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.]
Friday, October 21, 2005
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
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.
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.
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
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:
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.
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:
- 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 ... - 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. - 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!
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.
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
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.
"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.
(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 Nth 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.
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 Nth 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:
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?
(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
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?
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 ...
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.
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.
Sunday, October 09, 2005
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.
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.
Saturday, October 08, 2005
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.
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.
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.
Friday, October 07, 2005
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.
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.
Wednesday, October 05, 2005
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
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.
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.
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.
Monday, October 03, 2005
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!
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.
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.
Sunday, October 02, 2005
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.
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.
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