I enjoy Don Peck’s attempt at capturing the zeitgeist of the American empire’s decline – the article over at The Atlantic Online includes more than a few choice observations and anecdotal truisms for a generation losing its grasp on the American Dream and its alternately apathetic and unprepared antecedents: Some neighbors were at the Walmart [...]

… and nothing more.

Now with more somnambulism! Ideas rattling around in my skull… Hypothesis: Intestinal flora imbalances cultured with refined foods are a basis for systemic failure in the human body (there is already plenty of flim-flam out on the ‘net to this effect) Project: Intricate wood-burning project involving ouroboros design, ceramic inlay, complicated system of gears which [...]

[via Dangerous Minds] XOXO – The Operator

If you want to be happy, you must be a happiness machine. – The Operator

Once people accept the external valuation of a Higher Power, they are highly unlikely to go cold turkey. They may however, switch drugs, converting from one Higher Power to another, provided that they do it with intensity. In religion, it is a common observation that converts are always the most observant and faithful. It is [...]

… In closed markets and/or less-open cultures, corporations can have powerful identities. In Japan, for example, many people feel privileged to work for their corporations and attribute a great deal of identity and benevolence to them. In the United States, large corporations will also contain many people who treat “the corporation” as a specific entity, [...]

Collectives often present themselves as being necessary to protect us from ourselves. However, more human death and suffering have been caused throughout history by large scale conflicts between competing Collectives than could ever have been caused by conflicts between individuals. People sometimes kill and steal from each other because of self interest but it is [...]

Just as the identities we create for other people and things help us model their behavior, the identities we create for ourselves help us model our own behavior. We have a great deal of control over our own behavior, so our predictive models, in some respects, are also self-fulfilling prophecies. If you think that you [...]

Rarely do people hold feelings of neutrality about any ideology. Few people manage to ignore the higher level structure and consider the component ideas. This means that you can usually consider someone who despises a philosophy as a whole to be just as brainwashed as someone who embraces it completely. A person may know all [...]