If I’d lived my life by what others were thinkin’, the heart inside me would’ve died

I was just too stubborn to ever be governed by enforced insanity

Someone had to reach for the risin’ star, I guess it was up to me

"Up to Me" by Bob Dylan)

Sunday, December 24, 2006

Crunchkin's Picks in '06

 Posted by Picasa

Prayerbook I

 Posted by Picasa

Prayerbook

 Posted by Picasa

Organic Cybersynthesis

Why is it that every other entity in the human world and nature seems to be subject to decay and computer memory is not?

"No one actually said that computer memory was not subject to decay, but a lot of people assumed it to be true," explains Winky Dinkelstein, "...too close to a cult for my liking, but hey what can you do?"

"Hold on there, wait in tater picking minute," offers the engineer,"WHo said it was subject to decay?"

"No one," added Zero.

"Then how the hell did that idea get in here?"

"If computer memory decays, what is the rate of decay?" asked Krishnamundi.

"Ye cain't rightly say cain ye?
How many years old is the oldest memory on computer?
And what if the first deterioration starts at 3.2 years, then it squares and really picks up speed.
There haint no lonjitoodinal study! Got to wait and see.

v/IRTUAL dUST DAMMIT
WE ARE TALKING INTERDIGITAL STORMS
AND WINDS
SUBAUTOMATIC DETERIORANTS, etc...

Can't we make money out of this Boss?

Versus the Organic Synthesis Model of Teilhard de Chardin. We are all 'good neighbors' in the net consciousness but instead of Christic consciousness we get the Matrix, or you know, Vanilla Sky!

Same old, same old!

Ecclesiastes---nothing changes---war primordial, eternal---existence, matter swept into Love.

Post Deemed too Dark-INterNet News

Posts Unedited
Removed Grinch's Christmas Letter, the PLRC (Peoples Literary Review Committee) deemed too dark: "for certain readers at this sensitive time of year." Dolly Madison, chair of the unedit bipartisan team indicates that the removal of this Crunchkin post (and others like it) will lead to an overall improvement: "unediting is not simply removal of text but promise that new posts will conform with PLRC values."


Digital Deterioration
Crunchkin claims to have discovered a phenomenon he has called "digital deterioration" to describe the lessening in quality of his photographic work which sits in digital memory over time: "You don't notice it at first, but upon repeated visits to photos posted at the Crunchkin website, I began to notice a sort of chipping away at some of the core details in my photographic work."

The significance of this "discovery" is immense, for it suggests that the same laws of entropy which apply to the physics of material bodies, also apply to the digital interface in a Personal Computer. "That is what I mean by 'deterioration'!" Crunchkin demurred.

"Look at it this in a theological light! The silicon substrate is 'fallible' owing to time and rearrangement at a microlevel heretofore unguessed."

No one actually declared computers infallible, still the idea was bandied about in '06 down in Pumpkinsville.

"Can't make a mistake from what I hear," Gully responds. "Once saved the data stays fresh, permanent, and then I heard him whisper 'eternal'." But deep down he new it was wrong to insinuate that digital data might be preserved forever." It is shocking to imagine that of all the material substrates in the world, the one that composes the computer memory, is not subject to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics as this citizen suggests.

"Granted the deterioration level is slower than ordinary deteriorants such as dust, worms, war, and overall physical chaos," revealed Crunchkin: "I mean "slower" in a relative sense. Which is not to say that it is inoculated from arhythmy. Stephen Wolfram's 'automata'. It could as it were 'pick up speed' there might be a pattern chaos that emerges in an exponential rather an arithmetic manner. In which case all data is at risk, pretty scary to folks who have got their lives wrapped up in the functioning of this new tool."

Sunday, November 26, 2006

Tao

 Posted by Picasa

Scrappling

 Posted by Picasa

Self-Portrait

 Posted by Picasa

Socrates

 Posted by Picasa

D

 Posted by Picasa

Politically Speaking

This is a summary or finale concerning US and world politics: US citizenry must recall their independent and autonomous spirit. Each individual and household moving toward self-sufficiency, simplicity and frugality. We are at a far remove from individuals like Franklin or Jefferson, it is an age of weak spirit---so-called great men like B. Gates and other corporate and entertainment media leaders, who are simply ghosts, puffs of dust; brilliant and smart but indifferent to the soul of humanity.

Woodstoves, wells, single acre lots, detached from the dominion of utilities, services, and other corporate strangleholds. Consider, if costs of utilities and other so called essentials rise over a year at only 10%, and the citizen's wage remains the same, how much further behind at the end of this year the citizen will be! Fight back by detaching yourself from the grid as far as possible, prudently.

Do you for one single moment imagine that utility companies or leaders of corporations actually care about ordinary citizen life? If so, then we is the segregation of classes so apparent? Can a prudent working man enter club, or hotel, or restaurant wherein several transactions or purchase might count for several days of this guy's work? It is gambling. Consider proportion: an average citizen earns far less than $50, 000 per year, and works more than 40 hours, time spent in transport is stress, also work, so that what we mean by quality time is short. Now let's consider someone who earns say $200, 000 or more per annum. Is this 4 times $50, 000? No. Your first thousand must be spent on shelter, water, food, the lower levels in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Plumbing, lighting, etc... There is the bulk of $50,000 spent in basics and necessities. So if you earn 4 times, then you have your basics met, and the surplus is to develop you and your friends and family. Is this ethical? not in the least. Not by any standard of classical ethical teaching! Ethics concern itself most of all, not with family and friends, whose congeniality and sociability is a kind of reward if I invest wisely my 'kindness' and 'good deeds'. But ethics really gets to its essential challenge with strangers, aliens, even enemies and how we treat them, return the score, etc...

Loving friends and family is something that mammals do. Observe the deer, the rabbit, the wolf, homo sapiens is no different in this. Great!! Pat on the back! But why, this is simply evolutionarily generated selection with grooming and sharing behaviors common to all mammalia. In a word "mothering". I am thinking about the root of 'mammalia' and the "mammary" hence milkfeeding, wombs, sexuality which implies polar pairs, that is 'sexes'. Cleaning linked with affection is wonderfully developed in cats, dogs, as well as porcupines, and of course, wild rabbits. Licking, cleaning and so forth.

But what about those outside of the loop? Those who dwell at the periphery and margin of family affection. Even in rabbit populations we see attacks, cruelty, in short 'unethical' behavior usually linked with sexual ritual. For example, the 'king' rabbit being deposed by one of his 'sons' to take the Queen rabbit. What Freud called the 'Oedipus Conflict'.
The locus of consideration for ethics in not so much within the clan, whose sociability is guaranteed (to a certain extent) by deeply embedded, fixed rituals having been carefully selected over millenia of millenia, like a polished stone, to produce a seemlessly perfect phenomenon, such as caress, or touching. But it is in fact a carefully embedded natural phenonomen, without reference to any purely transcendent 'love'.

There are outsiders, and the way that we treat them is the essential core of ethics, taking for a natural fact that familial care and concern is smart, but not necesarily ethical in the strict sense. Ethics in the strict sense concerns debts we must pay to one another, to enemies, to ourselves, hence the very idea of corporations engaging in 'ethics' is rather ridiculous. If a man loses his job, or house or wife, he loses all. If a corporation worth billions loses millions it is chump change. A weekend bender, what the hell. Loss of livelihood is another matter. Point is corporations don't pay debts, don't sacrifice, don't lose, will not turn the other cheek, will never give their life for a friend. That is why the corporation is soulless, a dust factory. Crud, metaphysics of crud.

Turn the other cheek, forgive, accept apology, those are the signature behaviors of ethics. Consider your own life, and the profound courage it required to say "I'm sorry" because it is from the heart, it costs your soul and you feel it. This is the realm of ethics. How can a corporation, government, committee, institution or any other such groupthinktank care one iota for anyone's livelihood? It cannot---so like the neanderthal that is is, says to itself, "You know I don't care one iota for anybody if it means my corporation must lose---but this message will not go over well with people if they realize I am simply out for my own gain---so I will try to make them think that I actually care for them." This is the meaning of ethics in corporate life, call it risk management, PR, it's all the same.

Why do we fall so easily into this corporatism? We know deep down in our hearts that corporations have never really given any actual citizen anything of lasting substantial value which was not already available from nature. We know that the the only real souls we can trust are actual humans, we meet and live with---star worship and saints is all in the mind of the beholder. Why do Americans act so shocked when their stars fall? Morally, alcohol, profanity, etc... You know nothing of all these people you have never met save stories, either written or told. The only truth can be derived from individual observation and living together, with real and actual people, not statistics!

When dark winds and storms blow, then we must concern ourselves with more basic survival behavior---clean water, and frugality. There may be many days in which the remaining meals are simply crackers. Citizens have faced far worse trials, but consider how will the citizen face the dark days of reckoning, with the Beemer, Starbuck's Doubleshot, or Absolut (tm.) vodka? You will take what you can get in those days, and it won't be much. So the frugal citizen will already be there with water and the woodstove and the know-how, while the folks out on luxury holidays are in for a rude surprise. Get ready, or be prepared, or 'vsegda gotov' in Russian, means the citizen preparedness, not military, you knuckleheads. Nobody is going to come in and help you out. Look at New Orleans, a situation where---check out these ethics!---citizens are forced at gunpoint to evacuate their homes, and often pets, then to be corralled into the Astrodome a corporately technological structure incapable of being 'shelter' for human species---it is plastic and steel! So these citizens are forced to enter into this "shelter" where human moral atrocity abounds. Can we have a better image of the sheep being led blindly into a den of iniquity? Did anybody except real citizens give a damn about the people whose lives were flooded? Certainly not government leaders and officials. Some time gallons of water will pour onto their living room suites.