Digressions.

Distractions?           
Hasta la vista, baby.

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Gwynne Dyer in the Georgia Straight a few weeks ago: The threat of artificial intelligence and this in the New York Times a few days ago open up a thread, a vein, a seam of seeming gold in the murk: R.U.R. a 1920 Czech science fiction play by Karel Čapek. R.U.R. stands for Rosumovi Univerzální Roboti / Rossum’s Universal Robots. (Thanks to Martin) The theme is touched upon occasionally/sometimes/often in Doctor Who & Startrek. Lately several years worth of 'Person of Interest' episodes - ultra-conservative undertones but some interesting insights among bushels & bushels (& bushels!) of every-cheap-trick-in-the-book chaff. 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy', which is the best in my estimation because of the light-hearted humour in such nuggets as: "Don't Panic!" and, "The answer is 42." Luc Besson's recent film 'Lucy'. (Wowzers!) The Terminator 'franchise'.

Recursion #1 (digression within a digression): A thin layer of real story in James Cameron's efforts - T1 & T2 in this case - a tissue of lies rather than an integrated ideology of lies, which becomes clearer if you watch T3 & T4. Cameron seems to have fallen out with them over T3 somehow - idle speculation. Shades of Sidney Carton, altruism. Arnold Schwarzenegger later becomes the 'green champion' Governor of California. James Cameron becomes something approximately similar in the green movement with 'Avatar'. Both immensely wealthy. Both entertainers. Both getting lots.

I use the public library WiFi connection because I can't afford $300 a month for telephone & Internet anymore. There seems to be an increasing number of other people doing the same - competition for the limited number of chairs so it pays to be there when the door opens in the morning. A network such as the Internet is really a complex amalgam of devices spread through planetary space and components fail now and then. The reactions when the wideband narrows and slows (often apparently reacting to the weather outside) are interesting. No one says anything but you can feel people shift impatiently, hear them rebooting their PCs hoping for a return to 'normal' revealing that it's ... (just) an addiction. When the infrastructure stops Moore's Law will go into reverse hyperdrive and it will all vanish in a heartbeat. A century-long study funded (presumably) with Google profits? Are you kidding me? :-) A few loose ends: Symmetry with undead: intellect & mind cf. A.I. & cyber-whatever; and spirit cf. zombies, golem, vampires and the like. Last Exit to Brooklyn & Requiem for a Dream? These are some of the saddest stories ever. ... Why should they come to mind so strongly & repeatedly as I write this? And anorexic females? (Linda Hamilton?) Scale: at local & limited scale it all works fine; only in very large, general, planetary realms does it lead to collapse & extinction.

Recursion (or possibly pre-recursion) #2: The effigies below are not identified by the Guardian editors responsible for the article in which the photograph appears. I guess you are just supposed to know who they are. One of them might be Stephen Harper but I'm not certain-sure. Why aren't they named? Why don't I recognise them? There is the odd link here and there to whatever the text of the agreement coming out of Lima might be. Why don't I bother to follow these links and read the text? And why am I ready to simply accept whatever the chief of AOSIS says about it? In the clip (farther below) from 'The Newsroom' two numbers put my antennae up: 3 million years since CO2 levels were last at 400 parts per million, and 2,795 gigatons already released. I thought it was longer than three million years and I thought the 2,795 gigatons were the already discovered but not yet burned reserves (according to Bill McKibben's 'Do The Math'). Why don't I (bother to) check these numbers out? These are rhetorical questions gentle reader. Do government pension plan investments in fossil fuels count as subsidies? What are the seven criteria that Quebec laid out to TransCanada for acceptance of the Energy East pipeline? No one answers so these questions hit the round file as 'known unknowns'.

UNFCCT COP(out)20, Lima Peru, December 1-12 2014: IF the remainder of the 'developed' politicians had imitated and exceeded the excellent but insufficient gestures made by Barack Obama & Xi Jingping, AND IF all of them had anted up dramatically to help their less fortunate neighbours THEN something useful might have been accomplished next year in Paris. As it is I must stifle my feelings on such cunning stunts in fear of being arrested for uttering threats. Some fluffy bit of TV dreck - a HBO soap called 'The Newsroom' aired around the world in primetime - slides in a few minutes of climate change between its main ongoing plot lines & cleavage (fore & aft). It ain't strictly factual but it's pretty damn close (say, 97%), and it lets you laugh at what is the un-funniest situation humanity has ever faced bar none - which is healthy psychology for a civilization on the edge, the brink, the very very verge, of collapse, dystopia, extinction, whatever. So of course, people who could know better (viz. Peter Sinclair & Michael Mann among others) damn it with faint praise extending to outright condemnation. Doh! The clip is here; Sinclair's petty crit here, and Mann's mewling here and here. There isn't a position on this any more than there is a position on the temperature at which water boils. What else? ... Oh yeah, Jane Fonda has come a long way since Barbarella Psychedella & the Excessive Machine (at 31). A-and there's this. "Fuck you," whispers Slothrop. It's the only spell he knows.

 
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Shitholder.

Love has no pride.  
Hangin' by a thread.

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Here, listen to some'a this:                                   Who's gonna stand up?    Other versions: orchestral, With Crazy Horse, and solo.       A-and: Fork in the Road.

 

It seems obvious that Stephen Harper is the epitome rather than an exceptional case - from the election record alone. And Franklin, lost, maddened by the lead in his (then newly invented) tinned food, personifying all of us (including Stephen Harper) too accurately for comfort. As long as one is alive one has to be somewhere, doing something (even if it's nothing). This post will arrive in early December but it is being composed in mid-November because ... there's nothing else to do.

Pretence. I send my children away believing I am saving them, then sit in pubs all afternoon pretending to read newspapers and go in and out of cinemas until they close pretending to watch movies. Always buy two coffees and pretend to be taking one for an imaginary friend. Pretend to be sitting on a bench smoking a cigarette waiting for the library to open. exculpatory, adjective: Adapted or intended to clear from blame or a charge of guilt; apologetic, vindicatory. atonement, noun: The condition of being at one with others; unity of feeling, harmony, concord, agreement. Restoration of friendly relations between persons who have been at variance; reconciliation. Propitiation (favourable, gracious, kind) of an offended or injured person, by reparation of wrong or injury; amends, satisfaction, expiation (penance). A simpleminded mistake: Buber (I thought) is about categories - Thou/You/It - and it's so, in part, but he is also about process and arriving (possibly) at an authentic 'we'. Nós. dialogue, noun: a conversation between two or more persons; a colloquy (speaking together). dialectic, noun: the investigation of truth by discussion.         This meaning is muddied, the word having been idologically hijacked by the Socialists for         a specialized meaning which you can look up for yourself. dialogic, adjective: pertaining to, or of the nature of dialogue; sharing in dialogue.

Love/hate relationships, maybe this includes all of them, but surely not simultaneously (simply to satisfy mere mechanical feasibility). Pierre Reverdy may be right - «Il n'y a pas d'amour, il n'y a que des preuves d'amour.» One obvious possible proof is choice, which undoes in a way some of the cynical part. Probably no one will mention that the Brasilian cartoons are not translated this week. Oh well.

He that we last as Thurn and Taxis knew         Now recks no lord but the stiletto's Thorn,         And Tacit lies the gold once-knotted horn.         No hallowed skein of stars can ward, I trow,         Who's once been set his tryst with Trystero. Sturm und Drang then is it? A Fugue? Theory & Praxis (not knowing too many -axis words)? Twisted sadness? Chagrin? What is our Thomas on about? tacit: Not openly expressed or stated, but implied; understood, inferred. Latin tacere to be silent.

Job's wife says to 'im, "Dost thou still retain thine integrity? Curse God, and die." An odd question and a strange non sequitur kind of rhetorical echo. I'm not telling you any of this because I expect you to (necessarily) do anything but simply because I want you to know it, or (at least) have the opportunity of knowing it, the possibility, perhaps later on in the future sometime. Or not.

A-and, I am putting it into this blog so I can remember it too. There are kinds, modes, of thinking. Darwin in the 1850s, and ... Darcy Wentworth Thompson - 'On Growth and Form' (1917) - scientists. In statistics you trim off the highs and lows, discard the outliers; but in science it may be the very outliers that first show up some crack in the current theory and lead to a superior integration (seems to me). Please Sir, could I have a little yin with that yang? Will it be correctitude & ideology or (essentially) light-hearted observations on consistency designed to enlighten?

Filling time downloading TV programs and watching them; BBC, ITV, British shows mostly, mysteries, dramas, police stuff; there seems to be a band of gypsies who go about making them and the same actors appear frequently. The stories are mostly (99%) dreck, unreal mindless crap-o-la, manipulative shit, improbable, impossible, untrue, and the mind wanders. I forget what I've seen and watch the same series over again several times. Actresses with wide-set eyes, and I wonder how much of whatever is in mind or personality or intelligence or spirit, what you will, is determined by a (presumably) greater bifocal effect? Humming Big Bopper's 'Chantilly Lace' ... "Ain't nothin' in the world like a big-eye'd girl ..." The colours run from one thought to another, into them all, channels of memory remembered (and likely many more unconscious but still active in whatever structures store them). Up pops Pynchon's use of 'palimpsest' and another dozen layers pile on - startin' t'look like a jamboree! I read somewhere - one of the psychologists who designs clearly measurable experiments - that the change in size of the pupils in person A's eyes is perceptible by person B who then registers person A's level of interest and possible intentions. Amazing!   Not me. So much anodyne TV I can hardly recognize entire faces anymore nevermind details.

I pester my NDP Member of Parliament, Matthew Kellway, in public meetings and with repeated emails, to have him explain the detailed mechanics of fossil fuel subsidies. He is the NDP critic for environmental issues and might be expected to know. He never answers, except once, in person face-to-face, when he promises to. Now a report comes out, described in The Guardian, and available for download from Overseas Development Institute (ODI). Many questions are answered. One that isn't: What about government pension plan investments? (And unions for that matter?) I put it about but no one responds so I leave it here not to be forgotten. Suburbs as proxy (poxy) frontier. Gaudi's towers, and Shukhov's, are (certainly) not design-committee exercises. They lack the appalling language of correctitude & appeasement. They are also both incomplete - and don't remind me of dildos or french ticklers either. I am sure that none of these observations are connected.

The concrete column on the right there is for show not blow - there is a gap between it and the beam it appears to support - the structural engineer had integrity.   :-) Back-turnings and cold shoulders too numerous to count. Three 'Antichrist's. (At least) two horrible 'Waddya-still-doin'-here?'s. 'Asshole!' from the kids (specific sins not specified). Silent shunning from all the other kin. And one 'shitholder'. Doesn't guess. Hasta be told again and again. Nine inch nails an' the penny still don't drop. In the event, 'shitholder' is coupled with a flying solid-oak dining-room table (in the days when 'solid-oak' means something). Some people think he holds this against her. Not so. Such strong authentic originality fills him with amazed admiration, love. Put that way they (naturally) assume it's ... sarcasm, some irony some, twist or other. When all it is is true.

What are the facts? Who knows? And the whole computer thing is a red herring too, Vince was right. (God bless 'im - though neither of us would ever say such a thing.) A shitholder to be sure (me not Vince). Viejo verde ('green old man'). Gordo feio e fedorento. Com hábitos ruins, viciado, desesperado, infeliz, só. "To cease upon the midnight with no pain," says Keats ("the blushful Hippocrene" having already been touched upon above). A young man admitting he will live because the muse stops singing? Is that it? A curious inversion. I wish I'd saved enough for a hidey-hole in Brasil or Costa Rica. Disappear up my own arsehole like a dying anemone or coral polyp. I didn't, and I (exactly) do not know now what to do next.

  
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