An Authenticity Issue

Some Clouds

 Ok Chaps! Let us proclaim a reality. Hark the Herald, and I'll quote the following:

 "When the elite strip-mine the shared purpose of a society, they don't just impoverish the lower echelons; they isolate themselves. They lose the capacity for authentic human connection because they view everyone else as a data point to be liquidated or an asset to be acquired."

And this:

 "Once you are that isolated, you become terrified. You realize, at some subconscious level, that you are a naked emperor sitting on a pile of stolen grain."

 Yes indeed, profound agonizing loneliness is not a security problem, it's not an excuse to violate the weak without consequences, it's not an excuse to buy an island, contemplate a Utopian Village with hot and cold running water, air-conditioning and obedient help.

 A subject we addressed in the prose essay "Beaky Cap, who the hell are you kidding!"

While we are Livestock let us remember the silence and peace of a library

Milkweed leaf in morning sun

 We're still high on Black Darren, nudged up against the iron binding pigments of Red Darren, staring across the Olchon River, contemplating Offa's Mercia. Of course we are restless, this time it has to do with the Acting Witan of Mercia, their declaration that Middlesex, Berkshire and Buckinghamshire are Mercian lands, and the general unease of our understanding that the genuine business minds of the Industrial Revolution emerged from King Offa's Tamworth. Good solid men of sense, none of this wishy-wash of the cidar drinkers in the south who reckoned it was someone else's job to drove pigs.

 More recently our optimizing industrialists have learned to bypass the conscious mind  "The data-highwaymen discovered that the quickest way to keep a human eye glued to a glass screen is not to offer them a calm, balanced, worked example of macroeconomics or historical nuance. The fastest way to unlock the brain's attention center is to trigger a primal, somatic spasm—fear, tribal outrage, validation, or lust. The fantasy world isn't a grand ideological project! It’s a global cash-crop harvested from our nervous systems."

 Hear me now. Digital Highman want your attention, your peace and your sanity, it's a magic mushroom or a hen-bane they feed us. And guess what? Most of us are engaging the rush, we give them our devotion and give the Highwayman what he wants from us.

The view from Offa's Dyke redux

Milkweed

 Yesterday's mention of Offa's Dyke may have failed to penetrate or add balance to my attempt to stick it to the rich. The Dyke is a hundred and seventy odd miles through the Welsh Marches from Chepstow in South Wales to Prestatyn in North Wales. It was built by a Mercean King called Offa to make certain he could get his tarrifs from Welsh famers and traders and make sure the Welsh dragons stuck to their own country. Offa built a financial empire, his capital, a place called Tamworth in Staffordshire, was apparently awash with pigs, every household had a drove of them. King Offa was, in short, a Christian, he was nice to his wife, put an image of her on one of his coins, he was totally un-moved by the Beatitudes, it was just business, and, like most rich people, he was about as far as possible from being a poet it's possible to get. A Jeff Bezos of the second half of the Eigth Century, his entire existence was an optimization problem.

 

The View from Offa's Dyke

Hay Making

 Life is a relational poem! If we turn it into an optimization problem, then we are fucked! I don't know how else to say that! I don't know how you will understand this. I guess it depends on whether you have a dominating optimization plan.