Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 25
Actualized.org experienced serious server problems over the last week, resulting in 7+ days of site downtime. I was aware of this issue and working with server techs to resolve the problem that entire time. It took an usually long amount of time to fix.
I apologize for the downtime. I will be investing in better server services going forward.
As of this time the Actualized site and forum are back online and mostly operational. However, I'm still seeing login failure when logging into your Actualized.org account to access purchases like the Book List and Life Purpose Course. We are working to resolve that and it should be fixed soon.
Thank you for your patience.
I won this African mask at a Swiss auction recently:
It's from the Winiama people in Burkina Faso. These masks represent spirits and spiritual beings who adopt animal forms. This one represents a bat.
I've been looking for this particular mask for a long time. It's a classic. They are hard to find.
Louis Wain was a late 19th century English illustrator who specialized in depictions of cats. Later in his life he suffered from mental illness, perhaps schizophrenia. Eventually he was certified insane and committed to an institution.
This is the progression of his cat art:
Keep in mind, these were painted before the 1940's, before psychedelics were a thing. Before the discovery of LSD and DMT.
Looks like Louis Wain discovered Cat God.
And now he's probably a cat. Perhaps yours ;)
It's always a good day for a mindfuck.
Games can be windows into alternative universes. What if human life is just one kind of game world?
People usually regard games as silly and frivolous, but notice that human life is structured like a game.
Video games parallel the endless possibilities of Consciousness. There is an insanely large possibility space for the kind of game worlds that can be created. Most games are very unoriginal, they don't even come close to exploring the crazy possibilities for the game worlds that could be created if you really thought outside the box. There could be a whole new category of Alien Games — games not meant for human minds. Of course they wouldn't sell well. Which is why we end up with games like Star Field and Call of Duty instead.
Great news!
This would never happen under a Republican or Trump administration. In fact, Republicans and Trump will likely use the Supreme Court to re-instate non-competes and hamstring the FTC. A big part of the Republican judicial agenda is to strip power from regulatory agencies like the FTC, EPA, FDA, CPA, etc. These agencies protect little people from corporate exploitation.
This is why conservative and MAGA populism is bullshit. They don't actually pass laws that help little people, they pass laws and pack the courts with judges who defend corporate monopolies, ridiculous tax loopholes for the richest 1%, and consider corporations to have human rights. Trump doesn't care about defending little people, because there's no profit in that. The profit is in defending powerful corporate interests.
Don't let anyone fool you that Biden and Trump are equally bad. They are not. The Biden administration has taken real action to curb corporate overreach, by cracking down on monopolies. The Biden administration has sued Google, Amazon, Apple, and others over their monopolistic abuses of power. It's actually Democrats who are fighting corporations on behalf of little people, not conservatives. Conservatives, including MAGA, are defending the status quo — despite all their noisy rhetoric. And the status quo is corporatism, monopoly, oligarchy, and anti-democracy. If you think that voting for Trump will help you against corporate elitism you've fallen for Trump's con. Trump IS an elitist. He has contempt for little people and he does not care about actually doing the hard and uncomfortable work necessary for defending human rights. The status quo is to trample human rights, and that's exactly the system that conservatives conserve.
You can easily see that conservative populism is bullshit because conservatives pass no laws to reign in corporate power, they do the opposite under the guise of "freedom". Yes, American conservatives want corporations to be free to rape you and your children. Of course conservatives will deny this, but in practice that's effectively what their notion of "freedom" entails, whether they realize it or not. Many of them are just in denial about it because they benefit from it, or because they are lost fighting the conservative culture wars. But the culture wars are just a distraction from the legislative and judicial reality that conservative policy defends corporations and the top 1% more than anyone else.
Of course Democrats are not all pure. They also defend corporate interests in many cases because of lobbying and corrupt incentives. But they are better than these loud-mouthed conservative populists. You have to judge a party by what it does and who its legislation helps, not what it says, and not the culture war issues. If conservatives could see past the culture wars, they would see that their party is on the side of corporate monopolies and anti-free market. The aim of every major corporation is to destroy free markets. Because that's what they need to maximize profits.
The scale of our universe is insane:
Actually, the scale is infinite. God is Infinite Scale. Up, down, in, out, in every direction, in every dimension.
This is nuts:
Can your enlightened guru do that?
The intelligence of survival strikes again ;)
Lord of Cactii.
Really good insights into the rapidly approaching future of AI and its impacts on humanity: