Here’s that second repost I promised, about the Fourth Wall.
Speaking of walls, here’s an interesting blog entry about the DMZ between the two Koreas.
Right now, the two frontrunners in the U.S. presidential election are debating each other, the debate broadcast through various mass media outlets.
I listened for a few minutes and heard the same things they’ve been saying to and about each other all over again all over again.
So, I wandered into the study and decided to blog about my day, instead, which is more interesting to me right now, stoking my ego, not a presidential candidate’s.
Earlier today, I finished sewing the fiber optic light components onto my “Captain America, the ‘late Elvis years'” outfit for an upcoming costume party while I watched the home refinishing crew working on the house next door and the chipmunk/squirrel/wren wildlife digging through the leaves that have fallen onto our driveway.
Later, my mother called to say she’d found our family history book dating back to the beginning of the American Revolutionary War and will pass it on to me, leaving me as both inheritor and carrier for our future family members.
Later still, my wife and I drove on out into the countryside, stopping at a community center to greet our friends, the Cox family (no, not this one),who told us about their days working as tenant/cropshare cotton pickers, moving from rented house to rented house where crop work was needed, long before the high-tech days hit Huntsville and provided them office desk jobs.
Going to the community center was like walking back into the lives of my wife’s and my hometown.
Local politics, loosely tied to national issues but focused on specific problems that can easily be addressed without a legislative stalemate — prioritising road construction projects, sympathetically addressing the legal education needs of citizens going through the probate process, shaking hands with everyone in your district rather than swooping in for photo ops using canned speeches and preapproved Q&A sessions.
Tonight, the community center hosted three candidates for local political office (quotes below taken from their political handouts) while providing free dinner — southern pork BBQ, baked beans, potato chips, soda and tea:
I really want to write a scifi short story but first, a mention of the phrase “dark social,” the aspects of computer technology-assisted social connectivity that we don’t talk about as much as we used to, which may explain American ideology, or might not.
My wife says she can’t tell if either presidential candidate won tonight’s debate. As for me, I was turned off by their angry debate style and left the room, but you know that already, because I have bigger fish to fry.
Speaking of which, only 13,716 days to go!
When do local people, en masse, say “no more!” to higher education and highly-technical skill sets, creating viable subcultures that revert back to lower skill needs? How do they remain competitive enough to be profitable and stay in business as owners/employees?
Does a technology-based socioeconomic system, in general, have a fixed lifespan like a classic technology lifecycle?
Yes, these are repetitive thoughts but ones I want to grasp onto for myself and understand their implications for the future in this parallel universe of a blog.
Either we admit that our model of nations is out-of-sync and possibly obsolete or we open up the floodgates and let subcultures compete against each other at full blast, with subcultures, like species and languages, going extinct at a faster rate than before.
If the latter, will your subculture withstand the onslaught?
Would Congress let the U.S. economy go back into recession by not negotiating a bipartisan deal on pending tax increases if Obama is re-elected but would negotiate a bipartisan deal if Romney is elected?
That seems to be what this CEO implies as a major warning to eligible/potential/likely U.S. voters.
More for me to think about the rest of this day.
Time to read a book and get away from the computer.
We want to apologise to you Earthians.
A friend of ours who used to work in the roadside gem mining tourism business in western North Carolina — where “seeding” buckets with gems is common practice — was responsible for cleaning the scoop on the Mars rover, Curiosity, before it left your planet for the planet of war.
As a practical joke, he “seeded” the scoop on the rover so that when the rover processed the Martian soil, the seeded material would give a hilarious test result for scientists to ponder.
Or so we believe he first said.
Since then, he has retracted his original statement and is seeking psychiatric help in order to avoid jail time which would have been administered by the Inner Solar System Scientific Crime Council in a summary judgement.
We are evaluating other test equipment on board the rover, wondering if the purple haze we see in some images is a result of him covering camera lenses with rubies, sapphires and other gems he collected during his youth.
The Apple computer corporation is cooperating in this investigation.
The U.S. State Department has denied providing consultation to the worker on the ability to backtrack from one’s initial statements and expect to be believed ever again.
More as it develops…
The countdown shows 13,722 days to go.
I had promised myself not to care, to let my minions, given assignments in 1000-day increments, carry out their tasks, coordinate with each other and find a way to make the dream come true, with or without me.
I keep my head in the game, watching what they do, quietly making suggestions without seeming to insert myself into their conscious thought process.
I visit local establishments, saying thanks to people like Mathew at North Alabama Computer Associates, James at Radio Shack, Ricky at Chili’s, Honey at Best Buy Mobile, John Carroll at Walmart, Dominique at Beauregard’s, Caitlin at Carson’s Grille, and Mock Electronics.
What I find, when I order online, is the absence of connecting with people face-to-face.
Even so, I set up a chatbot to answer the phone for me and talk with “Rachel from Card Services” that (who?) is not related to another robocaller which (who?) says, “Do not hang up the phone!”
My chatbot switches languages word-by-word and phrase-by-phrase to test the intelligence of the chatbot on the other end of the line.
You didn’t know there was a silent chatbot war going on, did you?
You just thought you were receiving annoying calls from telephone solicitors, didn’t you?
Well, it’s like that.
See, I’m a nice guy. I go with the flow most of the time.
However, and there’s always a however (or ‘owever (or “but…”)), years of refining the exteriour personality, being a nice, easygoing guy, letting my wife blame me for a variety of issues that are of marginal importance to me, but sufficient for me to keep track (dancing skills, yardwork, house repair, etc. — see the comic strip “Dagwood” for further examples), appearances are deceiving.
I’m not always a nice guy. I can be, am, deceptive, downright mean, ornery, angry.
My job is to slowly replace members of our species with robots, androids, chatbots, cyborgs, etc., to maximise the efficiency of the system that will allow me to achieve the major milestone I only appear to not be reaching 13,722 days from now.
Some of my minions are self-aware enough to realise what they’re being asked to do, make themselves expendable, no sequels in their future.
The rest of you? I don’t know. You tell me.
I can put you to work creating new organisms that will establish beachheads on other planetoids, if you wish.
Or, to satisfy some members of the Committee, I can set the chess game of a war in motion, eliminating hundreds of millions of you, causing a setback in my timetable.
I prefer the former — it preserves the option of wars on other planets for our offspring to spring on each other.
While we’re on the subject, are you one of those who, when competing against one another, call each other schoolyard names that are unacceptable in polite company? I watch Australians make mountains out of molehills with such a scenario and wonder what else we primates are capable of when competing for the highest social positions in the land…
Time for the next set of actions to stir the pot of the national political election season!
Today, my scientists gave me a bag of parts to see if I could recreate the discovery they made.
Inside the bag was an Arduino board, a Sylvania Android tablet, a alcohol breathalyser and miscellaneous parts.
Within a couple of hours, I analysed the software installed on the two computer systems and deduced what my illustrious, if not esteemed, colleagues had pieced together for themselves.
Combining a voiceprint system with language dialect detection, the breathalyser signals are broken down by the Arduino, which coordinates with the Android tablet to create a personality profile, including a medical report on the person who breathes into the breathalyser, looks into the webcam and speaks several phrases at a precise rate of speed tailored to the individual test subject.
The software determines the approximate location of the person’s upbringing, compares the person’s speech patterns against a database of people observed in public CCTV/private webcam situations from the same subculture, analyses minute mouth/tongue/throat movement and breath contents to produce a health profile.
As a byproduct, the software guesstimates the type of childhood education the subject received and its effectiveness, using the audiovisual techniques given during the speech pattern testing portion of the software’s mini-exam.
Government-approved public education systems have already requested multiple copies of this “Arduinoidalyser,” in hopes that the software test results can be used in place of standardised classroom testing to predict a child’s future place in society without stigmatising the child’s testtaking abilities in comparison to other children.
Teachers who like the “tip the bottle,” as the saying goes, have asked that the breathalyser portion be turned off should the teachers have to submit themselves to the Arduinoidalyser for benchmarking.
= = = = =
Meanwhile, the Chinese government today demanded that all retailers carrying authentic/counterfeit footwear designed/manufactured by/for Wolverine Worldwide are officially banned because the Wolverine corporation makes footwear for the U.S. military and thus must be a covert spy operating on Chinese soil.
The U.S. government denied any direct covert surveillance connection to Wolverine.
After seeing the Wolverine Worldwide press release, Marvel Comics has decided to sue the Wolverine corporation for the use of the name of one of their most popular cartoon characters.
Wolverine Worldwide immediately countersued, saying they’ll grind their boots in the face of an comic book hero that never really served in the military.
The University of Michigan, in order to avoid controversy, has changed its mascot to the Persian Rugs in recognition of the changing democratics demographics in the Great Lakes state.
With a nod to an American atomic bomb scientist, while we’re at the blame game.
In one projection of the future, toilets no longer use water.
In that projection, sewer systems are filled with less fluid.
Sewer pipes are available for other uses if…
…if we find a substitute for water-based baths/showers, sinks with water spigots, drains for nonwater liquids.
What if we cleaned ourselves and our environment with liquids that collected into containers and the liquids then evaporated?
How would we dispose of the remaining material?
Instead of disposing, how about recycling/repurposing?
Dirt, oil, blood, skin cells, hair, sand, minerals, grass, sawdust, insects…and on and on.
No more sewer systems.
No more jewellery lost.
No more…
What do you pour down drains today that you no longer think about, out of sight, out of mind?
You’ve never waded down a sewer line, have you?
You’ve never smelled the gases flowing downstream with inertia.
You haven’t seen the screens collecting debris at the entrance to a sewer treatment plant.
When the toilet is reinvented, plenty of infrastructure changes take place, disrupting old models where companies and governmental agencies have vested interests in maintaining the status quo.
That’s a whole other paradigm shift of inertia to take into consideration.
Same as trying to change popular youth educational programs.
Not to mention the profitable postsecondary models.
Politicians will be politicians, protecting their jobs by not requiring companies to give 60-day layoff notices right before general elections, the OMB offering to reimburse companies for violating the WARN Act instead of raising the possibility that the general public would notice that their government representatives are pulling the wool over the eyes.
That, my friends, is what is wrong with our country right now.
It is time to look at the emperour’s new clothes once again and reveal what is right in front of your eyes but you’re too numb to notice.
Has the government of the United States become so brazen as to pull a stunt like this, the citizens unaware of how they’re being treated unfairly for the sake of a few votes?
If we don’t stand up for ourselves, who will?
Who are the people?
What happened to belief in the phrase, “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”?
I just don’t know.
I have hesitated to repeat a popular word like sheeple but it sure seems to apply here.
No matter whether Bush, Clinton, Bush or Obama was/is in office, the middle class keeps getting squeezed smaller and smaller.
If the middle class cannot see what’s going to happen to them, what IS happening to them, should I care?
Are we going to ignore an important piece of legislation so candidates can look good, especially the incumbents?
Do young people know what’s happening to their future?
Sigh…the storyline is going the way it wanted to go, showing that governments have no power, losing to the reality that corporate governance is the new norm.
Why bother to vote?
You tell me…
I saw a native American leaning against a wall when I drove out of the Publix parking lot today. He was wearing a shirt that stated, “The Original Founding Fathers”:
design includes Chief Joseph, Sitting Bull, Geronimo and Red Cloud
Enuf sed.
treetrunkdings 