Is there is a dark future for smart speakers in our lives—Amazon Echo, Google Home, Facebook Portal, and all the rest?
Introducing the most advanced artificial intelligence platform in modern history, in this brilliant video from Ghost + Cow. Presenting L1ZY:
Trump just retweeted the above image, which was tweeted by a crazy pro-Trump type. Pictured in jail, charged with treason, are special counsel Robert Mueller, Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, Hillary Clinton, former Attorney General Eric Holder, Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former President Bill Clinton, former FBI Director James Comey, and former Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
The first time I posted the question “Are we scared yet?” was on January 31, 2017, just a few weeks after Trump took office. I’ve asked it regularly since, most recently in June 2018, when CBS News was interviewing an ICE whistleblower at home, and government agents came knocking at the door in the middle of the interview. In truth, that question could be asked just about every day.
I try not to be unnecessarily negative, I am a reasonable person, and I am not paranoid. But I try to be realistic, I am a student of history, and I believe in America and in the rule of law.
Maybe you see where this regime is going, but don’t want to say it too loudly, so as not to panic your family, your friends, the economy and the market—or panic yourself. Maybe you see where this going and think that it doesn’t affect you, or that you will be alright, maybe even better off. Maybe you don’t see where this is going and are hoping for the best.
This is heading to a confrontation that we might find in history books or elsewhere in the world, but have never seen in America. As much faith as we have in our institutions, they have never been tested like this, and we haven’t seen the worst yet. Will we pass the test? We hope so. Should we be scared yet? Are we?
You can’t fight and eliminate myth. You can try. You can drive it away and banish it, but it will always turn up within the city walls. Because it is inside you and all the citizens.
When I began reading comic books, I didn’t know those stories were myths. When I first heard the stories of the Bible, I didn’t know those were myths. In the big world, something about these myths proved to be irresistibly and unstoppably popular. Comic book myths became an entertainment mega-industry. Religious myths laid the foundation for the beliefs of billions.
Enlightenment and modernism took on the task of demythologizing. That project has never been wholly successful. It is instead like whack-a-mole: bash one myth down and another will pop up. You may not recognize something as myth, but there it is. Bigger than life, embodying truths that defy everyday experience and evidence. Not only bigger, but more significant.
As the essayist Joan Didion wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Maybe instead of trying to stop telling ourselves stories, maybe instead of trying to loosen our embrace of myths (both impossible anyway), maybe we keep conscious of the myths, try to let go of the unhelpful ones, and try to choose better and more beneficial ones.
“#GivingTuesday is a global day of giving fueled by the power of social media and collaboration.
“Celebrated on the Tuesday following Thanksgiving (in the U.S.) and the widely recognized shopping events Black Friday and Cyber Monday, #GivingTuesday kicks off the charitable season, when many focus on their holiday and end-of-year giving.
“One of the best ways to get involved is in your own community. We’ve created a directory to help you find organizations, charities, events and more in your own community.”
If you have favorite charities, give today, through the holiday season and whenever. If you don’t have favorites, and are wondering where to give, you can check out some of the excellent organizations that review charities, such as:
Maimonides’ Eight Degrees of Tzedakah
From lowest to highest level:
Pushke (Yiddish), donation box
Not You
A film of a festival
long ago across an ocean
I wasn’t there you weren’t either.
The camera panned from stage
to a hill above the crowd
where a bare legged lady lay
voluptuous and young.
From this distance
filtered through screen and years
she looked like you.
All of us are elsewhere though
only one was there though
wasn’t that me floating above you
saying something that made her smile
legs langouring to that summer music?
If not you who
is she?
©
Red Flower
The red flower cannot help it
not the orange or yellow
being there for bee or bird
or me just as they are
©
Zen Master Dogen (1200-1253) and Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972) would have understood each other, liked each other, despite the seven centuries that separate them. Brilliant, visionary and overwhelmingly articulate, they were heirs to two rich traditions, Zen Buddhism and Judaism, which they further refined into pure essence. Their inspired prose is poetry, the poetry of the thing itself.
Both wrote about time in ways that exceed our comprehension by a step or two, so we run to keep up: Dogen most astutely in his essay Uji: The Time Being; Heschel in his book The Sabbath.
When you are at this place, there is just one grass, there is just one form; there is understanding of form and beyond understanding of form; there is understanding of grass and beyond understanding of grass. Since there is nothing but just this moment, the time being is all the time there is. Grass being, form being, are both time.
Each moment is all being, each moment is the entire world. Reflect now whether any being or any world is left out of the present moment….
Mountains are time. Oceans are time. If they were not time, there would be no mountains or oceans. Do not think that mountains and oceans here and now are not time. If time is annihilated, mountains and oceans are annihilated. As time is not annihilated, mountains and oceans are not annihilated.
Zen Master Dogen, Uji: The Time Being, translated by Dan Welch and Kazuaki Tanahashi, in The Essential Dogen.
Every one of us occupies a portion of space. He takes it up exclusively. The portion of space which my body occupies is taken up by myself in exclusion of anyone else. Yet, no one possesses time. There is no moment which I possess exclusively. This very moment belongs to all living men as it belongs to me. We share time, we own space. Through my ownership of space, I am a rival of all other beings; through my living in time, I am a contemporary of all other beings. We pass through time, we occupy space. We easily succumb to the illusion that the world of space is for our sake, for man’s sake. In regard to time, we are immune to such an illusion.
Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath.
There is a thought that religion is an ancient and now outdated way of dealing with our understanding of a complex world. As soon as we began to “understand” the world better, and could even do and make things once attributed only to the gods, religion was considered a vestige, and often an unhelpful or destructive one.
That is ironically wrong-headed. The more we did and made, the more exponentially complex the world became. Even if our tools of whole understanding kept pace with that development—which they didn’t—people were more interested in doing and making than they were in learning and using those tools.
One more step in the downward spiral is that those who still maintained religion often integrated it with doing and making, and religion lost its original power and purpose for understanding. They exploited religion, used it, made it transactional, which made it more unpopular with those who had already rejected it.
We can develop and choose other tools to understand what is now a radically complexifying world and to understand ourselves and our place in it. It does not have to be religion, but it has to be something. Religion is convenient and useful because it has already been built and refined, sometimes—but certainly not always—in positive and enlightening ways.
Choosing nothing is an option, but a costly one. Choosing something, religion or otherwise, may yet help get us out of the mess. This mess, and the ones inevitably to come.
The previous post about the biblical episode of Jacob wrestling with a man or an angel or God is entitled Wrestling with Yourself. Why so?
In the family saga, Jacob comes from a long line of people on an important mission, which mission they use as a rationalization for some sharp practices and lying. Abraham lies about his wife, saying she is his sister. Isaac lies about his wife, saying she is his sister. Jacob lies to his father Isaac, with a plan devised by his mother, saying he is his brother and stealing his brother’s blessing. After the wrestling episode, Jacob’s sons will lie to him, saying their brother is dead, while in fact they have left him to be taken into slavery.
We wonder just what sort of entity Jacob is wrestling with. The Hebrew word ish makes it sound as if it is a man, but the details of the story say otherwise. One enlightening view says that Jacob was actually wrestling with himself. Given his history and the history of the family, such psychological conflict is understandable.
The wrestling match ends in a tie, that is, Jacob refuses to give up, even though he is injured. This is exactly what happens if you wrestle with yourself. You can’t win, but if you don’t give up, you can’t lose either. At best, you come out of the match transformed. Hurt and pained, perhaps, but different enough to merit a new name.
The Action Bible, illustrated by Sergio Cariello (Genesis 32.24–32)
Jacob Wrestles All Night with an Angel or with God
Yaakov is left alone, and a man wrestles
With him until daybreak.
When the man sees he has not won against Yaakov,
He strikes him on the hip socket,
And as he wrestles with him
Yaakov’s hip comes out of joint.
Then he says, “Let me go. Dawn is breaking.”
But Yaakov says, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”
So he tells him, “What is your name?”
And he answers, “Yaakov.”
And he says, “You shall no longer be called Yaakov, but Yisrael,
For you have fought with God and men
And you have won.”
And Yaakov tells him, saying, “Please tell me your name.”
But he says, “Why are you after my name?”
And there he blesses him.
And Yaakov names the place Penuel, saying,
“I have seen God face to face and I am alive.”
The sun rises over them
But Yaakov is limping because of his hip.
Therefore, the children of Yisrael
Do not eat the thigh muscle of the hip
Because he (the nameless) struck Yaakov
On the socket of his hip.
Willis Barnstone, Poets of the Bible
Bob Schwartz 