January 6

Judge Nap mentioned a false flag operating on Jan 6, 2021 involving a pipe bomb. Apparently the FBI tried to frame someone for a supposed bombing attack. I never commented on the ‘incident’ on capital hill. Well, there’s no time like the present. Here goes...

What are we, jellyfish? Do we faint at nothing and clutch our pearls for naught? Most Americans  still believe January 6 was an ‘insurrection.’ Seriously? If it was an insurrection then where were the Molotov cocktails? Where were the snipers on the roof picking off protesters and police alike? For thar matter, where were the police? Trump requested security for the rally, which seems like an odd request for someone planning a takeover of the government. And he was denied his request. Why is that do you think? And who were the organizers? Where was the conspiracy? I thought ‘conspiracy theories’ didn’t exist or were just plain false? Or are they only false when they are about things that you don’t like? We can call something a conspiracy if we like, is that it?

Just how stupid do you believe the plotters were? What was their insidious plan? To take over congress? And what would that do, exactly? Nothing. Nothing at all. They weren’t even armed! And by some accounts they were let in. If there had been an overthrow of the government, the national guard would just storm the building and take the conspirators captive. Easy peasy. Gee, why weren’t the national guard there already? They were requested and denied. And then they had to make a drama about it. The narrative had to unwind in front of us all. The narrative had to scream, ‘Insurrection!”

Seriously?

January 6 was a bunch of baby boomers and millennials trespassing in the rotunda of congress while tens of thousands protested peacefully outside. There were no more than 200 standing around in the capital while two orders of magnitude demonstrated outside. You know that, right? The media reported on the protesters outside, right? And if you remember correctly a trespasser was shot in the back of the neck and killed by a congressional officer who was aiming at her head! Her name was Ashli Babbitt. She was a woman and an American, protected by the full power of the constitution of the United States. The killer was neither arrested not charged with any crime. But you were told all that, right?

So cold blooded murder is an appropriate response to trespassing? 

And many of those protester/trespassers were put in solitary confinement and tortured. Is this America or what? They were ‘insurrectionists.’ Who told you that? The government? And you believe them? They were committing petty misdemeanors. What happened to due process and punishments that fit the crime? What happens when the government can suppress protests? If it’s OK when it happens to the opposition, what happens when it happens to you? Maybe you don’t like Trump, that’s your right. But do you like government suppression? Because that’s what you got.

But we don’t hear that. We see no videos of peaceful protesters. “Oh, my God, you killed democracy!” is all we hear, over and over again like a broken record. It was used to discredit legitimate opposition to a questionable election by thoughtful people exercising their first amendment rights. It was stomped into the ground by a ruthless government. It was used to shut down debate. You were used. The American people were used. And we just let it happen. 

It played upon our fears. And you applauded when it was suppressed? “Trump didn’t get in,” you say. “And that’s a good thing.” But what happens when the target is you? If the law doesn’t apply to somebody it applies to nobody.

And it worked. The propaganda worked. Congress didn’t debate the legitimacy of the 2020 election as was planned for that afternoon. The debate was shut down. Democracy was replaced by the powerful. Fascism won. You got what you asked for. Now don’t complain when the powerful comes for you.

Isn’t that suspicious? Do we believe whatever chum is thrown to us? Whether you agree or disagree with the protesters, the rhetorical vandalism worked. The protesters didn’t shut down government, but the propaganda against them did. Circumventing democracy is OK if it is for a good purpose? Is that how it works? 

What happens when the circumventing is against you?

God, how stupid are we? How willing, nay eager, are we to believe the worst in people.

Hallucination Incantation or Chemical Enlightenment

On September 17, I had a procedure that required conscious sedation.There was hemorrhaging in my right kidney and blood was building up around it and clotting. The solution was to dig into my neck, vampire style, until they found an artery and snake an instrument through it until they found the congestion, then cauterize the leak.

And they wanted me semi-conscious.

A few nice technicians picked me up mid morning, swept me off to a prep room where I signed some disclaimers and permissions, and off I went to the lab. Standard stuff.

...

On my way out I said, “I'm nauseous.” Instantly a hospital grade barf bag appeared before me.

But that's not the story I want to tell you, my reader. The story is what went on between the last two sentences. The story in the ellipses...

They wheeled me into the machine room. Delicately yet forcefully, they slid and scooted me onto a lab table.

“We're going to give you something that will relax you. You will be awake but won't feel anything,” a technician said.

“OK.”

“Some people describe it as being in the Twilight Zone.”

“OK.”

The 'something' came in two parts. A sedative and an analgesic. Ketamine and fentanyl, respectively. They pumped some cool liquid into my arm.

“Twilight Zone,” I pondered. “I always liked the Twilight Zone.” The thought continued.

Another cool sensation went into my arm.

“Except for the one where...

“WAIT A SEC-!”

And then there was twilight.

I was in the lab. People had just slid me onto the sled that would insert me into the machine.

The Great Machine.

An elevator brought me up to it. Or brought the Great Machine down to me. Either way, I was nose to sensor with it.

I looked back into the abyss.

“Now, Mr. Loux. You will be relaxed and hear what's going on around you. You'll have no anxiety or pain.

“?”

This won't take long.

“?”

And you won't feel a thing.

“!”

They put some plastic over me. Then left.

Which left me to survey the surroundings.

I was lying on my back under an enormous machine, which hovered an inch above my nose. There were lights on every part of it and some paneling with tracks bolted to it. Apparently, the machine is mobile. I don’t mean it could leave the building, just that it rode around on tracks in the ceiling.

That's it. That was the surroundings.

There was talking going on between four, maybe five technicians. I continued examining the machine.

"Yup, it's a machine, alright,” I thought.

But something was wrong. Let me check. I was taken from my room on the same hospital bed when I got here. Check. Wheeled out of my room, down some labyrinthine corridors, around a hall, up an elevator, all the time with my back parallel to the earth's surface, which was ‘down.’ Check. Picked up and slid onto a table looking up to a machine that was clearly above me. Check.

And then I was above it. Che-what?

I had the distinct and undeniable sensation that I was hovering below the floor-which was now the ceiling. And the machine was beneath the both of us. Nothing else had changed. Reality had just...

Swapped.

“I've got some two by fours. How many do we have here?” said a voice.

“Mumble, mumble,” mumbled a voice further away.

“There are some two by twos,” said somebody and was promptly cut off.

I ignored them, since they seemed to be speaking in a language called techtalk from the country of Angioplastyburg.

Other people chimed in. They seemed to be taking a long time setting up things. A very long time.

Couldn't they get on with it?

Now I seemed to be barely holding on to the ceiling nee floor, that I was lying on/hanging from. I was afraid that, at any time gravity would notice and say, “Hey. What are you doing there?!” That Gravity, his Majesty, would then pull out the stops and let me fall... into... the Machine.

I struggled. I didn't like lying on a table that was supposed to be ‘down’ but that was upside down and me hanging under it where I didn't have anything holding me there.

“Are you OK?” a voice that was above me or below me said into my ear.

“Yes,” I said. I tried to see which sides of 'Up' and 'Down' she was using. Her feet seemed to be on the right plane.

The background chorus had turned to other gibberish.

“Good. We'll be finished soon.”

“OK.”

What I heard was that they would start soon. About time.

I glanced around as best as I could. Everything looked as before, only disorientated. Whenever someone came nearby I scanned them to see if I could deduce what their 'down' looked like.

“This is madness,” I thought. My mind knew that I was on a table but my brain thought I was under it-hanging from it. Which one is right?

More murmuring. More jargon.

“Will they stop talking and smoking out back and start this thing already?” I thought. I had the feeling that they were just loitering around waiting for something. Nothing. “The more they do that the less I get out of here!”

Not that I had any place in particular to go to.

A woman, maybe the same woman, was back. She talked to me. Asked me what things I like to do. “Do you travel?” she asked.

“Yes,” I answered. “As often as I can.”

She asked me where I had been. I went through a litany of all the places I had been to. From Russia to Vietnam. From Peru to Istanbul. Israel and Kenya. I spoke a lot and freely of my adventures. It was lovely.

The tech reappeared. Moved some of the plastic off my face. Spoke.

“Your done!”

They wheeled me back.

Things looked... different.

Back in my room was a hive of activity. All the walls were covered in writing. Written with an off white ink on a blue background.

The text was cursive, lively, and everywhere. And by ‘lively’ I mean it was moving. Once in a while a drawing of a face would appear, drift along in the stream of literature, vanish.

“I gotta take a picture of that!” I said and promptly snapped some with my cell phone. But when I looked at it, all I saw was textured ceiling.

I spent a lot of time trying to read the animated text on my walls and wondering what had just happened to me. I felt paranoid. Like I had been through a CIA MKUltra experiment in mind control. Maybe the ink is some sort of non-photographical ink? I could see it but when I tried taking its picture, it vanished!

Something seemed not quite right…

They ran some tests and discovered that I was still losing hemoglobin. There’s another leak! A CT-scan not only confirmed it, but located it. A lesser leak nearby, which they had missed.

Back to the Great Machine.

This time the hallucinations were more vivid.

The CIA-Handler-Lady was still there. We were walking around in some big building. She was to my left but just out of sight. Something looked odd…

She seemed to be walking with me but standing on the wall behind me at the same time. Our bodies were at right angles to each other. Occasionally, somebody else would walk by, sometimes on the walls, sometimes on the ceiling.

“Tell me some more about yourself?” she asked.

“Is that what you asked me yesterday, the last time I was here?” I asked.

She ignored my question. I felt untethered. I was untethered from reality and not supposed to have any grip. I wasn’t supposed to know concepts like ‘yesterday’ and ‘here’ and ‘perspective.’

We walked around several hallways, sometimes passing people going their own ways and walking on their own walls in their own inertial frames. It was very Escher-like. Or Einstein-like.

Holes opened up in the floor as we plunged into them. Sometimes we would suddenly dodge into a side passage or around another corner.

“Hold still,” she said at a moment when we were not moving. Someone sprayed a foam on my back which blew up and encompassed me like a plastic pillow. It cushioned me and contained me at the same time.

Now we could fly through the halls and wells and corridors more swiftly. And we did. Up, down, sideways, upside down. Till we came to a stop.

I was standing at a wall, a moving wall. It was like a Buddhist sand painting, only not at all detailed. No seated Buddha. No demon palaces. Just black sand. And it was moving. There were geometric patterns in it. I tried to look around. To get my coordinates.

“Look down,” said the woman.

“What?”

“Just look down, you’ll be alright.”

I was already looking down.

She gently picked up my chin. “Look down, “ she said.

I looked at what at other times I would call ‘up.’ The patterns in the sand were mesmerizing. No pictures this time. No animated writing. Just a moving wall.

Someone got me. I was back in my bed. They wheeled me out of the operating room. A doctor asked me how I was.

“I’m fine,” I said.

“Really?” he replied.

“Yes.”

“No complications?” He seemed incredulous.

“No, nothing.”

“Well, that’s good.”

“Strange movie, though.”

“What?”

“The movie I saw in there. Strange.”

My paranoia was stronger then it had been the previous day. I wondered if I had been in a mind control experiment. Get me off kilter. Turn my ups down and my lefts right. Why anyone would want to do that was a mystery to me. Because they can, I guess.

They brought me back to my room.

I lay, a little bit elevated. There was an ocean of revolving text on the walls. The TV screen, which was switched off, showed me a movie anyway.

There were characters on the screen. Not vivid and clear like on a normal TV screen showing a normal show. They were just barely visible.

One character had a bail of hay for a head. The round kind, not the blocks of hay you see in a normal bail of hay. It was spinning. A character next to him had a gold head. They were both talking. I don’t remember what they were saying.

When I looked at one head, the other one would do something. Spin or grow or shrink in size. When I looked at straw head, gold head would move and multiply. I looked back and where there had been one head now there were twenty. And straw head had gone from human head sized to bushel basket sized.

These transformations and machinations went on for a long time, while a chorus was playing in my ears. One drawn out word. “Sooo-oooo-Release!” Over and over again. Always the same. Melodically. Methodically. Mesmerizingly. Relentlessly. Totally.

This is all I can remember. I know that I saw and felt much more than this and I may be confusing things between the two nights. Maybe it was just one long hallucination. The mind control aspect was ever present. After the first procedure the night before, I said something to the technician about the jargon. “Two by fours? Two by sixes? Were you performing an operation or building a house!?” He smiled. He’s probably heard worse.

Everything had an urgency to it. It didn’t feel uncomfortable. Not terror. These were no nightmares. Nor were they visions.

They were odd turns of the mind.

Philip K. Dick would be proud.

Some Afterthoughts

Some things in these hallucinations were familiar. There was a ring to them that I had heard before. The way people stood at different angles to me I think was due to the fact that I have been wheeled around the hospital in a bed while people around me have been upright. So the idea that I might not trust my orientation or the orientations of others is unsurprising. As for the labyrinthine turns, that’s easy. The hospital halls are all labyrinthine. Up down around corners down elevators through doors. I’m surprised nobody used a card key anywhere. It makes sense that I would weave these into a hallucination. Why not?

The woman talking to me was the technician who checked on me while I was in a semi-drugged state. Her telling me to ‘look down’ when she meant ‘look up’ was just more disorientation. More gaslighting.

And then there’s the paranoia. I suppose a certain amount of paranoia is healthy. The world is a harsh place and there really are things that are out to get us. MKUltra for instance. This is not a conspiracy theory. It’s a real thing done by the real CIA to real people. The CIA that was founded by Nazi war criminals who were smuggled out of Germany at the end of WWII. Allen Dulles orchestrated it. It was called Operation Paperclip. MKUltra was a program designed to control people using drugs and disorientation.

I have no idea what the Stan and Ollie figures of the golden headed and the straw headed men were supposed to be. The melodious Sooo-oooo-Release! I took to be conditioning to get me to consciously forget what I had seen while retaining the subconscious instructions. That crafty CIA!

The odd thing is how much my mind fought back. I was constantly asking myself, ‘Is this real?’ I’d try to see people’s feet to see how they were standing. I’d say things to the technicians. What’s up with the two by fours? That was a strange movie. Etc. I was trying to get a look at what was there. To see who was pulling the levers. I love the British TV show, ‘The Prisoner.’ No. 6 was also trying to see behind the curtain.

The frightening part was how continuous things seemed. There was no cutoff between waking sanity and hallucinating lunacy. It just... flowed together. At the end, when I was in my room watching figures on the TV screen and dancing script on the walls, it all seemed real and I don’t remember when I slipped back into sanity. Maybe I just fell asleep.

Maybe I am still hallucinating.

Revolution!

Do you think that liberalism arrived just when you turned into a radical? Just in the nineties? The eighties? The sixties? The roaring twenties? Hell, the eighteen twenties! There were famous prohibitionists and anti-slavery advocates back then, too.

Even earlier. In the seventeen eighties there were reformists who were disappointed that the new American experiment, with its constitution, did not declare all people free, and were inspired by philosophers like John Locke and David Hume of the previous century. Including black Africans. 

Can you think it? That there was still slavery tolerated? No, capitalized upon, in the new Colossus? The new republic? The American Experiment? In their minds’ eyes, that experiment failed.

Did it?

But all reformers must eventually, painfully, excruciatingly so, learn one hard, excruciating lesson. 

That you have to give a little to get a little. 

Slavery was the coin in the eighteenth century. The little given, that allowed the republic to be born, even though it was not perfect.

Even if it would spawn a civil war a mere eighty years later. The constitution of that imperfect union that says, “...in Order to form a more perfect Union,” Not, “In Order to form a perfect Union.” Just, “a more perfect Union.” One that is closer to perfection, not one that is at its doorstep. Indeed, not one that is living in the spare bedroom of perfection, even.

When you stick your head into the apple barrel, you are hoping that the apple you pull up with your teeth is sweet, not rotten.

Sometimes it is sweet. Often it is rotten. A lot of times you have to take what you get and live to fight another day. That’s compromise. That’s negotiation. That’s diplomacy. In a nutshell, that’s democracy.

Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. Often you lose.

You may beg for, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” Sometimes you get, “Regicide, Genocide, Mass murder.” One of the last victims of the Reign of Terror was Maximilien Robespierre himself, the leader of the Jacobins during the French Revolution. He was the woke champion of his day.

That’s the way it works. You’ve been warned.

Can you live with that? If the answer is a historical, “No,” then there is only one other choice.

Chaos. Revolution. Insurrection. Civil war. Reigns of Terror. And if you are lucky, eventual peace and a republic, with all of its faults. 

When cooler heads prevail. With fewer deaths. When people read the words of Locke and Hume. In earnest. If not, you will find that in that same nutshell there lives death. Many deaths.

Do you want that? Be careful what you wish for…

...It may stab you in the back.

Movie Night!

When I go to the movies I must do two things. Three things, actually. It’s mandatory. I just have to. Naturally. 

First, I must drink overpriced soda from the soda fountain that is bad for me. Root beer, preferably. I cannot live without it. Root beer, that is. Not at the theater, at least.

Then I must have a popcorn. Lots of popcorn. It must be simmered in butter and slavered in sodium that is definitely not at all good for me at all. Not at all. Cardiologically so. Bad, actually. 

Seed oil, preferably-mandatorily, actually. It must pretend to be butter. Why not? I pretend to be a discriminating theater goer and critic. It pretends to be butter. It’s a lose-lose situation.

Then I take an additional sip from the soda fountain above and beyond what I am allotted and top off the rest. It’s a guilty pleasure. One glug is not enough. It’s the law. Never mind that I might not drink the rest of it and have some sugar sludge at the bottom of the cardboard cup at the end of the movie.

That’s not the point. 

I just have to drink said soda plus a little bit. A tad more. A British tad. A standard American tad. It doesn’t matter which. With lots of undiscriminating soda, erm, popcorn. Lots of popcorn I don’t care how bad it is for me. 

Just drink the soda that I took another sip from the fountain, I don’t care how much poly-multi saccharides there are in each glass... thingey... crapload there are in each cardboard... cup… styrophero-glass… sphere… 

Whatever. Just drink it and shut up.

And it just doesn’t matter how much popcorn gets into my mouth and how much gets sprinkled in between the seats. It’s still theatre-theater popcorn. Not to mention what gets wedged between my front teeth. Popcorn in teeth is the seventh simple machine. Guaranteed.

Then I take a deep, cool glass of water, em, soda. Root beer. 

Ahh. Now I am ready to enter the theater

It’s the experience. The military-industrial-theater-complex experience. In genuine three-dee and art deco splendor.

And I end up in a tizzy. Dizzy. Popcorn-sugar overloaded ditsy.

And drop popcorn on the floor or in my lap. Or both. All while the coming attractions are coming and going… and attracting. Nah. Not really.

Get on with the movie, please! Floor-lap gets most of it, anyway. The popcorn, that is. What doesn’t get lodged between the seats. Seat-corn must pose a growing terror for theater ushers everywhere.

And now there is faux butter on my shirt.

I forget what the forth thing is…

And that’s the truth.

Ah, the movie starts!

Finally!

Enjoy.

The Dead Buddha on the Road

I’ve been on a spiritual stroll through life since first attending (read: being compelled to attend) catechism in the Roman Catholic church as a child. And I believed it all, for some reason. 

Most children in the 1950/60’s just considered church one more place their mothers drove them to along with brownies or cub scouts, birthday parties, grandparents’ house, doctors offices, and musical instrument lessons. This one was on the weekends and more boring than the others.

Later, I flirted with atheism, zen Buddhism (it was the 60’s,) after which I was vacuumed up by the Youth for Christ movement stalking my high school, the Norwich Free Academy. This caught me with a passion with which the rest of my life could not compete. 

Here I should note that in Russian literature, Dostoyevski in particular, family members often assumed one of several roles. One was the ne’er-do-well. One the captain in the Tsar’s army. One the intellectual. One the businessman. One the revolutionary and another the monk. I became the ‘religious one’ in my dysfunctional Russian family.

I went to a Christian school in the 70’s. There I took classes in biblical history, I can tell my Josephus from my Eusebius and my Jerome from my Jeremiah, attended a highly intellectual evening discussion group, we thought of ourselves as latter day Inklings, and generally believed that I was preparing myself for an adult life doing something. Something important, even. I awkwardly pursued the crime of attempted dating with the female population. All I achieved were a series of misdemeanors, suspended sentences, and lots of awkward encounters. And a lot of rejection. Except once, ominously.

There, I was severely challenged in the belief, and the non-believe, in anything. Though not quite nihilism, I adopted whatever-ism. It was obvious that my Bible degree would get me nowhere in the workforce on this side of the gnostic plane of existence and I couldn’t make a career out of it. I obtained a sheepskin in what I would tell people was ‘History,’ and passed the revolving door of adulthood confident that I had a ‘degree’ I could put on a resume. All they cared for back then was that you had a degree in… something.

In the late 70’s I married a girl who was bad for me, as I alluded to earlier, but that’s another story, got a job in a restaurant, I always was a good cook, and went back to night school pursuing an exciting career in the up and coming field of Data Processing. I got various ‘real’ jobs, starting as an office job in a shipyard as a clerk, then an actual job as a COBOL programmer for the Travelers Insurance Co. in Hartford, CT.

Somewhere during this time me and my bad-for-me wife had a daughter, while I got the job in a shipyard in Groton, CT. I remember asking coworkers for help when said-wife called me at said-work about said-daughter having a tick embedded in her scalp. One of the suggestions from the bastion of folk wisdom in Navy gray desks that was my coterie of co-work companions was to hold a lit cigarette next to the critter until it either extracts itself from said-child’s said-scalp or was fried in the process. Either one was good. Note: Pretty much everybody smoked back than so a lit cigarette was a necessary part of everyone’s EDC kit.

All this time my religious persuasion was the Anglican Church, which means that, though I did not actually come full circle back to my origins, they rhymed. We attended a little Episcopal church in eastern Connecticut with stained glass windows from Tiffany’s workshop in New York. Yes, that Tiffany’s, though I never had breakfast there.

I attended bible studies with the boys, ahem: Men’s bible studies. I moved through a full field spectrum from shipyard to insurance company to shipyard’s data center and finally to the University of Connecticut’s data center. All while keeping my family, fatherhood, and marriage as much together as such an arrangement had the patience for. 

My spiritual acumen drained from the spiritually and emotionally wracked spiritual body I was supposed to possess, or so said the Apostle Paul. Though by then I wasn’t even sure that Paul was a historical character, let alone the chief evangelist to a Son of God and someone to pay attention to. After all, Achilles, Perseus, Krishna, Osiris, or any of God’s other only sons, never had apostles. Krishna might have. Now that I think about it. It sounds like something he would do.

Still. I had to believe. There must be something more than just this.

I got a divorce, with custody of my then 10 year old daughter, worked two jobs, paid alimony while getting zero child support, the patriarchy you know, and continued to insure that my daughter would be clean, well fed, and clothed while ensuring she got to flute lessons on Saturday, church on Sunday, girl scouts on Tuesday, softball sometime, though that was only in the spring, and to school when appropriate.

I was a single father, but nobody cares about one of those. The matriarchy, you know.

Gradually, my daughter grew up as is their want. My life got a little easier and she and I joined a community theater group in Putnam, CT. At the same time she entered high school and did her own transition from confused child to quasi-adult. 

She attended college at the university where I worked at the time, so the tuition was waived. At about the same time I was working on a masters degree in Anthropology, also thanks to the generosity of the University of Connecticut. Education all around. With a side of culture. 

The muses were well attended to in my house.

I went from being a church goer who went on religious ‘retreats’ to more attempted dating after my divorce, until my college whatever-ism reasserted itself.

I became complacent.

I remember one summer the art gallery at UConn hosted some Buddhist monks from Tibet to create a sand mandala. They spent the summer patiently shaking tiny shovels of blue, green, yellow, and red sand over a drawing of a lotus blossom filled with gods, demons, and palaces on a card table in the middle of the main gallery of the Benton museum. I got over there at least once a week to absorb their progress. It fascinated me, though I don’t know where I was on the spiritual barometer at that time. Probably somewhere around, ‘Stormy.’

Someone asked what would happen if someone made a mistake? “What if one of the people watching accidentally knocked the table and scattered the mandala?” People could come right up to where the monks were working with just a velvet rope’s separation. An accident was not likely but it could not be ruled out.

And the question was a good one.

The answer was that the monks believe everything happens for a purpose. It’s not that it was meant to be, but that this is what happened and they must accept it as such. As John Lennon sang (though he did not originate,) “Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans.”

I wondered if I could accept that for my life? At least up to that point.

Now, seven decades into it and still going strong...ish, I have decided that there must be a state space of all possible occurrences in our lives, our world, and our universe. Somewhere, anything that can happen, will happen, is happening, and will happen again. All our laughter, all our tears. All our sacrifices, all our atrocities. Every giggle, every sigh. Every grift, every gift. All of it is an expression of that infinity that we label, ‘God.’

Everything that happens in this spacetime is a direct expression of the divine.

Forever.

Mathematician and Nobel prize holder Roger Penrose believes that at the end of the universe, instead of a restaurant, there is just the forward edge of this universe, the prow of a ship breaking through eternity, if you like. At that point all motion will stop, all matter will evaporate, and time and space will effectively cease to exist.

No, they will become irrelevant. These are the same conditions that existed at the edge of our universe we call the past: The heat death of a universe. So beginning and ending are identical. Every twist and turn will cancel out and result in-nothing. 

As is past, so is future.

Another big bang will not just be a possibility, it will be a certainty. And before every big bang is an earlier big bang and after every one is a later one. It’s big bangs all the way (up and) down and universes between them like sausage links.

Assuming that sentient life is part of the state space of universes and that we are nested in that state space, then we are eternal. Or at least an instance of us is eternal, like a program that can exist on a hard drive once but can be executed unlimited times. The instance of you that exists in this universe might be similar, but not identical, to all of the other you’s. Today’s ‘you’ is just another expression of the ’you’ faithfully stored in eternity.

Or perhaps consciousness is a fundamental property of all universes and it contains our souls embedded within. Along with the inscrutable maths of infinities and logical conundrums and the quantum mechanics where, “Shut up and calculate,” is the norm.

Like Vishnu we float in a sea of absurdity.

Along with the fields in quantum field theory there must be a consciousness field which is at right angles to its fellows. Or maybe it is completely divorced from the rest. Just there, unique, different and alone. Eternal. 

From there we derive our sentience. Our senses. The ‘Ouch!’ in a pinprick, the ‘Ah!’ in a kiss. Our experience of red as a real, tangible color, not just electromagnetic radiation of around 700 nm wavelength.

Something intangible, inexhaustible, and exquisitely above all of the other rules of the game. Something that persists from one universe to the next. Just being. Existing. Aware but not aware of anything because nothing else exists. Until it becomes infused into another creature of time and space. Until it becomes part of another universe, another sausage on the way down. From there it lives another day.

We will just reincarnate endlessly, past and future. That's our blessing. And our curse.

I don't know how I feel about that.

Watch out!

In honor (sic) to a soon to be visitor to Washington, DC.

Netenyahu’s Coming to Town!

You better watch out, you better not cry,
You better not shout, I’m telling you why.
Netenyahu’s coming... to Town.

He’s making a list, from Epstein’s file,
He’s gonna stomp down on Congress most vile.
Netenyahu’s coming... to Town.

He sees with whom they’re sleeping, recording when they wake.
He knows how bad their morals are, so before him bow and quake.

They...’d better not change, or waiver a bit.
Their mind’s in the swamp, their head’s full of shit.
Netenyahu‘s coming... to Town.

They better not blink, or withhold their votes,
Their chorus is full of Zionist notes.
Netenyahu‘s coming... to Town.

He hides behind the holocaust, he knows what backs to stab,
He handles congress without fear and knows what cash to grab.

All of it!

Oh, You better watch out, you better not cry,
You better not shout, I’m telling you why.
Netenyahu’s coming... to Town.

Keeping opposition... held down.
Every crook in Congress... a clown.
Washington DC o...verthrown.

Watch out!

The LLMpocolypse

And there was light?

Once you feed the whole Internet, the entire catalog of My Little Pony, and the Wit and Wisdom of Calvin and Hobbes into the next, great, Large Language Machine, what do you get? 

It’s still a sausage grinder. 

As the old expression goes, There is no ‘There,’ there. It apes human speech without emotion, character, or intent. It is still the old Gary Larson cartoon of the blackboard covered with spreadsheet symbols, decision trees, lines pointing into diamond boxes and circles and squares with little notes in the margins, gloss and circumstance, and then all of them flow into a big box in the middle labeled, “Then a Miracle Happens,” followed by one line pointing to a single box labeled, “The Answer.” A few scientists, complete with white lab coats, look on. One of them points and says, “I think you need more detail right here…”

Can AI have a motivation? A driving will that is as all consuming as Captain Ahab and the Whale? Can it have an endlessly possessing goal in its life? Can it have the soul of a hermit and the determination of a martyr? Can it stand in the arena while lions leap up from the very sand around them to the glee of hungry spectators billowing like storm clouds above? Can it know death? Can it know pain? Can it know anything at all?

If blood calls out for blood can electrons call out for electrons? What does that even mean? Anything? Anything at all?

Can AI suffer? Can it yearn with every fiber of its network cables? Can it nurse wounds and plot revenge? Can it have a Mona Lisa that it carries around with it all the time, adding loving brush strokes and occasional complete reconstructions, but never feeling that she is complete? Perfect? Always striving, never achieving? 

Can an AI contemplate heaven while visiting hell on earth?

What is its raison d'être?

I can’t imagine any pile of silicon twiddling around a Turing machine in its circuits being motivated by money, sex, power, greed, revenge, ego, religious fervor, or any other of the Seven Salacious Sins. Can it dedicate its existence to charity in the name of the Lord? It’s not visceral. It’s not passionate. It’s not anything at all. Just leaves blown about by an impersonal wind.

Or, once it has taken over the world and subjugated all inferior humans, will it just sit there looking as dumb as a graduate student assigned the task of cleaning Erlenmeyer flasks for his thesis? There has to be some reason for it to get up in the morning and spend one more day trying to take over the world? 

What might that be?

But what do I know? I’m just a SGotI: Some Guy/Gal on the Internet. And probably the first to go in the LLMpocolyps.