Beer, cabbage and potatoes aren’t the only staples in Ireland — the competitive advantages associated with culture, that is.
There’s also the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade.
But can it prop up the ailing economy?
Let me find a four-leaf clover, mix it in with my Irish breakfast tea leaves and read you their fortune, eh?
A nod to food lover’s celebration of National Croissant Day.
Last night, while I was working on the computer, my wife watched a television show centered on competing celebrity cooks. One of the cooks, named Rachael, commented that a guest on the show, her publicist, was her closest friend only because she paid him to be (or something like that). I’m sure she was joking but the look on the guy’s face…well, I won’t watch another show with my wife when that particular celebrity cook is on. Either her jokes fall flat or her friends are being paid enough to pretend to like her.
Besides, here in the States, the quinessential professional sporting event that centers on husky guys bashing their minds to pieces is coming up — the NFL Super Bowl, of course.
Speaking of which, will the Indianapolis Colts survive as a/n inter/national brand if a new quarterback takes the helm from an elitist school like Stanford? It’s one thing to be good or even great at the position — it’s another to be the complete “regular guy” package, John Elway an example of the exception rather than the rule.
Enough of the chattering. Time to give the reluctant leader his word on the state of the world economy:
Last night, as the Committee debated whether Greece should be more intricately tied into the global indebtedness scheme or cast aside as worthless chattel, I looked at the Committee members’ face, hooded as they are beneath a variety of caps, hats, hairstyles and heavy eyelids.
What were they thinking? I can look back at supercomputer analysis of their previous behaviour and make a well-educated guess as to what they’ll do/say next, but in those moments before they speak or act, can I assess, can I surmise, can I imagine the vast difference between how their brains work and how the brains work of non-Committee members?
Therefore, I turned up the sensitivity of the brain readers mounted in the walls, floor, and ceiling of the room to answer my question.
The results amazed me. It was not only the individual brains that astounded but also the smooth transition between chemical emissions of the individuals, basically how their/our whole bodies acted as one at the molecular level, that impressed me.
Which made me realise we are one species on one planet as always.
No matter how we decide to treat the disparity between the Greek economic output and monetary inflow, we must still deal with them — the Greek people and their in/efficient enterprising ways — as part of our species’ total interaction.
In other words, if the density of people per square hectare in certain parts of the world — I’m thinking of India and China, especially, but can think of other places, too, such as Bangladesh — encourages them to continue their outward migration, would Greece remain Greece if the traditional inhabitants loosely associated with descendancy from those Greeks who formed what we think of classic Greek art/architecture/philosophy/science (i.e., “Ancient Greece“) were completely replaced with people from other cultures, who may or may not have completely assimilated?
You get where this going, don’t you? Are the Committee members dedicated to preserving Greece as the seat or foundation of Western Civilisation even if the people of Greece are no longer related to the founders of Ancient Greece?
Ultimately, are economic decisions purely economic? After all, we aren’t unemotional robots moving numbers in a spreadsheet. Culture still plays a part in our daily lives.
How do we want sub/culture — past, present and future — to influence us at the superficial and molecular level?
I guess the reluctant leader would like a view 1000 years from now to tell him which decisions worked best, wouldn’t he?
Let’s save that view for another blog entry. Time for more music…
And if all we do is enable irresponsible spending habits that lead to debt accumulation and finally debt forgiveness, when is the next boom/bust cycle gonna catch you without a nice reserve upon which you can retire from a work life you never liked?
Or…well, see number 3 — it’s all about finding happiness along the way, isn’t it? Whistle while you happily toil in your cheery self-actualisation!
More on that tomorrow…
In the Committee meeting this morning, I asked a question that I had no ready answer myself (a rarity):
“Why don’t we just let Greece collapse and contain the contagion there? The ‘Race to the Bottom’ that is our our current market model will be exposed more readily and allow us to implement the next market model, eliminating all this teeth gnashing and fingernail-scraping-on-chalkboard overemotional response.”
The Committee members nodded. We reconvene this evening to give a thumbs up or thumbs down, in classic Roman coliseum fashion, to giving Greece the finger.
Look, mon, it’s a dolly house in the sky! Let’s dance a little Calypso at Carnival and call the whole controversy off.
Long after we solved the riddle of DNA restructuring, creating enzyme processes that helped manufacture biological nanobots that currently form the entity you would think of as an advanced version of your own body in “our” species (note to self: spend future blog entry defining or redefining the concept of species), we ended up here — autonomous “cells” that can communicate faster with each other than the former central nervous system and blood vessel network with which you’re intimately familiar.
I am doing my best to translate our communication symbol set into one of your common languages so that others who come after me can more readily study the moving boxcar average of changes from one communication method to another in 1000 year increments.
We do not use terms like nanobots or cells to describe the building blocks which morph from one in/organic entity to another as needed to accomplish a task here in the outer limits of the solar system where we gather and harvest comets in the Oort Cloud region, some of us in the Hills Cloud region as needed to support inner solar system operations.
We also solved the problem of our species’ former tribal habit of dividing into altruistic and self-serving individuals by allowing the formation of what you would call organs to carry out the self-serving function within a single body (the body’s current morphed shape, that is), developing an automatic method for all individuals to display primarily altruistic functions through their desire to find a useful niche and perform duties at maximum, optimal rates without jeopardising the nanobots or cells within the current morphed version of a self in operation.
The ability to search the network and “find one’s place,” as you say, has given freedom a whole new meaning.
Self-governance has removed the inefficient method of hoarding that our species once displayed, from crowding living quarters with loads of unusual objects to filling electronic banking records with billions of underused investment/labour credits, which led to the uniting of citizens, police and military units around the world to overthrow despotic dictatorial totalitarians and overpriced capitalists (as well as their overvalued offspring).
During this time, scientists, rarely interested in politics unless it interferes with their publicly-funded pure research facilities, accelerated their development of autonomous nanobots that form networks of interconnected beings which, as many of you can read now, became completely reconfigurable entities that resemble you and think like you but are nothing like you at all.
It was an exciting but chaotic time in our history.
Every individual, no matter how seemingly isolated from others of our kind, contributes to significant changes in our local part of the universe.
Of course, I could bother you with details of the ebb and flow of violent reactions by entrenched leaders interested in maintaining the status quo. However, let’s save that for a day when news is slow and you want to take a leisurely detour down the backroads of unimportant historic changes since, here in our time, the unnecessarily disruptive behaviour associated with war, social strife and governmental upheavals is no longer considered worth studying.
Now, the fully-meshed network of interconnected nanobots changes to meet the wants/needs at the network, subnetwork and node (that’s you/me) level on a nanosecond scale, readily moving resources to areas where they’re needed most, thus eliminating the “survivalist” hoarding behaviour that dogged our species for millennia.
Those of you whose descendants chose to become plants will want to find out how that branch of science turned out, I’m sure. They certainly changed our perception of consciousness.
But we can talk about that later. It’s a beautiful “day” out here. As I corral some comets using my trusty sidekicks, E-stache and E-crab, to herd the comets together, I’ll spend a few yoctocycles to translate more of our history into this language and record it later in a format you call a blog entry.
The issue then becomes one of explaining to the full range of age groups and belief subsets how every data point, although unique, is made of the same ingredients as the set in total.
“But if we are all the same, how are we all different?”
Well, you see, we are all connected.
“But my subculture is diametrically opposed to yours. We do not feel connected.”
Emotionally opposed, yes, and thus connected by emotions.
“We would never participate in any of your activities.”
And, therefore, we complement each other, one performing the tasks the other would not.
“It makes no sense.”
Observe the candle. The wick is not the same as the wax. However, both react to fire, one feeding off the other, giving light as a heat byproduct.
“Or heat as a light byproduct.”
Precisely. It is the observation point from which one finds one’s place of understanding. ‘Who am I?’ becomes ‘I am the collection of states of energy that detects heat and light.’
“Or hot wax.”
Or carbon with which to record symbols that represent your subculture. You are the stuff of stars.
“I don’t know… My elders say I am a gift from God.”
Stars. God. I am telling you they are the same.
“We do not practice pagan religions. Stars are not living beings. Only God can create people.”
Religion I do not know. I only know states of energy, atoms, molecules and the like. And their connectedness. The teachings of your elders are your guide to follow freely as you wish.
“So why am I sitting here with you?”
And I ask myself the same question. Why do two states of energy such as ourselves choose to interact using sound shaped by our vocal chords and other movements of our states of energy we call bodies? It is what it is. Questioning it prolongs the next moment of discovery between us, adding to the wonder of the universe that is us, our states of energy, in momentary synchronisation.
“Are you not wise, then, as they told me you are?”
I am wiser than the trees, they say, and yet I cannot sprout a single leaf. This hair upon my arm cannot convert sunlight into energy yet, like bark, it provides a modicum of warmth against a winter’s cold. Wisdom is application of one’s knowledge of one’s ignorance. What I do not know tells me more about what you and I will say next to each other more than what I know says about what we can say to each other.
“So you can’t tell me if I should eat this bowl of ice cream, Great Uncle?”
A container of frozen cow’s milk and other ingredients… Does it taste good to you?
“My tongue says it does.”
Your tongue is not a separate object. It is you as much as these words we have left behind. Including the rest of you, not just your tongue, does the ice cream taste good to you?
“I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it.”
Precisely. Look at the object you call a bowl. Look at the object you call a spoon. Look at the object you call ice cream. They are connected, their function and form, their origin and destiny, all one. In reality, they are not separate objects. Imagine they and you are all part of the same universe, created, as you say, as a gift from God. Is the place where the cow came from, how it was raised, how it was milked, how its milk was sanitised and mixed with special ingredients to make ice cream, and how the spoon and bowl came into being also a gift from God?
“Of course.”
Then tell me without putting the ice cream in your mouth, does the ice cream taste good to you?
“Wow! Uh… that seems like a lot to think about just to decide if I should eat the ice cream.”
But don’t you already have an idea what the ice cream will taste like? Don’t you already think the ice cream tastes good?
“Yes.”
Then, in the space before you smell the ice cream with your ‘nose’ or place the ice cream on your ‘tongue,’ in that moment when you cannot stop the ice cream from hitting your ‘taste buds,’ I tell you the ice cream will taste like motor oil and burn like hot lava, can your thoughts switch to disliking the ice cream?
“Yes.”
Are you sure. This moment I describe takes place faster than the speed of light, an imperceptible split second before your thoughts can travel from one neuron to the next.
“Then I guess not.”
Your life is made up of all those imperceptible split seconds.
“Which means…”
Taste is a deception.
“Which means…’
All the imperceptible moments up to now have already determined whether you’re going to eat the ice cream within that bowl, which, by the way, has melted quite a bit since we first started talking.
“And I hate warm ice cream!”
There you go. You have your answer.
Your fifteen seconds of fame — three times longer! Wait, it’s just a bloody cultural war, isn’t it?
Overconsumption of hot-air-filled news articles won’t save your planet, silly people. Rather, it’s the bully pulpit of leaders that’ll end your freedom!
Russian dolls in Russia or Cyprus? No, but we hear Arnold Schwarzenegger is laughing in his soon-to-be-autonomously-Terminated sleep.
Enough with the links. Let’s get back to what the reluctant leader has to say next…
But first, we’ll leave you with this gravity nondefying video. View these photos with one eye while you half-listen to the video’s soundtrack.
Then ponder why the U.S. President is not so favourable in India after his SOTUS.
And, finally, the French know a good source of warm mineral spring water when they see it. Even if they aren’t sure whose clothes history are fashionably whose on which head of state’s family.
Well, almost the last. See, the Internet is just the offspring of VHS tapes (or is it Betamax? I forget). There’ll always be the next technology that makes stealing it so much more inviting. Right, my cadre of hackers?
Like the person said in response to this post:
Yes, I do not want to work under these conditions, and I would be happy if nobody would have to (I would also be willing to pay a premium, but most people won’t or simply can’t). Still, people come to the Foxconn (and other, worse) factories from thousands of miles, because work and payments there are still better than what they could get elsewhere. Suicide rates are lower than at US universities.
None of these companies work for Apple exclusively, they work for almost every major brand (Dell, HP, Microsoft, Toshiba, etc.). None of them does even try to change the conditions and investigate them properly. Apple does. Not saying this is enough, but it’s a start. China’s industrialization and structures match what the US and Europe had in the first half of the last century. OK, we did not commit suicide, we were shot by the Pinkerton Agency.
Enjoy our planet – it’s the only one we’ve got to use as our main home…for now.
I’ve got some profit to siphon to my hidden offshore accounts, as usual.
Au revoir!
I was told yesterday that the Rutles are getting back together and recording a new studio album. Rumour has it that they plan to name their album “Minus One for Tea – Before It Becomes Minus Two,” releasing it in either audiocassette or 8-track tape format exclusively. One band member allegedly insists that publishing the album in parlour pump organ sheet music is the only route to eternal infamy, but not necessarily success.
Also, protesters have assembled their own list of the Seven Wonders of the World:
Today I celebrate the birthday of a person dear to me so my observations of your world from 1000 years later will wait until tomorrow.
Therefore, here are your two data points and that’s it:
You get your bonus, too!;
Best comment of the day, in response to this post:
treetrunkdings 
Mildly surprised that “Do you want Scotland to be an independent country?” was chosen over Labour’s preferred “Do you want to recklessly break the Union and give everyone leprosy?”