Saturday, January 31, 2015

The new political map

See this post for the details of the political map below, on how different groups respond to the possible collapse of our global society. It seems fairly accurate. Kennilingus, both the man and the model, are seen as the savior from the most evolved level on the planet. However salvation is offered on a personal basis to only those who kowtow to the system and achieve certain states (disguised as elevated stages beyond relative measurement). That is all that is offered on a social basis as well via paid seminars, a model and some states, since consciousness per se is the Reality and the only thing worth working on. By edict any other form of social activism is green and ineffective from a lower order of consciousness. So yes, "God will save us" in our little in-group and the rest can go to hell where they belong.

I'd say Rifkin's Integral Commons is in the transition group, realistic about the dangers and possible collapse, yet willing to do something about it in actual terms of not just personal but socio-economically ecological action. And to hell with being called green or other derogatory names by the effete and narcissistic elites.

Friday, January 30, 2015

Fox News propaganda is devoid of reality

And their main purpose is to use that propaganda to manipulate pinheads for political purposes. This is no surprise. They've programmed low information voters to seek them as their number one news (sic) source, a source that is proven to be low on information and accuracy and thereby reinforces this unlearning feedback loop. Meanwhile liberals have a much wider, fact and science-based menu of news sources. That is, the latter are basing their opinions of cross-checking sources that provide a more unbiased and accurate view of current events. Again, no surprise, and it belies another of Fox's lying manipulations that both sides merely manipulate based on ideology.

Bernie Buzz

Here's a link to Senator Sanders latest news feed. He recently introduced a Bill to put 13 million Americans to work rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. Think the regressives will approve it? He has another article on how much the Koch brothers will spend in the next election, close to $1 trillion, and on what. It's not fixing the infrastructure. Then there's the Keystone XL pipeline, which will devastate the environment and not create many jobs. So the regressive lie about creating jobs is obviously bogus, since they have yet to create jobs with infrastructure bills. He also provided the graph below, which shows exactly what the regressive agenda is: enrich the rich at the expense of the rest of us. See the Buzz for much more.


Robert Reich talks to California Senate

CA is the place to be when it comes to the progressive bellwether of the US. It's one of the few place where the progressive agenda can make advances in the next two years.

Chris Hedges on American Sniper

See the full review here.

"American Sniper lionizes the most despicable aspects of U.S. society—the gun culture, the blind adoration of the military, the belief that we have an innate right as a “Christian” nation to exterminate the 'lesser breeds' of the earth, a grotesque hypermasculinity that banishes compassion and pity, a denial of inconvenient facts and historical truth, and a belittling of critical thinking and artistic expression."

Thursday, January 29, 2015

Robert Reich on the TPP

He does it again in one of his 2-minute videos, laying out the facts in succinct and clear style. Tell the President and your Congress people that no, this is not a good deal for most of us. It only reinforces there very things that created income inequality, the financial crises and many other maladies in the first place. Mr. President, this is not the good kind of working with the regressives just to get something done. In this case, the something is far, far worse than nothing.

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Colbert on regressive idiocy

He sums it up nicely here.


Superman has Supermind

I liked on this ridiculous program Ken Wilber (Kennilingam) is involved, the Superhuman Operating System. Now he comes out with a description of Supermind, the highest level of human evolution which of course he's attained. Balder has an IPS thread on this. Thing is, he's stated several times, this as one example:"Actual stages CANNOT be skipped" (10). And yet he cites Commons et al. in several places as those who validate postformal stages of development, and yet those folks do not have any stage higher than cross-paradigmatic. Wilber posits four stages (not states) above that, the highest being Supermind, which of course he's attained. There is exactly no evidence from postformal researchers above cross-paradigmatic, and that is extremely rare. And since Wilber asserts that one cannot skip stages, then he's also claiming to have achieved cross-paradigmatic on his way to Supermind. No so says Commons and his coterie at the Yahoo Adult Development Yahoo Forum:


Sarah Palin is an idiot

This comes as no surprise to anyone with half a brain. But apparently there are a lot of people with less than half of one because they still listen to her as if she says something of any importance. Jon Stewart skewers her and those that think (wrong word)...feel she's even remotely coherent, let alone a viable candidate for anything. Same with the rest of the regressive pack.

Monday, January 26, 2015

First elected European anti-capitalist Party

See the story.

Is holocracy hierarchical?

We've talked quite a bit about holocracy in this 2-part thread. Here's a recent article on it that claims that despite holocracy's claims it is entirely hierarchical. Therein is a discussion of Koestler and Wilber on the topic. Main complaint is a common refrain re: kennilingus, that it is basically a top-down, command and control organizational structure based on ideology.

Waking, Being, Dreaming, chapter seven

Continuing from this post:

It starts with a discussion of the different bodies according to Yoga: physical, energy, mental, subtle, causal. Thompson sees this not so much as actually different bodies in different planes of existence but as experiences of altered embodiment. The neural correlates of such different embodiments overlap with those of switching from first to third person perspective when we dream and imagine. E.g., in out-of-body experiences one still maintains a sense of a body from a centered perspective, which still orients via spatial image schema like up/down etc. This is even if we see our physical body from a third -person perspective, as if from above, since that perspective is still 'self'-centered with spatial orientation.

Sunday, January 25, 2015

Waking, Being, Dreaming, chapter six continued

Continuing from this post:

Imagination is involved in both waking and dreaming. Recall earlier that the brain wave patterns of both waking and dreaming sleep are similar. Even more so with lucid dreaming, since one is conscious that they are dreaming. Conscious awareness thus seems to be the indicator of when one is 'awake' in both states. In the case of the waking state it is awareness of the normally unconscious stream of consciousness, as well at the meta-awareness that watches this. That's one reason meditative traditions further develop this awareness during sleep, to make one's self-perspective a conscious, observant participant. Hence this is why it is called 'awakening' in the enlightenment sense.

However imagination does not mean something devoid of realty but rather the way our embodiment interacts with objective reality. In dreaming, although we turn off our sensory connection with the outside world, we nonetheless maintain a dream ego that operates within a dream world outside that ego, such world based on our memory of the waking outside world. The image schema that connect us to the outside world through our sensori-motor apparatus are operative in our 'imagination' during dreaming sleep as well.

Saturday, January 24, 2015

Psychopath patriot

See Maher's panel discussion of American Sniper. Part of the problem is this black or white worldview that see's either the great hero or the evil anti-hero. Btw, as one panelist noted, I did appreciate the film for its exploration of post traumatic stress disorder, and its portrayal of how war affects families back home.

Maher on the regressive Presidential candidates

Funny analysis of the "corporate ass-lickers" who are vying for rich benefactors "before the other guy blows him first."

Friday, January 23, 2015

Capitalistic spirituality

Mark has a FB post on the spiritual entrepreneur here. My comments to date follow:

The Rifkin article on healthcare Eric cited is just basic common sense on diet, exercise, personal development, environmental responsibility, etc., and indeed promotes LOHAS. LOHAS per se is not the problem; it's only a problem when it's contaminated with capitalist markers like ego inflation, greed and profit as the main motive. I.e., when LOHAS is coopted by capitalism. There are plenty in the Commons movement that approach LOHAS from a completely different consciousness, one of sharing and caring where yes, of course one needs to make a living and charge a fee, often sliding. And/or trade. And/or, as Rifkin discusses in his latest book, by belonging to networks that exchange services, some of which also take into consideration one's training and skill level so trades are not simple 1 to 1 exchanges.

Like Mark I can understand why some spirit-oriented practitioners become 'entrepreneurs,' since they are embedded in a capitalistic system that idolizes the individual's heroic achievements. This happens even to the best of spiritual teachers in this system, as well as it's reinforced by the traditions in which they studied, that of heroic and individual attainment that leads everyone to a new Jerusalem. It's time to move beyond the fixation on Heroes, but understandable that even those with the best intentions have yet to let it go.*

Thursday, January 22, 2015

It don't mean a thing

Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett have been teaming up for a number of songs, including this old classic:

The possible dangers of artificial intelligence

See Sam Harris's recent blog on this. Harris admits to zero marginal cost with this:

"Once we built the perfect labor-saving device, the cost of manufacturing new devices would approach the cost of raw materials."

Like Rifkin he also realizes that tech may one day supplant the need for workers, so then what? Just increasing wealth inequality as he surmises? Possible if we stay in a capitalist mode. Maybe not if we evolve into Commons mode.

His main issue though, one not contemplated by Rifkin in this book, is that the IoT just might gain autonomy given its virtually near infinite connections with, well, everything.

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Regressives can dish it out but they can't take it

One highlight of the President's state of the union address last night was when the regressives interupted his speech to derisively applaud when he announced has no more campaigns to run. But when the President turned the tables in response saying "I know, because I won both of them," the whining regressives couldn't handle it. See this article for their crybaby antics after their bully tactics fail. I say fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.

Deep play

Following up on this video from the Center for a New American Dream, the following is from chapter nine of  Rifkin's The Third Industrial Revolution:

"Deep play [...] is not frivolous entertainment but rather empathetic engagement with one's fellow human beings. Deep play is the way we experience the other, transcend ourselves and connect to broader, ever more inclusive communities of life in our common search for universality. [...] In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries being industrious was the mark of a man and becoming a productive worker the goal in life. Generations of human beings were transformed into machines in the relentless pursuit of material wealth: we lived to work. The Third Industrial Revolution and the collaborative era offer humanity the opportunity to liberate itself from the grip of mechanized life cocooned inside a utilitarian world and breathe in the exhilaration of being free: we live to play."

Senator Warren on infrastructure

She uses this topic to reiterate the value that we are all in this socioeconomic endeavor together. And part of that is the upkeep and upgrade of our infrastructure, from roads and bridges to the internet and shifting to a sustainable energy infrastructure. And all this creates jobs to boot. The below is from her email blast asking us to join her in petitioning Congress to create jobs by investing in our infrastructure:

"Nobody got rich on their own. Nobody. Sure, people who built great businesses worked hard. Most successful entrepreneurs worked their tails off. But those businesses need good soil to grow – and that meant they need roads and bridges to get their goods to market, dependable and affordable power grids, access to clean water and safe sewers, up-to-date communications – the kind of basic infrastructure that we build together.

Coming out of the Great Depression, we built those roads and bridges and power grids that helped businesses grow right here in America. We plowed money into our future, and as those businesses grew, they created great jobs here at home. But by the 1980s, our country sharply cut back on making those investments in our future, and now we’re getting left behind. Today China spends 9% of its GDP on infrastructure. Europe spends about 5% of its GDP on infrastructure. They are building a future for their businesses – and better jobs for their people. But the United States is investing only 2.4% and looking for more ways to make cuts. Today, the American Society of Civil Engineers says we have about $3.6 trillion worth of deferred maintenance, repairs and upgrading – and every day we’re falling behind.

That’s why my colleagues and I are calling on Congress to make improving our infrastructure a top priority this year. Will you join us?

Fricken wow

Can't say much more about these amazing and inspiring works of art.

Center for a New American Dream

Here's a video from the Center for a New American Dream, basically reiterating everything in Rifkin's latest book.

Monday, January 19, 2015

Dept. of Labor lets criminals manage pension funds

I know, this sounds like a paranoid conspiracy theory but it's actually true. Ralph Nader's article on this reveals the US government's blatant complicity in not only letting criminals get away with their illicit deeds, but encourages them to keep it up. Credit Suisse admitted to criminally aiding and abetting 22,000 wealthy US taxpayers avoid from paying their fair share, thereby placing an undue burden on the rest of us taxpayers. Sure, they paid a $2.6 billion fine, but that was miniscule to the profits they made on the criminal activity.

Waking, Dreaming, Being, chapter six

Continuing from this post:

The chapter begins with wondering if our waking life is a sort of dream, and what is real anyway? Tibetan dream yoga begins with maintaining mindfulness in waking life and treating it as if it were a dream. This creates the habit if mindful attention that can be extended into actual dreaming. However this tradition does not find either state to be more real than the other. Thompson mentions Madhyamaka and Yogacara supporting this view, and I'd say only the Yogacara-influenced Madhyamaka version does so. Bottom line and as noted earlier, both waking and dreaming are illusions compared with the really real, pure awareness from which all phenomenon springs. Through training of this witness, and using it to disidentify with both the waking and dream state, one can enter pure awareness in both the waking and deep sleep state and have direct access to the non-illusory, non-physical, really real.

Philosphy in the Flesh

In light of my ongoing review of Thompson's latest book, I was re-reading this today from Lakoff and Johnson's Philosophy in the Flesh (pp. 4-6), and it seems like a good place to interject some excerpts, as they are in line with Thompson's naturalistic neurophenomenology:

"Reason is not 'universal' in the transcendent sense; that is, it is not part of the structure of the universe. It is universal, however, in that it is a capacity shared universally by all human beings. What allows it to be shared are the commonalities that exist in the way our minds are embodied.

"The phenomenological person, who through phenomenological introspection alone can discover everything there is to know about the mind and the nature of experience, is a fiction. Although we can have a theory of a vast, rapidly and automatically operating cognitive unconscious, we have no direct conscious access to its operation and therefore to most of our thought. Phenomenological reflection, though valuable in revealing the structure of experience, must be supplemented by empirical research into the cognitive unconscious.

Regressive reality denial

Krugman nails them yet again: regressives hate facts because they belie their ideological attachment to the notion that government cannot do any good. When it does based on the facts and/or science regressives have to deny the facts to maintain this relentless canard that has proven wrong time and again. Krugman gives examples on climate change, supply-side economics, Obamacare, ebola.

According to Krugman, underlying this hate of government is a fixation on traditional hierarchy.

Maher's wrong on this point

Recall this recent video of Maher on free speech. Now see this article legitimately challenging him on one point. Yes, Limbaugh is entitled to free speech, but we are also entitled to boycott Limbaugh for his racist and misogynist hate speech. There are certain forms of speech that we should not tolerate, like inciting someone to violence. That was Maher's point about the Pope's statements; he doesn't tolerate it. Same goes the hate speech of intolerance. As liberals we should not tolerate intolerance, Maher himself having said as much in another video referenced in the above article.


Sunday, January 18, 2015

Good luck Mr. President

See this article. On Tuesday in his State of the Union speech he will unveil a plan to raise taxes on the 1% and corporations in order to pay for tax breaks for the poor and middle class. Part of the hikes on the rich include raising the rate on capital gains and eliminating a loophole that prevents inheritance income from capital gains taxes. Corporations that engage in risky financial instruments would be levied a tax. This revenue would pay for increase earned income tax credits for the lower and middle class.

Saturday, January 17, 2015

Bill Maher on freedom of speech

In his special new rule he addresses the attack on Charlie Hebdo and responses to it, including the Pope's.

Waking, Dreaming, Being, chapter five

Continuing from this post.

In a lucid dream one's attention is split: we know we are dreaming yet we still experience the dream ego in a dream world of fantastic, vidid and shifting events with some limited control. At least some of waking memory becomes accessible. Some methods are more likely to elicit lucid dreams: changes in the sleep cycle, melatonin and carefully observing hynagogic imagery as one dozes off (see, told ya). Another is using auto-suggestion before sleep each night that you will become lucid during dreaming.

To understand dreaming Thompson differentiates different aspects of awareness: witnessing, its changeable contents, and identifying contents as the self. In non-lucid dreams even though we're aware of a lot of changing contents we only identify with the dream ego at the center of the contents. In lucid dreaming we can stand back and witness not only the contents but the dream ego as well, thereby expanding our sense of self. So who or what is this witness?

Apophenia

I encourage everyone to real William Gibson's novel Pattern Recognition for a number of reasons. Gibson coined the term cyberspace in one of his earlier novels. He's an excellent writer and storyteller with believable if quirky characters that has been on the edge of realistic sci-fi for a generation. One reason I highlight this novel is due to its exploration of apophenia. We humans have a tendency to see patterns where there is only jibberish. And/or even if we see some legitimate patterns and form models therefrom, we tend to continue to impose those modeled patterns on new data despite other data to the contrary, i.e., confirmation bias. I know I've done this several times throughout my life, like with hermetic qabalah and kennilingus. I get so attached to the models I interpret everything through them and it becomes  an ideology that prevents further growth. Oft times I'd go through the most bizarre contortions to try to fit all data, no matter how contradictory, into the models. Granted, I've eventually come around on those two models and named that phenomenon kennilingus when it comes to Kennilingam's AQALitus.

Friday, January 16, 2015

Net neutrality under attack from new Congress

No surprise, as they hate regular folks having the power of open communication and coordination, as well as sucking up to their moneybag ISPs. This is from freepress to stop the regressives who are creating new legislation to hogtie the FCC from declaring ISPs common carriers under Title II and thereby maintain net neutrality. This is a key issue of our time so please read and contact your reps to stop this obvious corporate power grab.

"The FCC is so close to finally passing real Net Neutrality rules, and the cable lobby will do anything to stand in its way. Comcast’s first move is trying to get the Republican-controlled Congress to disrupt the FCC’s process. The legislation they’re concocting might be dressed up as a “compromise,” but its purpose — to stop FCC action — is all too clear.


Here’s the deal: Sen. John Thune and Rep. Fred Upton — the new leaders of the key congressional committees that oversee the Internet — are cooking up legislation that might look good on the surface, but is almost definitely a gift to the cable lobby.1 Both are on the record calling Net Neutrality rules “unjustified” and a “solution in search of a problem.” Their sudden change of heart looks like nothing more than an effort to undermine the FCC and distract the millions of Net Neutrality supporters who have spoken out in favor of Title II. If it looks like a trap, then it’s probably a trap. And we need your help to ensure your members in Congress don’t fall into it.

The Pope promotes the wife-beater's defense

I'm admired a number of the current Pope's opinions, but this is not one of them. He's saying that the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo had it coming because they insulted someone's religion. And that in so doing it's normal to use violence in retaliation. He said:

"If my good friend Dr Gasparri says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch. It’s normal. It’s normal. You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others."

Bullshit plain and simple. Of course you can. It's called freedom of speech. And those that respond with violence, no matter the insult, do not deserve physical violence in response. Ever. In fact such response, and the justification behind it, serves only to restrict freedom of speech. Yes, there are limits on that freedom, like yelling "fire" in a crowded theater. Or inciting someone to violence. Ironically, the Pope did exactly the latte, giving a free pass for someone to commit not only violence but murder in the name of one's religion. Shame on you Pope.

Thursday, January 15, 2015

Dimon of JP Morgan crying over what exactly?

See this article. CEO Dimon is complaining that those damned regulators are questioning his business practices. Boo fucking hoo. Robert Reich responds on FB, copied below:

"'Banks are under assault,' JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said yesterday on a conference call with reporters. 'We have five or six regulators coming at us on every issue.' Dimon seems to be missing the point. The reason regulators are coming at him and other big banks is they’re up to their old tricks, making risky bets with other peoples’ money on the way to another bank bailout. Meanwhile, Dimon has been spending time in Washington doing everything he can to roll back the Dodd-Frank Act, which was supposed to prevent big banks from going back to their old tricks. And Congress has been willing to do Dimon’s bidding. Over the last month, Wall Street has twice attached measures to unrelated bills that roll back banking regulations, and got them signed into law. (One of the last acts of the 113th congress was to block regulations requiring that the trading of exotic financial known as swaps be done with money not insured by the federal government.)

"My message to reporters: Ask Dimon how much money he and JPMorgan has contributed to political campaigns over the last three election cycles, why neither he nor any other big bank executive has yet been prosecuted for criminal fraud."



This is why regressives are attacking disability insurance

Recall this post on their attacks on disability insurance. At their core regressives think many of those on federal disability insurance are faking it and ripping us off. This reveals that they belief that people are lazy and would rather mooch off the system, and that the system is so ineffective that such deadbeats can get away with it. They hate the downtrodden and a government that helps them due to  Ayn Randian programming and social Darwinistic ideology. This was on full display with Rand Paul's recent comments that over half of disability recipient are faking it. When if fact--I know, they don't accept those things--99.8% of disability benefits were properly administered to those with actual disabilities. Obviously then such regressive claims and hatred are motivated not by truth but by ideological programming.


Waking, Dreaming, Being, chapter four continued

Continuing from this post.

Ordinary waking consciousness has a clear and separate sense of self, the I-me-mine of the ego. This dissolves in the hypnagogic state where we are fused and absorbed with whatever is arising. Spellbound as he calls it. One thing this state shows is that the self-sense is not a fixed and permanent structure but more fluid and changeable. In this state we are open to “more creative thinking and intuitive problem solving” (125), especially if we learn to consciously maintain that delicate balance between waking and sleep. The latter, of course, isn't completely spellbound and absorbed.

Freud saw this state as a regression, going back before reflective awareness and the reality principle. Mavromatis follows this line with a transpersonal twist: it need not be regressive but progressive as the sort of double awareness described above between waking and dreaming. Meditation can also elicit this state on the way 'down' the brain wave ride as noted above, but Theravada advises against staying in it as it lacks clarity, while Zen thinks its illusion and should be ignored. It also can lead to being absorbed and spellbound by the random images and sensations, which is seen as ego attachment. But as we've seen, this need not be the case if one applies one's trained attention to keeping that balance between waking and dreaming. This is akin to the sort of philosophical dualism in these traditions that sees relative and ultimate reality as completely different orders. And any intermediary between them that connects/separates them in mutual embrace, like this state, must itself also be of the illusory realm. (See the Batchelor thread.)

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Openly secular

Maher does a public service announcement. If you're secular, be proud and be vocal.

Humanism

In this post Sam Harris and Phil Zuckerman discussed rational religion. It supported LP's view of religion as a cultural format for organizing society. I see their discussion in this article* on humanism, with its own debates between its secular and religious branches. But even the secular branch falls within LP's broader definition of religion, and it is a fine example of the kind of rational religion to which we must move on a societal scale to redress socio-economic inequality and a host of other ills, in part propagated by 'lesser gods.'

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

Stewart has the only sane response to Faux Snooze

He can admit when he makes a mistake. But the regressives hold him to a standard that they themselves are far from. To wit, repeated studies showing that Fox makes more mistakes and misinforms its audience a lot more than its competitors. And Stewart's one mistake allows the regressives to then ignore all the other facts he gets right to completely avoid the real issue behind his piece. So Stewart's response to them is the only sane and appropriate one, and well deserved.

Waking, Dreaming, Being, chapter four

Continuing from this post:

He begins with differentiating the dream ego from the dream self. The former is embedded in the dream and the latter is aware that it is dreaming. Our imaginations take over in dreaming, the same imaginations we use during waking when we imagine things past or anticipate things future. When dreaming is lucid we have some degree of conscious control over the course of the dream. To see how it though is different from waking consciousness he proceeds through the stages of sleep.

The hypnagogic state is the transition between waking and sleep. This state can also occur while awake or in meditation. This state if accompanied by seemingly random images and sensory stimuli, often from past experiences and sometimes from pure imaginary sources. Synesthesia is common. I know from experience this is the first phase of my sitting meditation, wild and random mind meanderings. And in watching myself go to sleep I know this is the sign I've entered this state on the verge of dreaming sleep. Further into this state the waking ego boundary loosens and we are immersed in the imagery. To manipulate this state as in meditation requires a delicate balance between being receptive enough to allow the image intensity and vividness, yet focused enough to consciously reflect on them. Otherwise we awaken or fall asleep. When I want to sleep I welcome the latter. When I meditate, I maintain the balance so that I can enter a deeper, slower and more content-free state. Thompson gives a few methods for consciously manipulating this state.

Monday, January 12, 2015

Astute analysis of capitalism

In the video below. I like the conclusion on the just consequences for the bankers.

Krugman nails regressives on their hypocrisy, again

See this recent article. Regressives have long held that government spending does not in any way create jobs. Yet they're in a big hurry to pass legislation to spend money on the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. Their big rationale is that it will create jobs, so they're contradicting their usual canard about government spending not creating jobs. Furthermore, they could give a shit about creating jobs as evidenced by the jobs they failed to create by during their tenure as House majority. Plus they did the opposite with their sequester, as well as cutting 900,000 government jobs during their tenure. As everyone knows (except the idiots that voted for these lying charlatans), the real reason is payback for the giant contributions they received from the oil industry.

Waking, Dreaming, Being, chapter three continued

Continuing from this post:

In discussing the inadequacy of claiming consciousness doesn't require a physical body, Thompson makes an interesting distinction. He notes that forces and fields are physical but not material (95). This harkens back to the DL admitting that most states of consciousness have a physical basis, though some of those states may be very subtle, energetic, physical bodies. Nonetheless, the DL as well as Tibetan Buddhism generally still maintain that pure awareness can exist without a material and physical energetic basis.

The DL tries to get out of the phenomenological trap Thompson describes by noting that while one is in pure awareness they don't know they are, since that knowing requires conceptualization, which is absent in this pure state. After one has this experience they can look back and reflect that they were in it, so in that sense it is a third-person perspective. Thompson however does not buy this circular logic, finding them self-fulfilling prophesies based on one's traditional interpretations. And to date there is no physical evidence that can detect a pure awareness devoid of a physical body.

Regressive talking points about the homeless debunked

With facts. I know, they don't accept those pesky things that contradict their ideology. But for the rest of us with some semblance of reality, here's a video of how Salt Lake City is housing the homeless. It costs the city less to do this than paying for their emergency care and/or jailing them, so it belies the regressive talking point that we can't afford it. It also gives them the stability to go out and get a job, which contradicts that regressive talking point that it makes them lazy by giving out handouts.

Sunday, January 11, 2015

Integral ethics

In a recent FB post I linked to that now infamous, classic integral essay "Giving guns to children." I've been searching for articles on an integral ethics and found the below from PCC Forum, a presentation by Sean Kelly on a complex-integral ethics. The blurb on it follows:

This talk is a contribution to what I hope will be a more sustained dialogue between the project of integral theory founded by Ken Wilber and the method (or "Way") of complexity initiated by Edgar Morin. The focus for this portion of the dialogue is an inquiry into the nature of the ethical, with the assumption that such an inquiry can assist us in becoming more responsible participants in this most critical phase of the Planetary Era, the challenge of which can be understood as ethical to the core. Following a brief consideration of the idea of the Planetary Era, along with some preliminary thoughts on the nature of the ethical and its relation to theory in general, and to the project of integral theory in particular, I will explore several areas of conceptual overlap, complementarity, and creative tension in the proposals put forward by Wilber and Morin. These areas include: 1. a characterization of modernity in terms of a necessary differentiation and subsequent dissociation of constitutive elements (Wilber's "Big Three" of I, We, It; Morin's trinity of individual, society, and species). 2. the postulation of a fundamental ethical principle (Wilber's "Basic Moral Intuition" and Morin's notion of "re-liance"); 3. a multi-dimensional view ethical praxis with a focus on the transformation of
individual consciousness; and 4. a highlighting of the evolutionary primacy of love.

Friday, January 9, 2015

35 Democrats vote to gut Wall Street reform

Otherwise known as conservadems or corporate cock suckers. See the following from Daily Kos and please consider signing the petition to let these Wall Street lackeys know we will see them in the primaries.

sign the petition denouncing the 35 House Democrats who joined Republicans in trying to gut the Wall Street reform bill that Democrats and Elizabeth Warren worked so hard to pass in 2010.

On their second day in session, the House voted on a bill designed to weaken the most important protections of the Wall Street reform bill of 2010.

Thirty-five Democrats voted with Republicans and almost allowed the bill to pass. Fortunately, the bill didn’t meet the necessary two-thirds vote threshold to override President Obama's expected veto.

Interosculate

This Bryant FB post on the fractal nature of his Borromean theory reminds me of the word of the day, as well as a recurring theme at IPS:

Interosculate \ in-ter-OS-kyuh-leyt \, verb;

1. to form a connecting link.
2. to interpenetrate; inosculate.

Thursday, January 8, 2015

Senator Warren on the Keystone Pipeline

As usual she's on target. Who is served by regressives pushing this agenda? It isn't jobs or energy for the American people.

Waking, Dreaming, Being, chapter three

Continuing from this post:

He discusses a study of long-term meditators doing compassion meditation, which generated highly synchonized gamma waves. These are associated with alert and clear conscious awareness. A key ingredient of this sort of meditation is that it combines a general focus on an individual group with a strong affect or feeling of helping said focus. This reminds me of Lakoff's 'real reason,' where the body and emotions provide the basis for abstract thought, and by keeping this 'in mind' tames the abstract mind from dissociating into a purely ideal or absolute realm.

Thompson then says that the above style of mediation is of the open monitoring variety, where one does not select an object of focus but one remains open and attentive to whatever arises. I don't see how compassion mediation is of this sort, given its focus on people as objects of compassion, generated compassion being another object of focus. But letting that go for now, this sort of meditation trains one to distinguish the awareness itself from the objects it takes by noticing how the objects arise and then dissolve.

More evidence that Fox News viewers are the most misinformed

See this article citing a new U of MD survey supporting the above thesis. This study corroborates several others that have found the same thing: Fox News is a propaganda machine that blatantly lies to their audience to influence their votes and it works. A few facts from the survey on Fox viewers:

63% believe that Obama was not born in the US (or that it is unclear).
60% believe that climate change is not occurring.

Regressives don't learn, literally

Bryant noted at FB he has a new article on Luhmann. I've weaved both Bryant's work on Luhmann and Luhmann himself in various places like the fold thread, and most recently in the Waking, Dreaming, Being thread. So I got out my copy of Onto-Cartography, which I plan to review next, and looked up Luhmann in the index and read a few pages in the text. He's talking about how the operational closure of an organic machine like us can lead to confirmation bias that doesn't accept new input from its environment. However via what Luhmann calls 'second-order observation' we can open to new input that contradicts our bias and change our minds, i.e., we can learn (59 - 62). Which reminds me of this study showing that liberals are more open to new input and changing their biases while conservatives are not.

Wednesday, January 7, 2015

Dynamic scoring and voodoo economics

Thom Hartmann predicted it and it's come true. One of the first acts of the new House was to change the rule on how the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) scores budget proposals. Up until now the non-partisan CBO would make projections on how proposed policy would effect the economy, using tried and true methods that pretty much everyone agreed were accurate. But not the ideological regressives attached to voodoo trickle-down economics, whose false idol has always been that tax cuts on the rich, while reducing government revenue, will generate business investment and job growth. Never mind that it never has and never will; they still believe in this shibboleth despite all evidence to the contrary. So dynamic scoring builds this supposed increased job growth and the theoretical tax revenue into the CBO projections, thereby hiding the actual government deficits caused by the reduced tax revenue from tax cuts up front. It's voodoo math in support of voodoo economics.

Regressives plan to remove over 1 million from health insurance

Congressional regressives have a Bill that will change the Obamacare mandate, set to kick in this year and which would require employers with over 50 employees to provide insurance to full-time workers. Full-time is currently defined as 30 or more hours per week. The regressives want to change it to 40 hours per week. This gives greedy employers--not all of them are greedy but some are unquestionably so, usually those of the regressive party--will immediately change those working 40 or more hours to just under 40 hours so that they don't have to meet their insurance responsibility. The CBO estimates that 500,000 will immediately lose their insurance and another million will have to rely on Medicaid, thereby increasing the deficit by almost $74 billion over 10 years. Just another example of how regressives could give a shit about us regular, hard-working folk and pander to the rich and greedy employers who also could give a shit about their workers.

Let freedom ring

But which freedom? The regressives define it as freedom of individuals and corporations to do whatever they want for their own self interest. Progressives define it more broadly as balancing individual freedoms with society as a whole so that all benefit.


Tuesday, January 6, 2015

Regressives in new Congress go after the most vulnerable

This should be no surprise at all given their history. But they're at it again, this time going after those on disability insurance. The new House rules would cut it by 1/5 in late 2016. They claim that it's draining funds from social security retirement benefits but the linked article shows it's bogus. It's more typical of their hatred of the downtrodden and the social programs that help them. They are some seriously sick bastards.

Telotype writer

LP has an interesting FB post on telotypes. Hence it made me think of a telotype writer, sung to this tune:

Waking, Being, Dreaming, chapter two continued

Continuing from this post:

The referenced experiments showed that we tend to perceive a stimulus when there is a peak in a brain wave cycle, and not so when it hits a trough. I.e, much like the much longer waking and sleeping cycle, brain wave cycles that happen in milliseconds have a similar effect on perception. These experiements support the hypotheis of discrete, phasic moments. This holds true even for sustained attention of the meditative type. It's true that such meditative focus increases our ability to sustain attention, yet it is not continuous and alternates in millisecond intervals consistent with brain wave function.*

Further studies showed that adept meditators have better access and discernment to shorter millisecond stimuli. That is, there training allowed them to not only perceive stimulation of shorter duration, which non-meditators could do unconsciously, but to conscious report on and process it with the other 'aggregates.' Thus our experience is what we attend to, and meditation increases to what we can attend. But it's a long stretch to say that we can attend to all of reality per se and know it directly and fully given heightened and developed attentional skill.

Monday, January 5, 2015

More good news

from bellwether California Governor 'Moonbeam' Brown:

“'California, as it does in many areas, must show the way,' he said before introducing three specific goals: increase electricity derived from renewable sources from one-third to 50 percent, reduce vehicles’ petroleum use by up to 50 percent, and double the efficiency of existing buildings while making heating fuels cleaner. 'This is exciting, it is bold and it is absolutely necessary if we are to have any chance of stopping potentially catastrophic changes to our climate system,' he said."

Too true

This is exactly how I feel these cold winter nights.


Unavoidable conclusion

There is no other conclusion given the premises.


Good one


Regressives are wrong, as usual

See this for the details. Regressives predicted the following if Obama was re-elected. They were wrong in every case. I doubt you're going to hear any retractions though.

1. Gas was supposed to cost $5.45 per gallon. Right now it's under $2.
2. Unemployment was supposed to be stuck at over 8%. It's actually 5.8%.
3. The stock market was supposed to crash. It just had a record high of 17,823.
4. The entire U.S. economy was supposed to collapse. The U.S. economy grew at a robust 5% in the 3rd quarter of 2014, following 4.6% growth in the second quarter.

Waking, Being, Dreaming, chapter two

Continuing from this post:

While the Upanishads are unequivocal that consciousness is the infinite ground of being, (some) Buddhists contest this with the notion that consciousness is contingent and dependent on conditions. And yet it also has its own causal influence on conditions in an interdependent relationship of experience. But this seems to only explore human consciousness as one side of this experience, not the non-conscious experience of non-human (re)actants. According to object-oriented ontology even a non-living object still has some response-mechanism/experience to/of other objects, though that could hardly be called consciousness is the sense herein described. I sense a correlationism here that privileges human consciousness as a necessary prerequisite to experience.

Binocular rivalry is where two different images are presented to each eye. One will see each whole image one at a time alternatively. Studies of this phenomenon have shown that different levels of brain processing are involved, from basic sensory apparatus to higher areas that distinguish object categories. However the entire process is distributed, so that “visual awareness cannot be thought of as a end product of such an hierarchical series of processing stages” (28). Which of course reminds me of some of Luhman's research on the different interdependent aspects of a human being, that our bodies, emotions and mind have their own autonomy that indeed structurally couple with each other in our assemblage, yet there is no hierarchical transcend and subsume in this distributed network.

Friday, January 2, 2015

Waking, Being, Dreaming, chapter one

Continuing from this post:

He sets the stage with an ancient dialogue in the Upanishads. Our consciousness is the 'light' of knowledge of both the outer (gross, waking) and inner (subtle, dreaming) worlds. There is also a third state, that of dreamless sleep. Consciousness remains yet without any objects, inner or outer. It is a restful and peaceful state. And yet there is a fourth, not technically a state, just pure (causal) awareness that sees through and underlies all the other states.

The sacred syllable OM (AUM) represents and enacts the three states above via its intonation. The silence before and after the intonation, and/or the integration of all the syllables, is the fourth, “the nondual source of the phenomenal universe that's also identical to the transcendent self” (11). This is consciousness per se in kennilingus, the Self as pure awareness and cause of all phenomenon. In the continuing Upanishad tale mentioned above, this consciousness goes on after physical death and is reborn anew, until such time as we give up all desire and rebirth to dwell as one “with the infinite ground of all being” (13).

Regressives ignore the real problems

By hysterically fearing the small stuff because it feeds their xenophobia. God forbid should they actually take responsibility for the increased health care costs on everyone for their personal consumption habits, which cause far more deaths and disability.


Thursday, January 1, 2015

Drug test the real welfare recipients

The MI Governor wants to join several other States in drug-testing welfare recipients. Tom Hartmann gives us some facts about who are the real welfare recipients: corporations. The amount of benefits the poor receive are so miniscule as to be dwarfed by what tax-payer dollars are doled out to corporations. Regressives have such sick, twisted minds.

Senator Sanders' 2015 agenda

See this post for the details, as well as the video below. If this is your agenda then quit voting for people that are completely against it, to wit, the Republicans. Unless you're completely witless, as seems the case given the last election. The bullet points:

  1. Rebuilding Our Crumbling Infrastructure
  2. Reversing Climate Change
  3. Creating Worker Co-ops
  4. Growing the Trade Union Movement
  5. Raising the Minimum Wage
  6. Pay Equity for Women Workers
  7. Trade Policies that Benefit American Workers
  8. Making College Affordable for All
  9. Taking on Wall Street
  10. Health Care as a Right for All
  11. Protecting the Most Vulnerable Americans
  12. Real Tax Reform

Protection

This is from Lucinda Williams new 2-CD set, Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone. I love that title and I love this kind of sound. I'm looking forward to hearing the other 19 songs in the set.

New year's invocation

I don't see corporate Democrats as being at all a part of the progressive movement. The latter is more like Warren and Sanders, not at all interested in current economic pie gluttony. Quite the contrary and at 'war' with it, since this thread is about war (among other things). And war it must be, since the oligarchy is waging one on we the people. I say we invoke the metaphors (and God/desses) of war and have at it. Hail Ares and Kali! And may my pen be mightier than the sword.

Word of the new year

The word of the day is apt: incunabula. It means something in its earliest stages, like the new year. We might also say that of the integral movement and its models. It reminds us to not be so certain about what it is exactly, that we're still ironing it out. And that process will take considerable time, long after many of us here leave our mortal coils. Like with all new year's wishes I hope that I leave my mark, if only but an obscure footnote that someone reads and ponders on occasion. That I have some effect on treating AQALitus and moving the movement more toward the ecological Commons vision. Alas and alack, seems I'll never see that day, a new year's regret.