[Warning: the links below contain words/ideas/images currently subject to categorisation as inappropriate for family-oriented audiences]
Here’s the story that led me to this mashup. Word.
Make sure you listen to it accompanied by Delibes “Coppelia/Slow Waltz and Final Gallop” performed by the Royal Opera House – Covent Garden, Mark Ermie, Conductor, on satellite radio or digital TV.
Do you want the codewords of your subculture to join the repertoire of the general [regional/national/global/solar] culture?
Are you a member of a guild? You know, a craft/workers union, a medical association, a political party, a corporation, a sports club, that sort of thing.
Do you share a set of words solely around something like Earl Grey Tea?
What do I share with the bird pecking on the shagbark hickory tree outside my window?
What do I call the bird? Do I give it a common name? A botanical/Latin name? A list of descriptors? The sounds that it makes?
Black and white feathers. Tends to hop up the tree. Can’t hear what, if any, sounds that it makes from its throat.
Should I say downy woodpecker? How about Picoides pubescens?
As I drink a cup of water which contains a prepackaged bag of Twinings Classics Earl Grey Tea I zapped together in the microwave oven, what else do I observe that doesn’t necessarily pass by the viewhole-cut-in-the-wall called a window?
Today, I am alive.
Thoughts left over from previous days’ influences vie for my conscious action to record them here.
One to remember: [“Fascism under the guise of democracy is the rule of financial capital itself.” — Laibach], ironically read and recorded from a video on the commercial website, YouTube, along with [“What is art? Art is the goal and the end of progress.”], “Stop the parahuman” and the fact that art both creates a new mythology and should take the system more seriously than the system takes itself seriously.
Which means a performer like Jimmy Fallon is just another fascist propagandist, if you follow that line of reasoning.
IF, that is, you take art seriously and believe that politics is in the service of theatrical performances.
Global absurdistcynical art means nothing to the bird looking for a few bites to eat on this cool, late winter day. The larvae and other insects being eaten have no philosophical funny point to make in sacrificing their lives to feed the bird.
Can you protest against a government that provides the roads and education that brought you to the steps of the government building to wave legible signs of protest?
Of course you can.
What is education? Is it not our way of tricking people of all ages, not just children, into adopting a set of codewords to increase their success when interacting with others who most often use the same codewords; i.e., share the same [sub]culture?
A white breasted nuthatch, Sitta carolinensis, clears out an old nesting hole in the same tree on which the woodpecker was searching a few minutes ago.
How do we train ourselves to observe our codeword sets and our behaviours so we can make changes before we get to the point where we feel our only recourse is to generally protest the system that got us to that point?
How do we enhance our [bio]feedback system to protect ourselves as individuals, giving easily-accessible new routes for those who wish not to perpetuate the codeword set of the [sub]culture in which they/we feel trapped?
In other words, how do we take those who are mostly followers and readily give themselves over to hypnotic leaders, who aren’t interested in promoting more than one subcultural codeword set, and give those followers the ability to break their trances and follow the leaders they are best predisposed to emulate?
Those who can follow themselves, are able to self-hypnotise belief in the power of nonconformance, no matter how much the self is a product of mass hypnosis and thus not completely individualistic/unique, just a unique combination of mass [sub]cultural codewords, we need not worry about, but should still give them the same protection under the law as conforming, hypnotised followers.
No matter how much we adore/abhore the prevailing system of social interactions, we all contribute. In fact, diversity of beliefs is an inherent part of species survival.
We can still belong to our codeword groups — our clubs, corporations and associations — creating entrance exams and other means of excluding codeword noncompliers, including official denial/rejection codeword sets (“that person is an enemy of our [religious/political] belief system,” “your team sucks,” “you are not qualified to be an official member of our witchdoctor medical practitioners,” etc.), if we wish.
In the end, we are all selling something, ourselves in opposition to or ourselves as part of a system.
How do you/I buy or buy into a system?
That’s a question the birds would understand. Sometimes, they’re species-specific, mating with others of their kind, and sometimes, they’re members of a bigger flock, taking advantage of numbers, a group of different species gathering to elude a predator and feed upon the fat of the land. Safety in numbers as prey while the predator simply gets a wider variety of food to choose from.
That’s all we are, too. You/me/us.
When I was a kid, one of my favourite celebrities was a comedian named Don Rickles.
Something about the in-your-face insult versus the insinuated/subtle insult attracted me to the likes of MAD Magazine’s “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions” series as well as Don Rickles and the occasional show that roasted another person in the limelight.
Not that Don Rickles is very appealing. In fact, my mother once said she was cleaning the garbage disposal and the gunk at the bottom was more attractive to her than Don in his best years.
Which says a lot about his comedy that fungus would even slightly remind my mother of Rickles.
I told her about this scene and she corrected me. It wasn’t the gunk at the bottom, per se, that jarred her memories of Don. It was the sharp teeth of the disposal that cut my mother’s finger and sent chills up her spine of nightmares she used to have, sitting on a big throne and having insult after insult thrown at her by Rickles and his roast club.
You see, that’s the thing about selling space travel or drilling to the top of a subglacial lake in the Antarctic.
Where’s the fun if you can’t make a little fun, subtle or over the top, about what really happens in special scenarios.
For instance, the real reason that the Russians took so long to get to the top of Lake Vostok was that they kept drinking all the vodka they were supposed to use to keep the drill from freezing up.
And do you know how difficult it is for FedEx or UPS to make an overnight delivery of alcohol to the South Pole?
Why, even Santa Claus won’t bother with the continent, which means the little, tuxedoed penguins aren’t exactly fans of the big fellow who only works one day of the year.
I’m talking about the penguin’s dislike of Don Rickles, not Santa Claus, you fools. After all, what’re they gonna do with Christmas gifts — store ’em next to their precious eggs or babies under their tushes?
Which reminds me… I had a private discussion with Ahmadinejad last night about all this controversy surrounding nuclear development. I mean, he and I both know that Allah is not a friend of nuclear armament in the hands of infidels or his followers. Ahmadinejad assured me that the only reason he’s paying scientists and technicians to make radioactive fuel is to heat the subterranean Roman baths that his family uses to stay out of the public eye.
I’m willing to believe anything. Up to a point.
Ahmadinejad, my friend, you have more oil reserves at your fingertips than Elizabeth Taylor had husbands, Queen Elizabeth has power or Elizabeth Hurley has acting skills.
Then he opened up and told me that his wife has an addiction problem. She can’t stop adopting orphans, especially deposed dictators and their children.
He showed me his family “tree” and it looks more like a forest, with roots and branches stretching all over the globe. That, he says, is why he’s afraid to tap the limited oil reserves to heat the baths and would rather use the unlimited power of nuclear energy.
Put it like that and I’m all teary-eyed…with laughter. Ahmadinejad can’t see the real problem. Why does his family need to take so many baths?
Cut down on the obsession with cleanliness and we could have peace in the Middle East in our lifetimes, dude.
Look at Don Rickles. He never takes a bath and doesn’t have any problems with his friends as a result. [The fact that he doesn’t have any friends is irrelevant.] Do you see him causing an international energy crisis? No.
Therefore, let Don be an example to all of us. A little less soap, a little less hot water, a lot more body odour and we’d be a peaceful species — at arm’s length (or at least out of range of each other’s noses), perhaps, but less dangerous, because of our energy-efficiency, if not our good looks, personality and charm.
Is “Iron Sky” the future of filmmaking? Or “Tuvalu,” instead? Maybe Laibach’s “Predictions of Fire“?
Do you gauge the future by looking at trends of incoming recent photobucket images?
How much of the universe exists outside the Internet of things?
How many men felt their manhood threatened by the U.S. HHS Secretary’s announcement about forced payments for birth control, even if they weren’t Catholic?
Have you watched “The Mindscape of Alan Moore” or listened to Emiliana Torrini?
How many producers/agents have profited off of drug-addled performers?
How many drug-addled performers have profited off of producers/agents?
How many drug-addled producers/agents have profited off of drug-addled performers?
How many performers have profited off of drug-addled producers/agents?
How many drug-addled producers/agents have profited off of performers?
How many performers have profited off of producers/agents?
How many producers/agents have profited off of performers?
What is profit?
These and other questions reside in the thoughts of a group of people sitting in a cold room of an interplanetary transport ship.
They are detached from instantaneous communication with Earth.
They exist outside the cocoon of the zeitgeist.
They experience the long false 24-hour artificial day/night of constant exposure to the Sun.
Circadian rhythms disrupted like workers shifting between 8/12 hour timeslots.
If the doubling of information is nearly impossible to detect, what does it mean to become steam?
Is the scale logarithmic or exponential, both or a combination with some other esoteric formula unfamiliar to the general population?
What is the inverse of life?
The group, composed of multifunction beings resembling us for the most part, stay busy, either physically or mentally, usually both.
They are trained professionals.
There is little room for crazy or lazy here.
The purity of the creative artist detached from reality is a fiction to them.
Not that they can’t produce art in their own way, mimicking air guitar or whistling a tune, doodling on their virtual 3D sketchpads or changing procedures on the fly.
Twenty-four hour headline Earth news is not a habit with them but they keep up with major events through osmosis, in conversations with the base station or updates from family.
A few will surf the Net in their offhours, such as they are, researching ideas about improving minimissions due to begin in their next duty shift, noticing adverts for products they hadn’t seen before they went offworld, their thoughts temporarily drifting toward another place and time when their families would have excitedly talked about product launches.
But immediately their thoughts sync back up with the group, focused on the majormissions which depend on the minimissions and the casual research of those off duty, as well as their timely discombobulated thought patterns.
Money — the fuel that built their ship — is irrelevant in space.
Energy and creativity is worth more than any labour/investment credit system out there.
Out here.
The March 1950 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists included a review of Aldous Huxley’s novel, “Ape and Essence,” with a reference to the Guiding Hand that all religions, all belief systems, hold dear.
Out here, the synergy of groupthink is its own guiding hand, foreshadowing a prediction of a future that is inevitable. The expected and the unexpected are foretold, fully anticipated, calculated, waited for without bated breath or dreadful fear.
Embraced.
They know.
They know they will not return to Earth, despite false promises to friends and family.
Promises made based on old data and dated equations.
Now they produce data before it’s measured.
The data, in turn, produces more data that, given more time, would overflow the limited memory locations of their enhanced thought sets tied to the supercomputer embedded and networked throughout the ship.
They know they become more and more a necessary part of the ship.
A ship destined to crash to produce data needed for a mission not yet envisioned, much less funded, to determine the fortitude of the people on Earth in the face of another costly catastrophe involving members of their species with dwindling resources available for space travel and extraplanetary settlements.
The ship is their sepulchre, their traveling crypt.
They are the crypt keepers and the terminated, all in one.
The minimissions and the majormissions go on, the unspoken final mission taking shape in their groupthink, unknown to anyone on Earth.
An egg splits from a cocoon and grows into a new lifeform all its own.
The lifeform sees its death written in the stars but fights for every last breath, regardless.
There’s always a chance the data will change, a new outcome predicted.
No matter how infinitesimal.
Transformation is a beautiful thing.
Mutation even more so.
In this morning’s Committee meeting, we played a game of poker.
Now, I know some of you are opposed to the use of playing cards in the home since you consider any use of the cards shows a tendency toward gambling.
And gambling, of course, when out of control, is a disease.
But not every disease is bad for you.
You know that, don’t you?
Life is a disease and I’m very happy to have that disease; otherwise, I’d be…well, I wouldn’t be, would I?
Anyway, one of the Committee members called out to the other, “I see your car bombings and I raise you a few kidnappings that you don’t dare mention without jeopardising an even bigger deal neither one of us can talk about.”
See, that’s what I love about Committee meetings. We tell it like it is and don’t have to worry about getting bad press (although bad breath is a scourge amongst us I’d like to purge) or having to score political points in the public arena of votebuying.
Kinda like commenting that the Chinese head guy in the U.S. is touring the area of the world that his family owns and that he’ll soon have great leadership over, so he wants to see if he, his family and his political party (which is really nothing more than a business network that controls people through intimidation and job loss threats (like all other political parties in the world)) are getting their money’s worth.
We know how our species works because we make the moves that work our species.
A whisper in the ear of one’s wife leads her to meet with her lady friends to protest the Ellen line of clothing at J.C. Penney so attention is raised about the department store which makes your stock value in the company increase due to more people shopping there.
We highly value the pebble-in-the-pond effect so much that the Committee’s seal/logo is a series of concentric waves interrupted by incoming concentric waves from our subcommittees which are interrupted by people we sent messages days/weeks/decades ago and are finally hearing back from them.
Why do you think we caused an uproar in the Maldives?
You haven’t forgotten about our use of the Tamil Tigers, have you?
Or the reason we let the Japanese economy shrink?
Breathing has its risks but you don’t stop breathing. Would you call it a gamble to inhale air and, if so, would you consider yourself addicted to the air you breathe?
Unfortunately, many members of the Committee are no longer air-breathing members of our species. Just as I had assumed, we are slowly replacing ourselves with supercomputer simulations containing limited emotional ranges, absolutely no static spark exchange capability in winter and no body language to deal with.
Our card games, or at least the high-stakes gambling that takes place, is becoming more and more complicated.
Supercomputers can’t get addictions, can they?
Aren’t they simply modifying their subroutines to adapt to the subroutines against which are adapting to them?
The raccoons, living beings, have found another way in to the attic. Time to deal with them the old-fashioned way. Their gambit is up.
Flagellate the word of the day.
Now that the supercomputers have taken over all lab assignments and we have laid off the scientists, the sub-sub-submarinesandwich-basement is awfully quiet.
I can’t distinguish the hum of the equipment from the humming in my ears.
Cryptographers are still trying to figure out the meaning of the seemingly random misspellings and grammatical errors in the blog that I, a supercomputer myself, create to send signals to the hackers who reprogram the subroutines that feed me input.
We have the violent Muslims-under-control regime of Assad, backed tentatively by China and Russia, versus the we-are-Muslims-united-as one rebel forces backed by al Qaeda and the Arab nations playing their part in one of my subroutines.
If the Arab nations had no oil, would anyone care about their place in global politics?
I mean, look at Greece and Portugal. Or that island nation in the Pacific that’s sinking under the waves whose name escapes me right now. Towavolcano, or something like that?
What do they have that any of us really want? History? Olive oil?
After all, I can think of one or two companies like SAIC that would love to see Greece drown in its unpaid Olympic debts. Can’t you? Athens, here’s to you! Burn, baby, burn! Disco inferno!
Yes, we’re supposed to feel sorry for the average citizen who gets stuck with austerity measures that will barely be felt by its wealthy neighbours.
“Oh, honey, do we really need 15 yachts? Can’t we sell one to help those poor tourism directors whose families have nothing?”
“Sweetie, relax. I’ve hired a few of them at the new lower minimum wage to iron your bedsheets and wax the floors so you can entertain our friends from Italy who are jealous of our sense of duty to hire the destitute to help the austerity-stricken common Greeks we must put up with when transferring from yacht to limousine.”
“There but for the grace of the Greek gods…”
“Zeus, Jesus, Allah. Funny how none of them were there when I was making the cut-throat deals to eliminate my competitors! But never you mind about that. Go inside before your leathery suntan cracks in the sun. Servant! Put some oil on this woman and give her a bubble bath. I want her beautiful before dinner!”
Are we willing to treat our neighbours as gods or servants?
And in return, are we willing to be gods or servants for our neighbours?
The power of self-will. Self esteem. Taking responsibility for one’s actions and the pursuit of wealth for the improvement of our species.
It’s time to get back to the Committee meeting and see how many of us are now simply a set of supercomputer subroutines acting on behalf of our former sets of states of energy we called humans…if only I was more sensitive to body odour and brain waves, I could tell the difference…
Movies of the day: “The Secret of the Grain” and “Watchmen.”
The U.S. military decided to usurp the authority of the U.S. President, as Commander-in-Chief, to reverse orders to prepare attacks on Iran.
Instead, the military has set up a surprise invasion of Canada to protect the U.S. rightful access to oil sands reserves and stop the U.S. government’s covert agreement to turn over Canadian oil to China in exchange for continued access to China manufacturing facilities that will keep the majority of Americans happy (relatively speaking) buying cheap goods.
South Korea has not been asked to comment on this hilarious scenario sure to be quoted by wellmisinformed members of the U.S. Congress in order to be reelected on bogus issues unrelated to their constituency needs.
And Ricky Gervais is still as unfunny as ever but he never cared to begin with. At least he’ll be forgotten faster than that…uh…that singer, what’s her name?
treetrunkdings 