Secular / Sacred

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

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

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

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

You have no peers.
pk’s lawyer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Microbes

MICROBES THAT RULE THE WORLD

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

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

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

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

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

Who's pk?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This theme continues at pk.

Dead Mac

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

Whoopee!

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

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

Katrina's Lake George

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Radio

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

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

Good

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

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

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

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

pk's Society

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

Cosmology of Pirates

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

Goya, Colossus

Prediction, Reporting, Results

Elections, for example, sports.

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

Fine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Order, Archives

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

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

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

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

Circumcision

Shlain inspired, pk explains circumcision:

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

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

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

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

Fish Resort

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

Bravo: with a BUT.

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

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

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

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

Majority

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

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

Don’t know. But my speculation is NEVER!

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

The Blind Swordsman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Falsification: the Soul of Science

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

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

---

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

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

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

Fishing Paradise

Lake Istokpoga is my favorite fishing lake ever. And yesterday I had the best session with fly rod, popper, and bluegills I've had in years.

Social Intelligence

Never forget: humans are social. Human intelligence has a social matrix: and the society, the culture, governs what intelligence is acceptable, gets nourishment, recognition, and what intelligence gets ignored. What gets published is governed: by an editor (typically an editorial board) if not by a commissar (who himself has a matrix, support). What graduates and what gets left back is typically a committee decision.

(Of course nearly every one of these word/concepts has to be italicized.)

History, science, ... these are socially determined. Thus the reality our consciousness emerges within is social.
Simultaneously, we (all life) are organisms, populations ... species in an actual (non-socially determined) universe (Pleroma). Our maps are made in a real territory. Where the maps are too discrepant from reality, over time (after the oil runs out), corrections are made: by nature, truth, god. Subjectively, they appear as revolution ... death ... extinction; or as learning.

Literate societies, those with the thus-far most efficient means of propagating their memes, have thus far all been kleptocracies, hierarchically organized. Democracies claim to be bottom up, but anyone, no matter how map-ridden, can see it’s a lie. Jefferson, Franklin ... decided what the "people" were, what they wanted: and who qualified as people.

This of course is written by pk. pk advertises himself as a suppressed intelligence: ignored by the committees, by the commissars, by the public. As a child no one in my church, no one in my family, understood my theology. It doesn’t matter that I myself now reject it: the point is that it never got heard: at least not associated with pk. As a young man my reading, my explication, of Shakespeare’s sonnets never got heard, still hasn’t been heard: the best I can tell, not by a single individual, anywhere: even though I "taught" it in a college, even though I’ve now been writing it online for a decade (not that I've yet written it well, or completely, there or anywhere else). My adult (1970) offer of a bottom-up internet made a little bit of news by 1972: then none. The truth and history do not match.

After a revolution maps may be adjusted (which still doesn’t necessitate their being accurate). Before the 1960s all blacks were ignorant; since the 1960s black history is rich and complex. Facts get unburied (which still doesn’t make them complete). Under Communism, the Communists invented everything since the wheel. After its fall, maps get adjusted. Under the British Empire, God was an English gentleman (living off his investments). In America, Jesus was American: spoke English, shared the local prejudices (until the oil runs out).

Every institution has a crypt in which secrets are kept. I’m not saying for a moment that the secret Vatican archives are complete, wholly true. I am not saying that an accurate account of the theologies (or anti-theologies) of every heretic tortured is in that library, nor all Vatican science that didn’t get published to the public, nor all non-Vatican science repressed by the Vatican ... I am saying that there was a distinction, a discrepancy, between what the Vatican "knew" and what the Vatican published to the public. Elsewhere I’ve told how I learned that the Metropolitan Museum knew of many forgeries and misappellations among its collection NOT reflected in the labels shown the public. The Times too, Washington DC ... have unpublished archives: any item of which may be released when the Times, Washington DC ... decide is desirable: or necessary. Back to the wall, things get released.

And what gets released has a social matrix. The post-revolutionary society has its own agenda. With the revolution the doors to the Bastille are thrown open. The jailed thinker is released, the pickpocket is celebrated as a jailed thinker. Then the revolution makes its own new Bastille.

Knatz.com talks of how young pk loved jazz. I loved Bach too, but Satchmo was alive! Dave Brubeck was making great music NOW. I labored as hard as I could to promote the integrated swing of Benny Goodman to my school, my schoolmates. They didn’t want to know about it. Or, they already knew about it -- it being obvious; but they were unwilling to acknowledge what they knew officially. One teacher scratched the Lionel Hampton record she had given me permission to play in her haste to then stop the class from hearing it.
I couldn’t know at that time that what we were waiting for was Elvis! A white man we could give the adulation to, the money, the credit. We were waiting for Mick Jagger: don’t tell us about Muddy Waters.
See? That was BEFORE the 1960s.
Even today: we listen to the integrated music; but not if the integration struggle is acknowledged.
Thus our "history" is like a TV drama: suddenly we all have black best friends, gooks over for diner: so long as there’s no consciousness of how it came about.

These days my IonaArc blog gives a first look at Knatz.com-type new drafts. (Actually, I hope to develop the habit of noting all significant changes at Knatz.com through IonaArc: thus far only partially realized. Understand: these are drafts: first drafts (then second drafts). (N drafts go to Knatz.com: the real deal.)

Anyway, a lot of work remains to be done on this one: revisions, extensions.

Steroid World

Yesterday’s sports headline cited Barry Bonds’ promise that he’d definitely play again, possibly this season: the season thus far having proceeding without him following a knee operation. Today’s headline declares Bonds’ "Return Uncertain." The background for these possibilities is not only baseball and Bonds’ recuperation but the Balco steroid scandal. How much pressure is afoot to dissuade Bonds from healing? There are baseball traditionalists who wish out loud that Bonds had never lifted a bat.

We live in an amazing time. Last weekend both Tigar Woods and Jack Nicklaus walked the same golf links. Roger Federer’s march of greatness in tennis rivals Tiger’s in golf.
When Babe Ruth was making himself known as the Sultan of Swat, neither of us were around to see or appreciate it. All we have is a moment of two on film. I was alive throughout Hank Aaron’s career, but I wasn’t paying enough attention to appreciate what was before us. (The army stuck me with people who did pay attention: and their racist comments still rankle my ears. "He sees something white, and he hits it with a stick," was Joe Garagiola’s public comment.)

I am not exactly a baseball fan but by now I know enough to see at least part of Barry Bonds’ method: he’s got strength, speed, eye sight, eye-hand coordination -- and he waits and waits and waits till the ball positions itself for his maximum impact!

Did he take steroids? I don’t see how it’s possible that he didn’t. I also don’t see how it’s possible that many an unnamed star also didn’t. Think of photos of Magic Johnson arriving at the NBA; now think of recent photos of Magic Johnson. Sure he might have still continued to grow into his twenties; but into his thirties? and forties?

It isn’t just Bonds who needs an asterisk in the record books: it’s our whole era.

Reason & the Rain Forest

We all hear how the rain forests of the world are disappearing. We all hear reasons: the people need to eat today more than they need to breathe tomorrow ... The developed nations have suckered the Third World into hock, and now they have to burn their capital ...

Fine. But we should be suspicious of reasons offered by those in the game. What reasons might a disinterested Martian come up with? Well, I don't know any disinterested Martians to ask, but I'll pretend that I'm one:If humans won't restrain their own growth, natural forces will have to (and natural forces aren't altogether stupid: just slow). The rain forests are the lungs of the earth. Maybe "Nature" doesn't want us to breathe tomorrow and knows that we're short-sighted today.
Etc. But here's another angle: a kleptocratic angle:
Governments like to know where things are: their resources, their enemies, their slaves ... Once upon a time a people, sensing an enemy, could "disappear" into the woods. The South American governments have found that exterminating Amazon tribes isn't always easy: some of them just disappear. We in the north had the same problem: with Apaches and so forth.
When someone wants to kill school children, it's a piece of cake: because the government has herded them all into a school. Fish in a barrel. If someone wants to kill strikers, it's easy: they're striking at the factory!
So: if we destroy the rain forest, and all concentrate into camps, whoever wants to destroy us will find us easy to find. There will be nowhere to hide.OK, that's government. But who says Nature can't use government for its own purposes?