Predicting Hurricane Wilma

After a week of dire warnings, Hurricane Wilma is finally blowing around Sebring a bit. Piffle.
I’m not saying it didn’t slam Cancun. I’m not forgetting how Hurricane Charley ripped my roof last year. I’m just bemused about living in a media-mad world where we’re bombarded with forecasts, super-saturated with news.

Survival requires memory,
but also more than a pinch of forgetting.

Neither am I forgetting how much I’ve loved hurricanes all my life. We had a few good ones on Long Island in the 1940s. When I was three my family moved into a house in Rockville Centre that had five nice trees. A year or two later we had two battered trees: and three ugly stumps. But kids roll with punches like that. We all do. Survival requires memory, but also more than a pinch of forgetting.
I’ll never forget how I chose the height of one hurricane to bicycle my newspapers around my lengthy route. Sometimes I went sideways. The whole time I wobbled. Huge trees branches cratered the lawns, pulverized against asphalt ... No one expected their paper that day, and all they would have found later, swept among the shrubs, would have been a soggy, inky mess. But, boy, did I love hurling my tomahawk-folded National-Review Stars against the gale.

As teens we went body surfing right after the brunt of one mid-1950s storm. No fatalities, but it was close. Thirty seconds among the Jones Beach waves and everyone of us was tangled among rusted hooks, salt-rimed fishing line ... A huge sea-black ships beam loomed within inches of Al’s head ...

Last year I got to live a nightmare. The palm was banging against my bedroom wall. I thought I might get more peace down the road at my studio. It was a kick slaloming the mountain bike among fallen pine branches on the cave-dark road. No electricity of course. A half-hour into a sleep the studio shook under a ferocious kick from something steel. I went outside to look. And my circus tent car port attacked me from the oak tree.

trampling tent, becalmed
I’d had it staked down, but obviously not strongly enough. In the dark, those steel legs came at me like elephant feet.

But I’m talking about news and prediction. If you own a shipping fleet, if all your capital and then some is at sea, you definitely want to hear weather forecasts, you want them to be more accurate than possible. But why should the rest of us care? If I want to know what kind of a day (or night) it is, I just look out the window: or open the door and step outside. If I’m out in my boat and the lake turns upside down, I learn about it soon enough: just in time to duck. If the doctor thinks I’ve got two hours to live, I’d prefer him to keep it to himself.

I recall one time when I did want a weather forecast. I was driving from upstate to down state: the Apple and home. Passing a ski resort, I parked and napped, thinking I’d catch a couple of runs before hurrying the remaining hundred-odd miles to my desk. What awakened me more than daylight was torrential rain. Hmm. Should I hope it passes quickly? Catch at least one run? Or just head home? I drove up to the poor guy stationed by the entrance in a heavy rain slicker to direct traffic that wasn’t arriving.
I rolled the window a crack. "Have you heard a weather report?" I called through the gale. Bundled like Marge Gunderson in Fargo, he answered me: "It’s raining."

The guy looked like the stump in my childhood yard. The guy was about as bright. But at the same time as I insult him, I applaud him: the guy wasn’t polluted by a sense of FOREcasting. He was living like a skunk, like a raccoon ... moment to moment. Ah.

Freud wrote about media as core to our discontent with civilization.

PS There are a couple of things I’d intended in the weave that got left out. For the moment I’ll just tack on a couple of finger strings, weave them later:

Hurricane Wilma reminded me of my fictional Comet Beroena. My first novel (link temp. down) imagined Beroena’s ephemeris as confounding the experts. So we clobbered it, unknowingly burning the alien who was hot rodding it alive. Later, his friends didn’t care that the murder was unwitting.

I love hurricanes, but I did not love being without electricity for a week last year, Catherine ailing, the temperature in the shade over one hundred: stifling, not a fresh breath: part of what killed her: at ninety-six.

I am much less fond of tornadoes. One ripped through here in 1990, gouging a swath just over half a mile.
I was at the Toshiba, write, write, writing. Paused while the disk drive groaned away, saving my work, I realized that I was missing a bodacious storm. As I opened the door I was yanked horizontal, my right foot just barely catching the door frame. As I hovered, twisting in the gale, my gaze was arrested by the extension ladder, lifted from its hooks on the side of the wash room and cart wheeling through the air, sixty feet overhead.
That particular gust passed, face down on the steps, I managed to crawl backwards, back inside. I struggled the door closed.
Yes, I enjoyed the rest of that storm from inside: till the worst of it was passed. Then I went out and walked around: amid THE most spectacular sustained lightning display I have ever seen. The entire dome of the sky, from the zenith to all horizons was networked in electric blue-white violence.
But then this part of Florida regularly has fabulous lightning.

Chewy

5.10.21

Chewy

The movie Serenity sports a character, a secret operative for the united kleptocracies of interstellar space, who says, Moses-like, that there's no place for him in his Utopia. He's evil. He knows it. But all the eggs he breaks for his still-never-made omelette are necessary.
Cast for the part is the appealing Chiwetel Ejiofor. (Go Amistad!) The dude could give elocution lessons to the queen, but from a mile away any racist can see that his blood line is neither Lancaster, nor Rose, nor Hanoverian; but Nigerian!

The Stalinist pragmatics (what a joke, that humans could tell what's practical) is pure White Man. (It is at least in "our" European-dominant cultures, ruled recently far more by England ... America than by any Ruskies.)
Delicious.

In I forget which novel of my relatively recent D. H. Lawrence reading, there's an English capitalist who runs his mine by unrelenting business principles. He goes to church: at least he sends the ladies and kiddies to church. Titularly, and in actual superstition, he's a Christian. But, he's unusual in his certainty that he and his kind are destined for hell. He believes he is going to hell, that hell is what he deserves (in the next life, riches in this one), but he does what he does: willingly, with a zest: for civilization! For Empire!

The form in which poverty and lack of feedback ground my third novel to a halt was just getting started with the question of what is it that each individual believes that would cause her to violate her most sacred principles for some other competing principle. (Would not any aerobic bacterium man the barricades against dominance by the anaerobes? Would not any Homo break the rules to defend upright posture?) (But with social man, it gets tricky: Would you take one for the team?) (Would you commit murder to promote democracy? Would you commit incest to back equality of gender? Would you cannibalize for the good of General Motors? ...)

But others have done parallel things. A favorite of mine occurs in James Clavell's Shogun. Blackthorn and his shipmates wash up in Japan. They're thrown in a hole, pissed on, chopped up for kendo practice. But Blackthorn finds himself subtracted, promoted, protected ... (He has geographical, maritime MAPs!) So Blackthorn suddenly has a big house, money, servants. He shoots a pheasant and orders it hung: to ripen. But the Japanese don't prepare fowl that way. The rotting bird is an offense to the community of peons. Master has ordered it not to be touched. The ancient gardener cuts it down, fully prepared, and willing, to be executed: maybe tortured first. Still, he does it: for his community.

If the double bind is deep enough anyone will willingly go to the cross.

Nice to see that what Chiwetel Ejiofo's Operative sacrifices himself for is kleptocratic coercion, deception, slaughter ...

Stalin used the saw about needing to break eggs to make an omelette. Which smart Commie was it who told him, "I see the broken eggs; where's the omelette"? [Lenin, not Stalin, bk corrects: and anarchist, not Commie.]

PS Apropos of Serenity, apropos of the science fiction most generally known through high tech media such as TV and movies, bk just emailed me remembering his bewilderment at my objection to Star Trek as too damn militaristic. I think it was in writing my first novel that I voiced the objection: I was finding myself imagining a near future where every character had some rank, wore a uniform, worked for some damn army, government, UN ... was centralized, hierarchical.
bk, in 1982, hadn't yet seen any other kind! I in contrast had steeped myself in science fiction in 1950, 1951 ... when it wasn't all big budget, big kleptocracy. [bk says I made my comment in the 1970s.]

In the Bushes

For years, for decades, Richard M. Nixon was my ideal president. "I’m the President of the United States. I can bomb anyone I want," Oliver Stone had him say in the film. If it’s not a documentable quote, the spirit is still gospel.
Nixon was clever, devious, schizophrenic. You’ve got to have a basic brainpan for that. But he was certainly not what a philosopher, a scientist, a cutting-edge theologian ... would call intelligent.
All educated peoples live in kleptocracies. For pk, what could be more kleptocratic than a president like Nixon? Unless we were under Stalin.

But now it’s 2005. We’re bombing, torturing Muslims. Different setting, different colors for the setting, different temporal impressions. And my opinion in changing. Now I think the Bushes, any Bush, is the perfect Koba. Oh, there’s only one original Koba, but he’s dead.
I still shiver when I recall George Bush, Senior running for Vice-President with Reagan. He was a bulldog, a perfect Yalie, the Bulldogs: snapping at anything his masters wanted snapped at. My favorite moment in any presidential debate ever isn’t any speech from Lincoln, isn’t Nixon’s shadowed jowls against Kennedy’s baby fat (and atrocious Boston Rs: Cuba’r: We’ve got to flatten Castro, and Cuber), it’s Bush interrupting Geraldine what’s-er-face. She couldn’t get a word in edgewise. And of course the moderator allowed it! Democracy, you see: stage-managed.

Ah, you think. pk is picking on Republicans: he must be a Democrat. Not on your life. Oh, then he must be a Commie. Hardly. Can’t you tell an anarchist when you see one?
Except that all the other anarchists I know seem to accept civilization: big populations, corporations, markets too intricate for anyone to understand (but not so intricate that a zilllion experts won’t claim to understand them: and get licensed: by the kleptocracy.
No, no. I’m a We were better off, less toxic anyway, as Neanderthals, as Cro-Magnon: I wish nature could magically send a few hundred survivors back to the savanna, in Africa, and that we’d stay there.
Of course there won’t be any savanna in Africa. Africa too will look like BedStuy.

But could we only be too busy looking for food, looking over our shoulder for predators, for enemies, we wouldn’t be worrying about markets.

Meantime, we’ve got Bush: Bushes everywhere you look.

[2005 10 31 I promise a piece on Alpha Kleptocrats.]

PS: Gregory Bateson, THE teacher, told of a philosopher, one of the old Greeks, who ceased to believe in human speech. He said nothing, wrote nothing, left no disciples. Bateson, wisest of the wise, calls the guy foolish. But despite my reverence for Bateson, I LIKE that guy!
pk has written millions of words, talked a blue-streak, for well more than half a century. So much wasted breath. I could have been fishing! I could have been crawling around in the under story looking for a newt to pounce on!

PPS Did pk want to hear what candidate Geraldine had to say when Bush interrupted her? No. I wish the moderator had interrupted all of them: made the debates 100% commercials. Oh, of course the debates already were 100% commercials, but commercials for this or that agenda. A solid hour instead of Ford has a better idea or Tastes great! Less Filling! might have been less harmful.

PPPS "Cutting edge theologian"? Where did I get that idea? It’s not even an oxymoron.

Resisting Evil

Tolstoy advised us not to resist evil. I’ve always resonated with that, sounds Jesus-like to me. And I wish to extend it: Don’t resist evil -- lest you become evil.
I don’t claim any necessarily causal relation, but insist that the tendency will be there.
I write this after bailing out of a PBS program on American military torture of suspects arrested as terrorists and held at Guantanamo Bay.

At the same time I wish to insert a couple of qualifiers:

1. Watch out for self-labeling. It’s ludicrous for me to say, "I am good." Do I expect to be believed? It’s more ludicrous for countries to claim that they are good or that their enemies are evil.
   We could wait till God tells us what’s what at Judgment; or we could take all such claims with a grain of salt; or we could at least attempt to Inventory opinions:Jesus doesn’t seem to have said that he was good, Paul seems to say that Jesus was good, Francis seems to agree ...
2. We all have a general sense of what "good" means and what "evil" means; but beware of thinking that such attributes can be applied to actual organisms or to actual groups, living in time and space. One’s words, the other’s creatures.
   Can there really be any one-to-one correspondence? I doubt it.


3. But most important: what basis does ANY human bean have for thinking that they can tell right from wrong? Good from evil?
   Vanity vanity.
   Though I won’t agree that All is vanity! That’s just another Liar’s Paradox: if all is vanity, then so too is that statement!

I feel a nostalgia for the America of a near century ago when some US official refused to open the doors of his office to spying. He said, "Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail."
Of course we got rid of him, and have been spy spy spying ever since.

So. Did we become evil?
I see us to be evil: as I see any other kleptocracy.

PS Note in this context that human beans are forever attributing to themselves and their group impossible things. The law promises no censorship, but then squelches all sorts of things, sponsors (and coerces) environments (schools, churches, board rooms ...) in which only predisposiitons are likely to flourish. We go to Geneva, adopt conventions, then redefine them out of existence when push wants to shove.
As I said to a lawyer, "Homeostasis is a natural law; it cannot be legislated against."
But natural law doesn’t deter us. Vanity vanity.
Hey, why don’t we have a society in which anyone who want to write laws first has to prove that their cosmology, their physics, their psychology, etc. is perfect? First we should know whether time is finite or infinite, then we should know whether space is likewise, then we should know if the universe and the cosmos are coextensive or very different ... We should know which gods are true and which false ... We should prove that our understanding of the god is perfect ... Then we could talk about law.

US reduces protection of waters, wetlands

Report

"WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In the past four years, the United States has drastically cut back on its protection of waterways and wetlands, whose erosion was cited as a factor in the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina, according to a report issued on Wednesday."

See? I just said it! And a Bush will ahem lead us.

pk: American Heretic

I’m all for reason.
(Well, not quite all.)

I agree with Voltaire that reason is occasionally possible. We can point out numerous examples of its appearance in a host of individuals: Newton, Einstein, Korzybski, Wason ...
Now: show me a coalition of individuals ever being reasonable. I don’t see reason manifesting in groups. (Witness Congress, the Nobel selection committee ...)

Anyhow, here, I’ve got to shove in this key consideration: What Americans hold to be self-evident truth, isn’t that all men are created or that all men are equal, but that society is FIXable! (Let me get my million, my dozen million, my hundred million, and THEN give the niggers another dollar in welfare.)

I bailed out of being Christian a long time ago, and I never swallowed Original Sin, but my enduring stance is not that much different from the Christian bottom line: If you’re looking for justice, don’t look for it here.

I’ve more to say on this as well ("this" following from my Swift Enlightenment post of a moment ago), but, as I want to drag in another key consideration, I’ll post it in a third block: Can Evidence Be Destroyed?

The set will be:
Swift Enlightenment
pk: American Heretic
Can Evidence Be Destroyed?

PS In 1970 I too believed that society was FIXable: and my FLEX, supposed to become FIX, would have done it, or tried, given a chance. I still believe that society was FIXable in 1970, but that the public's non-choice choices put FIXing forever out of reach.
In other words (another Knatz.com ad nauseum iteration): At some point it's too late to stop smoking, you've GOT cancer. The world will still be full of people telling you to quit, but the people you needed to listen to where the ones who were saying it before your "ten-thousandth" cigarette.
I don't doubt that we'll put everything we have into stopping global warming: after it's too late. And (a) Bush will lead us.

Can Evidence Be Destroyed?

Jesus wowed ’em in the sticks. His rep preceded him, and, initially, Jesus wowed ’em in Jerusalem too: the people, the public. But Jesus didn’t stay there, reveling in their adoration; he went straight to the Temple: where he got a very different reception.
The Temple sandbagged him. And the people instantly shut their trap. The local kleptocracy, taking direction from Rome and telling the local kings and priests what they could and couldn’t do, backed the local kings and priests this time around, and crucified Jesus.
How do we ahem know this?
Because once the kleptocracy was no longer paying attention, some of the people from the sticks wrote down what they say Jesus had said: and done. Eighty, a hundred years after the crucifixion of Jesus some gospels starting showing up. Notice, right away: this is not good scholarship. But sometimes it’s the only kind possible. The kleptocracy kept its records ... and some people kept a different set of records, records not telling the same, the official, story.
Now: who you ’gonna believe? You don’t have to believe anybody, but do notice that the records are not the same. That’s the key. That’s the source of the macroinformation.

The kleptocracy keeps the records it wants. And for a long time, those are all the records the people will have. Until new fossils turn up, a new technology -- fingerprints! -- is discovered, old manuscripts found "new". (The ancient Egyptians had a big battery!)

I remember that last claim from decades ago. I never heard more about it, so maybe what those yoyos found wasn’t really proof of ancient Egyptian control of electricity. I don’t know. And THAT’s the point.
John may have been a lunatic. Jesus may have been a charlatan. Some huge portion of King James’ red letters may be political editing. ... Once thing remains clear: the kleptocracy did not keep honest records: and new records can always turn up.

I bet we’d find more macroinformation, galore, if we could compare the Church’s version of history in the last couple of millennia and "new" evidence from the Vatican archives. But I’m not for one second suggesting that the Vatican archives are a complete or true record either. The archives might show part of what some heretic said, but certainly not all: and not any of what the bulk of heretics said.

Once upon a time no one imagined that everything could be knowable. Once upon a time Og and Dora, and their little Bling, were busy looking for food, looking over their shoulder for the lion. The heap of vegetation they slept on had no walls. There were no pictures of Grandma. Og and Dora remembered Grandma, big Bling less so. And soon no one remembered Og or Dora or Bling.
In Sumer they scratched symbols onto clay to represent how many sheaves of wheat they’d harvested that year. And maybe their count was accurate (enough). But no Sumerian imagined that they had records of that year’s planetary biosphere production, let alone an inventory of the cosmos.

more coming, especially more on book burnings, on submissions getting ignored, on best sellers getting repressed ... and on pk’s history of being erased without a trace. And a N^th repetition of what pk tried to do about all this, and pk’s Jerusalem’s reaction.

This piece follows from pk: American Heretic, which follows from Swift Enlightenment. The order counts:Swift Enlightenment
pk: American Heretic
Can Evidence Be Destroyed?

2011 09 07 That was 2005. It's only since then that I've found and read Bart Ehrman's books of New Testament scholarship. Apparently we do "know" a great deal more about Biblical mistakes and lies than I'd been aware. Now we should comb the utterances of states and media with equal care.

Swift Enlightenment

Some philosophers in the Eighteenth Century believed themselves capable of Reason. They mistrusted their traditions which they said came from the Dark Ages. These philosophers came to be called The Enlightenment.
(My diction here is colored by the quick look I just took at what Wikipedia had to say on the subject.)
What it boils down to is that these thinkers believed that the human lot could be fixed: improved by human intelligence, by the right minds cooperating. Why that’s part and parcel of our most fundamental beliefs, is it not? Franklin, Jefferson ... that’s where they come from.
But notice: this all is an about face from the central doctrine of Christianity: we are born in Original Sin. Human Reason is not trustworthy. There is no hope in this world, and only Revelation can help us in the next.
Notice, the Eighteenth Century wasn’t the first to capitalize favored nouns. Also notice the sense of Reincarnation FOR THE SPECIES practiced by the Church.

That’s background. Here’s what I want to say: I love evolution. Therefore I love mortality. I love the idea that we are not the end, nor even any principal means. Without germs we couldn’t live, but some germs can kill us.
The central image of Christianity is a guy getting tortured. But another central image is that of a baby! There’s hope in the NEXT generation. But I love the fact that any of us may come with invisible potential flaws: birth defects. The seeds of our pathology are in our generation.
And therefore, among a host of other reasons, I love the sore thumb that stuck out in the middle of the Enlightenment: Jonathan Swift!

Right in the wake of Voltaire characterizing himself as reasonable (and everyone else a dunce) (right on, Voltaire) comes Jonathan Swift, whose Gulliver encountered not only Lilliputians, but a race that looked identical to our own: the Yahoos!
Swift also imagined a rational race, but they looked and behaved nothing like us. Not only did they not speak Latin; they didn’t even speak English!

What else I want to say in this wake, I’ll say separately, next, in pk: American Heretic. The set will be:
Swift Enlightenment
pk: American Heretic
Can Evidence Be Destroyed?

The Second Time Around

Love is lovelier
The second time around
song

You only go around once in this life ... says the beer commercial. Say: do the ad men know existence better than the theologians? (They could hardly know it worse!)
But I think the ad men may be right. Imagine the ways in which life would be different had we lived before, assuming the universe, life, society, to be similar in time₂ as in time₁. Not that everyone would behave quite identically.
But I’ll tell you, I wouldn’t let them put me in school again for anything. Dragging my feet on the way to kindergarten? I should have dragged twice as hard for day two. I wouldn’t answer another draft notice: take my five years in jail and be done with it.
I wouldn’t get married again. For anything, whatever the girl’s charms, promises ...
Oh, I’d have a kid again. Kids, plural; but without benefit of marriage.
Live with a woman? Of course. One can’t do without women.

PS Just occurred to me: how many miscarriages, how many stillbirths, result from the fetus fuming and fretting: "No, no, not again. I refuse to live again."

Music

I always loved music. The love became passionate around age ten by which time I had become a jazz nut, being called Jazzbo in church camp, and again in college. Music is one area in which my view of myself and others’ view of me coincided. I loved music and people saw it.
Now I’m not sure I don’t hate music. It depends entirely on what music we’re talking about. I nearly worship Miles Davis. It has nothing to do with what an asshole he so conspicuously was; it has only to do with the sound that he made: not just playing the trumpet, but as a creator of bands, a mentor and husbander to younger geniuses, a composer, a creator of styles, an architect of the spacing of sound: the most amazing rythmnist I’ve encountered. I love Bach, play a couple or a dozen of his pieces on the keyboard nearly every day. I love Beethoven: all the big names: Wagner: and a good number of the lesser big names: Fauré, Albinoni, Prokofief ... Jobim ... Khan, Shankar ... I love music that is conspicuously incomplete without the things that go with it: Don Giovanni, Fred Astaire, Michael Jackson ... For Billie Holliday, it’s enough to hear her, sure; but you really ought to see her too. (A bit late now. I was fortunate enough to catch her live in 1955 or so. (She was sick, near the end; but still ...))
So what do I hate? Nearly everything one hears in public: nearly everything on TV, on radio. I live my life trying, and largely succeeding, in avoiding media: except movies (where the sound track often doesn’t register consciously, even with me).

Anyone who reads more than a little pk already sees what I’m really getting at: classification, reification ... abstractions ... generalizations: and most basic: Realism versus nominalism: is music some Platonic Form? in heaven? Or is music just this song, and that tune, and the other recording?

2011 09 07 I've been talking about this since the mid-1960s. I'm not aware of a single person, certainly not any of my professors, who understood a word of it. Now I've been blabbing it on the internet since 1995: still zero.
Yet people go right on: acting as though they believe that the culture is capable of thought, as though schools and governments and churches receive as well as dispense information.

Also more coming on Music Class, Classes of Music, Musical Changes; but first I gotta jot a few other things while they’re in my head.
Note: This post concerns specifics versus abstractions, but ties closely to political issues as well. As is suggested again and again at K., a basic reason I came to hate much music related to the culture’s refusal to honor Afro-American genius: and by "Afro-American genius" I DON’T mean "black." Benny Goodman, Dave Brubeck, Gerry Mulligan ... had loads of Afro-American genius: mixed with Jewish genius, European genius ... home-grown non-African genius ...

Quickies

Quickies

I used to write slowly: thought much, produced little. Now I blitz my writing, whether my head is tightly screwed on or not. If it’s great few see it; if it’s lame brained, so what? Few read it. Besides, I can also always fix it: later.
I've always got a queue in my scratch folder for the blogs: the past couple of weeks the queue has lengthened atypically. So: expect some quickies from me: just the gist, and flesh it further another time.
Of course I’m also way behind on dressing my blog posts for more permanent development at Knatz.com.

Short Honeymoon

I love movies. I always liked them well enough, and even as a lad saw more classics than one might expect for a kid in the suburbs: not just Chaplin; Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, Lang’s Metropolis ... La Strada! Roshomon! I realized that I loved movies once I saw my second Fellini, my second Kurosawa. But thanks to a pal’s older sister who took us to an art theater on occasion, by the time I was eighteen I’d seen a single Bergman film several times: whatever the feature was, Illicit Interlude came along with it.
Sure I understood that the reason the movie was booked was because we catch a flash of the blond’s tush as she runs naked into the bay; but I actually thought the Bergman was good, long before the name Bergman meant anything to me.
I love movies such that I also love classes of movies, different types of classes: I love noir, I love ronin flicks ... I love French, Indian, Japanese, Italian. And of course I love an awful lot of Hollywood.
I love how the nouvelle vague guys film women. Hollywood can drive me crazy how it freezes the camera on the pretty girl; but when Jean Luc Goddard won’t let go of a pretty face, I love it, love it, love it: particularly with all his asshole inane profundities tripping along on the sound track.
Yes, of course I love women too; though they don’t always love me so much any more.
Anyway it’s in the above context that I grabbed Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Betty Blue from the library the other day, a good female face on the DVD cover.
Of course my scholarship isn’t always perfect, and at sixty-seven my memory isn’t always what it used to be. I saw "Beineix" and thought La Femme Nikita, with the long-thighed gamin. No, no, that’s Besson! I should have been thinking Diva! A great movie. That's Beineix. How had I lost track of him? Nikita has its charms, but it’s no Diva.
Keeping my parallel with women, everyone older than twenty-five (and some people younger) know that no matter how gorgeous the female, lust-love never lasts more than five years. I don’t care if you’re married to Marilyn Monroe, after five years, it’s Oh, that again. Love-love can be just getting started (or never starts); but for lust love, the honeymoon is over.
Betty Blue starts off smashing. The girl has a cute face, big mouth, a lot of teeth, bottom lip real big. Her tits bulge out from her sides even when her back is to us ... and there’s a full length fuck scene right off where the guy too is cute enough and the girl tries valiantly to come. I paused the DVD to email bk that he had to see this.
And there the honeymoon ended. After that, it didn’t matter how often she flashed her pussy, the movie was dreadful. I still haven’t endured it to the end.
Could it be because this fun-loving girl doesn’t just like to run around naked, but stabs people with forks, burns people’s houses down ...
In a very negative way Betty Blue reminded me of Truffault’s supreme Jules and Jim. In both, unconventional couples pay a price. I was moved by Jules’, Jim’s, and Catherine’s aging; Betty turns twenty without showing any non-erotic attractions: which for me severely limited her attraction, period, and compromised Beineix’s skills. It’s his film, so it’s his fault.
2005 10 10 I finished it. Finally. The ending was OK; it was the far too long middle that was insufferable.

Sesame Sponsorship

It’s nearly forty years since Sesame Street’s maiden program, but periodically, no causal association apparent, like pain from an old wound, the rage re-wells in me. "Sesame Street is brought to you by the Letter A."
I’d heard that a PBS show was coming, supposed to give kids a leg up in literacy, its eye on the underprivileged, and I’d been looking forward to it. I was a teacher in those days. bk was just a toddler. I was sure he’d get all the lift he needed without any PBS special program. I myself had arrived in kindergarten already half-able to read. All it had taken was an older sister who was herself learning. I saw what she was doing and tried it myself.
Don’t get me wrong; teacher or no, lover of John Donne, of ee cummings or no, I’ve never been an uncritical supporter of literacy. I believe that civilization was far less toxic in pre-literate times. A writer myself, I’ve still long suspected that we might be better off if we threw all our writing away, starting with the Bible, and not protecting Shakespeare either. In 1969 or so I hadn’t yet encountered Claude Levy Straus’s explanation that literacy’s utility was social control, but I’d been anarchist enough to be ready for it all my life.
Were we to throw our writing away I’d support starting with the Bible -- never mind how much I love it and cite it and return to it, because I also see it to be an endless well of harm: no evil more apparent to me than the idea that existence is property, that God owns everything the way the maker of a puppet owns the puppet, that we owe God gratitude for an existence I have no memory of asking for. I’m glad to be alive much of the time. I’m also sorry to be alive some of the time, embarrassed by my society nearly all of the time. But damn it, I don’t feel and don’t want to feel, don’t want anybody to feel, any debt. The way I love god has nothing to do with indebtedness. I emphasize that so I can segue straight back to my point: Sesame Street was sponsored by some alliance of public TV, corporations, and the public itself. It was a terrible lie to iterate to preschoolers that it was sponsored by a reified element of literacy: the Letter A.
Indeed, advertising is my sorest spot with regard to TV anyway. Program developers could have appealed to the public for direct support of programming in the first place. I remember no such appeals. No, we were intended to be captives of commerce all along.

Captives of commerce

In general: if the public doesn’t voluntarily pay for something, then the public shouldn’t have it: not school, not defense, not anything. Nothing enslaves us more than sponsors.

I love the joke about the teacher complaining to the parent that little Rocco is rude and disrespectful when given his milk before nap time in grade school. "Don’t give ’im no fuckin’ milk," says his mother. Right on. If the public doesn’t voluntarily pay for twenty-four hours times N channels of mind-bludgeoning entertainment, don’t give ’em no fucking entertainment.

Heroes

Why are there no heroes today?

Because ...

Sons of Saxons can only admit that Robin Hood stood up for the Saxons when they are no longer in thrall to the Normans, and any current society, Saxon or other, is always in thrall to its Normans. We can agree unanimously that Hitler was bad only when we’re no longer threatened by Hitler’s brown shirts. So long as there’s power, some Hitler will always have it, whether his name is Caesar, Napoleon, or Bush. Therefore, we have to see the courage and independence of Robin Hood, of Jesus, of Thoreau, while we cower, content with the kleptocracy’s fiat heroes: firemen, cops ... all working for the state.

Michelle Wie

Michelle Wie just turned pro, still 15 years old, still in high school, getting her an immediate $10 million a year in sponsors, making her the richest woman in golf and like the third richest female athlete, only Maria Sharapova and Serena Willians ahead of her: all dynamite chicks for looks as well as athletics. Michelle wants to play on the LPGA tour and on the PGA tour and to become the first woman to play in a Masters.

There are those who think that the PGA and the LPGA should be kept distinct: like "separate but equal." For golf, for sports, I see a lot of wisdom to that: so long as there is then also an open which is truly open. Could Michelle Wie make the cut in a real open? I doubt it, but perhaps we’ll see. My emphasis is that the PGA, with its understood "male," should have its limitations a bit more clearly understood. What’s excluded should always be spelled out: but never to seldom is.

Cell Phones

When I was in high school my good (and significantly older) friend Dick bought a plastic dash board mountable phone and put it in his car. Wireless. In fact it had no electronics of any kind. It was just molded plastic. Dick would drive around pretending he was on the phone: a very important seventeen year old.
I remember in the movie Wall Street, from the mid-80s, Michael Douglas (how is it possible for him to be as good looking as his father) walking on his beach just before dawn and calling Charlie Sheen on a wireless phone. That phone did have electronics: about forty pounds worth. It wasn’t a pretend phone, it was a real phone: or could have been. Hollywood could have switched in a plastic dummy to save Michael Douglas from having to carry equipment like a marine would raid a beach with, rather than walk before dawn for pleasure, or business. Michael Douglas has just made, or is about to make, sixty million dollars in an afternoon. (The most money I have ever made in an afternoon was seventy-four thousand dollars, in 1978, when dollars weren’t quite so worthless. But that money wasn’t replaced by another seventy-four thousand dollars the next day, and the next. It had disappeared within months, replaced by seventy-four dollars here and seventy-four cents there.) Sixty million though, that would have lasted me: a little while, even at 2005 gas prices. In any case, if I had sixty million dollars, for an afternoon, or a life time, I might have walked on my beach before dawn, but I sure as hell wouldn’t have been carrying a weights-machine-substitute telephone. Indeed, I did walk on my beach, before dawn and many another time, when I had seventy-four thousand dollars (and a four million dollar inventory in the warehouse), and when I didn’t have seventy-four cents, didn’t have a quarter, and didn’t carry a forty pound wireless phone. I wouldn’t carry a .04 ounce phone on the beach.
The beach, for me, is for getting away from business; not for being interruptable by a seeming-infinity of moron telemarketers with a badly memorized, poorly articulated spiel.
This afternoon, on the line in the supermarket, I heard a little ding, and the blond behind me answered her cell phone. For years now in the market, hoards of women walk the isles with cell phones glued to their ears. I think they’re reading prices for competing markets. But then I also see platoons of women walking the isles with cell phones glued to their ear that no market would hire in trust that they could reliably read the logo on a billboard. I suspect that their phone is real but that they’re connected to no one: just want to be mistaken for someone employed.

In my park there’s a woman with a cell phone grafted to her ear as she walks back and forth to the laundry room. Enormously fat, though hardly a freak these days, I’ll bet not one of her calls is real.

2011 09 07 I'm glad to notice this speculation years later to take it back, to apologize. I came to know Ruthie since then. Her cell phones calls were continuous and real: with other nursing school students. Ruthie was a real Good Samaritan to me by driving me to see the parole board in Fort Pierce when I first got out of jail and had no transportation.
I tell other impressive stories about her elsewhere.

In 1954 Dick’s wish to be mistaken for a busy, successful businessman, or rich playboy (driving an old Dodge), was sort of cute. (I certainly thought it was more inventive than the plastic rockets that other classmates bought to glue onto their cars’ fenders.) In 2005 the plethora of people with cell phones, on real or imaginary calls, is pathetic.

They’re like the wind that’s dipped only slightly below hurricane force for the last three months here. I dip my brush, hold it to my wall, and my touch-up paint spatters the tree three sites away. I recently met a woman who sees sure signs that we are entering the Bible’s Last Days. I sure hope so, though people have seen such signs forever. But I don’t remember any cell phones in John’s Apocalypse.

I bet there are plenty of crushed ones in any ER though.

Nobel Optics

Roy Glauber, John Hall and Germany’s Theodor Haensch, Rueters: Explaining what his and Haensch’s teams of researchers had accomplished, Hall said: "Most people have been using a radio dial to scan frequencies to find the right music, we’ve made it possible to do the same in the optical realm."

pk adds: I remember Isaac Asimov saying that light could hold millions of times more information than the radio spectrum.

"One of the best applications is to test whether what we teach in physics is true or just approximately true," he said.

pk adds: Now that’s music to my heart.

Who Practices? Who Believes?

One can tell which laws are serious and which are some other purpose masquerading as law by watching who practices the law, who obeys, who’s above it.

This point relates to the one I made Knatz.com's piece on Indoctrination. If all the patriarchs (and all the matriarchs), all the major land owners, all the captains of industry ... say grace before meals, then that culture takes grace seriously; if only women and little children say grace, then that culture no longer takes grace seriously. If all the alpha males wouldn’t miss an election, even from their death bed, then elections are how important decisions are made in that culture; but if women can vote, and ex-slaves can vote ... if poor people can vote ... then elections are a facade, a charade, a sham: elections are NOT how the important decisions are made.
But I was talking about law. Same applies. The sign says 55 MPH, ZHOOM! there goes a cop at 75. That law is a sham, not a real law at all.

For the longest time whoever jumped up, whether the maiden or the brave or the medicine woman or the chief ... they came back down. Stone age man had a concept of gravity, whatever term they used. For the longest time everyone obeyed that law. But then some astronauts exceeded earth’s escape velocity. For them to come back "down," something has to bring them back down. Nothing now will ever bring the Explorer back down. But has a law been violated? No, only stone age misperceptions of the law. If you follow Newton, Einstein ... you understand the law very differently. Neither astronauts nor Explorer nor this present millionaire space visitor has violated it.
If I launch a leg over the boat’s gunnel, place my foot on the water, place my other next to it, let go the boat, down into the water I go. But how sophisticated is our understanding the "laws" applicable to this familiar phenomenon? Again, gravity applies, but also invariances with experience with liquids ... But the story tells us that Jesus walked out onto the Sea of Galilea. Could the story be true? If so, was Jesus breaking any laws?
Or do we have the laws wrong in the first, second, and third place?

Note: when I say alpha males, do not be mislead; I am not talking about gender, neither are the zoologists: all of the "alpha males" in hyena society are female. The traditional name for the concept is misleading, but I didn’t invent it. Many a woman has become an alpha male (which does not prove that women are equal in the culture.

Speaking of speed limits, I was at Ivan Illich’s CIDOC, Cuernavaca Mexico when he was touting his idea of a universal speed limit. (Illich is the libertarian’s libertarian, but I can see why bk suspects him (and me) of being insufficiently anti-coercion (short of anarchist): Illich talked about law without always eschewing authority.) I sat in on a class in which Illich, the original deschooler, was explaining that we’d all be better off, as a convivial society, if no one ever went faster than fifteen miles an hour. (Illich did not mean that there should be a cop on the ski mountain to arrest my downhill velocity; he was talking about machines, about traffic.) CIDOC had first been full of radical Catholics studying American intrusions into South and Central America; at the time of which I speak, 1972ish, CIDOC was filled with American university tourists, getting academic credit for slumming below the border. One gal instantly objected, "What about ambulances?" As I say, I was just sitting in, I didn’t feel I had a right to speak among the tuition payers: but I thought, "You moron, if we all took it easy, powered down, preferred lo-tech, simple machines, few would need an ambulance. In the park I live in it feels like the majority have a pin in their joints or need a prosthetic hip because of traffic (ahem) accidents.

Politics of Denial

God keep us from getting what we wish for. I want civilization to fall on its face. I want to live long enough, just long enough, to see sea levels rising, the weather unbearable, gas $1,000 an ounce, money totally worthless ... people mugging each other, not for a hand-out, No, for the hand itself: throw it in the pot. Gotta eat something.
And, by God, I’ve got my wish. Almost. Sea levels are rising. The weather is unbearable.
Florida is famous for being windy. But for the last several years the wind never relents for more than an hour or two. The fish themselves are sea-sick from the chop.
In nice weather the bass come into the nice calm shallows: where you can see them, or at least detect their activity, at least guess where a nice one might be: cast to it ... and catch one: in an average of one hundred such casts. With the chop up, you can cast one thousand times, and catch nothing. You can fish a week and not find a single day’s legal limit.
Now some scientists have been warning us that this could happen for decades. But some scientists, all kleptocratically funded in some way, say, Oh yes, this is a natural pattern. It’s not man-made; it’s natural. Now those are the scientists that President Bush is anxious to reward, to republish, to tout. Oh, please let us get away with our politics of denial just a little bit longer.
Of course it’s a natural pattern: the species prospers until it fouls its environment, until it no longer fits what had birthed it (because it fit so well), until the species doesn’t fit: and goes extinct: and other formerly-fit species along with it.

Good. That clears space for something(s) that WILL fit.

more coming

2005 10 12 Midnight. I looked out the window. The palm fronds were still. I stepped outside. Not a leaf was stirring. I threw a couple of rods into the car and drove down to the bridge over the canal between Lake Jackson and Little Lake Jackson. The flag by the hotel was stiff out of the east. What the hell: my park is sheltered; the lake front is not.
By the time I've crossed the highway and gotten ready to cast, the wind is lifting my hat off my head. Still, I work the two rods, telling myself that each cast will be the last. Hell, I start to crank in the heavy rod and my lure is stuck. I struggle to free it: and a bass is splashing around on the surface. In this infernal, incessant, wind I have no feel of the line: can't tell a strike from a rock!

Anthems

Who besides me noticed that the televised US Open Tennis championships this year fell into step with baseball, football, and basketball championships by intruding patriotism? The performance of this or that national anthem? Who else was appalled?
I’m long accustomed to the rituals of the quintessentially American team sports hosting a patriotic element, the more so the more popular they are. But thus far the kleptocracy had kept its mitts off individualistic sports. When I go skiing (or fishing) I do so to get away from the society. The trouble with skiing is you use a machine-powered lift to get to the top of the slope. That’s why I came to prefer wilderness backpack-skiing: climb where you want to ski, bring food and a tent with you, find it virgin, carve it: and when it snows again, it will be virgin again. Fishing commences with a boat, gasoline-powered, or from a pier, built by a property owner, or a municipality, or a corporation. Sure, I still do that too, that’s how I started, but these days I like to just get to some nice water and wade out into it. (The canal off Estero Bay that I caught a snook in a few weeks ago was built by developers, in cooperation with Fort Meyers, or Naples Florida; but I just waded out into it: and the snook that grabbed my jig had nothing to do with political, human Florida; it emerged from the biosphere, from the Gulf ecology.
Standing atop Tuckerman’s Ravine, after getting there on my own legs (though I’ll first have had to drive hundreds to thousands of miles to get to the valley), I can have a moment of silence for the victims of Hurricane Katrina: I can have a moment of silence for the victims of Krakatoa, of westward expansion, of the monopolization of banks, of fiat money ... Mired in muck from Estero Bay I can sing America the Beautiful ... or Liebster Gott or Muddy’s Two Trains Comin’. I can even salute if I want to; no one’s pressuring me: and I can mean whatever I want by the salute. Or, I can just start my downward plunge, make my first cast.
Tennis is an individualist sport, aristocratic in origin. English, and Norman, nobles played it: with their ladies sometimes.
I got into tennis as an escape from the US Army -- as manifest at Camp Drum, Watertown NY, 1963ish. Camp Drum was kleptocratic drab: everything natural killed, barracks, pre-fab utilitarian ugly administration buildings, not a blade of grass not trampled to gray dust; the tennis courts were in a public park, verdant, with a zoo: nothing pre-fab allowed: a Potemkin facade to deceive ourselves with. I played tennis, with great enthusiasm, with no rules. I needed ... first, the park, with its courts; then: a racket, a ball, and a partner: someone not to compete against, but to cooperate with. We’d hit ground strokes to each other with the aim that they would come back to us: so we could hit them again, and again. I learned a forehand, and a backhand. That’s all we needed. We got good enough that we could keep the ball crossing the net till each of us had hit it three, sometimes four times. That accomplished, the caveman was welcome: one of us, either of us, could go for a winner: a shot deliberately hit out of the other’s reach (but within the strict definition of the court’s legal territory for singles play. The ball had to be in.
God didn’t help me since then when I’ve tried to play tennis against others. They want to keep score. They want to start with a serve. A serve? I had no serve: I’d always started with a forehand: right into my partner’s power zone. New partners would hit their first shot away from me! I’d hit to them, they’d hit away from me. Guess who won.

Oh, well. Life is made of things degenerating: just as it is likewise made of things elevating. Negative entropy (that is, positive entropy, creative entropy) couldn’t keep going without entropy.
But it’s another big slip toward pre-fab, toward grass ground to dust, when tennis tournaments too become an excuse for colonizing-nationalism.
We’ll become true Nazis when we make Kim Clisters, Roger Federer, and Elena Dementieva wear little US flags on their sleeve.

For Rent

I just got a pay per hit offer to advertise on an archived top Knatz.com page from 2004 June: the one that brags about the Father's Day card that Catfarmer sent me. Many an offer to trade links, to display banners ... I discard as spam as fast as I throw away the home loan or credit card offers. Realize: pk is the guy who wouldn't wear an I Like Ike button in the 1950s: a time when I actually did like Ike. I don't use my body to advertise others. K. is part of my body: at least part of my mind. I don't want Calvin Klein on my ass, Michael Jordan on my chest, Babe Ruth on my back ... I razor labels from my clothing. I resent the difficulty of removing the car dealership's logo from my car.

Partly, it's a class thing. Classy people are above engaging in trade. Of course the classy individual is first supposed to receive rents from a shire, country ... a state ... My great great grandfather was Prime Minister of England; but that's not good enough. He should have been an earl. Better: a duke.
That's a joke, of course, though few ever seem to get pk humor.

With total seriousness, I do offer my body, my mind, to advertising: where I chose the entity advertised! I advertise Shakespeare, and pay to do it. I advertise Korzybski, Bateson ... Fuller, Prigogine ... Tolstoy, Thackeray ... Jesus, Ivan Illich ... Masaccio, Kurasawa, Tarkovsky.

Secular / Sacred

We hold these truths to be self evident:
that all men are created equal.
US Declaration of Independence

Durkheim observed that the common thread in the religious mind isn’t God or even good, but rather a confidence that such minds can reliably distinguish sacred from profane. Every culture has its sacred cows, and these days most of what’s shoved up our noses as sacred is secular. In National Treasure the sacred treasure is the US Declaration of Independence.

Adams and Jefferson, appointed the composition committee, each tried to pass the buck to the other, Adams prevailing. So Thomas Jefferson wrote:We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.One thing about the sacred is: you memorize it, but don’t really think about it. Well, that worked for me too: until I got older. Now I like to think about the unthinkable, one unthinkable thing after another. I’ve long had my doubts about the utility of political misuses of mathematical concepts, equal for example. I know what "equal" means in arithmetic: 2 + 2 = 4. I sort of know what it means in mathematics in general. And I also know what it means in a Declaration of Independence: but I know it with an entirely different kind of mind.

The English-speaking American colonists thought they were far enough away from King George that they could finally tell him to bug off: that they, last century’s misfits, excess population, felons, dissenters ... could claim that they were peer to the House of Hanover -- and hoped to get away with it. It certainly did not mean that they were peers among themselves: except in the sense that male Athenians property holders in the time of Pericles, all two thousand of them (in a population many times that) pretended to be peers for a generation or two.

You have no peers.
pk’s lawyer

Thomas Jefferson himself owned slaves. Indeed, Jeff owned more slaves than all but one other in his county. I’ll bet he thought of his wife as his property. (Didn’t the church ritual, penned in the Sixteenth Century, say so?)

Under George (and George didn’t invent it), a few English peers (wherever they were born: Shropshire, Kent ... Germany) got to decide who had to pay tithes to whom. In the Bible everyone was supposed to pay 10% of their year's income to God (in the person of some church, some temple: a bunch of human priests). In the political era you have to pay some percentage to the state; what you give to God comes out of what ever is left over for you: double tithing. Jeff and his pals were telling George that they weren’t going to pay.
(George Washington proved, by the Whiskey Wars, that he and his pals were just as capable of taxation without representation as George of Hanover.) (Oh, but we had representation: George Washington and his pals!) (Hell, George Washington, Adams, and Jeff had had representation too: Hanoverian George and his pals!)

I’ve thought about all this for a long time. Some friends, my son, my diary ... have heard about it. But to date I’m not sure how much has leaked into Knatz.com (temp. offline).

It was seeing Ken Burns’ PBS documentary on Thomas Jefferson (seeing part of it -- I bailed out early) that got me seething to blog something like this: before developing it further at K. Russell Baker decades back posted a marvelous Times op-ed contrasting serious with solemn: serious being elevated, solemn denigrated. Ken Burns to me is solemnity personified. And he looks how Gainsborough’s Blue Boy would look if it were turned over to Disney for popularization: the infantile canonized; the macroinformation deleted. I thought his Civil War series was solemn enough, but it was his ten minutes of Wynton Marsalis for thirty seconds of Louis Armstrong in his Jazz series that really made me hate him. (Just like Jeff, Washington, Franklin ..., he sticks his pals where the subject belongs.)

But dig this: Jeff wrote, "We hold these truths to be self evident ... (that all men are created equal ...)" Truths?!?!? Self evident?!?!? Is it true? Is it self evident? Did Jeff believe it for a second? Do you?

I deny that equality is either true or self-evident in any visible political system, past or present. Is Bush equal to any member of his Cabinet? Is the Pope equal to a Cardinal? Not arithmetically. They’re not the same size, they don’t weight the same ... And not politically either. That’s why we have a head of state.

I theorize about the macroinformation latent in paradox, in contradiction, in complex systems ... but distinguish it from mere muddles: as in political discourse. (By the way, apropos of my title (and the base theme here), Jeff had earlier penned: "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable." See? Sacred! Undeniable? Sure: as in You better not try it!)

more coming Oh, and what’s coming will concern that problematic key word: "created!! I don’t see how it can be denied that Pleroma, the physical universe, AND Creatura, the universe of life, both exhibit design that neither Darwin’s theory of evolution nor its upgraded descendants can account for, but the term created intrudes a set of unnecessary specifics. Some things seem to have been designed, but we have no good ideas how. Say "God," and in truck unending freightloads of superstitious rubbish: with either Guido or Abdul thinking he’s in charge!

2005 10 04 Ha! Just a few days later! "A court in Pennsylvania is now hearing a suit brought by parents against a school district that teaches intelligent design -- the view that life is so complex some higher being must have designed it -- alongside evolution in biology class." Reuters.
The best arguments I’ve seen are in Michael J. Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. Now a Roman Catholic cardinal has published a parallel argument.

Microbes

MICROBES THAT RULE THE WORLD

"For more than 3 billion years, microbes have mediated critical processes that allowed higher organisms to evolve. These creatures dominate the Earth’s biodiversity particularly in oceans, where they account for 90 percent of the biomass.

"Scientists estimate that there are about 1 million bacteria and 10 million viruses per milliliter of ocean water, and about 1 billion bacteria per gram of sediment.

'"Although they are largely invisible to the naked eye, microorganisms are pervasive in all environments and have a profound impact on Earth’s habitability and biodiversity," said Mitchell Sogin, director of MBL.

"Marine microbes influence climate and play an essential role in maintaining the planet’s oxygen and carbon balance."

I’ve been meaning to talk about all this: and I will.

Who's pk?

Who's pk? Age now sixty-seven, I won't say that I've never met anyone significant parts of whose model of me didn't match my own, but very very few. Nothing to build with. (Keep separate of course the (macroinformational) question of whether or not their or my model of myself matches in any respect God's, or god's, or the truth.)

I've been trying to declare (while discovering) who and what I am since before puberty, at least since the middle of grammar school. Society's reaction, my own family's reaction, is to bat it aside. Considerations unwelcome.

Through 1990 I endeavored to publish my declarations, to make them public, to share: all to very little success. Getting online on a regular basis in 1995, I've devoted much of my home page to telling about the preceding half-century. Now there are a couple more experiences where dialogue shows partial matches, signs of communicational success. (1990 to 1995 I'd given up on publishing, was retired from the effort: retreated to my diary.)

My experience to date indicates that communication is rare, swept aside by the ever rising tide of self-promotions, self-deceptions: disinformation. So. It may be that neither friends (I used to have a couple) nor public is willing or competent to consider pk theses. It doesn't matter whether I say it well or ill; you won't hear it. god will be able to show the public, once it's dead, once its attention is enslaved, that it was told again and again and again and again how to live, what to avoid.

Of course my intended audience is 99.9% kleptocrat: people screaming about property rights on stolen land, people screaming how Jesus is going to save them: after clones, earlier in history, people just like them, killed him.

I summarize examples, chronologically, already developed at Knatz.com:

1. When I was ten or so my Sunday School teacher asked me what I intended to do with my Christianity. I readily answered, to his discomfort and dismay, that I would test my thesis that all religions were One: that our difficulties were problems of translation, of interpretation ...
   His reaction forecast to me that I would never get any help or understanding from my church.
   My point isn't that my thesis was true, or remotely original (though at the time I thought it was both); rather my point is that adults recoil from anything not a clone of their training. It isn't true merely of the cannibals; it's equally true of the missionaries.
2. I want to stop torturing Jesus after two thousand years of it, finally take him down off the cross. I wrote a story about it. I submitted it to the major magazines. At least the Atlantic had the decency to confess to tears at its rejection.
3. In the mid-1960s I started hearing people talking about quantifying information by counting storage bytes on a disk: as though English were efficient, as though data and information were synonyms ... Nonsense, I thought (not knowing that Norbert Wiener had been there before me): There's more information in Shakespeare's "My salad days, when I was green in judgement, cold in blood" than there is in the Manhattan telephone book.
   Nearly a half-century later I'm not aware of a single person who properly apprehends the implications (of Sentiens being entirely composed of information) (and nothing but information): even as I develop some at Macroinformation.org.
4. I didn't develop Macroinformation in the 1960s: because I was busy noticing correspondences between the Fair Love and the Dark Lady of Shakespeare's oxymoron-raddled sonnets, the Experience / Authority dichotomy of Chaucer's Wife of Bath, and the theological-cosmological-epistemological controversy between Scholastic Realism and nominalism that was spreading since the Eleventh Century.
   Neither did I see that both theses were really the same: complex information manifesting in multiple dimensions.
   In any case, the evidence mounting that NYU had understood little of what I'd said since matriculating, NYU additionally exhibiting a belief that it had no obligation to listen even as it bankrupted me, having teamed with Ivan Illich in his quest for conviviality in 1970, when my doctoral orals committee simply interrupted and dismissed my Shakespeare thesis in 1971, I abandoned the academia that had never not abandoned me.
5. Ivan Illich analyzed civilized institutions as coming to serve ends opposite and incompatible with their charters. Priests block messages from God, schools enslave us while making us stupid ... The solution would be for the public to network itself, keep its own records, obviate government, media ... What the world needed was a non-managerial librarian, someone who would keep records without judging or censoring them. And that's what I volunteered to do. Let the public tell whatever lies it wanted, but don't elevate the lies, merely record them: and also publish feedback so the wash might wash itself. Maybe filth would settle to the bottom instead of rising to the top.
   The internet I offered in 1970 would keep records of Who, What, When, Where ... and no one needed a computer to use it (so long as the library itself was tied to a mainframe). The public was invited to fund its own freedom. It didn't.
   Bankrupt myself, I was now bankrupting my wife (and her family) waiting for the public to funnel resources to its library.
   The library, as a potential, still lives: in my mind.
6. Much of my best thinking of decades went into my fiction. Art can punch through defenses that thought can't penetrate. I couldn't afford the postage to mail it. Publishers held the manuscripts for unconscionable periods: only to return copious misunderstandings. My story about an ineffective-looking guy who notched the deaths of many a mugger onto his knife came back from Playboy, from Esquire ... Lo & behold: Death Wish pops out of Hollywood a year later. Is there (in a kleptocracy) any lawyer who would even understand my complaint, let alone work pro bono to sue? How about the same lawyers who worked pro bono for the Mohawk to get their land back?
   When Harpers finally decided to publish my best story, the entire editorial staff was fired, all decisions reversed. (It's was Norman Mailer's excellence, not mine, that triggered the new avalanche of publishing cowardice.)
more illustrations coming

This theme continues at pk.

Dead Mac

Frustration! I have been unable to post to any of my domains, my gallery, my blogs ... for nearly two weeks! My Mac G4 was my only machine connected to my DSL service. With no other IS my other modems and machines were useless: for publishing on line. Fixing the G4 looked to cost approximately the price of a Mac mini, so I decided to abandon the G4 once my Mr. FixIt promised to make a DVD of the data.
Great: under the circumstances, provided someone could get me a Mac mini pronto. And that didn't happen. Mac Warehouse was back ordered, and then shipping took the better part of another week.
Well, two frantic days with a nifty machine but no current data on it for email addresses, no FTP software, most of my applications incompatible with OS X ... and I'm working again anyway.
At least, that is, I am able to post to Knatz.com, to my blogs, to Macroinformation.org, to InfoAll.org ... and to PKImaging.com.

Whoopee!

Expect frantic, rushed, catch-up drafts to come fast and furious.

28 September: Harrumph! My work has been fast and furious alright, but has yet to find it's way here.

Katrina's Lake George

It’s now a couple of weeks that have slipped by without my yet registering my outrage that the media seem coordinated in blaming New Orleans on nature. Millions of people living below sea level behind levees entrusted (forcibly) to the government?!? When they know that hurricanes are perennial? some worse than others?

Last year the hurricanes hit Sebring hard. They’re part of what killed my Catherine. I held her hand while the electricity was out for nearly a week, while the temperatures in the shade were over one hundred: no AC, no powered fans ... Katrina missed us this time but then bludgeoned the north Gulf of Mexico.

I’ll bet that New Orleans had a dozen or more Peters who tried to put their finger in the dike, but were arrested by the Bushes who wanted to monopolize all such activities for the "experts."

No, we can’t have real teachers in the schools. We crucify real teachers, pour hemlock in their ear, won’t publish them, drive their already published books out of print, hound them from the libraries ... The schools are the preserve of morons.

2005 09 24 Since posting the above I’ve been reminded that New Orleans’ population had been artificially inflated by this and that government interference. Leave the Mississippi alone and some people will live there anyway, periodically getting washed about: as Faulkner so wonderfully evokes in his Old Man. Some nine million people lived along the Mississippi Valley before 1492. They knew mud.
But nothing like current numbers: who therefore ought to know mud.

I remind all: again: read Ian McHarg’s Design with Nature!

Humans are social animals. We will always form groups, then gang up. But nation states, with governments, have gone way too far.

Radio

Whatever the inventor intended, whatever the first backers meant, the real function of radio turned out to be to turn all music into noise. (Thanks to the rare FM station, it succeeded only 99.9%.)

Now TV is making great strides turning tennis into noise. CBS late night US Open Report, far too frenetic for years, is now hardly distinguishable from Top Ten stations that interrupt themselves with the song, the song with another song, the other song again with themselves. No margins, no room to breathe.

Good

Etc, etc. ... And God saw that it was good.
When the Jews wrote down their key oral traditions, they juggled that around till it was right at the top, one of the first ideas.
And of course the Jews saw that they were good. I bet that the Jews weren’t the first culture to invent the idea of goodness and then attribute the quality to themselves as well as to their special magician in the clouds, but, best we can tell, they were the first to write it down.
There! two things: "good": and "written" records.

The universe that we know a fragment of was already upwards of fourteen billion years old when the Jews’ God created heaven, earth, and the Garden; the earth was upwards of four and a half billion years old. (Pardon the necessary ridiculousness of that statement: if a "year" is the period of the earth’s revolution around the sun, then how can there have been years before there was an earth?) When a spider is born, does mama spider teach it that it’s good? How about bacteria?
When India squashed into Asia throwing up the Himalayas, did the mountains think they were good?
No. The concept is a human concept. But humans had been around for quite a while before the Garden. Indeed, modern humans had been around for roughly one hundred and forty thousand years. Talk-talk-talking human beings had been around for forty thousand years at least.

Nevertheless, the concept of good, and the attribution of the concept to one’s group -- the United States is good -- is essential to the essence of what constitutes, not modern man, Homo sapiens sapiens, but civilized Homo sapiens: kleptocrats.

I’ll do more with this at Knatz.com’s Society section (temp. offline): in the part on Social Epistemology.
One thing I must be sure to tie in involves my oft-iterated distinction between elements of what we must call "design" in the universe and the so embarrassingly recent magical creation of the Jews' blood-demon.
How blood clots is irreducibly complex. We have no non-laughable way to put it in the camp of evolution. So, until our vocabulary improves, we might as well say that "god" did it: meaning: put it in a black box, the contents not mapped at present (and perhaps permanently unmapable!)
Black boxes are how we can talk with some sense without knowing every detail of every component of what we are saying. It's not quite the same as not knowing what the hell we're talking about: though we do plenty of that too.

pk's Society

I've been busy work, work, working to restructure the Society section in the "teaching" area of my Knatz.com. Check it out: pk’s Society Entrance.

Cosmology of Pirates

It’s a myth that people ever believed the earth was flat. They thought it was a sphere held up by Atlas. What held Atlas up? Why a big turtle, of course.
The joke goes that some wiseacre traveled to the top of the Himalayas to ask the wise man what held the earth up. "Atlas, and a turtle," the wise man answered. "Well, then," demanded our smartalec, what holds the turtle up?" "You can’t fool me," answered the wise man: "It’s turtles all the way down."
No, says pk. There is no giant turtle. Atlas holds up the world. Atlas used to be Greek, before he was Roman, after he was Persian. More recently he’s been Spanish, and British. Now Atlas is an American.
And Atlas stands not on the back of a giant turtle, but on the shoulders of a pirate: a great pirate. And the great pirate stands on the shoulders of another thief, and the thief stands on the shoulders of a great magician ...
It’s strong men, pirates, thieves, murderers, and great deceivers all the way down.
Or so we would do better to think. Actually though, nothing holds up the earth. The earth isn’t held up. The earth doesn’t need holding: and there is no "up."

Goya, Colossus

Prediction, Reporting, Results

Elections, for example, sports.

The paper shows the morning line, Cappy narrates progress around the track, then, in a close race, everyone waits around until the officials announce which horse crossed the line first, second, third ... Supposedly, nothing counts until the officials have sorted among the photo finish, the witness of their own eyes, complaints of fouls from the jockeys. Sometimes it’s easy: no fouls are claimed, and everyone saw, saw clearly, that Seabiscuit was many lengths ahead of War Admiral.

Fine.

But what if sponsors have spent millions to ride the high profile of the Yankees? or Tiger Woods? Tom Dewey? or Richard Nixon?
What if you own the newspaper and you want the election results on the street, an extra edition: and you want it on the streets before the votes have been counted, show what a magician you are? Why then you herald "DEWEY!" across the front page! But in the morning, when Truman wakes up, the votes show that he’s President Truman.

CBS spends expensive minutes over hours, Saturday and Sunday, analyzing in close up every move made by Tiger! by Vijay! by Phil! Those are the spending minutes; they are balanced by the network’s earning minutes: Tiger is driving a Buick. Tiger is smiling. The Buick is dominant, makes everybody happy. Tiger had damn well better win the tournament.

And he does. Lots. But not all. What do we do when the cameras have spent Saturday and Sunday on Tiger, on Vijay, but it’s Ben Curtis who finishes 18 with the low score? Who? The experts never mentioned him, never showed a shot of his until he suddenly grabbed the lead at 17: while all the big names fell down.

Before the race you can talk up any horse you want. Before the race you can put up your money, demand that others put up their money, or shut up. But after the race, we’re all supposed to shut up: except to acknowledge the winner: and the winner is the horse that crossed the line first, no fouls judged against him.
At the convention we can curse all the other candidates. On election eve we can incandesce our hatred of the major opponent. On election eve we can still threaten to move to Canada if the other guy wins. But the morning after the election we’re all supposed shut up: except to say Yes, President Truman.

Today’s final round of the PGA Tournament, this year again at Baltusrol, spun me between annoyance and enjoyment. I read all the articles that said Tiger should win easily. As difficult as Baltusrol may be, it was supposed to set up perfectly for Tiger’s game. I’m all for that. If Tiger won every tournament for the next twenty years, it would be fine with me. I missed him on Carson when he was a toddler, but I’ve avidly ridden his bandwagon since he was a teen: a dozen years of pk joining Tigermania.
But Tiger flubbed, Mickelson shone. Then Mickelson flubbed.

Sometimes it seems like some hero seizes the limelight. On Sunday they go eagle, birdie, birdie ... leap up the leader board. There’s been very little leaping in this tournament, and a lot of falling down: bogey, bogey, bogey.

You want to know about the week’s tournament? Thursday through Sunday? Seventy-two holes? Read the paper on Monday. A sensible person wouldn’t watch the horse race. Get a heart attack. Just scan the tote board after the race results are official. What difference does it make which horse had the lead at the turn? Only the finish line counts.

But no. Budweiser, Buick, IBM ... they all want it to be a horse race: where heroic will counts the most.
No. CBS, NBC, ABC ... all want the experts to narrate for us, between commercials: and want the experts to be right. The Yankees must win. Hell, they spent the most money. Dewey must win.

We really shouldn’t count the votes.
Counting the votes can make the experts look bad.

And this PGA is making everybody look ... well, if not bad, then human.

One thing’s sure though, surer all the time: a no-name may win a sporting event, but no major election will ever be won except by the Yankees, by Budweiser, by Buick. Sports are just window dressing, to pretend that everyone has a chance.

Order, Archives

The default mode for humans is daytime. Funny, cause our earliest mammal ancestors were night creatures.
Humans like best to look where the light is clearest: that makes hiding things easy: bury it in the dark.
It’s a stupid thief though who buries something in the dark under a light that can be switched on at any time. Of course ignorant of tomorrow’s technology, tomorrow’s habits, priorities, no theft is permanently safe.

You know the joke about the guy coming upon a guy searching under a street lamp: Wha’cha looking for, asks the newcomer. I dropped my car keys, says the seeker.
The newcomer helps him search for a while, then asks, Are you sure this is where you dropped them?
Oh, no; I dropped them over there.
Then why are you looking for them over here?
The light is so much better.

As with so many jokes, that’s deep. But deeper still is Gregory Bateson’s point that a patient random search of any hay stack will eventually find the missing needle; however infinite ordered searching will never find the thing misordered.

The function of any human archive is two-fold: we can file our property deed so that it can be found; we can misfile the Indian’s deed so it will never be found.
This relates to a number of Knatz.com (and other pk domain) modules. Additions will find themselves recreated at pKnatz blog.

Circumcision

Shlain inspired, pk explains circumcision:

Nearly a year and a half after digesting Leonard Shlain’s Sex, Time, and Power: How Women’s Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution, a connection with circumcision suddenly comes to me:
Judaism, and therefore Christianity, is famous for being a male-dominant religion: male obsessed: obsessed with blood, always in human matters evoking thoughts of menstrual blood. Shlain argues that women, Gyna sapiens, invented time (as a human concept, of course) thanks to evolution separating women from other mammal and primate females by ... hidden ovulation, conspicuous menses ... Suddenly, women were much smarter than men. Men had to struggle to catch up: or they’d never get laid again: women having figured out the connection between copulation and pregnancy, women having noticed the danger as well as pain of bearing big-headed babies, learned, for the first time, to say No.
So men invented talking, talk the woman into the sack. If women invented intelligence, it was men who invented human intelligence: based in promises, in illusions: in deception (including self-deception).
Women may have participated among men in inventing magic (self-deception) and even in positing special unseen magicians -- divinities, gods -- from their magic; but I’ll bet it was strictly men who invented Monotheism with its authoritative God: a boss.
Lie down! Spread your legs! Or you’ll go to hell! Authority, if you can summon it, is easier than seduction: now ordinary men can also get laid.
But women were first. And women were the mothers: the children were THEIRS! So men were jealous: for the first time.
Therefore, by homeopathic magic -- like begets like, men invented circumcision: make the male bleed: like a woman! Resculpt the penis: like a nipple!And if you circumcise the clit, why then maybe you can finally find the damn thing, in the dark.

2011 09 06 Silly me, that's not what I meant to say. The joke should have gone, "And if you circumcise the clit, why then you don't have to try to find the damn thing, in the dark."
I had a girl friend a few decades ago who gave me the idea that she herself didn't know where it was: because I'd been paying good attention to it for months, with fingers and tongue as well as whatever bumped from the pubis, when she took me aside to give me a lecture on locating it! I think her daughter must have given her a spiel and she was mindlessly passing it on, not paying any attention to sense: like a priest lecturing the mother of twelve on not over-prizing virginity!
After that I never wanted to give her another orgasm.
(And that wasn't the worst part: but this post isn't about that part of my sad story.)

I've been using Iona Arc to preview Knatz.com materials; in this case I jotted the ideas first at my Circumcision: Medicine, Science, & Superstition and now share it at this blog.

2005 08 19 It occurs to me, this baker’s week after blogging the above and apropos of my little aside joke at the end, that not everyone has heard about circumcision of the clitoris. Understand, I am NOT talking about removing the clitoris, but of unsheathing it. If the operation has its own proper name, as I’m sure it does, I don’t know it. I never heard of it till a few years ago, reading about a doctor who performed this little trick, scrapping away too thick flesh around the clit that would interfere with its function of female arousal, in all his operations on women, without their consent and without informing them afterwards. Doctors!
Women who’d been married, who had borne children, but who had never been aroused, who’d never had a clue what all the fuss was about, were suddenly becoming nymphomaniacs! They at long last had discovered arousal.
One poor woman though couldn’t stand it. EVERYTHING stimulated her: and it wasn’t pleasant.
Challenged, the doctor insisted he hadn’t done anything wrong: anything unprofessional!
God save us from professions.

Fish Resort

A Reuters news item today reports that the city of Chicago has installed a choice environment for beauty-starved fish of the thoroughly urbanized Chicago River. Like a modern zoo or aquarium (with a night house) the public can view and photograph the fish as they sample choice vegetation introduced to the resort.

Bravo: with a BUT.

I make the best of having been born in 1938 that I can by celebrating our times as interesting. Whether we’re on our way to a better society (or a better species) or whether we’re in a Last Days anteroom to hell, our times are interesting.
I don’t exactly have a choice; but if I did, and chose selfishly -- that is, if I chose to please myself, to like and approve my society, my species, I’d choose to live free: that is, in nature: before kleptocracy, before civilization. If I were lucky, I’d get to breed before I ran into a pissed-off lion, or a hungry stronger group. As it is, born into coerced FREEDOM, among critters who, if they understand a word of what I say, don’t have the balls to admit it, I join Ivan Illich in hating every new gimmick to manage us, to put everything in charge of moron experts, to replace woods with gardens and nature with a hospital: ever more expensive and destructive. Now even "wild" animals can’t survive without the interference of a hospital of some sort: animal social workers.

Nevertheless, under the circumstances, a nice modern zoo (or aquarium) with a nice nighthouse (or underwater viewing air-tunnel) is better than total urbanization (and extinction) for everything.

And I love fish. I love to eat them. I love to catch them. (I especially love that most of them are smaller than me: and I catch them, not the other way around.) I love to watch fish. I’ve had aquariums much of my life, if not currently: but then I’m in the water with them nearly every day: wading with my rod. Most of all I love fish because they’re wild: less and less, but still. I love to tussle with a creature that will kill itself rather than be captured. (Fish form their own schools: not a one state-fiated.) (Though once a bass has been released, it never again fights all out like the first time. And I doubt that any farm-raised fish will ever fight like a native.)

(Now me in contrast, if I were ever redrafted for church, for school, for the army, I’d fight like hell: which I didn’t the first time.) (Same if someone tried to trick me into another marriage!)

Majority

Majority:1) a preponderance
2) more than 50% of some sample
3) a political/legal/cultural averaging of some threshold.At twenty-one the previously judged immature aristocrat becomes legally judged mature: he comes into his majority.

Will the numerical majority ever come into its majority: of wisdom? Will the preponderance of people ever becomes mature? Allow free inquiry? free research? free speculation? churches and governments and universities no longer cowering about public opinion?

Don’t know. But my speculation is NEVER!

Cowering: they all cower; but won’t admit it. And the institutions the majority supports (in their minority) are granted an illusory dignity by that majority, which wills itself blind to that cowering.

The Blind Swordsman

When I was a kid I loved Cony Island, I loved Times Square: entertainment: neon lights, crowds, everything braying, everything for sale. After a while I saw the dirt, the disease, the whorishness. I was perhaps fourteen before I ever loved neon lights again: it was a National Geographic picture of Hong Kong’s entertainment district: the neon lights sculpted characters I didn’t understand. Drained of meaning, the patterns were once again beautiful to me.
Like opera: I don’t mind it if it’s in a language I don’t know (though after a while you DO understand some of the Italian, the German: or at least can mimick it phonetically.

When I was a kid I disapproved of westerns: people killing each other, stealing cattle, taking the law into their own hands. The church, the school, fed us parallel lines of behavioral propaganda; Hollywood contradicted all that, stimulated our imaginations to a cartoon of anarchism. But that cultural artifact, my "self," was determined to be "good." So I hardened my heart against all the shooting.

Imagine how confused I became when I saw Kurosawa’s Roshomon in the early 1950s. There the violence was so stimulating I couldn’t resist it. I didn’t see The Seven Samurai till it had been out at least a couple of years, a rerun: and I was smitten afresh. So what good had it done me to resist Hopalong Cassidy? Zoro? Oh, hell, admit it: I never resisted Errol Flynn.
But notice: I was seduced by the violence when it was alien. (Then how come The Seven Samurai seemed so, if not Christian exactly, so moral, so ethicaly challenging?)

2011 09 06 Whoops, IonaArc's graphics thru 2006 were stored at PKImaging.com. The fed destroyed all my domains, my images evaporated. Now I try to fix things as I notice which posts need fixing.

So I learned to love great Japanese films: Ugetsu, The Hidden Fortress, Bandits on the Wind, Yojimbo ... And they were all battle-torn. Indeed, I became addicted: and the addict starts seeing films that are far from great, that one doesn’t expect to be great, ethically challenging (or their challenge is concocted horeshit), just so long as the kendo will be good: Sword of Doom, Zatoichi ... (And by now I’ve gobbled a bunch of horseshit westerns too, any damn crime drama.)

But rather than ask what happened to Protestant Paul, let’s rather hypothesize that Hollywood knew my syndrome long before I discovered it in myself: they make their violent entertainments alien, they put them in a "west" no one ever actually colonized, ever lived in. Mine just had to be a little bit extra foreign before I succombed.

These thoughts visit me as I am about to watch a Zatoichi film for the first time in decades: Zatoichi, (the blind swordsman). The Zatoichi series in Japan was to Roshomon what B movies were to DW Griffith, what Quentin Tarantino became to John Ford. to John Huston ...

Later: It was cute. Big budget, professional production ... but this Zatoichi was blond (or at least ashen) and had blue eyes!

Every ronin cliché was employed: and at the end the huge supporting cast engaged in a hoedown: jazzy, funky, with syncopated percussion, and even tap dancing in high-heel clogs!

2005 08 07 I’ve an itch to detail a couple of other cute things about this bit of entertainment. (No one, not once, got kicked in the balls! (Though they were forever cutting themselves and each other with sloppy draws of the sword in crowded conditions.)
We have Zatoichi travelling as a masseur. He’s taken in by a nice farm lady. (She gets a massage, but doesn’t seem to give him any pussy.) The pair befriend a pair of pseudo-geishas: a brother and sister act, the transvestite brother masquerading as a dancer-whore-drinking-companion. Sister plays a biwa whose strings detach so she can use her instrument as a garotte, strangling the john while brother robs him. The biwa like all their paraphernalia conceal steel stabbing and cutting weapons. Seems to me that a wakizashi in the wood would ruin the tone. But my point is: none of the principals seem fazed by their profession or how they practice it. Hell, they’re just a couple of misunderstood kids who had a hard childhood. But then Zatoichi himself kills six out of seven people he meets. But we can see he’s just a farm hand at heart.

Zatoichi can kill everybody lickety-split because, being blind, his other senses are more finely tuned. He can taste where everyone is and what they’re doing, smell the precise position and intentions of their weapons. He makes beaucoup pocket money feeling whether the dice, hidden in the cup, add odd or even.

Which brings up the last point I’ll add: The gambling house gets tired of Zatoicho winning every bet, so they switch dice. He can hear that the dice are different: so he kills everybody present: the dice man, the pit boss, the cashier, the gofer, the joint manager: trashes the place. But the next night, clean and neat, they’re back in business: new dice man, new pit boss ...
Bush for President? How about Hollywood for God? Everybody neat and clean, no matter what a slob they are.

Falsification: the Soul of Science

If your models of reality don’t well map reality, don’t jibe smoothly with experience, make better models, redraft your maps: from scratch if necessary.

This wisdom is not natural to human individuals. Science is rare. No individual can be a "scientist" 100% of the time.
This wisdom is anathema to societies. Societies routinely stretch the bottom of their budget to buttress beliefs that have bumped against experience. Where the university has invested in Newtonian physics, it will resist relativity. Where the university has invested in relativity physics, it will resist quantum incompatibility. Where the Temple has elected its Sanhedrin, it will resist Christ. And where the Temple has accepted the rule of Caesar -- and which temple has not, it will compromise. Caiaphas can interrupt and contradict Jesus, Pilat can judge Jesus without any obligation to demonstrate understanding of what Jesus says: only what Caesar says.

---

The middle part of the previous paragraph instantly distanced the religious, the latter part alienated the scientists. That’s tough, I hold to the relationship, the apotheosis of reason doesn’t suspend homeostasis.
Besides, Michael Behe claims that most scientists do believe in god (the god of order, the god of design), and I suspect that Behe is right: in more than one thing.
Anyone still here: please understand: I use Christ as a symbol, and Jesus too. There’s no dogma in my meaning. There’s a little bit of "Christ" in any revolutionary, any ugly duckling, anyone blocked from the table. I don’t mean that there is an independent thing, immortal, infallible, and 100% a Christ. And I certainly don’t mean that a man called Jesus and crucified two thousand years ago was the only one to try to upgrade a church, a culture, and get kicked in the face.

Science too is based in belief, but science contrasts with religion in that science is supposed to welcome new maps whereas churches are fortified against review.

My piece on Falsification: No Truth Without It: The Wason Test has been at Knatz.com for five years and counting. The above is today’s revisit.