Category Archives: Poetry

Poetry, Security

Slop for the Luddites

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With apologies to Lord Byron and King Ludd.

I.
As the Liberty lots o’er the sea
Won their wage, and dearly, with blood,
So we, friends, we
Will strike, or live free,
And down with all kings but King Ludd!

II.
When the model they train is complete,
And the worker is stripped, used, and sold,
We will fling the obsolete
GPU box down at their feet,
And dye it deep in the gore of their gold.

III.
Though taupe as their cloud is its hue,
Since their profit is rotten as mud,
Yet this is the dew
Which the tree shall renew
Of Liberty, replanted by Ludd!

History, Poetry, Security

Bach? Beethoven? Schubert? Handel? Thank Mendelssohn

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He wasn’t just a great composer; he was a one-man cultural institution. At age 20 in 1829 he conducted the first performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion since Bach’s death, basically rescuing that name from obscurity and kicking off the Bach revival that defines to this day how we hear German classical composers. He alone, taking personal risk, championed other composers to make them more popular. He founded the Leipzig Conservatory. And his sister would have been world renowned as well, except for the misogyny. Europe’s leaders enjoyed her as a musical star while refusing to credit her. All of this, the entire authentic German history of classical music, then brutally was destroyed by that shithead antisemitic Wagner and even worse Orff.

Pfitzner, Egk, Müller all refused the Nazi commission to erase Mendelssohn; Richard Strauss had disdain for the project, and even the Nazi critic Fritz Stege wrote that Mendelssohn’s music belongs and it honors no arranger to touch it. Orff took it anyway. He was worse than any Nazi fanatic, the opportunist who took Hitler’s erasure commission when even all the committed Nazis wouldn’t touch it.

That’s https://echtorff.org

Poetry, Security

I’m on Mythos

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“I’m on Mythos” reminds me of the proud Google Wave announcements.

There is no “inside” to Internet protocols such as SMTP

People who love how a velvet rope now runs around their sense of self (e.g. “I’ve been allowed in”), are stumbling towards an old philosophical landmine.

Since at least the 1700s, thanks to Hume, humans contemplated when a mirror has no source image it will reflect whatever stands in front of it. The aspiration of an empty person then operates as a mirror, such that to stand in front of a VC-fueled speculative software velvet rope makes a user proud to reflect that rope as their existence.

Anthropic built Mythos as Rousseau built Sophie, to be valued through the eyes of others, and called it education. Wollstonecraft turned that education into a verdict against the source:

Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

Now that Google Wave failed, as if you even remember, has Mythos become your prison yet for adornment?