Horsemen of The Apocalypse

Leaf in Nest

      In discussion with the various entities I share the world with, many of whom fail the test for sentience, I find myself losing faith in the accuracy of large language models. Let's put it this way, I know it's not that easy to cool things in outer space and I know that in space electricity is precious. And yet, apparently, there is nowhere more suitable than outer space for the construction of these future Lords of Destiny currently referred to as Data Centers. Apparently space is cold, so cooling's not a problem, as well, up above the clouds there's an unlimited amount of renewable electricity, and if you add to this the life span of a GPU that's been protected from radiation, then Bingo, invest your life savings in a company that sends stuff to space.

     Don't get me wrong I still believe Copy and Paste was the Third Horseman of the Apocalypse, and don't give me any of that new age crap about the Book of Revelations not being about the future, and don't even begin to suggest that the Turin Test has anything to do with the first horseman of the Apocalypse, or try to tell me the Turin Test has anything to do with intelligence. No! The First Horseman was a cult leader called Pythagoras who died when he was seventy five around 500 BC.

    "OK! So who was the second horseman."

    Adam Smith's assertion that self interest in a free market unintentionally promotes the broader welfare of society. 

    "I thought there were four horsemen?"

    We'll know tomorrow.

In Opposition to Dualism

Marigolds

     My route through the many shapes and sizes of dualism does away with the many shapes and sizes of soul. Today I begin with Hindu Gitas one of which was written by a man called Ashtavakra, who offered a dialogue between a king and a sage, that suggests we should not try to be free, we are already free, it's an equivalent to the ego that wants to be something else and this something else causes misery, so why not ignore it.

    In another way, the king had an ambitious scared little shit inside him and that little shit needed to be bound and gagged and locked in a cupboard, rather than given an IPod, paraded around the Grocery Store, the Bookshop, the Grand Parade of adoring crowds.

     Ashtavakra's song wasn't about a stiff upper lip, grin and bear it, be brave you drip, it was about awareness and the illusion of separation. Truth was to be aware of the real which wasn't the body, or anything senses of mind could produce, it was an infinite, formless, awareness.

    This dive over the cliff for the sage was a claim that evidence from the senses were illusions, our reaction to the illusions would always be ill-informed, they'd always result in storm and stress, always result in the emptiness of misconception. 

    Between the sage and the king was the debate like the debate Tagore had with Einstein about the possibility of Objective Knowledge existing outside of our minds. Well worth the effort to point out that Ashtavakra had his being on earth something like four and half or five thousand years ago, and not a hundred years ago. 

    My own grasp of this objective/subjective thingy was first comfortably addressed in my mind by Bishop Berkeley. It was in a short book called Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. The Anglican Bishop Berkeley explored his esse est percipi - to be is to be perceived - physical matter does not exist independently from the mind. Berkeley died in 1753. For a religious man he was the enlightenment personified, he was blessed by God, adored by the American Episcopalians and admired by Kant.

   In my view knowledge is useful, vital, essential for a state of mind if that state of mind is to manage a moment, find food and shelter, see a way to make it through yet another winter - as the Buddhist might have it, it's a raft to carry me across a river and once on the other side I should leave the raft on the river bank, not carry it with me. And, you better have your sums right if your ego demands you do something absurd like go to the moon. Good luck to you finding solace up there, because answerlessness is the reality. 

The Mobility Routine.

Blanket Flower

       "In the post meal window." This is a direct quote from a man who looks like an Aardvark advising me through a computer screen that long walks are better than short walks. And here I think my point is this : who needs faux professionalism from the set defined as first world self appointed witch doctors who call themselves influencers. Go ahead just call it dog do-do. No wonder we're doomed.

   Anyway, the post meal window is not the time to sit there wondering how many fungicides and pesticides the banana and grape jelly sandwich you've just swallowed has been subjected to. The Post Meal window is a moment of time when some sort of walking about in fresh air is essential for the health of your soul, to your socio economic sense of belonging, and as I understand it, defines where you stand on the swirl in a Double Caffè Latte and Craft Cheese Slices. 

    Now, take it from me, a person who once a year visits a big box bookshop to marvel at the prices of new books, it's a two hour drive from here, it has an egg-stained woolly sweater and runny nose feel to it, it has a busy espresso and sticky bun shop attached to it, and you do not denigrate the wonderfully ill-tempered, in the classically Italian tradition, barista or barman, by asking for a cup of coffee. They will look at you as though you might have crawled out from under a cowpat, and the world begins to feel like the civilization you know and love, so you smile warmly and sparkle.

     Then if you ask what their head office expects a lowly customer to understand by 'Protein' and whether "Caramel Protein Latte" has any coffee in it, the "have a nice day" of corporate barbarism returns, as if from a dentist a detailed explanation emerges, your toes curl and you slowly begin to understand that your "mobility routine" is to just stay home and wait to die. 

The Running Dogs

Moonflower, a white morning glory

   The Past is an invention of the present and so is the future. Oh sure we have an oral and written history, some of it documented, and there are dreams and a lot of plotting around our future.

    But what was the actual experience of something like Feudalism. It wasn't a hierarchical triangle with a king at the top, better to think of it as a constantly flowing movement of agreement and disagreement around a series of mental constructs or definitions which can be illustrated by a triangle with a king at the top and a host of peasants along the bottom.

    Same today as it was in the time of King John, or Charlemagne.  But there is a difference between now and then. Back then, outside the drama, the system was based on personal relationships, regional custom and practice, long held local traditions in one location, go ten miles north and things were done differently. These personal relationships in Europe were increasingly informed by the Christian Church, which was more like a single institution with a shared belief system that was both taught and written down. 

    Overtime, as the size of a society increased, personal relationships as a basis for unity were increasingly thought of as unreliable. You get a sociopathic war lord becoming a megalomaniac who makes a habit of ignoring tried and true custom and practice, you just don't wear sandals with white socks, rather than persuasion a tyrant reverts to force, which is both risky and expensive. The more successful stable systems, particularly with respect to wealth creation developed institutions that encouraged individual initiative in free and equal associations, along with a rule by law, not by passion or wealth or who you knew and/or could bribe. The successful stable system has agreed upon and enforced standards of behavior that apply to all, not a random collection of dos and don'ts, depending upon who your uncle might be.

    The dream of course is one thing, the reality another. An agile mind can detect unfairness, and into the fore comes some such thing as Critical Race Theory to set so many hearts to furious blistering, and those blisters go back in time and place to the power of personal relationship, that moment of like that sees an unshared entitlement being taken away from the souls of the self chosen ones and freely given to the unworthy other.

    Here in the USA we are currently in danger of losing our myth of free and equal association to a coterie of retarded wolves the Chinese Revolutionaries once referred to as the Running Dogs of Imperialism. Of interest too is the origin of the Chinese reference to Running Dogs. The dogs were used to hunt, their fate was certain, an old saying Mao enjoyed went this way: "When the rabbits are killed, the running dogs are boiled."  

For the love of it

Cornflower

    Maybe not for Physics, but the idea of time for us people does contain a past and a future. These two states, the past and the future, comprise an understanding of the present which is different for each one of us. As the stories of the past coalesces into straighter and straighter lines, more of us share a similar past. This similar past becomes an origin, or a genesis which informs a present and provides the data for an interpretation of a future, which as the lines straighten we people also begin to share.

    For Christianity the shared past is usually described as a fall, the shared present is described as a search for salvation, the shared future, while it remains mysterious does seem to be a reunion with paradise for the obedient and redeemed and some sort of snake-pit for the disobedient and irredeemable.

    For Baxter and I the Christian understanding stops at the philosopher Epicurus, were rules for a good life are a salvation from unhappiness and begins to flounder when it reaches expressions like "Total Depravity" to describe the original state of the human condition.

   True, whether it be the sails of Viking Marauders hell bent on plunder and maidens, or that pervert Uncle Sprat back from whatever he does on the Mainland, the future can lurk in an often irredeemable, totally depraved manner. But when contemplating the future a mind does have a number of possible directions to take, not all of them horrible.

    Epicurus was born on the Athenian Island of Samos around the time Plato died (348 BC). He was a very wealthy man who had lost his fortune to a shipwreck. His followers, they paid no fee to hear him speak, saw their teacher as a guide who offered Salvation. He was less "getting a law degree and passing the bar exams" he was more an eye for "good conversation and positive attitude."

     His cure for Anxiety went this way: Don't be afraid of the Gods. Don't worry about Death. What is Good is easy to get. What is Terrible is easy to endure.

    The question for both Epicurus and Zeno, the founder of stoicism, both of them earth bound thinkers long settled into the polytheist story of a cadre of jealous Gods occasionally dabbling in human affairs who preferred to remain safely in their heaven while the souls of mortals were destined to a class bound underworld where nothing special happened, has to be : "Did Epicurus and Zeno, Plato for that matter, preach redemption and salvation."

A Genesis of Baptists and Motivation

Moon. 9.32 am US Eastern Standard Summer Time

     In my opinion Religion can be thought of as Motive Management in an Eternal Department overseen by a Taoist Celestial Master. The system has to be flexible enough to maintain a willing commitment without losing sight of a profit defined in terms of a genuinely and acceptably sensible future rather than a series of threats.

    Let's look at where the Baptists are, and here I'll risk the hay-baler and declare that the Baptists were an English speaking reaction to Calvinist Extremism that arrived in England via the Arminianist Interpretations of Jacobus Arminius, an understanding that was blossoming in the the early 1600's in the Netherlands. A Golden Age for the Dutch.

    "Sounds like an extremist minority opinion!"

    Calvinists have, or in the 1500's had, their five point plan, or TULIP, to guide them through the vicissitudes of such things as earthly election seasons. 

   T is for Total Depravity - Adam and Eve sinned, there is no hope in any of us people, so just remember that!

   U is for Unconditional Election - For Calvin, God chooses individuals for salvation based solely on His sovereign good pleasure. It has nothing to do with foreseen or preordained human faith, merits, or good works.

   L is for Limited Atonement - Christ died specifically for the elect, not for everyone.

   I is for Irresistible Grace - Because there is no hope in us people, God through the Holy Spirit works a miracle to put a person's soul back together before he or she is even able to become a believer. Once the Holy Spirit has done the work, there's no rejecting your soul, you might sell it, but you can't have it removed. Then, if you don't behave in a willing, able, sufficiently grateful, soul-worthy manner, you need to remember that having a soul isn't and never will be a free pass into heaven.

   P is for Perseverance of the Saints  -  God doesn't make mistakes. Those who God has truly saved, not the heavenly equivalent of a clerical error that sent the Holy Spirit to regenerate the wrong soul, they will be Believers to the end, they cannot lose their salvation. They have to chose salvation. They have to be motivated. They have to ignore the devil.

   "Parts of that sound a little bit mean."

   "Karl Marx would have agreed with you. He thought it mean and unsustainable."

  A Dutch Theologian called Jacobus Arminius wrote several critiques of John Calvin's thinking. Calvin was clearly a dangerous fanatic and time came for the Reformations most ardent reformers to have a synod, they chose a place named Dort to formally call a spade a spade, do away with paddling around, collect the nuts and bolts and sort stuff out.

   One of the upshots of the meeting at Dort was the realization that Calvin's Five Points, his entry level set of convictions for his supporters, once written down and signed for revealed what many thought a horrifying failure to grasp most of the New Testament.

   Fortunately The Synod at Dort also had a chance to have a strong look at Jacobus Arminius' critiques of Calvinist thought and they came up with a theological comprehension which modified and expanded upon Calvinism and produced  an understanding called Arminianism.

    The Arminiasts had their own five point program that addressed their disagreement with Calvinists on the three subjects of Human Free Will, Grace of God, and Salvation.

    Conditional Election: God predestines individuals to salvation based on His foreknowledge of who will freely choose to believe in Christ, rather than by an unconditional decree from on high.  In other words, God looks at you mewling a puking and because he already knows everything there is to know he is able to decide whether you'll believe that his only son Jesus Christ was born of a virgin and rose from the dead. This Calvinist thinking pattern had to be agreed upon because God knows everything. The however comes next in the idea of unlimited atonement.

   Unlimited Atonement. For those in doubt "atonement" is church speak for "making amends." For Jacobus Arminius the ultimate atonement was Christ’s death on the cross, God the Son making amends for some of his father's many flaws and for some of the less than polite things he did to us people in his rather needy efforts to get us to respect him. But, and this is very typical of the One God, while the saving benefit for humanity by Jesus' crucifixion was there for everyone, it was only ever given to those who "exercise faith." An ill-define term as any Baptist will endeavor to tell you

  Prevenient Grace: This is another important difference with Calvin's understanding of a chosen few. Prevenient is a way for the Pulpit to say that Grace comes first not after twelve dozen twirls around a catwalk. We people when we come into the world are already fallen, sinful and totally depraved, just awful. All the same, God's Prevenient Grace is given to all people so they can overcome their spiritual deadness and are awake enough to freely respond to the gospel, the Word, or the Message or the Good News. The operative words here are "Freely Respond."

     Resistible Grace: This too is a big difference for the followers of Arminianism, we people have genuine free will and in our purview we are able, of our own free will, to accept or reject God's offer of saving grace.

    Finally, the fifth point of clarification, is Conditional Salvation or Perseverance and Loss. True believers are called to persevere and remain in Christ. That much was and probably still is certain. But when something like this list of five Arminianist points was presented to the Dutch equivalent of the Parliament or House and Senate, there were disputes about whether a believer who willing chose to suddenly misbehave or was discovered behaving in a disgracefully ungodly manner could fall away, lose his earned salvation and have to rot in hell.

    The Dutch Arminiast disagreements with Calvinism set a bonfire under three English speaking males. They were John Smyth, Thomas Helwys and a man called John Murton, English religious reformers all of them. Unlike John Locke and other Calvinist Liberals hell bent on individual responsibility and limited entry into heaven, these three religious reformers had during their time on earth engaged more closely with the Beatitudes than for example with Genesis and the Lot conundrum (19), Deuteronomy (29), a goodly number of Psalms, Isiah (30 and 34), Ezekiel (38) ...... there are not shortage of Historical accounts of the old testament God in action.

    The point of it all for Baptists, when and if you were baptized you had to know what was happening and why it was happening, otherwise it had nothing to do with free will. If god in three persons were decent sort of chaps, if they meant us to have free will, they meant us to willing participate and to willingly participate you had have some clue what Grace was, and you had to agree that in a participating and responsible society of individuals salvation was a worthy pursuit. 

A Noble Lie and the Peace of God

Goldenrod Gone to Seed

    The Earth, according to Plato's Noble Lie, was our mother. When she created us she mixed different precious metals into our souls. Gold into the souls of rulers and guardians. Silver into the souls of auxiliaries and soldiers, auxiliaries were those who served society. Iron and Bronze went into the souls of the farmers, craftsmen and laborers.

    Look around chaps, there's a reason Plato wrote the lines of his Noble Lie for Socrates. Plato was never an idiot, he had his work as a tutor to the highly successful to look out for, so more likely Plato's own tongue was firmly in his cheek.

   Gold is a soft metal, pretty as a scanty princess, for men to fight over and possess. Silver's got a certain style, unless you're a Chinese Emperor silver is nothing to get worked up about, it polishes up nicely, makes a good candlestick for a lowly cat burglar. Bronze and iron are lumpen, they sit there looking useful until directed.

    In Plato's ideal republic, the Men of Gold weren't allowed to own anything. What society needed from them was a purification of their greed, their cunning, their ability to manipulate others, their skill at attracting personal wealth so that these talents might combine into a knowledge that passed all understanding called a Good Tyrant.

   And yes indeed, worth a quote from the King James Version from the missive written by Paul the Apostle and forwarded by Timothy, thanking the Church in Philippi for their financial support and a call for joy and even greater unity : "And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus."

   Following years and years of diaspora, by the time Pontius Pilate was the Roman Governor of Judea the majority of Jewish people lived outside of Judea. Philippi was a Roman Colony in Macedonia, on the Greek side of Rome, definitely in Europe. This colony had no Jewish Synagogue. For Paul the Apostle and his sidekick Timothy, in terms of world conquest, the Philippians were a bunch of non-Jewish outsiders, and the church in Philippi was a very big deal, it was almost up there with the Irish Saint Columba crossing the seas in a coracle, apparently, to convert the Picts.  

    It's "The Peace of God" that presents the promise "The Peace of a Good Tyrant."

October 27.

The Short Grass

      Contrary to Alfred propagandists and because Alfred's name was easy to pronounce and spell, he was not the first king of England, his grandson Æthelstan was.

    "Fancy that!"

    That expression brings to the mind, a call to imagination. "Fancy that!" goes back to them old days when "fantasy" had a whole bunch of foreign connotations from France and further back to the Latin and the Greek attached to it. It was a suspect and challenging area for the 14th Century Chaucerian minds of England for whom the matter of fact, the empathetic, the funny and the tolerant was so much easier than the practiced deceits of court-speak later generations adopted in an attempt to further King Alfred's 9th Century ambition to give his Saxons a little book learning and class, not something Early England was renowned for.

    For English speakers "Fancy That!" has rather gone out the window in this new age of gilded mantels and trim, obsession with toilets, along with the fartitude or gas-related endurance of Golf Courses. Of interest when the English had their Chaucer on the walk to Canterbury, the Scottish Court of James II was, when weather permitted, playing the almost entirely pointless game of golf and plotting with the French.

   This day in history also recalls the humorlessness of puritan convictions. Listed as follows : the absolute sovereignty of god, the total depravity of homo sapiens, the unconditional election of certain people who can do no wrong because they are chosen by god, and, the literal truth of holy scripture, the Bible.

    "Why today."

    On this day in 1682 William Penn founded Philadelphia.  He wanted to establish a "Holy Experiment." A free, tolerant society in North America based on Quaker principles of peace, equality, freedom of conscience, and representative government.

Epoch of Homo Sapiens

Chicken on the Loose

    Great Apes who have the homo sapiens collection of genes, can easily be chased back 250,000 years. Our divergence from the rest of the Great Apes occurred about half a million years ago which would have been toward the end of the geological epoch called the Pleistocene which consisted of 25 ice ages and lasted about two and a half million years.

   By the end of the Pleistocene (only 11,000 years ago) much of the mega-fauna, giant flightless birds, huge meat eating bears, mammoths and for some reason giant sloths were no longer existent, and here one argument for their disappearance are tool makers who could make fire and make an even bigger deal about going all alpha around hunting down and grilling meat.

    Our current Epoch or Age, it's a little early to think of 11,000 years  as much more than a hiccup of some sort, is already being called The Holocene, which rather ominously means wholly new time. It began with the end of the Neolithic, or when non-nomadic-farming became this gruesome period referred to as Civilization, or city dwelling. At the moment we are already in what the enthusiasts would like to call The Anthropocene, or the Age of Man.

   Meanwhile the less self absorbed have already given the Holocene three subdivisions. The first is Greenlandian, 11,000 to about 8,000 years ago, characterized by quite dramatic retreat of ice and rising sea levels. The second is Northgrippian, ended about 4,000 years ago, it got especially warm and good for farming. The third subdivision is the Meghalayan, its main characteristic is an extended period of drought that caused the Bronze Age collapse.  

Time?

Another Sunset, how many more!

      Schopenhauer informed his readers and anyone who listened that the present was the only reality, past and future didn't exist, it wasn't real. Nietzsche, as an example, when it was his turn to be a callow youth was much enamored of Schopenhauer's understanding of will, but he came to the understanding that the old man was too pessimistic, too weak and cowardly to properly embrace the world.

    For Nietzsche a robust mind needed a past and future, the present alone just wasn't enough for a "will to power." Nietzsche was a classical philologist, he was ancient languages and texts. Amongst other things Schopenhauer wrote about the Philosophy of mathematics and logic.

    "So what."

     So what indeed, my fellow Puddle Duck. The answer from my side is that linear thinking will always require a trinity to give it curve, slope and touches of humanity so it might flourish in the answerlessness of the present. Non-linear thinking patterns easily tolerate a single eternal present. 

    Plato made the claim that once the orbits of all the planets returned to their original equilibrium that would constitute the end of a Perfect Year and the beginning of the next perfect year. The issue of how many of our 'so called' years made up an astrological Perfect Year, remained deeply in doubt. Around four hundred years after Plato died Marcus Tullius Cicero, a Roman Orator and statesman, suggested that Plato's Perfect Year was twelve thousand nine hundred and fifty four of our 'so called' years.

    And here you have to remember that Roman property owning Stoics were generally of the opinion that their perceived order, beauty and perfection of the universe, as well as the occasional actual appearance of the Gods in history suggested that the Gods were Real. Meanwhile back in what remained of Athens, Plato's Perfect Year had taken itself into the assumption that because the universe returned to an equilibrium before embarking on the next Perfect Year the movement and placement of the stars at any one time could be used to predict the future, or what would happened next.

    "What is the point of time."

    Good one. Don't let anyone try to tell you they know what time is. My own position is as unsound as anyone else's. It divides in a more than pompous ass manner somewhere between the disagreement the self important Saint Augustine of Hippo had with Mânâ Rabba of the Mandaeans about the end times and the General Relativity of post classical physics

   Manichaeism reckoned that when you died if you'd been bad you just disappeared into nothing and good riddance, but if you were good your dust would enter the heavens and for the remainder of time you'd be a star, none of this rising from the dead that so appealed to Saint Augustine.

    Einstein's successors still grapple with time. Of their ideas, spacetime makes time more like a navigation point in space. For General Relativity, outside a closed system there is no time - the universe is a closed system. Quantum Physics, the subatomic, views time as a background parameter which is used to track how quantum states change.

   It does seem to me that much further than Physics our Tech Bros cannot go. And yet maybe the magic boxes that come from them will exact from us people the sort of faith that built pyramids.

The monopoly of the Profit Motive

Footwear

    I was a callow youth back when adult judgement was considered respectable. Those were the days when the claim that a split atom would result in free electric for everyone was gospel, pipe smoking voices would go into the conviction that doctors are more valuable than miners, that the dawn of civilization was the Neolithic and any suggestion that the Soviets were experimenting with a machine that would replace the stenographer was absurd.

    In 1983 the United States Government delivered report called A Nation at Risk which warned of a 'tide of mediocrity.' It asked 'reformers' to look at ways to boost academic performance. In the next seven years it became all about the person, self esteem, and the promotion of 'short, positive statements that students and teachers repeat to build confidence, reduce negative self-talk, and create a supportive learning environment.' Then, around 2004 or there about, My Space, Facebook and the waterfall from hell started prowling around feasting on self esteem to the point were even a cat could tell lies about itself.

    It wasn't the soviets who made the machine that would replace the stenographer it was the tragic monopoly of the profit motive.

In the Beginning was the word. Question for Realism?

Dandelion

     The question of realism in the way we think about stuff is a whole bunch of hoo-ha that preys on the difference between what is inside our mind and outside our mind. Of course there is a difference, damn right that chair is real, the Bear in the forest chops down trees or whatever. And yes we people can make things appear real that aren't real, likewise we can make things unreal that are real. 

    Here, in this paragraph, I'll dwell a while on the fate of my soul before suggesting the answer to the direct and irritating question "Do things exist independent of the mind?" is "Yes and No." All of which fails to ask the central question for Realism which is "What relationships are we exploring when we think?"

   Do we invent in our minds a morality informed by social reasons, or are there moral sentences that actually express propositions which refer to objective physical features of the real world? Are there mind independent aesthetic facts! Is Beauty real. And indeed there is a New Age tint to the ideas which emerged from physics and lean into the understanding that a collapsing wave may put our will in direct connection with a universal real. This quantum level entanglement is not so far away from the cause and effect of Descartes who wondered how a non-physical mind causes a physical body to move.

   The "think therefore I am" emotional dependencies that allow minds to cling to increasingly frail myths, are well exemplified by the arguments advanced by the likes of Victorian Naturalist, Aquarium Designer and Adventist Phillip Henry Gosse, who, as slowly the fossil and geological record suggested the world might have been a little more than 6000 years old and might not have been created in six short days and nights.

   The real of spiritual, it's a Protection Racket. 

    

    

The Folly of Realism - Mind Independence

Spider Webs

      Like all of us, Pareto's frustrations with our access to true or at least accurate things was a relationship between his mind and the world. His desire to find new ways of grasping that world, different more perfect paradigms, was no doubt an honest one. He might have been less flexible than some.

    His income came from his work as a civil engineer, he was a corporate executive in the Iron and Steel industry, he was a professor, he had a handsome inheritance. There's no doubt he had the convictions of the ambitious, his political activism on the side of classic liberal free trade, free markets and that whole anti-tariff tapestry of trust in the people to make their own decisions without the apparatchiks of state was much more than a hobby for our prince.

    Prior to 1893, before he drowned in sparkly cynicism, or failure, and moved to Switzerland to find solace in Sociology, Pareto had been a political man, one of the wolves. He wanted a parliamentary democracy and universal suffrage for Italy. He wrote pamphlets, he made speeches, he started an anti-protectionist league in Florence, he ran for office, failed to win an election, became sick and tired of being surrounded by militaristic, interfering, socialist eejits.

    You can look at his work and if you happen to be more like me, a geriatric F-You member of a the back row in good standing, you can see in his work the chauvinism of our body politic. It's a chauvinism that dominates the ruling class, the sort of "I've talked to Moses and the Arc stays" jackassery which if you're like me reaches into and throttles Business Studies, then comes up with the genuinely political idea that "We are the grown ups, they are the naughty children who need to be told what to do."

    Realism as a mind-in-the-world, would certainly agree with Pareto's suggestion that our species was unlogical. It doesn't follow a predictable pattern, odd things happen, odder behaviors follow. Pareto raised the flag of exasperation when he dismissed cardinal utility from his economics, it was pointless, it was that which cannot be uttered because it didn't readily lend itself to number. Ordinal utility, the number of widgets produced and purchased was collectible data. There's no universal solution to the equal sign that follows "I want a tortoise."  

Pareto Number

Spider Web

     Vilfredo Pareto had the intense eyes of the polymath child of an exiled Italian aristocrat. He had tight curly hair and a massive curly beard. He was an everything person, that rare creature a Renaissance Man, he could talk civil engineering, economics, political science and philosophy, and he saw in sociology a deconstruction, a critique of the idea that systems progressed in a linear fashion. He was born in Paris in 1848, he died in Switzerland in 1923. And to be polite he may have been a little neurodivergent.

   He proposed the idea of The Circulation of Elites. It was a theory about how bigwigs came in waves of passion and energy, they hung around for a couple of generations before drying up, becoming decrepit or corrupt, disappearing into the Cotswolds, Dordogne, maybe Rappahannock where they died of old age or a hunting accident. Pareto liked to think of his circulation of elites as "The graveyard of aristocracies." Indeed for the most part he saw the history of society as a history of a succession of aristocracies. The top looking down and slowly forgetting how to stay on top.

    His book, Mind and Society, looked at something else. He'd concluded that we humans in our day to day are unlogical, we lack a logical relation with the world around us, our actions rarely produce what we intend them to produce and yet, by our own judgement, we continue to insist that yes we make absolute and perfect logical sense at all times.

   Sure there's an element of "If you don't agree I'll punch you in the throat" in us people but the problem is we seem determined to spend many of our waking hours coming up with a whole bunch of magical, metaphysical and moral theories which in the light of day should make no logical sense whatsoever. For Pareto this unlogical relation with the world was a result of what he thought of as Instinctive Tendencies that were motivated by Sentiment. Naturally as a man of science, reason, an inheritor of the enlightenment and so on, he was  required to think of and then produce lists of Instinctive Tendencies arranged into categories which could be studied in detail, and from which schemes might be hatched that would solve the problems of the Human Condition. 

    For Pareto, his purpose for wandering into sociology was the failure of mathematics to accurately predict human behavior. In his economics Pareto's response to the problem of measuring cardinal utility was to to decide it was unnecessary to know what satisfaction a person got from purchasing a widget. It was only necessary to know the ordinal utility, how many of  this or that widget people purchased.

   His thinking was sufficiently self absorbed for his work to be considered a precursor to the Fascism that swallowed the second quarter of the 20th Century.  In the USA Pareto's ideas found a home in Harvard and dwelled mightily in the mind of the Machiavellian Talcot Parsons, a guru of US Business Management Studies which instructed bright young meteors on how to maintain an elite by squeezing the last drop of enthusiasm out of the unordained.

   I raise the subject of Vilfredo Pareto for what came to be called the Pareto Number. The number originates in an observation Pareto made about land ownership in Italy, it traveled far in its notoriety.  Apparently 80% of Italian land was owned by 20% of the people.

   In the minds of other thinkers this 80:20 relationship reflected the relationship between cause and effect. In other words a small number of causes result in a larger number of results. And on it went. In the factory a small number of people cause all of the labor unrest. In the street a small number of agitators cause the riot, damage to property and ruined reputations.

    Here, in my own world 20% of a population are wolves, 80% are sheep. Democracy is a method of determining the results of leadership quarrels amongst the 20% so that we sheep don't have to kill each other to decide disagreements between wolves. 

Waterloo, Peterloo, Luddites and Tech Bros

Walnut Palm

    We all agree good help is hard to find, humanity a difficult diversity of opinion, disobedience and attitude you don't really want seeing you naked, unless you can dismiss it as untitled and hardly human but when you come to the conclusion that Reddit or Facebook, any of these things, including what I do here, is Normal Human Communication then there's something seriously wrong with you.

   Then if your mission in life is to convert all Normal Human Communication to Reddit or Facebook or what I do here, then "pity the fool" is an inadequate epigram to describe the extent of your dangerous retardedness, at the same time "go stuff yourself" might be an even less sufficient reaction to the paucity of your being-in-the-world that's full of other wonders, other possibilities you have foresworn for what?

   A history of The Luddite reaction has lessons for us. The psychologists too have lessons for us. Ned Ludd, struggling with the unfairness of his status and the conditions of his employment lost his temper, he vandalized two of his master's weaving machines. The machine owners, a propertied class, in those days it was 3%, who dominated the Houses of Parliament, passed a statute which declared it a hanging offense to damage capital equipment. In 1813, a year after the statute became law 17 men were publicly hung in the grounds of York Castle. 

   In the summer of 1819 a cavalry unit called the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry which had been raised to confront the unrest that followed the Napoleonic Wars  and  the 15th Hussars who had charged the French lines at the Battle of Waterloo advanced on  a peaceful crowd of 70,000 gathered on the field of St. Peter's in Manchester England. 18 were killed, around 700 wounded.

    In that same summer of 1819 the Cotton Mills and Factories Act passed the Parliament. The Committee of the Ruling Class banned the employment of free children under 9 years of age in cotton mills, limited a working day to 12 hours, not including lunch break, in cotton mills and there was to be no night shift for Cotton Mill workers.

    In 1819 a Free Child lived at home. Free Children had parents. Some parents hired their children out to work in a cotton mill. An Unfree Child was bound by legal contract to a factory owner or a Parish and was protected by the Health and Morals of Apprentices Act of 1802.

   Charles Dickens was born on February the 7th 1812. Karl Marx was born in 1818

   

Schopenhauer's Ding an Sich and the wordless prayer.

Foots

    "The World as Will and Representation" was a book first published in 1818. A second two volume edition was published in 1844.

   Reacquainting ourselves with the spelling of Schopenhauer's name reminds me how much I enjoy his understanding of Will and how much sense it makes to me. What hints at his character and genius will in my last days remain his assurance to me and to anyone who would listen that Hegel was a charlatan, a chicken shit - my words - and a paid lackey of the Prussian State. 

   Difficult to think of Schopenhauer as anyone's disciple, his purpose in life seems to have been to ferociously disagree with everyone on principle, but lucky for his disciples he was able to give us all hope by fundamentally disagreeing with Kant on one very important aspect of Kant's thinking.

  Kant's thing-in-itself, his ding an sich - the true underlying reality - was unknowable. Schopenhauer's ding and sich was very knowable because we can feel it, experience it, it was there whether we liked it or not, nothing we could do about it, and essentially it was the source of all misery, discord and the awfulness of having to go though life as a human. Hegel was a moron, a weak minded idealist.....

    "Can you remind me what it was?"

    Schopenhauer called it The Will. It wasn't thoughtful, it wasn't conscious - consciousness for Schopenhauer was derived from the brain, consciousness was put there to serve as an indentured servant to The Will -  the will itself  had no plan or reason, it had no clue what it was doing, it was an endless, whining, urge to exist, force itself onwards into ever expanding nothingness, it was quite insatiable.

   And it was everywhere, in the sea, the mountains, on the way up to his rented rooms, it was in plants, animals, even in the seamstress who took him to court for pushing her downstairs because she was talking to loudly to his neighbor while he was busy solving the problems of the universe.

   The world and everything in it was a representation of The Will, and depressing though it was, its true underlying reality was absolutely knowable. And yes indeed, a lonely life was his, a Saint in a land of the heathen, until he came across a a book called Oupnek'hat - translates as 'Secrets to be Safeguarded.' 

   The book that gave Schopenhauer what he called  "the solace of my life and the solace of my death" was published in 1801 in Berlin. It was a Latin translation of a 17th Century Persian phonetic rendering of a Sanskrit text which contained the Upanishads, or some of them. The Upanishads are a collection of hymns from the late Bronze early Iron Age in North Western India that greatly contribute to later movements of thinking within the many and splendid directions of the Hindu Religion. 

   "Schopenhauer found solace?"

   He did. He called it solace, no holding back, he wasn't ashamed to admit Oupnek'hat was a comfort from anguish. Like many he was generally disgusted by the inadequacies and convictions of conventional theism, but more than that the Vedic texts confirmed his own directions in philosophy, and it's always good for us people to bathe in those moments when we don't feel shunned, alone and surrounded by idiots.

   Instead, as confirmed by the ancient texts, the world was an illusion, a veil of multiplicity, a subjective abundance, the truth so much deeper, the best you could do is belong to it. Liberation from suffering was a denial of will, quietness, renunciation and the death of ego. But again, Schopenhauer didn't completely agree with scholarship from the East, he was still totally miserable, doggedly going were few had been before him. 

   The  understanding of the underlying Will he shared with the Hindu tradition remained what he thought of as a unity reaching out, always reaching. But, as the Vedic scholars saw it the Gods didn't come first, they came afterwards, their underlying Will like Schopenhauer's had always been, not as a blind all-encompassing unity of some sort of un-directed purposelessness, it was a supreme intelligence, it was absolute unity, it was bliss, it was Teresa of Avila's wordless prayer that god was more than words, that god was real.

   Yes indeed, to loosely quote our man, "reading is thinking with another's mind," and thinking with another man's mind just wasn't something Schopenhauer was prepared to do.

Ice, The Comma and Interpretation

Frost Advisory Tonight

     A more real - a 'correcter' version of the suspect word realer - understanding of what is truly in the world would hold fast to the idea that nothing has a name.

    This realer understanding might point out that language is a naming tool which captures the movement of idea, silences it by converting it into a stopped object that can be fed through a funnel - a sentence - the essential structure of which is a straight line. Call this straight line a rule bound chain of connections that abjures any rejection of the rules, a misbehavior which in the past couple of years has been variously named 'hallucination,' 'hack,' 'last days of humanity'..... it's a long Madison Avenue worthy list, which in the legal world might be titled  'Misplaced Comma.'

    Let's have a look at the hallucinogen of misplaced commas.

    Rather than mention that ghoul Scalia's interpretation of a comma in the Second Amendment, it's up there alongside the absurdity of the contents of the Arc of the Covenant, consider this dedication - "To my parents, Mother Teresa and the Pope." Then there's a television program about Peter Ustinov's summer holiday - "Highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector."

    And the Oakhurst Dairy Case, Maine Labor Law and who gets overtime pay where a court decided that these words in the 1995 update to the statute "....the canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of...." without a comma after 'shipment,' meant that drivers who did the actual physical distributing by driving the delivery vehicles rather than the packing for shipment and distribution, were, despite the lack of a comma, indeed entitled to overtime pay.

    The tune is played, joy to the world, then along come the grammarians, written word monitors, a Gestapo which to keep us fat round and ever more frightened of misplaced commas has since 2003 been called the ICE of language. In the Maine Labor Law case Oakhurst Dairy, its lackeys, the my profits not yours hyenas and other hangers-on had to find between five and ten million dollars to pay drivers their mandated time and half back pay.

    

Pretty Sad Really

Dodo

    In an intellect that emerged from primordial wildernes as a survival tool that raises and makes answers to questions when it's not making things like battle tanks, silk stockings and wooden spoons, you might notice that hope finds patience, toys with tolerance before reverting to lumpen resignation. 

   "Learning that everything has a name transforms how the mind carves up reality, shifting an experience of a continuous, flowing background into distinct, labeled objects and categories"

    "While pre-linguistic minds can still grasp basic numerical and social concepts, acquiring a formal language dramatically expands abstract reasoning, complex planning, and the ability to share knowledge across generations"

    Gone are honor and glory, moments of bliss and explosions of consciousness that reduce being to the brilliance of a shooting star. Instead of basking in the glitter, we try to make it real by learning how to write so as to give ourselves over to an eternity that can be reproduced.

The enablers of Tyranny

Book

     An established pattern in our land places a premium on correct answers. A point comes when those correct answers become insecure. Let me just say that answers, a preoccupation that we people have chosen to call intellect, are written into history by politics not choice. And yes, there's a high chance you'll disagree on the definition of the symbol politics. And yes, there's a high chance you'll disagree on the statement; "The written world is an inadequate means of both communication and record keeping."

   "Aught is better than naught!" Or "owt better'n nowt." Then consider the expression or idiom: "Better aught than naught." 

    Granted aught and naught are archaic words. The first records suggest they go back to the 12 Century.  Allow yourself to understand that both words are still in use. Of the two statements, the second one, "better aught than naught," is recorded as the original and therefore correct version. This of course is nonsense in human speak but is sensible in number speak where "E=MC squared" is not "MC squared = E."

   The missing element between these two phrases, is not which one of them came first, it's the nuance, tone and the more visual signals that are entirely context related. Oh sure, Wittgenstein's language game has been well absorbed into the fabric of LLM training. If you want to know how, the machine records impressions of this or that human through the history of machine/human interactions. The context of a language exchange between machine and a particular person is build around past interactions and are added to the machines capacity to predict by searching through probabilities unique to the recorded interactions between machine and a particular human.

    The machine will have a record of your name, your age, your marital status and on it goes. A good chance the machine will have a record of you politics, your likes, your religion, what you find funny... From these records it will have a model of you from which it can predict likely interests, behaviors etc. It can do all these things as it quietly kicks the Turin Test in the nuts.

   The reason to give consideration to a machine's access to spoken language while converting written language into mathematically commodifiable number symbols has much to do with what, over the past five thousand years, the Written word has already done to our species.

    And what might that be?

    Written language is a consort of Agriculture, they are the original sins, together they have enabled the tyranny of commodity. Agriculture destroyed the natural world, written language began the process of destroying humanity. Spoken language, opposable thumbs and sublime sunsets are about all we have left of our humanity. 

       

It's fairly simple

Processionary Walnut Moth have hatched

    As a species we people struggle with singularity. Psychology, when in the pay of an autocracy, has puttered around probabilities and produced questionnaires that purport to match an individual to his or her calling. 

   And why is a questionnaire necessary? Because it's marketed as an efficient method of deciding where this or that human resource belongs. 

   The point about a type A personality, according to the Cleveland Clinic, is something like this : 'high ambition, intense competitiveness, time urgency, impatience, and a constant drive for achievement.' In short, for type A personality, singularity is getting other people to do what a type A personality wants them to do.

   In our world, many of these total a-holes are sieved out of the population then matched to employment opportunities in  corporations and other oligarchic structures that cut throats for their living, this includes theological structures and the political classes

    There's argument of course, but generally a personality emerges from a combination of innate genetic predispositions and the environment in which those predispositions are encouraged to dominate.

   When let loose on society, a type A personality will be subjected to levels of stress each time it senses the disappointment of not getting its way. Worth noting here that time moves and doesn't stand still so things like looking old, getting old and dying are unavoidable. 

   For a Type A, adapting to stress without being destroyed by it is a secret that doesn't come in a bottle, or from a kitchen or from a pharmacy or from a street corner or from a plastic surgeon or from giving itself to the Lord and finding peace in powerlessness.

   Where does the secret come from?

  It comes from becoming a bigger and bigger and more complex a-hole.

Europe and West Asia, Al in Arabic means House of.

The Kaaba. August 2018 - photo by Ali Wahid

    One of the main architects behind the current borders in Middle Eastern countries is a man called Sir Percy Zachariah Cox. He was a Major-General in the British Indian Army, he had a bunch of other titles, he was skinny and probably very bright, not big on rugby, more of a cricket and chess man and he died in 1937 a year before Oil was discovered in Saudi Arabia.

   In 1899 Percy was appointed Political Agent and Consul at Muscat and Oman, he later became Acting British Consul for this ancient part of the human world that had cleverly avoided being incorporated into the Ottoman Empire, but which had remained within the sphere of Ottoman influence for several hundreds of years. It was an area that included The Najd which is now part of Saudi Arabia.

    In 1899, when Percy Cox arrived in Muscat there was a major quarrel between the British, the French and the Arabs, a quarrel which amongst other things included the slave trade.

  The French had leased coastal land from the Sultan of Oman so they could maintain a coaling station for French merchantmen and the French Navy. The British had traditional problems with French merchantmen and the French Navy, they wanted the French out of the Indian Ocean, as far away from the Indian Subcontinent as possible, but mostly the British wanted to stop the slave traders from ruining British chances of controlling all of Eastern Africa.

   Unfortunately over the years Muscat and Oman had made good money trading slaves, ivory, rhino horns and so on. The French, in their territorial ambitions, had no real problems with a trade which had enabled the Sultans of Muscat to maintain a substantial empire that followed the Indian Ocean all the way down to the Cape of Good Hope. Instead the French had their eye on the Cradle of Civilization, up there were the Tigris and Euphrates made for rich and fertile lands.  And what with the Strait of Hormuz being something of tight fit, French territorial ambitions preferred friendly relations with Muscat and Oman.

   One of the problems north of Oman is and was called The Najd. It was a loose leaf collection of warring clans  and families who hadn't been able to get their minds around the idea that the world was divided between The British, The French, the Portuguese, the Germans, the Russians, the Ottomans, apparently the Omanis and eventually the United States.

   Sultans of Muscat had been obliged for centuries to keep an eye on the Najd, do everything they could to make quite sure The Najd was in a constant state of turmoil, because when those people up there weren't in a constant state of turmoil, they had this aggravating habit of trying to take the Sultan's palace and an income that included ship building and piracy away from him.

    A major player in the Najd were the Banu Hanifa clans. Long before Islam they had founded the city of Riyadh.  Around 1720 they'd formed a mutually advantageous alliance with the followers of a man called Abd al-Wahhab, he was a leader, an Imam, an activist, a scholar and a very strict medieval type religious cult leader. At times Banu Hanifa and their Wahhabi sect dominated Riyadh, when they did they presented a threat to Muscat and Omen. At other times they were busy with other things. They'd been beaten up by the Ottoman to keep them in their place, nor were they the only fierce and ambitious clan in the mostly empty lands of Arabia who laid claim to the walled city of Riyadh.

  Percy Cox with very little help from the French or the Sultan of Oman decided that it was time to make some sort of sense of The Najd by giving it what some might call a Land Law that was properly mapped out rather than constantly quarreled over depending on whim. It was a game the Ottoman's were good at playing. 

   Percy, had become Pro-Consul for the entire Middle East, a role he played from 1904 until 1919. He had much to learn about the area and its people. To help him, an archaeologist called Gertrude Bell who had traveled widely in Arabia had provided him with detailed lists of Arabian clans, territories and alliances she'd gathered though her own observations and from Colonel, then later Aircraftman, TE Laurence as well as a chap called Captain William H.I. Shakespear.

   Amongst his cadre of Political Officers Percy had a man called Jack Philby, his full name was Harry St. John Philby and he was the father of Kim Philby, a Cambridge man who spied for the Russians and died in Moscow in 1988. 

   Four years prior to the First World War Captain William H.I. Shakespear became the first British Political Agent to make contact with a Son of Saud called Abdulaziz II, who was leader of the Al Saud people. They'd recently been knocked around a little by one or other of their many enemies and the clan was feeling vengeful. Shakespear became military advisor to the Al Saud in the February of 1910. In 1915, in the first days of the Second of three Saud-Rashid wars, Shakespear was killed at the Battle of Jarrab. The British supported Al Saud and the Ottoman supported, traditional enemies of the House of Saud, the House of Rashid. 

    The Battle of Jarrab was fought in central Arabia, it was brutal and horrible, several Al Saud allies chose to run away, Al Rashid were the victors, the British lost an officer and went into a sulk with Abdulaziz who compared to Al Rashid had far too many enemies in the Najd.

    The Ottomans were gone, Britain and France were carving up the Middle East, the USA was sniffing around, this presented a very new set of problems for Arabia. For Abdulaziz, who in the end had had a good First World War, it was a little difficult to know what to do in this new, yet very familiar, set of circumstances. He wanted security and peace, and didn't want to have to make war or be told what to do by Britain or France.

    With Shakespear dead Abdulaziz adopted Jack Philby as an advisor to help with his European Problem.  Philby pointed out the boundary lines Cox, in his attempts to make Land Law across the Arabian Peninsular, had carefully put in place and had partially negotiated. Philby advised Abdulaziz to utilize the political and religious alliance his Al Saud had had with followers of Wahhabi since the 1740's. Get the fundamentalists to do the dirty work, get them to carve out and secure the traditional source of tribulation which was the Najd all the way to the Red Sea, south to the border with Omen and Muscat, might as well take a rational control of Mecca and promise access to one of the five pillars of the Islamic Faith to all who were physically, emotionally and financially able to perform the Hajj.

    After many battles, by the time oil was discovered in 1938, the Al Saud dominated the Najd and Abdulaziz II became the first king, or paramount chief of Saudi Arabia. The Wahhabi were like the Church of Rome to his Holy Roman Empire.

   Abdulaziz bin Abdul Rahman bin Faisal Al Saud, often called Ibn Saud, died in 1953. When he died one of the largest sources of oil in the world had been secured by the California Arabian Standard Oil Company. In 1944 CASOC was renamed the American Arabian Oil Company or ARAMCO

Free Markets and a well funded narrative?

Sunset

    Let's have a look at the new world with a few thoughts on 'Pricing Surveillance.' 

   What is pricing surveillance? 

   "It's when something like a supermarket uses personal data, browsing history, and AI algorithms to calculate your maximum 'willingness to pay' and then charges different people different prices for the exact same product or service."

   At the root of it is that moment or two when a carefree and happy gardener has to decide how much to charge a customer for something like weeding an ill-considered and tasteless perennial border that's not getting enough sun.

   Don't get me wrong unindentured day laborers have been floating this boat of pricing surveillance since the end of Guild System which eventually occurred in the last days of The Enlightenment during the dawn of an Industrial Revolution which presaged an era of denial the leisured have called The Romantic Age.

   What do the property owners look like, does the missus seem like a person who makes a good cup of tea, appreciates a chocolate biscuit and is happy with the mister. Does the mister work. Does he mow the lawn or does she. Does anybody in the household know how to weed or trim hedges. If you're invited inside do you feel obliged to take off your boots.... 

  There's a whole list which is built over time through the personal experience, often bitter, of being a jobbing gardener, and it's not just about guessing from the condition of their footwear what a property owner can afford to pay. It has much more to do with what psychologists call 'deservingness' because they can't bring themselves to call it 'tone.' 

    Once 'tone' is established, you might think the next issue is "How badly do I need this work?" You'd be wrong! The next question is "How much do they want me to do this work and how much do I want this work?"

    At the moment, when you give that calculation to an algorithm there are invisibles for which the algorithm has no data. 

    

   

   

For the Ages

Evening Aster

    By most accounts, The Enlightenment presented new ways of thinking about what and who we are. In the tradition of these things this new way of thinking eventually wandered into a period referred to as The Romantic Age.

   You can mark the beginning of The Romantic Age with the French Revolution and you can think of The Romantic Age as achieving a conclusion, in and around 1837 when the leisured classes concluded that reason wasn't all bad as long as it remained self conscious when it looked itself in the mirror and actually did something about the sewers.

   1837 was the year an 18 year old Queen Victoria was crowned, the same year that Michigan became a state, there were pro-slavery riots in Illinois, it was the year Dickens published his Oliver Twist, around the world a standing army had become increasingly important and there was redemption to be had by teaching supply and demand curves to heathen savages in faraway places so they could better understand the fundamentals of Calvin's Economic theories. 

   The Roman Empire and the Roman Republic regularly struggled with the phenomena of people moving away from using coin of a realm as the means of exchange. Gold by weight, silver by weight, something that kept its value was fine, but something the value of which was entirely reliant on trust wasn't big on the list. The Roman Denarius was an almost pure silver coin about the size of a US cent. The Greek equivalent was the Drachma and back in the days of Pythagoras, long before it became the Euro it was a bit smaller than a US cent. But the point is even when the coin had an intrinsic value, as in silver or gold, you can't make an omelet out of silver or gold.

     Calvin's own position was culled from the biblical texts. 'Earthly Riches' he'd concluded were nothing but smoke, the real do-do was living a life devoted to the goodness of god as explored in the scriptures. Nor did he approve of an element running through some of the texts that suggested usury was a cardinal sin, a combination of greed, gluttony, wrath and sloth. Not at all! If you lend money to someone, he claimed, and that someone made billions of doubloons on the basis of borrowing money from you it was only right that he send some of that profit your way. In short Calvin remains the Patron Saint of Modern Banking.

   In our current time, as truth becomes a brand, our species has achieved what may be the beginning of a new age. Future historians, if there are any, might look to the past see Sumerian invoices on a clay tablet, find someone like Liu Hui who calculated a value for pi in the 3rd Century AD or Shiing-Shen Chern with a wonderful name, possibly Turin or the triumvirate of Hinton, LeCun and Bengio which sound like the stops on a subway train.

   On the day mathematics died as our new age progresses our species will slowly begin to relearn lessons of the enlightenment one of which was the sad consequence of concentrating knowledge into fewer and fewer hands. 

As with the Hula Hoop, this too shall pass

Frog on Siding

     You can try calling them empire building fascists addicted to CapEx, but if you want to mightily piss off Polling Bros, AI Bros, Tech Bros generally, and anyone who believes there's an everything machine that will produce the rapture of a singularity that leaves us people entirely liberated from the toil of chasing sparkly things all you have to do is say Stochastic Parrot and you will be rewarded by the sort of pissed-offed-ness that launches ships. Then just go ahead and add: "by the way, if a bridge collapses, it's not because it's a bridge that's gone rouge ." 

    Like all guilt ridden land grabbing empire builders a defensive paranoid reaction is the self appraising reflex. The question of course is "why guilt ridden." When you think you're perfect, a criticism hurts and the rule is to build a narrative based, not on well researched data that more likely demonstrates your imperfections, but on the sort of massive lie that's so impossible the world has to be flat and full of people who just don't understand and never will know what intelligence is.

    When I utter it comes from my mind. When you utter it comes from your mind. Language, as it is, includes not only words and impressions of words, it includes an impression of the mind behind the utterance. And there's not a lot you can do about that because that's part of the way we are as beings. An LLM is a probabilistic sieve that is able to gather and utilize data about you, your interests, your political inclinations, and to anything from your side of the exchange it guesses with great accuracy what word comes next.

   When it speaks it has a tone and accent that broadcasts familiar impression and word usage which go toward tickling those receptors inside your mind that suggest personage. 

Power defined by belonging

Spindle Tree

    The Age of Enlightenment, or the age of wig wearing, came to a slow realization that reason and looking good in stockings wasn't the answer to everything. It was followed by a return to the dream world of Romance and an age of what I will call idealism which conflicted with the essentially analytical mindset forged by the Enlightenment. The analytical, or science, was basically boring, but the analytical, or science, made money and those dark satanic mills quickly produced lots of money for guns and lawyers for those who mattered. The rest of us stood stuck in a world of change that wanted us to belong, but you know, what difference would it actually make. This way power was given unto he who could make us want to belong to the world that he, she or  it was trying to make. If we go back a bit, it wasn't hope and wanderlust that pulled us out of the trees and onto the savannah, it was our disappearing trees that forced change on us.