Trump.

Read a long article on the rise of depression in 1^st world countries and that most of it is more accurately described as demoralisation. Demoralisation is a logical response to insurmountable odds, to where the battle is lost and there’s nothing one can do. It was attempted by both sides in WWll by bombing civilians but to little effect. It’s strange then that it should be happening in the richest countries without any organised intention to cause it. So what is this battle that so many people believe they have lost? What can be more intimidating than many tons of high explosives? In a word, reality. In the long lineage from Freud or more accurately the abuse of his work the unconscious of our societies have been mined to manipulate us. What began as marketing levers has become internalised. I might rationalise a need for an iPone6 but why I want one is from an inner sense of self that has been surgically inserted, or a pristine car when that quality is unnecessary in getting from A to B. This surgery of self like a face-lift doesn’t alter the underlying state of being. It’s a deflecting manipulative imposition only perceivable by the cardboard sustenance it provides. As this mind infection spreads through society people find themselves clucking like chickens at a hypnotist’s show. ‘Sure it’s stupid but I can’t seem to stop doing it.’ But now it’s not just an individual thing. Management, politicians, the media all subscribe to a mass communal un-truth impossible to avoid. We want out but can’t find the door. And in this state of demoralisation we lose our mind to shellshock. We choose Brexit, xenophobia and so possibly Trump. ‘Maybe Trump will get us a bigger TV, he says he can.’ But why do you want one? ‘I don’t know I just do.’

IQ.

Prof James Flynn has studied IQ and found in every recent ten-year period our IQ is increasing by some five points: We’re getting smarter. A hundred years ago an earlier scientist found ordinary people couldn’t think in abstractions, in logic and the hypothetical. They thought entirely practically. In terms of today’s IQ they were close to imbecilic, which of course they weren’t, they just thought practically. In the succeeding hundred years we have become comfortable with abstraction, logic and the hypothetical hence the increase in IQ, but before we feel superior this might have unforeseen consequences. By greater use of these higher functions of the brain we might well be neglecting the practical, experiential, emotional and empathic uses of our brain. For sure they’re still there but maybe subservient to logic and the like. And for sure we lord this particular intelligence and structure our society in its direction. The smart people get to the top because the top is created in those terms. And for sure it’s useful in certain areas but it’s beginning to have a negative effect. By fostering abstraction we’re literally abstracting ourselves from reality from nature the planet and hence neglect them in favour of our own constructs. By fostering logic we subdue feelings. By fostering hypotheses we invent often unreal alternatives. By subduing the practical, emotional and empathic we becoming cold and disconnected with an increasingly narrow skill set. This move to smart was very useful in the industrial revolution but the trend has continued until today we are suffering from it. I suggest most of our self-inflicted hardships are due to a growing sociopathic state of mind that our increasing IQ is leading us into with the smartest sociopaths leading the way.

And as my IQ (135) is classified as ‘Very superior’ don’t fucking argue with me OK. 

The Best is Past.

This morning MOT. Sailed through after I’d wiped off the telltale signs of a worn out oil seal from the fork leg on the way. So following on from yesterday: The best pasted twenty years ago. Not just bikes, everything. The second millennium will be known as the Bloated Age. We’ve had the Stone Age the Iron Age the Bronze Age and probably the Fish age and Roots and berries age before that. Sometime in the 80’s or 90’s and having everything we began to want more. It was a transition strangely unnoticed by historians. The mathematics of perception altered. A series based on the term 1/n, i.e. 1+½+1/3 +1/4 converges to a finite value where the term n, i.e. 1+2+3+4 etc sums to infinity. If we equate each additional value in a serie to some day-to-day imperative it will over weeks and months continue to sum one way or the other. If perception is the basic term of this series then whether it’s convergent to a finite value or divergent to an infinite value is majorly important. That’s the transition. If our desire is finite it has the chance of being met; if it’s infinite it hasn’t. It appears in this Bloated Age we simply want more irrespective of practicality. My motorcycle needs more power, my computer more memory, my software more features, my camera more pixels and so on. Things need to be faster, bigger, cleaner, happier and more exotic, all just more. Our perceptual series has become divergent. XP was fine, Windows 7 great, Windows 10 is so irrelevant Microsoft are beginning to be sued by many US states for their blatantly dishonest promotion of it. They even re-purposed the top right ‘X’ not as ‘close’ but ‘I accept.’ And even the top 1% while having more than they could ever need are hell bent on acquiring more. And, and even every kid’s spaceman chum, Buzz Lightyear is teaching our children to go, “To infinity and beyond!” A good joke but lost on a five year old’. No, bring back the blitz I want to join Dad’s Army. 

Bikes.

This morning at motorcycle shop for a new tire. We talk about bikes. We agree they’ve gone mad. Too over weight, over sized and over powerful to be enjoyable to ride. Given the restrictions of speed limits, roads and other road users and normal skill levels they’re useless but marketing has tricked bikers into imagery rather than reality. So what’s an ideal bike? Slim because it’s controllable, compact so it’s nimble, powerful enough to do a 100mph (around 50hp not 150), light so it’s easy to handle (150kg not 220), a robust simple motor you can rely on and that’s easy to work on so you can sort it if need be. I’ve motocrossed, trialed and done several 3,000 mile road trips all on suitable machinery quite unlike the monsters they’re selling today. Realistically adventure bikes need to do 40mph max off road and 100 on and around 150kg, i.e. a Jap 600 single. The Dakar, a 450. Touring bikes need 100mph and reliability, and all need easily available spares. And all need to be fun to ride. Track bikes OK need power but even then it’s about enjoying it and you can enjoy it on a sorted bike any size. Personally for me it’s a Yamaha SZR660 single. Had mine for 19 years and there’s still nothing better. 

The BBC

Just tuned in to BBC Breakfast. Must be short for, ‘Break fast and run away’, which I did. It was frightening. Pinky and Perky, presumably in some real existence known as Dan Walker and Sally Nugent, were in this incarnation truly Big Brother’s Ministry of Truth. They ran an interview with a top golfer who’d chosen not to go to the Olympics. After it they joined in mutual disdain that he’d given his honest opinion, that it would have been better if he’d made up some twaddle about his cat being ill or expecting an urgent Amazon parcel. It was as if spin has become the new truth, at least within our pre-eminent broadcaster. It’s no wonder Jeremy Corbyn is appreciated by the public yet has a hard time with the media and his own party. They literally can’t cope with honest factual opinion. They belittle it as un-real-worldly like an amateur playing in the professional game. The conservatives have always done it and Blair dragged the labour party to join them. The Lib Dems got screwed in the coalition so there’s no major force left in British politics that believes in speaking honesty. And after years of coping with spinning politicians the BBC is now in its own spin. In the following interview with a spinning politician the interviewer adopted her own interviewer spin supposedly to counteract it. It didn’t, it simply removed us even further from honest reality. This truly is the widespread adoption of double-speak and double-think as the norm in politics and the media. Poor old Jeremy. And this evening a doc following a refugee to almost England. He remembered fondly his youth in Damascus up until Syrian government security guards beat him gruesomely for protesting, how he was ripped off numerous times by the businessmen of the asylum transport trade. There’s a cautionary tale here, that if you let things get bad they’ll get worse. Asad, his government, police and those businessmen have double-thought themselves into a grotesque unreality of frenzied rabid dogs tearing into common flesh. With double think it’s possible. And it begins with spin. 

The BBC

Just tuned in to BBC Breakfast. Must be short for, ‘Break fast and run away’, which I did. It was frightening. Pinky and Perky, presumably in some real existence known as Dan Walker and Sally Nugent, were in this incarnation truly Big Brother’s Ministry of Truth. They ran an interview with a top golfer who’d chosen not to go to the Olympics. After it they joined in mutual surprise that he’d given his honest opinion, that it would have been better if he’d made up some twaddle about his cat being ill or expecting an urgent Amazon parcel. It was as if spin has become the new truth, at least within our pre-eminent broadcaster. It’s no wonder Jeremy Corbyn is appreciated by the public yet has a hard time with the media and his own party. They literally can’t cope with honest factual opinion. They belittle it as un-real-worldly like an amateur playing in the professional game. The conservatives have always done it and Blair dragged the labour party to join them. The Lib Dems got screwed in the coalition so there’s no major force left in British politics that believes in speaking honesty. And after years of coping with spinning politicians the BBC is now in its own spin. In the following interview with a spinning politician the interviewer adopted her own interviewer spin supposedly to counteract it. It didn’t, it simply removed us even further from honest reality. This truly is the widespread adoption of double-speak and double-think as the norm in politics and the media. Poor old Jeremy. And this evening a doc following a refugee to almost England. He remembered fondly his youth in Damascus up until Syrian government security guards beat him gruesomely for protesting, how he was ripped off numerous times by the businessmen of the asylum transport trade. There’s a cautionary tale here, that if you let things get bad they’ll get worse. Asad, his government, police and those businessmen have double-thought themselves into a grotesque unreality of frenzied rabid dogs tearing into common flesh. With double think it’s possible. And it begins with spin.