Fearful Symmetry

I'm not the first one to comment on all the mirroring that goes on. They're saying the GOP is rallying around opening an impeachment inquiry because Ukraine i.e. because the first impeachment inquiry against their guy was with reference to a phone call between the White House and president Zelenskyy in Kiev. 

So now it's tit for tat, quid pro quo etc., in going after Hunter & Co. on possible bribery charges (in which the current US president might be implicated).

The symmetry is not yet complete however. The GOP has yet to turn Russiagate backlash (from the base) into RICO charges centered around the conduct of Michael Morell and his project to make the Biden laptop story seem to be Russian misinfo, even when the FBI (and presumably the CIA) already knew better. 

There's a similar pattern of willfully acting with intent, in the face of being told otherwise by people in a position to know.

Per Dershowitz, once the parties start using RICO against each other, the public perception, that politics = racketeering, comes too close to the surface for comfort. People get reminded of their own suspicions, in seeing them confirmed.

The comedians start having a field day mixing the criminality of high society into the mainstream narrative, ala White House meets Heisenberg of Breaking Bad. That's an edgy genre that sells tickets.

More puzzle pieces swirl in the popular mind already, most importantly VIPS (Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity) which gets connected to the Guccifer story, ala Fancy Bear. That's been a topic in these blogs as well.

Safe to say, reviewing Russiagate in earnest is going to be a big topic going into 2024, as Americans try to process to what extent they've been lied to about this that and the other. Always a challenge. We tend to rely on help from those radio voices as we drive to and from work and/or work from home. The echo chambers and think tanks process differently.

Ethnicity Versus Race

There's this stereotype that some people are bred to be snobs. That's more a joke really. It comes with the territory, that one ethnicity will look down on another, as a way of maintaining its own cohesion. Dr. Seuss made fun of this whole pattern in his children's book about the Sneetches.

Lets go with "snob islands" and talk about breeding. 

When it comes to dogs and other show animals, breeding has come to mean something specific having to do with genetics (breeding in certain traits, while breeding out others), such as creating different colors of Lab for example. My Sy is chocolate colored.

When it comes to humans, we speak of "breeding" as a kind of "grooming" wherein a child is shaped and molded by means of memes more than genes. The training is epigenetic, meaning not that dependent on specific strands of DNA. 

"Through breeding" is how ethnicities develop, groups or subcultures, with in-common biases and attitudes. Some ethnicities seem to brand around their antipathy towards one or more others. Many professions could never afford themselves such a luxury, not having the freedom to be so picky, in terms of clientele.

Now you may suffer from a kind of blindness that makes it hard for you to distinguish between ethnicity and race. I've done a lot of blog posts on this topic, tracing back to my interest in anthropology and even early childhood experiences. I understand, by breeding, that "race" is an embarrassment to those who think in racist terms and that I don't have to willingly join in that type of thinking. 

I'm still free to distinguish between ethnicities and if I think pointing out your skin color will help others find you in a crowd, then I might mention it, along with that you wear glasses and wear a backpack. Where's Waldo?

I'm relieved to see we don't have so many "Caucasians" anymore, thanks to Ancestry dot com and like that. People are getting that more nuanced view of their Eurasian roots, and don't insist they all come from that one trendy neighborhood, which most of them couldn't find on a map without help from Google.

In summary, I think some ethnicities will persist in thinking in terms of race, but mine need not, nor need people who share my breeding.

Touch and Go

There's lots in the news recently, about biolabs and their purpose, and whether "gain of function" is a euphemism for "weaponize" and of course we have to do whatever the bad guys might be doing, to make sure we out do the bad guys. That's bad guy as well as good guy thinking, if "goodies vs baddies" is your thing.

The cartoons had a good model for a plot. Our heroes stumble upon a Dr. Evil type, off the deep end in planning nefarious WMDs or whatever. The kids outwit the dude and bring him to justice, medals all around.

However, per Prouty et al, a dispiriting Malthusianism still pervades, leading some religious types to think they're doing god's (or gods') work in serving a Dr. Evil type, i.e. it's minions that we need to stay nervous about. If it weren't for minions, the Dr. Evil types would be turned in, or at least outed, and we'd all get on with our lives, glad we're not all on the same page as cultist dupes.

That's what the news sources are saying too:  the "don't snitch" ethos is inhibiting the whistle-blower reflex as it seems Dr. Evil might have an argument, and if he's right then being a minion might be the safer path. If we buy that sane people might invest heavily in death-dealing technology, then we're likely to fall prey to "the complex" (the mental illness) we were warned about by president Eisenhower.

I think we've learned, from the movies if not from real experience, that minions are a "nice to have" and are actually essential for anything that's supposed to scale.  The Dr. Evil type has to have a recruitment kit, a pump and dump scenario, whereby the minions see a path to riches if not glory. A lot of "number two" types need to step forward, to whom Dr. Evil might delegate important responsibilities.

In Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, B. Fuller starts encoding this pattern in terms of Great Pirates, staying somewhat neutral as to whether said recruiters were monsters or worthy of loyalty, and/or capable of withstanding peer review (by other pirates). Sailing ships need sailors, no doubt about it. Venture capitalist enterprises need investors willing to invest their agency, not just their funds.

A question is whether we want to open the door to the possibility of a Dr. Good. Actually, that door was opened long ago, in fiction, science fiction and even in science, as psychology does not preclude Healthy Pirate Syndrome (HPS). One may have an ego without being an egomaniac. At least in principle. Dr. Dolittle comes to mind, good with animals.

Dr. B. Fuller got to walk the line, twixt heaven and hell, utopia and oblivion, and remark on its arcing nature. The neck and neck suspense arises from how close we go to the abyss sometimes, flirting with disaster.  He called it "touch and go".

Egoism Versus Egotism

I learned much of what I know about the philosophy called Egoism, from Trevor Blake, somewhat of an authority on the topic. Max Stirner is a central figure. Did Walter Kaufmann write about him much? Wes Cecil lists both Kaufmann and Stirner on his Forgotten Thinkers page.

Egotism tends to refer to pathological exaggerations of the ego's otherwise useful role in anchoring a form of self awareness related to choice making, according to tastes.  An ego develops as a personality or character such that self awareness of a self, a persona, evolves over time (or fails to evolve, as the case may be).

Confusion between egoism and egotism may account for some of the radical therapies which stress abolition of one's ego, or egocide, a kind of self canceling. Bucky Fuller spoke of committing "egocide" in the 1920s, only to be accused later, sometimes by jealous competitors, of egomania.  He certainly built a character that signaled to others about untapped potential.  These days we see a lot of egos feeding off "zero point energy" (cite Foster Gamble and Nassim Haramein) as a meme, crediting it back to Bucky as an inspiration, his Synergetics in particular.

Integral within contemporary Christianity is the idea of being reborn. Accepting Jesus Christ as one's personal savior may involve taking a sharp turn in any given character development scenario. One ego needs to die to make room for a next one. We might call it an ego overhaul, and it often becomes a part of one's life story. The turns we take get chronicled, by others if not by ourselves.  I'd say Fuller made a sharp turn in response to strong suicidal tendencies, there in 1927. However he didn't turn to Jesus at that juncture. He fell back on intuitions he felt had been prodding him since his youth, a still small voice he decided to nurture and make room for.

Fuller's character's evolution within the Boho Matrix of Greenwich Village is a topic I and other biographers take up elsewhere. Once the ability to transform one's ego (to reinvent oneself) is recognized, it's easier to keep the show on the road, in response to the road. Call it neuroplasticity. Call it a willingness to be shaped, and if necessary broken (a Quaker term), based on prior experience with a auto reprogramming. Fuller's persona continued to morph with the times.

My own story of punctuated equilibria might point to my time in Gotham as somewhat transformative. I'd moved to Jersey City from Princeton and taken a job as a school teacher. I was also volunteering downtown, at the New York Area Center, pursuant to Kaufmannesque leanings. I wanted to see what philosophy might do as a discipline, and was eying the role of est Trainer as somewhat groundbreaking. 

How could a philosophy lecture hit that hard? A lot depended on the willingness of the training participants to do some serious self overhaul i.e. self transformation was in the air and sharing honestly and authentically in a safe enough space, was encouraged by consensus, not by browbeating or a frenzied sales pitch on the part of the trainer.  Attendees had already paid their money as the curtain opened on Saturday morning, and they were eager to get down to business, with only two weekends to get it all done.

The Erhard and Fuller scenarios overlapped quite a bit, plus we had est: The Steersman Handbook (Charts of the Coming Decade of Conflict) by L. Clark Stevens, which I didn't find out about until quite a bit later. The sense we were creating or continuing a social movement, call it the Aquarian Conspiracy for shorthand, was fueling that sense of being part of something bigger than one's ego. That sensibility is not inconsistent with Egoism, nor with Taoism, and involves trusting one's own intuition (vs. taking cues or marching orders from others most of the time).

I'd say Quakerism encourages journaling, which includes blogging these days, because keeping a journal has the potential to be a character-building exercise, plus it's a way of inviting push back and feedback from other characters. 

When a Friend has a sense of a leading, a path to pursue, on behalf of a greater good, it's standard practice to set up a Clearness Committee and then a Support Committee, should the Oversight Committee agree the Meeting itself wants to get behind a certain Friend's ministry. Perhaps a traveling minute is issued and the newly registered minister becomes a circuit rider of some kind.  This may sound like a lot of dated terminology, because it is.

Along those lines (circuit riding), I'm anticipating more travel (I have my new passport, finally) and want this MacBook Pro to have as much battery life as the technology permits. My plan is to purchase a backup hard drive (HDD), use Time Machine to mirror its content externally, and then visit the Apple Genius Bar for battery maintenance, meaning I expect we'll swap out the old one for a new one.  Office Depot on MLK didn't have the HDD I wanted in stock, so I'm killing time blogging, before heading to the downtown store, which opens later.

Synergetics

A reason Fuller's Synergetics doesn't get a lot of press in some circles, is Fuller never bought into there being some "ladder to omniscience" in the following sense:  "solving" quantum physics, i.e. nailing it, still wouldn't let us predict Maxwell's Equations or the price of rice.  

The little stuff doesn't encompass or explain the bigger stuff, because synergy. That's heresy per some dogmas.

I got a message something along those lines from a lecture by Nobel Prize winning Dr. Robert Laughlin, wherein he talked about upsetting the apple cart at different levels. 

Extrapolating: it's not like the gears are locked so tightly that we have to wait for heaven and earth to move before we experience breakthroughs at some intermediate level, i.e. even when levels above and below seem relatively unperturbed. 

On some frequency on the radio dial, a plot twists, not disturbing other programming, yet awakening those who've tuned in.

Storms may be confined, but not rendered unreal. Expect those teapot tempests. Conservation laws at work.

M4W Workshop

Our workshop and movie-making exercise was on the theme of: take it or leave it as a whole versus take or leave specific parts of it (whatever "it" might be).  For example, I might choose not to watch a specific movie, in which case I don't. Or I might choose to watch it, and I watch the whole thing.  

Those are two singularities in a way: tuning in, and ignoring; remembering and forgetting.  Taking it, or leaving it.

In between, come the numbers between 1 and 1.  

If I have 2 things, I have the option of choosing either, bracketed by choosing none and choosing all. 1 2 1.

If I have 3 things (picture a triangle), I have the option of choosing them one at a time (3), in pairs (3), bracketed by none (1 way to choose) and all (1 way to choose). 1 3 3 1.

If I have 4 things (picture a tetrahedron), I have the option of choosing them one at a time (4 vertices V), in pairs (6 edges E), three at a time (4 faces F) bracketed by none and all. 1 4 6 4 1. V + F = E + 2.

If I have 5 things (picture a tetrahedron with an added center point), I have the option of choosing them one at a time (5), in pairs (10), in sets of 3 (4 external facets + 6 internal vanes = 10), in sets of 4 (5 - always leaving one out).  None and all.  1 5 10 10 5 1. 

If I have 6 things (picture a full octahedron), I have the option of choosing them one at a time (6), in pairs (15), in sets of 3 (20), in sets of 4 (15), in sets of 5 (6), bracketed by none and all. 1 6 15 20 15 6 1.

No news here. These are the rows of Pascal's Triangle and a verbalization of the combinatorics involved in selecting k items from n.  What we're adding is a cloud of points but with structure (triangle, tetrahedron, half octahedron, octahedron...).  But look how the octahedron suggests more pairs than just its 12 edges. We have those connections directly across, pole to pole, XYZ, giving 15 total.

When we get to a half octahedron (an alternative to a tetrahedron with a vertex in the middle), we already have pairs (defining edges) that aren't edges in the original figure, meaning two square diagonals. 4 (to apex) + 4 (around the base) + 2 (crisscross) = 10.  

With the full octahedron, we have surface edges (4 + 4 + 4 = 12) but also the internal XYZ segments. 12 + 3 = 15.

Organizing the point cloud up through a cube (8 things) has its charm but I see no benefit from scaling the ladder of Euclidean dimensions as we go down the rows, talking about polytopes. n-D polytopes are pretentious at this juncture in my view, adding too much unnecessary overhead.

Reading right to left on each row is about how many things to omit.  Keep all but one in exactly as many ways as choosing one.  Keeping all but two gives the same number as choosing only two.  Hence the symmetry. Complementary readings.

The 2nd row, two ones, is a "take it or leave it" just like the other rows.  

With the top row, of one alone, there's no taking and no leaving.  There's no "or" and no "and".

"Realization of otherness" (awareness) begets the 2nd row, as now the observer has separated from the observed and has the "take it or leave it" option.  The option to simply ignore and forget does not materialize in the "only one" world of complete unconsciousness.

The observer, growing down through successive rows as experience multiplies, never loses the freedom to be choosy, once that light comes on.

When we get to a half octahedron, we already have pairs (defining edges) that aren't edges in the original figure, meaning two square diagonals. 4 (to apex) + 4 (around the base) + 2 (crisscross) = 10.  With the full octahedron, we have surface edges (4 + 4 + 4 = 12) but also the internal XYZ segments. 12 + 3 = 15.

Organizing the point cloud up through a cube (8 things) has its charm but I see no benefit from scaling the ladder of Euclidean dimensions as we go down the rows, talking about polytopes. n-D polytopes are pretentious at this juncture in my view, adding too much unnecessary overhead.

Reading right to left on each row is about how many things to omit.  Keep all but one in exactly as many ways as choosing one.  Keeping all but two gives the same number as choosing only two.  Hence the symmetry. Complementary readings.

The 2nd row, two ones, is a "take it or leave it" just like the other rows.  

With the top row, of one alone, there's no taking and no leaving.  There's no "or" and no "and".

"Realization of otherness" (awareness) begets the 2nd row, as now the observer has separated from the observed and has the "take it or leave it" option.  The option to simply ignore and forget does not materialize in the "only one" world of complete unconsciousness.

The observer, growing down through successive rows as experience multiplies, never loses the freedom to be choosy, once that light comes on.

Civil Rights

My rant against gerontocracy (which flirts with idiocracy) turned out to be timely, as various events reminded people that the organizers of our little conflagration are angry oldsters with complexes. Russian and Ukrainian youth are in dreams deferred mode, whereas US youths aren’t facing a draft at least.  There’s empathy all around for the subjugated youth at the hands of tyrannical geriatrics.

During militaristic times, advances in civil rights bog down, because the people freeze into military hierarchies, become top down. Bottom up reforms get stymied as the commanders get bossy and send grunts to the front. If you had wanted more egalitarian democracy and more privileges and rights for both minors and adults alike, then outward war was misbegotten.

We’re looking at the civil right, the human freedom, to not be abused by ideologues who believe it’s their job to hatch and execute plans for all the rest of us. We’re the extras. If you’re not of a mind to be stuffed in a nasty old tank and sent into some stupid old fashioned tank battle, I understand. You’d rather not have your life ruined by morons, I get it.

I’m not typecasting all old people as misguided. A lot of them live according to obsolete thought patterns, true, but oldsters also have more hindsight, more experience, and in many cases more time to ponder and rethink. A good way to get out from under gerontocracy is to listen to oldsters telling how. Remember how MAD magazine used to leak the secrets of PR gurus (ad men, mad men of Madison Avenue), making allies among kids like me, just starting across the minefield of adulthood.