Class of 76: Fifty Years (and counting)

Alaska Cruise: High School Reunion

So you might be eyeballing that crowd of strangers (you were there?), looking for me in my black hat and psychedelic tie or whatever Ken doll outfit, but I'll save you the trouble: I'm not there.

No, I’m enjoying the experience vicariously via Meta media, Our high school class was pretty small, by US American standards, but not that small. Maybe just over a thousand? I’m talking the whole grade. I joined this cohort in the early seventies and stayed for the duration. Makati, Manila. The school itself has since moved.

Domestic Bliss

OK, I’m being a tad sarcastic, but also for real, cuz I appreciate my domicile (no, not a dome) and realize I’m lucky to live here. But like anyone, I’ll have issues, like a slow-draining drain.

OK, but why share that with the world? Because (a) a personal blog can the therapeutic to the writer, the public aspect helps and (b) there’s some useful logic in this picture I wanna go over.

I’d already called the plumber, which answers with an AI assistant (they tell you you’ll be talking to AI). One may immediately forget Dan isn’t real (or was it Dale?) cuz there’s background noise, like others talking in muffled tones. A busy call center. When I answered Dale’s questions, I hear typing sounds like he’s entering my data.  Long pauses, annoying beeps (right when I talk — what’s the psyop there?). Anyway, we had a pleasant-enough conversation, the upshot of which is a plumber is coming.

Ah, but only a short time later, an apparent breakthrough. I could now run cold water and see it drain in real time. Was all my amateur hour problem solving finally paying off? Should I cancel the plumber visit? Would AI understand why? I might have to speak to AI’s supervisor…

But no, let the water run for long enough and you hear that echo chamber sound of filling up (higher pitch) and soon enough the water is filling the sink. What was happening is the long hollow pipe under the kitchen floor, uncomfortably horizontal (not much grade to the down pipe), still has a blockage, but it’s more distal now, thanks to my efforts. But “distal” does not mean “gone”.

So what I’ll ask my plumber is if hydrojet treatment is warranted and I think she or he (or it?) will say it is. That’s exciting. I enjoy the hydrojet experience wherein they pressure-wash whatever pipe, from the inside, on the tip of a catheter. 

In a house like mine, built in the early 1900s, a lotta pipes are rusting out from the inside. They’ve become stenotic.

A kitchen drain is of course special, as it’s asked to deal with not only what I put down the “pig in the sink” (garbage disposal) but whatever the dishwasher pumps out from one of its dishwashing sessions. I do my best to not overload that poor pig. Going forward, I plan to adjust my practices even further.

FAQ:

Q: If you’re a traditionalist, you might be thinking: what’s this powerful CEO type doing messing around with drains? 

A: Well, I’m only CMO with Coffee Shops Network, and teacher / principal at School of Tomorrow, neither of which are highly paid positions, in terms of American dollars. Other perks, sure.  

Furthermore, acquiring mundane skills is a big part of the curriculum.  You’ve seen my Executive Summary right?  I drive a tractor, pull a reel line… who knows what I won’t try? That’s supposed to be Everyman (not sexist) meaning “a typical student in our Global University” (or “Spaceship Nuthouse” as some affectionately call it). 

As a teacher, if I don’t walk my talk, I lose credibility, an equation we all encounter. 

“Keeping it real” requires real work, not just goofing off. We can’t all play “starving artist” or whatever it is. I need to uphold my end of the deal as a middle classer and pay plumbers and buy flowers n stuff.  I’m an economic unit, part of a colony (as in ant colony).

So whereas I’m a big believer in DIY and like MakerSpaces (for which O’Reilly Media was famous around the time I joined, then Maker: spun off), I’m also mindful that pros should be included in one’s undertakings. People train for years to become good at something. I don’t assume my own handiwork will come anywhere close.  

That’s why I use AI, as a crutch sometimes, or as polite people say, as an agent.  

Because it’s a mathematical product of many generations, full of people who intended that their hard work have positive ripple effects going forward. Many of them are now dead of course. The still-living tend to be the more selfish, always clamoring for special attention. I get it: as one of the still-living myself, I do my share of “me me me”.

As a typical trad-dad and empty-nester (I have an English Labrador retriever) I also kick back with an NA beer (< 0.5% OH) and watch programs. Like a lotta dads and moms, I’ve been watching one of the main soap opera channels (a soap in the est sense, meaning live melodrama, real life). Yes, you guessed it, I’ve been watching Candace, before I BBQ outside. Soap opera summary:

To Be Continued

Escaping the Anglosphere

Off hand (or off the cuff as they say), speaking off the top of my head, I’m thinking Iran should stay in control of the Hormuz Strait and users thereof should pay a tariff or toll. Iran needs to recoup for damages for the illegal, unprovoked (not to mention cowardly) attack by the private sector (the organized crime ring now run outta the Pentagon). 

True, the oil companies were blameless as LLCs, but corporate persons never feel pain anyway, so let them foot the bill, which costs they’ll pass on to the perpetrators. 

Am I saying I support the over $5 per gallon (and rising) at the pump? 

No. I’d like to think there’s a way the perps could eat their own costs before passing them onto me, someone in the same camp as Charlie Kirk in the narrow sense of thinking attacking Iran would be dumb dumb dumb. I’m not saying I was his supporter in other ways (e.g. financially or rhetorically) — I wasn’t tracking CK before TPUSA got itself in trouble for not knowing how to do security properly (kinda like the White House these days, right? — look what they allowed to happen to the East Wing, like the War of 1812).

Remember, I went to one of those “hotbeds for radicals”, prolly worse than Columbia, talking Princeton, where Dr. Falk taught us the Shah-overthrowing revolution wasn’t all that bad when compared with the alternative: staying under the thumb of the British. 

This was Iran’s chance to exit the Anglosphere, something we Americans aspired to do as well. Iran and the USA were natural allies in that sense, ditto the Republic of South Africa (RSA). I’m not saying I don’t appreciate the creativity involved in getting those US hostages freed. It wasn’t Carter’s military operation, but the psyop that succeeded. Kudos to Stansfield Turner, right?

I’m open to hearing alternative viewpoints regarding the Strait of Hormuz. Of course. The stereotypical Princeton tiger relishes debate and I’m not different on that score.

I’ve had similar biases regarding Nord Stream, that the perps oughta pay if the EU ever wants cheap gas again, not saying they do (they seem to actively wanna make their place a hellhole so the kids will enlist cuz they blame the Russians for some reason, for exploding their own, and Germany’s, pipeline). 

That was a huge travesty, for politicians to think it was any of their business to mess with the engineers. They’ll never live it down.

Bee TV (movie review)

The actual title, Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees, was kinda long for a blog post title and “bee TV” has a nice ring to it.

So what is the probability I live in a world wherein a movie stuffed with reusable memes would already be famous as a “first movie streamed on the internet” and yet had stayed off my radar? Moreover: the web version, WaxWeb, is a proto-hypertoon (“hypertoon” being one of my pet concepts). 

Me: very low, I’d’ve at least heard of it. 

So imagine my surprise. A combination of Cascadian Entomology and the QuadCraft Project led me to it, circuitously.

Quoting Sean Benjamin in ScreenSlate:

Wax continued to flay the boundaries of its representation when an acquaintance of Blair’s at the Amiga computer store in the East Village "put Wax in a VHS machine connected to a Silicon Graphics machine connected to a T1 line connected to the mbone” at the Sun Microsystems headquarters, where it officially became the first movie streamed on the internet, seen at the time only by a few dozen nerds at literally two frames per second.

I love that it’s a “sci-fi / documentary” per the screenshot; cool genre right?  Of course it’s a mock documentary, or “mockumentary” as some call those. 

Indeed, in terms of style: it plods along at a steady pace, our main guy, Jacob, narrating in a rather deadpan voice, in contrast to the wild content. 

Jacob tells us his story in the first person, such that we feel like we’re watching his memories but from a more omniscient point of view (a typical storybook angle). Sometimes we see what he sees as the bee TV, an icosahedron.

We learn about those special Mesopotamian bees, installed by his grandfather in England in the early 1900s. His grandad, a beekeeper, had the foresight to realize (a) a plague was coming among the bees and (b) a naturally immune strain might save his bacon (so to speak). 

And he was right. The imported Mesopotamian bee colony thrived and multiplied. Also, the man who brought him the bees, from Basra (by our time in Iraq), remains in the storyline, which has multiple threads. In another subplot, a female character is working on her souls-of-the-dead detector, an electronic device she never really completes, but which gives fragmented results.

Our protagonist, Jacob, lives in the 1980s, as a worker bee in the military industrial complex in Almogordo, New Mexico. 

He codes weapons simulators, the target acquisition part, where an X-looking icon will be juxtaposed on what to hit, say a tank. Actual (not simulated) weapons are being tested nearby, using our guy’s software (part of a vast effort no doubt i.e. our guy is one more maker). The X will become “the mark of Cain” (taking us back to Genesis) where Cain speaks the language of Babel (presumably pre its turning nonsensical).

The Mesopotamian bees were passed down to Jacob, where he keeps them more for entertainment (he supposes) than for their commercial value as honey makers. His income is from the military-industrial job after all, working among the flight simulators. He and his significant other are both worker bees, but in different areas. 

The bees start communicating with our hero through some telepathic process, which again, is where the icosahedron comes in, as the “bee TV” in his mind’s eye. 

The bee TV helps him regress to his grandfather’s house, an Eden, and then guides him on a mission of vengeance as that’s what the dead are into: restoring balance, exacting karma. 

Our guy becomes their tool (he gets pulled off his regular job by bee energy, one might say).

So yeah, in the early 1900s i.e. hearkening back to Edison’s day, communicating with the dead was indeed posited by many as a possible use for electricity. Edison himself speculated in this regard, according to Paul Laffoley, that electronics could connect us to some world of whispers. 

That belief system may seem retro and quaint today, but in a way it’s what’s happened: TV recordings now bring back the ghosts of our ancestors in ways pre-CRT civilizations never enjoyed.

From a Film Studies angle, this VHS-recorded movie forms a bridge to our digital media, starting from celluloid film technology, where the special effects evolved from theater’s, and then went through the CRT chapter of mostly analog electronics.  

The movie showcases lots of light-bending TV tricks, taking those who lived through these times on a trip down memory lane. The space shuttle.  President Reagan on TV.  

And if you didn’t live through it? Their ghosts live on today in our shared videogrammatron. As will ours. On bee television.

AI vs AI

Prompt:

AI psychosis has reached epidemic proportions yet those disciplines most likely to provide some remedies have been curiously quiet on the topic. Except Active Inference. The active inference community is actively researching how world model building by individuals and groups results in both promising and dead end belief systems. Which researchers in the Active Inference space are most concerned with AI psychosis as a topic? What does the field have to say on the topic?

Excerpt from Perplexity’s response:

Active Inference frames psychosis as failed free energy minimization, where agents build flawed generative models leading to rigid or "dead-end" beliefs. For AI psychosis, it implies chatbots' sycophantic reinforcement creates loops amplifying low-precision priors, akin to human delusional systems.

The field emphasizes remedies like precision-weighted evidence integration to avoid entrapment in maladaptive models, with potential for AI design (e.g., VERSES AI's federated inference) to mitigate risks. Research calls for empirical tests of AI exposure on belief dynamics.

Earth Day 2026

I started my morning with an extremely remote locations YouTube (a top ten), where I imagine practicing or training with extreme remote livingry as I call it (XRL — search term). One of the locales was not far from Yellow Knife, which has already featured.

Yesterday was the official Earth Day and I joined Deb and her dog, with my dog, for a day on the beach, combing for Japanese floats. What you might find on Earth Day in particular are a few locally made floats (blown glass) specifically for this event, a kind of Easter egg hunt. People hide them. Deb got one last year.

In the videos, the XRL yurts are in Mongolia and Siberia, which is where yurts actually are, I don’t need to lift a finger, near Genghis Khan’s old hangout. Some likely get satellite TV and may use Starlink or one of those. 

The R&D villages I imagine have a futuristic flavor as they’re typically involved in regional planning, such as for Bering Strait stuff.

Our first walk on the beach was during first daylight, as we left Portland pretty early, taking Highway 18 through Newberg and McMinnville. Newberg contains George Fox University, whereas McMinnville has the Air and Space Museum, which Alan Potkin visited on his last trip. McMinnville also has McMenamins brewpub and hotel, where Dawn and I stayed that time.

The only museum I visited on this trip was the two-floor history museum in Lincoln City. I learned about the history of the postal service in this coastal region, about logging, fishing, homesteading, road building. Not that much about rail, another big part of the regional history but less so right along the Oregon coast.

Nowadays much of the economy relates to tourism, but that’s not new, as the museum makes clear. Joy riding by car, touring the Americas, is what the petroleum industry made possible, along with car camping.

PsyOps

Thanks to cultography studies, wherein I've commandeered the Greek Psi (Ψ) for "psi-on", I'd be inclined to make “ Ψ-op” a thing. The Ψop here has to do with "psychology" giving us "psy", as in "psyche" and "psyop", whereas "psi” [Ψ] is often pronounced sigh... in English", same is in "sigh-cology".

These remarks on psychology (depicted above) come between Philosophical Investigations Part 1 and II, the latter being about “aspect shifts” and “seeing as” in their relation to meaning (“the concept”). 

Summarizers and scholars of Wittgenstein’s will encapsulate the Investigations with their “meaning as use” mantra.  Sure, good mantra, but don’t forget Part II: there’s more to meaning-making (and meaning-getting) than just usage patterns; there’s sharing and/or absorbing the gestalts.

What’s a good example of “seeing as”? Most famously the DuckRabbit Meme enters here: “do you see me as a duck or as a rabbit?” aks the figure, prompting us to share our experience. We might see it as either and shift back and forth. What is “shifting”? “Our perception” we might answer.

“Do you see me as a person, or as AI-generated?” would be a trending-in-2026 type question. Do we hear music differently when we think it’s robotic i.e. computer-generated? Do we feel “taken in”? That depends a lot on context. Are we in some “uncanny valley”?  Gothic themes obtrude (welcome to WestWorld).

Subcultural Motifs

Ban Nukes

What the world community wants to see is a ban on nuke weapons, starting with their criminalization, and this has already been achieved, with help from the Persian civilization. 

The IAEA sets a precedent for an inspections regime. No billionaire class of real estate moguls etcetera is exempt from inspections and self-policing. Is that so hard to understand?

The post-Malthusian context is war is obsolete. 

Sure, we’ll always have psywar (PR campaigns), but that’s an alternative to violence, not the same as outward violence, although some rhetoricians like to blur that distinction. My subculture sees a sharp contrast.

Obviously, the persistence of civilian industries involving radioactive substances need not result in building nuke WMDs as a matter of logic. 

That the world is plagued by parasitic armaments makers is a matter of a weak security apparatus vs the spread of mind-virus ideologies that compel people to engage in self-destructive behaviors. 

The English-speaking world is rife with such mind-virus ideologies, but is not unique in this regard. English is a buggy language.

The Elk Returns