Dialing In More Indiana Jones

Leela liked this one, Dial of Destiny, a lot.  We'd done our homework, catching up by watching the Crystal Skull prequel the previous night.

She arrived by bicycle around 6 PM PDT, ate some of my Trucks Not Bombs inventory, and then we walked up to The Bagdad, getting to our seats before 7 PM and in time for the McMenamins history slides.  I'm a fan.  

I returned to Portland in 1985 as an adult, and grew up in parallel with this brewpub business, starting up around the same time, weaving it together with so many memories.  

Then came previews e.g. of Mission Impossible on IMAX -- although The Bagdad ain't IMAX.

I felt like a smarty pants (somewhat Wombat like -- what he calls her) because I'd included the Antikythera in a "history of math" timeline I did for McGraw-Hill in the 1980s (Rockefeller Center, 28th floor, Nola Hague my super).  

Good luck finding it. Big publishers do low circulation prototype textbooks kind of like big car companies make concept cars, ones that are drivable and everything.  I'm forgetting the title, but did at one time have a copy.  That's when I worked with Ray Simon, having met Ray and Bonnie in my Jersey City chapter.

Anyway, big deal right?  Of course that device should and would be included in any such timeline.  In the real world, the Antikythera has been X-rayed and recreated.  The movie may have embellished here and there, but didn't make up everything.

I've read or watched lot of the criticism of this movie, and know how some take exception to its way of taking the bull by the horns, the bull being aging.  

Unlike some of these god-like superheros, which get passed generation to generation (e.g. The Flash), Indiana Jones is an ordinary mortal and mortality is inevitably a theme.  He won't live much beyond the 1960s.  The Bond franchise went there too, with lots of overlap in the action between these two (jumping from a bridge etc.).

People take exception to the grandfatherly wisdom versus upstart young woman dynamic, even though she wises up, and he gets to meet Archimedes.  Of course he wanted to study the past up close, that was his profession after all.  Just getting to visit was certainly a privilege, though the circumstances were chaotic. However Wombat needed a more stable family matrix in the present.  Archimedes got to keep the watch and have airplanes remembered on his sarcophagus.

I'd recently been immersed in Phoenician studies i.e. watching a long documentary reviewing what we know about the rise and fall of Carthage in particular.  I felt like a smarty pants again, in recognizing the phenomenon of naval warfare, as Romans waged it, well before the Christian Era.

Leela liked it because she's pried open the lid on Astrology, not surprising given her background in religious studies (OSU), and base of operations in Nepal.  Ancient cultures up to almost the present time are somewhat impenetrable if you can't decode what they believed about stars and planets, which doesn't mean believing it all yourself. But you sort of have to half belief it just to get into it enough to see how it all works.  The anthropologist in me, such as I have one, has a well-developed sense of make-believe.

The real Antikythera is of course not a time machine so much as a predictive pocket astrolabe.  Its geared mechanism, oft attributed to Archimedes himself, replicates the movements of the heavenly bodies relative to one another.  

I'm not such a smarty pants when it comes to the details.  You wouldn't want to hire me as your Antikythera reader.  I confess I'm no Indiana Jones, fluent in several tongues.  My Stetson is way more beat up than his hat is.  I should get mine to the shop.

The Bagdad proved a rich atmosphere for an Indiana Jones film, given its What the Bleep decor.

Asteroid City (movie review)

 :: automat ::

I saw this movie a few nights ago.  

Some things were special:

• The guy I went with hadn't slept much and was drifting in and out, which turned out to coincide with a theme of the movie (or "play");   
• Oppenheimer was previewed, thematically connected; 
• the slide deck of ads at The Laurelhurst, pre movie, featured a chocolate lab much like Sydney, my dog.  

What I'm trying to say is: the atmosphere was one of fourth wall breakers.  Very meta.

The movie's colorful kernel has a playhouse, movie set, sound studio look to it, with the movie trick of feeling infinite and outdoors, as the police chase flies by (more than once), diminishing to a speck.  Very Bagdad Cafe in flavor, a favorite already.

A mushroom cloud in the distance. Strangers thrown together by the exigency of having brainiac kids.  A military. A meteor crater. Soda fountain. A UFO with ET.... Very 1950s. So many of the stereotypes so well rendered. We've all been there in our dreams.  Some of us never left.  This place is perfect, like an animated Norman Rockwell painting.

We have the stoic National Geographic type mostly combat photographer.  The school teacher.  The handsome cowboy Montana man.  Another principal is the tough but heart-of-gold 2nd tier actress, played by superstar Scarlett Johansson.  She and the photographer each have offspring.  

The photographer has four kids:  three little girls and a brainiac son.  The actress has her 15 year old daughter in tow.

A next layer out, the way I think of it, between the colorful kernel and we the audience, is a black and white apparatus having to do with the making of the play we're currently enjoying.  There we have the writer, the director, the actors auditioning for a part.  Some go on to become well known!  

This is where the sleep scene comes in.  The cast of auditioners sits in the bleachers facing the writer, who is explaining he wishes to insert a sleep scene wherein everyone in the play falls to sleep simultaneously, without exception.  Then he's like "OK do it!" and everyone pretends to pass out, except for the one sleep walker guy (there's one in every crowd).

We're the outermost layer, the audience, made self-aware by the play-within-a-play aspect, also favored by Shakespeare.

This is a film I'd like to own or at least have easy access to, as I'm already looking forward to a next viewing, while still munching on all it gave me the first time.  I got the above picture off Facebook, not from the movie.  It helps suggest the atmosphere, which includes the diner, gas station, automats, motor court village...

Pre Primary Politics

I think Marianne is on track with her rhetoric, in terms of preserving a sense of continuity, to the extent that's possible in the United States of Amnesia (Gore Vidal's phrase).  

She's like most DCers (although not a DCer herself) in wanting to start the NATO war narrative on February 24th, 2022, when the lid got taken off a situation that was already quite kinetic.  The shelling of the Donbass had to be admitted as world historic.  

Not everyone agreed on the tale to tell, leading to some serious bifurcations in the storyteller tree.

The hype around presidents has become farcical, with the candidates expected to promise way more than that office might constitutionally deliver.  Citizens with no imagination for democracy fall back on monarchical tendencies mighty quick.  That's the reflex base humanity has the most experience with.  

Democracy is science fiction, or might as well be, from the standpoint of how we're accustomed to behaving.

In that sense, I think Marianne is playing her cards correctly, in wanting to dial back expectations.  Americans should not assume such an entitled position, as one time victors in wars long ago.  

In these new chapters, history gets hammered into shape from a wider (more spherical) set of angles.  We get a more unshielded view of the inner workings.  It's more like having X-ray vision, and seeing more clearly where the bodies are buried (so many!).  We see a lot more of those skeletons, lurking in their respective closets, hoping to stay secret.

Thanks to a juvenile fascination with an imperial presidency on the part of the populace (neo-Romans in large degree), those posing to become president have to genuflect to this President on a Pedestal so many Americans carry around as egoic-iconic, closet monarchists that many of them be.  

Marianne is no exception.  She doesn't have permission to just be herself, while running for the right to staff the White House with a lot more of her people.  That means she too has to pretend she has a magic wand.  "Look, I can make all your debts go away and make your rent or mortgage affordable again."

What democracy requires is a great deal more time spent on study, which is where a UBI might come in handy.  However giving them time to appreciate their real situation, with its quasi creaky UBI, is what the pandemic did already, thereby sowing discord around whether working from home might be OK.  

That wasn't supposed to become such a hot topic, messing up the real estate market big time.  Before the middle class goes down with all hands, it's making a stand in the suburbs, defending what was sold, not that long ago, as the American Dream.

The good news is many more democratically minded than ever are doing their homework more assiduously.  

The Pizzagaters have entered adulthood by now, and realize it's not enough to just give lip service to "doing your own research".  Its time to wise up.

The Flash (movie review)

I'll say up front I was charmed by this film in many ways, once I remembered it was a comic book, its own genre, and if you haven't submerged yourself in that literature, you're right away out of your depth. In my case, I'm not an avid comic or graphic novel reader these days, but I'm a veteran scuba diver into comics to many depths.

I think what we have to remark on is that Parallel (actually, intersecting) Universes are the talk of the town this scifi season.  We had the Academy award winning Everything Everywhere All at Once to kick it off, then Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, and now The Flash.  All are about a spaghetti monster meta-verse (SMM) wherein many permutations of the current reality get tried  -- perhaps some or all are dead ends.

The Flash is true to the comic genre in being geared for teens thinking seriously yet fantastically about their next self, the adult they're "leveraging into" (if that's a way).  

I always think of the comic-borne generational teachings (mimetic DNA) as feeling "home grown" but also coming from an adult, a peer human, in touch with her or his inner teen and also a master in some mode of expressiveness (a comic book author, which might be a team).  

The opportunity, as always, is to teach some important life lessons, or at least echo the inter-generational thoughts about such philosophical topics as: "what if it were otherwise?".  More concretely:  "what if I could fix the past?".

The way these movies flicker between realities, and get you thinking in terms of swapping in different actors ... 

[ a way Flash knows he's in a different future, is different actors star in the same movies;  Michael J. Fox is not Back to the Future guy in this future.  Oh no!  That's a motif.  A kind of Mandela Effect as in this world you're the only guy who remembers "the way it was" unless maybe you came with companions (Dorothy had her Toto at least) ]

... develops a more easy come easy go relationship with reverie literature.  

The big budget versions do not necessarily seek to monopolize, only guide and suggest, and no convergence on a single telling is required.  Batman is like this in this movie, like that in this other.  Indiana Jones keeps shape shifting.  Astrologers sometimes have a better grip on this kinds of slidings.  Words like "woke" don't begin to capture all the turning wheels.  Culture is at least complex, if not complicated.

This film has to shine as a star in the universe in which film explores the same self in the form of two arguing brothers, one the older and more mature, the other the messed up kid, going nowhere.  Yet the superpowers must be passed on.  "The adult I hope to become versus the train wreck I am now" -- picture the thought balloon, above a teen reading some comic.  The recursion motif.  Pray to your future self for rescue, might be one version of bootstrapping.

I'm going to admit enjoying some of the action, the high kinetic first person physics type stuff, heavy game engine.  Like batman on that motorbike, chasing bad guys in a dense city.  Then there's the signature scene of the whole movie, alluded to in the credits, where Flash faces low nutrition limits, one of his vulnerabilities, thinks fast, solves the puzzle.  No babies die.  A universe we don't have.

Flash's mother was archetypal, and the family matrix well rendered, offsetting the rest of the movie: obvious super-real level fantasy, the stuff of Greek legends.  Flash is the comic book Mercury, back to Hermes with winged shoes.  We all know that, right?

The movie flirts with gender and ethnicity bias (is one or more of those bad?), all the morphic qualities teens wrestle with and of course not only teens.  As a perennial aspect of life, we're confronted with all these pivot points (Dawn liked coming of age stories), it's just that comics have been traditionally pitched to a specific (one could say stereotyped) target demographic.  

I'm saying the best way to enjoy The Flash -- and why not if you paid your money -- is to be a teen. Perhaps be yourself specifically, if you're able to connect, or be a generic teen, for at least a couple of hours.

Debunking Conspiracy Theories

I am aware of the theory that the Biden administration is in cahoots with the Russians in seeking the demilitarization of Ukraine.  

Dangling the mirage of a military victory against Russia, by feeding Ukrainian fantasies of military superiority, is what it took to inspire an all out assault with lots of junk weapons and no air support.  

Ukraine, left to its own devices, would not have undertaken its own self destruction without being egged on by the White House and its cabal of irresponsible so-called pro-Ukrainians.

I understand why many Ukrainians have doubted the proxy war was ever architected with their best interests in mind.  These qualms were present from the beginning.  Nobody thinks a tank war in Europe is appropriate in the 21st Century. 

The sense that the bottom of the bell curve, intelligence-wise, has way too much decision-making authority, runs strong.  If we have any smart folks in the room, why don't they end this madness?  Because they're so vastly outnumbered?  Isn't the Bell Curve semi-symmetrical?  Why does the Planet of the Apes contingent seem to have the upper hand?

I think many in The District are sincere in thinking they're in some kind of historic showdown, and they are. I empathize with diplomatic types who sense a lot of the investment banking discussions are no longer accessible to them.  When it comes to planning future infrastructure, you don't want juvenile bomb-happy types in the room.  They're too anti-social.

DC has opted out of the civilian control structure, having militarized its foreign policy to the point of having no friends in high places anymore.  This probably accounts for the specter of Papa Biden being cheered on by a tiny cabal of unilateralist ideologues with a track record of being wrong about everything. The dummies have been isolated to a set of swank addresses.

Multi-polarity was an inevitable result, with business relationships forming around the ongoing task of subverting and circumventing all the dark ages sanctions being imposed by the lower half (the anti-intelligentsia).  Europe has been buying gas from Russia, piped through Ukraine, throughout the entire misguided campaign.

Claiming it's a terrible thing for Americans, that China and Russia are sorting out their differences, is highly short-sighted, and is mostly a mantra among the low-brows on cable.  Americans have a role to play as well, when it comes to cracking down on unbridled, uncontrolled militarism.

Regarding UAPs, we all know the adage that strong claims require exceptionally strong evidence, and what does not count as "strong evidence" is first person testimony from the security clearance crowd.  We already have mountains of that fluff.

Having a top secret clearance is a bureaucratic rank, and does not automatically confer evidentiary weight.  In practice, having clearances relates to sharing database logins, rumors, gossip.  Claiming the super-secret nature of UAPs is what adds to their believability seems a kind of circular logical fallacy, an appeal to an evanescent type of authority.

The higher the security clearance, the more far-fetched the narrative, and the blurrier and less satisfying the actual evidence.  That seems to be the pattern anyway.  Stay tuned.

Speaking of the lower half of the Bell Curve (a snobbish tendency of Ivy Leaguers), I disagree that we’re not having a pre primaries debating round. True, there’s no League of Woman Voters staging an event on cable, and the corporate media aren’t interested in democracy, but we have our new internet-based news services and the debates are happening daily, albeit asynchronously, with interviewers we already know.

I've been tuning in RFK, Dr. Cornel West, and Marianne Williamson.  Only Biden seems uninterested in the political process, suggesting he's not a serious candidate this time around.

The older more synchronous debating format was made for cable TV viewers, a demographic that no longer subscribes to real news.  The corporate TV folks have opted out of democracy and want spoon-fed pabulum and rubber stamp candidates.  Politics is a spectator sport for them.  A debate would be somewhat pointless in that medium.

Sharing News

Original Screenshot

Memory Lane

This morning I joined Humanists of Greater Portland (HGP) for one of their weekly in-person yet Zoom-friendly presentations.  They've had this ambitious speaker program going for years, and archive the talks unless the reader objects, much as ISEPP (Linus Pauling Memorial Lecture series) was wont to do.

Gus Frederick was the speaker and these blogs chronicle my attending of his presentations on several occasions.  He specializes on the history of Free Thought in Silverton, Oregon especially, and more specifically he tracks the life and times of Homer Davenport, a principal political cartoonist of the post Civil War Era.

HGP's emcee opened with some remarks about Memorial Day, which is tomorrow, saying this tradition began in these very post Civil War days, as people came together to honor their ancestors, and especially their prematurely killed during wartime.

Homer's life spanned the Spanish-American War and the American-Philippines War.  These two blended together as Parts 1 and 2 of the USA's manifest destiny chapter, which we see continuing up through the superpower chapter, with the Cold War and reshuffle.  William McKinley ran with Theodore Roosevelt as veep, but then was assassinated while in office.  

Homer, when working for Hearst, participated in anti-Roosevelt campaigning, but he later switched, coming up with his Good Enough for Me meme.  Uncle Sam had picked his prez, was the idea, and Roosevelt got elected.  Out of gratitude, Teddy helped Homer score authentic Arabian horses from Bedouins in Arabia, with Homer going to Syria like some swashbuckling Lawrence of Arabia.

Amazingly, Homer's mother already had premonitions about her child being the next Thomas Nast, a great cartoonist, and enlisted the help of a Free Thought doctor to give maximum advantage to this soon to be arriving genius.  She died only three years later, after getting everyone to promise they would shepherd Homer towards his destiny.  Everything worked out as planned apparently.

That reminds me, I woke up to YouTube telling me more about the influence of Arabic culture on Frank Herbert, author of Dune, as he developed the Fremen (also associated with Frank's experiences among Quileutes).  Oregonians tend to culturally appropriate Dune (because Frank was among the Oregon dunes when conceiving Dune), and why not?  But why not also appropriate / open channels with Arab culture through rural memes, including the raising of show horses.

Dune was a major topic of conversation yesterday, between Alexia and myself, over Thai food.  She really likes the David Lynch interpretation (movie).

Gus, likewise media-savvy, likes to make the link between the sheikh's horse, and TV star Mr. Ed.

In the blog post before this, here in BizMo Diaries, I advocate using Bucky Fuller's bio, his timeline, to help anchor a panoply of timelines. We could be doing a lot more around the timeline concept, is one of my Pirate Party planks. I'm for treating Homer Davenport's scenario they same way, as one of those Open Sesame scenarios that leads to a wealth of other partially overlapping scenarios (i.e. there's a Big World in there, a veritable circus).

How I'd tie the Homer and Bucky scenarios together is through world expos, the one in Chicago, where electricity made its debut, and the one in Oregon, the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition.  This thread twists around the Disney thread, and takes us into the aerospace sector (Tomorrow Land), as well as to global grids on Dymaxion Maps.

Unlocking 1900s American Literature

I seem to claim to be a Pragmatist, enough so that I'm allowed to aim the John Dewey, Richard Rorty vector through Bucky and onward. What gives me that right.  I don't know enough about Charles Sanders Peirce, for one thing, although I did go through an abduction phase.  We had that ISEPP lecture...

I'd argue with the premise though.  I'm not the authority, clearly, I'm just into putting beads on a memorable necklace of connected thinkers.  I do it for the benefit of my students, and I haven't said you have to be one of them.  That's your decision.  Lets be peers.

Make your own necklaces, just make sure (friendly advice) you don't completely leave out some important beads.  Like Newton (as in Isaac).  Have I left out important beads?  For sure!  Why it's important to keep finding more teachers.

David left some nice comments on this one (embedded YouTube).

Pigging Out on Melodrama

If one comes from the premise that humans adore lurid tabloid melodrama, then this must be heaven on earth.  As Henry Ford Sr. put it, famous for stumbling late into its study: "history is one damn thing after another" (with an emphasis on "damn" I'd add).  

Welcome to purgatory?  Or is that a euphemism?  

Either way, admit you love it.  Every day, another episode of As the World Turns.

Lofty intellectuals sometimes make scoffing noises regarding soaps, but then concoct their own special scandals, like the Bay of Pigs, or some other misguided display of derring-do.  They want their place in the history books too.

I recall my little exercise when still a newly minted high school teacher, fresh from Princeton, now at St. Dominic Academy for young women (however defined).  They were to a man (chuckle) General Hospital aficionados.  That was the leading soap du jour.  

I passed out 3x5 (5x8?) cards saying:  "think of a soap opera plot, either one you've seen, or make it up, but substitute fancy titles, cast nobles and royalty, and turn them in."  I read some choice examples.  We all found it good fun.  "Yep, that's history".

But of course history is more than just human soaps, or should be.  The boundaries are fuzzy.  We depend on geological time for our relatively fleeting chronologies.  

You don't get diamond mine soaps, or oil well frenzies, or gold rushes, without diamonds, oil or gold.  The relatively slow (superhumanly slow) and relatively fast (superhumanly fast) inform what goes on in the here and now (local scope).

In some of our literature, we connect more with these higher and lower frequencies, invisible to unaided senses, and paint our dramas accordingly.  

They're still dramas (scenarios) but they’re maybe not soaps in the usual sense, of attracting lots of attention to the embedded advertisements.  

The medio-sphere is characterized by commerce.  Commerce depends on phenomena outside the medio (media) sphere.  The soaps flow along in a middle-way channel that's comfortingly comprehensible, a trough, a place to pig out.

Tourists Touring

I was short on cash and don't usually carry checks, and they didn't take plastic, but next time I'll get my lifetime membership in the Portland Theosophical Society Library. I was introduced by another tenant in the building, a CPA.  They've left NW Portland for a Beaverton-Hillsdale address.

I've been using the car more (driving out to Beaverton), so my mood (mode) has turned more spatio-geographic, as befitting us drivers.  I'm seeing the neighborhoods again, and how they inter-connect. Cars run it all by us relatively quickly, through all the windows.  We become geo-spatially fluent, more like London taxi drivers.

Seeing Portland loom closer, coming from the south on I-5, is pretty melodramatic, through those Terwillager curves, under the cable car, and over the Marquam... 

 ...then stopped by a freight train (not a problem, I love trains)... 

On out Hawthorne to the hood (neighborhood); I'd been gone on and overnight (myself and the dog).

I'm interested in Global University circuitry that gives people valuable hands-on skills doing agriculture but without extracting a big commitment involuntarily. I've written about all this a lot.  

The lure of the rural lifestyle is what's meant to serve as self-recruiting. We're not cudgeled the unwilling into harvesting the eggplant crop or whatever.  However, as a for-credit activity towards a doctorate in farming, you might want to try doing some hands on in Oregon's legendary Willamette Valley (where the river flows north).  We even do wines, like in Italy.  And raise alpaca.

Actually the alpaca business is mostly over the Cascade range to the east, in the Oregon high desert area. Yet these neighborhoods are but hours apart by road (Santiam Pass), so it's really all one rural ecosystem, crisscrossed by various grades of road, and festooned with jeweled cities and towns (not literally, but like in Oz). I liked the Coburg area, what I saw of it, just off I-5 north of Eugene.

But do rural folk want to host (for a stipend) any temporary alien house guest visitors of a student exchange program nature?  They'd prefer actual ETs the way a lot of them talk.  There's no wish to impose, but if some agree, then you will see more tourists taking pictures and frequenting the watering holes.  Is this OK?  Oregon is worth seeing, via work-study, as a retiree or whatever.  

Tourists do want to come here.  The flip side of the bargain is Oregonians like seeing the world.

In sending Peace Corps everywhere else but here, North America, our good people were spared ever being visited by the idealistic young except for missionaries, e.g. the Hari Krishnas and Rajneeshis. We didn't get government sponsored emissaries (more like State Department types than died-in-the-wool Christians) coming to our shores, wishing to assist the "richest nation on Earth" become less pathological about poverty.  

That's a gross exaggeration of course (a one sided account).  We had programs like Vista that turned inward.  Even scouting has flirted with the idea of community service.  The religious tribes run hospital empires, praise Allah.  

The traffic patterns whereby the ideologies spread, has really been every which way (tourists from everywhere, going all over) for quite some time, as humans have become more kinetic (get around more) thanks to technology.  

Almost everyone into "futurism" (which by now sounds retro) is aware of this trend, and has been for decades (if old enough to remember).

Mixed Use High Rises

 My comment on YouTube: 

The extent to which conversion is possible, to a more mixed use pattern, is indeed a hot topic. Floor space for "day camp" (a kind of school) doesn't necessarily require cookie cutter apartments. Think City Museum of St. Louis. Flexibility (convertibility) is key. Sharing restrooms is common in college dorms and even some remodeled higher end hotels featuring retro-futuristic lifestyles.

personal workspace (PWS)

Politicking

I've continued following with Marianne Williamson campaign, which for me is about nailing nails into the coffin of legacy media, run by moguls too afraid to rock the boat to be worth attending to anymore.  I'm hoping to put her people in touch with some from the Andrew Yang gang, as UBI is far from dead as a meme.

I've chosen the title for an obvious reason:  TikTok.  Marianne is doing well with the younger demographic that frequents TikTok.  This group is developing a fair amount of animosity towards the geriatrics who can't stand the idea that they're not role models.  No one wants to grow up to be like them.  Their solution:  ban TikTok.  See what I mean?  As Trump put it:  these guys (mostly guys) are losers.

Does this mean I think she has a chance to be president?  Of course she does, it's in the US constitution. However, the DNC, no respecter of the constitution, is hoping to shield the Bidens from any inconvenient requirements, having secured the nomination with behind the scenes machinations during covid.  The DNC, an enemy of democracy, hopes "behind the scenes" will work again, and is calling for "no debates" as of April, 2023.  Neither Biden nor Harris are known for their rhetorical skills at this point.

Disputing election results the way Sydney Powell and Rudy Guliani tried to (with help from MyPillow guy) was an obvious non-starter.  The vote counting infrastructure (ala Dominion voting machines) was not a major front in 2020, given how much of the supposed cyber-meddling by foreign agents was pure science fiction in the first place.  Corrupt players have long engaged in vote rigging shenanigans, with no help from the politburo.  Greg Palast and his ilk have already shown us the soft money underbelly, and it isn't pretty.

I'm not myself against electronic voting, although I do admit it comes with dangers.  Per my position papers going back, if we don't invest in high school level civics, including crypto savvy, we're going to reap what we sow:  nincompoops when it comes to infrastructure.  The DC player tends to outsource a lot of its internet savvy these days, which is the more likely ingress for foreign meddling.  Campaigns depend on algorithms they poorly understand.  An experienced candidate with a well-developed sense of the nation's demographics is likely to do better than any AI-based approach at this point, despite the hype.

Given the choice to short the high schools, the next generation is hopping mad.  The code schools had to jump in to provide remedial ed.  If you have no computer literacy, you have no business pretending to have the right stuff when it comes to running for high office.  But then the high offices do not require voters or elections, except in the shareholder / stakeholder sense, and even there, the process is often highly informal, or according to different rules (say if Quakers become involved).

Am I contracting out as a political adviser these days?  Hardly.  I'm more the guy who keeps pointing back to the high schools, suggesting that institution reinvent itself to serve adults as well as teenagers.  We need the equivalent of a high school refresher every ten to fifteen years, if we want to stay effectively informed about the basics, including such skills as driving and telecommuting.  The way to improve the quality of high school is to make it a resume-relevant credential regardless of age.  "When was the last time you went through high school?"  

A lot of people in congress and the military get their updates informally, without jumping through hoops.  They get on the job training.  However, the curriculum has fallen into disrepair in many cases, leading to lots of obsolete practices and dubious strategies, when it comes to command and control, and to bottom-up styles of governance.  Without a well trained and informed citizenry, we're not equipped, as a nation, to make a positive contribution to the world scene.  That so many in DC adopt an aggressive and bellicose line, proves that "lazy sleazy" is still the norm.  That's why DC is no longer much of a world capital, as negotiations proceed outside the beltway.

Downtown Meetup

One of my better decisions, in retrospect, and assuming this is something for which I might take credit (should I chalk everything up to fate?), was to get involved with the network of people friendly to Bucky Fuller's enterprise, including with Bucky himself (we exchanged communications).

I wouldn't stop there though.  

Getting mixed up with the Pythonistas was also a positive move, and so was mixing it up with the Centers Network (est), which gave me a boost, not financially so much as psychologically.  Going to Princeton and studying philosophy there:  also a good move.  

However it's up to me to turn all these developments into assets i.e. it's my own powers of transformation that turn shit into gold and gold into shit, both of which substances should be taken as metaphoric in this rendering of deeper alchemy.

Fuller's role as a steersman (cybernetician, trimtabber) involved getting people into networking.  Grunch of Giants is all about networks and networking, nowadays more structured thanks to social media, but still not in the mold of the LAWCAP corporation (LAWCAP being Fuller's coin, for "lawyer-capitalism").

Today I got to meet in person with another trimtabber, a member of the TrimTab Book Club no less, as I am.  Richard Ramsay was in Portland for an annual conference he's been attending for decades.  This time, he got an award from the chair for lifetime achievement, like an Academy Award in that discipline, of suicidology.

Richard was already an admirer of Bucky's, having heard him speak, and early on started phasing in some design science at the meme level e.g. by introducing the tetrahedron as a conceptual diagram.  He's well known in his social circles, and appreciated by many, for being quirky and innovative in this way.  

When Richard later found out how Fuller himself had been suicidal, and continued weaving that theme into his own autobiographical storytelling, the puzzle pieces fell into place.

I've been apprenticing in the field myself (informally, as someone with a longstanding interest in sociology and anthropology, and without seeking certification or credentials), since getting to know Richard and realizing its up to me to make the most of this opportunity.  

Social mores (customs) around suicide vary by ethnicity and continue to morph.  Richard has worked for decades with LivingWorks to help shape a consistent and constructive institutional response, at the global level, to this dire need for a social service.

In the fifty states the 988 help line has been inaugurated.  Canada hopes to someday follow suit.  The idea of a lifeline, a way to restart, is archetypal, embedded in lore, but how does it all work in practice?

We met in the hotel lobby and went out for pizza downtown.  Richard had kindly assembled some conference materials (program, decals, even a pen) on my request, so that I might continue to study this emergent subculture.  I learned a lot over our couple hours together.

Curriculum Extensions

We want Pascal's Triangle to show up in Casino Math as an anchor point, both for figurate and polyhedral numbers, and for the binomial distribution, approaching, in the limit (in the direction of infinity), the normal bell curve.  

Setting the area under said curve at one, and talking about probability distributions, along with pseudo-random number generation, is a part of it.

Something like:

 For a more complete rendering, click here.

Institutional Wealth

Let's start our GST analysis with the economics of an individual.  

Are babies born into property?  I'm thinking they'd have to reach their majority before their inheritance kicked in.  Some call it law, others call it anthropology (me more in the latter camp).  Some babies show up inside wealthy families and are slated to own the farm, if lucky enough live that long.

OK, but to what extent does a civilization provide high living standards to its hobos and vagabonds?  The question is designed to give one pause, as, given stereotypes, the nomad has a hard life, that of a drifter. Nomadic tribes, such as gypsies, show up in fairy tales as shunned.  Rock bands, with their roadies, like traveling circuses and carnivals, are sometimes romanticized, but just as often derided by the genres. 

What I'm suggesting, however, is that the lifestyle of the wandering pilgrim could be a new normal. Not owning much property could become a satisfactory option for many. 

The issue now though is that, if you drift, you'll probably have no mailing address for snail mail and probably can't interest a local bank in your business, or subscribe to healthcare programs. A smartphone and/or a laptop are not enough, to plug in to most infrastructure.  Even if you have a room at the Hilton.  

You'll be on a tourist visa or maybe a student visa.  Somewhere, there needs to be a home where you're rooted.  That's the expectation.  But need it be?  Snail mail could be delivered to your box through hotel services.

There's no reason in principle that an individual would have to own a lot of stuff, in order to get around, staying groomed and clean, well dressed and well fed, attending meetings, classes, sometimes teaching or instructing, other times learning or taking instruction.  

Life in a global university need not entail amassing a garage full of stuff, shelves full of books, knickknacks and souvenirs.  Or even if such cubby holes do exist, filled with items of personal value, their contents are appropriately storable and/or recyclable.

A fallacy associated with such speculations is the knee-jerk fear that a proposal is being floated that "everyone would have to live this way".  The alarm goes out, warning that "private property" has been targeted for abolition.

Clearly, some lifestyles are all about serving in custodial capacities, vs-a-vs specific buildings, ships, other infrastructure.  That's one kind of ownership, connected with stewardship.  Mostly though, "owning" implies "an ability to sell". Yet many properties have value-adding capabilities unrelated to their salability or transferability.

In suggesting a life without title to real estate, need not be a life bereft of entitlements, we're simply stating the obvious:  that having one's health and freedom, along with the means to stay out of harm's way, is in principle sufficiently satisfying to many people.  

Consider those in religious orders who feel welcome to partake of the order's shared assets and facilities.  

Are such people living in poverty necessarily?  

Of course not, although their wealth might be more institutional than personal, one might say.

But is the mere existence of such a lifestyle option a threat to those enjoying home ownership?  The implication oft seems to be those of high net worth, as conventionally accounted, are inevitably subsidizing those "of no means" (again, as conventionally assessed).  

But we're saying a global student-teacher nomad could have work-study access privileges vs-a-vs luxurious apartments and/or rustic situations without any specific ownership relationship to these programs and/or  accommodations.

How might we crew a business mobile, an exploratory vehicle for the Trucker Exchange (T4P), without having extravagant wealth?  

The vehicle is an institutional property, one in a fleet, and is enjoyed and operated by its crew without being owned by it.  

Some crew members might be holders of properties, here and there in the world.  Others might not be engaged in those language games, and yet they still have access to healthcare.

Pipeline Politics

Substack is letting me access the Seymour Hersh archive from two separate devices.  As it should.  I'm not cheating.  I paid my yearly subscription just now.  I'm also paying my $4 a month or whatever it is to the New York Times, which still runs articles I care about.

I'm reading Sy's The Nord Stream Ghost Ship published less than 24 hours ago.  The concluding paragraph reads:

The expert had one final thought: “In the world of professional analysts and operators everyone will universally and correctly conclude from your story that the devilish CIA concocted a counter-op that is on its face so ridiculous and childish that the real purpose was to reinforce the truth.”

Exactly.  As a trained scuba diver, NAUI certified (no doubt an expired credential), I was exposed to a lot of the lore.  Gill Gilleland, my exMarine diving instructor, told us about the special gas mixtures some professional divers would use, to avoid getting the bends while bypassing lengthy stays in hyperbaric chambers.  

I thought the more common protocol is to hang tanks on the line, such that ascending divers can stay at various depths, waiting for the pressurized nitrogen to slowly bleed out (boring).  But why use nitrogen in the first place?  From Sy's earlier article:

The pipelines ran more than a mile apart along a seafloor that was only 260 feet deep. That would be well within the range of the divers, who, operating from a Norwegian Alta class mine hunter, would dive with a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and helium streaming from their tanks, and plant shaped C4 charges on the four pipelines with concrete protective covers.

Actually, adding helium in place of some of the nitrogen may increase rather than decrease the need for decompression.  The narcotic effects of nitrogen under pressure is what to avoid.  I've been reading the Wikipedia article.  

As a sports diver, I was familiar with the navy dive tables and kept to relatively shallow waters.  That was easy in the Philippines, with great coral reefs beginning just beneath the surface.

That last paragraph though, jibes with my own analysis:

In my story line the USA is (a) innocent of wrongdoing and (b) actively pursuing the perpetrators, in part by making their cover stories ever less believable, ever more paper thin, to the point of transparent. 

Sometimes when doing medical research, you use colored or even radioactive dyes to trace a system or condition.  

Analogously, it's sometimes interesting to see which media outlets will repeat an obviously phony cover story, one deliberately designed to have gaping holes, if one has an operating hole detector.  These media outlets are catering to an audience that doesn't necessarily want the truth.  They -- the owners, editors, readers and so on -- want to be remembered for their loyalties, their obedience to specific powers.  They're placing bets on which factions will still have the upper hand at the end of the day.

This needle in a haystack blog is itself a media outlet, one could say.  Knowing something about the difficulties in diving to over 200 feet, for long enough periods to pack explosives around a pipeline, I'm not like your average clueless German journalist.  Nor am I an obsequious American, eager to show off my loyalty to the King or Emperor.  

I'm closer to Garland Nixon in thinking the conspirators behind the pipeline sabotage have no inherent right to represent themselves as avatars of a constitutional democracy.  They're closer to British imperialists.

From my own email outbox:

My own bias, when wearing a nationalist pro-USA hat (not necessarily red), is to finger the Brits as our primary adversary. The Revolutionary War was fought against Brits. The Brits attempted to destroy the USA in 1812 as well. There's some evidence the assassination of Lincoln was the result of a plot by British intel. British Petroleum (BP) did damage to the Gulf of Mexico that's still beyond the scope of settled science to fully assess.

If I were asked to rank "enemies of the USA" from high to low, I'd definitely rank the Brits higher than the Russians or certainly the Chinese. A great fear the Brits seem to have is better relations between the USA and Russia.

Totally quirky, I realize.  That's why I tend to save it for my blogs.  I should add here that it's British reflex-conditioning I'm up against, i.e. bots (like soulless corporations, e.g. Pearson), and not thinking people.  I'd like to save a next generation of British school kids from succumbing to inferior brainwashing.

Beltway Mafia

We're used to "Beltway Bandits" as a journalistic cliche, referring to the ring road around Washington, DC, which is lined with DC's favorite contractors, such as Unisys, Honeywell, and Booz Allen Hamilton.  However "bandits" may not be obvious enough in some circles.  Too cartoony.  How about the "Beltway Mafia" instead?

The Beltway Mafia is heavily into matters military and needs to keep the flow of weaponry going.  The front keeps shifting, from Iraq, to Afghanistan, to Ukraine.  The goal is not to fight these countries, but to arm them against their foreign enemies and their internal insurgents.  That's called the protection racket, which the Mafia is good at playing.  Accept our protection, or else.

Ukraine is especially dependent on the Beltway Mafia for operational support, while the BM is in turn dependent on the US (Uncle Sam).  The defense of Ukraine against its internal and external enemies is a high priority of these subcultural icons.

Some Ukrainians at first may have wanted peace with mother Russia, another homeland for many of them.  The Beltway Mafia put an end to those pipe dreams early on. A new raison d'être had been found.  A goldmine.  The new big business inside the beltway would be to "fight to the last Ukrainian".

Old World Order

People like to talk about some New World Order, as if we know what that means.  It means we're invited to take a Rorschach Test and to project an imaginary dystopian or relatively utopian future for ourselves.

There's some disagreement on whether we're already in the NWO or if it's still on ahead.  

Assuming it's still on ahead, that would mean we're in the OWO (Old World Order) right now.  

How shall we characterize such a thing.  Is it "rules based" in some way?

Before giving vent to your inner cynic, lets be clear:  rules exist.  Some people like to write about "laws" as in "natural laws" but I'm more into "rules" myself, as a matter of taste.

Some rules we follow come from an exceptionless side of things we don't have much control over.  We haven't the luxury of not obeying eternal principles, whatever those may be. We sense their applicability, whether or not we know how to codify them into words.

Sometimes we might acknowledge "miracles" wherein events seem to go against what we considered possible.  The reason we consider them "exceptional" in nature is that they're "the exceptions that prove the rule" (an idiom worthy of focus, if you get the time).  By updating our sense of the rules, we may need less room for these "impossibilities".

Last night, Everything Everywhere All at Once won a bunch of Oscars. I was too busy studying the Blood Simple special features to feel like breaking off, knowing I could get it in the dailies the next day (or later -- I mean in the reviews, say on YouTube).  

This movie (EEAAO, winning sevens statues), not unlike The Dawn of Everything, reminds us to stay away from false dichotomies, such as Manichean polarities, or such as "democratic" versus "authoritarian" or "globalist" versus "nationalist".  Why fall for an either/or mindset?  Remember neither.  Remember both.

My idea of a NWO is somewhat typified by EPCOT (all caps version), wherein a global Refugee Services keeps rescuing people from dead end circumstances.  We have two sides of the same coin (symbolized by the lake) with Tomorrow Land on one side, and Remember Land on the other.  

Then there's Fantasy Land, somewhat independent of any specific past-to-future axis (= scenario = narrative).  Tomorrow Land needs to be actively dreamed up, not treated like a place we stumble into.

So is all that Remember-Imagine-Tomorrow stuff the NWO or the OWO?  

Haven't we been dreaming ourselves into the future for some time now?  Of course we have.  

But in some complexes, or mindsets, the old seems at war with the new.  These "two sides of the same coin" fight one another.  People get locked into those mindsets pretty squarely sometimes, and even lose the key.  

Sometimes the best strategy is to show them the fire escape.

I'm indulgent of the nation-states model, and encourage more virtual versions of same, offering dual and triple citizenship or more, and having few restrictions on where you actually live.  

I could be a citizen of a virtual nation (VN) even if I live in Peru per this order.  Lasting VNs would actually take more work to create and maintain than blowing bubbles in the quantum foam.  I'm just sketching on the back of a napkin here at this moment.

Although it might sound like I'm talking to myself in a vacuum, regarding ideas that will never see the light of day, from my angle I see myself more as descriptive, keeping pace, updating my language to keep it synchronized with real world developments.  

Whether that makes me an advocate for the old or the new, in terms of what world order I favor, I'd say that's indeterminate.  I am always between what has been (the old) and what is to be (the new).  

That's what we mean by "living emergently" am I right?  And it's not just me who is doing it.

Quaker Doings

:: stark street meetinghouse ::

I've been out of the loop on a lot of activities, including memorial services, as I was busy care taking for my own mom.  

I haven't exactly been a hermit, but lets just say my inner circle has been tiny, but that's interpreting "inner" strictly, as in "could get covid from".  No one wanted to hear that Kirby had transmitted covid to his 90+ year old mother, least of all me.  She died of other things, such as we used to call old age.

I'm still not frequenting the meetinghouse, although I'm in compliance with their covid policies.  A Quaker Meetinghouse in the 2020s is quite frequently an eldercare facility, meaning the majority of attenders, including members, are of relatively advanced age.  Most would not have comorbidities, but some would, and that's enough to suggest a fairly stringent "lock down" protocol.

In our neck of the woods "lock down" was always a misnomer.  We had protocols, and businesses were forced to close.  I'm not saying it wasn't intense.  But we didn't weld people into their homes, the way we were seeing on social media, closer to ground zero (i.e. Wuhan in most narratives).  The Trump & Fauci policy that fit us best was: "no central government should be telling you what to do, ask your local governor for guidance".  Put another way:  it's a very varied country and no one size fits all.  Duh, right?

So was I scandalized that Florida stayed relatively open?  As an Oregonian, I was free to walk the dog outside, go to the beach, visit public parks...  I didn't get to Florida in that period, but I'm not about to throw stones.  Again, because I'm an aging Boomer and mom was even older, I went the Instacart route and holed up.  We got our boosters.  But I was never one to shout in any megaphone about how everyone should do as I do.  On the contrary, I'm accepting of my minority status, of full time care taker.

So, George Lakey, author of Dancing with History is passing through.  Our activists bestirred themselves without needing to be cued.  The Peace and Social Concerns Committee went through a crisis period, especially when our meeting turned into a battlefield in the Gender Wars.  

I was one of those diehards who did not want to see said committee "shelved" or "put on ice".  The key was to clarify the committee's role:  it's a place where activists come together to compare notes and tactics, but is not about "expressing the conscience of the meeting" i.e. it does not presume to represent "Quakers", nor even "Multnomah Friends" to the world.  We each have a calling to do that, individually.

My mother was at a nexus between AFSC (American Friends Service Committee), FCNL (Friends Committee on National Legislation), WILPF (Women's International League for Peace and Freedom) and RSoF (the Religious Society of Friends itself, i.e. bare bones Quakers).  That's not the full extent of her network, but it's enough to keep the switchboards busy.

Pythonic Andragogy

I am in the process of developing some Python warm-up notebooks, for a cohort coming my way.  My role as their instructor, is to dive right away into 3rd party libraries numpy and pandas.  That's very doable, this is a logical on-ramp or doorway in.

However, there's another part of me that knows you're joining the comic strip late in the game, as some say. There's a lot more to Python than we know. Does that matter?  How much Python coding should a student have, when starting in on a first Jupyter Notebook?  I have no dogma or catechism on the matter.

What I'm playing with though, are these warm-up notebooks, but with an eye to introducing what's to follow.  Python is big in server side development, and with PyScript to Webassembly a thing, may soon coexist on the front end somehow.  I'm not counting my chickens.  The point is that Python forks into many walks of life, as the primitive drawing (above) hopes to illustrate.

I put SQL and SQLAlchemy towards the trunk for a reason.  True, Guido is not an SQL hound, that's not his bag.  His focus was elegance and simplicity of syntax, if you think that's possible in an object oriented language.  Is English object oriented?  Sure.  It's oriented around objects (or call them things), which come in types.

Speaking of types, what I'm thinking is a little groundbreaking, is I throw the function type into the mix, as another type, a callable type.  Then we have instances of the function type.  No, we don't get to them with keyword class, but keyword def instead.  That fits our brains.

FSI Roundtable

A Roundtable about Rope Twisting:

What it reminded me of:

Zoom Games:

A Western Friend

Carol Urner 

(April 21, 1929 - January 30, 2023)

Peace Activist

Her bio as told by me is currently scattered among these many blog posts, however I'm preparing a more gathered telling.  

Carol lived all around the world, accompanying her late husband, Jack Urner whom she met at the University of Washington (Seattle).

I wrote Peace Activist as her line of work, with the Quakers (Religious Society of Friends) her industry, on the online form, for transcribing to the official death certificate.

She worked a lot with women, helping them start their own small handicrafts businesses, especially in the Philippines and Bangladesh.  She taught school, wrote textbooks, and participated in democratization and indigenous peoples rights projects.  When living in Cairo, she worked with the famously named Zabbaleen ("garbage people" -- they collect garbage from Cairo).

When in the USA, she worked on various issues with Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF).  

She wrote articles for a number of Quaker journals, including at least two Pendle Hill pamphlets.

Border Patrol

In this science fiction drama, the Canadians have turned sufficiently into an extension of District groupthink to be counted on to round up and return the "defectors" who try to draft dodge.  

In the meantime, those Mexican countries (wink) with their leftist governments, provide a haven south of the border for those wishing to avoid being sent to the front, as pawns for NATO.  

In that case, the border wall was a good investment.  It was always about keeping the prey hemmed in, in our game park.  We've been here before, in screenplays and dramas.

A sealed border is an affront to the freedom of movement for everyone, whereas most borders are semi-permeable -- meaning permeable.  Some of the right stuff, and right people, still gets through.  

Who are the right people with the right stuff?  That's up to the ones controlling customs.  

These read like grammatical truisms.  The fabled Hermetic Seal is more myth than physics, akin to a "perfect vacuum".  

Most membranes are at least permeable to light, meaning any electromagnetic frequency on the spectrum.

The question of citizenship or ships is not always a question of geographic locale.  You'll find citizens of country B inside country A and vice versa.  People mix it up like that, all the time.  

When an ideology puts people first, such complicated arrangements pose less of a threat.  From the viewpoint of the individual, it's rarely that complicated.  One cultivates one's loyalties as events unfold. Each step of the way makes sense, like a blockchain.

The idea that a person born anywhere on the planet has some inherent right of access to the whole planet, is not accepted even in principle as a part of the UN Declaration on Human Rights.  

The rights of citizenship, if one has citizenship, are not the same as access rights.  Thanks to private property rights, no one alive has unrestricted access in practice.  Even if "some inherent right" pertains, we see countervailing principles.  Then there's simply the inaccessibility of much of the planet.  No roads...

I'll be the first to admit I have no privileged access to most places.  Given my expired passport (I need to work on that), I'm pretty well penned in, but within a rather large area.  

What's oppressive is when the borders you must not cross keep you within a single campus or less.  Such arrangements are usually considered punitive, although if you're washed ashore at sea, on a deserted yet life supportive environment, then you may consider yourself lucky to be alive.  Hello Tom Hanks.

One hopes for at least an airport or dock, with appropriate boardable vessels coming and going.

Social Media Regarding Social Media

Random Gossip

From some Facebook timeline somewhere:

I'm still trying to figure out the IRA game (Internet Research Agency) as research seemed what it was up to: stage events, gain followers, sell stuff, promote memes... but to what end? Twas Bannon of Cambridge Analytica who overtly copped to trying to win elections, with that whole scary backstory about the secret Facebook quiz. Facebook took the heat and learned to kowtow.

I bet IRA was more "oligarchs playing with the west's new toys" trying to get in on the ground floor playing the new social media capitalist game. Swinging the election was likely not a motive, not at all. My hypothesis. Facebook and Google are global goliaths and the Russians assume (as I do) that they're just as entitled to their troll farms as any lobby group. IRA actually stood up to Mueller saying it had every right to play the game and Mueller backed down, seeing this as a footnote in history he'd like us to forget.

On the other hand, the whole Guccifer 2 business and Crowdstrike is a separate narrative and there we're told the GRU itself has its hands in everything, and working on Trump's behalf was definitely the goal in that case. The Mueller report goes into great detail, showing the Russians snapping to attention when Trump called for them to find those missing Hill-Billary emails. The only weakness in the narrative there is CrowdStrike wrote it under contract, with the FBI in no position to audit, only coach and cajole to get the narrative it wanted. It's not what I'd call highly credible, even if it's in the Congressional Record (so is a lot of other garbage).

Making Sockets More Secure

An issue CJ and I would argue about, was whether browsers were amiss in relegating unencrypted websites to second class status.  Chrome seemed especially heavy-handed.

I'd taken up the position that sticking with HTTP was no sin, any more than not wearing a mask, or wearing one.  In principle, we don't have enough info to talk about who's being "too unforgiving".  The bare fact of using HTTP does not warrant any kind of moral or aesthetic judgement.

I had a dog in the fight: through 2022, my Grunch.net, host of Synergetics on the Web, and hosted at GoDaddy, was serving plain old HTTP, with no encryption, no security certificate.  Perhaps for this reason, although I'm not clear on the mechanics, my ability to connect to my own website was degrading.

I cannot quite imagine what whitelist or blacklist would be frustrating traffic through my two routers, one behind the other, when neither registered any explicit blocking.  Was CenturyLink getting involved up line from me?  I'd reboot the routers, and at least temporarily regain access to the site -- or not (even that stopped fixing the issue). 

We could still ping and traceroute the grunch.net domain, just not get through to the server, netting a timeout instead.  Yet that very same website, viewed through Verizon, on a phone, was still quite responsive.  "What's up with that?" was the thinking.

Anyway, in the midst of all this confusion I decided it was time to bite the bullet and tackle the HTTP issue more directly, by upgrading Grunch.net to an HTTPS site.  

GoDaddy had a solution waiting.  I was able to follow the steps myself, although not without some confusing chat sessions (by voice and by text) with disgruntled tech support humans.

I'd point out to CJ that many of our treasured websites no longer had active administrators behind them.  Webmasters pass away.  Getting them converted over to HTTPS would require someone taking active measures and assuming administrative responsibility.  Is that even possible in all cases?  Given our rough and tumble Global U reality, we have no right to assume such faculty will be available.

Avatar 2 (movie review)

Bagdad Theater, 2009

The rumor I heard, on the lengthy delay between movies, is the director, James Cameron, was waiting for technology to catch up.  The first movie, a 3D as well as 2D work, constructed a state of the art, highly intricate world that would have to be topped.

As a visual feast (I saw it in 2D this time), Avatar 2 certainly delivers.  I hadn't gone back to watch the earlier one, so was maybe a little confused on who'd descended from whom, but blue people hybridized with sky people have only four fingers and a thumb, which singles them out for ridicule by kids in the other tribe (the water people, more green than blue).

The main plot element to get is: the main villain (a sky person, white) has arranged to reincarnate, and/or have his memories transferred, to one of "them" (a blue) if his current avatar (piece on the board, US Marine type) gets destroyed, and that apparently happened, as he wakes up in a blue body, but with the same gung-ho personality. 

The bad guy's white son, in the meantime, left behind because they can't freeze babies for cryogenic travel, grew up native, as a blue.  The blues are the Native Americans if you haven't figured it out yet, albeit mythically portrayed through Hollywood movie tropes.  They're also all-American and highly relatable.

The film is a lot about the "strong father" archetype.  The dads keep expressing disappointment in their kids, especially the boys, for their foolish misjudgements, and the boys hate being dissed by the man they most admire and aspire to be like.  They just want to be brave. The greens have a strong father chief too, with offspring.  The whites have their reincarnated guy with his left-behind "monkey boy" son.

The blue family seems very like The Incredibles family (also Disney), especially the teen girl, who feels marginalized as a four finger, and who is developing psychic powers beyond her peers (see Beetlejuice for another take on this character).  She saves the day on numerous occasions.  The younger boy does too, in bonding with the four eyed whale, the outcast one who had tried to fight the sky people earlier.

The plot is complicated but basically goes like this:  the bad guy Marine and his ilk (the sky people) have returned in their spaceships (buckyballs!) with a special grudge against the blue family dad.  

The blue family, to protect their own people, decide to hide out amongst the greens, which is controversial as the blues are forest people with underdeveloped lung power for undersea activities.  The greens agree to take in these Incredibles and teach them their watery ways, but it isn't long before the whites figure out where they are, and a fight ensues.

Cameron did both Aliens and Titanic and really knows how to put together a believable Machine World, an extrapolation of our own.  He also knows how to tilt the decks, as the ship is sinking, making the  passengers slide and/or climb what had been horizontal surfaces.  

Sigourney Weaver plays her cameo role, as the human mother of the blue teen with psychic abilities.  This mother and daughter don't meet directly in person, but on a psychic plane, in a dream state.

On the whole, I was glad to revisit this world and continue processing the machine versus natural technology rift.  The technology of the Native Americans is higher in many ways, if we include nature herself as a kind of Mech 'n Tech (which she is).  Whales are higher tech than any aircraft carrier, and so on.  

The brutish sky people are the Euro whites, the neo-Romans, the US Army more specifically.  A lot of what this subculture is most proud of comes in for criticism, in part simply for being so hackneyed, but also in the tradition of great westerns such as Little Big Man, and Dances with Wolves.  Europe is the dying world.  America, already inhabited, is the new world.

I saw the film by myself at The Bagdad and although the film was long, I didn't take any pee breaks.  Nor did I have my customary IPA or other drink (which probably helped) as I've given up beer (but not wine or gin).

After Princeton

These were my digs in Jersey City, post Princeton, a shared group house, more Platonic than polyamorous, though we certainly loved each other as schoolmates do.  We somewhat continued our lifestyle from 2 Dickinson Street.

My cohort was mostly using JCNJ as a springboard, to promising careers in the Big Apple, and they'd find a new place pretty soon. I found work within walking distance, as a high school teacher, and continued on in this space, renting from Mr. Chang, through other chapters of housemates.

Which house again? Immediately adjacent to the apartment building.  No solar panels.  Two cars.

Above, you'll see that same apartment building with the house behind it (red balloon). You're looking at Loews Theater on Journal Square, courtesy of Google Earth. The alley to the left of Loews, connecting JSQ to Magnolia, our old street, was used for a scene in The Joker. Newark was also used for that movie.

Nearby: The Stanley, used in a movie directed by Woody Allen.

This all happened in the early 1980s.  By 1984, I was living on the opposite side of Manhattan, in Queens, sharing digs with Ray Simon, along with a job at McGraw-Hill courtesy of Nola Hague.  

By then, I was also on the other side of a gig with Project VOTE!, aka Americans for Civic Participation, headed by Sandy Newman.  That was a rooming situation in Washington, DC (thanks Brenda), during the Reagan versus Mondale presidential contest.

Below:  Journal Square, across from Loews, back in the day.

Some Psycho Analysis

I don't see "the USA" as fighting Russia so much as an arrogant self-aggrandizing group we call neocons, which rose to power under Reagan during the Contra War against Nicaragua, and sees itself as being in charge. Many Americans have no beef with the Russians and are in fact of Russian heritage. Washington DC may see itself as representing "the USA" but some of us just see a silly City of Morons (one of my blog posts). Clearly I have my own deviant rhetoric.

I also tend to shy away from historical accounts that make "nations" the principal actors. I don't have any great belief in nations except as ideological / psychological constructs we use to organize our human affairs, akin to a corporation or religious bodies / institutions. 

The English language allows us to construct stories wherein Europe does this and London does that and Nicaragua does something else. I know how to talk this way too, and do (when in Rome...), but under the hood I'm a skeptic. Only humans have agency. These inanimate actors are at best a kind of journalistic shorthand. 

A faction of Ukrainian ideology wants "Ukraine for Ukrainians" and has a very definite idea of what that means. Ethnic Russians fall outside the definition. It's like if we had a faction here saying "real USAers" have to be white and of European heritage, anyone else is tolerated but is not as real. 

Given my upbringing as a liberal, I was taught that "ethnic uniformity" was a primitive older idea of "a nation" that had been superseded by the modern conception, one which accommodates a mix of cultures and religions and doesn't put any one of them in charge. I call that "secularism". 

Secular nations (which accommodate religions) are the ones I'm snobby about and think more highly of. "Ukraine for Ukrainians" sounds old fashioned and immature to my ears. I'm sorry this faction has gained an upper hand in Ukrainian politics and that they have their proud boy types to enforce their racist views.

Translating to Americanese I might say that in my view 2014 was a January 6 moment, except the Trumpies won, the ultra nationalist Bandero Ukraine for Ukrainian proud boy types forcefully took charge. The decent Ukrainians, especially out east, were shocked by this violent uprising and wanted out of this nascent nation-gone-bad. Russia is blue, fighting Maga Reds in Kiev. NATO is fascist to the core, we know from what it did to Libya, where my family worked for six years. 

One of the Angels

On Thursday, December 8, 2022 at 10:37 PM EST, Christopher John “CJ” Fearnley, passed away from a very aggressive, still undiagnosed cancer. CJ was 55 years young. He is survived by his partner Jeannie, two sister’s Michele and Brenda, his mother Marilyn, father Jack and stepmother Edyta, and two nephews Ryan and Nick. CJ was born in NY. CJ was a Comprehensivist and Explorer in Universe.

In my own experience, CJ was a great inspiration and collaborator, whether it was a deep exploration into Bucky Fuller, synergetic geometry, philosophy, Dante, Dostoevsky, Saramago or Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN, our last deep read. He had a reading plan that extended years into the future. In recent months, as he refined his ideas about the need for comprehensivity, he encouraged all to be macro-comprehensive and micro-incisive.

CJ was one of the angles.

-- D.W. Jacobs 

Adventures in Quakerism

Everyone has a different experience (of life) of Quakerism, in terms of vantage points assumed and/or achieved. I did a lot of the small meetup stuff, in part because my parents found sitting in silence a great way to get to know strangers, who then become Friends in one's own eyes.  The proverbial beholder's.

The above YouTube continues an earlier one that should just was well be entitled "experiments in" (versus "adventures in") Quakerism, which is not meant to sound cynical, as if Quakers were my guinea pigs.  I'm the guinea pig, and I'm encouraged to explore my religion "experimentally".

What's "my religion"?  Again, that's whatever pass for priors in terms of one's own dogmatism.  Not all beliefs can be under the microscope at every moment.  

One has to believe Google Maps or just trust intuition, unless one knows one's way about.  My friend Steve had a cul-de-sac dead end loop for an address, but the mapping software showed the street went through.  The procession of lost vehicles was endless.

What's critical is your religion have an update or upgrade process, whereby "waste beliefs" get dealt with and excreted. Nostalgically curating "bad beliefs" (as in "no longer useful") results in a level of metaphysical constipation that may become uncomfortable, not only personally, but institutionally, depending on one's role in society.

Quakerism, in focusing on silent worship, interrupted with ministry (aka ranting), does not get hung up on a bunch of "credos" wherein people give themselves the self indulgent benefit of being able to debate the trivial stuff quasi-endlessly.  You know you're dealing with the over-entitled when their predilection is to fiddle as Rome burns.

My hope for Quakerism, in a nutshell, is silent worship, as a central practice, as a catalyst, akin to various forms of meditation, will keep some of the least beneficial viral memeplexes from taking root.  Too many religions prove vulnerable to satanic "mind thetans" or whatever we wanna call 'em.