Saturday, March 8, 2014

You don't see this every day...

...unless you drive by 3rd and Howard everyday in downtown Spokane:



A song:

Ol' Glory

A demonstration of how the best musicians do their best live under the spotlight and its attendant pressure rather than the studio. The live version just kicks the studio version aside:

Ol' Glory in the studio

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Three's an Awesome Horde!

Brace your ears for the opening late '60s muzak, which was as horrifyingly ubiquitous as legend proclaims, and it's a wonder we survived, and listen to the shared genius of three giants having a good old time:

Ellington, Smith, Taylor

Willie's puff of cigar smoke at :56 makes it realer than anythang.

Does this virtue make my halo look fat?

It's no sin for us to express our basic biological natures and lavish affection on those with certain forms of physical appearance more than others, but it is less virtuous than other values and actions that, as we age and wrinkle, come to predominate our idea of what beauty is:

Does Anybody Love You?

"You're so lovely, so wise
You could make Venus crawl
But love between the ugly is the most beautiful love of all."

We are not obliged -- nor able, IMO -- to be saints, but the more we can attain those forms of love that love love above even the thing that is loved, the better we look in a cashmere halo, y'ask me.

This pale fire that flickers atop our biology, that doesn't just consume beauty but makes it, often out of much suffering,  is best cherished as a soul even if it is only a shadow.

One reason that the worship of God can be so fulfilling is that doing so inspires us to be what we hope God is: a world-shaped mirror that reflects everything, including the evil we all do, with understanding and loving forgiveness.

Tuesday, March 4, 2014

I'm not a number, I'm a bar code! What's your sign?

Someone wrote the following on a private forum I attend:

"In the future everyone will be implanted with a microchip at birth. It will include things like your IQ, your credit rating and your net worth. Also something new, called your "Gullibility Quotient". The used car salesman will know exactly who you are when you walk into the showroom."

My reply:

We fear such things because we cherish liberty as our primary means of self-preservation.

But we have increased our population immensely in a very short time, and the resulting body politic is basically a band of tumors fighting over the same blood supply.

So, as frightening as such universal identification schemes work, they are what is necessary if we are to continue being such a vast and powerful body politic.

Our bodies are totalitarian regimes in which each cell is typed for a specific job.

We wish not to be typed, we want free volition. But with so many of us living at once, accountability wants a scheme whereby we can be stamped.

This encroaching surveillance and identification is a symptom more than a cause.

Remember: one of the largest brain functions in humans is face recognition.

At some point, encroaching totalitarianism will make us individuals sufficiently uncomfortable as to demand a brain that actually cares about its body's constituent cells. We will cause it to feel our pain. Until then, our power structures will increasingly do with us as they will. Every day, they grow more powerful, using our efforts to become so. They make weapons and such that are denied to us. Imagine your body with claws that strike itself when the brain commands, injuring body parts that object to how the brains takes most of their blood sugar and oxygen.

Imagine this without neural pain feedback. The brain will bash the body to pieces if it so chooses until it destroys the body and thus itself.

This has ever been the logic of empire. We seem to be at an evolutionary impasse wherein this will no longer work.

To me, the question is: is reactionary pain feedback (rebellion, oppositional revolution, etc.) the better tactic? Or is the better tactic to build a different body with different "DNA", thereby starving the brain while creating cellular structures purposely designed to survive that brain death (collapse of empire)?

The clawed fists will not be able (barring fullblown nuclear winter and added WMD devastation) destroy all those radical cellular structures, and those that survive can network differently, coerced into doing so sanely and equitably by the extreme survival difficulties imposed by the wreckage caused by the old body.

As it stand, the populace is too easily lulled. It is not willing to send adequate pain feedback to the de facto psychopathic brain that literally has no compassion because it has no sense of feeling outside itself?

Meanwhile, since liberty is still our chief possession for self-betterment, here's an old-school howl.

Today's personal writing tip

The purpose of telling is to show us things, and the purpose of showing is to tell us things. 
R. Morrison