My Blog Week: January 24 to January 30
All the Latest from Torsade!

Cartoon of the Week: All You Need Is Lava
A Word on the Week
Hypnosis
Let’s imagine that you start an online business.
A subscription service, for which customers supply you their email addresses. You call yourself Cerqe, and claim psychic powers (with disclaimer that the site exists solely as entertainment). Your gimmick is this: You allow each user to create a profile of her “channelways”, a favorite color, a chosen animal avatar, etc. By these channelways, as you purport, your powers will detect her aura, and at such times as she needs special encouragement, you will send a message.
On a Wednesday one week, a Sunday another, she may open her email to find words to this effect:
Precious Ocelot, the Spirit of Love who commands the Universe knows of your suffering, and all Heaven’s Angels send you their blessings…
A skeptical customer might suppose these are easy words to write, and that sending random emails is not outside the capabilities of mailbots. But Ocelot will feel flattered by, even become dependent on, these messages. Where do we find the key to this everyday magic? We know once Cerqe has her clients hooked, she can sell them coffee mugs and calendars—and maybe political ideologies.
The key is randomness. When something arrives unexpectedly, we can tell ourselves a magical story about it: “Today, I really needed this affirmation, and of course Cerqe just knew!”
It isn’t clear the social media platforms knew they were doing this, but if we think about the unhinged contingent in America, and the influence of Twitter, Facebook, et al., we can see how the randomness of a timeline makes the reception of “new information” more mythical than information specifically sought. Were you to search YouTube for a conspiracy video, you’d have the consciousness of doing this by choice, and you would actively reject a number of videos, making small decisions about what you feel you can believe, thus at least training your mind to discern, if unreliably.
But you can appreciate the serendipity, if someone on Facebook sends a video, the ability of a recipient to magnify this random attention into destiny.
People who group online get the worst of group dynamics. Threats have the cover of anonymity, and of effacement:
“Let’s kill so-and-so” answered by “Sounds like a plan!” doesn’t convey whether the response is an encouragement to violence, or an antisocial joke. The inability to read body language and facial expressions means all emotion is pitched to an equal height; all events turn up as sudden emergencies. Those offering a wiser caution may be piled on; they lack the influence that mere head-shaking and hesitation can have in person.
Now, for the vaccine protestors who appalled everyone with their conduct in Los Angeles: Let Cerqe teach you a conspiracy.
You don’t really think the deep state would invite you to be injected with your chip, do you? So you would have the power to refuse? They have too many dark mechanisms to bother with cat-and-mouse games. The chips are in our food and water. You have been chipped already, and for a long time! Have you never heard of nanorobotics? Look it up! Of course, satellite-mounted magnetic beams (denomination unknown) control the movement of the chip-bots within your bloodstream, migrating them to lodge in your temporal lobes. The chips that program you are programmed in turn by flashing sequences too brief for you to be aware of, emanating from your screens. The only hope you have is to keep your eyes away from all screens, so that the chips become inoperative. Do not be destroyed by your addiction to social media. Strength lies in self-control. 😉
On Monday, a reissue of a poem found in Rattus, “Years Ago”. On Tuesday, “agreement”, from the Disputatio Legitima section of the Eight series. This one, needing its outline format, ran into difficulties when I tried to post it, the built-in list coding trying to override my html. I’ll work on the problem when I have time. Wednesday The Sword Decides! (part eight), brought Andreas into the palace, still feeling slighted by his new subjects. Thursday, part twenty-eight of Shine! by Mathilde Alanic, with Annie arriving for her visit with the Conans. Friday, Hammersmith, Aimee’s dilemma introduced. Saturday, part nineteen of “Celebrated”, Petra and Tom sorting out her old project.
Images on my posts often have a link to related information (click first image), sometimes serious, sometimes whimsical, sometimes in answer to a direct reference. Since people can be leery about links, I include them here: what they are, what sites they point to.
My Blog Week: January 24 to January 30
Years Ago (poem)
January 25
Eight: agreement (poem)
January 26
Marjorie Bowen: The Sword Decides! (part eight)
January 27
Mathilde Alanic: Shine! (part twenty-eight)
January 28
Hammersmith: Helping Hands (chapter five)
January 29
Celebrated (part nineteen)
January 30