BEg2 ch 31 brief summary part 1

[Mark Kohut]

Twin Towers embody America's religion (contrasted with the Buddhas) esp in
late capitalism, money. Straight out of
Eliade, a purported Pynchon influence. Taliban, emotively, want another,
peaceful-in-its-overt-beliefs religion destroyed
and the West's, the US's capitalism.

On Mon, Jun 6, 2022 at 3:10 AM Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Emotherapist Shawn vents (presumably therapeutically) to Maxine, drawing a
> line from the Taliban’s earlier destruction of the Twin Buddhas to the
> destruction of the Twin Towers.
>
> Maxine shares one of her worries, about the “aged kids” incident and he
> reminds her of her speculations of sighting Traipse by exaggerating the
> situation as “zombies.”
>
> Shawn then admits he too has been seeing people he knows are dead.
>
> She has to correct him about the zombies, (her sighting was only of one)
> and it looks like she doesn’t get as far as confiding in him about the
> “kidnapped kids” time traveler notion, nor about her own mingling/mangling
> of that cohort with the “script kiddies” Ice employs.
>
> Little joke:
>
> “Are we seeing some wholesale return of the dead?”
>
>  Maxine:  “You’d prefer retail?”
>
>
> Shawn quite evocatively cites a scene from TV of a woman ducking into a
> store just ahead of a black cloud of dust and destruction, which he likens
> to the consequences of Americans’ market choices that have always been
> swirling around outside “the American marketplace” as the consequences of
> externalized costs visited upon those locales and populaces to which they
> are externalized.
>
> Then he goes “And meantime the only help we get from the media is boo hoo
> the innocent dead. Boo fuckin hoo. You know what? All the dead are
> innocent. There’s no uninnocent dead.”
>
>  After a while, “You’re not going to explain that, or . . .”
>
>          “Course not, it’s a koan.”
>
>
> Maxine finds Horst laughing at TV, a rare occurrence.  He has a policy on
> only laughing when truly amused so Maxine wonders if it’s out of relief
> but, as Horst says, Mitch Hedberg was very funny.
>
> …apparently Mitch Hedberg’s comedy was the first thing to crack Horst’s
> stolidity since the Kenan and Kel “screw in the tuna” sketch:
> https://youtu.be/m29-zmykcIg
>
> Judge for yourselves.
>
> Although I liked “Good Burger,” I didn’t find the sketch super funny… but I
> don’t have the ability to play the commodities either.
>
>
>
> Justin tells Maxine about some weirdness with the Global Consciousness
> Project, a real thing (both the Project and the weirdness)
>
> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Consciousness_Project
>
> Which they had been bootlegging random numbers from, but for a couple days
> after 9-11 the numbers were less random. (This actually happened although
> there’s a lot of caveats, etc)
>
> DeepArcher’s untraceable/unhackable nature depended on the randomness, so
> Justin was worried
>
>   “It’s possible some people may have found their way in then who shouldn’t
> have. Soon as the GCP numbers got random again, the way back out would’ve
> become invisible to any intruders. They’d be caught inside the program.
> They could still be there.”
>
>          “They can’t just click on ‘Quit’?”
>
>          “Not if they’re busy trying to reverse-engineer their way to our
> source code. Which is impossible, but still they can compromise a lot of
> what’s in there.”
>
>    “Sounds like another reason to go open source.”
>
>         “Lucas says the same thing. I wish I could just . . .” He looks so
> perplexed that Maxine against her better judgment sez, “Stop me if you’ve
> heard this one. Guy’s walking around holding a blazing-hot coal . . .”
>
>
>          •   •   •
>
> Is this feature of DeepArcher like a hyperdrive, indescribable but created
> with hand waving because needed for the plot, or does the computing part
> compute?
>
> Getting stuck in the program?
>
> I mean, worst comes to worst, you could just turn off your computer, right?
>
> Actually, Justin clarifies - “they could still be there” I think what he
> means is these motivated hackers are in there and they don’t want to leave
> anyway, but also he and Lucas don’t know if they’re there?
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>