We don’t know what age this is,
where once it was gilded,
the greatest, the iron and industrial,
we live in an age now without name,
we are afraid to name it…to accept
the emptiness of partisanship
the narrow confines of categorization,
the moments and hours and days
and weeks of shame, of hateful speech
of hateful politics of hateful…air;
an age of distrust of the very things
we stand upon, the ground we walk over
as it is not what it seems, not solid
any more…this age is so far less
than the ages before, polished
by history but this one…so far gone
that it may not come back, can’t seem
to be revived yet we must….
we must rename, must relive, must
throw off the yolk of “us and them” and
them and them and them…we
want to, no, no, no, we must
unleash the pent up, the hidden,
the silent of us all, the majority
who are fearful, who are there always
but sad and beaten down by it all…we
must rename this age,
retake this age, reverse this course
because this course is down, is down,
is down and destined for failure,
for death, for destruction…destruction
of ourselves, maybe not dead
(human dead), but dead (mind and
soul dead)…we must change
while the majority cry, we fear
we weep because we may not know
the way, we may not know
the buttons, the order to push,
we may not know the idea
that there is a way back, that ultimately
this age is harmful and painful
and without a name but,
we know that when we land, when that
long sought after solid ground
rushes at us at a thousand miles
an hour…we know that we will die,
we will cease, we will be
the nothing that this age demands…we
know we must not let this age
be nameless.

http://www.wimp.com/traineddunk/

People who know me know that I am not a sports guy. Far from it and, in fact, I have a certain disdain for organized sports simply from the idea (and reality) of the vast riches that are rained down upon men who play games. A group of people who get together to form teams in order to entertain themselves by doing nothing more productive than personal exercise yet are rewarded far and away more than people who save lives through medicine or change lives through teaching. People who do nothing that carries the progress of humanity forward.

Then I saw this.

While my mind hasn’t really changed, I do see a different perspective, a deeper meaning and level than what I saw before. The application of research and science and the sheer will to change what is “now” into something that will be “then” is the lesson learned. It is the lesson that should be learned regardless…

…if it’s basketball…

…or quantum mechanics…

…or the best goddamn widget tightener.

The application of research and science and the sheer will to change what is “now” into something that will be “then”…

Believe. Go. Do.

~TrevorZe

You feel very, very strongly for what you believe in. You have extremely strong feelings. I get it, I really do. You can’t for the life of you imagine what the fuck those other guys are thinking…it makes absolutely no sense to you…nor does it make any sense to your friends. I totally get that you want what is best for the people of America, all people, and that you’re only trying to get those other guys to believe the same thing. You try but you just can’t see it from their point of view; no matter what they say it all just sounds so…idiotic…and you can’t help saying that out loud.

It seems like their arguments are all based on a very narrow view about what should and shouldn’t be done…both of which you absolutely 100% disagree with…and that they will not seriously listen to you, no matter how you ask or the well thought-out arguments you have. You’re getting angry because it seems goddamn unfair, that they’re taking advantage of the system and definitely not playing by the rules.

You’re scared that they’ll win and you’ll be forced to do things that you don’t believe in and don’t want to support. You feel helpless to stop them and want the people who represent you to get off their do-nothing asses and change things…to stop those other guys from winning, from gaming the system.

You feel helpless and without power.

The four paragraphs above apply equally to every single person involved with the current government crisis. The thing that should bring us together—our passion and beliefs and the strength of our ideals—is exactly the thing that is tearing us apart. We are poised across a battlefield, staring and waiting for the other side to blink…for someone to inadvertently cough…to set off the greater war. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

It only takes a few simple, honest and heartfelt words to end this insanity but just saying them is likely the toughest action that anyone involved in this madness can take. There has to be someone who can swallow their pride, stand tall and throw off the yolk of fear and say…

…loudly and proudly…

“You know, those Iranians need some pounding, fuck this screaming about unsustainable debt and Obamacare bullshit, let’s go to war!”

And we call all be friends again.

Believe. Go. Do.

~TrevorZen

Very few people on this planet and especially in this country do things independently—e.g. on their own accord and entirely because they singularly want to—without feeling the inexorable pressure of society to do whatever it is that they are doing. Simply, people shame the poor because society tells them that they should. That shaming the poor is “good” for society.

WTF! You say? How could that be in any way good for society?

Consider what a society is firstly. The popular definition is that it is “…an organized group of persons associated together for religious, benevolent, cultural, scientific, political, patriotic, or other purposes.” So one of its main duties, as a society, is to perpetuate itself, to ensure its own survival. Typically, societies that have disappeared have done so because they could sustain themselves and they couldn’t do that because they did not progress toward something. In short, they stagnated and because they couldn’t change, they died off.

Progress is the life blood of any society; the willingness and ability of the society to evolve as circumstances change. An example is that on Easter Island they chopped down the massive forests that covered the island and soon ran out of fuel for fires and building materials. Yeah, they died or went elsewhere.

So what does the need for progress in a society have to do with shaming the poor? Well, the biggest motivator is that we live in a highly commercialized society which means we’re money based and do very little in the way of personal and public validation that does not in some way involve material goods. But material goods have relatively long lifespans so the need to buy something new versus replacing something you already have is not conducive to product sales. Now how do we increase product sales?

Shame the people who can least afford the products in the first place.

Shame them for being too poor to buy the products and constantly question why they’re poor. Compare them to the rest of society who are “worthy” of the products because, duh, they already own them. Make poor people lathe themselves because they are poor and for no other reason. Force them to hate themselves so that they will over extend their credit cards, beg, borrow and steal whatever they can…make them do whatever it takes to buy the products.

Politicians love this kind of society, in fact, it’s the kind of society that has bred the politicians we currently have. Corrupt, partisan, self-dealing, ignorant assholes only in it for the lobbyist job after and the vast power during. Politician absolutely fucking LOVE keeping poor people poor…all the while pretending to care and “do something” for them.

• Food stamps? Let’s keep poor people poor.
• Welfare? Let’s keep poor people poor.
• Subsidized university education to make it horrendously expensive? Let’s keep poor people poor.
• Regulations destroying industry and jobs? Let’s keep poor people poor.
• Crumbling infrastructure, schools and services? Let’s keep poor people poor.
• Social legislation? Let’s keep poor people poor.

There is no one left in government who is honest because if there were, then we’d have vastly fewer people who are “poor”. I’m talking about real programs that actually work as intended to help people rise out of poverty by letting them manage and own their own lives. Real tax reform which puts back into people’s pockets what they rightfully and legally earned. Real entitlement reform which ends corporate subsidies and welfare, stops paying farmers to grow nothing, stops subsidizing private industry.

A real government for real people.

That’s how we stop shaming the poor.

Two men are walking from opposite directions toward each other down an increasingly narrow pass in the mountains. They live on opposite sides of the mountain and are returning to their families bringing food and money home. They are coming to the midway point of the pass where on one side is the wall of the mountain going almost straight up thousands of feet, on the other side is a sheer drop…again, for many thousands of feet. In that place there is really only room for one man to walk safely down the path at a time. It is a crisp, clear day with visibility for miles and miles. Each man can see each other for some time before they’ll meet. Neither slows his pace. Closer and closer they come to each other, all the while maintaining their speed on the narrow path.

Finally, they meet up with each other at the midway point and have to stop moving. Neither has clearance to the other side for the path is blocked by the man in front of him and neither is backing up to let the other pass. They stand and stare at each other. Before they talk or make any kind of statement, let me ask a simple question;

“Who’s fault is this impasse?”

Both men saw each other coming from a long way away, both have equal rights to walk on the path, either could have halted until the path was clear. Either could have altered their travels—the path itself, the speed they were walking or even stopping—in order to avoid the other. Both kept walking, completely ignoring the progress the other was making toward the midway point.

That’s right folks…

…welcome to Washington DC.

Believe. Go. Do.

~TrevorZen

“Love yourself mother fucker!” Shouted the wizened old man on the corner or the street. I could barely see him he was so small, so half in, half out of reality…but I could hear him.

“For every shitty thing you hate about yourself, for every shameful little regret you have, for every spiteful and infantile overreaction you’ve ever screamed out…you will find every single one of those in the people you meet.” He went quite for a second…then shouted “Every single person you meet!”

I stood and just absorbed. A wind carried trash over my shoe, the cars rumbled past, I waited. The old man twenty feet away stared back. I waited.

Finally, just before jumping onto the crosstown bus he opened his eyes wide directly at me and said in a perfectly soft whisper that I could both hear and feel, “Love yourself and you will never see those things in another person again…and you will love them for it.”

I was thinking about this idea of income disparity and the rich getting richer, the poor getting the shaft, “a level playing field” and all the rest of the junk that’s come across the web indicating that unless the government does something to address this, we’re all going to hell and in a very bad and painful way.

Um, shit, where do I start.

From what I know of the world, regardless of income or location or social strata—actually any filter you want to apply—people will generally seek to; a) associate with people similar to themselves, b) shun (or avoid) people who are not similar to themselves, and, c) exploit any advantages that they have in order to do either ‘a’ or ‘b’.

OK, the idea that it is hardwired into our DNA for people to exploit advantages over other people is pretty clear. Evolution has pushed us to respond to competition for resources by making us very self-centered when it comes to survival and the self-centricity makes us seek advantage wherever we can. That is not to say that we didn’t also evolve into social groups where helping others has become an important aspect of humanity. No, that is true, it’s just not as important “within us” as personal survival is. Of about 100,000 years of evolution, only the last 3,000 or so had a social component therefore the overall effect is very low.

Seeking advantage in the modern world is not about the best berry fields, the best fishing spots or where the most abundant game animals are…no, it’s about the best schools that lead to the best jobs that lead to the best “lives” because we no longer judge ourselves on simple survival. We judge ourselves on our comparative “success” because more and more of us no longer think in terms of “survival”. Not that large populations don’t (hell, look at sub-Saharan Africa) but that the first world (what we are talking about) doesn’t…or not much.

If you could pass a law right now, this very instant, that everyone in the US is only allowed to make one specific wage (lets choose $100,000 a year) regardless where they live, who they know, who their parents are, what color or gender they are, etc., etc…do you know what the consequence would be?

Go ahead, take a guess.

Not much different than the social strata and impenetrable echelons we have today. Sure, I’m assuming that there will be less hunger and less homeless and less strife (because of the other two) but people themselves will still be the same. They will still seek to exploit advantages in order to self-select their social groups, to self-deselect other groups. People will still live in gated communities and people will still ignore the problems of any other group but their own.

Income equality solves only a very, very few problems and even then it doesn’t solve them well. People who are irresponsible will continue to be irresponsible. People who don’t give a shit about others will continue to not give a shit about others and on and on and on…

…income equality will not open some magical door to a Utopian future because, by necessity…

…people will have to be a part of that future.

And we have some evolving to do.

Believe. Go. Do.

~TrevorZen

http://blogs.channel4.com/factcheck/gun-control-what-can-america-learn-from-britain/12466

A friend (Donnie) asked me to respond to an article comparing and contrasting gun control in the UK and the US but I had to think about it for a bit before replying. The article was pretty good, by the way, (see below) and seemed evenhanded and fair in its assessment. It didn’t really result in any kind of prediction or assessment but instead let the questions themselves serve as an answer. Kind of a pussies way out but ultimately it served its purpose.

So my response? As a Libertarian I am all for the go-to response (which is “Less government. More freedom.”) because that’s the basic premise that I view the world with but in this case I actually have an easier answer.

Constitutional Amendment.

If it is so utterly important and so vital that we, as a country, control guns (I’m lumping all of them together, handguns, rifles, shotguns, etc.) for our safety and the safety of our families then it should be utterly important and vital enough to organize the masses and get together and CHANGE THE CONSTITUTION (just like we’ve done 27 times) to alter the 2^nd amendment. The amendment can be reworded to specify what kind of guns we can own or who specifically can own them or whatever we want and, in fact, it can even be nullified, effectively removing it from the document. All of these changes would then explicitly alter the law and allow the precise control of the weapons. The thing that people seems to be yelling about.

The problem is that there are not nearly enough people in the US who want to change the constitution.

It’s not even close.

To change the constitution you need first to write the amendment (itself a daunting task) and then, before an amendment can take effect, it must be proposed to the states by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress or by a convention (known as an Article V convention) called by two-thirds of the states, and ratified by three-fourths of the states or by three-fourths of conventions (the method of ratification being determined by Congress at the time of proposal).

That’s a shitload of folks all agreeing to the same thing—the removal or nullification of gun ownership—and, as said earlier, those people just don’t seem to exist at the scale required. What does exist is just a few, very vocal, very loud people (media attention kind of loud) who want the rest of the masses to do what they say…

…because apparently those few know much better what is good for the massively larger opposition. Get where I’m going with this?

Anyway, like I said, “less government, more freedom” but I do understand that we are a nation of laws and those laws must be predicated on something and that something is the constitution of the United States so…want to change the laws?

Change the constitution.

#nuffsaid

So this is my grand conspiracy theory around stuff like this…

http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/09/16/miss-america-nina-davuluri-says-shell-rise-above-hate-filled-racist-twitter-comments/

Twitter was actually invented by an elite corps of intellectuals in the thirties (yeah, I know, with no internet yet they had to wait a while before fully testing it) who saw the encroaching de-intellectualization of the planet and were literally aghast (the word “aghast” was actually invented to describe these feelings). They collectively and inherently understood that this de-prioritization of thought, this denunciation of progress, was the unique element that had the ability to completely and utterly destroy the planet upon which we all live and are dependent upon.

This highly functioning group was a cross-sectional crew encompassing intellectuals from all areas of the then current spectrum of geniuses…Einstein, Tesla, Roosevelt, Edison, Churchill, Rand, Twain, Bongo the Counting Horse, etc…whose main and singular goal was the establishment of a worldwide process for very publically and transparently identifying—with as high a degree of precision as humanly possible— every fucking idiot, wherever they resided on the planet and to fully and completely eradicate them.

Backed by a powerhouse, global consortium of various trust fund recipients (and the odd lottery winner), the movement was a strong and articulate advocate of thinking and progress who, until their funding ran out 6 months after their founding, sang the praises of truth and science throughout the world, including some of the more sketchy areas of Brooklyn. While the actual functional act of instantaneously vaporizing anyone whom the process identified as a fucking idiot was stripped out of the original device, the code is still there and can be activated at any time.

Fast forward 8 decades and we have Twitter finally in the form and carrying out the function that it was designed for so long ago in those Smokey back rooms…the Accurate Sub-Sonically Housed Objective Lame Enjoinder Device (or ‘detector’ depending which Wiki page you believe).

Also known as the “ASSHOLE Detector”.

If you read this article, it seems it’s working pretty damned good.

Now we just need to find someone who can work on that code.

Every time I take a shower, when I turn the water on, I overshoot where the comfortable setting is (I turn it all the way hot) for a few seconds then turn back to where I think it’s the right spot. Every time. I don’t know when I started to do it but I think the idea was that I could get it to the right temp setting faster if I made it hotter first. I have no idea if this actually works or not—the scientific method calls for me to try different faucet techniques and record them all to see which one gets the water to the right temp the fastest, and use that technique—but…

…I still turn that puppy to hot first, every single time, regardless it passing the science test.

I think religion is like me turning that knob all the way first. One day in our early history we had this idea about the universe—that some grand creator lived up there and made everything and was just like us only perfect, blah, blah, blah—and it kinda made sense considering the level of our information and experiences we had at the time. It answered the big questions we had at the time and the great thing about believing in god and religion is that there never needs to be any validation in order to continue believing. As long as believing doesn’t actually cause physically bad things to happen immediately (in fact nothing happens, ever, as a result of believing) then that seems to be validation enough for most humans.

Well, not me.

I’m ok doing the faucet trick because it really hurts no one and doesn’t really alter the shower taking experience—regardless it’s actual effectiveness—but I can’t say the same thing for religion. The idea that there is a supernatural creator, vain and spiteful at us humans, is old and ineffectual and, in fact, demonstrably harmful to the people and the planet itself. Israel/Palestine, Sunnis/Shiites, Muslim/western, Christian/Jew, Secular/Non-secular and the list goes on and on and on…

…without validation that religious beliefs are actually…well, real.

The bottom line is that we are a collection of 7 billion or so tiny, tiny little blips of animated matter scrabbling over the face of a spinning little rock hurtling through a small corner of an immensely huge universe and we only have each other to validate that we are alive, that we are meaningful and that we—each and every one of us—deserve to give and be loved. We are the ones we need to believe in…starting with believing in ourselves.

To give and be loved should be our religion…

…that would definitely pass the science test.

Believe. Go. Do.

~TrevorZen