Humans communicate. Humans communicated ideas more complex than mosquitoes communicate. It does not follow that a given human can communicate a particular idea to a specific individual or group.
The jailer tortures the guy, the guy screams: others hear the screams, they understand: someone is in pain. Einstein writes a formula, very few understand even the symbols used, then a few more understand, then a few more. Some ideas become widely understood; many ideas stultify.
The Old Testament tells stories of God trying to communicate this and that to humans: and not doing to well. The New Testament tells the same story.
Then how come kleptocracies are full of churches which pretend we're competent to talk about such things? that congregations understand what's said to them?
The implications seem clear to me. How come I know of no one who understands a thing I say five hours after they first seem to understand some part of it?
Friday, January 28, 2011
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Sorry Sports Spectacles
Fed & Rafa
Roger Federer is the rare sports figure who commands superlatives: the way Bach, Mozart did in music, the way Michelangelo, Picasso did in art, the way Shakespeare ... Etc. Wagner, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis ... Jack Johnson, Ali ... I followed Rod Laver on the tennis courts in 1968. I've been saying he's the greatest ever since. I lauded Bjorn Borg, Pete Samras ... saying they are the greatest: after Laver. On the women's side I'd praise Chris, Martina Navrotilova, Martina Hingis .. saying they are the greatest: after Suzanne Lenglen.
With Federer I began saying that Federer was the greatest since Bill Tilden (whose quality we can't really know): so Federer is the greatest ever including Laver! People like me enjoy making such pronouncements: it's part of fandom, never mind that it's untestable, meaningless in more than one respect.
By a few years ago others began saying parallel things: John McEnroe to wit: on TV! But something unbelievable happened: before a consensus about Federer became universal, we all had to acknowledge that Rafael Nadal had become on clay what Federer was on grass and on hard court. Rafa beat Federer on clay. Fed beat everyone except Rafa, Rafa then beat Fed, repeatedly. So we had the ridiculous situation that Fed was the best, ever, but Rafa was better, in at least one respect.
The air was full of superlatives and some clowns started using simple analogies and declaring that Rafa was better than the best!
Currently, till today, we've had the giddy prospect of a Rafa Slam: Rafa holding all four major titles at once, even if spread over two calendar years: 2010, '11.
Now, before I continue, let me say: stars rob light from non-stars. A minor near-by star can eclipse a major far away star. Fed and Rafa are a step above the field. But there's a small crowd of great guys close around third place. Nadal just had a mediocre match against compatriot Ferrer. Excuses for Rafa dim Ferrer's accomplishment. That ain't right. Rafa had a chance for a Rafa Slam, but he didn't cash the chance. Fed had chances against Rafa: he cashed some, not all of them. Good, they're human. But there's a terrible pressure on the stars to be more than they are, to be more than possible. And much of the problem relates to the media pandering to the throng's yearning for certainty: in advance. Today's report from Australia includes this verbiage: "Murray won't have to get past Nadal this year, but he will have to beat Ferrer and either defending champion Roger Federer or 2008 champion Novak Djokovic to claim his first major title." Note again the diction: "Claim his first major title."
Murray has no major titles. Murray is not owed a major title. The golfer should score a birdie before being awarded the birdie. But no, the commentator will say "he's standing over the ball for his birdie." No: it's a birdie after it's been scored; not before. It's like Christians counting themselves in heaven's census while they're still alive. Will God have nothing to say about it?
The public "should" be allowed to grow up. I chastise the media. My own ridiculous claims about who's the greatest are relatively harmless. Awarding combatants prizes before the outcome is known retards our maturity: same as telling God what his judgment must be: before the facts can be established.
Roger Federer is the rare sports figure who commands superlatives: the way Bach, Mozart did in music, the way Michelangelo, Picasso did in art, the way Shakespeare ... Etc. Wagner, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis ... Jack Johnson, Ali ... I followed Rod Laver on the tennis courts in 1968. I've been saying he's the greatest ever since. I lauded Bjorn Borg, Pete Samras ... saying they are the greatest: after Laver. On the women's side I'd praise Chris, Martina Navrotilova, Martina Hingis .. saying they are the greatest: after Suzanne Lenglen.
With Federer I began saying that Federer was the greatest since Bill Tilden (whose quality we can't really know): so Federer is the greatest ever including Laver! People like me enjoy making such pronouncements: it's part of fandom, never mind that it's untestable, meaningless in more than one respect.
By a few years ago others began saying parallel things: John McEnroe to wit: on TV! But something unbelievable happened: before a consensus about Federer became universal, we all had to acknowledge that Rafael Nadal had become on clay what Federer was on grass and on hard court. Rafa beat Federer on clay. Fed beat everyone except Rafa, Rafa then beat Fed, repeatedly. So we had the ridiculous situation that Fed was the best, ever, but Rafa was better, in at least one respect.
The air was full of superlatives and some clowns started using simple analogies and declaring that Rafa was better than the best!
Currently, till today, we've had the giddy prospect of a Rafa Slam: Rafa holding all four major titles at once, even if spread over two calendar years: 2010, '11.
Now, before I continue, let me say: stars rob light from non-stars. A minor near-by star can eclipse a major far away star. Fed and Rafa are a step above the field. But there's a small crowd of great guys close around third place. Nadal just had a mediocre match against compatriot Ferrer. Excuses for Rafa dim Ferrer's accomplishment. That ain't right. Rafa had a chance for a Rafa Slam, but he didn't cash the chance. Fed had chances against Rafa: he cashed some, not all of them. Good, they're human. But there's a terrible pressure on the stars to be more than they are, to be more than possible. And much of the problem relates to the media pandering to the throng's yearning for certainty: in advance. Today's report from Australia includes this verbiage: "Murray won't have to get past Nadal this year, but he will have to beat Ferrer and either defending champion Roger Federer or 2008 champion Novak Djokovic to claim his first major title." Note again the diction: "Claim his first major title."
Murray has no major titles. Murray is not owed a major title. The golfer should score a birdie before being awarded the birdie. But no, the commentator will say "he's standing over the ball for his birdie." No: it's a birdie after it's been scored; not before. It's like Christians counting themselves in heaven's census while they're still alive. Will God have nothing to say about it?
The public "should" be allowed to grow up. I chastise the media. My own ridiculous claims about who's the greatest are relatively harmless. Awarding combatants prizes before the outcome is known retards our maturity: same as telling God what his judgment must be: before the facts can be established.
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Patriotism
My woman died a couple of years before the Feebs arrested me. I sure wanted to meet a new woman once I got out. I started attending the Highlands Senior Society, met women galore. I made a whole new class of enemy, enemies galore – Americans hate whomever they've wronged – but at least my bed had two people in it more often than one. I even got into the dances for free, since I agreed to teach the dancing.
There was a penalty though that was hard to bear. Before lunch, we'd listen to announcements. Then a flag was wheeled out and we'd have to Pledge Allegiance to the Flag: then sing America the Beautiful. I was never a patriot. I couldn't have easily become a disciple of Christ if I'd been a patriot. If I'd been a patriot how could I have tried to debrief people on their enslavement via compulsory education? How could I possibly have invented an internet to offer as an alternative? Flag-saluters don't try to redesign everything.
Patriots stood behind me during the patriotic exercises, threatening me behind my ear: "America! Love it or Leave It!!" But by that time I was also dancing with a table full of widows a few miles south at the Lake Placid American Legion. There these days I mostly dance with the girl I met at the Senior Social, but we dance before murals of tanks blowing the shit out of everything, ships sinking in oil slicks ... And, more often than not, before we finish for the night, the band plays patriotic songs. The socializers stand in a circle. The lyrics proclaim, "I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free."
Free? Since when? I was forced to go to school. There was no law that compelled university attendance, but it's all-but compulsory in this culture: certainly it was in my family. In my life time I've watched people become even more illiterate than they already had been while garnering ever more degrees, at ever higher prices: while wages skyrocket. Too bad there's ever less worth buying. Was getting put in jail for what I'd written an example of freedom? Was getting censored?
I suppose putting Jesus on the cross was an exercise in freedom as well.
Wasps sting whatever is not wasp that's intruding on the nest. Mama risks her life to grab baby from under the truck; momma does not risk her life to get the truck from under baby. So: I can understand Hatfields preferring Hatfields to McCoys. Even more fundamentally I understand me preferring me to you.
Sure we should give aid to our own, but try being a Good Samaritan to the other guy now and then. That's the way I see sense in a Christ saying, Prefer other to self. Just as a counter-measure! Not, Let's turn everything upside down; but, Why not not go whole hog every damn time.
I can understand Hatfields preferring Hatfields to McCoys: both families may be Scots-Irish, but any Hatfield genes will likely be closer to the genes of any other Hatfield than will any McCoy genes. Not absolutely necessarily, but probably, in general, you know? I can understand Hitler wanting to advance the blue-eyed: kind of Christ-like actually, since Hitler was himself far from blue-eyed, was anything but fair. I can understand Hitler hating the Jews: so did nearly everybody else in Christian Europe, right? I can understand Hitler wanting to kill the Jews: my life might have been easier if I'd wanted to kill anyone standing ahead of me on line to get into Birdland.
I wrote the latter first, then inserted the former. Next session I'll merge them better.
Nobody dances like you, Paul.
Joyce, LineDancingMarine
Joyce, LineDancingMarine
There was a penalty though that was hard to bear. Before lunch, we'd listen to announcements. Then a flag was wheeled out and we'd have to Pledge Allegiance to the Flag: then sing America the Beautiful. I was never a patriot. I couldn't have easily become a disciple of Christ if I'd been a patriot. If I'd been a patriot how could I have tried to debrief people on their enslavement via compulsory education? How could I possibly have invented an internet to offer as an alternative? Flag-saluters don't try to redesign everything.
Patriots stood behind me during the patriotic exercises, threatening me behind my ear: "America! Love it or Leave It!!" But by that time I was also dancing with a table full of widows a few miles south at the Lake Placid American Legion. There these days I mostly dance with the girl I met at the Senior Social, but we dance before murals of tanks blowing the shit out of everything, ships sinking in oil slicks ... And, more often than not, before we finish for the night, the band plays patriotic songs. The socializers stand in a circle. The lyrics proclaim, "I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free."
Free? Since when? I was forced to go to school. There was no law that compelled university attendance, but it's all-but compulsory in this culture: certainly it was in my family. In my life time I've watched people become even more illiterate than they already had been while garnering ever more degrees, at ever higher prices: while wages skyrocket. Too bad there's ever less worth buying. Was getting put in jail for what I'd written an example of freedom? Was getting censored?
I suppose putting Jesus on the cross was an exercise in freedom as well.
Wasps sting whatever is not wasp that's intruding on the nest. Mama risks her life to grab baby from under the truck; momma does not risk her life to get the truck from under baby. So: I can understand Hatfields preferring Hatfields to McCoys. Even more fundamentally I understand me preferring me to you.
Sure we should give aid to our own, but try being a Good Samaritan to the other guy now and then. That's the way I see sense in a Christ saying, Prefer other to self. Just as a counter-measure! Not, Let's turn everything upside down; but, Why not not go whole hog every damn time.
I can understand Hatfields preferring Hatfields to McCoys: both families may be Scots-Irish, but any Hatfield genes will likely be closer to the genes of any other Hatfield than will any McCoy genes. Not absolutely necessarily, but probably, in general, you know? I can understand Hitler wanting to advance the blue-eyed: kind of Christ-like actually, since Hitler was himself far from blue-eyed, was anything but fair. I can understand Hitler hating the Jews: so did nearly everybody else in Christian Europe, right? I can understand Hitler wanting to kill the Jews: my life might have been easier if I'd wanted to kill anyone standing ahead of me on line to get into Birdland.
I wrote the latter first, then inserted the former. Next session I'll merge them better.
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Times Square Warranty
I buy a toaster, a GE, at the WalMart, it comes with a two year warranty. After twenty-five months a heating element fails, or the plastic foot falls off the bottom and there's no way to reattach it without taking the whole bottom off, a procedure that requires tools I don't have and experience I don't have either. Oh well: I got two years out of it.
The Swedish sailor has shore leave in Manhattan. He goes to Times Square. Oh, Boy! movies! whores! drug dealers! The avenue is lined with electronics store fronts. The sailor buys a boom box with a five year warranty, for $9.98 plus tax. The sailor puts in on his shoulder. It's not very loud, but what the hell. By midnight the boom box doesn't play at all, it has zero volume. The next day the sailor takes the boom box back to the little store front. There's the same window display, the same counter display, the same Sephardic Jew who sold it to him. "That warranty is no good here. The company you bought it from is out of business, bankrupt. This is a different company. We have nothing to do with that other company."
(The sailor's mistake was that he didn't have the whole Swedish navy with him in the little store front. I bet his warranty would have been good if the ship's gun were aimed through the store window.)
I was an art dealer. But before I was an art dealer, I was a student, and a teacher: perpetually poor, almost as it were deliberately poor: a monk of sorts. As a student I always had art prints on my cell wall: big Rouault, big Klee, big Picasso, I'd bought for $1 each, put up with thumb tacks. I never spent more that $1 for any art (until I sold pre-Columbian originals, and they were consigned to me, I didn't have to pay for them until after I'd been paid for them: I sold one for $40, I owed the guy $20: back in 1958) until one day, coming back from the dentist, on Third Avenue just below Fifty-Seventh Street, in the 1960s, I saw a gallery with $10 framed art prints jamming the sidewalk. I got another Picasso. It was a small reproduction, but it was framed: the first framed anything I'd ever bought! Years later, in the 1970s, in the graphics business myself, a publisher, distributor, artist-rep, I noticed that "same" gallery. It seemed to be exactly the same. It seemed to have the same huge banner over the door: 50% Off: Everything Must Go. This time I was going there deliberately, to see the owner, one "Alan." I had an introduction from "Artie," the owner of a string of crumby schlock galleries downtown. Artie was an Ashkenazi Jew who'd married into a Sephardic family: Alan was Artie's brother-in-law. Artie always gave me a hard time, then bought dozens of things from me, always four-figures worth, always paid cash on delivery (always almost-always: I did get a bad check from him once). (I had Ashkenazi customers who would have cut me off permanently if they known I'd so much as spoken to a Sephardim!) The framed junk on the side walk was still the same size, still $10. But this visit I noticed that by the entrance to the store began a series of huge price tags all slashing everything in "half": $50 crossed out / $25; $100 crossed out / $50; $150 crossed out / $75 ... and so forth. As one progressed into the store the crossed-out prices escalated to $200, $250, $300 ... $500 ... $1,000. Now: here's the hook: toward the back of the store one began to encounter Calders, and Dalis: and there were no price tags. Alan bought four-figures worth of stuff from me, I delivered on the spot, he paid me on the spot: cash, $1,400 or so. I came back a month or two later to see how he was doing. There was my stuff. Things on my price list for $100, Alan had up with a huge tag: $200, crossed out / $100! He was offering my stuff at retail, pretending it was half-price. I'd sold at Alan at 50/20. In other words: if my list price was $100, any retailer understod that they'd pay me $50 for it. $100 was what they sold it for, not me. I always quoted retail prices so their custumer would only hear one price: the public's price. Any retailer also understood that if they bought in volume, they could expect a special consideration: 50/20: fairly standard. Alan, Artie, sold, relying on ignorance. But here's the thing: in the back of the store, where only Alan himself reigned, where none of his Sephardic baseball team of salesmen trespassed, there were all these Calders, Dalis, I knew the list price of almost all of them. One Dali I didn't recognize. "Alan," I said, "What do you sell this one for?" Alan answered that Levine had it on his list at $500: he'd sold one that morning to a New Jersey lawyer for $1,200. The lawyer probably thought it was $2,400! The lawyer had been set up toassume a 50% discount. Actually Alan got him to pay whatever Alan thought he could get for it. The store's structure softened the sucker up: no one had to say anything to him.
Please don't misunderstand: I am not saying that the Sephardic Jews are crooks, and no one else is; no, I am saying that some Sephardic Jews teach their children some standard business swindles early: they don't wait till they're middled aged and discover them for themselves.
But what I'm really saying is that the culture is full of swindles while the culture pretends to represent law and order! It doesn't. It hasn't. It never will.
These are stories intended to suggest general patterns, not absolute structures. We live in a far from honest society. We live in an economy of planned obsolescence. But of course there are also durable goods, honest merchants ...
My girlfriend gets incredible service from Harry and Davids, from LL Bean ... Decades ago a friend lived with his wife in Colorado in a Coleman tent: they lived way out in the woods, 24/7 for a series of years. The tent had a three year warranty. Having no other home, two adults, going in and out of the tent, in all weathers, finally, after two years and eleven months, managed to get the tent entrance zipper stuck. Coleman apologized that it had discontinued that model which had sold for $100: So, sorry, but would you accept our Olympic model as a replacement? It's bigger and sells for $150. My friends had the balls to accept!
It isn't just merchants who are crooks.
The Swedish sailor has shore leave in Manhattan. He goes to Times Square. Oh, Boy! movies! whores! drug dealers! The avenue is lined with electronics store fronts. The sailor buys a boom box with a five year warranty, for $9.98 plus tax. The sailor puts in on his shoulder. It's not very loud, but what the hell. By midnight the boom box doesn't play at all, it has zero volume. The next day the sailor takes the boom box back to the little store front. There's the same window display, the same counter display, the same Sephardic Jew who sold it to him. "That warranty is no good here. The company you bought it from is out of business, bankrupt. This is a different company. We have nothing to do with that other company."
(The sailor's mistake was that he didn't have the whole Swedish navy with him in the little store front. I bet his warranty would have been good if the ship's gun were aimed through the store window.)
I was an art dealer. But before I was an art dealer, I was a student, and a teacher: perpetually poor, almost as it were deliberately poor: a monk of sorts. As a student I always had art prints on my cell wall: big Rouault, big Klee, big Picasso, I'd bought for $1 each, put up with thumb tacks. I never spent more that $1 for any art (until I sold pre-Columbian originals, and they were consigned to me, I didn't have to pay for them until after I'd been paid for them: I sold one for $40, I owed the guy $20: back in 1958) until one day, coming back from the dentist, on Third Avenue just below Fifty-Seventh Street, in the 1960s, I saw a gallery with $10 framed art prints jamming the sidewalk. I got another Picasso. It was a small reproduction, but it was framed: the first framed anything I'd ever bought! Years later, in the 1970s, in the graphics business myself, a publisher, distributor, artist-rep, I noticed that "same" gallery. It seemed to be exactly the same. It seemed to have the same huge banner over the door: 50% Off: Everything Must Go. This time I was going there deliberately, to see the owner, one "Alan." I had an introduction from "Artie," the owner of a string of crumby schlock galleries downtown. Artie was an Ashkenazi Jew who'd married into a Sephardic family: Alan was Artie's brother-in-law. Artie always gave me a hard time, then bought dozens of things from me, always four-figures worth, always paid cash on delivery (always almost-always: I did get a bad check from him once). (I had Ashkenazi customers who would have cut me off permanently if they known I'd so much as spoken to a Sephardim!) The framed junk on the side walk was still the same size, still $10. But this visit I noticed that by the entrance to the store began a series of huge price tags all slashing everything in "half": $50 crossed out / $25; $100 crossed out / $50; $150 crossed out / $75 ... and so forth. As one progressed into the store the crossed-out prices escalated to $200, $250, $300 ... $500 ... $1,000. Now: here's the hook: toward the back of the store one began to encounter Calders, and Dalis: and there were no price tags. Alan bought four-figures worth of stuff from me, I delivered on the spot, he paid me on the spot: cash, $1,400 or so. I came back a month or two later to see how he was doing. There was my stuff. Things on my price list for $100, Alan had up with a huge tag: $200, crossed out / $100! He was offering my stuff at retail, pretending it was half-price. I'd sold at Alan at 50/20. In other words: if my list price was $100, any retailer understod that they'd pay me $50 for it. $100 was what they sold it for, not me. I always quoted retail prices so their custumer would only hear one price: the public's price. Any retailer also understood that if they bought in volume, they could expect a special consideration: 50/20: fairly standard. Alan, Artie, sold, relying on ignorance. But here's the thing: in the back of the store, where only Alan himself reigned, where none of his Sephardic baseball team of salesmen trespassed, there were all these Calders, Dalis, I knew the list price of almost all of them. One Dali I didn't recognize. "Alan," I said, "What do you sell this one for?" Alan answered that Levine had it on his list at $500: he'd sold one that morning to a New Jersey lawyer for $1,200. The lawyer probably thought it was $2,400! The lawyer had been set up toassume a 50% discount. Actually Alan got him to pay whatever Alan thought he could get for it. The store's structure softened the sucker up: no one had to say anything to him.
Please don't misunderstand: I am not saying that the Sephardic Jews are crooks, and no one else is; no, I am saying that some Sephardic Jews teach their children some standard business swindles early: they don't wait till they're middled aged and discover them for themselves.
But what I'm really saying is that the culture is full of swindles while the culture pretends to represent law and order! It doesn't. It hasn't. It never will.
These are stories intended to suggest general patterns, not absolute structures. We live in a far from honest society. We live in an economy of planned obsolescence. But of course there are also durable goods, honest merchants ...
My girlfriend gets incredible service from Harry and Davids, from LL Bean ... Decades ago a friend lived with his wife in Colorado in a Coleman tent: they lived way out in the woods, 24/7 for a series of years. The tent had a three year warranty. Having no other home, two adults, going in and out of the tent, in all weathers, finally, after two years and eleven months, managed to get the tent entrance zipper stuck. Coleman apologized that it had discontinued that model which had sold for $100: So, sorry, but would you accept our Olympic model as a replacement? It's bigger and sells for $150. My friends had the balls to accept!
It isn't just merchants who are crooks.
Monday, January 10, 2011
Population, Politics
Knatz.com had a complex while still incipient Society section on politics, still not yet recreated here. Right now though I add something implicit throughout Knatz.com that I here state explicitly, and I hope succinctly. Humans live in groups. Politics is natural to groups. But beyond a certain threshold the benefits of groupness can turn toxic. Beyond a certain population size, politics are toxic.
I believe that humans in groups no larger than two hundred, two hundred and fifty, are cute (until they run into another group). Chieftainships, nations, super zoos ... Uh, uh. I don't want it. Poison.
Left alone, we'll kill ourselves. Super groups will disappear. I hope.
But we're not left alone. The Church puts us in church. The state puts us in school. The economy puts us in the market: where we destroy the earth, destroy the earth, destroy ourselves, riding roughshod over natural limits: putting penny (after penny) in the fuse box, and then the next fuse box.
But that's all right. Just wait long enough. We'll destroy everything. And then there won't be any more of us. Or, we'll fail to exceed populations of two hundred. Or, the number is actually 225, 500: I don't know: some number. Some modest number. (There must also be a limit on how many correctly sized groups there can be: the earth could lose two hundred groups of two hundred; but could a million groups of "two hundred" remain unknown to each other?)
Or I'm wrong. And we'll spread to the stars. And then we'll run out of fuel, out of food, out of breathability.
pk's point all long has been that there are no political solutions to these problems. One can talk Nazis into killing Jews, but not likely into tightening their chastity belt.
We sterilize mosquitoes. We castrate niggers. Why don't we try a population politically self-restrained at two-fifty? Politics. Human nature.
Hey: everything's gotta die. How else can anything better develop?
I don't believe there are any political solutions to our problems.
I believe that humans in groups no larger than two hundred, two hundred and fifty, are cute (until they run into another group). Chieftainships, nations, super zoos ... Uh, uh. I don't want it. Poison.
Left alone, we'll kill ourselves. Super groups will disappear. I hope.
But we're not left alone. The Church puts us in church. The state puts us in school. The economy puts us in the market: where we destroy the earth, destroy the earth, destroy ourselves, riding roughshod over natural limits: putting penny (after penny) in the fuse box, and then the next fuse box.
But that's all right. Just wait long enough. We'll destroy everything. And then there won't be any more of us. Or, we'll fail to exceed populations of two hundred. Or, the number is actually 225, 500: I don't know: some number. Some modest number. (There must also be a limit on how many correctly sized groups there can be: the earth could lose two hundred groups of two hundred; but could a million groups of "two hundred" remain unknown to each other?)
Or I'm wrong. And we'll spread to the stars. And then we'll run out of fuel, out of food, out of breathability.
pk's point all long has been that there are no political solutions to these problems. One can talk Nazis into killing Jews, but not likely into tightening their chastity belt.
We sterilize mosquitoes. We castrate niggers. Why don't we try a population politically self-restrained at two-fifty? Politics. Human nature.
Hey: everything's gotta die. How else can anything better develop?
Animal House In Absentia
Animal House: 1978 recalling the 'Sixties: 1968 - through the early 1970s. The United States was insisting on conducting war without regard for law or decency or morality or ethics or political support from home not hijacked by Nazis. The setting was a college: not a "good" college (high class educational fraud); a totally fraudulent C-tier college. The (anti)heroes are the animals of the title. (Or are they? Everyone connected with the culture the film depicts/imagines were disgusting hypocritical animals: in point, Dean Wormer, Mayor "Carmine," the other frats and sororities posed as superior to the blatantly venal, degenerate Delta house. Hell, instead of explaining why Milton was assigned, the lit prof insults Milton and hides behind authority!) (In my Free Learning Exchange, 1970, you could study Milton or not study Milton. It was up to you, to your parents, to your ambition, your talents: there was no curriculum!)
The king is bad, so is the pope, so are the barons, so are the peasants. Sodom and Gomorrah. Dead-on American satire: disgusting and proud of it. It's well cast (but not nearly as well made as it could have/should have been). I just want to recall it to introduce my real topic: the concept of In absentia. Dean Wormer has it out for the Deltas. (A civilized society would have had it out for Dear Wormer long before it bothered turning on the scum of Delta House.) (Picking on Delta House is like squashing rat turds instead of capturing the rat.)
Faber College fulfills multiple roles in the society: it keeps semi-privileged young adults out of the job market, it separates future management candidates from present turn-the-bolt robots, it ripens (while degenerating) future dropout cannon fodder ... Once upon a time colleges developed to keep young nobles out of the hair of the reigning nobles: simultaneously the colleges trained a few talented peasants to read, write, take dictation, convey messages, maybe even give advice: Thomas Becket getting prepped by and for Henry II, Chaucer being trained for Richard II ... John Jay learning law for the young US.
Any college can do that: the ones that are relied on to do it are Harvard, Yale ... John Jay's Columbia. "Faber" College has no such role. Faber College is kin to WalMart's Sam's Cola imitating Pepsi's imitation of Coke: somebody gets rich selling mildly narcotic tooth-rot fizz to the public, somebody else can right away sell some imitation mildly narcotic tooth-rot fizz to the public, then somebody else can manufacture a really cheap mildly narcotic tooth-rot fizz and sell it to the public. Thus: Cambridge, Harvard, Faber.
Is intelligence involved anywhere? Sure. Intelligence isn't entirely absent from anything humans do; but don't expect much intelligence, don't expect quality intelligence. Do expect cut corners. Expect hypocrisy, fraud. You look for God, you get the Church.
Anyhow: Dean Wormer has it in for Delta House. He shows that he has Nazi powers, that he's the CIA as well as the White House / Congress. Dean Wormer is also the Court. He reads some charges to some proxy Deltas. A Delta rep begins to respond. "That's enough of that!" says Little Hitler.
In Paths of Glory French officers intend to "make an example of" a few soldiers. They chose three soldiers by lot, then they charge them with cowardice, then they execute them. The condemned are given legal representation, imprisoned, and shot. Why the legal representation? Why not just shoot them?
Same reason I was given legal representation after the FBI arrested me. Same reason the son of Allah eats with his right hand and pisses with his left, same reason the Jew avoids pork. Empty ritual: while thieves and frauds maraud the earth: destroying the possibility of our kind of life, bringing our species to a much-deserved, long-overdue end.
America wanted to bomb whoever it wanted to bomb. In the words of Hollywood's Stone's Richard Nixon: "I'm the President of the United States: I can bomb whoever I want!"
Harvard / MIT was important to such a goal, but so was Faber College. Full fraud needs Coke and Pepsi and Sam's Choice: and a huge helpless narcotized public with teeth as rotten as their awareness. Harvard, Faber, and Hollywood. And the Times. And don't forget TV!
The idea behind judgments in absentia is that "everyone" is supposed to be entitled to a fair trial. A fair trial in civilization is a replacement for the defeated General Custer putting the victorious Crazy Horse in jail. The US has to pretend to give Crazy Horse a trial, it has to pretend that the trial is "fair." It has rituals one has to attend law school for a decade to learn to pretend that facts or truth or reason has something to do with Manifest Destiny, with reelecting "the President." And those rituals are best carried out if the "coward" to be convicted is drugged during the trial. But it's then important to wake him up for his execution. Paths of Glory is elaborate in showing the care with which the unconscious soldier is revived so he'll be conscious at his own murder.
I suggest that kleptocracies conduct most of their rituals with the possibility of truth or reason held in absentia. Christians will be most brilliant in refuting Jews if no Jews are present: or, if those Jews present have first been castrated, lobotomized, sanitized.
It happened to me all my life, since childhood, long before the US court convicted me without having read the thousands of essays of mine that they censored, without having understand a thing I said: to my attorney, or all my life. My attorney strongly advised me not to speak at the trial except to answer direct questions from the judge, and then to answer, Yes / No: or they'd rig a trial that would convict me for forty years. How much writing would I be able to do when I was 108? How at 108 could I overcome the gap of Knatz.com having been silenced from 2006 to 2046?
Of course it didn't really matter: I already knew, not three people out of four billion had understood what I was saying: and those that did pretended not to.
Boy, has Knatz.com been refuted over the years: but always with Knatz in absentia.
2011 01 11 There's a marvelous line in Animal House that I didn't work in yesterday. The Delta turds con some girls from a sorority at a college other than Faber to go out with them. At their own Delta toga party they'd contracted Otis Day and the Knights: they spot a marquee advertising that group, but the bar proves to be a "black" bar: our college kids are stuck as an unwelcome minority. Trying to fit in, to look harmless, to make conversation, one Delta schmuck asks a threatening local, "Where do you guys go to school?" !
The blacks are not college kids. They are not the privileged. They are the bolt turners, the canon fodder. They are not being held apart from the job market, the delay sure to be made up to them later via compensatory privileges.
The king is bad, so is the pope, so are the barons, so are the peasants. Sodom and Gomorrah. Dead-on American satire: disgusting and proud of it. It's well cast (but not nearly as well made as it could have/should have been). I just want to recall it to introduce my real topic: the concept of In absentia. Dean Wormer has it out for the Deltas. (A civilized society would have had it out for Dear Wormer long before it bothered turning on the scum of Delta House.) (Picking on Delta House is like squashing rat turds instead of capturing the rat.)
Faber College fulfills multiple roles in the society: it keeps semi-privileged young adults out of the job market, it separates future management candidates from present turn-the-bolt robots, it ripens (while degenerating) future dropout cannon fodder ... Once upon a time colleges developed to keep young nobles out of the hair of the reigning nobles: simultaneously the colleges trained a few talented peasants to read, write, take dictation, convey messages, maybe even give advice: Thomas Becket getting prepped by and for Henry II, Chaucer being trained for Richard II ... John Jay learning law for the young US.
Any college can do that: the ones that are relied on to do it are Harvard, Yale ... John Jay's Columbia. "Faber" College has no such role. Faber College is kin to WalMart's Sam's Cola imitating Pepsi's imitation of Coke: somebody gets rich selling mildly narcotic tooth-rot fizz to the public, somebody else can right away sell some imitation mildly narcotic tooth-rot fizz to the public, then somebody else can manufacture a really cheap mildly narcotic tooth-rot fizz and sell it to the public. Thus: Cambridge, Harvard, Faber.
Is intelligence involved anywhere? Sure. Intelligence isn't entirely absent from anything humans do; but don't expect much intelligence, don't expect quality intelligence. Do expect cut corners. Expect hypocrisy, fraud. You look for God, you get the Church.
Anyhow: Dean Wormer has it in for Delta House. He shows that he has Nazi powers, that he's the CIA as well as the White House / Congress. Dean Wormer is also the Court. He reads some charges to some proxy Deltas. A Delta rep begins to respond. "That's enough of that!" says Little Hitler.
In Paths of Glory French officers intend to "make an example of" a few soldiers. They chose three soldiers by lot, then they charge them with cowardice, then they execute them. The condemned are given legal representation, imprisoned, and shot. Why the legal representation? Why not just shoot them?
Same reason I was given legal representation after the FBI arrested me. Same reason the son of Allah eats with his right hand and pisses with his left, same reason the Jew avoids pork. Empty ritual: while thieves and frauds maraud the earth: destroying the possibility of our kind of life, bringing our species to a much-deserved, long-overdue end.
America wanted to bomb whoever it wanted to bomb. In the words of Hollywood's Stone's Richard Nixon: "I'm the President of the United States: I can bomb whoever I want!"
Harvard / MIT was important to such a goal, but so was Faber College. Full fraud needs Coke and Pepsi and Sam's Choice: and a huge helpless narcotized public with teeth as rotten as their awareness. Harvard, Faber, and Hollywood. And the Times. And don't forget TV!
The idea behind judgments in absentia is that "everyone" is supposed to be entitled to a fair trial. A fair trial in civilization is a replacement for the defeated General Custer putting the victorious Crazy Horse in jail. The US has to pretend to give Crazy Horse a trial, it has to pretend that the trial is "fair." It has rituals one has to attend law school for a decade to learn to pretend that facts or truth or reason has something to do with Manifest Destiny, with reelecting "the President." And those rituals are best carried out if the "coward" to be convicted is drugged during the trial. But it's then important to wake him up for his execution. Paths of Glory is elaborate in showing the care with which the unconscious soldier is revived so he'll be conscious at his own murder.
I suggest that kleptocracies conduct most of their rituals with the possibility of truth or reason held in absentia. Christians will be most brilliant in refuting Jews if no Jews are present: or, if those Jews present have first been castrated, lobotomized, sanitized.
It happened to me all my life, since childhood, long before the US court convicted me without having read the thousands of essays of mine that they censored, without having understand a thing I said: to my attorney, or all my life. My attorney strongly advised me not to speak at the trial except to answer direct questions from the judge, and then to answer, Yes / No: or they'd rig a trial that would convict me for forty years. How much writing would I be able to do when I was 108? How at 108 could I overcome the gap of Knatz.com having been silenced from 2006 to 2046?
Of course it didn't really matter: I already knew, not three people out of four billion had understood what I was saying: and those that did pretended not to.
Boy, has Knatz.com been refuted over the years: but always with Knatz in absentia.
2011 01 11 There's a marvelous line in Animal House that I didn't work in yesterday. The Delta turds con some girls from a sorority at a college other than Faber to go out with them. At their own Delta toga party they'd contracted Otis Day and the Knights: they spot a marquee advertising that group, but the bar proves to be a "black" bar: our college kids are stuck as an unwelcome minority. Trying to fit in, to look harmless, to make conversation, one Delta schmuck asks a threatening local, "Where do you guys go to school?" !
The blacks are not college kids. They are not the privileged. They are the bolt turners, the canon fodder. They are not being held apart from the job market, the delay sure to be made up to them later via compensatory privileges.
Friday, January 07, 2011
News
For decades now I've emailed snippets of interesting online news to my son (and family). Now I regret not having shared sharing more widely. From now on I intend to post such snippets here at IonaArc, a new News post per month. Today's and the rest of January's will get posted here: if I remember, budget time, energy ...
I'm not going to bother with links: you cut and paste:
die-offs common
In the past eight months, the USGS has logged 95 mass wildlife die-offs in North America and that's probably a dramatic undercount, White said. The list includes 900 some turkey vultures that seemed to drown and starve in the Florida Keys, 4,300 ducks killed by parasites in Minnesota, 1,500 salamanders done in by a virus in Idaho, 2,000 bats that died of rabies in Texas, and the still mysterious death of 2,750 sea birds in California.
...
On average, 163 such events are reported to the federal government each year, according to USGS records. And there have been much larger die-offs than the 3,000 blackbirds in Arkansas. Twice in the summer of 1996, more than 100,000 ducks died of botulism in Canada.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110107/ap_on_sc/us_sci_dead_wildlife_fact_check
tears, pheromones, sexual disinterest
Emotional tears are chemically different from the reflex tears that form when you get dust in your eye. But biologists have long puzzled over the true function of emotional tears: Are they merely cathartic, or do they have some other physiological role?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110106/ap_on_sc/us_sci_tear_signals
aging bones
Bones undergo a number of changes with age, the researchers found. In both men and women, the eye sockets became wider and longer. The distance between the most prominent part of the brow to the top of the nose decreased, while the cheekbones stuck out less and the opening of the nose bones receded. Meanwhile, the lower jaw shrunk in both length and height.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20110107/sc_livescience/facialbonestructurerevealsage;_ylt=AsW9M8E7FFPZ02RM_IRRzC0PLBIF;_ylu=X3oDMTNidGlzcXZmBGFzc2V0A2xpdmVzY2llbmNlLzIwMTEwMTA3L2ZhY2lhbGJvbmVzdHJ1Y3R1cmVyZXZlYWxzYWdlBHBvcwMzBHNlYwN5bl9hcnRpY2xlX3N1bW1hcnlfbGlzdARzbGsDZmFjaWFsYm9uZXN0
Whether it's the Beatles or Beethoven, people like music for the same reason they like eating or having sex: It makes the brain release a chemical that gives pleasure, a new study says.
The brain substance is involved both in anticipating a particularly thrilling musical moment and in feeling the rush from it, researchers found.
Previous work had already suggested a role for dopamine, a substance brain cells release to communicate with each other. But the new work, which scanned people's brains as they listened to music, shows it happening directly.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110109/ap_on_sc/us_sci_music_on_the_brain;_ylt=AkgEHjnAaApK6E2Ydzsd8rsPLBIF;_ylu=X3oDMTJxNXBocTUxBGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMTEwMTA5L3VzX3NjaV9tdXNpY19vbl90aGVfYnJhaW4EY3BvcwMxBHBvcwMxBHNlYwN5bl90b3Bfc3RvcnkEc2xrA3N0dWR5bG92ZW11cw--
Life on Earth has exploited just about every conceivable niche, tolerating extremes of temperature, salinity, pH and pressure. Conway Morris makes the case that Earth life thus exists close to the physical and chemical limits of life anywhere. [The Weirdest Life on Earth]
Further, Conway Morris says, evolution operates predictably, producing relatively predictable outcomes. These two suppositions argue that alien life, if it exists, should be fairly similar to terrestrial life, generating intelligent beings much like us. These aliens may look unfamiliar, but any differences would be skin-deep.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20110110/sc_space/studyifwerenotaloneweshouldfearthealiens;_ylt=AsgZ7gO6qcV9KklcQA.Kt.kPLBIF;_ylu=X3oDMTM4YjVycXRmBGFzc2V0A3NwYWNlLzIwMTEwMTEwL3N0dWR5aWZ3ZXJlbm90YWxvbmV3ZXNob3VsZGZlYXJ0aGVhbGllbnMEcG9zAzcEc2VjA3luX21vc3RfcG9wdWxhcgRzbGsDc3R1ZHlpZndlMzly
Why is north up?
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/441/on-maps-why-is-north-always-up
I explained this one to my son bk when he was eight or ten years old: as we waited on the line for the ski lift. I would ask bk questions of that type, let him search for answers. One time the chair arrived and we got on: the guy on line behind us called after us: Why?!
Obese black patients receive less weight reduction and exercise advice from doctors than obese white patients, a new study finds.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/hsn/20110115/hl_hsn/israceafactorinobesitycounseling;_ylt=AnA._M4_X.tUDZSm97lXEqhllpd4;_ylu=X3oDMTQxZTgxbWoxBGFzc2V0Ay9zL2hzbi8yMDExMDExNS9obF9oc24vaXNyYWNlYWZhY3Rvcmlub2Jlc2l0eWNvdW5zZWxpbmcEY2NvZGUDbXBfZWNfOF8xMARjcG9zAzEwBHBvcwMxMARzZWMDeW5fdG9wX3N0b3JpZXMEc2xrA2lzcmFjZWFmYWN0bw--
A 1997 letter from the Vatican warned Ireland's Catholic bishops not to report all suspected child-abuse cases to police — a disclosure that victims' groups described as "the smoking gun" needed to show that the church enforced a worldwide culture of covering up crimes by pedophile priests.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110118/ap_on_re_eu/eu_ireland_catholic_abuse;_ylt=AurL2F3Shel_RWDG13JqgavC9bQF;_ylu=X3oDMTNzZGRjdWM2BGFzc2V0Ay9zL2FwLzIwMTEwMTE4L2FwX29uX3JlX2V1L2V1X2lyZWxhbmRfY2F0aG9saWNfYWJ1c2UEY2NvZGUDbXBfZWNfOF8xMARjcG9zAzQEcG9zAzQEc2VjA3luX3RvcF9zdG9yaWVzBHNsawN2YXRpY2Fud2FybmU-
I'm not going to bother with links: you cut and paste:
die-offs common
In the past eight months, the USGS has logged 95 mass wildlife die-offs in North America and that's probably a dramatic undercount, White said. The list includes 900 some turkey vultures that seemed to drown and starve in the Florida Keys, 4,300 ducks killed by parasites in Minnesota, 1,500 salamanders done in by a virus in Idaho, 2,000 bats that died of rabies in Texas, and the still mysterious death of 2,750 sea birds in California.
...
On average, 163 such events are reported to the federal government each year, according to USGS records. And there have been much larger die-offs than the 3,000 blackbirds in Arkansas. Twice in the summer of 1996, more than 100,000 ducks died of botulism in Canada.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110107/ap_on_sc/us_sci_dead_wildlife_fact_check
tears, pheromones, sexual disinterest
Emotional tears are chemically different from the reflex tears that form when you get dust in your eye. But biologists have long puzzled over the true function of emotional tears: Are they merely cathartic, or do they have some other physiological role?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110106/ap_on_sc/us_sci_tear_signals
aging bones
Bones undergo a number of changes with age, the researchers found. In both men and women, the eye sockets became wider and longer. The distance between the most prominent part of the brow to the top of the nose decreased, while the cheekbones stuck out less and the opening of the nose bones receded. Meanwhile, the lower jaw shrunk in both length and height.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20110107/sc_livescience/facialbonestructurerevealsage;_ylt=AsW9M8E7FFPZ02RM_IRRzC0PLBIF;_ylu=X3oDMTNidGlzcXZmBGFzc2V0A2xpdmVzY2llbmNlLzIwMTEwMTA3L2ZhY2lhbGJvbmVzdHJ1Y3R1cmVyZXZlYWxzYWdlBHBvcwMzBHNlYwN5bl9hcnRpY2xlX3N1bW1hcnlfbGlzdARzbGsDZmFjaWFsYm9uZXN0
Whether it's the Beatles or Beethoven, people like music for the same reason they like eating or having sex: It makes the brain release a chemical that gives pleasure, a new study says.
The brain substance is involved both in anticipating a particularly thrilling musical moment and in feeling the rush from it, researchers found.
Previous work had already suggested a role for dopamine, a substance brain cells release to communicate with each other. But the new work, which scanned people's brains as they listened to music, shows it happening directly.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110109/ap_on_sc/us_sci_music_on_the_brain;_ylt=AkgEHjnAaApK6E2Ydzsd8rsPLBIF;_ylu=X3oDMTJxNXBocTUxBGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMTEwMTA5L3VzX3NjaV9tdXNpY19vbl90aGVfYnJhaW4EY3BvcwMxBHBvcwMxBHNlYwN5bl90b3Bfc3RvcnkEc2xrA3N0dWR5bG92ZW11cw--
Life on Earth has exploited just about every conceivable niche, tolerating extremes of temperature, salinity, pH and pressure. Conway Morris makes the case that Earth life thus exists close to the physical and chemical limits of life anywhere. [The Weirdest Life on Earth]
Further, Conway Morris says, evolution operates predictably, producing relatively predictable outcomes. These two suppositions argue that alien life, if it exists, should be fairly similar to terrestrial life, generating intelligent beings much like us. These aliens may look unfamiliar, but any differences would be skin-deep.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20110110/sc_space/studyifwerenotaloneweshouldfearthealiens;_ylt=AsgZ7gO6qcV9KklcQA.Kt.kPLBIF;_ylu=X3oDMTM4YjVycXRmBGFzc2V0A3NwYWNlLzIwMTEwMTEwL3N0dWR5aWZ3ZXJlbm90YWxvbmV3ZXNob3VsZGZlYXJ0aGVhbGllbnMEcG9zAzcEc2VjA3luX21vc3RfcG9wdWxhcgRzbGsDc3R1ZHlpZndlMzly
Why is north up?
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/441/on-maps-why-is-north-always-up
I explained this one to my son bk when he was eight or ten years old: as we waited on the line for the ski lift. I would ask bk questions of that type, let him search for answers. One time the chair arrived and we got on: the guy on line behind us called after us: Why?!
Obese black patients receive less weight reduction and exercise advice from doctors than obese white patients, a new study finds.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/hsn/20110115/hl_hsn/israceafactorinobesitycounseling;_ylt=AnA._M4_X.tUDZSm97lXEqhllpd4;_ylu=X3oDMTQxZTgxbWoxBGFzc2V0Ay9zL2hzbi8yMDExMDExNS9obF9oc24vaXNyYWNlYWZhY3Rvcmlub2Jlc2l0eWNvdW5zZWxpbmcEY2NvZGUDbXBfZWNfOF8xMARjcG9zAzEwBHBvcwMxMARzZWMDeW5fdG9wX3N0b3JpZXMEc2xrA2lzcmFjZWFmYWN0bw--
A 1997 letter from the Vatican warned Ireland's Catholic bishops not to report all suspected child-abuse cases to police — a disclosure that victims' groups described as "the smoking gun" needed to show that the church enforced a worldwide culture of covering up crimes by pedophile priests.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110118/ap_on_re_eu/eu_ireland_catholic_abuse;_ylt=AurL2F3Shel_RWDG13JqgavC9bQF;_ylu=X3oDMTNzZGRjdWM2BGFzc2V0Ay9zL2FwLzIwMTEwMTE4L2FwX29uX3JlX2V1L2V1X2lyZWxhbmRfY2F0aG9saWNfYWJ1c2UEY2NvZGUDbXBfZWNfOF8xMARjcG9zAzQEcG9zAzQEc2VjA3luX3RvcF9zdG9yaWVzBHNsawN2YXRpY2Fud2FybmU-
Sunday, January 02, 2011
Either / Or / Hermaphrodite
Some things are either/or and never mix. Some are either/or but mix on rare occasions. Fer'xample, gender: the fertilized egg chooses one end for "head," the other becomes "tail." In taxa with gender, the creature then becomes either female or male: among humans (and others I don't doubt): the default setting is female. (Male takes extra information.) Only rarely is a human born hermaphrodite: with both male and female characteristics: and e'en so, testimony about facts is untrained and nearly worthless: sometimes worse than worthless.
Lots of things are either/or. But if you think for a while you may come up with exceptions: you're alive or you're dead: is there ever a gray area? Have medical officers always been infallible? Then why are there all those scratches of the insides of coffins dug up from the last century? Wasn't someone a bit hasty?
There's a good joke on the subject, a limerick:
There was a young lady – Miss Starkie –
Who had an affair with a darkie.
The result of her sins
Was quadruplets, not twins:
One black, and one white, and two khaki!
Now there's a profundity right there: mixes can occur statistically across a population that don't show in an individual. "My" genes look "white"; but my grandson may look black (or might if I had any genes I don't know about). But never mind: I don't care about gender, or ethnicity. No, the above is mere preface to a little theo-cosmology.
I was raised to be a Christian. Jesus, the Creed said, went to hell for three days, then ascended to heaven. We, we were told, would go to either/or. We would go to hell; OR: we would go to heaven. You could be male, you could be female, you could be white, you could be black: you would be Saved; or you would be Damned! That was it!
My church painted no pictures of visiting hell for Monday but being back in heaven by Friday evening. But what if God has a population of hells and heavens? Would salvation or damnation mix across populations, statistically? Or how about mixing either/or with one possibility actualizing on one universe and the alternate possibility actualizing in another, complementary universe? What if I'm saved in Universe6E but damned in Universe6F?
Lots of things are either/or. But if you think for a while you may come up with exceptions: you're alive or you're dead: is there ever a gray area? Have medical officers always been infallible? Then why are there all those scratches of the insides of coffins dug up from the last century? Wasn't someone a bit hasty?
There's a good joke on the subject, a limerick:
Who had an affair with a darkie.
The result of her sins
Was quadruplets, not twins:
One black, and one white, and two khaki!
Now there's a profundity right there: mixes can occur statistically across a population that don't show in an individual. "My" genes look "white"; but my grandson may look black (or might if I had any genes I don't know about). But never mind: I don't care about gender, or ethnicity. No, the above is mere preface to a little theo-cosmology.
I was raised to be a Christian. Jesus, the Creed said, went to hell for three days, then ascended to heaven. We, we were told, would go to either/or. We would go to hell; OR: we would go to heaven. You could be male, you could be female, you could be white, you could be black: you would be Saved; or you would be Damned! That was it!
My church painted no pictures of visiting hell for Monday but being back in heaven by Friday evening. But what if God has a population of hells and heavens? Would salvation or damnation mix across populations, statistically? Or how about mixing either/or with one possibility actualizing on one universe and the alternate possibility actualizing in another, complementary universe? What if I'm saved in Universe6E but damned in Universe6F?
Literal Metaphor
I mean that literally really means
Please take my metaphor seriously!
I phrased that a couple of decades ago: writer pk was really cooking in the late 1980s (too bad so few noticed). The line got added to Knatz.com somewhere in the 90s. Knatz.com and all my domains got scuttled in 2007, following my arrest in 2006, the US censoring me in early 07. It got posted to my InfoAll blog when I recreated my Knatz.com / Personal / Overview / Training / section there.
The way I present it here is an oxymoron: a sterling example of macroinformation, as the title juxtaposes incompatible logical types: literal and metaphor commonly being understood to be opposites, like real and fictitious and macroinformation is processed information, information interpreted in the light of friction among logical types.
The idea is fundamental to pk thinking and teaching. But to get it properly you have to also understand pk informational cosmology, with it existential sets: Pleroma, Creatura, Sentiens, Persona ... Pathologica ... Only Pleroma, the physical universe, is in any sense literally real. All else is mental, informational (macroinformational: metaphorical!
You, me ... we are ideas! that change, grow, purify; decay, get polluted ... moment by moment.
And so long as overpopulated kleptocracies continue to compel stone-age belief systems, continue to coerce unsupportable ideas (like education, taxation, conscription ...) the idea that a Christ can (or should) save us is preposterous: almost as preposterous as the idea that universities (media or churches or Congress) are competent to process ideas.
And those of us who believe in liberty and learning and information may as well gargle gibberish.
Please take my metaphor seriously!
I phrased that a couple of decades ago: writer pk was really cooking in the late 1980s (too bad so few noticed). The line got added to Knatz.com somewhere in the 90s. Knatz.com and all my domains got scuttled in 2007, following my arrest in 2006, the US censoring me in early 07. It got posted to my InfoAll blog when I recreated my Knatz.com / Personal / Overview / Training / section there.
The way I present it here is an oxymoron: a sterling example of macroinformation, as the title juxtaposes incompatible logical types: literal and metaphor commonly being understood to be opposites, like real and fictitious and macroinformation is processed information, information interpreted in the light of friction among logical types.
The idea is fundamental to pk thinking and teaching. But to get it properly you have to also understand pk informational cosmology, with it existential sets: Pleroma, Creatura, Sentiens, Persona ... Pathologica ... Only Pleroma, the physical universe, is in any sense literally real. All else is mental, informational (macroinformational: metaphorical!
You, me ... we are ideas! that change, grow, purify; decay, get polluted ... moment by moment.
And so long as overpopulated kleptocracies continue to compel stone-age belief systems, continue to coerce unsupportable ideas (like education, taxation, conscription ...) the idea that a Christ can (or should) save us is preposterous: almost as preposterous as the idea that universities (media or churches or Congress) are competent to process ideas.
And those of us who believe in liberty and learning and information may as well gargle gibberish.
Saturday, January 01, 2011
pk Profile 2011
pk here. I'm the man who believes what I believed as a boy: that the state had no right put me – or anyone else – in school.
I'm the writer who believes that it's past time to take Jesus down off the cross, to stop torturing him, to stop perverting god, the truth, the nature of reality. Given sixty years to try, publishers have never published any of it.
I'm the scholar who reads Shakespeare's sonnets by mapping the Fair Love / Dark Lady onto the epistemological impasse between the Scholastic Realism of the Middle Ages and the heretical nominalism which gave birth to science (and modern individualism). The universities don't have a clue, interrupt me the way the public school did.
I'm the thinker who explains the universe in terms of information, complex information, processed, interpreted, multi-dimensional information, in terms of macroinformation.
I'm the reformer who offered digital librarianship, cybernetic data-basing / social networking / quality-control feedback, an anarchist internet of voluntary-only information: forty-one years ago. Corporations, the government ... waited: then stole it.
Sick of kleptocracy, of thieves in charge, I wrote a satire: and to jail I went: censored, my thousands of essays stripped from the kleptocracy's plagiarized internet. How did the government come to be in charge of what CERN, the Pentagon, and MIT had stolen from god, from Christ, from Ivan Illich, from me? And from you!
Note: none of my messages have been received; all were interfered with!
Now I have only one message:
I'm the writer who believes that it's past time to take Jesus down off the cross, to stop torturing him, to stop perverting god, the truth, the nature of reality. Given sixty years to try, publishers have never published any of it.
I'm the scholar who reads Shakespeare's sonnets by mapping the Fair Love / Dark Lady onto the epistemological impasse between the Scholastic Realism of the Middle Ages and the heretical nominalism which gave birth to science (and modern individualism). The universities don't have a clue, interrupt me the way the public school did.
I'm the thinker who explains the universe in terms of information, complex information, processed, interpreted, multi-dimensional information, in terms of macroinformation.
I'm the reformer who offered digital librarianship, cybernetic data-basing / social networking / quality-control feedback, an anarchist internet of voluntary-only information: forty-one years ago. Corporations, the government ... waited: then stole it.
Sick of kleptocracy, of thieves in charge, I wrote a satire: and to jail I went: censored, my thousands of essays stripped from the kleptocracy's plagiarized internet. How did the government come to be in charge of what CERN, the Pentagon, and MIT had stolen from god, from Christ, from Ivan Illich, from me? And from you!
Note: none of my messages have been received; all were interfered with!
Now I have only one message:
None of my messages have been received!
pk online
Post a Comment: or,
pk online (I'm salting this several places at several blogs.)
Knatz.com, InfoAll.org, Macroinformation.org, PKImaging, com, AgainstHierarchy.org, several thousands of essays, stories, reprints, graphics, were halted by my arrest for posting a satire which the addressee and the fed conspired to misread. My five domains were obliterated at my sentencing, 2007 February, where my public defender, having convinced me, possibly rightly, that I'd never get out of jail alive, or be able to tell what happened, if I didn't pead guilty, allowed the court its head to destroy me by introducing zero relevant evidence. Fair trial means the defense helps hold the victim still.
But that's alright: human beings are not competent to judge. God will show that at Judgment, as though it needed showing. If there is no Judgment, if the truth will never be shown to humans, that's alright too: we'll just be dead and gone, with no proper memorial. (Why should we have a memorial? We have one: in the Christian religion, which not three Christians understand.)
Meantime, my money evaporated, my business destroyed, all my testimonies obliterated, I try to restore Knatz.com (and other pk domain materials) to the pk blogs not censored by the state: adding other blogs, new since 2007, for the purpose.
Alphabetically:
CybRev
InfoAll
InsTic
IonaArc
Macroinformation
PaulKnatz
pkKlep
pkTheo
pkTools
pKnatzQuotes
Featuring by Importance:
pkToolsNothing is more important to the possibility of human survival than the proper development of intelligence. pk comments on some basic Thinking Tools.
MacroinformationNothing exists in the human mind except by information, as information. We think we see rocks and trees and cities; no, we see, we think, we are information. We grossly misunderstand everything without my theory of Macroinformation (a particular Thinking Tool).
InsTicInstitutions come to serve ends incompatible with their charter. Illich was the great critic of institutions: pk expands on Illich.
InfoAllpk's Ivan Illich and deschooling materials spun off from Knatz.com to InfoAll.org. First the blog supplemented: now the blog tries, weakly, to substitute.
IonaArcKnatz.com's original supplementary blog
PaulKnatzRecreates Knatz.com stuff not extended to IonaArc
pkKleppk comments on kleptocracy. I showed a way around kleptocracy, I got destroyed for my trouble.
pkTheoThe bulk of my messages have always been cosmological, theological, epistemological.
pKnatzQuotesGathering and further editing Knatz.com's quotes files: quotes by Speaker, quotes by Topic, quotes by pk.
Other pk blogs of receding importance:
pkBowdlerstillborn pk self-censorship: sex comments, etc.
HSCenterpk created this blog to show the Highlands Senior Center what could be done with a blog, what could be done with a domain: a waste of time: they just sabotaged my work.
EMail to:
pk@Knatz.com
pk@Knatz.com
pk online (I'm salting this several places at several blogs.)
Knatz.com, InfoAll.org, Macroinformation.org, PKImaging, com, AgainstHierarchy.org, several thousands of essays, stories, reprints, graphics, were halted by my arrest for posting a satire which the addressee and the fed conspired to misread. My five domains were obliterated at my sentencing, 2007 February, where my public defender, having convinced me, possibly rightly, that I'd never get out of jail alive, or be able to tell what happened, if I didn't pead guilty, allowed the court its head to destroy me by introducing zero relevant evidence. Fair trial means the defense helps hold the victim still.
But that's alright: human beings are not competent to judge. God will show that at Judgment, as though it needed showing. If there is no Judgment, if the truth will never be shown to humans, that's alright too: we'll just be dead and gone, with no proper memorial. (Why should we have a memorial? We have one: in the Christian religion, which not three Christians understand.)
Meantime, my money evaporated, my business destroyed, all my testimonies obliterated, I try to restore Knatz.com (and other pk domain materials) to the pk blogs not censored by the state: adding other blogs, new since 2007, for the purpose.
Alphabetically:
InfoAll
InsTic
IonaArc
Macroinformation
PaulKnatz
pkKlep
pkTheo
pkTools
pKnatzQuotes
Featuring by Importance:
Macroinformation
InsTic
InfoAll
IonaArc
PaulKnatz
pkKlep
pkTheo
pKnatzQuotes
Other pk blogs of receding importance:
HSCenter
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