The hierarchy of being and the idea of reincarnation
My thinking on all of this grew in part from a few sources, most generally a sense I always had form earliest youth that I had been before and would continue to be (I recall none of the early memories of previous lives often encountered in the literature from extremely young children, generally 5 or younger, who also seem to demonstrate arguably residual sensitivity to various energy phenomena, such as auras, what are called ghosts, etc.. In my case it was a feeling.). My thoughts have been highly influenced by Nietzsche (who started from a premise of nihilism or what I call vulgar materialism, then dedicated his career to finding ways first to cope with that [such as the veils of transfiguring illusion found in The Birth of Tragedy], then to refute it by replacing it with something that resonated through eternity metaphysically [the idea of the eternal recurrence, which has to be understood as having had different levels of intended meaning, and which developed late in Nietzsche’s life, unfortunately cut short by his collapse into madness the idea arguably accelerated). They were also influenced by Heidegger (who used Nietzsche as his starting point without the burden of nihilism that tortured his mentor); Heidegger’s fixation, of course, was ontology (the study of the nature of being), he groped around looking for answers without ever really arriving at anything more concrete than a set of speculative assertions and a vocabulary (way of being in the world, thrown-ness, all being as being there [someplace specific with a concrete, essential identity, not being “anywhere” with any or no identity). This was all combined in my mind with the core concept articulate classically by writers like Plutarch critical to into-european spirituality, the idea that all being exists within a hierarchy, or, if you will, multiple overlapping hierarchies, of consciousness, from low to high (from the smallest instance exhibiting conscious, volitional intelligence, such as a mouse to a god, defined as a volitionally intelligent form of consciousness having greater individuation and more control over itself, its environment, and potentially other consciousnesses than a human). You could define a god more precisely as a being having a kind of supremely individuated, powerful consciousness (though not one omnipotent or necessarily immortal in its current form, and certainly not one with any definitional need to conform to some human moral definition of “good” or “all-good”).
You could also define various consciousnesses encountered universally in all human belief systems (assuming some base level of civilizational sophistication) between god or gods and humans – demigods, archangels, angels, demons, djinn, etc. (Of interesting note to me as a brief aside – there never has been any such things as monotheism, that’s an illusion asserted by various proponents of abrahamic structures, none of which are monotheistic, even Islam — all are predicated on the idea of not just God, but angels, demons, djinn, the critical difference between the Abrahamic faiths and all others, certainly Indo-European belief structures, is that while all intelligent peoples everywhere believe in a hierarchical multitude of godlike consciousnesses, ONLY the Abrahamic faiths, starting with that of those strange, little, “chosen,” people, the Jews, asset that their primary God is the only God and that all of the other gods of other peoples are “false,” or “demons” to be denied, reviled, cast out, whose altars are to be torn down and idols destroyed.
The God of the Jews is a “jealous god,” who tolerates no other (though even he and his adherents assert the existence of a multitude of lesser, subordinate godlike beings, angels and fallen angels (demons), to which category all other gods are supposedly reduced The Jews also uniquely defined their one primary god as Omnipotent, Eternal, and later at least implied he was “all good,” though that concept has little support in their scriptures and was more left to their theological offshoot, the Christians, another strange sect, to articulate explicitly. In my view, though Islam is, I believe, a bastard, cobbled together offshoot of these Abrahamic traditions that should only be taken seriously as a kind of retrograde, totalitarian death cult, the Islamic idea is more internally consistent than the Christian when confronting an Omnipotent being, their God being beyond good and evil, or rather, good not being defined for their god by any moral categories cognizable by humans but rather simply being the expression of whatever their god wants. It is a terrifying view, but I don’t think a god can meaningfully be both Omnipotent and All Good with Good being confined to whatever humans might like it to be in a given moment; certainly nothing in the actions of Yahweh in the Jewish texts seems remotely “good” by our moral calculus, let all “all good,” unless by “good” we mean him doing whatever he wants).
Anyway, I started thinking about all of this again during my war with the Kurzweil cult (documented on https://planetulrich.com ); briefly:
1. These people, organized around techno-triumphalist lunatic Ray Kurzweil, have now infested Google among many other organizations, and thus have the influence and resources to realize their particular vision for mankind, which is to either subordinate it to successor “machine intelligences” or replace it with them
2. They represent the logical conclusion of vulgar materialism and what used to be called Satanism (a worship of power as power, with a specific goal of transcending human limitations by transforming matter into life either infusing humans into that or supplanting them with it)
3. Critically: they deny that there is a qualitative difference between life and non-life and reduce all volitionally intelligent consciousness (something that has not been and arguably cannot be fully understood) to something they do understand, namely, what machines do – gathering and storing data, then manipulating it through calculation and using the product to inform action in the world.
To these people there is no difference between a rock and a person, or, as they would put it, if a computer has enough acting memory, long term data storage, sensors, and a powerful enough set of processors to manipulate that data and inform various actions in the world, then that computer could be as “intelligent” as a human, or more intelligent than a person, and thus would represent not just consciousness, but a transcendent consciousness. (This is expressed various ways, such as the “Turing Test,” i.e. If a computer is sufficiently facile at responding verbally to a person to fool the person into thinking it is human, than it may as well be considered human, etc.)
By denying the difference between life and non-life these people express absolute materialism and what Nietzsche called nihilism (as such a denial is a denial of the reality of consciousness as something having any meaning other than the product of random combinations of molecules over a long enough period of time).
I think this denial is both wrong and monstrous as well as being absurd. (I won’t repeat all of my arguments here; feel free to read over PlanetUlrich.com if you’re interested).
Anyway, if we accept the qualitative difference between life and non-life, with life being defined as anything having volitionally intelligent consciousness (which machines do not have, and in my view, can only ever mimic), movement to the classical idea of the hierarchy of being is simple enough, with all creatures having consciousness being qualitatively similar (though different hierarchically in degree of individuation, power over themselves and their environment, etc.)
I think what I’ve been referring to as volitionally intelligent consciousness should rather be called by its traditional term, the soul; further, I believe all creatures exhibiting volitional intelligence have souls. Machines do not and in my view can not.
I also believe the soul is immortal, and merely incarnates in physical forms for purposes of acting in the world. I suspect this is part of a process of transformation, wherein over the course of vast amounts of time beings learn to further individuate themselves and gain greater mastery over themselves, their environments, and others – or at least, within which such growth is possible (as is decay from higher to lower levels of individuated consciousness).
It could be thought of as an eternal game. Now, when reading the literature on this kind of thing, there’s often much Buddhistic type verbiage about the “goal” of this process being to learn how to become more “tolerant” and “loving” with the ultimate object being obliteration of the self in some vague oneness of being; I reject that as both undesirable, from my perspective, and totally unsubstantiated. I think the goal of being, to the extent it has a goal, is or should be to become what you are (as Nietzsche had it) not to become nothingness, as the Buddhists assert, and think they have it exactly backward –
Each consciousness in my view begins as part of this undifferentiated mass of being, then either is expelled, or detaches itself; it then incarnates over and over in various forms in the world as, arguably, part of the process of becoming what it is, learning to differentiate itself, and also to experience, to do.
(An aside:
1. I don’t believe that any kind of equality exists or is desirable, between sexes, species, races, ethnicities, ancestral groups, individuals; we do not see and should not want “equality,” what we see are overlapping hierarchies of ability, temperament, ways of being in the world (as Heidegger would call them).
2. As a necessary corollary, different groups exhibit different sets of preferences, what are called values, etc. All of this is rooted physically in genetics, which I believe is the mechanism by which souls express themselves in physical form in the world; that controls all aspects of personality, physical and mental preferences, etc; the closer related and thus more genetically similar people are, the more overlap there tends to be, probabilistically, the less related and more genetically distinct the more difference. Thus different groups express their “cultures” or rather the extended phenotypes of their shared genotypes in the world.
3. Different groups have different concepts of the beautiful as they have different concepts of the good. In my view, these are not “equal” to each other in some anodyne, phony relativistic way, but they are specifically valid for each group; Jews for example, really do think various building are beautiful that someone like me considers hideous. Both judgments are correct; similarly, the gods were always understood by everyone but the bizarre Abrahamic traditions as being particular to each group (existing tangibly but having particular relevance and currency for particular groups, arguably as more indicated, powerful expressions of the shared way of being in the world of the members of those groups.)
4. So, it could be that, consistent with all of this, there is no one hierarchy of the good, no one hierarchy of the beautiful, no one hierarchy of the true or the desirable, but an essentially infinite number of overlapping hierarchies particular to each way of being in the world (shared by individuals to the extent their ways of being in the world are similar, which generally corresponds to or is given physical expression by genetic similarity)
5. Thus it could be that different souls have different objectives or find the objectives most consonant to their gradually defined/discovered ways of being in the world. It could be that I am a Nietzschean who views being as a process of becoming what you are with an object of obtaining greater mastery over the self, the environment, and others (power), but that others have a very different way of being in the world; perhaps some of them really do strive towards greater “karmic purity” with the object of achieving “unconditional” absolute “tolerance” and “love” and being ultimately reabsorbed into some great undifferentiated mass consciousness (an idea repulsive to me). Perhaps others strive towards achieving ultimate submission towards some omnipotent or powerful enough being, as in the Islamic view. It could be, as was viewed traditionally, that all belief systems are true, in a way, NOT because they all ultimately say the same thing (they don’t), BUT because they are all true for those who naturally subscribe to them (as they are false for those who do not). Critically, in this view, it would not be belief or “faith” in something that makes it true, rather it would be true to the extent it was consistent with the way of being in the world of the proponent. That would of course mean that such truths are contingent but real, in the sense that different people can have an opposite aesthetic reaction to a given object that is still valid for both.
Now, being, acting and observing others in the world are enough to demonstrate to me both the qualitative difference between life and non-life and the presence of souls within beings that have life. Such souls would not necessarily be immortal; this question is inherently more speculative and draws on human traditions in all cultures of any level of sophistication as well as many experiences that don’t seem reconcilable with any other explanation. (One of my principles is that all beliefs of consequence are rooted in something real, however confused or distorted; the more various belief systems independently come to the same conclusions, the more likely the conclusions are to all spring from the same real thing. For example, it is a strange commonplace of all belief systems that gods, demigods, angels and demons existed in concrete form and acted in the world, then, at some point, vanished. I think it more likely that something like that is true than that people everywhere would have just decided independently that the gods all left. )
All human spiritual systems agree on the existence and effective immortality of the soul; into-european systems also all share a belief in transmigration of souls or what is called reincarnation (more often now encountered in their Indian offshoots, hinduism and buddhism). What evidence do we have that such a thing really happens; wanting it to be true, of course, isn’t enough.
- The most concrete evidence I’ve seen is documented memories of small children recalling specific details of past lives that are verifiable, consistent with reincarnation, and impossible to explain through separate encounters, chance, etc. Such recollections are often also accompanied by strange birthmarks and evidence of traumas that seem consistent with details from those past lives; they have been independently verified and can’t be rationalized away; some also exhibit not just memories of concrete details that arguably are otherwise impossible, but facility with languages they have never encountered and understanding of other things that cannot be explained adequately by their experiences as small children
- Were these simply fabricated accounts or drawn from books, movies, etc. they would happen more as children get older (and absurd more such information); but they don’t. They seem to stop around 5; similarly, such young children often demonstrate a sensitivity to energy lost as they grow older (as do animals).
- Near death recollections and experiences from past life regression should also be taken into account (not uncritically, but when properly verified).
All of this is part of a larger whole regarding the subtle body, energy, other phenomena that can’t be explained within materialist structures (ghosts, energy phenomena, psychic abilities, possession, out of body experiences, etc.)
Broken City Review
They should have called it Broken Story.
They had all of the right pieces, too, or enough of them to make it work, if they had really wanted to, they could have made a classic, instead of a throwaway, a mashup, cashing in on the bored January crowd at the movies.
“Kid this ain’t your night …”
They took a dive for the short money. In a year or two nobody will remember this movie was even made. It won’t have its own Quizzo question. It won’t even be a bad guess to a Quizzo question.
Just another one of those entries on somebody’s filmography that makes you stop, and say, “What was that?” “Oh“ “No wonder I never heard of it.”
It didn’t have to be like this.
Russell Crowe was so perfectly cast as the New York Irish reincarnation of Huey Long, you’d think they’d run him for real, maybe someplace more obviously corrupt. Chicago. He’s trimmed down, too, back to looking like a tough guy. Maybe not a Kung Fu fighter, or someone you’d have ziplining out of a helicopter with a Squad Automatic Weapon, but tough. Like a cop who still beats the crap out of the occasional pimp, just to keep his hands from getting soft. Not like somebody who spent the last ten years getting up two hours early to make the donuts.
Mark Wahlberg did his thing. He is no longer part of the Funky Bunch. He is now the guy you go to when you need somebody to look really pissed off and throw a crackhead through a plate glass window. (Actually, he always was that guy, it just didn’t get filmed as often in his Funky Bunch and pre-Funky Bunch days. If the world had only had smart phones and YouTube back then…). But I digress.
Someone knows something, he’s too drunk or too scared or too stupid to talk. Get Wahlberg. He’ll water-board the fucker, he doesn’t care.
Some street-slap lowlife raped and murdered your sister, you need him gunned down. Mr. Wahlberg will make that happen. Con mucho gusto.
They need to do a literate, full production remake of Death Wish and give it to this guy.
But Wahlberg and Crowe couldn’t save the movie.
Nor could Catherine Zeta Jones, though she has definitely hit a personal milestone here in her career transition from unlikeable love interest to indignant sociopath. To those who say such people can’t really be indignant, I give them this performance: if even a sociopath, or a sociopathic bitch, to be more precise, ever really burned with the indignant zeal of the righteous, it was Catherine Zeta Jones in this movie.
And the Dialogue; the Dialogue needs to have a movie of its own, one that has nothing to do with this story. We should start a Kickstarter campaign to have Tom Cruise reprise his character from Rock of Ages, and give him some of the Dialogue, in something otherwise written, produced and directed by people who had nothing to do with either film. Let’s give Stacee Jaxx and the Dialogue a place of their own, somewhere they belong.
Sharp, smart, even subversive, in its way, which is the only way that works, cutting against expectations. Neither Crowe nor Wahlberg would react to the currently fashionable agenda with anything but contempt. So that’s how they react.
The type of dialogue that people think of when they say a movie was well written. Not Double Indemnity, or The Departed, of course, but good enough, the type of writing the typical screenwriter can’t do, because he doesn’t have the talent, or won’t do, because he’s too prissy or doesn’t want to risk landing on some Hollywood queen’s Do Not Hire list.
But that couldn’t save it either.
Nor could the cinematography, or the music. The atmosphere was close enough to what they needed. I mean, I would have preferred more grime, razor wire, burned out cars on blocks, with everything tagged but the winos and the broken glass… hell, tag the winos too… but that’s me. I’ve always thought of New York like that. (I don’t think of New York as having, say, mime gangs. But if you’re going to do All his Honor’s Men, you should at least work in some rats, with the menacing music and the hired guns, maybe have them gnawing on a junkie. Local color.)
No, all of that was fine. Not Taxi Driver, but good enough. Every movie can’t be Taxi Driver.
But it made no sense.
And not in the way a David Lynch movie makes no sense, because it’s trying to say something about the incomprehensibility of life in the world.
No, it was just stupid. Muddled, bad, lazy writing. Nobody thought it through, they never asked the hard questions:
Would an actual person do that?
Anybody could look this up in under a minute online for free… Why would somebody kill to keep it quiet? It’s not quiet now! Isn’t that like killing someone to keep him from showing the world the deed to your condo?
I have no memory whatsoever of writing any of this, nobody does, maybe somebody should read it, once, before we throw it over the wall and go do that thing for the SyFy channel…
It was like the producer found a few unrelated story outlines in the trash at Alcoholics Anonymous and said to himself, This is My Movie! Why should I pay some guy to come up with this stuff? Who threw these out, they’re fine; get Deborah to type them up, move some pieces around, I don’t know, put it in order, a few find replaces, maybe hire some loser to do the dialogue once we start shooting. No, fuck that. They can just make it up. They’re all playing themselves anyway. Tell them to go out there and talk. Be natural. As long as Crowe or Wahlberg don’t actually beat somebody to death, we’re good.
The story was so bad it is impossible to watch more than once without being intoxicated or so distracted that you’re not watching it at all, you’re just in the room while it’s on.
It was one of those movies they start to make thinking they’ll do something Important, Win some Awards, then abandon halfway through, because, after all, it’s Costing Us Money. So Theme triumphs over Plot and Character, to the extent that Plot becomes farcical and Characters degenerate into script puppets, herking and jerking along to Make the Point of some hack who moralizes with a bullhorn. But even Theme never develops beyond the level of an Occupy slogan, and it ends up playing like the grand collaborative product of some State U op-ed writers, checking off the right boxes, to get that big shot at publishing unpaid blog entries on the Huffington Post.
Broken City Plot Analysis with Spoilers
Broken Story is about Corruption, the Biggest City kind, billions worth, and features all of the suspects that should have become usual enough to anyone with the stomach for an episode of Law and Order: the Big, Evil Corporate Land Developer, his Crony, the Crooked Irish politician, along with the other character types we’ve come to expect from Modern Morality Plays, the aggrieved, crusading Wife, the “idealistic” (read: weak, resentful and treacherous) son, the angry cop (or ex-cop, as here), determined to bring the system down, the Honest Liberal Politician (after all these years, he’s back!); we even have the Angry, though apparently Upright enough, Black police commissioner, who hates the Politician out of Moral Pique, and thus conspires with the others to Expose him, and, as we are supposed to have it, let Justice prevail.
But their hearts aren’t really in this TV hack work, so they try to make it more interesting, and that’s why the movie is a frustrating waste, worth talking about; not some NBC special put together over the weekend to sell Viagra.
—
We begin in an intriguing moral grey area, not some shrieky SPLC scripted movie of the week. Wahlberg guns down a criminal, for vengeance, and dresses it up to look like self defense. Crowe protects him, concealing evidence that would guarantee his conviction; par self-interest, and in part because he thinks the killing was justified. Nobody cries for the victim, a rapist murderer, not Wahlberg or Crowe, only the mob, and if you’re on their side, you may as well be one of the criminals. (The protestors are presented as a mass of the same filthy, chanting, hoodlums, degenerates and lunatics you would see clenching their fists at a rally for Mumia abu-Jamal. They do have the Upright Commissioner on their side, but he is hardly the moral voice of the film.)
Crowe is popular and effective. Most importantly, he doesn’t suffer from hypocrisy, the lazy writer’s usual vice. No, Crowe honestly respects Wahlberg, and applauds his actions, even if he is willing to use them for his own purposes later. “You, in my eyes, a hero.”
We move forward seven years, and Wahlberg is an ex -cop, turned private investigator, who peeps through windows with a camera for a living. The Mayor is in a dead heat against John Lindsay, back from the dead, this time as a (closeted) homosexual… an effete, stern, liberal plutocrat, fighting, as it were, in the name of the People, against the populist, working class, Irish politician, to Do What is Right. The story is already heaving and gasping at this point, being slowly ground down under the weight of Theme and Agenda, burdens that will build as it stumbles along, and mash it into pulp long before we reach the end.
The Lindsay character, or rather the idea of New Lindsay speaking for the People, in modern Left Homosexual form, is one of the movies many absurdities. The whole thing plays like the product of a Committee, with the talented members given occasional latitude to undercut the hacks, in a constant, ultimately failed struggle to create something more than a propaganda vehicle that makes money.
Lindsay will probably be no more recognized by the public here than Huey Long; of course, the real Lindsay presided over New York’s catastrophic transformation from the world of the Apartment, and Breakfast at Tiffany’s… to the dystopian nightmare of Death Wish. To present such a man as the Hope for the Future, against the forces of Crony Capitalism and Exploitation…
And on it slides, faster, from the absurd to the insufferable, with the entry of Mrs. Mayor, the Puritan Adulteress, the new Face of the Good and the True, Ms. Zeta Jones. They dragged her out to give a Sermon! In Triumph! About Equality! And Freedom, to Love Whomever We Choose! Standing with a great Banner behind her, the width and height of the stage, for, of all things, the Human Rights Campaign! Not some clever stand in, no, they had to use the Thing Itself. That’s How Important it was that we Get the Message!
In a different era, it would have been a cross, or a Red Star, in our time, we have that yellow equals sign.
The Pure and the True always have one of those things on the back of their Priuses, usually somewhere close to a big O.
Of course, Crowe is nowhere to be seen. If the woman wants to have her Own Private Idaho, that is very much her place, not his. He does not appear to favor the Freedom to Love Whomever We Choose.
He hires Wahlberg, as it is said, to investigate his wife’s adultery, since that’s the sort of thing Wahlberg does now.
While Crowe doesn’t seem to believe, per se, in her adultery, which is real, he does believe in her disloyalty, which is even more real; the core of the film, the rock upon which the whole story shatters.
Wahlberg doesn’t care for the Freedom to Love Whomever We Choose either, one of the many things, personality, principles, worldview, that make him a natural ally of Crowe. They read the New York Post, like the rest of New York, not the Times, like the metrosexual, transnational elite at the Human Rights Campaign.
From here the story gets… confused, slipshod… jerks and grunts… it doesn’t know what to do with itself. Somebody wanted it to be Chinatown, someone wanted And Justice for All… there must have been a few votes on the Committee for All the Kings Men, and there were always the Milk people hanging around, wanting, what, Brokeback City? (No, that’s just backdrop, morality posing, a distraction…).
At the end we are left with Crowe trying to thwart… his wife’s effort to receive information passed by his opponent’s (gay) campaign manager (her co-conspirator, not her lover!) from his Evil Developer Crony’s (ungrateful, indignant, disloyal) loser son, that would reveal, and expose… Crowe’s co-ownership of a corporation… something anybody would have been able to look up in the public record, something she would have seen in any tax return he filed. It wasn’t even buried behind a shell. His name was on the articles of incorporation.
The “scandal” is not even about the self dealing, which is cartoonish here, as the Mayor conspiring with a Developer to tear down a… massive public housing project… while simultaneously wiping out the city’s debt…
God forbid they tear down that project and put in office buildings.
We are supposed to just all go along with the idea that this would be a Bad Thing, the projects they show are a, somewhat, Happy Place, full of noble aspiring poor, more or less, not the teeming havens of criminality and parasitism such places actually are, in the non-Movie world… I suspect the people who actually suffer the consequences of these Mega-Projects being dumped in their neighborhoods would cheer if some mayor wanted to sell them all and demolish them… while the very elites represented by Catherine Zeta Jones, the Candidate, the Developer’s Son, the people who put the projects there to begin with… looked out in smug self congratulation from their Upper East Side terraces, Fighting the Good Fight to keep them there (and far away from their own homes)…
And why does Marc Wahlberg even care about any of this? Why the rage, the vendetta?
Crowe manipulated him into taking pictures that revealed his wife’s Source, of, the public information that she somehow suspected, but couldn’t prove, and wanted so desperately to expose. (Let’s leave aside the fact that this Source was his opponent’s campaign manager, who had to feed this information to the mayor’s wife, rather than, say, using it in the campaign… because that would be negative…) Oh, and the Mayor was blackmailing Wahlberg with concealed evidence about his vengeance killing, though (as perhaps our writing Committee didn’t understand), he had already been prosecuted for that crime, and cleared, so he couldn’t have been prosecuted again, making the evidence meaningless (Double Jeopardy, prohibited by the Fifth Amendment long before it became a game show concept).
That’s it, really.
Did the Mayor’s wife not know who Russell Crowe was when she married him?
Nothing indicates that he ever changed.
So, did Marc Wahlberg really care about the suffering Poor of the Projects? Tedious complications with his improbable, estranged, giftless wife notwithstanding, we have no reason to believe he did. He was just Angry that the Mayor hired him under false pretenses, and he delivered pictures about one thing thinking they were about something else.
There is more, but none of it matters, it only bloated the movie while making it more ridiculous.
Hack work. It would be fun to see a follow up with the Great Liberal Opponent running the city into the ground, but stories that real are strictly for comic book movies.
The purpose of technology
Well, these are fundamental questions. While I think technology can be used in some ways to transcend innate human limitations (generally genetically defined), I don’t think humans (as individuals or a species) can be made perfect, or should be.
Skepticism vs Techno-Triumphalism
The Absence of Intelligence in Machines
I don’t think machines have any intelligence at all, they just use complex algorithms and increasingly high levels of computation/data processing power to mimic intelligence; aeroplanes fly, and are not birds, submarines swim and are not fish, computers “speak” interactively, drive cars, whatever, and are not people. They have no consciousness; they lack the volitional intelligence of a cockroach.
Technology and atrophy
For machines to mimic life effectively in the future, they’ll have to have some sort of cretinization built into their speech patterns; not just profanity, but grammatical mistakes, moronic acronyms, spelling errors… the children of the future (hell, the children of right now!) will simply not understand correct English (having grown up immersed in technology that so simplifies the cognitive demands of daily life as to reduce everything to a level accessible to any mouth breather who can tap tap tap on a rectangle).
Aliens, or, Is there anybody out there
I always find these kinds of statements strange:
Why? We have found no life at all, anywhere, but Earth, nor do we have the slightest evidence of life existing anywhere else.
On secession talk
The Singularity and Abundance
Indeed that’s true (the Singularity is all about abundance, or The Big Rock Candy Mountain). I don’t believe it will be accomplished, of course. I’m not convinced that solar cells or other such technology will ever become cheap enough/efficient enough to scale to the point of providing essentially free energy.
Planet Ulrich 