Loose Leaf Notes

1. If the moon is a Mona Lisa then the sun is smiley face.

2. When it comes to texting, I’m all thumbs, which means that all my keyboard typing experience is useless to me now.

3. A Constitutionalist Originalist is like being a follower of the ‘eye for an eye’ Old Testament rather than the ‘love thy neighbor’ New Testament.

4. The difference between a graveyard and a cemetery? A graveyard adjoins a church and a cemetery does not. You can bury ashes in a cemetery but not a graveyard.

5. Honey Moon: The moon lifts its skirt / revealing its half-slip / a luminous wisp / of night’s borrowed blue secrets

6. I went to a thing HERE.

7. I don’t wear a mask in my dreams.

8. THIS is our Floyd Press editor of the local paper I’ve been writing for since 2006 and I’m one of the freelancer/contract reporters who have lost work (been cut back) since the paper’s new owners gut the budget and COVID limited events to cover.

9. I “fall” for it every year HERE.

10. “There are only two industries that call their customers ‘users”: illegal drugs and software.” Edward Tutte, Social Dilemma

11. “‘The Social Dilemma’ is a Netflix documentary that explores the dark side of social media, such as illegal data mining and manipulative technology to predict and control human psychology, with tech experts sounding the alarm on their own creations. “If the product is free, you’re the product…The manipulation of your behavior through predictive A.I., “attention extraction” (keeping you clicking for as long as possible) and the harvesting of your data and selling it to the highest bidder (oh, you like conspiracy theories, do you?) are all ways that you become the merchandise and advertisers become the customer. (And it’s not just commercial interests. Foreign entities are wreaking havoc, destabilizing societies all over the world.) These platforms are designed to create dependency and addiction in the service of this “surveillance capitalism…”  – Clip from a review

12. “We live in a world in which a tree and a whale is worth more financially dead than alive. For as long as corporations act in this way and are unregulated, these corporations are going to continue to destroy trees, to mine the earth… Now humans are the trees and whales. We are more profitable while we are spending time staring at a screen and consuming advertising and providing data to these big unregulated companies like Facebook, Google and the like.” – Justin Rosenstein –  Former engineering lead at Facebook; Former product manager at Google

13. I think the ghosts below are cute, until they stop moving, and then they the scare me.

_________Thirteen Thursday