Late August Weekend

So what was my weekend like? As you know, I like to study, and that includes adventures into the environment, such as taking Springwater Corridor to Sellwood and over the bicycle bridge to the Sellwood-Tacoma Max station. Ride Orange Line back to OMSI stop, transfer to FX2 to within blocks from home. That's work-study time.

On Sunday it was walk by Terry (ISEPP prez) and a consultant working on finding homes for left behind office furniture and supplies. I gather the John C. Lilly group has moved to other digs. Onward to Stark Street Meetinghouse (formerly ESI, before that Jantzen) where the testimony was about "sangha" (community) -- although no one actually used that Buddhist word (but many were maybe thinking it, given our demographics (I know I was)).

That night I watched Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, believe it or not for the first time, although having seen clips over the years, it felt familiar in places. I'd checked Movie Madness for it before, and imagined it was rented out, not realizing their Kubrick shelf wrapped around and down. I'm illiterate in so many dimensions I've lost count. Talked with fam through Verizon on my iPhone.

At Quakers, I met up with Dr. Carl Abbott over snacks and thanked him for his excellent presentation on Portland history for Humanists of Greater Portland (HGP), to which I'd been party over Zoom (not the first time I'd caught one of his talks). Urban Studies, PSU. I caught up with Leslie, back from California. 

Also, Megge suggested I join up with Peace & Justice (as it's now called -- did I get that right?). Quakers revolve through a finite set of management committees, learning to see a shared business from the inside, from many angles. Good experience building social and supervisory skills.

I'm just hitting some of the highlights. Weekends don't stand out that much at the moment. I do have a work schedule in the queue, with Clarusway again, but that's always contingent on other outcomes, per some cosmic Gantt chart I'm not privy to.

Speaking of Clarusway, this morning (Monday) I posted to edu-sig, a Python org Mailman group of longstanding, regarding digital roots (or "indigs" as some've called them).

Hawthorne Street Fair!  Slides above.

Posting From Cyberia

We'd like to get it to the point where arsonists in their bunkers, trying to start conflagrations, get treated more as psychiatric patients than as so-called "world leaders". This has to do with my Spaceship Earth imagery (inherited) morphing into Global University (GU) imagery, meaning "teaching hospital" and a lot of  psy-stuff. 

Faculty is working on curricula that turn out students with higher quotients in whatever respects higher quotients are needed. Perhaps we're sufficiently intelligent but insufficiently developed in other directions. What's our consistency score? 

Yes, I'm back to trucking and dirty jobs. The path to a PhD is through extensive practice with toolsets and skillsets. The medical doctor shares a lot of these same "I can learn anything" traits, which leads to some percentage crashing their single or even twin engine planes ("Too Gung Ho" on the tombstone).

Think of it though: to swap long haul driving work with a counterpart, to ride as a sidekick, to take in the language and customs and bring that back. Then study more if you want to and join that same fleet as a driver next time, and repeat. 

Airline pilots know what I mean. There's that inner circle that flies in and out of Hong Kong, or Rangoon or whatever (I had a bouncy ride into Rangoon once, as a passenger, on a DC3 or one of those).

The yahoos in their bunkers, trying to start wars, are already in rubber room approximators, so we shift attention to curbing enthusiasm for short term fireworks. Crushing obsolete institutions is actually a more rewarding exercise, and outward war as we know it has been seeing sunset for quite awhile now. 

We still fight psychologically. That's actually a more even playing field, and we can get back to Victorian values like "fairness" as we talk about it in sports. You know: honor. 

Just blasting zoomorphic creatures from an Apache helicopter is better shifted to simulator, to computer game. Acted out, it's schizo nutso, by horror film Poindexters, except not confined to film.

I've always been a fan of the global network at the city mayor level. Mayors meet and discuss issues. I'm told Portland has gotten better an learning from others, versus letting its earlier fame and glory go to its head. Then came a fall. 

But saying the fall of Portland was independent of seismic shifts shaking up the collective psyche more generally would be like wearing blinders, perhaps intentionally (confining attention to the "Markov blanket" is a systems technique). 

Portland might be talking to Shiraz for all I know (I don't claim to be privy to all that mayoral type chatter).

Denizens of Cyberia, enjoying more overview than ever before in history, have an angle on the arsonists now that everything's out in the open. 

Transparency in government was given lip service as an ideal, but now that we approach a bar that leaves behind legacy media, showing it from the back side (in the rear view mirror), the political process snaps into clearer focus. 

Those who would profit from more slaughter on the battlefield are filmed hyping slaughter to their stakeholders, in pure Hunger Games fashion. Doctors without borders see how capitalism can make you cuckoo, in addition to highly paid. 

However shooting mental patients was never considered much of a cure outside of quack circles, wherein the sickly witch hunters seek scapegoats for bounty (or merely mob approval). The first step is to disconnect psychopaths from their agentic dashboards, such as by unplugging the latter.

There's nothing cowardly about not jumping in the cage with the rabid dog and having it out. For what purpose would one do that? 

Let the dog rage at the cage itself, and think about euthanasia as a kind of putting to rest some core concerns, such as where do we have to draw the borders ultimately. Virtual states have boundaries too, if not contiguous.  

The reputed ignorance, of Americans, of political geography, might turn out to be a good thing, as we go soft focus on these older maps. The global university comes with new floorplans.

Contra Insanity