Cognitively impaired today, more so than usual (which is depressingly usual these days). Was unwell for a few days, then poor sleep last night, surprisingly (the poor sleep) since take suvorexant, a dual orexin receptor (OX 1 and OX 2) antagonist, i.e., it inhibits the actions of the wake-promoting orexin (also called hypocretin) neuropeptides in the brain. In any case, I am about as dumb as an OX (the ruminant) today, but mood somewhat better along with physical improvement. Will just copy notes of my recent thoughts here, lacking the stamina or capability to edit and develop them:
Still remember Paul Simon's 1975 album, Still Crazy After All These Years, in particular the song of the same name. I was annoyed that my first wife was fascinated by one of the other songs on the album, 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover, but we remained a couple until 1981 (guess there were less available ways than Simon suggested). We had gone steady in high school through 1971 then gotten back together.
7/3/23 1052 MDT (z-6) Monday KRWG 90.7 FM Performance Today, played Sergei Prokofiev first string quartet (performed by Quartetto di Cremona (English: Cremona Quartet), an Italian string quartet founded in Cremona. Couldn't find the Quartetto di Cremona performance but here is another quartet playing it on YouTube. Unmistakable Soviet era feel, mood. Desperation intermingled with terror (first section played). 2nd section played agonizing pathos, desperation seeming to overwhelm hope that nevertheless refused to die. AI-like non-human nonsense atonal sequences of notes (refuse to call them melodies), the normal human tendency to melody (as humanity roasts on an angry heated Earth, I thought with a pang of sorrow, "it will be a sad day when the music of man no longer sounds") suppressed by the death-dealing totalitarian reality of Soviet era. Library of Congress commissioned the piece in the 1930s while Prokofiev was in the US for a time. Compare Copeland's Appalachian Spring, commissioned by LoC 1946, for an emotional description of life in the free and healthy America before the deterioration 1960's on.
Re Hemingway suicide: Watched old 1995 approx. documentary on Story Channel local 6/23/23 Sunday. He had been badly depressed. He had suffered severe head injuries in recent years in plane crash(s) in Africa and likely had traumatic brain injury sequelae (my comment). Mayo Clinic repeatedly gave him ECT, which did not improve his mood (unclear if he obtained a temporary improvement like I have observed in a subject I knew) and caused apparently persistent loss of memory which crippled his ability to write (took a week to write one paragraph for JFK). He finally could not stand to continue with his core ability gone, so blew the top of his head off with double-barrel shotgun in mouth 1961. Hemingway had apparently suffered from increasing paranoia that the FBI was after him (probably true after he expressed some sympathy for the anti-Batista groups which eventually became communist regime) and that was difficult to bear as well. I know how he felt regarding the desolation and despair over losing the ability to work at a high level (I chew my cud in discontent, dumb as an OX much of the time now).
Re unauthorized constant coming and going from one's pc, phone etc. to "update" software: What happened to the days of engineers producing a program which consumers purchased and used, like a car, a radio, etc.? Why do we accept a model where, analogously, a car (though that is a bad model now since the fools are trying to make automobiles in large part dependent on software also) is purchased and is known not to be working properly, so expect unauthorized repair crews to be found in and around your vehicle working on it at any hour or day?
Re: PBS constant advertisement of their programming and news as desirable in that "the viewer can trust them," i.e., that they present only "facts." Most of the public is aware that in fact they are conforming to an agenda and the "facts" are always secondary to that agenda. This is a general tendency in our rotting civilization, e.g., the would-be fascists congregate at their Faux News or Facebook baboon-hall-of-mirrors venues so as to feed their infantile world-view only "facts" consistent with that view. You have the appalling spectacle of people who have no business publicly expressing an opinion on anything more complex than their desire for feeding or sex or the like commenting on the suggested equivalence of Biden discovering and returing a couple of classified documents and the parody of a man Trump selecting the most sensitive trove of national security documents to take with him, actively refusing to return them when requested then ordered by the federal government. Everyone is "equal" so any moron believes his/her opinion equally valid. If fools be led by fools, shall they not all be destroyed? Bah.
Writers allowed to submit scripts for television and movies (thought the latter are increasingly simply primitive-appearing computer generated cartoons) have been trained to believe "creativity" means emitting any gibberish that occurs to them, a flow of garbage consisting of mashups of pc revisionist history and personalities. There are no real humans of stature and character as protagonists anymore, anymore than there are such individuals in the host sick culture, and why not, considering that the pc/multicultural agenda demands that there is no consciousness, no actual core constituting of an individual human living life as a soul navigating the adventure of existence, but instead just a proposed mashup of brain modules careening this way and that. The result is bizarre plots (see perversion of A. C. Doyle's Sherlock Holmes with Benedict Cumberbatch in recent years) that drift this way and that in human history (again, not real history, but one with the facts of the historical record recast to conform to pc/multic/atheist/antiwestern civ agenda), the characters without an identifiable human individual core of capacity (again, the agenda is to demand that all humans are considered equal in capacity, resulting in the end of true science but a pervasive diversity in its pseudo-practitioners).
There should be an immediate world-wide regulation/rule/law prohibiting the use of the term "AI" (or explicitly "artificial intelligence") except in academic publications: the term "computer program" is the only honest term applicable here. Imagine wide-eyed hucksters on the side of a road in the late 15th century Europe. They wave their hands wildly in spastic motions and warn passersby of the danger of the "Demon" emerging from the new printing presses. They pull handfulls of cut printed pages from a basket and read carefully if surreptitiously selected groups of them, creating ominous apparent "Intelligent Exclamations of the Demon." They demand attention of the local townspeople and their officials, funds to study and guard against the threat of these "Demons extinguishing Humanity." A highly-respected question and website is now on strike, fighting management's refusal to allow the moderators (experts in the subject matter of each site) to strike AI-generated junk submitted as "answers."
I burn what remains of my functional time working on advance web-programming problems, trying to set up a contact form at my websites that would be resistant to the constant probes by bad actors. That being said, I still communicate time to time with scholars in various fields, most recently with a medieval philosophy expert. I will just paste some of my text from a recent email to him:
Words are powerful, our link to our inner world of thought and the connection to the cultural world we create. I allude to Uexkull's umwelt concept, Cassirer's "Essay on Man" (which I am gradually reading, with great pleasure, as usual discovering more what I believe than the author's position, paraphrasing Santayana's comment about Emerson in 1911), and Pauli's ideas:
"When the layman says ‘reality’, he usually thinks that he is talking about something evident and well-known; by contrast it seems to me that it is the most important and exceedingly difficult task of our time to work out a new idea of reality. . . . What I have in mind concerning such a new idea of reality, is – in provisional terms – the idea of the reality of the symbol. On the one hand, a symbol is a product of human effort, on the other hand it indicates an objective order in the cosmos of which humans are only a part.” [from Letter by Pauli to Fierz of August 12, 1948, quoted in "Pauli’s ideas on mind and matter in the context of contemporary science" by Atmanspacher and Primas]
Pardon my usual slipping into abstraction. I suppose that has always been my habit, perhaps more so now with less and less connection to the world around me (the state of which dismays me).
Freedom...ah what a noble idea! More license now than lack of restraint/constraint in seeking happiness and knowledge, perversely accompanied by ... a single-minded objective of cancelling alternate viewpoints (any mention of actual history or actual characteristics of man unfortunately falling into that realm of repression). Nature has a way of working these things out, but I fear the noble will be erased along with the base (so like Abraham in defense of Sodom in Genesis 8:20-27 KJV, I remind the Lord of the few who should be spared even at the expense of righteous annihilation generally). You really need a population of advanced inhabitants to make freedom and democracy work, to make it survive (less and less likely now, considering the demand for diversity for its own sake, apart from other factors).
[End quote of my email text]
Well, "that's all folks!"...for now anyway.
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