Life continues through women.

Beautiful women sing by being. The same neurons which respond to a beautiful
song also respond to a beautiful woman.

To even hear that men are disgusted by fat and ugly women makes women angry.
Women don't like hearing about fat or ugly women because women feel constantly
judged on their looks. The fact that female beauty is central to human
reproduction does not make them feel less pressure.

With respect to sluttiness, modern women are in a no-win situation. They are
either judged slutty by men, in which case they lose commitment, or they are
judged to be dependent on what men think, which makes them bad feminists.

A man calling any woman fat or slutty puts a doubly visceral fear into them,
for it represents a physically superior combatant entering her arena of
operation and battle.

Many famous men have been trapped by women. She offers to sleep with him to
further her own career or to catch him as a husband. If she doesn't get what she
wants, she retroactively revokes her offer and charges him with rape. The wise
man keeps good documentation of her offer for just such an eventuality.

"She offered her honor. He honored her offer. And all night he was on her and
off her."


Fate

A woman's fate is often determined by her beauty. This is inherent in human
biology. Beautiful young women are more fertile than ugly old women. Beautiful
young women get pregnant easily and give birth to healthy children. Men who
strongly preferred signs of health and fertility in women had more surviving
children in every generation.

A man's fate is often determined by his status. This is also inherent in human
biology. Rich and powerful men are more likely to be able to provide for and to
protect their children. Women who strongly preferred signs of wealth and power
in men had more surviving children in every generation.

Most men are sexually disappointed most of the time. Women don't care for most
men, who are then condemned to accept a woman who accepts them only from lack of
better options, or to be alone, or to be gay.

All women can sleep with a better man that they can get to commit. This misleads
women into thinking they are more attractive than they really are.

As women age, they become more anxious to attract a man and go back to those
they rejected when they were young, only to be rejected in turn because no man
wants something old he was refused when it was new.

Man: I gave you my love, but you didn't value it.
Woman: If you gave away your love that easily, it's not valuable.

Woman: I gave you my pussy, but you didn't value it.
Man: If you gave away your pussy that easily, it's not valuable.

Women fight by being more beautiful than other women.
Men fight by fighting.


Dating

Dating is a rough game played for high stakes.

Men must prove themselves. Women must look good.

In their early 20's, women have the advantage in dating. Later, men have the
advantage. Men become richer and more dominant and do not show age or lose
fertility as rapidly. Men's looks never counted for as much as women's anyway.

The balance of power between men and women crosses at about age 30.

Women's breasts and buttocks inflate at puberty, and deflate with age.

Women tend to look like their mothers as they age.

Women are physically weaker than men, yet have sexual power over men.

Women are drug dealers, selling men what they want most, love and sex.

Women rate the top 20% of men as above average, and 80% of men below average.
Men accurately rate the objective desirability of women on a bell curve.

Most women get daily interest from at least some men. Only the top 20% of men
get daily interest from at least some women. The tallest men get more interest
from women than men of average height. Height is status, standing tall.

Men tend to say what they mean, a mistake when talking to women.
Women abhor direct speech, which confuses men.

A man on a first date should not give away too many details about himself.

Women act "irrationally" when dating to keep the man off balance to judge his
stability. Women don't have to learn this because it is in their nature.

"The essence of romance is uncertainty."

Yet a woman also needs to feel certain that the man won't talk about her, to
protect her reputation for fidelity.


Advice

Advice for men in search of women.

If a woman chooses to talk to you at all, she probably likes you. This doesn't
apply to situations where she must talk to you, for example waitresses.

If she likes you, she will tend to point her feet at you.

If she likes you, she will eventually physically touch you and make it look
like an accident.

Most women hate to speak directly and clearly; they prefer to communicate via
subtexts the man is supposed to pick up. This is a kind of test.

Most women require that the man take the risk by making the first overt move,
like asking her out.

If a woman is alone in a bar, first ask if she's waiting for someone, if not,
then ask if she wants company. If she says no, just leave.

Do not talk about yourself much, just about her or other things. You're more
interesting if a bit mysterious.

Take her to a horror movie. When her heat races with fear, she may conflate it
with love, and you will seem protective.

Shut up and kiss her. If she avoids it, do not apologize. Say nothing and try
again later.

Men care mostly about looks at first, but women not so much. Women are looking
for men who are given public respect by other men. That's what turn them on.

Any woman at work is very dangerous to your job. She can get you fired by lying.
The system is rigged in her favor. Keep good records of emails and texts.


Judgment

We are all constantly judged by others in subtle ways, on our appearance,
understanding, and micro-expressions.

The judgment is relative to those around us. To do well puts pressure on others,
and if others do well, this puts pressure on us.

If one's hair is unkempt, or clothing not quite right, fly down, or even one
button not buttoned, it gives a signal to others that we are not quite there.

A single misspelled word or grammatical error can betray a lack of education.

"We have become increasingly dependent on the opinions of others based on
uncertain criteria." - Fred H. Goldner

It is never safe for a man to talk to a child or a woman alone.

We don't even know what the questions are.

We all judge ourselves, all the time.

The more people agree, the less likely they’re thinking for themselves.

We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.

We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their actions.

"The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no
good." —Malcolm Forbes

"You should not judge anyone until you've walked a mile in his shoes. That way,
you'll be a mile away, and you'll have his shoes." - Steve Martin


Subtext

Subtext is an encrypted message, a way to communicate feelings and not facts.

All arguments are really about the subtext. The stated facts are irrelevant.
It's hard to hear what isn't said, but it's always the most important point.

The person with the better perception has an advantage. Women perceive emotions
better than men do, giving them an advantage in relationships.

It is embarrassing to have our subtext understood by others when we're trying
to hide it. The very ideas we bring up betray our true thoughts.

We remember insults to ourselves and bring them up, betraying insecurities.

There is the polite answer, beneath which is the real answer, which takes effort
to decrypt. The excuse for missing your party is a cover for the real answer:
she is not that into you. The ambiguity is deliberate and subtle.

An immediate answer to a text shows interest.
A delayed answer shows disinterest, or feigned disinterest.
No answer is also an answer.

It is an important lesson for children that sometimes no answer is best.

To suddenly understand the subtext of women's words and actions is like suddenly
understanding the language of the birds. It was there all along.

If a woman likes a man, she will find a way to touch him. When she touches him,
it will be ambiguous, to maintain plausible deniability.

If a woman does not like a man, she will avoid even the slightest touch.

If a woman speaks at all to a man where her job does not require it, she's
expressing interest in him.

First woman on the moon radios ground control:
Woman:   Houston, we have a problem.
Houston: What's the problem?
Woman:   Never mind.
Houston: So, there is no problem?
Woman:   You know what the problem is.


Rejection

In dating, repeated rejection means having to move downmarket from what we
desire. This is painful, proving a limit to our sexual value as we are now.

It is normal for men to be rejected, though painful. This is why men are nervous
about asking women out. Men anticipate the pain of yet another rejection.

It is less normal for women to be rejected, because they have something valuable
to offer: nine months of pregnancy caring for half a man's genes. So it is yet
more painful for women to be rejected. "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned."

Rejected women console themselves saying "dick is cheap and abundant" but in
truth it is hard for most women to gain the commitment of a high-status man.

With self-improvement and dating practice, an average man can increase his
success rate with women from 1% to 10%. But rich, powerful, and famous men get
whatever they want 50% of the time with no effort at all.

The pain of being rejected is balanced somewhat by the right to reject.

It always hurts to be rejected, even when we try to convince ourselves we didn't
really want her. But if we didn't want acceptance, we would not have asked.

The cure for pining after a woman is to find another woman.

Men have infinite capacity for self-deception in love. Hope overrides obvious
truth. The slightest hint of interest from her is taken to have more
significance than it really does. Women are more realistic.

Men like to think that the women they are in love with are in love with them.
They are frequently wrong, and do not discover the error until she leaves, or
gets a restraining order. We believe what we want to believe.

There is a simple plot on continuous replay all around us, in which the man one
day realizes that his love and devotion to a woman was not only unreciprocated,
but that it resulted in her contempt for him.

Many men think they are loved by a woman when they are merely useful to her.

Women do not reject men outright, but try to fade away instead. Uninterested
women progressively increment the delay before responding to text messages.


Romance

After one taste of romantic love, men will humiliate themselves for more.

Intense love is crippling. If we could recall that feeling at will, we would
do nothing but sit all day and enjoy it, useless to the world.

We cannot choose to fall in love, or we'd do it all the time. But we can choose
whether or not to get close to the edge of the cliff, beyond which the process
runs on its own and takes us with it.

Once in love, we pity all who are not in love. Everything they do seems hardly
worth doing at all. They seem comatose.

The distance between love and ordinary life far below seems greater than the
distance between ordinary life and death.

In mundane life we chase subtle wisps of pleasure. In love, the hurricane blows.

Love is impossible to explain, though a million pop songs try, such as "Can't
Explain". Love songs reach only the audience that already knows.

Love cannot be argued with. It is its own axiom and proof.

She sparkles. You can think of nothing else. The pleasure from seeing her smile
or hearing her laugh overwhelms any attempt at self-defense. You're a junkie,
and it is heaven on earth. You have grabbed a live wire and cannot let go.

In the waltz, only your faces are in focus while the world spins about you both.

We cannot make anyone love us. We can only improve ourselves and then select
from those who are interested. It is the same in all kinds of sales.

Yet mere propinquity engenders many a love relationship.

Crushing romantic love is true happiness, but if we get our desire, the
ecstasy is transient, slowly descending into normal life. If we don't get
our desire, we waste in torment for want of it.

If you tell a woman "Tell me what to say!" then you've already lost.
She wants a man who doesn't need to be told what to say.


Hypergamy

Women trade up until they find a better man than they think they should get.

Women live in a state of tension between fear that their man might leave for a
better looking woman, and happiness that their man has the power to attract a
better looking woman.

High status men need do nothing to get free sex. Low status men must provide
money and time to women, and then get only duty sex. At the bottom, there is
only payment for prostitutes. And even prostitutes may refuse.

Men form themselves into hierarchies to accomplish big goals, selecting their
own leaders. Women then compete for the men selected as leaders by other men.

Women test themselves against desirable men. They brush against or bump into
such men. As long as they keep getting good reactions, they quietly consider
leaving their current man and finding one with more power and higher status.

Most of women's attractiveness is youth, which fades. Eventually women calculate
that the man they have is the best they will get, and they end the game.

Men with beards seem more dominant and more aggressive, and thus get more
attention from women than men without beards, even from women who claim to
dislike beards.

Physically strong and confident men may be poor, yet are treated by women as if
they were rich.

Violent men are sexy to women.

Mass murderers in prison routinely get love letters and offers of marriage from
women that they have never met.

Young women are turned off by excessive male devotion, but as a woman ages, she
wants less of the bad boy and more devotion from a man.


Feminism

Women are embarrassed by their periods and by their relative weakness. This
makes them "conceive a mortal hatred against that truth", as Pascal put it.

Feminists compare themselves to high status men but don't see lower status men
at all. They forget that that most men do not have high privileges.

Women back to Queen Medb have both resented and loved high status men.

Most men have never wanted to be women, but most women have wanted to be men.

The common female desire to be male disrupts male camaraderie, even on all
playgrounds of the world.

Women can choose to have abortions, but men have no say in it, only obligations.
Women can choose to give their children up for adoption, but men cannot.

Women gain new rights by marriage, but take on no new responsibilities.
Men take on new responsibilities but gain no new rights.

Marriage was only marginally worthwhile for men even before feminism. Feminism
has driven men away from marriage. Marriage rates have plummeted.

Men accomplish in order to win the prize of a woman. When men compete with
women, they are competing with the prizes, a confusing state of affairs.

When women have unlimited sexual freedom, all of them sleep with the same top
men, leaving most men with no reason to accomplish, undermining civilization.

Feminism intended to liberate woman, but has made many lonely and sad instead.

Feminism declares war on motherhood. Such a war cannot end well.

Feminism is extremely effective birth control.

Whole countries have been brought into demographic decline via feminism. They
are dying out, soon to be replaced by cultures that praise motherhood, such as
Orthodox Jews, the Amish, and Muslims.

Trying to be a man is a waste of a woman. Women are at their best as women.

"A virtuous woman who can find? For her price is far above rubies." - Proverbs


Sluts

Feminists may try to become like men by being promiscuous, as men inherently
are. But promiscuity doesn't make women men, it only lowers their value to men.

No man wants to marry a slut. Instead, every man wants certainty that the
children are really his own. But women do not mind marrying a man who has slept
around, because this proves his value to many women.

Any tattoo on a woman is a warning sign.

Women love men who can easily get another woman.
Men don't care if a woman can easily get another man, because they all can.

A woman who sleeps with many men has done something easy.
A man who sleeps with many women has done something difficult.

A woman who wants sex wants to give away something.
A man who wants sex wants to get something.

The lock that opens for all keys is a worthless lock.
The key that opens all locks is a valuable key.

Women don't like competition. This makes whores more tolerable than chaste
rivals. Women know that men are innately concerned about paternity, and that
whores are therefore unlikely to gain the long-term commitment of their man.

All religions forbid female promiscuity partly because it rapidly spreads
diseases and shortens life. Sluts are far more likely to get cervical cancer
from HPV, for example. Men are much less likely to catch a disease from sex,
unless they are gay.

Sluts trade away their long-term happiness as wives, mothers, and grandmothers
for the short-term pleasure of violating traditional rules.

Strip clubs reverse the pickup game. The strippers circulate looking for easy
marks the same way men circulate in bars looking for easy women.

Slit, slat, slot, slut.


Sex

All vertebrates have exactly two sexes, the female who creates eggs and the male
who creates sperm. There are no other sexes.

Female mammals have XX chromosomes, and male mammals have XY.

Every person has one mother and one father, and no other parents.

The shape of the human penis was optimized by evolution for semen removal. The
goal of thrusting is to pump out the semen of any recent previous man and then
leave one's own. The refractory period is to prevent us from working against
ourselves. Once we come, we cannot continue.

Women are more likely to contract a disease from heterosexual sex than men are.

Fellatio may have evolved as a way for women to avoid getting pregnant when they
didn't want to be. If a woman gives a man a blow job, she disables his ability
to impregnate her during the refractory period, as well as reducing her risk of
venereal disease. She could then escape or move on to be impregnated by a man
she felt to be of greater advantage to herself.

Women who swallow a man's semen are more likely to get pregnant from vaginal
sex with that same man later. Her immune system becomes more accepting of him.

The elephant seal cow puts up with the dominant bull seal because he defends her
from being gang raped by all the other bull seals.

Both men and women are sexually attracted to displays of great talent.

Sex has a dollar value, but romantic love is beyond money.

Sex is selfish, but love is generous, including another self in one's own self.

Women have a lower sex drive than men, except when trying to attract a powerful
man. "Power is the best aphrodisiac." - Henry Kissinger

Women need to attract large investments from men, and sex motivates men to stay.

Sex exists to create babies, yet no one thinks of babies during sex.

Women are all about the same in the dark. "They all have the same equipment."


Paternity

Paternity is uncertainty. This fact explains most sexual psychology.

Men prefer to marry virgins because they are concerned about paternity. The
more past sexual partners a woman has had, the less likely a man is to commit.
Women know this instinctively, and so they try to hide their sexual past.

Mandatory paternity testing at birth would greatly reduce child abuse. Abusive
fathers are often uncertain as to whether the child is truly their own.

Children are very fragile and in need of unconditional love and security. Abused
children may never recover a sense of security and belonging, and then go on to
be egotistical and abusive themselves, with no concern for others.

For a man to see his child and know it is his own is a source of great pride.
For a man to see his child and be uncertain is a source of great shame.

Even the fear of possible cuckolding makes a man invest less in the child.
Men who were not paranoid about paternity were cuckolded out of the gene pool.

A man who mistakenly acts as the father of a child becomes legally obligated.
We should eliminate all child support obligations of biological non-fathers.
Women will object, because it reduces their power to use men.

Women not care much whether the man who thinks he is the father actually is.
Women always know their child is really their own.

Maternal grandmothers take better care of their grandchildren than paternal
grandmothers do, because grandmothers know that paternity is uncertainty. They
do not want to invest much in a grandchild which may not be their own.

A thousand years of records in Iceland show that children entrusted to maternal
grandmothers survived better than those entrusted to paternal grandmothers.

"Bastards are smart." This makes sense because their fathers were obviously
smart enough to impregnate a woman without paying the cost of raising the child.
Bastards are evil too, for that same reason.
Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison are both bastards.

A: "My father can beat up your father."
B: "Oh yeah? Well my father IS your father."


Pregnancy

Nine women cannot create a baby in one month.

Pregnant women often develop a dark stripe from their belly button down to their
pubic hair. Their breasts grow larger.

The birth of a child squeezes shit and piss out of a woman.

An episiotomy during delivery is a snip through the side of the vaginal opening
with heavy scissors, to make the opening wider. Blood gushes out. It is sewn up
after the birth.

The umbilical cord is about as thick as a finger.

Human breast milk does not come out in a stream, but a spray. It is very sweet.


Inbreeding

Inbreeding is too much self, not enough other.

Recessive genes are broken genes. They may be beneficial. They are recessive
because having a functional copy on the other chromosome masks their effect.

Blonde hair, blue eyes, and lactose tolerance are due to defective genes for
pigment and for the lactose gene repressor protein. They are all recessive. They
are all adaptations to living in northern Europe where the sunlight is weak.

Neoteny means holding on to baby-like traits into adulthood, such as light hair
and the ability to digest milk. Humans show neoteny more than apes do.

Everyone has some harmful recessive mutations. To prevent the harm from
expressing, it is necessary to have a second chromosome with a functional gene.
This is the advantage of out-breeding, breeding with genetically distant
partners. Farmers are well aware of the greater health of hybrid offspring, and
there is a term for it: "hybrid vigor".

Inbreeding creates unhealthy children because the child is likely to have
harmful recessive mutations from both parents.

There is also "out-breeding depression", in which beneficial recessive genes
require two similar copies to work well. Out-breeding reduces the benefit for
these recessive genes.

We are all necessarily related to our spouses. The only question is how far back
until the most recent common ancestor. Each of our parents has two parents, 10
generations back we each have 1024 ancestors, and 40 generations back we each
have one trillion ancestors - yet this cannot be, because there were not one
trillion people 40 generations ago. So we all must be the product of repeated
inbreeding.

Inbred animals often retarded because so many genes are necessary to build a
properly functioning brain. Consider the English royal family. Another failure
is joint function, because it also takes many functioning genes to create
properly functioning joints. Inbred animals tend to have defective joints.


Marriage

Marriage is the joining of two selves.

More than anything else, a happy marriage makes a happy life.

A successful marriage requires each to understand the other's moods.

Marriage works as long as both spouses want it to work.

All marriages are business relationships to some degree. Jews acknowledge this
fact with a marriage contract which the couple keeps on a wall in their home.

A husband is obligated to protection and support.
A wife is obligated to cooking, sex, and childcare.
When a culture diverges from this traditional path, it eventually dies out.

Psychological studies show that wives are less interested in sex with husbands
who do most of the domestic chores, even if the wives claim otherwise.

The wife who gives sex without the husband's earning an income is being cheated.
The husband who earns an income but gets no sex is being cheated.

"When a man stops earning money, his wife may be understanding at first, but the
clock is ticking." - Chris Rock

When a wife stops wanting sex, her husband may be understanding at first, but
the clock is ticking.

To get rid of a husband is easy: stop having sex with him.
To get rid of a wife is hard: the state will give her your money anyway.

Many women think: "Maybe I can't have the alpha in charge of other men, but if
this beta is willing to support me even though I don't care about him, why
shouldn't I take what I can get?"

The best predictor of divorce is eye-rolling by a wife while her husband is
speaking. She is demonstrating a lack of respect. Without respect, she has no
sexual attraction for him either.

If your girlfriend disrespects you in public, it's already over even if you were
unaware of the fact.


Husbands

A husband has a house. The hus in husband means house.

A wife puts up with shit from her husband because she needs the house, the
income, and the protection he provides in order to raise her children.

For a stable relationship, the husband should be the primary breadwinner, and
should be the head of the household.

While women need resources from men, they frequently fall for men who provide
nothing, but are dangerous and therefore sexy. This makes evolutionary sense
because such fathers may give her sons who can spread her genes far more widely
than a responsible and loyal provider can.

All women want to marry the prince, but most women in a monogamous society must
settle for marrying an ordinary man.

Women throw themselves at the prince for an affair, who picks and chooses as he
pleases. "When you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything." - Trump

Women would rather have a fraction of a great man than all of an ordinary one.

Many women have found a husband in the state. The state provides welfare income
and police protection. Now a woman can raise a child alone, with tax money from
men and police protection from men. But the sons of single women are provably
more likely to end up as criminals, and the daughters of single women as single
mothers themselves.


Children

Young couples thinking of having children often first get a dog or cat.

Parents should tell their children how loved they are, and never insult them.
Children who are insulted by their parents become damaged for life.

Children are semi-selves, half our genes.

Billions of years of evolution have come down to us, the survivors of every
generation of winnowing. Which of your ancestors had no children?

Those with children know that those without cannot understand the joy and pain.
There is no point in trying to explain. "Children are the reward of life."

Boys need to know who is in charge, what the rules are, and whether they are
enforced.

Famous child prodigies always have a parent promoting his or her abilities to
the public, a parent who is also expert in whatever talent the child has.
Beethoven's father was a musician, as was Mozart's.

We want to protect our children and grandchildren for their whole lives, but we
will eventually die and they must continue on their own. The goal is to raise
children who don't need us.

Children have hard work ahead of them in life, finding love and meaningful work
without getting cheated too much along the way.

The atomized existence of car culture deprives children of a walkable nearby
community of relatives, making children susceptible to cults to find belonging.
Children who grow up in a close ethnic neighborhood have traditional beliefs and
relatives nearby who will help and protect them. They do not fall for cults.

All cults hate our families, because our families are rivals for our affection.
This is why Abraham was told to kill Isaac - to prove his loyalty to the cult.

Parental love for their children is necessary compensation for raising them.
Children do not remember what you gave them, only whether you loved them.

"If you didn't love your children, you'd kill them."
"I have two wonderful children - and two out of five isn't bad."


Letters

The first letters were literally pictures.

Alphabetic systems use pictures to represent sounds. The words for ox, house,
and camel in Semitic languages (aleph, beth, and gimel) begin with sounds
similar to our letters A, B, and G. These three letters are still recognizable
as an ox, a house, and a camel, if you know the history of the pictures.

Our first letter, A, was once a picture of an ox, which was in itself the word
for an ox, an ideographic system like Chinese writing. We can still see the ox's
horns at the bottom of the letter A. Someone figured out that we could write any
word that we could say by using a different picture to represent each sound of
that word in order. The existing picture-word for ox, "aleph", started with the
sound "a", so the picture of an ox became the symbol for the sound "a", and
remains so to this day. This is the rebus principle.

Our second letter, B, was once a picture of a house and that picture was in
itself the word for a house. The ancient Semitic word for house, "beth", started
with a "b" sound. So the word-picture of a house became the symbol for the sound
"b". And the system of writing was called aleph-beth, or alphabet in Greek.

By making pictures represent each sound we use, whatever can be spoken can also
be written, frozen in time.

Once it became easy to write down our thoughts, it became easy for one
generation to pass on a large amount of information on to the next. Oral
traditions are limited by the fallible memories of men. "The faintest ink is
better than the best memory."

Knowledge is power. Literate societies inevitably conquer illiterate ones.

"The pen is mightier than the sword."

Even a small amount of written information can dramatically change our
mental models. Consider a telegram. "Your son died in the war" gives grief.
"Your son survived and is on his way home" gives joy.

"Even if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature as
a terminology it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent it must
function also as a deflection of reality." - Kenneth Burke


Words

Words describe the world, yet are also in it, on paper, or in computer memory.

Words have meaning only by referring to something else.
Words reflect things. They are not the things, but look like them in a way.

To write is to reflect part of the world onto paper.

A word can refer to anything, including other words, but there is no single word
which refers only to itself. Words refer outward to the world, to model the
world in terms of our self-interest. We don't have words for things which do not
matter to us, and we don't care.

A digital bit represents true or false. Being is truth. Absence is falsity.

We can describe the world with bits, but the description of a bit is only
another bit - a copy of it. It requires yet more memory to model memory. So
omniscience, to remember all, is inherently impossible. There can never be
enough bits in the universe to model all those bits themselves.

"You can't have everything. Where would you put it?" - Steven Wright

"If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so
simple that we couldn't. - Emerson M. Pugh

Things become thoughts, thoughts becomes words, words become things.

Etymologies are instructive. We share bread with our companions, and meat with
our mates. The seminary is the reproductive organ of the Catholic Church.

Matter is the mother of the thing. We can see this in its etymology.
Pattern is the father of form. We can see this in its etymology as well.

To matter is to be a thing, to be material.

Every philosopher writes too many words, overlooking his own child begging for
attention at his knee. Philosophers miss the trees for the forest.

Three words changed the course of world history: "Limes cure scurvy."

To limit which words we may use also limits our ability to resist our owners.


Grammar

Most English speakers have used "it's" where they should have used "its".

his, hers, its
he's, she's, it's

The confusion comes from the possessive being formed with 's, except in the case
of pronouns.

Commas and periods should not go within quotes unless we intend to quote them.
The Germans already do this correctly. They like to be correct. Programmers must
also quote punctuation correctly, or their programs fail.

"Only" modifies the immediately following word.

I only eat fish when I'm sick. (ambiguous)
I eat only fish when I'm sick. (unambiguous)
I eat fish only when I'm sick. (unambiguous)

"I only eat fish when I'm sick" implies that we might drink fish otherwise.

English does use tone to convey information, though we are unaware of using it.
If we leave off the last consonant from "bit" and "big" we can still distinguish
them via tone.

The default pronoun in English is "he". This is no insult to women unless they
choose to be insulted. We should not change the language for political fashions.

It's not who you know, it's whom you know.

Languages diverge from a common origin just as species do. At first they are not
so different, and then suddenly draw sharp boundaries of distinction.


Language

Language is the transfer of pictures, images of the world, between people.

They may be images of things never seen by either person, or which don't exist.

The first words were pictures, in every language.


Writing

Writing is a representation, a re-presentation of a mental model.
Written language is halfway between real and imaginary. So is DNA.

Speech preceded writing by eons. The spoken form is definitive, not the written
form. Writing was created to reflect speech. Even as children, we learn to speak
long before we learn to read and write.

When two people converse, they are exploring each other's mental models, each
other's ideas, what each can see in his mind. "I see your point."

Ideas can be shared in speech or in writing, but speech is ephemeral. Writing
freezes ideas to be thawed later in other minds.

The written word is subject to decay over time, as all information is.

Graphs are better at convincing people than verbal arguments are.

Which books to read is an important and difficult problem. We may not know we're
wasting our time until our time has been wasted. We will never know which
treasures we failed to read, because we didn't read them.

The best books are usually short. They do not waste words.

Good words are light and accurate enough to hit a target far away in time.

The clearest writing uses redundancy to minimize ambiguity. The bible repeats
ideas with different phrasings to make the meanings unambiguous.

Consider how your point could be misinterpreted, then cut off the possibility
for misinterpretation by rewriting, or adding further explanation and examples.

Claude Shannon would understand why you added the redundancy. It is to
compensate for noise in the channel.

The challenge is to minimize ambiguity using the fewest words.

One needs to be in the right frame of mind to write well. Anger is the wrong
frame of mind.

All writing has a human context. The writer has friends, enemies, family.


Simplicity

A few good words at the right time are more valuable than whole libraries.
Too many words are worse than none at all.
Every wasted word should be counted as an error. Life is short.

We are dependent on black boxes of complexity, technical, legal, and financial.
We are dependent on specialists whom we must pay to understand and fix things.

Programmers depend on the innate complexity of technology to earn their living.
Lawyers and accountants depend on artificial legal complexity.

"All professions are conspiracies against the laity." - George Bernard Shaw

Professional degrees exist so that those without them are legally forbidden from
questioning one's professional judgment. One with a degree can be judged only by
others who also have such a degree, those who are part of the same conspiracy.

Simple laws and simple technology are best for people, but not profitable.

Most laws and regulations are made to maximize profit for some group with power.

The lawyers' great trick was to make sure there are too many laws to know, and
then to make the public responsible for knowing them, so that they need lawyers.

"Ignorance of the law is no excuse." One is obligated to do the impossible.

Conspiracies arise without planning, by confluence of interests. Lobbyists want
laws that trap the public and make them pay. Congressmen want "donations".

Mentor to a young programmer: "Don't document anything. If they don't know how
their business works, they can never fire you."

Managers get bonuses for adding unnecessary features: "Look, I did something."

Most programmers enjoy adding new features, not removing useless features.

All software eventually bloats to death as its complexity becomes untenable.

Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent
behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior.


Elegance

Elegance is sister to simplicity.

The Japanese and the Germans share a taste for order.

Order is simpler than disorder, and therefore more elegant.

The best wines have the simplest labels.

Efficient computer code is elegant, even poetic.

The elegant solution is also beautiful.

"Think deeply about simple things." There are many secrets yet to be uncovered.

Les is mor.


Censorship

Censorship comes from fear that truth will spread and harm our interests.

All free speech worth protecting is necessarily offensive to someone.

If we ban "offensive" speech, then the most easily offended can silence anyone.

The easily offended are dishonorable. Those difficult to offend are honorable.

The politically correct force the rest of us walk through life on eggshells.

National Security Letters, gag orders, and hate speech laws are all attacks on
freedom of speech by government, overt violations of the First Amendment.

Hate speech is only speech we hate, defined by subjective self-interest alone.

Copyright enforcement is practice for suppression of political speech.

Movie piracy is good practice for resistance to government censorship.

Samizdat, unofficial self-publishing, helped to bring down communist
totalitarianism in spite of government-controlled publishing.

Blogs and forums, our own samizdat, help us to resist corporate totalitarianism
in spite of internet censorship by tech tyrants.

All copyright should be limited to 20 years, like patents. The Mickey Mouse
extensions to copyright protect Disney profits at the expense of the public.

Every copyrighted work is stored as a large integer on disk. A copyright is a
claim to own that integer.

Anyone proud of his work should be more afraid that his work will disappear than
that it will be copied.

The ideal is uncensorable commentary on all advertising, news, and government.

Workers don't have political freedom because they can be fired for speaking
their minds, even outside of work. Only the rich are politically free.

Even one person standing up and speaking out breaks the spell of censorship.


Audience

All political and economic power is ultimately derived from having a large
audience.

Candidates for office spend millions of dollars to get an audience, because the
candidate with the largest audience usually wins.

Corruption is politics is usually about taking money for favors, money to be
used to reach the audience of the electorate.

Companies pay millions of dollars to advertise - to reach a large audience.

To have an enormous audience is to have enormous power.


Technology

"There is no cloud. It's just someone else's computer."

When it's someone else's computer, we are dependent on him not to turn it off.

Your Google docs cease to exist the moment Google decides they don't like you.

To use "free" Google services is to pay dearly with your privacy, as well to
betray the privacy of everyone who communicates with you using that service.

Technology has been a race between transportation and communication since the
railroad lines and the telegraph.

As telecommunications matures, it becomes more attractive not to cart oneself
and goods about in a metal machine, but to let the information we are seeking
come to us.

Unlike transportation, which physically moves an object, to transmit information
is to copy it, not to move it. The information also remains where it started.

3D printing approaches the convergence of transportation and communication.
Material artifacts may now be transmitted as information and realized by those
printers.

An army can have mobility or firepower, but not both.

"Any sufficiently developed technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Tools have genealogies, back to rocks. Tools are used to make other tools.

The Antikythera mechanism proves the early origin of finely machined gears.

We should not be surprised if fossilized tools one day prove that some dinosaurs
had a civilization 60 million years ago.


Computers

Computers model the world. They describe it. Their memories are written to, an
ethereal paper. Computers hold our ideas like writing does. Computers search and
transform our ideas faster and more accurately than our own brains do. Yet they
perceive nothing. "The spoon does not taste the soup."

Computers amplify our power to find solutions to our selfish problems.

Computers make us smarter in some mechanical ways like memory and mathematics.

It is far cheaper to create a model of a building in a computer's memory than to
create a building on the ground. We can create that model, flip it around, alter
it at will like a god, and destroy it if displeased.

The idea of the thing also has a reality, and sometimes this is good enough.
When the idea of the thing is good enough, real businesses get eaten by virtual
businesses. The retail store is devastated by the online store. The photo online
is much cheaper to create than the item on the physical shelf downtown.

"In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God, and the Word was God."

1 and 0 are being and nothingness, where being is separation from the other.

As computers get more advanced, they will get more advanced viruses.

As cellphones develop, they accumulate more senses: vision, hearing, balance.
They begin to approach life, mere insects so far.

Computers never add subtext. They mean what they say, and nothing else. This
makes them easy to understand for autists. Ordinary people are constantly
implying subtexts both by what they say and what they omit, frustrating autists.

To save money, use standards-based open source software.
To make money, sell proprietary closed source software.

Programmers are frustrated by corporate stupidity which demands compliance.
Open source software is written because the programmer wants to do it correctly.
Open source software is shared because the programmer wants meaningful work.

Whatever just happened is likely to happen again soon. This is why caches are
effective in computing, but the principle also applies to life.


Programming

To program a computer is to fully specify its behavior. Programmers are always
given incomplete specifications. Were programmers given complete specifications,
their job would already be done and they would have nothing to do.

Portability trumps performance. Bash is slow but will be used forever.

ASCII text is inefficiently stored, yet will be universally readable forever.

Laptops beat desktops and phones beat laptops, each with less computing power
but greater portability.

Web pages are readable on all hardware and all operating systems, unlike apps,
which are imprisoned and dependent on one operating system for corporate profit.

Every framework is a trap that the programmer's code will never escape.

No function definition should be longer than one screen.

All functions should be pure functions, except for the few that need I/O.

Complexity is cost. "Keep it simple, stupid."

Dependencies reduce portability. To maximize portability, minimize dependencies.

Captive user interfaces create a needless dependency on live human input.

All programs should be runnable as filters, taking stdin and writing to stdout.

All executables should be statically linked for maximum portability and speed.

The difference between programmers and salesmen is that the programmer will
speak clearly and tell the truth. The salesman will do neither.

A good programmer writes as clearly as possible out of sympathy for those who
will maintain his code later, and for those who must fix it in an emergency.

The best programmers produce negative lines of code per day. They remove bad
code and collapse redundancy while maintaining crystal clarity. To rate
programmers on the number of lines they add per day is counterproductive.


Dependency

Businesses get paid only because customers are dependent.
Were customers not dependent, they would not pay.

The first hit of heroin is always free, an investment in customer dependency.

Political and economic power come from creating dependencies on oneself. To make
desert tribes dependent, the Chinese built them a modern water system with a
shutoff valve controlled in Beijing, and then filled in all their wells.

To control people, give them money regularly and then threaten to stop.

The wealthy are dependent on their servants. When the servants stop cooperating,
wealth is revealed to be ephemeral. The boss is dependent on the employees.

Union power is the dependency of the owners on the workers.

Girl Scouts should once again bake and sell all of their cookies personally.
Girl Scouts should not be laboring for cookie corporations. Girls are children.

DNS names, SSL certificates, and search engine rank are insidious dependencies,
points of control. They can all be cut off to suppress political dissent.

Electronic payment systems are a way to suppress dissenting businesses, and a
way to spy on buyers. Gold, cash and crypto-currencies give freedom and privacy.

Tech companies trap our data in their format or on their website. To read our
own work, we must pay to decode their format or use their site.

The Android and iPhone platforms both trap our app so it won't run on the other
platform, yet web pages are usable on all platforms. Create web pages, not apps.

There are no app stores for web pages. Access is instant. Apps are a mistake.

Tech companies litter their "free" services with fishhooks. One day you find
you've got a fishhook embedded in you, and it is very painful to remove.

Apple is expert at making the fishhooks slide in painlessly.


Fragility

Were we all employed doing only what we do best, and to exchange it for what
others do best, we would have maximum productivity, but we also have maximum
economic fragility. When such a fragile economy is disrupted, many will suffer.

When the US elite outsourced almost all manufacturing to China for their own
short-term profit, they made the US utterly dependent on China.

As insurance, we should all have some ability to provide survival basics on our
own in small communities. It's fun too: water, farming, power, building, baking.

When the power goes out, the investment in a home generator pays off.
If the power never goes out, the home generator was the cost of insurance.

Survivalists forget that in emergencies, community help is more important than
ever. One Amish farmer alone would have a very hard time, but a community of
Amish can thrive forever without modern technology, and even without government.

What all religions lack is explicit acknowledgment of salvation in community.
The individual cannot last forever, but the community can.

Orchids are most efficient plant for their niche, but cannot survive out of it.
Dandelions are not efficient, but grow all over the world because they are
tolerant of varying conditions.

When the environment is static, the optimal organism is highly specialized for
a niche: orchids, anteaters, pandas.

When the environment is changing rapidly, the optimal organism is generic and
adaptable: dandelions, rats, people.

The specialist will outcompete the generalist in a stable enironment.

The dilemma between efficiency and resiliency is eternal.


Play

Play is practice for life. Children play at doing what they see adults do.

Kids play house because they see that adults live together in houses.

Games are practice for dealing with other people, winning and losing.

Sports are practice for war as it was waged for millennia, small groups of men.

Boys stage play battles because we are all the descendants of men who survived
battles with other men. Those men survived because they were inclined to think
about weapons and battles as boys. Girls, not so much. This is universal.

Girls play with dolls much more than boys do, again for obvious genetic reasons.
Girls grow up to be mothers who need to think about how to take care of a baby.
Boys do not play with dolls nearly as much, but they do play with toy soldiers.

Reading fiction is practice for life. We read about situations to see how others
handled them. We enjoy reading about people who have the same problems we do, to
give us ideas about solving our own problems.

Most literature is about love and death, because those are the problems of self.

The fiction you enjoy is a reflection of the problems you are trying to solve.

All movies include aspects of the writer's personal life history.

Mainstream movies feel empty when we're lonely because we realize that the
corporate movie makers don't care about us. They just wanted our money. Instead
of movies, what the lonely need is to know that they are loved.

Yet small movie makers do care. There is a love of humanity in those movies.

You get better at whatever you do. To improve at anything, do it over and over.

There are never two leading ladies in a movie. Men perhaps, women, never.


Learning

Learning is adding to our mental model of the world.

We learn at the edges of what We already know. The more we know, the faster
we learn. The surface of a sphere is proportional to the square of the radius.

We learn a fact at the expense of ignoring many other facts.

We're done learning a subject when we keep learning the same points over, not
new ones. This is also true when learning about life.

Pain is an excellent teacher.

Learning and pain are connected at the deepest levels of the brain.

We quickly learn what is painful. Evolutionarily, it was good to learn to avoid
pain and so the same neural pathways are used for both learning and pain.

Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from poor judgment.

To erase all your mistakes of the past would erase your wisdom of the present.

Experiences are more educational than books, and more valued than possessions.

It is harder to learn the truth when you think you already know the answer.

To be proven wrong stings our egos, yet brings us closer to the truth. We should
thank anyone who can prove us wrong.

The best student is not the one that memorizes the most, but the one that can
find mistaks in what he's taught.

A human lives at most 100 years, with few exceptions. That's about 36,525 days.
Every fact known to man had to be learned by some person in one of their days.

Do not leave children to figure out everything on their own. Life is confusing.
Tell them "This is the right answer" when you see that they are confused.

People stick with what they first learned, even if an alternative is better.
Smart software companies go after children for this very reason.
To change the world, focus on teaching children.


Education

Every society must reproduce itself by teaching children, little ignorant
barbarians.

All children should be taught civic duty in every year of school.

All children should be taught about government corruption by corporations.

Movies and books should teach about corruption of media and government.

Youthful ignorance is endlessly regenerated, a great treasure for the powerful.


School

Peers are a greater influence than nature or nurture. We do what our peers do.

Children should not have to learn polynomials. Most will never use them.

Children should do crossword puzzles in school because they are good practice
for thinking: there is not enough information, our assumptions are probably
wrong, and the answers depend on each other. As in life, we have to start with
guesses and backtrack as new answers come in and prove older answers incorrect.

We use 10% of what we learn 90% of the time, and 90% of what we learn 10% of the
time. It would be helpful if the teachers would tell us which is which.

There is a limit to the benefit of education to any one person. That person will
die one day, having used any one lesson N times. But if students leave behind a
greater sum of knowledge because of how they used their education, learning can
increase forever.

A college degree is proof of sustained obedience to arbitrary demands. A degree
qualifies one to be an obedient and unquestioning worker. The higher the degree,
the greater the proof of obedience and credulity, and the greater the fear of
independent thinking.

Good teachers are valuable. With a minimum of words they can impart a good
mental model, lighting the room so we can walk around without bruising our shins
on the coffee table.

Bad teachers set us back by imparting a wrong mental model, or none at all.

For maximum national stability and prosperity, we should teach patriotism,
marriage, hard work, and care for all our fellow citizens.

Children should be able to test out of any subject. They would have more free
time to learn, and would free up the teacher to help those who need help.

Children who test out of a class should still be in school, but allowed to read
in the library, or to exercise in the gym, or to work on a personal project.

People don't change. Every adult could be described by his kindergarten teacher.

Learn history to see the patterns, not to memorize the facts.


Universities

Universities have become centers of rigid political orthodoxy, enforced through
a reign of terror in which anyone can be convicted of some -ism or -phobia. No
evidence is needed and no defense is possible. The accusation is the conviction.

Accusations of political incorrectness raise the status of the accuser.

Purity spirals arise when some seek power by showing themselves more "pure" in
their ideology than others. As they get power, they organize witch hunts to
exclude and harm their enemies by accusing them of being less pure. No amount of
purity is ever enough. But in the end, Robespierre was also guillotined.

"Purity always goes wrong. You know when there was the worst witch-hunting? When
the Puritans were in charge. It doesn't work to be too pure, because people deny
their own negative stuff and then they start projecting it onto other people.
The main thing is to be tolerant, try and listen, and try and be kind."

"A Culture of Victimhood, in which prestige comes not from a resolve to
retaliate against threats (a Culture of Honor) or an ability to control one's
emotions (a Culture of Dignity) but from a claim to have been victimized on the
basis of race or sex, a grievance that is predictably ratified and redressed
by the campus bureaucracy." - Kim Holmes

The cult of victimhood has infected the corporate world via HR departments,
aided and funded by corporations who see victimhood as a useful distraction from
questions about the harms of globalization and regulatory capture.

Ivy League graduates are told they are the best and tell each other the same
thing. The the truth is that they are the best only at obeying and conforming.

In academia, awards are given for having received the most awards.

Liberal arts students argue forever because no one can prove anything, while
arguments between engineering students quickly end when one of them is proven
wrong. "No, that won't compile. Look."

Liberal arts students are pessimistic about getting a job, while engineering
students all happily know they will be employed.

Not everyone should go to college. The German trade apprentice system should be
adopted in America.


Victimhood

"You can see yourself as a victim or as a victor, regardless of the situation.
Seeing yourself as a victim is a huge waste of time. Instead, use the experience
to Show Up, Speak Up and Do Stuff to make a positive difference. Do. Not.
Become. A Victim."

Dhammapada: Mam adjiva, mam advahe...

When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.


Competition

There is no need to create a quality product or a cheaper one if there is no
competition. This is why every corporation aims to be a monopoly.

A moral business makes a better product, or a cheaper one.
An immoral business simply eliminates our alternatives.

Barbasol got itself written into law. All barber shops were required to buy it.

Cornelius Vanderbilt gave free rides on his Manhattan ferries until his
competitors all went broke. Then he started charging.

Microsoft gave away its word processor, spreadsheet, and browser until competing
businesses died. Microsoft made sure that payment for Windows was required.

The end game of every business is to prevent free market competition, to force
us to buy from them at unlimited or unknown prices. The US medical industry is
already there. Medical prices are unlimited and secret. There is no market
keeping prices down. Pay or die. All medical prices should be published instead.

Competition between businesses limits profits, benefiting the public. Many
businesses seek to limit "ruinous competition" by influencing the government to
impose regulation on their competitors. Most environmental laws are made to
protect profits, not to protect the public. Smaller businesses cannot comply
with excessive environmental laws, and so they go out of business.

Governments have a monopoly on their services, therefore quality is low and cost
is high.

Public employee unions are organized crime, extorting money from the public,
which has no alternative to the government monopoly.

When public employees have power to halt the functions of government unless
their demands are met, they have taken the government away from the people.

The hard problems in life are hard because we are ultimately competing with
versions of ourselves. We are all the descendants of winners, those who managed
to reproduce. This makes us all similar to each other.

Sibling rivalry is the first unpleasant fact of life encountered. The early
stories in the bible are about sibling rivalry, like Esau and Jacob.


Cooperation

Life is an iterated game of Prisoner's Dilemma, in which we do not know whether
to trust the other person. The winning strategy for an individual is called
"tit-for-tat": first trust the other person, then do whatever the other person
did. If the other person has been trustworthy, then one should also be
trustworthy to him. If not, then not. Yet, if no one trusts others, we all lose.

Low-trust societies become poor societies. Diversity destroys mutual trust. The
cure is to promote national unity in spite of our differing origins, and never
to promote diversity for its own sake. E Pluribus Unum.

Airport food is usually bad and expensive because there is little repeated
interaction between the same people and airport restaurants. Everyone buying
food in an airport is about to leave that city. The restaurants calculate that
their most profitable strategy is to be untrustworthy because they are unlikely
to ever serve the same customers again anyway.

A restaurant which does not list drink prices is counting on your being too
embarrassed to ask, so that they can overcharge you. If any business does not
post every price clearly, leave and never patronize them again. They have
already betrayed your trust.

The medical system in the US counts on hiding prices from us in the same way,
yet we are forced to use them. We face unknown and potentially infinite bills,
even for a single aspirin. It's like handing your credit card to the waiter in a
restaurant and saying "Order whatever you like for me, no matter the price."

During WWI trench warfare between France and Germany, neither side was able to
make progress. They shelled each other, causing deaths on both sides, but no
victory. The soldiers who had been in the trenches a while started to
deliberately miss with their shells to see if the other side would also choose
to miss. And they did. Eventually, French and German soldiers were having tea
with each other instead of killing each other. Generals were appalled and
realized that they had to keep swapping out soldiers in order to keep the
fighting going.

Trench warfare is a lesson for ending political corruption: people who have been
in Washington DC for a long time learn to cooperate with lobbyists for profit
and to abandon their duty to the public. One solution is term limits, to keep a
fresh crop of idealistic representatives coming in and then removing them before
they become cynical and corrupt. Another solution is publicly funded campaigns.


Specialization

Societal wealth requires worker specialization, a division of labor.

Cities become wealthy as each citizen becomes a highly productive expert in a
specialized niche instead of just another farmer.

We can each be better than average at something, but not at everything.

Cities are wealthy but fragile, a pyramid of dependencies.
Farms are poor but robust. They have few dependencies.
In every great disaster, city folks flee to the countryside.

A farming economy remains viable as long as the sun shines and water is
available. Cities may come and go with little effect on the farmers.

Every middle school should have a farm, a required class in farming, and fruit
trees, harvested by the students in the fall.

We farm ourselves, providing water and food, growing more people.


Fairness

Even animals and small children innately understand fairness.

It is fair to divide the pie or to choose the piece, but not to do both.

To be treated unfairly is to be told our self is unimportant.

We are motivated by money, but also by the desire to be fair.

Homo economicus, the "rational economic man", is a myth used by economists.

The ultimatum game proves that the motive of fairness is greater than the motive
of personal gain. No two people will agree to split $10 as $1 for one and $9 for
the other, even if they both get nothing otherwise.

No one should have the power to make laws which don't apply to themselves.

If taxes are to be raised, they should be raised on the raiser as well.

Life isn't fair. It never was and never will be. It is a waste of time and
energy to rail against the unfairness of life.


Problems

All problems are impediments to the continuation of self.

We are problem solving machines.

Our technology is new, but our problems are old.

All practical problems in cities are the same problem: how to get more money.

All the questions of life become the same question as we age: How well will we
handle the current but familiar old problem this time around?

It takes skill to see our possible problems and outcomes, but those
possibilities are limited, not infinite. Sometimes there are no good solutions.

All problems solve themselves eventually. Waiting may solve your problem.

Many problems cease to matter when we cease to care.

The most painful problems are where we must do something but cannot.

There is not enough time to understand everything, yet we must act now.

Everyone is replaying the lives of those who have gone before.

Ask for advice from those who care about you. Expect to make some mistakes.

Divide each problem into smaller problems, because smaller problems are easier
to solve. To solve even a small problem creates a momentum of success.

Sustained focused hard work is the key to success.

Do one thing at a time, because context switching is mentally expensive. Yet
when blocked waiting on something, don't waste the time. Do something else.

You can't always think your way out of a problem. Then you just have to accept.

Whatever our problems, they are easier to bear if we are loved.


Dilemmas

Thought selects for dilemmas. Non-dilemmas require no thought.

The right answer to a dilemma is often neither, half of each, or both.

Start by considering the worst outcome in either case of the dilemma.

Not choosing is also a choice.

We trade one problem for another, this pain for that pain.

Exercise or be fat. Study or be ignorant. Forgive or be lonely.

The urgent delays the important.

Decisions are costs. Freedom from choice can be cheaper than freedom of choice.
If unsure what path to pick, let your 90-year-old self on your death bed choose.

Many dilemmas are duplication versus dependency. It is more efficient not to
duplicate effort, but to depend on a centralized resource. This efficiency comes
at the cost of submission to centralized control, a loss of freedom.
Dependency is efficient but fragile. Duplication is robust but wasteful.

One can duplicate code, making it independent, or share code, making one section
dependent on another, increasing fragility.

It was cheaper for US pharmaceutical companies to outsource manufacturing of all
antibiotics to China. Then the Wuhan Virus made Chinese supplies unavailable
and US antibiotic manufacturing ability had been lost when US factories closed.

The human genome has opted for one level of duplication: duplicate chromosomes,
one from each parent. Duplicate copies of each chromosome gives us better
health. If a gene does not work on one chromosome, it will probably work on the
other - unless we are the result of incest. Then the backup copy will likely be
identical to the broken copy. This is why incest leads to birth defects.

We have all become dependent on centralized sources for our food and energy,
because it is much more difficult to produce our own. One solution is to produce
a survival level of food and energy locally. In an emergency we will at least
have food and energy, and when there is no emergency, we get the lower cost of
cheaper centralized production.


Goals

"Your dreams are very different from the actions that will get you there."

If you see you are going to fail, then fail quickly. Do not waste time.

Do not beat yourself up for failures. Learn and keep going.

Half the battle is knowing the right path to take. Ask for advice.

The future tense "I will" in English comes from Germanic words meaning "I want".
What we will do is what we want to do. Your future is created by your desires.

Predictions about the future themselves alter the future.

What we want is not necessarily what we like. We may feel compelled to want
something we don't do not enjoy. Desire does not always lead to pleasure.

Work well done is poetry.

"Work banishes those three great evils, boredom, vice, and poverty." - Voltaire

Gilgamesh could not find eternal life, but found satisfaction in having built
the walls of his city.

Life is a marathon, not a sprint. Deliberate practice builds skill.

The key to accomplishment is persistence, sustained focused effort.

"Drop by drop the pot becomes full." - Buddha

Slower may be faster.

For motivation, imagine yourself accomplishing what you set out to do.

Olympic medalists envisioned themselves winning.

You must say no to many projects in order to do a few projects very well.

Contentment lies not in accumulating possessions, but in relinquishing desires.


Evolution

We are the descendants of those who feared death. The others did not survive.
We are the descendants of those who desired sex. The others left no children.

Men were selected to find wealth and women fascinating.
Women were selected to find wealthy men fascinating.

We enjoy fat and salt and sugar because they are both necessary and hard to get
in nature, so there was a benefit to being motivated to get them.

We did not evolve to see truth, only to see what helps us survive.

All of evolution comes down to sibling rivalry. The more loved sibling survives.

Evolution does not keep what we don't need. When fish evolve in dark caves for
millennia, they do not just become blind, they completely lose their eyes
because eyes sometimes get infected. Eyes are a net loss in perfect darkness.

The tortoise has a shell and the hare has speed. They don't need both.

Evolution pushes expenses into the future if doing so wins a large current
benefit. Testosterone reduces life expectancy, but makes men stronger and better
at reproducing while they are young.

Evolution's motto is "Whatever Works". If it is necessary rip apart fellow
animals and eat them, that will happen. Humans are only slightly nicer about it.
If it is necessary to trick and trap the weak and innocent to get their money,
that is what will happen. All professions have many smiling hungry predators.

We understand only a few of evolution's tricks so far. The hard shell of a
tortoise obviously evolved to protect it from predators. But far more of the
tortoise was selected by evolution to survive under certain conditions, and
these more obscure adaptations have been yet to be recognized.

Evolution continues down to the present day, faster than ever because there are
more people than ever.

For 3,000 years, the Chinese executed their most violent criminals and promoted
universal study for government exams. The criminals had no more children, and
the successful government job applicants had many surviving children. Now the
Chinese are less disposed to violence and more disposed to intelligence.


Race

Human races diverged from our common ancestors in the same way that languages
diverge from common ancestors. Human races are as real as different languages.

If we can't talk about the reality of race, then all differences by race will
be falsely blamed on "racism". To deny that race exists is to deny reality.

Real science, unlike social science, has advanced to the point where we can
spend $100 at and be told our racial composition with great accuracy.

The denial of race demands we ignore what we see and suppress our thoughts. The
sentiment is laudable. Acknowledging the existence of race might lead to
deterministic thinking about race, but we should put truth above sentiment.

"There are breeds in the animal man just as in the animal dog."

Dogs have been separate from wolves for only 50,000 years, far less than human
races have been separate from each other. There are even tribes in the Andaman
Islands who have been completely isolated for 50,000 years. No one will deny
that different breeds of dog have different temperaments. Yet few will admit
that the different races of humans also have different temperaments.

Races vary in temperament, but only on average. The bell curves overlap a lot.

The young believe all races are the same. The old have enough experience to know
better. The young of every generation then think the old are racist.

Penis size, testicle size, intelligence, age at walking all vary by race, on
average. Black men have the largest penises and testicles, and lowest average IQ
scores. Asian men have the smallest penises and testicles, and highest average
IQ scores. Whites are in the middle, but toward the Asian side of the spectrum.

Testicle size evolved with female promiscuity, since men who produced more sperm
were more likely to be the one to father a child with a promiscuous woman.

Black babies walk at 11 months, whites at 12 months, and Asians at 13 months.

The different races evolved to thrive most on different foods, the foods most
available and with the most benefit in that given climate.

Race should be completely ignored in all admissions and employment decisions.


Africans

"Black people" refers to about a dozen different races. The genetics of Africans
varies far more than the genetics of white people or Asians. Black people look
similar to each other but that similarity masks large differences among them.

Humans originated in Africa, so there has been more time to diverge into
different groups there. The groups that left Africa and became white and Asian
are more homogeneous, since they are all descended from smaller groups that left
Africa relatively recently.

In most biological dimensions, the greatest variety is in Africa. Since the
greatest variety of athletic skills exists in Africa, selecting for the best
athletes in America is going to result in more black people than white people in
professional sports.

All the sounds of every non-African language can also be found in some African
language. The Bushman language has tones like Chinese does, and there are some
sounds in African languages that exist nowhere else, like the click sounds in
Bushman and Zulu. Africa has an amazing variety of languages, as different from
each other as French and Mayan are.

It used to be thought that human races were at most 50,000 years separated from
each other until a person in Cameroon was found to have a Y chromosome 500,000
years away from the rest of humanity. Then more were found. It is considered
impolite to talk about this fact.

African diversity also applies to immunology. Africans have had the longest time
to evolve human diseases and defenses against those diseases. Africans have the
greatest variety of the germ that causes stomach ulcers, for example.

The tallest people in the world are the Tutsi - in Africa.
The shortest people in the world are the Pygmies - in Africa.

All of the world's fastest sprinters have west African heritage.
Most of the world's fastest long distance runners are from east Africa.

One might also expect that some of the dumbest and smartest people in the world
are from Africa. The Igbo ethnic group from Nigeria is one of the smartest,
regularly outperforming Indian and Chinese students at Western universities.
This is not entirely cultural.


Indians

The American Indians are most genetically homogeneous race in the world. They
are the most recently split off and isolated. Only small numbers made it over
the Bering Strait or the Pacific to colonize all of North and South America.
It's a fantastic success story.

Then European explorers showed up in America and half of the Indians dropped
dead from smallpox because they're so genetically homogeneous and without
evolved resistance to European diseases.

A professor at the University of Michigan fabricated a story about "smallpox
blankets" that has been repeated for decades. It never happened, but it appeals
so a sense of guilt in certain people. They want to feel guilty for something
neither they themselves nor their ancestors ever did.

The American Indians were ill-treated, but there was no genocide of the American
Indians, only germs.

There was no genocide of chestnut trees in America, only a Chinese fungus.

Europeans also showed up in Africa about the same century they arrived in the
Americas, yet the Africans were fine. Africans had seen most European diseases
already. The harm went the other way, with Europeans picking up new diseases and
dropping dead. So Europeans were never able to effectively colonize Africa,
except in the far north and the far south.

Columbus was more related to the Indians from India than to the "Indians" he
found in the New World.


Irish

The Irish could not grow hard wheat in Ireland because the sun is too weak. They
grew soft wheat with less gluten, which makes crumbly bread. The Irish have the
highest rate of gluten intolerance because they are not adapted to wheat gluten.

The Irish have had cattle for millennia, and are very well adapted to drinking
cow's milk. They have the lowest rate of lactose intolerance.

Irish Gaelic is referred to as "Irish" and Scottish Gaelic as "Gaelic". This is
inconsistent.

Irish has many words which cannot be well defined, but only used in a context.

Irish has no words for yes or no. This is an advantage, since a question must be
answered with the verb. It is harder to misunderstand an answer, or to fake an
answer if you didn't hear the question.

The Irish never use just one word where they can use two or three.

The Irish considered east to be the principal direction, not north as in
English. East was considered forward and west backwards, the direction of the
setting sun and death. When immigrants went to America, they went west and their
relatives held a funeral because they would likely never seem them again.

Ireland was not a country until oppressed by the British. Oppression creates
unity.


Mediterraneans

Before Islam, the whole circumference of the Mediterranean and much of the
Middle East was Christian.

Ancient middle eastern cultures still exist as Christian ethnic minorities
today: Armenian, Assyrian, Chaldean, Coptic, Greek, Maronite, and Syrian
Orthodox. Around them the poor converted to Islam. All of the Christian
minorities are richer than their Muslim neighbors because richer people are less
likely to change their religion.

When the Muslims invaded Persia, many upper class Persians fled to India and
remained Zoroastrian down to the present day. They are calls Parsis.

The Romans still exist as the Roman Catholic Church, which still uses Latin.
Latin America is an extension of the Roman Empire, both genetically and
linguistically, still looking to Rome for leadership, to the Vatican.

Rome picked up Christianity through its soldiers in the Mideast. The US may pick
up a new religion from its soldiers abroad as well.

The Romans built roads to facilitate invasion and control, but those same roads
were later used to import Christianity, which eventually took over Rome.

In the late Roman empire, the people were distracted by games which were bad for
their moral health, such as watching others die in the Colosseum. They were
entertained but lost their sympathy for other humans. They poisoned themselves.

There are analogies between the late Roman empire and the current United States:
costly foreign wars, decadent entertainment, corruption, vast disparities in
wealth, and the loss of national unity that follows from too much diversity.

They end stage of every religion is an ethnic religious remnant with an archaic
liturgical language. "Thee" and "thou" are preserved in the King James bible in
English through the same process.


Parsis

The Parsis are the descendants of Persians who fled to India during the Muslim
invasion of Persia in the 7th century AD. They are among the last Zoroastrians,
with a smaller group still in Iran. They are also the richest and most
exclusive ethnic group on earth. Only 100,000 people, they are only 0.01% of
the billion people in India, yet they own about 25% of all Indian wealth.

Converts are not accepted, and children of mixed marriages are not considered
Parsis. There is enormous economic distress in India, so almost all the factors
for a genocide seem to be present, yet it never happens to the Parsis.

Non-Parsis are not even allowed to set foot in Parsi fire temples.

The Parsis have distinguished themselves in public works and an attitude of
benevolence toward the public. The have sponsored hospitals and schools, and are
seen as hard-working and honest. One factor for genocide that is missing is open
contempt for outsiders. The Parsis are exclusive, but take pains to be helpful
and not to offend, and this is the secret of their immunity from popular hatred.

Drawing a sharp boundary between self and other, us and them, and helping only
our own people is a reliable way for an ethnic group to get rich. Once a group
gains in wealth, it has no motive to admit poor outsiders who dilute that
wealth. The richer the group, the more exclusive. You can become a Jew if you
try, but you can never become a Parsi. The Parsis are too rich to allow it.


Armenians

The Armenians took care of their own, tended their businesses, and prospered.
They were successful and exclusive, much like the Jews. Then there was the
economic decline of Turkey, the loss of territory, and the rise of the Young
Turks, radicals determined to grab power. The stage was set for disaster and the
genocide happened in a similar way as it would happen a few decades later in
Europe, the main difference being that the Armenians were killed with bayonets
and forced marches into the Syrian Desert rather than with gas chambers.

Jews became genetically smarter than most other ethnic groups due to selective
pressure as merchants. But in the Ottoman Empire, the Jews did not become
smarter because their niche was occupied by the Armenians, who themselves became
smarter. The more successful merchants had more surviving children. Farming
people and manual laborers do not require the same kind of intelligence to have
many surviving children.

Some Armenians also moved into Poland as merchants, much like the Jews, but did
not remain distinct from the Poles because the religious barrier was small, with
both Poles and Armenians being Christians. But in Turkey, the religious barrier
between Islam and Christianity is very large, and so the Armenians remained
separate.

The Armenians are always the silver medalists in the victimization olympics.

The Armenian genocide is consistently downplayed or ignored by Holocaust
memorials and museums. Jewish groups have even lobbied Congress against the
recognition of the Armenian genocide. The Armenian genocide disproves the Jewish
claim to uniqueness as the only people who have ever suffered so much.

The similarity to the Holocaust is remarkable. The Armenians were richer and
better educated than the Turkish majority. Armenians have an intense sense of
uniqueness and belong to their own ancient branch of Christianity. They do not
seek converts.

The Armenian Orthodox Church is slightly but deliberately different from the
Greek and Russian Orthodox churches, intended only for Armenians.

Armenians say "It takes three Genoese to fool a Jew, and three Jews to fool an
Armenian." Lo and behold, the Genoese were themselves massacred in
Constantinople in 1182 because they were an exclusive and commercially
successful minority.


Jews

Jews are a community above all else. "One Jew is no Jew."

Jews are less than two percent of the US population, but own one third of US
capital and are one third of the students at elite universities.

Alienation from the majority culture is dangerous, yet essential for stopping
assimilation. Their self is not your self. Money gives security and status.

Jews were moneylenders even in the ancient world. Jews are born old.

Though a millennium of selection for successful businessmen, Ashkenazi Jews have
ended up with some mutations which make them smarter than average.

Jews specialize in starting businesses. Most people work for someone else.

Jews are smart because it was necessary be to run a successful business.

Jews' accomplishments in science and business have benefited all of us.

Jews sometimes provoke for no reason other than entertainment.

"Yiddish is the only language whose grammar has a present inflammatory tense."

Bugs Bunny is a Jew. Elmer Fudd is a goy.

A Jew who gets along with outsiders and eats with them will end up with
non-Jewish grandchildren.

Hasidic Jews and the Amish dress both in black, grow beards, speak a German
dialect, limit secular education, and avoid unnecessary contact with outsiders.

Antisemitism is ironically necessary for Jewish separation and survival.
The greatest danger to the Jews is not the hate of the majority, but their love.

Jews say "Antisemitism cannot be explained" but they do know the explanation.

No one likes the Jews, but then, the Jews don't like anyone else either.

Q: What do Jews think of non-Jews?
A: They don't.


Judaism

Judaism is the worship of the Jews.

The two Torah scrolls are the testicles of Judaism.

Jews were created by the Torah as much as the Torah was created by the Jews.
Jewish genetics have been altered by following the laws of the Torah.

At first the Jews said "The Elohim are the gods."
Later, "Yahweh is our only God."
Later, "Yahweh is THE only God."

The unity of God is a metaphor for the unity of believers in God. Both Jews and
Muslims stress the unity of God as a way of remaining unified themselves.

When the Jews pray, they use "us", "we", and "our", the -nu ending in Hebrew:
aveinu, eloheinu, kulanu. The grammar itself makes Jewish unity clear.

The Shehecheyanu prayer is clever, praising "God who has brought us down to the
present day". Only those who made it down to the present day get to say that.

One is a Jew by birth if one's mother was a Jew. This rule came about because
maternity is certain, and because intelligence is largely inherited maternally.

Judaism in a nutshell: "If you follow these 613 rules, God will give you wealth
and children."

The Jewish God said: "I am what is."

The 613 rules work whether God is a person or whether God is what is. Judaism is
a successful algorithm for dealing with what is.

You don't have to believe to be a good Jew. You just have to follow the rules.

Judaism is not about the afterlife. It's about this life.

Each individual dies, but the Jews may live forever. Giving up individuality to
be a good Jew makes one part of something eternal.


Christianity

Christianity is the belief that we can be forgiven no matter what we have done.

Christianity is popular because it absolves believers of their painful guilt.

Jesus quoted Moses, but not completely.
Moses said "Love your neighbor as yourself in dealings with your fellow Jews."
Jesus said "Love your neighbor as yourself", omitting the condition.

Jesus did not rob, rape, or murder like Mohammed did, nor did he have have a
wife and child to abandon like Buddha did.

The Muslim Jesus is not the messiah, nor the same person at all. Muslim Jesus
will return with a bloody sword to slaughter the Jews and abolish Christianity.

Atheists should be grateful to fundamentalist Christians because Christians are
self-inoculated against becoming fundamentalist Muslims who slaughter atheists.

If evolution is true, then maybe the bible is false, and believers are not going
to heaven even though this life is so hard. Therefore evolution seems false.

If Jesus died for our sins, that shows how guilty we should feel.

Salesmanship 101 is to create pain, then offer relieve that pain - for a price.

Christianity tells us that we are in danger of eternal damnation, and then
offers a way out by believing in Jesus, and donating cash.

Catholic dogma holds that Mary is "ever-virgin" yet the bible makes it clear
that Jesus had biological brothers.

Mary the mother of Jesus is a model for unconditional love.

Your mother loves you. Your bodies separated but your selves did not. Those
whose mothers turn against them are at high risk for suicide.

The cost of no hell is that there is no heaven.
The benefit of no heaven is that there is no hell.

The difference between Christian sects is primarily in who gets the donations.


Islam

Islam is the worship of Mohammed. The Koran repeatedly demands that Muslims
imitate Mohammed in every way. When one sees one's self in Mohammed, any insult
to Mohammed feels like an insult to one's self.

Islam is a simplified and universalized form of Judaism, plus Mohammed worship.

Islam has a simplicity lacking in other religions. Believe, pay, or die.

Polygamy in Islam resulted in rich men monopolizing all the women, leaving many
angry young men. The leaders of Islam wisely sent these angry young men outward,
granting them all the non-Muslim women and wealth they could capture. This
spread Islam quickly. Minarets are phallic symbols erected over the landscape.

Germans are naive about Islam. Muslim men are taught that non-Muslim women may
be raped with impunity by Muslim men.

The Jews rejected Mohammed's claim to be a prophet. Mohammed never forgave this.
He turned the direction of worship away from Jerusalem and towards Mecca.

Had Hitler won, we would now all reflexively say "Peace be upon him" at every
mention of Hitler's name, exactly as devout Muslims do when Mohammed is
mentioned. Hitler didn't like the Jews either.

Muslims are fellow humans who have been captured by a violent ideology. Muslims
cannot leave Islam, because to leave Islam would be to lose family and friends,
and perhaps get murdered. To leave Islam, they would need a new community to
join, one that is as supportive as the one they are leaving.

Muslims don't hate the West. They love the West and want the West to accept
Islam, but the West will never accept the religion of its historical enemies.
The rejection of Islam by the West feels like a rejection of themselves.

Islam's "role model for all humanity" is Mohammed, who massacred the 800 Jews of
Bani Qadr after they surrendered, approved the murders of the old man Abu Afak
and the mother of five Asma bint Marwan, robbed caravans, raped the Jewess
Safiya on the day he killed her husband, father, and brother, slept with 9 year
old Aisha. This is official Islamic history, from the Koran and Hadith.

Saudi Arabia had legal slavery until 1962, and slavery there continues to this
day informally. It remains part of Islam. ISIS tells the truth about Islam.


Buddhism

Buddhism explains the self as an idea, an illusion.

Every Buddhist book for sale is not Buddhist. They each fail by including the
author's name, the copyright notice, and the price. These three facts show a
selfish author, unqualified to teach Buddhism.

Sitting on one's ass seeking enlightenment is selfish.

Buddha's error was leaving his wife and child to seek enlightenment.
To seek enlightenment is to want, and therefore to fail.

Buddhism evolved out of Hinduism as a kind of Protestant movement.

The Buddhists of India were not prepared to defend themselves against Islam.
They were wiped out. Tibet and Sri Lanka were not invaded by Muslims and so
Buddhism continued in those places.

Sikhism evolved out of Hinduism in response to Muslim invasions, and took on
the martial aspects of Islam. "The oppressor's boot leaves its image on you."

There are even more sects of Buddhism than of Christianity.

The difference between Buddhist sects is primarily in who gets the donations.

Buddhist hell is a mental hell, the pain of knowing we have hurt others.

"Many Westerners think death is the end. Buddhists think that's too optimistic."

Marcus Aurelius' Meditations has insights similar to those of Buddhism. Marcus
could have known about Buddhism.

Jesus' sayings are similar to Buddha's. Jesus could have known about Buddhism.

We can become more accepting of how things are, but never completely accepting.
To accept all evil is to fail in life. We must defend those we love from evil.


Religion

Religion is more about belonging than about dogma. The more unlikely the dogma,
the more one proves his devotion to the group by believing it.

No religion ever publishes a strict accounting of donations and expenses.

All religions seek a monopoly on pleasure. All religions make their adherents
feel good about themselves for belonging to it.

The Sabbath meal is a romantic date, at sunset on Friday, with wine, candles,
song, and food.

New religions first spread among the poor to comfort them about their lot. If
the religion is adopted by the upper classes and then the government itself, the
oppression of the poor remains, and the poor then move on to new religions. Thus
religions get smaller and richer as they get older. The Parsis are the richest,
with the oldest religion, then the Jews, then the Christians, then the Muslims.

Religions create a fear and claim to be the cure. "You are a sinner who will go
to hell, unless you convert and become saved." Sales does the same thing.

Religions protect their own existence above all else or they cease to exist.
Thus the First Commandment, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me."

Religions must reproduce themselves in every generation, or die out.

Religions demand to be more important than our own children. Buddha left his
wife and infant son to seek enlightenment. This was Buddha's error.

Abraham should have refused to kill Isaac when God ordered him to. God's test
was to see whether Abraham would refuse. In obeying, Abraham failed. The right
answer would have been "A just and merciful God would not make such a request."

Religious rituals provide a sense of control in the face of uncertainty.
Cosmonauts piss on the right rear tire of the bus to the rocket before launch.

A belief does not have to be correct to be useful.

Religions give the young answers, a clear direction, and a community.

All of morality is only this: Do not cause suffering, even if profitable.


Philosophy

Reasoning from invalid axioms invalidates most philsophy, and all theology.


Tradition

Do not discard tradition lightly, because there are benefits which are not
immediately obvious. Traditions themselves survived a long time by protecting
and extending the lives of those who follow those traditions.

Many biblical rules have real health benefits. Washing hands before eating
reduces infections. Drinking small amounts of wine reduces heart disease.
Avoiding pork avoids trichinosis. Avoiding shellfish avoids red tide poisoning.

How can sex be a sin? One answer is that sex, like food, may kill you or spread
disease. What is morally right is defined by religion as that which keeps
believers alive and keeps the religion going. Sex outside of monogamy also
creates illegitimate children and breaks up couples, so that the children grow
up under stress.

Circumcision prevents cancer of the penis, and reduces the transmission of
diseases. Homosexuality spreads disease rapidly, and is therefore prohibited by
all traditional religions.

Other biblical laws may have benefits we haven't understood yet.

All forbidden foods are tasty. If they weren't tasty, there would be no need to
forbid them. Bacon is the best tasting food, and the most forbidden.

Traditions have value for creating a sense of community even if nothing else.

Marxism seeks to destroy tradition so that Marxist leaders can become dictators.
The process for resisting Marxist takeover was identified by a former KGB agent,
Yuri Bezmenov:

Keep your traditional culture and institutions.
Work for stability, not radical change.
Deny the next supposed "crisis" any importance. It is imaginary, not real.
Refuse to accept "the new normal". It's not normal and should not be accepted.

The path to health, wealth, and happiness is the traditional conservative path,
yet it exists in tension with exploration and creativity which pushes boundaries
and sometimes provides great benefits thereby.

Just because something is not being done does not prove it is wrong, yet one
should think deeply about why it is not being done before starting it.


America

America is to Europe as Rome was to Greece.

The difference between European and American attitude is explained by population
density. Americans were happy to meet a fellow citizen. Europeans, not so much.

Adventurous Europeans moved to America, and adventurous Americans to California,
where nothing is stable, not even the land itself.

California is not a friendly place. A sense of community is harmed by diversity.

Americans were optimistic because of two centuries of economic growth in a land
of unlimited possibilities, unlike Europe, where possibilities are very limited.

American economic expansion ended when cheap Chinese goods put American
factories out of business. Now America is dependent on China. Our elite sold our
independence so that stockholders could get richer at the expense of US workers.

"Free trade" is very expensive for US workers who lose their jobs to China.

Imaginary racism was used as an excuse for gutting America's manufacturing base.
Accusations of racism are a deliberately divisive distraction from China.

The Ivy League elite is for racial diversity, but against economic diversity. To
learn contempt for the real working class and their tastes is the core of every
Ivy League education. Hate for the workers binds the elite together for mutual
benefit. It is their mark of solidarity and belonging, allowing them to drain
money from the working class to enrich themselves without feeling any guilt.

Nassim Taleb perfectly characterized the "Intellectual Yet Idiot".

It will always be possible to temporarily boost returns to capital by moving
production to low-wage countries with weak labor laws and poor environmental
standards, but it harms the country. Tariffs and strong borders are the answer.

A country without a border is like a body without skin. Infection and death
inevitably result.

All of the productivity gains in the last 40 years have gone to shareholders
alone, and none to labor. Gains were shared until the Democrats sold out
to capital in the 1970s. Now labor has no representation in government at all.


Diversity

Diversity divides us, eroding mutual trust.

Everyone is more comfortable with people from his or her own ethnic and economic
background. We trust those who are like us more than we trust those unlike us.
This is universal human nature.

Civic engagement falls as diversity rises. People of disparate origins do not
care about or trust each other unless bound together by common history, a common
culture, and a strong sense of nationhood.

"The greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less
they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In
the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as
they do in the most homogeneous settings." - Robert Putnam

In a very diverse city or country, no one feels bound to his fellow citizens by
blood or history or religion or culture. The only bonds that remain are
economic, which never inspire loyalty to any place or its residents.

No man is willing to die to defend the borders of a country that has no soul.

Diversity results in widespread crime, a declining economy, and crumbling roads.

Corruption thrives on diversity, as each group looks after its own alone.

Diversity weakens countries until they are invaded and destroyed, or split in
endless Balkanizing wars. Where there is no single dominant culture, there is no
sense of belonging or duty. No one cares because it is no one's country.
Multiculturalism murders countries.

We already know the answer. It's on our money. E Pluribus Unum. "Out of many,
one." A single strong national culture is the answer to the harm of diversity.
Our grandparents were right about "the melting pot" creating new Americans.

Citizens should get to know each other, marry their children to each other, and
become unified. The country then benefits from increased mutual trust.

We are willing to care for each other to the degree that we feel part of the
same team. I will pay taxes to support your grandmother if she could just as
well have been my own grandmother.


Conflict

Conflict is inevitable.

We will always rationalize the exploitation of others.

The exploited will always revolt eventually.

We cannot all be rich, because someone has to work.

The old are richer and no longer need to or even can compete with the young.

We apologize to show non-aggression, but the apology itself can be aggressive.

Life is short. We are taken by surprise at how little time we get.

"The world does not know that we must all come to an end here, but those who
know it, their quarrels cease at once." - Buddha

A declining culture is always "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic".

The wise man is tired of jealousies and conflict.

In an exercise lab, they place lab rats in a big sink full of water, to make
them swim. The rats would panic and climb on each other, forming a ball. The
rats on the bottom could not breathe, so they would break out and crawl to the
top of the ball, causing it to capsize. This created a rotating ball of rats in
the water, all clones, all selfish. This is a good metaphor for human history.


Genocide

The Holocaust is presented as a unique event, but it was not. The early Jews
themselves repeatedly committed genocide as documented in the Old Testament.

"And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young
and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword." - Joshua 6:21

The "Holocaust" name itself is marketing to elevate one genocide above others.

Ironically, presenting the Holocaust as unique illustrates the very exclusivity
that is the primary cause of all genocides.

A typical genocide needs only a wealthy and exclusive minority group, a radical
group seeking power, and economic stress. The radicals use the stress to blame
the minority and gain power. Religious differences inflame existing tensions.

The Armenians were a wealthy and exclusive minority of different religion.
The Jews were a wealthy and exclusive minority of different religion.
The Igbo were a wealthy and exclusive minority of different religion.
Malay-Chinese were a wealthy and exclusive minority of different religion.
The Cambodian upper classes were a wealthy and exclusive minority.
The Tutsi were a wealthy and exclusive minority.

South African white people are now in great danger of genocide.

After a genocide, public recognition of the true causes is not socially
acceptable. The reaction was wildly disproportionate to the offense, so we
quietly ignore the offense and express sympathy. But we think "I could have told
you that was going to happen."

Anti-Semitic pogroms were about release from bondage to the alien. The many who
were in debt to Jewish moneylenders added fuel to the fire to escape their debt.

Jews relied on family, money, and education to quickly escape and recover from
pogroms, which happened every time the majority had debts to Jews.

True action against genocide would require a willingness to acknowledge and give
up the economic benefits of ethnic exclusivity. This will never happen, nor will
Holocaust museums ever mention it.


Borders

Borders define a country. Without a border, there is no country.

Women are not killed by invading armies. They are too valuable for reproduction.
Men are disposable. This follows from "Eggs are expensive, sperm is cheap."

Even male chimpanzees protect the borders of their territories against male
invaders. Female chimpanzees have no interest in territory, because like human
women, they find the winning male sexy, since he has proven himself in battle.

Young women are disinclined to maintain borders. They are not opposed to an
invasion of sexy foreign men who prove themselves more dominant than their own
men. Young women's interests are not the same as men's interests.

"Joshua sent out two spies to examine the fighting force of Jericho. The spies
hid in Rehab's house, which was constructed into the city wall. The men sent to
seize the spies asked Rehab to bring them out. Rather, she covered them under
bunches of flax on the roof, protecting them from being captured." - Joshua 2

Mohammed killed the husband, father, and brother of Safiya, a Jewish captive.
She knew that she herself would not be killed but instead be taken care of by
Mohammed and have his children. She did not resist.

La Malinche helped Cortes invade her own land, which ultimately resulted in the
near extermination of the American Indian Y chromosome in Latin America. It was
replaced with the Spanish Y chromosome. Native women found Spanish men sexy.

Women evolved to make sure all the children were fed and cared for. Once women
have political power, they often bend the rules for illegal aliens, undermining
respect for law and driving down wages. Business owners love paying lower wages.

The "dead illegal immigrant child" propaganda photo works on women but not men.
Show a picture of a drowned child to a man, and he's not likely to care much.
Show the same picture to a woman, and she will likely demand that men save all
such children, even if it is impossible. Business owners use this inclination.

Borders protect workers from globalists who seek out the world's lowest wages to
maximize profits for themselves at the expense of their own country.

Women who defend borders deserve higher praise than men who defend borders.
Those women are being selfless, while the men are merely defending themselves.


Invasions

We are all the descendants of men who invaded their neighbors' territory, killed
the enemy men, and took their land. The women were spared to be new wives.

The invader's language becomes the standard language. Latin, Arabic, Spanish.

Ireland lost to England because the Irish put clan first, while the English put
king and country above family. Ireland now speaks English.

The Scots were the advance guard of the Irish. They also lost to the better
armed and better organized English, who put loyalty to the king above loyalty to
clan. This cult-like centralization around the king allowed the English to raise
bigger and more unified armies than the Irish or Scots could manage.

The Vikings are still with us. We can trace a line from Vikings who invaded
Normandy, then England with William the Conqueror, and then North America. The
Vikings were unusual in taking on the language of the country they occupied.

Vikings raided the Irish shoreline, kidnapped women, and took them to Iceland.
We can see genetic evidence of this in Icelandic mitochondrial DNA.

Latin America has now almost entirely Spanish male lines with American Indian
females lines. The women went along with it because the Spanish were winning.
Women love the winner. American Indian women also gained immunity from smallpox
for their children by marrying invaders who already had this immunity.

Arab Muslims invaded the Middle East, removing all older cultures from power.

The title to any land can always be traced back to armed men who took it.

There is far more value held in land than in cash.

Ownership of land is only the ability to get armed men to defend it for you.

America is being quietly attacked by China through propaganda. "To destabilize
peaceful societies: pick the most extreme statements by a member of one
political side and play them to the most extreme members of the opposition, then
play their most extreme reactions back to the original group, and so on and so
on until the population is at war with itself."


Dominance

We swim in a sea of dominance and submission, too near and too embarrassing for
the losers to see it. The winners know the truth.

Even lobsters express dominance and submission. It's that old.

Others worry about angering the dominant man.
The dominant man does not worry about others at all.

The dominant man does not ask many questions. He either knows, or doesn't care.

Women watch men fight in order to choose the winner.
Men do not care about fights among women, only about their beauty.

Cheerleaders shout "Be aggressive!" with the implied promise of sex.

Women love assholes because they know that men who are assholes TO them will
also be assholes FOR them, defending them when they are in danger.

Women lust after dominant men with the same passion that men lust after
beautiful women. Women are disgusted by weak and needy men in the same way that
men are disgusted by fat and ugly women.

Women judge men harshly for apologizing because apologies look submissive. The
wise man rarely apologizes for anything.

Muslims built mosques on the Jewish temple in Jerusalem and on the temple of Ram
in India. Muslims turned the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople into a mosque.

The Spanish built the cathedral in Mexico City on the ancient Aztec holy site.

The Vikings ruled Normandy through dominance, and then brought their techniques
to England, whence their descendants ruled the world for a time.

In English private schools, called public schools, upperclassmen sexually abuse
younger peers. This is an early lesson in dominance, part of the curriculum, but
it spreads homosexuality, which weakens cultures.

"How do you know when a Canadian is angry? Because he is staring at your shoes
instead of his own."


Power

Power is the ability to make others obey. Power comes from making others feel
dependent on you. If no one feels dependent on you, you have no power.

The dependency need not be real. "The perception of power is power." Another's
belief that you have a gun can be as effective as actually having a gun.

Nietzsche said that a monk who visits a king may be treated with respect because
he has power over himself, which is difficult to come by. Kings admire power.

Dependent employees are obedient employees. Your boss has a motive to see you
take out a huge mortgage and to prevent you from getting cheap health insurance.

A mortgage is an abstraction which obscures the reality of masters and servants.
Once in debt, we must obey the boss, or men with guns remove us from our houses.

Even the boss is dependent on his workers. If workers unionize, they take power.

To control others, it is easier to withhold a benefit than to inflict a harm.

The only power a consumer has over a merchant is the power to refuse to buy.
The only power a boss has over an employee is the power to refuse to pay him.

Voting with your dollars is more effective than your votes in elections.

Unions withhold work from the boss, but unions depend on unity.

Real power is the ability to get one part of the population to attack another.

Powerful men are extremely attractive to women. Power is very masculine.
Powerful women are repulsive to men. Powerful women are not feminine.

Power defends itself without principles. Morality can be rationalized later.

Graffiti is written by the powerless on the walls of factories as an assertion
of existence. Yet, were they the factory owners, those same vandals would
ruthlessly prosecute graffiti artists.

What the people have is numbers that they can use in voting and in shopping.

A push in the right place can change the world. "Small ax chop down big tree."


Guns

The only defense against men with guns is a bigger group of men with guns.

Animals are bubbles, with a structure holding in an interior.
Guns are bubble-poppers, a remote way to punch a hole in an animal.


Status

The higher status one is, the more one is concerned with maintaining that
status. High status people self-censor to conform to their peers.

Archaic forms of speech acquire status from their antiquity. Latin still feels
more profound than English. King James English feels more profound than modern
English. Religions maintain status by maintaining archaic languages.

Status depends partly on the random shibboleths of current good taste.

Living doesn’t cost much, but showing off does.

People are acutely aware of their status. Higher status people live longer.

Much speech is approval-seeking, and fails thereby. The truly high status man
does not need your approval at all.

The higher status man speaks more slowly.

The quiet man wins approval because he does not seek approval.

When the usually silent man speaks, his words have more force.

Academia is less about learning than about paying for a paper proof of status
and conformity. Non-conformists are expelled from schools, or failed out. Most
teachers do not like their authority to be questioned. Bosses like the academic
proof of conformity when they hire. The most "educated" are the most obedient.

"Thatcher and Trump refused to give the automatic respect many academics feel is
their due. They gave the impression that they could see right through us, an
uncomfortable feeling."

"This elite perceived what was happening in national politics as a deadly
challenge to its own status." - Thomas Frank on why the elite hated Trump

When pronouncing foreign words, use only sounds which exist in your own
language. To use foreign sounds is a status signaling affectation.

Why would a teenage black girl deliberately get pregnant? Before she has a baby,
she is nobody. After she has a baby, she is somebody's mother, which makes her
somebody, a distinct rise in status.


Listeners

To have a large audience is to have power.

People kill to get a large audience. This is what terrorism is all about.

Censorship is to prevent your enemy from gaining a large audience.

Advertising rakes in money by delivering an audience to merchants.


Silence

Silence may speak volumes.

Silence can be ambiguous.

Silence has power.

Your position in an argument may be strengthened through silence, rather than
talking too much, proving your insecurity and giving away details which can be
used against you.

"You have the right to remain silent." This is an important right.

It is a greater insult to be ignored than to be insulted.

The frustration of the powerless is that the ruling class ignores them entirely.

Mentioning any topic is an approval of it.

We don't mention what we don't want others to think about.

If we do not belong, others may remain silent when we need their help. What
isn't said may cause more harm than what is said. "The bridge is out."


Resentment

"Man would fain be great and sees that he is little; would fain be happy and
sees that he is miserable; would fain be perfect and sees that he is full of
imperfections; would fain be the object of the love and esteem of men, and sees
that his faults merit only their aversion and contempt. The embarrassment
wherein he finds himself produces in him the most unjust and criminal passions
imaginable, for he conceives a mortal hatred against that truth which blames him
and convinces him of his faults." - Pascal

Many protesters are in truth protesting their failures, and not protesting their
stated cause, which they often know little about. They are objecting to the
cruelty of nature in rendering them ugly, or deficient in some other
embarrassing way. The 2020 violent protesters were strikingly ugly.

Beautiful women tend to be conservative, because they are happy with their lot.
Conservatives want to conserve a system which is making them happy.
Leftists want to destroy a system which they think is making them unhappy.

To say "I am this" or "I am that" is only about the "I am" part. It's an
assertion that one matters in the face of a universe that says one does not.

The resentments of the incompetent will never be slaked except by the
destruction of all competence everywhere.

It is difficult to go even one day without saying I, me, or my. "I don't talk
about myself" fails twice already.

We all want to look smart. No one wants to look dumb.

Cain slew Abel because God chose Abel's offering. Brothers have always competed
for the approval of their father.

In life, we accumulates guilt for our own sins and resentments for others' sins.
Graveyards are full of old resentments, never to be resolved.

"If we think of genius as something magical, we are not obliged to compare
ourselves and find ourselves lacking." - Nietzsche

We can't each be the best at everything, but we can each be the best at
something very specialized.


History

History is punctuated by revolutions against hereditary aristocracies.

Ibn Khaldun: Empires rise when men are unified and take over from a corrupt
decaying empire. The descendants of the founding men then become decadent. Then
outsiders invade and found a new empire.

The rich become ever richer by mere ownership, without work. The more they own,
the more rent everyone else is obliged to pay them. Then public infrastructure
falls apart. There is no unity or sense of nationhood any longer.

When social mobility ceases, a country is ripe for revolution or invasion.
Genocide is one form of revolution against hereditary aristocracy.

When an invasion starts, the oppressed join the invaders.
The Muslims were supported by overtaxed Byzantine and Persian peasants.
The Spanish were supported by Indian tribes oppressed by the Aztecs.

The post-revolution society slowly solidifies once again into a state of
hereditary servants and masters, as it was before, only with different masters.

The past is rewritten to suit the present power.

An art forger inserted fake pages showing his fake paintings in archived
exhibition catalogs from 100 years ago. Now no one should trust those archives.

Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Those who do learn from history are doomed to watch others repeat it.

The Netherlands and Egypt were both blessed with a river flowing one direction
and a prevailing wind the other way. Put up the sails, go upstream. Put down the
sails, go downstream. Commerce flourished. Thermodynamics shapes history.

When cultures step off the conservative path of mother, father, and children,
they die. The 60's were not the first free-love movement, there have been many.
They all fell apart. The Cathars of the 14th century had "free love", and died.

Trends over centuries are visible within one lifetime. The slow death of the
Celtic languages continues.

We live in the ancient times right now, before everything changed.


Patterns

We desire to see patterns a bit too much, and force facts into them.


Recovery

Cultures are always at threat of decline as their motive forces weaken with age.

When children fail to learn or be inspired by their own history, the culture is
doomed.

When women gain political power, the culture is doomed to invasion by foreign
men.

All that is can be recovered if it is written down.

Entire civilizations can be resurrected from books.

Stone is superior to paper or electronic bits in the long run. Metal is not good
for recording important facts, as it is melted into weapons eventually.

One's place among the living is recovered by learning one's genealogy.

Civilization has ended many times. The fall and recovery follows patterns.


Cities

All we need to travel is money and a passport, and maybe a visa. Food and
clothing and lodging can be purchased in any city.

We can travel from one city to another on the other side of the world and shop
in the same stores, yet 100 miles away a rural area is completely different.

There has always been conflict between rural and city people, the bourgeoisie.
Bourgeois means "of the city", from the word burg, "city".

Rural areas value self-reliance more than cities do, and necessarily so, since
the resources of the cities are far away from them.

Arabs, Scots, and Texans had to be assholes, because they live in remote areas
far from law enforcement. There were no police coming any time soon, so it was
necessary to intimidate potential criminals personally.

Cities depend on government and laws to function, rural areas less so. Therefore
cities favor more government, and rural areas favor less government.

Rich cities are all woke because they are full of people who were obedient in
school, obedient at work, and did not resist indoctrination. They make more
money, but they are afraid to question what they were taught, no matter how
wrong. It was their very obedience to indoctrination that got them their good
jobs. They are terrified of relying on themselves, and resent those who do.

The side of the highway and the worn down mall are unloved. They exude sadness.

Concrete is a sad kind of stone.

Houses fall apart as their aged owners give up on life.
Houses get repaired and renewed by the optimistic young.

The height of buildings as you enter a city is a 3D graph of its wealth.

From the air, cities look like cancers with tendrils into the countryside.
Cities pull in energy and material to replicate themselves. Thermodynamics can
predict and describe cities.

Companies and countries grow to the availability of energy, like living beings.


Homosexuality

Gays need to believe that their vice is innate to escape the pain of the truth.

Once their vice has been justified with the fiction of "I was born this way",
then all rational objection can be persecuted with a vengeance.

Gayness is a modern political construct. The idea of innate and exclusive
homosexuality did not exist until recently. Pedophilia was common in ancient
Greece, but those men also had wives and children.

Homosexuality is a learned addiction like many others. No gay men were born gay.
The majority of gay men were converted through sexual abuse as boys.

Gays are just two percent of the population, but commit one third of all child
sexual abuse. Pedophilia is the primary method of propagation of homosexuality.
The gay flag is bright primary colors, which attracts children.

Identical twins are not identically gay or straight despite sharing all genes,
the same womb, and the same upbringing.

The epidemiology of homosexuality matches that of a viral disease.

Scientists who publish facts showing that homosexuality is not innate risk their
careers, and so science is corrupted by politics.

Nature has no innate or exclusive homosexuality, but male mammals will fuck
almost anything, even other species, because of their very high sex drive.

Some men will fuck sheep. A male dog will fuck your leg.

All religions forbid male homosexuality because it rapidly spreads diseases and
shortens life.

Men are inherently promiscuous, making male homosexuality much more dangerous to
public health than lesbianism.

Gays deserve sympathy because they have a disease which they fail to recognize,
but they should not be allowed to spread that disease to children.

Lesbians have at least some evidence for innate predisposition to homosexuality.
In every country, gay men are more disliked than lesbians, because people know.


Outsiders

There are striking similarities between gays and Jews.

Gays and Jews are not the topics of polite conversation.

Gays and Jews are non-conformists, outsiders.

Gays and Jews live mostly in urban areas in distinct neighborhoods.

Gays and Jews are often in the arts.

Gays and Jews are each about 2% of the US population.

Gays and Jews are wealthier than average and better educated than average.

Gays and Jews have an excellent sense of humor and make fun of themselves.

Gays and Jews were massacred by the Nazis during WWII.

Gays refer to other gays as "family". Jews say "All Jews are family."

Homosexuality and Jews have coexisted throughout history, notably in medieval
Florence and modern New York City.

It is more common to discover someone is Jewish than to discover that he is not.
It is more common to discover someone is gay than to discover he is not.

Yet there is a barrier of religion between the groups. Orthodox Judaism bluntly
condemns homosexuals to death, and gays in turn reject religious tradition.


Names

We conflate the name with the thing, but the name is not the thing.

The pharaohs erased the names of their rivals from monuments.

The Jewish fear of saying the name of God is a subconscious echo of a child's
fear of saying his father's name and angering him.

European Jewish names are peculiar because they were assigned when Jews became
citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or Russia. In the Austro-Hungarian
Empire, the names were assigned as colors (Gelb, Weiss, Schwarz, Roth) or
precious gems (Diamant, Perle, Rubin) or the nobler animals (Adler, Baer, Lowe).
In Russia Jewish names were for places like cities (Minsky, Pinsky) or for
occupations. Before surnames, Jews had only their Hebrew given name and were
known as "son of" their father: Solomon ben David.

The Irish have the oldest hereditary surnames in Europe. The "O" names came
first (meaning "from" an ancestor), followed later by "Mac", which means "son
of". The Irish never named people for places, only for ancestors.


Identity

Identity is a label for self.

Religion, nation, tradition are markers of identity. Liberals blamed them for
wars and tried to eliminate them, but identity is necessary for survival. Those
suffering from lack of identity adopt one like "trans" out of desperation.

People without identity die out within a few generations, or are defeated and
enslaved by enemies who have a stronger religion, nation, and tradition.

To reject all religion is to throw out the baby with the bath water.

Anything we can measure, we can change. Now that we know how genetics works, we
can change our own genes. People will become other people, genetically unrelated
to their former selves.

You're a unique individual, just like everybody else.

The individual is the primary unit, and alone deserves blame and credit.

"Our best evidence of another man's true feelings and beliefs is his behavior,
not his words. What the Chinese knew is that a man uses this same evidence to
know what he himself is like. He observes his own behavior to understand his own
beliefs, values, and attitudes."

When we see ourselves doing something, we change our self-image to include "I am
a person who does this thing."

When we think others see us in a certain way, we see ourselves in that way.

We behave in ways consistent with our self-image.

All pride parades are reactions to shame. Shame is painful. St. Patrick's Day
parades are a reaction to the shame of losing to the English. Feminist parades
are a reaction to the shame of being dependent on men. Gay Pride parades are a
reaction to the shame of having adopted sodomy as an identity.

Except for cash, all financial assets are dependent on proving our identity.

With only the right address and the key you can come home late and crawl into
bed next to your wife.


Argument

Every argument is about self. Self is not negotiable. Existential fears drive
political polarization. Each side suspects that the other wants them dead.

You cannot change any minds through direct clear argument. Argument is always
perceived as a personal attack and results in a hardening of position instead.

"Faced with a choice between changing one's mind and proving there is no need to
do so, almost everyone gets busy with the proof." - John Kenneth Galbraith

"A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still."

To publicly argue against an idea is to also give that idea free advertising.
To kill a bad idea, stop talking about it. Silence is death for ideas.

"To end racism, stop talking about it." - Morgan Freeman

Do not argue, just ask questions and let others connect the dots by themselves.
When people come up with the answer by themselves, then they believe it.

The best way to change a mind is to eat and drink together. The worst way to
change a mind is to humiliate or threaten. As soon as we get angry, we lose.

It is easier to change a good friend's mind because he assumes goodwill.
It is easier to accept ideas which are similar to ideas we already hold.

To change belief is to leave a community of like-minded people, to change self.

Unspoken fears and resentments explain much otherwise inexplicable behavior.

Every grievance studies department is founded upon an unspoken feeling of
shame. Aggrieved minorities demand more syllables, like "African American".

Men often argue that the other side is lower status, and is therefore wrong.
Women often argue that the other side hurts feelings, and is therefore wrong.

"Some people are always vocally upset about one thing or another due to their
own personal life dissatisfaction, natural argumentativeness, desire for
attention, or other factors that can't be assuaged by any change in the world."

"You made me feel..." is never a factual statement. There is always choice.


Debate

To solve our problems, the most important thing is to debate the right way.

No one can give up beliefs without feeling humiliated. Humiliation is painful,
especially for men. In order not to feel the pain of humiliation, people
will hallucinate new "facts" into existence, and be blind to truth.

For women, being rejected by peers is more painful than humiliation.
Women usually adopt whatever their peers claim to be the truth. They just
want to fit in and are terrified of rejection and loneliness.

We need other people to be on the side of what is right and good, and opposed
to the lies and evil printed in the corporate media every day. We need them for
elections, and as friends. You can love the person but hate their false and
harmful beliefs.

What does work?

Maintain an even temper and good humor. Express love or at least acceptance for
those you are trying to convince. Try to understand the true motives for their
beliefs, which may be embarrassing and therefore unspoken. Clearly explain the
facts and their implications. Find points of agreement, and give credit for what
you have learned from the opponent.

Argue your opponent's point of view to gain insight into how he thinks.

Once the right tone is struck, reality itself will educate them, and they will
remember the correctness of your arguments at the right time.

"A conservative is a liberal who got mugged by reality."

In order to beat someone in a debate, your opponent needs to realize he has
lost. Therefore, it’s easier to win an argument against a genius than an idiot.

"This voter is not convinced by virtues or statistics. He is convinced by
dreams, visions, stories and jokes." — Curtis Yarvin


Politics

Political beliefs are rationalizations for embarrassing truths and fears.

We like to think we can change minds, but this is almost always false.

We may be able to convince someone they have overlooked a detail. Everyone
overlooks details now and then. This changes the frame of the argument.

The gentle skeptic is more convincing than the firebrand.

Most people don't have time for politics. They're busy with work, family,
shopping. They don't care unless they can see how it immediately affects them.
Thus people who do care have more influence than those who don't.

All large campaign donations are bribes given in the expectation of profit. The
profit comes from trapping the public in a rent-seeking scheme by law,
eliminating competition. Real estate, drugs, medical care, and cellphone service
industries all donate heavily to corrupt our lawmakers.

Corruption is protected by rationalization. "That's just how things are."

The person with integrity calls out all corruption, even by his own side.

We are deliberately divided along sex, race, and other lines to keep us weak.
Diversity is praised by those in power because a divided public keeps them in
power. We should always praise unity and never praise diversity. Virtue is in
accepting others without regard to race, not because of race. We are all simply
Americans. E Pluibus Unum.

"The old ethnic divisions of Europeans are no longer profitable for dividing and
ruling the public, so the elite have moved on to division by race and sex."

The political spectrum is a circle, not a line. The far left is similar to the
far right, violently intolerant of all dissent. Stalin was similar to Hitler.

Be careful what you write and say, lest you be quoted at an inconvenient time.

Conservatives are consistently happier than liberals.

The problems of the world don't matter as much as our own relationships. If we
are loved, we can be happy regardless of the political climate.


Taxes

Henry George was right.

At all times and in all places, armed men demand money from the public.
Sometimes we call this money taxes, other times we call it protection money. The
difference is in the budget for public works and theater to project legitimacy.

The Arabs were successful in gaining local support for their invasions because
they offered much lower tax rates. While the Byzantine Empire and the Persians
were trying to extract as much tax revenue as possible from their peasants to
fund their wars, the Arabs swept in and offered a better deal: taxes of only
2.5% of assets per year for those who converted to Islam and supported the
invasion. The peasants joined the Muslims out of financial self-interest.

Everyone in America must get dollars to pay taxes. Only the Federal Reserve can
create dollars. So we all must work for the Federal Reserve.

The British controlled East Africans by demanding taxes payable in British
pounds. There was no way for Africans to get British money except from the
British, so East Africans were forced to work for the British in order to pay
taxes and stay out of jail. They were pastoral people who had no need of money
and so it was hard to extract labor from them before taxes were imposed.

All government operations should be funded out of revenue collected in advance,
never from debt. If we don't have the money already, then we can't afford it.
The only exception should be infrastructure which will create more wealth than
it costs to build.

A penny saved is about two pennies earned, if you consider taxes.


Georgism

Georgism is the idea that there should be a single tax, a tax on land values.

The goal of every landlord is "I do nothing for you, and you work for me,
forever, because I am the owner of land you need to live on." This goal is
hereditary aristocracy, a form of enslavement. Georgism is opposed to this.

The Irish loved Henry George, because he described their plight perfectly.

Henry George watched the settlement of San Francisco during the gold rush, and
saw society separate into rich and poor on the basis of who owned land.

Georgism is fair since each pays according to the value of the land he owns.

It is impossible avoid a land value tax, since land ownership is public record.
Those who don't own land would still pay the tax via their rent.

There would be no tax returns, saving time. Tax accountants would hate it.

Abolishing tax on earned income and sales tax would create more jobs and more
commerce. Work is discouraged by income tax, and commerce is discouraged by
sales tax. Taxing land does not discourage land creation. Land already exists.

Radio spectrum is also a kind of land. Radio spectrum should also be taxed, not
sold off to the private corporations which donate the most to politicians.

Land ownership benefits no one but the land owner.

The ruling class deliberately conflates non-productive rent-seeking with income
earned from work to deter the voting public from taxing their unearned incomes.

There should be unified land ownership and land tax records for the whole
country in a nationally standardized and free digital format.

If poor or elderly people cannot pay their land value tax, the tax should be
recorded as a debt but not collected until the person dies or sells the land, at
which time the taxes would be collected from the proceeds.

The best tax is a tax on all forms of non-productive rent-seeking. All would
benefit except those who take land-rent without producing.


News

The selection of news is a much larger source of bias than the writing of it.

It's hard to read news that isn't reported.

"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about
answers." - Thomas Pynchon

Most reported news is negative, not positive, because we have been tuned by
evolution to pay attention to danger. It is profitable to stoke fear.

The corporate media seeks out divisive and inflammatory stories, because those
stories get the most readers and thus the most advertising money, harming public
peace and cooperation every day.

Oligarch-owned media is the most divisive, because it is in the interest of the
oligarchy to divide the public again each other, making them easy to rule.

The news is usually devoid of useful content.

One could go a lifetime ignoring the news and be happier for it.

"I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper." - Thoreau

People watch the news to feel good about having their personal biases confirmed.

"When the media is on your side, you're not the resistance."

"Every newspaper has a business section. None of them have a labor section."

Money gets attention through news production and advertising.
Advertising gets more money with which to spin and distribute the news.
So attention creates political control.


Rights

Rights are boundaries on the minimum territory of each self.

All of your rights can be instantly negated simply by declaring you incompetent.
Then your money will be managed by others and perhaps stolen, and you can be
locked up indefinitely and forced to submit to arbitrary injections or other
medical procedures without your permission. Mental patients are often held for
profit, and not because there is any good reason. No one cares about them.

Similarly, your rights can be negated by convicting you of a crime.

All prisoners should have the right speak to the public at least once per week
for one hour, no matter what they are accused of, to help ensure justice.

"Freedom of speech is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
- George Orwell

Nothing that requires the labor of another person is a human right.

Health care is not a human right. Education is not a human right. They are good
things, but they are not not human rights.

Free speech is a human right. Freedom from torture is a human right.

All human rights and obligations exist in a social context. Your right to swing
your fist ends where the other guy's nose is.

"We all learned this point early on in school: there are criminals in the world,
and allowing the police to break down our doors without warrants would help
criminals be caught. Despite that, we don't allow the police to break down our
doors without warrants. The police can catch criminals by searching homes only
when they have warrants, a process enshrined in the Constitution in order to
avoid the inevitable abuse that comes from allowing the Government to search our
homes without oversight. Thus, people such as the Founders who favor the warrant
requirement before the police can search our homes aren't pro-criminal. They
know that criminals can be caught while preventing government abuse and
lawlessness. Why is it so hard -- for some people -- to apply that same, quite
basic reasoning to eavesdropping and all other forms of surveillance?"
- Glenn Greenwald

Communism denies you the right to fail, a fundamental human right.


Constitutions

"The premise of the U.S. Constitution and others like it is that majoritarian
despotism is dangerous in the extreme; the Bill of Rights consists of little
more than limitations imposed on the tyrannical measures majorities might seek
to democratically enact (the expression of ideas cannot be criminalized even if
majorities want them to be; religious freedom cannot be abolished even if large
majorities demand it; life and liberty cannot be deprived without due process
even if nine of out ten citizens favor doing so, etc.)." - Glenn Greenwald

No state of emergency should ever be allowed to override a constitution.
Constitutions exist to prevent rule by state of emergency.


Democracy

Democracy is the idea that each adult gets one vote regardless of his wealth.

There is more power in a good voter guide than in any political party. A clear
list with evidence of which representatives are exporting factories or promoting
illegal immigration would do much to solve those problems. Yet it takes time and
money to create such a guide, and no businesses is willing to donate to the
effort because protecting the public interferes with maximizing profits.

Shopping is voting with dollars on what should get produced in the future. There
is more power in shopping than in voting.

We should pick a candidate of any party, and petition him to do the right thing,
track his progress, and score him in public.

Sadly, voters are under no obligation to study the candidates or the issues.

The poor are necessarily more numerous than the rich, since being rich means
having many servants. "The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply
of the poor." - Voltaire

Our owners fear democracy because they are always vastly outnumbered by their
own servants. Democracy is a threat to every ruling class.

Aristotle was opposed to direct democracy, because he saw that the masses would
simply take all assets from more productive people. Nor do we have direct
democracy in America. We have an elected legislative oligarchy.

"Power belongs not to the voters, but to those who count the votes." - Stalin

"When property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away." - Steinbeck

"When the great lord passes by on his high horse, the humble peasant bows low,
and silently farts." - Ethiopian proverb


Laws

Public opinion is the law. The media shapes public opinion, therefore the law.

We should have few laws, but good laws, well enforced, and only rarely changed.

The quiet promise of lucrative jobs motivates lawmakers to write bad laws.

Any law proposed to be temporary will probably be made permanent.

Corruption hides in the shadows of complexity like cockroaches hide in the dark.
Our owners love laws so complex that no one has time to read them. Simple laws
reduce corruption.

Laws should be written clearly, tersely, and in eighth grade English.

There are far more regulations than laws, all enacted by unelected officials.

Most regulations are designed to protect established businesses against new
entrants and new business models, not to protect the public.

When laws are not well enforced, we lose respect for the law. Every single car
that speeds should get a ticket every day, or the speed limit should be raised.

In ancient times it was remarked that all Jews knew all of their laws, while the
Greeks did not, because they were too complicated and too numerous. Therefore
the Greeks needed lawyers, while the Jews did not.

The average person should be able to read and understand all of the federal,
state, and local laws which apply to him, but each special interest group
creates obscure exceptions for its own profit, increasing legal complexity.

There should be mandatory elementary, middle, and high school courses in law.
Lawyers will opposed this idea because it reduces our dependency on lawyers.

Jurors should be allowed to decide that the law itself is unfair and should be
contested in a higher court.

Congressmen should be required to read proposed laws before voting on them.

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under
bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." - Anatole France


Privacy

Government should not be allowed to spy on any private digital content without a
signed search warrant as specified in the Fourth Amendment. Emails are letters.

"Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing
to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you
have nothing to say." - Edward Snowden

One benefit to violation of privacy: a bit of your self now exists in the brain
of your violator.

Whatever you can see on the internet can also see you. Whenever you load a web
page, your browser reported information about you.

The inclusion of "free" Google javascript on any website offers up our every
keystroke and mouse movement on the page up to spying by Google. Even the FBI's
"anonymous tip" site exposes everything to Google. It is not anonymous.

If any internet service is "free", then we are the product. Our privacy is
invaded and sold to merchants, every detail compiled into our life dossier.

To use Gmail betrays all of your friends' emails to you to Google too. It's not
just about you. Never use Gmail.

Mobile apps are far worse than web pages, listening in on your microphone, using
your camera, recording your movements, your location, your contacts, who you
were near. This information can and will be used against you. Avoid mobile apps.

All computers and phones should have mandated hardware kill switches for all
sensors, especially audio, video, motion, and gps. Batteries must be removable.

Kompromat, the Russian term for compromising information, was collected and
stored by the KGB in Soviet times, and is collected and stored by Google and
Facebook in our time, dystopian surveillance machines. They know what you did.

Catholic confession was the greatest source of kompromat ever, until Google.

Our owners used the Wuhan Virus to make it illegal to walk in to a restaurant
without it being recorded and sent to them. They are tracking everyone your
phone was near so they know where to look for you when you object to their
control. Our owners will try to make it illegal to use cash for privacy.


Robbery

Robbery is a transfer of beneficial order from one self to another by force.

A gun makes a mess of another person; it increases that person's disorder.

A robber with a gun is saying "If I shoot you, the your disorder will be much
larger than the disorder imposed if you hand me your money", though it's
unlikely that he will use those exact words.

Money allows a person to lower the disorder in his life, say by hiring a maid,
or in the case of a gunshot wound, a doctor.

There is a point at which the two quantities of entropy, the bullet wound and
the loss of money, are equal. Say someone carrying a large amount of money is
threatened with an unimpressive gun. If the value of the money is large enough
and the probable disorder imposed by the weapon small enough, The victim will
make a subconscious calculation and refuse to hand over the money.

Consider the oil in the Persian Gulf and the weapons used to defend it. They are
proportional in entropy.


Crime

Government and the mafia are similar. In both cases, armed men demand money for
protection. The difference is the level of public support. Government usually
has a larger theater budget to maintain public support for taxes.

Russian government tax collectors in masks confiscate business inventory to
cover the business's back taxes. Those agents look like bandits.

Colombian drug dealers build schools and hospitals in areas where the official
government fails to do so. Those drug dealers look like a government.

Those who lack trust create contracts. "If a lawyer is involved, it's too late."
Where the government cannot be trusted to enforce contracts fairly, a mafia
inevitably arises to fill that role.

The mafia does not usually rob people directly. They get you to borrow money, or
to engage in some vice that can be used against you. Then it's your fault.

If you're black find that and white people are nervous around you, remember that
black people in America commit violent crime against white people at twelve
times the rate white people commit violent crime against black people. Even if
you wouldn't hurt anyone, enough others would that there is a valid fear of it.

No case of a white man raping a black woman can be found, unlike the inverse.

The large differences in crime by race are censored in the US media. It is not
necessary to point out any fact just because it is a fact, but to censor facts
so thoroughly discredits the media and insults the victims.

The insult is compounded by the fashion of labeling all white people as racist,
even though most white people's ancestors arrived after slavery ended and are
happy to be friends with black people.

What is falsely labeled racism in America is the valid fear of black violence.

White people also commit violent crime at twice the rate Asian people do.

America is nearly the least racist country on earth, as measured by willingness
of people to live next to people of a different race. India is the most racist.

Never get into anyone's car unless you trust the driver with your life.


Evil

Good and evil are relationships. Good and evil do not exist unless others exist.

We feel the difference between good and evil. Our crimes accuse us even when
buried under the floorboards, as in "The Telltale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe.

There are no evil people distinctly separate from everyone else.

"If only it were all so simple. If only there were evil people somewhere
insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them
from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts
through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of
his own heart?" - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Yet some people are better than others.

Fentanyl kills, but some people sell it to you for money.
Prostitution spreads disease, but some people pimp for money.
Gambling is a compulsive disease, but some people run casinos for money.

It is a comfort that there are many horrible people you'll never meet.

Evil begets more evil. Being insulted makes one more likely to insult others.

Sometimes is is necessary to fight, but it is never necessary to deliberately
insult anyone.

Evil will kill whatever is good, and then wear its skin as a costume.

"In places where the wicked gather there is conspiracy only, not companionship:
these have no affection for one another; fear alone holds them together; they
are not friends, they are merely accomplices."
- Étienne de La Boétie, 1577


Corruption

Corruption is the abuse of public trust for profit.

Corruption requires rationalization. For example: "Everyone does it."

One should be paranoid in proportion to the amount of money involved. The long
game is worthwhile only for a lot of loot. The more loot, the longer the game.

The Sicilians say "The fish rots from the head down." Corruption spreads from
the oligarchy down to everyone.

Wikipedia was at first a testament to the common desire to be helpful. Then the
work of millions was locked down and corrupted by Wikipedia editors who abused
the good will of writers to push the political agenda of the oligarchy.

Mayor Alioto of San Francisco withdrew police protection from certain
neighborhoods so that crime would rise and property values would fall. Then he
bought property in those areas, sent the police back, and sold the property when
the values had risen again. He abused the public trust for profit.

Corruption causes poverty. Why work to create anything if it will be stolen?
Poverty causes corruption. "It is hard for an empty sack to stand upright."

No government is secure from corruption. One solution to corruption is to keep
swapping out government insiders rapidly. Term limits reduce corruption by
decreasing the amount of time Congressmen have to become corrupted.

Publicly funded campaigns would make our representatives more representative.

Even corruption itself is not secure from insiders. Criminals often break ranks.

Every large asymmetry in power inevitably causes corruption and rationalization.
It will always be this way. It's never over.

The elderly, the ill, and the mentally slow are the usual victims of corruption,
being the most dependent and defenseless.

Prisons and mental hospitals capture and keep inmates to profit from their pain,
because those people have no power and the police won't help them escape.

Crabs come out to eat the living flesh off of wounded and defenseless sea life.


Illegals

Illegal aliens violate national borders to steal jobs from the poorest citizens.
They cut in line ahead of legitimate immigrants who follow the law.

Yet the bigger criminals are the employers illegals. They steal wages from the
poor to give to themselves.

Business owners love illegals because they will work for less than legal
citizens and do not complain in public about pay or working conditions.

"The jobs that nobody wants" would indeed be wanted at higher wages, the wages
that would be paid without unfair competition from illegals.

Were we to enforce immigration law to increase wages for our poorest citizens,
our welfare costs would fall, though our cost for some goods  would rise. The
whole economy would benefit because when poor citizens get money, they spend it,
but illegal aliens send money out of the country, back to their home countries.

The humanitarian argument against deportation is funded by employers to keep
wages down, ignoring the suffering imposed on the poorest citizens.

To instantly fix illegal immigration, offer $10,000 and a free ticket home to
any illegal who proves that he was hired illegally and turns in his employer,
and mandate prison time for all employers of illegals with no exceptions.

A citizen who gets paid in cash risks going to prison for tax evasion. An
illegal who gets paid in cash never goes to prison for it. At worst, he just
goes back home with the money.

Mass illegal immigration of Goths ended the Roman Empire.


Rationalization

Rationalization is the automated minimization of guilt to maximize comfort.

We should fear the ability of others to rationalize harming us for their own
benefit. Conversely, we should suspect that we also rationalize.

Rationalization of theft from outsiders becomes part of religions.

The Gypsies have a legend that Gypsies comforted Jesus on the cross while others
would not, and so Jesus gave the Gypsies permission to cheat all non-Gypsies.

Jews rationalize sharp business practices by nursing a litany of complaints
against non-Jews. At Passover, the Seder includes the line "In all ages do men
rise up against us" but does not include the reasons why.

Tibetan Buddhist clergy rationalized the serfdom of Tibetan peasants to the
clergy by claiming that the peasants have a "1000 year debt" of labor to repay
for their sins, a debt which carries across lifetimes.

It's painful to know you are wrong. People seek to reduce pain. Therefore, they
alter their perception of reality to justify their false beliefs.

After Hamas slaughtered 1400 Israeli civilians, there were protests, but not
against Hamas. There were protests against Israel. How can this be explained?
The answer is that when faced with facts which contradict their firmly held
assumptions, people feel pain. To reduce this pain, they were forced to heighten
Israel's imagined malevolence to extreme levels, and to protest against that.


Poverty

Poverty means having no claim to other people's labor. If you are poor, then no
one is doing anything for you, leaving you with the impossible task of doing
everything yourself.

Individuals descend into poverty through illness, drugs, alcohol, and debt.

The homeless have spent all of their social credit. When they steal from friends
and family to support a drug habit, they foolishly spend the love others felt
for them.

To purchase with debt always costs much more than to purchase with cash.

The poor get only what no one else wants: the worst housing, the worst food, the
picked over clothing at the thrift store.

The poor depend on crime in their neighborhood to keep their rents down.

The richest neighborhoods each have a poor crime-ridden area nearby, where the
servants live. The rich also have an interest in keeping crime high in poor
areas, so that their servants can afford to live there on low salaries.

The fractal wall between wealth and poverty winds its way through every urban
core, guarded by doormen.

Charity to corrupt countries can increase poverty. Grain was shipped to Somalia
to alleviate famine caused by war. It was confiscated at gunpoint and then sold
at high prices to buy weapons to keep the war going.

Rent-seeking is our own corruption, bleeding the poor to fatten the rich.
Rent-seeking means seeking to increase one's share of existing wealth without
creating new wealth. Rent-seekers are always the biggest donors to Congressmen.

The poor lack order and predictability in their lives.

The poor are criticized for their bad taste, but it's not a choice between high
quality or low quality. It's a choice between low quality or nothing.

Possessions are a burden. Own little and keep what you own in good repair.

However poor, if you are loved and can read books, you have a kind of wealth.


Money

Money is control over labor. No one is wealthy without workers.

To be rich is to make others obey us. Money sets us free by capturing others. We
capture others by making them dependent on ourselves in some way.

The rich have many people dependent on them for some service, which is how they
in turn get others to serve them. "He is in manufacturing" or "He is in
software" means that he has control over some good or service that others need.

Money runs in a wide and obscure loop, but always a loop. We don't do for others
without others doing for us - unless we love them.

The money loop runs in the opposite direction from actual goods and services.
Whomever we pay for a good or service ultimately pays our boss, who pays us.

When you buy a good, you're buying the labor used to transform land into that
good. When you buy land, you're buying the services of the courts and police to
keep out everyone other than yourself.

Money is not as real as most people think. Money depends on belief in it.

Money is worth what we can buy with it. If there is nothing to buy, money has no
worth. What we can buy depends on the number of working people.

The most valuable thing you can buy with money is freedom from a job.

The rich drive up costs for the poor when they buy, especially real estate.

What makes money is what happens. What does not make money does not happen.

Money makes us do what we didn't want to do.

It is foolish to tell anyone how much money you have, unless you have none.

How can I get your money? Business, theft, taxation, fines, donations.

Money can't buy love, being selfishness, the opposite of love.

Lawyer: What did you do with the loot from the bank robbery?
Defendant: I spent most of it on hookers and coke. I wasted the rest.


Cash

Cash gives privacy.

A silver dollar from 1920 still has about the same value today.

A paper dollar from 1920 has only 4% of its value left. The other 96% was stolen
by the Federal Reserve. Yet most other countries' currencies are even worse.

The Byzantine Empire lasted 1,000 years because they never debased their gold
coin, the bezant. America debased the dollar when it was de-linked from gold.

Physical silver money by weight is beautiful and elegant. We should not have
dollars, but only ounces of silver, coined by the government in standard
weights, always 99.9% pure by law. Gold should be priced in ounces of silver.

Silver kills germs, making silver coins hygienic.

The Constitution is ignored every day: "No State shall ... make any Thing but
gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts" - Article I section 10

Gold and silver in hand are the only money that is not a mere promise, a debt.

Silver money will not end credit cycles, but will preserve the value of savings.

Silver currency gives power to the public by taking away government power to
print. No government issues silver currency anymore for that reason. Government
always wants the power to confiscate our savings through inflation.

Franklin D. Roosevelt made it illegal to own gold during the Great Depression.

Gold and silver have little inherent value in themselves, since they produce
nothing, but as long as they are in demand, they will continue to be in demand,
because people will work to get them.

The ATF regulates exactly those things that can be used as currency in the event
of a total financial breakdown: alcohol, tobacco, and firearms.

After WWII ended and the Nazis lost, the Nazi currency went to zero and people
used cigarettes as currency until a new deutschmark was established.

One rarely regrets being too generous, but one often regrets being too stingy.


Merchants

The merchant's self is not your self. Merchants do not love us. They want money.

If we did everything merchants wanted us to do, we'd be poor and fat.

Never ask a barber whether you need a haircut.

Merchants trade what they have too much of for what we have too much of. When
we buy, we are saying we prefer their good to our money.

There is a clay tablet from ancient Babylon written about 1750 BC, on which a
customer complains that a merchant delivered substandard copper ingots to him.

Professionals without morals are more dangerous than merchants. Some dentists
would extract all your teeth for profit alone. Some doctors would get you
addicted to drugs to keep you coming back.

Merchants raise prices until customers refuse to buy.

Price becomes a feature of the product in that it allows the buyer to signal
affluence to others.

The cheapest item usually ends up being expensive in the long run.

"There is hardly anything that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a
little cheaper. The people who consider only price are this man's lawful prey."
- John Ruskin

90% of everything is shit. Low quality is the rule, high quality the exception.

The best sales strategy is to find people who already want your product. You
need not convince them to buy. Sales becomes search.

Google became rich because in searching, we say what we are looking for. That
information, along with a detailed personal profile including our tastes and our
locations, is sold to the highest bidding merchants to save them time in finding
us. Google is very expensive to use, not free. Google sells your privacy.

Reciprocity is powerful. We feel we must reciprocate a favor. Merchants use
this fact when they give away samples. The Hare Krishnas give away a flower to
manipulate passing people into talking to them, and then into donating.


Business

Why does any business make money? Dependency. If you're not dependent, you don't
pay. If you're completely dependent, they can take all the money you have.

A monopoly supplier will confiscate all business profits by raising his price.

The money game is about dependencies: making others dependent on ourselves and
avoiding dependency on others.

Every business seeks to make the public dependent. Our dependency is their
independence. Their wealth is how much we must labor for them.

All business has an element of selfishness to it. Money is the opposite of love.

The poor and the sick are the most profitable, because they have the fewest
options. They must pay whatever is asked, or be evicted, or die.

A good dependency is, say, the creation of a restaurant which serves good food.
If we want that particular good food, we must pay. A bad dependency would be a
monopoly on food, such that we must pay whatever is demanded, or die.

Small businesses are less efficient but more human.

Software is a "scalable business". The same bits can be sold over and over at no
extra cost to the business. The profits are unreasonably large.

A restaurant is not a scalable business. To sell more, we need to buy more food
and hire more employees.

Much of tech uses the heroin model: first, make the customer dependent.

The feeling when one's business begins to succeed is akin to being in love.

Workers get depressed by their entrapment and exploitation like farm animals.

Governments and religions are also businesses. They farm people like animals.

Brands degrade the wearer to the status of cattle.

Our owners use religion, government, and corporations to gain ever more wealth
and power at the expense of everyone else. Our defense is democracy.


Economics

The economy is people doing nice things for each other, for a price.

It's all a fight about who is going to do what for whom.

Look around your room. Thousands of people were involved in creating it.

All goods come from land through labor. We ourselves were created from land.

Everything created by men we call capital. Tools are one form of capital.

Labor is applied to land via tools to create goods, more capital.

Economic growth is limited by human attention. With more attention, more can be
created. Processes can be automated only until they need human attention.
Customer service is human attention, which is labor, and therefore is hard to
come by. "Your call is important to us" is obviously false to everyone waiting
on hold for human attention.

Terrorism is just a way to get attention without paying the media for ads.

Monopoly profits harm the country in the long run.

Exporting factories to China results in American factories closing.
Importing illegals from Mexico pushes down wages for American citizens.

Both of those actions force wages down and therefore drag down the economy as
workers can buy less of everything. The businesses which forced down wages get
short-term profits, but in the end, all factories will be in China while America
will be impoverished and dependent on China, destroyed by our owners' greed.

When the rich get more money, they throw it on their pile in the basement.
When the poor get more money, they spend it, benefiting the economy.

New York is rich because of interest and commissions sucked in from elsewhere.

Boston is rich because tuition is expensive and medical research creates ever
more expensive treatments. Their money is also sucked in from elsewhere.

Silicon Valley is rich because the internet devastates real-world businesses.
"Software eats the world." - Marc Andreessen


Labor

Instead of dollars, we should think of prices as hours of labor we must do.
Most of the cost of production is the cost of labor.

Women were brought into the workforce for the same reason that illegals are
brought in from Central America: to drive down wages by making workers compete
more against each other for jobs, boosting profits for business owners.

The profit boost from driving down wages results in poorer workers, harming the
economy because the workers have less money to spend.

Real value is created by more people working, or working better. As a billion
Chinese people begin to work efficiently at specialized jobs in cities rather
than farming in the countryside, there is more to buy. Unfortunately, low
Chinese wages put Americans out of work and make America dependent on the CCP.

To control labor, our owners have the threats of eviction and poor medical care.
The US Chamber of Commerce lobbies to make sure that medical care will be far
more expensive to us if we don't work for a large corporation.

The dollar amounts in the social security debate are irrelevant. The important
numbers are demographic: how many people there are, and how many are working.
It is impossible for a large aging population to retire with only a small number
of younger workers working for them, no matter how much "money" they have.

Don't worry about job interviews. If they don't want you, they will find a
reason. If they do want you, you would have to work to lose the opportunity.

If your boss wants you to succeed, you just have to be good enough.
If your boss wants you to fail, nothing you do will ever be good enough.

Your boss can never really be your friend, since he may have to fire you.

The worst employees are the last to quit, because they lack other options.

If presented with two equal candidates for a role, pick the one with the least
charisma. The uncharismatic one has made it to where he is despite his lack
of charisma. The charismatic one got there with the aid of his charisma.

Q: How many employees work here?
A: About half of them.


Capital

Capital is everything made by people. Capital reproduces itself through labor.
All capital falls apart eventually, due to entropy.

A house is capital, but that land that it sits upon is not capital. It's land.

The economy consists of land, labor, and capital. Their distinguishing features
are the permanence of land, the hourly work of labor, and the degradation of
capital. Since capital is created by men, and all created things eventually fall
apart, capital must be continually renewed from land via labor.

The reproduction of physical capital is reflected in the reproduction of
financial capital, which is a claim on physical capital.

If you personally build a windmill, you should have the right to the income from
the windmill. To retire on its earnings is to retire on investment income from
the operation of the physical machine, less the cost of maintenance.

To retire on savings is like selling off shares in your windmill until it is no
longer yours, eventually zero. But to retire on investment income can
potentially go on forever, like income from the windmill.

Wealth runs the clock of entropy backwards. Decay seems to repair itself. The
house seems to clean itself, food appears on the table. Money makes water run
uphill.

Wealth is the secular heaven. The stock market is the secular Jesus.

When one is saved by Jesus, entropy also reverses. One comes back from the dead.

Many watch their investments when tired at work, thinking "Can I quit yet?"

Who watches the workers? Managers, but they may act in their own interest.

We are all captured and farmed by the rich until we can capture workers too.
A pyramid is a stable structure.


Capitalism

Capitalism brings general prosperity as long as labor gets to share in
productivity gains. When all gains go to our owners, capitalism devolves into
hereditary aristocracy, which we already fought one revolution against.

Exporting jobs and importing illegals are both ways of evading US labor laws,
impoverishing American workers for temporarily greater profits to shareholders.

Executives who export US manufacturing to China get bonuses, but the Chinese
themselves once had the death penalty for exporting silkworms and the knowledge
that silkworms eat only mulberry leaves. The Chinese were right about that.

The American dream creates self-blame. "If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?"

"This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful." - K. Vonnegut

Middle-class Americans are like a farmer with one cow who hates the farmer with
two cows, but loves the rancher with thousands. The farmer with two is a rival,
but the rancher with thousands is an idol.

No one's job in an American corporation is ever secure. The corporate self does
not include your self, unless you are a major shareholder. But then you would
not need a job.

All workers in a publicly traded corporation, even temporary, contract, and
janitorial workers, should also get a vote on how the company is run, not only
shareholders.

50% of share voting rights should be distributed to employees with 1 vote per
employee, and 50% of share voting rights should be the normal shares which are
bought and sold.

Differences in incomes are small compared to differences in capital ownership.
US taxes on capital gains are small compared to taxes on incomes.

When you overpay, you harm not only yourself, but poorer people who now have to
pay more because the market price subtly adjusts upward to your overpayment.


Corporations

Corporations are small dictatorships. The workers have no freedom of speech at
work, must obey orders, and can be executed (fired) at any time for no reason.

Corporations act in their own interests, not ours. If corporations happen to
provide something useful, that is only a means to power for them. As they
approach monopoly, what they provide becomes lower quality, and we are forced to
pay far more for it, because our alternatives have been eliminated.

Corporations should not have the rights of natural people, because corporations
are not people. Corporations should have limited lifetimes.

Corporations should be subject to a death penalty. Repeated abuse of the public
interest should result in the corporation's being dissolved.

Millions of human lives are sacrificed to the profits of corporations annually.

Humans are not meant to sit in cubicles all day.
Cubicles are graves, each containing a body, with a nameplate for a tombstone.
At quitting time, the bodies rise from the dead and drive metal coffins home,
only to return to their graves the next morning.

"Big companies destroy innovation and the human soul and all they do is give us
Federal Reserve notes in exchange for our lives. We are dying, one minute at a
time, spending it within the walls of cube farms, away from kids and family,
earning monopoly money they can hedge against but we the sheeple cannot. Now get
back to work." - Mick Russom

A comparison of the psycho-pathology of zoo animals to that of corporate
employees would show strong parallels.

Management wants you to speak up!
To say what you really think.
Even if it costs you your job.

"After your layoff, we will be a stronger company. Since you've always been such
a good team player, we know you won't mind."

"No one on his deathbed ever wished he had spent more time at the office."

A good job is more about whom we work with than about the work itself.


Raises

To get a good raise, at least four conditions must be satisfied.
1. They must have the money.
2. They must think you're worth it.
3. They must think you can go elsewhere and get it.
4. You must ask.

When you go in and ask, be ready for the likely excuses. Some common excuses and
how to respond:

"It wouldn't be fair to your co-workers to give you more than they get."
You should reply that what your co-workers make is none of your business.

"Other people will know you're getting paid more, and they'll be jealous."
You should reply that you hope your HR department is capable of keeping secrets.

"Ask again in 6 months or a year."
You should reply that you have another offer right now, and it doesn't make
sense to wait.

You may get a raise by emailing yourself a forged offer, if you know that your
boss reads your email. He has no inherent right to be snooping authentic email.

The odds of getting a good raise, say 20%, are small if you stay in your current
job, no matter how well you do. You almost always have to change bosses,
departments, or companies to get a good raise.

The only way to guarantee a good raise is to change jobs. If your boss sees
you've been working well for $50K, he's not going to give you a raise to $100K.
But if you change jobs in a hot job market, you may get that $100K.

The largest determinant of what you'll be offered upon starting is what you were
paid in your last job. You can lie about your previous salary, but HR workers
tend to know each other, and they may ask to see your previous pay-stubs.


Organizations

Organizations are a collection of selves which identify as a larger self.

One must appear to take on the beliefs and goals of one's employer.

All organizations seek to perpetuate themselves regardless of their merit.

Every group within every organization is determined to spend all its budget, no
matter how wastefully, out of fear that their budget will be cut next year if
they do not.

The first thing a social worker is taught is to find more cases to work on.

A charitable organization which actually solve the problem for which it was
created undermines its own existence, and puts all its members out of a job.

"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution."
- Clay Shirky

"(1) As if governed by Newton's First Law of Motion, an institution will resist
any change in its current direction; (2) Just as work expands to fill available
time, corporate projects or acquisitions will materialize to soak up available
funds; (3) Any business craving of the leader, however foolish, will be quickly
supported by detailed rate-of-return and strategic studies prepared by his
troops; and (4) The behavior of peer companies, whether they are expanding,
acquiring, setting executive compensation or whatever, will be mindlessly
imitated." - Warren Buffett

Many strange phenomena are easily explicable by facts few will say out loud. The
others are too embarrassed to say them, such as: A’s hire A’s and B’s hire C’s.

Excellence seeks to surround itself with excellence that it may achieve and
mediocrity seeks to surround itself with sub-mediocrity that it may prevent
itself from being supplanted. - Boriquagato


Banks

Banks are not a safe place to keep money. Governments confiscate money from bank
accounts every day. They take it when there is a judgment or fine against you.

Money in the bank can be confiscated even for unpaid parking tickets.
Canadian banks confiscated the savings of the Ottawa protesters.

Banks report our identities, balances, and transactions to the government.

In America, money is the game score and the banks keep the scoreboard. If we
lose in court, our punishment is to have our score reduced.

The Federal Reserve creates new points on the scoreboard for its friends.

The Federal Reserve exists to bail out the biggest banks at public expense. Big
banks never lose their bets. Heads they win, tails we lose through inflation.

It is naive to think the Federal Reserve does not abuse the power to print.

Inflation encourages people to put their money in banks where it can collect
interest. The Fed has an interest in promoting inflation so that we use banks,
and the government approves of the power banks give them to view balances and to
confiscate money. Under deflation, people would hoard cash and be free from bank
and government power. Therefore deflation will never be allowed.

It is a crime to even attempt to live without Federal Reserve Notes in America.
All who attempt it are by definition homeless, since the government demands
Federal Reserve Notes in order to pay property taxes. Someone may rent to us for
services we can provide instead of cash but then we are breaking the law for
having the "income" of a place to live without paying income taxes in Federal
Reserve Notes.

Since we all are forced to get Federal Reserve Notes to remain law-abiding
citizens, we are all forced to work for the Federal Reserve, a private bank.

"Give a man a gun and he can rob a bank. Give a man a bank and he can rob the
world."

"Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to
create money and control credit, and with a flick of a pen they will create
enough to buy it back." - Josiah Charles Stamp, 1st Baron Stamp


Finance

"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness.
 Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six,
result misery." - Charles Dickens

When you pay a bill, write on the bill how much you paid, when, and from what
account. Then you won't pay it twice by mistake.

Never own a debit card. When there is fraud, your money is gone and you must
fight to get it back. But with a credit card, you can still refuse to pay.
If your bank sends you a debit card, find a different bank which will not.

Direct deposit permission also quietly grants direct withdrawal permission.

Buy dividend-paying stocks with low P/E ratios if you want stability.

Rapidly increasing revenue justifies a paying a higher P/E ratio.

A dividend indicates a profitable stock, unless the dividend was paid from debt.

If the market falls for no particular reason, think "stocks are on sale today".

"The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

"You can't lose by winning." If you sold at a profit, don't look back.

If a company issues a billion shares and sells one share for a dollar, it is
technically worth one billion dollars.

Never trade on margin and never short a stock. You can be bankrupted easily.

Do not buy a house until you have saved up enough to pay cash.

If you never borrow money, then you never worry about your credit rating either.

It is good to save, but it is also good to spend, to be sure you'll get some
benefit before inflation, taxes, and other confiscation takes it away.

As you approach retirement, you have one more year of savings, but one fewer
year of life left to spend it.


Guilt

Blame is useful for rationalizing evil. If you want to injure someone, you must
first find a reason to blame him or her.

It is disturbingly easy to retroactively find blame for someone we have harmed.

The higher average culture-independent IQ of Asians correlates well with their
higher incomes in the US. The lower average culture-independent IQ of blacks
correlates well with their lower incomes in the US. Yet all differences by race
are unfairly blamed on white "racism".

"Reporting the data for Asian Americans would undermine, if not devastate, the
conclusions reached from black-white comparisons." - Thomas Sowell

Christianity promises of relief from the pain of guilt. Because Jesus died for
our sins and we are forgiven, then we need not feel guilty about the people
we have hurt, or failed to help when they needed us. We are saved from guilt.

The individual alone is responsible for his own sin. There is no group guilt.

Crying at funerals is more from guilt than from grief.

War heroes often risk their lives out of guilt at something they have done.
Whether they die in battle or defeat the enemy, their guilt is extinguished.

Do not cause suffering, if only for your own sake. Guilt is a burden.

The regret of guilt is a heavy burden. Many war heros risked their lives hoping
to either die or be redeemed from guilt.

The most valuable goods we can own are a clear conscience and a good name.

Don't do anything you wouldn't want to see publicized.

Do not promise what you may not be able to do. If you make a promise, keep it.

"Do not explain by malice that which can be explained by incompetence."
"I didn't say it was your fault, I said I was blaming you."

Cats and babies would kill us if they could, and they would not feel guilty. It
is good they are small and weak compared to adult humans.


Debt

Debt is what we have that belongs someone else. The "b" is from "de habeo".

The German words for "debt" and "guilt" are the same: Schuld.

Debt makes us guilty. The guilty may be harmed with impunity.

Debt is used to threaten harm, to control, to force labor. Debt is slavery.

Debt for production is sometimes useful.
Debt for consumption is always harmful.

Debt guarantees raise the cost to the buyer as more buyers compete. Government
guarantees of mortgage and student debt benefit only bankers.

Your boss loves your debt, because it makes you an obedient worker.

Debt interest never sleeps nor takes a day off. Interest is a relentless enemy.

Debt interest compounds exponentially, while incomes do not.

"Money loaned to a friend must often be collected from an enemy."

"If you lend someone $20 and never see him again, consider it a bargain."

If you can't pay cash, you can't afford it.

Assets work for us. Debt works against us.

We never have money in the bank. The bank has a debt to us, and may default.

Banks started in Italy as a place to store gold. Customers would pay for
storage. Then banks figured out that they could lend out the gold and pay the
depositor a portion of the interest. The problems are that the gold isn't safe
anymore, and now both the borrower and the depositor think they own it.

Most money is debt, a promise, an IOU. A coffee card is a debt. You give the
cafe $20, they credit my card, and suddenly there is $40 in existence. The new
money is only the promise that the cafe will give me $20 worth of coffee. The
old money is quickly spent by the cafe on labor, rent, coffee beans. As debts
are repaid, the amount of money in existence decreases.


Cars

Crime on public transit is the best car salesman.

On the bus we meet the poor, the mentally ill, and the retarded.

We have all been quietly enslaved to the automobile and oil industries.

Imagine a city in America with no passenger cars at all, only trams, bikes, and
pedestrians. There would be no fumes, little noise, little danger for
pedestrians. No space taken up by parking lots or garages. No gas stations. No
car purchase expense, no car insurance expense. No waiting in line at the DMV.
No taxes for maintaining freeways. No traffic fatalities. Drink what you want
without worrying how to get home from the party.

Those who could afford it would move to that city. It would become famous
for its quality of life. Property values would go up.

On the other hand, it would be hard to get the groceries home, and the elderly
and the ill would have difficulty getting around. Nor would we have the
protection from our fellow citizens that a car offers.

We'd still need fire trucks, ambulances, and police cars, but there aren't that
many of them. There would still be the need for trucks for construction. Routine
shipping could all be by rail. Munich has a system where shipping to the
pedestrian area is served by the subways early in the mornings.

Mackinac Island in Michigan banned motorized vehicle for more than a century and
is so beautiful and expensive that you can't afford it. Why shouldn't all city
dwellers finally live in peace, free from cars?

Highways are rivers of death. Death under the road, death on the road. Fumes and
brake dust in the air.

If roads were made of solar cells, they could provide enough power for cars.

Nothing will change, because cars are a strong dependency with which we are
controlled and farmed by our owners.

Cars kill about as many Americans every year as died in the whole Vietnam war.


Health

Medieval convents assessed the health of applicants with: "Eats well, sleeps
well, laughs well." These are still good indications of health.

Work hard and work out each day to sleep well.

Health insurance independent of our employers at the same cost would make us
independent. Dependency gives employers control over us. So businesses get to
deduct insurance premiums from their incomes, but individuals do not.

The US Chamber of Commerce is the biggest briber of Congress by far. It is the
employer's union against the workers. It lobbies against cheap and portable
health insurance.

The ability to start a small business requires that a reasonable independent
health insurance option exist. Minor and optional procedures need not be
covered, but should be paid for out-of-pocket from a menu of published prices.

There should be a small set of standardized health insurance plans by law. So
there would be plans A, B, C, D, and E. Every plan B, for example, would cover
the same care and have the same out-of-pocket costs. Only the premiums would be
different, making it obvious which plan is better.

Insurance companies should be obligated to publish the exact amount of coverage
for any given medical billing code to create a real market for medical care.

Except for life-saving care, all medical bills should be presented in advance of
treatment, and insurance companies should immediately say how much they will
cover, so that the consumer can make a market based choice. For life-saving
care, prices should be fixed by law because no market is possible when the
alternative is to die. We you must pay or die, you are being extorted.

Fee-for-service care encourages unnecessary services to get more fees.


Housing

There should be no mortgage interest deduction. It is a gift to banks, not to
buyers. New buyers lose more from increased housing prices than they gain from
the deduction.

There should be no Fannie, no Freddie, no FHA. They make housing more expensive.

Mortgage lending should be limited by law to rental value, not based on
comparable sales, so that every borrower could rent out the house to cover the
mortgage rather than default on the loan.

There should be an open and transparent market for houses, with all bids quickly
published and verified by a notary to prevent shill bids by realtors.

Underpricing is fraud. Sellers should be legally obligated to accept the first
no-contingency offer that meets their published asking price.

The government should publicly acknowledge that lower house prices are better
for young families, who are our future. But current owners wouldn't like lower
prices at all, and they have more political power. So none of this will happen.


Mortgages

Mortgages are a way for the owners of capital to create obedient workers.

Debt has always been used to control labor. Control over labor is money.

Why can't you leave your tedious job? Because armed men would come and kick you
out of your house. Worse, you trapped yourself by taking on the mortgage. It's
your own fault.

The workweek is never shortened as workers become more productive because no
matter how much productive we are, all additional profits go to stockholders.

We trade away the few days of our lives for money, but the value of the money
declines as we age because we have less life left in which to spend it.

We are farmed by the rich. It is a farm where humans are tended only well enough
to keep them able to work. We penned in by economics, and American guilt over
our own failure to be rich.

All high schools should require a course in lending, compound interest, and the
evil of borrowing from a payday lender. But our owners don't want that.

Guarantees for mortgages make houses more expensive, getting buyers deeper in
debt than they could get otherwise. Once in place, mortgage guarantees are
politically hard to remove because removing them would make houses cheaper.
Banks would not like cheaper houses. It would reduce the value of their
collateral. The elderly would not like it either, and they vote.

Guarantees for student loans make college more expensive, getting students
deeper in debt than they could get otherwise. This is the goal. The product of
college is indebted workers. Indebted workers are obedient workers.

If we need more of something, we should increase the supply of it, not the
demand. Build more housing, build more schools. Never subsidize debt, because
debt is slavery.


Rent

Rent is what we render for the use of another's property. The word rent comes
from Vulgar Latin rendere.

Rent and interest are the same thing, payment for the use of an asset.

One can rent a house, or one can rent money to buy a house, which is a mortgage.

The annual rent divided by the price of a fairly valued house is about the same
as the prevailing interest rate. Thus we can calculate a house's fair price.

"Rent-seeking" means seeking to take wealth from others without creating new
wealth. A classic example is putting a chain across a river and charging boats
to pass. No wealth is created by the chain, only a dependency.

The goal of every business is to run away with the ball and end the game, to win
and then prevent anyone else from playing. That is, their goal is to live from
non-productive rent-seeking forever, to become an aristocracy.

The most profitable model for every business is rent-seeking. The worst
businesses for the economy are rent-seeking businesses, because they create
nothing and impose a burden which discourages work and production.

The solution is to heavily tax all forms of rent-seeking, and nothing else.

We should tax the value of land, but never the building on it. Georgism is the
best tax system.

The rent on a building is fair, because a building is created and maintained.
The rent on land is unfair rent-seeking, because no one created the land, and
the services provided nearby come from public investment and taxes.

Governments themselves become rent-seekers over time, collecting without
producing, distributing a fraction of the loot in return for votes. This
destroys the economy eventually, when no one creates anything useful anymore.

Hereditary aristocracy is rent-seeking via land ownership.

Aristocrats are cannibals, feeding on the flesh of fellow humans.

In theory America has no aristocrats, but in reality, we do.


Success

In America, success means wealth.

It is hard to argue with success.

The rich and the famous seem on another plane from ordinary life, but they are
not discontinuous with ordinary life. There are only six degrees of separation.
You know someone who knows someone... who knows whatever famous person.

The usual ways Americans become rich are leveraged landlording, investing in the
stock market over decades, starting a business, or taking the elite road through
the Ivy League to Wall Street. The easiest path is to choose your parents
wisely.

One's chances in life are immensely improved by belonging to the right team, say
to the Jews or to old New England families, groups that know the system well and
already have many wealthy members who will help you because you are one of them.

Hard work is not enough to achieve success. One must also take risks.

To win a race, one must not only run hard, but also run in the right direction.
Half of winning in life is knowing which direction to run. Who will tell you?
Success is always a combination of individual effort and social context.
Your friends and relatives tell you which direction to run. They may be wrong.

To be lucky, put yourself in situations where you can be lucky.

To succeed at one task, you must ignore many other tasks.

Envision your future self to motivate yourself now. Have sympathy for your
future self.

Do not just make a list of things you need to do. Instead, allocate only a fixed
amount of time for each one so that you can see when you're biting off more than
you can chew.

"Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of."
- Benjamin Franklin


Wealth

Great wealth means control over many workers. We cannot all be rich. Who then
would be the workers?

Power is also wealth, because power makes workers obey you, just as money does.

Wealth depends on identity. Your wealth can be stolen by stealing your identity.
Wealth defends itself, or is stolen by others.

The rich can never separate themselves from the poor, who are their wealth.
"The comfort of the rich depends on an abundant supply of the poor." ― Voltaire

The rich are paid to be rich. The poor are charged to be poor.

"For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance,
but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away."
- Matthew 25:29

Wealth is very different from income. The majority of wealth in America is
inherited, not earned. The hereditary rich are boring people.

Culture-independent IQ tests are strongly correlated with income. Yet wealth,
unlike income, accumulates to those already wealthy, whether smart or stupid.

"Making one million dollars is hard. Making the next million is inevitable."

Great concentrations of wealth distort reality much like the gravity of a black
hole does, such that neither light nor truth can escape.

The young rich and the retired old are in the same boat. Their concern is how to
keep the rest of us working for them.

To retire, you need to own about 10 workers. But where will those workers get
the other workers they themselves need to retire?
It is easier for the rich to remain rich when the population is growing. This is
why illegal immigration is not prosecuted even though it harms poor US citizens.

Great fortunes are eventually diluted out of existence by numerous descendants.
The English custom of primogeniture is an attempt to forestall this process.

The rich live uphill because the homeless can't push shopping carts that far up.


Billionaires

Billionaires have succeeded in being the most selfish people on earth.
Extreme wealth is a kind of obesity, nothing to be praised.

"The secret of a great fortune made without apparent cause is soon forgotten, if
the crime is committed in a respectable way." - Balzac

The profit motive is useful, but one billion dollars is far beyond mere profit.

Most billionaires were created via an unfair advantage, not via the free market.

Billionaires are all opposed to the free market; they can only lose by free
market competition after gaining a monopoly. Billionaires support Marxists
because they want the game to permanently end -- with themselves on top.

Money is servants. To have a billion dollars is to have tens of thousands of
personal servants. No one needs that many personal servants.

No billionaire's charity will solve the problems created by the billionaire's
own business.

Billionaires are still limited in what they can buy by what is offered for sale.

"Diversity" is promoted by billionaires to weaken public unity. Diversity lowers
civic engagement, and a disengaged public fails to prevent regulatory capture
and the resulting rent-seeking profits which are so beneficial to billionaires.

When too much wealth is concentrated in one person's hands, it will inevitably
be used against democracy because democracy limits concentration of power.

There are 2,200 billionaires in the world, but there are 33,000 corporations
worth more than 1 billion dollars.

Corporations have no interests beyond the expansion of their own wealth and
power. Democracy is our only defense against corporations.

Billionares know each other and stay at each other's estates, not at hotels.
They know better than to question the origin of a friend's fortune.

Fame is not discontinuous. You know someone who knows someone who has some link
to even the most famous people.


Advertising

Advertising tries to make you unhappy with what you already have so that you
will spend money.

"Advertisement is the rich asking for more money. They disfigure their towns in
order to decorate their houses." - G.K. Chesterton

Truth in advertising: "We don't care about you. We just want your money."

Advertising is sold by an ad agency to a business, not to the consumer. This
explains bad advertising. It doesn't have to work, it just has to please a
business owner.

The cost of the ad is paid by the consumer. Most of the cost of a can of Coke is
the cost of the advertising, not the sugar-water in the can.

When the Romans murdered Christians in the Colosseum, they were unwittingly
spreading Christianity. They gave Christians the opportunity to stand in front
of thousands and demonstrate a faith so profound they would die for it. It was
colossal free advertising for Christianity.


Traps

The Turkey thinks the farmer is a good and kind man - until Thanksgiving.

American life is an enless series of traps set to snare unwary prey.

Americans are herded and funnelled through tollbooths to pay the oligarchy.

It is like living on a second rate cruise ship, where everything is overpriced.

The government does not serve you. It serves itself. Government should always be
minimized. All Federal agencies except the military and national trade should be
eliminated and their functions returned to the states where they belong.

The police do not exist to protect you. The police exist to protect their jobs.

Schools do not exist to teach your children. Schools exist to create jobs for
teachers. Your child's education is truly your responsibility, not theirs.

Healthcare is mostly a scam, from the insane insurance demands, to wasteful
tests and unnecessary procedures, to ambulance rides for unpublished immense
fees.

The worst scam of all has been the mass injection campaign for the profits of
the pharma companies that own and dictate the actions of the CDC, FDA, and NIH.
The injection is very dangerous and utterly ineffective, yet the media refuses
to publish the truth.

No company will tell you to do the right things, the things that will make you
healthy and happy, like exercising and spending time with family and friends.
Instead they will tell you to spend money on vain and stupid things so that they
can make money off you.


Owners

Our owners' self is not our self. They try to separate themselves from us.

"The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and
make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they're irrelevant.
The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of
choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own
everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the
corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress,
the statehouses, the city halls. They've got the judges in their back pockets.
And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of
the news and information you hear. They've got you by the balls. They spend
billions every year lobbying - lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know
what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else.

"But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of
citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed,
well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in
that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests.

"You know what they want? Obedient workers - people who are just smart enough
to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively
accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer
hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that
disappears the minute you go to collect it." - George Carlin

"Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups
representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S.
government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have
little or no independent influence." - Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page

"Who has predominant power in the United States? The short answer, from 1776 to
the present, is: Those who have the money -- or more specifically, who own
income-producing land and businesses -- have the power."

At Davos, Rutger Bregman suggested taxing the wealthy more. "It feels as if I'm
at a firefighter's conference and no one is allowed to speak about water." He
will never be invited back to Davos.

To command someone's assent via facts means the facts are powerful, but to
command someone's assent via a lie means that YOU are powerful.


Government

Government always evolves toward a mafia.

Government should always be minimized.

Any government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take
away everything you have.

"If you do not take an interest in the affairs of your government, then you are
doomed to live under the rule of fools." - Plato


Idealism

Idealism is the selfish desire to impose one's own agenda on others.

The young think they will change the world, but as they get older they just want
a good job, and finally, they just want a quiet retirement.

"People seem good while they are oppressed, but they only wish to become
oppressors in their turn." - Bertrand Russell

"The knight who slays the dragon then becomes the dragon." - Armenian saying

The idealist wishes to impose a state which can never be, and bewails the
occurrence of events which are bound to happen in every age.

The ideal world is a stirring goal, but impossible.

Whatever actually happens is proven possible thereby.

If we live our lives the right way, we have done our part.

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions." Unintended consequences kill.

Gay liberation resulted in half a million deaths from AIDS in the US alone.

Feminism resulted in mass childlessness, unhappiness, and demographic decline.

Communism resulted in the deaths of 100 million people, yet saw itself as the
savior of humanity. Even now it has believers in spite of its proof of failure.

The embarrassment of his own failure drives the believer in communism, producing
"the most unjust and criminal passions imaginable, for he conceives a mortal
hatred against that truth which blames him and convinces him of his faults."

Fanaticism is always a function of repressed doubt.

Sympathy extends our selves to include a suffering self. We feel his pain.

"With less sympathy in the world, there would be less trouble in the world."

"First, do no harm."


Equality

Equality of opportunity is a worthy goal.
Equality of outcome is impossible without violent oppression.

Communism is the public plundering the public, resulting in mass poverty.

Upward mobility is likely with hard work.
Downward mobility is possible in spite of hard of work.

The poorer you start out, the harder the next step up is.
The richer you start out, the less secure you feel about your own ability.

The military is one path out of poverty, assuming you survive.

Public libraries do more for opportunity than public schools do.

Ethnic groups that take care of their own do better than those that don't.

Even poor Jews and Armenians start life with a wealth of cultural knowledge.

Attention from two loving parents is the best predictor of success in life.


Friends

A friend is someone we include in our selves.

We like those like us. It is easier to be friends with someone similar to
ourselves.

A rich man cannot be friends with a poor man.

A beautiful woman cannot be friends with an ugly woman.

"Aboriginal Australians did not need to burn at the stake those who broke taboos
or refused to respect and follow traditional rites. It was enough that their
peers would exclude them from the community, and that they would then perish in
the desert." - Mariano Martin Rodriguez

Overheard in a preschool: "We don't like her, do we?"

We learn who our friends are when we desperately need their help.

To be quietly abandoned by friends is to lose a piece of our own heart. A new
line has been drawn between self and other, making a smaller self.

Ostracism is painful because it is separation from part of one's self.

Exclusion is a powerful weapon.

Always seek new friends. The happiness is worth the risk of disappointment.

Yet there are people we should run away from. It takes judgment to know who.

As a practical matter, it is good to have smart friends.

Half of the opportunities in life come as advice from our friends.

Sometimes your friends will deliberately give you bad advice because they are
afraid of being left behind if you do better than they do.


Loyalty

Loyalty is the firmness with which another is held close to self.

Loyalty is a kind of love, regarding others as self in spite of temptation to
betray them.

When we have been cheated, fired, or suffered any calamity at the hands of
others, what we need to hear from the people who love us is one thing: "I'm on
your side." This reinforces the bonds between us and the people who love us.

If they say anything else, the bond between us and them is weakened, adding to
our suffering. Even if we were at fault, they should still be on our side.

Every parent should tell his or her child: "I will always be on your side."

Jesus came to Simon Peter, who asked Him, "Lord, are You going to wash my feet?"
Jesus replied, "You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will
understand." "Never shall You wash my feet!" Peter told Him. Jesus answered,
"Unless I wash you, you have no part with Me." "Then, Lord, Simon Peter replied,
"wash not only my feet, but my hands and my head as well!" - John 13:6

A woman who won't flirt because she is married becomes more attractive thereby.
She has proven herself to be loyal wife.

Dual citizenship creates conflicting loyalties. It should never be allowed.

Polygamy creates conflicting loyalties. It should never be allowed.


Permanence

What seemed permanent when we were children is revealed to be temporary as we
age. Our parents grow old and die. Our houses are revealed to be just wooden
boxes that sit out in the rain and slowly rot.

Rust never sleeps.

You can't unscramble an egg.

Randomness will overtake each of us when we die. A scattering, disordering of
our bodies. No longer separate from the dirt, no longer a self. Ashes to ashes.

Nothing lasts forever. Nothing must be some pretty tough stuff.

Everything can be rebuilt. Plant seeds for recovery from the next disaster.
Write down genealogies, philosophies, practical advice, and store them where
they can be found.

The world has ended many times, descending into chaos and poverty.
The chaos and poverty runs a predicable course which eventually restores order.
The cities suffer more from the end of empires than the countryside does.

"The ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and
information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of
beneficial order." - Steven Pinker

Everything which has a beginning will also have an end.

Everywhere you've ever been is still there, even though you're not.

Regrets of the dying:

I wish I'd lived the life I wanted, not the life others expected of me.

I wish I hadn't worked so hard.

I wish I'd spoken honestly and openly.

I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

I wish that I had let myself be sillier and laughed more.


Perspective

Perspective comes from distance, many years or many miles.

When your flight takes off in the rain, you rise above the clouds into sunshine.

Bacteria reproduce in hours, people reproduce in decades, yet from an airplane,
an area infected with people looks like a Petri dish infected with bacteria.

When your child is dangerously ill, all political controversy instantly becomes
a farce unworthy of attention. At the end of our own lives, we can finally let
go of the resentments we nurtured for years, realizing their pointlessness.

When we are small, events that mean little to an adult assume iconic
significance and remain with us through life.

The older one gets, the more the ignorance of the young becomes apparent. Yet
they have good will.

Little in life is as good as one hopes, or as bad as one fears.

It's never too late to fuck up your life.

It really is a small world after all. Everyone knows everyone indirectly.

We are all just passing through. No one is a permanent resident.

We all die, but between here and there and now and then is valuable time and
space to enjoy being with people we love. Do not waste time.

Looking at a parent's life after his or her death, we think, "That was the whole
thing, an entire life." It was mostly just ordinary. What mattered was the
happiness of belonging to them, and of his or her belonging to us.

Were the world to end tomorrow, much happiness is still safe in the past.

Everything on the horizon seems adjacent. As we age from 10 to 50 years, the
ancient world moves five times closer. It was not so long ago, really.

80 years x 365 days x 24 hours = 700,800 hours in a long life.

"There are stars beneath your feet."


Humor

There is always some truth in humor.

Humor thrives on tension about death, sex, and loyalty.

Loyalty is the fundamental question of all human relationships.

Two campers are in the woods. A bear runs at them. The first guy puts on his
running shoes. The second guy says "You can't outrun that bear!" The first says
"I don't have to outrun the bear. I have to outrun you."

I told my mother I was going to buy a motorcycle. She replied "Don't do that. My
brother was killed in a terrible motorcycle accident. Take his."

"It was the least I could do, so that's what I did."

"Hurting you is the last thing I want to do. But it is definitely on my list."

How loud one laughs is proportional to the amount of tension one feels about the
subject of the joke.

Effective humor violates our assumptions, throwing us into a different context.
The sudden perception of a context switch causes a physical reaction like a
punch, hence the word "punchline". Yet we must make assumptions to function in
life. We cannot consider all the possibilities.

Crossword puzzles work on the same principle. Assumptions are set up and then
violated by an answer in a different context.


Enlightenment

So many of you! Every day is your birthday, and your deathday. They are all you.
Most don't get the joke. The few that do will laugh.

Human lives are 7 billion movies with similar plots, playing simultaneously at
different points in the movie. Be kind, because everyone we meet is fighting a
hard battle, battles we all know well.

Suffering may lead to enlightenment, but some are resistant. "The beatings will
continue until morale improves."

When a tornado rips apart a house and scatters its contents, the anatomy of our
pathetic lives is exposed. Worse, there is no disaster so bad that recovery is
not possible for the following generations. Dresden was rebuilt.

When you get all you ever wanted, you're still not done. Now you worry it will
be taken away.

When you're in love, the point of existence is directly obvious. The fact that
it happened is enough, even if the universe were to end.

When we're happy we think we'll never be sad again, and when we're sad, we think
we'll never be happy again. The truth is we will be happy when life goes well
and sad when it doesn't. It will go on like that for the rest of our lives. And
after our lives, it will go on like that for everyone else.

We are carried by the currents of life more than we swim in any one direction.

"Es war ja immer so." It was always this way, we just didn't understand before.

Sometimes we understand, but then the race of life catches up with us again, and
we must run on with it, losing the enlightenment we had for a moment. The moon
alternates between full and empty.

The enlightened are not free from dirty dishes and laundry.

The enlightened also die. The next generation may learn again, and may not.

Patterns fade into view eventually, or sometimes jump out at you.

"I think to myself, why is that Frisbee getting larger? Then it hits me."


Cycles

Differences arise naturally. We are never all the same. Siblings are rivals.

People who are similar are more likely to fight than people who are different.
That’s why civil wars and family feuds create the worst conflicts.

Some are ashamed, then feel threatened and angry. Those they are angry with get
angry in turn. There is conflict, then depression.

Take a step back and see the cycles between people. Step back further and see
the cycles of history. Read the classics. The wise know that all these things
will repeat. They see the whole. They know when we are rising or falling as a
culture. They know which paths are good and which are bad, and that it is
impossible to convince those on the bad path to quickly change their direction.
All that can be done is to plant a seed of doubt. The doubt must grow on its own
to flower into wisdom.

"A man of 40, if he have a grain of common sense, has seen all that was and all
that will be again." - Marcus Aurelius

"There is nothing new under the sun." - Ecclesiastes

"History does not repeat, but it does rhyme." - Mark Twain

The course of your life is largely the consequence of your actions.

Everything repeats endlessly. Whatever you do now has been done before. As you
age, you see yourself repeating everything. Perhaps you can improve at least.

The young see the elderly as inert because they are not playing the games
of finding a career and mate anymore, the games which consume the young.
The elderly can look at the young and know how their lives will likely go.

The elderly see the same things happening over and over in various permutations.
It all seems like a mddle school popularity contest. Even one's own death
becomes ordinary and boring at last.

After each accomplishment, then what? When you get what you want, then what?
You are still in the cycle.

The best you can do is to achieve a good understanding of how things are.


Freedom

"Today we need a nation of minute men; citizens who are not only prepared to take
up arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as a basic purpose
of their daily life and who are willing to consciously work and sacrifice for
that freedom." - Kennedy

That freedom includes freedom from corporations taking over government.

That freedom includes the freedom to own any gun the military has, to be able to
defend ourselves from a military controlled by corporations.

That freedom includes freedom from compulsory injections in all cases.

That freedom includes the freedom to use physical gold and silver as money.


Absurdity

"Formerly there were those who said: You believe things that are
incomprehensible, inconsistent, impossible because we have commanded you to
believe them; go then and do what is unjust because we command it. Such people
show admirable reasoning. Truly, whoever can make you believe absurdities can
make you commit atrocities. If the God‐given understanding of your mind does not
resist a demand to believe what is impossible, then you will not resist a demand
to do wrong to that God-given sense of justice in your heart. As soon as one
faculty of your soul has been dominated, other faculties will follow as well.
And from this derives all those crimes of religion which have overrun the
world." - Voltaire


Wisdom

Wisdom is knowing that each self has significance only by being loved.

The wise are difficult to anger. They understand others' fears and frustrations.

The elderly can easily forgive, remembering that they sinned just the same.

Understanding others' motives is a great advantage in life. One can reason from
motives to know how others are likely to act.

Read the Greek and Roman classics and the bible for their answers to the same
problems that you have now.

Be cautious about doing what you can't easily undo.

Don't just ask what could go wrong. Also ask what could go right.

Do not kill bugs. Capture them and release them outside. It is better for them,
and better for you. Except for mosquitoes. They should be killed.

The author of Ecclesiastes laments chasing after the wind, but forgets that he
belongs and is loved. He misses the trees for the forest.

Everything learned is lost, except what is written. To learn again is painful.

Everything repeated forever grates, then is intolerable, and then imperceptible.

Ignorance is endlessly regenerated. It is failure to understand belonging.

No trauma is the end of all trauma. A fresh hell awaits.

Even the worst day of your life is only the worst day so far.

Giving up is a great comfort. To live forever would be hell.

The brain quickly rots, all neural connections dissolve. They don't matter.

"There's no point in being the richest guy in the graveyard."

All that really matters is who loves us. Who will still love us when we can
do nothing for them? A small child can have more wisdom than an old man.


Belonging

Belonging is feeling part of a greater self.

To belong gives meaning. Yet we want freedom from the obligations of belonging.

Communities arise from shared interests, shared history, and shared ancestry.

Live within walking distance of relatives and friends for a sense of belonging.

To belong to a family that is there when you need them is a joy.

Belonging to a gang can give as much happiness as belonging to a loving family.

The happiest people usually grew up in a nuclear family, with a married father
and mother and several siblings. They have a deep sense of belonging from that.

Being in the military is belonging to the biggest gang, hopefully the best one.

Belonging to a religion is more about the belonging than about the the beliefs.

"People repeat the ideas of their group to show they belong to the group."

Signs and symbols show belonging. Hair, clothing, customs, food.

Keep a book of the names of everyone you meet, and when and where you met them.

Introduce all your friends and relatives to each other. Square the connections.

It is worth the effort to keep up with old friends.

Friends may come and go, but family is there when you are born and when you die.

Many people look for unconditional love while carrying a bag of conditions.


Exile

When you speak the truth you will be ostracized, exiled. This is painful.

But you will find a new community among others who speak the truth.

And there is great freeom and happiness is speaking the truth.


Genealogy

The point of genealogy to create a feeling of group belonging by common origin.

A family name is a valuable badge of belonging.

Unified paternal cousins can take over the world, as the Rothschilds did.

The natural group is the Roman gens, the known descendants of your common
patrilineal ancestor. Traditional Chinese and Irish culture was also organized
patrilineally, because it has the power to keep people together over centuries.

Take the long view, bring your family together over generations. Introduce them
all to each other. If some are unwilling, wait decades and introduce their
descendants. A strong family is a real treasure.

No matter which relatives you hate, you should love their children regardless.

Siblings have identical ancestors, but are very different from each other.

Genealogists track the dead to make connections between the living. Genealogies
without all living descendants are pointless.

Other people's genealogies are as boring as your own is interesting.

Meaning is in the group, not in the individual.

People who are a loved part of a group live much longer than those who are not.


Resurrection

Things fall apart, yet as long as life exists, the happy order can be recovered.

The happy order starts with a nuclear family of a father and a mother. They
conceive and raise a child who knows he or she is loved.

Economics are a hurdle, but once over that hurdle, the life of the mind can
begin again.

The best way to live is in continuous reading and implementation of ideas which
solve the problems of human and animal happiness.

As ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, so each mind should traverse the history of
human thought, from the ancient Greek and Latin books in the original language,
on to the latest ideas. Nor should the wisdom of other civilizations be
disregarded.


Happiness

Happiness comes from loving and being loved, from belonging. Sine qua non.

To love requires taking on responsibility for another.

Yet we are not responsible for anyone else's happiness. They must find it alone.

Happiness also comes from success at what we set out to do, however modest.

Freud said happiness comes from "love and work".

We can change our happiness by altering our trajectory in life.

More money increases happiness for the poor, but not for the rich.

A Rothschild to his children: "Dedicate yourself heart and soul to making money.
That is the way to happiness." It worked for them, since making money was a
family team effort, giving them a sense of belonging. And they were good at it.

Serenity, if not happiness, is always within grasp by accepting how things are.

There is happiness in not seeking happiness.

"Lord, give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to
change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

The bullseye can be drawn around the point where the arrow landed.

"Do not carry your troubles with you. Set them down and go on." - Buddha

Making others happy will make you happy.

Being friendly makes us happy. In giving we receive.

The right attitude is essential for happiness.

"He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me" -- in those who do not
cherish such thoughts hatred will cease. - Buddha

Do not pass by an opportunity to help. Each such opportunity is a gift.


Meaning

Everything meaningful signifies more self or less self, belonging or rejection.
That which does not affect our selves is not meaningful to us.

To have affected even one other life gives meaning to our own.

We worry about "the meaning of life" only when we have no real problems.

"We must cultivate our garden." - Voltaire

The starving do not think about meaning. They think about food.
When your child is sick, your meaning is to cure him or her.

To reduce someone else's pain always remains meaningful, even if the world ends.

No one in love questions the meaning of life.

Things can always get worse, but they can always get better as well.

The things in life that matter can't be purchased. They must be earned.

Meaning is here and now in how we treat friends and family, how they treat us.

How you spend every day is how you spend your life. Do not wait for your life to
begin. It already has.

This day will not come again. Do not waste it in arguments. Life is beautiful.

We must speak as sincerely as possible, even if our words are ignored.

The best times in our lives are not about what we had, but whom we were with.

Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what's left and
live it properly. - Marcus Aurelius

"Gilgamesh, where are you hurrying to? You will never find the life you seek.
When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained for
themselves. As for you, Gilgamesh, fill your belly with good things; day and
night, night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice. Let your clothes be
fresh, bathe yourself in water, cherish the little child that holds your hand,
and make your wife happy in your embrace, for this too is the lot of man."