end of the year sale
what have i done?
list achievements here
list new years resolutions there
i resolute to spend less time working for the man
i will record another cd
i will launch 'adventures' with my band
i will write new songs and a few new short stories
i will go to the amazon and drink ayahuscia with the cat people
i will get myself a giant robot like gort
i will get healthy and slim
i will learn new skills
i will learn old ones i have forgotten
i will increase my social network
i will save the planet (with assistance from gort)
i will tell people i love them and i am happy that they are my friend
i will meditate
i will do yoga
i will surf
i will go to gym
i will write blogs better
i will dream more
i will love better
i will not live in fear
i will fix my bathroom
i will attempt to be friendly to the people downstairs
i will attempt to be kinder
i will attempt to be less grumpy
i will take more plant medicines
i will get up early
i will enjoy the wind
i will walk in rain
i will feed the ducks
i will stop and smell the flowers
i will take much more dmt
i will dance on the head of a needle
i will attempt to push a camel through its eye
i will eat all the food on my plate unless it is animal
i will drink from the fountain of truth and youth
i will dance
i will trance
i will bring back gifts
i will travel light
i will lighten my load
ok
tonight i have to meet my brother to watch fireworks from a luxury apartment in the city. i have never even been in a luxury apartment before so im kinda nervous. what do i wear. do i have to bring anything. do i need to mind my ps and qs?
i'll report in tomorrow with the answers
have a safe and wonderful night.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
and another poor attempt at reverse propaganda here's melanie philips post
Groundhog Day For The Fifth Column Of Malice
MONDAY, 29TH DECEMBER 2008
So there is indeed now a war. In Gaza. Actually, there are two wars going on: one involving rockets and warplanes, and the other involving the media, as Barry Rubin notes:
Nothing is clearer than Hamas’s strategy. It gives Israel the choice between rockets and media, and Hamas thinks it is a situation of, ‘We win or you lose.’...The smug smiles are wiped off the faces of Hamas leaders. Yet they have one more weapon, their reserves, they call up the media. Those arrogant, heroic, macho victors of yesterday--literally yesterday as the process takes only a few hours--are transformed into pitiful victims. Casualty figures are announced by Hamas, and accepted by reporters who are not on the spot. Everyone hit is, of course, a civilian. No soldiers here. And the casualties are disproportionate: Hamas has arranged it that way. If necessary, sympathetic photographers take pictures of children who pretend to be injured, and once they are published in Western newspapers these claims become fact.
All too predictable – and going to plan, with assistance from the Club of Terror UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon who condemned ‘excessive use of force leading to the killing and injuring of civilians’, and Navi Pillay, the ludicrous UN High Commissioner for ‘Human Rights’, who ‘strongly condemned Israel’s disproportionate use of force.’ Of course, the Club of Terror UN has been silent about the actual violations of international law by the Palestinians, as pointed out here by Justus Reid Weiner and Avi Bell:
The Palestinian attacks violate one of the most basic rules of international humanitarian law: the rule of distinction, which requires combatants to aim all their attacks at legitimate targets - enemy combatants or objects that contribute to enemy military actions. Violations of the rule of distinction - attacks deliberately aimed at civilians or protected objects as such - are war crimes.
Furthermore, say Weiner and Bell, Israel actually has a legal duty to take action against Hamas under the Genocide Convention:
In carrying out their attacks on Israeli Jews as part of a larger aim to kill Jews, as demonstrated by the Hamas Covenant, many of the Palestinian terrorists are also violating the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. Under Article 1 of the Genocide Convention, Israel and other signatories are required to ‘prevent and punish’ not only persons who carry out such genocidal acts, but those who conspire with them, incite them to kill and are complicit with their actions. The Convention thus requires Israel to prevent and punish the terrorists themselves, as well as leading figures that have publicly supported the Palestinian attacks. Article 2 of the Convention defines any killing with intent ‘to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such’ as an act of genocide.
But for exercising its legal duty in accordance with international law, Israel is condemned and told to stop by politicians such as French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Miliband. The moral inversion is staggering. Miliband has called for an immediate ceasefire by Israel. The implication is that Israel should suffer the Palestinian rockets attacks indefinitely.
If anything has been ‘disproportionate’, it’s been Israel’s refusal to take such action during the years when its southern citizens have been terrorised by rockets and other missiles raining down on them from Gaza. No other country in the world would have sat on its hands for so long in such circumstances. But whenever Israel defends itself militarily, its response is said to be ‘disproportionate’. The malice, ignorance and sheer idiocy of this claim is refuted here comprehensively by Dore Gold, who points out that Israel’s actions in Gaza are wholly in accordance with international law. This permits Israel to launch such an operation to prevent itself from being further attacked. Moreover, it defines ‘disproportionate’ force as when
force becomes excessive if it is employed for another purpose, like causing unnecessary harm to civilians.
But Israel has demonstrably not been targeting civilians but Hamas terrorists. Despite the wicked impression given by the media, most of the casualties in this operation have been Hamas operatives. Even Hamas itself has admitted that the vast majority of sites Israel has hit were part of their military infrastructure. UNRWA officials in the Gaza Strip have put the number of deaths at 310, of whom 51 were civilians. The rest were Hamas terrorists.
Certainly, some civilian casualties are regrettably inevitable in any such situation – but particularly so in Gaza, since Hamas has deliberately sited its terrorist infrastructure amongst the civilian population.
Those who scream ‘disproportionate’ think – grotesquely -- that not enough Israelis have been killed. But that’s in part because Israel cares enough about human life to construct air raid shelters where its beleaguered civilians take cover; Hamas deliberately stores its rockets and other apparatus of mass murder below apartment blocks and in centres of population in order to get as many of its own people killed as possible as a propaganda weapon. Hamas is thus guilty of war crimes not just against Israelis but against the Palestinian people. Yet on this there is – fantastically, surreally – almost total silence in the west, which blames Israel instead. Historical resonances, anyone?
In any event, if by ‘disproportionate’ is meant merely an imbalance in the numbers who are killed on either side, this is actually inescapable if the infrastructure of aggression is to be defeated. Many more died in Afghanistan than in the 9/11 attacks; yet that war was necessary to destroy the Taleban. Many more died in Nazi Germany or Japan than in Britain or America during World War Two. Yet the scale of the Allied offensive was necessary to defeat Nazism and prevent yet more carnage amongst its designated victims.
The disgusting fifth column in the Gaza conflict, however, is – as ever – the western media. It was telling to witness the sight of British TV camera crews heading out to Israel on Saturday night. The point was that they weren’t already there – because their editors had not thought it necessary to send them to cover the resumed rocket attacks on southern Israel. Indeed, hardly anyone in Britain is aware that Israel is only now finally responding to some 6000 rocket attacks since 2001, with a fifty per cent increase after Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. British journalists were only dispatched to the battle zone when Israel finally retaliated – because, appallingly, it is only Jewish violence that is ever the story.
As a result, Israel is painted – wholly unjustly and untruthfully -- as the aggressor. The ineffable BBC reported in radio bulletins on Saturday that Israel’s attack had ‘put back the chance of peace in the region’. Most sane people would think that the reason peace in the region had been put back was that Hamas was continuing to wage aggressive war. And indeed, even now it is still firing rockets at Israel, including Katyushas and Iranian Grads which are reaching as far as Ashkelon and Ashdod. Today they killed another Israeli in Ashkelon and injured many more -- including several Israeli Arabs.
If the media have mentioned the attacks on Israel at all, they have done so as an afterthought. The main story is ‘disproportionate’ Israeli violence. As far as I can see, there has been no mention of the extraordinary fact that on the day prior to the start of the Israeli operation, a Palestinian from the Gaza Strip was admitted to hospital in Israel for medical treatment for a severe wound -- inflicted upon him by a stray Hamas rocket which had been fired at Israel.
What other country would treat its enemies in its own hospitals – which Israel does routinely with Palestinians from Gaza -- even when they are wounded as a direct consequence of their own side trying to murder yet more Israelis? What other country would provide or enable the supply of electricity, gas and other essentials to people who use such facilities to continue trying to murder as many of its cititzens as possible? On Sunday, for instance, as Ha’aretz reported, the Kerem Shalom crossing was opened to let through 26 trucks carrying food and medical equipment. Today it was opened again and about 40 trucks had entered with food and medical supplies by midday. Yet organizations such as Amnesty International have condemned Israel's imposition of all ‘blockades’ on the Gaza Strip as ‘collective punishment’, and Jeremy Hobbs, Director of Oxfam International, has called on Israel ‘immediately [to] lift its inhumane and illegal siege’.
Yet it is Hamas that is refusing wounded Gazans access into Egypt for treatment -- and indeed the Egyptians even opened fire on them. So where are the screams about Egyptian and Hamas brutality? Where are Amnesty and Oxfam’s condemnation of Hamas and Egypt? And might all those from the Foreign Secretary down screaming about a ‘humanitarian disaster’ in Gaza pause for one second and look at the well-fed, healthy Gazans parading across their TV screens? If that’s a ‘humanitarian disaster’ – with supplies constantly pouring through the illegal tunnels from Egypt, along with billions of dollars-worth of missiles with which to commit mass murder -- what do they call what’s happening in Zimbabwe, which for some unaccountable reason inspires among the high-minded merely indifference?
Such bigotry and malice are not confined to British media and NGOs. On Salon, Glenn Greenwald whines about
America’s one-sided support for whatever Israel does from our political class, and one-sided condemnation of Israel's enemies (who are, ipso facto, American enemies) -- all of it, as usual, sharply divergent from the consensus in much of the rest of the world.
Oh really? Well, Hamas has been blamed for this war by Mahmoud Abbas, who said Hamas could have avoided this attack if it had prolonged its ‘cease-fire’. It has been blamed for this war by Egypt; and Arab states which are terrified of Islamism in general and Iran in particular are privately rooting for Israel to wipe Hamas out. Even the Israeli left is supporting this operation. The only people taking the side of the genocidal terrorists of Hamas are the western media, parroting their propaganda and thus inciting yet more to join the murderous rampage against Israel as well as ratcheting up the pressure on world leaders to force Israel to stop before Hamas is destroyed.
Isn’t there a case for legal action against these media outlets on account of their blood libels, for indirectly aiding the perpetrators of attempted genocide
Groundhog Day For The Fifth Column Of Malice
MONDAY, 29TH DECEMBER 2008
So there is indeed now a war. In Gaza. Actually, there are two wars going on: one involving rockets and warplanes, and the other involving the media, as Barry Rubin notes:
Nothing is clearer than Hamas’s strategy. It gives Israel the choice between rockets and media, and Hamas thinks it is a situation of, ‘We win or you lose.’...The smug smiles are wiped off the faces of Hamas leaders. Yet they have one more weapon, their reserves, they call up the media. Those arrogant, heroic, macho victors of yesterday--literally yesterday as the process takes only a few hours--are transformed into pitiful victims. Casualty figures are announced by Hamas, and accepted by reporters who are not on the spot. Everyone hit is, of course, a civilian. No soldiers here. And the casualties are disproportionate: Hamas has arranged it that way. If necessary, sympathetic photographers take pictures of children who pretend to be injured, and once they are published in Western newspapers these claims become fact.
All too predictable – and going to plan, with assistance from the Club of Terror UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon who condemned ‘excessive use of force leading to the killing and injuring of civilians’, and Navi Pillay, the ludicrous UN High Commissioner for ‘Human Rights’, who ‘strongly condemned Israel’s disproportionate use of force.’ Of course, the Club of Terror UN has been silent about the actual violations of international law by the Palestinians, as pointed out here by Justus Reid Weiner and Avi Bell:
The Palestinian attacks violate one of the most basic rules of international humanitarian law: the rule of distinction, which requires combatants to aim all their attacks at legitimate targets - enemy combatants or objects that contribute to enemy military actions. Violations of the rule of distinction - attacks deliberately aimed at civilians or protected objects as such - are war crimes.
Furthermore, say Weiner and Bell, Israel actually has a legal duty to take action against Hamas under the Genocide Convention:
In carrying out their attacks on Israeli Jews as part of a larger aim to kill Jews, as demonstrated by the Hamas Covenant, many of the Palestinian terrorists are also violating the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. Under Article 1 of the Genocide Convention, Israel and other signatories are required to ‘prevent and punish’ not only persons who carry out such genocidal acts, but those who conspire with them, incite them to kill and are complicit with their actions. The Convention thus requires Israel to prevent and punish the terrorists themselves, as well as leading figures that have publicly supported the Palestinian attacks. Article 2 of the Convention defines any killing with intent ‘to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such’ as an act of genocide.
But for exercising its legal duty in accordance with international law, Israel is condemned and told to stop by politicians such as French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Miliband. The moral inversion is staggering. Miliband has called for an immediate ceasefire by Israel. The implication is that Israel should suffer the Palestinian rockets attacks indefinitely.
If anything has been ‘disproportionate’, it’s been Israel’s refusal to take such action during the years when its southern citizens have been terrorised by rockets and other missiles raining down on them from Gaza. No other country in the world would have sat on its hands for so long in such circumstances. But whenever Israel defends itself militarily, its response is said to be ‘disproportionate’. The malice, ignorance and sheer idiocy of this claim is refuted here comprehensively by Dore Gold, who points out that Israel’s actions in Gaza are wholly in accordance with international law. This permits Israel to launch such an operation to prevent itself from being further attacked. Moreover, it defines ‘disproportionate’ force as when
force becomes excessive if it is employed for another purpose, like causing unnecessary harm to civilians.
But Israel has demonstrably not been targeting civilians but Hamas terrorists. Despite the wicked impression given by the media, most of the casualties in this operation have been Hamas operatives. Even Hamas itself has admitted that the vast majority of sites Israel has hit were part of their military infrastructure. UNRWA officials in the Gaza Strip have put the number of deaths at 310, of whom 51 were civilians. The rest were Hamas terrorists.
Certainly, some civilian casualties are regrettably inevitable in any such situation – but particularly so in Gaza, since Hamas has deliberately sited its terrorist infrastructure amongst the civilian population.
Those who scream ‘disproportionate’ think – grotesquely -- that not enough Israelis have been killed. But that’s in part because Israel cares enough about human life to construct air raid shelters where its beleaguered civilians take cover; Hamas deliberately stores its rockets and other apparatus of mass murder below apartment blocks and in centres of population in order to get as many of its own people killed as possible as a propaganda weapon. Hamas is thus guilty of war crimes not just against Israelis but against the Palestinian people. Yet on this there is – fantastically, surreally – almost total silence in the west, which blames Israel instead. Historical resonances, anyone?
In any event, if by ‘disproportionate’ is meant merely an imbalance in the numbers who are killed on either side, this is actually inescapable if the infrastructure of aggression is to be defeated. Many more died in Afghanistan than in the 9/11 attacks; yet that war was necessary to destroy the Taleban. Many more died in Nazi Germany or Japan than in Britain or America during World War Two. Yet the scale of the Allied offensive was necessary to defeat Nazism and prevent yet more carnage amongst its designated victims.
The disgusting fifth column in the Gaza conflict, however, is – as ever – the western media. It was telling to witness the sight of British TV camera crews heading out to Israel on Saturday night. The point was that they weren’t already there – because their editors had not thought it necessary to send them to cover the resumed rocket attacks on southern Israel. Indeed, hardly anyone in Britain is aware that Israel is only now finally responding to some 6000 rocket attacks since 2001, with a fifty per cent increase after Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. British journalists were only dispatched to the battle zone when Israel finally retaliated – because, appallingly, it is only Jewish violence that is ever the story.
As a result, Israel is painted – wholly unjustly and untruthfully -- as the aggressor. The ineffable BBC reported in radio bulletins on Saturday that Israel’s attack had ‘put back the chance of peace in the region’. Most sane people would think that the reason peace in the region had been put back was that Hamas was continuing to wage aggressive war. And indeed, even now it is still firing rockets at Israel, including Katyushas and Iranian Grads which are reaching as far as Ashkelon and Ashdod. Today they killed another Israeli in Ashkelon and injured many more -- including several Israeli Arabs.
If the media have mentioned the attacks on Israel at all, they have done so as an afterthought. The main story is ‘disproportionate’ Israeli violence. As far as I can see, there has been no mention of the extraordinary fact that on the day prior to the start of the Israeli operation, a Palestinian from the Gaza Strip was admitted to hospital in Israel for medical treatment for a severe wound -- inflicted upon him by a stray Hamas rocket which had been fired at Israel.
What other country would treat its enemies in its own hospitals – which Israel does routinely with Palestinians from Gaza -- even when they are wounded as a direct consequence of their own side trying to murder yet more Israelis? What other country would provide or enable the supply of electricity, gas and other essentials to people who use such facilities to continue trying to murder as many of its cititzens as possible? On Sunday, for instance, as Ha’aretz reported, the Kerem Shalom crossing was opened to let through 26 trucks carrying food and medical equipment. Today it was opened again and about 40 trucks had entered with food and medical supplies by midday. Yet organizations such as Amnesty International have condemned Israel's imposition of all ‘blockades’ on the Gaza Strip as ‘collective punishment’, and Jeremy Hobbs, Director of Oxfam International, has called on Israel ‘immediately [to] lift its inhumane and illegal siege’.
Yet it is Hamas that is refusing wounded Gazans access into Egypt for treatment -- and indeed the Egyptians even opened fire on them. So where are the screams about Egyptian and Hamas brutality? Where are Amnesty and Oxfam’s condemnation of Hamas and Egypt? And might all those from the Foreign Secretary down screaming about a ‘humanitarian disaster’ in Gaza pause for one second and look at the well-fed, healthy Gazans parading across their TV screens? If that’s a ‘humanitarian disaster’ – with supplies constantly pouring through the illegal tunnels from Egypt, along with billions of dollars-worth of missiles with which to commit mass murder -- what do they call what’s happening in Zimbabwe, which for some unaccountable reason inspires among the high-minded merely indifference?
Such bigotry and malice are not confined to British media and NGOs. On Salon, Glenn Greenwald whines about
America’s one-sided support for whatever Israel does from our political class, and one-sided condemnation of Israel's enemies (who are, ipso facto, American enemies) -- all of it, as usual, sharply divergent from the consensus in much of the rest of the world.
Oh really? Well, Hamas has been blamed for this war by Mahmoud Abbas, who said Hamas could have avoided this attack if it had prolonged its ‘cease-fire’. It has been blamed for this war by Egypt; and Arab states which are terrified of Islamism in general and Iran in particular are privately rooting for Israel to wipe Hamas out. Even the Israeli left is supporting this operation. The only people taking the side of the genocidal terrorists of Hamas are the western media, parroting their propaganda and thus inciting yet more to join the murderous rampage against Israel as well as ratcheting up the pressure on world leaders to force Israel to stop before Hamas is destroyed.
Isn’t there a case for legal action against these media outlets on account of their blood libels, for indirectly aiding the perpetrators of attempted genocide
i know political and legal stuff is boring and i know that i'm the minority, i also know that no one will read this and change their mind about anything because the world hates jews and wants israel wiped off the planet but i'm gonna post it anyway, not to change your mind but just to prove to myself that i tried to educate people as to the other side of the usual media crazed left wing hatred for us. this is an article i found online.
Did Israel Use "Disproportionate Force" in Gaza?
By Dore Gold
Israeli population centers in southern Israel have been the target of over 4,000 rockets, as well as thousands of mortar shells, fired by Hamas and other organizations since 2001. Rocket attacks increased by 500 percent after Israel withdrew completely from the Gaza Strip in August 2005. During an informal six-month lull, some 215 rockets were launched at Israel.
The charge that Israel uses disproportionate force keeps resurfacing whenever it has to defend its citizens from non-state terrorist organizations and the rocket attacks they perpetrate. From a purely legal perspective, Israel's current military actions in Gaza are on solid ground. According to international law, Israel is not required to calibrate its use of force precisely according to the size and range of the weaponry used against it.
Ibrahim Barzak and Amy Teibel wrote for the Associated Press on December 28 that most of the 230 Palestinians who were reportedly killed were "security forces," and Palestinian officials said "at least 15 civilians were among the dead." The numbers reported indicate that there was no clear intent to inflict disproportionate collateral civilian casualties. What is critical from the standpoint of international law is that if the attempt has been made "to minimize civilian damage, then even a strike that causes large amounts of damage - but is directed at a target with very large military value - would be lawful."
Luis Moreno-Orampo, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, explained that international humanitarian law and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court "permit belligerents to carry out proportionate attacks against military objectives, even when it is known that some civilian deaths or injuries will occur." The attack becomes a war crime when it is directed against civilians (which is precisely what Hamas does).
After 9/11, when the Western alliance united to collectively topple the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, no one compared Afghan casualties in 2001 to the actual numbers that died from al-Qaeda's attack. There clearly is no international expectation that military losses in war should be on a one-to-one basis. To expect Israel to hold back in its use of decisive force against legitimate military targets in Gaza is to condemn it to a long war of attrition with Hamas.
Israel is currently benefiting from a limited degree of understanding in international diplomatic and media circles for launching a major military operation against Hamas on December 27. Yet there are significant international voices that are prepared to argue that Israel is using disproportionate force in its struggle against Hamas.
Israeli Population Centers Under Rocket Attack
There are good reasons why initial criticism of Israel has been muted. After all, Israeli population centers in southern Israel have been the target of over 4,000 rockets, as well as thousands of mortar shells, fired by Hamas and other organizations since 2001.1 The majority of those attacks were launched after Israel withdrew completely from the Gaza Strip in August 2005. Indeed, rocket attacks increased by 500 percent (from 179 to 946) from 2005 to 2006.
Moreover, lately Hamas has been extending the range of its striking capability even further with new rockets supplied by Iran. Hamas used a 20.4-kilometer-range Grad/Katyusha for the first time on March 28, 2006, bringing the Israeli city of Ashkelon into range of its rockets for the first time. That change increased the number of Israelis under threat from 200,000 to half a million.2 Moreover, on December 21, 2008, Yuval Diskin, Head of the Israel Security Agency, informed the Israeli government that Hamas had acquired rockets that could reach Ashdod, Kiryat Gat, and even the outskirts of Beersheba.3 The first Grad/Katyusha strike on Ashdod, in fact, took place on December 28. There had been no formal cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, but only an informal six-month tahadiya (lull), during which 215 rockets were launched at Israel.4 On December 21, Hamas unilaterally announced that the tahadiya had ended.
Critical Voices
On December 27, 2008, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's spokesmen issued a statement saying that while the Secretary-General recognized "Israel's security concerns regarding the continued firing of rockets from Gaza," he reiterated "Israel's obligation to uphold international humanitarian and human rights law." The statement specifically noted that he "condemns excessive use of force leading to the killing and injuring of civilians [emphasis added]."5
A day later, Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights "strongly condemned Israel's disproportionate use of force." French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who holds the rotating presidency of the European Union, also condemned Israel's "disproportionate use of force," while demanding an end to rocket attacks on Israel.6 Brazil also joined this chorus, criticizing Israel's "disproportionate response."7 Undoubtedly, a powerful impression has been created by large Western newspaper headlines that describe massive Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, without any up-front explanation for their cause.
Proportionality and International Law: The Protection of Innocent Civilians
The charge that Israel uses disproportionate force keeps resurfacing whenever it has to defend its citizens from non-state terrorist organizations and the rocket attacks they perpetrate. From a purely legal perspective, Israel's current military actions in Gaza are on solid ground. According to international law, Israel is not required to calibrate its use of force precisely according to the size and range of the weaponry used against it (Israel is not expected to make Kassam rockets and lob them back into Gaza).
When international legal experts use the term "disproportionate use of force," they have a very precise meaning in mind. As the President of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, Rosalyn Higgins, has noted, proportionality "cannot be in relation to any specific prior injury - it has to be in relation to the overall legitimate objective of ending the aggression."8 In other words, if a state, like Israel, is facing aggression, then proportionality addresses whether force was specifically used by Israel to bring an end to the armed attack against it. By implication, force becomes excessive if it is employed for another purpose, like causing unnecessary harm to civilians. The pivotal factor determining whether force is excessive is the intent of the military commander. In particular, one has to assess what was the commander's intent regarding collateral civilian damage.9
What about reports concerning civilian casualties? Some international news agencies have stressed that the vast majority of those killed in the first phase of the current Gaza operation were Hamas operatives. Ibrahim Barzak and Amy Teibel wrote for the Associated Press on December 28 that most of the 230 Palestinians who were reportedly killed were "security forces," and Palestinian officials said "at least 15 civilians were among the dead."10 It is far too early to definitely assess Palestinian casualties, but even if they increase, the numbers reported indicate that there was no clear intent to inflict disproportionate collateral civilian casualties.
During the Second Lebanon War, Professor Michael Newton of Vanderbilt University was in email communication with William Safire of the New York Times about the issue of proportionality and international law. Newton had been quoted by the Council on Foreign Relations as explaining proportionality by proposing a test: "If someone punches you in the nose, you don't burn down their house." He was serving as an international criminal law expert in Baghdad and sought to correct the impression given by his quote. According to Newton, no responsible military commander intentionally targets civilians, and he accepted that this was Israeli practice.
What was critical from the standpoint of international law was that if the attempt had been made "to minimize civilian damage, then even a strike that causes large amounts of damage - but is directed at a target with very large military value - would be lawful."11 Numbers matter less than the purpose of the use of force. Israel has argued that it is specifically targeting facilities serving the Hamas regime and its determined effort to continue its rocket assault on Israel: headquarters, training bases, weapons depots, command and control networks, and weapons-smuggling tunnels. This way Israel is respecting the international legal concept of proportionality.
Alternatively, disproportionality would occur if the military sought to attack even if the value of a target selected was minimal in comparison with the enormous risk of civilian collateral damage. This point was made by Luis Moreno-Orampo, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, on February 9, 2006, in analyzing the Iraq War. He explained that international humanitarian law and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court "permit belligerents to carry out proportionate attacks [emphasis added] against military objectives, even when it is known that some civilian deaths or injuries will occur." The attack becomes a war crime when it is directed against civilians (which is precisely what Hamas does) or when "the incidental civilian injuries would be clearly excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage."12 In fact, Israeli legal experts right up the chain of command within the IDF make this calculation before all military operations of this sort.
Proportionality as a Strategic Issue
Moving beyond the question of international law, the charge that Israel is using a disproportionate amount of force in the Gaza Strip because of reports of Palestinian casualties has to be looked at critically. Israelis have often said among themselves over the last seven years that when a Hamas rocket makes a direct strike on a crowded school, killing many children, then Israel will finally act.
This scenario raises the question of whether the doctrine of proportionality requires that Israel wait for this horror to occur, or whether Israel could act on the basis of the destructive capability of the arsenal Hamas already possesses, the hostile declarations of intent of its leaders, and its readiness to use its rocket forces already. Alan Dershowitz noted two years ago: "Proportion must be defined by reference to the threat proposed by an enemy and not by the harm it has produced." Waiting for a Hamas rocket to fall on an Israeli school, he rightly notes, would put Israel in the position of allowing "its enemies to play Russian Roulette with its children."13
The fundamental fact is that in fighting terrorism, no state is willing to play Russian Roulette. After the U.S. was attacked on 9/11, the Western alliance united to collectively topple the Taliban regime in Afghanistan; no one compared Afghan casualties in 2001 to the actual numbers that died from al-Qaeda's attack. Given that al-Qaeda was seeking non-conventional capabilities, it was essential to wage a campaign to deny it the sanctuary it had enjoyed in Afghanistan, even though that struggle continues right up to the present.
Is There Proportionality Against Military Forces?
And in fighting counterinsurgency wars, most armies seek to achieve military victory by defeating the military capacity of an adversary, as efficiently as possible. There clearly is no international expectation that military losses in war should be on a one-to-one basis; most armies seek to decisively eliminate as many enemy forces as possible while minimizing their own losses of troops. There are NATO members who have been critical of "Israel's disproportionate use of force," while NATO armies take pride in their "kill ratios" against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Moreover, decisive military action against an aggressor has another effect: it increases deterrence.14 To expect Israel to hold back in its use of decisive force against legitimate military targets in Gaza is to condemn it to a long war of attrition with Hamas.
The loss of any civilian lives is truly regrettable. Israel has cancelled many military operations because of its concern with civilian casualties. But should civilian losses occur despite the best efforts of Israel to avoid them, it is ultimately not Israel's responsibility. As political philosopher Michael Walzer noted in 2006: "When Palestinian militants launch rocket attacks from civilian areas, they are themselves responsible - and no one else is - for the civilian deaths caused by Israeli counterfire."15
International critics of Israel may be looking to craft balanced statements that spread the blame for the present conflict to both sides. But they would be better served if they did not engage in this artificial exercise, and clearly distinguish the side that is the aggressor in this conflict - Hamas - and the side that is trying to defeat the aggression - Israel.
Did Israel Use "Disproportionate Force" in Gaza?
By Dore Gold
Israeli population centers in southern Israel have been the target of over 4,000 rockets, as well as thousands of mortar shells, fired by Hamas and other organizations since 2001. Rocket attacks increased by 500 percent after Israel withdrew completely from the Gaza Strip in August 2005. During an informal six-month lull, some 215 rockets were launched at Israel.
The charge that Israel uses disproportionate force keeps resurfacing whenever it has to defend its citizens from non-state terrorist organizations and the rocket attacks they perpetrate. From a purely legal perspective, Israel's current military actions in Gaza are on solid ground. According to international law, Israel is not required to calibrate its use of force precisely according to the size and range of the weaponry used against it.
Ibrahim Barzak and Amy Teibel wrote for the Associated Press on December 28 that most of the 230 Palestinians who were reportedly killed were "security forces," and Palestinian officials said "at least 15 civilians were among the dead." The numbers reported indicate that there was no clear intent to inflict disproportionate collateral civilian casualties. What is critical from the standpoint of international law is that if the attempt has been made "to minimize civilian damage, then even a strike that causes large amounts of damage - but is directed at a target with very large military value - would be lawful."
Luis Moreno-Orampo, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, explained that international humanitarian law and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court "permit belligerents to carry out proportionate attacks against military objectives, even when it is known that some civilian deaths or injuries will occur." The attack becomes a war crime when it is directed against civilians (which is precisely what Hamas does).
After 9/11, when the Western alliance united to collectively topple the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, no one compared Afghan casualties in 2001 to the actual numbers that died from al-Qaeda's attack. There clearly is no international expectation that military losses in war should be on a one-to-one basis. To expect Israel to hold back in its use of decisive force against legitimate military targets in Gaza is to condemn it to a long war of attrition with Hamas.
Israel is currently benefiting from a limited degree of understanding in international diplomatic and media circles for launching a major military operation against Hamas on December 27. Yet there are significant international voices that are prepared to argue that Israel is using disproportionate force in its struggle against Hamas.
Israeli Population Centers Under Rocket Attack
There are good reasons why initial criticism of Israel has been muted. After all, Israeli population centers in southern Israel have been the target of over 4,000 rockets, as well as thousands of mortar shells, fired by Hamas and other organizations since 2001.1 The majority of those attacks were launched after Israel withdrew completely from the Gaza Strip in August 2005. Indeed, rocket attacks increased by 500 percent (from 179 to 946) from 2005 to 2006.
Moreover, lately Hamas has been extending the range of its striking capability even further with new rockets supplied by Iran. Hamas used a 20.4-kilometer-range Grad/Katyusha for the first time on March 28, 2006, bringing the Israeli city of Ashkelon into range of its rockets for the first time. That change increased the number of Israelis under threat from 200,000 to half a million.2 Moreover, on December 21, 2008, Yuval Diskin, Head of the Israel Security Agency, informed the Israeli government that Hamas had acquired rockets that could reach Ashdod, Kiryat Gat, and even the outskirts of Beersheba.3 The first Grad/Katyusha strike on Ashdod, in fact, took place on December 28. There had been no formal cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, but only an informal six-month tahadiya (lull), during which 215 rockets were launched at Israel.4 On December 21, Hamas unilaterally announced that the tahadiya had ended.
Critical Voices
On December 27, 2008, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's spokesmen issued a statement saying that while the Secretary-General recognized "Israel's security concerns regarding the continued firing of rockets from Gaza," he reiterated "Israel's obligation to uphold international humanitarian and human rights law." The statement specifically noted that he "condemns excessive use of force leading to the killing and injuring of civilians [emphasis added]."5
A day later, Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights "strongly condemned Israel's disproportionate use of force." French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who holds the rotating presidency of the European Union, also condemned Israel's "disproportionate use of force," while demanding an end to rocket attacks on Israel.6 Brazil also joined this chorus, criticizing Israel's "disproportionate response."7 Undoubtedly, a powerful impression has been created by large Western newspaper headlines that describe massive Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, without any up-front explanation for their cause.
Proportionality and International Law: The Protection of Innocent Civilians
The charge that Israel uses disproportionate force keeps resurfacing whenever it has to defend its citizens from non-state terrorist organizations and the rocket attacks they perpetrate. From a purely legal perspective, Israel's current military actions in Gaza are on solid ground. According to international law, Israel is not required to calibrate its use of force precisely according to the size and range of the weaponry used against it (Israel is not expected to make Kassam rockets and lob them back into Gaza).
When international legal experts use the term "disproportionate use of force," they have a very precise meaning in mind. As the President of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, Rosalyn Higgins, has noted, proportionality "cannot be in relation to any specific prior injury - it has to be in relation to the overall legitimate objective of ending the aggression."8 In other words, if a state, like Israel, is facing aggression, then proportionality addresses whether force was specifically used by Israel to bring an end to the armed attack against it. By implication, force becomes excessive if it is employed for another purpose, like causing unnecessary harm to civilians. The pivotal factor determining whether force is excessive is the intent of the military commander. In particular, one has to assess what was the commander's intent regarding collateral civilian damage.9
What about reports concerning civilian casualties? Some international news agencies have stressed that the vast majority of those killed in the first phase of the current Gaza operation were Hamas operatives. Ibrahim Barzak and Amy Teibel wrote for the Associated Press on December 28 that most of the 230 Palestinians who were reportedly killed were "security forces," and Palestinian officials said "at least 15 civilians were among the dead."10 It is far too early to definitely assess Palestinian casualties, but even if they increase, the numbers reported indicate that there was no clear intent to inflict disproportionate collateral civilian casualties.
During the Second Lebanon War, Professor Michael Newton of Vanderbilt University was in email communication with William Safire of the New York Times about the issue of proportionality and international law. Newton had been quoted by the Council on Foreign Relations as explaining proportionality by proposing a test: "If someone punches you in the nose, you don't burn down their house." He was serving as an international criminal law expert in Baghdad and sought to correct the impression given by his quote. According to Newton, no responsible military commander intentionally targets civilians, and he accepted that this was Israeli practice.
What was critical from the standpoint of international law was that if the attempt had been made "to minimize civilian damage, then even a strike that causes large amounts of damage - but is directed at a target with very large military value - would be lawful."11 Numbers matter less than the purpose of the use of force. Israel has argued that it is specifically targeting facilities serving the Hamas regime and its determined effort to continue its rocket assault on Israel: headquarters, training bases, weapons depots, command and control networks, and weapons-smuggling tunnels. This way Israel is respecting the international legal concept of proportionality.
Alternatively, disproportionality would occur if the military sought to attack even if the value of a target selected was minimal in comparison with the enormous risk of civilian collateral damage. This point was made by Luis Moreno-Orampo, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, on February 9, 2006, in analyzing the Iraq War. He explained that international humanitarian law and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court "permit belligerents to carry out proportionate attacks [emphasis added] against military objectives, even when it is known that some civilian deaths or injuries will occur." The attack becomes a war crime when it is directed against civilians (which is precisely what Hamas does) or when "the incidental civilian injuries would be clearly excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage."12 In fact, Israeli legal experts right up the chain of command within the IDF make this calculation before all military operations of this sort.
Proportionality as a Strategic Issue
Moving beyond the question of international law, the charge that Israel is using a disproportionate amount of force in the Gaza Strip because of reports of Palestinian casualties has to be looked at critically. Israelis have often said among themselves over the last seven years that when a Hamas rocket makes a direct strike on a crowded school, killing many children, then Israel will finally act.
This scenario raises the question of whether the doctrine of proportionality requires that Israel wait for this horror to occur, or whether Israel could act on the basis of the destructive capability of the arsenal Hamas already possesses, the hostile declarations of intent of its leaders, and its readiness to use its rocket forces already. Alan Dershowitz noted two years ago: "Proportion must be defined by reference to the threat proposed by an enemy and not by the harm it has produced." Waiting for a Hamas rocket to fall on an Israeli school, he rightly notes, would put Israel in the position of allowing "its enemies to play Russian Roulette with its children."13
The fundamental fact is that in fighting terrorism, no state is willing to play Russian Roulette. After the U.S. was attacked on 9/11, the Western alliance united to collectively topple the Taliban regime in Afghanistan; no one compared Afghan casualties in 2001 to the actual numbers that died from al-Qaeda's attack. Given that al-Qaeda was seeking non-conventional capabilities, it was essential to wage a campaign to deny it the sanctuary it had enjoyed in Afghanistan, even though that struggle continues right up to the present.
Is There Proportionality Against Military Forces?
And in fighting counterinsurgency wars, most armies seek to achieve military victory by defeating the military capacity of an adversary, as efficiently as possible. There clearly is no international expectation that military losses in war should be on a one-to-one basis; most armies seek to decisively eliminate as many enemy forces as possible while minimizing their own losses of troops. There are NATO members who have been critical of "Israel's disproportionate use of force," while NATO armies take pride in their "kill ratios" against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Moreover, decisive military action against an aggressor has another effect: it increases deterrence.14 To expect Israel to hold back in its use of decisive force against legitimate military targets in Gaza is to condemn it to a long war of attrition with Hamas.
The loss of any civilian lives is truly regrettable. Israel has cancelled many military operations because of its concern with civilian casualties. But should civilian losses occur despite the best efforts of Israel to avoid them, it is ultimately not Israel's responsibility. As political philosopher Michael Walzer noted in 2006: "When Palestinian militants launch rocket attacks from civilian areas, they are themselves responsible - and no one else is - for the civilian deaths caused by Israeli counterfire."15
International critics of Israel may be looking to craft balanced statements that spread the blame for the present conflict to both sides. But they would be better served if they did not engage in this artificial exercise, and clearly distinguish the side that is the aggressor in this conflict - Hamas - and the side that is trying to defeat the aggression - Israel.
Sunday, December 28, 2008
good grief. i'm older and none the wiser. for a moment there i thought i was but i was deluding myself. this of course effects my entry into the blog as i have nothing really of any significance to say. i spent the day with my little autistic friend. he phases out quite a lot, just starts waving his arms like a humming bird and his head fixates on something above him. he is obviously very happy when he does this and it's usually cued by some trigger like the knowledge of an ice cream or cake. people have spent years trying to understand this gesture but i have a feeling he's in an ecstatic state when he is doing this. he quite literally leaves his body. travels down the astral highways and it takes a while for him to return. i usually bring him back by joining in. im not sure if this is right or wrong but if i didn't intervene the hours would fly by and the day would pass. anyways i love it when he goes into that state, it makes me feel ecstatic myself.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
painkiller gig
music transmuted down to it's raw purest form, as an energy. an energy with the power to assist travel into different realms. an energy with the power to do what rock and roll is designed to do, move you. with music and words steve and the band took a small but privileged few on a journey into a place where the transcendental meets the cosmos. all you have to do is surrender and follow the flow. amazing sounds astounding music.
Monday, December 22, 2008
travel over the harbour bridge or was it the under the tunnel, either way i;m heading south, to bondi where my firstly i pop in on the wonderful wizard of oz who greets me and the sun with yoga poses and a smile. he wears a hat and a priest = aura t shirt and it feels really good to see him. i hand over some interdimensional plant life and my two faveroute movies 'smoke' the brilliant story of a strange bunch of charachters who inhabit a cigar shop in broklyn. and the other is the poetic beauty of my fave film 'dead man' we eat stolen pears and talk about strange things from the future, stuff i don't want to hear but already know, then it's of to my brothers, we wander through the markets, i buy him a book on girls, and then we go for a swim at the famous bondi beach, water warm, crowded and filled with seaweed.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
i often imagine my expansive vision of the universe in a similar way to that last shot in that silly men in black movie. there's two dimensions that i have to think about at first, the microscopic and macroscopic, so for example i start on the end of my nose, or my 3rd eye. taking the macroscopic imagine a camera focused on the end of my nose pulling back, as if getting further away, the nose becoming part of a face, the face recognisably me, the me in an environment, the environment being a garden, the me in the garden sitting in a street, the st in a suburb the suburb a county the county a state the state a country the country a continent, etc until we are out past the further reaches of the galaxy, ultimate black or white. then using the same process i imagine the end of my nose but the camera zooms into the microscopic, until we travel along the same kind of white or blackness we perceived in the macroscopic. okay now that's a weird thing to do, but i'm sure it's something that crosses people's minds once in a lifetime.
now what separates the weird from the eccentric is to imagine the process with the other dimensions, so start by using length, breath and then depth but now apply time, so the same process is happening along the time lines, then the other dimensions, the one's i cannot express without resorting to pure maths (to be honest i can hardly conceive them really but for the sake of this post lets say i can), there's an infinite amount of probability's and possibilities including the one we create. now when you look at all these dimensions as one, do you see god?
or does god see you?
i seem to be good at manifesting reality to suit me but it's a power that i think once learnt is best to put aside and just enjoy the simple things. the ego less need to desire or create. the need just to be. even gods have their days off. i imagine the gods at play, and what they choose to make is our existence. and we underneath it all are the gods at play. while i want to play with art and design and live like the characters from the legends at the end of time, everyone else wants to play war games or build financial structures . we need to play more people, we need to just let it all go and relax.
relax
now what separates the weird from the eccentric is to imagine the process with the other dimensions, so start by using length, breath and then depth but now apply time, so the same process is happening along the time lines, then the other dimensions, the one's i cannot express without resorting to pure maths (to be honest i can hardly conceive them really but for the sake of this post lets say i can), there's an infinite amount of probability's and possibilities including the one we create. now when you look at all these dimensions as one, do you see god?
or does god see you?
i seem to be good at manifesting reality to suit me but it's a power that i think once learnt is best to put aside and just enjoy the simple things. the ego less need to desire or create. the need just to be. even gods have their days off. i imagine the gods at play, and what they choose to make is our existence. and we underneath it all are the gods at play. while i want to play with art and design and live like the characters from the legends at the end of time, everyone else wants to play war games or build financial structures . we need to play more people, we need to just let it all go and relax.
relax
my autistic friend loves kylie, his mother whom i have known for 7 years bought me tickets to take him along to see the concert. i took with me timothy leary's 'the psychedelic experience' a book i read when i was in my early teens, i figured i'd read a few pages while kylie did her stuff. on the way we stopped at mcdonalds in ryde. pretty obscure for a vegetarian, and anti mcdonalds man like myself but i figured that i should let my friend make his own choices and mcdonalds has been programmed into all institutionalized people at an early age, besides it's his big night. so im waiting for him to eat his burger when some one yells out my name, it's my son jakob who is also a vegetarian. he has stopped with his three girlfriends on the way to see kylie as well. so we all sit together and then depart. at the dome by pure fate and chance i see jake and his friends are sitting in the row in front, i'm sitting in the wheelchair section.
kylie comes onstage and puts on a show. it's bright and energetic, dancing singing and i find myself actually enjoying it. she preforms one of my fave songs, 'can't get you outta my head' which i believe to be the perfect pop song. it is after all everything a pop song should have plus the added advantage of once heard impossible to get out off your head. it's what i call a mind bomb.
i notice as the show progresses there's a high level of esoteric symbolic used, giant crystal skulls, oriental mysticism, some references to death and rebirth. in the interval i read a few pages of leary where these themes are mentioned and am reminded the 'the psychedelic experience' is his interpretation of the tibetan book of the dead.
kylie was entertaining. the maya in all it's glory.
'the psychedelic experience' is brilliant. i'm amazed at how far ahead of his time leary was. even now a formidable explorer, i see why he thought he was crowley reincarnated. he must have written 'the psychedelic experience' as part of his initiation in to the upper realms of magus. he has served humanity.
i'm watching the new version of battle star galactica on dvd, despite the fact i don't have a tv i am able to watch it on my computer. it's great, almost as good as deadwood. the themes this series covers are amazing, it's gritty, realistic and had brilliant characters and the whole show bears little resemblance to the original tv show. i guess like all things the test will be in it's conclusion but i have to say i'm enjoying the journey with this one.
kylie comes onstage and puts on a show. it's bright and energetic, dancing singing and i find myself actually enjoying it. she preforms one of my fave songs, 'can't get you outta my head' which i believe to be the perfect pop song. it is after all everything a pop song should have plus the added advantage of once heard impossible to get out off your head. it's what i call a mind bomb.
i notice as the show progresses there's a high level of esoteric symbolic used, giant crystal skulls, oriental mysticism, some references to death and rebirth. in the interval i read a few pages of leary where these themes are mentioned and am reminded the 'the psychedelic experience' is his interpretation of the tibetan book of the dead.
kylie was entertaining. the maya in all it's glory.
'the psychedelic experience' is brilliant. i'm amazed at how far ahead of his time leary was. even now a formidable explorer, i see why he thought he was crowley reincarnated. he must have written 'the psychedelic experience' as part of his initiation in to the upper realms of magus. he has served humanity.
i'm watching the new version of battle star galactica on dvd, despite the fact i don't have a tv i am able to watch it on my computer. it's great, almost as good as deadwood. the themes this series covers are amazing, it's gritty, realistic and had brilliant characters and the whole show bears little resemblance to the original tv show. i guess like all things the test will be in it's conclusion but i have to say i'm enjoying the journey with this one.
Tuesday, December 09, 2008
i noticed that the newspapers say that support for the rudd govt. is at an all time high after his stimulus plan (giving everyone $1000 to spend. the idea being that people would go out and buy stuff thus saving us all from recession) now im no expert but isn't this the same as buying votes.
rupert mudoch says in an address to a bunch of people australia has grown lazy and complacent and does not have the means to compete with the upcoming global economy. apparently he got paid a huge amount of cash to say that whereas i've been saying it for years while everyone runs around proclaiming idiots like andrew denton and david marr the greatest intellectuals australia has produced. there's absolutely nothing intellectual about them, they are champagne socialists who promote their dumb agendas without any bearing on truth or progressive thinking what so ever. the left is dead as is the right. any self respecting individual would acknowledge this. politics is an old mans game, it has nothing to do with reality.
the big thing australia needs to do is start getting environmental concerns prioritized. stop meat production, grow hemp, invest in alternative fuels and start turning industry green. australia is in a great position to lead the world in this area. it has to, no other country will do it. i read that the writer of the govts. environmental report, the whitewash that says we need to cut emissions by a few % is now saying unless we turn around now, and india and china are included in what he describes as, a new kyoto then we are all doomed. this is exactly what bush and howard said. i know it's unpopular but it's true. kevin dudd has led us all up a wrong path of false hope, disillusionment and abandonment. instead of smart leadership we get money to buy plasma tvs.
in the argument of climate change most people seem to think it's human beings fault, some will argue it's nature, some say it's god. i personally think it's just a natural process which is gods will, humanity is so egotistical it's really thinks it is of some significance here. the process is working and the earth is just waking up. it's the vast majority off us that are still sleeping in two dimensional reality. wake up! because before you know it you will have sold your soul to fight the new enemy which is just an old friend. nature.
rupert mudoch says in an address to a bunch of people australia has grown lazy and complacent and does not have the means to compete with the upcoming global economy. apparently he got paid a huge amount of cash to say that whereas i've been saying it for years while everyone runs around proclaiming idiots like andrew denton and david marr the greatest intellectuals australia has produced. there's absolutely nothing intellectual about them, they are champagne socialists who promote their dumb agendas without any bearing on truth or progressive thinking what so ever. the left is dead as is the right. any self respecting individual would acknowledge this. politics is an old mans game, it has nothing to do with reality.
the big thing australia needs to do is start getting environmental concerns prioritized. stop meat production, grow hemp, invest in alternative fuels and start turning industry green. australia is in a great position to lead the world in this area. it has to, no other country will do it. i read that the writer of the govts. environmental report, the whitewash that says we need to cut emissions by a few % is now saying unless we turn around now, and india and china are included in what he describes as, a new kyoto then we are all doomed. this is exactly what bush and howard said. i know it's unpopular but it's true. kevin dudd has led us all up a wrong path of false hope, disillusionment and abandonment. instead of smart leadership we get money to buy plasma tvs.
in the argument of climate change most people seem to think it's human beings fault, some will argue it's nature, some say it's god. i personally think it's just a natural process which is gods will, humanity is so egotistical it's really thinks it is of some significance here. the process is working and the earth is just waking up. it's the vast majority off us that are still sleeping in two dimensional reality. wake up! because before you know it you will have sold your soul to fight the new enemy which is just an old friend. nature.
Monday, December 08, 2008
unmarked cars were following me as i made my way cross town
my satellite jamming device was playing up, so i configured a stealth spell and watched the cars behind slow down in confusion. the rest of the road looked clear. instinct told me to keep the spell switched on and protect the car with an aural shield, i picked up my bowl and stuck it, then created the sound wave. perfect. now i was invisible to their technology.
i drove to kat's house and parked the car off road. her dog was laying in the sun under the porch. there was a big crow sitting on the post box, looking kinda strange and out of place. it's eye was gazing at me as i walked up the drive, could be a surveillance device, the new ones looked very realistic. i knocked on the door, the dog looked up at me and then went back to it's sleeping position.
there was no answer, i took a look around the back, pulling my gun out, ready for trouble. kat was passed out on her lounge, a bottle of half full whiskey lay beside her just outta her reach. there were magazines and newspapers in piles on the floor and a few worn and torn books.
i let myself in and made some coffee.
she wasn't happy to see me. i'd let her sleep for three hours then attempted to wake her up. she was gone man, in deep sleep. i tried turning the tv up, nudging her, pushing her on one side and then i slapped her face, hard. she opened one eye and said,
' do it again and i'll strangle you, chop you up and feed you to the dog.'
i knew her well enough to know she was not kidding.
'kat, i need help.'
'it'll cost you.'
i threw the wad of cash down on her lap.
'pour me some coffee.'
i explained to her i needed her to cast a spell for me, my magick was limited by technology, i needed non local magick, something kat specialized in. she nodded as i explained my predicament.
'on the run from a drug corparation and you come here, smart thinking,' she said.
'i have nowhere else to go kat. there's only so far you can run.'
'yes straight to the kat. now i'll need some blood. yours as a matter of fact,' she passed me a knife.
'shit.' i mumbled.
'i need something of theirs as well, anything really, preferably with their label or emblem on it.'
'i don't have anything like that. my girlfriend, make that ex girlfriend may have something. she works for the bastards.'
'do you have her photograph?'
'yeah.'
the blood mixed into the bowl where the photograph burned, blue flames danced and crimson dripped down into them. kat made several hand signals, a lesser banishing ritual, there were some weird words muttered, words that sounded alien and strange. kat held the bowl and its burning contents over her head and then turned it upside down, some ash floated to the floor and then there was a sound that ripped open the world, it was a huge vast sound drowning out all other senses, i watched in horror as the swarm shot out of the bowl, millions of flies, billions, a thick black cloud ejected from the bowl and created a huge cloud above us. kat waited until the bowl seemed empty, she gestured me to stay within the circle she had drawn around herself.
'Lord Accaron.'
the noise from the swarm was unbearable, but gradually i began to make out words amongst the din. 'I bind you to thee Lord Accaron, Baal, Beelzebub. I wear the ring of solomon and my will commands you to serve it's bidding, and then i set you free amongst your kin, Lucifer and Leviathan. In return you may have many souls.'
the swarm started to take a shape, three dimensional sculpture towered above us, a face not of this word. it suddenly moved out through the window and within a few seconds was gone, leaving no clue of it's presence whatsoever.
'what the fuck was that?'
'an old demon.' kat picked up the bowl and started to clean it with her shirt.
'where's it gone.'
'to wreak havoc, spread decease and kill your enemies.'
'well let's have a drink.' i reached for the bottle.
my satellite jamming device was playing up, so i configured a stealth spell and watched the cars behind slow down in confusion. the rest of the road looked clear. instinct told me to keep the spell switched on and protect the car with an aural shield, i picked up my bowl and stuck it, then created the sound wave. perfect. now i was invisible to their technology.
i drove to kat's house and parked the car off road. her dog was laying in the sun under the porch. there was a big crow sitting on the post box, looking kinda strange and out of place. it's eye was gazing at me as i walked up the drive, could be a surveillance device, the new ones looked very realistic. i knocked on the door, the dog looked up at me and then went back to it's sleeping position.
there was no answer, i took a look around the back, pulling my gun out, ready for trouble. kat was passed out on her lounge, a bottle of half full whiskey lay beside her just outta her reach. there were magazines and newspapers in piles on the floor and a few worn and torn books.
i let myself in and made some coffee.
she wasn't happy to see me. i'd let her sleep for three hours then attempted to wake her up. she was gone man, in deep sleep. i tried turning the tv up, nudging her, pushing her on one side and then i slapped her face, hard. she opened one eye and said,
' do it again and i'll strangle you, chop you up and feed you to the dog.'
i knew her well enough to know she was not kidding.
'kat, i need help.'
'it'll cost you.'
i threw the wad of cash down on her lap.
'pour me some coffee.'
i explained to her i needed her to cast a spell for me, my magick was limited by technology, i needed non local magick, something kat specialized in. she nodded as i explained my predicament.
'on the run from a drug corparation and you come here, smart thinking,' she said.
'i have nowhere else to go kat. there's only so far you can run.'
'yes straight to the kat. now i'll need some blood. yours as a matter of fact,' she passed me a knife.
'shit.' i mumbled.
'i need something of theirs as well, anything really, preferably with their label or emblem on it.'
'i don't have anything like that. my girlfriend, make that ex girlfriend may have something. she works for the bastards.'
'do you have her photograph?'
'yeah.'
the blood mixed into the bowl where the photograph burned, blue flames danced and crimson dripped down into them. kat made several hand signals, a lesser banishing ritual, there were some weird words muttered, words that sounded alien and strange. kat held the bowl and its burning contents over her head and then turned it upside down, some ash floated to the floor and then there was a sound that ripped open the world, it was a huge vast sound drowning out all other senses, i watched in horror as the swarm shot out of the bowl, millions of flies, billions, a thick black cloud ejected from the bowl and created a huge cloud above us. kat waited until the bowl seemed empty, she gestured me to stay within the circle she had drawn around herself.
'Lord Accaron.'
the noise from the swarm was unbearable, but gradually i began to make out words amongst the din. 'I bind you to thee Lord Accaron, Baal, Beelzebub. I wear the ring of solomon and my will commands you to serve it's bidding, and then i set you free amongst your kin, Lucifer and Leviathan. In return you may have many souls.'
the swarm started to take a shape, three dimensional sculpture towered above us, a face not of this word. it suddenly moved out through the window and within a few seconds was gone, leaving no clue of it's presence whatsoever.
'what the fuck was that?'
'an old demon.' kat picked up the bowl and started to clean it with her shirt.
'where's it gone.'
'to wreak havoc, spread decease and kill your enemies.'
'well let's have a drink.' i reached for the bottle.
Sunday, December 07, 2008
From New Scientist
THE quest to understand the most complex object in the known universe has been a long and fruitful one. These days we know a good deal about how the human brain works - how our senses translate into electrical signals, how different parts of the brain process these signals, how memories form and how muscles are controlled. We know which brain regions are active when we listen to speech, look at paintings or barter over money. We are even starting to understand the deeper neural processes behind learning and decision-making.
What we still don't have, though, is a way to bring all these pieces together to create an overarching theory of how the brain works. Despite decades of research, neuroscientists have never been able to produce their own equivalent of Schrödinger's equation in quantum mechanics or Einstein's E=mc2 - a powerful, concise, mathematical law that encapsulates how the brain works. Nor do they have a plausible road map towards a "theory of everything", like string theory in physics. Surely if we can get so close to explaining the universe, the human brain can't be that hard to crack?
Perhaps it is. The brain is much messier than a physical system. It is the product of half a billion years of evolution. It performs myriad functions - reasoning, memory, perception, learning, attention and emotion to name just a few - and uses a staggering number of different types of cells, connections and receptors. So it does not lend itself to being easily described by simple mathematical laws.
That hasn't stopped researchers in the growing field of computational neuroscience from trying. In recent years, they have sought to develop unifying ideas about how the brain processes information so that they can apply them to the design of intelligent machines.
Until now none of their ideas has been general or testable enough to arouse much excitement in straight neuroscience. But a group from University College London (UCL) may have broken the deadlock. Neuroscientist Karl Friston and his colleagues have proposed a mathematical law that some are claiming is the nearest thing yet to a grand unified theory of the brain. From this single law, Friston's group claims to be able to explain almost everything about our grey matter.
It's a controversial claim, but one that's starting to make people sit up and take notice. Friston's work has made Stanislas Dehaene, a noted neuroscientist and psychologist at the College of France in Paris, change his mind about whether a Schrödinger equation for the brain might exist. Like most neuroscientists, Dehaene had been pessimistic - but not any more. "It is the first time that we have had a theory of this strength, breadth and depth in cognitive neuroscience," he says.
1 million Number of new neuronal connections formed every second
(in instructions per second)
Friston's ideas build on an existing theory known as the "Bayesian brain", which conceptualises the brain as a probability machine that constantly makes predictions about the world and then updates them based on what it senses.
The idea was born in 1983, when Geoffrey Hinton of the University of Toronto in Canada and Terry Sejnowski, then at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, suggested that the brain could be seen as a machine that makes decisions based on the uncertainties of the outside world. In the 1990s, other researchers proposed that the brain represents knowledge of the world in terms of probabilities. Instead of estimating the distance to an object as a number, for instance, the brain would treat it as a range of possible values, some more likely than others.
100 billion Estimated number of nerve cells in your brain
(in instructions per second)
A crucial element of the approach is that the probabilities are based on experience, but they change when relevant new information, such as visual information about the object's location, becomes available. "The brain is an inferential agent, optimising its models of what's going on at this moment and in the future," says Friston. In other words, the brain runs on Bayesian probability. Named after the 18th-century mathematician Thomas Bayes, this is a systematic way of calculating how the likelihood of an event changes as new information comes to light (see New Scientist, 10 May, p 44, for more on Bayesian theory).
Over the past decade, neuroscientists have found that real brains seem to work in this way. In perception and learning experiments, for example, people tend to make estimates - of the location or speed of a moving object, say - in a way that fits with Bayesian probability theory. There's also evidence that the brain makes internal predictions and updates them in a Bayesian manner. When you listen to someone talking, for example, your brain isn't simply receiving information, it also predicts what it expects to hear and constantly revises its predictions based on what information comes next. These predictions strongly influence what you actually hear, allowing you, for instance, to make sense of distorted or partially obscured speech.
In fact, making predictions and re-evaluating them seems to be a universal feature of the brain. At all times your brain is weighing its inputs and comparing them with internal predictions in order to make sense of the world. "It's a general computational principle that can explain how the brain handles problems ranging from low-level perception to high-level cognition," says Alex Pouget, a computational neuroscientist at the University of Rochester in New York (Trends in Neurosciences, vol 27, p 712).
However, the Bayesian brain is not quite a general law. It is a collection of related approaches that each use Bayesian probability theory to understand one aspect of brain function, such as parsing speech, recognising objects or learning words. No one has been able to pull all these disparate approaches together, nor explain why the brain works like this in the first place. An overarching law, if one exists, should attempt to do this.
This is where Friston's work comes in. In the 1990s he was working next door to Hinton at UCL. At that time Hinton was beginning to explore the concept of "free energy" as it applies to artificial neural networks. Free energy originates from thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, where it is defined as the amount of useful work that can be extracted from a system, such as a steam engine. It is roughly equivalent to the difference between the total energy in the system and its "useless energy", or entropy.
Hinton realised that free energy was mathematically equivalent to a problem he was familiar with: the difference between the predictions made by an artificial neural network and what it actually senses. He showed that you could solve some tough problems in machine learning by treating this "prediction error" as free energy, and then minimising it.
25 billion Processing capacity of a typical desktop computer
(in instructions per second)
Friston spent the next few years working out whether the same concept could underlie the workings of real brains. His insight was that the constant updating of the brain's probabilities could also be expressed in terms of minimising free energy. Around 2005 he proposed that a "free energy principle" explains at least one aspect of brain function - sensory perception.
As a simple example, take what happens when you glimpse an object in your peripheral vision. At first it is not clear what it is - or, as Friston would put it, there's a big error between your brain's prediction and what it senses. To reduce this prediction error, Friston reasoned that one of two things can happen: the brain can either change its prediction or change the way it gathers data from the environment (Journal of Physiology - Paris, vol 100, p 70). If your brain takes the second option you will instinctively turn your head and centre the object in your field of view. "It's about minimising surprise," he explains. "Mathematically, free energy is always bigger than surprise, therefore if you can minimise free energy you can avoid surprising encounters with the world."
Friston developed the free-energy principle to explain perception, but he now thinks it can be generalised to other kinds of brain processes as well. He claims that everything the brain does is designed to minimise free energy or prediction error (Synthese, vol 159, p 417). "In short, everything that can change in the brain will change to suppress prediction errors, from the firing of neurons to the wiring between them, and from the movements of our eyes to the choices we make in daily life," he says.
Take neural plasticity, the well-established idea that the brain alters its internal pathways and connections with experience. First proposed by Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb in the 1940s, it is thought to be the basic mechanism behind learning and memory.
Friston's principle accounts for the process by describing how individual neurons interact after encountering a novel stimulus. Neuron A "predicts" that neuron B will respond to the stimulus in a certain way. If the prediction is wrong, neuron A changes the strength of its connection to neuron B to decrease the prediction error. In this case the brain changes its internal predictions until it minimises its error, and learning or memory forming is the result.
All well and good in theory, but how can we know whether real brains actually work this way? To answer this question, Friston and others have focused on the cortex, the 3-millimetre-thick mass of convoluted folds that forms the brain's outer surface. This is the seat of "higher" functions such as cognition, learning, perception and language. It has a distinctive anatomy: a hierarchy of neuronal layers, each of which has connections to neurons in the other levels.
100 trillion Processing capacity of the human brain
(in instructions per second)
Friston created a computer simulation of the cortex with layers of "neurons" passing signals back and forth. Signals going from higher to lower levels represent the brain's internal predictions, while signals going the other way represent sensory input. As new information comes in, the higher neurons adjust their predictions according to Bayesian theory. This may seem awfully abstract, but there's a concrete reason for doing it: it tells Friston what patterns of activity to look for in real brains.
Last year Friston's group used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine what is going on in the cortex during a visual task (NeuroImage, vol 34, p 1199). Volunteers watched two sets of moving dots, which sometimes moved in synchrony and at others more randomly, to change the predictability of the stimulus. The patterns of brain activity matched Friston's model of the visual cortex reasonably well. He argues that this supports the idea that top-down signals are indeed sent downstream to reduce prediction errors.
More recently, Friston's team has shown that signals from higher levels of the auditory cortex are responsible for modifying brain activity in lower levels as people listen to repeated and predictable sounds (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 104, p 20961). This, too, fits with Friston's model of top-down minimisation of prediction error.
Despite these successes, some in the Bayesian brain camp aren't buying the grand theory just yet. They say it is hard to know whether Friston's results are ground-breaking or just repackaged old concepts - but they don't say he's wrong. Others say the free-energy principle is not falsifiable. "I do not think it is testable, and I am pretty sure it does not tell you how to build a machine which emulates some aspect of intelligence," says theoretical neuroscientist Tomaso Poggio of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Friston disagrees, pointing out that there are experiments that would definitively test whether or not a given population of neurons is minimising prediction error. He proposes knocking out a higher region of the cortex - using transcranial magnetic stimulation, say - and seeing whether free-energy models can predict how the activity of a lower region of neurons would change in response.
Several groups are planning experiments along these lines, but they need to work out exactly which neurons to target. "This would, I think, be an aspect of the theory that could be proved or falsified," says Thomas Wennekers, a computational neuroscientist at the University of Plymouth in the UK.
500 trillion Estimated number of synaptic connections in an adult brain
(in instructions per second)
Meanwhile, Friston claims that the free-energy principle also gives plausible explanations for other important features of the cortex. These include "adaptation" effects, in which neurons stop firing after prolonged exposure to a stimulus like a rattling fan, so after a while you don't hear it. It also explains other phenomena: patterns of mirror-neuron activation that reflect the brain's responses to watching someone else make a movement; basic communication patterns between neurons that might underlie how we think; and even the hierarchical anatomy of the cortex itself.
Friston's results have earned praise for bringing together so many disparate strands of neuroscience. "It is quite certainly the most advanced conceptual framework regarding an application of these ideas to brain function in general," says Wennekers. Marsel Mesulam, a cognitive neurologist from Northwestern University in Chicago, adds: "Friston's work is pivotal. It resonates entirely with the sort of model that I would like to see emerge."
So where will the search for a unified theory of the brain go from here? Friston's free-energy principle clearly isn't the ultimate theory yet it remains to be tested fully and needs to produce more predictions of how real brains behave. If all goes well, though, the outcome will be a concise mathematical law of brain function, perhaps something as brief and iconic as E=mc2. "The final equation you write on a T-shirt will be quite simple," Friston predicts.
On a more practical level, he says the approach will change our concepts of how the brain works and could help us understand the deeper mechanisms of psychological disorders, especially those thought to be caused by faulty connections in the cortex, such as schizophrenia. It could also shine a light on bigger questions such as the nature of human consciousness.
There's work still to be done, but for now Friston's is the most promising approach we've got. "It will take time to spin off all of the consequences of the theory - but I take that property as a sure sign that this is a very important theory," says Dehaene. "Most other models, including mine, are just models of one small aspect of the brain, very limited in their scope. This one falls much closer to a grand theory."
THE quest to understand the most complex object in the known universe has been a long and fruitful one. These days we know a good deal about how the human brain works - how our senses translate into electrical signals, how different parts of the brain process these signals, how memories form and how muscles are controlled. We know which brain regions are active when we listen to speech, look at paintings or barter over money. We are even starting to understand the deeper neural processes behind learning and decision-making.
What we still don't have, though, is a way to bring all these pieces together to create an overarching theory of how the brain works. Despite decades of research, neuroscientists have never been able to produce their own equivalent of Schrödinger's equation in quantum mechanics or Einstein's E=mc2 - a powerful, concise, mathematical law that encapsulates how the brain works. Nor do they have a plausible road map towards a "theory of everything", like string theory in physics. Surely if we can get so close to explaining the universe, the human brain can't be that hard to crack?
Perhaps it is. The brain is much messier than a physical system. It is the product of half a billion years of evolution. It performs myriad functions - reasoning, memory, perception, learning, attention and emotion to name just a few - and uses a staggering number of different types of cells, connections and receptors. So it does not lend itself to being easily described by simple mathematical laws.
That hasn't stopped researchers in the growing field of computational neuroscience from trying. In recent years, they have sought to develop unifying ideas about how the brain processes information so that they can apply them to the design of intelligent machines.
Until now none of their ideas has been general or testable enough to arouse much excitement in straight neuroscience. But a group from University College London (UCL) may have broken the deadlock. Neuroscientist Karl Friston and his colleagues have proposed a mathematical law that some are claiming is the nearest thing yet to a grand unified theory of the brain. From this single law, Friston's group claims to be able to explain almost everything about our grey matter.
It's a controversial claim, but one that's starting to make people sit up and take notice. Friston's work has made Stanislas Dehaene, a noted neuroscientist and psychologist at the College of France in Paris, change his mind about whether a Schrödinger equation for the brain might exist. Like most neuroscientists, Dehaene had been pessimistic - but not any more. "It is the first time that we have had a theory of this strength, breadth and depth in cognitive neuroscience," he says.
1 million Number of new neuronal connections formed every second
(in instructions per second)
Friston's ideas build on an existing theory known as the "Bayesian brain", which conceptualises the brain as a probability machine that constantly makes predictions about the world and then updates them based on what it senses.
The idea was born in 1983, when Geoffrey Hinton of the University of Toronto in Canada and Terry Sejnowski, then at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, suggested that the brain could be seen as a machine that makes decisions based on the uncertainties of the outside world. In the 1990s, other researchers proposed that the brain represents knowledge of the world in terms of probabilities. Instead of estimating the distance to an object as a number, for instance, the brain would treat it as a range of possible values, some more likely than others.
100 billion Estimated number of nerve cells in your brain
(in instructions per second)
A crucial element of the approach is that the probabilities are based on experience, but they change when relevant new information, such as visual information about the object's location, becomes available. "The brain is an inferential agent, optimising its models of what's going on at this moment and in the future," says Friston. In other words, the brain runs on Bayesian probability. Named after the 18th-century mathematician Thomas Bayes, this is a systematic way of calculating how the likelihood of an event changes as new information comes to light (see New Scientist, 10 May, p 44, for more on Bayesian theory).
Over the past decade, neuroscientists have found that real brains seem to work in this way. In perception and learning experiments, for example, people tend to make estimates - of the location or speed of a moving object, say - in a way that fits with Bayesian probability theory. There's also evidence that the brain makes internal predictions and updates them in a Bayesian manner. When you listen to someone talking, for example, your brain isn't simply receiving information, it also predicts what it expects to hear and constantly revises its predictions based on what information comes next. These predictions strongly influence what you actually hear, allowing you, for instance, to make sense of distorted or partially obscured speech.
In fact, making predictions and re-evaluating them seems to be a universal feature of the brain. At all times your brain is weighing its inputs and comparing them with internal predictions in order to make sense of the world. "It's a general computational principle that can explain how the brain handles problems ranging from low-level perception to high-level cognition," says Alex Pouget, a computational neuroscientist at the University of Rochester in New York (Trends in Neurosciences, vol 27, p 712).
However, the Bayesian brain is not quite a general law. It is a collection of related approaches that each use Bayesian probability theory to understand one aspect of brain function, such as parsing speech, recognising objects or learning words. No one has been able to pull all these disparate approaches together, nor explain why the brain works like this in the first place. An overarching law, if one exists, should attempt to do this.
This is where Friston's work comes in. In the 1990s he was working next door to Hinton at UCL. At that time Hinton was beginning to explore the concept of "free energy" as it applies to artificial neural networks. Free energy originates from thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, where it is defined as the amount of useful work that can be extracted from a system, such as a steam engine. It is roughly equivalent to the difference between the total energy in the system and its "useless energy", or entropy.
Hinton realised that free energy was mathematically equivalent to a problem he was familiar with: the difference between the predictions made by an artificial neural network and what it actually senses. He showed that you could solve some tough problems in machine learning by treating this "prediction error" as free energy, and then minimising it.
25 billion Processing capacity of a typical desktop computer
(in instructions per second)
Friston spent the next few years working out whether the same concept could underlie the workings of real brains. His insight was that the constant updating of the brain's probabilities could also be expressed in terms of minimising free energy. Around 2005 he proposed that a "free energy principle" explains at least one aspect of brain function - sensory perception.
As a simple example, take what happens when you glimpse an object in your peripheral vision. At first it is not clear what it is - or, as Friston would put it, there's a big error between your brain's prediction and what it senses. To reduce this prediction error, Friston reasoned that one of two things can happen: the brain can either change its prediction or change the way it gathers data from the environment (Journal of Physiology - Paris, vol 100, p 70). If your brain takes the second option you will instinctively turn your head and centre the object in your field of view. "It's about minimising surprise," he explains. "Mathematically, free energy is always bigger than surprise, therefore if you can minimise free energy you can avoid surprising encounters with the world."
Friston developed the free-energy principle to explain perception, but he now thinks it can be generalised to other kinds of brain processes as well. He claims that everything the brain does is designed to minimise free energy or prediction error (Synthese, vol 159, p 417). "In short, everything that can change in the brain will change to suppress prediction errors, from the firing of neurons to the wiring between them, and from the movements of our eyes to the choices we make in daily life," he says.
Take neural plasticity, the well-established idea that the brain alters its internal pathways and connections with experience. First proposed by Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb in the 1940s, it is thought to be the basic mechanism behind learning and memory.
Friston's principle accounts for the process by describing how individual neurons interact after encountering a novel stimulus. Neuron A "predicts" that neuron B will respond to the stimulus in a certain way. If the prediction is wrong, neuron A changes the strength of its connection to neuron B to decrease the prediction error. In this case the brain changes its internal predictions until it minimises its error, and learning or memory forming is the result.
All well and good in theory, but how can we know whether real brains actually work this way? To answer this question, Friston and others have focused on the cortex, the 3-millimetre-thick mass of convoluted folds that forms the brain's outer surface. This is the seat of "higher" functions such as cognition, learning, perception and language. It has a distinctive anatomy: a hierarchy of neuronal layers, each of which has connections to neurons in the other levels.
100 trillion Processing capacity of the human brain
(in instructions per second)
Friston created a computer simulation of the cortex with layers of "neurons" passing signals back and forth. Signals going from higher to lower levels represent the brain's internal predictions, while signals going the other way represent sensory input. As new information comes in, the higher neurons adjust their predictions according to Bayesian theory. This may seem awfully abstract, but there's a concrete reason for doing it: it tells Friston what patterns of activity to look for in real brains.
Last year Friston's group used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine what is going on in the cortex during a visual task (NeuroImage, vol 34, p 1199). Volunteers watched two sets of moving dots, which sometimes moved in synchrony and at others more randomly, to change the predictability of the stimulus. The patterns of brain activity matched Friston's model of the visual cortex reasonably well. He argues that this supports the idea that top-down signals are indeed sent downstream to reduce prediction errors.
More recently, Friston's team has shown that signals from higher levels of the auditory cortex are responsible for modifying brain activity in lower levels as people listen to repeated and predictable sounds (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 104, p 20961). This, too, fits with Friston's model of top-down minimisation of prediction error.
Despite these successes, some in the Bayesian brain camp aren't buying the grand theory just yet. They say it is hard to know whether Friston's results are ground-breaking or just repackaged old concepts - but they don't say he's wrong. Others say the free-energy principle is not falsifiable. "I do not think it is testable, and I am pretty sure it does not tell you how to build a machine which emulates some aspect of intelligence," says theoretical neuroscientist Tomaso Poggio of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Friston disagrees, pointing out that there are experiments that would definitively test whether or not a given population of neurons is minimising prediction error. He proposes knocking out a higher region of the cortex - using transcranial magnetic stimulation, say - and seeing whether free-energy models can predict how the activity of a lower region of neurons would change in response.
Several groups are planning experiments along these lines, but they need to work out exactly which neurons to target. "This would, I think, be an aspect of the theory that could be proved or falsified," says Thomas Wennekers, a computational neuroscientist at the University of Plymouth in the UK.
500 trillion Estimated number of synaptic connections in an adult brain
(in instructions per second)
Meanwhile, Friston claims that the free-energy principle also gives plausible explanations for other important features of the cortex. These include "adaptation" effects, in which neurons stop firing after prolonged exposure to a stimulus like a rattling fan, so after a while you don't hear it. It also explains other phenomena: patterns of mirror-neuron activation that reflect the brain's responses to watching someone else make a movement; basic communication patterns between neurons that might underlie how we think; and even the hierarchical anatomy of the cortex itself.
Friston's results have earned praise for bringing together so many disparate strands of neuroscience. "It is quite certainly the most advanced conceptual framework regarding an application of these ideas to brain function in general," says Wennekers. Marsel Mesulam, a cognitive neurologist from Northwestern University in Chicago, adds: "Friston's work is pivotal. It resonates entirely with the sort of model that I would like to see emerge."
So where will the search for a unified theory of the brain go from here? Friston's free-energy principle clearly isn't the ultimate theory yet it remains to be tested fully and needs to produce more predictions of how real brains behave. If all goes well, though, the outcome will be a concise mathematical law of brain function, perhaps something as brief and iconic as E=mc2. "The final equation you write on a T-shirt will be quite simple," Friston predicts.
On a more practical level, he says the approach will change our concepts of how the brain works and could help us understand the deeper mechanisms of psychological disorders, especially those thought to be caused by faulty connections in the cortex, such as schizophrenia. It could also shine a light on bigger questions such as the nature of human consciousness.
There's work still to be done, but for now Friston's is the most promising approach we've got. "It will take time to spin off all of the consequences of the theory - but I take that property as a sure sign that this is a very important theory," says Dehaene. "Most other models, including mine, are just models of one small aspect of the brain, very limited in their scope. This one falls much closer to a grand theory."
Saturday, December 06, 2008
two friend’s of mine were watching tv together, i happened to be sitting between them enjoying their company i guess. one of them flicked the channel to the news where we saw the middle off a report from an item talking about some attacks in israel. there were no details just that some palestinians had been killed, to which one of my friends said, ‘fucking jews. you would have thought the holocaust didn’t happen.’
i’ve heard this comment several times, in several different environments and it no longer hurts me or offends me, i mean i can’t expect everyone to share my perspectives. however what i find somewhat strange is their reactions when i make one of two comments.
comment one – yes it was much better for everyone when they didn’t fight back or defend themselves.
comment two – i guess if israel gives back the land to the arabs, australia can give back the land to the aboriginals etc.
silence.
last night i tried to explain that israel had given land back captured in wars it never started, for some kind of peace deal but in return were never given the security they traded it for. i also tried to explain that israel existed because the united nations created it but right now in europe, jews are targeted as much now as during the build up to the second world war and many of them escape to israel to get away from being harassed. like my parents who decided that the level of anti semitism in england had reached such a high level it had become unsafe. apparently france is even worse. it’s not something you would hear about in the media because its not good copy, but the facts are out there. jewish people all over the world are going to israel because of peoples attitudes towards them. just like any tribe they want to survive, if it means defending themselves then they should and critisism is very easy from the safe comfort of the northern beaches of sydney where the levels of danger my friends are subjected to are a double dose of caffine in their lattes and maybe the occasional comment in a blog.
so here i am sitting between two people who are my racist friends.
i’ve heard this comment several times, in several different environments and it no longer hurts me or offends me, i mean i can’t expect everyone to share my perspectives. however what i find somewhat strange is their reactions when i make one of two comments.
comment one – yes it was much better for everyone when they didn’t fight back or defend themselves.
comment two – i guess if israel gives back the land to the arabs, australia can give back the land to the aboriginals etc.
silence.
last night i tried to explain that israel had given land back captured in wars it never started, for some kind of peace deal but in return were never given the security they traded it for. i also tried to explain that israel existed because the united nations created it but right now in europe, jews are targeted as much now as during the build up to the second world war and many of them escape to israel to get away from being harassed. like my parents who decided that the level of anti semitism in england had reached such a high level it had become unsafe. apparently france is even worse. it’s not something you would hear about in the media because its not good copy, but the facts are out there. jewish people all over the world are going to israel because of peoples attitudes towards them. just like any tribe they want to survive, if it means defending themselves then they should and critisism is very easy from the safe comfort of the northern beaches of sydney where the levels of danger my friends are subjected to are a double dose of caffine in their lattes and maybe the occasional comment in a blog.
so here i am sitting between two people who are my racist friends.
Thursday, December 04, 2008
mecalito is good to me, he cruises through my thoughts at the right speed, my brain fills with his presence and warmth, i'm sorry man i say, i'm a fucked up piece of work at the moment, my lifes a fucking weird mess of fines and crap that don't mean anything anymore, how does that happen? one day a whole heap of shit means something the next it means less. i don't know, time i guess and perspective. im somewhat irresponsible about the details, i don't get it, i live righteous, pay my way, do the right thing and all the way there's the man, ripping me off taking his cut while fucking me over, it's not my society anymore, it's not my fucking world. i didn't ever want resources to run out, i recall running around skool telling everyone, the earth needs us to look after it not rape it, and get this, my teachers taunted me and humiliated me.
ahead of my time, always. behind enemy lines, always, that's me a freakazoid with a good heart and a sense of humour, the worst kind. the man hates me. yet ironically he pays my wage.
so i drunk me some mescal and it's awful, i gotta say, i wanted to vomit but i held on, and then i lay down. i could feel the world dissipate as i closed me eyes, the oblivion that came was beautiful, warm and protective, caring and healthy, i felt loved and healed so that i can love and heal. i see know that is the true state to be in, healing. fucking imagine if the world just went into healing mode, everyone did their bit to heal everyone, the trees, the sky, animals, one another, the rifts, the distance the fucking sad loneliness between souls. i wake up, play with pan, do some work on the computer my brain working at a million miles an hour, everything in there, all coming together. im an angel dancing on a pin.
ahead of my time, always. behind enemy lines, always, that's me a freakazoid with a good heart and a sense of humour, the worst kind. the man hates me. yet ironically he pays my wage.
so i drunk me some mescal and it's awful, i gotta say, i wanted to vomit but i held on, and then i lay down. i could feel the world dissipate as i closed me eyes, the oblivion that came was beautiful, warm and protective, caring and healthy, i felt loved and healed so that i can love and heal. i see know that is the true state to be in, healing. fucking imagine if the world just went into healing mode, everyone did their bit to heal everyone, the trees, the sky, animals, one another, the rifts, the distance the fucking sad loneliness between souls. i wake up, play with pan, do some work on the computer my brain working at a million miles an hour, everything in there, all coming together. im an angel dancing on a pin.
driving home from the sticks at 4 am jupiter and neptune are brightest starts in the sky sitting majestically under a crescent moon the roads are empty save for these horrific trucks with their bright lights and tail-gating and intimidating with their mass and speed, i'm exhausted after a night of naughtiness, my head feels like it's made out of jello and my eyes are almost rebelling at their cruel master whom has kept them open most of the night, dreams are already invading my head, my driving is cautious as i weave through strange dark streets heading north, over highways and towards something familiar. and there as i drive past the big temple and down towards mona vale, i see the sun over the ocean, a big blazing orange ball of energy. perfect sphere. i feel good, i set the controls to the heart of the sun, home where my dog waits for me.
we tae a short walk, it's about 6am, very peaceful, a hint of rain within the day, mist hangs over the grounds, birds have started to zip around, there's activity if you look close. i enjoy a long shower, i read a bit more of umberto eco's new book. it's great, he's actually looking at how culturally and politically we have actually gone backwards not forwards and the way he calls it is right, however he has not taken into account consciousness. he can't because he's a intellectual. i put the book down and start to blend some cactus, i make an offering, i clear my intent and cook up mescaleto, i smoke a long fat joint as i wait for the dripping process, i'm using John Allen's prep method. it's quite easy:
Items used in the preparation of Chimora include a blender, an 8-quart cooking pot, a spoon or wooden spatula, two empty potato salad containers (equal size) and some clean cloth used for straining.
The process starts with a one-foot section of a Trichocereus pachanoi cactus and yields a single dose.
The end of the cactus is shaped like a star, usually with four to nine ribs.
The one-foot section of cactus is sliced like a cucumber into star sections.
The star sections are then further cut into quarters so they will fit in the blender. The spurs (spines, needles) can be left on the cactus as the boiling process softens them into string-like pieces of material that can be discarded.
The cactus chunks and water are poured into a blender.
This mixture is blended until the cactus bits and water expand to the top of the blender. After it is blended, the resulting mixture is poured into a large 3-5 quart pot. This process is repeated until the whole cactus has been liquefied and poured into the pot.
The blended cactus/water mixture is cooked slowly on low heat until the mixture is even, approximately 30 minutes. Initially, the cactus pulp separates from the water and sits on top of the liquid
As the mixture cooks, the pulp will rise to the top of the pot, forming a foam that may spill over. A gas stove is preferred as it allows better regulation of the cooking temperature.
As the mixture continues to cook, it re-combines into one liquid and begins to turn green like the skin of the cactus. During this time, it needs to be stirred. Low heat and stirring are especially important during this first half hour of cooking.
Slowly over time, the pulpy green goop remixes with the water until it reaches the consistency of glue or snot.
After the water and pulp have rejoined, the heat can be increased slightly allowing the liquid to simmer (a light boil) continuously but without boiling over onto the stove.
The mixture is allowed to boil lightly for two to four hours until 12 to 16 ounces of goo left are left in the bottom of the pan.
During the 2-4 hour period of boiling the mixture needs to be monitored closely to avoid burning. Another 12 to 16 ounces of water or more may be added to prolong the boiling period. Eventually the mixture becomes a messy glob of gooey gluey goop.
A clean piece of natural-fiber cloth (a piece of a t-shirt is being used in the photo) is placed over the top of the blender, forming a pocket that acts as a filter.
The mixture is poured from the pot into the cloth. The liquid slowly seeps through the cloth and drips into the blender. The pulp material is caught in the cloth pocket. This process is repeated until all of the pulp has been poured into the filter cloth.
A piece of string is used to tie the top of the cloth closed around the pulp. The bag of pulp is suspended over the blender allowing the juice to drain from the pulp, through the cloth, into the blender. After fifteen minutes, when the cactus pulp has cooled down considerably, the remaining liquid is squeezed by hand from the bag into the blender.
The liquid is cooled for a short time until it reaches a temperature that won't burn the mouth or throat.
Opening the t-shirt reveals the remaining pulp. Since the psychoactive components have already been extracted from this material, it is discarded.
Finally, the juice from the blender is poured into a cup.
Tuesday, December 02, 2008
David Foster Wallace, who died last week, was the most brilliant American writer of his generation. In a speech, published here for the first time, he reflects on the difficulties of daily life and 'making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head'
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"
If you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude - but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. So let's get concrete ...
A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here's one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness, because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you've had that you were not at the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real - you get the idea. But please don't worry that I'm getting ready to preach to you about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called "virtues". This is not a matter of virtue - it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centred, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.
By way of example, let's say it's an average day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging job, and you work hard for nine or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired, and you're stressed out, and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for a couple of hours and then hit the rack early because you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home - you haven't had time to shop this week, because of your challenging job - and so now, after work, you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the workday, and the traffic's very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping, and the store's hideously, fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop, and it's pretty much the last place you want to be, but you can't just get in and quickly out: you have to wander all over the huge, overlit store's crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough checkout lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you can't take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register.
Anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and pay for your food, and wait to get your cheque or card authenticated by a machine, and then get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death, and then you have to take your creepy flimsy plastic bags of groceries in your cart through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to load the bags in your car in such a way that everything doesn't fall out of the bags and roll around in the trunk on the way home, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive rush-hour traffic, etc, etc.
The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it's going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and look at how deeply unfair this is: I've worked really hard all day and I'm starved and tired and I can't even get home to eat and unwind because of all these stupid goddamn people.
Or if I'm in a more socially conscious form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic jam being angry and disgusted at all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUVs and Hummers and V12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just 20 stupid feet ahead in a traffic jam, and I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and disgusting we all are, and how it all just sucks ...
If I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do - except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn't have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default setting. It's the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way: it's not impossible that some of these people in SUVs have been in horrible car accidents in the past and now find driving so traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to rush to the hospital, and he's in a much bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am - it is actually I who am in his way.
Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you're "supposed to" think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it, because it's hard, it takes will and mental effort, and if you're like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat-out won't want to. But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line - maybe she's not usually like this; maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who's dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles Dept who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible - it just depends on what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important - if you want to operate on your default setting - then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: the only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship - be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles - is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things - if they are where you tap real meaning in life - then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already - it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. Worship power - you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart - you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the "rat race" - the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please don't dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness - awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: "This is water, this is water."
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"
If you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude - but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. So let's get concrete ...
A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here's one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness, because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you've had that you were not at the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real - you get the idea. But please don't worry that I'm getting ready to preach to you about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called "virtues". This is not a matter of virtue - it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centred, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.
By way of example, let's say it's an average day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging job, and you work hard for nine or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired, and you're stressed out, and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for a couple of hours and then hit the rack early because you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home - you haven't had time to shop this week, because of your challenging job - and so now, after work, you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the workday, and the traffic's very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping, and the store's hideously, fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop, and it's pretty much the last place you want to be, but you can't just get in and quickly out: you have to wander all over the huge, overlit store's crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough checkout lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you can't take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register.
Anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and pay for your food, and wait to get your cheque or card authenticated by a machine, and then get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death, and then you have to take your creepy flimsy plastic bags of groceries in your cart through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to load the bags in your car in such a way that everything doesn't fall out of the bags and roll around in the trunk on the way home, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive rush-hour traffic, etc, etc.
The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it's going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and look at how deeply unfair this is: I've worked really hard all day and I'm starved and tired and I can't even get home to eat and unwind because of all these stupid goddamn people.
Or if I'm in a more socially conscious form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic jam being angry and disgusted at all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUVs and Hummers and V12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just 20 stupid feet ahead in a traffic jam, and I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and disgusting we all are, and how it all just sucks ...
If I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do - except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn't have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default setting. It's the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way: it's not impossible that some of these people in SUVs have been in horrible car accidents in the past and now find driving so traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to rush to the hospital, and he's in a much bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am - it is actually I who am in his way.
Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you're "supposed to" think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it, because it's hard, it takes will and mental effort, and if you're like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat-out won't want to. But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line - maybe she's not usually like this; maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who's dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles Dept who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible - it just depends on what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important - if you want to operate on your default setting - then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: the only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship - be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles - is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things - if they are where you tap real meaning in life - then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already - it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. Worship power - you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart - you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the "rat race" - the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please don't dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness - awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: "This is water, this is water."
Monday, December 01, 2008
God isn't big enough for some people - umberto eco
We are now approaching the critical time of the year for shops and supermarkets: the month before Christmas is the four weeks when stores of all kinds sell their products fastest. Father Christmas means one thing to children: presents. He has no connection with the original St Nicholas, who performed a miracle in providing dowries for three poor sisters, thereby enabling them to marry and escape a life of prostitution.
Human beings are religious animals. It is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion. You can see this in the positivist scientists of the 19th century.
They insisted that they were describing the universe in rigorously materialistic terms - yet at night they attended seances and tried to summon up the spirits of the dead. Even today, I frequently meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are superstitious - to such an extent that it sometimes seems to me that to be a rigorous unbeliever today, you have to be a philosopher. Or perhaps a priest.
And we need to justify our lives to ourselves and to other people. Money is an instrument. It is not a value - but we need values as well as instruments, ends as well as means. The great problem faced by human beings is finding a way to accept the fact that each of us will die.
Money can do a lot of things - but it cannot help reconcile you to your own death. It can sometimes help you postpone your own death: a man who can spend a million pounds on personal physicians will usually live longer than someone who cannot. But he can't make himself live much longer than the average life-span of affluent people in the developed world.
And if you believe in money alone, then sooner or later, you discover money's great limitation: it is unable to justify the fact that you are a mortal animal. Indeed, the more you try escape that fact, the more you are forced to realise that your possessions can't make sense of your death.
It is the role of religion to provide that justification. Religions are systems of belief that enable human beings to justify their existence and which reconcile us to death. We in Europe have faced a fading of organised religion in recent years. Faith in the Christian churches has been declining.
The ideologies such as communism that promised to supplant religion have failed in spectacular and very public fashion. So we're all still looking for something that will reconcile each of us to the inevitability of our own death.
G K Chesterton is often credited with observing: "When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing. He believes in anything." Whoever said it - he was right. We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity.
The "death of God", or at least the dying of the Christian God, has been accompanied by the birth of a plethora of new idols. They have multiplied like bacteria on the corpse of the Christian Church -- from strange pagan cults and sects to the silly, sub-Christian superstitions of The Da Vinci Code.
It is amazing how many people take that book literally, and think it is true. Admittedly, Dan Brown, its author, has created a legion of zealous followers who believe that Jesus wasn't crucified: he married Mary Magdalene, became the King of France, and started his own version of the order of Freemasons. Many of the people who now go to the Louvre are there only to look at the Mona Lisa, solely and simply because it is at the centre of Dan Brown's book.
The pianist Arthur Rubinstein was once asked if he believed in God. He said: "No. I don't believe in God. I believe in something greater." Our culture suffers from the same inflationary tendency. The existing religions just aren't big enough: we demand something more from God than the existing depictions in the Christian faith can provide. So we revert to the occult. The so-called occult sciences do not ever reveal any genuine secret: they only promise that there is something secret that explains and justifies everything. The great advantage of this is that it allows each person to fill up the empty secret "container" with his or her own fears and hopes.
As a child of the Enlightenment, and a believer in the Enlightenment values of truth, open inquiry, and freedom, I am depressed by that tendency. This is not just because of the association between the occult and fascism and Nazism - although that association was very strong. Himmler and many of Hitler's henchmen were devotees of the most infantile occult fantasies.
The same was true of some of the fascist gurus in Italy - Julius Evola is one example - who continue to fascinate the neo-fascists in my country. And today, if you browse the shelves of any bookshop specialising in the occult, you will find not only the usual tomes on the Templars, Rosicrucians, pseudo-Kabbalists, and of course The Da Vinci Code, but also anti-semitic tracts such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
I was raised as a Catholic, and although I have abandoned the Church, this December, as usual, I will be putting together a Christmas crib for my grandson. We'll construct it together - as my father did with me when I was a boy. I have profound respect for the Christian traditions - which, as rituals for coping with death, still make more sense than their purely commercial alternatives.
I think I agree with Joyce's lapsed Catholic hero in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: "What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?" The religious celebration of Christmas is at least a clear and coherent absurdity. The commercial celebration is not even that.
We are now approaching the critical time of the year for shops and supermarkets: the month before Christmas is the four weeks when stores of all kinds sell their products fastest. Father Christmas means one thing to children: presents. He has no connection with the original St Nicholas, who performed a miracle in providing dowries for three poor sisters, thereby enabling them to marry and escape a life of prostitution.
Human beings are religious animals. It is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion. You can see this in the positivist scientists of the 19th century.
They insisted that they were describing the universe in rigorously materialistic terms - yet at night they attended seances and tried to summon up the spirits of the dead. Even today, I frequently meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are superstitious - to such an extent that it sometimes seems to me that to be a rigorous unbeliever today, you have to be a philosopher. Or perhaps a priest.
And we need to justify our lives to ourselves and to other people. Money is an instrument. It is not a value - but we need values as well as instruments, ends as well as means. The great problem faced by human beings is finding a way to accept the fact that each of us will die.
Money can do a lot of things - but it cannot help reconcile you to your own death. It can sometimes help you postpone your own death: a man who can spend a million pounds on personal physicians will usually live longer than someone who cannot. But he can't make himself live much longer than the average life-span of affluent people in the developed world.
And if you believe in money alone, then sooner or later, you discover money's great limitation: it is unable to justify the fact that you are a mortal animal. Indeed, the more you try escape that fact, the more you are forced to realise that your possessions can't make sense of your death.
It is the role of religion to provide that justification. Religions are systems of belief that enable human beings to justify their existence and which reconcile us to death. We in Europe have faced a fading of organised religion in recent years. Faith in the Christian churches has been declining.
The ideologies such as communism that promised to supplant religion have failed in spectacular and very public fashion. So we're all still looking for something that will reconcile each of us to the inevitability of our own death.
G K Chesterton is often credited with observing: "When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing. He believes in anything." Whoever said it - he was right. We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity.
The "death of God", or at least the dying of the Christian God, has been accompanied by the birth of a plethora of new idols. They have multiplied like bacteria on the corpse of the Christian Church -- from strange pagan cults and sects to the silly, sub-Christian superstitions of The Da Vinci Code.
It is amazing how many people take that book literally, and think it is true. Admittedly, Dan Brown, its author, has created a legion of zealous followers who believe that Jesus wasn't crucified: he married Mary Magdalene, became the King of France, and started his own version of the order of Freemasons. Many of the people who now go to the Louvre are there only to look at the Mona Lisa, solely and simply because it is at the centre of Dan Brown's book.
The pianist Arthur Rubinstein was once asked if he believed in God. He said: "No. I don't believe in God. I believe in something greater." Our culture suffers from the same inflationary tendency. The existing religions just aren't big enough: we demand something more from God than the existing depictions in the Christian faith can provide. So we revert to the occult. The so-called occult sciences do not ever reveal any genuine secret: they only promise that there is something secret that explains and justifies everything. The great advantage of this is that it allows each person to fill up the empty secret "container" with his or her own fears and hopes.
As a child of the Enlightenment, and a believer in the Enlightenment values of truth, open inquiry, and freedom, I am depressed by that tendency. This is not just because of the association between the occult and fascism and Nazism - although that association was very strong. Himmler and many of Hitler's henchmen were devotees of the most infantile occult fantasies.
The same was true of some of the fascist gurus in Italy - Julius Evola is one example - who continue to fascinate the neo-fascists in my country. And today, if you browse the shelves of any bookshop specialising in the occult, you will find not only the usual tomes on the Templars, Rosicrucians, pseudo-Kabbalists, and of course The Da Vinci Code, but also anti-semitic tracts such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
I was raised as a Catholic, and although I have abandoned the Church, this December, as usual, I will be putting together a Christmas crib for my grandson. We'll construct it together - as my father did with me when I was a boy. I have profound respect for the Christian traditions - which, as rituals for coping with death, still make more sense than their purely commercial alternatives.
I think I agree with Joyce's lapsed Catholic hero in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: "What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?" The religious celebration of Christmas is at least a clear and coherent absurdity. The commercial celebration is not even that.
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