adumbrating urchins

Remember that sort of King Ubu, miserably pretending to incarnate the wrath of God, sick to the core on his raft, utterly blind to the omnipresent ‘golden’ sacrament in which he is actually drifting, completely disligated from the overflowing life that surrounds him, ‘discovering’ the meanders of the Amazonas (as if they were not already fully exposed to the innumerable forms of life that inhabit them), and declaring pathetically, faced with the ever-renewed display of the new ‘virgin’ lands (of the “West’), ‘I solemnly and formally take possession of all these lands’. This phrase condenses the absolute madness of conquest, of extractivism, of colonialism, of racism, of slavery in all its (pre-capitalist and capitalist) forms, of the reduction of nature to a ‘standing reserve’ of raw materials; the ‘evil’—i.e. the illness—of ethnocides, ecocides, and specicides, the hubris par excellence that is the unconditional ‘will to appropriate’, the reduction of subjectivity to be a particular instance of a single transcendental type and the concomitant reduction of the pleroma to a single correlative objective world.

Gabriel Catren, Pleromatica

The mention of indigenous' people's response to Patriotism is an interesting route for reflection. From the history and culture of the Haudenosaunee (specifically mohawk) people, they have as much of a Patriotism for the land which includes white people aswell. Ever since first contact, their response to europeans has been inclusion and mutual respect (demonstrated by the Two Row Wampum, a treaty that the Six Nations Confederacy still uphold even though the settlers have broken it). The traditional Mohawk resistance here doesn't advocate for complete removal or extermination of white people, but a respect of the initial treatises signed which promised respect of the land, respect of other nation's sovereignty and of communication/understanding between peoples. Patriotism might not envelop the full scope of the way these people connect with the land, but it describes the common spirit which leads them to fight to protect it and to want to share it with people, even if those peoples have done unspeakable things in the past. Reconciliation has become a vapid word used by liberals in order to wash their hands of collective blood. However, true reconciliation is still sought after by the indigenous peoples and by good actors within settler society. That reconciliation illustrates a sort of Patriotism of loving the land and the people who live on it, and seeking ways to make sure that love is achievable by undoing wrongs and forging a better path.

Behind every ugly, violent face, there is a war inside, there are people who care, there are simple people who want nothing but for there to be harmonious coexistence. Sometimes to tear off that face is the only answer people will accept. Other times, the answer is to soften that face, to make that face speak from the lips of the people that it is sorry, that it will do better, that it will not commit the same crimes again. Whatever the answer, that answer being contingent on the circumstances and the sentiments of the people, it is brought forth not by viewing Nations as homogeneous and decrying them as a whole. Instead it is brought forth by viewing countries as the roiling beds of ideas and possibilities that they actually are, in which friendship, forgiveness, reparations, and a future that does not repeat the past exist as boundless potentials waiting to be reached. Ultimately, statements like "there is not an America," "there is not an India," or "there is not an England" (t. Sam Kriss "30,000 Years of Hurt") are firey and do serve a purpose, and make a point, but in reality, the idea of a place is self-fulfilling, once it is made it is not so easily unmade. The truth is: if we want to see the world turn red, if we want to see the world made into something worth living in, without borders, the whole world, we must not fall into the age-old reactionary trap of saying to ourselves, "these places are fake" as much as the pretenses on which they were created were indeed pulled from thin air and erroneous to start with. They are no longer fake; what are we to do about it? We may either make them worth living in, or we may destroy everything and everyone. The latter answer is actually the answer of the current billionaire class. I do not concur. I will not capitulate to that, this tendency towards further isolation, acceleration of "safe spaces" and cloisters, ultimately leaving everyone who cannot afford the best safe rooms to fend for themselves in the wastes like as if it's Mad Max. The only cloister I will abide by is the one which exists to protect an instance of the effort to open the world up and reverse this tendency. Ultimately, neither the land nor its people should be divided or disowned as a solution. We must call people to work together. "I didn't want your help anyway" is the death rattle of a movement. Among the children of Hindu men, there are those who wish they did not live this way, that there was a better way that is less bigoted and self-defeating and preacarious. Just as among the children of slavers, there are abolitionists. Among the children of colonizers, there are those who want friendship, coexistence, and to pay reparations. I do call on Americans to actually make this a place where there is justice for all. It began as a cheap slogan, like everything else that is fake and a mere cover for something else. It should not remain a cheap slogan. It should be true. Through our actions, investigations, and work, we could make it true.

But we need to be very careful and pragmatic now learning everything we know from the time since. We don’t want to fall into the trap of magnifying contradictions to the detriment of our own cause. I think patriotism is a useful current to exploit. Going in arms-a-swingin’ isn’t always the strat when you’re trying to raise an army. Most people are more compelled by love than by contempt, despite what the reactionary propaganda machine will have you believe. The founding of the United States and it’s development was far from being homogeneous during it’s first hundred or so years. It has a complicated history, much of which is dominated by the names of slave traders and genociders, but like anywhere else there is a less acknowledged minor history full of amazing feats. America was founded on some enlightenment-era ideals that are, in themselves, not totally evil. The British cabinet is the progenitor of Israel, as well as America's progenitor. On one hand, American land is a land of extremes and contradictions that rebelled first against the crown and then there were many noble sacrifices made by revolutionaries made to try to correct the evils of those settler colonialists which established it. Israel, on other hand, was created as a vassal state, remains a vassal state, and exclusively exists to lick the boots. The same is true for, say, India, literally home of the Naxalites! No such places with genuine histories are so one dimensional. Israel, Saudia Arabia, the UAE, and states like these are the exception rather than the rule, precisely because their entire history is invented! And even in Israel, there are some people on the inside who do resist settler violence, left leaning Rabbis who oppose the expansion of settlements loudly. You must resist the urge to view nations as homogeneous. That is the fascist impulse of Nationalism in a nutshell! You would be surprised by what indigenous people and white people are capable of saying to each other in this country when they join in good faith, when the latter acknowledges the crimes of their fathers against the former, when eyes meet and truths are told. And my point is that there is a kernel of truth and wisdom inside even the most rotten enclosure of bad faith and colonial violence; there must always be or it would not hold the requisite legitimacy to command a mandate. See how the dogs flee from Israel the moment the power of their masters fails! Watch, the same will happen in the Emirates and the Kingdom of the Saudis as well! They believe in nothing. Inside the rotten core of Hindu India, the tribes still whisper their sacred truths, yearning to be recognized and held up again, the rebels still hold their territory and wait patiently for the support of a destitute populous, who could join with them and abolish the evils of India if they became braver. Inside the rotten core of the American security state, there is an idea of love and unity, and yes, even a shameful fear of apologizing for that which deep down the real ones know they ought to apologize for, that does transcend the concrete crimes of our fathers here, and there are also real achievements to be proud of. Achievements which were to the detriment of nobody, except in the cases where they were exploited by more wicked men down the line. There are radicals fighting to gain the momentum to pay the reparations. Radicals around this country who are putting enough pressure on the evil colonial institution to cause it to flail and harm itself, and we will continue to escalate.

A response to Goldman on Patriotism by two anonymous American Patriots

What is patriotism? Is it love of one’s birthplace, the place of childhood’s recollections and hopes, dreams and aspirations? Is it the place where, in childlike naivety, we would watch the fleeting clouds, and wonder why we, too, could not run so swiftly? The place where we would count the milliard glittering stars, terror-stricken lest each one “an eye should be,” piercing the very depths of our little souls? Is it the place where we would listen to the music of the birds, and long to have wings to fly, even as they, to distant lands? Or the place where we would sit at mother’s knee, enraptured by wonderful tales of great deeds and conquests? In short, is it love for the spot, every inch representing dear and precious recollections of a happy, joyous, and playful childhood? If that were patriotism, few American men of today could be called upon to be patriotic, since the place of play has been turned into factory, mill, and mine, while deafening sounds of machinery have replaced the music of the birds. Nor can we longer hear the tales of great deeds, for the stories our mothers tell today are but those of sorrow, tears, and grief.

We answer Goldman with a yes, Patriotism is precisely how she captures it in the first paragraph. It is not our enemy. The greatest Americans were patriots. We’re the country of Douglas, Truth, Whitman, Emerson, Ursula Le Guin, Muhammad Ali… We made radio and computers, landed on the Moon… we made San Francisco… an absolutely absurd topography on which to build a city. The seesawing roads… the byzantine knots of transmission lines, all of them presumably serving some function… everything miraculously sustained. Hiking the hills of San Francisco you cannot help but feel overwhelmed by a sense of collective unity, a longing for collaboration and peaceful coexistence. Even if this project is incomplete, even if it falls short of its stated ambitions, I cannot hide my admiration. America is a land of extremes, of traitors and of revolutionaries who have selflessly laid their lives down. I think we should honor the latter. There is a strong distinction between patriotism as a refuge for scoundrels, and Patriotism (Big P) as a genuine love of one's neighbors and the ideas that bind them to something that is above naked and shameless Imperialism. The latter Goldman had in droves even if she often used another formulation. She wouldn't have cared enough to try to communicate her own views to such a patriotism if they didn't have it. I genuinely think that the fact that the idea was spread that there is nobody left who loves his country for its people was a psyop. The fact is I am surrounded by such people on all sides, even those (especially those!) who lack political awareness and guile. Most of the people just have simple sentimental relationships to their homes and the people of those homes, except where this rot has taken hold. I believe that rot is explicitly intended to clear the way for those particular monsters who abuse the concept for cheaply bought political favor instead of holding a real idea of it in their heart. I'm not saying classical anarchists like Ursula Le Guin or Goldman herself were in on that op. They were a great thinking forerunners of some of the best modern revolutionary thought. Like all of the subtle ops that were injected into anarchism by the intertwining of secret societies with the "free thinking" movement spawned by the enlightenment, it is so insidious precisely because it functions by quietly redefining words while people aren't looking, confusing all which used to be plain.

Comparison of CLA with Zeta 1 The CLA's temporal pooler is much more flexible than Zeta 1's. It is compatible with CLA's sparse representations of spatial input patterns, and propagates the properties of sparse coding, including generalization, compositionality and efficiency of storage, to the representation of sequences. It is capable of continuous online learning, given that the learning rate is sufficiently slow, because the sparse representations at each level will gradually adapt as the lower level representations that they are built upon change. Finally, the CLA's sequence representations are sensitive to the specific order of the elements of a sequence, but are not bound to specific timings of sequence elements as were the Zeta 1 sequence representations. So long as a sequence's elements are activated in the correct order, the cells representing the elements of that sequence will become predictive and then active. This allows the CLA to respond invariantly to a given sequence presented at various rates of speed. The theory of cortical function underlying the CLA version of HTM is very similar to that of the Zeta 1 version. One difference is in the proposal of two different activity states for a pyramidal cell, active and predictive. Another difference is that the CLA implementation does not yet incorporate top-down feedback connectivity in any way, and so it remains agnostic on the issue of the several types of neuron that were proposed as part of the Zeta 1 theory in order to map a neuronal equivalent to the feedback portion of the Bayesian belief propagation equations. The CLA version of HTM is a significant improvement over Zeta 1. Its use of sparse distributed representations for encoding both spatial and temporal patterns allows for generalization, compositionality and online learning. Its method of encoding sequences preserves sequence order without requiring exact timing. And its biologically detailed level of abstraction makes it straightforward to extend and modify to incorporate additional aspects of cortical function. The CLA is not without its own weaknesses, however. As a biologically based model its components don't map directly to the equations of Bayesian belief propagation, as those of Zeta 1 did. This means that while the CLA is capable of similar processing as Zeta 1 but with greater flexibility, it is also more difficult to characterize mathematically. The CLA currently lacks any kind of top-down feedback, which would be required for a complete implementation of Bayesian belief propagation (which Zeta 1 had) as well as for additional cortical functions such as selective attention. The current CLA implementation also lacks the ability to discriminate sequences based on the specific timing of their elements.

The HTM Cortical Learning Algorithms (CLA) 1. CLA is a more biologically explicated model where each column is given a single dendrite segment through which it receives input from lower hierarchical levels. This is termed a proximal segment, because it corresponds to a layer 4 neuron's dendrites that are close to the cell body, where they receive feedforward input from axons projected from neurons in lower cortical regions. 2. The spatial pooler stage of the CLA will determine the degree to which the subpattern of input represented by each column's proximal dendrite matches the current input. Only those within a local area that best match their active input will be activated, by way of a k-winners-take-all (kWTA) process intended to model local lateral inhibition within a cortical region. 3. Columns which have been least active over time are "boosted" to be more sensitive to their inputs and so more strongly competitive with other columns, in order to encourage the participation of all columns within the set of representations and to enable the reuse of columns representing input patterns that are no longer common. 4. After the inhibition stage, when the final set of active columns has been determined, the proximal synapses of only those columns that are active have their synaptic strengths modified according to a Hebbian learning rule. The result is that, over the course of learning, the activity of each column comes to represent a specific combination of inputs that occur with high probability. 5. Temporal sequences can no longer be represented as Markov chains of spatial coincidence patterns, because those spatial patterns are now composed of a sparse compositional coding in which a given exact set of columns may rarely if ever be active more than one time. Instead, the temporal pooler of the CLA takes a very different approach. 6. CLA holds that while each cortical column represents a single specific spatial pattern of inputs, an individual cell within that column will respond only to that spatial pattern in the temporal context of a particular pattern of prior activity within the same cortical region. 7. While Zeta 1 abstracted this model, the CLA implements it explicitly. In the CLA, a cell may be inactive, or it may be in one of two states of activity. It may be active, meaning that it is currently representing feedforward input, or it may be predictive, meaning that it is primed or expecting to be actively representing input soon. 8. The active state corresponds to bursting activity of a cortical pyramidal neuron, whereas the predictive state corresponds to tonic firing. (Another possible neurophysiological basis for the predictive state is with a modified Hebbian synaptic modification rule with a short term memory trace.

9. A cell is put into predictive state by receiving above-threshold excitatory input via a distal dendrite segment. Distal segments project horizontally within layer 1, where they receive input from cells in the same cortical region. 10. An individual synaptic depolarization on a distal dendrite has very little effect by the time it reaches the soma, however multiple simultaneous synaptic depolarizations on the same segment of a distal dendrite can trigger the firing of the receiving cell. 11. This nonlinear property of distal dendrites allows individual dendritic segments to act as separate coincidence detectors that respond to a particular pattern of activity of nearby cells within the same cortical region. 12. In the CLA, a cell's distal segments learn a set of patterns of activity of nearby cells within the same region (by learning to respond to sub-samples of those patterns), which have previously led to the subsequent activation of the cell. When such a pattern of local activity is later detected, the cell is put into predictive state. 13. When a column is activated, representing the present activity of a particular pattern of feedforward inputs, then if any of the cells within that column were already in predictive state, only those cells transition to active state. All other cells in the column remain inactive. 14. The set of active cells in the column therefore represents the current activity of the spatial pattern to which the entire column responds, but within the temporal context of prior local activity represented by the particular cell(s) that were predicted to activate (ie., were in predictive state). 15. In this way only a subset of a column's cells are activated when it is part of a predicted sequence, the subset representing activity within the temporal context of that sequence. If none of the cells in the column are in predictive state when the column is activated, then all of the cells in the column transition to active state. 16. The activity of all of the cells represents the column's spatial pattern without preference to any particular contextual interpretation, by activating the cells that represent all possible interpretations. This approach is consistent with findings that prior expectation of a stimulus reduces neuronal activity when the stimulus occurs.

A body is no longer a holistic system. It is not the vehicle through which we experience joy and pleasure during our brief time in the land of the living. It is not a home to live in and be happy. It, too, is a collection of features: six pack, thigh gap, cum gutters. And these features exist not to make our lives more comfortable, but to increase the value of our assets. Our bodies are investments, which must always be optimized to bring us… what, exactly? Some vague sense of better living? Is a life without bread objectively better than a life with it? When we were children, did we dream of counting every calorie and logging every step? A generation or two ago, it was normal for adults to engage in sports not purely as self-improvement but as an act of leisure. People danced for fun; couples socialized over tennis; kids played stickball for lack of anything else to do. Solitary exercise at the gym also had a social, rather than moral, purpose. People worked out to look hot so they could attract other hot people and fuck them. Whatever the ethos behind it, the ultimate goal was pleasure. Not so today. Now, we are perfect islands of emotional self-reliance, and it is seen as embarrassing and co-dependent to want to be touched. We are doing this for ourselves, because we, apropos of nothing, desperately want to achieve a physical standard set by some invisible Other in an insurance office somewhere. [...] Is there anything more cruelly Puritanical than enshrining a sexual ideal that leaves a person unable to enjoy sex? https://bloodknife.com/everyone-beautiful-no-one-horny/

Xapiri and Terra Preta: Hacking of nature's source God by Yanomami There is a desert under the Amazon rainforest - which is why you might encounter articles saying how the Amazon may become a desert, that's because it is what it was. The Amazon soil is actually really bad, which obviously confused white men for a long time, for how could it be so that it held the most diverse ecosystem in the world? The reason is that, of course, the Amazon is not a jungle exactly, it is a garden, a humanly curated natural environment, so to speak, and it has been so for thousands of years.. The indigenous people in the Amazon have learned the ways of the desert, and it's really fascinating how they do things. This might be of interest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta This is a super-fertile type of earth that they are able to create by holding seasonal, controlled fires. I believe it exists naturally in Ukraine; the indigenous people in Brazil simply invented it too! Like, in your face, God! And with this technology they are able to both feed themselves and allow the forest to grow ever more strongly. And it's absolutely insane the level of both the magnitude the forest was able to reach, and the level of what one could call a scientific thought they were able to produce regarding how the forest works. I had the chance to be in the Amazon a few times. Actually, I have family there; my mother is from there. She's not of indigenous ascendance or anything, but, like, the forest was literally what you saw if you opened the door - still is, actually. There's a desert underneath the rainforest and the yanomami know it. They know it, they talk about it, and they advocate for it, for the entirety of their over 10 thousand year old society depends on that complicity with the desert. There's a whole nomadic system of burning certain parts of the forest, then planting something and leaving out to burn and plant some other thing somewhere else; they know you can't destroy large portions of it otherwise it won't grow back for you need the ecosystem, and this ecosystem is man-made throughout ancient techne which does not try to hack the source-code, so to speak. The yanomami call the source-code xapiri - subtle energies which come from the depthness of the planet. The cunning techne of the Amazon is one which modulates humidity and aridity in order to allow the xapiri to flow from the inside to the outside, and the xapiri are that which make everything, even the plants and the stones, alive, and it entails that every animal believes it is a human being.