Planet of the Humans

I started watching this right about the end of Earth Day 2020, near midnight in my Asylum District zip code.

The thesis is sort of:

We the innocents, the sheeple, the dupes, have been led by our corporate masters to bow down before faux green-washed altars to our own virtue, as planet saviors, while behind behind the curtain, they're using a diesel generator.  

Like picture an Earth Day sound stage, that they tell you is all solar and wind powered, all brought to you by renewables, but then actually they're burning wood chips, because forests are green aren't they?  And renewable (they grow back).  Either wood chips or natural gas, the latest craze (cleaner than coal if you don't mind fracking).

Meanwhile, solar and wind are hardly a panacea, as we don't have enough storage capacity to level off peak demand.

We don't talk about any smart house solutions with the battery on the client side (if you've got wind, charge your own batteries).

Either way, the battery making process is ugly and takes lots of fossil fuel.

The imagery is designed to frighten and dismay its audience with evidence of its huge carbon footprint, as it's called, and we go back to something between overpopulation as the problem, and people living in gross, ostentatious ways, people that look pretty much like us.

Nothing new there, the rhetoric since the 1970s at least.  A lot of the doomsayers didn't expect us to reach 2020 in fact.

We're really going to have to stop driving so much as commuters, and take a hard look at where the energy is going to come from.  Even an electric car is not a soul saver.

As someone who enjoys mega-projects and large scale engineering, I'm not especially dismayed by all that dismaying footage, but of course the highest technology in the picture is always nature's.  We humans are hers, after all.

Destroying nature's technology to make way for more technology doesn't always look that smart if we're serious about investment banking (science fiction, screenwriting).  We know how it is with  those humans: you can't trust 'em to do what's right, because they're greedy little buggers who like to dress up and drive fancy cars.

Even Al Gore, and that 350 guy, got greedy and sold us out.  They all sell out.

Damn them.  Damn us.

The Planet of the Apes ending, where we regret our stupid ways, is likewise sadly tragic.  We've really made monkeys of ourselves.

I look at that Planet of the Apes imagery myself in School of Tomorrow, and think "we are devo" in a lot of ways (overspecialized and so on). As Bucky liked to say:  Darwin got it backwards.

via GIPHY

FNB World (Food Not Bombs)

You'll find lots about FNB in these Quaker journals of mine, as I participated as a food hauler, with bicycle and one or two trailers, and as a cook. Later, as a vet, I'd just show up and eat, chatting with some from the old cast (e.g. Satya) while meeting newcomers.

Now that we're practicing new distancing rules and so on, I'm guessing the online manuals, the basis for the organization, are out of date.  Whether the continuing momentum (inertia) goes forward with the same name or not is a matter of semantics I suppose.  Perhaps some manuals have been updated.

I just unfroze some tofu from my last FNB meet up, pre isolation protocol, and although I was skeptical of its texture, Leela (aka Lindsey in former chapters) texted it was pretty OK this way.  I just fried some up and added like some soy sauce (I think that's what it is, unlabeled), and hey, it soaks stuff up nicely, like bread.

I'll be done with my frozen burritos shortly.  I munched on one of those on camera (see Youtube channel) awhile back, sounding a little sorry for myself because no one wanted to join me in my Geometry World (like Minecraft in some ways).

But these are actually pretty good burritos, even if unfrozen.

Rescuing the Concentric Hierarchy

beacon

A question from a reader was "what good is the concentric hierarchy beyond being like a pretty picture?" referring of course to the Bucky Fuller geometry I yak about a lot.

What if it is just a "pretty picture" meaning a sub-language featuring Platonics, their combinations and duals, with translated "volume" and "area" concepts to equivalents computed slightly differently?

By "sub-language" I mean a subclass of language semi-intelligible to other non-native speakers. Mathematics would be a set of many such sub-languages, but so would be various shoptalks and philosophies that may contain maths, but aren't themselves purely maths.

Synergetics is one such sub-class language, one of those philosophies that contains a geometric framework, namely said concentric hierarchy with a rhombic dodecahedron of volume six and so forth.  The pretty picture.

Should we teach a philosophy containing a pretty picture?  Is that a question about moral imperatives?  Is this an "ought" question?

Perhaps it's more like a question to tour guides.  We discover this abandoned old section of the museum and wonder if we should open it to the public.

The incentive to open might be to bring in more foot traffic, but what if that's not really a goal?  One assumes a museum has a sense of self preservation, but "museum" might not be the right model.

I suppose the counter-question is:  what have we got to lose in teaching it, given it goes down smoothly for the most part and needn't take a huge amount of time?  Why not swallow the pill, if it does no harm?

That's probably the question then.  We're still trying to judge harm.  Or is it that we've swallowed the pill already, and now are finding some of our practices coming under a different kind of scrutiny?  The ordeal of morphing to adapt to the cosmos is not one Synergetics begets, so much as anticipates.

I think if we'd swallowed the pill already, we'd see more symptoms, such as more Youtube clips featuring said concentric hierarchy.  The evidence is more that a tiny subculture keeps the sub-language alive, like one of those native or indigenous languages on the verge of extinction.

Be that as it may, the question remains:  should the anthropology or sociology museum allow or encourage tourism in this area?  Or maybe it's an art museum?  Does the concentric hierarchy constitute art?  We asked the same questions around Flextegrity.  That Tensegrity is art, and widely excepted as such, is encouraging.

I'm thinking Synergetics, and the pretty picture it contains, "hangs by a thread" and that thread is Tensegrity.

Given the art world has accepted the latter, there's a good chance it will accept the former, in due time.  In fact we've seen signs of that already, in exhibits subsequent to the publication of Synergetics, including notably Lattice Gallery in Portland, Oregon, October - December on SE Broadway.

But also at the Whitney in New York, and the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art (2009).

Citizen Diplomacy

I suppose the idea of "global citizen" sounds hokey as it never had any legal meaning, even if the UN Declaration of Human Rights underlined the self evident:  that human beings matter above and beyond the hokey melodramas they're made to star in.  They're a phenomenon of Nature, it sounds silly to point out, I realize.  We trash Nature, and are taught to laugh about it.

Anyway, enough moralizing. The point here is that of course a diplomatic crew, by job description, is acquiring and communicating intelligence about the terrain it traverses, in service of T4P and whatever sponsoring commercial carrier.  Nothing to stigmatize here, or get upset about.  There's no point screaming "espionage" when you're simply doing what everyone expects of you.

Gathering intelligence is a part of your business and way of adding value, which doesn't mean you just wander off over private property trying to ferret out secrets.  You become privy by being invited, and by proving trustworthy with the information (which sometimes means sharing it, perhaps without attribution to an original source, per the journalistic code of ethics).

Prowling around in the ambassador's office after hours, with a flashlight, is more private detective work than diplomatic. We need not confuse roles.  Not that diplomats can't be sneaky, or good at prying loose clues.  However our truckers have to get on to the next check point or place of business.  The analytical picture will develop from multiple reports.

The diplomat is familiar with "official channels" which is where the official truck stops come in. You'll have approved ways to be on panels, give talks.  If you've got a pet peeve, expect a track for that, if only the hallway track and ad hoc interest rooms.  Geeks bring their "unconferencing skills" to the table (thinking Barcamps, OS Bridge and so on).

Yes, there is government presence.  Why wouldn't there be?

Consistency and safety checks happen.

These are not "anything goes" hubs (these rucker havens, these asylum cities) of no discipline.  On the contrary, keeping a busy world hub going, with truckers coming and going, requires a tight ship to some extent. Think of a well run airport (PDX comes to mind).

That's not to say R&R is out of bounds either.  Even tight ships may have their cinemas and swimming pools.  Counter-culture cultures abound.  Diversity happens.  The cosmos is cosmopolitan. Truck stops may have dance and theater, in many languages.

For those just joining us, the year is 2030, lets say, and truckers have become accustomed to freelancing on a global basis, which doesn't mean without loyalties.  You may be your own business and still have a preferred list of customers, or a list of "goods" you would like to not be complicit in handling, plus you're not for being deceived.

Some drivers, let's say the better ones, won't transport poached animal products on principle and even advertise this fact.

At the core of our Global Trucking Network (GTN) is the network of Truck Stop Hubs (TSHs), which have evolved quite a bit from their early days along the Federal freeways (the I-system) of North America.

Those freeways still require a lot of maintenance, even with the "zombie truck" fleets (what we've also called "driverless") but then so are trains (e.g. subways) often robotic and just as intermodal.

Global University talk is a jargon and paints us all as students and faculty, we know that.  Long ago, specialization took specific forms, such as in Victorian England.  Some people were aristocratic and tea-cuppy, while others did so-called "dirty jobs" that needed doing, amidst many that were largely unnecessary.

Trucking stayed necessary, even unto the Era of Extreme Automation (people argue on when that started).  The class associations that used to set off university people as distinct from truckers, didn't survive the transition to a next century.

In addition to performing as students and faculty, we engage in maintenance, admin, janitorial and security.  Thanks to work-study, all jobs are part of some academic program or other.  You may certify as a black belt in some, a newbie in others.

The Quakers thought a lot in terms of nominations and rotating duties.  Your community would provide you with opportunities to become well-rounded, an investment in pooled abilities.

In that spirit, I've been focusing on trucking as a citizen diplomat activity.   You'll find some of my writings on Medium.

Yakking About Curriculum Matters

My impression is IB math (EU curriculum) is more likely to feature 3D vectors with rotation matrices i.e. stays geometric longer.

The YouEssIans (USians) go for that "geometry sandwich" with two slices of Algebra for bread. David DiNucci showed me an article about that.

The meat (10th grade geometry it's often called) is very thin, in the sense of planar. Mr. Euclid is milked for his proof of the proof concept, and meanwhile we're not "wasting time" with 3D printing or CAD renderings.

A lot of people are getting nervous about Shop and real tool use. Weren't schools supposed to teach about trades too? That's where a more hands-on geometry with SQL practice, in storing and retrieving the vectors, face topology, might help.

Milo Gardner suggests the big chunk of Euclid traces to political agendas to suppress all things German. Gauss and Number Theory needed less airtime. However along this same "lambda calc" track that'd feature SQL and real tool use, we'd put more about crypto. Number Theory is back on the front burner, along with Fermat's Little Theorem and Carmichael Numbers.

The Climate Change "Hoax"

"Climate change" is a hoax not because the climate isn't changing. Planet Earth has been completely transformed by its human inhabitants.  That's obvious.

Look at all the new, exotic radioactive elements in the environment, the plastics, the changed gas mix, the cities, the dammed rivers, space junk, the landfills.  Look at the sheer volumetric weight of human beings as a species.

Still not as much mass as termites, all told?  Add the weight of the buildings, the pavement.  Of course the planet has changed, and continues to change, thanks to human activity.

The hoax part inheres in singling out one parameter, such as global average temperature, and/or the percentage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and pretending that's the one variable that matters, when it comes to talking about this isolated "climate" concept.

Were we to talk about the "biosphere" instead, there'd be no argument.  But "climate" is something narrow, relating to ozone, ice ages and greenhouse gases.

Even though it's obvious that human activity continues to change the biosphere, debates rage, because we're fixated on global sea levels.  The number of species may be plummeting, the Amazon jungle dwindling, but if sea levels stay the same, well then climate change must be an illusion.  Ridiculous no?

I'm not that trusting of a "climate science" that tries to carve out a narrow niche and reduce itself to merely academic debates. 

We're just minutes away from a nuclear holocaust, on any given day, but somehow that's not the business of climate scientists.  Even though a nuclear holocaust would grossly alter our life support systems aboard Spaceship Earth.

A climate science that's not about preventing nuclear war, is not a serious science at all.

American Heritage (MATH)

I tip my hat to the Yang campaign (impressive) at the end of my talk.

Note to self: timeline slightly backward, as the Bucky Symposium at GWU was before the Python conference (Pycon).

I did get to visit with Ed -- including in Georgetown, and take that picture in my blog post: Ayatollah of the Tetrahedron -- but I had to bow out of the ensuing Python conference (Pycon) where I'd been scheduled to talk (on hypertoons).

Ed and I had planned a next dinner, but that one I had to miss. Dawn had just received her diagnosis.

Asylum District Lore

SuperBowl Sunday

I don't know if SuperBowl is really CamelCase, but as a Geek it makes sense to capitalize in that way. We have our ethnic idiosyncrasies too, after all.

I wasn't really expecting to catch the Super Bowl, in that I hadn't scheduled it, but on the other hand I'm a regular at a certain Asylum District "krobar" (a generic for me, Cork & Tap is the legal name) and the game was already in the thrilling 4th quarter.  Kansas City was down, and our dinosaur-friendly bartender is from there.  When they came back to win it, she was ecstatic, which was fun to witness.

Glenn was there to my right.  Dr. D. was on vacation from what we call HH, although that could mean HopHouse (nearby) and HH is all day when the krobar is open.  Cross-eyed crossword puzzling?  Crypticism creeps into American Lit through other sources besides me I'd hazard.

Speaking of "hazard", the Daisy Duke in Dukes of Hazard should not be confused with Patty Duke, who married "Gomez" in The Addams Family.  Patty Duke was a celebrity on the HDTV on an earlier evening, where old game shows are a staple when the SuperBowl isn't showing.  The other screen is always sports.

Then you might think of Daisy Mae, funny how these may all blend together.  Americans' "hillbilly" archetype is a part of the infusion.  I'm not planning to offer any exhaustive treatment here.

Daisy Dukes (safe search setting on, DuckDuckGo) were a type of cut-off popular with some "guys" (gender neutral), a fashion statement.

That's right, we analyze popular culture a lot, as we sip our various brews.

This time, on SuperBowl Sunday, I decided to stick with three consecutive 10 oz. ciders, a blood orange (blew the keg), the replacement peach-raspberry (tint of Vicks candy), and the a sour raspberry, which is really a beer but with cidery overtones.  I was one of the last to cash out.

Today on the day job (OCN) I'm able to apply Miller-Rabin (not a beer) to the problem of filtering out what aren't Mersenne Primes. School of Tomorrow is showing off again, trying to recruit high schoolers into an alternative PWS (home-schooling environment).

World Game Museum Exhibit

link

American Literature Versus Student "Debt"

Of course a truly patriotic president would permanently ban shipping lethal weapons to the front in any outward fight against Russia, and let Ukraine / Russia repair their relationship.

The president needs to stay focused at home, where parasites like Raytheon, Halliburton/KBR, Lockheed Martin, have bankrupted the country, both financially and morally.

Bucky Fuller, a true patriot engineer for social responsibility, took the United States off the hook in the 1980s (and got a Medal of Freedom for so doing), i.e. all this cost plus for profit privatized Murder Inc. going forward would not be the USA at all, just a fake news imposter phony (USA LLC), which the clueless Americans salute every day, pretending their allegiance.

The true loyalists took Uncle Sam off line in the 1980s, keeping his iconography safely blameless for what followed in the name of the American people. A global network of corporate persons (aka GRUNCH) seized control and went blithely ahead with their naked emperor "presidents". Who wants to be the next naked emperor working for "the man"?

Little Women (movie review)

We went to this on request of my sister, visiting from Whittier.  I'm glad she was into it, as I learned a lot from this film, looking through my Anthropology lense especially.  Long movie.  Carol had to go, once we got out, and that's when I learned about the murder plot the Secretary of State was involved in, along with POTUS. Back to the Twilight Zone (oblivion).

I'd never read the book Little Women, and decided to keep myself in the dark until showtime.  I recognized Emma Watson right away, the grownup Hermione of Harry Potter fame.  Her performance was brilliant as was the acting overall.  Speaking of Harry Potter, this was around the time its author came under fire, for some tweets or like that. I wasn't distracted.

These vivacious women had few prospects, when it comes to owning property and achieving financial security, absent a man, are busy doing whatever they might to cultivate their social virtues, as pianists, painters, or even writers.  I started thinking about Dora Marsden.

The writing profession has been especially closed to women, especially if we're talking tabloids or more lurid pulp fiction.  Women writing under their own names were supposed to keep it genteel. Tea-cuppy Victorian puritanism kept the bolder women running brothels, as the class conscious aunt pointed out.

We left reminded, by the end, that we're in some happy ending fiction, a bound book, whereas the author, one of the characters, is likely not exactly like her avatar in the story.  I'd need to read a biography of the actual author of Little Women to figure out the differences.  I'm going to leave that as an exercise for the reader, including me.

Some weeks after seeing this movie, during the crisis which followed Obnoxico's bad chess (Pompeo et al), I discovered Swiss philosopher Alain de Botton and his mocking attitudes towards Romanticism.  Ironically, a world wherein women were more economically empowered, would likely be more romantic, as relationships would be less "of necessity" or "of convenience".  That being said, many of the pitfalls associated with romanticism, as characterized by Alain, deserve the bright light of critical scrutiny.

I'm not saying Little Women is about preaching romanticism, it's not a corny comedy in that way.  I saw the movie in a more feminist light, and wished these sisters had more prospects.  Hollywood would come later. 

The US never did pass the Equal Rights Amendment, another nail in the coffin as far as some of us were concerned.  Lets hope future operating systems might serve us better, including those with Stars & Stripes decals.  In the meantime, we're stuck with a lot of phony baloney.

Holding It Together: Mnemonics for 2020

Ongoing Wanderers Conversations

Now that Yahoo! Groups is no longer archiving our Wanderers discussions, some of the same threads have meandered over to Facebook, where they gain a different audience.

Here's an example from recent weeks:

Kirby Urner Terry Bristol in this one I give the cosmologists the benefit of the doubt and accept a "heat death of the universe" scenario. Even so, after making that concession (for the sake of diplomacy if nothing else), there's still no justification in physics for the world "going downhill" in the near term. Using "heat death" scenarios to justify poor management is merely farcical, not tragic, and involves extrapolating a misbegotten Malthusianism, coupled with Social Darwinism. I bet Romer would agree.

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• Terry Bristol The universe is NOT running down. The supposed low entropy beginning is 'impossible to explain – if all processes are entropy increasing. Suggest watching my summer talk in Russia: How the Elements came to be as they are, July 28th, 2019, Mendeleev 150, St. Petersburg
  https://youtu.be/fKWLoBOZUtw

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  Kirby Urner Only some processes are entropy increasing, not all, in everyday thermodynamics e.g. planet Earth considered as an open system could as easily be syntropic as entropic. To what extent is that difference up to responsible engineering? What difference do the humans make, if any?
  
  As to whether the universe is ultimately running down, even were we to concede that as a debating maneuver, I would still argue that this has nothing to do with the fate of our Earth for the next million years at least.

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Nobody for Education President

I'm not getting that anyone wants to be the "education president" this election year cycle.  That was a Bush Sr. thing, having come off serving as Reagan's veep.  He wanted to lead us towards the thousand dots of light.

I feel I've learned quite a bit about the veep position, thanks to revisiting Nixon's tenure under president Eisenhower.  That's where Nixon developed his friendship with the various bosses, including Howard Hughes if I'm not mistaken.

A lot of antipathy towards the Castro takeover of Cuba kept building momentum, to where JFK would get the ball.

Back to "education president": those of us in the open source movement (where I take "free software" to be a hard kernel) projected the new accessibility, thanks to lower price, of computing environments, would transform middle and high school mathematics teaching.

SQL would merge with vector graphics.  Polyhedrons would be stored in, and retrieved from, a database, as a routine class exercise.

None of that happened to the extent we expected, as computer science was expected to fend for itself in the harsh turf war jungle.

My idea to go with "lambda" (λ) versus "delta" (Δ) calculus, to stand for computer science versus the older calculus track (each a "calc" of a kind), hadn't yet gained much traction, maybe never would.

Case in point:  a Linux box such as FreeGeek was giving to volunteer recyclers, running Python... or lets say a Raspberry Pi... both already have a tiny SQL machine included, as a part of the "batteries included" Python Standard Library, in the form of sqlite3.

We've had a whole generation go by and maybe some elite prep schools reflecting the new realities. The world needs social engineering, long feared and/or satirized as a bugaboo, but how can we deny the engineering component of designing for a better society?

I'm not surprised the game in my region is keeping current with China | Asia as the trend setter.  True, the Pacific Rim has been like that for awhile.  Japanese culture has strong roots on my town of Portland (Oregon) as well.

Getting more "SQL tea" infusions going in the Silicon Forest is perhaps not the same uphill battle others might face, in less technophile-dominated areas.  We understand engineering has converged with the bureaucracy in the world of operating systems, networking, project management.  Government is not just for lawyers anymore (or perhaps what it means to "program" is changing).

I've not given up on the math-programming hybrid as you might discern from my Youtube channel.

However, I've been over on the PATH side more than STEM recently, working on our bridge over the C.P. Snow chasm (know the one?). Philosophy Anthropology Theater History.  Theater encompasses rhetoric and politics.  Anthropology encompasses architecture and art, and so of course appears likewise in STEAM.  A lot of you know of this wordplay.

Having a philosophy you're clear about, able to defend and explain, is often helpful when it comes to prioritizing STEM projects, either for oneself or others.  People may not share your priorities, but will nevertheless be glad to know what yours are.

Gestalts Matter (School of Tomorrow)

"I've been meddling in the election, as a voter, as a citizen..."

We're looking back at April, 2018 as well.

The IVM (a space frame) Meets Rust (a language)

Harkening back to OSCON 2019, I'm diving into Rust again, a new fast-growing state of the art computer language.  Or rather, the community of Rust-fluent is fast-growing, whereas Rust is showing signs of stabilizing, much as Python has.  I'm told it inherits from ML, a favorite in the compsci crowd.

I grew up doing non-commercial programming for nonprofits, mostly, though the doctor practice took some initiative in sharing our work with commercial developers.  A real heart surgeon, working closely with a talented programmer (ahem), using Visual FoxPro, could fly around the country showing something battle-tested in CVOR.  No one had anything like it.  People thought I might be standing to make a lot of money, but I was just a consultant for Sisters of Providence, one of Oregon's biggest employers.

This was all before Python even existed, at least in my consciousness, nor did Python come bundled with a core developer supported GUI toolkit.  Guido got some DARPA funding to make Tk/tcl the GUI default, thanks to the tkinter module.  Later DARPA funded the Anaconda team to mainstream Spyder, built not on tcl ("tickle") but Qt ("cute").

Anyway, Rust is coming over the horizon and I have a golden application in the form of quadrays, an alternative vector class that uses the same traits for an interface, in terms of addition, subtraction, scalar multiplication and so on as ordinary XYZ vectors.  You could think of (4, 3, 1, 0) as simply an alternative representation of a corresponding set of XYZ coordinates.  That's what I'm using Rust to figure out.

(base) Kirbys-MacBook-Pro:quadrays mac$ cargo run

   Compiling quadrays v0.1.0 (/Users/mac/rust/projects/quadrays)

    Finished dev [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 10.22s

     Running `target/debug/quadrays`

q_a.a = 1

q_a.b = 0

q_sum.c = 1

q_sum.b = 1

xyz coords = [0.0, 0.0, 0.7071067811865475]

xyz coords for (4, 3, 1, 0)  = [0.0, 0.7071067811865475, 2.1213203435596424]

The XO's OK Iconography

Making Math Memes

The Joker (movie review)

:: Gotham ::

I've noticed the drop-off in the frequency of my movie reviews, and in my blog posts more generally. In part that's explained by my shifting a lot of weight to Youtube in the interim.  I'm developing skills in a different medium.  My first impulse, after seeing The Joker, was to talk to Youtube about it.

What to single out about Gotham is Gotham itself.  This is a living breathing archetype, so familiar, and so recent past.  Some middle aged might not be used to seeing their adulthood reality cast in such a steely, otherworldly light, as the flickering dream of some past, as seen from a dark ride (like boats floating by dioramas). VCRs, VHS, answering machines... a lot of us are still using that stuff.

The Joker is again all stereotypes and archetypes.  Yes, of course he works as a clown, where as a tragic figure he struggles to stay comic.  The viewer is meanwhile seeking to get the genre.  Is this even a batman film?  In my Youtube review, I keep saying it isn't, while referring to it as the batman film.  It's a film about how Gotham could only have a crazy core, given the despair of urban misery.

The Joker (Arthur) can't help but laugh.  He has a rare form of mental illness that makes him laugh uncontrollably, a kind of turrets.  Or so they say.  We see and hear an animal suffering, and he comes to realize too, that he is so much more a victim than he thought at first.

In Gotham, everything goes from bad to worse, if you're the clown people kick when they're down.

Didn't Salvador Dali report something similar?  He suffered from uncontrollable laughing fits for at least a week or two in his autobiography, which I recall studying in a coffee shop, over a sequence of visits.

The Joker's reality is likewise surreal, but not enjoyable (Dali seemed to be having some fun at least). The twists in this Oedipal Story are twisted, but that's the whole point with Oedipus (that it's twisted).  We're not really going against the grain of Western Culture; we're near its screwed up center.

Are we in the Matrix, or is this Zion?  Is there a difference?  The marriage of heaven and hell.

The class consciousness uprising that the Joker inadvertently sparks, is what brings the Joker himself to higher self awareness.  He does exist, after all.

He's going to break the fourth wall and burst onto the public stage he sees on television.  However it's likewise television that lures him in, Through the Looking Glass style.

In my Youtube I'm raising the dead, one might put it, in bringing up Marshall McLuhan.  What would he say about "hot" versus "cold"?  That Gotham is chill?