pk's Arrest

2011 07 23 When the federal court attacked and destroyed my domains it not only evaporated my thousands of text files online but my thousands of graphic files too. My PKImaging.com hosted many of the graphics for IonaArc. I'm fixing missing images asap as I find them.

In the summer of 2006 I decided to move all Knatz.com modules about factitious human hierarchies, that is, about authoritarian institutions — nation-states, governments, churches, compulsory school systems ... to a new domain: AgainstHierarchy.org. All of the files at InfoAll.org, my deschooling domain, would be absorbed there. So would all of Knatz.com's may Society modules on civilization, on kleptocracy ...

In 1962 I'd begun graduate school, dreading it, but wanting to teach college English — while also writing fiction, publishing scholarship ... But my graduate school, while utterly capable of dispensing known ideas, proved wholly blind, deaf, and dumb to my suggestions for improving those ideas. McLuhan's publisher told him that audiences can't absorb more than a tiny percentage of new material. Somehow McLuhan got published, and read, and rich, and famous ... anyway. There's no telling though how many original ideas die on vine, unheard by the society. I don't doubt that the more schools we have, the less we will hear; that the more governemtn funds "science," the sooner science will wither, replaced by authoritarian orthodoxy. The Temple will kill any son of god over and over. It's a "pope" societies want obeyed, not any god: unless the "God" is firmly in the control of the Church with its pope.

My graduate school hadn't understood a word I'd said, from 1962 thorugh 1970. By 1967 I was teaching: while trying to devise a way NYU might understand my thesis: my reading of Shakespeare's Sonnets in terms of orthodoxy versus experience. That never happened. But in 1970 I'd discovered Ivan Illich and his proposal to replace compulsory school systems with voluntary public cybernetic data bases, reinventing the ancient market place as it were. Such record keeping should belong directly to the public, without government interference. Post human resources, inannimate resources, match individuals based on expressed common interest ... and post feedback on the human and inanimate resources. That is, a colleage of a person listed as a resource, could evaluate the colleague: Plank commenting on Einstein, for example. Einstein's student could also comment on Einstein — as a teacher: tell if she thought he was looking up her dress more than he was concentrating on physics, for example. I offered to help Illich to realize the creation of such networks. I'd already been waiting for an internet for years, imagining such in fiction, in dreams. Illich told me to found such an institution myself, he was busy. I did. The Free Learning Exchange, Inc., NYC, 1970.

Free Publicity came quickly. A few people registered their expertise, a few more sought companions for a specified activity: guitar playing, for scream therapy ...

I circulated fliers around Manhattan, heavily around NYU, where I matriculated, and around Columbia, my Alma Mater, where I still lived. Columbia's initial response was good; NYU's was hostile: though faculty from both were on my board of trustees.

All this was detailed at Knatz.com, and then at InfoAll.org.

The public dribbled a few dollars toward FLEX. A Church group gave a bit more.
Time Inc saw my cable TV public resouce listings, and draggd me down to Madison Avenue. But meeting me, they changed their mind about publicizing any grass roots internet. IBM hailed my idea as a good one, then dismissed it as not for them.

Note above all: Illich's proposed network was that saint's Jessu-inspired invitation for titular Christians to become actual Christians. As a would-be disciple of Jesus, I recognized Illich as fully mature saint, closer to God than I: and I too was close. Churches which didn't help us are lying hypocrites, in defiance of Christ. But never mind, I continue my narrative:

I was already approaching middle age. I'd already been living on borrowed money for more than a decade except to a couple of years worth of slave-wages as a college instructor. I founded FLEX without any capital of my own. The public could have donated the necessary millions: and saved billions: plus, earned some measure of freedom from government interference. It didn't. The public rejects Jesus while claiming that Jessu will save them?

Should Jesus save those who block resources from his disciples?

Anyway: NYU had ignored my brilliance as a doctoral candidate, had seen that my ideas didn't prosper. NYU had ever right to ignore my offer of a cheap internet in 1970 and in 1971 ... but having done so, NYU had no right to make use of the kleptonet CERN and the US offered years later.

The US coopted my Jesus-inspired internet. My internet needed no PCs. The public needed to learn no programming unless it wanted to. The public rejected cheap, and bought expensive, wasteful, planned-to-be-obsolete garbage eagerly.
Dating services, Google, Yahoo, Amazaon, eBay ... all imitate features of FLEX; but without being FLEX.

Has CERN, MIT, SRI, Congress, MicroSoft, IBM ... once called Illich or me in for consultation? Not once. No more than the '49ers asked Sutter what should be done with the gold they were stealing from his land.

Anyway, impoverished, getting old, after an adulthood of thwarted reform, both of scholarship, of fiction, and of society as a whole, I decide I'd try one last device to try to win the attention of the thieves, to embarrass them if I couldn't correct or save them: I write to English professors at NYU, the group that first hadn't heard me there (even though all of the names had changed). I wrote a black satire: sayin that time was running out. If they didn't finally hear what I'd been trying to communicate with them since 1962, if they didn't hear by say 2007 or 2008, giving them another year or so, I'd come to NYU and bloody their nose, and maybe more than their nose.

Understand: this is satire. Satire is what pk did before pk invented the internet with Ivan Illich. Satire is what pk has ALWAYS written.

The postings, and the letters, were filled with meta-signals, with macroinformation, saying "This is not literal."
But NYU, MORE illiterate than decades before, called the FBI, and the FBI arrested me.

The Public Defender was a brilliant lawyer, perhaps the most intelligenct I'd ever encountered up close, but he made it perfectly clear: I'd get no more fairness from a trial than I'd gotten from my life. The US was determined to destroy me, and the truth, no relevant considerations, such as the meaning of what I wrote, would be admitted.

Well. I'd sought a stage. I wouldn't get one. Therefore, the best thing for me to do was to see if I could live long enough to be released: and tell more stories (for the public to ignore).

The lawyer told me that if I insisted on talking about deschooling, and about the stolen internet, the jury could be almost guaranteed to give the judge license for a long sentence. If I pleaded guilty, agreed with the government's falsehoods, I'd go home in a year.

On my return home, my landlord put it differently: "They saw they had made a mistake; but, being who they are, they couldn't admit it: so they gave you the shortest sentence they ever give: fifteen months. That translates as: Innocent!"

The judge could have asked me to take down the couple of files NYU was offended by. To stay out of jail, maybe I would have. But he didn't. He just censored the entire section of AgainstHierarchy.org. Why censor two files when you can censor two dozen?
Hell, already in violation of the Constitution, why not go for total irreversible damnation?

draft didn't progress, all getting moved to pKnatz blog anyway

pk's Society Modules

My home page opened in the early 1990s with a couple of biographical files, then quickly began adding scholarly, philosophical pieces, especially on science and epistemology. By 2006 when I was arrested and my online modules were censored, pk files numbered around 4,000. The bulk of them were housed within a folder I called "Teaching." My recent attempt to restore the most important of those files, the science files, the modules I call my Thinking Tools, got freshly frustrated, Google moving a blog out of my control. Meantime a few modules from the Teaching / Society folder are almost as important.

2011 07 19 Modules I recreated from Knatz.com here after my censorship I move to PKnatz blog.

Thinking Tool Set update

Thinking will routinely seem warped to those using a different tool set. Advanced thinking will routinely seem warped to those using a primitive tool set.

Would the caveman follow Pythagoras' "proof"? Would Pythagoras have a clue what Godel had done? Or Mandelbrot?

If Popper and Wittgenstein freaked each other out, how would St. Augustine and Popper get along? How would God get along with Wittgenstein?

2009 11 22

When I posted the above Knatz.com was alive and well. When the fed censored my AgainstHierarchy.org all my domains tumbled. I'd long regarded my Thinking Tools as the most important section of Knatz.com: I labored to recreate some of those modules at my subsequent pkTools blog, but never mind: all Tools are now being assembled and developed at the Thinking Tools section of pKnatz blog. (At WordPress I can make menus by category (and draw a web of Pages!))