Category: Journal

Déjà Vu

Déjà vu is the oth­er phe­nom­e­non that to me is eas­i­ly explain­able. Déjà vu is the expe­ri­ence of sud­den­ly feel­ing like you have been here before, like every event that hap­pens has hap­pened before. You remem­ber it in incred­i­ble detail. If there is somethere talk­ing, you remem­ber every word he or she says…just as they say it. You can nev­er quite pre­dict what will hap­pen next, but it feels like you should be able to.

This is not caused by any mys­ti­cal force, it is not because you dreamed the events pri­or to the time they take place. It is a result of the sub­con­scious mind pro­cess­ing things at a much high­er rate of speed than the con­scious mind. I think, once in awhile, a “fil­ing” error occurs and what is hap­pen­ing now is get­ting filed as an old mem­o­ry. So when the con­scious mind becomes aware of the glass falling off the table, the uncon­scious mind is ready with the “long ago mem­o­ry” that was cre­at­ed mil­lisec­onds before.

And déjà vu.

Slow Motion

Two days ago, I men­tioned how the event of slip­ping while car­ry­ing the buck­et of sauce took place in “slow motion”. I assume most have expe­ri­enced this phe­nom­e­non, but for any­one who has not…

Some­times in a moment of “cri­sis” events seem to take place very slow­ly in rela­tion to one’s thought process. The result is that in what is a frac­tion of a sec­ond, one can ana­lyze what is hap­pen­ing, go through a hand­ful of pos­si­ble respons­es, choose one, and still react quick­ly (not move quick­ly, just react quickly).

I have a the­o­ry on how this hap­pens and it has to do with yes­ter­day’s top­ic, con­scious­ness.

Nor­mal­ly, the con­scious mind has some­what lim­it­ed access to the sub­con­scious. Yes, infor­ma­tion read­i­ly moves from the uncon­scious to the con­scious, but the con­scious mind plays the pas­sive role of accept­ing the info with out hav­ing any role in its pro­duc­tion or any insight into how it is produced.

But some­times, in a “cri­sis” sit­u­a­tion, that rela­tion­ship changes and the con­scious mind is allowed access to the sub­con­scious work­ings. I sus­pect that the sub­con­scious process­es infor­ma­tion at a much faster rate than the con­scious mind can. When this faster pro­cess­ing is avail­able to the con­scious mind’s purview it seems like time moves more slow­ly than otherwise.

It is noth­ing more than “see­ing” the sen­so­ry infor­ma­tion processed at a much high­er rate of speed than the con­scious mind nor­mal­ly “sees”.

Tomor­row: déjà vu

Consciousness

Con­scious­ness is one of my favorite topics.

Con­scious­ness is inter­est­ing because so lit­tle is known of it (noth­ing for all intents and pur­pos­es) and because we all have the same access to it. We have our own and that oth­ers have it we real­ly can only accept on faith.

It is my expe­ri­ence that many peo­ple are not clear what is being dis­cussed when con­scious­ness is the sub­ject, so this post is my attempt to define consciousness.

If you would please indulge me, I ask that you close your eyes (not yet) and count to ten. Do this with­out mov­ing your lips and be sure that each num­ber is “enun­ci­at­ed” in your mind. Then be sure to open your eyes.

Go ahead and do that. I’ll wait.

Now, I would like you to point to the loca­tion where you count­ed to ten.

As I under­stand it, most peo­ple will point to right between their eyes. But some peo­ple will point to oth­er part of the body, par­tic­u­lar­ly the chest. A rare indi­vid­ual might point away from their body to a cor­ner of the room perhaps.

That loca­tion, that space, is your con­scious­ness. When I talk of con­scious­ness, that is what I’m talk­ing about.

I point right between my eyes. Where do you point?

Jets!!

Some cool videos of what hap­pens when a sphere falls into sand…

…from NPR’s Sci­ence Fri­day.

…from Dis­cov­er Mag­a­zine.

…from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go.

Below is my favorite:

This reminds me of when I worked for Domi­no’s Piz­za in Bloom­ing­ton, Indi­ana. I was a Man­ag­er Trainee (inden­tured ser­vent). One day we were set­ting up for open­ing and I was car­ry­ing buck­ets of sauce from the walk-in cool­er to the make line. A buck­et of sauce was maybe two gal­lons of sauce.

I walked out of the cool­er and slipped and fell. Every­thing hap­pened in slow motion. As I start­ed to fall my pri­ma­ry con­cern was to not spill the sauce. So I held on to the rim of the buck­et tight with both hands and tried to “catch” my fall with the upright buck­et. I was sur­pris­ing­ly suc­cess­ful at this and for a mil­lisec­ond I thought all was going to be well.

But then the sauce moved. It hol­lowed at the mid­dle and then gath­ered togeth­er and rose in a col­umn to the ceil­ing. There was very lit­tle left in the still upright and unmoved buck­et when all was said and done. The sauce was on the ceil­ing, the top of the cool­er, the table, the floor, and me.

It was worth it.

The above video’s also bring to mind one of my favorite sci­ence fic­tion reads from the six­ties:  A Fall of Moon­dust by Arthur C. Clarke in which a moon vehi­cle sinks into the fine dust of the moon’s surface.

Separation of Church and State

As some­one who does not believe in the divin­i­ty of Christ or in the Bible as the word of God, I am grate­ful for the con­sti­tu­tion­al sep­a­ra­tion of church and state.

My grat­i­tude is top of mind late­ly as I read the con­ver­sa­tion in the com­ments of one of Rick­’s posts.

It is dif­fi­cult enough dis­cern­ing the mean­ing of the con­sti­tu­tion with­out hav­ing to also deter­mine the mean­ing of the Bible.

The con­ver­sa­tion linked to above con­cerns polyg­y­ny and whether the Chris­t­ian God approves or not. If you are a Chris­t­ian, I guess that means some­thing. But what it means depends on what kind of Chris­t­ian one is and how one reads the Bible. And, of course, every­one thinks they read it cor­rect­ly. But if one is not a Chris­t­ian, then what the Chris­t­ian God says has no more relevence than what Odin has to say.

Whether the coun­try should allow polyg­y­ny (or homo­sex­u­al mar­riage) is a pub­lic pol­i­cy ques­tion. A pub­lic pol­i­cy ques­tion should be decid­ed based on real world evi­dence of what is hap­pen­ing in the world today and what the con­sti­tu­tion says (and maybe chang­ing the con­sti­tu­tion if nec­es­sary). The prin­ci­ple con­sid­er­a­tions should be whether some­one is being harmed or not, and whether a giv­en out­come enhances civ­il peace and pros­per­i­ty or dimin­ish­es it.

Happy Independence Day

Bart Gragg points me to an arti­cle about Noreen Evans, an Assem­bly Mem­ber in Cal­i­for­nia. Cal­i­for­nia, as I under­stand it, is in the midst of a seri­ous bud­get cri­sis. Evans is quot­ed in the arti­cle as saying

This mantra out there ‘live with­in our means,’ while it sounds real­ly nice, while it sounds real­ly sim­ple and it sounds real­ly respon­si­ble, it’s meaningless.

My first thought is that Mr. Coupal, of The Howard Jarvis Tax­pay­ers Asso­ci­a­tion, did not give enough con­text for the quote. I found a You Tube video of Evans’ com­ments. She added to the quote above:

Our means are com­plete­ly with­in our control…In good times we rou­tine­ly give away tax­es and in lean times we nev­er replace those tax deduc­tions or close those loop­holes. We con­tin­u­ous­ly bor­row, which is an enor­mous cost that we shift on into future years and we find our­selves now with a deficit, an ongo­ing struc­tur­al deficit that we sim­ply can’t close.

It is not clear who put the video togeth­er, but it is clear it was not done by some­one in agree­ment with Evans. I give cred­it to who­ev­er did it for pro­vid­ing a fuller context.

OK. That appears to be what was said. In my book, giv­en the con­text, Evans is cor­rect (but also wrong). Since the gov­ern­ment con­trols what the means are, to live with­in one’s means is, at best, a slip­pery con­cept. The prob­lem here is that it is still nec­es­sary to live with­in the means, whether it is by increas­ing the means or decreas­ing the living.

My grasp of what is hap­pen­ing in Cal­i­for­nia is slim at best and most­ly ground­ed in Jay Leno jokes (and I have not watched Leno in sev­er­al months). So from here on out I am talk­ing in the con­text of the fed­er­al government.

No one in gov­ern­ment will use the con­trol of the means so that we live with­in our means. 

No one. Not the Democ­rats and not the Repub­li­cans.* I want so much to write:

The Democ­rats vote to maintain/​add pro­grams and raise tax­es while the Repub­li­cans want to cut pro­grams and cut tax­es and some­how this results in lots of pro­grams and low taxes.

But that would not be true. Repub­li­cans say they want to cut pro­grams and cut tax­es, but the empha­sis is cut­ting tax­es and the real­i­ty is cut­ting tax­es. Cut­ting pro­grams just gets lip ser­vice. It is my under­stand­ing that even Rea­gan man­aged to elim­i­nate only one pro­gram in eight years.

Democ­rats can­not raise tax­es suf­fi­cient­ly to pay for all the pro­grams because Repub­li­cans will raise hell and, we the peo­ple vote the Democ­rats out and the Repub­li­cans in and the tax­es get cut but not the pro­grams. Gen­er­al­ly, the Repub­li­cans are hap­py to run with deficits as long as tax­es are low and the deficits are not caused by any new programs.

The Democ­rats run on the issue of need­ed new pro­grams and we the peo­ple agree and vote them in. Pro­grams get added, some tax­es get raised (but not enough and deficits con­tin­ue) and Repub­li­cans run on cut­ting taxes.….

Note that the com­mon­al­i­ty in both sides of the prob­lem is we the peo­ple.

We the peo­ple like our pro­grams. We the peo­ple would of course rather have low­er tax­es than high­er tax­es if giv­en the choice. What’s a con­gress­man and sen­a­tor to do?

Two hun­dred and thir­ty three years ago, fifty six men, rep­re­sent­ing the thir­teen colonies, signed the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence. Their sig­na­tures appear just below the last sentence:

And for the sup­port of this dec­la­ra­tion, with a firm reliance on the pro­tec­tion of Divine Prov­i­dence, we mutu­al­ly pledge to each oth­er our lives, our for­tunes and our sacred honor.

Their lives, for­tunes and sacred hon­or.

Our con­gress­man and sen­a­tors today are not will­ing to put their own reelec­tion on the line, let alone their lives, for­tunes and sacred hon­or. And there you go. We the peo­ple want pro­grams with­out tax­es and our elect­ed offi­cials are not will­ing to dis­il­lu­sion us for fear we will not reelect them.

Three days ago I post­ed A Sea of Red Ink. My hope expressed there is that by run­ning the deficit/​debt up to unprece­dent­ed lev­els, our reps will then have no choice but to show some back­bone, risk reelec­tion, and fix the problem.

In the mean­time, if you com­plain your tax­es are too high, be sure you include in your com­plaint what pro­gram you would also have cut.

My best to Cal­i­for­nia. I hope they fig­ure some­thing out.

*Yes, Ron Paul would prob­a­bly cut every­thing, but one man is not enough (and peo­ple would want him lynched after their favorite pro­gram got cut).

Don’t Take Burning Man So Literally

Via Alt­house, at Law.com, a man who

“did not think it was dan­ger­ous to walk sev­en to 10 feet into the fire’ even with flames on either side of him”

can­not sue the orga­niz­ers of the Burn­ing Man event accord­ing to San Fran­cis­co’s 1st Dis­trict Court of Appeal, even though

Ben­i­nati caught his foot on some­thing, “tripped and fell into the fire twice, bad­ly burn­ing both of his hands.”

It’s nice to know that there is a point at which a per­son is respon­si­ble for their own actions.

Sarah Palin

I guess Mrs. Palin had sym­pa­thy for Michael Jack­son’s fam­i­ly. I come home and it seems like every­thing in my Google Read­er is about Sarah Palin. There is plen­ty of spec­u­la­tion about why she is resigning.

I have seen argu­ments that her resign­ing the gov­er­nor­ship will not hurt her pres­i­den­tial chances in 2012, and I have seen argu­ments that her chances for the pres­i­den­cy are now fin­ished. I would tend to agree with the lat­ter. I do not see some­one win­ning the pres­i­den­cy when oppo­nents can point and say “quit­ter.”

Time will tell.

I have nev­er been a fan of Sarah Palin. But I can see how she did well in Alas­ka. And I can see how she may have been good for Alas­ka. Alas­ka has 571,951.26 square miles and a pop­u­la­tion of 686,293 for a den­si­ty of 1.19 peo­ple per square mile. Plus, the state has large quan­ti­ties of nat­ur­al resources. Res­i­dents do not pay state tax­es, they get a check from the state for their share of the nat­ur­al resource prof­its! (that’s social­ism if any­one cares).

Giv­en those facts, how much state gov­ern­ment do Alaskans need? Very lit­tle. Pal­in’s ide­ol­o­gy is min­i­mal gov­ern­ment. A per­fect fit.

When Palin was picked as McCain’s VP can­di­date, I had two prob­lems with her. I did not agree with her ide­ol­o­gy and she was not pre­pared to deal with the issues of the coun­try at large. Yes, she had her ide­al­o­gy and she had what she knew to do for Alas­ka, but she clear­ly had not giv­en the issues of the coun­try as a whole much thought. I would want the VP to have spent a bit more time think­ing about Iraq, Afgan­istan, Israel, and Iran; health care, reces­sions, bub­bles, and fed pol­i­cy than can be done in a six month cram ses­sion while furi­ous­ly trav­el­ing the coun­try campaigning.

I have no idea of what her plans are. And I wish her well. But if she is plan­ning to run for pres­i­dent in 2012 or 2016, I hope she uses the inter­im time to become famil­iar with the issues that a pres­i­dent may have to deal with so she can dis­cuss them with­out so much reliance on con­ser­v­a­tive boilerplate.