morbid games

little oomph and i got chased off the local grade-school astroturf soccer field where we've been practicing bike riding by public health authorities who were staking the place out. little oomph had just clipped a post with a handlebar and was crying between the ground and my embrace as public health authority called to me from the far side of a car to inform me the place was closed. i comforted my child (little oomph was ok; their hand was a little sore from whacking the post) while the authority approached (to about 10 ft) and repeated it. "i wondered" i said, "we were going to read that sign over there when we got within reading distance." "the signs are posted" said the authority gesturing to no signs at all. "maybe you ought to put them on that gate we came through where there were no such signs" i didn't grumble back. no need to argue or express pique; it's a thankless job, i reasoned with myself as we left. we tried a local church nursery school. had some success, bailed a couple times, decided it was too small. so we went to a local public high school parking lot across the street from a park. there were lots of people going and coming from, traversing and gathering in the park all day. we rode unmolested in the parking lot for several hours. little oomph can bring the bike to a stop and stand there holding it with fair consistency. toward the end the child managed to get going from a standstill unassisted several times, though with some frustration. finally little oomph fell and we packed it in.

talked to mom. she wanted to read an email to me. these people mostly send me jokes, she said and read a headline "guiliani interviews dr. soandso about 100% success rate curing coronavirus -- is there really a dr. soandso?" i don't know. it sounds like a name -- waitaminute: did you say guiliani? delete that and block the sender. she read on about a 100% success rate curing coronavirus with azithromycin, and zinc. i interrupted her: did you say guiliani? she said "what is the citizen free press?" it sounds to me like one of those right-wingnut propaganda sites that wingnuts accept as news. i don't think that's a joke. i mean, there's a fine line between what we recognize as trenchant parody and what a certain portion of the population take as serious independent news. so, yeah, it is a joke. you should regard it as a joke. but it is malicious disinformation. as i understand azithromycin and hydroxy chloroquine are dangerous; she seemed to know and agree to this. as a general rule, you should make every effort to prevent anything from rudy guiliani from getting into your awareness: that stuff is bad for your mind. "oh!" she twigged, "rudy guiliani?" yes: guiliani. rudy guiliani. all he wants is to throw sand in your eyes. "i didn't realize." delete that, and tell those idiots to skip you with the bullshit disinformation in future. she agreed to delete it, but probably won't push back on her brainwashed friend, more's the pity. then -- as i often do these days -- i related a recent episode of TWiV on which a virologist who has recovered from covid-19 said he'd been treated with hydroxychloroquine, and he recovered -- after experiencing some explosive diarrhea -- but was hesitant to link them causally, "because he's a scientist." mom chuckled.

fucking guiliani, man.

little oomph and i played "coronavirus testing and contact tracing" which mama found a bit morbid (the child is 5), but i'm game to run with the imaginative play and try to infuse the sensible nonpanic of not unduly censoring the scary thing. the child also reported spending a lot of time thinking about coronavirus like everybody else, and worrying that while we're all paying attention to that disease we'll fail to be attentive to the dangers of other diseases. both mother and i, separately, explained that those measures we're taking to stay safe from coronavirus are also keeping us safe from most other transmissible diseases. but it is true that if everybody in the hospital is focused on that one emergency maybe some of the other care we count on hospitals to perform will not be available or not be as good. so we were going to do our best to stay safe and healthy and not go to the hospital.

stay safe, y'all.

hot inflation eternal recurrence and the barycenter!

long exposition (which you know or can surmise):

i haven't been much of a youtuber, until recently. you know of the long history as media-shunning luddite, and as consumer of liberated material subject to ownership claims. laggard on the mobile device and broadband, as a dialer-up, my consumption was minimal, focusing on audio for maximum value per transmitted unit of memory. i thus obtained months worth of educational books on tape of the university lectures on x, many of which i've studied or heard attentively during many long hours staring at the emails of corporate vice presidents and recognizing words.

since broadband i've discovered and consumed a bunch of video courses in the same vein, either about music (history theory personalities etc) or, broadly, cosmology: astronomy, astrophysics, relativity, big bangs, black holes, particle physics and string theory.

significant portions of the latter category were excellently reintroduced, at a somewhat superficial level but with much more recent, expensive and mind-blowing animated visualizations of more or less the same data, in neil degrasse tyson's recent reboot of carl sagan's "cosmos".  =>aside: i am dismayed by one episode of the original, and much of the reboot, for the otherwise estimable hosts' unwarranted, defensive, patronizing and didactic lectures and digs concerning subject matter beyond their domain, plausibly intending better to delineate the boundary, but tyson exhibits about as much grace as penn jilette. as to sagan, well, what else would you expect of a scorpio astronomer with a taurus ascendant and sagittarius moon, given the podium?<=

and i have toyed with tedtalks. they routinely have a high pith quotient and top-shelf a/v, ultimately, though, amount to just another channel of edutainment. sort of like much npr programming, it is deceptively deep and informative, all the while smugly bolstering the status quo and soporifically lulling one to "stay tuned" (to the exclusion of other applications of attention, obviously).

unsatisfied with my dated (everybody is really excited about what they're going to learn when the large hadron collider at cern is turned on in, like, the two thousand and oughts) material, i turned to youtube.

king wen's asymptote, or approaching the outrage singularity

Terrence McKenna used to predict something like what has come to be known as the technological singularity, but with mystical, shamanic language: not just microchips, processing power, and miniaturization, but novelty itself! He ate dimethyltryptamine, dove into obscure divinatory schema, mathemagically waved his hands around (I have not, personally, tried to follow the mathematical foundations either of the I Ching or of Timewave Zero, but have read some statisticians' criticisms) and proposed a model mapping the exponential increase in novelty, which mapped perfectly to all of the events of novelty throughout human history, provided he set its endpoint -- the point at which the line ended because the scale could no longer accommodate it, the singularity -- to December 21, 2012. I believe he offered his theory well before scholars learned to confidently read Mayan glyphs; he died in 2000. I like his novelty theory -- although I have had a hard time conceptualizing what he might mean by novelty over the years -- and his mushroom-spore panspermia theory, although I'll admit, I have not thought about him much over the years, as 2012 mania peaked and passed.

Today, contemplating a forthcoming post, I did think of him and his notion of novelty -  the thought process is pretty much right there in the post title. You see, dear Reader, one simply cannot keep up with all of the things regarding which one ought to be well-informed and perhaps even exercise a little bit of moral agency. Every day there is an outrageous atrocity: while we're discussing today's atrocity tomorrow morning, there will be three more. So, I was thinking about former blog posts I've meant to revisit, the two newest Intercept leaks that I haven't finished reading yet (I have read the stories -- keep up the good work [non-gender-normative plural signifier ("folks?" -- what, too soon?)]s! -- but haven't finished the leaked source material), other leaks from other sources in other journals, several of our president's unfortunate statements, and on ad nauseam, when a new way of thinking about the novelty singularity struck me.

I have spent all these years thinking that novelty meant new stuff, things that are new, objects that are new, ideas that are new, technologies that are new -- "new" in this sense signifying previously unprecedented -- and not really being able satisfactorily to envision anything cognizable. These are all parts of the technological singularity, but, I think, not the novelty of McKenna's theory, or my current interpretation and invocation of it. Novelty, in this sense, I propose (or, he may have), is the encroachment on an awareness by any of an infinitude of "other sides" with their many-hued grasses, which might need to be considered in addressing the initial object of awareness. I think I said it in my The Hollow Men parody here:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang [, a whimper or a war crimes tribunal
But the staid, clinical, toothless, and patently committee-authored 600 page report of The Constitution Project's independent bipartisan Task Force of eminent personages on Detainee Treatment, its Document Database, Interview Index, Transcripts and Errata, which will be read by few, credited by fewer, and influence the conduct of government and policymakers not one whit 
and then a twitter update and something something reddit
and five egregious mainstream gaffes
and a yawn
as more technical reports about new catastrophes and catastrophes we negligently have been permitting to develop for scores of years are released, by teams of esteemed and tenured experts, one upon another for our reading pleasure if we could just find
enough time]

Perhaps when I get to writing that modern interpretation of Heidegger's The Question Concerning Technology, I can try to weave in some McKennaian novelty, say, as either part of the dangerous enframing aspect of technology or as the "saving power" that grows near the poison, or, as good ol' Marty seems to like to have it, as both. Ontologically.

As you may recall, dear Reader, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has been investigating probably totally unwarranted allegations that the Central Intelligence Agency might have done some torture a decade ago, for nine years or so, and has finally produced a thorough report, which has been submitted to the subject Agency and to the White House for redaction prior to publication.

Some days ago, the story goes, an office of the white house accidentally emailed draft talking points concerning the presumably-impending publication of the report to the Associated Press. This is not the first fortuitous leak concerning this report. In related developments, you'll recall the chair of that committee loudly decrying that agency's active interference with the investigation, and that agency denying, its pride wounded at the prospect that good American people might entertain the possibility that an upright, steadfast agency such as itself might engage in such unthinkably base behavior as alleged in that senator's slander. Well, Mr. Brennan's denial was unfounded. We might, generously, credit his trying to respond to the senator's charge, notwithstanding his later-asserted ignorance of the actual ops in his shop, from the gut, from his notion as a righteous executive of how the agency ought to behave, without deigning to check. It is a best practice among the who's who of executives in the government and private sector alike.

Anyway, I noticed some errors in the proposed "Topline Messages" (see them here), and took the liberty of editing them:

The 9/11 attacks were presented as an unprecedented threat to the security of the American people. Our government and people responded in ways that were mostly superficial, reactionary, vengeful and shortsighted. The use of interrogation techniques that were contrary to our values and traditions was no mistake, but policy. We must honestly address, acknowledge, learn from and punish the perpetrators, and effectively deter any repetition. 

The fundamental facts about this program have been subject to denials, lies and obfuscation from the outset; there is no indication that this pattern of obfuscation is at all diminished now. The U.S. government makes many statements concerning the value of transparency, but stalls, blocks, resists and delays every disclosure concerning prior and ongoing malfeasance, although it has been compelled to reveal certain heavily-redacted documents related to some programs in isolated cases. 

This report is damning. Details of the report emphasize the wisdom of out national decision not to use such interrogation methods, made significantly earlier than 2001 and deliberately breached at that time by order of the highest officers of the government, but leave grave doubts concerning our access to wisdom at any time since. 

While it leaves plenty unsaid, and plenty still withheld, the report leaves no doubt that the CIA cannot be trusted, even by its boss, its oversight committee or its inspector general; the report leaves no doubt that subjecting terrorist suspects to profound pain, suffering and humiliation was an ineffective means of extracting information, about which, before 2001, there had been no sincere debate; the report leaves no doubt that the harm caused by the use of these techniques outweighed any putative benefit. 

The report tells a story of which no American is proud. But it is also part of another story of which we all can be truly ashamed: America's democratic system was deliberately subverted by demagogues in its highest offices fostering hysteria and cultivating venal brutality as matters of policy, and it is not clear whether that damage can be repaired, whether any failsafes might be installed (such as, say removing faulty parts), or whether our core democratic values can be salvaged.  

These interrogation methods were debated in our free media -- "should Jack Bauer pound the balls of that swarthy suspect or not?"; challenged in our independent courts -- mostly unavailingly due to the transparency of state secrets; and, a mere four years after they began, restricted by an act of Congress. Only seven years later, presidential candidates agreed that torture is wrong, about which, before 2001, there had been no sincere dispute.  

The American people have agreed with President Obama's executive order banning torture and cruel treatment of detained persons, and revoking prior inconsistent executive directives, orders and regulations to the extent inconsistent with that order, because it was long overdue, and the American people have entertained no sincere debate on the question since significantly earlier than 2001.  

America still looks like a hypocritical bully, but one that is generous to its friends: it can champion whatever it presumes to and the world and language will more or less accommodate its depredations. Our democratic system is struggling with the entrenched interests of its own immense administrative and security apparatus, as well as the all the instruments of modern propaganda bent to the will of the masters of capital. Our Congress spent nine years researching and developing this report notwithstanding consistent harassment by the agency subject to the investigation, and the Obama administration strongly supported its declassification and heavy redaction in that spirit. This report will help the American people understand what happened in the past, so that the CIA can keep doing whatever it is up to these days free of the potentially censorious attention of the electorate.

It has, since, developed that the leaked talking points seem to have deflected and diluted some of the Brennan impact, and provided our president an opportunity to channel his predecessor in office right there on the camera, as grave and unfortunate an utterance as ever an American president has made, delivered with tin ear, absent affect and an impious litany of decontextualizing irrelevancies.

It has also developed that publication of the report may be further delayed because that senator finds the CIA's proposed redactions to "eliminate or obscure key facts." So, overall, it is good that Mr. Obama did not try to float that whole transparency chestnut from the original draft.

Also, I have been listening to a reading of Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson on YouTube, because I have finished watching All of Television, and am just about done reading the Internet. It is easier to listen to than it was to read.

the tree

Dear Reader, you may have noted my previous allusion to a magnificent tree.



Two visitors with arboreal and horticultural authority greater than mine have tentatively identified it as a silver maple, and my cursory consultation of tree-identifying resources on the internet has not undermined them.

During my sister and brood's visit in the region for a recent holiday, they all piled into the Suburban and, appropriately, came over to check out the new digs.

As we stood idly appreciating the back yard, the question of the tree's age arose, my brother-in-law imagining it might be a certifiably Revolutionary War-era tree. We were all aware that a tree's age could be determined by cutting it down and counting its rings. Somebody pined aloud for the availability of an information resource that might describe non-destructive methods of estimating the age of trees, and then they piled back into the Suburban to head (again, appropriately) over to the other in-laws' for the feast.

a mordant mordent

"Why make things more tense than they already are?"

she said and then
she threw back her head
and laughed like everybody
was doing it

and suddenly, uncomfortably
everybody was

with phalanges like these . . .

to win fluences

102 word submission on who or what influenced my direction in life as requested by alumni magazine editors for the spring issue via alumni affairs mass e-mail, unprinted.

The two influences that most fix my position, as a hungry,

variously-credentialed vortex of statistics and transactions with

the capacity to

generate and move capital

in American modernity, are

the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution,

by operation of which, over the past century,

(we the)

citizens have been rendered mere

consumers in the language of policy, and

Advertising, which gives

(we the)

consumers the miracle of perspective, teaching us

how to evaluate the relative merits of things

and be free. Hallelujah!

Existentially, an agent of doubt, I’m influenced

by Saturn, Neptune

and Mercury; politically: Uranus. Thanks for

the opportunity to share.

gotcher privacy policy anjer privacy policy

Amidst all the hoopla about the Google Services' new unified privacy policy, the Electronic Frontier Foundation offers How to Remove Your Google Search History Before Google's New Privacy Policy Takes Effect.

Related anecdote: Since I emigrated from the land of Lud and attained an electronic tether, I have tried to accommodate most of my wonted reading of the Internet by subscribing to feeds using the Google Reader utility on my mobile device. Using that utility on that device, I saw this post from Metafilter about that EFF Search-History-clearing post. But, although I could open the Metafilter post in Google Reader, I could not follow the link to the EFF, either directly or through a new window. When I simply tried to open a new window, Safari glitched. I'm sure there is an innocuous explanation.

Also related, the White House yesterday unveiled an aspirational set of principles -- to protect the individual privacy rights of consumers and "give users more control over how their information is handled" -- in a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights. (Consumers and users, note; not citizens or people)

Read Consumer Data Privacy in a Networked World here. (.pdf)

seven ways of looking at a [redacted]

much of what i know
about how little i know
i learned in his sphere

cut class to play chess
where's the black queen? if it was
up your butt you'd know

those authorities --
did you whip an egg at 'em?
whatever. later.

i have never seen
anyone pass out with his
eyes open but [him]

and, need i mention
the absurdly tumescent
half-ounce-a-pop joints?

and all the music
genre-bending bric-a-brac
and stinky, the cat!*

what the fuck is that!?!
strong walls make better housemates
WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT!?!

hellmark welcomes guest author, Badgun

The S&P Downgrade?

The country was a-shock, aghast, and agog this month, with the S&P “downgrade” of the US and its capability to discharge its debts – i.e., pay its creditors.

WOW! First time in history!

How could they do that??? It’s unconscionable! It’s un-American! And it’s untrue that there is any probability that the U.S. can’t honor (pay) its debts.

S&P is supposed to be looking at risk – risk of non–payment - so how could they possibly have reached the conclusion that there is any risk of non-payment of U. S. Government-owed debt? Did they make a multi-billion dollar error in their computations, as the White House and the Treasury Dept. hastily (and loudly) trumpeted?[1] There is little risk that we might ever be unable to pay our debts was the message. And that may well be (probably is, at least forseeably) true.

So! How could S&P possibly reach its conclusion?

Could it be because we told them so?

if only there were a way to find out

When we came to a factual dispute among our many long conversations, as a good friend and I do as regularly as we get together, we used to wager one six-pack of beer -- which party's preference controlled the particular type of beer may, at times, have been part of the wager, too, but I recall a six-pack of budweiser as the standard, like that kilogram in France.

Sometimes one of us would win, sometimes the other. It didn't matter, for we meant to drink that six-pack together; in such cases the purpose of the bet was served: to provide the occasion for more conversation to spawn fresh dispute generating new bets and so still more fora for more discussion debate dispute wager beer and . . . research (. . . and so on)!

But, as often as not, dear reader, it would turn out that our question was poorly phrased, which is to say that the point upon which our dispute had arisen represented our shared (or divergent) error with respect to or mutual ignorance of the subject at hand.

w.r.t. Malcolm X: where Marable's poems at?

[maybe this would add good contrast first - ed.]

Amiri Baraka wants to know where Marable's poems at:



(cf:

)

'k bye!

Once, a woman I had been seeing long enough to breach some of our cultural body taboos called me while I was studying. “Hi,” she said. “How are you?”

There were several volleys of the basic small talk exchange formula, then another salvo was voiced, with a change in tone that made my hair stand up, made my solar plexus sink in alarm: “What are you doing?”

By syntax, this should be just normal “fine, thanks, and you?” territory, but something in her tone made me stand up and go to the window of my darkened bedroom, replying “reading,” as I walked. Maybe it was the sound of traffic outside my window, faintly audible in delayed stereo over the phone line.

Straight out of film noir, I stood to the edge of the window, out of the wash of light and line of sight of the street, and kinked sufficient space in one of the plastic venetian slats to peer through.

“I see you,” I told her, “or, rather, your car.”

bibliomantic branks

In that part of my home where I entertain guests, or lounge on my own, books tend to accumulate. There is always, of course, the dictionary, probably the most frequently handled tome in my home, recourse to which is common in the course of just hanging out conversing. In addition to that are some of those books loaned by friends, and whatever reference books or citation sources may have recently been consulted. Lately, these have included the Viking "The Portable Nietzsche" and an edition of the Hagakure, and, for a couple weeks, Aleister Crowley's Book of Lies.

I mention the Nietzsche and Hagakure, particularly, because they have been my touchstones for the occasional rite of bibliomancy.

Have I intimated my interest in numinous lore before? (I have, Dear Reader, but ask that more or less rhetorically). Bibliomancy is the practice of divination by the chance-mediated selection of a passage of a text. (It is, to some degree, an influence on the author's notions of destructive writing). The classic (and classical?) example is the I Ching, oft' described as "the Chinese Book of Changes," and a principal text of Confucian culture, which may (but needn't) be consulted for divination by "casting the yarrow stalks" or throwing coins to determine the relevant passage.

As the word denoting the practice might imply, the Bible is another not-uncommon source text.

A pithy passage or aphorism from either of those books on my floor might spawn hours of fascinating conversation, contemplation, or the sequence of associations leading to a novel insight on some heretofore-insoluble issue; Nietzsche and the Hagakure (it is attributed to Yamamoto Tsunetomo) offer the would-be bibliomancer writings characterized by frequent brief aphoristic structure, yielding the chance of lots of meaning with little time spent actually reading.

the world peace game

kids say the darnedest things when they're livin' what sun tzu wrote.

with recommendations like these . . .

[circa 2003]

Dear [Director of Admissions] –

The following letter of recommendation, in support of Kaye Sarahson’s candidacy for admission to L'Université des Arts Culinaires, comes from an admittedly strange perspective. I have been her friend for about 12 years and also her coworker for about 2.5 of those. I will try to depict some aspects of this long relationship that I, as a writer and law student, imagine relevant to your appraisal of candidates, including her longstanding interest in and passion for cooking and feeding her friends and her ability to manage a staff striving to accomplish complex tasks in chaotic circumstances. In brief, Kaye is smart, a good manager, effective and reliable under pressure; she is also avidly and actively cultivating her knowledge, skill, repertoire and apparent talent for culinary arts. I hope you will bear with my somewhat rambling review, and thank you in advance for reading this letter and considering my friend’s application.

lectures from Radio New Zeland!

A modest sampling:

Galileo Lectures - The mystery of the first stars

Brainstorm Interviews - Neuromancing

Smart Talk Panel Discussions - Innovation and (Economy, Food, Education)

Talking Heads Lectures - Language, Memory, Continuity

Darwin Lectures - The storytelling ape

E = mc² Lectures - Einstein

Martin Lord Rees' view of the impending future

Sir Paul Nurse discusses two notions of creavolution

and a lot more! Listen listen listen, learn learn learn.

(see also)

Separately, in other news, Thomas Breuer says nuclear power is not compatible with democracy, insofar as democracy requires open societies, which, in turn, cannot provide the level of security that the magnitude of the uninsurable risk presented by operation of a nuclear reactor demands, while Michio Kaku seems to get a little . . . schadenfreude-y . . . whilst predicting doom (and hawking his new book of near futurism).

overheard in boy talk hell

i don't do too much overheard in boy talk hell. no doubt, as a result of millennia of patriarchal tradition, boy talk hell is kind of just normative generalized small talk, though it may still veer into decidedly men-are-gearhead-nerds-from-mars realms, as with the popular notions of fishing, the barbecue, power tools and spectator sports.

but today in boy talk hell, one party said to another party, "everybody objects to paying their taxes," and, with a pointed pause pregnant with contempt, "except you." (one of the many "everybody . . . but you" statements used by said party to said other in today's boy talk hell), and i had to look (once more) at my little prototype "do not cast your pearls before swine"-sign as i turned to engage...

that magical time ("i hate")

dear reader - we come again to that special time of the year -- mardi gras has passed (and les bon temps have rouler-ed), daylight is being actively saved ('though this writer does not quite understand how, or why, we would try to save it without first deploying a bunch of photovoltaic gear), and the kids are shaping up for spring break -- when the typically-disparate conversational miasmas of girl talk hell and boy talk hell tend to topically converge, and all talk everywhere is of that sport, and that league, and those schools once again.

wherever you are, i hope you either share (and enjoy) the mania or have sufficient insulation.

the 440hz rule

some guy sitting near me -- in my cluster of potluck supper table workstations -- a project ago or so asked me "what's going on in that mind of yours while you're sitting there silent for so long?"

i told him: "you know how mama always said 'if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all'? i'm doing that."