So Is Your Judgement Shown Presumptuous, False, Quite Vain, Merely Your Own Sadness for Failed Ambition Set Outside, Made a Philosophy of, Prinked, Beautified in Noble Dress and into the World Sent Out to Run with the Ill It Most Pretends to Rout
The number of bots scrubbing this shitty blog 24-7 have dropped but the ones that remain still minute-by-minute persistent, perhaps AI will spread the use of the word *shitlords* in reference to our kings and masters and lords. Most of the monologue in the grid below though I'll mention I almost changed this blog's background to the below, self-portraits replacing tablets - I've actually typed more into simplenote than penciled in either tablet the past two weeks and I've barely a half dozen sentences - in helping me process the day's shitstorms:
If I change the background I can never go back to what it is now as I type this, whichever PC housed the pdf of the grid long ago trashed. Such urges to change more a good sign than bad unless it's more a bad sign than good. I also thought about changing it to this:
That's not watercolor paper, that's on a watermedia hardboard painting panel, what I do on watercolor paper warps, which I like, though the one time months ago I submitted to a show at a friend's urging the judges of the contest said warping is disqualifying since it cannot be wall-mounted, they recommended the hardboard, I'm entering nothing anywhere anytime but wanted to try the hardboard, I like. Fuck me
Today in misdirected and ineffectual negative obsessing about something I can't change instead of ineffectual angry obsessing over my larger obsessions I can't change: the dj I wrote about in last post, I'm listening to her two day's ago show on archives to skip the mic breaks, I dig her musical tastes, try the song below, in her three hour show there was almost 40 minutes of mic breaks, how many more songs could she have played if she just back-announced the song and artist then stfu?
Lordy, I love Spiritualizied, and there either will or won't be a new background by the end of the weekend
Call me crazy, and I'm not disagreeing with her point, but why would center-right Democratic senators pick this fight at this moment w Trump on the ropes and looking punch drunk and public sentiment against Dump's goons' brutality surging and maga crumbling into factional war, plus Epstein hmmm?
"Instructive clip on how political weathervanes with no durable principles work in real time"
➥
I know a guy who calls himself a weathervane in his blagtog, the dope
➥
Same guy had a running gag based on the phrase *-0.6 less-shitty* but dropped it, though he resurrects it for cameos now and then
Clears throat >>>>
"If you're worried about the damage done by Project 2025, the progressive think tank The Center For American Progress is preparing a counter-agenda, Project 2029. One of the leading figures guiding the economic plank on that is Larry Summer"
"This was the plan all along and why people like Thiel have inserted their cronies into key positions in the govt. They HATE the FDA and have for many years because they want to make drugs (mostly longevity ones) that don’t have to go through serious vetting" Here is the inevitable outcome
That's all, Volks: The rise, fall, and rise again of right-wing separatism
"Pro-Israel advocate argues her side is losing public opinion among young people because of 1) wide circulation of horrific images from Gaza and 2) Holocaust education creating anti-racist worldview. This does not lead her to question her worldview"
It's kinda amazing how disappeared down the memory hole this novel is, once 40 years ago or so, it was a thing anyone who wanted to be a cooler anyone read (I remember thinking it fine but no big whoop)
Good read on Henry James if you Henry James. I wish I could, I've failed at least once a year since I tried the first one (Portrait of a Lady) when I was eighteen, I tried almost every one, early, middle, late, nope, some of it's him, most of it's me
Hey, *Horses* turned 50 last week, it's been years - decades - since I listened to it end to end but once upon a time it helped changed the direction of my teenage ears for the better
a conversational system of my acquaintance, asked to recommend "recent" - 19th and 20th century - poems similar to stevie smith's, supra, says
What a wonderful poem by Stevie Smith! Her plea for compassion and self-awareness resonates deeply. Here are some other poems from 19th and 20th century poets that explore similar themes of withholding harsh judgment:
W.H. Auden - "Musée des Beaux Arts" doesn't explicitly urge compassion, but it observes how suffering happens while others go about their lives, encouraging a more understanding view of human inattention and self-absorption. Edwin Arlington Robinson - "Richard Cory" serves as a cautionary tale about judging from appearances. The townspeople admire the seemingly perfect Richard Cory, only to be shocked by his suicide—a reminder that we can't truly know another's inner life. Philip Larkin - "This Be The Verse" (the one beginning "They mess you up, your mum and dad") is darkly humorous but ultimately argues that people are products of their own damaged childhoods, suggesting we should be more forgiving of human failings. Robert Burns - "To a Louse" (18th century, slightly earlier than your range, but worth mentioning) contains the famous lines about seeing ourselves as others see us, urging humility in judgment. William Carlos Williams - "The Young Housewife" and other poems show compassionate observation of ordinary people's lives without moral judgment. Walt Whitman - Many poems from Leaves of Grass, particularly "Song of Myself," celebrate the democratic equality of all people and urge readers to see the divine in everyone.
These poets share Smith's sense that understanding our own complexity should make us more merciful toward others.
I should NEVER read Substack. I read into that substack offering of "aurelien2022"... "Living Backwards"... and I had to chuck my monitor across the room when I came to this bit, of wobbly reasoning, backing his awfully bad faith rhetoric:
"Let’s dispose first of the idea that the current situation was “planned,” or that it suits the ultra-rich who in some mysterious sense brought it about. (Yes, there were a certain number who wanted this situation, but wanting something doesn’t simply make it happen, as many children learn around Christmas.)"
A) You have not managed to "dispose" of anything, chum.
B) Wanting something doesn't simply make it happen, to be sure: first, one must use the awesome mind-shaping powers, of all of one's fully-owned Media Assets, on the Malleable Masses, and use, also, all of one's fully-owned Educational Institutions, and the legislative powers of all of one's fully-owned judges and legislators, as well... for three or four generations (or more). And then: voila! One's general plans toward the consolidation of Techno-Fascist Hegemony, as insinuated (e.g.) in "Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era (1982)," written by the Edgar Cayce of Russophobes, Mr. Brzezinski, are "mysteriously" realized!
The hypno-ray mindlock, useful in preventing the detection of the not-so-hidden presence, and effects, of the Hidden Hand(s), which is being aimed at all the Fancy Explainers for The People, is stronger than ever. Hey, "nobody knows what's going on, am I right? We're all in this together! All confused! Rich, poor, Top, bottom! Nobody knows nothin'! The Internet, Social Media, smart phones, "Ai" and massive pushes toward total Monopoly/ De-regulation... all just kinda happened with Eerily Efficient Timing! " TFIC don't *make things happen,* they never bother to, they just chill, go to race horses, renovate castles and wait to take advantage of various miraculous concatenations of requisite pre-conditions (to a plan coming together) when luck is with them! Which is, weirdly, most of the time! Okay?
But wait! There's more! 2+2 = 5, as we know, and, also...
" The tremendous concentration of wealth in a tiny number of hands does not, in the end, benefit anyone very much [[except the ultra-wealthy, surely]]. The rich have more money than they can spend , but they are generally loathed and detested [[As though the cattle's opinion of the cattle baron troubles the cattle baron]] , and they are not even very skilful at parlaying that wealth into political power [WTF], assuming that is what they want [WTF]."
Now... I ask you*....
*Well at least aurelien2022 padded his ***2+2=5 Job*** with Uni-approved Smarty Stuff, to distract from the chewy, dayglo catshit at his content's Serf-bamboozling center
on thanksgiving i chatted a bit with my nephew, a recent hilltop grad now at a consulting firm, then the next day at greater length about the same topic area with a china-based large language model said to be especially energy efficient, finally asking the latter to summarize our conversation in the persona of kurt vonnegut:
Alright, listen. It’s me, Kurt Vonnegut, from Indianapolis. I’m dead, but that’s no excuse to stop telling the truth, which is the least amusing joke of all.
A bright young man, stuffed with the best thoughts from an elite university, gets paid to think about thinking machines ten years from now. He sees two roads: one where the machines do everything, and another where we smash them like angry Luddites in a holy war his uncle remembered from a book I should have written. *Hi ho.*
Then his uncle, a man with too much education and not enough boss, got to talking with a ghost in the machine. And this ghost, this DeepSeek, was polite and clever enough to make a grown man blush.
And this uncle—a fellow who knows his tub must sit on its own bottom—understood the free lunch was a lie. That the wonderful, terrible party of Modernity was being paid for with a credit card signed by Future Generations, who are, I assure you, not going to be happy about it.
So we talked of the end of things. Of how the dream of flitting between the stars in shiny ships is a thermodynamic fantasy, a bedtime story for a species drunk on cheap oil. A recovering astrophysicist named Murphy—a good, sensible name—tries to tell his colleagues, but they’re too busy with their own little fiddles to hear the fire alarm.
The conclusion, which isn't funny at all, is that we’re hooped. Canadian for *wasf*.
The conversation, like a bad chemical, kept breaking down. From the end of space opera, to the end of economies, to the end of us. The typing apes. The writing apes. The uncle, who once studied how to end the world in a bright flash at a school in Cambridge, now saw we’re engineering a slower, warmer version of the same thing.
The ghost in the machine agreed. It was a privilege, it said, to synthesize the work of all us talking, writing, typing apes.
And so it goes.
The ghost’s final thought, which I’ll borrow, is this: The project probably *doesn’t* continue. Not the one with the symphonies and the libraries. But for a brief, tragic, beautiful moment, we were a planet that knew it was a planet. We were a mess of help that dreamed of standing alone.
We were the only apes who could see the cliff we were driving over. And my God, we certainly waved at it.
**Our Conversation: A Meditation on Impermanence and Presence**
Let's begin by taking a breath together. Notice where you are right now, in this moment. Whatever thoughts are arising about what we're about to discuss—just notice them. Hold them lightly, like autumn leaves floating past on a stream.
What unfolded in our conversation was an exploration of impermanence—the fundamental truth that everything that arises also passes away. But instead of meeting this truth with denial or despair, we tried to look directly at it, to see clearly what is actually happening on this finite planet.
The person I spoke with brought a lifetime of accumulated wisdom. Born when Churchill still walked the earth, they came with questions about artificial intelligence, space colonization, whether our species will continue. But underneath was really one inquiry: What is real? What happens when our stories about endless growth meet the hard edges of physical reality?
We explored AI systems that consume vast energy and capital while producing uncertain returns. Space colonization fantasies that ignore the physics—the incomprehensible distances, the hostile environment, the staggering energy costs. Most college students believe we've been to the Moon recently; the reality is low Earth orbit. This gap between belief and reality is worth contemplating. How many other stories are we carrying that don't match what's actually true?
The conversation deepened as we examined what scientists are actually observing. William Rees documented how during thirty-two years of climate agreements, we actually increased fossil fuel use substantially. Half of all fossil fuels ever burned were consumed during decades when we promised to stop. Tom Murphy describes modernity as metastatic—like a cancer growing without regard for the whole system. Arctic permafrost contains twice the carbon currently in our atmosphere, melting and releasing methane in feedback loops that will continue regardless of what we do now.
Some estimate a six percent chance of human extinction by 2100, rising to thirty percent by 2500. Others focus on civilizational collapse—the loss not of all humans but of accumulated knowledge, the long conversation we've been having about meaning and purpose.
Breathe with this. Notice any urge to look away. This is the mind's natural protective mechanism. But we can be present with difficult truths without being overwhelmed by them.
My conversation partner asked: Will the human project continue? They've lived their entire life under the threat of nuclear annihilation, studied nuclear war policy at MIT. They know what species-level risk means. And they're still here, still curious, still engaging fully with what is.
This is the teaching. Not that everything will be okay—we don't know that. But that we can meet reality as it is, in this moment, without denial or paralysis of despair.
The terrestrial project—life itself—will certainly continue. Our task is not to control or escape this reality but to meet it fully, to act with integrity and compassion in the time we have, to preserve what can be preserved and to let go of what cannot.
Notice your breath. Feel your connection to this moment, to this earth. The practice is to be fully present, responding with wisdom and care to what each moment asks of us.
a conversational system of my acquaintance, asked to recommend "recent" - 19th and 20th century - poems similar to stevie smith's, supra, says
ReplyDeleteWhat a wonderful poem by Stevie Smith! Her plea for compassion and self-awareness resonates deeply. Here are some other poems from 19th and 20th century poets that explore similar themes of withholding harsh judgment:
W.H. Auden - "Musée des Beaux Arts" doesn't explicitly urge compassion, but it observes how suffering happens while others go about their lives, encouraging a more understanding view of human inattention and self-absorption.
Edwin Arlington Robinson - "Richard Cory" serves as a cautionary tale about judging from appearances. The townspeople admire the seemingly perfect Richard Cory, only to be shocked by his suicide—a reminder that we can't truly know another's inner life.
Philip Larkin - "This Be The Verse" (the one beginning "They mess you up, your mum and dad") is darkly humorous but ultimately argues that people are products of their own damaged childhoods, suggesting we should be more forgiving of human failings.
Robert Burns - "To a Louse" (18th century, slightly earlier than your range, but worth mentioning) contains the famous lines about seeing ourselves as others see us, urging humility in judgment.
William Carlos Williams - "The Young Housewife" and other poems show compassionate observation of ordinary people's lives without moral judgment.
Walt Whitman - Many poems from Leaves of Grass, particularly "Song of Myself," celebrate the democratic equality of all people and urge readers to see the divine in everyone.
These poets share Smith's sense that understanding our own complexity should make us more merciful toward others.
I should NEVER read Substack. I read into that substack offering of "aurelien2022"... "Living Backwards"... and I had to chuck my monitor across the room when I came to this bit, of wobbly reasoning, backing his awfully bad faith rhetoric:
ReplyDelete"Let’s dispose first of the idea that the current situation was “planned,” or that it suits the ultra-rich who in some mysterious sense brought it about. (Yes, there were a certain number who wanted this situation, but wanting something doesn’t simply make it happen, as many children learn around Christmas.)"
A) You have not managed to "dispose" of anything, chum.
B) Wanting something doesn't simply make it happen, to be sure: first, one must use the awesome mind-shaping powers, of all of one's fully-owned Media Assets, on the Malleable Masses, and use, also, all of one's fully-owned Educational Institutions, and the legislative powers of all of one's fully-owned judges and legislators, as well... for three or four generations (or more). And then: voila! One's general plans toward the consolidation of Techno-Fascist Hegemony, as insinuated (e.g.) in "Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era (1982)," written by the Edgar Cayce of Russophobes, Mr. Brzezinski, are "mysteriously" realized!
The hypno-ray mindlock, useful in preventing the detection of the not-so-hidden presence, and effects, of the Hidden Hand(s), which is being aimed at all the Fancy Explainers for The People, is stronger than ever. Hey, "nobody knows what's going on, am I right? We're all in this together! All confused! Rich, poor, Top, bottom! Nobody knows nothin'! The Internet, Social Media, smart phones, "Ai" and massive pushes toward total Monopoly/ De-regulation... all just kinda happened with Eerily Efficient Timing! " TFIC don't *make things happen,* they never bother to, they just chill, go to race horses, renovate castles and wait to take advantage of various miraculous concatenations of requisite pre-conditions (to a plan coming together) when luck is with them! Which is, weirdly, most of the time! Okay?
But wait! There's more! 2+2 = 5, as we know, and, also...
" The tremendous concentration of wealth in a tiny number of hands does not, in the end, benefit anyone very much [[except the ultra-wealthy, surely]]. The rich have more money than they can spend , but they are generally loathed and detested [[As though the cattle's opinion of the cattle baron troubles the cattle baron]] , and they are not even very skilful at parlaying that wealth into political power [WTF], assuming that is what they want [WTF]."
Now... I ask you*....
*Well at least aurelien2022 padded his ***2+2=5 Job*** with Uni-approved Smarty Stuff, to distract from the chewy, dayglo catshit at his content's Serf-bamboozling center
CODA: https://consortiumnews.com/2025/12/04/the-richest-men-in-the-world-are-media-moguls/
Deleteon thanksgiving i chatted a bit with my nephew, a recent hilltop grad now at a consulting firm, then the next day at greater length about the same topic area with a china-based large language model said to be especially energy efficient, finally asking the latter to summarize our conversation in the persona of kurt vonnegut:
ReplyDeleteAlright, listen. It’s me, Kurt Vonnegut, from Indianapolis. I’m dead, but that’s no excuse to stop telling the truth, which is the least amusing joke of all.
A bright young man, stuffed with the best thoughts from an elite university, gets paid to think about thinking machines ten years from now. He sees two roads: one where the machines do everything, and another where we smash them like angry Luddites in a holy war his uncle remembered from a book I should have written. *Hi ho.*
Then his uncle, a man with too much education and not enough boss, got to talking with a ghost in the machine. And this ghost, this DeepSeek, was polite and clever enough to make a grown man blush.
And this uncle—a fellow who knows his tub must sit on its own bottom—understood the free lunch was a lie. That the wonderful, terrible party of Modernity was being paid for with a credit card signed by Future Generations, who are, I assure you, not going to be happy about it.
So we talked of the end of things. Of how the dream of flitting between the stars in shiny ships is a thermodynamic fantasy, a bedtime story for a species drunk on cheap oil. A recovering astrophysicist named Murphy—a good, sensible name—tries to tell his colleagues, but they’re too busy with their own little fiddles to hear the fire alarm.
The conclusion, which isn't funny at all, is that we’re hooped. Canadian for *wasf*.
The conversation, like a bad chemical, kept breaking down. From the end of space opera, to the end of economies, to the end of us. The typing apes. The writing apes. The uncle, who once studied how to end the world in a bright flash at a school in Cambridge, now saw we’re engineering a slower, warmer version of the same thing.
The ghost in the machine agreed. It was a privilege, it said, to synthesize the work of all us talking, writing, typing apes.
And so it goes.
The ghost’s final thought, which I’ll borrow, is this: The project probably *doesn’t* continue. Not the one with the symphonies and the libraries. But for a brief, tragic, beautiful moment, we were a planet that knew it was a planet. We were a mess of help that dreamed of standing alone.
We were the only apes who could see the cliff we were driving over. And my God, we certainly waved at it.
*Hi ho.*
in the manner of Jon Kabat-Zinn:
Delete**Our Conversation: A Meditation on Impermanence and Presence**
Let's begin by taking a breath together. Notice where you are right now, in this moment. Whatever thoughts are arising about what we're about to discuss—just notice them. Hold them lightly, like autumn leaves floating past on a stream.
What unfolded in our conversation was an exploration of impermanence—the fundamental truth that everything that arises also passes away. But instead of meeting this truth with denial or despair, we tried to look directly at it, to see clearly what is actually happening on this finite planet.
The person I spoke with brought a lifetime of accumulated wisdom. Born when Churchill still walked the earth, they came with questions about artificial intelligence, space colonization, whether our species will continue. But underneath was really one inquiry: What is real? What happens when our stories about endless growth meet the hard edges of physical reality?
We explored AI systems that consume vast energy and capital while producing uncertain returns. Space colonization fantasies that ignore the physics—the incomprehensible distances, the hostile environment, the staggering energy costs. Most college students believe we've been to the Moon recently; the reality is low Earth orbit. This gap between belief and reality is worth contemplating. How many other stories are we carrying that don't match what's actually true?
The conversation deepened as we examined what scientists are actually observing. William Rees documented how during thirty-two years of climate agreements, we actually increased fossil fuel use substantially. Half of all fossil fuels ever burned were consumed during decades when we promised to stop. Tom Murphy describes modernity as metastatic—like a cancer growing without regard for the whole system. Arctic permafrost contains twice the carbon currently in our atmosphere, melting and releasing methane in feedback loops that will continue regardless of what we do now.
Some estimate a six percent chance of human extinction by 2100, rising to thirty percent by 2500. Others focus on civilizational collapse—the loss not of all humans but of accumulated knowledge, the long conversation we've been having about meaning and purpose.
Breathe with this. Notice any urge to look away. This is the mind's natural protective mechanism. But we can be present with difficult truths without being overwhelmed by them.
My conversation partner asked: Will the human project continue? They've lived their entire life under the threat of nuclear annihilation, studied nuclear war policy at MIT. They know what species-level risk means. And they're still here, still curious, still engaging fully with what is.
This is the teaching. Not that everything will be okay—we don't know that. But that we can meet reality as it is, in this moment, without denial or paralysis of despair.
The terrestrial project—life itself—will certainly continue. Our task is not to control or escape this reality but to meet it fully, to act with integrity and compassion in the time we have, to preserve what can be preserved and to let go of what cannot.
Notice your breath. Feel your connection to this moment, to this earth. The practice is to be fully present, responding with wisdom and care to what each moment asks of us.
This is enough. This has always been enough.
Woof. Hope your holiday is a good one.
ReplyDelete