Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History by Matt Taibbi

Ever been raped without even knowing it? But you wake up with a sore asshole so you blame the blacks, immigrants, and Jews. That’s basically the American public today.

 

The author makes the fatal mistake of coming in hard against the Tea Party and all its diverse members and supporters, essentially turning off many people who probably need to hear his message most.  It sounds all too much like MSNBC, a corporate counterpoint to Fox, an echo chamber sounding board for the most radicalized and angry political pundits.  It’s a total turnoff for moderates or even people on the other side, who may even change their minds.  All you’re doing is jerking off people who have already bought your philosophy, giving them foreplay with the viciousness and creativity in attacking their political opponents and culminating in orgasmic rhetoric belittling and dehumanizing them as utter idiots and morons.  There was a time when I actually supported a strong, powerful government, almost authoritarian, but I didn’t change my mind because libertarians berated me and my kind as idiots and morons.  Rather, I read libertarian books where there was very little mockery and creative disparaging rhetoric and instead clear, logical arguments against authoritarianism and ample historical evidence of the failures of authoritarianism.

 

The author has more than ample evidence of the collusion between government and big banks and big business.  Why does he have to start out the book like an MSNBC commentator?

 

“There are really two Americas, one for the grifter class, and one for everybody else.  In everybody-else land, the world of small businesses and wage-earning employees, the government is something to be avoided, an overwhelming, all-powerful entity whose attentions usually presage some kind of financial setback, if not complete ruin.  In the grifter world, however, government is a slavish lapdog that the financial companies that will be the major players in this book use as a tool for making money.

The grifter class depends on these two positions getting confused in the minds of everybody else.”

 

What everyone seems to conveniently forget is that the government has always been used by a small group of rulers to enrich and protect them while exploiting, looting, taxing, and impoverishing everyone else.  We seem to think that by getting rid of monarchs and aristocrats and creating elections, we have somehow harnessed the mighty power of government for the public good.  This notion has to be the most ludicrous thing ever, and yet, I would guess, the vast majority of people in this country and throughout the world, really do believe it, because 12 years of state-mandated indoctrination actually works.

 

* * *

 

The more books I read about the economy and finance, the more I keep hearing about the metaphors of ‘casino’ and ‘mobsters.’  Let’s take a reality check folks.  Our world is run by sophisticated mobsters and they’re running a casino operation where they get to make outlandish gambles and should they lose, all taxpayers get the bill for their losing bets.  To cushion the blow, the bill gets sent to our children and grandchildren.  Yeah, fuck them right.  They can handle $5000/month rent and $5000/month health care payments in the theoretical future they will not have on $4000/month stagnated salaries or part-time gig jobs maintaining and charging robots.

 

* * *

 

There’s a part in there about grifters taking ‘weekends in Reno.’  Has the author been to Reno?  LOL.  He should have said weekends in Tahoe or Vegas.  Only small time grifters weekend in Reno.

 

* * *

 

“These [pension] plans tended to be guarded by midlevel state employees with substandard salaries and profound cases of financial penis envy who were exquisitely vulnerable to the bullshit sales pitches of the Wall Street whiz kids many of them secretly wanted to be.”  One of the best descriptions of the naïve and unsophisticated government finance officials with state college degrees no doubt.  You can only imagine how they where wined and dined, perhaps even sent to resorts for bullshit workshops and conferences lavishly sponsored by Wall Street.

 

Apparently, I spoke to soon.

 

“Why not bet on something that people can’t do without – like food or gas or oil?”  “Hell, this is America.  Motherfuckers be eating pasta and cran muffins by the metric ton for the next ten centuries!  Look at the asses on people in this country.  Just let them try to cut back on wheat, and sugar, and corn!”

 

* * *

 

This book also does a great job covering Alan Greenspan and his dumping of cash into the laps of Wall Street as well as the Obamacare debacle that is basically healthcare collusion forced upon the public, the loosening of restrictions on commodities speculation leading to the sharp rise in gas prices in 2008 and Enron, and the selling of parking meter revenue to private investment consortiums, some of which were foreign wealth funds.

 

When I was a kid, I remember reading about the most corrupt times in US history, the Teapot Dom scandal, the 20’s and how people revolted and enacted a bunch of laws to take back control from the robber barons.  This was aided by muckrakers who exposed all the corruption.  It’s amazing that we’re living through the exact same kind of corruption today, but the big difference is that mainstream media has been bought up by the corrupt, so only books like this serve the purpose of muckraking, but since so few people read books, there is little popular education and anger.  Instead, the corrupt have successfully divided us in two and laser focused our hatred and anger toward one another.  I’d like to think that a hundred years from now, students will read about the early 2000s as a time of great corruption and income disparity that was addressed and fixed somehow, but I also fear that this is only the beginning of the end.  America today resembles Third World nations with the amount of flagrant corruption and looting going on.  There’s a point of no return when you’ve destroyed the middle class so completely that you have to turn on the poor for looting, but since there’s so little wealth in the poor, your nation simply crumbles and self-implodes.

 

The unfortunate thing about the world is that whenever any nation starts to succeed and generate wealth, it attracts parasites who come in to suck blood from the healthy specimen.  The more successful, the more parasites it attracts until finally they overwhelm the body and kill it.  Then the parasites jump ship looking for the next nation to suck dry.  Some people might be tempted to accuse the Jews of being these parasites with their sophisticated banking schemes, but this is utterly bigoted and forgets that for most of history, banking was a money-losing operation with borrowers often failing to repay loans and skipping town.  When nations realized the powers of banking and the ability to raise huge amounts of money for military supplies and weapons, certainly they used Jewish bankers (notably the Rothschilds) but it’s not that hard to quickly copy banking concepts and financial instruments.  I think the grifter class still uses Jewish bankers today, because they make a convenient scapegoat should everything go south.  Think about it.  You use a bank to create a financial instrument that is designed exactly like a Ponzi Scheme.  Would you use a bank run by WASPs and get them in trouble?  Why not use a bank run by Jews so that when the Ponzi Scheme falls apart and everyone gets mad, you can also point to the Jews for it.

 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003F3FJS2/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

 

Don’t Go There: From Chernobyl to North Korea – one man’s quest to lose himself and find everyone else in the world’s strangest places by Adam Fletcher

This is a travelogue to off-the-beaten-path, uncomfortable to dangerous places in the world by an early 30-something British wanker steeped in cynicism, privilege, and sarcasm.  I’m actually really glad I left England at age seven.  There’s a certain self-satisfying, self-comforting, snide attitude about the English, a derisive looking-down-on-everyone xenophobia when for much of modern history, England looted the world.  If you think England is so great, why did you have to steal shit from the rest of the world?

 

In Istanbul, they ponder why Germany lost two world wars and is now one of the most wealthy countries in the world while Argentina and Turkey suffer political chaos and turmoil.  Obviously, they’re not a smart gang of complacent folk hanging out at the fringes of protests.  But you can’t really blame them, because the state indoctrinates the public, and you can’t really expect the state to explain how corrupt it is.  You’ll never read a history book that basically starts out with, so there was a bunch of Europeans who decided to loot the world, and in doing so, they established a corrupt native government that is mostly still in power today which oppresses its people and enables further looting by First World nations.  Most non-Third World governments were created by Europeans for the express purpose of helping them loot their own countries.  In any criminal operation, you have the brains or the planners, and then you have to have the muscle, and governments full of natives are the muscle, and then you have the marks, the natives.  You can’t pull off a con job without the muscle.  The brains may have left their colonies, but they still pull the strings through the muscles left behind who create the façade of independent, sovereign countries.  Even if the colonists leave them alone completely, they’re henchmen looking for brains which invariably are the richest people of that nation or its military leaders.

 

I’m guilty of being a First World traveler.  My only exposure to global poverty was a short trip into Mexico and a trip to South Africa which was an incomprehensible paradox of First World wealth and Third World squalor often only several miles close to one another.  There is nothing like seeing global poverty face-to-face to shake you of your privilege and localized illusions.  Americans truly live in a sheltered bubble, fantasy world.  Your reality is what you see and experience firsthand.  Everything else you see on electronic media is an abstraction.  The starving, those living in war zones, extreme poverty, the images are about as real as CGI images of dragons, dinosaurs, and fairies.  And most of the gruesome images are hidden, the prisons, the torture, the bombing victims, etc.  Only once in a while do you get to see the carnage when Mexican cartels decide to display dismembered bodies to intimidate the public or politicians.

 

The author feels something amiss about vacations in comfort zones.  It’s possible he’s a disaster tourist, someone who gets a thrill by immersing in danger zones full of traumatized people dealing with war, famine, natural disasters, extreme poverty, etc.  But it’s also possible that he feels something missing in his life, like, his comfortable existence has made him numb, and that numbness makes him feel like he’s dead.  Maybe it’s both.  I’m reminded of the Asian-American guy who joined the Libyan resistance and almost got himself killed.  A lot of people cynically labeled him a thrill-seeking disaster tourist, and that may well have been part of his motivation, but I also believe there’s something deeper here.

 

We’re raised to believe that the more advanced the civilization, the richer the country, the richer you are, the more comforts you have, the more luxuries you enjoy, the happier you will be.  People go to great lengths to achieve happiness via the accumulation of wealth.  Well, that’s a lie.  Certainly, your life becomes better when you escape poverty, but between lower-middle class and upper-middle class, increased happiness is not guaranteed.  When people get richer, they make the mistake of continuing to spend beyond their means to look like they belong in the class right above them.  Let’s say you make enough money that you can afford a nice house in the nice part of town.  You’d be set for life, except your old car would look out of place, so you’d have to buy an expensive new car.  You could keep going to your cheaper gym or yoga class at your old neighborhood, but why not go to the more expensive gym and yoga class right in your new neighborhood?  You could make new, richer friends.  And when you hang out with those new, richer friends, you have to go to more expensive restaurants and do more expensive things.  People aren’t willing to just be frugal and spend within their means and accept the class they’re in.

 

At the same time, the comforts of modern life leave much to be desired.  Humans are specifically designed to suffer and struggle as well as share and help one another.  We can handle a lot more pain and suffering than we think, and we need to share and give a lot more than we think in addition to needing to exercise more and eat less.  But our bizarre phobia of pain and suffering and discomfort turns us into spoiled babies.  Our belief that we can subcontract our giving and sharing to government leaves us empty inside, lacking the continual bumps of oxytocin and dopamine from helping someone in need and being valued for it.  We are left spoiled, fragile, narcissistic, empty, anxious, depressed rich people living in luxury and comfort.  Then people make the mistake of believing that it is the luxury and comfort which is to blame so they try to indulge in these anti-luxury, discomfort vacations to shake themselves awake.  Burning Man’s harsh climate and lack of luxury amenities (except for Billionaire’s Row) is partially designed to reawaken your true self that is geared toward hardships and discomforts.  It isn’t the luxury and comfort that’s the problem.  That’s like saying food is the problem.  The problem is our infatuation with luxury and comfort instead of a healthy dose of it, we ram so much of it down our gullet that it sickens us.

 

Part of my discomfort with First Worlder’s when they travel to Third World countries is their privilege and arrogance.  I’m sure some of them love traveling to the Third World, because for the first time in their lives, they feel rich and privileged.  There are countless poor servers eager to serve their every need including cheap prostitutes.  They look down upon the poor natives with contempt, disgust, or at best, indifference.  You can’t really otherwise.  You can’t feel constant remorse and guilt for what your country has done.  It reminds me of the story of two siblings.  One was spoiled and treated well while the other was abused and mistreated.  You would expect the spoiled sibling to feel bad, but quite the contrary, he blamed his sister for getting what she deserved.  Can you expect the brother to go through life feeling guilty for being treated so well while his sister was abused?  The same happens in America with all the white people who refuse to feel guilty for the mistreatment of blacks.  Far from feeling bad, they blame the black people for their misfortunes and refuse to believe there is any more racism or mistreatment.  Perhaps at first, the First Worlder will feel horrible at all the suffering and poverty, but I imagine, over time, they become desensitized to it all and start to exploit their relative wealth disparity and act like their brethren wealthy in First World countries, looking down upon everyone else with disdain and contempt.

 

I feel that for a lot of First Worlder’s, they view the natives as background, like extras on a movie set.  They don’t walk the streets the way they walk the streets back home.  They walk the streets of Third World countries like privileged, superior beings.  They go to native entertainment venues and enjoy the quant, charming, little native culture.  They enjoy the cheap, exotic foods with lots of spices and thick sauces which were actually invented to cover up spoiled meats.  Far from being an enlightening, sobering face-to-face encounter with the destruction of European conquest and looting, they actually act like the rich European conquerors and colonialists.  I’m sure they look down upon the dark-skinned natives like animals and savages when in reality, many dark-skinned people have lived in civilization longer than Europeans.

 

That’s the problem.  Civilization weakens people so that a more aggressive and technologically advanced people can easily conquer entire empires with 1-to-20 ratios in soldiers.  Genghis Khan’s easy romp through the civilizations of Asia and Central Asia should have clued us in.  If civilization was so great, why was it virtually impotent against a much smaller group of hunter-gatherers?  It was actually the Europeans that were more like barbarians and animals.  When they conquered the Americas, they believed that washing was bad for your health and must have smelled like homeless people.  Those who conquered the Americas were not the upstanding citizens of civilization but rather the criminal outcasts and misfits.  It should be no surprise that one nation adopted the strategy of simply stealing cargo from another nation impressing thugs, criminals, and misfits into their navy.  It should be no surprise that an entire continent was populated by criminals.  Of course, you’ll never see that point of view in history books written by state-sanctioned supplicants.

 

* * *

 

Without even thinking, you imagine that any foreigner visiting your country is somehow a meticulously, scientifically median or mean representation of their home country and culture.  This is an obvious absurdity that we all seem to overlook.  First of all, there was a rather odd study a while ago that claimed that within each country, there’s an odd similarity in the proportion of extroversion and introversion.  It made me think that in every high school in America, there always seems to be a bizarre similar proportion of jocks, nerds, popular social kids, outcasts, etc.  It’s my hypothesis that in every large social group, we actively observe the proportions of different niches and typecasts, and then we unconsciously exploit an under-represented niche.  For example, you find a high school with a disproportionate number of jocks, so you realize you’ll be at the top of your class if you study moderately, whereas if you find a high school with a disproportionate number of nerds, you realize you can easily make varsity in almost any sport, so you become a jock.  Over time, an even proportion of jocks and nerds arises.  I think the same thing occurs in every group in every country, so that it’s quite possible that completely randomly, you’ll run into the most outgoing Swede, and from that, you’d assume all Swedes are outgoing.  Or you might run into the most surly and rude Afghan and assume all Afghans are like that.  Unfortunately, you’re just rolling a dice randomly and exposing yourself to an incredibly small sample of a rather gigantic population.

 

But at the same time, I don’t think it’s totally random.  I believe, first of all, in order to travel to a First World nation, you can’t be dirt poor unless you’re an immigrant.  Americans may encounter the poorest of Mexicans, but you’re not going to be exposed to the poorest of Bulgarians, Estonians, Kenyans, Koreans, etc.  This seems to corrupt your generalizations about people.  Few Americans realize that there are many wealthy or at least middle class, European-looking Mexicans, because they’re not the ones who migrate to America as much as their much poorer brethren.  We seem to assume that the English are well-to-do and wear fancy, tight, fashionable clothes, but we never encounter the yobs or hoodie-clans pretending to be 90’s American gangsta’s.  And back in the day when Cambodian refugees were being shipped to America, Americans viewed East Asians as poor and dark-skinned, but when the doors opened to Japanese and Chinese immigration, they sent over their smartest to acquire western technology, people thought East Asians were super smart and light-skinned.

 

Similarly, Asia tends to get a lot of short, nerdy American guys, because they don’t seem to get anywhere as much female attention as in Asia, where they are not considered short but average.  Related to this book, I would also argue that people that tend to travel, tend to be introverts in their home nations.  The reason they travel, is because they enjoy the anonymity of travel, the brief and superficial acquaintances they make along the way, the interesting phenomenon of how traveling to new places makes you extremely outgoing at least in the first few days, and the emptiness and alienation they feel at home, which makes them believe that the grass is greener on the other side.  This is also probably the motivation behind so many migrants and explorers.  If you’re happy at home and raising a family, why travel a lot?  If you can’t get a spouse and raise a family at home, if you’re unhappy and lonely, why not travel, why not roll the cosmic dice.  It’s better than status quo.  As a result, people traveling from foreign countries tend to be the outcasts, oddballs, introverts, and misfits.

 

I had to skip a few chapters.  The author was a bit boring.  His take on North Korea was the most interesting part.  The team knew all about the kid who was accused of stealing a propaganda poster and died, yet they still went, and even worse, they partied and drank.  If I’m in a country where the slightest misstep can land you in prison, I’m not getting drunk, sorry.  I actually read an article on him that was fascinating and more interesting than the book.

https://www.gq.com/story/otto-warmbier-north-korea-american-hostage-true-story

The craziest part of North Korea is that they likely stage every venue tourists visit.  Isn’t that crazy?  It’s like, they only have so much resources that they only can enjoy them when tourists visit as an attempt to try to demonstrate to tourists that the country is doing fine.  They gave this away really when North Koreans visited South Korea and accused them of putting every car in the country on the road during the visit.  No, that’s what you would do North Korea.

 

 

https://smile.amazon.com/Dont-There-Chernobyl-Korea-one-strangest-ebook/dp/B0796T9N19/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=don%27t+go+there&qid=1598031312&sr=8-1

The Hidden World of the Fox by Adele Brand

I think part of why we find foxes so fascinating is that there seems to be something going on behind their eyes, a peculiar and familiar sense of planning and consciousness that you don’t see as much in rats or cows, even pigs.  I think the mistake we make is that the fox is a predator, and with both its eyes in front, it must watch and observe to understand distance but also as a predator, that steady gaze is a stalking tactic.  It watches, to analyze and plan an attack, and when it watches humans, it studies us out of habit and not so much a demonstration of similar intelligence.  We are addicted to anthropomorphizing everything including nonanimals like cars and ships.  So we see a lot of ourselves in foxes, and their limited fear of us, their inclination not to immediately run from us, and in some cases, their interest in taking food from us, makes us also think they’re interested in a friendship.  Our interaction with foxes is probably similar to our interaction with wolves right before we decided to take them in and gradually turn them into domesticated dogs, it’s a sort of flirty tango, before they ultimately decide to become loyal companions.

 

We also love to Disneyfy nature, to romanticize it.  I certainly believe humanity went downhill when we converted from hunter-gatherer to civilization, but a lot of primitivists over-romanticize the hunter-gatherer life.  We certainly enjoyed greater freedom, equality, and were much healthier and taller and had bigger brains, but life wasn’t a Disney movie.  We ostracized people who didn’t fit into our tribes, probably killing them sometimes.  We waged vicious fights with other human tribes and intelligent apes.  While those who lived to old age, probably lived quite long, many didn’t get to old age.  There must have been many times of starvation and perhaps even cannibalism.  And while the social hierarchies were not as disproportionate as they are today, none-the-less, there had to be small social hierarchies with some people on the bottom feeling pretty shitty.

 

Likewise, the life of a fox isn’t a Disney movie.  Most cubs don’t make it to adulthood.  So many people miss the horrors of nature, because they’re hidden from us.  When animals get sick or starve, they hide, and their deaths and decay are hidden from us.  The ground hides countless baby and infant animals that starved to death.  Also, shockingly, alpha female foxes commit infanticide against the cubs of lower status foxes, and lower status foxes also tend to have more stress and suffer from sicknesses more, including mange (parasitic mites), due to a lower immune system.  There is classism in the world of nature.  I used to think all human vices were unnatural, but this was sheer ignorance about nature.  Everything we do and create is natural, just a different strategy or tactic of nature.

 

Our innate sense of disgust of infanticide and for many of us, our disgust of classism and social hierarchy come from our deep social instincts, but at the same time, our ability to commit infanticide and engage in social hierarchies, abusing those ‘below’ us, also come from our deep social instincts which make us often hypocritical or paradoxical.  Fact is, it’s whatever the situation calls for, and whether we like it or not, we have to be pliable in order to survive.  At one time, we can believe that we are heroic, loving, fair, and just, but at another, we find it more convenient to be a coward, hateful, unfair, murderous, and unjust.  I think we have to stop overestimating our character.  Our DNA gives us our character, along with social influences, but it also gives us some nasty traits with sufficient cues from the environment and others.  If we understand this, we would not put ourselves in situations where our character is likely to be compromised.

 

For example, we should know that no matter how noble and honest a political candidate is, when that candidate gets into office and acquires such disproportionate power and authority, they will inevitably become corrupted.  The solution is not giving anyone so much power and authority.  Certainly, prior behavior predicts future behavior, but since our descent into unkind behavior is triggered by so many factors, you never know, a candidate with an otherwise untarnished record, could suddenly turn.  The same goes for wealth.  Tech bros all want to change the world for the better, they want to improve the world, they want to get rid of poverty, they want people to be happier, but give them fame and money, give them female attention for the first time in their lives, give them any positive attention for the first time in their lives, and they start to believe they can do no wrong.  The predators who love to latch on to rich and famous people convert them, perhaps both consciously and subconsciously into the leader they want them to be, a ruthless, domineering, egotistical, monopolistic brute who does everything possible to become richer and more powerful so as to improve the position of those around him.

 

Free market Capitalism believes in allowing people to profit.  First of all, let’s disabuse ourselves of the idea that we live in a free market Capitalist economy.  Our economy is heavily rigged in favor of existing institutions and the ruling class.  But let us assume we did live in a free market Capitalist economy.  There would be billionaires, but not as many, but nonetheless, billionaires.  Knowing that wealth and power corrupt, these billionaires would inevitably corrupt the political system to write laws that benefit them, thus rigging the system and destroying the free market.  No matter how many laws you pass to protect the market, keep in mind, we have antitrust laws that are not being enforced, the rich will figure out a way of repealing those laws or simply getting politicians not to enforce those laws.  So the question is, should we even allow some people to acquire so much wealth and power.  The answer should be an absolute no.  The question is, how do we achieve this?  Instead of simply outlawing people from acquiring billions in assets, I believe, besides unrigging the market, an additional step needs to be made.  Since a free market will create billionaires anyway, and billionaires will tend to corrupt the free market, the solution must be stopping people from becoming billionaires.

 

My solution is as follows: First, we need a progressive capital gains tax up to the point of 99% for profits of over $100 million.  Second, we need to encourage and allow for workers to own a piece of the companies that employ them.  We need to start thinking of workers not as hired hands but as partners.  We should normalize owning a piece of the company you work for.  And there should be no reason the owner of a company should refuse to share ownership with their employees.  In fact, over time, companies that refuse to share ownership would be viewed as simply selfish and an undesirable employer.  Third, there is no good reason for anyone to own land, just as much as they should not be able to own air, water, or sunshine.  When we are born, because all the good land in our city is already owned, we are born indebted to landowners.  This is absurd.  We certainly can pay someone to build our homes, but it is the height of stupidity to have to pay someone to live on land.  Imagine people owning air and expecting you to pay for breathing their air.  Fourth, we loosen lending to everyone.  Certainly, a few unsavory folks would take out loans and waste it on materialistic purchases, but the vast majority would create businesses, and whether the businesses succeed or fail, they would in the meantime create jobs.

 

* * *

 

When things are going well, in abundance, we tend to behave the best, that is, more loving, sharing, and nurturing.  Unfortunately, we also tend to focus on social status and hierarchy, focusing on those who have more abundance than the rest of us.  If we are to maximize the traits we find most pleasing, that of love and kindness, perhaps instead of trying to teach these traits in environments of squalor and distress, we should focus on creating the environments that nurture these traits.  In other words, we create abundant environments, but not too much abundance.  We create stability and security, but not too much.  We allow for destabilizing changes and cycles of scarcity which actually come naturally.  The notion that we need the Federal Reserve to remove these cycles of scarcity and provide for eternal abundance is both misguided and unrealistic.  The Fed, to date, has simply not delivered, and in many cases worsened the cycle of scarcity by trying to artificially prop up the cycles of abundance.

 

As devil’s advocate, I would ask, why are we so enamored of kindness and love as a default?  I would argue that we are not.  People born into poverty and injustice are enamored of cruelty and selfishness.  As much as people living in abundance may have casual impulses for cruelty and selfishness, people living in poverty and injustice have impulses for kindness and love.  But our impulses for kindness and love are stronger, because we are one of the most social animals around.  We triumphed, because we were able to form larger and larger social groups and we simply won by outnumbering our adversaries.

 

That doesn’t necessarily mean we’re the most loving and kind animals.  Part of forming larger and larger groups was an ability to oversee the flaws in others, the ability to supplicate ourselves to greater and greater authorities, the ability to jump on bandwagons and harass outcasts, the heightened ability to conform and obey, etc.  None-the-less, our instincts of love and kindness remained strong, so that often we are confused when we find ourselves jumping on a bandwagon of hatred and ostracism.  Perhaps there are countless Karen’s out there who find themselves loving and kind to their own kind, but they’re actually confused and shocked when they exercise their instinct to persecute and bully what they consider outsiders.  Again, the solution is not so much taking all those Karen’s to character class but rather creating an environment where these instincts are not triggered.  In other words, exposing young Karen’s to racial diversity so they consider all races as part of their kind.

 

I also believe most Karen’s act out because they’re taking psychoactive drugs that mess with their minds.  They say that some antidepressants cause suicidal thoughts but never mention the logical corollary of homicidal thoughts, and if they’re causing such extreme thoughts, it’s not much of a leap to think that they’re also causing people to behave antisocially and shamelessly.  I’ve noticed that on certain drugs, my social conservativism goes away and I do stuff others would consider embarrassing or shameful.  Many drugs eliminate your sense of shame.  I’ve also noticed that on Ritalin, if I encounter a stressful situation that causes my heart rate to increase, the Ritalin puts me into overdrive and it takes a lot of mental effort to stop from overreacting to a situation.  There are times I’ve felt like killing people over an insult.  Drugs are condensed chemicals found in nature, but since they’ve never been condensed before, we have no natural defenses to them or experience dealing with them.  I firmly believe all kinds of drugs that are artificially condensed chemicals have hidden and dangerous side effects related to serotonin and suspend our sense of shame or inhibition.

 

* * *

 

We also always have to keep in mind that what we think is best for us may not necessarily be the best for us.  Often times, we are fooled by our DNA and things in nature, especially the human made things that are designed to ‘enhance’ nature like artificial sweeteners, fried food, sugar, cigarettes, antidepressants, etc.  We may wish to live in a world full of love and kindness, but fact is, we are designed to adapt to all different kinds of worlds.  Certainly, in a world of love and kindness, we have less stress, our gut microbiota is probably at peak health, our immune system is maximized, and we think, shouldn’t we try to be in this optimized state of homeostasis?  Perhaps that too is an illusion.  Yes, our bodies and our minds are healthiest in this state, but in nature, this environment never lasts forever, so we should always be ready for a world of cruelty, injustice, scarcity, and insecurity.  Perhaps the desire for utopia is misguided.  In trying to create a utopia, we delude ourselves and make ourselves vulnerable to con-artists, cults, and the absolute fear of losing everything.  The Baby Boomers seemed to have grown up in a utopia (until the Vietnam War), and perhaps it was growing up in an era of extraordinary wealth made them all the more shocked when they were being forced to fight in Vietnam, hence their radical rebellion and attempt to restore utopia, at least in their psychedelic trips.  As Nassim Nicholas Taleb reminds us, it is good to be challenged and face adversity so that we become robust and anti-fragile.  Part of life should always be tough and challenging, and we should not create a government that becomes a nanny to take all the bad things and hardships away, not that they would ever be capable of it, and in fact, they would create more bad things and hardships to justify their existence and guarantee their paychecks.

 

https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-World-Fox-Adele-Brand-ebook/dp/B07Q1HVZSF/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=the+hidden+world+of+the+fox&qid=1597509033&s=digital-text&sr=1-1

 

Simulation Hypothesis by Rizwan Virk

Ever since Matrix came out, it’s been trendy to imagine that we are living in a simulation, but the author provides some pretty compelling arguments that the quirkiness of quantum physics is not so bizarre after all if you accept the fact that reality itself is a digital simulation and what we consider solid, material reality is in fact an illusion.  Advances in computer technology, virtual reality, video games, and simulations are leading closer to the actual creation of a world that we cannot differentiate from reality, so the obvious question arises, perhaps we are already there.  At the same time, the coding, optimizations, and short-cuts in creating virtual reality seem to be mimicked by our very own universe.  Of course, yes, it could all be a coincidence that the real world is actually created just like a digital simulation, but at the same time, coincidences also point toward correlations.

 

The interesting thing to note is that a hundred years ago, when quantum physics was just discovered and computing was in its infancy, there is no way you could have known all this.  When I hiked out of the Grand Canyon, every time I looked up, I saw a ridge, and every time I climbed to the top of that ridge, there was yet another ridge above.  It is strongly possible that just like the philosophers of ancient Greece or even the 1920’s, we simply lack the technology to make it to the next step of better understanding reality.  Likely, a whole new technology or scientific discovery will arise that will make our current understanding of reality, our hypothesis that we live in a digital simulation, seem quaint and childish.

 

Also, what we consider reality is also heavily biased by our DNA, and this may well be integrated in the program that generates our reality.  From birth we are given shortcuts to understanding the world around us which is highly biased and a rather inefficient shortcut cultural way of communicating common ideas and feelings.  So there may be two shocks.  First, the shock of living in a digital simulation, and the second shock that even that simulation is not what we really think it is if you stripped away our DNA and all its inherit biases and distortions.  Missing from this book is a discussion of psychedelics which seem to alter our perceptions in such a manner that we don’t see the world through the lenses of our DNA, perhaps seeing the world as it really is or as fungi sense the world.

 

The author makes an interesting point that religion and in particular, Eastern religions have always told us that we live in an illusion and that we are here to grow and learn so we can “graduate” to the next level.  But who’s to say that the religious thinkers knew any better?  Religion itself has also gone through an evolution where only the religions that did not pose a threat to rulers were allowed, or religions that were adopted by particularly aggressive, military leaders proliferated while other religions were destroyed.  The author never explains by what authority or reason should we trust these religions besides the fact that they just exist?  And he notes the major religions and not the minor ones.  What about Paganism?  And what of the idea that when people take psychedelics, they have visions and ideas that are remarkably similar to religious experiences.  It’s quite possible that most of our religions are simply based on a bunch of guys who went out and ate magic mushrooms.  Of course, you could then argue that perhaps a hacker or wily programmer created psychedelics as Easter eggs, ways of somehow communicating to the characters in the simulation about the real nature of reality.

 

A rather big ethical issue I have with the notion of the simulation is all the suffering in the world.  When people talk about reincarnation, they always talk about once being a prince or queen and never being what 90% of the population was, peasants.  How much spiritual growth or even entertainment can you experience living as an uneducated peasant toiling away and breeding?  I have yet to come across a video game or virtual reality experience where you get to be a peasant breeder and raise poor, unhealthy children and spend most of your time working for a landowner.  If the only reason this world and all simulations exist is that a few lucky folks get to enjoy the middle or upper class and experience growth and development, it seems a pretty bad deal for the billions in the simulation who must suffer for their entertainment or education.  Then you can argue, well they don’t really exist.  They’re just background like all the animals, the plants, the rocks, the water, etc.  This is perhaps one of the most narcissistic, demented, immoral, and dehumanizing things you can do.  “Oh yeah, I live in a digital simulation where I get to enjoy a nice middle class life in a First World country so I can learn about humanity and grow as a spiritual being,” meanwhile either billions of people must pay for it by experiencing real pain, humiliation, and suffering, or you’ve crossed the line and declared that they don’t even really exist, they’re just a figment of your imagination.  I can’t imagine any kind of spiritual growth or awakening if it’s at the expense of billions of suffering lives.  And to claim that billions of peasants don’t actually exist or suffer is absolutely insane.

 

It is my hypothesis that reality itself is just simulation-like.  It doesn’t really simulate the base reality.  That reality doesn’t exist.  You can create a simulation within a simulation, and perhaps if you kept killing yourself and waking up in an underlying simulation, you could do this for all eternity without ever finding a true reality, because one just doesn’t exist.  You may well just be going in a circle where no one simulation can be designated as the one that started them all.  Reality is just simulation-like without ever simulating anything.

 

If you look at nature, it always seems to be searching for the most efficient way of doing things.  It makes sense that an organism that expends the least amount of energy to accomplish life and reproduction will pass those genes on, and through infinite iterations, what you have in the end is a remarkably efficient organism that hardly expends any energy to accomplish its goals.  A digital universe would be like that, one that is only rendered when a conscious being turns its head to observe it.  If we try to make a simulation of reality most efficiently as possible, why wouldn’t reality be like it’s own simulation?  If evolution works at a macro-scale, why wouldn’t the eventual reality be the most efficiently rendered one of them all with all the inefficient realities being squeezed out due to limited energy and spacetime?  If time goes infinitely backwards, there has been sufficient time for a triumphant world to dominate all others, and we wind up living in an incredibly efficient world that only renders when summoned upon by a conscious being.  This doesn’t point to an intelligent being creating anything as evolution would simply ‘reward’ efficiency at every step.

 

Another hypothesis is that the world creates intelligent beings that create a simulation of it.  In order to avoid being destroyed by the big bang, they create a simulation that runs with a faster clock, so that centuries are covered in one second.  Within that simulated world, intelligent beings arise that create a simulation inside it that runs with a faster clock, and so on and so forth so that you could have trillions of simulations running with faster clocks, and they could all play out within a few minutes.  Trillions upon trillions upon trillions of lives are lived out for millions of years, but all within a few minutes of the original world that created the first simulation.  But possibly, there is no first simulation, and if we were to go far, far back to earlier simulations, we would encounter infinity and worlds with such relatively slow clocks that for all intents and purposes, these worlds are virtually standing still from our world perspective.

 

* * *

 

At the end of the day, I have to believe that we are like Aristotle or Descartes.  They may have a bunch of rather profound notions of reality, but they lacked the understanding of quantum physics and computers to know that reality is a digital simulation.  Decades from now, more technology and more scientific discoveries will arise that will blow our minds yet again.  I simply can’t believe the amount of books out there that are increasingly blowing my mind and changing my fundamental notions of reality, culture, society, psychology, politics, etc.  With information and technology accelerating, there will be thousands, perhaps millions more books to blow my mind.  What I know today is mostly wrong and less than tiny fraction of what I could know ten, twenty, perhaps a hundred years from now if aging technology advances too.  What do to in the meantime?  Base my entire life off a hypothesis that may one day be wrong, modified, or added upon?  The more you learn, as the old saying goes, the more you realize you have more to learn and how relatively little you do know, and now updated, how much of what you do know will ultimately be revised and improved upon.

 

* * *

 

One of the most fascinating concepts of the book is how advanced computers store information associatively and how this could explain why synchronicity happens, the concurrence of related but not causal events, perhaps serendipity, perhaps a fault in how we think and remember things.  Certainly, we remember coincidences in our favor and not coincidences that are unfavorable or have no impact whatsoever.  If you were to read an endless list of numbers, you would remember the combinations of 13, 666, and other familiar numbers, and it’s all mere meaningless coincidence.  But perhaps in the way information is stored, and if our universe is truly nothing but information, there would be a greater tendency for happenstance and serendipity.  For instance, I read this book just after watching the movie Inception.  I had already bought the book before coming across the movie in my Amazon Prime feed, but then again, having bought the book from Amazon, did the algorithm stick the movie in my feed?  And does this point to something more insidious that our world is a profit-making venture.  We discover odd coincidences today, because our smart phone microphones are picking up everything within range and then turning around and trying to sell us something based on conversational subjects.  Is this the logic behind all the other coincidences in our lives?  Something is listening in on us, observing our lives, and then arranging interactions with certain people and places so that it can turn a profit?

 

* * *

 

The author implies some sort of reconciliation of science and religion, but I disagree.  If the universe is digital and simulation-like, it doesn’t mean there are conscious beings running the computer that is running this program.  Today, we have computers that run themselves and perform many functions without us and lacking consciousness.  Why can’t that be the case with our universe?  A conscious being running our universe program allows for the possibility that it checks in and like any lonely hacker, starts to mess with its inhabitants.  I think DNA makes us think we are special, that something or someone is watching over us like a parental figure.  I don’t think this may be the case.  It may just be our DNA screwing with us.

 

Why can’t our universe be an automatically run program by an artificial intelligence that is not conscious or sentient?  Perhaps a conscious being at one point created a program to create countless universes, but the program didn’t interfere with the conscious lives inside the universe.  The program however allowed for us to feel spiritual, transcendent, to learn moral lessons, to grow, to evolve, to become smarter and wiser, but the program just let us go on our own.  Is that so bad?  Isn’t this the ultimate goal of parenting, to finally allow your children to leave and live their own lives without your meddling and support?

 

Perhaps there was or is a god, but I have to believe it was wise enough to not create beings to worship it but rather to create beings to enjoy their lives freely on their own.  Someone who appreciates animals don’t capture wild animals and turn them into pets.  They appreciate them from a distance and don’t expect these animals to be appreciative of them in return.  I think humans need to liberate themselves from this unhealthy attachment to desiring a parental figure all their lives.  In its place, humans have created government and shady politicians who only exploit them and look down upon them with contempt and disgust.

 

* * *

 

When wild animals are caged, they do everything they can to be set free.  Humans are essentially caged, but mentally, and I believe that our struggle for knowledge, for the truth of reality, is actually a metaphor for our struggle to free ourselves from our cages.  We refuse to believe that the reality and life our culture and rulers have given us is the real one.  And in fact, it isn’t, and I’m not talking about it being a digital simulation.  We’ve been led to believe that our universe is this Newtonian, classical, material, analog world when in fact, it’s a quantum, relativistic, digital simulation-like world.  But at the same time, we’ve been also led to believe that we live in this free, equal democratic world where our government cares about us, and the richest man in the world is Jeff Bezos, and he wants to save humanity by sending us into outer space.  That is also a lie.

 

When scientists conjecture that the world is in fact a digital simulation, millions of people are willing to believe it, but when people conjecture that our government is a scam, that hidden rulers, what one person notably calls the grifter class, controls government and uses it against us, you’re called a conspiracy theory nut despite the ample historical evidence of the evils of our government and other governments like ours, democratic and otherwise.  One day, it will be common knowledge that our world is digital and simulation-like, but I can only hope that it will also be common knowledge that throughout history, our government has conned us and has always been used as a tool by the ruling/grifter class to exploit us.

 

* * *

 

Every philosopher must ask themselves the question, why can’t you accept reality as is and enjoy life?  There are people falling in love, breeding, enjoying their jobs, enjoying life, engaged in their hobbies, etc.  Why do you have to spend so much time trying to figure out what is real and what is not?  My answer to that question is that we all live in a cage, and the ones who have not learned helplessness are the ones trying to figure out what the cage is and what lies outside the cage.  What makes it so hard for me to enjoy life is based on what happened to my parents and to their parents and their culture and ancestors, and it involves wars, occupation, injustices, oppression, mass starvation, mass injustices, and widespread suffering.  Yes, if our rulers were kinder and our world were more just, moral, and free, perhaps I could accept my life in a cage and enjoy it.  Until then, I suffer the cynicism and caution and traumas of my ancestors, via epigenetics, exposure to my parents, etc.  Perhaps the traumas of our ancestors are deeply ingrained in our DNA and take many generations to fade away.  I need answers.

 

I’ve been driven to search for answers.  And it has ultimately led me to the belief that a grifter class rules above us and they utilize government and the public-held notion that government is good, to exploit and oppress us, both its own citizens and people in other countries.  Like a caged wild animal, I pace and pace and pace, and I want to change all that.  This is why I keep reading books and searching for the truth.  The idea that I’m living in a simulation of some actual analog, material world, and its being done so I can grow spiritually is so much horseshit for me.  An interesting science fiction distraction, but not one that addresses the real problem of the grifter class putting one over us.  The suffering of and injustice for billions of souls is very real indeed, and its not all for the spiritual development of a few narcissistic, middle-class fucks trying to ascend some ladder toward godness.

 

Also, an interesting idea that we are specifically designed to enjoy the reality that is created in our minds by our DNA, so that if we were to realize the true nature of reality, it would not be one specifically designed to make us happy.

 

https://www.amazon.com/Simulation-Hypothesis-Computer-Scientist-Quantum-ebook/dp/B07M81F1KG/ref=sr_1_1?crid=EJ3FLG1KJ54Z&dchild=1&keywords=simulation+hypothesis&qid=1597511859&s=digital-text&sprefix=simulation+h%2Cdigital-text%2C217&sr=1-1

 

The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It … Every Time by Maria Konnikova

Part 2 of 2

 

The story of John Law in France in the early 18^th century is one of the most interesting stories, because basically what he did is being done today on a much larger scale.  Law created a federal reserve type system where the French national bank printed as much money as they wanted, but then he created a trading company and issues stocks.  Those stocks rose, and people cashed out.  They were initially paid in paper money which Law could print as much as he wanted.  It was a simple plan to enrich investors.  The only problem arose when investors wanted precious metal coins instead of paper.  But think about our system today.  The Federal Reserve can print as much paper money as it wishes.  The stock market can rise and rise, and when people want to cash out, more paper money is printed.  Today, they simply can’t demand precious metal.  It’s basically the use of inflation to redistribute wealth from everyone to a few stock market investors.  All our purchasing power declines as the Feds keep printing money, but the stock market investors make up for the decline in purchasing power by simply getting more money than everyone else.  On top of all this, the purchasing power of the rest of the world also takes a hit, because they trade in US dollars.  So not only are a few stock market getting absurdly rich at the expense of US citizens, but also the rest of the world.  It’s a perfect scam introduced by John Law who is now known as a con-artist.  And then to top it all off, the Federal Reserve is planning to buy stocks to further inflate their value.  It’s insane how so few people see through this utterly absurd yet powerful con.

 

* * *

 

You ever wonder who has it best?  If you could be any income level, what would you be?  You certainly wouldn’t choose lower income, but would you choose $1 million a year?  People think that rich people are on top of the world, not a care in the world, not even working, just jet-setting in their private jets enjoying luxury hotels and lavish leisure.  A lot of rich people actually work maniacally.  Perhaps this describes the lives of the pampered spouses, but even then, you’re married to a workaholic who is used to everyone bowing down to them.  Then supposedly, they return home to an equal, respectful relationship?  As this book notes, the greatest mark is an arrogant one, one who thinks they are impervious to a con, because they are superior.  This looks a lot like the upper, upper class.  While they may be certainly exploiting others and buying politicians to game the system in their favor, they’re also more likely to fall for cons, including the entire con of the system.  I believe they live in a hyper-competitive world of dog-eat-dog ruthlessness, and you can’t enjoy life in such a horrible world, especially if you’ve been raised into this world by a parent who makes you believe this.

 

The author notes how they surveyed a certain high-income city in Denver, my guess is Boulder, and it’s remarkable how many people said they fell for scams worth tens of thousands, and you then have to take into account those who were too embarrassed to admit falling for scams.  You would think making more money inoculates you to scams and identity theft by spending more on personal security and savvy financial advisors, but their greed gets the better of them, and to top it all off, their conceit and arrogance blindsides them to all the red flags.  Then consider that one of the biggest tactics of a con-artist is simply providing a target with a companion, someone to listen to them, a pseudo-therapist.  The richer you get, you less time you spend with friends and family, the more likely, you’re lonely and alienated, so when someone comes along who isn’t intimidated by your status or wealth, who listens intently to you without appearing bored by your narcissism, all the sudden you have a trusted friend, whereas an honest person wouldn’t befriend such an ass in a million years.  If there’s any justice in the world, it is the fact that the richest folks in the world are not only sad, lonely, pathetic bores, but that they’re so desperate for friendship that they’re perfect targets for con-artists.

 

* * *

 

“Confidence men are master storytellers…”  What is the story we learned in school?  Humanity is the pinnacle of God’s creation or evolution.  We are special.  (We are propped up to be arrogant and conceited so we fail to believe that we can be fooled and manipulated like sheep.)  We are progressing from evil, dirty savages to loving, intelligent, clean civilized people.  We are all born flawed/in sin and need salvation whether it is through Jesus or through the indoctrination of civilization via mandatory state schooling.  Left to our own devices (meaning left free), we would descend backwards into dangerous savages.  We have also evolved from monarchs and dictatorships to freedom and democracy.  Government today is as refined and sophisticated as ever, ever more just, compassionate, fair, and balanced.  What a great story for a great con.

 

Except it’s all a lie.  Our ancestors, without civilization, were just as kind and loving and good if not more so.  Certainly, they were unkind and cruel to outsiders or even internally to those who caused trouble, but we’ve just taking that from the clan level to a national level where entire nations attack one another.  The more civilized one becomes, research has found, the smaller your brain, the shorter and less healthy you are, the worse your teeth, probably the uglier you are too since health is linked to symmetry which is linked to beauty.  The only ones who don’t get shorter and less healthy are those at the very top.  So in one system, pre-civilization, most people are healthy whereas in the civilization scenario, the vast majority are unhealthy, exploited, and oppressed.

 

* * *

 

One of the best arguments against large organizations and social hierarchies is not just their fragility and susceptibility to Black Swan events, but the fact that you put a few people on top, give them a superiority complex, feed their arrogance, and they become highly susceptible to cons, and the social hierarchy makes it near impossible for people to question or correct them when they see red flags.  Once the head of a large organization is sold or conned, there is little anyone under that person can do.  Some argue that it’s good to have one person at the top making decisions, because in a democracy, decisions get bogged down with debates and endless discussions and little action, but that is more to do with the flaw in the decision-making process.  Rather, it’s always better to have multiple eyes on a plan or policy to ensure it’s not a scam.  The nature of hierarchies creates an arrogant leader who is loath to be corrected or criticized and highly vulnerable to scams and cons, from within as well as outside.  How many times have you been in a large organization and witnessed a few of the CEO’s minions get in his favor and suddenly they can do no wrong, and they can steer the CEO into awful decisions and plans?  George W. Bush being handled by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld comes to mind.  W. Bush must have been an easy person to manipulate and con from inside and also outside.

 

* * *

 

Ultimately, the reason cons work so easily today is because we’ve all been initially conned by a parasitic system that preys on us and charges us taxes to live in its countries.  In exchange, it’s supposed to give us everything we need, security, happiness, friendships, love, meaning, direction, etc. but in return, it actually gives us the opposite, wars, conflict, threats, violence, discrimination, injustice, oppression, and exploitation.  So then a con artist comes along and here we are, depressed, anxious, alone, exploited, oppressed, and the con artist tells us that they can gives us relief, salvation, hope, the very things government was supposed to give us.  We fall for it, just like we fell for the government con, and just like the government con, instead of giving us hope, relief, salvation, direction, happiness, friendship, love, etc. just like government, it gives us conflict, threats, violence, injustice, and exploitation.  If you raise a world full of suckers, you create a world where it’s profitable to be a con artists, a veritable buffet of idiots to con and exploit.

 

 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00WDP836S/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

 

 

 

 

The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It … Every Time by Maria Konnikova

Part 1 of 2

 

I just realized the author’s last name is Konnikova, get it, con.

 

Humans are susceptible to cons for several reasons.  One reason is that we are very uncomfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity.  Our minds behave like our eye system.  We think our vision is totally clear, but there are a number of blind spots and out in the periphery, our minds are actually making up the illusion of objects we cannot see so we think our entire field of vision is complete and clear.  Our eyes also stutter when they pan, but our minds make us believe that they pan smoothly.  Whenever we see something ambiguous, our minds are constantly on the look out for either predators or prey.  This is why we see bunnies in the clouds or faces looking back at us.  Society is also a scam, so it’s natural that the folks on top want us to be gullible to everything.

 

On top of this, we are the most socialized creatures on the planet, and this makes us highly receptive to trusting one another.  Our ability to trust and like larger and larger groups of people gave us a survival advantage over smaller groups of competitor intelligent apes.  By working in larger and larger groups, our numbers became a force against all other animals on the planet.  The larger group always won, and we kept becoming larger and larger and larger.  The only drawback to this is the simple fact that it also made us extremely vulnerable to criminals and con-artists both from below and above.  Small time thieves would gain our trust and then steal our food while big time thieves would demand a tax from us in exchange for protection from their army, the oldest protection racket of them all.

 

There are powerful checks and balances in groups of about 150, the number our ancestors usually were limited to.  Everyone knew one another, and everyone had a reputation like a credit score.  In fact, your reputation was so important that if anyone threatened it, you would be willing to kill them for it.  A damaged reputation would mean being the lowest rung on the social ladder if not extraction from the group or even murder.  By creating larger groups than 150, we became stronger, but we also lost the ability to keep track of one another’s reputations.  This is probably where laws were created to codify morality and punishment.  Interestingly, I believe laws were also created then to support the pyramid scheme and give greater and greater advantages to those on the top of the group.  As groups became larger, those at the top became even more removed from everyone else, creating their own close-knit group of 150 while exploiting and killing the rest.  In their minds, anyone poorer than the top 150 were not a part of their group and hence the enemy.  But because they needed to keep everyone in the greater group, they created the story that they were all part of one big group that looked out for one another.

 

The author points out that con-artists lack of empathy, but I would also say that they lack the fear of a damaged reputation.  One reason I don’t lie to people is that I fear that when they find out, they’ll tell others, and I’ll get a bad reputation as a liar.  I don’t think con-artists have a lot of fear of being uncovered and people talking and then getting a bad reputation.  They also probably don’t fear the pain of guilt.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ll be reminded of something I did in the past where I hurt someone, and it makes me cringe.  I once found a man’s wallet on the road, and it contained $600.  I returned it to him.  If I had bought a large TV with it, I would never be able to look at it.  It would always remind me of the poor guy I stole from.

 

***

 

The author points out that “Cons thrive in times of transition and fast change, when new things are happening and old ways of looking at the world no longer suffice.”  This is interesting, because there seems to be a lot of scams in China including a lot of pyramid schemes and other get-rich-quick schemes.

 

We also think we’re more special than we really are.  In the beginning, the entire universe revolved around the Earth and humans sat at the top of evolution.  We buy lottery tickets, because we think we could win.  Countless kids spend countless hours practicing, thinking one day, they could make millions as an athlete, rock star, actor, performer, etc.  We don’t understand odds instinctively.  We see someone making millions, and we think it should be our turn too.

 

***

 

You ever come across someone who, out of nowhere, is rude and demeaning, and you felt like a stooge for assuming they would be nice and cool.  So, you kept smiling and trying to be cool for too long, while they continued being an asshole.  Then later, you say to yourself, I’m not going to be so gullible next time, I’ll be a bit more vigilant and if someone gives off the slightest signal of being a dick, I’m going to cut them off immediately instead of continue to try to be cool with them.  This, however, backfires.  Because the more skeptical, cynical, and vigilant you are, the more unapproachable you seem.

 

Most of street smarts is knowing how to protect yourself from a con, a scam, a thief, an abuser.  Unfortunately, what this also means is that the person must act ‘street tough’ so they feel like less of a target.  Unfortunately, this backfires in two ways.  First, it turns off good people.  Why get to know someone if they’re acting like they’re mean and callous?  Second, it actually makes you more of a target by more sophisticated cons.  Sure, a small-time crook may be turned off by your street tough airs, but a sophisticated con will see right through it.  You’re basically telling the world that you’ve been screwed and conned before, but all that means is that you’re probably unconsciously attracted to abusive and manipulative people.  You just need them to be a little persistent enough, and then voila, you’ll open the door to them and let them exploit you.

 

If you get burned by someone, you shouldn’t feel stupid for trusting them and even trying to turn them.  That’s just the price you pay for the overwhelming benefits of being trusting to everyone initially and hence opening up doors to mostly good people.  Unfortunately, if you’ve started out life with very untrustworthy and abusive people, you’re less likely to be trusting initially, and all this does is turn off good people and attract bad people.  It’s just one of those most unfortunate ironies of life, like being abused in your childhood and then not being able to form healthy relationships so you wind up either solitary in which case your abuser’s influence on you is unrivaled, or you wind up in unhealthy relationships with more abusers.

 

* * *

 

The best way to avoid being manipulated is by believing that you are incredibly susceptible to manipulation.  The stupidest people, the most gullible people in the world, believe they’re the smartest and the quickest to spot a con.  They are the best marks.  If you believe that you’re an easy mark, what would you do?  If someone told you about a killer stock that was going to shoot up 10x in the next few weeks, and you knew just how easily you get manipulated, what would you do?  You would be overly conservative and forgo the opportunity.  Overly confident people, and this reminds me of Trump, are the easiest to con, because they’re too confident about their abilities to spot a con.  They also have a tendency to rewrite history so that if they do get conned, they dismiss it and even refuse to believe that they were conned in the first place.  It must have just been a misunderstanding.  And in my opinion, the biggest con-artists are also the best at conning themselves, just like the biggest liars lie to themselves all the time.

 

Let’s say you want to lose weight.  An honest person would get up in the morning and go, I should do some cardio, and later get a salad.  But a con would go, you know if I don’t eat anything all day, I don’t need to do cardio.  But then at the end of the day, they give in.  They just conned themselves.

 

* * *

 

Here’s a really fascinating thing.  So, according to the author, what makes you more vulnerable to a con is not some intrinsic personality factor but rather circumstance: being lonely, isolated, going through loss, financial despair.  The irony here is that if you try to immunize yourself from being conned by being untrusting, you eventually wind up lonely and isolated, and voila, you wind up becoming more vulnerable to a con.  Not trusting people will also make you less likely to make good business contacts and relationships and also make you a less friendly coworker, and so you make less money, putting yourself at greater financial risk, and voila, again, you’re more vulnerable to a con.

 

* * *

 

Perhaps one of the more shocking things in the book is that couples tend to have more successful relationships when they’re not good at reading each other.  Those who were more successful at reading threatening cues wound up in shorter relationships.  In other words, just like the athlete who must sometimes con himself into feeling better about his performance than he should, couples should also con themselves into feeling better about their relationships than they should, and in a quantum twist, their delusion makes reality come true and their athletic performance and relationships actually become better!

 

* * *

 

When you live in a con society, a society set up as a pyramid structure, it’s pretty easy to become a con-artist.  All you have to do is make people believe that you are an authority figure, and they will do whatever you tell them to do for fear of crossing an authority figure.  The problem with a con society is that everyone becomes a con-artist.  Trust is no longer based on someone’s character and decency.  In fact, you can’t really even say ‘trust’ anymore as the word has become tarnished.  What you’re really doing is just obeying, and you obey, once you establish that someone has greater authority or status than you.

 

* * *

 

A rather profound point, “In many cases, our choices aren’t based on some innate preference.  Instead, they are constructed at any given moment by a combination of situational factors.”  I read a book about combat vets, and the interesting thing was how in certain situations, a soldier could be either a hero or a coward.  People tend to think that heroism or cowardice are innate, indicative of either great character or huge flaws.  In reality, much of our decisions at any given time are based on a calculus involving perception and the limited information we have at the time, what is sometimes called the fog of war.  We beat ourselves up for making bad decisions, but we attribute our good decisions to our innate intelligence and character.  We should be a lot easier on ourselves for our mistakes and a lot more humble about our accomplishments.  If you want to be a good person, the way to do it is not to try to make the best decisions all the time but rather, don’t put yourself in a bad situation and don’t hang out with bad influences.  I know for a fact that I often lose my temper when I’m in a hurry, so I try to avoid being in a hurry.  Certainly, I could work on my patience and temper, but I can also just avoid being hurried.  I also know that I make bad decisions when I’m stressed or that when I’m having a bad day, I act out when I’m drunk, so I’m more mindful of my drinking when I’ve had a bad day.  A lot of people would overdrink to forget a bad day, but I simply try to pace myself knowing that I have an inclination to overdrink after a bad day and act out as well.

 

And certainly, if you choose to avoid bad influences and to surround yourself with positive influences or people of strong character, you will eventually act more like them, because we are such intensely social creatures, we mimic those around us.

 

 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00WDP836S/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee

The author makes a powerful argument that the West is perhaps racistly or arrogantly underestimating China’s emerging technological progress and potential especially in the application of deep learning AI.  While America may have a monopoly on talented researchers from around the world, the author argues that now is the time to implement deep learning AI for commercial applications, and China can do this better than anyone else.  What most people probably don’t even know is that China basically has its own Internet ecosystem dominated (like America) with an oligopoly of tech conglomerates supported by the state, almost like the Korean Chaebol but in the tech sector.  However, they also have this hyper-competitive, cutthroat startup environment which essentially culls the lazy and incompetent and perhaps honest out of the market.  It is no surprise that China has not allowed American or Western tech companies to operate successfully in China, and this is perhaps a combination of the state making it difficult for them as well as the state empowering and supporting their Chinese competition and allowing them to blatantly steal foreign designs, programming, etc.

 

I support the free market, and China is obviously in violation of the free market from stealing patents, technology, and ideas to subsidizing and protecting its domestic markets.  However, and this is a huge however, the global market is not a free market either, and every country, to some degree, rigs the market in favor of their domestic industries.  And of all the countries, America is perhaps just as guilty as China if not more so especially with its financial and banking industries dominating the world and forcing the world to trade in dollars and buy US debt.  On top of all that, the US uses its military actively to intimidate countries and if necessary overthrows them if they do not give American businesses/industries favorable treatment.  They install puppet regimes or allies that are more than happy to sell off their country’s resources for cents on the dollar so long as they get a healthy cut of the looting.  What China is doing is essentially defensive against a largely offensive American industrial, financial, and military-backed looting of the world.  Keep in mind, the US went from more of an open-market economy before World War II into a corporate dominated one in collusion with the government in order to defend itself against Germany and Japan.  It takes rigged markets and corporate-state collusion in order to protect yourself from rigged markets and foreign corporate-state collusion.

 

This book is an eye-opener to say the least, and it seems like the West is mostly naïve to China’s growing potential, or what they might describe as a threat.  What is missing from this book is balance, but you can only imagine that the author knows very well never to criticize China or else forever lose their favor and be excluded from their markets, just like all US businesses know.  Fortunately, I can criticize China.  While certainly America is now an evil empire, China is also an evil empire capable of extraordinary feats of inhumanity including the mass forced abortions of the One-Child Era as well as historical atrocities mostly against their own people.  I can go on and on about US crimes, but we’re talking about China now.  The author ignores the reality that anyone critical of China is instantly ostracized, imprisoned, or has their social credit reduced.  He doesn’t bring up the whole social credit thing either which is a rather pernicious, evil, and fallible way to keep everyone in line.  He glosses over all the ugly realities of China, and the price of quick technological leaps including a population that is mostly driven by money and highly materialistic.  Where will this go?  It will go to a culture that is focused on making money and not keeping people healthy, justice, equity, and basic human decency.

 

He also has a rather Pollyannaish view of AI, and like all progressives and technologists, believes naively that progress and technology has and always will benefit humanity, at least on average.  He ignores the fact that historically, progress and technology has actually harmed humanity immensely from pollution to global wars to ever more deadly and invasive weapons to an ever more intrusive and invasive government overlord.  He ignores privacy concerns.  He ignores the fact that a lot of modern technology is designed to get users addicted to their apps, less social, and in fact, in many cases, more antisocial.  I can’t tell you how many hundreds of violent, antisocial videos Facebook loves to show me.

 

He also ignores the reality that even as he admits, modern technology is creating a widening inequality gap and deep learning AI will create an even wider gap.  He mentions the fact that wages have been stagnant for the first time in conjunction with advancing technology, and this should be a major, major warning flag, not something to just mention in passing.  If he thinks that rich people will agree to just pay taxes so 99% of the rest will get a basic income to sit around and do nothing, he’s beyond naïve, he’s actually fucking stupid, despite being rather brilliant when it comes to technology.  This is like 99% of the tech bros in Silicon Valley and perhaps China too, brilliant in a narrow, technical field yet utterly braindead in their political opinions and understanding of the world outside the tech field.  Yet they all think they should be running the world because billions of people use their stupid apps.

 

* * *

 

The book busts a bunch of myths about technology and AI.  One concept is called Moravec’s Paradox, “contrary to popular assumptions, it is relatively easy for AI to mimic the high-level intellectual or computational abilities of an adult, but it’s far harder to give a robot the perception and sensorimotor skills of a toddler.”

 

* * *

 

The author ends the book with some odd Pollyannaish screed about how the true purpose in life is love, and somehow, someway deep learning AI will free us from the chains of the mundane and a hundred inconveniences to achieve love.  Sounds like a con-artist or cult leader at this point.  For the longest time, humans have fallen for two huge cons, the con of royalty and the con of organized religion.  (I’m not saying believing in a god or having religious beliefs is a con.  I’m saying the way religious institutions have exploited religious beliefs is a con.)  Humans have been led to believe that there’s a group of humans that are more special than the rest, and therefore, we must toil and struggle so they can live in palaces and be happy.  Not the greatest con, but it worked for centuries.  Then came the con that the poor will inherit the kingdom of god, and all our toil and struggles, the result of living in a pyramid scheme, will be rewarded in the afterlife.  A much more ingenious and elaborate con.  Now we have the techno-progressive statist con, the notion that we are currently, wait for it, toiling and struggling, because in the not-so-distant future, technology will solve all our problems and liberate us so that we can go about focusing on the most important reason we exist, loving.  It’s a scam too.  Only the rich benefit from each of these scams, and it’s not because they have the most technologically advanced ovens that can cook the perfect meatloaf.  It’s because they have all the wealth derived from a portion of each of our incomes, stolen via taxes, fees, licenses, tolls, fines, inflation, and high interest rates.

 

Most writers, when offering advice for humanity, make the fatal flaw of appealing to the common person, the average person, or the general public.  They must believe that the common person and the general public run the show.  They don’t.  Let me repeat that in case your mind was wandering off.  The common person, the general public do not run the show.  It is an illusion of modern democracy perpetrated by mainstream media and the state, both of which are run by the rich, and they are the ones who make the decisions.  If the author wants to appeal to someone who can actually make things happen, he needs to address those who run the place, and he needs to convince them that it’s a win-win for them, and the benefits to all humanity are a byproduct that simply make them look humane, noble, perhaps even heroic.  But if he’s suggesting that the rich would have to make some sort of sacrifice, pay higher taxes, share or redistribute their wealth, then he might as well also appeal to flying pigs, unicorns, Elvis, and the Loch Ness monster as well to enact change.  The rich are already winning.  They’re already on top.  What can you tell them to convince them to change, when they risk losing their edge, their advantage, and their commanding lead and lofty vistas?  Those who have seen the light and changed their ways, are no longer on top, so by a system of self-selection, what remains on the top, running the show, are the dregs of society, the biggest addicts.

 

It’s also a fatal flaw to assume that everyone thinks like you and is motivated like you.  The rich became rich, not because they enjoyed serotonin from social engagement, building trusting relationships, volunteering, and helping sick children get better.  They’re a unique creature that gets serotonin from parasitically preying on everyone else, and they particularly enjoy preying on the weak.  They get bumps of serotonin from artificial achievements like becoming billionaires, being seen in exclusive and expensive restaurants, having their employees supplicate themselves to them, having servers prostrate themselves, the sadistic power of making employees or servers tremble with fear of losing their jobs, humiliating those who they feel insulted them, etc.

 

Serotonin from social stimulation is a healthy high that creates virtuous cycles whereas serotonin from artificial stimulants and antisocial stimulation is a quick, cheap high that requires ever greater doses.  Concurrently, you’re also experiencing pangs of guilt and embarrassment, but an easy way to tone down the sense of shame and guilt is ever greater doses of the artificial highs.  This creates a vicious cycle where you increasingly lose control and become an anxious addict of artificial, antisocial highs.  Now, appeal to these wealth freaks to change the system so everyone can be healthy and happy and focus on love.  Yeah, sure Jan.

 

One good reason not to believe in social hierarchies and pyramid schemes, besides the obvious fact that they are a scam, is that you’re creating leaders who become the most vulnerable to scams and cons.  Their air of superiority, privilege, greatness make it near impossible to question their judgment and wisdom.  Not only are they less likely to take advice from those ‘beneath’ them, but they are also less likely to question their own judgment, values, and decisions.  They essentially live in a cocoon of yes-people who affirm whatever beliefs and values they express, and just like the classroom full of kids who smile only when the teacher is closer to the window so the teacher winds up almost out the window by the end of the class, they unconsciously control the person at the very top.  The notion that the person at the top controls everything is a myth.  They may have the most power and wealth of anyone else, but they are under the control of their own delusional thinking and the crony minions who surround them and gain favor by kissing up to them and providing them with a safe cushion against reality and all the suffering fools ‘below’ them.

 

One solution, the author does not mention is isolationism or protectionism.  While we usually think of this as a national concept, it can also be applied to small communes or communities.  When we are all linked in a global market, the most powerful countries and corporations win out, because everyone finds their products and services cheapest and most valuable.  Everyone else becomes impoverished, because everyone is buying crap from a few players.  Think of Walmart and how they displaced mom-and-pop Main Street shops.  What is happening in towns across America with Walmart is happening across the world when American corporations enters foreign markets.  But what if you disengaged from the global market?  What if you practiced communal isolation and protectionism?  What if you promoted local shopping?  What if you were able to create your own currency to protect yourself from the domination of the dollar?  What if you created your own self-sustaining micro-markets?  Some may argue that this is exactly what happened to North Korea.  They were isolated, and yet they became impoverished.  This is a false argument.  They did not practice free markets within their isolated economies.  They did not allow people to create and run their own businesses, free of state controls and regulations.  And they stole a lot of wealth to redistribute to the leaders of the Communist Party and their military.  North Korea’s industry had also been shattered by the Korean War and their resources stripped by Japanese occupation before that.

 

The reason most Third World countries are poor today is not because they are not technologically advanced as much as the fact that for centuries their resources have been looted and their political systems corrupted or outrighted controlled by First World nations.  They remain poor today, also, because they are attached to a global market where their finished products cannot compete with First World finished products.  Their only advantage is cheap labor which is a race to the bottom and natural resources which get them in worse trouble when First World nations interfere with their political systems to support regimes amenable to corruption and enabling the looting of their natural resources.

 

“There may come a day when we enjoy such material abundance that economic incentives are no longer needed.”  I’m sorry, but that day has already come, and the only reason everyone is not enjoying material abundance is that it is distributed unevenly.  One of the fundamental problems of taking general advice from specialists and technologists is that they have a fundamental lack of understanding of politics, history, humanity, society, social dynamics, cons, corruption, psychology, basically reality and chaotic, complex systems.  They’re brilliant when it comes to small, quantifiable, controlled systems, by nature, they excel in mastering them.  Most people can’t stand dwelling in such a constrained, non-social environment, but these tech bros are right at home, masters of these small, controlled systems.  Then they make the fatal flaw of extrapolating their experiences with these systems to the entire world which works completely opposite of small, isolated systems.  So they come up with rather startlingly dense advice about how to run the world, over simplified, naïve, foolish, Pollyannaish, and unrealistic.  They’re also great targets for cons, because they over-simplify everything including human emotions and motivations, narrowly extrapolating their own emotions and motivations upon others, and in this way, it becomes unfathomable that others would con or lie to them.  I’ve worked with a lot of tech folks, and I can tell you, they are all easily intimidated by bullies and in trying to avoid conflict, get manipulated.  They’re atrocious leaders who either surround themselves with bullies, become bullies, or let people walk all over them.

 

One of the biggest flaws of tech geeks and engineers, the folks who run Silicon Valley as well the Chinese Communist Party, is their complete lack of appreciation for privacy and individual liberties.  In their overly simplistic and technical minds, privacy and individual liberties add complexity and chaos whereas their entire mission in life is to mitigate or eliminate complexity and chaos.  They are essentially control freaks who want to take out the human biasing, emotional, irrational aspects of life and somehow coerce everyone to embrace and adopt their personal concept of how the world should work: controllable, simple, constrained isolated systems.  If they love working in this bizarre landscape, why wouldn’t the rest of humanity?  If they have trouble forming relationships, socializing, loving, sharing, and being compassionate, why create a world where such things are necessary or prioritized?

 

In their utterly bizarre, antisocial minds, the world would be a better place if a few experts came up with solutions that everyone would be forced to adhere to, at least for a while to make a good go of it before analyzing whether it was effective or not.  Of course, when people resist, they can be marginalized, institutionalized, impoverished, taken out of the equation like outliers in statistics.  Of course, these tech geeks fail to consider the fact that people are not numbers, that marginalizing and institutionalizing them is a form of inhumanity and cruelty, that far from making the world a better place, they are in fact, creating hell on Earth for anyone who questions their deluded, biased, and antisocial freak ideas and beliefs.

 

The notion that you can appeal to the humanity of the rich is a Charles Dickens novel.  The idea that three ghosts can convince a rich stooge to be more generous and compassionate by forcing him to revisit his past, see the suffering of others, and envision his future, is a great novel and movie to show each Christmas, but in reality, the super-rich are long gone deranged, irredeemable addicts.  The system simply makes them so.  They no longer desire or crave normal social rewards but rather the deranged and corrupted desires of fame, recognition, greatness, domination, superiority, and the supplication of humanity ‘beneath’ them.  They have god complexes.  They no longer identify as humans, and they no longer consider human suffering and inequality as meaningful.  Their lives are placed on a higher platform, beyond logic and humanity.  They are gods, and they should be treated as such, worshipped, praised, elevated, protected, and privileged.  They con themselves just as much as they get conned.

 

* * *

 

The author mentions Universal Basic Income, which I find to be one of the most asinine concepts and essentially a rich man’s guilt-free con to make poor people think he cares about them.  What about eliminating taxes on the poor?  What about eliminating land ownership so the poor don’t have to pay rent to live on land nobody should have the right to own in the first place?  What about offering more credit to poor people?  The rich get the most credit.  They can invest in the most ludicrous ideas and go bankrupt multiple times and still get a healthy line of credit, just look at Trump.  His businesses declared bankruptcy six times, and he screwed over countless investors, and yet he still gets loans.  Why give someone income they never earned instead of just extending them a line of credit to open a business, and if they fail, let them fail, let them get another loan, so long as they’re paying someone a salary, that loan never goes to total waste.  Sure, they could be crooked and spend all their money on personal luxuries, but you have to have much better trust in humanity.  Why would they do this, when they could actually build a great business and make even more money, employ more people, contribute more to their communities, and develop a much better reputation as a honest and successful small business owner?

 

Fuck UBI; it’s a scam and a con.  Whenever someone gives you something you did not earn, you feel guilty.  If you don’t want to feel guilty, then you attack the person or institution giving you something you never earned.  You belittle and despise them in your attempt to justify your unearned gain.  This doesn’t empower you.  It makes you uncomfortably codependent and alternatingly guilty and arrogant.  Just like rich kids who inherit huge trust funds or get lavish gifts from their parents, unfortunately, they wind up belittling and despising their parents feeling alternatingly guilty and arrogant.  It doesn’t make them better people.  It actually turns them into privileged assholes.

 

Instead of UBI, why not just create a world that doesn’t disproportionately reward a few people at the expense of everyone else?  Why not allow or encourage workers to invest in the places where they work and get a piece of the profits?  Why not get rid of land ownership?  Why not extend more credit to the poor?  Why not increase taxes on capital gains and lower it on income?  There’s many better ideas for redistributing wealth besides a UBI.  Actually, it’s not even about redistributing wealth as it is not allowing a few people to game the system.  Wealth distribution would look a lot different in a free market than one where it’s rigged in favor of a few.

 

 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0795DNWCF/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1