Monday, March 18, 2024

Info on Disinfo


 1. I have been studying Disinformation since Journalism School. More and more the study of disinformation became a specific college study. [One of my professors back in the day, Larry Martin, had a full career as head of Intelligence in Czechkoslovokia during Communist Era. He could tell you how it was done before the Web.]

1.5 Weakly funded in the last two years the Important Cause of Disinformation Study has all been shut down.

2. This is how the Constitution Loving Dictator Works. The Mission: Spread Partisan Propaganda that He approves of. Harass others.

3. How? Set up pop-up groups with Right-Thinking Billionaire Funding capable of heaping subpoenas for emails, text messages, and other information related to government and social media companies. [This post was researched with the help of NYTimes and Bing AI.]

4. Complying with these requests consumed time and money. The threat of legal harassment also led to a decrease in funding from donors, including philanthropies, corporations, and the government.

5. Research Impact: Researchers fear legal repercussions and online political threats. They are trolled mercilessly. Think: Kitch pots banging at your bedroom window at 7 am. Many organizations that were previously engaged in this research stopped their efforts. So, the Dogs of Disinformation run free.

Finally, as a still-working journalist I need to point out that, if I start a magazine, I can run what I want, and you have no right to insert yourself into my publication. Free Speech means you can go down to the Town Sq and stand on a pony keg and say what you want cause it's a free country.  It's important to think twice, dont get confused, becuase dis-informers are on the prowl.


AI eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee ahhhhhhh

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is right up there with the MidEast, Ukraine, Democracy, Inflation and Kim Kardashian among the memes that we see in our news feeds today.

*On Wall Street, AI hopes drove a big boost in the stock market. People are going to lose jobs and machines are going to take over and we can rake in some bucks: Hurray! 

*For my brother, it’s a quick “Belated Birthday Card source” [Hell with Hallmark] 

*For headline writers, AI fever has been a chance to get clicks, hits and page views based on FUD - Fear Uncertainty and Doubt. 

*For an older writer, [me] AI nudges one forward, raining down ideas when his own synapses are flagging.*&%!



 

*&%! For some reason, AI understands my turns of phrase better than most people I am selling too. [Maybe I’ve been in the Belly of the Machine too long.] Hey Bard, if someone says their "synapses are flagging" - what does that mean?

The phrase "my synapses are flagging" is a creative way of saying someone is mentally fatigued. Synapses are the junctions between nerve cells in the brain where information is transmitted. It's not literally true that synapses get tired, but this expression uses scientific language to describe a familiar feeling.


Sunday, March 17, 2024

The Viking Terro

 


A monk's prayer

Bitter is the wind tonight,
It tosses the ocean's white hair:
Tonight I fear not the fierce warriors of Norway
Coursing on the Irish Sea. 

-Anonymous  [Translated by Kuno Meyer]


Wind fierce to-night

Wind  fierce to-night.
Mane of the sea whipped white.
I am not afraid. No vavening Norse
On course through quiet waters.

-Anonymous [Translated by Seamus Heaney]


Serendipity today - I pull out a Kuno Meyer translation from St Patrick's Irish Poetry posts past. And lo, that evening, reading through a book of Seamus Heaney translations. I discover the same poem with a different rendering. The fear of the Viking raider impelled many an imagining of the sea, and poem. [- J.V.

The painting is by Albert Ryder.



Saturday, March 16, 2024

Al compás del mundo – programa #119 –Blues Harmonica


Misposted this on Moon Traveler...But I Embrace the Random! For the music of your life and more visit Sister Site: https://alcompasdelmundo.blogspot.com/

Any program that starts and ends with Little Walter has got something going on right. And in this version of Mexican radio’s Al compas del mundo (radioactivaTX.org – in Tequisquiapan, Queretaro) I can do no wrong. Though I kind of, sort of, do a chronology of the harmonica in American blues, I had to start off this playlist with Little Walter Jacobs for reasons obvious to me and, I’m certain, many others. Followed by an all-time favorite – Rollin’ and Tumblin’, with Walter again, Muddy Waters, Baby Face Leroy Foster and an unnamed participant or two. It is a given that the blues developed in the United States brought by an enslaved population that introduced African characteristics from many different roots and regions. This lyric-less version of Rollin’ and Tumblin’ is played, moaned and wailed to create a mood that – to these ears – evokes the sound of the motherland, how distant that might be. Followed by early recordings of a novelty harmonica solo, jug bands, and country sounds. Followed by city sounds, largely out of Chicago through the great migration from the African American South. Followed by a touch of R&B (and Walter to finish). Big harmonica names throughout – Sonny Terry, Sonny Boy Williamson I and II, Howling Wolf, Slim Harpo, Junior Wells, Walter Horton, James Cotton…and a host of others who made the tiny blues harp into an icon of homegrown American music. - J.H.


Run List for Blues Harmonica Episode - First broadcast 3-14-24


01 Little Walter - Blues With a Feeling

02 Baby Face Leroy Foster - Rollin' and Tumblin' (part 2)

03 Palmer McAbee - Lost Boy Blues

04 Cannon's Jug Stompers - Viola Lee Blues

05 Memphis Jug Band - On the Road Again

06 Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee - Red River Blues

07 Houston Boines - Monkey Motion

08 Sonny Boy Williamson I - Good Morning Little Schoolgirl

09 Sonny Boy Williamson II - Ninety Nine

10 Howling Wolf - Who's Been Talkin'

11 George 'Harmonica' Smith - Yes Baby

12 Billy Boy Arnold - I Ain’t Got You

13 Slim Harpo - Baby Scratch My Back

14 Junior Wells - Messin' With the Kid

15 Walter Horton - Have A Good Time

16 George 'Wild Child' Butler - Jelly Jam

17 Big Mama Thornton - Everything Gonna Be Alright

18 Carey Bell - What My Mama Told Me

19 James Cotton - Soul Survivor

20 Little Walter - Sad Hours


Re:Cannon's Jug Stompers - Viola Lee Blues  On their first record, the Grateful Dead introduced many young Americans to one of the greatest Jug Band Era gems. The song is on Harry Smith's Anthology, which was a Lodestar for the Dead and others. Viola Lee Blues is almost a drone, it flowered into hallucinogenic patterns in the Dead's version. Many '60s bands came up with more than a little Jug Band influence. Count the Grateful Dead, the Youngbloods, Loving Spoonful and arguably the Velvet Underground here. Viola Lee Blues starts with a sentencing.The shaman narrator goes to jail for life, not clear why. Must have been a difference with Viola Lee. It makes sense, since this is "Viola Lee Blues". In this day in court, different cases lead to different sentences, but our narrator gets Life. He's been drinking white lightning, it's gone to his head, that is some kind of explaination. As a guy wrote on YouTube, the song: The haronica player Noah Lewis drives this song. The short exhaust chord at the conclusion is like a train arriving. It fires a synapse in my radio head. -J.V.

For more of a longer take on  the roots of Jug, go to Beedle-ee-bum: 8more miles to the Louisville Jug Bands  





Sunday, March 10, 2024

Alien Camp

I grew up in an alien camp


Not far from the lonesome 17 ramp


Counted all the lights in the Noosphere


Worked like hell ‘til I invented beer


Thursday, March 07, 2024

Pan American Psychism

 


Humanism applied to technology was a mindthrob in my youth - looking to make a mark, I guess. Found odd: Not much mention of it on this blog. But share here a link to the Thread of Humanism on Moon Traveller.

Oddly came to this morning with Pansychism or Panthiesim on my mind. The morning after a Night of Pints. That Pansychism, in opposition to humanism. Got out my Selections from Ancient Irish Poetry [Kuno Meyer]. Asked Google if St Francis was a panthiest [Answer: No, his comment on nature were all straight from Scripture.] 

My guru on humanism is Jacob Bronowski, a part of my directed studies back in the Milwaukee days. I looked him up this morning and, in fact, he had something to say in the panthiest way:

You will die but the carbon will not; its career does not end with you. It will return to the soil, and there a plant may take it up again in time, sending it once more on a cycle of plant and animal life.

Human or Cell? At what level do we want to encounter the Universe, to find a/the way? 

RELATED
A very Cellular SOng - Incredible String Band
Panpsychism - In Our Time, BBC



Monday, March 04, 2024

Space Station Bound







[NASA] - An international crew of four reached orbit following a successful launch to the International Space Station at 10:53 p.m. EST Sunday from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA’s SpaceX Crew-8 mission is the agency’s eighth commercial crew rotation mission with the company to the space station. [Shown Above: Before the launch.]

Wednesday, February 28, 2024

Fromm Here to Dystopia: Orwell, Afterward

i.

Kicking around our pad like many others is a paperback copy of 1984. For the heck of it in the doctor’s waiting room this week I read the Afterword there, written by Erich Fromm.
Fromm was a shrink who shrunk from Freud’s more strident theories on human behavior, theorizing that ‘freedom’ was a more essential part of the human complex than Siggy said.
[Truth Be Told [TBT]:I confused Erich Hoffer with Eric Fromm, as they both found a spot in the same cell in my brain… Hoffer was the author of The True Believer, a look at doctrinal Soviet-era communism, and was known as the Longshoreman Philosopher.
But Google set me right, and now I put Fromm and Hoffer into different brain cells. David Hofstetter was even more helpful in this.]
Fromm in Afterword places 1984 as chief among Dystopian works…tho the term he uses in 1961 is ‘negative utopia’. Utopian works beginning with Thomas More’s Utopia, writes Fromm, build on a trust in Progress that arose as the Dark Ages gave way to the Renaissance. The shock to the system that was World War I opened the gates of Dystopian Fiction, and 1984, he continues.
George Orwell's 1984 he views as the expression of a mood and it is a warning - the mood it expresses is that of near despair about the future of man it's a mood that began to find traction after the senseless bloodbath of World War One in the 20th century “when millions died for the territorial ambitions the European powers” under the banner of making the world safe for democracy.
This stuff has a resonant ring today, right?
A special flavor to Orwell's treatise, Fromm notes, is its consciousness of the nuclear and thermonuclear bomb. To stop worrying and live: it's been a full-time job for civilization ever since its inception. But the darkness of the 1984 bomb has given way to something else. Just a reminder: Russia's President Vladimir Putin last Thursday took a co-pilot's seat in a nuclear-capable strategic bomber - but the Western world little noted.
ii.

When we read 1984 in school, it was clear that its indictment of de-humanism was not just aimed at Soviet Communism’s Totalitarian Oppression. This world of “Doublethink” [“the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in one's mind, believing them and disbelieving them at the same time”] for the purpose of control and manipulation had its twin in the corporate culture of the day.
Writes Fromm: The West was becoming a “…centralized managerial industrial society of an essentially bureaucratic nature motivated by materialism only slightly mitigated by truly spiritual or religious concerns.”
That was also the take of the counter culture, the hippies, Woodstock Nation, or the Youth Movement – pick one. Like the IBM card, we did not want to be bent, folded or mutilated. I see the era as campaign for Renaissance in the spirit of humanism. What’s so funny?
If either Erich Fromm or Eric Hoffer came back down from the Valhalla of Psychology and asked me ‘Que pasa?,’ I’d say that All the bits and pieces of 1984 Fromm points to are jostled around in a different way today. There is massive distrust of systems, there is sense of media manipulation, there is epic materialism, there is lots of believing/disbelieving at the same time.

Friday, February 23, 2024

Private Lander Reporting?

 Kevin Chang in the New York Times



A lander called Odysseus resides on the Moon as of Thursday night. This is a privately financed lander, fielded by the intuitive machines of Houston. 

This lander is not your lander. 

It's their lander.

As with a series of moon landings before, it was unclear immediately if the vehicle had landed gently enough to continue to operate.

Further word was that it was on its side but that it worked.