Robot Wisdom auxiliary

everyone's experienced 'awakenings'
where the Con loses its grip
(as in Carpenter's "They Live")

but always falling back then
to sleep




after enough cycles
of wake-sleep-wake

a pressure-point
may come into focus

thru which the dark cloak
descends

but which can be resisted
standing up against the conformity
of millions of people
over thousands of years

and might this pressure-point
even be a single molecule
or at least a small cluster
in the brain
between the eyes

the ultimate battleground of good and evil

torn between
a state of comfort
and a state of virtue?

 
 
 
 
.

if we could graph the decline
since (say) 1950
in the average age
when usamericans conclude
that 'justice' in high places is a fraud
and evil almost always wins...

how much such damage has wBu done?

most recently
how much has Paulson done?

what hope is there
for any sort of WallSt ethical reckoning?

any Iraq/mideast reckoning?

any infrastructure/education/healthcare reckoning?

how do we refocus the popular outrage
when the media so adeptly blame the victims?

(cindy sheehan, for one
achieved a small miracle...)

 
 
 
 
.

reagan's victory in 1980
was a cold awakening for us hippies
the progressive dream drowned

and ever since we've been pedaling in sand
in tar
no traction

i see one hope

the solidity of science

social science without academic bs

an a.i. simulation of the Con

world history rewritten

in the broader context of psychological evolution

the etymogeny of meaning

the mysterious depths of sexuality

wakefulness intimidation ego and sleep

 
 
 
 
.

1916: 1st GSE [Wiki]

1934: FDIC created

1938: FNMA (Fannie Mae) [Wiki]

1968: GNMA [Wiki]

1970: FHLMC (Freddie Mac) [Wiki]

1980: Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act [Wiki]

1982: Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act [Wiki]

1985: Mar: Home State Savings Bank of Cincinnati collapses [Wiki]

1986:

22Oct: Tax Reform Act of 1986 eliminates real-estate tax shelters [Wiki]



1987: 1st CDO [Wiki]

Aug: Greenspan heads Fed [Wiki]

1988: Silverado Savings and Loan collapses [Wiki]

1989: Resolution Trust Corp [Wiki]

09Aug: Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act [Wiki]

1992: Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) [Wiki]

1998: $3.6B Long Term Capital Management bailout [Wiki]


2001:

20Mar: S&P start faking ratings for cash [loong]

01Jul: credit-default swaps outstanding $600B [pdf-table] [NyT tutorial]

2002:

15Oct: W commits to affirmative-action home loans [iSteve]


2005:

US housing bubble peaks [Wiki]

2006: Subprime mortgage crisis [Wiki]

01Feb: Bernanke replaces Greenspan [Wiki]

06May: 1st (of 100s) mortgage-lender bankruptcy [list]

03Jul: Paulson to Treasury [BizWk] [Wiki]

2007:

Jan: Bear-Stearns at $172/share [Wiki]

Mar: US subprime mortgages = $i.3T [Wiki]

09Aug: financial crisis [Wiki]

Sep: AIG auditor resigns in protest of ignored warning on CDS [Blmbrg]

15Nov: FASB 157 [Wiki] [CFO]

31Dec: credit-default swaps outstanding $62T [pdf-table]

2008: Economic crisis of 2008 [Wiki]

14Mar: Fed loan to Bear-Stearns [Wiki]

30May: Bear-Stearns bought by JPMorgan [Wiki]

30Jul: FHFA [Wiki]

15Sep: Lehman Bros bankrupt [Wiki]

24Sept: Buffett puts $5B into Goldman, talks up $700B deal [sweetheart terms]

Grammar, logic, compassion and research skills fail Sarah Boxer simultaneously when she writes that my website is "full of writings about James Joyce, artificial intelligence, and Judaism as racism [...]".

Wouldn't you guys rather be heroes than villains?

Jorn Barger
Robot Wisdom auxiliary
robotwisdom2.blogspot.com

compress your lifeline
to a pencilthin baton
one meter long

mentally mark off
years months weeks days
(if age>39, year<1")

paint it white for innocence
happyhealthygood

visualise the relative positions
of life milestones
starting school
reaching puberty
1st beer 1st joint 1st sex
significant others
kids of yr own
job changes, moving days

periods of bad health
paint yellow
(usually just a vthin stripe
visible only under magnification)

rhythms of sickness and health
regular or irregular
fast or slow

changes in health correlated with milestones
provoked by them
or provoking them



periods of sadness
color blue (if there was healthy white)
or green (if ill yellow)

bad days dispelled
by a good night's sleep

months or years of bleak misery



note where bad health caused unhappiness
(yellow followed by blue or green)
and vice versa
(blue followed by green or yellow)
and how these fit with your milestones

now add red
for experiments with vice
(by yr own definition of vice
or by your community's definition)

sexual experiments
drink drugs violence cynicism
acting nice or being mean

red on yellow = orange
red on blue = purple
red on green = black

see where karma
punished your reds
with ill health
unhappiness
or other milestone-punishments

see how red streaks ended
rehab detox awakening
finding a jesus

these colorings are your movie



now mondrianize this batonmovie
into vertical segments linked by
horizontal 'removals'

with vacations and businesstrips
reduced to simple horizontals

(3D mondrians encouraged
traced out over the flattened worldmap)

 
 
 
 
 
 
.

trisect a cube
into 8 cubelets
(8/27ths of a rubik)

balance it on any point

color the top cubelet white
and the bottom cubelet black

the upper three-layer
red yellow blue

the lower three-layer
orange green purple

call this a crayolacube



in antimath i explored
dozens of literary permutations
of (-, 0, +)

but using the crayolacube
we can raise that to the 3rd power

white = +++
black = ---
redyellowblue = ++-
orangegreenpurple = +--

and if we can discover
an optimal assignment
of these 3 dimensions
we should generate a
polti vocabulary
with 100s or 1000s
of distinct story skeletons



try
(happy, healthy, good) for white
(unhappy, unhealthy, evil) for black

(pullman's satanic yhwh
was also sickly and sad)

but the trick here is to recognise
that (red yellow blue) don't represent
the 3 virtues
but rather the 3 vices
each polluting virtuous white
to a minimally diluted primary

say blue = sad
yellow = sickly
red = evil

and orangegreenpurple
are then doubly dilute

orange = evil and sickly but happy
(think montgomery burns)

green = sickly and sad but good
(a tragic dickens martyr-heroine)

purple = evil and sad but healthy
(kissinger?)
((could even jill st john make him smile?))



now we can paint the worldtree

yellow plagues lopping branches

blue moods
driving emos and scandinavians
to suicide

red wickedness usurping
political and economic power

children born innocent/white
yellowing occasionally with measlesmumpschickenpox

evil parents necessarily
breeding unhappy children

increasingly unhappy blue during adolescence

all experimenting with a little red evil
drinks drugs sex cruelty
happiness destroyed
(blue green purple black palette)
or health destroyed
(yellow orange green black palette)

some committing to evil
(red orange purple black palette)

maybe just until a brush with
black misery and death
reawakens their conscience



take any single human branch
and straighten it into a baton

the baton's sequence of crayola colors
is one possible view
of that person's life 'movie'

happy or sad
short or long
rich or dull
selfish or selfless

(is there much correlation here
to favorite music genres?
blue-emo red-metal white-gospel?)

happy palette: white yellow orange red

healthy palette: white red purple blue

good palette: white yellow green blue

 
 
 
 
 
 
.

in worldtree visualisations
non-spacetime dimensions
(ie parameters
variables
ranges-of-values)
are normally represented as
rainbow-spectrum colorings

we can call a coloring 'progressive'
if each rainbow-color
in chronological sequence
in some way dominates the graph

eg a human value-system
colors each turning
of each human branch
between good-red (or good-blue)
and evil-blue (or evil-red)

perhaps idealising
a long-past golden age
or a distant future utopia

or a gradual blundering groping
towards unreachable perfect
justice and truth

and in the present moment
some or all of those rainbow shades
are (microcosmically)
in active conflict

 
 
 
 
 
 
.

how far
is the global war on terror
really a global war on
honor?

if the sixties represented
the most radical cultural shift
in human history

(and i think they probably did)

then the still-ongoing
war against the hippies

is the blackest
reactionary
incomprehensible
reaction

.

it's forever been a commonplace
of internet culture
that microsoft's unspoken motto was
be as evil as possible

so it's gratifying lately
in an almost pinch-me fashion
to watch bill gates scratching his head
dude, where's my monopoly?

finessed by google
flying the opposite flag

until one begins to visualise
the subsequent crumbling
of the republicans
the neocons
the capitalists

satan's earthly army

until sergey
turns in his chair

removes his mask

.

joyce revered dante's inferno
beyond all other art
for reasons i'm sorry to admit
i still can't entirely fathom

but dante at least invented
the genre of cruci-fiction
nailing his parochial enemies
to an eternity of earthly contempt

which surely appealed
to the youthful Stephen Dedalus
of silence-exile-and-cunning fame

but joyce also recognised from the first
that precision was a better revenge
than exaggeration

and by finnegans wake it seems
his ultimate target
has become himself
splayed and vivisected

incarnating all sins




in ulysses though
we face the test case
of gogarty/mulligan
still beloved of critics
for his exuberance

but likely doomed
eventually
like dante's nemeses
to cruci-fiction

once we resolve the riddle
of the midnight fistfight [notes]
and the morning rage [etext] [notes]

and i'm certain joyce
would have relished the prospect
of crucifying all the world's villains

mathematically
geometrically
on the Tree of Life

.

extreme manichaeism
might posit a single connected
universal conspiracy of evil
traceable all the way back
to the root of the Tree of Life

but more typically
conspiracies have origins
characterised by initiations
and violent enforcement
of a limited penumbra of consciousness
among non-initiates

tentacles venturing outward
among the gentiles
emboldened by each success

perhaps the most sinister trend
in the fiasco of 20thC social science
is the near-total disappearance
of the topic of will

wm james gave it a whole chapter in 1890
but more recently
the predominant characteristic
of college-educated liberals
is the weakness of their wills
as if
the sinister 'They'
can't abide
strongwilled liberals
preferring bloodless eunuchs
like Chomsky or Nader

and marginalising anyone who manifests
a streak of Blake
(or Christ his Tyger)
as emotionally unstable
tying gentilepeople in knots
of guilt over Original Sin

while Their secret societies'
satanic initiations
require ritual shedding of
guilt and conscience

a process mirrored more graciously
but slowly
for the deeply spiritual
as karma-burning

(joyce had miraculously mostly achieved this
by 1904
but silently, cunningly
exiled it into his work

with an occasional attested oral slip
systematically marginalised by Ellmann
as emotional instability)




but how strange
that our nervous systems
so easily hand themselves over
to others' wills

how unfamiliar
the physiology of mind-wrestling [broken link there]
as we strain to resist
Their persuasive evil

what might it look like
in an nmri scan?

the most elegant design
ought to employ
one of the two available brain hemispheres
jungianly
as acting-agent-of-the-Other

but i think too
the muscles of the will
must be mainly in the face
especially around the eyelids
showing worry and strain

(wilhelm reich taught an exercise
for breaking down
character armor
involving slow alert 360-degree
rolling of the eyes)

As a lefty, I hate having to add to my list of heroes, who really might really have helped Nola cope, both the military and the (pre-W) Halliburton/KBR. The day after a hurricane obviously isn't the time for environmental impact studies or self-esteem workshops, and we lefties need to forge a longterm consensus on this, sturdy enough to repel Rush&Rove-style attacks.

But where were the military and KBR when the levee broke? How did the neocons' greatest supposed strength prove their worst Achilles heel?

For some reason, the puppeteers whispering in W's earpiece didn't have a clue how to deal with a real logistic emergency, and didn't even have the sense to stand aside and let a grownup to take the wheel. Is it possible that none of them was glued to the live tv-news coverage-- has this administration deluded themselves into believing they're above the news, that reality is something they can arbitrarily create?

Their past experience had surely given them every reason to expect they could feed the newspeople a restricted diet of lies, and that the newspeople would bob their heads and gobble it down. And if there had been even a one-block physical distance between the reporters and the hurricane victims, this spinning probably would have worked. (In fact I wouldn't be surprised if the neocons recognise this, and look for ways to keep reporters penned up next time.)

W's incompetence has given birth to a White House culture where your title automatically means that others praise your performance, at least in public. The left needs to compile a reel of bureaucrats praising each other's responsiveness, as the live feed is showing hundreds dying.

My title for this post is inspired by Cheney, I think it was, saying that liberals after 9-11 wanted to give al Qaeda therapy... which has that perfect 1% level of truth allowing rightwing talkers to run away with it.

Therapy for Nola's ecology wasn't the prescription the day after the hurricane, but it was the prescription for the decade before. We need to learn to spinframe this.