Happy New Years!

Slavoj Zizek on Gramscian Trumpism

A Sea Island Group (NRSC)/ UniParty Perspective on MAGA

Jonah Goldberg interviews Laura Field.  Note how many of the MAGA "intellectuals" are affiliated with Leo Strauss, who also grandfathered the more pro-Israel Neocons (East Coast Straussians).  The Conservative split seems largely one between Athens and Jerusalem.

And this "Oedipal" (not Schizoid) analysis demonstrates precisely why Academics and "professional" (PhD) Intellectuals don't "get" MAGA.  The analysis fails to challenge the "privileges" of the Professional Managerial Class (economics from which their 'surplus' salaries are derived).  For to challenge the excesses of late Capitalism would require constructing a new order, more beneficial to the working class.  And that kind of change is "off the table" in their minds.  "You will own nothing and be happy".  It's to be the gypsy life for us all.

I miss Jonah's mom...  She "got it".  Trump is NOT a "Straussian".  He's an actual businessman/ owner (not a surplus salaried CEO/ PMC employee).

Goldberg in a Conversation with an "East Coast Straussian"

In this conversation, Goldberg clearly does not understand his part in the functional role of the University Discourse (Republican Party) in rationalizing the Master Discourse (President Trump).  He envisions himself as a "gatekeeper of conservatism" against the uneducated Populist masses.

Relativity and the Irrational Nature of Infinite Scaling

"All is number"

-Pythagoras

"Numbers Rule the Universe"

-Pythagoras

---

from Google AI:

Isaiah Berlin's concept of incommensurable values argues that fundamental human values (like liberty, justice, equality, mercy) are often incompatible and can't be measured on a single scale, meaning choosing more of one often means less of another (e.g., more liberty, less security). This leads to value pluralism, where no single, universal hierarchy of values exists, making moral choices tragic sacrifices, and necessitating a liberal society that protects freedom (negative liberty) to allow diverse, often conflicting, good lives to flourish.

---

from Wikipedia:

Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems, published by Kurt Gödel in 1931, fundamentally limit what formal mathematical systems can prove, stating that any consistent system powerful enough to do basic arithmetic will contain true statements that cannot be proven within the system itself (First Theorem), and that such a system cannot prove its own consistency (Second Theorem). These theorems revealed that truth and provability are not the same, shattering the dream of a complete, self-contained mathematical foundation by showing there are inherent limits to any axiomatic system.

Decoding Nick Fuentes & the Groyper Cargo Cult

It's so much Easier to indirectly spot one's own faults in 'Others' than the faults in one's self directly.  It's too personal.  It requires an ironic distance.  Nick Fuentes is simply the mirror "white" equivalent to their own woke DEI guilt-pride based Progressive Consumerist Cargo Cult.  The one that see's white people as Colonizers who must renounce Colonialism and ensure that Non-whites get their "fair share" of the Consumerist Cargo.

Late Capitalist Corporate Consumerism IS a Cargo Cult.  The Middle Class Petite Bourgeois Owner/ Producers (Prosumers) are all gone.  We're all surplus salaried corporate bourgeoisie now, awaiting the consumerist paradise wrought by the coming Technological Singularity and "unlimited' consumer choices...

No one will work (hunt/ fish/ farm) anymore.  We'll all just live off the "interest" our ancestors paid, and consume to our hearts content while AI and robots do all the work.  We're all pure Capitalists now...

Narratives: How They Make Meaning and How They Trap Us

Trapped in the Capitalist Discourse.

"It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism"

That phrase, often attributed to philosopher Slavoj Žižek (and Fredric Jameson), highlights how easier it is to imagine total apocalypse (asteroid, nuclear war) than a fundamental shift away from capitalism, pointing to "capitalist realism" where no alternative seems possible, though Žižek also argues we're already living in the "end of the world" through endless repetition and stagnation, not just disaster.

Victor Davis Hanson: DEI Is The Most ‘Toxic Ideology’ We’ve Ever Experie...

VDH On the Relative Importance of Having a Diverse and Inclusive Consumerist Cargo Cult

Being Able to Make and Do Things is No Longer Important...

Consumer Diversity is the Essential Requisite Quality!

Against the Dialectical Synthesis (Alchemy): Uni vs. Meta

from the Video:

Three Laws of Dialectical Materialism

1. Quantity changes into Quality changes into New Quantity

2. Struggle and Unification of Opposites (thesis/antithesis/synthesis)

3. Negation of the Negation

 ---

from Google AI:

Alchemy was an ancient philosophical and protoscientific tradition, originating in China, India, and Greco-Roman Egypt, aiming to transmute base metals into gold, find an elixir for eternal life (Elixir of Life), and discover the Philosopher's Stone, evolving into modern chemistry and pharmacology while also being used metaphorically for magical transformations. Key concepts included separating elements into basic components (mercury and sulfur) to recombine them, using alchemical symbols for elements and processes, and working through stages like nigredo (blackening) and albedo (whitening).

---

“The notion of the perfect whole, the ultimate solution in which all good things coexist, seems to me not merely unobtainable--that is a truism--but conceptually incoherent. ......Some among the great goods cannot live together. That is a conceptual truth. We are doomed to choose, and every choice may entail an irreparable loss.”

- Isaiah Berlin, "The Proper Study of Mankind"

---

"...and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called, 'Love'" 

- Plato "Symposium" (Aristophanes' Speech)

PS- People will never all love the same 'Whole/ Goods'  (Alchemical Quantity transforming into Quality)

Religion doesn't require a God.  It simply requires a Love.  A Philo-Soph.  It's a Generation from Opposites.  The negation of the negation is a "forgetting" of the preceding dialectical process of synthesis.  "Suffering" (Love yet unobtsained0 is the gap between a thesis and its' antithesis.  Sisyphus unhappy suffers  G_d is merely an anthropomorphized focus on the transcendent ideal (good).

What really raises one's indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering; such a senselessness, however, existed neither in Christianity, which interpreted suffering into a whole mysterious salvation-apparatus, nor in the beliefs of the naïve ancient man, who only knew how to find a meaning in suffering from the standpoint of the spectator, or the inflictor of the suffering. In order to get the secret, undiscovered, and unwitnessed suffering out of the world it was almost compulsory to invent gods and a hierarchy of intermediate beings, in short, something which wanders even among secret places, sees even in the dark, and makes a point of never missing an interesting and painful spectacle. It was with the help of such inventions that life got to learn the tour de force, which has become part of its stock-in-trade, the tour de force of self-justification, of the justification of evil; nowadays this would perhaps require other auxiliary devices (for instance, life as a riddle, life as a problem of knowledge). "Every evil is justified in the sight of which a god finds edification," so rang the logic of primitive sentiment—and, indeed, was it only of primitive? The gods conceived as friends of spectacles of cruelty—oh, how far does this primeval conception extend even nowadays into our European civilisation! One would perhaps like in this context to consult Luther and Calvin. It is at any rate certain that even the Greeks knew no more piquant seasoning for the happiness of their gods than the joys of cruelty. What, do you think, was the mood with which Homer makes his gods look down upon the fates of men? What final meaning have at bottom the Trojan War and similar tragic horrors? It is impossible to entertain any doubt on the point: they were intended as festival games for the gods, and, in so far as the poet is of a more godlike breed than other men, as festival games also for the poets. It was in just this spirit and no other, that at a later date the moral philosophers of Greece conceived the eyes of God as still looking down on the moral struggle, the heroism, and the self-torture of the virtuous; the Heracles of duty was on a stage, and was conscious of the fact; virtue without witnesses was something quite unthinkable for this nation of actors. Must not that philosophic invention, so audacious and so fatal, which was then absolutely new to Europe, the invention of "free will," of the absolute spontaneity of man in good and evil, simply have been made for the specific purpose of justifying the idea, that the interest of the gods in humanity and human virtue was inexhaustible?

-Nietzsche, "Genealogy of Morals (2nd Essay) 

A Christmas Card... from a Hooker in Minneapolis

On Platonic Space and Transcendence

Solstice

John Mather - Cosmic Dawn

Emergence

Spiral Dynamics: Evolutionary Value Systems in Multi-Cultural Societies

More on Spiral Dynamics from Wikipedia

On America's New National Security Strategy (NSS)

2025 NSS

Philosophical Alchemy

On Getting Beyond Good & Evil?

Vivek Chibber: Socialism Today

Weaponized Guilt-Pride: The Hyper-Moralization of Secular Politics

Moral Fools vs Ideologically Cynical Knaves

Why the Technological Singularity Isn't Coming...

Emanation:Creation::Buddhism:Monotheism - The Problem of Suffering

Notes from video:

On Metanoia and Theosis

Letting go (one-sided, does not mutually acknowledge transgression) vs. Forgiveness (two-sided, includes mutual acknowledgement of transgression before letting it go)

Emanation (dualistic emergence of multiplicity from the One) vs Creation (tripartite emergence of multiplicity from the One... trinity adds will/ to the dualism).  

Why in Buddhism suffering is caused by a moving away from the One and the solution is to return to the One and thereby reduce suffering (Unity w/o Multiplicity)(Destroying Multiplicity and Dissolving into the One) 

... whereas the purpose of orthodox theosis is to be reunited with the Creation (suffering already born within Creation)(Achieve Unity by embracing Multiplicity and embracing your distinctiveness and suffering within it).

Hegelian negation into unity (thesis:antithesis::synthesis) vs Deleuzian transcendence on a plane of emanence. 

Negation of the negation vs (dance - giving reason for the multiplicity)(Jesus on the cross: where absolute Unity and Absolute Multiplicity meet...Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani!) Jesus embraces the created suffering and takes it back upon Himself.

Nostalgia, Comrades!

Soviet Kitsch?  Or the Russian Path?

The Thinking Game

Immortality! ...but w/o continuity of consciousness? Who cares?

From Google AI:

A bio-electric blueprint refers to the electrical signals and patterns that guide cell behavior, development, and regeneration, acting as an organizational layer separate from DNA. This concept suggests that cells use these "electrics blueprints" to communicate and coordinate, ensuring the correct formation of anatomical structures like a head or other features. Research in this area is exploring how these bio-electric signals can be decoded and even manipulated for applications in medicine, such as wound healing and regenerative medicine. 

Key aspects of the bio-electric blueprint:

Cellular communication: All cells, not just nerve cells, use electrical signals to communicate, forming a "software" that runs on the cell's "hardware" (the genome).

Development and pattern formation: Bio-electric patterns dictate how an organism develops, coordinating the placement of organs and features. For example, the specific electrical pattern of a flatworm can be manipulated to create a two-headed worm, and this pattern memory is maintained by the tissue.

Regeneration and healing: This blueprint is also thought to be involved in regeneration and wound healing, as cells use electrical signals to organize and rebuild tissue.

Beyond genetics: It proposes a system of non-genetic information storage that holds "pattern memories" and provides a blueprint for building the body, which is a separate but interconnected process from DNA.

Biomedical applications: Understanding and decoding this bio-electric "electrome" could lead to new treatments for birth defects, and tools for tissue engineering and regeneration. 

Bio-Electricity - Nature's Operating System OS

and Boot Code

'Science' and the New Secular Religions of Progress: Hope Springs Internal?

1. AI -  Creating G_d

2. Nanotechnology - Defying G_d

3. Genetics - Playing G_d

Wha-a-a-a-a-a-h!

Palantir and In-Q-Tel

On In-Q-Tel and Abraxas

The Abraxas Stone

Q's Song...

...Stifled by the Architect of the Matrix

...e-r-r-r-r by the Analyst of the Matrix

The Archeology of Knowledge - A Genealogy of Religion?

The "Fire" of Prometheus?

AI Overview

Ergot poisoning symptoms can include nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and abdominal pain; gangrenous symptoms like cold, pale, and painful extremities that may lead to tissue death; and convulsive symptoms such as muscle spasms, twitching, hallucinations, and confusion. Symptoms can manifest within an hour and worsen with continued exposure.

• Early and gastrointestinal symptoms
• Nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea
• Abdominal pain and cramping
• Headache
• Weakness and exhaustion
• Excessive thirst or salivation

Gangrenous symptoms (due to blood vessel constriction)

• Numbness, tingling, and itching in the extremities
• Cold and pale skin, particularly in the hands and feet
• Weak or absent peripheral pulses
• Intense burning pain
• Loss of sensation
• Pustules or swelling of the limbs
• Dry gangrene, which can lead to the loss of fingers, toes, or limbs

Convulsive symptoms (central nervous system effects)

• Muscle spasms, twitching, or painful contractions
• Confusion, delirium, or psychosis
• Hallucinations
• Convulsions or seizures
• Drowsiness
• Vision problems

The Unanticipated Impacts of Introducing New Technologies 

I refuse to eat any bread that isn't Kosher/ Halal

When Picasso Sketched Stalin...

Sounding the Time Crystals in Your Head - I re-MEMBER now!

 

Time Crystal and Microtubules

That's Soooo Dope-amine!  SWEEEEEET!

The Fact-Value Distinctions Inherent in Classification Systems (Function/ Dysfunction) - A Case for Schizo-Analysis?

The New Society - Hierarchical Power v. Liberalism - Meden Agan

3 Pillar Approach to Recognizing Attempted Manipulation

1. Creating  Hierarchies for Establishing Rank & Authority

2. Shaming, Imparting Guilt from Authority

3. Imposing Scarcity (Punishment) or Dependency Upon Authority

Time is Flowing Like a River

 
Victoria Trumbull, "Memory is not stored in the brain"

Time, not space, contains memory

The leading theories of memory describe it as being stored in the brain – similarly, some argue, to the way a computer stores memory. But this assumption relies on materialist assumptions and problematically bypasses the hard problem of consciousness. Memory is not stored in space, but in time, argues philosopher Victoria Trumbull.

From ancient times, philosophers have used the “storage” metaphor to describe the phenomenon of remembering. Memory is often pictured as a vast warehouse or library of experiences. In the past century, this “storage” metaphor has come to be taken literally: neuroscientists today maintain that a “memory” is simply a given pattern or collection of patterns of neural activity. This hypothesis forms a key part of the greater worldview known as “materialism” or “physicalism”: in brief, the idea that reality consists solely in physical stuff, and, correspondingly, that the human mind is reducible or equivalent to the body or the brain.

The central problem with this picture of memory is that, like many descriptions of the mind, the storage metaphor is only a metaphor. It feels intuitive to say that we “store” memories like books in a library or files on a hard drive. While this is a useful metaphor insofar as it helps us to describe and express what it feels like to remember, it cannot be anything more than this.

In order to prove that memories are stored in the brain, we would need to be able to observe this. But this is not a fact that belongs to the order of observation and experimentation. The most that neuroscientists can do is track cerebral activity and attempt to correlate the physical brain state to a description of concurrent mental experience. In carrying out experiments of this kind, however, the neuroscientist has already provisionally assumed that there is an exact identity or perfect equivalence between the mental state and the cerebral state. In other words, the hypothesis of localization that the neuroscientist has set out to prove has already been assumed as an initial axiom of his or her research. The correlation between brain activity and memory reports doesn’t prove that memories are stored in the brain any more than the correlation between footprints and walking proves that walking is stored in footprints, or the correlation between the piano and a sonata proves that the sonata is stored in the piano.

If we assume that the brain stores up discrete, localisable memories, it then becomes extremely difficult to explain how the brain can be said to generate, preserve, and reconstruct “representations” of this kind. How can the brain translate an image of experience, itself intangible and invisible, into a physical record or neural pattern? The neuroscientist is left with the philosophical challenge famously known as the “hard problem of consciousness”: given the complex physical machinations of the brain, whence arises the conscious experience of remembering?

It does not make sense to say that we “store” the smell of coffee, the face of our mother, or the sound of a Mozart symphony “in” the brain. But can a pattern of neural firings, like the embossed print of Braille or the successive taps of Morse code, indicate or contain these prior events, or even mark their salient outlines? In recent years, the idea of “neural code” and the general hypothesis that the brain operates like a computer has been offered as one way of trying to solve this puzzle. But this framework simply provides us with another metaphor; the computer model is no more explanatory than the storage metaphor itself. Neuronal configurations may very well be a biological prerequisite for remembering, but it does not follow from this fact that these configurations are the memory, nor that they can be said to “represent,” “portray,” “depict,” or “contain” what is being remembered.

___

When neuroscientists locate memory “in” the brain, what they’re really finding is that certain brain regions are active during remembering

___

In truth, the theory of localization far exceeds the facts of current neurobiology. When neuroscientists locate memory “in” the brain, what they’re really finding is that certain brain regions are active during remembering. But being active during a process is not the same thing as being the storage location for that process. The brain is undoubtedly involved in remembering, but involvement does not necessitate containment.

In most neuroscientific experiments intended to prove that memories are stored in the brain, the researchers study habit, not recollection proper. Habit is a motor attitude or pattern retained by the body or nervous system; it is characterized by repetition and acquired by motor education. Memory is personal recollection, involving the persistence of the past under the form of an image, reflecting a unique moment of our original history. In famous experiments with rats and sea slugs, the kind of “memory” being studied is nothing more than a physiological response. What has been shown successfully in experiments of this kind is that physical conditioning produces a regular motor reaction to a given external stimulus, and that brain activity prepares and paves the way for the systematization of this motor response. In other words, what has been proven is that habit is effectuated via lasting changes in synaptic architecture. But to move from the fear response of a mouse to a human episodic recollection would require more than an increase in the number and complexity of neurons: it requires a distinction in kind, a categorical leap from motor habituation to conscious evocation.

Furthermore, if localization theory were true, and if memory-images are indeed “stored up” as cellular or neural traces, then the impairment of certain brain regions should definitely correspond to the destruction of certain well-defined recollections. But this is precisely not the case. For example, on a timescale varying from weeks to years, many patients who have suffered from a stroke come to recover their once-lost ability to speak and comprehend words. Similarly, certain objects or sound-based triggers can cause patients suffering from Alzheimer’s to suddenly recover memories that were previously lost in obscurity. Perhaps what we find to be impaired by brain lesions is the mechanism required to recall or express certain kinds of memories, rather than a firm and final destruction of the recollections themselves.

What, then, are memory-images? First of all, it is important to note that the objects of memory are not like the objects of perception. They are neither visible nor tangible. The remembered thing or event is not found in the present, except somehow intangibly “in” the mind, while the perceived object is present physically and externally. Second, memory-images essentially bear the mark of “pastness.” They are attached to the past by their deepest roots, so that we immediately recognize a memory as distinct from a perception and thus know it as “memory.” An individual recollection points to the wealth or totality of the past that it belongs to and from whence it originates; it points to the total history of the personal life we have lived since our birth.

For these two reasons, our desire to think of memories as “things” that are capable of being “stored” in a receptacle is what we philosophers might call a “category error.” Memory-images are not objects or things. We thus cannot apply to them the same categories, such as the necessity of “being contained somewhere” that we apply to the things of space. The relationship of “container” to “contained” here arises from a misguided analogy with material objects. Why should recollections, which are neither visible nor tangible, need a container, and how could they have one? We could say, again metaphorically, that they exist “in” the mind, but “mind” is not a literal container for mental experiences any more than the number 10 can be said to be a “container” for the series “1, 2, 3…etc.”

___

If we assume from the start that everything mental must be reducible to something physical, then we close the possibility of understanding the mind on its own terms

___

Memory is, essentially, a fact of time—it is the persistence of the past—and, because it is a temporal phenomenon, it is fundamentally extra-spatial. To extend to memories, to a series of moments in time, the obligation of “being contained” in a place is to transfer to a temporal phenomenon a quality which applies only to the collection of material bodies perceived in space. And it is this series of observations which leads us directly to the reality of the mind: because the past overflows the present, memory overflows the brain; and because memory overflows the brain, mind overflows the body.

Perhaps what the brain does in all of this is far less extravagant. The body or brain can be said to retain and resume specific habits, patterns, or motor attitudes. Most importantly, the brain provides the motor basis for recall. The capacity to remember certainly depends functionally upon the health and integrity of certain brain regions. Thus, if you damage certain parts of the brain, then you diminish the capacity for recollection within the present; you do not, however, destroy the images themselves. If we go further than this, if we say that a brain injury abolishes individual recollections, then we are forced to assume that psychological states are miraculously capable of springing about from anatomical configurations, and thus to consequences that partake of the metaphysical rather than observational order. The invigorating opportunity for neuroscientific research is to determine by what mechanism the brain concretely serves the dynamics of remembrance, but the storage hypothesis will only hinder neuroscience from pursuing its natural course.

If we assume from the start that everything mental must be reducible to something physical, then we close the possibility of understanding the mind on its own terms. We have consigned ourselves to translating the wealth of subjective experience into impoverished neural patterns, only to then realize that this has not helped us to “explain” memory in any meaningful sense of the word. A genuine science of memory would begin by questioning the storage metaphor itself. Perhaps memories are not stored “anywhere.” Perhaps the brain’s role is not to house the past, but to facilitate our engagement with it.

Mike Benz: The Alchemy of Propaganda

Ashley Brassfield, "Oversight Chairman James Comer Launches Investigation Into Soros-Linked Group’s Secretive ‘Chorus’ Program"

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer is launching an investigation into Sixteen Thirty Fund’s Chorus Creator Incubator Program, according to letters obtained by the Daily Caller.

The Sixteen Thirty Fund — whose donors include nonprofits tied to billionaire George Soros — is a nonprofit that has been accused of trying to sidestep campaign-finance disclosure rules enforced by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and Justice Department. It also bypasses standard media-ethics practices meant to differentiate real journalism from paid political work that must be disclosed, according to Comer.

In letters sent Wednesday to Sixteen Thirty Fund President Amy Kurtz and Sunflower Services CEO Allan Williams, Comer wrote that the Fund’s “Chorus Creator Incubator Program” appears to pay participants to amplify Democratic messaging online through secretive contracts that limit transparency about payments and tightly control the political content they produce.

Mr. Allan Williams by ashley

Two days prior, Arabella Advisors announced that Sunflower Services — a new Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) backed by lead investor New Venture Fund (NVF) and supported by the Windward and Hopewell Funds — is acquiring Arabella Advisors’ fiscal-sponsorship business.

Arabella oversaw a network of dark money groups that channel hundreds of millions of difficult-to-trace dollars into left-leaning political organizations and advocacy efforts.

“The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform works to uphold fundamental American civil liberties and protect the integrity of American elections,” Comer said. “To this end, we are investigating reports of new activities by Sixteen Thirty Fund— an entity with books that have long been in the care of Arabella Advisors.”

The letters to Kurtz and Williams discuss reporting regarding the program allegedly paying selected participants up to $8,000 per month to boost Democratic messaging online, but only under contracts that impose “extensive secrecy” about their payments and strictly limit what political content they can produce, according to a Wired report.

💰 A new public benefit corporation acquired left-wing dark money group Arabella Advisors’ financial sponsorship arm, with the group itself “ceasing operations,” the organization announced yesterday. pic.twitter.com/oGKjyAJu64

— Hudson Crozier 🇺🇸 (@Hudson_Crozier) November 18, 2025

Participants told the outlet the agreement warned they’d be “kicked out and essentially cut off financially” if they acknowledged being part of the program.

The contracts also reportedly required creators to route “all bookings with lawmakers and political leaders through Chorus” and barred them from using any program resources to support or oppose political candidates or campaigns without prior written approval.

The letter also cites the report that raises “concerning information about the motivations and ethics of Chorus,” including an alleged account that Graham Wilson, a lawyer for Chorus, described the program’s nonprofit structure as a way to raise donor funds, limit public disclosure and keep participants’ names off FEC filings. 

Ms. Amy Kurtz Letter by ashley

The committee is seeking a wide range of records related to the Chorus program — including contracts, communications, funding and budgeting materials, internal planning documents, marketing and recruitment materials, compliance records, and any correspondence with key individuals involved — covering all aspects of the program’s creation, operation, oversight, and participant coordination.

The Caller reached out to Sixteen Thirty Fund and Williams for comment but did not receive a response prior to publication.

Finnegans Wake: Punctuation and Syntax

The Death of the Author:

Hans-Georg Moeller and Ladelle McWhorter: The Modern Self

Index to Above Video:

00:00-3:55 Intro 

3:55-5:53 "Unbecoming Persons" 

5:53-12:59 From Wights to Persons 

12:59-16:37 Personhood 

16:37-28:16 John Locke and Personhood 

28:16-32:35 Slavery 

32:35-39:19 Sovereign Individual 

39:19-44:10 Secularization? 

44:10-52:40 Ownership, Individuality, Personhood 

52:40-57:40 The Hard Truth 

57:40-1:02:55 Dependent Belonging and Active Belonging 

1:02:55-1:09:45 The Prospect

On Several Regimes of Signs from Deleuze and Guattari's "1,000 Plateaus" + William Burroughs

Corruption and Economic Fragility are Built In

James Lindsay on the Essence of Critical Theory

"If Your Reality is NOT Ideal, CRITICIZE IT!"

"There are Trade-offs?  Don't Nit-Pick my Ideals!"

"Progress - Immanentize MY Eschaton!"

Bring on World Spirit's Rational State's End Times

...and then there's Sycophancy Theory....

...for all the Israel Sponsored MAGA Influencers like James Lindsay

Hegelian Positivism Infects Europe?

Prometheus, we barely knew ye!

Hegel's (and Progressivism's) Big Historical Idea

 

GWF Hegel, "The Phenomenology of Spirit"

The "World Spirit" on Horseback - Reason defined as "Historical Necessity Working Itself Out".  Absolute Spirit as the Rational State (and the End of History)

“I saw the Emperor (Napoleon)– this world-soul – riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.”

― Georg WF Hegel

Historical Necessity's Means of Natural Selection - The Violence of the Negative

from Google AI:

Hegel's "violence of the negative" refers to the concept that conflict, negation, and violence are not purely destructive but are necessary, active forces that drive historical and dialectical progress. This "negative" element is what allows for the development of new ideas, consciousness, and freedom by destroying or negating previous, limited states. It is through this process, including the confrontation with "the negative," that being is transformed into a higher, more complex synthesis, ultimately leading to a more developed understanding of reality and self-consciousness.

Immanentize the Eschaton! ?

What Would an Historian Like Arnold Toynbee Say about an End of History?

The Ancient Greek Answer to Buddhism...

The Conservative Answer to Community (Tragic Need v. Progressive Desire):

...Anti-Fragility vs. Fragility:

...Anti-Authoritarianism and Arboreal Power Hierarchies:

On the Ontology of 'Meaning'...

... and why we can't understand Lem's 'Solaris'

Do You Have AI Psychosis Yet? Dervy does.

Q Prefers human social Interactions.  You'd think it would be the reverse, that Q would prefer AIs (Tech) and Dervy humans (Socialism).  But then again, Q is a quant and Derv is a qualia, so they both seek the Generation from Opposites.

 

So, Arboreal (hierarchical) or Rhisomic (Deleuzian- flat) Power Structures? Where will you interact?

Pale Fire is a 1962 novel by Vladimir Nabokov. The novel is presented as a 999-line poem titled "Pale Fire", written by the fictional poet John Shade, with a foreword, lengthy commentary, and index written by Shade's neighbor and academic colleague, Charles Kinbote. Together these elements form a narrative in which both fictional authors are central characters. Nabokov wrote Pale Fire in 1960–61, after the success of Lolita had made him financially independent, allowing him to retire from teaching and return to Europe.^[1][2] Nabokov began writing the novel in Nice and completed it in Montreux, Switzerland.^[3]

Pale Fire's unusual structure has attracted much attention, and it is often cited as an important example of metafiction,^[4][5] as well as an analog precursor to hypertext fiction, and a poioumenon.^[6] It has spawned a wide variety of interpretations and a large body of written criticism, which literary scholar Pekka Tammi [fi] estimated in 1995 as more than 80 studies.^[7] The Nabokov authority Brian Boyd has called it "Nabokov's most perfect novel",^[8] and the critic Harold Bloom called it "the surest demonstration of his own genius ... that remarkable tour de force".^[9]

Novel structure

Starting with the epigraph and table of contents, Pale Fire is apparently the publication of a 999-line poem in four cantos ("Pale Fire") by the fictional John Shade with a foreword, extensive commentary, and index by his self-appointed editor, Charles Kinbote. Kinbote's commentary takes the form of notes to various numbered lines of the poem. Here, as in the rest of his critical apparatus, Kinbote explicates the poem very little. Focusing monomanically on his own concerns, he divulges what proves to be the plot piece by piece, some of which can be connected by following the many cross-references. Espen Aarseth noted that Pale Fire "can be read either unicursally, straight through, or multicursally, jumping between the comments and the poem."^[10] Thus, although the narration is non-linear and multidimensional, the reader can still choose to read the novel in a linear manner without risking misinterpretation.^[11]

The interaction between Kinbote and Shade takes place in the fictitious small college town and state of New Wye, Appalachia, where they live across a lane from each other from February to July 1959. Kinbote writes his commentary from then to October 1959 in a tourist cabin in the equally fictitious western town and state of Cedarn, Utana. Both authors recount many earlier events, Shade mostly in New Wye and Kinbote in New Wye and in Europe, especially the "distant northern land" of Zembla.

Plot summary

Shade's poem digressively describes many aspects of his life. Canto 1 includes his early encounters with death and glimpses of what he takes to be the supernatural. Canto 2 is about his family and the apparent suicide of his daughter, Hazel Shade. Canto 3 focuses on Shade's search for knowledge about an afterlife, culminating in a "faint hope" in higher powers "playing a game of worlds" as indicated by apparent coincidences. Canto 4 offers details on Shade's daily life and creative process, as well as thoughts on his poetry, which he finds to be a means of somehow understanding the universe.

In Kinbote's editorial contributions he tells three stories intermixed with each other. One is his own story, notably including what he thinks of as his friendship with Shade. After Shade was murdered, Kinbote acquired the manuscript, including some variants, and has taken it upon himself to oversee the poem's publication, telling readers that it lacks only line 1000. Kinbote's second story deals with King Charles II, "The Beloved", the deposed king of Zembla. King Charles escaped imprisonment by Soviet-backed revolutionaries, making use of a secret passage and brave adherents in disguise. Kinbote repeatedly claims that he inspired Shade to write the poem by recounting King Charles's escape to him and that possible allusions to the king, and to Zembla, appear in Shade's poem, especially in rejected drafts. However, no explicit reference to King Charles is to be found in the poem. Kinbote's third story is that of Gradus, an assassin dispatched by the new rulers of Zembla to kill the exiled King Charles. Gradus makes his way from Zembla through Europe and America to New Wye, suffering comic mishaps. In the last note, to the missing line 1000, Kinbote narrates how Gradus killed Shade by mistake.

Towards the end of the narrative, Kinbote all but states that he is in fact the exiled King Charles, living incognito; however, enough details throughout the story, as well as direct statements of ambiguous sincerity by Kinbote towards the novel's end, suggest that King Charles and Zembla are both fictitious. In the latter interpretation, Kinbote is delusional and has built an elaborate picture of Zembla complete with samples of a constructed language as a by-product of insanity; similarly, Gradus was simply an unhinged man trying to kill Shade, and his backstory as a revolutionary assassin is also made up.

In an interview, Nabokov later said that Kinbote killed himself after finishing the book.^[12] The critic Michael Wood has stated, "This is authorial trespassing, and we don't have to pay attention to it",^[13] but Brian Boyd has argued that internal evidence points to Kinbote's suicide.^[14] One of Kinbote's annotations to Shade's poem (corresponding to line 493) addresses the subject of suicide at some length.

Explanation of the title

As Nabokov pointed out himself,^[15] the title of John Shade's poem is from Shakespeare's Timon of Athens: "The moon's an arrant thief, / And her pale fire she snatches from the sun" (Act IV, scene 3), a line often taken as a metaphor about creativity and inspiration. Kinbote quotes the passage but does not recognize it, as he says he has access only to an inaccurate Zemblan translation of the play "in his Timonian cave", and in a separate note he even rails against the common practice of using quotations as titles.

Some critics have noted a secondary reference in the book's title to Hamlet, where the Ghost remarks how the glow-worm "'gins to pale his uneffectual fire" (Act I, scene 5).^[16]

The title is first mentioned in the foreword: "I recall seeing him from my porch, on a brilliant morning, burning a whole stack of [index cards of drafts of the poem] in the pale fire of the incinerator...".