mylesk | Recent Entries

"Platforms are weird: if you release yours on Easter Saturday, after the television debates are already over, and a month after the election campaign started, your body language doesn’t say “Key piece of voter information.” But nobody dares not release one."

Paul Wells, April 21, 2025

Like the 1936 experience of the British diplomatic service in China, I am living in interesting times. To my recollection, my brief experience as a professional futures analyst did not permit us to imagine the present that currently exists. The clues were there, but self-censorship kept me and my colleagues from ever suggesting anything like what is happening. We strained credibility often as it was.

A significant touchstone for me was the 2008 American Environics REGREEN values survey which was an insightful and profound data-set, but strategically and woefully misused. As a self-declared survey covering some relatively progressive parts of the United States, it had to have under represented the prevalence of anti-social attitudes in America when it found that 13% of Americans explicitly valued fatalism, racism, and acceptance of violence. If these were the findings in the Pacific Northwest, what could the rates be in the Deep Red states? And 13% of Americans in 2008 amounted to over 37 million people. 44 million today. 4 million more that the population my country.

And the conclusion of this study was not to bother talking to these people about climate change.

I cannot fault the authors for this conclusion since the study was commissioned to inform the development of a climate change advocacy strategy, but did they not see at the time that a massive population of Americans were at odds with democratic social norms? And the plan was to stop talking to them?

In 2008, these people lacked two things: a means to communicate with each other on a broad scale, and an authority figure to normalize the way they wanted to behave. But by 2016, they had aquired both. Nearly ten years later, we have today.
...
I began this post on 29 March after frozenstatures wrote about losing a friend in Canada. I had been thinking about needing LiveJournal friends in America; people to trust to help me know how much of what I read is real.

This could be a Job story, where "the Lord taketh away, and the Lord giveth."

Yesterday, I tracked down Thom Hartmann's article, "The GOP's 60-Year Conspiracy to Kill Our Democracy". Some algorithm had pushed it to me the first time I read it. The article recapped my existing beliefs about the negative attitude and posture of the Reagan Administration towards the federal public service and introduced me to the deeper history of conservative thought in the 1950s and its opposition to the post-war "liberal consensus" on the purpose of government. The liberal consensus is an ideological package which I've only learned about in recent months from the writing of historian-journalist Heather Cox Richardson.

It took me a while to find the article. I certainly remembered the impression that it made on me but I could not recall the details to my satisfaction. I thought re-finding it would be easy; a brower history search, or Google, or scan of Substack or my email account. But surprisingly, I could not find a digital trace of it. My outsourced memory systems had all failed me.

There is a culture war on memory being fought right now. Computers and the internet, and now artificial intelligence, have created the impression that trying to remember anything is a wasted effort. My casual conversations regularly include having questions about matters of fact shut down with, "why don't you just Google it?"

"I will Google it," I say. "But let's at least try for a minute to remember it ourselves."

Is there any value to this cognitive effort?

Is there any value to the effort I'm going to to write this post?
...
I remembered that the article pegged Ronald Reagan's administration as the time when the American war on the middle class and the public service materially began. And I remembered that the intellectual foundation for this attitude was a book published in the 1950's. And I thought that I had read the article on Substack.

I searched Google for "Conservative books 1950's". One of the returns was an annotated list of the ten most influential conservative books of the 1950s. I scanned the list and the name Russell Kirk felt familiar. I can't say that I recognized the name. It didn't have that satisfying flash of recognition that I feel when the right cluster of neurons fire together and I remember something! It really was just a feeling.

I searched "Russell Kirk Ronald Reagan Substack", and there it was! "The GOP's 60-Year Conspiracy to Kill Our Democracy" by Thom Hartmann.

I can still use my brain.

The first step in solving a problem is to clearly define the problem. The first step in solving a complicated set of problems is to solve the first problem first. The first step in solving a wicked set of problems is to understand and accept that the solution to any of the problems is going to have an effect on other problems - for some better and for some worse. Id est, there is no perfect solution.

My first problem is that I need to think deeper than three sentences. I could explain why I developed the habit of three sentence thinking but what would that serve? It would create a more engaging story here and now, yes, but it would plant seeds for other trouble. Is it enough to say that paying only three sentences worth of attention to something solved one problem but it created many others?

For the second time in two weeks, for the fifth time since 2025 began, I've been notified of LiveJournal activity.

First scalarparty "posted entry for the first time in a while", and then there was a lengthy catch-up from lilrongal.

Are people slowly abandoning the Zuckerberg platform and returning to where parasocial relationships really began (for me at least)?

I posted four entries in The Ephemeral Tourist/Nikka Emphemera after February 24,2022. I couldn't just get away clean after Russian troops escalated the invasion of Ukraine. Although Six Apart/LiveJournal was sold to a Russian media company in 2007, it wasn't until the war started and the email notices came out that LiveJournal would be governed by the laws of the Federal Republic of Russia that I started to get fidgety. Then the troll farms made the news, Cambridge Analyctica, election interference, the war; it doesn't feel like friendly territory over there.

But I have paid a price for not writing. The Myles-shaped hole in the world started to get smaller at the same time I stopped writing. The voices in my head started to get unruly, often chaotic, without the structure of long-form stories to keep them organized. The characters changed. Time began to evaporate. Memory ground down leaving a vacuum like the unstructured dreamspace in Christopher Nolan's Inception that was filled with a silent rage that I was ~ that I am still ~ unable to really manage.

People live in my mind rent-free. Or perhaps better said, parts of people, incomplete imaginary models of people, live in my mind and comment on almost everything I say or don't say or do or don't do. And I react emotionally to it all of it as though it is all really happening. The emotion affects my behaviour, and my behaviour determines the edges of the Myles-shaped hole in the world.

It feels very small.

Last night I dreamed I was walking with someone that I did not recognize though it definitely felt like someone I knew. She did not look like my best friend at work but in the dream this person gave me the same feeling as her. As we walked, she was telling me about the way she had wanted to relate to other people during the pandemic lock-down; how she had tried to talk to people as though they were dating, but it never worked, it never achieved the desired effect.

It wasn’t that she wanted romantic relationships with these people. It was only that dating conversations feel like they matter in a way that other conversations do not. Speaking with me often felt like dating, she said.

I think the dream was about LiveJournal. Because we were talking about relationships that felt like more.

_ _ _ _ _

I have wanted to write about this for a long time now.

Writing is not as easy as it once was. The first two paragraphs above ~ they have been re-written six or seven times now. I don’t remember having to do that. Writing has become more difficult for me.

Sometime after January 10th this year, I was continuing the Sisyphean task of trying to manage my email when I came across a notification in my “Social” folder saying that someone had granted me access to a Dreamwidth account. Over the past few years I have been trained - I have been conditioned - to treat all electronic correspondence with suspicion. If it is unexpected: is it phishing? Is it the opening move in a pig-butchering scam? If it is expected: is it genuine? Is it AI-generated? In all cases: is it monitored? Who is monitoring it? Will the matter have repercussions to my work or, more painfully, my personal life? Will other people get upset if I participate? Will I be discouraged from doing it because of the risks I am taking?

When you read that italicized word above, hear it in a bitter tone. That is the way it sounded to me when I added the em-dash break. I heard in my mind, “Over the past few years I have been trained … no, I have been conditioned…” and I heard and felt bitter resentment in the word.

You should never click links in an unexpected email, my cybersecurity training has told me. It has been about a month since I received the Dreamwidth notice so I cannot remember if I did it right - did I navigate to the platform in a fresh browser window? Log in correctly? I hope that I did. I did not recognize the account name, but something about the profile picture seemed familiar. I know I hadn’t seen that image before, but the elements of it resonated with me, like when you see an AI generated image that you know is fake but you can almost tell what it is supposed to be - a photograph of a fox against a grey background that appeared almost orange in colour, almost as if it was animated.

My February 17, 2017 Facebook post says, “Sometimes I feel like some of us used to live in a small town called LiveJournal, and we all moved to the big city [of] Facebook, and now we wave to each other in passing…”. I can easily name five people I follow on Facebook because of LiveJournal. Two of my Instagram follows are also people from my LiveJournal Friendslist. But the transactions are very different. For all the reality that is captured in photographs and the interests inherent in shared third-party content, I take it in like I am watching broadcast streaming content that isn’t particularly meant for me. And while I know that LiveJournal posts were not intended for me particularly, why do I remember feeling like they were?

On January 2, 2025, my Facebook feed reported that someone I had never met died unexpectedly due to double pneumonia. Chris Hearn’s friends were posting their condolences, sharing stories about how they knew him, their fondest memories of times spent together, or when they saw him last. I had never met Chris. And I didn’t take the opportunity to express my condolences because it felt strange to explain that I was posting because I read yetibuddy. But the impulse to write something has never left me.

Last week the Outreach Engagement Specialist at our technology and innovation department sent me a link to our intranet’s event promotions page where she writes a work blog about goings-on. I read an entry about the culture of creativity where she profiled members of the latest creative cohort by asking, among other questions, “Did you write about your teenage angst in LiveJournal?” I sent her a comment in TEAMS “You only wrote in LiveJournal as a teenager? LOL”. She replied, “I L O V E D LiveJournal” and we proceeded to share experiences with the people we “knew” but had never met.

All of this was floating around my milieu when I looked again at that Dreamwidth notice and then read, “I want to pretend this can be just like LJ back in the day.” And the elements of the profile picture snapped into meaning.

My previous blogs have functioned as aide memoires, although I am not sure how they worked. I believe that my memory was better when I maintained a blog, but I cannot say definitively why. Perhaps it is because writing for an audience, even a hypothetical audience, imposes a creative discipline, forcing me to think about what I am thinking more robustly.

I used my LiveJournal as a record; a chronicle of many dimensions of my life. This post will curate my recipes.

"Meditate on this," I recited to myself. "Meditate on the idea that an emotion is a sensation with a story attached. If you wait for the sensation to pass before attaching a story to it, you can prevent its persistence."

This recitation came to mind as I walked south down the alleyway between 82nd and 83rd street, just north of the stadium. I had seen the sentiment earlier that morning in a meme or article, and though I cannot recall the proximate source, I have heard the idea expressed in a TED Talk by Lisa Feldman Barrett, from Buddhist monks, and perhaps from Stroke of Insight author Jill Bolte Taylor. It is the idea that feelings fade in as little as 90 seconds unless they are re-triggered by thought. And if we are not conscious of the way we re-trigger ourselves, we can sustain an emotional state for so long that it becomes our character.

Like a physics gedankenexperiment, I am imagining two cognitive systems at work in my brain: the thought narrative trigger system, and the emotional coping system. The first triggers the emotions that I feel, and the second manages the impacts of the emotions I create. Over the past seven years, I have integrated these two systems into myself so that they now operate invisibly. The emotion I trigger most over the past seven years is anger. The way I cope with anger is the sub-form of forgetting that is denial. My mind runs an anger-denial cognitive machine.

I need to re-create the joy-remembering machine.

Of course, I have seen Paris, Texas a few times before, but not as many as you might imagine. Sam Shepard, Harry Dean Stanton, and the reason for the "of course" that begins this paragraph, Nastassja Kinski. I have seen the film a few times before, but I know the music well. Ry Cooder's soundtrack on cassette tape was one of those soundtracks-to-life albums that played through the open windows of the '82 Oldmobile Cutlass Sierra on warm summer evenings. Cooder's warbling guitar, and Stanton's half of the black dress peep-show scene:

"I knew these people; these two people. They were in love with each other. The girl was very young, sixteen or seventeen I guess. And the man, he was much older, and he was kind of raggedy and wild and she liked that. They were always laughing at stupid things. He loved to make her laugh. And together they made everything into a kind of adventure. Even a trip to the supermarket was full of adventure. And he loved her more than he had ever thought possible. He couldn't stand to be away from her during the day when he was at work. So he quit. He would get another job when the money ran out, and then he would quit again. But after a while she began to worry; about money, I guess. About not having enough." That is my version of the start of the speech. It might not be verbatim. It is as far as I know before getting stuck and having to look up the next line.

What is it? He began to drink and he would stay out late to test her; to see if she would get jealous. You see, jealously would be proof of her love for him. But she didn't get jealous, she would only worry. And then one day she told him that she was pregnant. She was about three months pregnant and he didn't even know. And now he knew that she loved him because she was carrying his baby and he decided that he would dedicate his life to her and his child. He quit drinking and found a steady job. But then something happened: she began to change..." I think that is how it goes.
...
Paris, Texas last night was a sequel viewing to satisfy a Wim Wenders appetite stirred by Perfect Days at the Metro Cinema the evening before. Of course, it isn't a sequel in the sense that it is a continuing story, but in Ross Douthat's sense of being of a shared "distinctive style and mood and setting" with deeply damaged protagonists working out their psychological and existential issues (Douthat, Ross. New York Times. 23 February 2024.) Often Paris, Texas felt like a shot-for-shot copy of Perfect Days - though it make more sense to put that the other way given the order that the films were produced.

One thing we were struck by is how much the unseen, antecedent action deepens the films. The loner male characters are both living with some profound past experience that is only partially revealed or hinted at, so what we actually see in the movies is how they are coping with their lives - more or less successfully. These men are, in different ways, coming to terms with their pasts.
...
I am trying to do this also; trying to come to terms with my past. And I need a new method for doing so. Or perhaps, I need to re-form an old method. I used forgetting as a method. I replaced writing with forgettting. And I have suffered for more than seven years for that reflexive choice. I am now trying to write differently.

Dinner at Tang Bistro. Wim Wenders' Perfect Days at Metro Cinema. Met Russ at the restaurant. Alyson was also at the film screen although we did not know until the end.

I note these facts here because I hope doing so will help me remember. I this is a causal experiment: does blogging improve memory more than writing in a private diary?

I do have a program in mind.

Before Marlo Reynolds was the Chief of Staff at Environment Canada and Climate Change, he worked for 8 years at Alberta's Pembina Institute. As a fellow environmentalist, our paths crossed regularly, but one such crossing was in 2004 when I received a scholarship to York University's Sustainable Enterprise Academy Business Leader Seminar where he was one of the speakers.

My co-hort was mostly sustainability directors from major corporations across the spectrum of industries, and Marlo presented to us a taxonomy of environmental organizations categorizes by strategic approaches. I don't remember all of the marine animals that his schema adopted, but protest groups were symbolized by sharks, community groups by dolphins, and collaborative groups, possibly, by killer whales.

I am thinking about Marlo this morning because he introduced environmentalist mindset to the co-hort of corporate employees with a short guided meditation.

"Close your eyes," he said, "and imagine the thing about society that most bugs you." Once we each had the single most irritating thing about public life firmly he mind, Marlo invited us to imagine an organization dedicated to solving that problem: How would it work? What solutions would it propose? How would it solicit support? "If you can imagine such an organization, then you know what it means to be an ENGO."

What is the biggest social issue that you want to help solve? is the focalizing question of the community organizer. For more than 20 years, my answer to that question was “environmental sustainability”, but this isn’t precisely true in July 2020. I think that today, the biggest social issue that I want to work on is social cohesion.

For the purposes of this informal discussion paper, I propose the definition of social cohesion as the tendency for a human community in a given territory to be in unity while working towards a goal or to satisfy the emotional needs of its members.

Further, this program proposes a qualitative spectrum with idealized social cohesion at one end and pure affective polarization at the other. The program’s strategic goal is to shift society’s current position on this spectrum towards the social cohesion end. It will advance this position through particular programs.

What are these “programs”?

- MemePoppers
- Media Literacy
- Integrated Meme Design

These are our hours. This is our time.

Saturday, June 13, 2020 is the 90th day of our now self-imposed public health lock-down. 90 days is a milestone in itself, and launches the ten-day countdown to the much more auspicious seeming 100 day anniversary.

I have named this experience of the 2020 CoVid-19 pandemic The Countach after the Lamborghini sports car of the same name, which was itself named for one of its designers favourite curse words meaning "contagion". The Countach has taken on many aspects of a spiritual retreat for me, and I have benefited from the opportunity to disconnect from some of the pressures of my life, and re-introduce new reflective practices. I count myself among a fortunate group of people who have experienced the public health lock-down this way. Vast numbers of other people without similar security are having a much harder time.

Luck, blessing, and fortune: does anything distinguish the three? I am grateful for the good fortune I've experienced in my life.

A quick Google check suggests that I may have coined the phrase: the secret of happiness is a good attitude and a bad memory; which, I submit, is an improvement upon the quotation attributed to both Ingrid Bergman and Alberta Schweitzer: the key to happiness is good health and a bad memory. My misquote improves the notion because it allows for people who suffer from some health impairment to also experience happiness.

The Countach has given me a freedom to connect with people on more of my own terms. It has replenished my supply of solitude and given me opportunity to reflect on my existence. It has improved the convenience with which I carry out my livelihood. For all this I am grateful.

Many people remark on the CoVid-19 public health lock-down as being without precedent, and I am never sure if they mean that this precise disruption of life has never occurred before, and if so, then nothing really has a precedent and everything is new, or if they mean they have never experienced anything like it in their lifetime. Or, perhaps it is a combination of both.

Profound disruptions of societies are the primary subject matter of historiography: wars, pandemics, technological revolutions. Each one is unique in some ways (and without precedent), and at the same time, they have features in common. But the thing that is rarely the same is the people who experience them. To each of us, our experience is unique. The CoVid-19 pandemic might have features in common with the 1918 Spanish Flu, or the Black Death of 1348, or the Antonine Plague of 165. But for all their commonalities - my favourite being Marcus Aurelius' observation that "the pestilence around him was less deadly than falsehood, evil behaviour and lack of true understanding" - the truth is that this pandemic is unique for being the pandemic that affects me.

These are our hours. This is our time.
Out on the verge of the rest of our lives.

The Countach Reflection Time
I have been thinking about history, religion, stereotyping, and freedom. What do I think I know and why do I think I know it?

On Day 74 of the Countach, Minnesota police applied deadly force during the arrest of George Floyd for passing a counterfeit $20. Protests against police violence have convened in cities across North America despite the on-going need for public health precautions. Explaining the seemingly contradictory behaviour of multitudes of people is trying to untangle a Gordian knot of motivations and circumstances. Perhaps it is a fool's errand, but like the aspiring foresight strategist I am, I want to untangle it.

Perhaps that is my topic; the overarching theme of this writing: strategic foresight. I want to have a sense of the future with a rich complexity that is possible through study of the past. And I want to understand the rich complexity of other people that is possible through introspection; the study of myself. I should be my most valuable tool in understanding the world.

So-called anti-racism is all the rage these days. My take on the "conflict" is that it is between those who are unabashed racist and people who abhor racists that, for the moment, I'll refer to as the progressives.

Yes, I want the 'good guys' to win, but they are at the disadvantage of being divided against themselves. This inner conflict is best exemplified by an affirmation sounding meme that showed up on FaceBook last week which reads:

No matter how open-minded, socially-conscious, anti-racist I think I am, I still have old, learned, hidden-biases that I need to examine. It is my responsibility to check myself daily for my stereotypes, prejudices, and ultimately discrimination.

The implication seems to be that stereotypes necessarily lead to discrimination and are therefore bad. It is this implication that I want to discuss.

I have not been disciplined about these exercises, doing them only as I remember to do them. I am doing part of them though. Whenever I transgress, I catch myself and ask the saint's forgiveness. But the days are fewer than not when I remember at supper and dinner to reflect upon their incidence.

This day, this supper hour, I recall two instances while walking to work. One minor, and one strange one where the blasphemy was silent, as though I cursed only in my mind, not aloud, barely noticing that I had done it. But for this reflection period, the count is: 2.

Profile

Myles Kitagawa

April 2025

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30

Syndicate

Page Summary

Politics Triumphs Over Policy Proof
Old Data
I can do it.
Solving Problems
Posted entry for the first time in a while
Millieu
Recipes
The Anger-Forgetting Machine
Paris, Texas Of Course
Brain Clay 1
The Program
The polarization of my time.
The Spiritual Exercises

Style Credit

Style: Neutral Good for Practicality by timeasmymeasure

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Jun. 24th, 2025 11:38 am