In Memoriam: Bill Moyers

EBN EBCS

Southern Circuit

 

Adult Discussion in Eugene

:: retired laptop cover ::

I was fortunate to be the guest of a meetup of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, which runs under the auspices of the University of Oregon’s Continuing and Professional Education program. Sam and Jill brought me to this well attended two hour event focused on adult discussion of matters of public record, such as the unfolding situation in the eastern hemisphere. 

Sam introduced me as from a somewhat similar group in Portland, the Wanderers.

I was impressed by the well-moderated discussion session and was reminded of Nick Consoletti’s PhD project focused on Bohmian dialog. Once the number of participants goes beyond a certain threshold level, a kind of meandering (wandering) flow may take over in which consensus for one static position or another fails to coalesce. This is a feature not a bug. It’s the shared exposure to a collective stream of consciousness that matters.

That being said, I sensed a lot of consensus that the Iranian leadership lusts for a satanic weapon, such as those stockpiled by infidels and the morally moronic. 

Given I was a guest among strangers, I didn’t bring up the WILPF narrative, which in many ways runs counter to theirs, and which takes into account what Iran has to gain by throwing its lot in with the more civilized nations in not indulging in a fallen, criminal, craven practice, per the UN Nuke Ban Treaty (informal name).

Iran gets to ride the high road mapped out by the intelligence community, in which not having lust for a nuke, yet being attacked for it anyway, by wildly projecting unconscious politicos, guarantees future support for a civilian nuke program by a sympathetic global community. 

Iran was not irresponsible and was abiding by the NPT when it was attacked by the morally moronic. That’s a line many will stay with, and why wouldn’t they? 

The NPT, in turn, is about the nuclear-armed, more reprobate political gangs learning to rejoin civilization by making peace amongst themselves. When it’s time to verify compliance, Iranians will be on the inspection teams along with everyone else. This has been a goal all along.

However, although I was thinking a lot of these WILPF-like thoughts, I kept my mouth shut, I was there to observe, not to make waves. Again, I admired how disciplined and respectful these folks were. Some joined by Zoom.

Our shared nuclear future as a global university was not the only topic this group tackled. What about the state of education and the role of testing? What about taxes? Is Oregon sufficiently business-friendly? All these subjects were debated.

Finally, as a concluding topic, we got to the question about Jaws: what accounted for the staying power of this movie classic?  Is it a lowbrow Moby Dick? Some of us worried about the global shark population and its exploitation by various human breeds of foodie. Others reinforced the “sharks are scary” meme, which, as a scuba diver, has mostly been trained out of me. Sharks are cool, mostly harmless, and for the most part not gratuitously hostile, and yet Jaws was effective as a scary movie.

Game Night

::  faculty meetup: casey, kirby, dante ::

QuarterWorld was packed last night. Although QW is easily within walking distance, we drove there on a rainy night. Ryan didn't realize ID would be needed to get in, so we returned to fetch that. He's 24 and doesn't drink (me either anymore, but for 0.5% beer), but alcohol is served on the premises, so they screen upon entry after a certain time. 

Minors are allowed entry (we're talking an arcade palace after all) earlier in the day.

I've been mentally keeping and "idiot scorecard" meaning I monitor myself for acts of unintelligence for fun. 

Examples: 

• leaving the car window down, such that Ryan got to sit on a wet seat
• leaving the car door open overnight, risking draining the battery (she started quickly)
• trying to fix a floor lamp switch for many minutes before realizing the lamp was unplugged
• leaving the SD card out of the camera making pix go to internal memory but I can't find the cord

Sometime around when Ryan was playing Tetris, or maybe DigBug, must've been when Operation Pound Sand was going down (my name for it). I woke up to a flurry of YouTubes (today, June 22) decrying the much anticipated strike against some vintage equipment bunkers.

Ryan is visiting faculty within the Cascadia context, in an advisory capacity, as a fellow math nerd. He's been studying my Number Theory notebook and reading up on factorization algebras. 

I'm being connected to other scholars via LinkedIn contacts, including a physicist into lambda calculus according to Rowan. Call it "curriculum hardening" or "tying off loose ends" maybe. The goal is not to become inflexible (a different meaning of hardening), so much as to become riddled with many tiny holes, versus fewer gaping large ones.

Dante and Casey were here earlier in the week, also visiting faculty, although Dante is from outside the Cascadian bioregion. We're working independently of any District think tank and receive no federal funding. Our subculture is more a Pacific Rim based phenomenon, than anything Atlantic-oriented.

Last night we started watching Atlas Shrugged, the movie, a three part DVD extravaganza, set in a parallel universe where train tycoons battle it out against a backdrop similar to ours, technology-wise, with cell phones and private jets, but no commercial air or truck traffic to speak of, only rail lines. Call it a "simulator reality" wherein issues relating to ideology get hammered on.

As I was telling Ryan, this science fiction story reminds me of another one, The Iron Bridge, which features Quakers who were likewise rail and steel tycoons in a non-egalitarian backroom-governed society: that of the English industrial revolution. 

In The Iron Bridge, our heroine travels (naked) back in time to sabotage said bridge, future analysis having determined that homo sapiens industrialized too soon, before they were sapient enough. Were this hallmark of industrial progress to fail, humans could healthfully be set back on their timeline, vs mutating into monstrous warmongers.

I'm learning some video and computer game lore from Ryan, which is useful going forward in my role of Coffee Shops Network CMO, which is all about winning high scores for charitable causes and projects around the world, and building a profile on that basis.

Teacher Kit

This DIY teacher kit consists of what might be readily obtainable supplies for many, yet hard to find, let alone procure, in some locales. However, even if you the teacher are in the latter category, with no budget or access to a big inventory, it's all about mapping out conceptual content, meaning you'll be able to follow in your imagination, just based on what's depicted.

What's depicted is a pyramid of clay balls, approximately the same size. There's an imperfect handmade feel to the balls and in some claymations I'd substitute more perfectly formed clay spheres. Behind this pyramid are a couple envelopes with balls apparently drying on them. The clay balls must have been painted by what's in those squeeze bottles. We see Red, Blue, Orange, Green, Yellow, and uncolored balls.

Earlier, I'd colored the balls using Sharpie pens, by poking them with colored dots all around, accounting for their roughness now, as what I did is paint over them (except for Yellow, too far gone, started over with that one). 

The goal, using more clay I'm harvesting from around the facility (I hope to not open the sealed clay brick depicted), is to add one more layer of balls to any face and then swap out the corners with their colored counterparts, in a particular ordering orientation we call BRYG.

By adding a layer, taking the displayed 3-frequency 4-eyes (colloquialism) to 4-frequency, I'm creating what we might call a first nuclear ball, equidistant from the four corner balls. By convention, I tend to color that one Orange. 

I'll then calibrate the tetrahedron as a whole such that my edges are one diameter (subdivided into four or whatever frequency), and therefore my spokes, from the Orange ball center to any corner color ball center is 2nd root of 6, over 4 i.e. $$ \dfrac {\sqrt {6}} {4}$$

But why use messy paints to color clay balls when you can buy the clay pre-colored? Or maybe you can't. I can, blocks away at my local supermarket, except none of the clay sticks are red. Red is important in my color scheme. I should check Amazon.

 

Nightmare School Bus

Prompt:  Look, no one is driving the school bus. 
The children pretend to be amused.

Given a lot of practice during covid with getting work done remotely, the logical civilian defense action is to stay out of big cities, avoid trains and airplanes. A ghost town economy is in the offing.

We notice DC is making no preparations for citizen safety, let alone mental health, in its rush to join the lunatic fringe in support of an arch enemy (to many, including within the Pentagon). 

Hurricane Katrina comes to mind. Citizens are being held hostage in the unholy land.

The appetite for work and business as usual will dissipate and the economy will grind down to a very low gear if the screens keep showing nothing but chaos and destruction. 

The filthy rich are starting to move to their bunkers some will notice. 

Should we let them emerge?  Maybe under a rock is a better place for them?

Not that the rich have much say in this. The clique maneuvering us towards a conflagration is minuscule. No one is feeling “represented” these days. 

As Jeffrey Sachs put it, we’ve been reduced to the role of helpless passengers. The school bus is running on Tesla auto-pilot, FSD: full self destruction.

We Work Together

 

Making Sense of Quadrays

Some of you "diplo" types will be interested in the cultography here, which isn't always Prime Directive anthropology where the whole point is to not disturb with your own alien culture to the point where you've disrupted the tribe under consideration. 

The paradigm anthropologist in question, the non-interventionalist, is great at (a) blending in but also (b) being forthright with the elders in terms of making it clear this is not some covert operation, not even missionary, but more innocently an opportunity to understand, document, and explain to peers back home. The goal is more mutual understanding, fostering better diplomacy on both sides down the road. 

That style of anthro is closer to what a diplomat does; they're not about undermining "the other" so much as standing up for themselves, and not being undermined. They play a defensive game, for the most part, which doesn't mean withholding criticisms or refraining from polemics to deflect insults. However, a lucky anthropologist has a support team and quick extraction services if need be, as in "OK, I see we're not getting along, I'm happy to get out of your face, let us know if you want another visit". I can see the ETs waving goodbye from their UAP windows.

Another style of anthro is more missionary, where you believe strongly in saving or liberating some target audience from some vile way of thinking organized by satanists or whatever. You're deeply invested in some goodies versus baddies melodrama, and have many unstated ulterior motives. 

"Interventionist anthropology" is not really in the same ballpark as doing "objective science" to the point of sounding oxymoronic, thanks to a gentleman (mainly male) class in a certain polite society awhile back. I'm thinking of Victorian England, at the height of the UK empire, and the emergence of "anthropology" as an academic and secular discipline, adjacent to curation and natural history.  The National Geographic Society comes to mind -- less a tool of imperialism, usually (I confess to not reading their magazine recently, is it more like The Atlantic these days?).

What does all this have to do with Quadray Coordinates? 

Put simply, Cascadians strongly notice they have a different pantheon when it comes to subcultures. More Blake and Swedenborg, less Galton, less of a NeoRoman eugenicist "us versus them" vibe. In those terms, that's hearkening back to the European schools, but then more to the point is how we don't really have to depend on Europeans that much to keep it grounded, meaning we have folk traditions that don't piggyback on eastern hemispheric mythos all that much. 

Lots to put in your pipe there, I know. Smoke it for awhile and see if it clicks. Watch the embedded YouTube to pick up on some of the cultography I'm talking about, if curious.