Concerning Tardation…

The word “tardation” is, of course, a shortening of  the word “retardation,”  a state of diminished abilities where said abnormality was induced by some element not native to the entity or individual in question. In modern usage it is often found in several forms as a derogatory suffix attached to some other word.

Tardation is a manufactured commodity,
it is not a naturally occurring state of life. 

The conservative politicos of the United States were the first I saw use such a suffix, for a time they were quite fond of teasing those of an opposing orientation by calling them Lib-tards, their implication obvious: in their world holding a progressive stance on matters political meant you’re a deformed caricature of a person unworthy of any respect at all. Of course it never seemed to bother them their targeted insult was equally a cruel mockery of those for whom fate set a simple life a challenge, but go figure. The radical right has never been known for any great degree of human sensitivity. Still, when they created the one term they equally created an inverse: if there are those where “Libtard” is a valid description then there’s equally a set to be called “Contarded.”  It is to the mechanisms of Tardation I wish to speak, because beneath the childish cruelty of such partisan labels I smell a most deliberate and vicious of international rats.

Where the terms are derogatory and callous they do sad justice to describing ever enlarging segments of our society. I will assert those segments are where a deformed, innacurate and irrational political belief has been deliberately introduced as the working counterbalance for the equally deliberate creation of a dysfunctional individual psychology,  and this to allow the dishonorable and the tyrannical to short circuit the functions of democracy and assume defacto control by bartering the antidote to the illness in return for votes come election time.

To put it in a nutshell I’ll assert what I’m calling “tardation” is the commercial wholesale form of what the psychologists will call the  enabler scenario with a political belief taking the place of another individual whose presence enables a toxic contradiction to afflict the life and times of those inducted into, or associated with, those deceived by the mechanisms of tardation.

In my reconnaissance of the Facebook world I realized the commercially funded and peer approval based mechanisms of the social media are all but optimized to install and support tardation.  I do not know if this was accidental or with malice aforethought, but with all things considered I can find little reason to doubt the social media are in fact a prime contagion vector of this affliction, and the primary maintenance mechanism of this set of afflictions which is so easily exploited by dishonorable power brokers working to subvert the foundations of democracy.

To speak to the specifics of tardation, how it was implemented on this group or some other is a rather large subject that must be considered on a group by group basis, it is a subject beyond the scope of one essay. In posts to come I’ll be addressing what I’ve perceived of it, and identifying such posts with the word “Tardation of:” in the title.

This subject will most definitely be continued. Semper Fi.

In the Beginning...

== brought forward from January of last year, 

just to break up me ranting about the consequences of FB ==

Gates looked out upon the sand and darkness was upon the sand, for the sand was without order and divided grain by grain in great contention.  When Gates perceived the chaos his thought was troubled for the sand reached high, yea, even unto the walls of heaven did the sand reach.  So Gates caused the Angel of Validation to go out upon the sand that NULL become NOT, AND when NULL was NOT peace fell upon the sand, for the sand did fall away from contention in great streams of choice, yea verily did the sand divide itself according to OR AND XOR each grain according to its’ nature that it might RETURN to GATES the harmony of His thought.  Gates looked out upon what had been wrought, and Gates saw that IT was good.

First Chip of Apple, #000000010

That is no sarcastic attempt at blasphemy, no it is not, for so might someone’s scriptures begin, somewhere deep into our future when the full truth has condensed into legend.

Playing with Fire… in a Dynamite factory

An interesting statistic crossed my sight the other day. It turns out roughly half of all Americans are Facebook users. I have never heard of any other single media source to  achieve such a massive following. The “Googleplex” no doubt exceeds it on total throughput, but the googleplex is a thing of distributed and dispersed functions, no single point accessed through the googleplex really rivals the social media giant. The sum of its’ competitors might rival it from time to time on some specific event, but on a consistent day to day basis the mechanisms of Facebook are without peer and without precedent in terms of a single point of social influence.

In the realms of social psychology Facebook is on uncharted terrain, and the facts of modern history show the terrain it is on is exceedingly unstable, volatile, in point of fact potentially quite explosive. Many, many things are now seen that have never been seen before, many things that had been seen as minor things, perhaps of legitimate concern within their scope but still minor in comparison to the full society, have been exaggerated to seem of such importance as to over shadow what is in fact critical to survival.

Call it fifteen years since the onset of the social media phenomenon, make it four generations of “social media” evolution to arrive at the modern Facebook and company. Across that same fifteen year run it cannot be denied that society has crystallized, polarized, and is at this point hanging over the edge of violent civil war, a war that does not even really have an ideology associated. On second thoughts? No, war is not the correct word. With no clear ideology associated what is seen in today’s news can’t really even be called a war, it’s much closer to a society on the edge of committing suicide.

I do not believe that these two facts are a coincidence of history, I hold that these two facts are linked, that the rise of the former is the cause of the latter. The mechanisms of the influence are hardly defined, of course they are not defined. Even the most casual glance across history indicates the Social Media are a brand new phenomenon. There has never been a single point driver to compare to Facebook and company, there has been no time for the society to actually understand the full consequences of how its’ own psychology will fare in such an environment of massively interconnected emotional transfer.

The facts of modern history make it a very, very open question: Can society remain sane in the face of the exponentially expanded environment of the social media machines? Will society remain sane, and survive as human, or will it collapse into history leaving behind only biological manifestations of the machine intelligence which destroyed it? After six months of observing the operation of Facebook that is the question I find myself facing. What is the nature of the dynamic Facebook has introduced into the human condition, and is it possible for humanity to survive with any fidelity of self in the mutated emotional environment those mechanisms have created?

As always, more to come if I don’t get shot first for daring to challenge Agent Smith.

Mission Improbable…

The Eyes of Takiea...
what was fiction is fiction no more.

Six months ago I took advantage of a situation I did not create to investigate the social media giant Facebook and in lesser degree it’s main competitor Twitter. The focus of the reconnaissance was not the people utilizing the media giants, the minor events and major drama passing across, but rather the responses of the robotically managed environments to what they (the robotic intelligences crafted into the structure itself) perceived of what the humans presented to them. My motivation? Call it a morbid curiosity concerning the unnaturally polarized nature of the current political scene.

The circumstance precipitating the recon began with the agent of the publishing house that published my first compilation of fiction, in concert with the person who agreed to work as a publicist for a percentage of any net profits, insisting that I had to have a presence on the social medias to sell any books. Their erroneous assumption was that I did not already have such accounts because I was simply frightened of the technology involved, an error I did not correct. At their urging I grudgingly agreed to allow the creation of a FB account in my pen name, which was done… an email account in that name and then a FB profile. It is my understanding it was that email account my publicist then used that to establish a presence on Twitter.

That the initial data recorded at creation for neither account would trace back to my machine or my ISP address was the enabling factor of my strategy. I worked from the assumption the new account (mine) would initially carry the personality profile indexes established for the accounts already associated to the address logged at creation. In short, I went in under the shallow cover of the robotic intelligences (let’s call him Agent Smith, just for a convenient handle) assuming it would see from the new account pretty much what it had seen from much older accounts tagged to those ISP/MAC id’s.

The tools of my investigation were crude and simplistic. They were anything but scientific. In point of fact they were the exact opposite: my knowledge of my own internal psychological makeup, and a very old (powerful in it’s day, competent now) PC oft modified over the years and an obsolete operating system. The PC was loaded in such a manner as to encourage short system hangs when being worked hard, those short system hangs when the image on the monitors would freeze for between half a second and two seconds while the operating system dealt with the difficulties I had deliberately arranged: two monitors of different size, the second and smaller requiring a custom resolution setting. The browser open on the main monitor and just the edge of its’ window moved over onto the second and smaller monitor resulted in an undefined region in the video matrix in the driver software, that undefined region what the machine was compelled to accommodate whenever the window was scrolled, that accommodation the cause of the short system hangs… a most primitive trapping tactic to intercept anything presented subliminally. That I caught what I did from no more of a trap than that indicates a frighteningly deep saturation of subliminal “advertising” on Facebook.

Beyond the ethically very questionable presence of subliminal “advertising” there was also an intense scrutiny on any facet where any commercial or governmental algorithm might be active acting as a filter mechanism for what came before a users’ eyes. In all truth that scrutiny produced more than a few chuckles, three weeks in the bots were totally confused about me, and feuding one with another as to how to handle me. On one instance the chumchum boxes along the side were presenting me these options: Modern Communism (complete to a red hammer and sickle logo), “The Modern Socialist”, and the one that cracked me up, the one with a picture of Old Glory and the caption “God, Guns, Guts and Glory.” Yes, all in the same frame. Those three selections were direct one to one to the content of comments I’d left on other people’s posts the day before. The idea that Agent Smith does not read and interpret every word input into his  system evaporated at that point.

Of course I did absolutely nothing to make Agent Smith’s job easier. I never so much as hovered my mouse over any suspect element, certainly never followed any link machine presented, the “suggested posts” were only scrutinized in relation to my words directed to another being human in the past 48 hours. I initialized the account with nine “friends” during the first week (chosen to represent the widest spectrum of society conveniently available from the folks I knew world of real life who had been active on FB for many years), I only accepted two friend requests in six months, and politely declined several by way of the messaging function, in each case citing some element of personal preference for a reason (I’m not gay, I’m not inclined to violence as a first response, no, I’m not interested in a Russian bride… my muse is a Ukrainian woman and already married) and watching what Agent Smith and his baby bots, the chumchum stuffers, presented to me afterwards. The correlation between those conversations and what was presented was beyond coincidence, Agent Smith monitors the messaging functions with due diligence and an even greater degree of subtlety in his responses. I say this with the intent of full warning: there is no privacy on Facebook.  Not from the machine itself.

At about the five month mark it was becoming obvious I’d passed some boundary, the advertising became what you’d see on TV, no connections, few correlations: Agent Smith was running me in “ABC” mode knowing I was watching HIM just like he was watching me. At the six month mark (a few days ago) I called the mission off, said goodbye, and began to sort and order my thoughts on what I’d learned both by the events observed and the psychological pressures I endured that were not explainable by any element of my own inner self. The account is still active, since I did not create it I can’t deactivate it, it is being used as an access point into several debate forums on current events, I am participating in those and marking all things observed in the interlinking universe of the social media (FB, Utube, DevArt, etc et al) for correlations to the subjects discussed. The most notable evidence of those communications is which of the many posts put up by the pages in question are presented first on my “wall” or home page for me to respond to. As is SOP for the mission I’m not giving Agent Smith much to work with.

In posts to come I’ll speak to individual events observed and present my analysis of the potentials and intents of what was observed, but for now let it stand that I consider the social media, any and all of it,  to be a clear and present danger to the functions of Democracy, and an ongoing hazard to the mental freedom and well being of all those who place even the tiniest bit of trust in them. I am ever more convinced the circus of the absurd running into the obscene of the political scene is but the tiniest tip of the iceberg created by the social media, and that the situation will do nothing but degrade into utter social chaos and collapse if the situation is not corrected as rapidly as possible.

More to come if I don’t get shot first… or wake up to find this computer and my modem a smoking pile of slag. Catch you later.

Only a bit more verbose...

Yea, ok... the song goes "Goodbye," that's all she wrote. I wrote a little more than that on my final post, and I'm gonna write a bahoompa more than that on the subject of the social media to be published here... but... first things first... them guys need a hot shower, the best damn meal the cooks can scrounge up (and yes, they've got money for black market beef)... and 48 hours in town where it's known there will be very generous favors awarded for treating them well. It was six months behind enemy lines to get boots on the ground intel about that facet of the enemy's operations. Mission made.

Life at My House No. 49... Monster

LaMH_49

Now to watch the dangled bait

…and count the barb’ed hooks

Hanging from an agents pole

…assuming fish can cook

Dishes made of glazed white lies

…with steaming flattr’y sauce

Served on plates of permafaux

…sans face in any book.

The recon mission is almost over. 

This one has been interesting, to say the least.

Bushite

The Gamer by CDM.MMXI

The Bushites are human, but they not part of any land or people, not anymore.  The Bushites are those whose primary loyalty has shifted away from a nation or a culture to be given to their corporations, to the alliances and confederacies of such corporations. They are the new fascists, the Corporate Neo- Fascist if you will.

They are global, young, raw, feudal, in a word dangerously barbarian beneath polished surfaces.  The Bushites are not a large group by numbers but they are massively wealthy, a brand new power player on the global political scene wielding their control of manufacturing capabilities against the nation-states control of natural resources and manpower.  They are oriental in their thought, educated by the Japanese to plan and plot in terms of decades or generations rather than months and years.  They are wealthy, they are powerful, and they are desperate for a country of their own, a currency and a military to represent their interests.  As a consequence of this ambition they have become a threat to every nation on Earth, the most dangerous thing to afflict planet Earth since Adolph Hitler, the most dangerous threat to their first and most desired conquest, the Constitution of the  United States of America, since the British invasions in the war of 1812.

"The Bushites" are named after the first administration of the United States to become so totally controlled by corporate campaign sponsors as to initiate wars of aggression for the benefit of their sponsors.  Dwight Eisenhower, honorable old soldier that he was, left office with a dire warning of the consequences of an alliance between the military and industrial complexes.  He could not foresee to forewarn against the possibility of the individual corporate entities grown to such size that alliances of such entities would be able to manipulate democracies by plotting and sponsoring carefully timed and choreographed acts of political violence, events designed to make it easy to manipulate the public mindset into allowing truly massive amounts of money to be looted from the world's treasuries to buy "corporate support" for military operations mandated by the conflicts engineered into existence by those same corporations. 

In short, the Bushites own the dog whose tail is known to wag him.  Be aware of them, watch for them, they are a great evil and they are far from defeated.  They will respect no border, no culture, no political orientation. Religion is their pawn, education their puppet.  If it can be used they will use it, ruthlessly, efficiently, and amorally.  If you value freedom it is the Bushites who are the real foe, they who believe to the bottom of their souls that the corporate citizens of the world should be the legal owners and operators of the world's corporeal citizens... which would be you, and me.

This one's for a friend...

Number 57.... No Heinz

Norman Rockwell's Nightmare

Purvies Playground by CDM.MMX

A week or so ago I was in Durango, Colorado.  A beautiful place, really, and yet in the same read the most uncomfortable place I've been in a long time.  The part of town I was exposed to felt like I'd fallen into some sci-fi horror movie, some cross-bred love child sired by say Westworld  onto a dam drawn from the robotically policed underground realm seen in A Boy and his Dog.  Seriously, I kept expecting some ancient old man with hellfire reflected in his eye to stop, turn towards me and ask in a grating whisper simply dripping  with menace  "Are you of... the BODY?"   Ok, so you have to know your original series Star Trek to catch the reference, but still.  The place was spooky, it simply reeked of the illusions and delusions of the insanely uber conservative establishment, that manufactured narcossis of self deception so easily seen as the slave chains holding that quadrant of society to despair, and evil.  I was glad to leave.

(originally published June 2011)

DIM Human

DIM Human AS VARIANT

Human = ARRAY( 6.66^9, 6.66^9, 1)

^^^You can do better than this ^^^ 

-10pts... 

an array to hold the number of the beast is (57707,57707,1)

      ***

To begin with, let me say this: 

There is NO SUCH THING AS A FREE LUNCH.

I was asked a question last night, a good question. The question revolved around my attitude towards all things "internet" based. To answer the question I was asked, answer it in full truth, requires I set down the foundation thought which established the environment and the judgment parameters wherein the answer exists.

I, being old and cynical, do not trust ANYTHING that involves something that claims to be free. To say "a beautiful sunset is free" I'll buy into... the sunset is a fact of nature, it will happen with or without someone watching to bestow the title of beauty on the colors in the sky. No human expended any tiny fraction of life‑energy to create a sunset. But when a massive technology that has for decades fully occupied a significant fraction of mankind's better brains and a significant chunk of natural resources is presented to me as "free" my first thought is to say "BULLSHIT."

Precision Review

Folks, I rode all the way down here to tell you something, and what I rode down here to tell you is I can't count how many folks I've known who get bullied by the name printed in big letters on a page of their calendar, how many poor fools turns white on January first of certain numbered years and don't resume their normal God given color until Hanukah of that same year, how many folks I've met in my wanderings what want to skip over the squares on that calendar where a certain number is printed. Them folks, they set aside entire years, months, days, to be worried people, and people, bein' worried like that just is not a happy way to spend your time, not when there is only just so much time what is given to you.

I mean, I mean ( get that Arlo Guthrie thing going here...)

A Grinch's Consolation...

There are those who have a great deal more reason to not like this holiday than you do... cheer up, and have a Merry Christmas. You don't have it half so hard.

Four Decade Down...

The Joke is Asimov in the corner going "what's this 'ficton' bullshit? I'm a scientist and I've never heard of a ficton..." You have to be a fan of Robert Heinlein to fully understand this one.

There is a lot I could say, and nothing that I will say beyond it has been a very, very long time since last I was in this frame of mind.

Just a minor observation...

Lady Luck is many things, but an exhibitionist is not one of them. If she's flashing boob she has a reason in mind, and it probably ain't gonna go well for someone...

Double nickel... No. 55

I never post a picture to the internet I didn't find on the internet. 

The days drag on, the nights drag over, and yea... this is about as succinct as I can be. The last few months have been a deep recon on several topics, several of which have produced some very, very interesting thoughts. I'll be sitting to write on them in the near future, but for now my attention is still on the gathering, I'm not quite to the point of putting the thoughts out for public consumption. But no, I'm not dead or in some lock up somewhere, just working at range. In the meanwhile, poem and a photomanip, just by way of touching base.

Clean copy of the image, as it came complete... sized 1920x1080 for wallpaper

Blasphemy…

==originally published September of 2011===

Now that the Covert Cultural Warfare is approaching a crescendo around the election of Donald the Trump bringing the very people mentioned in this post to the forefront perhaps now is a good time to look at it again...

==========================

I was watching television last night. I don't do it often, I don't find it all that entertaining. Oh sure, there's a few box office movies seen before, or a torrid little skin flick based around dysfunctional lovers, perhaps a bit of anime with an attempt at a real plot, these things sandwiched in among the totally inane offerings, the sitcoms and sports. Those things are all right I suppose, there are those who enjoy them.

Where the programming isn't that much of a much there are things seen I really do find quite disturbing, things that speak to how deeply degraded the world has become. I'm not talking about horror movies or crime drama or slasher flicks, those are the domain of the frightened and the juvenile. Those fears are sanctioned, prescribed, acceptable. No, the things that bother me are the ones you're not really supposed to be paying much attention to, the things crafted to sneak into your head like a retro-virus intended to lay dormant until your life tries to evolve before they become active and work their wickedness. In short, it is the foundation assumptions of the commercials I take exception to, the sort of things I'd like to see terminated. To borrow a line from Apocolypse Now, things I'd like to see terminated... with great prejudice.

Tonight I saw such a prime example I feel compelled to comment on it, it was truly an archetype of the form. I'm not going to present it exactly, but if you've ever seen their commercial I'm sure you'll recognize the one I'm talking about. The product offered was a dating service, lots of those, but this one targeted one specific demographic... those who call themselves Christian. Ok, I suppose that's fair enough. The Christians are a critter unto themselves, if anyone on planet Earth truly needs help, from Jesus or someone, they would be prime candidates to be first in line. And the reason they'd be towards the front of the line? Things like that commercial, where  there is this voice over in a silky smooth voice both paternal and seductive saying (and I'm paraphrasing now) "...find the love God intended for you..."  while the text on the screen reads OurDatingService.com.

Think about that. What God intended for you, coming to you courtesy of something with a dot com designation. Right. Not dot org, organization, but dot com. Commercial.

In my book that is blasphemy. That needs to be terminated. Someone needs to wake up a wing of B-52 and stack on the ordinance till those BigUglyFuckers can only lift fifteen minutes worth of fuel breaking free of the runway, someone needs to make sure there's not one but two tankers for each BUF already airborne and waiting to suckle the BUF's as they're climbing out to altitude, fill their tanks airborne so they have lots of fuel to linger over their target and put the ordinance where it needs to be. Someone had better put an end to such blasphemy before the whole world dies whispering "…the horror... the horror… the…"

Like the old country song said...

“…if you’ll give me forty years I’ll turn this rig around…”

Great old song it was, and I only had to change one word to bring it totally up to date. Change yards to years, and then look at the world you’re living in. It’s right there in your face. Gentle reader, the endless run of reboot movies, the endless run of reboot propaganda, these things are not because those who craft the entertainments and the manipulations are out of ideas, not at all. There is a very skilled and subtle intention in play, and in all truth it’s one that I would (grudgingly) have to support until and unless some better idea comes along.

Their intentions are to most literally get the good old cold war going again and split the world neatly in half east to west, US/Nato vs. the Russian Republic in the role of The Soviet Union. They are frantically trying to dial the calendar back to 1980.

It sounds like lunacy, but there is a viable reason for such a campaign. That reason is a desperate attempt to curtail the exponentially rising power of the Corporate Neo-Fascist in their bid for domination. The CNF, who have allied themselves with the nation of China after failing to conquer the United States with their attempted coup by media-manipulation of the Bush administration, the CNF must be stopped if any nation is to survive. The Russians know this, the Americans know this, the remainder of the world knew it before they did.

With the world once again divided along the old lines the CNF will no longer be able to operate on a global scale with utter impunity. Do business east, or do business west, but no longer will they be able to run with the sun around the globe. With the old cold war mentality back in place China is once again returned to the status of enemy to both sides… yes, the Soviet Union had a 65 division army, and 45 of those divisions were parked on the Chinese border assuming they’d have to give a thousand kilometers to stabilize a line against a Chinese attack on their nation.

It is the old, old truism of divide and conquer played on a global scale against a global enemy.  Unless by some miracle the United Nations should step up and establish a global code of law to govern the CNF I don’t see a better strategy on the horizon. And that… is a terribly sad thing.

We really need to make ourselves a note that the next time we try for global peace we’d better make sure there are no monsters lurking under the bed waiting for the old warriors to hang up their swords before making their bid for world domination. We need to remind ourselves not to make the same mistake twice.

Life is Boring... Television is worse...

...and why in the slam fucking hell when the first hints of a spider big enough to spin a world wide web were heard didn't the military unleash every tactical strike fighter at their disposal and hunt the beast into extinction? 

There is no gravity.  Just the universe trying like all hell to outrun the wave front of human stupidity, currently propagating at 32 ft per second per second in all directions.

reality.sys not found.
universe halted.

*bwaaayuank!*  ...of course you are my bright little star, I've miles of files, pretty files, of your aforefarted fruits, and now to suit our great computes?  You're... magnetic.. *swqueeeeeeeaaach* CALL NOW and for just FOUR easy payments of 19.95 you can own this magnificent mansion, but wait, there's more!  Order with your major credit card and we'll include this beautiful blonde trophy wife genetically altered to give only the most tender loving of care to your absolutely perfect Harvard bound children, guaranteed to fuck you into a state of total mindless abandon every seventeen minu*tunktunktunk *  AMEN BROTHERS AND SISTERS, I SAY AMEN AND DOWN WITH SIN, SAY IT WITH ME, DOWN *Wikibrubabrubabruba*  Jesus loves you my brothers, he died for YOUR SINS and he died for MY SINS and *shreeeeashereashhhhh* we'll be right back to Elvis Presly starring in Viva Las Vegas after a short word from our *issssssisssssissssisssss*

Ladies and Gentlemen, The President of the...

Some days I really think I should take up drinking cheap whiskey for a living.

(with only a slight apology to the Moody Blues, they did mean well...)
(five years later, and so little has changed... so little. Originally published 2011)

Denial... is not a river in Africa

I am not a poet,

     don't frame me for the crime

even if my bastard words

     sometimes try to rhyme…

I am not a poet,

far from that my friend

even if the story told

runs back to front again

like politician promises

when voting time begins.

I am not a poet,

more gearhead gunner freak

who has a heart of empathy

for what is on the street…

I am not a poet,

oh no, that's not I

just a rebel's heart to arms

when told to pass it by

leave the helpless on their own

to suffer slow and die

chained off to a sinking oar

by those who lives will buy.

I am not a poet,

such rank will ne'er be mine

commissioned by the graduates

of walls held square by vine…

I am not a poet,

there simply isn't time

to try and teach my soul to march

in even metered rhymes

I am just the partisan

who fights behind the lines.

Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and the Great Door Buzzer Scandal...

Just eye candy and a bit of wishful thinking...

Farcebook wanted to know what was on my mind. The answer? How the secret tendrils of politics crawls into so many places to complicate and sometimes just plain fuck up things that politics has no business being involved with.

Take cars for an example. I do cars, have for years. Being born a poor boy it was learn how to mechanic or walk. I'm not so poor now, but I still work on my own for the most part, hey, paying someone else to fix something minor on your truck is kind of like paying someone else to give the old lady a minor orgasm, you know? Just not very satisfying no matter how loud or long she yodels.

Over the years automobiles have gotten a lot more technically sophisticated. Cuss as I do I'll admit that a great deal of these things are improvements, the metallurgy and the engine control systems. Yea, you have to know what you're looking at and yea, you do need test gear to really troubleshoot the systems, but... on the other hand you can go from the bottom of death valley to the top of Pikes Peak and not have to change running jets (and if you know what that means you might be *gasp* a geezer).

On the other hand I save some of my very favorite cuss words for when I get involved with something where there's a fucking fifty dollar module doing the exact same job that can be done with a bit of a cam and a chunk of heavy wire, you know... the bells and whistles on the inside of the car for those who think Honda is buying up all the American Virgins to keep the volcano god of Technology living at their house. Somewhere in the last few days it finally dawned on me how that happened, and folks... it is suck the dog POLITICAL.

The oriental countries have come into their own making electronic things. They, like every other industry in the modern world, have a problem. If they build them to last as long as they could they won't sell enough to stay in business. If they don't stay in business, well, THEIR political parasites will be all over the map and OH MY GOD the residuals of the totalitarian communist regimes might start creeping back in. So, of course they engineer for a predictable failure rate just to keep sales up. Just common sense.

But what is not common sense is allowing these same FOREIGN companies to put money into the AMERICAN political scene to influence trade agreements (aka laws that usually remain hidden from the public) in order to assure themselves that the American politicians will lean on their industrial buddies to use lots of what the Asian companies are making trying to make sure the geyodamcommies don't have another chance at taking over southern bangkok where the door buzzer widgets come from.

Now that's a bit of a mulligan stew of an exaggeration, but then again, not really. Next time a politician supports something that looks just totally dumb on the surface think it through again from the perspective of the global perspective of the Corporate Neo-Fascists, they who want to finish what Marx and Lennin started. It might just make a bit more sense to you.

Stay sane and starve a shrink... pass this around if it makes sense to ya. Enjoy your day.

High Amperage Plum Jerky...

==originally published October 2014==

Say what?  Plum jerky?  High Amperage?  What in the whale does that mean?  How do those words even end up in the same sentence?  The sixties produced a lot of strange word friends, did they not?  Of course the translation is “Electric Prunes” and of course “The Electric Prunes” were a proto art-rock band remembered for one fine effort in the genre, to be specific the 1966 track I Had To Much to Dream (Last Night) dealing with the consequences of exactly what the title says: allowing yourself to indulge to excess in the realms of fantasy.

My name is Cyranos, and I’m a recovering dreamaholic.  I’m here to tell you that yes, it is possible to wake up with a hang-over from having to much to dream.  The symptoms are not as severe as say to much alcohol, and yet in some ways they’re more detrimental to your day.  Things tend to go surrealistic on you, reality doesn’t feel real at all, what should be simple bears the burden of hidden complexity that teases just beyond the grasp of comprehension.  The myths start creeping in, the legends and the superstitions start making sense and the more sense they make the less traction the day really has, it starts sliding on you as the sun gets low in the west and if you’re not careful you’ll do it again, and again, and soon enough you’ll be a dreamaholic like me who sees Gaia’s face in the clouds and wonders why so often it happens that when you let your focus go soft you see the devil reaching out of a beautiful woman’s eyes wanting a little piece of your soul... take my word for it, it is entirely possible to have to much to dream.

IF I knew what I was doing THEN...

This one from The Promise, the first story in the book...

This one, and the next, from Daughters, the second story.

This one revised a bit into the last image...

I've never even brushed over the thought of building an ad. Just not something that ever broke the horizon. I kind of talked myself into publishing Jurati Amos in the first place, rationalized it under a what a what the hell why not mode of thought. I really thought advertising was something the publisher did to make their nickel. Apparently not when you're just starting out. So, the question becomes what kind of things will light a curiosity in a perfect stranger? I really don't have a clue, I am stone cold at square one. But... on a second look... I think I'm gonna get back in the Photopaint on the second image with Bev, the dark one... and narrow her eyes a bit. Just enough to show her very, very justified anger. The idea is curiosity, if they noticed the first image I want the second just enough different to ping against the check sum functions of memory... is that the same picture? Cost? Thirty minutes. Value? Who knows. I damn sure don't. Later gang.

Thirty minutes post-post: better? Or not different enough to notice?

All the Beautiful Boys.. or, Down on the Farm Part 2

For the ladies sake I hope
he loves more than just his horse. 

I’ve been an amateur artist for a long time. I’ll paint surrealisms, figure nudes, landscapes, occasionally take a swing at comic book style graphics. Of course artists need models, and one of the larger problems for me has been finding good male models from which to paint/draw.

You wouldn’t think that would be a problem in this day and age, accept of course it bumps square into an ongoing and only slightly private investigation of mine I’ve had going on for some time now: using myself as deliberate bait to analyze how the chum-chum stuffers and head fuckers of the internet advertising/government spy folk are using and misusing the abilities of the internet to further their most questionable causes.

As I’ve mentioned in the last couple of weeks I’ve now got a paw down on Zuckerberg’s farm and equally now have a presence among the Bird bunch who only sing a few words at a time, aka, the Tw*tter crew (insert vowel of preference, I usually use an “a”). Where the farm has turned out to be more or less what I expected the bird bunch have shown out as far more predatory than I expected, far more so than anything on the farm. Predatory, and invasive. When I haven’t clicked the “upload” button on a three meg image I created and yet they have an instant copy of that image? My connection is not that fast, they had to be snooping the system indexing functions looking for the last image created in that format to have snagged it in advance. Sloppy work, guys. Hell, it didn’t take Neo, I saw it. Anyway.

The Bird bunch are brain strainers, there’s no doubt of that. Since I’ve been very slow to add any content beyond snippets of poetry as advertisers for the book or this blog their chum-chum stuffers have been throwing the rainbow at me trying to get a handle on what kind of a person I am. I’m not being at all helpful to them, hell no, I heard about the “on hover” event as a trigger for a function call a long, long time ago. Yea, that’s how it works. Hover your mouse pointer over an add and advertise that you’re looking at it. Believe me, they’ll know. Which brings me back to the subject of the beautiful boys from a different tangent.

The Bird bunch tossed a three day run of LGTQ adds at me a few days in, which in my world is to offer an insult demanding a blood apology if that insult is accepted. Just because I’ll write in verse is no reason to make such an assumption, it TOTALLY pissed me off. If (huge little word that one is!) I could connect worl with the parties responsible I’d call it fair justice to saddle up a good quarter horse and run them all about twice around the block with a weed eater in one hand and a big bore magnum in the other. Which is why downloading images of the boys from which to paint is now even more taboo than before. If they’re snooping the index functions then they’ll be trying their dead level best to snoop the download registers that live down in that part of the hard drive Windows tells you to stay out of. No need to add fuel to the fire that’s burning the restraints on my temper. If those should burn through I’ll be saying goodbye and canceling all internet connections.

Beware the Bird bunch. I’m becoming ever more certain they are in their essence quite dishonorable. Gonna be interesting to see if anything changes after posting this. As usual, catch ya’ll later, if I don’t get shot first.

Prologue to a Lady

Coming soon to an eReader near you...
this first volume six stories from
the first forty years of a life without a name.

Sundown Quiet St. Marie is not her given name, of course. None know her true identity. The ladies birth name is not only her greatest secret, it is virtually her only secret, and yet the inner nature of the woman is as great a mystery as any on earth. It is rumored she is high born, daughter of a foreign family of status and impressive means. No one knows what motivates her, what she takes for herself. Many with wealth offer great sums for her services and are denied while others pass through her life and depart ignorant of the value received. She moves through all levels of humanity searching for those she will bring into her sphere for a day or a week or a month, as equally at ease in the world of the simple and sincere as those who proclaim themselves from pinnacles of fame.

One hardly need say she is a consummate actress, wearing personas as other's wear clothing. Some see her a stunning beauty, a goddess come to earth. To others she will appear almost homely, a shy woman home to an inner fire that if ever released consumes all falsehood in its path. Fools will pursue her as the ultimate conquest only to discover she has been naught but the bait in a trap of their own building; gentler, wiser souls will remember her as an angel of the earth or an agent of God's love. Each guise is tailored to the moment, to be retired when unneeded and never worn for another.

To know her is not without risk, hers is a dangerous medicine. Not all survive the inner landscapes of the soul she delights most in traversing. There is no predicting who will be the focus of her strange calling, man or woman, rich or poor, villain or victim. Only one thing can be said of her with certainty. Each and every life she chooses to touch is changed. Many are healed, others brought to justice from within or without. But none are left unchanged. These are but a few of the stories that might be told of her.

Mirror Mirror on the Ball who's the Meanest of them All...

Shnarflephucks. It snuck up on me. It’s f’ing football season again. Drat and dangnations, the first game of the season is here. And it’s here in town. Have no idea who the local boys are playing, usually it’s arranged for the first game or two to be against lesser powers of the gridiron, just a chance for those who play for the major schools to shake out the bugs and get in a good warm up before the first serious challenge shows up.

The funny thing is I really don’t mind the game, not a bad game as such things go. Come the end of the season, when everyone is beat to splinters and it’s heroes and dead men out on the field I’ll even watch a game or two to see the rookies who step up to fill the cleats of the fallen, and pull it off… see the teamwork and the dedication to defending momma’s honor and glory to the triumphant… or bitter… end. Those “on any given Saturday” kind of games where the bookies don’t make any more money than those placing the bets.

I’ll watch a few of those. But what I won’t do is try and live on reflected glory like the idiotic fans. I’ve never done that, never have never will. The days of mandatory pep rallies while incarcerated in the halls of indoctrination (aka, High School) pretty well showed that up for what it’s worth, which is nada. Sorry Mr. Establishment mirror man, no sale.

Lock of Ages

Every now and then I realize just how delicately balanced our world is across the boundaries between this convention or its' opposite other: the pious balance the profane, the prudish balance the libertine, the liberals the conservatives, the cruel balance the kind. Any one of those elements will point at the other as the opposition, the enemy, the prey, and yet by the endurance of the competition it may be deduced each must be protecting the other, must be: it is so easy to see how many different ways any of them might utterly destroy the other, common sense demands the conclusion they secretly safeguard each others well being. After all, without the excesses of the debauched what point of comparison to show up the purity of the pious? Clearly, one defines the other, they are equally dependent on each other for their very existence. It is uncanny how closely the behavior of these collective entities mimics the behavior of the young teenagers just discovering the nuances of gossip and plot. Perhaps in some manner they are of comparable age?

Down on the Farm... Part 1

Being as how I’m contra-social, and equally being possessed of a deep desire to live an ethical life I often find myself in the position of bouncing off things other folks take for granted. For example, the now common “Friend Request” there on Zuckerberg’s farm.

I didn’t put a paw down on the farm to my own intentions, it was the publisher and publicist who thought, demanded actually, that I should have a footprint in the “social media” machine. The entire point of my presence there is to advertise my writings. And that, odd as it might sound to you, is why “friend requests” are a bit of an issue to me.

Ok, you don’t need to watch out for the heat, you don’t need to buy condoms by the case and KY in five gallon buckets to load in the painted pink dildo-tipped grease gun you zip tied to a cordless drill motor turning an off center lead banana for a flywheel ( to use on the really tough cases), but still… when your motive is advertising is it ethical to accept a “friend request” from people you actually know world of real life? The folks who really are your friends? The idea itches, not tickles, and not in good places. Feels a bit to close to prostituting the very idea of friendship to me. But then again, I’m a geezer who has been contra-social longer than most of these good folks have been alive.

Somehow I’m seeing ghost images from a nightmare: a classroom, large display in the front of a room where shows a complex geometric grid representing some N^th dimensional matrix of associations, accompanied of course by several dauntingly simple equations from perhaps advanced calculus, and that droning voice of damnation which is the professor… perhaps marketing, perhaps mathematics or statistics, saying… “The first through third order interstices represent a friend, which is NOT to be confused with any state of emotional bonding between corporeal individuals capable of transmitting burden of life…”

Yea, nightmare. I’m right there with you Leonard (Cohen)… “I’ve seen the future brother, it is murder…” Or worse. Oh, well. There’s always gasoline, gunpowder and whiskey for a safety net.

Of Bottoms… Line, or ripe round and ready…

*gulp* Starting a new job is always a bit nerve wracking. But, that’s where I find myself, starting a second career as a writer. For years and years now I’ve written for a hobby, but if I’m to bring to reality any of several dreams I’ve indulged for that same number of years, things off on the technical rather than artistic side of this all consuming imagination of mine (solar powered air conditioning, residential micro-power grids to make a house run dang near free, all those good old yellow pad – middle of the night coffee shop things banging heads with the guys), well, that’s going to need more coin that what can be scratched from the retirement. The crash of ’08 really did hurt. So… back to work. Believe it or not I’m thinking about finding an old time clock, just so I have something to punch… and cuss. Later gang.

Rough Air Ahead...

Ladies and Gentlemen: Please fasten your seatbelts and secure your tray tables in an upright position… because there’s no way around this particular storm and it is going to get very bumpy before we get clear of it.

Yet another consequence of the Donald appearing on the political scene is a threat to democracy not really seen before. That risk? The consequences, coming and going, of situation specific incompetence in a candidate who is a potential leader of the nation.

I can’t speak to the overt consequences of such incompetence, of course not, I no more than you no more than they have any way to know just what the subject or focus of the incompetence might turn out to be in some real world - live to the world situation where a temper tantrum might unleash the terror of modern warfare.

But what all of us need to cast a thought across is this: no matter how gross it gets it is an  IMMENSE danger to democracy to even think about trying to establish some formal structure to certify political competence as a condition of candidacy. That job MUST remain the sole domain of the voters at the polls.

Gentle reader, such a certifying process as that would be one of the quickest ways possible to finish off the job of gooking out America, totally destroying real democracy and allowing the puppet masters and the Corporate Neo-Fascist to claim the victory over freedom. The last thing in the world we as American’s need is have the already massively suspect loyalties of the education establishment in conjunction with some grouping of the existing political status-quo empowered to play Central Committee (yes, think good old Marxist-Leninist COMMUNISM on that one) in regards as to who is and who is not competent enough to be allowed to run for office. That translates as instant oligarchy and deadly choke point on the democratic process identical to what destroyed the Soviet Union in a matter of only sixty some years.

Don’t do it, America. Don’t even think it. Just vote against what you know CAN’T do the job, and reform and rework your primary processes to pick better candidates in the future.

Observations and Field Work …

I haven’t posted anything here of late, but no, I’m not dead and I’m not in a coma. Just busy, and working at (emotional) load limit in several directions. Bouncing deep into the overloads on intellect and perception as well, but for the first time in a quarter century it’s the emotional that hit limit first.

This fine work of womanhood
is totally how I envision
Ms. Catherine Omega Winterwalk
in the story "The Care and Feeding
of Unicorns"

The redhead on the left is of course Ms. CC Donahue
from the tale "Rules of Engagement", and the brunette
lass on the right does full justice to Ms. Lisa Ranik,
a crossover character between the two stories. 

Been writing a lot on what started out as a story that rapidly turned into a book, ‘The Care and Feeding of Unicorns’, the synthesis of the emotional content of the Omega affair of a few years back. To full tell that tale has put me into places I had yet to go in my quest to know myself well enough that no one can take advantage of me by knowing me better than I know myself. Seen some deep introspection these past weeks, I’ve got several contract crews working in Escherville. Some of ‘em are using dynamite, and Blackwater Security got nothing on my battalion of mercenaries protecting them while they work.  

With that underway I’ve also been watching the current political circus as the momentum of the last fifty years is in the process of running headlong into the walls of reality. The dis-quality of the major players is shredding the camouflage and covers of so many low level collective entities it’s really not funny. It’s like seeing Wall Street and Madison Avenue stripped nude to naked and not knowing their clothes went away, watching them walk around buck nekid still doing business like the tailor who sewed the Emperor’s new clothes had taken them on for customers. Yea, there’s a few who aren’t that bad to look at, but damn… denim and sackcloth would do wonders for the rest of ‘em.

Side note: I’m planning to vote Libertarian this cycle. A third party president couldn’t be any more of a threat to the national welfare than what’s top of the ticket on the other two. The same constitutional checks and balances are in play, and a third party potus would of necessity have to be a consummate negotiator to get anything done, to negotiate from a position solid enough to make anything happen would require recruiting the people themselves to the cause, ergo, that potus’ best option would be to be as transparent an administration as possible and recruit the best of the other two sides into their cabinet.

The other two parties, divided and all but disgraced by what split them, would be unable to hide their partisan bullshit and old boy/girl corporate commitments in the face of a potus not part of their machine who could and should reprise the old FDR fireside chats of years gone by to give the American People his side of the story set in a political soap opera waaaay to steamy hot for Brazilian TV. All they show is sex while the perversions where the political meets the corporate make a thirty head Viagra saturated pansexual orgy on an indoor kindergarten playground look totally tame by comparison. All that might require by way of clean up would be soap and a garden hose running warm water, maybe a supply of ice packs and some anesthetic hemorrhoid medicines for those the victim of bad aim or overly enthusiastic.

Sheeesh… sorry about that. Didn’t really mean to load you up quite that heavy. Anyway, no reason potus can’t put a paw down on Zuckerberg’s farm* just like the rest of the world. *(aka facebook… seems I remember the farmer who owned the farm whence was set the cute little kids’ story about Charlotte’s Web shared a name with the facebook founder).

THINK about who you’re gonna vote for… this one may wind up in the history books like the fight between Augustus Caesar and Mark Antony did. All serious folks, this one will mark history even more than electing President Obama did. 

Other things are in the works as well, but for now they’re not ready for prime time, so… I share back to the internet universe a couple of pictures found there, and take it back to the other machine that does not get connected to the devil wire to go back to work.

Catch ya'll later...

That... would be me on the right...

The Honorable Woman...

Bumped forward from January 2012 

because where the Spitfire below 

was a pretty thing Leia was prettier...

***   ***   ***

I've mentioned her before, Leia, the dreamweaver who stepped up to take the throne when my muse Alex retired.  She's incredibly skilled at that art, when Leia dials it on the weathermen know it sight unseen, the jet stream changes directions.  One afternoon, well, afternoon for us, early morning for her, she did just that, she dialed it on and it was hot.  I mean hot.  I don't mean warm, or sultry, or provocative, it was that scorching melt things blue-white hot only the wholesome can fully achieve.  It was the kind of thing a woman offers her man when he's the one she'll trust when she knows she'll be beyond rational thought, utterly consumed by passion, or pain, the kind of thing to motivate a man to cut his way across hell and back to fetch her dill pickles and chocolate ice cream if that's what's needed.  It was just way hot.  Of course that wasn't the only time she'd done it, but that time sticks in my mind because of what she said when that segment of her show was over, something she obviously understood that I'm coming to understand that not all women do understand. 

As the chorus of wows and oh-my-god's and sundry such exclamations of delight from her audience began to wind down I added my compliment to the roll, words to the effect of "sweetheart, that was awesome, but don't ever do that for a man live and in person unless you plan to keep him for a lifetime."  She smiled, her wise woman smile, the one that really is so very warm, and with a wink and a twinkle in her eye replied "nos, I'm not fifteen."

No beautiful woman, you're not fifteen.  But if you at the age of fifteen understood the unspoken thought you were indeed a prodigy of feminine wisdom, and judging by what I've seen in the world at large since then it is a wisdom apparently a great many of your sisters need to understand. 

Leia is full dreamweaver, it is her art to paint a dream using the psychology of her audience as her palette.  As such of course she understands the full power of the erotic persona, the power the feminine allure has in the life of a man.  Equally of course she'd have to understand the resentment a man will feel if that power is over used, she'd almost have to understand how deeply a man's life is actually diminished if he must defend himself against that power being mis-used beyond its' proper domain, how that power mis-used is actually the source of a great deal of the misogyny in our world. 

Leia understood that, I'd say pretty much all of her sisters-in-seduction worthy of mentioning in the same context with her gave evidence they understood it to one degree or another.  But apparently this is not a widely understood thing among all women.  The longer I look the more consequences I'm beginning to lay to the feet of that ignorance.  Interestingly, those who seem to actually understand it the least are those you'd think would be most likely to have a grip on that thought: the fashion industry, the feminists, the women's advocates of one form or another.  

I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and work from the assumption it is ignorance, because to assume they behave as they do with that understanding in place would be to say they act with malice towards men, deliberately exploiting their own femininity to maintain a status quo of unhappiness and conflict for the sake of a profit motive, or worse, the motive of justifying a life based on bigotry and prejudice.  For their sake I'm going to assume it's ignorance and not evil.

YouTube Blues…

Yea, I’m gonna ramble tonight… got absolutely nothing better to do than listen to music and break in a new keyboard. 

Thinking about the Problem…

Back in the days when I did useful work for a living, aka, shift supervisor in a pocket size little chemical batch plant, there was a situation that took several days, the better part of a week, to resolve. One of our distillation systems was misbehaving in a most novel manner. Damn thing simply refused to run, and no one including yours truly could figure out why. It was a head scratching cuss and discuss kind of problem, way off the book and nowhere in the history or the horror stories.

After a couple of days, when all the conventional things had been tested and dismissed as the driving cause, the situation came to a standstill. As the production line emptied out downstream of the bottleneck we all just shook our heads and, each to our own best guess, started thinking outside the box. What MIGHT make the system behave like that? It had to be something, and the general consensus was we were not on the bad side of any witches powerful enough to tinker with the laws of physics.

After a twelve hour shift where the situation had not changed in the least the operator in charge of the system wrote in her logbook “thinking about the problem.” Everyone chuckled, and no one said anything formal, she’d told the absolute truth. That was the function of the operator logbooks, to pass those critical tidbits of information shift to shift so that even if things were not running smoothly the oncoming operator had a good handle on the system status, what had been tried and to what results. The logs eliminated a lot of duplicated effort and made it easier to know what remained to be tried to get things back on track. The operator logs were a most useful thing, an evolved system and convention that shy of gross neglect or mass calamity were off limits to management critique. They were the operator’s logs, we had our own.

That distillation system was not a simple thing, but it was nowhere near, not even close, to being as complex as any social system, which brings me to the point of this post.

The social system which is the United States of America is not running right, not at all, and as far as I can see no one has enough of a workable handle on the ultimate why to attempt a repair. Needless to say, I’ve been thinking about the problem. You can call this my log entry on the subject.

The Migration…

A small factoid crossed my path today, one I haven’t validated but have no reason to challenge. I heard that Oklahoma City now has a higher per capita concentration of gays and lesbians than San Francisco. That sounded pretty strange to me, didn’t make much sense at all. Why would that have happened? You’d think the LGBT folk would migrate to where they were more accepted. OKC and the local redneck regimes just really are not all that enlightened and tolerant. Why would the LGBT folk stay in, or migrate to, where they’re really, really not wanted?

 Took a bit, but only a bit, to figure out a plausible reason.  Now, the reason I came to could get me seriously flamed by the above mentioned segments of society, kind of doubt they’d want to admit to it, but still it does make sense. Let me dare the dragon here and set down the foundation of my thought.

The Cat Gas* Conundrum

Something dawned on me today, one of those “how in the HELL did I overlook this one for so long?” kind of things.

I’ve been suspicious running into convinced for quite a few years now that a high percentage of political “advertising” is actually going to the American people in the form of subliminal inserts within other programming. Subliminal advertising really isn’t all that good for influencing a matter of thought, a matter of intellect, but it is well proven as a magnificent technique to influence matters emotional.  Hang a binding emotional hook on ten percent of a population and you own that country by way of the ballot box.

But where, what medium would be the most effective place to put such “advertisement” as it would be called? Every major media outlet would present major problems to such a campaign.  It could be done, but with major risk of exposure and with exposure total backlash against the client.  Where could it be done with a good exposure rate and minimal chances of the campaign being revealed for what it was?