I had a precisely 2 dreams which I have not forgotten in roughly 50 years which concerned "possible worlds" -- alternative routes that I could take.

So, 2 dreams about alternate worlds in 50 years? Not a trend. Most of my dreams seem to fall into the "make no sense whatsoever" category. A few nights ago I dreamt that I was on aliens' space ship. Of course it was strange -- what would you expect? Every now and then I have an "interesting dream" which seems to be fairly long, is a vaguely coherent narrative, and involves more or less pleasant subject matter.

Mostly I think dreams should not be taken seriously.

tell us more about the experience. What religious tradition beckoned to you?

Some small god of a rock speaking to paw was the result of hallucinations caused by paw's promiscuous nibbling on plants in the forest. The hallucination (which paw had not the sophistication to distinguish from reality) was compelling. Maw, on the other hand, was very fearful of snakes. She dreaded snakes, and because she dreaded them, she just assumed there must be something perverse about them -- like them being supernatural.

So the poor kid was pretty much doomed to hearing about one god or another all the time. When he grew up, he naturally warned his children about rock and snake gods. So, after only the second generation, religion was well on its way.

I'm only regressing back to when religion started -- that day paw said, "You know... there's something fishy about that rock."

Days later...

"Hey kid, get over here. Look at this rock. It just spoke to me again. Give the rock what's left of your pork chop. We don't want to piss off the rock god."

Minutes later...

"Hey maw; paws going crazy. He thinks there is a god in a rock."

"Shut up, kid," maw said, "or the snake god will sneak into our hovel and bit you."

That's how religion began. True, there was a time before parents and children: about a billion years ago. (I don't call divided bacteria children or parents.)

"Belief in God" is not invariably the product of child rearing practices, but it usually is. Parents teach religion to their children. That is where a belief in god comes from.

Adults non-believers are converted by missionaries or by social contact and a wish to belong to the community.

Disbelief is taught in some societies, but where religion is dominant, disbelief is most likely to be the result of individual responses. It is easy to bring a child into religion; an adult has to dig his way out.

In the first case they'd simply be exposed as bad scientists — LeBerg

One would think so. But... no. For one thing, the identity departments are not sciences, and they don't aspire to science. They are appropriately situated in the humanities where they presume to study the human situation. There are problems with 'identity' departments: One big one is the role ofadvocacy. There is nothing wrong with advocacy; lets have more of it. But advocacy isn't the proper function of an academic program. It belongs outside of the university. If you take away advocacy, there is not much left for these departments to do during an 8 hour day.

I am an old gay man with lots of experiences among gay people. Despite decades of life-experience and extensive reading, I don't think that the positive and negative aspects of gay people's experiences add up to an academic identity department. There just isn't enough there. Sociology, psychology, history, art, and literature are existing departments where a course or two could be productively offered. There are enough explicitly gay novelists to mount a 2 or 3 credit course in English Lit. Psychology has enough material to offer a couple of courses, I should think -- one on etiology for instance. There are some nice studies that have been done in sociology. A whole department? No. At most, a few courses offered by professors who are already good at what they do.

And if the academic world doesn't want to offer any classes on gay history, gay socializing patterns, gay sex habits, gay literature, gay law, gay music, gay pets, and whatever the fuck -- fine. Very well written books and articles have been published on the important aspects of gay life.

I'm something of a WASP. I'm not black, chicano, female, deaf, or several other categories. And this will offend specialists, but black, chicano, female, deaf, fat, and other categories of identity don't add up to academic departments either. Identity is best established at home, in the community, the work place, and other "natural" places. People who have an identity don't need academics studying it.

As for History, yes -- the history of black, chicano, female, native american, deaf, white working class, the uber rich, the middle class, the sodden poor -- all are appropriate topics of formal historical study.

Then there is the academic journal publishing business--another can of worms. Journals will get published if there are buyers. Given the publish-or-perish academic rules for advancement from non-tenure track to tenure track jobs, there is a strong demand for places to publish -- in all fields.

As editor of the old site, you were evaluating submissions from left field, right field, center field, back field, the stands, and the parking lot behind the field. Academic journals are narrow in range, and the editors expert in that narrow field. Your situation at PF would be analogous to Science or Nature accepting papers from biology, chemistry, and physics as well as French literature and Russian history.

The instigators in this case were not 'sharp shooting'; I'd say they were bombing more than the editors. They were casting doubt on the journals and the particular academic banana republics for which they stand. The authors of a paper in these dubious fields of scholarship usually have academic standing, but some don't. It isn't the academic standing that is the problem, it is the degree to which the 'field of study' has elevated itself on top of a spongy, soft, even squishy foundation.

Take "Fat Studies": with large percentages of the population now meeting the standard of obesity (being at least fairly fat) "fat studies" seems like a worthwhile field. There is such a field in medicine, and there is another one in the humanities. The medical field is concerned with the biological and medical aspects of fatness. In general, obesity/fatness is not viewed as a good thing in medicine.

The humanities version of Fat Studies is in favor of fatness getting good PR with titles like "Fat fashion: Fattening pedagogy in apparel design". or "Fat pedagogy and microaggressions: Experiences of professionals working in higher education settings". 'Fat Studies' is a good example of the advocacy function of identity studies. I will readily grant (as a formerly thin, fit man -- now fat, old, balding -- that being fat is not a personal, social, aesthetic, medical, athletic, or stylistic advantage. Arguing that being fat is not only tolerable (or deserving of empathy) but is positively a good thing on its own merits is fine for lobbyists working for a fat constituency. That approach doesn't deserve academic respect.

Weinstein is a cause célèbre, and so is Kavanaugh. But the thing is, very ordinary people are fairly routinely fired because of accusations which are not investigated, because the company brand (and the convenience of the management) are more important than the life of the individual worker. It's enshrined in the law of "employment at will" which is in place in most states. What it means is that you can be hired or fired at will (if there is no governing contract covering the individual).

Rules of evidence are, of course, irrelevant for employees facing firing under employment at will. If the boss says you offended a customer, or annoyed a client, or combed your hair the wrong way, or whatever, doesn't matter. You're fired, end of story.

Employees almost never have recourse, no matter how damaging the firing is.

Have a nice simple little piece about identity politics that even you might understand. — unenlightened

Did you understand it?

The authors of the hoax hailed from the left, not the right. None of them are members of the power elite.

it is very easy to find and mock contradictions in human endeavours of all kinds — unenlightened

Indeed. But there was a purpose behind the mockery, the pious fraud. Expose the vacancy in these fields. The insubstantiality of these fields has historical roots, as one would expect.

The articles submitted to the several identity-oriented journals (not major academic journals, except for Hypatia, apparently) were absurd. The point of the fraud was to show that the editors of the journals, applying their insubstantial methods, could not tell shit from Shinola. They were further casting doubt on the capacity of the identity studies programs which would consume the journal articles.

I don't think it is a stretch at all to say that "identity studies" has difficulty telling shit from shinola. Why? Because they aren't really academic fields at all. They are advocacy groups who employ hair-trigger sensitivity in responding to real or imagined slights. They are a means to address grievances.

50 years ago the new programs in chicano studies, black studies, gay studies, women's studies, aboriginal studies, and so on addressed some broad cultural groups which had been neglected, if not altogether ignored in the humanities.

All that happened at the same time that post-modernism and its various spawn came to dominate the university humanities fields and undermined what had once been solid fields. "Power: who has it and who doesn't" became the leitmotif of several fields, and led to a resentful focus on power deficiency among the populations represented in the specialist fields.

Society is now, and has long been crosshatched by major and minor faultiness of power differentials. Whether all those fault lines can be equalized is doubtful, because the major faultiness would have to be equalized first, and that would take a real revolution.

The revolution won't begin in the "Fat Studies" department.

The Three Deflaters of Academic Fluffo:



Math, Aero, Philosophy

the father actually doesnt have a responsibility to the child, who hasnt even been born yet, and who can now potentially be " wielded " by the mother to affect his life under OBLIGATION from the law. — Ranger

Ranger, are you involved in an ugly paternity fight?

The connection between sperm, egg, fatherhood, and motherhood has been firmly established. Control of fertility rests equally on the decision making of the man and the woman at the time sex occurs. I will grant you (much to the irk of some other sophonts*** here) that some men have been misled into marriage or child-support by addle-brained women. I must also grant that some women have been misled into pregnancy by addle-brained men.

Bearing a child is a big deal. If the mother decides to raise the child -- whether with or without the assistance of the biological father -- it's a daunting, extremely expensive project. It's a tough project sometimes for married couples that want to have children. Maybe it's a bad idea under any circumstances? (Consult with Schopenhauer1; he will enthusiastically explain the downside of having children.)

I'll grant you that unprotected sex is probably more enjoyable for the male than having sex with one's dick encased in latex. Quite satisfactory sex is still possible and probable, however. It seems to me that sex a la latex is better than facing a paternity suit. (DNA will nail down paternity quite precisely.) I prefer sex without a condom too. But in my case (and the case of millions of other gay men) sex with a condom is preferable to being exposed to AIDS, syphilis or gonorrhea. So...

You can use condoms.

You can get a vasectomy. (Probably reversible, but no guarantees.)

You can do without penetrative sex (blow jobs, hand jobs)

Choose acceptable options.

The days when men "sowed wild oats willy nilly" (fathered children they did not acknowledge) have not just passed, they have very passed. So, until such time as men can again fuck with impunity, you are screwed. Tough. But that's the way it is.

I do not apprehend that the father is yet responsible for the child, solely based on this fact that his rogue sperm has seeded an indiscriminately accepting egg. — Ranger

How was it that the rogue sperm were able to get within a very short swimming distance to the egg? Did they freestyle swim in from another county. looking for idle vaginas? Generally (at least among warm blooded vertebrates) a penis is inserted into the female orifice and sperm are deposited there in. Many insects do it that way, too. NO species on earth thinks that sperm just arrive in the vicinity of the egg coincidentally.
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***(chiefly science fiction) An intelligent being; a being with a base reasoning capacity roughly equivalent to or greater than that of a human being; does not apply to machines.

Social media got us. — Ranger

Except that you can let go; delete your accounts. You will survive and continue to flourish. People who delete their social media accounts don't shrivel up and die.

Certainly, social media is designed to keep us on its hook. No surprise there. Older forms of :social media" like newspapers, magazines, movie theaters, coffee shops, etc. used approaches that kept us coming back for more. We seek pleasurable experiences, and when we find them we return. It's not a fault; it is just the way brains work. Some people are put together in such a way that that they come back to social media a lot more, and it becomes a habit, then almost a compulsion, and maybe more than "almost". It is a compulsion.

For most of us social media remains at the habit level. We don't develop compulsions; we don't become addicted to Facebook, or weed, or alcohol. We use it, and stop when we have had enough. (It's not virtue; most people respond to satiation by stopping.)

A more serious fault in social media are the systems of reporting popularity, which causes some people to confuse "trending" with "truthfulness". "Trend" and "Truth" really aren't very similar concepts, but they have gotten confused by a lot of people. Trending items can be goosed in various ways to generate surges in popularity, which looks even more like truth to some people.

Yellow journalism (which was epidemic in the late 19th and early 20th centuries) ruthlessly lied and slandered for the purpose of generating newsstand sales. An early example is the treatment in the press of a plague outbreak in San Francisco several years prior to the 1906 earthquake. Various companies, Hearst's newspapers among them, either (or both) raised hysteria or denial. Their ruthless misrepresentations effectively screwed an appropriate public health response. [The consequences are enduring: the pool of plague (Yersinia pestis) in chronically infected rats and rodents in the southwestern US is the direct result.]

The best place to get reliable information about the world is still the reputable, vetted press. It isn't as provocative as the disreputable media (like the White House PR department or Fox News) but it is much more reliable.

It might galvanize the True Blues to vote; let us hope. However, the Raging Reds are also galvanized by Ford's testimony and Kavanaugh's heated denial. They are sensitive to the sounds of fighting: it arouses them. The protests of wounded women arouses them.

The Raging Reds (and the extreme left) is where American mobs are coming from: the campus left turns out small mobs that are obsessed about very narrow issues, and the angry conservatives can field large mobs obsessed with their much broader issues. A plague on both their houses! But the angry white right wing mobs stand to be a lot more dangerous. The right has fielded a number of bad mobs: the post WWI mobs that attacked organized labor (Red Scare); the Jim Crow white mobs; the anti-communist mobs of the 1940s and 1950s reacting to the New Deal; the mobs of better off working class or sort of middle class voters who have been working for decades to defeat Roe vs. Wade, and so on.

They are reactionary. They are more volatile than liberals in the offense they take at changes in society.

Liberally idealistic people must become better organized, more strategic, more pro-active, more volatilely action-oriented, more effective.

your explanation is clear and understandable, and therefore compelling.

Thank you.

If the net force acting on the ball bearing was zero, why would the ball move? On the other hand, can a ball sit on another ball of approximately the same size without moving? Or must it eventually move as a chance event? Which of Newton's laws is at play--a force pushing against it?

I like this better than your ball bearing:

Over 48 feet tall and 40 tons, the wind-carved rock balances precariously on a pedestal only 3 feet by 17 inches. (The color may have been manipulated in this photo)

It doesn't have to fall, but it probably will. Aside from human action, numerous independent factors could cause the rock to fall. Wind and earthquake come to mind, heating and cooling, particularly the freeze/thaw cycle--provided enough moisture was available at the right time in the right fissure. Very subtle influences, like the tidal pull of the moon, subliminal vibrations in the earth, shock waves from a meteor strike, lightning strikes, etc. could contribute to the fall.

Were we to carefully monitor wind, quakes, temperature, precipitation, the motion of the moon, and any other environmental factor we could measure, we could quite possibly not identify a single cause, because all these factors might be operating at the same time. Another thing, all the environmental forces operating on the rock are cumulative, and have been operating for a long time. (Don't we have to include the wind of millennia past as a causal factor?)

I cast my vote for "it fell" rather than "it was pushed".

Everyone is having sex with everyone. Its an orgy. — Ranger

Look, Ranger, if everyone is having sex in this orgy, THEN SOMEBODY IS GETTING MY SHARE! Please send details about where this big orgy is immediately.

should sperm be the property of its host? — Ranger

If one wishes to have some control over what one's sperm does after its hasty departure from the producer, then one had best use a condom. Alternately, one could get the sperm pipeline shut off near the source. Or, as part of the pre-coital negotiations to have sex at all (where one's various parts can be put, how long, how used, what words can be said, not said, and so forth, the participants could agree whether a pregnancy can be consummated or not.

Actually, the very act of negotiating the pre-coital contract might be the most effective birth control of all.

An additional alternative for the man is to have sex only with other men, then there won't be any worries about pregnancy or childrearing practices. Much less trouble, all round.

he may have lied provides justification to vote against him — Relativist

As far as I was concerned, Trump's nomination of Kavanaugh was the kiss of death. Kavanaugh could have walked on water, and it wouldn't have changed my mind. (Walking on water should be a bar to Senate approval, in any case.)

We're simply not built for happiness. — All sight

At least we're not built for enduring uninterrupted happiness. If life doesn't interrupt our happiness, we will do it ourselves.

Maybe it is more important for us to be useful in the world and to feel wanted and needed than it is to feel "happy". Useful, wanted, needed... shouldn't be taken as cognate terms for "happiness". Feeling useful, wanted, and needed are feeling useful, wanted, and needed. People who are useful, wanted, and needed are often, as the result of their being useful, wanted, and/or needed, engaged in work or care that is not pleasure or happiness producing.

For instance, municipal sanitation workers are useful, wanted, and needed. When they are called upon to repair a ruptured sewer line in the middle of a very cold winter night I don't imagine they feel 1 iota of pleasure in the experience. Still, they are MOST needed and wanted on the wretched, cold, wet job. They are also useful, needed, and wanted when they lay new water pipe in a fresh, dry ditch on a cool, sunny autumn day.

That's pretty much my view.

The stories might be better compared to a novel or play, where one uses an entirely fictional tale to illuminate deep truths about the human condition. Given the intended audience, everybody on Earth, such fictional tales would necessarily have to be fairly simple. — Jake

The whole enterprise of religion was a very early high point in human artistic achievement. We created the gods: this is an easy concept for the religious to accept about heathen religions, blasphemy when it applies to their own. Apollo or Odin, yes of course. YHWH or Allah? Burn him at the stake!

The gods were invented and their supporting literature was composed by mortal men who worked subtle and plain themes into compelling, inspiring, (sometimes readily) believable tales whose themes have endured for at least 5 millennia. (We don't know a lot about all the oral traditions that preceded the written tradition.)

The "Let go of the rope" story is less extreme than the story of Abraham and his son Isaac. Probably human sacrifice was a part of the proto-religion that produced Judaism and numerous other religions. It must have been a horror for the parents. The story of Abraham and Isaac still shakes people up.

The invented gods and their various religions flourished and became institutional, long before people started complaining about it. There is an unpleasant underbelly of religion. James C. Scott's Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States explains (Scott's theory) how the very early proto-state encouraged the rise of agriculture and urbanization, places like Jericho around 10,000 years ago. Why? Because the proto-state "demiurge" needed something to tax and controlled people to produce the grain. Grain was good for the proto-state because it ripened all at once predictably, could be gathered and stored, and could feed many people. The many people could be put to work weaving wool for the finer garments of the proto-state officialdom, trade, and more taxes.

The early proto-states were city-states were scattered around the fertile crescent and while not initially very stable stayed in business for quite a while, eventually producing more complex states that encompassed much more territory with much more complex economies and societies.

OK, so where does religion fit into all that? The early religions came to serve the early state early on, buttressing the authority of whoever-the-fuck-was-in-charge-of-the-palace and linking the power of the priest to the power of the potentate. And so it has remained, more or less, in various guises, ever since.

I interpreted it to mean "Let go of the rope." Meaning, put yourself entirely in my hands.

I assume that our unfortunate climber would soon arrive at the gates of heaven after having let go. In heaven we will find eternal rest in the care of God. Heaven will be an altogether pleasant experience, I have been led to believe.

Of course, it is possible that something else will happen, and somehow he won't be splattered on the rocks below. I wouldn't count on it. God doesn't intervene (seems to me).

We are either never united with God, or we are never apart from God except in hell. (I'm speaking here out of my past when I believed.) I don't think we transition one to the other.

I used to hear this sort of story (and worse) when I was involved in Metropolitan Community Church, a gay evangelical group. I come out of mainline Methodist church, and we didn't hear stories like that from Methodist ministers. But this MCC liked to promote what I would call kind of sentimental feeling-faith.

Cases are fought all the way up to the Supreme Court, but a candidate's appointment to the court isn't "a case". Kavanaugh is not being tried, he's being interviewed for a (very important) job. He isn't entitled to the job; this isn't Civil Service. He's either qualified or not, in the probably flawed judgement of the Senate. You or I may not trust the Senate, but that's the way the system works. Lots of people are going to be displeased no matter what decision is made by the Senate.

Kavanaugh isn't the first person to be stuck by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Often there is nothing one can do about the piercing except suck it up. Take Gore vs. Bush: Al Gore was devastated by the denouement of the election. There was no higher court to which he could appeal; he had to go home and deal with it as best he could. He did, and survived.

If the honorable and not guilty man (as opposed to an obviously innocent one) has been wrongly accused and can not shake the accusation, then he should gracefully withdraw from consideration. Why should he take himself out of consideration? Because the Court is much more important than Judge Kavanaugh--or any other nominee.

In the last year, a number of men have stepped aside (or been ejected) from their positions on the basis of allegations of "sexual misbehavior" that were not given a thorough hearing or examination. I am sure these guys were more than slightly angry, but they didn't have the opportunity to vent in front of a congressional committee on live TV.

Interesting about the Kuwait fires. But you know, when the FAA grounded all flights over the United States on 911, the loss of all of the contrails that the thousands of flights leave behind had an immediate effect on temperatures of about 2º C--warming the air in the day (less reflected sun light) and cooling at night (less of a blanket on heat escaping).

This was not so obvious that it was noticed at the time. A U Wisconsin researcher discovered the effect when reviewing temperature records during the week after 9/11. The effect was strongest along the east coast and in the midwest where air traffic is heaviest. When air traffic resumed, the effect promptly disappeared.

Some of us enjoy contemplating total destruction at a comfortable distance.

A somewhat bad event just doesn't have enough drama to it. I was not personally inconvenienced by the 2008 crash, and I was somewhat disappointed in the lack of riots in Hong Kong, Tokyo, London, and New York. Not so much as a rock thrown through a boutique's window. The coverage of Fukushima and Chernobyl, was quite satisfying.. Not too close, and lots of dire consequences forecast.

People who do not have an arsonist's bone in their bodies still enjoy watching a big fire, especially if people are not dying in it. And people who have nothing much to lose can get excited about the crises of fiat currencies.

The medications that effect the neurotransmitters are not correcting some chemical imbalance as that's a myth Psychoactive medication that are used to treat mental illness are palliative. It's like putting on a band aid. A person has to use a lot of other coping mechanisms to get them back on track. (And let us not forget about the placebo effect.) — Purple Pond

Ordinary depression presents a number of problems. For one, "a bad life" -- too much stress, debt, drinking, drugs, lack of exercise, bad environment, traumatic stuff, lots of anger, rage, and so on -- is not going to be relieved by any drug on earth. One's overall function will be quite adversely affected. What lots of people need who are diagnosed with depression (and they do have the required markers) is a "new life" where they have the skills and resources needed to change their circumstances.

I can attest to the inadequacy of antidepressants -- having taken various pills for some 30 years. Most of them did not work very well. Some of them had pretty unpleasant side effects.

But the major psychiatric conditions -- psychosis, bi-polar, schizophrenia, psychopathy, and severe depression -- often hell on wheels -- don't seem all that comparable to run-of-the-mill depression. A cure of these conditions is not around the corner. While the brain is at least somewhat plastic, it isn't clay that can be re-formed at will.

So, chemical "imbalances" in the brain is maybe not the case. (Thanks for the link to the SA article.) And there are other places things could go wrong: a nerve impulse is chemical between neurons, then electrical within the neuron, and back to chemical again. Maybe the problem is within neurons, rather than between neurons -- damned if I know which.

So, you are not the libertarian I thought you might be. All well and good, libertarian or not.

But let me ask you: Would you be in support of calling a constitutional convention in the next few years (it would take a few years to call one, most likely)? And, if you were in favor of calling a constitutional convention, what kind of constitutional document would you like to see?

How much of the existing constitution would you like to keep, and how much would you want to get rid of?

I for one, would like to have it clearly spelled out that CORPORATIONS ARE NOT PERSONS , in any sense, and CAN NEVER BE TREATED AS A PERSON. This would be to address the SCOTUS very very bad CITIZENS UNITED decision.

they don't call it brain disorders — Purple Pond

Why do you think they prescribe chemicals that act on brain chemistry? It is to treat disorders of the brain? What is not understood with many drugs is exactly which neurotransmitter in which part of the brain makes the most difference. Thorazine, for instance, or lithium carbonate are effective drugs; we know that they alter aspects of production/uptake of neurotransmitters. Exactly how isn't known, but that's not the same as having no idea of how they work.

Neurologists also treat brain disorders and prescribe medicine. What neurologists treat is generally non-affective, non-cognitive aspects of the brain, such as parkinson's, alzheimers, epilepsy, etc.

A lot of what psychiatrists deal with are disorders of mood, which are generated by the limbic system (the emotional center of the brain). Bi-polar is a mood disorder, as are depression and anxiety. Bi-polar patients swing back and forth between states of elation (can be nice until it turns into the terrors of psychosis) and states of very deep depression, sometimes bordering on catatonia.

Schizophrenia isn't a mood disorder. Neither is delusional thinking.

True, but isn't there much more to bipolar and schizophrenia than mania and hallucinations? It's very hard to treat all the symptoms when you can't do anything about the disease that's causing the symptoms. — Purple Pond

The disease of bi-polar disorder tends to be familial; a set of genes most likely causes the disease. The disease is the abnormal activity of the limbic system, alternately causing elation or depression. Attacks are often triggered by sleep disruption (caused, for instance, by east/west travel across maybe 6 time zones), or other diagnosable sleep disorders. Stress can trigger a bi-polar attack. Sometimes a bi-polar attack isn't triggered by anything. Its the genetic predisposition that makes stress or sleep loss dangerous for bi-polar patients.

Emotions screw up thinking in perfectly healthy individuals. A good share of the history of our species is about people who weren't thinking very clearly when they really needed to have a clear picture of what was going on. They couldn't because they were immersed in the emotion of the moment. For instance, they might have been so madly in love that they just didn't care that their army was ready to fight. Or fear might have caused someone to avoid risks that would have made them rich. blah blah blah.

The thing is, purple pond, we can't just open up the skull and pull out the limbic system to see what the matter with it is. Even if we could put it on a tray, it's still too finely constructed for us to figure out (at this point). You know, there are more possible connections between the 100 billion neurons in the brain than there are atoms in the universe. That makes it very difficult to evaluate what is happening when things go wrong (or right, for that matter).

I'm not clear about what causes schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorders. (NO reason why I would be clear.) Some neurologists/psychiatrists think it is a developmental disorder of the way the brain was put together in utero. A virus or some toxin might cause the abnormality. It just isn't clearly understood. Schizophrenia tends to cause very delusional thinking, like thinking the gas company is controlling your thoughts through the gas pipes in the building -- that sort of thing. (Maybe they are, but that would seem to be above and beyond the average gas company's performance capacity.)

Many psychiatrists (and others, laymen too) view mental illness as diseases of the physical brain which have behavioral or affective symptoms. A person who is bi-polar has something wrong with their brain. The symptoms of bi-polar disease -- mania, psychosis, deep depression, elation, hallucinations, and so on are caused by disorders of the brain. The same can be said for ADHD, schizophrenia, OCD, and so on.

The problem psychiatry has is that the brain can not YET be observed in a sufficiently granular level to identify which neurotransmitters in which neurons are causing the problem.

Many of the complaints which arrive at the psychiatrists doorstep are vague descriptions of unhappiness, dissatisfaction with life, generalized anger, fatigue, poor cognitive function, and so on. The patients are more or less functional -- but not happy. What to do for them to help them feel more upbeat and effective? A relatively small share of patients present with hallucinations, completely irrational cognition, self-destructive behaviors, and so on. They need totally different kinds of treatment than moderately depressed people require.

Since the brain can not be observed so closely as to identify causes, identifying treatments is likewise a fraught problem.

The available drugs that effectively address symptoms like mania, hallucinations... are crude but effective. The drugs that treat depressive conditions are also imprecise but are not quite as crude as the major tranquilizers. They don't work very well quite often.

People have gotten to the point where they live in these bubbles — DingoJones

I think this true. One can arrange to hear certain kinds of news about certain kinds of events reported in a certain way -- exclusively. Until the last 20 to 30 years it was far more difficult to establish an information bubble for one's self. The population as a whole received much more shared information -- ie, ABC, CBS, AND NBC news. And of the three, CBS led the pack, with NBC following, ABC trailing.

There were newspapers, magazines, and radio. But these too served rather broad, large audiences.

Some people feel there is just too much uninformed political discourse going on. The various Internet platforms give millions of unvetted people (a good share of whom are nitwits, airheads, extremists, and lunatics) a soap box from which to declaim their views. This is not an improvement over the situation of... e.g., 50 years ago when there were only 3 television networks broadcasting news. The range of approved and expressible network views was far narrower back then. In 1960, then President Kennedy had numerous affairs about which the country was not informed generally or in detail because it was considered "off limits".

Lyndon Johnson could be really, really crude, and Richard Nixon could be quite savage, but these moments were not offered hourly for public consumption.

The war in Vietnam was covered frankly, the frankness of which contributed greatly to the anti-war reaction. This is not to say that the war in Vietnam was always covered impartially (whatever that might mean) or truthfully. There was much that should have been said that was unutterable.

Certainly there were extremists, lunatics, nitwits, and airheads around 50 years ago. Quite a few really bad things were perpetrated by some very bad groups. But the difference between then and now is that there was less time devoted to the news (no CNN at the time) so coverage of IRA bombings or lunatic leftist gangs in Germany was minimal (not an altogether bad thing).

Your opening post is very poorly stated. I gather you think the SCOTUS has been getting out of hand ever since the Constitution was adopted in 1787.

Constitutions are not "sacred" documents like the Ten Commandments--carved in stone and handed down from heaven and valid forever. They are working documents designed to address the perceived problems of establishing government at a given time. If the 13 states had been static -- never changing -- the constitution would never have needed amending. The original 13 were dynamic, and more states were added. The economy grew along with the population, and the country became more complicated. New, unanticipated problems arose snd required resolution in the courts, because that is where people took their problems to be resolved. Not only have circumstances changed, but the commonly understood meaning of terms changes over time, as well.

My guess is that you would like to see an all-around smaller, less involved federal government. Maybe you feel that way about state, county, and city governments as well. Right? Does the phrase "Get government off our backs" ring any bells for you?

a nuclear war likely wouldn't ruin everything — ssu

Daniel Pentagon Papers Ellsberg was an analyst for the DOD. His sense was that nuclear war was seen to be survivable because the Russians and Americans both based their models on the destruction of nuclear blasts. If blasts were all there were, then a nuclear war would probably not ruin "everything". What was not modeled was the effect of say 2000-3000 nuclear blasts followed by massive firestorms throwing many, many tons of soot, combustion products, pulverized minerals (concrete, brick, etc.), and other matter very high into the atmosphere--much the way a big volcano eruption does. The amount of sun-reflecting matter would be enough to lower global temperatures for several years. It would NOT be a glaciating event. It would be several -- maybe 10 -- global, long winter seasons, followed by short frost filled springs, summers too short to grow much, leading into short frost filled autumns, and then back into "old fashioned winter".

The sudden cooling wouldn't kill people directly as much as it would starve billions. Plus there would be radiation, total disruption of industry, culture, transportation, communication, etc. Life would continue both for some people and for some species. For many species the disruption would be too severe to survive.

Africa, South America, and Australia would not be affected instantly, and maybe not as severely, but the idea that an all-out nuclear war would not be a global event is untenable.

I think you underestimate the adaptability and durability of the society and commerce. — ssu

Probably so. And I actually don't expect any sort of grand social meltdown without a nuclear war--and if the nuclear war is thorough, we won't be around to worry about it afterwards.

I looked up US defaults -- I was surprised. I didn't think the US had every defaulted, but not so (at least technically).

Gold as an investment is totally fine — ssu

As long as you buy low and sell high.

one could ask, what makes gold valuable — Relativist

3 things:

1. Limited supply; were gold as plentiful as copper or aluminum, it wouldn't be so valuable.
2. Its inherent properties (conductivity, resistance to corrosion, is malleable...).
3. It's yellow color is appealing. It takes a nice enduring shine and keeps it. (On the other hand, it's too soft for many applications, so it has to be alloyed.)

The trouble with all schemes for surviving the collapse of money is that no representative commodity, be it gold, diamonds, silver, or any thing else, will survive the collapse. — Bitter Crank

I'm not so sure about that. — ssu

I should have been clearer. The situation I was thinking of was farther out than the collapse of currency. I was thinking more along apocalyptic lines, the demise of the central state, anarchy, survivalists, etc.

Survivalists and like minded people who worry about surviving the coming apocalyptic social/political crash caused by "something" other than nuclear war, think that if they have silver and cold coins, a hide-a-way in the hills, 6 months worth of canned tomatoes and beans, an axe and a gun (guns, of course, lots of guns) they will do just fine.

Survivalists don't buy my argument that gold, silver, and diamonds just won't be worth anything after this grand crash, because you can't eat them, keep warm with them, and so on. They have a belief that there is "essential value" in gold that transcends everything else. It doesn't, of course.

After the crash, gold, or maybe old postage stamps, could function as currency provided that people had faith in odd bits of gold or old postage stamps. Faith here being the belief that the next seller would take the 2014 Forever stamp celebrating zinnias (or wtf) as payment.

perma-bears — ssu

The trouble with all schemes for surviving the collapse of money is that no representative commodity, be it gold, diamonds, silver, or any thing else, will survive the collapse. Once the currency system dies, we will revert back to bartering of useful goods. A big diamond on a thick gold ring will probablyly not trade for as much as a wormy apple. (Well, maybe a very wormy apple). What will matter is whether one can eat it, drink it, wear it to keep warm, or dig or shoot with it.

Old fashioned luxury goods like very fine china, jewels, and race cars won't be worth much.

I understand that paying taxes supports the value of a fiat currency: IF you do not pay your taxes with the fiat currency, you will suffer the consequences. The only way to avoid the problem is to produce income for yourself (thus accumulating a store of fiat currency) OR live under a bridge, and frugally at that, so you don't need any of the fancy toilet paper.

But it seems to me that the nation has to be robustly productive in order to make fiat currency work.

The unrecognized nation of West Cupcake has a very small population, produces ugly root vegetables that nobody wants (West Cupcakers don't want them either, but that is all they have to eat). The Parliament of Cupcake decides to issue paper currency so they can buy something better -- beets, maybe. Or even parsnips. A small press in Thailand prints up a batch and sends it off, but keeps enough to pay for the printing.

What will happen to this currency? Nothing. The money will not become worth anything to anybody because there is no production leading to an accumulation of wealth in any form. They dig up their ugly roots, eat them, and then plant some more. That's it for economic activity.

Suppose the West Cupcakers discover that they are sitting on a pile of rare earths, gold, excellent petroleum, and an extra thick rich seam of copper, tin, and zinc. The ill-fed Cupcakers pick up their shovels and start filling bags of product to ship out of their previously unused harbor. Business is brisk.

Now, because they have something that everybody wants, they are able to trade for apples, bananas, pork chops, and cheese. They never eat another ugly root vegetable. And they now have to pay taxes to support the governments efforts to control the now burgeoning mining industry.

Isn't this the necessary support for MMT? Real business?

It gets value from what it represents, which is ultimately human labour. — bloodninja