Feral Animals

Today Reuters has a good article on the impact of wild exotics -- dogs, pigs, rabbits, cats ... camels! -- on Australia. We’ve all learned what a disaster the introduction of rabbits caused. Some of us are even aware of the impact of mercantile and industrial civilizations marauding about: feral humans, fewer staying home these days.

Ah but the article mentions the possibilities for the menu! Imagine camel steaks in odd restaurants.

I always favored restaurants in which I could get odd meats: jelly fish, sea cucumber, sheep’s skull, brains in butter, chitterlings ... Here in Florida I know where I can dine on frogs, on turtle, on alligator ... I wish I knew where to be served snake, ’possum, ’coon ...

The Chinese are famous for eating everything; but local Chinese establishments know better than to offer variety to the locals. I asked one restaurant if they’d make an exception for me -- if I brought in the kill, would they prepare it for me? No way.

I’d do it myself if I only knew how to butcher. First though I should learn to hunt.

If things get really bad, remember how many people there are. Hunting them should be child’s play.

You’re right: I don’t mean that. It’s not just that cannibalism remains a deep taboo with me, as it does I am sure with you; but once humans realized they were being hunted, the bulk of us would start paying attention again real fast. And then the hunter would have his hands full. Hunting would NOT be easy. Or safe.

Cannibals & Missionaries

I have another Either/Or metaphor to offer. An American Lit scholar divided literature between Redskins and Palefaces: useful so long as it’s not taken solemnly or too literally.
Shaw analyzed Ibsen as showing society to be composed of Idealists and Philistines, with here and there an occasional (rare and precious) Realist. The Philistines can wear the ready-made shoes and don’t mind. The Idealists are uncomfortable in the ready-made shoes but are also uncomfortable admitting it: and so the Idealist waxes Platonic: "The shoes are perfect; experience is faulty." The Realist says, "Dammit, the shoe doesn’t fit. Can’t we make better shoes?" (Whatever is true of Ibsen, Shaw’s analysis critiques his own work to a T.)

Lately I’ve been thinking in terms of Cannibals & Missionaries: by which I do not mean that the "cannibals" are necessarily wrong, or backwards, or primitive ... Neither do I mean that the "missionaries" are right, or advanced, or that God agrees with them. What I do mean consistently with the image is that the Cannibals are like Shaw’s Ibsenite Philistines and that the Missionaries try to colonize them, to convert them, to change them.

I believe that we all have a right to try to change each other. I believe that many of us do try to change each other regardless of what I believe. And I believe that those trying the changing are often in equal or greater need of change themselves.

How many cannibals though ask the missionary for proof that their God is god or that their Bible was actually written by this God?
(Right there: watch out for people who capitalize their hobbyhorse. Churches, businesses, governments ... Why is Coke a big deal? What’s wrong with cola?) (That’s why Kleenex wants us all to say Kleenex when all we mean is tissue. That’s why the culture says butter when all it means is grease, and why Parkay says Parkay when all it means is grease.)

When I was young I was taught that the Christians knew what they were doing. Now I believe that the Freudians don’t take it far enough: none of us can be relied on to know what we’re doing: including, perhaps especially, the Freudians! Missionaries are inevitable. Once only Jehovah’s Witnesses came knocking at my door. Now the knock may be coming from Jehovah’s Witnesses or Mormons. Or Democrats.

How many Christians really stand for anything Jesus taught? Do they love their enemies? Don’t they pay taxes? Don’t their taxes finance wars? Or do we love our enemies by dropping napalm on them? Would Jesus accept that as love? Would Jesus accept that as the love he meant?

Whoops, sorry. I mean to be focusing on my Cannibals & Missionaries.

I think we’re all cannibals: and this time I do mean something primitive, wrong, in need of correction, in need of learning. I also suspect that too damn many of us are missionaries: meddling in what we don’t understand, overlooking what there is to be appreciated.

Many taboos were silly, I don’t doubt. And Freud was dead right in elucidating which taboos still apply: no cannibalism, no incest, no murder. Freud was further right in saying that the first of those taboos is still largely effective, the second somewhat effective, and the third not very effective. But: between law and taboo, I’ll take taboo. Taboos don’t get "written." Taboos emerge. Taboos evolve. Taboos are far better than laws at modifying our behavior.

Well, this didn’t go the way I’d planned. That happens again and again. But for the meantime I’ll take it. As I use my terms Cannibals and Missionaries I hope I won’t be altogether misunderstood.

---

It’s too bad I didn’t write this a couple of decades ago. I believe Cannibals & Missionaries would have seemed more contrastive to me then: and their roles less confused. These days it’s often the cannibals who act as missionary to the missionary. The missionary says, "Turn the other cheek," and the cannibal condescends to correct him: "No, it’s an eye for an eye, you fool."

Or: the missionary tries to tell his cannibal family, "Be healthy." But they’re hypnotized by the tube which is advising them to "Ask your doctor."

Polarized Intelligence

Everything we see is an image. Different energies are involved: the radiant energy of light: and bio-energies generated by the digestion of food by an organism with some kind of multiple feedback system: mind. Theorizing light has driven us crazy for centuries, though we seem to be getting somewhere. Semiotic epistemology in theorizing imaging makes one thing clear: Whatever is "out there," what we see, what we think, is wholly in our processing of it.

When we’re drunk, we can see double. When we look through a crystal we can see double.
Without careful study, all this business about transverse waves, wave versus particle, interference ... medium ... can be very confusing.

My interest isn’t physics though, but social intelligence. Societies see double all the time: though we can typically "think" only one image at a time. Still: contradictions go together like strawberries and cream.

For the moment what I have to say is mere introductory metaphor. But I intend to construct careful analogies in the near future.

Meantime: Culture puts glasses on its members. (Is society made of individuals? or of something else involving individuals? (Think particle vs. wave.) How does a culture’s glasses handle polarization?

How is it possible for us to imagine that we’re a democracy one moment and to have a Hitler or a Nixon or a Bush the next? How is it possible for us to imagine that we’re Christian, or at least moral, one moment and to napalm little girls the next? Why, if we’re interested in the free flow of ideas, do we fund institutions that man-handle ideas: and fund ONLY such institutions?

There’s a lot to relate here, a lot to resolve. I intend to do it.

Art, Movies, Money

Less money; more freedom
Martin Scorsese

Hanging out at the Whitehorse Tavern in the later 1950s I would regularly share poet José Garcia Villa’s table in the back room on Friday nights. José taught poetry writing at CCNY: despite his quirk of putting commas after every single word. Friday nights he would gather with some of his students, some of his friends, and I seemed particularly welcome.

José, a little odd in a number of ways, made no secret of having the hots for me. Once he respected that I wasn't that way however, he left me my own space and I enjoyed his soirées. (Dylan gone, José was the most famous poet currently a regular. Oh, all sorts stopped by: Faulkner, James Baldwin ... Jack Hawkins ... Tom Clancy seemed glued. But those are novelists, actors, singers. The White Horse was Celtic, however German Ernie was, and poetry was the Celtic main thing there.) I always got tons of free drinks at the Whitehorse — why was gone into at Knatz.com [censored, temporarily offline] — and José also got more than his share.

Oh, hell, I’ll repeat why here: years passed before I myself learned the reason, but Ernie, the owner, hated the Madison Avenue types that flooded the place after Life Magazine had featured the White Horse in its article on Dylan Thomas. The ad exec would request a tab, Ernie would comply: and then put every second or third drink for his preferred customers onto the bill of those he didn’t like. Mr. Exec would show up on the weekend, and out loud call, "Ernie, my tab." Then, "What? $187? I only had two beers." And Ernie would respond, "Pay it, or get out." Again and again, they paid. Ernie also bought his own rounds: like once an evening. If Ernie’s pony of Chivas Regal arrived at your table, soon followed by Ernie himself, that round was on Ernie. Otherwise, 50%, sometimes 75% of my bill, of José’s bill, was on Madison Avenue. One time I think I had sixteen beers: my bill was seventy-five cents (if I could be said to be thinking under those circumstances).

Anyhow, José once explained to me how he became a poet. As a boy in the Philippines he had wanted to be an artist: that is, to paint -- with paints, brushes, canvas, paper. But José couldn’t afford paints and brushes. José could afford pencil, paper. José became a poet. It was cheaper.

I write this as I pause before watching Batman Begins, the DVD. These days I spend more time with the player paused than playing. But I plug away, and slowly catch up on many of the movies I missed while starving at FLEX, while starving at my novels ... When I had a couple of dollars and a little leisure, I had seen a lot of movies. Early 1970s that ground to a halt.

I vastly preferred movies to the theater. With movies you got drama, a social medium, without all the planning, date making, advanced ticket-buying. And the art: the art could be so fabulous: Fellini, Bergman, Kurosawa ... Griffiths, Chaplin, Ford, Hitchcock ...

In 1955 Ray’s Pather Panchali hit the world. International awards galore. It not only played in cities, it played the occasional suburb. By 1958 I had seen it I don’t know how many times. One time in the 1960s all three films in the trilogy were playing en suite at the Little Carnegie. I entered at noon and watched them cycle till midnight. Was I ever a basket case by the time I staggered off to find something to eat.
Point is: Ray made Pather Panchali using a rented camera: and friends, amateur actors. The movie cost him a few hundred dollars to make. Now Robert Rodriguez makes watchable films at bargain budgets. Still, even for staggering cases like Ray’s with Pather Panchali, cameras, film ... cost more than paints, brushes ... and a lot more than pencil, paper.

But think: think of the artists who’ve drawn in the sand. Think of the poets who wrote without pencil or paper. Think of the millennia of epic poets who composed in their head, who performed at the camp fire ... And think of our society were everything costs more and more and more.

I’m going to go watch my movie now. But I expect to come back sometime and marvel at how good movies can be despite being so, to some extent necessarily, expensive to make: to make, to market, to show. It’s astonishing -- to me -- that art and movies have ever come within a light year of each other.

Oh, wait: favorite story: Chaplin was wildly successful immediately upon entering Hollywood. We all know that. Chaplin was the first artist to "earn" $1,000 a week: an unheard of amount at the time. What we don’t all know ... Wait: Chaplin said, about to sign, "Could you make it $1,075 a week?" "What’s the $75 for?" he was asked. "I need something to live on," he answered.
What isn’t known is that he was expected to pay for the movies he made out of that grand! It wasn’t salary; it was budget. And he wanted to blow the whole grand on the celluloid.

Honor

If you speak French a book is "un livre." It’s not a book; it’s un livre. We say "chauffeur" and the French say "weekend": words swop.
In physics, "work" is "force through distance." In market economies, work is what you do Monday to Friday. In English tennis you "throw up" the ball to serve. "Chris throws up so beautifully," said Virginia Wade. In America we "toss" the ball.

In America we spied with our eyes, with cameras in the stratosphere, with cameras in satellites; in Russia they listened through the door, under the floor boards. WASPS know better than to talk on the street; the street is where a lot of "ethnics" live: of course they talk on the street. I was trained not to demonstrate with my hands when talking; Italians tend not to talk without their hands.
In England children should be seen but not heard; in America the kids’ behavior is the entertainment.

We speak different languages, we live different cultures. When we mix we live more different cultures than we’re ever aware of. And yet we have these ideas of monism: we are one people, one nation, one law ... one God. One mankind. One species, supposedly.

My life is a long record of this and that monism. I also am pleased to know a little French, a little German, a little Italian ... Just in English, I know a little Elizabethan, read Chaucer fairly well, for a modern, can ever read little Old English. On the tennis court I somehow, clumsily, get the ball up in the air for service whatever you call it. On the street I can keep mum with the WASPS, scowl with the misanthropes, or slap five with a brother. I like to eat Chinese, French, Italian, Greek, Japanese, Swedish ... or mix them any which way in my own cooking. But there’s one thing I never learn, or recognize only after I’ve blundered again: we don’t all have the same ethics. We don’t all have the same honor.

Oh, sure: sometimes we’re honorable by our own standards, and sometimes we are less than honorable. I mean that we don’t all have the same standards. Not only are there different standards of honor among different professions -- in business it was important to be able to tell which customer might lie, but more important to know if his check would probably clear -- but there are different standards among cultural groups -- the gypsy will cheat any non-gypsy, but will he cheat a gypsy? -- among this and that, but -- and here’s what will make people scream -- between the sexes!

I’m not ready to blog my question of Are Women Honorable? just yet. This is a promise to do so.

While here though, I’ll just say this: we have different histories.

Women gang together: to wash, to gossip, to gather food, to talk child-rearing ... Men gang together: to hunt, to wage war, to work, to pass laws telling others how they must behave ... The team hunter, the team soldier, have a very different history from the child-toting food-gatherer.
Ok, now there are women who go to work, who join the gang to pass laws ... But women don’t have a million-plus year history of it.

In business, I sold to dealers who I knew wouldn’t keep one item of our agreement, but whose checks usually cleared. That was their honor. That was the whole extent of their honor. (While there were many more who wouldn’t keep a single term of our agreement and whose checks bounced! They had NO honor: in business.
When a male tells me he’ll call me, I know there’s a chance that he’ll actually call me: whether I want him to or not. If a woman tells me she’ll call me, I know she probably won’t: unless she was the one who came up to me in the first place.

The whole issue gets very messy where the principal business is male/female. And there women have no team history.

I must admit: I, a "male," supposedly, have very little team history too.

PS One thing we’ll have to consider is that both men and women are predators: carnivores: even if we decide to go with veggies for a while, even if we buy our meat slaughtered and dressed by the market system (even if we let the farmer rip the carrot from the ground for us). Both men and women can hunt, but in general it’s the men who hunt the women. Thus the male is a carnivore and a sexual predator; the woman is a carnivore, but is simultaneously the hunted. Morality between hunters is one thing, morality between predator and pray may be quite different.
One may prefer to be truthful with the analyst. It does not follow that one must then be truthful to the lion, to the snake, to the mugger ... to the male predator?
But what if the male is just trying to ... sell insurance, hold the door ... Not everything a predator does is predatory.
The thief could steal the magazine, on another occasion the thief could pay for the magazine. No one steals quite everything.

Pure State

One can prove things within a tautology: Pythagoras’ theorem, for example. But tautologies have no necessary bearing on the world of experience. Natural languages, such as English, have tautological aspects, but they are not tautologies. things can be argued in a natural language, but never proved. Today’s evidence can be refuted by tomorrow’s, ditto testimony, arguments ...

The world of experience has few to no pure states. We glibly talk about vacuums; but we know of no pure vacuums in nature, and we certainly have none in labs. So we settle for some threshold of emptiness: and call it a vacuum. The moderator calls for a show of hands; but no angels show those gathered x rays into all the dungeons of the universe to prove that no one is being help captive, with his hand tied down.

Under the law gold alloy of a certain refinement is sold as "pure gold." If it were really pure, you could do little with it, form no rings, no coins, merely watch it become impure: all by itself.
(Nothing in the universe is ever "by itself"; everything in the universe is always in the universe. The gold is in an environment which interacts with it.)

Any culture abuses truth with its customs of what can pass for "pure." Once upon a time if the theater offered "butter" on the popcorn, one could expect it to be butter: processed, but from a cow. With artificials, the theater could give you anything it wanted and call it butter. Then the law-makers step in: and the theater can sell you corn oil as butter, but not soy oil. "Fresh" at the supermarket means not frozen and defrosted more than a dozen times.
I’m sure the store knows how many times the product has been deliberately frozen and thawed and refrozen, but does it have any idea of how many times it’s been inadvertently thawed, inadvertently frozen?

The great modern philosopher, Wittgenstein, was conspicuous for not taking philosophy too literally.
I know that that’s a tree, says A.
B says to C, My friend isn’t insane:
We’re just doing philosophy.Wittgenstein knew how seriously to take testimony. Ask a guy if he’s ever been to the moon.
No.
Are you sure?
Yes. Never.
You mean you’ve never slept? You’re perfectly, infallibly, conscious each and every nanosecond? God, or some demon, or some UFO, couldn’t have taken you to the moon while you slept?This string of associations was sparked in my head the other day by a string of associations pk and bk were batting back and forth by email. Considerations of Shays’s Rebellion, and of the Whiskey War, had us talking, always in relation to anarchism, ideas of government, property, taxation; on distinctions between internal and external taxation: taxing imported booze versus taxing the products of private stills. bk was bothered by impurities in Thoreau’s anarchism: when T. dismissed some fuss over taxes.
I recognized the problem, the more so because of bk’s activities of recent years, but advised against being too bothered by it. Efforts at philosophical purity could lead to excesses such as we have seen with efforts at racial purity. We’re all mutts. Accept it.
I no longer worry so much even over the purity of my sainthood. Though the question remains: are you 99.9% sin and still calling yourself a saint? or are you 99.9% saint and still calling yourself a sinner?

Blah, blah, which brings me to today’s association: censorship.
The conservative challenges the liberal to a debate: on censorship. The conservative rents the theater and invites the liberal to go first. While the liberal is blahing against censorship, the conservative drops a screen and stars displaying, porn, then kiddie porn, then snuff films. Finally the liberal abandons the podium and rushes the screen, pulling it down.
I rest my case, says the conservative.We have laws against censorship. Hell, it’s in the constitution. But we practice it. I can run for office promising to practice it better, but why should anyone believe me? I can also promise to hold my breath for eight minutes; but I’d be a fool to bet on it.

The Constitution offers what we interpret as freedom of conscience, as freedom of speech ... So then why do universities still blather about academic freedom? Is academic freedom somehow more free than a Constitutional guarantee? Or are both guarantees of the same kind as the guarantee you get from the car salesman, the clothing salesman, the beer brewer? Has there ever been a university that didn’t squelch this idea while it was promoting that idea? Ignore the university’s testimony on the subject.

Has there ever been a church that admitted messages from its god that didn’t reflect the prejudices of the elders? Sure the god can say old things, things approved by the elders, but can the god say anything new? Can’t the elders shush the young theologian as they wish?

The university can stack its faculty with its brand of secular theologians; but the culture can always trump the university: make them sign a loyalty oath.
In Heller’s Catch-22 officers who’d already taken oaths to get their commissions had, during the waxing hysteria, to take additional loyalty oaths: at the mess hall, if they wanted to eat.

As always, I'm branching off before I've hit all my targets. I'll just stick stuff here and maybe reweave the whole later: two things:

Censorship:The schools, the media, teach us the Bill of Rights. Therefore, we think that we actually have them, not just on parchment, but in fact. Any college freshman though will tell you that freedom, no censorship, does not extend to shouting Fire in a crowded theater.
Now we're back to pure gold again. If a statement needs qualifications from lawyers, from college students, from a special class of experts ... forget it. You're talking bullshit in the first place. Political science is politics; not science.
Institutions:How we use our institutions -- our government, our universities, our churches -- to convince ourselves of our lies.
Just yesterday I posted this to my InfoAll blog:Institutions magnify our natural tendency to confuse map with territory. We think the word is the thing, the actor is the character. On top of that old established and bloated institutions can milk the confusion. Gathering together for hymns, the church encourages our deception that we're godly, spiritual; not thieves living on stolen land with the royalties for our ideas largely unpaid.
And this:Institutions structure and channel a society's illusions, especially its self-deceptions. We have laws, therefore we must be lawful. We have a Justice Department, therefore we must be just. Having a Defense Department proves that we're safe.

Churches prove that we're spiritual, schools that we are learned.

They prove it: if the proved-to are as naive as a typical audience at a typical magic show. But the magician said that the box the coin disappeared into was an ordinary box, he said he had nothing up his sleeves ...

See? If we're fooled by our own lies, then God must be fooled too. If we tell God we're innocent, he has to believe us, doesn't he? And if we say we're sorry, he has to forgive us. So we can all get into heaven: whole, with our stolen ideas, deeding our stolen lands.

The museum is very careful to show the provenance of the Van Gogh: donated by Mrs. Eli Watkins. The scholar at the university cites his college at the other university. Still: God knows, and we all know: Van Gogh didn't get paid. Mrs. Watkinds can't have owned it. And it doesn't matter if Professor Smith credits Professor Jones if both are hoarding water that nature gave to everything.We know not to trust the testimony of the accused: why do we trust the testimony of the cop? of the judge? of the expert? Are we in any real respect different from the people who called for Jesus to be crucified?
Don’t care about Jesus? OK, fine. Are we in any real respect different from the people who called for Socrates to pour hemlock in his ear? Didn’t we all sit with our thumb up our ass while Reich’s books were burned? while Leary was hounded from Harvard?
While pk was interrupted at NYU?

I iterate: whatever you say is true of the society, I challenge you. I challenge you to stand with me in an open boat on an open ocean during the lightning blitz. If I get fried, so what? If you get fried, will your seconds admit that I might have been right?
Uhh ... pk, What if you both get fried?

PS Re: Shouting Fire, triggering panic: Part of the problem is our facile confidence that complex issues can be handled by one-dimensional slogans. "No censorship" skips over too many problems. Then again these things are problems only in a hierarchical, centrally administered authority. Scientists studying emergent behaviors in decentralized systems are saying some very interesting and revealing things these days. Mitchel Resnick, for example, suggests that while for birds to flock together and fly in "formation," while there is no commander bird who keeps screaming "Fly in a Vee, a big damn Vee," the flocking may result from something as simple as the instruction pair: "Get close to another bird"; "Don’t bump into it."
Now note: a positive instruction is paired with a negative instruction: Do, Don’t. (And of course the instructions are in the genes, not in the politics.) I intend to keep my eyes open for additional Positive/Negative pairings.

Civilian Blood

Colonel: We can’t have you running around wasting friendly civilians.
Rambo: There are no friendly civilians.

First Blood was on the tube tonight. I got a glance at much of it, watched some as carefully as possible on the silly box. I’m pleased to find that I liked it almost as much as I did in 1982 when bk and I caught it fairly early in its first run. I’ll list a couple of things I like best about it, pretty much unchanged I find by the decades.

The movie brought the Vietnam war home -- where it belonged. US involvement in Vietnam killed an estimated four million Vietnamese; here the green beret tears up the local constabulary: and, boy, do they deserve it.

I liked its action. I liked Sly’s posing. I liked everybody’s overkill on everything they do, everything they touch.

I liked the movie’s silence. It’s terrific: until they start talking; then it’s ghastly.

I adore the utter realism: Sheriff Will Teasle violates the law, morality, decency, ethics, police procedure ... at every opportunity, but he’s still the boss, still in charge, still respected: even obeyed, in so far as the yokels were capable of following orders. The Americans here really didn’t make very obedient Nazis, but then the Nazis themselves turned out to be not quite so robotic as they were cast in WW II. Teasle gets his cops killed, his town blown up, and no one kicks his head through the street.

Hollywood has never failed to provide scripts in which the authorities, like Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, learn nothing from their experience. Before long it’s pretty clear that Sheriff Teasle’s stupidity is deliberate. I find that First Blood is a sterling example of that tradition: and Brian Dennehy performed the brainless beef beautifully: born for the role. My first memory of Brian Dennehy dates to 1957 or 1958. My old buddy Brian Carey had come to room with me in the Apple. Brian was sporting the beard that, among other things, had gotten him thrown out of Notre Dame. On our way to the West End Tavern we crossed from Amsterdam Avenue toward Broadway on West 114^th Street. The DEKs were already well-partied up as we passed, Brian and I, for the moment, utterly sober. Brian, I presume for his beard, got drenched in beer which the DEKs were quaffing directly from pitchers. They must have had a keg, so what the hell, dump it by the pitcher-full on the beatnik. When I glowered at them, myself having been spared the shower by accident or by design, the one drunk who met my gaze without flinching his eyes away was Brian Dennehy: our Lion center: and future terrific character actor for red-neck cop roles.

But back to the movie for at least a moment more: as a kid I loved the Burroughs Tarzan novels. Tarzan had only one weapon other than his body and his wits and his will to prevail: his knife. The cops have stripped Rambo down to hose him, so he’s half naked as he escapes. The one thing he is careful to grab as he flees the precinct house is his knife. The cops have cars, guns, radios, helicopters ... automatic weapons, bazookas ... That’s all right: the morons always bring the hero all the additional weaponry he will need when they come after him. All the hero has to do is take it away from them and shove it up their ass. But I don’t remember Tarzan bawling like a baby. Tarzan goes through kraut soldiers like butter. But I don’t remember Tarzan chickening out the second he sees an officer. Rambo kills the dogs, kills the cops, spares a kid with a hunting rifle, then resumes chewing up the non-coms. But as soon as he faces the sheriff, he backs off. As soon as he sees his old colonel, he goes all to pieces.

Rambo was half-naked, Tarzan was all naked (except in the movies). Tarzan didn’t hold his hand because the bad guy had a commission from some kleptocracy. Rambo blows everything to hell, sees the trinket of rank: and blubbers.

But at least the civilians got mauled.

The dialogue is really awful, but some of the lines are nevertheless revealing: gems. As his town is getting torched, Sheriff Teasle, over the bull horn, commands that the civilians "get indoors; await further instructions." The sheriff who’s gotten their town blown up assumes authority not just to harass unfamiliar long-haired pedestrians but to tell the citizenry what to do?
Leni Riefenstahl reported that Marlene Dietrich, on learning that Hitler had been elected, said, "Oh, good. Now the German people will have someone to tell them what to do." Sheriff Teasle makes sure that his pillaged Americans get the same privilege: he tells them what to do, promises to tell them more.

PS 2005 11 21 Same thing in Batman Begins (another movie I like; though I don’t love it as I love First Blood): Hollywood always offers a hero who mows through the pawns, chops up the knights and bishops, but stalls at the rook, queen, king. Rambo kills the dogs, kills the helicopter, kills the cops; but just talks to the sheriff, whines at the colonel. What would he do if he saw a congressman? or the president? What would he do if he saw the damn Pope?
Batman shows up for the big drug smuggle. He kicks hell out of the longshoremen, the truck loaders. Good thing there are no mail clerks, assistant copy boys around. Hierarchical society is a triangle with a very broad base. But Batman too can’t climb the sides of the triangle, doesn’t seem to even aim for the top. The crime king pin is sitting in his limo: right there, fer CrySake. Batman pulls him up through the limo’s moon roof, gives him a shake, a good talking to. If Batman really wanted to do something, why didn’t he leave the truck loaders alone, just show up in the limo, and kick hell out of the king pin?

Anthropologists tell of the African tribal villagers who were plagued by some white-man crooks. Some other white-man colonialists rounded up the crooks, arrested them, told the tribal villagers to keep them guarded in the hut. The crooks just slept for a day, and then walked out. The crooks were a worse parasite on the tribe than the colonial officials; but the tribesmen could do nothing to interfere with the free movements of a white man: except when some other white man was standing there, giving and supervising the order.
When my German shepherd was a puppy it was cute when he jumped toward my knee. But as he grew it was time to dissuade him from the habit. I read that all I had to do was to wait till he was on his none-too-well-balanced hind legs, half-way toward my crotch, and deflect him with my knee. The advice came with a theory, an explanation: the dog doesn’t see your knee deflect him, neither does he feel it: he feels only his failure: after a while he decides that it is simply impossible to put his front paws on a human body above the ankle. It worked.

So it’s understandable if the Rambos of the world can kick hell out of each other, maybe even frag a lieutenant, but they tremble at the captain, the major, the colonel ...
But Batman? Bruce Wayne? raised in a freaking gothic horror of a castle? Why couldn’t he stomp the chief?

I don’t think it’s Bruce Wayne. I think it’s Hollywood: doesn’t want to give the audience, the little would-be Rambos, chasing the popcorn with steroids, the little cops-to-be, the pups, the local tribesmen, any ideas.

Hail Victory

In 1949, observing Nuban rituals, George Rodger photographed that day’s version of their ancient wrestling. The vanquished bears the victor on his back.


Nuban wrestlers, detail, vanquished carrying victor
In the United States the photograph was shown in Life, or National Geographic ... I was eleven, maybe still only ten. That photograph has lived with me ever since, though I never saw it again until last night.

Watching The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, already riveted, I went bug-eyed when she showed the second of two photographs that had changed her life. The first had gotten her into movies; the second was the Nuban wrestlers --MY photograph. She narrated that it had moved her to quick-exit-left: the Sudan. She lived among the Nubans, danced with them, filmed them.

Leni Riefenstahl’s images had already formed much of my esthetic by the time I was ten. As a college friend explained to me (Jewish college friend), the reason all those news clips of Hitler and his Nazi rallies between features at the movie theaters during WWII were so stirring is that our documentary makers used Leni Riefenstahl’s footage. The sound track said Boo, but the visual track shouted Yea!
(The real information (the macroinformation) contradicted -- and trumped! -- the supposed information.)

I believe Riefenstahl when she iterated that she was never a Nazi. I believe her when she says that however much Goebbels wanted to get into her pants, she couldn’t stand him. BUT Leni Riefenstahl is THE genius of victory. Sieg Heil.

(And Leni Riefenstahl is THE genius of athleticism cresting as transcendant.)

---

Now the top wrestler in Roger’s photo is absolutely magnificent. I forgive myself for so responding to him as a child. I still respond to him today.
I still respond to Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, to her Olympiad. When I was six or eight I responded to the Saturday morning parades, building up the high school football game. I thought the drum majorette was a beauty queen. I’d be a couple of years older before I saw instead a skinny adolescent with goose pimples from the autumn cold: showing flesh that had nothing to show. By the time I was in junior high the football ritual embarrassed me in all ways.

The Nuban wrestlers are naked for the occasion: decorated though with gray dust. At the end of the occasion though the whole tribe would still be pretty much naked: with more everyday decoration.
Were those two to meet again, the outcome conceivably could reverse. Without Roger’s document, the moment was evanescent: both ancient and transient.
Hitler wanted France to carry him on its shoulders today, tomorrow ... for a thousand years. That’s the part that’s disgusting to me: our willingness to destroy the world to extend our time share.

Down the road lives a tribe of Nuba who decorate their faces on occasion. In twenty minutes any one of them can paint himself a unique design, as original, as startling, as beautiful as a Picasso. When they wash it off it’s gone forever: except for the endurance of the culture. Snowflakes: unique, gorgeous, gone.

Without Roger’s image I wouldn’t know that moment, and neither would Riefenstahl. With photography, with intrusive record keeping, we’re all Hitlers: unfortunates bearing us on their shoulders.

Was any of the fighting fair?

---

I just poked around, for the first time, a new-Nazi web site (just checking on my spelling for "Sieg Heil"). They said that Nazis are for greatness. (Well then they must be for a zillion things that Hitler’s Nazis were against! Much of the art they burned, for example.) They said they were for nature, beauty, health ... Well, in that sense then Leni Riefenstahl was the perfect Nazi. (So then who where those ugly stupid shit heads she worked for?) And so am I. And who isn’t?

German romanticism. Man!

I recommend The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl to anyone who isn’t already expert on her work. I’ll wait a while, then watch it again: if only to see at least once more her climbing vertical rocks at the top of the Alps (no ropes) barefoot, in a dress!

And she lived past 100. What a woman.

---

I don’t doubt that I’ll want to continue to add scrapbook-type jottings to this post. But it belongs at Knatz.com, slim and trim, with a scrapbook file linked from it.

As of today Tiger is a shot behind David Duval in Japan. Welcome back David! The divine Federer beat the wonderful Coria in Shanghai. Roger is running 80 wins to 3 loses in 2005. Two more victories and he’ll match McEnroe’s 82-3 of 1984. I wouldn’t mind if Michael, Tiger, Roger ... Ali ... never lost. But if they were still riding another guy’s shoulders beyond a discrete celebration period, I’d agitate to shoot them. Sports victories seem innocent. What Nixon did to get elected is not. What General Motors did to sell more cars is not.

But, as long as the core of the public tolerate GM and US welded piggyback, what can I do? But grind my teeth.

In the big world I hate the concept of Victory. In the stadium I’m still a little kid.

As soon as I found Rodger’s photo on line last night, finally knowing how to search for and find it, not easy before recently, since we refused to make it easy in 1970 with FLEX, I wrote bk how seeing that photo again sure puts Ali, Michael, Tiger ... in perspective. The movie concocts some trick to show Brad Pitt and Achilles leaping above some Goliath and piercing him neck to knee. We’ve seen Michael in enough real games to know that the spectacular really can happen. The Nuba show us that it’s been happing since before Homer.
And until we get archival footage of Homo erectus, we ain’t seen nothin’. Extinct, there have been pre-men who could eat Shaq and Jim Brown for breakfast, the women and children also covering territory that would challenge a leopard.

Brancusi

A couple of issues rattling around in my head this afternoon bumped into some old flotsam cankered there for half a century. The other issues I plan to develop and relate, some of my relationships not normally seen, but the old sore I must excise right now.

Back in the 1950s I heard that US Customs refused to admit some Brancusi pieces into the US until the import tax was paid on it. Works of art are exempt, but customs refused to recognize the acknowledged masterpieces as "art." Customs said that far from art, the Brancusis were just some wood and some bronze and some string.

The museums, the galleries, had the items valued at say $24,000 per. So customs wanted a whopping tax.


Hey, wait a minute. The Brancusi's were worth $24,000 per only as works of art. As wood, bronze, string the value was maybe $3. So pay the tax on the three dollars and consign Customs to the subhuman oblivion it belongs in. If Customs recognizes the value as $24,000 per, then it must also concede the items to be art: it was only as art that the value was "real." So: either let it in valued at $24,000, exempt, or value it at what you're taxing it as: $3 worth of string.

Related question: by what vanity does Customs imagine that it can distinguish art from string? First any government bureaucracy should demonstrate that it can tell shit from Shinola.

Fractal History

One generation hasn’t a clue. Another generation can track footprints while mama finds cookie crumbs on Junior’s clothing. Another generation can ID from fingerprints. Then we ID from DNA. We don’t know what tools we’ll have tomorrow. We don’t know that we’ll have a tomorrow.

bk just gave me Shays’s Rebellion: never heard of it: till very recently. Oh, I don’t mean it never crossed my ears; I mean it never came to my attention. Author Leonard L. Richards is a history teacher who, apparently like many another, had thought he knew all about it: until he did some research: research he didn’t have to climb Mt. Everest for; just through the annoyance and drudgery of reading some old records in difficult hand-writings. Presto: his, and now others’, views are changed: permanently.

Never mind what the views were, or are: just register that they’re different. View A was based on X information and a set Y of opinions; view B is based on X information and a set Y of opinions plus Y information and a set Z of unearthed old opinions.

Bull-headedness is immune to evidence; science changes with the evidence. And even history can have scientific moments.

I’ve only just begun the book. But I’m not writing about Shays’s Rebellion; I’m pondering the nature of evidence: is it fractal? Real onions can’t have infinite layers, but how about layers of evidence? What of what’s beyond our reach will ever come within our reach?

Once upon a time scholars of John Henry Cardinal Newman knew that he had written a book of a certain title. They knew that Newman had never published that book. Every Newman scholar knew that there must have been a manuscript, and that that "book," that manuscript, was missing. Let’s call the title X. One scholar went to the late cardinal’s office, had permission to look through his desk. It was one of those old desks with a row of dividers? pigeonholes? There he discovered the missing manuscript: in a compartment clearly labeled X! No one had looked for it! at least not very hard.

In the case of Shays’s Rebellion Leonard L. Richards noticed something anomalous (anomaly : difference : information): there was an odd quantity of records detailing who participated in the rebellion. There were records on these people. It seemed that other historians hadn’t bothered to look. The records were right in or around Boston: a Massachusetts scholar could walk, take the bus ... look into the neglected.

But again, I’m not talking about this rebellion, about which I still know little; I’m wondering: is evidence fractal? Infinite? Or finite? and we just need a bit more of it?

If information is infinite, we may as well give up right now: one point on the spectrum of ignorance is hardly more ignorant than any other point: knowledge will remain out of reach to infinity. Or ae we lazy prejudiced bastards who just need to wake up a little?

PS I’ll tell you one thing: my "desk" is full of evidence: evidence against the intelligence of publishers, the integrity of teachers, of governors ... My desk is replete with messages essential for survival: messages I’ve received and tried to relay, messages I’ve initiated ... none to few of them reaching their targets: no matter what I did. I’ve nearly run out of things to try. Mass murder I’m saving till last. But there are no pk scholars. Well, there are a couple. A couple have come to my desk and poked around. But no one has inventoried the whole, photographed the originals, looked for evidence to date them, logged all into a safe ...

So: either god has his own copies; or society’s evidence rooms are a joke.

Spend the Loot

The gal puts curlers in her hair to hold what she, not her genes, not the weather, put there. Maybe she perms it, sprays it, as well. Maybe she looks good, maybe she looks like a horse’s ass: point is, it works: for a while. But after a few night’s sleep, a few rain storms, that curl is a faded memory. After enough centuries her skull in the tomb looks pretty much like any other skull. Long enough later, there may not even be a skull.

If "nature" had put the curl there, eventually, "she" still looks just like any other skull, or, like nothing at all.

The thief grabs her purse. Quick: scores, and shoots up. The cops grab him. "Where’s the money?" Guh, guh ... He’s still on the nod. If the cops grab him in time, they can give the gal her purse back, the money still in it; or they can go have a beer, or donate the cash to St. Patrick’s Firemen.

If the thief is quick enough, there’ll be nothing to pay back.

When Napoleon grabbed the Rosetta Stone from Egypt, took it to Paris, it wasn’t the sort of thing that could easily be "spent." Centuries later a different "French" government could give the stone back to a different Egypt. And there could be all sorts of good excuses: We were putting it to good use; you were ignoring it.
It’s not quite the same with the Elgin Marbles. "Greece" was doing "nothing" with its classic architectural heritage. Greece wasn’t selling textiles to the world, sailing all over hell and gone, taking tall trees from Maine for ships’ masts, impressing sailors, soldiers ... Lord Elgin swiped the marbles, put them in London, where, thanks to all the sailing around and impressing of sailors and manufacturing textiles and hiring Cockneys into a new slave class, London got socked into a pollution such as the world had never seen, at least not associated with man. The marbles started to rot: faster than they were rotting left where they’d fallen at the Acropolis. England swipes marbles. Oh, sure: they were "putting them to use." England centuries later can give back only dust.

Guh, guh. On the nod.

Peoples swept across Asia, pushing other peoples. Sometimes they would have ousted the evictees nose to nose, spear to club, arrow to a stone cutter that fit the hand, machine gun to wooden staff. Sometimes the evictees would have receded before the advance, and the rousters would never have seen their costumes, heard their babble. Same in Europe, same in the Americas. What if, eons later, the "Chinese" felt bad, said they were withdrawing back to Mongolia, invited the Polynesians back to their "China" ... Say the Polynesians recognized themselves to be the true Chinese, wanted the mainland again: the China they got back would be only the ashes of the China they’d fled.

If the English gave Australia back to the natives, would they take the rabbits and cats back with them? Even if they did (even if they could, even if there were an England capable and willing of receiving them back), would the ashes of Australia then satisfy the natives who once had a very different ecology?

Modern kleptocracies in-common close their books at the end of the year. The values of the purses that they snatched are in their arm, burbling around in their blood streams, or long ago excreted, taken by the bacteria.

Columbus could have given the West Indians back their islands meaningfully only if he did it before he scored and shot up, before the King of Spain scored and shot up.

What if God specially resurrected Van Gogh, put him back in contemporary Arles, Paris, or Amsterdam: or Philadelphia or Tokyo. Could Van Gogh say to any effect, "Those are my paintings. You have no right to them. Give them back"? Could MOMA, could the Barnes, meaningfully say, "Oh, why don’t we buy them from you?"
Where would MOMA get new billions of dollars? What about the "owners" who got multi-million dollar write-offs when they "gave" the paintings to MOMA? When Barnes bought the Van Goghs for $20, $40, $80 ... maybe $200, did the dealers have a right to sell them?

If Australia gave Australia back to the natives, what would they do with wealth they had actually created, wealth they had a legitimate claim to? Much is stolen, but much is innovated too, earned.

Well, it’s beyond me. But I don’t believe it’s beyond God. God has got to be able to find a way to punish the junky purse-snatcher and to compensate the poor girl: who had a little curl, whose purse was snatched.
Surely God must have some way of knowing what contents of her purse were legitimately hers and what devolved from thefts she cooperated in.
(If you’re paying taxes on land snatched from the Mohawk, you’re cooperating.)

Now just a goddamn minute, pk. Who’s this goddamn God? Is this the same one who couldn’t find Adam hiding in the tree?

No, no, no. Sorry. I misspelled it. I meant god: the intelligence behind how blood clots, behind the Four Basic Forces ... behind evolution ... cybernetics, information ... behind how any cubic hectare of reef is every bit as complex, as simple, as any human brain, as any human city ... behind we don’t know what all (if indeed it’s intelligence that’s behind it).
Christians tell us that justice can never happen here, but assure it transpiring after death: in heaven and in hell.
I don’t believe that humans are capable to distinguishing earth from life from death from heaven from hell.
I believe that earth is just one of infinites of petri dishes in god’s "lab." I believe that god puts one kind of culture in one dish, infects it with a disease or two, watches what happens. god can then throw the dish away, clean and sterilize it, extract some of the resultant culture and move it to a new dish. god can throw a culture he likes out into the garden where it can take its own chances. Or, in a new dish, he can infect it with still other new diseases ...

Now just a goddamn minute, pk. You mean this "god" of yours is really just like God after all? just maybe a little smarter?

No, no, no. Sorry. I believe nothing of the kind. I’m just fantasizing: and trying to communicate something using your language.
Social truths cannot be uttered in university natural languages: like Standard Written English. Only macroinformation can rise an inch off the pavement, only art.

PS This draft isn’t bad, it says some of what I mean, but it also totally missed a couple of the illustrations I’m meant to put near the climax: illustrations not standard to anthropologists’ litanies:In the 1960s Ivan Illich was developing his critique of rampant American culture, cresting for example in Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress. Illich said that American trucks, exported to South America, could be more harmful than American tanks placed in the same places. The tanks could run things over, knock things down, burn and kill; but the trucks would addict subsistence cultures to tools it could never afford to keep up with. Roads would have to be built, a whole new (expensive) infrastrucutre would have to be inserted. Tanks would destroy some things; trucks would destroy everything. Suddenly, Illich, the Church’s most popular priest, the priest clearly closest to Jesus (and to St. Francis) in the two-millennium-long history of Christianity, was suddenly persona non grata.
Ours is the society of business: of greed enthroned, of no-questions-asked profit as our summa-theologica. Yet when Illich’s books sold surprisingly well, when paperback editions became best sellers, his books disappeared!
Ah! So profit wasn’t our only consideration after all. What we value even more is no criticism, no intelligent criticism.

Illich showed us how a people could shrug off centralized, top-down rulers: the public must network itself, obviate our reliance on hierarchy. (This from a priest!)
I recognized Illich’s design to be the internet I had been awaiting since 1960. Disregard the governments’ insistence on licenses, certificates, centrally-approved performance ... and people might judge for themselves. Soon, their judgments would necessarily improve: survival-driven. (And if they didn’t? Tough nugies.)
Immediately I told Illich, "I’ll do it." Over night I was answering correspondence with other mushrooming local nets (and licensed schools, universities), telling them how I would coordinate all the local nets into an internet. (Understand: network was a word conspicuously used by Illich; neither of us said specifically "internet"; the concept had been coined, but not the word.

Illich’s books disappeared from print, from the book stores. Fewer and fewer libraries acquired them. Illich’s speaking engagements in the US shrank. I witnessed him being invited to say more on TV by Hugh Downes, I witnessed him squeezed out, no explanation offered, Downes’ invitation was just silenced.
Illich’s books disappeared; pk’s never appeared.
Americans practice their "free speech," universities practice their academic freedom, only the way the Soviet practiced its highly ideal constitution:when convenient.
At first, by late 1971, pk’s FLEX (Free Learning Exchange, my seed for an internet) was getting free publicity right and left. Several dozen people were using it.
Then, all at once, we got no new publicity: and our contributions dried up: from two cents, to one cent, to no cents: and my volunteers finally fled: before we were tarred and feathered.
PPS This post is emphasizing theft and displacement over innovation, invention, new earnings. I’m aware of that. For some purposes I live with that flaw. Maybe Barns put his $40 Van Gogh into a nice frame: the frame belongs to Barns, not at all to Van Gogh. Barns and a host of others made the Van Goghs "worth" forty-, sixty-million dollars. But it was Van Gogh’s style they were doing it with.See? Right there: Van Gogh’s style doesn’t exist in isolation: MOMA, Barnes, were also using business’s billions, governments’ tax systems ...The baby can be killed, but there’s no way to give the father’s part back to the father and the mother’s part back to the mother once their union goes the way of all unions.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we refrained from improving things until we actually owned them?
I’ll bet god’s petri dishes have more than one genius hiding their light under a bushel until the correct green light comes on.
In the Seven Samurai Rikichi’s wife smiles in silence as the bandits’ stronghold burns around her. She refrains from shouting Fire. She’ll die happy knowing that some of her rapists will burn around her. (Maybe she even knows that her husband is among those setting the fire! Ah, but regardless, she knows she’s now damaged goods.)

Etymology (moved)

moved to pKnatz
and amended

Samurai

Ah, what a pleasure. I'm anticipating watching still another samurai flick. Knatz.com [censored, temporarily offline] goes into why I love samurai fantasies in several locations. I review some of the reasons right now.

Even as a kid I was embarrassed by Westerns. Sure I responded to the Lone Ranger on radio, but by the time Hopalong Cassidy was baby sitting TV kids in the 1950s I was having problems: being quick on the draw and hitting people with chairs in bar fights isn’t what my Sunday School taught me to approve. Swiftly, war movies were worse. Almost all movies were worse: if they weren’t shooting someone, they were showing a lot of tit, showing a lot of adultery ... Comedies where chinks get bowled down like tenpins didn’t amuse oh-so-self-serious pk. It took a little longer, but not much, for me to disapprove of feudal fantasies. Robin Hood was in my blood before my defenses were up -- yea Errol Flynn. But I wasn’t too old before I had problems agreeing with knights that the other knight was a bad guy and needed to be chopped up with a broadsword.

Even once I dismissed my Sunday School ideals as so much controlling rubbish I still resisted civilization’s training of the public in the easy delusion that the audience is good and that good guys should swiftly nuke whoever the media blackwash as bad.

I was no vegetarian, but I was the kind of a moral prig who was proud not to hunt. I was twenty-two or -three before I discovered the lust of dipping oneself in gore, exulting as I ripped guts from bluefish. But by that time Akira Kurosawa’s art had brought me to my senses, taught me that I could enjoy butchery as well as anyone.

By the end of High Noon every pimple-face is booing the frigid Quaker non-wife and rooting for Coop’ to kill, kill, kill.

Anyhow, that’s background, and I’ve given it before, not in too dissimilar words. Here’s what I wanted to add: if I had trouble with Shakespeare, and Sir Walter Scott, and Hollywood because of my silly delusion that I was a Christian, that I was ethical, I had no such problems with Japanese High Noons because I was not Japanese!
Nobody from Scarsdale wants to see Scarsdale nuked, but many a one from Scarsdale will laugh to see Chinatown turned to rubble. It bemused me as a kid to notice Christians reveling in Hollywood gore so long as the movie pretended to be religious. The Jewish merchant in the joke sells crucifixes without any sense of hypocrisy: it’s business. And there were plenty of real Jews in Hollywood, and plenty of non-Jews, all going to the bank after a technicolor crucifixion. Ah, but whatever hypocrisies were involved in Japanese investors going to the bank after a Japanese blood bath, well, what did that have to do with me? I could enjoy the blood bath with a clear conscience.

Funny thing is: the movie I’m about to watch is The Twilight Samurai. My pre-viewing impression is that this flick will be an exception: and already aware of the kind of stuff I’ve babbled above.

Today's Truth

Telling the truth has little effect if the public mythology and the truth are incompatible.

de Sade

My how time flies. I've written "de Sade" into my development notebooks again and again without ever wedging it into any of Knatz.com's (temp. offline) many god files. I never add "God." I always know what I mean, always assume I'll remember the connection. Now I won't have to 'cause here it is;

The French imprisoned the Marquis again and again. Finally they buried his body in lime: so there could be nothing to resurrect! So God could not have mercy on his soul!

In other words, human beans didn't trust God on this one: we wanted to trump God's judgment with our own.
Like shooting Oswald so he can't be tried.

Preventing a trial in that case didn't ratify Oswald's guilt nearly so much as it assured that probing for the truth would get less fuel. Did the French remember that they would get tried?

Whatever human punishments are for a murderer arrogating the government's role, I presume God will have his own for arrogating people.

Finger Bow

As huge as Knatz.com (temp. offline) is, it's minuscule compared to my development notes. As incomplete, short of advanced drafts, as some of my modules are, IonaArc was supposed to be a place where that would be OK: obviously a notebook, fast jottings. But of course by now my development notebook for IonaArc, stuff I haven't gotten to, is waxing: almost at the same pace as my not-yet-at-K files.

I mention a set of themes not yet aired: on reading, on literacy; why does civilization care if its public can read? Reading and writing as social control.
Some of that is at K: but not really gone into. Watch for it: here, and there.

Semantics, Property ...

In a natural language like English words with identical pronunciation can have different, even contradictory meanings. Raise and raze mean incompatible things, but they sound the same. In the case of this pair, the spelling is by convention distinguished, but in many another group distinction resides, if at all, only in the mind of the speakers. You: is it singular? or plural? Semantics, grammar ... the phenomenon is the same.

Well, we've all known that since we learned to speak, and then write, and maybe pay a little attention to spelling. But there remains many a word with multiple and incompatible meanings that even the literate don't distinguish properly. Spreading these borders a bit I invite you to think of the concept property.

Is there any mutualist anarchist (such as myself) who doesn't want his own toothbrush? My toothbrush is mine. Don't use it without permission. My car is mine, I have the key. The key is supposed to be unique: or at least rare. Don't steal my key, don't steal my car, don't borrow it and go racing in the muck. But I certainly don't mean that I "own" my car eternally. I don't pretend that God gave it to me. I bought it, I could sell it.

Consider other things that we think of as "ours." No lover, no bridegroom, wants the rest of his pack jumping into the bridal bed to share his bride's cherry. Does the groom think he owns the bride? In some cultures he's been encouraged to. How about real estate? Lots of people own their house. Do they also own the land it sits on? They may have a paper that says so, but the paper comes from a kleptocracy. Does God ratify the paper?

And if he does, where the hell does he come from? And where does he get the right?

If we own the land, how come the state can take it away when it wants to build a road? to house troops? to test a bomb? If we own the land, how come the hurricane can blow it away, wash it away, dump a hectare of mud on it?

I understand that the tornado can suck my toothbrush from my mouth and whirl it off to Kansas. I understand that the tsunami can sweep my bride from the bed, and me along with her: though we may then have very different destinations. I wind up broken in a tree upland; she washes out to sea. Maybe she lives with mermaids and becomes queen. Maybe she's plunked on an island whose people then worship her, or violate her corpse.

Property is a difficult, complex concept. Should we have thirty different spellings? Ten or fifteen (or fifty} different pronunciations? Not likely. Not unless we were tuned to the differences.

Try thinking of differences within other complex words. Is peace the same in a kleptocracy frequently at war as it is among picnicking Cro-Magnon who've never heard of a state? Of course maybe their picnic comes in the wake of bashing a few Neanderthal heads.
How about war? Is there a difference between driving wolves from your farm and driving Cossacks from your hovel? Is there a difference between knifing the Apache trying to take your scalp and drafting immigrants in New York to fight Confederates in Virginia? or suckering young people in Charleston to ship off to Cuba? to Midway? to Istanbul?

Switches

Apropos of Evo Devo, apropos of Evo Devo’s emphasis on switches, I promise a number of additional meditations on the switch, not only here, not only at Knatz.com, but most importantly, at Macroinformation.org.

Hitherto my (published) thoughts have been localized around K’s Thinking Tools.

Evo Devo

Check it out:
"Evo Devo's first big finding is that all animals are built from essentially the same genes."
!

Pay attention to the business about switches: and to this: "In other words, there are many species for the same reason that there are many sentences: you might know only a few thousand words, but you probably don’t lose sleep over the prospect of running out of sentences."

Iceman's Curse

BBC News reports that seven people have died who were connected to the discovery and analysis of "Oetzi." the Iceman.

"It is not known how many people have worked on the Oetzi project -- and whether the death rate is statistically high."
pk advises: before talking about statistics, remember where these workers commonly worked: the high mountains, in avalanche country! Mountains are extremely dangerous: as the Iceman knew: or learned.
That's part of why they are so wonderful.

Global Warming

PBS just aired Global Warming: The Signs and the Science. I interrupted my work to watch it, my work of the moment being on tenterhooks between writing a new introduction for Macroinformation.org [purged by the fed: see my Macroinformation blog] and getting back to Michael Crichton’s State of Fear: which is about global warming. As is so often the case, Crichton’s science is thrilling; while the thriller plot gets mighty annoying.

This post must remain "part 1" until I’ve persisted with the novel. Crichton’s plot is great is consigning the crisis to journalistic manipulation. It’s obvious that industry wants to keep polluting as it pleases; Crichton has not yet revealed what he thinks its complement is: what agenda is served by crippling industry? Environmentalism at the federal level would be one candidate. Nazis sucked up resources to persecute Jews, not only stealing everything from the Jews, but taxing other Nazis to do it. So, any cause becomes a self-bloating cause in itself: justifying fiddling the evidence, etc. In any case I must find out what agenda Crichton is setting up for ridicule before saying more here. It makes no difference there what scenarios I myself can cook up.

But I don’t need to read further to get to this more important point: neither the PBS show nor the Crichton novel (thus far) say anything about a flaw pk may be unique (or close to unique) in seeing: Crichton dates global warming as a concern to some fairly recent date: when funded concern surfaced, in the public eye. Maybe I’ll re-skim and try to find that date. Whatever it turns out to be, know this: I taught global warming at the college level in 1967 or 1968, vastly earlier than Crichton’s date. Shortly thereafter I was illegally fired from my post.
Neither the PBS nor the Crichton-thus-far betray a hint about such long-standing censorship, persecution of awareness.

My response to being fired, together with new hebetudes in my Ph.D. program, (together with my meeting Ivan Illich,) prompted me to found FLEX: to offer a public internet which would allow the public to bypass existing institutions: publish, and read, whatever information it wanted; no more censorship (except by the public as a whole), no more certificates, no more licenses ... Any scientist could publish – no peer review necessary FOR THE PUBLICATION, any novelist could publish, any crank ...

But we need another word on what I mean in saying that "I taught global warming at the college level in 1967." The date I taught it could easily be determined. Lemont C. Cole’s article Can the Earth Be Saved? got the cover position in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. I was not a biology teacher, certainly not an ecology teacher; I was an English teacher. But I was instantly convinced that ecological awareness must be spread to anyone under any excuse. So I assigned Cole’s article (with his permission), to my next class of freshmen, also assigning a paper on Cole’s efforts as rhetoric! (Hell, I’d just assigned Churchill, just assigned Hitler ... as rhetoric.) It wasn’t normal English studies, but that’s the kind of teacher I choose to be (and I wish I still had some of the yahoo responses from the class).

The Crichton novel is very good on the complexity of the matter: global warming is a set of theories the truth of which are far from settled. What evidence there is can be taken in more than one way. What it means, what will happen, is far from clear (all of which Cole had been more than clear enough on nearly four decades ago).

But as Knatz.com has been iterating for a decade, as I said nearly forty years ago, It’s not nothing: we don’t know, and we damn well ought to reign ourselves in from behaving like chickens with no heads.

Is that why I was fired? Teaching beyond my specialty? Or was it because I’d joined the group silently protesting US behavior in Vietnam before the chapel on more than one occasion? That year the English department had twenty-one members: huge, obscene, for a small liberal arts college. That year eleven of the twenty-one were fired. Yes, the bulk of that eleven had joined the silent protests on one occasion or another. But, ten of those firings were loudly squawked about in the school paper, clearly a political purge. My firing was not mentioned in the paper. My firing was conducted silently, in secret, my students didn’t even know about it.
So just maybe I was fired as part of the political purge, and I was fired silently because I was trying to raise ecological awareness.

The PBS show was very good on saying that there are already technologies at hand that could help: it’s time to start using them. My point here is that we have no records of what portion of the voices saying that in 1967 were silenced: by political and institutional means.
One day, day after day, Christians are persecuted. Then the next day, everyone is a Christian. And the church is administered by the persecutors!

The PBS show seemed clearly to suggest that the old institutions should now lead the way. Those are the same institutions that have been regularly lobotomizing themselves: for years, for decades, for centuries ... Ah, now that the Church has murdered so many heretics, let’s look to the Church for a little heresy: now that some of the heresies got through anyway and have become orthodoxy.

With FLEX, governments, universities, journalists, PBS, publishers of Crichton novels ... should have died on the vine by now. Why pay $6 to HarperCollins when you could buy a Crichton novel from Crichton (via FLEX), maybe for $1? Why watch a PBS documentary when you could already have read all the constituent papers from their authors, via FLEX, any time once the scientists post them?

Every year, every day, our institutions bury ideas, select which information, which theories, are to spread, which to be stuffed under a bushel. And every day, every year, we sit at the feet of these institutions, as though they were our proper leaders.

Supporting the same institutions that led us in lies yesterday
will not lead us to the truth today.
And while I’m here I’ll repeat: we are not sure that the earth is warming. The earth is warming: and cooling. Part of it’s "natural": meaning "not influenced by civilization". We can’t be sure what the results will be. Therefore, it does not follow that there’s no problem, that we can go on burning everything.

Intelligence should prevail; but can’t: not while we’re under the thumb of the same institutions that didn’t listen to Bucky Fuller, drove Illich’s books out of print ... fired pk, didn’t publish him.

Read what Illich was saying in 1967, 1969 ... Read what Illich was saying before he even started on Deschooling Society, and see what we should have been doing since 1967.
And Illich, in my hearing, never even mentioned global warming. He was just trying to get us to (opt to) live like human beings!

Part 1 PS: As usual, I'm reminded of a favorite pk joke. Back in 1971, 1972 Nixon proposed having US troops out of Vietnam by some date, some American political event, an election. A few weeks later he was proposing to have US troops out by some other date, a later date. Nixon could promise and promise, postpone and postpone, always sending more troops. I proposed for his campaign new promises for ever later dates by which he could talk peace and wage war. My proposals involved his committing new treasons, new illegalities, new sins ... and the White House liked my letter! But Nixon was just a typical institutional man. That's what all of our institutions have always done, figured out ways to diet tomorrow, never today. The fattest people can credit themselves with intentions of the severest diets. Murder enough saints, let enough time pass, and any cretin can pose in the garments of some dead heretic, now a hero. What was PBS paying authors on global warming in 1967?

That's when we needed to diet.
That's when we needed FLEX.
(Of course we always needed to diet, but 1967, 1968 was when ecological awareness was first spreading to a few receptive parts of the public: a few scientists, a few teachers.)
If we survive all this, it won't be for lack of scheming to fail.

2005 11 05 Global Warming Part 2 will begin soon: I’m getting close to finishing State of Fear. I pretty much know now what Crichton is saying the "other" conspiracy is, counter to big industry, big pollution; but I’m not sure I’m going to discuss it here: not till more people have had time to read the novel, which I strongly recommend: for the science, not for the adventure. I will say though that the passage on "ecology of thought" is delicious, fabulous. And I must copy its insults of contemporary universities to my InfoAll.org: under School’s Purpose. [InfoAll.org purged by the fed: see my InfoAll blog.]
One of the excellencies of the novel, in the thriller part but not unrelated to the science, is the conviction of rightness on the part of the media stooges: a congregation of faithful, immune to evidence, to reason, but oh what suckers for rhetoric.

Part 2: Neat. Read State of Fear. Or, don’t read it: just buy the paperback, go directly to page 500, read the ecology of thought stuff, then skip to the last few pages and read those. That’s where a smart characters proposes a temporary institution which should actually improve a great many things.

I thought Crichton became almost-great to actually great with Jarassic Park. Still, you had to read a lot of crap to get to the scientific wisdom. And in that latter category I now think State of Fear is his best work.

Except I’ve gone right on to his Prey.

Obstinate egotism ...
is a hallmark of human interaction with the environment.
Michael Crichton

2005 11 23 Crichton’s Fear novel suggests that feeding selected science and pseudo science is what our manipulative rulers are reduced to in the wake of the Cold War. He shows a number of stats that wouldn’t convince many that the earth is warming. True. It’s uncertain. And that’s MY point. Reuters has a good article today with more views. I quote a tiny part:"Even small risks in the climate need to be considered, just as we try to avert accidents at nuclear power plants," said Stefan Rahmstorf, a professor at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and an expert in ocean currents.

"I don’t think this is scaremongering. We don’t really understand the system," he said of risks that the warm Gulf Stream current in the North Atlantic might shut down in one possible "tipping point" scenario.
And: "Records of the ancient climate found in ice caps and ocean sediments show there have been staggeringly big shifts in the past. "Past climate change is ringing alarm bells," Rahmstorf said, referring to the climate’s fragility."

2009 12 13

A web article today reports on catching the scientists fudging data. It's delicious, though it seems clear that their well-funded enemies first called them names and drove them to distraction.

Dig this quote:"This is normal science politics, but on the extreme end, though still within bounds," said Dan Sarewitz, a science policy professor at Arizona State University. "We talk about science as this pure ideal and the scientific method as if it is something out of a cookbook, but research is a social and human activity full of all the failings of society and humans, and this reality gets totally magnified by the high political stakes here."

Hors de Combat

pk in 1995 was posting the earliest files of his home page, subsequently become Knatz.com [victim of federal censorship, Feb 2007]. I emphasized then, and need again to emphasize now, there, here, and at all pk domains, that pk has been hors de combat since 1990.
In the 1960s I wrote my ideas as art. In the 1960s I taught (as well as studied) within (as well as without) the university system. In 1970 I founded FLEX [victim of federal censorship, Feb 2007], offering a low-tech, no-PCs-needed, PUBLIC internet: make a free-marketplace, not just for learning, but for all possible public and private activities. In the 1980s I again offered my ideas as art: novels this time.
At each step I’ve been ignored, insulted, interrupted, fired, not-supported, misunderstood, misrepresented ... and, occasionally, beaten up.

In 1990 I said fuck it, I’m retired: I’ll never mail another manuscript to another publisher, seek to give no more public speeches. Lo and behold, within months, I met Catherine: and thereby found, unlooked for, the only reliable support I’ve ever received! But I was hors de combat: outside the fray. Retired. Fed up.
Then I got the Mac. Then I launched the first home page.

But: you see the point? All of pk’s online writing is post-give-a-shit. I am not running for office. I am not in a popularity contest. I am not angling for a job. I am not seeking disciples.
I am merely venting myself. Homo sapiens sapiens is the creature that talks and talks. Stressed, I babble. Relaxed, I babble some more.
My life had been devoted to discipline (the discipline of English ... the discipline of revolutionary innovation ...) So: my babble shows vestiges of that discipline, and of my former art.

And when it ain’t art? Fuck it. I’m babbling.

Oh, come on, pk. You can’t expect us to believe that.

Well, in that mask, I don’t give a damn what you believe.

Or: actually, I’m busy as a mole: stacking evidence, testimony: not against my species; against my society.

Journalism

Journalism informs. Journalism entertains.
"Informing" the public includes functions of manners-management ... "toilet" training: which fork to use, when you need a new car ... and when three new cars aren’t enough.
Informing the public includes misinforming the public. (It’s such a laugh that information managers always believe that management -- centralized, hierarchical -- can tell the information from the disinformation!) (As thought the Vatican had ever actually been in touch with God!) (As though government could ever know the pulse of anything but its most immediate oligarchy!)

Journalism provides employment for journalists (and for printers, ad agencies, pulp mills, word processors ...)

But those are not the only, not even necessarily the main, purposes for journalism. The most important function of journalism, from a management standpoint, is to know when to soothe the public so it will roll over and go back to sleep, and when to prod the public so it will jump up and bite.

Martyrdom

Jesus went and got himself in trouble, and within days he was dead. The arrest, the trial, the scourging, the crucifixion must have been agonizing, but they occurred overnight and the next day. Not many deliberate executions can be much worse than crucifixion, but at least the Jews wanted their victims dead by sundown. The Persians had invented crucifixion to make the suffering last, the Romans had improved the cross to make it the more agonizing ... And Jesus wasn’t alone. Two other condemned suffered alongside him. And how many others had been crucified on the same spot the day before, the week before, the month before? After Spartacus the Romans crucified by the thousand.

The US Constitution promised swift justice. Ha! What trouble-maker gets dispatched in a single day? Even after a verdict a radical, a wog, some nigger ... might be on death row for a decade! (Remember what Mencken said: Kill the poor bastard the second the lawyers have taken his last penny.)

God wanted to torment his loyal servant Job. He spread it out, made it last: so Lucifer would be the more impressed. (Show off!) (How impressed was Lucifer when he orchestrates the nailing up of his own son?)

If life on earth is sometimes a trial and sometimes an amusement, an occasion for idle wagering among divinities, just concentrating on the trial part, why can’t the martyrs all just be tried, convicted, tortured, and killed as swiftly as was Jesus? Why do the majority of us have to linger, and linger: like Job? The Jews eventually (before Jesus) had a law that you couldn’t torture the guy overnight. If he was still whimpering at sunset, you had to stick him with a spear. Christians should have a law at least as humane: I mean a law they actually apply. How could we martyrs go on strike to limit God’s punishments of the just?

Me, I should have been dispatched by overnight-and-the-next-day of first standing up for myself. When my mother dragged me to kindergarten, I yielded (hell, I was only five or so). So the moralist could say that going to school was my own fault: when dragged, I yielded. (When Clarrisa got raped, it served her right: she gave her money to her family of her own free will, she corresponded with Lovelace ... None of them had a conscience, but she did: so she’s responsible.) But once I did resist -- got sent to the principal’s office for satirizing the lesson, why couldn’t I have been dispatched within the next thirty or so hours? treated no worse than a Jew under Rome? Why am I still here, suffering, well more than a half a century later?

I accept that the earth is hell, that the inhabitants are the damned ... (the insects, the wolves ... must be damned too to come under human impact). I accept that. But why are some of us martyrs still lingering? The earth-hell should house only the damnded.

Or am I damned too and am just too stupid to know it?

Either way, my culture is too chicken to give me a nice, fair, dispatching trial.