A Political Recap

You might get from my critics that I'm close to incoherent when it comes to stating my views.  That's hardly the case.  

When it comes to recent domestic politics, I stood up for General Flynn at first, on the principle that new administrations need a long leash.  Let them bark up the wrong trees at first.  Don't undermine a president too early or you risk making a mockery of the office, from which legitimacy extends.

So yes, I thought the FBI was playing a risky game, and as it came out the game was mainly against Trump himself, it became increasingly a story of a deep state against an elected president, a descent into Banana Republic status.  No, I was never a Trump fan.  I'd voted for Hillary, and Obama before that.  I was attracted to Tulsi for her good American Samoan sense, her Hindu leanings not a problem, but I had no illusions that she could ever be enough of a scoundrel to occupy the post constitutional oval office.

Through the unraveling of Russiagate, three things became clear (a) the UK was still Meddler in Chief when it came to pulling strings in DC and (b) there would be no recovery from Banana Republic status (the presidency had pretty much died as an office) and (c) the insanity of the "rigged voting machines" crowd, which included the former president and his waylaid general.

Going forward: (c) interests me most, all insanity aside, as voting machines continue to be susceptible, just probably not in ways invented by amateurish storytellers with no real street smarts or savvy.  I think the Trump camp's rush to concoct fables regarding these particular voting machines was ill-fated from the get go, though they had little choice but to go with the hand they were dealt.

The beleaguered voters were trying especially hard to get it right in a pandemic.  Yes, certainly last minute measures were taken to let mailed-in ballots pile up.  Those would run through the counters after the votes cast on election day, and would outnumber in-person voting (again, because pandemic).

Because voters were trying so hard to have integrity, as a way of clinging to remaining sanity in hard times (they knew their critics were harsh and vigilant), the accusation of widespread hanky panky with the voting machines was just too much of an attack on the heart of the country's pride.  

The implication that Venezuelan malware had outwitted and subverted hard-working college-educated IT bureaucrats, or that vote counting had been outsourced to foreign agents in league with globalists, just seemed too great of an insult to ever forgive in some cubicles.

Our president was saying we can't or don't have free and fair elections no matter how hard we try, and  wanted to substitute his own judgement in such chaotic circumstances, to impose fairness by other means, never before attempted in United States history.  Talk about a Mad Cow disorder. 

People were not up for this circus.  The coup attempt collapsed because it relied on the slippery lie-for-money strategies of the so-called intelligence community ("my cousin overheard Hugo Chavez brag at a party that..."), as unqualified to define intelligence as Mensa.

Yes, beyond these foreground stories, of the District losing its grip, comes a longer backstory in which journalism managed to stop updating people on a lot of the intellectual happenings.  YouTube and such media came to the rescue on that front, and education acceleration with automation is getting back on track to some degree.

Regarding Storytelling

In this blog, which I mix with the idea of Quaker journal (Quakerism encourages journaling), I spend a lot of time wondering what's up with the storytelling industry.  Why do they have such crushing and unimaginative stories for us to live through?

Obviously, I am not the only one asking this question, and after looking into it for awhile, one realizes one is looking at a bucket full of writhing snakes, the "narratives" or "stories" or "scenarios" I'm talking about. I see a lot of them, and I see they're roiling i.e. not lying still.

A narrative is a mnemonic device in large degree.  That doesn't equate to a record of what happened exactly. Maybe a precise factual account is a part of some story somewhere.  Maybe not.  We weave stories to hold facts in our head, or rather to hold points of view.  The latter factors in the aesthetic and moral dimensions of concern to philosophers, if only to keep quiet about say in Wittgenstein's case.

Some stories are considered toxic and/or poisonous in some way.  These stories intertwine with ideologies, sometimes in the form of myth.  To those holding to these stories, they may be comforting and useful. Stories clash, snakes fight, or seem to.  Anything going on this long has to be seen as a natural process, a characteristic of the species.

Have we only been fighting over narratives since the Tower of Babel?  That's a funny question, given how few believe in that story.  Do I mean it seriously?  The question simply points back to our current state of confusion, post Tower.  The confusion seems deep seated.  But was there a time when we didn't have it?  Is that a sensible question at all?

In the primordial or archetypal sense of mythic objects, or guiding lights, we're happy to admit we're not doing physics.  A person interested in physics stories might find the archetypal realm a neighbor because of the continuity we impute, to electrons on the one hand, and to the psychological phenomena on the other.

I've been delving into the literature around the Wolfgang Pauli - Carl Jung collaboration, reminding myself of the tenuous relationships between physics and psychology.  Carl wanted to hold on to his credentials as a man of science, goes the narrative, and his work on "synchronicity" as a concept was an attempt to contribute to the literature of causality.  He was avoiding being labeled a theosophist for example. He didn't want to be a Rudolph Steiner.

Another contributor oft referred to in this context is Isaac Newton, one of the greatest of the physicists. He did not abandon his psychological fascinations either.  The publishing industry and those who sort narratives by genre, probably had more to do with making physics and psychology go their separate ways, than the principal authors, but they never fully succeeded with their enforcement, and the two are always coming together here and there, especially in California.

Told a different way:  alchemy, astrology and religion, rebranded as psychology and thereby remained rooted enough in the sciences to continue making alliances with other sciences.

Goofing Up

Just a little pin prick, a drop of blood, and a spendy strip that feeds the blood into the machine.  I got trained, I performed fine in the training.

It's not my finger.  The poking device elicited the expected "lady bug" size droplet.  However, applying it to the strip wasn't working.  The strip appeared to suck up the lady bug, but the machine refused to process.

Going back to an earlier archeological level, me at Overseas School of Rome (OSR), I remember losing at ping pong in a tournament setting.  In frustration, I threw the racket, pretty hard, and smashed a window.

Dr. Gillespie as was a real MD.  He wasn't licensed to practice in Italy however, and I don't think he needed the work.  He was happy to teach 8th graders instead, and joined the faculty as a full time biology teacher. He taught it like first year medical school in some ways.

Dr. Gillespie extracted my confession. I was hoping no one one notice, or if they did notice (how could they not?) maybe the didn't need the whole story.  However letting me get away with vandalism would've been bad for my character.

What I remember more than dodging blame at first, was how I'd choked in the tournament. I knew that feeling of panic, at a low level, this was ping pong.  But I knew what it meant to wipe out.  I wasn't that great at ping pong to begin with.

I'm scheduled for a retraining with the device, meaning I'll have to get mom over to the medical office buildings again.  We have a date.  I left the first training full of confidence this would be a piece of cake.

I don't see myself as unreliable, but nor do I see myself as immune from wiping out, especially when operating technology I'm unsure about.  Lots of steps, lots of do this then that. I get riled, I get frustrated.  I get this way when I lose stuff, like my car keys, like right before I need to go somewhere, like to teach a class.

I remember going over to assist with that est stuff in the 1980s, taking the PATH train to the New York Area Center in the East Side Port Authority Bus Terminal building.  Sometimes I would be late.  Since the whole assist gig was about looking at oneself and one's patterns, I would get confronted and asked some questions.  

I remember saying how I felt like a caged animal, being late yet unable to go any faster.

Another time I've felt panic is when I'm supposed to go on stage in a cyber environment (on Zoom), not as the host, but as the instructor.  A DJ is supposed to show up and get the meeting going, by showing a banner page with my name on it, and playing music.

When the DJ didn't show up that time, I could do nothing except dismiss the students via Slack, in real time, after an appropriate waiting interval. I felt like a fish out of water, a beached whale.  I tried contacting my counterparts on another continent.

These glitches happen.  I am happy to have a DJ host the channel and still appreciate that setup, even though it has more moving parts.

A sense of goofing up may be multi-level.  One my go through it as an individual, but also as a member of a group or cult (subculture).  

I remember when Multnomah Quakers got thrown into an international controversy when a couple of its volunteer, temporary leaders, promised the meetinghouse to a Radfems, a controversial group, without running it by Business Meeting for prior approval.  

There was a sense of disorientation among the members and attenders, once this news became known. The meeting ended up breaking its promise, from the point of view of the would-be renters of the space.

What I imagine goes on in the District from time to time, is a kind of awakening from groupthink of one kind or another. A collective bubble bursts.  A reality crumbles.  Trump's not getting a second consecutive chance at bat, as the POTUS, was reality-crumbling experience for some.  JFK's abortive presidency was even more jarring.

The goof-up might have been putting too many eggs in one basket.  That happens.  But do the groupthinkers eventually come to see it that way?  

Maybe we have other eggs in other baskets outside the District?

Building a Unit XYZ Cube within the IVM (School of Tomorrow)

Telecommuting

Today is a Saturday.  I've been immersed in data analysis and visualization classes pretty recently (leading them). 

More recently, I've had one or two planning meetings to attend, with FSI and/or TrimTab. I call them planning meetings given the anticipatory designing that goes on, much of it imaginary, like in Critical Path.  

The geoscope near the UN was never built.  Ephermeralization.

Newtonian Units

I used to do movie reviews rather frequently. I still see movies, but my energies have been directed elsewhere. I will explore ways to move the movies back into my blogs, without necessarily adopting a "movie review" format. 

For example, Quantum of Solace, a Bond film, one I'd so far missed (I've caught the majority I'd hazard, back through several chapters), got me thinking of the concept of Power once again. We started talking power during a TrimTab meeting and I stuck up for the Newtonian meaning: energy per time. 

What's the connection? 

When Bond and the Bolivian hellion need a hotel for the evening, she has this cover story worked out for two teachers, clearly of limited means. The hotel is far less than four star. Bond is having none of it, and insists they have the best most palatial digs anywhere on the circuit. He tells the desk the same story: two teachers... whom've just won the lottery. 

The Bolivian is impressed with Bond's power to spend money like water, and a swiftly flowing river of water at that. 

When nature is being powerful, she's showing off some combination of inertia and pattern-making. She goes for high wattage, but doesn't lose the structure, or if she does, an explosion takes its place, representing what until a moment ago had been more cohesive. 

The stately, one could say placid, flow of the lower Columbia, gets forced through what pass for water wheels on their sides, although we call them turbines today. The torque the river pushes against is that of magnets resisting the steady twirl. The current goes out across the lines at very high voltage, to stepping stations able to reduce the power to match conventional loads. 

Newtonian units also get into Work, not just Power, another politically loaded term. An anti-employee accomplishes negative work, but perhaps by burning the same calories as would a hard worker. Work is measured against a stipulated end state, so that syntropy and entropy compete in the business of making stuff happen. 

Was the design conducive to getting work done in the first place? 

Did anyone even know what the end goal was? 

Entropy might've been high from the beginning. 

Bond is not only burning through funds, he's making an effective difference from the standpoint of the crown. Lower life sycophants may have sold out, but 007's boss, a queen bee, has a lot of faith in his ability to evade her own henchmen. Now there's an interesting pattern for ya.

Positive Developments

The Youtubers of the moment share a lot of negativity.  Of course I'm able to sample from many time frames, so the current inflationary conflagrations in the eastern hemisphere, with repercussions around the globe, is only optionally a focus. I do believe in staying current, although I know that's relative. My grasp of UK politics has improved but I'm still not getting the India-China-Pakistan matrix that clearly, whereas obviously it's very important.

I should add that my bizmo (meaning "body" in this case) has toured in all of those nation-states. We walked across the border from India to Pakistan somewhere near Kashmir, ending up in Islamabad, then Peshawar, then Kabul... my mom is an Abdul Gaffar Khan fan, though they never met in person.  My good friend Glenn Baker had come from Islamabad to join us in the Philippines, in my senior year of high school.

Anyway, the good news is I was gifted with a hand-me-down Mac Pro, a lot like the one I already have and got used from Fubonn Shopping Center on SE 82nd.  However this next one volunteered to upgrade itself to Monterey, a big jump from Yosemite (these are names of Apple Mac computer operating systems, from the Intel chip days).  I've been having a good time beefing it up with my favorite software, including a POV-Ray, not through homebrew this time.

Navigating Bureaucracy

Getting one of my bank cards replaced, at the teller window, reminded me my driver's license had expired. DMV now has online renewal, and with proof of payment in the glove compartment, I'm good to go.

I've got mom's Medicare call in my queue.  We'll see if they let me do an in-home administration of the blood check.  I'd need to get trained.  Providence is fine with it.

Matthew took me to lunch at Barley Mill today.  Then we walked due south through Ladd's Addition to Palio on Ladd's Circle.  I've talked around these places before.  The Ladd sisters had a houseboat on the Columbia, where the original scenic photography hobbyists would gather.

Puttering with Sympy

 

A synergeoist on Synergeo wondered by what factor we would scale the icosahedron of edges one, to give it a volume of 20, i.e. what would the new edges have to be? 

We think of the Jitterbug Transformation and how s_factor = jb_cubocta / jb_icosa (snake case) i.e. jb_icosa times s_factor takes its volume from 18.51... (tetravolumes) to 20 (ditto). 

In other words, the factor in question is a 3rd root of the s_factor, since the latter scales volume, meaning its 3rd root is our linear multiplier.

The s_factor appears again when we morph the icosahedron into a cuboctahedron by a different route. Start with the icosa with faces flush to an octahedron's.  Rotate the tilted triangles to a minimum volume 2.5 cuboctahedral conformation.  Two applications of 1/s_factor does the trick.

More About Branding

Today's lunch conversation was about the physics of consciousness.  That's become the field.  I've questioned the priorities there, as a kind of psychologist, as what we need help with, as a faculty, is the unconscious.  Everyday dream time awareness, so-called consciousness, is something I tend to scoff at (just kidding).

Anyway, what kind of "psychologist" do I suppose I might be?  Do I hang out a shingle somewhere?  In the 1980s I think it was, the philosophers thought they might do this, making the claim that what ails people is more metaphysical than merely psychological.  

I could see the appeal.  Philosophy has been on the self help shelves in the past.  Stoicism and so on.

No, the psychology of individuals was my focus in the past, as a reader of Freud and like that.  Adler. But mass psychology, whatever that means, is more my focus today, and that means marketing and advertising, lobbying and propaganda i.e. changing the collective psyche i.e. politics.

Yes, I've called myself a lobbyist.  Once I realized the political process had a hand in determining curriculum, somewhat shocking to realize at first, I jumped into the business of pushing discrete math.  This had to do with high school level topics, and whether delta calculus would maintain its same level of dominance.  I posted tons to Math Forum about it, before the public forums were canceled.

But then of course Oregon Curriculum Network is more niche market than that.  Under cover, I've been an agent for Python Nation, not that our legals at PSF think there is such a thing.  

Guido's term as benevolent dictator was more tongue in cheek, somewhat mocking actual dictators.  That's true of Python Nation as well, similar to Rogue Nation (a brewery in Oregon) in taking the claptrap, the pomp, of nation-states, and using it for branding.

What's a nation-state, or a religion for that matter, beyond a brand?  One could say the difference is immeasurable as a brand is nothing without a substantial subculture to back it up.  Betty Crocker.  McDonald's. 

Exactly.  Ethnicity matters.  You need those subcultures.  The US had its deep believers in democracy.  The flag decals wouldn't mean anything without those old timers.  Other ideologies would adopt them.

Advertisers who believe in the Holy Ghost (a Zeitgeist) have an edge, one might believe, as a matter of faith. Or call them propagandists, as the Catholics do, or did, when everyone important spoke Latin.

Hollywood will tell you it's all show business.  I'm not saying that I disagree.  The show must go on.

If physicists want to be the next priesthood, or maybe that dream has come true already, we should get them involved in the treatments.  Help us with the mental health issues, war a chief pathology.  

That means curriculum development.  That means programming, as in television programming.  

But then television doesn't mean what it used to mean, either.  The internet (tcp/ip) has created the new groundwork.

I work at being a nationalist, a patriot, but for Python Nation, a science fiction virtual nation the PSF doesn't necessarily believe in.  That doesn't mean I've abandoned USA OS (my idea of a democracy, based on the one that died in darkness).  

I think we need practice in re-basing our nationalism in the cloud, more like the religions have done (the more successful ones).  

Cloud-based nationalism helps take the stress off the planetary ecosystem, freeing it from service as a mere backdrop for our nationalist fantasies.