Everyone's An Addict

My name is Ari, and I’m an addict. The details of my addition are moot, and not the point of this piece. Whatever specific substance, behavior, or situation causes a chemical reaction in the pleasure center of my brain such that I achieve a temporary pleasure which later is compulsively sought again and again is fodder for the grotesque and would distract from what I wish to accomplish here. Now, I understand that this public admission, bereft of details as it is, may not be sufficient to gain the trust of you, my dear reader. You are entitled to call me a coward or non-committal for not revealing the specifics, but it doesn't make any thing I'm about to say any less true.

Addiction has given me trouble for quite some time, in my daily life and conceptually. Many people I’ve encountered in my life have suffered from obvious and some much less obvious addictions and have candidly shared at least parts of those experiences. But I believe that there are many more people I know suffering silently with addiction, too ashamed to speak about it or ask for help. In writing this, I am attempting to transition from the silent sufferer to the open and honest addict because I believe that is where the solution lies.

An Attempt to Define Addiction

Paulo Zerbato - fineartamerica.com

As defined by the Medical Dictionary, addiction is: “a persistent, compulsive dependence on a behavior or substance.” It isn’t simply engaging with a particular vice. That's the first step, but eventually it develops into a psychological surrender into believe the substance or action has control of you instead of the other way around. In addition to the traditional usual suspects of substance addiction like illicit drugs, alcohol, and smoking, several other forms of addiction are just as prevalent and on the rise including: prescription drugs; internet, smart phone, and social media use; television; pornography; sex; video games; shopping; eating disorders (both over and under eating); gambling; sleep; working; making money; and broadly, ego elevation.

Modern Capitalism: How Is This Different Than a Ponzi Scheme?

Introduction: The Ponzi Scheme

If you Google “Ponzi Scheme” you will get this result:

“Ponzi scheme (n): A form of fraud in which belief in the success of a non-existent enterprise is fostered by the payment of quick returns to the first investors from money invested by later investors”

Running a Ponzi Scheme is illegal. It is illegal because it is considered a form of fraud, that the perpetrator of the scheme deceives investors with false statements about the nature of the business and what produces the returns. While the perpetrator may tell their clients that they are investing in a certain type of security, or financial product, or focused on some hot new industry sector, they are in fact just finding new investors to buy into the scheme, using the new investor's capital to pay returns to the original investors, which gives the illusion of investment returns. This process is repeated as long as possible, but it inevitably leads to a crash of the operation when the perpetrator cannot find enough new investors to pay back the old ones.

The man himself, Charles Ponzi. I trust him (image from biography.com)

Unfortunately when I , the cynic that I occasionally am, think of a the dominant economic philosophy of the Western world, I come up with pretty much the same description.

Fallacy of the Free Market - Greed Is Good?

The title of this article is taken from the 1987 film Wall Street, whose lasting legacy is a speech given by Michael Douglas' character, Gordon Gekko, at the shareholder meeting for a company he is trying to take over. Here is the crescendo of that speech:

“Teldar Paper, Mr. Cromwell, Teldar Paper has 33 different vice presidents each earning over 200 thousand dollars a year. Now, I have spent the last two months analyzing what all these guys do, and I still can’t figure it out. One thing I do know is that our paper company lost 110 million dollars last year, and I’ll bet that half of that was spent in all the paperwork going back and forth between all these vice presidents. The new law of evolution in corporate America seems to be survival of the unfittest. Well, in my book you either do it right or you get eliminated. In the last seven deals that I’ve been involved with, there were 2.5 million stockholders who have made a pretax profit of 12 billion dollars. Thank you. I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them! The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. Thank you very much.”

Why You Should Vote, Even if You Don't Believe in the System

Perhaps this is too little, too late with US 2018 mid-term elections less than a week away. Many people aren't registered to vote and that window is now closed. Except it isn't!!! Fifteen states, including my home state of California, offer some form of voter registration on election day (check here to see if you qualify). For those of you already registered you still have a couple of days to decide to vote or not.

There are reasons to not vote, sure. The system is controlled by a bunch of rich old white men, none of whom represent you or your ideas (it's completely possible that most of my readers are in fact rich old white men. I don't actually have demographic data to disprove this). The whole system is corrupted by money. There are only two viable political parties, evil and slightly little less evil. One vote doesn't matter. This definitely doesn't look like the representative democracy praised in history text books. You participation in a broken system makes you complicit in its existence. I get all those reasons. Well, maybe I don't get them, but I've at least heard them, and I think they're half-baked.

Did you?

But if these factors make you ponder, “OK, I could vote, but really, why should I?” then, lovely reader, do I have the perfect article in store for you. My reasons to vote, presented here and now, ad free, in the only format acceptable for conveying more than one piece of information on the internet, a list! Or a slideshow of one slide if you prefer to think about it that way.

How We're Dying: A Sign of Progress

It's easy to follow the news and feel like we're living in the most extreme times in history. Democracies are devolving into right wing authoritarian regimes. Another gang, drug cartel, or run-of-the-mill psychopath has just gone on a killing spree. There's ongoing violence and unrest in the Middle East. Still. Some militaristic dictator has just killed a bunch of dissenters. Three people were murdered in a neighborhood near you. Politicians can't agree on an issue and people are upset. The planet is melting. And the Muslims... well I'm sure they're up to no good. I don't wish to trivialize any of those stories (the ones based in reality, anyway) which are tragic and almost always feature grave injustice. Even in mock form those headlines give the impression that things are generally terrible and probably couldn't get worse

But I wanted to see if there was any data to support or refute that idea. So I decided to look up some data on how people are actually dying. So join me for a couple of minutes, take a break from the news, and let's look at the bigger picture for a couple of minutes. When we do, we will see that things can get worse for humanity, and in fact they used to be much worse. Which might, I mean it's possible, that it could maybe indicate, that things are getting... better?

This next statement might not appear like a positive piece of news, but it is: More and more people these days are dying of good old fashioned age-related illness¹. That's is good news because it means that they aren't dying from other more discouraging things like violence and war, easily preventable diseases, or malnutrition. People are still dying from those things, but as a percentage of the world's population it is much less than it used to be. Here is a breakdown of how we collectively died in 2016 as a percentage of the total 54.7 million global deaths:

Why Atheists Are Illogical Too

If you ask someone today how the universe was created, and were able to really press them with questions, somehow defying the odds and avoiding a fist fight, and forced them to answer I believe you would get one of two responses: "God" (or another word referring to the same concept, some all powerful creative force or entity, perhaps multiple gods etc), or "I don't know". Except maybe from the Buddhists who would dodge the question and tell you your personal liberation is what you should be thinking about. Some will respond that the Big Bang created the universe and might tell you as much as they know about that theory, but you, the whip snap learned person you are, would ask them what created the high density, high temperature state which precipitated the Big Bang, and at a certain point in the conversation they would not be able to give any further explanation as to how the universe was created.

Of course, the question itself might be bullshit. It's possible that the universe was never created and has simply always just existed. But you could then try the same line of questioning on “Why does the universe exist?” and get the same two answers.

Human (vs) Nature

I am not a fan of rock stacking. This is my controversial opinion of the day. I'm sure it will incense... someone. Perhaps it will set off such a series of arguments that result in an increase of my number of Twitter followers, my ultimate goal. To avoid confusion I am referring to the act by which humans, usually in some outdoorsy location like near a beach or a hiking trail, take some number of rocks and stack them on top of each other to make a vertical column, pyramid, or some other artistic shape.

I'll take a quick moment to differentiate this from cairn stacking (which can look exactly the same) but serves the purpose of signaling where a path is located, which is perfectly acceptable. Cairn stacking is minimally destructive to the natural environment and can even bring a net decrease in environmental destruction by keeping people on the trail while allowing them an opportunity to experience a natural environment. Also, some cultures will stack rocks on the outskirts of town to signify the beginning of a journey and the intent to return, and since those cultures are much older than I am, I'm not going to tell them it's wrong.

Who built it better, nature or man? (Near Ama Dablam, Sagarmatha National Park, Nepal)  -Photo By Ariel Gardiner

How to Rid the World of Those Insufferable Hipsters

A Bulgarian couple recently stayed with me in Sydney, and somehow we found ourselves talking about Australian hipsters. This quickly brought up the question: Does Bulgaria have hipsters? If so, what are they like? Well, as it turns out, they are pretty much the same. With most of modern life well documented on the internet trends spread across continents faster than ever. Bulgarian hipsters, and that fact that the “hipster” word is still so widely used, reminded me of this unpublished piece I wrote a few years ago. So I thought I’d finally publish it. It’s a little outdated, which has its own sense of irony, but I should really finish more of the things I start… so here goes:

I thought it would stop by now but it hasn’t. I thought there was enough self-awareness going around that people would catch on. But since that doesn’t seem to be the case, because people are still posting stories like this http://valleywag.gawker.com/douchebags-like-you-are-ruining-san-francisco-512645164  I feel this needs to be addressed. There is a longstanding war between the hipsters and those who dislike the hipsters, we’ll call them anti-hipsters, which ought to be settled once and for all. The combatants of this war have changed many times but the core issue is the same, one group of people, the anti-hipsters, doesn’t like the other, the hipsters, because the hipsters think they are cooler than they actually are.

Love Will Pay the Bills

In 2009 I heard a song called "Summer Cat" by a band called Billie the Vision and the Dancers. It was used in a commercial for a Spanish beer that someone posted on Facebook and I thought it was pretty catchy. So I looked up the band and listened to more of their songs. Though a bit silly at times, with some literal lyrics I couldn’t relate to, I found them entertaining and made it to the website of their record label which I borrowed to title this post: Love Will Pay the Bills. I was surprised to find that it was also the record company’s motto. Each of the band’s four albums were available to download for free, in their entirety, for me to keep and play on any device with no licensing restrictions. In return they asked only for donations and did so without annoying popups or adding me to a mailing list where they would continually ask for more. They gave no recommended contribution amount and there was no impression they would try to make me feel guilty if I never paid them anything. I thought it was incredible that they would so naively trust their fans, and the public at large, to provide the financial support required to continue to pursue lives as musicians without any requirement for them to do so. So I took a minute, thought about how much value the music had brought to my life, and how much it would continue to bring now that I had four albums downloaded, and gave them $20. I felt very happy about the exchange.

Reflections on Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

I have been interested in reading Rand for a while now, primarily because she is so frequently mentioned as a source of inspirational ideology… most commonly by modern libertarians and other people whose views I mostly oppose. So I wanted to read her work myself in order to understand her philosophy and then completely pick it apart. I was expecting to be angry at several points during the read, which I was. I was certainly not expecting to be impressed or inspired in any way, which surprisingly, I also was. I expected to come away from reading this book feeling justified in my mostly ignorant dislike of Rand, but the more predominant feeling was a severe dislike of those who I believe have grossly misinterpreted her ideas. Despite this, for all the effort Rand went to legitimize her philosophy as a solution for personal and social governance, I have nonetheless concluded, like many others before, that even though some of it is slightly interesting, her philosophy is riddled with shortcomings and oversimplifications of reality leaving it completely devoid of application to modern policy and governance. Here is a summary of my findings and reactions from the read:

Brief Plot Summary in My Own Condescending Words

Due to a rise of government corruption and communist ideas about redistribution of resources and labor, a group of principled stunning over-achievers, led by John Galt, who consider themselves to be the “motor” of the world decide to abandon their roles as society’s innovators and job creators, to avoid having their abilities exploited and the fruits of their labor redistributed to the lazy and thoughtless, bringing society to a grinding halt.

Public Interest Over Ayn Rand Objectivism

Individualistic selfish thinking doesn’t have a place in government policy because the policies that a government makes are not and never were intended to benefit an individual. They should be made with the public interest in mind and little else. And public interest, by its definition is not about one person, but rather people as they are, many individuals in one jurisdiction interacting with each other.

In today’s US political debates, however, public interest frequently seems to have fallen off the map, in many cases in favor of obviously biased propaganda, but in many others toward the focus on one individual or one situation.  Modern debate has “Joe the Plumber” examples of one guy not liking a situation and that is enough to tear down a whole taxation policy which could make millions of people better off. This appears to be because, as frustrating as it is, these individual allegorical stories resonate with the public better than logical debate. Which appears to be supported by the fact that I know who Joe the Plumber is. Fuck Joe the Plumber. Not the actual guy, I don’t really care about him either way (though I probably disagree with him on most important things). But fuck Joe the Plumber the political tool used to dumb down the conversation and move debate away from public interest. His interest is not public interest. If a policy is good for the public at large, that is all that matters and as long as we are transparent in how we get to that policy and we openly weigh competing interests against each other, there really shouldn’t be a problem. And if there is, it means there is something we have overlooked, or circumstances have evolved, perhaps differently than anticipated, and now we must look again and determine the current state of public interest on this issue.

Libertarians, especially the Ayn Rand objectivist types, essentially deny that there is such a thing as public interest, or that multiple people matter. But I have to ask: If only the individual matters, then why is there a government in the first place? Can’t we just make that person accountable to keep track of their own rights? The flat obvious response is a definitive “No”. The objective reality (if we’re debating government policy anyway) is that people cohabitate in the same spaces and must interact with each other. This is where the limits of self-interested personal philosophies become exposed and this is the reason that Ayn Rand’s objectivism doesn’t really fit with reality. 

Donald Sterling and Free Speech

Can we clear a few things up here? Great. The penalties handed out by NBA Commissioner Adam Silver to Clippers owner Donald Sterling for his unarguably racist comments which were recorded and then published was not a violation of Mr Sterling’s right to free speech.

The First Amendment says that “Congress shall make no law…” (my emphasis added, obviously). The NBA is private organization with its own constitution and governance. The punishment delivered was within the terms of that league constitution which all members, including players, owners, and employees of the organization must abide. There is not going to be an FBI investigation and a federal criminal trial over this issue, because the Department of Justice does not care.

There are anti-discrimination laws on the books, which do grant rights in certain activities of private organizations (e.g. employment law) and therefore come somewhere near this issue. However, the freedom to say racist things is not a protected trait, unlike ethnicity, age, sex, religion, etc. For those (Libertarians?) saying “I thought this was America?” and “What happened to free speech?” they are just conveying how little they know about the law and the US Constitution (or being a Libertarian for that matter).

Ultimately, Mr. Sterling’s comments were an expression of opinion, a form of protected speech, which on its own, I don’t believe teeters into the realm of hate speech. But while speech like Mr. Sterling’s is not illegal, it can certainly get you into trouble. It’s the same reason that a country club can kick you out if you don’t wear white clothes, or the Boy Scouts of American can kick you out if you’re gay. In the NBA, you can be kicked out for being racist, especially in 2014.

The Purpose of Generation Y

Hopefully I don’t offend too many when I speak on behalf of an entire generation, and surely I will, but  with rumors widely spreading that we are the new lost generation I felt the need to clear things up. It is true, there are no uncharted lands across uncharted waters (at least not on this planet) which need exploration. Google already photographed every inch of the earth and posted it on the internet to view for free. Unlike the often romanticized and enviable purpose of our grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ “Greatest Generation,” there is no Hitler leading an army to overtake a continent and commit genocide (at least not on any important continents) which will rally us from depression. Without such obvious hurdles of focus many of this generation do seem lost.

So Gen Yers have asked themselves questions in trying to evaluate just the correct life path including: Will this make me rich? Will I make enough to pay my bills? How many years of my life will I have to work this hard? Is this company ethical? Should I start my own business that is? What will my parents or my peers think of me? Can I make a career blogging? Will this satisfy the creative person in me? What can I do to help people? What is my purpose? But despite good intentions a clear path hasn’t emerged for most.

The generations before us are now defined by their existent societal problems and the ways they solved them. Several of these solutions and their corresponding heroes have been etched in statues and become our history and childhood education. But the truth is that in the age of explorers, most Europeans lived what would be considered ordinary lives in feudal Europe. But, they lived their lives anyway. While World War II devastated many European countries, the United States border was relatively unharmed, the total number of people who fought in WWII was roughly 70 million when the world’s population was 2.3 billion. Though it was many, it was still a vast minority of the people that defined the generation as we know it. The ones who are remembered, the ones that really defined the generation, are the ones that zigged while everybody else zagged.

First, I must warn: the lifestyle of an explorer is unique, but uncomfortable, as the lifestyle of a soldier is unique, but uncomfortable. It will be no different for the great ziggers of Gen Y. They will have to remain passionate with the conviction for progress in the face of adversaries and apathy. They will encounter an onslaught of criticism and doubt no different than those of previous generations. Our generational leaders will have to abandon the comfortable lifestyle bestowed to us in pursuit of a more important cause. But what cause are we to lead? Well, like preceding generations we must battle our current societal problems and keep humanity alive for our posterity.

I know this is going to sound like I think the sky is falling, because today might be relatively pleasant for you, but it really is falling. It is not going to fall today or tomorrow, but roughly in the next 50 years our world is going to run into some gravely serious problems. For many in Gen Y that will span the remainder of their lifetime.

When clean drinking water becomes very scarce because we’ve exhausted or polluted most of our natural springs through fracking, pharmaceutical contamination, or any of our other terrible environmental practices, our ability to sustain our existence will be in jeopardy. When oil becomes scarce all of those industries which in some way rely on oil – which either directly or indirectly is by my guestimation at least 97% of the global GDP – will grind to a halt and cease to function in the way they do now. We do not have the infrastructure to support our massive population without oil. We don’t even have reasonably efficient ways to create new oil-free infrastructure without oil. 

Throughout human history, struggles for resources following overexpansion have caused countless wars and led to the defeat of nearly every extinct civilization from the Babylonians to the Aztecs to the Nazis. The struggle over the last of the earth’s clean water and oil resources will be unimaginably gruesome. Most people will lose.

These problems desperately in need of solving are apparent to many, yet society perpetuates with little relevant discussion. We face new, significant obstacles that we’ve never encountered in quite the same way. If they were old or simple challenges, they would have been met already. We don’t have Hitler’s army to repel, or vast oceans to navigate. Now we have to battle apathy and distraction from our real problems. We have to battle the many forms of personal and collective addiction to short-term gratification. We have to battle corporate dominance over modern cultural behavior. We have to find the will to show compassion and mercy toward all those we share the planet with.

Like generations before us our task is to solve our current societal problems. Those with imagination see them already and are actively working toward solutions. We receive daily posts on our Facebook feeds about some of this incredible work, and for a moment the names involved become legendary figures, like what’s his name with that video about the African army leader a couple years back. Yet this doesn’t inspire action and their names are quickly forgotten, lost after the next byte is consumed. 

Our capitalistic, consumption-based culture is unsustainable. So the great calling of Generation Y is to create one that is. Sustainability is a daunting multi-faceted task staring each of us in the face. 

However, we know that solutions will be multi-faceted as well, with significant contributions coming from science and technology, governance and politics, media and mass communications, education and economics, but especially cultural and even spiritual changes at the individual level. We have powerful tools at our disposal which will help us, but it will require real hard work and it will be uncomfortable at times. We have roughly 50 years to right the ship and build a sustainable planet in order to avoid serious catastrophe. That is our calling.

So who is up for the challenge? Who will lead the efforts and who will be next to join them? Who will abandon comfort and truly zig while everyone else zags? Who will figure out how to safely gain independence from endless consumption and short-term gratification? Who will make corporate responsibility something more than a running joke or marketing device? Who will create large scale sustainable societies that will allow our species to exist on this planet through the next generation? Who will inspire action over apathy? It remains to be seen. But for those who are still looking for a purpose, I have laid it out very plainly. We can be remembered as the generation that blindly drove humanity over the cliff or the one that steered it toward safety. Either way, the purpose of Gen Y is quite clear.

The Freedom to Not Have Health Care Is Not a Freedom

This has mostly been settled by the Supreme Court's 2012 ruling about the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. But as the implementation date of the individual mandate approaches, I still hear a few murmurs and protests, mostly from House Republicans and their pundits, so I thought I should clear this up. The freedom to not have health care is not a freedom and it is definitely not protected in the US Constitution. The right to receive basic health care, including emergency care absolutely should be. Our country was founded on preserving all of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all of the people of the nation. That is why we flipped the bird to the motherland and went our own way. Health is an essential element of life and also a significant factor in pursuing happiness. Simply stated, healthier people are happier. So making health care accessible to all the people in the country and making that process more efficient is absolutely something the government should be involved with.

Since America, unfortunately, has a health care system primarily based around private health insurance, most commonly offered by employers, a mandate for health care access for every individual requires the purchase of private health insurance until a more thorough system overhaul can be implemented. But this requirement is not a violation of an individual’s freedom.

As the great libertarian Milton Friedman famously wrote quoted (and which I quote frequently) in his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom “my freedom to move my fist must be limited by the proximity of your chin.” Essentially, personal freedoms are fine until they adversely affect someone else. That is the unfortunate price we have to pay for living in a world not made up entirely of small individual islands each with a population of one. So how does an individual's choice to not purchase health insurance adversely affect others?

A Possible Explanation for Neoconservative Republican Ideology

The contradictions of the neoconservative Republican Party viewpoint run wide and deep. In some cases the thoughts align with the libertarian ideal that the government should not be interfering where it isn’t absolutely necessary. These surface in vague arguments about the free market and job creation. Any burden on a business that is created from a law is clearly unnecessary. However, the government should absolutely make laws about your personal life, particularly what chemicals you choose to put in your body and the sex of two people in love who wish to be a family.

Another contradictory idea is that the government should not be handing out subsidies or freebies to poor people because it is an inefficient use of tax dollars that does not benefit the whole and creates dependence. However enormous financial breaks systematically placed in the tax code for wealthy individuals and large corporations is quite alright even if those subsidies mean abandoning previously stated ideals about the free market.

Neoconservatives generally feel that the words of the nation’s founding fathers should be infinitely praised and relied upon for creating a perfect Christian nation even though ‘God’ wasn’t added to our money or included in our Pledge of Allegiance until the 1950s, they granted us the freedom of individuals to choose their own religion in the very first amendment of the constitution, and they wrote in passages about how the government they were creating with their words will not always be relevant. For example, the one from the Declaration of Independence that goes “…whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness,” meaning that the founding fathers knew that at least some of their words would have shelf life and would need to be adapted as society progressed.

Now, the predominant thought among progressives (people who naively want to make the country great for everyone) about these contradictory Republican viewpoints described above is that each is either a way to extract money from the poor into the pockets of the ruling class, or a way to garner the vote of uninformed, easily-influenced people, which really just serves to assist the first reason. While it is entirely possible that this is the case I think there might be a little bit more to it.

Vipassana Meditation: Part IV

This picks up where I last left off a couple weeks ago about my previous meditation experience and preparing for a three-day refresher course. I just got back last night and had to write about it.

After sitting the refresher course I didn’t think I would feel so good again. During the meditation nothing particularly amazing or unusual occurred so I almost didn’t think it was working. I was able to achieve more levels of deeper concentration, and sustain it longer. I felt the bleeding feeling throughout my back of stress and attachments coming lose through much of the course, which I've learned to take as a sign that things are getting better. But I was expecting some crazy shit to happen like the previous time and that really didn’t occur. There was no epiphany, there was no hallucinations. So for some reason I took this to mean that it hadn’t really worked and that the practice had lost its magic on me. Eh, not a complete loss, I probably de-stressed a bit, the food was good, and it was better than a weekend catching up on season whatever of whatever show.

I couldn’t be more wrong. While I fully realized there were consequences to what the practice could provide, I had always been very critical and skeptical about its application and benefit to me once I had returned to the real world. Since I had no plans of becoming a monk and that I have things to do in the real world I needed a system which would actually help me here.

It was upon returning to the real world where all the benefits of my weekend of hard work were realized. Part of the meditation teaches you to control your reactions. That instead of going through this unconscious cycle of reacting one can cut it off before that happens and this will help avoid misery. When one encounter senses, the body has built up a series of reactions to these sensory inputs, conditioning. I'll show you. When a mosquito lands on you, you are trained to swat at it without really thinking about it. There is a sensory perception of feeling the mosquito land on you somewhere, this is usually enough to alert your conscience, followed by a built in evaluation of good or bad, then an emotional and physical response. In the case of the mosquito it goes, there’s a mosquito on my arm (perception), this is a bad thing (evaluation), I’m stressed, annoyed, and worried it’s going to bite me and suck my blood which will leave some swelling and itch for a while, and I may get West Nile Virus (emotional response), I’m going to smack it hoping to kill it but at worst it will go away for the moment (physical response). While one mosquito isn’t going to ruin your day unless it has West Nile Virus, it does leave most everyone noticeably cross for a short period of time, and if that happened every five minutes for an entire day it would definitely start to take its toll. That stress you incur from the one mosquito when multiplied by a large number becomes a significant amount of stress. That can certainly affect your mood, and you might be left wondering why you don't feel better at the end of the day. Modern life isn't swarms of mosquitoes but there are many little stressors which can build up throughout the day. Maybe it’s a beep on your phone each time you get a new message which indicates another obligation that could be stressing you out. It could be the way somebody talks to you. It could be the way that other people drive you feel is adversely affecting you. Many of these things you can't really control. When all these things happen on a daily basis it can aggregate into unhappiness.

Capital Gains Are Ordinary Income to Many

During the last election cycle the issue of unique treatment of capital gains tax surfaced as it was determined that Mitt Romney and many other very wealthy Americans pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries because much of their income is derived from investments and not a salary. Those investments, if held longer than a year prior to their sale are taxed at 15% in most situations which is significantly less than the rate high income earners pay on ordinary income, usually around 35%. The rate is on par with the ordinary income level for a single tax filer who earns $8,926 – $36,250 annually based on 2013 rates.

What makes capital gains so special? A capital gain occurs when an amount received when selling an asset is greater than the amount paid for it. Sale of stock is the most common capital gain, however it includes almost any investment including bonds, real estate, equipment, and works of art but usually do not include personal use items. For tax purposes capital gains have been distinguished from ordinary income since 1913 though the rate at which they are taxed has changed several times since then. The drop to current level of capital gains tax of 15% was achieved through Bush II era legislation and represents the lowest it has ever been in US history. Though I don’t recall the Occupy movement ever claiming it as a specific gripe it well should have, and in 2011 Warren Buffett, one of America’s wealthiest (and most successful) investors, added to wealth disparity discussion when he claimed that the favorable treatment he receives on his earnings is unfair

A Rich Man’s Game

With a base in long-term investments capital gains disproportionately affect the rich, and luckily this is not a significantly disputed fact. However, it is my belief that this favorable treatment is unethical and detrimental to the collective welfare of our nation, which will be disputed by some. I propose that capital gains should be taxed just like regular income because after I disprove all the reasons the rich say it is necessary, all that’s left is an unfair mechanism which systematically helps rich to get richer.

The proponents of capital gains getting taxed lower than ordinary income rates usually do so under the guise that it sparks investment which sounds like it could be accurate. Lower taxes on an activity increases the propensity to do it, but it’s actually an argument based only on speculation. When you apply the policy to the behavior options of the investor the capital gains tax makes no difference in the level of investment.

Regulatory Capture and Cognitive Capture

I was familiar with the concept of regulatory capture, the idea that an industry can persuade the government, or another entrusted regulator, to not do their job of regulating. This is usually done through the vast amounts of influence the business carries in the money it generates and it can be practically done through several means including lobbying, financial contributions (legal bribery), bribery (the illegal kind), insider appointment, blackmail, and situational/political leverage. This leads to a very favorable climate for the industry, allowing it to go on doing whatever it was planning on doing without interruption, and over time can even lead to opportunities to push the boundaries of its operations further since it can go on without any real consequences. This creates situations where lobbyists paid by the industry actually write legislation with built in loop holes so both the industry and the politician can come out winners. The industry gets the rules in place, or lack thereof, that it wants while the politician will boost their reputation claiming they are regulating or fixing something with their Swiss cheese legislation. This is the relationship we have in the United States between our corporate world and our politicians. It’s essentially the same relationship as bribery and corruption and it has existed for just about as long as both industry and regulation have. However, I was never acutely aware of the specific term regulatory capture, and I feel better now that I know it and can quickly refer to the concept by recalling this term.

There is a related term called cognitive capture, which I recently came across and it describes quite well what I’ve been feeling about US society on an even large scale, and really global society as well, for some time but didn’t quite have the vocabulary to say. The term is borrowed from the psychological condition where the mind cannot perceive even important things in its field of senses because it is too distracted with other things in that field. In its borrowed definition is means that nearly everyone who is connected to society is too mesmerized by the modern capitalist world, and in some sense bribed by it, that they can’t see the injustice and plutocracy of it. And even worse, the mind can’t realize the distractions are systematic, intentional, and yes, even logical.

Vipassana Meditation: Part III

Part I and Part II of this epic tale

Day 7 –So I woke up with a realization that after that literally insane experience when falling asleep that I definitely needed to see this process through. I had obviously touched on something and found some real scary things inside of me.

Even if it was making strange things happen, I was learning a whole bunch and that these new experiences and challenges were just the sort of things I wanted, and ultimately the type of thing that is on a road to a rare destination. I went to morning meditation with renewed energy and determination to get better at the technique and see what else there was I could learn. Even if I thought I was destroying some of the sankharas that I liked, I determined that I probably couldn’t do any long-term damage to my ambition, my sex-drive, or anything else worth caring about in just 10 days so I was probably going to be fine. Besides, I had committed to do this for 10 days, so I was going to give it a full 10 days.

But in another immediate twist of attitudes, and despite waking up so resolved that I was definitely seeing the process through, by the afternoon I had once again decided that I was going to leave. I thought I had reached the limit of how far I wanted to go…

Vipassana Meditation: Part II

Part I in case you missed it and want to start from the beginning...

Day 3 – I began to make up personalities about the other people who were taking the course with me. Without the ability to talk or gesture or make eye contact, you just had to assume a lot about people if you wanted to give them any sort of identity. I determined that I thought roommate #2 was really pretentious and didn’t like me. I was dead wrong about this. He turned out to be a very nice humble guy. I was kind of annoyed by anyone else in the class who would breathe loudly or make lots of noise in the meditation hall. I felt like they had no social awareness and I wished that they would learn how to be still and silent so that everyone else could focus on their meditation. It turned out that by Day 5 everyone had gotten pretty good at doing this and found a way for themselves to be comfortable (and silent!) during the class.