Taomeow

I know it's a serious matter, but I can't resist offering my favorite movie scene dedicated to anger management: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEE7xzwogMc

You are, first and foremost, a smart man. Consequences may occasionally pan out to be -- what's the word I'm looking for -- severe? alienating? politically incorrect? I used to have a roommate and friend who was a gay white man. He was not proud of being either, but it so happened that I helped him accomplish something he became so proud of that he kept bragging to everybody every chance he got, even though for everybody else it wasn't an accomplishment at all... He came from a wealthy family and grew up in a community completely shielded from the rest of the world, and all he knew about swimming was always done in swimming-pools, by everybody he knew. (He was alienated from his family at the time I made his acquaintance.) So we went to the beach and I gave it all I had to convince him that the ocean was, well, swimmable. He doubted it. Waves. No boundaries. Sand, wind, all that weird stuff you don't encounter in a swimming-pool. I shamed him into trying, and he discovered he liked it so much that I had a hard time getting him to finally get out of the water. He was happier than I'd ever seen him. So he proceeded to brag to everybody he knew and even to strangers, just mentioning nonchalantly something along the lines of, "how was your weekend? Me, I went swimming in the ocean..."

Mint breeze enfolds me. Don't know about the people, but scarecrows look cool. (with a nod to Kobayashi Issa's late Edo period classic: "Approaching my village: Don't know about the people, but all the scarecrows are crooked.")

Interesting bilingual play of words for me. Lei is, incidentally, the Russian for "pour" in the imperative mood. Leika -- a watering can, and also the diminutive of Leia. Lei-ka -- same as lei but the imperative mood is expressed more informally.

I care for others, I don't care for still others -- like the falling rain.

That was such a silly movie. But of course Raquel Welch was an inspiration. I remember thinking she had nothing on me except for that leather and fur bikini -- but I so envied that outfit! (We had to wear uniforms in school... brown dress, black apron, white apron for holidays. A white collar and white cuffs to go with that dress -- you had to sew them on by hand, or rather baste so you could remove them easily enough because you had to change them often -- the ones that weren't pristinely white weren't tolerated. Civilization is overrated.)

Double double post and trouble

Depends on what you borrow that money for... I suppose it can go either way, or even both ways. E.g. if I borrowed money from myself to invest in gold 30 years ago, it would have made me poor then but wealthy now. Conversely, if I borrowed money from myself to invest in Enron 30 years ago, it would have made me wealthy then but poor now. Our situation is different though -- American government borrows money from American me the taxpayer but owes it to American them -- the Federal Reserve (20%), government trust funds (25%), private domestic investors (25% -- banks, mutual funds, insurance companies, etc..) to a total of 70% of the $33 trillion dollar debt owed to them, not to me. The remaining 30% owed to foreign countries is obviously also not owed to me even though it's been taken from me.

I don't know his work at all, but I've seen the structure of Time through ayahuasca-opened eyes. The "present" was like an observation point from which I could look at Time in all directions, the easiest was looking down onto the past. It was like a layered cake of winding rivers (or maybe of one river snaking this way and that way, its segments layered on top of each other), going all the way into deep infinity. The layers were see-through, so I could look down at the recent past, further down at the past that was more remote, etc.. Rivers were not just loopy but some loops did indeed cause Time to flow backward. I could focus on a particular section and "zoom in." It also appeared that I could dive anywhere into that river from my observation point -- but it was as scary as jumping from the edge of a cliff into an abyss, so I didn't. (I also didn't want to go UP but SHE dragged me there anyway and showed me the source of all that flow. This source I should liken perhaps to a dripping sink or some plumbing piping underneath it -- Time we experience and everything in it was apparently a side effect of operations of that "sink," That World -- a very incomprehensible place where you couldn't tell biology from technology, a bit like one of those Borg cubes and a lot like one of those Mesoamerican bas reliefs. SHE wanted to show and explain things to me but that place terrified me and I begged HER to get me outta there.)

I'd be all for being sent back to the stone age -- provided my own age would be prenatal, or to be precise, pre-conception. Once you're carried in the mother's womb and born and raised in the technology age, it's game over for the stone age adaptation purposes -- to the same, or greater, extent as being born and raised in the stone age is game over for your functionality in the technology age. If I were to choose a reincarnation plan though, I would definitely have my intent set tens of thousands of years back. I wonder if reincarnating back in time is possible. (Don't see why not -- some folks even retain vague impressions of technology from their previous incarnations into times that are "future" to their present ones. Some of those carriers of slightly under-erased memories of things-to-come become inventors and some write sci-fi, the rest just have strange dreams from time to time. I sometimes get future tech dreams -- I even thought of trying to patent some of the things I saw, but I'm too tech lazy. The ones I saw were very benign -- e.g. a far superior thingie as replacement for the cast they presently put on a broken limb, a large feather-weight umbrella that, when folded, can fit in your wallet... stuff like that.)

/\ key word "art." Meaning maybe murals, artistic photos, collages, what not that might fall under the category? "AI art" is an oxymoron though. What it really is is a technology for producing banal kitsch in order to stunt people's esthetic development, as part of the overall dumbing-down effort. (Although acclaimed art in the traditional sense has also produced many atrocities of abysmal taste and quite a few money-laundering scams, presented as "art" by corrupt critics and accepted by the public because there's many ways to play the public like a fiddle.)

@Nungali It's most definitely a direct quote from Lenin who asserted, in one of his numerous fantasy stories economy-related articles (which poor me had to study in school) that "once we've built communism, we will make toilets out of solid gold." I doubt Trump is a communist, don't know about the authors of the article (didn't open it because my computer issued some kind of warning about a redirect somewhere I didn't dare tread), but I think this is something that would find itself at home in the Current Events section... oops... presently nonexistent. I do not intend to break the rule about its nonexistence here -- if I mention something like the dynamics of the national debt, that's not "current," it's "habitual" -- started in the 1980s and then sharply skyrocketed in 2020 and onward. Incidentally we owe most of it internally, to our very own money-reinventing companies -- Japan is but a drop in that bottomless bucket.

Million, billion, trillion -- in many (most?) people's minds any which number with many zeroes is just "a lot." But there's lots and then there's other lots. Here's an interesting way to put them in perspective: A million seconds ago was May 23rd A billion seconds ago was 1993 A trillion seconds ago was 30,000 B.C. The US national debt is now rising by $1 trillion every 180 days.

Not just the animals' behavior changes under those temperatures, it looks like the human physique changes too, and with uncanny speed at that. Once I noticed, I just had to follow all those amazing transformations. At first the man is beardless and has a full head of hair, then at 3:33 he's still beardless but bald as a knee, at 4:13 his hair is back, praise the Lord, at 4:48 it turns black and he's grown a lush black beard in the past 35 seconds, only to shave it off at 5:24, then at 7:14 his beard is back with a vengeance but now it's grey, so at 8:03 he gets rid of it, and by 10:40 it's grown back and it's not grey anymore. I should have been looking at the cats the whole time instead. AI or not, real story or not, cats (with the exception of the poor artificially bred sphinx) are always furry. It's humans that can't seem to decide on the proper level of hirsuteness.

I chanced upon a Magritte exhibition in New York once, at the Met. It's interesting how reproductions give one an idea of "what it's about" and of whether "I like it," but originals do more -- not speaking out of snobbery, just my experience. I believe this "more" is about qi. Magritte played a lot with one of my favorite ideas -- increasingly displaced in modern times -- that the map is not the territory, the cat walking in the street is not the cat video, the caffeine pill is not coffee, the symbol/image/representation/idea is not reality. "The tao that can be told is not the eternal tao," ditto the tao that can be painted, videotaped, AI generated, reduced to a meme, a slogan, a simulacrum. Sometimes he was more than explicit about conveying this idea -- as here, driving the point across with no frills: This is not a pipe. And sometimes, less obviously, the idea that our inner representation/evaluation of things is not proportional to their actual nature, significance and dimensions: Personal values Rape: