The title of [this article] comes from the song “Lament For The Auroch,” by The Sword: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSNq03_6I5g . You’ll see why, in a bit.

Ultimately, this piece is about thinking through the full range of implications of your train of thought, and making sure you know and acknowledge the sources of your lines of thinking.

It’s also about Manichean AI gods at war for your BitCoin mining cycles.

Oh! And speaking of trains: Who’s seen Snowpiercer? Because it is an Amazing piece of Ray Bradbury-esque allegorical science fiction.

http://wolvensnothere.tumblr.com/post/91278483676/theres-only-one-rule-that-i-know-of-babiesHey everybody. In case any of you didn’t see this, I made a blog post, yesterday, basically about where my head is, recently. I’ve attached it, here.

One of the things that’s always kind of struck me is that there’s no cynic like a frustrated idealist. Someone who believes in the potential of how things COULD be, but has seen, over and over again, how “the way things are” grinds that into the dirt.

The Status Quo is the enemy of betterment–again, for a co-determined value of what “better” means. Stasis and comfort are wonderful, because we all like to know that we’re safe, that we can breathe without fear, but that’s all *I* want it for. That is, for me, stasis is the time to catch my breath, and we all need that sometimes. Some of us may need a little longer than others of us.

And like Oatman tries to get Martin to understand, there are tims when we all need to take a moment, be fully present in who and what we are, and realise what the world looks like, when we just breathe. But there’s a poem by Irish poet Ger Killeen called “Evolution Prayer,” that comes to me, when I think about theses kinds of things:

Dark night of my heart, raked
in the blizzard of my ten thousand lives,
I am again briefly
the Moloch of blind fish, sing again
briefly the pterodactyl’s jubilas
to the sun, am sacrificed
again briefly for the dog’s kingdom…
Dark night of my heart, I scream
in recollection of comfortless origins,
suffer for the arrogance
of my entropy. God protect me
from sins of stasis, keep me
in the movement that fixes me

You can find that in his 1989 collection “A Wren.”

I guess what I’m thinking about is a species of compassion. Compassion and, as my friend Kristen said, elsewhere, “Kindness, empathy, and boat-rocking.”

More audio, soon, for those who like the sound of my voice. If you want to give me an early birthday present (it’s next week), why not talk to your friends, and show them what we’re doing, here?

Thanks. We’ll talk more, soon.

In this, the first installment of me talking to myself while pretending to talk with you, we talk about the idea, concept, process, and practical effects of normalization. What is normalization, and what does it mean? We talk about Foucault’s understanding of norms as a means of social control, as well as May, et al’s understanding of the process in the real of medical technologies. I mention the Institutional Review Boards, or IRB, and for thoses of you not involved in academia, here’s some more about what those are and how they work: http://www.thehastingscenter.org/Publications/IRB/About.aspx PROCESS NOTES: I’m weirdly nasal for the first 3 minutes or so, and the audio starts losing my ending sibilants at around the 10 minute mark. If I’m going to keep using this recorder for these chats, then I’m going to need to alter both my posture and my enunciation. Not terrible for a very first run, if I may say so of myself, but it’ll get better than this. I’ll be posting this for public view, eventually, but you my dear patrons, get first dibs. Comments welcome, as long as you’re not straight-up jerks about it

Thank you so much for the support this month!