I Drank Too Much Wine Last Night

Well, not so much that I had a headache this morning…  

3 small glasses is a lot for my never very alcohol tolerant genetics…

Stress drinking…  

WTF…

How did We, as in “we the United States of America,” get to a point of de-evolution towards the 1950s?  

What is clear is that the Republicans have been doing an excellent job of political maneuvering, working together, while the Democrats have been squabbling amongst themselves, overall losing at almost every turn…  

Now We, as in “we liberal-type thinkers,” will be paying the price…  

Between legal changes toward voter suppression, packing the Supreme Court, and The Electoral College, minority rule is likely to prevail, likely for the rest of my lifetime, if not my kids’ and grandkids’ lifetimes…  

Of course, me and my wife, and my kids, financially at least, will be pretty much OK…  

It is the poor who will suffer the most…  

Roe v Wade decreased abortions, made abortions safer, and allowed people the choice to decrease untenable financial burden, when another child was not in the plans…  

Not to mention the, in my opinion, the clear moral choice of letting women control their own bodies… 

According to Clarence Thomas, contraception should be the next to go…  

WTF!!!!

So, how do I reconcile, my oft repeated statement that, “Whatever happens, is exactly what needs to occur…”  

I guess I can only come up with what I’ve written before:

http://enlightenedmdphd.blogspot.com/2022/02/economic-inequality.html

Figure out an economically feasible plan to “Provide everyone with basic living conditions, eliminate homelessness, dire poverty, fear for personal and family safety, opportunity for education and economic advancement.”  

The Democrats have to capture the minds and hearts of the everyday person, not just the most downtrodden…  

Then the Democrats can get the votes to overcome this radically conservative agenda at the heart of the Republican agenda...  

I am usually an optimist…  

These days I do not feel so optimistic…  

Namaste

 

Now “THEY” Can See What You Are Thinking!

I am a fan of Ken Wilber’s 4 Quadrant model, I won’t get into the details right now, lots of introductions online.  

As cited here:  “The Upper-Left (UL) quadrant is called the Individual-Interior quadrant. It’s also known as the “I” quadrant and uses “I language”, as Wilber would say.  This includes all subjective experience. For humans, this means emotions, thoughts, body sensations, meditative states, dream states, and so on – the phenomena that you alone experience.”

https://thegreatupdraft.com/ken-wilber-fundamentals-the-four-quadrants-for-newbies/

When I would teach about this model, I would say that the upper left quadrant is the place where you have to ask someone what they are thinking or feeling, and they can lie.  I would actually use the example of asking a person if they were a Democrat or a Republican, and they could lie.  

Apparently, that is no longer true.  

From the June 6th Ironic Times, page 2, (my favorite Monday morning read!)

Study: Brain Scans Can

Reveal Person's Political

Party Affiliation

https://www.ironictimes.com/1131-p2.html

I often find things I’ve not heard about elsewhere in this 3-page satire…  

So, I searched the above title in Google and found the following:  

“Functional Connectivity Signatures of Political Ideology,” 2022

https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/advance-article/doi/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgac066/6590843?login=false

Then following further links found these:  

“Political Orientations Are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults,” 2011

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3092984/

“Conservative and Liberal Brains Might Have Some Real Differences,” Scientific American, 2020: 

On the whole, the research shows, conservatives desire security, predictability and authority more than liberals do, and liberals are more comfortable with novelty, nuance and complexity. If you had put Buckley and Vidal in a magnetic resonance imaging machine and presented them with identical images, you would likely have seen differences in their brain, especially in the areas that process social and emotional information. The volume of gray matter, or neural cell bodies, making up the anterior cingulate cortex, an area that helps detect errors and resolve conflicts, tends to be larger in liberals. And the amygdala, which is important for regulating emotions and evaluating threats, is larger in conservatives.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/conservative-and-liberal-brains-might-have-some-real-differences/

Now in that 2022 study, they did need to use a current supercomputer to analyze the fMRI data.  

But then again, we now pretty much all carry what was a former supercomputer in our pockets, we call it our “phone.”  

So, who knows how long it might take to be able scan people with a pocket device and get some idea of what they are thinking, technology accelerates, often, exponentially…  

Maybe not in my, or my kid’s, or grandkids, lifetimes, but, if it can be done, someone will try to do this…  

Perhaps very scary…  

Namaste