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.