Arrow of Blame

A key reason I don't believe that humans are intelligent or honest enough to survive our own impact on the environment has more to do with viewpoint, with perspective, with psychology than with IQ: no matter what happens, while our minds function, we can blame something external for our misfortunes: The tobacco company made me smoke.

John Belushi reached one of his several pinnacles of comic excellence in the mind of this consumer when in The Blue Brothers his character is confronted, in a sewer no less, by Carrie Fisher's jilted bride: the slob has stood the cute girl up at the altar. Belushi rants a series of excuses: He ran out of gas, he was kidnapped by Martians ... climaxing with this narcissist screaming, "It Wasn't My Fault!"

Compare disgusting individual slob Belushi with the character of any human group, infantile narcissists all: nothing is ever our fault. All frustrations are always attributable to the previous administration, to the last generation ... America could expand to infinity, raping open the Gates of Heaven, if only it weren't for the Indians, or the Liberals, or the FreeThinkers, or the Communists ... or Hitler ... or the Women, or now the Terrorists!

Everything in the Jews' history would have been wonderful ... except for the Gentiles: the Philistines ... the Babylonians ...

Everything in God's universe would have been wonderful ... except for Lillith, for Lucifer ... (for narcissists other than that god himself.)

Cultures magnify their own immaturity(s) through their institutions: churches pretend to worship god, to defer to god, to study god's nature; actually they stifle all thought, all communications, except those they recognize as Given from the cradle. The myths central to Judaism emphasize this: Adam didn't listen (though he could blame Eve), the Jews didn't listen (though they could blame ... a list of things) ... Christianity doubles the ante: the Jews didn't listen even when it was God's Son who was doing the talking!

No one listens to pk because pk has always pointed out this pattern but without blaming any one but OurSelves!Notice: I don't exempt myself. I don't claim that my administration, had you made me your Stalin, would have been exempt from the laws of the universe: exempt from homeostasis, for example. No: we all try to preserve what we perceive as stability.Human groups don't listen to science either. One primary way we do that is to get some craven bully of an institution (like government) to fund additional delusional activity which we then mislabel science. In no time science will answer to the preference of the ignorant stupid lazy slob majority. We use universities the same way we once used churches: to pretend that we're interested in learning, in free speech, in free inquiry, in intelligence, in imagination ... while in fact we punish, torture and kill manifestations of it. My attempts to testify against my church, against my school, against my family went merely ignored until I actually did something courageous about it: offering to network people cybernetically in 1970, joining Ivan Illich to help lead his "deschooling" movement.Deschooling: I hate that term. I have always hated that term. Illich didn't like that term. Illich didn't invent that term. But we're stuck with it.
The trouble is: it puts what we were trying to de-emphasize, school, right in the center of things. Freedom fighters is what we were. We opposed coercion. We opposed vertical authorities.Illich loves "the church" of Christ-love. (So do I, though I don't call it a church.) We both hate the Church of coercion, of authority, of arrogance: of hubris.The group did what the group typically does: it shoved me onto a social side-rail, barely able to feed myself, until it found a way to plagiarize my decentralizing tool into another centralized-and-centralizing monopoly for the hierarchical authorities. The government (and government science)'s internet serves not diversity, not freedom, but authority: big corporations can swamp the dot.comers (but the dot.comers were already plagiarizing Christ-Illich-pk! paying no royalties.)

I don't say that all imperfections are my fault, or your fault ... or the fault of the Chinese. But the arrow of blame ought to be able to swivel in any direction as we try mental hypotheses. And when it comes to institutions, one solution might be suicide.

Imagine Ronald Reagan saying, "We want the government off our backs? Hey: how about I nuke DC!"

Faith

Falsity in a faith cannot rationally be investigated
within the circle of the faithful.
Faith was an important subject at Knatz.com (and its sister domains). I'll try to repost the main modules on the subject here at IonaArc, but today I start with a new statement, one just penned:

Falsity in a faith cannot rationally be investigated within the circle of the faithful. The falsity of this or that church cannot well be investigated by that church. Harder to see for moderns is that secular institutions block out the light as surely as any stone age temple.

American Democracy, the American Republic ... schools ... are our church: blinding, dumb making, incompatible with intelligence, with optimal learning. That's why there always has to be more than one church, more than one god, more than one epistemology, more than one science, more than one philosophy, always a metaN to metaM.

Advertising: Three Types

One of my favorite jokes in Bedazzled came when Peter Cook's Satan was issuing juvenile mischief to random folk passing him and Dudley Moore, the love-sick burger-flipper about to be tricked into selling his soul in new bit of juvenile Satanic mischief. Moore tells his long-time stage partner that his evil is really stupid. Satan confesses that he agrees: "The Seven Deadly Sins?" drawls Peter Cook: "I though them up in a single afternoon: the only thing I've invented since the Twentieth Century though is advertising!" The audience I was amid gave a good roar, me roaring in its midst. Unlike the bulk of my follows however I've written (and posted) some sharp comments on a smorgasbord of advertising evils. Today I regroup and synthesize:

First I assure you: I am not against advertising per se. I am against one modern degenerate form of it.

We need to distinguish among at least three different kinds of advertising.

1: Information: Identificaion / Location
The whale makes a sound that more than a few other creatures of the sea recognize as a statement of identity (and of location): I am a male sperm whale, basking around the surface of my summer waters, approximately such and such latitude by such and such longitude (and I sure wouldn't mind running into an accommodating female).
The elders place a crown on the head of the individual they believe (or hope to convince others) is magical, a useful tool to the people (and the elders). Those seeing the crown understand: that individual is the group's king: a symbol of the enduring qualities of their culture.
Hi, My name is Paul. I'm a writer, teacher ... sometimes lover ...

Those example advertising as simple declaration of identity and location. Here's a fourth example, a commercial example: Sol's Stationary, We sell office supplies: 123 Main St, 9-5 M-S, 555 777-1234.

I am as much for Sol's Stationary being able to say who he is, what he does, where he's located, and when he's open for business as I am for the whale to be able to declare himself ... or a yard-full of lightning bugs to flash chemical luminescence on a summer evening.

2: Misinformation: Misidentificaion / Mislocation
The Hidatsa sneaks up on the Mandan camp making a sound he hopes will be mistaken for the call of a screech owl.
Sol's Stationary says Sol's Stationary in all the ads, implying that what Sol sells is stationary. and though Sol does sell statinoary, some, just enough to maintain the pretense, his real product is cocaine.
Hi. I'm a priest. See my robe? I sell masses, hear confessions ... (But what I really do is have my eye on your wife, your daughter, your son ...)

Those example advertising as false advertising, declarations for the purpose of deceiving. I believe that it's a waste of time to tell a biosphere as full of misidentification and of identification that messages should be truthful. I wouldn't mind living in a society experimenting with honesty as long as the experiment were very cautious, ready to pull back into familiar dishonest at a moment's notice: risking that a moment might be far too slow. The thorough conservative wouldn't dare experiment with ANYTHING! In any case, both kinds of advertising are familiar: and both predate the birth of human beings: by more eons than we know how to count accurately.

Caveat:
Don't assume that distiguishing Identification from Misidentification is easy. More on that later.

But now we humans have introduced a third kind of advertising. First we'd have to identify it, then try to date it. There might be precursors in nature: study is too immature to tell. But here:

3: Irrelevance Confusion by Association:
Sol's Stationary says "office supplies: 123 Main St, 9-5 M-S, 555 777-1234: but also adds a carefully edited digital portrait of Brad Pitt: shaking water off his hat in Legends of the Fall, smiling, a few blond hairs loose in the sunlight. Sol has had liver-spots for a decade now, on the best day of his life he didn't look anything like the Brad Pitt. Sol is sending a signal confusing himself and his service with something he doesn't possess and that has nothing to do with the service of selling stationary. It's precisely like when the Lucifer of legend offered to trade knowledge of good and evil with Eve (and Adam). Did Lucifer possess what he was offering in trade? Really? Wasn't that supposed to be God's province?

---

Aiyaiyai, I just realized: I posted a reflection of advertising 2005 01 09 called The News as Advertising. I then edited it, moving it to Knatz.com. So far so good: but then I deleted it from Iona Arc! Now it's gone! I'm afraid I did that with dozens of posts, trusting the internet even though it's plagiarized from my work with Ivan Illich (and Jesus Christ)!

Now I know to restore it. I'll remount it immediately.

And more coming in this one too.

Mind Snatchers (moved)

Invasion of the Mind Snatchers
moved from Knatz.com to IonaArc to pKnatz blog.

Stuck

Stop the World I Want To Get Off was such a great title, it resonated with many of us. It has too many words for a good title by normal standards, and it requires much too much thought on the part of the public. Still, only retards will fail to grasp the impossibility of its demand. The phrase confuses "planet earth" and "world": the physical universe (Pleroma) is being confused with the social universe (Creatura / Sentiens (Pathologica)). Humans have no way at present (thank goodness) to "stop" the earth's spin or to much alter its ellipse around our star: and the mega-culture is hell bent on maintaining (and increasing) its momentum: no individual has yet been able to stop "Madison Avenue," or "America," or nationalism, or imperialism ... or faith-in-fuzzy-mindedness ... And if we could "stop the world," how would we "get off"? What would we get off onto? Is the solar system a trolley stop? Could we hop to the moon? to Mars? To a Macdonald's Asteroid? To a Hyatt Asteroid? To Planet PangoPango?

No. But the title is clear just the same: we're steeped in our culture, we're bound to our planet, but it's too much, it's killing us, it's driving us crazy ... there are far too many absurdities in our culture.

Every week at my Senior Center that specific manifestation of my culture demands that I stand with the group and Pledge Allegiance to the Flag. I have to pretend I'm murmuring the lies with the group: "one nation, under God, with liberty, and justice ..." How is the society that censors and imprisons God's messengers "under God"? The United States was founded by atheists; where did this lie come from? What liberty? We are all forced to go to school ... What justice? being tortured into pleading guilty so I'm on record as a confessed felon? And as I stand there, doing what I must do in order not to be returned to prison, so I can try again to offer my testimonies, my analyses over the internet, having been deprived from doing so to my society, to my family, to the college classes and reading public the culture has divorced me from ...

Then we sing God Bless America: and as its familiar lyrics round to a close my bully enemies stand close behind me and stage whisper to the back of my skull, "America: Love It, Or Leave It!"

Further, a friend I'm fond of dancing with, especially line-dances, interrupted a point I was trying to make to her by saying, "I know one thing: if anybody doesn't like it they can leave." Is Joyce (or are the bullies) in touch with my parole board? Can their innocence overrule the fed in preventing me from so much as leaving this specific federal district? I can't cross from Highlands County into Hardee County let along move to Brazil.

But why should I leave the territory of my birth? How does "my" country no longer belong to me? Why do rights belong exclusively to the kleptocrats, to the thieves? I want the kleptocrats to restore nature, and then drop dead: leaving me alone! (It would be nice if they restored nature, and also recompensed me for the things that have been stolen from me, plagiarized from me, sabotaged in front of me ... just before dropping dead.)

But none of what we wish for is how things work.

Ponder this analogy: The drunk is ruining his liver. The pot smoker is ruining his brain (so his mind will erode, and erode ...) The drunk's heart might not want to be contaminated by the drunk's ruined liver: but the heart can't jump ship. Neither can the lungs. Imagine the smoker's liver getting away from the smoker's lungs by jumping out of the body. How would the liver live without the drunk? Unless the liver just happens to jump when there's a medical staff there to put it into some scifi life-support system!

No, I'm stuck being a Christian, being an American, being human: or at least being among humans: my new species, my potential species, sabotaged, blockaded, poisoned.

Under God indeed.

Map / Territory : Generic / Brand

We humans evolved to think fast. In human terms, we do, it works (or seems to, so far). The corollary is that we don't always think well. Philosophy, especially the division of philosophy called science, helps. Still, it's a mess. Nearly all humans can think, after a fashion; far from all humans are adept at philosophy; very few humans, including those dressed in white coats and called by their employers"scientists," have an accurate idea of what science is: and even when we do, there are still limits to human intelligence that even genius doesn't automatically overcome. I say all that to remind us that Gregory Bateson told us that psychologists have said that the human mind is incapable of maintaining Korzybski's distinction between "map" and "territory." Korzybski said that we commonly confuse the Name with the Thing — Bateson says that psychologists say that we will continue to confuse the Name with the Thing, and the Menu with the Meal ... the Map with the Territory.

I've been re-emphasizing all this recently as part of Macroinformation, my study of complex Information. I subsume all or nearly all under semiotics, insisting that there isn't anything that we know, think, believe, process ... that isn't symbol or sign: from photons hitting the retina, to synapses firing, to saying, "That is a tree." We fast thinkers look through the telescope and say, "I see a star": when what we "see" is "light" which our culture interprets (in the English language) as a "star." We fast thinkers reify our common perceptions, rapidly forgetting, if we ever noticed, that all we have are signs, symbols, ideas: we have no direct, non-symbolic contact with ... anything: and certainly not with anything we should call Reality, or the Universe ...

No matter what we think, qualify it: it's human thought. And if we say, "God thinks it," or "The President says it": well, it's still human thought: thought by symbols, expressed by symbols. In other words ... rather, in the words I started with, nearly everything with us is "map"; though we routinely imagine we are dealing with "territory."

OK, that pk has been saying, again and again, since 1979: online since 1995. I review it, restating it here, to say something new, original with me this morning: modern culture, already liable to map / territory confusions, is dedicated to additionally confusing Generic with Proprietary: and the confusion is deliberately induced by our ... um, shall I say it? ... owners? (But of course our owners, giant multinational corporations for the most part, are themselves owned by the culture, the ghastly, ever more monolithic, culture.)

"Tissue" means something thin, flexible, of next-to-no-substance, disposable. The modern marketplace, with a cultural mandate to make everything-the-same, sells paper tissues in a box. The company manufacturing them calls itself Kleenex. Good, fine. What's neither good nor fine is what the company does next: it tries to get us, the buying public, to confuse the thing we've been taught to need, a "tissue," with a particular brand name of tissue: Kleenex. So: we'll no longer want a drink; we'll want a soda; we'll no longer want a soda, we'll want a cola; we'll no longer want a cola, we'll want a Coke. We'll no longer want a computer, we'll want a PC. We'll no longer want a graphic user interface, we'll want Windows. See? Apple had hoped we'd want Mac.

But that's just the beginning. When I can I'll go on with other deep difficulties:

Culture is rigged to substitute custom for nature: clothing for example. We'll defend the custom As Though it were in our genes!

Invisible Audience

Once upon a time the thief left fingerprints without knowing there could be such a thing as fingerprints. How many people realize that we sometimes leave footprints even though we can sometimes see our footprints? Now that we know about fingerprints, some thieves wipe surfaces they're aware they touched hoping to erase their fingerprints: but what traces do we leave that we yet have no science for?

The Jews imagined God walking in the garden and calling for Adam while Adam hides from God, ashamed. Primitive Adam imagines that if God can't see him the way he Adam sees, then God won't know where he is. But the Jews imagined God knowing what Adam was doing even when God couldn't "see" him. This and the other sect of Protestants imagine that God "saw" Adam eating the fruit before Adam ate the fruit, even before Adam existed.

We drop napalm on little girls. If we keep the press away, no photographers, we imagine that we can do anything: and no one will know!

How do we know that everything we do isn't on TV at Aldeberan?

Why hasn't Jesus come back to do what he promised? Maybe he has: and we didn't notice. Maybe he can't. Maybe he never meant to. Maybe he did mean to but God had other plans. ... Or maybe our running around like dogs that don't feel the leash has entered its third millennium of hit reality show around Betelguese. The sponsors won't allow anything to interfere.

Imagine that you're an actor on the stage. Imagine that you're in the middle of "To be or not to be." Can you see the audience? The light is low, but there's a spot light on you. The lights in the theater are dim, but they're not at zero. Can you see through your own glare to see all those dim faces out there? Do you know which ones are looking at you? which ones are asleep, or necking, or bored? How can you even try to see while you're concentrating on your lines? Maybe you don't have the words memorized perfectly yet. But even if you have them as perfectly as Burbage would once have had them, so well you could paraphrase and Sweet Will might not mind, might not even notice? You're still concentrating on the meaning! Who could multi-task so skillfully that they could act, and watch, and contemplate ... all at the same time? even if they're already a genius? even if they're already a double- or triple-genius?

We don't know who sees us. We don't know what they think. If we see, it's like veiled. My name-source Paul may have been full of shit on faith, but he had that through a glass darkly part just right. The mouse doesn't know that the owl sees it, though the mouse is keenly aware that there are predators. Parents try to control their children with threats of bogymen, but we may be leaving more traces than we know (or fewer!) regardless of what the parents mean.

Competent Theology

The previous post referred to the common belief that God is competent to know the truth. I was raised to believe that with no doubt. At the same time I was raised to be aware of some basis for our beliefs: Thomas saw the nail holes in the resurrected Jesus' hands ... Unfortunately for the common brand of theological epistemology I also became aware of other, more careful, more imaginative, more cautious epistemologies: to whit, science (and to philosophy not beholden to stone age theologies): the evidence must be evident to a group, any individual must be allowed to falsify the creed, experiments must be repeatable ...

So the mass audience trusts God's judgment: if God says the Jews really own the Canaanites' land, then the Jews must really own it: after all, it's really God's land anyway, isn't it? it's really God's everything. But shouldn't God be able to show us some evidence? (And no matter how much evidence God shows, what makes human audiences competent to judge the authenticity of evidence?)

Crazy Horse and his people had been living in the shadow of the Black Hills, at the Black Hills time of year, for longer than any Lakota could remember: how did their land and their sacred Black Hills suddenly belong to Washington DC and to the generals DC sent after Crazy Horse defeated Custer?

We should believe God's Judgment because God created the world! How do we know that? Evidence suggests that the universe came into being way longer ago than ten billion years. (How were "years" measured six billion years before there was an earth? How credible is God's claim to have made it six thousand years ago when it was already fourteen billion years old? Why should we trust the beliefs of any congregation of illiterate mis-readers of group fiction?)

If God says that Matthew Arnold was really the hero and George Washington the goat, does it suddenly become true? Should Matthew Arnold believe it? Should George Washington? Should Martha Washington?

When God tells us these things, will be be "telling" us? with words? in what language? why should we believe that we are competent to understand God no matter what language he addresses us in?
When the federal judge repeated the FBI's lies about me I knew that the federal judge was wrong, that he was a fool as well as a moron (or was he merely another bald-faced liar?)

Fools and morons are always asking me if I believe in God. Why can't any of them ever understand my simple answer: Never mind my relationship with God (It's personal, it's profound, it's direct ...); understand this: it's man I don't believe in! It's human institutions I don't trust.

Never mind how trustworthy I believe my own judgment to be: it's my mistrust of YOUR judgment that's relevant here.

Judgment

Christians are raised to hope for justice at Judgment Day. We're raised to believe that God is competent enough to know the truth. The older I get though the more trouble I have, the further I have to bend over backwards, to imagine any justice that could follow from history. We occupy, we rule, land stolen from others: from natives, from other countries, other cultures, and in the case of Sutter (among others), even from other "white" European settlers. What's God going to do with us? How could the Mohawk be compensated for the loss of "New York" state? for their near genocide? How would God compensate the Sabine men killed so the Romans could rape their Sabine women?

Knatz.com had a number of answers, more than one imagining on the subject. Here follows this morning's new draft on the subject:

---

Catholics succeed in scaring the bejesus out of children with threats of hellfire: hellfire following Judgment. God will judge. God will judge children who don't behave. Notice: churches routinely appeal to the self-regulation of the already-over-regulated: children, women, slaves ...
The Jews failed to scare the massagan out of those they were trying to impress: other people out-competing, out-cheating, out-hustling the Jews in the area of the world over-developed and over-crowded the longest. The Bible imagined the Jews' God judging the "nations": bullying those the Jews envied on behalf of the Jews: Today you steal my lunch money: tomorrow my big brother, my big friend, my big father, God, MY God, the owner of the universe, will make you lick my balls, make you eat my turds ... You watch out, God will give me Your lunch money.
Neither Catholics or Jews listen to me much when I imagine god judging the judges: Hitler and his judges, Stalin and his judges, Nixon-Bush and their judges: the judges who presided while my god-inspired fiction wasn't published, while my god-inspired scholarship was interrupted, while my Jesus-inspired public network was degraded, then plagiarized, while my outrage-inspired satires were censored: barred from the internet stolen from Jesus, Illich, and me. But that's nothing: Protestants absolutely never understood anything I said (that is, they understood it so instantly, saw where it was going, that they interrupted me, thinking that then it couldn't go there, that god couldn't make it go there.

Wait a minute, step back for a second: there's a fundamental, un-resolvable problem here. God, however you spell it, is so ambiguous a term, that the second you say it, you've confused and misled everybody. When I was a kid God was palmed onto us as "the truth." That's the main thing that god still is to me: the essence of things, the truth: not Newton's model of gravity, not Einstein's, not the word gravity, but the thing gravity: gravity in the actual universe; not in our pathology of misunderstandings, interruptions, and lies. But, simultaneously, when I was a kid and didn't know any better, God was a magician, Jesus was a magician: a worker of miracles. Now I repudiate magic and all magicians, there being no true examples that I can discover with anything like objectivity.

But, damn it, it's hard to give up hope of a big brother who'll fight your battles for you, and win: all for you, no payment necessary, cheap thanks more than enough. On the other hand, if you grow up at all, even 1%, then it's impossible to give up the idea of the truth: the idea that if we poison the earth, then keeping false records about the environment, refusing to understand what the scientists have tried to tell us, that therefore the poison won't be poisonous.

No. Bateson said it: God is not mocked: meaning, the poison is still poison, no matter what lies we tell, no matter how false our record keeping: no matter what we censor, who we crucify.

---

Here though is a problem I've always had, and still have, a little bit, with the idea of justice: divine judgment. If the Pope is supposed to be infallible, it's God the Catholics really imagine as infallible, isn't it? If God judges it so, it will be so ... right? These days I have trouble imagining anything infallible, I don't even want an infallible god. Be that as it may, put that aside for a moment.

The Jews' God had a bunch of commandments about giving God a monopoly on our admiration, but then he added something about not stealing. Now that's a commandment that almost any civilization will endorse, or at least pretend to endorse, there being no civilizations that aren't based on theft in the first place: didn't we subtract farmland from wilderness to have civilization in the first place: isn't theft what civilization is? (But can you imagine a caveman who wouldn't steal? Could you imagine a monkey that wouldn't grab the candy?

Back teaching, my office-mate told a joke that remains a favorite of mine: I quote how I'd already repeated it at Knatz.com: The English toff sees an ancient farmer in his ancient Irish field. "If you could have anything you wanted, anything in the world, what would it be."
The old peasant fixes the aristo with his eye.
"Judgment," he says. With venom.I'm with the old Irish peasant, that's what I've long wanted: judgment. But what I want to see judged isn't the child, isn't the disobedient girl, or the uppity wog; I want to see what God does with General Custer! with General Motors!

Illich told a story of an old Mexican peasant who say every day in front of his shack. A road was built, right over the spot where he sat. The old man still sat there. One day along comes an American in his car and runs the old guy over. The driver was upset, but blamed the guy sitting in his old spot in front of his old shack. He was "asking for it," sitting in "the road." That's what I want to see: I want to see that driver judged. And with him I want to see the road-builders judged. But not by the God who gives the Canaanites land to the Jews! I want to see the judgment made by the actual god, the actual truth of things, by the actual universe.

Unfortunately, that is the judgment that we see, constantly, every day: the truth. But we don't see the truth, we see only the lies we tell ourselves: The Lakota land is ours, God gave it to us. We were able to take it, so it's ours. And the poison we've poisoned everything with isn't poison: it's our halo, our crown.

---

I'd written an awful lot about Judgment in my fiction, in my novels, in my diary, and at Knatz.com. The fed censored my writing against artificial vertical human hierarchies. My family let my internet accounts lapse while I was in jail. My host destroyed all my data: five domains, evaporated, 3,000 files, 2,500 of them text files: whole chapters of books, whole books! Books otherwise hard to find! Chapters otherwise unpublished! I'll try to get it back up. Some of the materials on judgment I'll try to add as a special section of my PaulKnatz blog. Meantime this file forecasts some of that old material: here, at IonaArc, my original blog: a tiny supplement to the huge Knatz.com; since, its replacement.

But here's one detail repeated here and now: I suspect that this universe is merely a petri dish in which god lets this and that type of germ fight it out. What god learns from our petri dish and from other petri dishes, goes into other, ever-more-creative universes: any of which may surprise, may go wrong. Life, evolution, is not infallible: and has no point. But neither is it as stupid as we pretend.

---

The following post, Competent Theology, will develop related branches of this theme.

---

I really need to gather all my K.-related comments on the concept of Judgment and post them to this blog. Here a new note meantime:

Will Judgment Day commence when God is ready? or will God (and the world) have to wait while Marie Typhoid (and her court) decides what to wear?

By "Marie Typhoid" I mean to suggest Christian overtones, overtones of Marie Antoinette, and Typhoid Mary of US fame.

Miss California Fired?

An internet headline today says that Miss California was fired. Excuse me, isn't that like moving the "Brooklyn" Dodgers to California? The public thinks that a baseball team represents Brooklyn, that the team belongs to the city, that the team is a part of the city ... No, no. The team was a privately owned business. It could do whatever the culture would let it get away with — and apparently that was a great deal: including moving to another continental coast. Now Californians are encouraged to believe that "Miss California" is somehow of and for California. No, her image is owned by a private enterprise: the girl given the title, and the perks that come with it, must conform to what the privately owned business expects: California and its citizens, the world and its citizens be damned.

Once upon a time in the kleptocracy we call "England" the people believed that what they called the Commons was owned in common by all "Englishmen": "men" in that case also meant the women and children "belonging" to the men as well. In other words, if there was a sheep grazing on the Commons, that sheep was common property. Then all at once the "Commons" turned out to belong to this or that friend of the king. Suddenly your ordinary Scotsman discovered that this and that familiar part of Scotland belonged to some Englishman.

Whoever owns the LA Dodgers, or whoever owns Miss California, had better watch out: some kleptocrats may decide she belongs to Ted Turner, or to Bill Gates, or to god-help-us, The Donald.

Once upon a time it was easy: everything belonged to God. Of course the trouble with God was that he belonged to the Jews. No: then he belonged to the Emperor Constantine. No: then he belonged to the Catholic Church. ... Then God belonged to the Puritans. Now God belongs to any fundamentalist who's illiterate enough and loud enough.

I think we're going to find out too late that none of its belongs to any of us. 'Cause we'll all be dead: of terminal hebetude.

Trouble in Sentiens' Pleroma

The other day I noticed that I'd made my usual points about the trouble Galileo got into with the Church and the universities over his discovery of Jupiter's satellites. Years ago Knatz.com and this blog established a post or two on common pk symbols: god, Jesus ... Galileo, Abelard ... My Galileo point also jibes with important points made thus far principally at my Macroinformation blog. Gregory Bateson distinguished between the universe of Pleroma, the physical universe, and Creatura, his name for the universe of life. I extend his point to distinguish between Creatura and his sub-universe Sentiens, the universe of consciousness, of intelligence, of self-awareness.

Now: Galileo's difficulty was with establishing a fact about Pleroma within a self-satifisfied authoritarian society, wrong in its map of Pleroma. Imagine how much more difficulty he would have had had he tried to establish basic truths about the Church, the universities, about human society!!!

People like facts to be flattering, not true.

God vs. Nature

The Bible has God tell Adam to go forth and multiply. The trouble is Adam was already going forth and multiplying all over the place, and had been for two million years before God created him. Nature, to continue with personifications, already had expansion, colonialism, a characteristic typical of species: an environment fills with one set of creatures, things change, and another set takes over. Nature though has developed creatures capable of questioning old imperatives: should we just multiply, mindlessly? Or should we pay attention to results and actually try to survive? maybe by not multiplying quite so blindly.

Humans developed intelligence. We're not the first, maybe we're not the last. But we humans did develop intelligence conspicuously. And civilization makes a big deal of human intelligence. Except that civilized man, the only humans who get much attention in the press, are precisely the ones so slow to pick up on results!

Stonewall it, said more than one presidential administration: as more than one kingdom had said it before.

Catch-22 had Yossarian working on the wound he found on Snowden. The trouble was, while Yossarian was lavishing all his attention of that wound, Snowden's guts were falling out of a different wound in his back!

Cliff's Edge

I remember Bucky Fuller saying that civilization was right on the edge of a cliff: in a position to get better footing and save ourselves or to lose our footing and perish. (That was 1968 or so. He was speaking at Colby College in Maine where I was an instructor in the English department.) Bucky added that civilization had been seen to be on the edge of a cliff before. I saw all that to be true. But then Bucky added a point that really wowed me: he said that mankind was routinely on the edge of a cliff. It's not that we're imagining dangers: a little kid with a bogey man to worry about; the dangers are real, and it's mankind's signature trick to find a new threshold of danger as soon as the previous problems are solved.

New Threshold of Danger

So far we've been adequate to the task. And we've been lucky. It wasn't entirely luck: our not following other species march of oblivion relates to our abilities. But it wasn't entirely skill: a great deal of engineer's "redundancy" came with the environments we've come wrapped in. If we polluted that stream we found another stream; if we exhausted that resource, we found another resource. Plus ça change ...

There's nothing new about an oddball seeing danger and some priest of some church shouting him down to the flock:
Don't worry about a little sin. Buy me dinner and I'll see that God forgives you.
Don't listen to Galileo telling you that Jupiter has moons; listen to your church's denials, to the denials of your university professors ...
Don't pay any attention to your experience of the government's hand in your pocket, ignore the school board kidnapping and brainwashing your children; listen to the school ... and the government ... and the press ... and big business ... when all join hands and tell you, You're Free!!!

No. I think the cliff will win. Soon.

Society & Communication

Society & Communication

We are a social species, have elaborate communications tools. Obviously we have language, signs, assorted media. Even a stranger amid a different language group has ways to communicate "I am hungry," "I am thirsty," "I'm horny," "I need a latrine ..." Those points don't need me to elaborate them. And some other odd points about communication have already been made publicly by this and that scientist, by this and that social theorist, in this and that field.

For example:

The original purpose of language was for the male to steady the female while convincing her that she should risk her life in child birth by allowing him to copulate with her.

The original purpose of language was to lie, to deceive ..."Who goes?"
"Friend," while preparing the knife.

The original purpose of mass communications was social control.

...

What I bring here today are refinements on explanations more kin to those last on my list than first. In brief: I experience both personally and from "history" that humans, social man, are open to some types of communications, but closed to many others. Communications that we are open to are much in evidence, are much discussed, are no secret; but we are not aware and don't want to be make aware of communications that we are closed to: Galileo's contemporaries did not want to hear that the planet Jupiter had moons: they'd believed that the earth was the only body with satellites. Finding that satellites were common was a demotion for our faith in our uniqueness. (People still don't want to acknowledge how common "uniqueness" is!) Typically, we refused to learn what we had learned, except after a struggle.

Fortunately, the major religion of the west tells the situation both in the Old Testament of the Jews and the New Testament of the Christians: God talked to Adam, Adam didn't listen; Moses talked to the Jews, the Jews didn't listen ... Jesus tried to bring new messages from God, the Jews' high temple, supposedly devoted to this God, didn't listen ... In "fact," all the secular authorities, Roman and Jewish, ganged up, in violation of their own laws, to torture God to death ...

(The trouble is, this literature is closed to intelligent discussion: unless prescribed misinterpretations of the documents in question are subscribed to: you have to pretend that this fabulous complex, contradictory literature, is literally true, and pretend it in the face of the evidence (and lack thereof).)

Any one of Galileo's predecessors could have made a good living endorsing any of the Church's preposterous claims about itself; god help the poor slob who tried to tell any truth not of standard prescription. Today we have universities, departments of science, of history, newspapers, scholarly journals ... a zillion scholars with tenure ... but the situation is the same. Actually, the situation may be worse. Today's "Church," the secular state, has its hands deeper into public resources than any church of old ever had. With federal funding of universities, and of science, and of history ... you can pretty well guarantee that there can be no science, no history ... no real universities.

Our authorities are convenient for certain interests in the short run but are driving us toward extinction in the long run: a long run that may end abruptly at any minute. Once a would-be authority has actual authority, then it's not hard to tell the robot sheeple that they have free speech, or that they're intelligent, or literate, or the best and the brightest ... But a people could be those things only if they were alert to the tricks of false authorities: and humble about their own fallibility.

(How did Christians ever come to be so blind to their own theory of Original Sin? We believe in it only when we also believe that a little superstition neutralizes it!)

In 2006 I was arrested for complaining (over decades) that the kleptocray had stolen its egregious internet by perverting the voluntary public networking designed by Ivan Illich and offered by me in 1970. In 2007 the federal court censored my AgainstHierarchy.org — but my host deleted all of the 3,000 data files, 2,500 of them text, destroying my five domains in their entirety: art, biography, science, philosophy, information theory-and-fact, networking theory-and-fact ...

The papers mentioned only that a local terrorist had been arrested. No mention was made of censorship. Children are still told that they have free speech by a still compulsory school system. And now, released, horny, alone, when I attend a senior social, I'm expected to join in the Pledge of Allegiance, where the US claims to be "under God"! My fellows can't read my accounts of things online, but all can search for the government's concoction of lies: the FBI quoting my actual words but totally changing the meaning with their editing. (Give Leni Riefenstahl the editing room and she could make Hitler look good; give the kleptocrats the editing room, the Church, the US, the FBI ... and they can make saints, god, and scientists look bad. Look bad to morons, that is. Unfortunately, that's all we've got more than a dozen of.)

---

2010 11 10 Knatz.com referred to Galileo a great deal, so do my blogs, but it astonishes me to realize today that there's a major reason why I so sympathize with, identify with, and admire Galileo that I haven't mentioned. The Church inherited a traditional cosmology: anthropo-centric. Galileo saw through his telescope, firm evidence, that Jupiter had satellites. Conventional wisdom held that to be impossible. Church and academe tag-teamed him, threatened him with torture. Fine, happens all the time. Genius, sainthood, inspiration aren't as rare as we pretend. Jesus said lets love one another, we crucified him. Fine, that's our nature. But: here's the thing, the thing that puts Galileo and pk on the same page, just as pk and Jesus are on the same page: the Church continued to use Galileo's star charts while they persecuted him!

See? If the Yahoos kill the god, so what? They'll just fail sooner. Good. But they don't just kill the god! They kill the god and then steal what the murdered god was offering!

The retrograde society beat up on me because I wanted to take Jesus down off the cross. The retrograde society refused to understand a thing I tried to teach it about literature, about Shakespeare, about information ... Then the retrograde society rejected my offer of a cheap internet in 1970. But then almost immediately that society was supporting people who offered dating services: the dating services coming after my offer of the Free Learning Exchange, Inc., but the dating services were offering only a fraction of what FLEX offered while charging vastly more than FLEX asked for in average user cost.

If Winchester offers a better rifle, hunters don't have to adopt it. They can hunt rabbits with a rock. But it's wrong to starve Winchester and then plagiarize his improvements. We rejected Jesus: good for us, now we're damned. We shouldn't knock him down, kill him, and steal his salvation! That's exactly what we try to do. (Of course it won't work. We can steal an illusion of salvation, but not real salvation: real salvation can come only from our learning what's required, and our changing our behavior.) The Church wanted both worlds. It wanted the old cosmology, but also wanted the new profits brought by more accurate navigation: based on more accurate observation, deeper thinking, based on Galileo.

The US stomped on me for tying to offer the public a tool to get around compulsion, around government interference in the family, around compulsory schooling, restricted learning, and the preposterous semantic error of diplomas. Fine. Let the Yahoos die, and die quickly. But then the US stole my internet except for the soul of it! My internet was intended to make us more convivial, better Christians (whatever our religion); the US internet now has stronger censorship leverage than ever. How dare they steal my offering but pervert the result?

Fortunately, Judgment will not be run by the US, or the teachers, the lawyers, the doctors ... the priests; Judgment will be run by the Truth.

---

In Schindler's List the Nazis are marching Jews around the concentration camp while doing a bit of construction. A Jewess tells the Nazis how they should do their project better, introduces herself as an engineer. "Shoot her," says Amon Goeth. The Nazis obey, the woman is dead. What should we do, the workers ask mon Goeth what they should do. "Do whatever the Jew said," he answers. (I told the story at pkKlep.)

It isn't just Jesus ... Galileo, Illich ... pk. The exact illustration even got into the movies!

Communication

I'm moving all my Thinking Tools posts to pkTools.

No Container for Truth

The truth is too corrosive for the foibles of any human institution for that institution and its allied institutions to repeat let alone preserve. Evolution can and has produced individuals, would-be saviors, who can semiotically model the truth, but the model will not transport. It's like the physicist's plasma: we can (theoretically) make it (in very small quantities) but we can't hold it. Like plasma, the truth has no container: except art, and art can always be interpreted away.

Freedom

Knatz.com (and its ancestor, and its spin-offs) had a zillion modules on freedom, thus far none of them reposted to pk blogs. Before I get to it I have a series of things to add that I don't remember yet saying at K. I'll sketch a few reminders to myself, teasers for you, here.

Freedom

You can't be more free in this universe, on this earth, than CroMagnon man was. Did he talk about freedom? Or do we just start obsessing about it after we've lost nearly all that we ever had?

These days, to me, freedom is what comes with "nature": that is, a biosphere not mucked about with by several (and more) billion humans, all talking, talking, talking.

The aborning United States used "freedom of religion" as a sibboleth. The framers meant that the deists wouldn't put the Presbyterians in jail, or the Baptists, or the Methodists once they came along. They certainly did not mean that anyone could think or say anything they wanted about cosmology, theology ... this or that god ... Imagine Hawking set in front of Benjamin Franklin, two great "scientists," but from different eras. I can't imagine either letting the other get a word in (of course I'm first imagining Hawking as actually able to talk, without all that machinery, without that whole infrastructure of computers and programmers ...)

My son tells me that in France they care far more about freedom from religion than any freedom of religion. The Church has a visible presence in France, but is quite without power: would a contemporary Frenchman tolerate the Church if it started reassaming power? (Only if the Frenchman retained to power he now has: to dissent, to mock ...)

What I want is freedom from government.

Freedom of Speech

What good is it if no one understands what you say? if the institutions that manage our lives from birth (and before birth, before conception!) are illiterate? without imagination? are incapable of listening? and too full of themselves to realize that they are ... all of the above?

Maybe actually Franklin and Hawking would get along just dandy. Both were extraordinary men. But: Swift shows us Gulliver helpless among the Lilliputians, then later, just as helpless back in London, trying to explain Lilliput to Englishmen. The Gulliver of the narrative just went along with everything; the Gulliver trying to be a messenger gave up and went and lived, miserable, in the stable. At least in our Christian story we put Jesus out of his misery while he was still in his prime, before he had to waste any more words on us?

Prayer

Humans imagine that they can talk competently with gods, that gods came communicate with them: us, the humans.

Why don't religious meetings begin with a prayer:Oh, God:
If we are in any way misrepresenting you, send us a sign, right now. Burn me, claiming to be your priest, for example, right now.
Burn the congregation, right now, if they are making me say and do things against my will.
...

Divine Love

Should Jesus on the cross love those who are crucifying him?
The Christian answer is that he does: because he's not human,
he's superhuman, divine.
He's God! and God is Love. God, because of the crucifixion, forgives us!

Don't try to understand it: it's a mystery.

OK. I believed all that as a kid, even as a young man,
at least I tried to believe it.
I sometimes try to believe it at seventy, after being betrayed all my life, defrauded, blackballed, denied the rights claimed to be common across the culture ...

But there's one thing I refuse to respect this sort of Christian divinity for:Should Jesus love and forgive the Christians, no matter how many times they claim they love Jesus, no matter how many candles they burn, no matter how many doorbells they ring, no matter how much money they donate,
if they're still torturing and silencing and interrupting and misrepresenting God(-and Jesus)'s subsequent messages and messengers?There's Jesus on the cross. He loves and forgives the soldiers tormenting him. He loves and forgives the soldier who stuck a spear in his side: so the Jews wouldn't have to be embarrassed to be torturing their Messiah after their Sabbath commenced with sundown. Fine.
Now:Should Jesus forgive the Pope who puts a contract out on Martin Luther?
should Jesus forgive the Pope (or the professors) who threatened Galileo with torture for jeopardizing their (the Church's and Universities' ridiculous ignorant contradicted-by-observation model of the universe?
should Jesus forgive the Church for defrocking Ivan Illich, its greatest priest?

Should Jesus forgive the United States for censoring pk when it was Jesus-Illich's convivial humanity pk was working for?
should Jesus forgive the United States for telling children compelled to attend school that they have free speech while filling the jails with the silenced? such as pk?One last question:Should Jesus forgive the churches who keep no record of claims made by the congregation that God "spoke" to them?I think Jesus should forgive the churches exactly as much as he forgives the schools for allowing no notice, keeping no records, of non-standard ideas that emerge from the non-tenured portion of the school: the instructors, the students.

Proof

I'm moving all my Thinking Tools posts to pkTools.

Stotting in Civilized Man

The gazelle on the savanna senses a predator. The gazelle is built for speed, and for leaping obstacles. So is the predator: both pray and predator co-evolve together, there's no such thing as one species, independent of others, independent of an ecology. The behaviors relate by a complex "tree" that only science can begin to simplify while mapping with any accuracy. Anyway, what does the gazelle do? The gazelle stops munching, pricks its ears, sniffs the wind ...

And if the gazelle sniffs lion , or sees so much as a claw, or a paw, or a haunch of lion, why it runs like hell in another direction, right? No. Not quite. Commonly, just before running, the gazelle will hop up and down a couple of times: then run like hell.

What? It is crazy? A human male will jump off a cliff to impress his buddies, though the behavior, as any biologist can explain to us, is actually intended to impress the female: to get her to lie down and open her legs: so that the guy can get off: that is, mix his genes with hers, make a new guy who will jump off cliffs, or a girl that will still convey his courage to a subsequent male offspring. And so on. But ruminants have no investment in courage — courage is for social predators: they, ruminants, survive, or try to, by running away, by being quick, fast, alert, agile ... What could possibly "cause" crazy, wasteful jumping in place to allow a whole class of species to still be doing it and still be alive?

Jared Diamond explains: combining his brilliance with the wisdom of his disciplines: biology, zoology, physiology:Ruminant species have learned over eons that wasting a moment or two can actually gain in survival chances. The lion sees the gazelle, sees that the gazelle sees the lion, sees the gazelle waste time, energy, movement, not running away ... and the gazelle may "cause" the lion to pause, and think, Well, if that gazelle is so confident it can escape me that it wastes time showing off, maybe it can escape me and I'm wasting my time chasing it.

Some gazelles will get caught, become lion-lunch, but enough other gazelles discourage the lion that the species benefits: all ruminants benefit: for now.(Never assume that what aided survival yesterday will aid survival tomorrow.) OK, that's stotting, also known as pronking: in ruminants: as explained by contemporary zoological sciences (and paraphrased by pk). I mention it not only because I think it's neat, but because I find all sorts of analogies in it beyond the one that Jared Diamond mentioned it to develop: specifically, Diamond introduced stotting and its scientific "explanation" additionally to explain human behaviors that at first glance seem wasteful, stupid, dangerous: such as substance abuse — drugs, alcohol ... (Apparently paleo-evidence supports a theory that humans have been drug-chewing drunks for a very long time now.) But back to the gazelles: the stotting gazelle is telling the predator, Don't waste your time, I'm too fast for you; the human is telling her candidate bed-partner, Look at me: I'm such a great specimen of Homo sapiens that I can drink myself stupid and still have men buy me furs, a Mercedes, and send my kid to Exeter, while the male is trying to convey analogous advertising lies.

The strategy obviously has pitfalls. A lot of gazelles have become hors d'oeuvres for a lot of predators; a lot of human drunks and junkies have wrapped themselves around a tree whether or not they impressed the girl.

OK. Jared Diamond's extension of stotting as an explanation for substance abuse is brilliant, profound: but pk says it doesn't stop there. It may not explain everything, but it sure can be used to shed light on other otherwise incomprehensible behaviors: like why civilized man has devoted 99 calories to ignoring over-population, global warming ... any number of concepts intended to make us wake up and take stock to every one calorie devoted to understanding and responding to the danger.

How about civilized man making life impossible for anyone who doesn't go along with the idea of a God who'll bail us out no matter how drunk, stupid, or depraved we become ... All we have to do is say, "I believe," and light a cheap candle, the quarter going not to God, but to some priest? Isn't that like stotting? Isn't that a way of saying, Existence so favors us humans, the cream of life, the point of everything, that we don't have to be alert, or agile, or truthful, or speedy ... and mostly, we don't have to be honest: with ourselves ... about anything.God is such a sap: he'll buy any horse-shit we feed him, he loves us so. (And if he weren't, we'd get ourselves a different god: pronto!What other explanation could there possibly be for civilized many tolerating a governmental hand in its pocket to fund thugs with guns called cops, illiterates displacing thinkers in pens called schools ... If anyone tries to point it out, as I did, his university can interrupt him, postpone his advancement, make it impossible for make a living (without jettisoning all plans, hopes, investments) ... Finally I was arrested, given a kangaroo trial ... censored, wanted off restoring destroyed information to the internet: stolen from me, Illich (... Jesus) in the first place!

Is civilization a form of stotting?

Look God, We don't have to be smart. We can dance on the edge. You'll bail us out, you won't let us fall. (And if you do, the US will bail our ass!)

Free Will

I want to develop a piece on free will in which I largely ignore the question of whether man has free will, concentrating instead on whether religious man would allow God free will.

The Bible presents a series of obligations for God. The story of the Flood has God saying that he won't do it again. Really, no matter what we do, if everyone smokes crack and has a crack baby, God still won't get pissed off and drown us all as he did in Noah's day, or turn us all into pilars of salt as he did for Lot's wife?

The Jews' Bible tells the Jews that God will judge the nations, after which God will enslave everybody except the Jews, all for the sake of the Jews. The Bible promised that God will do this for the Jews No Matter What the Jews Do In The Meantime!!!

Christians say that the Bible promises this and that: so many Jehavah's Witnesses in heaven. At Judgment will God have any say in the matter?

I won't respect any god until the religious would shit a brick rather than allow him to get a word in edgewise.

But you know what? I don't think my god is going to say anything at Judgment. I don't think any humans are going to say anything either. I think we're all going to be dead, and that god won't need any speech.

Brutal Music

Today's StraightDope reports:

I've heard and read stories about musicians, specifically hand drummers, pissing blood after playing a particularly tough or long set. The great Armando Peraza, Santana's longtime bongo and conga player, told an interviewer: "Playing percussion for Carlos you had to be able to play hard, non-stop for sometimes up to three straight hours, and play loud enough to be heard over the electric instruments. A lot of times I played so hard that I would piss blood after the shows. Santana gigs were an endurance test of the highest order." What would the connection be here? Can blood really get into the urine through this kind of physical exertion?--James

Cecil replies:

Music is a brutal business, James: String and keyboard players can suffer from focal dystonia. Saxophone and clarinet players develop disorders of the temporomandibular joint. At least one guitarist, Terry Balsamo of the metal act Evanescence, apparently gave himself a stroke by head-banging onstage. And hand drummers risk rhabdomyolysis, the disorder you refer to. Typically it's not blood they're seeing in their urine, though — it's muscle.

Rhabdomyolysis occurs when muscle cells are damaged to the extent that they break down in the body, releasing into the bloodstream several substances, including a protein called myoglobin that’s excreted in the urine (if you're lucky) and imparts the reddish brown color.

The condition is sometimes called "crush injury syndrome." Some of the first recorded cases were seen during the London blitz in World War II, resulting from the battering people took when they were trapped inside collapsing buildings. It's also found in the victims of earthquakes — after the 1988 Armenian quake more than 1,000 cases were reported — and auto accidents. Some less typical cases have evidently been caused by lightning, centrifugal pilot training, CPR compressions, riding a mechanical bull, being attacked by a wolf, and taking advice from goons.

For more, see:
www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2848/can-playing-the-bongos-make-you-piss-blood

Fascism

Politics reduces to two contrasting simplicities. If you believe in liberty then you must be in essence an anarchist. If you believe that the group has a right to rule in individual, then the steps to becoming a fascist are all but inevitable.

The US gives a monopoly to the post office: fascism.

If I were a "caveman" I don't imagine these distinctions would bother me. As it is, I have zero confidence in civilization. Fascism oppresses me from all sides.

More will follow as I can make time.

Hypocrisy

Every kid in Sunday School looks down on hypocrites, despite knowing somehow that all adults are hypocrites. I had extra talents, extra seriousness (and a meta-sense of humor, of mockery): I still looked down on hypocrites as I grew up. But what what I really hate is secular hypocrisy: institutions that pretend to serve freedom but actually create mono-culture.

Most of all I hate the sheeple pledging allegiance, droning about "liberty and justice for all": while the FBI arrests philosophers on any pretext they can concoct, while the cops bust the heads of dissidents.

Of course the press doesn't report such things: abroad, yes, but seldom at home. Even if a reporter were capable of seeing what's before his eyes, sponsors would punish any organ that let slip more than some fraction of truth.

More will come after I rescue another few dozen Knatz.com classics to these damn 2D blogs.

Group Fiction

More than one module in pk domains offered Jesus as an example of group fiction. My theory of macroinformation argues that all complex information is data interpreted. Shakespeare, were he among us, would have a priviledged position in interpreting Hamlet, but no matter what he said, I, and you too, could still have our own interpretation. I for one have watched famous authors revise their interpretation of their own play upon hearing my interpretation (Edward Albee with his Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf, for example).

But no, the fundamentalists don't want that. They want the world to be black and white, true and false, with authorities right, the truth answerable to them! (That might be grand where the fundamentalists not always so wrong, so retrograde, so stupid, so ignorant ... about EVERYTHING!)Bill Maher, on Christianity:They make it up as they go along!I've already been cheated, defrauded, unpublished, interrupted, misrepresented, bankrupted ... blackballed ... arrested, censored; but I'm still talking: or trying to talk. The ill will of the religious fundamentalists though will pale compared to the ire of secular gullibles when I say that, similarly, our concepts of "freedom" and "democracy" and "education" are also group fictions.

---

2009 06 07

Thinking of Horus, of Mithras, of other pre-Christian born-of-a-virgin martyred-then-resurrected god-saviors, it occurs to me, I shouldn't just be talking about group fiction, I should be talking about group plagiarism.

Oh but then we're all kleptocrats: we don't just steal land, steal women, steal gold, steal labor; we steal stories, religions, saviors, gods ... We steal ideas, we steal superstitions. Not even our stupidity is original.

Initiations

For all the thousands of posts I've done at my domains and blogs I've never coordinated some scattered comments on initiations. I can't now either, but I do now pledge to do so: if I live, if my I.S. bill is paid, if blogspot.com still accepts my posts ...

In the Italy where Shakespeare set his Romeo and Juliet any young rascal with a sword, meaning "son of a property holder, perhaps a noble," could wound or kill almost any one on the street without a sword: the magistrate could be relied on to back the money, and the hell with Jesus' love or God's law. But with or without such details we all know: the privileged of the society are privileged. It's just a redundancy. The law is for the privileged, by the privileged. Ah, but in the famous (read infamous) "public" schools of the English aristocracy (and its public servants) any half-starved school master could terrorize any future duke with impunity. As soon as Lord Byron came by his great expectations, he was transferred from being tyranized by a nanny to being tyranized by the Harrow School: and he had the chilblained feet to prove it.

pk has written, only half-joking, that this practice was the society's way of getting some of their own back, in advance, from the injustices that the privileged lords (and their courtiers) would visit upon the public once they came of age. Now: who else has noticed?Don't we among the developed democracies do exactly the same thing with our own doctors while we have them trapped as interns? as residents?
Can anyone possibly actually believe that making a young doctor work an eighteen hour shift is good for those under their care? or good for the doctor?
No: it's getting our pound of flesh from them before they go off and earn $600,000 a year for being the second-leading cause of death, just behind heart disease.

Census

Sesquipedalian Census, or Napoleon the Enlightened

When we lived in small groups nobody needed to count members. Even toddlers knew the group. It's kleptocracies, remote governments, government by proxies — representatives, ha ha — that want to count heads.
Still, the idea of "census" came slowly, and in stages: and required sophisticated math concepts and statistical approximations and sophisticated interpretation to make much sense. Ancient kings and their courtiers might devise strategies for estimating losses in a battle: issue each soldier a coin, know how many coins were distributed ... count the coins reclaimed after the battle: and you know, fairly accurately, how many losses you sustained, how many men you have still walking.
But the modern census started with Napoleon. He had bureaucrats under the charge of some sophisticated mathematicians "count" Frenchmen. (Frenchmen, what a funny concept: when there are Gauls, and Celts, and Catalonians ... all insisting that they have as much right to live as anyone else. The "French" language had to be shoved forcibly down everyone's throat. No trouble for the Gauls, but it sticks in the craw of the Catalonians, to name only one example.)
Forty million is what they came up with. It scared the bejesus out of every one of Napoleon's kleptocratic neighbors. The emperor of Austria trembled like a baby.
You see, these other monarchs had no idea how many "people" they had.

"Primitive" peoples can typically count to three. After three, they say "many." Governments up to Napoleon said, One, two, three; then they said "many." How many peasants are there? Many. Or they'd wax poetic: like leaves on the trees, like sands on the shore ...

Napoleon said, "Forty Million." A terrifying concept, for those sophisticated enough to know that a million is a lot, but too unsophisticated to know that the number is meaningless without other similarly accurate numbers to compare it to. What would the Austrian emperor have thought if his spies told him, the French have got forty million; but you're got thirty-eight million, or sixty million. The emperor should shit his drawers only if told, "The French have got forty million, and you ain't got but six hundred thousand." That's the time to pass out cold.

Mozart and da Ponte had Don Giovanni's Leporello number the Don's conquests quite specifically. Ma in Ispagna son già mille e tre. Very funny: because it's so totally unlikely (not just the number, but the implicit accuracy of record keeping). Hemingway's Nick Adams goes fishing, he sets up a perch in the grass. A grasshopper comes and sits on it. He plucks the grasshopper, hooks it , casts it, catches a trout. By that time there's another grasshopper sitting on the perch. No matter whether Nick catches a dozen trout or thirty, he will expect another grasshopper to be sitting on the perch for him to grab as his next bait. Nick doesn't take a census of the grasshopper in the county before he goes fishing. Don Giovanni didn't go to city hall to prowl for records before he went looking for another wench. No, no: one, two, three ... many.
Industrialists didn't take a census of the peasantry before testing how many children could sicken and die in their factories before there were no more children ready to be exploited for a penny a week.
Nietzsche said that the superman was like the ocean: infinite, capable of taking into himself endless amounts of poison and garbage while remaining himself pure: like God listening to endless gibberish from selfish morons wanting unstinted shit for Christmas. Peasants, wenches, children ... red bicycles ... Austrians ... One, two, three ... many. And many more.

The thing about language, any moron can use it. Any moron can say "infinite" without having passed a test administered by Georg Gamow.

Trouble is: we blather about many, and escalate it to infinite, without having measured the ocean or counted the wenches or the children.
I once sat with a lawyer, my jaw dropped, as I watched him "calculate" how much money we were going to make selling some stuff we were about to trick the IRS into helping us finance. The lawyer envisioned us publishing limited editions of lithographs. We'd print 250 there, sell the first 50 at $750, sell the next 50 at $1,000, raise the price to $2,000, sell them out, print the nth edition, sell the first image as cocktail napkins ... And within minutes had showed us a volume grossing $55 million: in a coupl'a years. This lawyer had no idea how difficult it was to sell one! or how long it took how few editions to sell beyond fifty. To him, money was infinite: put up a perch, and pluck the dollar that arrives to sit on it. Cast, catch, re-pluck.

I smiled and nodded not because I believed that I (or anyone) could sell all those images out, but because I knew that the dentists and doctors and plumbers my lawyer would approach for the capital, the IRS pushing their scam, would have no more idea about how hard it was to sell anything out than my lawyer did, and that therefore, by New Years, we'd have hundreds of thousands of new dollars in our bank accounts and multi-millions of dollars worth of new inventory, some of which actually would sell (provided it was me doing the selling).

The logic is impeccable: as long as you know nothing of the real world.

Sure there are publishers who've printed a Sinatra album, an Elvis album, a Beetles album ... sold it out, printed more. But there are many more publishers who printed a YoYo album, and sat with the inventory, paying the warehouse bill till they go belly up.

Never mind: that's more than I meant to say about all of that. I didn't mean to lose sight of my target: kleptocracies.

The Romans didn't invent salt mining. It was the Celts who were the salt masters in the Roman's part of the world. The Celts organized salt mining, salt extraction. Salt was essential for preserving food. Preserved food is essential for kleptocracy: for keeping armies moving: on their stomachs. The Celts flourished. Until the Romans noticed that they were flourishing.
The Romans flourished not by inventing anything, but by stealing inventions, and then administering them. Let the Celts invent the salt business: the Romans could then just take it away from them: the way the US, the universities, the corporations stole the internet from Ivan Illich, Jesus, and me: perverting it as they did so. Point is: once the alpha kleptocracies, following blindly in the wake of the Romans, assuming that there will always be other poor countries to exploit, other poor countries to steal resources from, the buyer determining the selling price for the seller, has destroyed all the open grasslands, all the wet lands, all the forests, all the reefs ... we'll set up a perch, but wait and wait for a new grasshopper to come and be bait for us. We'll look for new wenches to deflower and won't even find any old whores. And children to work for a penny a year? why there simply will be none to be found, none to be found at a penny a second either: and neither will we be here to do the finding.

First draft, what the hell.

Obverse

The obverse side of the coin is the heads side; not the tails. Right? What could be clearer, less ambiguous?
Nothing: on a coin. But what about other human dualiites? Male / Female? Rich / Poor? Matter / Energy? Wait. Before investing mental processing in any of those pairings, in or proposing pairings of your own to process, stay with me and let me propose a couple I promise are fertile: and don't forget, I'm laying tracks toward a question of ambiguity in what's obverse in complex dualities. I precede a bulls eye with a near hit:

What is an American public's purpose in censoring Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn from school and public libraries? Well, the claimed purpose (from traditional racists of course) is to combat racism. Twain's characters say "nigger," are called "nigger" ... and "nigger" is lower case. First, here's an example. In Huck the protagonist stumbles onto a down-river aunt of his friend Tom Sawyer that his up-river friend is scheduled to visit. There are some cute confusions of identity, the friends loyally trying to cover for each other. In any event Auntie asks the presumed "Tom" why he's so late. "Tom" claims that there was an accident, an explosion on the river boat. Auntie exclaims and asks, "Was anyone hurt?" "No ma'am. Killed a nigger," our slick liar replies. Either Huck or Tom could easily improvise such a lie: they're boys, they've cleaver, they're anti-Authoritarian ... And neither of them is a died-to-the-marrow racist, but they both speak the language and dress in the costumes of their day. So, I ask: is censoring such great literature an act opposing racism? Or is it an attempt to cover our history from ourselves and from our children? so racism can continue to poison the culture? invisibily?

Both interpretations are obverse by two different meanings of the word. There's "obverse," meaning "principal reason," and there's also obverse, meaning principal counter-reason.

Ambiguity can dissipate information, dilute it; or ambiguity can multiply information: near double it, more than double it ...

Racism is a classic pk subject, but even more core is schooling and deschooling. What's the obverse purpose of compulsory eduction, administered by state-controlled school bureaucracies? To educate? Or to regiment?
To make us independent? or to cripple us into dependency?

Well, both answers are obverses: incompatible obverses.

---

Note: Male / Female above: If the woman is on top, is it not intercourse? Is she then guaranteed infertile? Coins are coins, but other dualities are not coins, and are not necessarily simple.

---

Hey, wait a minute pk: you glibly cite Matter / Energy as a human duality?!?!?
pk answers: I won't back down from that on the basis that all human concepts, including the concepts of physics (including the concept "God"), are exactly that: concepts. And they're all human, no exceptions: at least not until we can meet and compare notes with a non-human sentience. Once we meet intelligent Alderberanis, then we can begin to become objective about who's intelligent, what's sentient ...

---

2009 02 03 What I've written thus far on the obverse both here and above, is inadequate. Part of my problem as author (and yours as thinking-reader) is that what I have in mind shares subsets with so many other important concepts from ambiguity to limitations of human sentience (with severe limitations to human intelligence and honesty!) I'll try to do a more complete job at my InsTic.blogspot.com.)

Do You Believe In God?

Human language can be used to model the territory honestly, efficiently, accurately, but that is its Sunday-best, not the costume it grew or weaned in. Creatures in rut declare their identities: Yearning frog here; or Capable bull. So do rutting predators: I'm a male lion. But hunting, the predator conceals its identity. The female lions stalking the gazelle try to declare nothing of their imminence to their targets: Silence, they say: never mind us, we're just waving grass, tricks of the light ...

Humans rut: boy, do we ever. Humans can also sit and munch veggies: chew the fat, chew the cud. But humans also hunt, humans also prey on each other: oh, not for calories, there wouldn't be too many of us around if we did that; but for resources, for turf, for bragging rights: a rutting stage.

Do You Believe In God?

What do we mean?

Well, different things at different times. Of course. Different things at the same time as well. And the attribution is necessarily interpretational in all cases: unless there's an infallible God to dictate objective truth to us: at Judgment: infinitely far away from us in time, orthogonally far removed from us in space, and logic.

Who goes there? Friend or foe?
Friend.

Should we shoot in the direction of the voice? Or provisionally believe the voice: until s/he gets close enough to put a knife in our ribs?

Do You Believe In God? can mean a zillion things, but an open sincere naive inquiry into the details of your faith is the least likely. I propose that there's nearly always one meaning: alternate-obverse if not primary-obverse: Are you on my team? Not Do You Believe In God? But Are you within my semantic and political control?

Actually, if you think about it, very few questions we ask each other are independent of power, politics, of jockeying for control. Who did you vote for? That nigger? We're always testing our alliances, testing our level in the pecking order: trying to rise, looking for a chance to cheat.

---

Note: for a consideration of ambiguity in our concept of "obverse" ("alternate-obverse if not primary-obverse" above), see the next post. (2009 02 03 Note further, what I've written thus far on the obverse both here and there, is inadequate. I'll try to do a more complete job at my blog InsTic.)

Also: Though I have read Huck multiple times and studied about Huck many times more, none are within recent decades. I avoided retelling the plot in detail so I would be risking fewer errors, but I still could have made one. Realize: it doesn't matter, the point about America, politics, literature, censorship and racism are the same regardless of whether it was Tom or Huck-as-Tom improvising his lie.

pk Profile 2009

I've been writing since 1948: stories, novels, essays, science ... Little was published other than by myself. My university ignored my reading of Shakespeare. The world largely ignored my offer of a cheap internet in 1970, as it's more recently ignored my theory of macroinformation. The fed censored me in 2007 and now threatens me if I republish. There's nothing new about authorities hating saviors. Some of my classic modules I'm trying to repost at my blogs.

Censored!

Please pardon my absence, I was unavoidably detained. That is, I wrote something, a black-comedy, an extreme satire: the object of the satire misread it as a threat (literally, it was a threat, but the writing was symbolic, not literal. (Try explaining that to the fed: my public defender saw it, but made no effort to acquaint the court with the truth. I got railroaded, kangarooed.)
I had roughly three thousand modules on line, distributed over five domains and several blogs. The court objected to two files: the satires. (It was primarily the federal monopoly on violence that I was satirizing!) But the judge censored the entire section. My host (Canadian!) panicked, and deleted the whole of Knatz.com (pk's home page), Macroinformation.org (pk's information science page), InfoAll.org (pk's deschooling and non-coercive internet offering of 1970 page), and AgainstHierarchy.org (pk's domain launched in 2006 to take over Knatz.com's political and sociological modules) got wiped out.

(My family had paid all my bills billed by mail, but the most important bill, my domains, was billed by email, and was not paid. For $6 or so overdue, my host destroyed all my data!) (My family could have, but did not, restore my domains!)

Now released ... (my landlord explains it thusly: They saw they made a mistake, but, being who they are, they can't say so: so, they let him go with a minimum sentence. (Translate: he's innocent!))

I ask that you pardon me for being unable to continue my IonaArc blog. Please do not pardon the cause of the interruption. I offered the public a tool to pry the government off their back in 1970 (my FLEX, reported at InfoAll.org, one of the censored sites). The public didn't utilize it. I don't expect God or god or nature to forgive such a public. I certainly don't.

But absolutely we shouldn't forgive the hypocrite government!

I'm so proud to have gotten the US to violate its most sacred law: the First Amendment!

I'll try to add more details, more posts. I'll try to restore my persecuted domains. Wish me luck. Call, help, send support.

pk Profile 2008

The deschooler: offered a cheap internet in 1970, arrested in 2006, censored in 2007, three thousand text files knocked offline.

Caesar & Pompey

When it was over, Federer returned to the locker room, cracked open the champagne and spent an hour with perhaps the only other athlete on the planet who understands such sheer domination.
They'd met for the first time earlier in the day, but had been distant admirers. And after Federer's third Grand Slam win this year and ninth overall — Woods has won 12 majors — they visited. Federer sat while Woods stood with his foot on a chair, two champions in the zone.Tiger could have fucked up KingFed's supremacy, maybe actually did a little. Now Fed says he's going to the golf majors and "pay Tiger back," standing at the 18^th green on day for.
Roger said that he wanted to play all the better with Tiger sitting next to his girl in his box. (Mirka's his business manager too, btw.)
If we were Romans 2050 or so years ago, we might have rooted wildly for Caesar: and for Pompey. Should each learn the other's sport now and face off? Can we really stand to have both Jehovah and Jesus in the same universe at the same time? In the same place?
On the women's side, Masha was devastating: and looked better than any female athlete ever had: losing, let alone winning. But pretty or not, she was petulant afterward -- when her father's illegally coaching her from the stands was mentioned.
We may wind up wanting to assassinate this queen.

Pepsi

"The Americans love Pepsi-Cola. We love death."
So said the Afghani guerrilla, according to Time.
That comes as a shocking revelation to me. You mean Coke has lost its grip on the world''s perceptions? You mean Pepsi has caught up not just between New York and California but in the mountains of southern Asia?
Could be. I don't exactly follow these things. It can take forever for a hermit to notice something well documented in public rivers.

Meta Tiger

Nixon's moron at the Times, William Safire, wrote perhaps the single stupidest hebetude I've ever seen. Responding to someone's metaphor of "quantum change," Safire looked it up, didn't bother to understand, and responded that quantum distances were very small. So, if a total change of state, occurs at a nanometer, we don't have to notice it.

Guy plays golf, shoots 106, gets a handicap of 34, shoots 99, gets a handicap reduction. The scratch players get no handicap: or aren't allowed to claim them in a PGA tournament. But seedings take over in a way: who gets to play at all, who gets to play last ... Somebody wins the tournament. Good. That's what the tournament was for: to declare a winner.

But there are tournaments next month too! next week, all over. a choice of tournaments, in countries around the world. For some time now there have been sort-out-the-champions tournaments: the British Open for one, the Masters for another. The next thing we know, to be champ, you have to have won not only multiple tournaments, but multiple Major tournaments. Thus, for the longest time, the only real champion was Bobby Jones; until there was also Jack Nicklaus.

Now there's Tiger Woods. Now there's been Tiger Woods for a decade, actually, for thirty years. But something else just happened. Not only did Tiger Woods just win the PGA title, again, for the third time, not only had he just won his two previous tournaments, including, ha!, the British Open, for a fourth time, not only did this record and that record and the other record fall, but something else happened too: Tiger moved into a new golf category. Not just the best golfer this week, in this tournament, not just the best PGA player, not just the greatest golfer of all time ... He'd been all of those things already, except for measurements involving a whole career, and you can't have that while the career is on-going. No, Tiger's accomplishment set up a whole new meta-category, for golfers anyway. It's a category previously known only to a very few: Achilles, Ruth, Ali ... Tiger is now everywhere understood to be the bestBestBEST...

The next step would transcend sport. Tiger would be with Jesus.

PS Mike Wilbon posted a related piece at MSNBC, but I wanted to relate parallel observations to a meta series.

Judgment

A symbol, codeable as a single datum, one bit, can stand for anything: "X" stands for "Cosmos." Meantime any universe within that cosmos may have some vast number of time lines: the location for example of each particle at time_m, time_n, time_o ... Thus the number of symbols needed to represent details within the cosmos may be enormous. The number of symbols needed to represent say the thoughts of male virgins under the age of fifteen in New York City on May 3^rd may be greater than the symbols needed to map all thoughts by all humans alive up until the reign of Rameses. Thus: any symbol in any world might sybolize the entire cosmos; but all the particles in universe_x might not be adequate to map all the events in world_y. Thus some twelve year old with a G12 processor might be able to hold his own judgment day for world NT of universe ZN, but all the gods that have ever lived or not lived, been imagined, or not imagined, couldn't map the complexity (or the simplicity) of the whole cosmos.

Trash Talk

Trash Talk And the Federalization of Everything

Zizou head-butted the wop talking trash to him. Now everyone tells Zizou that talking trash is part of the game: if you can't take it, get off the field.
Excuse me: are there no limits? no thresholds? Does the ref has no business knowing the specific insult? Are ethnic differences not to be considered?
Is lack of information ever wiser than presence of information?

Once upon a time you knew if you were sick. Your family knew if you were dead: even before the bacteria knew, or the vultures. With federalism, some expert, some priest, some anointed one, some bureaucrat with a certificate from the state alone can say to the satisfaction of the state whether you're sick, whether you're dead ... It's not enough to tell your teacher, your boss, that you were sick, that you're grandma died, you need a note from your doctor, from the undertaker.

Once upon a time no body knew better what junior needed, wanted, liked or didn't like better than mom. Then, past toddlerhood, nobody knew better than junior himself. Now junior needs a shrink to tell him what he wants, and the shrink needs a social worker in grace with the legislature to tell the shrink whether he's a quack.

The guy talks trash to Zizou. France against Italy. Some paper immediately says that the wop called Zizou a "terrorist." Now that's a hot topic. It used to be you had to be a Philistine ... or a Jew ... or a Commie ... or an anarchist to deserve no due process. But of course the paper had no idea what was said. Right now the preponderance of reported opinion holds that it doesn't matter what was said: athletes, playing before a paying crowd, with TV sponsors to consider, have no rights to any sore spots. It doesn't matter what the guy says, the athlete has to ignore it.

Can that view possibly stand up to experience?

The guy calls you a motherfucker, so what: these days that's just aural wall paper: like saying there are clouds in the sky. What if he says, "Your mother sucks the boils up the Saddam's ass"? What if he says, "I left a firecracker up your baby's cherry"?
Those insults don't bother you? Fine. Then you won't head butt. But since when can a committee decide what will and won't pull your trigger?

No, no, no. What was said can always count.

'Roid Rage

I'm just reading a second- or third-hand claim that Barry Bonds would go into steroid rages. If what seems true is true, then why should we care what happens to Barry Bonds? In the days of the caesars, his property could have been confiscated. In the days of any tyranny he could be boiled in oil, hung in a dungeon. In these days of the tyranny of the public, anything could happen.

But, even hanging from chains on the wall of a dungeon, rats crawling up his rag of a breech cloth, Barry should be able to sue. He should be able to sue Mark Maguire for going ahead of him. He should sue the chemists who synthesized the fucking things. He should be able to sue the Giants for encouraging him: and sue the public for a host of silly choices.

I threw the above up real fast (doesn't it show?): but a minute later read a very good suggestion that I believe applies to the whole society as well as to sports as mercinary entertainment: decriminalize all the drugs. Let the athletes take anything (just as we could let the junkies OD if they wanted, leave them to die in the gutter). Cheating can't be controlled, don't try. (I'll link to that article a bit later.)

And another PS: Since we can't ever be sure of how much cheating took place, don't take anything too seriously: not the World Series, not the Supreme Court, not the College of Cardinals.

Mickelson Crumbles

Journalism earns its keep by dramatizing events as though prized neuroses of the culture were being daily vindicated. Thus: Hitler winning an election isn't Hitler winning an election; it's a Triumph of the Will. If you add up the number of strokes with the club over four rounds of championship golf, then Geoff Ogilvy is the new US Open champion. No. Ogilvy isn't the winner; Phil Mickelson crumbled. Just as Colin Montgomery crumbled. As though it were about Will and lack of will.
Skill has something to do with will. Luck has something to do with success.
Journalism doesn't just give facts; it uses famous names to fashion a morality soap opera in which our deepest prejudices are vindicated. The one group that always wins and never loses is the public.

Sorry public: with journalism you lose every time.

PS. I don't mean that Phil didn't crumble: once again Arnie-like he went for more than sense might dictate: and at a time when his driver wasn't working! The bold win some of those, and lose a lot more. Certainly skill counts: and will: and luck ... And don't forget math: probability, averages, statistics ... I doubt there will ever be a journalist who will get it all correctly balanced. We'd have to call him god if he did.

Nothing

I worship the god of nothing. The god of nothing neither wants nor needs my worship. I do it because I am a human being: and human beings want and need to worship.

Human beings want and need to believe in something greater than themselves: and only nothing fits the bill.

Long live fools.
Long live nothing.

Boo Birds

Kid's parents are standing there screaming encouragement, kid hits a long ball. Parents go berserk: even if it's caught. Same kid gets to the finals, but on hostile ground. At the plate the boos drown the cheers. Will the kid hit one out?

Barry Bonds has heard cheers, he's heard boos. Bonds can hit the homer through the boos But he's been there before. Still, he'll hit more homers amid cheers.

Jesus spoke to the crowds. On arriving in Jerusalem they put down a royal carpet of palm fronds. For once he wasn't on foot. But he was riding no thoroughbred charger. Neither was he perched on the back seat of some open limousine. But not many hours later he was getting his flesh (and exposed organs) scourged off him. He'd have heard nothing but boos. Ditto a few hours later on the cross.

On the cross, was Jesus more like the kid in the enemy park? or like Barry Bonds in Chicago? Don't forget: it was his first time.

if Jesus is human, as the orthodox Mystery insists, he'll doubt himself with the hoard against him. If Jesus is divine as the orthodox Mystery also insists, why should he care about boos? any more than I sympathize with fire ants while they're biting my ankle?

Ah, but he is supposed to Love us.

Soul

Immortality of the Soul? No, no. Listen:The soul is emergent. Informational. Macroinformational.Like life, it is substanceless. There's no thing there. But unlike life, which manifests in organisms — bodies — the soul —being informational, mental — doesn't exist when not being thought about: like a lap when you stand up.

---

How I put it before:The soul is a synergy of synergies among synergies: a synergy between the synergy stack of the individual organism and its relation to the aggregates of the aggregates of synergy stacks at large.
(I have also called god the synergy of synergies.")

---

2009 04 05

I copy this post to my Macroinformation blog.