its been a while since i've had a cool idea in the shower. when i used to smoke the whacky i had them a lot more often.
i was thinking about how i dont think i'm a very self-determined person, and how hard it is for me to make decisions, and most often i just choose to (or not to) ride the waves that come along.
i thought that maybe i should try to get onto the self-determined path and just think about what i want, and then a way to get to it. or better yet - 3 ways, just to force myself to think about the problem for that much longer, giving myself a chance to find a "better" solution. and then just go for it. i'm sure some of these goals will prove to be total blunders. but at least i'll start learning to play the game. maybe along the way i'll find a way to refine my aim. by then i should have good skills to actually get there. the process will be faster, more efficient, automated. noam chomsky says that automation was invented not in order to make things more efficient, but rather to give the management control over an operation - instead of having highly skilled workers, a machine would do all the work, and its overseer would require a much smaller set of skills, therefore he would be less paid and more easily replaced, the replaceability being the key factor. but in my case, i'm shooting for the propagandist purpose of automation - efficiency. i want to just be used to making decisions, determining where i'm going, determining the steps to take to get there. these days i only every now and then have some cool ideas, but they just evaporate away, i forget about them, or just dont follow thru with them. i need to start dealing more with concretes. on the one hand, people who insist on getting facts, concrete information, white or black - they just anoy me. things are often not that simple, there's many things to consider. but how much easier must this kinda behaviour make things for them! while i'm debating the pro's and con's of having white sugar in my coffee or none at all, because there is no brown, they're already driving away to order another shipment of white sugar because business is booming.
i guess thinking in terms of concretes, units, gave rise to spoken words, writing systems, letters and print, mathematics and computers, etc, but we now forgot the other model, the other way of looking at things - that all these seemingly individual things, are part of a whole sytem, our world, our universe.

once upon a time i commented on shenry's blog...


"dude - so feel for ur paw... in the name of all canadians, i'd like to say that i'm very sorry.
i guess we've come to an understanding that border dudes tend to be frustrated cop wanna-be's, and i figure this attitude of "protecting" ur country and the qualified peeps in it is deffinitely encouraged from their superiors. on both sides.
my brother once wanted to go on a crazy motorcycle tour after he graduated from the local tech institute: down the coast, and then maybe a bit east, and then back up to canada. he was gonna check out area 51, grand canyon, umm... what else is there to check out? ;)
so anywho, the border-fuck asked him what he's doin', howcome he's got this big back-pack, so my bro told him, and then he was asked if he's working. "well, no" he said, "just graduated." i think they told him to pull over, and then that dude or some other dude came out of their little building and handed him this piece of paper and started telling him he's been denied entry and wont be allowed entry until he proves that he's working in canada and pays his bills, and bla bla bla. my bro was just astonished, looking at the paper he was just handed, trying to make sense of it, his trip took some planning, and now it wasnt going to happen. and the border fuck is like "look at me when i'm talking to you!"
anyways, my bro got turned around and sent back home, and hasnt had much inkling to go down south since.
recently, while crossing the border to visit phx' family, i glimpsed some kinda little poster-type thing, almost as if targeted at the border fucks, saying something about them being the representatives of their country, and so to act professional or something. maybe thats the thing to do: when one of them gives u attitude, ask to see his manager, and write to all gov't representatives above him, as far up as possible.
i seriously dislike going down to the states, and really mostly because of the attitude at the border. that and the flag-flying and ribbon-stickering everywhere. someone in china had a great idea and made millions off these new american nationalistic sentiments. they're doing canada pretty good too, but thank god we havent been hit by ribbon-sticker mania just yet. but other than that, i remember noticing how nice i thought some people in san francisco were, and i've heard from phx' mom that once people sorta got to know them, they, in general, turned out to be pretty nice too. i guess people are people, anywhere u look, but its not necessarily that governments are evil, either, because governments tend to be the mere shadows cast by big business. thank you noam chomski :)
that logic works for me: business creates the facade that government is, to create seemingly legitimate laws that create an environment that most facilitates the flow of wealth from as many sources as possible to said business. i wonder if, in their greed to harvest from ever larger markets, trans-national corporations will be the end of countries... oops! look at the european union :D i guess that will be the end of idiot border guards, and an influx of idiot mall security...
but in the meantime, there's plenty of businesses that depend on the countries they're based in for protection from pesky competition, in forms such as import taxes and duties, tax breaks for themselves, subsidies, etc. and if they can keep these convenient structures in place by making small, tax-deductible donations to political organizations, just so they can recruit more people for their cause, then why the hell not - its a very logical investment! as long as the politics game continues, government stays in place, the public's attention is on it, and not on the actual shadow-casting powers that be, and the money keeps flowing. so i guess the NAFTA problems are just the struggles between trans-national corporations and single-country based companies: the big guys want nafta, the "small" guys dont. seems to me like big corps got us little peeps in their pocket: we like the cheaper stuff they're able to provide, and we wanna work for them because they pay more, or at least got benefits or something. unless people start acting more along non-economic lines. but then i think of the fair trade coffee thing, and how corporations have adjusted to that. also - is that all the choice we have? support big business or huge? but it wasnt always like that - there was the seemingly business-less communist idea. but that didnt seem to last very long. maybe because of man's seemingly built-in sense of greed, in all its colors and shades. greed is such an ugly word - how about gathering instinct..? with the twist that jealousy provides, because even if you think you have enough, the next guy has more, and if the unforseen occurs and he survives because he has that much more and u die? i wouldnt think this would be conscious - more like a hardwired reflex which u inherited because ur predecessors survived thanks to that reflex, and those who didnt ... didnt. now, a question straight out of "Dune" - are u a human, whose mental ability has evolved to be stronger than the hardwired reflex of an animal? will you survive, or will u die?
hehe, politcs and evolution - i always seem to end up babbling about those :)
but back to paw - maybe the border fucks found it somewhat suspicious that anyone would want to go to a colder place for vacation. and there's plenty of pot up here too, so unless paw's got a killer strain and nothing else does it for him, or he doesnt want any pesticides... i also figure its good to go when its busy, so they just want to get everyone thru and be done with it.
i was also wondering what paw does out there, just being a hermit? just has enough daily chores to keep himself busy enough? or is he like writing books? just wondering what a guy would do all by himself all the time.
ok, time for beddy :) "

meandering thoughts

i sometimes think of a person's dna as a sort of switchboard, where different traits are either ON or OFF. same for traits of character. but some traits of character are controlled directly by genes that are on and off. maybe even all. some traits, of character or not, might be controlled by a single switch. some traits might be the result of a specific sequence or combination of ONs and OFFs. one such switch, or combination of switches might be the willingness to co-operate. or maybe thats a combination of relatively low agression, and an ability to recognize the benefits of working together versus working alone. thanks to those, we're able to live in societies. being able to learn by example is probably very important. maybe it wasnt even as lucid a trait as being able to recognise the benefits of working together, as needing to work together - for survivial. and all of a sudden, what no one individual was ever likely to reach, a diverse pool of people did attain. sharing of resources, pooling of efforts, parallel processing... would we have gotten this far if our agression was turned up much higher? (yeah, maybe it's more like an array of dials rather than switches...) if we were all agressive and no one was meek, how could the power of many ever be harnessed? or all meek and no agressives. there might be no direction, because no one would feel like imposing their will on anybody. maybe societies are something like pyramids - people who wont take direction from anybody either end up at the top, or die in the process. then people who just have a tendency to impose their will, but will take it up the ass for a time and with benefits. they control people with yet less drive behind their will. that way, a BIG push can be made in one direction. sheer brute force works ok, but greater yields seem to occur when ur underlings actually somewhat agree with u - that way they truly do push in the same direction as u. enter propaganda = public brainwashing. or the brainwashing of the public. the public being the masses with something of an opinion? a direction? a few fiascos in that department, and the name propaganda gets enough bad connotations that it must be renamed to public relations. a little stick and a bit o' carrot and the donkey hopefully runs more or less where u want it to. which might be towards a precipice, but all u can see is the paradise on the other side of it. oops!