GREAT interview

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Antiwar is interviewing everyone they can get from the right/left sit-down against the war held a few weeks ago, and I am loving most of what I'm hearing. They're all talking about how much we have to agree on, how great it would be to come together to get this back to some semblance of normalcy—which we do ALL agree on—and THEN hash out our differences on policy once that is accomplished.

There ARE some sensible people left in America! I love how he mentions we lefties should be starting our own tea party chapters! I love how he mentions that Libertarians are pretty much a mix of lefties and righties. I love how he calls us "non-Euclidian". I love that I can find evidence at all of not-so-hypnotized humans applying themselves to the manifestation of SENSE, and lament all that time I wasted waiting for a thoroughly-hypnotized gossip-monger to have an epiphany.
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and, while we're on the subject

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I found this interview fascinating and encouraging... and know already that much of it is just plain true. It was spectacular to hear someone mentioning how our mental conditioning cages us for life, and doing it from the perspective completely divorced from anything you would call "Zen". I love how she discusses that there actually is NOT nothing you can do about certain predicaments, healthwise or otherwise, and adored the discussion about how what we frequently mistake for the advance of senility is really much more about feeling we should be able to remember information that did not interest us to begin with. She does a great job of articulating this.

Plus, she gets on the subject of how the too frequently dodgy information on the internet can actually improve our chances of discerning reality from the clues flying up out of this mosh pit world. This was particularly interesting to me, of course, because it was a problem I immediately encountered upon my connection to the internet... which was very late by the standards of many denizens of the tubes. I started to have regular access sometime in early 2005, but did not have my own 'round the clock connection until late 2005. I began being exposed to many alternative news sites and investigative journalism sites that were telling me stuff quite at variance with what I'd been led to believe about just about everything for my entire life, and I had always been comparatively well-informed, already knew the mainstream stuff was bunk... but had not the first part of a clue just how far into complete nonsense it actually was.

I immediately became intensely suspicious. I remember contacting some poor guy who ran a popular leftist site to ask him just who he was, and how on earth could I have faith in the outrageous stuff he was posting. He splutteringly replied as best he could, and as I was reading his response it occurred to me that even though I had not trusted the mainstream media for many years already, I still had some idea that mainstream sources were superior, could be used to rest one's case upon, EVEN after having thoroughly demolished the idea of the citing of authorities as purely delusional in a book I'd written. I sat there reeling over the realization of the depth of this business the Buddhists call "delusion" and wondered if I should bother trying to track down what was going on it the world, or what.

Obviously, I decided to start shooting the tubes and stay mindful of the mental conditioning that both goes into the reportage and opinion and that same problem with the one absorbing this information. I learned not to just take everything I read at face value, or to let my knee jerk up and bash me in the chin when someone came up with something that fought with what I already thought. I learned to check up on people. I learned to gauge the reliability of certain sources and not automatically accept the veracity of even the most trusted sites. I learned that people bragging of their own investigatorial prowess were very weak on investigatorial prowess, and saw with my own two eyes how the constant suggestion of it hypnotized readers into believing the boasts over assessing the content. If it agrees with their world view, they are the most apt to swallow it whole and cease looking further to get at the truth... at reality.

I don't know if I share Dr. Langer's optimism about this wreckage. I think she suffers from a default assumption that most are as intelligent and open-minded and driven to the discernment of the actual as she is. But her insights are very worth your attention.
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even though i'm too young to need this

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... I still think I need it....
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code phrase cher thirty-two

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Yesterday was a long day. I had things holding over in my head to talk about on the tubes, comments, emails, and a bunch of podcasts and lectures I wanted to get through, beside the usual poking about and picking things to mention to you, beside the half an eyeball on the comments yonder, beside the fiddling with images thing and freaking out about all the bugs in this new operating system release and fantasizing that they must have had to fire all the programmers who were Motorola chip aces and hire Intel chip aces... which... uhm... would be people Bill Gates has fired... which may in fact be badges of honor, but, sheesh, still appalling.

I was getting that loopy dropsy feeling at a semi-sane hour and was very near getting in bed when I decided I ought to go back and look at a thread I'd commented on, since it had generated some emails from a dear friend. Well, to my abject horror, I had put this darn cogent comment on the WRONG thread in all my flying about, catching up with the stuff that had held over in my head... and so I think that has to automatically make the comment dippy or even insulting... but I was too loopy and too exasperated, and am leaving it to today to sort out... or maybe just let stand because it might actually apply also on the thread I did post it on... but... sheesh! Mortifying. I have to go back and sort that out once I've had enough coffee, if they haven't managed to delete the comment.

On the one hand, how does this bit differ from me trying to pour the cream for my coffee in the sink instead of my cup, or running out to light a cigarette when there's one lit and sitting in the ashtray already, or making a careful list of all the stuff I have to buy at the store, being extra-careful to make sure that sucker is IN my pocket so it actually gets to the store with me, only to do my shopping without remembering the list is in there until I'm going for my money at the checkout stand? It's, like, normal by now, isn't it?

And how does it differ from the very thing I was at pains to write such a long email about yesterday, a discussion of the economies of attention in a brain determined to strip particulars and skip the mundane in the overriding search for elegance? Isn't that a good excuse? Does it have to be senility? I can plead genius, can't I?

No. Dammit. UNacceptable. I'm trying to help a bunch of smart youngsters get a clue about stuff they have to live another thirty years to get on their own and this just will not do.

We can say I'm helping them fear the advance of senility so much they will be more apt to perform, now, while their cookies have not crumbled yet. Or, best, they caught my request to delete it before too many others had to endure it.

So I got in bed, and put this high vexation out of mind, and began to read myself into the head swimming so deeply I don't know what I'm reading mode, which is the almost dirt certain prelude to actual sleep, and I'm reading about big rifts in the top ranks at Apple and it's seeming to bolster my theories that the bean counters were taking big advantage of Steve Jobs' transcendency while he was busy struggling so hard for his life, and that there are PC-mentality hacks putting out not-good-enough, customer-riling and perfidiously-obtuse excuses for product, and he's not happy about it either.

And then everything went black. Yes. Fade to black.

Then this really upsetting and undeniable urge to pee made me get up in the middle of intense dreaming and trying to note the dreaming's Zen application AS I'm dreaming it... damn bodily necessities... which really changes the character of all that dreaming and tends to wipe the slate... and it then, diving back into bed, relieved, put me in the flipping from dreaming to awake mode, flipping some nine hundred times before I finally realize I am awake and not flipping right back into dreaming.

All that stuck was "Cher 32"... and me having the notion that it was the code phrase demanded of me by somebody trying to tell me things in my sleep.

i'm having the suckiest day

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a different kind of looking

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I'm very tired of children walking around in grown up skin bags. They're so exhausting. You give it to them straight and it ends up like you'd shot it through a crystal. The light hooks a left or a right and they're as blind as if you'd never turned on your beam. I want to scream, "This means you!" I do. I do. But kiddies keep blathering their invective and their excuses and their blubbering over the mean élite... printing it on t-shirts, squirting it on blogs, carrying placards, stickering their bumpers... wearing their colors....

They can't hear. They can't see. They're all walking around as though this sentience gig they've got going for them is actuality and not just the contents of their own benighted heads entertaining them... as reality plays out, completely invisibly, in plain sight.

We all want to ascribe to Americans this ugly failing, bitch about the uniquely American nature of such spoiled incoherence, but, well, on the tubes now, we know that just isn't so.

We also know that this problem doesn't inhere just the bubbas out there, just the uneducated, the great unwashed. Nossirreebob, it don't. There are PhDs from everywhere quite as childish and lightless as, say, yer basic census worker lyncher... while I do grant statistically less likely to lynch. That's okay, though, because their stupidity is at least as deadly... just less apparent... and especially to them. Truth be told, smart people are harder to wake up because their minds are too well defended against sense breaking on their intellectual shores.

People are too used to calling their idiocy "honesty" and wouldn't know the kind of honesty it takes to wake up, to grow up, to stop all this nitwit doing and perform, if it walked up, a surprise polar bear, swiped their jaws off their faces, left them scrambling across their own icebergs to get them back on their bloody-dim pusses. It's that appalling. You aren't interacting with anyone if you only read what you already think, only hear what harks up what you've already made of thin air, only see what your conditioning says is real. Nope. You're locked in a space suit you call skin, and you should be praying for that polar bear.

We've got a global case of I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I going here on the tubes and out in the walking around world, too. Yes we do. It makes my spine feel like a hot poker and all my muscles limp. My head feels like it's gonna fall off its titanium plate. I'm giving you the hairy eyeball, tonight, children.

Maybe in the morning I can do better.

sentience x

If you want to watch Britney's big performance....

Reality check. Thanks, Alan.

sentience ix

sentience viii

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sentience