"Housekeeping"

*

The posting has been light lately mainly because I have a freelance editing job that will take a month or two. Also, I'm trying to rethink my posting schedule so I'm not always a prisoner to the laptop on Friday and Saturday nights.

As I've implied in recent months, I'm not satisfied with the same blogging model I've been evolving for the past few years. There are plenty (i.e., way too many) of blogs that comment hypertopically on every unprecedented or heinous development domestically and worldwide. Nothing wrong with that, but my feeling now is that there's no way to keep up with it except for full-time bloggers who specialize in domestic politics, military issues, economics, whatever. I don't have the expertise, time, or energy for that. I feel my originality lies elsewhere, if only I can figure out where. So that's what I've been trying to do for the past several months.

You knuckleheads seem to like the music posts, so those will continue. But not necessarily on Friday and Saturday any more. I can have my prayer meetings and fish fries whenever the fuck I please, so that's what I will start doing shortly.

The Fifty50 keyword system is a wreck and always has been, so I'll spend some time trying to curate it so it's more helpful in finding old posts or whatever.

I want to start including more graphical content again because visual arts are important to me and I like to share. Along those lines, comic strips and animation have always been two of my central joys in life, and I find that others often take an interest if provided a helpful context.

Some readers might remember my referring to a project I called the "Model Of Everything," then scaled back to a "Diagram of Everything." That has been percolating in back of the skullbone all along, and I want to give it some more visibility soon. The point of the project, if I can even call it that with a straight face, is to step back as far as necessary to view science, on one hand, and philosophy/religion, on the other hand, as residing within the same reality context... and, in fact, providing indispensable services each to the other. More later. I do not claim that this is a modest or even achievable endeavor. But I do believe that it's necessary for practitioners in each domain to let go of their blinkered outlooks in order to break a tenacious impasse in human evolution. And if anybody can do that, the fuckin' RubberCrutch can!!!

Finally, I'm closing in on an alternative approach to political and economic commentary. It involves taking about 10 steps back from the "dailiness" of everything; contemplating a much longer timeline than political commentators normally do; and squinting like a painter does to blur out nonessential details and better see the true colors of things. The biggest challenge is to avoid getting sucked into the "dailiness" every time we're treated to a new outrage. In my continuing surveys of philosophy and history I'm finding that there's really nothing new going on. I'm interested in the historic conditions that lead to a revolutionary break from seemingly eternal political, religious, and economic impasses. They do happen, and civilization does move forward. Our jobs are to stop worrying about things that we do not individually control, keep our heads down, and squirt our chromosomes into the gene pool if we wish.