Western Metaphysics

More Escapism

RT_E

RT_T

Both RTs have a unit radius IVM ball inside, but only the RT_T is small enough to let it poke through. The RT_E enwraps the uni-ball completely, its body-center to face-center radius matching that of the ball's exactly.

The workflow or pipeline I'm employing is an old one for me, in operation since the 1990s, using POV-Ray the whole time as my final rendering engine, and Python behind the scenes to write the scene description language.

The above eight lines are sufficient to generate all of what's needed to get the above RT_T graphic. Note the 0.9994 which students of Synergetics also learn as an algebraic expression.

A question I get is what does it all mean? 

I usually say it means we have a ladder in spatial geometry for becoming more advanced at CAD (computer aided design). 

Fluency in right-brained spatial imagery is an end in itself, or one could say a skill that comes in handy along many walks of life. 

The ladder is accessible to middle and high school level students, with elementary school segments as well (e.g. All Sixth Grade Assembly).

At the college level, we're talking about America's leading positive futurist, getting smeared and then memory-holed by the Grunch, a monster he helped to foster. 

The fight isn't over however. As Bucky spelled out in Grunch of Giants, a mytho-poetic and prophetic work, the front lines run through our colleges and universities, with some presidents having the guts to allow deeper dives among faculty, in response to student demand. We want our positive future back.

The Global U is coming together, helping to fill the power vacuum left by a fading nation-state system, with the Middle East already in the blender. 

Even as I write this, we're seeing Bibi quit the UN after lecturing legacy diplomats about how he's surrounded by non-nations he doesn't believe in (Jordan, Lebanon...), mere lines in the sand, against a backdrop of targeted explosions and terrorism among the well-armed paramilitary gangs. 

The political data layer is in turmoil, as people try to wrap their heads around the new post nation-state status quo that pertains therein. These gangs help themselves to factory-fresh inventory, amassed and allocated under the cover of nation-state decals, as politicians on the take grease the skids. That inventory proliferates and propagates in a free market, as economists predicted it would.

That means Refugee Planet is here, and is going to need more asylums, places for people to go who aren't wanting to participate in all the outward violence. 

Even soldiers, most of them economic refugees themselves, stuck far from home thanks to low living standards, are not always on board with the oligarchic mafiosi. 

Getting bossed around by privatized criminal syndicates takes some getting used to. One must overcome any sense of patriotism or honor.

Prompt:  Uniformed soldiers and other economic refugees from many countries gather in a playful Epcot-like village featuring high tech yurts and electric ATV vehicles.

Oval Office

Prompt:  The White House tour guide explains to tourists, by pointing to a diagram, how the Oval Office is meant to resemble the human skull in cross section, a secret teaching about the inner president within each one of us, a secular picture of a high position with lots of overview and supervisory powers.

Safety Nets

 

AFSC Stuff

I worked with Martin for many years via AFSC here in Portland. Mostly I was a program clerk meaning the token titular Friend meant to help with the curriculum, which in our case was youth oriented and started out as a way to address tensions between two demographic groups in the high schools: Latinos and Asians. They had other names for one another. Our program was named LAAP (Latin American Asian Pacific program) or something like that.

Another role I played was as apprentice contributing editor for Asian Pacific Issues News published out of our Portland office. Towards the end, I was briefly editor in chief. This newsletter is today very hard to find, a collectors’ item. We used it as currency to exchange for similar newsletters from around the Pacific Rim. We’d all read each other’s stuff, synthesize and summarize, and recycle. Such is a media ecosystem.

Why was I doing all this stuff? I had my skill set as a curriculum developer and had been sent to Boston to learn from an AFSC youth program there, as well as to attend Daniel Ellsberg’s Manhattan Project 2.0, about cleaning up post the original Manhattan Project (at Hanford et al).

Later, I tried to adapt my AFSC ideas, successfully implemented in the form of LAAP, staffed by two directors, one Asian, one Latino, to a different clientele piggy-backing on Glenn Stockton’s dream of an Institute of Integral Design. Glenn had enough skills to impart and inventory to share to fill a “maker space” (a term he despised — “maker” sounded too crude maybe, for craftsman). I would encourage learning moviemaking (skills I’d also like for myself)

For a short time, Portland AFSC itself was casting about for new digs, and we brainstormed this next chapter together (we had a committee). But the days of our youth program were over, at least here in Portland, and people moved on. Martin and I went our own ways but stay in touch over Facebook. I’m considered an AFSC Alumni Network guy.

I did have another AFSC role I should mention: as representative of our Yearly Meeting (NPYM), I was tasked with flying back to Philadelphia for annual corporation meetings. I’ve written a lot about those corporation meetings elsewhere, including when chronicling My Dinner with Kiyoshi (see comments).

Invective

Partly why my Pirate Party wants the USG to take more responsibility for schooling its own future officials, is leaving it to prep schools has been a bad idea by many measures. 

You get too many of these Elon Musk types who seem to assume their high status in life is God-given and well deserved, and that's why it's their burden to take the rest of us over some cliff or other. 

Victoria Nuland comes to mind, or Condoleezza Rice, or Madeleine Albright. I don't look up to these peeps as intellectually suited to their roles. But they managed to pull strings and get plumb positions, too bad for world history, looking back. Not to only pick on women: Jake Sullivan, Antony Blinken... total disasters, from a USG point of view.

I think if the USG had boarding school opportunities starting for kids of a young age, not dependent on personal means or family finances, that we might groom (not a bad word) a cadre (not a bad word either) a cohort of future diplomats who were actually good at their jobs for a change, because of their well-conceived educations.

One obvious symptom of our weak privatized system is that big publishing can't turn on a dime, or even take off from a runway a mile long. The inertia is just too much to overcome. 

So whereas we should have been talking about America's greatest futurist subversive, Bucky Fuller, in the same pantheon as Martin Luther King, the only TV we got was either maudlin mourning or poking fun. Cry or laugh, neither serious.

NPR did a really terrible job with the Bucky narrative, botching the story completely. Given the high "spoiled brat" index of the people working there, that's not surprising. 

They didn't get any "Bucky math" in prep school and so assume there's no there there. That's the arrogance that comes with thinking your teachers really knew their stuff. Question authority more?

Anyway, I'm glad at least a few schools are showing promise this fall season (you know who you are) and we have some talent in the pipeline. 

In the meantime, we'll put up with Imposter Syndrome and pretend the USG exists, even though it doesn't for the time being. Uncle Sam is quite dead. In his place: the corporate version: shallow, vapid, devoid of real brains. A zombie. 

Patriots underground work on a next version of USA OS.

I just saw Beetlejuice Beetlejuice at the Bagdad last night (crowded!), which might explain why I'm seeing Ghost House tropes in real life. The focus of that movie is phoniness versus what's really real. The difference may get pretty thin. 

When you've lost integrity as a being, a lot of automaticity kicks in and you find your life filling up with involuntary unfree responses. You start lip synching the party line and marching to the groupthink drummer.

Martian Math (update)

Martian Math has been heating up on the back burner. Now that it's "back to school" season, I'm pumping out the educational materials that any Silicon Forest teacher might need, to tell our history. 

Who was Doug Strain? How did his scenario overlap the AFSC's here in Portland (AFSC = American Friends Service Committee)? 

Answer: although Doug was a pacifist during WW2, a conscientious objector, he was not a Quaker, and yet he admired the work of the AFSC especially and so when Quakers needed a new meetinghouse, he helped arrange for that to happen, with AFSC gaining some office space in the process (from which it later moved).

That's Doug Strain of Electro-Scientific Instruments (ESI), one of our Silicon Forest parent companies.

Doug also funded the preservation and renovation of the boyhood home of Linus Pauling, thereby establishing a beloved landmark along Asylum Avenue (renamed Hawthorne Boulevard after said Asylum's head doctor), in the Asylum District where I live.

What I did today was add the above picture of AI King Hilbert (named for Hilbert Spaces) to the Storyboard: Martian Math album. I don't want my invisible army of Martian Math teachers (they might not call it that) to feel like I'm only catering to high schoolers and not taking it up to the college level.

When the Jesuits wanted to impress Chinese intellectuals with "best of the west" inventions, what came to mind was perspective painting, as perfected during the Renaissance. These canvases went hand-in-hand with another Jesuit-favored topic: the mnemonic arts. Memorize the floorplan of a public building, such as might be shown in a perspective painting, and create a VR experience wherein treasured memories could be represented as icons, and thereby organized on a "virtual desktop".

My understanding is the Chinese were skeptical that time-energy invested into realism was well spent, as paintings do not share the burden, later shared with photographs, of providing literal depictions of exactly what's present.

Without falling into a rift and debating these issues, I simply want to draw the analogy and say n-dimensional linear algebra is a technology around which humans are justly proud. They've made a lot of headway with their matrix-driven apparatus, including in the realm of metallurgy, where graphical processing units (GPUs) do matrix ops with blinding speed, allowing 30 frames a second and higher frame rates, computed in real time, within our computer games and simulations.

This pride will feed our willingness to devote considerable attention to conventional Hilbert Space presentations, in tandem with delving into the Martian stuff, with its four basis vectors at a mutual 109.47 degrees, ala the methane caltrop (molecular structure). CH4. 

Instead of XYZ and 3D space, we have the IVM and 4D space, but moving between the two has become smooth, owing to Qvector <-> Vector conversion algorithms. Qvectors are the 4-tuple "quadrays" used to map out the IVM, assigning unique whole number addresses to every CCP ball in the bunch.

Food Services (Global U)

When I want to model a minimal food setup, including for myself, I'm likely to think in terms of water (that's obvious) and Soylent, the white powder jokingly named, but also made of soy, so apropos.

In a place under siege, such as Gaza, it's not sufficient to have stockpiles of the powder, once the water goes bad. Brands like Nestles and Denali may come in too many small bottles, whereas the recipe at scale calls for tanker trucks.

What we hope and pray for, of course, are non-emergency situations. Two teams of scouts have agreed to a meetup, involving game equipment, say paintball, and for the duration of their engagement, canteens and or camelbacks of Soylent are all you get, in terms of nutrients. The point is to stay focused on the game and not get sidetracked into the intricacies of outdoor BBQ.

One may object to the cruelty of using humans as guinea pigs and I'd agree, assuming the collaboration of the humans in question is involuntary. In my own case, I'd go for days of only Soylent out of curiosity. Would my body die of boredom or send of signal flares in the form of cravings? I did not experience myself as self-hating. I was doing science.

What about pregnant women? Am I completely heartless?

Again, I'm more suggesting an approximation or simulation when it comes to Soylent, given the total calories per bag are easy to measure. 

We set up our Sims game "as if" they only eat Soylent, because we're in need of only so much realism, and no more. We keep the dry powder in sealed bags and add potable water as needed, at the point of service. 

Soylent users have been known to introduce alcohols at this point, to keep things lively and or to aid with sleep. If that's something we want to model, or experience for ourselves, that's an option. Again, coercion need play no part in this. I'm free to opt out.

Colluding on Confinement

When it comes to writing the historical accounts, I think we'll find it interesting that the Americans were calling for "a cease fire" but not for "an evacuation" even though Gaza was rubble by then, unlivable, outbreaks of polio.

 
Sure, it's an "open air prison" but you've gotta stay put, because we, the hand-wringers, the pearl clutchers, say so. Talk about collusion on genocide!

 
Obviously the denazification program was never completed in the American mindset. Ukrainians and Bosnians, even Syrians, got to leave the war zone. Palestinians though: they're supposed to love bygone olive groves so much that they'll put up with any amount of carnage. Stay in the cage with the rabid dog kids! They're nostalgic at gunpoint.

If I were a Palestinian, I'd use my sovereignty to get the hell out of there and never return. I'd have the right of return, but I wouldn't use it. Who wants to go back to a hellhole Americans worship as "a holy land"? Not me. I'll take New Jersey over Gaza any day of the week. But wait, I have no sovereignty, that's the whole problem. I'm supposed to just stay here and get bombed while the Americans fret and act stupid (what they're best at).

XREF:
Gazans to Guantanamo?

City of Morons

Why We Fight (movie review)

Drone Fun

I got some valuable drone training in, on my latest visit to the XRL facility, more a prototype in being farm bound, rural, but hardly eXtremely Remote. Mostly flat farmland is a perfect setting for drone training.

Given GST’s immersion into Active Inference, I was quick to appreciate the “sensory input” versus “action output” model, with a Markov blanket wrapping that me-ball self, controlling the aircraft. I brought that up with the Institute during the most recent Coda session, and sure enough, the “drone model” as already well developed, in the Julia programming language.

However Markov comes up in another way where drone action is concerned. Quadcopters easily take the place of “sea turtles” in those “random walk” demonstrations. When only the present position counts, in terms of imparting momentum going forward, then notions of randomness come into play, as what we have is always a probability distribution, perhaps sharp, perhaps diffuse. Markov chains enter the picture, along with some history of Russian greats.

Those sea turtles, you may recall, all start at (0,0,0,0) but then each picks from twelve options, or thirteen if “staying put” is an option. Role the dice. To each option, a permutation of {2, 1, 1, 0}, there corresponds a hop through space to a neighboring zonohedron, with twelve compartments or “voxels” around each. Each hop is through a diamond faced center. We call them K-points, as they’re where the closest packed spheres “kiss”.

So the goal here is to have the drones hover in such a matrix, with illumination patterns signifying the wandering sea turtles, four of which make a tetrahedron. Drones light up or go dark depending on whether the corresponding zonohedron, conceptual only, would be occupied. Variations on that theme. I’ve cast the neutral buoyancy IVM nets in other action frames. In both cases we might take advantage of unique (a, b, c, d) whole number addressing for matrix positions.

An ideal gas may be modeled in a static moment as gas molecules in IVM positions, with random offsets, although you’ll likely put science mag editors in an uncomfortable position if you do that; “IVM” (or “isotropic vector matrix”) is verboten terminology within the sphere of capitalist realism. Don’t say “A-” or “B-particle” either, or risk accusations of promulgating “the BEAST” (a specific geometric vocabulary, considered 

GST Meets Neuroscience

:: enclosed enclosure ::

Whatever happened to GST after it featured in my science fiction as the planning discipline behind our Global Data Corporation, amalgamated outside "whiteman law"? In that form, it stayed on the periphery, affiliating itself with Synergetics, and thereby drawing us closer to Discordians and Subgenii, usually avoided by university faculties and prosperians, as too wild and risky for purely academic treatments.

Synergetics, in the meantime, got picked up by the Markov Blanket tribe, the Active Inference folks with their Bayesian brains. Markov membranes feature here in two contexts:

(a) nothing makes it to the future from the past but through the present (where change is made)

(b) the Markov blanket divides an inside from an outside in an agent-based model of any self + other

Yes (a) may be regarded as a truism, and (b) is likewise part of a framework, a setup, and one consistent with the Omnidirectional Halo pattern of No More Secondhand God. 

The Markov blanket, in this (b) case, encloses the neural network we like to probe, seek clues from, a black box in many respects, but also protective, like a skull casing, keeping our delicate modeling systems from damage by the rough and tumble outside. 

Sensory organs mediate between these two worlds (outer and inner), bringing in news. From that inner black box, full of unknown unknowns, then spring the agent's actions, responses to what's incoming, robotic and reflex-based, or perhaps thoughtful and considered, or maybe initiated from out of the blue. 

Our own models may find another's actions rather impossible to predict, or even our own may elude explanation sometimes. We rationalize, after the fact. 

Our models may adapt and improve, or get hot swapped (radically updated), over time.

In the older (a) sense, GST long included "edit/recombine" as shorthand for "value adding", a correlate of the old economics concept of "doing work". 

Incoming are all the "factors" that make up one's circumstances including a "free energy" allotment, so-called "disposable (or discretionary) income" i.e. what's left to a worker to work with in an uncompelled, not automatic manner.

We typically symbolize the incoming as a pie chart, with slices as mundane as air and water, in a temperature controlled space. Do we have bandwidth? What inventory? 

Outgoing is our performance, including all manner of communications: vocalizations, facial expressions, gestures of all kinds. Perhaps one paints, writes poetry, programs, plays roles in theater, all of the above. Perhaps one is a craftsman and makes beaded necklaces.

Neuroscience and computer science have knit themselves together rather inextricably, which stands to reason, given the cell-silicon interface is highly populated with busy devices, with more in the pipeline.

With machine and deep learning, we now have what we call "neural networks" on both sides of that same interface, with many analogies bridging the two flavors: chemical wetware versus software on hardware. 

Electrochemistry has bonded what at one time were separate disciplines.

Python: Still Relevant

This professor works in the same ballpark as I do: Python as applied to data science, Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL: a subtype of ML) in particular. However my bailiwick has been earlier in the pipeline, between data gathering and feeding said data to Machine Learning models. That includes: preliminary analysis, normalization, standardization, cleaning, reorganizing, visualizing.

Statisticians didn't have all these fancy ML tools until recently and their discipline up until then hasn't faded so much as abetted what has of late become center ring: deep learning. 

In practical terms, what used to be managed in spreadsheets (volatile) and databases (more secure) is now managed with a hybrid of the two: the programmable DataFrame. Bring your rows and columns into a single complex object, and work with it in code, rather than with fleeting mouse clicks or other unreplicable magic dust.

Why am I plugging Python in the philosophy blog? For many obvious reasons, but let's just say because the School of Tomorrow, powered by latter day American Transcendentalism (a kind of intuitionism), is using Python to yak up the 4D meme. Yes, I'm referring to Quadray Coordinates and so on, not to be confused with (x, y, z, w) coordinates within the hypercube, or Quaternions. Disambiguation is important at this point, or you'll get rather lost in the 4D jungle.

A less obvious reason: I think the philosophers' obsession with such as propositional calculus, ala Russell, Wittgenstein, Frege et al, was really about laying the groundwork for Turing and Von Neumann types to add the electronic dimensions. Logic meets circuit boards, giving us logic boards, and eventually the CPUs and GPUs we think about, and program, today. Philosophers should learn to program, in other words, if only to keep in touch with the atomic layer, the domain of Democritus.

Homer Davenport Festival

What may feel eerie, and more as an absence than a presence, is deja vu. What's absent is a secure memory which the current episode clearly resonates with, such as the last time one waited for the bus at this very stop. "Deja vu" is not the correct term in this situation, just as when I show up for work every morning, same bat time, same bat station, I don't say "deja vu!" unless maybe I'm trying to be funny.

My car trip with Derek (Deke the Geek) to Silverton this afternoon, was not so much deja vu as an opportunity to reminisce. Glenn Stockton and I had come to Silverton at least once before, to that building with the Norman Rockwell paintings, blown up big, outside. A community center, right? We passed it on the way out of town, after the lecture, and by way of Mt. Angel.

This time, the Gus Frederick lecture on Homer Davenport was in the Silver Falls Library, two doors down from the museum, which I thought about visiting, but what about the soundstage across the river? That was the more anomalous event. The museum is but an hour away by car, open weekends, from 1 to 4 pm. 

Once the lecture was over, around 3 pm, we decided to roam back over the wooden foot bridge to the soundstage, the festival booths, the rides. This was a family friendly beer-oriented festival, one of several to grace the region. Mt. Angle has a big one, in October. Here we were in early August, inaugurating the beer festival season. Not that either of us had any beer. We ended up not spending any money at all, only gas.

Who was Homer Davenport again? I've blogged about him before. He lived during a more civilized age, before the weapons got so much uglier, with psyches to match. We're safe in calling him a political cartoonist, but he was also an influencer, someone with a keen eye for the critical elements within some story of the day, in the public eye.

Davenport also did some "straight" journalism, meaning not so cartoonish, although still with the hand drawings, high quality and precise, because photography was still difficult to include in daily newspapers. In his younger years, he was sent to New Orleans to cover a prize fight featuring a native son of Silverton, who lost. In his older years, he had a front row seat at the Paris, France trial of Dreyfus, of Dreyfus Affair fame.

I filled in that hole in my knowledge, regarding that Dreyfus business, from another angle when viewing the French language film Antisémitismes, by Ilan Ziv. The Ziv documentary weaves together a number of threads, many of them on the theme of demonizing Jewish people as scapegoats or simply as uber-rich. In the case of Germany and Poland, one senses envy, mixed in with various other flavors of unconsciousness. 

Psychoanalysis was still a new science. The public was even less in control of projection as a psychological phenomenon, we may project.

Davenport's "He's Good Enough for Me" meme, starting with Uncle Sam saying that of Theodore Roosevelt (a campaign slogan), got picked up by others, to where one sees the British analog of Uncle Sam (John Bull) so saying of prime minister Balfour, of Balfour Declaration fame. 

These "synapses" are apt even today, in 2024, so many decades later, as life in the eastern Mediterranean region becomes less civilized than in Homer's day, around the time of the Chicago World's Fair, followed by Portland's Lewis & Clark Exposition. Homer was really into animals (as in nonhumans) and sometimes traveled with a whole menagerie, such as when exhibiting the family farm at said exposition, as part of a living diorama.

Working Out

You've probably had the same thought I have, when working out in the gym: gee, here's a lot of energy expenditure going nowhere, a lot of wasted watt-hours. One has fantasies of hooking those exercycles directly to the power grid, at least the building one, and keeping the lights on or something. Those espresso machines take power.

A better solution for some demographics, a Venn Diagram intersection of identity components: age, gender, occupation, current state of health, set goals, expected outcomes, is probably doing housework. This way, you'll kill multiple virtual birds with one stone, reaching moving and standing goals, while adding negative entropy to your space.

If you're anything like me, a guy with internal real estate (several rooms, basement, attic, detached garage), then housework is an endless spigot of chores of varying size and duration, and I'm not only counting or thinking about stereotypical "guy work" just because I'm a male.

I'm talking about vacuuming, sorting books, dusting, excavating old storage piles periodically and recycling their contents from inventory. That all takes work and also hand-eye coordination. 

On the other hand, enough tasks are repetitive to permit daydreaming, and its within these structured daydreams that we plan out what to do next. Unless, that is, you want to surrender your daydreaming time to the studios. Sometimes that's a refreshing alternative, given how professional daydreamers know their business.

Let's set the actual physical tasks aside for a moment and suggest that no matter what your line of work, there's some way to plan your workflow ahead of time. 

As with exercising in the gym, "mental muscles" come in groups (work together) and get tired with overuse (a tautology almost). 

Your faculties benefit from a round robin approach, a spiral staircase, wherein you upgrade gently and gradually when you can, which doesn't close the door on relatively more jarring overhauls and stress tests.

Workout-aholics know to come in with a "lesson plan" or "to do list" and it will likely involve a well-planned sequence of "stations", meaning exercise machines each with a specific muscle group focus.

In computer world, the webserver has to allocate some amount of total bandwidth to each client browser that connects with it. In operating system jargon, you might allocate a process or a thread. A whole process subdivides into threads and is therefore in principle "heavier" than a thread.

Do you have an intense dislike for meetings wherein the way to gain or regain the floor is to interrupt others, even mid-sentence, interjecting somehow? 

Women, on average, trained to be more demur within the patriarchy, were suddenly in management roles without the right default level obstreperousness, and had to take trainings in how to up their level of "bitchiness".

Think about mostly male engineers working all day with operating systems that are indeed "interrupt driven". Everything just chugs along, until the next interruption, in which case the operating system may switch its attention to some other process.

Think of doing housework and getting a call on your cell. Or the doorbell rings. Cell calls go to voicemail but doorbell rings may be harder to ignore, especially if a knock follows. 

Planning models that do not allow for unforeseen interruptions in their conceptualization likely lack enough sophistication for many types of operation, both military and civilian.

Remember, it's your attention span. Consider carefully, not only which machines you'll visit, and in roughly what order (making it up as you go is OK, as long as you know when you've fallen off the path), but also what you'll be doing in your head, with regards to earbuds, VR goggles, or whatever else your workout space comes with. 

Sometimes it'll just be you alone with your imagination. You're ignoring the overhead TVs. What do you plan to think about? Multi-tasking? Event planning? Cosplay? Protein-folding? Your next blog post or YouTube? Explorations in the geometry of thinking?

Keep Portland Queer

As some of my correspondents are aware, I've finally stumbled across Mark Fisher, the philosopher and commentator on contemporary culture. He extends my study of punk music, which in my curriculum links to the School of Tomorrow and of course solarpunk as an antidote or counter to cyberpunk.

Mark does a lot to dissect the meaning of "weird" versus "eerie" in his book on these two concepts. 

The weird involves a presence, not necessarily horrific or terrifying, but off kilter, eliciting a sense of not belonging or, if it belongs, then our priors (Bayesian speak) must be what's off. We may live in a different world than we expected.

The eerie is more about a rekeying of intentionality, shifting the emphasis from human agents with free will, to tricks and flips of fate. Again, the eerie might be employed or evoked by a writer of horror genre fiction, but the eerie need not be scary so much as haunting, as if by dim memories or a sense of deja vu.

Mark dives into various authors (Lovecraft...) and filmmakers (David Lynch... Hitchcock), as well as musicians (Brian Eno...) to make his points and tease apart these meanings. I'm enjoying such investigations as they jibe with my own philosophical background as a Wittgensteinian. When we want to know the meanings of words, running to a dictionary is the lazy option.

Naturally, the unconscious is not far below the surface in Mark's analysis, and Freud figures prominently, in part as an authority to overcome, as Freud's use of "uncanny" has tended to obscure the nuances Mark is attempting to capture.

As I wrote to a friend in the background:

Is "queer" insulting though?  Deja vu we might've had this conversation?

I'm watching old lectures by one Mark Fisher, philosopher, author of Real Capitalism and other books, including one on the eerie and the weird (just purchased).  That's adjacent to the old meaning of "queer" as in "odd" or "different", but oftentimes in a positive sense as in "novel" or "out of the box" ("the box" being stuffy and stultifying).

Speaking for myself, I like being called an "odd duck" and stuff like that, "a martian" one of my favorites.

Again, summarizing some of my thinking, to another friend I wrote:

Podcast taking up Mark Fisher's book on the eerie and the weird:

https://youtu.be/4gSpNIct1-0

They explicitly address obtuse / dense academic language and how Mark steers clear of it for the most part.

My focus has been Martian Math as embedded within or serving as a portal to science fiction as a genre, which sometimes borders on the eerie / weird as well as on horror (adjacent / overlapping genres).

The sense of humans embedded in an inhuman (nonhuman) intelligence comes through in episodes featuring uncanny synchronicity for example.  "Human writers could not have written this" is the sense.  

Or it'll be a combination:  an outlandish human project goes wrong, or not as planned, thanks to the surreal aspects of life itself.  That can be a good thing, if the human project was misguided or nefarious in the first place.  

The sense of divine intervention, angelic or demonic, is a counter to human hubris. Humans may have had a hand in world affairs, but are ultimately not in control. The Ouija Board comes to mind, and that sense everyone has that they're not the ones moving the planchette.  The (collective) unconscious versus the ego persona.

There's a whole segment towards the end of the podcast about how it sounds weird or strange to remind people that the country they imagine they live in is all make believe e.g. the line between the USA and Mexico or the USA and Canada, is all imaginary-fictional. To remind people that their "world" is a fantasy based in social conventions, is to elicit an alien viewpoint, which I've called ETPV (ET point of view) in other writings.

In the background:  Bucky's Grunch of Giants, about untethered capitalism versus cosmic evolution.

Government Issue

I'm juggling more balls, or spinning more dishes (a different circus act), thanks to my ramping up within my Clarusway work environment again. I get a different email account and access to the various company drives containing courses I'll be teaching and/or have taught previously. Having both accounts active and switching back and forth means blocking / unblocking various Google drives and so on, as I switch identities.

I'm thinking back to my childhood and growing up and how "government issue" took this weird turn such that "GI" meant a lot to people, in terms of both "the GI Bill" and "GI Joes", the latter being plastic dolls with more of a social role than Ken dolls, being soldiers. None of the Kens were military if I'm not mistaken.

In some alternative worlds, Uncle Sam issued "GI phones" as a kind of fallback smartphone anyone could get with sufficient proof of need, maybe not income based. Simply claim one. The apps would offer courseware deliberately tailored to groom (not a bad word) future government personnel. 

If you want to keep living in a democracy, you have to plan ahead, and having everyone grow up in non-democratic hierarchies (not every church or corporation is an unprogrammed Quaker meeting recall) is hardly a way to nurture the relevant skill sets. No wonder we're all out of diplomats.  

When all you have are amateur paramilitary types (Ollie North types as I call 'em), then all you get are covert operations. You need real statesmen to preserve a civilization, vs having rogue gangland mercenaries commit NS2 type terrorism, by definition not the game of proudly overt states. 

We've fallen below threshold, perhaps because we no longer have "GI anything" anymore. GI just means "gastro-intestinal" today, and just about every joe or jill has a tract like that. No government can take credit for such basic gear and equipment.

I wouldn't be the first to suggest Ken needs to learn from GI Joe, in terms of knowing how to fly a helicopter and lift stranded hikers off mountains. EMTs in general like adjacent to the Coast Guard, in turn adjacent to the other branches. 

We learned during that South Pacific tsunami during Dan Rather's tenure that the GI people enjoy responding to natural disasters, helping people, regardless of "race, religion or credo". That's a hint, I think, about how to rebalance. 

We need a breed of GIs that aren't cannon fodder for the grand strategist wannabes who still think like its the 1900s.

Turning Back the Clock

Per my intake interview, as I think of it, I mentioned my goal of "turning back the clock". I was referring to the so-called Doomsday Clock of the atomic scientists, the ones who tell us how "close to midnight" we might be (really close in their estimation). "Midnight" means WW4 (per Critical Path, I'm going with "WW3" as the cold one, still ongoing).

Rather than manufacture a ton of consensus around the clock turning back, let's say to a quarter 'til, I should offer my thesis as to why I'm right about where we're at, relatively far from WW4, based on something other than majority rule (oxymoron?) or majority perception.  

In other words, we're not on the brink of nuke war because both the Russian and American elites (and I'm not talking about average rich people, as clueless as they come) are at ease with where we appear to be going, in terms of World Game and energy sharing. The Chinese too. 

We all read Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth in the 1970s. We didn't forget our thinking and plans when the helpless children, grownups in name only, took command of the various dashboards now disconnected from reality.

No, I'm not saying the elites enjoy a level of telepathy the muggles don't experience, or that our oracles at Delphi give us the insider view. I'm saying if you do your homework, you'll find that legacy media tend to waste people's time with low quality narratives designed for know-nothings. More glimmers of the truth shine through here and there.

In a world wherein the default is to get force fed a nasty diet of drivel and bad info, one can't then turn around and blame the hoi polloi for not being able to follow. Of course they can't. Let's hope at least a few find their way out of that cesspool.

If I sound like an elitist snob, that's by design. At least I'm not a mindless hawk like those morons in the US congress, or like those so-called "justices" (no longer respected), or like the dysfunctional executive branch. If I'm not a hawk, does that make me a dove? Why so little imagination? I'll be a crow instead.

Attitude Tuning

If you poke around in my blogs, you'll know I'm big into "citizen diplomacy". But what does that mean? Humans learning to be diplomatic took time. Diplomas had to be invented first, meaning universities. Instead of Universe, call it University why not?

Nowadays we have all these personal workspaces (PWSs) using Zoom every day, or perhaps they use other channels. Or they're recording straight to YouTube, via live stream or as completed, likely edited, projects. By this means, diplomacy proceeds, in the form of continual "attitude adjustments". 

If you're in an activist role, then "attitude" has to do with observation and orientation in an OODA loop sense. You'll be taking active measures based on updates to the cockpit (fighter jet talk). If you're passive, you may yet be following closely. These terms come with so many shades of meaning.  As a "passivist" you may feel you're studying for a more active role later.

Americans with relative expertise and education have more powers than before, thanks to the more evolved telecommunications infrastructure. We see the trend is really with respect to Earthians in general. Earth is still becoming more like America, but that doesn't mean "led by the Beltway Mafia" so much as "benefitting from unbridled communications".

The "motherboard" (if we might call it that -- think "the grapevine" if old school) is better able to keep pace with change, in a virtuous circle, to the extent we're all able to participate in the important business of being citizen diplomats. Or shall we say "layman diplomats"? To what extent is citizenship required, to travel the globe? Does every trucker crossing a border someplace have a passport?  Is every gypsy caravan "from a country"?

We've always had "the masses" and / or "public opinion", or have for a long time. The process of "manufacturing consent" might have been more top-down in an age before we all became "channelers" (in the sense of having a channel). 

Nowadays, the processing has to run deeper, and maybe for longer, but the outcomes are proportionally better anchored in real mindsets. Crummy propaganda becomes less effective in proportion to "influencers" becoming familiar with PR techniques. The audience (active and/or passive) has become so much more sophisticated.

Don't Look Up

Spaceship Earth by AI

Speaking of ethnicities and culture wars (aren't all wars about cultures, or between them?), one reason Star Wars fans might be taking out their frustration on Papa Disney is escapism just isn't working across the board. We're in the middle of a hot war between superpowers and the message "don't look up" is ringing hollow. The billionaires are already moving into their luxury apartment bomb shelters.

Mad Max (Furiosa) didn't attract big audiences either. I saw it. A well made film, for what it was, but what it was, was too close for comfort. Showing a post-apocalyptic idiocracy on the big screen is somewhat triggering, not conducive to escapism. 

Dune 2, on the other hand, was in a convincingly different alt universe, and that's what we need, if seeking anti-realism.

As of this writing, the Pentagon, circuitry controlled by outsiders, is busy using high powered weapons to strike inside Russia, with no permission or understanding from the American people. 

The calmness in the streets has to do with their not really following the action. It might also have to do with countervailing media, which throw ice water on the whole business, playing up the war game escapism currently underway and offering a more credible, less dystopian, world game instead.

The stridently arrogant of this world want to plunge us into conflagrations. The result is not surprising: the circuitry is rewiring to lock out the outsiders, if possible, to disconnect them from their arsenals, to which their continued access is now unauthorized. 

When people believing themselves to be insiders wake up to their actual NPC status, that'll be a good day. In the meantime, we're being victimized by morons.

Emerging Ethnicities

My vision of the world rallying to the needs of the besieged in Gaza and setting up an evacuation flotilla was counter what borders are all about: restricting freedom of movement, penning people in, subjecting them to the authority of whomever happens to be exercising jurisdiction over whatever region they happen to be trapped in.

In the SimU game, campuses dot the globe and students, faculty, admins flit about more freely, engaged in work-study. The question "where are you from?" is considered fairly bogus, unless it means "where were you born?". Obviously we're all from Planet Earth and each of us wanders its surface to some degree.

I wouldn't expect any top down "world government" to take care of these movements. Migration patterns are not always subject to tight regulation by bureaucracies. On the other hand, campuses with liberal intake policies may nevertheless be able to track enrollees. I'm able to write science fiction about it all, drawing from existing patterns.

You'll find people deliberately confusing "genocide" with "ethnic cleansing" all the time, because they don't want to think too hard. Nor is ethnicity a static attribute. If your ethnic group has been bombed or otherwise attacked by another one, that tends to change your ethnicity. 

You may now have a permanent grudge, an ax to grind, that you didn't have before. Or perhaps your ethnicity is about not carrying grudges. Your discipline is about working through negative emotions and finding ways to transform them. A lot depends on what anchoring religions and/or metaphysical disciplines you want governing your life, which preferences change with time, as possibilities are revealed.

I still envision mixed-use skyscrapers and other buildings, some of which identify as New Palestine University (NPU) or simply Palestine, but it's more a corporate logo than a national flag, in the sense that no contiguous boundary around a large geographical region is presumed. Diaspora nations (the best kind) dot the world with assets. 

Contiguous boundaries have mostly been replaced with credentials and access to specific goods and services, specific facilities, such as on a US military base in the Philippines, and/or through a university.

Am I saying I'm a practitioner of "zionetics" or one of those, meaning I'm eager to cleanse Palestine of Palestinians?  No. All these ethnicities are already globally distributed. I don't have to lift a finger. 

Let Palestinians come and go as they please, via Palestinian Airlines or whatever. But with an early emphasis on "go" i.e. to get away from toxic neighbors. Return when the neighborhood improves? It's up to individuals, unless they break too many rules. Banishment remains a practice.

I'm free, as an American, to laugh at the Louisiana Purchase as the science fiction it was and is. I'm free to make light of ethnicities that take the idea of nation states so uber seriously, or that believe in "races" at the cost of sacrificing an ability to think globally. I don't have to brainwash myself the same way they do, nor am I compelled to respect their choices, as many Jews and/or Christians and/or Muslims etc. likewise do not.

My ethnicity also doesn't feel compelled to always agree that "space is 3D" even if we're well-versed in that metaphysics. We have our own namespaces. That's in part how we bond. Given telecommunications, we don't feel compelled to all move to the same base in Arizona or Utah or whatever. We might build a school in Gaza, perhaps near to a McDonald's or a Vkusno i Tochka, the way schools are in Oregon (next to fast food joints).