IonaArc

IonaArc Menu

2011-09-08T01:00:00.000-04:00

Blogs are like newspapers: whatever the editor writes, selects, prints gets published for that issue, that date. Dictionaries, encyclopedias, archives are different: there there is a hierarchical organization as well as a chronological one, the hierarchy more important than the chronology.

pk's Knatz.com was hierarchical from day one. I mounted that days work, but located it in a hierarchy, a logical tree: this post is didactic, this personal, this organizational. Among the didactic posts this one concerns divisions of reason, this one concerns men living together or failing to live together in a society ... this one is cosmological, this one is both cosmological and theological, while that one distinguishes plants from animals, terrestraisl from extra terrestrials ...

This post (while it happens to get posted on 2011 09 16) is a taxonomic post: organizational, a hallway connecting rooms, an elevator indicating that men's wear is on the second floor, kitchen gadgets in the basement ...

Blogspot organizes posts by year, by month, in order of day. My new IonaArc Menu is getting built at the PKnatz blog. To date it links to the posts here chronologically. My progress with it is still in 2005. Ah, but once I've caught up to the present, I'll start to distribute the links in pKnatz's category menus. Thus a post date, while it may be important, as with a Christmas piece, or a 9-1-11 piece, is normally trivial: what counts is taht this post relates to pk on Semiotics, or to pk on human institutions, or tells a story about pk from when he was in grade school ...

pk's Arrest

2011-07-19T16:45:00.001-04:00

2011 07 23 When the federal court attacked and destroyed my domains it not only evaporated my thousands of text files online but my thousands of graphic files too. My PKImaging.com hosted many of the graphics for IonaArc. I'm fixing missing images asap as I find them.

In the summer of 2006 I decided to move all Knatz.com modules about factitious human hierarchies, that is, about authoritarian institutions — nation-states, governments, churches, compulsory school systems ... to a new domain: AgainstHierarchy.org. All of the files at InfoAll.org, my deschooling domain, would be absorbed there. So would all of Knatz.com's may Society modules on civilization, on kleptocracy ...

In 1962 I'd begun graduate school, dreading it, but wanting to teach college English — while also writing fiction, publishing scholarship ... But my graduate school, while utterly capable of dispensing known ideas, proved wholly blind, deaf, and dumb to my suggestions for improving those ideas. McLuhan's publisher told him that audiences can't absorb more than a tiny percentage of new material. Somehow McLuhan got published, and read, and rich, and famous ... anyway. There's no telling though how many original ideas die on vine, unheard by the society. I don't doubt that the more schools we have, the less we will hear; that the more governemtn funds "science," the sooner science will wither, replaced by authoritarian orthodoxy. The Temple will kill any son of god over and over. It's a "pope" societies want obeyed, not any god: unless the "God" is firmly in the control of the Church with its pope.

My graduate school hadn't understood a word I'd said, from 1962 thorugh 1970. By 1967 I was teaching: while trying to devise a way NYU might understand my thesis: my reading of Shakespeare's Sonnets in terms of orthodoxy versus experience. That never happened. But in 1970 I'd discovered Ivan Illich and his proposal to replace compulsory school systems with voluntary public cybernetic data bases, reinventing the ancient market place as it were. Such record keeping should belong directly to the public, without government interference. Post human resources, inannimate resources, match individuals based on expressed common interest ... and post feedback on the human and inanimate resources. That is, a colleage of a person listed as a resource, could evaluate the colleague: Plank commenting on Einstein, for example. Einstein's student could also comment on Einstein — as a teacher: tell if she thought he was looking up her dress more than he was concentrating on physics, for example. I offered to help Illich to realize the creation of such networks. I'd already been waiting for an internet for years, imagining such in fiction, in dreams. Illich told me to found such an institution myself, he was busy. I did. The Free Learning Exchange, Inc., NYC, 1970.

Free Publicity came quickly. A few people registered their expertise, a few more sought companions for a specified activity: guitar playing, for scream therapy ...

I circulated fliers around Manhattan, heavily around NYU, where I matriculated, and around Columbia, my Alma Mater, where I still lived. Columbia's initial response was good; NYU's was hostile: though faculty from both were on my board of trustees.

All this was detailed at Knatz.com, and then at InfoAll.org.

The public dribbled a few dollars toward FLEX. A Church group gave a bit more.
Time Inc saw my cable TV public resouce listings, and draggd me down to Madison Avenue. But meeting me, they changed their mind about publicizing any grass roots internet. IBM hailed my idea as a good one, then dismissed it as not for them.

Note above all: Illich's proposed network was that saint's Jessu-inspired invitation for titular Christians to become actual Christians. As a would-be disciple of Jesus, I recognized Illich as fully mature saint, closer to God than I: and I too was close. Churches which didn't help us are lying hypocrites, in defiance of Christ. But never mind, I continue my narrative:

I was already approaching middle age. I'd already been living on borrowed money for more than a decade except to a couple of years worth of slave-wages as a college instructor. I founded FLEX without any capital of my own. The public could have donated the necessary millions: and saved billions: plus, earned some measure of freedom from government interference. It didn't. The public rejects Jesus while claiming that Jessu will save them?

Should Jesus save those who block resources from his disciples?

Anyway: NYU had ignored my brilliance as a doctoral candidate, had seen that my ideas didn't prosper. NYU had ever right to ignore my offer of a cheap internet in 1970 and in 1971 ... but having done so, NYU had no right to make use of the kleptonet CERN and the US offered years later.

The US coopted my Jesus-inspired internet. My internet needed no PCs. The public needed to learn no programming unless it wanted to. The public rejected cheap, and bought expensive, wasteful, planned-to-be-obsolete garbage eagerly.
Dating services, Google, Yahoo, Amazaon, eBay ... all imitate features of FLEX; but without being FLEX.

Has CERN, MIT, SRI, Congress, MicroSoft, IBM ... once called Illich or me in for consultation? Not once. No more than the '49ers asked Sutter what should be done with the gold they were stealing from his land.

Anyway, impoverished, getting old, after an adulthood of thwarted reform, both of scholarship, of fiction, and of society as a whole, I decide I'd try one last device to try to win the attention of the thieves, to embarrass them if I couldn't correct or save them: I write to English professors at NYU, the group that first hadn't heard me there (even though all of the names had changed). I wrote a black satire: sayin that time was running out. If they didn't finally hear what I'd been trying to communicate with them since 1962, if they didn't hear by say 2007 or 2008, giving them another year or so, I'd come to NYU and bloody their nose, and maybe more than their nose.

Understand: this is satire. Satire is what pk did before pk invented the internet with Ivan Illich. Satire is what pk has ALWAYS written.

The postings, and the letters, were filled with meta-signals, with macroinformation, saying "This is not literal."
But NYU, MORE illiterate than decades before, called the FBI, and the FBI arrested me.

The Public Defender was a brilliant lawyer, perhaps the most intelligenct I'd ever encountered up close, but he made it perfectly clear: I'd get no more fairness from a trial than I'd gotten from my life. The US was determined to destroy me, and the truth, no relevant considerations, such as the meaning of what I wrote, would be admitted.

Well. I'd sought a stage. I wouldn't get one. Therefore, the best thing for me to do was to see if I could live long enough to be released: and tell more stories (for the public to ignore).

The lawyer told me that if I insisted on talking about deschooling, and about the stolen internet, the jury could be almost guaranteed to give the judge license for a long sentence. If I pleaded guilty, agreed with the government's falsehoods, I'd go home in a year.

On my return home, my landlord put it differently: "They saw they had made a mistake; but, being who they are, they couldn't admit it: so they gave you the shortest sentence they ever give: fifteen months. That translates as: Innocent!"

The judge could have asked me to take down the couple of files NYU was offended by. To stay out of jail, maybe I would have. But he didn't. He just censored the entire section of AgainstHierarchy.org. Why censor two files when you can censor two dozen?
Hell, already in violation of the Constitution, why not go for total irreversible damnation?

draft didn't progress, all getting moved to pKnatz blog anyway

pk's Society Modules

2011-07-19T01:23:00.000-04:00

My home page opened in the early 1990s with a couple of biographical files, then quickly began adding scholarly, philosophical pieces, especially on science and epistemology. By 2006 when I was arrested and my online modules were censored, pk files numbered around 4,000. The bulk of them were housed within a folder I called "Teaching." My recent attempt to restore the most important of those files, the science files, the modules I call my Thinking Tools, got freshly frustrated, Google moving a blog out of my control. Meantime a few modules from the Teaching / Society folder are almost as important.

2011 07 19 Modules I recreated from Knatz.com here after my censorship I move to PKnatz blog.

Thinking Tool Set update

2011-07-07T21:30:00.000-04:00

Thinking will routinely seem warped to those using a different tool set. Advanced thinking will routinely seem warped to those using a primitive tool set.

Would the caveman follow Pythagoras' "proof"? Would Pythagoras have a clue what Godel had done? Or Mandelbrot?

If Popper and Wittgenstein freaked each other out, how would St. Augustine and Popper get along? How would God get along with Wittgenstein?

2009 11 22

When I posted the above Knatz.com was alive and well. When the fed censored my AgainstHierarchy.org all my domains tumbled. I'd long regarded my Thinking Tools as the most important section of Knatz.com: I labored to recreate some of those modules at my subsequent pkTools blog, but never mind: all Tools are now being assembled and developed at the Thinking Tools section of pKnatz blog. (At WordPress I can make menus by category (and draw a web of Pages!))

Knatz.com: redirects

2011-06-23T01:30:00.002-04:00

Knatz.com now brings browsers to this blog. I'm using PKnatz blog to recreate my censored domains: and when it's a bit better progressed we'll link "Knatz.com" there. [As of 2011 07 09 I begin to add all IonaArc posts to the menus at pKnatz: thus wedding them (without changing these URLs).]

IonaArc is my first blog, it has the most posts. Initially it was a supplement to Knatz.com, my main personal domain. Since the fed scuttled my five domains, IonaArc became the main remnant of my work online (or off).

2011 04 06 I'm very pleased by my new LineDanceAlliance blog.

PKImaging.com was my business domain.
Knatz.com was my first personal domain.
Macroinformation.org was my science domain, spinning off Knatz.com's information theory (Knatz.com / Teaching / Thinking Tools / Information / Macroinformation /).
InfoAll.org was my DeDe domain: DeRegulate — DeProfessionalize — Deschool: the three being my simplification/expansion of Ivan Illich's "deschooling."
AgainstHierarchy.org was the domain I initiated to give space apart from Knatz.com for the Knatz.com / Teaching / Society / subfolder Social Order /.
All five domains were destroyed by fed censorship in 2007 Feb.

The name AgainstHierarchy was intended to suggest opposition to factitious, politically-imposed hierarchines. Our idea of "the tree of life," or "vertibrates" reflect natural hierarchy. I'm all for it. Churches, temples, represent an idea of magical hierarchy — a creator, a boss, owning everything: I used to be for that. But The Church, this nation, the FBI, the army ... represent politically imposed hierarchies. I'm against all of them (and so should you be if you want surviving great grandchildren).

Knatz.com had nearly three thousand text files, posts I call modules, all hyperlinked, all part of a coherent view of life, the world, learning, wisdom ... survival opportunities: and thousands of graphics: logos, drawings, photos, art ... Knatz.com also republished persecuted and hard to find books: Illich's Deschooling Society, for example. Factitious hierarchies, from the school and university education system, to the the publishing industry, to plain old social homeostasis (tarring and feathering the god, the genius, the saint), the same system that elevated Pilat over Jesus, the Temple over God, had made sure than my teaching didn't transmit. My 1970 Free Learning Exchange, unlike my scholarship (or fiction) of the 1960s, found ready free publicity (hard cash needed to build infrastructure: an unregulated internet), but by 1973, FLEX had been successfully hooded. Fewer and fewer learned about our offering (even though volunteers increased for a while!) The government and its cronies, media and so forth, had successfully kept its sheeple in the dark: exactly the way the Temple kept God's new messages from the old faithful 2000 years ago.

Fed jails tortured me into confessing. My public "defender" passed on the government's threat to jail me for forty or more years, me being then sixty-eight years old, going deaf, half-blind, and wholly broke: a pariah for a lifetime: unemployable: partly due to my obligation to god (my promise to serve Christian conviviality by opposing all government coercion: after I'd made an alternate learning system functional (my efforts there sabotaged). This lawyer, admitting that he "may burn in hell for this," that is for not passing my perspective, relevant facts, to the court, freeing the court to pursue its persecution based on misinformation and blocked-information: he saw that I am a disciple of Ivan Illich and that we were a pair of disciples of Christ, but he would do nothing to disabuse the court from the false testimony of the FBI. (The FBI substituted its document, stitched from my words, but not being my prose, not being my meaning, missing my meaning.) I had seen my most important remaining opportunity to lie in staging a last hurrah for deschooling, using my trial as the stage. But no. My lawyer convinced me that nothing of the kind would happen. The fed would convince the common citizenry of Palm Beach, the county I'd be tried in, that I was a terrorist, plain and simple. No mention of deschooling would be allowed. The jury would not hear of my experience in university where not a thing I tried to communicate was received by the powers, the faculty, the administration, the student body. (Imagine a church in which the priests heard only Your sins and Never the Church itself's sins!)

I confessed believing it to be the quickest route to getting back on line, to add my experiences with the fed at Knatz.com (and elsewhere, as appropriate). But the FBI stole my computers. They were no longer properly synchronized once they returned them. The FBI had the key to my house, they ransacked everything. I still have some of my evidence against the system, against NYU, for example, but there's no telling what the FBI stole that I haven't discovered yet, may never discover (and if I don't, who will?) Anyway: the fed broke me, already broken, as they intended to. They wasted my last couple of thousand dollars. Now I'm on welfare: healthy, but helpless. I can't afford DSL. I can't afford to remount one let alone five domains.

I've been recreating some of Knatz.com files at my blogs. IonaArc was my first. Now there are a dozen or more. I'll list them in a moment: different blogs have different specialties, just as did different folders at Knatz.com.

The domain Knatz.com was originally purchased by my son, bkMarcus (Brian Knatz Marcus), intended as a birthday gift. Somehow title never transferred, which turned out to be a good thing.

pk blogs:

Iona Arc
Macroinformation
InfoAll
pkTools
PaulKnatz
InsTic
pkKlep
pkTheo
pKnatzQuotes
CybRev

And of vastly less importance:

pkBowdler
HSCSeniors

There's also a paulknatz blog at WordPress.com, but I haven't yet decided what, if anyting, to do with it.

Properly, with a smidgeon of funding, I'd reestablish everything at at resurrected Knatz.com! and grow it from there.

EMail to:

pk@Knatz.com

News

2011-04-07T12:18:00.005-04:00

A woman attacked a Gauguin hanging in a museum!
According to court documents, Burns said she believed Gauguin was evil and objected to nudity in the painting.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110405/ap_en_ot/us_painting_attacked;_ylt=AoF3p9Jxzs1eIq8eSB88uhxxFb8C;_ylu=X3oDMTJoYzJ0N2t0BGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMTEwNDA1L3VzX3BhaW50aW5nX2F0dGFja2VkBHBvcwM3BHNlYwN5bl9tb3N0X3BvcHVsYXIEc2xrA3BhaW50aW5naGl0Yg--
Did the Church keep records of people attacking crucifixes in church? maybe because they didn't believe in torture and murder?
What would the US do if someone attacked a voting booth as an inadequate communication tool between slave and kleptocracy?

the White House biographies offer an unusual history lesson. Some are examples of blatant boosterism and outdated scholarship. Others are oddly selective or politically incorrect.
George W. Bush's entry, for example, makes no reference to Hurricane Katrina or the economic collapse of 2008, but does find room for the names of his dogs.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110405/ap_on_en_ot/us_white_house_biographies;_ylt=AiMQZzaMvfK9ApiffAldC8VxFb8C;_ylu=X3oDMTJuZmx2Mm9kBGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMTEwNDA1L3VzX3doaXRlX2hvdXNlX2Jpb2dyYXBoaWVzBHBvcwM0BHNlYwN5bl9tb3N0X3BvcHVsYXIEc2xrA2hpc3RvcmlhbnNxdQ--

While both the liver and the brain influence caffeine consumption, "It turns out that your liver, more than your brain, determines daily caffeine intake," said study researcher Neil Caporaso, of the National Cancer Institute.
"You might think, I drink caffeine to feel good, or not to feel bad, but that, in turn, is established by how fast your liver breaks down the caffeine," Caporaso said. "If your liver breaks it down very rapidly, then likely you drink more."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20110407/sc_livescience/caffeinecravinglinkedtogenetics;_ylt=AtD20OP6594pejwxHI7mcAAPLBIF;_ylu=X3oDMTNlNWVkc25qBGFzc2V0A2xpdmVzY2llbmNlLzIwMTEwNDA3L2NhZmZlaW5lY3JhdmluZ2xpbmtlZHRvZ2VuZXRpY3MEcG9zAzEzBHNlYwN5bl9hcnRpY2xlX3N1bW1hcnlfbGlzdARzbGsDY2FmZmVpbmVjcmF2

The gigantic underground plume of partly molten rock that feeds the Yellowstone supervolcano might be bigger than previously thought, a new image suggests.

The study says nothing about the chances of a cataclysmic eruption at Yellowstone, but it provides scientists with a valuable new perspective on the vast and deep reservoir of fiery material that feeds such eruptions, the last of which occurred more than 600,000 years ago. [Related: Infographic - The Geology of Yellowstone.]

Earlier measurements of the plume were produced by using seismic waves — the waves generated by earthquakes — to create a picture of the underground region. The new picture was produced by examining the Yellowstone plume's electrical conductivity, which is generated by molten silicate rocks and hot briny water that is naturally present and mixed in with partly molten rock.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20110411/sc_livescience/yellowstonesupervolcanobiggerthanthought;_ylt=AtKzSIbb74.bVRn7e9PmX20PLBIF;_ylu=X3oDMTNlbzBrNml1BGFzc2V0A2xpdmVzY2llbmNlLzIwMTEwNDExL3llbGxvd3N0b25lc3VwZXJ2b2xjYW5vYmlnZ2VydGhhbnRob3VnaHQEcG9zAzMEc2VjA3luX21vc3RfcG9wdWxhcgRzbGsDeWVsbG93c3RvbmVz
Almost 17 million years ago, the deep plume of partly molten rock known as the Yellowstone hot spot first breached the surface in an eruption near what is now the Oregon-Idaho-Nevada border.

As North America drifted slowly southwest over the hot spot, there were more than 140 gargantuan caldera eruptions — the largest kind of eruption on Earth — along a northeast-trending path that is now Idaho's Snake River Plain.

The hot spot finally reached Yellowstone about 2 million years ago, yielding three huge caldera eruptions about 2 million, 1.3 million and 642,000 years ago.

Two of the eruptions blanketed half of North America with volcanic ash, producing 2,500 times and 1,000 times more ash than the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington state. Smaller eruptions occurred at Yellowstone in between the big blasts and as recently as 70,000 years ago. ...

pk here now: I've been a doomsday fan since childhood. I've spent my adulthood warning us about dangers that no one wants to heed. (Never forget, it's not the boy-who-cried-wolf who owned the sheep the wolf killed! He was behaving badly when he called a false alarm, but the society is doomed that ignores real alarms. The boy was mortal anyway; but did the society have to be?

Today's Thought

2011-03-11T11:56:00.002-05:00

Recently I've been posting News files in which I share news from the web. I've been making a new one each month. Now I think I'll similarly post a Thought of the Day page.

What may be true in the long run lacks bearing on those of us in the short run.

The society says the cops are there to protect the weak: but the lynchers know that the cops are there to protect them: the lynchers.

What does Big Brother want us to think? ( ie, to pretend to think.)
I know, That we're Individuals! That we're intelligent! That we're honest!

Church: a conspiracy against god, to allow humans to declare that their group is saved, pretending to speak for god. Jesus couldn't get a word in edgewise with the Temple. Other angels can't get a word in against the claimant groups. (Similarly a citizen cannot get a word into a democracy: unless it's clear to all that he displays the prescribed delusions.)

News

2011-03-01T01:24:00.006-05:00

News for March Mating game: Too much choice will leave you lonely Scientists have made a surprising discovery: The more options you have for choosing a lover, the likelier you are to end up with no-one. British investigators, in a new study released on Wednesday, looked at the strange dynamics of choice in speed-dating, a fashionable way for singles to meet. Speed-daters race through a rota of one-on-one meetings, judging each person for suitability after a conversation of a few minutes that ends when a bell sounds. Assessing large numbers of candidates was not a problem in itself, the researchers found. In fact, many speed-daters found more potential partners when they were able to cast their net into a larger pool. But this advantage only worked when the available candidates were all broadly similar. When candidates were too dissimilar, speed-daters became confused by many conflicting factors -- and often failed to choose anyone. "There are models of human 'rationality' which posit that variety is a good thing," said researcher Alison Lenton at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. "What will be surprising to some people is that our results suggest that increasing option variety leads to chooser confusion. People are more likely to choose no-one at all when faced with greater variety." In short, variety is fine... but in manageable doses. http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110302/ts_afp/sciencesexlifestyle;_ylt=AgSbziOT64DPyshG_bxI0iAPLBIF;_ylu=X3oDMTJoZnQxNDhiBGFzc2V0A2FmcC8yMDExMDMwMi9zY2llbmNlc2V4bGlmZXN0eWxlBHBvcwMzBHNlYwN5bl9tb3N0X3BvcHVsYXIEc2xrA21hdGluZ2dhbWV0bw--

The above reminds me of shopping for clothes when I was a teen. My mother would take me to Robert Hall in Hempstead, there were hundreds of suits, I couldn't prefer one to another. I first became a good salesman when it occurred to me that the same problem might be preventing my prospect from making up her mind and getting out her checkbook. There were six graphics on the display wall, all by the same artist. Two were large, they were the same price. I just picked on arbitrarily, said "I think you'll see this best in better light," and carried it to the front window. That's all it took. Separated from the wall, separated from the display group, my customer saw that it was removable, transportable. It became clear to her that it could be hers: should be hers. From the window I carried it to the wrapping counter for her. I had broken its, and her, "suction."

Scientists skeptical of meteorite alien life claim Mar 7 Yahoo, links not working today WASHINGTON – NASA and its top scientists are distancing themselves from a space agency researcher who concludes that he found alien bacterial life in meteorites that were collected many decades ago.

pk adds: a pair of young German scientists examined meteorite fragments in the 1940s and reported finding marks that suggested fossils of bacteria-like things. (Sir Fred Hoyle told the story, repeatedly.) That was the end of their careers.
Things haven't changed since Galileo, human societies all still belong with Lilliput. Universities bear all the earmarks of human hubris, arrogance, not letting the other idea get heard.

Are the long nights and financial burdens of parenting really worth the emotional benefits? New research is saying no: When confronted with the real economic costs of having children, most parents will exaggerate their happiness to validate their choice to have children.

"Many people believe that to be truly fulfilled in life, it is necessary to experience the joys of parenthood. Children are considered an essential source of happiness, satisfaction, and pride," Richard Eibach and Steven Mock of the University of Waterloo, wrote of their study in the March 2 issue of the journal Psychological Science. "However, the idea that parenthood involves substantial emotional rewards appears to be something of a myth."

But, times are changing. Since the 1920s, the economic value of having children has been dropping fast. Children can no longer work on farms or bring home paychecks, and they demand more financial support than ever before, the researchers say.

As children's economic value has plummeted, their perceived emotional value has skyrocketed, becoming, "the economically worthless but emotionally priceless child," as Princeton sociologist Viviana Zelizer wrote in her book, "Pricing the Priceless Child" (Princeton University Press, 1994).

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20110307/sc_livescience/momdadkidthemselvesoverthejoyofparenting;_ylt=AsI2FauerUp9zDkRVzQcHhAPLBIF;_ylu=X3oDMTNlcm1scmwyBGFzc2V0A2xpdmVzY2llbmNlLzIwMTEwMzA3L21vbWRhZGtpZHRoZW1zZWx2ZXNvdmVydGhlam95b2ZwYXJlbnRpbmcEcG9zAzQEc2VjA3luX21vc3RfcG9wdWxhcgRzbGsDbW9tZGFka2lkdGhl

Elephants naturally understand when to lend a helping trunk much as people know when to lend a helping hand, displaying a complex level of cooperation confirmed only in humans and our closest relatives until now.

Elephants are widely regarded as possessing advanced brains, displaying levels of intelligence seen only in humans, dolphins, chimpanzees and others capable of higher forms of thinking. For instance, elephants recognize themselves in mirrors, learning that such reflections are images of themselves and not others, behavior apparently unique to species that show complex empathy and sociality.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20110307/sc_livescience/elephantscooperateprovinghowsmarttheyreallyare;_ylt=Ag9kBfEbPHtxZo2bZdlLusEPLBIF;_ylu=X3oDMTNzM3JuYmNqBGFzc2V0A2xpdmVzY2llbmNlLzIwMTEwMzA3L2VsZXBoYW50c2Nvb3BlcmF0ZXByb3Zpbmdob3dzbWFydHRoZXlyZWFsbHlhcmUEcG9zAzYEc2VjA3luX2FydGljbGVfc3VtbWFyeV9saXN0BHNsawNlbGVwaGFudHNjb28-

Volunteers who took a 100-minute nap before launching into an evening memorization task scored an average of 20 percentage points higher on the memory test compared with people who did the memorization without snoozing first.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20110308/sc_livescience/whynapsmakeyousmarter;_ylt=Av9WkenWXZgoA.ClhJkuU3EPLBIF;_ylu=X3oDMTJycmZtOGc5BGFzc2V0A2xpdmVzY2llbmNlLzIwMTEwMzA4L3doeW5hcHNtYWtleW91c21hcnRlcgRwb3MDNQRzZWMDeW5fbW9zdF9wb3B1bGFyBHNsawN3aHluYXBzbWFrZXk-

Hundreds of disaffected Anglicans left the Church of England to become Roman Catholics on Ash Wednesday, the Christian day of penance.

The day set by the church to welcome converts wishing to join the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, a unique grouping created by Pope Benedict XVI for Anglicans left feeling isolated since the Church of England decided in 1992 to ordain women as priests.

seach Yahoo for the URL. I've been meaning to do something on the subject, I'll get to it:

briefly: should a church conform to the culture? or lead the culture to a standard?

The question conflexifies when we know that the church has altered and misrepresented evidence of the early church since the beginning; Specifically: Paul's epistles are far from honest about the role of women in Christianity. Now: do we want to conserve lies? do we want to stick up for choreographed oppression? apparently. Make sure that the religion can't be corrected, dissipate the feedback, repress, forget facts.

Christians pretend to believe in God, but are all atheists. We believe we can get away with anything!

We believe that an omniscient god couldn't possibly correct us! It's bad people who need correction, not the kleptocrats who stole the universe.

Singular TIME

2011-02-20T11:10:00.000-05:00

I just wrote in my News item for this 2011 February:
The AI Singularity predicted for thirty-odd years from now may very much change things, I don't doubt that things will change; but will AIs produced by dishonest human institutions be honest as well as smart? What if the AIs learn hypocrisy from us as well as programming? The AIs may keep us around for reasons of their own, they may depend on us for some things no matter how smart they get, but will they be dumb enough to allow us political power? Power over them? I doubt it, I hope not.

I'll be back to explain, offer background, unpublicized facts.

pk Online

2011-02-17T15:03:00.002-05:00

I had five domains, several blogs, thousands of essays and other text files, thousands of images on line. The fed destroyed all that, all but destroyed me.

I can't afford to repost, so I've been recreating some classic pk modules at blogs.

Here's what I'm going to do now: get all my files into a blog, sorting by blog specialty.
Then, reorder, as logically as I can, so visitors can browse by Knatz.com type categories: Teaching / or Personal /

I'm going to stop explaining all this every time I mount a new post.
Then I'm going to my five destroyed domains back up, restoring the original logic, improving on the original logic.

Cupid Conflict

2011-02-13T11:47:00.002-05:00

After the dance Friday night my beloved Jan told me that Liz, her son's girlfriend, had commented on the behavior of Cybil, the woman who'd audaciously plucked me from Jan's side toward the end of the evening to invite me onto the dance floor with her. I'd never seen Cybil before in my life, but we did a foxtrot. Buddy Canova, our favorite one-man-band immediately went into a repetition of the Cupid Shuffle and I kept Cybil on the floor with me to do it too. Others, lots of others, got up also to enjoy this simple, highly syncopated line dance.

On the drive home Jan had showcased my attractiveness to women and this Cybil's chutzpah in snatching me right from under her. The next day Jan told me that Liz had commented further on Cybil's rudeness by reporting that during the Cupid Shuffle Cybil had repeatedly bumped into her.

Ah! I explained the situation, and some core of its significance, to Jan. I repeat it to you here – it has more than one moral.

Background details are necessary:

We were at the American Legion, Lake Placid FL.
Buddy Canova is a hell of a musician, playing and singing with digital support.
My dancing is celebrated at the Legion, and elsewhere, and has been since 1950 or so. I've been teaching line dancing around Highlands Country for three years now, having learned it myself only three years ago.
The Cupid Shuffle is a recording in which the singers call the dance steps. It's four basics to the right, four basics to the left, four kick and replace steps, and four funky twentyish degree turns adding up to 90 degrees: to face a new wall. The singing instructions don't begin till well into the number. I begin the dance as soon as I feel a clear "5, 6, 7, 8 ..." On the recording used at our Thursday night Legion session, I always come out in synch with Cupid, the song leader. When other bands play other recordings, most mixing their own singing and playing with the recording, karaoke style, I don't always come out in synch. Typically I'm the first one up, the dance leader. In that case, once the recorded "to the right" comes along, I loudly "correct" the group: and everyone joins me in synch.
When I thus "lead" a line dance, I take the center of the floor, face the audience, my back to the band, and begin.
Ball room dances are improvised. A bull could cross the dance floor during a number and skilled dancers can avoid both each other and the bull: like mosquites getting missed by your snatching hand. But not line dancing. In line dancing the whole line (or set of lines) have to synchronize: like the Rockettes. A bull crossing a line dance floor will cause havoc.

OK. Liz told Jan that Cybil had been bumping her. Here's what happened. Cybil asked me to dance. We did. Buddy went right into the Cupid Shuffle: for the second time: we'd already had twenty or thirty people up for that same line dance. Cybil and I were in the corner of the floor on the band stand side. Thus: I was already with a partner. There was no time for me to take the center of the floor. So Cybil and I merely began. Others arrived. But they didn't follow me (and Cybil): and they didn't coordinate with the wall rotation our dancing had already established.

Buddy's Cupid is one regularly out of synch with the dance if begun at his 5, 6, 7, 8. Buddy is a musician, not a dancer. He isn't coordinated with a choreographer, or a dance director. When Cupid began his "to the right," I loudly corrected everyone else's synch with my dancing, except that the others adjusted to my count but still stayed oriented to a wall not my wall.

I'm the first dancer on the floor. They should be oriented to my wall. The Christians should coordinate with the already established Jews, not the Jews adapt to the newcomer Christians. If MacArthur is marching the troops, and Rommel arrives with his troops on the same field, Rommel should coordinate with MacArthur, not just let the troops bump into each other: unless you want the practice to be the war.The last time I was in Vermont the modesty rule for the swimming hole was very simple: whoever got there first set the rule: nude, or bathing suits. If the girl and her data are at the swiming hole first thing in the morning, and some more guys arrive, they have to don suits. If the guys were there first and then the couple arrive, it's skinny hour. When I'm dancing the Shuffle facing the north wall, others arriving should adopt the same orientation, turning west with me.

The Big Bangers say that the universe began with a Singularity. There was nothing, infinite, eternal nothing. Then here was a Singularity. It happened. It could happen again. Not likely. But then the Singularity itself wasn't likely. Just possible. And given enough possibility, it will happen. So: I've enjoyed the thought for decades, What if: a new Singularity occurs, spontaneously, instantly, in the enormous expanse of empty space between the proton and the electron of a hydrogen atom in your elbow? Talk about a tumor! If that Singularity was like ours it would expand at its speed of light, very fast. That universe could rip this universe up pretty well. Or: that universe could, in time, obliterate this universe. Or: that universe could be absorbed by this universe.

Save for a separate meditation the dynamics of this universe being matter and the new universe being something like anti-matter ... and so forth. It could be a real mess. The old god could eat the new god, the new god could eat the old god ... or, after the new god had eaten the old god, the old devil could reach out and gobble the new god ... Physics could change. But, if there are still people, though their religion would change, it might not in any way reflect what actually happened!

On the dance floor, as elsewhere, I'm a natural leader. But kleptocrats hate natural leaders. Socrates got pressed to commit suicide, Jesus got arrested, got Rome's version of a fair trial, got scourged, crucified. And the people who stood with their thumb in their ass then join the priesthood and say they represent Jesus. Boy, I can't wait till a real Judgment where we hear what God and Jesus really say: if we let them get a word in.

Buddy's a musician. Music is counting in large part, so's dance. Buddy should know the dance steps and time his version so that "5, 6, 7, 8" will mesh with "to the right, to the right." Buddy should see me on the floor, and give me time to get to the center, where I'll be most visible: or, take me aside and say, "Paul, let someone else lead this one: you led the last one. You're always leading them. Take five."

I resist the temptation to corner the Legion's boss and suggest that he let me consult with his bands on coordinating music and dancing. In West Side Story, in any stage production, music and dance, have to coordinate. Leonard Bernstein has to be able to talk to and listen to Jerome Robbins. A director has to make them both behave (as a producer makes a director behave, and bankers make the producer behave). Lou is a musician, but I doubt that his training is very deep. He doesn't strike me as knowing the dances, or caring. The other musicians he hires screw up all the time, get their rhythms wrong, show that They Can't Count! without any correction from him, at least not any that's visible to me. I resist because I am not a member, don't want to become a member, can't afford the dues, but don't want to loose my main dancing venue. If Lou sees that I'm not a member I may get 86'd right there: lose my mine of alternate dance partners.

Picture this pacifist dancer dancing before an American Legion mural of war: ships burning, tanks burning, oil slicks aflame! Where else am I supposed to go? If my fellow Americans had simple murdered me the first time I complained about having to go to school, then the bomb droppers could do whatever they want to the Cupid Shuffle. They don't deserve to have me to coordinate them.

There isn't enough wealth in the history of the world to compensate me for what's already been done to me. And why would I get a penny's compensation before Jesus got compensated? or Socrates? or Crazy Horse? or John Sutter?

I post this: then rewrite it, from scratch: better, in better order.

Authority: Gen / Degen

2011-02-05T13:27:00.003-05:00

Generate / Degenerate

The language group says that "two and two is four." Any speaker of the language, teaching the language to a newbie or to a foreigner, has authority. In such a case the infant never knows better than the adult.
The case naturally and legitimately generates authority.

The situation is different where a human group does not know something for sure, but must make decisions. It's guessing. If I am crossing the Sinai I may guess that I'll reach my destination by night fall. If I and my brother are crossing the Sinai, he may guess that we will not reach our destination by nightfall. (My wife may think that we won't reach it by tomorrow night fall either, his wife may think that we'll arrive in an hour, but both women know to keep silent while we're speculating. Here we have no authority, or contested authority, or a default of male authority. Maybe my brother is older, maybe he has provisional authority.)

If brother is wrong, natural authority will transfer to me. If I am wrong, natural authority will transfer to our wives: or to one of our daughters, or one of our sons.

Human experience suggests a hierarchy. Human behavior may try to alter the natural hierarchy: men see women coming, and knock them back.

In such circumstances authority degenerates, but may yet hold its place by accumulated (or stolen) power.

The peasant saw that the priest could spew magical gibberish better than he, the peasant. So the Church acquired authority. The Church said that man owns the earth, by God's authority, that man is the center of creation, that the earth is the center of the universe. The Church went further: it said that the earth is the only physical center in the physical universe.

But Galileo saw moons around Jupiter. Authority split. Galileo's observation was based on experience: he saw it. The Church's position was based on authority, degenerated authority: they said it. So, as always happens in groups so large that they're disconnected form individual's experiences, authority and evidence came into conflict: conflict direct and open.

It's continued since: by simple experience one might think that bombing gooks was killing them. But no: state authority says that raining terror is helping them: is good: Christian, if you will. Of course the free press, which wants Fortune 500 advertising, backs authority. And we have an utterly dishonest public: with no rational hope of survival.

Never mind God's punishment: neither I nor my brother nor my wife nor my brother's wife, nor our daughters, nor our sons, know how to cross a desert in a group larger than one: not once a false state has knocked down a false church.

I'd be for starting over: if we could have a habitable biosphere left. But no: it's too late. In founding FLEX (see InfoAll) I (following suit with God, Christ) offered a last chance. The state-coerced public ignored it, stole and perverted it.

Gifts stolen by knocking Santa Claus down won't satisfy enduringly.

Politics

2011-02-03T12:50:00.001-05:00

pk is the deschooler. With Illich dead, pk inherits. pk earned what he inherits.

Deschooling is the social stance which opposes compulsory ritual. The public got out from under the Church's compulsions; now it's past time that Americans, and the rest of the world, get out from under the alpha morons who run things: tell the state and the school board, and the draft board, to take a hike: indeed, just to ignore the state and the school board. If absolutely no one (who didn't actually want to) paid taxes, if people boycotted the products and services of corporations who paid taxes, and who lean on the alpha morons to guide them what to do with the taxes, who to bomb, the state would be bankrupted by the effort of putting everyone in jail: the jail walls would decay: and the schools would be inhabited by squatters, by people not compelled to be there: students and their state-paid guards, the teachers, the administrators.

So. You see: I've taken a step beyond deschooling. Or rather, deschooling represents (the most outspoken) part of my general anarchism: the belief that the state has no legitimate function: it doesn't matter which state. There's an irony there: pk is the guy who says that

There are no political solutions to our problems.

So it sounds like my politics is no politics. But it ain't true. No politics is the condition the species was born into. Everything being supervised by politicians, who wield not understanding, but power, is recent, factitious, artificial: not natural!

Anyway, Knatz.com (and all my domains, with their thousands of essays and articles and stories) had a section on Politics (in Knatz.com / Teaching / Society / NoHier /). I need to recreate that material on line, in a blog, where it should be archived regardless of whether I can pay to again host Knatz.com. I'll begin putting the materials into a vacant chronological spot. I was put in jail October 2006. 2006 October 13 onward for fifteen months is open. November will do temporarily: perhaps I should should all Knatz.com / Teaching / Society / materials not already archived to blogs into that temporal space: / Society / Social Epistemology, / Society / Survival /, and the rest of / Society / NoHier /.

A movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it.

Ben Hecht

Ben was a smart cookie, a great writer, a genuine wit. Could his statement be literally true? I don't see how; but it's delicious.

I'll say the same thing about lots of things:

A society is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it.
An institution is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it.
A church, a school, a university is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it.

Oh, Ben, for shame! For shame, pk, for repeating his solicism: where's the gender disclaimer?

An anything is never any better than the stupidest woman connected with it.

Religious Mania

2011-02-02T11:32:00.009-05:00

The woman's behind was plush. Her buttocks flexed like a champion horse as she strode the Catskills street. A slightly more natural pace might have signaled the tear in her shorts less. As it was, every step forced shining panty silk, and a good crest of gluteus maximus, into the breach. Her bottom winked at the world. I had tried to get my mouth near her ear to whisper, "Miss, you're pants are ripped," but even my runner's stride made discretion impossible. After a couple such attempts I stood my ground and watched her ass send its signals over diminishing distance. "She knows," I told myself: that's why she wouldn't pause to hear what I was telling her. It wasn't that she was being rude, it wasn't that she didn't hear me; she knows. She's fleeing: and thereby broadcasting her embarrassment the more. Female flesh.

I've remembered her distress since then not because her rump was classic so much as because her humiliation at the world seeing her underwear – and the health of what it covered, was so pronounced. She reminds me of me. Her manic modesty reminds me of my vain imitation of Christ: indeed it reminds me of Jesus' own passion: and of the publicity-conscious contortions of many a religious nut.

Mania: obsessive activity to no visible result. It's religious when the disconnection between action and result becomes manifest: the shaman praying over the cholera victim, the congregation praying for Hitler to be kind: Jesus going to the cross as a magical ritual of redemption for mankind: pk's paroxysms to warn his fellow man against state power. The state isn't saving us; it's making life impossible.

The woman with her heaving ass fled my attempts to tell her of her display. Mel Gibson showed a Hollywood Jesus getting scourged, persecuted, crucified – and even his own disciples denied they had anything to do with it. I protested the school silencing my alarms, and my family, the whole society, told me, "Shut up, Go back to school (the same school that doesn't listen, won't learn), Never mind that it's counter-intelligent, subversive of survival: Submission is the path to making money.
"Survival is not our object; money is."

Survival is not our object;
money is.

If the woman had slowed down, she might have gotten back to her car without the entire population noticing her ass. For two thousand years the whole world has had Jesus-on-the-cross shoved in their eye. A lot of good it has done. Where's the salvation? Where's God's kingdom? Can God really still love us? when we haven't learned a thing?

The "holy man" in India standing on one leg, living on a pole, sticking needles through his balls ... What's transformed? Did spring come? Sure: but then winter followed. Did it rain? Yes: but then it got dry. People are the same: only there's billions more of us: all the more addicted to submission before the state.
Before 1870 we all had to bow down before the war lord, but we didn't all have to go to school: where teachers mindlessly repeat rituals of the state – I pledge the legions of the flag – never mind the farm chores.

Everything I've said to the public since junior high has just gotten me in trouble. The Temple would have left Jesus alone if he'd just practiced the same hollow hypocrisy the priests were already master of. No: it was Jesus actually cutting close to the bone that riled them, stirred them till the rabbis actually got the secular power, the Roman governor – according to the stories, to defy Roman laws to persecute the Jewish savior for them.

Today the United States dispenses with promises of spiritual salvation. It's claims are secular (Rome's were both sacred and secular). The US claims freedom: while abrogating it. It promises, it pretends to guarantee, freedom of speech.
How can I have freedom of speech and simultaneously be compelled to be in school x hours a day y hours a week? Wouldn't freedom of speech mean that the state couldn't interfere not only with my ability to speak but with what I said and where and when I said it?
The condemned can scream all he wants – down in the dungeon, where no one can hear.

But even if such impossibilities were possible: what good is freedom of speech when no one understands what's said or written? by key people? I tried to explicate Jesus. Rots of ruck. I tried to show that our reading of Shakespeare missed much of the potential. Uh uh, the professors were impervious. And the state backs the egregious experts.
So I tried to tell the public. I offered digital librarianship, an internet, that the public could have protected from the state. Major institutions blinked: IBM, Ma Bell, TIMELife. Might as well try to train chickens to juggle.

But, me – like the guy standing on one leg, like the girl jiggling full stride, me, still trying, four decades later, the US put me in jail! for what I'd written! They were embarrassed that I hadn't done anything. But that didn't stop them. And the media? Simply reported my satire by rote: as extortion: and forgot about it.

Jesus was convicted of blasphemy – translated as insurrection! I was convicted of extortion. Mocking my rapists is extortion!

Pad the Alarm

People who've padded the alarm so it can't be heard, who've drugged the watchman, replaced humans with robots ... can't be saved. People who stand by while their saviors get poleaxed sure don't deserve to be.
Understand: the Romans weren't atheists: they believed in Jupiter, and Mars: and Caesar. But the pope who put a contract out on Martin Luther, he had to be an atheist. He had to have disbelieved that God would judge! He had to have believed that the Church would do the judging, that he'd be exempt from judgment, that God would back the Church: a rotten church.
My contemporaries don't believe in God. Or, like the Pope, they believe that God won't hold the US to any standards the US doesn't volunteer to be held accountable to.
Atheism. Lawlessness.
(And never mind God: use Truth as a synonym!)

Back in her car, I hope that woman drove home safely, got changed into other pants without accident. That tush was still hers, ripped pants or whole: not quite all is evil in the world.

St Peter denied Jesus once he was arrested, getting mistreated by official power. Maybe he should have been crucified upside down for that. But the story tells it that he was crucified upside down for trying to tell people they could be saved. By the time he was crucified upside down, might he have learned that the state kind of didn't cooperate?

Every day I encounter people who don't have a clue who I am: despite my articulateness, despite my dozens of short stories, three novel attempts, thousands of essays, my public trail of offering community data bases, social networking, cybernetic alternatives to school, to government, to the Fortune 500 ... despite my having been jailed and censored!

That woman shouldn't have ignored my message. She'd have been less embarrassed had she slowed down, walked normally. Now I'm glad that my ministry was received no better than Jesus'. My lifelong behavior is manic: trying to save people even while being tormented for it. It's religious: totally removed from reason. I don't learn from my experience, so you don't have to learn from yours. That's mania, religious mania.

It's in vain. And I'm glad. Hooray for futility.

Jesus' suffering was over in a day. Mine too is evanescent. I'm seventy-two, I'll be gone soon. But human suffering is just getting a-going.

2011 06 23 Note the comment. Thanks, Buddy, glad to help, wish I could help more: also wish I'd gotten some help, a lot of help. Meantime though, please know that my PKnatz is gathering my dozen blogs into one coordinated place, and recreated my fed-destroyed domains.

related post at pKnatz blog

In Memoriam

2011-02-01T14:31:00.001-05:00

News: Country music singer Doc Williams, who left coal mining as a teen to play in beer gardens and became a star radio act with his wife on Jamboree USA, has died. He was 96.

In Memoriam

When ever an asset to the culture dies, those who remember shim "should" tell what they remember. I loved Doc Watson and here I'll tell of a close encounter with him. In 1957 or '58 my buddy and I agreed to run the Si Como No Mexcian artifact gallery on MacDougal Street for the owner while he went to Mexico to gather more inventory. Al sold original pre-Columbian pottery picked up from the ground around the pyramids. He also carried Mexican-crafted sandals, tops, pants ... His stock was damn low, we wouldn't have much to sell, but hell, it would keep me from drinking beer in the White Horse every night. Supposedly I was working: studying, taking an extra lit class in summer school: neat: Columbia co-ed for a change.

Next door was an idle basement which would soon be converted into the Gas Light. Bob Dylan would half-live there for the next several years. Upstairs next door was the Caricature coffee house. Next over, going toward Bleeker, was a string music shop: guitars, mandolins, zithers, banjo ... Sales and repairs. My buddy Alan reported being in there when some blind guy was shown a twelve string guitar. "Gee, I've never played a twelve string," the blind guy said. They handed him the axe. Right off, he blew the roof off the place. First try, sounded more like Leadbelly than not.

Doc Watson. That's right.

I didn't see it, but I almost saw it. I was only a few dozen feet away, in the Si Como No.

PS. Distinguish between Al the store owner and Al my buddy. Esquire had a great full page color pick of Al the store owner that year: Al sitting with a guitar at the fountain in Washington Square. 1958 hippy beatnik: right on Woody Guthrie's turf.

More News: Willie Mays Aikens, who went from World Series star to federal prison inmate, has been hired by the Kansas City Royals as a minor league coach.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110201/ap_on_sp_ba_ne/bba_royals_aikens;_ylt=AkA4lfd3bb7YNjKfHmQtv.QLMxIF;_ylu=X3oDMTJtamthYWUyBGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMTEwMjAxL2JiYV9yb3lhbHNfYWlrZW5zBHBvcwM3BHNlYwN5bl9hcnRpY2xlX3N1bW1hcnlfbGlzdARzbGsDcm95YWxzaGlyZXdp

I read this line because I knew Willie Aikens at Jesup fed jail, played chess against him. I was one of the best players, Willie was a bit better (at least I never beat him, though I'd regularly get a pawn up, then fade). He regularly got trounced by a guy called "Wall Street." I never played Wall Street, arrogant bastard. I went a step out of my way to befriend Willie because I though he trounced Wall Street regularly. Apparently it was the other way around.

I'm glad I was there no longer than I was: but I also would have liked to have strengthened my game to the point where I'd humiliate Wall Street. Then again, if I got better, so too could have he: he was younger. They were all younger, by quite a bit.

News

2011-02-01T00:02:00.008-05:00

Last month I initiated a News post. Now it's February, so I commence a fresh one:

Leonardo
A male apprentice, longtime companion and possible lover of Leonardo da Vinci was the main influence and a model for the "Mona Lisa" painting, an Italian researcher said Wednesday.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110202/ap_en_ot/eu_italy_mona_lisa;_ylt=AmtfpHTjxxdXOp8qqxwTiWBxFb8C;_ylu=X3oDMTJqYXZoMjQzBGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMTEwMjAyL2V1X2l0YWx5X21vbmFfbGlzYQRjcG9zAzIEcG9zAzYEc2VjA3luX3RvcF9zdG9yeQRzbGsDbWFsZW1vZGVsYmVo

VOC
You've probably heard the term VOC, which stands for volatile organic compounds. VOCs are chemicals that give off gas from certain materials and liquids. These chemicals hang around our homes, sometimes for years, polluting the indoor air and causing adverse health effects. VOCs are one of the main reasons that indoor air is often 200 times more polluted than the outdoor air.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/usnews/20110202/ts_usnews/5waystofreeyourhomeofdangerouschemicals;_ylt=Atkp37VRDL5YoqWfDDdFlBIPLBIF;_ylu=X3oDMTNncGFnOW01BGFzc2V0A3VzbmV3cy8yMDExMDIwMi81d2F5c3RvZnJlZXlvdXJob21lb2ZkYW5nZXJvdXNjaGVtaWNhbHMEcG9zAzcEc2VjA3luX2FydGljbGVfc3VtbWFyeV9saXN0BHNsawNmdWxsbmJzcHN0b3I-

Oysters
By averaging the loss among all regions, the researchers came up with an estimate that 85 percent of oyster reef ecosystems have been lost, but said that figure was likely low because some areas lacked historical records for comparison.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110203/sc_afp/environmentusfoodoceans;_ylt=Ap0T6iE_fq31o6upNnpscFIPLBIF;_ylu=X3oDMTJsc2NnbnZpBGFzc2V0A2FmcC8yMDExMDIwMy9lbnZpcm9ubWVudHVzZm9vZG9jZWFucwRwb3MDNQRzZWMDeW5fbW9zdF9wb3B1bGFyBHNsawNveXN0ZXJzZGlzYXA-

CO2
The Mongol invasion of Asia in the 1200s took enough carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to offset a year's worth of the world's gasoline demand today, according to a new study. But even Genghis Khan couldn't create more than a blip in atmospheric carbon compared to the overwhelming effect of agriculture.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20110208/sc_livescience/mongolinvasionin1200salteredcarbondioxidelevels

Rape, Egypt, Lara Logan
Sexual harassment of women is an all-too-common occurrence on the streets of Cairo. But many women noted a complete absence of it in the early days of protests in Tahrir Square, where demonstrators made a point of trying to create a microcosm of the society without many of Egypt's social ills.
However, in the final days, and especially after the battles with pro-Mubarak gangs who attacked the protesters in Tahrir, women noticed sexual assault had returned to the square. On the day Mubarak fell, women reported being groped by the rowdy crowds. One witness saw a woman slap a man after he touched her. The man was then passed down a line of people who all slapped him and reprimanded him.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110215/ap_en_ot/us_tv_lara_logan_attack;_ylt=AjCl7R6F6KixeeWxccUMLAlxFb8C;_ylu=X3oDMTJvam8xc2VnBGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMTEwMjE1L3VzX3R2X2xhcmFfbG9nYW5fYXR0YWNrBGNwb3MDMwRwb3MDNwRzZWMDeW5fdG9wX3N0b3J5BHNsawNjYnNuZXdzbG9nYW4-

Poisoned Oaks
Auburn: Oak trees poisoned at historic site
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110217/ap_on_sp_ot/auburn_trees_poisoned;_ylt=AoFgKaBgummvYTPq4XoT_LcLMxIF;_ylu=X3oDMTJpOGwzdTA2BGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMTEwMjE3L2F1YnVybl90cmVlc19wb2lzb25lZARwb3MDNwRzZWMDeW5fbW9zdF9wb3B1bGFyBHNsawNhdWJ1cm5vYWt0cmU-
I include this news item to declare that Knatz.com had a fair amount of material on differing attitudes toward trees in different times, places, cultures. The oak was especially revered: along with mistletoe, a common parasite of oaks.
pk wishes to emphasize: the ancient Teutons punished harm to trees severely. One convicted of cutting the bark of an oak had his belly button removed and tacked to the injured oak. The criminal was then driven around the tree in circles as his intestines were pulled from his guts by his passage. The trees wound was therefore bound by the attacker's flesh.
I love a number of aspects of Teutonic justice.

Little Replaces Big
"Humans have always fished. Even our ancestors have fished. We are just much much better at it now," said UBC scientist Reg Watson.
Examining the 2006 numbers, 76 million tons of commercial seafood were reported, meaning about "seven trillion individuals were killed and consumed by us or our livestock," said Watson.
Watson said fishing efforts have been growing over the past several decades, reaching a collective point of 1.7 billion watts, or 22.6 million horsepower, worldwide that year.
In terms of energy use, that would amount to 90 miles (150 kilometers) of "Corvettes bumper to bumper with their engines revving," he said.
"It looks like we are fishing harder for the same or less result and this has to tell us something about the oceans' health. We may in fact have hit peak fish at the same time we are hitting peak oil."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110218/sc_afp/environmentoceansfish;_ylt=Ap2GMjghMUgICjnSnQahPlMPLBIF;_ylu=X3oDMTJqZWQzY2ozBGFzc2V0A2FmcC8yMDExMDIxOC9lbnZpcm9ubWVudG9jZWFuc2Zpc2gEcG9zAzcEc2VjA3luX21vc3RfcG9wdWxhcgRzbGsDZmV3ZXJiaWdmaXNo

pk adds: civilization formed a similar pattern on the land masses. Gatherer/hunters archeo-anthropologists tell us were bigger, stronger, healthier, had better teeth than the incipient farmers but were fewer. In conflict the toothless runt farmers beat the tiny team of better athletes. Numbers rule. So soon there was an earth full of spastic midgets with bad teeth: us: or at least us till very recently. Currently we're getting bigger again, healthier again, have dentistry even as we lose our teeth. But it's artificial, temporary, can't last.
The AI Singularity predicted for thirty-odd years from now may very much change things, I don't doubt that things will change; but will AIs produced by dishonest human institutions be honest as well as smart? What if the AIs learn hypocrisy from us as well as programming? The AIs may keep us around for reasons of their own, they may depend on us for some things no matter how smart they get, but will they be dumb enough to allow us political power? Power over them? I doubt it, I hope not.

Space Weather & Gadgets
A potent solar storm could disrupt these technologies, scorch satellites, crash stock markets and cause power outages that last weeks or months, experts said Saturday at the American Association for the Advancement of Science's annual meeting.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110220/ts_alt_afp/usastronomyspacetelecomweather;_ylt=AiuoqGuQduuZEp0kGGwLgo0PLBIF;_ylu=X3oDMTJzMGtzdTdhBGFzc2V0A2FmcC8yMDExMDIyMC91c2FzdHJvbm9teXNwYWNldGVsZWNvbXdlYXRoZXIEcG9zAzgEc2VjA3luX21vc3RfcG9wdWxhcgRzbGsDc3BhY2V3ZWF0aGVy

Communications

2011-01-28T12:52:00.000-05:00

Humans communicate. Humans communicated ideas more complex than mosquitoes communicate. It does not follow that a given human can communicate a particular idea to a specific individual or group.

The jailer tortures the guy, the guy screams: others hear the screams, they understand: someone is in pain. Einstein writes a formula, very few understand even the symbols used, then a few more understand, then a few more. Some ideas become widely understood; many ideas stultify.

The Old Testament tells stories of God trying to communicate this and that to humans: and not doing to well. The New Testament tells the same story.

Then how come kleptocracies are full of churches which pretend we're competent to talk about such things? that congregations understand what's said to them?

The implications seem clear to me. How come I know of no one who understands a thing I say five hours after they first seem to understand some part of it?

Sorry Sports Spectacles

2011-01-26T15:44:00.000-05:00

Fed & Rafa

Roger Federer is the rare sports figure who commands superlatives: the way Bach, Mozart did in music, the way Michelangelo, Picasso did in art, the way Shakespeare ... Etc. Wagner, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis ... Jack Johnson, Ali ... I followed Rod Laver on the tennis courts in 1968. I've been saying he's the greatest ever since. I lauded Bjorn Borg, Pete Samras ... saying they are the greatest: after Laver. On the women's side I'd praise Chris, Martina Navrotilova, Martina Hingis .. saying they are the greatest: after Suzanne Lenglen.

With Federer I began saying that Federer was the greatest since Bill Tilden (whose quality we can't really know): so Federer is the greatest ever including Laver! People like me enjoy making such pronouncements: it's part of fandom, never mind that it's untestable, meaningless in more than one respect.

By a few years ago others began saying parallel things: John McEnroe to wit: on TV! But something unbelievable happened: before a consensus about Federer became universal, we all had to acknowledge that Rafael Nadal had become on clay what Federer was on grass and on hard court. Rafa beat Federer on clay. Fed beat everyone except Rafa, Rafa then beat Fed, repeatedly. So we had the ridiculous situation that Fed was the best, ever, but Rafa was better, in at least one respect.

The air was full of superlatives and some clowns started using simple analogies and declaring that Rafa was better than the best!

Currently, till today, we've had the giddy prospect of a Rafa Slam: Rafa holding all four major titles at once, even if spread over two calendar years: 2010, '11.

Now, before I continue, let me say: stars rob light from non-stars. A minor near-by star can eclipse a major far away star. Fed and Rafa are a step above the field. But there's a small crowd of great guys close around third place. Nadal just had a mediocre match against compatriot Ferrer. Excuses for Rafa dim Ferrer's accomplishment. That ain't right. Rafa had a chance for a Rafa Slam, but he didn't cash the chance. Fed had chances against Rafa: he cashed some, not all of them. Good, they're human. But there's a terrible pressure on the stars to be more than they are, to be more than possible. And much of the problem relates to the media pandering to the throng's yearning for certainty: in advance. Today's report from Australia includes this verbiage: "Murray won't have to get past Nadal this year, but he will have to beat Ferrer and either defending champion Roger Federer or 2008 champion Novak Djokovic to claim his first major title." Note again the diction: "Claim his first major title."

Murray has no major titles. Murray is not owed a major title. The golfer should score a birdie before being awarded the birdie. But no, the commentator will say "he's standing over the ball for his birdie." No: it's a birdie after it's been scored; not before. It's like Christians counting themselves in heaven's census while they're still alive. Will God have nothing to say about it?

The public "should" be allowed to grow up. I chastise the media. My own ridiculous claims about who's the greatest are relatively harmless. Awarding combatants prizes before the outcome is known retards our maturity: same as telling God what his judgment must be: before the facts can be established.

Patriotism

2011-01-22T11:14:00.002-05:00

My woman died a couple of years before the Feebs arrested me. I sure wanted to meet a new woman once I got out. I started attending the Highlands Senior Society, met women galore. I made a whole new class of enemy, enemies galore – Americans hate whomever they've wronged – but at least my bed had two people in it more often than one. I even got into the dances for free, since I agreed to teach the dancing.

Nobody dances like you, Paul.
Joyce, LineDancingMarine

There was a penalty though that was hard to bear. Before lunch, we'd listen to announcements. Then a flag was wheeled out and we'd have to Pledge Allegiance to the Flag: then sing America the Beautiful. I was never a patriot. I couldn't have easily become a disciple of Christ if I'd been a patriot. If I'd been a patriot how could I have tried to debrief people on their enslavement via compulsory education? How could I possibly have invented an internet to offer as an alternative? Flag-saluters don't try to redesign everything.

Patriots stood behind me during the patriotic exercises, threatening me behind my ear: "America! Love it or Leave It!!" But by that time I was also dancing with a table full of widows a few miles south at the Lake Placid American Legion. There these days I mostly dance with the girl I met at the Senior Social, but we dance before murals of tanks blowing the shit out of everything, ships sinking in oil slicks ... And, more often than not, before we finish for the night, the band plays patriotic songs. The socializers stand in a circle. The lyrics proclaim, "I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free."

Free? Since when? I was forced to go to school. There was no law that compelled university attendance, but it's all-but compulsory in this culture: certainly it was in my family. In my life time I've watched people become even more illiterate than they already had been while garnering ever more degrees, at ever higher prices: while wages skyrocket. Too bad there's ever less worth buying. Was getting put in jail for what I'd written an example of freedom? Was getting censored?

I suppose putting Jesus on the cross was an exercise in freedom as well.

Wasps sting whatever is not wasp that's intruding on the nest. Mama risks her life to grab baby from under the truck; momma does not risk her life to get the truck from under baby. So: I can understand Hatfields preferring Hatfields to McCoys. Even more fundamentally I understand me preferring me to you.

Sure we should give aid to our own, but try being a Good Samaritan to the other guy now and then. That's the way I see sense in a Christ saying, Prefer other to self. Just as a counter-measure! Not, Let's turn everything upside down; but, Why not not go whole hog every damn time.

I can understand Hatfields preferring Hatfields to McCoys: both families may be Scots-Irish, but any Hatfield genes will likely be closer to the genes of any other Hatfield than will any McCoy genes. Not absolutely necessarily, but probably, in general, you know? I can understand Hitler wanting to advance the blue-eyed: kind of Christ-like actually, since Hitler was himself far from blue-eyed, was anything but fair. I can understand Hitler hating the Jews: so did nearly everybody else in Christian Europe, right? I can understand Hitler wanting to kill the Jews: my life might have been easier if I'd wanted to kill anyone standing ahead of me on line to get into Birdland.

I wrote the latter first, then inserted the former. Next session I'll merge them better.

Times Square Warranty

2011-01-12T14:25:00.002-05:00

I buy a toaster, a GE, at the WalMart, it comes with a two year warranty. After twenty-five months a heating element fails, or the plastic foot falls off the bottom and there's no way to reattach it without taking the whole bottom off, a procedure that requires tools I don't have and experience I don't have either. Oh well: I got two years out of it.

The Swedish sailor has shore leave in Manhattan. He goes to Times Square. Oh, Boy! movies! whores! drug dealers! The avenue is lined with electronics store fronts. The sailor buys a boom box with a five year warranty, for $9.98 plus tax. The sailor puts in on his shoulder. It's not very loud, but what the hell. By midnight the boom box doesn't play at all, it has zero volume. The next day the sailor takes the boom box back to the little store front. There's the same window display, the same counter display, the same Sephardic Jew who sold it to him. "That warranty is no good here. The company you bought it from is out of business, bankrupt. This is a different company. We have nothing to do with that other company."

(The sailor's mistake was that he didn't have the whole Swedish navy with him in the little store front. I bet his warranty would have been good if the ship's gun were aimed through the store window.)

I was an art dealer. But before I was an art dealer, I was a student, and a teacher: perpetually poor, almost as it were deliberately poor: a monk of sorts. As a student I always had art prints on my cell wall: big Rouault, big Klee, big Picasso, I'd bought for $1 each, put up with thumb tacks. I never spent more that $1 for any art (until I sold pre-Columbian originals, and they were consigned to me, I didn't have to pay for them until after I'd been paid for them: I sold one for $40, I owed the guy $20: back in 1958) until one day, coming back from the dentist, on Third Avenue just below Fifty-Seventh Street, in the 1960s, I saw a gallery with $10 framed art prints jamming the sidewalk. I got another Picasso. It was a small reproduction, but it was framed: the first framed anything I'd ever bought! Years later, in the 1970s, in the graphics business myself, a publisher, distributor, artist-rep, I noticed that "same" gallery. It seemed to be exactly the same. It seemed to have the same huge banner over the door: 50% Off: Everything Must Go. This time I was going there deliberately, to see the owner, one "Alan." I had an introduction from "Artie," the owner of a string of crumby schlock galleries downtown. Artie was an Ashkenazi Jew who'd married into a Sephardic family: Alan was Artie's brother-in-law. Artie always gave me a hard time, then bought dozens of things from me, always four-figures worth, always paid cash on delivery (always almost-always: I did get a bad check from him once). (I had Ashkenazi customers who would have cut me off permanently if they known I'd so much as spoken to a Sephardim!) The framed junk on the side walk was still the same size, still $10. But this visit I noticed that by the entrance to the store began a series of huge price tags all slashing everything in "half": $50 crossed out / $25; $100 crossed out / $50; $150 crossed out / $75 ... and so forth. As one progressed into the store the crossed-out prices escalated to $200, $250, $300 ... $500 ... $1,000. Now: here's the hook: toward the back of the store one began to encounter Calders, and Dalis: and there were no price tags. Alan bought four-figures worth of stuff from me, I delivered on the spot, he paid me on the spot: cash, $1,400 or so. I came back a month or two later to see how he was doing. There was my stuff. Things on my price list for $100, Alan had up with a huge tag: $200, crossed out / $100! He was offering my stuff at retail, pretending it was half-price. I'd sold at Alan at 50/20. In other words: if my list price was $100, any retailer understod that they'd pay me $50 for it. $100 was what they sold it for, not me. I always quoted retail prices so their custumer would only hear one price: the public's price. Any retailer also understood that if they bought in volume, they could expect a special consideration: 50/20: fairly standard. Alan, Artie, sold, relying on ignorance. But here's the thing: in the back of the store, where only Alan himself reigned, where none of his Sephardic baseball team of salesmen trespassed, there were all these Calders, Dalis, I knew the list price of almost all of them. One Dali I didn't recognize. "Alan," I said, "What do you sell this one for?" Alan answered that Levine had it on his list at $500: he'd sold one that morning to a New Jersey lawyer for $1,200. The lawyer probably thought it was $2,400! The lawyer had been set up toassume a 50% discount. Actually Alan got him to pay whatever Alan thought he could get for it. The store's structure softened the sucker up: no one had to say anything to him.

Please don't misunderstand: I am not saying that the Sephardic Jews are crooks, and no one else is; no, I am saying that some Sephardic Jews teach their children some standard business swindles early: they don't wait till they're middled aged and discover them for themselves.

But what I'm really saying is that the culture is full of swindles while the culture pretends to represent law and order! It doesn't. It hasn't. It never will.

These are stories intended to suggest general patterns, not absolute structures. We live in a far from honest society. We live in an economy of planned obsolescence. But of course there are also durable goods, honest merchants ...

My girlfriend gets incredible service from Harry and Davids, from LL Bean ... Decades ago a friend lived with his wife in Colorado in a Coleman tent: they lived way out in the woods, 24/7 for a series of years. The tent had a three year warranty. Having no other home, two adults, going in and out of the tent, in all weathers, finally, after two years and eleven months, managed to get the tent entrance zipper stuck. Coleman apologized that it had discontinued that model which had sold for $100: So, sorry, but would you accept our Olympic model as a replacement? It's bigger and sells for $150. My friends had the balls to accept!

It isn't just merchants who are crooks.

Population, Politics

2011-01-10T14:32:00.002-05:00

Knatz.com had a complex while still incipient Society section on politics, still not yet recreated here. Right now though I add something implicit throughout Knatz.com that I here state explicitly, and I hope succinctly. Humans live in groups. Politics is natural to groups. But beyond a certain threshold the benefits of groupness can turn toxic. Beyond a certain population size, politics are toxic.

I don't believe there are any political solutions to our problems.

I believe that humans in groups no larger than two hundred, two hundred and fifty, are cute (until they run into another group). Chieftainships, nations, super zoos ... Uh, uh. I don't want it. Poison.

Left alone, we'll kill ourselves. Super groups will disappear. I hope.

But we're not left alone. The Church puts us in church. The state puts us in school. The economy puts us in the market: where we destroy the earth, destroy the earth, destroy ourselves, riding roughshod over natural limits: putting penny (after penny) in the fuse box, and then the next fuse box.

But that's all right. Just wait long enough. We'll destroy everything. And then there won't be any more of us. Or, we'll fail to exceed populations of two hundred. Or, the number is actually 225, 500: I don't know: some number. Some modest number. (There must also be a limit on how many correctly sized groups there can be: the earth could lose two hundred groups of two hundred; but could a million groups of "two hundred" remain unknown to each other?)

Or I'm wrong. And we'll spread to the stars. And then we'll run out of fuel, out of food, out of breathability.

pk's point all long has been that there are no political solutions to these problems. One can talk Nazis into killing Jews, but not likely into tightening their chastity belt.

We sterilize mosquitoes. We castrate niggers. Why don't we try a population politically self-restrained at two-fifty? Politics. Human nature.

Hey: everything's gotta die. How else can anything better develop?

Animal House In Absentia

2011-01-10T10:36:00.008-05:00

Animal House: 1978 recalling the 'Sixties: 1968 - through the early 1970s. The United States was insisting on conducting war without regard for law or decency or morality or ethics or political support from home not hijacked by Nazis. The setting was a college: not a "good" college (high class educational fraud); a totally fraudulent C-tier college. The (anti)heroes are the animals of the title. (Or are they? Everyone connected with the culture the film depicts/imagines were disgusting hypocritical animals: in point, Dean Wormer, Mayor "Carmine," the other frats and sororities posed as superior to the blatantly venal, degenerate Delta house. Hell, instead of explaining why Milton was assigned, the lit prof insults Milton and hides behind authority!) (In my Free Learning Exchange, 1970, you could study Milton or not study Milton. It was up to you, to your parents, to your ambition, your talents: there was no curriculum!)

The king is bad, so is the pope, so are the barons, so are the peasants. Sodom and Gomorrah. Dead-on American satire: disgusting and proud of it. It's well cast (but not nearly as well made as it could have/should have been). I just want to recall it to introduce my real topic: the concept of In absentia. Dean Wormer has it out for the Deltas. (A civilized society would have had it out for Dear Wormer long before it bothered turning on the scum of Delta House.) (Picking on Delta House is like squashing rat turds instead of capturing the rat.)

Faber College fulfills multiple roles in the society: it keeps semi-privileged young adults out of the job market, it separates future management candidates from present turn-the-bolt robots, it ripens (while degenerating) future dropout cannon fodder ... Once upon a time colleges developed to keep young nobles out of the hair of the reigning nobles: simultaneously the colleges trained a few talented peasants to read, write, take dictation, convey messages, maybe even give advice: Thomas Becket getting prepped by and for Henry II, Chaucer being trained for Richard II ... John Jay learning law for the young US.

Any college can do that: the ones that are relied on to do it are Harvard, Yale ... John Jay's Columbia. "Faber" College has no such role. Faber College is kin to WalMart's Sam's Cola imitating Pepsi's imitation of Coke: somebody gets rich selling mildly narcotic tooth-rot fizz to the public, somebody else can right away sell some imitation mildly narcotic tooth-rot fizz to the public, then somebody else can manufacture a really cheap mildly narcotic tooth-rot fizz and sell it to the public. Thus: Cambridge, Harvard, Faber.

Is intelligence involved anywhere? Sure. Intelligence isn't entirely absent from anything humans do; but don't expect much intelligence, don't expect quality intelligence. Do expect cut corners. Expect hypocrisy, fraud. You look for God, you get the Church.

Anyhow: Dean Wormer has it in for Delta House. He shows that he has Nazi powers, that he's the CIA as well as the White House / Congress. Dean Wormer is also the Court. He reads some charges to some proxy Deltas. A Delta rep begins to respond. "That's enough of that!" says Little Hitler.

In Paths of Glory French officers intend to "make an example of" a few soldiers. They chose three soldiers by lot, then they charge them with cowardice, then they execute them. The condemned are given legal representation, imprisoned, and shot. Why the legal representation? Why not just shoot them?

Same reason I was given legal representation after the FBI arrested me. Same reason the son of Allah eats with his right hand and pisses with his left, same reason the Jew avoids pork. Empty ritual: while thieves and frauds maraud the earth: destroying the possibility of our kind of life, bringing our species to a much-deserved, long-overdue end.

America wanted to bomb whoever it wanted to bomb. In the words of Hollywood's Stone's Richard Nixon: "I'm the President of the United States: I can bomb whoever I want!"

Harvard / MIT was important to such a goal, but so was Faber College. Full fraud needs Coke and Pepsi and Sam's Choice: and a huge helpless narcotized public with teeth as rotten as their awareness. Harvard, Faber, and Hollywood. And the Times. And don't forget TV!

The idea behind judgments in absentia is that "everyone" is supposed to be entitled to a fair trial. A fair trial in civilization is a replacement for the defeated General Custer putting the victorious Crazy Horse in jail. The US has to pretend to give Crazy Horse a trial, it has to pretend that the trial is "fair." It has rituals one has to attend law school for a decade to learn to pretend that facts or truth or reason has something to do with Manifest Destiny, with reelecting "the President." And those rituals are best carried out if the "coward" to be convicted is drugged during the trial. But it's then important to wake him up for his execution. Paths of Glory is elaborate in showing the care with which the unconscious soldier is revived so he'll be conscious at his own murder.

I suggest that kleptocracies conduct most of their rituals with the possibility of truth or reason held in absentia. Christians will be most brilliant in refuting Jews if no Jews are present: or, if those Jews present have first been castrated, lobotomized, sanitized.

It happened to me all my life, since childhood, long before the US court convicted me without having read the thousands of essays of mine that they censored, without having understand a thing I said: to my attorney, or all my life. My attorney strongly advised me not to speak at the trial except to answer direct questions from the judge, and then to answer, Yes / No: or they'd rig a trial that would convict me for forty years. How much writing would I be able to do when I was 108? How at 108 could I overcome the gap of Knatz.com having been silenced from 2006 to 2046?

Of course it didn't really matter: I already knew, not three people out of four billion had understood what I was saying: and those that did pretended not to.

Boy, has Knatz.com been refuted over the years: but always with Knatz in absentia.

2011 01 11 There's a marvelous line in Animal House that I didn't work in yesterday. The Delta turds con some girls from a sorority at a college other than Faber to go out with them. At their own Delta toga party they'd contracted Otis Day and the Knights: they spot a marquee advertising that group, but the bar proves to be a "black" bar: our college kids are stuck as an unwelcome minority. Trying to fit in, to look harmless, to make conversation, one Delta schmuck asks a threatening local, "Where do you guys go to school?" !

The blacks are not college kids. They are not the privileged. They are the bolt turners, the canon fodder. They are not being held apart from the job market, the delay sure to be made up to them later via compensatory privileges.

News

2011-01-07T15:11:00.007-05:00

For decades now I've emailed snippets of interesting online news to my son (and family). Now I regret not having shared sharing more widely. From now on I intend to post such snippets here at IonaArc, a new News post per month. Today's and the rest of January's will get posted here: if I remember, budget time, energy ...
I'm not going to bother with links: you cut and paste:

die-offs common
In the past eight months, the USGS has logged 95 mass wildlife die-offs in North America and that's probably a dramatic undercount, White said. The list includes 900 some turkey vultures that seemed to drown and starve in the Florida Keys, 4,300 ducks killed by parasites in Minnesota, 1,500 salamanders done in by a virus in Idaho, 2,000 bats that died of rabies in Texas, and the still mysterious death of 2,750 sea birds in California.
...
On average, 163 such events are reported to the federal government each year, according to USGS records. And there have been much larger die-offs than the 3,000 blackbirds in Arkansas. Twice in the summer of 1996, more than 100,000 ducks died of botulism in Canada.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110107/ap_on_sc/us_sci_dead_wildlife_fact_check

tears, pheromones, sexual disinterest
Emotional tears are chemically different from the reflex tears that form when you get dust in your eye. But biologists have long puzzled over the true function of emotional tears: Are they merely cathartic, or do they have some other physiological role?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110106/ap_on_sc/us_sci_tear_signals

aging bones
Bones undergo a number of changes with age, the researchers found. In both men and women, the eye sockets became wider and longer. The distance between the most prominent part of the brow to the top of the nose decreased, while the cheekbones stuck out less and the opening of the nose bones receded. Meanwhile, the lower jaw shrunk in both length and height.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20110107/sc_livescience/facialbonestructurerevealsage;_ylt=AsW9M8E7FFPZ02RM_IRRzC0PLBIF;_ylu=X3oDMTNidGlzcXZmBGFzc2V0A2xpdmVzY2llbmNlLzIwMTEwMTA3L2ZhY2lhbGJvbmVzdHJ1Y3R1cmVyZXZlYWxzYWdlBHBvcwMzBHNlYwN5bl9hcnRpY2xlX3N1bW1hcnlfbGlzdARzbGsDZmFjaWFsYm9uZXN0

Whether it's the Beatles or Beethoven, people like music for the same reason they like eating or having sex: It makes the brain release a chemical that gives pleasure, a new study says.
The brain substance is involved both in anticipating a particularly thrilling musical moment and in feeling the rush from it, researchers found.
Previous work had already suggested a role for dopamine, a substance brain cells release to communicate with each other. But the new work, which scanned people's brains as they listened to music, shows it happening directly.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110109/ap_on_sc/us_sci_music_on_the_brain;_ylt=AkgEHjnAaApK6E2Ydzsd8rsPLBIF;_ylu=X3oDMTJxNXBocTUxBGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMTEwMTA5L3VzX3NjaV9tdXNpY19vbl90aGVfYnJhaW4EY3BvcwMxBHBvcwMxBHNlYwN5bl90b3Bfc3RvcnkEc2xrA3N0dWR5bG92ZW11cw--

Life on Earth has exploited just about every conceivable niche, tolerating extremes of temperature, salinity, pH and pressure. Conway Morris makes the case that Earth life thus exists close to the physical and chemical limits of life anywhere. [The Weirdest Life on Earth]
Further, Conway Morris says, evolution operates predictably, producing relatively predictable outcomes. These two suppositions argue that alien life, if it exists, should be fairly similar to terrestrial life, generating intelligent beings much like us. These aliens may look unfamiliar, but any differences would be skin-deep.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20110110/sc_space/studyifwerenotaloneweshouldfearthealiens;_ylt=AsgZ7gO6qcV9KklcQA.Kt.kPLBIF;_ylu=X3oDMTM4YjVycXRmBGFzc2V0A3NwYWNlLzIwMTEwMTEwL3N0dWR5aWZ3ZXJlbm90YWxvbmV3ZXNob3VsZGZlYXJ0aGVhbGllbnMEcG9zAzcEc2VjA3luX21vc3RfcG9wdWxhcgRzbGsDc3R1ZHlpZndlMzly

Why is north up?
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/441/on-maps-why-is-north-always-up
I explained this one to my son bk when he was eight or ten years old: as we waited on the line for the ski lift. I would ask bk questions of that type, let him search for answers. One time the chair arrived and we got on: the guy on line behind us called after us: Why?!

Obese black patients receive less weight reduction and exercise advice from doctors than obese white patients, a new study finds.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/hsn/20110115/hl_hsn/israceafactorinobesitycounseling;_ylt=AnA._M4_X.tUDZSm97lXEqhllpd4;_ylu=X3oDMTQxZTgxbWoxBGFzc2V0Ay9zL2hzbi8yMDExMDExNS9obF9oc24vaXNyYWNlYWZhY3Rvcmlub2Jlc2l0eWNvdW5zZWxpbmcEY2NvZGUDbXBfZWNfOF8xMARjcG9zAzEwBHBvcwMxMARzZWMDeW5fdG9wX3N0b3JpZXMEc2xrA2lzcmFjZWFmYWN0bw--

A 1997 letter from the Vatican warned Ireland's Catholic bishops not to report all suspected child-abuse cases to police — a disclosure that victims' groups described as "the smoking gun" needed to show that the church enforced a worldwide culture of covering up crimes by pedophile priests.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110118/ap_on_re_eu/eu_ireland_catholic_abuse;_ylt=AurL2F3Shel_RWDG13JqgavC9bQF;_ylu=X3oDMTNzZGRjdWM2BGFzc2V0Ay9zL2FwLzIwMTEwMTE4L2FwX29uX3JlX2V1L2V1X2lyZWxhbmRfY2F0aG9saWNfYWJ1c2UEY2NvZGUDbXBfZWNfOF8xMARjcG9zAzQEcG9zAzQEc2VjA3luX3RvcF9zdG9yaWVzBHNsawN2YXRpY2Fud2FybmU-

Either / Or / Hermaphrodite

2011-01-02T15:40:00.004-05:00

Some things are either/or and never mix. Some are either/or but mix on rare occasions. Fer'xample, gender: the fertilized egg chooses one end for "head," the other becomes "tail." In taxa with gender, the creature then becomes either female or male: among humans (and others I don't doubt): the default setting is female. (Male takes extra information.) Only rarely is a human born hermaphrodite: with both male and female characteristics: and e'en so, testimony about facts is untrained and nearly worthless: sometimes worse than worthless.

Lots of things are either/or. But if you think for a while you may come up with exceptions: you're alive or you're dead: is there ever a gray area? Have medical officers always been infallible? Then why are there all those scratches of the insides of coffins dug up from the last century? Wasn't someone a bit hasty?

There's a good joke on the subject, a limerick:
There was a young lady – Miss Starkie –
Who had an affair with a darkie.
The result of her sins
Was quadruplets, not twins:
One black, and one white, and two khaki!
Now there's a profundity right there: mixes can occur statistically across a population that don't show in an individual. "My" genes look "white"; but my grandson may look black (or might if I had any genes I don't know about). But never mind: I don't care about gender, or ethnicity. No, the above is mere preface to a little theo-cosmology.

I was raised to be a Christian. Jesus, the Creed said, went to hell for three days, then ascended to heaven. We, we were told, would go to either/or. We would go to hell; OR: we would go to heaven. You could be male, you could be female, you could be white, you could be black: you would be Saved; or you would be Damned! That was it!

My church painted no pictures of visiting hell for Monday but being back in heaven by Friday evening. But what if God has a population of hells and heavens? Would salvation or damnation mix across populations, statistically? Or how about mixing either/or with one possibility actualizing on one universe and the alternate possibility actualizing in another, complementary universe? What if I'm saved in Universe^6E but damned in Universe^6F?

Literal Metaphor

2011-01-02T11:02:00.001-05:00

I mean that literally really means

Please take my metaphor seriously!

I phrased that a couple of decades ago: writer pk was really cooking in the late 1980s (too bad so few noticed). The line got added to Knatz.com somewhere in the 90s. Knatz.com and all my domains got scuttled in 2007, following my arrest in 2006, the US censoring me in early 07. It got posted to my InfoAll blog when I recreated my Knatz.com / Personal / Overview / Training / section there.

The way I present it here is an oxymoron: a sterling example of macroinformation, as the title juxtaposes incompatible logical types: literal and metaphor commonly being understood to be opposites, like real and fictitious and macroinformation is processed information, information interpreted in the light of friction among logical types.

The idea is fundamental to pk thinking and teaching. But to get it properly you have to also understand pk informational cosmology, with it existential sets: Pleroma, Creatura, Sentiens, Persona ... Pathologica ... Only Pleroma, the physical universe, is in any sense literally real. All else is mental, informational (macroinformational: metaphorical!

You, me ... we are ideas! that change, grow, purify; decay, get polluted ... moment by moment.

And so long as overpopulated kleptocracies continue to compel stone-age belief systems, continue to coerce unsupportable ideas (like education, taxation, conscription ...) the idea that a Christ can (or should) save us is preposterous: almost as preposterous as the idea that universities (media or churches or Congress) are competent to process ideas.

And those of us who believe in liberty and learning and information may as well gargle gibberish.

pk Profile 2011

2011-01-01T01:01:00.003-05:00

pk here. I'm the man who believes what I believed as a boy: that the state had no right put me – or anyone else – in school.

I'm the writer who believes that it's past time to take Jesus down off the cross, to stop torturing him, to stop perverting god, the truth, the nature of reality. Given sixty years to try, publishers have never published any of it.

I'm the scholar who reads Shakespeare's sonnets by mapping the Fair Love / Dark Lady onto the epistemological impasse between the Scholastic Realism of the Middle Ages and the heretical nominalism which gave birth to science (and modern individualism). The universities don't have a clue, interrupt me the way the public school did.

I'm the thinker who explains the universe in terms of information, complex information, processed, interpreted, multi-dimensional information, in terms of macroinformation.

I'm the reformer who offered digital librarianship, cybernetic data-basing / social networking / quality-control feedback, an anarchist internet of voluntary-only information: forty-one years ago. Corporations, the government ... waited: then stole it.

Sick of kleptocracy, of thieves in charge, I wrote a satire: and to jail I went: censored, my thousands of essays stripped from the kleptocracy's plagiarized internet. How did the government come to be in charge of what CERN, the Pentagon, and MIT had stolen from god, from Christ, from Ivan Illich, from me? And from you!

Note: none of my messages have been received; all were interfered with!

Now I have only one message:

None of my messages have been received!

pk online

2011-01-01T01:00:00.000-05:00

Faith

2010-12-30T11:41:00.001-05:00

There's a reason for faith commonly under-appreciated:

We humans can't function without faith. We know nothing without faith. When we bark our shins we're showing faith in our sensory system: faith that the pain in our leg represents contact with a physical universe. We don't know anything without faith.

Faith can be overdone. Witness St. Paul.

Which brings me to my point: humans use faith to displace whatever they want displaced: experience, reason, logic ... Faith can substitute for any of them. Schools, churches, media ... dispense faith.

A gallimaufry of examples may be the least misleading (just a couple to start):
We drop bombs on people. Common logic would indicate that that's bad, but no: with faith, we can see that that's how Americans help people. Americans are helpful. Isn't that what the papers say?

We murder Christ, drink his blood, eat his flesh. You'd think we're murderers, deicides, vampires, cannibals; no, with faith it proves that we're saved, God's Chosen.

We just lost nine bets in a row at the track. You might think that that means that gambling is for fools. No, with faith, it proves that we'll hit the jackpot next time.

Some, More, Too Many

2010-12-24T13:34:00.003-05:00

We're a social species. Groupness was chosen for us as a survival strategy by our species/environment ecology long before any of us as individuals could have been considered intelligent. The ploy that made us money yesterday can put us in the red tomorrow. I'm for groupness: never mind that I had no more choice in the matter than you did. But for the last few decades I've been dragging my feet about super-groupness. I've love mankind in ones, and occasionally by the dozen: but I dread all groups larger than what I believe was the correct size for a human group: maximizing around two hundred, two-hundred and fifty.

Group a um

I love Jesus, however rickety the sources of our stories about him. I love his twelve disciples. I love how Leonardo grouped them into sub-groups: three, three; six, six: seven: thirteen, with an odd extra, a female confusing everything.

I love the early church: a few hundred Christians, hiding from the Romans: like Jews hiding from Hitler. But I hate the Church.

I love Daniel Boone, Buffalo Bill ... but I hate nations. I hate two hundred million Americans become three hundred. I hate a world population of a billion become four billion, five billion ...

There are lots of good things that are good, good, good: but then become toxic. Human groups cooperate as well as compete, they love as well as hate, they help as well as sabotage. If Roosevelt opens the door for Stalin, that's nice; but when Mussolini cooperates with Hitler's murdering Poles, something's gone wrong. Even cooperation can turn toxic.

Watch out for human groupness turning super-toxic. I sometimes with we were back on the savanna, lucky to find a dead bug.

Plant Succession, Human Recession

2010-12-14T15:48:00.005-05:00

I just posted news at another blog on Jan's slash pine falling in yesterday's winds. That post was about Jan and her beautiful home and grounds (and lake) ... This post will continue hints begun there on Florida ecology: specifically on human disruption of Florida ecology, focusing on pine flat woods, and detailing recent history of Lake Charlotte, here in Sebring, Highlands Country, Florida.

Plant Succession
Pine flat woods had been the dominant environment in pre-civilized Florida. Florida has been above sea level for at least ten million years. Gradually the sea receded, creating dry land around the Highland Ridge than runs from what is today Lake Wales south to today's Lake Placid. Florida plant succession would have begun with scrub land. Pine flatwoods and other environments such as bogs and cypress swamp would have followed. The original Florida would have been scrub, followed by scrub with pine flatwoods taking over more and more territory. In the last couple of million years hammocks developed: islands of hardwood trees, some deciduous, and palm trees, taking over moist low lying but not swampy ground.

The common pine of Florida is the slash pine. Slash pine, when Morgan and Flagler developed Florida (once the US army had cleared inconvenient humans aside for them) covered 60% or more of the territory. Hammocks range from just a few trees to a forest as large as Highlands Hammock, here on the west side of Sebring. The health and continuing identity of a pine flatwoods depended on natural fire. Periodic natural fire kills off the oak trees growing up as "weeds" amid the pines, burns off ground fuel, permits light to penetrate to the under-story. Slash pine seeds cannot germinate without light. (Scrub pine seeds cannot germinate till fire has opened the cones!)

Human Recession
Humans have lived in Florida for some time, but not in large numbers prior to Morgan and Flagler. Once Florida was developed, pine flatwoods was the common environment, so pine flatwoods was the environment to be superceded by human settlement. Humans at first employed fire for slash and burn farming, but post-Flagler humans repressed fire. Oaks persevered. Pine seeds got shaded into sterility. Ground fuel accumulated: so when fire did come there was danger of it building a momentum that the slash pine had insufficient resistance to. Thus sea bed gives way to scrub, scrub gives way to pine flatwoods, pine flatwoods shares borders with hammock, with swamp, with bog, with bay head, and then to human settlement, and then ... to catastrophe: potential catastrophe anyway.

Jan has lived on her lake in Sebring for a decade or so. A number of slash pine that made the property seem like something out of James Fennimore Cooper fell in that time. Today there are a half dozen magnificent pines, 75 to 85 or 90 feet tall, but only a half dozen. Today there is one fewer than yesterday. Note: there are no new pines growing up!

Plant life grows toward light. Dig a canal, clear a road, trees lean into the clearing. In Florida the soil is young, thin, poor in nutrients. When there's wind, and in Florida there's wind a plenty, and at more than one time of the year, the trees slip their moorings, fall into the road, into the canal. In 1990 I gave the history and ecology tours at Highlands Hammock State Park. I'd drive the tram along the canal built by the CCC in the 1930s at what was then the south border of the park. The south canal is bordered by hammock, by bog, by bay head, by pine flatwoods. Every day trees would have fallen into the canal, across the road: mostly red maples. Everyday the rangers would Vroom out to the south canal in their trucks with chain saws, and RRRR, RRRR cut the trees into logs and shove them to the side of the berm. Everyday, when I could, I would go out to the south canal, with a community service slave (or two) (when I could get them), and throw the logs off into the bay head so that the public, on the tour, would see an illusion of naturalness. Weekends, with a slave or three, I'd drag limbs and boles out of the canal and haul them off into the bay head, out of sight of "my" tour: cosmetics pretending to be natural. If I hadn't, the chances of the public spotting an alligator, or a cooter, let alone an otter, were negligible (despite the canal being way over-populated with alligators: once stretch sometimes had three dozen baby alligators visible in a compound "nursery": big mama also commonly visible. (The males, ten, sometimes fourteen feet, were visible to me when I ventured on foot into the side canals: we saw few big males along the south canal.))

At Jan's lake side a couple of grand pines lean westward, out over the lake. I hope their roots on the landward side are well anchored, because they visibly don't have much buttressing on their "weak" side. This set of facts in this case casts no blame on human behavior: the lake was there before the railroad blossomed Sebring's population, and before a widened Highway 27 exploded it, especially on the west side of 27, west of Lake Jackson. Certainly no blame can be laid at Jan's door: or at mine: I, who pick up the fallen pine cones for her, so that her "lawn" is unobstructed, imitating an English lawn, where the squire didn't contend with slash pine, "English" "landscape" having been concocted by human development over centuries, not just decades. (Isn't it amazing that humans mistake fingerprints of our activities as "nature"! schools doing nothing to correct us!) (There's been little nature in England for a long time: except insofar as everything is nature: including our interference.) But: everything else is evidence of the interference of development. The pine population isn't just waning; it's disappearing. A dozen pines become six, become four, become one, become none.

Ah, but we "gain." Everything is covered with potato-vines! The sky is blackout out by a superabundance of Spanish moss: indigenous to Florida but not common in unmolested pine flatwoods. That is, Jan's grounds were covered with vines and moss until I yanked most of it down and burned it on the beach.

I also clear ground fuel from her borders: and beyond her borders. Jan's property is beautiful in itself, both deep and wide, lush with growth, and on the lake. See some of my posts on her home at the PaulKnatz blog, 2010 September: a dozen and a half such posts, with views of the beach, and so forth. Southward, her property is bordered by a right of way the neighbors can use to access the lake. Further south the land is "jungle": unmaintained by the widow in residence. To the north Jan's lot is bordered by a lot wholly undeveloped. There the pines completely disappeared under the potato-vines: or had, till I cleared ten or twenty feet inward, improved Jan's view: and protecting Jan's home from fire, reducing the ground fuel.

Please allow for my preference for the possibility of a mankind governed by restraint, by good sense and good manners; while I am an enemy of unbridled human id. (I unbridle my own id, but that's just me; 6 billion of us are another matter. And if I thought it would help, I'd bridle my own!) I'm not for forest and against human settlement: until human settlement proves incompatible with forest: then I'm for forest and against human settlement. Humans in groups could have lived on earth for millions of years into the future (barring an unknown, perhaps unknowable, calamity). As it is I think I future is truncated, foreshortened.

details and exposition will be added over time

Sovereignty

2010-12-14T12:59:00.007-05:00

A current (current/ancient) squabble between the Irish and the Church goads me:

I don't accept King George III's sovereignty in the Americas in the 18th Century, I don't accept it in the British Isles either.
We "white" "Americans" threw George and his redcoats out. Good, I approve. Except we didn't throw him out so people could be free of his sovereignty, we threw him out so our own King George, and his cronies, could be sovereign in his place. Take Palm Beach, Florida, for example: a nice stretch of Atlantic coastline. Natives lived there, and who wouldn't, given a choice? So we sovereign white people, sent our army, at the combined suggestion of JP Morgan and Henry Morrison Flagler: who wanted to develop and sell the other people's turf.

Gee, if I like Donald Trump's real estate, and if I were a sovereignty like George's England, or the other George's US (or like the Pope's Vatican!), could I send an army to chase Donald Trump off of 57^th Street, so I could develop it?

If I had an army, the answer is, Yes: I could try. And if Trump yielded, I could claim sovereignty.

(But would it be true?)

My attitude toward sovereignty as divulged above is not new, not recent. It's acuity is chronic: across time. But here's a related change of pk attitude: once upon a time, for most of my life, since childhood, I would have conceded sovereignty to God. More recently I would have conceded sovereignty to god. Now I'm not sure I concede sovereignty to any entity.

I'm afraid that needs a lot of explanation: in this culture. I was raised to believe that the universe belonged to God. That he made it, that he hadn't sold it, or given it. Or, if he gave it (or sold it), the way he gave Israel to the Jews — "Israel" being occupied by Phoenicians the Jews called Canaanites — it still really belonged to him: so God could give, and God could take back: an Indian giver! (Of all the insults and injuries we visited upon natives — short of murder, genocide, etc. _ is any worse than still calling them by Columbus's mistake: "Indians"? Yes: maybe calling giving-with-strings-attached "Indian giving"!)

Let's concede that God owns the earth and the sky and the Jews ... and Israel. Let's concede that he owns you and me ... and every wog: every poor bastard born in the ghetto, every poor bastard born in Bangladesh, every poor bastard born in the New Guinean highlands, people who till recently had never heard of Africa let alone Europe let alone the US. Do we really concede that God has a right to torture the souls of those people for eternity if they don't get baptised? If God is sovereign, then he does. Just as if the US is sovereign, then we have the right to drop napalm on little girls, and bombs any damn where the President pleases! And the Vatican doesn't have to cooperate with charges brought against its priests! Sovereign!

It's been a long time since I've accepted the beliefs I was taught as a child: that the universe was magical, that it needed a creator to exist, that magic, not physics, determines things ... that the big magician owns everything, that he can give things to his special creature, man. Today I don't believe that humans are competent to have opinions probable of truth on any of these matters. Individuals are capable of learning, I see that, but I've become unconvinced that human society is capable of learning: short of a catastrophe so catastrophic that any shred of the species that came through the catastrophe would no longer be the same species: oh, please, I hope.

See? That last little reservation? Whom am I praying to? To a good god, to a progressive god, to a potential evolution, to something ... better.

But not to a god who owns anything!

Trying

2010-12-10T13:09:00.002-05:00

Trying

drawing by bydlr

I'll be adding text here shortly

Flotsam Causes

2010-12-01T12:10:00.002-05:00

Eight-ball into the side pocket! It's so easy, or it is with a little practice. You line up the 8-ball with the side pocket, you fix the line in your mind, you line up your cue ball with the spot on the 8-ball intersected by your imaginary line to the pocket, now you line up your cue stick, decide whether to roll the ball straight, whether to impact the cue ball low or in the middle, depending on where you want the cue ball to go after it impacts the 8-ball, decide if you want any English on the ball, and make your stroke. If your stroke is true, the 8-ball will fall into the side pocket: far more often than not. If it doesn't, then you didn't stroke it right, or, you didn't see your lines correctly, didn't make the right decision about where your balls impacted. In any case, unless there was an outside disturbance, an earthquake, the table disintegrated, the 8-ball went where you made if go regardless of where you intended to make it go. That's physics, that's the physical universe, the universe Gregory Bateson calls Pleroma. The trouble with our thinking is we think, and we are trained to think, by not very bright or original thinkers, that we live in the physical universe. Well, indirectly we do: the physical universe as modeled by our symbolic universe. But it's that later universe, or combination of universes, Creatura, Sentiens, that we directly live in: and in these universes of life, of symbols, of intelligence, of awareness, of false awareness, things are not simple.

I repeat a favorite illustration of my son's: Black Crayon. The school system learned that children who attempted suicide had used more black crayon in their drawings than normal: so they took all the children's black crayons away. The morons in charge of schools and children confused symptom and disease: they thought that by preventing the symptom, use of black crayons, they could prevent the disease. (Their action was irrelevant: except as a betrayal of liberty.)

Now here's an illustration that's long been a favorite of mine. The kid acts up in school, he's over-active, they say. They give the kid a med, you learn that the med is classified as a "stimulant," you go whoa! You're trying to calm the kid down, a stimulant is the last thing you should give him. Wrong: the stimulant tried by the staff stimulates the kid's activity repressor: it's the kid's natural depressive system that stimulated. Paradox? Only superficially. The logic is complex, but not illogical. That's Creatura, Sentiens: the universe of life.

But, I repeat: we think we live in Pleroma. We think that causes are as simple as lining up the 8-ball. We all do it. I do it.

Ferinstance, if you've read around pk enough surely you've seen his iterations of his identification with Jesus, the martyred god, with Galileo, the martyred genius .... The more so since my arrest in 2006. Still, it was not new thinking. I've identified with Jesus since childhood, and so do all Christians, even if not to the extent I do (or with the manifest justification!)

But dig this: in pk thinking, Christianity itself, Jesus himself, is subject to the same simplifications, the same vanities. God made man in God's image, a vain, self-maximizing fragment of consciousness.

I offered the world Illichian social networking in 1970 when I joined Illich's deschooling ideas to found the Free Learning Exchange. Cybernetic data basing, digital record keeping, in a public institution Not Controlled by Government! might allow humans to realize some of the social implications of Christianity, help us live together convivially, without the arrogance and interference of imperial kleptocracy. There, see? I think of myself as a cause! Well, of course I am a cause, and so are we all. But what is being caused is very complex: maybe there's an 8-ball involved and a cue ball, and maybe also an earthquake, and the table disintegrating.

When I invented the internet I was very much aware, and have routinely said, that "my" ideas had been floating around me for a decade at least, 1960ish: so much flotsam and jetsam. Now here's me, flotsam floating around amid jetsam. I encounter Illich, himself a jetsam floating around amid flotsam. He refers to Jesus in a way I resonate with, though I see Jesus as also so much flotsam floating around amid so much jetsam: in a world where Augustus Caesar, himself a Sargasso sea of flotsam and jetsam, was deluding himself that he could take 8-ball-in-the-side-pocket control of the world! Augustus influenced the world. So did Jesus. So do I, and you. So does the catatonic institutionalized in a box hosed out every other day by someone without a green card who the moment before stole the hearing aid from some old lady in the same facility.

Now here's the United States, stealing everything that is or isn't nailed down, paying royalties to those perceived as powerful and stomping extra hard on those perceived to be defenseless, deaf, and not accidentally, to my claims that it's my ideas that were stolen.

This is familiar. This is the universe of life, subset Sentiens, complicated by politics: the state of people organized for leverage, bossing people down-tide of them. I don't claim to understand it all: what I claim is that the Augustus Caesars, the Hitlers, the Nixons, don't understand it, understand if far less well than I do, but lack the humility to admit it, as well as the intelligence to understand it half as well as I do: and too stupid to see that it's they who are helping to disintegrate the table!

The majority is always smarter than some minority, but also less smart, far less, than some other minority.

I like to trust that god is smart, but fear that he too, at least the capitalized one, God, is so much flotsam. So instead, these days, I just trust that the 8-ball is going where we actually sent it, never mind where we meant to send it.

Bateson's cosmology of Pleroma and Creatura I report on and developed further (Sentiens ...) at Macroinformation.org. That domain got destroyed, is still down, but some material is being restored (and further explored) at my Macroinformation blog. (Same host as IonaArc.)

Imagine You're Not Here

2010-11-18T23:37:00.002-05:00

I have too much imagination: that's the reason the Director of Continuing Education gave for firing me. That was in 1973. The company was Stone and Webster which engineered nuclear power plants. John Constance hired me to be his assistant director but I'd come to make him antsy. I love his reason the more because by 1973 I was accusing the world, including Stone and Webster and John Dennis Constance of having too little imagination: I'd founded the Free Learning Exchange to offer digital librarianship of community resources as a replacement for coercive kleptocracy and its sleight of hand institutions, its compulsory school system preeminently. But the world was to self-complacent to save itself: an inconvenience to me but fatal to all of us.

But before I met Ivan Illich's concept of cybernetic social networking in 1970 I already had a favorite example of humans' lack of imagination. Hark back a decade or so before that. In the 1950s we worried about the nuclear bombs that we'd made and used coming back in our own face. Somewhere around 1960-something I saw a British documentary which shared the fear and pretended to marshal it. The film asked the audience to imagine a nuclear attack and then showed the film's own story board scenario fleshed by actors. We watched stiff upper lip Brits queuing up for food and water, all very civilized, very British. No, you fools: first you have to imagine that this theater is empty, or burned into nonexistence, we're all dead. Or most of us are dead and those few who are still alive and mobile are not queueing up nicely; they're gouging each others eyes for a sip of water.

The movie should I believe have asked us first of all to imagine that 99.9% of us, the lucky ones, were no longer alive.

Telephone

2010-11-17T11:28:00.001-05:00

Cro-Magnon man could walk, run, hide in a cave. When you had diarrhea you could hide behind a bush, but everyone knew. Your family, your group, knew your ass, your guts, you knew theirs. With agriculture man came to live in "houses." By Roman times the rich lived in houses that afforded "privacy." Unable to see out, others unable to see in, you could abide in the bosom of your hearth, imagining that you were safe: and, once Hannibal was defeated, you were: for the moment. The Romans did the kicking, everyone else in reach got kicked.

By the time of the British version of empire the rich man lived in a house. He didn't answer the door, a butler answered the door, or a maid, or his perfectly behaved wife, or his perfectly behaved child. In the office outsiders could reach the rich man only through his secretary. The sheriff knocked down the door of the poor man, but by 1860, if the sheriff thought the plantation owner had committed murder, the sheriff rode up to the plantation house, bowing, showing deference: the black butler would answer the door, the black butler would show deference to the sheriff while the sheriff showed deference to the plantation owner in the person of the black butler. Eventually the sheriff would stammer out a message, Please, if it pleases, I have come, to, with your permission, arrest you, Your Ownership.

By the early Twentieth Century Hollywood was inventing itself. Movies that a short time before would have been made in NY or NJ or Chicago were made in Hollywood, near the hills above LA. Charlie Chaplin, a London music hall transplant, redefined fame while he redefined film wealth. Chaplin was the first film star to sign a contract for $1,000 a week. It made headlines everywhere. Chaplin, at the time of signing, asked could they make it $1,025? What was the $25 for? I need something to live on, he answered. Chaplin was planning to spend the entire big bill on production: he himself could live nearly on air. Before long Chaplin was making one feature film instead of multiple short films: one and two reelers. Chaplin set new financial records when his Modern Times charged $2 admission. The studios said no one would pay it, Chaplin said they would: and they did. Chaplin made a feature every five years or so thereafter, and though he continued to pay salaries to favorites such as Edna Purviance for decades in exchange for no obligations on their part whatsoever, Chaplin kept a great deal of the money from his features for himself and his own private uses. Ah, you may think, so that's why he lived out his old age with Eugene O'Neil's daughter, Oona, on a mountain in Switzerland, vacationing on the Riviera at will. No. Chaplin's Hollywood wealth paled beside the money he'd made by putting his Hollywood wealth into the phone company.

Chaplin got rich enough in Hollywood to become very rich on Wall Street; but, Chaplin wouldn't allow one of the black beasts into his home. If you wanted to sell Chaplin a Fuller brush, you had to knock on his door and deal with the butler. Chaplin, the twentieth-century rich man, had no phone.

Knatz.com's Teaching / Thinking Tools repeated Gregory Bateson's comments on communication under the metaphor of the game telephone. Gather people, have a party. Assign person A to write a brief message on a piece of paper and hand it to person Z. Person A then whispers the message to person B who whispers it to person C. When "the message" has been passed to all participants, that person declares the message aloud. Person Z then reads the original written version of the message. Commonly there will be little resemblance between the "original" signal and the message as relayed.

I was just doing something in the bedroom. The phone rang. Rather than answer the bedroom phone I walked to my desk chair by my Mac, in the front of the house, sat down, and picked up. A voice with an accent that may have been from the subcontinent, some form of "Indian," said something that I interpreted to mean, Am I Mr. Knatz? Yes, I said and endured some more noise in that accent. "I don't hear well," I explained. "So far I've understood nearly nothing of what you've said." I listened further, assuming that it was a telemarketer, but not having proved it yet. I next explained that of the latest barrage I'd herd one word, but still made no sense of it: something Alliance.

Why wasn't the butler taking care of this for me? Why wasn't my perfectly behaved wife? or child?

Nah. I had to hang up on her myself.

Such Knowledge

2010-11-17T06:45:00.000-05:00

After such knowledge, what forgiveness?
TS Eliot

Pre-dawn this morning that line by TS Eliot came into my head — After such knowledge, what forgiveness? — for the first time since I can't remember when. That's funny, that line used to live in my head, daily: 1956 or so when I first read it, through 1961, '64 when it was a regular visitor. It's been so long now since I've read any TS Eliot at all I don't even remember which poem the line is from!

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Knowledge, forgiveness: Christian themes, pk themes. TS Eliot themes.

But it's 2010! What does the Twenty-first Century have to do with knowledge? with God? with forgiveness?

Of course it's the Christian shtick that we can be forgiven no matter what: if we are repentant. if we put our trust in the Lord.

But we're not repentant! What trust do we put in the Lord? We're not contrite. If we're contrite, say, over Vietnam, what are we doing bombing Afghanistan?

Are we bombing Afghanistan? I don't know. I no longer know anything. That I ever thought I knew much was all illusion, an illusion forcibly inherited from my far from honest or intelligent or knowledgeable or forgiven culture.

PS I see I had it in my quotes files, at Knatz.com and at pKnatzQuotes blog. So it has been in my head more recently that I'd said. Wrong about another thing.

Mislabel

2010-11-16T10:55:00.002-05:00

Knatz.com was big on the concepts of misrepresentation and mislabeling. Knatz.com got deposed: domino-censored, in the wake of federal censorship of my AgainstHierarchy.org. My unconstitutional arrest and subsequent parole is now over. Of course they can arrest me again, but their threat of constantly watching me is now officially expired.

Before my arrest I'd featured some Knatz.com modules by posting them here at IonaArc. Since my release I've added a couple, then others at my PaulKnatz blog. But I haven't get gotten to add my pieces on mislabeling and misrepresentation.

The Christian story shows the Temple of Jerusalem pretending to represent God while instigating to get Jesus crucified. The Temple of Jerusalem still exists, is still in business.
Ivan Illich said similar (that is to say, profoundly Christian) things about the Roman Catholic Church. (He himself was a priest, a monseigneur!) The Roman Catholic Church pretends to represent Jesus Christ. It's claim is not better based than the claims of the Temple of Jerusalem.

Jesus got crucified.
Illich got defrocked, the rug pulled from under him.

I, pk, a disciple of Jesus (via Ivan Illich and direclty) say that the United States pretends to represent the people of America but that we, US, do not. We do not represent God or Jesus or the People. We are thieves, kleptocrats. We are the damned.

We, as a group; not me, individually.

I'll be adding more about this: but everything I've written in the last forty years says the same things. You don't know my writing because your owners do not want you to know my writing: or Jesus' words: or God's words.

But of course there I'm doing a little mislabeling of my own: using metaphors at least, using metaphors I know the kleptocrats are constitutionally incapable of understanding: God doesn't speak in words, though all possible messages are there: here: in the universe. It takes science to read it: science rendered impossible by coercively state-run everything.

Knatz.com's Thinking Tools made this point (not yet transferred to pkTools blog):
Raymond Smullyan delighted the Johnny Carson show with a logical puzzle: say you have three containers. One holds dimes, another holds nickels, the third mixes dimes and nickels. Each is labeled: with one of the three possible lables. Each is mislabeled!
Raymond asked Johnny (and the audience): What's the fewest number of containers you have to open to figure out the correct labels: and what's the fewest number of coins that have to be examined.
And the answer is: One coin from one container: that is, one coin specifically from the mislabeled "Mixed" container.
Think about it: you'll see.

Now: Knatz.com had told that story, and made the following point: but before continuing the point, I merge with another, related point: Newton figured out the gravitational relationship of the earth and the moon. Newton figured that the earth and the moon held each other by gravitational lassoes as it were. There were two forces: gravity, holding the two bodies together, and inertia, making the two bodies want to get away from each other on a tangent, like a stone thrown from a sling. Newton decided that the two forces just balanced: and the moon and earth remained tethered. (Modern science agrees, with a slight modification: the moon is actually pulling away, slightly.
New posed and solved the species' first Two Body problem.

Writing my novel By the Hair of the Comet in 1982 ff., I wanted to calculate the ephemeris of a fictitious comet. I asked an engineer with a fondness for science fiction to help me with my Three Body problem. I wanted to use the sun's mass and Jupiter's mass to estimate a path for a comet of mass x. The engineer could only bluster. There are no solutions for three body problems. Human genius is already impressed with itself for getting a toe-hold with a Two Body problem.

Now: Raymond figured out a Three Mislabels problem: But human beings live in a world where Everything is mislabeled! There's no logic that can solve our problems.

Newton, fabulous genius: not smart enough. Raymond: very clever: not smart enough.
Illich, Fuller ... pk: not smart enough.

Now: will we live long enough to see: Is God smart enough?
Can evolution find a way for life to survive despite kleptocrats ruling everything? Crucifying gods, defrocking saints, jailing cybernetic revolutionaries.

Golgotha

2010-11-10T12:34:00.001-05:00

The people stood around Golgotha with their thumb in their ass while Jesus was crucified.

Of course it's impossible to tell how true the story is: like most stories it's fairly empty of facts. But I know this: today,

Christians stand around with their thumb in their ass
while Jesus' disciples get much the same treatment!
And do you know what? what may be worse?

Americans stand around with their thumb in their ass while freedom fighters are persecuted, the society using its whole arsenal to remain kleptocrats, damned, unChristian: and not free.

Hypocrites coming and going.

Satisfied

2010-11-05T10:42:00.000-04:00

I'll be satisfied when God puts everyone in hell. Once there I hope he'll use me to explain to a finally captive audience why they're there: exactly what I already do, for God, without the audience.

But what if God doesn't put everyone in hell? Or what if there is no God, no matter how clearly he's communicated to me? Or what if there is no hell: other than here, right now, and all time previously over the last five or ten thousand years?

Oh, well: I never really expected to be satisfied anyway.

To Be

2010-10-30T13:54:00.003-04:00

To be or not to be. How old were you before you even began to understand Hamlet's opening words to his most famous soliloquy? I recall clearly that it was so much gibberish to me before I began to absorb even the obverse meaning, the literal meaning. If you accept Christian dogma, including the dogma of Original Sin, then what right could we possibly have to exist: unless and until God forgives us, saves us? On another hand if your a naturalist, then surely we have a right to be born, to breathe, to eat ... to move around ... to breathe out, to defecate, to pollute ...

How's this for literature?
You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.Recognize it? Does this help?Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.I first saw those lines printed in a church on the south shore of Lake Geneva. It thrilled me. It was a Christian church, pseudo gothic, but I tell you the prose is pure blasphemy: there's no original sin in it, and the God doesn't jibe with any Christian orthodoxy. This is a secular poem with a God you can make up as yo go along. The church's post offered a provenance: "found in a Baltimore church in 1692." In fact here's the whole quote:Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.

As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant, they too have their story. Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit.

If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism. Be yourself. Especially, do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love, for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is perennial as the grass.

Take kindly to the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be, and whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.

Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.Makes you feel holy? It's a secular holiness, not at all Christian. And trust me: I know seventeen-century English: and that prose is post-Eighteenth Century! But then the story is well known by now. See for example this. Another church passing around more misinformation.

Before the Romans (and the Jews), cultures of law, no one, nothing, needed a right to exist. It's only in an over-crowded over-managed (kleptocratic) world, a world full of laws and lawyers, a world run by manipulated ambiguities, that anything needs a right to exist.

Christianity is kleptocracy that would shame us, then allow us relief: salvation: if we behave (not the way God said; the way the kleptocrats say!) Contemporary kleptocracy, kleptocracy descended from the eighteenth-century rationalists (ha ha, meaning atheists, of course, deists, like Jefferson, Adams, Washington) would shuck us of our designer guilt and recloth us as innocent thieves (who don't even know what they're stealing, that they're tresspassing).

Aside: Do you know this Woody Guthrie verse? Everybody knows his This land is your land, this land is my land ...
As I went walking
Along the woodlands
I saw a sign there,
Said No Trespassing.
But on the other side
It didn't say nothin'.
That side was made
for you and me!Never mind if my words are slightly different from some printed version: Woody wouldn't have. He changed his own lyrics as he sang: there's no one correct version. He's a folk hero, not an editor.

Note further: Woody wrote that and many another song in a project for FD Roosevelt. The politics are very complex. The sentiments are largely left: meaning government control, government interference, meaning socialism; on the other hand the anarchist sentiments are ineradicable. I love Guthrie for the anarchism, and the humanity, not at all for the alignment with the Democrats.

Sutter's Gold

2010-10-29T14:46:00.001-04:00

It isn't just that we stole Sutter's gold, while we invaded his domain, destroyed his farm, killed his livestock; it's also that we had ignored him when he invited us to join him as associates.

Sutter was born in Switzerland. He began setting his life in the new world up in New York (hung out in Brooklyn, knew Edgar Allen Poe), but soon headed west: at a time when it was well established that no one knew how to cross the Rockies: the Pacific wasn't the limit; the mountains were the limit. Sutter looked for fellow explorers to discover such a passage. He found no helpers. He found a way alone. We learned the way because he had found the way: unaided by us.

Sutter got to California, saw that the Sacramento Valley was ideal for agriculture. Again, he looked for partners, for associates, for fellow laborers and investors. He found none. He sailed further west, to Hawaii. There he found partners: Hawaiians who would invest their labor in return for a share of results. Sutter named his enterprise New Helvetia: New Switzerland. He sought, and obtained, treaties recognizing his sovereignty with Mexico, Russia, and the US. By 1849 Sutter's domain had rich farming, mighty live stock, not only employees and associates, but a private army.

Everything going swimmingly, he began to branch out into the lumber business. It was at his mill, all on "his" property that gold nuggets were found in the stream that powered the mill. It was Sutter's mill. Sutter's employees found the gold. Rightly, they reported their finding to Sutter. They were due some of the value: they found it; he was due some: they found it because they were on his land, doing his bidding. The owner gets some, the finders get some. But Sutter told them to keep mum: develop the lumber, then I'll think about developing metals.

Meantime the employees' kids played openly with the gold. Strangers passing by saw the kids, scoffed that the kids had real gold nuggets. Their moms said, "Oh, no: it's real gold alright." And that was the end of Sutter's New Helvetia, his agriculture, his lumber, his army, his mining.

People from the east poured west: over Sutter's route (finding other routes as well: once traffic was possible, it spread). (Did we thank him for the knowledge? Did we pay him a toll?) No, we tresspassed, panned for (his) gold, got hungry, killed his livestock.

The US put a court house in a rapidly developing San Franciso. Sutter summed his losses and sued. Twelve judges saw justice in his claim, awarded him hundreds of millions of dollars. The new citizens of San Francisco, suddenly finding themselves due for back rent and damages burned the court house to the ground. The judges scattered for their lives.

The US was used to gobbling land. The US, like any imperial kleptocracy, was used to taking whatever it wanted. What was different here was that we were stealing from a "white" man! It's doubly wicked irony that he'd invited us to share with him in the first place.

Oh, I don't doubt that Sutter wanted the lion's share. Why shouldn't he? Maybe he would have been difficult to work with, or for. Still, even if we'd declared emminent domain, we're building our highway through your living room, we should have paid him something for the land, the cattle, the lost profits ...

Sutter may have been the first white man robbed by the mob of white men. (He's the first I can name, where we all know the name.) But he wasn't the last: I offered social networking to the public in 1970 (as an alternative to social coercion in education: establish a cybernetic data base of learning resources, then every body mind their own business). (Johnny can learn to read: if he wants to. If Johnny choses not to and starves to death, it's nobody's business but Johnny's. If Sammy learns to read in twelve days instead of twelve years, then corners the rock-and-roll market, good for him. School was nothing really but a Procrustean bed anyway.

I asked for help, for resources, to build infrastructure. Years passed, decades. Then suddenly coercive governments and their institutional tools shove digital record keeping up our noses. I offered cheap public software development years before Microsoft was founded. I tried to engage IBM in my ideas in 1971, decades before they invested a penny in internet-related R&D. Bill Gates still didn't want anything to do with "the" (stolen) internet even after the internet was a world-wife phenomenon!

"You" all could have had convivial cheap versions of all of these things before there was such a thing as the PC! Once you did decide that you wanted them (after the kleptocracy's version was shoved up your nose) (after the money was taken from your pocket), someone should have noticed me: impoverished, a pariah, my son kidnapped, afforded no protection from the law, not published, now censored: all because I devoted my life to trying to deliver God's messages of social salvation (to people who still don't get Jesus' messages of spiritual salvation!)

I should have been killed the second the school noticed that I was intelligent. At least I should have been killed the second the fed realized that they wanted to steal and pervert my ideas. But I'm still alive, somehow, among the double-damned.

The End Is Coming

2010-10-25T14:39:00.001-04:00

Media-laden society is always hearing about doomsday predictions. Only careful readers and listeners will realize how many there are. Only scholars will document how many doomsdays come and go without the forecast-doom arriving. Jim Jones may have known what he was doing when he led his group of believers to suicide before they could all be disappointed in his election.

Churches destroy evidence the way Alexander killed his brothers once the king had died. Alexander knew he would have civil wars enough, enough challenges to his anointing, without his brothers coming up with alternate wills. If the Apocalypse of John is the only apocalypse Christians know, then they'll think it's unique: a dime a dozen lowers the value (to make a redundancy joke).

I just read online about another. And John, and Nostradomos, and some of my own rhetoric came flowing past me. What brings me here to scribble these words is a thought of the purpose of false predictions in a media-laden society: if the sheeple hear false prediction after false prediciton, they'll become skeptical about doomsday predictions and lull themselves into a belief that they're secure, that nothing can harm them. If Jim Jones was full of it, and even Jesus' Kingdom of God didn't arrive soon after his death (or since, so far as we can tell), why then global warming can't harm us: and neither can smoking, or cheating, or lying, or the medacious ignorant politically agenda'd school board!

I foisted a The End Is Coming joke decades ago. A friend gave a costume party under the theme Vicars and tarts. Males were supposed to dress church-related; the females were supposed to dress as though they were hawking their wares. I dressed as a prophet: beard, long robe. I carried a doom sign. Hung from my waist, over my cod, was a sign that said "The end is c-c-coming": with an orthographic joke on orgasm you see, and over my behind was a matching sign that said, with relief, "The end is come."

German and Jew

2010-10-18T16:12:00.004-04:00

Inge and I heard about a party over on Lexington. Last through the door of our group we found it held by a petite brunette. Inge marches by her with a curt inclination of the head. The brunette, our hostess as it proved, almost melted to the floor in abject terror. As she slid downward I stepped into her foyer to quick figure out what to do. Once I was across the threshold and hoving over her, her descent toward the floor revealed an entrance-way wall full of Kathe Kollwitz graphics: etchings, lithographs.

Our hostress began to recover on her own. "Your friend," she murmured. Inge had disappeared into the inner realms. "I ... I," she continued, am Jewish. She ... she," she said,"is so ... German!" Shudder.

I took my hostess' elbow, spoke close to her ear. "Me too," I said. "German by ancestry anyway." But she was already responding: "No, you're not; she is."

I'd never met the woman before. I don't know if she was normally hysterical, if she was an over-reactor. Never mind, this happened: it shows one woman's terror at the specter of something that could be associated with Nazis: in this case, a big, muscular raw-boned woman with tits that without any help from a bra and sticking straight out before her seemed massive enough (and aggressive enough) to knock over buildings, a jaw like a Tracy and the Pirates character, something from casting for Howard Hawks, but unaccountably and spectacularly female, shoulders like James Caan's.

Actually this woman was right in at least one detail: Inge is German, at least she was then: mid-1970s. (If fact she now once again lives in Germany: may or may not winter in her Pompano Beach condo. It's got to be three years since she last visited me.) I was born in NYC as were my father and grandfather; but my great grandfather was born in Germany. My mother's father too was of Germanic heritage: not too many generations here. I might remind some people of something Nazi, wrongly or rightly; Inge could remind anyone of something Nazi. Inge reminded the Germans themselves of things German: her government tried to recruit her to throw the discus for them in the Olympics. If she had, I bet she'd have broken a bunch of records: when I play tennis with her her forehand practically rips the racket out of my hand.

Anyhow: true story, but it's really just an excuse to display this incredible Kathe Kollwitz graphic: the artist of terror, of invasion of person, of female vulnerability, of infants crushed by killers.

I never told Inge of the impression she made. But Germans know anyway: don't they?
Like Americans.

Society

2010-10-15T10:57:00.001-04:00

We're social animals. Me too. Thus, naturally, I love society: depend on it, agree with our ancestors survival choice to group.

But I hate this society.

Society in contrast loves itself ... and hates me.

Society in general says it follows God, worships Jesus, but of course it does just the opposite. Those who follow God, or try to, or who ally with Jesus, or try to (those who overturn the money changing tables in the temple, or try to), are still isolated, persecuted, silenced. And society has no conscience about it. (Neither is society very conscious.)

I started drafting this intending it for InfoAll, my deschooling, deregulation, deprofessionalizing blog. But now I remind one and all that the major part of my Knatz.com, a censorship casualty of the fed destroying my AgainstHierarchy.org, was my Teaching area, and the largest area of that was my Society folders (with their myriad sub-folders!)

More on the same set of metaphors will appear at a range of blogs, including this one, and including InfoAll.

God Is Not Mocked

2010-10-10T07:25:00.001-04:00

Gregory Bateson's last book, Angels Fear, argues the truth of the statement God is not mocked by explaining it in a way that thrills me to my toenails. I translate his explanation thusly: in the long run, the truth counts. At the end of the day, the territory is the territory, no matter what the map depicts. In other words, in human terms, in human social terms, if nicotine is carcinogenic, but the myth says it's the cigarette (and the scotch) that makes Bogie so attractive (not his genes, the makeup, the script, the lighting ... Ingrid Bergman, Lauren Bacall), and you think Camels are mild, or, It's the taste! then at the end of the day, you'll still have cancer. God is not mocked.

If human beings are expelled from the Garden of Eden, but then stumble on the Americas and take them from the natives, saying that God rewards the good guys, but then we black ball the best guys, gush goods at the most compliant mediocrities, in the end, will our votes, our will, our self-deceits trump the truth? or will we all have cancer no matter what we edit for television, or drivel at the universities?

Can the actual universe be a dangerous place if we all conscript children into school and tell them they're free?

Is it the carcinogen that causes cancer? or the Nielsen rating that prevents it?

In other words (if Bateson is right, and Korzybski, and pk): reality will have the last word: only it won't come as words.

There are and will be consequences for human behavior. The pathological lies told by our major institutions: government, school, church can pacify us only so long. In the end it won't be just Jesus and his disciples who are dead.

1%er Association

2010-10-07T16:38:00.001-04:00

My GRE's Top 1% appeared at the PaulKnatz blog. It offers another metaphor for the theory of social homeostasis I've been developing at Knatz.com/Society (and here at this Iona Arc blog. The term "1%" here refers to intelligence, to learning, to discernment, discipline, and imagination inreading: but I can't use the term without recalling another use I learned about when I taught at Colby in Maine. My nextdoor neighbor rode a BSA Victor: a one cylinder off-road bike with big knobby tires — a lot of torque in any gear, even at modest revs, which this garbage-pickup-truck Maine Tibadeau had customized with ape hanger handlebars: his bike was an oxymoron: it contradicted itself by the microsecond: road! off-road! road! off-road! road! off-road! Hells Angels ride on pavement, showing off for the pimply girls, and they put high handlebars on their chopped Harleys. Dirt riders have to be on top of the action, with strong handlebars below their shoulders: for control, in the dirt. Anyway, This Tibadeau once told me that his friends were "1%ers" I told him I didn't know what that meant. He said, "You know, they say that It's only 1% of bike riders who give motor-cycling a bad name: well, We're that !%!"

Now that's a very different sort of 1%, isn't it? But maybe there are similarities. In social homeostasis it's both ends of any spectrum that are rejected by the mean. Those of average intelligence, of average learning, of average morality won't listen to the Gandhi or the Jesus or the Tolstoy, but they also don't honor the village idiot or the purse snatcher. I gloy in my intelligence, in my ethics, in my honesty, the more so becuase they are rejected by others: well, these bikers gloried in being bad to the bone.

Im-phatic Iago

2010-10-03T16:28:00.001-04:00

A line illustrating Iago's manacing diction in Shakespeare's Othello just floated into my head (apropos of nothing I'm aware of): "But for a satisfaction of my thought; / No further harm." The diction is an intrusion: where did harm come from? It's purely, ingeniously gratuitous on Iago's part as he begins to poison the atmosphere around Cassio (and around Othello, who's passed him over for promotion) (that's the imagined harm!)

Make of it further what you will: I pass my thought along here to initiate one point: "99%" of human communications are phatic. It's verbal musak. It's for soothing relationship, not for conveying information. There's little content. Sweetie pie! Coochie Coo! Hey, Babe! That's what we're used to: so Iago's "harm" sticks us like a frozen ice pick.

Note: the basic prosody for the scene is iambic pentameter. Iago's "But for a satisfaction of my thought," is perfect meter: ten syllables, five accents. The following line is also perfect iambic pentameter, but Iago speaks only the first two beats: No further harm: (though they read like three beats, don't they?) It's what Othello asnwers that fills out the technical meter: "Why of thy thought, Iago?" Now, reflectively, we can see: Iago gets two of five beats, Othello three.

Let me tell you: even the damn meter is dramatic, and establishes character. Well, damn it, it's Shakespeare!

Evolution, Society, and the "1%"

2010-10-01T16:16:00.004-04:00

Context: See GRE's Top 1% at the PaulKnatz blog. (Also see my Knatz.com/Society module on the subject: an earlier post here at IonaArc.)

I just added this PS at the former post: Understand all along how my points all fit into my workings of the theory of homeostasis: any system, certainly any living system, structures itself to preserve what's preserved, and to make slick paths of change. Averages claim to value excellence but what they really value are averages. Thus an individual of "IQ" 200 will barely be able to communicate with an individual of IQ 180, while neither will be understood by the staff at the NYT, The Smithsonian, Harvard ... Though in time, without credit, ideas, observations, admissions from such a stratosphere may filter inward toward the mean.

In other words, the mass of humans don't hear anything from more than a little bit "above" them: messages from geniuses, from artists, from divinities, from saviors ... may take millennia to filter down (inward, toward the core of men): or, may never get there at all. Not all seeds germinate; not all ideas become seeds. Evolution follows a random path, not an ordained path to perfection. Meantime: human institutions are there to pretend to facilitate communication while actually blocking it, editing it, managing it: supervising it.

God didn't tell me to get credit for offering a cheap internet in 1970, he just told me to offer it: the way he told Jesus to offer salvation. Only enough of what Jesus said penetrated to assure damnation; only enough of my cybernetic public records keeping penetrated to shore up kleptocracy. Still: it's all only temporary.

Eve's sisters didn't see that Eve was the mother of a new species, a species that would wipe her sisters off the face of the earth: out-performing them in fitness for survival. If they had, if her parents had, if her brothers, or uncles, or cousins had: they would have killed her. For all we know her relatives did sort of see it, maybe they kept her in a cage. Piers Anthony's Isle of Women imagines her as a pariah, the family weirdo. Still: Eve managed to attract Adam, Even managed to keep Adam attracted to her. She managed, exiled at home or not, to get Adam to bring her red meat, and to help feed and care for her children. That's how Eve was different: and its her descendants, her species, us, that have choked the earth and gobbled and wasted its resources in the five-or-six figures-of-years since.

Societies believe that they are entitled to know everything, to think anything, to understand what needs understanding. Of course we don't; the part is not the whole. Theologies posit a god who understands everything. No, no: not my god: I don't want any god who could muck up evolution. Between god and evolution, I'll take evolution: learning, growth, maturation, change ... adaptation. The worst curse I ever offered the Roman Catholic Church was that it should remain stuck with its teaching: that is, go under: hard.

When I taught at Colby in Maine my nextdoor neighbor rode a BSA Victor: a one cylinder off-road bike with big knobby tires — a lot of torque in any gear, even at modest revs, which this garbage-pickup-truck Maine Tibadeau had customized with ape hanger handlebars: his bike was an oxymoron: it contradicted itself by the microsecond: road! off-road! road! off-road! road! off-road! Hells Angels ride on pavement, showing off for the pimply girls, and they put high handlebars on their chopped Harleys. Dirt riders have to be on top of the action, with strong handlebars below their shoulders: for control, in the dirt. Anyway, This Tibadeau once told me that his friends were "1%ers" I told him I didn't know what that meant. He said, "You know, they say that it's only 1% of bike riders who give motor-cycling a bad name: well, we're that !%!"

GRE's Top 1% appeared at the PaulKnatz blog: 'cause it's about me! Spin off material appears here: because it's not about me. That is to say, the PaulKnatz blog is at least titularly biographical; IonaArc is philosophical ...

We humans say that we're "intelligent": as though intelligence were an absolute, all-or-nothing condition. I say it's a position (or a range of positions) along a specrum: along which we claim to belong more via ignorance and prejudice than objective measurement. Do we have IQ tests for snails or dolphins to match our tests for ourselves? Are our tests for ourselves worth anything? Will our tests for ourselves be worthy anything when we meet ET? or god?

Think of this: accept for a moment a "Christ" as something divine, resembling something human. Give this Christ an IQ test. Compare his performance to yours or mine: or Einstein's. Have we accurately mapped Christ's intelligence?

How did Christ's IQ test performance match Jehovah's? or Baal's? or a cobblestone from old Geneva?

Where do human institutions get the hubris to pretend that those institutions are competent to pursue their supposed goals? I mock my IQ test. I mock my school performance. I mock my performance in this society. None of our tests prove anything but institutional incompetence, the pathetic naivete of civilization. Now: the other side of that same coin:

Our institutions claim purposes and functions that would not be supported by falsifications administered by ET. My schools pretended that their purpose was to train me, to civilize me, to educate me ... My schools never demonstrated competnence to do any of those things: they were just fiated into power by the thugs of our kleptocracy. I've spent my adulthood offering disproofs; the society has spent my entire life ignoring my messages.

Well, that would be OK perhaps in a world in which Christ was a falsehood. Or in a world where there was no Truth other than that stage-dressed by the kleptocrats. In that universe the carcinogens in the tobacco won't kill anyone until a majority votes for it to be so. But what if we live in a world were truth cannot be compromised? What if the poison is poisonous whether we officially publish it to be so or not? In other words: can false authorities fiat their false authority into passing for truth in reality?

I say not. My society tackles me, knocks me down, holds me down: so there's no contest.

Did you ever hear such a story? Sure: it's told in the Bible. Not very accurately. Not at all honestly. But still. Mythically it's true. It's there: a truth we tell, but ignore.

Celestial Trial

2010-09-29T13:49:00.003-04:00

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.

Nazi Mythologies of the Hidden Wealth of the Destitute

2010-09-28T16:18:00.004-04:00

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.

Experts, Specialization

2010-09-23T10:53:00.003-04:00

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.

Who Owns New York

2010-09-18T11:52:00.004-04:00

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.

Bleeding

2010-09-11T08:59:00.007-04:00

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!

Negative Adam

2010-09-02T08:26:00.007-04:00

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!)

Earthly Judgments

2010-08-25T06:29:00.002-04:00

The human world, the human kleptocratic world, is governed by human judgments. Some kleptocracies pretend to be guided by divine judgment: Christian European states, for example. But till God is heard from (so all would know it's God speaking (how would that ever happen?)) all we have are the Christian kleptocracies' word for it.

I believe in God's judgment: provided we understand God to mean truth: the actual territory, not some human representation, some "map" of the territory. But that judgment (the truth) will never be known by human kleptocrats. Or it may be approximated by individuals both intelligent and honest, by you, by me (on our good days): but the moment we form a group, a society, with compulsory school and military service, and taxation, and media run for profit ... No, no, no.

I was just recalling some human judgments portrayed in the Old Testament. Genesis has Lot visited by some angels. The nasty neighbors take the angels to be men: good looking men. The neighbors demand that Lot give his guests up to the neighbors so they can bugger them. Lot offers his virgin daughters instead. And God reduces Sodom and Gomorrah to rubble. But just before, did the Sodom Gazette report that the Sodomites had misidentified some victims for rape? No, no, no.

Trouble is, we only get to read the earthly judgments: while the exceptions, like pk's writing, gets ignored, or misrepresented, censored ... while pk is jailed.

Double Negative

2010-08-22T12:40:00.003-04:00

Double Negative

Bio-Paradox

The kid causes trouble at school. Some neighbors hear that the school is giving the kid stimulants. Huh? No, no: the culture wants the school to pacify the kid, so all the kids can be pacified: whaddrthey giving the kid stimulants for?

Because the pharms figure that what makes the kid hyperactive is hypo-activity of some behavioral repressor: maybe if the repressor is stimulated it will let the kid inhibit himself, naturally. Ah: behaviorism of a level more sophisticated than we're used to in the old simple-minded culture: the cue ball hits the eight ball, the eight ball drops into the side pocket; we're no more used to complex causes than we are to multiple body problems: we can handle Joe and Marilyn, but not one million people on the subway, everybody hand forced against somebody else's something or other.

Bear with me: I broaden the base:
The school teacher says that "two negatives make a positive." She illustrates,"I ain't gonna do that nohow" means that that non-standard-written-English speaker is going to do it! No, no, no, lady: lots of negatives mean negative, Negative, NEGATIVE. They're connected in parallel, not in series. (With batteries, series connection boosts the amperes; parallel connection deepens the voltage, it doesn't multiply the current.)

That's a start. I'll join my targets next time, forging a new metaphor.

Pretend Authority

2010-08-19T02:24:00.010-04:00

Authority is necessary for any politically imposed belief system so the belief can be asserted over experience.

Real authority, were there any such thing — a church that actually hears and represents an actual god, a government that actually represents a population of sentient, non-toxic beings, I would be for. As it is, I'm against all authority that I'm aware of: as fraudulent, factitious, illegitimate. (Of course the authorities can, and have, side-railed me, silenced me, impoverished me, arrested me, and censored my writing as well as my speech. Notice that I haven't arrested or impoverished any authorities that I know of (though I do try to keep resources from governments by avoiding having an income, thereby being free of income tax.)

Schools pretend to have and to represent and to be able to bestow knowledge, skill, wisdom. Sounds good. But what you actually get are a bunch of experts telling people not to listen to Galileo and his telescope, that Copernicus was crazy, that some "theory" of "Creationism" concocted a century and a half after Darwin is legitimate "science" ...

King Herod ruled the Jews in Jerusalem by the forbearance of the lieutenants of Augustus Caesar. When Jesus was hailed by Jews (in the street as it were) as King of the Jews, Herod and the Temple priests tag teamed him, getting the Roman rubber stamps to help. Who were the experts? Jesus? the Son of God? No: the priests, the governors ... the money changers whose tables Jesus overthrew.

No. In heaven authority may be real; here on earth it's fraud: pure fraud followed by purer fraud.

Meantime, notice. You son tells you the priest fucked him in the ass. You tell your son that he's imagining things, for shame, the priest is a holy man. Then you see the priest with his robes up and your son held bent, you tell the bishop. For shame, the priest is a holy man, scolds the bishop. Finally the bishop sees it, tells the cardinal, the Pope ... the Times. For shame, the priest is a holy man.

The experts, authorities, can erase experience: over and over.

Related thoughts I'll sketch in a post on Discrepancy Reduction: at my pkTools blog.

Mugging Santa

2010-08-18T12:44:00.004-04:00

Santa is said to bring gifts to good little boys and girls on Christmas Eve. The gifts are for the children. All they have to do is sit and wait. Then they'll have them (if they're good.)

What though if the kids are bad little boys and girls? What if the bad kids (and grownups: kleptocrats, bureaucrats) know Santa is coming? What if the bad kids ambush Santa from the shadow of the chimney? Will the bad kids then legitimately own the good kids toys? (They will if they run the government and write the laws and monopolize the justice departments.)

God sent Jesus to offer us mercy. But we knocked him down, tortured him. Do we "own" the mercy?

Do kleptocrats have God by the short hairs? Or is God just giving us, still, all the rope we need to hang ourselves? An infinity of times.

Law: Nature, God, Science, Society

2010-08-17T11:05:00.002-04:00

If scientific law and nature's law and God's law are not one and the same then is there something wrong with science? or nature? or God? or the society which has such concepts?

That's what I just wrote among my Law quotes at my pKnatzQuotes blog. I hope the statement implies the essay that belongs with it. I post the statement here where such an essay might develop.

Initially I'll say only that I don't believe that human governments, kleptocracies all (these days) are competent to administer science: and if we don't know what the truth is, how can we write laws? how can we hear laws? I don't trust the Church's word on God; I don't trust the US' word on what the "people" say; I don't trust the Times to know or tell the "news"; I don't trust schools to know what science is: and that includes Harvard, MIT!

The Cross of Iona

2010-03-10T14:53:00.005-05:00

The Cross of Iona

Otherwise known as
The Celtic Cross

Competence

2009-12-14T03:31:00.002-05:00

God, order ... law ... These are ideas that humans have without the competence to contemplate them well.

Culture

2009-12-04T13:26:00.004-05:00

Culture is a faith-based phenomenon: evidence gets ridden over roughshod. Americans believe (as they're told) that they're "free" (while the government has its hand in all pockets, while school is compulsory ...), Christians believe that they're "saved" (while Jesus' disciples still get arrested ...), "scientists" believe that they're "rational" (while whatever ...) (Once the FBI lab has been caught falsifying evidence, why is there still a funded FBI lab? Why once university labs have been caught falsifying evidence are there still university labs? Why are there still governments? schools? (and universities?) Why are there still churches? Cheats from the get-go.

Culture, that's why.

Human cultures typically believe that they are competent at theology, science, history ... How many of those beliefs would bear testing? How are we going to stop God from being objective in his tests at Judgment? What percentage of God's messages have penetrated the culture to reach the target audience? Some? Any? Certainly not all.

I believe the answer is Some. Very few. And none that I've been involved in. The crazy thing is: the culture's soldier ants – cops, teachers, bureaucrats – don't even see what they're doing. They think they're "right"!

Knatz.com had many modules on culture. The above blurt is merely today's. I'll be restoring the earlier modules here at IonaArc as I can.

Finch Bump

2009-12-02T16:31:00.002-05:00

I tend to think of myself as "always" having been a teacher, and a great one, but this morning I recalled an incident from my adolescence proving that any such impression is far from true: an early attempt at teaching was ill-advised, unsuccessful, and turned brutal.

Pre-teen pk was always doing the neighbors' gardening, had a big newspaper delivery route, had a drawer full of money: and few expenses, very few vices: I'd indulge in malted milkshakes and Clark Bars at the worst. Generally the only other things that I bought were jazz records, a few of those weekly, but this memory involves an exception. I was in a pet store. One cage was active with tiny birds, "half" of which seemed to be in the air at one time changing perches. They were colorful in a pattern and of a combination of hues I wasn't familiar with: subdued grays, yellows: harlequins of subtlety. "Finches": $n.nn each, the sign said. I wanted that activity, I wanted to own it, to have it. I bought a cage and one of those finches for it, took it home, and hung it in our front enclosed porch.

The solitary finch was active I suppose; but nothing like the crowd of finches had been. Already I felt let down. But I didn't dwell on my disappointment, I had plans: I was going to train this finch. I was going to train this finch to perch on my finger. But my hand in the cage drove the finch crazy. Now the finch was hyper-active, didn't alight for more than a moment. A solution occurred to me: the finch will fear the wooden perch less than my finger: train the finch to the perch that I'm holding, then train the finch to perch closer and closer till the finch will perch on my finger.

But of course twelve or thirteen year old Paul had no experience with training anything, had no concept of time passing for individuals and populations. My finch was fleeing the perch I held just as manically as it had fled my finger in the cage. The poor bird was wearing itself out and was losing agility. I decided that we needed a break in our training. I topped up the finch's seed and water bowls and left it alone.

The next session went no better. But I had another idea. The bird might learn more to my satisfaction if the perch I held for it were longer, further away from the me he hadn't yet learned to love and trust. Sho nuff, I had a dowel in the basement. I had a dowel of a diameter the finch could grip. I got the dowel. Now we needed more room. The cage was too small. I closed the door between the porch and the living room to confine my circus to the enclosed porch and let the finch out. Immediately the finch flew as far away form me a possible and clung to a curtain at the top of a side window. No, no, train yourself to ME, I beamed my thoughts at the terrified bird. I approached the finch, holding the long perch out for it. But the dowel poking near its belly just drove the finch to the other end of the porch. This was not going at all the way I'd hoped and planned.

In a word: now I was getting tired. The bird would cling to the curtain top at the north end of the porch, but flee to the south end as soon as I re-crossed the porch near the middle. And something else was happening: the bird was beginning to poop all over the porch in its desperate flights. Paul's circus rehearsal was out of hand.

My grip on the dowel tightened. Had my face enough age to show a little character I'd start to look more like Bogart and less like Alan Ladd, more like Lillian Gish's father in Broken Blossoms and less like Lillian Gish, more like Wiley Coyote and less like Tweety Bird. I approached the center of the room. The finch saw me coming, and flew past me, high up near the ceiling.

I didn't plan it. I didn't see it coming. My action showed me that I didn't know myself at all. I swung the dowel like a saber. I slashed at my poor new pet.

Luck was against us, in the extreme. I connected. The little finch was knocked cold, clean out of the air, and lay on the carpet. I was heartbroken. What had I done? I picked it up, cradled it in my hands, blurted that I was sorry. Like a balloon the finch's finch beak inflated into a bump that seemed bigger than the finch. Did you ever see a bird with a bump on its beak? A bird that was all beak to begin with?

I put the bird back into its cage. The bird came to, and reclaimed a spot on a perch. But not for long. The finch fell to the cage floor. Before long it expired. I threw the corpse away, moved the empty cage to the basement. I'm not sure what young Paul learned that day; but old pk learned something: because just recalling the story this morning I realize: I'd forgotten completely about it! I learned that I hadn't learned to teach in one I'll-tell-you-whether-you-want-to-hear-it-or-not session.

Race (moved)

2009-12-02T15:46:00.018-05:00

moved to Race: A-Scientific Myth

Shakespearean World

2009-11-30T15:09:00.000-05:00

A world in which Shakespeare is revered, preserved, assigned doesn't spawn more Shakespeare; it spawns academic dreck. The "Shakespearean" world is chock-a-block choked with dreck writing: writing by the trained, by the certified.

(Did you ever read a document written by a school board? or by an English department? (Not by an English teacher; by an English department? (or a math department, or a history department ...?)))

(Media then save us: till media are saturated with media dreck.)

Superstition

2009-11-30T09:17:00.004-05:00

That we've outgrown superstition is the principal superstition today.

What could be more pathetic
than a people who've replaced sexual terror
with an AIDS epidemic thinking that not
instantly jailing pornographers from the wrong
social station means that there are no taboos?

I don't believe that Alan Watts had any greater title than The Book: On the Taboo of Knowing Who We Are. That taboo applies as much today (if not more) than it did the day Watts' book was published.

Secular Absolution

2009-11-28T08:26:00.005-05:00

"Te absolvo," says the priest to the sinner. "I absolve you." The Church spreads this idea that God can forgive sin and that God delegates his powers to the Church and the Church passes the miracle along to the priest.

That was once upon a time. The sinner could exploit the peasants, starve the workers, rape the virgin ... give a coin to the priest to help build St. Peter's Basilica, and the priest could say, "I absolve you." God was supposed to have to make good on it. (Who do you sue if he doesn't? The priest is personally without property: the Church owns all the property. Besides, you're dead before you realize you've been deceived: and of course the Church doesn't believe its own lies, or it would realize that all the defrauded souls would start howling.) (Besides: starving workers wasn't "sin"; sin was sacrificing to Baal, or eating pork, sacrificing a lamb with a a flaw, a mark on it, ... sin was holding your dick with your right hand ... failing to observe some taboo, failing to be precise in some ritual ...)

But now God isn't God: now the State is God. No one gives a shit about divine grace. No: we want secular salvation: from our secular god, the State: and the state buys our love with secular absolution: we steal a continent from the natives, Washington forgives us as we do it. We waste God's grace: Washington forgives us.

The State is the kleptocrats' proxy thief. DC steals cybernetic networking of the public from Jesus-Illich-pk, but perverts it into the planned obsolescence already reigning. But then the kleptocrats' thief absolves the kleptocrats. The left hand knoweth not what the right hand doeth: or pretends not to.

more, smoother, later

Monopoly

2009-11-22T10:19:00.001-05:00

Say "monopoly" and we think "industry": or "markets. We think economics, money.

As I think the term money definitely applies but as secondary, far secondary, to power, to influence: to control. Social control, the control of the minds of the subjects of a kleptocracy. It doesn't just apply to the west but we westerners think the west is the world: our exposure is western, our schooling is western ... like Judeo-Christianity.

There: Judeo-Christianity: a set of religions of monopoly. One Temple, One Church, claims that One God created, owns, rules all. Monopoly.

The one Church claims one orthodoxy: no discussion allowed. Or, if there is discussion, the discussion is faked. This Protestant once sat in on a confraternity for Catholics. A priest gave us the dirty on what was wrong with the movie Martin Luther. He asked if any of us had seen it. I said I had. I asked if he had seen it: he hadn't. Yet he was lecturing us: from ignorance. Ignorance as authority: that's monopoly.

In the one US the government monopolizes the gold: and the schools, and the taxes, and the law, and the justice ... and the jails ... Oh, pardon me: control may be fought over among the federal level, the state level, and the county level ... When I was in jail I watched in stitches as the state cheated the fed while the county cheated the state.

This could extend in any of many directions. No doubt I'll be back: if I live, and can still see, and have fingers.

Embracing Injustice

2009-11-22T04:53:00.002-05:00

I embrace injustice.

Injustice is all I've gotten, all I'm gonna get. I might as well embrace it: I've got to embrace something.

Could that be what Jesus meant by loving your enemies? On the cross did Jesus love those who were crucifying him? If his need for love was desperate enough, he'd have to: because the mortal agony was all he had left!

Dancing Thoughts

2009-11-20T11:02:00.023-05:00

Cha Cha for the Hands

I'd been taking requests all morning at my line dancing class when I announced that we'd do the Special K Cha Cha: I reviewed the sequence of steps and selected Marc Anthony's I Need to Know on the CD player.

Highlands Senior Social:
Ahn, Paul, Barbara, Jean

This pic is not of the class
but of a line dance during the regular morning session.
It looks to me like we're at
Count #13 of The Electric Slide.

I love the dance, and I love the song. I love Marc Anthony's polyphonic composition and his precise performance. I enjoy dancing with the core of dancers who were on the floor with me at the moment: Nancy, Isabel, Barbara, Joyce. Others would join us but not yet. At the end of the number Isabel and Barbara were conferring on something:One said, "I've got the steps, I'm trying to learn the hand movements."
"There are no hand movements," I said. "Do what ever seems natural."
(And Jim Clark, setting up his guitar amp for the ballroom band that would begin playing at 10, volunteered, "My utilities guy says, 'Do whatever spins the meter'.")There was no time at the time to make sure that my point was clear (or to make sure I'd heard them right) (my hearing being none too reliable these days) (so I'm not even sure they were talking about the Special K, the dance we'd just danced). But my thoughts for the rest of the class were teeming with associations, clarifications ... analogies. I share some here:

Whole Body

There isn't any part of Michael Jackson's body that wasn't part of the dance he accompanied his "singing" with. Every digit of every finger, his ears, his ear lobe, knew exactly where each sixteenth beat was. It would almost seem that simultaneously every follicle of his hair knew as well where each third of each beat was. Fred Astaire was in total command of his body and was wholly at one with the swing music: as Michael Jackson was one with the funk. And it isn't just dancers: back in the 1950s I loved to watch Horace Silver while I listened to his music. Different parts of his body pulsed with each of the several variations of the rhythm he was exploring. His left foot was tapping one rhythm while his right foot was beating another, his head was nodding with a different emphasis while his elbows made rude comments: all while playing the most unbelievable funky piano accompaniment to his band. Charlie Parker's drummer told of the immortal saxophonist demonstrating rhythmic independence for him. Bird took over the drum set, his alto sax still strung from his neck, and kicked a Charleston beat on the high hat, a Dixie beat on the bass drum, beat triplets on the snare drum with one stick while accenting quarter note triplets on the tom tom with the other. That's the sort of rhythmic juggling the saxophonist can do! Each digit is alive!

For line dancing the choreography may cover only the feet (the body necessarily following) but the dance welcomes the whole body, mind, and spirit.

If the women had been referring to the Special K, and liked what I was doing with my hands, good, let them do something similar: or something different. We're all dancing, all dancers. (And it helps if the body has natural resonance to music (and is trained into mastery of some of the subdivisions of time). We're not the Rockettes, identical in as many details as the Roxy Theater can control; we're free: within a prescription.

Let me narrate an analogy:

Analogy: Skiing

I didn't ski till I was twenty-two or -three. Once I skied I became mad for it. I injured myself almost instantly, but didn't stop. By my third trip I was skiing expert slopes with names like Hell Gate. But it was several years before I skied those expert slopes well: well enough so that lifetime racers at Tuckermans Ravine accepted me as one of them. I remember a watershed moment which transformed me from not-really expert to expert enough. My best ski buddies at Sugarloaf Mountain in Maine were instructors there. Hubbie was a German professor at Colby during the week and Herr Skimeister on the weekends. In all our time together Hubbie never "instructed" me in anything: till one day. He said he bet that if I cut a quarter of an inch off my ski poles it would help me get my weight forward for the pole plant. I did it. With my new shorter poles I made sure that each turn commenced with me coming forward to plant the pole tip right by the tip of my ski. It was magic. I was transformed. I instantly became a better balanced, more dynamic, more graceful skier! (And more courageous! (I was already far more daring than suited my wife (or my employer).))

Then I realized that the length of my poles had nothing to do with it; the essential point was I wasn't getting my weight far enough forward in initiating the turn. Skiing safety depends on turns, and turning depends on alternately weighting and un-weighting. The weighted ski resists turning; the unweighted ski finds resistance unnoticeable. As long as I returned my weight forward for each change of edges I was rescuing myself from the natural tendency (natural cowardice) that causes intermediates to hang "back" on steep slopes: putting sludge into their turns, and inviting overturning. No, no. You get on top of gravity. You ride it. You keep your upper body in the fall line: while you swish your skis from side to side, like windshield wipers. We fall off the saddle every time we lag. Suddenly, even on the steepest slopes, where it counts most, I was skiing with my whole body.

It's a paradox: where the danger is the greatest, you throw yourself into the danger: then you dominate it.

Same applies to dance. Same applies to everything.

Lesson

No matter the steps, the part prescribed,
the part your feet have to do
and do in synch with the others –
Dance with your whole body.
Use your arms, your hands, your fingers –
not just for balance,
but to express the rhythm,
the dance, the music,
yourself!

Meter, Rhythm

Meter is the predictable side of the rhythm. The dances that I do are all either common time of waltz time: either 4/4 or 3/4: four beats to a "measure" or three beats to a measure. The music that I love to listen to, sing, or play may be in 5/4 time, or 6/8 time, or 2/2 time, and I wish I did encounter dances in those times (in 6/8 time especially, I do love 6/8 time) (and maybe some dances, like the polka, are in 2/2 time); but trust me: the line dances I encounter and the ballroom dances at our social are basically 4/4, with the occasional waltz thrown in. That's meter: meter declares what the rhythmic regularity is; but it ain't music till it becomes irregular, unpredictable. That's the rhythm: the part that's different, a part that one may fall in love with.

I find I Need to Know to be rhythmically fabulous: salsa of the highest sophistication. But though I also love the Special K Cha Cha, there's one thing about the dance I find week: its juncture between choruses. I would like to see it re-choreographed with a better turn around.

Illustrations in specific line dances will follow below.

Juncture

My dance training consists of a two week course in the sixth grade, and some line dance participation in this my seventy-first year. I don't know if there are dance theorists who use either term; but they've got to have the concepts. I develop them by analogy from linguistics and from music. Juncture here is the border shared between two distinct things: like a sea shore; like the ending of chorus one and the beginning of chorus two ... Here's an example from linguistics: consider the phrase "night rates": now consider the word "nitrates." The phonemes are identical; yet in the one case we all clearly hear "two" "words"; while we hear one in the latter. The difference is one of juncture. "Night rates" separates the /t/ from the /r/; "nitrates" links them: blurs them.

I am not crazy about how the Special K cha cha recycles itself: how count #32 junctures against the next cycle starting with count #1. I think the juncture could be improved. Whereas I love some of the junctures we had just danced: Amos Moses, for example: of The Electric Slide. (Details may follow.)

Turn Around

"The turn around" is a musician's phrase: in jazz music, in pop music. Let's say you're playing a twelve bar blues. The song displays a harmonic and rhythmic pattern over twelve measures: that's the first chorus. When it's your chorus you play the same progression of chords, but your solo should "comment on" the melody; not just repeat the melody. (Miles regularly improvised counter melodies. That's why Bird was in love with the raw kid.) And no matter whose chorus it is, when the last two bars are arrived at, bars eleven and twelve, use chords that point at the final tonic chord; not the tonic chord itself. In other words, if the blues is in G, not only do you use a lot of 7^ths (and maybe 9^ths and 11^ths and 13^ths) (that's what makes it "far out"), your final measure will be G (or G7), the tonic, giving a sense of closure, of finality: but while cycling through the choruses you don't want it to close, you want to keep it open: so you substitute chords that "point at" G: Am7 / D7, for example. The Am7 / D7 chords turn the chorus back on itself: a final G will finish it.

Analogy: Writing

Here's a different analogy, from writing. Edgar Rice Burroughs ends a middle-of-the-novel chapter with Tarzan trapped in the pit with the lion: that keeps the narrative open, ongoing. Having him marry Jane is how Burroughs might close the last chapter: the end of the story.

Analogy: Ballroom

Analogy from ballroom dance: I dance a fox trot. I use my slow, slow, quick-quick step; I sense the tune ending: I put my partner into a spin: and we bow / curtsy to each other on the final beat. That's the tonic, the cadence, the closure: all before is ongoing: turn around.

Illustrations: Juncture

Line dances are all a given number of counts. The counts don't have to match the beats in the music. They typically don't. Pop music is often based in a sixteen measure pattern. the number of beats in a chorus is therefore four times sixteen = sixty-four. Line dances are typically sixteen beats, thirty-two beats, thirty-six beats ... It doesn't matter: 4/4 line dances will come out fine with 4/4 pop music. Never mind where the musicians' measure is; synch with the count of the dance.

I criticized the turn-around of the Special K ChaCha: I'll illustrate in a moment. First I'll set it up with an illustration of a turnaround, the juncture between repetition one and repetition another: in the line dance Amos Moses. Amos Moses is only eight counts. On 1 you place your right heel forward; on 2 you bring your right foot back beside your left, transferring your weight to your right foot. On 3 you place your left heel forward. On 4 you bring your left foot back with your right, but turn it one-quarter turn counter clockwise. If you started facing a north wall, you're now partly turned toward the west wall. On 5 you swing your hips square with the west wall as you bring your right foot into a step to your new right, the north wall. On 6 you step your left foot behind your right foot, a kind of a "vine" move to the right (north at the moment), transfer weight. On 7 you move your right foot further right (or north), but start to twist back clockwise (soon to face east), as on 8 your left foot follows your hips around to square with the east wall.

That's the "chorus": eight counts: eight counts with a quarter turn left and a half-the-hall turn right. You start out "north"; you end up east: after turning west: all in eight counts. But now here's the thing: you continue the dance. You recycle. Count #9 is a repetition of Count #1.

By itself, one 8-count cycle is cute. But you ain't seen nothin' yet. 5, 6, 7, 8 turns around into 1, 2, 3, 4. And the juncture is funky. Even a dancer with good balance will have a time maintaining an erect neutral posture from which to resume the right heel forward, right heel back, left heel forward, left foot turn ...

There a natural, an inevitable lag between your feet and your hips. Funky, man, move those hips. Come on girl, push that tush!

continues in a sec

Get Down

2009-11-14T21:36:00.003-05:00

Soon after we married Hilary wanted a kitten. Soon she wanted a dog: to keep the kitten company. (Then she wanted a baby: just a little one, please.)

Hilary wanted a scottie, which we'd named Angus in advance. (Imagine our surprise when the pup we brought from Macy's puking all over the subway was a German shepherd.) I determined that I'd become a good dog trainer. When Angus chewed my slippers I spoke harshly to him. From then on Angus chewed only Hilary's slippers. I trained Angus never to get up on the couch. Thereafter Angus vacated the couch as soon as he heard us coming home: or at least as soon as he heard me coming home.

Once when Hilary was pregnant and walking Angus he pulled her down and dragged her. That time I ignored the book's admonition to make sharp noises near the dog, especially near the dog's snout, but never to actually hit the dog. I did hit Angus that time. I beat Angus. A lot of good it did. But someone clued me in: "How old is the dog," that person asked? "Is he two yet?" "No: a year and a half." "Never mind," he said, "Be patient. Until he's two he's a puppy: un-trainable. Once he's an adult you'll see your training take effect." Wow, was that true. Once Angus was two he proved to be the most amazingly intelligent and well behaved dog. I've already told some Angus stories elsewhere. The Fed in censoring my AgainstHierarch.org domain knocked all my domains, all three thousand of my text files off line and my couple of thousand graphics. Gradually I'm remounting some of the modules, but thus far I don't think any Angus stories have been resurrected. But I tell this Angus story for a different reason. Actually it's not an Angus story at all: it's a Paul story: a Paul and his society story.

You see: the one dog training lesson I got from the books that actually worked and worked almost right away, long before Angus was two, concerned training Angus not to jump up against people: pawing at their shins, thighs, and crotch. The book said to deflect the dog with your knee: wait till the dog is half way launched, where he can no longer see your knee coming. Then just stick your knee out and deflect the dog from landing against your legs or body. The book "explained" that the dog would eventually give up. Eventually the dog would assume from his failures to land on his target that human beings simply can not be jumped up against. By golly, whether or not that reason applied, the technique nevertheless worked. Angus stopped trying to climb people.

And now I see how very well the same technique should have worked on me, would have worked on me had I had any sense. All my life I've tried to explain things to my society: how to live like humans, how to be less shameful, less illegitimate, less foolish, less deadly ... I've devoted my talents to writing my messages as stories, as myths, as jokes ... as art. But the society doesn't want me jumping up against its vulnerable parts: so it just puts its knee out. No matter what I say, no matter how humorously I weave the matter, the society doesn't want my paws in its sensitive parts, and it deflects me. The stories aren't published, my professors all play Peanuts' Lucy and pull the football away before I can kick it. My novels aren't published. Finally my domain modules are outright censored.

But look: here I am: stupid me: still trying to communicate!!!!

God Is

2009-11-10T10:25:00.005-05:00

I have moved this post to my new pkTheo blog.

Self

2009-11-10T09:51:00.005-05:00

Everyone thinks "only" of his self.

("His" there is of course a [sic] joke. Language contorts us before we even begin to model experience.)

But understand: the self is an idea: an idea which always (the older one gets) includes others.
A mother's self will include her baby,a lover's self will include the beloved,
a soldier's self may include not only his buddies but his enemy.

As pk is always saying, there isn't anything in human consciousness that isn't an idea. Our only "contact" with the cosmos is through signs, symbols, information. The mind (an abstract) is based in a wetware of electrical switches. There are no concrete things there. None. (Except the wetware itself.)

Dummy Tackles

2009-11-04T06:10:00.009-05:00

An article online this morning reminds me of an old conundrum of mine. NFL teams drill their players in running, blocking, passing ... but all punches are pulled in tackling practice. They practice everything hard: except tackling. They don't want to injure their own stars. Come Sunday each team's stars can waltz through the other team's punch pullers.

Kids grow up playing Bang Bang, You're Dead. I did. And I was steeped in cowboy movies with their bar fights, John Wayne taking a punch, shaking it off, and powing the other guy. At the end of the cowboy movie Gary Cooper would shoot umpteen bad guys so he could finally go one on one against Frank Miller and kill him dead, Grace Kelly then forgetting her Quaker foolishness and giving him a kiss. Real gun fights really killed people; Hollywood has only one Gary Cooper: so Hollywood chairs crumble to sawdust when crashed on his head, Hollywood haymakers just miss: and the actors playing the heavies get to sue big time if they sustain a bruise from practice with Jean Claude Van Damm. As a kid my Christian training made me resist enjoying the general culture's training: one hour of love and tolerance on Sunday has a hard time standing up against 24/7-1 of Hopalong Cassidy getting hit with sawdust chairs. I refused cooperation in following John Wayne and Gene Autry. It wasn't until I was at college and started going out of the general way to watch Akira Kurosawa's direction of Toshiro Mifune in chopping off heads and cutting people out of their kimonos with his katana.

I discovered that I loved the violence: violence with a heavy moral always. Then I'd watch Mifune go one on one (or one on a dozen) in any director's samurai flick. But by that time I was an adult (of sorts: do any of us ever really reach adulthood?) I loved art, including cinematic art, but I loved science too: Darwin, evolution, Bateson ... And I thought and thought: how can it be good for the species for "our" hero to kill "their" hero? (Or for their hero to kill our hero?) If the Yankees beat the Dodgers every year, why were there still Dodgers to beat next year? (I never doubted that the lords of Flatbush wanted to raid the Bronx (or beter yet, Manhattan) and rape and pillage, leaving none alive.)

If Gary Cooper shoots every other six footer every two hours, how can there even be one six foot Gary Cooper?

Now, restate the problem: if the NFL players really played to tear each others head off, how can there be more than one NFL player left with a head? And if all punches are pulled, if all is Hollywood, how come there are real fatalities in real wars? Are there any real wars? The NFL doesn't mean to practice fakery, but that IS what they practice. Come Sunday heads get torn off only by accident: and then everyone howls.

Why howl for blood, and then howl if there is blood? (Is that what it is to be human these days?)

Once upon a time wars were to kill enemies. But then war changed. Now wars are to kill a few so the surviving bulk can be ruled: as passive consumers. The Romans killed the Celts to take over their salt mines without paying them any royalty. Modern Romans (like us) kill as few Celts as possible: so we can own the salt mine, paying surviving Celts peanuts to work the mine: and then sell them the salt!

Ah, I've wandered into related areas. I meant to stick with the one point: lions competing against hyenas on the savanna can kill the hyena without much visible harm to the lions, but the big male lions can't kill all the other big male lions without harming the lions as a whole.

In the wake of worshipping Kurosawa's costume flix I heard about martial arts tournaments where the combatants could break bones, maim, and maybe kill each other, all scrambling for the one top spot. Musashi doesn't just beat Kojiro; Musashi kills Kojiro. (And Kojiro doesn't mind: he wanted to discover whose bushido was better: and Musashi shows him).

I'll develop this further later.

Satan

2009-11-01T13:01:00.000-05:00

Satan is God's prophylactic glove: so God doesn't have to touch diseased souls with his bare hands.

Honesty

2009-11-01T11:50:00.002-05:00

Science invented honesty. Science accelerates technology. Kleptocracy, dishonesty/hypocrisy incarnate, monopolizes science, reducing it back to technology: honesty submerges back into the infinite potential of the void.

An honest society would repel dishonesty; a dishonest society, this human society, repels honesty.

Honesty will fare in human society about as predictably as Jesus fared with the Temple in Jerusalem. Anyone who expects us to welcome Jesus the next time may as well expect phosphorus to lie inert on water.

The above statements were written a day or so apart from each other. Only then did I notice that they sort of go together. I add more such statements in a scrapbook form: though of course any of these could expand to an independent module.

Cheating: the orthodox excuse their own cheating as being on the side of the angels: it's OK to cheat For God.

Jesus in Siberia

2009-10-26T13:49:00.009-04:00

Siberia is a region of Asia which has come to symbolize a wilderness far from civilization where Big Brother can exile dissidents. Stalin can send messages into Siberia; the exiled cannot send messages out. Indeed the exiled can barely communicate among themselves. Starved and tortured, an exile can barely communicate within himself. The English have an expression that the nonconformist has been "put in Coventry": same thing, though without the Stalinist extreme of the late Soviet. (Americans don't have quite so handy a term for it that I can think of. We have "sold down the river": but that references individuals who were slaves in the first place, no one cares how well they can communicate.)

Jesus is a name for the entity that Christians claim is the Son of God, the promised Messiah of the Jews. Etymologically the name seems to mean "son of the father," blessed of God ... or a series of such meanings (as do also other Semitic names.) (Barabas, for example, also means son of the father: in Arabic too). Christians (and others) have used Jesus to symbolize someone who's virtuous (while everyone else is sinful), someone who's right (while everyone else is wrong) ... I'm going to put the two symbols together into an oxymoron: and see what they do. (First I set a comet tail tangent for our entrance, referencing a fictional entity related to Stalin's Siberia.)

Stephen Hunter, one of the most wonderful of all male-oriented fiction-weavers created a character in his novel Tapestry of Spies, that he then recreated in his novel Havana. The guy has been a loyal Commie all his adult life, a brilliant assassin and strategist and spy for Koba, committing brilliant crimes for the sake of converting society into an absolute tyranny of bureaucrats claiming to serve anarchism. (We real anarchists, we independents, hate that crap.) The trouble with being a crook for Koba is that soon Koba will fear you and send you to Siberia. (When I was in the federal prison at Jesup, arrested by the FBI for accusing my graduate school of fraud and pretending that once I was flat broke, utterly helpless, old and starving, that I was actually going to do something about it, I met prisoner after prisoner who testified that they'd been an assassin for the FBI, or a coke dealer for the CIA, or a go between for FBI-CIA-HellsAngels assassins and pot farmers. The Kobas of the US betrayed them too. Me they merely betrayed all my life, sending me to school, lying about how free I was. I'm their natural enemy, because I conspicuously never bought it; they, my fellow federal prisoners, in contrast, had been loyal crooks and murderers for US: covert versions of the uniformed soldiers we seed around the world.

In Havana our spy is thrilled to catch and eat a cockroach in his cell: a rare bit of protein for the deracinated genius. But a moment later, Koba's Siberia thugs come and drag our genius before some higher level Koba thug, and guess what? Koba has another self-sacrifIcing task for his exiled master mind. Will the master spy cooperate? Will he again suffer and sacrifice himself on behalf of Koba and world Communism? Of course he will. Or at least he pretends to agree. (The master spy in Tapestry may have had something else up his sleeve as well: like stealing a few hundred million dollars from Koba and the Soviet!)

Now: notice some of the parallels possible to draw between Jesus, God's scapegoat, and the long-suffering Commie spies of Hunter's fiction:

In the first case Jesus cooperates in being arrested, kangaroo'd, and tortured to death because it's the only way Christian assumption has it that God can figure out to save human beings from sin. Now: according to the Gospels, Jesus got resurrected: into immortality. According to Christians Jesus is alive again, with a real body. He spent three days in hell to singe away his own trivial little tad of sin, but his permanent residence is heaven, where we can think of him as interchangeable with the father: like Hamlet and Hamlet. I like to think that Jesus is alive, body or no body, and can travel wherever he wants: back to earth, back to Jerusalem ... back to hell ... where he can seek out his tormentors and piss in their mouth. (I like to imagine that I'll be able to do the same, with him, or without him, once I'm finally dead.) (Oh, please.)

But meantime, imagine this: Jesus is resurrected. Jesus goes back to Jerusalem. The again living Jesus gets treated exactly the same the second time as he did the first: sees he'd be treated the same to infinity. Jesus thinks, "Hell": learns how to dance, meets a bunch of nice Jewish girls, and takes turns among them rewarding himself for a change. Or: Jesus is still locked away in the same prison he was first locked in: his spirit can go to heaven on occasion, but not his body. And God comes to Jesus in prison (or sends an angel) and says, "I have another mission for you: man still isn't saved. I want you to go out and let them mis-try and crucify you all over again."

What will Jesus say to God the second time? Will Jesus say "Yes"; but then go and steal a few hundred million-trillion dollars in gold and move it offshore-off-planet to Aldeberan? Will Jesus say "Yes," go to Cuba and try to save Fidel Castro from Earl Swagger?

How much sacrifice should Big Brother expect from his master spies?

When God whispered to me about secrets of literature, secrets of Shakespeare, then about summoning the global village via cybernetic librarianship of the planet seen as a network of independent communities, free of Big Brother everywhere because a vigilant mankind refused to tolerate any more Big Brothers, I said "Sure": and conceived of my doctoral thesis (1965), then founded the Free Learning Exchange, Inc., 1970, NYC. And so forth and so on.

Now I'm deaf and blind and half-impotent, subsisting on welfare while other fed and local services are denied me by bureaucracy after bureaucracy: some of the bureaucrats mere amateurs, mere receptionists. What will I do if God comes to me now? "Paul, I have here a solution to human survival even more profound than an anarchist internet. Are you ready? I'll even buy you a hamburger: and maybe a hearing aid. While we're at it, we'll take care of that cancer on your ear."

I don't know. I fear I'd do it. Though I wish he'd ask Jesus first. Or Koba's spy.

Would I steal the hundred million dollars? I'd seriously be tempted.

Angels

2009-10-24T13:09:00.004-04:00

Is there anything more absurd in human society than the belief that a god can communicate with a human culture, directly, one-on-one, the communication successful in reaching the entire cultural group? Yes: the idea that a god can use an intermediary, a messenger, an "angel," and get the same results.

Notice: my statements don't imply the nonexistence of the god; neither do my statements deny the existence of communication, and absolutely they do not deny the possibility of communication between a god and a human: or a god and an angel: or an angel and a human; my statements are skeptical in the extreme that a chain of such communications is possible in a human culture. The god may speak to the man, or the angel, or the woman, or the child: the angel may speak to the man, or the woman, or the child (or the other angel — or the other god; but it is the plural of man, the society, the culture, the religion, the nation, the republic ... that I'm denying sentience to. God can talk to Moses, but can Moses talk to the Jews: AND be understood? Jesus can die, for man or for any other purpose; but will mEn be able to get it? to communicate it? to set up theological seminaries that get it?

Not in my experience. Not in my experience as a speaker, a writer, a messenger, an angel ... I testify that I heard the god. I testify that I heard my own imagination. I testify that I translated the message into speech, into literature, into art. And any god can show, contemptibly easily, that none of the message, none of the literature, none of the art penetrated beyond this or that individual. No "group" of receivers ever formed. There was this god, and that man, and that woman, this and that angel; but no host of angels. No sentient society.

I said so. In speech, in art, in literature. And they arrested me, jailed me, branded me ... But I'd long been branded. Hadn't been not branded since ten years old.

I've lived my life believing that there is a way: though as I age I believe it less. (Hope diminishes, despair waxes with experience.)

Meta-communications communicate in statistical fractions: if a termite drops a grain of sand and no other termite in that generation of workers drops another grain of sand next to it, that doesn't mean that no termite sand column will ever erect there. Jesus getting crucified for suggesting that we behave ourselves doesn't prove that the messages of an N^th Jesus will succeed in communicating zero between the god and the society. On the other hand the cosmos may never reach an age adequate for the necessary learning to take place. Evolution may go "up," and then "down," but never arrive anywhere.

How would we test my claims? How could we be scientific about this?

Now the only rational way to test either idea would be to find some perspective from which all gods and all societies, all cultures, were accurately included, and start counting. There is no such perspective to be found, in my experience, in all cultural claims that I know of, or in my own personal imagination, my imagination either social or divine; so, we're limited to thought experiments: test the imagination the best we can.

Grab the Redhead

2009-10-22T12:45:00.018-04:00

Escorting a cute red head back to our table I found the aisle blocked by a single wide body. I skipped holding her chair that time and let her go around by herself. But the guy turned out to have been lying in ambush. He grabbed Red and squeezed her.

Red didn't seem flustered. She sat down and said to her friend sitting across from her (next to me), "I just got a grab."

I was frustrated because I'd been elaborately courtly to Red all day: bowing at the end of a dance, offering her my arm as we walked, holding her chair ... and Mr. Wide's heterosexual aggression I already found boorish. I'd allowed myself to be finessed out of the action and was frustrated and tongue tied. But Red's friend didn't say anything either. The rest of our table seconded our silence. But back home I posted a report immediately, an early draft of this here: and asked the following ethical conundra:

What should Red have done or said? What should I have done or said? What should our friends have done or said? What should our senior social have done once I told our CEO?

But something happened as a result that puzzles and annoys me even more. A more complex account will be told as a Paul Knatz story at Redhead Revisited.

Two years later another chapter perhaps explains some part of what went wrong: and right: Red Alert.

K. Conundrums

2009-10-19T12:05:00.004-04:00

This section of posts will parallel my K. Symbols section, spread around Iona Arc over the past several years (while concentrated at the censored Knatz.com in the Teaching area.) The pk conundrums are minor K. symbols, long salted around K.: here I merely repeat and summarize:

How can you have a year when there's no solar system?Cosmologists imagine a universe which came into existence roughly fourteen billion years ago in which the earth and our sun came into existence as "the solar system" around four point six billion years ago.
So: I see there the earth has had "years" for four point six billion years, not for fourteen billion years, and certainly not for any period of time longer than fourteen or fifteen billion "years."How can you have a mile when there's no earth?Same problemsCertainly you can have time, you can have units of time. You can have extension, dimension ... units of "length," "width," "depth," "duration" ... but I don't see us having "years" or "miles" prior to having a solar system. In fact I don't see it prior to English being spoken: specifically modern English: My English!

Thus time may be infinite, the cosmos may be older than the universe, the universe is older than the solar system, and the solar system is older than the English words "time," "solor system," "earth," "mile" ...

The same way you can have an infinitely powerful, infinitely old God create the universe six thousand years ago using an already fourteen billion year old universe (in a cosmos of which we have no ideas of age, direction, originality, uniqueness ...)

Homo Sapiens Moronsis

2009-10-19T08:53:00.003-04:00

I know it's silly to think that names describe the thing named. Is Prudence prudent? Is Honest John, the used car dealer, honest? is Faith faithful? How tricky can Tricky Dick be relied on to be?

In Linnaean classification and its derivatives human beings belong to the Genus Homo and to the species sapiens. Modern humans, we who talk a lot, are additionally classified with an extra "sapiens," indicating the "modern" "race" of humans: Homo sapiens sapiens. To "man" gets added "wise": to wise man gets added wise wise man.

For decades pk mocked the taxonomic redundancy, publishing such among his modules, comments, jokes ... online since the early 19990s at Knatz.com and its related domains. Today I wish to propose a new name: Homo sapiens moronsis.

Fiat

2009-10-19T08:33:00.010-04:00

"And God said," according to the Latin Bible by which Christians interpreted the Jewish sacred tradition, "Fiat lux." That's a lot of languages, a lot of mythology, and a lot of iron age, bronze age, cosmology/theology we pass through before we get to the English interpretation of King James's scholars:

Let there be light.

"Lux" is "light." So what's "fiat"? Make, create, come into existence ... Who knows? Literal translation is very iffy between incompatible world-views: the old gods, the old myths don't translate one-to-one: not to contemporary schooled persons who think that jobs and health care is what society is about. But never mind: I'm not after literal meaning, I don't believe in literal meanings anyway: only metaphorical interpretations, macroinformational re-interpretations: of the kind that got Jesus crucified. And I want to start a new section among my blogs, sort of parallel to my Knatz.com symbols posts, where the concept "fiat" gets extended as well as examined.

Fiat Money

First: the idea of fiat money, a phrase that's been around for a while, has been stated by pk at and around Knatz.com over the past decade. I'll remount that module following this post (or ASAP thereafter), doing so before I rewrite it as well as it needs, just to get the idea on record. Other people's expression of the idea can be sampled in economic literature on-and-off-line. In brief here:Money emerges from a human market place, then specialized organs of the market such as banks invent bank notes to substitute for horses, cowrie shells ... or gold: then government emerges from the welter of the market with its specialized organs (conceive "market" roughly as property, products, vendors, buyers, public, banks) takes over and, "borrowing" substitute "money" from the banks, issues its own money-notes. The governments next step in "borrowing" everything is to subtract the gold from the money: leaving government with all the property, all of the gold, all of the land, all of the resources ... and the public and the banks and the vendors with a lot of paper: fiat money.
The market had "made" money out of human value decisions; the government takes it over, sucking out the value.Here today I wish to make notes for further development extending the metaphor of fiat-this and that to other preposterous contemporary fiats, especially hidden fiats: fiats not examined in the over-developed but school-addled forebrain of over-populated Homo sapiens moronsis.

Fiat Innocence (/ Fiat Guilt)

coming next (this was my original stimulus to come on line and to blog this.)
(In a word, beyond a certain density, society becomes infected by institutions that exempt themselves from the standards they uphold: the government supervises the law suits but you can't sue the government: except by the most unlikely confluence of improbabilities: such as, you need the government's permission to sue the government!
Thus, in all essential things, the government is innocent by fiat.

I love James' Genesis where God gives his first command in a passive voice. In Latin, "fiat lux" sounds commanding: now there's a general in charge of the troops: a BIG magician. In contrast, "Let there be light": who's doing the letting? Is God the magician? and the cosmos the sorcerer's apprentice?
According to BigBangers, the universe first existed without light. Is that what James' Genesis means? Fourteen billion "years" ago (how can you have a year when there's no solar system?) energy had flashed into existence, matter precipitated out, and now the system was ripe for some energy to manifest as visible light, radiating in all directions from all possible sources and propagating at c. velocity: c, being roughly 186,000 miles per second.

(And it was upon penning that last that I decided I had to add a K. Conundrums section.)

The Kingdom of God

2009-10-16T21:26:00.000-04:00

One important difference between earth and the Kingdom of God, certainly at least as I imagine it, is that on earth the reigning kleptocrats don't have to listen to the charges their victims make against them. The Christians may get to accuse Caesar, but not to his face. Hitler's bureaucrats can refuse to grant an audience to the rabbis: especially once the rabbis are jammed together with all the other Jews, minus their geld and their gold teeth, into the concentration camps. Nixon, prior to his resignation (and seldom after it), did not have to sit still for the world's litany of his crimes.

In the Kingdom of God on the other hand, as Jesus is depicted as having painted it, when God speaks, the universe will listen, not merely leave the room.

just starting, more to say of course

CommunicationN

2009-10-06T11:06:00.005-04:00

The possibilities of success for a message vary with the number of communicants involved. There are several meta-levels – quantum leaps as it were – involved.

The Jews' literature tells us that God spoke to Adam, to Noah, to Abraham, and to Moses. God's success rate in that literature fell off abrupty as Adam tried to communicate with Eve, Noah with his neighbors, Abraham with his son, Moses with the Jews. The Gospel of Mark had Jesus unable to communicate with his disciplines let alone with you and me: or did, before early Christians rewrote that gospel, changing the ending.

Jump to the Twentieth Century: I was unable to communciate my thesis idea to my thesis advisor, certainly not to my satisfaction (and I can't imagine to Shakespeare's satisfaction either!) But under those circumstances, what was the probability of my success in communicating my reading of Shakespeare's Sonnets to the graduate English Department faculty? to a peer review publication? to the bookish portion of the general public? to the public as a whole?

I've never failed to communicate some messages one-on-one. My success rate drops off precipitously if a third party is present. My communication ratio where crowds are involved remains close to zero. They understood enough to invite me, then knew better than to let me actually speak, or to listen if I spoke anyway.

But:

I believe God's success rate is little better. I believe Abelard's, Darwin's, Mandelbrot's is little better: and they have the advantage of (now) having famous names, where an extra person or two might pay attention.

I've published a great deal about communication over the decades, said a great deal more over the past half a century or so. The fed knocked down my AgainstHierarchy.org domain, and my other four domains fell with it, no one helping to catch while I was in (or out) of jail. (There: that's another factor, one the censors understand very well): if the censor can label a prophet a criminal, then the prophets message, already not receivable by the majority, has an even steeper climb against the grade of human inertia.

more coming

This is a first draft. I didn't write that at all well above where I said that Noah didn't communicate well about the flood with his neighbors. The story has him not trying to warn the neighbors: not warning the neighbors was part of God's message to him. Rewrites will follow. Bear with me in the meantime.

Reality

2009-10-04T12:21:00.001-04:00

Reality is a symbol: a symbol that would impose a world view, elbowing examination aside.

Religion

2009-09-30T17:53:00.006-04:00

Religion reflects human imagination concerning the cosmos. Organized religion restricts human imagination concerning the cosmos.

2009 11 16

I yesterday started pkTheo, a theology blog. The above statement is duplicated there, related posts are being moved there.

My post on Communication_N will say more on the same theme before I add more here.

2009 10 26

My current thinking emphasizes the difference between individual and group. The proposition that there is a God who speaks to a Moses (or a Jesus) (or a pk) does not necessitate any proposition that that God therefore speaks to the Jews (or to the Christians) (or to Americans).

Every Christian faction believes that they've got God right (says Bart Ehrman). I say that those factions are wrong: so they put me in Siberia, ignore-while-censoring my theo-cosmologies. I am sustained by imagining a Judgment in which God merely shows people their actual behavior – as distinct from their wishful image. Not in eternity! Time itself is infinite. Merely after we're extinct will suffice.

And I iterate my point from my one article actually published, long ago in 1971, that universities (and all socially-compelled Western schools) derive from Christian monasteries: not thought fettered only by truth; no: thought control.

The orthodox don't listen to the heterodox, will break all their own rules to avoid hearing. Universities have as much academic freedom as monasteries have philosophical tolerance: the same amount of "free speech" that Americans have in a media-ruled market: where the media depend on advertising revenue, and advertising revenue depends entirely upon Pollyanna.

Sport

2009-09-13T11:55:00.007-04:00

I love sports. I love to ski, and to fish, and to play tennis; but that's not what I'm talking about when I say I love sports — I mean spectator sports: seventy thousand people filling Yankee Stadium and screaming at Joe Dimaggio, I mean a nation glued to the radio late at night, my sister and I eavesdropping from the top of the stairs, as Joe Louis pummels Max Schmelling, the whole world paying attention, I mean hundreds of millions of people transfixed in front of their TV as Michael Jordon, aging, wounded, goes up for the winning J as time runs down.

I love who good writing about sports is swiftly immortalized; while good writing about theology, cosmology, homeostasis, information, kleptocracy ... must pass a gauntlet of pummeling morons: elders opposed by nature to improved theories, unwilling to pass hypotheses that make them nervous: elders from church, from universities, publishing houses, network executives, answerable to pharmaceutical companies, to big tobacco, to Chrysler and GM ... to the BOD, to the alumni ...

The screaming about Babe Ruth was encouraged once it passed a certain number of decibels. The screaming about Josh Gibson was muffled before it ever approached those decibels. Still, despite Gibson, despite Cassius Clay getting persecuted as Muhammad Ali, what I love about sports is, spectator sports, is thatSports are where the society actually allows the map to sort of fit the territory; unlike politics, business, religion ... the competition is sort of fair, the playing field is sort of level, the judges are sort of honest ... The rules actually make some effort at clarity ...

Today's sports news has an unusual item: Serena was playing Kim Clijsters in a semi-final at the US Open. I cite what I just emailed my son, bk:Serena vs in the US semi
Serena already had a warning, abusing her racket against the post.
In match game against her, she faults, then throws in a foot fault, bring up match point against her. So she screams and threatens the line judge. The line judge does according to the theoretical instructions, report the abuse to the umpire --every one had heard it, but the ump isn't allowed to officialy hear it till it comes through chanels, and the ump awards a penalty point to the receiver. and Clijsters wins the match.

a warning plus a penalty = a point against.

Serena said that foot faults hadn't been called against her all season. Note she didn't say that she hadn't foot faulted. You can't win at that level if you don't almost foot fault, sometimes actually foot faulting.

I was in Madison Sq Garden decades back, Rod Laver playing.
A foot fault was called against the Rocket at an important point late in the match.

Rod spoke up, was heard in the back rows. Oh, no, Shut up, Rod, I thought.
But Rocket said, "How many of those have you called tonight, Ref?"
and the place roared. with delight.
Rocket resumed serving, and won, of course.

Serena offered to shove the ball down the lineswoman's throat.
Tennis would be a different game if official Tennis had penalized Jimmy Connors or John Mac by suspending them when they were still 14 years old.

And really socking it to them when they were "adult" pros.

The great Jack Krammer was announcing radio for a big match decades ago, Mac or someone was carrying on, and Krammer's cohort in the booth said too bad these punks don't have smooth tempers like you, Jack, and Kramer said, No, no, he had a terrible temper.
Huh? We never saw it.
Jack said, Maybe you never saw, because past age 12 I was careful to hide it.
He'd been having a tantrum on court. The officials were indulging him, not exercising the rules. His father came down from the stands, approached the umpire. The umpire announced the match for Krammer's opponent: Jack's own corner, his own FATHER! volunteered him as DisQ!

Corroborate, Please

2009-08-30T15:46:00.002-04:00

The Jews say, through their Bible, that their God said that The Jews are God's Chosen People, that God intends for the Jews to have this land, that destiny ...

If I arrive at Ellis Island with a book under my arm, and that book, written by my brother, describes the Trump Towers on 57^th Street, and says that the God who created the universe loves me and chooses me and intends for me to have the Trump Towers ... should Donald Trump and his lawyers move out, signing all papers over to me? Wouldn't Donald Trump and his lawyers want to meet this God, to question him on his supposed creation of a universe, or his authority to love me, or to give Donald Trump's Towers away?

The Christians say that it's them, Christians, that God loves, that we're no good, but it's OK, because God loves us so much anyway that he finagled a trick against himself whereby we torture him to death, and he just loves us to pieces because of it. Now we can firebomb Dresden, nuke the Japs, napalm little girls in Vietnam, drop bombs on Bagdad ... lie, cheat, and swindle, but God gives us the right to steal from the Mohawk, defrock his priest Ivan Illich, interrupt his messanger pk, arrest him, jail him, railroad him ... but he rewards us with eternal bliss anyway: all we have to do is say that we believe that Jesus loves us.

If some woman traipses all over Times Square saying that I love her, shouldn't someone ask me for corroboration?
Who asks God to corroborate what the Jews say?
Who asks God to corroborate what the Christians say?

No one allows pk to corroborate anything that he says: but how about at Judgment? What if there is a Judgment?

How are the Jews going to control what comes out of God's mouth then? What will the Christians do? Interrupt him? Crucify him again?

Text / Telephone

2009-08-29T11:40:00.004-04:00

Text

Telephone

Merely thousands of years ago text didn't exist; now it's ubiquitous. (And anything overly familiar maybe hard to think clearly about.) Animals have used sounds for a very long time. Animals have also used visual cues for a very long time. Humans developed speech, modern humans developed complex languages, both natural and artificial. (You mother calling your for supper is using natural language; the salesman talking about hooking your car up to the computer is using artificial language, as is the doctor telling you about your embolism: I here am writing a mixture of both natural and artificial languages.)

Telephone is the name of a game that many scientists are familiar with, and that we all recognize the truth of the moment we hear about it. At a party form the members into a line: so they're organized like numbers, serially: 1, 2, 3 ... The game leader writes a word on a slip of paper, then whispers that word to the person in position 1: at an end of the line: the beginning of the line. Person 1 whispers what he hears to Person 2: and so on and so forth. Person N whispers it to person N+1 until Person Last is reached. Person Last then writes down the word that he hears. Finally the game leader displays the two pieces of paper: 1) the message sent, and 2) the message received. Rarely will the messages match.

Now put those two ideas together: Text + Telephone. Conclusion: there is frequently noise on the phone: the information sent is not always the information received.

Jesus is supposed to have given us advice. The evidence is not clear. Now we're supposed to believe that we have his text: pure, clear, saving! Not likely: except by miracle.

Now, after a lifetime of dealing with text, and criticism, and scholarship, including textual criticism, I jot this little note, touching on an array of problems concerning information.

The other day I mentioned some textual problem to my date. "Well, what does the manuscript say," she asked, in all innocence, her naivete just brimming. That's the problem, exactly. For important documents from the past, we don't have the manuscript. We can't check what the author wrote: not God, not Moses, not Homer, not Sophocles, not Jesus, not Shakespeare ... and even among contemporaries, not necessarily with pk: so many of my manuscripts have been lost, stolen, borrowed and not returned, interfered with (by the FBI among other parties!)

I have a number of things I want to sketch here, and I intend to. Bear with me as the balance of the post develops scrapbook-style.

What pop icon do you remember the first appearance of in your lifetime? When Elvis performed Jail House Rock there was only one version that go a wide hearing. A millennium before Elvis would have been like anyone else: his song could be heard only by those within range of his voice when he's signing it. The mother nursing her baby may have only half-heard it, so too the lovers nudging each other in the dark. But by the 1950s things got mass recorded, mass broadcast ... the public got used to the delusion that there could be one version of something. "Toscanini, now that's Beethoven!" "Nonsense! Wilhelm Furtwenger! Now that's Beethoven!"

In the 1960s we heard the Beatles on the radio. Then we heard them in the movies, and everywhere. Now we hear popular Beatles tunes as "classics": we hear them on the elevator: is that "I Give You All My Love"? Well, it ain't the version from the 1960s. You can follow I don't doubt my point about Elvis and the Beatles. Maybe you follow my point about this or that recorded performance of esteemed classics: such as some symphony by Beethoven, or Brahms, or Mozart. Are you ready to see it illustrated in relation to Shakespeare?

Are you ready to see it illustrated in relation to the New Testament? How about the Old Testament?

Male / Female

2009-08-25T11:09:00.024-04:00

Male

Female

Ask the couple coming out of the church if they can tell the difference between right and wrong. Of course they can. They'll also assure you that they can tell god from devil, sacred from profane. Their youngest child standing on two legs will likewise assure you that they can tell not only good guy from bad guy, but man from woman! So when Jack Lemon and Tony Curtis shoot the scenes in drag for Billy Wilder, Marilyn Monroe sharing the camera time, everybody is shaking with laughter, with disbelief.

We'll come back to that in a moment: show the kindergarteners a still of Arnold Schwarzenegger from Conan, ask them if he's man or woman, all the kids will answer "Man," and answer right away. Even the retard will be only slightly behind the main crest of certainty.

Do the same with the pic of Marilyn from The Seven Year Itch with her dress blown up over her um, er female central.

They'll all say woman! or female! or dame! or blond! and they'll say it right away. Now show a picture of a robin, ask what kind of a creature it is. They'll all answer "bird" readily enough. OK: in your Arnold, Marilyn sequence, show a picture of Paul Reubens in his Pee-Wee getup. In your robin sequence show an ostrich. The kids will still say "bird," but the answer will come slower. Robin will get a quick crest; ostrich will get a slow crest: fuzzier. The same is true in your Arnold-Marilyn-Reubens sequence if you slip in a picture of Fran Liebowitz. Or Amélie Mauresmo.

Try a picture of world champion South African runner Caster Semenya, the one in the current gender row.

When her performances were mediocre, no one bothered her; when she got better, and got better fast, uncertainty, doubt, hostility blossomed around her. That article offers a sad litany of gender doubt over a series of athletes, all supposedly female. The article just linked tells stories of school athletes who had to have a teacher accompany them to the bathroom to check their genitalia.

Guess what folks, most teachers are not qualified to judge gender even with a gander behind the briefs.

Read Jared Diamond on the subject in his great book Why Is Sex Fun? I'll summarize a fast word, but I mean it, read Diamond, savor the whole argument:
Diamond the physiologist reports that his specialty has decided that the difference between male and female boils down to one thing: testes. If testes are present, even dud testes, undescended, non-functioning: it's a male; no testes: it's a female.

Without the male gonad pumping out male hormones a human body will develop as "female": smooth face, broad hips, pronounced breasts ... With testes, male! but if the testes malfunction, the technically male body will also mature as female! "He" will "be" "male" but will appear to be "female."
The blond knocks your eye out, what a face! what a bod! Get her clothes off, she's got a pleasant face, great boobs, a slender waist, a lovely mons veneris, a darling vulva ... no penis; but look closely, look up inside: there's no vagina! She's a he! Your average teacher, in South Africa or in Queens NY isn't likely to notice the one essential. In an undeveloped male, the testes remain hidden, they never descend into a scrotum. Still, physiologically, scientifically, he's a male.

2009 09 11

Update: A Reuters article just confirmed exactly that result in Semenya's case:... tests had found Semenya had no womb or ovaries, but that she had internal testes, the male sexual organs which produce testosterone, and her levels of the hormone were three times that of a 'normal' female.The report didn't elaborate on the presence or absence of a penis or a vagina. The article reported on a charge of Semenya being a hermaphrodite. But that term remains ambiguous without the specific definition of the physiologists: testes: male!

PS: Don't you just love Conan pictured above, Arnold in his shoulder-length hair? far longer than Marilyn's!

2009 09 12

The latter points in the above relate well to pk points developed for decades (and at the censored Knatz.com since 1995), but under Linguistics: specifically under the fork between natural language and artificial language. In this case, once again, scientists, using artificial languages as well as natural languages (biology, zoology, physiology ... within "English") make clear distinctions (only one distinction is needed: if there are testes, it's male, whether or not the testes are visible or functioning) and the rest of mankind, not rehearsed in physiology, getting heated over ambiguities. Politicials, legislators, lawyers ... may use artificial languages, the law, for example (legal English has its own, separate, history) to generate heat while shedding no light.

Note: I am not automatically and wholly on the side of "science." The South African politician who defended Semenya's trophies by pointing out that she had been accepted in the races as "female" and had won the races makes sense to me. By the physiologists' standards, "she" is male; by the rules of the track her having been accepted as female should not be held against "her." The poor hermaphrodite should not be victimized: the non-scientists should be wailing and gnashing their teeth over their own fuzziness, their emotionalism, their prejudice ...

I believe that mankind would do well to learn a little science, but I try not to confuse my "ought" with something accomplished. I do not want bureaucrats labeled "scientists" to restrict future meaning or discussion. I do not want natural languages controlled, supervised, by experts claiming to represent artificial languages.

On the other hand, if the public doesn't voluntarily smarten up and smarten up fast (by achieving some command of artificial languages like "physiology"), we should not be surprised or complain too loudly when we spin down extinction's drain.

Science / Religion

2009-08-25T09:01:00.006-04:00

I have moved this post to my new pkTheo blog.

Religion / Science 8.24

2009-08-24T10:27:00.007-04:00

Science

Religion

Religion and science have one thing in common — a huge thing: they're both thought systems. That is to say they are both human thought systems.

Science may be wrong as a matter of fact but
religion is typically wrong as a matter of principle!

If we ever meet intelligent species from somewhere other than earth (in religion, gods have had intelligence attributed to them among other attributes), from another star system, from another galaxy, from a parallel universe ... or from an N-Orthogonal universe, then we'll have to rethink all such concepts: thought, human, science ... religion ...Religion is a very old thought system. "Very" there is of course relative: the genus Homo is millions of years old. The species has been around for six figures of years; the sub-species has existed for big five figures. Religion doesn't leave lots and lots of hard clear fossils, but there's beaucoup evidence for five figures of years. The Cro-magnon cave paintings show beautiful evidence of religion that's close to twenty-thousand years old. Usual interpretations of the images behold a magical relationship between the imaging and the animals depicted: paint the painting, have a good hunt, once the migrations commence a spring parade right past your cave entrance!

We imagine, seeking evidence, that the hunters were trying to order their world: to their own advantage, with lots of fresh meat. Science tries to leave the magic out of its ordering: but still wants lots of fresh meat, a generous share of scarce resources.

Magical explanations form a big characteristic of religion. Advantage to your home group is another. Here's still another, key to what I'm here aiming at: religion (remember, a thought system!) assumes some nearly magical ability on the part of the faithful: to send or receive messages from the magical realm, for example; to be able to distinguish the holy from the ordinary: Monday is ordinary, the Sabbath is holy ... Science is much more modest in its assumption that sometimes some humans can be responsible some of the time and that that responsibility can be bequeathed to some group for preservation: a university science department, for example. (I'll share that assumption, but only to a very minor extent!) (The decay rate of intellectual integrity should itself be a major focus of science, but don't expect honest cooperation from state-funded institutions.) (And don't expect an Iona-like monastery to receive many tithes from a public.)

But here now is a characteristic distinguishing religion from science that started this ball rolling this morning, stimulating me to begin this post:

Both religion and science try to predict events, but religion repressed new thought in order to insist that it's got it right; whereas science, at least in theory, is supposed to keep doubting, keep testing, to never be sure. (But of course scientists know better by the time they are weaned than funding will not come without a great display of Certainty!) (Tell everybody, while wearing a Doom-sandwich-board, that the sky will fall tomorrow, and somebody may give you a dime; say, Of course we need fresh testing, always, and they'll take their dime back.)

There, I don't think that's bad for a first draft. It makes a couple of points. Many more could be developed at leisure, but I just want to arrive at one of the key points I'd aimed at without wanting to put it in the first sentence. I've just been through a struggle between the General and the Particular: I wanted to make universal generalization, yet get get to a few specific illustrations. Here:

Prediction

The Bible told the Jews what had happened, supposedly: what they wanted to believe was their history. (It's an unusual bit of self-hypnotism because the Jews don't merely flatter themselves in the portrait. Of course this may well have largely been an attempt by their priesthood to control the general population. (Regardless, it established a tendency which I, pk, leap on: blaming priesthoods, with precedent! for not hearing God, for failing to convey messages! Exactly what my life, my history (my mythology,) has been about!)) But then the Jews also slipped in a few imaginings about their future as well: there would a a Judgment, in which the God of the Jews would judge the other nations, the Gentile Goyim, enslaving them for the comfort and convenience of the Jews. Imagine the Babylonian Prime Minister having to buff the toenails of the humblest Jewish extra daughter.

The Christians magnified this tendency big time. The Jews' Genesis was about origins; the Jews' Exodus was about Jewish guilt as well as Jewish Chosen-ness; but Christian Revelation is about what's going to happen to everyone who doesn't swallow Jesus as their magical savior. Hence, Christianity has filled the human world with book-thumping illiterates who are Right, regardless of reason, evidence, intelligence, imagination, responsibility ...
(See? Now I'm Christian, in background, if not in specific dogma: and I'm Right! But not "regardless of reason, evidence, intelligence, imagination, responsibility ..." On the contrary. Still, the rhetorical style is Christian.)

These days though I follow Prigogine, chastising science, urging us to disabuse ourselves of "scientific" as well as religious Certainty. Quantum Thermo-Dynamics kicks the habitual hubris of Newtonian calculation into the dustbin. (Don't blame Newton! He never said that solving one or two two-body problems justified human arrogance on all possibilities!

Well, Shut Mah Mouth!

Above I "quoted" myself: "Science may be wrong as a matter of fact but religion is typically wrong as a matter of principle." I hope it's obvious that I don't mean that literally. I mean it literarily.

Arrow of Blame

2009-08-22T11:14:00.019-04:00

A key reason I don't believe that humans are intelligent or honest enough to survive our own impact on the environment has more to do with viewpoint, with perspective, with psychology than with IQ: no matter what happens, while our minds function, we can blame something external for our misfortunes: The tobacco company made me smoke.

John Belushi reached one of his several pinnacles of comic excellence in the mind of this consumer when in The Blue Brothers his character is confronted, in a sewer no less, by Carrie Fisher's jilted bride: the slob has stood the cute girl up at the altar. Belushi rants a series of excuses: He ran out of gas, he was kidnapped by Martians ... climaxing with this narcissist screaming, "It Wasn't My Fault!"

Compare disgusting individual slob Belushi with the character of any human group, infantile narcissists all: nothing is ever our fault. All frustrations are always attributable to the previous administration, to the last generation ... America could expand to infinity, raping open the Gates of Heaven, if only it weren't for the Indians, or the Liberals, or the FreeThinkers, or the Communists ... or Hitler ... or the Women, or now the Terrorists!

Everything in the Jews' history would have been wonderful ... except for the Gentiles: the Philistines ... the Babylonians ...

Everything in God's universe would have been wonderful ... except for Lillith, for Lucifer ... (for narcissists other than that god himself.)

Cultures magnify their own immaturity(s) through their institutions: churches pretend to worship god, to defer to god, to study god's nature; actually they stifle all thought, all communications, except those they recognize as Given from the cradle. The myths central to Judaism emphasize this: Adam didn't listen (though he could blame Eve), the Jews didn't listen (though they could blame ... a list of things) ... Christianity doubles the ante: the Jews didn't listen even when it was God's Son who was doing the talking!

No one listens to pk because pk has always pointed out this pattern but without blaming any one but OurSelves!Notice: I don't exempt myself. I don't claim that my administration, had you made me your Stalin, would have been exempt from the laws of the universe: exempt from homeostasis, for example. No: we all try to preserve what we perceive as stability.Human groups don't listen to science either. One primary way we do that is to get some craven bully of an institution (like government) to fund additional delusional activity which we then mislabel science. In no time science will answer to the preference of the ignorant stupid lazy slob majority. We use universities the same way we once used churches: to pretend that we're interested in learning, in free speech, in free inquiry, in intelligence, in imagination ... while in fact we punish, torture and kill manifestations of it. My attempts to testify against my church, against my school, against my family went merely ignored until I actually did something courageous about it: offering to network people cybernetically in 1970, joining Ivan Illich to help lead his "deschooling" movement.Deschooling: I hate that term. I have always hated that term. Illich didn't like that term. Illich didn't invent that term. But we're stuck with it.
The trouble is: it puts what we were trying to de-emphasize, school, right in the center of things. Freedom fighters is what we were. We opposed coercion. We opposed vertical authorities.Illich loves "the church" of Christ-love. (So do I, though I don't call it a church.) We both hate the Church of coercion, of authority, of arrogance: of hubris.The group did what the group typically does: it shoved me onto a social side-rail, barely able to feed myself, until it found a way to plagiarize my decentralizing tool into another centralized-and-centralizing monopoly for the hierarchical authorities. The government (and government science)'s internet serves not diversity, not freedom, but authority: big corporations can swamp the dot.comers (but the dot.comers were already plagiarizing Christ-Illich-pk! paying no royalties.)

I don't say that all imperfections are my fault, or your fault ... or the fault of the Chinese. But the arrow of blame ought to be able to swivel in any direction as we try mental hypotheses. And when it comes to institutions, one solution might be suicide.

Imagine Ronald Reagan saying, "We want the government off our backs? Hey: how about I nuke DC!"

Faith

2009-08-07T18:32:00.002-04:00

Falsity in a faith cannot rationally be investigated
within the circle of the faithful.
Faith was an important subject at Knatz.com (and its sister domains). I'll try to repost the main modules on the subject here at IonaArc, but today I start with a new statement, one just penned:

Falsity in a faith cannot rationally be investigated within the circle of the faithful. The falsity of this or that church cannot well be investigated by that church. Harder to see for moderns is that secular institutions block out the light as surely as any stone age temple.

American Democracy, the American Republic ... schools ... are our church: blinding, dumb making, incompatible with intelligence, with optimal learning. That's why there always has to be more than one church, more than one god, more than one epistemology, more than one science, more than one philosophy, always a metaN to metaM.

Advertising: Three Types

2009-08-02T10:38:00.012-04:00

One of my favorite jokes in Bedazzled came when Peter Cook's Satan was issuing juvenile mischief to random folk passing him and Dudley Moore, the love-sick burger-flipper about to be tricked into selling his soul in new bit of juvenile Satanic mischief. Moore tells his long-time stage partner that his evil is really stupid. Satan confesses that he agrees: "The Seven Deadly Sins?" drawls Peter Cook: "I though them up in a single afternoon: the only thing I've invented since the Twentieth Century though is advertising!" The audience I was amid gave a good roar, me roaring in its midst. Unlike the bulk of my follows however I've written (and posted) some sharp comments on a smorgasbord of advertising evils. Today I regroup and synthesize:

First I assure you: I am not against advertising per se. I am against one modern degenerate form of it.

We need to distinguish among at least three different kinds of advertising.

1: Information: Identificaion / Location
The whale makes a sound that more than a few other creatures of the sea recognize as a statement of identity (and of location): I am a male sperm whale, basking around the surface of my summer waters, approximately such and such latitude by such and such longitude (and I sure wouldn't mind running into an accommodating female).
The elders place a crown on the head of the individual they believe (or hope to convince others) is magical, a useful tool to the people (and the elders). Those seeing the crown understand: that individual is the group's king: a symbol of the enduring qualities of their culture.
Hi, My name is Paul. I'm a writer, teacher ... sometimes lover ...

Those example advertising as simple declaration of identity and location. Here's a fourth example, a commercial example: Sol's Stationary, We sell office supplies: 123 Main St, 9-5 M-S, 555 777-1234.

I am as much for Sol's Stationary being able to say who he is, what he does, where he's located, and when he's open for business as I am for the whale to be able to declare himself ... or a yard-full of lightning bugs to flash chemical luminescence on a summer evening.

2: Misinformation: Misidentificaion / Mislocation
The Hidatsa sneaks up on the Mandan camp making a sound he hopes will be mistaken for the call of a screech owl.
Sol's Stationary says Sol's Stationary in all the ads, implying that what Sol sells is stationary. and though Sol does sell statinoary, some, just enough to maintain the pretense, his real product is cocaine.
Hi. I'm a priest. See my robe? I sell masses, hear confessions ... (But what I really do is have my eye on your wife, your daughter, your son ...)

Those example advertising as false advertising, declarations for the purpose of deceiving. I believe that it's a waste of time to tell a biosphere as full of misidentification and of identification that messages should be truthful. I wouldn't mind living in a society experimenting with honesty as long as the experiment were very cautious, ready to pull back into familiar dishonest at a moment's notice: risking that a moment might be far too slow. The thorough conservative wouldn't dare experiment with ANYTHING! In any case, both kinds of advertising are familiar: and both predate the birth of human beings: by more eons than we know how to count accurately.

Caveat:
Don't assume that distiguishing Identification from Misidentification is easy. More on that later.

But now we humans have introduced a third kind of advertising. First we'd have to identify it, then try to date it. There might be precursors in nature: study is too immature to tell. But here:

3: Irrelevance Confusion by Association:
Sol's Stationary says "office supplies: 123 Main St, 9-5 M-S, 555 777-1234: but also adds a carefully edited digital portrait of Brad Pitt: shaking water off his hat in Legends of the Fall, smiling, a few blond hairs loose in the sunlight. Sol has had liver-spots for a decade now, on the best day of his life he didn't look anything like the Brad Pitt. Sol is sending a signal confusing himself and his service with something he doesn't possess and that has nothing to do with the service of selling stationary. It's precisely like when the Lucifer of legend offered to trade knowledge of good and evil with Eve (and Adam). Did Lucifer possess what he was offering in trade? Really? Wasn't that supposed to be God's province?

Aiyaiyai, I just realized: I posted a reflection of advertising 2005 01 09 called The News as Advertising. I then edited it, moving it to Knatz.com. So far so good: but then I deleted it from Iona Arc! Now it's gone! I'm afraid I did that with dozens of posts, trusting the internet even though it's plagiarized from my work with Ivan Illich (and Jesus Christ)!

Now I know to restore it. I'll remount it immediately.

And more coming in this one too.

Mind Snatchers (moved)

2009-07-25T08:43:00.011-04:00

Invasion of the Mind Snatchers
moved from Knatz.com to IonaArc to pKnatz blog.

Stuck

2009-07-23T10:38:00.007-04:00

Stop the World I Want To Get Off was such a great title, it resonated with many of us. It has too many words for a good title by normal standards, and it requires much too much thought on the part of the public. Still, only retards will fail to grasp the impossibility of its demand. The phrase confuses "planet earth" and "world": the physical universe (Pleroma) is being confused with the social universe (Creatura / Sentiens (Pathologica)). Humans have no way at present (thank goodness) to "stop" the earth's spin or to much alter its ellipse around our star: and the mega-culture is hell bent on maintaining (and increasing) its momentum: no individual has yet been able to stop "Madison Avenue," or "America," or nationalism, or imperialism ... or faith-in-fuzzy-mindedness ... And if we could "stop the world," how would we "get off"? What would we get off onto? Is the solar system a trolley stop? Could we hop to the moon? to Mars? To a Macdonald's Asteroid? To a Hyatt Asteroid? To Planet PangoPango?

No. But the title is clear just the same: we're steeped in our culture, we're bound to our planet, but it's too much, it's killing us, it's driving us crazy ... there are far too many absurdities in our culture.

Every week at my Senior Center that specific manifestation of my culture demands that I stand with the group and Pledge Allegiance to the Flag. I have to pretend I'm murmuring the lies with the group: "one nation, under God, with liberty, and justice ..." How is the society that censors and imprisons God's messengers "under God"? The United States was founded by atheists; where did this lie come from? What liberty? We are all forced to go to school ... What justice? being tortured into pleading guilty so I'm on record as a confessed felon? And as I stand there, doing what I must do in order not to be returned to prison, so I can try again to offer my testimonies, my analyses over the internet, having been deprived from doing so to my society, to my family, to the college classes and reading public the culture has divorced me from ...

Then we sing God Bless America: and as its familiar lyrics round to a close my bully enemies stand close behind me and stage whisper to the back of my skull, "America: Love It, Or Leave It!"

Further, a friend I'm fond of dancing with, especially line-dances, interrupted a point I was trying to make to her by saying, "I know one thing: if anybody doesn't like it they can leave." Is Joyce (or are the bullies) in touch with my parole board? Can their innocence overrule the fed in preventing me from so much as leaving this specific federal district? I can't cross from Highlands County into Hardee County let along move to Brazil.

But why should I leave the territory of my birth? How does "my" country no longer belong to me? Why do rights belong exclusively to the kleptocrats, to the thieves? I want the kleptocrats to restore nature, and then drop dead: leaving me alone! (It would be nice if they restored nature, and also recompensed me for the things that have been stolen from me, plagiarized from me, sabotaged in front of me ... just before dropping dead.)

But none of what we wish for is how things work.

Ponder this analogy: The drunk is ruining his liver. The pot smoker is ruining his brain (so his mind will erode, and erode ...) The drunk's heart might not want to be contaminated by the drunk's ruined liver: but the heart can't jump ship. Neither can the lungs. Imagine the smoker's liver getting away from the smoker's lungs by jumping out of the body. How would the liver live without the drunk? Unless the liver just happens to jump when there's a medical staff there to put it into some scifi life-support system!

No, I'm stuck being a Christian, being an American, being human: or at least being among humans: my new species, my potential species, sabotaged, blockaded, poisoned.

Under God indeed.

Map / Territory : Generic / Brand

2009-07-14T17:04:00.006-04:00

We humans evolved to think fast. In human terms, we do, it works (or seems to, so far). The corollary is that we don't always think well. Philosophy, especially the division of philosophy called science, helps. Still, it's a mess. Nearly all humans can think, after a fashion; far from all humans are adept at philosophy; very few humans, including those dressed in white coats and called by their employers"scientists," have an accurate idea of what science is: and even when we do, there are still limits to human intelligence that even genius doesn't automatically overcome. I say all that to remind us that Gregory Bateson told us that psychologists have said that the human mind is incapable of maintaining Korzybski's distinction between "map" and "territory." Korzybski said that we commonly confuse the Name with the Thing — Bateson says that psychologists say that we will continue to confuse the Name with the Thing, and the Menu with the Meal ... the Map with the Territory.

I've been re-emphasizing all this recently as part of Macroinformation, my study of complex Information. I subsume all or nearly all under semiotics, insisting that there isn't anything that we know, think, believe, process ... that isn't symbol or sign: from photons hitting the retina, to synapses firing, to saying, "That is a tree." We fast thinkers look through the telescope and say, "I see a star": when what we "see" is "light" which our culture interprets (in the English language) as a "star." We fast thinkers reify our common perceptions, rapidly forgetting, if we ever noticed, that all we have are signs, symbols, ideas: we have no direct, non-symbolic contact with ... anything: and certainly not with anything we should call Reality, or the Universe ...

No matter what we think, qualify it: it's human thought. And if we say, "God thinks it," or "The President says it": well, it's still human thought: thought by symbols, expressed by symbols. In other words ... rather, in the words I started with, nearly everything with us is "map"; though we routinely imagine we are dealing with "territory."

OK, that pk has been saying, again and again, since 1979: online since 1995. I review it, restating it here, to say something new, original with me this morning: modern culture, already liable to map / territory confusions, is dedicated to additionally confusing Generic with Proprietary: and the confusion is deliberately induced by our ... um, shall I say it? ... owners? (But of course our owners, giant multinational corporations for the most part, are themselves owned by the culture, the ghastly, ever more monolithic, culture.)

"Tissue" means something thin, flexible, of next-to-no-substance, disposable. The modern marketplace, with a cultural mandate to make everything-the-same, sells paper tissues in a box. The company manufacturing them calls itself Kleenex. Good, fine. What's neither good nor fine is what the company does next: it tries to get us, the buying public, to confuse the thing we've been taught to need, a "tissue," with a particular brand name of tissue: Kleenex. So: we'll no longer want a drink; we'll want a soda; we'll no longer want a soda, we'll want a cola; we'll no longer want a cola, we'll want a Coke. We'll no longer want a computer, we'll want a PC. We'll no longer want a graphic user interface, we'll want Windows. See? Apple had hoped we'd want Mac.

But that's just the beginning. When I can I'll go on with other deep difficulties:

Culture is rigged to substitute custom for nature: clothing for example. We'll defend the custom As Though it were in our genes!

Invisible Audience

2009-06-19T09:43:00.004-04:00

Once upon a time the thief left fingerprints without knowing there could be such a thing as fingerprints. How many people realize that we sometimes leave footprints even though we can sometimes see our footprints? Now that we know about fingerprints, some thieves wipe surfaces they're aware they touched hoping to erase their fingerprints: but what traces do we leave that we yet have no science for?

The Jews imagined God walking in the garden and calling for Adam while Adam hides from God, ashamed. Primitive Adam imagines that if God can't see him the way he Adam sees, then God won't know where he is. But the Jews imagined God knowing what Adam was doing even when God couldn't "see" him. This and the other sect of Protestants imagine that God "saw" Adam eating the fruit before Adam ate the fruit, even before Adam existed.

We drop napalm on little girls. If we keep the press away, no photographers, we imagine that we can do anything: and no one will know!

How do we know that everything we do isn't on TV at Aldeberan?

Why hasn't Jesus come back to do what he promised? Maybe he has: and we didn't notice. Maybe he can't. Maybe he never meant to. Maybe he did mean to but God had other plans. ... Or maybe our running around like dogs that don't feel the leash has entered its third millennium of hit reality show around Betelguese. The sponsors won't allow anything to interfere.

Imagine that you're an actor on the stage. Imagine that you're in the middle of "To be or not to be." Can you see the audience? The light is low, but there's a spot light on you. The lights in the theater are dim, but they're not at zero. Can you see through your own glare to see all those dim faces out there? Do you know which ones are looking at you? which ones are asleep, or necking, or bored? How can you even try to see while you're concentrating on your lines? Maybe you don't have the words memorized perfectly yet. But even if you have them as perfectly as Burbage would once have had them, so well you could paraphrase and Sweet Will might not mind, might not even notice? You're still concentrating on the meaning! Who could multi-task so skillfully that they could act, and watch, and contemplate ... all at the same time? even if they're already a genius? even if they're already a double- or triple-genius?

We don't know who sees us. We don't know what they think. If we see, it's like veiled. My name-source Paul may have been full of shit on faith, but he had that through a glass darkly part just right. The mouse doesn't know that the owl sees it, though the mouse is keenly aware that there are predators. Parents try to control their children with threats of bogymen, but we may be leaving more traces than we know (or fewer!) regardless of what the parents mean.

Competent Theology

2009-06-14T13:48:00.001-04:00

The previous post referred to the common belief that God is competent to know the truth. I was raised to believe that with no doubt. At the same time I was raised to be aware of some basis for our beliefs: Thomas saw the nail holes in the resurrected Jesus' hands ... Unfortunately for the common brand of theological epistemology I also became aware of other, more careful, more imaginative, more cautious epistemologies: to whit, science (and to philosophy not beholden to stone age theologies): the evidence must be evident to a group, any individual must be allowed to falsify the creed, experiments must be repeatable ...

So the mass audience trusts God's judgment: if God says the Jews really own the Canaanites' land, then the Jews must really own it: after all, it's really God's land anyway, isn't it? it's really God's everything. But shouldn't God be able to show us some evidence? (And no matter how much evidence God shows, what makes human audiences competent to judge the authenticity of evidence?)

Crazy Horse and his people had been living in the shadow of the Black Hills, at the Black Hills time of year, for longer than any Lakota could remember: how did their land and their sacred Black Hills suddenly belong to Washington DC and to the generals DC sent after Crazy Horse defeated Custer?

We should believe God's Judgment because God created the world! How do we know that? Evidence suggests that the universe came into being way longer ago than ten billion years. (How were "years" measured six billion years before there was an earth? How credible is God's claim to have made it six thousand years ago when it was already fourteen billion years old? Why should we trust the beliefs of any congregation of illiterate mis-readers of group fiction?)

If God says that Matthew Arnold was really the hero and George Washington the goat, does it suddenly become true? Should Matthew Arnold believe it? Should George Washington? Should Martha Washington?

When God tells us these things, will be be "telling" us? with words? in what language? why should we believe that we are competent to understand God no matter what language he addresses us in?
When the federal judge repeated the FBI's lies about me I knew that the federal judge was wrong, that he was a fool as well as a moron (or was he merely another bald-faced liar?)

Fools and morons are always asking me if I believe in God. Why can't any of them ever understand my simple answer: Never mind my relationship with God (It's personal, it's profound, it's direct ...); understand this: it's man I don't believe in! It's human institutions I don't trust.

Never mind how trustworthy I believe my own judgment to be: it's my mistrust of YOUR judgment that's relevant here.