They came upon a circle of nomads Camped far from the lights of the town Blue men with scars and malarial eyes And teeth that were pointed… filed down He said: “These are the people I’ve been searching for, This is more than I ever could have hoped!” As they threw him down on a blanket And tied […]
The Fulfillment Machine
If you don’t know, Artificial Intelligence, AI, is creeping inexorably into our lives. From facial recognition technology to autonomous vehicles, from drone swarms to Siri, from Tesla to Pandora’s “Musical DNA”, AI and Machine Learning are among the incredibly powerful – and largely invisible — forces driving our next cultural revolution.
Thanksgiving Blues
Sunday morning we killed the turkeys. This is an important fall ritual on the Figure 8 because it brings with it a level of intimacy with our own lives that we find sorely lacking in the Age of Robots and Artificial Intelligence. It’s the same impetus that drives our effort at growing vegetables, and hunting for protein when we can: because it moves us decidedly off of the crass and mindless consumer X and comes with a refreshing dose of participation and personal responsibility that remain life’s best teachers.
Death in the Creekbed
In a consumer society, where so much of what we require for daily life forces us into roles of utter dependence upon complex, fragile, and unaccountable systems, there are few remaining outlets that allow us at least the illusion of self‐sufficiency. Hunting is one of them.
One Drop Of Blood
The recent kerfuffle over politician Elizabeth Warren’s DNA test proving that she has Native American blood (a degree denoting a likely ancestor dating back from the early 19th Century) is a fine illustration of the continuity and persistence of the American fixation on race. I will leave it to others to parse the implications of the unseemly […]
Beware The Outrage Trolls
“A tongue can accuse and carry bad news The seeds of distrust it will sow But unless you’ve made no mistakes in your life Be careful of stones that you throw… — Hank Williams, “Be Careful Of Stones That You Throw” * This is how this rolls: Somebody, somewhere, with an ax to grind digs […]
Apostate Blues
Readers of this site generally accept the proposition that our American experiment in self‐government is taking on water. I would argue that, all things considered, the ship is actually beginning to list heavily under the combined weight of a wholly unaccountable administrative state, a surreal burden of debt we will leave to our grandchildren as a kind of cynical stocking stuffer, third‐world education standards, tribal strife stoked by retail journalism, a new and prevailing cultural adulation of the victim mentality, meme‐think politics, and a Congress that is more or less directed by the parasitic whims of a guild economy.
Talk Sexy To Me, Alexa!
“This is the kind of surveillance that people can actually like. There’s satellites up there not only to spy on us, but to help us lead better lives.” — Marcel Salathé, head of the Digital Epidemiology Lab at Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne on using satellite photographs to correlate obesity and environment. Oh, fuck […]
The New Counterculture In A Time Of Collapse
By Rick Schwertfeger for RunningIronReport.com Evidence increases in the United States today of two processes underway simultaneously: One, a potential collapse of key institutions that underlie the existing American economic, political, and social systems. Evidence abounds of an economic system that concentrates wealth in a small minority of Americans, and leaves the majority struggling with insufficient income, […]
Daybook Entry, 10 September 2018, Figure 8 Ranch
I often return to the poets these days. From great translations of the Illiad and the Odyssey to Beowulf, from Shakespeare to Dylan Thomas, and more frequently to the modern giants like Charles Wright, Richard Hugo, or Galway Kinnell, I find a touchstone that gentles my nerves. That ritual works for me because fine poets fire the language with precision, and stoke the imagination with what John Keats called “Negative Capability.” Our world is sorely lacking in appreciation for the mysterious and the levitating these days, and the airwaves are so rich with insincerity, so over‐cooked with political certainty and righteous declarations, that the daily and endless caterwauling amounts to a kind of relentless propaganda bullhorn.
Fault Lines
“At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined… could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make […]
On Political Correctness
A recent letter to the editor in The Nugget Newspaper, which I edit and where Craig has a column, defended “political correctness” as “basically another term for respect, consideration, kindness, and generosity towards others despite their race, ethnicity, gender, or disability.” This definition elides the modern origins of the term, which lie in totalitarian attempts to own […]
