I recently watched 'the anarchists' on HBO and it was very funny. Sad but funny. It was the kind of delusion that led people to go nuts for Trump. Why are people so easily led on by conspiracy? In my opinion it's because reality is by consensus. I know people (men) have scoffed when I've said that in the past because they like to believe there is some objective reality, but there is not - well mostly not. Most of what we know and think is contextual. Who I am and how I spell words, which words I chose is based on my context. It's based on years and years of 'this is how things are done'.

And how things are done depends on your social context. It's mostly the story of you. It fills your head with stuff like this is my home and these are the people I belong with. It is also why any kind of memory loss is so daunting for you and those close to you. I digress.

Anyway, the Anarchists don't see how they were cocooned by the influence of their US$$ and their government and how they had no way of protecting themselves from themselves or from others who may have problems with sharing reality. You don't have to be a veteran to have problems with reality, as the guy in 'the anarchists' did, which no doubt the 'anarchists' would blame government for veterans and the wars republicans inflict on us. Curiously once the US military destroyed the Iraqi government, spontaneous stability didn't develop instantaneously. I have asked 'anarchists' why this didn't happen but there was never an answer.

The cause that unites them is taxes. They are greedy and don't want to pay taxes. In my opinion I get way more from government than I get from corporations. For example, a stable economy, even corporations like a stable economy. Keeping a stable economy is difficult because republicans keep trashing the economy whenever they hold the presidency. Lowering taxation for those who can afford it does nothing for the economy but hurt the economy for everyone including the rich. And W trashed the economy hard. Needless to say Trump only wanted the presidency to help himself, whether it was to our money or keeping himself out of prison.

The government also stimulates the economy by offering incentives for various projects. Like the fixes to the road along the Big Sur, streamlining healthcare, paying for research like helping with the cost of developing technology...

The government also keep diplomatic relationships open with other countries to promote trade and for the benefit of the individuals whether it is tourism, business travel or other... 

I loved how the anarchists were all congratulating themselves on how intelligent they all are.

I used to assume if i could understand or do something then anybody could understand or do it also. I never thought I was particularly smart or had superior understanding and I still don't. But then one day quite recently that I was making all kinds of assumptions about others that were unjustified.

I don't know what you do or don't understand, what you chose to understand or what you decided to ignore, because I don't know anything about your education, your childhood or anything about your background. You may have decided to be not be particularly smart about math, for example, or your parents weren't particularly smart and told you it was okay to hate math... but I do think that how smart you is based on a series of decisions you've made over the years about what you were good at. But stuff happens. Perhaps you suffered some degree of brain damage so to some extent it is out of your hands how intelligent you can be.

There are all kinds of ways you can do to improve your intelligence.

1. Always check your assumptions. It can take awhile to even figure out what your assumptions are. Keep hunting, there is so much gold in finding out what your assumptions are. But beware the journey into wonderland like: what is real, who am I... this is the stuff of philosophers..., so be warned!

2. Question your sources. They may be saying something you've heard before, but it doesn't make it true. Why are they saying it, do they benefit from me believing, repeating what they said/say? If someone is saying something different, is it necessarily wrong?

More can be found in Sagan's baloney detection (critical thinking) kit, something we need commonly and now more than ever.

I remember thinking government is the problem, I'd heard it said, and I believed it. I have no idea why I even thought it, but I decided my belief was based on no real research or science and there are a great many people who benefit from dis-empowering government. For example I get much more from govt than I get from business. For example a stable economy, government is currently trying to control corporate greed by slowing inflation.

People will always try to put you in a box. Once they figure out which box you belong in, you are easily dismissed as irrelevant. The only way you can avoid being put into a box is by not using your most powerful weapon, your brain.

Why are women so mean to each other? I know I don't get it. Perhaps they know they can get away with it, after all women have been trained in the social pecking order. And women have been trained to roll over for it, whereas a man might hit you and he knows he'll probably get away with it because women have been trained to roll over after being hit, or whatever.

And sometimes those women we depend on most are the meanest, friends, mothers, sisters, female bosses, office mates... Perhaps that's about bonding, because mothers who are meanest have their offspring bond with them the most strongly, and perhaps that works beyond mother/offspring as what is commonly referred to as the stockholm syndrome?

I remember seeing women say 'I knew Amber Heard was lying', when I asked how they knew there would be silence, no answer... perhaps they answered but their response was buried under a pile of facebook spam. 

The biggest problem with all this blatant misogyny is that some men are using it as an excuse to abuse more women with their toxic masculinity. And now Dior are reusing the fat Johnny Depp ads for their toilet water 'Sauvage' which I can only assume smells like asshole.

Seriously, be nice to women. Giving birth has to be one of the most dangerous things humans do, yet women do it for each and everyone of us.

Okay I get the idea of the holy fetus so pure and innocent and when Bush couldn't find enough fodder for his wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he used the power of cancelling army contracts, thus heating up the need to end abortion. A mere 13 years later Roe v Wade has been cancelled by SCOTUS judges who got their law degrees from Wheaties packets (although my husband likes to call these degrees from valuable online non accredited universities). 

Once again Republicans have gone that extra mile in double think, the pro-life movement is really about building armies. When the Catholic Church banned abortion it was for Napoleon to build armies.

One time I was debating about abortion with some Bible Belt fundamentalists and their advice was to make sure I didn't get pregnant. This infuriates me because it's not about me. I have enough money to make sure I can have an abortion if I need, I live in a state where I have access to healthcare and abortion... I am okay and if I did get pregnant I would probably have the baby. People have heard me say I'd keep the baby and decided I was pro-life. But that is MY CHOICE. I can also imagine a million scenarios where abortion is a desirable option, for instance: no support, financial or help, no longer wanting to be in a relationship with the father, not merely because of rape, but he moved on to another partner, has another partner, went to jail, abuse, discovering he is addicted to... or some other deal breaker... 

Or there are problems with the pregnancy. My mother desperately wanted 6 children, she miscarried 3 of her pregnancies. I don't know much of what happened during the miscarriage because I was young and she never told me.

But many things can go wrong in a pregnancy and sometimes the miscarriage doesn't come out as normal. Indeed each fetus is a genetic experiment the universe is performing. If the experiment is a success then the fetus is born and grows up to go on to reproduce. This isn't normal, it's actually very lucky. Pregnancy is both extremely dangerous for both the mother and the fetus. If you haven't heard the statistics let me reiterate there are 198 preventable deaths from maternal mortality out of 100,000 births in the US, the highest in the developed world. 

This isn't about me, this is about all of us, or all women of child bearing age and their partners. Another woman was hysterically upset about babies who'd never receive kisses and cuddles because they were aborted. Seriously. To which I rejoined: forcing a baby to be born which the mother doesn't want won't guarantee the baby will get kisses and cuddles.

To join our society it is very much about apprenticeship, we join our society by being apprenticed by those who are meant to care for us from birth. Caring for an infant is very much a 24/7 job, a burden that people (usually the mother) must take on willingly. Some men like being care givers but the bulk of the work usually falls to the mother because of a so-called mothering instinct, something invented by men to make women shoulder the burden. Kids from the foster system are unlikely to be adopted because they'll receive so much abuse and we all know this, otherwise it is nothing but slavery. Or ask about Romania's Ceausescu abortion ban, and freakonomics argued that crime rates went down 18 years after abortion became legal.

Many women seeking abortions just aren't ready to put their lives on hold to be a mother. Whether it is because they aren't ready to be a mother or women who already have a family and don't want to explain to their siblings why they gave their brother/sister up for adoption and really want to do something else with their lives. 

For a better society make sure your children are loved and wanted and parented well and don't force women into motherhood as slavery.

The role of gender is very much a reference to how you see yourself within society. Our society tells us what gender means so having to do all kinds of changes to your body to feel like you can exist within a society probably means society is giving you bizarre messages about gender and while I understand there is a spectrum to gender, there really is only male or female in our society.

We were taught about the notion of transgender in the high school I went to and I remember thinking about it's relevance to me as a female. I am very much not your stereotypical female especially not then. I didn't want to be a mother, I thought the whole idea of having a baby inside of me was weird, I loved science, I was outspoken... was I really a male inside a female body?

In the end I decided I was me inside my own body. And the idea of getting gender reassignment was pretty hardcore; would I be swapping the frying pan for the fire? I didn't know at the time, because I didn't have a strong idea of the benefits of being a man beside the few men I knew were pretty awful, people I definitely did not want to be.

Now I have a fuller understanding of the idea of what it means to be female and male within the context of society. I have found more female role models, people I'd never heard of until I was older, and it helped me a lot knowing about women who went on adventures and talked to people and did things on their own.

If you feel the need to transition from one gender to the other, of course I support your decision, but is it society forcing you to feel uncomfortable within your own skin? Perhaps we need  to change society to broaden gender roles?

I used to work at a research institute that classified a software package called Maya as pornography. They may have been right, there isn't even a GNU version. GNU octave is a clone of Matlab. There are many GNU versions of paid for software. It is very expensive software but you can represent genuine physics within the MAYA environment. What makes this powerful is that we can simulate physics within the system. I thought this might be a great way to simulate insects and other biological systems within in.

Why is this important? When I build my systems on computers I get to test my hypotheses, see if I am right, find errors, fix those errors and prove myself right. This is great for finding flaws with in the model, find problems with  underlying assumptions...

Why I thought of this is I've been reading Edward O Wilson's book, 'letters to a young scientist', and in the prologue he mentions how he got funding for a website for all the insects. So I visited his website and it had been moved to the Smithsonian website. I guess at least it still exists but it's not as comprehensive as he made it out to be. Anyway that's why I thought of the models I proposed at this research institute.

I think this is a worthy attitude for all scientists, whether they are working with biology, physics, chemistry... of course many scientists are simulating their models, notably weather forecasters, and sometimes they get their models wrong, and sometimes they don't.

Even now we are seeing how deeply our planet goes in protecting us from ourselves, in all the damage we've done to the environment. Reading 'The ends of the world' by Peter Branner shows how many layers of protection there is, but most importantly, we have huge brains, we should be able to solve this problem, it's part of us achieving maturity as a civilization. but it's from our environmental models we've learned so much about our environment and as our models evolve as we learn, scientists build better and better models.

I watched a series about Ghislaine Maxwell. I did fall asleep during the middle of it, but basically what I saw showed how she did it all herself and no one helped her apart from the Duke of York and Jeffrey Epstein on sex fiend island. Although seemingly every high profile men of the 80s and 90s made their visit.

I don't know much about statutory rape law, but visiting probably doesn't necessarily prove guilt, unless prior knowledge was known of what was on offer during an island visit or you get there and figure out what''s going on and you lock your door and hide in your room if you had no prior knowledge. The law is a multifaceted thing, are you still guilty if you know it's going on and don't try to stop it? While this is the law sometimes, it may not apply to statutory rape on sex fiend island.

Apparently distancing yourself is enough to make you immune from prosecution as this clip shows and even if it happens in your home you are still immune, if you watch this clip as well.

It is awfully convenient that only Maxwell is to blame. I am not saying Maxwell shouldn't do time but she clearly is not the only culpable one here.

I remember hearing decades ago there was some high profile ring, but I didn't believe it was true. But now I believe it. I think the more I hear of the things men get up to the less I should be surprised by the evils of men; and certainly what their victims get up to as well. And I do think Maxwell had been a victim at some time in her life.

Belonging is a powerful need most of us share.

By this I mean we humans completely depend on our relationships with other people. It is part of our story of who we are, who our friends are, who your parents are, our relationships with our siblings, and our understanding of all these individuals relationships with us. Then there is what we do with our time. This is why amnesia and Alzheimer's disease are so utterly disorienting (especially for loved ones), why it is so difficult to make new friends, and why break ups are so daunting.

But being a victim does not give you a free pass to victimize others. To prevent victimizing others you will need access to alternative behaviors. Many victimized people do not go on to hurt others, but to not do so requires an awareness of alternative behavior. Victims tend to be isolated by their abusers so learning about alternatives might be difficult. And it might entail being okay with being alone, being able to find alternative role-models and enough self-awareness to ponder how the role-model might behave in such a circumstance. Even being aware of the possibility of asking yourself to empathize is a step towards preventing the perpetuation of abuse. This is based on my understanding of Lonnie Athens' research.

I believe hugging is better than sex, for what it's worth especially when that abuse was sexual.

I am currently reading Rebecca Solnit's book, The Faraway Nearby. And I am at the point where she is talking about money. I know I have often talked about money here but I think it is time to rant about it one more time.

Solnit is generally an excellent writer and a brilliant intellectual who I'd love to talk to some day, but I think she is wrong about money.

In my opinion we don't ask for favors because of the position it puts us in, Solnit thinks indebtedness, I think it puts us in the position of the person thinking they owe us something. I have asked people for things, like help opening jars for example, and the person thanked me for letting them help me. What I didn't realize was how he would grow to be obsessed with me.

People on the internet are calling this the Benjamin Franklin effect.

If anything, people want to reciprocate after a favor to make sure they don't incur unwanted attentions from the friend. And perhaps it works out as friendship for men, but for women asking for a favor from a man can provoke the obsession that I had no idea I was incurring. I don't know if it was the cause or if there was more at work, either way I think it is safer to stick to asking females for favors if you are female.

Money is the best way to avoid social interaction. You want/need something, you throw money at them and you don't have anything to worry about. You get your whatever... and you don't have to know anything more about the person.

Without money you have to talk to whoever is offering... whatever you want, and find out away to get it from them. Talking and time... I remember that when reading that book 'the kindness of strangers' as some guy hitched his way across America without money, in a vanity project where he carved a chunk of his life off and talked to people while they gave him lifts across America.

I think this is the root of why society has gone to a lot of trouble to keep money out of the hands of women. Women talk to people, find out about their lives, remember details, manage social interactions, because they have to to get what they want/need. But keeping money out of women's hands has the added benefit of making women a slave class.

I remember one guy who was writing something on a new economic model and I asked him about women being paid to raise children and he was shocked and said women do that for love. Love does not pay the bills or the rent or the mortgage. Raising children is expensive, time consuming, hard work. It's also a 24/7 job for pretty much all of two full decades and women are just supposed to do it for love? and if she does take a night off, and if something goes wrong, the first cry will be 'where was the mother'. And fathers who stay with the mother of their children aren't doing it for love?

But primarily it's about cheap labor. Women are largely treated as slave labor, domestically, and this is why employers resist paying women as much as men, because men think of women as slave labor at home.

I guess this is why men used to pay a price for a bride and then there was the dowry, I guess to get rid of a daughter that is of no economic use to her father.

For what it's worth I believe Amber Heard. So many don't because for some reason some of us feel the need to protect men.

I haven't followed the story, I haven't seen any of her movies, yet I have seen many and often enjoyed Depp films, but enjoying a film isn't the same as liking everything about a person acting in the film.
Isn't it the function of actors to adopt a persona distinct from themselves?

Constantly we see women receive huge amounts social ridicule based on them telling us their stories.

This includes Joyce Maynard who wrote about her relationship with JD Salinger in her memoir.
And pretty much everything Hillary Clinton said was turned into a joke.

The sexism women endure who put themselves forward in testament against a man is horrific, whether it is if she is raped, the ordeal she must endure to get any form of justice within the legal system is indeed horrific. From the rape itself, the collection of the sperm sample, then the court system, the lawyers, the defendant staring at you, and the often pathetic sentence the perpetrator receives - why would a woman put herself through that?

Or if a woman kills her violent husband it is never treated as self-defense, because a woman seldom can take her husband on in hand-to-hand combat, she will pretty much always lose. She cannot stand her ground, the castle law doesn't apply, it is 'his' home after all...

The legal system is really about maintaining social hierarchy, and has little to do with actual justice.

Because this all comes down to he said/she said, and as I've said in this blog before, he is always the poor innocent victim and she is always the vengeful harpy.

So any woman brave enough to accuse a man of abuse of any kind is truly brave and so yes, I believe Heard.

But what is worse is now they want to take away a woman's right to be able to determine her own life. They don't target 'do not resuscitate' orders or men who don't wish to wear face masks, but probably the most powerless in society, poor young women.

No doubt Putin was emboldened by his success in the US and with Brexit to launch this war on the Ukraine. But Putin wasn't alone and no doubt was only successful because libertarians amplified and perpetuated his misogyny with their own.
I am so sorry Clinton wasn't elected in 2016 because I am sure many more Americans would've been alive today if Trump hadn't been elected and Putin would never have invaded the Ukraine if it wasn't for his success meddling with the 2016 election of Trump.
What I find bizarre is how many people never bothered to read Clinton's platform, never bothered to fact check any of the stream of lies spewed about her, yet ignored and refused to believe the stream of truths about Trump.
We have photographic evidence of Trump's creepiness yet people believed in droves the ridiculous pizzagate.
I remember some of the nonsense I heard which included Clinton was the reason for her husband's infidelity. I said to the man who said this tragic piece of stupidity: so if your wife cheats on you, we should blame you for her cheating?
There was no response. Yet we know there was cheating with Ms Daniels and suddenly cheating is completely irrelevant.
I don't know how many libertarians were actually Russian hackers, some, many... but there were plenty of Americans who believed the lies and propagated them, including Glenn Greenwald and Naomi Klein, who really should have known better. But Libertarians have never been credited with an over abundance of intelligence despite their self described superiority (are there better examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect?)
Yet libertarians kept offering alternatives to Clinton who had no hope in hell of being elected, which resulted in the election of Trump, and thus emboldened Putin to invade the Ukraine.