What is a non theist, and why I am one...

Sometimes coming across a good book or three helps you find the language to explain things you already know about yourself. Literature, poised with the power to enlighten inform and change, can also serve the purpose of shining a light on that which you already knew and held dear.

Even my decision to call myself a non-theist (as opposed to using the word atheist) is a deliberate attempt to focus my thoughts and the thoughts of others back on to the meaning of the actual word, so that the taboo's and common misunderstandings of "that other word" are easier to avoid.

I probably owe the clarity of my thinking to three books I've read in recent history, though I preface this to make clear I've since adolescence thought of myself as a non-theist and a secular humanist, long before I ever fully understood what those words and phrases implied. 

Lets start with Richard Dawkins. Though I had followed his work by initially reading excerpts of his two books on biology, "The Extended Phenotype" and "The Selfish Gene" (after which I did properly read his books) it was his book "The God Delusion" that helped me understand within myself better how others could believe in absurd things that I could not. Furthermore, that book helped me stop my "fence sitting" on the subject, making me realize that my placations and silence were serving no useful purpose for me or anyone else.

The next author would be Sam Harris. His is an interesting history, that I can perhaps relate to on some level. It appears he reached his state of epiphany after having studied eastern Buddhist practices for the better part of a decade. Though I never formally studied Buddhism myself, I was strongly exposed to it during the years I studied Aikido, so I was aware of just how enlightening this eastern view of the world and our place in it could be trans-formative to ones character. Though Sam wrote several books on the topic, his last full length work "The Moral Landscape" did much to codify my awareness of where he has been suggesting we go with his premises and arguments. He makes a compelling case for rational inquiry into the nature of suffering and its consequences that separates our need to cede this ground to men in pointy hats.

The final and most recent work that has helped me better understand myself and my own thinking in particular is Penn Jillette's latest book "God, No!" Full of wit, and a considerable dose of anecdotes about his crazy life, he distills what it is to be an atheist and humanist into such logical and coherent (and ridiculously simple) terms that it makes me think what this man could have done if he'd been writing books instead of drowning Teller all of these years. :)

All you have to say, to be an atheist, is to answer "I just don't know" to the whole epistemological question. And when you do, it automatically answers whether or not you believe, because you cannot believe if you don't know. These two sentences should get many agnostics (as I once thought I was) off the fence. 

Once you realize that the existence of deity is utterly unknowable, it gets such a huge and burdensome question out of the way for you, so you can focus on living your life and figuring out what that is all about. The precious gift of life is itself the reward and the point for me, negating any need to believe in ridiculous and divisive things. And contrary to those who might think otherwise, it is not a path to nihilism, rather it is for me a path towards true enlightened existence. 

From The Other Side

As I've blogged about my following of various transparency movements (those being #OccupyWallStreet #Anonymous #Wikileaks) there is perhaps one interesting tidbit I've left out. My older brother is a significant figure in South Carolina's #Teaparty.

Considering that we're family, naturally we don't let politics and philosophy interfere with being family. Or maybe that's not such a natural thing. Our family is unique in some regards. Our mother was an active participant in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960's, so growing up with such a person made sure that philosophical debate about social issues, morality, ethics, and political systems was a given. As such I suppose my brother and I are simply well schooled in our ability to come to loggerheads over an issue and set it aside to eat dinner together, tell jokes, and just be family.

Our differences philosophically are significant. He is a devout christian, and I'm an atheist. He's quite the right leaning conservative whereas I'm far more libertarian/left in my social philosophy. Given my knowledge of other families with such sociopolitical divides, perhaps it is a small miracle we get along so well.

One thing I had to "wake him up" about was just how large #OccupyWallStreet is getting. He's still somewhat convinced that the likes of George Soros and others on the left are funneling tons of money and resources into the movement (and thus in control of it), but I think I did at least convince him that on some level #Occupy is sort of picking up where the #TeaParty left off. Even he begrudgingly admits that much of the #Teaparty steam has been borg'd by the Republican Party (thanks in no small part to the Koch brothers and Newt Gingrich). He met personally with Newt Gingrich a couple of months ago, which more or less convinced him and his fellow senior group members that their group wanted nothing to do with him.

Being a senior and founding member of one of the earliest #TeaParty groups in the country, we've naturally had quite a few discussions over the last few years and I have to admit that many of the things he and his group were claiming about how our economy seems to function were and are indeed largely correct. He does tend to buy into conspiracy theory far more than I do, but I've already blogged about my feelings there. Such conspiracies may be true, but proving them to me seems to be a waste of time and effort better spent on simply dismantling the apparatus around the process itself.

At any rate, after our discussions yesterday I found it quite surprising that a significant, if not major mover and shaker in the #TeaParty and I can agree on so much. Perhaps it's not so amazing though. The apparatus that are broken in our political system are the very ones in the way of real debate, discussion, compromise, and resolution. In other words we both realize, knowing full well we reside at times in near polar opposite ends of the political spectrum, that we can't even get down to the messy details if we don't fix the system first.

• We both agree that banks too big to fail, should be too big to exist.
• We both agree that "financialization" is akin to Las Vegas gambling and should be illegal or tightly controlled.
• We both agree that our government must get back to its Constitutional roots.
• We both agree that money must be taken out of politics.
• We both agree in principal that the Federal Reserve must be changed.

I would find it difficult to imagine a #TeaParty member or an #OccupyWallStreet occupier who would disagree with very little if any of the above as clear goals. The minutiae can be debated of course. We both differ on, for instance, precisely what we'd like to see happen to the Fed. And the Constitutional roots of our government? We disagree on the scope of what that means.

But look, here's a hardcore #TeaParty advocate and a rather staunch left leaning #OccupyWallStreet #WikiLeaks and #Anonymous follower who can AGREE ON SIGNIFICANT THINGS.

What this tells me is that once you get past the smoke and mirrors of the press and the plutocracy, we're largely on the same side on most every vital issue. This is the hidden progress in the social landscape of this country that shows perhaps America is waking up. I like that.

Ramblings Of An Incessant Thinker: A Broken Country - How To Begin Fixing It

Ramblings Of An Incessant Thinker: A Broken Country - How To Begin Fixing It: A Broken Country Many people I know are utterly fed up with the state of things in our country, and they always seem to ask “how did we get...

A Broken Country - How To Begin Fixing It

A Broken Country

Many people I know are utterly fed up with the state of things in our country, and they always seem to ask “how did we get here?” Everyone has their opinions on this of course, and most are at least somewhat close to the mark in my estimation. The issue I take with most people I know is simply that they still choose to see the problems and potential solutions in a two dimensional manner, at least in the political sense.

More and more I've come to conclude that our two party system is largely broken. And not necessarily because two parties aren't enough either. Rather it is that these two parties represent a nearly unbroken history of political machinations that have distorted the entire political process. Republicans and Democrats still tow their individual party lines when it comes to the sort of standard arguments we expect from them, so little has changed on the surface. What has changed are the underlying processes that drive the system itself.

The Tea Party Movement is one of several recent “answers” to the overall frustration the public feels with the process, but one I feel strongly has misplaced priorities often owing to a naive interpretation of the facts behind our current socio/economic situation. The other significant movements geared towards overall transparency, such as #OccupyWallStreet and #Anonymous seem to get little if any press, and what little they do get is often quite distorted. Both being significantly driven by the revelations of #Wikileaks does make a difference though in how these movements should be interpreted. Why you ask? Because at the end of the day this approach differs significantly from the simplistic finger pointing sort of solutions offered by all other sides.

We live in a complex society, one where individual liberty and freedom are tantamount to most people, even if much of our liberty and freedom in practice today is an illusion. Anyone with a brain can realize that we have huge problems in this country, and even I believe there are significant and distinct root causes for the situation we find ourselves in. What I assiduously avoid however is conspiracy theory. I avoid it, not because some of those theories may not be true, but rather because the real problem is the existence of the machinery of conspiracy itself. I ran across a great article here that really digs into the larger issues at stake, which also paints a much broader understanding of what #Wikileaks is really about. The gist of this thinking however, is that limiting the capability of conspiracy in itself will help us at least begin to gain the transparency we all seek. Only with transparency can we really get a handle on the root problems of our society at a level of detail worth solving.

One other thing is vital to understanding the nature of our situation, and that is having at least a cursory understanding of modern American history. Laying bare a few facts about a couple of specific presidencies has for me codified my thinking in regards to our current situation. And surprisingly, one of those presidencies is not the one most haters of our current government jump on, Franklin Roosevelt. Granted, there has been some rather obvious fallout from the FDR administrations establishment of our current social welfare systems. But this fallout is largely a result of the tampering by later presidencies. How do I mean? Let's take a look at one particularly egregious presidency.

Whenever you mention Richard Nixon, it always seems to bring back the image of the Watergate debacle (or Futurama, depending on the generation you come from, but I digress). However Nixon's administration, as well as the congress serving around him before and after his election, really have quite a lot to answer for. I would bet that few people realize that it was Nixon who was behind the WIC program (Women/Infants/Children), behind the expansion of the Welfare and Medicare programs, or our current system of heavily subsidized agriculture.

Sounds more like a liberal platform than a republican one doesn't it? To understand one must remember what the social landscape was like at the end of the sixties. Inner city poverty was a real and growing problem, and the middle class were being equally hammered by cyclical food pricing issues. What better way to get elected and stay elected than enact programs that REMOVE THESE ISSUES AS POLITICAL ISSUES. We can also thank Nixon for the first real reform of health care in the 20^th century through the deregulation of the insurance industry, a reform that has basically destroyed our healthcare system. While we're at it, one must recall the key shifts that took place in our Federal Court system under his administration, which were responsible for the beginnings of the reinterpretation of the 14^th Amendment which now gives citizen-like rights to corporate entities.

The other president worth mentioning here is Ronald Reagan. His administration was able to convince much of the political establishment, including many democrats, that trickle down economics was a viable economic strategy. It was during his administration that we saw the vast deregulation of financial institutions, which has led to our current series of debacles. Prior to these two administrations our finance sector largely worked towards building real capital, and making real investments in real things such as manufacturing and infrastructure. Since the Reagan era, our finance sector has transformed our entire economy into one driven by “financialization”, or one that works by making money from money itself. Not only would things like “Collateral Debt Obligations”, “Naked Short Selling”, “Credit Default Swaps”, and Hedge Funds not even exist now had Reagan not done what he had done, they would be illegal today. More importantly the whole process of financialization has made absolutely sure that the only people that can gain anything in our society are the ones who have the money to play.

To be entirely fair here, the three Democratic presidents we've had in this timespan have been as guilty of buying in to the above mentioned situations. Most aggregiously so of Bill Clinton and our current President Barack Obama.

Economists tend to focus on the big picture entirely too much, and this bears out rather obviously when one looks back over the last thirty years. The American economy has largely grown (despite three significant economic downturns) well ahead of inflation during the last thirty years. But when one only looks at a single metric, one often misses important details.

Though our economy has grown much over the last thirty years, that growth has had significant and measurable costs. The relative wealth of the top 20% of earners in America has grown by a factor of four, to represent nearly 86% of all wealth in America. Four hundred of the wealthiest American's have the equivalent incomes of the lowest earning 100 million Americans. Meanwhile those at the poverty level have not only seen their ranks grow, but have seen their effective incomes (when factored against inflation) actually contract. The American middle class, once coined thus because it represented the largest group of citizens, now earns barely 6% of the overall wealth in our country.

In my estimation both sides of the political landscape have got it all wrong, and for all the wrong reasons. Republicans and Tea Partiers want to limit government largely because they think that free enterprise and capitalism can fix everything. I tend to agree that this would be true myself. The problem though is that our finance systems are not geared towards a proper and competitive capitalist market at all. So until our government (the one Republicans and Tea Partiers hate and mistrust) reestablishes the sort of controls and oversight we had prior to the 1970's this sort of thinking will get us nothing but what we've already experienced.

The Democrats hang on assiduously to their social programs, largely because they strongly believe that the government must be in the business of being our societies safety net. I also agree with this assessment, but in the end it is a naïve solution to placate our citizenry that solves nothing. The government simply cannot shore up growing wage inequities through masterful use of the tax code. Such types of redistribution of wealth only strengthen the desire to make our tax code all the messier, and prohibit people on both sides from even remotely considering building a proper tax code from scratch designed for the 21^st century. As important, growing reliance on entitlement programs erodes our society emotionally and culturally in countless obvious ways. The government can also not play a huge direct role in fostering innovation or shoring up our countries aging infrastructure, mainly because we have the lessons of history to show us how poorly our government does such things efficiently. The reason why the corporate and financial interests in this country are not investing in these areas is primarily because more money is to be made from all those other financial boondoggles I mentioned above that would otherwise be illegal ones.

Our federal government exists for the sole purpose of drafting laws, enforcing laws, and regulating interstate commerce. Until our government gets back to it's roots here, very little is going to be solved.

*AND* until we enact campaign finance reform to get the money influence out of Washington, absolutely nothing will be done.

So what needs to happen? Regulate our finance sector so that it cannot continue to treat Wall Street like it's Las Vegas East. Restrict and regulate our insurance industries so that they function as actual insurance companies like the did prior to the 1970's. Break up the "too big to fail" banking system because something too big to fail should be too big to exist. Work with the Justice Department to try to reverse the recent 2010 ruling “Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission” which basically gives corporate America carte-blanche to run our political process entirely. And stop getting involved in wars that serve no purpose. Our colonial era-esque military presence in 135 countries has got to go away, not to mention our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. The largest single drain on our federal budget, relative to collected income tax, is the Military and not social welfare as most would have you believe. People forget that one of the largest programs, Social Security,  is fed by an entirely different tax, known as the FICA tax. Social Security will have to be reformed, this is true enough, as it is an unsustainable program as it is currently administered. But lets stop with the lie that it is one of our biggest expenditures fed by income tax, because it is not. Incidentally we can also thank Nixon for the reason why the General Accounting Office plays this stupid game with our budget, because it was in the governments interest then during Vietnam, as it is now, to hide the true cost of war.

Most of our societal problems could easily begin to be addressed if our government simply got back to doing what it is supposed to. Easier said than done I know, but it is where we have to start. 

Wisdom Is Where You Find It

You can find wisdom in the most unlikely of places, like for instance the testimony of Hermann Goering in an interview before he committed suicide at Neuremberg in 1946. How on earth can a drug addled Nazi general and obvious sociopath have something wise to impart? Because such a man truly understands the nature of war, that's how.

"Herman Goering, at the Nuremberg Trials:

“Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

Full context:

http://www.snopes.com/quotes/goering.asp"

And history repeats itself...

p.s. There will be some who will totally discount the above, simply because of who it came from. Just realize that we tend to divide pivotal figures in history into either the "good" or "evil" camp as a matter of course, and that this is usually a mistake. My three favorite examples of this phenomenon are Dr. Martin Luther King, Mohandes Ghandi, and Mother Teresa. All three are lauded figures of "good" in 20th century history, but take the tiniest effort at understanding their history and you realize they were simply people that did what their convictions bid of them, and weren't always good or noble in the literal sense.

Dr. King did indeed spearhead the Civil Rights Movement in America, and he used his christian pulpit as a rallying point. But those who know the history of the movement also know his most influential lieutenants were secular atheists, because southern baptists didn't want anything to do with the boat he was rocking. After his death they all magically stepped in and claimed credit of course. His extramarital infidelity is also a matter of history, and well documented, but this sort of thing gets swept under the rug. These truths in no way detract from the good that he did, but they do show that Dr. King was merely a man who was as fallible as the next guy. Incidentally he got his ideas of non-violent protest not from christianity, but from Ghandi.

Mohandes Ghandi spearheaded India's non-violent protest against british colonial rule of India. He however did not get his ideas of non-violent protest from Hinduism but from Jianism, an obscure pacifist religious sect located in northern India. He was also a racist who viewed africans as less than human. This is well documented during his early days as a news reporter in northern africa. He also had weird ideas about chastity and health, which led to his lifelong habits of sleeping with young girls to tempt himself (as part of his interpretation of the Yoga doctrine), and his obsessions with enema's. So yeah, Ghandi was a freaking nutter, but a nutter who in the context of his day did good things for his fellow Indians.

Mother Teresa. Sigh... There's little good I can say about her. Though she won a Nobel Peace Prize for her work with the poor in Calcutta, and spent her whole life raising money for the Catholic Church, one must remember that none of the money she raised for the church was ever spent in her hospices. Hospices that lacked even the basics in medical care. She can be lauded for diligently spreading the word of peace and love over the course of her lifetime, but in practice she did almost nothing for either peace or love other than talk about it. In the end she was just a silly woman with good intentions who let her religious precepts hold her back from anything remotely resembling true greatness.

When one takes away the distorting lens of history, and realizes that historical figures and historical moments cannot easily be condensed into a few paragraphs for a classroom discussion, one realizes that it is all too easy to stop looking at historical figures as simply people.

When you do realize that even the best people in history were just as flawed as you or I, you can also realize that perhaps even the worst people in history were just as flawed. And this is what makes the above quote from a monster like Hermann Goering matter.

"God Delusions", Hacktivism, and the FBI six months late to the party.

As CNET (and virtually every other able bodied news outlet) reported a few days ago, the FBI has announced the arrest of 16 individuals who were allegedly linked to "Operation Payback". As you may recall, Operation Payback was an AnonOps DDOS response to Paypal's refusal to process donations to the online activist group Wikileaks which started at the end of last year.

In response AnonymousIRC and Lulzsec released a statement to the FBI today, making it clear how not seriously they are taking statements from deputy assistant FBI director Steve Chabinsky. I won't rehash what was said here, so just click through the links if you need to get up to speed on this.

The part of all of this I find amazing is how utterly this series of events and it's responses flies in the face of what is really happening.

First off, Operation Payback was organized under an entirely different effort than #Antisec. Secondly, did it really take the FBI half a year to track down a janitor and a pizza shop employee (two examples of the 16 arrested) using "script kiddy" tools to participate in a DDOS attack?

Operation Payback required little in the way of hacking skill, apart from the ability to click a mouse, and yet the timeliness of these indictments and the #Antisec response to them are both a clear reality distortion field that the press at large seems to have missed entirely. For those of you who haven't thought this entire situation through lets step back a bit and examine the situation.

The PayPal DDOS, which was just a part of the larger focus of "Operation Payback" was a DDOS, or Distributed Denial Of Service attack, one of the most basic of attacks. A successful DDOS is all about bandwidth and numbers, and requires (in the case of individuals utilizing their own bandwidth against a network behemoth) a LARGE NUMBER OF PEOPLE PARTICIPATING. Far larger than 16 to be successful against a network giant like PayPal. And yet here we are six months later and the FBI proudly announces its progress in arresting less than two dozen people, all of whom seem to possess about as much hacking skill as your average Farmville whore? This is akin to the FBI going after Pablo Escobar and coming back with an indictment of that cousin of yours who wouldn't stop smoking weed and living on your couch, six months after he entered rehab and started working at Denny's. Is the press really this dense?

Curiously enough the combined #Antisec response I linked above sort of just played along with this, so as to have a reason to respond, and I'm sure the above facts were not lost on those guys at all as they lulz their way  to their next activity.

It is going to be an extremely unfortunate next few months for the 16 who have been arrested, as they are now the poster children for the FBI's effort at putting lipstick on a pig in it's "War on Cyberterrorism". They are the hacktivist equivalents of Jammie Thomas, the Minnesota mother who in 2007 was found liable and fined $1.5 million for allegedly using Kazaa to download 24 songs.

I interviewed Jammie Thomas in 2007 for a tech publication I worked for, and found her to be (after the fact) someone who was really on top of the ethical and legal morass she had found herself in. I only hope the victims of this latest legal farce will be able to come up to speed as quickly and effectively as she did. Nothing like being a scapegoat hunh?

The larger point I want to make is to those of us who might decide in future to participate in grassroots "hacktivism". Just be aware of the real risks before you decide to partake in a crusade of any kind. Most of the critical decisions in life are really just exercises in risk assessment, and it's best to do this with information, so that you're feelings are kept in check with reality.

As I've blogged about before on my personal blog, people are far more apt to do things that make them feel good about themselves regardless of whether or not what they are doing is actually doing any good. As one of my mentor's Penn Jillette said "If feeling good and wasting your time is a good idea, maybe heroin is for you."

That's not to say that I think people participating in grassroots hacktivism are stupid or wrong headed, not at all. It's just that I note over and over again in commentary how many of the participants in such endeavors are called "delusional", or accused of having "god complexes". The solution is simply to know, really know why you are a part of something. Be critical, skeptical, do the research, grow your awareness, and do so yourself outside of the influence of others (including me) before you "step aboard the lulzboat".

Where War Has Gotten Us - A Simple Math Lesson

As we sit today wondering whether or not those in Congress and the Executive Branch of our government will sit down and decide what to do with our debt ceiling, just consider a few inconvenient truths, one only recently come to light thanks to Wikileaks.

We've been at war in the Middle East for twenty years now. A war propagated by neocons convinced that reshaping the Middle East was in the U.S. interest. Think this is conspiracy theory driven fallacy? The Wikileaks dump of over 400,000 diplomatic missives has certainly caused much in the way of public embarrassment for the U.S. and it's allies, but there are a few choice and damning tidbits, like how we gave Iraq the green light to invade Kuwait just to give us an excuse to brand Iraq a threat worthy of invasion. I find it curious how not only the mainstream press but the American public can ignore this damning fact, given that it was revealed on the floor of the House Of Representatives earlier this year.

What does this have to do with a budgetary crisis? Our own General Accounting Office still pegs military expenditure as roughly 20% of our annual budgetary expenditure. The government has been playing this "trick" with accounting ever since the Nixon Administration, from which we also got our modern healthcare system, subsidized farming, and things like the WIC program, all moves to take critical financial issues off the table of political discussion. Thanks a lot Tricky Dick!.

The problem with this lies in the accounting itself, because the GAO includes the Social Security Trust Fund as part of its budgetary calculation. Keep in mind the important but often forgotten fact that the SSTF is fed by FICA taxes and not Income Tax.

If we do a few things the budgetary problem becomes much different. If we take the SSTF, Social Security, and FICA off the table a very different picture emerges. And let's just forget the looming insolvency of the SSTF for now. It is a concern, but not a pressing one in the immediate term.

If we do this and run the numbers against the U.S. Governments own accounting figures, the Military and all of it's obligations end up being around 54% of the annual expenditure. 54% of an expenditure where we are also borrowing roughly 40 cents on the dollar to pay for it.

So the question becomes, why are we at war?

This isn't some juvenile "peacenick" play, hating on the brave men and women serving our country, but a real and critical question about the motivations behind war. Patriotism can easily become foolishness when you're fighting for the wrong things, based on entirely wrong reasoning.

Agree with me or disagree with me as you see fit. Indeed I encourage and want more debate on this subject, just be sure to come up with compelling arguments to explain away the grade school math at work here.