Hard Times An Enfer

               You know you’re living in hard times when even the devil can’t pay his rent.  Sacre Blue!

                  I thought of this watching an old TV show. In it a character, a writer, complains that he sold his soul to the devil  and now the time is up and the hellhounds are coming round to drag him down to hell.  That’s now his complaint though.

           “I shoulda asked for fame, instead I asked for talent.”

          How true. How true. At least with fame he would have gotten laid more often instead, having talent without “the convenient social graces that open all doors, what he wound up with was a one way ticket to hell.

         I try that racket but it didn’t work. The apparatus was not powerful enough apparently. When my ten years were up I looked at the hellhound, which in my case was a miniature schnauzer   and said  “I asked for  fame and fortune. I was even willing to compromise on the small stuff. You call this  fame and fortune. Who the hell knows who I am?  I’m living on food stamps and haven’t had a decent bottle of wine in twenty years.

              Now you come to me an expect me to quietly join the long line of chumps marching slowly to the big hot place?  Piss off.  And you can take your Google robots and they can piss off too. I deserve better. I’m a better person then what you want to make me out to be.”

            The dog just shuffled it’s feet and grinned slightly, the S-O-B was trying to intimidate me, understand?   Then it says

            “We know where you live”

            “Yeah,” I replied, “My dentist knows where I live too and I’m twice as fraid of him as I am of you.”

              “You’ll be hearing from us”  Then he shuffled off with a dozen or so suburbanites, their chains clanking in the gathering darkness.

                 Like I care. Like I care about anything  WTF is the world gonna do to me? Kill me? Hey, My times a coming. It ain’t long I knows that and it ain’t my fault things got screwed up so badly. It’s yours.

          Look over to the right. See any comments?  Why not. Lemmie tell ya something. I got peeps that are like professional word spitters  and they pay me the compliment of ripping off my ideas. Normal people think I’m smart as anything too. My problem is my competitors are so driven to excel and succeed that they can’t  say a nice word about anyone. It would lodge in their throats and choke em to death!

              But always having some way of showing they are dissatisfied with things that is how they demonstrate they are smart – and heaven help them if they are not smart at least wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;

            Tra la la

--   ALF

                            "Long Live the Revolution"

                         AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

 Norma Deren

Cosplay Pere UBU and Japanese Auto production

Cosplay --  Pere UBU and Japanese Auto production

(or, Sixteen going on Sixty)

            -Note Bene - I don't want to mislead you the following has very little to do with Japanese auto production other then that the teamwork production style has been used successfully by Sony  in JPOP and particularly with Ayumi Hamasaki - and a few other tangential comments, such as the Japanese feel more comfortable exporting technology then services and this may negatively impact overall business impact.

             The article is a part of a continuing series of attempts to break Americans away from the naive assumption that everybody loves them and more so that everybody wants Americans to take over their businesses.

                      It being a lovely spring day it seems a good idea to break away from the usual intellectual stuff ‘round here and and talk about a fashion style. Being as I’m a guy and I don’t “dress up” this will be a limited discussion of necessity. 

  

                Jimi Hendrix used to say the reason why he became a musician was so he could dress the way he wanted without being labeled a “fag.” Then again, Jimi said a lot of stuff. 

                   The operant word here today is Kawaii, a Japanese word for which there is no direct translation. As a lifelong musician, if you say the word Kawaii to me I’m going to think of the synthesizer company from the seventies and eighties. They may still be around. They were like the second level of quality and cost behind the first rank, larger Japanese Synth Companies which were Yamaha and Roland. These companies are definitely still around and their keyboards are used in most major rock concerts.

           Actually I still have a Kawaii XD-5 drum machine, which was a poor man’s 808 and into which I hand programmed from scratch (sine waves) in order to get the Harry Partch Scales and other musical oddities– It took a long time but I was very proud of it.

Obviously any talk by me about Kawaii ( Pronounced like Hawaii) is going to include a lot of music talk to preface it. First off, I like J-Pop , but it’s a different idiom from American music. We like to say Brit music stems from the music hall and American music stems from the barn. All indigenous music has the influence of the court and the vulgate but J-pop is more towards the court. I like to say that the Japanese make pop songs the way they make cars – they are team operations of very precise working together. It is very dramatic as well.

             Briefly when Disco collapsed into synth pop in the 80’s it went all over the word and spawned techno, rave, house, and all the other dance genres. ( As an aside, in regards our usual themes here, the major cities of the world have more in common with each other then with the smaller cities of the individual nations – this is because of the rise of a global upper class as the human race bifurcates and heads down the path to new, separate species.)

                              For me, in the beginning was the KLF. Drummond and McCaulty were a Scottish duo ( The Kings of the Low Frequency – The Keltic Liberation Front – The justified Agents of Mu Mu) who had a coupla hits, especially “Last Train to TranceCentral”, “3AM Eternal” and “justified and Ancient” – that really rocked. Then they for intents and purposes, retired and began new careers as conceptual artists. This was like, 1990.

                          Then in the early 90’s in the first example of classic Jpop the Sony company, put together the group Zone. I have little info about them – but – for instance when that chick alledgedly wrote the tune “Complicated” as a teen ager I did not buy it. Eighteen year old girls do not write those type songs. I get the impression that “Secret Base” the first big Zone tune, was written as well by a professional.

                            Zone may have been like the monkees but it was all there – the performance, the song, the production. The girls may have not been rocket scientists but they had a quality that really helps in terms of Kawaii.

                             At it’s worst Kawaii can be like the playboy bunny syndrome. As a musician one gets to see rich people and how chicks suck up to them and it can be a drag when the girl behaves as if she’s fourteen years old – especially if the girl is closer to forty then fourteen. Kawaii or “cute” mean effervescent, playful, happy, but it also can mean manipulative.

                     Don’t forget the line between the playboy bunny and the prostitute is not very wide, but as well there is a strong theatrical tradition, both European and Asian that is as work. Let me review the music quickly and we’ll get back to that.

                          First off one wants to mention Otsuka Ai, who is a singer that varies her repertoire from up tempo dance “feel good” numbers to confessional self expression songs and also includes love ballads. It is the love ballads that may be difficult to take in that they usually involve misty images of he BF at the moment, kittens, old gentle people with smiles of wisdom and mohair sweaters.

                          There’s a group called AAA, or triple A that does up tempo stuff well. A few jpop band seem to have extra singers and dancers – sort of like boy bands- but they don’t overdo the gratuitous harmonies and the dance routinues, rather then being co-ordinated schuck and jives tend to be acrobatic.

                         The giant of the genre since 2000 is Ayu Hamasaki. At first you think shes the Madonna of Japan and she can do that – and she does very successful and elaborate live shows in the Madonna mold. She also tends to do the evening gown ballad trip a little more then kids go for. As a songwriter I’d suggest that in some ways ballad writing is so formulaic that a lot of stuff that should not be performed winds up on stage.

                   We joke that it gives the singer a chance to rest before the next up tempo number. Ballad writing is not dead but there’s gotta be something musical goin on or it’s just a space filler.

                       Incidentally other then “konnitchiwa” and “hai”, I don’t know a lot of Japanese but different languages lend themselves to different melodies. When Elizabeth Browning wrote “Sonnets from the Portuguese” she was referring to the fact that it is a very mellifluous language. Listen to Brazilians like Djavan or even Jobim and is obvious.

Japanese doesn’t have a lot of long, syllabic exercises but it’s is filled with many one sound words, which means it can make rap that moves very fast.

              I can’t rap to save mey life because I’m trapped within all these multisyllabic academic words. And, for instance groups like the Orbital and FSOL could never seem to fuse their beats with any kind of organized lyric content. Ibiza Chill out does a slightly better job, as does Italian house music with it’s endless repeated choruses.

Japanese music doesn’t have that problem . In a nutshell their songs often have begininnings middles and endings which is to say they have what we call poetic form, if not architecture. And groups like Zone can be easily compared with the Go-Gos musically.

                        As I indicated Ayumi Hamasaki is the major Jpop artist. She records like most of the major artists on Sony and so she has people write the music and a more or less constant studio band, including a very good lead gtr player.

                             ````

                          Basically one of the keys to successful post disco dance music is modulation. Triple A does it and other groups as well and this helps the tune avoid the repetitiveness that led to it being so hated, at aleast in the states. Hamasaki does that effortlessly and on a tune like Flying high she shifts tempo, key, and meter at the same time, dropping into a rap thing. It’s very effective.

                                The two masterpieces are “Evolution” and “Surreal”. I can’t claim full knowledge of her oeuvre as of yet however. There are tunes that continue the advances made in those two songs,and as well, as in the case of virtually every major artist, she has spawned imitators. Her background seems quite ordinary and she has worked her way up the ladder over the years. She’s not really Kawaii and in fact, from what I can gather, she’s considered something of a trend setter herself.

It’s funny and it seems contradictory that in American Country Western music we’d ordinarily think of female singers as subservient to their men but there’s also a tradition of women being pressured into be the servants of men and not liking it. So Ayumi seems to have that sense of what we sometimes joke as “the ever present tortured artist effect.” In other words she simply will never be totally happy.

In this instance then one can’t imagine Ayumi Hamasaki being content to be classified as part of any trend other then her own. As I indicated there are permutations of Kawaii that extend beyond the brainless bimbo stereotypes of love bunnies and prostitutes.

One is it is a very brightly colored and attractive fashion statement – much akin to Carnaby Street in the UK in the sixties. To increase the allure a little more a genre called “Cosplay” or costume playing involves young women dressing up as their favorite anime characters or in the style of same.

                   Recall if you will the Japanese have for a long time had a very sophisticated religious sense. They, for the most part have no messianic religions ( although that may weaken their ability to withstand the seductions of messianic leaders) and - not to put too fine a point on things, spent centuries slaughtering each other in the Shogunate wars. Therefore the normal adoption of God poses, through masks, as in Noh drama, is not as all inclusive as it would be in more primitive societies. People understand that magic only goes so far.

I use religious analogy that’s what I’m comfortable with- but theatrical comparisons are, if anthing, more direct. Alfred Jarry’s “UBU Roi”, Hugo Balls “DADA”, the Kapek Brothers “Rossums Universal Robots” all carry the same philosophical baggage.

If you prefer a wider context, the works of Cocteau, the so called “New Vaudevillians and even Pee Wee Hermans plays offer the same absurdist underpinnings .(For those unfamiliar with American theatre Herman (Paul Reubens) based his “Pee Wee” character on the 20’s comic Eddie Cantor.

                 To bring this back to more familiar territory recall what I once labeled the Mickey Mouse line. Two armies face off on a battle field. One is dressed like Mickey Mouse. They advance on each other an one side is decimated because they could not fire on an enemy that looked like Mickey Mouse

             To elaborate further. I was talking to a bus driver the other day. He’s of average intelligence and no bad habits. Someone has indoctrinated him with the line that President Obama allegedly hates the military. (Actually what is happening there is we are witnessing the setting up of the post warfare military. On all levels re-enlistments are jockeying to get the sweet spots like Germany, South Korea, or even the Pacific and nobody wants anything to do with the middle east.)

              We are not concerned with that question here – what is important is how the message is transferred and if the message  transfer takes hold, can it be changed in light of the facts, or is it beyond such alteration?   That American military policy has since the second world war been based on subjective beliefs is a given - but it can no longer be afforded.

                 Realistically we must assume our typical bus drivers mind  is made up forever. This doesn’t mean that counterprogramming can’t be employed but lets not count on it. The selfish gene doesn’t care about truth and you have not begun to understand real horror until you look into people’s souls.

                      For intents and purposes the goal of those who would enslave you is simple – “How can we make our candidate more Kawaii?” How can we convince the voter that despite every appearance of being a heartless psychotic our boy loves his mother, children and small dogs.

                       Now I must begin by apologizing if I offend the sensibilities of readers. I don’t mean to do so, but on the other hand to refrain from addressing certain issues would be a disservice to the reader, and what is more a disservice to the work at hand.

                       One feels like Winston Churchill in being compelled to remind the reader that if some tells you they don’t like you, you must take them at their words and not think that one can simple overcome prejudice with kindness. Over coming obstacles with a sense of humor and will power is something that belongs in Hollywood and on television, but it doesn’t happen that often in real life.

                          What we may suggest exists is a duality of attitude discernable in cultures that ,mirrors that which we see in individuals. The monads create the totality. More advanced societies like more advanced people learn to mask this duality. As we say the key to success is hypocrisy, meaning the ability to force others to live under constraints that we ourselves can disregard. In classic terms rulers make decisions that mean life and death for followers whilst never risking that themselves.

                        Again we traditionally force the dispossessed agree to terms we ourselves would never consider. For instance the notion often promulgated that if two sides side down and talk eventually they will get to know ech other and like each other. They may get to know each other and they may even, as adversaries develop a sort of admiration for each other – but that doesn’t change the essentials.

                              Strindberg might suggest that in cases where one side is disadvantaged, it can be forced to capitulate and in do so retroactively change it’s viewpoints but when cultures or persons of sufficient back ground interact this is not the case. Isreal and Palestine have been talking for over a lifetime and there’s no suggestion they trust each other anymore then originally. This is an interesting case because both cultures are verbally dexterous, and because the ground is not fungible. Like a virgin it either belongs to one side or another.

                        Accuse me of prejudice if you will but for years I lived in NYC and nearby and went through many attacks of chemicals, bombs, hand guns, etc and the other side was nearly always Islamic – So what is one supposed to think? I hear apologists say that 9/11 could not have been predicted and find what our leaders try to make us think is laughable. That said, on a personal level most Muslims are able to control their disgust for westerners – especially when it comes to sex.

                          In Oxford UK I lived for five years in the same house as Muslims. I had the upper flat – they had the lower. We had zero interaction until they started stealing my mail from the mailbox and they got the bank card which they used to empty out my UK bank account.

                           Another little story. I would buy the newspaper and small goods from the local store and put the change into a container for Islamic charities. Behind the counter was a little old lady and you know, it’s sort of an unwritten rule to always be polite to little old ladies because it’s they wh secretly run the world.

                           And so she said to me one time, “You know that money goes to Islamic Charities,” with the implication that I was a fool since the actual collection was for the Jihad. The point to be made is that the dual association between the west and Crusaders is inevitable and unavoidable and after all - it did happen.

                  The joke in Europe is Muslims move west but Christians rarely move into Muslim countries because who the hell wants to live like that?

                           The irony, realistically is that it quite possible that the western refusal to disassociate itself from the Feudal Islamic states brought about a large part of the anger between the two areas. I’ve never been east of Istanbul but I have been to former third world colonies and one of the ongoing resentments about the colonial periods is that the European colonists refused to educate or in anyway improve the lives of their subjects.

The parallels between the Islamic world and the Japanese culture are not difficult to find – especially when we consider that women are more segregated from the rest of society then in the west. In actually though the degree to which women are hidden away in Japan is much less then in Islam.

                   To repeat though what you have is people who are polite to you , up to a point, but in actual truths, among themselves regard you as undesirables. These are both societies that were closed to the rest of the world until the nineteenth century whereupon they were open up via gunboat diplomacy.

                            There is no American equivalent for the Japanese world Gaijin, or foreigner and it is the embarrassed Japanese parent that must silence their child who cries out “Gaijin!” upon seeing in particular a westerner, on the street. Again the joke is, if you see a white person on the street in Japan they are either a tourist or an English teacher. There are very few other reasons for white people to be there.

                               As an aside this seems to contradict the notion of open markets – but there are plenty of American Businesses there, only run and owned by Japanese. Suffice to say neoliberal economic policies as promoted by both parties in the US are only of interest to American Corporations when there are substantial profits to be made – if that’s not the case, no one cares.

                                     And being realistic again we must not forget that these are the people we dropped the bomb on. A little reticence is not to be unexpected. A friend of mine mentioned that she grew up in Osaka, and the first thing I recalled is that Osaka was on the short list for the next few atom bombs to be dropped.

                                 As the Buddha would say, “We are dealing with conditioning” It’s an interesting an unsolvable question as to what is the difference between conditioning and knowledge. They are almost like viewing the same event from different angles.

But even were the bomb not in existence the issue as to who was destined to control the sea lanes of the Pacific would still apply.

                          Although as an undergrad, and earlier I was an avid reader the study of history is encapsulate history in to a series of axioms. The twentieth century could be synopsized as “Everybody wants to be like Great Britain.” The Germans wanted an overseas empire. The old Empires just wanted to stay in power, and the Japanese wanted their own empire as well. I joke that Roosevelt read the riot act to Churchill, saying in effect, “No look here you’re going to have to let go these colonies, like India, because they give other nations bad ideas.”

                        All this is to say that especially when an entire group of people move into an area they either are assimilated or conquered. American’s , I’ve said before, often consider the politeness of the Asian person as a form of lying. Indeed As Mark Twain said the Arab fathers highest recommendation of his son’s merit was that he lied well. 

            That said the type of lies told by different cultures vary as much as the type of truths. What they do have in common is they're essentially ways of misleading the listener.

In the west the preferred technique for lying is rhetoric, or verbal slight of hand 

             This rely's on logical paradoxes. The Asian method is to make the truth so small as to be obscured by the side revelations.  The Islamic method simply refuses to address the logical flaws at all, preferring as it were to continally change the terms of argument.

 

             As something of a student of languages one must say that the actual language differences between English and Arabic and Asian create further philosophical differences. I’ve mentioned previously the late arrival of Islam is mirrored in it’s legalistic presentation of the laws of the supreme God.

And the Asian mind is different in some ways. Man is more of a part of nature then the ruler of nature. It is however at this point that we must stop and reconsider. Immediate to mind come two deadly fallacies about “the rest of the race” that have to be dealt with.

In some sense they are actually so absurd that one stands a chance of gaining a near universal understanding of the processes they invoke. In other words they are classical propaganda of the variety that insists for instance that members of other races smell different.

                    This ought be straightforwardly understandable, as I said. Much of what we speak of here in these essays is beyond I guess you’d call normal college level perceptions- but remember the smartest people in the best schools are motivate, like myself not so much by the approval of the common herd but by the knowledge that one has expanded the boundaries of human perception.

                  I like to think that my brothers and sisters engaged in the uncreated conscience of generations yet to come have decency and morality at heart but the jury is still out, and As I have tried to indicate the potential for the damage to the future life on earth is frightening. Added to nuclear winter and global warming is now the potential for species bifurcations – where the fortunate will live long and prosper and the less fortunate will descend to a state of subhumanity.

                             That said , when I was a boy it was a given that “Asians do not care for life the way we do.” The assumption was that they did not value their lives and hence were more then willing to die and shed the veils of the phenomenological world. One could point to misunderstood philosophical antecedents, especially the idea of reincarnation and notions of cyclical time but the people who perpetrated this myth had no such complexity in genesis.

                         Their simple message was “It’s okay to kill Asians because Asians don’t mind dying.” As in any form of enforced slavery one must degrade the target to subhuman status before the process of enslavement can contine. Added to that was the idea that there was no Asian single God head in messianic terms and needless to say it was assumed that Asian parents could not possibly love their children. The fact that ancestor worship is far more prevalent in the east then in the west doesn’t seem to have sunk in.

                       If Lenin had his “useful idiots” – those kind hearted souls who without knowing why or how advanced the cause of the revolution we can create another category – convenient fallacies- these are purportedly scientific misconceptions or beliefs that just happen to be of practical advantage to the believer.

                 The next illusion is that we can ascribe the general character from the specific. This makes no sense in any application and again it is created and used for the sole purpose of denying to other people their basic humanity. It is such a large topic one hardly knows where to begin.

Essentially it is the extrapolation, nearly always of some wrong, from one individual to a racial, religious or ethic category. Any such preconceived notion then has the attraction –to some- of removing the responsibility of others to treat the persons in the degraded category decently.

                  I suppose it could be considered something of a bummer that I end this explication of a Japanese fashion trend in this way, but such things have origins. They are in the context of their environment. Many cultures have varying degrees of differentiation between sexes.

                      In Poland for instance the women and men socialize separately but work together in the field. Separate sex socialization, especially out of the home and family tends to lead to problems with Alcoholism. One could make substantial progress in halting death by alcohol in Russia – not by attacking the drinking but by attacking the association it has with manliness for instance.

                   In Japan where long hours in same sex environments are the norm it is almost to be expected that “the ladies” would discover to pass the time to be amused and to impress each other via what the anthropologists would call variations of display.

The whole thing , as I imagine the males would agree, is that it is harmless as long as one doesn’t take it too far.

                    I will conclude with one last observation which is the comparative lack of interest the Japanese show in exporting some of the most attractive elements of their culture including J-pop. Their willingness on the other hand to import cultural artifacts is very impressive – but it is almost as if their export trade, in electronics and automobiles, something for which they have displayed incredible aptitude, is considered “man’s work”, and they prefer to leave the other side of life to the domains of women.

• gs

Snap , Crackle, And Pop

            Hello again,

    
            There's a lot of written content today. Looks as if the tendency is going to be to post less often with larger amounts. Plus we may finally be getting some MP3's online - you know I'm beginning to wonder if people don't like us. Could it actually be that despite protestations to the contrary the large media content providers are not actually interested in increasing competition?
         It's just a thought - which leads to the problems with Megaupload and Google. The reason persons such as myself and P. Diddly and others like Megaupload is it's convenient  and it's immediate. We use the service in an entirely legal way.  Quite frankly there's not a lot of contemporary pop I'd care to DL because the business sucks so bad.
           Still it's an interesting business practice. What's next? Maybe Yahoo can get the Feds to shut down Google because a percent of content there is definitely illegal.  The CBS can get the Feds to shut down NBC for some equally bogus reason.
         And practical topic Number two I still can't make heads or tails of WTF Google is talking about viz privacy.
Traditionally on the net firms start with a certain amount of good will, which in time they squander in the great quest for revenue.Waiting for them to come to their senses is a little like waiting for that girl that left you to come back to you. The little slut has made her decision.
      Speaking of which I should probably say something about Apple, but what is there to say - they have made their decision. The numbers don't lie. It's still a good product but it may be more appropriate to think of the overall market as multi- sourced. One company makes the software,  another the hardware another the telecom, etc.
       
          In many ways the many questions about techonlogical firms all boil down to one thing - propriatary usage. It's a very broad topic as we know. Teknos is a broad subject. At it's worst it is the basis of the totalitarian state - and the only way a true totalitarian state can be administered.

      We know that a modern totalitarian state requires advanced technology. The question is now - "Can we have advanced technology and resist the lure to totalitarianism?

      The Jury is still out  but I think it's a good idea to develop alternative social and economic resource distribution systems  "just in case" things go south.

   Were it not for President Obama I'd feel much stronger about this  but it's still not easy to forget the madness of the administrations preceding his and wonder what will follow his.

Naked in the Wasteland

 Viral trigger mechanisms in the Verbal Universe

           

                   If you’ve been with us for awhile you’ll know that the subject here has evolved from the broader applications of contemporary information distribution to the more specific uses and effects of meme application.

                To provide context for these investigations we’ve tried to establish overall parameters of technological development ( eg: The clan unit, the city, the state and now the technostate, which could be loosely described as “the state on steroids.” Some also call the present era, “Post colonial” or even the the era of globalization – but that can be a little problematic. 

                         The two initially most advanced technostates, Germany and Japan, while producing imports and exports also have advanced internal markets ( having to some extent learned their lessons in the Second world war). The two largest economies The United States and China fit the post colonial description better, requiring raw materials for import and access to markets for export. 

          An interesting side mention about Germany and  Japan is both have lateral economies - one the one hand, thanks to strong educational systems they can produce world class products whereas at the same time the refuse to divest themselves of traditional business models.  In Japan this means the small rice farms. In Germany, speaking from personal experience for instance, my family has owned a bakery in northern Alsace for almost three hundred years - suffice to say in America for a business to survive  that long would raise eyebrows since it represents a failure of  the dynamics of the market place. To paraphrase the statement in America is the only  good business is the dead business.

                The greatest attraction for many who write about public affairs is the fear of becoming victims of things that one has no control over. As the case may be most of us, most of the time, overcome our fears and proceed to live our lives, a well as we can. Obviously this is because should fear, or paranoia be unfounded then unless something new is added to the equation the whole thing becomes untenable.

                     For writers who are employed or have found their true subjects the problem is solvable. Two things to remember in portraying yourself as a genius are 1) Control the topic of conversation and limit it to things you are comfortable with, and 2) Long before your statements about one thing have proven absurd more on to another subject.

                          Motivational trigger words are nothing new. They are, after all , the life’s blood of advertising. To get someone to buy a candy bar however is far more difficult then convincing them to volunteer or accept conscription to fight and die in a war. 

                         Consider this. A spy has information that A he knows has been transmitted to his controller and B, that he knows has not been transmitted. What the potential informant wants to do is establish a trust relationship with the controller so he transmits to the controller information the controller already has.

Whether the intell is “true” or not in the absolute sense isn’t important. There is no truth – only degrees of reliability. One might suggest that it is always more difficult to convince the recipient that something I true, then that something is a lie. In part this is because the truth often requires a response of sort.

                       By transmitting to the receiver only information they already have or believe one may establish credibility. This is why much of ongoing information distribution is for the purpose of convincing people of that which they already believe. This doesn’t make such information useless – after all the product producer is being paid, but for the ostensive purposes of informing others the product serves no purpose.

                         So, one of the first things we can say as regards the topic in general, as in the case of the Roman Senate circa 200 CE, is that victory often goes not to the better case but to the better lawyer.

There isn’t too much you can do about the prejudicial context you find yourself in but a knowledge of how the context is established can allow one to , in effect, ”hack the context.” This is critical and the basis of the entire ethos. The most dangerous enemy is not the one out to get you – but rather the one out to rig the system. You are not the specific target. You are roadkill.

                                     The second critical factor in a successful exploit is not when you destroy the system. That is for children. In the case of the most successful operation no one even recognizes that it has happened! (One thinks of Reaganomics.)

                                   A good book to describe closed systems is “Godel,Escher, Bach.” Imagine yourself in a painting by Escher, the castle with ascending descending stairways is a good example. You want out of the painting – you want to enter a new dimension of existence but like Kafka’s Mr K you discover there is no means to do that.

                           One reason why might be that the system was established in order to prevent escapees. It wants to maximize productivity and eliminate non productive units. This is not necessarily a useful hypothesis because if it can be proven in any specific case then the system comes off looking bad and can be held liable. One could suggest that the system is exploiting it’s human labor force for the non human ends.

A more sustainable justification for the establishment and continuation of the system is not that it wants to maximize productivity per se but that the self evident purposes of systemic “life” are contingent upon maximized productivity. It’s like saying that when a society commits genocide that mass murder is not the primary goal of the system but rather an unfortunate, but necessary side effect. This can mean the difference between being a billionaire and a firing squad.

                               Hence the most powerful weapon in the arsenal of the tyrant is not the gun, but the lie, and more so the willingness of people to believe the lie. That was my initial purpose in beginning these studies. I sought to insulate myself, if not others, from over dependent suggestibility. I’m as human as the next guy. I thrill to flag waving and bands and excitement and the lure of the high life - but sometimes a humble life is much better then an empty promise.

                                To speed this up, and bring you up to snuff, to give an example. A PDF file often has an embedded font included so that when you read the file you get the exact font they want. It’s a nice touch and it brings the context (pardon the pun) along with the text.

                          If you read bad novels, meaning those we no longer consider worth reading, of the 19t century many of them are written in purple prose, meaning a lot of adjectives, and elaborate description and long sentences. Modern writing, although the number of words continues to grow, tends to be shorter and more concise, leading to that wonder of the modern age, the one word sentence. Absolutely.

                      Arguably the two best, or most influential American novelists were newspaper writers, Twain and Hemingway, who both took great pains to spare the reader undue verbosity.

                    As I indicated in a recent essay the trend in information dispersal is towards shorter messages with pre-established meanings   analogous to oriental pictograms  and in the even longer run, in a way comparable to when the advent of the written word lessened the need for memory, which has attrified in the modern man the use of words themselves in a few hundred years, will be  superfluous..

Pt two You don’t wanna know

                 In the film “Personna” by Ingmar Bergman a Vietnamese monk douses himself with gasoline, strikes a match and immolates himself in the middle of a busy Saigon street.

                      Question;        could some form of future political protest be allowed where a flash mob, brought together on the internet, could replicate the monks protest?

                            Answer: You don’t want to know

                               Wish they all could be California Girls Girls Girls, 

                           Girls Girls Girls, Girls Girls        Girls, Girls

                                                            Brian Wilson - Mike Love

                                     I miss ALF. He’s very superstitious and lives in another world, a place he calls “the other shore” – way over yonder. He’ crazy, but he has a beautiful consistency.

                              The thing is when the first mass net suicide takes place it need not be for the best of reasons. It need not be for any reason at all. One of the emo-trigger programs will be coded incorrectly and bingo – a few hundred dead – but don’t worry – we have already established that corporations don’t kill people - people kill people.

                    Which leads us to the fact I’m on the last few pages of Umberto Eco’s latest book – The Prague Cemetary. I’ve read a half dozen of his efforts – the Name of the Rose, of course. I found the Island of the day before and  the Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana  difficult to wade through, but the non fictions are interesting.

      

                      Like Mr Eco I’ve written much more in essays and non fiction then fiction and I can sympathize with the problems of the genre – but In The Prague Cemetery you can feel the writing and portrayal of the main character getting stronger as the book goes on.

                     It’s a one character book and he is not someone who we hate although he is a character of unmitigated evil. He’s not the currently popular vampire evil either, except very tangentially. He’s just does his job, which is to forge documents for whoever needs them – and who has not felt the urge to fudge that tax form, or perhaps to clarify the intentions of a recently deceased?

                         There’s a lovely passage where he is requested to copy the handwriting of a person and write a letter to incriminate one Alfred Dreyfus. This he does and everything is satisfactory until they discover that he has copied the handwriting of some one other then the Jew. In a rational world this would be problematic. It is however explained away simply by stating that Dreyfus wrote in the style of someone else in order to confuse any potential suspicions. Beautiful.

                 A useful concept is the wave theory of actions. In physics, at the extreme end of the theoretical spectrum there’s the possibility of what are called “waves of probability.” Thus the birth of great men is held to be evidenced by celestial events. In studying the chaotic forms of information dissemination we can suggest a similar thing such as waves of absurdity. To define them by negation we can say they are situations where the normative laws of proof no longer apply. They come into being when, obviously one side or another, or both in a information war have gained the upper hand.

                   In the bible this supremacy is sometimes demonstrated by taking the vanquished upon a hill, making them lie down with their heads on the ground and then grinding their heads into the dirt with one’s sandal. Sometimes the victor kills the loser , sometimes not, but the point is demonstrated. The same procedure occurs when a policeman grinds the head of a demonstrator into the street with their boot.

                  For instance when the rural, conservative forces in America had the upper hand this idea of forcing the vanquished into an act of submission took place in the revival of creationism. The losers were forced to recant their beliefs in the scientific explanation and to accept the equal validity of intelligent design, or God in the evolution of the human species.

                    The point I wish to make is the issue of who made who is not the main thing. What happened a few million years ago is inconsequential. The point is who controls what we are allowed to think? Who humiliates who. The spirit of the person, like the spirit of a horse that would be ridden comfortably must be broken. They must be taught to accept whatever the state tells them ,no matter how absurd and baseless the evidence. 

                   Once you have forced a man to accept the absurd, as in Reaganomics for instance you have come a long way towards total domination of his mind.  

                 Again by establishing waves of absurdity the inconsequential becomes the basis of acceptance of the important. One cannot count the number of political leaders who gain power on and emotive basis and then use it for the simple gaining of wealth. In the case of creationism, like in the Dreyfus case, the lack of evidence that God created the world six thousand years ago, and all the evidence to the contrary, I held to be further evidence of God’s work, since he has been so clever as to hide his tracks. Either way you lose.

                    The title of the Umberto Eco book refers to the Protocols of Zion, a document believed to be forged in the late nineteenth century Russia, but in any case forged, that was used as evidence of a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world and henceto prove complicity of every one of them.

The common expression for this sort of thing is misinformation. The problem is that we have all gotten so good at it that it begins to cancel everything out. The purported holy grail is the viral message that is transmitted by hitherto uncommitted parties. In the US in election period we are told to beware the October surprise, where in misinformation enters the news cycle and an election occurs before it can be refuted.

               “Where’ your ma? Where’s your pa?

                  Gone to the white house ha ha ha”

                                        early political attack

                           The difficulty is quite obvious. It is that we can only believe or not believe what we are told and so we tend to either believe everything or nothing.

                       There are however many other truths then verbal or visual. The question we face today  is how to utilize them to form a coherent, humane society  and if that is impossible -as it may be - to form a society within a society  for the protection of the sane.

         It seems amusing that in a world gone mad it is the sane and not the lunatics that need to  be sheltered - but there you have it.

Part Three Monkey Talk

                     Way back when I was an undergrad the School I was at at the time, Hofstra University, had extensive animal testing lab, comprised of some very unhappy primates living in five foot square metal cages. I like the mathematical near certainty of experimental psychology but in retrospect can’t understand how the research was particularly useful. Such behaviorist research was mostly a solution in search of a question.

The teacher however said something that triggered a long line of inquiry into the philosophy of thought. For what it’s worth I don’t think he himself understood very well what he said because he said it in such as was as to indicate he hadn’t given much thought to the issue and took the phrase for granted as true. Remember first that this is a guy who spent most of his life dealing with chimps. He was not cold blooded by any means but as in the case of many professionals, doctors in particular, he had to establish a definite boundary between the individual subject and the species as a whole. The same is very obviously true with cops.

His research was primarily towards understanding how much apes could learn, how they learn and it’s permutations. He said “All knowledge is a language.” While this may seem a little problematic it can be understood as saying that knowledge is that which can be communicated. That which cannot be communicated, let’s call it “awareness” for instance, may be real but it is overstretching the definitional bound to call it knowledge.

                        Suffice to say I had already done my homework in terms of the Greek philosophers and while not needing the opportunity to prove it , did not consider myself at a disadvantage in the usage of such terminologies. I hadn’t as of yet read Wittgenstein, but from the common post Freudian deconstructive perspective one could easily annihilate such pithy statements as All knowledge is language. This is because we could simply tag on to the equation and all language is metaphor. It’ basic going back to Locke and hardly anyone questions the lack of absolute reference points when we deal with language.

As the expression goes “Describe the taste of an apple.” It cannot be done without resorting to simile or metaphor and each is inaccurate.

                      Rational people, of common sense recognize that this notion is untenable in real life. If I say an apple is sweet , hopefully you have enough experience to make some surmise as to it’s flavor. The problem is you or I may agree on what an apple tastes like but machines, unless they have it defined quantitatively are incapable of doing so. 

              In the same way Godel desribed the limitations of euclidian math so too  Wittgenstein does the same with the written word.  It's not a matter of obsoleteness it's more a matter of incompleteness. A clue is that math relies on the axioms of euclid but it cannot prove them. To prove them one must go beyond the dimensions of the euclidian Universe, which is easy enough to do, once you know how ( eg fractals)

 

The Dark Prince

                        Well, I’ve finally gotten around to digging some VHS tapes out that I put into storage over twenty years ago. It’s interesting. One of the movies I was sure to watch again is “The Company of Wolves” written by Neil Jordan and Angela Carter after a story by Ms Carter.

It is a masterful retelling of the tale known in Europe and “Little Red Cap” and here in the states as “Little Red Riding Hood”. I would not be at all surprised either should there be a Sanskrit version from old India. It has the hallmarks. The story itself is one that is taught in many psych/lit classes – in part because Freud make a big deal of it – but as these things go anyway, the story is pretty obvious. Woman attains puberty, gains the attraction of men and then has to decide which one is right for her.

                         The fact that Red’s teacher is her grandmother and not her mother is notable not only because the mother would most likely be too involved (overprotective) but also because the wolf is much more at home in the role of altruistic, distant , guardian, then the mother. It is his goal, obviously to bed the girl, but he does this by as much as possible, masking his true intent - to a degree in fact which most of us find absurd. It goes without saying that full body hair and long teeth are not the sort of thing grandmothers are noted for.

                      Why the film is so good is that it creates a world both of fascination and fear, which is much like many people’s initial sexual experiences. It relies on the same thing which keeps the teenagers in the haunted house after strange things begin happening. Real life is, when you come down to it, a bore.

What tends to lend weight to some purveyors of fairy tales the accusation of fascism is that many of the offenders are exclusively interested in male quest literature. The monomyth has created more bad stories then anything else in the past century –it’s just so easy to plug in the names and do the same old story. That said it’s a truism that girls will listen to boy stories, but boys will not listen to girl stories. It’s sort of like the gag response when one comes upon homosexuals in flagrante.

                          This however does not mean there are no fairy tales about women, quite the contrary and in fact it is safe to say that the percentage of tellers of fairy tales that are women is much higher then in other genre’s , especially histories, genealogies and war stories.

                          The messages sent to the different sexes are almost entirely opposite. The male is told that they must go on a great quest, face dangers, subdue nature and then carry the weak but happy bride over the threshold of their happy home. The lesson the fairy tales teach the female is not to be pushed into anything. A similar story, though not quite so obvious is of the Sleeping Maiden.

                         Here a king and queen yearn for a child and when a girl is born they have a great celebration to which the entire kingdom including three witches is invited. A forth witch, who had been uninvited shows up and declares her present to the princess to be a sleep of a hundred years. Before I get to the Dark Prince I’d like to mention two things that are often said about this story.

One is the curse, specifically, is to last one hundred years, and bravery and deering do aside the fact that Prince Charming wins the hand of the fair maiden is a matter of pure luck! He just happens to be in the right place at the right time and she just happens to be lying there so he decides it couldn’t hurt if he were to kiss her just once.

                               There’s also an aspect of heavy mythical thinking here. By this I mean mythical thought, like mystical thought (if there is such a thing) is not of the ordinary variety. In our ordinary thoughts we think things to prove their existence in myth we think to disprove it. Suffice to say all the talk about dragons over the past few thousand years has not brought any into existence. Again, mythical thinking turns in on itself.

Hence to give the boiler plate explanation. The redemption of the Prince can come about not by any specific action or task fulfilled, but by the extension of his own being. You can’t do things in order to achieve goals you have to do them because you’re rather do them then not, and consequences be damned. Whether crossing the razor bridge, or entering the Grail castle the same law applies.

                                  Suffice to say this is often a little disingenuous in actual terms. The hero goes out on a quest for a dozen years is almost killed, driven mad, loses his identity and then helps the lady across the stream because it was the polite thing to do.

                            Secondly something that is often described in great detail is the castle wherein the sleeping beauty sleeps. There are suitors naturally, those men who would like the hand of the princess so as to claim the throne for their own. They may not be bad men per se but nevertheless their interest is not as lovers and therefore they have to die.

                            And a castle can accumulate a lot of corpses in a century. The middle ages especially took delight in describing the roadways and gate ways littered with the bodies of the would be kings, all in varying stages of decay, some just bones, some with the rags of their finery still waving in the wind.

After a hundred years as well the world is completely different. The king and queen are long dead. All friends, relations; an entire world has passed. This is the sleep of fairy land where Thomas the Rhymer, and Rip Van Winkle spend a long lifetime unawares it is any more then a single evening.

Does the presence of all this death discourage the dark prince? Not a whit! His is a quest of absolutes. They died – but he will not die- because he is pure of heart. Should the demons slice him to shreds still their victory would be hollow because he did not surrender. As well, let remember he has never seen the sleeping beauty. She is someone who may have come to him in dreams, or maybe not and for this he is willing to sacrifice his home, his family . his God itself. (I tell you they don’t make princes like they used to.)

So, while Sleeping Beauty is a tale primarily told to relate the condition of women I’d like to say something for the Prince Charmings in the audience as well. In real terms what we are speaking of is a man who knows of the world but does not allow the world to corrupt him. Correction he does not allow the world to overly corrupt him.

                      Here I shall lower the mask a bit. One of the things that as a child struck me was the the appearance of gigantic figures, at the end of Fantasia and Sleeping Beauty in particular that could be described as satanic. I recall wondering how he got away with it, but then he was was Walt Disney - everybodies favorite uncle. One explanation is that the man who gave him his name, Disney Pere, was not his actual father. His actual father was a Spanish gypsy. I have neither time nor inclination to go into detail but this led to issues with his mother and a long stream of troubled mother figures in his films. Where for example was Snow Whites parents?

                       The point is Walt had something he had to say. Early on it looked like he was on his way to fame and fortune with Oswald the Rabbit, but not to put too fine a point on things, he was cheated out of ownership. The kicker is that they who stole the property didn’t have the ability to make anything of it, whereas Walt, riding back west from NYC came up with the world’s most famous mouse.

  Spielbergdisplays similar characteristics with the over riding theme of many of his films being “That thing that is out there in the darkness.” What’s incredible about him is his films rarely venture in to the horror genre and remain solidly adventure stories.

                           Now let’s take the game even a step further. Game theory is often just set theory with different sorts of boundaries. The big game is of course, the world and heaven help us if we think we can get a handle on that. The world kills most people. It’s like the castle who’s thorn bushes hold the would be lovers of the princess by the dozens – all dead and decayed.

IF one is careful however, we establish little worlds, little sets which are far easier to manage and survive within. They may even, as well, provide clues as to the wider worlds without.

The problem is, of course, we cannot establish smaller sets without knowledge and that knowledge is liable to kill us. Make no mistake as well, Nietche say that which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger – but unfortunately he ran into something that killed him. What is more, and this is a terrible lesson to learn, we like to think that over coming obstacles makes us better people, more capable at least but such is not the case.

I find that the suggestion that suffering is good for the soul is made most often by those who have no inclination what so ever towards such actions. We grow old. The body and mind both weaken even as the number of experiences grows.

That said we must persevere. We may not be great, nor our intentions pure and noble, but we not ask if it is so. As Patton said “I don’t want you to die for you country – I want you to make the other bastard die for their country.” In an America insisting on fairness and equality this has to be borne in mind.

So let’s visit a small world – the Tamlinmedia world. It’s almost the turn of the millennium and two knights have been off voyaging and return telling us of the great wonders they have seen They are Sir Francis Fukuyama and Sir Thomas Friedman.

Sir Francis has discovered the end of the dialectic of the evolution of nations economic systems. Hallelujah we is all free! There is, he suggests, now a common consensus that the neo-liberal system of capitalism is the way to go. There may be the occasional blip along the way but the road ahead is straight and smooth, much like the road to hell.

Unfortunately for those playing the game of musical chairs the stabilization of society is the last thing on earth we want. We want a chance to get ahead – for that matter we want to halt the rapid disintegration of our way of life. What Sir Francis is not at first aware of is that people when hungry will resort to the use of guns and they penetrate such armor as the contemporary knight may avail themselves of.

                            Still this does not disturb him nor his readers nor his publishers because they have raised to a high art the skills needed to walk over dead bodies that litter highways. What does Fukuyama in however is the next book he wishes to write – because he has in essence left the world in the hands of the corporations and they are quite indifferent to human happiness or survival – and what is even worse- they are indifferent to the survival of optimistic futuristic glad handers.

                  Sir Friedman is different. Where Sir Fukuyama cast his glance forward into the future to see a bright new world of peace and prosperity , Sir Friedman notices that the corporations have achieved great penetration of foreign markets right now – and do you know what he thinks? He thinks it’s a good thing! And do you know what the people who own media and corporations and coincidentaly pay his salary think? They agree with him!

                     Neither of these chaps is an idiot. From my perspective, if anything they represent seductive chimeras, the Vasudevas or temptresses of Indian thought, and both to their credit after raking in the bucks with a little nonsense, qualified and retracted some of the more egregious errors.

          A thought occurs to me that while conventional thinking guards castles with armies and guns the  mythic paradigm does you with lovely ladies who are far more likely to be successful.

        At some point policy is made evident by warfare.It’s a lovely suggestion to thing that war is off the table forever, but when one is in the subservient class the freezing in place of situations is not attractive. As the old song goes, “If I don’t do it somebody else will.”

In terms of chaos theory the advantages granted to the small well organized unit in terms of defeating larger cohorts of prey will always work to encourage their existence- and the prayers of the victims go unheard. Having made an intensive study of the large Media Companies we have to admit that they are only as good as their leadership. We are speaking about leaders who think nothing of selling their firms into bankruptcy.

It would be nice if skill sets could really be taught – that MBA’s taught people how to run a business but I observed long ago that in practical terms by far the most successful firms in the field of technology were those started and run by people that knew the specific’s.

                    As the years went by I noticed that in the firms of wider corporate purviews, the holding companies in effect, not only was there no interest in specific products but even the continued existence of the company itself was of little concern; certainly not when compared to a half billion dollar payday.

I am afraid that some who enter the sacred realms are not pure of heart.

We must prepare ourselves for the eventuality that they would attempt to kill us.

=grs

new paltz   march 2012

 

Robotic Refractivity

longish post today - every once in a while , as Paul McCartney would say - "you hit a goodpatch" and quite often it's when  you're not expecting it.  attended a lecture on the five senses today - the current them de jour in academia  among the physiological pyschology crew is how experience shapes perception - it was okay but I'm glad I'm not a student as it was extremely  elementary - I probably could have done a better jub, actually but I liked the speaker as a person -  with a lot of academics we look down on them because they seem so interested in trivialities - but someones got to do it and as well they have the onerous task of teaching - which is my idea of a nightmare.

           As stated, fortuitous break through inasmuch as I have the feeling that barring unforeseen catastrophe we're going to be cranking up the music end again. I'm sitting on four CD's worth of stuff already, but actually the best way to make music is to do it at one shot - that way the tune is fresh in your mind and you have an idea of what to do, and everything is at hand - but I wanted to upgrade both skills and hardware in terms of mastering - Have been very impressed on the difference that makes - plus I wanted to do some things mastering wise that would be  new - having done the Same old Same old for years - plus I was just in a bitchy mood as far as the music industry goes - I feel that someones got to be in charge and it;s been left to me.

             In any event did you ever read Wagner's auto- bio?
Amazing how verbose some of these chaps can be? Isn't it? I say there - can't you hear me? I said amazing how verbose some of these people, these music people can be - I wonder why? What do you think? Er, can you hear me? Can you hear me - Hey   duh  what's the problem?  cat got yer tongue?

=--=-=-=-=-=-==------=====-------======-------=====--=-=-=-=-=

Today I awaken to find myself in the footsteps of Columbus for several reasons. Neither of us is possessed of the greatest theoretical knowledge of our times, but correspondingly our practical experience using the tools of the available science of the day is not , that I know of, superseded.

My skills are not of the best, the “deepest” or most complex, but they are of a wide range – much like the self educated man must needs resort to the canonical literature, not having a mentor to instruct him in what is currently in fashion, or useful.

All importantly however is both he and I set out to find one thing and found another. In fact this paper will refer to several interrelated discoveries, which, since they may appear in the context of other things I will describe immediately.

In the field of Artificial Intelligence or robotics, since the inception we have sought to increase man/machine integration by making a machine more like a man, be it the ability to run, or human interface guidelines, but the real adaption, which is occurring already and we don’t see it, is man is becoming more like a machine.

Like many of us I was apprehensive about the seeming loss of freedom from the apparent growth in the domination of economics and manufacturing by machines and machine intelligence. The sciences as we know them point us outward – to new spaces and worlds which are then mapped and identified, but they don’t always tell us how to control the things we discover.

We know that the conventional responses to the allocation of new powers, religion, ethics, the moral sense, are not always sufficient to override the genetic response of seeking domination, but when several sciences are combined and seen in the light of each other, the problem becomes far more manageable. The older sciences, economics and psychology seem adequate for their former tasks but apt to be overwhelmed by the powers established from the domination of context.

The greatest psychoanalyst around is not going to “cure” a person who lives with a psychotic. The only cure is to find a new way or place to live.

Semiotics and Chaos theory, on the surface have little in common, but together, and only together they can serve as forms by which the human race, as it evolves into the new species, can determine the directions it would like to choose. The symbol will provide the monad, the chaos will provide the gravitational field within which the monads will create the structures that man inhabits.

The important thing about chaos, is that while at any given moment, in it’s pure form it is unknowable,it is yet capable of a transformative action. Again, we cannot follow Pi to the end of it’s journey to infinity, but we can establish it as long as the time period we have to deal with. (and like, time, it moves in one direction, although description of that direction is impossible, as far as I know all we can say is time moves into “the future”)

I see know that the implications of what I have just said may not be immediately comprehendible, but they are practical. In the same way people rushed to discover the weak spots into the net so far they will continue to do so as attempts to monetarize it increase. Likewise no declaring of something as off limits will succeed unless all parties, globally agree, and it is not in their interest to do so. Plus theres the THX-1138 factor which states that one must not seek to enforce laws that cost more to enforce then the benefits accrued by doing so.

The difficulty, historically, with law is that it is too often meant to protect property and unless the property is distributed equitably law cannot be enforced.

For those who have difficulty seeing technology (Teknos) in any other sense then machinery it might be helpful to read the books of Lewis Mumford. He views the original Teknos, as did the Greeks, to be the creation of the city. When disparate units or monads, are combined or co-ordinated to perform a common task that is Teknos. The monads can be anything, nuts and bolts, bits and bytes or him and hers.

What became for me a crucial sentence in the present work was the observation many years ago, that Germany and Japan were the original technostates and to defeat them it was necessary for the United States, Russia and the allies to take upon themselves the characteristics of the technostate. If this was so then must we also expect to see the brutality and indifference to life of the totalitarian regimes? Is dystopia inevitable?

Tokyo was, in the eighties, thought of as the city of the future. In reviewing some walk throughs on Youtube one can see the many little alley between the buildings in the nearby areas – places where people grab a bite to eat, get a little video, smoke, drink and talk. Now the title of most futuristic city probably goes to Shanghai, but for our purposes Tokyo will do.

The reason why is because between MITI and the conservative banking system there is the apparent contradiction of a quick moving, yet conservative establishment. The rice industry in Japan is famous for it’s many small family owned farms. While it might seem at first contradictory, neither a top down , nor bottom up market system, I don’t think it’s the case. In effect I don’t either sector bothers much with the other.

This points out a curious aspect of the technological revolution that has had little attention paid to it. It has also led to confusion when the question is incorrectly postulated. Because we can’t see anything wrong with the possibility of supply side boosting does not mean it will work in the real world. This is another example of how you can get everything right and do wrong. This leads to irony and paradox.

What we may have is an extremely modern, sophisticated fortieth floor and a bottom level unchanged for hundreds of years. We may not want this. There may even be efforts to eliminate this bottom level. I caution against over zealous purification's however for sometimes it is in the dark corners of our worlds that viral strains uncontaminated by the norm, remain

I will go into greater detail in the following. The boundary less state, and the technostate which are two sides of the same coin, will be the ground upon which the show proceeds. It is important to be aware that we are all human. We have common needs, eating, sleeping, and emotional connections.

By inclination we all want to live in penthouses, on drugs, in soft surroundings and pleasant sounds, and we can suggest that every cop wished every criminal lived such a life. How pleasant to be like James Bond, following beautiful lady secret agents through the glamour spots of the world.

England’s King Alfred, on the other hand saw his father and brothers slain by invaders. Of all the isle only the southernmost kingdom of Wessex, his, survived. Had he lived in a court his days would have been numbered, but he did not do that. Instead he went to ground. He lived in swamps, and forests. He gathered aid where he could find it.

To my brothers and sisters on the scene I send greetings. To others who might wish hegemony over us I send this warning. You will never win, you have never won because you can’t trust those beside you and you have no idea of who is beneath you. The only power any of us can rely on is fairness and truth and love.

               part two -  actually written first   - this was the break through but I wanted to present as clear a picture as possible as soon as possible  given the difficulties  - and   you know - it's not that difficult to understand this- In the same way a child can understand a light bulb today, but a genius could not understand one in the eighteenth century - it has to do with our seeing what we expect to see.

         Plus  to reiterate - this paper has two contexts  - the socio-political - how the state will evolve, via the waves of understanding driving the mass public  and secondly how the individual will evolve as it subsumes formerly individualistic characterists into the hive mind. 

          Note I am no friend of the hive but this is the way it's going to be and we may as well get used to it.

Also as to formatting  - I haven figured out a way to retain the word formatting through open office and into blogger - so you'll have to live with this clumsiness.    and yes, I'm still farting around trying to figure out  what I'm going to do with Google  - WHATEVER HAPPENED TO "DO NO EVIL?" 

            My policy has always been Newtonesque which is to say I tend to regard communication with the public as something of a necessary nuisance - I mean it's not like I ever met anyone online with the same work ethic or anything.  Everything sucks. They give stuff away - they lie about being your pal and then they screw you  - hallelujah I'm a bum

   BTW the dictionary on Word is extremely limited  - they should put out a version for smart people.

-----------------------

In the event anyone wonders why there have been so many military observations and parallels in recent weeks you can relax about one thing at least. - We are not, in the form of earlier revolutionaries, interested in picking up guns or blowing things up. If we went that route then we should have already lost the battle – for more then one reason.

The significant difference in geopolitics between this century and the one gone by is that physical possession of money, or land, no longer dominates our thinking. What is crucial however remains the answer to the question “Who controls the land and the wealth?”

From the present vantage point it is difficult to see colonialism as a major factor, whereas it was tin the nineteenth century the overriding factor. What we refer to as neo-colonialism, sometimes called globalization may seem frightening at first but the more egregious aspects of it can usually be controlled by the national state. A greater threat to stability results from a form of corruption that is not seen as such. It occurs when the social fabric is unable to withstand the changed environment brought about by technology.

A good example is the United States in the last decades of the twentieth century. Things may be improving in recent times if only because the economic disasters have sunk in to even the most think headed reactionaries. To put it plainly we do not have corruption in the sense of having to pay a hundred dollars to buy chopped meat, or gasoline, but the legislative bodies have been so severely hampered by the changing economic circumstances ( which they are to some measure responsible for) that the result has been a paralysis.

That said we are concerned with more then the sphere of governmental activities in one nation alone. Governments are only part of the story and so too one nation, however large, is also only part of the story.

Suffice to say people have noticed the coming of the internet and concluded sometimes that it may be having an impact on the way we live, but even that remains only part of the greater story which, in essence , is the story of the collection and use of data about humans on an unprecedented level. This alone, without malevolent intent on the part of users creates a loss of freedom.

Let me confess to being, in most cases, a peacenik. The old folk song about “I ain’t gonna study war no more” is part of my heritage. What changed me is two fold. Experience of watch the CEO’s of the past thirty years in action has frightened me and convinced me that many of them have developed signs of psychosis when it comes to decision making.

Unfortunately for me and those who think like me the approach of genetic domination by the few over the many has a strong scientific basis. There’s a lot to be said for co-operation but most species, like most civilizations, do not last more then a short time.For the record, I don’t know, were the tables to be turned, If I should show others the mercy denied me and those like me. Until that situation arises however it is of no concern. Remember I’ve been doing this for many years. It could be said that I am speaking for the situation that has faced tens of millions of people, but only those who have tried realize how careful major media is to avoid anything controversial.

That said, I’ll stop whinging and return to the actualities. We are always returning to the basics which are the ways that information is distributed and subsequently used as the basis of belief. The blunt term for this is propaganda.

New media however do strange things to the old advertising/propaganda paradigms. Ordinarily it is Pain or Fear of pain , which creates anxiety. Then the product is introduced which brings about relief in the form of the cessation of the original pain/anxiety stimulus. In the world as some believe it to be, it would be obvious that the pain that is alleviated is only the pain that has been created, but the mind does not have a long memory. As well , without other information it is impossible to tell the difference between reality and products of imagination.

In politics, whether Willie Horton, or the great Jewish Banking Conspiracy, the creation of fear is a normative function of the electoral process although few are as honest as Richard Nixon or Joseph Goebells in saying it.

This is all elementary. What is new is our understanding of flocking behavior. This can be seen in chaos theory and is one way of suggesting an understanding of the synchronic motion of large numbers of monads within a system. This is where the parallel with military operations comes in; because both involve primarily not individual decisions or actions but those of groups of varying size.

Look; contrary to what you may be beginning to think I am not here to scare you. I am here to prepare you for the brave new world. Where Nixon went terribly wrong we can say is he divided the world into enemies and friends and then expected people to act on that basis, but people change and as well they react differently to different actions taken against them. In the new world the very notions of enemy and friend no longer hold true.

The real implications of the existence of the unconscious are staggering even now, over a hundred years after we realized such a thing could exist. We cannot rely on old ideas of enemy and friend not because man is duplicitous, or deceitful, but because man himself is not completely aware of the origin and motive of his own actions.

As I suggested years ago, one of the difficulties of modernity is that the individual no longer counts for much in the sense that the decisions that control his life are not made on a personal basis, but often by others, human or machine, who are literally hundreds or thousands of miles away. One may be a good carpenter, a great one even, and still be out of work because the job can be done cheaper somewhere else.

Likewise we are now categorized according to the need to achieve balance of race, of religion and even sexuality in the workplace. The fact that some cultures may excel in some tasks is often overlooked.

Our normal understanding of the behavior of clouds is that they lead to more extreme decisions then those made by individuals. An individual may be offended by what they think is inappropriate behaviors, a crowd is more liable to take action against the person doing it. This is something of a truism in the study of human behavior. The essential aspect is our desire to conform to the wishs of the mob, to go along with the crowd.

When we think of the communities only there’s two possibilities I’d like to mention Group think and the suppression of individuality due to the fact that the identification of persons opposed to the prevailing order is very easy and the record is permanent. First off, let’s consider some of the limitations of propaganda. It can only do so much. As Abe Lincoln said you can’t fool all the people all the time and there comes a time when people are eating sandwiches made of paper that they are not going to believe the suggestion that the sandwiches are good food.

There are several ways in which the claims of misinformation can be refuted by reality. One is if the truth is somehow so obvious the lie becomes unsustainable – this is rarely a cause for difficulty since the lie can be tailor made to fit any given situation. The second element is time. Lies tend to have limited lifespans and so must either be supplanted by other lies (and thereby changing the subject) of in some other way made of unconcern to the targeted population.

Classically then the benefits of communism for the common man became increasingly mythic and unsustainable to promote as the years and decades went by. On the other hand the imaginary threats facing the the third reich only had to be sustained for a decade and thus never had the chance to be refuted by facts. It ought be taken as a given as well that totalitarian regimes have to wield a two edged sword – on the one hand they need the enemies to justify their oppression and on the other hand they have to prevent counter information from expediting the arrival of that time when the axiomatic lie is no longer believed.

The dictator, the criminal, the chess player and the corporate buy out artist have one thing in common which is that they operate on a limited basis with an exit strategy in place even prior to the initiation of the project. Some may wonder how a CEO can tolerate seeking their businesses crash and burn – but they don’t realize such bankruptcies are not failures – they are successes for they allow the board of directors to loot the assets of the corporation and then walk away scot free.

As an aside when a corporation gets a bailout it’s not only management that benefits – management would benefit either way – if anything a bailout prevents management from getting immediate access to guaranteed salaries. If you want, here’s another seemingly lopsided statistic. Ninety five percent of the money stolen in the US is done by white collar criminals, who in turn make up less then one percent of the criminal population. This is a little off the present subject but realistically it is difficult to tell a man not to steal a few million dollars when he faces no more then a year or two imprison - at most. It’s a deal too good to be true, but such is not really our concern, because there the law of competition works it’s magic. Meaning that your competition is no longer the legal system , but rather your erstwhile associates who are eager to steal as much as they can before you do.

The hive, the flock, the school of fish – these are all images called to mind when we think of how beliefs and opinions change in the sensorium that is the internet and associated networks. Our understanding of how it is that flocks can swerve so fast to avoid crashing in to things is incomplete but we are fairly certain that it is not as if the lead bird sends out a signal. It is more like all the other birds are keeping an eye of the one ahead of them and when it changes direction so too do they. This is one example of how information flows. Viral information isn’t the same since the population is not looking for the meme to occur, even though in most cases the point of interest is some sort of human or animal behavior.

In science fiction movies , such as “Dune” we are asked to consider the possibility of the navigation of space time by basically “Feeling our way.” Presumably this entails moving ever constantly to ever “thinner” until one reaches a point where the doorway between the dimensions we know is wide enough to permit travel though it. This can also be thought of as analogous to the way differing belief systems will coexist in the coming centuries.

Theory suggests that persons in large groups will tend to have more extreme beliefs and take more extreme actions but this does not always hold true . The traditional poetic image for seeking direction as to how to live a life is being lost in the woods, as in the case of Dante. This is often elaborated to where the potential seeker sees an exotic animal or bird and follows it, thereby losing contact with his companions and allowing the journey to selfhood to begin.

When we speak of flocking behavior in chaos theory there are several ways we can go about it, and likewise several ways to image it. The flock of birds, with a single bird at the point is a way of thinking about the strange attractor that “sinks” into non Euclidean space and hence creates the shadow forms known as fractals.

That is the most directed, “tightest” form of fractal directionality. Then we could move over to the actions of schools of fish and from there we can see the loosest form of fractal creation which could be represented by leaves in a windstorm, or dust devils. In these later cases the objects in motion that we are aware of, the leaves, have no action input into the process of motion. They are simply reacting to environmental conditions the way a rock would roll down a hill. Of course the hill is infinitely high, which takes some adjustment in order to visualize.

Incidentally this area, between tightly delineated chaos and, chaotic chaos, is an area that needs more research. When things can be seen as determined and then they are not then it’s a good guess that the determination continues only by means that we are not aware of.

So now we come to Semiotics. It’s amusing to thing of a Unified Field theory of language – one that would matter the bricks that the house of knowledge is made of, with the order in which they are laid. (Then Wittgenstein could rest easy.)

I , for one, hesitate to do so and I’ll tell you why. First off I’m assuming you know much more about these subjects then you do, but if I don’t approach things this way I’m liable to never get around to the essentials.

Semiotics, as popularized by Umberto Eco, is the study of the meaning of signs. This includes words but many other things as well. My first hesitation comes about when I think of “Zohars Book of Dream’s” This was an encyclopedia of what elements of dreams were supposed to mean. In a way it’s rubbish because no dream means anything without it’s context in the waking world – bet such books have always been with us, dating at least to the Egyptians. Therefore a monkey means one thing, a toaster means another and put them to gether and you find out what the dream means. It is something like a science of monads, where we have constituent elements but only extremely dubious connections between them.

I believe Mr Eco has some understanding of this, if only because he’s aware of what sells and what doesn’t sell. My own hesitation is based on what I call the Hitler Paradigm

Politicians, merchants and movie makers all spend much time and money trying to figure out what the public wants. I jest that I,l like most of us, have known a fair share of Cassanovas, always tall, handsome and confident and I daresay they never seemed too concerned with asking themselves what women want. They know.

The Hitler Syndrome, which is to be taken seriously says that all the research not with standing every once in a while someone will come alone and be able to know the mind of the public – because he is one of them – warts and all. Stalin and Alexander were the same things. When Alexander cut the Gordian knot it demonstrated how single minded he was. It also demonstrated, as if we needed it, the single mindedness of the guy. Had he unraveled the knot all he would have would be two ends of rope.

Hitlers attitude towards someone being potentially a trouble maker was to take them outside and shoot them. In other words he had no interest in potential, only actual. To understand how this effected me one has to go back to the beginnings of my writing online. This was in the days of the LoD (Legion of Doom), 2600 and other hacker groups and most of us were not wealthy. Bluntly stated either you broke the law or you got a job pumping gas. I won’t lie. I wasn’t the gear head that Phiber Optic was, nor did I have the social skills of Kevin Mitnick or Bernie S. I was a musician after all- caught between two worlds, neither of which understood or cared for the other.

Plus we think of rock and roll as a tough life but by the time I got to the Dreamland BBS in 93, a large percentage of those there were on probation and had little use for a newbie. These were guiys who were valedictorians in their schools and went to Cooper Union, a free school with a very high scholastic level.

The major problem I faced, like so many others, was that I had worked and studied hard in highschool and college and then there was no place to go. Three generations of rising living standards came to a dead stop with me. Right wing radio announcers preach their messages of hate but they have an audience of men who feel that all the advantages have gone to women, minorities, and foreigners. I can’t live by that mentality but the task of psychological survival confronted me nevertheless.

Blame it on my proletarian upbringing, but this is why I have trouble thinking of myself as an artist, and prefer I be thought of as a craftsman and so too “art for art’s sake” never really rang my bell. Returning to the subject at hand, as well, one would hardly accuse the lawmakers of the United States of being motivated by the disinterested discovery of truth. To prevent our annihilation at the hands of the notoriously bloody western European mind we have to prepare ourselves.

In actually it’s not good to promise more then one can deliver and for most of us the primary determinant of what happens to us in life is the family, but there are other things at work as well. And in truth I am not that familiar with Semiotics. I’ve done some reading and can’t argue with what is said, but don’t know how much is said. Perhaps I think of it as hundreds of postcards blowing in spirals in the wind. That, like the Bingo Game of the Gods, would not be so bad, but those post cards, monads of information, are not going to be left alone. People will seek to appropriate them and use them for profit.

And it just gets weirder from here.

Consider you’re a parent and you have the opportunity of “cleaning” your offspring’s genetic code. Not only will they be disease free but they will be several times smarter then you, so smart in fact that they find you intolerable. When they grow up they need not marry but are allocated a “special child,,” (one each , please) by the state and they go to the zygote bank and have a choice not unlike a Chinese menu, one from column A, on from column B, and so on.

You’re a sentimental fool so you ask what it would cost to have aperson in the form of your parents, recreated, from DNA – No they don’t do that anymore – the insurance rates got too high.

Millions of years of evolution comes to a sudden stop – replaced by the market system and a generally agreed upon series of desirable personal characteristics.

John Stewart Mill had one of the highest IQ’s ever recorded. He was reading and writing Greek at five. He wrote with big words and tried to convince his fellow nineteenth century brits that the golden rule was best.

“The greatest good for the greatest number.” he said The people thought “This means he want me, who have somethink, to give to one what ain’t . Blimey. Fat chance of that happening.”

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