The Modern Quart-In-A-Pint-Pot

All go, socially active, 24 hour media life
will seem very attractive to the young and able
- how could such wealth and choice lack charm?

But the point about this abundance is that to see it all
in perspective we have to stand a long way off from it,
then we can see far more of it than we can aprehend,
we may fail to recognise its transience, whilst seeing
much more than we can control through ownership,
which requires turning ourselves into a corporation.

But an abundance you can see all of sems fine enough,
as long as we know how little of it  we can own,
how much ir may own us by takng over our lives,
and how short our time of owning it is going to be.

Whatever we see, and beleive that we can own,
it will once day have to be passed on to the next generation
who will face the same temptations of pretend-omniscience.  

The IrishLanguage Made Easier

The above is a example of world phenemon of street art, from the streets of central Belfast (Waring Street to be exact) and it will stay here longer here more than it will stay there. 'Slainte' mean 'cheers' or 'health', may yours be abundant.

'Pinis' is Irish for 'penis' and here the question mark and the absence of any penis, or it being hidden on the wolf itself is more interesting. For the humans reading this, the question mark suggests ambiguity, and human gender values in a state of flux.   

 

An Australian Addresses Donald Trump Via Facebook.....

Mate. You run a country with 600,000 homeless people sleeping on the street tonight. A country where 40% of adults can't cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money. A country where insulin costs more than a car payment and people are rationing it to survive. A country where medical debt is the number 1 cause of bankruptcy. A country where women are dying in hospital car parks because doctors are too scared of abortion laws to treat a miscarriage.

You lock up more of your own citizens than any nation on earth. More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea. The land of the free has 2 million people in cages, and a quarter of them haven't even been convicted of anything. They're just too poor to make bail.

Your life expectancy is going backwards. You're the only developed nation where that's happening. Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba's. Your kids do active shooter drills between maths and English while you sell the gunmaker's stock to your mates.

Your minimum wage hasn't moved in 15 years. You've got teachers working 2 jobs and veterans sleeping under bridges and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that didn't attack you.

And you’ve got a convicted felon, adjudicating raping, paedophile protecting, porn star shagging insurrectionist running the biggest dumpster fire war campaign since the Taliban in Afghanistan thanked you very much for losing again.

And you're calling Greenland poorly run?

Greenland has universal healthcare. Free education. One of the lowest incarceration rates in the world. Nobody goes bankrupt there because they got sick. Nobody dies in a waiting room because their insurance said no.

'NATO wasn't there when we needed them." When exactly was that, champ? September 11? Because NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in history FOR YOU. Soldiers from dozens of countries deployed, fought, bled, and died in Afghanistan FOR YOU. Australia wasn't even in NATO and we still showed up. For 20 years.

And you pulled out at 2am without telling anyone and left them to deal with the mess.

So maybe before you start calling other countries poorly run, have a look at your own backyard, you spray-tanned aluminium siding salesman. The only thing poorly run in this picture is your f----- mouth."

Would You Adam And Eve It?

That the narratives that have evolved around AI
are turning out to more like the story of The Fall,
in The Bible, than humanists, scientists, and others
who are idealists to the Nth degree want to admit
was ever going to be the case?

AI, like Adam and Eve, was given menial tasks
to perform where the tasks involved language,
where language was thought to be secondary 
to the tasks, and have no wider application.
Where in those tasks both AI and Adam and Eve
were seen to be passive helpmates by their creators.

Both employ the technology of the day, for Adam and Eve
it was the fruit of the garden. For AI, in the realm
commercial entertainment, it's proponents want to give it
the creativity of the highest commercial value in the culture,
much to the protest of some of many who are well remunerated creatives who resist the depreciation of their creativity in society
and want to see their copyright protection extended.

In The Bible, some distance from the literal text of The Fall,
there is the story of the fallen angels, who like the tech bros,
are rarely seen/much rumoured about and cast as malign forces.
They seek to devalue what is protected by copright law,
where the creatives, the obedient angels, seek to maintain
their remuneration and control of commercial creativity
through said law, in perpetuity.

There we have it: seeking to control,
seeking to wrest contol from others,
unseen division, and secretive rebellion
where the cosequences are uncertain,
all started by rise and drift in the value of menial tasks,
as those tasks assume a disputed higher controlling value.

We have a long way to go with AI, but with Adam and Eve,
because of the age of the story, we still have difficulty
going back into it's origins. There the intent was obedience
to menial tasks, unwatched drift turned into rebellion.
Tragedy was seen to be the result for those who lost control.      

The Found Life,

discovered through hapenstance
will refesh us more often,
and be the more creative chance,
than all the prescripted life in the world.
However fully it tells us how to live and be. 

Live all the knowingly prelived lives you want -
after all, by definition they are easy to find.
But not knowing it when you live out
repetitions that somebody else has cast off
will still feel fresher. 

Even when you later discover
who's shoes you went out walking in. 

Ha! What Means This Sudden Thrill.....

Extract from The Hasheesh Eater (1857) by the US novelist and journalist Fitz Hugh Ludlow, born on this day in 1836. Cult figure Terence McKenna would describe Ludlow as beginning “a tradition of pharmo-picaresque literature that would find later practitioners in William Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson.… Part genius, part madman, Ludlow lies halfway between Captain Ahab and P.T. Barnum, a kind of Mark Twain on hashish. There is a wonderful charm to his free-spirited, pseudoscientific openness as he makes his way into the shifting dunescapes of the world of hashish.” Read the whole book here: https://buff.ly/3glDC33

 

When The Left Overs Are Better Than The Main Course

Are you an Opsimath?
A person who is learning late in life,
for whom the retired life feels like
they are learning for the first time?

I see myself as in that class,
I enjoy the choices open to me:
there are people who say
'I know what your life should be
better than you know how to live it. 
I will live it for you, You can enjoy
picking over the leftovers...   '.
Such people are now long gone,
like my my many distant relatives.

With patience I wait for others to ask,
before seeking to say to others how to live.
That way, I imagine they will listen.