What if the only remaining option for pulling your sister out of a coma appeared to be Ancient Egyptian medicine? Would you start placing old curios in a circle around your doctor as per his directions? Or could you resist?
we're not kids anymore.
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Peter Solarz
RMH

⁂
Xuebing Du
will byers stan first human second

Kiana Khansmith
cherry valley forever

Kaledo Art
One Nice Bug Per Day
todays bird
almost home
Cosimo Galluzzi

titsay
ojovivo

Product Placement

izzy's playlists!

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sheepfilms
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@gettingdialectical-blog
What if the only remaining option for pulling your sister out of a coma appeared to be Ancient Egyptian medicine? Would you start placing old curios in a circle around your doctor as per his directions? Or could you resist?
Obama Circuit Equation
[Wide angle image of Earth from space]
“Reacting to a {climate truth}-of-spiking-heat" and a backlog of unexecuted rules, the Obama White House has been building statistical C02 equations “unattempted yet by other admins”---symbolizing tailpipe gas and (maybe not) the methane from e.g., each bison. The way the rhythm goes in fine print just released: “Under Executive Order 12866, agencies are required, to the extent permitted by law, “to assess both the costs and the benefits of the intended regulation...”
What Costs and Benefits? How? Ultimately:
“Maybe the feeble lakes and swamps
Of the back country will get plugged into the circuit
And not just the major events but the whole incredible
Mass of everything happening simultaneously and pairing off.”
New gases were found to be implied in the Clean Air Act. So, not far off(?): executive orders could allow for some kind of Foundation study of planetary destiny: the statistical, future-tracking of masses, the big equations that say: "This is what's going to happen to all of us" could point toward the existence of free will, etc. In the meantime, could there be mail-in forms with blanks about household resource use? Yes (not now---but soon): If the Common Law is a living thicket---And a(nother) constitutional law professor president and his cabinet can find a way to reread the Clean Air Act and do an end-run around a immobile entity that includes congress.
Death +/- Gloves
Second One: There's a checkout counter receipt coming: In one vision, there's probably: bisphenol A on the surface of the thermal sheet that just got metal-tooth-ripped and handed over. Thousands, millions of BPAs: two nanohexagons carboned together over and over in ink and the paper's rubbing off on fingers: in another world there they are, the molecules heading dowgullet toward glands. At which point: who knows? Someone says that the nanochains are heading to help some cells build tumors and cancer death cemetery silk flower displays. So, maybe time for work gloves...?
Second Two: “Oh, I don’t need a receipt. Thanks.”
If you were a dinosaur what kind of dinosaur would you be?
[via]
A "2030s" asteroid death is casting shade [wwwwwhhhhh-ush]— already:
If I were crunching next to lava flows,
and strangers fiended through the jungle brush:
(1.) “RRRRAAAWR!” / (2.) “Danger! Danger!
Babies to nest”
then would I think: ‘Oh, yeah,
somewhere Light
above me sparks in in night pictures
from a metal rock that I’d never eat’?
Would I think to start a night watch team to
slingshot coconut mountains against it
for the safety of the day? Maybe not.
And who would find some bones like mine
in m[etal/uddy] sha[d/ll]ows
caked and dried and packed and
baked up into hills:
who/me? and my egg selves saying
that the dust on
us had something tinny to it?
400 PPM
[via]
A worldwide climate change legend has a new chapter about 400 ppm - the atmosphere has hit 400 parts carbon dioxide to million whatever the atmosphere is made of - as if this C02-level might do something to the sky—with "red lines" of gassy heat bounced in from the sun/etc snaking upward to the atmosphere where they trapped like birds inside greenhouse glass, heating and distorting the world-under-the-blue-dome: mega(er)-churning hurricanes targeting your coast, mega(er)-wildfires, super(er)-droughts, etc.
Hmmm...in movies we're somehow going to space. In movies about movies, the atmosphere is kind of like that story about the map, the map that is made to cover the entire Empire:
the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it....
And much later:
there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
Speaking of which, there could always be new maps to make about the Earth and the atmosphere. So many textures. It could be a hoax like in that one Michael Crichton book about the poles. It could be a hoax like the legend where there's a Michael Crichton-ish writer who realizes that there's demand for a book about how climate change is a hoax. Or C: both A and B. Speaking of map-making, 400 PPM, it could also be like the story of the anarchist wasps and cartographer bees: the heat goes up, the map changes, and the people who don't believe in (the) order end up losing their land to the mapmakers. The conquerors have their stingers ready and give their order: "Write!"
Moving along.
Work Time
1. At what point is it better to stop talking about the weight of a lifestyle on what's around it? (Тhe ecofootprint from the time that you bought shrimp, and they ended up clearing some mangroves in Thailand or somewhere to raise more shrimp/tilapia in industrial lagoons and the fisherman who lost their seashore-jungle ended up going inland to clear trees to plant crops and the ambient temperature and temperature extremes possibly went up, which maybe you felt back in America, looking out through the fine dust blowing across the Pacific from Asia, which was the moment when you thought about buying a drink, before you went out to garden and...)
2. At what point is it time to stop saying organic and "be like," it's good to eat organic and finally change clothes and start—
3. There are times when worrying about moving tomatoes across state lines seems like something to do: it seems like a time to protect them from the greenhouse heat of a car and take them into the mall to possibly decide against finding "some kind of respectability outfits" ...but then, really, you're driving, and...
The Desert o[f/r] Los Angeles
Econometrics
Why spend a "college bookstore amount of money" on an econometrics textbook? That much money adds up to, oh, basically enough to buy a month of eating bulk chickpeas, kale, peanut butter, or something.
Why spend that much? Maybe because when Karl Marx looked at corn and iron and when he looked at a table, he imagined that the ghost of exchange value was hovering behind it, a seemingly arbitrary and possibly menacing value. He seemed to believe that this abstraction runs roughshod over something called use value, the real, raw, sticky, crunchy, directly cravable part of life. Flowing arbitrarily, though? Really? Aren't there reasons for all these prices?
Surviving a Sunstorm at Home
So, you try to check your phone for Facebook updates. It feels like the right thing to do.
The phone doesn’t even light up. The battery was full and it won’t even turn on. Hmmm....
You open your computer. You’re going to zombie through the Huffington Post, the Drudge Report, whatever.
Nothing. The same thing. Black screen.
You’re at a window and try turning on the lights. Nothing. No light. Which is when you notice: the hum of electronics is missing. No noise from the fridge.
This Article is About Taxing Stock Options?
Somewhere supercomputers are maybe reading this post. Somewhere supercomputers are extracting keywords from this post and aggregating them with keywords from other articles and Twitter feeds. They're tracking the frequency of words and overcoding them with an algorithm that is gaming out the chances that, yes, there will be a stock market transaction tax in Europe and/or the US and/or somewhere like Japan. Other investment algorithms will have to [be] adjust[ed] accordingly because there will surely be, on balance, less of a profit to make from high-frequency trading, right? The kind of high-frequency trading that supposedly entered an amplifying feedback loop that triggered an emergency at the New York stock exchange and other exchanges around the world. The Flash Crash was somehow markets around the world automatically (read: automatedly) plunging as the software at quantitatively-driven firms responded to the software at other firms. People panicked and some watched icily as their assets plunged and rebounded.
These algorithms and the former economics and finance majors who run them are all maybe “wondering” in their various ways: where do we go from here? Some people are asking: what are we going to do: we get our Christmas Lexus leases from this HFT money; we were going to send our kids to that boarding school or that somehow-expensive Quaker day school. "We were even thinking of investing in a fixer-upper farm (beach house) out in Hunt Country (the Cotswolds, the Hamptons, etc) But one of them could think that maybe in the long run a Tobin Tax would make it easier to get that dream life that "I’m kind of just pretending to already have(?) Do I like the hypothetically easy money that I can skim off a robo-driven market swing? How do I say that some parts of me are claiming: denomadize this life and the bucking markets that it seems to mirror?"
Semi-Droned Law
Laser-beaming robots could be flying over Yemen now. Or who knows, they could be practice-bombing targets over US soil, launched by guidelines just-discovered-to-have-lurked-there-latent in the Anglo-Saxon Common Law. This semi-droned specter animates an entire legal system whose pasts-that-pass-for-reasons stretch back deep past mead-halls—it stretches back to pasts that are maybe older than a monster-darkened wilderness, with roots that seem specifically to grow from Runnymede where an English King signed vellum on the meadow, where an English King surrendered sovereign rights to barons who'd put together something called the Magna Carta. And the Magna Carta has all these crucial parts in it like: “NO Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed...” With a seal melted onto the vellum or whatever they used to sign it, every single man (or, like, in some revised spin-off documents: every person) would be subject to the law of the land, one big zone-continuum under the rule of some legitimate paper; and after British law gave birth to a rebel-baby US version—and also after an American version expanded—now the law could be everywhere, maybe out on other planets. Forever.
Video Games
You weren’t going to play video games. This could have to do with vibes that some lifestyles were out of touch with a future truth(?), an ancient truth(?), the truth of some kind of economic base between the electronic things: "I've been hearing about Karl Marx..." Somehow the truth was like one of those magazines, the ones where they show teens who are enmeshed in some sort of flows of capital, and somehow playing video games vampires their lifeforce because they go up into a simulation and don’t think about how Super Mario or whatever is a blooping, scrolling light interaction that is distracting from some story about how the people who made the game in China all sleep on cots in some sort of 8000-person dormitory (prison?) and maybe eat concrete in their food and can’t get their union recognized and no one will hear about their picketing, and it'll just be reported as some crowd getting in a fight outside the factory gates, etc.
Some people play some video games because of some legend about how they force you to focus on the present rather than rushing, concepting off into "cloud country" of some world of forms where there are all these tweets about Marx and what can you do with them?
You’re going to play some video games because of some legendary truth about what happens to people who don’t play video games. Maybe they’re like people who watch Wheel of Fortune, eat TV rays, eat Werther’s butterscotch candies, think about being babies, zero in on a baby, and somehow they’ve come unstuck in time, grandma—grandpa—uncle whoever, and can’t deal with: "where are my keys?"
Somehow some major-experts bear this out: there are all these studies showing that people who play memory games are less prone to dementia or...
Thrift Shop
"Thrift Shop”'s on the radio somehow. On the radio in Kentucky, on the radio in Indiana and {>>>}: there's this Macklemore clubrapstrutting new-old clothes.
This could be a song about dangerous cravings out of sync with the moment on the radio, when the DJ is, like: "50 straight minutes of all-the-top-hits. DJ, turn it up-Up-UP. There's an Easter Sale at Macy's."
Whatever. Macklemore has some vibes, maybe: coming in the doors, saying “WUDDUP, I’ve got a [rooster noise]..."
And maybe someone at Clear Channel and Cumulus Broadcasting is worried enough to share it. Somehow: why couldn't there be another summer-time 2011 London free-for-all: kids ransacking discount racks at a northside high-street H&M, the neighborhood JD Sports, KFC, McDonalds. Like the turnover of clothes and flash fashion chains and looking-good were part of some pre-planned high-velocity machine that could misfire and get kids to coordinate break-ins via txt and throw rocks to get some new overalls or the new chrome-plated jorts or whatever.
"Next slide": when the [whoever-those-people-are] burn down your London data centers how can you microtarget them with craveables?
This could be a partial misreading. The song could have a nice horn riff. Like, it's a novelty song. "Next: Justin Timberlake - Mirror etc...You’re just like a mirror/whoa-oa/mirror staring back at me/whoa-oa.”)
But, OK. Still: "The Salvation Army in town has piles of 99 cent Danielle Steel novels."// "wlkng thr nw."
The Asteroid That Will Kill You‽
The asteroid Apophis will hit the Earth in 2036‽ Then you'll die‽ Most of us will‽
Maybe would-be-friends-we'll-never-meet will get to feel vibrations from the rock if they end up flying shuttles in from other planets. The impact dust - and waves - and flames will somehow feed some life-unfriendly clouds around the globe before they part and let in sun in 2037‽
The Earth might miss the rock. But the sun cooks up some waves that blows the stuff in outer space around in mystery-patterns, so there's still this chance...
Neil deGrasse Tyson is an actual(?) astrophysicist and reveals this possible future in a Wired Magazine article, "We can Survive Killer Asteroids - But It Won't Be Easy". Wired.com commenters maybe read about how Apophis "could fill the Rose Bowl" and then they started sorting out some crucial facts involving Sarah Palin, the Republican Party, or possibly the Liberals, or some Plot-Against-the-People. Also: would conservatives have been loyal to the King during the American Revolution(?):
So anti-war libs would have fought the war of independence and pro-constitution conservatives would have stayed under Barack (I mean George) III? To think they let folks like you vote and have children. (Well, abortions.)
Another timestream involves studying physics (for free online or wherever) and deflecting a large object - or maybe writing camp songs about teens and asteroid physics. Obama might be an "Illuminatus", "Communist", "Republican", and even an "Islam". And somehow it turns out he could have been giving relevant advice (and living a soap opera) in State of the Union addresses when he said Americans could stand learning more math and science skills.
Living With Coal
[via]
Last year, a crowd surrounded Kentucky's State Capitol, a parade of teens and grandmas holding signs: "Topless Mountains are Obscene" / "Support the Clean Streams ACT" "End Mountaintop Removal" "RENEWABLE ENERGY". This one gravel-throated man in the thick of it shouted all the way up Capital Avenue: "My daughter's lungs are black! My eyes are burning too! Dear Mister Governor, Happy Valentine's to you!"
Maybe they were mad about some scientist legends. There's that one connecting mining to high rates of cancer and poverty - and some story that coal-fired power plants are killing the world we know.
The thing is, even if a carbon-heavy “biosphere” gets too wild, hot, or toxic for some oxygen breathers, some of us could still live under bubbles or upload our minds into a new kind of digital lifestyle. Right now, greenhouse gas-emitting plants are powering America’s grid and helping scientists create new creatures. Nanobots, cyborgs, and probably some other programs are (on the verge of) taking up residence in silicate and airborn Internet zones.
Meanwhile, coal plants are helping support the market that can produce a future where we join them. That one 2011 study may have shown that the coal industry places a 571 million dollar net burden on Americans every year in diseases and environmental damages, but these “damages” are another name for gifts. With hospital bills and cleanups people have new ways to make money and boost economic indicators like Gross Domestic Product.
This could make sense. Apparently, Alan Blinder is a Princeton economist and he says we’re already supposed to be money-chasing programs. He also has this vision that we can thrive in correlation with a rising National Product. So, the year could be 2080 or "835 Flavor Zone$" in coal-powered cyber-simulations, and we're really working our algorithms to help currency spin faster.
In the meantime, the prophecy stands that we’re approaching a singularity: somehow we'll no longer create machines who serve us, but will just serve machines. This might be news if the world weren’t already full of systems beyond our control.
Speaking of which, to judge by the crowd in Frankfort, Kentucky, some people are really attached to the bodies they already have.
How could a teen dialectician approach making New Year's resolutions?
Time is probably rolling by. And years, too?
Somehow years could be relevant. Recycling that one Donovan song, we could also end up with this:
First there is a New Year's
Then there is no New Year's
Then there is.
Lifestyles supposedly happen because there's some latitude for action. Real teens may not make history just as they please, but New Month's or New ____'s are milestones, good points to believe that things are gonna be different now.
National Holidays
[photo via]
Thousands of Argentines disappeared between 1976 and 1983. Friends and family tend to blame the military junta that ruled the country, but who knows? They may have gone on vacation. Given the level of state secrecy at the time, we're free to imagine crowds of missing dissidents on the beach, at resorts, really getting it going.
The new National Defense Authorization Act could help more people could go on indefinite holiday in a mystery zone outside the public sphere. You could be held, for reasons unknown (to you), at Guantanamo Bay - 'til death do you part.
The United States would seem to be a little different from Argentina in that it has a tradition of habeas corpus: people accused of crimes have the option of formally challenging their imprisonment. This could be one of those traditions that many of us find nice. The widespread protests against the NDAA would suggest as much, also suggesting that the future legitimacy of the federal government's actions rest on using these powers with discretion. Otherwise, the formulation that they're protecting us from violent fiends could quickly invert and teens could start saying, "They are the fiends infringing on our special freedoms!"
Both of these views may be overlooking a secret truth: that infringing on the sanctity of other lives is always already a part of life. You could be making an executive decision right now affecting millions of belly bacteria, Kobe beef, celery, Canada geese. But, conveniently, the legal persons described in the U.S. Constitution are ostensibly humans. Otherwise, adjudication could be significantly more complicated.
If you don't identify as a sentient fern or some "non-human life form" then this could be a part of reality that seems irrelevant. But even if the repression of chickens doesn't factor into our decisions, this same possibility of surplus-repression may still give us pause. What are some good reasons to support a legal framework whose benefits we can't enjoy? Even if we enjoy them now, the NDAA may fail the Veil of Ignorance test: if we're unsure who we might become or who our future bureaucrats might be, would we want to endorse a policy that could force us to be subject to the law without having any chance to contest it? Maybe you're already an enemy combatant without knowing it.