Breakfast at Tom’s

I continued my discussions with Terry of ISEPP this morning, over omelettes at Tom’s. 

I’m scanning some of my notes from the meeting, which included me briefly indication why we might not couple “squares” with “to the second power” (or “cubes” with “third power”) because other, simpler shapes (triangle and tetrahedron) work better, at least in some special cases (all cases are :special”) — I point I feel past, having made it many times.

We reminisced about his dealings with various institutions, which were win-win in the sense that Portland enjoyed a strong lecture series, whereas sponsors got to advertise their sincere support for such a lecture series, and help out in other ways. 

In cases where the sponsors were schools, Terry would make sure the invited speakers, big names in many cases, also made it to said schools.

We went through many cups of coffee.

Economics Meets Thermodynamics

A sequence of discoveries for me is: I'd long been listening to Terry Bristol, ISEPP president, wrestle with the twisted story of thermodynamics, the discipline, still ongoing. 

Words like "entropy" continue to pick up new spin, as different disciplines, such as Machine Learning, have a go at working it in. I'd say successfully enough, from my angle.  As long as there's "noise...".

Terry goes to the Carnot corpus, both father (Lazare) and son (Sadi), and traces the evolution of basic concepts vs-a-vs a more Anglophone corpus, which, although in the same ballpark is not quite the same. 

The English and French were tugging the emergent field of thermodynamics in different directions, in ways not always easy to sort out or disentangle.

Careless conflation of subtle differences in meaning, in the rear view mirror, is always the temptation, especially when one's goal is to employ the supposed advantages of hindsight. Thomas Kuhn makes the same point in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions: the storytellers like to airbrush out the messy details.

Thanks to cosmetic censorship, the lay public may think everyone in a subculture is thereby on the same page. A stereotype around mathematics, for example, is it's a universal language and, as such, is hardly marred by the unsightly disagreements that fracture the less settled disciplines.

Put another way: revisionism is endemic to history-telling, especially when the topic is as ephemeral as the meaning of technical terms in co-existing namespaces.

From that trampoline-background, I jump to my General Systems Theory view, echoed by Dorion Sagan and Eric D. Schneider in their book Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life.  I see planet Earth as an open system, not as zero-sum. Humans channel the energy, per water wheels et cetera. Plants turn air and dirt into animal-powering edibles by photosynthesis.

Dorion took the stage here in Portland that time (as had his dad Carl Sagan, and his mom Lynn Margulis, all generously sponsored through the Institute for Science, Engineering and Public Policy, Terry's nonprofit) to give us a coherent picture of where Earth is getting its energy from -- and it's not really controversial once you see it. 

Like of course. 

So our daily energy budget isn't entirely from taxes and human labor then?

From that last question one can see I'm sounding themes in Economics, one of my interests. 

Then, through YouTube, I saw some clips of Steve Keen. His talk sounded more enlightened, and of course I mean from my angle. I'm not claiming some exalted objective authority regarding what matters, so much as narrating a sequence of new-to-me discoveries: from Terry talking thermodynamics, to Dorion, to Keen, not forgetting Paul Romer, another economist Terry would speak highly of.

Plus my GST work traces back to Kenneth Boulding, Bucky Fuller... maybe all the way back to Pharaoh Akhenaten. 

Only then, after getting Perplexity, the chatbot API, to fill me in more on Keen's thinking, did I learn, again from YouTube, that Keen and David Graeber were close associates. 

Learning that was a "small world moment" for me as I'd already wired in Graeber within my School of Tomorrow namespace (context), the anthropologist who taught at Yale and wrote about Bullshit Jobs, among other topics.  Debt: the First 5000 Years and The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity are two others he authored or co-authored.

The picture here is of Earth getting to surf the energy gradient supplied by our star. The star powers the water cycle, keeping the rivers flowing, the turbines turning, the lights on, the TV on, the games going. Games like Rat Race and so on, whatever the humans are into (anthropology goes here). 

Ants, other bugs, have their own pattern languages.

Laying Track

:: Flying to the Moon by Russell Towle ::

I retired to the Ikea queen, my back room snooze nest, with the dog log, and the iPad, so I could drift off to the sounds of YouTube channels, at first consciously selected, then coming up in the algorithm on autopilot as I started fading in and out. 

I got into the weeds of Wall Street, with veteran traders explaining global economics and the widening living standards spread. 

What that one guy was saying is economists live in a bubble because their theories average way too much, hiding the spreads. The janitor plus the CEO, divided by two, or rather an army of janitors, divided by N, gives an income level for the matrix (algebra), whereas one of the key parameters has just been whitewashed. The economists miss the boat all too often. I've always suspected as much.

I guess the question this time is whether there's really a "no risk" option in state issued bonds, meaning US Treasuries, when the states issuing said bonds are on such shaky ground. The evolutionary clock continues ticking and a lot of the old thinking has a half life. Really, all of it does. That's why we have new thinking.

People are having a hard time making sense of what AI seems to be planning for them, but then there's a lot of trust in "the computer" however defined. Per Active Inference, we have our reality models and devote any free time to making them work, as that's a survival thing: having a sense of what's coming.

I was telling DK on the phone yesterday that I didn't think Oswald had "handlers" and it's not like a lot of people were testing the rules, in terms of going to the USSR and returning. He didn't really defect in either direction. He'd file paperwork. 

The guy (LHO) was aloof to the ways of his fellow humans but was willing to, had no choice but to, play their games. Lots of USers today are moving to Russia, meaning it's not a one way street. They might prefer the more orthodox culture, not that Oswald did.

DK mentioned the base in Japan (where LHO was stationed) was involved with U2 work, which as always, connected me mentally to the Prouty corpus. I know a lot of experts have been over this territory and know his line: that U2 was never "shot down" and there was good reason for an embarrassing-to-Dulles psyop at that time. Allen was not privy to that particular inner circle, but then I'm not saying Oswald was either, based on Prouty's elliptical writings.

On the bright side, a lot of the WW3 talk has shifted to the past tense recently, as the sense is the USG is less actively involved in poking the bear. That job has been turned over to the EU and west Ukrainians. 

My focus of late is formerly eastern Ukraine (New Russia) and intourist possibilities, not that I expect there's really any longer an Intourist. That's the agency our family booked with, for that Kabul --> Tashkent --> Moscow --> St. Petersbug --> Helsinki trip that time. The tour guides of Mariupol will tell their tale from the eastern angle, complete with new museums.

Mainly though, DK and I were focusing on Bilinski's rhombic dodecahedron, and how DK can model it with U, V, W modules, which make the fat and thin rhombohedra. Russell Towle came up in the conversation. I hadn't realized before how close that guy was to Merry Pranksters, which ties all three of us in the Cascadia culture a lot more, metaphysically speaking.

:: two BDs in an RT ::

Crypto Carts

I believe some avid researchers, hot on the trail of this or that, come to my blogs hoping for a lot of insights and tips into crypto, meaning crypto currencies. 

Why? 

Partly because Alec Nevala-Lee, a Bucky Fuller biographer, has helped spread awareness that Robert Kiyosaki the Rich Dad, Poor Dad guy is a Fuller fan. I don't recall if Alec's book actually makes this connection; I'm recalling a 2022 podcast I recently came across thanks to Nurse Ratched (codename).

Well, not wanting to disappoint, I am cultivating a crypto thread, but it's somewhat narrowly focused to a template ecosystem we find here in Portland, Oregon: that of the food pod, consisting of food trucks, which all take credit and debit cards.

My mental model is especially influenced by two experiences: getting to enjoy Club Med as a family and, the The Chinook Book, which apparently died of covid (from the economic contraction associated therewith).

Image: I can stoke up my crypto account with a "tourist currency" (locals use it to), good at participating establishments, that gives me discounts if we reckon dollar for dollar. You could call these "dollars that go further than ordinary dollars" if you spend them wisely i.e. pay attention to where to go, what to buy.

The "stretched dollar" crypto, measured in units, given a name, goes to my account. I've paid for these tokens using a mainstream currency. The card and/or app associated with this account is able to pay merchants in that same crypto currency. They have the requisite device readers.

The crypto is pegged to my identity, like credit card money, meaning transactions leave more of a trace than in a strictly cash-based economy. This is part of the appeal:  transaction logging.  Big Brother, perhaps the name of a software suite back at headquarters, knows when and where you buy a burrito. We already have shopper cards that work the same way.

That's right: to my influences, I should add having a Fred Meyer card in my wallet, and getting discounts for using it, almost daily. The discount coupons Freddies sends me in the mail are customized towards what purchases I routinely make, I've noticed. Smart. I use the coupons when I think of it. My friend Dave is more of a master at this game, and I've learned from him.

What about Club Med you're asking? That's easy: we had to buy plastic beads, colored gold, copper, tan, and where these around our necks as necklaces. We might be scantily clad in beachwear, so who wants a bulky wallet? If I wanted a drink, I shortened my necklace, by handing over some beads to the vendor. 

Club Meds always seemed well-managed and well-designed. That's from a teenager's perspective. We already lived in Europe so joining the French working class on their vacations was actually more affordable than most ways of enjoying some fun in the sun. I especially remember the one in Romania, on the Black Sea. We drove there from Rome, with many stops before and after.

Getting all these ideas more concrete would require a simulation. I've written Python code to simulate a supermarket, with a shopper class, inventory class et cetera, from which instances get made. But it's too simple and has no graphical components. I'm just using it to teach Python, not research crypto carts inside the context of a SimCity.  SimCity would be another influence, or Sims more generally.

None of this crypto cart stuff really has to happen in Portland, if that's impractical. I'm thinking more in terms of refugee cities, Asylum Cities. I think refugee camps have already done stuff with crypto, am I wrong?  It's time to hit the chatbot I currently favor (Perplexity) and do some more digging.

Comprehensivist Musings

I probably bring in less money in a year than most Wall Streeters put up their nostrils in snow in a week or a month or whatever. I never cultivated that habit, one of many. I have pushed to "put the coke back in Coke" on the theory that what 1800s pharmacists were doing around microdosing was not all that bad for some patients. We all get to be patients, some of us practicing as doctors as well, on Looney Tunes Earth.

Speaking of prohibited substances to which the privileged have largely unfettered access (a measure of wealth, in that potlatch sense: do you have the means to host those wild parties?), I was a student of Col. Prouty, Man X in the Oliver Stone movie, JFK, the Donald Sutherland character. Through books and CD ROM and YouTube interviews and so on; I never actually met the guy personally. 

Prouty goes on and on in some passages about how NORAD is plenty aware of all small plane traffic over the southern borders it need do nothing about. Leave Arkansas air traffic to Arkansas and so on. His implication being (he says so outright): these small planes are often packed with prohibited substances, continuing a tradition going back to at least Prohibition (when it was more about rum than white powder).

Insert: my curriculum has a portal into cryptography here, in the person of another strong woman, Elizebeth Smith Friedman, the Prohibition Era code cracker who, along with her husband, helped dig the ground where the NSA rests today, conceptually speaking.

Focusing on a physical wall or fence is not necessarily what you'd do if focusing on the real smuggling vectors. A Dymaxion Projection with smuggling vectors traced worldwide would make for some spanking new content in one of those Salon-type online magazines. Nice coffee table content: where it all comes from. A lot comes from Oregon I would imagine.

But once again, given I'm a comprehensivist, a tourist passing through, I'm hardly the resident expert and would not be on the team to make that map. So many pros know the Mena stories and others like them more intimately than I do. If you don't know that Arkansas airport then you're even less well read than I am, so remember that about comprehensivists. I know some virology also, without being a Fauci. What glues it together is pattern matching, a fancy name for analogies. Analog: shapewise similar but size-wise not (that's an oversimplification).

Why am I bringing up JFK and narcotics and spooky underworld stuff ala Col. Fletcher Prouty? If you check back in history, around now they were dumping lots of JFK files into the public domain, much of it documents already well known but with redacted shielding now removed, lifting the veil in some cases. Also, the great wall along or in the Rio Grande was a major focus among the various American countries involved, such as the Republic of Texas (also a part of the Federation you learned about).

As a blogger, doing a journal, like any good Quaker, keeping up with my practice, I allude to current events and share my angle. My angle on borders in general is they're a rather new thing in terms of micro-management, surveillance, gait analysis and so on. We didn't always have these drones and monitoring personnel. Borders were easy to draw and defend on paper, such as by scathing memoranda in diplomatic circles, but most people were without documents. They hadn't made it to middle class status yet.

So the proposal to clamp down on the undocumented and criminalize poverty worldwide, starting with using borders as approximations for the prisons within prisons on the drawing boards, is pretty off the scales radical. Future shock is indeed shocking. We're cattle in our own electrified pens. One cow to the other, over an electric fence: at least it's not open borders, or you could eat my grass (a shared thought balloon).

What has DOGE found in terms of prisons in the permit phase, planning phase, or conceptual art. Is there any truth to the rumor that Mars will be a one way trip for volunteer lifers with no prospects, a prison planet? That sounds like a series on Amazon or Netflix, so apologies if I just inadvertently plagiarized. Sometimes I trespass, my devices not having entirely aligned maps compared to what more local maps show.

Russell Towle is another reason I'm hearkening back to the 1960s, to the Merry Prankster Era, which was well before my time in terms of my not having an adult body yet, when Further was plying the highways and byways, criss-crossing North America, running acid tests.  I was twice removed: once in being still in grade school, twice for being in Rome by then. I saw Yellow Submarine (twice, once with my parents) at that little theater in Trastevere that specialized in English language movies. What was it called again? Pasquino. The other one, Archimedes off Piazza Euclide, was within walking distance from my house. So it's not like I was completely disconnected from USA TV culture. I was even a Cub Scout.

Russell Towle was into rhombohedral zonohedra when David Koski and I discovered him online. He kindly helped me over email regarding my having aspect ratios wrong in my rendered POV-Ray output. Thanks to him, my graphics improved. Then suddenly he was gone. The Wolfram people mourned his loss also; he'd helped showcase the powers of Mathematica and Wolfram Language. Now just today I'm reading up on his overlap with Neal Cassady and those folks. As Spock of Leonard Nimoy fame might put it: fascinating, captain.

Politics as Sport

Helmet Man, OPDX, 2011

If you're looking for where I weigh in on matters athletic and/or military, keep looking, because I'm only quasi athletic (does scuba count?) and never served.  

Like I followed from the sidelines when the debate was whether to allow women into combat. As a Quaker (contra outward physical violence -- other kinds too but let's start with that) I found it ironic that the right to keep this a Planet of the Apes was just as much women's work as men's. Demolition engineering that is, the big undo button. 

Many males with chestal displays (medals, insignia) said the presence of women was too distracting and kept the men from focusing on homicide. My read (OK I'll have a view) is: that some men would probably do better as brave heros with lots of women around in a position to notice.  Also: a combatant pilot at ten thousand feet is different from being in boots on the ground, or crammed into a tank.

So many peeps wanna pile on already. When I see a big pile of peeps, piling on, making a mountain or molehill, I'm not one to always run over and leap on. "That issue is already getting lots of attention, so I'm not needed" is more my reaction, to pop culture fad altercations over this and that. 

Which is not to surrender my right to jump in if I feel like it.

Anyway, to the real point of this post:  to what extent is politics run on the model of fans boosting teams at a sporting event? I'm gonna say football, with deliberate ambiguity as to whether I mean ala NFL or FIFA. 

Is the ball a hexapent? Adidas telstar pattern (another name for it)? Buckminsterfullerene? Or is it oblong?

When you boost a team, you're feeding encouragement, shouting rah rah. You're not a referee on the field and you're not still deciding which team you are for. If you're an avid sports watcher, you don't pick your team on the fly. Or maybe I should say: if you're actively following a given sport, a whole tournament. 

You know which side you're on, and what your role is. In the back room, there's a lot of betting. Casino Math.

That's what I get about so much that is politics, punditry, and editorializing:  you know which side you're on, and as a loyal fan, your role is to stay loyal, especially when chips are down. Your job is to pump nutrients into your side, feed it energy. I think of my role during Occupy, bringing in food by Food Not Bombs bicycle trailer.

Those others, who don't seem to have a dog in the fight (idiom), or skin in the game (similar), seem colder and more aloof. Maybe they're just being polite when they shout rah rah, because they're a guest of some highly partisan host family. Go along to get along. When in Rome.

The aloof types are more like concessioners, hot dog and cotton candy vendors (would you like a large or diet coke with that?). They don't need to pick a side, but they do depend on a partisan fandom, a polarized audience that has to care and shout "fight fight fight". Without all those hormones flowing, they won't buy the flags and other souvenirs. If you're not here to boost a team, maybe try the symphony down the street?  They say opera is entertaining.

Sharing the Solar Bounty

At a recent think tank meeting, during a time discussing generalities, the conversation turned to whether the game was zero sum. Like I said, very general.

My view was folks oughta get paid to self educate, perhaps starting with self education on how to do self education. UBI (universal basic income) isn’t for nothing. To which the retort was why should anyone pump gas in a gas station while others were subsidized to learn Spanish? It’s zero sum after all.

Where should our share of solar income, vast and ongoing, show up in our lives. Some would say: the sun on your skin, and lighting your way during the day, is your portion. 

That sunlight helps grow wheat, as well as turn the stones that grind it to bread, and are you not inheriting  a stake in said human enterprise?

The Technocracy movement seems antiquated to me too now, but I can see where it was coming from: hook UBI to everyone’s share of the energy harvest, which is owing ultimately to no man nor to the labor of men. What men owed has already been paid.

Spring Equinox Gathering 2025

Every chair was taken in the iconic Pauling House, a heritage site here in Asylum District and in Portland more generally. The occassion: Spring Equinox. We meet four times a year anymore, whereas Wanderers used to keep to a busy schedule of weekly meetings, with invited or indigenous (in-group) speakers.

Our format for gatherings is rambling wandering conversation. Gordon and Barry talked about shipping, motor sizes, tilt angles. Tilt angles for motorcycles had come up earlier. Unfortunately Brenda, our resident biker chick (scientist by day), couldn't make it this time.

I'd characterize Wanderers as scientists and engineers by and large, but with no strict membership requirements, nor really any kind of membership roster. Somehow we always stay the right size for a small meeting room like this.

I brought Sydney the dog and made my brief speech about how non-humans are likewise Wanderers.  I've always been one of those eager to keep things less human-centric. Admitting non-humans in such an informal setting has not been controversial. We've had other pets join us as well. I like to say Keiko is/was an honorary Wanderer.

We managed to include Steve Mastin by Facetime. Although my iPad is not a registered device on the Verizon network, my cell phone is, and played the role of hotspot. We used to have our own Wifi SSID for ISEPP, but president Bristol only works there in the mornings sometimes so no longer maintains his own company Wifi. ISEPP is a 501(c)(3), my late wife the bookkeeper long ago.

I got to chatting with Barry about my "Chinese Peace Corps" meme (he'd been in the US Peace Corps in Brazil some decades back), providing free eyecare (like glasses) from vans in Detroit. Providing a global safety and healthcare net could double as a see-the-world opportunity, in a more benign way than joining the military. Such ideas are apropos in any institution named after Linus (anti-nuke prof) and Ava (WILPF) Pauling.

Charting a Leftist Trajectory

The online Collins dictionary labels "lefty" with [British, informal, disapproval] i.e. built right into the meaning is a negative spin, akin to "cult" or "propaganda". The meaning: "If you refer to someone as a lefty, you mean that they support the ideals of the political left." But that's already secondary to "left handed" meaning someone who defaults to their left hand for precision activities such as handwriting or drawing.

Per my own counterintelligence against standard English connotations, I've worked to rehabilitate "cult" (for example) such that it gains a more neutral sheen, as a nickname or short version of "subculture", which has an almost mathematical dryness in being some subset of a larger culture, which pretty much any culture already is, and with more factions internally, a recursive data structure right down to "a cult of one" (but what about all those split personalities?).

I'd like to get back to "split personalities" following Maurice Nicoll again, as I often do, with a nod to Kierkegaard and his "to will one thing" discussion. A more typical personality is not so single-minded, or is overzealous with tyrannical tendencies, often a self-overthrowing situation, no need to lift a finger.

However I want instead to take up the left-right axis, insofar as their is one, and talk about my owning a leftist placement, even without claiming to be a fan of Marxist analysis. My economics is more a "free money from the sun" thermodynamic analysis, not that intelligence makes no difference. General Systems Theory (GST) seemed free for the taking when I got around to recycling and/or perpetuating some key terms.

I use other language somewhat oddly as well: "fan" is a status one earns through a lot of homework. I might be appreciative of what I've gotten from a talented vocalist, or rhetorician, or movie director, and that's a step towards becoming a fan, but it takes work to really be a true fan of someone or something. I suppose my meaning of "fan of" is closer to that of "acolyte of" and/or "disciple of", closer to "devotee".

I get to be a leftist through a Mark Twain style anti-imperialism. The Anti-imperialist League included Andrew Carnegie. Quakernomics, the book, is about industrialists with utopian visions of company lifestyles, from janitorial staff, to HR, to officers on the bridge. This commitment to egalitarian structures, sometimes associated with "communism" is likewise associated with horizontally structured private enterprises, where management intermingles with specialists, such as we have in Macrodata Refinement (joke: an allusion to the back rooms in our corporate mazeways).

I'm sympathetic to Hemingway and to the Spaniards who stood up to the fascists, already back then (pre WW2) cutting their teeth as right-wing bad guys. We (e.g. Wikipedia) still think of Franco as a rightie, anti-Franco Republicans as lefties. Those were impressions I developed through the Laughing Horse Books video collection. I've also chronicled in the Coda, March 2025 meeting minutes, regarding my radio-listening habits of some fifteen years ago (waiting in the car for pickup at Winterhaven), then tracing the crackup of Air America and the trajectory of Thom Hartmann and others into the RT America sphere, a bevy of leftists before banned; an iron curtain came down in TV world, with the attempted neocon-NATO coup-takeover of American media.

My other connections to leftism would be through both WILPF and AFSC. I probably don't want to complicate the story further with too many ideological affiliations beyond those two. For example, I'm not planning to tally up clients I've had, as to where they might weigh in on any left-right spectrum. I'm more apolitical than that, less partisan, in my business dealings. Like I'm not a front for any political party other than my own, my Pirate Party, to keep it simple. I believe I'm officially registered as in independent.

Mickey 17 (movie review)

Dr. D. joined me at the last minute for this 7 pm showing at The Bagdad. The theater (part of a brewpub empire) was reasonably well attended. Folks lined up for brew and 'za. Outside it had turned cold. Keeping this place well heated has gotta be one of the number one expenses.

Previews: remake of Superman coming; rectilinear brainwashing ala MineCraft Movie coming too. That'll be good for our own PR as we promulgate the IVM in contrast to XYZ, so we need XYZ to stick around. Never mind if that's over your head jargon. Poke around.

My practice was to avoid all YouTube or other reviews of this movie until after watching it. I'd seen the previews several times. I've been going to films more in recent weeks, as well as using my home theater. Then right after the film I came home, hooked the iPad to the HDTV and we watched reviews by deepfocuslens and Critical Drinker, both of whom found it disappointing. 

I'm not so down on it, but then I liked Joker 2.

I guess a question is how tight and in control of itself we found the movie to be. In terms of reality construction, I think it did well. The movie created a believable world, by science fiction standards, in which "expendables" might be 3D printed and with memories restored, shades of Avatar 2 more than anything. The associated props developed over time. Especially strong: allusions to Covid. Mickey goes through like nine lives being a guinea pig for the mRNA vax they'll all need, to survive their new home planet.

The new home planet is inhabited by an intelligent life form that's half tardigrade (but bigger) and half potato bug. They’re both cute and terrifying at the same time, like this movie (both a comedy and horrific). The scientists, per stereotype, are starting to work out a translator and are on the brink of establishing a dialog, while the militarists are (again per stereotype) looking for opportunities to chronicle themselves being heroic, striking courageous postures (like a general on a rearing horse).

Probably where I part company from the reviewers, and maybe even from the actors and script, is I didn't see the preacher pair, the Jim and Tammy Bakker cult leaders, the evangelists, as trying to parody Trump, let alone Trump and Melania. If we insist on presidential parallels, I'd say the Tammy Bakker character, the Lady Macbeth (into sauces, a cooking show maven) is more of a Jill Biden, with Jimmy a younger Joe. But why push either analogy? The stereotype these two present is more culturally ingrained than specific politicians, in my experience.

That we're looking at two consecutive Mickeys, printed the same way, with memories from the same brick, leads to a meditation on how they're nevertheless completely different personalities. One seems more meek and mild, the other more temper driven and self protective. Their attitude towards one another forms a kind of internal monolog made public. They want to kill each other at first, but their shared anima (soul figure) unites them as allies and friends in the end. The more selfish one turns altruistic. Together they usher in a new era.

I thought having a black African heritage female cop excited for sex with two white guy twins was a comment on science fiction's role in pushing the envelope. A first famous "inter-racial" kiss on TV was between Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Urhuru on Star Trek, a sensitive moment (a risk) for the network and somewhat uncomfortable on the set (Kirk insisted on several rehearsals). "How far we've come" this movie was saying, in having its women so aggressively (and jealously) interested in the Mickey bros.

That's what the critics didn't like: science fiction that takes on too many social issues is too hard to follow and think about. But I'm thinking its satirical flavor extends to making fun of how science fiction is expected to tackle social issues, by tackling them all. It reminds me of The Good Place in being almost academic about the ethics issues. That transparency to philosophy in the background, the plot little more a thin veneer, is characteristic of comic book works, catering to young readers coming to grips with their own values, whatever these turn out to be.

Dr. D. pointed out a paradox in that Mickey is always being asked what it's like to die, but at no point would the memory brick be refreshed enough to remember dying, so he's really as clueless as anyone about what it's like in the rear view mirror. He simply has the cognitive security of knowing (because of affirmation from others, and because of accumulating memories with gaps) that he's exceptional in being an expendable. What might seem an especially lucky outcome (immortality of sorts) comes across as anything but.

Another factor that maybe colored my experience was the "laugh track" provided by the living theaters; the two guys sitting behind us, that one guy in particular, laughed loudly and riotously, and as the credits scrolled they expressed delight with the movie. Their enthusiasm was quasi-infectious, boosting the comical quality of the film. The potato bug monsters, both cute and ugly, were alone worth the price of admission (with a senior discount, admittedly).