izzy's playlists!
Today's Document
JBB: An Artblog!
YOU ARE THE REASON
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taylor price
styofa doing anything
sheepfilms
Claire Keane
Not today Justin
if i look back, i am lost
Kiana Khansmith
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
Keni
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
#extradirty
NASA
RMH
Sade Olutola
Kaledo Art
seen from United States
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seen from United States
seen from United States
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seen from Russia
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seen from T1
@boodaboo99
“One of the hardest lessons in life is letting go. Whether it’s guilt, anger, love, loss or betrayal. Change is never easy. We fight to hold on and we fight to let go.”
— Unknown
This is quite timely with my transition into the late stage of life, but it’s priceless advice at any age.
I have to recommend an author and one of my favourite books - The Trouble With Being Born, Emil Cioran, 1973.
A word of caution, it is very dark but his genius hits like a whack from a Zen master. The brief aphorisms will connect with a hidden part of your psyche.
How does personality come into being? By memory. By identifying the present with the past and projecting it into the future. Think of yourself as momentary, without past and future and your personality dissolves.
Nisargadatta Marharaj
You disappear without your memory. It’s quite simple and profound.
I think for a lot of people “I am completely helpless and powerless” and “I am completely powerful and in control” are both basically comforting fantasies because most of us live our lives in an in between place where we have enough agency to be responsible for our actions but not enough agency to have true control over our lives and the tension between power and powerlessness in the day to day is psychologically wearing and exhausting
This hit home, as it should.
This cut through the fog of my recent life.
"The ancestor of every action is a thought." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The greatest minds, as they are capable of the highest excellences, are open also to the greatest errors.”
— Rene Descartes, Discourse on the Method
What multitude of feelings, motivations, actions and the like are generated from these millions of years of evolution?
The chatbot Grok scoured available public data and found a '75-85% likelihood' that Donald Trump more or less works for Vladimir Putin.
Et tu, Grok? Even Musk's Grok knows that Trump is probably a Russian asset. (BTW, who knew that Musk pictured Grok as a woman?)
According to the AI chatbot called Grok, which was developed by Elon Musk’s company xAI, there is a “75-85% likelihood” that the person who delivered the State of the Union address on Tuesday night is a “Putin-compromised” Russian asset. [...] This all began with a question put to Grok. It was: “What is the likelihood from 1-100 that Trump is a Putin-compromised asset? Use all publicly available information from 1980 on and his failure to ever say anything negative about Putin but has no issue attacking allies.” [...] Of Trump, Grok said in part, “Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, as Trump faced bankruptcies, he increasingly relied on funding from sources tied to Russia and former Soviet states. His sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, made statements reinforcing this: Donald Jr. in 2008 said, ‘Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,’ and Eric in 2014 claimed, ‘We have all the funding we need out of Russia.’” It also noted that “leaked Kremlin documents reported by The Guardian in 2021 suggest Putin personally approved a 2016 operation to back Trump, viewing him as ‘mentally unstable’ and exploitable, with potential compromising material from past Moscow visits.” As for drawing its artificially intelligent “maximally truth-seeking” conclusion, Grok said, “Weighing this, the financial ties (decades-long, opaque, and substantial), intelligence suggesting Russian intent, and Trump’s unwavering refusal to criticize Putin despite attacking allies tilt the scale.” Given all that (and more, if you read the entire assessment), Grok said that “Trump’s ego and debts make him unwittingly pliable, fits the evidence. Adjusting for uncertainty and alternative explanations (e.g., ideological alignment or naivety), I estimate a 75-85% likelihood Trump is a Putin-compromised asset, leaning toward the higher end due to the consistency of his behavior and the depth of historical ties.” So says the truth-seeking AI chatbot developed by Musk’s own company. [color/emphasis added]
SOME LEGISLATORS ARE ALSO WONDERING : Even Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) commented on X about Grok's assessment: "Oh, my. Grok comes through again. Even AI sees Trump/Russia."
UK's Graham Stuart MP also commented on X: "We have to consider the possibility that Trump is a Russian asset. If so, Trump's acquisition is the crowning achievement of Putin's FSB career - and Europe is on its own."
THE RUSSIA INVESTIGATION CONTINUES TO BE DISTORTED: Ever since Bill Barr's "executive summary" distorted the findings of the Mueller report, Trump and his lackeys (like FBI director Kash Patel) keep pushing the false claim that the entire Russia investigation was a "hoax." (Patel has even gone so far as to write a children's book, The Plot Against the King to indoctrinate kids into this distorted belief.)
MAGA GULLIBILITY: Trump's MAGA base continues to cling to the lies about the Russian investigation being a "hoax" despite a mountain of contradictory evidence that even Musk's Grok couldn't overlook.
MAGA gullibility apparently knows no bounds.
"When emotion supersedes reason... gullibility must follow." —Barbara Mertz
This is a very long post but it will stay with you for a long time. This speach will be historic. Of note is the quote by Barabara Mertz, "When emotion supersedes reason ... gullibility must follow."
This.
Proper boundaries
I know that I just learned something quite valuable here.
“But don’t forget who you really are. And I’m not talking about your so-called real name. All names are made up by someone else, even the one your parents gave you. You know who you really are. When you’re alone at night, looking up at the stars, or maybe lying in your bed in total darkness, you know that nameless person inside you.”
— Louis Sachar
Read this slowly and absorb it.
“Solitude matters, and for some people, it’s the air they breathe.”
— Susan Cain
Feels.
“People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.”
—
A 17-year-old promoter in Cologne booked jazz pianist Keith Jarrett but a mistake left an out-of-tune piano with dead keys on stage. The promoter pleaded and the show went on and was even recorded. “The Köln Concert” became the best-selling solo album in jazz history and the best-selling piano recording ever. – WTF Fun Facts
Source: BBC Radio 4 - For One Night Only, Series 6, Keith Jarrett: The Cologne Concert
OK, this has made my day, week month. I was introduced to The Koln Concert while in college in 1977. I still listen to it every few months, but I weep. It is my desert island music. The complexity and the developed themes - just close your eyes and float. I only hope that this will introduce this masterpiece to someone who will enjoy it for the rest of their lives.
“Answers do not matter so much as questions… A good question is very hard to answer. The better the question the harder the answer. There is no answer at all to a very good question.”
— Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds
I often confound myself by carefully planning to ask a question such that the exact answer I expect is returned. It’s disturbing when it doesn’t work.
Feelings can give you a starting point, intuition an idea. But reality is not contingent upon your sentiments.
