Are these two news items related? You decide:
Tag Archives: chapter excerpt
Attaboys from WordPress for posting blog entries
“Hey,” says WordPress every time I post a blog entry, “you’re about to hit an artificial target of a round number of blog entries. Way to go!”
Here are three entries from the Guardian as a thank-you to them for loaning my blog a photo of a street protestor:
And now, back to the Committee, the supercomputer, the hackers, business associates and others who run the show in which we pay you a pittance to perform as marionettes…
Where we spend our money…wisely?
We are…Marshall the 1% of the 1%. Where are you investing your investments?
Will Cuonzo Martin be a one-off or a longterm investment for UT men’s basketball? Can you fire a coach midseason in his first year, or…or do you think he’ll be the next Coach K and just needs some time?
LiFePo4
Thinking about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs today, comparing individualistic versus collectivist societies.
And then, remembering the kid on the playground who ended the game by saying, “It’s my ball and I’m going home,” while reading about the U.S. and Iran trading words over a no-longer flying electronic gizmo called a drone.
Will Brazil clear the Amazon rain forest in my lifetime?
Will governments shrink as retirement/pension plans are taken away from workers, thus decreasing the desire of people to get quasi-guaranteed-for-life government jobs? How will decreased tax revenues (a/k/a redistribution of wealth) change sociopolitical behaviour in the longterm? Is there a destabilising effect by fewer government bonds being issued?
Should the leaders of MF Global be hung by their short and curlies as a lesson to everyone else who says, “Well, sure, I was the head of the company — ‘the buck stops here’ and all that — but I’m just there as a leech to earn a big salary, using my face recognition as a selling point. I have no idea what I’m doing and certainly don’t know what’s going on in the company. I use coded words and phrases all the time — management doublespeak — how am I supposed to know which code words or phrases are actually interpreted and implemented by my employees?”?
Is there a tipping point in biodiversity for our species? Do we really want to find out?
What is the economic impact of Burt Rutan’s new venture?
Insects fly past the window.
A solar cell charges a battery on the front deck.
How many times have you gone out on a date with someone you met via an e-dating site and the date tells you, after meeting you in person, “Oh, well, I’m really serious about someone else”? We use coded words and phrases all the time. It’s up to us to figure out how to change our tactics/behaviour to hear different words and phrases the next time. Remember, insanity is hearing the same thing over and over and expecting to hear something different even though you haven’t changed.
Thanks to Garrett, Linda, Tiffany and Heath at Cracker Barrel; Batteries Plus; Sophie’s link to a Simple Guide to Having Fun; those who don’t use mobile phones, the Internet or electronic social networks.
Time to have fun away from the computer-connected global subcultural meme set. I assume the freedom of the Internet will be here when I get back.
Oh, and hey, be careful out there when buying Chinese real estate — the price of nest eggs in China DOES have an effect on you right now. Somehow, I feel like I’m repeating myself, repeating myself, myself, myself, self, my, oh my…
Warwalking
When you let go of stereotypes, question the assertions of those who claim authoritative positions, and accept yourself for who you are (no matter how much the “you” is uniquely unaligned with the subculture and cultural influences around you), what do you have?
If you are simply the intersection of waveforms, does a “you” exist?
I can say my skin is aging because, although I lose lots of skin cells every day, there is a consistency, a continuity, that goes with the concept of a substance that loses its flexibility and thickness with time, showing flaws, defects and indications of previous incidents that do not go away and, in fact, lead to a partial deterioration of this somewhat hairy divide between myself and the rest of the universe.
Have you ever walked through your neighbourhood and surreptitiously collected the source points of wireless computing signals by wearing a backpack which hides an electronic data collector inside?
Are locks, firewalls and passwords a warning or a challenge to you (and sometimes both)?
Other than gravity, entropy and other currently immutable laws, to what do you owe your existence? Social rules, both overt and implied?
Are we all just the result of previous beings successfully reproducing themselves?
Do you have a well-trained habit of saying “a group of things is” or the grammatical slip of “a group of things are” in your literary repertoire?
Do you know who Dale Earnhardt, Jr, is? How about Dr. Grigori Perelman?
Can you ignore all labels and let waveforms pass through you without using a sieve or filter to interpret them?
Have you ever tasted organic chai tea? Do you know if such a word as “chai” exists and, if so, how it is normally pronounced or correctly spelled/written in its native language?
Do you take (swallow, inject, rub on, drop in, etc.) any prescribed medication and, if so, the etymology of the words that describe what you take?
Daily, I ask myself what I’m doing here, listening to the echoes of the labels that bounce against me from the nearest [sub]culture, restricting myself to the use of a few thousand words, punctuation marks and writing rules to record my place in the universe even though I don’t exist.
We are all disrupters in the flow of time. Condensed waveform intersections.
I do not exist. The Book of the Future, which does not exist, either, is a device which reflects waveform intersections that are bound to happen.
A tree cannot see itself as a book, a table or a pencil.
We do not see what we will become, only what we know we can become: intersecting, reflecting waveforms.
Did my red hair, or people’s comment about what red hair means, contribute to my fits of uncontrolled rage when I was a kid? Is it just me or, when I’m aggressively happy, I, as a male, want to have sex, not romance, to quench my thirst for aggressiveness?
I, this list of labels, am an ordinary guy whose skin shows the scars of UV radiation and entropy.
I have achieved all my dreams and goals. I am happy to live and ready to die. This “I” has no need of time or social recognitions/obligations. “To be” is sufficient to describe me now and in the not-now.
Happiness is a condition of intersecting waveforms, not a goal, or a journey, or an object.
The laws of nature and social rules define the temporary restricted waveform intersections that look like me here.
Remove the labels of “laws of nature” and “social rules” and there is no me.
Time to not be me away from this social phenomenon called a blog.
The meditation session is over.
Billions of dollar bills waiting for their profiles
Will a billionaire become the next head of the Russian government? After all, if Putin, the almighty bear who presides like a self-appointed emperour, admits that a woman, albeit the U.S. Secretary of State, got the better of him, then is he capable of governing the largest geopolitical entity on this planet? Look what happened to his friend, Berlusconi.
Speaking of billions of dollars, have you looked at your U.S. currency lately. It might be a work of art.
However, Canadians have all the fun in Cuba, though, don’t they? My hats off to Talin for sharing this story.
The last Cuban cigars I owned I purchased at the Havana House Cigar and Tobacco Merchant in Toronto, Canada. I brought them into the United States and karma got me — a few months later, some teenagers broke into our house and stole, among a variety of small items, my box of Cubans.
Time to decide — stay with my LiveScribe Echo/Pulse pens or go with something old but new?
BTW, Talin, what’s up with Canada unjoining the Kyoto protocol? My guess, too much dinero in cutting down boreal forests and pumping…uh, I mean, fracking oil down the middle of the U.S. Will global warming turn Canada into a swamp once again, with tonnes and tonnes of methane free for those who need natural gas in their ovens and stoves, even if they can’t afford food?
My wife mentioned an actor set off a publicity stunt on a transportation device because his career is about to stall out. Then, like a journalist interviewing a journalist about a nonevent, the actor turned his publicity stunt into a nonevent. Beware those who seek attention for attention’s sake [YAWN!]. They quickly drop off the public radar for crying “Wolfgang!” too many times [NOTE: see reference to supposed leader of the UK, Cameron, and his isolationist theories].
And that actress who insists on baring it all — can you not find a good acting gig? Surely, there’s a production company that wants to see you performing as another set of twins, grown up and mature, this time.
Anyway, if a billionaire can lead Russia, is there hope for other countries, too?
For instance, at a meeting of the Committee last night, one of the members said, “Let’s have a show of hands of who wants to see Assad’s head on a pike in the middle of an angry Syrian crowd? Just what I thought.” TV appearances buy you nothing except contempt, Mr. Bashar al-Assad. There is no forgiveness for you here. May God have mercy on your soul.
= = =
Thanks to Dominique at Target, Ashley at Coldstone and Haley N at Longhorn.
Yet Another Bosnia (with a nod to Deidra)
Bodies piled up like sticks of wood in a rick.
Trucks drove up and unloaded more bodies.
Bodies upon bodies upon bodies rolled into the mulch pile.
Used to be that wood chips, grass clippings and bits of rubber tyre were the favourite form of insulation/protection spread around the formal landscape.
But, when bodies became too plentiful to dispose of properly, government regulations freed the use of bodies for gardening.
Fresh bone meal for the roses. The ashes of Air Force warriors for flower bulbs.
After all, parts is parts, as they say.
Until we truly give ourselves over for recycling, then recycling is just a word for pretending to do the right thing when putting a few cans and plastic bottles at the curb once a week.
Next door, the driver lifts the canvas top from his load, pulls down the liftgate and dumps a pile of fresh mulch for my neighbour.
Flies buzz around.
Steam curls into the crisp, late autumn air.
“Special imported Syrian mulch,” the walnut-skinned driver yells at me as he takes a wad of cash from my neighbour. “Better than Mexican.”
I nod, glimpsing the future on another planet, where every organic resource is more precious than flerovium and livermorium.
Until they place a moratorium on mulched corpses, the future is now my past and present, too.
Happy holidays!
Who are you? I asked you first.
Sometimes I think about a former work colleague of my wife who, paralysed from the neck down, learned to create artwork with a paintbrush in her mouth.
Here I sit, wondering what I’d do if only I had better computing tools to accomplish my tasks.
If I can’t sing, I can use LaDiDa, by Khush, Inc., to turn my wailings into song.
If I can’t afford to pay for copyrighted music as background to my amateur home comedies, I can use Songify, also by Khush, to turn narration into a backbeat tune.
What to “film” next?
Another satire?
Another tribute?
A view of the future?
The Cameron and Clegg Show
A friend’s facebook status* easily sums up the Cameron screwup at the EU conference, with Sarkozy making the following comment, you can imagine:
“Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries”…Watching the French taunting of the silly English k-niggits. Gotta love me some Python!
Life imitating art, or something like that.
Tonight, while sitting with Chuck, Sharon, Janet, Steve and my wife at my wife’s office Christmas party, I pondered the universe and my place as reluctant leader of the Committee…
When my wife is too tired to dance and the room is full of lovely ladies willing to dance, why am I sitting at the table writing in my pocket Moleskine?
When senior leaders walk the crowd to show off their ties in hopes of winning the ugliest tie contest, why is the latest supercomputer output sitting unread in my home office?
Do you have your finger on the pressure valve of your subculture? Are you citizens easily placated?
Can you tell the difference between the two clones, Cameron and Clegg, the Yin and Yang of British politics?
Thanks to AC and Rachel at Walmart, the staff at the Huntsville Marriott, the Huntsville police on patrol, and the coordinator(s) of the Torch Technologies Christmas party.
A group of my work colleagues are happily celebrating the official receipt of their U.S. patent number. I’ll help them with specifications and marketing docs because I believe in their faith in themselves.
As Richard Branson said, helping others is what we do best. Profit is the aftereffect of a life well lived.
Sorry I missed Christabel and the Jons last night — my wife was too ill to dance so I stayed with her, watching a college football game while she make homemade holiday gifts for friends.
Back to the supercomputer output — time waits for no report that feeds on the report that fed on itself iteratively. Should I buy a [Flash] Gordon style supercomputer to put in the attic and displace the raccoons?
Is it just me or are the Nobel Peace Prize winners getting younger and younger? When will a newborn child, the result of genetic reengineering, receive the Nobel Peace Prize and Time IoT Object of the Year award within days of birth?
Thanks to Coleen Monroe, *Kimberly Lewis, Elexa Rose, all the new friends on facebook, and the guy at Walmart who plans to raise a flooded houseboat tomorrow (the whole thing about 12/20/2011, though, will pass in a little over a year, and society will move on to the next great prediction of doomsday, as it always has and always will, because of the need to feed our survival traits when things are generally going well for some but not others (i.e., all the time), a favourite subject for those in public (e.g., politicians) who want your attention AND your money/time/investments/labour credits).
Ever wonder why no one seems to talks about acid rain anymore?
Seven Billion People and Countless Other Beings to Talk About
What is Julia the Thanksgiving Girl or Jenn the rocket propulsion specialist doing right now?
What about John in the checkout line or Michelle in the deli at Publix?
Terrence or Mildred of Comcast, what does either one do on the weekend?
Or KK at Carson’s Grille?
Imagine a small fleet of crafts heading toward a distant habitable planet, sending and receiving reports along the journey, landing 1,000 years from now, funded by private individuals and companies on Earth that no longer exist in 3011.
What if government as we know it anywhere on Earth right now is no longer tenable in the near or distant future?
Would you trust the backers of a privately-funded, online voting or vote-matching system?
Shouldn’t our new system of cooperating with one another (what we commonly call politics or government) be more, not less, transparent?
Many business people are used to meeting in private, negotiating and signing nondisclosure agreements or other documents that prevent the average person on the street from seeing the details of average business transactions.
We call it competition, trade secrets, intellectual property and similar terms that ensure protection of privacy.
Government is that odd amalgam of public and private interfaces, where sole-source contracts and competing bids go up against marketing and advertisement campaigns.
If two ideas are competing against one another for limited resources, which of the ideas’ weak points or strengths is more important than the other’s?
I can talk about free, live, open source software (FLOSS) because there’s enough profitmaking available and excess resources for such a concept in small to medium markets.
What about on a global scale?
After all, a gaboodle of mobile phones contain Android, which contains a core, or kernel, of Linux code.
In our newly-connected global economy, which operates by and large as a supergossip network, where much of what we say to each other is superfluous but informational, we have created a citizenry that lives and loves outside the bounds of geographically-based political entities.
[Cue several paragraphs of historical comparisons to previous interconnected civilisations]
Are you interested in the status quo — government as it is and has been — or something new, something that develops from grassroot efforts, where we seamlessly become part of the Internet of Things, and transparency is commonplace but there’s room to respect the needs of profitmaking and intellectual/personal property rights?
I grew up playing board games called “Monopoly,” “Risk,” “Life,” and other cultural teaching tools centered on competition. I didn’t play boards games that directly taught cooperation. Instead, collusion of players ganging up on another was the indirect lesson I learned when one player was dominating and the others didn’t want that player to win.
It was in team sports and partner-based card games that I learned to cooperate with others in order to win against a respected opponent.
What are we teaching each other and our children about the future?
treetrunkdings 