Having strong urges to smash the crap out of this unit and give the brain a rest.
Thanks for this observation. Apparently some of my relatives in Austria thought that all was well despite Angschluss. They didn’t make it. This is one Jew whose antennae are up 24/7. I’d rather be a canary in the mine than a dead Jew in an oven.
Re the “scarecrow” effect. I saw a woman get hit by a car as she crossed in the middle of a 4 lane street at night. When she landed with a thud, I thought she was dead and called the police to report that accident and that I thought she was dead because of the loud impact of her hitting the ground.
The firehouse was about a block away and the police/ambulance arrived in a matter of a minute or two. I wandered over to tell the police what I had scene, but stopped next to young woman at the scene. I remarked to her that I thought the victim was dead but I couldn’t see her body, to which she she said, “I’m not dead.”
You could have knocked me over with a feather. Apparently her backpack shielded her from serious injury.
I said “I’m glad you’re not”. She said, “So am I”.
The rest of the night was a lot easier on the mind knowing that this woman had survived in good condition. I never did talk to the police as the woman had already told them that she was wrong to cross the street the way she had.
Lessons learned: Never cross a dark. busy street except at the crosswalk. Miracles do happen.
“Life will get back to normal.”
“There’s nothing wrong with this!”
Cue Kevin Bacon in “Animal House”
Excellent article. There’s much to think about and this is about common sense and instinct. I’m still on step one and within that step, I’m stuck at anger (rage is the appropriate name) but I also realize I need to get better prepared.
Thanks for the post
That is why people have to be trained to go into combat and why people who live hard lives are more likely to survive a crisis.
Thanks for posting this.
It is disquieting how many still ignore the warnings. How many continue to trust the talking heads on the boob tube instead of their own instincts. How many refuse to even admit to the possibility.
Perhaps it is because it is such a downer topic. Maybe it is because they fear that it is already too late.
I listened to the warnings. I did my setups (an ongoing affair that is now part of my lifestyle).
I may not be zombie-proof, but but I’m damned close.
“Normalcy bias” is a survival mechanism designed to take your attention over from whatever it’s doing, and make it focus on what is presented. It should last no more than a few seconds. You should then resume activity to safely consider the message you were just given logically.
Peripheral vision (something else that should not be ignored) can present many “false positives” that should be studied just long enough to ignore with confidence, or act on. I was driving along when I could swear I saw USS Enterprise, NCC-1701, taking off at about a 45 degree angle. I could feel the hair on the back of my neck stand up, and I almost slammed on the breaks.
My conscious mind told me there was a better explanation, and to not do anything stupid while driving. I took a conscious two-second look, and saw a twin-turboprop Beechcraft 200 King Air with wingtip tanks taking off and banking sharply, providing me with a view I didn’t normally experience. I also verified there was a small airfield off to the left, behind some hangars.
Also, in some high-stress situations, the subconscious brain will discard certain sensory input it considers unnecessary to handle the crisis at hand, freeing up more “computing resources” for the real problem.
I was moving through an intersection on a green light when the pickup waiting to make a left turn going in the opposite direction decided it was safe to cut me off rather than wait another second for me to go by. I didn’t lean on the horn, and I never considered braking. Instead, I cranked on a hard-right turn, and my field of vision went white.
All that existed was the steering wheel in my hand, and the sensation of a hard-right turn in the seat of my pants. A small voice told me my GMC could not maintain that much right bank for long, so I should prepare for a left turn. It also told me that to prevent fishtailing all over the road, the rate and extent of the left roll should be half that of what I just did. With that done, I was told to center the wheel and proceed normally.
I looked around, and everything was normal. The @sshole who cut me off was nowhere to be seen, but at least he hadn’t wrecked. I’m sure I must have crossed his field of view (assuming he had his eyes open) within a few feet of his front end. He probably continued on, totally oblivious.
I still wasn’t oblivious. I tried to recall what just happened ten seconds before, but my video memory was still just a white field of view. Today, I can still only remember the white screen, the steering wheel, and the sense of rate of roll in the seat of my pants.
A doctor confirmed that in some stressful situations, the amygdlia, which controls instincts, can override some sense and brain functions to either let an instinct kick in, or lighten the processing load of the conscious mind. Conscious repetitious training, as in some martial arts, is a way of adding new instinctive skills to your brain by hard work to “program” it.
This is also a way of managing the “fight or flight” response into something more practical, such as “cover, evaluate, then fight, or flee”. We are no longer apes living in trees with the luxury of only two instinctive actions.
Thanks for posting! I’d love to see you be able to do a FULL show covering all of this & more on Beck. Great job last time, but way too short ;)
it wasn’t a scarecrow it was the great Flydini working out the bugs in his new act.
“Normalcy bias” or denial was standard for many in Russia as it morphed into the Soviet Union, as well.
It soon got to the point that there weren’t many options for time off, as in point 10. Cryptic black humor was one of the releases. Under Stalin, when acquaintances would ask how things were going, one of the few answers that might not result in being ratted on to the secret police for treason was, “Normálno.”
Lord, have mercy!
Ping
There are far too many today who refuse to know anything beyond their little cushy life and will never remove their rose colored glasses even when they become cracked.
This explains why so many Jews continued living in Germany, even after they were forced to wear identifying yellow stars and discriminatory laws were passed against Jewish people. Life had been so good for so long that, surely, things would get better. Jews who could have easily afforded to move out of the country stayed, and perished.
You think of this when you watch some of those programs on the rise of the National Socialists in Germany, knowing how the story turns out.
It’s hard to understand why they didn’t see the signs and take action.
Then you look around at what is going on today…