Month: April 2023

Speaking of charities, I’m just not feeling the Paul Newman’s company anymore. It turns out they give a tiny portion to charity because they count giant oversized administrator salaries as legit overhead. And the quality of their goods has deteriorated. The Paul Newman’s dressing is full of nasty crap it didn’t used to have in it. Paul is rotating elegantly in his grave. (He’s too cool to spin.)

I get sooooo many causes asking me to donate money, and on a daily basis if you include email. (They sort of punish you when you donate by selling your information to other causes). Good causes, yes, except a few that are perhaps not what they seem. Causes I’d like to donate to and sometimes do. But who can afford to donate to all of them?

Somewhere a person decided they must donate to all of them, was thus made homeless, then applied to one of the causes they’d donated to, and was turned down because, sorry, hon, there are just too many asking…

Ask them what they want? What a strange idea! Do you do that after you’ve shot them? That’s what you must mean. You shoot them and then ask them “By the way what did you want?”

I mean, what else are all these guns for? The front door gun, in its special holster by the front door, was rather expensive. Do you know what those things cost? Silly not to use them. Getting a sniper rifle soon. Gotta figure out where to use that.

Possibly front yard landmines could be more expeditious. They would be relatively inexpensive, seeing as millions of them are manufactured every year.

AI copyright in spotlight after platforms pull “fake Drake” song

By the numbers: The song that was played 600,000 times on Spotify and attracted 275,000 views on YouTube was widely shared on social media, with one clip posted to Twitter that has since been disabled garnering 20 million clicks.

This AI that faked out Drake is appalling but I wonder if an AI was initiated to do a fake Rolling Stones song could really make you think that was the Stones. Fans of Drake –millions–evidently thought this was Drake. But could that work for Stones fans? For fans of Drake, yeah I can see it. For fans of Harry Styles, easy to fake I bet., How about fans of Lou Reed or, say, Johnny Cash or Waylon Jennings? No way they’d fall for that stuff. Drake is easy to fake because he’s cookie-cutter.

There is an instructive silence. The chattering goes on around it, and nothing is learned from the chattering. The silence remains silent and somehow speaks. Could be like a prism; an empty crystal that reveals. The silence says not a word but is always revealing; perpetually, silently indicative. It’s non-specific, and quite definite. It reflects conditions, and is unconditioned. It indicates suchness; it indicates an edgeless sphere large enough to contain all of time.

A special intelligence can happen, almost as lightning happens, on social media; there’s a special stupidity that frequently happens, as mudslides happen, also on social media.

Sometimes data is shared that leads to smart, collaborative group-think. But often in a social media setting, as we respond to the clusters of endorphin hits which come so very rapidly, homo sapiens 1.0 is prone to mindlessly clutching at those feelings, jumping to conclusions–stupid conclusions. I look forward to homo sapiens 2.

I don’t blame social media per se. It merely illuminates our slavery to instinctual reactive responses. It takes advantage of it and rubs our primeval snouts in it. Our nightmarish history, with The Holocaust, with wars fought for religion, with slavery–is yet another manifestation of our outmoded neurological firmware, our faulty epigenetic programming. We’re glitched with primitive neuro programming, to go alongside with our capacity for engineering and art and science.

Social media is an accelerant, as in firefighting jargon. It makes human nature’s rampant irresponsibility worse. It can accelerate the good, but oh so often accelerates our worst impulses.