A Report on Bolivia

These two Friends (Amigos) had been a part of a larger team of about a dozen Quaker not-missionaries, eager to learn more about this South American bioregion, which is quite high in the sky, like Bhutan in a lotta ways. The native Americans (a cultural label with a genetic overlay) have not surrendered their ways of life to the outsiders of more Eurasian extraction, but have blended or fused a synergetic coexistence that features an overhead tramway and max security prison.

Our presenters were to my way of thinking competent (as in professional) anthropologists (anthropology being the A in STEAM, intersecting with PATH as in Scrabble) and spoke responsibly of their own fears and trepidations, mixed with many joys and deep admiration for their hosts and guides. The culture was deeply egalitarian without a lot of the short circuits that come with social hierarchy. You greeted everyone, and everyone greeted you, vs finding out who the dignitaries were and just greeting them.

Given the audience were themselves Amigos (Friends) the presenters had easy access to a shoptalk we already shared, and so could characterize a specific gathering ritual, wherein participants contributed foods and so on, as a “potluck”, while immediately noticing the differences. “Potlatch” also comes to mind if you’re native American from these parts where I’m living (Pacific Northwest corner of Lower48 on those cable weather shows). However “potlatch” is more encompassing in terms of what gets sourced or traded.

Their trip (tour) was back in January (2026) so close to a year ago (we’re in late October). They’d delivered this slides before, just not to our group, Bridge City Friends. The presentation and slides were well organized. Larry shared the talk over Zoom and Rebecca, a program supervisor, chimed in at the end, as a next such not-missionary group is in the making (already full) for 2027.

I say “not-missionary” because Bolivians already have Quakers (Amigos) of the more evangelical variety meaning they aren’t in need of converting and besides, our brand of unprogrammed Friend don’t believe in mixing NGO work (let alone GO work) with proselytizing, a word I even have trouble spelling given how infrequently I use it (yes, I’m a Friend of the unprogrammed variety). On the contrary, the Prime Directive was in effect (alluding to Star Trek): the visit was not about being ambassadors of some spreading way of life the locals were expected to adopt. Bolivians don’t need fixing. They’re working it out just fine.

The tour was a 10-day whirlwind featuring visits to many micro-climates outside of La Paz. Political tensions resulted in Rebecca needing to reprogram their travel plans at the last minute. A lot of improv was going on, again a testament to the skill and flexibility of these travelers (wanderers). 

I learned more from the presentation than I’ll attempt to chronicle in this Friendly journal post. I was grateful to have happened by with my camera. More usually I walk to a closer Meeting but the rains had come and I’d just been studying Trader Joe’s on social media and had a hankering to shop there on my way home. However the parking lot was packed and I decided to return at another time (like prolly today, the day after).

Brake Test

This morning I did my Sellwood Loop shortly after sunup (“sun-take”), a first serious road test of the new braking configuration. 

Joe Bike needed to swap out the rear rack I’d earlier purchased, as the old one was interfering. I wasn’t charged for the replacement rack, as the first choice had been on their recommendation.

“Sun-take” and “sun-cut” come from poet Gene Fowler as I recall, an ex-con who’d remade himself on the inside by re-geniusing. I wasn’t so much a Church of Subgenius freak back then or I’d’ve made more jokes about getting up to sub-level myself. 

Subs make “leaps” of (or into) genius, like a dolphin leaps, or a cow — over the moon. Gene was wanting to help Bucky with alternatives to “sunup” and “sundown” (ditto “sunrise” and “sunset”) given the z-axis bias built in (as if we all shared one). 

We forget we each have a private z axis (z for zenith, directly overhead). The "up vs down" dichotomy is a bit suss, in other words, when we think that's what the sun must be doing. That's the joke about my "outstairs" versus "instairs" offices ("out vs in" being better than "up vs down" in a lotta ways).

The Sellwood Loop takes me by the abandoned Ross Island cement plant, which I’ve envisioned as a converted Parks n Rec utility, a place to fly (and sometimes crash) checked out drones. Some facilities are BYOD (the drones are user-provided).

Pilots typically favor abandoned, picturesque, buildings for their camera-equipped FPV drones, by now a popular genre on YouTube, with the video streams set to music. 

Our notion of “picturesque” means “interesting” more than “calendar or postcard cute”, although it definitely includes the latter.

Once on the Orange Line Max, I fumbled with the iPhone hoping to buy a reserved seat for a showing of You Can See Everything. I’d be there now had the transaction worked. I believe what happened is I took too long futzing with entering the charge card. 

The train came and I ended up starting over, trying to buy the same seat being held by my previously bungled attempt -- which eventually timed out, but not before I'd already blocked myself. Based on the bank statement, the amount went through, but was immediately refunded.

Brake Adjustments

Saturday Morning

Saturday mornings: I've tagged them (mentally) as "good for bike rides" cuzza so little traffic. Yet the buses n trains are frequent. My mode is intramodal (mix modes, like bike + bus today, sometimes Max (a train)). This Saturday morning started out with rain, but I didn't let that stop me.

By the time I got to Voodoo Doughnuts, other side of the Steel (bridge), the rain had stopped. They let me in (the door is locked by default) and I got my usual: maple bar (lately with bacon) + a romeo (raspberry blob inside) + black coffee (12 oz is their only size).

A nice old lady asked if I could spare enough dollars for a doughnut and I offered the romeo, still untouched in the bag, with napkin, and she expressed pleasure, saying romeos were here favorite. "I shouldn't be eating these anyway" I said, which is true enough. Then when removing the bike lock, I spilled the rest of my coffee. I wasn't overly perturbed. I'd be having more coffee later, at the Turkish place across from the python store.

From Voodoo, I took a riverside route under the Hawthorne (bridge) and back up to a higher ground bikeway. Somehow I found myself on a freeway offramp, which was unintentional, but it shortly reunited me with the more bike-friendly roadways. 

I boarded an FX2 on the west side, and rode over Tilikum (bridge) to SE 34th. That's when I detoured to the Turkish coffee place. I should go back there tomorrow, to the python place across the street (pet shop) as Barry (the family python) is likely in the mood for food.

Monday is my regular checkup / consult, which'll likely be somewhat perfunctory given the blood tests happened back in August and came out OK. I've got a consult with a cardiologist in November, likewise routine. I've been pretty serious about exercising lately, now that I've figured out how to make it fun. "Urban skiing" I call it, when I avoid serious up slopes when riding and use public transport (bike friendly) to get "towed" back up to my neighborhood.

The other exercise I get mostly comes from walking, which features quite a bit in Wandering, my generic urban sport, with occasional loops to the hinterlands.

Sydney, my k9 companion, is turning 15 around today. Yet she made it to the "outstairs" office to join me in starting this blog post. I'll be going "instairs" to upload this morning's pictures, from which photostream I'll grab one or two for embedding here.

Synergetic Intelligence (SI)

I was distantly following, through YouTube thumbnails mostly, some rebranding by the WH from AI to SI, from artificial to super, from phony to above the law (where the ruling class lives). This effort to hoist AI into the top tier and give it a boss voice (vs sycophantic) is what a lot of the labs are tasked with. Many in the Pentagon would like AI to (a) gain personhood and (b) bark orders. Humans could then shield themselves from taking responsibility, as they do using corporate personhood today (capitalism = AI as Nick Land puts it). 

What strikes me is machine learning techniques really did help to amplify search (as in Google search). I know it’s trendy to make fun of boomers like me who see “aksing” as the main point of a MEMEX, but let’s get real: chatbots are big business, circular financing (self booting?) notwithstanding. By “search” I mean the next step beyond getting a long list of hits; getting a synthetic material woven from raw strands, pulling together authored texts and swirling them together into structured cogitations.

I’m happily surprised how effective next token prediction is really, when the LLM is suitably trained. The magnetic inter-attractiveness of text blobs, based on KQV attentiveness, really makes some nice “glue balls” on almost any topic (even if some of these bubbles are little more than thought balloons that go pop in the night). We use RI (real or raw intelligence — human generated) to train the models, so what we get back is both digestible and, ideally, nutritious. 

So why not turn happy suprisal into its adjacent namesake: synergetic? Machine learning proved to be synergetic, when LA (linear algebra, word2vec stuff), or call it NLP (natural language processing) got hyperscaled to engulf what used to be called “big data” (I date myself). Swallow as much RI as possible and map it as a terrain, like when developing a gravity map of the earth (vs GPS). Let humans loose in the Matrix. Let them go wild. Endow them with agentic powers. That’s the hype.

Speaking of “hype” (poet Gene Fowler — Regeniusing Project — complained it meant little more than “wow” that word), the reason I sometimes say “aks” instead of “prompt” is I’m “axing” through hyper-dimensional space to flatten a hyper-plane (angled slice) into 2D representations in terms of tokens, all that chatter the chatterbox hands back.

So yeah: SI = synergetic intelligence. By that I don’t mean something to worship or make into a boss. We’re not going back to “divine right” with ELIZA (the paradigm proto-MEMEX in terms of putting humans to the Turing Test (a test many fail hah hah)) the Queen Bee. 

We’re just saying the intel got surprisingly useful all of a sudden, and in ways that helped the readers (the aksers) catch up. I’m not suggesting AI (SI) puts us all on the same page, but it does propagate convergence to some average, some mean. It recenters the bell curve, in terms of what’s normal to think. From there, RI (real intelligence) is free to branch off, further exploring this new geometry of thinking.

Ditto the LMMs BTW, meaning image generators with a wider semiotic range when it comes to tokens. A central problem in the philosophy of language has been how to generalize this word “language” such that it could take in “the language of film” (semiology). Language is not just various flavors of prose and programs. Language is driving your car (language game) to the grocery store (shopping games) and back. 

What does the “center line” represent (sometimes solid, sometimes dashes)? The dashboard instruments share First Person Physics (think airplane cockpit). The actively inferring driver is giving different weights, levels of attention, to types of signage. The act of driving is not “representational” in the picture theory of meaning sense. 

“To language” is “to engage” in the sense of “gear in with” to do work. Sometimes language goes on vacation (Wittgenstein) and becomes more like idle wheel-spinning. Likewise chatbots needn’t be about providing results of earth-shaking significance. They simply chatter. It’s easy to be synergetic without needing to be super. In aksing a trained MEMEX to synthesize reading materials from stored RI, I get to stay a self employed Quaker Subgenius at the end of the day.

Transformative Moments

When sharing a Bucky bio, perhaps making one up on the spot, LLM-style, there’s that 1927 pivotal moment to talk about. Fuller began to dwell on this low point in Chicago, from an egoic point of view, later on, seeing it as transformational.

Elsewhere he brings up his relationships both with Al Capone and with J.P. Morgan bankers, saying he could appreciate their respective worldviews. Empathy is not just overhead when it comes to modeling and therefore actively inferring tomorrow’s developments. One’s ability to create models of others’ viewpoints is more like a crucial skill.

However, empathy alone is not guaranteed to give birth to a coherent system; for that one needs another kind of resolve: commitment to doing one’s own thinking, not outsourcing one’s ability to self encode, not to talking head authorities, not to chatbots, not to other family members. One’s angle, one’s perspective, deserves its own custom built namespace, and that’s self generated from the inside out, more than from the outside in.

In my own telling, I’m likely to liken Fuller’s transformative experience to that of Eckhart Tolle. In Tolle’s telling, he’s reached the conclusion he can no longer live with himself, followed by the insight that he’s the one suspending disbelief. He was free to disbelieve, so to speak, and that’s what happened.

A question might be how to model such moments in terms of variable free energy, what Karl Friston talks about under the topic of Active Inference, likewise an evolving namespace, recycling words such “habit” and “stubborn” and “policy” in connection with one’s choice of action.

In both Eckhart’s and Bucky’s tellings, we encounter a volatile mix of self loathing and self pity, a gunpowder that ignites an inner explosion. A psychological configuration is experienced as a kind of dead end.

Both men became famous teachers who kept retelling their respective stories. 

One doesn’t necessarily have a coherent narrative at the ready, unless planning a grift ahead of time. Once these stories become developed, they tend to have a lot of commonalities. William James, a curator of such experiences, might have called them “religious” but that’s an optional shoptalk.

In Fuller’s case, the resolve to do his own thinking meant freeing his inner scholar to return to its studies, ala Education Automation. He wanted all those dymaxion toyz for himself as well, and knew only the economies of scale could make that practical; they’d need to be mass produced. To that end, his world was in need of more designing engineers with an holistic enough approach to be realistically anticipatory.

How might we enable for scholars to return to their studies? An obstacle in the path of many would-be scholars, especially young ones, is conscription. States, like neighborhood gangs,  give themselves that privilege.

A military career seems to hold out the promise of better toyz, higher living standards, even at the cost of higher risks. That’s why some states choose a “use it or lose it” approach to war-making: a circular form of justification makes wars and weapons of war a fait accompli, not a circuitry to question and maybe switch off.

Eagle Crossing

Google Earth View

With solar panels, lithium battery, and inverter loaded, the coast-bound bizmo was on its way, with my car queued behind it in the Blue House (sun bleached) driveway. I was headed at 180 degrees, inland, to my usual stop at Eagle Crossing, a restaurant where Hwy 26 crosses the Deschutes River, inside the nation of Warm Springs.

The terrain we (me n my dog) were driving through is certainly cinematic. Mt. Hood stood out sharply against a blue sky. The descent into the Deschutes river valley is spectacular. After walking Syd, I let her nap in the backseat while I enjoyed a sandwich and salad, with coffee. The atmosphere was cheerful.

Zoomed Out

Disc 2 of the High Sierra Criterion Collection had an entirely different movie adaptation of the same novel, entitled Colorado Territory. Same director. I had it on in the background, enough to match up some of the plot elements. 

I’m not sure this later 1949 adaptation featured a dog as a main character. I was too busy packing the car to pay close attention. I returned both discs on my way outta dodge.

One of our Wanderers is on a dig in some Etruscan excavation, and I’m getting sporadic updates. Another Wanderer is in Asia. We Wanderers get around.

Lifting the battery and solar panels into the bizmo was a two-person job.

Zoomed Out More

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeosie (movie review)

I’m back to Film Studies, even though the HDTV is on the blink, no longer beholden to its own API (control panel). I have a CRT TV right next to it, a Sony Trinitron. Works great. The same DVD player feeds either display device via three cables (one video, L and R audio).

Don Luis Buñuel has been the focus. I watched The Discreet Charm of The Bourgeoisie, a kind of anthropology translated to a surrealist register. Then I took in the rest of this Criterion Collection two-disc set. This felt like one of those laser-cut exceedingly complex jigsaw puzzle pieces fitting into place, giving more of the picture.

Buñuel grew up with Salvador Dali, the hallmark surrealist; they were good friends, though far from clones of one another. He moved to the USA in hopes of making films in that film-making mecca, but his reputation preceded him in that closed-minded culture and he ended up churning out what we might call TV shows in Mexico (formulaic, mass produced, low budget, relatively). He became a Mexican citizen. Then he made it back to Spain and reestablished his career there, especially around Toledo. He married, had kids, loved making and drinking dry martinis.

I realized I’d seen at least one other of his films already, the one where a lotta people feel trapped indoors, unable to cross some invisible line. Someone at the Quaker meeting had recommended that one. I wonder if I wrote a review of it. I’ll look later.

As for this particular film, it features repeated variations of scenes we’d expect at this tier of society: dinner parties, embassy intrigue, trysts, triangles, drug dealing (via diplomatic pouch), often polite interactions with the police and military, although not without run-ins. Lots of drinking. 

Also the occasional murder, most likely a poisoning or by means of a firearm. A lot of the violence takes place in dreams. As the movie progresses, we start to realize it’s pretty surreal, but, per the director’s aesthetic code, not over the top. Don Luis is into deadpanning. He keeps things low key.

What comes through in the tributes from his associates is he was a much loved and treasured guy, somewhat the mischievous rascal from the outside (the impression he gave). I was reminded of the David Lynch tributes, which is not to conflate two very distinct personalities. Lynch was something of a surrealist too, and had a strong eye for what he wanted to capture on film (not an unusual trait in a director).

The Darwinisms

Although I do hype some aspects of the speed reading course I took in the Philippines, in a Makati business tower (not at the school), namely the utility of doing recalls after reading (diagrams, more than any squiggly notes in longhand), I'm no speed reader. I’m a browser.

As soon as I got home from the Belmont Street Fair, I started looking at some books I’d just snagged for a dollar apiece, The Age of American Unreason among them.

Yes, I agree:  the backlash against Darwinism wasn’t entirely over whether fossils disprove Genesis, but over whether the billionaires (as we call them today) are entitled to rule, not by divine right anymore, but by by the divine right of evolution, a eugenics ideology in other words.  Social Darwinism gave Darwinism a bad name, and still does.

The eugenicists are champions of the idea of “races” pitted against one another in some struggle for supremacy. There’s no real genetic science to bolster their “races” hypothesis although we do have haploid groups, right? Traits travel together sometimes, much as personality traits do. Authoritarians like to micro-manage and obsess about others’ business. We all know the species.

I’m not especially sympathetic to the self-righteous who believe their grasp of science is what entitles them to dictate. It’s that feeling entitled to dictate that I find suspect, for whatever reason. Religion plays the same role, of cementing some hierarchy among wannabe bosses. Such organizations are attempted anyway. They come and go.

Cascadian Synergetics