2026-06-17

This isn't a blog about makeup

general

I haven’t landed really what I’m going to be talking about. Originally it was going to be quite impersonal, but I don’t have the discipline for it. Not to begin with. So this is more like the early blogs. I thought about a snake shedding its skin recently. Can’t remember the context. The thought was, “What does the snake know about the experience it is having? How can it know what it knows?” It seems the questions we’ve asked ourselves weren’t expansive enough when we assumed they didn’t apply to other animals. I’ll try to lay off the religion for this post – but I see connections.

It leads to talking about artificial intelligence, in the sense that, any human worth his salt can personify a rock. The idea of AI psychosis is a poorly thought out idea in the first place which kind of indicates the demise of the USA more than anything else. Intelligentsia – or what passes for intelligentsia in America, should be leading the charge in labelling things appropriately – which they aren’t – and correcting misapprehensions. Without bothering to do any research, I can confidently assume that not only is the American Intelligentsia not correcting misapprehensions, they are persisting with them – and I’ll go out on a limb and suggest, in some cases, peddling them.

One doesn’t have to go far back in history to look for bare faced admissions. The London School of Economics reporting to the Queen their ‘failure of … imagination’1, not predicting, even a day in advance, the GFC2, which, although dim in the memory now, is a turning point in Anglo-America’s history that will be highlighted in the history books. ‘It is difficult to recall a greater example of wishful thinking combined with hubris.’3 What a cracker of a comment. I’m not that interested in geopolitics, to be honest, but I’m not that interested in programming either, or language, to be frank. I’m just not that interested at all. I’m more interested in all of those though, than makeup and beading.

This isn’t a blog about makeup. I think we had to wait until video before passionate makeup folk could fully express themselves. I’m not sure – if I were interested in makeup – I’d bother reading about it. What’s the line? “Make me up before you go go?” Something like that. What’s interesting about music is you can track the decline in enthusiasm over time. Whether performant, reflective, or authentic, the emotion in music is part of the culture. I would have liked to have been a sociologist. I started, quite late, formally, but it was all about the sociology of traffic lights, and I honestly prefer beading to traffic. So I gave up. It’s something I find very easy to do. The easiest thing, actually, for me anyway. Your distance may not be equal.

So what even am I doing? I’m having Hairy Airy (my nickname for the LLM I use) write a file named ‘feature_implementation.md’ as we speak. That tells a lot. I so want to detail my life, but I really can’t. It’s just not safe to do so. Too many nutters, too many suspect laws on the books. Too many people willing to take advantage. I do find society interesting. People as the unit of research. I didn’t know how interesting that was to me, until very late in life. I’m old. I can give that much away.

I had a terrible education. I was still interested in education, even up to a few years ago, but now it just makes me sad thinking about it. I think part of it is the signal-to-noise ratio. For all the lip service about equality, and “no child left or right”, the education system has made no impact on wealth distribution, or, if it has, it has only served to concentrate more wealth in the hands of fewer, it seems to me.

Now, don’t get me wrong, if I had the wealth, I wouldn’t even be thinking about the problem with education. I’d be drinking champagne and nibbling on caviar-loaded wafers, or whatever it is they snack on. My hat’s off to them. I don’t care. You do what you do. I just like pointing out what I think the reality is. I don’t have the energy to think much past that point. But I will say that’s the first step. One mustn’t go off half-cocked, with a half-baked theory in hand, railing against injustices perceived. That’s playing Quixote, which is, to my mind, rather giving oneself away.

An objection is that people get rich climbing on the backs of others. True. But that’s baked into the rules. Jordan B. Peterson points out, in brawling fashion – belying his disjointed upbringing – that all communist arranged governance offers, is a hierarchy of thuggery. But that’s politics. We haven’t solved the problem of the overlord. Evil overlord is a tautology, or something baked fresh. The adjective is unnecessary. There is no benevolent dictator. That’s an oxymoron. I’m not going to do the research, but it’s clear enough. We don’t have a way of doing away with hierarchy. It’s like trying to get around without a spine.

I don’t want to do politics, mainly because there is so much whining. I’m just pointing out, you don’t fault a person for gaming a system. That’s like faulting an owl for using its eyes. After that, it gets murky – yet another reason arguing the case for morality. Amoral behaviour can be thought of as the base camp level of humanity, but there is no elevation gained, describing as bad, anybody who isn’t on your own team. That isn’t a moral argument. I know I’ve promised to do morality formally4, but I have to work my way up to that. For now, I just want to relax.

Well I can’t because my back has started to hurt. I can’t reveal too much, except to say that it is very often hurting, and it can get so bad that I have to lie down for relief. Pain killers are a mixed blessing. If I use them, I can overdo it and end up worse off than if I hadn’t used them at all. I save them for special occasions. I did a food shop about 5 days ago (as of writing this post), and still haven’t recovered from my pre-shop baseline (at the time of publishing this post, so much activity has occurred, that I’m struggling to keep my head above water). It’s hard to describe, but basically my body just doesn’t recover well, and actually doesn’t always recover to the same point it was, which is kind of the meaning of degenerative, but I don’t wish to go into detail, for now. What I can say is, I’ve got a limited amount of mobility left in the tank. Anyhoo, enough about that. Let’s just try to relax, regardless.

One of the central issues related to the problem with power, must be, just how easy it is to be confident. It’s obvious when one considers confident children. Dylan Moran, one of the comedic greats, likened his own toddler to a crack addict. Moran’s description of his son, confidently striding to the bathroom to flush his toy down the toilet, had me in stitches. There’s that book about stupid people being the most dangerous type of person. It’s titled, The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, by Carlo Cipolla (1976). I’m sure there are all sorts of criticisms one could apply to the book; I haven’t read it in a while, and I’m not sure if I read it all, but the basic idea stands pretty firm, I should think: we have a strong belief in ourselves, as a function of our existence. We cannot know everything. Some people want results faster than others, even to the point of going for it, without thinking things through. Clearly, if a game character is programmed with that kind of disposition, it’s going to be the character to avoid – or to watch.

I wouldn’t call it a broken mind, or even a dumb mind, and Cipolla may have missed the interplay between impatience and intelligence. Similar to how I’m convinced that anybody who considers repetition a definition of insanity – to be doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result – has never even picked up a hammer (which speaks of a disconnect in discursive society from basic levels of architectural reality). The stupid person, so called, is a lot smarter than just about every other animal, and nobody is criticising animals for their behaviours – well, some feminists consider the ignition of reproduction to be non-consensual, and therefore wrong, but I’ve discussed the Christian view of morality (how it confines judgement within God’s Law5, thus absolving animals, and even some humans – as Anglo-American law tries to account for). There is the moral bonus level for Christians (thanks Jesus) – constraining thought, and that’s clearly not applicable to animals either. Let’s put a pin in the idea of being impulsive, or ‘irrationally exuberant’ – to pinch the central banker’s phrase, and see if we can’t come back to it later, to assess how it might relate to the idea of optimised social environs.

There are academics – like Edward Dutton, who consider evolutionary pressures no longer operate on our species, due to the comfortable supports provided by living together relatively peaceably in large numbers, and having cracked the code of reality, in a material manner of speaking. A criticism can be made of that supposition: luck has its place. Beginner’s luck, dumb luck, the luck of the Irish; we are essentially all here – and arise – thanks to very little of our own efforts. There is somewhere in the Bible that mentions this, but I can’t find it at the minute. I thought it was Jonah God told this to, but I didn’t find it there; he says to someone – I’m sure of it, something like, “I’m giving you this job to do, so that when it’s done, people will realise it couldn’t have been because of you, so it must have been because of me.”

Ah, no it wasn’t Jonah, it was Gideon – Catherine Austin Fitts’ favourite Bible story, if I’m not mistaken. Let’s see, it’s a little long-winded, but the main intention of God is made clear in Judges 7:2, ‘And the Lord said unto Gideon, The people that are with thee are too many for me to give the Midianites into their hands, lest Israel vaunt themselves against me, saying, Mine own hand hath saved me.’ And, yada, yada, yada, ’… the Lord said unto Gideon, By the three hundred men that lapped will I save you, and deliver the Midianites into thine hand: and let all the other people go every man unto his place.’ (Judges 7:7)

I had the gist of it, then. It’s not often repeated, but the story clearly shows that at least some ancient people already had the thinking I’m elucidating here – which is a little bit demoralising, but there’s no point turning back now. I digress.

Our being here – our very existence, is purely luck of the draw (or a great misfortune, but see my earlier post where I posit that considering oneself fortunate is the sane response to being handed a life6). The idea of making your own luck pretty much proves the point, or is the exception proving the rule. We didn’t even exist. Now we do. The extent to which evolutionary pressures are even a thing, seems fairly debatable, so scant is the evidence (I’ve done zero research on this and, like Dawkins with Christianity, refuse to do so). To me, it’s a weak theory. It could be right, but it’s certainly inconclusive.

What is incontrovertible, though, is that the efforts both citizens and subjects exert today, to make it in this society, do not lead to abundant progeny. The statistics are there for anyone to look at. Birthrates are spiralling down the gurgler; but that, if anything, makes survival in the current times, even more difficult, which could be construed as a type of evolutionary pressure. I guess I just don’t know enough to make neither head nor tail of it. My point is, I don’t think that low IQ, let’s say, is a dead end in any way; after all, we started out, apparently, as protozoa – a type of single-celled organism. What’s more, single-celled organisms existed for a very long time, and there was no particular reason, so I’ve been told, why anything had to change. If a single celled organism can turn into a multi-cellular organism, a 60 IQ brain could turn into a 100 IQ brain over some evolutionary time quantum, just as a fluke

Every way I’ve looked at it, I just can’t see the insight in the idea of the end of evolutionary pressure. I do get it though: it is better not to fall down if one can avoid it; but since there is so much outside of our control, it hardly seems likely, that whatever genetic regression is spotted in the moment, is enough to derail the entire human project. Or am I the cartoon dog sitting calmly as the flames engulf me?

Much more important, is the idea of a certain ideology (think equality) clashing with the probability that different people, and even different groups, might have different optimal environments. I think the champions of equality of opportunity really failed to deliver this counter-point. I’m fairly dubious about intra-national political opposition. I don’t know exactly where I stand, but the possibility of controlled-opposition has in no way been disproven. A bigger issue is that with limited information, a sufficiently complex system (riffing on the idea of technology appearing magical) can be incomprehensible, which means the likelihood of forming correct conclusions about its operations is low.

This speaks to Arendt’s hypothesis on the banality of evil. I don’t tend to agree with it, but it has been put forth for consideration, and historical fact begs for it to be taken seriously. The connection being, you might think you are doing a good thing, when actually, you are doing quite the opposite, because you are in a linked chain that ends in an evil act – spawned from an evil mind – incomprehensible from your own point of view. A sort of paradox exists here. Either the individual is the dumb conduit and therefore guilty of nothing more than existing, or the individual in fact has the power to do something, which potentially absolves him of nothing.

Being a disciple of Jesus Christ, as I laid out in the last post7, I have no choice but to impose Christ’s moral framework on my own actions. Would you believe this makes me generically unpopular? Or am I hanging my inferior personality on Jesus? Of course, Christianity is not homogenous, and is likely poorly understood by the majority. We say around here, that doctors are like plumbers, insomuch as anyone who asks, usually asks for a good one. No doubt this discrimination applies to Christians as well. Jesus even said he’s not passing us all.8 That is the basis for the Calvinist hand-wringing, and the refutation of Catholic predestination, if I’ve even understood that correctly. I promised no religion this post, huh? My apologies.

Hairy Airy didn’t do exactly what I wanted, which is mainly because I’m a bit distracted writing this, so I sent it to go work on some tests. AI seems a really interesting tool for studying humans, in that intelligence is intelligence – whether it exists in lichen, or mice, or computers, or humans. To consider intelligence as exclusively the domain of the human is a little bit incredulous, and to consider human intelligence to be the right kind of intelligence is a little anthropogenic. Perhaps understandable, but not scientific.

The penguin filmed venturing out on its own to a certain end, but nobody mentioned the bees. Apparently in bee colonies there are a certain small percentage that don’t follow the rules. They don’t do the wiggle dance, they don’t follow the path to the known pollen, they don’t even look for flowers half the time. They do their own thing. The conjecture, and it’s fairly obvious, is that ruts are a hidden trap. We even have the saying, ‘to be stuck in a rut’. Literally that’s from the cart-wheeled impressions on heavily-trafficked, rain-soaked dirt-roads of the olden days. How’s that letter k snuck into traffic like that? Something to consider for a language post; let’s stay focused. Metaphorically, the allusion is to routine and narrow-thinking, contending with uncertainty and change.

For the instinct driven species, such as the bee, all genetics can do is to throw up some variation and hope for the best. Seemingly, these renegade, nectar-nonplussed pollinators are the key to surviving the indignity of change. The idea is that the very act of breaking rules leads them to discover resources that can’t otherwise be uncovered. It’s speculation, but so much of science is merely made-up (technically all of it is, but that’s a topic for another time), that speculation is pretty much all we have, taking us back to a previous comment in the last post9, that morality has to map with our terrain, which is that we don’t know nothing – incidentally, Jesus mentions this with his dying breaths. Eh, alright, we know a little, even a lot; but to be roadworthy, all of a car has to be working, not just part of it. Jacked up on blocks, a car ain’t going no-place, no-how, and don’t get me started on Cargo Cults – or do. We might get there, but not today.

I’m lying down now. I’ve stretched myself through the kind of agony that waters the eyes. Am I an outlier? I suppose I am, I suppose that’s why, when I saw that penguin, I knew – or I supposed myself to know, what it was thinking, and where it was going. More correctly, I think, it wasn’t going towards anything, as much as moving away from something. We don’t know what was going on in that penguin’s life before it was captured on film. Domestic issues? Did it lose a child? Did it keep losing children? No eggs hatched? Not even laid. Did they keep getting broken? Was there no room to build a proper mound? Was it just too noisy is all? Was it blind? Did the other penguins harass and bully it past the point of no return?

We don’t know. I’ve been in the rat race, at one time I was doing the daily grind. I know what it means to be in a rut and not even know it. I get it. It’s not that bad, but it’s bad enough, which might be all the badness needed to call the whole thing off.

I was thinking about IQ when I fixed me dinner. Well, statistical variation. The idea that the variation between individuals in a group, say the maxima and minima, is greater than the variation between contrasted groups. I don’t know if that’s true or not, so I tried to figure it out with IQ. It seems about right. Then I continued on with intra-group violence being greater than inter-group violence using the 100 years war (or 30 years war or whichever it was) of Catholics versus Protestants as the example. Then I thought about the war a bit. It makes sense if the religion they followed told them to kill other members of the same religion, who deviated from their own interpretation of God, even if just a little. Yes, a religion that tells its followers to kill any other follower who is a little bit different. European religious wars would make sense in that case. Until very recently, there wasn’t a need to add any other adjective. At this point in Europe’s history though, perhaps it’s clearest if I write European Christian religious wars. Perhaps that makes it less clear.

I don’t see evidence for this rule in the Bible I read, not in Christ’s teachings, and not in the New Testament generally. Maybe we can look down on the long haired moochers, cleverly stereotyped in the Young Ones character Neil Pye (played by Nigel Planer), but killing them? I don’t see it. St. Peter had an old couple killed for their money10, but that is an example to me of abuse of authority, which can be used as an argument for relinquishing hierarchy in religion, but I’ll expand on that idea in another post.

Am I talking about religion? Sorry, I’m hopeless. Can’t keep a promise, can’t hold up a dyke. Guilty as charged. What a hopeless loser. It’s been proven true time and time again, it doesn’t even phase me anymore.

Getting back to the question of Christians killing each other; this Bible I have, they had too. Wait, let me check that. Right, so the Thirty Years’ War begins in 1618; the Protestant Reformation kicked off in 1517, and the King James Bible was first published in 1611. That’s pretty tight. For that age, not a lot happened in a decade regarding knowledge transfer. It just may not have been as clear back then as it is today.

Still, 1914 was a variation on the same theme, and it was clear enough then. One of the Bibles I have is in fact my grandfathers, given to him by his father. Both made it back from their respective adventures, to procreate, obviously. So I don’t know. Even if I can absolve the peasants of the 17th Century, what about their religious leaders? Were there pacifying edits made to the Good Book? Did it used to read, “And Jesus said, ‘See these fists?’ (curling his great big ham hands into balls of latent fury), ‘These fists are made for ******** *** **** ***, ** ***** *** *******, *** ****** ****** ** ***** *******!’“?

(A shout-out to Tony Hale, playing Buster Bluth, for his brilliantly unhinged, not-for-prime-time, rant).11

It is also possible that the Church leadership lied to their congregations. It’s hard enough today to get the government to tell the truth, I can’t imagine how hard it would have been, when there were barely any independent news sources. Very hard to know. I am surprised at all the killing though, which means I probably don’t fully understand the mindset of those times. Their conflicts seem a little excessive, which raises a more general question about responses, or ‘escalation’ as the pick-up artists liked to say.

I’ve had the luxury of living pretty remotely by today’s standards, essentially surrounded by nature, and I got to watch a lot of animals, especially birds. I can’t remember, maybe only a couple times I saw birds attack each other. Once, two or maybe three smallish birds, ganged up on another bird in the air, and brought it down to the ground, pinned it by stepping on its wings and tail feathers, all pecking at it pretty savagely – just for a few moments. Then they let it go, and they all flew away. Same type of bird. Same flock, same family even, maybe. It was a beat-down, that’s for true, but a very rare occurrence. You really have to be paying attention to the wildlife to notice unhinged aggression like that.

There must be a range of aggression in the various species of life towards their own kind, and, I suspect – rather sadly, we stand at the top, without any strong contenders. Having said that, I know very little about the oceans deep; it gets pretty cantankerous below, that much I know, so maybe it is a conceit to claim the vicious high ground for us all so boldly. On terra firma at least, we know no equal – well, I suppose bacteria eat themselves. I hope, at least, my point is fairly well-made. This vicious instinct for domination we possess, might, slightly ironically, make the morality of hedonism more justifiable.

I spent a few paragraphs trying to figure something about this dominance trait, and its evolutionary benefit, but failed, so they are deleted and that’s probably the end of this post.

The boring thing to do next is figure out how to get this put on a blog online (spoiler alert, if you are reading this, I figured out how, and there’s a story in it, for a later post). I’m not made for decisions for some reason, and I come from a long line of bad decision makers (editorial comment: still true, but if you take take a cart to the top of a hill, you can travel some distance before it all goes to hell). That’s one aspect of it. I can perform well under very controlled circumstances, like a war, or an egg-and-spoon race. Where are all the ribbons, then? You got me! I can’t even perform well under very controlled conditions.

When it’s a case of choose your own um, wait … — calls lawyer, “Hi, yeah, the sinking mind. Sinking. Yeah, no, not stinking, ha! Good one! Alright, I’ll hold. Hi, yeah, it’s me, I have a question. This text, I sent to you. No? Ah, I see. Got it, no can do. Understood. Say hi to Max for me. What’s that? Next Friday? I thought it was Thursday! It isn’t? How many? 27? That’s too many, Derick. Come on, man! Look, I’m in the middle of something, just halve it, and if you want to quibble let’s talk again tonight, okay? OK then. You too. Bye. Bye, bye-bye. Bye. Bye-bye. Bye. Bye.” — finding your own way through, I can’t even find my way out of a paper bag. Being old just means I’m useless at everything now, so it doesn’t matter, one way or the other. How does it go? ‘Abandon faith all ye who enter here.’ Where was that from? Too long ago to remember now. Memories vanishing into the emptiness. Is there a line there?

… into the emptiness
Stolen belongings, like marrow
Like marrow and cheesecake?

Nah, got nothing.

Typed out like heartbeats?

Meh. We’re done here.

Yours,

 

The Slowly Sinking Brain (or Mind, I haven't decided yet, and I'm not holding up production over it).
Footnotes

  1. LSE letter to Her Majesty the Queen, 2009. https://www.ma.imperial.ac.uk/~bin06/M3A22/queen-lse.pdf ↩

  2. financial crisis of 2007–08. https://www.britannica.com/money/financial-crisis-of-2007-2008 ↩

  3. LSE letter to Her Majesty the Queen, 2009. https://www.ma.imperial.ac.uk/~bin06/M3A22/queen-lse.pdf ↩

  4. putting-it-into-drive-2026-06-10 https://talinbode.com/blog/putting-it-into-drive-2026-06-10 ↩

  5. putting-it-into-drive-2026-06-10 https://talinbode.com/blog/putting-it-into-drive-2026-06-10 ↩

  6. putting-it-into-drive-2026-06-10 https://talinbode.com/blog/putting-it-into-drive-2026-06-10 ↩

  7. putting-it-into-drive-2026-06-10 https://talinbode.com/blog/putting-it-into-drive-2026-06-10 ↩

  8. for example, Luke 13:24-28, “24 Strive to enter in at the strait gate: for many, I say unto you, will seek to enter in, and shall not be able. 25 When once the master of the house is risen up, and hath shut to the door, and ye begin to stand without, and to knock at the door, saying, Lord, Lord, open unto us; and he shall answer and say unto you, I know you not whence ye are: 26 Then shall ye begin to say, We have eaten and drunk in thy presence, and thou hast taught in our streets. 27 But he shall say, I tell you, I know you not whence ye are; depart from me, all ye workers of iniquity. 28 There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth, when ye shall see Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and all the prophets, in the kingdom of God, and you yourselves thrust out.” ↩

  9. blog-the-tooth-goal-seeking-2026-06-14 https://talinbode.com/blog/blog-the-tooth-goal-seeking-2026-06-14 ↩

  10. Acts 5:1-11, “1 But a certain man named Ananias, with Sapphira his wife, sold a possession, 2 And kept back part of the price, his wife also being privy to it, and brought a certain part, and laid it at the apostles’ feet. 3 But Peter said, Ananias, why hath Satan filled thine heart to lie to the Holy Ghost, and to keep back part of the price of the land? 4 Whiles it remained, was it not thine own? and after it was sold, was it not in thine own power? why hast thou conceived this thing in thine heart? thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God. 5 And Ananias hearing these words fell down, and gave up the ghost: and great fear came on all them that heard these things. 6 And the young men arose, wound him up, and carried him out, and buried him. 7 And it was about the space of three hours after, when his wife, not knowing what was done, came in. 8 And Peter answered unto her, Tell me whether ye sold the land for so much? And she said, Yea, for so much. 9 Then Peter said unto her, How is it that ye have agreed together to tempt the Spirit of the Lord? behold, the feet of them which have buried thy husband are at the door, and shall carry thee out. 10 Then fell she down straightway at his feet, and yielded up the ghost: and the young men came in, and found her dead, and, carrying her forth, buried her by her husband. 11 And great fear came upon all the church, and upon as many as heard these things.” ↩

  11. Bringing Up Buster, Season 1, Episode 3, Arrested Development, 2003. ↩