I’ve been meaning to sit down for quite some time to ramble out the various thoughts and conclusions regarding male sexuality that have been swirling around my personal ecosystem for, well, probably decades. Recently, various ideas have coalesced into a coherent whole which now stands in needing of a proper venting. Here goes.

Everything about male sexuality can be explained under one simple notion — the need for DNA to replicate itself.

Simply put, DNA’s primary mission is to ensure that it’s information is transmitted into the next generation.

While this is similar to explaining male sexual appetites under the guise of a “need to breed”, it deviates slightly when seen from the perspective of DNA’s need to replicate, mainly because it’s an informational exchange, which also more clearly explains the constant barrage of informational stimulus a man receives on a moment-to-moment, daily basis. I’ll explain.

When a man spots ‘a nice rack’, DNA is sending him a signal that he should make contact. For the simple reason that full, shapely breasts are often an indication that offspring are more likely to survive.

When a man sees a hot ass, DNA is sending a double signal — a nice ass is usually an indication of child-bearing hips as well as a visual echo of breasts, which are so critical to DNA’s survival. Men are also drawn to attractive behinds, simply because the “rear entry position” (i.e. doggy style) is THE most common sexual position in the natural world. To be blunt, we see a hot ass and instantly are flooded with a desire to mount it, regardless of whether the woman attached to it wants to be mounted or not.

These signals, which a man feels as a rush of sexual desire, can also be triggered by full red lips and cheeks (an indication of health), overall beauty (which signifies higher likelihood of further generational transmission) and a host of other minor “informational inputs”. Remember, DNA itself is pure information. It’s mission is to replicate and it has evolved over the millennia to deliver highly sophisticated messages to the male brain for the purpose of it’s own survival, regardless of how we feel about it.

What DNA understands is that it must send a constant barrage of these messages to the male brain if it has any hope of being passed on to the next generation. Factor in female rejection, the relatively small frequency of egg fertilization and (historically at least) the low odds of survival for birthed offspring and DNA has evolved to be certain of one thing — either it must constantly stimulate a man’s sexual desires (causing him to release copious amounts of sperm in as many females as possible) or it won’t survive.

Further substantiation of this theory of male sexuality for DNA propagation can be found in what I think of as “tribal groupings.” As humans we have a much longer history of existing in small tribal units versus towns or the ever-evolving mega-cities of the moment. Therefore, when it comes to male sexuality, we often perceive our environment in terms of small tribal units. On a bus, in a restaurant, in a park… wherever we go, most men size up their present environment to find who is the most attractive “sperm recipient” at any given moment. (Sorry ladies, I know you’re much more than that, but I’m strictly speaking here from the POV of DNA.) This perception of small groups, similar to that of a tribal unit, is further proof of DNA’s mission and how it hasn’t evolved in one key respect.

You see, DNA doesn’t have a clue that we’re no longer running around in tribal units, nor does it know about the complex social and cultural conventions regarding male/female relations, condoms, pornography or any of the myriad distortions and manifestations of male sexuality that have arisen over the ages.

As has been long asserted by neurologists, what the brain sees, it believes. So when a man jerks off to porn (in its many variations), DNA is convinced that its mission is being fulfilled. Men feel relief not simply because an orgasm is pleasurable, or that stored-up sperm has been cleared out for a fresh batch. These sensations exist because DNA wants it that way, otherwise it won’t survive.

I honestly can’t say whether anyone will find the above thesis illuminating or not. It seems likely that a woman could re-write this from the feminine perspective, assuming that there is a commensurate explanation for their sexual desires and its connection to DNA replication. What is also missing from this thesis is accounting for homosexuality in terms of DNA propagation; having no experience in the subject, I also have no authority to posit alternative theories.

Personally, coming to understand this simple fact of DNA propagation has helped put into context the never-ending barrage of stimulus that is the source of so much continuous, daily distraction. It doesn’t reduce the stimulus, but at least makes it easier to not be controlled by it.

The real question in my mind is when DNA will evolve to understand that males no longer need to release sperm every other day in order to assure its survival. In other words, DNA simply hasn’t caught up to the fact that infant mortality has declined dramatically and that there is an abundance of potential partners available now, compared to its persistent insistence in perceiving those tribal groupings.

There can be no doubt that the world would be a much more peaceful place were DNA to evolve in this manner, allowing the release of so much continuous pressure on the male system. (The damaging affects of this constant frustration would surely make for another lengthy essay…)

Perhaps what DNA simply needs is for self-awareness of its intent to occur in its host before this evolution can finally take place.

Ahh, but if only it was that simple…

I think this needs a revision, to something more like this:

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to create a horrifyingly inverted travesty of history.”

Granted, it doesn’t roll off the tongue as well as the original, but it more closely describes what has been unfolding in the U.S. in recent years. I’m speaking specifically about the Tea Party and their utter lack of basic knowledge of the event for which they were named.

The original Boston Tea Party was not just about taxes on the importation of tea. It was about a massive corporation (the British East India Company) who wanted to monopolize importing tea and other basic necessities into the colonies, destroying small businesses in the process. Sounds a lot like the efforts of a whole host of modern mega-corporations who actively seek to kill the competition, skip out on taxes in spite of huge profits, and rent legislators to fix the system in their favor.

So history is repeating itself, but on larger, planet-threatening scales and where it all turns into a bad acid trip is how easily outraged (and frighteningly ignorant) working and middle class families can adopt this historical moniker while being utterly manipulated by the very class enslaving them. It’s Robin Hood in Reverse.

There is a lot of money behind the Tea Party movement, and it’s not coming from the grassroots. Forbes magazine and the owners of the largest private corporation, the Koch Brothers, are among lots of high-rolling plutocrats who enjoy manipulating the system to their own ends as it makes them even wealthier.

We’re talking about billionaires who are so slap happy greedy they don’t know when to stop, like an alcoholic on a bender inside a whiskey factory. Just for a little perspective… the average American family income is $50k. It would take 20,000 years to spend a billion dollars at that rate.

Orwell, Huxley et al couldn’t have imagined something more surreal. Let’s pray that all the card-carrying Tea Party folks eventually wise up to the fix and realize they’ve been ranting on the wrong side. Class war is in fully underway and the oligarchs are winning. While I’m not one for pitchforks and torches, something has to be done before this society fully unravels much in the same manner as past civilizations who allowed the extremes of wealth and poverty to erode the very foundations of their societies.

1. advanced civilizations exist
2. they’re here as the result of a “USOP” (universal standard operating procedure) and
3. we’re under quarantine until we reach a state of Total Peace, i.e. the end of all conflict between nations and the use of mass-scale violence to solve disputes and seize power

Advanced Civilizations Exist

To state that the Earth is the only planet capable of producing intelligent life is a logical absurdism. Even given the astronomical odds of a star system producing the perfect conditions for life to develop, it’s more likely that there are hundreds of thousands of inhabited planets with intelligent life than there aren’t, simply because of the vast numbers of stars and planets in the cosmos.

Astronomers have finally come around in recent years to declare that there are likely tens of thousands of planets capable of supporting life with similar qualities as Earth. My hardcore science friends will argue that they can’t make such a declaration without evidence, but it really seems beside the point. There are an essentially infinite numbers of stars with planets to match. It’s just simply good odds. Life MUST exist on other planets because it’s more mathematically logical to believe it than to not.

Moving forward from this point, the most clearly logical next step is to assume that the civilizations inhabiting these planets across the universe are at various stages of development. Some are still in the stone age, some are at a similar level of technology and others have advanced millions if not billions of years ahead of us. Simple logical deduction.

IMHO, this org has the best proof for the existence of ETs I've ever come across.

This inevitably leads to debates about the impossibility of inter-stellar travel and the tired old “nothing travels faster than the speed of light” argument. The usual blather that skeptics make, denying an alien presence on Earth, is because they say it’s impossible to travel across the vast distances of space. This is wrong for two reasons. First is technological, the second is quantum.

For a civilization like ours, which has barely scrapped the steam engine, to place technological limits on other, far more advanced civilizations is a major logical absurdity that UFO skeptics make.

To say that advanced civilizations could never develop inter-stellar travel is as ludicrous as comments made about the first ‘heavier than air’ craft developed over a hundred years ago. Wake up folks, we’re talking about the likelihood of civilizations at least a million years more advanced than us. We just started using cellphones, for crying out loud. Time to drop the anthropomorphic pretense and start assuming that other civilizations can travel anywhere (and possibly anyWHEN) they want to.

This leads to the second fallacy about inter-planetary travel — that everything is too far apart, that the speed of light barrier is preventing us. The fact is, information DOES travel faster than the speed of light. This is something even Earth-bound physicists have already proven, even though we understand nothing about the larger implications.

Known colloquially as spooky action at a distance it implies that the universe is a hologram where intimate connection exists across the vast distances of space. And remember — we just discovered this but barely understand it. To insist that a culture a million years ahead of us is incapable of figuring out the details necessary to complete faster than light travel just seems laughable.

But Why Would They Come Here?

Yes, space is big. So big your brain will hurt the moment you try to comprehend it. In the scheme of things, our planet is less than a particle of dust in a gnat’s toe jam. So why would anyone bother coming here? Simple. Atomic fission.

There’s a major theory going around the physics community that the universe is holographic. The theory has been posited that the universe may be holographic as means of explaining the “information traveling faster than light” problem previously mentioned.

So just imagine for a moment that you’re an alien race, a million years more advanced from us. What’s the one major warning signal that there’s a “new kid on the (universal) block”?

Nuclear fission.

The splitting of the atom is the first signal that a civilization has advanced to a stage that it’s about to become a threat. Granted that the developmental time-scale between fission and inter-stellar space travel may be hundreds if not thousands of years, but to advanced civilizations, that’s chicken scratch. The first warning sign of a new upstart will always be the splitting of the atom because it’s a signal of extreme danger, atomically speaking. For once a civilization learns to split an atom, there’s no going back. It’s a major rite of passage that signals the possibility of cosmic mass destruction, because the steps from local atomic events (read: Hiroshima) to larger events (like accidentally blowing up stars) are quite few in the vast washes of time.

This inevitably leads to my theory of why there was an explosion of sightings around World War Two and immediately after. It wasn’t for the usual “mass hysteria” justifications made by skeptics in their attempts to debunk tens of thousands of sightings. It’s because they actually happened.

For those who need proof...

Why?

Because the U.S. and other major powers on the planet started shooting off a bucket load of nukes. Given the extremely limited amount that we comprehend about quantum physics, it doesn’t take a major leap to imagine that there are cosmic seismograph alarms going off on the other side of the galaxy any time a civilization reaches the developmental stage of nuclear fission. That is the peak moment when it’s time to observe whether a planet is friend or foe, capable of solving it’s internal conflicts without violence or not.

As much as I enjoy alien invasion movies for their pure entertainment value, I don’t think it’s remotely true. There aren’t war-like races running around the universe trashing other planets for resources or subjugating civilizations in their quest for cosmic dominance.

That’s what WE do, HERE.

It’s just more anthropomorphic nonsense. I’m convinced that no civilization is allowed to leave it’s solar system until it has graduated beyond the stage of solving problems with violence and that any planet that hasn’t reached that stage of maturity is under quarantine.

In Conclusion

Alien civilizations exist because it’s more mathematically logical to assume it than to deny it. Second, they’ve masted quantum mechanics and have broken the faster than light barrier. Third, they found us because of our fondness for nuclear explosions which advanced cultures would find as easy to detect as we do earthquakes.

Finally, they’re here to suss out whether we evolve past our penchants for violence as problem-solving technique. Until then, we’re in lock down and aren’t getting out of the solar system.

In about 100 or 200 years time, I have a strong feeling that people will be looking back on us, the survivors of the 20th century, and they’re going to say things like “those poor people…” just in the same way that we look back on those that lived through the Black Death.

Remember the Black Death?

That was the horrifying pandemic that lasted for a few years around 1350, killing 30-60% of Europe’s population. We look back on that and other similar events and say things like “oh, those poor people, they suffered so much. How couldn’t they know that _____ was so dangerous?”

It’s easy for us to have this attitude of what’s obvious (like not drinking the water near the outhouse) because of the progress we’ve made, but I’m convinced that in the future the exact same thing will be true of OUR age. But in the future people will say things like… “How didn’t they know it was insane to dump oil (AKA pesticides) all over their crops? Oh those poor people with all of that ADD, ADHD, OCD stuff… didn’t they know they were living in toxic soup?”

I suppose that’s the price of progress.

In the past I would have died from flea infested rats. Today I’m driven mad by restless leg syndrome which has cursed me with only a handful of restful night’s sleeps. In the future they’ll know what caused it. Time will march, knowledge will be gained, and we’ll become those “poor suffering souls” for future generations to look back on. Such is progress!

If you saved the median US income ($50,000) every year — without spending a single dime — it would take you 20,000 years to save up to a billion dollars.

After you’ve choked that one down, read the rest of the article.

A backlash is coming…

While I know there aren’t many options for an ejector seat, escape hatch, back door or similar quick exit out of the nearly constant over-stimulation dilemma, one thing that I’ve found that helps is cultivating a sense of timelessness is the midst of the stimulation stream. It comes through truly focusing on the moment, rather than worrying about The List. We all have Lists of things to do, whether written or not. Staying in a state of anxiety about the List is a major buzzkill, but the way out is really just a breath away.

It’s about the moments, not the accomplishments. Obviously, it feels good to finish something, cross it off the list and feel satisfied while moving on to the next task. Because that’s just it — there will always be something else to do. If we get too hung up on The List we’ll miss the beauty of the moment.

One thing I’ve been doing lately is writing a lot of Hubpages articles. It’s been a part of my overall business strategy, but I’ve found something else in the process — the enjoyment of writing, in the moment, not worrying about anything else. The format is usually short and sweet, so it’s easy to focus on exactly what needs to be said in that particular moment. If you’re a writer, I highly recommend checking it out. You might find it as enjoyable as I do. (Some links are below.)

But whatever your thing is, try and do it like it’s the only thing that matters in the whole world. Playing with your kids, cooking dinner, getting in some exercise, even driving. Slow down, take a couple of deep breaths and realize — this is the first and last moment of your life. There’s only now.

An idea came rather suddenly.

I realized that our nervous systems are over-loaded for a simple reason — we’re making at least 100 times the amount of decisions that our ancestors made.

Set the mental way-back machine to just five generations. Trains had been around for a few decades but most people were still getting around by horse-propelled transit. Everything was slow… transportation, goods and services, information. To get to the general store for provisions you’d either walk or ride a bike. The nearest danger was probably stepping in dung or being cautious to not startle the livestock.

Imagine that pace as your routine. Sure, everyone was working hard and it was usually back-breaking labor. I’m not suggesting it was easy, just simple.

Now mentally switch forward. Imagine yourself hurtling down a freeway at 70 miles per hour on the edge of rush hour. Mentally compare 10 minutes on that freeway to a 10 minute walk in a 19th century town. The contrast should be jarring.

In 10 minutes on a highway you’re making hundreds of minute decisions for your personal survival and the safety of everyone else surrounding you. The task becomes routine with time, but doesn’t change — there is a constant underlying stress that a mistake in your personal judgement could cost dozens of lives and hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage. Even basic city driving brings similar risks. We’ve become normalized to the process but I don’t think the stress of making so many instant, life-threatening decisions is unnoticed by our nervous systems.

Now start to factor in your job. How many decisions do you have to make a day? How many requests do you get from co-workers? How much do you have to read, ingest, digest and regurgitate on a daily basis? Even the laziest office worker is likely processing as much information in a day as a person a hundred years ago processed in a week.

Tally up the stress total but don’t stop there. Add in family and friendships, processing all of their personal issues and dilemmas. What stressors are unique to our era? Climate change, politics, the global economy, wars, disease. Its true that a lot of these things existed five generations ago (except for the obvious threat of global warming), however, today we’re saturated with hundreds more information inputs.

Physical items like desktops, laptops, mobile phones, PDAs, televisions in the home and nearly every conceivable public establishment, newspapers, magazines. Digital inputs from email, websites, searches, blogs, Facebook, Twitter and dozens of other social networking tools.

I’m convinced the reason we’re so stressed out is that our nervous systems were not designed for the amount of stimulation they’re receiving and that what’s needed is for us to gently slam on the breaks and re-examine the runaway train that is our culture. Its getting us nowhere fast. Whole eco-systems are in collapse, our climate has been dramatically warped by our fossil fuel and consumption addictions. Which brings us to the “numbing effect.”

Another part of this nagging question about stress was related to feeling utterly numbed out by tragedy. The oil spill in the Gulf, the continuing, utterly pointless wars in Central Asia, climate change and the appalling lack of action to mitigate it, the dramatic swing towards crazy in American politics, the sheer brazenness of the manipulators of our economic/legislative system…

It’s enough to keep one up at nights, but it doesn’t. I rarely feel anything about these issues anymore and that scares me. Maybe its because I’m an expat living so far away from it all, but I doubt that’s it. I think everyone is suffering from this problem and I think its because of everything I’ve been saying already… our nerves are over-capacity so we can’t emotionally or intellectually process these issues to the degree that is required. This IS the modern horror and it should be stopped.

I’m not suggesting a return to the “good ole days of yore” because really, they had it hard. Really hard. But we’ve really got to slow down and give our nerves a break. Fortunately a dramatic combination of peak oil and climate change may do exactly that. In the meantime, keep exercising as it really helps wipe out stress. Meditate, do yoga, hell, just SIT STILL for 15 minutes and do nothing and it’ll help.

And above all… imagine that future world where we still have some of the benefits of modern technology but the pace of agrarian life. I’m sure we’ll get there someday. Better to chose it than to have it chosen for us.

Religion and Economics deftly frames neo-liberal economics as a modern religion. Framing is an extremely important cognitive tool that allows us to see through the haze of habit and get a clearer vision of the world as it is, not as we’ve become habituated to see it.

If there was something on this planet that stands in need re-framing above all else, it is neoliberalism, a system of economics that concentrates massive wealth, steals the resources of the global poor, caused the current economic crisis and is directly responsible for most of the world’s ecological disasters.

John B. Cobb Jr.’s essay, while a bit long-winded, point by point compares the phenomenon of neoliberalism that bears a striking resemblance to the world’s religions in the “glorious” principles it espouses, the commitment it requires of its believers and the worship of its deity above all else.

This is an extremely useful re-framing of the economics of unregulated growth, not just because we’re all feeling the disastrous effects of its methodology, but that we assists in a complete paradigm shift of its essence, in order to help us break free from the spell it has so thoroughly cast on this planet.

Simply put, economics is a religion we need to stop worshiping before its too late. Reading Cobb’s essay helps realize we’re in a temple of someone else’s making and its time to walk out.

The other night I did something unusual. A ritual from distant, deep memory — I turned out the lights, put on some headphones and listened to an album straight through. Truth be told, I’ve done that countless times listening to my own albums, but usually as part of the process of analyzing, proofing, etc. Its been a much longer time since I put on one of those albums. You know the ones. The kind that pull you in to your heart-wrenched pain, providing catalyst for tears and release.

In this case, it was Tones on Tail’s Night Music. But there were others through the years. Roxy Music’s Avalon, The Cure’s Disintegration, any of the first three Smiths’ albums. Ohh how the Brits are capable of concretizing the pangs of adolescence.

The album itself is stunning. A masterwork anchored in the goth/new wave era, yet somehow completely untethered by the usual constraints of genre. It feels liberated from its time and place, which was an odd sensation, since its also how I felt, listening to it for the first time in perhaps 15 years.

Liberated, because there were no painful tears, no gut-wrenching agonies that had been embedded in that music when I first heard it so long ago. They were gone, only to be replaced with the still regrets that time brings.

The irony of adolescent angst is it’s freedom. As teenagers, whether our suffering is real or imagined (which I must admit I was victim of both), the incongruity lies in how liberated we are to feel, regardless of how many of our emotions center around feeling trapped. We’re teenagers — having no control of our own destiny, assailed on all sides, tormented by a thousand different pangs. But we’re free to feel these things. Never in one of those “late night with headphones” would I have conceived that the real feelings of being trapped would come later. Trapped by survival. The need to keep going, regardless of how you feel because life demands it. Work, love, money, pressure.

In many ways I was relieved to find, listening to that exquisite album after such a long absence, that so many of my adolescent torments had long-since dissolved. But at the same time, I missed the catharsis that was so easy to come by in my youth. Instead, the feeling of dull, locked away caverns of regret and remorse, still with me but still inaccessible by the pressures of time. Maybe to be opened once again, if the emotional “liberation of youth” that I took for granted is allowed, by time, to make another grand entrance.

As the album reached its end, there was no mourning for the last note, no tears to wipe from salty cheeks. Just an odd feeling for their absence and the lingering feeling that I should probably get to bed. To be prepared for the demands a new day would bring.

In Oslo this morning, a hundred countries – including Switzerland – affixed their signature to a Convention that prohibits cluster munitions. A major landmark for humanitarian law.

This was the result of an extraordinary mobilization of state and non-state actors. In Oslo’s City Hall this morning, at 10 o’clock on the dot, over 100 countries signed the Cluster Munitions Convention. Notably absent were producers, such as the United States, Russia, China, Pakistan and even Israel.

While I might still have a knee-jerk reaction to the absence of the US, the world’s largest arms producer, I’m holding on to the more positive aspect of this news — the unprecedented shift towards disarmament and peace occurring in the world today.

Cynicism would have us focus on the abundant evidence to the contrary. This is why its so important to take a deep breath and realize… this treaty and others of its kind are unparalleled in the history of human affairs. It instantly forces recall of an ancient prophecy:

And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. (Isaiah 2:4)

I’ve always been fascinated by the last part of that passage — “neither shall they learn war any more.” This phrase has SO many implications, most obviously the notion that the study of war LEADS to war. The institutionalized habit of studying history through the assumption that we are essentially war-like in nature has fostered permanent perceptions in the minds of many that there simply is no alternative. The “war as nature” premise teaches us to view history as a series of inevitable struggles. An eternally evolving shift of conflicts from which there is no escape and at best only painful mediation.

However, if we adjust the definition of our essential nature towards a view that we are a historically young species who is in the process of evolving to higher levels of order (the signs of which are even more abundant than the specific news of progress towards peace) then we begin to see war as a regrettable and tragic result of an immature humanity’s addiction to resolve conflict through violence.

The idea that the human race evolves over time as a collective in relation to the similar stages of an individual (infancy, childhood, adolescence, maturity) was first introduced by Baha’u'llah in the late 1800s and has recently been mentioned, albeit in another context, by biologists Paul Ehrlich and Robert Pringle:

“Homo sapiens, is about 200,000 years old.” If one considers that mammalian species – of which we are one – last a million years on average, that places Homo sapiens in the middle of adolescence.

And what do teenagers do? They grow up.

Taking this view of our essential nature into context we can see our potential fate with a new hope. Not that we’re doomed to endlessly fight meaningless wars but that we’re in the process of evolving to a higher level of consciousness, an inevitable result of which is we will sign meaningful treaties, develop potent international defenses against armed conflict and injustice, and eventually reach a stage of maturity where the various battles in our bloody history are brushed aside for a larger, more lasting study of our true, essential nature — that of peaceful beings who went through a turbulent stage of development and eventually… learned war no more.