I had an important point to make...

[Wombaticus Rex]

In one of his teaching tales, renowned hypnotherapist Milton Erickson tells the true story of a man named Joe. Joe was one bad dude.

I was not aware that Milton Erickson had a reputation for true stories.

It was a very good parable, though!

[Searcher08]

In one of his teaching tales, renowned hypnotherapist Milton Erickson tells the true story of a man named Joe. Joe was one bad dude.

I was not aware that Milton Erickson had a reputation for true stories.

It was a very good parable, though!

This one was actually true - Erickson said the experience of Joe's transformation was the most important single influence on his thinking as a psychotherapist.
The whole thing is described in much richer detail in the wonderful book 'Phoenix' by David Gordon (page 166+). Film being made about his life... one that overcame enormous odds - just like Joe.

So even if someone has a 'crime gene' and a bad childhood, that doesnt have to be the end of the story...

[Project Willow]

All I am saying is this - let's suppose, as a thought experiment, that there is an 'evil' gene. Whether it may be triggered or not in an individual could depend on a) whether the individual posseses the gene and b) the stimuli the individual receives during childhood and adolescence.

Now, the unscrupulous, armed with the knowledge that an individual has inherited this gene through themselves might see to it that the right set of stimuli be admisnistered that can induce a mindset (of weakness) to non-empathic warmongering, a desire to have power over others, deceitfulness, corruption and generally all the traits we see in the over-arching power structures of today.

It's not very good even as a thought experiment. It's far too simplistic. First of all, there would not be just one "gene", but sets and levels of traits and capacities that may provide the clay for a range of responses sculpted by environmental stimuli. I use the word may intentionally, as there all kinds of unpredictable stimuli that can intercede, and push any given process in innumerable directions.

Agree with WR on the Bloom book, although I haven't read it myself. It's clear that harmful behaviors such as deceit, cheating, and violence, work for our species, as individual and group strategies, in an evolutionary sense. These strategies combined with relatively recent technological advances are not working out so well for the planet however.

Here are some other resources you might consider.

I gravitate towards this author's work because of what I went through, and I am familiar with the mechanisms he outlines.
http://www.amazon.com/Violence-Reflections-National-James-Gilligan/dp/0679779124

Here's some recent work on the corruption of power, as it were.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/06/20/research-finds-wealth-warps-your-perspective-and-makes-you-less-ethical/
Research finds wealth warps your perspective and makes you less ethical
Across multiple studies, researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have found that being in the upper-class predisposes individuals to acting unethically.

We've also had, in various threads, many discussions on the causes of human violence, from individual psychological to societal levels. I can't remember exactly where however. If you're here for awhile, you'll come upon them.

It is very uncomfortable to ascribe individual behavior to genetics for all the reasons stated so far in this thread, especially in how it denotes intransigence, and to the painful ends to which such perceptions can lead. You can put me in the thought police category for saying so if you wish.

[JackRiddler]

Just dropped in to an old favorite, edge.org, for the first time in ages, and checked out the 2013 "World Question," which was "What should we worry about?"

War, nuclear weapons, pollution, burning the planet, ocean acidification and the great die-off, a totally warped and sick economic system that produces global misery, alienation and inequality, the way it relies on racism and sexism, the powerful drive toward totalitarianism clearly inherent in most states and currently manifesting itself in the most powerful ones, the power held by ideologies of benightment and violence?

Ha! What should I see on the very first answer?

Eugenics is making a big comeback, apparently. In China, which is about to EAT THE WHITE GOOD GUYS, according to this guy. That's what we should worry about, damn it, the Chinaman threat!

Will the Europeans respond in time by bioengineering their own genome for intelligence and other forms of "human resource quality"?

Notwithstanding, when you read the following, you'll see eugenics has definitely made a big comeback in this guy's head.

And remember, the idea that "they did it first" even when they didn't (and usually they didn't) is how Western and US institutions justified genocide of the indigenous, MK-Ultra (due to the North Korean mind control myth), the doctrine of flexible nuclear targeting and "limited nuclear war" (due to the missile gap), etc. etc.

Note: Unlike some of the phantoms promoted most persistently on this board, this guy and the mentality he represents are ensconced in power, non-magical, very logical outgrowths of the present political-economic system, in a word: REAL.

Whatever the eventual name of the ideology is going to be, he expresses the cutting edge fascism of the 21st century.

http://edge.org/responses/what-should-w ... ried-about

2013 : WHAT *SHOULD* WE BE WORRIED ABOUT?

Geoffrey Miller

Evolutionary psychologist, NYU Stern Business School and University of New Mexico; author of The Mating Mind and Spent

Chinese Eugenics

China has been running the world's largest and most successful eugenics program for more than thirty years, driving China's ever-faster rise as the global superpower. I worry that this poses some existential threat to Western civilization. Yet the most likely result is that America and Europe linger around a few hundred more years as also-rans on the world-historical stage, nursing our anti-hereditarian political correctness to the bitter end.

When I learned about Chinese eugenics this summer, I was astonished that its population policies had received so little attention. China makes no secret of its eugenic ambitions, in either its cultural history or its government policies.

For generations, Chinese intellectuals have emphasized close ties between the state (guojia), the nation (minzu), the population (renkou), the Han race (zhongzu), and, more recently, the Chinese gene-pool (jiyinku). Traditional Chinese medicine focused on preventing birth defects, promoting maternal health and "fetal education" (taijiao) during pregnancy, and nourishing the father's semen (yangjing) and mother's blood (pingxue) to produce bright, healthy babies (see Frank Dikötter's book Imperfect Conceptions). Many scientists and reformers of Republican China (1912-1949) were ardent Darwinians and Galtonians. They worried about racial extinction (miezhong) and "the science of deformed fetuses" (jitaixue), and saw eugenics as a way to restore China's rightful place as the world's leading civilization after a century of humiliation by European colonialism. The Communist revolution kept these eugenic ideals from having much policy impact for a few decades though. Mao Zedong was too obsessed with promoting military and manufacturing power, and too terrified of peasant revolt, to interfere with traditional Chinese reproductive practices.

But then Deng Xiaoping took power after Mao's death. Deng had long understood that China would succeed only if the Communist Party shifted its attention from economic policy to population policy. He liberalized markets, but implemented the one-child policy —partly to curtail China's population explosion, but also to reduce dysgenic fertility among rural peasants. Throughout the 1980s, Chinese propaganda urges couples to have children "later, longer, fewer, better"—at a later age, with a longer interval between birth, resulting in fewer children of higher quality. With the 1995 Maternal and Infant Health Law (known as the Eugenic Law until Western opposition forced a name change), China forbade people carrying heritable mental or physical disorders from marrying, and promoted mass prenatal ultrasound testing for birth defects. Deng also encouraged assortative mating through promoting urbanization and higher education, so bright, hard-working young people could meet each other more easily, increasing the proportion of children who would be at the upper extremes of intelligence and conscientiousness.

One of Deng's legacies is China's current strategy of maximizing "Comprehensive National Power". This includes economic power (GDP, natural resources, energy, manufacturing, infrastructure, owning America's national debt), military power (cyberwarfare, anti-aircraft-carrier ballistic missiles, anti-satellite missiles), and 'soft power' (cultural prestige, the Beijing Olympics, tourism, Chinese films and contemporary art, Confucius Institutes, Shanghai's skyscrapers). But crucially, Comprehensive National Power also includes "biopower": creating the world's highest-quality human capital in terms of the Chinese population's genes, health, and education (see Governing China's Population by Susan Greenhalgh and Edwin Winkler).

Chinese biopower has ancient roots in the concept of "yousheng" ("good birth"—which has the same literal meaning as "eugenics"). For a thousand years, China has been ruled by a cognitive meritocracy selected through the highly competitive imperial exams. The brightest young men became the scholar-officials who ruled the masses, amassed wealth, attracted multiple wives, and had more children. The current "gaokao" exams for university admission, taken by more than 10 million young Chinese per year, are just the updated version of these imperial exams—the route to educational, occupation, financial, and marital success. With the relaxation of the one-child policy, wealthier couples can now pay a "social fostering fee" (shehui fuyangfei) to have an extra child, restoring China's traditional link between intelligence, education, wealth, and reproductive success.

Chinese eugenics will quickly become even more effective, given its massive investment in genomic research on human mental and physical traits. BGI-Shenzhen employs more than 4,000 researchers. It has far more "next-generation" DNA sequencers that anywhere else in the world, and is sequencing more than 50,000 genomes per year. It recently acquired the California firm Complete Genomics to become a major rival to Illumina.

The BGI Cognitive Genomics Project is currently doing whole-genome sequencing of 1,000 very-high-IQ people around the world, hunting for sets of sets of IQ-predicting alleles. I know because I recently contributed my DNA to the project, not fully understanding the implications. These IQ gene-sets will be found eventually—but will probably be used mostly in China, for China. Potentially, the results would allow all Chinese couples to maximize the intelligence of their offspring by selecting among their own fertilized eggs for the one or two that include the highest likelihood of the highest intelligence. Given the Mendelian genetic lottery, the kids produced by any one couple typically differ by 5 to 15 IQ points. So this method of "preimplantation embryo selection" might allow IQ within every Chinese family to increase by 5 to 15 IQ points per generation. After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness.

There is unusually close cooperation in China between government, academia, medicine, education, media, parents, and consumerism in promoting a utopian Han ethno-state. Given what I understand of evolutionary behavior genetics, I expect—and hope—that they will succeed. The welfare and happiness of the world's most populous country depends upon it.

My real worry is the Western response. The most likely response, given Euro-American ideological biases, would be a bioethical panic that leads to criticism of Chinese population policy with the same self-righteous hypocrisy that we have shown in criticizing various Chinese socio-cultural policies. But the global stakes are too high for us to act that stupidly and short-sightedly. A more mature response would be based on mutual civilizational respect, asking—what can we learn from what the Chinese are doing, how can we help them, and how can they help us to keep up as they create their brave new world?

Freakonomically, man! Such an out-of-the-box asshole.

Also, a scaremonger.

Prediction: The Chinese don't know what the fuck they're doing any more than other purported eugenicists.

Sure: transhumanism

like the purported Chinese eugenics, and the laughable supremacist thinking of NYU Stern Business School professor Miller,

is based up on the totally insane idea that 21st Century human beings have any fucking clue what we're doing to ourselves, our environment, and the cosmos in general. We can't even manage the world we actually live in, let alone create new ones that match it in richness and complexity (sorry, English: virtual reality is pretty fucking boring compared to the real world). Anarcho-primitivism, for all of its romantic idealism (sorry, English again: crunchy-granola-hippy-dippiness), is at least based on something that actually worked for 100s of 1000s of years.

Better?

.

[seemslikeadream]

July 29, 2013 — A good state of mind -- that is, your happiness -- affects your genes, scientists say. In the first study of its kind, researchers from UCLA's Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology and the University of North Carolina examined how positive psychology impacts human gene expression.

What they found is that different types of happiness have surprisingly different effects on the human genome.
People who have high levels of what is known as eudaimonic well-being -- the kind of happiness that comes from having a deep sense of purpose and meaning in life (think Mother Teresa) -- showed very favorable gene-expression profiles in their immune cells. They had low levels of inflammatory gene expression and strong expression of antiviral and antibody genes.
However, people who had relatively high levels of hedonic well-being -- the type of happiness that comes from consummatory self-gratification (think most celebrities) -- actually showed just the opposite. They had an adverse expression profile involving high inflammation and low antiviral and antibody gene expression.
The report appears in the current online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
For the last 10 years, Steven Cole, a UCLA professor of medicine and a member of the UCLA Cousins Center, and his colleagues, including first author Barbara L. Fredrickson at the University of North Carolina, have been examining how the human genome responds to stress, misery, fear and all kinds of negative psychology.
In this study, though, the researchers asked how the human genome might respond to positive psychology. Is it just the opposite of stress and misery, or does positive well-being activate a different kind of gene expression program?
The researchers examined the biological implications of both hedonic and eudaimonic well-being through the lens of the human genome, a system of some 21,000 genes that has evolved fundamentally to help humans survive and be well.
Previous studies had found that circulating immune cells show a systematic shift in baseline gene-expression profiles during extended periods of stress, threat or uncertainty. Known as conserved transcriptional response to adversity, or CTRA, this shift is characterized by an increased expression of genes involved in inflammation and a decreased expression of genes involved in antiviral responses.
This response, Cole noted, likely evolved to help the immune system counter the changing patterns of microbial threat that were ancestrally associated with changing socio-environmental conditions; these threats included bacterial infection from wounds caused by social conflict and an increased risk of viral infection associated with social contact.
"But in contemporary society and our very different environment, chronic activation by social or symbolic threats can promote inflammation and cause cardiovascular, neurodegenerative and other diseases and can impair resistance to viral infections," said Cole, the senior author of the research.
In the present study, the researchers drew blood samples from 80 healthy adults who were assessed for hedonic and eudaimonic well-being, as well as potentially confounding negative psychological and behavioral factors. The team used the CTRA gene-expression profile to map the potentially distinct biological effects of hedonic and eudaimonic well-being.
And while those with eudaimonic well-being showed favorable gene-expression profiles in their immune cells and those with hedonic well-being showed an adverse gene-expression profile, "people with high levels of hedonic well-being didn't feel any worse than those with high levels of eudaimonic well-being," Cole said. "Both seemed to have the same high levels of positive emotion. However, their genomes were responding very differently even though their emotional states were similarly positive.
"What this study tells us is that doing good and feeling good have very different effects on the human genome, even though they generate similar levels of positive emotion," he said. "Apparently, the human genome is much more sensitive to different ways of achieving happiness than are conscious minds."
Other authors on the study included Jesusa M.G. Arevalo and Jeffrey Ma, both of UCLA, and Karen M. Grewen, Kimberly A. Coffey, Sara B. Algoe and Ann M. Firestine of the University of North Carolina.

[coffin_dodger]

Willow said:

It's not very good even as a thought experiment. It's far too simplistic

Why does everything have to be complicated?

One branch of science is starting to probe the possibility that the underlying state of complexity is simplicity.



Wouldn't that be a great mechanism of control - to convince everyone outside the magic circle that it was all far too complicated for outsiders to get their head around? Too many factors? Too many threads and strands? Too much for one layperson to grasp the bigger picture of?

P.S. I never, ever have considered you thought police, Willow. I take back the thought police thing anyway - it's more a case that some have little scope or time to entertain ideas other than their own deeply-entrenched ones. I was feeling rough earlier - this world gets me down quite a lot - and I still haven't gotten over the way this community dealt with C_W. In my insane world it was brutal and hardly representative of a caring community looking out for a lost soul who was indirectly crying out for help. But that's just the thoughts of a sad, disillusioned middle-aged man with a heavy heart.

[coffin_dodger]

I don't see the need for any active conspiracy to maintain this system, though: I think our culture does that.

I'm sorry to appear pedantic, but how does our culture 'maintain' this?
Are you saying that nothing can be changed because that's just the way we all are?
That I am just as responsible for the Iraq war as the vested-interest of the MI complex, the financiers and the gov't mouthpieces that sell it to us?
I assure you, that is not MY culture.

[barracuda]

Where's the fish, btw?

Can I be of some assistance here? Is the Götterdämmerung at hand?

[coffin_dodger]

LOL. that's quite witty. Like you a bit more now.

[barracuda]

Well, I researched my ancestry back to 1958, and not one of us was unlikable.

[JackRiddler]

I will say however, I have had my family history researched back to 1650 and not a single one of my many ancestors had a propensity towards violence or 'evil' - yes, they served in wars, but it wasn't their decision to go to war.

2,013 minus 1,650 = 363 years. Assuming a low pre-industrial average of 22.7 years between generations, that could be as many as 16 generations. That would mean your family tree dating back to 1650 might have 65,536 slots to fill in (2 to the 16th).

But let's make this improbably easy. You may call it 12 generations, meaning a very high 30 years' average time between generations. After all, a woman's childbearing years can go well into her 40s, and even octagenarian males have been known to father. Twelve generations would involve a mere 4,096 ancestor slots, 2 to the 12th. This still means that going back only to 1650, we each have somewhere between four thousand and sixty-five thousand ancestor slots to fill in our family trees.

These numbers should be telling you that human populations engage in an enormous amount of inbreeding. (Imagine we went back to 1000, or 10,000 years ago.) That's true of everyone, even your noble ancestry, and works further to your advantage in this argument. It means it is possible, although extremely unlikely, that the total number of real mothers and fathers involved in your family tree since 1650 might be half the total number of possible slots, or even less.

Just for the sake or argument, let us grant you the billion-to-one extreme, i.e. that since 1650 it has only taken a total of only 1000 distinct mother-father couplings to produce you in just 12 generations.

That still leaves you with about 2000 ancestors since 1650. As the absolute, billion-to-one minimum. The likeliest number of ancestors in that period lies between 20 and 40 thousand, however.

You say you have researched them all in sufficient detail that you can assure us "not a single one... had a propensity towards violence or evil."

It's late.

Do you mind calling bullshit on yourself now, or do we have to drag this out further?

.

[Searcher08]

I will say however, I have had my family history researched back to 1650 and not a single one of my many ancestors had a propensity towards violence or 'evil' - yes, they served in wars, but it wasn't their decision to go to war.

2,013 minus 1,650 = 363 years. Assuming a low pre-industrial average of 22.7 years between generations, that could be as many as 16 generations. That would mean 65,536 slots to fill in your family tree (2 to the 16th).

But let's make this improbably easy. You may call it 12 generations, meaning a very high 30 years' average time between generations. After all, a woman's childbearing years can go well into her 40s, and even octagenarian males have been known to mate. Twelve generations would involve a mere 4,096 ancestor slots, 2 to the 12th. (That's right, going back only to 1650 we each have somewhere between four thousand and sixty-five thousand ancestor slots to fill in our family trees.)

These numbers should be telling you that human populations engage in an enormous amount of inbreeding. That's true of everyone, even your noble ancestry, and works further to your advantage in this argument. It means it is possible, although extremely unlikely, that the total number of real mothers and fathers involved might be half the total number of slots in the family tree.

Just for the sake or argument, let us grant you the billion-to-one extreme, i.e. that since 1650 it has only taken a total of only 1000 distinct mother-father couplings to produce you in just 12 generations.

That still leaves about 2000 ancestors. As the absolute, billion-to-one minimum.

You say you have researched them all in sufficient detail that you can assure us "not a single one... had a propensity towards violence or evil."

It's late.

Do you mind calling bullshit on yourself now, or do we have to drag this out further?

.

Genetic bottleneck theory

The Toba eruption has been linked to a genetic bottleneck in human evolution about 50,000 years ago,[28][29] which may have resulted from a severe reduction in the size of the total human population due to the effects of the eruption on the global climate.[30]

According to the genetic bottleneck theory, between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago, human populations sharply decreased to 3,000-10,000 surviving individuals.[31][32] It is supported by genetic evidence suggesting that today's humans are descended from a very small population of between 1,000 to 10,000 breeding pairs that existed about 70,000 years ago.[33]

[Wombaticus Rex]

I'm sorry to appear pedantic, but how does our culture 'maintain' this?
Are you saying that nothing can be changed because that's just the way we all are?
That I am just as responsible for the Iraq war as the vested-interest of the MI complex, the financiers and the gov't mouthpieces that sell it to us?
I assure you, that is not MY culture.

I place no faith in the subconscious doctrine of inherent essences, so I would never phrase it as "that's just the way we all are." Being is ineffable, unspeakable, and far beyond the scope of my abilities to understand.

I would say "that's just the way an aggregate majority of us act." Now, let's be clearer still: I'm talking here about enabling, not enacting. A majority of us enable the monsters who enact the atrocities in question, wars and genocides and huge EDM festivals.

That's because, to make the complex cartoonishly simple, we prefer our reality to be cartoonishly simple, with strong leaders, clear narratives, and understandable problems. We prefer convenience to hard work, we prefer security to scarcity, and none of that is evil. Those tendencies do enable great evil, however.

The levels of scale at work here also mean that our individual efforts and endeavors are quite pointless in the face of the national superorganisms that we inhabit. (I probably have some bone cells in my canine teeth that consider themselves vegetarians, you know? Sucks to be them...sucks to be us, too.)

Bloom's napkin sketch rubric for "complex learning systems" has five parts:

1. Conformity Enforcers
2. Diversity Generators
3. Inner-Judges
4. Resource Shifters
5. Intergroup Tournaments

Here's a more in-depth rendering from a review:

Bloom’s theory of group selection relies on five key elements: conformity enforcers, diversity generators, inner-judges, resource shifters, and intergroup tournaments. In Bloom’s words, this “pentagram of the learning machine” was in place at least 120 million years ago and comprised “some of the secrets of the nascent global brain.” At first glance, these components are rather straightforward. Conformity enforcers ensure that groups maintain enough similarities to actually function as a group. These “enforcers” are group members who, like the bully on the playground or the informant in a police state, demand obedience to some behavioral norm in exchange for protection from harm. In the best sense, conformity enforcers encourage unity and the pursuit of normalization; in the worst sense, enforcers stifle creativity and destroy deviants. These enforcers are balanced by another element: the “diversity generators.” These individuals each test a new hypothesis of the communal mind, exploring possibilities that conformity enforcers would ignore. They “spawn variety” and open paths to new developments. Generally, diversity generators seem overwhelmingly positive; however, they require some amount of balance, or the individuals lose their connection to the group. When too many members fail to identify with and protect the group, the group dies, and is thus removed from the “global brain.” So, some amount of conformity is required to ensure that the diversity generators do not diversify to the point of their group’s destruction.

While conformity enforcers and diversity generators are actually individuals within the system, the remaining three elements—inner-judges, resource shifters, and intergroup tournaments—are instead personal and group mechanisms for development and control. Inner-judges are, according to Bloom, the equivalent of cellular mechanisms that encourage apoptosis (cell death). These judges, through some (rather poorly explained) system of hormones and chemicals, create a sometimes overwhelming feeling of despair in individuals who have failed to contribute to the group. Inner-judges are usually harsh, unforgiving critics who can encourage individuals to remove themselves from the progress of the group, either through suicide or through an inability to continue performing tasks. One’s critic is often triggered by the work of a “resource shifter”—something that “shunt[s] riches, admiration, and influence to learning-machine members who cruise through challenges and give folks what they want.” A resource shifter is not necessarily an individual; it can “range from social systems to mass emotions.” It also works in both directions, since it can either heap rewards upon some members, or “cast...some into some equivalent of pennilessness and unpopularity.” In some instances, the resource shifter acts based on the outcome of intergroup tournaments—friendly or serious competitions between groups that “force each collective intelligence, each group brain, to churn out innovations.” Resource shifters reward the winners of intergroup tournaments, ensuring that their innovations are further explored. But, the shifters also take away needed resources from the losers, fueling the self-destructive impulses of their inner-judges and starting a chain of negative reinforcement that, if left unchecked, can lead to the annihilation of the entire group.

Group formation, then, is not simply the random result of individual selection; rather, individuals and groups are selected together, with the needs of the group shaping the destinies of its members. An individual success or failure is important to the group only because it confirms or destroys a hypothesis, not because the genetic success of each individual is encouraged. In a colony of bees, for example, the workers do not have the opportunity to pass on their own individual bits of genetic code. However, they do have the opportunity to ensure the success of the group, and encourage the survival of the queen’s DNA by finding food sources and protecting the hive. Individual bees may die if they fail in their tasks, but the group as a whole survives, and so is considered a success. The hives that find and exploit new food sources survive; those that do not soon perish, and their group endeavors are lost forever.

More here: http://www.stanford.edu/class/symbsys20 ... brain.html

[coffin_dodger]

Thanks for your explanation Wombat - appreciate that. I still 'have a feeling' our current paradigm is in the process of a massive shift - but, rhetorically, to where? I just hope it's better.

[Project Willow]

Willow said:

It's not very good even as a thought experiment. It's far too simplistic

Why does everything have to be complicated?

It doesn't have to be, but when you're discussing human behavior and the interplay of genetics and environment, and considering what little we still understand about how all the forces involved coalesce to form behavior, it just is, IMO.

P.S. I never, ever have considered you thought police, Willow. I take back the thought police thing anyway - it's more a case that some have little scope or time to entertain ideas other than their own deeply-entrenched ones. I was feeling rough earlier - this world gets me down quite a lot - and I still haven't gotten over the way this community dealt with C_W. In my insane world it was brutal and hardly representative of a caring community looking out for a lost soul who was indirectly crying out for help. But that's just the thoughts of a sad, disillusioned middle-aged man with a heavy heart.

I understand. The world gets me down too. I also understand how you can feel that way about what happened with C_W, especially since it's impossible to see what went on in private, where indeed most folks had the same feelings and took a caring approach. The sad part was finally coming to the realization that there are some things that are beyond this community's ability to help.