Wandering Faculty

I'm comparing notes with our friend Mazur, regarding Ms. Vam, an erstwhile house guest (over Christmas).  They've been here before, including during the Joker Riots (as I call them).

A couple of my Freddie-related friends, meaning I know them through Fred Meyer's, the local Kroger's, are heading for Japan and Taipei soon, which I think of as geographic areas, all parts of China.  Because all is China per the "virtual" lens of Chinese Earth.

Americans tend to have their lens too, seeing Earth is belonging entirely under their management, with insurgents everywhere, disobeying El Supremos.  I'm not saying all Americans are that messed up, just some meme viruses have taken their evident toll.

I'm saying it's psychologically healthy to take the planet, our Promised Land, under one's care.  The religions teach us we should have been doing that all along.  "Like Duh", saith the Lord.  But we're slow.  We're humans, whom the angels call "the retarded ones" (translating from Persian or one of those).

Year of the Rabbit [Hole].

I like that Joe Rogan is compassionate regarding Alex Jones.  These were among the Youtube personalities of my day, along the the Gregory Brothers (includes a sister).

The Dark Side of TV

Lots is already written on the "dark side" of TV, so your mind, dear reader, may already be racing ahead, showing me darkness.  We could start with all the overt drug pushing, shocking to British viewers that time they tuned in, to hear Oprah interview the royal couple or whatever it was.  The TV itself is just a device, but a lot of folks hope to turn it into a bully pulpit, including me from time to time.

On the topic of bully pulpits:  how different are these from soap boxes, and how do we train a machine learner to distinguish between the two?  When is so and so being tyrannical, and when is so and so exercising freedom of speech, and how do these overlap?  For analysis purposes, we need a spectrum.

Spectrum:  on the one hand, you have someone sounding bold and sincere about a topic, with no obvious leverage over the listeners i.e. the power of the rhetoric, lets say invective, is what the speaker is banking on, the powers of persuasion (hold that thought).  On the other hand, you have a commanding officer barking orders surrounded by people trained to obey.  The speaker has more than "just opinions" when able to use powers of coercion.  The spectrum runs from persuasion to coercion.

Powers of persuasion:  that gets us back to advertising and using what we know of human psychology to develop compulsions and motivations.  TV is for brainwashing (socializing) around lifestyle practices around associated brands. The term "lifestyle" is just a placeholder here, perhaps a euphemism.  Slavery is a lifestyle, as is soldiering.  The word itself connotes glossy magazine shots of well off civilians, with their cigarettes and alcohol and healthy bodies, around a swimming pool.  Wouldn't you want all that for yourself?  Come to our workshop, our church etc.

Change of subject (sort of).  My YouTube recommendation engine, giving me a "beaten track" through the jungle, is queuing up lots about "toxic fandom" (a bad thing) i.e. paying customers registering their disappointment with a given product.  A typical pattern is the remake.  Confronted with the design science revolution as the "next big thing" the cowardly capitalists shy away, preferring to re-fight World War 2 in some dimension, and in the meantime they remake past hits with live action and computerization, like in Mary Poppins.  The acting may not be getting better, but the computerization sure is.

Hollywood seems to be charging down a dead end tunnel associated with the wider California mindset, which is tainted by gold rush "get rich quick" fantasies.  With enough action and special effects, and demographically focused pandering, to some semi-fictional Gen Z or whatever (sounds Russian), we should be able to recoup the investment and then some, winning a money game that top guns respect.  Some of us respect Scientology because of how much money it made for itself, and for no other reason.  I'm not saying that's me, and I've never been a Scientologist (Quakers have "clearness committees" or "committees for clearness" -- I've blogged about that observation).

I respect California for broader reasons, including for its trippiness e.g. Esalen and like that.  We're talking epigenetics here.  I have no interest in discussing "racial stock" or "preferred genes".  The sense in which Social Darwinists were right is the sense in which Social Darwinism failed to compete effectively.  We're beyond Marx versus Darwin or whatever it was.

Likewise I respect the IC (intelligence community) for what I anticipated it might become, and it became, i.e. an outgrowth of networks and networking beyond the masterminds inside any government.  We still have the high seas and its own laws, beyond the supervision of landlubbers.  That sounds like the premise for many a TV show, ala Joss Whedon or someone else with a Matrix mentality.  I'm coming from Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth obviously (obviously if you've been doing your homework).

I always thought we were cowardly to make Amsterdam bear the brunt of drug tourism, not that we have to call it that.  All the downsides of an experiment, concentrated in one place, means only a few types of solution get tried.  I was glad when Portland stepped up to the plate, and other cities willing to work within an alternative legal matrix (a different namespace).  We want to keep moving in the direction of medicalization versus letting the punitive morality police be in charge.  Back to bully pulpit.

How much are nurses bullies, when upholding an oath to fight for life?  They do things patients find uncomfortable, to try to keep them alive.  What if the patient would prefer to die?  That's a perennial question for the medical sciences.  We prefer investigations in psychology over how much time in prison our predecessor gave out as prescriptions.  The entire culture is obsessed with putting so and so in jail, even where the diagnosis is some kind of crazy.  The same issue comes up around guns.  How does one keep the crazies from enacting their fantasies?

Speaking of crazies and their fantasies, who would have thought:  a tank war in the 21st century.  That something so dark ages could break out was presaged however.  The degeneration of international law as a namespace ended up putting nation-states through the blender in some ways.  The crazies saw no reason to obey.  They saw a direct path from A to B.  How does a mental hospital self heal, when the doctors themselves are obsessed with nutty theories?  That's not just an academic question.

I'm skeptical that the medical profession has its act together insofar as the war on drugs does not get more intelligent attention.  Tucker Carlson says all the bad stuff is coming across borders, but what about by small airplane, and what about cocaine?  Follow the cocaine to Wall Street and major money laundering by the deep state, or pick on the poor and homeless, the pedestrians, the street people.  When you think "drug dealer" think "private plane".  That being said, I'm for medicalization as I've said.  Be frank about a president's drug habits.  I enjoy cannabis here in Oregon, perfectly legally.  I don't use cocaine.

Why do I keep bringing up drugs in connection with TV (the dark side)?  Because lifestyles are about anthropology and psychology and because TV is about programming the people, on a spectrum from persuasion to tyranny.

AI Tube

In my view, YouTube GPT or whatever they call it, will offer us some hilarious views of ourselves in the mirror, shown here as the phonies we sometimes seem to be, even to ourselves.  

Deep fake pundits go on for hours, jabbering fluently, or so it sounds, about the events of the day, weaving in some analysis, plugging a product, handing off to another talking head.  All done by AI, according to deep ruts in the existing corpus, using standard newspeak (includes intonation).

That machines have caught up with phony intelligence and get to mimic us, throws that old monkey wrench of self doubt into the picture.  So we’re not gods after all.  We’re back to being robots again, Pinocchios, all proud of our so-called “consciousness” only to discover we never had any.  

That glass was empty, whereas the “unconscious” runneth over with nonsensical content.  

Life is a tale told by an idiot and yadda yadda.  Wait, am I cutting and pasting from a chatterbox right now?

What I’m really looking forward to is Quant TV GPT, meaning some Wall Street like nonsense with bulls against bears.  Should we be looking at T-Bills or holding out for a better yield that’s also more secure? What would that be?  Theranos?  Just kidding.  

But that’s the thing:  we’re allowed to go bust on a mega scale.  Humans make ruinous choices, but we often edit those out when writing official history.  What’s historic, memorable, worth recording, are those few non-ruinous courses of action.

I’ve had my own bookkeeping language, influenced by the “sunshine school” (an elite of the  astronomically minded).  

On the assets side, sunshine begets flowing rivers and the “water wheels” i.e. the labor-saving devices (including electronics) employed by humans to augment their own potential.  Photosynthesis, likewise fusion powered, begets both gas exchange and jungle formation.  

On the liabilities side, we’re in a world of hurt, a Ghetto Planet, suffering from the consequences of our own inaction and/or wrong actions.

Geographic Pedagogy

In the previous (lengthy) post I took up the data layer containing sovereign nation border information.  Different schools preach different maps.  Stanford shows one Ukraine, whereas a Chinese "Google Earth" might show another.

Does that mean we're planning to use geography (the subject) to brainwash students?  Most definitely, if one means by brainwash:  learn by heart, make native.  The very image sounds threatening though.  Who wants their brain "washed"?  Brains are delicate and need to stay in their casings.

But yes, we're schooled early to see the various political borders, if only to later see them shift around.  That's part of the training.  Not my invention.  I got the same training.  I'm as brainwashed as you are, presumably.

However lets think about oceans, about water, which cover most of the Earth.  Long before we get to undersea or more floating cities -- which take time to emerge organically, from a requisite mindset, which we may not be up for -- we get cartoons.  

Artist conceptions, computer renderings, may seem arbitrarily realistic in the dimension of social media, i.e. as long as they're framed and on Facebook or whatever.

I'm as guilty as the next guy of sharing "fake building" memes, these amazing architectural feats of the imagination, many of them rather impractical once you think about it, not to mention impossible to pull off affordably, and/or implement for real, without making headlines.  

"Spot the Fakes" is a tricky game though, as architects have indulged in showing off what the new software can do, in the form of blueprints for real structures.  

This was Bucky's game as well, to wow us with blueprints, and the artist conceptions, but then, from time to time, to actually build it for real, as in Montreal in time for the Expo, to make the USA seem really on top of its game.  But lets not forget the Union Tank Car domes either.  Or the Climatron.

The point is not to bicker over whether Bucky took too much credit for all this Grunch business, and just revel in the sheer existence of EPCOT's Spaceship Earth, or the MSG geoscope in Las Vegas, its exterior skin especially (the internal skeleton is not classic geodesic), or the "giant golf ball village on Menwith Hill in England, or the Eden Project in Cornwall.

Disney was able to stand up to Bucky and pay homage without paying royalties.  The patents had entered the public domain by then.  The engineering firm was named Tishman.  I followed the story in the early 1980s, from my personal workspace (Magnolia 284) in Jersey City.

But they're not really fake when not pretending to be real, are they?  

Their realistic renderings, what architects are often especially good at, need not be that deceptive.  

Ditto in the movies.  

We know there's no place called Narnia where the director could talk the camera crews to film fauns, no planet called Pandora with camera crews in submarines.  These places have to be created artificially, like we do at Universal Studios.  

Verisimilitude, not veracity, is the goal.  But there's a fine line.  Cite WestWorld.  Cite the AI chatter boxen.

I'm wanting to use the deep ocean as a setting for animations, wherein we do what crystallographers do:  we partition space (the water) into lattices.  Shall we use Kepler's Bricks (rhombic dodecahedra) or Descartes' unit cubes?  Both obviously, and more besides.

We have transformations between lattices, which may amount to conventions vs. God-given, meaning we are not aiming to impersonate angry fathers and act like jerks, making tyrannical prisons out of bead games.

Kepler's Bricks fill space such that a sphere in each one of them is tangent to twelve others.  Radiating outward, from any ball (any IVM sphere as we call it) are these layers of 12, 42, 92, 162... balls.  The growing cuboctahedron.  The Vector Equilibrium in Bucky's parlance.  And also lattice-defining.

Both Kepler's Bricks make a lattice (repeating pattern), but so do the rods running ball center to ball center, connecting adjacent centers through the twelve diamond facets and perpendicular thereto.  

This dual lattice ends of carving space into two types of container, four sided and eight sided, with twice as many of the former type (2:1).  Volume-wise:  four-side : eight-sided = 1:4.

The above animation, encoded in words, form the "scenarios" of a "hypertoon spaghetti monster", meaning the tangle of animations converging to switch points where random segues, smooth transitions, happen, taking us from one scenario (spaghetti strand) to another.  

In one scenario, we might fade from an IVM skeleton (akin to cubic close packing and face centered cubic in other namespaces) to an actual ocean, with schools of fish.  

We pan around to find dangling sensors, each held in place relative the others, fixed by some flextegrity placeholder stiffening scheme, and each uniquely addressed by computer using (a, b, c, d) coordinates.  

The sensors might also be colored lights and by programming them, we make more spatial animations.

These are what I call reveries, and string together through hypertoon necklaces.  They take place "off shore" we could say, beyond the concerns of men, outside the jurisdiction of wanna be sovereigns with their pomp and circumstance.  

In the ocean depths, where we're free to dive into pure geometry, without the claptrap of nations, minus the political sphere.  

Again, you might call this a brainwashing.  We're deviating from purely XYZ (Descartes' Bricks) and moving to a different set of boxen.  That's not the standard North American curriculum for sure, not the usual Anglo-Saxon stuff.  Is the Kremlin behind us then?

Parents might come to the town halls and sound off, because we're not emphasizing right angles enough.  We're operating outside the established orthodoxy.  How is junior ever going to get a job as a high priest within the XYZ church?  How will the little darlings get their Ivy League educations, and proper manners?

Although I've been in the role of high and middle school math teacher more than most, on average, I've always taken a parallel extracurricular "Saturday Morning" approach, which might explain my also working for Saturday Academy off and on. 

Saturday is when the kids stereotypically get do what they like, and not what the teacher or authority figures want them to do.  Oft times, the elective activity of choice is watching television, or it did in my day.  That's when the sugar lobby had them cornered, just as they had the work-at-home mostly moms cornered with soaps.  For the dads they had sports bars, and games on the weekends.

They'd market relentlessly.  Mad Magazine told us all about it, pulling back the curtain and showing the machinery of Madison Avenue.  Meanwhile, communists and totalitarians did propaganda.  Our propaganda was called advertising or making commercials, and was much more innocent, sharable with kids.  I was sold.  I'd go into advertising someday maybe, and psychology (they go together right?).

The advertising of adult drugs (not just beverages) has since moved in big time, even as television has become more powerful.  The brainwashing has been intense, and continues to be.  Just ask your doctor.

So in some, yes, geography is a topic around which the various subcultures differentiate, in terms of how much attention they devote to what.  

A wannabe political science professor or diplomat or high ranking general, is probably going to spend a lot more time with the CIA Fact Book, or pandas data tables, trying to remember which sovereignty exports and/or imports what, than a wannabe math professor.  

The math professor is more likely out there in the deep oceans, cavorting with dolphins, engaged in space-filling honeycomb games with Archimedean honeycomb duals (i.e. Couplers and so on).  

And it's not either/or is it?  

When well rounded ambassadors get together, with their cultural attaches, on a sunny day, to clink glasses, toasting world peace, maybe they show off some their latest and greatest hypertoons on the LCDs, kind of like when Matteo Ricci wanted to impress the Chinese, with Renaissance style perspective painting.

Regarding Borders

SW TexMex Region

I just watched a YouTube about George Soros, with whom I've had no contact, nor have I worked for his NGOs to my knowledge, but maybe I did, as a CUE guy, with nonprofits my main clientèle.  

As an applications developer and like that, it wasn't my business to get nosy about sponsors or donors, even if I worked on donor databases.  Data is data.  I worked with medical data too and always maintained confidentiality.  It's easy to forget what you never really knew.

However, I can't claim to be on another planet from Soros either. As the author of one Project Renaissance, that spells out a whole public-private partnership ideology, which so-called "ruling elites" apparently these days favor, we might have some things in common.  I tend to admire Hungarians, as among my favorite Martians (citing Hargattai).

I can't say I'm that freaked out about governments working in partnership with NGOs in various ways; it seems inevitable, based on a crowded planet and the one motherboard, Spaceship Earth's.  Or not so crowded, depending on your perspective.  That's not saying I favored or had a hand in the design of Twitter's backdoor for state censors.  "Partnership" need not connote "clandestine".  

Lets just say I don't immediately shout "fascist" just because I see multiple sectors of society working together, semi-amicably. Some labels are best applied based on an empirical track record, and not on mere blueprints or back of the envelope diagrams.

My attitude towards borders is realistic i.e. I start with what is, i.e. what's defacto.  It's the idea of completely closed borders among nations, and the accompanying hole-free tracking of humans' movements, that has never been tried before. Governments didn't have that kind of tabulation power.  The Third Reich had the vision and motivation, and finally, the technology.

"Closed borders" would be an experiment run by social engineers, an experiment on a vast scale with only some wanting to sign on to make it happen, and in a rather totalitarian manner, as glaring exceptions cannot be tolerated, somewhat by definition.  Everyone needs to play along.  That's a red flag in my book.  If the experiment fails, is the damage reversible?  Who gets to judge when failure happens.  Has it failed already?

As the "global reach" authors have written, about transnational capitalism, the "great piracy networks" i.e. conspiracies among private fleet controllers, prototypical of today's corporations, have historically long predated anything so purportedly above ground and transparent as the modern constitutional nation state, a relatively new kid on the block.

In other words, modern nations have been the exception to the rule, and not for very long, against the backdrop of human history.  

Could we go back to mainly city-states?  I say "go back to" but with the caveat that it was never that simple, either then or now.  The city-state model is plenty Machiavellian, what with alliances and advances in encryption.

What's the difference between a city and a campus, by the way?  Sometimes the latter have their own power plants.  Might a school become a virtual nation?  I'm not saying we have laws for this, but nor have we laws for every aspect of crypto-currency use either.  The picture is still evolving in other words.

In this context of their potential eclipsing or disappearance, for lack of maintenance (we're back to talking about nation-states): even if the threat is existential (with respect to them), it's not necessarily the end of the world if they've faded.  That's a round-about way of saying we shouldn't take nations for granted if we want to keep them around.  They'll get shrugged off.  We're doing EPCOT now.  Tomorrowland, featuring Spaceship Earth, looks relatively nation free (with pavilions preserved to sell merch, like Chinese food).

We need to distinguish customs checks from border patrols for example, when debating and discussing these intertwined issues.

An airplane is well over the border before it lands in some airstrip in Arkansas, and so any search of its contents, checking against a published manifest, could technically be customs, but not border patrol.  

Prohibition, its enforcement, paid some attention to borders but often transgressed, using foreign countries and/or international waters as a battleground for a civil war over alcohol and other substances (here is where "substance control" comes in). 

Prosecution of what are not considered crimes in a foreign state, outside of one's region of jurisdiction, represents a breakdown in law and order.  Imperialism entails imposing or attempting to impose one's jurisdiction, one's edicts, by hook or by crook, upon a resisting, countering intelligence that does not recognize said empire's authority or legitimacy.

I've already circled the writings of Col. J. Fletcher Prouty quite a bit in these blogs, and in my YouTube channel too.  He's a far better authority on these matters, of the battles over substance control, than I am, given my parochial perspective.  

Oregon is one of those liberal states in wanting to medicalize, versus criminalize, the campaign against drug abuse.  Drug abuse happens everywhere and our attention should not be narrowed to focus only on the criminal cases.  Big name foundations helped launder the proceeds from the Oxycontin push.   Media channels take money from crooks all the time, we've learned, even if these crooks have the best lawyers on their teams.

Many old timey religious types tend to favor moralizing "bad guys" talk over more psychological "sick guys" talk, as their remedy takes the form of punishment, versus "sending to the doctor" the way a more merciful God would do.  Playing the angry father tends to be one of the easier forms of grandstanding, and hence the shrill tone of so much politics.  I suppose they consider it "fire and brimstone" (apocalyptic?).

Anyway, I acknowledge permeable borders, and am not surprised at them, as permeability is part of my more generalized model of a biological membrane.  That's what membrane means:  there's leakage, at some frequencies, or call it filtering.  

When systems become super intolerant of exceptions, they tend to become brittle and therefore fragile and therefore anxious about their own longevity, which leads to further fragility and so on, a descending spiral, ending on the ash heap of history.

Question:  Do I want all borders to become one hundred percent impermeable based on the interests of their true and rightful controllers?  I'd begin answering by questioning the question.

First question:  why would it matter what I think or want?  Big wheels are turning.  I'm the observer-flaneur in this, with my sketch pad open.  It's not "historical determinism" to say cosmic forces are at work.  "The sun shines" is just as obvious.  

Sure, Bucky Fuller showed up with his Dymaxion Map with its nationless data layer.  More political world maps, making their debut around the same time, are by now obsolete, given shifting borders.  Nations come and go, and that's the reality, not just propaganda.

Second question:  Has this ever been tried?  Don't pretend you're the one representing some status quo at least, if you're one of those "borders rule, no exceptions" types.  I'd call exceptionless borders the wet dream of ultra nationalists, perhaps coming true at last?  

Third question: was this planet meant for nationalists only?  What about gypsies?

When it comes to the southwest TexMex region, I think it has a precious Disney-influenced identity it needs to show off as friendly and sophisticated, not war-like.  Peaceful is the new normal where international eco-tourism is concerned.  Theme parks need to keep their own bombardment to a minimum, for business reasons.  Operational tanks are just too Jurassic, outside of museums and circus spectaculars.  They masquerade as other than Dark Ages devices, convincing no one.

In truth, Americans of all stripes pour across the borders semi-indiscriminately each day, as the already sufficiently documented.  

Unfettered travel across state borders is the norm within the United States (and what the EU was shooting for internally) wherein documentation may still be an issue, just probably not at physical border crossings.  

Interstate lines are only lightly policed in the USA, with no mandatory pullovers.  Weigh stations for trucks are something else.

Document policing is closer to substance control, and these may coincide at some border, as when and if one of your critical documents (e.g. a passport) has expired.  I'm looking at renewal myself.

Bureaucracy aside, I'm for stressing the so-called Latin American world (part of the West) as its own destination, and whether you're in the United States or not (e.g. for a conference) may be somewhat of a technicality, not of primary importance. The venue is isolated and guests don't stay for long.

It's not like people outside the US don't have Uncle Sam style merch on display, perhaps for sale, so you can't go by what's in anyone's front yard or souvenir store inventory, necessarily, to determine whether they're an outpost.  Every nation has its shadow diaspora, proud of its roots, and not hiding it (or disguising it, as the case may be).