Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Celestial Trial

Knatz.com / Teaching / NoHier / Justice / Celestial /Module initiated 2005 05 25
(Originally from my Legitimacy Scrapbook)

My favorite example of human justice attempting objectivity is the Indonesian Celestial Trial. Where secular justice fails to satisfy a disputant a celestial trail may be appealed for. Of two, both disputants must agree. The secular courts must also agree that they're out of their depth. The dispute relocates to a pair of towers. Each tower has a hut at its top. Each hut has a hole in its floor, pierced by a runged ladder from the ground. Each disputant climbs his separate tower, each in hailing distance of the other. Families may gather on the ground.

The huts are constructed so that an adult Indonesian has no room to stand erect or lie at length. The "floor" is too narrow to sit at one's ease. Any sitting position must be constantly shifted: to distribute the stresses elsewhere. One may stand erect only by standing on the ladder, one's trunk thrust up into the hut, the rungs biting the soles of one's feet. Via a rope one's support group may send up beverages of one's choosing. What foods may ascend are monitored.

Thus the towers are like crosses that one is not nailed to and that both disputants may survive.

Both disputants have the right to descend from his tower at any time: but descent means that you lose: heaven is declaring the other guy to be in the right.


My description reflects my memory of Piers Anthony's presentation of the system in one of his Geodyssey novels (Shame of Man, I believe). (He's careful in his research; I'm trusting my memory, hoping you at least get the basic idea.)


I emphasize:



pk issues a challenge to any and all social institutions. You say you serve this or that ideal? I say you don't. Ascend the towers with me, and we'll see who gives up first.That challenge is easily expandable to individuals:You say you own your property [Knatz.com link, searchitem] legitimately? Your inheritance is free and clear? You were fairly elected president? I say you don't. I say you weren't

Ascend the towers with me, and we'll see who gives up first.

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Nazi Mythologies of the Hidden Wealth of the Destitute

The typical anti-Semite, take a 1930s Nazi for example, was told as a child, and told again, that any Jew, no matter how impoverished the Jew seemed, had a hoard of gold somewhere nearby. Naturally, if a Jew has gold, why then that gold doesn't belong to the Jew, but to the Nazi who'll take it from him: right? So: the Nazi is within his rights, the Nazi is obliged, to find the gold: and liberate it: from the enemy of God, and transferring it to the friend of God. Right? Therefore, it's perfectly reasonable to beat the Jew and torture the Jew: and if the Jew dies before giving up the gold, well that just proves how wicked the Jew is! Doesn't it? !

Any extortionist racket may work similarly. The king wants to wage a war. Why just tax the peasants! The peasants say they'd given all they could last year. But the peasants must be lying, right? It's in the nature of peasants to lie; while it's in the nature of the extortionist rulers to be the chosen of God, right? So it's just right and proper that the government burn, torture, and kill the wicked peasants until they cough up enough new taxes to invade Lorraine, or France, or Poland ...

I've lived my life without an income. I gave up the jobs of my youth, the jobs that kept me flush with cash, and went into hock, stayed in hock, in order to attend, as I was told to do, school after school: AB, MA, doctoral work, lots and lots of doctoral work. But I never got a regular job. On the contrary, though I was hired as a college teacher, I was fired, and blackballed from further employment during the kleptocracy's hysteria of the late 1960s. That's the circumstance in which I offered a cheap low-tech internet in 1970: I wanted to loosen the universities' strangle hold on the culture. My offer received a trickle of support: then that trickle was stopped (and mopped) not by accident: just another friendly service from our utterly dishonest institutions: universities, government, media ... Fortune 500, big science ... I did this and that to stay alive: I wrote my stories and my novels and still talked about Jesus-inspired Illichian social networking, all to no avail, gaining no income. And all my glorious cash reserves of high school had been long-since depleted by college. Spend all, and never gain: except from patrons. My patrons, all modest, kept me alive, though less than functional. When PCs came along I was among the last to be able to get one: I, who had proposed public software for everyone, so no one would need a PC! (The local FLEX, like a local library, could have done the code, the machine talk, for you.)

In 2006, when the estate of my patron of 1990 to 2004 was all but spent, I wrote a satire to my university, the last university to take all my money while seeing that I got none back. I did what I do in writing to all institutions that never understand a thing I do or say: I pretended that communication with them was possible. I pretended that they had understood me all along, that they knew perfectly well who I was, and that they were just pretending not to understand. I pretended to be like them: commanding, in charge, with rights. I pretended to be hold them accountable for their crimes! Imagine a lone Jew addressing Hitler as though anything could be discussed with him! I told my university that rock bottom was coming up at me fast: and that if it hit me in the face before I'd heard understanding from them, if I went stone broke while the bully who'd robbed me remained flush, and silent, then I, Christian, pacifist pk, was going to come to NY, murdering my way north along the highways, till I arrived at NYU where I would introduce the deschooler's Judgment. They read it "literally"! That is to say: they don't know how to read: which is exactly what I'd been telling them, without understanding, since 1962!

NYU called the FBI. The FBI, illiterate peers to the tenured English professors, arrested me. And ever since the fed has been extorting money from me: Where, you miserable terrorist swine, is your pile of gold?!

Well, my satire didn't get the hoped for effect — understanding, responsibility — but it did solve my terminal poverty problem. The jail fed me, provided me with a bunk. The medical facilities were lethal, as well as tardy, but they were an improvement over none, and never. Out of jail, "early" — since I was tortured into "confessing" my guilt, the fed keeps my nose just above water. I get $500 a month and food-stamps, and Medicaid as well as Medicare, and pharmaceutical co-payments. As long as I have no emergencies, no car repairs, I can just breathe. !

But now the fed want to collect the fine the judge levied against me. I'd said, Help! They arrested me. I'd said, You're bastards, and I'm insulting you the worst I can by pretending, obviously falsely, that I'm just like you: a murderer, a terrorist, a liar, an extortionist ... a coercionist, a kleptocrat! All the fed gets is, He's got a pile of gold somewhere, and we must get it from him!

I said to my parole officer, I have nothing now that the fed doesn't give me. The fed and the state figure I can live on roughly $700 a month: and I can, I do: just barely. But now the fed wants me to pay $100 per count of the six felony counts you tortured me into confessing to. Fine, give me another $600, and I'll give it right back. Now the fed wants to fine me $4,000. I said I have nothing, I'm rapidly getting down to nothing, so the fed figures I can easily afford $4,000 out of the government's dole of $700 a month. Give me the extra $4,000 and I'll give it right back. Say I can pay it $25 a month: Fine. Give me $725 a month and I'll give you $25 a month.

No. They want a payment plan. I gave them one! They don't listen! They're incapable of understanding! They don't understand what Jesus or Confucius or Buddha or Einstein .... or I have said to them. They just want the gold. And they just know — they bet my life! — that I have it buried somewhere.

Thursday, September 23, 2010

Experts, Specialization

No matter what's wrong, the specialists, the experts, will prescribe more expertise: more specialization: maybe a higher level of specialization.
The Church will prescribe a priest, a mass, communion ... maybe prayer too.
The dietician will prescribe more diet.
The doctor will prescribe a doctor, and some medicine, from the pharm, cousin to the doctors: the dentist will prescribe more dentistry.
Back killing you? you go to the chiropractor, he performs a miracle? You guessed it: he wants you back for more treatment. He'll treat you until you're really paralyzed: and he, not you, will have your money.

Sometime one layer of specialist will prescribe another layer of specialist: the GP may prescribe a surgeon, the surgeon may prescribe a psychiatrist.

Bucky Fuller said this. I've been repeating it since the mid-'Sixties.
No: actually I'd been saying it since the early 'Sixties, 'cause McLuan had said a version of it too.



I'll edit in my Experts section from my fed-et-alia-destroyed Knatz.com.

Saturday, September 18, 2010

Who Owns New York

Oh, Who Owns New York? shouts a rah rah song of my alma mater. The chorus screams the answer: C - o - l - u - m - b - i - a!

That answer isn't too ridiculously far from the truth: King George founded his Kings College on land around Trinity Church. As the school expanded to become a university land now known as Rockefeller Center was donated, and a huge part of Morningside Heights got added, and other packets and parcels all over: not to mention all the Third World land, race courses and so forth controlled by this Ivy League behemoth. Well, if the Church can own land, if the US can own land, if my landlord can own land, why can't my school?

All that just introduces my real subject: sideways, as it were. Consider this: Who owns the New York Yankees? Who owned the Brooklyn Dodgers? Can the residents of Brooklyn be forgiven if they thought that had some rights of ownership? when the team got spirited off to the Pacific coast?

Today there's an article I see as directly related: "After 21 years of tailgating in the same lot outside Ralph Wilson Stadium, Ken Johnson plans to take his party across the street starting with the next home game in two weeks.
And with him, Johnson's bringing along his wildly colorful and popular traditions: from the red 1980 Pinto on which he grills meat on the hood to the pizza oven made out of a filing cabinet to a chicken wing-cooking mailbox and, yes, even the long-established ceremony of drinking shots of Polish cherry liqueur out of the thumbhole of a bowling ball." Johnson said, "In my case, I do push the limits, so I can't scream too loudly. But you wonder how many people go to games because of characters like me. I think I add to the experience."

I wasn't much of a baseball fan in the 1940s. At the start I was only two, at the end I was only twelve. I didn't live in a normal, nuclear family: my father was drunk on the couch, or drunk at the RR station, or lying in a gutter somewhere; I never played ball with him. I don't know if he ever played ball with anyone. In a neighborhood stuffed with girls my age I had plenty of partners to play doctor with but no boys for marbles or catch. One blessed day I saw a boy only slightly older than myself. "Hi." I ran up to him. Rudy, just moved from Flatbush, demanded, "Are you a Dodgers fan? or a Yankee fan?" Huh? I hardly knew what baseball was. "Oh, a Yankee fan!" he decided. He jumped on me and beat me up.

So as the 1950s approached and I from my bicycle delivering papers saw the Yankees trash the Dodgers year after year after year, I glowed with satisfaction. Of course I came to know a little bit about those teams. I saw Joe Dimagio. At Rudy's house I became familiar with the oompah band that played at Dodgers home games.

Understand. I am not a lawyer. My father was the lawyer, and my grandfather. (You can see where I get my respect for the law!) I don't know who the court house in Brooklyn (or Manhattan, or Rome) believed owned the legal entity The Brooklyn Dodgers (or whatever its legal entity name was). I understood that there was some individual or group who claimed that the corporation belonged to them. But I also understood that Brooklynites thought they had some claim. I saw that the band was part of the team no matter what the law said. I saw that the players, and the fans, and the TV announcer, and the subway ... were all part of the Brooklyn Dodgers. And I have always understood that the players and the fans and the oompah band and the beer hawker ... were not consulted when the Dodgers moved to LA. Nor were the kids chasing home-run balls in the streets beyond the fences.

Saturday, September 11, 2010

Bleeding

Every kid knows that doctors in the Middle Ages bled you. You got sick, they let out the bad blood. Sometimes they used leeches. Dryer's Passion of Saint Joan shows La Pucelle squirting arterial blood from her arm while the functionaries scramble with a bowl trying to catch it.

(My army friend Phil joked that the medicos had the principle right, but they wasted the wrong body fluid: it was bad semen that had to be released when you're sick. The stud needs to screw his way back to health.)

I say that blood letting still goes on, more blatantly than ever, only it's neither blood nor semen that gets sucked and wasted. The world is run by experts who no matter whether things are right or wrong prescribe that they and other experts suck money. The government sucks taxes, then more taxes. The worse things turn out, the more taxes they suck. As your family falls apart, the lawyers suck all your money. Bruise a toe and the hospitals will not only bleed you dry, they'll bankrupt Social Security while they do it.

How come nobody tries getting rid of all their money before the vampires strike? (Like I did.)

But you know what? The vampires get me anyway. Yesterday I had to buy off the extortionist fed (who railroaded me on an extortion charge to do it!) Of course I don't have a dime that the fed doesn't give me, once it bankrupted me a few years ago, destroyed me and my pitiful remaining business; but these protection racketeers demand more from me than they give me to give! And next year they'll find some pretext to demand yet more. (Like blackmailers: Squeeze till dry.)



One thing: even though the doctors didn't know that the blood circulates, or that it carried oxygen, or that you needed oxygen, they seldom bled you to death; they thought they were releaving putrid build-up of noxious pressure.
Get a note from your doctor!

(My army buddy's joke conspicuously doesn't worry about how much semen the stud has to lose!)

The medieval doctors didn't worry about blood being either vital or self-sustaining. Institutional parasites behave as though their hosts' money were infinite. It's a really stupid blackmailer who kills the kidnapped or who bankrupts the blackmailed. And it's a really stupid government that subsidizes the stupidity of the vampires!

Thursday, September 02, 2010

Negative Adam

When I say I don't believe in the Church, I don't mean that I deny that there is a building on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Third Street called Saint Patrick's Cathedral. I know the building is there, I've been in it since childhood, seen it hundreds of times, read about it hundreds more. I don't mean that there are no structures in the territory called The Vatican or that there is a myriad hierarchy of priests centered there, some called cardinals, one called a pope. I don't deny that there was a building around the corner from where I grew up called a Presbyterian Church. On the contrary I attended that church regularly from childhood till I was eighteen. I went to sunday school there, was confirmed there. No. What I mean is that I deny that the Church or churches, any of the churches that I'm aware of, are any of the things that they say they are. I deny that the church represents god. I deny that the church can wheedle divine forgiveness for human nature. I deny that the church's promises of getting us into heaven have any validity.

I have never said I don't believe in God. But we'll come back to that.

I see that the church stands on a book called The Bible. Churches say that the book is written by god, and that the book possesses the attributes of god: goodness, virtue, authority ... I deny that the church's Bible was written by god. I don't say that god never wrote anything; I say that the churches don't have it. What they have was written by the churches!

The churches claim that they transmit messages from god. But the principal story that the churches tell recounts a church, the Temple of Jerusalem, blocking messages from the god incarnate, Jesus. Now the churches want us to believe that they've reformed? that they're not like the old church?

When I say I don't believe in government, I don't mean that I deny that there are buildings in Washington, DC. In don't deny that many of those buildings are filled with bureaucrats: even some who claim to "represent" me! I don't deny that people are taxed, and schooled, and drafted, and sent to drop bombs on other people. I know that there's a courthouse here in Sebring, I know an artist who's painted it. Everywhere you turn there are almost as many schools as there are churches, all promising to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse, taking immature human dross and converting it to literacy, numeracy, reason ... art appreciation ... democracy. Everywhere there are tax offices, police stations, cops ... galore. No. What I mean is that I don't believe any government has a legitimate claim to law, to order, to taxation, to education, to compelling us when where and how to learn arithmetic or history or home economics, who to put in jail or who to give a monopoly to.

Everywhere there are journalists and teachers and senators ... people one or another institution claims inform us or educate us or represent us. I deny that any kleptocratic institutions or any employees of kleptocratic institutions do us anything but harm. Journalists package misinformation, teachers teach what the board says, not what scholars say, senators hear only what the Fortune 500 want heard. Government blocks information, mismanages information. God and intelligence, evolution and survival are eclipsed.

When I say that I don't believe in man, that doesn't mean that I deny that there are six billion of us, fast becoming ten. I mean I deny the things commonly claimed by our publicists. I deny that we are intelligent (in so far as "intelligent" implies an absolute). I deny that we are aware (in so far as "sentience" implies something completed (or even well-begun)). God gave us a Garden of Eden, we've perverted it into a roadway to oil spills. I deny that we have a future (other than one too shameful to talk about).

But, you know, I take it all back. I do believe in some of the things churches say. Take Original Sin, for example. I don't believe that we were created evil (I don't believe that we were created!) But I certainly do see that we're evil.

Christians say that God is good and that Jesus was good and that the Jews and Romans killed him (because he was good!) (Notice of course that "Jews and Romans" here means governments!) That's all well and good: except that we're no different! not as a group! I'm different, maybe you're different; but we are not different: we kill god everyday, kill the good, torture and murder geniuses as well as saints.

Evil? I said above that I do see that we're evil? Evil is something I spent my youth denying the ascendancy of. (I thought God would forgive us all!) What I mean is that we're incapable of living well, as a society. We're incapable of learning.

Maybe when the society has finished commiting suicide, an Adam and an Eve might survive. Some future mankind might be different: might walk with God, and Nature, and Science. With Truth.

I used to wish that I would be that Adam.

But the society took too long to bring about Armageddon. Now I'd be no good at being Adam.

Now I'm no good at much.

(Except for how I love my Eve!)