Bob's blog - the realm of threalm

"Not the Bee"  published a piece on 8 December about Amazon's cloud computing division having an outage earlier this week, leaving thousands of people with faulty fridges, front doors and thermostats etc.  Amazon's  Internet of Things "smart homes" stuff, designed to make the little things easier and life more convenient, went down. This made some small smart things quite big, dumb and less convenient. Being locked out of your home, shivering with cold at home or having spoilt food in the fridge, can cause you problems.  And that's just the easy to identify domestic stuff. Whole energy grids, traffic light networks, defence systems or hospitals could easily be included in such a list in only a slightly different scenario. There's a signal here, amidst the noise, if you're looking for it.

We do seem to be living in "interesting times"  (or is this just an expression of my personal "contemporary historical significance bias"?). Our civilization seems to be in the midst of a nervous breakdown in the early 21st century, what with 9/11, the IPCC, GHG emissions, LGBT IQ , BLM, CRT, Brexit,  Trump, COVID19, Biden, Xi, Putin, J6, and the Insidious Acronym Plague (IAP).  Amongst other crazy ideas, personal identity has now become a big deal in our public domain. The former aspirational liberal ideal of racial, gender, ethic, disability and religious blindness as the way to live and interact in a fair and proper non-prejudiced way, has now been inverted by the prevalence of the confounding and contradictory idea that unless you demonstrably display preference and sympathy for certain specific, but seemingly ever changing, categories of people and opinions, you are evil, wrong and undeserving of an audience.  For many centuries there has been a confusing Engli

The Samizdata quote of the day on 1 December 2021 from Perry de Havillland is from a website I have not encountered before: Eugyppius . Here's the quote:      People tend to believe things that further their personal interests, and universities are no exception. Wokification succeeded largely because it gave a lot of different people a lot of different things that they wanted. It gave the increasingly powerful university administration a reason to hire more administrators to manage diversity and ensure its forward march. Self-propagation is the highest goal of administrators everywhere. Wokeness also became a useful tool in ongoing turf wars between administrators and faculty. Diversity is a simple metric via which the administration can interfere with faculty hiring and academic operations; new diversity hires know who is buttering their bread and remain loyal to the administrators whose policies brought them in. For the increasingly mediocre and incapable faculty who now teach a

  Sydney   lockdown blues  Westerly winds blow through the day. Covid stats are spiking. There's merch to buy with Afterpay  and then we are going hiking. Writing another Instagram sprawled in my lounge chair, bored and tired of home I am. How much more can we bare? Bob 26. 07.2021

From the  definition  in the Urban Dictionary. Baizuo   (pronounced "bye-tswaw) is a Chinese epithet meaning naive western educated person who advocates for peace and equality only to satisfy their own feeling of moral superiority. A   baizuo   only cares about topics such as immigration, minorities, LGBT and the environment while being obsessed with political correctness to the extent that they import backwards Islamic values for the sake of   multiculturalism . The Chinese see the baizuo as ignorant and arrogant  westerners  who pity the rest of the world and think they are saviours. Justin Trudeau's  worldview is a low-resolution caricature of  an adult's  worldview.                "Oh yeah. He's a total  BAIZUO ." I guess it makes sense that the Chinese would have such an accurate and precise word to describe the many useful idiots they exploit to further the demise of the West and promote their own ascendancy.

Apparently computers will never write good novels or poetry. That is according to a carefully crafted narrative in Nautilus by Angus Fletcher dated February 10, 2021 entitled Why Computers Will Never Write Good Novels . Thank you again to the Arts & Letters Daily website for pointing me in the direction of another story that is helping me make sense of this confusing post Trumpian and COVID world. Angus Fletcher's thesis in Why Computers Will Never Write Good Novels is beguiling and quite encouraging, and it does seem to help neutralize Cameron Hilditch's thesis in National Review, discussed a couple of posts earlier on this blog, that Technology Will Destroy Us . Fletcher's proposition is that because computers think only in the syllogistic Boolian language of AND/OR/NOT, which is necessarily directionaly neutral and non-causal, computers cannot create imagined causes and connections that are the essence of authentic disbelief-suspending narrative. It was quite an eye

Perhaps to help stop technology destroying us we might each day seek to unplug . Say... Leave your mobile on the bench today, become unplugged, yes, tablet free, go out the opened door to play;  touch, taste, sing and see.   Be beguiled by beckoning birdsong , brace brazenly 'gainst the blust'ring breeze, bypass business and the bustling throng, bend time, slow space, incept brain freeze .   Sieve slimy sand though sandalled soles,   smear sweating  skin with sunscreen oil,     slide seaweed strands through swimsuit holes,    savour sweet stenched  sea and soil. Wonder at the wideness of the world's night, wistfully wander where there's no walkway, plunge dark pools and  rise up to light, then wake to silently laugh out loud, OK?   Technology is impotent to destroy such doggerel emerging from depths of our sub-consciousness. So  threalm  on.  Less blogging and more jogging and snogging 'til we've pulled out of this tech death spiral. OK?   

In the cacophony of the interesting times in which we live it has been difficult to sustain a coherent picture, let alone a coherently articulated explanation for why such chaos has now enveloped us. This may partially explain the long silence of the Realm of Threalm through the time of Trump and COVID. There has been all too much to talk about in recent years but not really a lot to say that makes sense of it all.  I have been prompted however to return from my social commentary somnolence to blog again here by a Nation Review article of 23 January 2021 by Cameron Hilditch entitled " Technology Will Destroy Us ". I might just have been shown a plausible story that helps coherently explain what the hell is happening in this noisy, fractious, partisan and unforgiving world we now seem to live in. Here's a summary (using the article's own words) of what appears to be its thesis: Technology allows human beings to shape reality in such a way that it conforms to their own