Towering Babble

 

Back in 1946, George Orwell expressed his doubts about, Politics and the English Language in an essay with that title. If he was correct then that politics was corrupting  language, it's even more true now. Only today, it's not just politics. Social media and a tribalized electorate isolate Americans into conflicting subcultures.

Those who spout unreasoned political nonsense abuse both language and factuality. But one only needs to look toward academia to find serious language corruptors. Academicians abuse language by making it inaccessible to the more than two out of three Americans without college degrees. I suppose academicians coin new terms as a substitute for new ideas. It's a dangerous practice.

Take the term, critical race theory. What does it mean? The term invites attack. If instead, one promoted teaching the history of what really happened, who could object?

Another term I can do without is systemic racism. The word "systemic" bothers me. Without knowing which system, political, social, financial, or educational, is under discussion, it's impossible to address the problem. If I said instead that racism was culturally embedded, I'd be providing a better description of the problem. The seeds of racism are found in children's rhymes, folk tales, ethnic jokes, and locker room talk. Racism is embedded in American culture and that is where it must be sought. Only by understanding its cultural manifestations can we understand how it's embedded in different systems within our culture and its subcultures.

 

Big Donor Man

 

Dave asked me to write something, but I haven't had time. The children's grandparents are visiting and that means no days off for me. Granddad was playing a song by some old band called the Doors. I was thinking about the song and came up with my own lyrics about lobbyists and wealthy donors. It's not much. Perhaps the excerpt from my book explains it better.

WTF, yo...oh

C'mon, duh, duh, c'mon, duh
I am a, duh, I'm a big donor man
I'm a big donor man
The plebes don't know, but the rich folk understand

Hey, all you serfs that are tryin' to survive
I'm taking away the money that keeps you alive, duh
'Cause I'm a big dough man
The plebes don't know, but the rich folk understand
All reet, duh

You chumps go eat your lunch, crap on week-old bread
What we say at fund raisers make you wish you were dead, duh,
I'm a big donor man, wtf
The plebes don't know, but the rich folk understand

Well, I'm a big donor man
I'm a big dough man
Duh, sucka, I'm a big dough man
The plebes don't know, but the rich folk understand

Excerpt from Fix It. Voters don’t usually notice charitable donations that are subsidized by government, but these aren’t the only invisible ways in which elites can leverage government for their own advantage. Rent-seeking occurs when scarcity adds to the amount that can be charged for a product or service. Scarcity, however, can be artificially created by groups seeking to create regulations which favor themselves. There are four ways in which special interests can gain unfair market advantages, Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles write in, The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality.

Their examples of special interest rent-seeking come from finance, intellectual property, occupational licensing, and land use. Lack of competition, they argue, is one of the reasons behind income inequality. Enforcing antitrust laws would create more competition “But an absence of competition also comes from the affirmative use of government power, such as when incumbents are able to fend off challenges by constructing barriers to entry like licenses or intellectual property protection.”

While no one wants to see a doctor lacking sufficient credentials, over-strenuous requirements can keep qualified physicians out of the game:

Although graduation from a U.S. medical school is not required to obtain a medical license, completion of a U.S. residency program is … The U.S. residency requirement, combined with highly restrictive policies on high-skill immigration, makes AMA power over medical school accreditation a powerful lever to constrict supply. Meanwhile, by historical accident the vast bulk of funding for residency slots is provided by Medicare, and for cost saving reasons the number of slots has been frozen since 1997. In 2016, for example, 8,640 graduates of accredited medical schools who applied for residencies—or roughly a quarter of all applicants—failed to be given a match.

If a quarter of new doctors can’t find residencies, then shortages of doctors are bound to lead to higher healthcare costs. Should the AMA choose to loosen requirements enough to increase the supply of physicians, they would also be reducing the potential salaries of their members. Groups like the AMA lack incentives to increase membership and are likely to become even more restrictive in influencing licensing requirements. Unfortunately lawmakers receive most of their information from those most likely to engage in rent seeking. Such groups have both money and organization on their side while ordinary citizens lack both and are often unaware of potential rent seekers.

Silicon Valley is another source of rent seeking. Just recently one of Amazon’s patents expired. This was for their one-click purchasing method. While there’s nothing inherently inventive in a method that saves a mouse click, Amazon none-the-less gained an advantage over Barnes and Nobel with this dubious patent.

It’s easier now than in earlier years to obtain patents. “In 1982, the newly established Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) was vested with exclusive appellate jurisdiction over patent cases. Since then, the CAFC has reshaped the law by lowering the standards for patentability and expanding the scope of patentable inventions to include software, business methods, and even parts of the human genome. As a result, the number of patents issued annually by the US Patent and Trademark Office has increased almost fivefold. …

For this reason an entire industry buys patents in order to sue those who infringe upon them. The potential liability that one might be sued for accidentally using another company’s patented method discourages innovators from developing new products. Loosely defined and over-enforced, patent laws are stifling start-ups, crushing competition, and preventing progress.

Spam for breakfast, nothing for lunch

This morning I checked my email and found a message from Jeff Bezos. How exciting! Here it is:

Hi,

My name is Jeff Bezos an American technology entrepreneur, investor, and charity donor. I'm the founder, CEO and president of Amazon.com, Inc. I believe strongly in ‘giving while living’ I had one idea that never changed in my mind, that you should use your wealth to help people and i have decided to give Five Million Dollars, to randomly selected individuals worldwide. On receipt of this email, you should count yourself as the lucky individual. Your email address was chosen online while searching at random. Kindly get back to me at your earliest convenience, so I know your email address is valid. …

Best Regards,
Mr Jeffrey Preston Bezos, Billionaire investor

Whoa. Five million? Really? Sign me up.

But then, I asked myself, "What's the catch? There's always a catch." Thinking this, I hesitated to reply to Mr. Bezos. "Why," I asked myself, "would Jeff Bezos choose me? Could this email be SPAM?"

Or is it really from Mr. Bezos? Is he the kind of philanthropist who gives money to random strangers? Not according to a Forbes article from September, 2020. The magazine scored 400 billionaires on their philanthropy. Five was the high score. Bezos got a one. That score means he's given out less than 0ne percent of his wealth.

Well, perhaps he's a humanitarian. Not so, according to this PBS story. Former employees consider Amazon a dehumanizing workplace. But if Bezos isn't a philanthropist or a humanitarian why would he want to give me five million?

He could be sitting on a lot of spare change. Maybe not. Didn't he just buy a 500 million dollar yacht?

On another note, my ancestors used to hunt and gather their food. They didn't own much, because there wasn't much to own. The food they acquired, they shared with their neighbors. Their neighbors likewise shared food with them. Sounds like Communism, doesn't it? Luckily, humanity replaced gathering with farming, and hunting with animal husbandry, so that it could invent real estate and other forms of property. With property comes capital and with with capital comes Capitalism and its heir, income inequality. Through new methods and technologies, Capitalism now churns out extreme income inequality like climate change churns out high waves. Society could do something about this, but why stop a great party just because some go hungry?

Is the brain a spiritual organ?

The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain: A Neurologist’s Search for the God Experience
Kevin Nelson, M. D.
Nonfiction 326 pages

Concentrating on near death experiences (NDEs), and to a lesser extent, other spiritual experiences, Kevin Nelson asks how these experiences arise in the brain. He identifies the brain regions and conditions typically involved in NDEs and related experiences. For example, one cause of NDEs can be loss of blood flow to the brain. When blood is cut off to both the brain and the eyes, tunnel vision may result. This may explain why people who have had NDEs report traveling down a tunnel. The bright light they report at the tunnel’s end may be light observed through partially closed eyelids. When blood is cut off to the temporoparietal area, patients may experience an unobserved presence or a sense of being outside their bodies.

Fright is another factor that can trigger a NDE. Nelson cites the NDE experienced by the Russian author, Dostoevsky, when he faced a mock execution in front of a firing squad.

Near death experiences arise, Nelson believes, in a unique state of consciousness that is neither wakefulness nor sleep. This is the state that some people experience just prior to falling asleep, upon awakening, or occasionally while awake. Those who have had NDEs are more likely to have experienced dreaming while awake than are those who came close to death without experiencing the unique consciousness associated with NDEs.

Normally, we are either awake or asleep. Several microscopic components in the brain’s locus coeruleus act as a switch, toggling us between wakefulness and dreaming. Pain, low blood pressure, or lack of oxygen can cause a portion of the switch called the vlPAG to flip us into a dreaming state or rapid eye movement (REM) consciousness.

When the vlPAG suddenly flips their consciousness, some people may report having an out of body experience (OBE), often accompanied with a sense of well being. After being bitten by a lion, explorer, David Livingston, experienced, “… a sense of dreaminess in which there was no sense of pain or feeling of terror …” Although such experiences occur when the body is in crisis, they can occur at other times as well. Nelson quotes a woman who was “lying anxiously in bed, halfway between being awake and asleep,” who had a sudden OBE.

Two portions of the brain, the temporoparital, and the dorso-lateral prefrontal, regions use little energy during REM sleep. They can be said to be turned off. However, during lucid dreaming,  the dorso-lateral prefrontal region remains turned on. People experiencing lucid dreams are aware that they are dreaming. For hundreds of years, some practitioners of Buddhism in Tibet have trained themselves to experience lucid dreams. Trained lucid dreamers have reported experiencing emotions ranging from fear to ecstasy. Nelson quotes a lucid dreamer’s report of a joyous out of body experience. Afterward, “The euphoria lasted several days, the memory, forever.”

There is a strong similarity between the experiences reported by those who have had vivid lucid dreams and those who have had near death experiences. If the vlPAG suddenly flips consciousness into REM while the dorso-lateral pre-frontal region remains turned on, then one can be dreaming while awake, and perhaps having a spiritual experience or NDE.

Such experiences can be life-changing, but do they prove life after death or the existence of God? There is no reason to think so. However, if the brain is the locus of human experience, that doesn’t refute the possibility of an afterlife or of God’s existence. Countless souls have staked their belief in the divine on their spiritual experiences, regardless of whether or not those experiences arise in the brain.

Those who have had spiritual experiences, as well as, 42 percent of those who have had NDEs report having felt a sense of unity, peace and joy. However, Nelson is unconvinced that spiritual experiences are necessarily accompanied by REM sleep intrusions into wakeful consciousness. He feels that such experiences arise in the brainstem and specifically involve serotonin receptors which are numerous in that region. He cites the experiences of John Lilly who experimented with sensory deprivation chambers and later with LSD in conjunction with sensory deprivation.

The use of powerful hallucinogens does not guarantee spiritual experience. Some experience paranoia rather than bliss. Nelson quotes a man named Frank for whom psychoactive substances brought about a religious delusion. Frank was able to shake his delusion but experienced depression in the process. Clearly psychoactive drugs aren’t toys.

Hospital patients can choose either to be, or not to be, resuscitated. There may come a time when those nearing death can choose whether, or not, to be raptured. When science allows us such choices, it risks offending the religious. Never-the-less, Nelson is hopeful that a new wisdom will arise from considering the brain as a spiritual organ.

Too good to be true?

Extra Sensory: The Science and Pseudoscience of Telepathy and Other Powers of the Mind
Brian Clegg
Non-fiction, 321 pages

If you’re looking for proof of psi phenomena you won’t find it here. Instead, you’ll read a history of poorly designed research and questionable results. This is interesting in itself as an explanation of what constitutes good experimental design and what doesn’t. Although the author describes several theoretical mechanisms that could explain psi phenomena, he also notes that only minimal evidence supports its existence.

 In his conclusion, Brian Clegg notes, “… coming at this with an open mind while frankly wishing that ESP did exist, I have to conclude that the existing experiments have demonstrated nothing more than coincidence, artifacts of the experimental design, misunderstanding, and fraud.”

 Another physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, became a good friend of psychiatrist, C. G. Jung. The two collaborated together on a book with each contributing a section. In Jung’s section, the psychiatrist describes what he calls synchronicity, a phenomena consisting of meaningful coincidences, and considered to be an acausal connecting principal. Pauli himself experienced a type of synchronicity as the jocularly known Pauli Effect. Reputedly equipment malfunctioned whenever Pauli entered a laboratory in response to the Pauli effect. Jung’s synchronicity as well as Pauli’s Effect is largely based on anecdotal evidence and not achievable in a laboratory as a significant percent of correct guesses regarding the next cards in a deck.

Clegg feels that current methods of testing psi phenomena will never produce significant results. “What the researchers seem to have totally forgotten is that they are attempting to verify the validity of hundreds of years of anecdotal evidence. … Real-world ESP is not about small statistical variations; it is about clear, specific communication.”