"I Ain't Gonna Be Your Dog." - Chester Burnett (a.ka. Howling Wolf)

"A winter's day, in a deep and dark...April!?" Paul Simon did not write that lyric, it doesn't exactly trip off the tongue, but it's that kind of day.

I dropped the Wittgenstein biography ("I'm a genius, I'm such a miserable genius, and if I'm not, I don't deserve to live.") and jumped into Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink - The Power of Thinking Without Thinking." Now isn't that appealing, to think without thinking? The books tells us we do it all the time, and I guess the evidence is all around us.

It is fascinating, because it's about our brains, and how we know stuff that we don't know we know (Wittgenstein by the way would agree). What do we know in the blink of an eye? It turns out a lot -- we read faces (mind-reading), we make all kinds of unconscious (not Freud's version) judgements and decisions, that we don't know we're making, and if we start analyzing why we made such and such a judgement, we get really confused, or actually lie about how or why we came up with that particular judgement (or something like that).

In times of danger, anger, fear and stress, some of us can make some miraculous, life-saving decisions in a blink, and others of us can make catastrophic mistakes -- Amadou Diallo -- "lookout, he has a gun!" Forty one bullets later, "Oh shit, it's only a wallet!"

Hey, evolution explains a lot: " At 175 (heart beats per minute) we begin to see an absolute breakdown of cognitive processing... the forebrain shuts down, and the mid-brain - the part of your brain that is the same as your dog's (all mammals have that part of the brain) - reaches up and hijacks the forebrain. Have you ever tried to have a discussion with an angry or frightened human being? You can't do it... you might as well try to argue with your dog."

The dog will always win the argument. You can banish him, punish him, but you ain't gonna reason with him. Doesn't this explain a lot of the pain, suffering and turmoil in the world? It's a dog eat dog (we become the dog) world when we live in anger and fear.