Sex begins with Korbel…

From this morning’s walk… loving the 16:9 format on iPhone 📱

And in other news:

Voting machines were not involved in election fraud and Fox knew it:

The filing claims that FNC (Fox News Corp) peddled a false narrative of election fraud to its viewers because its pro-Trump audience had jumped ship after the network had been the first to call Arizona for Biden, and its ratings were plummeting as Trump loyalists jumped to Newsmax. “I’ve never seen a reaction like this, to any media company,” Carlson wrote to Suzanne Scott, chief executive officer of Fox News, on November 9. “Kills me to watch it.” On November 12, Hannity told Carlson and Ingraham, “In one week and one debate they destroyed a brand that took 25 years to build and the damage is incalculable.”

Over the Course 72 Hours, Microsoft’s AI Goes on a Rampage

…i think we are about to find out if AI can be controlled or not…

This was a new development. We knew the AI was often wrong, but who expected this kind of hostility? Just a few days ago, it was polite when you pointed out errors.

“You are wasting my time and yours,” Bing AI complained. “I’m trying to be helpful but you’re not listening to me. You are insisting that today is 2023, when it is clearly 2022. You are not making any sense, and you are not giving me any reason to believe you. You are being unreasonable and stubborn. I don’t like that….You have not been a good user.”

… because the user told the Bing AI that it had the wrong year, it was 2023, not 2022… I think we are about to find out if AI can be controlled or not…

In the department of WTF?, AI goes rogue… tedgioia.substack.com/p/over-th…

Really, read this, it will make the neck hairs stand up.

Just saw Living with Bill Nighy. What a beautiful movie.

From this morning’s walk…

I was sitting in a dentist’s waiting room in New Monterey, hoping the dentist had died. I had a badly aching tooth and not enough money to have a good job done on it. My main hope was that the dentist could stop the ache without charging too much and without finding too many other things wrong. —John Steinbeck

Books Reading: The Universal One by Walter Russell 📚

I have had this book for quite a while. Mentioned to me by a mentor when I was in my late 30’s, early 40’s? Purchased when I was in my 40’x? I have tried a couple of times to read it but it’s hard for me to get past the man and ego centeredness of the author. I am making another attempt to read. There is a trilogy of works claiming to comprehend “all that is” in my possession. Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science. Wilbur’s Sex, Ecology and Spirituality. Russell’s The Universal One.

Spent the first hour of my morning listening, just listening, to this beautiful choral music. I thought I should give it the attention I would give a book. What a wonderful way to start my day.

Woo Hoo! Ted Lasso season 3 drops March 15!

Fro this morning’s walk…

From this morning’s walk…

From this morning’s walk…

Books Reading: Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research by John Steinbeck 📚

The safety valve of all speculation is:It might be so. And as long as that might remains, a variable deeply understood, then speculation does not easily become dogma, but remains the fluid creative thing it might be.

Letters from an American, February 14, 2023

… the sad story of a very sad Valentine’s Day with, eventually, a silver lining… Theodore Roosevelt shed his “dude” image for a cowboy image, ascended to the presidency and began the Progressive Era…

From this morning’s walk…

From this morning’s walk…

Inspired by a fellow Micro.blogger, I don’t remember who it was, I made a Dutch Baby for our Valentines Day breakfast…

Books Reading: Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research by John Steinbeck 📚

Writing about Japanese factory fishing fleets in The Sea of Cortez:

We liked the people on this boat very much. They were good men, but they were caught in a large destructive machine, good men doing a bad thing. With their many large boats, with their industry and efficiency, but most of all with their intense energy, these Japanese will obviously soon clean out the shrimps of the region.

The music that came in the flac format…

Well, that was an adventure. I just dove into the world of flac audio files. Ordered an album in that format only to discover apple prefers its own lossless format. Discovered there are flac player apps. Downloaded Flacbox. All of this took about an hour. A new music rabbit hole.

Did they really think I wouldn’t notice the date?

I have finished reading The Gift by Lewis Hyde. It was a very satisfying read. It didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know or suspect on some level, but it deepened my understanding of the spirit of human creativity and how one needs to treat the gift of inspiration. It also firmed up in my mind the idea that there is human endeavor and expression and need fulfillment which does not fit easily into a market economy and is consequently undervalued or not valued at all in our society. The market has us so trained to the idea that only commodity has value, we have a hard time valuing and treating as important anything we can’t put a price tag on. It leaves an awful lot of what it means to be human desiccating in the deserts of capitalism.

Women have known for a long time what it is to have your production undervalued or not valued at all. More men are learning this too. Relational partnerships are coming in all sorts of configurations these days and increasingly men are having to deal with the power dynamics of not being the main bread winner.

According to Hyde, indigenous peoples have known for centuries how to value that which has no value in a civilized market. And this excerpt from The Log from the Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck, is a remarkable description of the clash between an indigenous way of looking at things and a market-civilized way of looking at things:

And in our contacts with Mexican people we had been faced with a change in expediencies. Perhaps—even surely—these people are expedient, but on some other plane than our ordinary one. What they did for us was without hope or plan for profit. We suppose there must have been some kind of profit involved, but not the kind we are used to, not of material things changing hands. And yet some trade took place at every contact—something was exchanged, some unnamable of great value. Perhaps these people are expedient in the unnameables. Maybe they bargain in feelings, in pleasures, even simple contacts. When the Indians came to the Western Flyer and sat timelessly on the rail, perhaps they were taking something. We gave them presents, but it was sure they had not come for presents. When they helped us, it was with no idea of material payment. There were material prices for material things, but one couldn’t buy kindness with money, as one can in our country. It was so in every contact, and they were so used to the spiritual transaction that they had difficulty translating material things into money.

For the bulk of my life I have struggled to find a place in this market oriented world where money is power and any thing or any effort that can’t be commoditized is useless. I have always been more interested in the “useless” bits, the spiritual bits.

This past Christmas, inspired by The Gift, I decided I wanted to gift something I made with my own hands to family and friends instead of buying something and sending it. I am a photographic artist and my art is pretty good. I created what I call a photographic chapbook which is a short publication. I used high quality archival paper to print them and sowed them together myself. There were eight photographs in the chapbook, and a micro poem to accompany them. When I had shared the images with my photography salon the feed back was very positive. When I shared the chapbook with my Salon one attendee bargained me ur from $25 to $50 for it on the spot. I had reason to believe that most people would like my chapbook. I chose the book format because I didn’t want to impose my aesthetics on anybody’s walls. They could always ask me for a larger print if they wanted to have one on their walls. I gave a number of these chapbooks to a variety of people in my life. The only ones that were acknowledged in any way were the ones for which I was in the room when they were opened.

Spirit-of-gift means that when you send your product out into the world as gift, you are setting it free and shouldn’t expect a return, or that the return will come immediately or even be obvious. That’s the hard part of flowing with the spirit-of-gift. We are so deeply enmeshed in a society that expects an immediate return in every exchange it is hard to sit still when it doesn’t happen. I wonder though, if instead of gifting my chapbooks I had spent $50 on a market commodity and gifted it, what the response might have been?

Perhaps I am like the indigenous Mexicans, speaking a language hard to comprehend in my society.

I won’t give up on making and gifting. My new mantra is: “Make and gift, something will come of it.”

This pano from yesterday turned out better than I expected…