Had a convo over Thanksgiving with some friends, wherein they were worried about Trump winning the election and spelling “the end of democracy.” I asked them why they were so afraid of Trump after nothing really happened the first time he was president.
They said he’s the kind of leader who could get fanatics to keep him in power and do all kinds of dangerous things. I said that was possible but hypothetical. Right now the current regime (whoever’s running it) is doing dangerous things, and we’re lucky Russia won the war so it didn’t get desperate. They didn’t really have an answer for why things are worse and more dangerous now than when Trump was president or for why (other than his style) he was more likely to do something crazy.
Even so, they’re in the position of wanting to stop Trump from getting voted in because of the hypothetical risk it poses to democracy.
Put differently, they want to actually and concretely subvert the will of the people, i.e., the democratic process, to avert a hypothetical situation wherein the democratically elected president decides to subvert the democratic process. Let’s kill the democracy ahead of time on the off chance Trump decides to kill it after being democratically elected. It’s very strange.
Is the Fourth Turning coming to a close, or is it just getting started?
For the former, you could say the financial crisis was the start and the covid biomedical tyranny (and all the lies it entailed) the culmination. And now that the lies are unraveling we’re getting beyond it.
Or now that the lies are unraveling and the WEF/Biden admin types are under fire, they will unleash the real virus/cyber-attack blamed on AI/WWIII, etc.?
I could see it going either way.
yeah, that’s basically my conclusion too.
Thanks — posted it via Iris
Relatedly I saw a post by (I think) nostr:npub17u5dneh8qjp43ecfxr6u5e9sjamsmxyuekrg2nlxrrk6nj9rsyrqywt4tp where he instructs you how to import your Twitter history into NOSTR.
On the one hand I want to do this because that’s my work over more than a decade and why the fuck should Twitter get to own and keep it exclusively?
On the other, I posted on that platform not knowing I couldn’t delete at the time, and once I import it to NOSTR, it’s forever. I mean I’m sure the NSA or whoever has all my posts including deleted ones, including my brief nym account, but the public has no access to it, and it’s not readily associated with me.
So it’s a tough call whether to import. I think I will, as I was always *somewhat* conscious of posting to these platforms, but I am far too lazy to go back and really look at what I was writing in say 2010.
In the end, I don’t think it matters much what you said a decade ago anyway — pre-bio-medical totalitarianism and post are like two difference lifetimes at this point.
Just posted an article on my other account nostr:npub1dwhr8j9uy6ju2uu39t6tj6mw76gztr4rwdd6jr9qtkdh5crjwt5q2nqfxe with the wrong title, and there’s nothing I can do about it because you can’t edit on nostr.
On the one hand, that’s annoying, but I’m starting to come around on this being a feature rather than a bug.
Finality on posts means no altering history. It also incentivizes you to take more care before putting something out into the world. Beacuse even if you edit or delete something, it still went out into the world at the time and created ripples into infinity that can’t be retracted or undone, even if you edited it later.
This is just the same as if you said something in real life to someone. You could apologize later, you could clarify later, but you still said it the way you said it at the time.
In the past too, when you were painting on a canvas or writing on a piece of paper, you had to focus, you had to get it right. What does it do to the quality of mind one has when they can sloppily hit send and fix it later, as opposed to knowing you have to work with care and precision?
Even now, I am making typos and editing *before* I press “post” so it’s still far easier now. Having to live with the version after I post it is really not much of an imposition, and the upside of finality and trust outweighs being stuck with some errors for me.
Deleted all the FB-owned apps (FG, IG, WA) in 2018. Everyone uses it here (Portugal) too, drives people crazy I don’t use it too.
Your husband is based. Zuckerberg is obviously a turd.
WEALTH
"It’s strange to contemplate my good fortune. I worked hard when I had to and was willing to take calculated risks, but others were more driven and grasped new disciplines more easily. I suppose my greatest strength was efficiency — I was often lazy and took short cuts. Hence I had an advantage over the more industrious who were apt to stay the entire course.
I was also distrustful. I don’t remember being cheated by anyone specific, but I had the sense I might be at any moment. And not nickle and dime-level cheating like someone skimming from a tip jar, but that an abyss might drop out from under my feet. Maybe I would lose my job and wind up homeless. Or my savings would be wiped out in a market collapse. Or the authorities would find some tax I had inadvertently neglected to pay, some clerical error I made, some form I didn’t file.
My mission became clear: I needed to accumulate sufficient wealth with tolerably little effort in a short enough time and without risk of ruin. Then I needed to store that wealth securely and with minimal risk of seizure or confiscation.
I could recount how I accumulated the trove of gold and precious jewels, the shrewd investments I made, as well as the mistakes, but it’s not especially interesting. Others were more successful, visionary and tolerant of risk. Instead, I want to describe how I preserved my wealth, though for reasons of operational security, obviously I cannot be as specific as I’d like."
Whoever they might be, if there are any!
Went running today, felt like a million bucks on the walk home. Thought: “Whatever this feeling is, is the opposite of reading the news on Twitter.”
Went back on Twitter to feed my addiction to fear and anxiety anyway for half an hour under the guise of “keeping up with the news.”
So much hype for everything happening. As I said, the more I read, the less I feel one way or the other about it.
We used to leave narrative making to historians, but now it’s happening in real time — they’re already saying the MSFT CEO is a genius for how he handled this.
How do you know?
I really don’t know what to make of the news:
Millei — WEF or BTC maxi?
Sam Altman/OpenAI — good riddance or things will just get worse with MFST now?
This is how I feel about most developments and public figures now.
People have hot takes about a situation, and I just think, “we’ll see.”
Would not have taken the Cardinals (12-point favorites) two years ago in the Circa Survivor Pool ($6 million prize, there were only 23 people left.) That was a bad mistake.
A BRIEF PAUSE
I was all set to press the button. An eccentric friend who tinkered with electronic gadgets in his garage had built it. It was connected to a generator of sorts, and with white letters in red background, read “pause.”
There was a dial on the generator that allowed you to set the time of the pause. Apparently, when you pressed the button, it would stop the movement of everything in the universe for the duration on the dial. My first thought was a 10 minute break might do everyone some good. And it was hard to see what could go wrong — if everything were paused at the same time, there was no way someone could steal your wallet while you were temporarily incapacitated.
But then it occurred to me 10 minutes might not be enough. Why not pause for an hour — surely that would be even more restful. What about an entire day? It’s not like anyone would miss anything as everyone else would be in the same suspended state. How far did the dial go anyway?
I turned it farther, and it went from days to years to centuries. The more I turned it the larger the increments got. How crazy would it be to set it to a trillion years?
I laughed to myself, but realized quickly it wouldn’t be crazy at all. No one would be any the wiser, and everything would resume just as it were once we unpaused. In fact, everyone’s experience would be exactly the same whether I had paused it for a trillion years, 10 minutes — or not at all.
I looked at the dial again and realized the numbers I thought referred to minutes, hours and years were not based on any particular unit, they were only numbers. And I now noticed it was nowhere indicated that the dial was related to the duration of the pause. I had assumed a pause button would need a duration, but of course such a duration had no meaning. Time could not exist independent of the movement of hands around a clock, planets around their stars, telomeres shortening inside of cells.
So what would happen if I pushed the button? Either it would freeze for an infinitesimal fraction of an instant, so rapid no one including me would notice, or it would freeze forever because that instant, no matter how tiny, would never end. There was therefore no upside to pushing it. In neither scenario would I get an answer.
I pushed it anyway.
. . .
There’s no way for me to say whether the machine worked. Perhaps it stopped time forever, that universe froze to death, and I am only relating this story to you from another one in which I was born and had these memories. Or maybe it stopped and restarted without my knowing. Perhaps these machines are commonplace, and we’re being stopped and restarted all the time, like a light that flickers so fast we can’t tell it ever went out.
First you have counting 1, 2, 3, 4…
If you want to speed up counting, you can add.
Instead of counting from three to six, you can just add 3 + 3. Addition therefore is just repeated (iterated) counting.
But instead of adding 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 3, you can just do 3 * 6 because multiplication is iterated addition.
But instead of multiplying 3 * 3 * 3 * 3, you can just do 3 ^ 4 because exponentiation is iterated multiplication.
That’s where most people leave off in their education, and they feel perfectly content to live their lives only because they don’t know what they’re missing.
Beyond exponentiation lies tetration, or iterated exponentiation…
I really enjoy conspiracy theories, not only because so many have turned out to be accurate but I like to entertain possibilities I would not otherwise have considered.
There was that old Zen book “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind” wherein the author Shunryu Suzuki says: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”
That said, WTF happened with the October 11th detonation, via emergency broadcast alert, of the mRNA nanoparticles wherein Marburg virus, ebola, e coli would be released?
I mean I was down with the zombification of half the planet as much as the next person, but if you miss that big on a theory, there has to be an accounting of it.
Very disappointing when the conspiracy theorists are just as unwilling to own errors as the narrative purveyors.
