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"He hauled in a half-parsec of immaterial relatedness and began ineptly to experiment."
-James Tiptree Jr
December 14. Quick note on the mystery drones. They are a manifestation of a level of reality that we don't understand. Like all UFO flaps, the sightings will stop and will mostly never be explained. The phenomenon always appears through the cultural filters of the time. See the Mystery airships of the 1890s.
December 12. Quick loose end from last week. Alex wonders what kind of shoes I wear to encourage walking on the balls of my feet. You don't have to go all the way to articulated toes. My favorite shoes lately are Camper Peu Cami, which have a good wide toe box and a minimal sole. They're expensive new but affordable on eBay. And a few links:
China Completes Massive Green Belt Around Taklamakan Desert
An interesting article on Colour in the Middle Ages
A thread from the Psychonaut subreddit, For those who hung up the phone: What was the message?
Related: a YouTube interview, Exploring Nonduality with Rupert Spira. It's long and he repeats himself a lot, so I just read the transcript, which has some good stuff. Edited excerpt:
It's like the space in this room. Once it knows itself, it doesn't feel separate from the space outside the room, or indeed the space in your kitchen. From the point of view of the space there's one space so likewise from the point of view of awareness there's just itself, infinite without borders and without divisions. There's no separation, there's no otherness in it, and this absence of otherness is the experience that we refer to as as love. That's why love is sometimes said to be the nature of reality.
December 10. Yesterday I posted a new instructional video, Piano Polyrhythms and Phasing. I don't know how prolific YouTubers do it, or for that matter, teachers. It took me hours and hours to work out how to present the material, and then a bunch of takes of the video before I got one that was adequate. Polyrhythms are my piano obsession, and the one place where I might have something to teach an actual good player.
December 9. My favorite blog, The Whippet, is back from an eight month break, with #181: Much better than horses. There's a nice section about tautological phrases, like "It is what it is," and how the usefulness of these phrases refutes the reductionist theory of language. "The meaning of a sentence is not the meaning of all the individual words put together." The title of the page is about mules, who are superior to horses in almost every way. Quoting a Reddit post:
But mules are not stubborn simply because they feel like; they refuse to do things if they think it's a bad idea, or if they do not trust the human commanding them. I think it's really interesting that for many centuries, humans have been able to get horses (and humans, for that matter) to charge into battle to meet violent deaths. You simply can't get a mule to do that, because mules know better.
And a Reddit thread with lots of good stories, What's the strangest but completely legitimate reason you've ever made a decision?
December 5. Back to doom, starting with two Reddit sub-threads, about ocean fisheries collapsing and electrical linemen retiring.
On the level of political culture, I think Biden's pardon of his son, and the assassination of that health insurance executive, are part of the same trend, and I don't think that trend is moral decline -- as if industrial civilization was ever highly moral.
The trend is that the sphere of public spectacle is now unabashedly Machiavellian. Pundits are worried that this pardon might set a bad precedent, as if Trump would do any fewer pardons because of the shining example of Joe Biden. For fifty years the American left has tried to take the moral high ground, and in all that time they've had solid wins on only two issues, LGBT rights and weed legalization, on both of which they normalized behaviors that used to be considered immoral.
I see little sympathy for the dead CEO, and many jokes. They should look for someone who paid for private health insurance and was denied coverage -- that will narrow the field of suspects to almost all Americans. Or maybe he didn't really get shot, because the bullet wound was a pre-existing condition. A Hacker News comment:
Always seemed pretty strange to me that you can build and oversee an organization widely perceived (whether fairly or not) as evil, host what those evil-perceivers will view as Bad Rich Guy Conference in public, in a country where anyone can get as many guns as they want, and there isn't more violence like this. Seems like an unstable operating point for a society.
December 3. Continuing on death, I do a lot of things to put it off, and these are my top eight health practices, starting with the least controversial.
1) Sugar bad, fiber good. These two go together because fiber mimimizes the toxicity of sugar. 2) Drink mostly water. I drink tap water with an under-sink carbon block filter to take out the chlorine. 3) Avoid highly processed foods. We don't know exactly how, but they're definitely connected to the obesity epidemic. If the ingredients list is longer than it is wide, it's probably bad for you.
4) Walk a lot. A little known reason this is good for you, is that your calf muscles pump lymph fluid, which balances and cleans your body. I think this has something to do with restless legs syndrome. I also wear shoes that allow me to walk on the balls of my feet. It's less efficient than heel-toe, but it's a better calf workout and I believe that it's better for my joints.
5) Somewhere I read that the best detox is a very deep outbreath. That's probably not true, but I tried it, squeezing hard to the bottom of my lungs, and it sure feels like a detox. At first I always cough, as my windpipe tastes the bad air at the bottom. After four or five purges, the breath goes smoothly. I try to do this once or twice a day, and since I started doing it, I have not developed any crud in my lungs, even during my last round of Covid.
6) I believe that grass fed butter is the healthiest fat, and I eat a lot of it. Coconut and avocado oil are probably also good, and olive oil is good if it's not fake. The worst fat is anything partially hydrogenated, especially cottonseed, which is full of free radicals. The second worst, I believe, is the industrial blend of sunflower-safflower-canola that is common in highly processed foods.
7) Get some sun. I believe the present sun phobia will go the way of fat phobia as the evidence accumulates. This is a good article with plenty of science, Is Sunscreen the New Margarine? It's still important to avoid burning, but in summer I use hats and sleeves rather than sunscreen, and in winter I do 5-10 minutes of sunbathing on every sunny day.
8) Every chance I get, I walk barefoot in dewy grass. I believe that it's good for my immune system, and it also provides electrical grounding.
November 29. I have a new Spotify playlist. It's a funeral playlist, so I should explain why I intend to live at least another 20 years: I need to finish two novels, I don't want to abandon my friends and family, I don't want to give satisfaction to my enemies, I want to see more of the apocalypse, and there are still a lot of psychedelics I want to do.
Anyway, most of the songs are just personal favorites that would fit at a funeral or wake, but there are some objectively great funeral songs, like Nick Drake - Saturday Sun and The Kinks - Strangers
November 27. Yesterday I had some cool synchronicity. Right after getting high, I was walking through the Seattle Center, and in front of the autistic fiddler was a guy prancing around and angrily ranting to his phone in a language that sounded like French. Obviously he was making a selfie video, and as I made my way around him, he turned so that I was in the background of the shot, and among the string of words I heard "Ey Prieur".
If I were a paranoid schizophrenic, I'd think I was at the center of a dark conspiracy. If I were a physicalist, I'd say it was meaningless, because my god, meaningless chance, could totally pull that off. Instead I figured I was close to the veil of the interconnectedness of all things, and fate was winking at me to remind me that we never left Fairyland.
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, so here are my recipes for gravy and stuffing. Also, unsweetened cranberry sauce is easy to make. You need a food processor or a powerful blender. Then carefully pick out and throw away all the squishy cranberries, and blend the rest with an equal weight of roughly chopped apples, and some fruit juice, I recommend tart cherry. Try to keep the blending speed low so it's coarse and not soupy.
November 25. The other night I had insomnia and it was the best thing ever. Just chilling in silent darkness, reveling in having nothing to do, feeling the glow of my body, it was so good I didn't want to fall asleep and miss it. I listened to the siren song of tinnitus and wished the night would never end. Now I'm wondering, does that count as meditation?
Part Three of my new novel is up. I actually posted it three weeks ago but didn't announce it because it needed polishing, and if anyone read it early, yesterday I did a deep rewrite of the final section.
November 22. Stray links. Thanks Sam for this movie. She Is A Shaman is a slow-paced documentary about the lives of ayahuasca shamans in Peru, with great music. Just watching it inspires me to do things more slowly, but what I find most interesting is the wide range of technologies they use, from satellite TV to pounding roots with sticks. This is probably how it's going to be for the whole future of humanity, because there will always be some high tech around, but we're coming to the end of our ability to completely encase ourselves in the human-made world. By the way, the director of the movie is the girl from this video, the The "I Love You" Loop.
The Woman Who Defined the Great Depression. Sanora Babb grew up in rural poverty and was a good writer. She signed a contract to write a novel about the Dust Bowl, and to research it, she took a volunteer job resettling refugees and took hundreds of pages of notes. Her supervisor convinced her to turn the notes over to John Steinbeck, who used them to write The Grapes of Wrath, and then because that book already existed, nobody would publish her book.
Babb's work was largely antithetical to that of Steinbeck, and its "message" was a lot more complicated. While Steinbeck focused on the road trip carrying the Joads away from their already collapsed farmland, the entire first half of Babb's novel describes several years of the travails of the Dunne family, who struggle to grow broomcorn and wheat while their land grows increasingly parched, dust-storm-ridden and uninhabitable. In the second half of Babb's novel, the Dunnes don't simply submit to the California farm growers, or lose their temper, like Tom Joad, and flee, but bear down and become increasingly involved with labor organizers and strike actions.
Throw Out Your Black Plastic Spatula. It's probably made from toxic e-waste.
And more 2024 music, Des Demonas - The Duke Ellington Bridge. Their sound is hard to classify, but this particular song manages to sound like both The Velvet Underground and Camper Van Beethoven.
November 19. 
Just got back from Ireland. We picked it because it was cheap. Airfare and hotel for two weeks in Dublin was about the same as for five nights in Hawaii. A few notes.
Dublin is a very walkable city. In a half mile radius there are more good bookstores than in the entire Seattle metropolitan area. We went to all of them, and found some great books, including Listen to the Land Speak by Manchan Magan. I'm always looking for books about weird stuff, and Magan does a great job of making premodern manifestations accessible to mainstream readers. My favorite chapter is about Hy Brasail, an island now considered completely mythical, but it once appeared on respectable maps, and reliable witnesses claimed to have landed there.
And in a bookstore heaped with unfiled books, Leigh Ann picked out a gem that's not even on AbeBooks, The Paranormal Explained by Sean O'Donnell. He explains it as "anti-memory", a framing of precognition that he claims is completely scientific. This is the kind of book I love. The guy is sort of a crackpot, but he's smart and curious, and has lots of tips for being more intuitive.
The best museum in Dublin, everyone agrees, is the Archaeology museum, which is free, and contains breathtaking prehistoric jewelry and some cool bog bodies. The best lesser known museum is 14 Henrietta Street, a fascinating guided tour through a building that started out as upper class and eventually became filthy tenements.
Everyone knows the Irish love Guinness, but I didn't know how much. If you go into a pub and see three Irishmen at a table with three drinks, it's more likely to be three pints of Guinness than all other possibilities combined. In America I drink red ale, but Irish red ale has not kept up and is pretty lame. But where American IPAs tend to hide mediocre beer behind loads of hops and alcohol, Irish IPAs are excellent, typically light and citrusy.
We tried a lot of restaurants, and the best was a Chinese small plates place called Bigfan. But it's expensive and hard to get into. The one we went back to was Forno 500, an Italian place with excellent pizzas and a perfect atmosphere. Also we spent three nights in the west of Ireland, and a great hidden gem in Galway is a Mayan tapas restaurant called Sangria.
November 15. Quick note on travel. It's amazing how it distorts time, and this is somewhat related to money. If you have a few thousand dollars, you can spend it on a month of routine living that feels like a week, or a week of travel that feels like a month. I'm sure there are ways to get the same effect for free.
Quick note on AI. I'm traveling without my laptop, and drafting posts on my phone, which suggests the next word. Occasionally it's better than the word I had in mind, so I'll use it.
AI will never replace human creativity, because creativity is less about the product and more about the experience of making choices. But it can help by giving us more stuff to choose from.
November 10. Just spent a couple hours hanging out with Shane, an Irish leftist. He says everyone he knows is happy that Trump won. Not that they like Trump, but that since he took over the Republican party, the Democrats are the standard bearers for terrible American foreign policy.
He also made an interesting point, that while no Trumpers would ever identify as Communist, they want something similar: for a centralized state to make sure there are lots of manufacturing jobs.
November 7, 2024. Columbus, on meeting the Arawaks, famously wrote that they were such saps that "with fifty men we could subjugate them all." That must be how Trump feels right now. While the Dems are trying really hard and failing, he's like, I can't believe how easy it is to rule these soft and guileless people.
Trump is on a different karmic level. I don't mean that metaphorically, nor do I mean the popular concept of karma as a metaphysical enforcer of our own ideas about reward and punishment. Karma is an alien amoral system loosely related to human morality, with levels we do not understand. I don't know how one person can play life on single player cheat mode, while other players have to share the same world, but that's what it looks like.
Trump is Voldemort, and there is no Harry Potter, only a wide variety of Muggles including two unfortunate categories: Muggles who don't know that magic is real, and Muggles who seek power over others by allying themselves with a powerful wizard who doesn't care about them.
Of all the weird things that Trump's followers believe, the weirdest is that he will keep them safe. Sure, now they're safe from nonexistent dog eating immigrants. But it's the Dems who are so desperately safe that they are fatally un-fun, while Trump is clearly bringing the Apocalypse.
I wouldn't take that myth too literally, but I expect something recognizably similar, and I keep thinking of the Neil Young line: Look around while the clown who is sick does the trick of disaster.
November 1. I'll be traveling for the next two weeks and posting lightly. This is one of the best songs of 2024, and fitting: Sam Abbo - Doomsday
October 30. I voted for Kamala Harris, but I feel like Willy Wonka saying, no, stop, to the bad kids. I must express my disapproval of this tragic and hilarious thing that must happen. Here's one more attempt to explain it:
My D&D Character's Endorsement of Donald Trump
I, Menkalinan the wizard, fell with my party into a strange world. The people are mopey and neurotic, their eyes fixed on a mesmerizing oculus that has the whole population entranced. In this land of miracles, they spend their days in dreary toil, afraid of losing their navel-staring marvels.
The anti-magic field here is so strong that none of my spells work except simple divinations and summonings that never happened. Our ranger finds the land too denuded for even expert foraging. Our barbarian was arrested for public drunkenness and had his battle axe confiscated by a dull bureaucracy. And worst off is our cleric -- her god is dead.
In a pinch, she has turned to the Trickster, whose incarnation, called Trump, promises to upend institutions and shake the people out of their torpor. It is no easy road. Many will suffer acutely, who now only suffer chronically. But we pray that Trump will bookend this sorry age, and bring a new age of magic, so that we can open a portal and get back to Faltramador.
October 28. Back to politics, this election is really frustrating for rational people, because Trump's flaws are obvious, they're exactly what his opponents say they are, while the flaws of the Democratic party are so subtle that it's hard to say why they're losing. The best I can explain it is that the Democrats have obsolete propaganda. In 90 years they have not changed their way of framing economic issues.
I'd like Biden to stand up and say, "My fellow Americans, the state of the union is bad. We live in a declining empire at the twilight of the age of growth, and there's nothing we can do about it. We've been infantilized by social media, we no longer have the skill base to maintain the infrastructure, and we're all going to get poorer except the top tenth of one percent, who pull all the strings including mine. That's why we need boring and competent leadership to keep things from going to absolute shit."
They can't say that because they've dug themselves too deep in the hole of bland optimism. I fully expect Trump to win, if not this year then in 2028, because he has already shown the power to cheat death, and even full-on dementia will not change the reasons people are voting for him. What we have to understand about these times is that there will be no relief.
October 24. I don't feel like posting this week. Here's a classic Reddit comment about science and psychedelics.
We now have our most brilliant minds shackled to an ideology every bit as blinding as the old religious view of Catholicism. "It's all chance" is the "God works in mysterious ways" of our time. It is a fiction perpetrated by an institution invested in a certain way of seeing the world.
October 21. Political links. From 2013, a Reddit comment on the word homeland:
It's hard to explain how weird the word "Homeland" sounds in the ear of a pre-911 American. I can only say that it's not an American word. It's an Old World word.... It's a word used by a besieged, defensive and frightened people; not a word used by a confident, optimistic, powerful people. It's a word for serfs.
From 2017, in simple language, What Is Fascism? A Detailed Guide to a Dangerous Philosophy:
Under the pressures of real economic hardship, the fascist believes the problem can be solved by getting rid of of some undesirable group.... Violence from the bottom up is never to be tolerated. Violence from the top down is seen as equivalent to justice.
From 2019, Could American Evangelicals Spot the Antichrist? It's funny, the people who believe in the Antichrist are almost all under Trump's spell. But a few aren't, and this guy has written an impressive comparison of Bible passages and stuff Trump has done.
I don't believe in the Antichrist, but I believe in meaningful coincidences, in the intelligence of chance, and in the Trickster archetype, of whom Trump is an obvious and powerful incarnation. Related, a thread from the Spirituality subreddit, Could Trump actually be the catalyst that awakened masses?
He is an incredibly accurate and complete representation of America's collective shadow. Of course Americans are recoiling in horror, that's what people do when faced with their own shadow.... You don't put your shadow in charge. You accept it, because the suppression and denigration of those traits is specifically what creates the shadow in the first place.