Tuesday, April 14, 2009

God vs. Nature

The Bible has God tell Adam to go forth and multiply. The trouble is Adam was already going forth and multiplying all over the place, and had been for two million years before God created him. Nature, to continue with personifications, already had expansion, colonialism, a characteristic typical of species: an environment fills with one set of creatures, things change, and another set takes over. Nature though has developed creatures capable of questioning old imperatives: should we just multiply, mindlessly? Or should we pay attention to results and actually try to survive? maybe by not multiplying quite so blindly.

Humans developed intelligence. We're not the first, maybe we're not the last. But we humans did develop intelligence conspicuously. And civilization makes a big deal of human intelligence. Except that civilized man, the only humans who get much attention in the press, are precisely the ones so slow to pick up on results!

Stonewall it, said more than one presidential administration: as more than one kingdom had said it before.

Catch-22 had Yossarian working on the wound he found on Snowden. The trouble was, while Yossarian was lavishing all his attention of that wound, Snowden's guts were falling out of a different wound in his back!

Saturday, April 11, 2009

Cliff's Edge

I remember Bucky Fuller saying that civilization was right on the edge of a cliff: in a position to get better footing and save ourselves or to lose our footing and perish. (That was 1968 or so. He was speaking at Colby College in Maine where I was an instructor in the English department.) Bucky added that civilization had been seen to be on the edge of a cliff before. I saw all that to be true. But then Bucky added a point that really wowed me: he said that mankind was routinely on the edge of a cliff. It's not that we're imagining dangers: a little kid with a bogey man to worry about; the dangers are real, and it's mankind's signature trick to find a new threshold of danger as soon as the previous problems are solved.

New Threshold of Danger

So far we've been adequate to the task. And we've been lucky. It wasn't entirely luck: our not following other species march of oblivion relates to our abilities. But it wasn't entirely skill: a great deal of engineer's "redundancy" came with the environments we've come wrapped in. If we polluted that stream we found another stream; if we exhausted that resource, we found another resource. Plus ça change ...

There's nothing new about an oddball seeing danger and some priest of some church shouting him down to the flock:
Don't worry about a little sin. Buy me dinner and I'll see that God forgives you.
Don't listen to Galileo telling you that Jupiter has moons; listen to your church's denials, to the denials of your university professors ...
Don't pay any attention to your experience of the government's hand in your pocket, ignore the school board kidnapping and brainwashing your children; listen to the school ... and the government ... and the press ... and big business ... when all join hands and tell you, You're Free!!!


No. I think the cliff will win. Soon.

Friday, April 10, 2009

Society & Communication

Society & Communication

We are a social species, have elaborate communications tools. Obviously we have language, signs, assorted media. Even a stranger amid a different language group has ways to communicate "I am hungry," "I am thirsty," "I'm horny," "I need a latrine ..." Those points don't need me to elaborate them. And some other odd points about communication have already been made publicly by this and that scientist, by this and that social theorist, in this and that field.

For example:
  • The original purpose of language was for the male to steady the female while convincing her that she should risk her life in child birth by allowing him to copulate with her.


  • The original purpose of language was to lie, to deceive ..."Who goes?"
    "Friend," while preparing the knife.


  • The original purpose of mass communications was social control.


  • ...


  • What I bring here today are refinements on explanations more kin to those last on my list than first. In brief: I experience both personally and from "history" that humans, social man, are open to some types of communications, but closed to many others. Communications that we are open to are much in evidence, are much discussed, are no secret; but we are not aware and don't want to be make aware of communications that we are closed to: Galileo's contemporaries did not want to hear that the planet Jupiter had moons: they'd believed that the earth was the only body with satellites. Finding that satellites were common was a demotion for our faith in our uniqueness. (People still don't want to acknowledge how common "uniqueness" is!) Typically, we refused to learn what we had learned, except after a struggle.

    Fortunately, the major religion of the west tells the situation both in the Old Testament of the Jews and the New Testament of the Christians: God talked to Adam, Adam didn't listen; Moses talked to the Jews, the Jews didn't listen ... Jesus tried to bring new messages from God, the Jews' high temple, supposedly devoted to this God, didn't listen ... In "fact," all the secular authorities, Roman and Jewish, ganged up, in violation of their own laws, to torture God to death ...

    (The trouble is, this literature is closed to intelligent discussion: unless prescribed misinterpretations of the documents in question are subscribed to: you have to pretend that this fabulous complex, contradictory literature, is literally true, and pretend it in the face of the evidence (and lack thereof).)

    Any one of Galileo's predecessors could have made a good living endorsing any of the Church's preposterous claims about itself; god help the poor slob who tried to tell any truth not of standard prescription. Today we have universities, departments of science, of history, newspapers, scholarly journals ... a zillion scholars with tenure ... but the situation is the same. Actually, the situation may be worse. Today's "Church," the secular state, has its hands deeper into public resources than any church of old ever had. With federal funding of universities, and of science, and of history ... you can pretty well guarantee that there can be no science, no history ... no real universities.

    Our authorities are convenient for certain interests in the short run but are driving us toward extinction in the long run: a long run that may end abruptly at any minute. Once a would-be authority has actual authority, then it's not hard to tell the robot sheeple that they have free speech, or that they're intelligent, or literate, or the best and the brightest ... But a people could be those things only if they were alert to the tricks of false authorities: and humble about their own fallibility.

    (How did Christians ever come to be so blind to their own theory of Original Sin? We believe in it only when we also believe that a little superstition neutralizes it!)

    In 2006 I was arrested for complaining (over decades) that the kleptocray had stolen its egregious internet by perverting the voluntary public networking designed by Ivan Illich and offered by me in 1970. In 2007 the federal court censored my AgainstHierarchy.org — but my host deleted all of the 3,000 data files, 2,500 of them text, destroying my five domains in their entirety: art, biography, science, philosophy, information theory-and-fact, networking theory-and-fact ...

    The papers mentioned only that a local terrorist had been arrested. No mention was made of censorship. Children are still told that they have free speech by a still compulsory school system. And now, released, horny, alone, when I attend a senior social, I'm expected to join in the Pledge of Allegiance, where the US claims to be "under God"! My fellows can't read my accounts of things online, but all can search for the government's concoction of lies: the FBI quoting my actual words but totally changing the meaning with their editing. (Give Leni Riefenstahl the editing room and she could make Hitler look good; give the kleptocrats the editing room, the Church, the US, the FBI ... and they can make saints, god, and scientists look bad. Look bad to morons, that is. Unfortunately, that's all we've got more than a dozen of.)


    2010 11 10 Knatz.com referred to Galileo a great deal, so do my blogs, but it astonishes me to realize today that there's a major reason why I so sympathize with, identify with, and admire Galileo that I haven't mentioned. The Church inherited a traditional cosmology: anthropo-centric. Galileo saw through his telescope, firm evidence, that Jupiter had satellites. Conventional wisdom held that to be impossible. Church and academe tag-teamed him, threatened him with torture. Fine, happens all the time. Genius, sainthood, inspiration aren't as rare as we pretend. Jesus said lets love one another, we crucified him. Fine, that's our nature. But: here's the thing, the thing that puts Galileo and pk on the same page, just as pk and Jesus are on the same page: the Church continued to use Galileo's star charts while they persecuted him!

    See? If the Yahoos kill the god, so what? They'll just fail sooner. Good. But they don't just kill the god! They kill the god and then steal what the murdered god was offering!

    The retrograde society beat up on me because I wanted to take Jesus down off the cross. The retrograde society refused to understand a thing I tried to teach it about literature, about Shakespeare, about information ... Then the retrograde society rejected my offer of a cheap internet in 1970. But then almost immediately that society was supporting people who offered dating services: the dating services coming after my offer of the Free Learning Exchange, Inc., but the dating services were offering only a fraction of what FLEX offered while charging vastly more than FLEX asked for in average user cost.

    If Winchester offers a better rifle, hunters don't have to adopt it. They can hunt rabbits with a rock. But it's wrong to starve Winchester and then plagiarize his improvements. We rejected Jesus: good for us, now we're damned. We shouldn't knock him down, kill him, and steal his salvation! That's exactly what we try to do. (Of course it won't work. We can steal an illusion of salvation, but not real salvation: real salvation can come only from our learning what's required, and our changing our behavior.) The Church wanted both worlds. It wanted the old cosmology, but also wanted the new profits brought by more accurate navigation: based on more accurate observation, deeper thinking, based on Galileo.

    The US stomped on me for tying to offer the public a tool to get around compulsion, around government interference in the family, around compulsory schooling, restricted learning, and the preposterous semantic error of diplomas. Fine. Let the Yahoos die, and die quickly. But then the US stole my internet except for the soul of it! My internet was intended to make us more convivial, better Christians (whatever our religion); the US internet now has stronger censorship leverage than ever. How dare they steal my offering but pervert the result?

    Fortunately, Judgment will not be run by the US, or the teachers, the lawyers, the doctors ... the priests; Judgment will be run by the Truth.


    In Schindler's List the Nazis are marching Jews around the concentration camp while doing a bit of construction. A Jewess tells the Nazis how they should do their project better, introduces herself as an engineer. "Shoot her," says Amon Goeth. The Nazis obey, the woman is dead. What should we do, the workers ask mon Goeth what they should do. "Do whatever the Jew said," he answers. (I told the story at pkKlep.)

    It isn't just Jesus ... Galileo, Illich ... pk. The exact illustration even got into the movies!

    Communication

    I'm moving all my Thinking Tools posts to pkTools.