How information is really handled

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I have never watched Crowder so I have nothing to say about the show, But I tend to believe the quotation below. I have experienced similar and worse stalking and interference in my own life. Many groups use spies (and assassins) for many reasons, chief among them: you are a threat or a potential threat; or you are useful or potentially useful. War for internal control of USA is a multitrillion dollar activity with many parties vying for control or to keep control. Add to that many foreign actors.

Crowder is getting Conspiracized, as after his voter fraud episode last week where they tracked down bogus voter addresses, suddenly he mysteriously lost his power for no reason. Then people began saying they fact-checked his show, and the bogus addresses he attributed to people were wrong. So he checked, and it turns out after his show, somebody went into the state voter roles, and changed a lot of the addresses he looked, at right after his show. But the new addresses were provably fake as well, so it was just to make it look like he was sloppy. If I told you he has his own dedicated intelligence team, watching his show and looking to discredit it, and with access to go in and alter state voter roll databases in the middle of the night, running surveillance on everyone of his employees, and that maybe even an employee or two are informants either sent in by that intelligence operation, or blackmailed and turned by it, it would sound nuts. But that is the world we live in. Do you think you could go in and alter the state voter rolls anon? This is a high-level intelligence operation.

The left is sufficiently bad enough for this one reason alone that it should be wholly rejected

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Democrats almost always vote party-line as a block. Our 95% leftist MSM almost always “reports” and opines in lock-step with the Dem party-line. Ninety percent of academia similarly follows (or in their opinion leads because they are so smart) the same Dem party-line.

For nuance, you can add the vast majority of Republican politicians, who constitute the other wing of the Uniparty. They very often go almost all the way with the Dem party-line. “Independent” politicians are also typically obedient members of the herd.

Party-line, block vote, lock-step conformity, no deviance, we are always right and everyone else is always wrong: This alone is sufficient reason to reject all Dems, almost all GOPs, 95% of journalists, 90% of academics, and most corporate “leadership,” which has now almost fully bowed to the yoke of leftist group-think.

Fortunately, the American public, who are supposed to be served and represented by the above malign actors, are much more various and open in their views with a strong majority still supporting fair elections, our beautiful Constitution, and our rights as individuals to say, think, and do what we want without cowering before the leftist herd.

Incidentally, this basic theme of overweening conformity is similar in kind to the theme of psychological abstractions standing in for the actual realities of dynamic real-world psychology. Abstractions of this type often act like ideologies in that they narrow research and restrict inquiry into areas alive with multitudinous possibilities. Some aspects of this are explored here: Science discovers we don’t know how to end conversations well as well as in many other posts on this site.

Also, Buddhism itself is extremely anti-conformist, anti-group-think, anti-ideological and very pro-individual. The Buddha clearly emphasized the importance of individual responsibility, choice, and freedom leading to liberation. Liberation from? The confines of a false self, ego, identity, group, religion, or ideology. Why? Because those confines are illusory; they are the stuff of delusion. They are the very stuff from which we seek to liberate ourselves.

Science discovers we don’t know how to end conversations well

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…When participants guessed at when their partner had wanted to stop talking, they were off by about 64 percent of the total conversation length.

That people fail so completely in judging when a conversation partner wishes to wrap things up “is an astounding and important finding,” says Thalia Wheatley, a social psychologist at Dartmouth College.

People Literally Don’t Know When to Shut Up—or Keep Talking, Science Confirms

I don’t mind saying that for FIML partners, this sort of thing is child’s play. Not only that, the self-reported accounts of when people wanted to end a conversation, are weak data points similar to self-reported food consumption.

In FIML, conversations rarely “end.” Like all topics, they remain open because conversations are themselves important topics of conversation. FIML partners are rarely stuck with wondering if they said too much or didn’t say enough or understood correctly or missed making a significant point because they can easily revisit any conversation and clear up any and all lingering thoughts about anything.

FIML proves to partners that the real meat of their interactions is the interactions themselves at whatever level is important to them; be that micro, meso, or macro levels.

Besides myself, few if any psychologists have studied live, dynamic interactive interpersonal material because like all people psychologists themselves have been trapped at an abstract level of understanding human psychology.

Most past research about conversations has been conducted by linguists or sociologists. Psychologists who have studied conversations, on the other hand, have mostly used the research as a means of addressing other things, such as how people use words to persuade. A few studies have explored what phrases individuals say at the ends of conversations, but the focus has not been on when people choose to say them. “Psychology is just now waking up to the fact that this is a really interesting and fundamental social behavior,” Mastroianni says.

Lemme tell you guys, there is way more material in this area than when or how to stop talking. In fact, there is so much material, in many ways doing studies on isolated aspects of how people talk actually obscures the subject. This can happen because studies are conducted at a level of abstraction that is different from and much more simplistic than the real-world, real-time reality of dynamic interactions themselves.

We see this kind of mistake again and again in psychology: grand theories of the mind, taxonomies of personality disorders, cognitive reframing, and so forth. Experts peering at human psychology from above or through the abstract lens of scientific studies; when actual human psychology itself can best—and really only—be accessed by individual persons themselves working with a willing and similarly self-aware partner during real-world situations.

I am very much in favor of studies like the one above because they do provide general markers that most people can learn from. That said, the people who really must own the subject of psychology are people themselves. You do not need to wait for more studies to do FIML. You can start today and be well on your way in a few weeks. Plus it’s free and you don’t need a therapist.

Here’s an idea for Mastroianni or any other academic in a position to conduct psychological studies. Study FIML. Contact me for help or figure out how to do FIML on your own. Then teach it to, say, 20 couples and assess their progress over a year or more. Use whatever you like as a control group.

Years ago, I remember getting into lucid dreaming and lucid sleep well before these practices were widely known. I thought it was marvelous to be able to become lucid during sleep. I still do think that and also I am delighted that at some point lucidity became so common teenagers were doing it. I hope something similar will happen with FIML.

The basic FIML technique will become much easier when more people do it and understand how fundamental it is to good speaking and actualizing human potential. Once you understand what FIML is, you will see that you can’t really have a really good relationship with your SO without it.

As for ending conversations: from a FIML point of view it’s a little messy and rarely clearly determinable because all real exchanges are happening live and we almost never know exactly where we are, where we are going, or when our talk is over. From a FIML point of view, this is subject matter for active speech. Easy to handle and fun to play with a few times. There are thousands of reason one may want to end a conversation or take it up again. Or start a new one. A large benefit of FIML is far fewer afterthoughts and almost no feeling of being “stuck in some endless conversation that [you do] not want with no way to politely extricate [yourself].”

Notice how being “polite” is used in that phrase. Consider how much profound psychology lies just beneath that word.

The Diamond Sutra and modern thought

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Modern thought is characterized by physicalism and atheism.

The forerunner of physicalism was materialism. Basing everything on matter doesn’t make good sense so materialism became physicalism. Physicalism, very simply, means that everything obeys the laws of physics, and thus physicalism has an open-ended definition because the laws we understand today will surely be different in the future.

Criticisms of physicalism claim it is vague since, as of today, we can’t say what the ultimate laws are and we are unlikely to ever be able to for how do you know when you know all there is to know?

I have no problem with physicalism and would be happy to call myself a physicalist. I think physicalism fits well with Buddhism and if you push at it a bit it can easily include many aspects of religion and the “supernatural,” which just means that which has not yet been explained by the laws of physics. See The invented God argument for more on this angle.

Another interesting way to connect modern thought with Buddhism is to look more closely and with different eyes at the Diamond Sutra or any other major wisdom teaching within the Buddhist tradition.

The Diamond Sutra is a long answer to a single question: “…when good men and good women commit themselves to complete, unsurpassed enlightenment, on what should they base themselves, and how should they subdue their minds?”

The Buddha’s answer is that they should be generous and not base their generosity on anything. That is, no phenomenal thing, nothing material, nothing conditioned. To say it another way, they should be generous but not base their generosity on any transient thing or material calculation.

Doesn’t that sound like the Buddha is indicating a higher level of understanding not unlike the laws of physics? Consider some questions: Where are the laws of physics? What holds them together? Do the inhere in matter, do they spring from matter, or do they “reside” at some other level?

I don’t know what it would mean for them to inhere in matter or spring from matter. Are the laws “out there?” Are they  more fundamental than matter? Higher than matter? We don’t have the answers to these questions yet, but there is nothing wrong with the questions.

The Buddha’s answer to Subhuti also contains this: “This means that he should not base his generosity on form, and he should not base his generosity on sound, smell, taste, touch, or thought.”

In Buddhist thought, our senses are sight (form), sound, smell, taste, touch, and thought. These, of course, can be expanded to include proprioception, balance, and much more. The important point here is that the Buddha uses the six senses mentioned to categorically exclude all phenomenal input including thought.

It takes time if you are coming from a modern language to see thought as being a sense. But look at how materialism has transformed into physicalism and how we can’t be sure even today which of our thoughts is really good and will be viable in a hundred years and which of them will look outdated in ten years. Psychoanalysis and materialism, to name just two thoughts, have suffered complete falls from grace over very short time-spans.

Consider again the six senses of Buddhism. Sight depends on light, something outside the body system. And so does sound, smell, taste, and touch. We see and perceive via our senses because those things are “out there.” Birds fly because air supports them. Fish swim because the water allows this. The fish are adapted to water and have evolved within it.

But what about thought? Is thought material? An epiphenomenon of matter? Since materialism is a weak philosophy, we should ask instead is thought physical? Does it obey the laws of physics?

One answer is reductionism, which goes down deeply into matter to find what we may already know. But another answer is that thought is “out there.” It exists independent of our bodies and brains. Just as the laws of physics do not inhere in matter, so also does thought not inhere in the body. As a bird’s wings are supported by the air, so our thoughts are supported by a reality that is different than the material world and probably superior to it.

If that is so, our capacity for thought is shaped by the laws of physics as much as our bodies are shaped by matter. Birds crash, make mistakes and die due to their mistakes. So also, we humans make mistakes in our thoughts and crash and die due to those mistakes. To glimpse a higher source for thought and being is not to say that our thoughts cannot be horribly mistaken.

Glimpsing a level of reality, profound physicalism, that is “superior” to the reality apprehended by our senses is not to say that we are enlightened or that we have reached the end of the road. We have, rather, caught sight of a way of understanding our lives that is fuller and probably truer than anything on the current spectrum that lies between materialism and spiritualism.

Is this what the Diamond Sutra is indicating when the Buddha adds generosity to the emptiness of the self? As sentient beings, we are capable of being generous. But we also tend to want to have our actions confirmed by our lower senses, our material senses, thus reducing them in much the same way that materialism can reduce higher sensibilities by binding them to a lower calculus.

Is this why the Buddha makes his point so explicitly? He says, “This means that he should not base his generosity on form, and he should not base his generosity on sound, smell, taste, touch, or thought.”

Profound wisdom (prajna) means being generous without basing that consciousness on anything material or any understanding we have (so far) of physicalism. Now, does this mean that generosity is itself an element of the deepest laws of physics? Do we perceive unconditional generosity because it is already “out there?” Is the universe as we know it generous or is it cold, as so many materialists claim?

The Buddhist answer is that the universe is generous. We know it is vast, abundant, and creative. We k now it “obeys” the laws of physics such as we know them. We know birds fly due to there being air. Is the Buddha saying we can grok profound, unconditioned generosity because it is already “out there?” It’s part of what an enlightened being knows?

In this respect, can we say we have made some progress in analyzing whether maths are “out there” or are mere constructs of our minds? The answer would be both, with an emphasis on maths being “out there.” Surely some of them are wrong, and some are not deep enough, but like the laws of physics or the generosity of a Buddha, maths are also very importantly “out there” and that is why we can find them.

Similar things can be said about other uses of the mind that rise above materialism—music, in this respect, is far more than mere “pleasing sounds,” art more than pretty pictures, poetry more than good sounding words.

Another way to look at this is consider what you mean by your “self,” your “personality,” “ego,” “autobiography,” etc. Can your personality, such that it is, handle detailed analysis of active communication as in FIML practice? I am all but certain it can’t. So what good is it if it cannot even analyze its own listening and speaking while they are happening?

In Buddhism, the self, the personality, the ego are fictions. They obscure reality rather than reveal it. If your personality or self is a touchy little thing inside your head that loses control of its emotions every time it hears anything out of the ordinary, how can it be true? Why would you want it? Why do we organize our senses and beings around such bankrupt concepts as self or personality?

The small answer is we don’t know any better and everyone else does it so we can’t be different. The big answer is the Buddha’s answer. The self is a narrow organizing principle that relies on base sensory calculations to maintain itself and as such is subject to the selfish delusions of greed, pride, anger, and ignorance, to name just a few.

The answer the Buddha gives in the Diamond Sutra to Subhuti’s question is a supreme “physicalist” answer which indicates that just as birds can fly humans can soar.

__________________

first posted SEPTEMBER 25, 2014

The Peculiar Schema of DNA Codon’s Second Letter

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The second letter of the three digit DNA codon bears remarkable schema of such extraordinary improbability, that the question arises, “How did this 1 in 2.7 sextillion occurrence happen at all, given that it could not evolve because one needs the XXX DNA codex before one can have evolution occur in the first place?” This is the egg in the proverbial ‘chicken or egg’ causality dilemma.

…In other words, there are not enough stars in the entire Milky Way to pull off this incredibly-remote in possibility six-miracle event. This does not necessarily suggest the intervention of aliens or Gods (each fallaciously ad hoc), however it does imply that something exceptional and beyond our current frame of understanding has occurred behind the appearance and ascendancy of life on Earth. I do not have to declare a murder or accident when I find a dead body. All I have to know, is that I have a dead body and that something extraordinary has transpired. This is science. Plugging one’s ears and refusing to examine the corpse, is not science. I have no doubt that whatever the mechanism is that precipitated this codex, it is a natural feature of our realm. I simply regard it to likely be one we don’t yet know about or understand.

link to original

Covid leaked from Wuhan lab: German scientist

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Year-long study of pandemic’s origin concludes it started with ‘laboratory accident’ in Wuhan

…Dr. Roland Wiesendanger, who specializes in nanoscience at the University of Hamburg, on Feb. 18 published a 105-page report on ReasearchGate titled “Study on the Origin of the Coronavirus Pandemic.” The study was carried out from January to December 2020 based on scientific literature, print articles, online media, and correspondence with international researchers.

In his report, Wiesendanger listed six “significant indications” that the coronavirus pandemic started with a leak from the WIV.

German scientist says 99.9% chance coronavirus leaked from Wuhan lab

Chinese official reaction to the finding: China calls Germany’s Bild ‘despicable’ for reporting on Wuhan lab leak theory

Declassified FBI reports show how bad spying on Trump was

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…the memos’ most explosive revelations are the sheer breadth of the FBI’s insufficiently predicated dragnet targeting the Trump campaign, and the agents’ clearly stated purpose of thwarting any Trump campaign effort to get dirt from Russia that could hurt his Democratic rival.

“The Crossfire Hurricane investigative team is attempting to determine if anyone in the Trump campaign is in a position to have received information either directly or indirectly from the Russian Federation regarding the anonymous release of information during the campaign that would be damaging to Hillary Clinton,” one of the early FBI electronic communications (ECs) from Halper’s undercover work stated.

Once-secret FBI informant reports reveal wider-ranging operation to spy on Trump campaign

Right-left comparison of top concerns

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Here is a direct link where you can see results for GOPs.

There’s the “great divide” in USA if you believe the polls.

Trump policies were typical American conservative: economy, trade, borders, deregulation, energy independence, no wars, taxes, Bill of Rights. MSM grossly mischaracterized his policies in a way that can only be described as propaganda. For proof of this assertion, look at the results above; fear-based caricatures, personifications of primal fears.

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