The Fugue State

enlightenment is a concept
by which we can measure our pain.

The dream is over
What can I say?
The dream is over
Yesterday
I was the Dreamweaver
But now I’m reborn

In 1980,  Athletes from around countries around the world, who had trained their entire lives to compete in a global event were left in the cold.  Many proud Canadian athletes had their dreams stolen.  Why did this happen?  How and why did so many athletes lose so much?

It was in the height of the Cold War.  And the USSR was at war in a far away country called Afghanistan.  At the same time, the Olympic Games was being hosted in Moscow.  Afghanistan was a bit of  a pet project of the United States at the time.  The US funneled money and arms into its Mujahadeen(who later became the Taliban)  in an attempt to destabilize the USSR.   The USSR had viewed Afghanistan as a place where Islamic guerrilla militants (ie, terrorists) were destabilizing peace in the region, and had sent their armed forces in to pacify the area.

Canada and the United States, among other countries in the free world held a boycott of the Soviet Union for their being at war in Afghanistan.  It was the largest boycott ever of the Olympics.

Flash forward to 2010.

Canada is at war with Islamic guerrilla militants in Afghanistan.   And yet we have the audacity to host the 2010 winter olympic games.   Do we not remember our boycott of the Soviet Union for this same reason?

If it is not worth boycotting a country over being at war in Afghanistan then the athletes who were left behind in 1980 deserve an official apology from the Canadian government.   We Canadians owe an apology to the people of Moscow, and Russia for needlessly slighting them for a cause that we should not have supported, that is, the people of Afghanistan.

However, if it is worth boycotting a country over being at war in Afghanistan then Canada should suggest, as it did in 1980, that all free Countries around the world boycott the country that is both hosting the games and who is at war, that is to say, us.  We should suggest that Russia, in particular boycott us.

Because if we fail to do either, the history books will recall what a gross act of hypocrisy we have committed, even if we choose to forget.

Okay first of all, this list doesn’t pretend to be the most relevant or interesting links for everybody.  This list is coming from me, Jeff Cliff, in Regina, Canada, and I have a particular biased viewpoint, especially when we’re talking about what I think is subjectively the more important of things to happen.  So keeping that in mind…

#52: You’d think by now that most of the research on the DMCA has been done in the US, but a group at the University of Washington somehow came out with some refreshingly new research.  Their DMCA paper: “how my printer got a DMCA takedown notice”

#51 Steyn’s censored article .  This would have been a minor historical footnote, had it not been banned so thoroughly.  Now it’s on this list, and Steyn is set to be some kind of a martyr that could easily tip off a global clash of civilizations.  This won’t, however be the only censorship entry on this list.

#50 more chinese colonialism in africa

#49 “centralized medical organizations like the CDC really do need to exist in a modern capitalist economy Without the CDC, those markets simply wouldn’t exist.  Call them parasites if you need to, but the CDC, or something like it, is necessary;  because multibillion dollar markets depend on its existence.  However, limits are in order.

#48 Suicide, and in general, the problem of the meaning of life, starts to become a problem worthy of serious global coordinated effort there as problems of basic sanitation, war, and disease start to become, although not solved yet, tractable.

#47 the Conservatives openly flaunting the rule of law while refusing to be held accountable by parliament.

#46 Russia threatens hot nuclear war against poland, just like they threatened a violent reaction to Georgia months before they went in.  And worse, there are many incentives for them to actually strike Poland/Ukraine

#45 The CBC continued to drop the ball, all year.

#44 Since the Cadman tape turned out to be accurate, which means Harper committed a felony by trying to have MP bribed.  Yet somehow, we re-elected him.  Go figure.

#43 With the CDMCA and otherwise, the conservatives tried to criminalize everything!

#42 The green party tried to shut buckdog up through a lawsuit.

#41 This image kind of puts things in perspective, and I’d nominate it for image of the year if I could.

#40 …and This one is probably the most messed up thing I’ve ever seen.

#39 The bailout.  FC coverd it

#38 In probably the most manipulative politicking I’ve seen yet, the Conservatives tried to bankrupt the liberals, cripple the block, hurt the NDP and evaporate any hope for the greens in one fell swoop by removing federal subsidies for political parties, while keeping donation levels down.  This of course, lead to pretty much open revolt on them, and the creation of the Coalition which should be assuming power any day now.

#37 The perfect storm of food insecurity; the financial industry problems spread all over the world, with many countries stopping exports, having bad crop yields to begin with, all while china & the middle east oil caliphates buying heavy into foodstuffs.  Many are starving, this year.

#36 slashdot on computers & africa, and overpopulation.

#35 SDA on Copyright

#34 A neonazi woman capitulates to reason, and canadian inquisitor richard warmen pushes her back into the hardline right wing fold

#33 Lamarck vindicated

#32 Pseudoscience in Canada:

i) Kid’s being forced to go to “psychic” councillors in canadian school
ii) Psychic taken as evidence by the court system
iii) MOM BUGS THEIR KID WITH GPS AND AUDIO RECORDING EQUIPMENT, which proves her innocence.

#31 SEC, among other authorities, tempbanned shorting!

#30 Green party gets served lawsuit for being right on agent orange.  In 2007, but I didn’t hear about it back then.

#29 Health & Safety law clashed with a HRC tribunal, and as a result, restaurants, never really safe to begin with, will be even more dangerous to eat at. I wish this was the height of the HRC’s lunacy, but they will be featured more further down the list.

#28 for example, in their supporting Sharia law in Canada

#27 China surprised everyone by pulling off persecution of new york falungong

#26 Although the US election went to obama, we probably really don’t know what the vote really was.  Even a broken clock is right twice a day, and it seems like that’s about as accurate as the US election system is about now.

#25 Geist v. Crookes, along with Warman v. Conservative Blosphere.  In general, the blogosphere, both conservative and non, came under attack from all directions by people armed with lawyers.

#24 RIP 1948-2008 UN Declaration of Human Rights.

#23 Inner-city Saskatoon cooperative/food bank/health centre closed by Wall/Saskatchewan Conservatives.Very, very sad — it cost peanuts compared to other initiatives, and gave some degree of a safety net to an area with child prostitutes and gang violence, among other problems.  It’s leaving our fellow citizens to die in the gutter, and doing nothing to reduce crime.

#22 but how can we think rationally about these things when we’re drugging ourselves specifically so we don’t have to face up to such problems?

#21 Then there’s the forests in the US, a pretty remarkable tale of our impact on the world which we live in.

#20 Bell gave the middle finger to people in ontario, and throttled everyone, including ISPs which used Bell for connectivity.

#19 Greiving parents in China and Russia were both made into parents for greiving, probably the most cruel thing outside of genocide I’ve encountered.

#18 Marc Emery, last I heard, is still getting steamrolled by the US and Canadian government, and with him, any illusion that Canada is actually a soverign country.

#17 honeybees having trouble around the world–this is a surefire sign of biosphere collapse.

#16 Outside of Saskatchewan, Canada sheds its marijuana prohibition law

#15 Although not as obvious as Rwanda, Congo has its own problems of similar if not greater magnitude.

#13 The US is involved in terrifying things, hiding prisoners from the red cross(which, history shows, there is only one reason for…they knew they were torturing prisoners with no good reason, or that they knew right well that what they were doing could get them prosecuted in the hague)
What’s more; the very highest people in the US government are directly responsible.

#12 Oppression of the first nations continues as the innu get evicted.  It’s not merely ancient history—this is happening this year in Canada, folks.

#11 Data was read directly from the visual cortex

#10 You have to do more than Hyperlink to get charged with defamation in Canada, thankfully

#9 the IOC tried to steal the Canadian National Anthem

#8 Ezra Levant, censorship magnet and media gadfly, was attacked by everybody.

#7 Conservatives hide candidates from public, during an election.  What were they afraid of?

#6 Along with the greens being practically extinguished by the Conservatives, the liberals being soundly defeated, the Action party falling into internal strife, the Christian heritage party found itself in the sights of the HRC tribunals glare

#5 One of the casualties of all the censorship lawsuits, was the voice of Saskatchewan Saskblogs

#4 And independent news media is now a pipe dream in the west now that Winnipeg Indymedia has been destroyed.

#3 The CRTC, finally making itself useful, pushed the CHR line back a little by refusing to allow them to limit freedom on the internet.

#2 The HRCts tried to hide their mistakes, which there definitely were

#1 And in general the Human Rights Court Tribunals made themselves into a public spectacle.  First moderate conservatives, and finally those of us on the left are coming to grips that there is an unaccountable court going around setting bad precedent, and that there is a whole political backdrop(including threats of violence) involved–and that anyone who thinks freely, conservative or not, is at risk.

“CHR commission;  if you’re anti-racist, they will investigate you.  If you’re a racist, they will investigate you. The only appropriate response is submission”

Well there you go.

Today I was reading freethinking blog samizdata, and got to thinking. A lot of people have trouble accepting the work of peer review, especially when the results of peer review don’t ‘jive’ with their political stripe, or perhaps when they suspect that there is a significant bias involved against their theory of choice.

My idea to try to bring some clarity into the real bias would be for journals with peer review in place should post not only the articles that made it through, but each article/edit of an article which did not.  Not in the same place, of course–but there should be a tool which generates a random paper, and you, the reader are supposed to act as a judge, as to whether or not you would accept the paper in the journal if it were up to you.  Not whether you accept the article as right, but whether you accept it as reasonable enough to make its way into the journal.

The next step would be, to allow you, as the general public to try to rate a good deal many of these papers, and then compare your results with the results of the actual body of ‘peers’ which does the ‘official’ reviewing.  Comment threads could be allowed to provide places for differences / errors to be discussed.  This would allow a Bayesian individual to gauge to some extent how rational the peers of that journal are, and in turn, how much respect to give that journal.

Of course, one could still be wrong in assuming what is and is not rational, however being given the access to the inner workings of a peer review journal would give you more reason to trust/not trust a journal than exists today.  Climate change skeptics, for example, might find that the science involved really is well thought through, or at the very least beyond their ability to understand and that they should perhaps either trust the IPCC more or trust their perhaps uninformed views less.  Non-climate change skeptics could also use the service to ’sanity check’ their beliefs in the IPCC’s results.

The best part about such a system is that the hard part–gathering the data–is already done.  Archiving the data might be a little bit more costly than the current approach(toss the crap, only publish the good stuff), but even a 1% acceptance rate by a journal would leave only two orders of magnitude; ie, hard drives are advancing in capacity such that this would only be a big deal for a few years before the drive capacity made the archival a non-issue again.  The engine for rating / creating Bayesian results wouldn’t be too difficult to write, and would look a lot like existing tools such as the Open Source engine running Reddit.

Open Access journals and journal aggregators such as arxiv are the first step of a reformation of how science is done, all levels including social and technical ones, that computer technology has started.

Thoughts?

I am employed by, and a member of the New Democrat Party of Canada.  However I do not represent the party, its views, the views of its members, blah blah blah.  But you may as well know this, in case you don’t read my other feeds.  I am biased, but I try to minimize my bias in general.

Words I do not see in the party platforms(hopefully this will be a larger list):

Read the rest of this entry »

As I promised to Jack Layton, I did indeed take 2 hours off work to watch the debates.  More as I add to this post.

For more on the stuff here, see my LJ (there’s a switch)

Oh I should mention an important fact(thanks Saskboy for pointing this out); I work for the NDP.  I am not an NDP member, so my views aren’t necessarily even close to the NDPs, but I should be pointing this out nonetheless.  I don’t intend to mislead you by neglecting to mention this, I just started there not that long ago and I haven’t quite picked up the habit of putting this disclaimer up routinely yet.  In my mind I’m pretty much just a university student still.

Read the rest of this entry »

Zen is a concept.

Picture this. You’re a University Student. Like me, when I took Macroeconomics, you’re taking a summer course, with online tests through WebCT. After a long walk home, you sit in your computer chair, and go through your books one last time; you have a quiz tonight.

You log in to your computer, and log on to the class website to do an online quiz for your class. You nod to your webcam; the webcam that was put there by your professor. The professor isn’t necessarily watching you, but your webcam tracks your every movement, so that when the quiz begins, you’re not caught looking at your textbook across the room, getting up to go the bathroom(and hence, obviously cheating, much like if you got up to go to the bathroom during a regular exam). There’s a microphone on your computer that’s listening to everything you say, and every rustle of paper. If it picks up any sound, it alerts your professor to pay attention to you—to make sure again that you’re not cheating.

But since this is mandatory, and since every class has this setup, there’s more—You accidentally think back to what lays across the room and remember you have a copy of 2600(a dissident magazine, the possession of which is liable to get you convicted on TERRORISM charges) laying in the open. You panic…you had gotten stoned last night and hung out with your secret hacker friends and had forgotten to put it away. You can’t look at it…the camera tracks your eye movement—you have to stay focused on the screen, focused on the test.

The camera detects something funny about your body movement, and the professor is alerted. She notices the magazine, and calls the cops. Before the test is done, the SWAT team kicks down your door, shooting your dog, and before you know what happened you’re unconscious in a black bag heading for a secret prison in cuba.

Sounds far fetched? Not really.

Check This out (at 18:15). It’s an Off the Hook episode which deals with a company selling the 1984-esque Mandatory Webcams. This is something you’ll probably have to see for yourself.

I have taken WebCT class, and I could probably have cheated, but didn’t. There was no point–WebCT tests are far easier than their paper counterparts, at least the ones I took. Actually in retrospect, it now makes more sense why the class average was so high.

I’ve got a webcam that I voluntarily put on my desk. It doesn’t work half the time, but still—-I’m probably on the ‘privacy is dead/useless’ side of most things, but even so, here in this case I don’t think it should be mandatory in order to go to university to subject yourself to this massive breach of privacy. Pretty much everything else in the above story has happened to someone, somewhere, there are no missing pieces of the puzzle anymore — if this system becomes commonly used(or worse, made mandatory by the government), it really will be the end of free society.

Something struck me deeply this week. It may not sound like much, but there’s a lot of things involved here, let’s see if I can ecludiate(word?) them.

I have been listening to the zencast podcast since a little before I worked at SaskTel. It helped keep a sense of perspective, and helped me to keep calm while dealing with irate customers on the phone. The kinds of things that it discussed I found new, and insightful. Christianity deals with some of the things, but only in passing, and only in a ‘read this passage’ way, where the passage says ‘don’t be afraid, for god is with you’, ’suffer, because god loves you’ or something like that–nice in principle, perhaps, but doesn’t actually *help*. The point being, the kinds of things that Christianity usually tries in order to help people’s lives have tended to be

1. Appeal to Authority
2. Appeal to the Afterlife

A better mind, a clearer perception of the world, these things are not what Christianity is about. To (especially early) christianity, the world is not understandable, and it’s best not to ask too many questions. Everything that you need to know is in the bible, which is read to you because you shouldn’t know how to read. Sure, there are exceptions, but they tend to be later-christianity hacks to make the faith seem less absurd in light of more secular opposition (before science could stand on its own feet, it really didn’t make much more sense than christianity. By the 19th century, there was little doubt, but before that time there was still work to be done, and both science and christianity proper benefitted from this era of competition).

Buddhism, on the other hand, deals entirely with the material world, kind of. All that is required is the belief in the existance of suffering(which is really a psychological/objective fact, at root). Buddhism then looks into the nature and causes(and effects) of this suffering, (and in doing so, the nature, causes and effects of pleasure). It’s a little pseudoscientific. However, it’s only so because it’s utterly personal, subjective but based on objective truths. Even if the ancients who hashed this stuff out couldn’t know it at the time. The whole idea is trying to make the human experience bearable, livable, to improve life itself, right now, starting with things we can do today. And it’s not like you can’t question their tactics, either. I’m pretty sure you can — sure a lot of buddhism is based around the teachings of the buddha, but I don’t think it’s actually necessary–it’s the quest that’s important, it’s the goal, it’s the intent. Once you accept that(really, the 4 noble truths) you are compelled to accept the rest by logic, science and the bayesian method. And if there is an error in the interpretation of buddhism, well, get on the wiki/publish-or-perish deathmarch/corporate gravy-train and improve our understanding of that, right?

I meditated. I learned some things about myself that I might have known earlier, but realistically did not take seriously(unless there was intense pain involved–for example my heart needs kindness and care. I know for a fact that it does because of the pain it has given me, but I could have known that by just paying attention to the way my heart feels when I treat it poorly, instead of ignoring it). It sounds simple, but these kinds of things are downplayed if given any time at all in modern economic and pragmatic worldviews, even those associated with judeo-christianity(and I suspect, Islam). One of the books I read(I think it was ‘patterns of educational philosophy, brameld(?), Uhawaii, 50s) right before I started university suggested that the peak of american thought up until him was Zen buddhism, Deweyan Pragmatism and I think existentialism. He may have been on to something; amid the repetition, the redundancy, the secretness(non-american buddhists have a heirarchy of secrecy to their discredit, and like a modern university or scientology-like cult, there is a whole staircase of levels to go through in order to become enlightened, definitely more than necessary), I think in the western understanding of the world, there is something missing. When taking Econ296(ecological economics) I read a paper(I think it was “buddhist economics” by E F Schumacher) on a suggested buddhist economics. He wasn’t very explicit–but later on in the course, the entire economic system was simplified into 3 things–the achievement of pleasure, the ridding the self of suffering and I think the third thing was related to identity/society (can’t remember that, either). Really, the course was, in it’s entirety, about simplifying ecological economics into ecology/systems theory/biology, non-ecological modern economics and buddhism. Again, the point here is that economics and buddhism are two pieces of a single puzzle, two ways of looking at a single problem, and although they deal with somewhat different things I think that they should both be learned, or neither.

One way this could manifest, I think, is that it would do *incredible* good for vipassana(sp?) to be taught in late elementary school through early highschool… far better than Channel 1, probably just as good as ritalin. Easy to understand, calming, and something to guide you as you live. Who wouldn’t want kids to be calmer, more perceptive and happier? Granted, I only have a part in that question as a former child, as a former peer, but I encourage those of you who do and will have children to take a serious look at this question, and the question of what you want society to do with children in general(is education merely passive? to get jobs? to become a citizen/human being? etc)

Where the shock came in, is when Gil(name?), on Zencast, suggested a per-class donation. It wasn’t required, just suggested, for simple things, building maintenance, bandwidth, whathaveyou. I tallied up my listens, and tried to figure out what it was that Zencast had suggested as far as payment and, well, I won’t tell you what the number is but it is big enough to be worth taking a second look at the whole situation.

Hypothesizing away my own poverty for one moment, from preachers on TV asking for money to spread the faith to SKTFM who suggested that “corporations and churches both want to steal your money and rob you of your soul”, giving money to churches is in my mind something of a verbotten activity. It’s just not done, because they can and will rob you blind.

And yet, in a sustainable society, we would have both economics and buddhism(and if you’re into that sort of thing, a (monotheistic) religion (like christianity)). We would have an understanding of ourselves, the world, and an idea how to make ourselves and the world better. So it is not really unreasonable for the Zencast monestary to ask for a pittance so that they can maintain their temple, while the property values around them hit the roof(nearby houses, outside of the slum which they sound like they are in, easily top 1$M). Now let’s assume that I was willing to give them something, through Ripple, even.

First of all, it’d mean more work. But what does work entail? Usually, causing suffering. Both in myself, possibly the customers, and the ‘external’ of the externalities inherent in both capitalist and really, when it comes down to it, communist/similar production. It would mean not paying attention to myself, the suffering both in myself and elsewhere in the world, and exiting the buddhist arena, and going into the economic arena, to toil for awhile. Much like going to work to afford school, I suppose. Would it be enough to just try my best to work rightly? To consume rightly? To bear responsibility of society, and to act always towards the optimal, most efficient path? The golden mean?

This is something that there has to be a balance of, but in my mind in part this undermines part of what Buddhism(and in doing so, I guess economics, and in part, the (meaningfulness?(word?)) I’ve found that both economics/science and buddhism give theis approach to life) is doing—I can’t even try to be happy more, that it makes more sense to suffer, and to be purpesfully unable to deal with suffering, so that others may have a chance at not-suffering?

I guess when written down like that it sounds whiny/simple. Sometimes you can be happy, sometimes you can’t, and the stoic/buddhist path is well defined in either case.

A related problem to all this is the biopolitical definition of a citizen. Who deserves to be a citizen? Is it right for me to squish the bugs in my house (for failure to pay rent)? What about to eat meat? To kill bacteria/viruses/fungi who threaten me? What about other human beings, even monsterous ones who we might otherwise kill/jail/exile? What the hell do we *do* with other people who clearly violate the law/cause harm on others in a serious way/cause mass suffering? Who choose not to be part of the (deme/socially acceptable group/society/future)? I think it is a related problem. I think it’s a problem that is in essence a political sub-problem of sustainability in general.

So, to sum up

Is Zen Buddhism/Vipassana(sp?) really something that is not just reasonable but which gets at something fundamental in life, something that actually makes human life better in a serious and effective way? If so what kind of church/educational structure should Zen Buddhism (the kind which we ought to support) be/be taught from? Is it ok to give existing structures your material support/help them change into different kinds of structures that might be better, in case the first question is answered as something different than what they currently have?

Is such an institution part of a sustainable society(with our without religions(christianity, islam, judaiism, atheism, etc to go with it)?

Another example; it is clear to me that I should not drink coffee, or at least, not treat it like I usually have in the past. Yet, if I do so I might be able to get short-term productivity gains that would enable me to give material support to the institution in question, allowing it to sustain itself. But then, what is that but exploitation, even if willful? Is that kind of thing part of a sustainable System of the World? An ethical one?