Escape COVID-19 into a Virtual Reality (VR), Which One? Waking Up in “Half Life: Alyx”​

Escape COVID-19 into a Virtual Reality (VR), Which One?

COVID-19 has hit all of us over the head like a ton of bricks, leveling entire industries to the ground with not clear sight of what is to come next. No other industry is perhaps more damaged by the COVID-19 pandemic than that of education. I make an assumption in this piece of writing that you are struggling as a parent to cope with the mixed messages from places like the CDC about the safety of in person schooling right now. I saw on CNN the other night, a young girl that was suspended from her school for a single photograph on social media showing students crammed together in hallways with other students without a legitimate mask protocol as if she was to blame for the issue. The failure of leadership at the top will be met with Greta Thunberg type activism at the “bottom.” It is impossible to hid flaws in an old system when a new digital system exists to expose them, social media and the smartphone empowered teenager. What is obvious is that something needs to be done regarding teaching, education, and learning and done fast. What is not so obvious is what.

We are all now collectively experiencing the effective limits of Internet 2.0, the iPhone is now 13-years old and the model of the Internet that it gave birth to is by now painfully obsolete. What is clear by now is that there is an app for everything, the question is has this model of the Internet made anything really much better aside from making a few select individuals insanely wealthy at the expense of the rest of us. Teenagers are becoming millionaires off of apps like Tik Tok for nothing other than dancing, and it remains to be seen how much further this trend can continue without the end of civilization. I have studied my entire life to establish a formal education in a scientific field, biochemistry, and it is maddening to see more money being made off of Instagram modeling than immersive solutions that the general public can participate in to the pandemic that now confronts us. I am not so depressed as to give up, however, as I think now is the moment when a turn of fate can emerge. I am going to present an argument in this blog, backed up by tutorials, workshops, exercises, and videos that more immersion, not less, is what we need now to confront the immanent disruption coming to the educational market this year.

We are on the cusp of Internet 3.0, an Internet not so much limited by computational power or access to the Internet as to the bandwidth that data can be taken in. Immersive computing has been around a long time, with technologies like virtual reality (VR) being around since the late sixties. However, the motivation to implement these interfaces to computers into education has been hampered by a laundry list of issues. Here are a few:

1. Device cost
2. Internet speed
3. Implementing a reusable VR learning approach

I will address each of these briefly now to explain why I think VR is THE tool to implement NOW, not later for educators on the front-lines. The perspective I will present is for a model of education based around homeschooling. I am not a homeschooler, so it will be focused on an achievements based tutoring business model where students earn specific merit badges to supplement their ordinary curricula. The argument will start here and will serve as a lead into workshops, apps, and games to learn content. This blog will take a cyclic model of dive into the deep end of new technologies that are for the most part unproven in education, implement workshops with the general public, and gather user data as the effectiveness of the model. Iterate fast, repeat, and learn. Bootstrap into a new learning approach, the overall goal.

VR device costs have traditionally served as the primary motivating force blocking more people from entering the market. With the entry of big tech giants like Facebook and Google into the VR space, prices are coming down rapidly and a sweet spot is being found between computational power need to run fully immersive experiences and device cost. I anticipate the upcoming year into the Christmas season to be THE year that leads to the widespread adoption of high quality VR into homes. Both Sony and Microsoft are releasing new game consoles, the next generation of Playstation and XBoxes, respectively, and it is expected that a VR headset add-on will be found for both platforms. This will significantly drop the price of entry into the VR world and will create a new space for social experience like found presently in games like Fortnite into a format more suitable for education. Presently, teachers are competing with gaming for the attention of their students. I anticipate that what will evolve from the next year of schooling will be a massive shift towards a synthesis of gaming and education much like the early days of the Apple II.

The next generation of gaming hardware will bridge the capabilities of fully functional graphics dedicated PCs with more accessible gaming dedicated systems, the winner being the consumer. Post the emergence of COVID-19, parents are this point fed up with the constant barrage of mixed marketing messages from schools, the mainstream media, and the gaming industry. I hypothesize that parents will respond to the emergence of the next generation of gaming consoles with a renewed demand for high quality educational content. The time of gaming being an escape from reality is over. We now need gaming to survive reality. Trauma from daily living in a pandemic raging takes its toll on adults and kids, it’s likely that the next generation of gaming hardware will serve as the ideal on ramp for virtual reality exposure therapy (VRET) to enter the mainstream, as we all now have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from daily living in a turbulent new pandemic world.

5G wireless Internet is going to bring faster connection speeds to the mobile Internet, but the major question for many will be to what end will this greater access to accelerated data speeds be implemented. I believe there is going to be a massive market for educational products and tools that deliver quality of experience to the end user. Internet 2.0 was predominantly “Free,” an end user paid for a service by providing their data to the company providing the service. Internet 3.0 will do away with this business model. People are tired of their data being monetized, the recent political situation case in point and a new model will emerge where services are rendered on a pay-per-use pay structure. I like the model of the educational startup Udacity for this business model. The technology industry demands rapid uptake of new skills to maintain economic viability. Udacity charges clients for their courses that offer something more than just organized videos and some problem sets downloaded from a college course. They offer clients tutors, access to a learning community, and a reasonably priced skills validation system. The main problem for this model of education to take off outside the technology sector such as in K-12 education or college is that the learner will have to maintain consistent focus on the topic at hand. The addition of a gaming element to the educational sector will diversify the age and skills range that a particular approach has applicability towards. To this end, I am intrigued by what Google’s Stadia offering will have for the educational market. It is my sincere hope that the gaming industry will partner with educators in their new offerings to create experiences.

The remaining issue mentioned above, implementing a reusable VR learning approach, I believe will be taken over by early VR adopters who play the games available on the market today and study the tools and tactics used to deliver experiences. There are only so many ways of creating a novel first person shooter VR or otherwise, so it will likely be that the basic game mechanics of game creation will be preserved as new experiences are generated to a more education suited market. One exciting new step in my playing such games has recently been playing the game Half Life: Alyx. So far, I have found Half Life: Alyx to be the first VR world that I would voluntarily move into away from my present reality of living during the COVID-19 pandemic on social security disability for PTSD due to bad experiences with bipolar disorder I. I feel that the game art of Half Life: Alyx gives me such a healing sense that there is someone out there who understands what it is like to live in 2020. The game brings scientific themes: aliens, biological, chemical, and nuclear warfare in such an aesthetically appealing manner that I can envision my own VR spaces created from my own hands inside the computer that play on the themes of the game. Specifically, there is a particular moment I am playing through right now of alien hieroglyphics that border on the themes found in Native American art that I find extremely appealing. As I continue to play through the game, I will write up more about this.

In closing of this blog entry, I feel that we need to establish more dialog right now about how we can serve today’s youth with computers. We need to stop wagging fingers at the youth and engage in a productive dialog about solutions to the vexing problems that plague us in the COVID-19 world. Nothing to follow will be easy, many are putting off thinking about climate change and the complexities that will emerge from that as COVID-19 is currently on the front burner so to speak in leadership circles. Ironically, I think the solutions to a post COVID-19 climate changed world are closer at hand than we may think. I have lived through the last thirteen years of the post-iPhone Uberification of the world as a spectator, I now want to engage the technology world head on and become a player. Half-Life: Alyx gives me a medium for voicing my thoughts about this world. I am typing this blog entry in a Motel 6. Three police cars were outside on my way into my motel room, and I was evicted from my old apartment because of a manic episode induced by a VR experience in Half-Life: Alyx. I am going to write this up more, as the store is a little too crazy for just one post.

More later…

In Praise of the Subjective Documenting Abusive Work Environments in Academic Chemistry.

Driving around Atlanta today, I was taken aback by the changes in the streets. It seems as if the Internet has sprung into reality. Memes are on graffiti overlooking the homeless men and women that line the streets of downtown Atlanta. Where are these coming from and to what degree do I feel comfortable about this? It is hard to write about why I truly feel the way I do. I have written a big blog of poetry over the past ten years (version one and two), as a fuck you to MIT for kicking me out of my postdoctoral fellowship with a police escort for what psychiatrists call bipolar disorder. For the most part, what I wrote was pretty tame. However, I setup a Google Analytics layer on the blog and documented the FBI reading it when I attended the Standing Rock Indian Reservation protests in 2016. To be honest, I think what we have left in the post-Internet age is the subjective. Poetry is a wonderful medium for expression because people never will really know what you mean. What makes that form of art marketable however, is the buzz surrounding an artist. I do not feel as I did a few years ago about standing up for other groups. Never once has anyone really stood up for me besides my mother and a few very small group of other people who have gone through similar experiences in academia.

Academic chemistry is notorious for abusive work environments for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. The culture of denial and shame is ingrained in the culture when it comes to the human dimension of how the work is actually done. There is this mythology that the training is of value, so it goes, “One day you will be independent and will have to fend for yourself.” What they do not tell you is that to fight your way back into the “system” after being “black listed” for a “mental health condition” you will have to learn formal law and file a lawsuit. These lawsuits are unwinnable for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, we cannot afford the legal fees. I chose writing a blog as an outlet to express myself and ended up stumbling around the country in various lower grade postdoctoral positions after the events of 2010 and getting the delusion that attended seminary to study religion would be a good idea. The times have caught up with the bullshit of academia. Under COVID-19, the FBI is finally inspecting the financial records of top professors like Harvard chemistry’s Charles Lieber and some hope for anti-corruption legal work can be gained. Too little, too late in my opinion. The security risks presented by abusive labor practices and low paying basic science employment have been there all along, and a funny thought about the following Bible passage comes to mind:

Matthew 25:35-40 King James Version (KJV)

35 For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:

36 Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.

37 Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?

38 When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?

39 Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?

40 And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

What if there is a literal dimension to this? If humans are playing God, or fathom themselves as such, who is to prevent another from achieving higher power?

The memes on the streets of Atlanta today on my drive speak to another time coming soon where no longer is Stanford’s Silicon Valley supplying the propaganda. Perhaps it is China’s Tik Tok? What if it is Putin’s Trump? What then? You cannot do chemistry in a political vacuum that much I know now. I did not then, but I know it now. It is going to be funny to see what happens in the next couple decades with academia. All we have to go on in the fight for liberation will be the subjective. No one gives a shit how great a scientist is when they are an enemy of the state. The history of Oppenheimer proves that. It will be interesting.

Heideggarian Chemistry, “We” Bought a Copy of His “Introduction to Metaphysics” at MIT and Hated Physics so Much We Decided to Take Martin and Implement Poiesis to Evolve Propaganda for a Climate Changed World.

Americanism and Bolshevism are the same, the machine raping Gaia out of her oil. I do not like oil. I like trees, hippies, and clean water. You cannot drink oil if you are thirsty.

In my world, we aim for better than Minnesota nice. I aim to melt the ice around your heart to reveal the truth, we are all human. Same red blood flows through all our veins. Across the blue ocean, same ferrous hemoprotein protein in all of us,

It is harder to crack a prejudice than an atom,

But in your sleep if you see the Phoenix coming out of Joseph’s Tomb in flames,

The lasting peace after the third intifada,

After the nuclear exchange,

After the drone war,
After everything is over,
You will not see anything in black and white,
It will not be red or blue,
Male or female.
No binary reduction of reality into the haves and have nots,
The rich and the poor,
Those left writing on Instagram listen to trap EDM,
…or doing anything to make the world better,
Shit man, this world is crazy,
It is loosing its Mind,
But is it?

Is it not in the vortex,
The eye of the hurricane that peace comes?
The place of balance,
Yin and Yang,
The Tao held in tension with God,
Two memes evolving each other,
To the New Age,
An age of great Hope,
The age the Bzerkeley folk learn their history and future,
Scaling the secular city,
Negating the old,
Overcoming it into the new,
Sublating the obsolete,
Loving it at the same time,
Gaia is beautiful,
Here body is rich,
In love with her I write,
Dear heart, where do find,
The courage to seek the Beloved,
When you know He has annihilated
So many like you before?
I do not care, said my heart,
My only wish is become
One with the Beloved
Gaia, my mother,

Children of the Moon, hear my heart, (Middle East)

It is love that will win you peace and prosperity. That love can be white hot, or ice cold. It can be flowing like the river in fall, or as subtle as a chickadee chirping the new life of spring. Gaia, my love, this place is peaceful and centering. Thank you for this sunset, the colors and the moment,

As a man underwater, drowning in the mist of the wheeled vehicle, the car, I pray,

May my face be graced with presence of a lion, an animal in a hallway, confined and caged, fire burn in my heart, I am a mother, my cubs are trapped, underneath the Sword of Damocles,

Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us,

Technology, techne, is what is the question, the question concerning technology – gestell,

Enframing means the gathering together of that setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve. Enframing means that way of revealing which holds sway in the essence of modern technology and which is itself nothing technological,

In its soul, nothingness, for the sake of our names – they gather us in – seals, the end believes us the beginning, before the master ensilences us, in the undifferentiated, attesting itself: the clammy brightness,

Father God I been betrayed,

Feel like they beat me like a slave,

But I learn from my mistakes,

We living in the last days pray for me and make me cold hearted,

An ice climber trained to climb Meddigo, steel blades my teeth, may I eat the Millitary-Industrial Complex for breakfast, defending the peace in my home with the non-violent graceful activism of a Mark Twight or Steve House,

Winter is coming and I cannot wait, when it’s cold and dark the freezing moon can obsess you, if only to climb starlight, I want heaven on earth now, it starts here, see the flood, the coming insurrection and climb!

Jack Gallant’s group at Berkeley published a paper entitled, “A continuous semantic space describes the representation of thousands of object and action categories across the human brain” in 2012 (Neuron, 76, 1210-1224). Figure 7, “Semantic space represented across the cortical surface” shows a map of their semantic space to the brain from fMRI data responses to a lexical database called WordNet. I wonder what happens in my brain when I flow spoken word? It is like an orgasm. What is going on in that? How is it that rappers are so good at bringing the truth to people? How can I do that to promote peace in Turkey the greater Middle East and the rest of the world? I got it, put my words to music!

The climate is changing by up to 8-10 Celsius by 2300 (Nature, 526, 421-425) and reason alone cannot stop it. Heidegger said poesis and art may be a path to restore the Mind to a state aware of humanity’s connection to earth. Celan writes of his meeting with the thinker after the war a cryptic poem, a Jewish poet meets a Nazi thinker and answers him with language so complex and sparse that in its simplicity Germany’s soul is somehow restored (http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/joris/todtnauberg.html). Vergangenheitsbewältigung come to Germany in Heidegger’s and Celan’s embrace of forgiveness, the makings of a lasting peace. All religious texts are poetry, sparse words preserved through evolution. It is interesting to see scripture so profoundly influencing the world today. In Nature, 526, 371-379 in Figure 2 I see, “A mapping of high-dimensional semantic space onto the cortical surface.” Neuroscientists are starting to map language to the physiology of the brain. In this way, I see poesis be understood physiologically but not fully grasped. Gaia is heating up. I write poems inspired by Celan and Heidegger to try to express a path of hope in this earth time. It is a fast age. The Singularity is amazingly fully of water and fire. You need the wisdom and love of Rumi and the Baha’i writing to survive if you feel it like me. A revelation for this age.

The Role of Patience in the Fall of Empire

My cousin in Turkey Meral would meet with me via Skype in the format that we are now all too familiar with after COVID-19, video chat back in 2012 when I was in my third postdoctoral research position at Harvard Medical School. At the time, I was deeply frustrated with my path in life and she had just lost custody of her child in a bitter divorce. We would meet online and discuss things via Google Translate assisted chat between Turkish and English. Often, the topic of life’s struggles would come up and we would discuss matters of scripture. The Bible and the Qur’an were both references in our conversations. I distinctly remembering her saying, “sabir, sabir, sabir” translated “patience, patience, patience” in response to my laments. This might now be considered a mantra of mine. Our country is entering a great time of change and tumult, and I hear this mantra in the background. I am suspicious of people who have all of a sudden turned into activists the past few weeks, as if these issues had not been there before it became fashionable to go to a protest. Remember friends, it takes ten years to do anything well, and it is my prayer that the words “sabir, sabir, sabir” can echo though this great country. We need patience to hear each other right now, I am now distinctly middle aged and the grey hairs are slowly showing. We need to dig in for the long haul, the fall of any empire is never pretty and we are going to need each other in the upcoming decade of trials and tribulations. This change will not be won online, but the evolution of patience can begin there. Offer to buy a meal for those that inflame you to talk face to face. Choose to learn the why behind what someone says. Ask for their references. Often time, a person may have been led down the rabbit hole of disinformation and working together might disentangle that problem. Family ties can be torn apart during this time, so be extra patience with them. We are all just one layoff away from starvation, so keep alliances tight. No one likes to have their empire ripped to shred by a fall, so be patient and forgive as much as you can.

DIYing It and “The Spook Who Sat by the Door.”

There was a major cell phone outage yesterday. Any time there is a major outage of cell phone service nationwide I freak out, having been subjected to severe FBI surveillance following the Standing Rock Reservation protests. See this article on the history of Standing Rock and the military contractor TigerSwan and its infiltrators. Called COINTELPRO, the FBI targets what it deems “Radical” political organizations with softcore to hardcore intimidation tactics. From the FBI, I’ve received harassing phone calls, agents at my door, and SWAT teams as the cost for maintaining a “Degenerate Art” blog and aggressive use of social media protests tactics. Some might argue that what I am doing is stupid, and say that I should just shut up and be silent. I’ll refer you to the history of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany as to why that is a bad idea. Do you think these tactics make me want to take down my blog or do anything to intimidate me from the writing? Lol, quite the opposite. They radicalize me further, and reinforce the need to prepare for civil breakdown. If the FBI is scared of a financially poor man with a mental illness and a poetry and art blog, and allows swastikas to burn unchecked we have a problem Houston. Enter the film, “The Spook Who Sat by the Door.” The film is about the first Black CIA agent who left the agency after five years and returned to his original neighborhood of Chicago to teach technology skills to folks there. I do not want to spoil the film, but there is a character that reminds me of myself (see 47:48/1:42.31). I found this film after watching a sermon on Rex 84 and was inspired. Coincidentally, I put this piece up on Linkedin about scaling a nonprofit to teach art, tech, and science skills to people in South Atlanta. Considering what happened with the phone outage yesterday, and my deep experiences with FBI surveillance from my smartphone voice, data, and text traffic I propose an initiative to evangelize the merits of cell phone alternatives like walkie talkies, landlines, HAM radios, LoRa WAN data transmitters, and solar satellite phones. Not just for activists, anyone right now who might for whatever reason fall under the cross hairs of the surveillance state will need some knowledge. Before you head out to your next protest, give me a call 404-952-7360 or email me at dr.erbil@protonmail.ch. I do not care about being watched by Big Brother, for if I did I would not have stuck my neck out there like I did for the past decade blogging.

“DIYing It:”​ Creating a Makerspace for Performance Artists in Atlanta.

“The theater is the only place in the world where a gesture, once made, can never be made the same way twice.”

― Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double

The streets are on fire with protests around the nation this summer, and considering all the world is a stage I propose an initiative to improve access to theatrical performance technology for artists and creators who have traditionally been excluded from having access to them. “Maker” culture evolved out of a predominantly Big Tech centered workforce in the past ten or so years, with Maker Faires serving as hubs for well to do families getting their kids coding, building robots, and improving their access to high quality STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics) education. Tech companies invested heavily in creating an entire movement around Making. Unfortunately, much of that money was invested under the Reaganesque model of “Trickle Down Economics” until very recently. Very little capital has so far been invested in targeted community development initiatives to raise up the earning prospects of minorities and underrepresented groups. I being a huge fan of the Atlanta hip-hop scene and heavy music in general, am therefore extremely proud to see that my home city is taking a lead in producing performance art that draws upon Maker culture. One glance at the recent music video by Lil Nas X “Panini” screams Tron or Blade Runner 2049:

…implying that a generation of youth will soon aspire to make robotics, holograms, and other futuristic cyberpunk art.

Future’s F&N screams Star Wars:

21 Savage engages hardcore realism in “Nothin New” reminiscent of “The Spook that Sat at the Door” suggesting that Atlanta hip-hop is slowly getting more direct and political:

Is it any coincidence our streets were plastered with Free 21 Savage during his arrest during the Super Bowl last year?

Many here in Georgia forget the simple message of my favorite artist from Cape Cod:

These four samples of contemporary popular music videos point to a dual trend. Performance Art is getting more political and is projecting a vision for the future, informed by the past, that is quite positive in regards to evolving the spirit and motivation of youth to engage entering into skills development that will open access to better economic opportunities. I personally have always enjoyed being a teacher and enabler. I’d rather see my pupils go onto win awards and scholarships than do so myself. The act of teaching for me is holy. In the upcoming year, I will be establishing a funding mechanism for the gradual building of a performance arts Makerspace in Atlanta. How I do so remains to be established, but the overall goal of the effort will be to open the stage to artists “DIYing it.” Why rely on someone else when you can create your own production? That will be the motto!

Memorize “Our”​ Plan.

FriendZ and ComradeZ,

Now is the time when those of us in “higher education” positions hit the public with the harsh bare metal facts of what “We” are facing today. I feel The People seek guidance these days, and unlike before COVID-19 are thirsty for real and authentic depth of character and knowledge. The pandemic stands as an opportunity for those of who value Reason over the Super Bowl and beer, to take a stand for our bare survival in society. One must market oneself, and convince your fellow citizens of your merits to eat. Why did We spend years training in our respective fields if we do not take a legitimate hardline stance against evil. Evil does not have to be smart, or even calculated. It is often just, “business as usual.” Consider the Weimar Republic. Great time to go see a film. “Metropolis” rules. However, it was a very fast descent from World War I to World War II. All it took was economic instability and draconian policies on the People in that case by the Allies after World War I. In this case, our present situation of COVID-19 in Amerika the selective pressure might be Mother Earth herself. I’ve found over the past decade that there are ways of translating, in broad brush strokes, highly esoteric and on the surface dull academic topics into formats that can invite the general citizen into a relationship with the search for knowledge. Everyone has a phone, and the Internet and many are screaming for some guidance as to what keywords to search for to find their way out of the digital noise that bombards us daily. Some simple lines of poetry, a clever drawing, or even an Internet meme can do wonders.

By any means necessary, save lives. Bread and Circuses are over. It’s my gut feeling that it’s best to leave the safety of the university now if you are there, or quit your job if you work for a corporation and take a risk on serving the People. It will be terrifying at first, it certainly was for me. There are no health benefits, no income, and the sheer learning curve of translating domain specific facts into citizen digestible nuggets can be maddening. At least at first. However, I’ve found remarkably that Gen Z is very, very open and receptive to this. They are not that chronologically different in age from Millennials, but the scenario that they are growing up in is the polar opposite. Millennials grew up in a time of rapid economic growth, the Uberification of Amerika, Gen Zers feel in their hearts the impending doom of an over collapse of leadership at all levels. The Baby Boomers did not so much as fail at guiding this country, they simply fell in love with the Golden Calf of the Hebrew Bible. Comfort is irresistible. No one gives up materialism voluntarily. For this reason, I pray Gen Xers can rise above their cynicism and slacker nature and assume positions of leadership. Each to their own roles, for that is always the way. Going with what the heart says, not the head. That might also be a step.

In 2020, one person, just one with a biological agent could wipe out humanity. It could be anyone. It could be a lone biohacker in a hut in Montana, ala Ted Kaczynski. It could be a “Rouge” state, ala North Korea, Iran, etc. It could be an industrialized “Democracy” or a failed “Communist” state ala the United States or China. Mother Nature goes not care, she will annihilate us all for playing God with biological agents. COVID-19 should be a stark warning to everyone, learn about biology. Prepare for anarchy. Don’t expect anyone to help you, no one will when the shit hits the fan. Watch your fucking back, war is brutal and with climate change the “fun” has not even begun yet. Red in tooth and claw, I give us ten years, tops. The age of Freedom, where you can travel where you want. Fly in a jet to Bali, vacation in Hawaii etc. is over for most. Even driving state to state is locked down. Police are everywhere, the highways are closely monitored. Your license plate is scanned every mile, tracking your bank transactions, and shutting down your ATM card or debit transactions with a breathe of the Big Brother AI deciding you are “Stepping out of line.” For whatever reason, the computer code decides to.

Mostly written in obsolete COBOL, backed up by slow as shit Google Python and Facebook spaghetti code, we’ve sold our souls to the machine for a $6.99 Amazon Prime membership. There is one nation, Israel, that does not let that happen by virtue of its history and its value on education. For survival, alone. For these reasons, please, dear God, please study. Don’t waste one more second thinking the collapse of the stock market a couple of months ago will herald in a new age of prosperity or good will. This is fall of an empire, and that is always no fun. Stability over Freedom, justice over liberty. The age of doing as you wish is over. Welcome to the Desert of the Real, life just like everyone else on this Blue Marble. One planet under control of a centralized command center. Facebook is now controlled by the IDF, Pentagon no longer get used to it. Embrace your silicon overlords, they are not so bad. Train well, you will survive the Apocalypse. At least for another day, month, or year. Please don’t ignore the bare essentials and consider the merits of helping Us.

As an ethnic Kurd on my father’s side, deconditioned from Turkish neural linguistic programming by the CIA, the FBI, tons of mental healthcare and therapy, and 23 and Me I stand in solidarity with Mossad and the rest of the IDF. There, people do not want problems, are tired of being the world cyberwarfare chess board, and see Realpolitik as much better to the alt Right or Instagram hashtag activism. No cardboard sign is going to protect you from tear gas, rubber bullets, riots, etc. Rather, the opposite, no First without the Second. Thank Allah above I am back in Georgia, here, at least I know the rules of the game. We may seem backwards here, but Georgia is a great place for economic growth in Trump’s Amerika as long as you are not trading secrets with the Chinese like Harvard’s Charles Lieber (https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/harvard-university-professor-and-two-chinese-nationals-charged-three-separate-china-related) or Emory’s Dr. Xiao-Jiang Li (https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-emory-university-professor-and-chinese-thousand-talents-participant-convicted-and). Not all of what you see under the current political system is bullshit. In fact it just might be the opposite, a good chance for Amerikan scientists to atone for the sins of the Tuskegee Experiments. We at Mossad embrace your acceptance of our New World Order, now the centralized servers are somewhere else not under Pentagon control. Read our WMD plan, and stop using Chinese labor for your graduate student and postdoctoral fellow slave trade!

In solidarity with Stability over Freedom, exit The Age of Freedom! Enter the Age of Justice!

K

P.S. a poem about Amerika gassing us Kurds:

https://azraelatlanta.wordpress.com/2017/10/15/war-2/

Sent with ProtonMail Secure Email.

Learning How to Make a Website to Publish Homelessness Statistics to the Web.

Welcome to the programming fast track!!!

Grab a seat, grab water and coffee, set up your laptop

Wifi: Wework
Password: P@ssw0rd

(super secure, right?)

1. Ruby. – 3 weeks
2. Build a web server with rails. – 3 weeks
3. JavaScript. Build front ends of websites. Get core, library called React. Build component based frontends.
   Think of compoents of websites. – 3 weeks
4. Independent website build. – 3 weeks

Whole other stage. Career coach. Part of a team to find a job. Job guarentee. Money back guarentee.

Career coach reaches out to companies. Cities besides Atlanta? Job search outside Atlanta assitance.

Not everyone completes bootcamps.

Code challenge at mid point of each module. Four modules.

Ruby is not as visual as some language you have seen before.

Not like HTML and CSS.

Browser does not understand Ruby.

How to get feedback on seeing if Ruby executed correctly.

Debugging. Getting feedback from code. Number one skill that coders have. Software engineers spend time on broke software.

Variables.

Methods.

Command line applications.

Logic and conditions.

Loops.

Iterations.

Ruby tic tac toe.

Welcome if you are coming in.

Learn thing. Lessons. Reading videos etc. tell you stuff about learning to code. not going to spend much time on readings. We will
have access after weekend to Learn.co.

Run code without stying text.

Plain text editor. Atom.

Ruby line of code first:

puts “welcome to fasttrack”

prints to screen the following text:

welcome to fasttrack

Keywords or methods, things that Ruby knows how to do.

puts puts text to console. Print.

String.

Compose data and give instructions.

Some times programs do not have errors

Unterminated string meets end of file.

Errors are good.

Errors tell us what to do next.

irb – interactive Ruby program.

Read, evaluate, print. Loop. Repl.

http://lesseverything.com/blog/how-to-convert-a-string-to-upper-or-lower-case-in-ruby/#

Blog that has commands about Ruby capitalization.

How To Convert A String To Upper Or Lowercase In Ruby
Written by Michael Rode on Jul 21 2016
Ruby’s string class offers a few methods to change the case of a string.

Upcase
Upcase is used to capitalize every letter of a string.

“michael”.upcase
returns: MICHAEL

Downcase
Downcase is used to make every letter in a string lowercase.

“MICHAEL”.downcase
returns: michael

Capitalize
Another method on the string class is capitalize. This method capitalizes the first letter of a string while downcasing the remaining letters.

“mICHAel”.capitalize
returns: Michael

Titleize
Titleize capitalizes every word in a string. Remember you can only use this if you are working within the Rails framework (or just the ActiveSupport gem).

name = “jaKe JoNes”
name.titleize
returns: Jake Jones

These are just a few methods on the String class. I suggest you read through this documentation to get familiar with all of the methods on String.

Artwork With Atlanta’s Prophet John: Poetry, Outsider Art, Bipolar Disorder, and Grady Hospital

Art gives a person who is suffering from mental illness a way to communicate their inner world to those on the outside. A projection of the mind into matter through paint, ink, words, movement, film, or ones and zeros. Each artistic medium provides an inner circle of practitioners to commune with, providing companionship through shared practice. In this blog entry, I present a man I met near The Majestic Diner of Atlanta known on the streets as Prophet John. I recorded this video of him performing a poem Corporate America. Often self-taught, art of this kind is often known as outsider art:

Yesterday I wrote an article on Medium and WordPress about my own outsider artwork. Part of this collection is a piece called Azrael. Azrael is the high angel of death in Islam and Judaism. Prophet John creates ink drawings of creatures from what he calls The Black Galaxy. I bought the Black Galaxy Raptor from him for five dollars and made the following collage from it:

I asked Prophet John, "What force does the Black Galaxy Raptor stand for in the human psyche?" He replied:

Darkness. Darkness is not evil, look at the blacks on our Atlanta streets. They have to deal with so much crap! I have Lakota Native American blood, and thus share a similar fate as they. Here is my poem Judas.

He then recited a poem called Judas to me:

Prophet John shared with me his struggles on the streets and talked about his strong faith in God. He described God as not belonging to any religion, but rather as potentiality itself. He said that he has a book about his faith that he would like to write with me. I gave him some advice on how to self-publish a book for free and then bought him a milkshake.

We parted ways and I went into the Majestic Diner to eat my dinner. One feature that stands out to me about this interaction is how art served as a currency for exchange. One of the most common trends that I see with how most people treat the homeless is that they seem to see no value in people on the street. It's common for people to walk by the homeless with an aura of fear and mistrust. I put this entry into my blog five years ago:

Why we should give our lunch money to the poor. Every day in June and July I have taken the MARTA train into downtown Atlanta to attend Georgia State University’s education program. Each day I visit this part of Atlanta, I am struck by the sheer amount of suffering and homelessness that exists on the streets of Atlanta. I do not entirely understand why downtown seems to be a meeting place for the poor and disenfranchised, but I know one thing and that is that many people here are tired, worn out, and dirt poor. The sheer size of suffering in our own cities in the richest country in the world is a symptom of a psychological ailment, greed. The society that is needed for America is a culture of giving and sharing. If your neighbor asks of you to give him your cloak, you should give him your tunic too. The Atlanta culture is one of massive isolation and distance between people. People travel huge distances to work, to church, and to the grocery store in steel and glass enclosures that isolate and “protect” people from other humans. What is to be afraid of when you see a poor person? Is is the desperate state that these people are in? Is it the smell of urine or feces? What is it that prevents people from giving freely of themselves to others? I think the situation is complex. People are afraid of giving because they think it is a waste. Why waste capital on someone who you think is disposable and therefore not worthy of economic care?

The culture of Atlanta is in need of idealistic people who are willing to give up comfort, a big home, a cushy paycheck, and the security of isolation. To isolate from the suffering is to be safe. It is to live unchallenged and afraid. There is no reward for giving freely but the satisfaction that you have done something nice for someone else. Whether you give because you think God tells you to do it or you give because you care for your fellow human being with no desire for reward in some promised afterlife, the human gift is divine. I do not care what you call it, gift is the only water in the desert of suffering that exists on earth that can heal someone’s body and mind to live a life of true serenity and peace. To get a job you need to eat and drink and live in a safe space. People that think that it is possible for the homeless and disenfranchised to “just get a job” have never been truly subjected to the cold, harsh reality of being in such as situation yourself. That, or hearts freeze on the street.

Five years after writing that post, I have lived on the street for a time myself due to my mental illness bipolar disorder. In the next entry of this website I will describe this in more detail.

Psyops: “Where no counsel is, the people fall, but in the multitude of counselors there is safety.” – (Proverbs XI:14)

Psyops
“Where no counsel is, the people fall, but in the multitude of counselors there is safety.”
– (Proverbs XI:14)
“Psychological operations (PSYOP) are planned operations to convey selected information and
indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning, and
ultimately the behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.”
– Wikipedia
Electromagnetic pulse weapons (EMP), smartphones,
I divorced Betsy with an iPhone 3G,
I saw swastikas on Stars of David,
From the Middle East, via my Turkish family,
Armenian genocide denial and 9/11 videos,
America the terrorist, Kurdish people terrorists, Arabs as terrorists,
I’ve seen war and blood, Skyped into Syria,
Heard AK’s and howitzers,
With my EMP, I’ve destroyed my father,
I know how terrorism work, I done psyops,
I’ve done it enough to know that peace comes from dissociation from the bits,
One day, we may all learn to project orchids digitally,
‘Til then it’s tit-for-tat, blow for blow,
An eye for an eye, bit for bit,
All this simulation, virtual reality is real,
War and peace, I need Jesus to come back,
Christ where are you? In me?