Siberia is a region of Asia which has come to symbolize a wilderness far from civilization where Big Brother can exile dissidents. Stalin can send messages into Siberia; the exiled cannot send messages out. Indeed the exiled can barely communicate among themselves. Starved and tortured, an exile can barely communicate within himself. The English have an expression that the nonconformist has been "put in Coventry": same thing, though without the Stalinist extreme of the late Soviet. (Americans don't have quite so handy a term for it that I can think of. We have "sold down the river": but that references individuals who were slaves in the first place, no one cares how well they can communicate.)
Jesus is a name for the entity that Christians claim is the Son of God, the promised Messiah of the Jews. Etymologically the name seems to mean "son of the father," blessed of God ... or a series of such meanings (as do also other Semitic names.) (Barabas, for example, also means son of the father: in Arabic too). Christians (and others) have used Jesus to symbolize someone who's virtuous (while everyone else is sinful), someone who's right (while everyone else is wrong) ... I'm going to put the two symbols together into an oxymoron: and see what they do. (First I set a comet tail tangent for our entrance, referencing a fictional entity related to Stalin's Siberia.)
Stephen Hunter, one of the most wonderful of all male-oriented fiction-weavers created a character in his novel Tapestry of Spies, that he then recreated in his novel Havana. The guy has been a loyal Commie all his adult life, a brilliant assassin and strategist and spy for Koba, committing brilliant crimes for the sake of converting society into an absolute tyranny of bureaucrats claiming to serve anarchism. (We real anarchists, we independents, hate that crap.) The trouble with being a crook for Koba is that soon Koba will fear you and send you to Siberia. (When I was in the federal prison at Jesup, arrested by the FBI for accusing my graduate school of fraud and pretending that once I was flat broke, utterly helpless, old and starving, that I was actually going to do something about it, I met prisoner after prisoner who testified that they'd been an assassin for the FBI, or a coke dealer for the CIA, or a go between for FBI-CIA-HellsAngels assassins and pot farmers. The Kobas of the US betrayed them too. Me they merely betrayed all my life, sending me to school, lying about how free I was. I'm their natural enemy, because I conspicuously never bought it; they, my fellow federal prisoners, in contrast, had been loyal crooks and murderers for US: covert versions of the uniformed soldiers we seed around the world.
In Havana our spy is thrilled to catch and eat a cockroach in his cell: a rare bit of protein for the deracinated genius. But a moment later, Koba's Siberia thugs come and drag our genius before some higher level Koba thug, and guess what? Koba has another self-sacrifIcing task for his exiled master mind. Will the master spy cooperate? Will he again suffer and sacrifice himself on behalf of Koba and world Communism? Of course he will. Or at least he pretends to agree. (The master spy in Tapestry may have had something else up his sleeve as well: like stealing a few hundred million dollars from Koba and the Soviet!)
Now: notice some of the parallels possible to draw between Jesus, God's scapegoat, and the long-suffering Commie spies of Hunter's fiction:
In the first case Jesus cooperates in being arrested, kangaroo'd, and tortured to death because it's the only way Christian assumption has it that God can figure out to save human beings from sin. Now: according to the Gospels, Jesus got resurrected: into immortality. According to Christians Jesus is alive again, with a real body. He spent three days in hell to singe away his own trivial little tad of sin, but his permanent residence is heaven, where we can think of him as interchangeable with the father: like Hamlet and Hamlet. I like to think that Jesus is alive, body or no body, and can travel wherever he wants: back to earth, back to Jerusalem ... back to hell ... where he can seek out his tormentors and piss in their mouth. (I like to imagine that I'll be able to do the same, with him, or without him, once I'm finally dead.) (Oh, please.)
But meantime, imagine this: Jesus is resurrected. Jesus goes back to Jerusalem. The again living Jesus gets treated exactly the same the second time as he did the first: sees he'd be treated the same to infinity. Jesus thinks, "Hell": learns how to dance, meets a bunch of nice Jewish girls, and takes turns among them rewarding himself for a change. Or: Jesus is still locked away in the same prison he was first locked in: his spirit can go to heaven on occasion, but not his body. And God comes to Jesus in prison (or sends an angel) and says, "I have another mission for you: man still isn't saved. I want you to go out and let them mis-try and crucify you all over again."
What will Jesus say to God the second time? Will Jesus say "Yes"; but then go and steal a few hundred million-trillion dollars in gold and move it offshore-off-planet to Aldeberan? Will Jesus say "Yes," go to Cuba and try to save Fidel Castro from Earl Swagger?
How much sacrifice should Big Brother expect from his master spies?
When God whispered to me about secrets of literature, secrets of Shakespeare, then about summoning the global village via cybernetic librarianship of the planet seen as a network of independent communities, free of Big Brother everywhere because a vigilant mankind refused to tolerate any more Big Brothers, I said "Sure": and conceived of my doctoral thesis (1965), then founded the Free Learning Exchange, Inc., 1970, NYC. And so forth and so on.
Now I'm deaf and blind and half-impotent, subsisting on welfare while other fed and local services are denied me by bureaucracy after bureaucracy: some of the bureaucrats mere amateurs, mere receptionists. What will I do if God comes to me now? "Paul, I have here a solution to human survival even more profound than an anarchist internet. Are you ready? I'll even buy you a hamburger: and maybe a hearing aid. While we're at it, we'll take care of that cancer on your ear."
I don't know. I fear I'd do it. Though I wish he'd ask Jesus first. Or Koba's spy.
Would I steal the hundred million dollars? I'd seriously be tempted.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Angels
Is there anything more absurd in human society than the belief that a god can communicate with a human culture, directly, one-on-one, the communication successful in reaching the entire cultural group? Yes: the idea that a god can use an intermediary, a messenger, an "angel," and get the same results.
Notice: my statements don't imply the nonexistence of the god; neither do my statements deny the existence of communication, and absolutely they do not deny the possibility of communication between a god and a human: or a god and an angel: or an angel and a human; my statements are skeptical in the extreme that a chain of such communications is possible in a human culture. The god may speak to the man, or the angel, or the woman, or the child: the angel may speak to the man, or the woman, or the child (or the other angel — or the other god; but it is the plural of man, the society, the culture, the religion, the nation, the republic ... that I'm denying sentience to. God can talk to Moses, but can Moses talk to the Jews: AND be understood? Jesus can die, for man or for any other purpose; but will mEn be able to get it? to communicate it? to set up theological seminaries that get it?
Not in my experience. Not in my experience as a speaker, a writer, a messenger, an angel ... I testify that I heard the god. I testify that I heard my own imagination. I testify that I translated the message into speech, into literature, into art. And any god can show, contemptibly easily, that none of the message, none of the literature, none of the art penetrated beyond this or that individual. No "group" of receivers ever formed. There was this god, and that man, and that woman, this and that angel; but no host of angels. No sentient society.
I said so. In speech, in art, in literature. And they arrested me, jailed me, branded me ... But I'd long been branded. Hadn't been not branded since ten years old.
I've lived my life believing that there is a way: though as I age I believe it less. (Hope diminishes, despair waxes with experience.)
Meta-communications communicate in statistical fractions: if a termite drops a grain of sand and no other termite in that generation of workers drops another grain of sand next to it, that doesn't mean that no termite sand column will ever erect there. Jesus getting crucified for suggesting that we behave ourselves doesn't prove that the messages of an Nth Jesus will succeed in communicating zero between the god and the society. On the other hand the cosmos may never reach an age adequate for the necessary learning to take place. Evolution may go "up," and then "down," but never arrive anywhere.
How would we test my claims? How could we be scientific about this?
Now the only rational way to test either idea would be to find some perspective from which all gods and all societies, all cultures, were accurately included, and start counting. There is no such perspective to be found, in my experience, in all cultural claims that I know of, or in my own personal imagination, my imagination either social or divine; so, we're limited to thought experiments: test the imagination the best we can.
Notice: my statements don't imply the nonexistence of the god; neither do my statements deny the existence of communication, and absolutely they do not deny the possibility of communication between a god and a human: or a god and an angel: or an angel and a human; my statements are skeptical in the extreme that a chain of such communications is possible in a human culture. The god may speak to the man, or the angel, or the woman, or the child: the angel may speak to the man, or the woman, or the child (or the other angel — or the other god; but it is the plural of man, the society, the culture, the religion, the nation, the republic ... that I'm denying sentience to. God can talk to Moses, but can Moses talk to the Jews: AND be understood? Jesus can die, for man or for any other purpose; but will mEn be able to get it? to communicate it? to set up theological seminaries that get it?
Not in my experience. Not in my experience as a speaker, a writer, a messenger, an angel ... I testify that I heard the god. I testify that I heard my own imagination. I testify that I translated the message into speech, into literature, into art. And any god can show, contemptibly easily, that none of the message, none of the literature, none of the art penetrated beyond this or that individual. No "group" of receivers ever formed. There was this god, and that man, and that woman, this and that angel; but no host of angels. No sentient society.
I said so. In speech, in art, in literature. And they arrested me, jailed me, branded me ... But I'd long been branded. Hadn't been not branded since ten years old.
I've lived my life believing that there is a way: though as I age I believe it less. (Hope diminishes, despair waxes with experience.)
Meta-communications communicate in statistical fractions: if a termite drops a grain of sand and no other termite in that generation of workers drops another grain of sand next to it, that doesn't mean that no termite sand column will ever erect there. Jesus getting crucified for suggesting that we behave ourselves doesn't prove that the messages of an Nth Jesus will succeed in communicating zero between the god and the society. On the other hand the cosmos may never reach an age adequate for the necessary learning to take place. Evolution may go "up," and then "down," but never arrive anywhere.
How would we test my claims? How could we be scientific about this?
Now the only rational way to test either idea would be to find some perspective from which all gods and all societies, all cultures, were accurately included, and start counting. There is no such perspective to be found, in my experience, in all cultural claims that I know of, or in my own personal imagination, my imagination either social or divine; so, we're limited to thought experiments: test the imagination the best we can.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Grab the Redhead
Escorting a cute red head back to our table I found the aisle blocked by a single wide body. I skipped holding her chair that time and let her go around by herself. But the guy turned out to have been lying in ambush. He grabbed Red and squeezed her.
Red didn't seem flustered. She sat down and said to her friend sitting across from her (next to me), "I just got a grab."
I was frustrated because I'd been elaborately courtly to Red all day: bowing at the end of a dance, offering her my arm as we walked, holding her chair ... and Mr. Wide's heterosexual aggression I already found boorish. I'd allowed myself to be finessed out of the action and was frustrated and tongue tied. But Red's friend didn't say anything either. The rest of our table seconded our silence. But back home I posted a report immediately, an early draft of this here: and asked the following ethical conundra:
What should Red have done or said? What should I have done or said? What should our friends have done or said? What should our senior social have done once I told our CEO?
But something happened as a result that puzzles and annoys me even more. A more complex account will be told as a Paul Knatz story at Redhead Revisited.
Two years later another chapter perhaps explains some part of what went wrong: and right: Red Alert.
Red didn't seem flustered. She sat down and said to her friend sitting across from her (next to me), "I just got a grab."
I was frustrated because I'd been elaborately courtly to Red all day: bowing at the end of a dance, offering her my arm as we walked, holding her chair ... and Mr. Wide's heterosexual aggression I already found boorish. I'd allowed myself to be finessed out of the action and was frustrated and tongue tied. But Red's friend didn't say anything either. The rest of our table seconded our silence. But back home I posted a report immediately, an early draft of this here: and asked the following ethical conundra:
What should Red have done or said? What should I have done or said? What should our friends have done or said? What should our senior social have done once I told our CEO?
But something happened as a result that puzzles and annoys me even more. A more complex account will be told as a Paul Knatz story at Redhead Revisited.
Two years later another chapter perhaps explains some part of what went wrong: and right: Red Alert.
Monday, October 19, 2009
K. Conundrums
This section of posts will parallel my K. Symbols section, spread around Iona Arc over the past several years (while concentrated at the censored Knatz.com in the Teaching area.) The pk conundrums are minor K. symbols, long salted around K.: here I merely repeat and summarize:
How can you have a year when there's no solar system?Cosmologists imagine a universe which came into existence roughly fourteen billion years ago in which the earth and our sun came into existence as "the solar system" around four point six billion years ago.
So: I see there the earth has had "years" for four point six billion years, not for fourteen billion years, and certainly not for any period of time longer than fourteen or fifteen billion "years." How can you have a mile when there's no earth?Same problems Certainly you can have time, you can have units of time. You can have extension, dimension ... units of "length," "width," "depth," "duration" ... but I don't see us having "years" or "miles" prior to having a solar system. In fact I don't see it prior to English being spoken: specifically modern English: My English!
Thus time may be infinite, the cosmos may be older than the universe, the universe is older than the solar system, and the solar system is older than the English words "time," "solor system," "earth," "mile" ...
The same way you can have an infinitely powerful, infinitely old God create the universe six thousand years ago using an already fourteen billion year old universe (in a cosmos of which we have no ideas of age, direction, originality, uniqueness ...)
How can you have a year when there's no solar system?
So: I see there the earth has had "years" for four point six billion years, not for fourteen billion years, and certainly not for any period of time longer than fourteen or fifteen billion "years."
Thus time may be infinite, the cosmos may be older than the universe, the universe is older than the solar system, and the solar system is older than the English words "time," "solor system," "earth," "mile" ...
The same way you can have an infinitely powerful, infinitely old God create the universe six thousand years ago using an already fourteen billion year old universe (in a cosmos of which we have no ideas of age, direction, originality, uniqueness ...)
Homo Sapiens Moronsis
I know it's silly to think that names describe the thing named. Is Prudence prudent? Is Honest John, the used car dealer, honest? is Faith faithful? How tricky can Tricky Dick be relied on to be?
In Linnaean classification and its derivatives human beings belong to the Genus Homo and to the species sapiens. Modern humans, we who talk a lot, are additionally classified with an extra "sapiens," indicating the "modern" "race" of humans: Homo sapiens sapiens. To "man" gets added "wise": to wise man gets added wise wise man.
For decades pk mocked the taxonomic redundancy, publishing such among his modules, comments, jokes ... online since the early 19990s at Knatz.com and its related domains. Today I wish to propose a new name: Homo sapiens moronsis.
In Linnaean classification and its derivatives human beings belong to the Genus Homo and to the species sapiens. Modern humans, we who talk a lot, are additionally classified with an extra "sapiens," indicating the "modern" "race" of humans: Homo sapiens sapiens. To "man" gets added "wise": to wise man gets added wise wise man.
For decades pk mocked the taxonomic redundancy, publishing such among his modules, comments, jokes ... online since the early 19990s at Knatz.com and its related domains. Today I wish to propose a new name: Homo sapiens moronsis.
Fiat
"And God said," according to the Latin Bible by which Christians interpreted the Jewish sacred tradition, "Fiat lux." That's a lot of languages, a lot of mythology, and a lot of iron age, bronze age, cosmology/theology we pass through before we get to the English interpretation of King James's scholars:
"Lux" is "light." So what's "fiat"? Make, create, come into existence ... Who knows? Literal translation is very iffy between incompatible world-views: the old gods, the old myths don't translate one-to-one: not to contemporary schooled persons who think that jobs and health care is what society is about. But never mind: I'm not after literal meaning, I don't believe in literal meanings anyway: only metaphorical interpretations, macroinformational re-interpretations: of the kind that got Jesus crucified. And I want to start a new section among my blogs, sort of parallel to my Knatz.com symbols posts, where the concept "fiat" gets extended as well as examined.
Fiat Money
First: the idea of fiat money, a phrase that's been around for a while, has been stated by pk at and around Knatz.com over the past decade. I'll remount that module following this post (or ASAP thereafter), doing so before I rewrite it as well as it needs, just to get the idea on record. Other people's expression of the idea can be sampled in economic literature on-and-off-line. In brief here:Money emerges from a human market place, then specialized organs of the market such as banks invent bank notes to substitute for horses, cowrie shells ... or gold: then government emerges from the welter of the market with its specialized organs (conceive "market" roughly as property, products, vendors, buyers, public, banks) takes over and, "borrowing" substitute "money" from the banks, issues its own money-notes. The governments next step in "borrowing" everything is to subtract the gold from the money: leaving government with all the property, all of the gold, all of the land, all of the resources ... and the public and the banks and the vendors with a lot of paper: fiat money.
The market had "made" money out of human value decisions; the government takes it over, sucking out the value. Here today I wish to make notes for further development extending the metaphor of fiat-this and that to other preposterous contemporary fiats, especially hidden fiats: fiats not examined in the over-developed but school-addled forebrain of over-populated Homo sapiens moronsis.
Fiat Innocence (/ Fiat Guilt)
coming next (this was my original stimulus to come on line and to blog this.)
(In a word, beyond a certain density, society becomes infected by institutions that exempt themselves from the standards they uphold: the government supervises the law suits but you can't sue the government: except by the most unlikely confluence of improbabilities: such as, you need the government's permission to sue the government!
Thus, in all essential things, the government is innocent by fiat.
I love James' Genesis where God gives his first command in a passive voice. In Latin, "fiat lux" sounds commanding: now there's a general in charge of the troops: a BIG magician. In contrast, "Let there be light": who's doing the letting? Is God the magician? and the cosmos the sorcerer's apprentice?
According to BigBangers, the universe first existed without light. Is that what James' Genesis means? Fourteen billion "years" ago (how can you have a year when there's no solar system?) energy had flashed into existence, matter precipitated out, and now the system was ripe for some energy to manifest as visible light, radiating in all directions from all possible sources and propagating at c. velocity: c, being roughly 186,000 miles per second.
(And it was upon penning that last that I decided I had to add a K. Conundrums section.)
Let there be light.
"Lux" is "light." So what's "fiat"? Make, create, come into existence ... Who knows? Literal translation is very iffy between incompatible world-views: the old gods, the old myths don't translate one-to-one: not to contemporary schooled persons who think that jobs and health care is what society is about. But never mind: I'm not after literal meaning, I don't believe in literal meanings anyway: only metaphorical interpretations, macroinformational re-interpretations: of the kind that got Jesus crucified. And I want to start a new section among my blogs, sort of parallel to my Knatz.com symbols posts, where the concept "fiat" gets extended as well as examined.
Fiat Money
First: the idea of fiat money, a phrase that's been around for a while, has been stated by pk at and around Knatz.com over the past decade. I'll remount that module following this post (or ASAP thereafter), doing so before I rewrite it as well as it needs, just to get the idea on record. Other people's expression of the idea can be sampled in economic literature on-and-off-line. In brief here:
The market had "made" money out of human value decisions; the government takes it over, sucking out the value.
Fiat Innocence (/ Fiat Guilt)
coming next (this was my original stimulus to come on line and to blog this.)
(In a word, beyond a certain density, society becomes infected by institutions that exempt themselves from the standards they uphold: the government supervises the law suits but you can't sue the government: except by the most unlikely confluence of improbabilities: such as, you need the government's permission to sue the government!
Thus, in all essential things, the government is innocent by fiat.
I love James' Genesis where God gives his first command in a passive voice. In Latin, "fiat lux" sounds commanding: now there's a general in charge of the troops: a BIG magician. In contrast, "Let there be light": who's doing the letting? Is God the magician? and the cosmos the sorcerer's apprentice?
According to BigBangers, the universe first existed without light. Is that what James' Genesis means? Fourteen billion "years" ago (how can you have a year when there's no solar system?) energy had flashed into existence, matter precipitated out, and now the system was ripe for some energy to manifest as visible light, radiating in all directions from all possible sources and propagating at c. velocity: c, being roughly 186,000 miles per second.
(And it was upon penning that last that I decided I had to add a K. Conundrums section.)
Friday, October 16, 2009
The Kingdom of God
One important difference between earth and the Kingdom of God, certainly at least as I imagine it, is that on earth the reigning kleptocrats don't have to listen to the charges their victims make against them. The Christians may get to accuse Caesar, but not to his face. Hitler's bureaucrats can refuse to grant an audience to the rabbis: especially once the rabbis are jammed together with all the other Jews, minus their geld and their gold teeth, into the concentration camps. Nixon, prior to his resignation (and seldom after it), did not have to sit still for the world's litany of his crimes.
In the Kingdom of God on the other hand, as Jesus is depicted as having painted it, when God speaks, the universe will listen, not merely leave the room.
just starting, more to say of course
In the Kingdom of God on the other hand, as Jesus is depicted as having painted it, when God speaks, the universe will listen, not merely leave the room.
just starting, more to say of course
Tuesday, October 06, 2009
CommunicationN
The possibilities of success for a message vary with the number of communicants involved. There are several meta-levels – quantum leaps as it were – involved.
The Jews' literature tells us that God spoke to Adam, to Noah, to Abraham, and to Moses. God's success rate in that literature fell off abrupty as Adam tried to communicate with Eve, Noah with his neighbors, Abraham with his son, Moses with the Jews. The Gospel of Mark had Jesus unable to communicate with his disciplines let alone with you and me: or did, before early Christians rewrote that gospel, changing the ending.
Jump to the Twentieth Century: I was unable to communciate my thesis idea to my thesis advisor, certainly not to my satisfaction (and I can't imagine to Shakespeare's satisfaction either!) But under those circumstances, what was the probability of my success in communicating my reading of Shakespeare's Sonnets to the graduate English Department faculty? to a peer review publication? to the bookish portion of the general public? to the public as a whole?
I've never failed to communicate some messages one-on-one. My success rate drops off precipitously if a third party is present. My communication ratio where crowds are involved remains close to zero. They understood enough to invite me, then knew better than to let me actually speak, or to listen if I spoke anyway.
But:
I believe God's success rate is little better. I believe Abelard's, Darwin's, Mandelbrot's is little better: and they have the advantage of (now) having famous names, where an extra person or two might pay attention.
I've published a great deal about communication over the decades, said a great deal more over the past half a century or so. The fed knocked down my AgainstHierarchy.org domain, and my other four domains fell with it, no one helping to catch while I was in (or out) of jail. (There: that's another factor, one the censors understand very well): if the censor can label a prophet a criminal, then the prophets message, already not receivable by the majority, has an even steeper climb against the grade of human inertia.
more coming
This is a first draft. I didn't write that at all well above where I said that Noah didn't communicate well about the flood with his neighbors. The story has him not trying to warn the neighbors: not warning the neighbors was part of God's message to him. Rewrites will follow. Bear with me in the meantime.
The Jews' literature tells us that God spoke to Adam, to Noah, to Abraham, and to Moses. God's success rate in that literature fell off abrupty as Adam tried to communicate with Eve, Noah with his neighbors, Abraham with his son, Moses with the Jews. The Gospel of Mark had Jesus unable to communicate with his disciplines let alone with you and me: or did, before early Christians rewrote that gospel, changing the ending.
Jump to the Twentieth Century: I was unable to communciate my thesis idea to my thesis advisor, certainly not to my satisfaction (and I can't imagine to Shakespeare's satisfaction either!) But under those circumstances, what was the probability of my success in communicating my reading of Shakespeare's Sonnets to the graduate English Department faculty? to a peer review publication? to the bookish portion of the general public? to the public as a whole?
I've never failed to communicate some messages one-on-one. My success rate drops off precipitously if a third party is present. My communication ratio where crowds are involved remains close to zero. They understood enough to invite me, then knew better than to let me actually speak, or to listen if I spoke anyway.
But:
I believe God's success rate is little better. I believe Abelard's, Darwin's, Mandelbrot's is little better: and they have the advantage of (now) having famous names, where an extra person or two might pay attention.
I've published a great deal about communication over the decades, said a great deal more over the past half a century or so. The fed knocked down my AgainstHierarchy.org domain, and my other four domains fell with it, no one helping to catch while I was in (or out) of jail. (There: that's another factor, one the censors understand very well): if the censor can label a prophet a criminal, then the prophets message, already not receivable by the majority, has an even steeper climb against the grade of human inertia.
more coming
This is a first draft. I didn't write that at all well above where I said that Noah didn't communicate well about the flood with his neighbors. The story has him not trying to warn the neighbors: not warning the neighbors was part of God's message to him. Rewrites will follow. Bear with me in the meantime.
Sunday, October 04, 2009
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