Skip to main content

Reptile Brains




The Brain: Evolution? or just a freaky thing that happened eons ago to confuse us?


I am taking my Obama bumper sticker off my car this morning. The election is over, and the honeymoon has begun. It won’t last long – but after 8 years of Bush, he will get the benefit of the doubt until at least march of 09.
If I wake up on November 5th and find out he has lost, I will conclude that the election was stolen, or look for the hand of god in all the oblivious places.

If McCain steals the election I am prepared – orange flap hats to family and friends, re-entrenchment in all things social, and preparations for a wartime economy. The end will be nigh and all things will come to pass quickly in a furious anger; justice and decisiveness will rule the day, and all will rue the night.

At time like this I start think the big part of the brain that sits on the reptilian part is just a steroided genetic mal-selection gone wild. That the stress of thousands of years of conflict between hormonal emotion and cool logic has decompensated into a free for all of craziness. Sort of ‘without god there is no morality’ combined with ‘ no attachment of logic to words makes randomness sound as good as anything else.’ Adverbs and adjectives spewing without the structure of nouns and verbs – anarchy of sentence structure thrust onto paragraphs of speech and thought.

Obama makes sense to me when he talks. The words follow a pattern in my head that, like music or art, rings true. I don’t know if he has it in him to be a Lincoln or F.D.R., but it gives me hope to think that with him there might be a chance. I know that what makes us great as a people, and what makes the crap of democracy worthwhile, is that when facing crushing times, we find the strength to make better, and a leader to hold up to a mirror of best we can become.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Satoshi Nakamoto claim

I met a man claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto outside a building I work at near the SF train station. He asked to talk to me. He was white, 50ish, with a 3 day beard that seemed trim.  He was dressed in high quality, slightly worn Patagonia gear.  He spoke in a quiet voice and didn’t appear obviously crazy after a brief talk with him.  He said that he had worked with people in the building that I’m at, but was confused about the details.  “You ever had amnesia?,” he said, not knowing who he was talking  to. “It’s like that.” Having enjoyed our talk - he then asked if I would do him a favor and,  “get the message out that I’m back in town —that’s all,” he said, “They’ll figure the rest out. “ “marshallmathersfoundation.com,” he added,“ they’ll need to know that. “ He’s wearing bright orange gaiters if interested. He’s probably going to be around for a while.  He’s maybe nutty, but since he didn’t bring up Deuteronomy during our conversation, I’m giving hi...
1 comment
Read more

Free Willy

“…Some say it's just a part of it We've got to fulfill the book.” B. Marley Before I completely run away from the point, the subject of this essay is free will, or, more accurately, the illusion of free will. It will be interesting to see if free will even comes up laterally over the next few hundred words now that I’ve set it up as a specific goal.  The imp of the perverse makes it a sure thing that I won’t – but that surety might also double back and force  me to stay on point. There are no dogs to pick  in this fight and it’s not a fight,  and if I’m right, none of this is anything but documentation for a litigious god that will never see it. Like quantum mechanics, life is about either time or place, never both, and how we choose to pretty up our choices is neither the point, or even a choice – it’s after the fact punctuation we use to justify and make sense of our ontological messiness.  (Science has proven that we decide things with our body b...
Post a Comment
Read more

We sit in passionate apathy

"You can’t debate with someone who hates you." C. Hitchens   Reason has become a tool to manipulate you into thinking things are true that you know are not true. Science and math have become a tools for the wealthy to increase the piles of money they then use to Rent the laws.  Religion continues to be a form of racist nationalism – a nation built on manufactured words that demand the permanent death of all humans who follow different words. The more the others believe their truths, the more they need to die. Welcome to the new hybrid theocracy -- based on the Eastern Orthodox, but with just enough Texas to really pop. The intellectual framework for western society no longer works for most people – faith has been lost and now ridiculed; common sense beliefs passed down for generations are being discarded while children are being raised as docile pups to be eventually clubbed into the correct forms of submission. We no longer question and an...
Post a Comment
Read more