Looking Back

A popular exercise in high school history could be to have students write a narrative they imagine in a future history book, about the recent past. Try to emulate the style of academic writing to some extent, but with an audience of people at their same reading level, which is high school to adult.

But of course that’s a broad assignment, which is part of the challenge. How does one pitch it at the right level of overview. The main thing is to emulate hindsight and tell the story differently, to signify the future perspective. What does the current time look like, from after the Singularity? We’re writing science fiction in that case. Martian Math.

Drawing from my own recent corpus and generating from that, a lot of us geeks were turned on by the global electrification trend, which president Johnson made his name in connection with, being a point man when it came to electrifying Texas, still with its own grid. We picked up on the HVDC trend and bought into the World Game plan to link up the hemispheres. On the other hand, a slower business-minded mindset could not conceive of such infrastructure minus its own ownership and control of it, and these delinquents sidetracked the project in order to prove who was calling the shots.

Something about “taking credit” is amiss in today’s cybersphere, where a lot of the content creeping in is recycled bot talk, but not flagged as such. Teen zeens, fan literature, vehicles for advertising, have found ways to amp up content using only half human-authored texts. Text generators abetted by editors, allowed to editorialize, compete with naked thinkers to using AI. The more phony stuff tends to come with telltale signs if one knows what to look for.

Martian Math opted for hydropower in conjoining the physics of power generation with synergetic volumetric accounting, a minor wrinkle, experimental, and a door-opener for curriculum developers, as now we’d have a stronger geometric vocabulary and concept set. Students from our academies would rocket ahead, not being burdened with the kinds of ethnocentrism that lead others to spin out of control, sometimes right out of the gate.

Am I a Racist? (movie review)

As y'all might know, I'm a YouTube junkie. I've got it playing from when I feed the dog breakfast, before sunup, until sundown, off and on. 

And as YouTubers know, to tug on a video is to yank on a long chain of recommendations. "If you liked that one, what about this one?" And so on. I don't resent said algorithms; I use them as mirrors. I'm able to see how my interests change over time.

Anyway, a lot of my peeps have started reviewing that Matt Walsh movie, which broadcasts from the right on the political spectrum, which in snapshot, in today's lingo, means it's prone to pick on a lot of the more juvenile elements within the professoriate (e.g. the ones who haven't gone back, in later life, for those high school refresher courses per my School of Tomorrow).

The meme of "race" (not genetically based really, and yes, we all have a skin color, what's your rgb?) still besets American discourse, whereas most of the time what they really want to talk about is "ethnicity" but that word is hardly made available to them, given the weakness of the anthropology department. 

Teasing apart "race" from "ethnicity" is more where my training would go. There's not color blindness, but there might be some acknowledgment that "race" is more important in apartheid cultures than others.

I prefer the word "apartheid" to "systemic racism" and think it's useful, even essential, to speak freely about the US apartheid system that we succeeded in stamping out for the most part, starting with the anti-slavery movement and leading through a civil war to the civil rights movement.  People are still working hard on their phobias. Islamophobia and Russophobia are still prevalent as mental illnesses.

Those human rights gains were all hard won and we should thank our lucky stars we're not in the pit of hell like Israel is, for choosing apartheid as its moral compass (nothing to do with Judaism in my view, which is here to stay, by continuing to morph, as they all do, these world religions). Too bad women never got an Equal Rights Amendment though. Patriarchy triumphed, at least in the lagging political sphere.

Anthropology, the discipline, always had a hard time escaping ethnocentrism, but it least it had a name for it, and could therefore set up a program whereby individual students of anthropology could start to deprogram, to whatever extent they wished or could. 

Deprogramming means discovering one's own birth culture to be sufficiently alien as to no longer come across as the one obvious choice, even for oneself or one's family, going forward. Roll your own, from the wealth of great lineages made available.

You have to work on transcending your own ethnicity to have empathy and understanding of the others, and that work eventually becomes more about solo psycho-philosophy or "soulmaking" in the James Hillman tradition. You don't necessarily die with the ethnicity you're born with. That's partly what makes it less attractive to bureaucrats, who want to check a box that never changes.

The racists, on the other hand, that dwindling number who actually still believe the pseudo-science, find it convenient to corner a market they call "whites" (scoff scoff), who have no choice but to need endless deprogramming, given how deeply programmed (so-called "privileged") these buggy bots have become. 

"Ethnic whites" (invented for the purposes of this blog post) delude themselves into thinking it's all about them and their racist identity (ethnicity), and then they're supposed to suffer guilt about that, followed by transformative rebirth. As an ethnic Asian (self identified), I consider such "whiteness" rather callow and I'm glad to not be an ethnic white in that sense, although I won't deny my skin has a pale rgb value.

DEI trainers are or were a type of deprogrammer. 

Matt goes undercover, in the manner of a Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen) to infiltrate the DEI trainer universe, and mock it thoroughly. 

He concludes with his own over-the-top version of a training, which likely DiAngelo would call "weird", just as was her own lucrative interaction with the guy pretty "weird" (the $30 race reparations incident).

I'm on board with mockumentaries as a genre, however if I wanted to mock racism (and I do), I'd take a different tack. I'd bring up all those websites about Noah and his spreading family after the flood, and how encoded the racial talk becomes in Bible studies.

These different races really became more pronounced after the Tower of Babel incident though (we're still in Genesis here), when a lack of mutual understanding proved a godsend: peeps were no longer working lockstep on a fruitless, morally bankrupt project to "reach god" through the vertical dimension (the so-called 3rd dimension, i.e. depth). 

Humans have continued confusing themselves with the word "dimension" ever since.

God loves His little morons though, and wanted them to survive, and so confused their tongues this time (vs sending a flood). That started a clumping process whereby humans distilled into the five races we have today: black, white, red, yellow and brown. Everyone else is a mixture of these five. 

That's in the sapien branch of the hominid family. The Neanderthal and Denisovans were presumably racialized in different ways (we don't have all the data yet -- I'm looking forward to the AI art).

Perhaps I just don't sound mocking enough? 

The literal Genesis story has been a dead horse for centuries, such that its skeleton was long ago back to sand. Only the symbolic meanings, as hinted at above, have any ongoing ethical or aesthetic value. 

If we want literal history regarding a Great Flood, we should study Ballard et al and steer clear of theologically-minded spin doctors such as myself. 

I'm interested in the dharmas, but when I want science, the Bible is not the first book I think of.

Another Journal Entry

I was sorry to learn of Lowen's passing; this was the first I'd heard. Now I see the announcement in the newsletter.

I've been somewhat peripheral to the life of the Meeting, as was driven home today during Peace and Justice committee meeting, in which I felt clueless about much of what was talked about. 

Which didn't keep me from opening my fat mouth a few times (I tried out another joke: one thumbs up one down). The joke: my pronouns are in the possessive tense: his and theirs. Hah hah?

Joking aside, the most insidious of all pronouns is "we" but people rarely talk about that one, especially "we white people" (guffaw... barf). What "we" whiteman, right?

Kepper, Lowen's partner, made a telling point when talking about filling out Lowen's death certificate info and having to specify race. The clerk just assumed "white" but Kepper added "he wasn't white until his twenties" which of course the clerk couldn't process. 

What she meant was: Lowen was born into the Jewish tradition and wasn't allowed even to caddy golf games except in Jewish clubs. The country club WASPs were that anti-semitic, even that recently. A good reminder.

Did we want an anti-racist trainer to come into the Meeting and catalyze a transformative experience for the attenders present? Friends have fallen a long way away from being leaders in the anti-racism campaign I gather. Now they need help, like any corporation (we are a corporation, not for profit). Color us IBM? 

I'm saddened to see booji well-off people spending money on themselves to deprogram. Yes, racism is insidious. But isn't our faith and practice all about self deprogramming, to make more room for God's will (to use the archaic language)? Sad that we have so little faith in our faith that we need to heavily rely on outsiders, is how I was taking it.

Speaking of my take on racism (old hat by now, with so much already here in my journals), here's the gist of my view, that a racist is someone who believes in races:

An Apple Story

Did I mention my Mac Pro died? I was typing mid-sentence when the whole computer froze, nothing I could do but hard reboot, at which point it went to a rectangular icon, not the Apple, and told me to contact Apple support. 

I tried the recovery utility options, downloading a RAM boot drive. It saw nothing to fix, meaning no storage. I was looking at a total loss of access, with no viable boot process. 

I was pretty demur (that word is going around) about it, not nonplussed, calm. 

After all, I was on a beautiful Oregon farm in a luxury trailer with a loyal and happy dog. I was learning tractor skills. 

And back home in Portland, I had the external drive TimeMachine on my desk. I didn't think it would help at all with the dead Mac, but if/when I got a new one, I'd have access to the old files. I was proud of myself for taking it in stride, although I did reach out to friends and family with snippets of what was happening.

One of the more positive results, and I need to tell Terry about this at the Equinox gathering, since he gave it to me, was the Apple iPad turned out to be more capable than I'd thought. No, I wouldn't use it to do my Python work, but in terms of telecommunications and staying organized, it held up under pressure. My skills improved. 

Secret: when the GUI seems bonkers, rotate the screen 90 degrees as in "long tall mode" the GUI improves, even if the keyboard is then at the wrong angle (relatively).

Once back in Portland, I resolved I'd need to visit the Apple Genius Bar downtown and get a read on whether the Mac was repairable. But I took my time, pondering my options. What if I could get by without a powerful Mac. I have older computers, including an older slow joe Mac Pro. I wouldn't wanna teach my Python classes on the slow ones, but what if I wasn't gonna be teaching any Python classes soon?

That was the question: was the course in question (Python + Data Analysis + Data Visualization), for Clarusway, still a go? We hadn't touched base in awhile. 

From the beginning, it was considered contingent, based on getting the peeps, the students. 

I have the workflow sketched out in a generic fashion in my Code School Blueprints album, developed after some years working for a startup code school (within a bigger company). I'll embed those slides here, why not?  

Faculty hangs out in a holding pattern, learning new skills, prepping, until a course is chartered (like a charter flight, instructor = pilot). I'm in a holding pattern with respect to that particular course, while working on other projects.

I've nudged the company with some queries and will likely hear back shortly, but then this happened: the dead Mac Pro sprang to life. 

I'd plugged it in upstairs, in my office (a real office, declared on taxes some years, not a bedroom, except for the snake), and walked away, knowing it'd get as far as the "contact Apple support" screen. 

I didn't check on it for at least two days. 

But then it was time to feed Barry (the python) a mouse, so I walked to and from Tropical Hut on Divsion, across Chavez, around noon, and at some point decided to hit the spacebar. The Mac sprang to life, at the usual login screen. It had booted! It lived!

The first thing I did was do another TimeMachine backup as the best I had was not entirely up to date. 

Ever since, I've been enjoying poking around in familiar territory, my working environment for the last two to three years. I feel like I'm reunited with a country I'd steeled myself to maybe never see again. She's been working ever since. 

I'm hoping she won't go into a coma again, of course. Probably next time I visit that farm, I'll leave her here and just use the iPad. It does Zoom. I still had my meetups. Coding in Python can wait, when tractors become the priority.

Soap Opera Summary (satire)

The news says NATO is about to give itself permission to amp up its invasion of the Russian homeland. The idea is to keep Ukraine out of NATO on technicalities but “for all intents and purposes” to use it as a military base, as had been happening under President Blinken and Vice President Nuland for some time now. 

Wait, did I get the narrative wrong? Anyway, it’s time for NATO to get the show on the road.

Back in knee jerk legacy media land, there’s probably some sense that people are following the action and are ready to jump into their roles as nationalist loyalist troopers, happy to march march march like the old people tell ‘em is necessary. 

The NATO geezers expect the allegiance of a younger generation not necessarily cut out to play hero in such a tawdry low class drama. Who wants to die for the knuckle draggers? “Why let those dinos live through me?” your average coder is thinking. “They don’t even know Python, most of ‘em (OK, Ada maybe).”

I can’t think of anything more uncool than living in Virginia with parents slaved to Beltway Mafia politics. What an ugly childhood for so many. Shades of Laurel Canyon right? It’s the kids of privilege, like Washington and Jefferson, who are more likely to rebel against the parent company (East India in their case). The Doors.

The frenzied media, MSNBC especially, need to do way more to whip up Russophobia (aka dementia russogenica). Rachel Maddow, help us out here. The needle hasn’t really budged in a while, as attention turns to the “states are no solution” drama in the so-called “Middle East” (snicker). Is it time for another novychok bedtime story? What airplane is parked next to what airplane?

President Blinken needs to deliver some great oratory, before people forget the plot again. Help us remember how democracy is at stake. Tell us how authoritarians will never get a toehold in the USA at least. These people are just not psychologically ready yet. Not for Mafia brand theater. More snake oil kool-aid is needed. Pass the numbskull sauce.

Let me help y’all out. Um.. um.. “My fellow Americans…”. Something like that. And knock it off with the Zionista thing, that’s too radical for our middle of the roaders (pet lovers, cat ladies) by several orders of magnitude. No one thinks that’s cool anymore. Let the Brits take over that whole show. You know, the guys who started it. Lawrence of Arabia and all that.

America: The Exceptional Nation

Decrying "exceptionalist" as in "spoiled brat" is not the same as claiming someone or something is exceptional. Maybe it is, we don't know yet. Exceptionally bad smelling? Exceptionally expensive? So many dimensions exist.

So for a segment here, if only to be contrarian (we have that right), I would argue for other reasons, let's yak about in what ways "America" (so much to say) is indeed "exceptional" (which it is). 

One thing that's easy to observe is: a lot of the people who came here were underdogs, fighting some establishment back home and ending up with the short end of the stick, as some say. They then had to risk everything to start over here in the New World. And once they got here, they wanted one thing: revenge.

A lot of new Americans came here with a chip on their shoulder.

OK, I'm being a little facetious, but America's shores do harbor a lot of ethnicities within which "getting back" at whomever, is high on the agenda. 

Given how America is a mighty place, and its control rooms appear open to anyone able to pay to play, why not seize those amazing military assets and extract from those enemies back home the price they deserve to pay (something high, obviously)? I mean, it's an obvious agenda to pursue.

Examples come piling in: refugee Gulenists wanted by Turkish authorities; refugee Falun Gongists seeking revenge against Xi, Ukes who hate Russkies, Russkies who hate Ukes, back and forth like that a million times. 

They each want to rule the world, or at least get Americans to rally around their cause. Obviously I skipped over more obvious examples. The list goes on and on.

I think in that sense America is indeed exceptional. A huge number of its citizens came here with axes to grind, scores to settle, plans to get even. 

For many, it was a maybe simple story of succeeding at the personal level, in spite of all odds, and having news get back home that so-and-so was no small town idiot after all. These stories are often heartwarming. For others, the story is more civilizational, about "the people" (or "pueblo") more generally.

Critics who want to play counterpoint will insist we remember all the people already here, before the floodgates were opened to colonization, by the invention of mass ocean going vessels. 

The Mayflower was no Carnival cruise ship, we know that, but it was at least a step in that direction. People indulging in "religious convictions" could finally afford to book passage, and not have to help with crewing the ship or memorizing constellations (considered a pagan fixation by many).

True, Turtle Island was already festooned with stellar cultures, spread out and not forced into interpersonal violence on the scale of say Napoleon's people. Europe was far more densely populated, had more lethal weaponry, and exploited horses. The "Indians" had a lot to learn.

Napoleon decided to sell much of America to those Washington, DC people (a revolutionary avantgard), because he needed his troops to stay in the fight for the long haul. He needed to pay their salaries. 

The Louisiana Purchase helped keep his struggling Empire going against England's. Not so long before, the USA had fought the same foe. The USA kept expanding west, fighting over slavery as it did so, with the industrial revolution more on the side of the Quakers in the long run.

Nothing regarding America's exceptional nature, as a platform for diaspora nations to consolidate and pass on culture, is contradicted by its original network nations, going back to Inca, Mayan, and Aztec to name a few -- the people we tend to call "Hispanic" today, for lack of a more intelligent word.

My narrative is more designed to switch attention from "melting pot" shibboleths (which I also use) and point out how "preserving ethnicity" was never an "unAmerican" goal. 

You're allowed to keep practicing those rituals and rites, whatever they may be, and public schooling is not about countermanding your family's values on that score, as long as you don't interfere with the rights of others to perform otherwise, ritualistically and/or costume-wise (cosmetics, jewelry... we don't all share the same tastes, all right?  Welcome to Walmart). 

Explaining my Workflow: from 2D to 3D

:: reintroducing myself on X... ::

:: ... as a political cartoonist ::