Category: General

My initial fascination with the internet back in the late 90s and ongoing was the sense that all of humanity's quirks & eccentricities was slowly growing into cyberspace.  What was forming was a huge superconsciousness fueled by porn and cat memes. (For what it's worth, cats currently outnumber porn)   A new evolution of consciousness was upon us.

    As make-your-site places popped up, like geocities and angelfire, you got a true glimpse into people and their individual qabalahs for better or for worse.   I joined in the best I could, in those days of heavy shamanic self-medication, randomly creating accounts, dropping rants and then finds new places to sprinkle with my prose.  It was more personal as the content was created rathered than the recycled posting that happens on social media now. 

   My father-in-law has been going slowly deaf most of his adult life.  Years as a solitary self-employed lumberer tethered him to his own thoughts as the chainsaws help eat away at his hearing. He is retired now.  Recently the Papa and his new bride went and acquired iPhones, stepping bodly into the 21st century, tickled by the thoughts of being able to speak to the computers help in their hands.

    The Papa continues to be a man of nature. The sunrise finds him up and ready for a walk. He drives off to secluded spots with his trusted companion Windy and spends the first several hours of the day getting thick with nature.

     The new iPhone has made this ritual a little different.  The Papa sends out dozens of photos & videos to his children, bride and grandson of his morning explorations complete with the type of in-joke ridden captions you expect from a man who doesn't let the silence stop him from thinking.  When asked he apologized for not putting me on the list but I insisted.  This is what I enjoyed, 21st technology sharing with us the poetry of a man's soul.  The is what the internet, the Great Glass Bead Game, is for.

We all live three lives: a public one, a private and our secret life.  Most of us tend to work on one/the other or both of the former and ignore or work around the latter.

When we are in a relationship, at first we only share our private lives.  As the relationship deepens, we cannot help but be affected and effect each other with our secret lives.  This is not conscious.

This hidden part, this is where are neuroses, our 'demons' tend to be buried.  Our secret lives are secret for a reason. We are protective, if not ashamed of them and having someone so close to your inner core is frightening.  This is partly why familiarity breeds contempt.

To further a or any relationship, it our duty as a Lover to strengthen our 'inner core' as it were in order to deepen the relationship.  Tame our neuroses, lay the demons down on the talking couch.  Keep time for yourself to dwell in the 'crazy' continue to have a third secret life.  But temper yourself into your private life so that you be Love & Healing for those who share private lives with you.

A thoughtful piece by Jesse Walker:

http://reason.com/archives/2015/03/15/what-we-mean-when-we-say-conspiracy-theo/

Having lived through the neo-conservative revolution with it’s “stay on message” media philosophy, I tend to see shifts in media truespeak as orchestrated. A perfect example is the brilliant slander of the term “political correctness” to hurl against someone who calls you out on your bigotry.

 

I have never read and at this point I probably never will.

This refusal defies all my laws of bibliography and synchronicity.  I work in an environment where I hear it mentioned at least once a day, Seriously, like the library has no other books on race relations.  I never read or watched The Help. or The Butler.  or 12 Years a Slave no matter how many well-meaning patrons push it at me.

I don’t need to forgive anyone for America’s race relations. And I won’t.  You never forgive, you change.  Just like any other personal relationship.  I am not sure that I am comfortable being in a personal relationship with my American heritage, merely because of the vehement 24% that will take offense to this sentence much less my life. At this point I am required to defend myself by saying how much I love my country. Which I will not because of Mathew VanVlack, who taught me the Erasmus quote “I am human, therefore nothing human is alien to me” back in High School. Obviously this Cartesian thread took us different places. He was a good friend.

Colin Wilson was an important thinker in my limited intellectual word.  He took the existentialist crisis head on & sought tools against it.  He understood Uncle Al’s declaration that “Know thee that existence is pure joy”, while embracing The Great Work as did Gurdjieff.  His works explored both mysticism & deviant criminology in an effort to understand the vast possibilities that is human existence.

I was never the reader of novels that Colin was, I have no desire to tackle Proust & my one foray through Joyce’s Ulysses was enough. It was more his interpretations of his beloved reads that I found inspiring.

One of the great Silver keys given to Wilson by Abraham Maslow, who shared with the Colin the work he had done on “peak experiences” .  Dr Maslow insisted that these “peaks” were spontaneous & beyond our control.  Wilson begged to differ & in his 1971 opus “The Occult” postulated ‘Faculty X’, a superior sort of intuition that could be part of mankind’s next development.

Let us keep in mind that Mr. Wilson was not a scientist but a literary critic and armchair philosopher.  Nevertheless I find his speculations absolutely fascinating.

I’ve seen several people run into problems when using the Overdrive Media Console on the Nook HD to borrow eBooks from the library.  They download the book fine read the first page and then when they go to advance the book automatically skips to the next chapter.  The problem only happens when Overdrive is downloaded from the Nook Store.  The solution is to delete Overdrive, download Google Play from either the Nook Store (if still available) or a browser.  Download Overdrive from the Google Play.   Set up as before and should work fine.

Some applications just work differently from Nook Store vs Google Play.  Twitter on the Nook HD needs to be the Nook version.  I will update if/when I learn more.

   Recently a woman bragged to me about her daughter.  The daughter had been fascinated by computers since childhood.  She ended up going into internet security and the Department of Homeland Security paid for her education.  The young child who would admonish her parents for not having strong enough passwords now puts her whole life on Social Media with her omnipresent smartphone.  Wasn’t she concerned about privacy, her mother had asked.  It sounded like the daughter shared with her mother the idea of the Singularity, explaining that once the technology was possible, having as much of her personality as possible on the Web was paramount.

We will deal with the idea of the Singularity later.  For some reason, the conversation reminded me of this book, published 1993.   The premise of the books involve genetic engineering where some children of the rich are made Sleepless, genetically modified so they can go without sleep.  While the rest of us waste 8 or more hours a day, the Sleepless are learning and evolving past us.

The subject of Objectivism is a main theme in this book.  When human beings are not born equal should they be treated equally? Should the superior (Sleepless) be held back by the um, Sleepful?

Frankly Objectivism tends to be just another excuse for discrimination and false superiority.  As if class, race, wealth, language, creed, religion, gender, sexuality and, lets be honest, facial symmetry have been enough ways for humans to judge each other not-worthy.

The Sleepless and the Sleepers is an interesting concept, especially when used an analogy for the technologically advanced and the technophobic.  As usual it is important not to let the analogy collapse into Bigotry.

 

For a while I was having a problem with my Chrome Browser.  Whenever I opened it, I was told it hadn’t shut down correctly and would I like to restore.  I traced this back to the day I downloaded and installed Audible Manager to take advantage of a free audiobook offer.  Research showed I was far from the only person that this had happened to.

In order to fix this I had to uninstall Audible completely and completely uninstall Chrome before reinstalling.  Merely resetting Chrome did not work.

 

In the biography of Adam Smith written by John Rae, we learn that when the proto-economist was young, around 3 or 4, gypsies attempted to kidnap him.  They released the boy when pursued by his family.  This just seems like a fun fact to speculate on.

It wasn’t too uncommon an occurrence, so I doubt his parents harped on it too much.  One can certainly imagine that they couldn’t help but threaten to give young Adam back to the gypsies if he didn’t go to bed.

How about Time Travel?  Maybe communist time travelers went back in time disguised as gypsies to kidnap and re-educate the capitalist messiah.  Luckily (?) the Trilateral Commision became aware of this devious plot and sent a commando team to foil it.  Also disguised as gypsies, they killed off the communist team and the child.  A capitalist changeling was left for the parents.