Memes Obliterated

As I've said before, the swastika was widely used as a good luck symbol for thousands of years, prior to the NAZI's.

But due to horrors of the NAZIs, swastikas have been removed from all public use, save the fevered hatreds of Neo-NAZIs, Skinheads, and pissed off teens looking for attention. It's become verboten, like many other NAZI symbols (the Hitler stache, for example).

It's remarkable to consider - in the span of ten years or so, a symbol that was used worldwide for tens of thousands of years was removed from use. Obliterated. A meme created by ancient mankind - the swastika is one of the oldest human symbols, up there with the circle, square, the line, and the triangle - gone in the blink of an eye.

Consider this when looking at our culture, our society, our world. What might seem timeless can be changed in an instant. There's no such thing as permanence.  There's also no such thing as objective meaning.

Coke and a Smile

For real - the artist obtains an actual neolithic vase and paints Coca Cola logos on them. Read about Al Weiwei here. This is a genuinely provoking piece of art for me, as 1. It's a Neolithic vase! They don't grow on trees. But 2. I get it, and it works. It's stunning.

That kind of reaction is specific to art, and is one of its chief powers. At the same time, it's like saying one is against murder, and so committing the worst murder you can think of to show how bad murder is. Don't murder, kids!

Nuts.

Hello Free Shrugs

How nice. Do you think it's sincere, or ironic? Could be an in-disguise hipster pranking morning rush hour. Or a Jesus junkie out for a fix.

I think this guy's ironic. But there you see a shrug, for free, and presumably many more to come. So he's delivering, even if ironically. I mean, it's not like shrugs aren't ironic either. You know?

Also, too - the word "hello" clearly can be spoken as "Hell!", "O!", as if in fiery damnation. Ironic, huh, for such a friendly word? What isn't ironic, though, really?

Hello Metal Slave Bikini Kitty

Sexy Slave Hello Kitty is reason number 4815 that I must get myself to a Comic Con some point soon. I seem to just keep missing them in my local area, and am not that committed to travel to one. Inertia, you know? But to see wonders like this costume with my own eyes would check a little box in my heart. And that's the whole point of life, right?

Scales of Perspective (Let's Go!)

Here we go - let's bring it home. Here we have the proton and neutron, the building blocks of the nucleus, which, combined with electrons, make up all atoms. Inside the proton and neutron are quarks, which come in colors. What makes up a quark, you might ask? So far, according to standard theory, nothing. According to String Theory, strings. Now, at this scale of perspective, quarks aren't really "things", but like electrons, they exist, believe it or not, more like "probability waves". Here's another picture that might illustrate that better:

 See? They're kinda there, kinda here, kinda moving all around all the time. Anyways, quarks make up protons and neutrons, protons and neutrons make up the core of an atom:

 Again, with the fuzziness - the gray clouds outside the nucleus are the "probability waves" of the electrons, which, like quarks, are kinda here, kinda there. But the nucleus is our first "real" thing that we can understand at our macro level. But consider! Every atom that makes up every bit of matter you see is 99% empty space. It is only the Electromagnetic field generated by the electrons that gives it the impression of solidity - fields, not "things". Atoms make up everything we know, so let's skip way up to the next level of this thesis (Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form), the stellar realm:

 Its our new friend, the Oort Cloud - but, like the atom itself, each star is just a tiny bit ensconced in a far larger cloud - a shell - of particles that are here and there. In this case, frozen ice and rock, but you see where I'm going with this, yes? Next up, a picture I just posted!

 So, again, like the stellar neighborhood, and like the atom itself, our galaxies exist as tiny specks amongst a far larger sphere of Dark Matter. And just as a reminder at the scale of perspective we are currently talking about, here's a yearbook photo:

Every little box here is a picture of a galaxy, and this is just a tiny sample. There are hundreds of billions of galaxies out there (maybe many, many more), each containing hundreds of billions of stars. Some perspective, eh? But we're not stopping there:

 The Multiverse - just a theory at this point, but everyone seems to be heading towards acceptance of it quite quickly. Note, that our entire Universe might just be a small part of a larger sphere which in turn is contained within a still larger sphere which itself is contained within an even bigger sphere of existence.... and where it ends, who knows? Maybe it goes on forever. 

Have I blown your mind yet? I just blew my own - in fact, I've been living in a constant state of awed wonder since coming to appreciate these levels of perspective. This is where we live! This is our existence - we are part and parcel of this grand construction.

And in this scheme, does the guy who cut you off at the light really matter? Does anything really matter? No - objectively, how could it? We're all just dust in the wind.


Or, different answer. Better answer: All that matters is what you want to matter. In fine Existential tradition, we - humans - bring meaning to these scales of perspective. We choose how we want to perceive it, how we interpret it, how it makes us feel. You may not be able to change the multiverse we all live in, but you can change how you think about it, how you feel about it.


And that's all the freedom we can ever have: How we choose to deal with these infinities.

Yeah?  So choose wisely. And this is the task I've chosen for myself, and am sharing with you if you're willing to follow: The exploration of perspective. Hope you enjoy the ride.

It doesn't have to make sense

It's from the intertube - it doesn't have to make sense. Which made me think: The absurd is funny because our brains recognize that it doesn't make sense and we don't have to try and figure it out, and this provides a great relief to our brain since it spends so many countless hours trying to figure out why all kinds of stupid stuff is happening (stupid stuff that is probably absurd yet we won't accept that). This relief translates as laughter, which has other beneficial effects as well - indeed, one could view laughter as the mind self-medicating.

Not to say we can't derive meaning from the reality around us, just that, rather, perhaps we need not try and find meaning in everything. Like the bumper sticker says, sometimes shit happens, and that's all that can really be gleaned from the event.