mosul part i

The first time I heard him drop the f-bomb was when I phoned two weeks ago to find out why he hadn’t shown up to our meeting. I was beginning to worry. There had been reports of several bombings in Mosul. After repeated attempts, he finally answered with masked, yet palpable, terror in his voice: “Shlama lukh, Mr. Timo. I’m very sorry about today, but, you know something? This fucker-psycho…he made a big explosion outside my home.

mosul part ii

He sobs as he burns the photos. “They were my friends, my brothers. We ate together. We played music together. I fixed their instruments for them.” The faces of the American soldiers melt and bubble before turning black in an impromptu crematorium from his kitchen, destroying any memorial evidence of camaraderie with the invaders. He was able to find work at the nearby Saddam General Hospital of Mosul making $2 a day.

ainkawa

He walked through the door of the high roof of our meeting place which overlooked tens of lighted crosses across the Ainkawa Quarter. I could make out a star-spangled bandanna which bore an American bald eagle, its wings spread from ear to ear, protecting a freshly shaven head. The shininess of the scalp reflected some of the full moon light, glowing around the base of his durag. He carried a long black object over his shoulder.

Anti-Theodic Allegory of Manifest Destiny in the Film Noah and the Novel Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West

Introduction Creation is laid waste. Apocalypse is meted out to plunderous men. With Noah auteur director Darren Aronofsky fearlessly delivers a syncretic1 celluloid spectacle that, while neither achieving nor surpassing the brilliance of his prior oeuvre2, nevertheless succeeds in nudging the Biblical filmmaking genre towards the secular and science fiction, and therefore, a more universal arena. Leaving aside the timely and relevant environmentalist aspects of the film, I argue that Noah is an anti-theodic allegory of European-American manifest destiny in the same vein as Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 novel Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West (hereafter referred to as Blood Meridian)3, of whose lapidary, epigraphic prose rises to a biblically epic register.

it was dusk

It was dusk. Already the stars were revealing themselves, boiling on the summer horizon. I would be allowed fifteen minutes at the summit of the citadel; the policeman kept my passport as collateral. This was Kirkuk, Iraq, July of 2008, in the fifth year of the war. We were there to film in a city being pulled asunder by vestiges of the former regime and by the ensuing sectarian melee among Kurds, Assyrians, Turkmens, and Arabs.

babylon

See the ruins of Babylon: mud bricks lie clumped in heaps, faint outlines of an ephemeral empire, perpetually dissolving sand castles enduring a higher tide. We grasp at its former physical form like Plato’s subterranean prisoners who evaluate shadows on a cavern wall. A vain replica of the glorious double gate of lapis lazuli (the original was stolen and re-presented in a far-flung museum) lies open to the northern horizon, where presently a new Babylon—Baghdad—is groaning beneath the tyranny of quotidian violence.

all we have left to eat is tomato paste

All we have left to eat is tomato paste. We are eating it with salt….We are ready to kill ISIS ourselves with knives, or by biting them, because we are in so much pain.¹ As of this writing, the Iraqi Security Forces and the Kurdish pesh merga (“those who face death”) are launching an offensive from the ruins of ancient Nineveh on the banks of the Tigris to wrest control of western Mosul from Da’ish (to use the pejorative Arabic acronym for the Islamic State or ISIS).

The Anabaseis of Penelope and Ninsun

Mother: weeps—laments her son’s uncertain fate—prepares to approach the god—hopes to avert a theodic crisis—bathes—is purified—dresses herself—is in the presence of women—ascends—bears a strewn offering—prays These are the ritual contours from parallel scenes in the Epic of Gilgamesh (3.35-119) and the Odyssey (4.749-767; 17.46-60). Ninsun, mother of Gilgamesh, and Penelope, mother of Telemachus, perform the rituals at a prodigious distance of space and time from each other (Mesopotamia in the 3rd Millennium BCE and Ancient Greece in the 2nd Millennium BCE, respectively).

7 scorpions and a shaman

Doi Saket, Thailand—My little thatch-roofed hut was situated in a wetland populated by two mud-covered water buffalo and a colony of scorpions. I encountered seven of the black arachnids during a month-long stay. The seventh one stung me on the hip during the witching hour. It felt like an injection with a hypodermic needle, the aching pain of the venom colonizing the muscle. The owner of the land took me to see the village shaman over a period of two days.

śakti

glimmering she effortlessly slinks into corporeality gladdening the silence the sinewy parts utterly she expires manifesting as the deathless words she commands

cosmic bodies

E = mc². You may remember this from grade school that matter and energy are equivalent and that the amount of pure energy contained within even the smallest of objects is staggering. Now, imagine the amount of pure energy contained within the body-mind apparatus! It is this energetic principle that we leverage to expand and evolve—not that we need to be “better,” for we are fine just as we are. We need only to abide in our essence nature to experience that truth.

a stronger container

At some point, the grosser (as in the opposite of subtler) practices fall away. There’s less technique, less doing, and there arises more of the ability to drop into the pure ground of being. But we all have to begin somewhere… We are bio-electrical beings. Consciousness resides in every cell. The mind is in the body. It is literally true. Through the practice of yoga, we develop the body-mind’s ability to handle inner intensity.

destruction operator

There is a direct relationship between attachment to the stagnant status quo and the corresponding increase in force (pain) of the destruction operator. Lean into change, into the unknown, for it is the only sure bet.

on the commercialization of spirituality

After stripping away the commercialization of spiritual awakening, of balancing the cakras, which, in New Age speak is pronounced “shakra,” of creating your own reality, of raising your vibration, what is left? Yoga is about wanting your own life instead of someone else’s—living with reality—about realizing what is there in plain view of your everyday experience: the immediacy of being, this embodied experience. Central to the unfolding process of yoga is the augmenting of access to your innate power of autonomy (svātantrya-śakti) which goes hand-in-hand with abiding in your own essence-nature.

Commentary on Bacchylides Ode 3.15-47: For Hieron of Syracuse (468 BCE)

Gold? yellow, glittering, precious gold? …Will knit and break religions, bless the accursed, Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves And give them title, knee and approbation With senators on the bench: this is it That makes the wappen’d widow wed again; …Come, damned earth, Thou common whore of mankind, that put’st odds Among the route of nations, I will make thee Do thy right nature. —Timon of Athens, IV.

reaching a unity point

Helming a sailing vessel is very much a meditative practice. In sailing we tune our physical and mental awareness to the flow of the sea, to the whimsy of the wind, to the sensations within the body arising from contact with the sailing vessel herself. We reach a unity point—sea, wind, mind, body, vessel—and then the state of flow arises. We develop the elegant ability to be with what is, to respond in alignment with our essence nature.

gradually, then suddenly

We are practically inept when it comes to sensing exponential growth, until, all at once, the thing that had been at the margins is suddenly ubiquitous.

ethical AI

Like a virus, ethical problems can infect the decisions and actions produced by Artificial Intelligence, leading to unintended real-world consequences for the humans who ostensibly should benefit from more fair minded processes within the plumbing of an unbiased, disembodied algorithmic process. But AI systems, as a technology, are an extension of the human body-mind apparatus–like a spear or a vessel for water. As such, AI systems are forged by the human body politic within the fire of a collective consciousness (and unconsciousness).

somewhere in the world

At the onset of the financial crisis of 2008, somewhere in the world, the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto was binding the chaos and the order, the private cryptographic key with the validation of the public ledger. Bitcoin, the timechain, and “proof of work” were born to secure a decentralized network and its digital property, not through the brute force of the bullet or the bomb, but through the pacific, electromagnetic properties of bit-flipping, of converting electricity into cryptographic computation to verify, to validate—all without any trust whatsoever in the network’s participants.

AI ist Tot: Theory of Mind, LLMs, and Insights from Non-Dual Śaiva Tantra

The function of the ordinary, feeble means of knowledge is to make apparent some previously unknown fact. Therefore, these are neither useful nor capable of establishing Awareness, which is independent, undivided, and continuously revealing itself. As it is said in the Trikasāra (‘The Essence of the Trinity’): ‘If a person desires to step on the shadow of his head with his own foot, he will find his head will never be in the

Strengthening Drone Detection with Bio-Inspired Algorithms and Knowledge Distillation

In the event no signal is received after two minutes, a timed relay will place the robot plane, or ‘DRONE’, as it will be called hereafter, in a turn. — Radio Control of Aircraft From behind the headboard slipped a tiny hunter-seeker no more than five centimeters long. Paul recognized it at once — a common assassination weapon….It was a ravening sliver of metal guided by some near-by hand and eye.