Pandemic Ponderings II

As life is slowing returning to normal, we can look at some of the positive results of the “shelter in place” edict. The quarantine gave many people time to stop and reflect on their life choices. Specifically, those thoughts have been primarily about spending habits and occupational options.

As far as finances go, operating on a shoestring proved to be a disaster for small businesses. Many will close or have closed permanently during this period. For working stiffs, living from one paycheck to another could have proven much worse than it did. Had there not been a moratorium on evictions, the homeless numbers would have skyrocketed. The lesson I hope we learned is to always have a nest egg.

During this crisis, many people starting questioning their career choices. There are “essential” workers that have been relatively unfazed during this period. For instance, the construction industry pretty much continued as normal. Unfortunately, many young people these days want to be computers jocks; ignoring a vast source of relatively well paying jobs in the trades. Very few high school students will elect to go to trade school or enter an apprenticeship program. Prestige is nice, but it doesn’t pay the bills. I hope people took a good look around and observed the people that were still employed during all this.

Pandemic Ponderings

To say that recent events have been strange would be a vast understatement. The pandemic, with it’s economic and social impact, is the stuff that “preppers” have been talking about for decades.

The first prepper I met was my high school psychology teacher. This was in the seventies. I’ve subsequently met many more. They have all preached the same philosophy. Namely, that society would eventually break down, so you better be prepared when the shit hits the fan.

Dismissed by many, they now have the supreme “I told you so” moment.

Gays, Blacks and Hollywood

While most of America was still treating homosexuality as a mental illness, there was widespread acceptance of gays among the black community. Subsequently, there has been this wink-wink, nudge-nudge “pact’” between queers and blacks dating back to the early days of film making. This is why, going all the way back to the 1930s, you rarely see a black or gay person portrayed negatively on film.

Unwarranted Arrogance

Arrogance has never been an attractive personality trait. It is even less attractive when it is unwarranted. When I meet a person that is not particularly good looking, not particularly talented or not particularly intelligent that walks around with a swagger as though they are "king shit", I automatically assume that they are either a gang member, a member of a weird religious cult or a government employee. Who else, besides an individual with the power of a group behind them, would engage in such behavior? This is, of course, assuming that they are not delusional.

It has been my experience that people with genuine abilities will have the tendency to downplay them. The reason should be obvious. They do not feel the need to prove themselves.

Spiritual Warfare

These charlatans, these public pietists
Whose sacrilegious and perfidious manners
Deliberately betray and parody
All that men hold most hallowed and most sacred.
These are the people who for mean advantage
Make piety their trade and merchandise,
And try to buy credit and offices,
Rolling their eyes and mouthing holy words
Their pilgrim's progress take the road to heaven
As a short, easy way to wordily fortune.
We see them pray with one hand out for alms;
They preach of solitude, but stay at court
And with their holy zeal they keep their vices;
They're vengeful, faithless, treacherous, and tricky.
And to destroy an enemy, they cover
Their savage hate with heaven's interest.
And when they hate, they're the more dangerous,
Because they take up weapons we revere,
Because their fury, to general applause,
Takes an anointed sword to stab our backs

-Molière
Tartuffe

D List Virtue

There is a fine example! That good woman
She lives austerely now, that's true enough;
But age has put this ardor in her soul,
And makes her play the prude, despite herself.
As long as men would pay their court to her,
She made her graces work for her advantage.
But her allurements ceasing to allure,
She quits society, which quitted her,
And with a veil of virtue tries to hide
The dimming of her antiquated charms.
This is the classic fate of old coquettes;
They hate to see their gallants disappear.
Unhappy and abandoned, they can see
No other recourse than the trade of prude.
And these good women with severity
Make universal censure, pardon nothing.
Loudly they blame the lives of everyone,
Not out of charity, but out of envy,
Which can't endure that any woman share
In pleasures time has thieved away from them.

-Molière
Tartuffe

Flashback

 

It’s 1977. I walk into a music store and pickup ELP’s Works Vol. 1. I remember the cute chick with the blues eyes at the counter: “classy album”. She was right.

Talking Heads

The clerks, the kings, the thinkers; they talked and with their talking ran the world. The truck drivers, the pyramid builders, the straight duty men; the ones who could not talk; they built the world out of their very tongueless-so the talkers could talk about how to run it and the ones that built it. And when they had destroyed it with their talking, the truckdrivers and the straight duty men would build it up again; simply because they were hunting for some way to speak.

-James Jones

From Here to Eternity

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Tyranny

The effects of tyranny, my dearest one, are to be seen not so much in executions, privations, surveillances, matricide and fratricide, ruined reputations, unjust trials, exile, and murder, shocking events of the capital; no, tyranny has finally achieved its foul purpose when among the many, scattered at large, there are acquiescence, apathy, complacency, bland acceptance of outrage, pride in vulgar triumphs, blurring of the meaning of words, confusion in moral standards-in short, a blight of the communal character. It is when people who are thought of as good solid citizens, those who make up the backbone of the populace, become touched by this blight and do not realize it, become not only the infected but the infectors-this is when tyranny has won the day.

-John Hersey

The Conspiracy

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You Are A Lover of Words

People turn to you because you give voice to dreams, notice little things, and make otherwise impossible things appear real. You are a rare bird who thinks the world is beautiful enough to try to figure it out, who has the courage to dive into your wild mind and swim there. You are someone who still believes in cloud watching, people watching, daydreaming, tomorrow, favorite colors, silver clouds, dandelions, and sorrow. Be sacred. Be cool. Be wild. Go far. Words do more than plant miracle seeds. With you writing them, they can change the world.

-Ashley Rice

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Look At Me

And I did not write for many evenings that followed. In my new security I began to see it all in a different light. I began to hate that inner chemical excitement that made me run the words through my head while getting ready to set them down on the page; I felt a revulsion against the long isolation that writing imposes, that claustration, the sense of exclusion; I experienced a thrill of distaste for the alternative life that writing is supposed to represent. It was then that I saw the business of writing for what it truly was and is to me. It is you penance for not being lucky. It is an attempt to reach others and to make them love  you. It is your instinctive protest, when you find you have no voice at the world’s tribunals, and that no one will speak for you. I would give my entire output of words, past, present, and to come, in exchange for easier access to the world, for permission to state “Look at me”. And I do not go back on this. For once a thing is known it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten. And writing is the enemy of forgetfulness, of thoughtlessness. For the writer there is no oblivion. Only endless memory.

-Anita Brookner

Look At me

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Some Native American Wisdom

When the wind blows and spreads its might through the trees and howls through the caverns of the mountains, do we understand its purpose? No, but we take comfort in the fact the wind is wind and has its own mission, its own destiny, and we have ours. Do not be burdened by what you do not understand but focus on what is in your power to do and seek and learn. Wisdom is your truest friend. and each must find that within your own heart, and that wisdom requires that you travel a path that is uniquely yours and not made for others.

Do not be afraid, but trust that you will grow and become better warriors when you meet with obstacles. It is by conquering these battles that we learn how to live greater grace and stronger beauty.  Therefore these obstacles are gifts upon your soul and you will surely flourish like the stunning flowers in the meadow if you allow yourself.

Fear is the greatest obstacle everyone must overcome, for fear is what holds many back–fear of what is not known, fear of what is known, fear of change and the fear of remaining the same, fear of dark and fear of light, fear of many people, fear of being alone, fear of life and fear of death. If you can learn to handle your fears with confidence, then you will face the world with a strong and determined face and your power will soar like the eagles. If fears control your very essence, then you are doomed to travel the snake upon its belly, forever lying lowest to the earth and not feeling the heights of God above us.

We all need teachers and guides and spiritual influences to show us what they learned and how they have traveled the world. It is good and not bad to have such help, but remember with caution that they cannot be your source of inner light; you must create that for yourself.

- Wind Dancer

Olga Grushin

"From its very birth at the dawn of humanity," the man was saying in a mild voice bred of generations of intellectuals, "pictorial art has served two separate functions: ritualistic and decorative. In its primitive stages, art amounted to, on one hand, drawing pictures of slain animals on cave walls to ensure some friendly spirit's help in a hunt, and on the other, fashioning necklaces out of seashells to make savage women more bearable to look at. Gradually, as man matured, these two original functions-communicating with the spirit world and making the present world more pleasant to live in-crystallized into what I see as art's two great raisons d' etre, if you will: the search for the Divine and the search for Beauty. In the Dark Ages, when man was weighed down by superstitions, the Divine predominated at the expense of Beauty, but at the very peak of artistic development-and by that, of course, I mean the age of the Renaissance-the two searches grew more and more intertwined until they became one. And for one brief moment God was beauty, nature was God, and the Divine and the Beautiful could be found equally in Titian's voluptuous nudes and in Mantegna's emaciated saints. The miraculous balance lasted hardly more than a century, yet it brought about a flowering of genius so extraordinary that it sustains us to this day. But inevitably, as the world moved on, life gained the upper hand over art, and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with their new mantras of enlightenment and reason, led to the beginning of the end. As art's two purposes drifted apart once again, creation found itself boxed into increasingly narrow compartments: portrait, epic painting, genre painting, religious painting, landscape, still life...Then, with the advent of our own monstrous age of machines and secularism, Beauty was killed by industrialization, God was declared persona non grata by so-called progressive thinkers, and thus, in a blink of time, both higher artistic purposes lost all meaning. What are we left with? A sad bunch of labels and occasional pathetic attempts to recover at least something of art's previous glory, either by desperate proclaimers of art for art's sake, who try to restore Beauty but invariably end up painting poodles and shepherdesses or the aesthetic equivalent thereof, or by eager revolutionaries who seek the Divine in a red banner of humanity, hoping to use art for the common good as if it were a loaf of bread or a pair of boots-needless to say, in vain, for a purpose does not become sacred merely by virtue of being noble."

                                                   -Olga Grushin

                                                   The Dream Life of Sukhanov

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 A Pirate Looks At Fifty-One

In November I turned fifty years old. In my short life I've seen the computer industry explode. My first computer was a total piece of shit Timex Sinclair that was a complete joke. Between then and when I got a "real" computer in 1986-a Mac Se Plus with a whopping 512k of memory-there were Trash 80's, Commodore 64's, and other toys that obviously pale in comparison to today's devices. When Microsoft introduced Windows, I didn't immediately switch over. Eventually, like a good chunk of the world, I did. I've gotten comfortable with the OS, but most of the creatives and coders I know use Macs.  Since I can comfortably put myself in neither category, I'm allowed some leeway.

Life, pre-Google, consisted of services like Compuserve and Prodigy and with search choices like Lycos.Yahoo is what I was using at the time. The web was not pretty in the late eighties and early nineties. It had very little graphic capability even with a T1 line.  YouTube would never had worked.

Eventually, I got turned on to Google. Since I had lived in the area-Google's original URL was google.stanford.edu-I figured these guys and girls weren't complete retards. I was right. I presently use most of their services. As for the privacy thing...well, the U.S. government knows more than a few things about me. I generally trust Stanford graduates and computer geeks.  The government? Their track record speaks for itself.

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 God Is Too Big For One Religion

Both revelation and delusion are attempts at the solution of problems. Artists and scientists realize that no solution is ever final, but that each new creative step points the way to the next artistic or scientific problem. In contrast, those who embrace religious revelation and delusional systems tend to see them as unshakable and permanent...

Religious faith is an answer to the problem of life...The majority of mankind want or need some all-embracing belief system which purports to provide an answer to life's mysteries, and are not necessarily dismayed by the discovery that their belief system, which they proclaim as "the truth", is incompatible with the beliefs of other people. One's man's faith is another's delusion...

Whether a belief is considered to be a delusion or not depends partly upon the intensity with which it is defended, and partly upon the number of people subscribing to it.

 -Anthony Shorr
 Feet Of Clay

There's nothing more dangerous than a misinformed, intolerant fanatic. Any belief system which has as its goal the creation of mindless, impotent automatons--I have some "crazy", Brave New World-type theories on drugs and alcohol--and which discourages the objective, unemotional analysis of its precepts is one which is probably not worth adhering to.

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An Inconvenient Truth

In November I gave all my computer hardware to someone for safekeeping. In the past, this stuff has had the uncanny ability to sprout legs. Perhaps this was due to statements I made to certain people in which I insinuated that I was going to start posting the pictures of my stalkers on the Internet. Perhaps it may have been due to me announcing the possible subject matter of future blog posts. (e.g., Angels, Voodoo and the Rise of Depression in America) I do know that I've had a difficult time hanging on to cameras and laptops.

 

Now that I'm using public computers and can no longer hack databases, pirate media or watch porn, I wonder what excuse will be generated to justify blocking my access to the Internet. I quiver in anticipation.

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The Independence of Cyber Space

Anonymous declare a Note on Independence of Cyber Space :

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, we come from the Internet, the new home of Mind.

On behalf of the future, we ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one; therefore we address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty it always speaks. We declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us, nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear. You are toothless wolves among rams, reminiscing of days when you ruled the hunt, seeking a return of your bygone power.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. The Internet does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

We have watched as you remove our rights, one by one, like choice pieces of meat from a still struggling carcass, and we have collectively cried out against these actions of injustice. You have neither usage nor purpose in the place we hold sacred. If you come, you will be given no more and no less power than any other single person has, and your ideas will be given the same consideration anyone else would receive You are neither special, righteous, nor powerful here.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. This claim has been used throughout the centuries by many an invading kingdom, and your claims are no different, nor do they ring any less hollow. Your so called problems do not exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours.

The Internet consists of transactions, relationships and thought itself; arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. It is the last truly free place in this world, and you seek to destroy even that freedom. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. A place where anyone, at any time, is as free to come and go, to say and be silent, and to think however they wish, without fear, as anyone else. There is no status beyond the merit of your words and the strength of your ideas.

We are creating a world where anyone anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here. There are only ideas and information, and they are free.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions.

The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

In the United States, you repeatedly try to pass unjust legislature in an attempt to restrict us. You disguise this legislature under a variety of different names, and pass excuses that they are for our own protection. We have watched you, time and time again; attempt to censor us under the guise of Copyright protection, or for the protection of Children. These laws come in many shapes and forms, in the name of ACTA, PIPA, COICA, SOPA, but their intentions remain the same. You seek to control what you cannot.

We scorn your attempt to pass these bills, and as a result, our discontent at your misaligned efforts grows each day.

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy, Mexico, Spain, Greece, Egypt, Canada, the United States and many others you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of the Internet. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that is already blanketed in bit-bearing media.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no different than pig iron.

In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our presence in the world we have created immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in the Internet. We have created a medium where all may partake in the forbidden fruit of knowledge, where egalitarianism reigns true. May our society be more humane and fair than yours.

We are the Internet.

We are free.

 

http://thehackernews.com/2012/03/anonymous-declaration-of-independence.html

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The Best and the Brightest

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness"

-Allen Ginsberg

 

 

Some of the most intelligent and most talented people I have met have been homeless and/or substance abusers. If I was a deluded conspiracy theorist, I'd think that there was some sort of concerted effort to level the playing field by destroying the best and the brightest. By reviewing the last sixty years of our nation's history, I'd probably be able to make a pretty good case for it. An unbiased study that traced the eventual destinations of the smartest grade school students of the past sixty years would reveal some interesting data, I'm sure.

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The Peter Principle 1.2

If one has demonstrated an aptitude for a particular task, it will be the one thing that they will never be allowed to do.

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Cui Bono

"Every society consists of an organized minority controlling an unorganized majority."

                                                             -Dick Eastman

When one has the ability to manipulate people like chess pieces, it doesn't really matter who appears to be in power. Despite clever rhetoric and deceptive social engineering tactics, it is difficult to disguise the more blatant aspects of "cause and effect". Regardless of their ingenuity level, most people eventually reveal their true intentions.

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