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Weaponized Religions

Downloading the latest Dogmas (a Matrix Refresh)

As I’ve said many times through my channels, I’m not a Marxist. 

That doesn’t make me an enemy of Marx or Marxism, but does mean I’m not fan, because to really be a fan you need to do sufficient homework, not just offer empty praise, lip service, or expedient flattery. 

I’m not a Taylor Swift fan for the same reason: I couldn’t tell you the name of her songs or recite lyrics. But that doesn’t mean I have a negative opinion of Taylor Swift. On the contrary, I went to one of those three hour movie versions of her road show and enjoyed it — a lot more than most other non-fans have done I’d hazard.

Not being a fan is not the same as being an anti-fan or detractor. A non-fan is closer to being clueless about X than to experiencing antipathy towards X.

Back to Marx. Didn’t he say “religion is the opium of the people”? 

I get that many religions are addictive and foment a detached view of life, and/or provide a fantastic kind of science fiction (e.g. Scientology), but I’m more inclined to see religion as a mind-control tool used by elites vs a ground-up grassroots phenomenon. 

Folk religions provide the raw material. Elites turn folk beliefs into ideologies more useful to their agendas, which often involve conquest and territorial expansion. 

So not so much “opium” as “chip implant” — which of course Marx had no experience with (chips had not been invented yet).

Christianity would not be what it is today without its constant reshaping by imperial powers. That doesn’t mean Christianity is helpless against this type of manipulation, just most people don’t develop their immune systems sufficiently and are easily programmed by the powers that be. 

I’d consider it a topic within anthropology to study how religion is almost always weaponized by the agenda-makers, but not necessarily to their own benefit as miscalculations are common. 

Most schemers and dreamers seeking to use others as cannon fodder find their schemes backfire sooner or later, as people get wise to what’s up.

So am I saying religion is bad? Not really, as I do believe a controlled mind is better than an uncontrolled mind. But it’s best if the individual human is auto-programming through intuition versus submitting to the authority of others. Many religions discourage this, and I’d say those are the religions to stay away from, if you value personal autonomy. 

Some don’t want autonomy — they wanna escape having a sense of self, of responsibility, and just bliss out. Isn’t that what Eric Fromm’s Escape From Freedom was all about? Time to chat with Perplexity again.

Regarding Marxism, if it contains the dogma that only human labor is a source of value-added in an economy, then that I’d certainly disagree with. We could have a debate maybe.

Warm Springs Circuit

The tent is passing tests but for the flaking reflective material used on the reversible (either side up-facing) over-tent, anchored by stretchy hooks pulling down to the tent’s corners (> 4), with a single ridge pole tied to the apex. At the apex, three geodesics form a triangle to support the dome. The skin is hooked to these from below.

However, the air mattress failed completely. I hadn’t tested it in awhile and was please to find both hole plugs. Just like old time, I blew into it, filling the thing with lung exhaust. But it never filled, because a seam had become unglued or was slit or whatever. Not only was this a large hole, it didn’t look at all reparable, so I stashed it in the estate’s trash.

That’s right, this was all happening within the perimeter of a privately owned patch of land with its own facilities: running water, heater, air conditioner, refrigeration, even WiFi (which I’m using now). I slept in a bed instead of outside in the tent, which is just as well, as although I’d brought blankets (not a sleeping bag), anticipating a warm night, it dropped into the low 40s on the Fahrenheit scale (32 water freezing to - 212 water boiling, in equally-sized “degree” gradations).

Getting here through Warm Springs Nation was problem free, for me and the dog, even though fires are raging throughout the region and legions of firefighters are bravely combatting the spread. Spokane, Washington has it worse in a lotta ways. The fires I’ve been seeing on local television includes that one east of us in the Ochoco Mountains. Yesterday we visited Smith Rock at watched hikers and climbers from a picnic table, eating deli-prepared sandwiches. That evening: fresh huckleberry pie from Eagle Crossing, my Warm Springs stop. Fam call with the sisters.

Given WiFi, I’ve continued barreling ahead with Project Manga (as I think of it) which includes Anime of course. We’ve got our design science revolutionaries providing a lotta raw material for didactic comics likely to be more popular in Japan than in Gotham at first.

Testing the Tent (continued)

:: campfire lore ::

Testing the Tent

:: diorama: c6xty miner campsite ::

I've not used it in awhile and may be using it on an overnight shortly, and even if I don't, I wanna keep up my skills. 

So I set it up in my backyard as a part of this diorama: vintage mining site, digging for C6XTY -- and finding some! 

A productive vein for sure.

Engineering Vistas

Gemini LMM

More Grid Talk

Continuing with our curriculum design talk:

What’s good about substations is their layout is likewise a circuit diagram of textbook quality, looking down from above especially, the “drone view”. Simulations work as well. These are already genres on YouTube. I’m not suggesting we need a lotta peeps flying their commercial drones over substations. On the contrary, I’m only in favor of engineers doing that (not destruction engineers either, the ones who only know how to wreak havoc).

Why we make this our promising beginning is all the electrical principles of capacitance and inductance, impedance more generally, expressed in ohms, are on full display in a highly macroscopic way. Plus we’re dealing with AC. Too many bonehead classrooms never get beyond DC digital. Not that we have anything against digital: the control room takes some of that AC power for its own DC use, to power the monitoring relays, ready to snap a circuit breaker if the waves get too stormy, as in outside safe operational parameters.

Don’t wait until they niche you into “linesman” or something before you take up the topic of carrier signals, used to keep the power supply well behaved. Quoting Gemini (Google + AI):

A carrier signal in a power substation is used for Power Line Carrier Communication (PLCC), which utilizes high-voltage transmission lines to transmit protection commands, telemetry data, and voice communication between remote electrical substations. [1, 2]

What we help our students discern is whether they’re getting a “for dummies” version of everything, not because they’re dummies, but because they live in a society that thrives on dummies and needs them to be dummies. Also good doobies. These go together in a lotta ways. 

So yeah, start with capacitors and circuit breakers the size of a truck, then work your way down to the same principles at work on a motherboard, with everything tiny and maybe also DC, but maybe not? Don’t let them corral you into only thinking about Arduinos though. 

Don’t get me wrong: I love Arduinos and the like. I’ve both taken and taught classes wherein Arduinos were featured. Make Magazine was just down the hall from our code school back in the day.

It’s not either/or. On the contrary, it’s zoom in (tiny small) and zoom out (macro big), with the same topics in focus: electromagnetics, radio transmission, signalling, frequencies, resistance, compression and tension. 

Take advantage of “substation macro” to pry open the secrets of “gate logic micro” later, or at the same time. 

Then use substation literacy to connect back to the hydro-cycle: evaporation (clouds and wind); condensation (rain, lightning); gravity-fed water systems (power and agriculture); deltas and watersheds (fisheries, hatcheries), marine biology, and back to evaporation. 

Cascadian Pragmatism pays attention to the ecosystem embedding (what some people still call the economy).

Hacker Lore

Hah hah, fooled ya. I meant weed hacker lore. That’s a device (a weed hacker is), as in Over the Hedge.

I’ve been joking how I’m “keeping up with the Jones’s” which means competing with others in one’s neighborhood to show off one’s worldly goods. Having a flashy new midlife crisis car in the driveway is classic. That’s not me though: my Nissan is from 1997.

Keeping up with the Jones’s is a way of showcasing one’s own prosperity, or at the very least one’s ability to keep up appearances, and then maybe take it to the next level if one gets lucky and hits the jackpot. 

In the Norman Rockwell version, Asteroid City trad-wives would gossip over the back fence about their latest appliances, inflaming jealousy and subtle hints to the hubby that it might be time to ask for that promotion. A willingness to relocate helps. There’s always another McMansion waiting on the other end.

My old podunk electric weed hacker in the garage, which needs to be plugged in (long cord), is just a toy compared to this new guy, this new cordless “energy slave” I just unboxed. I’ll be able to pleasure the landlord nextdoor with my more manicured-looking side yard, typically a gnarly briar patch. 

No, this is not a promotional posting. Ego is not paying me (that’s the brand). I’m just narrating a sequence of events. I acquired the Ego in Springfield, the town made famous by The Simpsons.

There’s another meaning of Jones however, and I’m not talking about Davy Jones (the guy with the locker), no, I mean Generation Jones. 

You can look it up: some demographers decided it made sense, at least in the population they studied, to split the Boomers into two, by renaming the latter portion of the wave to Jones, in recognition of various sea-changes.

What were those sea-changes? Why not inspire some comments and discussion among my Facebook friends?

Farmland Physics

A motif in these blogs is First Person Physics, which I started as a meme on a physics teacher list (AAPT types) at which point Dr. Bob Fuller recognized the potential and invited me on to his “pirate ship” (his enterprise), then seeking a next NSF grant. 

I became Bob’s project’s webmaster and got to join a meetup in Lincoln, Nebraska in the build-up to the application. I also got invited to an AAPT conference as part of the deal. 

When Dr. Fuller passed away, I was privileged to join an event celebrating his stellar achievement in physics andragogy and pedagogy. Among his acknowledged influences: Robert Karplus and Piaget.

Today was about First Person Physics on a farm. The farm is bordered by a scenic river and the architect-landscaper wants to take advantage of the view’s best vantage points, easily reachable by foot or electric ATV. 

However the river also floods periodically so no additional permanent structures are permitted. Rolling and re-angling a log, already nearby — albeit shortened with a chainsaw — to such a vantage point (the one by Walden Pond — no we’re not in New England) is permissible in terms of codes, but an unanchored log is likely to float.

The final design includes long metal bladed stakes that, when twisted into the topsoil, will anchor the chains over each end of the log bench, keeping it from drifting off. We’ll see if it works. The Gator was enlisted to help with the rolling and re-angling. Even a small log is too heavy for one person to manhandle.

This is where the concept of “energy slaves” enters in. We’re talking about what replaced horses, and human slaves before that (serfs, cow-pokes, many land-bound farmhands), namely John Deere and Kubota tractors, combines, wheel and reel lines, agricultural grade pumping and irrigation systems. 

A mechanized farm still needs personnel, but they may spend more time in the control room than out in the fields.

This Oregon farm where I do work-study is not an animal farm though. No chickens, no pigs, no livestock of any kind. The property therefore doesn’t need to be fenced. However, future owners have been kept in mind during the design process. The animal stalls and watering troughs are all in place, if currently unused. Sometimes a shepherd will rent grazing space, but they bring their own removable fences nowadays.

My suggestion to the owner was we organize university fleet vans to bring doctoral candidates and other degree program students out into rural Oregon for a look see, perhaps to participate in safe work best practices. Tour a windmill farm. Visit the AC-to-DC HVDC site near The Dalles, as well as BPA. 

Check out a data center or two (I recommend Facebook’s in Prineville), and take in a lecture on social engineering from the pros.

Stop in at the aforementioned farm for the rustic C6XTY museum, another roadside attraction. 

If this is your first time in America, so much the better. What could be more authentic than the home of Homer Simpson. You’ll find murals all over town, if you know where to look.

DevOps Retreat

I'm sure some geeks might complain about my use of DevOps here, as "development and operations" already has its own meaning, and people sometimes wish for a neologism versus any kind of revectoring. 

Like with Synergetics, Fuller's writings: there's more re-vectoring than neologism-ing going on, even though he’s accused of having a remote vocabulary. In many respects it’s the same dictionary, just he applies a different spin. That’s what writers do.

In my case, devops is closer to “curriculum development” but we’re factoring in “operational mathematics” more the way Bucky used that term, to imply that his mathy prose had operational significance (think “psyops”).

Am I allowed to say I’m on one of my circuits in my BizMo? Since I’ve done a lot to re-vector that word, almost a neologism, but not really, according the Urban Dictionary, I suppose it’s up to me. 

So my dog and I hopped into a BizMo, stopping for brunch in Hillsdale with Bradford and then continuing on south to our retreat site, there to engage in devops with the others, in a semi-luxurious environment (there’s even a “Walden Pond” with outdoor seating).

What others do I mean? 

These days, it only takes WiFi and some other gear to set up one’s mobile office. I’m able to work both synchronously and asynchronously without expecting others to the burn fuel it’d take to physically join me. My own fuel is subsidized (privately in this case) so it’s easier for me to hit the road maybe. 

Many of my counterparts do not have access to, let alone own, motor vehicles.

Per the embedded picture above, I’m using Gemini to flesh out what happens in Synergetics around Euler and Gibbs as anchoring proper names; how Fuller merges them into his own language, picking up on visual processing on the one hand, and emotional processing on the other (“process work” fits in around here somewhere).

That Euler + Gibbs synergy is a portal into First Person Physics, by way of the observer, and the observer’s psychology (operational). Applewhite, a collaborator on Synergetics, was “in it for the psychology” he once told me (I recall we were discussing pronouns and his including them in the index).

Re-vectoring is often the better choice as one is leveraging pre-existing denotations and connotations, not starting over from scratch. Synergetics builds on our English language heritage, a kind of legacy medium, but alerts its readers (the alert ones at least) about the remoteness of the Synergetics vocabulary.