"On Oct. 2, 1959, missile engineer Jack Hamilton and his wife Marsha are touring the proton beam deflector of the Belmont (California) Bevatron when a platform collapses and the couple, along with six other assorted people, are plunged through the artificially-generated cosmic rays to the concrete floor below. Shortly thereafter, Jack finds himself facing the eye of God ... only not really. Various other realities turn up, and it gradually dawns on Jack that each member of the wounded, irradiated party is getting his or her turn to create reality around the rest of them. But how will they get out and back to the world as they've known it? This early (1957) Dick novel is obviously dated in some ways -- there's a strong anti-McCarthist strain in the plot -- but features some of his familiar themes in concrete form. "
David Loftus, Resident Philip K. Dick Scholar

Well, I guess Belmont may serve in fiction - for Berkeley. And McCarthy? - what could be more up-to the-Ashcroft-Minute ?? Funny that: the Bevatron [there was only One] was *my* gig - alas it provided few metaphysical insights, mostly just physical ones. But hey..! Lots of Power.. as might dazzle the juvenile minds amongst us; we kept the children away from the switches, though.

Did you know that a pulse of ~ 5 x 10¹¹ protons at ~ 2.1 Gev/C is equivalent to a .22 bullet through the brain? We could manage ~ 5 x 10¹².

One needs no Eye in the Sky clever imponderables to debunk this bill of goods so effectively sold (nay - no selling needed: it's mother's milk) to the bang-bang folks with paint-balls, hand-tailored camos and a need to fantasize bein Heroes.

Want a PKD which fits perfectly?
The short story about, Newsclowns. Banality is so.. malleable, like all fashionable lunacies.

Sinclair Lewis had your number before you were ever spawned, Illusioned and periodically re-Illusioned. You're a natural fit for repetitive tasks - punch cards or keyboards. Who knows? given enough decades - you might even mature - as in ripen, rather than as in rot (?)


Ashton

It has 'read' a bit, can do simple repetitive math, extrapolate a certain amount of serial thought - but the hubris is the largest barrier. That is at its height in youth and inexperience of a variety of real persons - away from comfy homies.

It has dabbled in Nietzsche, imagines it grokked same (!) - was dazzled by the possibilities for mischief henceforth, with sufficient forgetting of the referents which every word demands. Sloppiness there.

Just nowadays it imagines that links to others of the affected and afflicted - substitutes for looking for root causes. And it is mesmerized by the techno- programmable milieu.. imagining that people may be herded as easily as datapoints.

It could.. possibly learn something of life, one day. Ditch the siren-song of Certainty and become a Human Being, accepting the ignorance of every homo-sap about all the real Questions. It could.

For now, it's been reIllusioned - and like all religious dogma, that must run its course, before the actual state-of-ignorance can be copped-to. Natch I have no idea if this one will eventually make it; so many Love It - it's sooo EZ to hold-tight to those ephemeral Certainties!

(Why, people Kill to hold-on to those! Regularly.)



Ashton

PS Techo folk are more vulnerable - why.. their theories seem to work! So Well in makin machines 'work'.. well, you get the idea.

I= i_o e^KT And All That Jazz

tripe from yesteryear - I'll go with the original work. My ignorance is inherent; some folks have to study to achieve it.



The Nintendo-Britney Eloi