It isn't just that we stole Sutter's gold, while we invaded his domain, destroyed his farm, killed his livestock; it's also that we had ignored him when he invited us to join him as associates.
Sutter was born in Switzerland. He began setting his life in the new world up in New York (hung out in Brooklyn, knew Edgar Allen Poe), but soon headed west: at a time when it was well established that no one knew how to cross the Rockies: the Pacific wasn't the limit; the mountains were the limit. Sutter looked for fellow explorers to discover such a passage. He found no helpers. He found a way alone. We learned the way because he had found the way: unaided by us.
Sutter got to California, saw that the Sacramento Valley was ideal for agriculture. Again, he looked for partners, for associates, for fellow laborers and investors. He found none. He sailed further west, to Hawaii. There he found partners: Hawaiians who would invest their labor in return for a share of results. Sutter named his enterprise New Helvetia: New Switzerland. He sought, and obtained, treaties recognizing his sovereignty with Mexico, Russia, and the US. By 1849 Sutter's domain had rich farming, mighty live stock, not only employees and associates, but a private army.
Everything going swimmingly, he began to branch out into the lumber business. It was at his mill, all on "his" property that gold nuggets were found in the stream that powered the mill. It was Sutter's mill. Sutter's employees found the gold. Rightly, they reported their finding to Sutter. They were due some of the value: they found it; he was due some: they found it because they were on his land, doing his bidding. The owner gets some, the finders get some. But Sutter told them to keep mum: develop the lumber, then I'll think about developing metals.
Meantime the employees' kids played openly with the gold. Strangers passing by saw the kids, scoffed that the kids had real gold nuggets. Their moms said, "Oh, no: it's real gold alright." And that was the end of Sutter's New Helvetia, his agriculture, his lumber, his army, his mining.
People from the east poured west: over Sutter's route (finding other routes as well: once traffic was possible, it spread). (Did we thank him for the knowledge? Did we pay him a toll?) No, we tresspassed, panned for (his) gold, got hungry, killed his livestock.
The US put a court house in a rapidly developing San Franciso. Sutter summed his losses and sued. Twelve judges saw justice in his claim, awarded him hundreds of millions of dollars. The new citizens of San Francisco, suddenly finding themselves due for back rent and damages burned the court house to the ground. The judges scattered for their lives.
The US was used to gobbling land. The US, like any imperial kleptocracy, was used to taking whatever it wanted. What was different here was that we were stealing from a "white" man! It's doubly wicked irony that he'd invited us to share with him in the first place.
Oh, I don't doubt that Sutter wanted the lion's share. Why shouldn't he? Maybe he would have been difficult to work with, or for. Still, even if we'd declared emminent domain, we're building our highway through your living room, we should have paid him something for the land, the cattle, the lost profits ...
Sutter may have been the first white man robbed by the mob of white men. (He's the first I can name, where we all know the name.) But he wasn't the last: I offered social networking to the public in 1970 (as an alternative to social coercion in education: establish a cybernetic data base of learning resources, then every body mind their own business). (Johnny can learn to read: if he wants to. If Johnny choses not to and starves to death, it's nobody's business but Johnny's. If Sammy learns to read in twelve days instead of twelve years, then corners the rock-and-roll market, good for him. School was nothing really but a Procrustean bed anyway.
I asked for help, for resources, to build infrastructure. Years passed, decades. Then suddenly coercive governments and their institutional tools shove digital record keeping up our noses. I offered cheap public software development years before Microsoft was founded. I tried to engage IBM in my ideas in 1971, decades before they invested a penny in internet-related R&D. Bill Gates still didn't want anything to do with "the" (stolen) internet even after the internet was a world-wife phenomenon!
"You" all could have had convivial cheap versions of all of these things before there was such a thing as the PC! Once you did decide that you wanted them (after the kleptocracy's version was shoved up your nose) (after the money was taken from your pocket), someone should have noticed me: impoverished, a pariah, my son kidnapped, afforded no protection from the law, not published, now censored: all because I devoted my life to trying to deliver God's messages of social salvation (to people who still don't get Jesus' messages of spiritual salvation!)
I should have been killed the second the school noticed that I was intelligent. At least I should have been killed the second the fed realized that they wanted to steal and pervert my ideas. But I'm still alive, somehow, among the double-damned.
Friday, October 29, 2010
Monday, October 25, 2010
The End Is Coming
Media-laden society is always hearing about doomsday predictions. Only careful readers and listeners will realize how many there are. Only scholars will document how many doomsdays come and go without the forecast-doom arriving. Jim Jones may have known what he was doing when he led his group of believers to suicide before they could all be disappointed in his election.
Churches destroy evidence the way Alexander killed his brothers once the king had died. Alexander knew he would have civil wars enough, enough challenges to his anointing, without his brothers coming up with alternate wills. If the Apocalypse of John is the only apocalypse Christians know, then they'll think it's unique: a dime a dozen lowers the value (to make a redundancy joke).
I just read online about another. And John, and Nostradomos, and some of my own rhetoric came flowing past me. What brings me here to scribble these words is a thought of the purpose of false predictions in a media-laden society: if the sheeple hear false prediction after false prediciton, they'll become skeptical about doomsday predictions and lull themselves into a belief that they're secure, that nothing can harm them. If Jim Jones was full of it, and even Jesus' Kingdom of God didn't arrive soon after his death (or since, so far as we can tell), why then global warming can't harm us: and neither can smoking, or cheating, or lying, or the medacious ignorant politically agenda'd school board!
I foisted a The End Is Coming joke decades ago. A friend gave a costume party under the theme Vicars and tarts. Males were supposed to dress church-related; the females were supposed to dress as though they were hawking their wares. I dressed as a prophet: beard, long robe. I carried a doom sign. Hung from my waist, over my cod, was a sign that said "The end is c-c-coming": with an orthographic joke on orgasm you see, and over my behind was a matching sign that said, with relief, "The end is come."
Churches destroy evidence the way Alexander killed his brothers once the king had died. Alexander knew he would have civil wars enough, enough challenges to his anointing, without his brothers coming up with alternate wills. If the Apocalypse of John is the only apocalypse Christians know, then they'll think it's unique: a dime a dozen lowers the value (to make a redundancy joke).
I just read online about another. And John, and Nostradomos, and some of my own rhetoric came flowing past me. What brings me here to scribble these words is a thought of the purpose of false predictions in a media-laden society: if the sheeple hear false prediction after false prediciton, they'll become skeptical about doomsday predictions and lull themselves into a belief that they're secure, that nothing can harm them. If Jim Jones was full of it, and even Jesus' Kingdom of God didn't arrive soon after his death (or since, so far as we can tell), why then global warming can't harm us: and neither can smoking, or cheating, or lying, or the medacious ignorant politically agenda'd school board!
I foisted a The End Is Coming joke decades ago. A friend gave a costume party under the theme Vicars and tarts. Males were supposed to dress church-related; the females were supposed to dress as though they were hawking their wares. I dressed as a prophet: beard, long robe. I carried a doom sign. Hung from my waist, over my cod, was a sign that said "The end is c-c-coming": with an orthographic joke on orgasm you see, and over my behind was a matching sign that said, with relief, "The end is come."
Monday, October 18, 2010
Friday, October 15, 2010
Society
We're social animals. Me too. Thus, naturally, I love society: depend on it, agree with our ancestors survival choice to group.
But I hate this society.
Society in contrast loves itself ... and hates me.
Society in general says it follows God, worships Jesus, but of course it does just the opposite. Those who follow God, or try to, or who ally with Jesus, or try to (those who overturn the money changing tables in the temple, or try to), are still isolated, persecuted, silenced. And society has no conscience about it. (Neither is society very conscious.)
I started drafting this intending it for InfoAll, my deschooling, deregulation, deprofessionalizing blog. But now I remind one and all that the major part of my Knatz.com, a censorship casualty of the fed destroying my AgainstHierarchy.org, was my Teaching area, and the largest area of that was my Society folders (with their myriad sub-folders!)
More on the same set of metaphors will appear at a range of blogs, including this one, and including InfoAll.
But I hate this society.
Society in contrast loves itself ... and hates me.
Society in general says it follows God, worships Jesus, but of course it does just the opposite. Those who follow God, or try to, or who ally with Jesus, or try to (those who overturn the money changing tables in the temple, or try to), are still isolated, persecuted, silenced. And society has no conscience about it. (Neither is society very conscious.)
I started drafting this intending it for InfoAll, my deschooling, deregulation, deprofessionalizing blog. But now I remind one and all that the major part of my Knatz.com, a censorship casualty of the fed destroying my AgainstHierarchy.org, was my Teaching area, and the largest area of that was my Society folders (with their myriad sub-folders!)
More on the same set of metaphors will appear at a range of blogs, including this one, and including InfoAll.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
God Is Not Mocked
Gregory Bateson's last book, Angels Fear, argues the truth of the statement God is not mocked by explaining it in a way that thrills me to my toenails. I translate his explanation thusly: in the long run, the truth counts. At the end of the day, the territory is the territory, no matter what the map depicts. In other words, in human terms, in human social terms, if nicotine is carcinogenic, but the myth says it's the cigarette (and the scotch) that makes Bogie so attractive (not his genes, the makeup, the script, the lighting ... Ingrid Bergman, Lauren Bacall), and you think Camels are mild, or, It's the taste! then at the end of the day, you'll still have cancer. God is not mocked.
If human beings are expelled from the Garden of Eden, but then stumble on the Americas and take them from the natives, saying that God rewards the good guys, but then we black ball the best guys, gush goods at the most compliant mediocrities, in the end, will our votes, our will, our self-deceits trump the truth? or will we all have cancer no matter what we edit for television, or drivel at the universities?
Can the actual universe be a dangerous place if we all conscript children into school and tell them they're free?
Is it the carcinogen that causes cancer? or the Nielsen rating that prevents it?
In other words (if Bateson is right, and Korzybski, and pk): reality will have the last word: only it won't come as words.
There are and will be consequences for human behavior. The pathological lies told by our major institutions: government, school, church can pacify us only so long. In the end it won't be just Jesus and his disciples who are dead.
If human beings are expelled from the Garden of Eden, but then stumble on the Americas and take them from the natives, saying that God rewards the good guys, but then we black ball the best guys, gush goods at the most compliant mediocrities, in the end, will our votes, our will, our self-deceits trump the truth? or will we all have cancer no matter what we edit for television, or drivel at the universities?
Can the actual universe be a dangerous place if we all conscript children into school and tell them they're free?
Is it the carcinogen that causes cancer? or the Nielsen rating that prevents it?
In other words (if Bateson is right, and Korzybski, and pk): reality will have the last word: only it won't come as words.
There are and will be consequences for human behavior. The pathological lies told by our major institutions: government, school, church can pacify us only so long. In the end it won't be just Jesus and his disciples who are dead.
Thursday, October 07, 2010
1%er Association
My GRE's Top 1% appeared at the PaulKnatz blog. It offers another metaphor for the theory of social homeostasis I've been developing at Knatz.com/Society (and here at this Iona Arc blog. The term "1%" here refers to intelligence, to learning, to discernment, discipline, and imagination inreading: but I can't use the term without recalling another use I learned about when I taught at Colby in Maine. My nextdoor neighbor rode a BSA Victor: a one cylinder off-road bike with big knobby tires — a lot of torque in any gear, even at modest revs, which this garbage-pickup-truck Maine Tibadeau had customized with ape hanger handlebars: his bike was an oxymoron: it contradicted itself by the microsecond: road! off-road! road! off-road! road! off-road! Hells Angels ride on pavement, showing off for the pimply girls, and they put high handlebars on their chopped Harleys. Dirt riders have to be on top of the action, with strong handlebars below their shoulders: for control, in the dirt. Anyway, This Tibadeau once told me that his friends were "1%ers" I told him I didn't know what that meant. He said, "You know, they say that It's only 1% of bike riders who give motor-cycling a bad name: well, We're that !%!"
Now that's a very different sort of 1%, isn't it? But maybe there are similarities. In social homeostasis it's both ends of any spectrum that are rejected by the mean. Those of average intelligence, of average learning, of average morality won't listen to the Gandhi or the Jesus or the Tolstoy, but they also don't honor the village idiot or the purse snatcher. I gloy in my intelligence, in my ethics, in my honesty, the more so becuase they are rejected by others: well, these bikers gloried in being bad to the bone.
Now that's a very different sort of 1%, isn't it? But maybe there are similarities. In social homeostasis it's both ends of any spectrum that are rejected by the mean. Those of average intelligence, of average learning, of average morality won't listen to the Gandhi or the Jesus or the Tolstoy, but they also don't honor the village idiot or the purse snatcher. I gloy in my intelligence, in my ethics, in my honesty, the more so becuase they are rejected by others: well, these bikers gloried in being bad to the bone.
Sunday, October 03, 2010
Im-phatic Iago
A line illustrating Iago's manacing diction in Shakespeare's Othello just floated into my head (apropos of nothing I'm aware of): "But for a satisfaction of my thought; / No further harm." The diction is an intrusion: where did harm come from? It's purely, ingeniously gratuitous on Iago's part as he begins to poison the atmosphere around Cassio (and around Othello, who's passed him over for promotion) (that's the imagined harm!)
Make of it further what you will: I pass my thought along here to initiate one point: "99%" of human communications are phatic. It's verbal musak. It's for soothing relationship, not for conveying information. There's little content. Sweetie pie! Coochie Coo! Hey, Babe! That's what we're used to: so Iago's "harm" sticks us like a frozen ice pick.
Note: the basic prosody for the scene is iambic pentameter. Iago's "But for a satisfaction of my thought," is perfect meter: ten syllables, five accents. The following line is also perfect iambic pentameter, but Iago speaks only the first two beats: No further harm: (though they read like three beats, don't they?) It's what Othello asnwers that fills out the technical meter: "Why of thy thought, Iago?" Now, reflectively, we can see: Iago gets two of five beats, Othello three.
Let me tell you: even the damn meter is dramatic, and establishes character. Well, damn it, it's Shakespeare!
Make of it further what you will: I pass my thought along here to initiate one point: "99%" of human communications are phatic. It's verbal musak. It's for soothing relationship, not for conveying information. There's little content. Sweetie pie! Coochie Coo! Hey, Babe! That's what we're used to: so Iago's "harm" sticks us like a frozen ice pick.
Note: the basic prosody for the scene is iambic pentameter. Iago's "But for a satisfaction of my thought," is perfect meter: ten syllables, five accents. The following line is also perfect iambic pentameter, but Iago speaks only the first two beats: No further harm: (though they read like three beats, don't they?) It's what Othello asnwers that fills out the technical meter: "Why of thy thought, Iago?" Now, reflectively, we can see: Iago gets two of five beats, Othello three.
Let me tell you: even the damn meter is dramatic, and establishes character. Well, damn it, it's Shakespeare!
Friday, October 01, 2010
Evolution, Society, and the "1%"
Context: See GRE's Top 1% at the PaulKnatz blog. (Also see my Knatz.com/Society module on the subject: an earlier post here at IonaArc.)
I just added this PS at the former post: Understand all along how my points all fit into my workings of the theory of homeostasis: any system, certainly any living system, structures itself to preserve what's preserved, and to make slick paths of change. Averages claim to value excellence but what they really value are averages. Thus an individual of "IQ" 200 will barely be able to communicate with an individual of IQ 180, while neither will be understood by the staff at the NYT, The Smithsonian, Harvard ... Though in time, without credit, ideas, observations, admissions from such a stratosphere may filter inward toward the mean.
In other words, the mass of humans don't hear anything from more than a little bit "above" them: messages from geniuses, from artists, from divinities, from saviors ... may take millennia to filter down (inward, toward the core of men): or, may never get there at all. Not all seeds germinate; not all ideas become seeds. Evolution follows a random path, not an ordained path to perfection. Meantime: human institutions are there to pretend to facilitate communication while actually blocking it, editing it, managing it: supervising it.
God didn't tell me to get credit for offering a cheap internet in 1970, he just told me to offer it: the way he told Jesus to offer salvation. Only enough of what Jesus said penetrated to assure damnation; only enough of my cybernetic public records keeping penetrated to shore up kleptocracy. Still: it's all only temporary.
Eve's sisters didn't see that Eve was the mother of a new species, a species that would wipe her sisters off the face of the earth: out-performing them in fitness for survival. If they had, if her parents had, if her brothers, or uncles, or cousins had: they would have killed her. For all we know her relatives did sort of see it, maybe they kept her in a cage. Piers Anthony's Isle of Women imagines her as a pariah, the family weirdo. Still: Eve managed to attract Adam, Even managed to keep Adam attracted to her. She managed, exiled at home or not, to get Adam to bring her red meat, and to help feed and care for her children. That's how Eve was different: and its her descendants, her species, us, that have choked the earth and gobbled and wasted its resources in the five-or-six figures-of-years since.
Societies believe that they are entitled to know everything, to think anything, to understand what needs understanding. Of course we don't; the part is not the whole. Theologies posit a god who understands everything. No, no: not my god: I don't want any god who could muck up evolution. Between god and evolution, I'll take evolution: learning, growth, maturation, change ... adaptation. The worst curse I ever offered the Roman Catholic Church was that it should remain stuck with its teaching: that is, go under: hard.
When I taught at Colby in Maine my nextdoor neighbor rode a BSA Victor: a one cylinder off-road bike with big knobby tires — a lot of torque in any gear, even at modest revs, which this garbage-pickup-truck Maine Tibadeau had customized with ape hanger handlebars: his bike was an oxymoron: it contradicted itself by the microsecond: road! off-road! road! off-road! road! off-road! Hells Angels ride on pavement, showing off for the pimply girls, and they put high handlebars on their chopped Harleys. Dirt riders have to be on top of the action, with strong handlebars below their shoulders: for control, in the dirt. Anyway, This Tibadeau once told me that his friends were "1%ers" I told him I didn't know what that meant. He said, "You know, they say that it's only 1% of bike riders who give motor-cycling a bad name: well, we're that !%!"
GRE's Top 1% appeared at the PaulKnatz blog: 'cause it's about me! Spin off material appears here: because it's not about me. That is to say, the PaulKnatz blog is at least titularly biographical; IonaArc is philosophical ...
We humans say that we're "intelligent": as though intelligence were an absolute, all-or-nothing condition. I say it's a position (or a range of positions) along a specrum: along which we claim to belong more via ignorance and prejudice than objective measurement. Do we have IQ tests for snails or dolphins to match our tests for ourselves? Are our tests for ourselves worth anything? Will our tests for ourselves be worthy anything when we meet ET? or god?
Think of this: accept for a moment a "Christ" as something divine, resembling something human. Give this Christ an IQ test. Compare his performance to yours or mine: or Einstein's. Have we accurately mapped Christ's intelligence?
How did Christ's IQ test performance match Jehovah's? or Baal's? or a cobblestone from old Geneva?
Where do human institutions get the hubris to pretend that those institutions are competent to pursue their supposed goals? I mock my IQ test. I mock my school performance. I mock my performance in this society. None of our tests prove anything but institutional incompetence, the pathetic naivete of civilization. Now: the other side of that same coin:
Our institutions claim purposes and functions that would not be supported by falsifications administered by ET. My schools pretended that their purpose was to train me, to civilize me, to educate me ... My schools never demonstrated competnence to do any of those things: they were just fiated into power by the thugs of our kleptocracy. I've spent my adulthood offering disproofs; the society has spent my entire life ignoring my messages.
Well, that would be OK perhaps in a world in which Christ was a falsehood. Or in a world where there was no Truth other than that stage-dressed by the kleptocrats. In that universe the carcinogens in the tobacco won't kill anyone until a majority votes for it to be so. But what if we live in a world were truth cannot be compromised? What if the poison is poisonous whether we officially publish it to be so or not? In other words: can false authorities fiat their false authority into passing for truth in reality?
I say not. My society tackles me, knocks me down, holds me down: so there's no contest.
Did you ever hear such a story? Sure: it's told in the Bible. Not very accurately. Not at all honestly. But still. Mythically it's true. It's there: a truth we tell, but ignore.
I just added this PS at the former post: Understand all along how my points all fit into my workings of the theory of homeostasis: any system, certainly any living system, structures itself to preserve what's preserved, and to make slick paths of change. Averages claim to value excellence but what they really value are averages. Thus an individual of "IQ" 200 will barely be able to communicate with an individual of IQ 180, while neither will be understood by the staff at the NYT, The Smithsonian, Harvard ... Though in time, without credit, ideas, observations, admissions from such a stratosphere may filter inward toward the mean.
In other words, the mass of humans don't hear anything from more than a little bit "above" them: messages from geniuses, from artists, from divinities, from saviors ... may take millennia to filter down (inward, toward the core of men): or, may never get there at all. Not all seeds germinate; not all ideas become seeds. Evolution follows a random path, not an ordained path to perfection. Meantime: human institutions are there to pretend to facilitate communication while actually blocking it, editing it, managing it: supervising it.
God didn't tell me to get credit for offering a cheap internet in 1970, he just told me to offer it: the way he told Jesus to offer salvation. Only enough of what Jesus said penetrated to assure damnation; only enough of my cybernetic public records keeping penetrated to shore up kleptocracy. Still: it's all only temporary.
Eve's sisters didn't see that Eve was the mother of a new species, a species that would wipe her sisters off the face of the earth: out-performing them in fitness for survival. If they had, if her parents had, if her brothers, or uncles, or cousins had: they would have killed her. For all we know her relatives did sort of see it, maybe they kept her in a cage. Piers Anthony's Isle of Women imagines her as a pariah, the family weirdo. Still: Eve managed to attract Adam, Even managed to keep Adam attracted to her. She managed, exiled at home or not, to get Adam to bring her red meat, and to help feed and care for her children. That's how Eve was different: and its her descendants, her species, us, that have choked the earth and gobbled and wasted its resources in the five-or-six figures-of-years since.
Societies believe that they are entitled to know everything, to think anything, to understand what needs understanding. Of course we don't; the part is not the whole. Theologies posit a god who understands everything. No, no: not my god: I don't want any god who could muck up evolution. Between god and evolution, I'll take evolution: learning, growth, maturation, change ... adaptation. The worst curse I ever offered the Roman Catholic Church was that it should remain stuck with its teaching: that is, go under: hard.
When I taught at Colby in Maine my nextdoor neighbor rode a BSA Victor: a one cylinder off-road bike with big knobby tires — a lot of torque in any gear, even at modest revs, which this garbage-pickup-truck Maine Tibadeau had customized with ape hanger handlebars: his bike was an oxymoron: it contradicted itself by the microsecond: road! off-road! road! off-road! road! off-road! Hells Angels ride on pavement, showing off for the pimply girls, and they put high handlebars on their chopped Harleys. Dirt riders have to be on top of the action, with strong handlebars below their shoulders: for control, in the dirt. Anyway, This Tibadeau once told me that his friends were "1%ers" I told him I didn't know what that meant. He said, "You know, they say that it's only 1% of bike riders who give motor-cycling a bad name: well, we're that !%!"
GRE's Top 1% appeared at the PaulKnatz blog: 'cause it's about me! Spin off material appears here: because it's not about me. That is to say, the PaulKnatz blog is at least titularly biographical; IonaArc is philosophical ...
We humans say that we're "intelligent": as though intelligence were an absolute, all-or-nothing condition. I say it's a position (or a range of positions) along a specrum: along which we claim to belong more via ignorance and prejudice than objective measurement. Do we have IQ tests for snails or dolphins to match our tests for ourselves? Are our tests for ourselves worth anything? Will our tests for ourselves be worthy anything when we meet ET? or god?
Think of this: accept for a moment a "Christ" as something divine, resembling something human. Give this Christ an IQ test. Compare his performance to yours or mine: or Einstein's. Have we accurately mapped Christ's intelligence?
How did Christ's IQ test performance match Jehovah's? or Baal's? or a cobblestone from old Geneva?
Where do human institutions get the hubris to pretend that those institutions are competent to pursue their supposed goals? I mock my IQ test. I mock my school performance. I mock my performance in this society. None of our tests prove anything but institutional incompetence, the pathetic naivete of civilization. Now: the other side of that same coin:
Our institutions claim purposes and functions that would not be supported by falsifications administered by ET. My schools pretended that their purpose was to train me, to civilize me, to educate me ... My schools never demonstrated competnence to do any of those things: they were just fiated into power by the thugs of our kleptocracy. I've spent my adulthood offering disproofs; the society has spent my entire life ignoring my messages.
Well, that would be OK perhaps in a world in which Christ was a falsehood. Or in a world where there was no Truth other than that stage-dressed by the kleptocrats. In that universe the carcinogens in the tobacco won't kill anyone until a majority votes for it to be so. But what if we live in a world were truth cannot be compromised? What if the poison is poisonous whether we officially publish it to be so or not? In other words: can false authorities fiat their false authority into passing for truth in reality?
I say not. My society tackles me, knocks me down, holds me down: so there's no contest.
Did you ever hear such a story? Sure: it's told in the Bible. Not very accurately. Not at all honestly. But still. Mythically it's true. It's there: a truth we tell, but ignore.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Celestial Trial
| Knatz.com / Teaching / NoHier / Justice / Celestial / | Module initiated 2005 05 25 |
My favorite example of human justice attempting objectivity is the Indonesian Celestial Trial. Where secular justice fails to satisfy a disputant a celestial trail may be appealed for. Of two, both disputants must agree. The secular courts must also agree that they're out of their depth. The dispute relocates to a pair of towers. Each tower has a hut at its top. Each hut has a hole in its floor, pierced by a runged ladder from the ground. Each disputant climbs his separate tower, each in hailing distance of the other. Families may gather on the ground.
The huts are constructed so that an adult Indonesian has no room to stand erect or lie at length. The "floor" is too narrow to sit at one's ease. Any sitting position must be constantly shifted: to distribute the stresses elsewhere. One may stand erect only by standing on the ladder, one's trunk thrust up into the hut, the rungs biting the soles of one's feet. Via a rope one's support group may send up beverages of one's choosing. What foods may ascend are monitored.
Thus the towers are like crosses that one is not nailed to and that both disputants may survive.
Both disputants have the right to descend from his tower at any time: but descent means that you lose: heaven is declaring the other guy to be in the right.
My description reflects my memory of Piers Anthony's presentation of the system in one of his Geodyssey novels (Shame of Man, I believe). (He's careful in his research; I'm trusting my memory, hoping you at least get the basic idea.)
I emphasize:
Ascend the towers with me, and we'll see who gives up first.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Nazi Mythologies of the Hidden Wealth of the Destitute
The typical anti-Semite, take a 1930s Nazi for example, was told as a child, and told again, that any Jew, no matter how impoverished the Jew seemed, had a hoard of gold somewhere nearby. Naturally, if a Jew has gold, why then that gold doesn't belong to the Jew, but to the Nazi who'll take it from him: right? So: the Nazi is within his rights, the Nazi is obliged, to find the gold: and liberate it: from the enemy of God, and transferring it to the friend of God. Right? Therefore, it's perfectly reasonable to beat the Jew and torture the Jew: and if the Jew dies before giving up the gold, well that just proves how wicked the Jew is! Doesn't it? !
Any extortionist racket may work similarly. The king wants to wage a war. Why just tax the peasants! The peasants say they'd given all they could last year. But the peasants must be lying, right? It's in the nature of peasants to lie; while it's in the nature of the extortionist rulers to be the chosen of God, right? So it's just right and proper that the government burn, torture, and kill the wicked peasants until they cough up enough new taxes to invade Lorraine, or France, or Poland ...
I've lived my life without an income. I gave up the jobs of my youth, the jobs that kept me flush with cash, and went into hock, stayed in hock, in order to attend, as I was told to do, school after school: AB, MA, doctoral work, lots and lots of doctoral work. But I never got a regular job. On the contrary, though I was hired as a college teacher, I was fired, and blackballed from further employment during the kleptocracy's hysteria of the late 1960s. That's the circumstance in which I offered a cheap low-tech internet in 1970: I wanted to loosen the universities' strangle hold on the culture. My offer received a trickle of support: then that trickle was stopped (and mopped) not by accident: just another friendly service from our utterly dishonest institutions: universities, government, media ... Fortune 500, big science ... I did this and that to stay alive: I wrote my stories and my novels and still talked about Jesus-inspired Illichian social networking, all to no avail, gaining no income. And all my glorious cash reserves of high school had been long-since depleted by college. Spend all, and never gain: except from patrons. My patrons, all modest, kept me alive, though less than functional. When PCs came along I was among the last to be able to get one: I, who had proposed public software for everyone, so no one would need a PC! (The local FLEX, like a local library, could have done the code, the machine talk, for you.)
In 2006, when the estate of my patron of 1990 to 2004 was all but spent, I wrote a satire to my university, the last university to take all my money while seeing that I got none back. I did what I do in writing to all institutions that never understand a thing I do or say: I pretended that communication with them was possible. I pretended that they had understood me all along, that they knew perfectly well who I was, and that they were just pretending not to understand. I pretended to be like them: commanding, in charge, with rights. I pretended to be hold them accountable for their crimes! Imagine a lone Jew addressing Hitler as though anything could be discussed with him! I told my university that rock bottom was coming up at me fast: and that if it hit me in the face before I'd heard understanding from them, if I went stone broke while the bully who'd robbed me remained flush, and silent, then I, Christian, pacifist pk, was going to come to NY, murdering my way north along the highways, till I arrived at NYU where I would introduce the deschooler's Judgment. They read it "literally"! That is to say: they don't know how to read: which is exactly what I'd been telling them, without understanding, since 1962!
NYU called the FBI. The FBI, illiterate peers to the tenured English professors, arrested me. And ever since the fed has been extorting money from me: Where, you miserable terrorist swine, is your pile of gold?!
Well, my satire didn't get the hoped for effect — understanding, responsibility — but it did solve my terminal poverty problem. The jail fed me, provided me with a bunk. The medical facilities were lethal, as well as tardy, but they were an improvement over none, and never. Out of jail, "early" — since I was tortured into "confessing" my guilt, the fed keeps my nose just above water. I get $500 a month and food-stamps, and Medicaid as well as Medicare, and pharmaceutical co-payments. As long as I have no emergencies, no car repairs, I can just breathe. !
But now the fed want to collect the fine the judge levied against me. I'd said, Help! They arrested me. I'd said, You're bastards, and I'm insulting you the worst I can by pretending, obviously falsely, that I'm just like you: a murderer, a terrorist, a liar, an extortionist ... a coercionist, a kleptocrat! All the fed gets is, He's got a pile of gold somewhere, and we must get it from him!
I said to my parole officer, I have nothing now that the fed doesn't give me. The fed and the state figure I can live on roughly $700 a month: and I can, I do: just barely. But now the fed wants me to pay $100 per count of the six felony counts you tortured me into confessing to. Fine, give me another $600, and I'll give it right back. Now the fed wants to fine me $4,000. I said I have nothing, I'm rapidly getting down to nothing, so the fed figures I can easily afford $4,000 out of the government's dole of $700 a month. Give me the extra $4,000 and I'll give it right back. Say I can pay it $25 a month: Fine. Give me $725 a month and I'll give you $25 a month.
No. They want a payment plan. I gave them one! They don't listen! They're incapable of understanding! They don't understand what Jesus or Confucius or Buddha or Einstein .... or I have said to them. They just want the gold. And they just know — they bet my life! — that I have it buried somewhere.
Any extortionist racket may work similarly. The king wants to wage a war. Why just tax the peasants! The peasants say they'd given all they could last year. But the peasants must be lying, right? It's in the nature of peasants to lie; while it's in the nature of the extortionist rulers to be the chosen of God, right? So it's just right and proper that the government burn, torture, and kill the wicked peasants until they cough up enough new taxes to invade Lorraine, or France, or Poland ...
I've lived my life without an income. I gave up the jobs of my youth, the jobs that kept me flush with cash, and went into hock, stayed in hock, in order to attend, as I was told to do, school after school: AB, MA, doctoral work, lots and lots of doctoral work. But I never got a regular job. On the contrary, though I was hired as a college teacher, I was fired, and blackballed from further employment during the kleptocracy's hysteria of the late 1960s. That's the circumstance in which I offered a cheap low-tech internet in 1970: I wanted to loosen the universities' strangle hold on the culture. My offer received a trickle of support: then that trickle was stopped (and mopped) not by accident: just another friendly service from our utterly dishonest institutions: universities, government, media ... Fortune 500, big science ... I did this and that to stay alive: I wrote my stories and my novels and still talked about Jesus-inspired Illichian social networking, all to no avail, gaining no income. And all my glorious cash reserves of high school had been long-since depleted by college. Spend all, and never gain: except from patrons. My patrons, all modest, kept me alive, though less than functional. When PCs came along I was among the last to be able to get one: I, who had proposed public software for everyone, so no one would need a PC! (The local FLEX, like a local library, could have done the code, the machine talk, for you.)
In 2006, when the estate of my patron of 1990 to 2004 was all but spent, I wrote a satire to my university, the last university to take all my money while seeing that I got none back. I did what I do in writing to all institutions that never understand a thing I do or say: I pretended that communication with them was possible. I pretended that they had understood me all along, that they knew perfectly well who I was, and that they were just pretending not to understand. I pretended to be like them: commanding, in charge, with rights. I pretended to be hold them accountable for their crimes! Imagine a lone Jew addressing Hitler as though anything could be discussed with him! I told my university that rock bottom was coming up at me fast: and that if it hit me in the face before I'd heard understanding from them, if I went stone broke while the bully who'd robbed me remained flush, and silent, then I, Christian, pacifist pk, was going to come to NY, murdering my way north along the highways, till I arrived at NYU where I would introduce the deschooler's Judgment. They read it "literally"! That is to say: they don't know how to read: which is exactly what I'd been telling them, without understanding, since 1962!
NYU called the FBI. The FBI, illiterate peers to the tenured English professors, arrested me. And ever since the fed has been extorting money from me: Where, you miserable terrorist swine, is your pile of gold?!
Well, my satire didn't get the hoped for effect — understanding, responsibility — but it did solve my terminal poverty problem. The jail fed me, provided me with a bunk. The medical facilities were lethal, as well as tardy, but they were an improvement over none, and never. Out of jail, "early" — since I was tortured into "confessing" my guilt, the fed keeps my nose just above water. I get $500 a month and food-stamps, and Medicaid as well as Medicare, and pharmaceutical co-payments. As long as I have no emergencies, no car repairs, I can just breathe. !
But now the fed want to collect the fine the judge levied against me. I'd said, Help! They arrested me. I'd said, You're bastards, and I'm insulting you the worst I can by pretending, obviously falsely, that I'm just like you: a murderer, a terrorist, a liar, an extortionist ... a coercionist, a kleptocrat! All the fed gets is, He's got a pile of gold somewhere, and we must get it from him!
I said to my parole officer, I have nothing now that the fed doesn't give me. The fed and the state figure I can live on roughly $700 a month: and I can, I do: just barely. But now the fed wants me to pay $100 per count of the six felony counts you tortured me into confessing to. Fine, give me another $600, and I'll give it right back. Now the fed wants to fine me $4,000. I said I have nothing, I'm rapidly getting down to nothing, so the fed figures I can easily afford $4,000 out of the government's dole of $700 a month. Give me the extra $4,000 and I'll give it right back. Say I can pay it $25 a month: Fine. Give me $725 a month and I'll give you $25 a month.
No. They want a payment plan. I gave them one! They don't listen! They're incapable of understanding! They don't understand what Jesus or Confucius or Buddha or Einstein .... or I have said to them. They just want the gold. And they just know — they bet my life! — that I have it buried somewhere.
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Experts, Specialization
No matter what's wrong, the specialists, the experts, will prescribe more expertise: more specialization: maybe a higher level of specialization.
The Church will prescribe a priest, a mass, communion ... maybe prayer too.
The dietician will prescribe more diet.
The doctor will prescribe a doctor, and some medicine, from the pharm, cousin to the doctors: the dentist will prescribe more dentistry.
Back killing you? you go to the chiropractor, he performs a miracle? You guessed it: he wants you back for more treatment. He'll treat you until you're really paralyzed: and he, not you, will have your money.
Sometime one layer of specialist will prescribe another layer of specialist: the GP may prescribe a surgeon, the surgeon may prescribe a psychiatrist.
Bucky Fuller said this. I've been repeating it since the mid-'Sixties.
No: actually I'd been saying it since the early 'Sixties, 'cause McLuan had said a version of it too.
I'll edit in my Experts section from my fed-et-alia-destroyed Knatz.com.
The Church will prescribe a priest, a mass, communion ... maybe prayer too.
The dietician will prescribe more diet.
The doctor will prescribe a doctor, and some medicine, from the pharm, cousin to the doctors: the dentist will prescribe more dentistry.
Back killing you? you go to the chiropractor, he performs a miracle? You guessed it: he wants you back for more treatment. He'll treat you until you're really paralyzed: and he, not you, will have your money.
Sometime one layer of specialist will prescribe another layer of specialist: the GP may prescribe a surgeon, the surgeon may prescribe a psychiatrist.
Bucky Fuller said this. I've been repeating it since the mid-'Sixties.
No: actually I'd been saying it since the early 'Sixties, 'cause McLuan had said a version of it too.
I'll edit in my Experts section from my fed-et-alia-destroyed Knatz.com.
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Who Owns New York
Oh, Who Owns New York? shouts a rah rah song of my alma mater. The chorus screams the answer: C - o - l - u - m - b - i - a!
That answer isn't too ridiculously far from the truth: King George founded his Kings College on land around Trinity Church. As the school expanded to become a university land now known as Rockefeller Center was donated, and a huge part of Morningside Heights got added, and other packets and parcels all over: not to mention all the Third World land, race courses and so forth controlled by this Ivy League behemoth. Well, if the Church can own land, if the US can own land, if my landlord can own land, why can't my school?
All that just introduces my real subject: sideways, as it were. Consider this: Who owns the New York Yankees? Who owned the Brooklyn Dodgers? Can the residents of Brooklyn be forgiven if they thought that had some rights of ownership? when the team got spirited off to the Pacific coast?
Today there's an article I see as directly related: "After 21 years of tailgating in the same lot outside Ralph Wilson Stadium, Ken Johnson plans to take his party across the street starting with the next home game in two weeks.
And with him, Johnson's bringing along his wildly colorful and popular traditions: from the red 1980 Pinto on which he grills meat on the hood to the pizza oven made out of a filing cabinet to a chicken wing-cooking mailbox and, yes, even the long-established ceremony of drinking shots of Polish cherry liqueur out of the thumbhole of a bowling ball." Johnson said, "In my case, I do push the limits, so I can't scream too loudly. But you wonder how many people go to games because of characters like me. I think I add to the experience."
I wasn't much of a baseball fan in the 1940s. At the start I was only two, at the end I was only twelve. I didn't live in a normal, nuclear family: my father was drunk on the couch, or drunk at the RR station, or lying in a gutter somewhere; I never played ball with him. I don't know if he ever played ball with anyone. In a neighborhood stuffed with girls my age I had plenty of partners to play doctor with but no boys for marbles or catch. One blessed day I saw a boy only slightly older than myself. "Hi." I ran up to him. Rudy, just moved from Flatbush, demanded, "Are you a Dodgers fan? or a Yankee fan?" Huh? I hardly knew what baseball was. "Oh, a Yankee fan!" he decided. He jumped on me and beat me up.
So as the 1950s approached and I from my bicycle delivering papers saw the Yankees trash the Dodgers year after year after year, I glowed with satisfaction. Of course I came to know a little bit about those teams. I saw Joe Dimagio. At Rudy's house I became familiar with the oompah band that played at Dodgers home games.
Understand. I am not a lawyer. My father was the lawyer, and my grandfather. (You can see where I get my respect for the law!) I don't know who the court house in Brooklyn (or Manhattan, or Rome) believed owned the legal entity The Brooklyn Dodgers (or whatever its legal entity name was). I understood that there was some individual or group who claimed that the corporation belonged to them. But I also understood that Brooklynites thought they had some claim. I saw that the band was part of the team no matter what the law said. I saw that the players, and the fans, and the TV announcer, and the subway ... were all part of the Brooklyn Dodgers. And I have always understood that the players and the fans and the oompah band and the beer hawker ... were not consulted when the Dodgers moved to LA. Nor were the kids chasing home-run balls in the streets beyond the fences.
Saturday, September 11, 2010
Bleeding
Every kid knows that doctors in the Middle Ages bled you. You got sick, they let out the bad blood. Sometimes they used leeches. Dryer's Passion of Saint Joan shows La Pucelle squirting arterial blood from her arm while the functionaries scramble with a bowl trying to catch it.
(My army friend Phil joked that the medicos had the principle right, but they wasted the wrong body fluid: it was bad semen that had to be released when you're sick. The stud needs to screw his way back to health.)
I say that blood letting still goes on, more blatantly than ever, only it's neither blood nor semen that gets sucked and wasted. The world is run by experts who no matter whether things are right or wrong prescribe that they and other experts suck money. The government sucks taxes, then more taxes. The worse things turn out, the more taxes they suck. As your family falls apart, the lawyers suck all your money. Bruise a toe and the hospitals will not only bleed you dry, they'll bankrupt Social Security while they do it.
How come nobody tries getting rid of all their money before the vampires strike? (Like I did.)
But you know what? The vampires get me anyway. Yesterday I had to buy off the extortionist fed (who railroaded me on an extortion charge to do it!) Of course I don't have a dime that the fed doesn't give me, once it bankrupted me a few years ago, destroyed me and my pitiful remaining business; but these protection racketeers demand more from me than they give me to give! And next year they'll find some pretext to demand yet more. (Like blackmailers: Squeeze till dry.)
One thing: even though the doctors didn't know that the blood circulates, or that it carried oxygen, or that you needed oxygen, they seldom bled you to death; they thought they were releaving putrid build-up of noxious pressure.
(My army buddy's joke conspicuously doesn't worry about how much semen the stud has to lose!)
The medieval doctors didn't worry about blood being either vital or self-sustaining. Institutional parasites behave as though their hosts' money were infinite. It's a really stupid blackmailer who kills the kidnapped or who bankrupts the blackmailed. And it's a really stupid government that subsidizes the stupidity of the vampires!
(My army friend Phil joked that the medicos had the principle right, but they wasted the wrong body fluid: it was bad semen that had to be released when you're sick. The stud needs to screw his way back to health.)
I say that blood letting still goes on, more blatantly than ever, only it's neither blood nor semen that gets sucked and wasted. The world is run by experts who no matter whether things are right or wrong prescribe that they and other experts suck money. The government sucks taxes, then more taxes. The worse things turn out, the more taxes they suck. As your family falls apart, the lawyers suck all your money. Bruise a toe and the hospitals will not only bleed you dry, they'll bankrupt Social Security while they do it.
How come nobody tries getting rid of all their money before the vampires strike? (Like I did.)
But you know what? The vampires get me anyway. Yesterday I had to buy off the extortionist fed (who railroaded me on an extortion charge to do it!) Of course I don't have a dime that the fed doesn't give me, once it bankrupted me a few years ago, destroyed me and my pitiful remaining business; but these protection racketeers demand more from me than they give me to give! And next year they'll find some pretext to demand yet more. (Like blackmailers: Squeeze till dry.)
One thing: even though the doctors didn't know that the blood circulates, or that it carried oxygen, or that you needed oxygen, they seldom bled you to death; they thought they were releaving putrid build-up of noxious pressure.
Get a note from your doctor!
(My army buddy's joke conspicuously doesn't worry about how much semen the stud has to lose!)
The medieval doctors didn't worry about blood being either vital or self-sustaining. Institutional parasites behave as though their hosts' money were infinite. It's a really stupid blackmailer who kills the kidnapped or who bankrupts the blackmailed. And it's a really stupid government that subsidizes the stupidity of the vampires!
Thursday, September 02, 2010
Negative Adam
When I say I don't believe in the Church, I don't mean that I deny that there is a building on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Third Street called Saint Patrick's Cathedral. I know the building is there, I've been in it since childhood, seen it hundreds of times, read about it hundreds more. I don't mean that there are no structures in the territory called The Vatican or that there is a myriad hierarchy of priests centered there, some called cardinals, one called a pope. I don't deny that there was a building around the corner from where I grew up called a Presbyterian Church. On the contrary I attended that church regularly from childhood till I was eighteen. I went to sunday school there, was confirmed there. No. What I mean is that I deny that the Church or churches, any of the churches that I'm aware of, are any of the things that they say they are. I deny that the church represents god. I deny that the church can wheedle divine forgiveness for human nature. I deny that the church's promises of getting us into heaven have any validity.
I have never said I don't believe in God. But we'll come back to that.
I see that the church stands on a book called The Bible. Churches say that the book is written by god, and that the book possesses the attributes of god: goodness, virtue, authority ... I deny that the church's Bible was written by god. I don't say that god never wrote anything; I say that the churches don't have it. What they have was written by the churches!
The churches claim that they transmit messages from god. But the principal story that the churches tell recounts a church, the Temple of Jerusalem, blocking messages from the god incarnate, Jesus. Now the churches want us to believe that they've reformed? that they're not like the old church?
When I say I don't believe in government, I don't mean that I deny that there are buildings in Washington, DC. In don't deny that many of those buildings are filled with bureaucrats: even some who claim to "represent" me! I don't deny that people are taxed, and schooled, and drafted, and sent to drop bombs on other people. I know that there's a courthouse here in Sebring, I know an artist who's painted it. Everywhere you turn there are almost as many schools as there are churches, all promising to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse, taking immature human dross and converting it to literacy, numeracy, reason ... art appreciation ... democracy. Everywhere there are tax offices, police stations, cops ... galore. No. What I mean is that I don't believe any government has a legitimate claim to law, to order, to taxation, to education, to compelling us when where and how to learn arithmetic or history or home economics, who to put in jail or who to give a monopoly to.
Everywhere there are journalists and teachers and senators ... people one or another institution claims inform us or educate us or represent us. I deny that any kleptocratic institutions or any employees of kleptocratic institutions do us anything but harm. Journalists package misinformation, teachers teach what the board says, not what scholars say, senators hear only what the Fortune 500 want heard. Government blocks information, mismanages information. God and intelligence, evolution and survival are eclipsed.
When I say that I don't believe in man, that doesn't mean that I deny that there are six billion of us, fast becoming ten. I mean I deny the things commonly claimed by our publicists. I deny that we are intelligent (in so far as "intelligent" implies an absolute). I deny that we are aware (in so far as "sentience" implies something completed (or even well-begun)). God gave us a Garden of Eden, we've perverted it into a roadway to oil spills. I deny that we have a future (other than one too shameful to talk about).
But, you know, I take it all back. I do believe in some of the things churches say. Take Original Sin, for example. I don't believe that we were created evil (I don't believe that we were created!) But I certainly do see that we're evil.
Christians say that God is good and that Jesus was good and that the Jews and Romans killed him (because he was good!) (Notice of course that "Jews and Romans" here means governments!) That's all well and good: except that we're no different! not as a group! I'm different, maybe you're different; but we are not different: we kill god everyday, kill the good, torture and murder geniuses as well as saints.
Evil? I said above that I do see that we're evil? Evil is something I spent my youth denying the ascendancy of. (I thought God would forgive us all!) What I mean is that we're incapable of living well, as a society. We're incapable of learning.
Maybe when the society has finished commiting suicide, an Adam and an Eve might survive. Some future mankind might be different: might walk with God, and Nature, and Science. With Truth.
I used to wish that I would be that Adam.
But the society took too long to bring about Armageddon. Now I'd be no good at being Adam.
Now I'm no good at much.
(Except for how I love my Eve!)
I have never said I don't believe in God. But we'll come back to that.
I see that the church stands on a book called The Bible. Churches say that the book is written by god, and that the book possesses the attributes of god: goodness, virtue, authority ... I deny that the church's Bible was written by god. I don't say that god never wrote anything; I say that the churches don't have it. What they have was written by the churches!
The churches claim that they transmit messages from god. But the principal story that the churches tell recounts a church, the Temple of Jerusalem, blocking messages from the god incarnate, Jesus. Now the churches want us to believe that they've reformed? that they're not like the old church?
When I say I don't believe in government, I don't mean that I deny that there are buildings in Washington, DC. In don't deny that many of those buildings are filled with bureaucrats: even some who claim to "represent" me! I don't deny that people are taxed, and schooled, and drafted, and sent to drop bombs on other people. I know that there's a courthouse here in Sebring, I know an artist who's painted it. Everywhere you turn there are almost as many schools as there are churches, all promising to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse, taking immature human dross and converting it to literacy, numeracy, reason ... art appreciation ... democracy. Everywhere there are tax offices, police stations, cops ... galore. No. What I mean is that I don't believe any government has a legitimate claim to law, to order, to taxation, to education, to compelling us when where and how to learn arithmetic or history or home economics, who to put in jail or who to give a monopoly to.
Everywhere there are journalists and teachers and senators ... people one or another institution claims inform us or educate us or represent us. I deny that any kleptocratic institutions or any employees of kleptocratic institutions do us anything but harm. Journalists package misinformation, teachers teach what the board says, not what scholars say, senators hear only what the Fortune 500 want heard. Government blocks information, mismanages information. God and intelligence, evolution and survival are eclipsed.
When I say that I don't believe in man, that doesn't mean that I deny that there are six billion of us, fast becoming ten. I mean I deny the things commonly claimed by our publicists. I deny that we are intelligent (in so far as "intelligent" implies an absolute). I deny that we are aware (in so far as "sentience" implies something completed (or even well-begun)). God gave us a Garden of Eden, we've perverted it into a roadway to oil spills. I deny that we have a future (other than one too shameful to talk about).
But, you know, I take it all back. I do believe in some of the things churches say. Take Original Sin, for example. I don't believe that we were created evil (I don't believe that we were created!) But I certainly do see that we're evil.
Christians say that God is good and that Jesus was good and that the Jews and Romans killed him (because he was good!) (Notice of course that "Jews and Romans" here means governments!) That's all well and good: except that we're no different! not as a group! I'm different, maybe you're different; but we are not different: we kill god everyday, kill the good, torture and murder geniuses as well as saints.
Evil? I said above that I do see that we're evil? Evil is something I spent my youth denying the ascendancy of. (I thought God would forgive us all!) What I mean is that we're incapable of living well, as a society. We're incapable of learning.
Maybe when the society has finished commiting suicide, an Adam and an Eve might survive. Some future mankind might be different: might walk with God, and Nature, and Science. With Truth.
I used to wish that I would be that Adam.
But the society took too long to bring about Armageddon. Now I'd be no good at being Adam.
Now I'm no good at much.
(Except for how I love my Eve!)
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Earthly Judgments
The human world, the human kleptocratic world, is governed by human judgments. Some kleptocracies pretend to be guided by divine judgment: Christian European states, for example. But till God is heard from (so all would know it's God speaking (how would that ever happen?)) all we have are the Christian kleptocracies' word for it.
I believe in God's judgment: provided we understand God to mean truth: the actual territory, not some human representation, some "map" of the territory. But that judgment (the truth) will never be known by human kleptocrats. Or it may be approximated by individuals both intelligent and honest, by you, by me (on our good days): but the moment we form a group, a society, with compulsory school and military service, and taxation, and media run for profit ... No, no, no.
I was just recalling some human judgments portrayed in the Old Testament. Genesis has Lot visited by some angels. The nasty neighbors take the angels to be men: good looking men. The neighbors demand that Lot give his guests up to the neighbors so they can bugger them. Lot offers his virgin daughters instead. And God reduces Sodom and Gomorrah to rubble. But just before, did the Sodom Gazette report that the Sodomites had misidentified some victims for rape? No, no, no.
Trouble is, we only get to read the earthly judgments: while the exceptions, like pk's writing, gets ignored, or misrepresented, censored ... while pk is jailed.
I believe in God's judgment: provided we understand God to mean truth: the actual territory, not some human representation, some "map" of the territory. But that judgment (the truth) will never be known by human kleptocrats. Or it may be approximated by individuals both intelligent and honest, by you, by me (on our good days): but the moment we form a group, a society, with compulsory school and military service, and taxation, and media run for profit ... No, no, no.
I was just recalling some human judgments portrayed in the Old Testament. Genesis has Lot visited by some angels. The nasty neighbors take the angels to be men: good looking men. The neighbors demand that Lot give his guests up to the neighbors so they can bugger them. Lot offers his virgin daughters instead. And God reduces Sodom and Gomorrah to rubble. But just before, did the Sodom Gazette report that the Sodomites had misidentified some victims for rape? No, no, no.
Trouble is, we only get to read the earthly judgments: while the exceptions, like pk's writing, gets ignored, or misrepresented, censored ... while pk is jailed.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Double Negative
Double Negative
Bio-Paradox
Because the pharms figure that what makes the kid hyperactive is hypo-activity of some behavioral repressor: maybe if the repressor is stimulated it will let the kid inhibit himself, naturally. Ah: behaviorism of a level more sophisticated than we're used to in the old simple-minded culture: the cue ball hits the eight ball, the eight ball drops into the side pocket; we're no more used to complex causes than we are to multiple body problems: we can handle Joe and Marilyn, but not one million people on the subway, everybody hand forced against somebody else's something or other.
Bear with me: I broaden the base:
The school teacher says that "two negatives make a positive." She illustrates,"I ain't gonna do that nohow" means that that non-standard-written-English speaker is going to do it! No, no, no, lady: lots of negatives mean negative, Negative, NEGATIVE. They're connected in parallel, not in series. (With batteries, series connection boosts the amperes; parallel connection deepens the voltage, it doesn't multiply the current.)
That's a start. I'll join my targets next time, forging a new metaphor.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Pretend Authority
Authority is necessary for any politically imposed belief system so the belief can be asserted over experience.
Real authority, were there any such thing — a church that actually hears and represents an actual god, a government that actually represents a population of sentient, non-toxic beings, I would be for. As it is, I'm against all authority that I'm aware of: as fraudulent, factitious, illegitimate. (Of course the authorities can, and have, side-railed me, silenced me, impoverished me, arrested me, and censored my writing as well as my speech. Notice that I haven't arrested or impoverished any authorities that I know of (though I do try to keep resources from governments by avoiding having an income, thereby being free of income tax.)
Schools pretend to have and to represent and to be able to bestow knowledge, skill, wisdom. Sounds good. But what you actually get are a bunch of experts telling people not to listen to Galileo and his telescope, that Copernicus was crazy, that some "theory" of "Creationism" concocted a century and a half after Darwin is legitimate "science" ...
King Herod ruled the Jews in Jerusalem by the forbearance of the lieutenants of Augustus Caesar. When Jesus was hailed by Jews (in the street as it were) as King of the Jews, Herod and the Temple priests tag teamed him, getting the Roman rubber stamps to help. Who were the experts? Jesus? the Son of God? No: the priests, the governors ... the money changers whose tables Jesus overthrew.
No. In heaven authority may be real; here on earth it's fraud: pure fraud followed by purer fraud.
Meantime, notice. You son tells you the priest fucked him in the ass. You tell your son that he's imagining things, for shame, the priest is a holy man. Then you see the priest with his robes up and your son held bent, you tell the bishop. For shame, the priest is a holy man, scolds the bishop. Finally the bishop sees it, tells the cardinal, the Pope ... the Times. For shame, the priest is a holy man.
The experts, authorities, can erase experience: over and over.
Related thoughts I'll sketch in a post on Discrepancy Reduction: at my pkTools blog.
Real authority, were there any such thing — a church that actually hears and represents an actual god, a government that actually represents a population of sentient, non-toxic beings, I would be for. As it is, I'm against all authority that I'm aware of: as fraudulent, factitious, illegitimate. (Of course the authorities can, and have, side-railed me, silenced me, impoverished me, arrested me, and censored my writing as well as my speech. Notice that I haven't arrested or impoverished any authorities that I know of (though I do try to keep resources from governments by avoiding having an income, thereby being free of income tax.)
Schools pretend to have and to represent and to be able to bestow knowledge, skill, wisdom. Sounds good. But what you actually get are a bunch of experts telling people not to listen to Galileo and his telescope, that Copernicus was crazy, that some "theory" of "Creationism" concocted a century and a half after Darwin is legitimate "science" ...
King Herod ruled the Jews in Jerusalem by the forbearance of the lieutenants of Augustus Caesar. When Jesus was hailed by Jews (in the street as it were) as King of the Jews, Herod and the Temple priests tag teamed him, getting the Roman rubber stamps to help. Who were the experts? Jesus? the Son of God? No: the priests, the governors ... the money changers whose tables Jesus overthrew.
No. In heaven authority may be real; here on earth it's fraud: pure fraud followed by purer fraud.
Meantime, notice. You son tells you the priest fucked him in the ass. You tell your son that he's imagining things, for shame, the priest is a holy man. Then you see the priest with his robes up and your son held bent, you tell the bishop. For shame, the priest is a holy man, scolds the bishop. Finally the bishop sees it, tells the cardinal, the Pope ... the Times. For shame, the priest is a holy man.
The experts, authorities, can erase experience: over and over.
Related thoughts I'll sketch in a post on Discrepancy Reduction: at my pkTools blog.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Mugging Santa
Santa is said to bring gifts to good little boys and girls on Christmas Eve. The gifts are for the children. All they have to do is sit and wait. Then they'll have them (if they're good.)
What though if the kids are bad little boys and girls? What if the bad kids (and grownups: kleptocrats, bureaucrats) know Santa is coming? What if the bad kids ambush Santa from the shadow of the chimney? Will the bad kids then legitimately own the good kids toys? (They will if they run the government and write the laws and monopolize the justice departments.)
God sent Jesus to offer us mercy. But we knocked him down, tortured him. Do we "own" the mercy?
Do kleptocrats have God by the short hairs? Or is God just giving us, still, all the rope we need to hang ourselves? An infinity of times.
What though if the kids are bad little boys and girls? What if the bad kids (and grownups: kleptocrats, bureaucrats) know Santa is coming? What if the bad kids ambush Santa from the shadow of the chimney? Will the bad kids then legitimately own the good kids toys? (They will if they run the government and write the laws and monopolize the justice departments.)
God sent Jesus to offer us mercy. But we knocked him down, tortured him. Do we "own" the mercy?
Do kleptocrats have God by the short hairs? Or is God just giving us, still, all the rope we need to hang ourselves? An infinity of times.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Law: Nature, God, Science, Society
If scientific law and nature's law and God's law are not one and the same then is there something wrong with science? or nature? or God? or the society which has such concepts?
That's what I just wrote among my Law quotes at my pKnatzQuotes blog. I hope the statement implies the essay that belongs with it. I post the statement here where such an essay might develop.
Initially I'll say only that I don't believe that human governments, kleptocracies all (these days) are competent to administer science: and if we don't know what the truth is, how can we write laws? how can we hear laws? I don't trust the Church's word on God; I don't trust the US' word on what the "people" say; I don't trust the Times to know or tell the "news"; I don't trust schools to know what science is: and that includes Harvard, MIT!
That's what I just wrote among my Law quotes at my pKnatzQuotes blog. I hope the statement implies the essay that belongs with it. I post the statement here where such an essay might develop.
Initially I'll say only that I don't believe that human governments, kleptocracies all (these days) are competent to administer science: and if we don't know what the truth is, how can we write laws? how can we hear laws? I don't trust the Church's word on God; I don't trust the US' word on what the "people" say; I don't trust the Times to know or tell the "news"; I don't trust schools to know what science is: and that includes Harvard, MIT!
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
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