Memes symmetric in M/R - "Science"

By Wayne Brown

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Bitcoin

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Bitcoin is not a currency. Very few people, from Nobel Prize Winning economists to the "man on the street" understand money and value. The phenomenon of cryptocurrency is a case in point. I highly recommend the little horror story of Gerald Cotton and Quadriga  as background to my comments here. Not wanting to trust their money with any "central authority", Quadriga's customers handed over their life savings to a trusted criminal and they vanished with him when he died. Marketplaces in of any scale require an underlying currency to function. At the very least, such currency must have a more or less stable value on the day the market takes place. In practice, such currencies become stable in larger territories over longer time periods, usually backed by the agreed-to value of some particular good, such as gold or silver or the promise to pay gold or silver.  Unlike in the imagination of crypto believers, the "government" is just another play...
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Alien Invasion

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In Alien 1979, we were introduced to a creature that invades its host and connects itself so deeply to the host's internal organs that removal of the invader will kill the victim. When religion is installed in the mind of a baby and left to grow for years, disentanglement seems close to psychological suicide. The human "self" is so entangled with the invader that survival without the resident alien seems impossible. In fact, the invader has become the "self". The alien egg is planted soon after birth. The victim is raised in a deeply religious household that is itself part of a religious culture. Inside the bubble, the fantasy is daily reality. This is particularly insidious for women, who may find themselves mothers in their early teens, saddled with caring for (and infecting) families of their own long before they develop brains that are capable of "pushing back" against bubble-think. Religion tends to be "hard wired" into generations of wo...
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The IOUTopia Model

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