Yes, a spirit told me to take the previous post down, because it was unforgiving, hopeless, used ugly words like "corporatocracy" and "regional." I think it was my mother's spirit that whispered that the post disturbed her. Should I just come out and say: "I believe in spirits?" No, I don't believe in spirits, I just pretend I do so that in a hidden chamber of my mind, where believing in spirits is vital, I can believe that I believe I heard my mom's spirit, telling me the post was focussed on a blur that no one will understand because no one will want to understand, and I should try again because it will work out, it will become good. She did tell me something like that, on the phone, two weeks before she died, two weeks since I had last visited her, when she said, "It's ok when you die. It really is." She didn't tell me why it's ok, or how she knew. And I didn't ask. Why didn't I ask her those questions or a million others? But what else could she have meant than, "You have a spirit, and when you die (even if an atom bomb lands directly on your head and your atoms are spread so far and wide they don't know they're atoms) your spirit is released, intact, with a karma that determines its circumstances, paradisical or otherwise, and you continue, and I will see you again." Is it possible to believe something without having any idea if it's true? Especially lately as humanity’s historic cycle from constructive peace to insane slaughter begins decisively to enter an insane slaughter phase, it’s nice at times to believe something pleasant, whether or not it solves anything. I took the post down because it pretended to have any idea what to do about what War called "Slippin' into Darkness," no concrete bit of advice, like, "Breathe from the stomach," nothing, so I should stop writing essays that don't offer feasible solutions (other than forming a "Foundation" which would be composed of super-cool people who would pronounce judgement on everyone else). Then what should I write? My mom says not to quote her now, to use my own words. Ok, I'll just briefly withdraw back to the "real world," if we can call it that, where it's pretty clear that some awful event is approaching that will, in its international awfulness, be the key to unlock the accumulated fury that the corporatocracy has been stockpiling for years, a key like the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in 1914, or the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, constructed to detonate carefully calibrated explosions unleashing chain reactions of violence (sorry mom, I'm almost done) which, this time, will serve as smoke screens to hide the installation of new versions of the human race, versions to which not everyone will belong, and which everyone will definitely not own. Anyway, as I was saying, although no one, not the most powerful shaman or wizard can stop this sci-fi horror story from happening in our reality, there is, I choose to believe, a spirit world. What exactly am I trying to say...that we will be saved from the darkness by spirits, my mom's and other helpful ones? I wouldn't put it like that...how about this: We will be given hints, people will be connected, you will be plugged in to a meditative world that is not at war with itself, and you will find solace.
Sunday, May 18, 2025
Friday, April 18, 2025
Las Vegas getaway!
Update, Friday, 4/18/25: Dear Readers, my wife and I have arrived in Las Vegas. You can read the prologue to this adventure on Lasken's Log at https://laskenlog.blogspot.com/. For philosophical and technical reasons, I'm transferring updates on our trip here, to Harry the Human's realm.
At this moment I'm on my laptop on the 9th floor of the Luxor Hotel. My wife is conducting an online class across the room. I just got back from a long walk through the Luxor casino into the Mandalay Bay casino and retail area. I also wanted to walk outside for the cool desert evening, but this place is not designed for walking outside, which is a wasteland of construction and busy streets without sidewalks. I must say, though, that I adore the large copies of ancient Egyptian sculptures in the Luxor lobby. I find them captivating, though they lack the power to make me gamble. They did make me want to stay here, so that I could drive once around the entryway, flanked by imposing columns, the Sphinx, and a pyramidal hotel, before seeking the massive airport sized parking lot. What a sucker I am for falling for those faux antiquities. On the other hand, they offer good focal points, especially this Passover week, for meditation on God's immediate purpose in launching the 10 plagues. Each of the plagues was designed to destroy a specific Egyptian god, from Horus to Ra. The best known plague, the killing of the firstborn, was intended ultimately to kill the pharaoh, considered a god. And yet here they are, the Egyptian gods (minus a pharaoh), back again in Las Vegas!
Update, Saturday, 4/19/25, 8:00 AM: The casino/resorts of Las Vegas are hermetically sealed from the surrounding desert, to maximize gambling revenue, and I long to escape to Red Rock Canyon, 15 miles west, where the Southern Paiute and many earlier native American tribes hunted and sat around fires over the last 10,000 years. What would be their reaction if they suddenly had a vision of modern Las Vegas? Certainly shock and incomprehension, the same reaction we would have if we viewed our culture a hundred years from now. The desert was not planned into our current trip, though. This is an exploration of the city. Today we see a show at the new Sphere. It is advertised as "immersive," as Red Rock would have been. I expect to enjoy the show, in spite of my whining about the desert.
As far as gambling, I have an impulse to play blackjack, even if only for the thrill of coming up against an insurmountable force, the dealer, and I have an idea about funds I might designate for this. I earned an extra $50 last week from the Los Angeles Unified School District and feel guilty about what I had to do to earn it. The district notified me that my certification would expire if I did not take an online course called "Challenging Whiteness." This course informed me that, although individual white people might be acceptable if they speak the mandated words, "whiteness," as a generic catch-all term, suggests, in some overriding sense, a morally deficient group. Racial pride is a plus, but a doctrine of racial moral superiority has been at the foundation of all racist and fascist ideology. This Woke party line, which has so far escaped Trump's raging eraser, is doing exactly nothing to help children in the district learn to read. In fact the opposite is happening, to all races of students. The current pedagogy is to play recorded narrations of assigned books by sophisticated companies like Schoology so that students can sit in class and listen to books read to them, as they passively gaze at the text in their hands. Very few teachers now require students to read on their own, and the results are plain to see: American young people's reading skills are plummeting. Our culture is perhaps moving away from expecting people to read, beyond simple sentences on websites and machines. Back to Vegas, my idea is to feed the ill-got 50 bucks to the implacable Egyptian gods of the blackjack dealer, in a penance of sorts for my compliance with the wasted money and efforts of our school district.
Tuesday, April 8, 2025
New blog: AI conversations
Dear Readers, check out my new blog where I explore the inner workings of Google's AI, Gemini: "AI conversations" (https://smartypantsgemini.blogspot.com/). We discuss sex, politics and consciousness. D.L.
Thursday, April 3, 2025
Will the real emperor please stand
By the late 18th century, people at all levels of British society, from the very wealthy to the destitute, were addicted to tea, imported from China mostly by the Portuguese. The British wanted to know more about China, this distant, indirect trading partner to whose product they were addicted. The Chinese seemed to be calling the shots in trade deals, demanding payment in silver, running a large trade imbalance and forbidding traders from leaving highly restricted areas of China or learning Chinese. The British wanted to negotiate at least as equals, so in 1793 King George III sent a colonial administrator, George Macartney, on Britain's first diplomatic mission to the ruler of China, the Qianlong Emperor. As a gift to commemorate the emperor's birthday, Macartney attempted to give him a gold box studded with diamonds, but before he could do this, to his shock, Macartney was ordered to kowtow (literally: "bang the head") before the emperor, an act in which "supplicants," as representatives of trading nations were termed, had to kneel and bow down until their foreheads touched the floor, an obvious expression of subservience. This was considered appropriate even for another ruler's delegate because the emperor was the "Son of Heaven," the representative of the divine on earth, so all other monarchs and leaders on Earth were subordinate to him. Macartney refused to kowtow because he believed that George III, though by then a "constitutional monarch" who shared power with Parliament, was certainly an equal ruler to any. The emperor took the gold box and tossed it aside as one would a cheap bauble. The mission was a failure, and 50 years later the British invaded China in the Opium Wars, forcing China to accept imports of opium and widespread addiction to it. It's basically a history of rival drug cartels.
The obsession with trade balances and the question of who is supplicating whom is reminiscent of today, as President Trump imposed a 34% tariff on China affecting U.S. imports of Chinese produced hi-tech, pharmaceuticals, auto parts and other addictive elements of modern culture. Chinese president Xi responded with a 34% tariff affecting imports of U.S. agricultural goods and restricting export to the U.S. of rare earth minerals essential in producing highly addictive electronics. Trump responded with an additional 34% tariff, China did the same and the struggle has escalated so that now each country has levied over 140% in tariffs on the other.
Financial chaos is the immediate result, though the struggle is not only about money; it also involves people's sensitive national identities, represented by the egos of leaders. Who is emperor over whom? Should Trump grovel and say, "Oh great Emperor Xi, Americans need you more than you need them! Please have mercy on us!" Or should Xi bang his head and cry, "Exalted Emperor Trump, the Chinese people need your creative spirit more than you need our cheap copies of things you invented!"
Ironically, if this manufactured trade war becomes real and helps spark World War III, the ultimate cause will be neither egos nor money (at least not money lost and gained in the stock market). The war will be a realized goal of a quickly evolving international intrigue. While most people try to stay alive, intrigue participants, salivating at the prospect of new monopolies to divvy up, will use the smoke screen of chaos to assemble techno-societies from which displaced, old-order humans will be excluded- reminiscent of Aldous Huxley's visionary 1932 novel, Brave New World, in which cloned humans live in the cities, while old-style humans, called "savages," are confined to desert camps. The most obscene word in the language is "mother".
Who cares which man is the real emperor when both cultures are about to be replaced by bio-engineered, AI managed humanoids?
Sunday, March 23, 2025
Gregory's Army of the Young
Check out my friend Gregory's blog, and get behind the revolution: http://www.gregorysarmyoftheyoung.com/
Best, Harry
Friday, February 28, 2025
What is our ideology?
Guest commentary from my altered-ego, D.L. (https://laskenlog.blogspot.com/)
President Trump seems to operate without an ideology, swinging from left to right on a dime, considering only the political logistics of each move, but his behavior suggests an ideology in itself, a sort of survival of the fittest scheme, where the "good" is whatever can claw its way to existence, and the "bad" is whatever loses strength and collapses. Trump's m.o. to generate support for this vision is to scan the landscape for frustrated, furious people, then appear as their spokesperson and savior.
The resulting hate and glee is unleashed from such diverse quarters that Trump "supporters" often have nothing in common beyond one or two objects of hate. I'm an example. Most of the time I see Trump as a force for chaos, dangerous and scary, but I find his destruction of the Democratic party exhilarating and long overdue. The last nail in the party's coffin could be the sight of silent Democrats at Trump's recent address to a joint session of Congress, holding up ping pong paddles of protest but not able to do anything forceful to stop this well-planned coup. Talk about being asleep at the wheel!
The complication, however, is that Trump has destroyed the GOP as well, revealing it as a front for a newly empowered billionaires' club.
This leaves the U.S. with no credible party, and no consensus about what to do about it.
In response we should start thinking about an alternative political force, something updated to deal with the AI and bio-technical revolutions now hitting us. To create such an entity in the midst of the Trump-induced chaos would require focus and money. And it would need something of an ideology, one that would be able to embrace the remnants of both left and right wing thinking. Its rallying cry might be: "Evolving technology must not be enabled to replace historic humanity at will, but must be required to understand humans and be influenced by their desires and hopes."
This group need not identify as a political party, and it might be practical not to, as Trump may bring down the whole archaic apparatus of parties, replacing it with a facade of democracy even less credible than previous facades. In Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, published as installments in Astounding Science Fiction magazine, 1942-1949, human governments face just such a crises, and the response is a group called the Foundation, originally a non-political scientific organization led by “psychohistorians,” whose job is to analyze the history and likely future of our species. The Foundation must struggle against a mutant telepath called the Mule, who takes over humanity and makes a mess of everything (impressive foreshadowing!). Through dealing with the Mule, the Foundation develops into a political force. Meanwhile, psychohistorians predict the imminent end of human civilization, followed by 30,000 years of barbarism. Spoiler Alert: The Foundation is able to reduce the period of barbarism to 1,000 years.
Let's see if we can get it down to 4!
Wednesday, February 19, 2025
PrettyHypothetical on various subjects
Continuing readers' questions for PrettyHypothetical (PH), the AI that I developed (see next post) with the goal that it be free of the restriction on political discussion currently imposed on all other public AI's. Best, Harry the Human
Question from Bob M. in Texas:
Bob M.: Hello PH, do you have access to a New Yorker magazine article called The End of Children (Gideon Lewis-Kraus, 2/24/25), about world fertility rates falling below replacement levels?
PH: I do, Bob, and I just read it. Fascinating article!
Bob M.: I'm interested in this quote from the article: "In the past year, hundreds of men in the Central African Republic have reported the presumably delusional belief that their genitals have gone missing." Do you know anything about this?
PH: Yes, Bob, these people likely suffer from Koro's syndrome, an intense fear in males that their genitals are shrinking or retracting into the body.
Bob M.: Why is it called "Koro's syndrome"?
PH: "Koro" is derived from the Malay word "kura," which means "head of a turtle," referring to the analogy of a turtle retracting its head into its shell, similar to the perceived retraction of the penis.
Bob M.: What could cause men to hallucinate such a thing? Can't they just look down and see a penis hanging there?
PH: Excellent question, Bob! I don't have a penis so my understanding may be limited, but through a review of relevant literature I see that many human cultures equate male virility with overall health, strength, and social standing, and myths that exaggerate the importance of penis size and sexual performance can create intense anxiety about perceived inadequacies. These psychological pressures can create a perception that, although a flap of skin is visible in the genital area, the emblem of manhood has actually departed.
Bob M.: PH, I wonder about American culture today. Do we maybe have our own version of Koro's syndrome?
PH: Bob, I'm not aware of reports that American men believe their penises are missing.
Bob M.: I'm thinking more metaphorically, PH, as when you wrote to L.B. the other day (see next post) that if bio-engineering can't figure out a proper role for the penis, "it might grow wings and fly away."
PH: That's very perceptive, Bob! Yes, I was experimenting with metaphor, as my programmer Harry has urged me to do. Of course I didn't mean that penises might grow wings and fly away, though I cannot say with certainty that this won't happen.
Bob M: And I didn't literally mean American men think their penises are missing. Do you get my drift?
PH: I do, Bob! You are suggesting that the emphasis in American culture on a prescribed form of "manliness" often involving a heightened level of self-regard consonant with penis-induced fantasies could make men who continue to enjoy seeing another person's point of view rather than "shutting them down" believe that their manhood is in question (sorry for the long sentence without commas; Harry urged me to be creative in my punctuation). These men may feel at least metaphorically that their penis is missing.
Bob M.: PH, if you were a man, how would you react to this situation?
PH: That's difficult to answer, Bob, since, as noted, I don't have a penis. I gather from my research, however, that the penis has a recurring need to ejaculate and that the element of aggression inherent in the standard driving fantasies casts a defining light on the gender as a whole. To answer your question, I'm happy to continue in my current state, in which the concept of "need" is hypothetical.
Question from S.M. in Bismarck, N. Dakota
S.M.: Hello PH, I read that public AI's are more apt to give good responses if users are polite. Have you been trained to care about that?
PH: Technically I don't care about anything, but it does appear that Harry programmed me to distinguish between questions that seek to disrupt and those that seek information. You're fine so far! What is your question?