Corbyn and the Jewish question

 

The strength of the Jewish lobby is once more seen, not only in our political life but also into our social structure.
The Jewish Question is an historical issue stretching back to the strength and representation of Jewish people on the boards of Banks, a time when the banks were seen as the enemy and when the economy and the lives of ordinary people were contrasted with the wealth of the senior banking fraternity.
It was brought into focus during the turmoil after the First World War with Germany knocked to its knees by the Reparations demanded especially by France, the Jews were seen to profit from the condition of the German economy and this was deeply resented by the population as a whole and helped in the rise of Hitler and his National Socialism.
The strength of the Jewish lobby in the politics of America, and again especially on the boards of the major banks which inevitably control the economic direction which is often, not seen as being in the interests of the "people" at large.
From the Jewish State, regularly in the spotlight, Israel is criticised in the ongoing way it deals with Palestinians who were part of the contextual social fabric of the Old Testament.
The Holocaust was the most barbaric event ever to be carried out by humans and whilst the Jews were not the only targets of German prejudice, a group to be exterminated from the German national scene but they were the most clearly identified and it rightly provoked, after the war the condemnation of the whole world. It also produced in the world at large a special case for being careful in what you say about Jewish Society.
My own memories of that society, specifically in South Africa were that they were  exclusive and excluding.
They saw themselves as being special and with their influence, specifically in the West where apart from Congressmen and Bankers, many media moguls were Jewish and they always had a platform to denigrate any opposition.
Jeremy Corbyn is the latest to fall foul of the Jewish lobby and is currently being ridiculed for not having decried a wall mural which depicts a number of old men, clearly Jewish, sitting around a table on which the board game monopoly is being played. The table is made up of legs which seem to depict the mass of "the people" symbolic of the suggestion that the Jewish fraternity are above the people in their pursuit of wealth.
The Tower Hamlets mural was taken down in 2012 after pressure from the Board of Deputies and the Jewish Council and Corbyn at the time had questioned its removal.
It reminds me of the furor raised when the Muslims became incensed by cartoons depicting Mohamed. Mohamed of course is their holy icon not simply a collection of men who appear to depict an unsavory aspect of Jewish power.
Caricature has been mainstream in Britain for many years. The lampooning and characterisation of political leaders reached is zenith with "Spitting Image" and whilst I am sure it caused much embarrassment to those who were made fun of or depicted in a draconian fashion, I can't remember anyone making a fuss.
Is it the case that the Jews see themselves as too precious, too special. If this is so perhaps they are deserving of being lampooned since their specialness rests on their being the "Chosen People", cast in an historical backdrop which has more than a fair bit of pantomime about it.

 

What makes them tick

 

As a person who has always advocated "freedom of thought and speech" and who has rejected the totalitarian compulsion to be guided by any number of influences, why would I be in favour of performing a totalitarian rethink of my mind through meditation.

Isn't the fact that the world is filled with distortion and variance which makes living in it so interesting. Isn't the 'complexity' of human relations the gift we have of being human and coming to terms with so much variability.

If we train our minds to exclude much of the noise flooding in don't we, as we filter what we conceive as good and homely from the bad and unhealthy, don't we distort our free will.

Listening to a Jehovahs Witness on the doorstep is in my mind to be confronted with a good person, a person who has never the less tuned into one program and is not listening to any other channels. They are experts in their own field but their expertise is so narrow, so finely tuned to resonate on only 'one way of thinking' that they are often spurned by society at large. I have to say, I never spurn them neither do I spurn the Seventh Day Adventist, the Mormon, or anyone with a belief system (not only a Religious system either) since everyone is entitled to their own conclusions about life and the way we live. Many a long conversation on the doorstep provoked a negative response when I come inside but my answer is that I respect them for having the courage to stand up and be counted in a world ruled by conformity.

They and their kith are are struck with the trauma of fundamentalism, a wide eyed exclusion of others in the sense that the others don't understand, don't follow to the letter their particular belief system.

Perhaps that is the problem of belief. Belief in anything that it excludes or closes down that intonation, that friendly ear we should all have of others and what makes them tick.

Leaving things to my next life

 

It always strikes me how different our perspectives on "the good life" are.
Being part of the mechanism which motivates us 24/7, the television adverts, the programs on selling up and moving to a new country, the extensions, the new bathroom or kitchen, the hifi apparatus not to mention a new car, it's an industry which goes under the heading of the advertising industry who's job it seems is to continually pummel the senses, to be involved in something which was not on the radar until we stimulated to think about it.

Simplicity "the simple life", used to be much sort after. Uncomplicated lives with aspirations in keeping with reality. Not any more and as these, must have, must experience symbols become entrenched in our minds they lead us further and further away from who we really are.

The travel brochure, the fitness regimen, the food and diet advice, everyone wants a piece of you. And where in the midst of all this is the real you. Where is 'your' identity, where are your foibles, your eccentricities, who was it who piled on top of you those lists, lists of what to do and what to see, lists of what is good and what is bad.
Our character, if we were fortunate to be allowed to imbibe our experiences growing up was a slow, layer upon layer experiential process which was administered to us by our environment, our parents and the friends we chose to associate with. It was not a copywriters fantasy or a photographers telephoto lens exclusive, it had all the elements of who we were and the values we had. These values were unique to us and a small coterie of friends, they remain with us as a sample of what we experienced and the values we formed from that experience and it is why I treat with great scepticism the calls to change from who I feel comfortable as, into someone more aligned to the common mania to seek tick boxes life style, have been there and done that, as if being there has any relevance in a whistle stop tour or a one day stop over on a cruise ship.
Around your feet, where you stand today is enough to be getting on with, thank you very much and if there is more, I think I will leave it to my next life 

Artificial Intelligence and the 1%

Subject: AI and the 1%

It's a bit like that Darwnistic moment when the primeval soup that came into being as the planet cooled and chemistry began to be identified, that life came into being, the result of conditions being just right for a combination of chemical elements to spark the embryonic reproductive process. 
Artificial intelligence is the result of computational power throwing into the computational mix sufficient neurons for spontaneous thought to exist.
This is different from repetitive modelling of human behavior in a computer to simulate that behavior in a machine or a robot, rather this is a type of symbiotic process where the the elements of thought or at least the constituent bits which go to make up thought are thrown together to see what evolves.
The parallel computer, a computer which, unlike a normal computer which handles its computations sequentially is instead, a collection of individual processors networked to feed results of each of its computations into the other processors, each interacting and each adding or subtracting from the resultant outcome much like a human brain does. It has millions of feedback loops to subject the analysis into millions of options with the experience of memory to narrow down the useful from the useless. A thinking rationalising machine.
The argument that the machine will never be capable of Platonic reasoning or philosophical insight, given that the human mind has such computortive power, is now being questioned as the Super computer begins to match the brain in computational power.

Of course the brain is the result of thousands of years of  refinement, and the attempt to interrogate the boundaries of thought with little productive thought other than thought itself is still a long way off.
The unpalatable truth though is that whilst Artificial Intelligence, (even when it thinks for itself) will hopefully be constrained by the logic of the job in hand.

Unfortunately this probably  covers the sort of thinking 99% of human-kind do anyway.

A sobering thought

 A sobering thought

 

One of the strange things about the mind is it's ability to make do with approximations.
What we see in detail is not the detail of what we see. The brain through the eye sees what it sees and instead of responding to the actual, reverts to memory to fit what it sees with a memory of what it had seen before having pigeonholed the event as such and such. The fact that the new image was marginally different is brushed over and we are conveniently left with the convenience of something we know and can rationalise.
This assembling and dissembling of images means that our reality is false and based on approximations. This ability to render onto the brain and the mind sufficient information for the memory to fill in the gaps was the basis of cinematography and the cartoon industry where a few approximations of movement in the frame meant that when the frame and the subsequent frame were viewed the mind did the work of assuming the flow of movement from its memory of how in real life such a scene would look.
In the effort to compress information to send complicated pictures down a telephone line, the mathematical analysis of a picture reveals that a massive amount of information can be left out of the transmission,  reassembled at the other end and by a series of mathematical assumptions which the brain and the mind, through the memory accepts and conceptualises as information.
The basis of all life can be processed into maths. The guiding hand we have in our quest to understand is mathematics. The core of what we are and who we are can be determined by a set of mathematical equations which simply simplify what we assume to be mystical.
It's a sobering thought

Beyond the self

Beyond the self 

The concept that there is an ideal life is pretentious since the word "ideal" is subjective.
What is ideal for one is not for another and the suggestion that there is some sort of "ideal state" and suggests an end point like 'paradise'.
Biology, human sciences indeed physics is engrossed in the concept of the unknown, the unknowable, chaos theory, or crisis theory where the metaphor of disturbance, a butterfly's wing can tip the balance and cause cataclysmic storms in the Southern Hemisphere in other words from a small change, unbalanced chaos occurs.
If the nature of things can not be described through the mathematics of predictable occurrence,  if the unknown outweighs the known and if on the unknown rests the starting point of all which is known we are in a speculative mess.
If the chaotic events do not reveal themselves to rational explanation where do we, the human race fit in the pecking order. Why must our search for pastoral  peace be so all consuming, why must we peruse the mind as a last resort, a sort of buffer from the reality around.
Does the lure of peace "that passeth all understanding" not describe, like Alice's bolt down the rabbit hole, a crazy world of upside down logic.
Does the mind not reside best in its natural habitat, amongst the extremes of thought and tension which inhibit our day. Are we not better off ridding ourselves of our demons which give perspective to the term good and bad by accepting their relevance in our daily life.  If we meditate and instill a hypnotic state of controlled self absorption to insulate ourselves from the conflicts all around  us, on the presumption that we will better understand them and ourselves by analysis, don't we just create a platform where there is room for only oneself.