On my morning walk I took a different route, through the valley fields, instead of through the wooded hills. Along part of my way there was the roar of traffic from a nearby road, then, moving away from it, I could hear the birds again. According to the Merlin app, these differed from the ones I hear …
Just as the movie Interstellar makes no sense until you hear the backstories (see my previous post), our lived reality cannot be understood without the existence of a backstory. A backstory is not an interpretation. We cannot deduce or interpret all of what was happening on screen simply by watching the movie. In a similar way, we cannot …
It seems to me that the number one question of the hour , in modern societies, is how to adopt a sane response when we are surrounded by madness? Here, it’s visceral and tribal; and generally unhinged. You can sense this if you detach yourself sufficiently to be aware of how people are thinking, without …
I have a sneaking suspicion that the reason we haven’t found any evidence for advanced civilizations elsewhere in the universe is that they are consistently short-lived – a few thousand years, out of the billions of years that stars have existed. So the chance of stumbling across one is really small. And, by the same …
On my morning walk listened to the two recent episodes from Tech Won’t Save Us, “How the US Weaponizes Tech in the Middle East” and “The Geopolitical Fight Over Huawei” both of which are really interesting. One of my thoughts is that we are just the end users of terminals connected to gargantuan telecommunications infrastructures …
Find a country that the majority of the world reviles for crimes against humanity or would in any case be too scared to visit; avoid the locals because it’s too painful to hear them or argue with them, and end up staying home because you don’t feel like leading a normal life with all that’s …
Purpose or lack of purpose is something that exists in the human plane. To escape suffering that is caused by war, famine, climate change, a person risks his life with the purpose of reaching a better place. Purposes relate to cause and effect; to agency. A subject acts and an object receives the action. By …
Being a good citizen Being a good citizen of the 21st century requires knowledge and awareness so that we can make good decisions on an individual level, about what products to buy, what to do and what not to do. On the other hand, our individual solutions have very little effect, compared to those of …
New Hubzilla server Yesterday I signed up for yet another server, this time KNThost, because they have a managed service for Hubzilla (also Streams). At this stage I really think I need to have some help with running Hubzilla instances. The one that I hosted on an unmanaged VPS has gone bad, and no longer …
Are we just who we think we are, or do we always represent something – some group; some nation; some identity? There are things we would like to say, but then we remember that as a “privileged white male” or as a citizen of a former colonial power, or something else, it is probably better …