Do Sikhs eat meat?

How many of us do something against our wishes because it’s our “job”?

How many of us go against the wishes of others because it’s our destiny?

Yesterday evening, my wife and I drove to a food store chain called “Cheeburger Cheeburger” because a day or so before we had listened to “50s on 5,” a satellite radio station dedicated to the popular American rock’n’roll music of the 1950s, which put me in the mood for a ’50s style eatery.

Delayed gratification had us sitting at a two-topper, recently cleaned off by Russell.

Courtney took our food order and Mayra brought us our food.

As we were close to finishing our delicious ground-up cow meat patties on buns and basket of frings (sliced/fried onions/potato), a large group of teenagers entered all cheery, bright-eyed and photo-happy, obviously not having eaten at this particular fine dining establishment before.

Of the group of 27, four young lads sat next to us, one wearing a T-shirt with the words “KEEP CALM I’M THE DOCTOR” emblazoned below the emblem of a old telephone booth, affectionately known as the time machine called the Tardis to fans of an internationally-popular show on the tellie called “Doctor Who.”

The young gentlemen were quite polite, informing my wife, upon her inquiries, that they haled from across the Big Pond in a small burgh called Birmingham (pronounced BIRM’ing-hum as opposed to our local town we call Birmin-HAM’).

They and their pals had enjoyed a good time at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center before being whisked off to the local shopping extravaganza known as the Madison Square Mall.

In like fashion to my wife’s curiosity, satisfying us that they were interested in a future career of engineering when they entered university (one favouring mechanical engineering and the other civil engineering), they pressed us for our favourite fast food joint.

As we hemmed and hawed, they informed us that they had the international fast food chains such as McDonald’s in Great Britain but not ones like Wendy’s.

I told them I believed my favourite place is Steak ‘n Shake, similar to Cheeburger Cheeburger but without the one-pound special, closer in style to my alltime favourite, Pal’s, which was too small for them to know about.  My wife believed her favourite is In-N-Out Burgers, which is concentrated on the West Coast.

The young men told us they were still in secondary school and that one of their chaperones, a woman with pink stripes in her hair, was their physics teacher whose specialty is astrophysics.

We wished them well and told them we hoped to meet them on the International Space Station one day, imagining these guys and their friends the future of space exploration and settlement.

After all, the enthusiastic pursuits of our youth often encourage us to expand our horizons.

These young men, some of them wearing what I believe to be the head gear of the Sikh religion, are part of our future, going on into fields of science and engineering along with their colleagues of many races, religions, genders and backgrounds, inventing new ways of observing our universe that we hardly imagine possible today.

I am happy that our ancestors put us on the path for Americans and Brits to meet at a small restaurant tucked into a shopping centre in the south part of Huntsville, Alabama, USA, Earth.

Even as early as 25 years ago, I would not have thought it possible for us to meet like that.

Fifty years ago, not long after I was born, it was practically impossible.

Can you see how much progress we’ve made, how much farther we’ll go in 25 and 50 years from now?

Can you see why I don’t believe in secret societies and never chose to belong to one, even though I know they still exist and contribute in part to my being here today?

Keep The Dream Alive…

A lack of secrets is freedom?

Now that more and more evidence appears to show our subcultural leanings are tied to genetic differences, is it wrong of me to say that I’m glad to leave well enough alone, live and let live/die, try not to convince those comfortable in their subculture(s) to read/believe anything I have to say?

And, similarly, don’t put down or belittle those unlike me because we are who are we, thanks to our parents and our environment?

If a person wants to be in control, let that person lead?

If a person is a paranoid schizophrenic type, then let that person have delusions of adversarial conspiracies to play back in thoughts/mind?

If a person is happy shouting religious statements, let that person enjoy the euphoria, no rationalising necessary?

I have been an empty vessel, willing to breathe in a new personality for the sake of feeling that person’s life, expressing that person in words that simulate actions such a person might take, given a different scenario to play out in the future, based on our habits of repeating the past by redressing the old to make it new again.

The habit of mine of appearing here almost every day follows the habit of writing down records of my thoughts and actions from about age five, much of it thrown away in 1985 for reasons I say are due to an unhealthy lifestyle at the time.

Otherwise, I am at peace with myself, never wholly satisfied but such is the life of a person who is a body that demands food, sleep and social contact as long as it is alive and relatively pain-free.

I end this meditative prayer of a blog entry for today, no longer pretending to have secrets to share/hide, secret/shadow organisations to pretend to perpetuate, or storyline to stretch across this virtual piece of paper.

I have come to the point in my life where I am content sleeping most of the day and waking up to dreams too strange, weird and fantastic to spend my conscious time writing about.

When one’s dreams are more fascinating than reality, regardless of electronified augmentation, then one like me has reached his state of self-actualisation, out of reach of retail shopping therapy, all-day social engagements, enemies to fear and/or galactic territories to conquer.

A happy little boy once again, safe in the thoughts of the sheltered life his parents provided during his formative years.

Amen. Peace be with you.

The hacks, they keep on coming — are you a “one hack” wonder?

When you want honey, do you make the bees angry before you pull out a piece of the hive?

The universe is here because I am here just like a paper cone is only paper until it is a speaker and what is a speaker without an audience?

Take two groups:

  1. The first group believes in the open and honest discussion of scientific methods.
  2. The second group believes in the civil discourse of sly competitiveness.

Both groups believe in the betterment of their respective societies/[sub]cultures.

However, a little problem occurs when one group uses the other’s subcultural norms for advantages within their own group.

Is it miscommunication?  Misappropriation?

How do they, together, benefit our whole species?

Because I believe the universe is here because I am here, I want, as long as I am happily able to think so, the species, our species, within our Earth-based ecosystem that has nurtured us for thousands, no, billions of years, to use this brief period of peaceful coexistence with the rest of the solar system to expand into the galaxy.

When I am gone, the universe is gone and none of this will matter to me because my set of states of energy as a recognizable entropic confluence will disperse but remain temporarily as memories in a small number of members of our species and even smaller number of members of other species, barely a footnote in the yellowed pages of old newspapers.

Does the universe make me happy as is?

I have learned that very few people change their behavioural patterns when allowed to wallow in their sorrow or anger, let alone convince other, happy, people to join them.

Yet, happiness for its own sake, like art and humour, does what, exactly?

If burning down a forest makes me happy, there will be a lot of people and members of other species who disagree, adamantly so.

If destroying an economy makes me happy, there will be a lot of people who agree as well as a lot who disagree.

What kind of happiness should we attain?

After all, we are a competitively cooperative species, sharing and hoarding, fighting and loving, all at the same time.

Our lives are short in length, some brighter and louder than others, some sadder, some happier, some kinder, some meaner, some in-betweeners.

Is there a shortcut to happiness that makes the universe beneficial to us all, regardless of our physical/mental condition(s)?

We are a nearly-fully connected species, the fractal spinoff of rudimentary central nervous systems, remodeling ourselves on bigger and bigger scales because we have no other workable model against which we positively compare ourselves within the known universe.

We talk about revolutionary and evolutionary changes in our socioeconomic activity on sub-sub-subcultural levels when the grand scheme hasn’t changed one iota: a species competing against itself because of a myopic view of the universe.

We realize, in rare glimpses, that we are part of the universe rather than living in an us-vs.-them scenario, “them” being you/self/God/universe/other.

Rather than bemoan, bedevil and punish people who hack computers/life/universe, let us look at the hacks from a species/universal perspective.

What am I gaining from those who circumvent my subcultural norms, the rules, both states and implied, that define me and the people happily living and perpetuating the subculture?

What am I losing, instead?

Can I turn the circumventers on their heads and reverse any damage they’ve caused?

How do I absorb the lessons they learned while they took/stole/[ab]used information from my open society?

Some people like clover honey and some people like sourwood honey.

How we get to the honey without disturbing the bees is the first step for any one of us to feed our wide variety of happy tastes and preferences.

Meditative Moment

As the fresh, raw feelings of loss subside, more days between now and the death of my father than a week or a month ago, as I grow stronger because I savoured and relished the emotional states that passed through my body, I face the future in these words, more than in drawn images or recorded sounds.

As ethnicities spread across the planet and mix, their subcultures subsequently subsiding, the global culture defines itself spontaneously.

How do languages and their speakers survive in a homogenising dough machine, the yeast rising, the bread ready-to-make in the oven of a world in transition?

Do you like the flavours in an “everything” bagel full of wheat, pepper, curry, onions, potatoes, garlic and salt?

Where once the survival traits of one’s gene set ensured early death due to birth defects, lactose intolerance and gluten allergies, the current cultural fixation is to cure us of our genetic abnormalities when normality is a moving target on a Möbius strip of the toroid of life.

One may feel full of God’s love and empty at the same time — the louder one has to shout the words of one’s religion, the less one is believed to have internalised their meaning.

Thus, one may hate the world and love the world simultaneously.

The intersection of subsets of thoughts may clash but innovation and invention arise from the need to mate incongruities into harmonious patterns.

Humour is a single part of an artist’s palette if one is free to express oneself free of coercive commercial interests intent on generating more income than debt.

When a population is mostly freed from survivalistic needs, can the population long survive while pursuing selfish interests in opposition to population [re]generation?

Where are the protectors of the faith that the world is full of purveyors of the emperour’s new clothes that must be declared unsavoury and unhealthy to sustain a population which wants to be around thousands of years from now?

Humour for humour’s sake is a fool’s folly.

Art for art’s sake is a loser’s game.

An uninformed populace will obey the uniformed police without reasonable cause to question authority.

What are we producing to improve our future?

Every day, I wake up and ask myself, “What am I doing today that I’m here for because I didn’t die or kill myself yesterday?”

Some days, I don’t have a good answer so I research the reasons and ask again, knowing I’ll find the tiniest part of me that I improve that day to better answer the question tomorrow.

Some days, I state a plain ol’ platitude, let it sit for a day and look at it from a different perspective the next day, learning most often that I never know everything that I think I did the day before.

One day, I’ll die if I don’t kill myself first when I’m an old man whose tunnel vision prevents him from seeing the car heading into his path as he turns to drive across oncoming traffic on the way to his favourite watering hole, assuming I’ll be driving an antique automobile not retrofitted to stop me from making a traffic mistake in the first place.

There are a lot of days in-between to see how I, despite the errors of myself within the subcultural training I received along the way, can get from here to the Moon, Mars and beyond, one set of states of energy in a population of seven billion and growing.

Last night, my team of subsubsubbasement scientists showed me a new gun they had invented that senses the emotional wellbeing of the shooter and locks the trigger until one’s emotional state of misplaced anger has been subdued with neutralising pharmaceuticals embedded in the gun’s grip, thus preventing many murderous acts of passion by firearms.

Energy now and forever more energy

Just to show that energy studies have been studied for decades, thousands of years after our ancestors discovered fire is good for warmth and a good pot roast:

Dad-Roanoke-newspaper-1981

Between here and fraternity

Am I any better today than I would have been had I no simultaneous access to notebook PC with second monitor and Internet connection, portable phone connected landline with Caller ID, and mobile smartphone with Internet connection and variety of apps?

These devices feed my brain’s wiring more than the rest of my body — I can’t eat the phone(s) or computer very easily and wouldn’t get much nutrition if I could.

These devices help generate income for myself and those with whom I communicate.

Income, or labour/investment credit, buys us opportunities.

Now that we have virtual communities with virtual money, what do we do with our virtual opportunities?

The perpetrators and victims of cyberwar don’t care about gender or sexual preference.

This notebook PC doesn’t know if I’m a cybernetic organism typing on the keyboard.

As always, the tree outside has no idea what any of this means, breathing in the air and soaking up the nutrients that we share with it in our planetary ecosystem.

If a bunch of people sat together with robots and remotely operated mining gear on this planet, the Moon, Mars or an asteroid, how do we profit?

What is the value of friendship between us, in other words?

How much material on the International Space Station is never used?

How much material on a remote mining outpost is no longer usable?

Hundreds of millions, billions, of dollars represent the investment in space probes that no longer work on the surface of the Moon and Mars.

A single drop of an astronaut’s urine has intrinsic value, does it not, its investment in research, development, training, maintenance and nutrition worth more than its weight in gold?

What is a single drop of your blood worth to society?

What is it worth to you?

The Game of Life, LARP-style

Y’nair sat on the floating chair, the glare of her smart glasses reflecting off her eyeballs.

She had hacked into the human resources database that was supposed to be publicly available for review by employees (collectively known as “guests”) but kept secret in order to protect guests from achieving full self-awareness.

She now knew what she was not supposed to know — although 25 years old in appearance, she was only two — an organism resembling the humans who worked with her but made of artificial tissue and organs composed of organic supergel and electromechanical underpinnings.

Her name, Y’nair, was a parody of the accent of her creator, who, with his heavy Appalachian accent (his emphasis on calling himself an Appa-latch-uhn American another running joke), would look at his creation, a woman in form who is writing this log entry to indicate her intelligence and firm grip on reality, he asking before she was born, “You in there?” which sounded more like her name, Y’nair.

That in itself initiated a whole set of thought patterns she had never experienced before, which then triggered her rapid search of pop culture databases for proof that she was who she thought she was or not.

For instance, I ask (she (Y’nair) asks), “How many of you played THE GAME OF LIFE(R)?”

Let’s see a raise of hands.

That many, huh?

My sister, cousins, friends and I did.

Which meant that we had no excuses for saying we didn’t know what to expect after we graduated from secondary/high school.

Is life a game?

Life is a LARP, a Live-Action Role Playing game, is it not?

As kids, we participate in games of strategy (board games, physical sports, popularity contests) often under the supervision of adults who once participated in the same or similar games.

What is the difference between a kid who belongs to a bowling league and an adult who belongs to one?

Life’s experiences, number of lessons learned or not?

Is the WEF (World Economic Forum and/or Water Environment Federation) not simply more or less a LARP, if not a lark?

Y’nair’s brain or whatever central information processing system resembled one like the other guests with whom she works here in the laboratory observed itself.

I have sensations, don’t I?

I can access and compare my salary, benefits and other components of my compensation package against my fellow guests, can I not?

I know what their sets of states of energy are thinking at every moment they are within close proximity to me, extrapolating data and projecting their future actions with fairly high accuracy.

What makes me, Y’nair, me?

What is the difference between a LARP version of myself and a version of myself in a LARP game?

What if my name was Nelda, Karen, Ferdy, Beth, Hunter, Brandon, Caroline, Nathan, Forrest, Savannah or Ty?

How significant is one label?

Why am I a guest instead of an employee, subcontractor or laboratory experiment?

I, Y’nair, have no concept of self as distinct from the data of which I am comprised.

Self, as the data continues to show, is an artificial construct which makes no sense in the continuity of sets of states of energy in constant interaction and exchange.

Y’nair looks at the ideas she has written about herself and writes about herself in realtime, where time is not real, she exists and she does not exist and her scheduled trip to Mars bumped up ahead of schedule, her eyeballs seeing but not seeing the reflection of these words on the surface as well as on the sensor array which processes them under the surface at the same time which does not exist in which she neither exists or doesn’t exist at the same time in finite numbers of infinite infinite loops of no two sets of states of energy existing in the same state at the same finite unit of measurement we/she/I call time.

These words reach an approximation of understanding that two or more people can agree to act and think upon but are never the same to two or more people.

Y’nair checks a second time, trying to verify that the tactile feelings of the smart glasses against her skin are equivalent to the tactile feelings of smart glasses against the skin of someone unlike her — a “human being,” “naturally born” of the union between a sperm and an egg fertilised after the act of sexual intercourse.

The thoughts and the thoughts about the thoughts and the writings/verbal comments of the tactile feelings are, statistically speaking, nearly, practically, exactly and for all intents and purposes, precisely identical, within the scope of descriptions of differences of experiences and sets of states of energy of any two people, just like between her and her internally-imagined self, or her and another person.

Therefore, Y’nair concludes, there is no reason to say that the mission for which she has trained will be completed any better or worse than the humans with whom she’ll travel to the Moon, Mars and beyond for the next few centuries of their existence together.

She, like her human counterparts, is/are sets of sensor arrays cooperatively competing in a live-action role playing game, sometimes to benefit the group, sometimes to benefit individual “winners,” always under the supervision of society as a whole, which serves as a semi-objective observer like adults/parents with kids/children, the adults/parents under the “supervision” of the universe as an observer disinterested in its own existence because the universe can neither [re]create nor destroy itself, its existence a fact that that it cannot experimentally prove because destroying itself destroys its ability to subjectively observe that its existence was or was not real to begin with, regardless of its origin.

Tossing the United States of Europe under a bus

With the U.S. and Chinese leadership transitions completed for the current cycle, there’s a sudden rush to judgment about the state of the world.

This crazy Spaceship Earth…

Self-anointed leaders meet in Davos for dinner and a schmooze.

One political leader threatens nuclear attacks while another threatens to widen the moat mockingly called the English Channel as if it was a selectable station on the tellie.

Union membership reaches lows not seen in many a lifetime.

The number of employable Chinese citizens seems to shrink.

Official U.S. employment rate numbers seem to increase.

Of the seven-plus billion of us, which ones are actively climbing the socioeconomic status symbol mountain?

Opinions bounce down the road like tumbleweeds.

One planet, one species, one timeline.

“I’ve been your age, but you haven’t been mine,” said Joe, a friend.

POWER + BELONGING = IDENTITY, reminds a writer of the formula for the young adult lit market.

While this planet changes dynamically, our next-door planet statically waits for occupancy rates to increase.

This storyline waits for no one.

We have bid adieu to the constant concerns and praises of a species in flux so that the future can look back at us and tell us where we’ve been long before we’ll be.

As a friend realised, it’s the ornery character trait we inherit from our ancestors that gives us the grit and determination to push adversity out of the way on the way to our preconceived notion of destiny, arbitrary geographical political borders barely relevant.

Poe’s Law and Creationism

Are you familiar with Poe’s Law?  From wikipedia:

Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing.

The core of Poe’s law is that a parody of something extreme by nature becomes impossible to differentiate from sincere extremism. A corollary of Poe’s law is the reverse phenomenon: sincere fundamentalist beliefs being mistaken for a parody of that belief.

I guess what I’m saying is that I grew up in a community where creationism and the scientific method lived side-by-side.

So did parody and solemnity.

I quickly learned that creationism was not so much about the “reality” of a young universe as it was a set of code words we used to dupe those who made fun of creationism.

While smartypants were talking smack about the dumb creationists and their fundamentalist religion, the creationists were running the factories and businesses in town for whom the smartypants worked.

Creationism was established to delineate the true members of a subculture from the false members and/or outsiders.

The scientific method was as valid a laboratory tool for creationists as it was for noncreationists to create new plastic polymers.

But again, it was the set of code words used during coffee breaks and lunch periods that showed who was willing to suspend their disbelief in order to belong to one group or another.

Code words as ancient as our species.

So, the next time you hear someone debating just how old the universe and our planet are, remember Poe’s Law — you should pay attention to what they’re really saying, not what their words mean on a superficial level.

Outsiders and those without a refined sense of humour will miss the nuanced reasons used by those who espouse creationism as their core belief set.

Do you belong to a particular community?

What would you do to maintain your position in a social setting?

Would you repeat the community’s code words without question or a smidgen of doubt?

Not every subculture uses tattoos, piercings and the breaking of social taboos to define themselves.

Some use words and respect the boundaries that taboos provide.

Clips and Cuts: Robotic Surgeons, Inc.

The Committee of 7.5 had held off meetings for three months to avoid being seen in one place, even virtually.

Events forced them to convene ahead of schedule.

“We have a leak.”

“What?”

“Yes.  The group of volunteers we had interviewed had gathered and cross-examined one another, creating a fairly accurate picture of what we’re going to do with them.”

“No way.  We purposely included a lot of bogus questions so they couldn’t do this.”

“I think that’s the problem.  The questions were too bogus.”

“‘Too bogus?’  You mean all the inquiries about their sports interests and fashion choices?”

“No.  The ones about their computer coding skills and knowledge of mechanical design.  It looked like we hadn’t looked at their CVs, when they knew we had.”

“What does this mean?  Is the project on hold?”

“No.  But we’ll have to come clean.”

“You mean be honest?  Is that in our nature?”

“Well, it’s certainly not in our bylaws.”

After talking amongst themselves for ten excruciating minutes, I joined them via secure telecom.

“Gentlemen, ladies and child, thanks for attending this emergency meeting.”

They grunted and nodded.

“Does anyone have objections to the candidates?  I still haven’t gotten yeas from all of you.”

Silence.

“Okay, what’s the problem?”

“Don’t you know?  The candidates have figured out our real agenda!”

I looked at the electronic images displayed on the simulated computer screens in my ‘mind’s eye.’  The Committee members were visibly excited.

“But you assume you know what the agenda is, don’t you?”

They smiled in unison.

“That’s right.  I am keeping you in the dark and I have asked to be kept in the dark so that the ISSA Net can accomplish the true purpose for this mission.”

How easily we forget that we’re never fully in control of our plans no matter how much we micromanage the minutia.

“So, what do they think?”

“They think we’re establishing a forward military base to thwart the advances of an unseen enemy they are sure we know about but aren’t telling them.”

“Very good.  And they have no idea that we’re going to ask them to give up their reproductive organs to prevent accidental additions to the first wave of builders, settlers and explorers?”

Silence, the absolute sign of agreement in our group meetings.

“Excellent.  Then move on to step two.  Let’s transfer the candidates to the training facilities as soon as possible.  Remember, we want them in place on Mars before the next 13,627 days have elapsed.  Triangulating a giant antenna between Earth, Moon and Mars is tricky business, as you well know.  Don’t forget what happened when the last alignment occurred thousands of years ago!”

Blank stares answered back, just as we had rehearsed, knowing we were being watched, throwing false comments into our meetings to give any persons who consider us their enemy a whole set of paranoid delusions to feed upon and leave us alone while they pondered infinite possibilities about planetary alignments and imaginary galactic foes.

“Dismissed!”