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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.

I’m All Right Jack (movie review)

Most readers will likely be entirely unfamiliar with this movie, that’s my guess. Peter Sellers. Rosalie, my librarian friend, knew it well, and recommended it, but she’s a least two standard deviations to the left (towards literate — as in left brain), not anywhere near middle of the road.

Perhaps I’m simply projecting my own ignorance, as an MMU student with less than full fluency in British culture. Maybe that’s why I found this movie so educational, as it wasn’t afraid to poke fun at (expose, dissect) both tiers of psyche in that social Darwinist environment. 

Management had split off against the Workers, white versus blue (as in collar) and education levels, as well as birthright land rights, made a huge difference in that respect. “Upper class” means a way of talking (the My Fair Lady insight) and projecting one’s insider (owner) status. Of course the whites and blues are all men and all Euro-white, with females (another caste) as trad-wives, moms and, if you’re lucky, rich aunts.

Of course there’s immense irony in the fact that the Peter Sellers character, representative of the working class, is unable to do dishes or darn his own socks. Minus the women’s caretaker role, the so-called workers are effectively ineffective. 

The leading character, a well-acted buffoon, is from the educated insider class. He’s something of a dandy. I found his over-reactions hilarious vs-a-vs those ball-playing women but then the joke was on me cuz I didn’t get this was a nudist colony until the closing scene. Duh.

So our educated dandy is too supercilious to get his hands dirty and the job interviews all bomb. They convince him to go undercover, as working class (the rich aunt is skeptical), at a missile factory and this is where the international relations figure in. 

The aristocratic Brits wanna sell weapons to their colonies in the Levant (a semi-country roiled by competing narratives) and make money the old fashioned way: by dreaming up illusionary scenes (like stage magicians) for the journos to report, while meanwhile they make out like bandits — cuz that’s what they are: next generation Venetian schemers as Bucky describes em (“Venetian” rhymes with “Phoenician” in Fuller’s quasi-Joycean vocabulary (long story)). 

The worker Brits are trying to resist over-exploitation by organizing around their spanking new ideology, a mash of Marxism and maybe Systematic Ideology (another native source of narratives). Peter Sellers plays a worker-bee indoctrinator, keeping his little army in position to exert leverage by inspiring his brand of groupthink.

But the goofy upper class doofus bungs it up, by not catching on (his level of self awareness is close to zero). He inadvertently subverts the labor unions, weakening their collective bargaining position, to where only strikes (stopping working) seem to be a way back to equilibrium. These strikes effectively spoil the business dynamics and the aristocrats see their schemes go up in smoke (which is just as well, as the Levant is better off without the Brit missiles).

The whole plot becomes a wry comment on the hopelessness of the entire economy, which nevertheless makes movies like this one, and brings us Monty Python.

As I was saying to Rosalie later: “I know this culture”. I was actually being groomed as an aristocrat in 3rd grade, wearing a tie, learning how a table was set with the manners to go with. 

I was a lone American (one of maybe two) in that school, not a boarding school. I’d go home to my American parents, but as someone increasingly Britified (I had the accent). Eventually they recognized the pathologies I was developing and they pulled me out, and sent me to a more American school.

I’d avoid any job-roles requiring a tie after that, as a rule of thumb, which in Britain might be a sign I was blue collar, a label I’ll accept (aesthetically, I prefer blue to white — tuxedos look infinitely stupid). 

However out here in Cascadia we’re more an egalitarian meritocracy, an engineering culture, meaning status is not conveyed through dress (millionaires dress down, not up) but by one’s level of fluency in STEM languages. 

In a nutshell: credibility as an actor, in a management capacity, requires knowing at least some computer science, like the workers do. That’s the gist of the so-called AI revolution: you need to talk like a geek to sound agentic.

But we’re talking about a science fiction future with respect to the 1950s. HG Wells might wanna take over the story at this point.

Travel Plans

Oops, I spaced out the presentation at Third Eye, the one Cloud told me about. If you saw my Sacred Geometry video… the presentation was about the Galactic Calendar included therein. 

I was gonna introduce myself as “from across the street” as that’s where Center for Science, Peace and Health has its shingle out. I’d told Cloud I’d be there and all the next day that was my plan. Then I woke up early Tuesday to realize I’d missed the boat.

I keep thinking I’m on the brink of visiting Greater LA, but then stuff keeps getting in the way. Like that galvanized iron kitchen down pipe that finally became irreparable, and had to be replaced. That happened quickly but then a city inspector needed to sign off on it (how it works in Portland) and my plumber mostly works in the neighboring state, with different rules, plus July 4 festivities obtruded. 

The July 4 festivities (Blues, fireworks, summer movies) were welcome and I wasn’t in a super hurry, but neither was I gonna take off for LA to see my sis and other peeps, or even drive to destinations nearby, as long as the plumber was gonna need access to the basement, and, as it turned out, my local WiFi. 

The test and city sign-off were completed yesterday.

On the recommendation of family members, I started watching For All Mankind on Apple TV. I suppose it’s believable that NASA personnel would have been that glum about humans finally landing on the moon if they didn’t feel they’d done it themselves. Humans get programmed with an “us vs them” mindset pretty early — we see the children getting brainwashed. Even with the Marxist-Leninist label removed, the Russians remain the “them”. Russophobia is endemic among the Manifest Destiny dolts, and let’s not forget Sinophobia. The Mickey complex is indeed deeply psychological.

Sydney and I would be up for Wandering with that BizMo, checked out from the BizMo fleet library, so to speak. That’d help with the prototyping (thinking Trucker Exchange, Silicon Forest stuff). I’d be one of the seniors involved, coming in more as a curriculum developer, as my School of Tomorrow has some work-study concepts that might further spread, while benefitting from all the fine tuning. In the meantime, I’m Wandering multi-modally, making ample use of the Nissan.

I’ll head over to Third Eye Crossing later today and buy some of that merch I was gonna get at the presentation I missed attending. That’s a business I wanna support, a neighbor.

Adventures in Wonderland (movie review)

The actual title is longer: Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a possessive possessive. This is the one wherein we find Peter Sellers and Dudley Moore, to name two big future stars, in heavy makeup. The movie is pre CGI and uses old school special effects to produce Alice’s adventure, in color, with sound (she even sings and dances; it’s a big part for Fiona Fullerton).

My topic these days is “fairy tales” and, sure, we can argue what constitutes same. Alice’s universe has no entities called “fairies” unless we count the Tweedle Brothers who might be gay, but that’s an entirely unrelated etymology. What’s important is to discount the narrative itself as purely fiction, so we don’t get hung up wondering “how much of this is true?” (answer: none of it is, and she wakes up in the end).

Another confluence was Dr. D, over at Blue House for post dog-walk dining (we were a five-some: three humans and two dogs); he’s been immersed in the Alice lore in past chapters, involving a commercial publishing enterprise and book launch just down the street from Wanderers (Linus Pauling House) on Hawthorne, at Fernie Brae, which no longer exists (Third Eye still does though, across the street).

What struck me, and Dave reassured me this was a main point of the novel, is how blasé and go-with-the-flow Alice was. Her reality was turned upside-down and yet she preserves her even, good temper and optimism, yet not without some exercise of judgement. She draws on her priors and updates quickly. She’s your quintessential Bayesian.

I’m reminded of a quote buried in the Wittgenstein corpus somewhere, maybe in the Investigations, maybe in On Certainty, where he says (paraphrase): “what if I woke up one morning and everything had changed? …Maybe I’d just join in.” I want to add “like Alice”.

Once we identified Peter and Dudley through all that makeup it was easy to project forward and picture them in future movies. I love Dudley in Bedazzled (with Raquel Welch as Lust) and Sellers in so many, but especially Being There.

Backstory: I entered Movie Madness (MMU) with the intent to rent I’m OK Jack, on Rosalie’s recommendation, but to my surprise I couldn’t even find it in the database. However that search did lead me to the Sellers shelf in the Foreign Films section (UK/British) and from there I selected this Alice movie, and a small anthology of early (1930s) British comedies. I haven’t watched those yet. 

At this point I realize the movie is actually I’m All Right Jack and that may well be in the collection. I’ll check next time I’m there.

Gifts from Japan

Sydney and I visited with our friend newly back from Japan, accepting gifts to pass on to our circle, pictures also. 

Sydney is a chocolate English Labrador.  Her main hobbies are eating, sleeping, and grazing like a cow, smelling things. She’s so well-behaved she’s earned her right to walk around the block leash free.

In the news, the Lower48, part of the post USA diaspora, is being subjected to tyrannical rule by a Monster U (aka USSA) engaging in reckless out-of-control warring with no popular mandate. 

Post USA indeed. Pretty obvious, if there’s some awareness.

We look to the Global U to help us with teach ins, about how we got here and how we might make it to a next chapter.

Scapegoating one man is relatively easy. The people hiding behind the scapegoat enjoy having their human shield.  Wealth creation (adding life support) takes more planning.

Our syllabus uses technical shoptalk like LAWCAP and GRUNCH, a lot of which got amplified in the Occupy chapter (which we’ve been revisiting this Summer Term at School of Tomorrow).

For lunch I had Korean BBQ, from a food truck in one of the pods I frequent.

Pattern Language: the Alcove

:: annotated mother goose atop global matrix ::

Sheep Detectives (movie review)

I caught this one on Prime, my curiosity piqued by a positive review from Beth, who has years of experience raising sheep in rural Oregon, and is also a retired librarian who consumes media at an amazing rate, like Rosalie does. 

This so-called Mercado Group (where our book club got started) has been meeting for years and is a steady source of guidance when it comes to my studies, especially when it comes to fiction.

Sheep Detectives is a clever movie, weaving the whodunnit genre, the murder mystery, with more existential explorations of mortality. The sheep do not have an adult human’s view of death, except the older wise ones who remember stuff. Usually, sheep just want to forget.

However what keeps sheep wanting to remember are unsolved puzzles, such as who killed George, their good-hearted shepherd who has been hoping to reunite with his two kids, whom he had put up for adoption (I’ve forgotten why already, baa!). 

A good memory is a prerequisite for detective work. Lilly, a loyal and intelligent sheep, teams up with the elder sheep to bring the killer(s) to justice. She fights off the temptation to go unconscious, prizing self awareness which is likewise awareness of otherness (Synergetics for Sheep could be a slide deck).

The most singular trope in this move is that of the “winter sheep”, a divergent introvert that wants to belong as a youngster but over time learns to accept its loner status, with a more distant relationship to the herd.

We have both a noob (a lamb) and a senior (older sheep) of the winter type, helping us plot the trajectory, the arc, of such an archetype, portrayed unpromising at first (an ugly duckling) but as noble and helpful to the herd’s long term survival in the end (swan). 

Sheep dynamics are a kind of mind dynamics, which includes being super forgetful.

The integration of live action actors with animated talking sheep is quite impressive. These two forms of mammal intelligence, four legged and biped, seamlessly share the same sense of humanity, including a sense of loss when dear ones depart, and a wish to avenge victims of foul play by detecting the perps.

The dynamics in question map to individuals for sure, but also to more Machiavellian entities, such as states, which likewise engage in subterfuge (e.g. false flag attacks) as well as bumbling, clueless behavior. What inspires the bumbling police guy to snap out of it, finally, are the off camera (from his point of view) antics of the sheep, whom we might map to other fairy tales with invisible spirit worlds (e.g. ghosts). 

X-Day Again

I’m not gonna devote this blog post to church (of the Subgenius) arcana. Per my Fun Homework YouTube you might know that I don’t have anywhere close to the encyclopedic knowledge of church lore to the extent some do, whether ordained or not (I never had reverend status).

Instead, I’m gonna continue with my account of July 4, the day before (X-Day is celebrated on July 5, and is like a family event, never in competition with Burning Man. There’s a documentary you could view.

So I got off to an active start with the bike loop, like old times (S2P). Then what? Well, I got into Wandering mode meaning I had all kinds of fantasies about where I was going, with some pegged objectives (catch the fireworks at least), so I didn’t set out to see Minions 3 at the Fox Tower Regal. Again, I had the theater mostly to myself. I enjoyed the movie a lot and will get back to it later.

After that, I circled back to the waterfront having come downtown by FX2, and whaddya know I got a perfect direct line of sight to one of the main Blues Festival stages, just north of the bridge, on which I was standing. Great sound. Great bands. Great crowd, with many pouring across the bridge in both directions, which had to get raised soon after I arrived: two, not one, two fireworks barges were ready to take their places for the after dark show.

By the time the fireworks started, I was back on the east side (of the river) where a custom DJ booth took advantage of the echo under I-5, and they did an excellent job of it. Their music made a perfect soundtrack for the visuals, the fireworks. And yes, I did notice all those people having dinner on the bridge in that cordoned off area. Very imaginative.

I walked from my viewpoint through OMSI parking lots to Tilikum Crossing, the same stop where I often hop on the FX2 with my bicycle. This time though, given the emptying out of the downtown, the FX2s were hopelessly full, so I decided to walk to Powell and grab a 9, transferring to a 75 at Chavez, with enough layover time to shop at Safeway for all American cheese puffs and Diet Dr. P. 

There’s a corny carnivalesque aspect to July 4 ceremonies. People are serious about not being too serious. I overheard some people singing the theme song of Team America, World Police, which is satirical. 

A sense of pride emanates from a cosmopolitan city like Portland cuz, for all the negative spin doctoring, it’s that proverbial “melting pot” people keep registering their skepticism about, as too pie-in-the-sky. 

But it’s the on-the-ground reality, this wealth of diversity sharing in the festivities. We’re not talking about speculative eventualities. We’re melting in a melting pot whether we like it or not. The Portland vibe is we like it, as we already melted long ago and just wanna stay what we already are: weird. 

We wear that word “weird” as a badge of pride, all kidding aside, and with the support (not opposition) of the commercial sector. Visitors have come to expect said weirdness just like when you’re in Gotham you expect there might be a Joker lurking in there somewhere. Ditto: weirdness lurks. Think “incommensurability” maybe.

Blues Festival on KBOO

Toy Story 5 (movie review)

One might wonder at my choice of time tunnels. The avatar: a white haired senior, clearly an old guy, riding alone on the bus in a tie and Python-branded sweater, because today it’s chilly enough for such garb, even in summer, when Europeans are experiencing record heat. I’d been to Quakers earlier (Bridge City Friends) and didn’t bother to change before heading out again. I often wear a tie when riding the bus.

The choice of time tube (as in program): bus and walk to and from Pioneer Place Regal Cinemas and take in Toy Story 5, 1:20 Sunday matinee. The senior price: somewhere between $12 and $13. 

I had the auditorium all to myself but for what I assumed were a parent and young child in the row ahead of me. The child seemed about the age of the two star kids in this movie.

Toy Story 5 is for sure made for children, and for parents of children, who have that shared concern about sociality, meaning not only finding friends, but the right friends. With whom is it OK, in the sense of beneficial, to hang out? 

Families tend to feel their way forward in America, more than they’re handed a list of pre-approved playmates, although it’s also the case that some communities are very ingrown and isolated, even in the 21st Century. That may be by choice. Diversity is the name of the game, which doesn’t mean “without boundaries”. Not every community has a sense of a shared public space. This movie recreates single family wooden homes in both a suburban and rural (as in horse-owning) setting.

Toy Story movies always harp on the same theme: the kids who own and actively play with these toys are growing up fast and the dolls therefore have a sense of their own mortality (sense of doom), an approaching death of relevance. They’ll end up on a box in the garage, or they’ll be donated, passed along. At best. The dolls in Toy Story 5 have been through several owners. They’re jaded, Woody has a shiny bald spot, and, as toys qua toys, they're losing ground to screen devices.

I have nothing negative I want to say about this movie. On the contrary, I felt witness to a serious yet humorous investigation into childhood issues around belonging. Inside Out 2 was another one in this genre. These movies (I’m talking about the “for kids” genre) serve a real purpose, both reflecting and refracting.

It’s not like I’m not moody. I’ve got the AirPods and Verizon and have my various antennae, for times when I’m walking or on the bus. Today I waited until I got home to walk the dog, before tuning in about the dirty wars (a redundant characterization in a lotta ways). Kids just wanna have a childhood and watch some cartoons, but so-called Adult World, or Machine World -- kids with guns in a lotta cases -- comes at them fast. Many get born into some nightmare scenario, whereas the stars in Toy Story are just coasting through the usual ups and downs.

My favorite aspect of this movie was the whole shipwrecked shipment of Buzz Lightyears, all groupthinking together, a mini hive mind on the move. There’s a satirical flavor to the Buzz legion that transfers over to Rambo movies and the wider genre. Males in packs. Team players. A fun ethnicity.

Cowgirl Sheriff (the star) is pointed and direct in her manner, goal driven, a born leader (if toys are born). Woody shows up, also somehow high ranking and already with a partner, allowing for an uncomplicated romantic subplot involving Buzz (he has a crush on Cowgirl). 

The movie opens with some kitchen utensils getting married, within a girl’s imagination, with the other toys playing along. We’re clearly in a space where “getting married” is imagined often. That’s not unique to Disney movies, obviously. 

This story keeps the married couples heterogenous in that parent couples are conventionally nuclear. No isotopes. Nothing molecular. 

It’s not meant to be a soap so much as a coming of age action thriller involving favorite toys getting lost and found. Again, The Inside Outs are somewhat similar. Science fiction? OK, it’s a soap, but deliberately easy to follow. Keeping track of who’s who is a learned skill.

I agree with this message also: letting the screens do all the work and not exercising one’s own powers of imagination through creative improv dollhouse style play, including with others (thereby making friends), is likely to come at a cost. Many parents would approve of that message.

So don’t let them shame you for diving into fairytales, anime and manga, where useful info lies encoded. Have a real inner life, in the first person, vs trying to outsource your emotions. 

A rich fantasy life is something to protect, vs bargain away for high pay. When they pay you to deliberately impoverish yourself, maybe its time to change the job description, or even switch careers. 

Parenthetically speaking, I’ll add that I don’t find STEM subjects to be inherently unimaginative, especially when we make it STEAM, by adding Anthropology.

Screen-based Sims and SimCity showed how the dollhouse simply re-emerges in the digital realm. We get a play within a play almost no matter what we do. 

Some of these screen based simulations might be more focused on the engineering. The Buzz Lightyears might even be into that, if sober. 

I was intrigued by some of the previews. One in particular, the claymation one by Laika, features Portland (before the portal is entered). WildWood I think it’s called.

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