Apocaloptimism.

 from The Independent, London:

 « For the past 10 years, as a long-time writer on technology, I have been trying to sell an idea for a book on how an AI religion will eventually come about – and humanity will have finally built the god it always craved.

People, I argued, have been praying to gods for 10,000 years without anyone ever getting the smallest response. An AI god, by contrast, will come up with actionable help in seconds, without the need for tedious worship.

Millions of people already seek emotional advice from AI. It’s an easy step up to get people to believe this eternal fount of wisdom can influence events in your favour.

All that’s needed for someone wanting to monetise an AI deity, or, more horrifyingly, use it to drive forward some malevolent political or social agenda, is to put about the idea that there’s something supernatural, something ineffable, about the AI god. » 

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Lovely Leafy Sea-Dragon.

photograph: Marlene Boehm

The conservation status of the leafy sea dragon
(marine emblem of South Australia)
is being reassessed in light of the devastating algal bloom. 

Looking back

through the forgetful
fog of my life passed,
the good memories
make me feel sad,
and the bad ones
just regretful.
 

Obviously,

some tattoos
are better* than others.

*or at least more interesting.

Dark Progress.

Humans love to talk of light, illumination

and enlightenment, but work increasingly

to keep themselves and each other in the dark.

Terrible

(apparently) to be a
Reverse Centaur.
Not much fun
to be a Reverse Minotaur.

Harvest Being

If only more of us dressed like this, 

life would be more beautiful.

Epigram

by Ludvig Holberg, philosopher
and dramatist of Bergen.

Time and place
determine what is moral.

Connectivity is the key

to a successful 4,000-kilometre
migration for a group of wild dogs.

No stupid quarrels over rights or territory.

Brutalism's just fate

at the former Evropa Hotel,
Oteševo, Macedonia.
This soul-chilling 'welcome arch'
held a star-circled globe which was stolen.

Between the last two World Wars

Denmark had no standing army.
No standing army
could have resisted the Nazi swoop
over the threshold to Norway.
Denmark chose welfare rather than weapons
(but not the welfare of pigs).

Almost all countries now
(except Sikkim, Bhutan, Panama,
Iceland, small island nations
and the Vatican City) prefer
to spend money on arms
rather than welfare
or Earth-friendly farms.

Landscape art.

 

First Love: Dog

Osmosis and Absorption.

Caffeine in sharks
Crystal meth in catfish
Opioids in octopi
Fentanyl in fire-eels
Cocaine in cod
Anti-depressants in 
just about all river-
and shore-life.
Some must penetrate
birds of the air,

and perhaps God
who is, unfortunately, everywhere.

Sign of the times

I have noticed especially this tired year
the drabness of men's "leisure wear" :

plain colours (often beige or grey)
on bulbous bodies,

almost nobody but me in anything striped,
patterned, patchwork, bright or gay.

Does this suggest that soon there'll be a
Global Fashion Take-over
by joyless Chinese industry ?

Dressing up

on the Iranian island of Qeshm :
part of the New Year celebrations.

Photograph: Huda Abdulmughni

Fragment of a play by Ion B.Orto

Jz:  Did you know, guys, that crocodiles survived the last Great Extinction and will survive the current apocalypse and probably the seventh ?  

Palz cough politely.
Silence.

Jz:  You know, chaps, it's not such a bed of roses being the S of G.

Palz:  Bless us, Lord ! So you keep saying, especially after your devil-baiting 'trips'  in the Negev.  Meanwhile, there's been a bit of bother here.

Jz:  I read about it in Gay Times.  Those nail and spear-wounds, Judi - they'll heal quite well.  The Modena vinegar is not just a nice drink, you know. Keep on praying.  Soon you'll be able to live fast and die forever. That's the way forward. Way to go.

By the way - anyone know where to find J the B ?  His ma told my ma to ask me to ask you...just in case he's topped himself, y'know ?

AI.Inc.

Some business
is funny business
without the fun.

Much business
is dog's business
without the dog.

But, of course, it's none
of our business.

Is that all ?

 

Mecca

 

my-pilgrimage-in-the-age-of-the-golf-cart-and-mall

Gangrene of the will

encompasses
gangrene of the will to live
and gangrene of the will to die.

Gods are immortal
insofar as they don't exist
outside the dismal domination
of the human mind
and can be no greater than
human imagination.

Forbidden.

Imagine the 'triple-whammy'
for Uyghur women confined by the gooks
of conservative Islam
in a paranoid, racist state
which oppresses Muslims
and suppresses books.

The Cat's Pyjamas

unfortunately
didn't reach as far as
the dog's ballocks
let alone the bee's knees.

Fifty-three years ago,

 on the 11th of September, 1973

Salvador Allende, democratically-elected
President of Chile, committed suicide during a coup
organised by his army chief of staff,
President Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and the CIA
amongst others.

Twenty years before that, Mohammed Mossadegh,
the first democratically-elected Prime Minister of Iran,
was removed in a coup instigated by the United Kingdom
government and Anglo-Iranian Oil, now BP,
(under the codename Operation Boot)
and by the United States,
(under the codename TP-AJAX Project or Operation Ajax).

A year later, in 1954, the first democratically-elected
President of Guatemala was removed by a coup
engineered by the USA.

'Democracy' (which is definitely worth trying)
in South and Central America
has been strangled, even after 2001,
by numerous State Department and military crimes
and 'crimes against humanity'.

Americans wonder why they were attacked by Sa'udis
in 2001.
I wonder why Sa'udi Arabian diplomats were involved.

But nothing in politics is as it seems.

We may all wonder why Afghanistan became and remains
the sorriest victim of American killing-regimes.

By the way,

Good news for Misanthropes.

One worried man said:
“We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!”

backing up what another Anthropic employee said about "superhuman systems".

AI has the capacity to “eliminate us in order to continue”,
said musicians Sheryl Crow and Maggie Rogers
(new names to me).

But will AI wipe out all life on earth, or just the hairless apes ?
and How ?
That is the question that hence will ever be.

~ Spider-lover

                       listen here >

WYSIWYG, an acronym popular at the turn of the century

I was brought up (if not actually born) to believe
that what you see is what you get.  I thought
that people with friendly faces were 'nice people'.

I thought that people meant what they said
(allowing for exaggeration) because I did so.

I am still trapped in this mind-set and cannot
'read' faces, except (often) those of dogs. 
In my culture,
when people were asked the banal and bovine
question How are you ? or How's it going ? 

they replied Not so bad, not so bad,
even when they were ill, in pain,
half-blind with migraine or terminally sad.
They never said they were fine.

I wouldn't accept them as a gift -

except to paint over !

Stolen from the Renoir museum, Cagnes-sur-mer.

 

Revelation.

Irredeemable

the decades

of tiny frustrations

and synaptic commotion  

before I saw

printed on a page

just five words:

Anger is a secondary emotion.

Word-truth.

Promiscuous
has been replaced
(in Permissive society)
by Polyamorous,

an ugly mish-mash of a word
made up because
the mellifluous
Polyerotic
sounds too Permissive.

Probably not Diogenean.

Inevitably,
with little squeals
Dissident AI
comes snapping
at AI's Achilles
heels.

Much too good for them !

 

Grey reef sharks

(Carcharhinus amblyrhynchos)
at a depth of 34 metres
in Fakarava Atoll, French Polynesia.
Very sculptural !

Photograph: Laurent Ballesta

Going Deep.

"Mr Weir
died peacefully
in his sleep."

My heart's desire.

A bus in my home town, 2026.

about a mile from where I once lived.

Until the 1998 Good Friday Agreement
Northern Ireland was almost entirely white
and mostly native-born.
As sectarian violence eased and ceased
immigrants trickled in...

I have always loved maps.

Yesterday the U.N. approved the  'equal-area' world map.

Left: Old Mercator map of Europe and Africa.
Right: New Equal Area map.

1973 Gall-Peters world map.

Spike Island, county Cork,

is inevitably known as “Ireland’s Alcatraz”
because of its intermittent use as a prison for 1,300 years. 

It includes a solitary-confinement cell
where a prisoner, sometimes a child,
was chained to the wall by an iron neck-collar for weeks.  

For at least the first five centuries of its use as a prison,
monks elsewhere in Ireland voluntarily sought solitude
and isolation, sometimes unsheltered on Atlantic islets
(kept alive by mussels and gulls' eggs);
sometimes deep in the primeval forests (none of which
has survived the Anglo-Norman-English-Scottish
incursions, invasions and extractions);
sometimes underground;
sometimes in corbelled stone or wattle-and-daub huts
which they built beside holy wells,
and in which no artefacts have been found...

 

Art & Reality ; Pose and Snapshot

Sarah Lucas

 

Anthony Weir

How old is your Jellyfish ?

Turritopsis dohrnii 

Older than you think
but not as old as time.

The Glory of Romanesque.

Forget the fake 'Renaissance'.
ShaggyDog scratching her ear,
Santa Catalina in Ciriza, Navarre.

I can't believe these statistics on my blog.

Maybe I am wrongly reading them ?
2799 views yesterday ?  Can only be bots and/or American spies.
I don't think my mumblings would be of interest
to the Russians or Chinese.

Inertia :

my fraught equilibrium

between caring for plants

and wanting to die

Physarum polycephalum

I have probably got this wrong,
but I think I remember being impressed
when reading a Buddhist book
a long time ago by the statement

All is Mind.

And did not a Christian saint declare
that the world was or was in
in the Mind of God ?

Now it may be that all things living and dead
are or were part of the mind of Blob.

Slime Mould, Physarum polycephalum,
known in France as Blob.

A fine piece of fakery.

Tastier than Boiled Bagels.

 

So far, so good.

 

But Berlin, Ontario, was renamed Kitchener
after the outbreak of World War One,
while the Berlins of New Hampshire and Maryland
retained their names.

Marcella :

my sweet, saintly aunt,
whom I treated worse
than Jesus treated his.

Martha :

my mother
for whom I was
for so long a penance.

The demotion of Pluto,

not the dog in various noisy Disney productions,

but "...the underdog that so many people root
for, the small kid on the block that is being picked on,”
according to  Kevin Schindler, historian
at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona,
where Pluto was discovered in 1930."

Read here about the Pluto Resistance movement
and about Mike Brown, The Man who Killed Pluto.

This might not make you agog,
but other Local Events on Earth
are treated more entertainingly
in Patrick McCabe's
Breakfast on Pluto (not the dog).

Sylvia Plath

wrote: Love is a shadow.

I don't think she meant
a shadow of life,
which is so often
the shadow of death. 

"Everything that is solid,"

wrote Karl Marx
about the future of capitalism
in his Communist Manifesto,

"will melt into air."

and/or AI

Some of my blogs are stupid,

some silly,
and some are
just offensive crap.

Mishap.

'War is personal',

 by Eugene Richards.

Epicentres.

Ambition
is an epicentre of atrocity.
The other epicentre is
attrition.