Faith

There's a reason for faith commonly under-appreciated:

We humans can't function without faith. We know nothing without faith. When we bark our shins we're showing faith in our sensory system: faith that the pain in our leg represents contact with a physical universe. We don't know anything without faith.

Faith can be overdone. Witness St. Paul.

Which brings me to my point: humans use faith to displace whatever they want displaced: experience, reason, logic ... Faith can substitute for any of them. Schools, churches, media ... dispense faith.

A gallimaufry of examples may be the least misleading (just a couple to start):
We drop bombs on people. Common logic would indicate that that's bad, but no: with faith, we can see that that's how Americans help people. Americans are helpful. Isn't that what the papers say?

We murder Christ, drink his blood, eat his flesh. You'd think we're murderers, deicides, vampires, cannibals; no, with faith it proves that we're saved, God's Chosen.

We just lost nine bets in a row at the track. You might think that that means that gambling is for fools. No, with faith, it proves that we'll hit the jackpot next time.

Some, More, Too Many

We're a social species. Groupness was chosen for us as a survival strategy by our species/environment ecology long before any of us as individuals could have been considered intelligent. The ploy that made us money yesterday can put us in the red tomorrow. I'm for groupness: never mind that I had no more choice in the matter than you did. But for the last few decades I've been dragging my feet about super-groupness. I've love mankind in ones, and occasionally by the dozen: but I dread all groups larger than what I believe was the correct size for a human group: maximizing around two hundred, two-hundred and fifty.

Group a um

I love Jesus, however rickety the sources of our stories about him. I love his twelve disciples. I love how Leonardo grouped them into sub-groups: three, three; six, six: seven: thirteen, with an odd extra, a female confusing everything.




I love the early church: a few hundred Christians, hiding from the Romans: like Jews hiding from Hitler. But I hate the Church.

I love Daniel Boone, Buffalo Bill ... but I hate nations. I hate two hundred million Americans become three hundred. I hate a world population of a billion become four billion, five billion ...

There are lots of good things that are good, good, good: but then become toxic. Human groups cooperate as well as compete, they love as well as hate, they help as well as sabotage. If Roosevelt opens the door for Stalin, that's nice; but when Mussolini cooperates with Hitler's murdering Poles, something's gone wrong. Even cooperation can turn toxic.

Watch out for human groupness turning super-toxic. I sometimes with we were back on the savanna, lucky to find a dead bug.

Plant Succession, Human Recession

I just posted news at another blog on Jan's slash pine falling in yesterday's winds. That post was about Jan and her beautiful home and grounds (and lake) ... This post will continue hints begun there on Florida ecology: specifically on human disruption of Florida ecology, focusing on pine flat woods, and detailing recent history of Lake Charlotte, here in Sebring, Highlands Country, Florida.

Plant Succession
Pine flat woods had been the dominant environment in pre-civilized Florida. Florida has been above sea level for at least ten million years. Gradually the sea receded, creating dry land around the Highland Ridge than runs from what is today Lake Wales south to today's Lake Placid. Florida plant succession would have begun with scrub land. Pine flatwoods and other environments such as bogs and cypress swamp would have followed. The original Florida would have been scrub, followed by scrub with pine flatwoods taking over more and more territory. In the last couple of million years hammocks developed: islands of hardwood trees, some deciduous, and palm trees, taking over moist low lying but not swampy ground.

The common pine of Florida is the slash pine. Slash pine, when Morgan and Flagler developed Florida (once the US army had cleared inconvenient humans aside for them) covered 60% or more of the territory. Hammocks range from just a few trees to a forest as large as Highlands Hammock, here on the west side of Sebring. The health and continuing identity of a pine flatwoods depended on natural fire. Periodic natural fire kills off the oak trees growing up as "weeds" amid the pines, burns off ground fuel, permits light to penetrate to the under-story. Slash pine seeds cannot germinate without light. (Scrub pine seeds cannot germinate till fire has opened the cones!)

Human Recession
Humans have lived in Florida for some time, but not in large numbers prior to Morgan and Flagler. Once Florida was developed, pine flatwoods was the common environment, so pine flatwoods was the environment to be superceded by human settlement. Humans at first employed fire for slash and burn farming, but post-Flagler humans repressed fire. Oaks persevered. Pine seeds got shaded into sterility. Ground fuel accumulated: so when fire did come there was danger of it building a momentum that the slash pine had insufficient resistance to. Thus sea bed gives way to scrub, scrub gives way to pine flatwoods, pine flatwoods shares borders with hammock, with swamp, with bog, with bay head, and then to human settlement, and then ... to catastrophe: potential catastrophe anyway.

Jan has lived on her lake in Sebring for a decade or so. A number of slash pine that made the property seem like something out of James Fennimore Cooper fell in that time. Today there are a half dozen magnificent pines, 75 to 85 or 90 feet tall, but only a half dozen. Today there is one fewer than yesterday. Note: there are no new pines growing up!

Plant life grows toward light. Dig a canal, clear a road, trees lean into the clearing. In Florida the soil is young, thin, poor in nutrients. When there's wind, and in Florida there's wind a plenty, and at more than one time of the year, the trees slip their moorings, fall into the road, into the canal. In 1990 I gave the history and ecology tours at Highlands Hammock State Park. I'd drive the tram along the canal built by the CCC in the 1930s at what was then the south border of the park. The south canal is bordered by hammock, by bog, by bay head, by pine flatwoods. Every day trees would have fallen into the canal, across the road: mostly red maples. Everyday the rangers would Vroom out to the south canal in their trucks with chain saws, and RRRR, RRRR cut the trees into logs and shove them to the side of the berm. Everyday, when I could, I would go out to the south canal, with a community service slave (or two) (when I could get them), and throw the logs off into the bay head so that the public, on the tour, would see an illusion of naturalness. Weekends, with a slave or three, I'd drag limbs and boles out of the canal and haul them off into the bay head, out of sight of "my" tour: cosmetics pretending to be natural. If I hadn't, the chances of the public spotting an alligator, or a cooter, let alone an otter, were negligible (despite the canal being way over-populated with alligators: once stretch sometimes had three dozen baby alligators visible in a compound "nursery": big mama also commonly visible. (The males, ten, sometimes fourteen feet, were visible to me when I ventured on foot into the side canals: we saw few big males along the south canal.))

At Jan's lake side a couple of grand pines lean westward, out over the lake. I hope their roots on the landward side are well anchored, because they visibly don't have much buttressing on their "weak" side. This set of facts in this case casts no blame on human behavior: the lake was there before the railroad blossomed Sebring's population, and before a widened Highway 27 exploded it, especially on the west side of 27, west of Lake Jackson. Certainly no blame can be laid at Jan's door: or at mine: I, who pick up the fallen pine cones for her, so that her "lawn" is unobstructed, imitating an English lawn, where the squire didn't contend with slash pine, "English" "landscape" having been concocted by human development over centuries, not just decades. (Isn't it amazing that humans mistake fingerprints of our activities as "nature"! schools doing nothing to correct us!) (There's been little nature in England for a long time: except insofar as everything is nature: including our interference.) But: everything else is evidence of the interference of development. The pine population isn't just waning; it's disappearing. A dozen pines become six, become four, become one, become none.

Ah, but we "gain." Everything is covered with potato-vines! The sky is blackout out by a superabundance of Spanish moss: indigenous to Florida but not common in unmolested pine flatwoods. That is, Jan's grounds were covered with vines and moss until I yanked most of it down and burned it on the beach.

I also clear ground fuel from her borders: and beyond her borders. Jan's property is beautiful in itself, both deep and wide, lush with growth, and on the lake. See some of my posts on her home at the PaulKnatz blog, 2010 September: a dozen and a half such posts, with views of the beach, and so forth. Southward, her property is bordered by a right of way the neighbors can use to access the lake. Further south the land is "jungle": unmaintained by the widow in residence. To the north Jan's lot is bordered by a lot wholly undeveloped. There the pines completely disappeared under the potato-vines: or had, till I cleared ten or twenty feet inward, improved Jan's view: and protecting Jan's home from fire, reducing the ground fuel.

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Please allow for my preference for the possibility of a mankind governed by restraint, by good sense and good manners; while I am an enemy of unbridled human id. (I unbridle my own id, but that's just me; 6 billion of us are another matter. And if I thought it would help, I'd bridle my own!) I'm not for forest and against human settlement: until human settlement proves incompatible with forest: then I'm for forest and against human settlement. Humans in groups could have lived on earth for millions of years into the future (barring an unknown, perhaps unknowable, calamity). As it is I think I future is truncated, foreshortened.

details and exposition will be added over time

Sovereignty

A current (current/ancient) squabble between the Irish and the Church goads me:

I don't accept King George III's sovereignty in the Americas in the 18th Century, I don't accept it in the British Isles either.
We "white" "Americans" threw George and his redcoats out. Good, I approve. Except we didn't throw him out so people could be free of his sovereignty, we threw him out so our own King George, and his cronies, could be sovereign in his place. Take Palm Beach, Florida, for example: a nice stretch of Atlantic coastline. Natives lived there, and who wouldn't, given a choice? So we sovereign white people, sent our army, at the combined suggestion of JP Morgan and Henry Morrison Flagler: who wanted to develop and sell the other people's turf.

Gee, if I like Donald Trump's real estate, and if I were a sovereignty like George's England, or the other George's US (or like the Pope's Vatican!), could I send an army to chase Donald Trump off of 57^th Street, so I could develop it?

If I had an army, the answer is, Yes: I could try. And if Trump yielded, I could claim sovereignty.

(But would it be true?)

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My attitude toward sovereignty as divulged above is not new, not recent. It's acuity is chronic: across time. But here's a related change of pk attitude: once upon a time, for most of my life, since childhood, I would have conceded sovereignty to God. More recently I would have conceded sovereignty to god. Now I'm not sure I concede sovereignty to any entity.

I'm afraid that needs a lot of explanation: in this culture. I was raised to believe that the universe belonged to God. That he made it, that he hadn't sold it, or given it. Or, if he gave it (or sold it), the way he gave Israel to the Jews — "Israel" being occupied by Phoenicians the Jews called Canaanites — it still really belonged to him: so God could give, and God could take back: an Indian giver! (Of all the insults and injuries we visited upon natives — short of murder, genocide, etc. _ is any worse than still calling them by Columbus's mistake: "Indians"? Yes: maybe calling giving-with-strings-attached "Indian giving"!)

Let's concede that God owns the earth and the sky and the Jews ... and Israel. Let's concede that he owns you and me ... and every wog: every poor bastard born in the ghetto, every poor bastard born in Bangladesh, every poor bastard born in the New Guinean highlands, people who till recently had never heard of Africa let alone Europe let alone the US. Do we really concede that God has a right to torture the souls of those people for eternity if they don't get baptised? If God is sovereign, then he does. Just as if the US is sovereign, then we have the right to drop napalm on little girls, and bombs any damn where the President pleases! And the Vatican doesn't have to cooperate with charges brought against its priests! Sovereign!

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It's been a long time since I've accepted the beliefs I was taught as a child: that the universe was magical, that it needed a creator to exist, that magic, not physics, determines things ... that the big magician owns everything, that he can give things to his special creature, man. Today I don't believe that humans are competent to have opinions probable of truth on any of these matters. Individuals are capable of learning, I see that, but I've become unconvinced that human society is capable of learning: short of a catastrophe so catastrophic that any shred of the species that came through the catastrophe would no longer be the same species: oh, please, I hope.

See? That last little reservation? Whom am I praying to? To a good god, to a progressive god, to a potential evolution, to something ... better.

But not to a god who owns anything!

Trying

Trying

drawing by bydlr

I'll be adding text here shortly

Flotsam Causes

Eight-ball into the side pocket! It's so easy, or it is with a little practice. You line up the 8-ball with the side pocket, you fix the line in your mind, you line up your cue ball with the spot on the 8-ball intersected by your imaginary line to the pocket, now you line up your cue stick, decide whether to roll the ball straight, whether to impact the cue ball low or in the middle, depending on where you want the cue ball to go after it impacts the 8-ball, decide if you want any English on the ball, and make your stroke. If your stroke is true, the 8-ball will fall into the side pocket: far more often than not. If it doesn't, then you didn't stroke it right, or, you didn't see your lines correctly, didn't make the right decision about where your balls impacted. In any case, unless there was an outside disturbance, an earthquake, the table disintegrated, the 8-ball went where you made if go regardless of where you intended to make it go. That's physics, that's the physical universe, the universe Gregory Bateson calls Pleroma. The trouble with our thinking is we think, and we are trained to think, by not very bright or original thinkers, that we live in the physical universe. Well, indirectly we do: the physical universe as modeled by our symbolic universe. But it's that later universe, or combination of universes, Creatura, Sentiens, that we directly live in: and in these universes of life, of symbols, of intelligence, of awareness, of false awareness, things are not simple.

I repeat a favorite illustration of my son's: Black Crayon. The school system learned that children who attempted suicide had used more black crayon in their drawings than normal: so they took all the children's black crayons away. The morons in charge of schools and children confused symptom and disease: they thought that by preventing the symptom, use of black crayons, they could prevent the disease. (Their action was irrelevant: except as a betrayal of liberty.)

Now here's an illustration that's long been a favorite of mine. The kid acts up in school, he's over-active, they say. They give the kid a med, you learn that the med is classified as a "stimulant," you go whoa! You're trying to calm the kid down, a stimulant is the last thing you should give him. Wrong: the stimulant tried by the staff stimulates the kid's activity repressor: it's the kid's natural depressive system that stimulated. Paradox? Only superficially. The logic is complex, but not illogical. That's Creatura, Sentiens: the universe of life.

But, I repeat: we think we live in Pleroma. We think that causes are as simple as lining up the 8-ball. We all do it. I do it.

Ferinstance, if you've read around pk enough surely you've seen his iterations of his identification with Jesus, the martyred god, with Galileo, the martyred genius .... The more so since my arrest in 2006. Still, it was not new thinking. I've identified with Jesus since childhood, and so do all Christians, even if not to the extent I do (or with the manifest justification!)

But dig this: in pk thinking, Christianity itself, Jesus himself, is subject to the same simplifications, the same vanities. God made man in God's image, a vain, self-maximizing fragment of consciousness.

I offered the world Illichian social networking in 1970 when I joined Illich's deschooling ideas to found the Free Learning Exchange. Cybernetic data basing, digital record keeping, in a public institution Not Controlled by Government! might allow humans to realize some of the social implications of Christianity, help us live together convivially, without the arrogance and interference of imperial kleptocracy. There, see? I think of myself as a cause! Well, of course I am a cause, and so are we all. But what is being caused is very complex: maybe there's an 8-ball involved and a cue ball, and maybe also an earthquake, and the table disintegrating.

When I invented the internet I was very much aware, and have routinely said, that "my" ideas had been floating around me for a decade at least, 1960ish: so much flotsam and jetsam. Now here's me, flotsam floating around amid jetsam. I encounter Illich, himself a jetsam floating around amid flotsam. He refers to Jesus in a way I resonate with, though I see Jesus as also so much flotsam floating around amid so much jetsam: in a world where Augustus Caesar, himself a Sargasso sea of flotsam and jetsam, was deluding himself that he could take 8-ball-in-the-side-pocket control of the world! Augustus influenced the world. So did Jesus. So do I, and you. So does the catatonic institutionalized in a box hosed out every other day by someone without a green card who the moment before stole the hearing aid from some old lady in the same facility.

Now here's the United States, stealing everything that is or isn't nailed down, paying royalties to those perceived as powerful and stomping extra hard on those perceived to be defenseless, deaf, and not accidentally, to my claims that it's my ideas that were stolen.

This is familiar. This is the universe of life, subset Sentiens, complicated by politics: the state of people organized for leverage, bossing people down-tide of them. I don't claim to understand it all: what I claim is that the Augustus Caesars, the Hitlers, the Nixons, don't understand it, understand if far less well than I do, but lack the humility to admit it, as well as the intelligence to understand it half as well as I do: and too stupid to see that it's they who are helping to disintegrate the table!

The majority is always smarter than some minority, but also less smart, far less, than some other minority.

I like to trust that god is smart, but fear that he too, at least the capitalized one, God, is so much flotsam. So instead, these days, I just trust that the 8-ball is going where we actually sent it, never mind where we meant to send it.

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Bateson's cosmology of Pleroma and Creatura I report on and developed further (Sentiens ...) at Macroinformation.org. That domain got destroyed, is still down, but some material is being restored (and further explored) at my Macroinformation blog. (Same host as IonaArc.)

Imagine You're Not Here

I have too much imagination: that's the reason the Director of Continuing Education gave for firing me. That was in 1973. The company was Stone and Webster which engineered nuclear power plants. John Constance hired me to be his assistant director but I'd come to make him antsy. I love his reason the more because by 1973 I was accusing the world, including Stone and Webster and John Dennis Constance of having too little imagination: I'd founded the Free Learning Exchange to offer digital librarianship of community resources as a replacement for coercive kleptocracy and its sleight of hand institutions, its compulsory school system preeminently. But the world was to self-complacent to save itself: an inconvenience to me but fatal to all of us.

But before I met Ivan Illich's concept of cybernetic social networking in 1970 I already had a favorite example of humans' lack of imagination. Hark back a decade or so before that. In the 1950s we worried about the nuclear bombs that we'd made and used coming back in our own face. Somewhere around 1960-something I saw a British documentary which shared the fear and pretended to marshal it. The film asked the audience to imagine a nuclear attack and then showed the film's own story board scenario fleshed by actors. We watched stiff upper lip Brits queuing up for food and water, all very civilized, very British. No, you fools: first you have to imagine that this theater is empty, or burned into nonexistence, we're all dead. Or most of us are dead and those few who are still alive and mobile are not queueing up nicely; they're gouging each others eyes for a sip of water.

The movie should I believe have asked us first of all to imagine that 99.9% of us, the lucky ones, were no longer alive.

Telephone

Cro-Magnon man could walk, run, hide in a cave. When you had diarrhea you could hide behind a bush, but everyone knew. Your family, your group, knew your ass, your guts, you knew theirs. With agriculture man came to live in "houses." By Roman times the rich lived in houses that afforded "privacy." Unable to see out, others unable to see in, you could abide in the bosom of your hearth, imagining that you were safe: and, once Hannibal was defeated, you were: for the moment. The Romans did the kicking, everyone else in reach got kicked.

By the time of the British version of empire the rich man lived in a house. He didn't answer the door, a butler answered the door, or a maid, or his perfectly behaved wife, or his perfectly behaved child. In the office outsiders could reach the rich man only through his secretary. The sheriff knocked down the door of the poor man, but by 1860, if the sheriff thought the plantation owner had committed murder, the sheriff rode up to the plantation house, bowing, showing deference: the black butler would answer the door, the black butler would show deference to the sheriff while the sheriff showed deference to the plantation owner in the person of the black butler. Eventually the sheriff would stammer out a message, Please, if it pleases, I have come, to, with your permission, arrest you, Your Ownership.

By the early Twentieth Century Hollywood was inventing itself. Movies that a short time before would have been made in NY or NJ or Chicago were made in Hollywood, near the hills above LA. Charlie Chaplin, a London music hall transplant, redefined fame while he redefined film wealth. Chaplin was the first film star to sign a contract for $1,000 a week. It made headlines everywhere. Chaplin, at the time of signing, asked could they make it $1,025? What was the $25 for? I need something to live on, he answered. Chaplin was planning to spend the entire big bill on production: he himself could live nearly on air. Before long Chaplin was making one feature film instead of multiple short films: one and two reelers. Chaplin set new financial records when his Modern Times charged $2 admission. The studios said no one would pay it, Chaplin said they would: and they did. Chaplin made a feature every five years or so thereafter, and though he continued to pay salaries to favorites such as Edna Purviance for decades in exchange for no obligations on their part whatsoever, Chaplin kept a great deal of the money from his features for himself and his own private uses. Ah, you may think, so that's why he lived out his old age with Eugene O'Neil's daughter, Oona, on a mountain in Switzerland, vacationing on the Riviera at will. No. Chaplin's Hollywood wealth paled beside the money he'd made by putting his Hollywood wealth into the phone company.

Chaplin got rich enough in Hollywood to become very rich on Wall Street; but, Chaplin wouldn't allow one of the black beasts into his home. If you wanted to sell Chaplin a Fuller brush, you had to knock on his door and deal with the butler. Chaplin, the twentieth-century rich man, had no phone.

Knatz.com's Teaching / Thinking Tools repeated Gregory Bateson's comments on communication under the metaphor of the game telephone. Gather people, have a party. Assign person A to write a brief message on a piece of paper and hand it to person Z. Person A then whispers the message to person B who whispers it to person C. When "the message" has been passed to all participants, that person declares the message aloud. Person Z then reads the original written version of the message. Commonly there will be little resemblance between the "original" signal and the message as relayed.

I was just doing something in the bedroom. The phone rang. Rather than answer the bedroom phone I walked to my desk chair by my Mac, in the front of the house, sat down, and picked up. A voice with an accent that may have been from the subcontinent, some form of "Indian," said something that I interpreted to mean, Am I Mr. Knatz? Yes, I said and endured some more noise in that accent. "I don't hear well," I explained. "So far I've understood nearly nothing of what you've said." I listened further, assuming that it was a telemarketer, but not having proved it yet. I next explained that of the latest barrage I'd herd one word, but still made no sense of it: something Alliance.

Why wasn't the butler taking care of this for me? Why wasn't my perfectly behaved wife? or child?

Nah. I had to hang up on her myself.

Such Knowledge

After such knowledge, what forgiveness?
TS Eliot

Pre-dawn this morning that line by TS Eliot came into my head — After such knowledge, what forgiveness? — for the first time since I can't remember when. That's funny, that line used to live in my head, daily: 1956 or so when I first read it, through 1961, '64 when it was a regular visitor. It's been so long now since I've read any TS Eliot at all I don't even remember which poem the line is from!

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Knowledge, forgiveness: Christian themes, pk themes. TS Eliot themes.

But it's 2010! What does the Twenty-first Century have to do with knowledge? with God? with forgiveness?

Of course it's the Christian shtick that we can be forgiven no matter what: if we are repentant. if we put our trust in the Lord.

But we're not repentant! What trust do we put in the Lord? We're not contrite. If we're contrite, say, over Vietnam, what are we doing bombing Afghanistan?

Are we bombing Afghanistan? I don't know. I no longer know anything. That I ever thought I knew much was all illusion, an illusion forcibly inherited from my far from honest or intelligent or knowledgeable or forgiven culture.

PS I see I had it in my quotes files, at Knatz.com and at pKnatzQuotes blog. So it has been in my head more recently that I'd said. Wrong about another thing.

Mislabel

Knatz.com was big on the concepts of misrepresentation and mislabeling. Knatz.com got deposed: domino-censored, in the wake of federal censorship of my AgainstHierarchy.org. My unconstitutional arrest and subsequent parole is now over. Of course they can arrest me again, but their threat of constantly watching me is now officially expired.

Before my arrest I'd featured some Knatz.com modules by posting them here at IonaArc. Since my release I've added a couple, then others at my PaulKnatz blog. But I haven't get gotten to add my pieces on mislabeling and misrepresentation.

The Christian story shows the Temple of Jerusalem pretending to represent God while instigating to get Jesus crucified. The Temple of Jerusalem still exists, is still in business.
Ivan Illich said similar (that is to say, profoundly Christian) things about the Roman Catholic Church. (He himself was a priest, a monseigneur!) The Roman Catholic Church pretends to represent Jesus Christ. It's claim is not better based than the claims of the Temple of Jerusalem.

Jesus got crucified.
Illich got defrocked, the rug pulled from under him.

I, pk, a disciple of Jesus (via Ivan Illich and direclty) say that the United States pretends to represent the people of America but that we, US, do not. We do not represent God or Jesus or the People. We are thieves, kleptocrats. We are the damned.

We, as a group; not me, individually.

I'll be adding more about this: but everything I've written in the last forty years says the same things. You don't know my writing because your owners do not want you to know my writing: or Jesus' words: or God's words.

But of course there I'm doing a little mislabeling of my own: using metaphors at least, using metaphors I know the kleptocrats are constitutionally incapable of understanding: God doesn't speak in words, though all possible messages are there: here: in the universe. It takes science to read it: science rendered impossible by coercively state-run everything.

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Knatz.com's Thinking Tools made this point (not yet transferred to pkTools blog):
Raymond Smullyan delighted the Johnny Carson show with a logical puzzle: say you have three containers. One holds dimes, another holds nickels, the third mixes dimes and nickels. Each is labeled: with one of the three possible lables. Each is mislabeled!
Raymond asked Johnny (and the audience): What's the fewest number of containers you have to open to figure out the correct labels: and what's the fewest number of coins that have to be examined.
And the answer is: One coin from one container: that is, one coin specifically from the mislabeled "Mixed" container.
Think about it: you'll see.

Now: Knatz.com had told that story, and made the following point: but before continuing the point, I merge with another, related point: Newton figured out the gravitational relationship of the earth and the moon. Newton figured that the earth and the moon held each other by gravitational lassoes as it were. There were two forces: gravity, holding the two bodies together, and inertia, making the two bodies want to get away from each other on a tangent, like a stone thrown from a sling. Newton decided that the two forces just balanced: and the moon and earth remained tethered. (Modern science agrees, with a slight modification: the moon is actually pulling away, slightly.
New posed and solved the species' first Two Body problem.

Writing my novel By the Hair of the Comet in 1982 ff., I wanted to calculate the ephemeris of a fictitious comet. I asked an engineer with a fondness for science fiction to help me with my Three Body problem. I wanted to use the sun's mass and Jupiter's mass to estimate a path for a comet of mass x. The engineer could only bluster. There are no solutions for three body problems. Human genius is already impressed with itself for getting a toe-hold with a Two Body problem.

Now: Raymond figured out a Three Mislabels problem: But human beings live in a world where Everything is mislabeled! There's no logic that can solve our problems.

Newton, fabulous genius: not smart enough. Raymond: very clever: not smart enough.
Illich, Fuller ... pk: not smart enough.

Now: will we live long enough to see: Is God smart enough?
Can evolution find a way for life to survive despite kleptocrats ruling everything? Crucifying gods, defrocking saints, jailing cybernetic revolutionaries.

Golgotha

The people stood around Golgotha with their thumb in their ass while Jesus was crucified.

Of course it's impossible to tell how true the story is: like most stories it's fairly empty of facts. But I know this: today,

Christians stand around with their thumb in their ass
while Jesus' disciples get much the same treatment!
And do you know what? what may be worse?

Americans stand around with their thumb in their ass while freedom fighters are persecuted, the society using its whole arsenal to remain kleptocrats, damned, unChristian: and not free.

Hypocrites coming and going.

Satisfied

I'll be satisfied when God puts everyone in hell. Once there I hope he'll use me to explain to a finally captive audience why they're there: exactly what I already do, for God, without the audience.

But what if God doesn't put everyone in hell? Or what if there is no God, no matter how clearly he's communicated to me? Or what if there is no hell: other than here, right now, and all time previously over the last five or ten thousand years?

Oh, well: I never really expected to be satisfied anyway.

To Be

To be or not to be. How old were you before you even began to understand Hamlet's opening words to his most famous soliloquy? I recall clearly that it was so much gibberish to me before I began to absorb even the obverse meaning, the literal meaning. If you accept Christian dogma, including the dogma of Original Sin, then what right could we possibly have to exist: unless and until God forgives us, saves us? On another hand if your a naturalist, then surely we have a right to be born, to breathe, to eat ... to move around ... to breathe out, to defecate, to pollute ...

How's this for literature?
You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.Recognize it? Does this help?Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.I first saw those lines printed in a church on the south shore of Lake Geneva. It thrilled me. It was a Christian church, pseudo gothic, but I tell you the prose is pure blasphemy: there's no original sin in it, and the God doesn't jibe with any Christian orthodoxy. This is a secular poem with a God you can make up as yo go along. The church's post offered a provenance: "found in a Baltimore church in 1692." In fact here's the whole quote:Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.

As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant, they too have their story. Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit.

If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism. Be yourself. Especially, do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love, for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is perennial as the grass.

Take kindly to the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be, and whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.

Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.Makes you feel holy? It's a secular holiness, not at all Christian. And trust me: I know seventeen-century English: and that prose is post-Eighteenth Century! But then the story is well known by now. See for example this. Another church passing around more misinformation.

Before the Romans (and the Jews), cultures of law, no one, nothing, needed a right to exist. It's only in an over-crowded over-managed (kleptocratic) world, a world full of laws and lawyers, a world run by manipulated ambiguities, that anything needs a right to exist.

Christianity is kleptocracy that would shame us, then allow us relief: salvation: if we behave (not the way God said; the way the kleptocrats say!) Contemporary kleptocracy, kleptocracy descended from the eighteenth-century rationalists (ha ha, meaning atheists, of course, deists, like Jefferson, Adams, Washington) would shuck us of our designer guilt and recloth us as innocent thieves (who don't even know what they're stealing, that they're tresspassing).

Aside: Do you know this Woody Guthrie verse? Everybody knows his This land is your land, this land is my land ...
As I went walking
Along the woodlands
I saw a sign there,
Said No Trespassing.
But on the other side
It didn't say nothin'.
That side was made
for you and me!Never mind if my words are slightly different from some printed version: Woody wouldn't have. He changed his own lyrics as he sang: there's no one correct version. He's a folk hero, not an editor.

Note further: Woody wrote that and many another song in a project for FD Roosevelt. The politics are very complex. The sentiments are largely left: meaning government control, government interference, meaning socialism; on the other hand the anarchist sentiments are ineradicable. I love Guthrie for the anarchism, and the humanity, not at all for the alignment with the Democrats.

Sutter's Gold

It isn't just that we stole Sutter's gold, while we invaded his domain, destroyed his farm, killed his livestock; it's also that we had ignored him when he invited us to join him as associates.

Sutter was born in Switzerland. He began setting his life in the new world up in New York (hung out in Brooklyn, knew Edgar Allen Poe), but soon headed west: at a time when it was well established that no one knew how to cross the Rockies: the Pacific wasn't the limit; the mountains were the limit. Sutter looked for fellow explorers to discover such a passage. He found no helpers. He found a way alone. We learned the way because he had found the way: unaided by us.

Sutter got to California, saw that the Sacramento Valley was ideal for agriculture. Again, he looked for partners, for associates, for fellow laborers and investors. He found none. He sailed further west, to Hawaii. There he found partners: Hawaiians who would invest their labor in return for a share of results. Sutter named his enterprise New Helvetia: New Switzerland. He sought, and obtained, treaties recognizing his sovereignty with Mexico, Russia, and the US. By 1849 Sutter's domain had rich farming, mighty live stock, not only employees and associates, but a private army.

Everything going swimmingly, he began to branch out into the lumber business. It was at his mill, all on "his" property that gold nuggets were found in the stream that powered the mill. It was Sutter's mill. Sutter's employees found the gold. Rightly, they reported their finding to Sutter. They were due some of the value: they found it; he was due some: they found it because they were on his land, doing his bidding. The owner gets some, the finders get some. But Sutter told them to keep mum: develop the lumber, then I'll think about developing metals.

Meantime the employees' kids played openly with the gold. Strangers passing by saw the kids, scoffed that the kids had real gold nuggets. Their moms said, "Oh, no: it's real gold alright." And that was the end of Sutter's New Helvetia, his agriculture, his lumber, his army, his mining.

People from the east poured west: over Sutter's route (finding other routes as well: once traffic was possible, it spread). (Did we thank him for the knowledge? Did we pay him a toll?) No, we tresspassed, panned for (his) gold, got hungry, killed his livestock.

The US put a court house in a rapidly developing San Franciso. Sutter summed his losses and sued. Twelve judges saw justice in his claim, awarded him hundreds of millions of dollars. The new citizens of San Francisco, suddenly finding themselves due for back rent and damages burned the court house to the ground. The judges scattered for their lives.

The US was used to gobbling land. The US, like any imperial kleptocracy, was used to taking whatever it wanted. What was different here was that we were stealing from a "white" man! It's doubly wicked irony that he'd invited us to share with him in the first place.

Oh, I don't doubt that Sutter wanted the lion's share. Why shouldn't he? Maybe he would have been difficult to work with, or for. Still, even if we'd declared emminent domain, we're building our highway through your living room, we should have paid him something for the land, the cattle, the lost profits ...

Sutter may have been the first white man robbed by the mob of white men. (He's the first I can name, where we all know the name.) But he wasn't the last: I offered social networking to the public in 1970 (as an alternative to social coercion in education: establish a cybernetic data base of learning resources, then every body mind their own business). (Johnny can learn to read: if he wants to. If Johnny choses not to and starves to death, it's nobody's business but Johnny's. If Sammy learns to read in twelve days instead of twelve years, then corners the rock-and-roll market, good for him. School was nothing really but a Procrustean bed anyway.

I asked for help, for resources, to build infrastructure. Years passed, decades. Then suddenly coercive governments and their institutional tools shove digital record keeping up our noses. I offered cheap public software development years before Microsoft was founded. I tried to engage IBM in my ideas in 1971, decades before they invested a penny in internet-related R&D. Bill Gates still didn't want anything to do with "the" (stolen) internet even after the internet was a world-wife phenomenon!

"You" all could have had convivial cheap versions of all of these things before there was such a thing as the PC! Once you did decide that you wanted them (after the kleptocracy's version was shoved up your nose) (after the money was taken from your pocket), someone should have noticed me: impoverished, a pariah, my son kidnapped, afforded no protection from the law, not published, now censored: all because I devoted my life to trying to deliver God's messages of social salvation (to people who still don't get Jesus' messages of spiritual salvation!)

I should have been killed the second the school noticed that I was intelligent. At least I should have been killed the second the fed realized that they wanted to steal and pervert my ideas. But I'm still alive, somehow, among the double-damned.

The End Is Coming

Media-laden society is always hearing about doomsday predictions. Only careful readers and listeners will realize how many there are. Only scholars will document how many doomsdays come and go without the forecast-doom arriving. Jim Jones may have known what he was doing when he led his group of believers to suicide before they could all be disappointed in his election.

Churches destroy evidence the way Alexander killed his brothers once the king had died. Alexander knew he would have civil wars enough, enough challenges to his anointing, without his brothers coming up with alternate wills. If the Apocalypse of John is the only apocalypse Christians know, then they'll think it's unique: a dime a dozen lowers the value (to make a redundancy joke).

I just read online about another. And John, and Nostradomos, and some of my own rhetoric came flowing past me. What brings me here to scribble these words is a thought of the purpose of false predictions in a media-laden society: if the sheeple hear false prediction after false prediciton, they'll become skeptical about doomsday predictions and lull themselves into a belief that they're secure, that nothing can harm them. If Jim Jones was full of it, and even Jesus' Kingdom of God didn't arrive soon after his death (or since, so far as we can tell), why then global warming can't harm us: and neither can smoking, or cheating, or lying, or the medacious ignorant politically agenda'd school board!

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I foisted a The End Is Coming joke decades ago. A friend gave a costume party under the theme Vicars and tarts. Males were supposed to dress church-related; the females were supposed to dress as though they were hawking their wares. I dressed as a prophet: beard, long robe. I carried a doom sign. Hung from my waist, over my cod, was a sign that said "The end is c-c-coming": with an orthographic joke on orgasm you see, and over my behind was a matching sign that said, with relief, "The end is come."

German and Jew

German and Jew moved to pKnatz blog.

Society

We're social animals. Me too. Thus, naturally, I love society: depend on it, agree with our ancestors survival choice to group.

But I hate this society.

Society in contrast loves itself ... and hates me.

Society in general says it follows God, worships Jesus, but of course it does just the opposite. Those who follow God, or try to, or who ally with Jesus, or try to (those who overturn the money changing tables in the temple, or try to), are still isolated, persecuted, silenced. And society has no conscience about it. (Neither is society very conscious.)

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I started drafting this intending it for InfoAll, my deschooling, deregulation, deprofessionalizing blog. But now I remind one and all that the major part of my Knatz.com, a censorship casualty of the fed destroying my AgainstHierarchy.org, was my Teaching area, and the largest area of that was my Society folders (with their myriad sub-folders!)

More on the same set of metaphors will appear at a range of blogs, including this one, and including InfoAll.

God Is Not Mocked

Gregory Bateson's last book, Angels Fear, argues the truth of the statement God is not mocked by explaining it in a way that thrills me to my toenails. I translate his explanation thusly: in the long run, the truth counts. At the end of the day, the territory is the territory, no matter what the map depicts. In other words, in human terms, in human social terms, if nicotine is carcinogenic, but the myth says it's the cigarette (and the scotch) that makes Bogie so attractive (not his genes, the makeup, the script, the lighting ... Ingrid Bergman, Lauren Bacall), and you think Camels are mild, or, It's the taste! then at the end of the day, you'll still have cancer. God is not mocked.

If human beings are expelled from the Garden of Eden, but then stumble on the Americas and take them from the natives, saying that God rewards the good guys, but then we black ball the best guys, gush goods at the most compliant mediocrities, in the end, will our votes, our will, our self-deceits trump the truth? or will we all have cancer no matter what we edit for television, or drivel at the universities?

Can the actual universe be a dangerous place if we all conscript children into school and tell them they're free?

Is it the carcinogen that causes cancer? or the Nielsen rating that prevents it?

In other words (if Bateson is right, and Korzybski, and pk): reality will have the last word: only it won't come as words.

There are and will be consequences for human behavior. The pathological lies told by our major institutions: government, school, church can pacify us only so long. In the end it won't be just Jesus and his disciples who are dead.

1%er Association

My GRE's Top 1% appeared at the PaulKnatz blog. It offers another metaphor for the theory of social homeostasis I've been developing at Knatz.com/Society (and here at this Iona Arc blog. The term "1%" here refers to intelligence, to learning, to discernment, discipline, and imagination inreading: but I can't use the term without recalling another use I learned about when I taught at Colby in Maine. My nextdoor neighbor rode a BSA Victor: a one cylinder off-road bike with big knobby tires — a lot of torque in any gear, even at modest revs, which this garbage-pickup-truck Maine Tibadeau had customized with ape hanger handlebars: his bike was an oxymoron: it contradicted itself by the microsecond: road! off-road! road! off-road! road! off-road! Hells Angels ride on pavement, showing off for the pimply girls, and they put high handlebars on their chopped Harleys. Dirt riders have to be on top of the action, with strong handlebars below their shoulders: for control, in the dirt. Anyway, This Tibadeau once told me that his friends were "1%ers" I told him I didn't know what that meant. He said, "You know, they say that It's only 1% of bike riders who give motor-cycling a bad name: well, We're that !%!"

Now that's a very different sort of 1%, isn't it? But maybe there are similarities. In social homeostasis it's both ends of any spectrum that are rejected by the mean. Those of average intelligence, of average learning, of average morality won't listen to the Gandhi or the Jesus or the Tolstoy, but they also don't honor the village idiot or the purse snatcher. I gloy in my intelligence, in my ethics, in my honesty, the more so becuase they are rejected by others: well, these bikers gloried in being bad to the bone.

Im-phatic Iago

A line illustrating Iago's manacing diction in Shakespeare's Othello just floated into my head (apropos of nothing I'm aware of): "But for a satisfaction of my thought; / No further harm." The diction is an intrusion: where did harm come from? It's purely, ingeniously gratuitous on Iago's part as he begins to poison the atmosphere around Cassio (and around Othello, who's passed him over for promotion) (that's the imagined harm!)

Make of it further what you will: I pass my thought along here to initiate one point: "99%" of human communications are phatic. It's verbal musak. It's for soothing relationship, not for conveying information. There's little content. Sweetie pie! Coochie Coo! Hey, Babe! That's what we're used to: so Iago's "harm" sticks us like a frozen ice pick.

Note: the basic prosody for the scene is iambic pentameter. Iago's "But for a satisfaction of my thought," is perfect meter: ten syllables, five accents. The following line is also perfect iambic pentameter, but Iago speaks only the first two beats: No further harm: (though they read like three beats, don't they?) It's what Othello asnwers that fills out the technical meter: "Why of thy thought, Iago?" Now, reflectively, we can see: Iago gets two of five beats, Othello three.

Let me tell you: even the damn meter is dramatic, and establishes character. Well, damn it, it's Shakespeare!

Evolution, Society, and the "1%"

Context: See GRE's Top 1% at the PaulKnatz blog. (Also see my Knatz.com/Society module on the subject: an earlier post here at IonaArc.)

I just added this PS at the former post: Understand all along how my points all fit into my workings of the theory of homeostasis: any system, certainly any living system, structures itself to preserve what's preserved, and to make slick paths of change. Averages claim to value excellence but what they really value are averages. Thus an individual of "IQ" 200 will barely be able to communicate with an individual of IQ 180, while neither will be understood by the staff at the NYT, The Smithsonian, Harvard ... Though in time, without credit, ideas, observations, admissions from such a stratosphere may filter inward toward the mean.

In other words, the mass of humans don't hear anything from more than a little bit "above" them: messages from geniuses, from artists, from divinities, from saviors ... may take millennia to filter down (inward, toward the core of men): or, may never get there at all. Not all seeds germinate; not all ideas become seeds. Evolution follows a random path, not an ordained path to perfection. Meantime: human institutions are there to pretend to facilitate communication while actually blocking it, editing it, managing it: supervising it.

God didn't tell me to get credit for offering a cheap internet in 1970, he just told me to offer it: the way he told Jesus to offer salvation. Only enough of what Jesus said penetrated to assure damnation; only enough of my cybernetic public records keeping penetrated to shore up kleptocracy. Still: it's all only temporary.

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Eve's sisters didn't see that Eve was the mother of a new species, a species that would wipe her sisters off the face of the earth: out-performing them in fitness for survival. If they had, if her parents had, if her brothers, or uncles, or cousins had: they would have killed her. For all we know her relatives did sort of see it, maybe they kept her in a cage. Piers Anthony's Isle of Women imagines her as a pariah, the family weirdo. Still: Eve managed to attract Adam, Even managed to keep Adam attracted to her. She managed, exiled at home or not, to get Adam to bring her red meat, and to help feed and care for her children. That's how Eve was different: and its her descendants, her species, us, that have choked the earth and gobbled and wasted its resources in the five-or-six figures-of-years since.

Societies believe that they are entitled to know everything, to think anything, to understand what needs understanding. Of course we don't; the part is not the whole. Theologies posit a god who understands everything. No, no: not my god: I don't want any god who could muck up evolution. Between god and evolution, I'll take evolution: learning, growth, maturation, change ... adaptation. The worst curse I ever offered the Roman Catholic Church was that it should remain stuck with its teaching: that is, go under: hard.

When I taught at Colby in Maine my nextdoor neighbor rode a BSA Victor: a one cylinder off-road bike with big knobby tires — a lot of torque in any gear, even at modest revs, which this garbage-pickup-truck Maine Tibadeau had customized with ape hanger handlebars: his bike was an oxymoron: it contradicted itself by the microsecond: road! off-road! road! off-road! road! off-road! Hells Angels ride on pavement, showing off for the pimply girls, and they put high handlebars on their chopped Harleys. Dirt riders have to be on top of the action, with strong handlebars below their shoulders: for control, in the dirt. Anyway, This Tibadeau once told me that his friends were "1%ers" I told him I didn't know what that meant. He said, "You know, they say that it's only 1% of bike riders who give motor-cycling a bad name: well, we're that !%!"

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GRE's Top 1% appeared at the PaulKnatz blog: 'cause it's about me! Spin off material appears here: because it's not about me. That is to say, the PaulKnatz blog is at least titularly biographical; IonaArc is philosophical ...

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We humans say that we're "intelligent": as though intelligence were an absolute, all-or-nothing condition. I say it's a position (or a range of positions) along a specrum: along which we claim to belong more via ignorance and prejudice than objective measurement. Do we have IQ tests for snails or dolphins to match our tests for ourselves? Are our tests for ourselves worth anything? Will our tests for ourselves be worthy anything when we meet ET? or god?

Think of this: accept for a moment a "Christ" as something divine, resembling something human. Give this Christ an IQ test. Compare his performance to yours or mine: or Einstein's. Have we accurately mapped Christ's intelligence?

How did Christ's IQ test performance match Jehovah's? or Baal's? or a cobblestone from old Geneva?

Where do human institutions get the hubris to pretend that those institutions are competent to pursue their supposed goals? I mock my IQ test. I mock my school performance. I mock my performance in this society. None of our tests prove anything but institutional incompetence, the pathetic naivete of civilization. Now: the other side of that same coin:

Our institutions claim purposes and functions that would not be supported by falsifications administered by ET. My schools pretended that their purpose was to train me, to civilize me, to educate me ... My schools never demonstrated competnence to do any of those things: they were just fiated into power by the thugs of our kleptocracy. I've spent my adulthood offering disproofs; the society has spent my entire life ignoring my messages.

Well, that would be OK perhaps in a world in which Christ was a falsehood. Or in a world where there was no Truth other than that stage-dressed by the kleptocrats. In that universe the carcinogens in the tobacco won't kill anyone until a majority votes for it to be so. But what if we live in a world were truth cannot be compromised? What if the poison is poisonous whether we officially publish it to be so or not? In other words: can false authorities fiat their false authority into passing for truth in reality?

I say not. My society tackles me, knocks me down, holds me down: so there's no contest.

Did you ever hear such a story? Sure: it's told in the Bible. Not very accurately. Not at all honestly. But still. Mythically it's true. It's there: a truth we tell, but ignore.

Celestial Trial

Knatz.com / Teaching / NoHier / Justice / Celestial /

Module initiated 2005 05 25

(Originally from my Legitimacy Scrapbook)

My favorite example of human justice attempting objectivity is the Indonesian Celestial Trial. Where secular justice fails to satisfy a disputant a celestial trail may be appealed for. Of two, both disputants must agree. The secular courts must also agree that they're out of their depth. The dispute relocates to a pair of towers. Each tower has a hut at its top. Each hut has a hole in its floor, pierced by a runged ladder from the ground. Each disputant climbs his separate tower, each in hailing distance of the other. Families may gather on the ground.

The huts are constructed so that an adult Indonesian has no room to stand erect or lie at length. The "floor" is too narrow to sit at one's ease. Any sitting position must be constantly shifted: to distribute the stresses elsewhere. One may stand erect only by standing on the ladder, one's trunk thrust up into the hut, the rungs biting the soles of one's feet. Via a rope one's support group may send up beverages of one's choosing. What foods may ascend are monitored.

Thus the towers are like crosses that one is not nailed to and that both disputants may survive.

Both disputants have the right to descend from his tower at any time: but descent means that you lose: heaven is declaring the other guy to be in the right.

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My description reflects my memory of Piers Anthony's presentation of the system in one of his Geodyssey novels (Shame of Man, I believe). (He's careful in his research; I'm trusting my memory, hoping you at least get the basic idea.)

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I emphasize:



pk issues a challenge to any and all social institutions. You say you serve this or that ideal? I say you don't. Ascend the towers with me, and we'll see who gives up first.That challenge is easily expandable to individuals:You say you own your property [Knatz.com link, searchitem] legitimately? Your inheritance is free and clear? You were fairly elected president? I say you don't. I say you weren't

Ascend the towers with me, and we'll see who gives up first.

Nazi Mythologies of the Hidden Wealth of the Destitute

The typical anti-Semite, take a 1930s Nazi for example, was told as a child, and told again, that any Jew, no matter how impoverished the Jew seemed, had a hoard of gold somewhere nearby. Naturally, if a Jew has gold, why then that gold doesn't belong to the Jew, but to the Nazi who'll take it from him: right? So: the Nazi is within his rights, the Nazi is obliged, to find the gold: and liberate it: from the enemy of God, and transferring it to the friend of God. Right? Therefore, it's perfectly reasonable to beat the Jew and torture the Jew: and if the Jew dies before giving up the gold, well that just proves how wicked the Jew is! Doesn't it? !

Any extortionist racket may work similarly. The king wants to wage a war. Why just tax the peasants! The peasants say they'd given all they could last year. But the peasants must be lying, right? It's in the nature of peasants to lie; while it's in the nature of the extortionist rulers to be the chosen of God, right? So it's just right and proper that the government burn, torture, and kill the wicked peasants until they cough up enough new taxes to invade Lorraine, or France, or Poland ...

I've lived my life without an income. I gave up the jobs of my youth, the jobs that kept me flush with cash, and went into hock, stayed in hock, in order to attend, as I was told to do, school after school: AB, MA, doctoral work, lots and lots of doctoral work. But I never got a regular job. On the contrary, though I was hired as a college teacher, I was fired, and blackballed from further employment during the kleptocracy's hysteria of the late 1960s. That's the circumstance in which I offered a cheap low-tech internet in 1970: I wanted to loosen the universities' strangle hold on the culture. My offer received a trickle of support: then that trickle was stopped (and mopped) not by accident: just another friendly service from our utterly dishonest institutions: universities, government, media ... Fortune 500, big science ... I did this and that to stay alive: I wrote my stories and my novels and still talked about Jesus-inspired Illichian social networking, all to no avail, gaining no income. And all my glorious cash reserves of high school had been long-since depleted by college. Spend all, and never gain: except from patrons. My patrons, all modest, kept me alive, though less than functional. When PCs came along I was among the last to be able to get one: I, who had proposed public software for everyone, so no one would need a PC! (The local FLEX, like a local library, could have done the code, the machine talk, for you.)

In 2006, when the estate of my patron of 1990 to 2004 was all but spent, I wrote a satire to my university, the last university to take all my money while seeing that I got none back. I did what I do in writing to all institutions that never understand a thing I do or say: I pretended that communication with them was possible. I pretended that they had understood me all along, that they knew perfectly well who I was, and that they were just pretending not to understand. I pretended to be like them: commanding, in charge, with rights. I pretended to be hold them accountable for their crimes! Imagine a lone Jew addressing Hitler as though anything could be discussed with him! I told my university that rock bottom was coming up at me fast: and that if it hit me in the face before I'd heard understanding from them, if I went stone broke while the bully who'd robbed me remained flush, and silent, then I, Christian, pacifist pk, was going to come to NY, murdering my way north along the highways, till I arrived at NYU where I would introduce the deschooler's Judgment. They read it "literally"! That is to say: they don't know how to read: which is exactly what I'd been telling them, without understanding, since 1962!

NYU called the FBI. The FBI, illiterate peers to the tenured English professors, arrested me. And ever since the fed has been extorting money from me: Where, you miserable terrorist swine, is your pile of gold?!

Well, my satire didn't get the hoped for effect — understanding, responsibility — but it did solve my terminal poverty problem. The jail fed me, provided me with a bunk. The medical facilities were lethal, as well as tardy, but they were an improvement over none, and never. Out of jail, "early" — since I was tortured into "confessing" my guilt, the fed keeps my nose just above water. I get $500 a month and food-stamps, and Medicaid as well as Medicare, and pharmaceutical co-payments. As long as I have no emergencies, no car repairs, I can just breathe. !

But now the fed want to collect the fine the judge levied against me. I'd said, Help! They arrested me. I'd said, You're bastards, and I'm insulting you the worst I can by pretending, obviously falsely, that I'm just like you: a murderer, a terrorist, a liar, an extortionist ... a coercionist, a kleptocrat! All the fed gets is, He's got a pile of gold somewhere, and we must get it from him!

I said to my parole officer, I have nothing now that the fed doesn't give me. The fed and the state figure I can live on roughly $700 a month: and I can, I do: just barely. But now the fed wants me to pay $100 per count of the six felony counts you tortured me into confessing to. Fine, give me another $600, and I'll give it right back. Now the fed wants to fine me $4,000. I said I have nothing, I'm rapidly getting down to nothing, so the fed figures I can easily afford $4,000 out of the government's dole of $700 a month. Give me the extra $4,000 and I'll give it right back. Say I can pay it $25 a month: Fine. Give me $725 a month and I'll give you $25 a month.

No. They want a payment plan. I gave them one! They don't listen! They're incapable of understanding! They don't understand what Jesus or Confucius or Buddha or Einstein .... or I have said to them. They just want the gold. And they just know — they bet my life! — that I have it buried somewhere.

Experts, Specialization

No matter what's wrong, the specialists, the experts, will prescribe more expertise: more specialization: maybe a higher level of specialization.
The Church will prescribe a priest, a mass, communion ... maybe prayer too.
The dietician will prescribe more diet.
The doctor will prescribe a doctor, and some medicine, from the pharm, cousin to the doctors: the dentist will prescribe more dentistry.
Back killing you? you go to the chiropractor, he performs a miracle? You guessed it: he wants you back for more treatment. He'll treat you until you're really paralyzed: and he, not you, will have your money.

Sometime one layer of specialist will prescribe another layer of specialist: the GP may prescribe a surgeon, the surgeon may prescribe a psychiatrist.

Bucky Fuller said this. I've been repeating it since the mid-'Sixties.
No: actually I'd been saying it since the early 'Sixties, 'cause McLuan had said a version of it too.

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I'll edit in my Experts section from my fed-et-alia-destroyed Knatz.com.

Who Owns New York

Oh, Who Owns New York? shouts a rah rah song of my alma mater. The chorus screams the answer: C - o - l - u - m - b - i - a!

That answer isn't too ridiculously far from the truth: King George founded his Kings College on land around Trinity Church. As the school expanded to become a university land now known as Rockefeller Center was donated, and a huge part of Morningside Heights got added, and other packets and parcels all over: not to mention all the Third World land, race courses and so forth controlled by this Ivy League behemoth. Well, if the Church can own land, if the US can own land, if my landlord can own land, why can't my school?

All that just introduces my real subject: sideways, as it were. Consider this: Who owns the New York Yankees? Who owned the Brooklyn Dodgers? Can the residents of Brooklyn be forgiven if they thought that had some rights of ownership? when the team got spirited off to the Pacific coast?

Today there's an article I see as directly related: "After 21 years of tailgating in the same lot outside Ralph Wilson Stadium, Ken Johnson plans to take his party across the street starting with the next home game in two weeks.

And with him, Johnson's bringing along his wildly colorful and popular traditions: from the red 1980 Pinto on which he grills meat on the hood to the pizza oven made out of a filing cabinet to a chicken wing-cooking mailbox and, yes, even the long-established ceremony of drinking shots of Polish cherry liqueur out of the thumbhole of a bowling ball." Johnson said, "In my case, I do push the limits, so I can't scream too loudly. But you wonder how many people go to games because of characters like me. I think I add to the experience."

I wasn't much of a baseball fan in the 1940s. At the start I was only two, at the end I was only twelve. I didn't live in a normal, nuclear family: my father was drunk on the couch, or drunk at the RR station, or lying in a gutter somewhere; I never played ball with him. I don't know if he ever played ball with anyone. In a neighborhood stuffed with girls my age I had plenty of partners to play doctor with but no boys for marbles or catch. One blessed day I saw a boy only slightly older than myself. "Hi." I ran up to him. Rudy, just moved from Flatbush, demanded, "Are you a Dodgers fan? or a Yankee fan?" Huh? I hardly knew what baseball was. "Oh, a Yankee fan!" he decided. He jumped on me and beat me up.

So as the 1950s approached and I from my bicycle delivering papers saw the Yankees trash the Dodgers year after year after year, I glowed with satisfaction. Of course I came to know a little bit about those teams. I saw Joe Dimagio. At Rudy's house I became familiar with the oompah band that played at Dodgers home games.

Understand. I am not a lawyer. My father was the lawyer, and my grandfather. (You can see where I get my respect for the law!) I don't know who the court house in Brooklyn (or Manhattan, or Rome) believed owned the legal entity The Brooklyn Dodgers (or whatever its legal entity name was). I understood that there was some individual or group who claimed that the corporation belonged to them. But I also understood that Brooklynites thought they had some claim. I saw that the band was part of the team no matter what the law said. I saw that the players, and the fans, and the TV announcer, and the subway ... were all part of the Brooklyn Dodgers. And I have always understood that the players and the fans and the oompah band and the beer hawker ... were not consulted when the Dodgers moved to LA. Nor were the kids chasing home-run balls in the streets beyond the fences.

Bleeding

Every kid knows that doctors in the Middle Ages bled you. You got sick, they let out the bad blood. Sometimes they used leeches. Dryer's Passion of Saint Joan shows La Pucelle squirting arterial blood from her arm while the functionaries scramble with a bowl trying to catch it.

(My army friend Phil joked that the medicos had the principle right, but they wasted the wrong body fluid: it was bad semen that had to be released when you're sick. The stud needs to screw his way back to health.)

I say that blood letting still goes on, more blatantly than ever, only it's neither blood nor semen that gets sucked and wasted. The world is run by experts who no matter whether things are right or wrong prescribe that they and other experts suck money. The government sucks taxes, then more taxes. The worse things turn out, the more taxes they suck. As your family falls apart, the lawyers suck all your money. Bruise a toe and the hospitals will not only bleed you dry, they'll bankrupt Social Security while they do it.

How come nobody tries getting rid of all their money before the vampires strike? (Like I did.)

But you know what? The vampires get me anyway. Yesterday I had to buy off the extortionist fed (who railroaded me on an extortion charge to do it!) Of course I don't have a dime that the fed doesn't give me, once it bankrupted me a few years ago, destroyed me and my pitiful remaining business; but these protection racketeers demand more from me than they give me to give! And next year they'll find some pretext to demand yet more. (Like blackmailers: Squeeze till dry.)

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One thing: even though the doctors didn't know that the blood circulates, or that it carried oxygen, or that you needed oxygen, they seldom bled you to death; they thought they were releaving putrid build-up of noxious pressure.

Get a note from your doctor!

(My army buddy's joke conspicuously doesn't worry about how much semen the stud has to lose!)

The medieval doctors didn't worry about blood being either vital or self-sustaining. Institutional parasites behave as though their hosts' money were infinite. It's a really stupid blackmailer who kills the kidnapped or who bankrupts the blackmailed. And it's a really stupid government that subsidizes the stupidity of the vampires!

Negative Adam

When I say I don't believe in the Church, I don't mean that I deny that there is a building on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Third Street called Saint Patrick's Cathedral. I know the building is there, I've been in it since childhood, seen it hundreds of times, read about it hundreds more. I don't mean that there are no structures in the territory called The Vatican or that there is a myriad hierarchy of priests centered there, some called cardinals, one called a pope. I don't deny that there was a building around the corner from where I grew up called a Presbyterian Church. On the contrary I attended that church regularly from childhood till I was eighteen. I went to sunday school there, was confirmed there. No. What I mean is that I deny that the Church or churches, any of the churches that I'm aware of, are any of the things that they say they are. I deny that the church represents god. I deny that the church can wheedle divine forgiveness for human nature. I deny that the church's promises of getting us into heaven have any validity.

I have never said I don't believe in God. But we'll come back to that.

I see that the church stands on a book called The Bible. Churches say that the book is written by god, and that the book possesses the attributes of god: goodness, virtue, authority ... I deny that the church's Bible was written by god. I don't say that god never wrote anything; I say that the churches don't have it. What they have was written by the churches!

The churches claim that they transmit messages from god. But the principal story that the churches tell recounts a church, the Temple of Jerusalem, blocking messages from the god incarnate, Jesus. Now the churches want us to believe that they've reformed? that they're not like the old church?

When I say I don't believe in government, I don't mean that I deny that there are buildings in Washington, DC. In don't deny that many of those buildings are filled with bureaucrats: even some who claim to "represent" me! I don't deny that people are taxed, and schooled, and drafted, and sent to drop bombs on other people. I know that there's a courthouse here in Sebring, I know an artist who's painted it. Everywhere you turn there are almost as many schools as there are churches, all promising to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse, taking immature human dross and converting it to literacy, numeracy, reason ... art appreciation ... democracy. Everywhere there are tax offices, police stations, cops ... galore. No. What I mean is that I don't believe any government has a legitimate claim to law, to order, to taxation, to education, to compelling us when where and how to learn arithmetic or history or home economics, who to put in jail or who to give a monopoly to.

Everywhere there are journalists and teachers and senators ... people one or another institution claims inform us or educate us or represent us. I deny that any kleptocratic institutions or any employees of kleptocratic institutions do us anything but harm. Journalists package misinformation, teachers teach what the board says, not what scholars say, senators hear only what the Fortune 500 want heard. Government blocks information, mismanages information. God and intelligence, evolution and survival are eclipsed.

When I say that I don't believe in man, that doesn't mean that I deny that there are six billion of us, fast becoming ten. I mean I deny the things commonly claimed by our publicists. I deny that we are intelligent (in so far as "intelligent" implies an absolute). I deny that we are aware (in so far as "sentience" implies something completed (or even well-begun)). God gave us a Garden of Eden, we've perverted it into a roadway to oil spills. I deny that we have a future (other than one too shameful to talk about).

But, you know, I take it all back. I do believe in some of the things churches say. Take Original Sin, for example. I don't believe that we were created evil (I don't believe that we were created!) But I certainly do see that we're evil.

Christians say that God is good and that Jesus was good and that the Jews and Romans killed him (because he was good!) (Notice of course that "Jews and Romans" here means governments!) That's all well and good: except that we're no different! not as a group! I'm different, maybe you're different; but we are not different: we kill god everyday, kill the good, torture and murder geniuses as well as saints.

Evil? I said above that I do see that we're evil? Evil is something I spent my youth denying the ascendancy of. (I thought God would forgive us all!) What I mean is that we're incapable of living well, as a society. We're incapable of learning.

Maybe when the society has finished commiting suicide, an Adam and an Eve might survive. Some future mankind might be different: might walk with God, and Nature, and Science. With Truth.

I used to wish that I would be that Adam.

But the society took too long to bring about Armageddon. Now I'd be no good at being Adam.

Now I'm no good at much.

(Except for how I love my Eve!)

Earthly Judgments

The human world, the human kleptocratic world, is governed by human judgments. Some kleptocracies pretend to be guided by divine judgment: Christian European states, for example. But till God is heard from (so all would know it's God speaking (how would that ever happen?)) all we have are the Christian kleptocracies' word for it.

I believe in God's judgment: provided we understand God to mean truth: the actual territory, not some human representation, some "map" of the territory. But that judgment (the truth) will never be known by human kleptocrats. Or it may be approximated by individuals both intelligent and honest, by you, by me (on our good days): but the moment we form a group, a society, with compulsory school and military service, and taxation, and media run for profit ... No, no, no.

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I was just recalling some human judgments portrayed in the Old Testament. Genesis has Lot visited by some angels. The nasty neighbors take the angels to be men: good looking men. The neighbors demand that Lot give his guests up to the neighbors so they can bugger them. Lot offers his virgin daughters instead. And God reduces Sodom and Gomorrah to rubble. But just before, did the Sodom Gazette report that the Sodomites had misidentified some victims for rape? No, no, no.

Trouble is, we only get to read the earthly judgments: while the exceptions, like pk's writing, gets ignored, or misrepresented, censored ... while pk is jailed.

Double Negative

Double Negative

Bio-Paradox

The kid causes trouble at school. Some neighbors hear that the school is giving the kid stimulants. Huh? No, no: the culture wants the school to pacify the kid, so all the kids can be pacified: whaddrthey giving the kid stimulants for?

Because the pharms figure that what makes the kid hyperactive is hypo-activity of some behavioral repressor: maybe if the repressor is stimulated it will let the kid inhibit himself, naturally. Ah: behaviorism of a level more sophisticated than we're used to in the old simple-minded culture: the cue ball hits the eight ball, the eight ball drops into the side pocket; we're no more used to complex causes than we are to multiple body problems: we can handle Joe and Marilyn, but not one million people on the subway, everybody hand forced against somebody else's something or other.

Bear with me: I broaden the base:
The school teacher says that "two negatives make a positive." She illustrates,"I ain't gonna do that nohow" means that that non-standard-written-English speaker is going to do it! No, no, no, lady: lots of negatives mean negative, Negative, NEGATIVE. They're connected in parallel, not in series. (With batteries, series connection boosts the amperes; parallel connection deepens the voltage, it doesn't multiply the current.)

That's a start. I'll join my targets next time, forging a new metaphor.

Pretend Authority

Authority is necessary for any politically imposed belief system so the belief can be asserted over experience.

Real authority, were there any such thing — a church that actually hears and represents an actual god, a government that actually represents a population of sentient, non-toxic beings, I would be for. As it is, I'm against all authority that I'm aware of: as fraudulent, factitious, illegitimate. (Of course the authorities can, and have, side-railed me, silenced me, impoverished me, arrested me, and censored my writing as well as my speech. Notice that I haven't arrested or impoverished any authorities that I know of (though I do try to keep resources from governments by avoiding having an income, thereby being free of income tax.)

Schools pretend to have and to represent and to be able to bestow knowledge, skill, wisdom. Sounds good. But what you actually get are a bunch of experts telling people not to listen to Galileo and his telescope, that Copernicus was crazy, that some "theory" of "Creationism" concocted a century and a half after Darwin is legitimate "science" ...

King Herod ruled the Jews in Jerusalem by the forbearance of the lieutenants of Augustus Caesar. When Jesus was hailed by Jews (in the street as it were) as King of the Jews, Herod and the Temple priests tag teamed him, getting the Roman rubber stamps to help. Who were the experts? Jesus? the Son of God? No: the priests, the governors ... the money changers whose tables Jesus overthrew.

No. In heaven authority may be real; here on earth it's fraud: pure fraud followed by purer fraud.

Meantime, notice. You son tells you the priest fucked him in the ass. You tell your son that he's imagining things, for shame, the priest is a holy man. Then you see the priest with his robes up and your son held bent, you tell the bishop. For shame, the priest is a holy man, scolds the bishop. Finally the bishop sees it, tells the cardinal, the Pope ... the Times. For shame, the priest is a holy man.

The experts, authorities, can erase experience: over and over.

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Related thoughts I'll sketch in a post on Discrepancy Reduction: at my pkTools blog.

Mugging Santa

Santa is said to bring gifts to good little boys and girls on Christmas Eve. The gifts are for the children. All they have to do is sit and wait. Then they'll have them (if they're good.)

What though if the kids are bad little boys and girls? What if the bad kids (and grownups: kleptocrats, bureaucrats) know Santa is coming? What if the bad kids ambush Santa from the shadow of the chimney? Will the bad kids then legitimately own the good kids toys? (They will if they run the government and write the laws and monopolize the justice departments.)

God sent Jesus to offer us mercy. But we knocked him down, tortured him. Do we "own" the mercy?

Do kleptocrats have God by the short hairs? Or is God just giving us, still, all the rope we need to hang ourselves? An infinity of times.

Law: Nature, God, Science, Society

If scientific law and nature's law and God's law are not one and the same then is there something wrong with science? or nature? or God? or the society which has such concepts?

That's what I just wrote among my Law quotes at my pKnatzQuotes blog. I hope the statement implies the essay that belongs with it. I post the statement here where such an essay might develop.

Initially I'll say only that I don't believe that human governments, kleptocracies all (these days) are competent to administer science: and if we don't know what the truth is, how can we write laws? how can we hear laws? I don't trust the Church's word on God; I don't trust the US' word on what the "people" say; I don't trust the Times to know or tell the "news"; I don't trust schools to know what science is: and that includes Harvard, MIT!

The Cross of Iona

The Cross of Iona



Otherwise known as
The Celtic Cross