Three quarters of my money and a quarter of my time is spent on sustenance – shelter, food, and health; stretches and laundry and meals. What's the point?

US end of life suggestion - one terminal drug dose per person

Every US citizen gets an electronic prescription for a terminal drug dose, one time only (associate with SSN; maybe have IRS track).

Maybe one has to be over some age to fill it.  It's OK to sell it (black market) but if one does, one then only has access to 'ordinary' health care.  (One round of chemo, one hip replacement, ... )  No exceptions at all for second round of prescription.  Indeed some hardship.  And yes, risk that teens could access these.  Of course risk that people incompetent to choose would indeed choose.  Yes, subject to abuse, influence.  But overall, puts choice in the hands of the individual with way less risk and cost than current situation.  Very American.  Very autonomous.  Completely simple.

On models of personality typing

On models of personality typing

In a self-organizing system with just a few rules, natural clusters will form and cohere. These convergences move only within their own borders, though one needs to be outside the border to recognize that. These sets can be enneagram types, astrological signs, DSM diagnoses, … . There will be many likenesses and unique differences and the likenesses will enable people to fit themselves into a comfortable pattern. Most people will place in the background the parts of themselves which don't quite fit. And then the model becomes,if not Truth, a generally accepted option for understanding each other.

For the idea to hold, it isn't necessary to have any god or supernatural belief, beyond accepting self-organizing ... seeing the likeness creates the patterns and then adopting the pattern finds more likeness, reinforcing over and over, enlarging and pruning, until a typology is built and naming rights are claimed for the construct, and the typology is taught and made complex.

See, for instance, Game of Life Cellular Automata, Andrew Adamatzky, 2010 for discussions of cellular automata, boundaries, convergence, and a lot of the convergences (glider, cross, … ) and applications.

Santa Cruz

Santa Cruz is changing. From the left-most US city, we are moving towards bigness, dealing with a smaller economy by setting hungry policies for the dollars of others and withdrawing support for the values of innovation, creativity, smallness, and volunteering. By implementing the plans of the Community Programs Committee, we will be concentrating power in large professionalized service delivery agencies.

We are not learning lessons from the national failures.

I'm discouraged by the short-sighted survival mode that the funding guidelines committee has approved especially here where there is so much involvement in spirituality and holism and ecology.

When pragmatism trumps the values of community and connection to create a professionalized safety net, the quality of life here will degrade.

An example of the kind of exclusion is in the city's new health focus area where the old-fashioned physical and mental health silos prejudices against people who experience moods swings, fear, voices and visions by segregating mental health from physical health. A result of this segregation has been, on average, 15 years of potential life lost.

By assuming emotional well being is somehow separate from diet and exercise and cancer, separating things we can touch prejudices against feelings and fears. Just consider all the effort to get people to go for help which they are ashamed of wanting, ashamed because of the selfishness behind the carve out, carved out to get separate funding by separating out the people who would be helped. 

Can you feel stigma?

Sometimes people don't ask for help because of prejudice, because of concerns about discrimination, because of shame. Mostly it's because of shame. I think using real words that connect with real feelings would set an example for someone feeling as if life had lost all value. I don't think many people *feel* stigma. Stigma is a concept from sociology that carries no emotional burden, makes it easier to distance ourselves from shame. The mental health field uses it all the time, for distancing. I think changing the language of campaigns would ground them in real experience and further the willingness for people to reach out.

Hope

My understanding is that the human body is optimized for environmental conditions of about five thousand years ago, that we haven’t quite caught up with ourselves. Animals have a fear and survival response that they seem to immediately be able to turn off once the perceived danger is no longer present. Humans seem not yet able to turn off that switch, and for some humans the stress response continues to reverberate and amplify.

I wonder if meditation practices, prayer, and other forms of self-talk are trying to wire the brain so that we can turn off the fear response when we don’t any longer need it, install a balance to the auto-response to fear with an off switch.

I also wonder whether there is a distinction between adaptation, acceptance and awareness. Because cognitive dissonance is uncomfortable, if there seem to be no options, we accept, justify to ourselves, rationalize. But if there seem to be options, we maintain dissonance, stress, ... so it seems to me that the whole self-help/improvement industry sustains unhappiness and dissatisfaction (suffering) by emphasizing hope, change, grasping for tomorrow, averse to today.

I think there can be a two-fold (at least) track towards a unified theory of understanding everything - the deterministic/logic/science/rational/law method we tend to value most; and a merger/oneness/butterfly/self-organizing/awe/mystery track which is woven throughout the former, might even be the mesh on which the former is built and on which it depends. Not as mutually dependent as warp and woof, rather a framework which once the thinking structure is built fades away, is not necessary for the structure but is necessary for a new or different structure and is necessary to rebuild if the existing structure is destroyed.

What might be the impact of fewer degrees of separation?

Webmind values the reunification program because individual reunifications increase global net happiness.*. I think the idea is that individual joy leverages into global joy.

More broadly, it seems there would be fewer degrees of separation between individuals, between communities, between countries, a stepped up version of social networking. And thus more peace, because species don't fight as much with their own kind.

But what about rage within families, honor killings, Boznia, Rwanda, … ?

Is this what consciousness brings when it overrides earlier adaptations?

Now I'm wonder about the impact of fewer degrees of separation.

* Sawyer, WWW:WATCH, p 300