Showing posts with label suffering. Show all posts
Showing posts with label suffering. Show all posts

Friday, August 8, 2014

Humans Kill For No Reason - The Failure of Counter Arguments

I often here the counter argument about survival instincts of other species causing them to kill without cause, which is completely incorrect. I'll counter the three main examples and lay this matter to rest.

First they often cite chimp or gorilla behavior, the often violent reactions to perceived invaders. There, I just explained why they kill each other without even touching on the science and why this example is not valid. But I'll continue anyway.

Every species has evolved a certain set of traits that help it's survival, not as individuals but as an entire species. Territoriality is one of those very effective traits to help a species, even humans have this trait but I'll get into that at the end. It is a method of ensuring there are enough resources for the group, often maintained by closer relatives and any others who threaten the resources are seen as enemies.

Us failing to see a valid reason for these behaviors is not proof that there is no valid reason. We anthropomorphize far too often, and in doing so we attempt to apply human logic to actions which are often instinctive.

A better example would be how the gorillas treat kittens when there is plenty of resources and security, many videos and stories of this type permeate the internet now. They are kind and gentle, even forgiving to a fault. Remove the instincts and they behave much more humane than most humans.

The second example are male lions killing cubs, another instinctive behavior. Again, that alone demonstrates that it is necessary, they do not have the social structure that allows the luxury of any other behavior, unlike humans. Male lions also do not kill them all, their instinct even has limits.

This behavior allows them to strengthen the pride and keep it stronger. It is a trait resulting in thousands of years of natural selection, because it works to help with their social structure. When placed in a situation which lacks the pressures of the wild, the instinct rarely kicks in, their environment is different and favors different traits.

So yes, both of those examples are not relatable to human logic and human caused suffering. They are both instinctive and cause by environment, by altering the environment the instinct is not triggered and they do not harm others without reasons easier for humans to comprehend. So stop anthropomorphizing before coming up with some counter argument.

The third, and I saved the best for last, is the domestic felines' tendency to play with their prey. Another example of anthropomorphizing, and one that is regularly misused. The "toying" is actually caused by a suppressed instinct to hunt, we selectively bred them like this so it's our own fault anyway.

When in the wild, felines have to battle for food, they have to chase and strategize to capture their meals. We selected the most playful felines for hundreds of years, playful being how we viewed this instinct, and bred them to a point in which this instinct is no longer bound to the need for food.

Yes, we made domestic felines sadistic to suit our own desires. We altered an instinct that was refined by natural selection without considering the long term consequences of this genetic engineering. There are many more examples of this problem in other domestic species and even ourselves.

So thus is not an example of animals killing needlessly, it is an example of why genetic engineering needs to be more scientific than it once was.

As humans we have one rare trait, seen in only a few other animals, it is the ability to alter our own instincts through knowledge, understanding, and willpower. We have no excuse to harm any other animal without a good reason, none. This us very important because of our population growth, too many humans causing unnecessary harm will destroy the ecosystems and make the planet uninhabitable for our own species.

We needs these other animals to survive, plain and simple. Nature needs the diversity to ensure the survival of these other animals. Our interference in any way will always cause more harm than good.

We have engineered some species for our food supply, there is not need to hunt the wild species now. So yes, humans are the only animal that causes unnecessary harm.

Thursday, February 27, 2014

Musical Genius - Life Genius

We know what makes a scientist a genius. We know what makes an artist a genius. We know what makes a politician a genius, or a military leader, or even a business owner. But what makes a musician a genius?

This question is one that I have discovered to have implications in much of our lives. Music is one part science, one part shock, and three parts wisdom. The wisdom that is required is knowing your audience, knowing yourself, and knowing the culture. Many musicians fail, they fail because they don't get to know their audience at all, then make the fatal error of forgetting themselves.

They lose themselves in their message, becoming too inundated with what should be, they forget to address what is. Many people will argue that the lyrics are less important than the tones, they are wrong, it's not even debatable. They are wrong because even music with no singer has lyrics, the lyrics are in the tones and perceptible only to those sensitive to such things.

My tastes in music are often called eclectic, I move from sounds of the forest to Akira the Don, then to Marilyn Manson, in one day. I hear the lyrics from both the singer and the tones, the instruments cascading around my ears, flooding my head with images. Those images are the lyrics of the tones, the lyrics of the music itself. This is where the genius can be found, the lyrics of the singer and those of the tones must dance in your mind, painting a picture.

The music is the landscape, the stage, the singers are the actors. They must work together or the song is grating on the ears. Only a few musicians with sung lyrics have accomplished this, and most are not even well known, others are only well known in very specific cultures. Now what does all this have to do with life?

As we go through life, we experience the world, reality, learning from it and being altered by it. The end result is the "me," it's what and who you are. That is our sung lyrics, what's in front, what everyone sees immediately when we come into their lives. But what we leave behind, as we move through life, that is our tone's lyrics, the landscape we are seen in when we are remembered. The footsteps we leave behind, the remains of our actions or inaction, the smells and sounds people will remember with our words.

A life genius leaves a lasting impression, where their tones are in line, matched to their singing, their impressions match their words. A life genius will remain forever in the minds of those they encounter, just like a musical genius, because it all just fits so perfectly. I often work to remember those who don't have that synchronization, either their words are wrong or their landscape is off somehow. I do this mostly out of pity, they will never be remembered by many, but also because then I hope I can learn from their mistakes to help teach others not to make them.

I know I leave an impression, often people will approach me on the street, people I cannot remember for the life of me, and they will call me by name and try to discuss things I have done. No, nothing that I have done wrong, often they reminisce about things I had helped them with. That is why I am now sharing my wisdom, the things I have seen, so more people can be life geniuses.

One could call this handing out free help a way to make up for past wrongs I had committed, you'd not be far from the truth. When I was young my mother, and church leaders, discovered I had this knack, this ability, to capture the attention of people. I could speak to large groups, even when I was really young, and sway them, manipulate their thinking. My tones, my voice, my appearance, it all worked together, so well that none could ignore my words, and they could not forget them either.

So I was placed before these groups, told how they should be swayed, I was used as a tool, and did not fight back. I should have fought back, but at the time I did not understand what it was. I was brainwashing these poor people into following a religion that even I knew was completely made up. So now you are wondering what my secret is, how can you do what I do? You want to know how to capture people's attention, to become a lasting memory in their minds. Everyone wants to know this.

The first thing, make sure your voice matches your personality. Not talking about pitch, that is difficult to control for most people, but your accent, how you speak the words. If your personality is one of prudence, commanding and in charge then your words should be sharp, short, and precisely spoken, for example. Do not be afraid to experiment, and ask perfect strangers if they will remember you tomorrow.

That's the second step, you must not fear talking, share your ideas, your thoughts, your opinions. Talk to people, even talk to yourself. As you walk through life, try it, speak your thought processes aloud, the reaction of those around you will tell you how well you can make an impression. Try to think of the last person you remember talking to themselves in public, you'd likely be hard pressed to do so, but there may be that one you do remember, the one who's voice, appearance, and personality just stuck in your head. That is the person you want to be.

Style is also important, your personal style should match, clothing and other artifacts, you. If you are perky, cute clothing with adorable characters will set the stage, let people know who you are, it defines their first impression, building the stage for you to act on. If you are brooding, dark, with an air of strangeness, dark clothing and makeup is perfect, but your voice and speech pattern must match as well. Try to recall the one person, dressed in all black, that spoke with a rapid, high pitched, excited voice. The ones that remain in your head are those who speak with an angry pattern, or one of doom and gloom, deep, dark, foreboding.

Anyone can become a life genius, but very few of us are naturals. Those who turn it into a profession often work long and hard at it, testing, changing, adapting, and often failing before they succeed. Naturals like me, we tend to shy away from people in real life when we grow older, resenting the damage we had done as youth, trying to avoid doing more damage. So I invite you, the wise and experienced people of today's generation, become a life genius, make people remember you, sway their minds to a healthier society.

Wednesday, February 26, 2014

It's A Boy - Maybe Not

Gender in humans has been something pretty skewed by ideology that we have lost sight of the most important aspects of life. Everyone from street people to medical doctors still insist they know better than everyone else. The reality is that we really don't know.

The first life forms on the planet, the ones we got our genetic start from, are all capable of asexual reproduction, they did not need to have any form of physical attraction for each other. But does that mean they had no genders or sexuality? Well, no, these early organisms likely had the same variations in gender and sexuality we see in the more complex life forms today, they just didn't need them, and had no brains to act on the genetically determined attractions.

As life forms became more complex, colonies of these earlier life forms evolving to work with other colonies, we call these "organs" now, genetic material needed more variation to keep the organisms alive. Enter sexual reproduction, as an option. The earliest life forms didn't need to reproduce sexually, they didn't require the sharing of genetic material, it was an option though. The life forms that did utilize this option, however, became more common, their populations grew faster and they adapted better to their environments.

Essentially, natural selection had more traits to select from because of the organisms that were mixing their genetic material with similar organisms, resulting in more variation, more life, and more chances for survival. This eventually produced more stable methods of reproduction, bisexual and orgy style methods being the most suitable for producing stable, and capable, offspring.

But life is like a weed in a garden, once it starts, there's almost no way to stop it. So organisms spread through the planet, covering it's surface completely. Plant life terraformed the planet so that other life forms could crawl on the dry portions as well. Life was booming, and the only real threat to life was other life. So the original methods of reproduction were no longer necessary, they actually had a drawback in that many species were quickly overpopulating portions of the planet. When plants do, they create too much oxygen and the atmosphere itself can become explosive as a result.

This eventually produced a collection of species that reproduced in a less efficient method, mono-sexual. A dichotomous gender system, one male, one female. This system slowed their growth, allowing the resources to be more easily divided among them, increasing their fitness within the world. But these species came from those who had other methods of reproduction, and thus the genetic material needed to drive reproduction included those of various other methods as well. This proves to be a huge benefit, because it slowed down the reproductive rates even more, allowing even more resources to be available for any individual of a species.

Fast forward to today, skipping the Triassic and other eras, and you now have modern species, humans being one of them. At first humanity embraced our primitive natures, even today we are very primitive actually. This prevented us from over populating our environment, allowing the resources to be more plentiful for each individual is what helped to make us a strong species.

It was all moving along swimmingly for a while, several million years went by and our species was improving in ways no other species had managed to improve. We learned to not only utilize our environment, but how to change it, what we now call genetic modification. Our methods were sloppy at first, but we were so very young then. But our population growth was not excessive, it was "just right" for our species, because not everyone was breeding, and people were dying at very young ages.

Then the worse thing could happen, people decided they didn't want to be animals anymore, which was not going to magically change us into something else. So they found ways to enforce this dichotomous gender system, using social engineering, we call it religion now. This caused more people to reproduce, more people to breed, and our population began exploding. Our only saving grace was that illness claimed more of us when our populations reached critical levels.

Then we figured out how to keep ourselves alive much longer, medicine, clean water, and other advances. We lost control of our population completely, yet people still hold onto this idea, the one idea that started this mess in the first place, that everyone should breed. This has not only created some serious social problems, psychological problems in children, and over all insanity in the general population .... it has ultimately caused us to become our own biggest threat.

Luckily, we are still intelligent, somewhat, enough to realize that these problems hurt each other socially and psychologically. So we are making strides in correcting the presumption that humans only exist to breed, however, most will still deny the bigger threat to our species. Over population of any species is a bad thing, not because it will stamp out other life forms, those will evolve into better life forms as a result, actually. It's a threat to our species because the resources for each individual will be reduced to a level that requires us to kill each other more than we do already.

We have worked for peace in our species, trying to end all wars, yet right now war is the most humane method of keeping our population in check. I would rather us be able to afford peace in the world, than to see the gender system remain a dichotomy just because of some ignorant humans who cannot mature beyond childish superstitions.

Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Garbage - The True Value of Psychiatry

Psychiatrists are often looked on for diagnosing the sanity of another person, or to determine if that person is a danger. In the USA our courts still give these witchdoctors the power to, essentially, end someone's life for any reason they see fit. I do mean any reason.


Psychology is a scientific study of behavior in humans, a very scientific one that utilizes the scientific method and incorporates information from solid sources. Yet psychologists are largely ignored in the USA, the people in charge still give psychiatrists a free ticket to torture, maim, and even kill patients who often need nothing more than a hug.

So what makes a psychiatrist no more than the modern witchdoctor? Simple, they have absolutely no scientific research backing up any of their claims. It's all based on stereotypes and personal opinion, often relying on the highly inaccurate anecdotes of other people. Basically, the psychiatrist just chooses who they want to destroy, and who they want to leave alone, the "mad scientist" archetype.

My common response to the difference between the two is "a psychologists asks you what you are thinking, a psychiatrist tells you how you should think." This adage is highly descriptive on so many levels, I will look at them all. The first being that we know, for a fact, that there is no real insanity, for if there was there would be no real sanity. Every type of thinking, or method of logic, is inherently unstable, that is the price of being an organic organism. This we know from neurology and genetics.

This means that a psychopath is no less sane than a pacifist, a vegan no less sane than a carnivore, and a hypochondriac no less sane than a sky diver. The problems arise when these modes of thinking interfere with social interactions in a manner that causes unnecessary harm to others. Note, that does not include one's self, which I will get into in a bit. A psychotic personality works very well as a military soldier, or even a slaughter house, because killing is the primary thought in their logic. In reality, most psychotic people are never a problem, and many do work in fields which killing is acceptable, or required.

I am a morbid personality type, everything my logic follows is mechanical and curiosity can cause me to do things which others may consider stupid, or insane. The reason it's considered morbid is that I am willing to look into things that others dare not contemplate, I know of the most painful way a human can die, for example. However, I am far from suicidal, I fear being dead more than anything else imaginable.

As for being a danger to one's self getting a free pass, it does anyway, all psychiatrists do is determine which calculated risks they approve and then deem all others "insane," often resulting in the destruction of many lives. But living is not simply breathing, and altering a personality kills that person, making them a completely different person. Psychiatrists employ many methods to kill someone, from drugs to electroshock "therapy," even surgery. Yes, even today psychiatrists, untrained as neurologists, can perform surgery on patient's brains, even in the USA.

They work around the laws by using consent forms, while the patient is under the influence of potent drugs. Ironically, these same methods available are ignored by medical doctors, who actually have the proper training to do surgery. But that is for another time. The psychiatrists have a license to kill, and no one ever questions it out of fear of becoming one of their victims. So what do we do? We fight back, inform the people in charge that these monsters are not only wrong on everything they assert as "sane," but that we are tired of them being given a free license to kill.

One of my friends fell victim to these murderers, she was talked into getting electroshock "therapy," which is only effective for combating extreme cases of seizures, by a psychiatrist. She is gone, her body is now inhabited by someone else, someone who is not her. That psychiatrist got away with murdering my friend, killing her in a savage way. Psychiatrists are no better than Gilles De Rais.

Monday, February 24, 2014

Gender - The Damage Done By Religion

About 400 years ago, gender was considered as nothing more than "what you're attracted too." A phrase we commonly used when discussing that era was "the time when women were women, and so were the men." The reason this phrase was so apt was because of the fashions and styles of the time, everyone wanted to wear lace and ruffles, the fancier and prettier, the better your status was. That meant that the men and women looked alike, so alike that if you accidentally slept with someone of the same gender, no one batted an eye.

That was also the time that religion had just began taking hold of the masses, a specific religious ideology actually, and people began to buy into the nonsense, people who couldn't afford the lace and ruffles. Now I am not one to deny a poor person their right to be jealous, I am always jealous of things other people have that I don't, however, what made this particular era so sinister was that this jealousy was used as a means to trick people into following a specific religion. This particular religion said it was "bad" or "evil" to be like everyone was at the time, giving the poor masses a false sense of superiority.

I am, of course, talking about the first of the christian religions. The odd thing was that it was not being "gay" or the cross-dressing that the religion stated as evil, at least not the part that the masses at that time were told about, they were told it was being wealthy or successful. But why tell them that? To keep the control, actually. The priests and religious leaders were all milking the poor people of their money, and status, just like all other eras, and all other religions.

The religious leaders did not stop there, to ensure that their power was secure they berated women holding any position of authority, undermining the authority of the queen, treason, essentially. To accomplish that the religious leaders had to convince the masses that women were inferior, incapable of making good decisions, and weaker. This was also to make the better dressed noblemen look weaker as well, they were, after all, dressing like women.

Throughout history this tactic is the most effective method of overturning a regime of any sort, paint the small group in power as something "evil" and the masses will agree, without realizing they are only giving that power to a different minority group, like preachers, for example. Ancient Egypt had a solution to this, though it was on intentional, their religious leaders were akin to political parties, each god representing an ideal. In turn, the party with the most willing followers was considered the will of the people, ultimately giving the people the real power.

The system is great, but as we have seen countless times, even today, it had the flaw of being too close to Anarchy to remain organized for long. However, the theocracies that we see in the more modern eras, and today, are worse because of the damage they do to the societies and cultures. Even today women are thought of as weaker, less capable, all because some preachers wanted to wrest power from one woman in the past.

This notion has been manipulated further by the modern religious leaders so that it attacks everyone who is not a straight, white, religious male. I use the word "white" because the notion of "race" has been decimated by too much misinformation, I will address that specific topic another time. This new trend of attacking anything that's different from what one person has labeled as acceptable has also corrupted the medical industry, financial industry, almost every government, and most of the cultures.

Ironically, even as we begin to open up, our cultures mend this damage caused by religious leaders, the progress is very slow. Mostly because we still allow the delusion that we call "religion" a free pass. Religion still has a free pass to do what it wants, people can still claim their beliefs trump even reality, allowing or even causing harm to others as a result. Today the medical industry will accept that the extremes exist, but continually ignore and deny the "in-betweens."

Now, I am not saying we should go out and jail, or worse, all religious people. That would make everyone else just like them. Instead we need to simply stop accepting their excuse of "it's my beliefs" and hold them accountable for all their actions, or inaction. We also should find treatment for those who are delusional enough to think their god talks to them directly, medical treatment, like how we treat all people who are delusional.

The trick is getting the professionals who do not have the same delusion to treat them.

Sunday, February 23, 2014

Doctors Who Care

Nope, the title does not describe doctors in the US, not by a long shot. Perhaps one out of every thousand doctors here does care about their patients, but that's being generous. Medical doctors in the USA probably care less about you than moth being hunted by an owl cares about the owl.

One of the key pieces of evidence is how many doctors wanted the health insurance act proposed by Obama and many other politicians, including most Republican politicians, enacted. What does this act do? It certainly does not require doctors to care for their patients, it does not force hospitals to take any urgent care patients, nor does it require that a patient's rights are honored.

All this act did was force every patient to pay for a middle man to deal with the doctors. Why would the doctors support this? Greed, plain and simple. If you have insurance, they will be paid, in full, by someone, even if you die because of their mistakes, or lack of care. A medical doctor can now get away with ignoring all your symptoms, ignoring all your ailments, and still be paid all the money they want.

The key to why this is a problem lies in the fact that you need insurance, even for basic care, regular checkups, and life saving medications. I am not for "handouts" at all, especially handouts for those who own yachts and overpriced cars. The insult to injury in all this, doctors are not basing their practices on scientific research at all.

There's why I hate doctors so much. A university physics professor once said, on a national program, that he had failed most of the medical students for his classes. This is very easy to see, when you see a doctor and happen to know a thing or two about biology or genetics, you can easily test them. Most doctors still assert that asexuality in humans is impossible, when not only is nothing impossible (according to scientific research), sexuality is a genetic trait and this means every possible behavior that we know of is possible within every organism that has a genetic system. Meaning, not only is it possible for humans to be asexual, it's one of those traits that will always be present in the population.

That is the simple test I use, being asexual I get to see their reaction when I explain to them what I am. Their expressions are often the first sign, but how their attitude changes is the most telling. Almost every time they take on the attitude that I must be ignorant or lying, not realizing that I have been studying biological sciences for the last decade, lacking anything better to do really.

So now the doctors can do whatever they want, ignore scientific research and information, even kill their patients, and still be paid a lot more than they deserve. All because of patients buying into the lie that insurance is the problem. This is often referred to as a placebo, create a solution that only appears to address some problem, then convince the people it does.

The danger of placebos is that they ignore the real problem, the root of the problem, something doctors are very skilled at doing in the US. They often claim "pain is not a symptom" to me, which I know is complete folly as pain is often the first alert, and primary, symptom of the most deadly and serious ailments. This phrase is simply a cop-out, a method of placating the patient so they can still get paid without having to do anything. Their reasons for not wanting to do anything will vary, though it takes a cold heart to not care about a patient, a very cold heart indeed.

So what is the real problem here? Greed, in the only industry that greed should not be present. I am not one to be nostalgic, I love the future, but in this instance the old way of thinking is better. Doctors use to take a "Hippocratic Oath," in which they promised to do what they could to make people healthy, even if it opposed their religious ideals. They took that oath very serious, often even giving free medical care to uphold it, and only those who did care about their patients became doctors. Then doctors started being able to charge more money, the economy improved and even the least of us lived as kings.

That was when the oath lost all meaning, the greedy people, the ones who learned they could make a fortune by duping the uneducated and naive masses, they began flooding the medical industry. Doctors today abuse patients as a means of gaining more money than they are worth, everything from hiding the true costs to dismissing important symptoms. But the one fact that bothers me is that these are almost all doctors in the US.

Doctors in various other countries are often more giving, or more understanding. Many will even take cash on delivery, some do not get paid until the patient is healthy, others will listen to patients through long distance communications without any promise of being paid for it. Doctors in Washington state are some of the most greedy though, a state I am currently stuck in through no fault of my own. I am sure others exist in other states, but as a general rule any US doctor should be suspect of being driven by only greed.

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Surviving is Not Living - The Medical Nightmare

Yes, I am still surviving, surprisingly enough, in spite of the medical industry of the USA. A quaint little story of my life will illustrate what I mean by that.

I have had some medical problems, lots of them recently, and each one has always been diagnosed wrong, resulting in nearly dying. Now I live with a lot of pain, and suffer every day because of the failure of doctors to diagnose something not only preventable, but common. So I went in to a specialist one time, they told me "pain is not a symptom," flat out denied the first symptom of any ailment.

I was attempting to get something diagnosed and stopped this time, before it became worse, before it cost taxpayers more money to correct. Yes, all my medical bills are covered by the taxpayers. Anyhow, the doctor simply denied there was anything wrong without a single test, the last time this happened I was admitted to the emergency room several times and needed an expensive, life saving, operation that could have cost only a few thousand dollars, but wound up costing the taxpayers more than $30,000 .... plus the costs of all those emergency room visits.

Anyhow, the answer to my complaint about it being a real problem was them attempting to lock me up, claiming I was suicidal in spite of me actually trying to save my own life again. A few thousand more from the taxpayers and they finally let me go. This is what psychiatrists are, a scam to be used by the state as a means of justifying more tax dollars to be funneled into the medical industry, nothing more.

So now the problem is getting worse, I am sleepless most nights, the pain becoming too great at times. But here's the real problem, doctors are not interested in the patients living, they are only interested in keeping the patients breathing so they can milk the insurance companies, and states, for every penny possible. Sounds like a bit of paranoia? Well, I would have thought it was nothing but paranoia 10 years ago, but nothing beats actually going through it.

But wait, there are statistics that help my case. This is where the patients are failing, you all need to start doing some research and demanding that doctors do their jobs. A majority of gallstone cases are diagnosed as "irritable bowel syndrome," basically means they are saying it's all in your head instead of something that will eventually kill you. Yep, my biggest brush with death was gallstones that were misdiagnosed. Thinking I was a rare case I didn't think too much of it.

Then I go online, yes, the internet. While there is a lot of junk online, there is also a ton of useful information, like the fact that my case is far from rare. Turns out I knew, personally, a dozen people online who had the exact same story about the gallstones. That piqued my interest and I started searching for more. To my shock, a Google search turned up more than a few hundred stories that were exactly the same.

Here's the kicker, the surgery for removing the gallbladder, in optimal situations, is only a few thousand dollars, and minimally invasive with a high success rate. The surgery required if there are complications is extremely expensive, and can be very invasive, requiring a longer recovery and hospital stay. Not to mention, there is a high chance of developing medical issues in the future because of the complications and invasive surgery.

This is a gold mine for the medical system, not the insurance companies mind you, but the actual doctors and institutions. Insurance companies have to pay for this, and if they don't, the taxpayers will pay for it all. The medical professionals are paid, in full, for their mistakes for the rest of what they call your life. But it's not really a life, is it? You are just surviving, pain and other problems making living very difficult, if possible at all.

This is the reality of the medical system in the US, the reality that is often whitewashed by the doctors and nurses, and administration. They point the finger at the insurance companies, to make sure you ignore their mistakes. It is time the US changes for the better, instead of one step forward, two steps back. We need to force this country to leap ahead.