Decline of the Empire

The Religious Impulse

I have given short shrift to the role of religion in human affairs, but that's not because I don't regard it as important—a person can't cover everything. But yesterday's post was about the unconscious, and surely the religious impulse which has always dominated human beliefs and behavior is something which springs from it.

I don't have some Big Point to make today, at least a new one. I've got other posts to prepare, and I merely wanted to jot down a few things about religion today.

When we think about religion, we all have the same prejudices. The common conception of religion involves some (random?) combination of God, or Gods, holy books, heavens, hells, spirituality, ethical/moral injunctions, invisible entities, and so forth. We think of religion as a faith-based approach to things we don't understand; there are mysterious forces out there kicking our ass and we better placate them before they tap dance in earnest all over our sorry selves.

There is an astonishing amount of self-deception in all this. For example, it easy for humans to make the leap from placating some invisible entity in the sky to knowing what that entity wants from us, and enforcing His Will. This invariably results in some kind of war between the Good—those on God's side—and the Evil—those who have turned their back on the Holy Truth, which is known only to the Good. Or vice versa, where the Good are Evil and the Evil are Good. Things certainly can get ugly, as any glance at the historical record reveals.

But the main confusion for many modern people is that they don't have or require religion. This is self-deception of the most exquisite sort. They do have a dominant religion, called Humanism, which is organized around a boundless faith in Progress. These are the humans who think of themselves as highly Rational, guided at all times by the bright, perfect light of Pure Reason. They worship the science gods, the technology gods, the economic growth gods, the social progress gays-can-get-married gods.

They retain high priests like Paul Krugman. Ask an Arbitrarily Chosen Economist, and he will never fail to tell you that the future looks better than the shit we're putting up with right now.

And aren't we all better off for all this Progress? I mean, except for the fact that 17 people own all the land and have all the money.

These Humanists are also the ones spearheading the push to destroy the biosphere, and it seems that they can not stop themselves from doing so. Tell me, could anything be more Rational than that?

I know I have talked about this quite a bit on DOTE, but, really, you can't say it often enough.

And when I say Humanism, which includes Capitalism, you can throw Socialism and Communism in that same basket. Humans can't exist without an _______ism.

British Philosopher John Gray is very good on these points. He locates the roots of Progress in the Judeo-Christian tradition, which inserted God and purpose into history. That's when human beliefs became teleological, i.e. human history not only has a purpose but also has an end-point. Human history certainly does have an end-point, but it's not the one humans think it is

Before the Judeo-Christian tradition, humans thought of the world as going through a series of Grand Cycles. The same shit happened over and over again. The cycle was eternal. Now, in the Age of Progress, we get teleological bullshit like Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere and Ray Kurzweil's singularity.

But what Gray usually neglects to mention is that the Progress religion was a natural outcome of the discovery of Science, Technology and Fossil Fuels. If that stuff hadn't happened, there would have been precious little Progress and nobody would be talking about perpetual economic growth. People would be arguing about God's Will instead.

Well, Gray's main interest is the world of ideas, as befits a political philosopher. He has little interest in the physcial world—you know, the one going to hell in a handbasket.

Also, when you see radical atheists (like Richard Dawkins or Bill Maher) go after traditional god-fearing religionists, you should see a war between two religions, not a righteous conflict between rational people and irrational people.

So it is a very bad mistake to take the world of humans and divvy them up into two piles—those with religion and those without it. I'm sorry to tell you that they've all got religion, be it secular or the ordinary type in line with our common preconceptions (with Gods, holy books, etc.)

In fact, the war on an abstract noun (terrorism) is nothing less than a thinly disguised Holy War between two world religions, Islam and Humanism. I think it's high time we brought Democracy to the Middle East, don't you?

The Middle East also happens to be where most of the world's remaining easily accessible crude oil is.

Even within the United States, there is a low-key Holy War going on between certain Christians and Humanists, though nobody wants to call it that.

Whenever we find a Universal Behavior (the religious impulse in this case) we also have a rock-solid case for locating the source of that behavior in the Human Unconscious.

Religion (gospel music, spirituals) did give us the Blues, so we can definitely put that on the plus side.

That's pretty much all I have to say today.

A Few Related Posts

Economics As Religion

The Crooked Timber Of Humanity

The House That Fossil Fuels Built

This Is Progress?

The Failures Of Progress — What Has Been Lost

The Failures Of Progress — What Will Be Lost

 

The Reality Of The Unconscious

Today I am going to take a turn which some readers may be uncomfortable with, as I will explain at the end of this post. Notwithstanding some people's discomfort, for me, it must be done.

Over the last 42 months I have referred to and pointed out many examples of characteristic human behaviors. We have to take those observations very seriously, for how else are we to explain why humans are wrecking the biosphere and thus destroying their own habitat?

If we take those observations seriously, we must then ask where do these behaviors come from?

Regarding these destructive behaviors, if you were to ask humans to explain themselves—for example, why are you fucking up the oceans?—you would (and do) hear some pretty bizarre stuff. Rationalizations, billowing clouds of bullshit, avoidance of the question—all sorts of stuff. Beyond the obvious distinction we must constantly draw between what people say and what people do, we must ask ourselves where this babbling, obfuscation and denial come from.

In fact, much of the confusion and conflict in the world, and certainly 99.99% of the bullshit, springs from people taking what other people say at face value. What all but a few, knowledgeble people say about these important matters—fucking up the oceans—must never be taken at face value.

Experience with the difference between talking and doing quickly reveals that humans are deceiving themselves just as much as they are trying to deceive you. If that is so, and observation confirms it again and again, where do phenomena like self-deception come from?

Such behaviors must come from the human mind. Simply put, there is no other place they could come from. And since the vast majority of human beings are simply unaware of what they doing or why—they will tell you one thing, but they are also, in effect, doing something else—one must posit and accept the existence of the unconscious mind. There is simply no way around it. Your only alternative is to continue to take what humans say at face value, remain mired in pointless, invariably prejudicial human conflicts and confusion (e.g. politics), and, in the end, kiss the biosphere goodbye.

To be clear, I am not talking about typical human scheming where (for example) a politician or banker says one thing while intending to do another. There is nothing unconscious about lying and intention. I am looking at things at a much deeper level. For example, the whole point of politicizing global warming, even for those who believe it is happening and human-caused, is to do nothing substantial about it, e.g. via carbon markets, cap & trade schemes, carbon taxes, subsidies for renewables, funds for advanced battery research, etc.

Why is that? That's the level I'm looking at.

An excellent essay by psychologist/fiction writer Frank Tallis provides us with some useful background material. It is called The Unconscious Regained. It is long, and you can read it on your own, so I will quote it briefly. It seems that the idea of the "unconscious" has been in and out of favor for many centuries now. For example, let us look at the so-called Age of Reason.

The modern history of the unconscious begins with the posthumous publication in 1765 of New Essays on Human Understanding, by the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. In this work, Leibniz described the mind as a marriage of conscious and unconscious parts, and suggested that behaviour could be influenced by what he called minute perceptions - that is, perceptions that occur outside of awareness.

This idea was not welcomed by Enlightenment thinkers, who preferred to think of the mind as wholly transparent and rational. Indeed, they suggested that the workings of the mind could be profitably compared with a table clock - numerous examples of which were beginning to appear in the fashionable salons of Europe. Leibniz had broken ranks with The Age of Reason. His doctrine of minute perceptions strongly suggested that human beings could behave irrationally, and subsequently, his precocious enquiry into unconscious mental life was rejected (and then more or less neglected for over a hundred years).

Towards the end of the 18^th century, however, the rise of Romanticism resulted in a complete revision of Enlightenment values, and the reintroduction of the unconscious as a key idea among those with an interest in the mind.

This historical stuff is interesting, but has little bearing on the human situation in the 21st century. In the modern era, the idea of the unconscious begins with Sigmund Freud. Here is the important text.

One of Freud’s greatest achievements was his evangelical promotion of the unconscious. He rescued it from the obscure backwaters of philosophy, psychiatry, and mesmeric stage shows, and branded it for general consumption. After Freud, the idea of a submerged agency – or hidden intelligence – that might reveal its motives in dreams, became widely accepted, and by the time the critics were landing their most powerful punches on the body of psychoanalysis, the Freudian unconscious was already an established feature of cultural life...

But Freud’s real achievement – even more than his cultural conquest of the western world – was his estimation of the importance of the unconscious; an estimation that is arresting on account of its sheer magnitude.

In his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, written between 1915 and 1917, Freud claimed to have delivered the ‘third blow’ to narcissistic humanity. Copernicus had delivered the first, depriving humanity of a central place in the cosmos, and Darwin had delivered the second, by proving our animal ancestry. Freud believed that by emphasizing the importance of unconscious processes in mental life, he had delivered the third and most wounding blow: our most valued characteristics – free will, rationality, and a sense of self – are mere illusions, and we are all the products of unconscious and uncontrollable forces.

The fact that Freud placed himself among such distinguished company as Copernicus and Darwin has always raised the hackles of Freud’s enemies; however, Freud’s hint that his insight into the importance of unconscious mental life might in some ways be even more significant than the heliocentric universe and evolution, reliably promises the spectacle of apoplectic rage. Yet, in this respect, most contemporary neuroscientists would agree that Freud was very probably right.

I am not going to beat around the bush—most, if not all, of Freud's ideas about how the unconscious works are laughable and thus worthless. And the same can be said of Carl Jung and many others. However, some observations, like the defense mechanisms of Anna Freud and others, have enduring value. For example, denial and rationalization are defense mechanisms. Surely no one can doubt the ubiquity of these cognitive behaviors in human affairs.

All theories of human motivation must begin with a theory of mind, and that theory must start by positing the existence of the unconscious. The questions then become what does the unconscious contain? and how and to what extent does the unconscious influence or drive human behavior?

Thus, if you observe humans destroying the biosphere, and they deny that they are doing just that, which is most often the case, then if you want to know why they are destroying the biosphere, you must ask what unconscious motivations drive such destructive (and self-destructive) behavior?

If you don't accept this formulation, I can not help you, and your reading of this blog differs little from the typical human fascination with train wrecks and other disasters, not to mention unhealthy wallowing in a state of fear and angst.

Freud's comparison of the unconscious with Copernicus and Darwin is apt and correct—"the ‘third blow’ to narcissistic humanity."  However, the "third blow" has not been accepted in the way the first two have. Why is that?

Astronomical observation easily confirms that the Earth is not the center of the solar system, the Milky Way, the local group of galaxies, or the observable Universe. The fossil record the Earth's rocks retain easily confirms that evolution is a fact, although humans are still capable of denying that evolution occurred. In these two cases, we are on solid ground.

But in the case of the unconscious mind, there is great resistance to accepting its existence. It is easy to see why, to wit—

• Humans have no direct access to it; by definition, it lies outside of awareness.
• Humans do not like the idea that they are not entirely in charge of their own lives. That's why humans are hostile to the idea of luck (randomness), and invent bullshit like "you make your own luck."
• Scientists have been traditionally hostile to things they can not sense or measure with instruments

Regarding the third point, Tallis makes the straightforward observation that brain scientists (mostly neurologists and psychiatrists) now routinely make fairly superficial, micro-level observations of how the unconscious works. For example, see my recent post Why Doesn't Negative Information Go Viral? That's why Tallis called his essay The Unconscious Regained.

That said, the first two points remain. Those points explain why humans generally are hostile to the idea of the unconscious, as I said at the outset. Some of you reading this may be baffled by this post, or reject what it says, or simply not process what it says.

So it goes.

This is the first in a series of posts before the End of Time on July 26, 2013. To prepare for those new essays, you might review my posts The Limits Of Free Will In Human Action, Seeing The Signal In The Noise, and Psychotherapy For Homo Sapiens.

The idea that the human mind is a "blank slate" whose eventual contents are filled entirely by childhood experience and absorption in a culture is, to be frank, ridiculous. But in considering the unconscious, humans are bumping up against the dangerous shoals of Determinism, and the idea that their behavior is largely out of their hands is unthinkable.

However, to understand the Human Condition, you are going to have to think about the unthinkable. Otherwise, how are we to ever understand why humans are destroying their own habitat, and can not stop themselves from doing so?  This is not happening just in the United States; it is happening everywhere on Earth where humans live.

In short, without a "good enough" theory of mind and the unconscious, humans are merely puttering around in the dark. Such a theory need not be complicated, at least if one leaves out many of the details. It must, however, be falsifiable.

Think about it.

Remedy du Jour -- July 14, 2013

Today I'm featuring the great Lyle Lovett. Lyle made his first albums in the 1980s, which is when I first started listening to him. I lived in Austin, Texas in the early 1980s, so I was familiar with the music scene down there. Lyle's written so many wonderful songs over the years that it's pretty damn tough to choose just five. That said, I'm partial to his 1988 album Pontiac, from which I took three tunes. Lyle's music helped me get through some pretty rough times. So Thank You, Mr. Lovett, I'll probably need you again.

• If I Had A Boat — live with John Hiatt and Joe Ely , from the 1988 album Pontiac
• Pontiac — title song of that album, studio version
• North Dakota — live, from the 1992 album Joshua, Judges, Ruth
• Step Into This House — written by Guy Clark, live, playing solo, from the album 1998 album of the same name
• LA County — live, from Pontiac

 

 

 

 

 

Invasion Of The Lionfish

Humans fuck up ecosystems in a variety of ways. Introducing new, "invasive" species into ecosystems in which they do not belong is a common example of our shameless interference with nature. One of the worst examples in recent memory is getting more attention. Let's start with the brief UPI science report Invasive lionfish in Caribbean, Atlantic growing in numbers.

CHAPEL HILL, N.C., July 11 (UPI) — A voracious, invasive fish is out-eating all competitors in the Caribbean and predators appear unable to control its impact on local reef fish, researchers say.

Lionfish, a long-popular aquarium fish native to the Indo-Pacific region, are invading both Caribbean and Atlantic waters and threatening local fish populations, they said.

Native predators seem to have little effect on the numbers of lionfish, researchers say.

"When I began diving 10 years ago, lionfish were a rare and mysterious species seen deep within coral crevices in the Pacific Ocean," said Serena Hackerott, lead study author and graduate student at the University of North Carolina. "They can now been seen across the Caribbean, hovering above the reefs throughout the day and gathering in groups of up to ten or more on a single coral head."

Native reef predators such as sharks and groupers appear unable to control the population growth of red lionfish in the Caribbean, either by eating them or out-competing them for prey, the researchers said.

Human intervention may be the only solution to the problem of this highly invasive species, they said.

"Active and direct management, perhaps in the form of sustained culling, appears to be essential to curbing local lionfish abundance and efforts to promote such activities should be encouraged," the study authors wrote in the journal PLoS ONE.

Human intervention may be the only solution to the problem ... very nice! It is the Homo sapiens way. Create a problem. Study the problem. Get busy solving the problem, which creates some new problems requiring study and, eventually, human intervention. And so on, ad infinitum.

How did these lionfish get to the Atlantic and Carribean? Well, they didn't swim there from the Indo-Pacific, did they?  How lionfish got into waters where they didn't belong is now lost in the mists of time, but we can make an educated guess about how they got there.

... James Morris Jr., an ecologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Center for Coastal Fisheries and Habitat Research is in Beaufort, North Carolina, has recently discovered that a lionfish was caught as long ago as 1985 in Dania, Florida, north of Miami, "the first record of a lionfish being caught " off the Atlantic coast, he says.

The "most likely vector" for all the invading lionfish, he says, was someone (or even several people) in the aquarium trade, releasing the fish and possibly eggs, into the wild.

And the result has been—

In less than a decade, the Indo-Pacific lionfish (Pterois miles and P. volitans) has become widely established along the Southeast U.S. and Caribbean. Lionfish are presently invading the Gulf of Mexico and South America. Recent estimates of lionfish densities indicate that lionfish have surpassed some native species with the highest estimates reporting over 1,000 lionfish per acre in some locations.

Lionfish are capable of permanently impacting native reef fish communities across multiple trophic levels. Lionfish occupy the same trophic position as economically important species (e.g., snapper and grouper) and may hamper stock rebuilding efforts and coral reef conservation measures.

As if the world's coral reefs were not already under heavy assault, the reefs of the Carribean must now cope with obese lionfish feasting on over 40 species of reef fish and crustraceans in a place where they have few or no natural predators.

The proliferation of invasive species is due to a lethal combination of a highly interconnected global economy and human stupidity/carelessness/cluelessness — insert your favorite word here.

Another reason I'm going to quit writing this blog is because it's getting harder and harder for me to take this human nonsense seriously. Maybe that's the real lesson of living in a world of over 7,000,000,000 people in the 21st century.

I would also like to see the reefs of the Carribean while there's still something left to see, assuming I can get the money together to go there.

 

Profitable Technology Is Always The Answer*

*Or, When all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Is there is problem? Running out of cheap oil? Fucking up the climate? Laying waste to the oceans?

Never fear, humans have a solution. It's always the same solution, of course, because ... well, they're humans!

I was going to write one final post about geoengineering to fix global warming, but we're in the End Days here, so I wanted to generalize the problem. Please recall my recent post A Green Venture —Tuna In A Tank. As you may recall, bluefin and yellowfin tuna are being hunted to extinction in the world's oceans. That sounds like a problem to me. But as I said, never fear, humans have a solution. I'll quote that post.

Let us move beyond the absurdity of raising tuna in a tank. How does this project reflect the human relationship with the natural world?

♦ What is the best way to "take pressure off wild stocks" of tuna?

That's an easy one—humans need to stop catching tuna in all the world's oceans right now. But banning tuna fishing is impossible for humans to achieve. Thus the obvious behavioral change required to save these magnificent animals is off the table.

♦ What will humans do instead?

Well, what do humans always do? Start a business! Make some money!

According to Bradley and Mottur, it's the ideal time for a tuna aquaculture venture.

"Japan can't produce all the tuna it needs for the country's own purposes, and the U.S. is a net importer of fish, including tuna," Bradley said. "So there is tremendous potential for us to produce fish that could easily be sold in the U.S., especially if it's a sustainable product in an environmentally responsible manner."

It's an ideal time for tuna aquaculture because the world's tuna stocks are declining precipitously. Clearly this project is going to be a money-maker, both before and after the wild tuna are gone.

And now, let us turn to what seems at first glance to be an entirely different problem—there's too much CO₂ in the atmosphere! Not only have humans put billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere (and the oceans), but they're putting more of it into the atmosphere (and the oceans) all the time. That definitely sounds like a problem to me.

But never fear... because Peter Eisenberger, distinguished professor of earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University, has an answer. Actually, he has the only humanly possible answer, as NPR recently reported in This Climate Fix Might Be Decades Ahead Of Its Time (with audio). Here's a partial transcript.

Lead In — When President Obama laid out his ambitious plan to address climate change this week,  he focused especially on reducing the amount of carbon dioxide we put into the air.  A few pioneering scientists are taking the idea of reducing carbon dioxide in a different direction. They're thinking about ways to remove what's already in the atmosphere, and possibly turn a profit in the process. NPR's Richard Harris caught up with one of the scientists who is exploring this new approach.

Richard Harris — Lots of researchers are trying to tackle climate change by inventing better batteries, better solar cells, better wind mills, and more efficient vehicles. Peter Eisenberger has been looking at the problem from another perspective.

[ My note — another perspective????? ]

He's not trying to invent anything, he's trying to take advantage of the vast wealth of knowledge that we already have at our fingertips.

Peter Eisenberger — If we look at knowledge as a commodity ...

[ My note — what else could knowledge be? ]

... we have generated this enormous amount of knowledge, and we haven't even begun about the many ways we can apply it. So I felt that if we reversed the normal process of innovation, that is somebody goes into the lab and says Eureka! I've got this new material, look what it can do, I've got this new process, but rather said, this is what the world needs. You could go and find ready, existing knowledge that would enable you to do it.

Harris — He decided what the world needs is a way to suck carbon dioxide right out of the air. We're putting 30 billion tons [30 gigatons] of it into the air every year, and it's driving climate change. So he and another professor who works with him at Columbia University ...

[ My note — The co-founder is Graciela Chichilnisky, who helped invent Europe's carbon market.  ]

... founded a company to do just that.

Eisenberger — And it turned out that the best device already exists. It's called a monolith, [and it's] the same type of instrument that's in your catalytic converter in your car that cleans up your exhaust.

Harris — He put together a bunch of these monoliths... [image below]

... They grab carbon dixoide from the air, and release it again when you heat them up. Their company, called Global Thermostat, was bankrolled with seed money from liquor and music magnate Edgar Bronfman. The company has built two pilot plants at Menlo Park, California. But of course there were big issues to solve: what do you do with the carbon dioxide once you've captured it, and how do you make money?

Eisenberger — So then we looked for these ways to monetize CO2, and found out lots of people wanted to use CO2 as an important feedstock for making a valuable product.

OK, that's enough. In fact, that's more than enough because the NPR story now goes off into the weeds and discusses the merits and drawbacks of this absurd solution (also see here). If we focus on the trees, we will never see the woods.

"If they don't tell you you're crazy, you're not doing something worthwhile," says Peter Eisenberger, co-founder of Global Thermostat, a firm that's building a device to pull carbon dioxide from the air.

Now think back to my save-the-tuna post. Here's the quoted text from that post, suitably modified to fit this new case.

♦ What is the best way to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere?

That's an easy one—humans need to stop putting so much CO2 into the atmosphere right now. But curtailing carbon emissions is impossible for humans to achieve. Thus the obvious behavioral change required to halt dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate is off the table.

♦ What will humans do instead?

Well, what do humans always do? Start a business! Make some money!

According to Eisenberger and Chichilnisky ... Global Thermostat (GT) offers low-cost solutions to capture CO2 promoting sustainable and harmonious use of the earth's resources. It utilizes low-cost process heat left over in a range of industrial activities to capture carbon from air [quote from the website]...

It's an excellent time to suck CO₂ right out of the air because humans are putting it into the atmosphere at an alarming rate, which is fucking up our benign Holocene climate...

I assume you see the obvious similarities. And I'm sure it will be a green, sustainable business too!

Eisenberger says if they don't tell you you're crazy, you're not doing something worthwhile. But Eisenberger is not crazy in any conventional, consensual sense—how could he be? He's doing what all the other humans are doing to address the various problems humans have created. 

Now recall this line from my recent post The Heart Of Darkness, which was my last serious post before I announced that I am ceasing publication.

Humans are crazy, but since they're all crazy in more or less the same way, nobody is crazy. Go figure.

That observation captures Peter Eisenberger perfectly. It also captures the Human Condition perfectly. When Eisenberger says people are calling him "crazy," he means that people think his profitable, technological solution to a surfeit of CO₂ in the atmosphere is particularly over-the-top, perhaps more appropriate to the 22nd century (see the NPR story). But when I say humans, and Peter Eisenberger in particular, are "crazy," I mean that humans always employ such inappropriate solutions.

The people calling Eisenberger crazy, like "Mr. Stabilization Wedge" Peter Socolow of Princeton, also want to use current technologies to reduce carbon emissions instead of cutting them off at the source by shrinking economies and populations. He merely wants to use different technologies. Socolow's program is funded by British Petroleum and Ford.

Given the scale of the problems humans have created, these alleged "solutions" are totally absurd. Using catalytic converter technology to "clean up" the atmosphere is totally absurd, it is inappropriate beyond measure, and not just because it's expensive, you've got to use all kinds of resources to build the monoliths, there's no place to put the collected carbon, you've got to transport the carbon, and so on.

But significant behavioral changes are off the table, so there we are.

Humans have a hammer—the growth-stimulating, market-based, applied technology hammer—and that's the only thing they have. And why? Because they are humans. With Homo sapiens, what you see is what you get. Therefore, to humans, who have only this one hammer, everything looks like a nail. And that's very crazy.

Where are the space aliens when you really need them? I'll bet those aliens could sort these humans out

And the only solution available, the profitable, technological solution, is one very important reason why humans are destroying the biosphere, and can not stop themselves from doing so.

I may post tomorrow, and there will be a Remedy du Jour on Sunday.

Have a nice weekend.

 

Humanity's Comeuppance — Population? Or Consumption?

Today I need to take care of some unfinished business which I first mentioned in The Limits Of Free Will In Human Action.

When I talk about exponential "growth", or talk about the "urge to grow" being built right into the human animal, what am I referring to? Many researchers focus on population growth alone, but at a fairly high level of generality, I've always viewed population and consumption as indistinguishable and equally weighted. In DOTE's final days, I was reminded that I wanted to address this important question by a recent article in The Guardian. Andrew Simms was reviewing the work of Stephen Emmott (and Danny Dorling) in We keep moaning about population, but ignore consumption habits. He quotes Fred Pearce.

Three years ago the science writer Fred Pearce, a knowledgeable and long-term observer of climate change and other natural resource issues, published a book called Peoplequake.

Although expecting population to grow (and level off later in the century), Pearce came to quite opposite conclusions. Future historians, he wrote, would look back on this period in history as marked by a, "dramatic decline in fertility and the transformation of the role of women in society." In recent years, writes Pearce, fertility rates have generally fallen off a cliff.

If there is an explosive problem, he wrote, it is to do with consumption, and it is a problem for a wealthy minority of humankind. The poorest three billion people on earth, short of half the world population accounted for about 7% of carbon emissions, while conversely, the richest 7% of people accounted for about half of all emissions.

Observations like this seem obvious enough— the rich people do most of the consuming because ... they're rich. The more interesting bit has to do with fertility rates, which we can think of simply as the average number of children women have during their child-bearing years. These rates are indeed falling, as The Economist made clear in this 2009 article.

SOMETIME in the next few years (if it hasn't happened already) the world will reach a milestone: half of humanity will be having only enough children to replace itself. That is, the fertility rate of half the world will be 2.1 or below. This is the “replacement level of fertility”, the magic number that causes a country's population to slow down and eventually to stabilise. According to the United Nations population division, 2.9 billion people out of a total of 6.5 billion were living in countries at or below this point in 2000-05. The number will rise to 3.4 billion out of 7 billion in the early 2010s and to over 50% in the middle of the next decade. The countries include not only Russia and Japan but Brazil, Indonesia, China and even south India...

Modern Malthusians tend to discount the significance of falling fertility. They believe there are too many people in the world, so for them, it is the absolute number that matters. And that number is still rising, by a forecast 2.4 billion over the next 40 years. Populations can rise while fertility declines because of inertia, which matters a lot in demography. If, because of high fertility in earlier generations, there is a bulge of women of childbearing years, more children will be born, though each mother is having fewer children. There will be more, smaller families.

Assuming fertility falls at current rates, says the UN, the world's population will rise from 6.8 billion to 9.2 billion in 2050, at which point it will stabilise [see chart 1 above].

The Economist can never waste an opportunity to bash Malthusians, but more to the point, why are fertility rates falling in the wealthy nations? I found another article at The Economist which explains the issue very well. It's called More or less, and asks the question Why, as people get richer, do they have fewer children?

One of the most significant phenomena of modern history is the demographic transition: as people get richer, they have smaller families. This slowing of reproduction with economic development is the reason why Thomas Malthus’s prediction of disaster, caused by the human population outstripping its supply of food, is unlikely ever to come true. In the short term, Malthusian doom has been evaded by innovations that increased the food supply. But in the long term it is likely to be a ceiling on demand [consumption] that helps to save humanity. The world’s population, now some 7 billion, is expected to level out at a little over 10 billion towards the end of the century.

Why the demographic transition happens, though, is obscure—for this reaction by Homo sapiens to abundance looks biologically bonkers.

Other species, when their circumstances improve, react by raising their reproductive rate, not curtailing it. And work just published by Anna Goodman of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and her colleagues, in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, suggests what humans do is indeed bananas. Dr Goodman has shown that the leading explanation advanced by biologists for the transition does not, in the context of the modern world, actually deliver the goods.

Bear with me, it's worth getting into the details.

This explanation is that, according to circumstances, people switch between two reproductive strategies. One, known to ecologists as “r-selection”, is to produce lots of offspring but invest little in each of them. This works in environments with high infant mortality. The other, known as “K-selection”, is to have only a few offspring but to nurture them so that they are superb specimens and will thus do well in the competition for resources and mates, and produce more grandchildren for their parents than their less well-nurtured contemporaries. The demographic transition, according to this analysis, is a shift from r-type to K-type behaviour...

If the r/K interpretation is correct (the letters stand for the rate of reproduction and the “carrying capacity”, or resource richness, of the environment), then an advantage of some sort for the socioeconomically privileged should show up as the generations succeed one another. Dr Goodman’s analysis shows that it does, but in a way that is not translated into any obvious evolutionary advantage.

Reducing family size certainly creates what look, on the face of things, like more competitive descendants. Children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren alike get better marks at school, are more likely to go to university and have higher incomes as adults. What these competitive individuals do not do, though, is go on to compete in the one arena which matters in a Darwinian sense: reproduction. If anything, the tendency towards smaller, more socially successful families tends to feed back on itself over the generations, and the contribution of the K-selected to the gene pool therefore shrinks.

To biologists, this is all very puzzling. If K-type behaviour is not delivering the goods then it should never have come about in the first place. But there may be an explanation: that the psychological make-up which encourages K-type behaviour worked in the past but is not appropriate to modern circumstances.

Disregarding how these two strategies evolved, let's simply state the two rules.

• In circumstances of high infant mortality and poverty, measured by GDP per capita, humans use r-selection and fertility rates are high.

• As wealth grows, humans increasingly use K-selection and fertility rates fall.

The second rule baffles biologists, for no other animal behaves this way.  

Homo sapiens is sui generis! No surprise there.

But as wealth grows, real consumption rates grow, even though (counterintuitively) fertility is falling. Fewer people consuming more. The Economist asserts that in the long term it is likely to be a ceiling on demand [consumption] that helps to save humanity, for if fertility and consumption were both growing at the same time, even these hopeless optimists realize that Homo sapiens would be well and truly fucked.

For optimists, K-selection is humanity's out, the fine print in the Human Contract with Nature which gets them off the hook. Writers at The Economist and Hans Rosling (video below) and many, many others expect to see a world of 10,000,000,000 wealthy people whose fertility rates are falling. They then turn around and wring their hands in despair about what will happen when the human population goes into permanent decline because everybody is so rich

The latest U.N. projection says there will be 9.6 billion humans on Earth in 2050. Presumably, most of them will be living high on the hog like Americans once did.

But let us leave these Fantasies behind, and return to the subject of "growth" as I laid it out at the beginning at this post.

Humans have advanced technology (e.g., birth control) and culture, including education. It seems to me that what makes humans unique among the animals, as expressed in this K-selection/wealth/fertility relationship, is that in humans, higher consumption, enabled by education, technology and culture, substitutes for (replaces) the biological (innate) satisfaction animals evolved to receive from child-rearing.

And as wealth and consumption grow, so does the evolutionary fitness of offspring, even if there are fewer of them. So humans do not simply pullulate (breed) like rabbits regardless of the circumstances. Consequently, when we talk about "growth" generally we might want to careful (or maybe not, depending on the circumstances) to include both population and consumption.

The 2nd rule above, the one that baffles biologists, is an example of what I call an emergent property or trait in the human animal. Such characteristics can be quite unpredictable based on known evolutionary principles, as the K-selection/wealth/fertility relationship suggests. You could not know that humans would behave this way until there was sufficient wealth for this newly found human characteristic to emerge.

You could not know that all large, complex human societies are characterized by great wealth and social inequality until you have large complex societies. Little in hunter-gather societies of the last 120 thousand years suggests that we would get the grotesque wealth distribution distortions we saw during the Chalcolithic and Bronze Ages (in various parts of the world) and thereafter, or that we see now in the 21st century. Thus we get the complex, interesting dance of technology and culture on the one hand, and biological determinism on the other.

Humanity's eventual comeuppance is in large part a byproduct of the fact that the biologically determined urge to grow is an implacable force. Will that comeuppance be due to population growth? Or is it due to consumption growth?

The answer is it is due to both, as discussed here.

I hope this post clears up some of my previous statesments about "growth" and humanity's fate.

Hans Rosling is always good for a laugh. Wait 'till the end...

 

Why Doesn't Negative Information Go Viral?

I have always highlighted negative information on DOTE. Sometimes I get hostile e-mails asking me why I don't accentuate the positive. What's wrong with me?

Humans filter or reject negative information, as I first discussed in The Optimist's Brain. And let us not forget in this context that Ignorance Is Bliss. Humans surround themselves with positive information about themselves and their astonishing exploits. Human never tire of basking in their everlasting glory. Humans consider themselves to be the greatest thing the Universe ever produced. Humans think, albeit unconsciously, that the goal of all Creation, starting with the Big Bang, was to create them. I call this The Human Conceit, and I will post about it again before DOTE goes off the air.

Most of this human self-evaluation has nothing to do with Reality, of course, which is why I must present a lot of negative information on DOTE to provide even a tiny semblance of balance in the human view of the natural world and the artificial world they have created. As I once said in another context, the net effect of presenting this negative information is a lot like pissing in the ocean to raise the sea level.

Needless to say, highlighting negative information is not a popular thing to do. Doing so creates no "buzz" on the internet or anywhere else. Things I write about on DOTE—for example, the coming mass extinction in the oceans—never go viral. I should add that when I say "negative information," I am not talking about train wrecks, celebrity murders, plane crashes, or Justin Bieber peeing in a mopbucket.

What kind of stuff does create a lot of buzz? And why?

Brain scientists at UCLA think they have part of the answer. Science Daily reported on the new study in How the Brain Creates the 'Buzz' That Helps Ideas Spread.

How do ideas spread? What messages will go viral on social media, and can this be predicted?

UCLA psychologists have taken a significant step toward answering these questions, identifying for the first time the brain regions associated with the successful spread of ideas, often called "buzz."

The research has a broad range of implications, the study authors say, and could lead to more effective public health campaigns, more persuasive advertisements and better ways for teachers to communicate with students.

"Our study suggests that people are regularly attuned to how the things they're seeing will be useful and interesting, not just to themselves but to other people," said the study's senior author, Matthew Lieberman, a UCLA professor of psychology and of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences and author of the forthcoming book Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect.

"We always seem to be on the lookout for who else will find this helpful, amusing or interesting, and our brain data are showing evidence of that. At the first encounter with information, people are already using the brain network involved in thinking about how this can be interesting to other people. We're wired to want to share information with other people. I think that is a profound statement about the social nature of our minds."

Lieberman thinks he's stumbled upon a profound result about the social nature of the human mind.

So do I.

I am going to leave out the details about how the study was conducted. Read the Science Daily article for details. Let's zero in on the data and conclusions.

"We're constantly being exposed to information on Facebook, Twitter and so on," said Lieberman. "Some of it we pass on, and a lot of it we don't."

"Is there something that happens in the moment we first see it — maybe before we even realize we might pass it on — that is different for those things that we will pass on successfully versus those that we won't?"

It turns out, there is. The psychologists found that the interns who were especially good at persuading the producers showed significantly more activation in a brain region known as the temporoparietal junction, or TPJ, at the time they were first exposed to the pilot ideas they would later recommend. [image above]

They had more activation in this region than the interns who were less persuasive and more activation than they themselves had when exposed to pilot ideas they didn't like. The psychologists call this the "salesperson effect."

"It was the only region in the brain that showed this effect," Lieberman said. One might have thought brain regions associated with memory would show more activation, but that was not the case, he said.

Here's the key text.

"We wanted to explore what differentiates ideas that bomb from ideas that go viral," Falk said.

"We found that increased activity in the TPJ was associated with an increased ability to convince others to get on board with their favorite ideas. Nobody had looked before at which brain regions are associated with the successful spread of ideas. You might expect people to be most enthusiastic and opinionated about ideas that they themselves are excited about, but our research suggests that's not the whole story. Thinking about what appeals to others may be even more important"...

The story here is that ideas go viral because the human brain is wired for (attracted to) ideas which will appeal to others in whatever social group we're talking about. That in itself is what makes an idea popular, and perhaps largely determines whether an idea is "good" or "bad" in the judgement of the human evaluator. The study authors call this the "salesperson effect." The effect is stronger in some people than it is in others.

All this makes sense to me. Clearly, whether an idea is "good" or "bad" with respect to some objective standard we might call Reality has nothing to do with the popularity of the idea. In fact, most of the ideas that may go viral are fantasies, as in this study (see the Science Daily article). Humans love Fantasy.

Now, consider this finding in the context of what I said in the introduction to this post. There are clear constraints on which ideas will fly and which won't. If you wanted to truly understand the human monkey, you would have figure out why positive ideas and attractive fantasies make the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) light up like a Christmas tree, and why negative ideas and reality go over like a lead balloon.

That's the experiment I want to see, but I doubt we'll ever see it. My answer of course has to do with innate Optimism and the Human Conceit which I briefly described above.

But there is a larger take-home lesson here. The brains of these human monkeys are basically all structured in the same way. (There are several thousand exceptions among the 7 billion humans on Earth. These relatively few exceptions only serve to prove the rule.) And the fact that human brains are all wired the same way is what I refer to as Human Nature on DOTE.

Without a "good-enough" theory of Human Nature, there is no hope whatsover of explaining, for example, why humans are destroying the biosphere and can't stop themselves from doing it. I will present my views of Human Nature before DOTE goes off the air on July 26, 2013.

 

Disrespect For Nature

For many millennia, and especially in recent centuries, humans beings have demonstrated a callous disregard for the natural world. Interestingly, before the human population got so large, and human wealth grew seemingly without limit, and human energy needs became so great, Homo sapiens basically got away with their disrespect for Nature. I can't help but think that if humans had been taught a few really painful lessons along the way, maybe they would have thought twice about fucking with the natural world.

The lessons these heedless humans were taught—the dessicating droughts of 8200 years ago in the Middle East, the collapse of the Mayans, treeless Easter Island, the Little Ice Age, and so on—obviously didn't take. These conflicts with the natural world were were too localized, too few and far between, or not big enough to get their attention. And humans don't remember the past anyway.

Humankind's rise took place during the benign Holocene Epoch, which begins after the Younger Dryas cold spell about 11,600 years ago. No worries!

But now, finally, in the 21st century, Homo sapiens is going to get a really big lesson about the consequences of disrespecting Nature. Unfortunately, by the time a really big lesson comes along, it's far too late to take that lesson to heart and do better next time, because such a lesson is so devastating that there's not much left to start over with, if anything.

Today's subject is the increasingly bizarre behavior of the Jet Stream in Earth's northern hemisphere. I wrote about this once before in What Happened To Spring? (March, 2013).

It's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff in weather-related disasters. First, there are so many of them, and there are more all the time, which is no accident of course. If you are somebody who likes to worry about all this human-caused shit, I suggest you worry about the recent behavior of the Jet Stream. Nature's revenge has begun.

Consider The Independent's (U.K.) story Britain basks in sunshine at last. But is it all part of the same global pattern of freak weather?

What connects this weekend’s glorious summer weather with the record heatwave in Death Valley California, the devastating floods this spring in Germany, the miserably cold March in Britain, unusually warm temperatures in Alaska this winter and many other examples of extreme weather around the world?

 The answer according to some scientists is a high-altitude ribbon of fast-moving air in the northern hemisphere called the jet stream which appears to have changed from travelling in a relatively straight direction from west to east to a path that meanders widely between north and south.

A growing body of evidence suggests that something has happened to the jet stream, a river of wind which circumnavigates the globe at an altitude of between 5 and 7 miles and at speeds of up to 200 mph. Over the past few years scientists have noticed that it increasingly becomes “locked” in one position, sometimes for weeks at a time, bringing extreme heat or cold as well as droughts or floods.

This spring was a prime example. Instead of following its usual path to the north of Scotland, the jet stream shifted south for several weeks, bringing the coldest March in 100 years to Britain, as well as devastating rainfall and floods to central Europe and record high temperatures to Finland and western Russia.

Over the past week or so it has shifted north again, flipping to its more usual position over the top of Scotland, allowing a mass of warm air and sunshine to move over most of the British Isles from the Azores further south – bringing joy to Wimbledon’s centre court.

“The key question is what is causing the jet stream to shift in this way?” asked Professor Stephen Belcher, head of the Met Office Hadley Centre last month when he helped to organise a workshop of 26 experts to discuss the recent run of unusual seasons in Europe.

One possible answer lies in what is happening in the Arctic, which has seen temperature increases some two or three times higher than elsewhere in the world, and leading to dramatic and unprecedented loss of sea ice and melting of the massive Greenland ice sheet.

Scientists know that the jet stream is driven by temperature differences between the Arctic and latitudes further south. The smaller this temperature difference, the weaker the jet stream, and the weaker the jet stream the more likely it is to meander as travels around the northern hemisphere, said Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University in New Jersey.

“Certainly it all fits together. We are seeing big fluctuations in the path of the jet stream and where it gets into a meandering the north-south waves tend to stand still in one place, bringing extreme weather because whatever weather you are getting tends to hang around for a long time,” Dr Francis said.

“We see the west to east winds of the jet stream that are weaker and these winds are driven by the temperature differences between higher latitudes to the north and lower latitudes to the south. We know these temperature differences are becoming less marked,” she said.

“The evidence is piling up and at some time the circumstantial evidence will pile up enough to prove the case. The problem is that we don’t yet have enough long-term data from the real world to verify the connection, but the climate models seem to be telling the same story,” she added...

While Jennifer Francis of Rutgers waits for enough circumstantial evidence to pile up to convince 17 people whose opinion doesn't matter that the increasing decreasing temperature differential between the Arctic and lower northern lattitudes is fucking up the Jet Stream, I note that researchers have linked unusually heavy melting of the Greenland ice sheet in 2012 with the meandering Jet Stream.

The research, published today in the International Journal of Climatology, clearly demonstrates that the record surface melting of the GrIS was mainly caused by highly unusual atmospheric circulation and jet stream changes, which were also responsible for last summer's unusually wet weather in England.

The analysis shows that ocean temperatures and Arctic sea-ice cover were relatively unimportant factors in causing the extra Greenland melt.

How does one end a post like this one? Well, some of you may have heard about the heavy flooding in Alberta, Canada, and that too may be related to the "wobbly" Jet Stream.

Let's watch Nature teaching humans a lesson. Not that anybody will learn anything from it.

 

 

Is Humanity Doomed?

After giving it a lot of thought, I have decided to stop publishing DOTE on Friday, July 26, 2013, at least on a daily basis. (I may or may not publish sporadically thereafter.)

I am giving you three weeks notice. I will explain my decision (in part) by concluding some unfinished business with John Emmott, whose views I considered in What Are Our Options? I will also comment on John Gray's review of Emmott, which only reinforced my decision to quit.

Emmott says the following at the end of his essay.

Science is essentially organised scepticism. I spend my life trying to prove my work wrong or look for alternative explanations for my results. It's called the Popperian condition of falsifiability. I hope I'm wrong. But the science points to my not being wrong. We can rightly call the situation we're in an unprecedented emergency. We urgently need to do – and I mean actually do – something radical to avert a global catastrophe. But I don't think we will. I think we're fucked. I asked one of the most rational, brightest scientists I know – a scientist working in this area, a young scientist, a scientist in my lab – if there was just one thing he had to do about the situation we face, what would it be? His reply? "Teach my son how to use a gun."

I didn't use "fucked" in the title of this post to preserve whatever respectability I have left. That was another futile gesture on my part of course

Emmott explains himself in this Q&A subtitled "wind farms are not the answer to our problems."

Is your conclusion, that "we are fucked", a good place to start the debate from?

The problem is that I don't see much debate happening. So it's hardly surprising that I think we're fucked.

The whole point in writing the book is to try to get us to think about the problems we face in a way we just haven't thought about them before, and hopefully to act as a catalyst for a global debate. But this needs to be a different debate than just some one-dimensional discussion about "population" or "climate" or "going green". The debate we urgently need to have is about us – about how billions of us live, behave, consume irresponsibly, about how billions more want to live, behave and consume. And about how another 3 billion that have not yet been born will, or want to, do the same.

Emmott's first point—there is no serious debate or discussion about the human-caused destruction of the biosphere—is largely true with one egregious exception. DOTE is that exception. But Emmott has never read DOTE of course. And neither has John Gray. And neither has ... you get the idea. Reading some obscure blogger without proper credentials—he's probably a nutcase—would be beneath them.

Not only have I explained in tedious detail over the last 3 years why humanity seems to be fucked, but I have tried again and again to explain the deep roots of why humanity is fucked, i.e. why humans are not capable of changing their behavior. So Emmott wants to get a discussion going that has already taken place on one very obscure blog with a dedicated but very small following.

And by the way, I have also explained on DOTE why people do not think about the problems we humans face, as Emmott wants them to do, and why there is no general debate about the Human Future. Emmott is still talking about the debate "we urgently need."

In short, DOTE is effectively invisible. I am not accomplishing much here. I am keeping myself busy. Since you do not write this blog, you can have no real idea how being invisible makes me feel. All this stuff appeared in The Guardian, as does John Gray's review (below). Nobody is asking me to summarize my views for The Guardian. And there's more insulting stuff right here.

You presented Ten Billion on stage at the Royal Court in London last year. Was the theatre a good medium for this message?

It was enjoyable. The obvious limit of theatre is that it imposes a fairly heavy constraint on getting the message out – only a small number of people can listen. Interestingly, overwhelmingly, the people who came to speak to me at the talk, and everyone in my lab, and all my friends, all said: "Everyone should hear this message. You must write a book." So I did.

Take a moment to try to imagine how that quote makes me feel. Everyone should hear this message, Emmot is told, you must write a book. So he did. Jesus!

If Emmott, after his talk on stage at the Royal Court, needs a publisher, no problem! He easily gets that publisher, writes the obvious book, and the next thing you know John Gray is reviewing him in The Guardian. Easiest fucking thing in the world! Like falling off a log!

Needless to say, I was not invited to give a talk at the Royal Court. I don't have a publisher. Hell, I don't even have a pot to piss in. I could go through the exercise of self-publishing, which would only make my humiliation complete.

In one go at The Guardian, Stephen Emmott and John Gray got more readers for their incomplete thoughts on whether humanity is doomed than I could possibly get in a year of trying.

And if I say that I am light-years ahead of Stephen Emmott in thinking about the problems he discusses in his book Ten Billion, which I am, I simply come off sounding like an asshole. Lose-Lose!

At this point, you might be saying "Dave just wants some notoriety and attention." Well, clearly, some part of me does want those things, but what I really wanted when I started this blog is an interesting life, and laboring day after day in impoverished, frustrating obscurity does not offer it.

And if I say that I am well ahead of political philosopher John Gray in thinking about the problems Emmott talks about, I simply come off sounding like an asshole again. This is Gray talking.

Emmott's short, highly accessible and vividly illustrated book marshals compelling evidence that "entire global ecosystems are not only capable of suffering a catastrophic tipping point, but are already approaching such a transition". He sees only two ways of dealing with what has become a planetary emergency:

"The first is technologising our way out of it. The second is radical behaviour change." Emmott is skeptical about the first – particularly geoengineering schemes, which he views as highly risky – and sees no evidence of any readiness for radical behavioural change.

Yes, for a long time now, I have explained why humans always "prefer" technological solutions to their problems and why changing their behavior is not an option. (The word 'prefer' is in quotes because I don't think humans are making choices about how they approach the huge planetary problems they have created.)

Are we fucked, then? Well, it's clear we're in for a pretty rough time. The physical systems of the planet look like [they are] becoming more dangerously unstable. As Emmott explains [blah, blah, blah]...

As I have explained over and over again on DOTE.

... While the planet is changing at a rate unknown in human experience, there is no prospect of any radical change in human behaviour.

No kidding.

That doesn't mean there is nothing that can be done. Unless climate change escalates to chaotic levels, the human animal will muddle through... The shift in thinking that will be needed if we are to prepare ourselves for living in a different world begins with reading Emmott's indispensable book.

Well, the question of whether the human animal will muddle through, the title question of this post, is the question on the table. Although he says humanity is "in for a pretty rough time," it seems to me that John Gray just begged the central question. Obligatory hope, with a twist.

Gray simply asserts that if climate change doesn't become too "chaotic," humanity will survive the coming population bottleneck. Well, having read Gray, I can tell you he doesn't know the relevant science, and whatever Emmott told Gray in his book was news to him. And as an eminent emeritus professor of political philosophy at the London School of Blah, Blah, Blah, Gray must not stray too far outside the bounds of social propriety. If he did so, he wouldn't be writing for The Guardian, and neither would Emmott.

And nobody is talking about the human destruction of life in the oceans here. In the context of muddling through, or not muddling through, only I do that.

Writing DOTE goes nowhere for me. Writing DOTE has not opened up a single opportunity for me for life after DOTE. Nobody has offered to underwrite a book I might write. Nothing happens. I need to face the music. It's time I faced the horror—the terror—of life after DOTE

I have no idea what I will do. But I can not live with the frustration of writing this blog anymore. And what is worse, my frustration is so bad that I have become an asshole (with high blood pressure). I tell people off for making comments which seem to me to fall short of the mark I am aiming for on DOTE. I have become a jerk.

I don't like becomimg an asshole because I am not an asshole. That's not who I am, and I don't like turning into somebody I am not. If you and I met for a drink, you would probably be pleasantly surprised to learn that I'm a pretty nice guy who is easy to talk to.

And then there's the hate mail I receive. Have I mentioned the hate mail?

From all this writing and computer time, I have also developed early symptoms of carpal tunnel. I need to nip that problem in the bud. I changed the ergonomics of my work station, and that seems to have helped. I've been doing this for almost 42 months now. That's a lot of computer time.

Humanity may or may not be doomed—probably is—but one thing that's looking clearer every day is that I am doomed. I am not going to get that interesting life.

I have wanted to stop writing this blog, on and off, for some time now, for these reasons and others I haven't mentioned. I've given everybody three weeks notice, which is only polite, and I've also given myself three weeks to summarize all the work I've done here on DOTE. I won't be wasting that time, and hopefully, I won't be wasting yours.

Remedy du Jour -- July 7, 2013

Back in the 50s and 60s Blue Note Records was the place to be for jazz recording artists. This label cranked out hit after hit, and had a successful "formula" for creating them. Nowadays of course there is no such thing as a hit jazz single, let alone a hit record. Let's listen to some of those popular tunes today. Bluenote jazz was one of greatest cultural developments of any time or place. Let's revisit that Golden Age today.

• The Sidewinder — Lee Morgan
• Short documentary and concert for the 70th anniversary of Blue Note Records
• Blue Train — John Coltrane
• Song For My Father — Horace Silver
• Maiden Voyage — Herbie Hancock
• Moaning — Art Blakey and The Jazz Messengers