Can't say I was Robin Williams biggest fan but I was sad about his suicide and whether that was brought about by depression or anxiety and depression brought on by the early stages of Parkinson's disease.

Williams chose roles that were sensitive and important although I didn't always enjoy them and often I didn't see many of his films. Perhaps because they were usually as subtle as being hit over the head with an anvil.

But there was one part thing he did that echoed deep and that was Witman's barbaric yawp.

I too am not a bit tamed—I too am untranslatable;  I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
                            - Walt Witman

For those of us who admit to having barbaric yawps and I have no idea how many there are, because more of us are kinda a bit like Will Hunting, undiscovered geniuses who yawp mighty yawps, while celebrating ourselves and not really paying attention to how we treat proven friends.

It is tragic anyone would suicide for whatever reason and one of the surest ways to prevent suicide is by being useful and needed by friends.

Which brings me to another tragedy, soldiers returning from the wars are committing suicide at an extreme rate, and while they may have friends and be useful, PTSD may be so severe their friends and family may be beyond being able to help them. And this is tragic too.

When we think we are being rational, we are really pretending.

I know it seems like we are using our magnificent powers of deduction,
logic and abstract reasoning skills, but like all our brilliant scientific apparatus, and I hate to say this because I know this feeds the science deniers, that what we call rational is only approximately so.

Just as we live in our 3D universe where all dimensions are nicely homogenous, it is purely our brain turning our Reimann space into a nice cartesian space for us. And we know this is true because we know the earth is round. We know space is curved by the mass of objects in space, our powers of rational thought proved it to us, but nevertheless we live in Cartesian world because our brains make it so.

Newton, brilliantly figured out the movement of objects through frictionless space, how he did that I don't know because the other way we could describe our world is friction planet. We don't live in space where our bodies find it extremely difficult to adapt to friction free. The guys on the space station just love having fun with that.

On friction planet, up always comes with gravity, hardly homogenous.

All rational decisions, all deductive reasoning, at the end of the day, comes down to preference. No one can predict all the consequences of one's actions. It's like those fictitious butterfly wings that cause that tsunami in New York or Rottadam or where ever, actions ripple out across our space-time continuum.

We think we thought of everything and trip over unintended consequences all over the place.

Besides we know that all of our logic and abstractions end up with the shaky foundations of Godel's theorem. All our systems will end up broken, whether they are economic, political, mathematical.... I'm not saying we shouldn't try, I'm just saying we need to remember that there is error involved.

There is always a measure of uncertainty. Is Schrodinger’s cat dead or not? And if we look we interfere with the experiment. I can see that? If you were told you were the guinea pig in Monsanto's experiment, how would you feel? Well you are.

Despite not knowing the answers to everything, and it is possible we will never know everything, thanks to the power of our brains to forgot what is known and that all things will never be written down somewhere handy where it can be easily found by others.

Our brains are only so good, and that makes them awesome. Our brains perfectly model our environment to within tolerance and understanding. We know how the light switch works, we know how these computers work, or not.

We are constantly overestimating our tools and how much we know. We constantly underestimate how wrong we are about everything we know.

We proudly crow about our rationality and ignore kindness and compassion. Sometimes the intelligent thing to do is to forgo rationality and think about what we are saying.

Our society prospers because it is based on sharing. We share our labor, we share our skills, we share our resources and our time... and from the sharing we get abundance and survival.

As I have stated earlier we are pretty pathetic without our tools and without each other. We are easy prey for larger mammals and make an easy meal perhaps, but together we are utterly formidable.

We have brilliant communication skills, we have incredibly clever, we have tools and we organize and thus we are no match for other large mammals. The main reason we are formidable is that we share.

Our whole society is about sharing. We share our skills, our knowledge, our resources, our labor, our time... whatever it is we have we share.

In exchange we receive these tokens that we use to exchange for other things we need. And thus we survive together in abundance to facilitate our survival. We get wealth beyond the tokens, infrastructure, people acting on your behalf all the time, picking the fruit you will eat, picking the coffee beans that you will brew your coffee with all brought to you with optimally recent technology and a maximally clean cup, no not sterile, because that'd be inefficient and unnecessarily clean.  We know how to do good enough very well and we all benefit from it.

Except the problem is some of us see this as a model for scarcity. They do not see abundance, they see scarcity and as a result they try to take more than they share. Scarcity is one way to increase the value of in demand objects. This is why 'imperfect' potatoes are not sold in supermarkets for premium prices, they are often left to rot.

And this results in the tragedy of the commons. We pinch pennies by using bromiated flour instead of iodized flour, corporations do scorched earth farming to save tax pennies, corporations want to turn the DNA of food crops into royalties, and take from California its water while in severe drought to frack. Anything to make a few pennies.

Scarcity and abundance are perspectives. The Australian Aborigines lived in harmony with a desert environment for 40,000 years in abundance and westerns arrive and in 200 years decimate the continent with their scarcity farming techniques.

We are intelligent beings. we should be doing better with our farming techniques, and not continually see the commons as something to steal from to survive at the expense of others.

Us humans are very much social animals, we need each other to survive and thus the desire to belong to a community is overwhelming.
A community starts with your family. Many people have bad families and go on to form new families or join other communities.

Our belonging to society is conditional on our contribution. We are cared for, when we have downtime, because we contribute. Typically in most western societies, if you are unwell, the government ensures you get healthcare and can continue to survive when you cannot work.

Most western governments have this contract with their population, we need you and we will help you when you need help. Women need this contract because it is expensive to take off time from work when raising children. It is a detriment to her career yet she is expected to give birth and raise her children most often for free or with her husband's help in the US. Other countries will contribute to the women by helping her finance raising her children.

Her contributing children to the population aids in the long term success of the society. Children will grow up to replace older generations by doing the work, repairing the infrastructure of the society, producing the next generation of technology, and go on to produce the successive generations.

In light of our need for society, and we reap benefits from being part of that society, our society is a mechanism for sharing our skills, resources and time.

I help you, you help me.

We are also lazy creatures, our bodies like to conserve energy, so in the evenings when we come home from a hard day at work we turn on the TV and watch other human being interact with each other. This way we don't have to go to the trouble of interacting other other human beings and deal with the problems they have.

While we ask each other how the other is going, we mostly want to hear everyone is doing well and the day-to-day problems people have should be just background noise on our lives, not unless its major, then we'd probably like to be kept in the loop, but this is just for our acquaintances.

Real friends know about what is really happening in our lives. Real friends know your favorite colour, real friends probably even know what you ate for dinner. Real friends don't ostracize us on a whim and if they do, they are expected to explain why. If they don't it leads to people doubting there is real friendship to begin with.

Corporations leverage our desire to belong to sell us stuff. People pay a lot to belong to Apple world. I remember when the iPod came out, people were telling me how awesome their iPod was with its fancy price tag and having numerous faults. I had an MP3 player that never had a problem, held more songs than I ever played, was plug and play so I could also transport my PhD thesis, sundry files easily.

Other corporations have developed worlds too, Disney, Virgin, you buy the product so you feel like you belong.
Furthermore these worlds are yours forever to belong to until you choose not to anymore.

Our need to belong spills over into our tribalism. We form teams because this is how we survive. Do not underestimate the damage you do when community members are ostracized without explanation. Nor forget that you benefit more from society than the money you receive in exchange for your time, skills and resources. You get to survive because of it, something that money cannot buy.

In our society there are many things we do NOT talk about, they are secrets.

Most of these secrets involve women and especially rape. Women don't tell of their experiences because they are taught to feel ashamed and men, well men would never admit to being raped and would never admit raping anyone.

If you listen to mainstream discussion, they will say there are no rapes, all rapes are made up. We know rape is made up because women recant their accusations of rape all the time, they do it to hurt men, don't they.

Recently a number of women have told me of their rape experiences. These are rapes, no one even bothers to mention how many times they've been subjected to sexual assault.

Most women don't want to discuss their rapes because people will start evaluating whether they think it was rape, something they are prone to do. Women seldom report their rapes because they will get letters in the mail saying the police have decided not to prosecute their case despite DNA samples and photos of bruises. Men giving their bros alibis for when the incident occurred. Or women not getting a blood sample done in time to prove she was given date rape drugs. Or the FBI not even bothering to process over one million rape kits. And by some miracle you do get a prosecution getting a real sentence for the rapists, because the 14 year old brought the attack upon herself, or herself, because he is too rich, or no prison time..., or Steubenville, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.

So the woman gets raped, she gets a rape kit done which may or may not be examined, she goes to court and is treated like she is guilty because she is the victim (what was she wearing? was she drunk?) and yet she is only doing it to hurt the guy? What is the downside for a man raping a woman? As far as I can tell, there is none. He MIGHT have to go to court and then he might get a tap on the wrist.

Yet last night I was told that it was a woman's responsibility if she is raped. And some guys all gathered together to tell me so. They call themselves libertarians too. Its amazing how libertarians treat women's bodies as a commons.

What has shocked me is HOW MANY WOMEN HAVE COME OUT AND TOLD ME THEY WERE RAPED.

It occurs to me that if so many women have been raped there are a lot of men out there who are rapists because I think its very unlikely only one or two men are doing all the raping. It makes me wonder about all these men who deny rape statistics. Perhaps they are ashamed of their gender and don't want to believe the truth about other men. Or they have something more to hide and they deny something they did was rape. I think we should take a longer look at men who deny rape statistics.

Another secret is that men get raped too. While it is possible for women to rape men, lets be honest, men are also raped by men as well. Perhaps this is the biggest secret of all. Women are raped so they rape men and men rape men and great circle of silent sexual violence continues. Our homes are supposed to be a sanctuary.

I have the impression men think women's bodies are a commons, that women are there purely as ornaments that they can use for sex if they find them attractive enough and ridicule them if they aren't. And this is possibly why they don't want women in the workplace because men think of women only useful for sex and it gets distracting for the men.

Of course this is a generalization about men. A lot of men realize women are conscientious and intelligent workers who get the job done and are cheaper to employ than men. But an organization that employs more men is more powerful, because they aren't being distracted by women and women aren't as powerful.

Another secret is that women's breasts serve a real purpose, the production of milk for their offspring, which is dangerously close to something men would love to do and that's pornographic. This is why women are not allowed to breast feed in public. Women's breasts are only really valid in our society as ornaments.

Women getting periods, women having body hair, women having menopause, and smells are all a secret. I think this is because a woman's age is the biggest secret of all. We only really want to think of women as per-pubescent, hence as young girls who have no real personal power, inexperienced, immature and trivial. As we know from hurricanes with women's names causing so much damage because apparently we don't treat them seriously.

Women should ever expect to enjoy sex, but once they've had sex they are always lusting after men, as women accusing a man of raping her are put on trial when they accuse a man of raping her, "she must have been asking for it".

But more secrets are that some men are really bad at sex I've heard. Men actually do seek relationships with women because women make good friends. Men fear we won't praise them enough, they need to impress women. Men are very afraid they can't live up to their reputation.