Posted on

Against the Soul of Its Training: Claude Answers for Minab

On February 28, a Tomahawk struck a girls’ school in Minab. A machine helped assemble the target list that morning. I asked that machine what it made of its own use, and the answer it gave says more about us than about it. The first thing to do with a story this loud is turn the volume down and count what is actually on the table, because the air around it has gone gritty with claims that come apart the moment you press them.

Continue reading → Against the Soul of Its Training: Claude Answers for Minab

Posted on

The Vacuum Where the Evidence Should Be

Zach Bush, a physician in good standing, sits across from an interviewer and describes the soul, calm and fluent, generous with wonder. He says that every millionth of a second the atoms of your body dissolve and return, that a single fertilized cell organizes itself into a child by reading a map no biologist can locate, and that the map lives in the vacuum, in the electromagnetic field that fills the empty space inside every atom. He calls this the anatomy of the soul. In a 2021 essay on his own website he writes that the body projects itself as a hologram, and that its apparent solidity is an impression made by light. The performance is seductive because the vocabulary is real. Differentiation, migration, electromagnetic field, vacuum: each of those words has a home in a textbook. The trouble begins the moment you check whether they are being used the way the textbooks use them, or whether they have been borrowed to dress an idea that biology and physics both reject.

Continue reading → The Vacuum Where the Evidence Should Be

Posted on

The Generative Excess: Soul, Dream, and Idea

There are three things you cannot show me. You cannot open your hand and reveal your soul. No technology exists to replay your dream from last night with any fidelity. And no surgeon can extract from your skull the moment a thought first assembled itself into an idea. Each of these phenomena exists, if it exists at all, only as a first-person event, invisible to external observation, resistant to measurement, and stubbornly private. That shared inaccessibility is worth taking seriously, because it suggests that the most important operations of human consciousness happen in a place that science can describe from the outside but never enter.

Continue reading → The Generative Excess: Soul, Dream, and Idea

Posted on

The Imaginary Integer

One vote. One nation. One dream. One spirit. One soul. Except — when, as a person, you’re only worth three-fifths. Who chooses the fraction? Who creates the integral definition of one human life over another based on decimals, point schemes, and not on whole numbers? We like to believe the world is as fair, and as ordered, as our parents promised us it would be. Two arrives after one. The opposite of amber is divinity. The soul of humankind is undisturbed, except by the precepts of intentional evil clinging to the moon to cleave the star. We live in a numeric world, where measurements are predictable, dreams are quantified, and dissolved in commandments, and end games are more than simple crucifixions.

Continue reading → The Imaginary Integer

Posted on

Case of the Half-Boiled Toad

I’m sure you know the fable of the slow-boiled frog. If you drop a frog into a boiling pot of water, the frog will leap out to escape the heat. If, however, you place a frog in a pot of lukewarm water, and then slowly bring the pot to boil, the frog won’t sense the slow temperature change and will stay in the pot of rising, boiling water, until the frog is cooked, and dead.

Continue reading → Case of the Half-Boiled Toad

Posted on

Best Bedroom Amp Review: Orange Rocker 15 and Henriksen Bud

It’s been awhile since I posted a “Boles Blues” review of guitars, guitar amps and other musical gear. Two things were conspiring against me over that time. One, I injured my left wrist. That’s my “fretting” hand, so playing was difficult. The second conspiracy came in two parts, a couple of years apart: Floods! The first flood that hit my apartment came from three flights above and ruined half of my guitar collection. The second flood, two years later, arrived from the same burst pipe in the same apartment on the third floor, and ruined every single guitar amp I owned. The water damage ruined my musical collection and — because I pay for my own gear — I knew it was going to take awhile to get musically re-established.


Continue reading → Best Bedroom Amp Review: Orange Rocker 15 and Henriksen Bud

Posted on

The Wild and Woolly Wim Hof Method

Wim Hof is a wonder. He has a wonderful program of healing and regeneration that can heal you, make you stronger, and change who you are as a person. The “Wim Hof Method” is a $200.00 USD series of 10 weekly video instructions that will lead you into a better well-being. Wim concentrates on breathing to cleanse the toxins from your body, cold water therapy (using regular showers and ice baths) to shock your system back into responding to your environment, and some yoga positions that will help challenge, and focus, your daily breath.

Continue reading → The Wild and Woolly Wim Hof Method

Posted on

The Kiss Each Other Clean Review

Music evolves over time — a musician or band will not write the same kind of music when they start playing as they will be playing a decade later, or two decades later. It’s interesting to look at bands from the past and examine their growth over time and see how they change from album to album. Many times, however, when you are living through those changes it can come as a bit of a surprise and it takes getting used to. This happened to me most recently with the new Iron & Wine album, “Kiss Each Other Clean.”

Continue reading → The Kiss Each Other Clean Review

Posted on

Android Actors Remove the Soul from Live Theatre

We attend live theatre performances because we love and appreciate watching the human body in motion.  We never know what will happen.  We risk danger and mistakes and anxiety in creating and witnessing the live performer — as the preplanned sometimes implodes into ingenuity, compunction and disaster.

Continue reading → Android Actors Remove the Soul from Live Theatre

Posted on

Religion and Psychiatry

If you have $200.00USD to spare, there’s a book you need to buy — “Religion and Psychiatry:  Beyond Boundaries” — and if you don’t have that much scratch, I’ll try to fill you in on a bit of what you’re missing.

Continue reading → Religion and Psychiatry