Sunday again. Humid, sunny, cool in the shade before the heat that is as inevitable as death on a day like today in this wet place. A cup of hot coffee. My breakfast today was nothing but grain. Yesterday, that was a fine breakfast; one you could take a picture of and carry it with you all day. Today's breakfast looked like something my ancestor from 100,000 years ago would have eaten in the right time of year; and not with rotting meat either, barely harvested, grains that were barely domesticated. Well, perhaps I should only go back 20,000 years or perhaps only 15,000; this more egyptian than eastern; but the results of a culture beginning to settle down, to cooperate, to turn nature's grains into man's. But not modern man's today, this stuff is too rough, too much like what we'd feed to a horse; or a horse would find itself growing wild. It costs more, I suspect, to find something that dates back to a more ancient time, a modern gleaming factory trying so hard to reclaim the past.
We are not far removed from the past. The cereals reflect a move towards cooperation, but these were done around the same time that we were wiping out the Neanderthals, our poor cousins, who were, perhaps too civilized to kill us, or perhaps they were equally capable, but lacked the properly placed vocal chords to issue complex battle plans, unable to call for help so that a band of weaker, less intelligent hominids, but more organized to wreck chaos, could wipe them out. Perhaps it was the shift in intelligence towards what we call the thin skulled modern man instead, but we don't really know.
One might think the thin skull showed a move towards a peaceful nature, but it is certainly more likely linked to the need to get a larger brain out of a smaller birth canal; the mind being the best protection of a warlike species against its worst enemy which probably changed; starvation, cold, drought, flood, wild beasts but always primarily each other. The most competitive hunter being ourselves, the final food source perhaps, but certainly the most competition for whatever food was available.
The coffee I had and the grains I ate were taken from someone else by my society. Certainly parts of each came from somewhere else where someone is hungry, just as people close to me are probably hungry this morning. Hungry for affection, for power, for entertainment, for food. Thirsty for knowledge, the hair of the dog what bit them last night, or just water.
I am not at war with China, anyone in the middle east, technology or religion. I'm not even battling with traditional fundamental physicists. They are all out to get me, but not because they care about me or even know what I am. It is what we do. We are 90% mindless, the part of our brains we don't use you might argue, but that part which is largely cushion for the balance is not what I mean. It is the conscious mind that is 90% mindless. We focus on things with only a tiny part of our brains' computing power, just enough to hold one thought at a time. The part holding the thought shifts constantly, a tiny part of the conscious part, the rest being left to ruminate on its own, worrying about the future, planning the next big conquest that it instinctively thinks it needs to survive when just the opposite is the truth.
This 90% unsupervised brain, shifting about as it does as thoughts go from one place to another during the day, the one thought at a time we can hold onto, is the reason we cannot expect to get along. Human cooperation is merely one method of surviving to this Bedouin part of the brain traversing across the landscape of consciousness wondering what needs to be done to wipe our its neighbor if it gets too competitive.
Now we are turning over the responsibility to machines and it just so happens that China makes most of our machines. As the article below indicates (well worth reading because it has subtle humor for something that is really humorless except to those of us who have inappropriate senses of humor). By exporting our manufacturing we are handing over the next set of weapons, even as we think we are refining them.
The future of warfare: Why we should all be very afraid http://www.salon.com/2014/07/20/the_future_of_warfare_why_we_should_all_be_very_afraid/
I would note that this article is very well written, but a bit on the naive side. It talks about a ban because it is such a bad weapon. Even killer androids are not as bad (yet) as nuclear weapons and yet we have stock piles of those around the world. To say we cannot build them because of a "ban" simply means that those who don't care about bans must make them. The same is true of killer biologicals, in their case manmade directly and indirectly as products of nature, enhanced by man's attempts to control them.
When I talk about China's weaponized economy, when I write about the failing role of the West I am not even fighting a war against ignorance and if I were it would only be fighting a war against my own ignorance and not necessarily anyone else. It is my ignorance. I accept it. It's just intellect for intellect's sake or perhaps a lack of intellect, the punctured balloon hissing away.
I'm not so sure a battle against ignorance, even my own, is a battle I can win, the odds being stacked against me, my time limited, my intellect borrowed.
Chinese General: Abe, Hagel Speeches Are Provocative Toward China - Wall Street Journal
http://tinyurl.com/kwgw3ml
shared via www.newshog.co
We are a warlike people in a warlike race of man. The last book I listened to, "Before the Dawn" confirmed that there are many species of man today as there were in Neanderthal times, all of them having the strengths and weaknesses; but now, apparently, all smart enough to kill based on factors other than similarity or difference. Refined to the point where we can use logic to define our enemies even though we cannot use it to define our actions. 99% of the 10% of our brains we use is screaming "kill or be killed", the 1% remaining out-numbered, out-smarted and out-gunned, sitting and writing blogs and occasionally reading them.
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