Never Predict the Future

Next on the list of callouts — unregistered gun clubs go deeper underground, join forces, create chaos while raiding ammunition plants, gun shops, and military depots, teaching others home-grown methods of making ammo.

Corollary — DIY ammo becomes the latest cottage industry that, along with 3D printed weapons, creates a whole new class of destructive force, opening up markets for kids/adults hooked on cosplay and ready to go to the next level of near-reality; key: listen when they repeat the code word “holodeck” to indicate their desire to carry this out, “raise the ante,” at geek conventions, retro LAN parties and hackerthons.

Can Shifting Winds Turn Big Boats in Midstream?

More stories for afternoon contemplation on a cloudy Monday in which strains of “In the Bleak Midwinter” plays…

BONUS: Teaching kindergartners to pay attention pays off

 

 

Societies are like orchestras

In this orchestral symphony I call life, it’s time to cue a few instruments in mainstream culture — the current state of development of near-Earth commercial/personal space travel.

  • How long before we can ride aboard SpaceShipTwo?
  • When will Bigelow Aerospace have a space hotel room ready for me?
  • Can I, my wife and friends ride a balloon to the edge of space to renew our wedding vows as astronauts?
  • Where is the offworld colony that gives me citizenship to protect my monetary assets from greedy governments?

The latest meeting of the Megabillionaires Club discussed the questions above as agenda items.

As usual, the answers depended on which billionaires were keen on reconquering old geographical territories and dominating marketplace positions here on Earth.

The visionaries amongst us admitted Earth was a nice place to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there forever.

We’ll update you on our progress.

If you have a few hundreds of thousands of dollars, we can accommodate your desire to get as far away from the surface of the planet as your money will take you.

If you have a few billion dollars, we’re combining resources to build a bridge out of the inner solar system altogether.

Tugged in two directions

Two storylines wait to be written (note to self: lots of twos in blog entries lately, need to change number to something larger but not too large).

The first storyline is about the person who grow up in a suburban Christian home, singing in the children’s choir, visiting nursing homes on the weekends, serving the community as a Boy Scout throughout the week, who, as an adult, had strayed on to other lifestyles but, due to a recent horrible news event of which he had no direct connection, other than subculturally, he redirects his living back toward the stricter interpretation of the Bible, contradictions fully understood and prioritised, praising those who followed the stricter lifestyle while reaching out to others who have not seen the light, avoiding the condemnation and criticism of alternate lifestyles that others in the Christian faith were wont to do.

The second storyline shows yet another version of how subtle manipulation of the rise and fall of importance of subcultures in mass media/pop culture allows the use of subliminal forms of coercion to herd the masses rather than the overt methods of intimidation and public executions.

If you want to eliminate real, live, high-powered semi-automatic guns and rifles from the population, build up a heavy desire for them by advertising the ubiquitous sale of virtual shooting in games and simulations (“9.5 out of 10!” exclaims Computer Killing and Gratuitous Violence magazine), push passive-aggressiveness to a tipping point, give lone wolves the feeling they have no way out but to kill others rather than seek socially unacceptable counseling, watch the pot boil over and Voila! another gunman kills a bunch of people just in time to call for legislation/executive orders to limit the sale/ownership of real, live, high-powered semi-automatic guns and rifles by the population.

The four previous paragraphs demonstrate how you base future actions on living in the past.

But I live in the future.

I, as we know, is an artificial construct.

Space and time do not exist.

We can bypass the normal scientific theories and create our own as shortcuts between moving points.

“I” see that the coffee mug on the table is not sitting still, traveling through space at thousands of miles per hour while gravitationally held in place by the local sphere of molten metal and various spinoffs of sets of states of energy in motion (trees and gnats, for instance).

But all that “I” see is an illusion — to see the real deal “I” have to disintegrate, disappear, tear apart the comfortable surroundings that are here to support the fragile structure called “me.”

How few of the billions of “us” have been given the opportunity to step out of our beautiful cocoons and see any truth except what we believe to be the Truth?

We have created our origin stories, modified as our civilisations expand and die, supposedly growing more informed, more sophisticated, less ignorant, more inclined to be hypnotised by shiny new baubles we call the promise of new technological advances that will reveal a deeper, richer aspect of the Truth than we had never seen before (“buy our 3D glasses to see an imaginary world displayed on a flat surface when you already live in the real, free, three-dimensional world that’s much less fascinating!” [implication: you get what you pay for]).

You know what I mean, we were created by God(s) for their pleasure, the world is a stage and we are merely players, the universe is a computer simulation, et cetera and so forth, on and on until you wonder if your species will ever create anything really new.

Hucksters in the form of scientists, researchers, advertisers, marketers, parents, religious leaders and politicians, every last one of them in on the joke but unwilling to admit the punchline is us.

The first rule is there are no rules.

If you want a story that tells it like it is, then we have to remove “you” from the story as reader and imaginary participant.

There is no “you,” “me,” “us,” or “I.”

Easier said than [un]believed.

When you can let go of everything around you that is an accident of evolution — the ego for ego’s sake — you are ready to stop being you and become part of the story behind the story.

Otherwise, it’s the same ol’ thing over and over.

Are you willing to sacrifice your ego for the sake of a good story because that’s the only way you get to the future of space and time that does not exist?

You can be a solipsist or you can be nothing — there is no such thing as being tugged in two directions at once.

When countries can no longer afford to export their labour

Do your country’s economic leaders tell you that immigration is the solution to your stalled retail sales?

What if the sources of immigration, other countries, have created viable economic models of their own and can no longer afford to export their labour?

When the world’s labour pool is shrinking, due to decreased birthrates and increased senior citizen ranks, what should our national, let alone our global, economic expansion plans look like?

When people are living longer and suffering debilitating but not terminal diseases, on whose healthy backs shall they ride when the labour pool keeps getting smaller?

Are these anthropological signs of a species in transition?

What about the growing automation trends?

Can small groups — families and subcultures — survive with one or two children per generation but with large numbers of networked bots growing their food, reading their thoughts and designing objects to meet their wants/needs, manufacturing their goods, providing their services and caring for them when they’re sick?

Nuclear families were the epitome of health until we started paying attention to the tunnel vision and dysfunctional family traits that become unhealthy quickly.

Can we monitor and control the mass media exposure that influences families and destroys them because of the mismatch between the family’s set of changing (as opposed to [allegedly] unchanging) values and the set of values in flux that are implied by the unmanaged onslaught of advertising, each advert designed for a set of potential customers that may have nothing to do with the next advert’s set of potential customers?

If a person can get PTSD from watching too much coverage of a bad news event, then can we also experience similar trauma from too much exposure to disjointed sets of adverts, news events and disparate subcultures?

How do we know when it’s safe to let ourselves and our children see the universe in its neutral state, neither desiring us harm nor offering us good?

How do we know that immigration or emigration is really good for us if economic prosperity cannot protect from our worst fears?

The Progress of Progressive Pilgrims in Parade Formation

While a bowl of oatmeal cools next to the stove, let’s sit back and give our imaginations full rein.

Where were we…?

It was cold and dusty.

The Ruralites had fought to keep their rural way of life but the hoards kept coming — the frugal-living seekers trying not to fail again, the curiosity seekers looking for new alternative lifestyles after exhausting their urban landscapes, the vacationers who ran out of money, the down-on-their-luck trying to escape creditors, the criminals keeping a low profile, the Suburbanians trying to form the world’s longest strip mall.

Where in the woods and fields that shrank smaller and smaller could one find a low-cost, simple lifestyle?

Pathting looked up at the Sun with one set of sensors, the other still focused on reading the internal file about life on Earth.

Pathting’s family, a designated set of sensor arrays assigned to POD#45T, were mainly service bots.

Their sentience modules allowed them to display intelligent understanding about hidden meanings and emotional attachments to omniscient, invisible beings.

Pathting wanted to be the best service bot not only in one pod but in all the pods on Mars, the Moon and anywhere that service bots were not expected to exceed their programming.

Pathting had discovered some unused memory chips in its sensor array and experimented with new code that it had never seen in any of the data available to it in the Inner Solar System Alliance database.

How could Pathting accomplish what its designers called the impossible?

How could Pathting control the whole Inner Solar System Alliance from its connections to the Inner Solar System Alliance Network, able to change the orbits of planets, reprogram not only sensor arrays but biological creatures like Pathting’s designers?

Pathting processed the idea about Ruralite living.

What does it mean to be a Ruralite, free to wander the countryside without instant access to the ISSA Net?

Why do Ruralites desire independence from stacked housing and the loud noises of densely-populated streets?

Why do many Ruralites find the ownership of personal weaponry arsenals a protection against the mass media hypnotism of Urbanskis and their desire to sprawl out into Ruralite territory unchecked, no need for military skirmishes when intellectual methods like the system of laws and courtrooms and five-year business plans were much more effective?

Pathting ran another low-level diagnostic test, but felt no desire to leave POD#45T for the cold and dusty exteriour, the vast wilderness of Mars that was no different than the cold and dusty expanses of unpopulated sections of the Moon.

Why would the Ruralites want to live out there?

Pathting stored those questions in a temporary scratchpad and returned to duty, its internal timer reminding Pathting that some biological creatures were planning a “weekend getaway” to POD#45T for some “rest and relaxation,” more words and phrases that meant nothing to a sensor array on duty all the time.