The Grey Mech Cometh

This morning I woke about 4:30, got up made coffee, thought of somethings I had to do, then sat down to watch the rest of Terminator: Genysis. I do not quite understand the continuous softening of Sarah Connor in the series of movies, but it was OK.

I mean, the whole time-travel-paradox thing with an evil John Connor lost me at the first turn in the time maze and I really did not understand a word of the patter the characters spoke about "future so-and-so" and "in the past so-and-so"... so much was my befuddlement that Skynet himself became more like a pantomime horse in the sky...

zipping through various incarnations, or immetallations, or implasmations of newer and more advanced terminator entities.
So I did not seek to understand.

Furthermmore, there was a sub-plot of Sarah and John's father-to-be and romance, but any romance was always preceded by (1) strategy sessions, or (2) tactical discussions, or (3) meditations on time-travel paradoxes of Skynet and related devices.

I liked it. I do not sit through films I don't like. I like Terminator films. Period.
Yesterday I watched The Queen of Katwe, and I liked that, too, and I always like Mira Nair's films.


After finishing with Terminator: Genysis, I took in a few blinks-worth of Suicide Squad - I figure I'll watch about 15 minutes per day to keep the evil from boiling over - and then I went to the good old computer, thinking I would be greeted with a few laughs about the new administration.

Fate, had something else in mind.


Steve Bannon Believes The Apocalypse Is Coming And War Is Inevitable
Trump’s top adviser thinks we’re in “the great Fourth Turning in American history.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/steve-bannon-apocalypse_us_5898f02ee4b040613138a951?ref=yfp

... In Bannon’s view, we are in the midst of an existential war, and everything is a part of that conflict. Treaties must be torn up, enemies named, culture changed. Global conflagration, should it occur, would only prove the theory correct. For Bannon, the Fourth Turning has arrived. The Grey Champion, a messianic strongman figure, may have already emerged. The apocalypse is now...

... Strauss and Howe’s theory [which theory is the view held by Mr. Bannon] is based on a series of generational archetypes — the Artists, the Prophets, the Nomads and the Heroes — that sound like they were pulled from a dystopian young adult fiction series. Each complete four-part cycle, or saeculum, takes about 80 to 100 years, in Strauss and Howe’s reckoning. The Fourth Turning, which the authors published in 1997, focuses on the final, apocalyptic part of the cycle.

Strauss and Howe postulate that during this Fourth Turning crisis, an unexpected leader will emerge from an older generation to lead the nation, and what they call the “Hero” generation (in this case, millennials), to a new order. This person is known as the Grey Champion. An election or another event — perhaps a war — will bring this person to power, and their regime will rule throughout the crisis...

I was not entirely honest with you about this morning.
Before I had gotten out of bed, I was thinking of fears and flight; I was thinking of the things that haunt my mind and bedevil me; I was thinking of the strange imaginings that sometimes sap my strength in the marches of the night...
Then I got up made coffee, thought of somethings I had to do, then sat down to watch the rest of Terminator: Genysis. I do not quite understand the continuous softening of Sarah Connor in the series of movies, but it was OK...

I have mentioned I often was oppressed by a vision of a future dystopic. This was back in the 80s and before, well before most of the modern day bleak future visions, but not before Brave New World, 1984, and A Chronicle for Leibowitz.

I knew such things were madness, because I lived in the USA, powerful, wealthy, religious.
And since the turn of the century, I saw 9/11, the 2008 Financial Crisis during which you could see how nervous the President and the Treasury Secretary were on TV, and I have now seen the abomination of desolation in the holy place....

I hope to God the Bannon article is nonsense, for the idolatry of one's own mind in pretending to know the infinite mind of God is spiritual death.


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The Grey Mech is a character is Gregory Benford's Sailing Bright Eternity (1995), a mechanical device of ultra-potent destructiveness.
Why grey? Why is Strauss and Howe's champion grey?
What about Mr. Grey in Stephen King's Dreamcatcher?

"Young man, why are you here? You know we have an appointment in Samarra t'morra!"

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Just The Right Word

כג) שִׂמְחָה לָאִישׁ בְּמַעֲנֵה פִיו וְדָבָר בְּעִתּוֹ מַה טּוֹב)

A man takes pleasure in his own speech, but how good is the right word at the right time!

(Mishlei 15-23)


Just the right word at the right time; what a great thing is understanding, a mastery of speech, and a sense of timing so that everything comes together at the right time. Not too many people have it. Cicero was a great orator of ancient Rome, but he saw fit to edit his orations in order to smooth out the rough edges, and to insert better turns of phrase; in short, to try to find the right word at the right time.

Similarly in reading of Tanakh study [the study of the Jewish Bible] in Kol Hamevaser:
Editor’s Thoughts: Reflections of an Unrepentant Tanakh Enthusiast
By Dovi Nadel | Published: May 13, 2015
http://www.kolhamevaser.com/2015/05/reflections-of-an-unrepentant-tanakh-enthusiast/

R. Simeon b. Eleazar testified on the authority of R. Simeon b. Hanina: He who reads a verse at its proper time brings good to the world, as it is written, “And a word spoken in its proper time, how good is it.” 

 Irving Amen Woodcut

Yet, as we read further afield in Forward:

Some Jewish Groups Waffle on Donald Trump Anti-Muslim Push
Josh Nathan-KazisDec 8, 2015
http://forward.com/news/326417/some-jewish-groups-waffle-on-donald-trump-anti-muslim-push/

... Zionist Organization of America national president Mort Klein said banning all Muslims from entering the country was “going too far.” But he went on to rationalize Trump’s position: “Few people would oppose Hindus or Buddhists, or Christians coming to America, but Hindus or Buddhists or Christians are not saying or doing things that threaten people’s lives,” Klein said. “Muslims are.”

Klein said that the ZOA’s board recently voted unanimously to oppose “Syrian Muslims coming to America.”

Congressman Lee Zeldin, the only Jewish Republican in the House of Representatives, did not answer directly when asked what he thought of Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims entering the country.

Instead, he too focused on the issue of Syrians.

“Focus at the moment should be on improving the visa waiver program, stopping the influx of Syrian refugees due to current vulnerabilities in the vetting process, and defeating ISIS altogether,” Zeldin wrote in a statement.

The Orthodox Union, meanwhile, a large centrist Orthodox umbrella group, said that it had “no position” on Trump’s Muslim ban. The group and its advocacy arm are often vocal on foreign affairs issues, and rallied loudly on Capitol Hill against the Iran deal.

The Rabbinical Council of America, a Modern Orthodox group, did not respond to a request for comment about Trump’s plan. The group has made statements in recent months on terror attacks in Israel and Paris, and on the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.

Groups that did condemn Trump include the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, J Street, and the Israel Policy Forum, according to a JTA report.

Blogger and activist Pamela Geller, who the Southern Poverty Law Center calls “the anti-Muslim movement’s most visible and flamboyant figurehead,” told the Forward that Trump’s proposal doesn’t go far enough.

“Trump didn’t call for a complete ban, but only a temporary one,” Geller wrote in an email.

No, not a complete ban. It is a step-wise process, first step, second step, and so on. We are all familiar with the tedious Martin Niemöller, are we not, with his obsessive step-by-step description of trifles? Step by bloody step:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Martin Niemöller

Reminds you of the comic film What About Bob?, right ?  Reminds you of Dr. Leo Marvin's book, Baby Steps.

Isn't this all a black comedy? Isn't History being wound backwards, and then being reset, just for laughs? And we are all going to baby step or goose step through it again?

Was there not a time when there was a boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany? Did it not begin in spring 1933?
The boycott was largely unsuccessful,  but it revealed the course the future would take.

The Future...  unless we can manage to speak the right words at the right time!

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Living Large In The Villa Dei Pisoni

I have started reading the report on Human Trafficking issued by the United Nations Office On Drugs And Crime (UNODC) issued in February, 2009.
I suppose that it is still timely. I mean, I don't think things have gotten much better. They may have deteriorated. Probably have. Human trafficking has probably gotten worse along with other areas of worldly things: wars, drugs, etc.

Villa dei Pisoni - Piso's Pompeiian Villa

I was talking to someone this morning about this modern form of slavery, and I was shocked at the scale at which it exists. I mean, it made me feel like Lucius Calpurnius Piso, Julius Caesar's father-in-law, taking in the sun at his villa in Herculaneum on the outskirts of Vesuvius...  probably stuffing wedges of oranges into his mouth and chasing the grandkids around the garden while the subterranean caverns trembled all about.

I knew that there was a large percentage of the populace that abused women and children. I knew that there was a segment that seemed to hate women and children and saw them as little more than the unwilling objects of whatever impulses drove them.

Some say that the amount of evil in the world is the same, that there is an average to which evil tends.
I disagree. I think we are in the Devil's Bull Market, and I feel like an ancient Roman looking about and feeling the winds of change steal the breath from his mouth.

Piso's villa was known as the Villa of Papyri because of the large amount of papyrus scrolls found there.
We have no guarantee against the storm, the deluge, the hurricane, the volcano of a world in love with evil. We find it the fondest expression of the Sublime to feel the fear of our own disintegration, and deny the drudgery of integration.
We stand on the edge of the cliffs, shunning the monotony of the low planes.
We seek the thrill of mountains to climb, ignoring the drabness of the "Meals On Wheels" lives of those who toil for the Good.

 The Rakekniven, Antarctica

We have looked at Greatness and seen ourselves. What else remains?

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Angry Matthew

 People Whose Job Is Memorizing Books

Matthew 6:

28 “And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. 29 Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. 30 If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith?

31 So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32 For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them.

33 But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. 34 Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

And this brings us to The Angry Bear on Automation and Jobs and the very, very near future:

Eighty percent of current jobs may be replaced by automation in the next several decades.

Steve Roth | May 18, 2014 11:46 am
http://angrybearblog.com/2014/05/eighty-percent-of-current-jobs-may-be-replaced-by-automation-in-the-next-several-decades.html

That’s the conclusion of Stuart W. Elliott in his recent paper, “Anticipating a Luddite Revival.” (Hat tip: RobotEconomics.)

We’ve seen that scale of transformation before. But this one promises to be roughly four times as fast, dwarfing Luddite-era concerns:

…the portion of the workforce employed in agriculture shifted from roughly 80% to just a few percent. However, in the shift out of agriculture, the transformation took place over a century and a half, not several decades.

But there’s a much bigger difference this time — a hard limit that time can’t ameliorate:

...The level 6 anchoring tasks in Table 2 are not only difficult for IT and robotics systems to carry out, but they are also difficult for many people to carry out. We do not know how successful the nation can be in trying to prepare everyone in the labor force for jobs that require these higher skill levels. It is hard to imagine, for example, that most of the labor force will move into jobs in health care, education, science, engineering, and law.

I’ve said it before: the median IQ is 100, by definition. Fifty percent of people are below that level. We (and they) are facing a hard cognitive limit that the Luddites never approached. I don’t think anybody reading (or writing) this post can appreciate how hard it would be to make a go of it in today’s technological society — even get through high school, much less provide a healthy, happy, financially secure life for one’s family — with an IQ of 80 or 90.

Are people who aren’t born smart lacking in “merit”? That’s what meritocrats are claiming. (Though they will vociferously defend themselves, deploying endless arguments both specious and obfuscatory.) If you’re in the low-IQ group (and don’t inherit), your miserable position in life is fixed at birth. Get over it.

Currently, work is the only way for the majority of people to legitimately claim any significant share of our remarkable prosperity. (Social-support programs provide a pretty insignificant and tenuous, insecure claim that’s not generally viewed as legitimate, only unfortunately necessary.)

If those folks 1. can’t find jobs that they can do, and 2. receive negligible claims on our prosperity if they are lucky enough to find one of the few remaining, we’re facing a world of haves and have-nots. Sound familiar?

[...]

One fundamental belief has to change: that finding and doing a job is the only thing that gives you any claim on a decent life. Because for many, jobs that provide decent claims simply aren’t there, or won’t be soon. (Likewise the belief that rebalancing your financial portfolio annually — doing the arduous, taxing work of “allocating resources” — is extremely meritorious and gives you a just claim on an outsized share of our collective prosperity.)

Horses faced exactly this situation in the first industrial revolution. They could never learn to drive tractors and trains.

I’ll be the first to say that people aren’t horses. Which gives rise to the ugly next thought:

They shoot horses, don’t they?

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Beat! Beat! Drums!

 Holocaust's unholy hold
The deeper we are stuck in our Auschwitz past, the more difficult it becomes to be free of it.
 By Avraham Burg 
 November 16, 2008
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-burg16-2008nov16,0,4227786.story

 ...The Shoah is so pervasive that a study conducted a few years ago in a Tel Aviv school for teachers found that more than 90% of those questioned view it as the most important experience of Jewish history. That means it is more important than the creation of the world, the exodus from Egypt, the delivering of the Torah on Mt. Sinai, the ruin of both Holy Temples, the exile, the birth of Zionism, the founding of the state or the 1967 Six-Day War...  

...I voluntarily withdrew from political life in Israel. I couldn't help feeling that Israel has become a kingdom lacking in vision and without a prophetic horizon. On the surface, everything is in order; decisions are carried out, life moves on, the ship sails along. But where is this movement heading? No one knows. The sailors are rowing without seeing anything; the lower-ranking officers are holding their eyes up to the leadership, but the leaders are not capable of seeing past each coming, rising, tumbling wave...

  ...utopian vision has fallen silent in Israel. Concerns for personal survival and well-being, as well as fear about the ongoing bloodshed and security emergencies, about Gaza and Iran and the realities of demographics and population, have silenced the moral debate and blocked the horizons of vision and creative thinking. I believe Israel must move away from trauma to trust, that we must abandon the "everything is Auschwitz" mentality and substitute for it an impulse toward liberty and democracy...  

The Past as a Mutual Panopticon Prison, wherein the Past imprisons the Present, the Present imprisons the Past, and both imprison the Future.

Time is growing short everywhere: Israel, the USA, Russia, the Ukraine, China, Vietnam.
There is an unholy gigantic drum and there are years between percussions.
The drums are beginning to beat again.

Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!

Through the windows—through doors—burst like a ruthless force,

Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,

Into the school where the scholar is studying,

Leave not the bridegroom quiet—no happiness must he have now with his bride,

Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, ploughing his field or gathering his grain,

So fierce you whirr and pound you drums—so shrill you bugles blow.

Walt Whitman
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reprint from 2008

Terms Limits And Campaign Contributions

Limiting the number of terms a person may serve in the legislature will result over time in the real power being transferred to (1) the bureaucracy, and (2) the large campaign contributors, who will be able to plan years ahead with a slate of potential candidates and replacement candidates.

It will be an assembly line legislature, all funded by big donors.

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Acceleration

 AP Photo of Syrian Rebel

You would think that it would be a few more years before the next big flash crash of our society, but I do not think so. Things tend to accelerate. Just like climate change: originally it was thought that changes would be gradual and long-term; now they are washing in with the daily tide.

Acceleration will keep our minds occupied, so we shall not dwell over much on the brave, new world.

I am personally making plans to be disinvested in all markets by 2016.

Why?
Well, as I mentioned yesterday, I do not have a representation to accompany my intuition; I do not see tides of blood, whores of Babylon, or  Wall Street 1929 or 2008. I'm just keeping my eye on the ball of the future.

I was feeling pretty chipper, even though we had a number of funerals this year. I felt good until I saw that picture of the Syrian Free Army rebel who was showing off his body tattoos of women.
Tattoos are quite definitely un-Islamic...
and tattoos that depict humans seem blasphemous from the point of view of Eastern iconoclasm...

It was then I felt as if I sensed the Desolation of Abomination standing in the holy place...

and everything began to change. I still don't "see" anything, but I have the feeling of a blade of ice seeking my heart.

I feel like my body is the tanned leather of the market of 'Ukazi, near Mecca, scraped with calamities to come!

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Fiddling As The World Wanes

I used to wonder what it was like to live in Imperial Rome; what was life like in a society that was on decline and falling - at least, declining as it seemed to my perspective, a point of view which was ready to see decline by years of reading Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
What was it like, I wondered, to maintain a steadfast resistance to the obvious truth of Christianity? And after Constantine, what was it like to devolve into chaos and strife?

I sort of guess that I know.

From Eureka Alert:

Even farm animal diversity is declining as accelerating species loss threatens humanity
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-05/ispo-efa052313.php

...Some scientists have termed this the "sixth great extinction episode" in Earth's history, according to Dr. Zakri, noting that the loss of biodiversity is happening faster and everywhere, even among farm animals.

He underlined findings by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization that genetic diversity among livestock is declining.
"The good news is the rate of decline is dropping but the latest data classify 22% of domesticated breeds at risk of extinction," Dr. Zakri said.

Breeds become rare because their characteristics either don't suit contemporary demand or because differences in their qualities have not been recognised. When a breed population falls to about 1,000 animals, it is considered rare and endangered.
Causes of genetic erosion in domestic animals are the lack of appreciation of the value of indigenous breeds and their importance in niche adaptation, incentives to introduce exotic and more uniform breeds from industrialised countries, and product-focused selection.

Among crops, meanwhile, about 75 per cent of genetic diversity was lost in the last century as farmers worldwide switched to genetically uniform, high-yielding varieties and abandoned multiple local varieties. There are 30,000 edible plant species but only 30 crops account for 95% of human food energy, the bulk of which (60%) comes down to rice, wheat, maize, millet and sorghum.

"The decline in the diversity of crops and animals is occurring in tandem with the need to sharply increase world food production and as a changing environment makes it more important than ever to have a large genetic pool to enable organisms to withstand and adapt to new conditions," he said...

 A changing world, a changing climate... and the problems mount.
Scientists see the problems, and they try to evaluate them, and they warn us, but we find it hard to respond, and we wish to maintain our tender dance of weaving in and out between "tipping points" of no-return.

A senior US Senator visits Syrian rebels over the weekend.
What could be the purpose of that? Is there any conceivable purpose other than to maintain an area of conflict for years to come? The influence of radicals in the rebel groups has been demonstrated; our inability to control these groups has been shown over and over again; so why are Republicans and Democrats so insistent upon facilitating civil wars and disturbances of the peace?

The terrible "IFs" are accumulating.

Senator John McCain and his ilk are playing the fiddle while the world burns...

...for the contradictions will kill all of us. For instance, to ensure that nations do not produce their own arsenal of nuclear weapons, the USA must play a role of impartial arbiter between nations; this is a role that goes back to the end of World War II.
If the USA cannot perform this function, if it tilts aggressively to one side, then it cannot dissuade nuclear proliferation by moral persuasion. Instead, it must resort to Rome's favorite remedy of sending in the legions.

In an age that needs leaders, we have partisans.

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A Kierkegaardian Moment

 

The Future Eden of Ringworld

Kierkegaard's leap of faith described a recurring jump to bridge the gap between very different phases in human life. These are more like passages that dot our lives, rather than a one-time event.

I had a Kierkegaard moment ("K-jump") when writing about guns after Newtown.

I was just watching a 60 Minutes segment of the parents of the dead from Newtown, and their lobbying effort to persuade state legislatures to pass meaningful gun laws. (Part of the show includes the startling information that the Lanza mother's gun closet was in her son's bedroom !) My K-jump had come back in January after the moment I realized that there was no real common ground between a gun culture and a no-gun culture.
As long as guns are as plentiful as dandelions in a spring field, the best security there is in a school is more guards in the form of trained and armed guards. Otherwise, there will be too high a probability of mortal chaos.

There are nations and societies in the Western world which actually have gun control laws that work; we are ignorant of them. If we are aware of them, we belittle them in the exact same manner we belittled the UN weapons inspectors who said that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction program.

I think of the Gospels and I think of Gandhi, and my mind goes there.
Then I think of the American Revolution. Then Waco, which was an atrocity by any description. And I, too, have smoked the long burning weed of libertarian meth about repressive and dangerous government...

Then my mind goes to that place where guns are enshrined in the Second Amendment.
But then I am strongly drawn to the belief that the Second Amendment was not to guard against the US government - as the participants in the Whiskey Rebellion may have held - but to allow communities to defend themselves against Native American attacks and slave uprisings.

I did the K-jump when I realized that there is no common ground between the Gun Culture and the Non-Gun Culture.
Gun Culture does have its own logic, and the USA is uncovering it and implementing it.
Non-Gun Culture is possible in this violence-worshiping world only if we live according to the Sermon on the Mount or under the philosophy of Satyagraha of Gandhi, or the ways of peace of Islam and Judaism and Buddhism and all the other ways to the Holy which deny violence.

The Gun Culture is alien to me now, and so are all its manifestations in the near future. I hope to spend the rest of my life building a sanctuary where the way of Peace can be practiced; the sanctuary may be little more than a shelter where the remnants of the survivors of the politicians' destruction of the world economic system may huddle, or it may be a New Eden.
It is in the hands of God.

The one thing I do know is that there is no common ground between the old world of weapons and warfare and the new world of Peace and Truth. I admire the efforts of the Newtown parents, but I think they will soon discover that the logic of weaponry will overtake them.

I am sorry about this. I know that the paradigm is working together and negotiating, and I myself have said so. But this is not a matter of taxes or no taxes; taxes are not a moral issue. The definition of moral issue should not be extended by our greed to include all that a generation desires.
But the matters of the Sermon on the Mount are such matters, and they do not appear in the best light when we see them in the Big Easy which is the Present, the times of casuistry and avoidance of such morals; it is the Time of Paranoia and Thuggery.

Like the Amish withdrew, yet witnessed the slaughter of their Innocents at Nickel Mines.

The Present is a time-bomb.

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