Manicnotes

Singularity, Infinity and Asymptote

2012-01-09T02:55:00.000+11:00

A year and a half ago I relayed the content of an intense, heavily symbolic dream with obvious pregnancy of urgently-needed deciphering to a colleague. Several months afterwards I learnt of its startling prescience and its clever depiction of a complicated situation involving five people's emotional stances towards each other. This colleague was in a position to realise the gravity of some of my dream but declined to inform me of its literally life-threatening meaning because of his loyalty to a mutual friend. He did so despite the fact that we had both previously collaborated in ensuring that this mutual friend didn't finally succeed at one of his many suicide attempts. I didn't know at this point that the colleague had deliberately wiped the entire contents of my external drive holding years of work and memories at the behest of the mutual friend who was in the grip of crystal meth- and opiate- induced psychosis. The colleague's response to my dream-retelling was, "I'm glad you've reached a singularity." I only knew the meaning of the term "singularity" from my knowledge of physics and mathematics so found the reply baffling - I just immediately sensed pretentiousness and misapplication of a scientific term to the human/psychological/societal/cultural sphere a la Alan Sokal, especially since the colleague is an English major and cultural theorist. Yeah, I'd deck him if I ever saw him again. Gratifyingly I've since read a dissertation by him and was surprised to learn that he can't write and fundamentally misunderstands some basic concepts in the fields of philosophy and law, both of which I'm trained in. The mutual friend had lead me to think he might be a genius. The mutual friend has also told me things that would destroy the colleague's academic career on revelation. But I'm nice.

That was a bitchy little rant. Anyway.

Today I simultaneously, synchronistically stumbled on the concept of "singularity" in two different contexts: the metaphysical and the technological/futurist. This was after a period of re-evaluation of my opinion about the validity of the technical use of the designator "infinity" in mathematics.

My approach to the metaphysics of mathematics is a bit unusual. I think it could be described as "Kantian". I definitely have to elaborate because I don't think there have ever been many philosophers that have actually ever come close to understanding the thoughts of Kant that are relevant here, including Kant himself. I don't care how revered they are/were. Kant's writing itself feels like he was aware that he was touching the boundaries of human comprehension, and that he knew humans are strictly confined to a certain type of rationality that honestly reaches out to truth, but in a particular way that prohibits access to objective/universal/ultimate truth. But this isn't relativism. The first thing to try to understand is that empiricism vs rationalism/idealism is a false dichotomy. I think Hegel got this. Space-time, the physical universe and consciousness are both real and human constructs, as if human consciousness and perception interact with the objective field in a way that structures this field in a particular way for us, but just for us. And at the same time, because we can't exceed the strictures of reason and perception, which are in turn real, it's worthless to speculate about objective reality; we have our own true reality. Again, don't confuse this with relativism. I think Aldous Huxley got this. I definitely can't put it into words. The second thing is that I think even Kant himself underestimated how much of our thinking is synthetic a priori. I really don't think people can intuit even the most simple arithmetic or even small natural numbers. I've written about this before. When I was a kid I was amazed that maths, which proceeds from whole reams of assumptions that are unprovable but intuitively commanding, could proceed in abstract obliviousness to anything outside itself and yet matched up with the physical world, and that some mathematical proofs would just lie around for centuries before some genius applied it to something in nature. Maths is never wrong! So obviously empiricism is out of the question. Strict Platonism was always more attractive but I was still in the darkness of lack of imagination exhibited by those who counter that there is no way the abstract can interact with the physical. Kant finally gave me more of a concrete way of elaborating what I thought was code written into the Universe of which our physical brains are a part, and thus share the same code. Learning maths never felt like learning, it felt like remembering, like inheriting our evolutionary birthright sitting in the depths of our brains all along. But now I'm a Platonist in a Kantian way. Mathematics is written in the sky, but in our sky. And that's where exploration of the ontology of maths ends. I can imagine things like Dialetheism being valid, but not in our Universe.

So I've always had a problem with infinity and asymptotes. They just can't be grasped by human reason, and of course not experienced. And yet they're absolutely essential concepts for a lot of maths, and a lot of that maths in turn is verified by the existence of parallels in the natural world that are beyond any probability of mere coincidence of the abstract with the physical. Infinity isn't something you can even just be agnostic about precisely because it exceeds comprehension. I think Levinas rambled something about this. You simply can't have an opinion about infinity. Full stop.

Then there's Goedel's Theorem.

A word on recursion, which applies both to Goedel and proponents of technological singularity theory. We need to use it but be aware that it's epistemologically problematic.

"Singularity" in metaphysics is the "Omega Point". It's basically an unprovable, spiritual idea that is quite attractive. It's teleological, but I don't personally have a problem with that. The concept of infinity don't present a problem here.

Infinity causes problems for believers in the Technological Singularity. By definition an asymptotic curve cannot reach - let alone progress - past its asymptote. Therefore it's ridiculous to speak of reaching a singularity, or the future beyond a singularity. Time (the x-axis) will not slow down or stop or something when computers' processing power goes into hyper-growth (the y-axis).

A side note on Technological Singularity and Artificial Intelligence: believers mustn't have much understanding of neurology and the nature of human intelligence. The brain is the most complex known system in the Universe. Its functioning involves chemical, electrical and magnetic transmission. It's a chaotic system. There are all kinds of crazy things about it I won't go into. We know next to nothing about it, and by definition, being constrained by the consciousness it produces/facilitates, will never be able to understand it in totality. Computers crash because they're made by fallible humans and rely on insurmountably fallible systems of logic. They'll get faster than us but will always be limited by our limitations.

One last thing: Stephen Hawking makes all kinds of inferential mistakes from his mathematics. Don't take the current theories on event horizons of black holes seriously.

Performativity or Elitist Apologism? The Ethics of Lady Gaga

2011-10-29T06:20:00.003+11:00

"People are supposed to argue about whether what I’m doing is valid. That’s exactly the point. It’s not valid, but it is!" - Lady Gaga

The real question should be, Is it ethical?

Stefani Germanotta's conceptual art project in which she created Lady Gaga as a vehicle for the deconstruction of fame and pop music celebrity was interesting. Not least because Lady Gaga actually attained massive fame through, and in, the process of Germanotta and her collaborators' analysis and exploration. Of course Germanotta failed to destroy, or even permanently alter, the mechanics of pop music celebrity through her project. It is not a moot point whether or not such change was Germanotta's aim in the first place. The question of what her aim was goes to the morality of the continuing Lady Gaga project.

I don't speak Germanotta but I can if you like.

Several key concerns immediately arise when interrogating the Lady Gaga project. First, the celebrity's overt declarations and gestures that seek to elevate Gaga to more than just a pop-musician and her work to more than just pop-music. As if she would be ashamed if her art stood in isolation without insinuations of something deeper and more transcendent founding it. Second, Gaga's insistence on a "performative" conceptualisation of life (and its correlates): her facade, her various dissemblances, her patronising, potentially deleterious and reactionary message that "freaks" can transform themselves and their situations through mere iteration and projection of concept and discourse into a yielding "material" world. Third, product placement and commercial endorsements. And finally, Weird Al Yankovic's apparently unwitting expose on Machine Gaga.

The first concern is self-explanatory. While professing to respect the art that she is working with, Germanotta seems insecure and somewhat embarrassed about being just a pop star. Sometimes it feels as if she is giving a wink back to old colleagues and friends who expected her to excel in a field commanding more elitist respect. As if she is having a joke at our expense while making a lot of money from us. The term "little monsters" is downright patronising and mean-spirited to people who may not be aware of the "fame" project. It is hard to engender self-respect in people who have an insecure "Mother Monster". The overt declarations to which I refer include things like Lady Gaga's citing of her "favourite" philosopher's work on "solitude", deliberately implying that she comes from a rarefied elite of geniuses who can draw from a palette of various philosophical works to condole for the "solitude" that the greatness of her artistry imposes on them. She has also sought to trump Madonna thus: "She reinvents herself album to album. I reinvent myself week to week." Gaga has made also made preposterous (and possibly intentionally polarising) claims about the gravity of her work, like claiming that Born This Way comprises pop-music of an entirely new and revolutionary genre. The overt gestures include everything from symbolism-cramming to the meat dress to the lack of the slightest tone of irony in her voice in Gaga's voice during her philosophically dense account of the creation of the Universe at the beginning of the video of "Born This Way". We get it. You're deeper than the average pop star. The dread of being thought to be a sell-out or being stuck in a role that she truly doesn't respect herself is absolutely palpable and it's a shame. A lot of people actually like and revere the art form of pop music.

In an early blog post, Lady Gaga praised Paris is Burning, a film documenting marginalised, generally impoverished "freaks" attempting to salvage self-concept essentially through declaration of their own celebrity in drag balls. Apparently Germanotta is oblivious to the resultant accusations of the director's exploitation of the film's subjects. Or of some aggrieved subjects' subsequent filing of legal proceedings against the director. Performativity understood as a serious metaphysic and as a useful approach to the task of substantive liberation blushes in the face of these facts. Madonna's treatment of the same phenomenon in "Vogue" was honest in promising nothing more than escapism from "heart-ache" through hitting the dance floor and affirming that "you're a superstar". Germanotta's understanding of performativity purports to offer literal, concrete escape from marginalisation through such acts.

Germanotta glibly ascribes "freak" status to herself and propagates the idea that Lady Gaga is the result of constructing an image and simply becoming it. Lady Gaga calls other pop-stars "lazy"; the corollary is that her "freak" "little monsters" who haven't attained self-realisation must be lazy for not embracing their own "inner superstar". Germanotta was born this way: beautiful, talented, intelligent and privileged. But her message goes thus: I did it, so why don't you? Which is another form of the grand, uniquely American deception that all are born with equal opportunity and that there is space for all to realise the American dream. Gaga says that "the show is life itself". She says that "no-one can make the music of your life for you". Perhaps not, but the ruling classes can set limits on the range within which you can play your instrument, while convincing you that things are otherwise. If you are fat or ugly you certainly won't appear in their music videos, as pointed out in Pop Matters. If you are gay, however, "Mother Monster" can be that kind of "freak" too, and even accompany you through this kind of freakdom - whether you like it or not, as Joseph Alexiou points out. Gay is just on the borderline of general public acceptance and controversy, and is kinda cool right now. (I wonder if I need to divulge that I'm queer here?) As cool as not being bullied. As cool as just being yourself! (Or inventing that self to subsequently stay true to.) And finally, well, apparently starving Africans must just have issues honing their performative iterations, but let's not talk about that.

Consummation of the complete performance of the pop celebrity requires liberal entry into product endorsement deals and profligate product placement in music videos, according to purveyors of the Lady Gaga performativity narrative. Some point out that Gaga shows blatant disrespect to some of her placements, undermining any positive positioning for them. She also head-scrambles by mixing real product placements with fictious ones (an extension of her general culture-jamming tactic embodied in her successful ploys to make observers question what is "real" about Gaga/Germanotta herself and which of her utterances can be taken as truthful).

Speaking of truth, the tampering of which, for the purposes of the Gaga project, is not actually objectionable in itself, the Weird Al Yankovic "Gaga-Saga" has been the most revealing thereof in Lady Gaga's career. Yankovic never releases parodies without the original artist's consent. After being tortuously frustrated by Germanotta's manager's micro-managing and eventual rejection of Yankovic's proposed parody of "Born This Way", the comedian declined to release the parody, except on the internet. The parody went viral and forced Germanotta's hand in immediately (and studiously cheerfully) granting permission for fear of appearing overly-precious, or, in the alternative, not in absolute control of Lady Gaga's career. Gaga insisted she was unaware she had been approached for permission, but the huge glitch in the narrative thus caused could not be repaired by her scrambling. Control over career and self-generated reality is a central, untouchable part of the Gaga brand that is not meant to be subject to speculation as other aspects of Gaga are actually required to be. It should be noted that Yankovic has been an erudite scholar of the pop music celebrity phenomenon for far longer than Germanotta.

Academics can be Gaga apologists all they like in their own textual performances: in their own quests for academic acclaim or career furtherance. But this will not change what should be perceived as objective truth in a real, material world, whatever variations in phenomenological experience obtain amongst its observers. Reversion to the acrobatics of a particular version of performative theory is just plain reactionary and oppressive. It is irrelevant if even Germanotta's acts of oppression and pursuit of personal gain end up being explained away as performative attempts to provoke discussion about these phenomena emanating from other celebrities. I aver that the objective effects of Germanotta's actions have been harmful so far and will continue in this vein.

Before ending this piece, I'd finally like to contend that rigorous academic enquiry requires some disclosure of writers' personal investment in the face value product. If you need to dance every time you hear "Born This Way" then it would be dishonest not to mention this in say, a piece critiquing its positioning in contemporary Marxist dialogue. So here's my broad disclosure: I really like and sometimes love most of Lady Gaga's music though do not consider it revolutionary or innovative (her hooks sometimes reach genius level and the production is excellent), find her voice serviceably powerful and versatile, am aware of its range but find it otherwise unremarkable, love most of her videos, think she is an excellent actress, find fashion in general boring and am occasionally irritated though sometimes amused by her clothes, think her face is aesthetically pleasing but her body a bit on the thin side, find her asexual, and think her persona is generally endearing.

Anyway, from now on I propose to acquit myself from any further audience of either Lady Gaga or her army of pseudo-academic supporters. Others are free to continue to "love this record" though they "can't see straight anymore", but not me. I'm going back to listen to The KLF. Over and out.

Public Apologies for Socially Unacceptable Comments/Behaviour

2011-10-29T04:43:00.000+11:00

Public personalities shouldn't apologise immediately after making an "unacceptable" comment or being found to do something socially unacceptable unless the action/comment is a spur of the moment accident that goes against their underlying belief system. If, as in most cases, the slip is reflective of their underlying belief system, then they are actually belittling the values they are transgressing by making a quick apology. Quick apologies are nothing more than self-serving attempts to minimise public condemnation and are thus dismissive of the offence itself.

Dendy Cinemas; Mel Gibson; Icon Film Distribution

2011-10-29T04:36:00.000+11:00

People seem to be unaware that the formerly hip Dendy Cinema chain is now owned by Mel Gibson's Icon Film Distribution. Gibson has been accused, with varying levels of proof, of anti-Semitism, racism in general, sexism and violence against women. For those who prefer to ignore such issues, patronising the Dendy Cinema chain should present no problem.

Conservatism's Role in Intellectual and Societal Developments

2011-10-29T04:32:00.000+11:00

Conservative/reactionary intellectual and political opinion is a vital component of the game of humanity.

1. It acts as protection against intellectual/academic sophistry. Pruning.

2. It moderates societal flux, helping to protect humanity from potential threats to physical survival change may bring.

3. Progressive politics/thinking derives its meaning from its very opposition to the anchor of conservatism.

4. Moral achievement can be derived from brave but judicious battle against conservatism/consensus ideas, especially where there is physical, financial or societal risk.

Chaz Bono's transsexualism publicity drive and some Americans' negative reaction to it can illustrate something else. While hateful reactions probably come from emotional derangement in some individuals' grappling with the mystery of human sexuality that confronts us all, I actually think there are reasonable, decent people out there that shouldn't be slammed for their antipathy. I don't dismiss religious people or the moral implications they believe should be drawn from their religion. And I think belief in the reality of transsexualism in any case hinges on other beliefs in relation to metaphysics, physiology, gender, psychology, etc. For instance, the "born into the wrong body" line in most cases requires a belief in non-physical "mind". Doctors can validly call "disease" like they used to with homosexuality without transgressing any obvious hard-philosophical prohibitions I can think of. For me though it just comes down to respecting others' conceptions of their own identity as more important than other considerations, so I just accept transsexualism as currently conceptualised and propounded by the people it affects the most.

I reckon most opinion can ultimately only be regressed to more or less distant propositions that are beyond the probing of rationality. Ie whether you like it or not, you have faith in a bunch of stuff that you can never prove with reason. So people shouldn't be attacked for holding hick-type positions. And anyway, even if reason could reach everywhere, meaning that your opinion can have more intellectual weight (for want of a better analogy - I don't want to talk about strict truth here) than others', well, it's just not cool for smart people to laugh at or vilify dumb people.

So be nice to conservatives - in my personal experience it seems that when you are, it feels like, no matter how angry they may be about some issue, deep down they're actually emotionally reaching out to you to help them churn their thoughts. They're vulnerable little critters and it's kind of sweet even when they are defensive.

Channel Seven Tennis Wimbledon Men's Semi Final Broadcast; Stephen Conroy

2011-07-01T23:39:00.001+10:00

I'd settled myself down to watch the semi-finals broadcast, advertised as running from 10pm tonight. Instead, there was some Jennifer Aniston movie. I called ACMA. There was no answer. Then I called Channel Seven, whose operator named 'Justin' advised me to call Stephen Conroy, Federal Minister for Communications, saying that for undisclosed reasons, broadcast was blocked on the normal channels and was exclusive to digital Channel 7 Two.

All three of Conroy's listed numbers were engaged or had voice mail enabled. Here they are if you wish to register your complaint:

Parliamentary: (02) 6277 7480

Ministerial: (03) 9650 1188

Electorial: (03) 9408 0190

Google Censorship and Information Flow Hegemony; Internet Homogenisation; Epistemic Issues Regarding Search Engines

2011-06-26T15:02:00.002+10:00

The advent of widespread internet access was originally portended - with varying levels of techno-mania and hyperbole - as the dawn of a great new age of universal democracy, free flow of information, debate and exponential refinement of human knowledge. Excitement has since been tempered by the realities of Facebook-style banal social networking / social dislocation, proliferating crank/quack pages, information overload, general world-wide-web wankery and security issues.

Most damaging, however, has been the lack of trust in the veracity of information and gravitas of opinion offered by various small/fringe sites, and the resulting flight of the masses to sites perceived to be authoritative. Sites such as Wikipedia, imdb.com and online versions of mainstream newspapers and magazines fit into the latter category. There is also Google-skimming, a practice in which the consensus version of "facts" is obtained by flicking one's eyes down the extracted text from the top ten sites listed by a Google search query.

Most readers of the preceding sentence probably wouldn't have registered the very fact that they should have been surprised at the mention of only one search engine. Google has become so dominant in the search engine market (over 80% of all searches) over the course of the first decade of the 21st century that the term "google" is just about the only one-word verb in the English language meaning "to search the internet for information about" or "to use the internet to ascertain whether 'x' is true".

Most Google users simply type a word or several words into the query field and see what comes up. Google does offer very limited Boolean operators and some other features to refine searches, but hardly anyone is conversant with Boolean anymore or learns Google's own modifiers. In fact, Google offers tempting drop-down auto-complete search suggestions as you type just in case you happen to momentarily consider thinking for yourself. In auto-complete, certain terms are censored, some of them bizarre. For a list, see here.

Google crawls text in individual web pages, but does not capture everything on the internet, especially if pages are not linked to by other already-indexed pages. Non-captured pages are relegated to the Deep Web. Google then processes language through PageRank, a secret, constantly-updated algorithm that decides the order of search results. PageRank involves hundreds of factors like synonyms, text proximity, context, the number and quality of links from other pages and their prominence in turn, location of the searcher, meta-tagging, frequency of people's clicking on Google's proffered results, the user's previous searches, hand-tweaking and other non-disclosed factors, possibly including commercial and political considerations.

One result of PageRank's reliance on linking is that a small number of people can perform a "Google Bomb": setting up a bunch of links from a certain term to a certain site. Once upon a time the search term "miserable failure" was Google Bombed to link to George W Bush's official biography. Google hand-tweaked things so this was no longer the case.

From personal experience, I can vouch for the accusation that hand-tweaking of ranking goes on. According to Sitemeter I've had a few people from Google spend up to a few minutes reading some of my pages, presumably for quality assurance, but with two particular pages that could be considered defamatory I've had multiple reads. To Google's credit they still rank on the front page for searches of these two relatively prominent people's names. On the other hand, my diatribe Against Tourism ranked #1 on Google for about five years for search terms like "against tourism" and "for and against tourism", but sometime in the past six months was demoted ruthlessly (buried so deep in Google that I can't be bothered to dig down to see where it's gone). And it has nothing to do with linking, because no-one had ever linked to it. As far as I can tell none of my other pages have been effectively censored like this. I like to flatter myself that my argument was too politically and commercially uncomfortable, concise and compelling for Google's friends, despite the fact that few people actually read it! After this particular post Google might not be kind to my whole site at all.

On the creepy/conspiracy theory side, this article documents Google's and the CIA's investment in Recorded Future, a company involved in scouring the internet in real time and predicting events like "terrorist" activity. Google Street View, Big-Brother-like in itself, harvested 600 Gigabytes of data from people's private computers via their unsecured wireless devices. And anyone that's ever used Gmail would know the eeriness of having the entire text of email scanned and ads directly relating to the subject matter of their email appearing on screen, especially when connected with the information that Google harvests about the email user's Google searches.

It reminds me of Maya Arulpragasam (MIA)'s: tirade : "You can Google 'Sri Lanka' and it doesn't come up that all these people have been murdered or bombed, it's 'Come to Sri Lanka on vacation, there are beautiful beaches' ... you're not gonna get the truth till you hit like, page 56, and it's my and your responsibility to pass on the information that it's not easy anymore." And the lyrics to her track "The Message": "Headbone's connected to the headphones / Headphones connected to the iPhone / iPhone's connected to the internet / Connected to the Google / Connected to the Government" (from the ungoogleable album "/\/\ /\ Y /\").

And "Bulls on Parade" by Rage Against the Machine: "I walk the corner to the rubble that used to be a library / Linin' to the mind cemetery now / What we don't know keeps the contracts alive and movin' / They don't gotta burn the books they just remove 'em."

Leaving aside conspiracy theories, the current dysfunctional situation with the internet carries major epistemic, and therefore power, implications for the human race. We first need to ditch Google, explore and be vigilant about other search engines such as Scroogle.

Then we have to have the intellectual courage and drive to entertain alternative conceptualisations of the way the world works, while maintaining a critical stance towards fringe sources of information. I've always thought this but had the point driven home to me recently while researching "Hadronic Mechanics", a thought system that may or may not be bogus. It was devised by Ananda Bosman and Ruggero Santilli. The revision history on Wikipedia's page about Santilli vividly illustrates the issue of Internet information homogeneity and suppression of information. Without any knowledge of the subject itself you can instantly tell that there is an orchestrated campaign to discredit Santilli being waged on Wikipedia, especially in light of the number of physicists who have cited his works according to Google Scholar.

But, indeed, it seems to be everyone's need for consensus or some kind of ultimate citation authority that is the cause of the retarded development of a truly dynamic, critically engaged,intellectually democratic internet with wide and varied information dispersion. Instead the Wikipedians cry, "Citation needed".

The statement "a = a" cannot be contested; it's a priori and analytic. However, the attribution of insanity to someone who questions whether 1 + 1 = 2 is authoritarian if you believe (unlike most contemporary philosophers) that there is such a thing as Kantian a priori synthetic knowledge. Or if you believe in set theory, believe in Goedel's theorem, or have taken cognisance of the irreconcilability of quantum physics and the theory of relativity.

Maybe we can use the term "sanity" loosely to describe correspondence with consensus common sense apprehension of reality and unspoken assumptions. This would mean, for instance, that Newtonian physics is the sanest form of physics, with other theories possessing varying levels of sanity. All synthetic propositions in all thought systems, including the current proposition, are unable to be given the status of being absolutely true, and rely on infinite regresses of assumptions. So we are reduced to making subjective assessments of each other's sanity depending on adherence to different assumptions. This is fine. In fact there is no other way. Citation not needed. Hyperlink away! ...or even not at all.

Banning CO2-Producing Fossil Fuel Mining

2011-04-19T20:31:00.000+10:00

It's ridiculous that the debate about how to mitigate inevitable global warming/climate change never touches on the role that the actual mining of carbon dioxide-producing substances plays in the whole chain of events. If you mine/tap something, it's going to be used. And countries like Australia with massive coal deposits, etc, should consider limiting the actual mining of these substances. A handful of people in Australia are getting rich from the mining boom, which is in turn inflating the Australian dollar, which in turn is hurting export industries like services, tourism and manufacturing, which actually employ the vast majority of people. The people getting rich from mining are not going to be alive when their children and grandchildren suffer the consequences.

And any 'debate' about climate change should be dispatched thus: 30% of carbon dioxide in the current atmosphere was emitted during the industrial revolution. It takes 20-30 years for the resulting climate change to manifest. And the ocean is absorbing the elevated levels of CO2, making it more acidic. There are going to be dire consequences even if all carbon emissions were halted now. We are only now seeing the effects of carbon emitted in the 1980s.

There will be a disintegration of civil, social, infrastructural and legal relations in the coming decades. It will be difficult to co-ordinate anything. It isn't going to be only people in the third world dying from tropical diseases, etc; people in the developed world will not have access to pharmaceuticals for diseases such as HIV, cancer, heart disease, diabetes and arthritis. Maybe the realisation of this combined with self-interest will be the only thing that will prompt people in countries like Australia to consider banning the export of fossil fuels.

PBS Coverage of Vitamins and Supplements

2011-04-19T20:01:00.001+10:00

The Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme should cover vitamins, minerals and supplements that are more effective/preventative than standard big-pharma drugs. It would save taxpayers a lot of money in the long run. Two obvious examples are omega-3-rich supplements like salmon oil, and magnesium. Both of these promote general health and, more specifically, prevent and ameliorate the symptoms of Bipolar Disorder. Magnesium citrate in particular is a great, symptom-free substitute for lithium.

Compulsory Superannuation; Corporate Welfare

2010-08-16T20:19:00.001+10:00

It's always interesting when socialist ideas are harnessed to ensure the continuation of the version of capitalism by which the West is currently entranced.

This article by Stephen Long exposes a tactic corporate welfarists have relied on for some time in Australia: the diversion of workers' pay to compulsory superannuation schemes. It shows that workers would have been better off if their pay had been shunted into bank term deposits or even government bonds since records started being kept by APRA in 1997, than if 9% of their pay had been poured into superannuation funds. This blog has covered this issue before. However, one thing that needs to be pointed out is that the share market has been propped up not just by the actual transfer of wealth from workers to corporations, but also by compound interest and opportunity costs from the 9% diversion.

Paul Keating should hang his head in shame.

Gender Inequities at Different Levels of the Career Path

2010-08-06T17:46:00.001+10:00

I recently had a conversation with a close female whilst in the middle of an academic crisis. In what she would have considered gracious words for herself, she said that in her job as a supervisor it was usually males who she had to nurture more, or supervise more closely. She said it in a derogatory tone and implied that males are spoon-fed while growing up, thus giving them a lack of initiative and self-reliance when thrust into the workforce. Her implications may be true. This woman is less reflective and more defensive than me, so I said nothing, but thought, "Listen to yourself".

When we look at gender disparities in workplace pay - in which females usually come out second best - we have decided that the problem is with the system, not with females.

According to the WHO, in 2004 males committed suicide at around four times the rate of females.

When males "underperform", scarce thought is given to the fact that there may actually be systemic, cultural or environmental factors at play.

As an axiom, it should be held that no gender is superior or inferior to the other. Any propositions that conflict with this axiom should be given scrutiny and should be red flagged as suspect. There are differences in physical makeup, emotionality and intellect between the genders. We should recognise such differences, and if we think it appropriate, institute programs to make up for such differences. Affirmative action is an example of such a program.

Society doesn't expect men and women to compete against each other in sport.

There are obvious differences between the two genders.

But thinking that one gender is superior to another reflects a type of bigotry or lack of philosophy.

Homonormativity; Sexual Cycles; Sexual Identity, Behaviour and Orientation; Gay Marriage

2010-08-03T22:13:00.002+10:00

I don't actually believe in the concept of static homosexuality (it's a construct that's only 100 years old, and only in Anglo-Western society) but I finally caved in to homonormative bigots at the age of 25 and chose to call myself "gay" so that I could actually have relationships and not derogatorily be considered just "trade”. Sex is much easier to get with gay males than with hetero females. I’m pragmatic. But I don't even think the whole thing’s even about a gay-bi-straight spectrum.. for instance I cycle at different times of the year, even within a day.. and my intra-gender tastes cycle too. It makes people I have relationships with insecure so I have to hide it.

And I think that different senses can have different orientations simultaneously.. eg in general I'm more visually attracted to males but with the tactile I'm more attracted to females. Even that cycles too. But i can accept that other people may not be like me, that there are bell-curves and polarity-swinging involved, and don't dismiss people who identify as "straight", "gay” or "bi" exclusively. Just as I think those people shouldn't judge my sexuality either.

Then there is the difference between identification, behaviour and inner feelings. I don't think people who identify as gay should judge people who identify as straight but have inner homoerotic desires, vice versa, etc, etc.

As for marriage, it is a legal institution with boundaries. For instance, we don't allow inter-species marriage, or marriage with under 16s. Is it racist to denounce Aboriginal religious beliefs about 12 year olds being ready for marriage? With paedophilia, again, where do you draw the line? For me the whole thing is about power disparities. For instance, I was sexually precocious, was physically, emotionally, and intellectually ready for sex at the age of 11, and I had it. I wouldn't consider it paedophilic for an adult to have consensual sex with me at that age because I was in control. I know people who aren't emotionally ready for sex at the age of 25. I would consider it paedophilic to have sex with such a person because of the power disparity. With marriage, it used to be an institution to entrench power disparities between men and women. It still sometimes is, but it's evolving. I don't believe in it myself. But I wouldn't deny other people the right to it. Now that it's generally cool in Western society to accept people who identify as "gay", society is probably ready to allow marriage between such people. But we're not ready for inter-species marriage or to accommodate Aboriginal concepts of marriage. Boundaries, boundaries, boundaries. I think that people who deride people against gay marriage should think for a bit, judge a little less, and not glibly throw around epithets like "bigot".

Sometimes chasing heteronormative definitions of relationships in gay relationships can be self-destructive. For instance, a lot of harm was done when lesbians used to have to define themselves as "butch" or "femme" and nothing in between. Ditto when some gay men feel that gay men have to be divided into "tops" and "bottoms". If there are no power disparities entrenched by such divisions, or by chasing gay marriage, then go for it. But if there are, we should have a second think.

I just think that there are more important things for the gay community to put energy into, such as stopping violence against gay people (which is still rampant, i can personally tell you), the spread of HIV, etc.

Peer Undermining/Bullying Syndrome; PUBS

2010-07-03T03:41:00.005+10:00

A suggestion of a personality disorder for the upcoming DSM-V: PUBS, otherwise known as Peer Undermining/Bullying Syndrome.

Usually suffered by females, this syndrome should be categorised as a personality disorder. A fellow collaborator - RMT - and I have both noticed a cluster of personality traits in other humans and come to the conclusion that it is a subtype of personality, or a personality disorder not yet identified by the wider psychiatric community.

The cluster of symptoms occurs as follows. Generally, the disorder is suffered by females, especially those with lower-than-average physical attractiveness. It is more commonly suffered by females who are attracted to other females.

The primary symptom is an inclination to undermine peers by espousing, on varying levels of subtlety, negative evaluations of said peers to colleagues, family members, friends and authority figures ("dobbing"). These negative evaluations are insinuated into the minds of colleagues without the victim having right of reply, either because the victim does not know they are being undermined, or because the subtlety is so refined as to deny opponents any tangible propositions against which to argue.

The classic example of a sufferer of PUBS is someone with deep insecurities, a need for dominance or pre-eminence, and a tendency to bully. Often sufferers are females who've been convinced during maturation that they are aesthetically displeasing. They are often - but not exclusively - overweight females with homosexual inclinations. In lesbian "butch-femme" dualistic relationships they take the "butch" role; however their sexuality is usually repressed and diverted into destructive power-disparitive relationships with other nominally heterosexual female companions.

PUBS sufferers are often "alpha" females who react to intellectually or emotionally strong males with slights of which the victimised male may or may not be aware. Such alpha males are usually not aware of the threat posed by PUBS sufferers, and so may not even bother to counter the PUBS sufferers' attacks, to their own detriment. Because PUBS sufferers are often lesbians, they are masculinised, feel threatened by, and are envious of, the competence they may encounter in "alpha males", and initiate a struggle for alpha power. However, their struggle is usually covert, denying the victimised male the ability of right of reply unless they possess sophisticated assertive techniques (rare in males who usually polarise to the overtly aggressive or the verbally reticent).

Dodgy IT companies; Savvis

2010-05-20T19:56:00.004+10:00

I'm about to publish a list of dodgy IT companies etc who keep trying to access my computer according to Peerblock. But here is one who's prevented me from accessing Men Can Stop Rape: Savvis.

Here's wikipedia's entry on their dodgy activities, the resignation of their security officer and his release of internal documents re said activities: Savvis dodgy.

Stavudine, Lipodystrophy and the Developing World

2010-05-20T19:13:00.005+10:00

I find it strange that the HIV anti-retroviral drug stavudine is being phased out of the developed world mostly because of concerns about lipodystrophy. Maybe fat-fuck rich people need a bit of lipodystrophy. Although those pot-bellies on kids in the third world are unattractive to potential celebrity serial-adopters. Lose some weight, get in shape!

Neologisms: Salignoria, Salignorophilia and Salignorophobia

2010-05-15T21:17:00.004+10:00

Salignoria means being unaware of an insult being thrown at you.

Salignorophilia means loving it when someone doesn't understand that you've insulted them.

Salignorophobia means being annoyed that someone is unaware that you've subtly insulted them.

Salignorophobia is my favourite because i love inducing it in other people who've thrown subtle passive aggressive slights at me. There is nothing more satisfying than seeing the anger on someone's face when they see your expression of feigned blissful ignorance after working really hard at coming up with a subtle insult against you that you can't confront directly or eg report word-for-word to an employer as bullying. I learnt it from practising it on my step-mother when young.

MIA Born Free

2010-05-14T20:28:00.009+10:00

MIA Born Free
MIA Born Free
F**k u censorious c**nts!!!

In Defence of Barnaby Joyce’s “Net Debt Gross, Public and Private” Concept

2010-02-24T20:15:00.001+11:00

It’s easy for people who are - understandably - overwhelmed by the intricacies of politically contentious economic concepts to be as triumphalist as people such as the ABC’s Chris Yuleman in deriding non-mainstream economic ideas in his report on tonight’s 7:30 Report. Part of his report derided out of hand Senator Barnaby Joyce’s moronically titled “Net debt gross, public and private”. Joyce is no economic genius but Yuleman was a sheep in following the mainstream media’s universal condemnation of Joyce’s argument. The condemnation was largely due to the wording, in my opinion.

The fact is that foreign debt, incurred by both the public and private sectors, should be conflated. The only qualitative difference should be in the rate of interest paid on the debt. Just as if the government transfers, say major assets such as Telstra and Qantas, to the private sector, then privatisation means there is no change in the total level of assets in the Australian community, just a change in the distribution of wealth from the working class to those who can afford shares (minus the proportion of privatised wealth being sold to foreign interests).

So people shouldn’t dismiss ideas that are out of favour in the mainstream, especially if their derision is just a quick journalistic decision due to the wording of the exponent involved. The fields of economics and psychology are particularly susceptible to such treatment. Think for yourselves, people.

When Atheism Entails Suicide

2010-02-21T17:48:00.002+11:00

I hold the following train of reasoning: if you have been the subject of unremitting pain for the past 30 years, and have no rational, probabilistic expectation of ever emerging from such pain, then you are irrational in your decision not to commit suicide if you are an atheist/materialist. Just as an atheist who is condemned to, say, a year of physical pain with certain death afterwards is irrational in not euthanising themselves.

Recently someone I know (an atheist/materialist) commented that this was a “sad” way of looking at life. (I’ll leave the philosophical issues with a materialist commenting on the word “sad” to another day). To me it is a sadder state of affairs to endure a lifetime of pain due to an inability to follow the chain of reasoning involved, or to endure it because your irrational brain precludes you from such action despite the dictates of your frontal lobes. Methinks in people whose intellects are capable of following the reasoning, or people whose emotional brains are strong enough to override their intellect, but who do not follow my reasoning, that there are unresolved childhood theistic immersion issues involved.

It’s just simple statistics, people. Not that hard.

This brings you to the vexed issue of “faith”. In my interpretation, you either have been graced with it or not, depending on the path the Universe has intended for you. It’s definitely not to say that people with faith are further along the journey to Nirvana than those without. For me personally, I was a hardcore atheist/materialist from 1990-2002, until, after a year’s worth of intense honours-year formal philosophical training, I had an experiential episode of such gravity that I haven’t gone back since. And that’s what faith comes down to: the experiential, not the theoretical.

Jaguars around Sydney; Jaguars in DMT hallucinations

2010-01-23T18:24:00.002+11:00

I find it interesting that jaguars are just about the most commonly encountered entities in DMT trips and that there have been numerous reports of feral jaguars or panthers around outer Sydney. The Sydney jaguar issue has long been considered a myth but more evidence is mounting that there may be some kind of large black feral feline in the Hawkesbury area. Sydney is centred on a large basin of sandstone (and quartz), considered by some to be characteristics of places with high levels of “hallucinations”, “visions”, “UFO sightings” or whatever. Australia is also one of the richest places in the world for DMT concentrations in plants, together with naturally occurring MAOIs which allow human oral ingestion of DMT to be psychoactive: the foundation of Aboriginal Dreamtime theology. (A side note: Aborigines used to use DMT to stun - but not kill - fish in rivers in order to catch them easily; the fish have no MAOs to inhibit psychoactivity).

Politics of Mental Illness, Personality and the DSM-V

2010-01-23T17:33:00.003+11:00

People who’ve made gigantic strides in the progress of humanity have often been classified as “mentally ill”, “hysterical” (in the words of Madonna, “Dr Freud! Analyse this!”) or “psychotic“. It‘s important to understand the prevailing definitions of the above terms, and especially to realise that “psychosis” has nothing to do with “psychopathology".

The DSM-V is on its way (which will include such “disorders” as “Internet Addiction Disorder”). Inclusion of such “disorders” will damage the authority of the DSM, a real blow in the fight for people relying exclusively on such diagnoses for things like paid or unpaid time off work. How many nomenclatures can be given to each and every dis-ease to which literate, Millennial humans will be subject? Can gay people barrack for the DSM to include homosexuality (as it did 30 years ago) for strategic political purposes? If you feel like going (late 20th Century) statistical, Bipolar Disorder is suffered by gay people at three times the rate of the general population and by transgendered people at ten times the general rate. “Borderline Personality Disorder” was a sexist refinement of Freudian “hysteria”, invented in the wake of the sexual revolution and women’s liberation; as such it’s diagnosed in women at four times the rate of men. It’s a political “disorder”, marginalising women’s emotional reactions to their continuing, subtler and thus more difficult to detect and iterate, forms of oppression. It’s no coincidence that “homosexuality” left the DSM at the same time as BPD entered it.

“Personality disorders” can be useful models for interpreting and anticipating people’s behaviours, but I don’t think someone can have a defective personality. People can have various brain architectures (to do with neuronal positioning, chemistry, electrical potentials, etc) which are completely out of their control, at least until adulthood. But if you believe that people are more than mere physical robots, then you believe in “personality” and its concomitants such as responsibility, free will, etc. Philosophical rumination on “personality” reveals that it is a non-material thing. It’s my belief that personalities (“souls”) are more or less advanced in certain facets of functioning and morality than others, not that some personalities are defective. This is one of the main reasons I’m against the death penalty.

I think Schizophrenics need to be listened to more. For some reason I encounter many Schizophrenics on trains to whom I’ve given varying levels of politeness. As someone diagnosed with another “mental illness” (Bipolar Disorder) I should try to engage more, but it’s difficult, just as I know it can be difficult for Neurotypicals to engage with me sometimes. If we could systematically establish facilities at which Schizophrenics can be afforded whatever level of life assistance they need, while professional psychologists, linguists, anthropologists, philosophers, etc try to decipher whatever wisdom Schizophrenics are trying to give humankind, then we would go a long way to becoming a civilised society.

So basically I think one of the big next steps for humankind is a re-evaluation of the etiology of neurovariation, compassionate and practical reintegration of Neurovariants into a civilised society, and most of all, an attempt to understand the meaning of neurovariation for humankind. Why does it exist, what lessons does it afford us, and what knowledge can be derived from the ramblings of people with it? Neurovariants are going to have to politicise themselves in co-operation with progressive-thinking Neurotypicals.

Bipolar Pride
Resources on GLBTI people and affective disorders
Neurotypical underestimation of Autists‘ rich inner world
Interesting discussion on bipolarity and sexuality

Neologisms: Femophilia and Mascophilia

2010-01-16T16:42:00.001+11:00

It’s strange when journalists have to refer to people attracted to females as “men (and women who prefer women)” and people attracted to males as “females (and men who prefer men)”. The former can be referred to as “femophiles” and the latter as “mascophiles”.

Leftism, Rightism and “Political Correctness”

2009-10-28T18:52:00.000+11:00

I just saw a US PBS news report where a doctor advocating for poor people in respect of “neglected diseases of poverty” (a very American concept among developed countries that could equally be used for Australian Aborigines) hesitated about saying that pharmaceutical companies don’t invest in treatments for such diseases because poor people can’t afford, or don’t have the health insurance for, the medications that treat them. She actually said she didn’t want to be non-politically correct. So maybe we’re at a point where being PC isn’t just about being left-wing. Perhaps it simply means going with the predominant elite political orthodoxy in the face of a contrary orthodoxy held by the general public. (The public option for health care in the US is more popular with the public than with their HMO-funded politicians.)

“Blogs” in Online Newspapers

2009-10-28T18:44:00.002+11:00

Opinion or gonzo pieces published in online newspapers do not count as “blogs” just because they have comments open to them. “Blog” = “weblog” = “web diary”. This has been angering me for some time.

A Reason Australians Fear Boat People But Not Plane Arrivals; Skin and Penetration

2009-10-18T16:50:00.001+11:00

Some scholars think that “leprosy” spoken of in the New Testament was really any form of skin disease like psoriasis, but that Jews in that time equated a non-intact skin barrier with corruption of the soul. This soul corruption was the source of ostracism, not fear of catching the skin disease. The lesson here was not about Jesus’ bravery and compassion overriding his fear of infection; it was about all humans being redeemable and that all humans should be beyond judgment and ostracism from other humans.

There is some kind of innate, universal human reaction to skin being pierced. This explains irrational fear of syringes/needles/injections/blood tests and people’s fascination with tattoos and skin piercing. Getting a tattoo or piercing is like a roller-coaster: meant to induce pleasant, conquerable fear and an endorphin rush. An intense emotional motivation and response is also involved in the actions of people who pathologically cut themselves.

I think this same irrational but emotional response to penetration of boundaries is at play with Australia’s reaction to boat people versus their reaction to asylum seekers coming by plane. There is also a definite, prominent element of racism involved but that won’t be dealt with here.

Australia’s fear of boat people is irrational for a number of reasons, including that there are hardly any compared to asylum seekers and illegal immigrants who come by plane.

I haven’t really found anyone in the media questioning why Australians have such differing reactions to boat and plane arrivals. David Marr glosses over the question, briefly stating that the issue is one of “control”. All other opinion I’ve found on the question relies on the racism issue.

I think Australians, like the British and the Japanese, visualise their island country in their head as derived from all the maps they’ve seen of their country. This gives them a subconscious sense of their country as being like an independent cell with a membrane. The issue of people coming into their country through their coast is more subconsciously analogous to the concept of “piercing”, “puncturing” or “penetration” rather than “porousness”, which, I think, is the way, say, Americans view their borders.

This is an irrational, emotional response, probably related to evolutionary factors. It doesn’t mean it’s a wrong response. But you would think that humane people would try to override whatever initial negative emotional reaction they have with a look at the empirical data and a dash of empathy.

Fear versus Love Dichotomy

2009-10-15T18:40:00.001+11:00

I was first introduced to the “love versus fear” dichotomy by someone well-known and who I thought I felt deep feelings for. He went to a couple of Hillsong Church masses when I knew him, and was impressed despite the anti-gay rhetoric.

I’m not sure exactly through what neural substrates (I hate using that term - implies you’re a moronic reductionist) the joy of feeling connected to the Universal employs, but the pathways seem, to me, extremely addictive. If you connect ideas in the cerebral cortex to certain limbic responses then you are playing with fire.

Like Donnie Darko, I’m not sure why so many religious and neo-religious (New-Age) groups have devised a “fear v love” dichotomy. Maybe the purveyors have an ulterior motive - I don’t know. But I do know that fear doesn’t preclude me, personally, from love and vice versa. I would like someone to explore the origins of this purported dichotomy; personally I don’t really know how this came to be.

Superannuation Funds Advertisements

2009-10-11T16:43:00.002+11:00

I’ve seen a couple of superannuation funds TV advertisements lately saying that the sharemarket will rebound as if it’s a certainty. One of them features Bernie Fraser, former head of the Reserve Bank of Australia. My own fund lost 10% in the past year, a good performance relative to other funds, but implies that superannuation is a long term investment that will perform better in the future. No one knows if sharemarkets and other areas of investment for super funds will ever rebound at all. No one knows if capitalism will even survive in its present form in the future. The NSW Department of Fair Trading, the ACCC, etc should be alert to these dangers and try to protect your average punter from the dangers. But everyone assumes that the present model of “capitalism” will prevail and deliver results for those foolhardy enough to put their retirement savings into.

Contradiction in Atheists Using Eugenics

2009-10-11T16:24:00.002+11:00

There’s a full circle at play here: the only way you can believe in eugenics is if you believe that consciousness itself (a non-materialist concept) should be allowed to be a factor in determining what environments obtain (implying who lives and breeds, etc). So you can’t be an atheist while being a eugenicist. I personally believe that humans don’t have an inkling of what constitutes a worthwhile human being and should shut their over-educated and over-specialised mouths and allow natural human evolution to develop as is. Perhaps in 20 years’ time there will be no space for humans who spend their time critiquing tracts of English literature.

Disappointing Signs of Barack Obama’s Weakness: Military Torture/Abuse Photo Issue; Appointment Mistakes; The Tamil Issue

2009-10-10T17:06:00.005+11:00

[written a few months ago - minus Obama's problems re Rx]

Barack Obama has made a mistake in his backflip on releasing photographs of US military abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US Federal Court of Appeal ruled in a case between the ACLU and the US Government that the photos should be released. The dispute is now headed for the US Supreme Court, at which Obama has previously said the US Government couldn’t win. Obama has made a mockery of his pledges of governmental transparency.

He has shown some of the first chinks in his armour by not trusting his own authority and judgment and blinking in the face of opposition from the military. At first the retention of Robert Gates seemed to be a considered decision; now it seems like an act of weakness. Obama looks uncertain on his feet, deferring to the advice of the military who have a clear conflict of interest in this issue when dealing with acts that not just make themselves look bad but also could lead to the laying of charges against senior figures in the military. The excuses that the release of the photos could stop future military investigators doing their jobs properly and gathering all possible evidence for fear of publication or that enemies of the US could be enraged and put US troops into more danger are ridiculous. Military investigators do their jobs - if they don’t then their Commander in Chief must be weak. Further troop danger is a poor excuse because people motivated enough to join anti-occupation paramilitary groups need no further antagonism.

First, Obama is in a strong enough position to take on forces within his government and the military and withstand any underhanded retribution. He just mustn’t realise it.

Second, everyone is going to assume the worst if the photos aren’t released. Obama’s assurance that the photos aren’t as bad as those that emanated from Abu Ghraib is unconvincing. Some Pentagon officials have said that they are worse.

A further worrying sign of deferral to people who Obama thinks are authorities is the appointment of Tim Geithner as Treasury Secretary and Larry Summers in a senior economic advisory role.

Geithner is a banking industry stooge. He has worked for Henry Kissinger’s consulting firm. He has worked for the IMF, a proxy for neoconservative bankers and an organisation that has destroyed several economies including that of Argentina’s through giving loans in return for the decimation of their public sectors. Paul Keating has excoriated Geithner’s work at the IMF in the Asian Financial Crisis in the late 1990s, saying that China and other Asian countries won’t deal with the IMF ever again after Geithner’s work there. Keating also says Geithner is partially responsible for China’s hoarding of capital and refusal to float the renminbi, contributions to the Global Financial Crisis. Geithner was head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank in the time leading up to and including when it oversaw the beginning of the financial crisis. While there he did the bidding of financial institutions including hedge funds. The Federal Reserve is in turn actually owned by the banking sector, contrary to most people’s beliefs.

Summers is viewed with derision by many in the academic community due to several scandals at Harvard. He is also pro-tax cuts in recession, not spending on infrastructure. He is a follower of Milton Friedman, hardly an expert of getting out of recessions and depressions. Summers is too close to the finance industry who he is now supposed to help restructure.

Perhaps Obama should turn to economists who predicted the Global Financial Crisis instead of people who helped create it.

Finally, Obama has been unforgivably late in speaking out about the Sri Lankan genocide of the Tamil people. He has also refused to do anything more than speak out. Obama should use his stature to put more pressure on the Sri Lankan Government.

These are just a few signs of Obama’s lack of confidence. On other issues he has been impressive so far.

Sexual Orientation by Sensory Taxonomy

2009-10-01T18:50:00.001+10:00

There is yet another complicating factor in classification and determination of sexuality in addition to other factors like the genetic, the hormonal, the emotional, the cyclical, the situational, the deliberative, the socially constructed, etc. I’ve known this for a long time but this morning I woke up with it pushing itself insistently into my mind. People can have different sexual orientations for each of their senses.

Personally, I am far more visually attracted to men, but it sometimes oscillates, especially on psychedelics. The over saturation of distorted female forms in the media I was exposed to in my adolescence has altered my sexuality on the visual level. Sometimes I realise I wouldn’t actually want to have sex with a lot of the men I check out, and often there’s an element of self-comparison / competitiveness involved.

I hate deodorant, perfume or aftershave on either sex so it’s difficult to make a judgment, but I like the smell of men’s sweat more than that of women‘s, but the other way around when it comes to breath.

On the tactile level I prefer women. This is complicated by the fact that I prefer to take the “lead” role in sex, for instance I instinctively hug a sexual partner around the waist rather than around their neck.

I’m not sure about my reaction to vocals. I like any sexy voice. I like both high-pitched and husky voices on women. Unlike most gay men I like soft voices on men that have a touch of femininity, as well as gruff voices. For some reason when I hear a woman having sex in a neighbouring apartment I react with jealousy and want to fuck the woman. I usually jack off.

The above with respect to my own reactions must be tempered thus. I think I’m an unusual case: a mostly gay man who has an extremely “heterosexual” 2D:4D ratio (ratio of the index finger to the ring finger). My EEG, as well as that of my mother’s, shows a lack of hemispheric coherence associated with autism and over-masculinised brains.

Simon Singh; Alternative Medicine and Chiropractic; Defamation/Libel; Scientific Method

2009-07-15T19:47:00.002+10:00

There was a story on alternative/complementary/integral medicine on the 7:30 Report last night that entered into the vexed debate about the status and validity of complementary medicine, and how it should be treated by the government with respect to funding and regulation. It was prompted by a UK case in which a pop-science journalist, Simon Singh, had been sued by the British Chiropractic Association for defamation after he alleged that the BCA “happily promotes bogus treatments.”

Western science in various fields has been wrought by paradigm shift after paradigm shift incessantly over the past 100 years. Among these are the painful revocation of the Cartesian mind-body split and the overthrow of Newtonian mechanics as the ultimate truth in physics.

Candace Pert’s Molecules of Emotion and Marcia Angell’s The Truth About the Drug Companies are two excellent books including accounts of how 20th and 21st century “science” has been distorted, retarded and even falsified by political, personal and economic imperatives. Neither Pert nor Angell are outsiders. Pert should have won the Nobel Prize for her discovery of the opiate receptor and Angell is former editor-in-chief of The New England Journal of Medicine.

Singh sticks to the “if it aint documented in peer-reviewed publications then it aint true” line. It’s discouraging that people purporting to be media between “hard science” and public awareness are trying to stifle the still-nascent progress in some Western scientific circles to document the relationship between the mind (which materialists consider a mere epiphenomenon of brain circuitry) and the body. “Science” wasn’t invented in the 17th or 20th centuries - 5000 years of empiricism is the basis of Ayurvedic medicine. Just because something hasn’t been published in a 20th century peer-reviewed journal doesn’t mean it isn’t true. People like John Dwyer from UNSW should understand this.

Singh has been defeated in a lower court ruling but is appealing with the support of this list of public identities.

Defamation laws in general are a hindrance to free speech and should be dispensed with. It seems odd that a scientific debate will be decided by a court. This puts into relief the situation that there is no Science God that we can defer to. If it is the Establishment then we’d all still think the Sun revolved around the Earth. Almost all worthy revolutions in science have come from people with deep spiritual beliefs and from people most definitely dismissed initially by the Establishment. This fact puts favourable light on the fact that legal cases arising from “science” are decided by 12 common folk on a jury. Common folk with common sense, or at least you’d hope.

Pert says “The argument that [alternative therapies] are untested , and therefore can’t be taken seriously, is not valid. So much of mainstream medicine itself is totally unproven - yet we do it anyway.” She also points out that understanding the exact mechanism behind a given medicinal treatment isn’t a prerequisite for its use.

So how to deal with medicinal treatments outside the purview of materialist science? There is an obvious danger of quack treatments. Perhaps each branch of complementary medicine should establish a self-regulating guild. Operators outside of each guild should still be allowed to practice but with patients being informed that they are not endorsed by the guild. Banning such operators would be another example of deferring to authority, which may be tainted by internal politics, etc. But in no circumstances should a governmental authority be permitted to stop people from obtaining the effective - or ineffective - treatments they desire.

One remaining issue would be how to deal with parents of children who die after receiving alternative but not mainstream medical treatment. Again, a vexed issue.

From personal experience evaluating different forms of yoga, I have realised that I need to be on my toes, research and pay attention to my personal experiences. There are many branches of yoga with many gurus - how do you know that you’re not entering a school devised by someone with subconscious megalomaniac tendencies? And that is the lesson for everyone: trust your own intuition.

Fair Pay Commission Minimum Wage Freeze

2009-07-08T20:54:00.001+10:00

The Fair Pay Commission’s decision to freeze the minimum wage for the first time since 1982 is economically irresponsible and morally wrong.

First, the CPI went up only 0.1% in the March quarter, leaving inflation low and falling from a 12 month rate of 2.5% to the end of this quarter. There is no great need for wage restraint.

Second, as pointed out in this article, the decision will run counter to the fiscally expansionary stance of the Federal Government, eating up the latest cash bonus. People at the lower end of the income scale spend rather than squirrel (not through irresponsibility but through necessity) and money diverted to them presents a larger stimulus to the economy than money diverted to, eg, people who derive their income from profit. As Peter Kriesler says in the Brisbane Times article, “…one [person]'s pay increase increases the likelihood of someone else getting a job” and low income earners are more likely to spend locally.

Third, the proportion of total outlays that businesses spend on low income wages is probably overstated. I have no evidence for this, just a strong hunch - can’t be bothered researching. And keeping workers happy with a decent pay packet is almost always a cost-benefit analysis winner.

Fourth, the incentive for people on welfare to go back to work has been diminished. This is especially the case with the pension due to increase by over $30 per week in September.

Now a moral issue. Successive Australian governments have ideologically pushed for income and economic growth through upskilling of the workforce while simultaneously maintaining very high levels of immigration. Sometimes the developed world can outsource low paid jobs to the Third World such as in the call centre industry. Sometimes the rich cannot outsource to the Third World. Australia doesn’t have a ready supply of millions of illegal immigrants such as that which helps power the US agricultural industry. Someone needs to clean our toilets. We should have some respect and maintain decent income levels, especially in global cities with exorbitant rents such as Sydney.

John Howard‘s Ian Harper and his Fair Pay Commission will be happily farewelled by many Australians.

Moron of the Day: Jessica Irvine

2009-07-01T19:02:00.001+10:00

Jessica Irvine has written little diatribes that have irked me for some time with her lack of economic literacy and simultaneous employment at one of the most venerable media institutions in the country (the SMH).

Here she conflates the class of underemployed, possibly mentally ill pensioners with the “non-lodger… [people] who couldn’t be bothered” and with “tax cheats looking to avoid liabilities”. I’ve explained before why a lot of the 200,000 people, including myself, have missed out on the $900 tax refund. Irvine should pull herself out of her cloistered inner-city mindset and take a look at reality. Further infractions on her part will possibly be postered here if not worthy of separate blog posts. And her infractions have been building up for a while. Fairfax should spend some money on someone who actually understands economics.

The Chaser’s “Make a Realistic Wish Foundation” Skit

2009-06-11T18:48:00.001+10:00

The negative and ubiquitous reaction to The Chaser’s “Make a Realistic Wish Foundation” skit has been an indictment of the maturity of Australian society.

Comedy is meant to push the boundaries of what can be considered the sacred cows of culture. It has a utility beyond just making people laugh. In this case three sacred cows have been stepped on: cancer, death and children. Personally, when I watched the skit, I laughed out loud harder than I did to any other segment of that particular Chaser episode. My laughter was partly prompted by its irreverence / potential controversy. I can’t step into the shoes of people whose children have terminal cancer so can’t be totally definitive in my praise of the skit, but I know that when my own personal subjects of angst are made the object of ridicule, I laugh. That doesn’t mean that parents of dying children should have a similar ease of amusement. I’m sure that some do though, and I would bet that dying children would laugh more readily at the skit than the parents.

Western society has gradually over the past century cast children in a role of increasing vulnerability and dependence. I’m not sure of all the reasons, but some salient ones are that child mortality has plunged, that people have less children and have them at older ages, and that the opportunity cost of having a child has soared. It is, however, wrong and damaging to underestimate the strength and intelligence of children. Even twenty years ago parents didn’t feel the need to drive their children half a kilometre to school because of their perceived helplessness.

Another issue is proximity. Australians have reacted to a skit about a couple of hundred children who die each year of cancer but failed to react to other comedic stabs at, for instance, J’amie’s hilariously callous attitude to her African sponsor children in “We Can Be Heroes: Finding the Australian of the Year” or her “AIDS in Africa” fashion show vignette in “Summer Heights High”. Millions of children are dying of AIDS and malnutrition in Africa. Apparently their lives have less importance than those of Australian children.

The ABC should be ashamed that they’ve been bullied into censoring The Chaser and taking it off the air for two weeks. The demotion of Amanda Duthie of the ABC is a disgrace and an act of cowardice.

Another issue at play here is Kevin Rudd’s popularism and social conservatism. His condemnation of the skit contributed to the overreaction and the ABC’s disgraceful actions. This isn’t the first time he’s both rode the wave of talkback anger and contributed to it. He was wrong in demonising Bill Henson’s art. He was also wrong in attacking Germaine Greer’s words of sanity in the midst of the mass, unthinking canonisation of Steve Irwin after his death. Rudd should show some moral and intellectual leadership.

Matthew Johns Group Sex Scandal; Multiple Male Sexual Activity; Homosexuality; Porn; Age and Consent

2009-05-14T15:38:00.001+10:00

Matthew Johns is an outright scumbag for what he did to that 19 year old New Zealand woman viz a viz group sex with multiple males and allowing other men to stand around masturbating and watching. Regardless of whether the woman involved actually consented to more than just Johns and one other player having sex with her, the act was a disgusting one to perpetuate on a 19 year old. We have laws about paedophilia because age is a factor in whether there is consent in sexual activity. Age doesn’t make discrete jumps so we are forced to make arbitrary decisions about at what age consent for sex can legally be given. But age is a matter of degree; a 19 year old is only slightly more in control of her sexuality than a 15 year old.

Multiple male sexuality with a woman involved is usually always a sublimation of homosexual desire. I used to be a male prostitute for mostly males but also for the occasional husband and wife. It was my experience that the women seemed to have the experience forced on them through coercion from their husbands, and that the husband would be more focussed on me than their wives. One time I had a husband deliberately thrust his legs and genitalia on my legs and genitalia as I had vaginal sex with the wife while he had anal sex with her. I’ve had a male friend who had a crush on me but was in denial about his homosexuality continually suggest a threesome with a woman. I declined because I didn’t want to be a part of that kind of sublimation.

Most heterosexual porn is focussed on the penis more than the vagina. Not much hetero porn contains material where there is no penile penetration of an orifice. A lot of hetero porn has multiple male sexual activity. Hetero porn where a woman gives oral sex to a man or where there are men standing around ejaculating on a woman’s face is very phallocentric. This suggests to me that a lot of hetero porn viewing involves sublimation of gay male energy. Also, in a penis-vagina sexual act, the man cannot ignore his own penis. This suggests that all penis-vagina penetrative activity involves some sort of homosexual energy. Everyone has both heterosexuality and homosexuality in them to some degree. The only men who this doesn’t apply to are ascetics and men who only participate in sexual acts that don’t involve penises.

Annabel Crabb has written an excellent article in the SMH pointing out the homosexuality involved in the Matthew Johns incident. She says:

“If you want to get together and celebrate your oiled, toned bodies in the celebrated Greek tradition, then go ahead.

Just leave the ladies out of it, will you, and do us all a favour?”

My experience has been that male team sport fosters gay energy. The team spirit involved, the constant exposure to other naked male bodies in prime condition, and the inevitable constant contact with all parts of other male bodies is homoerotic. NRL (rugby league) is especially conducive to homosexuality because of the exaggerated masculinity of the bodies involved and the extremely high level of physical contact with other players’ bodies. There have been other NRL homoerotic incidents like the Johns one that have been revealed in the press, and probably many more that haven’t been reported. It will go on forever as long as the public are willing to continue to pour adulation on rugby league players. Society itself is gay if it celebrates prime male physical conditions and skills the way it does.

Pru Goward is right in saying that Johns should reveal who the other players were. But she should pull her head in when betrays her disdain for women who consent to group sex by saying:

“If there is a young woman in Australia who does not now know that having sex with one or two men at once is not risky sexual behaviour she perhaps needs to go back and look at a bit more television…Risky sexual behaviour ... does not lead to a white wedding.”

That’s an appalling implicit levelling of partial culpability on the part of the women involved.

Malcolm Turnbull’s Analogy Between Government and Individual Debt

2009-05-07T11:56:00.001+10:00

In his address to the National Press Club yesterday, Malcolm Turnbull drew an analogy between the finances of an individual and that of the Government:

“If you knew your financial situation was going to deteriorate, if you know your income was going to be reduced, would you go to the bank, borrow a fortune and spend it? You know you wouldn't.”

This is a faulty analogy. The Government is, in a democracy, owned by the people. So the Government going into fiscal deficit through increased spending is the same as an entity borrowing to pump money into itself - not to spend externally. The exceptions are that money is transferred from some parts of the economy to other parts and there is some leakage when money is spent on imports.

A more appropriate analogy would be like this: A family has several income earners who pool their finances together. Some of them get sick and stop working and earning. (This is a recession.) They will not get better unless they take some medicine that they can’t afford due to the family’s drop in income. So the family takes out a loan to pay for the medicine. (This is the Government going into budget deficit.) The sick family members get better, go back to work and earn money again. (This is an economic recovery.) The family is in debt and it will take some time to pay the debt off. But they are able to do so due to their restored income levels.

Consciousness Chauvinism

2009-05-06T20:13:00.002+10:00

A neologism: “Consciousness Chauvinism”. It means the inability, through lack of imagination or empathy, to imagine different modes of consciousness; both actually imagining specific alternative modes and imagining the possibility of alternative modes.

Mental illness, psychedelic drug use and the higher levels of meditative accomplishment afford ways to overcome this deficiency.

The preponderance of Consciousness Chauvinism amongst humankind is the reason we are a priori incapable of finding intelligent alien life. Aliens, if they exist, would almost certainly not have the same type of consciousness that humans enjoy through our very especial type of central nervous system based on our particular type of vertebrate skeletal structure.

Intelligent Design (Creationism) theory is a mistake made through Consciousness Chauvinism. People who advocate it are blinkered and lack meta-thought. They can’t conceive that immensely complex systems such as organisms could come into being through any means other than the same way humans design things. The classic “if you found a functioning clock in the middle of nowhere you would be irrational to think it wasn’t designed and constructed by a human” argument is a case in point.

Animals, plants, cells and even stones may have consciousness; it’s just that we are a priori incapable of knowing whether they do - at least in normal states of consciousness. This is a problem brought about by the current strict Western scientific dictate that if a concept can’t be falsified through empirical investigation then it can’t be a theory.

People who are blessed with meta-thought shouldn’t be harsh to those who are not,including advocates of Intelligent Design / Creationism. Creationism is an interesting phenomenon because it derives from the idea that the ultimate cause of existence is thought. But, contra Descartes’ “cogito ergo sum” philosophy, there is no reason why thought needs to be attached to an entity that does the thinking. Through this analysis, Creationism can actually dovetail somewhat with some Eastern philosophy/religion and the newly created philosophies that have emerged in the past century or so as a result of the overturning of Newtonian physics through Einstein’s relativity theory and the formulation of quantum physics.

Equally, we shouldn’t be harsh on people who still believe in Newtonian mechanistic science and haven’t integrated the past century of discoveries in physics into their real life everyday thinking. Hardly anyone actually understands quantum physics let alone the metaphysical implications involved. It’s been said that only several people on the planet can truly visualise the mathematics involved in quantum physics in their head. (That is not to say that many other physicists don’t understand quantum physics and the mathematics involved - they do, but they just can’t picture it in their heads.)

For those who know they will never even begin to understand quantum physics there remains the path of experiential understanding of the fact that consciousness pervades all matter. This experiential understanding can be gained through various religious practices like certain types of yoga and meditation, various types of “mental illness” including schizophrenia and manic psychosis, or through high doses of psychedelic drugs.

Experiential understanding is ineffable. Language represents an obstacle to overcoming Consciousness Chauvinism. Built into language are confusions including semantic structures inherent in all languages that constrict people’s thought to that which is goal-driven, teleological, and tending to over-use of personification. There are probably other constrictions in language not identified here.

For elucidation (unfortunately through language!) the following books are recommended:

1. The Mind of God: Science and the Search For Ultimate Meaning by Paul Davies. Davies (a widely-respected physicist and popular science writer) explains how mathematics is the only system of thought that can prove it is a religion (through Goedel’s Theorem) itself. He explains in laypeople’s language the developments of the past century in physics. He concludes that “a rational explanation for the world in the sense of a closed and complete system of logical truths is almost certainly impossible” and that “mystical experience”, which he hasn’t actually had himself, is probably the only way to overcome the paradoxes created by 20th century physics.

2. The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot. This is another popular science book. Talbot explains how 20th century physics, the theories of physicist and metaphysician David Bohm (a collaborator with Einstein), developments in 20th century psychology, the theories of neurophysiologist and metaphysician Karl Pribram, all point towards a conception of the Universe as consisting of matter that is simultaneously consciousness.

3. Beyond the Brain: Birth Death and Transcendence in Psychotherapy by Stanislav Grof. Grof is a former Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University of Medicine. This is an academic book. Grof proceeds from the work of Bohm and Pribram. He integrates his own work with the past century of developments in psychiatry (especially psychoanalysis). His work includes thousands of LSD psychotherapy sessions (before LSD was put under prohibition around the world circa 1970) and subsequent “holotropic therapy” sessions involving, among other techniques, breath work that creates a psychedelic state of mind within minutes. He concludes that individuals must integrate a stable dual sense of being both matter and consciousness simultaneously through experiential understanding to attain psychological health. He also concludes that the fate of civilisation depends on humans realising that Newtonian physics is over and that all matter is also consciousness at the same time.

Magda Szubanski: Corporate Sellout

2009-05-05T21:05:00.001+10:00

Magda Szubanski has for a long time ranked as one of the most beloved and/or trusted Australian celebrities according to research conducted on behalf of television networks, PR and marketing companies. This year she ranked sixth.

She has sold her celebrity clout in the past to Jetstar and now to Jenny Craig. Jetstar is a low-fare off-shoot of Qantas, who wanted to fill a gap in the market without damaging its brand and cherished safety record. Jenny Craig is a weight loss program company. Both are distasteful entities. Szubanski has abused her fame.

Australia’s Carbon Emissions Trading Scheme, Economic Protectionism and Double Dissolution Elections

2009-05-05T20:38:00.003+10:00

Penny Wong’s and Kevin Rudd’s Emissions Trading Scheme has a woefully inadequate carbon emission reduction target of 5%, in contrast with Britain which has unilaterally committed to a 24% reduction on 2000 levels. Australia’s scheme inexcusably and irrationally provides for exemptions. Exemptions will distort the market, resulting in a movement of these externalities from non-exempt industries to exempt industries. Exempt industries will actually be encouraged to emit more to profit from this distortion in the market. Rudd wants to position himself as a moderate on the issue, balancing the interests of big Australian polluters with those of the community who are interested in combating global warming. The Government has obviously been closely collaborating with business groups and the ACTU to get their endorsement for their policy. Shame on the ACTU.

Of course Australia is a small player in terms of proportion of global carbon emissions. But Australia is an extremely influential player in terms of shaping global opinion and policy. Rudd has done a lot to rehabilitate Australia’s standing in the world which was diminished by the former Howard government’s multifarious detrimental actions. He should use Australia’s influence to set an example for the rest of the world.

An inadequate ETS is a form of economic protectionism. Malcolm Turnbull’s objection to the ETS is a form of advocacy for protectionism. Protectionism contributed to the severity of the Great Depression and has been rightly cautioned against worldwide in the current Global Economic Crisis. Australia has opened its markets in the past without the rest of the world reciprocating to the same extent and has benefited enormously economically. The same should happen in this case.

A few months ago it looked like a double dissolution on some hypothetical issue would have delivered the Government control of both Houses. Now it looks probable that the ETS issue as an election trigger would give the Greens an increase in Senate representation and possible balance of power. Australians feel strongly about this issue and, further, the revelation of Treasury predictions of an extended fiscal deficit to 2015 will erode the ALP’s vote. The Rudd Government should be wary of a double dissolution election on this issue.

Alcopops and Food Engineering

2009-03-23T22:08:00.002+11:00

I have a friend who works at a company that chemically manipulates the taste, texture etc of food products.

Her company was in the process of creating a new version of a well-known alcopop containing vodka that would increase its highest-alcohol version from alcohol content of around 7% to 10%. The 7% version was a triumph in flavour engineering. Apparently my friend’s company laboured over the precise formula of food acids, alcohol, sugar and the like to make it readily palatable without much of an alcoholic flavour. It is still available although the alcohol content has been slightly lowered.

When it came to the crunch amid the media hysteria over binge drinking and the new taxes on alcopop, the distiller decided to abandon plans for the 10% version. From personal experience the 7% version is like drinking lemonade and before you know it you’re drunk. The fact that it contains carbonated water also helps to open the valve between the stomach and small intestine (small colon), allowing for rapid intoxication without stomach bloating associated with, say, beer. One step behind injecting pure alcohol.

Before my friend told me about the company scrapping the project for the 10% version I knew that it would be lethal and result in adverse publicity for the company and I suspect such concerns were involved in the abandonment.

As a footnote I’ll mention that a pub in Newtown has been selling the drink with a 70% hike on its full sale price - not a 70% increase in tax - resulting in it selling the product for $28 per four-pack compared to $18 at other outlets.

Cyclical Phenomena and Means/Medians/Modes

2009-03-22T17:13:00.001+11:00

You can’t take an arbitrarily selected period in a cycle and then average out the position where the mean or median lies. I’m reading a (poorly written and argued, littered with nonsensical sentences but somewhat informative) book called Blinded By Starlight: The Pineal Gland and Western Astronomia by Frank McGillion in which he writes that a study found that the “mean” day of delivery for babies was the first or second day after the full moon.

The lunar cycle is a natural continuous sine wave so it is logically impossible to pin down the average day on which something happens. Humans impose on the cycle periods - usually beginning at new moon as appears to have happened in this study. Arbitrarily deciding the point of the beginning of the cycle will give a distortion in which the mean will usually lie somewhere near the middle of the period. So the mean birthday humans have would be around the first of July because we have arbitrarily fixed this as the midpoint of the period in the annual cycle. But there cannot be such a thing as a mean birthday.

It is possible to have a mode in an arbitrarily selected period in a cycle.

Earth’s Orbit; Mathematical/OCD Conscious Design of the Universe?

2009-03-21T23:57:00.000+11:00

The Earth’s orbit around the sun is elliptical. This means that its distance from the sun varies, meaning that the whole Earth - not just one hemisphere - gets hotter twice yearly at the same time. Then there is the tilted axis of the Earth causing each hemisphere to be more exposed to the sun and therefore hotter at diametrically alternating points in the year. The first of these effects doesn’t seem to talked about. I need someone to explain this to me! I don’t want to trawl through astronomy books.

The only two explanations I can think of is that the decrease in distance from the sun is too small to influence the Earth’s temperature, or that the Earth orbits so that the equinoxes or solstices occur at exactly the points at which the Earth is closest to the sun.

I love how the Earth doesn’t have years that are perfectly divisible by a whole number of days. It’s like one of many pieces of evidence against conscious design of the Universe. Or against “Intelligent Design“. I also love all the pieces of evidence that strongly suggest the Universe was created by an entity with a deep love of mathematics and a bad case of OCD. It’s as if humans have been put in a puzzle with deliberate contradictions that can never be resolved. Perhaps resolution isn’t important, but the way humans go about debating the contradictions is instead. Process, not purpose

Steve Fielding; Kevin Rudd Possible Double Dissolution Election

2009-03-19T22:52:00.002+11:00

The Australian Senate is hilariously numbered to force the Government to secure all non-Coalition votes to get Opposition-opposed legislation enacted. So far with pieces of important legislation the Greens and Nick Xenophon have been savvy, principled and mature in negotiating with the Government. Steve Fielding has been a mess. The man shrieks and gesticulates wildly in Senate speeches, betraying his sense of inadequacy in the face of giant responsibility. He was savaged for capitulating into support for the Government’s stimulus package without extracting significant concessions as the other cross-benchers did. This criticism seems to have motivated him to try to extract big concessions from the Government to pass other disputed legislation. I applaud Fielding’s desire to eliminate alcohol advertising in sport. But he has to be realistic in his demands. He is not a mature negotiator as the other cross-benchers have proved to be.

The Labor Government won a landslide election in 2007 on the back of years of activism by the union movement against WorkChoices. The Senate is now opposing the dismantlement of WorkChoices with Fair Work over a few points of dispute with Xenophon and Fielding. The ALP is leading the Coalition 56-44 in the latest Newspoll. Still landslide territory. Fielding won a Senate seat with 2% of the vote in Victoria in 2004, defeating the Greens’ candidate David Risstrom who won 9% of the vote as a result of undemocratic and non-transparent preference deals with the major parties as are available in the election system for the Australian Senate. Family First won 3% of the Victorian Senate vote in the 2007 election, failing to win a seat. Fielding will, in all probability, be flushed from the Parliament in the next election. If Kevin Rudd called a double dissolution election now he would probably win control of both houses. I think this course of action is seriously being considered by Rudd.

Compulsory Superannuation and its Interaction with the Stock Market and Property Prices

2009-03-06T20:08:00.000+11:00

It’s really interesting and informative that the current global economic crisis is resulting in a reluctant collision between socialism and capitalism. I’ve already commented on the US government nationalising privately-owned finance entities. It’s ironic and hilarious to watch car companies grovel to the US congress. Save us from our own capitalism! The “consumer” (what a revoltingly derogatory term for a “human”) has become more the “taxpayer” now that it suits those in power.

Paul Keating - who I respect greatly on some levels - was the architect of much of Australia’s degeneration into an individualistic, greed-infested, socially “recalcitrant” (if I can use that word) nation. His were the culpable free-market reforms of the 1980s and early 1990s, not John Howard’s and Peter Costello‘s economic reforms which don’t really extend beyond the GST (how visionary!) and the abortive attempts at destroying the unions.

One initiative of Keating’s was to force workers to funnel part of their income into superannuation funds. The rate is currently 9% of income. The tax rate on such diverted income is much lower than that of income tax rates, affording a taxpayer-funded boost to the assets of people whose income allows them to divert extra income into superannuation. Howard/Costello further raided government coffers to introduce a co-contribution scheme in which the taxpayer transfers cash into the hands of those who can afford to divert income above the mandated amount.

The superannuation funds have been mostly invested in the stock market and property. This extraordinary interaction of socialism (mandated income contributions) and capitalism (the recipient stock market and property markets) over-inflates the value of the stock market and property markets at the expense of workers. Exacerbates the bubbles. One trillion dollars - the value of one year of Australia’s GDP - is in superannuation funds. Despite, or partly because of, this distortion in the free market, the markets are plummeting, exposing workers to massive losses in savings. Australians have the most money invested in managed funds in the world per capita. Now that the world recession has hit, ordinary Australians are finding their socialised income frittered away in the free market. And they have Keating to thank for it.

Nathan Rees’ and Tony Kelly’s Quiet War on Civil Liberties

2009-03-06T17:50:00.000+11:00

The NSW government is quietly stripping away civil liberties while everyone’s pre-occupied with the global financial crisis.

The deployment of 500 mobile fingerprint scanners is an outrage. Police play loose with definitions of reasonable suspicion and people, especially from marginalised groups, will have to walk down the street under Big Brother-style threat of being subject to a biological determination of identity. There are four million fingerprints on Australian databases - out of a population of 20 million - and many of these are fingerprints that should have been discarded under present rules (those taken for minor offences).

The second act of Nathan Rees and Tony Kelly attacking civil liberties is to allow already-occurring illegal police searches of properties and hacks into computers to yield evidence that will be admissible in court. To legitimise police breaches of the law is inexcusable. Such searches are occurring without the property/computer owner’s knowledge. From now on police will be able to conduct searches and hacks without the owner knowing for three years. Absolutely draconian.

The familiar catchcry when civil liberties are being thus attacked is that you have nothing to fear if you’re a law-abiding citizen. But who decides what behaviour constitutes criminality? The police clearly cannot be trusted if they’re breaking the law already. NSW has a long history of police corruption. Three years’ grace will open the door to evidence being planted more easily.

It’s a slippery slope, and, if you end up with authoritarian governments, which is a distinct possibility in dire economic times, everyone should be afraid. Australians have fought off the “Australia Card” before, with good reason. The portable fingerprint scanner issue is the same issue. Let’s not lose the fight now. Democracy always has to be constantly fought for and can never be taken for granted.

Kevin Rudd's First Economic Stimulus Package and Increased Savings/Reduced Debt

2009-03-06T17:15:00.000+11:00

There is nothing wrong with some of the cash from the first economic stimulus package being squirrelled away in savings or used to pay off debt, one of the open wounds left by the now-ending era of massive private/consumer debt. Fixing a problem that is exploding in our faces (debt) is no bad thing. Less people will lose their houses. In turn it will add extra liquidity to the Australian banking system as people put their money in deposits and pay back debt. The boost in consumption is a good thing as long as the goods bought add genuine utility to society. Shifting debt from the private to the public sphere is wise; the government is better able to manage debt than hapless McMansionites and the interest rates afforded to the government are considerably lower. People need to remember that economics is about people being better off, happier and more able to pursue their life paths, and society/civilisation progressing. Raw GDP numbers don’t tell the whole story. It’s bad for people to lose their jobs in the short term but it is long term unemployment that erodes self esteem the most. Short term dips in GDP are therefore of less import than what the government does to ensure long term job growth, quality of pay and conditions in work and the general progress of civilisation.

Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard must be spooked to consider dropping paid maternity leave exactly when we need it the most. This is a proven economy-booster, protects the jobs and retains the skills of working parents, only Australia and the US don’t have it among developed countries, and, moreover, it is a social good. The same goes for funding of the SBS, another job booster (the media is hurting right now) and is, again, most importantly, a social good.

Rudd is in general doing a reasonably good job handling the crisis. He should be applauded for his plans to push for a global regulatory framework for banks and for his position in favour of letting some US banks fail. As I’ve said before, Australia is lucky that John Howard and Peter Costello were ousted before the crisis started hitting hard

Depression/Mania and Removing Facebook Profiles and Blogs

2009-02-20T22:32:00.006+11:00

I've noticed that a lot of people sporadically take down and then re-publish their blogs and Facebook profiles. It seems to be when they are depressed that they censor themselves . Then they put their published material back up. I've never seriously considered taking down manicnotes. It has to do with intellectual bravery. I've considered taking down my profile on Facebook when I've felt depressed. But I just leave it alone knowing I'm OK

When people are manic they feel immune to criticism and publish what they think is (or really is) the truth. Then they fall into depression, doubt the intellectual or aesthetic content of their material, feel embarrassed by their disclosures and withdraw. They should have the courage to bare all, stick with unfashionable positions and not be ashamed when they're wrong.

The way I think everything you write is like a tattoo. You should own it. Even if you don't agree with it later. It's intellectual honesty and bravery. It's history. Taking down your online material is akin to burning books in Nazi Germany.

Cash Bonuses, ATO and Pensioners

2009-02-05T18:22:00.002+11:00

In Kevin Rudd’s second economic stimulus plan, as I understand it, who gets the $950 cash bonus for low and income workers will be determined by the ATO. Many pensioners through depression and other disabilities neglect to put in tax returns and will thus miss out. Even when they’re able to do a bit of work here and there and are therefore owed money by the ATO. They can do their last tax return late and get the bonus but many haven’t claimed for years and would be subject to fines. They would also have to call all their former employers for group certificates - if the employers haven't gone bankrupt. For pensioners the bonus should be paid through Centrelink like the first bonus.

Kevin Rudd’s Second Economic Stimulus Package

2009-02-04T17:37:00.000+11:00

Before Kevin Rudd’s budget is examined, a few ideas on budgets that won’t be accepted by many.

The proposition that the size of change in the fiscal position constitutes the size of contraction/expansion injected into the economy is wrong. Each year should be treated anew. The absolute size of the surplus/deficit is the size of the contraction/expansion injected. For instance, if the budget position moves from a deficit of $20b to a $10b deficit, the government is still injecting $10b into the economy for the year.

The concept of a Platonic budget should be developed. In this concept there is an ideal budget for optimal economic and social development for each year written in the sky. No-one can know what the composition of the ideal budget is but the government should try to divine it and deliver as close to an ideal budget as possible. Thus there would be a Platonic ideal amount of money to be spent on education for a given year, etc. If the government spends $5b on education when the amount that should be spent is $10b then the government is withdrawing $5b from the education sector, not injecting $5b.

So Kevin Rudd’s move from a $20b surplus to a $20b deficit is just $20b worth of expansionism, not $40b. And his $6b for social housing (it seems like it’s over four years but the figures are hard to pin down) is woefully inadequate; if in an ideal budget the amount should be $20b then Rudd is effectively withdrawing $14b from the social housing sector.

It’s impossible to know what the size of the deficit should be and what the spending and revenue compositions should be but it seems that Rudd and his team have been thoughtful. Rudd should be praised for the speed of his intervention, the attempt at a good mix of cash injections and infrastructure spending, the weighting of infrastructure spending to ready-to-go projects, and his alacrity/bravery in treading on the states’ turf in the face of crisis. Tax cuts are hard to recoup when trying to put the budget back into surplus, are too easily saved and produce no extra productive capacity in the economy. Rudd was wise to keep them to a minimum. Most would consider the size of the spending increases to be huge so Rudd should be praised for his boldness. In all probability he hasn’t gone hard enough, though.

Perhaps he’s waiting to watch overseas developments to decide whether he’ll go harder but time is of the essence and it looks like anything can happen given the decimation of the US and European banking systems. We could be in for a decade-long stagnation like Japan went through. Capitalism as we know it could collapse and be replaced by a system we can’t even imagine yet, probably heavily Chinese-directed.

Ultimately on a fundamental level the West has been raping the Third World and there will be a reckoning.

Australia fortunately stumbled back into the land of Labor governments in time for this crisis. A Liberal government hooked on the spin that deficits are bad would have fallen into deficit too but not with the same decisiveness and thought. Peter Costello’s paucity of ideas on the matter is on display for all to see. He derides the December $10b as a virtual transfer of government cash to retailers. Heard of the multiplier effect? Malcolm Turnbull has destroyed his leadership by opposing the second stimulus package. History won’t be kind.

My Autistic Traits; Overlap With Symptoms of Other “Disorders”

2009-02-04T14:43:00.002+11:00

Tomorrow I see my psychiatrist. He puts up resistance whenever I want to talk about the fact that I have clear autistic/Asperger’s traits that I inherited in double dose from both my parents. But tomorrow I’m going to push the issue. I think he resists my claim because of his stated reason that I’m too sociable and make too much eye contact but I think other reasons are that the diagnosis would get too unwieldy (Bipolar Disorder + ADD + Asperger’s) and autism isn’t easily medicated. My psychiatrist likes medication.

I read somewhere that if both your grandfathers are engineers then you have a massively increased probability of having autism. Both my grandfathers were working class versions of engineers: one was a fitter and turner and the other could build houses from scratch.

The reason I’m writing this post now is that the past two days I’ve fallen into old behaviours that I haven’t had for years. Due to a prescription debacle I haven’t had Ritalin for three weeks. I also gave up cigarette smoking at the same time. I’ve been off my anti-depressants for two months. I haven't done yoga, which I do daily, for a week and a half due to a bad finger cut. Over the past three weeks I’ve been unable to read books but only short articles. My attention has been diffuse. My energy - which I actually feel/conceptualise - hasn’t been aligned with my physical body. It’s like a cloud leaking out of my body. It’s also more intense than before and when I allow it to compress itself back into my body it feels like I need to do intense physical activity to unleash it. Finally, I’ve fallen back into what I call “wall-staring” in the past two days. Yesterday I spent an hour and a half staring at the wall. Today I spent over two hours doing it. While I do it my diffuse but intense energy makes me perform all kinds of tic-like behaviours like restless leg syndrome -type leg shaking, tapping my fingers on the wall, mouthing lyrics to songs, shaking one arm in the air a certain amount of times and then the other an equal number of times, etc. I groan in a steady monotone that releases energy. Sometimes I allow the groan to turn into a yogic “om”. I feel like getting a chopstick and digging it into my stomach, my arms, my neck and back to release the energy. I get a song - and somehow sometimes even multiple songs simultaneously - into my head in perfect reproduction. Today I have Bjork’s “5 Years” in my head. I can hear every layer of the instrumentation, every nuance in Bjork’s voice (though don’t necessarily understand the lyrics - voices sound like just another instrument).

I have digestive problems like autistics. I rarely feel true hunger like I would when I was a child. It usually feels like anxiety. I also never get constipated - my tendency is towards diarrhoea, but not all the time and not severe. It’s worse when I’m anxious.

I have extreme mathematical and spatial ability.

I’m not a social retard but I’m extremely shy. I’ve worked on it so much that most people don’t realise it. I don’t enjoy conversation - it seems like it should be a functional device rather than a recreational one to me, although I really wish I could enjoy it. I enjoy it when dealing with intense/fresh concepts. I can’t follow group conversation. I don’t like being lonely but conversation takes a lot of energy from having to concentrate on both the content of the conversation and the emotional state of the other person so I end up wanting to spend a lot of time alone. I’m a bad liar, can only manipulate people bluntly and am easily manipulated without my knowledge (though if I realise it’s happening I shut it down). I’m very open. I often spout inappropriate/offensive responses in conversation, although I’ve worked very hard at moderating this.

I really want to fix the problems but know that to do so - on top of my yoga - I’m going to have to totally reconstruct my diet. Which is hard enough for a normal person but I just can’t cook and only have one hot plate in my kitchen.

The symptoms overlap with and interact with other symptoms that could be classified as ADD, Bipolar Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Hopefully communicating this to my psychiatrist and other interested people if they hit this post will go some way to helping untangle all the symptoms and classifications of “disorders”.

Here’s an article about an extraordinary video in which an autistic woman explains how her repetitive behaviours (which are way more intense than mine) derive semantic content from the external world for her.

Anthroproximity: Kary Mullis’ and Stephen Jay Gould’s Mistakes

2009-02-03T15:10:00.000+11:00

Both Kary Mullis and Stephen Jay Gould err when they attribute disproportionate importance to levels of reality that humans don’t ordinarily deal with or are affected by.

Gould in Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin says bacteria are the dominant life forms on Earth due to the fact that they have the highest numbers and flourish in more varied environments than other types of life. Anyone who has a decent understanding of evolution understands that Gould is right in positing a non-hierarchical picture of the tree (not ladder) of evolution. It’s embarrassing that Gould has had to backlash against linear models of evolution climaxing at the pinnacle of humankind. But this is a purely biological issue. These criteria for “dominance” are ridiculous in any other realm. To equate one instance of a species of bacteria with another instance of the species of homo sapien is lunacy.

Mullis is a Nobel Prize winner. In Dancing Naked in the Mind Field he interestingly both makes the above mistake and grapples with the issue almost explicitly.

Mullis is a climate change sceptic. He correctly says that the Earth’s climate changes erratically and dramatically by itself. This is an attempt to show that the climate isn’t proximate to humans. Mullis tries to write off global warming as a theory requiring human hubris. How dare we think we’re capable of wreaking such colossal change? However, when something as proximate to carbon-based life (carbon) is raised by a proximate species (humans) on our planet by dramatic levels then the issue becomes proximate to humans. The Earth will continue, evolution will continue, etc if global warming destroys our habitat but that’s irrelevant to us. The world was once home to only one-celled organisms. This is irrelevant to us. Relevance being a matter of degree of proximity. What is relevant is whether intelligent human life exists on Earth or not. Carbon sits at 200 parts per million in the atmosphere in ice ages, was peaking at its normal non-ice age peak of 300 ppm in 1960, and is now at 380 ppm. This is a 27% increase on any level on record. The record stretches back 600,000 years. There is also ocean acidification, with increased carbon absorption resulting in a decrease in pH of 0.5 units by 2100 to the lowest level in hundreds of thousands of years. Marine ecosystems producing food for humans (a proximate phenomenon) will be destroyed. The end result of these changes on chaotic systems like the planet’s weather system are totally unpredictable. But there will be anthroproximate changes.

But then Mullis realises it’s important to recognise that humans with our five senses and limited range of devices that increase our range of perception (telescopes, microscopes etc) only get to tune into several of millions of channels that are happening around us. He also recognises that all channels might be equally important on some hypothetical cosmic level but they are not all equal to humans. This is what he means when he decries the amount of resources put into quantum physics (relatively non-proximate) when there are more pressing proximate issues for humans in physics, such as making sure Earth isn’t hit by a huge asteroid.

Even if eventually we find out dogs have bigger IQs than humans due to vastly superior spatial ability or the inclusion of other elements of intelligence, we will never say that dogs are more intelligent than humans. We will simply redefine intelligence again and include things like the ability to read a novel or manipulate the physical environment. And we would be right in doing so. Humans as observers can only ever measure the influence that other humans have in spheres in which they all interact. Extra channels such as levels for phenomena such as psychic activity that mainstream science currently has difficulty detecting, measuring and putting in theoretical context are proximate - but much less proximate - than those that science is currently adept at dealing with.

Small Penis Pride Movement; RTA Pinkie Ads

2009-02-03T13:33:00.000+11:00

There should be a small penis pride movement. I think the main reason there isn’t is because no-one wants the whole world to know they have a little dick. Perhaps also men widely known to have a little dick are looked at with derision. Solution: Have a secret database of members and have someone with a documented big dick front the organisation.

There are RTA ads on TV right now (the “pinkie” ads) in which men who speed while driving are accused by onlookers of having small cocks. How do men in real life with little cocks feel when they see these ads? They’re actually pretty offensive. Imagine if there were government-funded ads in which women were demeaned for having parts of their bodies not being of particular proportions. This is the kind of issue the small penis pride movement should tackle.

Slumdog Millionaire: Bad Politics, Telegraphed Ending, Bad Acting/Direction

2009-02-02T18:29:00.001+11:00

Slumdog Millionaire is a poor movie by a poor director, Danny Boyle. The acting is atrocious from both the child and adult players. Theatre-seat cringes come thick and fast. The first half hour has promise with the way the slums are portrayed and the reassuring imprimatur of M.I.A. rinsing over the vision. But by the time the last half hour comes up, bad direction, unconvincing plot devices, simplistic portrayals of motivations, one-dimensional characters and an obvious, telegraphed ending leave the viewer wanting to exit the theatre early. To console themselves with a choc-top in the foyer while waiting for their friends to come out. Who probably agree with the critics, damn them all and their pretensions.

Particularly irksome is the inclusion of the gameshow Who Wants to be a Millionaire and the implied moral that the prize to chase is the girl and the cash that will let you leave the slums. The cash that will put you above everyone else. The slums are the main star of the movie and Boyle treats them with as little an explorative attitude as he does the rest of the characters. The main guy got out, and that’s all that counts. Rich good, poor bad.

Then just when the viewer is ruminating on how Bollywood the plot was, for no apparent reason the main characters appear in a Bollywood film clip dancing and singing after the film ends.

Boyle has mined a realm of deprivation before with similar disdain for its humanity: Trainspotting. Compare the book and the movie of Trainspotting to see how Boyle imparts his cold touch. And the at-the-time uber-cool soundtrack was a disgrace considering the subject matter.

The controversy over whether the main child stars of Slumdog were effectively returned to the slums after the film is as vexing as the plot of the film. Who cares? There are millions in the slums and to take issue with whether one actor a viewer gets acquainted with over two hours gets to leave behind their contemporaries in the slums is to do a Madonna or Angelina Jolie with respect to their Third World adoptions.

Verbal Misemphasis in Advertisements and Individualism in Australia

2009-01-30T13:37:00.001+11:00

I’ve noticed that a lot of Australian TV advertisements have voice-overs or characters speaking with emphasis put on the wrong syllable in a sentence. The syllable usually falls on pronouns. For instance, there is a Jetstar advertisement where a woman at the end says “Don’t you deserve a bit of luxury?” instead of “Don’t you deserve a bit of luxury?” as would be natural in the Australian idiom. The first emphasis means the viewer deserves luxury as opposed to other people. The second emphasis would be neutral about who may or may not deserve the “luxury“ but means the viewer deserves luxury as opposed to non-luxury. I think it’s just poor training in acting school and poor direction in the ads themselves but I also think it’s pretty revealing about the Australian psyche after a decade of Howardism.

Self Storage Centres; Western Acquisitiveness

2008-12-01T14:31:00.000+11:00

The recent proliferation of self storage centres is a symptom of Western materialism and acquisitiveness. It’s repellent and morally wrong when people take up more space or have more possessions than is their fair share on Earth. People who use self storage centres like Kennards Self Storage - unless they’re homeless - display a thoughtless selfishness and a psychological pathology that creates a need to acquire. Often people who have excess acquisitiveness are also fat. The selfishness is on two fronts: having too many possessions and taking up too much space. It’s the same pathology that results in people driving 4WDs/SUVs, eating too much, having oversize houses, being obsessed with making money, etc.

Stopping Time: Photon Stasis and Impossible Vision

2008-12-01T14:17:00.000+11:00

When people create fantasies/stories about stopping time they get it wrong in that they don’t account for lack of photon movement. A person walking around in an environment with stopped time would see just blurs as their retinas come into contact with random, multidirectional photons suspended in the air. Further, the speed of contact of the retina and the photon might be so slow that the retina wouldn’t recognise the photon. The person would have to move their head at the speed of light and catch photons with their retinas to recognise them. Also the retina might rely on the vibration of the undulations in the wave function of the photon and the resultant energy.

If the person stayed absolutely perfectly still they might be able to carve out a scene in their vision except for the proton problems just mentioned. But staying perfectly still would be the equivalent of being stopped in time too; there would be no sense of time standing still for the person.

Craig James and David Koch vs Ross Gittins; NSW Mini-budget

2008-11-11T15:35:00.000+11:00

I’m sick of seeing sub-standard economists like Craig James from CommSec and David Koch getting together on Sunrise and peddle the idea that the NSW Government has gone “broke”. Today I actually saw Koch almost fall out of his chair with his whiny voice gesticulating about bad economic management on the part of the States, agreeing with James that State governments had gone broke and praise successive governments at the federal level for running surpluses. Actually they both have whiny voices. I’ve already explained why running a deficit in recession is a good thing and why it has to happen in NSW right now.

People like Koch and James, together with right wing shock jocks, have bullied Nathan Rees and Eric Roozendaal into a mini-budget cutting services and shelving infrastructure programs, precisely when they should be doing the opposite, as the Sydney Morning Herald’s Ross Gittins rightly points out. Thank god for people like Gittins. Otherwise you’d have to seriously start to question your own sanity in the face of seeming overwhelming consensus that the Earth is flat. How do people like serial talking head James and smug pseudo-experts with grating voices like Koch get to be the voice in the ear of the masses?

My First Homophobe Attack

2008-10-26T14:30:00.005+11:00

On the weekend of my ex's birthday we went out cruising Oxford St, Sydney while pilling off our dials.

We ended up at Cue Bar which is a mixed gay/straight club. The DJ was awesome, I was really relaxed and the dancing just moved me without me trying..I felt great.

This really good looking, muscled guy smiled at me while I was dancing. I smiled back and he did a beckoning gesture with his finger. I walked over and talked to him for a while, even grabbed his waste and told him he was cute. Then I asked if he was gay. He got funny and said "no". He asked me if I was gay. I said "yes". He pushed me away and said "get away". I asked him what his problem was; I wasn't cracking on to him. He said "just go back and dance, go away" and pushed me again. I told him it was Oxford St so what did he expect and that he had a problem.

I was in Ecstasy heaven and quickly threw the vibe off, went back and danced. I told all my posse about what happened and we were all staring at him and whispering. He didn't look at us and got on the phone, presumably to gather some mates for a dance off! Like in "Beat It". Then half an hour later I was in my own world dancing when he came and confronted me again. He had one skinny tall disgustingly ugly drunk friend he'd mustered up. I told him I wasn't interested in him sexually and wasn't interested in fucking up my night with a fight with someone random who had a gay/homophobe complex. He said I'd been whispering to all my friends about him and we needed to go outside and have words. My friends got between us and pushed me and him back. Hot Russian chick with us, AV, was really good at calming me down, she was a real sweetie.

He threw a glass of water on my friends and some bouncers came and threw the guy out.

The other friend stayed and tried to rile up my mates. He got his cock out which was apparently speed dick size and stuck his finger up.

For some reason the whole experience didn't really disturb me as much as it seemed to upset my mates. Probably because I was Eing off my skull. But it was my first true homophobic attack and I'll cherish it for the rest of my life!

Triple A Credit Ratings; Government Debt; Keynesian Economics; Infrastructure in NSW

2008-10-10T21:17:00.001+11:00

Triple A ratings are a farce. Self-appointed ratings agencies such as Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch are unreliable; they were giving some of the recently collapsed and nationalised financial institutions AAA ratings before they self-destructed. In any case a drop in credit rating equates to not that much of an increase in interest rates paid on borrowings.

The current economic orthodoxy and popular view of government finances dictates that governments maintain surpluses at all costs - and in a low-taxing environment. In Keynesian economics, which rescued the world from the Great Depression, it is correct for governments to go into debt when there is a recession. They pump money into the economy, create jobs and build infrastructure that will create economic growth in the long term. Debt is not a dirty word.

The NSW Government should abandon its paranoia of the ratings agencies, recognise that Sydney is on the verge of recession and use the opportunity to invest funds in infrastructure. It should spend billons of dollars creating a proper public transport system for Sydney, including a full heavy rail line to the North West and a rail line from Glenfield to Leppington. For decades to come Sydney will reap economic and social benefits. Future generations will thank us, just as we thank the then braver bunch of people in charge of NSW when things like the current rail system, Sydney Harbour Bridge, etc were built.

Also, the Federal Government should immediately do things like increase the pension for all pensioners, injecting billions of dollars of its surplus into a segment of society that needs it and will spend it on things that will boost the economy more than well-off people would. Higher government spending will result in the Reserve Bank of Australia raising interest rates. Part of the current credit crisis has to do with the fact that interest rates worldwide have been too low for too long, making it easier for people to take on mortgages and lines of credit that they can’t afford. Moderately high interest rates are sometimes desirable.

Finally, if the NSW ALP Government wants to win the next election, Carmel Tebbutt needs to installed as leader. Nathan Rees is a poor performer.

Sex Work Stories On My Blog; Defamation; Professional Privacy Standards

2008-10-06T18:33:00.000+11:00

I’ve been out of sex work for over a year now. I’ve held a job down the whole time. I’m pretty sure I’ll never have to go back.

Now that it’s all behind me I wouldn’t mind telling some sex work stories on my blog. I have to be careful (or maybe I won’t!) about defamation laws. Then - it sounds strange - but I was very professional in many ways in my sex work and one of them was a strict rule of non-disclosure and discretion. I don’t know why. And I guess there’s also the issue of maintaining my anonymity; there are only two agencies for male sex workers in Sydney (Delivery Boys and Knightcall). I think I might throw a few stories out from time to time though. Fuck it.

Some Simple Maths for Moron Journalists; Percentages

2008-10-06T18:23:00.000+11:00

When something is analysed in terms of percentages and changes/differences in percentage terms, a distinction needs to be made between absolute change and relative change.

For instance, if something goes from being 10% to 20%, this means a 100% increase, not a 10% increase. 20% is twice the size of 10%, not 10% plus a 10% increase, which would mean 11%.

Second, the way percentages of percentages work seems to elude journalists. If 50% of the population have a certain opinion, and in this group 80% also hold a second opinion, it means 40% of the entire population hold both opinions. Then if, in the other 50%, 40% of them hold the second opinion, this means a further 20% of the population holds the second opinion. This means that 60% of the entire population hold the second opinion. Conversely if 80% of the population have a certain opinion and 40% of them hold a second opinion, it means that 32% hold both opinions.

I’m sick of moron journalists that report political polls, medical statistics etc with bad analysis of percentages.

Julie Pasco, Tobacco Smoking, Depression and Causation in Science

2008-10-06T15:06:00.000+11:00

Julie Pasco of the University of Melbourne has done a bogus study on the role of cigarette smoking in depression.

She started out with a group of smokers and a group of non-smokers. No one had depression. Then after ten years she found that 14.9% of smokers developed depression while 6.5% of non-smokers developed depression. The problem is one common in modern science: a refusal to tease out causation. Just because they didn’t have depression at the start of the study doesn’t mean that the smokers didn’t have neurochemical or environmental issues that cause depression already pre-existent. Does tobacco cause depression, does depression cause tobacco consumption or do they both exacerbate each other? Or does tobacco even guard against depression? Cigarettes with their dopaminergic quality, social utility in some work places and role in occupying the hands and punctuating time could have an anti-depressant effect. It could be that the smokers were self-medicating and would have had even higher rates of depression after the ten year interval without tobacco.

The only way an answer to the question of tobacco being a unidirectional cause of depression can be obtained is to have a study in which a group of non-smoking people is divided into a control group and a group that is forced to smoke and see the rates of depression after a long interval. Ethics committees would reject it, rightly of course.

Pseudohedonism

2008-10-05T22:03:00.000+11:00

Pseudohedonism means faking pleasure. It can mean false display of pleasure to others or convincing oneself of one’s own pleasure.

In prosperous Western countries pseudohedonism is rife and is a detrimental phenomenon. There is a fine line between trying to put yourself in a good mood and moving into a state of denial of boredom and anhedonism. There are a lot of reasons for people in rich countries to experience anhedonism and depression. They won’t be listed here but prominent among them is being freed from continual manual labour, not having to strive for survival and being dissociated from your body.

Examples of pseudohedonism include faking orgasms, rich people self-consciously forcing laughter at plays and people listening to music that society deems worthy without really feeling it.

People need to get back in touch with the immediacy of phenomena. They need to have visceral reactions to art and activity. If music for example doesn’t provoke a reaction in the body or unmediated emotional reactions without intellectualising , or if there is too much consciousness of associations such as certain music scenes, then any enjoyment derived is fake.

Too much intellectualisation of phenomena mediates the reaction. Fashion is a major interruptive intellectualisation. For instance people get confused about what they’re sexually attracted to by societal definitions of what is attractive. In the present era this means women are making themselves too thin, men strive to be more muscled than they should be and both genders engage in too much hair removal and fake tanning. Too much intellectualisation results in trained musicians becoming divorced from an immediate reaction to music and people who study English being bad writers.

Consciousness seated in biological entities creates many problems that humans have to tackle. Pseudohedonism takes humans away from the truth. People need to quiet their intellect often, trust their own judgment without worrying about other people’s opinions and get back in touch with their own visceral reactions and intuition.

Childhood Obesity and Health; Australian Communications and Media Authority; Food Standards Australia New Zealand

2008-09-19T21:27:00.000+10:00

Recently the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) and Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) made decisions allowing big business to continue exploiting children.

ACMA refused to impose further restrictions on junk food advertising during children’s TV programs. It went so far as to claim that the research shows no link between junk food advertising and childhood obesity. This is in contrast to the strong movement in Europe to protect children from brain-washing that can destroy their health. It is a wilful attack on the health of the populace.

FSANZ has refused to ban six food additives that cause ADHD, mood disorders and allergies, particularly in children. This is despite moves in Britain to ban them and an open letter by 100 Australian health experts to follow the British move. The additives are sunset yellow (110), tartrazine (102), carmoisine (122), ponceau red (124), quinoline yellow (104) and allura red (129). Again, it’s not just a failure to protect, it’s a wilful attack carried out in the interests of big business.

ACMA is headed by Chris Chapman. The minister responsible is Stephen Conroy.

FSANZ is headed by Philippa Smith. The minister responsible is Jan McLucas.

These events are further evidence of a society that is hostile and destructive towards its children and maintains a contradictory, compensatory stance of overreaction to paedophilia, which it pretends to abhor and yet won’t take concrete actions to tackle.

Disability Support Pension and Age Pension in Australia

2008-09-11T19:52:00.000+10:00

Both the Age Pension and Disability Support Pension are at $273 per week. All Federal politicians have been pushed to admit that they wouldn’t be able to live on it. Kevin Rudd is, as with virtually all other policy areas, waiting for reviews before he acts on the issue. Jenny Macklin’s review on the Disability Support Pension won’t be completed until next year. Meanwhile pensioners suffer malnourishment. Brendan Nelson has, cleverly and rightly, challenged Rudd to increase the pension immediately.

Unfortunately all are focused on the Age Pension. They unduly heed AM talkback radio for a representation of public need and opinion. This form of media is dominated by listeners from the elderly age bracket. Disabled people, many of them mentally ill, are less vocal. There are 731,461 people on the Disability Support Pension and 866,000 people on the Age Pension.

Wendy Harmer is a legend for saying the government needs a “kick up the arse” with respect to the Disability Support Pension.

America Goes Socialist: Nationalisation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

2008-09-08T20:05:00.003+10:00

One of the biggest lies neoconservative Straussians propagate to subjugate the masses is that of the existence of free market capitalism. It does not and will never exist. Just as communism never has and will never exist. The US Government has diverted the people’s wealth to the hands of a few power mongers for decade upon decade with increasing subtlety. Today the Straussian myth was laid bare for all - who wanted - to see. The nationalisation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is corporate welfare on an untold scale. The US Government now owns half of the mortgage market. It follows the UK nationalisation of Northern Rock. Is capitalism coming undone? No. It never existed. The so-called efficiency of the free market today became an obvious joke for those who weren’t convinced before.

References:

An embarrassing, desperate prediction less than two weeks ago by Al Yoon of The Australian and Bradley Ball of Citigroup that nationalisation would be averted.

Hypocrisy and the nationalisation of the Banco de Venezuela.

Henry Paulson, complicit corporate welfare propagandist.

Moron of the Day: Paul Sheehan on Sarah Palin and New Media

2008-09-08T17:09:00.000+10:00

Paul Sheehan is a poor writer and constructs his arguments in a way in which you can see his goals telegraphed quite clearly. He is a dishonest logician. I just happened to pick this particular article in a fit of anger. It could have been any.

This article is laughable and embarrassing. He attacks old media and its treatment of Sarah Palin. He rants on about how he researched Palin through YouTube (!) before hitting the old media and somehow got a more balanced view of her through this method of research.

He argues that the New York Times failed to capture [sic] that, if white working class people decide they “want a real-life version of Mr Smith Goes To Washington” then Palin will have “a popular legitimacy”. Wtf? What is this new concept, “popular legitimacy”? Does it equate to popularity? So he’s basically arguing that the New York Times didn’t say that white working class people might want to have their country emulate a movie and this will make Palin popular. I’m sorry but he’s just sheer idiocy incarnate. And can’t write. Maybe he should get off YouTube and do some decent research. Then he would know that Palin is under corruption clouds with respect to eg Troopergate and Blackberrygate.

Footnote: thanks to a friend who sent me this feminist critique of the deeply misogynistic choice of a nobody token female to try to capture the Hillary Clinton vote.

Electricity Privatisation in NSW, PPPs and Corporate Welfare: It’s Time To Get Angry

2008-08-28T20:58:00.001+10:00

I wasn’t going to touch this issue but it’s time to get angry and active. The defining issue of New South Wales politics in our time is that of public versus private ownership of infrastructure. Secondary to that is the issue of business lobbying of, and influence over, NSW Parliamentarians.

In the past decade or so we have seen the ALP government sell off assets, refuse to invest in desperately needed infrastructure and enter into agreements for privately-funded infrastructure and public-private partnerships (PPPs). As the population grows this has led to a reduction of crucial services for the people and infrastructure, and taxpayer money being diverted to big business. Prominent amongst these failures is the following. The refusal to expand heavy rail to the burgeoning outer suburbs of Sydney. The degradation of the hospital system. The transfer of taxpayers’ money to big business from misplaced PPPs or privately owned infrastructure like the Cross City Tunnel, the Airport Link, the Lane Cove Tunnel etc. The slowly dying public school system.

Big business owns the NSW ALP. Most MPs are effectively employees of big business.

The final straw is the attempt to privatise electricity. Michael Costa and Morris Iemma look like leaving politics once this final act of corporate welfare is completed. Like Bob Carr they will probably get jobs with the businesses who benefited from their acts of theft. They may very well have deals lined up already. How else can you explain their tenacity on this issue in the face of ferocious public and party opposition?

Such a crucial asset as the electricity system needs to in the hands of the people, even more so given the fact that global warming and the carbon emissions trading scheme are imminent.

I plan to vote Green first then preference Liberals over Labor at the next election unless my local MP not only crosses the floor but becomes instrumental in removing Iemma and Costa from their positions of power. That is how angry I am. I would rather wipe the parliamentary ALP out and wait four years for democratic renewal than allow them to continue destroying Sydney and NSW in general. My local MP is Carmel Tebbutt. She’d better leave her kid at home, take control of things and take the reigns from Iemma, Costa, Joe Tripodi, Eddie Obeid and Reba Meagher. The NSW ALP could fracture permanently if sanity doesn’t prevail. This has federal implications too.

Everyone should threaten their local ALP MP with electoral annihilation. Both use the shock a pollie website and find your local MP and send them an email. If they don’t do the right thing then vote Green or Liberal. Teach these people a lesson that democracy will prevail.

Rage: Germaine Greer vs Noel Pearson, Marcia Langton, Hannah McGlade and Miranda Devine

2008-08-22T19:17:00.001+10:00

Some sense has to be instilled into the frenzied controversy over Germaine Greer’s essay on Indigenous rage. Here is a defence of Greer’s arguments.

Noel Pearson is oblivious to the fact that he agrees with Greer when he says “It's not rage that's killing these communities, it is the sense of resignation that nothing can change”. The sense of resignation is a salient element of the “rage” Greer describes. His endorsement of John Howard’s Indigenous Intervention is due to the fact that it centralises power over average Indigenous Australians in the hands of members of the Aboriginal meritocracy such as himself. Pearson condescends to average Aborigines. He is not one of them. His statement “I want Aboriginal men to take more responsibility” is patronising and evinces his inner feelings of superiority to other Aboriginal men. It is also in the same vein as people who think society can be elevated to higher levels of civility through individuals in isolation spontaneously deciding to improve their own behaviour. This is a rightist myth and will never happen. Hannah McGlade is also guilty of propagating this myth. Society can only elevate itself through collective action, but not the kind of collective action that disempowers Aboriginal people and unilaterally takes their land away from them.

Greer was mistaken in singling out Aboriginal men. The rage extends to Aboriginal women and children. I see it almost every day when I walk through Redfern. However objections to Greer’s essay that she offers no hope misses the point. Hope can come after the extant rage has been expressed. This is where Greer leaves off. Her essay is a plea for the warranted rage not to be ignored and suppressed. What’s done has been done and can’t be forgotten. Hannah McGlade either doesn’t understand this or wants the rage to be quashed and conveniently forgotten. Things aren’t so easy. It’s slightly redeeming that the article in The Australian which claims that “Aboriginal elders” disagree with Greer (without citing a single elder’s opinion - Pearson etc aren’t elders, they’re part of the meritocracy) acknowledges that elders agree with Greer that treaties are vital.

When Marcia Langton says that Greer’s assertion that rage is a result of the destruction rained on Indigenous societies in the past 220 years is “circular” she descends into an embarrassing nonsense. Where is the circularity? Melbourne University should be ashamed to have someone of such intellectual stuntedness in their employ. Langton doesn’t muster a single valid argument against Greer, let alone one that could condemn Greer as “racist”. Langton should understand that the background of Greer’s argument concerning the forced conversion of Aboriginal society into (mutilated) nuclear families is one that she has employed in the past in her critique of Western society. Cellular, isolated nuclear families are destructive in general. Langton should do some more reading herself rather than exhort Greer - her intellectual superior - to do so.

There is as much point in engaging with Miranda Devine on an intellectual level as there is with engaging in such with a five year old. She is the Sydney Morning Herald’s token right-wing columnist. The SMH undermines conservative discourse by not employing a conservative of more intellect. Her “critique” of Greer’s essay consists solely of personal slights and a quote from Langton. Devine attacks Greer for being out of control of her moods and having issues of abandonment with her father. She also, in a low, unforgivable passage that SMH editors should not have published, implies that Greer is paedophilic.

Germaine Greer is a contrarian, she does delight in it, but this doesn’t detract from the incisive force of her logic. People of less understanding than Greer should be careful when attacking her.

Reasons Not To Commit Suicide

2008-08-12T15:41:00.000+10:00

For people with unremitting pain, whether it be physical, mental or a combination thereof, and who are atheist, it is an irrational act to continue living. For pained atheists with reasonable expectations that the pain will be ameliorated it is rational to continue living, and a judgment call for them to make. For pained people whose joy in life is greater than their pain it’s rational to keep living. For pained people who enjoy pain it’s rational to keep living. Finally there is by definition no meta-reason why people should act rationally.

The following is a list of reasons, in order of my reckoned prevalence in humankind, why people in general don’t commit suicide. They include the non-atheist.

1. Joy in life.
2. Resilience to, or inhibited perception of, pain.
3. Concern for loved ones.
4. Beliefs about the afterlife involving hell, karma, grand plans/designs of the Universe etc.
5. Fear of pain involved in death.
6. Inertia.

(NB - this isn’t a cry for help or anything!)

Pedophilia: An Empathic and Practical Approach

2008-06-09T16:46:00.000+10:00

People who have paedophilic drives are born that way or have had childhood experiences not under their control that promote the drive. My starting assumption is that people reach adulthood with a set of psychological challenges they had no control over and that people face a life-long struggle to work with these challenges in a way that will minimise harm to other humans.

Right now Western society ranks paedophilic activity as one of the most pointed issues facing us. At the same time Western society revels in unrelenting sexualisation of children for commercial purposes.

If society exalts images of pre-pubescent people while destroying the lives of people who obsess on them then there’s a contradiction. The more parents insist on driving their children to school and deprive or distort information about sex getting through to their children, the more children are vulnerable to both actual abuse and the psychological impact of abuse when it hits them. If everyone talked openly about sexual abuse then it would decline. It would decline because children would be more open about talking about sexual experiences whether they’re welcome or not. It would also decline because the legally recalcitrant element of the act would be lowered, freeing both victims and perpetrators to talk about the issue. You get the feeling that a lot of society revels in, and is repulsed by, in a mind-stimulating way, the juxtaposition of sexuality, youth and moral indignation.

Modern psychology hasn’t been helpful. There needs to be a movement in psychology that addresses paedophilic urges for people who don’t want to enact them. If Western society were sincere in its purported aims to protect children from porn and paedophilia then there would be things like hotlines and special psych units for paedophiles. The truth is that society doesn’t want to rid itself of paedophilia. Society is enjoying having a panaceaic scapegoat and all-triumphing slur. Sometimes the people who have the least respect for young people are the ones that purport to have the most concern for them. A bit like sexist men purporting to be chivalrous towards women.

I have no sympathy for people who indulge their paedophilic urges, whether it be in reality or through watching media represent paedophilic activities. However there is a clear need for de-mystification if society truly wants to rid itself of paedophilia.

People who are most stridently anti-paedophilic without suggesting or wanting remedies other than life imprisonment have to be worried about. This was evident in the recent Bill Henson hysteria. The people who disrespect and are least interested in the mental complexities involved in the cross-over between childhood and adulthood are more likely to be paedophiles themselves than people that take an empathic, practical approach to addressing child sex abuse. There is something disturbing about both Henson’s works and the face of Henson himself. You don’t focus on a particular subject area without having an interest in it that may exceed the bounds of the ideas presented in your actual work. Henson creeps me out.

It’s bizarre that society considers sexual misconduct with underage people to be worse than murdering underage people. Think: what does this tell you about society?

Another issue is how the internet has helped paedophiles normalise their drives through contact with like-minded people. And another issue is that there are a lot of paedophilic images on the net, that young people in the first part of this century are often developing their sexuality in tandem with input from the internet, and that this can influence their drives. Tom Allard talks about this possibility and the further possibility that looking at child porn could increase rates of actual child sexual abuse. He cites a small study in prison in which 25% of inmates locked up for viewing child porn initially admitted to actualising the fantasy. By the end of the study 85% of people locked up for viewing child porn admitted to actualisation.

Of course there is the issue of whether paedophilic “love” is morally repugnant. I personally find it repugnant but not because of the juxtaposition of innocence and sex. Kids aren’t as innocent as people think. I find it repugnant because of the lack of informed consent, the malleability of children’s sexual trajectory and any fear that is instilled in victims. I’ll note that there is a question of degree (where does the age of consent cut in - other egs such as whether “consent” should factor in things like IQ - eg should the age of consent cut in at 18 rather than 16 for people that have an IQ lower than 80 etc?).

People who are born into paedophilic bodies but who make active attempts to address the issue and who don’t molest children should be admired. Paedophilia is the focus of suspiciously intense focus and supposed disgust in Western society right now. Right-minded, courageous, non-offending paedophiles should be the subject of utmost respect.

The overriding point of my rant is that we have to have empathy for people who are born with or develop child-sex fantasies in their adolescence. And that, if we were truly serious about addressing the problem rather than using it as a McCarthyist demonisation tactic, we would have more psychiatrists/psychologists deployed to help people who have child-sex drives and who don’t want to offend.

The truth is that society loves to hate paedophilia and loves to use it as a tool to demonise others.

Moclobemide (Aurorix) and LSD

2008-06-09T16:30:00.000+10:00

Chronic administration of MAO-inhibitors does something to your serotonergic pathways that blocks LSD.

My particular experience is with moclobemide (Aurorix). I find that you need to go off it for about three weeks in order to maximise your acid trip.

Yoga Potentiates Psychedelic Experience; Psychedelics Inform Yoga

2008-06-09T16:29:00.000+10:00

When I do yoga while on psychedelics like LSD, psylocibin and DMT my trip gets boosted and directs itself into parts of my body that hold tension. The tension seems to represent psychological issues within myself. If I relax into the tension then I get insights pertaining to my own psychological makeup.

Even when I’m not doing yoga psychedelics point me to areas in my body that hold tension. Points of tension in the body correspond to psychological issues. Sometimes my body throws itself into yoga positions. The main points of tension for me relate to an inability to drop my shoulders and tension in my lower back.

I strongly agree with historians who say that yoga was created with the aid of psychedelics.

I also think that you have to use psychedelics sparingly and wait to at least start implementing recommendations that they download for you before you continue with your next trip. The more yoga you do between trips, the more the trips will reveal to you. Both should be used for accelerated progression through the yogically devoted life.

DMT; Discarnate entities; Inter-dimensional psychic travel

2008-05-10T17:11:00.001+10:00

I’ve had three DMT trips. The first was two years ago and was smoked DMT at my home. The second two were oral DMT trips at my guide’s clinic.

Trip 1.

In my first smoked trip I was with my ex. I smoked a cone and felt nothing. A minute later I had a second cone. Before I could put the bong down my curtain exploded kaleidoscopically into the ceiling. I put the bong down and lay on my bed. It was winter and my body burst into sheer heat; I had to throw off my clothes and breathe. I had fractals of red and green alternating with each other and moving at pace in precise geometrical beauty. I consciously marvelled at how powerful my subconscious mathematical mind was. Then I felt anxious and out of control. I hadn’t researched DMT and didn’t know if it had toxicity. I felt like I was dying. I’ve had several near-death experiences before and each time I’ve just surrendered and felt bliss and serenity. The same happened this time. I surrendered and just breathed. Then the Universe spoke to me (not in auditory mode - in “download” mode). It went to my first chakra and said nothing will ever kill me, but at the same time nothing sustains me except my own essence. I have causa sui. It said just relax and stop holding on. Then it went to my second chakra and said I need to have more fun and just enjoy life. Then it went to my sixth chakra and said “all of this is under the control of this chakra”. A purple and pink alternating ying/yang vision of the Universe as a man and woman kissing and turning into each other appeared. Then I dissolved. I had total ego death. I had no name, no body, no sense of “me”. I became one with the Universe, a Universe that was benevolent and had meaning. After five to ten minutes it all ended.

Trip 2.

My second DMT trip was an oral dose of 50mg with a MAO-inhibitor I will leave anonymous. I felt sleepy and my pupils dilated. A few times as I was falling asleep involuntary groans emanated from my throat. A popping noise happened inside my head. After an hour or so I just felt bored and got up and went to my guide’s office for a debriefing.

Trip 3.

My third DMT trip was extremely intense. I had 100mg with a MAOI. I had also been taking the MAOI as my anti-depressant. I took a largish dose in the morning. I also have a slight addiction to Valium/diazepam (maybe 20mg a day, sometimes more) and have been drinking alcohol to excess lately, after having given up a long cannabis addiction. The night before I had gotten drunk. That day I had no diazepam. I had hardly anything to eat. I had a bad fight with my ex and was deeply depressed. I didn’t tell my guide any of these things because I didn’t want him to keep the DMT from me. In the first stage of a DMT trip your GABA levels drop. Within 15 minutes visuals and a rush started coming on. I knew I was in for a big trip and felt exultant. But then the GABA drop hit. I had extreme anxiety and the visual hallucinations went at an incomprehensible pace. I had malevolent clowns flying at me. (It turned out later that my guide had a DVD set of Richard Dawkins, with a stencil-art picture of Dawkins on the front of it that I must have seen from a particular angle. I find Dawkins to be dishonest in both his reasoning and emotional motivations for his reasoning. His logic is faulty and disingenuous and raises my hackles. The picture of Dawkins was the prototype for my clown hallucinations. I laughed my arse off when I realised.)

My body became extremely hot and I felt nauseous.

I flew through, it seemed, at least three dimensions. I had benevolent beings putting up their hands in a “stop” gesture, saying that I wasn’t ready to go where I was going. One of them was Bart Simpson. I had extreme rushes of sound. I had a Janet Jackson track in my head called “Throb” which is virtually an instrumental dance track. It mixed with my auditory waves and mutated into an entirely new musical composition. It was an impressive composition which I could have manifested into the material realm if I could work electronic musical programs. I remembered the track and its elements for the rest of the day.

I had a rape scene of a woman being bent over the bonnet of a car. My mother in real life has recently been raped and deliberately run over. I have been suppressing my emotional reaction to these events because I have no control over them. DMT and psilocybin make me horny. I had to decide if the vision I was seeing was erotic or terrifying. I decided it was terrifying. I couldn’t see my mother clearly. Sometimes the woman mutated into Marge Simpson, who represents a mother figure to me. Then I realised I hadn’t spoken to my mother in a week and she could very well be dead (she lives in a really rough suburb with a lot of alcohol and crystal meth -fuelled violence). I was scared I would come into contact with her spirit and she wouldn’t be stable. A photo of her I haven’t seen for years came into distinct clarity and detail in front of my eyes. Then I saw a vision of Alice in Wonderland holding a long staff like those used in jousting. It was golden and had a curled, wrapped composition. It fired lasers. She shot someone and then was turning towards me before I opened my eyes and dispelled the vision. My ex is also involved in the DMT trial and had had a vision of Alice in Wonderland being impaled the week before, unbeknownst to me.

Then I reached my destination, a new dimension that seemed four levels removed from my own. Two discarnate, malevolent entities appeared in the corner of the room. They were not happy with my intrusion into their realm. They sent me telepathic messages. They berated me. They told me “how dare you come here. You’re not welcome. What are you doing here?” Then “We’re going to get to you in the second stage of the trip. We’re going to fuck with your head and punish you.” There was also an Aboriginal pattern of white dots in a circle with Aboriginal entities who weren’t malevolent trying to communicate with me. I had to politely decline because I was overwhelmed.

I turned on the light and stumbled out to my guide. I asked him in my oblivion and stuttering for a dose of “you know, the drug that blocks DMT”. He said “What drug?” I could barely speak. He took me back into the room and sat down with me, calmly reassuring me and asking about my experience. He said I could have a wafer of Zyprexa/olanzapine, but we both decided I should continue through the next two stages of the trip without it, despite my fear that the two malevolent discarnate entities would have their way with me in the second stage of the trip. He told me to take some diazepam. I took 20mg and he left. I had an urge to hug him. The rest of the trip I spent with the light on and trying to fight off the trip, probably unwisely.

My guide had another client in a room at the other end of the house. My hearing was so acute that I thought his door was open. I could hear every squeak of their chairs, every uttering. I thought it was a woman and I thought she was angry at my guide for having to have half an eye on me through her appointment. I considered going out and apologising to her. When my guide came back he said it was a male who was just raising his voice when getting angry about his partner.

I went back for my debriefing. I laughed copiously about the extremity of the trip. I also realised that I had realigned my belief viz a viz discarnate entities, who I had previously believed to be all benevolent. I realised there were nasty beings out there. I went into a state of bliss and relief. I felt great for hours afterwards and the next day.

DMT is in a class of its own in terms of psychedelics. It is utterly different to LSD. It is closer to psylocibin, but I have only had contact with benevolent beings on psylocibin, and psylocibin gives you a pleasant, MDMA-type rush at the beginning, whereas DMT gives you an unpleasant GABA drop.

Some references:

Apparent Communication with Discarnate Entities
Induced by Dimethyltryptamine

Overview of DMT: The Spirit Molecule, by Dr. Rick Strassman

Mysticism and DMT by Ananda

Pineal gland

Cricket Advertising; Pro-Alcohol Ads in Conjunction with Anti-Tobacco Ads; NSW ALP and Political Donations

2008-02-03T15:43:00.000+11:00

It’s obvious to any moron just who is providing funding to the NSW ALP Government from watching the cricket. Every second ad is for alcohol. Every third ad is a NSW Government anti-smoking advertisement. All they need to fully show their true colours is to mix it in with pro-development advertising.

The graphic anti-smoking advertisements are to be applauded. But why don’t they have advertisements showing the immediate and long-term effects of alcohol? Why do they allow alcohol advertising at all?

The answer is that the NSW ALP’s political donations come mostly from the alcohol/pubs/clubs industry and the real estate / property development industry. Our Government is basically a sub-branch of these industries.

Read all about Reba Meagher at the pub.

MDMA and Eyesight/Optometry

2008-02-01T11:20:00.000+11:00

Serotonin levels are intimately linked with the musculature surrounding the eyes, short-sightedness and long-sightedness.

On Christmas Day last year I gave my mother MDMA, primed with a small amount of a MAOI. Halfway through the day she realised that she didn’t need her glasses to read. She had two reasonable high separate doses. Normally, even with her glasses on, she needs to hold reading material far away from her eyes. It was a massive correction in her eyesight that disappeared in the following days.

I am slightly short-sighted due to excessive reading but had unusually good long-range vision when I was a child. I have been resisting getting glasses for a few years because I’ve noticed that after yoga or working outside with plants my vision largely corrects itself. This MDMA/optometry issue needs to be studied.

Penis Size and Race

2008-01-26T21:18:00.000+11:00

More Un-PC stuff from me. After extensive and probably excessive sexual experience with men in both professional and recreational modes (I’ve been a male prostitute for a cumulative total of about six years and a male slut for more) I know all about penis size and race. Sexual addiction, yes.

The biggest are Africans, Germans, Anglos and Mediterraneans. The smallest are East Asians, Indians/Subcontinentals, Polynesians and Melanesians. Chew on that for that for a bit. And I’m not stupid enough to not know that bell curves overlap and there are exceptions to the rule.

And car size has an inverse relationship with penis size in general.

Memekast

2008-01-25T18:40:00.000+11:00

I’ve been turned onto an awesome source of soul-arousing electro music. Big respect to the Memekast website which you can download direct from or use iTunes to download for free. It’s weird, I’m in a zone where I’m tuned into music from the West Coast of the US, especially San Francisco right now.

Paradigm shifting: Demonic to Pathologic to Energetic; Empathy as Catalyst

2008-01-25T13:12:00.001+11:00

No models of cause/effect that humans can grasp are ever the whole truth. Humans in our filtered modes of consciousness and physical perception are only capable of attaining better, closer, more useful models of reality. Witness the progression of physics from Newtonian mechanics to quantum mechanics. (Realise that after half a century to a century after the advent of human channelling of the mode of quantum physics we still rely on Newtonian physics for 99.99% of all mechanical modelling).

Two topics dear to my heart, “mental illness” and sexuality have gone through and will go through similar paradigm shifts to enhance our understanding of the universe. The shift has been from the demonic to the pathologic to the energetic.

People with alternative brain architecture and alternative sexuality used to be treated by Westerners as being inhabited by demons or being in collusion with satan. Then empathy and empirical analysis converted the approach to that of pathology (thankyou Freud, thankyou Kinsey). Mentally ill people were discovered to have biological, genetic, environmental and experientially “causes” of their conditions. Biological and now genetic “causes” of “homosexuality” were discovered. The orthodoxy is still having trouble with contending with environmental and experiential “causes” of alternative sexuality because humans are still unable to contend with the implications of the way children being raised being part of “homosexuality”. We’re still not ready; if we do shift to this paradigm now we run the risk of psychologists who claim to have cures for homosexuality being given credence.

Some of us are now ready to switch to an approach to alternative brain architecture and alternative sexuality as being more a matter of energy and consciousness. I, for instance, am convinced that you can consciously direct your energy to modify your own mental state and sexuality. That is heresy, especially to gay rights advocates, most of whom are still fighting to show hillbillies that there’s nothing wrong with homosexuality.

Ultimately to me the catalyst that enable progression from the demonic to the physical/pathologic to the energetic is empathy and lack of judgment. Empirical analysis is a secondary and valuable tool too. Humility in the face of a vast wall of knowledge and recognition that you can’t grasp the full reality helps. And acceptance of diversity and difference, even if you don’t understand other human beings and why they do what they do, is so valuable and crucial to mankind’s progression. And never assume that the paradigm we’re currently at (or if you’re ahead of the game, are starting to apprehend) is the total, final truth. It goes on forever.

Car Hatred

2008-01-25T13:06:00.000+11:00

I’m about to sound like an old person. “Back in my day…”

Here we go. I’ve noticed a change in Australian culture to do with attitudes of motorists since I was a kid.

1) Pedestrian crossings. They were once sacrosanct havens for pedestrians. Now pedestrians stop and give way to cars at crossings. Motorists consider them to be part of the road. When I got my licence I was taught to take my foot off the accelerator and hover it over the brake when approaching a crossing.

2) Ambulances/Fire trucks/Police. When I was a kid people used to drive up onto footpaths and median strips and stop completely at intersections whenever a siren was heard. Now motorists just keep progressing through intersections.

3) Blinkers. People used to put their blinkers on 30 metres before a corner, no matter who was around. It was an automatic thing, not something to be deliberated over. Now people only put them on when they think people are around. When I’m crossing the road and a car isn’t indicating I assume they’re going straight, cross the road and force them to stop. Fuck em. Same as I do with crossings. I walk straight out without missing a beat and stare at the person driving the car to let them know, though I never do it in a way that puts myself in danger.

There’s a couple of reasons behind this shift, to do with the rise of individualism, Howardism and the NSW Govt’s propagation of freeways for the McMansionites combined with their neglect and declination to expand Sydney’s rail network.

I think that cars should be banned from parking in the back lanes of Newtown. They’re an eyesore, force you to walk on the road to get around them and slow up moron motorists who don’t know where they’re going and don’t use blinkers and block your view of the moving cars.

Zolpidem/Ambien/Stilnox; Heath Ledger; The bizarre edge to my manic episode

2008-01-24T17:39:00.000+11:00

Zolpidem should be banned. And the scumbag makers of it, Sanofi-Aventis, should be prosecuted and their board members imprisoned.

It’s a bad sleeping tablet anyway, making you drowsy for maybe two hours after which you rebound but have inhibited frontal lobe activity. I must have had twenty of them in one day in January last year when I was in the midst of a manic episode. It ended up with me doing some bizarre things of which I have limited memory. For instance I went to the house my ex-partner and I were moving out of with several types of flammable substances intent on burning the bad energy out of the house, but on the way also bought a “Kath and Kim” box set and U2 DVD. I smashed up half of his things with different motivations for smashing different things. He himself had earlier tried to take a full tub of Valium while on Stilnox. I had to physically restrain him. I ended up sleeping in the house engulfed in the fumes of methylated spirits and kerosene. It’s still hard for me to put together the time line of what I did in that few days / weeks I was taking Stilnox. At some point I bought my mother harnesses for her dogs and a signal converter for her DVD player but have no memory of it whatsoever.

People on Stilnox basically operate like they’re sleepwalking. And when you’re under the influence of benzos or hypnotics and alcohol you can end up attempting suicide, as has someone I know, without really meaning to do it. There is no way Heath Ledger died of a purely accidental overdose of benzos or hypnotics. I wonder what substances the authorities tested the rolled up $20 note for. Who has a rolled-up note lying around without snorting something with it? He may have been snorting a crushed up legal medication. The difference between a medicinal dose of hypnotics or benzos and a fatal dose is massive. When you’re under the influence of them you can forget how much you’ve taken or just sleepwalk your way into bizarre behaviour like suicide attempts. Someone in Sydney fell to his death by sleepwalking off a balcony while on Stilnox. Jack Nicholson, who played The Joker in a Batman movie just as Heath Ledger did, apparently warned Ledger of the dangers of Stilnox. It’s time to ban zolpidem.

My recommendation for anyone needing sleep is to take an anti-psychotic like Seroquel (quetiapine) or Zyprexa (olanzapine) with Valium (diazepam) if needed. Even smoke some cannabis, but avoid alcohol.

Meanwhile I don’t know why Heath Ledger’s death has affected me so much. Maybe because of the drugs involved, maybe because he was only a few months younger than me. I had a dream the night before his death that was conveying to me the need for prioritisation of my relationships over my need to explain things to myself, analyse things, convey information and indulge in my never-ending theories about the universe and philosophy.

Germany and Religious Freedom; Scientology; Censorship

2008-01-20T17:30:00.000+11:00

Germany’s proposed banning of the religion of Scientology is reminiscent of prior German Nazi burning of books and attempts at eliminating Judaism. They shouldn’t ban Scientology. Even the most flagrant of cults that are essentially attempts to control humans’ behaviour and power should not be banned. Hello Catholic Church and McDonald’s, massive real estate -holders! Clearly Germans are still obsessed with thought-cleanliness. “Hostility to the German Constitution”? Scary. Definitions of “religion” are interesting. If Scientology is a pseudo-religion with the primary aim of manipulating human power structures and making money then it seems like it has to be treated as a corporation.

However, in the same vein, the acts of Angus and Robertson, Dymocks, Pan Macmillan and St Martin’s Press directed towards censoring Andrew Morton’s biography of Tom Cruise in Australia are essentially book-burning. No legal injunction has been obtained by the Scientologists and until such an injunction is obtained book stores should continue to sell it. Praise goes out to Kinokuniya, Gleebooks, Borders and The Australian newspaper for trying to source the book elsewhere. It’s still possible to buy on amazon.com.

If reincarnation is true and non-linear in terms of time then I may very well be reincarnated versions of the Dalai Lama or L Ron Hubbard like lil Suri Cruise. Bow before my awe, bi-atches! Meanwhile maybe James Packer is an alien.

Princess Diana Conspiracy; Prince Harry’s illegitimacy; Islam

2008-01-20T17:21:00.000+11:00

Prince Harry is obviously not Prince Charles’ son. He’s way too good looking and looks like James Hewitt.

It’s weird that James Hewitt denies that he’s the father and that Paul Burrell testified to the inquiry into Diana Spencer’s death that he’s sure that Prince Philip was “incapable” of arranging his sdaughter-in-law’s death. Looks to me like people have been told that they’ll meet the same fate as Diana if they don’t toe the royal line.

Princess Diana had Borderline Personality Disorder and was too much of a loose cannon for the royals to let live. Like other BPDs she had a magnetic persona, making her more popular than the royals. From the letters she wrote to Philip you can see the BPD… “love you, Pa” etc. Why was he so involved? His letters betray an overbearing desire to control the PR damage after the divorce.

Prince Philip is racist. The Queen Mother was a Nazi sympathiser. Diana was using Dodi Al-Fayed to get back at Hasnat Khan. Both of them were Muslims.

Diana and Islam

Bipolar Pride

2007-12-13T16:14:00.000+11:00

Bipolarity is a phenomenon that extends beyond but includes what psychiatrists call Bipolar Disorder.

Bipolar Disorder is a gift and a curse, as is bipolarity in general.

Bipolar Pride is not about having pride in the disorder itself, but in the underlying bipolarity that has a polarised mania-depression axis as one of its manifestations.

Bipolar Pride doesn’t mean you should indulge in or exacerbate the negative facets of Bipolar Disorder, eschew medication altogether or try to stay in a state of mania. It does, however, entail a rejection of any attempts to weed out genes or suppress the expression of genes that are associated with Bipolar Disorder. We need to reject eugenics. Bipolar DNA is responsible for a lot of the scientific and artistic breakthroughs that have improved life for humans over the past few thousand years.

Bipolar Pride also means advocating and working towards establishing a world in which people with more bipolarity than the rest of the population are accommodated by society and in which society can extract as much of our creativity as possible. Both Bipolarites and Neurotypicals will benefit.

Here’s an interesting discussion on the concept of Bipolar Pride among Bipolarites with varying opinions and understandings about what the concept would be.

Bipolarity definition link

Studies about the link between creativity and bipolarity:

Bipolar Disorder and the Creative Genius

Enhanced creativity in bipolar disorder patients: a controlled study

Creativity and mental illness

Temperamental commonalities and differences in euthymic mood disorder patients, creative controls, and healthy controls

Artistic creativity and bipolar mood disorder

Prominent people with bipolar disorder

Definition of Bipolarity as a Generalised Concept in Humans and Nature

2007-12-13T15:53:00.000+11:00

Bipolarity is a fundamental phenomenon. It occurs in natural systems and is a feature of logic as currently apprehended by humankind.

The definition of bipolarity is the existence of an axis between two extreme states of a single quality upon which the poles are more prominently-inhabited by a single entity than the middle.

“Polarity” refers to single entities remaining constantly on one pole. For instance, a politically polarised society is one that comprises extremists on both poles.

A bipolarised object in chemistry could be for example unstable substances that switch from solid to gas with virtually no gradation in temperature.

An example of a bipolarised natural phenomenon could be sunlight as perceived by humans on planet Earth. For 95% of the time it’s either light or dark… twilight and sunrise are too brief for sunlight to constitute a steady-spectrum phenomenon.

Bipolarity is the underlying phenomenon in Bipolar Disorder. The bipolarity in people with Bipolar causes not just swings between mania and depression but gives bipolarites, in varying combinations and degrees, bipolarised character and physical traits. For example bipolarites are often capable of both greater physical weakness and strength than neurotypicals, of greater empathy and lack of empathy, of greater and lesser linguistic skill, extreme attraction to both genders etc.

While I’m at it I’ll give another neologism: “metabipolarity” in which the tendency to bipolarise can itself swing from none at all to extreme tendency. This is where I have to briefly mention dialectics and the fact that moderation is often a path to nowhere but bipolarision can lead from being and nothingness into “becoming”. I’ve raved about dialectical resolution before during manic episodes. It’s all here on this blog somewhere.

Some previous posts re this issue:

Rant about dialectics

Polarites

Polarites vs People on Extremes vs People in the Middle

A fault of mine (dialectics)

NSW Departments of Health and Housing and DOCS

2007-12-11T16:07:00.000+11:00

Shellay Ward, Dean Shillingsworth, the newborn baby’s body found in a paddock next to the Pacific Highway in Belmont. If people are genuinely interested in the series of child protection/neglect issues that haven’t been dealt with adequately by the New South Wales Government’s agencies lately then here’s your list of people responsible:

Ministers for HEALTH
My opinion of Reba Meagher. April 2007-now

John Hatzistergos 2005-2007

Morris Iemma 2003-2005
He has his name on the plaque of the disgraceful St George Hospital PECC I stayed at from the time he was Health Minister.

Ministers for HOUSING
Matt Brown April 2007-now

Cherie Burton 2005-2007

Joe Tripodi Feb 2005 - Aug 2005

Carl Scully 2003-2005

Ministers for COMMUNITY SERVICES (DOCS)
Kevin Greene April 2007-now

Reba Meagher 2005-2007

Carmel Tebbutt 2003-2005

I don’t think people genuinely care though. I think they love it. I think it’s the combination of supposed innocence and darkness that gets people obsessed with child neglect/abuse in general. The more strident people are about child abuse, the more suspicious I get. It’s like pornography for them. Children aren’t innocent. They can put up with more pain than adults. The only things we should be concerned about are childhood trauma because it can shape people for the rest of their lives and children’s inability to be assertive and process information in a mature way. But for the last two issues you can extend the concern to adults who are emotionally or intellectually compromised in any significant way. If people cared about sexual abuse of children they would care about adults using other adults’ emotional vulnerability to extract sex. If anything these same people think the opposite; right wing scum condemn single mothers who usually end up pregnant because of emotional weakness/dependence towards men.

My own almost fatal experiences with the NSW Departments of Housing and Health.

Chuck Norris Presidential Election Endorsement of Mike Huckabee

2007-12-10T19:50:00.000+11:00

Fuck Chuck Norris for endorsing Mike Huckabee. Check the political grid to see where he fits in. I will never watch a Norris movie again and hope that everyone else boycotts his products to punish him.

Prince and Intellectual Property; Genius as Channel

2007-11-29T17:56:00.000+11:00

I will never deny Prince’s genius. As I’ve said before, he has never stopped making genius music for the past 30 years and will stake a place in classical music studies hundreds of years from now.

I also say the following in full recognition of the fact that you can’t be an extreme genius without having alternative brain architecture which some morons can term “mental illness”.

I forgave Prince for converting to the Jehovah’s Witnesses and even for censoring his old songs. However, I will not forgive him for his latest series of actions trying to assert intellectual property rights over everything he’s ever touched. Fuck Prince! No-one owns anything that emanates from their own intellect. Certain people have access to extremely open channels of communication with different parts of the cosmos. But that’s all it is, a channel. If you’re a genius it has nothing to do with you. Someone upstairs or whatever decided you would be rewarded/burdened with a broad pipeline for downloading information from the Universe. Being a genius does not give you the right to control what you have channelled.

Also, one point to make about IP in general: if you’re not gonna make something coz it’s not gonna make you rich, your stuff is probably shit anyway. We only need the real art.

Gough Whitlam and the Balibo Five

2007-11-20T16:08:00.000+11:00

I love Gough Whitlam and won’t hear of morons’ criticisms of his being economically irresponsible or whatever simplistic explanations they put together for themselves to escape the fact that he was probably the best Prime Minister in Australia’s history. I probably wouldn’t be alive without Medicare and my father wouldn’t have been the first person in his family’s history to go to university without Whitlam. Some of my friends wouldn’t have survived South East Asia without Whitlam’s and Malcolm Fraser’s immigration policies.

BUT! Fuck Whitlam for what he did to the Balibo Five and their families. Not excusable. What strikes me is the similarity between Whitlam’s strategy of pretending not to receive bureaucratic advice and Howard’s similar behaviour, albeit taken to an extreme of frequency and gravity. I hope this is the one fuck-up I find out about Goughy; I love him to death.

Julia Gillard Picture in Advertisements: Hilarious Sexy Assassin!

2007-11-19T17:13:00.000+11:00

I can’t actually find a picture of Julia Gillard in the Liberal Party advertisement where they keep zooming in on her in a shot where she’s wearing sunnies saying stuff like “unionists will take over the country”. Whoever is in charge of Liberal Party internal polling and strategy has misread the country. She looks like a hot sexy assassin. That’s the kind of lawyer I want running the country. And those ads with Joe McDonald shouting “we’ll be back!” are at worst benignly funny and at best give people who believe in unions an adrenaline rush. They’ve miscalculated on the union thing bigtime. The enmity is starting to diminish and the past 2 or 3 years of union campaigning against WorkChoices has bolstered their image in the public’s eye.

Matt Damon + Tom Brady

2007-11-19T17:10:00.001+11:00

It’s hilarious that Matt Damon nominated this NFL dude Tom Brady as the sexiest man alive or whatever instead of himself. Yes, I’ve heard the rumours. Anyway they’re both hot.

Seroquel (quetiapine) Side Effect: Excessively Relaxed Throat and Choking

2007-11-19T17:07:00.000+11:00

Seroquel is new. Anyone on it is a guinea pig. I’ve discovered a side effect that hasn’t been reported as far as I can tell yet. It relaxes the back of your throat and tongue excessively. For me, it means difficulty swallowing. Almost every time I’ve eaten after taking quetiapine I’ve had food lodge in the back of my throat or go down my trachea rather than oesophagus. It’s fine if you’re not going to eat and are just gonna crash out, but not otherwise.

The other atypical antipsychotic I’ve had experience with is Zyprexa (olanzapine). I’ve had no side effects from that except weight gain. It’s really annoying too because Seroquel gives you a beautifully calm buzz when you take it, almost like Tramadol. Olanzapine doesn’t. Apparently prisoners crush and snort Seroquel.

Kevin Rudd and the Death Penalty

2007-10-10T16:27:00.000+10:00

Yet another mistake by the otherwise competent yet vision-less Labor leader. He better not fuck up again. As much as I can’t stand him, we NEED to win this time. I feel sorry for Robert McLelland for stating the proper position and then being humiliated by Kevin Rudd. Kevin Rudd is still the person for the moment but he better be careful. The death penalty is never acceptable and any astute politician would have gauged that the Australian population agrees, regardless of whether “terrorism” was involved. We’re not Neanderthals like the Americans.

Tori Amos American Doll Posse Sydney Concerts; Pip, Clyde and Dark Energy; Synchronicities

2007-10-04T21:21:00.000+10:00

Tori Amos did 3 concerts at the Sydney Opera House in her 2007 American Doll Posse tour. I saw 2 of them: the 1st (Pip) and 3rd (Clyde).
I had a number of synchronicities / life lessons surround these experiences.

1) On the day of the Pip concert I had a massive fight with my ex, almost ending our friendship but with him ending up coming to the concert. He left after the first song which “happened” to be a nasty, powerful, gut-pumping version of “Cruel”. I wasn’t so dodgy as to interpret it as being about him; it was about me. “I can be cruel / I don’t know why / Why can’t my balloon stay up / In a perfectly windy sky?”. My depression and what a cunt I can be.

2) I ended two long-term friendships in the weeks leading up to the concerts. One my ex who I’ve known for 12 years, another a close friend I’ve known for 7. During this period I learnt that the true meaning of “Caught A Lite Sneeze” was about the inability or unwillingness of people to ditch relationships that are no longer useful or workable. I also had to consider whether my relationship with my ex, which is probably the most meaningful relationship in my life outside of my family, was still viable.

3) In the week leading up to the 1st concert I had a strained dialogue with my sister (who I consider to be the 2nd most intelligent person I’ve met after me - don‘t slam me for that, I know) involving feminine intelligence. My ex also pulled me up for a couple of sexist comments. I consider myself to be an arch-feminist.

4) This may just be paranoia or self-absorption but I am pretty sure Tori looked at me for a period of time that wasn’t brief towards the end of the concert. I had an empty seat next to me, stand out physically, was virtually dancing in my seat and realised I was raising my eyes to the ceiling as if in prayer while singing along to “God”. I’ve noticed DJs use me as a barometer in the past because I have an excellent sense of rhythm and dance and totally lose myself. I was close to the front.

After the Pip concert, which my frontal lobes barely remember because of the valium, scotches and ecstasy I imbibed to deal with the fight with my ex, I had a horrible depression settle on me. I knew I needed to see Tori again to rectify how I had disrespected her. Pip stirred dark energy in me that I’m not strong enough yet to confront. I knew that if I went to see the 3rd concert it’d be Clyde. She’s the one that sees the potential in everyone, even when they don’t see it themselves. I identify with her most closely out of the American Doll Posse. I knew she’d heal what Pip had antagonised.

At 10am on the day of the last concert, one of my ex’s clients told him that he’d bought a ticket each for them to that night’s concert. My ex and I went into overdrive, hit eBay etc. My face, body and voice closely resemble my ex’s so we pretended I was a cousin from the country, resulting in my securing (through the client) the very last standing ticket to Tori Amos’ very last concert in Australia.

5) In between the two concerts I had a magic mushroom (psilocybin) trip by myself. Towards the beginning of the trip I was lying on the floor and found myself re-enacting some specific head movements that Tori was doing in Pip character. They were jerky head/neck movements, as if trying to hear something that you know is going to be disturbing that you really need to hear. Very rarely during trips do I try to escape from the darkness inside me. I think that if you bear with it, stay with the pain, you are rewarded more than amply once you emerge from psychically painful themes during trips. But I was trying to escape from the dark energy. I didn’t want to feel sadness, anxiety or anger. I was shit-scared for once. The head-jerking would disappear once I stopped withdrawing my energy and allowed it to flow from my core around my navel and just below my navel into my head and ears. Obviously Tori could not have been actually experiencing this during the concert but I am convinced that I tapped into what she was trying to communicate. We’re always trying to be happy, positive, etc. There’s a place for the dark.

At the Clyde concert I stood behind the stalls in the Opera House, was able to move around, was by myself, etc, so decided to commune directly with Tori and pretend there was no-one else there. People moved away from me. I danced. I bawled my eyes out in the following songs:

Bouncing Off Clouds
Caught A Lite Sneeze
Cloud On My Tongue
Digital Ghost
Spark

I know, bizarre choices to cry in. Especially the “Bouncing Off Clouds” which was the opener.

There’s more I have to say so I’ll probably update this post later but WOW! Best 2 concerts of my life and I have to give maximum credit to the band, especially the drummer Matt Chamberlain. He pounded my guts out, especially in the Pip show which was a total rock-fest. Everyone knows that Tori is a piano genius but not that many people seem to realise she can do rock/swing/jazz at the absolute A-grade level eg “Talula”, “In the Springtime of his Voodoo”, “Little Amsterdam”.

Cruel
1st Concert Set List
3rd Concert Set List

Madonna and Paedophilia

2007-07-28T18:12:00.001+10:00

I am not accusing Madonna of being a paedophile, but here are three instances where she’s pushed the boundaries on this topic:

1) The film clip to “Open Your Heart” where Madonna is a stripper and a little boy watches her. At the end of the clip she runs away with the boy.

2) The film clip to “Cherish” where she cavorts with a little mer-boy on the beach.

3) A section in the book “Sex” where she is photographed lying down with, or in bed with (I can’t remember) a teenage boy. Text celebrating the sexuality of youth accompanies it.

Anxiety as a Causal Agent in Morality; Psychopathy and Benzos

2007-07-28T17:57:00.000+10:00

If you lose your consideration for other people when you take benzodiazepines then you’re not much better than a psychopath. Psychopaths generally feel less anxiety than normal people, although this is not the primary cause of their aberrant behaviour. If the only thing preventing a normal person from being selfishly destructive to others is anxiety at the consequences, then there is no morality in the normal person’s forbearance. This is why you don’t discipline children through corporal punishment. They will be so immersed in the anxiety of the moment that they don’t have room to digest why they shouldn’t have done what they’re being punished for in the first place.

Reboxetine plus SSRIs = No Sexual Dysfunction

2007-07-28T17:56:00.000+10:00

For people who have unduly delayed orgasms while on SSRIs, reboxetine (Edronax) is a great anti-depressant to throw into the mix. If you have reboxetine by itself it can make you premature ejaculate. Mixed with SSRIs you perform normally. It also puts your mind more in touch with your body’s drives, eg sex drive in general, drive to eat, etc. Anti-depressants that exacerbate symptoms commonly associated with depression (eg lack of drive) should be used with caution. This is commonly the case with SSRIs.

In the US Ritalin (which, like reboxetine, increases noradrenalin levels) can be prescribed for SSRI-induced delayed anorgasmia. In Australia psychiatrists have to do it off-label.

Centrelink Disability Support Pension Line; Rent Assistance Backpayment Policy

2007-06-06T16:25:00.001+10:00

After coming out of hospital recently I stayed with my Mum for a couple of months before getting a new place. I tried ringing the Centrelink Disability Support Pensioners’ and Carers’ Line to tell them of my move. Five times. On five separate days. Each time it was engaged, except for one time I got through but, after entering my CRN, I was put onto a line that rang without any answer. I rang again immediately. It was engaged.

When I took the half hour walk to my nearest Centrelink, after a 25 minute wait in line I was told that Centrelink’s policy is not to backpay rent assistance. Which is unjustified money-scrounging in itself, but even more so if Centrelink prevented me from doing so. So the 10 days I lived in my new place without telling them were deducted from my rent assistance. The women at the desk were already aware of the problem with the Pensioners’ line but were unable to help me.

My Adventures at St Vincent Hospital PECC and the NSW Department of Housing

2007-06-06T16:18:00.000+10:00

A few months ago I had a bad manic episode with psychosis. I voluntarily admitted myself to St Vincent’s Hospital. I discharged myself after spending a week in emergency intake departments. They’re called Psychiatric Emergency Care Centres (PECC), have minimal facilities and are meant to hold you for no more than a day or two before you get into a ward.

I had to recount my story, which was a distressing and embarrassing one, to no less than seven doctors in useless 10 minute interviews. I never saw the same doctor twice. Some of the doctors were absolute beginners and had limited knowledge of the niceties of neuropsychiatry. The nurses seemed to have more intuitive knowledge of what was going on, which is understandable since they get to know the patients.

Mania is exacerbated by lack of sleep. 3 out of 7 nights there my sleep was interrupted. Once when a schizophrenic patient had a spaz out in the middle of the night, once when a security camera failed and had to be fixed, and another time when I was transferred at 3am to St George Hospital’s PECC because there was a bed shortage crisis. I live in the city and my relatives live nowhere near Kogarah. Hence my decision to discharge myself early, against the advice of doctors.

In my psychosis I lost my housing. The hospital did not assign me a social worker or liaise with the Department of Housing, and considered sleeping on my (also mentally ill) Mother’s lounge to be adequate housing.

Luckily I was still in a hypomanic state and had the drive to be able to apply for Department of Housing accommodation, which is a Herculean effort in itself. I visited their offices at least four times, had to run all over the place sourcing documentation from the hospital, Centrelink, at least 3 different forms from my psychiatrist on 3 different occasions, etc. I applied for “Priority Housing”, yet it still took the Department of Housing 2 months to even get me an interview. I heard homeless people being turned away from emergency accommodation because all the motel rooms were booked out during Mardi Gras.

Eventually I was rejected for Priority Housing because, though I fulfilled all other criteria, I was considered able to find accommodation myself. This is the case if there are properties in your area that cost less than 50% of your income. However, if you get the Disability Support Pension, this means 50% of your pension proper, plus your full rent assistance. So someone on a total benefit of $315/wk is considered capable of affording $185/wk.

Meanwhile I have to pay off debts, buy basic furniture, medication, new sneakers, a new backpack, medicate myself with yoga, exercise and vitamins, etc, etc. And I was unable to access the Department of Housing’s Rental Bond Assistance since this would alert potential landlords that I am not working, rendering me unable to find a place in the currently overheated Sydney rental market. No one can live on that kind of income, even if they do depression-style scrimp cooking. So it’s back to sex work I go.

I’m disgusted when I think back on my dealings with these supposed safety nets over the past few months. I hate to think how other people like me with mental illnesses but who have a lower IQ, less social intelligence and assertiveness, and nothing to trade like their body must cope with such an uncaring system. I guess they end up at Matthew Talbot Hostel or something.

Mercedes Benz Searching for Meredith Hellicar

2007-03-01T17:25:00.000+11:00

Someone from Mercedes Benz hit my site looking for blog posts about Meredith Hellicar. Perhaps they’re gauging what the public reaction would be to hiring her in an executive position.