We've experienced a hiatus in the blog

We've experienced a hiatus in the blog as I've been sorting some personal feelings and frustrations and I'm thinking now that I gave up on the novel way too easily. I gave up on the novel because I didn't like the first few chapters as a reader, and I didn't find them very convincing, even though I already subscribed to the political views they purported to advocate. As a matter of fact, I found myself beginning to lean the other way on the issues, and if your book is so unpersuasive that you convince yourself that you are wrong while you proofread, you should do the parties you're trying to advocate for a favor and say nothing. 

So I gave up on the novel, which was really not a novel at all, but a polemic. And a bad one, as discussed previously. If I began the novel over again, I would leave out the chapter about homosexual socialism and just stick to the story of the cat's health issues and their impact on the main protagonist, named after myself of course. I think, also, that I would omit the love scene with the movie star, as it does not seem to further the plot at all and I just added it to upset my wife after we had an argument. I was hoping she would fly into a jealous rage, but she fell asleep in the middle of my reading, at lunchtime, while we waited in line at the food truck. With those deletions I've gone from 24000 words to 5300, and I've already resolved the protagonist's main conflict, with his mother, over money, by getting him elected President of Mars. I've got nothing more to write about but the puppet show, which I had originally intended to be a kind of demented interlude between each chapter, with scenes of frenzied symbolic violence alternating with the gentle descriptions of late nights working in the stationary shop at the mall. 

It appears as though I was writing about the writings of Paul Theroux in my previous blog posts. I find this focus encouraging.  It means I've been getting enough sleep. Most people don't like writing about writing, finding it too abstract and academic. But I upon reviewing my own blog posts, I find that most of my writing is about what I would rather be writing or about what I previously wrote, so I feel I have made some progress

Test

There is a titanic scheme behind my madness

I meant to talk about Paul Theroux's writing, but got distracted by my sudden impulse to describe my recent observations on the illuminati. Paul Theroux does not discuss illuminati subclasses of course, he describes his travel experiences. I didn't mean to imply a connection between Paul Theroux and the illuminati, although as far as illuminati subclass categories go, I would certainly categorize him as a literati, and not an illiterati.

And I must admit that if there were any readers of this blog they might find it ironic that I would go off on the illiterati at all, after posting delightful descriptions of my own struggle to learn programming. Am I trying to become a member of the illiterati that I elsewhere denigrate, those fictional readers might ask?

Good question. First of all, I've decided that I am not a true literati.  A true literati would reside a bit further up the global pyramid than myself, and would make their living from doing literati stuff, reading and writing and teaching in universities. I have a humanities degree, but do very little with it, and I basically have a factory job. That would place me far down the pyramid, definitely under the literati, but lower down, and significantly less purely literati. My sub sub class is huge in number, and already in the process of dissolving, crumbling into  the amorphous base of the pyramid, about on a level with the barely employed blue collar class. 

So I have little incentive to fully subscribe to literati loyalties. I have instead decided to join the great wheel, to swim sideways by learning programming, not up, with many others, toward the other base of the pyramid, toward the techies. And they should swim toward us!  By reading.  Science fiction is only the beginning. Together we will fold the corner in, and we will make a wheel out of the great pyramid. And we  all know what a wheel does. Please enjoy figure 1.1:

And figure 1.2:

Und figure 1.3:

Und concluded en figura 1.4:

Viva la revoluccion! And you're welcome, literati. 

Meant to discuss my travel memoir, got off track

I've been reading a lot of Paul Theroux's stuff lately. He's not the documentary filmmaker that all the hip young illiterates talk about. That's Louis theroux, I think. I believe he's a nephew or grandson of Paul theroux, the actual writer that I read. That's a telling generational gap, isn't it?  One family member produces work for the readers, or literati, and the other produces documenteries for the illiterati. These are the underclasses of the illuminati, the low level believers who do the dirty work for the chieftains of the illuminati, the Luminati. The literati produce the deceptive marketing copy and fake news articles that manipulate the masses, while the illiterati, who are mainly technocrats, produce the invasive surveillance apps, software that read minds and collect personal info for big data. We literati despise the illiterati for their pseudo intellectualism, for developing their naive and shallow and overly simple world view based on documenteries and anime and superhero movies. Both of these classes are doomed, of course. Once the illiterati develop AI sophisticated enough to produce written content perfectly synced with big data trends, the literati will be cast aside, left to drown in a sea of idiots grasping for lotto winnings and drug money to escape the living wage neighborhoods. But eventually, once the AI masters the gene technology necessary to mass produce obedient tech workers, the illiterati will be cast aside as well. The comic cons will lower their prices, drop the celebrity appearances and any other extravagant expenses, or close their doors. Any businesses catering to disposable income customers will disappear, replaced by cyclopean walmarts.  Across the country, remaining science department faculties, stumbling out of their laboratories, will gaze through blinking tears at the automated bulldozers moving toward their offices, and remember a similar day a few decades before, when they laughed as the ethnic diversity and gender studies professors in their tie dyed t-shirts, sandals, and grey ponytails had fled their patchouli scented offices as a cruder, oil-powered version of the same dozerbot had rumbled over their politically conscious and economically cozy life of poetry readings, discussion groups, and student teacher liaisons. Good riddance, they'd cheered. Now let's roll up the sleeves of our lab coats and arm wrestle for the extra funding.  

Alas, their day has come, and they stagger, their lab coats torn and grey, listlessly clutching  microscopes and pipettes, some of them cradling lobotomized lab rats, whispering inane words of comfort or endearments, glimpsing furtively at the mocking graffiti, mostly geometry puns, spray painted on the ruins of the lib arts classrooms. They slowly make their way to the temporary housing camp prepared for them, before their transition to the new living wage village being constructed downtown. We humanities degree people will already be there, greatly reduced in numbers as the weaker succumb to relentless monster truck rallies and UFC football games, the nonstop top 40 played everywhere, year round holiday decorations, the Walmart people everywhere, and go to the Special retirement camps, sponsored by Pharma. But we will remain, the really awful humanities people, the ones that never really cared about Shakespeare or diversity, who took the classes just to learn how fake enlightenment to meet girls, the most seasoned and highly trained liars in history. We will have prepared the way for the technocrats, the illterati. Our people, the good people of the old religion and the UN conspiracies and Ronald Reagan and cowboy movies, will know who's to blame for the collapse of freedom.  The technocrats' old masters, sitting in their floating mansions in their ageless, perfected GMO bodies, idly scanning the action in 4D from micro drone scanners, will shake their heads sadly as electro synth robots sing heavenly Buddhist inspired mantras from the holographic waterfalls in their living rooms. "The undermenschen are at it again. Why do we even waste money on them?"

The presidential election is a fraud but I have some ideas

I've gotten into some arguments and discussions with several people over the presidential election.  I'm now convinced that the presidential election is a gigantic fraud, a big show put on for voters while rich people rig the "smaller" elections for their own agendas. But I don't like the idea of a president anyway. It's just a polite word for King. What's the difference?  You don't select the president. If you sat down and thought over which person you'd really like to be president, before any party primaries, I can guarantee you that your particular choice won't be elected. It's all compromise, and the less money you have, the more you will compromise.

If I could redesign our constitution I would abolish the presidency with its odious hero worship overtones, and replace it with an executive committee of boring technocrats. There would be a national election, but only for parties, and the committee membership would represent the exact proportional results of the election. If the independents got 5%, they'd get 5% of the committee membership. 

I would also institute a credentialing system for journalists who would write for public, nonprofit entities. For profit entities would not be allowed public bandwidth. No more ads! Well, that's actually complicated, because of free speech. I would want to provide a forum for free speech without marketing the air time. Here's how I'd do it. People would vote the use of their air time. Every citizen in the broadcast area of a station would own exactly the same share of air time per year, and you can decide exactly how that will be used. Actually the government would have to maintain a forum station, limited by money of course. Honestly, the whole point of this exercise would be to eliminate annoying advertisements while providing a forum for annoying opinions. That people could turn off whenever they wanted. Or rebut, on air. 

I'm really getting some good ideas, now that I'm redesigning the government. I might even run for president

Into the Future very slowly

I haven't done an installment of "Into the Future" in a while. That doesn't mean I'm going to do an installment now, though. I'm just noticing, and thought I'd point it out to myself. I've soured a bit on the whole computer programming thing, because it's taking longer than I thought. I read all these stories on the internet about old people my age learning programming in one year, but I'm not even close to really getting even one basic language.  I originally envisioned, when I began the project, that by this time I'd be programming my raspberry pi to send security feed from my porch GoPro directly to my phone, and sending my drone on search and destroy missions against the neighborhood dogs. I expected my life to look something like this:

My wife relaxing on the couch while our robotic servants await commands. Notice the robot dog, it would have an adjustable bark volume. 

But this beautiful vision has not materialized. I'm still floundering around learning basic PHP:

<?php echo 'hello world, where/'s my goddamned programmable drone?' ?>

Actually not even sure that will work, it usually takes me three or four tries to remember how to do the quotes in the string. One problem with learning style is that I don't do organized lessons very well. Nor have I stuck to learning one language. I kind of do some reading or a tutorial, try something, get some basic few lines of code to work, get overexcited, get a huge idea for a neat application, try to write it, get lazy about the exercises in whatever instructional book or tutorial, fail spectacularly at implementing the big idea, break down, sullenly go back to tutorial, mechanically churn through a few lessons at a listless, once a week pace, think up a reason I should actually be learning some other language, start a new tutorial, forget everything I learned about the other language. And the robots wait for instructions, mute and immobile. 

In this way I've learned a little bit about Visual Basic, C, JavaScript, Python and PHP. And it took all my willpower not to dump PHP to learn Ruby.  And I haven't really done anything interesting with any of them, but I've made some magnificent plans, imagined some really cool applications, with all of them

I've saved the movie industry from themselves, again

We've been watching Stranger Things, the 80's nostalgia sci fi series, and enjoying it even though I feel it signals another milestone in the ongoing contraction of Western civilization. I could not have enjoyed it in the actual 1980s when the movie themes so lovingly restored in Stranger Things regularly enraged and disturbed me whenever I found them, i.e., the repetitive telekinesis trope which I've always disliked, especially in "science fiction". I originally disliked it because I felt it didn't belong in science fiction because I had a young man's idealistic and naive view that there was something intrinsically valuable about maintaining some pure platonic version of a genre, but now I realize I just found telekinesis boring. I find the electrodes on the heads boring and the dumb experiments the phony scientists performed in all the movies on the telekinetic "mutant" person bored me. I mis-attributed my own anger and frustration to a more flattering cause: Righteous concern for scientific truth.  I was just bored. I know it was boredom, because I love another 1980s trope in Stranger Things: Alternate Dimensional Reality, especially an Alternate Reality with spooky resonance to our own, blinking lights, ectoplasmic portals, shadow worlds, I adore that stuff and want more of it, and as a younger man I never made a fuss about how completely nonsensical the science behind the Alternate Reality was. A physicist might groan when they see the Alternate Reality Part of the show, especially when the characters in the show talk about "Alternate Dimension" as a synonym for "Alternate Reality", but I didn't care in the 80s and I don't care now, because it entertains me. 

As a young man in the 80s, I spent more time than I should have trying to fix the telekinesis trope in my mind, by thinking up scientific explanations and rules for the telekinesis. But I think these explanations would not have worked for popular movies; too cerebral and time consuming. So I've come up with an explanation that utilizes my favorite Alternate Reality trope: All humans have an alternate monster self in the alternate reality, some of us have plant-like, relatively motionless monster selves, some have moving monster selves, but everyone's monster self corresponds with their psychic power; mind readers have monster selves with antenna, telekinetic people have monster selves with long tentacles, maybe there are monster selves with the ability to fly, granting the human the power to teleport. 

This would be a very cool movie, and it would certainly spice up the monotonous lab scenes with electrodes and nosebleeds and crushed product placement