Our Friend tacitus - RIP 12/2010 - A compilation of brilliant and exhilarating posts

[SteveO]

Reserved for posts9

[SteveO]

Reserved for posts10

[josef]

aw man now i know i’ve been out of the loop. tremendous loss. very sad to read this news.

[bhillboy37]

Refer for later

[OoohYahhh]

Later is Now, bhillboy.

Y’all are not going to do the work to find the wisdom of Tacitus or any of the other luminous intellects who have graced these pages through the years. (and there have been many) Hell, you don’t even run the simple searches to see if the subject of your thread has been discussed before. Granted, Tacitus is not an easy read. He caressed and cajoled massive concepts of human awareness and interaction. His logic and prose was often convuluted and occasionally descended into babble. But what do you expect from uber-sensuous NLP porno-shamanism Zen? He was the one. The one of us who had the best chance of seeing through the matrix. The one of us who, for a few shining moments, could see beyond the illusion we call a world.

Soooo… while I’m reading through this collection of threads (along with some of his posts in other threads), I’m going to post a few of the gems out back here. Make it a little more accessible.

@tacitus

…
My assessment of the problems that normal males face in every aspect of day to day life (especially the strangeness of the workplace) is absorbing and working through streams of information that end up overloading the mind, before that information can be sifted through and organized as a background screen of wisdom, self image, large scale beliefs about the world, human nature, ethics, obligation, and so on.

Instead we are waist deep in clutter, trivia, rumor, political saber rattling, junk logic, junk science, and whatnot that really doesn’t add up to too much at the end of the day.

A major part of positioning oneself for success (in anything you choose to define as success) is clearing out as much irrelevant crap as humanly possible, simplifying you mental maps for maximum efficiency, or as someone once said, genius consists of having the fewest moving parts, digging much deeper into your subject than everybody else is doing, establishing high quality social networks that support your ambition, having a reputation for credibility… meaning that people can pretty accurately predict the result of an interaction with you…

So I’d say… devote some consistent time to mental focusing and quieting… put a player with headphones, decent quality, a squirt bottle of an integrative pheromone… and as often as reasonable… do some mental integrative process when you can…

Bakedness, Konsciousness, Mindness

Mmmmmm… random observations on Civilization In Decline… Since I haven’t watched television in 2.5 years, brief forays back in to toob-land are unsettling… is it me or are we in a death spiral of progressive collective assholification ? Political discourse, once (or maybe not) the domain of adults, seems to have degenerated to early adolescence… it’s just.. weird… Art Dudley recently put it this way… “watching television today is like watching a sewage collection truck with a talking donkey at …

@tacitus

since I’ve been playing a lot with pheromones in relation to light sources… these things have been taking me by surprise, as I never thought of light quality as a significant influence on pheromone response… my experiments are now suggesting (at best a suggestion, much need to be done to confirm or disconfirm these “discoveries”… i.e. that they are not just random coincidences that create the illusion of correlation of of strong causality…)

I have been testing identical pheromone mixes on multiple sexual partners, and changing the light used during sex… with an incandescent, broad spectrum blue light, as opposed to a true monochrome LED emission blue, the pheromone mix produced a playful more emotional, verbal communicative state that did not have a fundamental, animalistic sexual note, it was as if under the influence of blue energy, the mind was more humorous, free floating, non goal driven, the pleasures were diffused around emotions, feeling, and physical sensations… while under the orange light the identical pheromones were part of a “lightening bolt orgasm” experience where the orgasmee is struck with a stunning, whole body spasm, breathless type of orgasm… I noticed my own feelings and energy flows were also quite sensitive to the light color… substantially more so than without the presence of pheromones…

I am starting to think that as light has an impact on the hypothalamus, and pheromones certainly do as well, the hypothalamus must be co-reacting to the intersection of these two factors… perhaps the ideal environment would have a three color mixing panel where precise light levels, color saturation, and hues could be specified to ideally react with the pheromone state… this may be a major component in why people will have one type of pheromone experience in one environment and a very different on in another, such as under corporate energy saver fluouescents, or under moonlight, on in bright daylight, or say, orangey club lights… I do notice how many clubs and bars have converged on an orangish color… must be that the bar sells the most drinks under these conditions… makes me wonder what happens in the middle of the spectrum with greens, yellows, indigos, and maybe also with really pure LED violet colors…

@tacitus

which sorta makes sense… light, fragrances, primitive balance sensing, some auditory information innervates to both higher level processes, what we might term “aesthetic” where we consciously contemplate it, and also subcortical parts of our awareness… parts of out mind where experiences are formed into gestalts… pheromones do absolutely appear to address the subcortical gestalt consciousness as one of a multitude of factors working on that level of awareness… so naturally you have to wonder… would certain ambient sounds, like shaped white noises, or water sounds, or whatever, also feed into these consciousness shaping processes ?

@tacitus

noise shaping often means arranging spectral distribution… there are whole claaes of noise colors, blue noise, brown noise, 1/f noise which might not be the same as brown noise, red noise… and of course, one of my favorites, black noise… yup, it exists as either a mathematical construct (cauchy noise) or stuff you can listen to… I sorta came to this by observation when I was listening to raindrops hit the window and noticed that certain patterns of raindrops that came in persistant-intermittent spatters of a certain frequency were having an exceptional general effect on my neurology… this “shaped randomness” which had bursts and lulls does satisfy some of the definition of “black noise” , somewhat as does the crackling sound of a fire…and to some extent also the babbling brook sound, which is somewhere between brown and black noise, I was thinking if you could replicate some of that mesmerizing stacatto that is both consistent and inconsistent you have a non distracting sound (that’s the major drawback to most attempts at romantic-erotic-sensual music… it over engages the mind, and the mind atempts to synchronize with the music, which can be at odds with the body mind rhythms) where the pure white noise source is overconsistent… so it would seem that the trick on the level of auditory neurology, is to randomize in very controlled ways that allow the mind to flow freely and remain deeply focused without being “thoughty” … odd thing is a bunch of smart Chinese have introduced this identical idea as a therapeutic device that emits infrasonic energy as a way of introducing “healthy randomess” into ill parts of the body… if you place one of their infrasound transducers on your mattress, the bed will wurble with an almost imperceptible, but delightfully strange sense of aliveness… which, naturally will be the subject of an upcoming experiment… and what shall we call this one, The Black Noise Orgasm ? Probably will be noisy in any case… some of these women when they let go, man they really let go… I think I completely understand the true origin of the opera now… as for babbling brook sounds… I knew this gal who ran an excellent cathouse, she fully grokked the aesthetics of sex, and went to the trouble of obtaining small illuminated tabletop fountains for each room that produced a specific gurgling sound… she must have searched for ages before she found the ones that generated the exactly right combination of softness and plangeance with the precisely right noise structure… something about that sound could trigger profound erotic states of consciousness, especially when coupled with flickering oil lamps… althought I think flicker noise or 1/f noise is somewhat distinct from black noise, a degree of blackness/cauchy persistance seems to cause the sound to have a much deeper traction in the mind…

@tacitus

which sorta makes sense… light, fragrances, primitive balance sensing, some auditory information innervates to both higher level processes, what we might term “aesthetic” where we consciously contemplate it, and also subcortical parts of our awareness… parts of out mind where experiences are formed into gestalts… pheromones do absolutely appear to address the subcortical gestalt consciousness as one of a multitude of factors working on that level of awareness… so naturally you have to wonder… would certain ambient sounds, like shaped white noises, or water sounds, or whatever, also feed into these consciousness shaping processes ?

@tacitus

I would never conclude anything of the sort… the real action is in the mind itself… the mind is a “reality generating machine”… so the things you perceive as existing outside of yourself are actually the mind’s (meaning the lower and intermediate perception forming process as the higher “meaning” forming processes) description of reality… music is only vibrating air molecules that takes on beauty and meaning within your mind… of course a composer’s mind had to appreciate how to vibrate those molecules so your mind would react to them in a positive way. It is hard to know how one variable will impact the individual’s sense of pleasure or meaning… I’ve been listening to many slow wave type musics, drones, ambients, stuff designed for mental exploration, meditation, massage… even some with binauaral beat layers for specific frequencies… thinking that if you experience them just so you might induce a consciousness shifting state during sex… pheromones are one possible high quality experience shaper that might alter or deepen this moment into some kind of mind opening trance phenomenon… pheromones+carefully designed environment+right person+mental preparation might = extra-galactic head repositioning…

There is this outrageously bizarre women I discovered who say she does super-deep level sex hypnosis… although her, emmmmmm, specialty appear to be somewhat of an acquired taste: …
hope that link works… my own thoughts were… yikes ! A hypno-dominatrix ? What has the world come to… psychokink ?

Maybe I’ll stick to recordings of cicadas, surf pounding on the beach, north indian classical music…

@tacitus

as with most brain chemisty, endorphins and enkeaphalins are a large topic, and there is a new class of “bliss neurotransmitters” called anandamides… they supposedly give you feeling of pleasure and satisfaction from eating fatty foods and smoking pot, among other things…

“The researchers found that anandamide is part of a network of nerve cells in an area of the brain called the striatum, which coordinates all body movements and other motor behavior. In the striatum, the anandamide network inhibited dopamine’s attempts to stimulate the body’s motor nerves. Normally, nerve cells regulate this behavior by releasing anandamides at the same time they release dopamine. In order to temper the effects of dopamine, the anandamides bind to nerve cell sites called cannabinoid receptors, so-named because they are targets of tetrahydrocannabinol (marijuana’s active ingredient) as well as related chemicals like anandamides. When anandamides were bound to these receptors, body movement in the rats decreased.”

This might explain why after good sex or smoking cannabis materials, people tend to be lethargic and physically sort of stuporous..

Some pheromones or putatives might, that’s a very tenetative “might”, have a moderate impact on endorphin or anandamide receptors..

However, as the drug companies figured out with other aspects of brain chemistry… this issue might be how fast a particular brain breaks down pleasure chemicals… as many medicine like Prozac actually work by preventing the breakdown of neurotransmitters… it’s up to your brain to make them…

@tacitus

there’s something about aerobic sex that appear to have an awesomely tonic effect on the entire body-mind apparatus… hooray pheromones! … it seems like it is maximizing Heart Rate Variability by some poorly understood mechanism that I would guess has to do with rejuvenating the vagus nerve(s) signal quality, or the way the vagus nerve is communicating with the brainstem… also have observed that when doing a lot of aerobic fucking it is very easy to maintain my weight regardless of what I eat or when… but it has to be fully engaged, passionate sweaty sex… the critical element is the deep sense of engagement on multiple levels of being… it just has to be retuning the sympathetic-parasympatheic balances of the autonomic nervous system which include appetitive responses… the implications of this are fairly astounding… that “passionate sex deficiency” might actually be a clinical condition that we, as a health conscious society, must address with all of our available resources… imagine if these clusters of depression, obeisity, cardiovascular disease, low grade rage that often manifests when operating motor vehicles, substance abuse… could all be fucked into oblivion… Harris will get the Nobel Peace Prize…

@tacitus

now tinkering with nature sounds and shaped noises… Jane the legendary whoremistress of the legendary Jane’s was right about the musical tones of water when right on the money… some recordings are too white noisy, waterfalls come to mind, and some are too sputtery-crackly like fire recordings… surf and wind sounds have been middle level successes… the best by far are the sounds of slow moving streams and very delicate shorline sounds that have a burble, almost a laughing tone to them, sort of a musical randomness with a low frequency ebb and flow… when all else is in place these sounds can be so freaking erotic… and some eastern bamboo flute sounds, or mixtures of ambient musics and wet sounds… they seem to create a state of long time distortion and help delay and synchronize orgasms and build ups to near orgasms so you can stay in the zone for a long time and resultantly have a potent brain massage…

Other interactions....

since I’ve been playing a lot with pheromones in relation to light sources… these things have been taking me by surprise, as I never thought of light quality as a significant influence on pheromone response… my experiments are now suggesting (at best a suggestion, much need to be done to confirm or disconfirm these “discoveries”… i.e. that they are not just random coincidences that create the illusion of correlation of of strong causality…) I have been testing identical pheromone mixes on multi…

[OoohYahhh]

My post pheromone self... game as instinct training ?

Fine and well… there was a phase not too long ago where something indefinite began to shift in the way I was relating to people, the pheromone experiments appeared to allow my brain to wire in new social circuits in ways I hadn’t appreciated, and even now do not understand… That said, WTF ? Throughout the day it is like women just start talking to me out of the blue and STICK to me… older, younger, straight, gay… and I’m not wearing any pheromone, cologne, or “social signifier” that says… well……

@tacitus

Fine and well… there was a phase not too long ago where something indefinite began to shift in the way I was relating to people, the pheromone experiments appeared to allow my brain to wire in new social circuits in ways I hadn’t appreciated, and even now do not understand…

That said, WTF ? Throughout the day it is like women just start talking to me out of the blue and STICK to me… older, younger, straight, gay… and I’m not wearing any pheromone, cologne, or “social signifier” that says… well… whatever…

Like, por ejemplo, walking down Bleeker street and this chick is trying to wrassle up customers to the comedy club, and we banter for no more than three seconds and she starts walking along with me, pressed into my side like a long lost girlfriend, and she wants to keep talking for, mmm, two blocks ? Errrr… never met this chick, never laid eyes on her… I’m not in PUA mode, I want to get home and eat raw almonds and read about the Authoritarin Personality and take a hot bath… YoooKay…

Hot older dyke wants to talk about body language, younger bored girls want to talk about the south pacific…

What does it all mean, Sherlock ? I deduce that over time the pheromones had unconsciously got me into novel behavior patterns that are either too gnereral, too subtle, too nuanced… such as they can’t be easily written down or put in instructional form… and slowly but surely these attiitudes-behaviors-thought patterns began to fuse into a personal social style...

So here’s one (more) vote for the theory that pheromones in conjunction with other behavior changing processes, learning tools, etc… actually act as “game skill development catalysts”… where eventually the pheromone might be a nice extra nudge while the real work has taken place in the mind of the user ?

@tacitus

OK.. I’lll repeat that… the real work has taken place in the mind of the user… who is the one exposed to the highest concentrations… the user, or wearer, has about 90% unconsciousness of how he (or) she is perceived by other people. Most have no idea how others see them, or really feel about them. Most behavior is unconscious, automatic pattern... and the best psychology theory tells us that the personality is strongly established before 5 years of age… and then it changes slowly, with difficulty…

Sooo.. what this also reveals is those people who are succesfull with others, either gettting good partners, or business, or whatever, probably were exposed to successful child rearing patterns which set these skills in place before there was any self consciousness…

What I believe pheromones are (partially) capable of doing is softening some of the rigid or deeply set internal structures so one can become flexible again and learn new relating patterns, assuming one is so motivated, and by practicing them over and over one is given a second chance at behavioral self patterning… so low success or frustration can change into high success or social ease…

At which point the pheromone is nice, however the success comes from deep level personal change… either of attitudes towards others or attitudes towards oneself, or expectations of how others might perceive us, or how we expect them to react to us…

@tacitus

Looks like my next reading project is The Dependent Personality by Robert Bornstein… one might begin to think that certain personality types (the Dependent type is sort of an amped up Oral-Passive who had, ummmm, “issues” with rebellion, autonomy, and parent-child differentiation) will naturally fall into dependency relationships with just about anything… including pheromones as The Answer… often the human-human relationship dynamics will have a closed in, energy sucking need… suffocating cuddly dreams of big down comforters and heaping plates of chocolate chip cookies (sinfully rich!) and cozy, cozy, cozy… one wonders about the natural audience for all those foodie lyfestyle publications, tankards of foamy beer, puttering around in big sheet steel uteruses called SUVs, while suck, suck, sucking on a 64 ounce Pineapple-Vanilla-Strawberry-Frostee Frappe and much, munch, munching on a nice big greasy Big Boy (eeeewwwwww… )…

Needless to say, the same dynamics can be turned loose on the playground of the psyche known as Pheromones… making them RESPONSIBLE… you know the drill… something out there MADE ME do something… those Big Boys MADE ME eat them ! That booze MADE ME drink it by… well.. by being so irresistible I just had to… pass out in the stall with my head between my legs…

This may be counterintuitive as all hell, but I think Pheromones combined with the right mindset actually increase one’s awareness, and as a result they increase one’s SELF AGENCY (taking appropriate and self reflective responsibility for one’s state of being)… because they may loosen the set-in-epoxy early socializations enough that one can step aside and inquire, WHY did I believe it was necessary to think (about myself, about my social connections, about the way the world in general is put together) like that ?

This may explain why some people appear to have moments of existential shock when a basically inauthentic, rigid, contrived, artificial, or other form of psycho-bullshit identity suddenly experiences the fresh, liberating air of real emotion…

@tacitus

The take home goodie lesson is that one should understand what oral-dependency IS… as a life shaping character trait that is programmed in early and has consequences... my mentioning “foodie” culture was to point at the deep oral-dependency programmming very basic in american (and more so with every year… out to global consumer culture) attitudes…

The Shrinx of the world (the people you/we pay good money to straighten us out and send us merrily on our way) have connected the dots…

The dots in question are the relations of links deep in our unconscious minds between safety, identity, nurturance, obedience, the way our primary connections form and are maintained, and how we stuff our faces on a regular basis…

Thus… early experiences with food, how we are fed, the sorts of stuff we are fed slowly generalize into “global attitudes” about how we relate to romantic interests (what we carry around as an inner model of a nurturing relationship), how we consume information… can’t help but notice that much of the information we consume is strongly geared to oral-dependent psychology… i.e. over simplified baby food or crispy sweet snacks, nothing that requires too much chewing or strong digestive enzymes, please… we bore easily, you must understand…

Well, well… how do pheromones fit in with all these breast feeding issues ? Orals, you see, even in big guys, are what they call the “unreflective, good time Charlie” personality… yee haw, spring break dude,
lotsa nachos and tits (hmmmmm saith the freudians… ) that many a glorious young femme has learned to be oh so wary around… because the oral can go from the ego-syntonic party hearty state to the collapsed, ego-dystonic state of desperate neediness, blubbery sob fests when she changes her mind, huggy snuggly clingy demand for nipple, for nacho, for brewski… and orally fixated women ? Don’t get me started, especially those goddam oral expulsive types that yammer on incessantly about the most trivial ass shite, sending their plate back to the kitchen three times because the shrimp isn’t just so… and home again home again jiggety jig to settle in to some serious TV viewing (“her” show, the one she “has to” watch… or she’ll get cranky… orals are famous for getting cranky… frustrated orals are in sort of a permanent low grade stew about all their irritiations, like they have fiberglass insualtion particles under their clothes… nothing a nice tub of Ben and Jerry’s won’t fix, for about 2 hours until the insulin shock wears off)…

Enter the Sherriff… some get down bad ass pheromone mix that cuts through the crap like Drano through bacon grease. Wham bam… real emotion… direct contact… all the buffers and cushy stuffy goo goo out of the way.. let’s get real baby, talk truth, quit the act and be the resolved state… holy mother of mike ! Saying what you mean and meaning what you say… coming from the gut for once instead of dancing around the fat layers… breathtaking, shocking… you know it’s hard… hard as all get out to be real, undefended… not have a whole heap of defense mechanisms to numb the feelings… heck, a lot of people are scared shitless of real emotion… it is so anti-ritualistic… so anti-compuslive… so anti-fraudulent… so freaking liberating, so refreshing, so ballsy and simple… therefore so feared.

@tacitus

Heh… don’t get me started on social masochism…

All ye Playas must know the basic point: there is “the game”… as in a rather narrow focus subculture doing its best with an fairly limited theoretical toolset… and then there is The Game… the big time, megabucks, play for keeps Great Kahuna game… annnd, if you want to score off the Real Game, in this day and age, you have to know psychodynamics backwards… kid you not, Roscoe… mmmmm… you’ll notice that the business book sections don’t go into psychodynamics ? It’s not like this stuff isn’t well known and utterly essential to high level success, it’s more like it is too important a subject to speak freely about among the SheepFolk…

You can’t consider a marketing campaign, product development, making a movie or televsion programming, politics, opening a restaurant franchise, getting over on the collective of humanity in any way, shape or form without a highly refined knowledge of personality structure and psychodynamic function… why izzat ? Because, mon grasshopper, those with billions who have an abiding desire to turn them into deca-billions or centi-billions KNOW… the money is in reflexive, unconscious responses to carefully shaped stimuli… the money is NOT in rational argumentation as to why you should compare nutritional content statements about the level of reprocessed beef tallow in that yummy pizza crust…

Like, you think any emotionally activating, emotionally charged television show is that way by accident ? You think Fox News hasn’t studied PPD (paranoid personality disorder) and the Authoritarian Personality style under the equivalent or an electron microscope ?.. and every tiny tweak, every nuance they can play around with is inteneded, on multiple levels, to be emotionally triggering to every unconscious hot button these personality styles are encrusted with ?

Not to single out such fine minds as those responsible for Fox programming, as just about everything you see, hear, or read is made with a particular “psychographic” in mind, hopefully one with a lot of spending power…

See… this is how the Big Time Game works, to play whole segments of the population while convincing them that they are thinking for themselves… “we report, you decide”… uhhhh, sure…

Or, take the mushrooming of that magnificent expression of the aesthetic imagination… Reality Television… oh my, what might this be all about ? Narcissistic Personality Disorder anyone ? With a nice dollop of Oral Fixation… always eating, drinking, thrilling hoedowns of oral expulsive name callings then shniffling off to whine about it on the cell phone which is suspiciously shaped like a candy bar or a cute little turd (which brings us to another set of developmental issues)… heavens… this Narcissism has taken on a life of its own, people who will do just about fucking anything to be noticed for their ability to eat vermin… ah yes, eating vermin, well, there’s the Oral part surfacing again…

@tacitus

Well, it could be classic fear of intimacy, or a near cousin to it, emotional perfectionism… …there a lot of people, I’d guess the majority of people, who have strong irrational beliefs about what a relationship should (as in: has to, or freak out and run for the hills) look like… as if there is some kind of detailed mental checklist of each stage, what kinds of rituals, how the rituals are performed, what magical words must be said in what way at what moment, how one must fit into the family system… you must be superior to dad, or dad must be superior to you, or you must worship me, or I must worship you, or we must worship each other but God forbid we show any imperfection, weakness, need or incomplete development… some, Eric Berne and others, have referred to these deeply entrenched patterns as “life scripts”… and once you’re on board, there is a strong unconscious expectation for you to live up, or live down to, the stage directions of the life script… when people get very interesting, original, and highly self determined is when they 1, recognize that they aren’t living a life so much as their life scripts are living them, and 2, say to hell with it and begin to design their own life patterns… sometimes referred to as blowing it off and getting real…:o

@tacitus

Frustrating, innit ? One walks through the business section at Barnes and Noble… some Donald Trump here, some this and that over there… and yet one is struck by how little they have to say… everything is general, inspirational… it’s ATTITUDE… bla bla bla… but they never seem to drill down into real information, the “how” is never addressed, everything worth knowing is “proprietary”… trade secrets and all that… so you read maybe 100 things, and this suggests some triangulation is in order, how do you get to the underlying patterns, the real sources of success ? Ever noticed when you’re talking business with somebody, or talking about business with somebody, or you’re around political people, and you start in on sensitive territory, everyone gets so defensive, so tight lipped, so wary, so unwilling to say anything ? Like this strange pall of mystique, silence, paranoia, hyper-control, neuotocism, fear, anxiety, bureaucracy, hidden factors, non-disclosure contracts… whatever the F… Tacitus Rule #7, ( I forget what the first six are, and if I knew I wouldn’t tell you on principle) the more important, or valuable, or dangerous a piece of information is, the more neurotic people become about that information, the more their emotional state and behaviors will change with regard to that information, sometimes they get wide eyed, or sometimes get this Wild West Shootout bullshit on their face, all squinty eyed and sizing you up in a “knowing” way… sometimes it becomes mouth energy, like the lips are sealed tight with Crazy Glue (aptly named), or they will stare straight ahead like watching a movie on a tiny screen off in the distance…

OK… so get this straight… I sort of imagine that most books written for the middlebrow, wants a simple solution that doesn’t require much steam or angst market, self help-ish variety are either 1. masturbatory vanity jobs so the douchebag ex CEO can see his name bandied about as a “thinker”, 2. money grubbing hack jobs that are the ten thousandth re-packaging of the same old intestinal contents that have been the staple of “success literature” since the 1920s, 3. brain dead neo-mystical drivel that will be forgotten as soon as the next cycle of brain dead neo-mystical drivel establishes a niche in the marketplace (anyone still reading the Celestine Prpohecies ? No ?)… 4. who moved my cheeze ? 5… I can’t tell you about point #5 because you don’t deserve to know…

@tacitus

we, the young witch and I are experimenting in a fairly orderly way with energetics… i.e. combining technology (such as pheromone chemistry) with more shamanic technology… complex tones, binaural beats, creating soundfields of insects… the carlos casteneda side of the equation without all that fantasy baggage that castaneda idiots ramble on without any understanding and some other inputs that aren’t too well known or understood..above and beyond having very, very good sex there is a long energetic, deep consciousness change that seems to emerge from the choice of frequencies, the types of life form sounds, and these long duration orgasm-zen-meditations… the actual consciousness payoff is as if the sex is a springboard to another dimensionality of life experience…

@tacitus

We have almost every product commercially available, both a fine collection of “pure” binaural entrainement tones, meditative tones with music, binaural plus nature sounds, pure nature sounds both atmospheric and animal, pure musics and chants… after a lot of structured experimentation we have found deep, potent, near out of body experiences with some, profound meditations with others, light trances with yet others… some of this you won’t see coming, put on the deep theta mediataion or delta frequencies and two hours later realize you’ve been on a cosmic journey someplace either far inside or far outside… sometimes it has seemed like the esssence of prayer, sometimes like the evocation of the shamanic spirit, sometimes like mind meld, and sometimes just a jolly good fuck.

@tacitus

BTW, under these conditions one will greatly appreciate a fine sound system versus a mediocre rig… fine doesn’t have to be big or cumbersome, however well chosen components carefully mated are essential for the quality of the journey… other choices matter, the purity of the massage oil is key (bulk products for the spa market are cheap and nobody complains when the goal is fixing a sore neck… for shape shifting and OBEs you need better grade)… we put in some hours learning Ericksonian inductions, co-hypnosis, trance mutuality too… so that leaves us where for now… uber-sensuous NLP porno-shamanism Zen ?

Have mercy, child… whatever it is… it renders a whole lotta trivial life issues basically irrelevant and worth moving past as rapidly as one can get up and split… adios, freakshow…

Adios amigo.

[PheroQuirk]

some snippets from the past (tacitus)

Digging through some old emails, I thought I would post these snippets that I misplaced before:

Digging through some old emails, I thought I would post these snippets that I misplaced before:

@tacitus

> Since for some reason I can’t post…
>
>
> You have been using mones for 20 plus years… And doing meisner,
> bodywork, NLP for a long time also. Why is it that you are experiencing
> such major shifts only now? What was the catalyst?

An estimation, at best: numerous sub-strands or internal threads of “ego
structure” slowly, organically evolve over time, under the radar of day to
day struggles… first the individual strands need to be attended to… so
one invests in the particular, finding the best drama people and going
through that, learning the fine points of pheromones and how best to use
them… et c. Then I have some perception of a secondary process where
the strands begin to weave together into a higher dimensional tapestry, or
like ensemble jazz improvization some aspects are foregrounded and some
recede but play suppporting roles, then the figure-ground relationship
changes… we’re taling about deep processes… even the serious
psychologists wrtiting for the professional reader have difficulty
expressing this…’
>
> Why should mones do this? I can see a virtuous cycle with say a314 and
> experimenting with higher status behaviour… How else?

Better understood as a relational field between people which is greatly
amplified by the pheromones, the critical factor is the quality of the
relational field,so let’s assume a strong relational field, add to that
NLP and Ericksonian skill sets, good motivation and “positive mutual
regard” (as opposed to, say, egotistic sense of triumph)… a pinch of
some shamanic tendency… I’d guess that someone with no Other Than
Conscious Communication training (NLP or whatever) would have a harder
time getting into the drift of it…
>
> One channel is that they strip away the veneer covering the social matrix
> and give one the possibility of becoming aware of interactions at a
> reptilian and mammalian level. Mones aren’t necessary for this, but even
> androsteNone helps make the dynamic of dominance, for example, more
> evident.

I’m guessing-hallucinating that there may be more to this, consciousness
may have not so well understood structure or qualities which are both
unimaginably profound and ludicrously simple at the same time… in other
words, we may be “talking within the box” when we believe we have some
mastery of the subject… when the subject may be so much larger than our
ideas of what constitutes the box ?

>
> Feel free to cc reply to the forum…

@tacitus

> Not such an easy path to remain an independent thinker within an
> Institution.

No, it certainly isn’t. There are constant, often overwhelming pressures
to be drafted into the groupthink. I firmly believe that early childhood
experiences that give the child a sense of both (and this is absolutely
critical) deep self confidence and clear conviction, both moral and
intellectual, as well as the flexibility to constantly adjust to changes
in external reality, whether they be great macro shifts, or often more
importantly, fine nuances of change… so often I have seen a “false
strength syndrome” that is, IMO, a way of reacting to low self confidence,
one must always have the suppleness to know, regardless of circumstances,
that one can freely think for oneself…

> [redacted]

You know… this is too mysterious for me… I’m having at this moment a
parallel conversation with another party that is almost the exact mirror
of this one… did I somehow walk through a synchronicity portal ?

Well, OK.. a life changing decision… given what I now know, one of my
chief criteria is nurturance… does the proposed
environment/relationship offer consistent, and here consistency is a key
issue, nurturance as part of the whole sphere of performance ??? I think
there is always a recognition, conscious or unconscious, whether you have
a human safety net under you or not… low nurturant environments often do
extract an initial performance spike, followed by a long tail to
burnout… and it is burnout you must avoid…

@tacitus

constantly scan everything… my thought was shaped largely by my great
grandfather, who I knew and died when I was 9, a close confidant of Harry
Truman and one of the authors of the Marshall Plan, GATT, and the Bretton
Woods accords… interesting man because he had a limited education, went
to work after the 8th grade, not even high school… so he developed the
ability to think about the most complex subject in the simplest terms, the
key here was in the choice of images and metaphors that allow one to
penetrate to the essence of the condition… so of course Stalin didn’t
fool him for a minute, when grand intellectuals were sucked into that
fantasy, and Gromyko who could intimidate anyone only could sit and stare
at him… this simple country man.. his primary lesson was not the raw
news as given, but what was hidden in it, why was it stated in a
particular way, what was being left out, how did the assemblage of stories
point to a deeper truth ?

@tacitus

>How long before one gets habituated to Glauberman
> do you think?
good question… I went through a Glaub phase of nonstop self
programming… even now, not having used it in 2 months, out of the blue I
will be hit with a fully unexpected whoosh of change… a wholly new
sense of self or world… such as last night… amazed me… Petra had no
faith in them, uses them for a brief time, and out of nowhere meets the
man of her dreams… and her perception/behavior/outcomes are dramatically
different than anything I was prepared to believe about her… how much
is the content and how much is just hemispheric coordination ? I’d say the
perception of knowing it, being habituated, may not fully align with the
results, those may be slowly developing under the surface of consciousness
for a while longer, esp. if you are digging down into other layers of
self…

@tacitus

Business Week Story: Bonfire of the Builders (message from 3 Aug 2007)
This is a significant development… the media have signalled with
today’s Business Week that the meltdown can no longer be denied or
explained away… I’m beginning to scent panic.

@tacitus

Now that a fairly long learning (meisner, method, others) have integrated
into the “unconscious behavioral self” I’m having a great time, a
wonderful time really, when the actor training spontaneously surfaces,
almost like having an extra perceptual channel or a new set of muscles…
I think NLP is well bleneded into the compost of self as well. Pester
Glauberman, ask him to do a Meisner or actor’s development set… Lord
knows, there is a vast market for people who need these skills in the NYC
area, his home base…

@tacitus

Good stuff can come out of (seemingly) nowhere… you might set a course
to a cluster of self betterment practices, with no predefined payoff…
example, last night I decided, purely on a lark, tho try one of Jeff
Thompsons “gamma” meditation CDs as the background to a long
eroto-meditative massage evening… pheros were involved too… out of
the blue, I’m seeing these Tantric thought forms… lovely things and
wholly indescribable.. and my lovely thing is going into some kind of
gamma trance too, and we’re sending all this body-mind energy back and
forth…
there was a consciosness psychedelia… extrordinary… much better than a
pint of swill…

@tacitus

> You have been using mones for 20 plus years… And doing meisner,
> bodywork, NLP for a long time also. Why is it that you are experiencing
> such major shifts only now? What was the catalyst?

An estimation, at best: numerous sub-strands or internal threads of “ego
structure” slowly, organically evolve over time, under the radar of day to
day struggles… first the individual strands need to be attended to… so
one invests in the particular, finding the best drama people and going
through that, learning the fine points of pheromones and how best to use
them… et c. Then I have some perception of a secondary process where
the strands begin to weave together into a higher dimensional tapestry, or
like ensemble jazz improvization some aspects are foregrounded and some
recede but play suppporting roles, then the figure-ground relationship
changes… we’re taling about deep processes… even the serious
psychologists wrtiting for the professional reader have difficulty
expressing this…’
>
> Why should mones do this? I can see a virtuous cycle with say a314 and
> experimenting with higher status behaviour… How else?

Better understood as a relational field between people which is greatly
amplified by the pheromones, the critical factor is the quality of the
relational field,so let’s assume a strong relational field, add to that
NLP and Ericksonian skill sets, good motivation and “positive mutual
regard” (as opposed to, say, egotistic sense of triumph)… a pinch of
some shamanic tendency… I’d guess that someone with no Other Than
Conscious Communication training (NLP or whatever) would have a harder
time getting into the drift of it…
>
> One channel is that they strip away the veneer covering the social matrix
> and give one the possibility of becoming aware of interactions at a
> reptilian and mammalian level. Mones aren’t necessary for this, but even
> androsteNone helps make the dynamic of dominance, for example, more
> evident.

I’m guessing-hallucinating that there may be more to this, consciousness
may have not so well understood structure or qualities which are both
unimaginably profound and ludicrously simple at the same time… in other
words, we may be “talking within the box” when we believe we have some
mastery of the subject… when the subject may be so much larger than our
ideas of what constitutes the box ?

@tacitus

From Nov 2007
The Doomsayer… my worry dating back to March 2007, when we started
talking about this, was that a creeping deflation dynamic could gain
traction… reasoning: in an overcapacity (or anti-scarcity)
environment, it is easy, rational, etc.. to defer spending because you
know it will be cheaper tomorrow, or you will have a better negotiating
position next month so you don’t enter discussions this month, or money
will be cheaper next month so why go to the bank today ?

Seen in a motivation light, an inflationary, asset chasing worldview, is
“do it today, preferably do it yesterday”… so the inflationary
psychology is urgent, dynamic, competitive… it morphs into an auction
market… deflation is the great unknown Yin to inflation’s behavioral
Yang… where slowness is more profitable than speed, deferrral better
than action, and bidding wars give way to product pitches…

@tacitus

Emwave is on the #1 setting… best I can manage… boy does it help if
you use it regularly, both for business mindfuness and socially… others
relax when one is relaxed… THAT’s the ticket right there, nothing else
needed if you have a modicum of social skill… just deep relaxation,
confidence…

Also use the Thoughstream GSR device at night when I read…

@tacitus

great work emerging on frontal lobe dominance, and resetting this with
magnetic pulses… so if you have a “constant anxiety” condition, it is
now believed that this is a hemispheric imbalance…

@tacitus

btw… have been using my nova pro mind macnine with the blue led glasses
at low brightness… set at mmmm around 20% power… this is quite nice
in the evening… with the meds, it seems to untangle the wires… that
and maybe 20-40 minutes of biofeeback with the emwave (I have 2 now)…
the whole is absolutely greater than the sum of the parts…

P.S. reaction to .25 cut indicates latent anxiety… was watching as it
sold off like a waterfall… infer that B.B. sees the fed pinched between
the two “flations”

@tacitus

I’ve seen some really devastating things on Jupiter-Pluto angles, personal
and impersonal… there is more to this than meets the eye… as if we are
entering a new alignment of powers

@tacitus

Dec 2007
overcapacity… to squeeze this down, we now innovate and manufacure
faster than the natural arc of obsolescence… depression ? well.. it may
be this: we’ve got too much of everything and simply need some time to
stop consuming so we can use what we’ve got… ten, fifteen years of
gorging unwind in two, three ? The lessons of the G.D. were a lot of crap
has to be gotten rid of before new jobs, new projects made any sense…
…
I’m second guessing, I think there is institutional memory of the LTCM
rescue, and a lot of macroids are thinking the same pattern is unfolding,
a global meldown-despair story, the idiots are forced to cooperate, and
pow, melt up… that’s just mind reading… if larger forces are at work,
things beyond quantification… hope the parachutes are correctly packed.

@tacitus

Dec 2007
interesting, esp in light of the M3 liquidity analysis you sent
yesterday… I’ve read the newspapers (the actual yellowed physical
copies, not excerpts or post mortems) from the crash of 1929 aand after…
they spoke glowingly of how the market was stabilizing well after a “brief
flurry” of selling… hoooooo…

Also read the rise of Hitler in the same manner, primary sources… they
mocked him as a nobody, said his panzer corps were slow and cumbersome…
and called him by his mother’s family name, Schikelgruber… I was
wondering, who the hell is this Schikelgruber ? OH… him, got it…

@tacitus

Dec 2007
unsuccinctly gnomic as usual… hadn’t considered the Physiocrats in a
good long time… we should think about a world of mass divergence of
interests that has matured past outright theater war as a rebalancing
mechanism (wars, hot or cold, are ultimately about resource access and
distribution… dare anyone mention the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity
Sphere ?) yet… yet… here are the same basic resource conflicts… the
need for energy either as simple carbons (oil, gas, coal) or complex
carbons (grains, proteins) or water… weird that China is facing a true
water crisis, their water is so contaminated it is approaching Kazakh
standards, and the Middle East has always been a millenial water war at
root… M.E. has the oil but not the labor nor the food, China has the
labor but not the energy, we have the food but need the labor (imported or
offshored, cheap labor is the crack cocaine of the US economy, note all
those wretchedly built subprime houses didn’t assemble themselves))…
and… the “glue” that held it all together is-was a superfluid, think
phase II liquified helium, system of money pipes…

@tacitus

Dec 2007
IME the most compelling things to read are the day to day thoughts, the
telling ordinary human stuff… how news was received, how changes were
emotionally processed… must say… and nobody seems to want to report
this, there are a shocking number of unleased and seemingly unleasable
ground floor commercial properties in good parts of manhhatan… here’s a
real “tell”… some of the projects have been stopped in mid conversion…
such as a well known chinese restaurant that has been there through every
downturn, they put down a beautiful new floor then locked up and closed
the place… or a cluster of premium items, my favorite razor blades, not
being stocked… and not replaced with anything… just a large empty
shelf… this is in a super-prime part of the west village BTW… a
statistical blip or not ? Jury is still debating.

@tacitus

this has been an open question for the systems thinkers… do complex
systems leverage and deleverage because this is a basic structural law of
nature ? Or do ideas long outlive their usefulness while better ideas are
waiting to be heard, or simply does on generation come in as revolutionary
and go out as reactionary ?

In the current instance, I’d guess that Franken-Keynsianism worked too
well for too long because of the unplanned for rise of American unilateral
power, nobody imagined the surge of confidence and willingness to invest
in the post cold war world… resulting in what looked like a perfect
model, and since the model looked perfect for the nonce, everybody wanted
to emulate a winning formula, when they were spending down a massive peace
dividend… for a while, more did create more… now we hit the
Schumpeter breakdown… for the system to regenerate and purge itself of
overcapacity, it must digest the excess of the last wave so a new cycle
of investment can begin… however, this time it must do this against the
grain of population dynamics, so civilizations will have to use exognes
from the less developed economies to restart the process…

@tacitus

> sometimes humour a way to avoid grappling with an uncomfortable issue ?
>
> thats a rather english approach. ----- Original Message -----

monkeys must do it too… humor, possibly, is a way of searching for a
clarifying mental model… when humor works it comes through like a flash
of comprehension, an unexpected connection or something “hidden in plain
sight” is made visible…

@tacitus

> what is the new music saying about our future? you read plato on music
> and politics? what are the hip emerging trends today? i thougyht it was
> poetic a vintage 1920s evening here (high sleb attendance, lots of cool
> in-the-know people despite that) that started in 2003 is coming to an end
> this evening.
Well… culture is incredibly prismatic at the moment… “old new” and
“new old”… like a yearning for old styles, KT Tunstall and her torch
singing, far out jazz… I’m hearing (and get sensing) an unusual amount
of 60’s radical music, even in Starbucks, old garage bands… maybe that
60’s thing started up about the time subprime got moving, I do feel the
awakening of a generation in it, the yearning for a “60’s moment”…

@tacitus

Dec 2007
> yep this is nothing really like anything i am aware of historically but
> it seems to be of the same magnitude as problems of late 1920s. let’s
> hope it it resolved in a better way.

You know, back then many adult males in power had syphilis and it made
them irrational… (my great uncle treated a number of them)… and we
had no stabilizing mechanisms like today… not to mention primitive
communication… intoxicated with mad leaders and fully broken societies
horribly traumatized by the first world war… so I’m confident we’ll see
no implosions like that…

in 1929 it would have been pretty
> hard to imagine how things would start to develop ten years later. 2020
> isn’t so far away, and it’s interesting that various war cycles start to
> tick up into that date.

This is a new thing we’ve wandered up to… the Y or Z generation is deep
down, terrified at the magnitude of the task facing them… and I bet they
will find a way to seize power and declare the Fogies obsolete…
environmental concerns are destined to be thing #1…

i don’t expect total and utter disaster tomorrow,
> but i have a bad feeling and expect when we look back in ten years we will
> see this time as beginning of a significant change in phase. but takes a
> long time sometimes for obvious to
> play out.

Ron Paul and his ilk are the foretaste of things to come… we are very,
very likely to see a generational transfer of power and responsibility
that takes our breath away… there is real urgency in this, and it is
more than personal urgency, it is a felt plantary survival urgency,
cellular DNA urgency…

i was expecting the fed to stop raising rates in early 2005
> after all, because it seemed obvious further hikes would damage the credit
> markets. ha!

Are they a lot dumber than generally believed ? In 2005 all sights were on
the job market… we lived and died by employment numbers… maybe they
thought if wages could be kept stable, productivity ever increasing,
housing would take up the slack, and oil would soon be $20 bbl. ? There
were so many cross linked assumptiuons back then… Bush would be
remembered as one of America’s great presidents ?

[quote=tacitus]

> risky events cluster (‘bad things happen in bear markets’) and people
> extrapolate linearly from recent experience.

Once the brain has logged in major success… for most minds, perhaps
except for the most exceptional, it becomes impossible to deviate from
that winning formula… ergo the studies of how few corporations are able
to retool across major changes and are merged or liquidated eventually…

> there is always a young
> turk looking to make his way by taking a little more and a little less
> conventional risk. and if you don’t play the ponzi scheme as an investor
> they take the money away.

That’s a curious sytemic element… one is forced to play the game as
designed, then build in the biases and mental models of that game, then
cannot adapt… the breakdown clusters are actually failures of the brain
to image new realities and exploit them ?

> so perhaps it’s an emergent property of
> speculative capitalism given human nature. and yes also the (former young
> turk, now establishment) promoters of ideas outlive their usefulness and i
> think kuhn had it right on that front.
>
> one thing i think that faciltated the regulators being asleep was a
> mistaken belief about the nature of free markets that arises easily from
> the lately more influential chicago school framework.

Perhaps the Chicago model worked too well in concert with the breakdown of
the Soviet model, as a means of rapid transition… however, we created
a near monster of gangstgerism in thr 1990s over there via shock therapy,
and Putin for sure is a product of that shock therapy, which you could
well say is Chicago 1920s school of operation… while Kodorkhovski rots
in prison…

> if you’re going to
> interfere with markets by providing deposit insurance and preventing
> competition in currency then standing back and saying ‘anything goes’

well… you get these nutty confluences of unfettered opportunity with a
state sponsored put option built in… a perfect recipe for moral hazeard

> (ah,
> how sweet the change from major to minor. funny the link between music
> and markets) is not a neutral stance to be applauded by libertarians. but
> of course the fed and fdic hardly have been the most exciting topics of
> late and most free market thinktanks receive lots of corporate funding…

@tacitus

was reading something on the correlation of humor and personal success…
those with the best sense of humor have a tendency to rise higher in
organizations, make more money over lifetimes, and have fewer health
problems… OK.. admittedly there is dumb humor, but there is also a form
of humor which is a type of very sophisticated thinking offered in a
agreeable form, there can be avoidant humor too… I’m all for humor as a
way of expanding the suppleness of the mind, playing with unexpected
combinations of ideas, slipping past defense mechanisms… humor+wisdom
can be the finest thing we have…

[PheroQuirk]

More snippets…

@tacitus

> yes… i don’t see any perfect analogues although one can draw lessons
> here and there. niall ferguson’s point about how risk can get repriced
> was a v interesting read (zero at beginning of 1914 and started to get
> repriced only in a couple of days leading up to weekend when the markets
> closed for 4 years).

Had to be the ultimate shock to the senses… they were predicting the
war would conclude in 3 months ? My grandfather, scot regiment, went in
looking like a boy, was gassed at the Somme, came out looking like an old
man… have photos of him before and after… didn’t know a human could
age that fast… lesson ? Nobody understood the technology in their
hands… are we in the same pickle ?

> so when thinking about possibility of capital
> controls, devaluations, debt repudiation etc worth remembering that you
> may not get all that much warning from mkt price action. (and people
> around you may think you mad).

> which leaders do you think had syphilis?

Uncle X would never say who… he was the top man to see if you were a
head of state or powerful business figure.. he told me the number was
higher than anyone was prepared to believe, and among them persons above
suspicion…

the
> thing is - not clear to me that environmental concerns are the no 1
> concern right now!

Agreed up to a point… I think they’ll be sharply increasing in the next
5 years and may reach a true torschlusspanik… the old german term
fopr the panic when the castle closed its gates before a barbarian
invasion and all the townspeople tried to get in…

even wrt energy, peak oil to me seems much more
> pressing than carbon (which to me is a not-so-compelling-evidence but
> massive consequence payoff issue). deep complacency amongst Ys and Zs, no?

Looks that way… could change in a snap… and I’m beginning to think
it will…

> they haven’t known anything bad happen (unlike, as you point out, the
> generation that came of age in 1920s when memory of WW1 still fresh and
> there was a deflationary correction even in early 1920s). fed is not dumb
> in a book learning sense, obviously.

Nay… but academics by nature, and survivors of political jungles more
than biologic jungles…

> but i hated bernanke’s approach even
> when read him at university. wrong lesson was drawn about
> what went wrong in 1920s. and large econometric macro models can hide
> what is really going on (that would be apparent to somebody with a
> reasonably-trained intuition and grasp of credit and capital structure).

i.e. those who have to go through the process of really borrowing money or
negotiating terms…

@tacitus

there is collective hypnosis… I honestly believe that the mind of the
individual can experience profound hypnotic trance induction through the
participation mystique… what we fail to see is how we move, or are
moved, from one highly selective impression of what is real to another…
the illusion or trance state can be so absorbing, like watching a great
movie or reading the perfect novel… one never stops to consider…

@tacitus

I’m dosing my right frontal lobes with some 20-30 Hz. fields via a local
coil, and it is freaking amazing how fresh and new “reality” is
experienced… being a strong left hemisphere verbal type, going right
hemisphere you see things in wholes, totalities, things are taken in
instead of being commented on, fragments join into completions… very
William James…

@tacitus

> yes the zen/sufi stuff is v cool… somehow in england humour is too
> often used as a way to cut short the discussion as it approaches an
> uncomfortable topic or to cut down a tall poppy (people being
> uncomfortable here with certain kinds of changes in status). ----- Original

Brit culture has a seemingly strong tendency to want to keep things
implicate… status is implied… the idea that you would put something
out in plain sight is threatening… so they talk about the weather… ah
yes, the weather… hilarious when we have the odd english soul here and
there, and the conversation needs to begin on the weather note… they’re
unconfortable with their status, they’re uncomfortable with their lack of
status, the celts suspect the saxons are laughing at them, the saxons
think the celts despise them… and they all talk about the weather…

@tacitus

The Chinese have these awfully long stretches of brillance and domination
followed by the most pathetic disentegrations and decay… this new day
in China is like Tang Era II.. well, weirder actually, more like the
governance of the mongol Khans, the innovation of the Tang, the
materialism of the Ming… deranged peasant millionaire aggregate of all
the doors of the collective unconscious simultaneously thrown open… I
wonder if they will stabilize or go into a cultural psychosis ?

> i guess you nailed it there. (add to that different generational
> experiences - utterly different). should one expect collective
> unconscious in asia to be marching to a different (although synced) beat
> to that of europe and the us given still quite distinct cultures? how
> does it play out from here?

Plutonic… west and east have great reservoirs of history and who knows
how much collective compost under the veneer of rationality…

@tacitus

Mine was built by a certifiable madman whose nom was Klark Kent, made good
circuits, precise emitter with a small coil one can press to the head…
the funniest was lat night I put my left hemisphere to sleep with a 2.5 Hz
pulse and woke up my right with a 30 Hz… all was one elegant unity with
not a word to disturb it…

> how do u target the frontal lobe without it hitting another area ?
> complex to construct?

@tacitus

Ahhhhhhhh… we implant such outrageous images and movies in each others
minds… the game is to see who can top the other for sheer artistry of
hypnotic installations… we’ve advanved to the point where we’re cross
feeding our minds with things that would be the envy of Federico
Felinni… pheromones have been a great asset in this…

@tacitus

Tacitus speaks in the third person when his mind is especially fertile
with new ideas… Tacitus was reading up (in the faintest sense) on
Javanese Mysticism whilst pondering the nature of hypnosis, the mind,
psychoanalysis, anxiety, Freud, and other grand elusive notions…

I’m seeing the outlines of a larger problem-meets-solution informational
issue here… the problem is that we have far, far too much information
rolling in 24/7… much of that information is “frame unstable”… are we
talking about implicate cyclic structures, the meaning of the price of
coffee in barcelona, the psychology of the chinese consumer, whether or
not Hillary Clinton is surrounded by lesbians, sunspots, earnings, Linux,
the avian flu, Iraq ???.. ad infinitum…

What’s missing ? All of these info-flows make no assumptions about the
mental state of the reader…

Sooo… how is it that some readers can integrate large amounts of
near-chaotic information and extract a coherent trajectory out of the
broth, and other readers seem to fragment into a TMI state of being
overwhelmed and unable to make decisions ?

IMHO… the critical thing, the difference that makes the difference, far
more than the particular tool set one has on hand, XYZ indicators vs.
Roy Kelly vs. must be hundered of schools and tools all,
to some extent, claiming to be “it”… or a better grade of “it”…

I’m beginning to massively revise my thinking w/r/t these Grail Quests,
because it now appear to me that the real deal has a lot more to do with
the parts of the brain that integrate incoming data into coherent
meanings… suggesting that real trading success is a function of the
brains capacity to form a useful semi-stable model of “what this moment is
all about”… the inputs of indicators, trading systems, news reports,
opinionations are all well and good, but they cannot stay at the level of
finality, they have to be up-converted into a a higher level of
understanding… in the sense that the image that falls on the retina is
not what the mind’s eye sees…

There must be a way to use the mind tools we now have, possibly with
better theoretical bases, imaging studies, and so on, to build, assemble,
teach, entrance, belief shift, along those lines, maybe a better
application of Glauberman’s method, or NLP, to pattern the mind to have
the capacity for grasping the hologram of the moment, not the fragmented
abstractions, but the larger truth that the fragmented abstractions are
pointing to…

Have been listening to numerous brain wave tuner-ish CDs during trading
hours, esp in the theta range, with not bad results, and cross testing
with girlfriend time, where we’ve also run through many of the known
products…

Ok… now when most of the thinky types I know hang out they seem to be
sort of revved up, beta wave, left lobe… some residual competitives,
residual insecurities… lotsa pushy inner voices… ya know, that driven
shite that makes madmen of us all…

Just as a possible… what happens if there is a more right brain,
perietal lobe, alpha-theta wave environment to hang out and think aloud ?
Dunno how, like some of Jeff Thompson’s meditative stuff is on properly
placed speakers or whatever…

@tacitus

early Feb 2008
I’d put it this way… we’re seeing unheard of crosscurrents here in
manhattan… one neighborhood will look like boomtime, plenty of money,
lots of attitude, shine on you crazy diamond, etc… and another area, not
far away, will look like a real nasty recession… like two totally
different economies marbled together…

@tacitus

feb 2008
meanwhile, Mr. Bill of PIMCO speaketh:

“Those who put their faith in the ability of a finance-based economy to
remain healthy are being similarly challenged today. A critic can find
numerous examples of incredible, bubble-popping asset structures from
subprime mortgages to structured investment vehicles to collateralised
debt obligations squared that are threatening to reverse the expansion
of the shadow banks and break our finance-based economys back. The most
recent one, however, centres around the monoline insurers with Ambac as
the most important link in the chain that presumably cannot be allowed to
break.”

Ought to work in stand up comedy…

@tacitus

Feb 2008
Now is the time we most need our clear simple thinking… so easy to
become swamped in informational flooding, like when caught in strong
currents, the thing is to not thrash around too much, just get good deep
breaths and stay floating
> more looking at pictures than thinking at the moment. it’s a confusing
> time and trying to look at things objectively before imposing too much
> preconceived ideas on things

@tacitus

hmmm… ya know, animal protein is expensive… takes 10 units of grain
to make 1 unit of cow… maybe we will see a massive change in dietary
patterns, a la OPEC 1974… the soybean revolution ? Funny, when I was a
kid, soybeans were animal fodder…

@tacitus

Every freaking time it goes from being a business practice problem to a
mass psychology problem… and the ensuing panic does 2/3 of the
damage… methinks what we’ve got is a “primordial soup” of
mini-recessions, mini-wars, asset shiftings, armies of half competent
ministers and bankers stamping out one fire, then the armchair bursts into
flames… instead of the tsunami metaphor maybe like tornado alley, one
town is knocked to splinters, the town next looks like nothing happened..

@tacitus

Feb 2008
political side is caught up in brutal succession war… clintons know how
to go ugli-neg, they knock obama down and he doesn’t stay down, so they go
one nastier… creates massive policy vacuum, bush is now a non-entity,
commands no attention, no respect… so there is no dominant story, no
thematic, nothing setting the tone… only bankers running to and fro like
herds of wildebeest…

“These clumsy clowns of the wild, with their humped shoulders, sloping
backs and rocking-horse gait may justifiably snort and grunt in alarm,
toss their massive heads about nervously and search the air for scents of
predators: being the favourite prey of lions they have to be ever on the
alert. They are gregarious, and occur in herds of 20 to 30 individuals;
they may also form much larger herds numbering thousands. Like the black
wildebeest, their social organization consists of territorial males,
female herds, and bachelor groups. On their massive migrations, the
younger, non-territorial bulls travel at the perimeter of the herd, often
relying on the timidity of accompanying zebra for an early warning if
predators are about. Exceptionally inquisitive, blue wildebeest often
stand and stare at an intruder, before suddenly whirling round and
galloping off. Blue wildebeest are tough and although normally timid, will
fight ferociously when cornered”

@tacitus

have been tinkering with supplies from the perfumer’s industry, raw
ingreds… I’m reasonably certain that the nose-brain has a thing for
aromatic combinations… that the “big kahuna” is a complex aroma-mone
fit…got aromachemicals, testing Givaudan’s new one, Safraleine… pure
safraleine is wildly intense, supposed to dilute at least 1:100 or
thereabouts… fabulous stuff, very dry, almost like gunpowder, male to
the max… without being “pimpy” in the slightest… also new diffusion
control material, Glucam P-20… slow release humectant…

@tacitus

thought you would enjoy this: Hungry ?.. I thought that was an internal
state ?

Hand-wringing About American Culture - Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge? - The New York Times

"Ms. Pickler threw up both hands and looked at the large blackboard
perplexed. ?I thought Europe was a country,? she said. Playing it safe,
she chose to copy the answer offered by one of the genuine fifth graders:
Hungary. ?Hungry?? she said, eyes widening in disbelief. ?That?s a
country? I’ve heard of Turkey. But Hungry? I’ve never heard of it.?

@tacitus

ya know… here in manhattan the new all glass, no insulation, hypermodern
french-tokyo look is all the rage… = insanely high energy use to
maintain room temperature… pretty to look at all lit up at night though,
I will freely admit… curious little detail… “old school” new york
buildings tended to have small window to insulated wall ratios, ugly, true
and sort of dark, yet held the heat well and didn’t turn into greehouses
in the summer… gotta wonder here, if we peak energy, and kWH of
electricity goes through the roof (NY electrical rates already climbing
sharply) could all these lovely new innovative buildings become
economically non-tenable ? Bizarre, yet very posible… if one begins to
see monthly energy bills of 2500-5000. per month…

@tacitus

there are striking differences too… the russian/soviet structure was so
freaking rigid… their governing class was a bureacracy with no concept
of change… here I think we are suffering from a bad decay in public
education… not as brittle, not close, but maybe more like softening like
overheated wax than cracking like thin glass ornament…

@tacitus

Shall be interesting to see how this process unfolds… if Chinese
business is changing to higher cost, who gets the orders ? US factories
for a change ?

@tacitus

Passing strange… I’m on the threshold of understanding Ericksonian
consciousness… the use of each hemishpehre as a separate yet fully
integrated mind… absolutely the most fascinating possibility, being “two
selves but also one self”

@tacitus

well, Goebbels learned from Freud’s nephew, and Hitler learned from
Goebbels…

> Propaganda very often works better for the educated than it does for the
> uneducated. This is true on many issues. There are a lot of reasons for
> this, one being that the educated receive more of the propaganda because
> they read more. Another thing is that they are the agents of propaganda.
> After all, their
> job is that of commissars; they’re supposed to be the agents of the
> propaganda system so they believe it. It’s very hard to say something
> unless you believe it. Other reasons are that, by and large, they are just
> part of the privileged elite so they share their interests and
> perceptions, whereas the general population is more marginalized. It, by
> and large, doesn’t participate in the democratic system, which is
> overwhelmingly an elite game. People learn from their own lives to be
> skeptical, and in fact most of them are. There’s a lot of skepticism and
> dissent and so on.
> http://www.zmag.org/CHOMSKY/interviews/dissent-excerpts.html

@tacitus

> why is the middle east so volatile? some have posited special factors
> relating to more intense local geomagnetic fluctuations and the like.
> history matters of course, but still would be interested to read more work
> on this

So damn many deep, ancient cultures with embedded cultural memory… I
have heard stories of how transplant patients suddenly experience memories
purpotedly of the donor… prob. B.S. but I don’t rule it out… some
memories may be tied to RNA (RNA reverse codes easily, DNA doesn’t…
that’s why RNA viruses are such “good” mutators)…

@tacitus

March 2008
we have to look a the whole organism…

demographics, nutrition, weather changes, effects of regression to global
means of wages, quality standards, how cultures function and dysfunction,
limited or reduced ability to model outcomes (no neural, genetic
algorithm, agent based complex adaptive system technique can begin to
figure this out… they work well on simple industrial problems)…

here’s an interesting structural problem… if modelling the future
becomes exponentially more complicated, how well can policies and systems
be made to cope with the future ?

@tacitus

Started testing P123 today… don’t think anyone on the Androtics side
would be interested… tried a small dose, 50 mu… not much, then
sprayed sweater with approx 400 mu.

Wow!.. potent. Sedating like a serotonin medicine. Significantly
anti-anxiety, deeply calming… this is a beaut… your internal dialog
just turns off… I was sitting there, eating lunch, ordinarily noisy
cafeteria style place, cheap fast and clean… place fell nearly silent,
peaceful… like no urge or need to make conversation… felt like a Zen
hall…

In a mix, 100-150 mu might be the ticket… would sure take the edge off…

@tacitus

> The signal noise ratio on board has really gone down. The attention
> grabbing title threads don’t help.

the board mostly jejune bravado now… p123 is somewhat novel… it is
mellowing, relaxing, yes, more wallop than p96, not dissociative like
TAK… I am ramping up test mixes, how it behaves in the company of
others, P series and the rest… is yet to be known… so far appears to
move perception form visual to auditory… so might be a great
pro-conversation additive.

@tacitus

comes out of confirmation bias: one a model is accepted, data is then
curve fitted to support the model. Everything is subtly adjusted in the
mind of the beholder to explain why the model “is” reality…

@tacitus

March 2008
reason for this: the next economy will need ultra high strength magnetics
(because they use less electricity to generate force)…

For your consideration:

“Summary: Unlike conventional ferromagnetic materials such as iron and
Supermendur, which produce saturation magnetization fields of
approximately 2 T, several of the rare-earth elements (holmium, terbium,
erbium, gadolinium, and dysprosium) yield saturated fields of nearly 4 T.
This property makes these rare-earth metals particularly attractive as
flux concentrators for use in superconducting magnets. This report
concerns the use of holmium inserts to enhance the peak useful field of
the nominally 12.5-T, 5-cm-bore tape magnet manufactured by the
Intermagnetics General Corporation (IGC). Nonlinear magnetostatic analysis
indicates that this field increases to nearly 16 T with the rare-earth
poles inserted within the bore on both sides of the coil’s split-plane
radial access gap. This paper focuses on computer modeling methods and
experimental results.”

@tacitus

I’m in the “third way” school of thought as my working hypothesis… seems
that we’re walled in on both sides and we may be stuck in a narrow cattle
chute… the thing that gives me pause is the dimension of the
unknowns… and the seeming Bourbon detachment of the Executive branch…
there is a deep sense of confusion, no clear direction of leadership in
any sector, and the usual tonics have a weak effect on the patient… when
you have a viable business trading in the 60s one day, and it is an
insolvent carcass the following week, with around 13,000 financial
employees with no place to go… I’d say that’s out of whack… that sends
a profoundly out of paradigm note… that the best and the brightest have
become redundant… weren’t these the folks doing the restructurings and
mass layoffs in the industrial sector not so long ago ?

@tacitus

We are so freaking in tune it looks like we have been going out with each
other for 5 years… there is this sense of comfort and mirroring like
people who have known each other very well..

So the waiters assume we are an established, stable, toghether couple…
and treat us accordingly… although they are popping the eyes out of
their heads… older guy, 25 year old to die for chick… you could see
the thought balloon… what IS up with those two ?

Ahhhhh…

So I concluded this… the Kyrgyz people are a much more primordial,
nomadic folk who must be exposed to massive quantities of human and animal
pheromomes… and my gorgeous companion must have “read” my pheromone
signature as being at the normal, tribal level and thus felt that I was
someone she could be fully realaxed and natural with… where a over
washed westerner may have found me apallingly intense…

Anyway… nothing happened later, I walked her back to her apartment,
kissed her on the cheek, and agreed to see her sometime next week…

@tacitus

(on Kurzweil)
frankly… his is either being facetious or something is wrong with his
mind… the human brain has a vastly different system architecture than
any computer…

@tacitus

> risky events cluster (‘bad things happen in bear markets’) and people
> extrapolate linearly from recent experience.

Once the brain has logged in major success… for most minds, perhaps
except for the most exceptional, it becomes impossible to deviate from
that winning formula… ergo the studies of how few corporations are able
to retool across major changes and are merged or liquidated eventually…

> there is always a young
> turk looking to make his way by taking a little more and a little less
> conventional risk. and if you don’t play the ponzi scheme as an investor
> they take the money away.

That’s a curious sytemic element… one is forced to play the game as
designed, then build in the biases and mental models of that game, then
cannot adapt… the breakdown clusters are actually failures of the brain
to image new realities and exploit them ?

> so perhaps it’s an emergent property of
> speculative capitalism given human nature. and yes also the (former young
> turk, now establishment) promoters of ideas outlive their usefulness and i
> think kuhn had it right on that front.
>
> one thing i think that faciltated the regulators being asleep was a
> mistaken belief about the nature of free markets that arises easily from
> the lately more influential chicago school framework.

Perhaps the Chicago model worked too well in concert with the breakdown of
the Soviet model, as a means of rapid transition… however, we created
a near monster of gangstgerism in thr 1990s over there via shock therapy,
and Putin for sure is a product of that shock therapy, which you could
well say is Chicago 1920s school of operation… while Kodorkhovski rots
in prison…

> if you’re going to
> interfere with markets by providing deposit insurance and preventing
> competition in currency then standing back and saying ‘anything goes’

well… you get these nutty confluences of unfettered opportunity with a
state sponsored put option built in… a perfect recipe for moral hazeard

> (ah,
> how sweet the change from major to minor. funny the link between music
> and markets) is not a neutral stance to be applauded by libertarians. but
> of course the fed and fdic hardly have been the most exciting topics of
> late and most free market thinktanks receive lots of corporate funding…

[PheroQuirk]

More snippets…

@tacitus

Somehow this seems to be as much about the author’s mind than the failings
of his subject.

Not that I fully disagree with his points, taken as points…

However he errs by confusing the man, the circumstances of his society
that have been generations in the making, some academic theories like
deconstruction that had their brief moment in the 1980s, major
civilisational cycles that are surfacing… his argument give far too much
credit to one individual for collective processes… and I think this is
the general failing of media driven thinking, the media have to
personalize because personal stories are more compact, they have crisp
dramatic arcs, they conform to fantasy and mythologic templates (as does
professional wrestling)…

It is substantially more demanding and more rewarding to frame present
moment “scans” of the great plutonian and saturnine processes as cosmic
flux that some mortals are able to surf better than others..

@tacitus

On some level the Chinese scholars might have understood: man is a
fundamentally oblivious being, he sees and responds to what is near,
cleanly outlined, easily put into language. The wiser the sage, the more
the inchoate ground of being is sensed, the less personal (and less
personalized) events are taken to be… the western reflex is to try and
contain the cosmic in the personal… possibly this extends to the idea
of having a “personal relationship” with a savior figure, or strong
feelings of personal identification with sports figures and teams,
television shows, poster boy and girls… and we become offended when
they’re defiled, we “take it personally”.. to the point that we cannot see
the impersonal for what it is..

[quote=tacitus]

the thing we are entering may well be memorialized as the Age of
Bottlenecks… conditions too intractable for the usual workarounds, and
there will be second and third order unknowables popping up like weeds..
I do believe that in long run julian simon was right. In other words
> peak oil might not mean end of industrial civilisation. But on a horizon
> of a mere twenty years there can be bottlenecks… Possibly large enough
> to cause civilisational collapse, of a sort. There have been many
> periods of collapse and rebuilding before, after all.
>

@tacitus

OK… welcome to the brawl…

recently I’ve looked closely at the 4 major asteroids on natal and
sysnastry charts and conclude that asteroids + chiron + lilith are
essential data points… haven’t touched that Uranian pseudo-planet
business yet but might be surprised… logically, five large misshapen
chunks of rock and one lunar barycenter given a mythological name oughtn’t
do too much… then one considers that the asteroid belt has prob. hundred
of minor asteroid-oids in circulation… things get q. detailed..

@tacitus

I’m a huge believer in systems and ecologies… I’d far rather design a
platform for a cluster of minds to engage in high value resonances that
try to educe “the answer”… b/c (apologies for using a v. technical term
from philosophy) the noemata of reality are are in such constant deep
flux… increasingly, and inescapably, we need powerfully intuitive teams
that can reset their perceptual filters on the fly, we almost need a new
conception of mind itself, of personality, ego, identity, consciousness…
I’m sensing that, a new organization of the mental arrangement is in the
offing… and a new culture (among the leading edge) will soon arise as a
substrate for that mind…

@tacitus

April 2010
Looking at the fragile conditions of the real china, some great strengths
sitting atop widespread abjection… the China as the next great Empire
theme doesn’t wash… nor does it look likely that this will be a great
power struggle… I have a completely different metaphor… the anaconda
style of chess play as attributed to Garry Kasparov… careful calculated
moves and countermoves… the cold warriors are trotting out their
perennial armageddon tropes… sounding no different than they did
analyzing the great looming showdown predicted by Stanley Kubrick in Dr.
Strangelove… more 19th than 17th century

@tacitus

my apologies to whoever compiled this stuff… it is filled with items
that either make no sense, or would be completely trivial to anyone
familiar with microbiology, or shows an abject ignorance of chemistry (for
example “zinc cadmium sulfide” is not a gas and has no capacity for
becoming gassified, it is an inert, insoluble bright yellow pigment that
glows green under ultraviolet light that can be used to mark airflow
patterns by capturing it in air filters) there is some legitimate concern
that ZnCdS could produce toxic responses due to the cadmium content,
however it would be far too inefficient to use it as a warfighting
agent… I could go on, but this is at best a clueless hodgepodge of real
misdeeds, harmless tests and simulations, wild overreachings, does the
author have any idea of what a retrovirus is ? Is, um, fluorINE (chemical
element) dangerous, yes, so is chlorINE… but we contain significant
amounts of chlorIDE ions (which don’t exist in isolation, the ion always
comes with a counterpart, typically a metal like sodium)… minute
quantities of many trace substances such as Selenium are essential, more
than that can be highly toxic.. fluoIDE ion is exceptionally toxic to the
canidae (domestic dogs, dingos, wolves, coyotes)… if fluorIDE ion was
present in unacceptable quantities in tap water, dogs would be dropping
like flies…
…
To be a bit more precise, medicines (and potentially toxic nutrients and
adjunctive substances) are gauged on the “therapeutic index”, or
therapeutic ratio, which compares the quantity required for the optimal
benefit (harder teeth in the case of fluoride) to the dosage where toxic
effects begin to appear… clearly the high therapeutic ratio is desired,
and this is a key piece of risk-benefit public policy determinations…
one of the dominant problems with excess fluoride in humans is
fluorosis, or stained teeth in children… for some reason places with
v. high naturally occurring fluoride in the water supply can have skeletal
damage… there is some assumed connection between high fluoride and
thyroid dysfunction…

In low doses, fluoride does appear to be very beneficial for bone and
tooth structural integrity, and in excess doses it weakens them… the
major risks outside of some parts of asia are kids drinking fluoridated
mouthwash.

Linus Pauling institute in Oregon finds little risk associated with water
supplied fluoride ion:

Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University
…
he reads as well intended, albeit lacking in rigor… I am not opposed to
his point if it can be expressed in proper scientific terms, even in a
simplified rat model where a series of populations are exposed to
increasing gradients of fluoride, the thyroid glands are removed and
carefully examined, and so on… his interpretation is interesting but
unsupported… real science reads v. differently than this..

@tacitus

I’ll see if I can find it on youtube… IME sometimes even grounded
politicians are stressed out, frazzled, and run at the mouth… I consider
it significant when they show signs of late phase Nixon, Fuld, Idi
Amin… mental breakdown vs. fuzzy moments… one should always be alert
though

@tacitus

as for brains and the things they
emit… there does appear to be an assessment loop that shuttles between
the frontal lobes and the midbrain (lobes plural b/c the right frontal
cortex and the left appear to have opposed, and hopefully balancing
functions, the left orbito-frontal zone connected to positive, optimistic
judgments and the right to more aversive, anxious, threat oriented
assessments)… sometimes a patient with chronic depression or negative
life view will be therapeutically zapped with a transcranial magnetic
stimulator… I think they pulse the right lobe and take it out of action
for a few minutes… seems a lot of dark negative thinking will
dissipate… following on E. Golberg, my take is that the healthy mind is
a result of an exquisitely coordinated interplay of these two global
filters that allow us to try on different ideas, beliefs, orienting
schemes… perform necessary thought experiments, weigh possibilities,
consider 2nd, 3rd, 4th order consequences… very much good executive
brain stuff…

I have so often run into varieties of idee fixe conditions, permabulls,
permabears… these seem to me to be symptomatic of poor hemispheric
coordination, the humors are out of kilter… not at all limited to
financial types though… more common that generally known…

A good mind in my perception has a jolly nature and a sober nature that
comfortably coexist, it doesn’t tend to stick in ruts, especially circular
ones that dig themselves deeper with each run around the track. It’s the
whimsical, curiosity driven aspect that refuses to take our ruts
seriously.

Maybe when the reptilian core of the old brain becomes too hung up on a
theory it does what neural nets do when they’re overtrained, it finds a
local solution and keeps digging itself a single perspective well when
there might be much better water over the next hill…

@tacitus

I listen to meditative CDs, Jeffrey Thompson, Binaural Beats.com,
Transparent Corp’s altered state series, etc. most nights after I hit the
bed and am in transitional alpha-to-theta-to-delta sequence… there are
nights when nuttin’ special happens and other nights when one finds the
mysterious sweet spot… the next day feels so internally organized and
coherent… then I’m def. most aware of how often I’m waaay substandard,
too disorganized on one hand or too tight and judgmental on the other…
Prevagen, the “LH hand” calcium binding protein from Quincy Biosciences is
a major assist… being old and crusty I need 80 mg. per night… they say
I’m greatly slowing down brain aging by consuming this… might have a
look at the discussion with warren over in androtics about Tau protein and
head injury… some football players now taking prevagen to block long
term head injury effects…,

@tacitus

BTW… this is an important nuance… with the exception of very
expensive units, all midmarket to budget market CD players have defective
master oscillators… a little known fact of total crap hiding behind
cute packaging… you may well wonder what is a master oscillator and why
should anyone care ? The answer is that the MO directly controls the
resolving power of the rest of the circuit… in stereophile circles,
this quality is referered to as the “musicality” of the circuit…

The key point is this: Thompson, et al. go to great lengths to encode very
precise, embedded signals that the ear often doesn’t hear in the auditory
sense but the brain does perceive at a sub-psychological level… these
encoded patterns then act as an organizing template for the brain…

In order to get the full monty effect I use a custom modified player with
a special oscillator installed… the difference is far from subtle.

@tacitus

war only in the metaphoric sense… china has a considerable historical
consciousness… long segments of chinese history involve shortages,
droughts, famines… I think they have inherited shortage consciousness
from being a civilization founded on capricious river systems, their way
of framing prudent conduct involves being ready for the inevitable
unavailability of food, leather, firewood… and they also see history,
human affairs as a fundamentally cyclical process, this is now embedded in
the collective unconscious…we americans are, otoh, an ad hoc,
improvisatory, cross that bridge when we come to it culture… euro
culture seem to fall in between..

@tacitus

don’t overlook-underestimate the flood of new technologies, new
understanding that reshape everything w/o a single cataclysm… nobody can
properly know the impact of this quiet roar, we’ve become accustomed to
the sound, surely will blow our collective minds sooner or later..

@tacitus

the nut is that we moved from being a research and development culture to
a financial culture… all the best minds doing financial work rather
than making and discovering… economic theory can’t be busted… in the
end it is all about incentives

@tacitus

The lesson that stays with me is how long and psychologically debilitating
these day after the party years are… really a period where one
discredited batch of theories and their theorists are tossed out and and a
new bunch moves in… it is a long grinding fallow period that gives rise
to a whole new set of intensities…

back then interest rates rose (the idea is that they would rise forever,
we would have mass starvation, the Islamic world tweaking the west…)…
some things have cycled back and some have cycled in their inverse form…

there will be a change of psychology, a turning point, things will go
fully as expected then fully not as expected, time them right and you’re
solid gold..,.

@tacitus

P75 has a teenage aspect… tested this in acting class… when I used
p75, discipline broke down, we messed up our scenes horribly, males became
obnoxious… A314 is vastly more reliable… P93 seems to have a better
“lieutenant general” energy about it, P80 is a sergeant, P75 is a raw
recruit with an attitude problem… I’d love to see P106 back in
stock… that stuff is the colonel, all business and straight to the
issues, facts versus impressions… A314+P93+p86 would be quite
interesting… charismatic…

@tacitus

opera saves the world ? Opera alone I’m not so sure about… true
culture, great culture, though… the mountaintops of musical, literary,
pictorial genius… the things worth living for and fighting for… are
not so abundant today… perhaps we have a genius of our own, a degenerate
genius that comes from marketing and advertising culture…

@tacitus

the thing is: there are so many possible ways of being smart… some
smarts are the result of having extensive/intensive experiences with
humans and their foibles… Donald Trump has a phenomenal cache of street
smarts which is people in action smarts… he knows what make people
tick, what they’ll line up to pay for, what motivates an employee… does
Trump’s people smarts extend to diplomacy ? Would his negotiating style
work on a nuclear arms reduction round, or multilateral trade talks ?
Wouldn’t bet good money on that outcome… Truman had a great sense of
people, learned, btw, by being an insignificant habedasher, he knew how to
talk to the average man in a way that he would be understood, and he knew
this by selling them clothes… he knew human things in a way that Kennedy
never could have, Kennedy knew human things in a way that Truman never
could have, and neither had the military instincts of Eisenhower…
academic excellence isn’t an automatic qualification or a
disqualification, the best and the brightest thrown up against Ho Chi Minh
and Vo Nguyen Giap, with the entire US military-industrial complex behind
them would lose 50,000 US lives and a land war to boot, who would have
guessed a little chipmunk of a man, Deng Xiao Peng would open the
floodgates that became modern China, on the other hand an essentially
technocratic operation like managing the RMB could not conceivably happen
without an advanced cadre of experts at PBOC…

@tacitus

this armchair psychoanalysis is driving me mad!
-Siegmund Freud

@tacitus

IMHO… universities and colleges are fantastic resources… much
specialized knowledge is concentrated there that can’t be obtained
elsewhere, I don’t want engineers learning Metallurgy For Dummies, esp.
the guys calculating the alloys for the wings of aircraft I might be
flying on… and with no Stanford, we would have no Google and a
bazillion other points of advancement… certain areas of knowledge do
senesce and calcify, or become overrun by bitchy marxists, tenured
buffoons, and/or comatose drones, a well informed, self directed,
motivated student ought to be able to avoid these sloughs of mediocrity…

@tacitus

have to say… anyone who takes an iota of this seriously, madonna or
otherwise, doesn’t realize the level of their own idiot dupedom… popular
culture is calibrated to bring out these pathetic micro-outrages… the
stuff is formulaic from beginning to end… don’t paglia and her type know
they’re being played for laughs ? They need to see the Ali G. factor in
all of this.

@tacitus

Thomas Sowell wrote a fine book, “Migrations and Cultures”… I remember
enjoying it…

grabbed this review from amazon, expresses it well:

"How does moving from one country to another, or from one continent to
another, affect people? How does it affect the lifestyle of those who
move? Conversely, how does this change the culture of the recipient
country? In his book MIGRATIONS AND CULTURES, Thomas Sowell explores the
various answers to these questions by examining the historical changes
wrought by migrations amongst six different groups of people: Germans,
Japanese, Italians, Chinese, Jews, and Indians (from India, not North
America).

By looking at the histories of Germans who migrated to various places in
Russia - Baltic, Volga, Black Sea - as well as the differing histories of
Germans who migrated to various places in the United States, Brazil,
Paraguay, and Australia, he avoids drawing false conclusions that are
often made when only one or two particular cases of migration are studied.
Sowell applies this broader historical frame of reference to each of these
six groups to better understand cultural phenomena. For example, Orlando
Patterson at Harvard once wrote that the Chinese were prominent in Jamaica
for reasons peculiar to Jamaican history. But by looking at the Chinese in
other cultures, one sees they are dominant “middleman minority” in other
places as well, ranging from Thailand or the Philippines to Panama City or
Lima, Peru. So that one is forced to conclude that it wasn’t something
unique to Jamaican history that made Chinese prominent as middlemen, but
rather due to something in the culture the people brought with them to
China, whether in the form of particular skills or work habits or
inclinations and attitudes to life.

After years of exhaustive research, consultation with other scholars, and
wide-ranging travels in preparing his trilogy (RACE AND CULTURE,
MIGRATIONS AND CULTURES, CONQUESTS AND CULTURES), Sowell concluded, “If
there is one pattern that emerges from all these histories it is that each
group has its own cultural pattern - and that these patterns do not
disappear upon crossing a border or an ocean.” Some things, such as
external cultural manifestations of language or dress, may change far more
readily than internal cultural values such as social mores, marital
choice, religious practice, propensity to sacrifice and to save earnings,
or attitudes towards work, all things which go into that little phrase,
“cultural capital”.

Sowell’s book is exhaustively researched but not pedantic. His numerous
specific examples for the general statements he puts forth not only make
his work readable but reliable as well: in making a point, he backs it up
with specific historical examples. His book is not “light reading” in the
way a intriguing novel might be, but it is “sound” reading, enlightening
and trustworthy. I didn’t get the feeling Sowell tried to pull the wool
over his readers’ eyes: he instead attempted to lay out the facts in a
coherent, honest fashion. His conclusions are insightful (and sometimes
controversial). Provided one keeps a pen or pencil in hand to stay
attentive to this text, I believe most will find this an enjoyable reading
experience. "

@tacitus

? Are stable
preconditions needed for social cycles like these to emerge as distinct
phenomena ? Did the dark ages have sufficient resources/conceptual
flexibility for “contemplative” responses to appear ?

@tacitus

another plausible theory is that archaic regions, the so called dark dna,
which might be portions of million year old or so viral code, have
inappropriately activated, they’re looking at the theory in multiple
sclerosis…

hmmmm… that’s really out there… a latent code for a viral envelope is
triggered by a live human virus… weird but cool

@tacitus

does raise a ++ important point… grain storage is as big a deal as
grain production and transportation… as a kid growing up in big ag areas
I clearly remember every town bigger than West Podunk has a grain elevator
by the railroads as the most sophisticated (and best maintained) piece of
public technology for miles around… grain storage was/is a BIG deal in
terms of expertise (knowing all about moisture levels, fumigation
standards and techniques, preventing dust explosions… the list goes on,
there are many things that go bad with stored grain and a little spoilage
goes a long way fast… constantly battling molds, weevils, mice and
everything else on legs)… I can’t imagine HOW a less developed economy
CAN maintain its reserve stocks w/o massive investment in grain driers,
good clean grain cars, inspectors (as in non-corrupt who won’t certify a
bum crop) etc… the US grain producers have a deep background in doing
this, the new economies ? Not so sure…

@tacitus

the counterargument is that brains are developing on non-linear
timelines… they don’t connect-and-prune their neural connections at
precisely the same chronologic point for each individual… and even then,
within the brain, different regions can mature well ahead of others… the
human brain from 16-24 is maturing in uneven developmental surges… the
skills that come easily in one person at 20 might not be well absorbed by
another until 25… I’m much more in favor of interrupting education from
18-22 and introducing a period of apprenticeship or real world experience
where one “learns the ropes” as to how the real world operates… then
returning at an age when a much higher % of brains are on an even
baseline..

@tacitus

everyone needs to remember that rate environments are psychologies as
well as economics… the low rate enviro. has produced a mind set, really
a worldview that the average investor will find it difficult to unwrap his
mind from… prob. the typical professional investment manager as well…

@tacitus

sounds exactly like the mindset I inhabited before discovering the marvels
of pheromones… fully understand the gravity of the central point
though… it is easy to lose sight of the way that orderly consistent
administration of legal processes IS the fundament of civil society…
legal precedent is, in a multitude of ways, the codification of all of the
learnings a civilization has endured… which, I strongly believe, is
why the concept of precedent is so important in legal philosophy…
precedent acts as a firewall, in special cases there is an agreement
that the firewall need be breached, and in those cases the conversation
typically ascends to the higher levels of the federal judiciary… what
the author here is underlining is that we have entered a condition where
precedent is being breached without judicial review… and most worrying,
this is a massive breach of the most basic foundational piece of the
social equation… that contracts express specific intent, and further,
are intended to be interpreted within a stable procedural framework…
once you begin putting ideas into people’s heads that contracts might
not be enforceable, or words don’t necessarily mean what they claim to
mean, or a contract might be a reliable expression or a relationship
between the parties on Monday, and the same document might be subject to
whim or arbitrary interpretation on Friday… then the next natural step
is the Mafiafication of the society, one must begin to align with
enforcers, thugs, those agents further outside of the bounds of law…
very much like the loansharking business and their legbreakers…

@tacitus

I sort of knew this… never thought about is as a historical pattern
though… well worth looking into

"This week, the People’s Bank of China jolted stock markets around the
world with a surprise interest-rate rise, and the leaders of China’s
Communist Party called for “accelerating the transformation of the
nation’s economic-development pattern.” This drive to manage growth harks
back to a declaration on April 22 that “of the many government functions,
the most important is to facilitate commerce and help industries.”

The odd thing is, the Chinese government made that statement on April 22,
1903.

Amid the almost irresistible excitement over China’s explosive growth, it
is important to understand that the Asian giant has run this exact race
before—several times—and the results weren’t pretty."

301 Moved Permanently

@tacitus

all true… china has tipped in multiple arenas and is moving towards
tippage in others, esp. geo-strategic areas they have avoided in the past,
some of this translates in the concept of “muscle”… like they flexed a
few weeks ago in denying Japan rare earth supplies… however they may
also be hostage to forces not entirely within their mercantilist model of
control… never before has an abject peasantry been catapulted into a
modern consumer class with such speed… I’m reading about a phenomenon of
auto-ownership madness over there… an unstoppable flood of demand that
the state planning apparatus MUST satisfy or risk social instability…
which then poses a series of knock on effects… pollution, congestion,
massive roadbuilding, new outlying communities…parking spaces… and
all of this is compressing the USA between maybe 1950-1990 into a frenzied
decade…

[PheroQuirk]

More snippets…

@tacitus

on the home front psychology, i.e. confidence in the future, confidence
that future oriented projects will pay out handsomely, confidence that
there will be stable, good quality work, confidence in home ownership…
is a basic factor in mobilizing capital… during an age of capital
immobility it is fantastically difficult to initiate anything, a meeting
with investors, a roadshow touting a new idea… the very receptivity
to new ideas is so much part of the socionomic equation… where in
opposing psychologies, which I sort of suspect are animating Chinese
investors, there’s the “don’t miss the train” thinking, that one ought to
grab at anything because you might hit the jackpot… I sense that the
emotional condition of depression is also one where it is impossible to
imagine the future as being meaningfully different from the present…
Gary Shilling has called this period The Great Deleveraging which I
believe is also the title of a new book yet to be released… not only are
macro bets being painfully unwound, it is increasingly clear that we have
in place very faulty mechanisms for unwinding them… which are coming
directly into conflict with the idea of a nation as a framework of laws…
efficient unwinding exacts a great cost in the sense of the integrity of
law, and some negotiations have to take place between the financial
integrity of the system and the legal integrity of the system… because
when you tacitly OK the shredding of law, you start planting major doubts
in the mind of investors coming back for the next round… why should I
place my bets in an environment where my contracts may have no bearing ?

@tacitus

I tend to believe that ages of breakthrough discoveries have a perverse
tendency to also usher in ages of fantasy because the normal orienting
points that the average man or woman references have become unstable or
indistinct… in this strange turn of events, the more the
creative/disruptive/emergent factors play in the psychic life of an age or
a dominion (which you might say is evidence of a kind of vigor in the
upper reaches of mental activity), the more the world we know and love
seems to be a place that is the result of outrageous and novel thinking…
however the lower wattage minds rarely comprehend the theoretical
frameworks of these massive advances, however they can and do transpose
them onto the world they know as familiar reality… hence one might
discern in Harry Potterism not the mark of the beast and the advent of the
antichrist, rather ordinary minds and ordinary imaginations that have
become uprooted from the previously known sense of stable reality and
fashioning this as magical processes at work… stasis my be dull and
stasis may be stifling but stasis encourages a more universally accepted
standard of common sense, right thinking, and accepted behavior… sadly,
stasis also relegates economies to plodding ceremonialism and Brezhnevian
mediocrity…

@tacitus

noticed that… did read some fascinating research that suggested merely
thinking a lot about sex could trigger hypothalamus-pituitary changes that
would alter the rate of brain development… this, surprisingly, has held
up although don’t know the current status or ongoing research… theory is
that exposure to sexually “charged” material does induce deep brain
changes… some concern that widely available hardcore porn can force
parts of the brain through an early neuronal puberty like set of changes,
which, here is the v. interesting part, also causes a corresponding
reduction in free ranging imagination… sex imagery and sexualized
children’s cultural products may cause a premature narrowing of the
imaginative focus… may explain the cretinism in much of our public
entertainment…

@tacitus

Nov 2010
I’m seeing essential strength in the growth sector, particularly the high
technology growth sector that almost suggests another 1990’s like market
in tech… this makes sense if there is a major global recovery in the
emerging world… somebody wants our best of class technologies and is
willing to pay for them… on the other hand, homebuilders are dead in the
water… the aging, demographically trapped elder economy, soon to be a
major consumer of medical and care services looks like a low multiplier
dead weight… so we’re stuck with a two track recovery… intense,
aggressive, upwardly mobile on the periphery and stagnant, politically
frozen, debt anchored in the center..

@tacitus

This line of inquiry deserves a book length response…

at the apex are titanic factors…

among these I’d say

1. a global shift from the western tactical view to a longer term asiatic
   strategic view in all matters… for a long time the western, market based
   and local solution based way of extracting value worked well, yet it
   worked in a vacuum of sorts, there was no competing model emerging from a
   developed, economically stable planning apparatus… until recently… it
   appears that this is radically outside the box for western voters…
   mentally it is like a roman gladiator trying to fight a dense fog bank…
   the fog bank has no apparent form, no clear center, it is impossible to
   clearly identify one’s relationship to the adversary, and the adversary
   fully understands this..

2. this prods a reactive psychology into action… the foggier and less
   understandable the outside world appears… the more the simple minded and
   uninformed will demand “clarification”… and the media and political (as
   well as religious leadership) class are savvy enough to give them
   “clarifying” bones to gnaw on even if they have no sufficient structural
   understanding of the multiple, densely intertwined processes that drive us
   forward… this shows up as a troubling know-nothing conservatism… a
   bone headed need to be assured, distracted, amused… the fog of confusion
   also provides excellent cover for the true elites to accomplish their ends
   without public scrutiny…I don’t have any idea who the senior members
   of the chinese communist party are, what they think, what their commercial
   ties are, how they are connected to the global capital structure… but I
   am quite confident that they do…

3. Establishing first rank financial centers seems to be much harder than
   most realize… and a place of the most intense competition, prob. because
   it is well understood that the financial web inherent in a New York or
   London acts as a major lever of global power… once in place, these
   centers tend to stay in place…OTOH… “commodity boom capitals” are
   disconcertingly unstable… fascinating to read say, the history of rubber
   as a strategic commodity, the efforts expended to control the rubber
   market, the boom towns and social experiments that followed the rubber
   business… same with the oil business and their boomtowns, rich as
   Croesus one day, a windblown sticker patch the next, think
   Odessa-Midland…

4. Kevin Kelly’s new book What Technology Wants is essential
   reading… and weirdly californian… only internet culture could produce
   thinking like that… by turns atrociously evangelical and mind
   expandingly insightful… it does represent a frontier in systems
   philosophy, especially on the subject of parallelisms and convergences…
   however I think he gets it exactly wrong that the “technium” is making us
   smarter and better… I see real breakdown in knowledge and memory…
   surely the republican Romans saw the same process in their increasingly
   vulgar, present oriented, egotistic, dimwitted culture and instinctively
   knew where it was all headed…

will respond at greater length, about to be timed out by my email server

@tacitus

Sure… any comparative study will be grounded in the personality of the
one making the comparisons… although there is a great deal of truth in
the observation that the Roosevelt-Wilson phase will probably be seen,
like Hammurabi’s reign, as a Age of Codification… where the Gilded Age
will be remembered as ushering in the Age of Standardization… the great
tycoons were also great standardizers… so I think that the name Standard
Oil was expressing a fundamental attitude towards industrial processes,
rail gauges, the rise of engineering schools and a general practical
teaching of calculus, not to mention the Bismarkian concepts of
standardized education in the initial stages of learning…the transition
not unlike the Isrealite transition from kings to rabbis… however, IMHO,
the sheer scale and sense of necessity engendered by the Civil War set in
motion a very survival derived psychology…an attitude that “anything
goes, by any means available, and don’t be too concerned with the petty
rules” unleashed a fierce dynamic, both promethian and corrupt, that
consolidated the american internal hegemon from coast to coast, firmly
established the border with Mexico, finally brought the indigenous
population under absolute control, and made a stable supply of high
quality (for the times) and low cost food a normal, expected state of
affairs for the average citizen… rather suddenly have this triple
beneficence at hand, an externally protected (oceans on the sides and
weak, unambitious neighbors above and below) national boundary, a swift
and orderly internal consolidation, and a widespread industrialization of
food, energy, communications, transportation, and metallurgy all at once,
and arising from a background of complexity suitable for an agrarian
society… meant that the most driven, most ambitious, most ruthless, most
able to forge order out of wilderness conditions, would become the
dominant caste…

@tacitus

I seem to have a form of ESP that allows me to walk into an archive or
library with no prior knowledge and find exactly the document I need… it
is an almost frightening inner sense that has overtly baffled and
unsettled people who have been with me… I feel something like a magnetic
pull that draws me towards a source of information, it is both rational
and irrational…

@tacitus

Nov 2010
the explosive take off of the equity markets of newly-emerged economies
has been a currency play as much as a pure equity play… which has
further pushed capital to the periphery, which has further accelerated
those economies…

we have a cooled off US economy force feeding younger economies…

in that sense, we here in the USA have served as a global “heat sink” for
inflationary pressures…

managers have probably put off purchasing decisions and run plant,
equipment, people on leaner maintenance cycles, holding off of capital
upgrades, meaning that there may be a an upgrade buying surge once the
US economy looks like it has stabilized across sectors… it may take a
while to get all the crap off the books, clarify the impact of new
legislation, put new workers in place, adapt to new technology, etc… it
isn’t so much that we’re in a state of collapse as we’re in a state of
slow preparation for the next business cycle…

however… we are also in for a global repricing of skilled labor, food
and raw materials, and environmental compliance issues… going green
won’t be cheap, may be structurally impossible for china at this stage of
the game, which may force the west to think in terms of extra-green…
this could be a big money capital equipment growth cycle, esp power
generation…

@tacitus

Eric Fromm has written extensively on the relationship of
self-marketability, protestantism, capitalism, and manufactured
“niceness”… a bland riskless ordinariness as a necessary means of
getting ahead in the world
…
Escape from Freedom is his best, and most generally recognized work…
he’s always had an annoying social engineering streak that left me
nonplussed, his historical descriptive points are good though
…
IIRC… he sees the modern condition (as well as the pre-modern) as
moving in the instrumentalist direction… in that one’s personality,
one’s presentation become instruments to be artificially composed and
directed outwards… leading to a ritualized, but numb, kabuki culture of
false selves speaking to other false selves…

@tacitus

this is a big point in contemporary psyc. research… an a fascinating
conundrum that neuroscience is delving into… one one hand, rational
decisions that are unlinked from the emotional centers (by damage to the
amygdala) very often tend to be catastrophically bad… the conclusion
being that emotions and gut feeling are central to good decision making…
however, other medical people specializing in the brain, Robert Burton for
example, have shown that the same mental apparatus can produce
inflexible sensations of absolute certainty where solid grounds for
certainty do not exist (he cites certain rare and compelling disorders such as
Capgras and Fregoli syndromes… where the patient has an unshakable faith
that a logically impossible, patently ridiculous belief must be true,
e.g. a favorite possession has been diabolically replaced with a perfect
counterfeit replica… sometimes this delusion goes so far as wives or
lovers… one’s wife has been switched with a perfect impostor)…

Thus we have two extreme points, one pole being a complete lack of being
able to link emotional reasoning with logical reasoning (the Spock
psychology of a Robert McNamara or Soviet sate planners) and the other a
mad, profoundly felt, almost religious conviction that one is in
possession of a deeper, logic transcending perfect knowledge…

There seems to be a Golden Mean that balances cool logic with warm
regard… the fine art of being an adult in the best sense of the word is
knowing how to fully embrace the two without becoming lost in either…

@tacitus

the key idea is integration of consciousness… this itself can be
tricky, from the viewpoint of a cultural conversation, if there isn’t a
well grounded, widely entertained idea of what consciousness means…
we’re a profoundly UNconscious culture in many ways.. the mass media can’t
discuss consciousness because as it well knows, they would lose the
viewing public in half a second if they tried…

You probably have noticed how carefully regulated work environments are,
particularly as one ascends to the upper zones, in order to insulate them
from discrepant information… even the dirtiest, most criminal
enterprises at the ground floor level (one can think of most of the
activities originating in Orange County, CA. as belonging to this
category) pass through increasing filters of abstraction and sanitizing
until they reach the C-suite stage where they have transmuted into nothing
but a hieretic code of the financial-priestly caste… at this degree of
the game, everything must be referred to only in the thickest of
euphemisms, nothing is said outright, everything referred to in second and
third order obliquity…

@tacitus

emergent systems were big in the late 1990s… there was a worldview that
prob. arose from theoretical question in the life sciences indicating that
complex adaptive systems would converge on optimal fit solutions… with
no referees… IME, it seems that good systems have a degree of both
processes… at some point there have to be hierarchies of criteria…
what will the grounds for better vs. worse be ? On one hand there is inert
scholasticism, on the other self indulgent blather…

@tacitus

I think much of my angst comes from a passing knowledge of network
effects… 2008 was a prime example of network collapse… the odd thing
about these buggers is that they exhibit better than expected stability
most of the time… so problem that would have produced moderate tail
effects in a weakly networked system cease to be of concern in a high
networked system… as we trundled from crisis to crisis… japan, mexico,
asian contagion, LCTM, russia, dot com, the “stinger” on the scorpion’s
tail moved further out, however the toxins weren’t eliminated, they were
in fact concentrated to lethal levels… what we may have built for
ourselves here is a great termite mound that may be subject to inherent
instabilities that are much harder to model, much harder to time (the Dept
of Defense war gamers refer to this a “twitch capacity”… what is the
shortest amount of time one can detect an incoming threat, evaluate the
nature of the threat, and appropriately respond to the threat ?) and much
harder to coordinate solutions for…

Consider the rise of the Chinese investor class w/ internet… operating
within the CCP info-sphere… they know that they are operating in
filtered environment, and vital economic information, news stories, etc my
be withheld from them or distorted for central propaganda purposes… this
knowledge itself may act as a crisis accelerant because the population has
gained the plus side of a networked system (thus much faster reaction
times) within the minus of an information distorting control apparatus…
hence in the specter of a crisis, the possibility of a stampede, trying to
get in from of a wall of imperfect information, is greatly enhanced…

@tacitus

I’ve been instilled with a special sensitivity to the idea of law as the
organizing principle of an advanced society… Kevin Kelly in the book I
referenced, rightly, I think, considers law to be a technology as much as
physical sciences present us with technologies… the problem is this,
corrupting legal processes leaves a dangerous legacy, just as unsafe as
corrupting, say, the standards for making steel creates dangerous
buildings and bridges… you may not realize how potentially unstable a
corrupted structure will be in the future until the materials are pressed
to their structural limits, and that might not happen immediately, so the
engineering handbooks start saying that you can safely substitute weaker
steel, cheaper stuff to make, perhaps easier to work with tools…
eventually you get legal frameworks that are like chines condos…

@tacitus

Toynbee also alludes to this process in a somewhat top down way.. he
speaks of mimesis… the natural tendency of the lower orders to mimic the
attitudes, values, and morality of the elite… when the elite
degenerates, they lose the confidence of those who are led, and mimesis
breaks down…

do you strongly disagree with a particular point while holding his general
framework valid, or do you feel that he is in the grip of a fundamental
error of perception ?

@tacitus

depends on the concept of an intellectual, Thucydides was one type,
Voltaire quite distinct, Sartre another case altogether.. every age seem
to have a style, a way of talking to itself, some types are inevitable,
other types so out of sync with the zeitgeist nobody takes them
seriously…

@tacitus

Somebody did a study that found (in the policy bureaucracy level of
things) that being wrong WITH everyone else, meaning agreeing with the
current paradigm regardless of the obvious crap quality of the paradigm,
had very few long term negative effects on one’s career path… whereas,
those who were seen as not team players, regardless of the rightness of
their concerns, had shorter and less exalted careers… so it is probably
a hard learned behavioral lesson of how one survives the politicized
environment..

@tacitus

I noticed that references to “prison”… serious crimes, surged and peaked
through the 2006-2009 phase, while references to “jail”, presumably lesser
crimes, have been slowly and evenly ascending… suggesting that low level
social dysfunction is becoming a structural feature of the low employment
world..

Moved Permanently

@tacitus

a hellish amount of this genre is in current production… much of it
frightens me… now it is “how to be a ruthless golddigger”… ran across
this monstrosity…

How to meet the Rich: For Business, Friendship, or Romance: Ginie Sayles: 9780595367238: Amazon.com: Books

• 6 Key Profiles of the Rich—Where they live; How they work; what they
  want & what they look for in you
• The 14 Layers of Class; and how to get them
• Power Dressing™—Dress with purpose to achieve goals
• Find Rich Clients for your business
• The 3 Steps to enter society
• Your Social Personality—becoming a Winner
• Upgrade your humble abode with Class inexpensively
• Love Patterns of the Rich—how to take it to the altar & protect
  yourself in Prenuptial Agreements
  • Rich Sex?

@tacitus

it seems that we had been in a phase where looking ahead, thinking about
the future, building mental models and abstract constructs was part of the
shared mindset… which may have coincided with a collective peak… I
would hazard a guess that a smaller fraction of the social universe IS
doing modeling, scenario planning on an unimaginably high level, however
the general attitude has regressed to simple minded entertainments and low
intensity/low energy titillation… as the media companies fully
understand… video games, soap operas, low rent controversies ARE the
basic stuff of thought for many today…

@tacitus

note that vagina and syphilis are perfectly correlated in 1880… this
must have been the heyday of the urban slums… then we get a hideous peak
around WW1 and another peak around WW2… which suggests that these wars
were as much about septic conditions as they were about munitions… must
have been absolutely ghastly from a public health perspective…

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=vagina%2Csyphilis%2Ctuberculosis%2Ctyphoid%2C+malaria&year_start=1700&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=4

@tacitus

few more wrinkles…

if we add in Lothario with Casanova (here’s a good example of
capitalization)… we can clearly see social patterns emerging, then
unwed gives us some late stage behaviors…

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Casanova%2CLothario%2Cunwed&year_start=1700&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=4

social moods #1

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=resentment%2Cshame%2Caccusation&year_start=1700&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=4

social moods #2, revenge and guilt run ahead of terror

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=revenge%2Cterror%2Cguilt&year_start=1700&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=4

do orphan populations lead crime waves (as in Russia today ?)

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=orphan%2Cslay&year_start=1700&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=4

@tacitus

see how alienation and Nietzsche occur as major trends, with the
language of junk culture appearing as a residue…

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=nihilism%2CNietzsche%2Calienation%2Ccliche%2Cbanal%2Cnarcissism%2Cphony&year_start=1700&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=4

@tacitus

this too was astonishing…

we can see the mad surge of interest in thought and thinking in the 17th
century…and a century later, words enter use that suggest abstractions,
thinking about thoughts, ideas and plans…

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=think%2Cthought%2Cidea%2Cplan&year_start=1500&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=4

@tacitus

how interesting that rank and capital (which I take to be indicative
of a rising merchant class) are tightly connected, the the idea of the
self appears 60 years later and never looks back, rank slowly but
steadily declines until it is overtaken by status in 1940…
consciousness surpassed rank in 1880 so that must have been an
important inflection point, and awareness finally surpasses rank in
1975…

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=self%2Cconsciousness%2Cawareness%2Cstatus%2Crank%2Ccapital&year_start=1700&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3

@tacitus

this is truly strange, the concept of fool and fraud appear to have a
strong inverse relationship… are people prone to frauds when they no
longer consider that they may be fools ?

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=fool%2Cfraud&year_start=1700&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=2

@tacitus

Russian history in one lesson

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=fear%2Chunger%2Creligion%2Cgovernment%2Cchaos%2Cpolice%2C+rat&year_start=1850&year_end=2008&corpus=12&smoothing=4

@tacitus

understanding modern personality types
v. illuminating… we see a strong decline in the immature,
infantile, and neurotic sectors, and a pronounced climb in the
antisocial and paranoid types (hinting at a culture w/ definite
sociopathic tendencies)

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=antisocial%2Cneurotic%2C+infantile%2Cimmature%2Cschizophrenic%2Cparanoid&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3

[PheroQuirk]

More snippets…

@tacitus

It does appear that there is an optimal balance between abstract
knowledge… after all it is thousands of times more efficient than
learning everything via trial and error… a good grounding with the right
ideas being introduced in the right sequences, challenging the mind w/o
overwhelming it… the grounds of educational excellence… that can be
different from precious conceptual castles in the air or mental acrobatics
that serve no real purpose, like sailors who would make increasingly
complex knots to while away the time on long voyages…

and down to earth realism and pragmatism, the ability to see it and tell
it as it is and not fool oneself about what the agendas are… I think
Santayana had something to say about the relationship of surfaces and
depths:

bingo:

Masks are arrested expressions and admirable echoes of feeling, at once
faithful, discreet, and superlative. Living things in contact with the air
must acquire a cuticle, and it is not urged against cuticles that they are
not hearts; yet some philosophers seem to be angry with images for not
being things, and words with not being feelings. Words and images are like
shells, no less integral parts of nature that are the substances they
cover, but better addressed to the eye and more open to observation. I
would not say that substance exists for the sake of appearance, or faces
for the sake of masks, or the passions for the sake of poetry and virtue.
Nothing arises in nature for the sake of anything else; all these phases
and products are involved equally in the round of existence…

[monesmadedoit]

Long time no see PQ. Tacitus posts are classics. No doubt.

[Brian_F]

Endlessly thankful for this, Quirk. Glad to see you.

[Phya]

Hey guys, I came back to re-read some of Tacitus’ old posts and I can’t access them anymore. Surely they aren’t lost forever? Does anyone have an archive?

[Dee_A]

Hi newbies!

I want you to meet a legend, and hopefully, his notes will inspire you to continue testing and discovering cool combos of your own.

Just a reminder though… If any of the links fail to load you to the right thread, just do this…

Let’s say the link is “https://pheromonetalk.com/t/funny-sad-or-insane-hemhorroids-and-clubbing/36573

Simply delete the “lounge/”

It should look like this afterwards : “https://pheromonetalk.com/t/funny-sad-or-insane-hemhorroids-and-clubbing/36573” And this will work fine.