Back to the Future

I've flashed on the Nord Stream debacle a few times, saying it couldn't be the work of a great nation.  Not with a coverup.  If it were heroism, brag about it.  But if it's not, then slink around and act guilty.

So in that sense, my USA, as I was saying, was not behind such a thing.  But, Planet of the Apes style, we could nevertheless have Ollie North types with the keys to this or that meeting room.  I'm not saying people living in The District (aka City of Morons) weren't complicit.

So we would have to call such a cabal pro-Ukrainian right?  So that part of the yacht story would read correctly.  It wasn't the USA aka Uncle Sam, not seen since the 1980s and suspected a goner, if not making a comeback, so it must have been some pro-Ukrainian group.  Fine.

Whether they used a yacht or not, vs suckered the Norwegians into being the bad guys, time will tell.  Either way, the USA was not involved.  By definition.  There's no need to lie about what happened to protect the USA.  If there's lying happening, it's to protect some pro-Ukrainian group.

Evolving Mythology

 

I've noticed my specific glue language has taken a turn in that I'm specifically sheltering Synergetics with "P folk", not relying on "M folk" to do that job.  What am I talking about?

Given there's only the one P in PATH, you might suppose Psychology and Philosophy were destined to duke it out as to who gets the helm.  However, psych folk are more likely to claim their home on the other side of the C.P. Snow chasm, in STEM, as a Science.

What about Politics, won't it vie with Philosophy for the premier P on the marquee?  No, Politics comes under Theater.  Anthropology (not Art) is our bridge discipline.  We study ourselves (all is vanity), as humans (not as members of some superior race or chosen pueblo, that's History, oft written by the proud), and in so doing crisscross back and forth twixt the liberal arts and engineering.

OK, with those clues, you've likely guessed it:  the M-folk comprise the mathematically-minded establishment, networks within networks of various faculties, with silo-style verticality such as in K-16 (the "grades" -- YMMV).  

I'm not denying our wedging into that M-silo mid-level, around 8th through 12th grade, and winning some recruits, but that mostly just means abducting them into P for reprogramming (of themselves, by themselves, for themselves) with guidance provided by various syllabi and curriculum artifacts.  Reading programs, in other words.

For example, a high school maths teacher will tune in CHoP (concentric hierarchy of polyhedrons) and think "this'd be great for my 10th graders".  In traversing the directed graphs of connecting concepts, however, said teacher finds herself wading in to lots of narratives involving historical figures, who are not themselves considered mathematicians.  

We step outside the established pedigreed family tree and pick up more Aquarian Conspiracy types, various illuminati / literati.  Marshall McLuhan for example, and Hugh Kenner. 

That Hugh Kenner wrote Geodesic Math and How to Use It, becomes a premise for the ensuing narrative I then spin.  Quoting from the M4W archives:

Hugh Kenner wrote Geodesic Math and How to Use It, which was not about quadrays per se, but which set a precedent for a James Joyce scholar, fluent in literature (he wrote The Pound Era), wading into the shallow end of the maths swimming pool and beginning the construction of a new namespace, independently of the established M in academia.

Hugh was something of a polymath. He also wrote for Byte Magazine (McGraw-Hill) and was one of the first to track "chatbots" (again in the news, thirty years later).

I think Dr. Kenner may have inadvertently emboldened the Quadrays people (me one of them) to realize we're entitled to name our four spatial vectors at 109.47 degrees to one another "basis vectors", even if we choose to not make them unit length. The choice is grammatical, and Category Theory, with its liberal ideas about equivalence, helps us provide a justification.

Correction:  I should have said "forty years later" as the ELIZA-bot stories were from the 1980s.  The World Wide Web came later, around April 1993 -- we just celebrated the web's 30th anniversary last month.  However, thirty years ago, chat bots were already a thing, and had been for over a decade.  They weren't using large language models yet though.  ELIZA was a psychotherapist, Racter an erratic polymath.  They came with built in personalities.  Stay tuned.  Good ideas don't die, they recycle.

So Philosophy is up to sheltering and nurturing the CHoP stuff while inviting selected M-folk to come tour, packing whatever memes they want to share with us (such as from Category Theory or CT, not to be confused with CRT).  Cross-fertilization occurs, and we keep the most positively synergetic for a next round of upgrades.  Our mythology thereby evolves.

Friendship Societies

As a career programmer consultant and custom applications developer, I had numerous mostly non-profit clients in the greater Portland area.  The Northwest Regional China Council for example.  Portland may not be as integrated into the Pacific Rim economy as Seattle, given its relatively diminutive port facilities, but it's certainly another chip on the global motherboard.

Networking among subcultures does not require world travel as much as in the past.  Sometimes it feels more necessary to hop a jet and meet with counterparts in person.  However, when one lives in a big enough city, said counterparts just as often have good reasons to come here.  In the meantime, we have our electronics and shared stashes and repositories.

Probably one of the best ways to diffuse tensions, which tend to work in favor of warmonger businesses, is to keep friendships and communications alive across supposed ideological boundaries.  Although stereotypically a source of tensions and outward war, these days a religion, such as Quakers, provides ready-made circuitry for community building exercises and other confidence building measures.

The exercise of free speech has become less of a luxury than a necessity in an age when retro Planet of the Apes tendencies wish to destroy recent gains and return us to a pre-civilization that's easier to control and/or understand.  We're able to reassure our friends that we're not ourselves participants in these campaigns to stoke the flames of animosity.  On the contrary, our network of friendship societies is about creating new workarounds.  Portland is a welcome catalyst, in providing a staging ground.

A Billion Billionaires

As a child of the 1960s, I grew up focused on advertising as an intersectional discipline:  psychology, public relations, sociology, with the hard sciences supporting from below.  

The psychology part was especially interesting, and we felt MAD Magazine was on our side, helping to forewarn us of the life of others seeking to manipulate us, that was in store.

The gospel of abundance and prosperity often seems a self parody, as it touts billionaire levels of wealth for all.  However, under the hyperbole, you find the obvious truths, regarding people "living like kings". 

The kings of old never had iPhones or streaming, could only dream of such capabilities.  That's where our being billionaires stems from, along with not having to sit on some throne all day, listening to petitions and grievances.

Just walking through a contemporary airport, say in China, going from train to plane or vice versa, is more than the greatest queen of old could have experienced, and here we're just everyday individuals, not special, not singled out, yet satisfied with the infrastructural solutions to our travel needs.  

We thank the engineers and regional planners, who took the time to scope it out, and to the construction specialists who made it happen, and to the willing guinea pigs (the early adopters, the test pilots) who checked it out and provided valuable feedback.

We've reached a kind of limit on Ghetto Planet in that average living conditions have to keep improving for us to know that we're making some headway with all our tools.  We need honest benchmarks to keep us honest, which is another way of saying "in touch with reality" which has its rules.  

It's one thing to rail against government for being way too strict, which it often is.  It's another to rail against Mother Nature and her exceptionless principles, whatever these might be, not saying I'm the know-it-all.

Billionaires of the future, ahead of us in living standards, will enjoy a more congenial ambient backdrop.  It's not that we'll all live in luxury accommodations all of the time.  But then who would want to do that?  

Being out in the mud, digging trenches, laying pipe, is not a bad way to build muscles and hand-eye coordination.  This could be First Person Physics for a university program.  

The downer is when you're made to work as somebody's slave instead of on your own behalf along a work-study track (a tour of duty) of your own devising.  Others benefit, either way, but so do you when you're on board with your training.

A theme park has the rides that it has, although there's turnover.  Oaks Park has its newest roller coaster.  However you, the theme park goer, are not required to ride them all, nor any, in any special order.  That's all up to you.  This is the mix of fatalistic (stoic) versus freedom-loving we wish to achieve.  

We can't do anything about what we can do nothing about, yet there's a remainder we might mess with to our heart's content.  Let that be towards our contentment.  

Billionaire talk, and money talk in general, is a disguise over that sense of lasting security one might feel for one's self and one's loved ones, the lastingness of which is ever finite (mortal) in any matrix.  We feel impelled by deltas to keep working it, exercising those freedoms.  

That picture some have, of having enough to sit back and coast, is not all that realistic, given the sense of mortality every billionaire likewise feels.

One of my points though, is that Bucky Fuller was not lying (not being misleading) in some super naive way, when he talked about our living standards being higher than those of the kings and queens of yesteryear, not only physically but, potentially, psychologically.  

We're freer to distribute the psychological burdens of self governance more equally, and that's actually a favor to royalty in a lot of ways.  Leaving the job to just a few chosen celebs was actually more a source of their potential misery than many would know.  Being the scapegoat of the masses is no fun, even if they fatten and pamper you before the sacrifice.

A Patriotic Vista