Can Mindfulness Meditation Cure Neo-Con Panic Syndrome?

Two discoveries from the world of science this week combine wonderfully well to address the problem of overpolarization that troubles American politics.

First, the discovery that the brains of conservatives, viewed on an MRI, have measurable differences from the brains of liberals. Their amygdalas are larger. Wikipedia explains, "The amygdala processes reactions to violations concerning personal space." They have personal space violation issues.

Secondly, the discovery that mindfulness meditation reduces the size of the amygdala. In eight weeks. (Thank you Boing-Boing for the link.)

Mindfulness meditation is kind of like sitting with God as you let yourself become still.

A mindfulness teacher can be found.

Your local Quaker meeting will know more about this. These days they're called the Society of Friends. They worship by sitting in silence and many of them are very liberal.

Several Moore's Law Corollaries

Computing bang for the buck doubles every two years. It has done so at least since 1968. It will continue to do so, experts say. Gordon Moore first noticed this fixed rate of growth in that year, and the principle has become known as "Moore's Law", not because it is logically proven but because, like gravity, we notice it.

Doubling every two years, computing bang for the buck increases at a yearly rate of about 41 percent.

Why 41%? 141% x 141% = 198.8%, a doubling. That's because 141% = 1.41414141, the square root of 2. This is exaggerated precision. It could be 39%. Call it 40 percent.

There are implications. Today's new laptop will be half the price in two years. A heavy investment in any media, whether it's 45 rpm vinyl records or Zip(tm) drive disks from the 1990's, can become obsolete in a decade or less. The implications can have implications.


Corollary 1: The information available over the internet doubles about every two years.

Six years ago I was first able to see an aerial view of the plot of land my great great grandpa Myron farmed around 1872. Today I am able to find cheap houses on Realtor.com and drive by them late at night using Google Street View. Last night in Kalamazoo I think it was, Street View offered a 3d option. I clicked it and a red-blue 3d screen came up. Google apparently has just now doubled the camera lenses in the cameras they use to capture street views. Or I was staying up too late.

What you can see is doubling every two years. This is apparent from experience.


Corollary 2: Visibility doubles, including personal visibility, every two years.

The seer is also the seen. Google your own name. How many references to your grandma are on the internet? The price of seeing the world is that the world sees you. Your visibility doubles. Comb your hair.


Corollary 3: Transparency doubles every two years.

Computers are both data storage devices and communications devices. Their ability to compare the present with the past and to communicate the difference doubles every two years. Contradictions are ever clearer.

A politician who tells the local crowd one thing and the national crowd something else is quickly shown false. You can see through him.

Politicians who change course see their past preachings shown on TV, cross-cut with their current ones. Unless the story of their conversion is made clear, their past is continually held up to illuminate their present. Their past shines through their present.

Transparency doubles.


Corollary 4: The true surrounds the false twice as effectively every year.

Public lies fail. Proven wrong by ever more visible data, they become an embarrassment to the liar, because they don't go away. Newscasters who make things up become targets for comedians, and a single silly lie is shown and joked about again and again.

Video clips about old hokeyed stories like "The Willie Horton Story" that brought down Michael Dukakis become like labels from shown over and over again. The James O'Keefe fake Acorn video is becoming similarly iconic. Anything fake becomes an island surrounded by the true.


Corollary 5: Dimensionality of the view increases.

The dimensions of measure are usually considered to be height, width and depth. And then there's weight. That's a fourth dimension of measure. To a database programmer, every field in a record is a dimension of measure. It is a dimension along which he can sort a set of records.

If you want to find all the blue 1946 Plymouths in Saginaw, Michigan, you sort the set of Michigan license plate records by year, automobile make within each year, color within make within year, and by town within all the rest, and you scroll down the screen until you see the cars. If the data fields have been indexed, then you just throw the indexes against each other and out pops your final set.

The increase that is the doubling of stored data is spread over increases to the number of records, the number of fields on a record, the length of the fields, and the number of fields that are newly indexed to simplify searches. The doubling itself is spread over many dimensions of measure. The number of fields in records increases - dimensionality increases - but it probably does not double.


Corollary 6: Refinement of presentation increases.

There's the mechanical layer. Silicon. Then there is the logical layer. Then successively more abstract layers. Nuance evolves, in a computer. As the junction count doubles.

The tool reaches to fit the hand. The presentation converges ever better on the mind that sees it.


Corollary 7: Boundaries blur.

Telephones are becoming televisions. Cars are computers, little R2D2s that guide you and tell you when they need an oil change. Skype telephony is free and global. Global ethics are trumping local tyranny. (Slowly, though, and there is much to be done.)

News of horrors, of genocides and torture, reach global eyes and ears 40 percent better every year. As the past is more and more uncovered, the world owns the knowledge of all its parts.
 

Corollary 8: The granularity of the viewable is ever finer.

This is true for high-definition television, true also for data driven views of the world.

The granularity of indexing is ever finer. This brings the shape of the world as we know it ever better into view. Every grain of sand can have an address.


Corollary 9: Searchable Information Becomes The Teacher.
 
Search engines compete to provide ever better indexed linking to all that is known. The world's knowledge about what is known makes the Googles, Yahoos, and other search engines natural educators. Everyone with a computer is in school again.  


Corollary 10:  A THING is born. 

A growing common culture loves cultural diversity. Growing access to all cultures by all cultures ensures that the best of each will survive. The oneness of man is becoming self-apparent.

We are it.

Modern man lives inside - our unity lives inside - the digital exoskeleton. If silicon chips were to disappear, our interests would become local once again. 


Corollary 11: The digital technology that unites us defends its wholeness.

This proof is left to the reader.

Take The Profit Out Of Prisons

Prisons for profit are lobbying Congress for new business. America now has five times as many prisoners per capita as other countries. Taxpayer dollars are being wasted on oversentencing. We can get by more cheaply. And more justly.

The idea of taking the profit out of imprisonment should be popular with a wide part of the electorate. It could be a good horse for a candidate to ride in the upcoming election. Both left and right could find reasons for supporting it.

So - Take The Profit Out Of Prisons.


Successful businesses need to return a slightly larger profit every year. If the business is a government contractor, success requires working ever-larger contracts, or making the current contracts ever-larger. Perhaps jobbing out the work of government to business has caused the tax increases and rise in the 'size' of government that conservatives rant about? So one would think, if one thought.

Would government have grown to such a monster if its service providers didn't need to show a bigger profit every year?

A Job-Creating Gun Insurance Bill

Cars can kill. To be on the road, a car has to be licensed, inspected, and insured. Guns can kill. They should also be insured.


Suppose every gun owner were required to have gun insurance?

Suppose insurers had to pay out whenever any firearm in the country injured or killed someone other than the owner?

This is the simplest, most rational, idea for curing firearm misuse that I have found. It would create a new kind of insurance for a presently uninsured market, helping to manage risk by giving it a cost. It could mean many new jobs for Connecticut insurers, and new income for any agent who sells gun insurance. Just as the AARP sells Medigap insurance, the National Rifle Association might find it to its benefit to see that its own members are covered.

Not every state would want the law. Some might want to license and insure handguns, but not rifles or shotguns. These states could get victim coverage for handgun violence but not for hunting mishaps.

Receiving payouts for victims could be a carrot that would make a state want to take part in the program.  A federal law could require states to license and insure their guns, else lose participation in the payout program.

Possibly some politician in Connecticut, where America's biggest insurers tend to hang their hats, could invite their donors to contemplate the cash flow they could bring in by insuring America's overarmed populace?  Here's a market, all you capitalists!

We can change the ground the problem stands on. Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, and a lot of other politicians in Connecticut know the insurance honchos. They know people. Here's a new market for the insurance companies. Does anyone know Barney or Chris?

For some, this may seem like using evil to fight evil, but if we can turn evil against itself, then it nulls itself out. The cost of insurance - and the more stable society that insurance produces - would lead more and more people to let go of their guns, and the gun insurance market would create its own dwindling.

I suspect that every governor would want to have a program like this for their state. Nobody would want to live in an "uncompensated victims" state.

Is There a Chauvinistic Personality Disorder? CPD?

Almost anyone is better than some people. Almost anyone is better at communicating happiness than some people are in this world. Almost anyone is smarter in ways than some people. Anyone can mow their lawn better than their neighbors. For a lot of people the little differences matter. Their self-image needs continual re-inflation. Something continually deflates it. Maybe it never was whole. There's a worry hiding up in their belfry.

For others, self-image is no worry. They are who they are, and that's that. But for these worriers, making sure that the world agrees with all the ways that they are better than other people becomes a life's work. What ails them?

Could it be that getting D's on their report cards all through their school years affected their development somehow?

Children develop at different rates. Teaching them in groups - and grading each student's results vis-a-vis the group - ensures that some students will always do poorly. For twelve of the first eighteen years of their lives, most children are made to be afraid of doing poorly.

People who aren't too bright, who have grown up being graded at the bottom of the curve, may tend to spend their adult lives downgrading others. Racially, sexually, tribally, nationally, whatever.

Chauvinism is a belief that something about you makes you better than others.

Racism is racial chauvinism.

Sexism is sexual chauvinism. ("Male chauvinism" is one of the several sexual chauvinisms. In fact, the word 'chauvinism' alone is often used to refer to male chauvinism.) Sexual chauvinism includes gender chauvinism, lifestyle chauvinism, and genital/mammary size chauvinism.

Ageists often feel that their own age is the best age of all. They always did. Young ageists look down on the old and the old look down on the young. Are these people age chauvinists? There is certainly age discrimination. A result of age chauvinism, one would guess. In a culture that worships youthfulness.

Tribal chauvinism. This can include religious chauvinism, when a religion is particular to a tribe. Religious tribalism drives Mideast politics. Do tribes look down on other tribes? Oh, yes. Not everyone is the Chosen of God, if you're a tribal chauvinist.

National chauvinism is hyper-patriotism. Nation-worship. Competitive nation-worship. He who flies the biggest flag on his lawn is the most patriotic, therefore the best among neighbors. National chauvinism is one of the more common chauvinisms.

Religious chauvinism. The one true way is one's own. As ever it will be, for one and for all. Religions deflate because they forget that they are only pointers to the real. They are not the real. But for some people, their religion must be worshiped. Pump it up!

Moral chauvinism. Those who know what is right also know who you are, and they'll tell God. Who speaks to them regularly.

Class chauvinism. Proud to be an Okie from Muskogee. Proud to be off the grid and under the bridge. Proud to be 'old money' rather than 'new', proud of the royalty in one's family tree. Proud.

Intellectual chauvinism. There is intelligence. Then there is intellectualism, the worship of intellectuality. This is also known as 'liberalism' by the hoi polloi. Brains worshiping brainhood.

All of these are chauvinisms. How many people have more than one? A majority, it seems. The people who don't have any chauvinisms at all are the ones I would like to get to know, but they are rare.

When a person exhibits one kind of chauvinism, is that usually the only one they express? Or does machoism follow on racism, and racism follow on religious defamation? Do some people have a chauvinistic response stored away for just about any situation?

Is chauvinism itself then not a social disease, a disorder?

Chauvinistic Personality Disorder. CPD.

Archie Bunker disease.

There are causes. And there are cures.

Train Back On Tracks

When I saw Glen Beck weeping on his show and saying "Thank you, Mr. President!" after his previously having called Barack Obama both a fascist and a communist, there came a sense that some things have now changed.

The psychopath who emptied 31 bullets into a crowd in Tucson last week was not particularly right-wing nor left-wing, although he does appear to have absorbed several demented ideas from those on the extreme right who love to be panicked. He had asked his congressman, Gabrielle Giffords, a Zen koan - "How can there be government when words make no sense?" She could find no sense in his words, and he was insulted.

This could happen to anyone. Suddenly conservatives who once espoused weaponry and called for killing their opponents if they did not beat them in the elections backpedaled furiously. Sarah Palin's map of the US showing gunsights lined up on the congressional districts where she wanted to defeat an incumbent suddenly became a map of "surveyor's markings".  Congressmen denied what they had been.

Then, at a stunning gathering to memorialize the lives that had been taken, Barack Obama refocused the national attention on the victims, on those who just happened to be there when the gunman exploded. When a madman kills, all the damage is collateral damage.

Calling for an end to demonizing and vindictiveness, Obama targeted the source of America's illusory anger. Calling for a straight-forward exchange of ideas, he provided a role for the unhappy, a route toward a world of common understandings. Calling for an end to artificial divisions and made-up conflicts, he pointed America toward a unitive future.

Perhaps Fox News, Glen Beck's employer, had learned that Wikileaks now has "insurance" files on owner Rupert Murdoch. Perhaps the call for a unitive process simply pulled the rug out from under Beck and the oxygen out of his studio. Perhaps hearing Attorney General Holder reading from the New Testament's second letter of Paul to the Corinthians led Beck to realize that we are all God's  disciples, even if we do not announce it to the world.

Perhaps America's differences have become now surrounded by America's unity.

Perhaps they always were.

On MSNBC news last night, on the very liberal Keith Olbermann show, who should appear as guest but an arch-conservative, a very logical arch-conservative, the National Journal's Reihan Salam, who managed to differ without demonizing.