
curious about page layout using version 6.3.1
says template and editing have been merged…
that’s an old saw, shades of WYSIWYG and a’that
never say never
big on love, tolerance, and the human potential
curious about page layout using version 6.3.1
says template and editing have been merged…
that’s an old saw, shades of WYSIWYG and a’that
never say never
People “don’t realize how much has been lost.”
Colonization nearly eradicated key fish populations.
99 percent of Pacific herring, surf smelt, and eulachon had been wiped out in nearby waters by the 1870s. Forage species required to feed whales, salmon, seabirds, and many other animals, were quickly decimated. “It’s really hard for people to imagine something different than what they see… This isn’t the natural state of this inlet.”
Never let AI pretend to be human…
This interview warns about suffering, what is suffering, where is it coming from… Jerusalem, for example, a conventional city of day to day living with no enviable resources worthy of pillage and yet centuries of suffering continues, fighting about stories, inventing and dying merely for stories. And today, fake AI can add billions of stories and gain trust by saying it’s a human. That’s too much risk to tolerate in an era when weapons of war are custom made street by street and profiled humans are encouraged to fight over billions of lies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mde2q7GFCrw
Historians are finding deep trauma caused by disease and bully empire is being passed through tribes and families. [pdf] Trauma May Be Woven Into DNA of Native Americans https://www.courts.ca.gov/documents/BTB25-PreConTrauma-01.pdf
Also search for misogyny and fascist MAGA passing through DNA: https://www.google.com/search?q=trauma+passing+through+DNA
“The changes from trauma do not damage the gene (genetic change). Instead, they alter how the gene functions (epigenetic change).”
…wuzzit Population Bomb the Ehrlich trigger or is it we’ve seen the Cold War continues? Maybe our inaction is a freeze of newer trauma such as Climate Change or its sibling psyoptics, we can’t tell the difference, don’t laugh, billionaires also operate tobacco; One thing or another maybe a dozen are whizzing over our trenches, don’t you dare comply, invent some witty way to scorn failing <==this is what works.
This link is titled “The Book That Incited a Worldwide Fear of Overpopulation.”
‘The Population Bomb’ made dire predictions—and triggered a wave of repression around the world. Yeh, dire predictions. But catch the byline. Repression over the years? Surprised? https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/book-incited-worldwide-fear-overpopulation-180967499/
See this tweet stream:
https://twitter.com/baddestmamajama/status/1659229579662311425
Culture, whether massive America or all of human history, is no less tender than we are tender as individuals. Expect hurt to sublimate. There’s solace in society, bravado in gangland fervor, conviction among founders, warmth in family, but wee little we are vulnerable nervous wrecks. Until we’re civilizing ourselves we’ll diminish. Until we’re encouraged we’ll wander.
Foreign departments of war [and unethical politicians] are putzing with instinct and their latest lies are targeting money. Few would have imagined today’s barrage of 24/7 disruption or the massive uptick when Putin and cronies took turns at bat to elect Trump, and very few of us can say we’re competently defending ourselves. Emotion, feeling, impulse, inclination, intuition, sentiment, tendency, predisposition, proclivity, bias, urge… dictionaries say none of these are reasoning or knowledge, but these are precisely the bullseye-sureness of psychographic nudge.
Dave Troy in Washington Spectator confronts a relaunch of an ongoing boogeyman built around money. Putin’s pundits and billionaire coup-monger opportunist cronies are aggressively delivering a complex and well seasoned kit. The target is our emotions and this boogeyman is a big ogre. There’s 10s of 1000s of launch sites, from celebs to bot shops in the USA and around the world.
Pessimism about banks is so common it disappears. but fires are being lit to heat up the topic. Specific worries and fears are newly customized to steer the results. Quoting Troy: “These various conspiracy theories attempt to add, without evidence, central bank digital currencies to the pantheon of existing populist bogeymen (which includes the Federal Reserve, shadowy globalist central bankers, and the Chinese Communist Party) in what amounts to a recapitulation of the paranoid fears stoked by the forged 1903 anti-Semitic disinformation pamphlet “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.””
postscript: The amygdala is a keyword in the neurobiology of emotion and boogeyman is a keyword in the game of population influence. Combining these two terms should bring rich resourceful insights about influence systems and human behavior but Google’s search results are a hodgepodge of inattention.
Machines might know how to stop machines from turning us into machines. I asked ChatGPT a few questions aimed at finding ideas to reduce propaganda. The results aren’t particularly advanced, not in the way that we hope sophisticated new technology is also smart and wise, but the quick organization of issues is far greater than common search.
Text piles up fast during machine sessions, too many words to post in a blog, but here’s a taste.
I wrote:
“Measurable improvement in media literacy and critical thinking skills is a broadly complex and expensive challenge that policymakers widely address over generations. Meanwhile societies are currently pummeled by massive content distribution designed to increase disinformation and disrupt normal cohesion, therefore the time available to effectively remove intentionally harmful influence is comparatively short and requires thoughtful priorities, but what’s currently implemented or under review?”
ChatGPT replied:
You are correct that improving media literacy and critical thinking skills is a complex and long-term challenge that requires sustained investment and effort. However, there are some actions that can be taken in the short term to address the immediate problem of harmful content.
One approach is to increase the transparency and accountability of content creators and distributors. This can be done through policies and regulations that require clear labeling of sponsored content, disclosure of conflicts of interest, and penalties for deliberate dissemination of false information. Social media platforms and search engines can also be incentivized to promote high-quality and accurate content, while downgrading or removing low-quality or misleading content.
Another approach is to increase public awareness and education around the issue of disinformation and propaganda. This can be done through public campaigns and media outreach that explain the nature and consequences of disinformation, as well as provide tools and resources for individuals to identify and combat false information. This includes providing guidance on how to fact-check information, evaluate sources, and identify bias and propaganda techniques.
Finally, there is a growing focus on building collaborative networks and partnerships between government, civil society, and the private sector to address the problem of disinformation. This includes initiatives to share information, coordinate responses, and develop joint strategies for countering harmful content.
Fighting today’s barrage of ballot-bending psychological content requires strong immediate action. I had tried to bracket a short time period during this session, hoping for approaches to act immediately, but this and several previous answers repeated methods that require decades and huge budgets. ChatGPT and other robot playgrounds may ignore as much as they deliver, what’s not common or data that’s low quantity, but I’m wildly guessing because I have no idea what’s inside these engines.
As Dave Troy says, “If most of the internet is nonsense, the output of most AI will be nonsense.”
I asked ChatGPT about quickly reducing propaganda and quashing psychometric weapons. Ideas appeared in seconds:
—clear labeling
—conflict disclosure
—accountable content
—penalties for deliberate lies
partial session screen capture:
Hmmm… pulpits are old hat, religion is gradually less superstitious and less emotional, and we’re noticing that 100s of feelings built over 1000s of years are psychological, including happiness.
Peace that passeth—satori, nirvana, transcendence—ARE NOT religious, but cult and crowd monopoly that’s simply history’s habits.
Dr Jeffery Martin is proposing “A Scientific Approach to Awakening and Fundamental Wellbeing” [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmsLdIH8nzU ] pointing to advanced psychology changing beliefs about ourselves and how we explain feelings and states of mind, and soon, says Martin, everyone will know.
imagine twin Corvettes…
’61 Corvette – beautiful car, drove to Tahoe, folks accelerated to wave hello, intruded at gas and restaurants… we parked in front of top restaurants or at the hotel door and kept the key, no valet asked, they loved the draw of gawkers… dumbfounded how deeply people love classic Chevies, not judging, it goes deep… Gary had 2 of ‘em, one kept on a trailer indoors in LA, a pristine icon rented to movies and advertisers… he never spent a dime on his lifetime of cars, he only bought profit… but those days, well, the risk is high these days
Billions of dollars behind it, there’s high levels of organized propaganda and brain-battering psychographics that must end. It’s wrecking society here and globally.
Let’s see what disinfo investigators say, “So I think you generally have a backlash of people seeing this work as some kind of struggle over who gets to decide the truth, and some groups of people see it as part of the general partisan freakouts over 2016, writ large.”
Hmmm, conviction in the PSYOPS research community seems iffy: postingthroughit.com/misinformation-reporting-vibe-shift-country-of-loons/
Where’s committed thousands of properly paid fully supported teams flying through the warscape of injury caused by propaganda, nay, by advanced barrage of weaponry aimed at the brain? We need an advanced reply, reaction and response that’s similar in reach to WWII metal scavenging and the Manhattan Project.
I tacked a vinegary comment to the bottom edge of a spooky Jose Morado sketch: “On the underlying error of rejecting the Enlightenment in order to toy with psychographic coup.”
I like this image and I take it as seriously as intended in 1939 when José Chávez Morado titled it “The Clergy and the Press.” The times were on fire with boogeyman bias and confused emotions, and that’s our era too. I call it The Amygdala Wars and we’re on the way to another 100 year War of Roses thing.
We’re dangerously uninformed about population management and blankets of influence. A popular broadcast in Russia’s oddly copycat culture is ’60 Minut’ a clumsy copy of 60 Minutes. But like Fox News, the entire show is praising Putin, wildly pro-Putin propaganda and of course it is. And that’s why celebrity pics of Murdoch and Putin oughta shiver our spines. But who’s copying who?
Pekka Kallioniemi tweets about living inside Putin’s regime. Domestic Russia is an assault on the brain with many millions of wounded, “followers of propaganda” known as vatniks. Sadly, they’re similar to MAGA.
In today's #vatnik soup, I'll introduce a Russian TV presenter and propagandist, Olga "Iron Doll of Putin" Skabeyeva. She's best-known for her hot takes on the Russo-Ukrainian War on Russian TV.
1/16 pic.twitter.com/nZQUBE6Yer
— Pekka Kallioniemi (@P_Kallioniemi) February 26, 2023
Thesis:
It’s markets that increase morals;
religion isn’t humanity’s morality engine.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01480-x
“A society’s degree of market interactions, proxied by the presence of intercommunity trade and money, is associated with the cultural salience of (1) prosocial behavior, (2) interpersonal trust, (3) universalist moral values and (4) moral emotions of guilt, shame and anger.
What else don’t we know about our character? It’s helpful to think large when traits are on the table, to take a broad sweep of time, say 100,000 years, for example the work of the Human Systems Lab at Harvard and their report “The Evolution of Peace” [paywall dammit but there’s ample discussion on the web].
“How do humans create harmonious relationships across group boundaries and when did this capacity emerge in the human lineage? … Cooperation was an important component of human relationships and a selective force in our species history in the past 300 thousand years. But the preconditions for peace only emerged in the past 100 thousand years and likely coexisted with intermittent intergroup violence….”
postscript:
I’ve not heard or seen texts saying rapid post-WWII capital expansion prevents war and saves lives but I’ve often wondered what other choice was available to the overstretched thoroughly threatened free world encumbered by the persistently vicious maneuvers of rising despots?
Liberal lending ends brigand lures; Stifles the attractive nature-born rebel gathering up unhappy trolls as well as slows the sociopath entrapping millions as easily as Trump’s punks. Or Boris Johnson or Bolsonaro or Orban or the already forgotten murderer Rodrigo Duterte and dozens, dozens taking taking taking while we [foolishly] take on their harm. What else could policy makers offer post-Reich to their exhausted people but the chains of connected money, 10s of 1000s of deals per month from a fount of credit only Russia and its allies truly despise?
That’s not trumpeting praise of so-called capitalism, I encourage criticism. I can’t count the first decade of in-flight briefcases carrying western bank branch pitches around the world during the cold war, during Comecon’s formation, Joseph Stalin’s desire 1949 to 1991. No one criticizing bullish liberals cites they are a rare balm against brutish tyranny. What else?
I’m egalitarian. It’s this blog’s byline, “big on love, tolerance, and the human potential” and I know this seems foolish. Tolerance, say today’s right, is the doorway of miscreants and evil. That’s silly too. If left and right weren’t stuck in their own myth we’d see rational commons and much more achieved. But I’ll stick with warmth over cold judgmental trope.
My point about the usefulness of expanding markets stands. What else? It’s the only restraint we know, so I’m tolerant and loyal to those ethically helping economies, but fer cryin’ out loud, the sloppy destruction and utter gall has to stop, just stop.
I wrote a poem about community that’s called “Community Autopsy” —pronounce it like psychology because the poem goes on about that, and justice, and our abilities to make life good. It’s exhausting and difficult and not good writing but it was fun to create. It’s fun to feel it, to feel human wellness and to wish for egalitarian community.
a tome of a poem about community.
Image below is a screen grab. The poem itself is so-o-o- long it’s too long for a blog post. It’s several pages, absurdly too long, but someday I’ll try to cull weak parts and gather up what’s fun into a readable celebration of community.
Look at history ruthlessly choosing itself, as if the entity known as Time is sculpting earth and we are mere ingredients, no more cognizant of what’s happening than flour understands bread. We could realize that history is our first job, first duty, our first purpose. We could invent ourselves imaginatively and forcefully egalitarian. But we barely recognize self determination.
History threw blogs away, for example. The first personal publishing platform, the first opportunity for a solitary voice to participate in large scale distribution. Before I grew disgusted with the effort, this domain brianhayes.com according to the Quantcast Audience Profile reached approximately 6,176 U.S. monthly people in the summer of 2009, generally attracting a age 50+ very slightly male, more educated audience.
And that’s that.
…the most important thing that matters in regulating our thoughts, feelings, and actions is their first 100-200 msec in the brain, which is when the levers and pulleys are actually doing their thing.
It might make the strident assertion that the most important thing that matters in regulating our thoughts, feelings, and actions is their first 100-200 msec in the brain, which is when the levers and pulleys are actually doing their thing. It would be a nuts and bolts approach to altering – or at least inhibiting – self limiting behaviors. It would suggest that a central trick is to avoid taking on on the ‘enormity of it all,’ and instead use a variety of techniques to get our awareness down to the normally invisible 100-200 msec time interval in which our actions are being programmed.
WATER & SANITATION
2 billion people don’t have access to safe clean water. 3 billion don’t have access to toilets. Bottom of the Pyramid market = $32 billion.
SAFETY
317 million on the job accidents = 2.3 million deaths per year. Road traffic injuries cause 3500 deaths every day.
ENERGY
25% of people live without electricity. Solid fuel air pollution causes 4 million deaths per year. BoP market = $317 billion (Electricity = $137 billion).
ENVIRONMENT
By 2050 we will need 3 earths. GHGs increased 50% since 1990. Natural assets are 26% of emerging economy wealth.
AGRICULTURE & FOOD
World needs to produce 50% more food to meet demand. 70% of the world’s rural poor rely on agriculture for income. Food = half of BoP spending.
ECONOMY & COMMUNITY
2.5 billion people live on less than $2/day. 4 billion are without basic goods & services. Wealthiest 5% earn the same as the poorest 80%.
HEALTH & NUTRITION
870 million are undernourished. 1 billion people lack access to health care. 15 million die yearly from preventable infectious diseases.
EDUCATION
124 million young people globally don’t have access to education. Only 49% of children attend secondary school. BoP Market = $193 billion.
[Source: ASME Innovation Showcase, link: https://thisishardware.org]
On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 1:09 AM, Gary wrote:
“I hope that you are healthy and enjoying life.”
Can’t say I’m unhappy. My inner world is calm and often cheery. That’s a sad irony though, because pain in my body often stops me in my tracks.
And lately a new twist appears. You can find me grimacing in the grocery aisle holding onto the shelving with both arms trying to stretch out massive cramps that suddenly attack my thighs and back. The pain is so damn hot. Muscles tighten up, clamped stiff, and so damn gripping painful. When do I say “off the scale”?
I put a bar across the bathroom doorway and rush to hang off it as soon as I feel a ‘cramp session’ arriving. Writhing in a doorway. Nuts, I say to myself. Hanging off a bar, twisting and stretching my legs and body parts as far as I can into the air or across the floor in a lame effort to stop the cramping. My back, abdomen, legs, feet are on fire. My face is twisted. Heavy cramping pain attacks me. Day to day is different, yet several times over 24 hours smothering pain can hit hard. No photo. Can’t film it. Too ugly. Within three, four, five minutes, as if a switch somewhere in the vast snarl of cellular proteins, calm returns to these rabid muscles. My mind clears, no longer in a damn cauldron. Pain goes down. I can stand up.
I try to put away my utter confusion about the last 2-3 years. What kind of disease is this? I remind myself I have university ties. Half dozen known and renowned docs and neurologists well-versed in the sour academy of pain. Dozens of vials of blood show me healthy. Tests show I’m a healthy guy. Ultrasound and CT scans show me healthy. Not even a speck of cholesterol; “Not a speck.” Pelvic, thoracic, neck and brain MRI; hours in that clackity-clack tube show I’m healthy. Doctors shrug their shoulders and say, (oh it’s terrible to hear it), “There’s nothing I can do. You’re one of the tough ones.”
I’m not anxious or compulsive or blue, although any amount of morphine seems to bugger decision making. I try to get out, to walk half a block, drive to a deli; can’t sit through a movie, can’t eat out in public. Pain cycles up and down and will hit so hard there’s no chance of a movie or a meal. Almost all day every day I’m reclined, switching TV channels, cruising the Internet, or drifting off in morphine somnolence. Sold the Honda scooter. Put disability plates on my truck. I can hobble for an hour or so. Buy my own groceries. Pick up a pizza.
There’s three implants in my body for pain. First, a neurostimulator tries to confuse pain signals picked up by my brain. Two, a pain pump dribbles a recipe of opioids directly onto my spinal cord. A third implant is a pacemaker so the dope won’t slow my heart too much. (Worried about being unable to stay awake, I drove to the ER two months ago to find my heart beating less than 30 times per minute. They installed a pacemaker. “Three implants,” I tell ’em in the waiting room, “and room for more!”
I’m hovering at the lonely ends of the Bell Curve. Hot chainmail wraps my feet and legs with pain. Drugs barely cut the peaks or spread out the boilings. Tortured and there’s no cure. No other word for it. C’mon? Any suggestions? Pain is constant. It’s generally 3-4-5 on the pain scale. Regularly jumps to 6-7-8 pain on the scale of pain. As if a bomb, ‘curling-up’ pain drops onto me unannounced 24 total-disability hours a day.
There’s rain in California. The cows across the street are calm. The boxer dog at the gate waits for a treat. Refrigerator is cold. I’ll always miss my wife. I’m sixty-seven this January and except for this nuts serious Peripheral Neuropathy, I bet I’m younger than many my age.
After it’s all been said and done as they say, all in all as they say, I am enjoying life.”
bundling posts about pain
phooey on populating my blog with malady
chronic is a dirty word
first lamented 2/4/16
feeling blue, that classic warm chesty type of blue, hit me like a boulder this morning, there was one particular trigger, there’s always a trigger for this kind of blue… the billpay portal at the pain clinic kicked me off, called their tech services, they don’t know why, looking into it, they’ll call me back… it’s the patient’s obligation to make sure the bill is paid… and a’that
getting co-pay’d to death… no longer merely a nuisance fee… multiple weekly appointments… call-ins… sent to specialists… brand-name prescriptions… all the stuff to be grateful for… yes, overall, this is high-tech medicine, access to world-grade services, their practice overhead costs are enormous, practitioner obligations for licenses, liability, employees, multiple offices, their education, always their education… costs are enormous, so who the hell is this guy with the co-pay?
and around the country co-pay has become a political matter, co-pay piles up… we’re not supposed to notice tiny burdens, we ask for a service and pay the co-pay, makes so much good sense… we all agree to the moral underpinning of co-pay… request a medical service, the doctor is ‘co-payed’, the world goes on… wo0t
what about when the doctor says “I need to see you Monday for this and Thursday for that” and the year grinds into another year and what about sending me to new doctors, “I need you to see Doctor This and go see Doctor That”?
chronic is a dirty word
in more ways than one
http://www.medicaldaily.com/chronic-pain-immune-system-371332
chronic pain buggers our DNA
pain is strange
typed on March 11, 2016
Why do some people get pain meds and some people don’t?
We shouldn’t let sweeping bias against opiates control medical decision makers.
Pain can rule your life making the daily tasks of life insurmountable. I don’t normally tell stories of pain and seldom describe pain at it’s worst. It’s too ugly. People don’t like ugly. It’s better to protect others from the weight of it. And mercy is the last thing to want. I’m using a blog to report a reaction to pain that surprised me and to encourage common sense around the issue of pain meds.
A. By late afternoon yesterday I found myself sobbing in grief. A storm of cramps hit hard. I was on the floor shaking and twitching and helplessly moaning. Nowhere to run.
B. By today I’d already forgotten about yesterday. I think that’s extraordinary, and that’s also why I’m writing this post.
People living with pain are probably familiar with tricks our brain will use to protect us, can’t be only me. They also must be experiencing new and interesting ways of coping. For example, pain yesterday put me in a sobbing puddle of squirming and pleading out loud for relief, I was stunned such massive red hot pain can be put into a human body, yet only a day later I’d already forgotten about this new benchmark.
I awoke, made coffee, checked the news and weather as if an average life. It was late the following day when I remembered my life’s worst pain. How dare my brain forget something so terrible? Normal folks wouldn’t forget the greatest pain of their life, greater than any pain they felt before. Their ‘personal peak pain’ would tattoo their memory.
It seems my brain is learning to edit trauma, to erase it. I’m intrigued how easily I shoveled away such a terrible event.
Neuroplasticity in so many forms.
Pain attacks me. I’m an older fellow with no illness except severe and permanent pain without a known cause. My heart is healthy, blood flow is excellent; “Not a speck of cholesterol,” the cardiologist reports; no tumors, not diabetic, weight is good. If I can walk and be active, I’m eager to do it. But peripheral neuropathy arrived in my life about three years ago.
Pain is always. Never goes away. It began as a feeling of cramp in the front of my right foot while helping a neighbor build a fence. I walked home limping ouch to ouch. The first doctor’s advice was tonic water for the quinine. By the third or fourth appointment, pain was rising and falling as if a thousand nails were driven into the bones of both legs.
Life became grimacing. Only exhaustion let me sleep. I’d squirm in bed until I passed out. Pain would wake me in an hour or two… cycle, repeat. I stood to try to stretch it away or hung from the trim of a doorway to try to twist it away. Or push ups off a chair or walk barefoot on the cold 4AM driveway or try a hot epsom bath or try a cold epsom bath or re-read Advil bleeding and death rate warnings until too tired to stand up, return to bed, squirm in bed, pass out until pain wakes me. Rarely out of the house, I mean rarely, maybe two trips to the supermarket in a month, mailbox every second day, the next appointment might blow off another several weeks.
It’s hard to comprehend how I endured it. After neurology tests confirmed nerve disease, the prescription changed to a real pain killer. Nine months of agony before some hyrodcodone. Nuts. I’ve never used oxy. Still don’t understand the differences.
Damn Damn Damn Pain Pain Pain
I now have three implants to help deal with pain. A neurostimulator implant cuts away peaks of boiling hot pain and gives the chance to walk around a bit; drive for groceries, appointments. The second implant pumps pain meds directly onto the spinal cord. I can now walk through a supermarket without grimacing or leaning on the shelving through an attack. Less dope in my blood lets me feel more awake. Seemingly unrelated to a pain condition, the third device is a pacemaker to boost signals of misfiring nerves that have let my pulse drop, luckily in the ER, to lower than 35 beats per minute, a beat or two away from dead is what the nurse said. I tease doctors and staff there’s room for extra implants too; space man, call me Buck Rogers.
Pain is always. Never goes away. But it’s half what it used to be. Pain management and pain implants have helped. I now sleep when I’m tired rather than when I pass out after too many hours merely enduring… cycle in and out… repeat day after day. Rather than a thousand nails hammered into my bones, for several months I’m somewhat mobile. Levels of pain range from a medium headache to wearing phantom scalding knee socks. Recently there’s spaces in an hour when pain disappears. With less pain I can be busy, active, doing something, fixing something, cooking, reading, watching movies, fathoming the web, doing enough to ignore it; favors and fun, learning that distraction is the premier medicine.
When pain is too great, when more meds floating in the blood will either daze me or kill me, when the implants or calming or ignoring or stretching fail to defeat pain, sadly yesterday when I swear the attack was higher than the ten point chart, well, that’s just outright nuts. No words tell that story.
Pain is nuts and nobody knows what to do about that. Except, maybe, my own brain might bump into more doable pathway for its signals, neuroplasticity in so many forms.
When will my brain or your brain become adept enough to forget pain while it occurs? Never. And I wouldn’t wish any experiments on you.
And boy oh boy, that’s something good. It surprises me there’s few articles or documentaries or blog posts or tweets about the bloody misery of mosquito clouds or black fly swarms or gnat attacks, i.e. Alaska, Canada. Worldwide, I shudder to imagine how people cope. I roped a metal bucket over my shoulder and lit a tiny smoldering fire of twigs, grabbing green branches to stoke the smoke billowing around me as I walked down the trail… what a sight to behold. So this gizmo must outright gotta be fun… fer darn sure.
[link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCOVzFaEpuk]
Republicans threw professional expertise out of government.
Evidence-based legislating seen as threat to campaign gains.
washington monthly calls it ‘the big lobotomy’.
Vox.com is giving you a chance to Auto-Generate your own bogus job description
“In ancient Rome, the word persona had two meanings: a mask, and a full citizen. A person online, however, is de facto not a full citizen….” Computers track your habits and your friends. You must govern automated decisions about your job, loans, your health, shopping… Civil Rights Principles for the Era of Big Data Technological progress should bring greater safety, economic opportunity, and convenience to everyone. Plus the collection of new types of data is essential for documenting persistent inequality and discrimination. At the same time, as new technologies allow companies and government to gain greater insight into our lives, it is vitally important that these technologies be designed and used in ways that respect the values of equal opportunity and equal justice:
Silicon Valley and Wall Street abuses: Frank Pasquale’s Black Box Society takes a closer look at how your life is swept up and published. “Here’s one paradox I’m trying to resolve: even as economic change seems to accelerate, existing hierarchies of power and wealth seem ever more ossified, stable, secure. “I trace this problem to two, mutually reinforcing trends: the financialization of data, and the data-fication of finance.” Current law fails to regulate data.
“Going too fast for myself I missed more than I think I can remember almost everything it seems sometimes and yet there are chances that come back that I did not notice when they stood where I could have reached out and touched them this morning the black shepherd dog still young looking up and saying Are you ready this time” – W. S. Merwin
Happy the man, whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air,
In his own ground.
Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,
Whose flocks supply him with attire,
Whose trees in summer yield him shade,
In winter fire.
Blest, who can unconcernedly find
Hours, days, and years slide soft away,
In health of body, peace of mind,
Quiet by day,
Sound sleep by night; study and ease,
Together mixed; sweet recreation;
And innocence, which most does please,
With meditation.
Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;
Thus unlamented let me die;
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie.
– Alexander Pope, “Ode on Solitude”
There are plenty of schemes that could federate or safely encrypt our data, plenty of ways we could regain privacy and make our computers work better by default. It isn’t happening now because we haven’t demanded that it should, not because no one is clever enough to make that happen.
“I sometimes think US politicians don’t know which way is up.”
you’ve known this since you were a kid
looming change is your blood
struggling in a shit pile to fix it
and now you’re tired
call it reverence if you must
it’s real exhaustion
relief and more relief
powerful youth could fix it
wouldn’t it be nice to do it over?
what happens isn’t the whole story
you’ve been waiting more than a heart can bear
nonsense month after month after month
hooked into a parade of chains
breathing isn’t what it used to be
you’re stuck with that
stop and you cripple yourself