The Blog of Jason “Jayce” Olshefsky

After the parade, Ali and I got lunch at Mac’s Philly Steaks (76 South Main St., Canandaigua). It’s a decent place and — with my only slightly trained taste — felt that their cheese-steak sandwiches were quite authentic. It was definitely a good start before we headed out to Stony Brook State Park (10820 State Route 36, Dansville) to go camping.

The first thing we noted was there were several signs declaring that no alcohol was permitted in the park. This was not mentioned earlier and we intended on having a *ahem* good time, so our cooler was filled with quite a bit of beer and wine coolers. As such, we said nothing and quietly circumvented the rule by using cups and keeping it inside the tent. It was only because the park was minimally staffed that we — and some significant percentage of other campers (10% to 75% would be my guess) — were able to imbibe.

I imagine the rule was created to allow rangers to eject “rowdy” campers. However, it’s really just a way to circumvent the inherent unfairness of a subjectively applied rule like “no alcohol abuse”. The personal prejudices of a park ranger would directly come into play — perhaps as innocent as permitting attractive young women to “keep it quiet” or as sinister as searching the camps of black people for illegal contraband.

I end up stuck at a crossroads about it all. On the one hand, I think it’s important to allow a certain subjective leeway in interpreting the law — after all, it’s part of the checks and balances devised in the Constitution. But on the other hand, I want law itself to be, well, law — such that it defines the boundaries of permissible behavior.

As it stands now, it appears that determining which laws are “Law” and which are “suggestions” is a collectively agreed-upon and largely arbitrary process — molesting children?: no way; talking on your cell phone while driving?: only if you won’t get caught. It goes back to what I said before: laws are entirely voluntary. Personal behavior is not defined by law, but it often correlates because laws — in my opinion — should codify only universally unacceptable behaviors. A tall order indeed — and in all likelihood, too tall to actually accomplish.

All I’m saying is that laws should either be all absolute or all suggestions but not an arbitrary mix.

Anyway … where was I. Oh yeah, camping.

So Ali and I got set up pretty well and spent the first day kind of lounging around. Well, that’s what we did most of the rest of the time too. We did go on a hike around the rim of the gorge … a long, tiring hike indeed.

We also swam in the man-made, stream-fed pool. It was a clever dam structure in the gorge to offer a swimming area that included a kiddie section and another section that went as deep as 8 feet. It was very cold — around 60°F. I had been in the water already so I was prepared but Ali was quite shocked by it. I found that I could get used to it, though. It was also quite nice that, despite the silt in the water, there was no chlorine so it left you feeling nice and fresh.

We also spent a lot of time exploring the gorge — another illegal activity that a large contingent of park visitors freely violated [thank goodness for funding cuts so there were no rangers to kick us out!]. I particularly liked the larger waterfalls, one of which included a deep section you could jump into from a short rock ledge, and another had a blast of cool water that you could let pound on your back like a friggin’ 200 gallon-per-minute massage. The stream varied in width and flow-rate, depending on whether it had cut through depths of the slate bed. Some of the deeper troughs had enough flow and were smooth enough that you could use them like a water slide. The rough patches in the slate bottoms were enough to rub holes in my 20-year-old swimsuit, though.

We left the campground once to get ice cream at The Stony Brook Farm Market (10895 State Route 36, Dansville) — a nice excursion in the middle of the weekend. Ali had accidentally booked through Monday so we got to stay late on Sunday. The place cleared out right at 11 a.m. — check-out time — leaving us with just a half-dozen other camps in sight; much different from the fully-booked state over the weekend. We got back in the afternoon on Sunday and tried getting back into the swing of things with limited success.

Sondra and I had a discussion this morning about getting things done. We’ve both completed projects of various scales in our lives but were trying to figure out why it’s so hard to finish the last step. We focused on creative projects where one starts with but an idea and makes that come to physical reality — step-by-step. It seems like it’s not too hard to get a project started although there is some resistance because there’s not yet a foundation which makes a creative idea alone pretty easy to dispel (except those ones that really nag at you). Once things get rolling it’s even easier because there’s always some next step to strive toward. But then right at the end, it seems the last few steps are just drudgery. We wanted to figure out why.

Since I’ve been on the kick of blaming everything on fear, I decided to do that here too. Like I blogged before, I feel that fear and excitement differ only in one’s attitude: that if you’re anxious, it’s fear, but if you’re joyous, it’s excitement. In both cases, it’s a reaction to your logical mind’s “no answer” reaction — it happens when you don’t have enough information to divine the best course of action … or you just don’t know what’s about to happen at all.

So with the end of a project, all the facets you tried to control are finally put to the test — and then there’s all the things you didn’t think of. Will it be like I thought it would? Will people react to it like I thought? Will it last? Will it fail? — All these unknowns suddenly come to the forefront.

But then we were discussing it and neither of us really felt that we were afraid of finishing a project. Usually we pushed through with either force-of-will or were excited to finish it, but never really “afraid” per se. But I still felt it fit the pattern of fear and the reaction to it: the process of dawdling through the last steps of a project indicate a fear of completion — that anxious reaction to the unknown.

So if there is indeed a fear/excitement (or fexcitement, if you will) reaction to this unknown event, is there a way to uncork it, let it out, and handily finish a project? Why was it that some projects we worked on seemed to never touch that dawdling stage but even accelerated to completion?

Yes.: it’s celebration.

Whenever we had a project that was easy to complete, there was a celebration at the end. That’s what I get from Burning Man: it’s a celebration to declare the completion of projects and the presentation of them.

In fact, the more general case is that one celebrates a rite-of-passage. By celebrating, there’s focus on the opportunity: the new, unknown things that are to come. By not celebrating, it’s a focus on the loss: the absence of what was, and a dreary apprehension toward living without that ever again. For instance, a high-school graduation party celebrates a step toward adulthood, taking focus away from the death of childhood and coercing fear into excitement.

So projects call for a rite-of-passage celebration as well: from “in process” to “done”. Because when a project is completed, the activity stops and the project makes the transition from something that is “to be” to something that “is”. Focusing on the activity of the project and the end of “doing” — and specifically ignoring that transition to a new form — makes it a mourning experience of loss, an unpleasant experience to avoid.

I want to far overuse this technique in the near future, celebrating everything. But then I might skip that step and save it for the “big” things that really need a kick-in-the-pants.

I woke up in the middle of the night, and as often happens, the demons in my head took hold and won’t let me get back to sleep. This time it’s that I’m trying to reconcile killing someone for my own convenience.

The United States is at war with Iraq. What that means is that there are people sent by the U.S. who are encouraged by us to stay. There are a lot of people in Iraq, on the other hand, who want those people to leave. We sent our people there with all sorts of weapons so they can kill the people who want us to leave — and likewise, the people who want us to leave try to kill the people who we sent.

This will continue until our President shakes hands with somebody and people sign some papers and then the people we sent will come back home.

So switching to the concrete, there is someone in Iraq right now whose direct relative has been killed by an American. That is, there is someone whose brother, sister, father, mother, husband, wife, son, or daughter has been killed by an American.

There is no way anyone can convince me that this is a good thing.

The reason that person was killed is because the U.S. sent someone there who killed them. If that American were never there, then that person would not have been killed.

I pay my taxes and I will continue to do so. If I don’t, I’ll go to jail. My life will be disrupted in an unfavorable way, but there is pretty much no risk that I’ll die if I don’t pay.

However, those taxes have been used to fund the war. If I had not spent that money, perhaps there would be one person who didn’t go to Iraq. And because they wouldn’t have been there, then some person in Iraq wouldn’t be dead tonight. And their living relative would not have to experience the unbearable loss of their kin.

That’s the nature of the faulty logic of my sleepless mind.

However what keeps me from going back to sleep is that someone is dead — and more importantly that someone is being killed right now, and tomorrow it will happen again. And again and again.

Think about the person you love the most in the whole world right now.

Now bang: they’re dead.

Somewhere there’s a person who knew this was going to happen. What he did to stop it was to write a couple letters to people telling them he thought it would be a bad idea. But he also sent those people money — a lot of money — knowing full-well that they intended to use it to kill your loved-one. To be completely fair, that person would have his life disrupted — he’d go to jail if he didn’t pay the money.

So on the one hand, you’ve got the corpse of your loved-one. And on the other, you’ve got someone who wasn’t willing to spend a couple years in prison to stop it. Both are cases of lost years, but in one case it’s the absolute remainder of one’s life and in the other, a few years of my life.

I can’t figure out the morality of the whole thing, but I sure feel terrible that someone’s loved-one is dead because I didn’t want to stop it.

Now maybe I can shrug and go back to sleep.

I got into a discussion on Tribe the other day about what is fear — specifically, when are decisions made because of fear. I argued that fear never comes into play in decision making because it never gets the chance to be explored. I talked about this with my friend Tony and he pointed out that biologically, fear is the same thing as excitement — the only difference is attitude. So I thought I’d revisit all of it and try and tie it into something coherent.

In the Extreme Honesty Tribe, I made a case for fear never actually being experienced in a rational decision-making process. It’s a semantic argument, but important: saying one didn’t act because of fear usually means they decided to avoid a situation that might cause fear. For instance, saying “you didn’t apply for that creative director job because of fear” doesn’t really mean that you were afraid — you just avoided the anxious experience.

In other words, fear is the experience of feeling anxious from taking an action that has a broad and unpredictable set of outcomes. Curiously, it’s the same circumstances that cause excitement — except that instead of anxiety, one feels invigoration. Hence, it’s all attitude; whether one is worrying about a negative outcome or anticipating a positive one.

Let me start a scenario to work from: running into a busy street, right into traffic. When I think about it, I think, “that’s a stupid idea because I’d probably get run over.” If I imagine myself actually doing it, there would be screeching tires and people honking their horns and maybe some collisions; I might get run into and thrown over a car; or maybe I get whacked and injured bad enough to lose consciousness and end up in a hospital.

But then I think, “well, I actually probably won’t get run over unless I jump right out in front of a moving car.” What would probably really happen is that people would honk and yell and stop. If I made my way to the other side, they’d probably cuss and gesticulate angrily and that would be that.

In that is an interesting demonstration: that our reflexive rational sense is often quite flawed. If I say, “why don’t you just run out into traffic?” the reflexive answer is something like, “so I don’t get hit by a car”. However, if you separate “running into traffic” into two cases — “arbitrarily jumping into traffic” and “abruptly entering traffic such that an attentive driver would have adequate time to stop” — you find that two separate risks emerge. In the former, there’s a statistical likelihood that you’re going to get hit: if cars pass at an average of one every 5 seconds and it takes 2 seconds for them to successfully stop, then your odds are 2/5 that you’ll get hit by a car if you randomly enter traffic. But if you only enter traffic when an attentive driver has the ability to stop, your chances of getting hit are much lower — let’s say (arguably …. arguably)1 in 200 that a driver is not being attentive — then that’s your odds of being hit. It’s still not enough to warrant the risk, at least for most of us, but if you add in your own ability to jump clear in the 2 seconds when a driver is failing to stop, then it’s really not all that bad.

But that in itself is a flawed argument. While statistical analysis opens up to new ways of understanding the world, it still is not a predictive tool: it can only guarantee the outcome of future statistical analysis. For instance, no matter how many ways I analyze the results of the roll of a 6-sided die, I still cannot predict the outcome of the next roll. If I run into traffic — whether arbitrarily or with caution — I cannot predict whether I will actually be hit by a car.

So now where’s our rational mind? Mine says, “Well, regardless: I don’t want to piss people off”. I’ll leave an exercise for the student to chase each risk and reward (to oneself, to the drivers, and to society in general) of such behavior to its nonexistent conclusion.

But what would the point be — of running into traffic, for instance? Therein lies the point of the whole thing: I don’t know and neither do you. Perhaps one would grok the behavior of people in cars and find solace in that. Perhaps one would realize that they have been overly cautious their whole life. Perhaps someone turns around and seeks the pedestrian to punch them. Perhaps one would get hit by a car. — I don’t know.

I can guarantee, though: that one will face a situation where the outcome is unknown. And that is the root of both fear and excitement.

I can also say that I experience regret whenever I encounter a situation that would force me to face unknown outcomes and I avoid it because of that — that I avoid a situation if I believe myself to be unlikely to succeed without evidence. I regret it because I think it perpetuates a state of childhood — that dispelling the unknowable through experience is the path to true adulthood.

And I think it is indicative in the culture around me. Powers-that-be are drawn to the safe and the statistically demonstrable. We shun risk-takers — and at the same time admire them … in an instinctive way. I think it is our nature to face the unknown to make it understood.

The ultimate, permanently un-shareable unknown is death itself. Only by constantly building confidence in our ability to face the unknown can we even hope to face our inevitable ends with peace, confidence, and grace.

I noted a press release from City Hall (30 Church St.) from May 23, 2008 titled “Mayor Duffy Statement on Court’s Approval of Midtown Condemnation Proceeding“. The title implies Midtown was condemned, but the body of the release states, “we are thankful for Judge Van Strydonck’s decision to grant our motion to take ownership of Midtown by eminent domain.” My confusion was directly clarified in the Wikipedia article on eminent domain, explaining that “the term ‘condemnation’ is used to describe the formal act of the exercise of the power of eminent domain” and that it is “not to be confused with the same term that describes a declaration that real property, generally a building, has become so dilapidated as to be legally unfit for human habitation due to its physical defects.”

While I’m no fan of the myriad of ways the government can take away one’s earned property, I do give preference to those methods which are a simple if-then algorithm. What I mean by that is things like property tax: I at least know that if I do not pay my property tax, the government will take that property away. As such, I can choose my course of action and understand the reaction.

Exercising the power of eminent domain — condemnation — can happen at any time and without any cause on the part of the property owner. Because of that, I would hope that the government uses it with great care. Let’s say you’ve got a $50,000 house — at least that’s what it would sell for on the open market. If the government wants to run a highway through it, I would hope that is done gingerly and fairly — so for instance, one might request $150,000 to find a suitable replacement home in short order and to cover personal losses and such, but it would typically be unreasonable to request $1,500,000 unless there’s some unusual circumstances.

One has to remember, of course, that the will of the government will persevere. Realizing that, it should be as cordial a disruption as possible — the government providing the “scooped-up in the hands of God” kind of move, and the property owners agreeing to reasonable discomfort. In theory, the governmental need for the property is so great that paying more than the current market value is a bargain.

Admittedly I’m talking about someone’s home. In the case of Midtown, it’s commercial property. Regardless of who owned it — [and with great reluctance *sigh*] even if it’s a property holding company — as long as they met the requirements for keeping the property, as far as I’m concerned, they have the right to continue to keep it.

So let me go back to eminent domain once more. My recollection is that it’s for things like a highway or a railroad where one property owner blocks completion of a much larger project — for instance, a farmer refusing to sell a mile of access across a 1,000 acre farm, preventing the completion of a 500 mile highway, or at least dramatically increasing the cost and complexity. I gather that historical precedent has changed this view, and indeed a project can target only one property.

In the case of Midtown, the whole project has me thinking of the City government with cartoon dollar-signs in their eyes: it’s the City gambling with their revenues as if they were a business. I would much rather have had them support PAETEC’s efforts to purchase the property themselves — welcome PAETEC to the table and open up the zoning and permit processes, for instance. As I see it, PAETEC has no risk — the City now owns Midtown and PAETEC can set up their world headquarters wherever they please. This is the same perfect-storm situation as the Fast Ferry: the City removed risks to encourage economic development, and caused irreconcilable bad business decision to be made in the artificial safe-harbor.

But I would also like assurance that the property owners have been justly compensated — by definition of the property owners. I guess this will come to be known in the coming months, as the press release says, “the parties affected by the condemnation will have six months to file claims for additional compensation that they believe are not resolved by the condemnation and relocation payments”. We shall see.

Ali, Stacie, and I went to Hogan’s Hideaway (197 Park Ave.) for dinner. I stuck with the sure bets of a good wine, French onion soup, and a grilled cheese and was not disappointed. Well, okay, except the sandwich which wasn’t grilled as much as I’d like.

After that we headed to Station 55 (55 Railroad St.) for the ArtAwake event. We were surprised to find that they charged a cover at the door — not exactly an art-gallery-kosher move. I was then disappointed to find the works were not particularly impressive. Worse was that the lighting left nothing to the imagination and there were no nooks to explore. It didn’t help all this any that there was no wine to be found either — which, among other things, can help loosen one’s ingrained bindings with America’s corporate-consumer culture. Alas, it was a big disappointment for me, and kind of kicked off the evening poorly.

So then we went to The Bug Jar (219 Monroe Ave.) a bit early to catch the bands there. Unfortunately — despite it being a rather popular headliner — Gaylord, in their last Rochester show before moving to Atlanta — the happy-hour vibe was still in full-force: blaring house music and all. I only really saw the first band, Razor Wire Shrine who are an instrumental chaotic rock band with subtle influences from all over the place. I only caught a little of Fledgling Death, a thrash/heavy metal kind of band. By then the three of us were quite tired and decided to call it an early night.

In related news, The Landfill (625 Weiland Rd.) has been shut down (related because sucky Station 55 has not — it’s too milquetoast to displease the aristocracy). I recall reading it in a news clip from The City Newspaper but it doesn’t appear to have made it to the online edition. I believe it was a casualty of Mayor Robert J. Duffy’s plan to shut down house-parties, as I was pretty sure it was some guy’s house. When I first heard of that law, I was concerned it would be abused beyond its original intent: to give police the leeway they “needed” to shut down house parties when they came upon them. Now, my vision of a house party that needs to be shut down is one that is completely out of control — where the residents have lost their ability to control the party themselves.

Once again — like the shutdown of A|V Art Sound Space (N. Union St. at Trinidad St., #8 in the Public Market, formerly the All-Purpose Room) — the creative fringe of this city has had its hands chopped off. And once again, I theorize that this will push one more of these inspirational creators to go find a tolerant city. And the Mayor and all his cronies will sit around and not care about those one or two fringe people, but to me, they inspire — and I assume so of other creative people. And unfortunately that is not a column in their spreadsheet and it doesn’t compare well to tax dollars.

So, I’m left giving this advice: don’t trust the police. They are not your friends. They are not there to help you. If you see them, go away from them.

I hope this is what the mayor has in mind.

Today I did my usual Saturday running around — groceries, lunch, hanging out with friends, and other miscellaneous errands. Everything seemed to go pretty well.

But in talking with my friends, we got on the topic of politics and the war and that was kind of upsetting — the old “Where’s Osama?” game … all the lives and money lost on (both affecting generations to come) … the power grabbed in the midst of it all. Then there was some tangential notes about the police: someone I knew a little was arrested; my friend got pulled over for not signaling when he’s sure he did (and right in front of his house); and the new surprise “no left turn” from westbound East Avenue onto southbound South Goodman (allegedly — I could swear they just installed a left-turn arrow for that turn).

I also observed people driving strangely in the last couple days. There are a lot of near-misses and generally poor form out there. It’s like people are … well … scurrying. Like it’s the day before the hurricane hits and everyone is running around trying to get those last survival essentials.

All these things combined and I was hit with an overwhelming feeling of dread — the knot-in-your-stomach kind of feeling just before you get into a car accident. Only it’s lasting for the better part of an hour.

I hope it’s nothing … maybe it’s just me noticing things I hadn’t noticed before — having my senses more open than I have in years. Maybe it’s just some recent snarls in my own life. Or maybe it’s that I’m noticing everyone else (including myself) having a generally dour attitude — a chronic kind of thing that just won’t abate, but that you kind of get used to.

We’ll see.

My friend Sondra and I had a lengthy discussion about altered states of consciousness and whether the physical world as it is presently understood is all that there is to be known. We have both had experiences that seem to defy theories that we misinterpreted coincidental events or that we selectively remembered events that confirmed a theory.

She has recently had apparent success using sigils — a method of creating a symbol to influence a specific outcome. However, as both of us are skeptics, the lack of a causal understanding has us frustrated — although not so much frustration as to stop using what seems to work, especially when it does no harm.

She spoke of the theory that the symbols themselves were being “charged” with something (I almost wrote “energy” but that’s not what I’m talking about). The concept is that if we can observe a symbol (a word, for instance) and that can cause a thought to form in our minds, there is a transfer of something from the symbol to ourself. If that’s true, then can it be possible to charge a symbol with something that can later be received? Can it be used to communicate on some level different from language?

I felt it might be that a sigil is a representation of the start of an action that we forget how we complete. I made an analogy of pounding in a nail: starting with a nail protruding from a board, you would (1) desire for the nail to be pounded in, (2) get a hammer and pound in the nail, and (3) observe the nail pounded in. Now consider the experience if you forgot that you did #2: you would have observed a protruding nail that you wanted pounded in, and then you would note that it was indeed pounded in. What if a sigil is a way to express a desire, and we simply forget how we accomplished it, leading to an outcome that we wanted in the first place?

We also talked about out-of-body experiences, or at least extending our influence and connection to the world beyond the confines of our bodies. A long time ago I had tinkered with out-of-body experiences. One time I felt that I could locate the presence of non-physical beings in space — hundreds of them everywhere; in another, I heard a cacophony of voices. In both cases, though, it scared me — I very much did not want to reach a point where I couldn’t avoid “seeing presences” or “hearing voices” so I turned away from those techniques.

So what if that was a valid, real perception? — a sensory device that I had not needed to use and that I psychologically blocked. What if that could help explain facets of our existence that have yet been unexplained? What if we have deliberately blinded ourselves to avoid seeing something that is complex and confusing; powerful and enriching? The cells in my body are connected in complicated ways, so why not a connection to all life to a similar degree? Why not a connection to the universe in its entirety?

It’s certainly an exciting prospect … [unless, of course, it’s demonstrably an illusion; then it would kind of suck.]

But then I don’t want to dive right into the world of pseudoscience. A serendipitous e-mail gave me a hint, though. It was a link to a TED Talk by a neuroanatomist named Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor titled My stroke of insight. In it, she outlined her own experience of having a stroke and how it affected her brain — an expert in brain anatomy who got the chance to experience what she often explains to others.

The lecture is moving and engaging, but what I took away from it was a reminder to rely on science in my own exploration. One of the key parts of validly using reason and logic to come to conclusions is to start from a point that has already been established — “A” then “B” then “C”. One of the pitfalls in exploring topics that are “out there” is to claim that it is an entirely new frontier and to start from a point that it is not grounded in established knowledge. Doing so invalidates any conclusions attained, so not only is it a false path, it’s genuinely a waste of time.

So it’s one thing to explore and play, but to draw conclusions — like mine and Sondra’s analytical brains desperately want to do — requires that we start at a point of known, physical reality.  Maybe this left-brain, right-brain stuff is a starting point.  I guess I’d better get reading.

Ali and I headed to The Memorial Art Gallery (500 University Ave., near Goodman St.) to see the archaeology lecture. Dr. Garrett Fagan was there to talk about The Dangers of Pseudoarchaeology.

To start with, archaeology is the analysis of physical remains, paying special attention to the context of those remains — their geographic location, location relative to other items and within the strata of the region, any documented historical context, and so on. Further, he stated that there is an assumption among archaeologists that other archaeologists are interested in the best explanation for things.

Pseudoarchaeology — “armchair archaeology” if you will — is performed by people who are not interested in the best explanation at all. Rather, the goal is to attain sensational results — and as such, truth that inconveniently gets in the way of that goal is ignored, denied, or derided as being part of a conspiratorial establishment. It abuses select methods of archaeology for the purpose of lending credence to itself. So, for instance, it may take a small piece of data and fabricate a vast conclusion from it. Or it may rely on outdated models — cherry-picking debunked theories to support a hypothesis.

The thought then is, “so what?: legitimate archaeology will debunk their findings”. Well it’s not so hard when some guy shows up on TV with a wrench and claims it’s the bone of a metal dinosaur. But when it’s someone who’s published a dozen books under the “archaeology” category, it’s quite another.

And therein lies the cornerstone for the “dangers” that Dr. Fagan outlined. The pseudoarchaeologist makes their conclusions first then finds data to fit that — specifically, they skip the peer-review process that is designed to strengthen legitimate theories and diminish illegitimate ones. Relatedly, they will deride critics and celebrate supporters; whereas a true archaeologist will celebrate the respectability of criticism or support and deride inferiority. Frequently the pseudoarchaeologist will leverage nationalism and other unrelated reasons affect objective investigation.

But worst of all is that these pseudoarchaeologists don’t do any real archaeology but they are supported under false pretenses to establish dig-sites which are no more respectable than (and just as destructive as) looters.

The key — in my mind — is that the average person is not an expert in archaeology (and in point of fact, is seldom an expert in any more than one field). As such, they rely on indicators of expertise to make a decision: advanced degrees, validation from others, longevity of their claimed expertise, etc. Unfortunately, all of these can be forged and the non-expert is left wondering what to do.

I guess for most, it’s to remain vigilant. Look for telltale signs — sweeping conclusions, derision of all critics and celebration of all supporters, and a strong influence of motivations external to the work-at-hand.

I also left the lecture with a sense of familiarity for the kind of person that makes a pseudoarchaeologist. It’s the same traits that make up the pseudoscientist and the fraudulent leader. In all these cases, the perpetrator of fraud creates an environment of power and prestige by convincing people that established knowledge is simply a conspiracy against wonders-untold that is otherwise claimed untrue.

For the pseudoarchaeologist, it may be that ancient civilizations were far more advanced than we are — despite established knowledge that they used tools and techniques that we have built upon to become more advanced than they. For the pseudoscientist, it is almost exclusively an attack on good old Thermodynamics Law #2: that you can’t get more energy out of something than you put in — perpetual motion machines, and miraculous energy machines constitute the bulk of their exploration. And for the fraudulent leader, it is a claim that vast improvements can come from their method of leadership which history has consistently shown to be a path to a civilization’s destruction.

And I agree with Dr. Fagan’s comment that these people are not evil, just misguided. They are often deluded by the same thing that tricks others: the fundamental belief that great rewards exist to be claimed; and the refusal to accept that sometimes the greatness of a reward is distorted to be larger than it actually is when observed from afar.

The Dryden Theater at George Eastman House (900 East Ave.) showed Happy Birthday, Wanda June and Ali and I got to see it, despite the terrible road conditions getting there. It was a film based on a play by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. with a very theatrical feel, giving it a bizarre edge. It was funny and poignant, making the point that war is really quite pointless and that there really isn’t any value in the “heroism” of fighting and killing. Oh, and how incredibly silly and dangerous the idea of “heaven” is.

The plot of the film follows a woman and her son. Her husband has been out-of-contact for 8 years on some kind of heroic journey — wars, killing animals and the like. She gets a college degree and begins to piece her own life together by courting two men: a pacifist doctor and a hero-worshiping vacuum cleaner salesman. Her husband makes a surprise return and tries to retain his brazen, hero’s status.

The point, in a way, is to ask, “what the fuck is so heroic about killing?” It really resonated with me. I had been asking more-or-less the same question for a while. For instance, it’s common knowledge that you thank soldiers for defending the country. But given our eternal conflict in Iraq, it’s become … unsatisfying … for me to do so. When you fundamentally disagree with the idea of war in the first place, and then add on that further fighting is only inciting existing enemies and creating more then how can you thank someone for making America less safe? It gets to the point of patronizing — like thanking the neighborhood cat-murdering idiot for keeping your house safe from cat infestation.

In fact, it’s more about fear. I feel compelled to thank a soldier for the sake of not getting in trouble, yet my opinion of the situation is so bad that I want to tell them, “stop fucking volunteering!!!!” [With extra exclamation points, even.] Please.

And what scares me more is people who believe in an afterlife — especially those who think it’s the promised land of 57 varieties of virgins. And before you think I’m bashing Islam alone, ask a Christian how much they’re looking forward to meeting Jesus and how lucky people are whose miserable earthly existence is cut short. It’s really quite scary. I really would like it if people believed like I did: that we get one shot at life and that we should make the best of it and help everyone else to make the best of theirs too.

But that makes me some kind of Godless monster, right? I mean, true evil in the world comes from the Others — the people who don’t read the Bible and don’t go to church and don’t hate gays and don’t believe women are just baby incubators.

Sorry … I digress …

The response from war hawks is always the same: “your pacifist beliefs are all well and good, but what happens when someone sticks a gun in your face?” Well then the rules change, don’t they? If you believe in the value of life — especially that you only get one go around — then you’d better believe I’m going to try and avoid kisses from bullets rushing to show me the love.

The trick is this: “peace first”. Or, if you must, “war last”.

In other words, if you come upon people who say, “we hate America,” figure out why first. At present, the only reaction is to blow the fuck out of them. You see, we can talk and understand and resolve for a long time — even have an ebb and flow about the whole thing — but you can’t un-blow the fuck out of someone. So save that for last.

Then the response from the hawks and jingoists is, “what about 9/11?” Oh yeah — what about that? We need to get “them”, right? And who are “they”? Why Osama bin Laden of course. Haven’t heard that name in a while, have you? Of course not: if you watch 9/11 Press for Truth or read The Complete 911 Timeline or the related book, The Terror Timeline: Year by Year, Day by Day, Minute by Minute: A Comprehensive Chronicle of the Road to 9/11—and America’s Response, you’ll find that the Bushies carefully herded bin Laden to safety in Pakistan.

You’ve been had, America.  Wake up!