Flocking late to the debate

This joke again: The Pope, John Wayne, and Hitler are getting on a bus. As the Pope attempts to pass the driver, neither showing a senior's pass, nor dropping coinage for the single fare, the driver holds him up with the tenor of a clearing of his throat and a, "Fare, please."

The Pope's graceful smile betrays a hint of condescension. "I am the infallible Holy Pontiff, respected representative of well-over a billion Catholics around the globe," comes his reply. "Anyway," he adds, indicating poverty with a gesture of his hands, "I don't have pockets." He blesses the driver with a sign of the cross and moves to the back of the bus, taking a seat.

He is followed by John Wayne, who likewise attempts to pass ignoring the driver who, as with the Pope, stalls the actor's obliviousness by asking him to show a ticket or pay the fare.

John Wayne contemplates the confrontation with a shift from one foot to the other and then squares himself with the driver and boasts, "I am an American icon, representative of the greatest generation, and a symbol of the heroic taming of the savage frontier. I don't ask you to compensate me for my service and I sure as hell ain't gonna pay for a ride on a pinko city bus." He saunters to the back of the bus and takes a place just near enough the Pope to be able to sit with his legs spread wide apart.

Next comes Hitler.

[alternative addendum::]

The driver takes one look at the Führer and, annoyed, waves him past with a, "Oh, Jesus. Just go ahead!"

The rhetorical moral of this tale is, if you can't stop the Pope or John Wayne, how're you gonna stop Hitler?

 

The present point: imagine surveillance is the Pope. Surveillance cameras and Flock are, respectively, John Wayne and Hitler. If you prefer, replace surveillance with another mode of gathering data on people and, eventually, outsourcing the gathering to be shared with... whomever.

 

This is just the latest iteration I'm prompted to mention. Previously, on Warning About What This Means For Tomorrow When Today Should've Be Enough Yesterday:

The Pope = law & order

John Wayne = lack of accountability for same

Hitler = result of lack of accountability

 

The Pope = prison

John Wayne = privatizing prisons

Hitler = school to prison pipeline

 

The Pope = extraordinary rendition

John Wayne = kill list Tuesdays

Hitler = just bombing whatever with goal post shifting goals

 

The Pope = district-based school funding

John Wayne = charter schools

Hitler = corporate prison pipeline

 

The Pope = state secrets

John Wayne = prosecuting whistleblowers

Hitler = in-group patriotism über alles

 

The Pope = health insurance

John Wayne = insurance mandate

Hitler = coverage rug pull

 

The Pope = Piety and neutrality

John Wayne = "Commies!"

Hitler = "literally" Hitler cough Ben-Gvir

 

The Pope = feature

John Wayne = bug

Hitler = bug feature

 __

 

And in sports: The Reds get picked to perform an operation on a wrenched ankle. Let's go to the video:

Chronos Disease and Jung's Cure

I wrote something about this subject thirteen years ago; my personal statute of restraint prevents my citing it here. I'm only doing this to recapitulate and ramble on. In spite of my criticisms that follow, these are nevertheless the ramblings of an uninitiated ignoramus.

 

The shelves are full of people full of it, which doesn't mean their wares haven't sold out, even if they had in reaching their fulfillment sold out themselves. I'd be late to the game in referring to them as 'grifters', and there are many kinds and many brands. I have two in mind.

 

First, I'm thinking of the Deepak Oprah variety, by which I mean both namesakes and all they have spawned, plus parallel thinkers and all those from whom they stole their wee earth shattering ideas.

 

Take, for instance, "what quantum physics tells us", which one should, of course, for the sake of honesty, amend to what quantum physics does not tell us, or, at best, what it doesn't necessarily rule in or out.

 

To set it up before I dig too deep, I'll briefly mention the second, more qualified grifter class, who, if you're algorithm has allowed, have appeared on every podcast hawking the primacy of the deterministic universe. I wanted to adverbialize the previous sentence with "for some reason" because their exposure gives off psyop-y vibes, as in, like, conspookuousness. But since there are so many grifting off the concept of the psyop, I forwent. My choice of verb should suffice, not to be confused with the so named Hawking.

 

I just want to make conspicuous that their opting for the free-will destroying brand of determinism incorporates the same "what something tells us" claim when the opposite is true, i.e. our observations of the reliable laws of physics do not preclude the truth of our observation of having very real choices, and until you can run an experiment that proves you "could not have done otherwise", you'll never be able to prove otherwise.

 

The primacy of a theory includes its utility. The utility of free will has determined (if you will) the entirety of human existence. Maybe the problem is that the questions of the origin & nature of what may have emerged from all that is fundamental has made for so much mythology that it seems it should follow that all the emergent stuff is just illusory bunk. Wouldn't it be ironic if the planet became an earth sized data center filled with our translations of that same bunk?

 

I'm sure some human-proclaimed tech genius has used the baby and bathwater metaphor on behalf of the expansion of data centers. The first thing I think of whenever I hear that analogy is how it has been used to argue for the utility of the servitude of slavery (read Thomas Carlyle); I cannot think of a positive example, though I am not looking too hard. 

 

Anyway, amusing is the idea that a super intelligent machine could somehow render human life superfluous while also stripping itself of the resources necessary for its own survival. I predict they won't be able to do otherwise.

__ 

 

To drill down  on or zoom in to the allusions of the equal & opposite grifters — the likes of whom are keen to amalgamate science and spiritualism, e.g. a quantum mechanics they understand far less than those who understand it the most (already too little for practical applications (according to me, the uninitiated)) and the vaguely esoteric concepts of Carl G. Jung and the wonderful world of a equally bastardized Buddha — I'd like to zoom in literally- figuratively to our substance as such. In other words, I'll just ignore any claims about what quantum physics tells us.

 

Not only are we said to be part of a universe with more space than substance, but we, or any object within this vast space is comprised of more space than substance. Or, I suppose another way to put it would be that there is more space between our molecules than their collective size. To the uninitiated like myself, this seems like we can only see each other and all these objects around us because of our size.

 

If I were the size of the smallest particle, I would only be able to see particles of comparable scale. If I were an atom, I'd see atoms. I wonder if there's an eye of a size that would see nothing at all. Like, too small to see the distant stars, yet too big to see the distant stars. What would I see if I were the size of the universe?

 

I think I got distracted. What time is it? Time was you could find a clock in the public square. Less so now. You can still find them at the base of a steeple. Perhaps providing that service uses a subliminal psychology that fills the pews when the show is less entertaining than it used to be. 

 

I think about how difficult it is to maintain attendance in a theater vs. the same for a church.

 

Speaking of building attachments to unfalsifiable ideas, this guy called Jung walked the woo line that put butts in the seats. Or maybe his business thrived in spite of it.

 

His essay on synchronicity seems to me, the non-initiate, to be, on the one hand, a claim that mind blowing coincidences are as central to the makeup of the universe as the determinism of physics, yet, on the other hand weaselly enough to be but a meditation on the psychological effect such coincidences have on us. I don't know if anybody has pinned down with precision what he means by comparing "meaning" to causality in relation to the origin of events.

 

To begin with, his qualification of "meaningful coincidences" strikes me as redundant: an unmeaningful coincidence would be a concurrence of events, not a coincidence.

 

Anyway, without projecting any of my ideas on to his, I'd say that in an infinite universe of infinite time, coincidences of the most mind blowing capacity are bound to happen eventually.

 

To you lesser initiated, the idea of synchronicity came to Carl G. Jung while he was treating a patient. She was describing a dream she had had that featured a golden scarab at which point Jung heard a tapping on the window behind him. He went to the window to investigate and saw a gold-green beetle.

 

More significant re. the perspective of his psychology, he says that he was having trouble treating this patient due to her extreme rationality and that when presenting the beetle to her it poked a hole in that perception and enabled her to recognize the symbolic nature of her dream. Or something.

 

What if it hadn't? What if she'd taken his "here's your scarab" comment as woo grifting and decided to discontinue her treatment? What if no one'd bought what he was selling?  

 

 

Subscription Service

Der Parkbank Pinkler Kapitel XXXIX: die Dimension der Demenzen der Menschen

XXXIX.

 

In einer, sagen wir mal, nicht allzu fernen Zukunft, hier heute als vergangene Zeit dargestellt, als man damit anfing, Straßennamen nach Straßen zu benennen, genauer gesagt, umzubenennen, sowohl die Umbennener selbst und die, die von derselben von Abscheu überschauert, waren sich bewusst, worum es ging, sprich dem (eigenen) Arschloch hinterher eilen. Arschlochallez! Als hellseh' historiker darf ich solche Maßnahmen bürokratischen Umwege nennen. 

 

Ich kann dies und auch anderes tun. Wie, zum Beispiel, die Zukunft in die Vergangenheit verwandeln. Denn ich bin zwar kein Hellseher, aber ich sehe heller, auch wenn ich eventuell geisteskrank bin. 

 

Genau deshalb rede ich nicht nur von, sondern sehe ich vor mir auch die Stalinallee-Allee, ehem. Karl-Marx-Allee, ehem. Stalinallee, die nach der nach dem verrufenen Georgier benannten Allee umbenannt worden ist.

 

Ich leite an ihren, ähm, Anschluss weiter, die ehemalige Frankfurter Allee, die zum Glück, zumindest aus Gründen des Fortbestands, nach der gleichen Allee namens des selben Mannes aus Stahl benannt ist. Ohnehin, würde Polen glücklicher mit Krupp an der Oder nebenan?

 

Diese beiden Alleen sind noch für den Namen geeignet. Ich denke hier an die Stralauer zwischen Ehrenbergstraße und Elsenbrücke, wobei die Umbenennungsorgie eine gewisse Folgerichtigkeit enthält. Die heißt nun Stralauerallee-Straße.

 

Und das ist noch nicht alles. Stell dir das mal vor. Sie haben die Spree in Amazonas umbenannt. Im Bezug Bezos natürlich.

 

Zur Einheit (schon wieder): 

 

Die Spree strömte sich in Grenzen, Gebirgszüge sowieso. Doch letztere hat schon jene lang gehaltene Teilung in den Schatten gestellt, die hier an den Bänken der früheren verlief, im Alten Fritz' Hain.

Die Beute aus der Himmelswand gekratzt, ein Geschoss nach dem anderen, in die Luft, über diese einst gespaltene Stadt.

 

Eine Einheit an die andere, sich zu einem konkreten Tribut erhoben, an Höhenflüge, Schwingen der Begierde.

Triumphierend beherrscht, die Teilung vor den Bänken befestigt. Denn wenn so eine Kette stetig strömt, fließen die Früchte dem Siegreichen zu, einst gemeint zu den Massen hinunter...
 

...Moment. Sind die Fesseln mit einem Schlüssel versehen?

Apropos vorbei gelaufen: 

  

 

 

 __

xxxviii. << -- >> Kapitel ??

.

'cep 'timber!'

Fruchtstr & Stalinallee 1960

Hover over Foto:

Straße der Pariser Kommune & Karl-Marx-Allee '25 

 

Der Parkbank Pinkler Kapitel XXXVIII: durch die Tore

        Du bist dran.
            —das Alltribunal

XXXVIII.

 

Jenny de la Torre Castro

 

 __

xxxvii. << -- >> Kapitel ??

Grüngubener

As usual with this series, hover your cursor over and off the image to compare it to 2025, or just click on it.

  Grünberger- & Gubener, Friedrichshain-Berlin 1955 | (hover/click 2025)

Heiligabend

Id is what id is

Individual reactions represent parts of the poll. Ignoring all but what's statistically significant represents an error in the errand. Each is its own easy answer, yet there's truth to every one.

 

What we have in common is the desire to be told something others would rather ignore or cannot understand or will remain oblivious to. People pulling together aren't moved by the same issues. Imagine each person hanging from a different string tugged by the same puppeteer. Campaigns are complicated that way, but some are better than others at carrying them out. There are always enough lies to go around.

 

Being utterly freed from the albatross of truth helps. One could try to counter that by educating the masses on the intricacies of history, its effect on present realities, lessons to be learned about better laid plans, etc., but there lies an honesty we've yet to achieve, and again, it contains too much too many people don't want to hear. Or so I hear. Fudgy facts filtered through the tradition of folk conditioning and you can forget about clarity. Hence simple sloganeering.

But if you're ailing, looking for the easiest, most significant answer, it's people will flock in greater numbers to the biggest crock because it seems like it's not trying to hide anything.

 

Anyway, don't invest your love in fear. And bring on the white winged dove.

 

Belated 40th to Three of a Perfect Pair

On the home stretch of the drive to '84, with tensions running high under pressure to produce the third and final album of this band's incarnation, Fripp came up with a fabbo plan:

  Link to: original 'ToaPP'

 

Album cover parody by Timothy P. Hoffman

Untold suns dawning out of darkness

I recall an interview of an artist roommate of Syd Barrett's in which he told of how when he'd be working on a painting in his room, he'd also be acutely aware of Syd's inert presence, lying on his bed in the other room, and he imagined Syd must be thinking that he could get up and do anything, but as soon as he did, it would preclude the possibility of anything else. At least that's what I recall of it (though I'm not gonna search for it on YooToob and distract myself).

 

Anyway, it struck me as profound at the time, whereby only now do I consider his roommate's tale a classic projection, of which he would seem to have been aware, insofar as he did state it was what he had imagined Syd might be thinking.

 

At any rate, this reminds me, too, of what I perceive as the increased commonality of the discussion of the notion that we humans have no free will, but rather, like everything else in the observable physical universe, are only objects in a chain of determinism, and, though this is not new, it not so long ago occurred to me that this is both a simplification and complication of reality.

 

In short, the deterministic nature of the cause & effect universe does not preclude our having choices at every twist and turn. Yet most of these seem to me like choices at the ho-hum place of the routine management of the human condition of being aware we can make them. Or not.

 

The choice to paint one's walls falls into this category, I think. Then there are the manifold decisions to be made that become increasingly unavoidable as the state from which this confrontation occurs falls into categories we perceive as more crucial to wellbeing, and ultimately survival.

 

As regards depression and anxiety, I think about how my established routine has gone so far toward diminishing their debilitating effects by keeping them less looming than their latency would imply. But that's not all !-D

 

Indeed, the sense of purpose is always looming; indeed, merely getting up early achieves only the first step wherefrom the rest presents itself with nagging choice after nagging choice, to be made, or not, whereby each has its own threat assessment swimming synaptically unseen yet ever present, as is evinced by what I've coined the OCD of mind, i.e. the manic nature of seemingly shambolic and infinitely rapid thinking that won't let one go.

 

Hence the routine, which continues with a series of doings, the only obsessive nature of which is anything that would get in their way, i.e. force a choice to change the program, a change of commitment. But these are pretty easy to get around as long as I can avoid all-or-nothing thinking.

 

Enough of the pitfalls of freewill; there is also a liberating freedom — at not just one, but two ends of the spectrum of always choo-choo choosing: At the one end is an eternal recurrence of the realization that, even if I cannot do anything I want, I can feel any way I want about it; what was nagging me was merely me. At the other end's the choice to not choose, leaving one's future free for whatever comes next.

 

As long as I can balance the ability to know what I can do without (and say, 'I don't need this' without nagging consequences) with the recognition of how doing-with would net positive results without drastically changing my universe, my sanity remains intact.

 

As regards the fear of commitment, I think it is based on all-or-nothing thinking, with oft unwarranted worries about the exclusion of anything or anyone else. Selfish or not, can't I choose to make someone else (feel) good or better or less bad?

 

People who love music have reported sometimes getting more out of creating mixtapes for someone else. Correctly or not, they feel a sense of giving to someone else the enjoyment the music'd brought to themselves. I can't imagine the choice to make a mixtape shuts out future personal possibilities.

 

Can I do that by painting a wall? In my case, probably not, yet the walls of my kitchen have provided a sense of something whose value I cannot diminish. And I didn't even do anything.

 

Had I painted the collection of tiny triangles that just happen to recount to my mind the tale of The Illustrated Man, with the other tales therein, including the blank spot on the wall for the fear of the known future, I am sure my retelling of the tale of the painting of the wall would paint my face with the sense of accomplishment, my attitude about pride notwithstanding. Let's say the sense of satisfaction would be net positive if not at all selfless. And you can always repaint a wall or leave it for someone else, assuming someone does not come along and take that choice away beforehand. 

 

The creative impulse rules.

"The World the Children Made"

Catherine ær Estwycham in K∂ntlän∂

re. iirc to fellow lefty & d, mr multiple dr, dj

Like liked lefties often enough occupying right realty, I employ an ambi- unconscious Janus minded bog-standard handedness that led, like Ringo, semi- wrong way round (his thru the roll, me thru the feet) but like you & unlike him course corrected quickly and like you, not unlike him, 3rd grade teacher, Sr. Linda, made mere mention, as I recall, to me in class about the idea of my trying to write thru my right, after which I made mere mention, as I'd recalled it, to Mama, maybe the same evening, after which Mama called her & showed her teeth as only one could over the phone.

Moron memory here (& n.b. cf. its reliability, as I'n't cf. prior to draft so'sn't to contaminate its contamination).

Hildegard-Jadamowitz-Straße 1958 (hover or click for 2024)

Gedouda Dashtreet

Stalinallee/Fruchtstraße - 1960

Hover or click for Karl-Marx-Allee/Pariser Kommune - 2024

mashed potitles vii

Novem be nine

No ember benign,

November bemoan:

the West that is known

will never be mine.

 

Gabriel-Max-Str. - 1989 (hover/click: 2023)

for the birds

a minute-fourteen

you will never get it back

just think how they feel

 

Der Parkbank Pinkler Kapitel: Rückfünfzehn

Obschon du da bißt, treffen wir uns demnächst auf jenes Klemp.

—Oonsa R. Tsaeler
(Gespraech im Spiegelbild)

.VX

 

Es wird gefragt, wenn das Abbild waagrecht gerade andersrum erscheint, warum nun nicht gleich auf dem Kopf stehend? Angenommen, das ist nicht lustig gemeint, fallen wir hier in die Kategorie von falsch gestellten Fragen. Stellt man die richtigen Fragen, müssen Fragezeichen nicht gestellt werden.

 

Wie sähe es aus, wenn du deinem wahren Ich gegenüberstündest. Wieso hat der einzelne Kopf sowie der hinterer Teil gleich zwei Backen. Warum zählen zu den jeweiligen Geschlechtsorganen, sonst ledig und allein zwischen zwei Beinen, gekoppelte Eier.

 

Wofür braucht eine Nase zwei Löcher aber Alex nur ein Platz. Weshalb den Kapiteln römische Zahlen zuweisen und nie bis fünfzig zählen. Was soll an Symmetrie denn so erschreckend sein.

 

Von deren vertrauten Anredeform abgesehen, inwiefern ist Du egozentrisch. Von wegen Enden, wie kannst du ein Killer erkennen, ohne ihn auf die Reihe zu kriegen.

 

__

xxxv. << -- >> Kapitel ??

Times Signs

Saray ho! Hoserei, Warschauer-/Revaler Straße - 1952
(hover/click for twunny twunny-three)

rummage round the ropes

Wühlisch- in die Seumestraße, Berlin - 1914

(hover/click for 2023)