Saturday, November 12, 2005
Today's Truth
Telling the truth has little effect if the public mythology and the truth are incompatible.
Friday, November 11, 2005
de Sade
My how time flies. I've written "de Sade" into my development notebooks again and again without ever wedging it into any of Knatz.com's (temp. offline) many god files. I never add "God." I always know what I mean, always assume I'll remember the connection. Now I won't have to 'cause here it is;
The French imprisoned the Marquis again and again. Finally they buried his body in lime: so there could be nothing to resurrect! So God could not have mercy on his soul!
In other words, human beans didn't trust God on this one: we wanted to trump God's judgment with our own.
Like shooting Oswald so he can't be tried.
Preventing a trial in that case didn't ratify Oswald's guilt nearly so much as it assured that probing for the truth would get less fuel. Did the French remember that they would get tried?
Whatever human punishments are for a murderer arrogating the government's role, I presume God will have his own for arrogating people.
The French imprisoned the Marquis again and again. Finally they buried his body in lime: so there could be nothing to resurrect! So God could not have mercy on his soul!
In other words, human beans didn't trust God on this one: we wanted to trump God's judgment with our own.
Like shooting Oswald so he can't be tried.
Preventing a trial in that case didn't ratify Oswald's guilt nearly so much as it assured that probing for the truth would get less fuel. Did the French remember that they would get tried?
Whatever human punishments are for a murderer arrogating the government's role, I presume God will have his own for arrogating people.
Thursday, November 10, 2005
Finger Bow
As huge as Knatz.com (temp. offline) is, it's minuscule compared to my development notes. As incomplete, short of advanced drafts, as some of my modules are, IonaArc was supposed to be a place where that would be OK: obviously a notebook, fast jottings. But of course by now my development notebook for IonaArc, stuff I haven't gotten to, is waxing: almost at the same pace as my not-yet-at-K files.
I mention a set of themes not yet aired: on reading, on literacy; why does civilization care if its public can read? Reading and writing as social control.
Some of that is at K: but not really gone into. Watch for it: here, and there.
I mention a set of themes not yet aired: on reading, on literacy; why does civilization care if its public can read? Reading and writing as social control.
Some of that is at K: but not really gone into. Watch for it: here, and there.
Monday, November 07, 2005
Semantics, Property ...
In a natural language like English words with identical pronunciation can have different, even contradictory meanings. Raise and raze mean incompatible things, but they sound the same. In the case of this pair, the spelling is by convention distinguished, but in many another group distinction resides, if at all, only in the mind of the speakers. You: is it singular? or plural? Semantics, grammar ... the phenomenon is the same.
Well, we've all known that since we learned to speak, and then write, and maybe pay a little attention to spelling. But there remains many a word with multiple and incompatible meanings that even the literate don't distinguish properly. Spreading these borders a bit I invite you to think of the concept property.
Is there any mutualist anarchist (such as myself) who doesn't want his own toothbrush? My toothbrush is mine. Don't use it without permission. My car is mine, I have the key. The key is supposed to be unique: or at least rare. Don't steal my key, don't steal my car, don't borrow it and go racing in the muck. But I certainly don't mean that I "own" my car eternally. I don't pretend that God gave it to me. I bought it, I could sell it.
Consider other things that we think of as "ours." No lover, no bridegroom, wants the rest of his pack jumping into the bridal bed to share his bride's cherry. Does the groom think he owns the bride? In some cultures he's been encouraged to. How about real estate? Lots of people own their house. Do they also own the land it sits on? They may have a paper that says so, but the paper comes from a kleptocracy. Does God ratify the paper?
And if he does, where the hell does he come from? And where does he get the right?
If we own the land, how come the state can take it away when it wants to build a road? to house troops? to test a bomb? If we own the land, how come the hurricane can blow it away, wash it away, dump a hectare of mud on it?
I understand that the tornado can suck my toothbrush from my mouth and whirl it off to Kansas. I understand that the tsunami can sweep my bride from the bed, and me along with her: though we may then have very different destinations. I wind up broken in a tree upland; she washes out to sea. Maybe she lives with mermaids and becomes queen. Maybe she's plunked on an island whose people then worship her, or violate her corpse.
Property is a difficult, complex concept. Should we have thirty different spellings? Ten or fifteen (or fifty} different pronunciations? Not likely. Not unless we were tuned to the differences.
Try thinking of differences within other complex words. Is peace the same in a kleptocracy frequently at war as it is among picnicking Cro-Magnon who've never heard of a state? Of course maybe their picnic comes in the wake of bashing a few Neanderthal heads.
How about war? Is there a difference between driving wolves from your farm and driving Cossacks from your hovel? Is there a difference between knifing the Apache trying to take your scalp and drafting immigrants in New York to fight Confederates in Virginia? or suckering young people in Charleston to ship off to Cuba? to Midway? to Istanbul?
Well, we've all known that since we learned to speak, and then write, and maybe pay a little attention to spelling. But there remains many a word with multiple and incompatible meanings that even the literate don't distinguish properly. Spreading these borders a bit I invite you to think of the concept property.
Is there any mutualist anarchist (such as myself) who doesn't want his own toothbrush? My toothbrush is mine. Don't use it without permission. My car is mine, I have the key. The key is supposed to be unique: or at least rare. Don't steal my key, don't steal my car, don't borrow it and go racing in the muck. But I certainly don't mean that I "own" my car eternally. I don't pretend that God gave it to me. I bought it, I could sell it.
Consider other things that we think of as "ours." No lover, no bridegroom, wants the rest of his pack jumping into the bridal bed to share his bride's cherry. Does the groom think he owns the bride? In some cultures he's been encouraged to. How about real estate? Lots of people own their house. Do they also own the land it sits on? They may have a paper that says so, but the paper comes from a kleptocracy. Does God ratify the paper?
And if he does, where the hell does he come from? And where does he get the right?
If we own the land, how come the state can take it away when it wants to build a road? to house troops? to test a bomb? If we own the land, how come the hurricane can blow it away, wash it away, dump a hectare of mud on it?
I understand that the tornado can suck my toothbrush from my mouth and whirl it off to Kansas. I understand that the tsunami can sweep my bride from the bed, and me along with her: though we may then have very different destinations. I wind up broken in a tree upland; she washes out to sea. Maybe she lives with mermaids and becomes queen. Maybe she's plunked on an island whose people then worship her, or violate her corpse.
Property is a difficult, complex concept. Should we have thirty different spellings? Ten or fifteen (or fifty} different pronunciations? Not likely. Not unless we were tuned to the differences.
Try thinking of differences within other complex words. Is peace the same in a kleptocracy frequently at war as it is among picnicking Cro-Magnon who've never heard of a state? Of course maybe their picnic comes in the wake of bashing a few Neanderthal heads.
How about war? Is there a difference between driving wolves from your farm and driving Cossacks from your hovel? Is there a difference between knifing the Apache trying to take your scalp and drafting immigrants in New York to fight Confederates in Virginia? or suckering young people in Charleston to ship off to Cuba? to Midway? to Istanbul?
Switches
Apropos of Evo Devo, apropos of Evo Devo’s emphasis on switches, I promise a number of additional meditations on the switch, not only here, not only at Knatz.com, but most importantly, at Macroinformation.org.
Hitherto my (published) thoughts have been localized around K’s Thinking Tools.
Hitherto my (published) thoughts have been localized around K’s Thinking Tools.
Sunday, November 06, 2005
Evo Devo
Check it out:
"Evo Devo's first big finding is that all animals are built from essentially the same genes."
!
Pay attention to the business about switches: and to this: "In other words, there are many species for the same reason that there are many sentences: you might know only a few thousand words, but you probably don’t lose sleep over the prospect of running out of sentences."
"Evo Devo's first big finding is that all animals are built from essentially the same genes."
!
Pay attention to the business about switches: and to this: "In other words, there are many species for the same reason that there are many sentences: you might know only a few thousand words, but you probably don’t lose sleep over the prospect of running out of sentences."
Iceman's Curse
BBC News reports that seven people have died who were connected to the discovery and analysis of "Oetzi." the Iceman.
"It is not known how many people have worked on the Oetzi project -- and whether the death rate is statistically high."
pk advises: before talking about statistics, remember where these workers commonly worked: the high mountains, in avalanche country! Mountains are extremely dangerous: as the Iceman knew: or learned.
That's part of why they are so wonderful.
"It is not known how many people have worked on the Oetzi project -- and whether the death rate is statistically high."
pk advises: before talking about statistics, remember where these workers commonly worked: the high mountains, in avalanche country! Mountains are extremely dangerous: as the Iceman knew: or learned.
That's part of why they are so wonderful.
Wednesday, November 02, 2005
Global Warming
PBS just aired Global Warming: The Signs and the Science. I interrupted my work to watch it, my work of the moment being on tenterhooks between writing a new introduction for Macroinformation.org [purged by the fed: see my Macroinformation blog] and getting back to Michael Crichton’s State of Fear: which is about global warming. As is so often the case, Crichton’s science is thrilling; while the thriller plot gets mighty annoying.
This post must remain "part 1" until I’ve persisted with the novel. Crichton’s plot is great is consigning the crisis to journalistic manipulation. It’s obvious that industry wants to keep polluting as it pleases; Crichton has not yet revealed what he thinks its complement is: what agenda is served by crippling industry? Environmentalism at the federal level would be one candidate. Nazis sucked up resources to persecute Jews, not only stealing everything from the Jews, but taxing other Nazis to do it. So, any cause becomes a self-bloating cause in itself: justifying fiddling the evidence, etc. In any case I must find out what agenda Crichton is setting up for ridicule before saying more here. It makes no difference there what scenarios I myself can cook up.
But I don’t need to read further to get to this more important point: neither the PBS show nor the Crichton novel (thus far) say anything about a flaw pk may be unique (or close to unique) in seeing: Crichton dates global warming as a concern to some fairly recent date: when funded concern surfaced, in the public eye. Maybe I’ll re-skim and try to find that date. Whatever it turns out to be, know this: I taught global warming at the college level in 1967 or 1968, vastly earlier than Crichton’s date. Shortly thereafter I was illegally fired from my post.
Neither the PBS nor the Crichton-thus-far betray a hint about such long-standing censorship, persecution of awareness.
My response to being fired, together with new hebetudes in my Ph.D. program, (together with my meeting Ivan Illich,) prompted me to found FLEX: to offer a public internet which would allow the public to bypass existing institutions: publish, and read, whatever information it wanted; no more censorship (except by the public as a whole), no more certificates, no more licenses ... Any scientist could publish – no peer review necessary FOR THE PUBLICATION, any novelist could publish, any crank ...
But we need another word on what I mean in saying that "I taught global warming at the college level in 1967." The date I taught it could easily be determined. Lemont C. Cole’s article Can the Earth Be Saved? got the cover position in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. I was not a biology teacher, certainly not an ecology teacher; I was an English teacher. But I was instantly convinced that ecological awareness must be spread to anyone under any excuse. So I assigned Cole’s article (with his permission), to my next class of freshmen, also assigning a paper on Cole’s efforts as rhetoric! (Hell, I’d just assigned Churchill, just assigned Hitler ... as rhetoric.) It wasn’t normal English studies, but that’s the kind of teacher I choose to be (and I wish I still had some of the yahoo responses from the class).
The Crichton novel is very good on the complexity of the matter: global warming is a set of theories the truth of which are far from settled. What evidence there is can be taken in more than one way. What it means, what will happen, is far from clear (all of which Cole had been more than clear enough on nearly four decades ago).
But as Knatz.com has been iterating for a decade, as I said nearly forty years ago, It’s not nothing: we don’t know, and we damn well ought to reign ourselves in from behaving like chickens with no heads.
Is that why I was fired? Teaching beyond my specialty? Or was it because I’d joined the group silently protesting US behavior in Vietnam before the chapel on more than one occasion? That year the English department had twenty-one members: huge, obscene, for a small liberal arts college. That year eleven of the twenty-one were fired. Yes, the bulk of that eleven had joined the silent protests on one occasion or another. But, ten of those firings were loudly squawked about in the school paper, clearly a political purge. My firing was not mentioned in the paper. My firing was conducted silently, in secret, my students didn’t even know about it.
So just maybe I was fired as part of the political purge, and I was fired silently because I was trying to raise ecological awareness.
The PBS show was very good on saying that there are already technologies at hand that could help: it’s time to start using them. My point here is that we have no records of what portion of the voices saying that in 1967 were silenced: by political and institutional means.
One day, day after day, Christians are persecuted. Then the next day, everyone is a Christian. And the church is administered by the persecutors!
The PBS show seemed clearly to suggest that the old institutions should now lead the way. Those are the same institutions that have been regularly lobotomizing themselves: for years, for decades, for centuries ... Ah, now that the Church has murdered so many heretics, let’s look to the Church for a little heresy: now that some of the heresies got through anyway and have become orthodoxy.
With FLEX, governments, universities, journalists, PBS, publishers of Crichton novels ... should have died on the vine by now. Why pay $6 to HarperCollins when you could buy a Crichton novel from Crichton (via FLEX), maybe for $1? Why watch a PBS documentary when you could already have read all the constituent papers from their authors, via FLEX, any time once the scientists post them?
Every year, every day, our institutions bury ideas, select which information, which theories, are to spread, which to be stuffed under a bushel. And every day, every year, we sit at the feet of these institutions, as though they were our proper leaders.
Supporting the same institutions that led us in lies yesterday
will not lead us to the truth today.
And while I’m here I’ll repeat: we are not sure that the earth is warming. The earth is warming: and cooling. Part of it’s "natural": meaning "not influenced by civilization". We can’t be sure what the results will be. Therefore, it does not follow that there’s no problem, that we can go on burning everything.
Intelligence should prevail; but can’t: not while we’re under the thumb of the same institutions that didn’t listen to Bucky Fuller, drove Illich’s books out of print ... fired pk, didn’t publish him.
Read what Illich was saying in 1967, 1969 ... Read what Illich was saying before he even started on Deschooling Society, and see what we should have been doing since 1967.
And Illich, in my hearing, never even mentioned global warming. He was just trying to get us to (opt to) live like human beings!
Part 1 PS: As usual, I'm reminded of a favorite pk joke. Back in 1971, 1972 Nixon proposed having US troops out of Vietnam by some date, some American political event, an election. A few weeks later he was proposing to have US troops out by some other date, a later date. Nixon could promise and promise, postpone and postpone, always sending more troops. I proposed for his campaign new promises for ever later dates by which he could talk peace and wage war. My proposals involved his committing new treasons, new illegalities, new sins ... and the White House liked my letter! But Nixon was just a typical institutional man. That's what all of our institutions have always done, figured out ways to diet tomorrow, never today. The fattest people can credit themselves with intentions of the severest diets. Murder enough saints, let enough time pass, and any cretin can pose in the garments of some dead heretic, now a hero. What was PBS paying authors on global warming in 1967?
That's when we needed to diet.
That's when we needed FLEX.
(Of course we always needed to diet, but 1967, 1968 was when ecological awareness was first spreading to a few receptive parts of the public: a few scientists, a few teachers.)
If we survive all this, it won't be for lack of scheming to fail.
2005 11 05 Global Warming Part 2 will begin soon: I’m getting close to finishing State of Fear. I pretty much know now what Crichton is saying the "other" conspiracy is, counter to big industry, big pollution; but I’m not sure I’m going to discuss it here: not till more people have had time to read the novel, which I strongly recommend: for the science, not for the adventure. I will say though that the passage on "ecology of thought" is delicious, fabulous. And I must copy its insults of contemporary universities to my InfoAll.org: under School’s Purpose. [InfoAll.org purged by the fed: see my InfoAll blog.]
One of the excellencies of the novel, in the thriller part but not unrelated to the science, is the conviction of rightness on the part of the media stooges: a congregation of faithful, immune to evidence, to reason, but oh what suckers for rhetoric.
Part 2: Neat. Read State of Fear. Or, don’t read it: just buy the paperback, go directly to page 500, read the ecology of thought stuff, then skip to the last few pages and read those. That’s where a smart characters proposes a temporary institution which should actually improve a great many things.
I thought Crichton became almost-great to actually great with Jarassic Park. Still, you had to read a lot of crap to get to the scientific wisdom. And in that latter category I now think State of Fear is his best work.
Except I’ve gone right on to his Prey.
2005 11 23 Crichton’s Fear novel suggests that feeding selected science and pseudo science is what our manipulative rulers are reduced to in the wake of the Cold War. He shows a number of stats that wouldn’t convince many that the earth is warming. True. It’s uncertain. And that’s MY point. Reuters has a good article today with more views. I quote a tiny part:"Even small risks in the climate need to be considered, just as we try to avert accidents at nuclear power plants," said Stefan Rahmstorf, a professor at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and an expert in ocean currents.
"I don’t think this is scaremongering. We don’t really understand the system," he said of risks that the warm Gulf Stream current in the North Atlantic might shut down in one possible "tipping point" scenario.
And: "Records of the ancient climate found in ice caps and ocean sediments show there have been staggeringly big shifts in the past. "Past climate change is ringing alarm bells," Rahmstorf said, referring to the climate’s fragility."
Dig this quote:"This is normal science politics, but on the extreme end, though still within bounds," said Dan Sarewitz, a science policy professor at Arizona State University. "We talk about science as this pure ideal and the scientific method as if it is something out of a cookbook, but research is a social and human activity full of all the failings of society and humans, and this reality gets totally magnified by the high political stakes here."
This post must remain "part 1" until I’ve persisted with the novel. Crichton’s plot is great is consigning the crisis to journalistic manipulation. It’s obvious that industry wants to keep polluting as it pleases; Crichton has not yet revealed what he thinks its complement is: what agenda is served by crippling industry? Environmentalism at the federal level would be one candidate. Nazis sucked up resources to persecute Jews, not only stealing everything from the Jews, but taxing other Nazis to do it. So, any cause becomes a self-bloating cause in itself: justifying fiddling the evidence, etc. In any case I must find out what agenda Crichton is setting up for ridicule before saying more here. It makes no difference there what scenarios I myself can cook up.
But I don’t need to read further to get to this more important point: neither the PBS show nor the Crichton novel (thus far) say anything about a flaw pk may be unique (or close to unique) in seeing: Crichton dates global warming as a concern to some fairly recent date: when funded concern surfaced, in the public eye. Maybe I’ll re-skim and try to find that date. Whatever it turns out to be, know this: I taught global warming at the college level in 1967 or 1968, vastly earlier than Crichton’s date. Shortly thereafter I was illegally fired from my post.
Neither the PBS nor the Crichton-thus-far betray a hint about such long-standing censorship, persecution of awareness.
My response to being fired, together with new hebetudes in my Ph.D. program, (together with my meeting Ivan Illich,) prompted me to found FLEX: to offer a public internet which would allow the public to bypass existing institutions: publish, and read, whatever information it wanted; no more censorship (except by the public as a whole), no more certificates, no more licenses ... Any scientist could publish – no peer review necessary FOR THE PUBLICATION, any novelist could publish, any crank ...
But we need another word on what I mean in saying that "I taught global warming at the college level in 1967." The date I taught it could easily be determined. Lemont C. Cole’s article Can the Earth Be Saved? got the cover position in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. I was not a biology teacher, certainly not an ecology teacher; I was an English teacher. But I was instantly convinced that ecological awareness must be spread to anyone under any excuse. So I assigned Cole’s article (with his permission), to my next class of freshmen, also assigning a paper on Cole’s efforts as rhetoric! (Hell, I’d just assigned Churchill, just assigned Hitler ... as rhetoric.) It wasn’t normal English studies, but that’s the kind of teacher I choose to be (and I wish I still had some of the yahoo responses from the class).
The Crichton novel is very good on the complexity of the matter: global warming is a set of theories the truth of which are far from settled. What evidence there is can be taken in more than one way. What it means, what will happen, is far from clear (all of which Cole had been more than clear enough on nearly four decades ago).
But as Knatz.com has been iterating for a decade, as I said nearly forty years ago, It’s not nothing: we don’t know, and we damn well ought to reign ourselves in from behaving like chickens with no heads.
Is that why I was fired? Teaching beyond my specialty? Or was it because I’d joined the group silently protesting US behavior in Vietnam before the chapel on more than one occasion? That year the English department had twenty-one members: huge, obscene, for a small liberal arts college. That year eleven of the twenty-one were fired. Yes, the bulk of that eleven had joined the silent protests on one occasion or another. But, ten of those firings were loudly squawked about in the school paper, clearly a political purge. My firing was not mentioned in the paper. My firing was conducted silently, in secret, my students didn’t even know about it.
So just maybe I was fired as part of the political purge, and I was fired silently because I was trying to raise ecological awareness.
The PBS show was very good on saying that there are already technologies at hand that could help: it’s time to start using them. My point here is that we have no records of what portion of the voices saying that in 1967 were silenced: by political and institutional means.
One day, day after day, Christians are persecuted. Then the next day, everyone is a Christian. And the church is administered by the persecutors!
The PBS show seemed clearly to suggest that the old institutions should now lead the way. Those are the same institutions that have been regularly lobotomizing themselves: for years, for decades, for centuries ... Ah, now that the Church has murdered so many heretics, let’s look to the Church for a little heresy: now that some of the heresies got through anyway and have become orthodoxy.
With FLEX, governments, universities, journalists, PBS, publishers of Crichton novels ... should have died on the vine by now. Why pay $6 to HarperCollins when you could buy a Crichton novel from Crichton (via FLEX), maybe for $1? Why watch a PBS documentary when you could already have read all the constituent papers from their authors, via FLEX, any time once the scientists post them?
Every year, every day, our institutions bury ideas, select which information, which theories, are to spread, which to be stuffed under a bushel. And every day, every year, we sit at the feet of these institutions, as though they were our proper leaders.
will not lead us to the truth today.
And while I’m here I’ll repeat: we are not sure that the earth is warming. The earth is warming: and cooling. Part of it’s "natural": meaning "not influenced by civilization". We can’t be sure what the results will be. Therefore, it does not follow that there’s no problem, that we can go on burning everything.
Intelligence should prevail; but can’t: not while we’re under the thumb of the same institutions that didn’t listen to Bucky Fuller, drove Illich’s books out of print ... fired pk, didn’t publish him.
Read what Illich was saying in 1967, 1969 ... Read what Illich was saying before he even started on Deschooling Society, and see what we should have been doing since 1967.
And Illich, in my hearing, never even mentioned global warming. He was just trying to get us to (opt to) live like human beings!
Part 1 PS: As usual, I'm reminded of a favorite pk joke. Back in 1971, 1972 Nixon proposed having US troops out of Vietnam by some date, some American political event, an election. A few weeks later he was proposing to have US troops out by some other date, a later date. Nixon could promise and promise, postpone and postpone, always sending more troops. I proposed for his campaign new promises for ever later dates by which he could talk peace and wage war. My proposals involved his committing new treasons, new illegalities, new sins ... and the White House liked my letter! But Nixon was just a typical institutional man. That's what all of our institutions have always done, figured out ways to diet tomorrow, never today. The fattest people can credit themselves with intentions of the severest diets. Murder enough saints, let enough time pass, and any cretin can pose in the garments of some dead heretic, now a hero. What was PBS paying authors on global warming in 1967?
That's when we needed to diet.
That's when we needed FLEX.
(Of course we always needed to diet, but 1967, 1968 was when ecological awareness was first spreading to a few receptive parts of the public: a few scientists, a few teachers.)
If we survive all this, it won't be for lack of scheming to fail.
2005 11 05 Global Warming Part 2 will begin soon: I’m getting close to finishing State of Fear. I pretty much know now what Crichton is saying the "other" conspiracy is, counter to big industry, big pollution; but I’m not sure I’m going to discuss it here: not till more people have had time to read the novel, which I strongly recommend: for the science, not for the adventure. I will say though that the passage on "ecology of thought" is delicious, fabulous. And I must copy its insults of contemporary universities to my InfoAll.org: under School’s Purpose. [InfoAll.org purged by the fed: see my InfoAll blog.]
One of the excellencies of the novel, in the thriller part but not unrelated to the science, is the conviction of rightness on the part of the media stooges: a congregation of faithful, immune to evidence, to reason, but oh what suckers for rhetoric.
Part 2: Neat. Read State of Fear. Or, don’t read it: just buy the paperback, go directly to page 500, read the ecology of thought stuff, then skip to the last few pages and read those. That’s where a smart characters proposes a temporary institution which should actually improve a great many things.
I thought Crichton became almost-great to actually great with Jarassic Park. Still, you had to read a lot of crap to get to the scientific wisdom. And in that latter category I now think State of Fear is his best work.
Except I’ve gone right on to his Prey.
Obstinate egotism ...
is a hallmark of human interaction with the environment.
Michael Crichton
is a hallmark of human interaction with the environment.
Michael Crichton
2005 11 23 Crichton’s Fear novel suggests that feeding selected science and pseudo science is what our manipulative rulers are reduced to in the wake of the Cold War. He shows a number of stats that wouldn’t convince many that the earth is warming. True. It’s uncertain. And that’s MY point. Reuters has a good article today with more views. I quote a tiny part:
"I don’t think this is scaremongering. We don’t really understand the system," he said of risks that the warm Gulf Stream current in the North Atlantic might shut down in one possible "tipping point" scenario.
And: "Records of the ancient climate found in ice caps and ocean sediments show there have been staggeringly big shifts in the past. "Past climate change is ringing alarm bells," Rahmstorf said, referring to the climate’s fragility."
2009 12 13
A web article today reports on catching the scientists fudging data. It's delicious, though it seems clear that their well-funded enemies first called them names and drove them to distraction.Dig this quote:
Hors de Combat
pk in 1995 was posting the earliest files of his home page, subsequently become Knatz.com [victim of federal censorship, Feb 2007]. I emphasized then, and need again to emphasize now, there, here, and at all pk domains, that pk has been hors de combat since 1990.
In the 1960s I wrote my ideas as art. In the 1960s I taught (as well as studied) within (as well as without) the university system. In 1970 I founded FLEX [victim of federal censorship, Feb 2007], offering a low-tech, no-PCs-needed, PUBLIC internet: make a free-marketplace, not just for learning, but for all possible public and private activities. In the 1980s I again offered my ideas as art: novels this time.
At each step I’ve been ignored, insulted, interrupted, fired, not-supported, misunderstood, misrepresented ... and, occasionally, beaten up.
In 1990 I said fuck it, I’m retired: I’ll never mail another manuscript to another publisher, seek to give no more public speeches. Lo and behold, within months, I met Catherine: and thereby found, unlooked for, the only reliable support I’ve ever received! But I was hors de combat: outside the fray. Retired. Fed up.
Then I got the Mac. Then I launched the first home page.
But: you see the point? All of pk’s online writing is post-give-a-shit. I am not running for office. I am not in a popularity contest. I am not angling for a job. I am not seeking disciples.
I am merely venting myself. Homo sapiens sapiens is the creature that talks and talks. Stressed, I babble. Relaxed, I babble some more.
My life had been devoted to discipline (the discipline of English ... the discipline of revolutionary innovation ...) So: my babble shows vestiges of that discipline, and of my former art.
And when it ain’t art? Fuck it. I’m babbling.
Oh, come on, pk. You can’t expect us to believe that.
Well, in that mask, I don’t give a damn what you believe.
Or: actually, I’m busy as a mole: stacking evidence, testimony: not against my species; against my society.
In the 1960s I wrote my ideas as art. In the 1960s I taught (as well as studied) within (as well as without) the university system. In 1970 I founded FLEX [victim of federal censorship, Feb 2007], offering a low-tech, no-PCs-needed, PUBLIC internet: make a free-marketplace, not just for learning, but for all possible public and private activities. In the 1980s I again offered my ideas as art: novels this time.
At each step I’ve been ignored, insulted, interrupted, fired, not-supported, misunderstood, misrepresented ... and, occasionally, beaten up.
In 1990 I said fuck it, I’m retired: I’ll never mail another manuscript to another publisher, seek to give no more public speeches. Lo and behold, within months, I met Catherine: and thereby found, unlooked for, the only reliable support I’ve ever received! But I was hors de combat: outside the fray. Retired. Fed up.
Then I got the Mac. Then I launched the first home page.
But: you see the point? All of pk’s online writing is post-give-a-shit. I am not running for office. I am not in a popularity contest. I am not angling for a job. I am not seeking disciples.
I am merely venting myself. Homo sapiens sapiens is the creature that talks and talks. Stressed, I babble. Relaxed, I babble some more.
My life had been devoted to discipline (the discipline of English ... the discipline of revolutionary innovation ...) So: my babble shows vestiges of that discipline, and of my former art.
And when it ain’t art? Fuck it. I’m babbling.
Oh, come on, pk. You can’t expect us to believe that.
Well, in that mask, I don’t give a damn what you believe.
Or: actually, I’m busy as a mole: stacking evidence, testimony: not against my species; against my society.
Journalism
Journalism informs. Journalism entertains.
"Informing" the public includes functions of manners-management ... "toilet" training: which fork to use, when you need a new car ... and when three new cars aren’t enough.
Informing the public includes misinforming the public. (It’s such a laugh that information managers always believe that management -- centralized, hierarchical -- can tell the information from the disinformation!) (As thought the Vatican had ever actually been in touch with God!) (As though government could ever know the pulse of anything but its most immediate oligarchy!)
Journalism provides employment for journalists (and for printers, ad agencies, pulp mills, word processors ...)
But those are not the only, not even necessarily the main, purposes for journalism. The most important function of journalism, from a management standpoint, is to know when to soothe the public so it will roll over and go back to sleep, and when to prod the public so it will jump up and bite.
"Informing" the public includes functions of manners-management ... "toilet" training: which fork to use, when you need a new car ... and when three new cars aren’t enough.
Informing the public includes misinforming the public. (It’s such a laugh that information managers always believe that management -- centralized, hierarchical -- can tell the information from the disinformation!) (As thought the Vatican had ever actually been in touch with God!) (As though government could ever know the pulse of anything but its most immediate oligarchy!)
Journalism provides employment for journalists (and for printers, ad agencies, pulp mills, word processors ...)
But those are not the only, not even necessarily the main, purposes for journalism. The most important function of journalism, from a management standpoint, is to know when to soothe the public so it will roll over and go back to sleep, and when to prod the public so it will jump up and bite.
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
Martyrdom
Jesus went and got himself in trouble, and within days he was dead. The arrest, the trial, the scourging, the crucifixion must have been agonizing, but they occurred overnight and the next day. Not many deliberate executions can be much worse than crucifixion, but at least the Jews wanted their victims dead by sundown. The Persians had invented crucifixion to make the suffering last, the Romans had improved the cross to make it the more agonizing ... And Jesus wasn’t alone. Two other condemned suffered alongside him. And how many others had been crucified on the same spot the day before, the week before, the month before? After Spartacus the Romans crucified by the thousand.
The US Constitution promised swift justice. Ha! What trouble-maker gets dispatched in a single day? Even after a verdict a radical, a wog, some nigger ... might be on death row for a decade! (Remember what Mencken said: Kill the poor bastard the second the lawyers have taken his last penny.)
God wanted to torment his loyal servant Job. He spread it out, made it last: so Lucifer would be the more impressed. (Show off!) (How impressed was Lucifer when he orchestrates the nailing up of his own son?)
If life on earth is sometimes a trial and sometimes an amusement, an occasion for idle wagering among divinities, just concentrating on the trial part, why can’t the martyrs all just be tried, convicted, tortured, and killed as swiftly as was Jesus? Why do the majority of us have to linger, and linger: like Job? The Jews eventually (before Jesus) had a law that you couldn’t torture the guy overnight. If he was still whimpering at sunset, you had to stick him with a spear. Christians should have a law at least as humane: I mean a law they actually apply. How could we martyrs go on strike to limit God’s punishments of the just?
Me, I should have been dispatched by overnight-and-the-next-day of first standing up for myself. When my mother dragged me to kindergarten, I yielded (hell, I was only five or so). So the moralist could say that going to school was my own fault: when dragged, I yielded. (When Clarrisa got raped, it served her right: she gave her money to her family of her own free will, she corresponded with Lovelace ... None of them had a conscience, but she did: so she’s responsible.) But once I did resist -- got sent to the principal’s office for satirizing the lesson, why couldn’t I have been dispatched within the next thirty or so hours? treated no worse than a Jew under Rome? Why am I still here, suffering, well more than a half a century later?
I accept that the earth is hell, that the inhabitants are the damned ... (the insects, the wolves ... must be damned too to come under human impact). I accept that. But why are some of us martyrs still lingering? The earth-hell should house only the damnded.
Or am I damned too and am just too stupid to know it?
Either way, my culture is too chicken to give me a nice, fair, dispatching trial.
The US Constitution promised swift justice. Ha! What trouble-maker gets dispatched in a single day? Even after a verdict a radical, a wog, some nigger ... might be on death row for a decade! (Remember what Mencken said: Kill the poor bastard the second the lawyers have taken his last penny.)
God wanted to torment his loyal servant Job. He spread it out, made it last: so Lucifer would be the more impressed. (Show off!) (How impressed was Lucifer when he orchestrates the nailing up of his own son?)
If life on earth is sometimes a trial and sometimes an amusement, an occasion for idle wagering among divinities, just concentrating on the trial part, why can’t the martyrs all just be tried, convicted, tortured, and killed as swiftly as was Jesus? Why do the majority of us have to linger, and linger: like Job? The Jews eventually (before Jesus) had a law that you couldn’t torture the guy overnight. If he was still whimpering at sunset, you had to stick him with a spear. Christians should have a law at least as humane: I mean a law they actually apply. How could we martyrs go on strike to limit God’s punishments of the just?
Me, I should have been dispatched by overnight-and-the-next-day of first standing up for myself. When my mother dragged me to kindergarten, I yielded (hell, I was only five or so). So the moralist could say that going to school was my own fault: when dragged, I yielded. (When Clarrisa got raped, it served her right: she gave her money to her family of her own free will, she corresponded with Lovelace ... None of them had a conscience, but she did: so she’s responsible.) But once I did resist -- got sent to the principal’s office for satirizing the lesson, why couldn’t I have been dispatched within the next thirty or so hours? treated no worse than a Jew under Rome? Why am I still here, suffering, well more than a half a century later?
I accept that the earth is hell, that the inhabitants are the damned ... (the insects, the wolves ... must be damned too to come under human impact). I accept that. But why are some of us martyrs still lingering? The earth-hell should house only the damnded.
Or am I damned too and am just too stupid to know it?
Either way, my culture is too chicken to give me a nice, fair, dispatching trial.
Monday, October 31, 2005
Finger String
A couple of weeks ago I posted a trio of entries centering around the preservation versus destruction of evidence. It promised more to come. One thing that must come with it will be a consideration of the degrees to which human beliefs correspond to evidence. Not none, but not what we pretend.
like how religious still believe that God is supposed to HELP them, despite all the stories of the Bible; like how Americans believe that their government is "theirs," and is "good" ... despite all the news, and is there to HELP!
A polity is a body of faithful, and the faithful are rountinely immune to evidence. Christians watch the torture of some heretic: and BELIEVE they are seeing an act of faith! Democracies watch governments, education, journalism ... stage-managed, and believe it's for the good of the public!
like how religious still believe that God is supposed to HELP them, despite all the stories of the Bible; like how Americans believe that their government is "theirs," and is "good" ... despite all the news, and is there to HELP!
A polity is a body of faithful, and the faithful are rountinely immune to evidence. Christians watch the torture of some heretic: and BELIEVE they are seeing an act of faith! Democracies watch governments, education, journalism ... stage-managed, and believe it's for the good of the public!
Friday, October 28, 2005
Catholic
Means universal — one universe, one God, one world, one church, one orthodoxy, one set of standards ...
Supposedly.
Sounds appealing: until you experience it. Anyone with more than three seconds experience of life knows that societies build towers of babel, not unity.
For example (I’ve said this at Knatz.com, but feel the itch again today): Once upon a time every woman could be called "Mistress." It has overtones of being established, accepted, part of the society, wed to a property holder. Common enough, it gets abbreviated Mrs. Mrs.’s daughters are also called mistress; but a new distinction creeps in: and the junior mistresses are abbreviated "Miss": means she’s not married yet, is NOT the wife of a property holder however much she may be the daughter of a property holder. What about the spinsters? What about the dykes? !!! So women, at the time of my young adulthood, proposed "Ms": pronounced with the sibilant voiced: Miz.
Great! One category, instead of two. A chicken in every pot, every man his own king. But it doesn’t work that way. Instead of two categories, married and unmarried (actually there’s always an extra category implicit, understood: neither of the above), now there were three categories: married, unmarried, malcontent (and necessarily a fourth: none of the above).
(If every man is a king, then king has lost all of its meaning. Same as when the lawyers in the courtroom call everyone (except the accused) Sir. (Or Madam.))
God comes along in a world of myriad gods. I’m the one that counts, he says. So in a world with temples galore, a new temple is formed: We’re the right one. Then there’s a schism and the new temple splits. Each new sect says We’re the One. But what you actually have is another damn temple!
The royalists, the democrats; the Mensheviks, the Bolsheviks; the Republicans, the Democrats ... It’s always Oh, Jesus, another one; never Ah, now we’re all united.
Isn’t it regularly the case that where there’s a king, there’s also a Pretender. Followers of the Pretender, if he has any followers, will say that he is the true king. Official society is perpetually accused of being illegitimate. (And pk always agrees.)
Who in the world, who in history, has a better claim to monism than pk? Hell, I offered FLEX in 1970: one networked record system, unregulated. I was trying to take record keeping from the kleptocracy and its institutions, claim it for the public, show the public a way to do without all of the old institutions ... In the case of pk, I am isolated down to myself alone. I say, with good reason, On me: I am the library. Government steals my ideas, and says, Here is the library: of Congress!
Or, Here is the internet. (Built from money we’ve coerced from you.) (Now: privatize it! Render all the computers you’ve just put yourself in hock for obsolete in six months: so only the richest can keep up.)
I like to imagine God throwing you all into hell: as murderers, thieves, ingrates ... You paid royalties, but not to those actually due the royalties.
Every day the new sons of Adam imagine themselves to be legitimate.
PS I said above, "my ideas." My ideas are Illich-derived, Fuller-derived, Arthur C. Clarke-derived. My ideas actually are everything-derived.
Supposedly.
Sounds appealing: until you experience it. Anyone with more than three seconds experience of life knows that societies build towers of babel, not unity.
For example (I’ve said this at Knatz.com, but feel the itch again today): Once upon a time every woman could be called "Mistress." It has overtones of being established, accepted, part of the society, wed to a property holder. Common enough, it gets abbreviated Mrs. Mrs.’s daughters are also called mistress; but a new distinction creeps in: and the junior mistresses are abbreviated "Miss": means she’s not married yet, is NOT the wife of a property holder however much she may be the daughter of a property holder. What about the spinsters? What about the dykes? !!! So women, at the time of my young adulthood, proposed "Ms": pronounced with the sibilant voiced: Miz.
Great! One category, instead of two. A chicken in every pot, every man his own king. But it doesn’t work that way. Instead of two categories, married and unmarried (actually there’s always an extra category implicit, understood: neither of the above), now there were three categories: married, unmarried, malcontent (and necessarily a fourth: none of the above).
(If every man is a king, then king has lost all of its meaning. Same as when the lawyers in the courtroom call everyone (except the accused) Sir. (Or Madam.))
God comes along in a world of myriad gods. I’m the one that counts, he says. So in a world with temples galore, a new temple is formed: We’re the right one. Then there’s a schism and the new temple splits. Each new sect says We’re the One. But what you actually have is another damn temple!
The royalists, the democrats; the Mensheviks, the Bolsheviks; the Republicans, the Democrats ... It’s always Oh, Jesus, another one; never Ah, now we’re all united.
Isn’t it regularly the case that where there’s a king, there’s also a Pretender. Followers of the Pretender, if he has any followers, will say that he is the true king. Official society is perpetually accused of being illegitimate. (And pk always agrees.)
Who in the world, who in history, has a better claim to monism than pk? Hell, I offered FLEX in 1970: one networked record system, unregulated. I was trying to take record keeping from the kleptocracy and its institutions, claim it for the public, show the public a way to do without all of the old institutions ... In the case of pk, I am isolated down to myself alone. I say, with good reason, On me: I am the library. Government steals my ideas, and says, Here is the library: of Congress!
Or, Here is the internet. (Built from money we’ve coerced from you.) (Now: privatize it! Render all the computers you’ve just put yourself in hock for obsolete in six months: so only the richest can keep up.)
I like to imagine God throwing you all into hell: as murderers, thieves, ingrates ... You paid royalties, but not to those actually due the royalties.
Every day the new sons of Adam imagine themselves to be legitimate.
PS I said above, "my ideas." My ideas are Illich-derived, Fuller-derived, Arthur C. Clarke-derived. My ideas actually are everything-derived.
Quest for Fire
I am just about to sit down and rewatch Quest for Fire.
Go, thou, and do likewise.
The DVD, just arrived in the mailbox, netflix.com being contracted to juggle three at me at a time: send one back, get another. Reviewers at the time of Quest for Fire [1981] called it a "clinic for actors." True, but it also had Desmond Morris on hand to advise on the science, Anthony Burgess to invent language for mankind somewhere in between Homo erectus and Cro-Magnon.
Ron Perlman! Rae Dawn Chong!
PS Twenty minutes into the film -- it’s every bit as marvelous as I remembered -- I pause to "correct," to tighten. Desmond Morris is credited for the gestures, the body language: rather more specific than the "science." And a great, great job too.
An opening graphic dates the fiction to "80,000" years ago. We’re dealing with Homo sapiens, but not yet Homo sapiens sapiens. In other words, they had language of a sort but were not yet talking a blue streak.
The last twenty-four years have seen dates firm up in some areas, loosen in others, but it’s all sure good enough for a fiction.
80,000 years ago does though seem to me to be a little recent for quite the number of other ape-men they encounter.
PS, Post Watch: Jean Jacques Annaud, the movie creator, in his DVD director’s cut commentary says we could add another zero: 800, 000 years ago. The theory of the multiple tribes is Desmond Morris’s: and seems to be holding up, so long as we’re flexible with the time.
I already mentioned my enthusiasms for the invented language. What I didn’t know until I followed JJ’s commentary on the DVD was that a second language was also used, one that JJ arranged for but couldn’t supervise. The plot follows three heroes sent from a tribe of Cro-Magnon that have lost a battle with a cannibal tribe to find more fire, their fire also lost in the scuffle. They steal fire from a different cannibal group, thereby abetting the escape of a pair from still another tribe, the most advanced we see. They have not only pottery and shelter building, but can kindle their own fire. Thus we meet Rae Dawn Chong’s character.
JJ had all the tribes speak the one invented language -- they all knew what they were saying; but Rae Dawn’s tribe, when the sound track was later laid, had its speech supplied by Canadian Innuit: in Innuit. Apparently the Innuit were saying some funny things: maybe like kids commenting on a dumb movie. JJ heard that every igloo had Quest for Fire on the VCR and would laugh and laugh at the things their tribesmen said.
So, hey: how about a new director’s cut, with subtitles for the Innuit’s rude comments?
2005 11 05 I'm still enjoying Quest for Fire's after taste: not surprising since I'd never left off tasting it, even with only the one original viewing in 1981. As impressed as I was by Ron Perlman's performance then, I'm the more impressed now. But of course it's Rae Dawn who's most memorable of all: and I bet that's true not just among males, who marvel at her naturalness wearing nothing but paint. Then again, would we notice Rae Dawn half so well were her role not so well conceived? Now we're applauding not just Rae Dawn, not just JJ, but Desmond Morris! I particularly like how the female is shown as leading the male. In 1981 I balked a little that not only does she teach Noah fire-kindling, but the missionary position, but of course it's Myth: and should be.
But what's making me chuckle this week plus later is Ron Perlman's slowness to respond when female rumps are stuck under his nose. But then the third guy's growl when Ron Perman decides to try his luck with him, however brief, is worth the rest combined (including Ron Perlman's responding shrug).
2011 09 07 I've been renting movies to watch with my beloved Jan, including movies I select to acquaint her with. So: we saw Quest In 2010. Wonderful. I'd watch it again, right now.
Go, thou, and do likewise.
The DVD, just arrived in the mailbox, netflix.com being contracted to juggle three at me at a time: send one back, get another. Reviewers at the time of Quest for Fire [1981] called it a "clinic for actors." True, but it also had Desmond Morris on hand to advise on the science, Anthony Burgess to invent language for mankind somewhere in between Homo erectus and Cro-Magnon.
Ron Perlman! Rae Dawn Chong!
PS Twenty minutes into the film -- it’s every bit as marvelous as I remembered -- I pause to "correct," to tighten. Desmond Morris is credited for the gestures, the body language: rather more specific than the "science." And a great, great job too.
An opening graphic dates the fiction to "80,000" years ago. We’re dealing with Homo sapiens, but not yet Homo sapiens sapiens. In other words, they had language of a sort but were not yet talking a blue streak.
The last twenty-four years have seen dates firm up in some areas, loosen in others, but it’s all sure good enough for a fiction.
80,000 years ago does though seem to me to be a little recent for quite the number of other ape-men they encounter.
PS, Post Watch: Jean Jacques Annaud, the movie creator, in his DVD director’s cut commentary says we could add another zero: 800, 000 years ago. The theory of the multiple tribes is Desmond Morris’s: and seems to be holding up, so long as we’re flexible with the time.
I already mentioned my enthusiasms for the invented language. What I didn’t know until I followed JJ’s commentary on the DVD was that a second language was also used, one that JJ arranged for but couldn’t supervise. The plot follows three heroes sent from a tribe of Cro-Magnon that have lost a battle with a cannibal tribe to find more fire, their fire also lost in the scuffle. They steal fire from a different cannibal group, thereby abetting the escape of a pair from still another tribe, the most advanced we see. They have not only pottery and shelter building, but can kindle their own fire. Thus we meet Rae Dawn Chong’s character.
JJ had all the tribes speak the one invented language -- they all knew what they were saying; but Rae Dawn’s tribe, when the sound track was later laid, had its speech supplied by Canadian Innuit: in Innuit. Apparently the Innuit were saying some funny things: maybe like kids commenting on a dumb movie. JJ heard that every igloo had Quest for Fire on the VCR and would laugh and laugh at the things their tribesmen said.
So, hey: how about a new director’s cut, with subtitles for the Innuit’s rude comments?
2005 11 05 I'm still enjoying Quest for Fire's after taste: not surprising since I'd never left off tasting it, even with only the one original viewing in 1981. As impressed as I was by Ron Perlman's performance then, I'm the more impressed now. But of course it's Rae Dawn who's most memorable of all: and I bet that's true not just among males, who marvel at her naturalness wearing nothing but paint. Then again, would we notice Rae Dawn half so well were her role not so well conceived? Now we're applauding not just Rae Dawn, not just JJ, but Desmond Morris! I particularly like how the female is shown as leading the male. In 1981 I balked a little that not only does she teach Noah fire-kindling, but the missionary position, but of course it's Myth: and should be.
But what's making me chuckle this week plus later is Ron Perlman's slowness to respond when female rumps are stuck under his nose. But then the third guy's growl when Ron Perman decides to try his luck with him, however brief, is worth the rest combined (including Ron Perlman's responding shrug).
2011 09 07 I've been renting movies to watch with my beloved Jan, including movies I select to acquaint her with. So: we saw Quest In 2010. Wonderful. I'd watch it again, right now.
Dreaming Adam and Eve
The summer after the sixth grade Carol came over everyday. We’d climb the tree to the roof of the garage, sit there in the shade and dream out loud.
Carol said, "Wouldn’t it be great if we woke up one morning and everyone else were dead. We could do anything we wanted: drive the car, take all our cloths off ..."
Morning after morning we woke up and everyone else was alive. We couldn’t drive the car: though soon enough we went down into the garage and took all our cloths off.
Everyone dreams of being Adam and Eve, don’t they? Don’t you too dream of surviving something catastrophic for everything else, you alone, you and your companion survivor, your necessary mate, siring the future?
How flattering that Carol apparently wished me for her Adam. I’d take her as an Eve, I’d take almost any girl sitting on the roof with me.
As we get older the fantasy complexifies. Sitting in my office, c. 1968, my office mate, Bruce Spiegelberg, an Eighteenth Century scholar, damn interesting thesis on Robinson Cruse (with a male Eve) recreating Eighteenth Century England on the tabula rasa of his desert island, dreamed aloud the common dream of the leftist liberal, that he’d awake one morning: all the officials, the president, the governor ... no doubt the department chairman, would be hanging from the lampposts ... and here’s where Bruce seemed to think his version of Adam surviving the battle field of revolution was unique: he’d just smile. See? Bruce imagined himself surviving, being the inheritor, the new administration.
In some of my dreams as a kid, I was the one dead: Jesus, not Peter, Paul, and Mary. In 1968 I could imagine Bruce walking down the street, smiling, as everyone else is hanged, only I’m likely to be one of the ones on the lamppost. Sure some bad guys get executed in society’s occasional paroxysms, but the best guys get executed all the time, including during the paroxysm. The good die young, the best minds destroyed by madness ...
But those are dreams, common dreams, dreams in common. There were only four-some billion of us then; now there’s six-something. And what am I doing at age sixty-seven? still sitting? still babbling away?
I don’t know if it’s core-human, but it’s certainly core-contemporary to believe that the future will improve: and that we’ll get the credit! I certainly believed that much of my life, that we’d learn something from our experience, and tried my damndest to make it true, still do try; but I no longer believe it.
If I now fantasize of things getting worse and worse, that too is not uncommon, it seems to be the new wave of the core-contemporary. What’s still core-core-contemporary about it is the addiction to ideas of "better" or "worse."
Bateson admits that beauty seems always to be destroyed, yet there’s always beauty still. How does that happen? Negentropy? Happen it does. And it’s not our doing.
Even seeing the pattern, we don’t understand it.
Carol said, "Wouldn’t it be great if we woke up one morning and everyone else were dead. We could do anything we wanted: drive the car, take all our cloths off ..."
Morning after morning we woke up and everyone else was alive. We couldn’t drive the car: though soon enough we went down into the garage and took all our cloths off.
Everyone dreams of being Adam and Eve, don’t they? Don’t you too dream of surviving something catastrophic for everything else, you alone, you and your companion survivor, your necessary mate, siring the future?
How flattering that Carol apparently wished me for her Adam. I’d take her as an Eve, I’d take almost any girl sitting on the roof with me.
As we get older the fantasy complexifies. Sitting in my office, c. 1968, my office mate, Bruce Spiegelberg, an Eighteenth Century scholar, damn interesting thesis on Robinson Cruse (with a male Eve) recreating Eighteenth Century England on the tabula rasa of his desert island, dreamed aloud the common dream of the leftist liberal, that he’d awake one morning: all the officials, the president, the governor ... no doubt the department chairman, would be hanging from the lampposts ... and here’s where Bruce seemed to think his version of Adam surviving the battle field of revolution was unique: he’d just smile. See? Bruce imagined himself surviving, being the inheritor, the new administration.
In some of my dreams as a kid, I was the one dead: Jesus, not Peter, Paul, and Mary. In 1968 I could imagine Bruce walking down the street, smiling, as everyone else is hanged, only I’m likely to be one of the ones on the lamppost. Sure some bad guys get executed in society’s occasional paroxysms, but the best guys get executed all the time, including during the paroxysm. The good die young, the best minds destroyed by madness ...
But those are dreams, common dreams, dreams in common. There were only four-some billion of us then; now there’s six-something. And what am I doing at age sixty-seven? still sitting? still babbling away?
I don’t know if it’s core-human, but it’s certainly core-contemporary to believe that the future will improve: and that we’ll get the credit! I certainly believed that much of my life, that we’d learn something from our experience, and tried my damndest to make it true, still do try; but I no longer believe it.
If I now fantasize of things getting worse and worse, that too is not uncommon, it seems to be the new wave of the core-contemporary. What’s still core-core-contemporary about it is the addiction to ideas of "better" or "worse."
Bateson admits that beauty seems always to be destroyed, yet there’s always beauty still. How does that happen? Negentropy? Happen it does. And it’s not our doing.
Even seeing the pattern, we don’t understand it.
Thursday, October 27, 2005
Sociologist Major
A Fox World Series commentator reported that a player was enrolled at some university: as "a sociologist ... major." He studies sociologists? Bravo. How come I haven’t heard more about this needed discipline? And where are the doctor majors, the lawyer majors, the anthropologist majors?
As I hope my ellipsis suggests, the jock pro paused between "sociologist" and "major." Clearly he had confused himself between saying "sociology major" and "sociologist," finally making an awkward linguistic half breed (Hanna Storm, Bob Costas, the guy was not): and pk likes to pretend to misunderstand everyone by taking them literally. There’s humor there: a little.
Actually I blog the guy’s gaff for serious reasons: 1) to mourn Fox’s relatively inept entry into big time sports-casting; and 2) to inform the young that sports-casting today is far less intellectually embarrassing than formerly: and I think it’s TV that’s made the difference. Since radio, there have always been announcers for sporting events whose mouth could keep pace with Seabiscuit. But they were a minority. Interviews with sports heroes were mercifully brief: "How’s it feel to be champ?" "Uh, duh, great." His fists are fast, his arm, his back ... are strong: what? we want him to be able to talk too? Well, today they can. Not just the quarterback, but the tail back ... and the point guard ... all sound like they’ve been coached for careers that will straddle Hollywood and Madison Avenue as well as put their ring or gridiron in a less benighted light.
I remember Jim Courier attempting a few words in French after winning at Roland Garros in Paris: an American assaying a second language? We expect English from Russians, the French, Ethiopians; we do not expect a two-way street.
While here I’ll say that while I favor participation in physical activity over getting fat on hotdogs in the bleachers, I do enjoy much off the standard fare of spectator sports. Nowhere else does the desperation show so clearly as we costume ourselves in a level playing field. Once we marvelled that there was a place where Pollacks and Hunkies could distinguish themselves. Good God! then there’s niggers? Then Central Americans like baby alligators: up to your ass. Then Japs!?!? Chinks!?!?
Equal opportunity is even funnier on the playing field than it is in the work place.
Today I’ll supply only one example: from my beloved golf. (If Tiger won EVERY tournament, it would be fine with me.) (For a while.) Once upon a time Babe Didrikson played in a men’s event. Last year the phenomenal Annika Sorenstam teed off the first couple of days with the boys, then a spatter of others. This year that long tall drink of beauty, Michelle Wie, has declared her ambition to be the first woman to play in the Masters. ...
Alright, alright. NOW: [Reuters]Jean Van de Velde, famous for losing a British Open, says he wants to play in the women’s equivalent at Royal Birkdale next year.
The Frenchman, who let slip the 1999 championship at Carnoustie by running up a triple-bogey seven at the 72nd hole, is unhappy at the Royal and Ancient Golf Club’s (R & A) recent decision to allow women to qualify for the British Open.
"It’s crazy that women should be allowed to try to qualify for our Open when men cannot do it for their Open," Van de Velde told reporters after struggling to a seven-over-par 78 in the first round of the Volvo Masters on Thursday.
"I intend to make a stance. What kind of discrimination is this?" Solution: Have a men’s open: open to men; and a women’s open: open to women: and an Open Open: open to any golfer who qualifies: even if it’s an orangutan.
Minorities can (justly) pooh-pooh the Baseball Hall of Fame: Sure some of them were good; but it was only open to white guys.
An Open Open might encourage women to dismiss the Masters: Sure Jack Nicklaus, Fred Couples, Tiger Woods ... but they were afraid to let the girls compete: put them in worse than swaddling cloths from the cradle.
PS Speaking of public illiteracies, hebetudes, I’ll mention another that’s been annoying me for some time, iterating today: at IMDb.com: "Born Today" [a regular feature]: "Friday, 28 October 2005: Julia Roberts (38)"
I believe that she’s thirty-eight; but then how can she have been "born today"? If she was only born today, how come we’ve heard of her? How come her performance list is so long? How can she be so mature, so beautiful. Infants may move us, but their beauty is of an entirely different sort.
Of course they mean that today is her birthday: she was born "today: 38 years ago." Why can’t they say what they mean?
As I hope my ellipsis suggests, the jock pro paused between "sociologist" and "major." Clearly he had confused himself between saying "sociology major" and "sociologist," finally making an awkward linguistic half breed (Hanna Storm, Bob Costas, the guy was not): and pk likes to pretend to misunderstand everyone by taking them literally. There’s humor there: a little.
Actually I blog the guy’s gaff for serious reasons: 1) to mourn Fox’s relatively inept entry into big time sports-casting; and 2) to inform the young that sports-casting today is far less intellectually embarrassing than formerly: and I think it’s TV that’s made the difference. Since radio, there have always been announcers for sporting events whose mouth could keep pace with Seabiscuit. But they were a minority. Interviews with sports heroes were mercifully brief: "How’s it feel to be champ?" "Uh, duh, great." His fists are fast, his arm, his back ... are strong: what? we want him to be able to talk too? Well, today they can. Not just the quarterback, but the tail back ... and the point guard ... all sound like they’ve been coached for careers that will straddle Hollywood and Madison Avenue as well as put their ring or gridiron in a less benighted light.
I remember Jim Courier attempting a few words in French after winning at Roland Garros in Paris: an American assaying a second language? We expect English from Russians, the French, Ethiopians; we do not expect a two-way street.
While here I’ll say that while I favor participation in physical activity over getting fat on hotdogs in the bleachers, I do enjoy much off the standard fare of spectator sports. Nowhere else does the desperation show so clearly as we costume ourselves in a level playing field. Once we marvelled that there was a place where Pollacks and Hunkies could distinguish themselves. Good God! then there’s niggers? Then Central Americans like baby alligators: up to your ass. Then Japs!?!? Chinks!?!?
Equal opportunity is even funnier on the playing field than it is in the work place.
Today I’ll supply only one example: from my beloved golf. (If Tiger won EVERY tournament, it would be fine with me.) (For a while.) Once upon a time Babe Didrikson played in a men’s event. Last year the phenomenal Annika Sorenstam teed off the first couple of days with the boys, then a spatter of others. This year that long tall drink of beauty, Michelle Wie, has declared her ambition to be the first woman to play in the Masters. ...
Alright, alright. NOW: [Reuters]
The Frenchman, who let slip the 1999 championship at Carnoustie by running up a triple-bogey seven at the 72nd hole, is unhappy at the Royal and Ancient Golf Club’s (R & A) recent decision to allow women to qualify for the British Open.
"It’s crazy that women should be allowed to try to qualify for our Open when men cannot do it for their Open," Van de Velde told reporters after struggling to a seven-over-par 78 in the first round of the Volvo Masters on Thursday.
"I intend to make a stance. What kind of discrimination is this?"
Minorities can (justly) pooh-pooh the Baseball Hall of Fame: Sure some of them were good; but it was only open to white guys.
An Open Open might encourage women to dismiss the Masters: Sure Jack Nicklaus, Fred Couples, Tiger Woods ... but they were afraid to let the girls compete: put them in worse than swaddling cloths from the cradle.
PS Speaking of public illiteracies, hebetudes, I’ll mention another that’s been annoying me for some time, iterating today: at IMDb.com: "Born Today" [a regular feature]: "Friday, 28 October 2005: Julia Roberts (38)"
I believe that she’s thirty-eight; but then how can she have been "born today"? If she was only born today, how come we’ve heard of her? How come her performance list is so long? How can she be so mature, so beautiful. Infants may move us, but their beauty is of an entirely different sort.
Of course they mean that today is her birthday: she was born "today: 38 years ago." Why can’t they say what they mean?
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
IQ
Anything alive tries in some way to stay alive. But trees, when you carve their bark, when we cut them down, do they protest? Complain? Tell on us? Not that I can see, hear, sense ... imagine.
Once hooked my bass will break its heart trying to escape. But once I hold it in my hand, is there any accusation in its eyes? I don't think so.
There was a story in which a rabbit in a trap suddenly notices the mechanism holding the door sprung shut. The rabbit fiddles the gizmo, the door opens, the rabbit hops out and goes on its way. The solar system it seems had for a few tens of thousands of years been passing through a local galactic stupid cloud: everything's IQ had been temporarily stunted. Free of the cloud, humans rapidly become so bright we kill each other and everything else at twenty times our former rate.
Is life an intelligence test? Well, in some ways, maybe so.
If so, it seems to me that the trees, the insects, the fish ... are passing it better than the primates.
Well, says the churchman, then it's a good thing we're not plants, not animals, not primates.
Uhh ...
Once hooked my bass will break its heart trying to escape. But once I hold it in my hand, is there any accusation in its eyes? I don't think so.
There was a story in which a rabbit in a trap suddenly notices the mechanism holding the door sprung shut. The rabbit fiddles the gizmo, the door opens, the rabbit hops out and goes on its way. The solar system it seems had for a few tens of thousands of years been passing through a local galactic stupid cloud: everything's IQ had been temporarily stunted. Free of the cloud, humans rapidly become so bright we kill each other and everything else at twenty times our former rate.
Is life an intelligence test? Well, in some ways, maybe so.
If so, it seems to me that the trees, the insects, the fish ... are passing it better than the primates.
Well, says the churchman, then it's a good thing we're not plants, not animals, not primates.
Uhh ...
Monday, October 24, 2005
Bird Flu
Here’s what got me started on that last, Vive La France, post (and segue to this one):
Even before we were bombarded with warnings about Hurricane Wilma, there was escalating panic about bird flu. We are living in an I am sure very temporary illusion that big government and its licensed experts, like big doctors, can let man get away with murder forever. Still, now and again, some scientist gets reported saying, "It ain’t so, Joe."
This is all deliciously apposite to me, because I’ve just been watching the 1995 movie Restoration. However marvelous the movie is in its casting, performances, periodicity, what’s really groovy is how it moves from lower middle class struggle to restored feudalism making up for missing years, to Quakers quietly not going away ... to the Plague hitting London, to the Fire hitting London.
Wasn’t it just three or so hundred years before that plague had put down two-thirds of Europe’s population? (Every school boy knows that: how come not one school boy knows the ratios elsewhere for that time? How many died in Asia? in the sub-continent? in the Middle East?) Yet here we are, London even bigger, even filthier, in the later Seventeen Century than it had been to start the Fourteenth Century. Men moved back onto Mount Vesuvius as soon as the lava had cooled. Even now, men are moving back into New Orleans, where, again, they’ll trust the Army Corps of Engineers.
If I had any say, after the fires of Rome, London, Tokyo, Chicago, San Francisco ... we'd have at least considered a small population back naked on the grass lands, instead of Rome, London, Tokyo, Chicago, San Francisco ten times bigger.
Now: bird flu: what the hell is that? and why am I talking about plague if I’m curious about bird flu?
I don’t know what bird flu is. (I don’t really know what plague was.) Point is, they’re diseases. Diseases are very old. We couldn’t defeat them, not and also live. (If we killed all microbes (maybe we could), we’d die that same hour. Can’t live with some of the bad ones, can’t live at all without the whole of the rest. (I vote to mind our own business, do our thing, and let the diseases do their thing: unimpeded.))
What is very young is epidemics of diseases. Epidemics are only possible with dense populations. Traffic across natural boundaries also helps. Crowds in Asia, a ship to Istanbul, another to Venice ... and crowds die in Rome, in Paris ...
Jared Diamond explains it beautifully: lots of humans imprisoning lots of pigs: that’s how humans get pig diseases. The Neanderthal knew the mammoth would come, and where. They knew where there was a cliff. Fire was controlled by Homo erectus, the Neanderthals had it. Flame-hurling Neanderthals scared the wits out of migrating mammoth on the edge of a cliff. Cro-Magnon were laying in ambush at the pass for the deer, the horse ... that had to come through.
There was contact: the Neanderthal sticks his flint in the mammoth’s ribs, the Cro-Magnon hurls a spear at the horse ... but that could have gone on and on without a Neanderthal getting a mammoth disease (or the mammoth getting a Neanderthal disease; or the Cro-Magnon getting a horse disease (or a horse getting a Cro-Magnon disease). Hell, there weren’t even epidemics among Neanderthals, or among Cro-Magnons! Because few had ever seen more than a few dozen of his kind at one time.
Modern man squats in one place, shits where he squats, and cages every mammoth, deer, and horse he can find, right in the same place. (Did you ever see how chickens are farmed these days? They live in barracks! like draftees! Except that when I was drafted they turned the lights out for four hours of sleep. For chickens we don’t ever turn the lights out!))
Well, actually, mammoth went bye-bye, deer don’t cage well; but we caged everything we could: trees, birds, fish, chickens, pigs ... In the army, in prison, in civilization, everybody squats among the same germs: and then we send emissaries abroad, carrying those microbes. (It’s really amazing that this or that plague didn’t kill 100% on 100% of its chances.)
Well: Diamond traces this and that disease from cow to chicken to man: under human husbandry. I don’t remember any of the traces ripping through wild populations en route. Yet here, with bird flu, it seems that both wild and domestic birds are vulnerable: man potentially vulnerable.
So, please, public: help me out here. Who can trace this (these) disease(s) for me? In particular I want to know, What’s the connection with things that humans have caged? Where are we among the links? Did domestic geese have it before wild geese got it? Did it live in a diaper basket before then? Can ALL birds get it? or only some?
When we get it, will we all live in barracks with the lights on?
Even before we were bombarded with warnings about Hurricane Wilma, there was escalating panic about bird flu. We are living in an I am sure very temporary illusion that big government and its licensed experts, like big doctors, can let man get away with murder forever. Still, now and again, some scientist gets reported saying, "It ain’t so, Joe."
This is all deliciously apposite to me, because I’ve just been watching the 1995 movie Restoration. However marvelous the movie is in its casting, performances, periodicity, what’s really groovy is how it moves from lower middle class struggle to restored feudalism making up for missing years, to Quakers quietly not going away ... to the Plague hitting London, to the Fire hitting London.
Wasn’t it just three or so hundred years before that plague had put down two-thirds of Europe’s population? (Every school boy knows that: how come not one school boy knows the ratios elsewhere for that time? How many died in Asia? in the sub-continent? in the Middle East?) Yet here we are, London even bigger, even filthier, in the later Seventeen Century than it had been to start the Fourteenth Century. Men moved back onto Mount Vesuvius as soon as the lava had cooled. Even now, men are moving back into New Orleans, where, again, they’ll trust the Army Corps of Engineers.
If I had any say, after the fires of Rome, London, Tokyo, Chicago, San Francisco ... we'd have at least considered a small population back naked on the grass lands, instead of Rome, London, Tokyo, Chicago, San Francisco ten times bigger.
Now: bird flu: what the hell is that? and why am I talking about plague if I’m curious about bird flu?
I don’t know what bird flu is. (I don’t really know what plague was.) Point is, they’re diseases. Diseases are very old. We couldn’t defeat them, not and also live. (If we killed all microbes (maybe we could), we’d die that same hour. Can’t live with some of the bad ones, can’t live at all without the whole of the rest. (I vote to mind our own business, do our thing, and let the diseases do their thing: unimpeded.))
What is very young is epidemics of diseases. Epidemics are only possible with dense populations. Traffic across natural boundaries also helps. Crowds in Asia, a ship to Istanbul, another to Venice ... and crowds die in Rome, in Paris ...
Jared Diamond explains it beautifully: lots of humans imprisoning lots of pigs: that’s how humans get pig diseases. The Neanderthal knew the mammoth would come, and where. They knew where there was a cliff. Fire was controlled by Homo erectus, the Neanderthals had it. Flame-hurling Neanderthals scared the wits out of migrating mammoth on the edge of a cliff. Cro-Magnon were laying in ambush at the pass for the deer, the horse ... that had to come through.
There was contact: the Neanderthal sticks his flint in the mammoth’s ribs, the Cro-Magnon hurls a spear at the horse ... but that could have gone on and on without a Neanderthal getting a mammoth disease (or the mammoth getting a Neanderthal disease; or the Cro-Magnon getting a horse disease (or a horse getting a Cro-Magnon disease). Hell, there weren’t even epidemics among Neanderthals, or among Cro-Magnons! Because few had ever seen more than a few dozen of his kind at one time.
Modern man squats in one place, shits where he squats, and cages every mammoth, deer, and horse he can find, right in the same place. (Did you ever see how chickens are farmed these days? They live in barracks! like draftees! Except that when I was drafted they turned the lights out for four hours of sleep. For chickens we don’t ever turn the lights out!))
Well, actually, mammoth went bye-bye, deer don’t cage well; but we caged everything we could: trees, birds, fish, chickens, pigs ... In the army, in prison, in civilization, everybody squats among the same germs: and then we send emissaries abroad, carrying those microbes. (It’s really amazing that this or that plague didn’t kill 100% on 100% of its chances.)
Well: Diamond traces this and that disease from cow to chicken to man: under human husbandry. I don’t remember any of the traces ripping through wild populations en route. Yet here, with bird flu, it seems that both wild and domestic birds are vulnerable: man potentially vulnerable.
So, please, public: help me out here. Who can trace this (these) disease(s) for me? In particular I want to know, What’s the connection with things that humans have caged? Where are we among the links? Did domestic geese have it before wild geese got it? Did it live in a diaper basket before then? Can ALL birds get it? or only some?
When we get it, will we all live in barracks with the lights on?
Vive La France
In the joke the Nazi officer commandeers some woman from the streets of Paris. As he pulls his pants back up, buttons and adjusts himself, he says, "In nine months you will give birth to a fine half-Aryan boy. Heil Hitler!"
But apparently the woman had been commandeered before: more than a couple of times. She says, "Long before then you will have syphilis. Vive La France!"
The Germans were trying to infect the world with Germans. The French whore didn’t have to do anything, not anything unusual, to be part of an infection much older than Germany.
Men try, and succeed, I don’t know for how long, to infect the world with men. Just maybe, eventually, things older than men, may have something to say about it.
Once upon a time volcanos erupted so often there were hardly any microbes around, let alone big critturs. Eventually, men put ever more men in ever more dangerous places: Pompeii, New Orleans ... space! Vesuvius blows, buries Pompeii, and soon other men build an even bigger city right next door. One thing I always loved about skiing: I knew it was dangerous: I knew I didn’t belong there (This isn't the savanna):
Get a rush from getting away with murder: God must really love me.
Cross your fingers.
Men don’t like to think of themselves as an infection. Men think of themselves as what’s right. George Bush leads us in what’s pure.
I say there isn’t much that can’t be thought of as an infection, calm down and think it through. Existence infects emptiness with energy, with matter, with stars ... life, intelligence ... How can we prove that stars ... life, intelligence ... is better than emptiness?
(Simple: be too stupid to see the problems!)
Continues with Bird Flu
But apparently the woman had been commandeered before: more than a couple of times. She says, "Long before then you will have syphilis. Vive La France!"
The Germans were trying to infect the world with Germans. The French whore didn’t have to do anything, not anything unusual, to be part of an infection much older than Germany.
Men try, and succeed, I don’t know for how long, to infect the world with men. Just maybe, eventually, things older than men, may have something to say about it.
Once upon a time volcanos erupted so often there were hardly any microbes around, let alone big critturs. Eventually, men put ever more men in ever more dangerous places: Pompeii, New Orleans ... space! Vesuvius blows, buries Pompeii, and soon other men build an even bigger city right next door. One thing I always loved about skiing: I knew it was dangerous: I knew I didn’t belong there (This isn't the savanna):
Get a rush from getting away with murder: God must really love me.
Cross your fingers.
Men don’t like to think of themselves as an infection. Men think of themselves as what’s right. George Bush leads us in what’s pure.
I say there isn’t much that can’t be thought of as an infection, calm down and think it through. Existence infects emptiness with energy, with matter, with stars ... life, intelligence ... How can we prove that stars ... life, intelligence ... is better than emptiness?
(Simple: be too stupid to see the problems!)
Continues with Bird Flu
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.
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.
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.
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, becalmedI’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.
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