Debt Rattle April 13 2020
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Gather Ye Childhood Sleds While Ye May?
The acoustics are about perfect, her voice is perfect for this kind of thing.
WES, can you cite the source for the Maine seed banning? I’m not finding anything. I am, however, seeing this:
Maine surge in seed sales exceeds supplies
“Maine-based seed company, Johnny’s Selected Seeds, stopped taking orders from non-commercial customers for a week on the last day of March because their volume of sales was so much greater than previous years. According to a report on Maine Newscenter’s 207, online orders with the company are up 300 percent and half of those are from new customers. Filling non-commercial orders was scheduled to resume this week.
“Melissa Frost of Frost Farms Garden Center and Landscape on Route 102 is waiting on an order of seeds she recently placed and was told would be delayed by a couple of weeks.
“I think we’re going to see quite a surge in veggie seedlings and vegetable starters,” she said. “Our seed order is bogged down because across the U.S. everything is craziness.”
Fortunately most produce here is not GMO, so my wife saves seeds (tomato, okra, Thai egg plant, papaya, squash, hot chilies, etc.; all the rest comes from cuttings.
“This, inevitably, led the neuroscientists who noticed these changes to conclude that “gut feelings and bodily reactions were necessary to think rationally” and that without a functioning ventromedial prefrontal cortex it’s impossible for us to integrate these emotional gut feelings with conscious thought. So without this region of the brain working properly “every option at every moment felt as good as every other.” As it turns out, it’s this most primitive, instinctual, split-second region of our brains that leads the charge into decision-making.
“And so “moral reasoning is mostly just a post ad hoc search for reasons to justify the judgments people had already made,” meaning that by the time you notice yourself weighing options and thinking about the best path, you’ve really already decided subconsciously and emotionally, and are just spinning excuses and justifications to yourself.
“So if you continually put yourself in emotionally-charged situations, it’ll only be a matter of time before this elephant of subconscious emotional desire shifts beneath you and takes a step down a path that can ruin your life and the lives of those around you. And it’s always this dominating emotional elephant of rapid instinctive moral judgments that’s in control, the best that the contemplative reasoning rider on top of this primal beast can do is to come up with rationalizations after the elephant has sated its desires.
“Sometimes these desires are perfectly healthy for ourselves and the society around us, at other times they leave feelings and lives trampled behind. Which means that although the rider can do his best to look into the future in an attempt to steer the elephant down the best path, more often than not he’s left trying to serve as the elephant’s spokesperson without really knowing what the elephant is thinking and “fabricating post ad hoc explanations for whatever the elephant has just done” while justifying whatever course it feels like taking next.
“On a social level this had an obvious impact, “once human beings developed language and began to use it to gossip about each other, it became extremely valuable for elephants to carry around on their backs a full-time public relations firm” to provide an acceptable justification for everything we do. Because after all, “reason is the servant of the intuitions. The rider was put there in the first place to serve the elephant.”
“But this elephant isn’t always galloping along blind to everything except its own whims. Since although “we make out first judgments rapidly, and we are dreadful at seeking out evidence that might disconfirm those initial judgments … friends can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves: they can challenge us, giving us reasons and arguments that sometimes trigger new intuitions, thereby making it possible for us to change our minds.” So although “many of us believe that we follow an inner moral compass … the history of social psychology richly demonstrates that other people exert a powerful force, able to make cruelty seem acceptable and altruism seem embarrassing, without giving us any reasons or arguments.”
“As humans, we see our behavior as far more noble then it actually is, and assume that an outside other wouldn’t live up to the standards we’ve set. But as Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman chronicles in the book dedicated to his late friend, Thinking, Fast and Slow, after we take a careful look at just how subject to outside influence our own behaviors and thoughts are it becomes impossible not to acknowledge just how malleable we really are.”
ANd then, counter-counter-point:
The Devil in these details strongly, I say, strongly implies that this thing is the product of some kind of genetic engineering. We’re back where our suspicions first started, only now with enough evidence to feel those suspoicions are more justified.
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