thoughts…rants…irony…fiction…observation…
Even after the Emancipation Proclamation, even after the Civil War, even after Civil Rights laws…
Racists enslave, undermine Reconstruction, create Jim Crow conditions; racists resist integration, good schools, good jobs for Blacks for 170 years. Racist suppression creates slum conditions with poor education, emotional misery, broken homes, crime, gangs. Racists: “See, that’s how Blacks are.”
“Now, proposals to divert carbon dioxide from smokestacks to vast subterranean wells are regarded…as crucial to any hope of meeting the world’s climate goals. The Biden administration’s plan to zero out emissions from the power grid by 2035 hinges on the success of colossal carbon capture…” – The Washington Post today.
If congress had forced the energy industry or if industry chose to make a difference they could’ve spent the money to radically (and successfully) reduce emissions through developing new scrubbing technology. But they cheaped-out. Now they want to do this dodgy sequestration stuff. How long can that go on?
Biden is between a rock and a hard place. He doesn’t have the authority to just order industry to install new scrubbers, and to shift over to clean energy. He doesn’t have the political power to get new laws done. He’s pushed his EPA and he’s gotten what he could get done in congress. The carbon sequestration “solution” is outright desperation.
The power brokers fouling air and water, the greedy thugs behind the catastrophic greenhouse effect, cheerfully rationalize their unsustainable industry; most of them believe their own lies. They cultivate self-deception and rationales, they polish excuses till they’re blinded by them, hypnotized by them. They rationalize us into cancer and climate change. They bask in lies as in a tub of warm water.
The water will begin to seethe, and will cook them in time…
In STORMLAND:
“Look! I told AI to put a unicorn horn on an image of my boyfriend! And I said, add Pegasus wings to him, and it did! I’m an artist!”
“Look, I told AI make the queen of England have a fly’s mouth and it did! I’m an artist!”
“Look! I told AI make flowers with 5 kindsa petals and now I’m an artist!”
Good music can be AI-imitated well enough so that many people will be fooled, but *very* good music and really truly earthy music that has *that certain feel* of the human experience in life will not, imo, be duplicable.
AI will find the imitation of banal music, and banal art, to be easy prey.
I use the word ‘prey’ regarding the art, music and writing that AI sucks up and imitates. I do not use the word with imprecision. I assert that chatGPT and Suno and Udio, et al, are essentially shapeshifters, like the pod-people in movies who take you over, and use your form, destroying the original person in the process. AIs of this kind are designed to predate. They are designed to devour and digest. The predator leaves the bones of creators behind, within its scat.
SEE: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/udio-ai-music-chatgpt-suno-1235001675/
I have a pet monkey. Not a chimp or bonobo, but it resembles them: it’s my body. My body, with much of my brain, is a largely primitive primate; hunting about, acting on impulse–if I let it. I have the poor thing mostly trained, after fifty years trying. I have compassion for it. I give it treats. I say things to it, to comfort it. It is not me, but it provides the simple firmware I use to support the vehicle I now move around in.
The truth protects itself. So I can put this here, and there’s no harm in it. Only one or two people, if that many, will take it in.
The inner of the inner circle, the esotericism of esotericism, is the refinement of attention into a field, that encloses oneself, that acts as a kind of magnifier for the absolute intelligence, which is always trying to reach us. Attention itself, when fully activated, is the real third eye. There are certain practices that suddenly reveal what is actually meant in Thunder, Perfect Mind. These are forms of meditation that, in the end, are all the same form. These forms of meditation (ultimately all the same form, arrived at in different terms) do not involve chanting. They do not involve visualization. They involved feeling and sensing more and more refinedly, in a particular praxis, until you see what people glimpse on drugs–but you see it clearly; you may hear other people thinking; you feel–as another Gnostic text says–a fullness, an intelligence that is also radically simple. You become conscious, and suddenly the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita and the Gospel of Thomas and Krishnamurti make sense. Duality is like the two feet you stand on, and your body is unified. One no longer identifies with emotional pain; you can feel it passing through, you treat it compassionately, but it doesn’t capture you anymore. Vanity, ego, doesn’t die–you just put it on its little shelf, and wear it as you might wear a tiara. But you are not your tiara. All that happens–from a very simple process strenuously pursued.
POOR THINGS. 10 minutes in, I thought, “A tiresome over-arty obliqueness imitating David Lynch, & trying to fuse Frankenstein, The Miracle Worker & Dr Moreau.” But then it soon came together–& it triumphed. A steampunk-surrealist coming of age story from a hilarious perspective. Gorgeous. Brilliant acting, sets that would have made Fellini jealous.
Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe.
The trailer:
Trump is a japing babbling senile spittle-spraying 1959-style comedian who’s guilty of rape and keeps getting away with crimes and yet still gets to go up on stage and do his stand-up set for people who pretend to like him because certain lies and unadulterated hate feel good to them.
I see Mitch McConnell is now endorsing Trump. McConnell destroyed America as we know it during Obama’s term: McConnell organized to block Obama’s Supreme Court pick. This led to the right-wing-sycophant dominated SCOTUS we have now, which has allowed the Confederates to win the Civil War after all.
And Trump laughs and slaps his knee and raises a noose in place of the American flag and he hugs the noose and says, “I got noose for you, people! I’m going to be President for life!” And his audience laughs and applauds.
If national polls are to be taken as a general trend lasting into November, then it could be that Trump will win against Biden. It’s a real possibility that this man fighting 91 court charges could once more be President. It seems that voters are being bought–purchased by the counterfeit-currency of lies. The GOP message to voters is: “you will bank more money if Trump is elected.” A lie…but…
GREED.
Greed is an altered state. It’s a kind of drunkenness. It makes people stupid. More likely to believe lies.
Yes, Biden made a mistake, with respect to support on the left. He shouldn’t have eagerly leapt at supporting Israel’s retaliation against Hamas’s brutal incursion of October 7–a retaliation which Netanyahu’s political opportunism turned into a panoply of war crimes. But the latest Big Lie from Republicans is a simple falsehood endlessly echo-chambered: the claim that Biden’s economy is faltering. And Trump will, supposedly, put more money in the public’s pocket. The average person will probably feel some shame, in voting for Trump. They know he’s a rapist, a liar, a con artist, and they may even suspect that he is a Russian Kompromat. A traitor. But they’ll vote for him out of kneejerk, salivating GREED. “I’ll have more money in the bank if Trump is elected.”
They won’t be proud of it. But many of them will do it. Partly because they believe the lie about the economy. Partly because of simple…
GREED.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/
The roll-out of new AIs will highlight their use in social control. Over 10 to 20 years, these programs will get increasingly better at media manipulation.They’ll observe what gets the desired social result. They’ll learn what imagistic and misinformation buttons to push, micro-second by micro-second, for optimum control. All this will be at the behest of worldwide oligarchies; at the direction of dictators, and corporatists. AI social control proficiency will be almost invisible, but as effective as steel chains and electric prods.