Wild Chocolate

It is Friday the 10th of January in 2025. For me, born in 1957, 2001 will always be in the future. For me, age 67, I'm still 25 in my head. @ 25 I was a werewolf, a bronze bull. 

I know I am not any of those things, still and all, safer with me than anywhere else in the universe.

I like this book and you might want to read it.

Wild Chocolate By Rowan Jacobsen 

There was a USA chocolate rennaisance in the 2010s, and as usual I sleptwalked through it. I knew about the coffee rennaisance in the 70-80s, but this hunt for heirloom strains of cacao, the source of chocolate Inow know through this book.

Big Chocolate, with plantations mainly in Ghana and Ivory Coast, uses hardy breeds with bitter taste and no flavors. Original cacao is reknowned in Mexico but from the Amazon. If you have read the book 1491 by Charles C Mann you will know that up to 40 million people lived there, with roads and island cities and plantations. Teddy Roosevelt almost perished on an expedition to the Amazon. Like conquistadors before him, he nearly starved in a garden.

Original cacao is callled food of the gods for a reason. Not quite psychedelic but at the least taking the right direction. It's nice to see coarse USA tastes maturing and taking flavor, taking life seriously. Fine chocolate now is sourced directly from indigenous "farms" and is called bean to bar, and savored by locality, reputation, etc. "farms" in quotes because the trees are not a monoculture. It turns out cacao trees really like being at the floor of rain forest, so win/win for farmers and rain forest. 

I had considered a greenhouse of cacao trees up here in the Midwest. I mean, Canada and Iceland grow bananas, tomatoes, and coffee, why not cacao?  Easy to bring sunlight down to 40%, humidity up to 80% and temperatures ranging from (depending on what you want the fruit to do) 80-90F. It turns out the pollinators for cacao are these bitey little mites that leave horrid marks if you scratch them, and they need a rainforest in a greenhouse to survive. Pass on the greenhouse for now.

Florida Vacation

Five days in Cape Coral. Ate well, got some sun, got some color, got some exercise. Alternating nights drinking. Cape Coral has canals, from above it looks like the PacMan game, so walking was a maze. I tried to do the blood sugar walk after each meal, and was 3 out of 5 days doing it. Enough walking to get a tan. I was supposed to lose weight and instead I gained it like a fat fat fatty.

(My kidney doctor scolded me for gaining 7 lbs in three weeks. I was like; the holidays. He said, you are like a starship with only one damaged warp nacelle running. You can't afford any extra mass. You are too tubby of a rocketship. Lose those pounds. That got through my geek skull)

The weather was perfect, the area hideously overdeveloped, businesses cheek to jowl. Still nothing to the auto and diesel smokes tempered in frozen airs of the great Northern cities, Great Lakes Sector. Each inhale of gulf air was a sinus rinse. Wonderful. 

I enjoyed it. And that surprised me how unenjoyable my life has been lately. Not from depression or events, just a general fog of suck.

We went to the beach. The beach was foggy and people freaked. It is always foggy in the winter. The Gulf water was 65F, Lake Michigan in June? temp. Warm air, cold water = fog. The fog burned off. Most people stuck to the shore, but my grand niece from Kansas was determined to get in the ocean. We waded out in the sand shallows. Finally about 20 yards out, we got some big breaking waves. I turn around and almost every kid from the beach is behind me. 

Oh, I realize, I am an adult. I am the adult. The water is safe, with the adult present.

Better still, I'm Grandpa Weed, so we are going to have a fun time. I throw my great niece into the waves, then I have to throw everyone. The kids cavorted in the surf like seals. They played like otters.

Finally I say OK kids we are going in, followed by an Aww and I said Nope In You Go. We waded ashore. It was cool. I led a tribe for a liitle bit. And, you know, my motto:

Safer with me, than anywhere in the universe.

Algorithms

Most people look at the Egyptian pyramids and see massive stone monuments, ancient wonders of the world.

I see an algorithm. An algorithm run on the platform of a human machine. A human machine composed of people, each completing subroutines as tasks broken down into logical components. Some of the components involve teams, others specific individuals. 

The pyramid constuction itself is not the objective function, or not the primary one. The objective function is the creation and maintenance of the human machine itself, that in turn can make pyramids or whatever else you want. How the pyramid is built within this larger system can range from a lean mean harsh system of slavery to an almost playful state of volunteerism.

This large system is obviously a network. The component of the network can be people or ants or microbes or even photons. 

There is no complexity of scale, but there is complexity of components, and so complexity of connections in total. Our cellular machinery is far more complex than the most amibtious projects of the human animal, and not just through sheer numbers. When neural nets were first being played with on paper with pencil, it was quickly recognized that the sophistication of the net involved not only number of layers, but also the nodes. The simpler the nodes were in deciding to fire like a neuron, the faster the processsing speed of the net, but the cruder the results. Even more important was recognizing new connections and dropping unused ones based upon decisions of the nodes. Many of these new connections on paper were called back propagation, connections to earlier layers, into the "past". It becomes an all purpose tool, iterating itself.

Is this going to be about AI? Thankfully, no.

When I was 12, I read a book called The World of Star Trek, by David Gerrold, who wrote the "Trouble with Tribbles" episode. One of the chapters involved  world building, and Gerrold used the example of what world could create the starship Enterprise, by substitutiing what the modern world needs to do to make a 747? 

There are the materials and skills required to build the plane, but also the expanding network that supplied those materials and skills, until before you know it, everybody and everything in the world is involved. How do you cost that out? (The answer is when the signal of cost is swamped by all the other costs, thats' your cost, which is typcially about 18 months back).

This opened my pre-pubescent mind to the world of supply chains 50 years before I heard the phrase.

Supply chains? Supply webs! Once you start sourcing out what it takes to build, not just the airplane, but everything you need to build the airplane, all the way down to feeding little bitty babies, you realize its a gestalt. A whole greater than the sum of its parts.

It blew my tiny little mind. Material conduits as algrorithms involved in a big bang of creation called the 20th century, modern times, the monkey singularity. All from the network of funny little ape-shaped bugs.

I should have stuck with pursuing logistics, but I didn't, and here I am now, in a shitbox apartment typing on a 30-year-old computer piggybacked onto my smart phone hot spot. All of which, a mere 50 years ago, would have made little 12-year-old Johnny squeal with delight at how cool the future is. What was the point I was writing about? I forgot.

Algorithms. Is that how CEOs see people? Does Elon Musk coldly eye you for your capability, and capacity for punishment? As components, cogs within a machine, bees in a super organism? I think the psychopaths do, and as I can turn off most of my humanity when I need to, I get where they're coming from.

But we do recognize collective good and collective effort and collective care all as vastly superior to an optimal objective function.

Xenophilia

Considering the amount of guns in the USA, and the number of companies ruining lives for money, you'd think a lot more CEOs would be murdered. Common aversion to violence, not to mention the more mature motive of not getting caught, prevents a lot of these murders. Lack of knowledge and forward consequential thinking also hamper a lot of attempts.

It's not like these business types don't deserve it. After the killing of the CEO, social media exploded with horror stories of denied health care, and also inside stories as to the callous behavior of employees. Not to mention all the fraud and cheating. Kid Murder is right, they are parasites, middle men doing nothing but adding a percentage, which can oftentimes be obscene 11,000+% percentages.

A war of all against all, which is neoliberalism. The shareholder is the only real individual which the free market magically transposes into a corporate wave/particle. And since Citizens United, given all the privileges of personhood without the responsibilities. Well, Mangione has supplied a radical solution for Citizens United, a FAFO personal responsibility of one final conclusion. If you are part of a superorganism, you are complicit, and open to fiduciary and legal consequences. 

People will object that the murdered CEO was murdered! Forget solving any underlying problems. True, but look at the response and tell me mice can't scare elephants.

Also, I finished the bronze, pics included of Xenophilia, the piece title but also the name a series of bronzes I did back 10 years ago? Exploring the relationship between people and aliens/robots/AI. 

Not pets, but not tame. So a relationship "distinctly ambiguous and rather disturbing".

Short Pour and Other Defects

Two Mondays ago the bronze class poured my piece called by many "What the Hell is that?" Part trilobite, tortoise shell and plant roots, the waxes looked like this.

Unfortunately, there wasn't enough metal to fill my piece (last in the heat). I let out a Fuck, and then a FUCK that could be heard other side of campus. My fault really. Even though I was not directing the pour, I could see there wasn't enough metal in the crucible. I didn't intervene, and it came up short.

No problem, Over the Thanksgiving holdiay I crafted a wax part of the missing metal, got it all invested and burned out and ready for the Monday pour.

While this mold was being seated in the box, one student poured some sand into my mold. FUCK I said and grabbed the mold to shake the sand out. Problem is cold moist sand sticks to the interior of a hot ceramic mold. When I devested the piece, the edge that was to be welded had sand and gas porosity pinholes in it.

So after fixing that, I TIG welded the pieces together and now am in the process of grinding and sanding.

This isn't the first sculpture I've rehabilitated. Some I've completely reanimated. 

Rejuvenation Pills

No one likes getting old. Everyone would like to be immorbid. Let's be careful here. Immortal doesnt include youth or return to youth. Immorbid means you stay hale and hearty.

I've convinced that we humans have pupal, larval, and adult insect stages, seeing as we are ape-shaped bugs, really. Funny little bugs, floating on a ball of lava, at the bottom of a razor thin ocean of air. There's no molting or cocoons, no overt dramatic stages,  but there are stages. Puberty obviously, but research have shown body changes at age 40 and 60. One more late stage adult change, I suspect, happens around 80, where you turn into a tough old bird, or a fragile and more gracile one (both are useful adaptations).

I'm laying the ground work for the rejuvenation pulls discussion. Recognizing biology, we eliminate pills that can turn you into babies, or with lack of access, turn you into a corpse in front of our eyes. Much as I like that stuff, it's unrealistic bullshit.

So, rejuvenation pills might take you back to a prior stage. If you are 60+, you go back to 40. If in you're in your 40s, welcome to 25. Anyone taking the pill before age 25 has no known effects. Let's not rule out compounding, so that someone aged 80+ could over time go back to 25. 

If you hated Boomers, just wait.

Rich people want this kind of immortality, and given the statistics on generational wealth being solid, it's a good bet. You risk the occasional chaos, but you assume if things take a shit you can't get the pills anyway. In which case you age normally, or if things have really taken a shit, die.

But let's say things take a minor shit, a bottleneck, and the rejuvenation pills either have a lasting effect, or are available, many of these bunker billionaires find themselves slaves to the Furious Host. The Great Unwashed Undead Survivors. Immortal Barbarism? Nah. Like it or not we are a superorganism. But the irony of Elon Mush or Donnie some war lord's butt, is funny

All Is Lost

I broke up a fight in my class. Well, not a fight but a pushing and shouting match. I did the drill instructor number on the two of these voting age adults. One of them actually said "He started it!"

And you wonder why Trump won. 

In the age of bullshit, improvise.

The world of 500 years ago, even 100 years ago would to our eyes be an ostentatious abundance, a startling abundance of life. 

We live in a poverty world, caused by our own selfish tastes, not learning; therefore doomed. No amount of prepper prepping or billionaire bunkering is going to help out. The bottleneck is coming, but it can be postponed. Is it worth it? 

It's not too late. All we have to do is stop killing everything. Nature knows how to bounce back after four billion years of knockdowns. Take the sharks as an example, once as numerous as passenger pigeons or buffalo, many are now classified Critically Endangered. Their populations have been decimated by 95% since the 1980s. Pelagic sharks, ocean going sharks have suffered the worst due to industrial fishing.

We are closer than we think to fisheries collapse. The industry response is to fish down the food chain, and currently krill is now on the menu. If we aint heading towards Soylent Green, I don't know what.

Zooming in to the USA, does the choice of a Trump or Harris, Republican or Democratic regime make any difference? The answer is mostly no, but ah there's that mostly.

Biden's Big Fucking Deal that is building 5 trillion in infrastructure is what Trump should have done in 2017. Period. Hard to cancel since it beneifts so many red districts. Biden was old, not stupid.

But the Trump regime had blow jobs and hand jobs to get out of the way, to satisfy the donor class or else. And Putin*

Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, with mediocre GDP growth but boy did the rich get richer? And Infrastructure Week was a tired joke. So, this is a problem again. It's amazing how all these consumers just throw their money at these frauds. I mean, when I hear the word entrepreneur, I reach for my revolver. And check for my wallet. 

The biggest worry is that our economy shows no sign of slowing, and after we get over the AI bubble, there is every indication of another roaring twenties. That would accelerate the killing, putting collapse as early as 2032. Biology and medicine are making stunning progress and I wouldn't be surprised if things along the lines of rejuvenation pills or something within the decade.

If you hate Boomers now, just wait.