There is much to be said about the world we live inside of and perhaps we can believe it is a great and awesome one. But; what if it is not? I have come to believe that the world is way too meaningless; broken; and even simple for my taste. So allow me to elaborate:
I love cats. That is to any reader who is familiar with me; something well established. But when I think about the life of the cats I know; the world in which I was born and raised becomes way too meaningless. Imagine the life of a stray cat. To some people it is how it must be; it is their nature; well of course that it is banal and worthless opinion. How can the life of any creature in a city be natural and right? Here we get into the first big rule about humanity that people are systematically blind to what is happening around them.
The next part of our observation can then be about how these poor cats are being treated in the city environment. First there is the problem of these poor animals having to live in the street; in coldness; in an environment that always has for them the potential of being hit by a car or worse and they have to live in bright places in the night; to listen to very very loud sounds and to be actually living a Blade Runner movie. This is insane, inhumane, and inanimal.
But then no one cares. Not even if they try. Most people have no care for this forms of suffering. Well then; what must we make of this? Sadly I eat meat, and the only way that, in our world can be done is by raising a poor animal; in the worst conditions that one can imagine and that will be something you buy in the supermarket. I don’t believe that when Marx was writing about alienation he would have ever imagined a day where we raised animals so badly that they didn’t have the muscles to walk—since they never had. I am so ashamed of myself for this. For still eating animals. This is just so horrible.
So what can we say about ourselves then? We create very very horrible conditions for animals to be raised just so we can kill them and eat them because this is the most profitable way?
I have seen footage of chicken being tied to a machine that would chop their heads. I have seen factory lines that would transform chicks to a running blade that would instantly cut them to pieces. Writing about them is making me so very sad; so very ashamed of being alive; and yet; I still eat chicken so what can be said about me? Just a horrible creature.
And this goes on for even our own species. There is currently a gravely horrific genocide going on in Gaza. The continuation of all the very insane things that happened to the people of Palestine and how are we alive and laughing is something to be very worried about. I have seen the cries of children and how can anyone see that and still live? It is so horrific; so very insane… I really hate it. And then still; I’m here; doing nothing about it.
This is something that is mostly going on all around the world. There is something about these people that makes me… one to truly care and that is more than insane. I just wished that there was something true to have been done about it.
With all of that said; We can bring to resolution that the actions of our people; our world; are way far than anything to be proud of. There is too much talk about humanity and the notion of democracy; but then what kind of it? Where is this democracy going to be helpful where we are seeing children being bombed; shot in the head; and killed on live TV? How is this even possible?
Now if we also go and take a look at the current landscape of the culture; even more horrible things are there for us to see.
Let me focus on our approach for making two previously huge systems; first the classical music. It has been perhaps the greatest form of music that humanity has come up with. There has been no other form with such scale of creation; orchestration; and innovation compared to the tools at the disposal of its players and composers. Classical music had truly achieved Egyptian Pyramids.
Scales of where it could have — and in fact has gone. But if we look closely the advancements have been in the form of a very narrow point of view. In the infinite possibilities of composition; of all the different configurations; the themes; the use of instruments;… It just seems that the form of the Philharmonic Orchestra has somewhat never been altered. This is to a point where every single detail of this form of music has become traditionalized. There is perhaps a very clear dress code; strict traditions on how to come onto the stage; bow; where anyone has to sit; who must walk in after the main virtuoso; who before; who to design the concert halls; and as you know every instrument in the classical music has exactly the same look; sound; measurement; and… In fact something so important in classical music is to “perform the piece exactly as written in the sheet musics”. This is why some believe the right (or perhaps the better name) to be “Exact Music”. You may view classical music as a form of sport; a game; just like in Tennis or UNO all the rules and instruments and the whole environment is exact; only the play and the players differ. While I consider this form of system design to be very much full of relief; in the same time there is nothing… more limiting than this. In all the years that the classical music has been the limiting form [I left the piece here…]
Unfortunately it seems van der Kolk took the famous Mark Twain quote “never let the truth get in the way of a good story” to heart.
All this suggests that certain people may have certain physiology or hormonal profiles that make them susceptible to trauma.
What this would suggest is that van der Kolk could be getting everything backwards.
That is, trauma doesn’t lead to dysfunction or abnormal brain function, physiology or hormonal regulation. Rather, an unhealthy person may be more susceptible to trauma.
I guess building an actual browser, from scratch, is still a task so monumentally difficult that even a company that is aiming for super-intelligence can’t tackle it.
Dr. Michael Scheeringa […] expected that after The Body Keeps the Score hit the bestseller list following its publication in 2014, it would quickly lose all credibility and be banished to the bargain bin due to its many blatant scientific errors and grandiose narrative.
Instead, it maintained a streak of being the #1 ranked book in Psychiatry on Amazon.com for years. Just last week, the week of June 29th 2025, The Body Keeps the Score is ranked #5 for most sold for all nonfiction books on Amazon’s official weekly ranking. It’s maintained an unbroken streak on the top 20 most sold nonfiction list for the past 233 weeks - over 4 years and 5 months.
The movie, by sheer speeding up the mechanical, carried us from the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configuration and structure.
General Sarnoff went on to explain his attitude to the technology of print, saying that it was true that print caused much trash to circulate, but it had also disseminated the Bible and the thoughts of seers and philosophers. It has never occurred to General Sarnoff that any technology could do anything but add itself on to what we already are.
When IBM discovered that it was not in the business of making office equipment or business machines, but that it was in the business of processing information, then it began to navigate with clear vision.
Let us return to the electric light. Whether the light is being used for brain surgery or night baseball is a matter of indifference. It could be argued that these activities are in some way the “content” of the electric light, since they could not exist without the electric light.
This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the “content” of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph. If it is asked, “What is the content of speech?” it is necessary to say, “It is an actual process of thought, which is in itself nonverbal.”