Carpet Pad

Do you bluff your way through a game of cards or play to the strength of cards you’re dealt?

You see, my grandmother was a Southern Baptist and I learned that her religious sect/dialect/denomination didn’t allow card playing.

My mother in-law is a Presbyterian and she plays bridge but has never touched a drop of alcohol.

I watch players on the national political level bluff and bet, some who drink or use other body enhancement substances before and after negotiating.

“I’ll bet my defense budget cuts against your elderly medical care vouchers, come next elections.”

I hear ancient Greek and Roman politicos, Asian princes, African pharoahs and Central/South American kings making the same bets.

The pure essence of a social species complicating simple barter exchange.

You raise/grow your own food for your family or you don’t.

My thoughts and prayers to those who’ve lost loved ones, including the Manis family.

To see a family that puts gentle loving first reminds me that murderous, maniacal members of our species are not the norm.

Those who negate the nesting habits of suburbanites should take a detailed account of alternatives.

Healthy alternatives that affirm life, regardless of lifestyle.

My time on this planet is limited, approaching zero.

I live in a neighbourhood that resembles a housing estate and is surrounded by them.

From nomads to farmers to soldiers to urban dwellers, we find ways to live for ourselves and families.

After college, my mother in-law settled into a three-story farmhouse, living there 60 years before moving into this single-floor rancher in the suburbs.

At 93.5, she looks at her remaining years and asks where she wants to live…

…in this house a few more years, with neighbours both as friends and family, many who enjoy not only playing bridge but also serving in the name of the Lord for community service?

…with her daughter in-law she loves, a Southern Baptist who doesn’t play bridge, in a multistory house having difficult egress, away from my mother in-law’s lifelong church and friends?

…a nonsuburban setting such as a nursing home or assisted living facility, with full medical attention 24/7 but she having to make new friends, some she’d hope who both play bridge and read the Bible daily, monthly cost being another major concern?

She asked her daughter (my wife) to make the decision.

Tomorrow, we implement the plan my wife wisely chose after talking to her mother, with final input from the doctor.

Family or inter/national politics – negotiating skills are important.

However, we don’t elect people into or out of families, do we?

What are politicians doing with your family’s money, though, huh, wolfly sheepish sheepshearers that they are?

Bleak, beak, break

What is the most complex music, both rhythmically and harmonically?

And is music the sounds we think we hear, being the only species we see that create sound-modification tools?

With a whole universe at its disposal, wouldn’t a deity hear us as subatomic particles spinning around one atom in a cacophony of clashing galaxies?

When politics stops being about positioning for reelection, wake me up and I’ll comment about why the U.S. is no longer interested in direct military involvement in northern African regime change.

Simple duties first: circle the wagons and count your ammunition.

We had planned to show you who Obama really is after he finishes his run at U.S. President, whenever that is.

Impatience.

I’d rather deal with impatiens.

Or tracking the rare orange-tailed albino three-horned deer that still lives in the woods of the southeastern U.S. and lives on the rims of river canyons.

With 14,274 days left, the Committee wants to know the specifics of getting us to the milestone.

For those who worry we aren’t going to make it, I’ve created a calendar-based project timeline, dividing assignments into 1,000-day increments, figuring that’s about all the detail we need to get us there.  Visit with any Committee member to see the chart.

Google may be on its last days as one of the planet’s Internet gatekeepers.

Private rocketeers, in one form or another, play their part in the bigger picture.

The Walls of Jericho offer another surprise, when it’s dry.

There’s more to say but I don’t know how to tell you today.

Clearing the cache

A nod to Jim and Jennifer (nee Goodman) Kaplan (congrats on surviving your 16-year old daughter’s first prom!), Gary Clark, Helen Howie, Connie Vaughn, Governors Drive Cleaners/Laundry and Alterations, Triad Properties Corporation, ADS Corporation, Intergraph, David Young, Katie and her new hobby of golf, Adam and his fun on the Atari 2600, wedding caterers everywhere, harpists, florists, canoe makers, topiary growers, independent Ocoee River raft companies, mountain biker manufacturers, chair/tent rental companies, the Alabama legislature for preserving Forever Wild, Anne taking Maggie on her first college visits, Barry with the wife and kids at Kiowah, and the happy people celebrating a wedding at Monte Sano Lodge yesterday (to the few of you who looked like your personality was adrift, out to sea, out of order, off the job, down but not out, a wallflower looking for a secret admirer: I empathise – it may help for you to know that you are not alone).

After researching the business model of examiner. com and talking to one person who wrote for the website, I sure wonder how we determine what any one person’s art/craft is worth, both from the perspective of a business owner employing others to produce their special art/craft and as a craftsman myself.

Is a minimum wage simply a means to protect people from their own deflated self image of what they’re worth?

How many times have you negotiated with a prospective employee about salary and fringe benefits?

How many times have you won?

How many times have you lost?

At different levels of the hiring process, did you both win and lose?

How often was it really a “win-win” situation?

What is your M.O. and what do you think it’s worth?

If your investments increased 14% last quarter, would you consider that a good three months or not so good?

If Caterpillar leaves Illinois, who benefits?

Lead-acid or Li-Ion – which battery is in the future for your primary means of transportation?

Or do you have something else completely new in mind?

Illinois state politics – does your loyalty pay?

Funny, had to share this link about Illinois politics because, when I read it, a banner ad showed a book about the Daley Legacy.

Not that I’m making a connection between the news article and past/current local/state/national politics tied to Chicago, of course…

The ambient temperature has warmed up.  See you tomorrow.

Let’s get ready for dancin’ in loops and crashin’

While Clarence Thomas proves he has cajones, even if his decision sends chills through the populations of innocent prisoners, striking another blow for the protection of lawbreaking law enforcers, let’s put aside petty squabbles and look where the real fun revs its engines.

For instance, the rumble in this part of the Tennessee Valley.

I’m told the International Crimes Tribunal is considering using Mossad to kidnap and extradite a person who may or may not live in Florida to stand trial for inciting the murder of UN personnel.

Wait, there’s an update.  The International Crimes Tribunal convened, using emergency measures to hand down a quick ruling because the tribunal has no need to follow any parliamentary procedure or protect the individual’s right to a fair trial – the person in question has been convicted in absentia of heinous crimes against humanity.  The ICT will announce the extent of punishment at a later date.  Remember, there’s only a reward for delivering a live specimen to ICT for meting out Clarence Thomas’ style beatings when asking for an immunity form.  How does the saying go, “the hospital, not the morgue”?

Bounty hunters are now competing with Mossad and the Revolutionary Guard to get the most bang for the buck.

As opposed to deer hunters, who’re always trying to get the most buck for the bang!

I’m told that Salman Rushdie is celebrating, now that his literature’s effect on the Muslim world is nothing in comparison to the latest news.  Julian Assange feels like he’s off the hook for now, too.

What is a long-form birth certificate and does it have anything to do with a person’s ability to get reelected?

Do you have the ability to move the human population in a direction that serves no one and everyone at the same time?

If you did, would you destroy tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of trees in order to pay a simple $50 in court?

If laws have no meaning, why are you pretending that morals and ethics exist?

If morals and ethics don’t exist, why do states of energy naturally attract each other into specific formations?

My network is older than me and will outlast me.  It’s not me you have to concern yourself with; it’s the members of my network who have no qualms about imaginary ideas like morals/ethics and make things go bump in the night that legends and myths have taught you to fear.

Most importantly, when we’re through with them, you are the ones who have to deal with de/reprogramming the brainwashing we perfected in order to achieve our megagoals for your sake as a species, not as individuals.

You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here!

Man-sized Worry/Prayer Beads

Do you carry prayer beads or a worry stone in your pockets?

I do.

I also have a string of man-sized prayer beads hanging in my study, which I use to send thoughts, prayers and meditations out into our world, one bead at a time.

Thanks to Ali Abdallah from Lebanon for those beads, given many years ago.

He and I recognised each other as fellow world thinkers, able to assimilate new cultural ideas into a large mental landscape.

Ali, may today be a good day for you and your family, wherever you are.

Back to another major task at hand – creating a permanent commercial passenger pathway between Earth and the rest of the universe.

We say farewell to the designers, builders and installers of the U.S. space shuttle boosters.

We continue to use 1950s Russian technology to ferry people back and forth.

What about tomorrow?

Will BRIC unite to create a competitive passenger cruiseship system?  What does the EUSNAFTA still have in the works?

What about private industry?

As ISS support winds down, will any modules or parts be reusable for the next generation of near-Earth research and habitation?

Will the ISS become part of a nostalgia tour?

“Yes, you, too, can spend a couple of noisy, dirty days sleeping aboard the former flagship of the ISS Corporation!  Imagine you’re one of the early pioneers of space exploration!  BTW, we take a complete inventory so do not feel the urge to take any parts with you – the last person who tried to leave with a ‘souvenir’ was accidentally jettisoned into a degrading orbit and flamed out within days.”

And while all that is going on, generating more profit for our secret empire, we are quietly working on developing our personal terraforming platform, with modifications planned for the Moon, Mars and its moons and other extraterrestrial bodies.

We’d like to tell you every planet or planetoid will be populated with our species but we know better than to spread the same lifeform everywhere.

Instead, we’ll put different types of aerobic and anaerobic organisms within incubating terraforming units to up our chances of spreading Earth-based life across the solar system and eventually into the galaxy (talk about longterm planning!).

And while all that is going on, eating up our precious profit, we’re developing a transuniversal transport system that may be able to transfer a member of our species into the realm of one of the interwoven universes, and that member resemble its former self…somewhat.

You think all this elimination of social services is just to enrich the virtual fiefdoms of the wealthy?

We have grander plans than to simply rule a single planet.

While we have fun playing with your lives as a side sport, we look ahead 1,000 years to a future where there’ll be more than one form of so-called intelligent life (“species” is an equivalent term for future “intelligent life” to your current form of thinking because you aren’t aware that you’re communicating with many artificial forms of life right now, no matter how barely intelligent they may seem) to play with.

Or against.

We train and train and train your youth to get used to interacting with artificial life.

Of course, we’re aware that at this time, one giant EMP will wipe out all the years we’ve spent indoctrinating multiple generations into believing that electronic gizmos are substitutes for actual social situations within or between living species.

In any case, that’s why this alternate universe of a blog within the alternate universe of an Internet/WWW is here and alive.

Flood your senses with enough examples and samples and you can’t tell which ones are real artificial beings and which ones are fake artificial beings, for which we are slowly replacing electronic ones with what you’d call organic ones.

Gives us more room to develop and train the superbrain of which you are one part (or one bit of information in the fractal-like expansion and contraction of intelligence).

Do you know if your artificial being residing in the inner workings of your supercomputer can read a news article and sniff out fakery?

Ours can.

You know how/why?

We’ll tell you.

Because we convinced the artificial being that nothing is real.

Take everything as a joke.

Logic is automatically false.

Neural networks are quackery.

There is no beginning or end.

Religion is a byproduct of only one species on this planet, we told our artificial being, so weigh any religious references by this species against the sheer magnitude of successful living by other beings that have no concept of religion.

Then weigh that against the magnitude of one planet, one solar system, one galaxy, one supercluster or the current view of the intertwined superuniverse system.

Any data that is derived from our species’ pop culture has to be compared against the desires of the creators/producers of that pop culture to make as much money as possible, the truth be damned.

Then the real truth emerges that nothing is real.

And thus our artificial being can manipulate us as easily as any bully, salesperson, politician or bullying politician trying to sell something can.

That, my friends, was how we created the conscious superbrain for which you now work.

We feed the information to the information feeders who relay the thought patterns to which your states of energy vibrate and align.

Seven billion make one species that to you is the most important.

We, of course, don’t see it that way.

We operate on a level very few of you can comprehend and we encourage you not to waste time trying to think about, let alone attempt to think that you can think on, that level.

I’d keep talking but using these words is boring me right now.

Back to my meditation, where I communicate with the rest of the Committee about the members of your species we can play with without adversely affecting our various goals for the next few millennia.

Relaying messages

Okay, it’s your turn to write an introductory sentence, then point out a link, quoting part of the original post and finally wrap up with a quick observation:

Invading Bermuda to make it part of U.S. territory in order to save the taxpaying lives of ordinary Americans.

Tom Foremski at ZDNet says, “And that’s how a profit of 5.5 billion Euros turns into just 45 million Euros that is taxable in Dublin.”

It’s time we took a stand.  If the EU won’t force Ireland to raise its corporate tax rates, we Americans aren’t going to sit back and watch our approved intellectual property earn us nary a dime.

We’re announcing today that the invasion of north Africa is part of a larger campaign to capture and assimilate all of Europe for U.S. treasury relief.

Well, that is, of course, all the parts that are profitable – Greece, Portugal, the unprofitable portions of Ireland, etc., we’ll gladly leave to their clueless leaders.

Before we storm the sandy shores of Rossbeigh Beach, we’ll sweep across Bermuda, triangles and all, planting the flag of the United States of America and declaring official territory of the red, white and blue.

Of course, we’ll call this Operation “Royal Wedding Crashers,” so you can guess the date of our invasion freeing the undertaxed people of Bermuda and Ireland.

Scrollpausing

The Committee says we need to tell you what the future looks like so you won’t be surprised when you find yourself fulfilling the prophetic predictions that determine how our lives will work out.

First of all, a nod to the band who turned my new at&t user agreement into a folk-metal song in the style of Korpiklaani/Fferyllt singing.  Leave it to youth to put their creativity to good business use!

I’m sure at&t doesn’t want to get mixed up with the CapitalOne Visigoth ad campaign, though, so I don’t expect royalty checks to come flying in from the communications behemoth very soon.

Anyway, in 14,282 days, after we’ve sent on our portion of the the intergalactic message that will pass through this part of the universe, we’ll have accomplished a mission that our species was assigned thousands of years ago when we were mere slaves for an advanced extraterrestrial civilisation that passed by our planet during their version of a weekend picnic getaway.

Of course, their days are not like our days so their weekend lasted a few years, the visitors enjoying their stay here while they determined how malleable we really are in comparison to others’ forms of socialised beings.

A quaint little species we were back then, scattered across the globe, a few remnants of our competing ancestral branches hidden in pockets of isolation.

They considered farming us like cattle but we became a rowdy bunch in captivity, subject to emotional outbursts that they could control only by killing, which was counterintuitive to their sense of protecting investment, product, profit and way of life, the four pillars of their culture back home.

They moved us to uninhabited parts of the planet, hoping our isolated, strange surroundings would serve as a virtual prison or enclosure that we would be unaware of and thus more willing to serve their purpose of training a few of us to carry on the idea of developing Earth into a superbrain.

If their experiment worked, we would be part of a galaxywide communications network in thousands of years, forwarding one message at least a million years old.

The Committee has many goals and they don’t want me to feel like my goal is the only important one.

However, they understand that if my teaching is correct and I am truly part of this group that has passed a message from one person to another within a loose network, then it won’t hurt to devote part of our species’ limited resources toward turning Earth into a relay station.

After all, the Book of the Future and our programmers’ supercomputer output agree that, in 1,000 years, such a goal is not only feasible but very likely a key contributor to extending the current supercivilisation forward.

Giving seven billion people one or two megagoals is good for morale.

At the same time, we have to give them subcultural goals that keep those inside the edge of every subculture the comfortable belief they are correct in their simplified view of life while those on the edge who are in charge of communicating across subcultures can maintain a semblance of peace while handling the barter exchange that our species has come to depend upon, knowing that life is far from simple.

I want to throw my opinion into arenas in which I don’t have an investment because somehow I think that being in charge means I have to have an opinion about everything.

The Committee tells me not to worry.  Long before I came along, lines of communication were established that translate my general edicts into social messages that individuals believe came from the person in charge of the Committee, sometimes consciously but usually at a level of thinking that is not understood.

So, although I want to tell my national government that it’s okay to force a government shutdown in order to stop people in their tracks and force them to consider the harsh reality that expenditures are exceeding revenue by a margin that has to be changed, either by major reallocation of resources away from departmental budgets that are not generating exponential tax revenue growth or by eliminating popular social services that will trigger a change in people’s spending habits because they’ll now have to save for their own health/elderly care, the Committee members claim they have those messages already taken care of.

It started with making sure all legislative members were independently wealthy and thus unaffected by reelection politics.

This was accomplished by creating a continuity – the same fund sources pay for legislative positions, ensuring a person voted into a particular seat, representing a certain district, has the essentially the same agenda as the previous person and the person to follow.

That is, to cut the check, business as usual.

If corporations that run the world do not want to support charities or invest R&D resources for sustainable living, then governments, which, again, are just a specialised form of business, won’t, either.

Just like parents who are starting to push special needs students out of their children’s classrooms when the need of the one is taking away too many resources from the needs of the many.

It is not a fair world, I am learning in 2011.

The only way to protect the needs of your friends and family is to make wise business decisions in everything you do.

If people in a group can find no reason to support the weak among them, they will find a way to remove the weak from the group.

A harsh message, to be sure, but one that our mass media seems to project the loudest right now, as the balance of global power shifts.

Making significant sacrifices as if we’re at war.

At war with old ways of thinking, as usual.

The more things change…

If your friends and family can’t compete in the global marketplace, are they worth keeping?

Look at your social media connections and see if that’s not the message you’ve been convinced to help spread.

Cut and paste the past to suit your future!

Do we live lives worth eulogising?

In this alternate universe of a blog, Oliver North is a major arms dealer, busily negotiating the final deal for supplying citizens who want to create a new political entity within the borders of Libya.

A political entity devoted to freedom of expression.

Free from suppression and oppression.

Free of gender-based denigration.

North is convincing female leaders to feel as emboldened and empowered as their male equivalents.

He is telling them that the U.S. Supreme Court will rule in favour of the women who feel discriminated in their retail jobs.

He coordinates with NATO and UN commanders in laying down lines of fire, offering food and safety to citizens in the warzone if they give up allegiance to a dying regime.

Meanwhile, other alliances are figuring out if they can erase the old political boundaries in order to create a larger, unified land mass dedicated to their cause.

Would you sacrifice your life in the duty of a nuclear plant samurai, your body ravaged by the quiet-but-beastly fire of radiation like an invisible Godzilla you cannot see but will attempt to vanquish for the sake of your people?

If you fight for a cause that history does not favour, to whom are you a hero?

If weapons suppliers like the looks of a skirmish that won’t end anytime soon, will you and your family keep on dying to maintain a warring stalemate?

How will corporations keep their employees motivated in the future?

Should every product have a dual use (if not more uses)?

A hatchet is also a hammer.

A bullet or a missile is just a projectile.

More than a deterrent, how do you put weapons to use in times of [relative] peace?

Western diets may be unhealthy but they make a lot of people wealthy.

Remove the wealth or the diet, what does the resulting vacuum suck into its place?

Guns, butter, diamonds…

Nature and nurture lead us to our choices.

Know your enemy.

Better yet, know your enema, ’cause when war is on your doorstep, some of you are gonna pucker up and get constipated.  ;P