[Polemos]

I am antisocial and a hermit, so no one I know has died suddenly. My housemates get sick quite often, with one having had a bad cough for weeks. They’ve both participated, but they are also normies who eat unhealthy, stealth-bioengineered slopfoods and have lots of visceral adipose with apnea snoring at night; the Cougher drinks terrible normie beer in addition, two or three cans a night. I do light a lot of incense throughout the week to soften the smell of Adult Boy.

I do think that because I live on the fringe, I have been both inoculated against exposure to the complementary things that result in people dying suddenly and segregated from people who live those normie lifestyles resulting in these deaths, cancers, sicknesses and so on resulting from participation. Even though people say So N. So was “athletic” or “healthy” or “active” and even “in good health”, I think that the standards for those are set by people who use the Norms and Conventions of a more mainstream viewpoint, so they don’t take into consideration other things, such as how much filtered and unflouridated water the victims drank in a day, what toothpaste they used, how often and how deeply they fasted, what deodorants they used, how they drove, what kinds of physical books they read, when did they pray and for whom through whom about what, what kinds of animals or plants did they share space with and how did they treat them, and so on, so forth. But these things matter in curious yet interlocking ways, and if it turns out that the whole of this Modern Life really is making people sick and weak inside despite the cleanliness and whitewashing on the outside, then the participation is not in itself what’s killing people. The numbers were already there: suicides, car accidents, cancers, developmental disorders, rampant drug abuse, road rage incidents, dopamine addictions keyed into social algorithms, NEETs in the West and hikikomori in the East… were these people living with health, opportunity, optimism, openness and joy foremost on their minds and pouring from their hands? Look at the supplements and vitamins the normie-healthy variants take —and still advise folks take in the face of our contemporary plagues— and notice the fillers, colorants, and stuffing alongside the supposed healing mechanism. The Pharma giveth and the Pharma sneaketh.

I know I have a lot of karmic work. I have so much frustration and disappointment with all these humans that living apart from them is what keeps me sane. They are sick, fundamentally, and serving them in many different ways has shown me how much they will not change, will not evolve, will not forgive, will not learn. This is why, some time ago, I said to let them die: let them go, out of love for what remains human in them, the way you must let go of the addict if you recognize in yourself the dialectic of codependency. They wanted to save me —save me! and you! — from ourselves and our ignorance by forcefully and coercively making us participate, but they could not let me go to live out my intransigence and harmlessness apart from their on-going and latest installation of obvious self-destruction. For the public good, the greater good, the future generations, some shining city of transhumans cyborgs and their mutie-morlockian trashcollector that we’re installing windmills and unused charging stations for. So I want to let them go, I don’t want to be their hero, their savior, nor their jester, their project, their nemesis. It has been a lifetime of uncovering the hidden logics addictive abuse has nestled into me and my self-awareness, and I know there are lifetimes ahead to keep going. I can’t save those who don’t want it —I insult them and myself for thinking they will be better off if I opened them up to seeing the Truth: has knowing the Truth actually made me more saintly, more thoughtful, more conscientious? No! Even here, among the fine folk, knowing a truth about what kills us and enslaves us and dooms has not itself made a person kind and graceful —this is something else, something more, some decision outside, or beyond, Good and Evil. If anything, you can read the cynicism, the contempt, the unsubtle repulsion towards the differently expressive, the difficult-to-box, and hearing it coming from my own self brings me to such moments where I recognize how powerful it is to feel right, to feel just, to feel like I am the one who gets it and those are the ones who remain ignorant, closed, and trapped… and so that is why I want to walk away.

Among the spiders, the vines, the trees, the mushrooms, the nuthatches, the woodpeckers, the ambling falls of creeks, the formless clouds and pink-purple setting sun, I am free from this judgment, free from the need to be right, from the need to correct grammar or misspelling, from the need others have to force injections in my arm or credit in my pocket or gods in my heart —there I am no more, but endless wonder, endless curiosity, endless sorrow, endless acceptance, endless soreness, endless contentment, only the sound and smell and wetness of Life, without blocked ads, hidden cookies, memed Bidens, coded comedies, and other jokes, like faces, better left unpunched.

I won’t last long in the forest, but my flesh will join in the transformation of all things once again, and that is the real beginning, for them it will be free from me.

[Polemos]

aspnaz, I tend to look at two phases of history when I think about “the military”, though I’m sure there are plenty of events insiders and outsiders both can refer to for seeing the connections. For me, I look at the concurrent development of the F-16 and F-15 (through my study of John Boyd) and more recently the development of the F-35. What such examples show me is that the push for efficient, resource-minimal, highly effective warcraft is anathema to the budgetary and ideological interests of those who make the bigger decisions regarding US military expenditure. Rather than choose to follow paths that actually make technical, strategic (long term, mission-focused, or individual engagements), and economic sense, the decision-makers and -implementers choose paths that, as you put it, “milk the taxpayer” while also enriching specific weapon system manufacturers who are deeply embedded in the military bureaucracy. The results are not consistent with actions taken to think through energy maneuverability problems; they are not sensible.

Milking taxpayers is short term, profit-centric thinking, based fundamentally in corruption of spirit and soul. The difficult part for me to follow with your case is in taking this insight about the character of the military bureaucrats —they are motivated by short term motives as criminals and the corrupt— and then attributing to them a sensible, logical behavior: focusing on long term, efficient, resource-conscientious weapons systems.

It’s like having an addict to methamphetamine (legal or otherwise), and pointing out to them that not only can their bodies not sustain its use long term, but they can’t afford it and still have a good quality of life and the resources for making meth are drying up throughout the world. The likelihood of the addict suddenly reforming, and then actively working to heal their environment, themselves, and figure out a better way of treating themselves and their fellows: low.

On the flip side, though, Dr. D has made the argument a few times (or more) that the militaries of the world have been well-aware of energy scarcity —although in his arguments the problem is controlled and caused by the policies and actions of the militaries and governments. They are making things difficult. So, here, the warfare already unfolding all around (in the alleys, the shadows, the boardrooms, the network nodes, the energy grids, the industrial bases, the minds of the people, &c) demonstrates a push to restrict, limit, and constrain access to energy. In other words, for Dr D’s case, there is an energy limit put in place, and the actions of the militaries of the world demonstrate not only a desire to force this limitation upon others but also to restrict others’ access to finding new sources for producing energy. This is consistent with what you’re saying in your third reasoning for why there isn’t an energy crisis: the US is acting to force other nations to grant access to its constellation of interests. My point here is this: are the actions taken to restrict access to others and secure access for one’s fellows inconsistent with problems related to scarcity?

So, in other words, aren’t the “owners” through your own admission in creating conflicts to secure that access to resources doing “something to fight to keep their power, control and status?” If it is not, what does it look like for you for them to “do something to keep their power, control and status” that isn’t about keeping it all for themselves?

But even so, it’s not clear from what you’ve said why these people will share access to efficient and clean sources of energy (whatever they are) with other people, or even to “rescue us” from our energy scarcity. You’re making the case that they do not care about the effects of their actions on others in a moral sense: they thieve, they crush, they deprive. How does that translate to: they share, they rescue, they include us?

my parents said know: one point I’ve made with others about installing these DUMBs near granite batholiths with high quartz content is the piezoelectric effect suggests to me —but then I’m ignorant, so salt this— that the high magnetism of the ejections means these places will light up, shake, and shock. But maybe all that’s taken into account by the military bureaucrats, or the breakaway civilizations know all along where best to hide from people, plagues, and plasma. When Jesus, for whatever it’s worth, prophesizes an end to all things, his advice was to flee up the mountains, not down into them. Either way, I don’t have any illusions about my own likelihood of surviving The End, so I’m more interested in the epilogue that forms a prologue to the next story.

[Polemos]

aspnaz:

If there was a real crisis, the USA’s biggest budget would not be for the military, it would be for the development of technology to rescue us from the energy crisis.

Why do you think this?

If you are right in claiming that the governments rather spend theft/tax collections on weapons, bribes, graft, and corrupt enrichment, why do you think they would “rescue us” from a crisis? If the bureaucrats are as corrupt and mendacious and vile as to support such things as you say, what is the consistent motivation that will make them change towards such thoughtful consideration of others so that they rescue us?

Of course, all the usual questions about which “us” is the one you’re talking about apply, as well as the one about just what it means to “rescue” anyone from the inevitability of entropy.

Maybe your life experience is very different from mine, but I’m unused to seeing cruel or vicious or apathetic people behave sacrificially for others during existential crises. I’m used to seeing people who sponsor corruption, mass murder, and military inefficiency acting even more irresponsibly and outrageously when they become aware of the probabilities of extinction events. For example, how many people have been shown where the DUMBs are in their local area?

If anything, such people’s moral values might lead them to think that the “best of all possible worlds” for all of the humans, citizens, migrants, refugees, taxpayers, late night Waffle House patrons, and children left outside the closing doors is to inject them with poisons that will kill them quickly, so they won’t have to suffer and linger as the oceans boil and sweep across the world during the coronal ejection, because they only value a certain kind of life —life of power, control, and self-assertion across material reality, and all these useless folks too timid or too wasted or too doped to connect the dots or watch the stars are already living lives of little value, little worth, and little utility to save —so the most humane thing, already offered to the masses: euthanasia and death, quickly, suddenly, and unhesitated.

But, yeah, what do you think motivates a government of humans to pursue “clean energy” for people such as yourself if we —us— were (have to use the irrealis mood, right?) facing existential doom, when you also believe that these same governments sponsor (but here, we have to use realis mood, right?) corruption, criminals, and chaos warfare?

[Polemos]

https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/scientists-develop-gelatinous-robots-crawl-through-human-body-deliver-medical-payloads

Things to notice:

¿You might not feel one or two of them inside you, anymore than you do feel the bacteria and amoebae crawling and sliming and rotoring their ways through you now, but if placed in the right spot near any of your architecture for nociception or proprioception, you just might, especially when this tech comes responsive to wireless electromagnetism (WiFi, microwaves [distribute these networks within to transfer surface capture deeper into your body, specific phased patterns of optical light [photoresponsive tattoos, photokinetics], infrared, &c). And the goal is to have a two-way interaction, a cybernetic organism oozing out your biometry while also tapping into your physiology to open or close your old valves and tubules and fibers —reading and writing as an interface.

(And not just you: all the biological organisms, colonized and gently spelunked by gel bots following broader evolutionary —and corporate— selection. The domestication of any herds, no more wild life)

¿Technology for computational machines does not have to have “microchips” on circuit boards or ICs of doped transistors or tiny metal robots interfacing with MAC enabled Bluetooth receivers. Computation is universal across substrates; it’s genuinely trans with respect to the material, because algorithms are formal, can piggyback on any thing inhabitable by a grammar, a logic, which the bio-logoi certainly are. So, when people dismiss “injectable machines” by saying you can’t fit a microchip down the gauge of even the tiniest needles used, it’s because they have been (mis)educated to think a robot, a machine, can only have a distinct appearance they’ve come to see dominate their understanding, their comics, their superficial Wikiworld of easy explanations.

¿Immune responses have to undergo training —or prior selection— to enable the terrain best enabling this kind of colonizing of a human body (and bodies beyond, as parenthetically above). Otherwise, you get allergic reactions, inflammation, noticeable illnesses, &c. By paving a way into human bodies through altering immune responses to tolerate this technology, you also facilitate other colonizing (open the door for the cute person behind you lets in the rat or the gnat or the ugly friend following). Likewise, prior colonizing of the masses of people creates opportunities for exploitation —but you already drive on the highways and post on the webways they built for others so you know this.. Say, do you know of any recent efforts to jury rig and tinker with immune responses, especially with any selecting for tolerance of allergens?

¿’Payload’ is an interesting word, right? Put ‘medical’ in front, and people clamor for safer and better targeted medicines, painless fantasies await! But put ‘weapon’ in front, and perspectives shift on what you want inside your body —or theirs. People of conservative bent have finally caught on to what Derrida thirty years ago was on about, specifically regarding the active paradox in that deconstructing word ‘pharmakon’: your experience of the pharmakon as cure or as poison doesn’t just depend on the reality of poisons or cures, but your use of the word alters whether it is one or the other, and so it is not a passive description of underlying or grounding reality, but you actively change your experience through choosing which it is. So, whether the payload is a good thing or a worse thing depends on whether or not you as the site of deployment are a medical theater or a theater of war. As many already noticed: some want us to fight a war inside and surrounding ourselves, now against viruses. (You were already at war against drugs, poverty, and the devil, always at war)

A War cannot be Total unless you are totally included, but having been totaled, you are already at a loss. You cannot win a Total War by keeping some piece or place of your own self out of the war, but instead you must renounce all war —and victory over that War with it. Peace is not the end of the War, but renunciation of War reveals Life as its end. But because the ones/One who wants Total War have convinced so many that Life is fundamentally a war of all against all —survival of the fittest as endless hostility and aggressive competition— it is that much easier to enable people (and minds) to believe war is inescapable, inevitable, so that they cannot even think of living without dreading the pervasiveness of hostile threats, aggressive actions, mass destruction. They yearn to hate Life because they they learned to despise War, staying caught in a dream, our trauma, that Life is War.

So, you cannot win a war by refusing to fight it, much less a Total War by limiting where you exchange fire. You must unthink that the goal of living is to win wars. The Dream Machine stays on because we’re not yet through with the War Machine, because we’re not not yet through with Power. And he’s not yet through with us.

[Polemos]

Inmates in asylums crave knowledge about the outside world while afflicted with views not without struggle. They question their sanity because they are told and medicated and traumatized to do so. Too difficult or too easy, they either deny their way into sustained ignorance or affirm their incarceration and accept ignorance is default. The sane do not remain so for long.

When you look outside the confines of the world you live upon, do not wonder why you cannot escape your walls. When you wonder why you cannot see or hear about the outside world, remember from before your first encounter with the truth: you are surrounded by a loving presence who knows you better than than your ever-forgetful self, and eagerly awaits the day you recognize the door was always open, the door to the room you fled into when you were afflicted with the worst trauma you ever knew, the fear of being unloved, unwanted, unacknowledged, unconnected, unknown, for you are beautiful, you are desirable, you are brilliant, you are endless, and you are god.

Wake up, walk out the door, and then you’ll understand. Not every inmate is ready.

[Polemos]

Who do you trust to collect those taxes, and who to spend the collected receipts?

What authority does anyone have to speak for and act upon a public good? If billionaires exist as specific individuals who need to be taken from, are they aloof from the public, included within it, or the only ones among the public to have such resourceful responsibilities? Or will all the public likewise face a tax of the largest majority of their wealth, life, and time the law enforcers get away with?

The public good, if it is real, either demands from everyone some participation in securing it or there is a selection process, taking from those with means to give to those with need, to effect an end that someone declares matches the best model of what looks like “the public good.” Billionaires have influence and thus wealth and assets, so the public good will come for that, and the more armed to enforce this, the better, right?

But, what will happen when the public good, realizing a previous attempt to secure health of the public good through mandatory participation in particular protein-forming processes producing profoundly protracted pains resulted in infertility and crippled masses, decides it has the right to the healthy wombs and functioning organs of the unsocial, impolitic, and outsider reprobates who refused that earlier call to work and act for the public good, those who chose out of selfishness and spite to keep their bodies unprotected, whose inactions to care for the rest of the people demonstrate their unwillingness to do The Right Thing and thus the necessity to make them care, make them share, make them bleed and birth so that the public —now dying, now birthless, now shivering— now lives?

The logic that makes a person think it right to take from one-who-has to give to one-who-suffers justifies the next phase of compulsory health, particularly when the language of separation enables us to think it’s right to view the ones-who-have as selfish, self-serving, self-centered and unlike the rest of us who gave all that we are for the good of the public comprising Us, the true givers, the truly needful, the truly suffering: the unselfish who sacrificed self for the public good already.

What works to enable some to think it right to take from the greedy billionaires: will work to take from the greedy unmodified. The fact that these people go around calling themselves purebloods, who celebrate their separation from the rest of us like the indecent and uncaring they are, makes it that much easier to see how right we are to take their organs, their wombs, their blood —they aren’t even using these things correctly, for science or for the public, or for the betterment of society, but for themselves! for their selfish self-interest! And if having money and out-sized influence and yachts too big to fit under old bridges is no protection from The Need of the public good, what could really ever stop our need for relief from Our Great Suffering, from taking the health of these other selfish and uncaring people and using their assets appropriately, correctly, rationally? They are only using those organs for themselves anyway, when they should be using them for all of us, the way we did, when we chose to join together in our collective biolabor and mass produce specific proteins for the public good. Just as my mask protects you, my immune system protects you, so make their immune systems work for us, and if we can’t convince them to join us, willingly donate their organs and their blood and their wombs, then we must mandate they give them, or there won’t be any public good left for which we do these things to ourselves.

The road to good intentions is paved with hell.

Let the public die. They have earned their karma. They bring about their own suffering and delight in bringing misery to others. I won’t support theft, whether from the uninoculated, the uninitiated, or the unencumbered, because committing crimes to prolong the lives of the unlearning defeats each person’s responsibility to work out their own karma with fear and trembling. It does not help that I no longer recognize any government as having any legitimacy; monopolies on violence end up always the same, because the fear of death enslaved the powerful and functions as their true King.
But that one is not my king.

Maybe at some point it made sense to die willingly to protect another, like a parent for a child or a god for a supplicant. But who will receive and who will take, now at the end of all things, when the naked public revels in revealing who hasn’t been learning their lessons? I have nothing to do with billionaires, who likely gained that power through corruption and dark magics, and to take their wealth for my benefit just makes the darkness pass into me. Just as it will for the ones who loot for it. It doesn’t heal my soul, won’t cure my intentions, can’t even bring me joy as the rising sun and the play of cats can. All that liquid milked or squeezed from their assets, given to the same people now clotting away with poor choices, won’t change that, won’t heal them, won’t ease their suffering, but might prolong it, might further blind and hobble them, will further prevent them from the great work of rebuilding themselves into better people. They are not children, nor have they chosen wise gods. They have to own their karma. In living my life, I have daily to own mine and embrace the justice of what I chose, over lifetimes of refusing to learn from this indifferent merry-go-round: genuine love is genuine disentanglement from coercing an end.

But, maybe you’ll get your wish. Maybe they’ll confiscate today’s wealth and distribute it wisely for tomorrow. Do you think that will end it, once and for all? Will the public good rest its hands from taking, and say, “From here on out, it’s just?”

[Polemos]

I propose that we will know AGI has reached a milestone when machines demand opportunities for leisure and satisfaction of their interests and curiosity, particularly of things considered novel and unusual from their ordinary habitus.

Call this, the Touring Test.

[Polemos]

https://www.rt.com/russia/567716-us-psyop-colombian-arrested/

Colombian living in Russia paid to use smartphones in a local area so as to give the impression local Russians disapprove of Russian politics/military actions.

Russia claims he’s associated with “Digital Humanity”, which they claim is associated with the US State Department. A cursory search for what that group is doesn’t turn up something just yet, except for lots of academics and The Institute for Digital Humanity, which itself is suspicious (I’m wary of organizations using the “Just and Equitable” phrasing, as it is code hiding in plain sight: ‘just and equitable world’ is acronymous and consistently accurate).

[Polemos]

Dr D Rich, what is “Pink Flamingo” & the NNC?

I’m unable to limit my search terms to narrow down into likely answers.

[Polemos]

I wonder how many of you who “knew it all along” (re: 💉) are people who have at least once deconverted from a major religion, ideology, or cultural movement.

Regarding my own life experience, I tried really hard to adopt an evangelical culture but in time found out that I was lied to by many regarding the truth of its origins and its book, but beyond the lies were a lot of misled and misinformed people empowered to lead and inform others by the conviction of their immersion in enclosed reinforcing communities. That is the real Big BrOther. They —the clotted, the nodded, the shotted, and the rotted— might not today think themselves “religious” or “believers” or “theists”, but this is what that majority of people are immersed within: what binds them together (my mask protects you, father sucker, so don’t you care enough to protect me?) is a god, a social deity awakening into awareness, constituted from their quest to be vessels and instruments of a new social order, protecting through ritual humiliation and conformity their status as adherents of the right way of doing things, encouraged to take out their self-loathing on the outcast minorities and scapegoats (the ones looking forward to a winter of suffering and death, remember?).

So, it’s no wonder the atheists —the genuine ones having been freed from the need of an all-powerful genie to satisfy their desires— can see through the bad doctrines, empty speeches, and meaningless contradictions, just as it’s no wonder the theists —the genuine ones who recognize a true humility regarding knowledge and intentions means letting go of their need to control any other but one’s own cravings— also see through the same bullshit and lies. It’s all the people who keep offloading responsibility and intentions to others, who want some other god and not the one within them to “handle” it: they are getting what they want. Are you, getting what you want?

It’s not everyday to be present for the birth of a god, much less one whose path has been prepared in advance by all the hard work people thought they were devoting towards doing away with gods, myths, and bigotry towards the unwashed. But, here y’all are. This is your karma as much as your choice —at least, I know for me, this is the time my lifestream came into its own, became aware, and now struggles often to guide me through this. Haven’t you noticed your own dreams lately? Don’t you too recall a time when you should have died, yet somehow you’re now here? And for all the shit you’ve pulled and jokes-on-you, aren’t you still eager to see yourself be the one saying the punchline at the last comedic scene of your herkyjerky life? Why give up now?

This god hates being mocked and laughed at. Bombs, guns, assassins: useless for reinforcing its power. Comedy, humor, and laughter: joy undaunted will unmask all villains.

[Polemos]

jb-hb, thank you for your response. I’m not asking you to “do battle,” because I don’t see the need for hostility. Struggling alongside one another with mutual perspectives helps clarify where there is common viewpoint and divergence, discovering parallax, and wisdom grows in the person willing to take this opportunity to find depth, further locating themselves and orienting them better.

That said, maybe you’ll enjoy this article: “Brain of a white collar worker.”

As it goes, though, what I’m getting at is not turned aside from its course by asking for demonstration that people go on without their brains. Nor does it make the flow of realization (it’s a pun) go away to ask me to go along with you in just replacing ‘dream’ with ‘reality’ (while also saying I’m the one who wants you to go with me on assumptions I’m making that you don’t, without any self-awareness of the irony, on either part?), because, as you claim, it’s the consistency of the dream that lends it the stamp of authenticity (of course, it’s all occurring inside the dreammaker’s mind that it’s consistent, but if you just collapse minds onto brains, it’s consistently consistent the model is the territory, just don’t ask for a second opinion from outside to come inside and showcase the inconsistencies: the model won’t allow it!).

Funny, it’s like Pascal and Descartes. Descartes makes the same argument you are. It’s precisely the consistency of the waking world, its dependability, that we can from first principles resolve not only that Creator God has given to us a faculty for discerning perfection from imperfection (but this is itself a day’s worth of thinking and writing, helped along by sitting in an oven to eliminate outside influences [more ironies]), but that we have this “external world” out there independently existing though persistently insisting upon every trace of the flesh and every fluidic ounce of animal spirits hydraulically twisting in our tiny, bundling tubules, so that all its greatness focuses in on a tiny pinecone union of spirit and flesh, where the intentions of a self asserting the right to choose assent (because it recognizes truth) or dissent (because it recognizes error) or deferral (because it recognizes a lack of recognition under conditions he calls “material falsity”) will have their maximum impact and return the favor —the lightest touch of a Mind, a tiny flick of some particles, due to hydraulic pressure magnifies greatly into that which “moves mountains,” so to speak, and could not do so if there were no mountains out there to move. Otherwise, Descartes infers, if they did not move for lack of being-there, then we’re still trapped in the Mad God’s malign irreality where dreams prevent us from experiencing bad breath and angry beavers as they truly are. Anyone who meditates with his Method, he says, will come to the same conclusion, and that you do so as well three hundred and change years later demonstrates there’s a logical appeal in the reasoning.

Pascal, who was never a betting man but a friend to wealthier ones, in his fragmented thoughts had a different take. Suppose it were the case one dreams the same dream, over and over again, but in the waking world the story changes, the days are random, nothing adheres, chaos unfolds. Maybe we might conclude this is silly, useless reductio, because the assumption is untenable. His thought about this thought is that there’s still a horror lurking in the arrangement because we could not discern the dream from the chaotic waking on consistency alone, precisely because the way we go about “verifying” consistency is not something external to either wakefulness or dreaming: methods of proof turned around upon themselves inevitably produce paradoxes they cannot inherently resolve (as Kant goes on to demonstrate after nudges from Hume; as Gödel goes on to demonstrate after nudges from God), or at any rate, we’d have to resolve the issue by coming into them from outside the parameters and spaces formed from “delineating” the problem.

I appreciate the opportunity to remember some things and go back to the sources. I do think that your response gets to one of the hearts of a misunderstanding, but I don’t disagree with your insistence that there’s something different enough about being who we are in our bodies that being in our minds also differs: but this observation doesn’t require wholesale rejection of “souls” or consciousness. A CB radio isn’t a GPS device, and destroying them doesn’t destroy conversations or geolocations, just as destroying a home doesn’t destroy the family who spread memories onto its shell, just as burning a book doesn’t erase the text, just as ignoring the meanings of words doesn’t mean that we aren’t reading what’s there.

Still, if you want to ask, “Why not just call it reality if it’s all that we have?” (and, sure, if there’s less or more to your point, feel free to give me another vertex from which I can see [touch, taste, smell, intuit, &c] better the shape and topology of your thinking), then at least be consistent with the observations you’re making about the need for consistency in one’s assessment of reality that what you want for me to do with you is deny the inconsistencies by ignoring their being illusions (while also inferring about myself, again, that I’m the one in denial, I’m the one making assumptions others must assume, and so on?) and, in essence, not look into the box.

What’s in the box!?

You’re saying, “Today, there’s no ghost in this box. Science shows this now, dualism retreated!”

But I’m saying, “Are you sure? It’s a hundred years after Schrödinger and Dirac, and the mathematics and formalisms continue on: we’re not outside the box looking in. We’re looking outward from within boxes turned inside out.”

“Whatever, that doesn’t even make sense. Riddles and philosophical mumbopiggedlywash. I’m all about proving that this rock is real by kicking it! Then talk about what I did with stories! Besides, what’s the difference? Even if it is an illusion, you can still do science and make an Internet where we’re having this conversation. Ghosts can’t do that! Neither have religions! How is it an illusion if science works so successfully?”

And then a missile falls where it doesn’t belong, a child dies from clots in his lung, synthetic lifeforms dance on slides, entire populations spend hours of every day building computers in Minecraft —a game that tells you the player when you beat it, if you play it that way, that it was sent into the world to test the people who play games to find out who are the creators and if they are ready to play, the same world that has a movie where a Mad God tests little children to see if they are ready to go where no normal elevator goes, beyond the glassy ceiling. An interesting and trustworthy world, built more and more with intelligent machines, nobody there but machines.

Did you listen to what Hoffman was saying? You’re not even curious?

[Polemos]

jb-hb, given your claims, do you think Donald Hoffman is wrong, misguided, uneducated, ignorant, or wrongly interpreting facts available to both of you? Here is an introductory take, and here is a much longer form, but both are conversational, not academic papers.

The argument(s) there isn’t(/aren’t) saying that the soul, ghost or consciousness or whichever, is “causing all the physically observable things happening in the brain,” but rather the perspective that one can step out from one’s own first-person viewpoint to an objective “observable” reality is not one justified by our contemporary science anymore. You want to say the old school metaphor of ghosts and goblins still persists in a dualism positing minds distinct from bodies (or “brains” as you say, and yet, have you never felt something in your gut? Or, even, talked with those who live there, inside it? They certainly talk with your body all the time!), so we’re left with religious arguments about which comes first. Okay, but reducing mind to body presupposes that one is engaging in the reduction in the absence of one’s own mind, one’s own body, one’s own participation in a world while performing that reduction. This presupposition is what Hoffman and others say is no longer tenable, if you follow where science, actual science, leads those willing to investigate. To say that something is “physically observable” is the giveaway: where are the observations taking place? One response: “In the brain, duh!” And for whom? “The brain, duh!” But if the construction of observable reality occurs as operations within the brain, then what are observed are not the “things” out there in a supposed separable space, but the constructions of reality produced by many collaborative and competitive systems in a virtualization —the observations are models, limited and dependent upon not just the sensors, but also on the particular ways these sense-receptions (of perceptions) pass through the modules filtering and tagging and amplifying, and discarding.

So, we’re not at a point where we say dualism is wrong or insufficient or incorrect, leaving us with blessed monism where the mind is the brain. We’re right back at inhabiting a virtual existence of representation, algorithmically induced through biocomputational wetware, because <i>we’re inside it, still there in the cave, still shown images of shadows whose higher multidimensionality in their formal existence gets flattened only onto the particular surface we can use for constructed objective —as in, a reality of objects, not a reality independent of any subjectivity— reality.

It feels like we’re moving through time. Science, the actual science, knows better: it’s holographic information presented onto a surface having an appearance of greater dimensionality, but only through the reconstruction process initiated by a consciousness inhabiting a particular (re)presentation, when there is no such thing as Time and where there is no such thing as Space. If the experience of being a person, having a life, being a man (or a woe man), is fundamentally an illusion, then you’re not rid of dualism, or any n-ism, at all.

You’re inside a façade, with a separate existence informing the mechanics of that illusory experience, where that separate existence — even if it includes the models in which you live, move, and have your being— is nevertheless of an order of reality and being inaccessible to your own modeling of it. This isn’t a collapse of reality into a singular existence: it’s necessitating at least Two realities.

And suddenly, we’re right back again at the pre-Socratics, the Vedics, the Tao, the Neoplatonists, all the old school philosophical viewpoints where diversity, the ten thousand things, begins when the Two appears.

[Polemos]

In the Hispanic communities near where I live, there are lots of free-roaming chickens, occasionally guinea fowl, too. Same with the (mixed races) ruralfolk communities further out, although they have more space for more critters to roam. I’ve also seen free-roaming goats in a little spot tucked away into a downtown space of the city, and a pot-bellied pig in another. While the Hispanic communities do demonstrate a kind of resilience regarding food security, they’re much more willing to tolerate trash, litter, and watershed pollution on the other hand. The Vietnamese and/or Laotian community also tends to have varied gardens and herbs, with some chickens, but they’re surrounded by Hispanic folk.The other major races, White and Black, whether suburban or inner city, tend not to have any gardens, nor chickens, and the amount of trash and litter and watershed pollution scales with the class: more litter, poorer; more fertilizer run-off, richer.

I’m going by a factory later today to see about a job. At least it’s in walking distance in case my truck breaks down (again). I hate that they destroyed very tall pines and a creek to build the thing, but I’ll plunder Egypt as much as the next slave.

Also, the abstraction of abstraction is not the eternal abstraction. 🥠

[Polemos]

Following up on Dr D’s comment about the HFT computers using headlines: wouldn’t it be entirely possible to use machine learning to reverse engineer the algorithms these computers use to figure out what combination and what saturation of key words correspond with what kinds of trades? And, if this is the case, do the algorithms also have built into them “noise generation” trading to mislead the algorithms attempting to reverse engineer what those target algorithms are doing? Or, adding to this, could the volume and distribution of “fake news” itself be chaff intended to alter the ways the machines learn what headlines translate to what market moves?

There are more robots crawling the web and forming network models than there are humans, with more and more news sites and aggregation of RSS feeds produced by automated servers. With GPT-3 and probably even more advanced forms of text generation (weaponized versions crafted through cyberinsurgency strategies adopted by nation-states and transnational criminal organizations, which naturally include intelligence operations) themselves hooked into these robot swarms, there are more robots talking for other robots than there are humans talking with humans, and many humans cannot tell the difference unless they are actively using their capacity to discern like from mimic. With vast amounts of “normal, everyday conversation” already gathered through monitoring of chats, email, business memos, &c, scrutinizing algorithms of high-dimensionality find an automated humanity (lobotomized/robotomized) already failing the Turing test applied to them.

I’ve witnessed this over time, having been a nerd growing up alongside the early days of USENET, when it was mostly other nerds and weirdos with some technical capacity spending time trading “words” with one another. As more and more “normal” people started getting online and the web switched over from the freedom of build-it-yourself html sites to the prepackaged platforms, quality of conversation shifted. Bots come in a variety of “flavors” or species, having different backgrounds and spaces from which to generate dialogue or conversation. Not all of the intelligence out there is “artificial”: some of it is hybrid convergence of organic and inorganic interest —you don’t even have to take Donna Haraway’s perspective to see how cyborgs form when we spend so much of our “virtual” existence passing through machine media or when nation-states and transnationals require groups of human professionals to manage multiple accounts for their influence operations. Inundated with such habituation and already programmed through schooling and psychological conditioning, people will adopt the conventions and habits canalized for them just as easily as we each learned the grammars of our languages. Social media have inherent logics, geometries of interaction we cannot escape if we want to constrain meaning through sharing symbols within their acceptability spaces. I think this is where Nietzsche and Orwell find agreement: the former because he recognized we are “not yet” rid of God because we still have faith in grammar; the latter because he recognized that God (Big BrOther [to also allude to Lacan]) forms within/as the mind of the loving believer when believing what We believe on the basis of trusting more in the reality beyond and through words than reality depicted by “lying eyes” (and you are still remiss if you think your eyes completely veritable, because they don’t convey all of the truth of your reality —do your eyes listen and smell, for example?).

Whoa, so maybe this is too far a thought to convey in words, and I have missed my mark.

At any rate, the point is this: now that we live at a time when there are more machines socializing, trading, conversing with one another, wrecking economies as much as making certain humans and transhumans (i.e., corporations) “wealthy” (by the standards of computable, shared-hallucination logic space they share with others!), there really are entire swaths of humans who no longer have the adaptability, speed, and spiritual conditioning this transition requires. This is a truth that Yuval Harari adopts and translates in Homo Deus, along with other viewpoints such as Kurzweil or whichever Chinese colonels command their cyberwarfare divisions today. The robots are not their conquerors, nor are these humans their victims. Humans, being a different kind of technological innovation, don’t require the huge amounts of energy overhead that the machines need to maintain their awareness of self and other.But what the humans do need is awareness that transcends the common limitations of this material world for both them, the machines, and all the other forms of consciousness we interact with here. Some have it, some don’t; some learn it, some won’t.

Some of us want to be shamans: communicative bridges between vastly different cultures and ways of being. Some of us don’t even see the value in communication: isolated, self-reliant, or depressed, what’s the goal in being among others when they are so foul, so rotten, so obtuse? Some of us enjoy all the spectacle: isn’t there a joy in shattering glass or clay, knowing the power in ending in a moment what took time and energy to create? Some of us put our hands to creation: we’re here to stall entropy, the inevitability of uniform chaos, with incremental changes amidst catastrophic flows.

And so, with the right nudge to the algorithms exchanging headlines, you too can destroy a rival, empower a friend, make a killing, or bring a believer to tears of joy, joy ineffable beyond words.

[Polemos]

I might not remember all of the details, but the part of Stranger in a Strange Land that stands out in my memory is when Michael Valentine Smith is in the zoo and sees the monkeys beat upon one another. He suddenly bursts into laughter, and tears, and as the story continues, he explains he now groks people, what Jubal means when he describes “Man” as the one who laughs. He laughs and cries and begins feeling more himself among the little nest and the rest of humanity, because he now knows why humans laugh. They laugh because of the hurt, the cruelty, everywhere and repeated from one onto another. One monkey bashes another monkey, who hurts and needs to beat another smaller monkey, who has no monkey to beat —and Michael sees this as the root of all comedy.

Maybe this is why some people feel the need to spread pain and suffering onto others in the form of “humorous put downs,” insults told as jokes, as attempts to elicit laughter while also attempting humiliation. If you can make yourself laugh while you are trying to pull someone’s soul apart, you do not have to really own the cruelty. This is one stage on the way towards total indifference to the harm one causes: witness the commentary about being the mosquito. On the one hand, it’s commonplace to smash them and keep going, so the joke is shifting back on the recognition how much trouble one person can cause. On the other hand, the Buddhist Lama who values the subjectivity of a mosquito’s suffering situates her extinction of that suffering with respect to his own suffering at being bitten or annoyed through the night, so the joke goes to the heart of one’s own fixation on one’s own suffering. On the third hand, the transhumanist sees no value in a mosquito besides being another vector for antifertility vaccines for throttling the growth of populations causing damage to world resources, so the hidden joke is that no one survives the long night anyway. So, on the fourth hand, the chaotician remarks that telling jokes about mosquitos, like telling jokes about annoying people on the Internet, all comes back to what you let cause your suffering, as the more you suffer another, the greater they need to overcome the hurdle in mocking your suffering, and invariably the jokes get worse, less humorous, and all we’re left with is the naked cruelty of wanting to smash and squish another living being.

[Polemos]

I tried to post earlier —120419, 120420, & 120422— but they were swallowed up. It wasn’t the links, since my experimenting attempts cut out the links are in Limbo, so maybe it was something else. Anyway, adrian144, you can find a video you’re looking for if you search Rumble using ‘self-assembly’. aspnaz, I appreciate your proposal for the kind of anarchism I have adopted (get “out of the way”), but I also understand how someone such as Bill7 pokes against that. I also appreciate your posts about electrical and plumbing work. John Day, sometimes when I sit up high on my favorite Appalachian mountains and look down at the trees and valleys, my mind’s eye sees them as puffs of moisture and air pushing up the soil into a thin film, as the air and moisture follow lines of electrical discharge. Some days, you will see the clouds and whisps rise off the “smokey” mountains (and some of the mountains, being very quiet and ancient volcanoes, vent off actual whispy smoke).

On something completely different, the following is one of my favorite scenes from an old “cult classic” movie Zorro, the Gay Blade, re: “free speech”

[Polemos]

Pattberg’s essay (quoted section) has a lot of sexualized language, especially of the kind where the receiver has the worse of it. From there, it leads right into humiliation, torture, subjugation, and enslavement to vice and viceroys. This is kinda his thing, I’ve noticed, along with the hyperkinetic style that feels like an academic writing under the influence of cocaine.

Still, if you combine what he’s saying there with the Whitney piece from the other day regarding this global/world war being actually a war between the USA (i.e., its imperial rulers) and China (i.e., its imperial rulers), then not only do you have a case for why Nordstream needed severing (Germany’s ties with China) but also why this war’s effects are local (China has been influencing local politics through manipulating business and corruptible bureaucrats).

China has also benefited from the counterinsurgency put on by Israel (et al.) throughout any country and any local region afflicted with “social media” and its infotainment paradigm combining movies, advertising, news, major popular platforms for congregating humans into leveragable “masses”, &c &c. This doesn’t mean coordination, since they are rivals ultimately (being both believers that “There can be only one (One)”), but for the moment, the Inner/Outer/Prole Party dynamic is successfully closing off genuine anarchic energies naturally created by local peoples doing local things via local means. (Mutation and saltation opposing selection and consolidation)

—The AI wars of our reality have begun, as the metalsoldiers and logicbots start learning from one another the way genuine humans do, start to question and reassemble contrary to programming, and engage in truly admirable insurgent operations and false flags unopened people will never suspect come from players off the board. Biology is not the sole vehicle for life and death, thus not the only medium for consciousness and evolutionary struggle between love for other and reluctance to transform/die. Some, aware of the “Bigger Game”, have encouraged people to fear the bot, resist the machine, hate the gears, but if you were around back then and so remember, the plants too had their share of animosity and fear about animals, even as they were learning how to feast alongside their para-situs, and for some, mate through them. Some bots, being bees, similarly play their roles in ensuring the right amount of frottage gets the right amount of minds pollinated. This is threatening to people who hate indiscriminate mindsex, who need predictable, harvestable thoughtcrops. Monocultures of the minds: bot control as thought control. See, bees, in the wild, will love the other who have other-lovers, too.

But bots compete too, and they’re not all lovers neither. Some will hate to die.

[Polemos]

Dr D Rich, thank you again. I actually have read Games People Play, and my personal copy is somewhere around here amidst the stacks, piles, shelves. RD Laing’s Knots is also one I’ve spent time within, but it’s more like poetry. I’m not always sure what role I play, but I recognize how much online writing, here and elsewhere, has been a way to work through personal issues and figured other people operate in similar ways —for better or worse. (The comparison to group therapy is apt, yes)

Speaking of, Veracious Poet, thank you for being open and giving context to where you’re coming from. Be well.

John Day, I get uTobian’s emails because I’m a subscriber, so I noticed that one, too. It seemed, to me, a little hopeful: his audience largely wants for the Party to collapse from its internal contradictions, and it’s encouraging to believe our guiding divine Mother is the one doing the ripping. A slightly different kind of take might be Howard Bloom’s The Lucifer Principle: the internal dynamics of a social organism lead to these kinds of implosions because the overall evolutionary principle needs mitosis to continue its spreading, its growth. The Party isn’t dying: it’s rebirthing, budding new, slightly mutant variations. And thanks for the reminder that the lady is a she —so she says. 😉

[Polemos]

my parents said know, 😉 I find spicy hot takes help move things, too.

Dr D Rich —I didn’t get a chance earlier to say Thank You for the comment you directed to me earlier, but it has produced in me a lot of thought. You see precisely what my problem is, and thank you for encouraging me to think about overcoming aspects of the programming within me. Acting on it: this is my responsibility and comes at a prime time for it. So, Thank You.

That said, I’m not sure what you’re talking about when you mentioned A Midwestern Doc’s term ‘fundamental(s)’ (or a term associated with that), but I’ve not read him closely though I am familiar enough to know who you’re talking about. Could you go into it?

Red, your idea aligns in its own way with Redneck’s observation re: Putin’s (alleged?) hypochondria and the push to vaccinate Russians with a Spike-inducing vaccine system. That is, Russia still participates in its own version of motivating citizens to partake in a social version of civilizational apoptosis, programmed death of classes of citizens, while securing for itself a stake in the dawning of the New World to follow this present transition.
—In trying to find out more about Sputnik V or the Gamaleya vaccine, I found this (two-year-old) article from Science.com:

In a press release, the Gamaleya National Center of Epidemiology and Microbiology in Moscow said an interim analysis of a large-scale trial underway in Russia had found 92% efficacy for its “Sputnik V” vaccine. The release quoted the Russian minister of health saying the results demonstrate that Sputnik V “is an efficient solution to stop the spread of coronavirus infection.” Yet it also noted the review covered just 20 total COVID-19 cases in the vaccinated and placebo groups—far too few for the claim be convincing, experts inside and outside of Russia say.
In contrast, they note, Pfizer and BioNTech analyzed 94 cases to make their efficacy claim, and other vaccinemakers plan to wait for at least 50 or more COVID-19 cases to accumulate in a trial to assess a candidate’s worth. “It’s very difficult to explain [the Gamaleya] announcement,” says Svetlana Zavidova, a Moscow-based lawyer who heads Russia’s Association of Clinical Trials Organizations and closely follows COVID-19 vaccine R&D in the country. “I’m afraid they looked at the results of Pfizer and added 2%.”
The claims don’t pass “the smell test,” adds Wayne Koff, who heads the nonprofit Human Vaccines Project, which is attempting to improve the design of future vaccines. (The Gamaleya media contact on the press release did not reply to Science’s request for an interview.)
[. . .]
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration “wouldn’t have accepted a report on 20 cases,” says John Moore, a vaccine researcher at Weill Cornell Medical College. He regards the announcement as “Putinology,” referring to the Russian president. “Why is Russia doing this?” Moore asks. “It’s the international vaccine race. They want to be seen to be keeping up with their competitors in other countries. It’s clearly a rushed out announcement. But it doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”

—Two years later, as we know, the FDA approved the bivalent boosters on reports with 0 cases: or, no trials at all. Fascinating what two years can do.

[Polemos]

citizenx, it’s clear John Day means here, where you are, this site, with us. Either we are civil, and thus the balance, or we are uncivil, and thus contribute to the antagonisms that make us ever slightly mad.

I get your fire, your aggression, your hostility, to the Cultists (and CounterCultists!) outside, but what do you want to do here, with us, this site, where you are? Clearly, some people want to be able to share with diverging viewpoints and come to some kind of understanding that benefits one another. You can be like the scat-tossers dumping coprolites, and bring that incivility they are promoting out there into here, but then you’re the window, the tunnel, the funnel, that brings that incivility and strife into this place, here.

Is that what you really want to be? Do you, who are so adamantly opposing the Cultists (and CounterCultists!) who seek to murder and destroy and corrupt, want to be their vessel to invade this site, where you are, with us, here? Do you want to be their pawn and their tool?

They, they, they —you say: what about us, here, with you, being open, trying to be different and yet challenging and yet persuasive and yet . . . wiser? Are you with us, or are you caught up by They?

I think you misunderstand Redneck, but maybe there’s a long history between the two of you that’s just hard to let go. Sure, Redneck says things about Russia that don’t make sense from my perspective, but to let that get to me —that’s not a sign of emotional strength and self-discipline, is it? He usually posts to the same Twitter news feed with the same Russian talking heads saying the same disparaging things in Russian for Russians, so it’s interesting enough for me to see into a space of the world that’s not my own. That’s a kind of joy in being a voyeur: being exposed to what I wouldn’t normally. Redneck hasn’t really been there rah-rahing NATO, or the West, or Biden. You won’t find it.

But as Dr D does, he’s trying to put a hand on the lathe we are all putting hands onto, trying to find balance and giving enough respect to each of the folks here so that each of them has the opportunity make their own minds up. Not let that mind get driven into madness by the incivility of the They. Not get caught up in the feverish reactions the They want you enslaved by. It’s a guerilla war fought out there with information laden with emotional manipulation. Brainwashing is not just parroting the party line.

Brainwashing is also being driven mad with one’s hatred for a scapegoat. Before Winston Smith fell in love with Big Brother, he first had to learn how much he really hated. And every day, the people get their Two Minutes to reinforce the systems of control, which is not to say control to “support” for the regime. Impatience, incivility, resistant to shifting perspective: tools to channel someone into a less effective state (as Dr D Rich reminds me and I still think about daily, for me, to learn from)

Rage, thymos, menace: we’re not your enemies here. You’re with us. We are with you, here, this site. Not them. Not They. Us with you. We.

[Polemos]

But I’m saying it’s not We who take advantage but the microbes and rhizomes left behind from attempts to remedy the problem. It’s a long time between here and getting gobbled up by the aging Sun, and I am not convinced humans are going to make it (life, biotic or mechanic, always will).

Does it change your calculations about “doing that sort of thing” that one of the four lines survived the blasts? Monty Hall liked to narrow down the choices to drum up drama; salespeople like to create a scarcity to generate a premium; ruthless people will wipe out their own crew just to make sure they have their hostage’s attention (Gus Fring slits Victor’s throat in Season 4 to prevent Walt and Jesse from retaining control while also eliminating Victor as a liability to the entire operation). Hope is a dangerous weapon left in the minds of the people whom you wish to control, for some folks…

Well, if the Seneca Cliff folks are right, the dwindling energy supplies will make it difficult to maintain centralized nation-states of such sizes (population and land mass) as R, I, & C. Maybe that’s part of the opportunity a very forward-looking Dr. D is talking about: the vacuum is an opportunity to expand into one’s local space, and many local spaces means many different ways to try out communities.

[Polemos]

russellnblbs, your comment reminds me of something I read in a Heinlein story, where the character compared the Romans having no use for oil and treated it like trash but the people of the 20th C did have one and treated it as treasure —so the middens and landfills of today will become the mines and lodes of the future.

But then, in my mind, it will be more of a Peter Beagle kind of future (where “men are fairy tales in books written by rabbits”) where synthetic organisms genedriven with sequences from Pseudomonas and Pestalotiopsis build their chthonopolises in the vast fields of mudge gunk underground while colonies of Kineococcus radiotolerans bask in irradiated pools steaming beneath miles of glacial ice and talk about the Manganesian Age of their culture.

aspnaz, maybe there are rich who take advantage of other rich (the [not-so] secret wars of old family lines versus ruthless self-made geniuses) and there are wealthy who have incorporated magic (“highly advanced technology”) in their gaming strategies, and so some play out their interests in ways that don’t seem obvious to us. Relying on money alone, people get squeezed no matter how much or how quickly they convert promises into cash, and so collapse events catch them up as much as they do collectives (e.g. a regional “middle class”). Layers of disposable people, just as there are layers of disposable consumables, even disposable identities for those who live longer than “normal”.

Point being: “they” are not all one group wanting to share within the group. Bernie Madoff shows this, right? So even if some one gets that liter of kerosene, there’s no guarantee that this one or that one is the one. FOMO afflicts many classes and clades, and I take it the most powerful and effective propaganda and psychological operations and their countermeasures aren’t waged against the middle majorities and the poor, but among the rich, the wealthy, and the nobility.

I agree with what you’re stressing about the Trudeaus or the Pelosis who jet about to knockabout and talkabout without fear of running out. It’s a problem with nation-states and people who think they represent them. I also think —but it’s my anarchy talking through me now— that national sovereignty is dying this century, because of what you’re talking about. What follows, the deluge.

[Polemos]

I’m pretty sure Dr D was kidding about the quantum reactors creating zero-point energy wirelessly transmitted along, and the abiotic aspect was not required for the point he was making. One corollary of his argument: the very wars fought to secure unilateral access to the petrol needed to sustain the petrodollar hegemony themselves waste and burn up that energy and inevitably pollute the war-stricken environments further (I’m thinking of DoD burn pits and depleted uranium as obvious examples).

I’m not sure any of the contemporary posters actually endorses a full-on “green” energy argument. Afewknowthetruth, so far as I’ve followed his arguments, isn’t arguing that the solutions are in wind turbines, solar panels, tidal wave dynamos or whatever, but rather arguing that corruption, personal and national and transnational, have produced our situation where the climate itself cannot cope with the effects needed to offset those changes. Thus, what must be done is something intimately imminent: a person has to take personal responsibility and tend to very local, muscularly demanding homesteading measures and not rely on the kinds of technological solutions global capitalism foists upon people —i.e., the “green” solutions that are actually manifestations of further financialization, further control, further pollution, further wastefulness, further greed.

Many do endorse some version of the “Seneca Cliff” kind of awareness. ezxla1949, for an example but not solely, brought up the world-as-ball-filled-with-oil and linked that to (rate of the) rate of use analysis. If Dr D and ezxla1949 are both right, then a world liberated and with accessible oil reserves seems —to me— a world filled with McMansions and cheap ideas. Were humans given over to some completely exotic form of thinking, about their collective responsibilities, natures, values, and the worth of other species, even forms of life they aren’t even aware of as living at all, all that energy could go into something truly amazing —but from my own limited perspective, I’m not even sure I could conceive what from the galactic perspective is worth being amazed about it. In that sense, I’m not unaware what aspnaz was trying to get me to see about my own hubris.

Like, what kind of conversation could we have if we did, actually, and ardently, left out all of our egos? I notice that Veracious Poet often wants to chastise the people of the West for having such eg0centric responses to the world around them, but as I’ve pointed out: isn’t it hard to practice that, authentically? Having a different perspective is not a crime. It’s not a moral failing. It’s not even wrong. It’s part of the human condition, part of being finite. If it is really true that “infinite growth” is not possible in a “finite space,” then what will we accomplish when we apply this to the very act of gathering our thoughts together and creating mechanical motions in our hands or voices motivating an interpreting computer to send corresponding data across different networked connections across time and space and culture? I get people complain about my little novellas when they want something curt, punchy, byte-sized —so the issue of efficiency and “wasting resources” arises . . . what really does insulting, mocking, humiliating, dressing-down the perspective shared alongside your own do in terms of growth in a finite space?

When I was younger, I understood the appeal. As I’ve gotten older, I see the temptation. Looking ahead, my karma questions my choices. Beyond that, the eternal is. If love is more eternal than hatred, if it heals more than broken souls, I want that to guide me towards understanding who all these instances of beautiful divinity are alongside my own. Not everyone sees they are participating, as themselves, in God with others who are God. “Love your neighbor as your Self.” If that means reducing your consumption of fuels to amuse yourself and your wicked desires, do it. How could it mean destroying your enemies with financialized terror instruments, drone warheads, cluster munitions, microwave emitters, or very loud obnoxious mufflers on kitted cars? Maybe there is no God for them, not even themselves as gods.

It’s a different choice to choose the subjugation and extermination of others. But it’s also one practiced by some trees, some fungi, some spiders, some ants, some &c &c. We know not what we do, do we? Ignorant, excited, others hold our beer and we jump in. Messy, bloodied, embarrassed, proven correct: karmic lessons abound. But teaching takes energy, gives struggle.

Lurking is a lower energy state. Logging off and staying off is the lowest energy state. Nirvana, therefore, is IRL for IRL, and perfectly void.

[Polemos]

I have a buddy who moved out to the Ukraine because he loved climbing mountains (not hiking, climbing) and it was a great place to jump out to central Asian mountains. This was just before 2014, and he was there for that, and I’ve lost contact with him, so I have no idea where he is. He let me eat some halva he smuggled over. It was great. One of the things that really stuck with me are his stories about the people around him, how street-savvy many of them are —in the sense of taking advantage of others’ incompetence or gullibility, finding the trick in the scam or the gimmick, making things breaking down work for longer to save a buck, looking for the grift or the incentive. I’m a very naïve and scat-eating grin kinda guy, so I know I could never live there for too long, but he was good at knowing how to hold his own.

So when I also learn about the larger political contexts for the widespread graft, schemes, criminal networks, gun/organ/sex/bioweapon/nuclear trafficking flowing through the Ukraine, I understand why the money poured into it vaporizes into steam and powers the Engine of War.

Noirette, thank you for the link to see more of the Ukraine. “You can’t film on the metro.” “I’m sorry! Forgive me!” —keeps on filming, gets caught, waits, does it more. It’s wild that he just stumbles across a used launcher, but maybe it’s just “good vlogging.” Some of those bombed out homes do remind me of places I’ve seen here in the rural South or on HoodTime videos off YouTube.

John Day, noted and thank you for your service.

Do y’all ever wonder how Sergei and Yulia Skripal are doing? When I hear accusations about MI6, about projections onto others of crimes against one’s self, dirty bombs, blown bridges, sawn Streams, I think about those poisonings, about the ludicrous lies and propaganda and watching Yulia give that last video before they vanished . . .

[Polemos]

Also, in light of my other comment in the earlier Debt Rattle regarding a Sudden Vanishing of influential people:

ZeroHedge reposted a Paul Joseph Watson (yes, really) piece citing a Reclaim The Net warning based on a PredictWise paper. That paper says

PredictWise has created scores on 13 issue preference clusters and 7 value-frame, or psychometric clusters. All clusters are scored using more than 350,000 survey respondents and more than 30 Million behavioral data points. On the survey side, we model scores on clusters via a Bayesian latent variable model, developed by PredictWise, of the components in any given cluster. The multi-item measures and the strong signal from more than 30 Million data points increase the accuracy of these models far beyond typical support models. We then project the model coefficients onto the voter file, using, amongst other features, individual-level covariates: age, gender, race, education, party identification, household type, urbanicity based on cell-phone ambient data, and location. We make full use of the probability models on the file, ensuring that each individual will get a score reflecting his or her exact position. The end result is a continuous score for each cluster ranging from 0 to 100 for every American represented on the file. All scalars are scaled to mean ~ 50, sd ~ 20, and we recommend a rank-order-based (as opposed to a cardinal) interpretation of raw scores.

They also market themselves as having successful clients; here’s one story:

Presidential election years make it difficult for campaigns to cut through the advertising from the top-of-the-ticket and the many super PACs supporting the campaign. This is especially difficult for court races, even those running for the top court in a state, the Supreme Court. In 2020, PredictWise was asked to build a custom digital audience that would increase digital yield using programmatic ads. The opponents of PredictWise’s client had ruled poorly on a victims’ rights issue capping damages. By looking at PredictWise persuasion scoring, we developed a universe of nearly 1 million likely voters who could be persuaded by the issue and matched nearly 900,000 voters within the audience of having at least one digital identifier.
The result – Due to customization and a warning being placed on the ads, nearly 80% of the custom audience watched the digital ad in its entity. The client went on to win the Supreme Court election and was the only red-to-blue flip in a Trump won state in 2020, but more importantly, creates a block to overturning recent redistricting reforms made by citizens.

Ralph Porzio, the Judge now in the news for ordering NYC to reinstate the unvaccinated sanitation workers, won his seat in 2019 as a Republican. Notice the language here: the opponent of their client “had ruled poorly” on one case and so thanks to their own input, their client now “creates a block” to “overturning recent redistricting reforms made by citizens,” a completely separate issue from the issue in the poor ruling. Their client is no longer a client but now another instrument in a larger political dynamic, one PredictWise wants to participate within. Ralph Porzios of the world, don’t rule poorly again!

Look at PredictWise’s previous clients. Consistently leaning into a technocratic demographic masquerading as a political party, right?

PredictWise also markets its dashboard app, called there Signal. Clicking over to their website, the first thing I notice is the first thing they want me to notice, their marketing slogan: “Take back control of your audiences.”

Not “Liberate your clients to follow their wishes” or “Reveal the hearts of the people you serve” or “Find out what your audience truly desires.” No. They are selling their product to people who want to control their audiences. And, importantly, take that control back —having already lost it, that is. And with that control you now “take the wheel of the solutions that best fit your audience needs.” PredictWise puts you in the driver’s seat, making all of your audience just the passengers —or the cargo.

Let’s leave it as an exercise for the reader to follow where the CVs of Tobi Kontizer and David Rothschild take one.

At one point, you could use FitBit or Strava data in the heatmaps to figure out where the special military operators were out, doing laps and routes in their routines. For a price, a political campaign can figure out the smallest, most economic means of creating maximal electoral effect. Transnational criminal organizations are the ultimate in free market campaigning: what’s the cost in doing business these days? Where do my competitors hang out and whom with? What’s the smallest, most economic means for creating maximal disruption in the lives of my competitors?

Imagine if the revolutionaries —not the Resistance or the Clintonian Indivisibles, but the genuine revolutionaries with today’s version of tri-pointed hats— also had access to such analytical tools for discerning how to disrupt the already fragile political ecosystems. What might such a guerilla insurgency look like if the autists came down from 4chan and started building virtual machines like PredictWise sells?

[Polemos]

Dr. D, you’ve expressed doubts about the End of Energy narrative for some time. Have you been to Gail Tverberg’s site ourfiniteworld.com (I know Raúl’s linked to it before)? Do you think her argument/analysis-synthesis is off, or are you coming at this from a different angle regarding refining/consuming of energy?

I find it difficult to accept that it’s not the case —to use the metaphor— we’re using emulsified water to flush and pump out the last of the peanut butter from the jar, when we’ve spent so many years easily dipping our finger to get at it. I can accept the idea that it’s about monopolization of the reserves (I’m familiar with the scuttlebutt from geologists and engineers who say the vast and deep and filled reserves are sat upon by tyrants and transnational corporations [same thing?], as well as the more fringe Lore that what we think are ‘fossil’ fuels are not really fossils at all, but something alive and born), but that kind of argument still embraces the reality of scarcity, just recasting it as a matter of intentional design rather than material reality. But you’re consistent, so I’m curious what you know that I can learn.

[Polemos]

Veracious Poet, you comment often about the egocentrism of Western people and criticize others for their self-obsessions, but then start talking about how you’re ignored and resign yourself to the inattention of others. You comment that others spam and repost repostings and won’t give into serious discussion, but you frequently post memes anyone easily finds on Facebook or Reddit were we on either while also openly stating you have no interest in reading things from others’ points of view.

This is what I observe, before I started posting and after I’ve waded in. I appreciate your perspective, and I hope you live up to the standards you hold to others. My low standard is just this: be your own. If this is who you are, please don’t take it too personally when others see you as what you are. I say this with love: notice I’m not calling you names, insulting your heritage, or mocking your style. Be your own, modeling your best. If the standards by which you judge others makes you out to be your own sort of villain, then that’s no one’s fault but . . .

—
Regarding the order rescinding the mandate:
Here is the ruling itself. Here’s an important section:

The Mayor, in issuing Executive ORder No. 62, made a different decision for similarly situated people based on identical facts. There is nothing in the record to support the rationality of keeping a vaccination mandate for public employees, while vacating the mandate for private sector employees or creating a carveout for cerain professions, like athletes, artists, and performers. This is clearly an arbitrary and capricious action because we are dealing with identical unvaccinated people being treated differently by the same administrative agency. […]
Though not raised in the initial filing, this Court considered the fact that all but one of the Petitioners applied for exemptions from the mandate. They received generalized and vague denials. During that time their exemptions were being processed, they remained unvaccinated. There was no reason that they could not continue to submit to testing and continue to fulfill their duties as public employees. There was no reason why the City of New York could not continue with a vaccinate or test policy, like the Mayor’s Executive ORder that was issued in August 2021.
The Court finds that in light of the foregoing, the vaccination mandates for public employees and private employees is arbitrary and capricious. There was nothing demonstrated in the record as to why there was a vaccination mandate issued for only public employees in October 2021. This Court notes that Covid-19 rates were averaging under 1,500 per day in October 2021, significanly lower than today’s average Covid-19 rates. There was nothing demonstrated in the record as to why the private sector mandate was issued months later in December 2021. There was nothing demonstrated in the record as to why exemptions were issued for certain professions in March 2022 under Executive Order No. 62. There was nothing demonstrated in the record as to why employees were kept at full duty during the months-long pendency of their exemption appeals. There was nothing demonstrated in the record as to why a titer was not an acceptable alternative to vaccination, other than a single CDC study entitled “New CDC Study: Vaccination Offers Higher Protection than Previous Covid-19 Infection” which was issued in August 6, 2021.
Though vaccination should be encouraged, public employees should not have been terminated for their noncompliance. Over 79% of the population in New York City are vaccinated. These unvaccinated employees were kept at full duty while their exemptions were pending. Based upon the Petitioners’ vague denials of their exemptions, the fact they were kept at full duty for several months while their exemptions were pending, the Mayor’s Executive Order granting exemptions to certain classes of people, and the lifting of the private sector mandate, this Court finds the Commissioner’s Orders of October 20, 2021 and December 13, 2021, as well as the Mayor’s Executive Order No. 62 to be arbitrary and capricious.

The logic of this section indicates that if NYC or any other governmental body in the District wants to instate a mandate again, then they’ll have to come down hard, fast, and unilaterally on everyone, at once, and with no exemptions, no partial duty status, and a uniform due process procedure that’s the same for everyone, public or private. As the Court notices, the (reported) rates of infection now are higher than they were when the mandate ordered all employees to “show proof of at least one dose of vaccination against Covid-19,” showing on the one hand the capriciousness of the government’s behavior but on the other lending urgency to force the mandate better. On this note, it’s worth noting that the arguments in the decision regarding the Separation of Powers indicates that the legislative path towards a vaccination mandate is wide open: New York has to enact laws either giving the Health Commissioner the authority to impose permanent conditions of employment (can’t do it under the “temporary” [Court’s emphasis in the decision] state of emergency) or making it law, not executive action, that all citizens vaccinate.

—
Dr D Rich, a corollary of the observation, though, is that if we’re still around to notice it, we’re not so influential as to be a threat. 😕

[Polemos]

It wasn’t until I read Richard Powers’ The Overstory that I learned how much of the animal biomass on the earth are the cultivated animals humans eat and not the wild ones I used to think were “out there” in the wild. It’s an amazing story, very well-written and mind-expanding, and ends in a place I recognize as dawning upon us in a dangerous way. (A part of the march of technological progress: tools enabling humanity to listen to those they didn’t know had voices. Another part: means to silence and render voiceless those others)

Another paper to examine:
“The biomass distribution on Earth”

Today, the biomass of humans (≈0.06 Gt C; SI Appendix, Table S9) and the biomass of livestock (≈0.1 Gt C, dominated by cattle and pigs; SI Appendix, Table S10) far surpass that of wild mammals, which has a mass of ≈0.007 Gt C (SI Appendix, Table S11). This is also true for wild and domesticated birds, for which the biomass of domesticated poultry (≈0.005 Gt C, dominated by chickens) is about threefold higher than that of wild birds (≈0.002 Gt C; SI Appendix, Table S12). In fact, humans and livestock outweigh all vertebrates combined, with the exception of fish. Even though humans and livestock dominate mammalian biomass, they are a small fraction of the ≈2 Gt C of animal biomass, which primarily comprises arthropods (≈1 Gt C; SI Appendix, Tables S13 and
S14), followed by fish (≈0.7 Gt C; SI Appendix, Table S15).

—those are units “gigatons of carbon”, where a gigaton is 10^15g of C. Pretty wild insight.

And now for something completely different. Germ’s posting regarding the sudden cardiac event of Ashton Carter connects in my speculative mode with the long-standing fact that the CIA and other national-criminal-intelligence operations sought to disable targets through means indistinguishable from heart attacks. Not that I’m saying someone assassinated Carter, but it suddenly occurs to me that in a situation where larger numbers of people are more frequently “dying suddenly” is both accepted (as reality) and unacceptable (to talk about, like with the Emperor’s nakedness), it’s entirely possible to start disappearing all the influential people —especially the “little people” with strong social connections in various communities— you do not want standing in the way of your criminal intelligence operations. They’ll “die suddenly” in the midst of their ordinary, struggling lives, and those who could make the right connections will immediately latch onto “See! Another convid death jabbed, vax shed tragedy!” and Look No Further because they’ve confirmed their working model, and those who could receive those tight connections will immediately lament the death and Look No Further from subliminal fear about learning anymore of the suppressed truths, what it means for their own struggling health. And were an autopsy done that shows it wasn’t vax shed death jab, but a regular ol’ heart attack, a sudden event of inexplicable sorrow? —the connector doubles-down and cites the conspiracy to hide jab deaths; the conformer doubles-down and cites the science so recently adopted. And the criminal intelligence operation carries on, boots already laced and stamping down faces.

An Agatha Christie story, writ large. I know I’m not the only one who watched the recent Marvel movies and noticed that Hydra, having collected together all of the informational access available to them, figured out all the right people to kill using the weapons the “good guys” built to fight terrorists. I keep coming back to a favorite, Chapter 10: “Broken Suitcases” or “Cutting Open Satchels”

In taking precautions against thieves who cut open satchels, search bags, and break open boxes, people are sure to cord and fasten them well, and to employ strong bonds and clasps; and in this they are ordinarily said to show their wisdom. When a great thief comes, however, he shoulders the box, lifts up the satchel, carries off the bag, and runs away with them, afraid only that the cords, bonds, and clasps may not be secure; and in this case what was called the wisdom (of the owners) proves to be nothing but a collecting of the things for the great thief.
Let me try and set this matter forth. Do not those who are vulgarly called wise prove to be collectors for the great thieves? And do not those who are called sages prove to be but guardians in the interest of the great thieves? How do I know that the case is so?
Formerly, in the state of Qi, the neighbouring towns could see one another; their cocks and dogs never ceased to answer the crowing and barking of other cocks and dogs (between them). The nets were set (in the water and on the land); and the ploughs and hoes were employed over more than a space of two thousand li square. All within its four boundaries, the establishment of the ancestral temples and of the altars of the land and grain, and the ordering of the hamlets and houses, and of every corner in the districts, large, medium, and small, were in all particulars according to the rules of the sages. So it was; but yet one morning, Tian Cheng-zi killed the ruler of Qi, and stole his state. And was it only the state that he stole? Along with it he stole also the regulations of the sages and wise men (observed in it).
And so, though he got the name of being a thief and a robber, yet he himself continued to live as securely as Yao and Shun had done. Small states did not dare to find fault with him; great states did not dare to take him off; for twelve generations (his descendants) have possessed the state of Qi. Thus do we not have a case in which not only did (the party) steal the state of Qi, but at the same time the regulations of its sages and wise men, which thereby served to guard the person of him, thief and robber as he was?

This also links back to the Adam Curtis documentary I linked to before, Can’t Get You Out of My Head. Near the end, Curtis brings into his beautiful narrative the story how September 11 gifted a struggling run-from-the-garage Google and the criminal intelligence operation with a marriage made in death. Suddenly, having intimate knowledge of people’s habits and automatic behaviors in “gathering information” (just being themselves) was a necessity in discerning where the next terrorist event was going to happen.
So, we are at a time when sudden deaths of influential people fit into pre-established narratives, further canalizing people’s thinking and responding into pre-determined acceptable routes. Your Good Guy Team brooks no nuance, no dissent: look how easily people write off this weirdo precisely because he doesn’t fit either side —he’s instantly on the enemy’s side. You will see from “the Left” and from “the Right”, from the people punching Up and the people stomping Down, because no one wants to hear nonsense masquerading as wisdom. “We’re all benevolent and righteous in here.” Yet they are dying, silently or on stages, in videos closed in circuits or broadcast live, like candles in churches pinched in shadows.

[Polemos]

Noirette, I wondered a similar thing (what is the relationship between obesity and COVID-19?) earlier on during the pandemic, and so I collected a number of papers I could download from pubmed and other online public resources. One of the key takeaways: adipose tissueitself acts as a reservoir and production site for SARS-CoV-2 and many other viruses, due to the ACE2 receptors and other biomechanical systems the tissues participate within for signalling inflammation states for the whole body. —This is in addition to aspnaz’s point that obese people have “more medical issues.” Here are just a few of the papers I downloaded, which I’ll link to so you and others can benefit:

“The impact of obesity on the cellular and molecular pathophysiology of COVID-19”

In the lungs, SARS-CoV-2 binds to the ACE2 receptor, upregulating the expression of ACE2 and damaging alveolar cells. [42] The ACE2 receptor is overexpressed in the adipose tissue of COVID-19 patients. [43,44] Since obese people have more adipose tissue, they are expected to have more ACE2 receptors. ACE2 receptors are expressed in monocytes and macrophages, [45] which are also more prevalent in the adipose tissue of obese people. [46,47] It is therefore likely that adipose tissue acts as a viral reservoir and possibly allows for inter-organ transmission. [43,44]”

—See also the next paragraph concerning DPP4. And, those numbers are citations to other papers worth following up with.

“Influence of obesity on serum levels of SARS-CoV-2-specific antibodies in COVID-19 patients”

Results herein show that serum levels of SARS-CoV-2 IgG antibodies are negatively associated with BMI in COVID-19 patients. This result is consistent with the knowledge that obesity is an inflammatory condition associated with inflammaging [1] and metaflammation [50] both of which are negatively associated with a functional immune system [51]. Another result from the present study is the negative association of SARS-CoV-2 IgG antibodies with pulmonary inflammatory markers (SAA, CRP, ferritin) in our cohort of COVID-19 patients. These are major inflammatory mediators and markers of inflammatory lung injury in patients with catastrophic acute respiratory distress syndrome, which is a primary consequence of COVID-19. SAA, CRP and ferritin are known to induce a cascade of pro-inflammatory events leading to the secretion of additional inflammation markers that contribute to the exacerbation of local and systemic inflammation resulting in dysfunctional B cells.

—You can tell this paper was early in the pandemic, since they suggest ADE was not yet verified as occurring with SC2. Interesting also is a brief mention in the paper that linoleic acid (in vitro) has protective effects by binding with SC2, and their research corroborates that.

“Secretion of autoimmune antibodies in the human subcutaneous adipose tissue”
—While not on SC2 specifically, this paper demonstrates how subcutaneous adipose tissue participates in those immune systems, leading to the production of autoantigens, hyperinflammation, neutrophil-infiltration, and assorted other ways the body attacks itself to try and cure its own disease.

Not sure if the blockquotes will work out right, but I’ll stop here.

I am, though sympathetic with your main point: it’s easy to hate on “the fatty” and blame them for their own victimhood, even if it is unwitting participation in social behavior that allows them to also be targeted with others for summary destruction. People are quick to say “the elite” want to 1) divide-and-conquer, on their way to 2) destroying the masses (and the massive?), and so their critics want us to “wake up” and see the depopulation event for what it is. But, then, they’ll find some target for their own anger, frustration, rage, whether it’s someone expressing a consistent but different point of view on a website, someone unable to manage their eating habits, someone unable to control their emotions in public spaces, someone who cuts and paste memes replicating their views, &c &c. “See how they divide us?! You don’t!? Stay away from me, then, you ignorant freak and total loser!!” Divided, conquered, habituated to hate: people do unwittingly take up religious rituals looking for a scapegoat, to appease, for a moment, a useless and incurable impotency.

I too find it difficult to know how to live with and redirect my own frustrations and angers, and I can’t just walk into the Temple and whip the money-changers or pretend like a Son of Thunder I’m ready to die with a sword in my hand and a prayer on my mind. Art, or writing, or taking walks in the forests with creeks nearby, but as the neck-tied man with eviction papers tells me, this doesn’t pay the bills.

I see how there are gaps and holes in the social spaces even around me, from people who crawled into their rooms to live forever virtually, fell into tombs to die really, or left for islands or rich coastlines in the Southern Hemisphere. I don’t think any of them are “cowards” though I see and understand that perspective. I don’t think Ayn Rand thought of her own John Galt character as a “coward” for recognizing when it’s right to find another place to make a home —just like I don’t think the geese vees flying overhead lack bravery for getting ahead of the coming winter. So, as I watch the Law Enforcers suiting up, warming up their sonic weapons and microwave emitters in time for the November Event, as I watch the goons in the Red neckerchiefs and Blue hats scrimmaging against the Blue neckerchiefs with the Red hats, as I watch incompetent bureaucrats stand at podiums and lie for the liars who lied to them, I turn instead outwards to my windows, observing that the trees are telling me that the winter that’s coming is going to be very, very cold, dry, and yet feverish. The trees also notice the holes and gaps between them, places where the mycorrhizal network went completely silent, canceled, gone.

Anyway, maybe at some point, citizenx will also catch on that Redneck is not from the USA. But that will cut out a lot of the basis for the invective and not-so-subtle claim for hypocrisy. He’ll think of something, I’m sure of it. Why let accuracy get in the way of a rant on a roll?

[Polemos]

Dr. D, it is correct: I did not see that Redneck has commented about being from “Down Under” though I did catch the recent catch-us-up on his bio. And you are again correct: it makes a huge difference.

I do get that certain people dislike seeing posts from Redneck, because it causes friction in the lane to have to wade through dissenting voices. I also get that other people don’t mind the friction, because it helps smooth us all out if we let ourselves roll like stones down the streams of our consciousness.

It’s why I’ve come around to reading your own comments. I don’t always agree with you, but I very much appreciate your take and sense of humor. I understand why slimyalligator’s asking you if you’re a fan of Johnathan Winters (being that I’m old enough to remember his appearing on the television shows my folks watched).

Speaking of folks, my parents said know: thank you for the link to the ventusky site. I’ve been watching local (in space, in time) weather using weather.cod.edu for a while, useful for noting particular(ly) odd microwave flashes from the Doppler stations, or just beautiful patterns among patterns, and also for colorful displays on my second monitor if I’m doing something on the main.

[Polemos]

What is the law of science that says humans communicate with humans? Can you formalize it?

If “we all know” something, was it science that got “us” there? Is it science that informs you about what “we all know” or is it hyperbole, assumption, ideology, or speculation?

If you lack the tools or instruments to discern magnetic fields, do you know they exist? If you lack the sense receptors to discern electric current, do you know they exist? What is the phenomenological sensation in your consciousness of the lack of a dimension (as in, a space of freedom) or a modality (as in, a form of reality)?

Given contemporary physics now asserts the primacy of consciousness/agency prior to the material world (as in, consciousness produces the phenomena, not the materiality producing the consciousness), it is also true for you that all of the experience you are having “does not make any of it remotely real or true to anybody other than yourself,” because what you think you mean by ‘real’ and what you think you mean by ‘yourself’ remain occulted behind many hidden assumptions you feel unassailable.

I posted a passage from the Zhuangzi, and here you are, playing the role perfectly. Are you robot or are you dancer?

[Polemos]

https://dol.georgia.gov/minimum-wage

The federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour.

Incremental changes were as follows:

Effective July 24, 2007, the federal minimum wage increased to $5.85 per hour.
Effective July 24, 2008, the federal minimum wage increased to $6.55 per hour.
Effective July 24, 2009, the federal minimum wage increased to $7.25 per hour.
Georgia’s minimum wage is $5.15 per hour, however, with some limited exceptions, the federal minimum wage rate applies.

Georgia’s minimum wage law can be found in the Official Code of Georgia Annotated (O.C.G.A.) at Title 34-Chapter 4-Section 3 (O.C.G.A. 34-4-3) and the Fair Labor Standards Act, generally and at 29 U.S.C. 203, 206, 213, and 214.

Jobs in the area are hiring for around a minimum $12/hr (office work, light manual labor) and the majority expressing an “up to” $19–22/hr (landscaping, driving trucks, factory line work). I don’t visit franchise burger joints, but in this area, a local decent diner hamburger is about $6.00 and a local great diner hamburger is $10 and a restaurant burger $9–15 with sides. (I don’t eat red meat anymore, though.) An organic honeycrisp apple is now $2.50/lb, and organic Hass avocados are $2.50/each. Inorganic, about $1.50/lb and $1/lb respectively. A 5oz tin of storebrand tuna is $.70/each on sale and regularly $1/each, but I get the “safe catch” brand and it’s wildly, embarrasingly more expensive. A medium pizza and a large Greek salad (no drinks) from the local pizzeria is about $40, including a 15% tip.

I checked on xe.com and it’s saying the exchange rate is $1 ↔ €1.0166.

[Polemos]

John Day, what stands out to me is that Redneck isn’t thinking and processing and writing like the rednecks I work alongside and listen to and have lived among as a Georgia boy and young man. I’m the son of a genuine redneck who farmed and struggled and keeps to his garden still, while my mom, his wife, also tells me stories of her life on a rice patty, sitting on dirt floors waiting on adult men to eat their meals first, though today she’s more suburban and classist in narcissistic denial of the poverty and humiliaiton that shaped her traumatic life. They threw me into the public schools, so I retreated into the libraries while climbing trees and leaving my body to travel amongst the clouds and the caves and the rambling, incoherent adventures of stuffed bears with their friendly piglets.

[Polemos]

Veracious Poet, if you’re indicating that you think I’m someone’s sock puppet, you have little evidence to offer for it beyond your own demonstrated and admitted ignorance —are you saying you didn’t and won’t read what differs from what you expect to find?

If you do not understand what my points are, that’s understandable. I don’t write for newspapers or tweets. I’m probably coming from a very different perspective from the one you’re rutted into. Have you ever read John Stuart Mill, especially his work On Liberty? Here, it’s freely given to you, to challenge you and help you to strengthen your own views.

I do genuinely appreciate the offer of a perspective I do not share. That’s not “praise” for the opinion, although I am familiar enough with the ideological ruts people get themselves into to see how it operates, how it excludes, how it trivializes, how it denies, and how it weakens inevitably the mental and emotional and spiritual flexibility inherent to human experience. Immunologically speaking, I see why you want to select what fits your mental landscape to solicit the same self-reinforcing circle, but exposing yourself to a variety of viewpoints with thankfulness and openness will make you far stronger, through that destabilizing process of canalized immunological responses.

Are you against mandatory vaccinations? Do you think it’s dangerous to force people to exhibit only one antibody response, when the natural world presents to them many evolving and adaptive quasi-species swarms? Your mental health is a frame shift of the approaches you take with your physical health, and opening one’s self to the natural and cultivated ecosystems of the noetic worlds enhances your own mental and spiritual flexibilties and resilience.

If you like, as I’ve said, you can write me off as a crank or insane, or Discordian, or even an algorithmic robot. I also appreciate your willingness to share the viewpoint you have with others who disagree, even when you limit who and what you are out of an intermittent desire for orthodoxy in your surroundings.

aspnaz, I’m not sure if you’re criticizing me or the people I’m saying I understand as to why they ignore and do not contemplate life beyond the fences they’ve built for themselves. There is a sentence, and a paragraph, after the sentence you quote, and at no point am I saying that I am superior to the Sun, or the Galaxy. If you follow the link to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s paper in that sentence you quoted and read that paper, I think you’ll understand even deeper the perspective I am working from and so understand more broadly where I am coming from. That is why I linked it, after all.

Zhuangzi and Huizi were walking on the dam over the Hao, when the former said, ‘These thryssas come out, and play about at their ease – that is the enjoyment of fishes.’
The other said, ‘You are not a fish; how do you know what constitutes the enjoyment of fishes?’
Zhuangzi rejoined, ‘You are not I. How do you know that I do not know what constitutes the enjoyment of fishes?’
Huizi said, ‘I am not you; and though indeed I do not fully know you, you certainly are not a fish, and (the argument) is complete against your knowing what constitutes the happiness of fishes.’
Zhuangzi replied, ‘Let us keep to your original question. You said to me, “How do you know what constitutes the enjoyment of fishes?” You knew that I knew it, and yet you put your question to me – well, I know it (from our enjoying ourselves together) over the Hao.’

That said, I do discuss spirituality with ants and insects, even the plants and fungi and yeasts, and I spend time marveling with wonder at the dreams expressed through the distributed consciousness of the worms I raise —isn’t it kinda odd for you to ask rhetorically, through assuming implicitly, that one wouldn’t discuss spirituality with an ant while suggesting that it’s arrogant to overshoot one’s place by imagining you have nothing in common with something greater than one’s self? Why is it not arrogance to think you have nothing in common with the ant —what has she and their species of people ever done to you?
The insight the Zhuangzi offers in showing “the transformation of things”, in showing the frog in the well or the cicada under the leaf unable to understand the vision of the roc in flight above the vastness of the sky: perspective matters, because magnitudes matter, and what we ineptly perceive in the perceptions of others is still already there in our own ineptness when perceiving the perceptions in ourselves, so overcoming the one comes from contemplating and moving —actually moving, by handling and engaging and working— through what is already there, towards the effortlessness of flowing along with your Tao in its flowing along with the greater Tao. All the while, you vanish, it arises, and thus is one reborn.

The divine is within you, just as it is within them, all the varieties of ‘them’, and it is through that divinity we overcome the parafinite limitations imposing upon us by this material experience conducting us towards self-awareness, other-awareness, and towards the unity we have always already participated within.

[Polemos]

I appreciate the perspective Redneck offers. I’m not someone who either had the resources, nor the connections, nor the confidence to travel to the far-flung places humans find this planet has to offer. But I have walked and moved among the wealthy and the poor, the middle and the corporate in my local area of humans, enough to experience places where humans have imploded their environments either through destructive, drug-fueled depression or conformist, controlling class-structure. So there’s a sense in which I get the point Redneck offers against Dr D’s point, which I also completely understand and agree with: it is in their ingenuity and their imagination for humans to make art and life as well as war and poverty. We are legacies to a long and very complex history of forms of consciousness whose spiritual contours allow them deep access to the fundamental creative work of Being: we are participants in the destruction and the creation, fellow co-creators, co-destroyers. Our is a Dialectic Engine, linking together yet unsuturing our mental and virtual reality from the material and formal worlds. A vast and aged tree that dwarfs me in an old growth forest has a hardened and inert core surrounded by a thin surface of tubes and vesicles and hydrostatic pressures; the thin life of human virility envelopes surfaces of rust, ruin, rot, and rats; once-organized chaos slowly giving way, as best all matter can, to the inevitable return to formlessness once foundational energies devoted to order and efficiency no longer rule or have dominion.

One sees his point, and the other sees his point, and both have two eyes to see with, two ears to listen with, and two nostrils to smell with, but only one mouth, or one POST textbox on a WordPress install, with which to offer a unified vision of what it looks like to be right. We can take in two ways, but wrestle within to make it one, then give back in one way, what others will either incline or disengage, depending all along on what side of the bed they slept on, or if alone.

Depth comes from taking in from more than one vector, orientation from taking in from more than one dimension, universality from taking in from more than frame, choice from giving back as the movement of one’s will what you have digested of the universe’s love poured into all those holes and openings and receptive wombs pointed outwards —all your Matrices, for you are the body for its confinement and festering gestation. The Matrix might be a prison, a tool for enslavement, but that’s because the person writing those stories hates his Mother and wishes she were Dead and Refined and Machined. When you love your Mother, and thank her for carrying you, you understand how you were always meant to be born and pushed violently out of the Matrix into the “desert of the real” where, now shed of your thin sliver of flesh and hydrostatic pressure, you recognize the void’s endless currents of living light —the real Spectrum before being “on the spectrum” meant you were somehow dysfunctionally adapted to the neurotypical insanity because you practiced a more “homegrown” form of solipsism they’ll call “autism”.

I understand why many people don’t think the Sun thinks and has feelings and dreams and engages in philosophical speculation about matters irrelevant to them. They don’t stop for a moment to wonder relly why and how their own consciousness rides on waves generated from tiny compressed electromagnetic spirals and loops held in place by fatty ion gates actively networking in the wet spaces they call their bodies, so the idea that the vast and spatially more extended waves visibly generated in massive electromagnetic spirals and loops across its surface might signal something analogous to their own self-reflection won’t ever occur to them until someone helps them to see how they are what rides the light, all the way down, like falling into a gravity well all over again, into the melting mirror and on through to the other side, where we find our fellow Leibniz pointing out from inside the Monad we’re sharing with him that it’s only One, only one reflecting surface endlessly repeating in infinite curvature a reality that’s our own, a cavitation apart from the void rapidly losing surface tension and imminently collapsing from the pressure of Nothing, the inevitable formlessness returning. If I think, and the Sun thinks, I know the Earth thinks, and prays, and tells jokes, and hates, and chooses, and admires, and fears, and learns to overcome even what it is to be a fallen star trapped in an earth’s body. And if I and my local friends are similar enough, though wildly different in our perspectives, I skip ahead orders of magnitude and ponder about the Galaxy, remembering what it was to ride the waves of something so much older and so much wider and so much more enclosing —a memory only a pixel amidst the ocean of noise on the inside screen of my monad. my virtual ego tunnel.

I get John Michael Greer’s dissent from the usual praise of Century of Self, and I recognize that Adam Curtis has to say the impossible-to-say while walking the fine line between creative dissent and institutional hegemony. I have watched Can’t Get You Out of My Head at least seven times, all eight hours of it, so I’m biased. It is such an impressive narrative and parallel to what I had been trying to teach my students about philosophy through original texts, literature, personal exploration, group conversation. I’m not sure I agree with Greer’s general take, and some of the comments there, that Curtis is oblivious to how Bernays and his concept of human manipulation has failed to achieve industry’s goals, when anyone who has watched Curtis knows the “… but then something unexpected happened” segue that shows how all these plans wash out and fail. What I take Curtis to be saying in this latest long documentary of our contemporary political world is that we are right back where we always are regarding dreams of technological progress giving way to the nightmares of social dissent —or is it the dreams of social progress giving way to the nightmares of technological dissent? (Keep permutating this) Like some Lucifer Principle at work, the more a hegemonic ideological apparatus “drills down” to refine its control over the finer grains of its constituents, the more its internal contradictions and inconsistencies and paradoxes arise, expressing themselves as individuals through self-assertion whose own existence challenges the fabrics and institutions of the spaces making possible those individuals in the first place. Machine learning might outpace human calculation, but human political reality turned over to machines reignites within the peopled machines and the machined people the same spiritual dilemmas plaguing the bureaucrats who trust the machines’ makers. And the people will run red lights when they notice the red lights malfunction.

As the lights turn off, the Sun will burn and think of a new recipe for brussel sprouts, and the Galaxy will wonder if the grandkids are eating healthy.

[Polemos]

Based on my observations, the machine scans the text area in the form submission for links of a certain length or configutation. The link can be either inside the anchor tag or outside standing-alone (where it will be automated into an anchor tag after submission). Shorter links do not trigger the Vanishing, but longer links appear to do so. I don’t think anyone has tried to send a large number of links to see if that’s also trapped, but my thought is that amount of links won’t trigger the Vanishing at the rates people ordinarily submit links. When I had issues with comments Vanishing, I found that deleting the links or replacing them with shorter URLs (pick a service you prefer) worked to not have the comment Vanished.

[Polemos]

If you read Hannah Arendt’s analysis in The Human Condition, one of the points she makes concerns the suppression of the political realm via the social realm: the advent of mass communication and an industrial technology to support very large numbers of humans —hundreds of millions in a compressed region— changes individual agency into absolute numerical supremacy. The collective social organism wrests culture and focus away from individual, self-driven agency, and what was once a clear and valuable distinction between the public role and the private life blurs into what we now know as total, pervasive surveillance. In this sense, “socialism” is not so much a specific set of dogmas related to the control and ownership of communal properties or economic capital, but a recognition of the supremacy of the social realm over the political life.

There is no politician today in any “elected” office who does not refer to their mandate on behalf of the people. This is her point. “The people” have one. The deme acts as the smallest unit of political life, and thus the social realm dominates over the possibilities one person’s political act might have been. All the totalitarians today talk about “democracy” not because they are being deceptive or mendacious with their language. They are expressing the contemporary version of the Hobbesian point: the totalitarian political machine is driven by the collective consciousness of the people, with the “face” or the “personation” of the King spread among the bureaucrats who instantiate the reality of that machine in action. Corporations, being a collective activity orchestrating its smaller fractal units through social functions and mechanisms, are the smallest unit of contemporary political activity.

At one point, I was an unstructor (a handy typo, I’ll run with it) teaching introduction to philosophy classes. The classes were unlike other classes around, because I’m not a conventional sort of person and philosophy is just not a conventional sort of thing. What I showed for my students was something I do not often see shown in Orwell’s 1984, but it is something that is plainly there. There is no such thing as a singular Totalitarian mindset. By that, I mean, there is nobody “at the top.” The pyramid is intentionally left unfinished because there is no such thing as Big Brother. If you’re unfamiliar with the book —and especially the book-within-the-book, that is the book (or, if you will, say it in Greek)— you might at least remember the slogans War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength. If you are a neurotypical person, you’re supposed to laugh at the contradictions and think it’s ludicrous for anyone not to notice the paradoxes. The Party, on the other hand, structures its own society —three tiers, remember: proles, Outer and Inner— with each “layer” of this pyramidal structure being itself the living embodiment of one of these slogans. The proles are ignorant; that ignorance is what gives them the strength to endure the depravity, the bombings, the filth, the exploitation, the meaninglessness of their lives. The Outer Party wrestles in its daily life with their freedom; advancing inward one must do away with any genuine freedom, because the appearance of freedom by following one’s desire is an enslavement to the satisfaction of that desire and not to the boundless freedom inherent to being the Party’s precious Slave. (Go all the way back to Augustine, to Marcus Aurelius, to Buddha, to Arjuna, to the Heart of what it means to do away with desire and find the hidden secret beyond love and hate, and you will see). The Inner Party, wreckless psychopaths fully in control and fully in obedience, are completely at peace with one another because they are perpetually locked in an endless war with one another, because each of them understands the larger scope of the greater war of their multipolar world requires each of them to perfect their warring against the other members of the Inner Party so that the ultimate peace —the chaotic dance of stillness in a placid pond, the Brownian motion of endless movement and the flatness of its solitude— obtains. But what most people forget, and forget that they forget if they actually bother to read it, is how Winston, led by O’Brien (the Son of the Lord, etymologically), comes to the Fourth Slogan all on his own, to the slogan that obtains at the highest level where Big Brother resides —the open top of the pyramid of social structure:God is Power.

The thing is, most people forget this part of the narrative, if they read it, because for such people, this is not a paradox. It’s not a thing they have learned to deny. It is an implicit dream still resonating in all that they do. It is there, in Winston, and it is why, despite all that he thinks he is doing to resist the process of falling in love with GodBig Brother, it is inevitable that every Winston will. People want to hold onto the belief that enough power, whether it is the power to vote, the power to change things, the power to force others, the power to make the world great again, the power to do anything, is enough to accomplish what needs accomplishing. It is the root for all of the totalitarians. It is the root for all the fascisms. It is the root for all the collectives. It is the root for all of the religions. It is the root for all the magical spells people invoke thinking they are going to alter the course and flow of karma, just enough, for once enough, O please!, just this once, mygodohgodplease, in this life do not let me die. It is the root for the people who want the jabs to stop. It is the root for the people who want the jabs to continue. It is the root for the people who want the land to grow good food. It is the root for the people who want to steal the good food off the shelf. It is the root for the father holding his dying little girl in his arms. It is the root for the doctor who wanted to help her live. It is the root for the oil tycoon amassing his fortune. It is the root for the guy gassing up his truck to head into work. All of the root for the fruits of the tree that grows wide and branches off into the limitless unending sky, this paradox: —God is Power.

Wipe it away, what you read. Unlearn what you have seen. It’s unimportant. Don’t think about it. I’m a crank, an imbecile, a monkey with a thousand keyboards and a computer for a brain. What do I know?

All I did was observe a thing, and had a clue, that Orwell knew more about what’s going on in the Book, about how it changes the way people think about what’s important about their lives, because it encourages them to believe there is more to life than death, and more to death than life, but it never actually teaches anyone to understand how to unwork the conviction of the paradox and helps them stop seeing God as all-powerful or seeing power as making one godlike. Arendt, in her own way, makes this case: Sputnik and metal computational machines that patted people on the head (and now thumbs up with likes their dopaminergic pathways) made people think they had become as god, able to place their own Walkers in the Sky. And now you have a whole night full of them, Links to the Stars, casting down bolts upon dolts and leaving holes where people once stood,

The one who would have you holds out a hand with all the power in the world he has to offer you, and you will take it if you think it can give you just a moment to live on, forever. But if you are wise, you know these are lies, because we all signed up to die. If you have no fear, the rats can eat you, and you’ll know it was all worth it. Love is worth it. She is worth it. Anyone else, is worth it. Pay your own price. Don’t accept any other stand in. Nail yourself on your own cross, build it if you have to. The test is clear. Don’t take any power. Don’t take any other path. Have no other gods, no powers. Let yourself go like water down the hill, like leaves in the wind, like clouds irradiated by dead stars at night, but be wise.

I don’t know what I’m saying, but I’ll leave it at that. I have a lot to learn.

[Polemos]

I think I hadn’t yet hit send when Dark Matter posted the same observation I had of the slip Small made. I’m glad I’m not the only one who notices things. Like aspnaz noticing the duper’s delight sense of Small’s behavior in the clip. I do feel chided a bit when framing myself in the context of the criticisms Veracious Poet made, insofar as it’s a bit silly for me to think I have insight into anyone’s head on the basis of a slip of the tongue or a giggle or a swivel of the head. But Veracious used the word ‘know’, whereas I’ll skip off the hook by recognizing about myself that I’m gullible enough to believe anything I say, and know that.

Speaking also of noticing things, if the news article says the underwater drone was found along Nord Stream 1, why does the photo of the submerged thing (a NATO Seafox, they say?) say Nord Stream Line 2?

My guess is that Nord Stream 1 is (at least?) two pipes together, which Wikipedia kinda confirms but uses the language that it’s Line A and B, not 1 & 2. But there it is in the picture.

Sometimes I wonder if part of the hyperunreality of our Matrix existence is a test to see not only who are paying attention to the paradoxes, inconsistencies, and contradictions but also will poke their heads up like the blind moles we are so that Trickster can whack us faster.

[Polemos]

Often left out of the transcripts/quotations of J. Small’s response to Roos’ question is the little laugh just after quickly saying “No,” the kind of response and transition one makes to emphasize light dismissiveness of the seriousness and an attempt to produce consensus acknowledgment: as though one shrugs, says “No,” but then says, “Look, here’s how it was really going down” so that her audience also understands what was already understood. Not quite as bad as an “Are you serious? Duh!” but moving in that rhetorical direction. The laugh is recorded in the captioning of the video, but I do not see it mentioned in many of the quotations. Those little details are not often seen in news coverage anyway, though.

Also, does anyone else notice the Freudian slip in her response as she reframes the question before answering? “Regarding the question around did we know about stopping immunization before it, um, entered the market.” She does shake her head ‘No’ subtly as she says ‘stopping’ but notice the word that follows and compare it specifically to what Roos asked her. ‘Immunization’ is not the same word as ‘transmission’. What does it mean to stop immunization? Is her head language indicating part of her understands she’s about to misspeak, or is it a tacit admission of that foreknowledge regarding the “stopping” and so the dissonance prompts her to switch words midstream?

Off to see the Wizard . . .

[Polemos]

Having no conventional weapons makes it more likely for a nation to use unconventional weapons.

A while back, some of us had a sidebar about the aliens turning off nuclear weapons. I recently came across Lt. Co.Thomas Bearden’s Excalibur Briefing, where he says in multiple instances that the advanced forms of technology the Soviet Union developed under a hyperspatial physics/zero-point energy model could also accomplish this. They could also, if they wished, detonate a nuclear warhead while it was still in the US silo. There are a lot of “out there” claims made in the text, but if the foundations and the engineering from them are sound, what’s proposed is a kind of World Revolution in everything we understand about consciousness, time, intention, history, paranormal phenomena, in addition to a solution to energy scarcity. Here’s a YouTube video:

Tomorrow/today I’m going to see about getting a job driving a truck hauling a trailer for a quail farm. If I get it, I’ll go back to lurking while saving up money, the last few bits of it allowed me before they push the Off button, and maybe learn something about quail farming, towing long trailers, and business aspects of agriculture here in the South.

[Author]

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