I've told this one a million times. I was sitting at a table on the fourth floor of the cafeteria at the college I attended. I was smoking cigarettes with my friend Eric, who lived in the same dormitory hall as I did and knew my girlfriend and her best friend. I think I was supposed to be quitting smoking (a task I showed little enthusiasm or skill for, but I kept up a facade, mostly because of the girlfriend) and so had taken to smoking in out of the way places rather than in my room or on the dormitory balcony, my usual haunts. Although it's also entirely possible this conversation occured after the girl dumped me and I dumped any pretense of quitting smoking. Whatever the case, soon after this, Eric transferred to a different college and we never maintained a sufficiently regular line of communication to attain the sort of understanding we shared at the time this conversation took place. I can't remember what we were discussing, but I was off on one of my usual diatribes about the way things ought to be. Eric kept raising reasonable objections based on demonstrable reality and finally said something to the effect that the world just didn't work that way. And I said, "Yeah, but in a Perfect World..." and Eric said, in an completely exasperated tone of voice, "Jesus, Jon, good luck finding your perfect world."
This concludes the segment of the Kingdom Come Institute Home Page categorized "Vision"
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Friday, March 31, 2006
flashes in pans ain't shooting stars
Tracemaker,
tracemaker,
escalator to the stars
it's all done with mirrors and magnets
these days
And all your fame
is just a trace
a fine white track across
the cloud chamber
Outside the planetarium
he's still out there somewhere
a trace and transformation
on a twist of cellophane and
rusted silver
Tracemaker
escalator
make me a trace
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
tracemaker,
escalator to the stars
it's all done with mirrors and magnets
these days
And all your fame
is just a trace
a fine white track across
the cloud chamber
Outside the planetarium
he's still out there somewhere
a trace and transformation
on a twist of cellophane and
rusted silver
Tracemaker
escalator
make me a trace
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
a monster in the sleep of reason
And just when I am about to relinquish my last objection and accept that I am nothing but a collection of vague phenomena following a strange cycle of orderly processes that are nonetheless abitrary by the epistemolgical engines on which I try or more often than not fail to base my very existence. I'm ready, I want to, really. Fall into the stern embrace of science, declare myself matter and give up once and for all on anything higher than being as it is. As I am.
Why do I dream? Why do I dream still of Merwin, of Simon, of the Kung Fu Master, of a girl named Sue. Why do I dream of the Shareholders, the Appraisers, the Men Without Style, Crow, the Big Computer. In a dream life singularly filled with tornados, with alarming visions of the future, with long corridors that fall strangely into warehouses I've never known or been. O don't mean it, Idon't want it, but nevertheless I dream of an endless horizon of empty sand, of an ocean that was a road that circled all the world. Why do I dream of Kingdom Come?
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Why do I dream? Why do I dream still of Merwin, of Simon, of the Kung Fu Master, of a girl named Sue. Why do I dream of the Shareholders, the Appraisers, the Men Without Style, Crow, the Big Computer. In a dream life singularly filled with tornados, with alarming visions of the future, with long corridors that fall strangely into warehouses I've never known or been. O don't mean it, Idon't want it, but nevertheless I dream of an endless horizon of empty sand, of an ocean that was a road that circled all the world. Why do I dream of Kingdom Come?
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Salamander Diary
For those who will insist that it is ridiculous and impossible, consider a recent release in the scientific press concerning recent advancements in the Scientific Establishment's understanding of intramolecular bonding in ice crystals. 1999 and we're getting close to cracking ice, boys! Pretty soon we'll have it all figured out.
At the center of the earth is a world we have no direct experience of. We know a little of that strange realm of temperatures and pressures so monstrous that we may never be capable of sustaining them on any scale for any length of time. These conditions have persisted for hundreds of millions of years, engaging in a chemistry we have no experience with or paradigm of. Ghost continents move on the surface of unburning liquid fire, phantom tides rock shores of supeattenuated metal crystal. There the salamanders reside, a race seven and a half million years older than our own, perfectly aware of us and uncaring of what we may do with in the horrifying, unimaginable cold and paucity. They are long lived and we are insects, slow and dismal life forms born of a slow and dismal sphere of material being. They are far more concerned with their byzantine internecine conflicts.
Yet one rival faction maintains that although our lives are brief, our prodigious breeding habits will soon result in a critical, continuous shortage of souls, an astral competion in which the salamanders, which breed seldom and gestate for decades, are bound to be badly done by. Their leader, his sinuous agglomeration of dynamic spears resplendent in the refracted rainbow currents, interlocking plates of electrified ion membranes as thin as frog's skin, advocates unleashing their vastly superior technology to eliminate the human problem for once and for all. In mazy warrens carved and held by phenomenal electromagnetic engines, bent clerics from the priesthood who control the sacrements of scientific inquiry are forging a single vessel, a box designed, like any good bomb, to carry a payload that one of their number created in absolute secrecy, then died while loading the magazine. Only the manufacture of the delivery device remains.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
At the center of the earth is a world we have no direct experience of. We know a little of that strange realm of temperatures and pressures so monstrous that we may never be capable of sustaining them on any scale for any length of time. These conditions have persisted for hundreds of millions of years, engaging in a chemistry we have no experience with or paradigm of. Ghost continents move on the surface of unburning liquid fire, phantom tides rock shores of supeattenuated metal crystal. There the salamanders reside, a race seven and a half million years older than our own, perfectly aware of us and uncaring of what we may do with in the horrifying, unimaginable cold and paucity. They are long lived and we are insects, slow and dismal life forms born of a slow and dismal sphere of material being. They are far more concerned with their byzantine internecine conflicts.
Yet one rival faction maintains that although our lives are brief, our prodigious breeding habits will soon result in a critical, continuous shortage of souls, an astral competion in which the salamanders, which breed seldom and gestate for decades, are bound to be badly done by. Their leader, his sinuous agglomeration of dynamic spears resplendent in the refracted rainbow currents, interlocking plates of electrified ion membranes as thin as frog's skin, advocates unleashing their vastly superior technology to eliminate the human problem for once and for all. In mazy warrens carved and held by phenomenal electromagnetic engines, bent clerics from the priesthood who control the sacrements of scientific inquiry are forging a single vessel, a box designed, like any good bomb, to carry a payload that one of their number created in absolute secrecy, then died while loading the magazine. Only the manufacture of the delivery device remains.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
parenthetical ellipsis
(if you believe anything believe that right now you are in the only moment that you've got... that's all, the sum and total of it, the Main Spring that drives the intricate clockwork, the Big Magnet that spins it all around... if you're being offered a solution that doesn't deliver right now then you're being taken for the oldest ride in the book.. and that's okay, you can be that person, you can take that ride... every day is a good day, every thing you can imagine is permissable... there is no structure, there are no rules, there is no written down thing that does not become a new thing as you are in the act of reading it... I prefer to know what is driving me rather than to be the person who pretends that they are actually doing the thing when what they are doing is thinking about the thing... this is my path, my way, my cross to bear... I don't possess it and I can't pass it along or impose it one you... it is here for you, if you need it then you will possess it, if you desire it it is yours... you have already arrived at the solution, and if you find to your dismay that it is nothing you can hold in your hand or even in your mind, take a deep breath and remember that if you could lay hold on it it could not be the true solution...)
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
One Hand Clapping
21/101
The files among other things
collect one thousand songs
for example the world's smallest bell
and the way the surf of the big sea pounds
and the meow of the kitten that made me sad
dripping water in a cave where noone's been
and diamonds crystallizing on Neptune
and a duplicate of Einstein's voice in parrafin
a grasshopper chewing on the first page of
the last copy of an undiscovered verse
which lays out in aching clarity
a truth so complete it had no choice but to disperse
a cymbal, a wristwatch, a part horn
a candle, a bir'd bone snapping
a windmill, a whirlwind, a dinosaur egg
from which there comes the slightest tapping
but nowhere among these rare recordings
or the nine hundred eighty five more
is the sound of one hand clapping
they say it's somehow secretly embedded in the core.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
The files among other things
collect one thousand songs
for example the world's smallest bell
and the way the surf of the big sea pounds
and the meow of the kitten that made me sad
dripping water in a cave where noone's been
and diamonds crystallizing on Neptune
and a duplicate of Einstein's voice in parrafin
a grasshopper chewing on the first page of
the last copy of an undiscovered verse
which lays out in aching clarity
a truth so complete it had no choice but to disperse
a cymbal, a wristwatch, a part horn
a candle, a bir'd bone snapping
a windmill, a whirlwind, a dinosaur egg
from which there comes the slightest tapping
but nowhere among these rare recordings
or the nine hundred eighty five more
is the sound of one hand clapping
they say it's somehow secretly embedded in the core.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
any descriptive statement in this document is untrue
I use the word paradoxical a lot. It's the most descriptive word in this universe.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
will keep our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord
There is another thing I want, I suppose... Something harder to describe, perhaps harder to acheive. It is a feeling, or perhaps a state of mind... I sense its outlines when I read about Zen, and the Tao, and it resonates with the phrase =the peace of God that passes all understanding.= I'm seeking it in work, in the absorption that comes with task, craft. I want to be more comfortable in my own skin, I want to feel better placed in my life.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
1994: I make a New Year's Resolution to kick your ass
Then again, maybe I'll suddenly stumble upon my TRUE MEDIUM OF EXPRESSION, during the pursuit of which I will meet my TRUE SOUL MATE who will spend her fabulous wealth on me when not making ecstatic love with me. In the Bahamas.
Then again, maybe I'll get sick and die.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Then again, maybe I'll get sick and die.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Lies, damned lies, haf-truths, the whole nine yards, and the kitchen sink
Why all this craziness, this seemingly purposeful obsfucation? Call it a reflection, a work of fiction in progress, emulating a paradoxical model of a seemingly unified reality. Normally I try to be fairly direct. I'm an Occam's Razor guy all the way. But I keep a circumspect eye on the reality of Mencken's assertion that every complex problem has an answer that is simple, direct, and wrong.
Nevertheless, learning to cultivate a tendency to look for the simple answer is not a bad skill in a world of many lies. Consider the oft reported mythology that eating the worm at the bottom of a bottle of tequila will result in some sort of super intoxication or possible visionary experience. Now, the agave is a weird plant, and I'm always open to possibilities. But I have to say, doesn't it seem likely that this legend has a lot of roots in the fact that eating the tequila worm is an activity that invariably follows killing a bottle of tequila? Now, if someone were to fish ou the worm, and in a sober setting of unimpaired reality devour it solo, and send back a report on the effects... But no one I've ever talked to has done that. They always finish the tequila first. These are not reliable witnesses.
I'm still hearing people argue over whether The Blair Witch Project is "real." I think the profusion of spoiler reviews, interviews with the performers and other creators, and media internet buzz would dispell this idea. But the point is, I didn't need to go searching for an answer when I first came across one of those annoying query-response textfiles of some electronic discussion site, containing an argument between half a dozen people regarding the veracity of that particular bit of indy cinema. We're talking about three students, all with noted personal and family ties, dissapearing in the woods with a witchcraft connection, and live film footage being recovered a year later... Good God, wake up. That's not just news, it's prime news. If something like that really happened in America it would have been making headlines for months, and a whole new spate when the tape was found.
Flashback: Fargo, Moorhead, July of 1999. I'm staying in a hotel, prepatory to seeing my friend Jack safely into nuptial bliss. I get up one morning and the hotel lounge teevee is tuned to CNN. JFK Jr. is missing. No one knows where he is. He took off in his little plane and just didn't show up at his stated destination. With three minutes of news I made the following deduction: John-John was dead and so was everyone with him. As the pilot, Junior was most likely drowned to death and still lodged in the cockpit. Am I a genius? Well, yes, but in this case Genius had little to do with the deduction. I'm just smart enough to realize that while being famous means many things in this society, it doesn't provide any protection from falling prey to the simplest explanation for an amateur pilot not making it to land in a small plane: crashing into the sea.
God knows there are enough mysteries in this life that genuinely defy explanation. Try not to be stupid about things that are this obvious.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Nevertheless, learning to cultivate a tendency to look for the simple answer is not a bad skill in a world of many lies. Consider the oft reported mythology that eating the worm at the bottom of a bottle of tequila will result in some sort of super intoxication or possible visionary experience. Now, the agave is a weird plant, and I'm always open to possibilities. But I have to say, doesn't it seem likely that this legend has a lot of roots in the fact that eating the tequila worm is an activity that invariably follows killing a bottle of tequila? Now, if someone were to fish ou the worm, and in a sober setting of unimpaired reality devour it solo, and send back a report on the effects... But no one I've ever talked to has done that. They always finish the tequila first. These are not reliable witnesses.
I'm still hearing people argue over whether The Blair Witch Project is "real." I think the profusion of spoiler reviews, interviews with the performers and other creators, and media internet buzz would dispell this idea. But the point is, I didn't need to go searching for an answer when I first came across one of those annoying query-response textfiles of some electronic discussion site, containing an argument between half a dozen people regarding the veracity of that particular bit of indy cinema. We're talking about three students, all with noted personal and family ties, dissapearing in the woods with a witchcraft connection, and live film footage being recovered a year later... Good God, wake up. That's not just news, it's prime news. If something like that really happened in America it would have been making headlines for months, and a whole new spate when the tape was found.
Flashback: Fargo, Moorhead, July of 1999. I'm staying in a hotel, prepatory to seeing my friend Jack safely into nuptial bliss. I get up one morning and the hotel lounge teevee is tuned to CNN. JFK Jr. is missing. No one knows where he is. He took off in his little plane and just didn't show up at his stated destination. With three minutes of news I made the following deduction: John-John was dead and so was everyone with him. As the pilot, Junior was most likely drowned to death and still lodged in the cockpit. Am I a genius? Well, yes, but in this case Genius had little to do with the deduction. I'm just smart enough to realize that while being famous means many things in this society, it doesn't provide any protection from falling prey to the simplest explanation for an amateur pilot not making it to land in a small plane: crashing into the sea.
God knows there are enough mysteries in this life that genuinely defy explanation. Try not to be stupid about things that are this obvious.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
The Station of Breath
The first station of Total Health, Amplified Human Awareness, Sexual Immortality, Optimal Longevity and Integrated Personality is breath. No matter what it is precisely you do with your time, you've got to breathe. Number one. Number two: breathing is a very clear physiological function where both concious and unconcious control are evident. We can control our breath as much as the movement of and arm, and yet if we lose track of it it proceeds without ado. The gimmick of all meditative techniques is to accomplish the impossible trick of being aware of the moment in which the awareness of breathing ceases. That's when you tap the mainline of your personal power. Hence the popular anthem of the Neopseudomillennial formalist movement, "Shut up and breathe!"
So, that's very easy, but you have to do a lot of it, repeated, daily, breathing for long uninterrupted periods. For top efficiency you'll have to fit in at least two hours a day. But it's okay, you can start small, you've been wasting your whole life up to now, another couple of months is not going to kill you. And there are lots of cheap and free aids to keeping a practice of breath on track. Whatever works: just try to remember thath you're just breathing. You can start right now, trust me, there's no shame in admitting that you could really use it right now, just be quiet for a second...
Now, breathe...
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
So, that's very easy, but you have to do a lot of it, repeated, daily, breathing for long uninterrupted periods. For top efficiency you'll have to fit in at least two hours a day. But it's okay, you can start small, you've been wasting your whole life up to now, another couple of months is not going to kill you. And there are lots of cheap and free aids to keeping a practice of breath on track. Whatever works: just try to remember thath you're just breathing. You can start right now, trust me, there's no shame in admitting that you could really use it right now, just be quiet for a second...
Now, breathe...
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Hell is VERY MUCH other people
Okay, I like to be completely cryptic, but just for you, here's a secret clue as to why you're "unhappy" all the time and feel "anxious" and "unfulfilled:" you all drive around too much. Cars are the devil. They're noxious, dangerous, inefficient death cages on wheels. I watch a lot of traffic, being primarily a pedestrian and mass transit consumer, and at any given time about seventy percent of you look like you're about to pop something important towards the front of your skull.
I reiterate: It's very difficult to shut up and breathe. And I tell you truthfully, at the root of all our driving and the million complicated jobs we drive to and the six to eight hours sitting stunned and complacently being harped at to buy products, all the rushing around crazy, get to the doctor at three to try to outwit mortality for another year, or head to the local den of sin to knock a couple of years off our life expectancy, all of it, ALL OF IT is caused by our inability to shut up and breathe. We constantly swarm, trying to shake off a feeling of suffocation.
The fact that the ultimate symbol of useless frenetic movement, driving, is an activity that simultaneously forces us into an attitude of extreme passivity at the very moment when it is about to take our lives, while poisoning the very air we so often forget to breathe appropriately, is one I'm still trying to figure out. I can't say whether that's irony or merely overkill.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
I reiterate: It's very difficult to shut up and breathe. And I tell you truthfully, at the root of all our driving and the million complicated jobs we drive to and the six to eight hours sitting stunned and complacently being harped at to buy products, all the rushing around crazy, get to the doctor at three to try to outwit mortality for another year, or head to the local den of sin to knock a couple of years off our life expectancy, all of it, ALL OF IT is caused by our inability to shut up and breathe. We constantly swarm, trying to shake off a feeling of suffocation.
The fact that the ultimate symbol of useless frenetic movement, driving, is an activity that simultaneously forces us into an attitude of extreme passivity at the very moment when it is about to take our lives, while poisoning the very air we so often forget to breathe appropriately, is one I'm still trying to figure out. I can't say whether that's irony or merely overkill.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Do you seek influence, access, and the Key that Opens All Locks?
Confidence. Isn't that what it all boils down to? Nobody plays by the rules, everybody bends the agreements a little. Half the things that are wrong with you - your weight, your hair, your low IQ, the general shape of your face and the condition of your skin - are determined by factors outside your control. Nobody ever wrote anywhere that life is fair, and consequently most people figure to just get whatever they can lay hands on. Confidence is the one thing that will put you in the lead in every conflict where you face competition that has you bested on mere worthiness.
Our unique system of home audio studies are designed to fill you with the sense that somehow, despite all indications, your actions are flowing according to the will of some great force far beyond your dim capacity to understand. An ineffable sense of being in gear with the very clockwork that orders the cosmos will destroy all ordinary urges to second-guess, berate, and humble yourself. Watch rapid advancements occur at the job. Take charge at meetings and show up your boss. Never get ripped off by a shyster day-trading scheme again: learn to say no with the conviction they'll all remember. Score with women who are clearly out of your league.
The smart operator knows that there's a reason for everything. It's no mystery why that stupid looking slob is with that gorgeous girl, why your scheming coworker got the promotion you worked for, why the check cashing ring chose your mailbox for their latest scam. Look deep within and realize that Confidence is the missing element in your armament of opportunism.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Our unique system of home audio studies are designed to fill you with the sense that somehow, despite all indications, your actions are flowing according to the will of some great force far beyond your dim capacity to understand. An ineffable sense of being in gear with the very clockwork that orders the cosmos will destroy all ordinary urges to second-guess, berate, and humble yourself. Watch rapid advancements occur at the job. Take charge at meetings and show up your boss. Never get ripped off by a shyster day-trading scheme again: learn to say no with the conviction they'll all remember. Score with women who are clearly out of your league.
The smart operator knows that there's a reason for everything. It's no mystery why that stupid looking slob is with that gorgeous girl, why your scheming coworker got the promotion you worked for, why the check cashing ring chose your mailbox for their latest scam. Look deep within and realize that Confidence is the missing element in your armament of opportunism.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
agencies
There are a lot of places where schemes are conceived whereby it might be that a few men control all the vast and fermenting kingdom of our travels on this mortal coil. If it's so things must be getting run by a different class of humans because from this side, we're not that organized.
Nevertheless, the argument always arises to explain the sameness of our days spent toiling uselessly under the sun, for the continual arc of our great societies always into more ignominously brutal dissolutions. It's hard to deny that mushrooms really do seem to be from another planet, fungi in general but particualrly mushrooms... and slime molds...
But honestly, that doesn't necessitate the existance of some kind of mushroom overlords monitoring our television transmissions from the dark side of the moon. I guess I can't absolutely exclude the possibility...
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Nevertheless, the argument always arises to explain the sameness of our days spent toiling uselessly under the sun, for the continual arc of our great societies always into more ignominously brutal dissolutions. It's hard to deny that mushrooms really do seem to be from another planet, fungi in general but particualrly mushrooms... and slime molds...
But honestly, that doesn't necessitate the existance of some kind of mushroom overlords monitoring our television transmissions from the dark side of the moon. I guess I can't absolutely exclude the possibility...
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
killer bean
May I just say that I find it objectional that a considerable percentage of Corporations supply their coffee addict wage slaves with free access to their drug of choice, while my cigarette habit is self-funded yet nevertheless denigrated and relegated to cold back alleys and crowded doorways? Now, I realize that coffee is viewed by most of these pathetic junkies as an absolutely essential aid to getting a damn thing done in the morning, tired and grey as they all are from having their circadians screwed seven ways from Sunday by the agricultural paradigm that people should get up early to work. I realize that they get terrible headaches and cannot take a proper shit without their fix. But even so, isn't the leading principle of America equality? Just because I choose to screw up my mind by burning a leaf instead of boiling a propagule, should I miss out on the benefits of employer-supplied stimulants? Cigarettes are, after all, the most profitable product in this modern world. You would think this would count for something among the business classes. Of course, they don't provide free work related access to any of the remaining three of the five pillars of the Shareholder economy (gasoline, alcohol, and electricity). Which makes me wonder: just what is it about coffee? Who's running THAT confidence game?
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
fuquetue
Some people might like to contact someone regarding something they've encountered in the Kingdom Come Institute, particularly when the content contains the assumption that they hold certain opinions and proceeds to call them "Asshole" for holding it. Knock yourself out: I fully support human beings behaving as if they had free will, and there are many methods of contacting me. Some of them are contained in these pages, others are available by the usual methods. I do not, however, provide a convenient clicky-link that will pop up a e-mail form all ready for you to vent your impotent rage. So you will have to do at least a little bit of work. Before you expend your labor needlessly, I do beg you to consider certain facts.
1. I do not "represent" the Kingdom Come Institute: I am merely a semiautonomous semantics engine on its behalf and a member of its set.
2. Bear in mind that your are responding to a work of fiction in progress. If this strikes you as a worthwhile thing to do, more power to you.
3. Consider the significance of the fact that you are responding to the nickname "Asshole."
4. I'm really smart, so chances are you're wrong anyway.
5. I will not, of course, reply, unless, in fact, I do.
Here is a pre-generated form letter you can consider your reply if you do contact me and fail to receive a response. Please feel free to bookmark this page and return to it anytime you feel like getting some answers.
Dear Asshole,
It is with sorrow and dismay that I deny you a personalized response to your trivial correspondence. One of the following reasons is probably responsible for this failure to reply.
1. You said something so stupid in the first three lines of your message that I was compelled to immediately relegate your dismal opinion to the most convenient waste receptacle.
2. You are either a. clearly guilty or b. clearly innocent of whatever it is you are objecting being accused of. In either case, further commentary is clearly unnecessary.
3. You have made a valid and thougghtful response for which I have no snappy reply at hand. Consequently I choose to respond with a disdainful silence.
4. It is clear from your reply that you have failed to comprehend the content that you are objecting to. Since only bad fiction has to be explained, I decline to reply, as I refuse to accept that I am a poor writer.
5. So sleepy.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
1. I do not "represent" the Kingdom Come Institute: I am merely a semiautonomous semantics engine on its behalf and a member of its set.
2. Bear in mind that your are responding to a work of fiction in progress. If this strikes you as a worthwhile thing to do, more power to you.
3. Consider the significance of the fact that you are responding to the nickname "Asshole."
4. I'm really smart, so chances are you're wrong anyway.
5. I will not, of course, reply, unless, in fact, I do.
Here is a pre-generated form letter you can consider your reply if you do contact me and fail to receive a response. Please feel free to bookmark this page and return to it anytime you feel like getting some answers.
Dear Asshole,
It is with sorrow and dismay that I deny you a personalized response to your trivial correspondence. One of the following reasons is probably responsible for this failure to reply.
1. You said something so stupid in the first three lines of your message that I was compelled to immediately relegate your dismal opinion to the most convenient waste receptacle.
2. You are either a. clearly guilty or b. clearly innocent of whatever it is you are objecting being accused of. In either case, further commentary is clearly unnecessary.
3. You have made a valid and thougghtful response for which I have no snappy reply at hand. Consequently I choose to respond with a disdainful silence.
4. It is clear from your reply that you have failed to comprehend the content that you are objecting to. Since only bad fiction has to be explained, I decline to reply, as I refuse to accept that I am a poor writer.
5. So sleepy.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
welcome to your head
Concerning terminology. It's a shame that more people don't put in some heavy time considering the roots of language, the meanings of the terms they throw around as if newly minted. There is a wealth of knowledge and power (some would argue they're the same thing) to be found in the constant evolution of language, and a world of strange surprises. In the realm of computers the story is doubly interesting, since so often the terms that seem so new have very old roots. It's a text centered culture, and computers are no exception. Consider the concept of the reboot, a term used only in computers, but anchored in the venerable colloquialism of pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps.
Better yet, consider the term war in naming our dear little electronic matrix. The Matrix is a better term for it, I think, now forever consigned to be associated with a second rate science fiction movie starring a third rate action hero. But it's moot, anyway, since it's down to the Internet and the World Wide Web. My take on it is that Internet is the nominal winner, as it sounds more technical, and for all the attempts to bring it to the people, this is still a very technical media. That's all going to change, so maybe the more happy friendly World Wide Web will win out. But what strikes me as funny is the fact that the base terms of these rival nomenclatures, Web and Net, are not only completely nontechnical but mean exactly the same thing. That's language.
But if I really want a chuckle I always think about the term =scrolling.= This is a nice case, a term who's root concept is so lost in antiquity that the average person will never ponder where the word came from. It has no use outside of the world of electronic display, and yet at it's core is a document form that was basically old technology a thousand years before a computational engine was even conceived.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Better yet, consider the term war in naming our dear little electronic matrix. The Matrix is a better term for it, I think, now forever consigned to be associated with a second rate science fiction movie starring a third rate action hero. But it's moot, anyway, since it's down to the Internet and the World Wide Web. My take on it is that Internet is the nominal winner, as it sounds more technical, and for all the attempts to bring it to the people, this is still a very technical media. That's all going to change, so maybe the more happy friendly World Wide Web will win out. But what strikes me as funny is the fact that the base terms of these rival nomenclatures, Web and Net, are not only completely nontechnical but mean exactly the same thing. That's language.
But if I really want a chuckle I always think about the term =scrolling.= This is a nice case, a term who's root concept is so lost in antiquity that the average person will never ponder where the word came from. It has no use outside of the world of electronic display, and yet at it's core is a document form that was basically old technology a thousand years before a computational engine was even conceived.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
koan
Do you still doubt my assertion that text is the highest technology that human beings have attained, containing the power to hack the only engine that claims the ability to alter physical reality, the human mind? Don't lie to me: I can see it in your eyes. So consider the case of the koan.
For those of you too wrapped up in the culture of fast food and teevee to open your minds to the broader horizons of human understanding, a koan is a sort of riddle, a traditional question used in the practice of Zen Buddhism as an aid to enlightenment. The most familiar is perhaps what is the sound of one hand clapping. Whether one credits such things or not, the fact is that, transmitted through the medium of text, koans have caused a sudden and irreversible change in the minds of millions of human beings: they are cosmic zingers that tip the balance and force the participant into a dynamic relationship with the unknowable. And all contained in a few dozen intrinsically meaningless symbols. Find me an animated gif that can say the same.
On the face of it, koans seem meaningless: constructions that are syntactically sound but semantically empty. Yet it's incredibly difficult to craft a good koan. Trust me, I've tried. Not just anything will work. Because they are not, in the end, meaningless phrases. They are amazingly dense encodings of the central mystery of symbolic representation: that point where seemingly sound semantic principles lead to apparent paradox. Which may seem like a lot of gibberish, until you get into Wittgenstein and Godel, and suddenly it doesn't seem so sure. There are more things in heaven and earth... And damn if a lot of them don't come popping out of this strange human mystery of text.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
For those of you too wrapped up in the culture of fast food and teevee to open your minds to the broader horizons of human understanding, a koan is a sort of riddle, a traditional question used in the practice of Zen Buddhism as an aid to enlightenment. The most familiar is perhaps what is the sound of one hand clapping. Whether one credits such things or not, the fact is that, transmitted through the medium of text, koans have caused a sudden and irreversible change in the minds of millions of human beings: they are cosmic zingers that tip the balance and force the participant into a dynamic relationship with the unknowable. And all contained in a few dozen intrinsically meaningless symbols. Find me an animated gif that can say the same.
On the face of it, koans seem meaningless: constructions that are syntactically sound but semantically empty. Yet it's incredibly difficult to craft a good koan. Trust me, I've tried. Not just anything will work. Because they are not, in the end, meaningless phrases. They are amazingly dense encodings of the central mystery of symbolic representation: that point where seemingly sound semantic principles lead to apparent paradox. Which may seem like a lot of gibberish, until you get into Wittgenstein and Godel, and suddenly it doesn't seem so sure. There are more things in heaven and earth... And damn if a lot of them don't come popping out of this strange human mystery of text.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
one tiny ameoba
Origins of Text Deep Background 1 Origins of Life
Before this can go any further it's necessary (well, that's a matter of opinion but I'm in charge) to discuss some origins issues. Starting way way back...
Discussing the origins of life is tricky stuff. I'm always reminded of Bugs Bunny, you know, "one tiny ameoba..." There are three basic theories on where life came from:
1. Inexplicable divine intervention. Well, maybe inexplicable is not a term all so called Creationsists would agree with. The point is, and despite arguments to the contrary, at the point you bring an omnipotent deity or pantheistic life force into the picture, you've left the realms of science. This is not a value judgement. I am scientifically trained but I am also quite religious (although some of my views are considered heretical by various churches). Science is a discipline of knowledge and one of its accepted tenants is that that which is not subject to testable theorization, a category under which the concept of God certainly falls, cannot be addressed by scientific consideration. This doesn't stop anyone trying but there it is. Anyway, you get the picture: preexistant First Cause-type entity, hoodoo magic and there's life. Unsearchable, paths beyond tracing out, etc.
2. Life arose from undirected chemical/physical interactions occuring naturally because of the environmental conditions that existed in an as-yet undetermined point in the geological history of the Earth. That's a moderately scientific hypothesis: It can't really be proven, few statements about the extremely remote past can. But if it could be shown that there are processes by which protean life forms and subsequent primitive unicellular organisms are formed which are consistent with the established prinicples of physical and organic chemistry and with what knowledge we posess about the conditions of early Earth, I think most scientists would view this as an acceptable proof. It should be noted that science has not yet acheived this, or even close. At best, inquiry along these lines has not excluded the spontaneous generation of living constructs from a nonliving material matrix. The questions of the mechanisms of formation of living systems is very much an open one and a matter of debate. The reason most scientists and most people who believe in science take this relatively unsupported view for granted is because they just can't come up with a more reasonable explanation. And that's okay, its an Occam's Razor sort of solution. For now.
3. Life arrived from an extraterrestrial source. This is not, as some would contend, an unscientific theory. Certainly it's no less scientific than the spontaneous generation view. The notion of a universe inhabited with star-faring lifeforms or protolifeforms is well established as a theory and has many respected proponents. However, just like number two it's far from proven, and there is no solid or direct evidence that it's true. The fact is, there are some tricky problems with the theory of life originating from spontaneous physical phenomena on prehistoric Earth, and this theory, while it doesn't actually address the basic life origin problem, does move it off of the Earth. This puts it beyond formal scientific study until we reach other planets with life or we find some living or almost living stuff floating around in space.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Before this can go any further it's necessary (well, that's a matter of opinion but I'm in charge) to discuss some origins issues. Starting way way back...
Discussing the origins of life is tricky stuff. I'm always reminded of Bugs Bunny, you know, "one tiny ameoba..." There are three basic theories on where life came from:
1. Inexplicable divine intervention. Well, maybe inexplicable is not a term all so called Creationsists would agree with. The point is, and despite arguments to the contrary, at the point you bring an omnipotent deity or pantheistic life force into the picture, you've left the realms of science. This is not a value judgement. I am scientifically trained but I am also quite religious (although some of my views are considered heretical by various churches). Science is a discipline of knowledge and one of its accepted tenants is that that which is not subject to testable theorization, a category under which the concept of God certainly falls, cannot be addressed by scientific consideration. This doesn't stop anyone trying but there it is. Anyway, you get the picture: preexistant First Cause-type entity, hoodoo magic and there's life. Unsearchable, paths beyond tracing out, etc.
2. Life arose from undirected chemical/physical interactions occuring naturally because of the environmental conditions that existed in an as-yet undetermined point in the geological history of the Earth. That's a moderately scientific hypothesis: It can't really be proven, few statements about the extremely remote past can. But if it could be shown that there are processes by which protean life forms and subsequent primitive unicellular organisms are formed which are consistent with the established prinicples of physical and organic chemistry and with what knowledge we posess about the conditions of early Earth, I think most scientists would view this as an acceptable proof. It should be noted that science has not yet acheived this, or even close. At best, inquiry along these lines has not excluded the spontaneous generation of living constructs from a nonliving material matrix. The questions of the mechanisms of formation of living systems is very much an open one and a matter of debate. The reason most scientists and most people who believe in science take this relatively unsupported view for granted is because they just can't come up with a more reasonable explanation. And that's okay, its an Occam's Razor sort of solution. For now.
3. Life arrived from an extraterrestrial source. This is not, as some would contend, an unscientific theory. Certainly it's no less scientific than the spontaneous generation view. The notion of a universe inhabited with star-faring lifeforms or protolifeforms is well established as a theory and has many respected proponents. However, just like number two it's far from proven, and there is no solid or direct evidence that it's true. The fact is, there are some tricky problems with the theory of life originating from spontaneous physical phenomena on prehistoric Earth, and this theory, while it doesn't actually address the basic life origin problem, does move it off of the Earth. This puts it beyond formal scientific study until we reach other planets with life or we find some living or almost living stuff floating around in space.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
sweet mystery of life
Some side notes on the origin of life.
Regarding Divine Intervention: First off, the scientifically apt among you best not get too smug about the role of a potentially divine agent in the development of life. Better minds than yours have contemplated the possibility of God (or something like God) when confronted by some of the trickier questions that the question leads to. But I would reiterate: it seems pretty clear that, God or no, we live in a phenomenological physical universe that is running according to certain reliable dynamics that seem relatively unconnected to the intellectual and spiritual dynamics that we associate with meaning, will, and purpose. If one assumes that God exists, they must also assume that God has chosen to arrange physical reality according to these principles. Consequently, I'm far from persuaded that the acceptance of the existence of a Deity in any way eliminates the question of an observable and scientifically comprehensible physical mechanism for the formation of life.
Regarding Spontaneous Generation: There's a big temptation, in a secularized scientific worldview, to talk about the formation of life in terms of an incredibly improbable event. The idea is that because conditions were just exactly right, this crazy coincidence occurred and boom, there's your life. This kind of thinking fails to recognize a couple of core truths about the scientific idealization of reality. The first is, there's no such thing as a coincidence in science. The whole principle of science is that every cause follows its attendent effect, according to set and predictable laws of exchange and interaction. (Okay, science is a bit more complicated than that. I've read my share of the philosophy of science, believe you me). If life arose from sheerly physical interactions, as a result of molecular bonding and energy exchanges and all the rest, it did so because the arrangements of living systems are, so to speak, built in to the laws of thermodynamics. Life may be rare (another currently unprovable point of severe contention) but that does not make it any less fundamental to the nature of the universe. In pure science, nothing exists that is not fundamental to the nature of the universe.
Regarding Life from Space: This is in some ways a pretty theory and I certainly think it's a valid and worthwhile theory, but that doesn't change the fact that even though it gets presented as one, it is not a theory on the origin of life. It's a theory of the origin of life on Earth, which is a very different issue. It leaves us still very much strapped as concerns how life arose from the (one presumes) chaotic maelstrom of the young and tempestuous physical universe. Personally, I'm convinced that mushrooms came from another planet. But that's not science either, that's just an opinion.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Regarding Divine Intervention: First off, the scientifically apt among you best not get too smug about the role of a potentially divine agent in the development of life. Better minds than yours have contemplated the possibility of God (or something like God) when confronted by some of the trickier questions that the question leads to. But I would reiterate: it seems pretty clear that, God or no, we live in a phenomenological physical universe that is running according to certain reliable dynamics that seem relatively unconnected to the intellectual and spiritual dynamics that we associate with meaning, will, and purpose. If one assumes that God exists, they must also assume that God has chosen to arrange physical reality according to these principles. Consequently, I'm far from persuaded that the acceptance of the existence of a Deity in any way eliminates the question of an observable and scientifically comprehensible physical mechanism for the formation of life.
Regarding Spontaneous Generation: There's a big temptation, in a secularized scientific worldview, to talk about the formation of life in terms of an incredibly improbable event. The idea is that because conditions were just exactly right, this crazy coincidence occurred and boom, there's your life. This kind of thinking fails to recognize a couple of core truths about the scientific idealization of reality. The first is, there's no such thing as a coincidence in science. The whole principle of science is that every cause follows its attendent effect, according to set and predictable laws of exchange and interaction. (Okay, science is a bit more complicated than that. I've read my share of the philosophy of science, believe you me). If life arose from sheerly physical interactions, as a result of molecular bonding and energy exchanges and all the rest, it did so because the arrangements of living systems are, so to speak, built in to the laws of thermodynamics. Life may be rare (another currently unprovable point of severe contention) but that does not make it any less fundamental to the nature of the universe. In pure science, nothing exists that is not fundamental to the nature of the universe.
Regarding Life from Space: This is in some ways a pretty theory and I certainly think it's a valid and worthwhile theory, but that doesn't change the fact that even though it gets presented as one, it is not a theory on the origin of life. It's a theory of the origin of life on Earth, which is a very different issue. It leaves us still very much strapped as concerns how life arose from the (one presumes) chaotic maelstrom of the young and tempestuous physical universe. Personally, I'm convinced that mushrooms came from another planet. But that's not science either, that's just an opinion.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Friday, March 24, 2006
and the good luck not to fuck up too much (another sideline from the realtime stream)
Is the "f" really that much of a "bomb" anymore? I mean, seriously. Nevertheless, sorry, there it is just sitting in the title. Sorry about that. On the other hand, it's probably time for people to get over the illusion of "work safe" surfing. It was for the purpose of a little verbal jest, a kind of riddle. This is a post about Firefly.
Last night I watched the last episode they ever made of Joss Whedon's (of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel teevee series fame) short-lived science fiction series Firefly on borrowed DVDs. And the whole time I was watching it, the whole time I was watching the entire series, I kept thinking, is it worse, sitting here really enjoying this handful of episodes, getting engaged with the characters and the plotlines and just absolutely knowing that there was no way on earth any of it was going to get remotely resolved, feature length film (that I get to watch tonight) notwithstanding? I mean, there are seasons of material set up there. I'm looking forward to the movie but it isn't in any way going to satisfy me, because it is about 108 hours shy of what I figure would be a reasonable time to really do that show justice. I figure it would cost about $220 million to finish it. That's real money, I admit, it's like a serious medium sized public works project. I personally think it would be worth it, but then I have about three thousand dollars in the bank.
Or would it have been worse to get all excited while it was actually airing (at which time it was something I was vaguely, vaguely aware of, so vaguely I can't recall for sure anything I might have thought about it, though I think there might have been the slightest attention followed by a "space western by that Buffy guy... yeah, no thanks" reaction. I know I never saw enough of any of it at the time to make an impression, good or bad)?
That would have been worse, no doubt.
And you know, it's just a teevee show and I'm not going to wear my black armband. I felt the yen to ponder it a bit. I'm not planning on getting into what I think is right or wrong about the show - I think it is pretty damn near perfect television... for me... but I wouldn't bother to argue the opinion with anybody. Less am I all that interested in talking about why it failed. What is going to take off and what is going to stall in entertainment is really a mystery, even more so in the speculative arena. About the only concrete difference you can say about the speculative is that the brass rings are in even shorter supply, and if you're doing live action the production costs are almost always higher than average, so do the math, it's hardly a surprise. Still, there seem to be some lessons in it. But they ain't particularly pleasant ones.
First off, if you're a quirky show it's got to be a mixed blessing to get picked up by Fox. Fox learned a very simple lesson from The Simpsons: wierdo shit can earn you a goddamned fortune. So they just scoop up as much of it as they can and fling it at the wall. So, if Fox is looking at your project, well, there's gotta be a better than average chance of them picking it up. But the unfortunate converse is, they are ruthless about scraping off anything that doesn't stick fast and firm. Enough of the shit analogy. Toss these sorts of ruthless, profit motive realities in with a bunch of nice, sensitive creative types and you've got yourself the saddest bonus features I've ever seen on a DVD. Of course, I'm a sap, and Firefly was clearly a show for saps.
Lesson number two: from a pragmatic perspective, the geek sap demographic is pretty much fucking worthless. For moral support, ego massage, and internet jibber jabber, fantastic. For mainstreaming a high production value television series, worthless. There are not enough of us and even when our opinions manage to show up on the mainstream radar, they just don't rate. About three times a day I think about something and have this moment of fantasy that the whole uberconnected, smart and worldly and presumably generally well heeled (educated, access to a computer at home or work) could get all together, kumbayah, and make it happen. How hard could it be to raise $220 million?
And then I snap out of fantasy land and remember that Serenity, which was just heavy all over the internet, like a serious free geek advertising phenomenon, basically tanked at the box office. The nail in the coffin, you could say. In fact I'll just go ahead and say it. That movie was the last nail in the coffin, whatever didn't get wrapped up there will never ever get wrapped up, if I know my crappy world. The end. And I don't doubt anyone on the money side involved in it will let a bunch of geek froth enthusiasm persuade them to back a dark horse anytime soon. We're ahead of the curve on the communication infrastructure and that's all, so we sound a little louder from a certain point of view, even a nobody late adopter like yours truly. But in the American Idol universe we don't even fucking matter. And we ought to get used to it. Nothing's changed. And I could go on and on about why that is but I'd be branching rather far afield of the topic. Having embarked on this, I come to realize that the whole topic is kind of pissing me off. I guess nobody likes powerlessness.
Last night I watched the last episode they ever made of Joss Whedon's (of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel teevee series fame) short-lived science fiction series Firefly on borrowed DVDs. And the whole time I was watching it, the whole time I was watching the entire series, I kept thinking, is it worse, sitting here really enjoying this handful of episodes, getting engaged with the characters and the plotlines and just absolutely knowing that there was no way on earth any of it was going to get remotely resolved, feature length film (that I get to watch tonight) notwithstanding? I mean, there are seasons of material set up there. I'm looking forward to the movie but it isn't in any way going to satisfy me, because it is about 108 hours shy of what I figure would be a reasonable time to really do that show justice. I figure it would cost about $220 million to finish it. That's real money, I admit, it's like a serious medium sized public works project. I personally think it would be worth it, but then I have about three thousand dollars in the bank.
Or would it have been worse to get all excited while it was actually airing (at which time it was something I was vaguely, vaguely aware of, so vaguely I can't recall for sure anything I might have thought about it, though I think there might have been the slightest attention followed by a "space western by that Buffy guy... yeah, no thanks" reaction. I know I never saw enough of any of it at the time to make an impression, good or bad)?
That would have been worse, no doubt.
And you know, it's just a teevee show and I'm not going to wear my black armband. I felt the yen to ponder it a bit. I'm not planning on getting into what I think is right or wrong about the show - I think it is pretty damn near perfect television... for me... but I wouldn't bother to argue the opinion with anybody. Less am I all that interested in talking about why it failed. What is going to take off and what is going to stall in entertainment is really a mystery, even more so in the speculative arena. About the only concrete difference you can say about the speculative is that the brass rings are in even shorter supply, and if you're doing live action the production costs are almost always higher than average, so do the math, it's hardly a surprise. Still, there seem to be some lessons in it. But they ain't particularly pleasant ones.
First off, if you're a quirky show it's got to be a mixed blessing to get picked up by Fox. Fox learned a very simple lesson from The Simpsons: wierdo shit can earn you a goddamned fortune. So they just scoop up as much of it as they can and fling it at the wall. So, if Fox is looking at your project, well, there's gotta be a better than average chance of them picking it up. But the unfortunate converse is, they are ruthless about scraping off anything that doesn't stick fast and firm. Enough of the shit analogy. Toss these sorts of ruthless, profit motive realities in with a bunch of nice, sensitive creative types and you've got yourself the saddest bonus features I've ever seen on a DVD. Of course, I'm a sap, and Firefly was clearly a show for saps.
Lesson number two: from a pragmatic perspective, the geek sap demographic is pretty much fucking worthless. For moral support, ego massage, and internet jibber jabber, fantastic. For mainstreaming a high production value television series, worthless. There are not enough of us and even when our opinions manage to show up on the mainstream radar, they just don't rate. About three times a day I think about something and have this moment of fantasy that the whole uberconnected, smart and worldly and presumably generally well heeled (educated, access to a computer at home or work) could get all together, kumbayah, and make it happen. How hard could it be to raise $220 million?
And then I snap out of fantasy land and remember that Serenity, which was just heavy all over the internet, like a serious free geek advertising phenomenon, basically tanked at the box office. The nail in the coffin, you could say. In fact I'll just go ahead and say it. That movie was the last nail in the coffin, whatever didn't get wrapped up there will never ever get wrapped up, if I know my crappy world. The end. And I don't doubt anyone on the money side involved in it will let a bunch of geek froth enthusiasm persuade them to back a dark horse anytime soon. We're ahead of the curve on the communication infrastructure and that's all, so we sound a little louder from a certain point of view, even a nobody late adopter like yours truly. But in the American Idol universe we don't even fucking matter. And we ought to get used to it. Nothing's changed. And I could go on and on about why that is but I'd be branching rather far afield of the topic. Having embarked on this, I come to realize that the whole topic is kind of pissing me off. I guess nobody likes powerlessness.
Monday, March 20, 2006
Darwin is my Copilot
The Origins of Text Deep Background 2: The Origin of Species
When you're playing the where has this strange anomoly (maybe) called Life come from? game, you get used to saying, well, let's just assume that Somehow...
So, uh, well, let's just assume that somehow, life has made it's appearance on the Earth stage. If you want to beleive that it was engineered by crazy metal salamanders swimming in the earth's molten core, that's okay by me.
So you have, well, organisms: they are unicellular, they have some minimal ability to respond to their environment in a directed fashion, they have membranes that allow the transport of elements that allow them to retain their organization, and excrete what's left over when they have utilized these elements. Most importantly, they have the ability to make copies of themselves. They spread and prosper, in a modest unicellular sort of way.
Flash forward just a whole bunch of millions of years: the surface of the planet is absolutely covvered with organisms. Number-wise, the majority are still unicellular. But in addition, well, you know the score. Ferns, flowers, mushrooms, insects, lizards, fish, sharks, octopi, whales, shrews, giraffes, the whole nine yards. What happened? Where did all these distinct, multicellular, specialized creatures that can breed and now make not copies, but variations on one another, come from?
Darwin said, survival of the fittest and thus natural selection. The creatures that survived and managed to make the most copies of themselves are better represented in the population. The creatures that don't cut it, can't reproduce or can't survive, fall by the wayside. Nature selects (although selection is a term containing a subtle value judgement) those best adapted (although adaptation is a term that contains a subtle value judgement) for survival. In a nutshell, what survives survives. Evolution for Dummies.
Well, wait, how does adaptation occur? Some argue that a creature (although, well, let's face it: creature is a term that contains a subtle value judgement) can adapt to its enviroment and pass this along to its offspring. The proto-giraffe stretches its neck out trying to reach long branches, and whad'ya know, it has long necked babies. Not so, says Darwin's camp. In their view, the adaptations are just variations, caused initially (in the assexual reproducers) by environmental mutagenic factors (who knows? they didn't know a hell of a lot about the thermodynamic basis of reproduction back then). The mutations that have a survival edge survive. Selection selection selection. Unicellular breeds multicellular, groups of cells start to specialize. Once breeding enters the picture, (another big mystery), there's a new element. Now creatures can induce their own mutations, as it were: every generation is a survival experiment. The breeders specialize to the point that their germ cells (eggs and sperm, yahoo) are incompatible outside their own group. You got yourself a species. A conglomeration of specialized cells acting as a singular organism, descended from untold eons of whatever works, taking advantage of "chance" mutations. Hence this modern world.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
When you're playing the where has this strange anomoly (maybe) called Life come from? game, you get used to saying, well, let's just assume that Somehow...
So, uh, well, let's just assume that somehow, life has made it's appearance on the Earth stage. If you want to beleive that it was engineered by crazy metal salamanders swimming in the earth's molten core, that's okay by me.
So you have, well, organisms: they are unicellular, they have some minimal ability to respond to their environment in a directed fashion, they have membranes that allow the transport of elements that allow them to retain their organization, and excrete what's left over when they have utilized these elements. Most importantly, they have the ability to make copies of themselves. They spread and prosper, in a modest unicellular sort of way.
Flash forward just a whole bunch of millions of years: the surface of the planet is absolutely covvered with organisms. Number-wise, the majority are still unicellular. But in addition, well, you know the score. Ferns, flowers, mushrooms, insects, lizards, fish, sharks, octopi, whales, shrews, giraffes, the whole nine yards. What happened? Where did all these distinct, multicellular, specialized creatures that can breed and now make not copies, but variations on one another, come from?
Darwin said, survival of the fittest and thus natural selection. The creatures that survived and managed to make the most copies of themselves are better represented in the population. The creatures that don't cut it, can't reproduce or can't survive, fall by the wayside. Nature selects (although selection is a term containing a subtle value judgement) those best adapted (although adaptation is a term that contains a subtle value judgement) for survival. In a nutshell, what survives survives. Evolution for Dummies.
Well, wait, how does adaptation occur? Some argue that a creature (although, well, let's face it: creature is a term that contains a subtle value judgement) can adapt to its enviroment and pass this along to its offspring. The proto-giraffe stretches its neck out trying to reach long branches, and whad'ya know, it has long necked babies. Not so, says Darwin's camp. In their view, the adaptations are just variations, caused initially (in the assexual reproducers) by environmental mutagenic factors (who knows? they didn't know a hell of a lot about the thermodynamic basis of reproduction back then). The mutations that have a survival edge survive. Selection selection selection. Unicellular breeds multicellular, groups of cells start to specialize. Once breeding enters the picture, (another big mystery), there's a new element. Now creatures can induce their own mutations, as it were: every generation is a survival experiment. The breeders specialize to the point that their germ cells (eggs and sperm, yahoo) are incompatible outside their own group. You got yourself a species. A conglomeration of specialized cells acting as a singular organism, descended from untold eons of whatever works, taking advantage of "chance" mutations. Hence this modern world.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
entropy not mentioned once
The Origin of Species Notes
It isn't for nothing (or mere lack of imagination) that I'm ripping off the title of Darwin's famous treatise. This is this indeed the next step after the origin of life on the twisty road to the origins of Text. It's also important to realize that Darwin's work continues to have a profound impact on our view of the concept of the evolutionary development of life. This is right and appropriate: Darwin's seminal, visionary treatise is a work of genius that deserves its place on the Essential Shelf of science. But one should not forget that it was written a long time ago. We know many many things now that are inconsistent or at least wildly tangential to Darwin's original conceptions of evolutionary development through natural selection. Genes, chromosomes, the double helix and DNA, jumping genes, viral vectoring of genetic information, the evidence that important cellular components developed through seperate genetic/evolutionary pathways and entered the modern cellular structure in a symbiotic relationship through mechanisms unknown, carbon dating and the establishment of a partial geological timeline based on the finer points of radioactive decay physics, theories of fast intermittent evolution, introns, all these and a hell of a lot more have complicated the picture long since Darwin shuffled off the mortal coil and became part of the fossil record. This doesn't even approach some of the wierder arenas of thought, the possibility of the seeds of evolution, like the seeds of life, coming from outer space, for example. And as always, divine intervention, in the form of the evolutionist/creationist fusion of divinely guided evolution, lurks in the margins, for some religiously minded scientists (or scientifically minded believers) an answer to the teeming questions that life creates.
Even so, when trying to apply the principle of evolution to very complex issues like human development, it is not unusual to see people behaving as if the question of evolution was still as simple as in Darwin's day, a slow, progressive, and continual process of development through chance mutation, "selective" breeding and survival of the fittest. I'm no biologist so I can't give you the cutting edge of current thought. Barring some harrowing advance in the prevention of aging, I don't particularly expect to see the core question of the thermodynamic basis of the development of a complex and constantly transforming global network of interacting living systems out of a presumably non-living prehistoric earth answered in my lifetime. But a failure to recognize the complexity of the question and the interconnectedness of the issues involved leads to an pseudo-scientific interpretation of human history that is as fantastical and crude as the most primitive examples of the religious, spiritual, or metaphysical interpretations of the same, for which most science-fixated observers have so much contempt. That is to say, it's not to say there isn't an element of the truth in it... But it hain't the whole picture by any stretch.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
It isn't for nothing (or mere lack of imagination) that I'm ripping off the title of Darwin's famous treatise. This is this indeed the next step after the origin of life on the twisty road to the origins of Text. It's also important to realize that Darwin's work continues to have a profound impact on our view of the concept of the evolutionary development of life. This is right and appropriate: Darwin's seminal, visionary treatise is a work of genius that deserves its place on the Essential Shelf of science. But one should not forget that it was written a long time ago. We know many many things now that are inconsistent or at least wildly tangential to Darwin's original conceptions of evolutionary development through natural selection. Genes, chromosomes, the double helix and DNA, jumping genes, viral vectoring of genetic information, the evidence that important cellular components developed through seperate genetic/evolutionary pathways and entered the modern cellular structure in a symbiotic relationship through mechanisms unknown, carbon dating and the establishment of a partial geological timeline based on the finer points of radioactive decay physics, theories of fast intermittent evolution, introns, all these and a hell of a lot more have complicated the picture long since Darwin shuffled off the mortal coil and became part of the fossil record. This doesn't even approach some of the wierder arenas of thought, the possibility of the seeds of evolution, like the seeds of life, coming from outer space, for example. And as always, divine intervention, in the form of the evolutionist/creationist fusion of divinely guided evolution, lurks in the margins, for some religiously minded scientists (or scientifically minded believers) an answer to the teeming questions that life creates.
Even so, when trying to apply the principle of evolution to very complex issues like human development, it is not unusual to see people behaving as if the question of evolution was still as simple as in Darwin's day, a slow, progressive, and continual process of development through chance mutation, "selective" breeding and survival of the fittest. I'm no biologist so I can't give you the cutting edge of current thought. Barring some harrowing advance in the prevention of aging, I don't particularly expect to see the core question of the thermodynamic basis of the development of a complex and constantly transforming global network of interacting living systems out of a presumably non-living prehistoric earth answered in my lifetime. But a failure to recognize the complexity of the question and the interconnectedness of the issues involved leads to an pseudo-scientific interpretation of human history that is as fantastical and crude as the most primitive examples of the religious, spiritual, or metaphysical interpretations of the same, for which most science-fixated observers have so much contempt. That is to say, it's not to say there isn't an element of the truth in it... But it hain't the whole picture by any stretch.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
ecce homo
The Origin of Text Deep Background 3 The Origin of Human Beings
So anyway, we take it as assumed that life, having occurred somehow on the face of the Earth, then goes through a process to diversify and specialize. And so, monkeys turn into humans by the same process and here we are, right?
Unfortunately, it isn't quite so simple. The problem, and it's still very much a question that is on the plate of evolutionary biologists, is that human beings showed up in what seems like a very short period of time. We're talking a radical increase in brain size occuring with, in the geological time-frame, astonishing speed. Boom boom boom, you got three times the cerebellum. There is also the issue that, up to not very long ago in human history, most humans had mental capacity far beyond what their personal survival required. One could argue we're headed back to those times, but that's neither here nor there. What happened?
Well, there are a few basic theories. One is that we didn't actually show up all that damn fast. Biologists with a traditional Darwinian bent have juggled around the various contenders for "missing link" status (if you didn't know, the supposed speed with which modern human physiology appears in the fossil record is the origin of that much-abused term), trying to get a consistent picture of human evolution. There has been some success, some of the gaps are filled in, but not so much as to really put the question to bed. Another idea is that evolution actually tends to occur in fast bursts, spurred perhaps by environmental pressures. In this view, human evolution is really the norm rather than the exception. There is some interesting evidence but I wouldn't call it conclusive. But again, not much in evolution is when it's tackling issues of such antiquity.
There's another related theory, that I think is kind of interesting. The idea is that humans are actually basically premature apes. The concept is, for some unknown reason, certain apes gave birth prematurely, and as a result their offsprings still-elastic skulls permitted more unrestricted growth of the brain. I know, I know, it sounds crazy. But there it is. It explains our extreme helplessness at birth (definately counter-survival), our hairlessness and generally unfinished appearance, maybe even our intense social needs (if it happened that way, these first wierdo naked monkey creatures would have been totally reliant on their social cooperation for their initial, tenuous survival until they figured out what the big brains were good for). Well, it's hard to say. Could it happen again? I mean, might we stumble upon a tribe of brand new protohumans being raised by their confused orangoutang parents? Wouldn't it have had to have happened to a bunch of apes at once? I mean, otherwise you'd assume that just one individual would just not be able to provide enough genetic impact to raise a whole race up outta the monkeys. But if this is the case, why? What was the first cause?
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
So anyway, we take it as assumed that life, having occurred somehow on the face of the Earth, then goes through a process to diversify and specialize. And so, monkeys turn into humans by the same process and here we are, right?
Unfortunately, it isn't quite so simple. The problem, and it's still very much a question that is on the plate of evolutionary biologists, is that human beings showed up in what seems like a very short period of time. We're talking a radical increase in brain size occuring with, in the geological time-frame, astonishing speed. Boom boom boom, you got three times the cerebellum. There is also the issue that, up to not very long ago in human history, most humans had mental capacity far beyond what their personal survival required. One could argue we're headed back to those times, but that's neither here nor there. What happened?
Well, there are a few basic theories. One is that we didn't actually show up all that damn fast. Biologists with a traditional Darwinian bent have juggled around the various contenders for "missing link" status (if you didn't know, the supposed speed with which modern human physiology appears in the fossil record is the origin of that much-abused term), trying to get a consistent picture of human evolution. There has been some success, some of the gaps are filled in, but not so much as to really put the question to bed. Another idea is that evolution actually tends to occur in fast bursts, spurred perhaps by environmental pressures. In this view, human evolution is really the norm rather than the exception. There is some interesting evidence but I wouldn't call it conclusive. But again, not much in evolution is when it's tackling issues of such antiquity.
There's another related theory, that I think is kind of interesting. The idea is that humans are actually basically premature apes. The concept is, for some unknown reason, certain apes gave birth prematurely, and as a result their offsprings still-elastic skulls permitted more unrestricted growth of the brain. I know, I know, it sounds crazy. But there it is. It explains our extreme helplessness at birth (definately counter-survival), our hairlessness and generally unfinished appearance, maybe even our intense social needs (if it happened that way, these first wierdo naked monkey creatures would have been totally reliant on their social cooperation for their initial, tenuous survival until they figured out what the big brains were good for). Well, it's hard to say. Could it happen again? I mean, might we stumble upon a tribe of brand new protohumans being raised by their confused orangoutang parents? Wouldn't it have had to have happened to a bunch of apes at once? I mean, otherwise you'd assume that just one individual would just not be able to provide enough genetic impact to raise a whole race up outta the monkeys. But if this is the case, why? What was the first cause?
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
junk science
Origins of Text (a Sideline): Junk Science
I have a tendency to throw the terms and issues of science around in a fairly fast and loose manner. This has been known to raise the ire of scientists and non-scientists alike. So casual readers may find themselves wondering whether I know what I'm about, or if I'm just cluttering up their display with a bunch of "Junk Science."
Reasonable. I'll say this: I've been studying science my whole life, and I like to think I have a grasp on the topic. For those of you who insist upon qualifications, I did receive a Bachelor's Degree in Chemistry with Honors from a well-respected state university in 1990, which makes me a degree less qualified than Dr. Science of public radio fame. I follow the scientific press in a limited way, and what I do follow is the hard science press, as opposed to the popular. I'm far from an expert on any particular branch of science. I wouldn't want to have a debate with Steven Jay Gould, for example. The fact is, science has become a field so specialized that even if I had the knowledge get deep into these topics of evolution and human development, chances are you wouldn't be able to understand it unless you were in the field already, in which case there wouldn't be much point. This is the broad brush approach. I can say this with absolute confidence: though some may claim otherwise, the questions of the origins of life, the origins of species, the mechanisms of evolution, and the origin of humanity are all very much open. If there's anybody out there who really knows how it all works, they are 1) privy to some information the rest of us haven't seen and 2) not talking.
On to "Junk Science". This is a term that's made a bit of a splash in the press and gets used to advantage by politicians on a semiregular basis. It doesn't mean anything. Science is a process and a discipline. There is not one single topic in science on which there are not a variety of opposing yet valid points of view. Attempts to fit science into broader philosophical frameworks have been failures. Kuhns, Popper, Russell, Berkeley: these are all interesting, but it's like Einstein's famous quote about reality and mathematics: To the extent these philosophers describe the actual practice of science, they fail to impose a consistent philosophical structure, and to the extent that they create a consistent philosphical structure, they fail to describe the practice of science. Some scientists want to come on strong with the viewpoint that science is the end-all-be-all of human thought. This is indeed junk: I say, call me when you've got a theory that justifies electromagnetics, quantum mechanics, and relativity and can explain the thermodynamic basis of evolution and whay human beings run around full of the notion that they are self-conscious and have free will. Don't you Autodynamics people get on my case either: while interesting, your theories are incomplete and still full of holes. I'm not judging science here. I love science and I also believe in it. But it is still a human discipline and so has a lot of error, inconsistency, incompleteness, and the sort of core level paradoxes that symbolic systems which model reality (like TEXT) are always mired in. What I'm pushing may at times be bad science, based on my ignorance or the intention to mislead or deceive (this is, after all, a work of fiction in progress); a lot of it is certainly old science, since I have a tendency to read at my level, and it's often impossible to do that without going back 30-40 years. Some of it may not be science at all, and I may or may not tell you which is which.
What it's not is "junk science." Junk science, if anything, is bullshit dressed up as science in order to con people. For example: when Steve Forbes tells the readers of his crummy magazine that Global Warming is Junk Science, despite the fact that it has the concensus of climatological scientists worldwide, the nod from NASA, and a stamp of approval from the American Chemical Society, and when the only people denying that it's happening are a tiny group of lone dissenters (and one thing you learn in science is that there are always a few dissenters), when the most advanced climatological models in the world are showing that the assumptions of global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions are consistent with direct observations of documented geological emmission events, and when the only people pounding the pulpit with the lonely voices of dissent are people with extreme vested interests in maintaining the oil economy (that is, rich assholes): now, that's junk science. Caveat Emptor, people.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
I have a tendency to throw the terms and issues of science around in a fairly fast and loose manner. This has been known to raise the ire of scientists and non-scientists alike. So casual readers may find themselves wondering whether I know what I'm about, or if I'm just cluttering up their display with a bunch of "Junk Science."
Reasonable. I'll say this: I've been studying science my whole life, and I like to think I have a grasp on the topic. For those of you who insist upon qualifications, I did receive a Bachelor's Degree in Chemistry with Honors from a well-respected state university in 1990, which makes me a degree less qualified than Dr. Science of public radio fame. I follow the scientific press in a limited way, and what I do follow is the hard science press, as opposed to the popular. I'm far from an expert on any particular branch of science. I wouldn't want to have a debate with Steven Jay Gould, for example. The fact is, science has become a field so specialized that even if I had the knowledge get deep into these topics of evolution and human development, chances are you wouldn't be able to understand it unless you were in the field already, in which case there wouldn't be much point. This is the broad brush approach. I can say this with absolute confidence: though some may claim otherwise, the questions of the origins of life, the origins of species, the mechanisms of evolution, and the origin of humanity are all very much open. If there's anybody out there who really knows how it all works, they are 1) privy to some information the rest of us haven't seen and 2) not talking.
On to "Junk Science". This is a term that's made a bit of a splash in the press and gets used to advantage by politicians on a semiregular basis. It doesn't mean anything. Science is a process and a discipline. There is not one single topic in science on which there are not a variety of opposing yet valid points of view. Attempts to fit science into broader philosophical frameworks have been failures. Kuhns, Popper, Russell, Berkeley: these are all interesting, but it's like Einstein's famous quote about reality and mathematics: To the extent these philosophers describe the actual practice of science, they fail to impose a consistent philosophical structure, and to the extent that they create a consistent philosphical structure, they fail to describe the practice of science. Some scientists want to come on strong with the viewpoint that science is the end-all-be-all of human thought. This is indeed junk: I say, call me when you've got a theory that justifies electromagnetics, quantum mechanics, and relativity and can explain the thermodynamic basis of evolution and whay human beings run around full of the notion that they are self-conscious and have free will. Don't you Autodynamics people get on my case either: while interesting, your theories are incomplete and still full of holes. I'm not judging science here. I love science and I also believe in it. But it is still a human discipline and so has a lot of error, inconsistency, incompleteness, and the sort of core level paradoxes that symbolic systems which model reality (like TEXT) are always mired in. What I'm pushing may at times be bad science, based on my ignorance or the intention to mislead or deceive (this is, after all, a work of fiction in progress); a lot of it is certainly old science, since I have a tendency to read at my level, and it's often impossible to do that without going back 30-40 years. Some of it may not be science at all, and I may or may not tell you which is which.
What it's not is "junk science." Junk science, if anything, is bullshit dressed up as science in order to con people. For example: when Steve Forbes tells the readers of his crummy magazine that Global Warming is Junk Science, despite the fact that it has the concensus of climatological scientists worldwide, the nod from NASA, and a stamp of approval from the American Chemical Society, and when the only people denying that it's happening are a tiny group of lone dissenters (and one thing you learn in science is that there are always a few dissenters), when the most advanced climatological models in the world are showing that the assumptions of global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions are consistent with direct observations of documented geological emmission events, and when the only people pounding the pulpit with the lonely voices of dissent are people with extreme vested interests in maintaining the oil economy (that is, rich assholes): now, that's junk science. Caveat Emptor, people.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
put it all together and it spells
DEEP BACKGROUND:mind
But for me the next step is where it all sort of falls apart. Life appears from a lifeless earth, this strange form of energy and matter that supposedly happened at random (suggesting that the physical laws that govern the universe have no significance in the realm of the small and particular? I've never understood what a person could possibly mean by using the term random in a scientific context. There's nothing random about dice. We're just not very good at observing them...) either here or somewhere else and came here, sure, and the nature of life is to evolve into structures of increasing complexity, to carry out it's processes of reproduction and transformation...or whatever, the point is, it was, but what was is not what is so we assume that it must have transformed from what is. All this says fuck-all about what the scientific mechanism is underlying this process. Just how exactly DO little twists of complicated amino acids cause the self manufacture of intensely complex interactive kinetic sculptures? How do they guide the formation of a construct capable of modeling its surroundings with nothing but an abstract system of symbols? What is the origin of Mind? Don't look to science for the answers. Two days ago I read in the scientific press one player in the human genome game announcing that they were figuring that the human genome was about a third again as big as they had previously thought. We're just grazing the surface of whatever deep, wierd scientific principles are harnessed in the mysterious stuff of life. I don't have a lifetime to wait for science to tell me how my brain works, what it's for, how I may best utilize it. I have no choice but to conduct my own experiments. What is free will, in terms of potassium diffusion across a membrane? What is self-knowledge, as considered from the point of view of a highly tailored molecule released across the synaptic cleft to a receptor cell? Science has plenty of theories on the development of life but the origin of this mind, this self-conscious, world-changing mind, remain quite opaque. And at that dark and uncertain doorway we discover the origin of text.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
But for me the next step is where it all sort of falls apart. Life appears from a lifeless earth, this strange form of energy and matter that supposedly happened at random (suggesting that the physical laws that govern the universe have no significance in the realm of the small and particular? I've never understood what a person could possibly mean by using the term random in a scientific context. There's nothing random about dice. We're just not very good at observing them...) either here or somewhere else and came here, sure, and the nature of life is to evolve into structures of increasing complexity, to carry out it's processes of reproduction and transformation...or whatever, the point is, it was, but what was is not what is so we assume that it must have transformed from what is. All this says fuck-all about what the scientific mechanism is underlying this process. Just how exactly DO little twists of complicated amino acids cause the self manufacture of intensely complex interactive kinetic sculptures? How do they guide the formation of a construct capable of modeling its surroundings with nothing but an abstract system of symbols? What is the origin of Mind? Don't look to science for the answers. Two days ago I read in the scientific press one player in the human genome game announcing that they were figuring that the human genome was about a third again as big as they had previously thought. We're just grazing the surface of whatever deep, wierd scientific principles are harnessed in the mysterious stuff of life. I don't have a lifetime to wait for science to tell me how my brain works, what it's for, how I may best utilize it. I have no choice but to conduct my own experiments. What is free will, in terms of potassium diffusion across a membrane? What is self-knowledge, as considered from the point of view of a highly tailored molecule released across the synaptic cleft to a receptor cell? Science has plenty of theories on the development of life but the origin of this mind, this self-conscious, world-changing mind, remain quite opaque. And at that dark and uncertain doorway we discover the origin of text.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
have it your way
You should realize that they're feeding you slow metabolic poison. Desperation, fatigue, sterility a thousand slings and arrows and that's on top of the the thousand that were already invented in ol' Billy's day.
Yeah, the package is pretty and the fragrance has a certain bestial allure, but pause for a moment to consider the symbolism of talking dogs, men in clown suits, southern gentlemen. How much do you know about the strange brown paper packets that the dehydrated meat comes in? Didn't you see that fourteen year old teller on a milk carton last summer? Why are half these fries cold?
Slow poison, dripping from bizarre fungi, entrails of a cow arranged in horrible patterns on the floor. Exceedingly bad.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Yeah, the package is pretty and the fragrance has a certain bestial allure, but pause for a moment to consider the symbolism of talking dogs, men in clown suits, southern gentlemen. How much do you know about the strange brown paper packets that the dehydrated meat comes in? Didn't you see that fourteen year old teller on a milk carton last summer? Why are half these fries cold?
Slow poison, dripping from bizarre fungi, entrails of a cow arranged in horrible patterns on the floor. Exceedingly bad.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
speaking of tie-ins
For me it's all about coca cola. I mean, here you have an enormously popular medicinal, uh, beverage, with a nice whallop of cocaine and some groovy new world herbs to boot. Then the substance, the primary lure gets yanked, and what'ya do? Why, build a massive empire based on a precise imitation. That's America, man, that's the whole picture. It doesn't matter anymore, the old empirial notions of occupation and conquest. Who'd want to live in most of those places in this day and age? But coca cola has invaded the whole world. A bloodless revolution. I'd like to give the world a coke... well, hell, sure boys, but wouldn't it be nicer to sell them all one?
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
a king's ransom
I was reading an article in a tatty little pamphlet they throw in with my Sunday paper. It's produced by the same infotainmonopoly that suffers the city rag to exist. It's a "Weekend Magazine" which bears the name of a daily paper that has affected the name of the currently recognized government of our fine nation.
The article was on everybody can be a millionaire these days and how people who don't end up with a million dollars when they retire are just not trying hard enough. Rule number one was to appreciate living in America, where it's much easier to get rich than, say, Chile. It sort of disgusts me that this kind of pandering propaganda gets played as news in a supposedly respectable media outlet, but there you go. The establishment penetrates all aspects of the shareholder economy.
The rule I liked best was to appreciate the power of compound interest. Oh, yeah, that's the stuff. The king and his chessboard, laying down one coin, two, four, and eight...how anyone believes we're actually creating long term value, when we're constantly building products that are designed for obselescence, products designed merely to facilitate the consumption of other products, is a flat out mystery to me. Compound this, buddy: Any money you're not investing in the motivation to autonomy and self-sufficiency is money down the great big crazy drain of inflationary force-feedback economics. Stop Saving!
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
The article was on everybody can be a millionaire these days and how people who don't end up with a million dollars when they retire are just not trying hard enough. Rule number one was to appreciate living in America, where it's much easier to get rich than, say, Chile. It sort of disgusts me that this kind of pandering propaganda gets played as news in a supposedly respectable media outlet, but there you go. The establishment penetrates all aspects of the shareholder economy.
The rule I liked best was to appreciate the power of compound interest. Oh, yeah, that's the stuff. The king and his chessboard, laying down one coin, two, four, and eight...how anyone believes we're actually creating long term value, when we're constantly building products that are designed for obselescence, products designed merely to facilitate the consumption of other products, is a flat out mystery to me. Compound this, buddy: Any money you're not investing in the motivation to autonomy and self-sufficiency is money down the great big crazy drain of inflationary force-feedback economics. Stop Saving!
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot
Not too long ago I was at a party and got into a discussion with some former Israelite with a strange name about gun control. About five minutes in I suddenly realize dhow ridiculous and pointless it was to pursue this debate, we were both just trotting out canned statistics generated by agencies far from bias, and neither one of us had the slightest intention of changing our views. So I just stopped talking, let him have the last word, whatever.
Nevertheless, when I came across a satirical editorial yesterday that facetiously suggested a plethora of restrictive knife control laws to curb a recent spate of stabbings, I couldn't help but think, well, yeah, talk to me when some guy stabs twenty-five people in a MacDonald's.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Nevertheless, when I came across a satirical editorial yesterday that facetiously suggested a plethora of restrictive knife control laws to curb a recent spate of stabbings, I couldn't help but think, well, yeah, talk to me when some guy stabs twenty-five people in a MacDonald's.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
parties
Anybody up for meta-meta-politics? What if you were to form an alternative party that held that anyone who wanted to run should be on the ballot? I mean, who invented this whole =party endorsement= thing anyway? Is that in the fuckin' constitution? Anyway. Why not? Just get a million people, uh, and form a party. Collect ten dollars. Start signing up presidential hopefuls. Why not endorse them all? "I'm sorry, we just couldn't decide. They all have such great ideas." I hear tell there's a guy down south that runs every year. Talks to aliens. Why not? Bill Clinton could do with a little talking to aliens, bring him back to reality. Just start forming =Generic Liberal= parties and "Armageddonist Orthodox" parties, screw up the whole landscape. Militia Free America Party. Frightened Lutheran Democrat Party. Dog Fuckers. The possibilities are endless. Let's insist that pepsi and coke form parties... We'll find out what those bastards stand for for once and for all.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
quotidian
Well, this can't go on, can it... This clenching of fists, this marking of days in two hour increments, little moments of autonomy pieced out on the maze trail at precise intervals. These little games, storing up little moments like squirrelled away nuts of time... Cannot. Can't go on, these tortured metaphors...
No, these processions of days, these long empty corridors of time, fogged by dope and familiarity. These empty mirrors. These slow, familiar pauses.
These idiot jobs, this piecemeal earning, these little plots and plans, all this uncertainty. The familiar cycles of thought, of writing, of emotion. Vast circadian miasma, Daniel's "quotidian sorrows," this PROBLEM, this SITUATION, this thing...
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
No, these processions of days, these long empty corridors of time, fogged by dope and familiarity. These empty mirrors. These slow, familiar pauses.
These idiot jobs, this piecemeal earning, these little plots and plans, all this uncertainty. The familiar cycles of thought, of writing, of emotion. Vast circadian miasma, Daniel's "quotidian sorrows," this PROBLEM, this SITUATION, this thing...
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
reap slash sow
Sewed and sewed until my back ached, until my neck seemed permanently arched, until I was developing nerve shocks in my fingertips from grasping that same thin shard of metal again and again. At first I thought of nothing, let the uncomplicated nature of the activity draw me through, pull tight and around and through again. Again. Again. By the time I got to the second sleeve, my mind had loosened up considerably and I was dwelling on injustices that I perceived as being dealt against me.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
ninety five's thesis
Well, back up five lines or so and resume the thought. Terrible cycles, yes, the theme for the last five years, and we will, once again, begin a session which we call...
Retrospect.
5 years ago, today...
I said: "Just push it a while longer yet, gotta get some things done."
Four years ago today...
"Be strong. Be strong. Time. Sleep."
Three years ago today...
"Jeezus, I mean okay, yes, honor and boldness and carpe diem and glory and God but sometimes I'm just tryin' to survive and God knows it ain't easy in this world."
Two years ago today...
"Rain, thunder, lightening, strange howlings in the night and I... I? I! I do not know too much. I am trying, but then I am given to believe that trying alone is not sufficient. I am not tired enough and it is far too late. Things, as I may have pointed out or alluded to, have in more ways than I can count not worked out as I had planned, or hoped. Or dreamed."
One year ago today.
I said: "Further up and further in. Maybe. Eight now it all just seems like round 'n round. Oh, but a new day always dawns."
Today. Then. I sigh and smoke and worry about tomorrow. Cycles, yes. Still with me.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Retrospect.
5 years ago, today...
I said: "Just push it a while longer yet, gotta get some things done."
Four years ago today...
"Be strong. Be strong. Time. Sleep."
Three years ago today...
"Jeezus, I mean okay, yes, honor and boldness and carpe diem and glory and God but sometimes I'm just tryin' to survive and God knows it ain't easy in this world."
Two years ago today...
"Rain, thunder, lightening, strange howlings in the night and I... I? I! I do not know too much. I am trying, but then I am given to believe that trying alone is not sufficient. I am not tired enough and it is far too late. Things, as I may have pointed out or alluded to, have in more ways than I can count not worked out as I had planned, or hoped. Or dreamed."
One year ago today.
I said: "Further up and further in. Maybe. Eight now it all just seems like round 'n round. Oh, but a new day always dawns."
Today. Then. I sigh and smoke and worry about tomorrow. Cycles, yes. Still with me.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
I only contemplate the return
twentythird vision
We must travel until we wish to return home. This is not a moral but a descriptive pronouncement: it is our nature to range as far afield as we dare. Necessity may be the guiding force of evolution but it has never fully ruled our lives.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
We must travel until we wish to return home. This is not a moral but a descriptive pronouncement: it is our nature to range as far afield as we dare. Necessity may be the guiding force of evolution but it has never fully ruled our lives.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
By the time we got to Woodstock it was burning to the ground
I felt my heart fill with a monstrous joy when I heard that they were burning Woodstock in a town called Rome. They will blame the trouble as usual on a few bad apples, on a few greedy vendors, on the heat, on lack of sleep. Hell, I even read someone blame it on nudity. A common cause of fires, no doubt. It scarcely matters what lies spew from the mealy mouths of the promoters and reporters, what self-deceptions bubble out of the the pathetic youth remnants of the terminally attenuated hippie movement and their aged doppelgangers, the former hippies who somehow convince themselves that the moneymaking made for teevee promotional juggernaut of 1999 bears a remote resemblance or "spiritual connection" (groovy, man) to the spontaneous phenomenon of thirty years ago. This is not a last minute glitch after three happy happy days, not an isolated incident perpetrated by a few bad kids. This is Death of Culture time. Woodstock died along with the rest of the doomed movement in 1971 (the year I was born), so I found scarce reason for getting worked up (pro or con) over the grisley spectacle of its clumsily ressurected corpse on display in 1994. But this is something more, something special. Woodstock, burning in Rome, in 1999.
I'm immune to the Woodstock mystique and to the era in general. Everything that was stupid and naive and false about the hippie counterculture can be correlated exactly to the subsequent dissipation, bastardization, and commercialization that followed hard on the heels of the Summer of Love. While there's little question that the original event was a Defining Moment, it was merely a promising rally for an upstart contender in the Culture Wars. In the end it didn't mean anything, because a very small portion of history demonstrated that the hippies were laughably out-gunned, out-classed and unprepared for the hard-core reality of societal politics. Their message did not carry and their center could not hold.
Still, Woodstock was something... and I can only be thankful that some few had the decency to stand up, do the right thing, and make a fine effort to burn the travesty of the modern incarnation to the ground. It's a fitting end to the story of Woodstock in the Twentieth Century, already sanitized, packaged and wrapped in lies, ready to be a two hour television commercial for the third-rate messiahs that the Suit brigade have hired to separate our children from their fast-food dollars. A long strange trip indeed...
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
I'm immune to the Woodstock mystique and to the era in general. Everything that was stupid and naive and false about the hippie counterculture can be correlated exactly to the subsequent dissipation, bastardization, and commercialization that followed hard on the heels of the Summer of Love. While there's little question that the original event was a Defining Moment, it was merely a promising rally for an upstart contender in the Culture Wars. In the end it didn't mean anything, because a very small portion of history demonstrated that the hippies were laughably out-gunned, out-classed and unprepared for the hard-core reality of societal politics. Their message did not carry and their center could not hold.
Still, Woodstock was something... and I can only be thankful that some few had the decency to stand up, do the right thing, and make a fine effort to burn the travesty of the modern incarnation to the ground. It's a fitting end to the story of Woodstock in the Twentieth Century, already sanitized, packaged and wrapped in lies, ready to be a two hour television commercial for the third-rate messiahs that the Suit brigade have hired to separate our children from their fast-food dollars. A long strange trip indeed...
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
considering this it is sometimes difficult to remember
Consider the phenomena of recovered abduction memory. Consider the suspiciously large neuron of the giant squid. Consider the theory that in certain crystallized clays exist the templates by which life was formed. Consider the parable of the talents, the parable of the thieves, and the parable of the little boy who Knew Too Much. Consider the Coelecanth. Consider the recurring imagery of the labyrinth and the spiral. Consider the strange pathology of spontaneous combustion. Consider the phantom continents and tectonic plates that ply the metal oceans of our earth's molten core. Consider the theory that our semantic abilities rely on mental processing capability stole from our visual centers. Consider the tale of the elephant and the five blind men. Consider crop circles, stone circles, sewing circles and circle jerks. Consider the failure of mathematics to resolve linear and circular geometry in terms of rational numbers. Consider the eyeball of the wily octopus. Consider the independent reproductive pathways of our mitochondria. Consider the theory that all life originated in another galaxy. Consider the irrational states of being at the far end and dead center of the universe. Consider red shift and the blue event horizon. Consider the symbolism of five horsemen. Consider the flight of the bumble bee and the four minute mile. Consider base ten mathematics. Consider bilateral symmetry, chirality, and the human hand. Consider the theory that evolution occurs not as a slow process but in a series of sudden leaps. Consider your navel and what collects there.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Statue in the Sky
The world presents me with a crumbling artifice, time ravaged stone, any semblance of human features all but erased by the crushing weight of all the history that has gone before, of all the destiny that is to come. This sad statue is my Atlas, holding up a sky that is nothing bu a sheet draped over a couple of chairs.
Which is fine. Me, I've got no problem with anything, I'm always singing, happy and content with the person I am. But it strikes me as strange when they paint it all the bright unreal colors of this modern age, and claim it is a new god, just fresh risen from the sea or descended from the stars above. I know his name of old, King Entropy, and I do not object to his appearance, because my name is written in his book just the same as yours. Understand I'm not objecting to anything, least of all to this venerable king tricked out in day glow and christmas lights, with a well chosen modern name painted across his weathered chest in smeared lipstick. He wears everything well, and all things fall off his cliff by and by. This too shall pass.
I take it as a grave error to stand before the stuatues that have been set before us and assume that they have lost their relevance and belong to some other age. It may be a graver error to believe to readily the interpretations of scholars who dress these icons in the finery of an age their creators could never know. Perhaps this all works itself out in the end: as far as I can tell, noone knows for sure. I can only step back from the time battered dias and see that even the statue itself is an illusion, it was torn down teo thousand years ago and never replaced, as nothing in this world is never replaced. It floats above us in the sky, now, the Flying Dutchman of the idol set, seeking a port that will accept its cargo of entropy laced dreams from the minds of the Million.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Which is fine. Me, I've got no problem with anything, I'm always singing, happy and content with the person I am. But it strikes me as strange when they paint it all the bright unreal colors of this modern age, and claim it is a new god, just fresh risen from the sea or descended from the stars above. I know his name of old, King Entropy, and I do not object to his appearance, because my name is written in his book just the same as yours. Understand I'm not objecting to anything, least of all to this venerable king tricked out in day glow and christmas lights, with a well chosen modern name painted across his weathered chest in smeared lipstick. He wears everything well, and all things fall off his cliff by and by. This too shall pass.
I take it as a grave error to stand before the stuatues that have been set before us and assume that they have lost their relevance and belong to some other age. It may be a graver error to believe to readily the interpretations of scholars who dress these icons in the finery of an age their creators could never know. Perhaps this all works itself out in the end: as far as I can tell, noone knows for sure. I can only step back from the time battered dias and see that even the statue itself is an illusion, it was torn down teo thousand years ago and never replaced, as nothing in this world is never replaced. It floats above us in the sky, now, the Flying Dutchman of the idol set, seeking a port that will accept its cargo of entropy laced dreams from the minds of the Million.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
negative spaces in the mind
some of the recurring themes in my dreams are talking cats (they never talk very well, it sounds kind of parroty and mimicy and just spooky as hell) tornados (which took over from nuclear mushroom clouds, once a common childhood symbol: in a particular dream the latter turned into the former and then tornados began poulating my dreams, although I haven't dreamed of them in years), long narrow hallways and giant expansive warehouses, completely empty city streets and public structures, the memory loss of one or more days or more frequently the memory loss of a particular portion of every day over the course of several months, revolvers that work poorly and have too many chambers in their cylinders or weird shaped bullets that don't quite fit, and, if I don't happen to be smoking cigarettes at that particular point in real time, cigarettes.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
If I pass not this way again
I wish it all were better, I wish it all were good. No use, no use, not in this world, not in this life, but even so I wish it were. I wish it were all strong, mighty, rousing, sufficient to wake you up, to wake me up, to wake us all up to life, to this astonishing, inexplicable invention.
Will you bear with me as I work it all out? I bet you won't, and maybe that makes you the smart one despite my high IQ. If I'm so smart then why ain't I rich? Say I say that it is not my desire say I say I will not be turned but what do I know. No one's offering to buy this thing that I refuse to sell.
But don't blame me, don't argue, don't push. I'm not asking you for anything, no one can ask anyone for anything. Nothing in my hand I bring, only to the cross I cling. We all get nailed in the end. Finally to stop these grasping hands, fixed and held. Finally to halt these wandering feet, fixed and held. Finally to still this restless heart, a spear driven in the side. Finally to quiet this angry tongue, choked silent a sour sponge soaked in gall, vinegar, cheap wine cut off my cheap whines. Finally to darken this relentless mind, forsaken, and have given up the ghost.
Seek and who knows what you would find. If we sought a better way, if we sought a different structure of value, if we sought to live our lives with intention, with mindfulness, with integrity, who knows. Are you a happy cow? Do you expect to find the answer on that flashing screen? No chance friend: if there's anything close to an answer that has risen from the human mind, you can bet your ass it exists in the form of text.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Will you bear with me as I work it all out? I bet you won't, and maybe that makes you the smart one despite my high IQ. If I'm so smart then why ain't I rich? Say I say that it is not my desire say I say I will not be turned but what do I know. No one's offering to buy this thing that I refuse to sell.
But don't blame me, don't argue, don't push. I'm not asking you for anything, no one can ask anyone for anything. Nothing in my hand I bring, only to the cross I cling. We all get nailed in the end. Finally to stop these grasping hands, fixed and held. Finally to halt these wandering feet, fixed and held. Finally to still this restless heart, a spear driven in the side. Finally to quiet this angry tongue, choked silent a sour sponge soaked in gall, vinegar, cheap wine cut off my cheap whines. Finally to darken this relentless mind, forsaken, and have given up the ghost.
Seek and who knows what you would find. If we sought a better way, if we sought a different structure of value, if we sought to live our lives with intention, with mindfulness, with integrity, who knows. Are you a happy cow? Do you expect to find the answer on that flashing screen? No chance friend: if there's anything close to an answer that has risen from the human mind, you can bet your ass it exists in the form of text.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Thursday, March 09, 2006
Mister 300
A little aside from the current temporal stream as I hit the 300th entry of the mess that It's Rome, Baby! has become. Most of what has appeared recently was written between 1998 and say 2003. I'm not blogging, here, really, for the most part. I'm archiving. I know that in one of the four or five inconsistent "explanations" of this thing I said I was really just in it again to make money off of Google's AdSense. This is kind of a joke because I average about 50 cents a month off the ads, which means it will take around seventeen years to crack the hundred dollar point that signals a Google payoff. I would very much like to know what all of those "never gonna make it" AdSense balances for failed media moguls like myself really add up to in terms of money Google owes but probably will never have to pay out. I'm quite certain this is not a piece of information that will be forthcoming anytime soon. Anyway.
Actually, I think it is just a matter that the material is there, good or bad, I'm giving it its platform, no matter that it is a tiny speck in a sea of tiny specks, it's out there. I read the stuff like "The neoshamanist who relegates science to the position of another killjoy institution of the Patriarchy is comitting exactly the same error as the closet social-darwinist physicists who insist that science has (or at least should) set us free from any superstitious belief in agencies or forces that defy understanding or operate outside of the tiny slice of phenomenological possibility that are accounted for by our formalized languages so far" and I just wonder, why the hell do I bother writing that down? I mean, it seems more or less true (though after years of wasting time in public discussion forums I can see just where yahoos of one ideological stripe or another would misinterpret what I'm trying to say) and not badly put to me, but really. Would anyone ever actually slog through a chunk of sesquipedalian prose, let alone try to parse what it actually says? Was I just trying to be a smarty pants, or did I actually feel compelled to record that thought. I can certainly remember being somewhat fixated on thoughts of this manner, so perhaps I can give myself the benefit of the doubt. But seriously: not likely to pop up on Boing Boing anytime soon. If long disjointed rants are the order of the day there are no doubt more entertaining (and short spoken) lunatics out there.
I'm still sort of bemused by the whole supposed phenomenon of "blogging." When I started experimenting with the form I assumed that it was just essentially a self-publishing thing. People were all into it to get a showcase for their unpublishable stuff. But what I saw was that most people were using it as a vehicle to become unlicensed syndicators of mainstream content. Now, I'm certainly not one to get all up in arms about people's intellectual "property" but I'm also not interested in reading what amounts, 90% of the time, to some obnoxious stranger reading paragraphs of the paper out loud and then making comments about them. The feeling is I'm sure mutual, so. To me it's just an html word processor and free webhosting. There's no reason not to, nobody is going to be tracking me down to try and get me to print the Kingdom Come Institute Book, and I'm certainly not going to pony up the money myself or go through the rigamarole and expense of setting up with one of these POD publishers. So I'm archiving it, and very nearly everything else I've got left sitting around in digital document format, online, giving me permission I suppose to stick the original files in some sort of final archive folder and forget about it, at last, move on to something new.
Once upon a time all the KCI stuff was going to end up as a component of my overarching text domain, pentagonfiles.com. Digging through the paper archives the other day I realized that this domain is set to expire in 5 days and at this point I'm inclined to just let it slide. It's the snappiest domain name I've yet owned, which is maybe not saying much, but nevertheless, money is money and it's already been parking to no aim or purpose for 5 year. I remember just when I bought it. I was just about to get married. Now I am a dad and more or less self employed and both myself and the world are very different to the extent of being well-nigh unrecognizable. And the unfinished corpus of the Kingdome Come Institute is getting online at last.
There are about 140 of the KCI essays, interspersed with the occasional song, left to go up. After that remains only pentagon/files, which I won't put up unless I intend to finish it. At this moment I do actually intend to finish it, there are 65 chapters done and I think about 35 to go, an even hundred should do it.
After that I don't know what I'll do with this locus. I might just let it rot or I suppose I might start generating original material again. For now, today, this instant... I think I'll knock off early for the rest of the week.
Actually, I think it is just a matter that the material is there, good or bad, I'm giving it its platform, no matter that it is a tiny speck in a sea of tiny specks, it's out there. I read the stuff like "The neoshamanist who relegates science to the position of another killjoy institution of the Patriarchy is comitting exactly the same error as the closet social-darwinist physicists who insist that science has (or at least should) set us free from any superstitious belief in agencies or forces that defy understanding or operate outside of the tiny slice of phenomenological possibility that are accounted for by our formalized languages so far" and I just wonder, why the hell do I bother writing that down? I mean, it seems more or less true (though after years of wasting time in public discussion forums I can see just where yahoos of one ideological stripe or another would misinterpret what I'm trying to say) and not badly put to me, but really. Would anyone ever actually slog through a chunk of sesquipedalian prose, let alone try to parse what it actually says? Was I just trying to be a smarty pants, or did I actually feel compelled to record that thought. I can certainly remember being somewhat fixated on thoughts of this manner, so perhaps I can give myself the benefit of the doubt. But seriously: not likely to pop up on Boing Boing anytime soon. If long disjointed rants are the order of the day there are no doubt more entertaining (and short spoken) lunatics out there.
I'm still sort of bemused by the whole supposed phenomenon of "blogging." When I started experimenting with the form I assumed that it was just essentially a self-publishing thing. People were all into it to get a showcase for their unpublishable stuff. But what I saw was that most people were using it as a vehicle to become unlicensed syndicators of mainstream content. Now, I'm certainly not one to get all up in arms about people's intellectual "property" but I'm also not interested in reading what amounts, 90% of the time, to some obnoxious stranger reading paragraphs of the paper out loud and then making comments about them. The feeling is I'm sure mutual, so. To me it's just an html word processor and free webhosting. There's no reason not to, nobody is going to be tracking me down to try and get me to print the Kingdom Come Institute Book, and I'm certainly not going to pony up the money myself or go through the rigamarole and expense of setting up with one of these POD publishers. So I'm archiving it, and very nearly everything else I've got left sitting around in digital document format, online, giving me permission I suppose to stick the original files in some sort of final archive folder and forget about it, at last, move on to something new.
Once upon a time all the KCI stuff was going to end up as a component of my overarching text domain, pentagonfiles.com. Digging through the paper archives the other day I realized that this domain is set to expire in 5 days and at this point I'm inclined to just let it slide. It's the snappiest domain name I've yet owned, which is maybe not saying much, but nevertheless, money is money and it's already been parking to no aim or purpose for 5 year. I remember just when I bought it. I was just about to get married. Now I am a dad and more or less self employed and both myself and the world are very different to the extent of being well-nigh unrecognizable. And the unfinished corpus of the Kingdome Come Institute is getting online at last.
There are about 140 of the KCI essays, interspersed with the occasional song, left to go up. After that remains only pentagon/files, which I won't put up unless I intend to finish it. At this moment I do actually intend to finish it, there are 65 chapters done and I think about 35 to go, an even hundred should do it.
After that I don't know what I'll do with this locus. I might just let it rot or I suppose I might start generating original material again. For now, today, this instant... I think I'll knock off early for the rest of the week.
The fourth estate smashes into the forth wall
It's twenty five years since Chris Chubbock blew her brains out on WXLT-TV in Sarasota, and Paddy Chayefsky's visionary film Network has seen glorious realization in an endless procession of "real video" evening programming on some of our popular television networks.
Our case in point finds two teenage girls pushing the envelope of control in a stolen vehicle of the extra-large size commonly known as the Sports Utility Vehicle. The young adventurers are engaged in a wild chse with multiple police cruisers, living out the very best of the American dream as exemplified in cultural classics such as Bubblegum Rally and Smokey and the Bandit. After a series of narrow escapes and accidents of increasing severity, the junior high criminals are brought to bay by threat of arms. The commentators final analysis: they were "two girls with more car than they could handle."
Setting aside the obvious consideration of whether we may be a whole nation with more car than it can handle, it occurs to me that there is an interesting bit of historical comparison at work in these filmed rebellions against the basic order. Mao said that all power comes from the barrel of a gun, but the scientist demonstrates that that sort of power really boils down to a question of momentum. We have many millions of tons of steel lashing around on the roads. And most of us abide more or less by the rules, keep to our side of the road and wait our turn at the ramp meter. We ignore the obvious destructive potential of our costly posessions. And yet we are watching in fascination as one of our numbers suddenly breaks loose from the hive's dance and goes on the rampage, one last doomed and desperate bid to win free from the lines we have drawn so tightly around our lives.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Our case in point finds two teenage girls pushing the envelope of control in a stolen vehicle of the extra-large size commonly known as the Sports Utility Vehicle. The young adventurers are engaged in a wild chse with multiple police cruisers, living out the very best of the American dream as exemplified in cultural classics such as Bubblegum Rally and Smokey and the Bandit. After a series of narrow escapes and accidents of increasing severity, the junior high criminals are brought to bay by threat of arms. The commentators final analysis: they were "two girls with more car than they could handle."
Setting aside the obvious consideration of whether we may be a whole nation with more car than it can handle, it occurs to me that there is an interesting bit of historical comparison at work in these filmed rebellions against the basic order. Mao said that all power comes from the barrel of a gun, but the scientist demonstrates that that sort of power really boils down to a question of momentum. We have many millions of tons of steel lashing around on the roads. And most of us abide more or less by the rules, keep to our side of the road and wait our turn at the ramp meter. We ignore the obvious destructive potential of our costly posessions. And yet we are watching in fascination as one of our numbers suddenly breaks loose from the hive's dance and goes on the rampage, one last doomed and desperate bid to win free from the lines we have drawn so tightly around our lives.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Shamanetics
All of which returns us to the fundamental situation: human beings, runnin' around all crazy with these mind things. However shadowy and hazy the picture of evolution may be, however limited our understanding of the thermondynamic realities that give rise to the peculiar organization of matter that we call life, all this pales in comparison to the dearth of information that exists as to the development of mind, culture, and especially language. This is not to say that theories don't abound. Theories do abound. But it's all guesswork and supposition. And yet language is the basis of all systematization of experiential evidence. All science, mathematics, logic and psychology are at root an attempt to accurately describe experience through modeling in specialized language systems.
Just this morning on the bus I was reading an author exploring shamanistic practices of the radical redefinition of reality in the context of hallucinogenic plants. The author's contention was that these rituals displayed an authentic archaic understanding of reality as defined by language, a stance he portrayed as being antithetical to modern scientific thought. It is common for science to be set up in this manner, the cold seperate voice of disenchanted modernity, allied firmly against the spiritual traditions of our ancestors. Although science certainly presents itself this way, I think it is an attitude that ignores the reality of the fact that science itself is a practice of creating reality out of language. The neoshamanist who relegates science to the position of another killjoy institution of the Patriarchy is comitting exactly the same error as the closet social-darwinist physicists who insist that science has (or at least should) set us free from any superstitious belief in agencies or forces that defy understanding or operate outside of the tiny slice of phenomenological possibility that are accounted for by our formalized languages so far.
The final integration must recognize the reality and power of science as what it is (and now wouldn't be a bad point to start seeing as how we're already dipping our curious toes into the vast and mysterious pool of the genome) and demonstrate that it's fundamental nature as a language based device for illuminating, understanding and transforming reality correlates on all levels to the philosophical techniques of all ages, including shamanism and other mystical practices. The seperation is created by the distinctions we enforce from both sides, and is enforced by the false claim that it is in fact the seperation which has given rise to the distinctions.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Just this morning on the bus I was reading an author exploring shamanistic practices of the radical redefinition of reality in the context of hallucinogenic plants. The author's contention was that these rituals displayed an authentic archaic understanding of reality as defined by language, a stance he portrayed as being antithetical to modern scientific thought. It is common for science to be set up in this manner, the cold seperate voice of disenchanted modernity, allied firmly against the spiritual traditions of our ancestors. Although science certainly presents itself this way, I think it is an attitude that ignores the reality of the fact that science itself is a practice of creating reality out of language. The neoshamanist who relegates science to the position of another killjoy institution of the Patriarchy is comitting exactly the same error as the closet social-darwinist physicists who insist that science has (or at least should) set us free from any superstitious belief in agencies or forces that defy understanding or operate outside of the tiny slice of phenomenological possibility that are accounted for by our formalized languages so far.
The final integration must recognize the reality and power of science as what it is (and now wouldn't be a bad point to start seeing as how we're already dipping our curious toes into the vast and mysterious pool of the genome) and demonstrate that it's fundamental nature as a language based device for illuminating, understanding and transforming reality correlates on all levels to the philosophical techniques of all ages, including shamanism and other mystical practices. The seperation is created by the distinctions we enforce from both sides, and is enforced by the false claim that it is in fact the seperation which has given rise to the distinctions.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Shoot-out at the Occipital Ridge
This kind of thing gets tossed around a lot, but it bears repeating until it sinks firmly into your skull: Whatever it is, however it works that some force, whether it be a blind, amoral force of the organizational edicts of lifeless physics, or some sentient and directed intelligence, it doesn't necessarily matter. Regardless of the schema you subscribe to, the reality is that the societal development of humanity completely leaves the arc of life development in general. Although still under powerful compulsion to breed and die, we are now and have been for at least hundreds of thousands of years a unique element in the world of living things. Whether we are abosolutely unique... well, this remains to be seen. But science cannot approach (and hasn't really tried since Darwin's day) do form any kind of rational assessment of the evolutionary significance of mass human behavior. And this is no surprise: the language and models of evolutionary biology and Darwin are all but useless in the face of the enormous speed with which our culture and technology are mutating, as compared to biological evolution. In culture, mass behavior alterations need not wait around to the next generation to establish a base population and dozens more for the behavioral impact to start breeding seriously into the population. A whole society may change its behavior in light of a particular event, overnight. This change may dissapear the next year, or it may persist for decades or even centuries. Look at the university system: they invented that in the Dark Ages.
But on an even more fundamental level, the fact is that our behavior doesn't really fit the evolutionary paradigm. Yes, we try to breed, and yes, we try to avoid death. But our minds and powers and inclinations are always driving us beyond these simple organism concerns, sometimes even superceeding them completely in the service of some high ideal. We are adapting at an enormous pace, yet most of the adaptations have nothing to do with survival and even less with finding a good piece of ass. The question is, are we doing things for a reason? Not whatever crazy nonsense we all feed ourselves about motivations and justifications, but a true justification. Question number two is, does this reason connect to the reasons behind the whole life swarming up out of the lifeless primordial indistinction? Are we talking about the same thing at all anymore? Are humans really "evolving" at this point? Or has our new method of cognitive and societal adaptation completely superceeded the dominant paradigm of the development of living systems?
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
But on an even more fundamental level, the fact is that our behavior doesn't really fit the evolutionary paradigm. Yes, we try to breed, and yes, we try to avoid death. But our minds and powers and inclinations are always driving us beyond these simple organism concerns, sometimes even superceeding them completely in the service of some high ideal. We are adapting at an enormous pace, yet most of the adaptations have nothing to do with survival and even less with finding a good piece of ass. The question is, are we doing things for a reason? Not whatever crazy nonsense we all feed ourselves about motivations and justifications, but a true justification. Question number two is, does this reason connect to the reasons behind the whole life swarming up out of the lifeless primordial indistinction? Are we talking about the same thing at all anymore? Are humans really "evolving" at this point? Or has our new method of cognitive and societal adaptation completely superceeded the dominant paradigm of the development of living systems?
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Are We Not Men?
Okay, but this pot is still boiling: It's easy enough to talk about evolution in terms of the drive to self preservation and adaptation to environmental changes. It's much harder to talk about if you take away all terminology that represents a human value judgement. Seriously: the concepts of fitness, survival instinct, genetic kinship, herd instinct... In the end, we discover that perhaps there is a great deal in common between the way we humans and the way animals, plants, fungi, and little microscopic doodads behave. What there isn't is a clear connection to the way matter generally behaves, which is, in a manner that displays little in the way of desire, guidance, or self-determination. These are all essentially human constructs, and the whole language of evolutionary biology is dependent on these concepts, even though they have as yet no scientific basis. In fact, most people paradoxically hold the twin assumptions that
1. While animals display a variety of impulses, including survival, kinship, family values, pair bonding, social organization, curiosity, and self-awareness (whether this correlates to the human level of self-consciousness is of course a subject of debate), these traits are all fundamentally scientific in nature, derive from evolutionary origins, and any connection made to the higher faculties of human existance are pure anthropomorhism,
and
2. That although any human characteristic can just as easily be correlated to the supposed scientific rationale of evolution, and linked to survival and successful breeding tactics, nevertheless the impulses that move the human race are special, somehow, and not merely the chaotic and complex effects of molecular randomness.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
1. While animals display a variety of impulses, including survival, kinship, family values, pair bonding, social organization, curiosity, and self-awareness (whether this correlates to the human level of self-consciousness is of course a subject of debate), these traits are all fundamentally scientific in nature, derive from evolutionary origins, and any connection made to the higher faculties of human existance are pure anthropomorhism,
and
2. That although any human characteristic can just as easily be correlated to the supposed scientific rationale of evolution, and linked to survival and successful breeding tactics, nevertheless the impulses that move the human race are special, somehow, and not merely the chaotic and complex effects of molecular randomness.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
The word becomes text and dwells among us
Maybe the fact of the matter is that all of life as we know it and all that remains for us to discover is just the meaningless (in the context of human language models) interactions of ambiguous space-time events unfolding in a minor footnote to the overall cosmology of our expanding universe. It could be that all of our society and culture and all the million issues that we treat so seriously through our day-to-days are just meaningless results of an overactive feedback between the our cognitive structures and our environment and other people's cognitive structures. I don't personally buy this, because it fails to account for self-consciousness and free will, and if we cannot trust these simple and universal perceptions, then why should we trust the perceptions of logic and science, that are held and grasped by a much smaller segment of the population?
It doesn't really matter. Whether we claim a final allegiance to God or Man or Science or any other archtypical bugaboo, at the end of the day we are going to wind up taking our own little slice of the existential pie seriously, we will continue to rate the problems of humanity as the most significant problems, we will continue to be compelled by the questions of the human spirit and the human experience. It may be that we are destined to eradicate ourselves, or at least the current "advanced" society, before we really tap deeply the ancient well of the genome. But if we don't, then we are indeed witnessing the next order of evolution on Earth, right here and now. What will this revolution bring? Hell On Earth, or Kingdom Come? Or Both? Or Neither?
We cannot possibly begin to understand the direction we have chosen as a species until we recognize that we live in a world formed by rapid, disorganized evolution of cultural mindsets. The rules of evolution that apply to the rest of the living system may provide hints, clues and metaphors for this other process, but they are not the same at all. We cannot look elsewhere for the models of how our minds have developed and formed our cultural mindsets, because the human condition is, to the best of our knowledge, unique. Therefore we can only look to our own history for guidance. And in all our history, revealed and hidden, there is only one artifact that displays the processes of mind in symbiosis with language, shaping reality: That is text. That's why I'm here, that's why you're here, that's what this is all about. The strange and devious blueprint of mind and culture we have been leaving for ourselves.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
It doesn't really matter. Whether we claim a final allegiance to God or Man or Science or any other archtypical bugaboo, at the end of the day we are going to wind up taking our own little slice of the existential pie seriously, we will continue to rate the problems of humanity as the most significant problems, we will continue to be compelled by the questions of the human spirit and the human experience. It may be that we are destined to eradicate ourselves, or at least the current "advanced" society, before we really tap deeply the ancient well of the genome. But if we don't, then we are indeed witnessing the next order of evolution on Earth, right here and now. What will this revolution bring? Hell On Earth, or Kingdom Come? Or Both? Or Neither?
We cannot possibly begin to understand the direction we have chosen as a species until we recognize that we live in a world formed by rapid, disorganized evolution of cultural mindsets. The rules of evolution that apply to the rest of the living system may provide hints, clues and metaphors for this other process, but they are not the same at all. We cannot look elsewhere for the models of how our minds have developed and formed our cultural mindsets, because the human condition is, to the best of our knowledge, unique. Therefore we can only look to our own history for guidance. And in all our history, revealed and hidden, there is only one artifact that displays the processes of mind in symbiosis with language, shaping reality: That is text. That's why I'm here, that's why you're here, that's what this is all about. The strange and devious blueprint of mind and culture we have been leaving for ourselves.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Wednesday, March 08, 2006
forceful redirect
So, forget everything about evolution, social darwinism, human consciousness, cultural development and monkeys. It's all irrelevant. Even recent history is impossible to truly know. By the time anything like "history" gets to you, it's already been refracted through the distorting lens of the perceptions of whoever started the story in the first place, the distortions of time and language that must inevitably take their toll on all things venerable, the societal and personal preconceptions of the historian... And God only knows what happens to it when it crosses the boudaries of your eyes. Science has nothing at all to say about almost everything that has been written on the subject of where humanity, in all its modern glory, came from. Noone knows and the chances are very very good that no one will ever know for sure. It's easy enough for an author to create a plausible account that shows preliterate humans learning language, society and religion from gobbling up psilocybin mushrooms... But it's just as easy to make the case that humans learned to use language so that they could finally make it completely clear what a pain in the ass everyone else was. So just try to put it out of your head.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Preview on a half-formed universe
Why is there one thing, rather than another? We may ask, why is the world one thing, rather than another? By world we may mean the world most of us perceive ourselves as living in, the limited human spectrum of commerce, ambition and desire. Or we may mean the planet Earth or the whole universe. Some physicists at the far edge of theoretical cosmology claim that the fundamental question the physical universe poses to us is why there is something rather than nothing (presumably because the math with nothing is so much easier). I would call the latter question merely a subset of the former. We may set ourselves the question of ancient Greek philosophers, wondering whether the universe is secretly a plenum or a void. Really, there is no difference between these two possibilities. The fact is that the universe presents itself to us as neither: it seems to contain something, seems to be contained by nothing, and yet it does not seem to be full. All the questions return to the template, which is, why is there one thing, rather than another. In seeking to answer this question we may become so caught up in the supposed causality that led to a perceived state of things that we forget entirely just how acausal even asking such a question is. A causation based philosophy of things, such as the physical sciences strive for, eventually must either admit defeat in explaining the whole world, or else it must finally declare that there is no way that anything can be one thing or not another. Anything can only be what it is, because the effects that are perveived in the condition of a particular situation were predetermined by the causes that led to this condition; these causes in turn were once effects, caused by causes, and so on. At first glance, asking why there is one thing, rather than another, seems the very image of causal thinking. Seeing a condition, we ask "why," implying that there must be causes from which the situation arose. But the question also contains the acausal concept of the possibility of more than one possible condition. The significance of this question leads again to the mystery of the mind. We perceive, in the realization of our free wills, that it is possible for us to alter the seemingly inalienable laws of causation. Paradoxically, confronted with this unexpected power, we immediately seek to somehow use the laws of causation (as we understand them) as the agency of this will. This paradox contains the root from which the flowers of our suffering and the imprisonment of our wills grow.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
making the case for an acausal universe
The objection arises: "physical universe" as opposed to what? Although the masses still subscribe to religion and spirituality, among a certain subset of the intellectual elite the concept of metaphysics, or even worse a spiritual or invisible realm, has lost its credentials and respectability: they refuse to acknowledge living in what one of their ranks described as a "demon haunted world." To them, all that is left to the universe is the "physical" universe, and so it seems redundant to specify.
Not to thrash the dead horse (although why the hell not - the horse doesn't care)... I can go so far with science as to accept the possibility that life is merely the extreme example of physical matter engaged in patterned reciprocal feedback behaviors (even though science has yet to display proof of this assumption). I cannot go so far as to ignore my own consciousness or my constant perception that I am posessed of free will if I wrote this today I would have to add many exceptions to "free". It is not simply that science has not yet worked out an explanation for these qualities. It is quite simply that these qualities do not even remotely fit in the current paradigm of the physical sciences. Only in the last few decades have scientists (and scientasters) even put forth some tentative and controversial theories on the possible agency of free will, in identifying structures in the brain where it might possibly be that the fundamental indeterminacy of quantum particles could be captured. But that's either cutting edge or pure bullshit (too soon to tell) and anyway, even if it's so, it doesn't explain anything any more than the discovery of neurons did. We've always known that the mind was the agency by which most of cognition ocurred. Knowing how the mind might be able to "choose" one electrochemical pathway over another is fascinating, but it is far and gone from understanding why it might do so, and what it might imply that it is aware of itself doing so.
So, until science provides me with a better explanation of what's going on within the boundaries of my skull, I will continue to consider science to be merely a model of an aspect of reality, and I will continue to distinguish between physical reality - loosely translated, what science can talk about, and plain old reality - the world the rest of us live in every day. which is just chock full of stuff science doesn't know anything about.
I also hearby declare my apologies for talking about "science" as if it were an entity with a will and desires, and promise only to do it occasionally in the future.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Not to thrash the dead horse (although why the hell not - the horse doesn't care)... I can go so far with science as to accept the possibility that life is merely the extreme example of physical matter engaged in patterned reciprocal feedback behaviors (even though science has yet to display proof of this assumption). I cannot go so far as to ignore my own consciousness or my constant perception that I am posessed of free will if I wrote this today I would have to add many exceptions to "free". It is not simply that science has not yet worked out an explanation for these qualities. It is quite simply that these qualities do not even remotely fit in the current paradigm of the physical sciences. Only in the last few decades have scientists (and scientasters) even put forth some tentative and controversial theories on the possible agency of free will, in identifying structures in the brain where it might possibly be that the fundamental indeterminacy of quantum particles could be captured. But that's either cutting edge or pure bullshit (too soon to tell) and anyway, even if it's so, it doesn't explain anything any more than the discovery of neurons did. We've always known that the mind was the agency by which most of cognition ocurred. Knowing how the mind might be able to "choose" one electrochemical pathway over another is fascinating, but it is far and gone from understanding why it might do so, and what it might imply that it is aware of itself doing so.
So, until science provides me with a better explanation of what's going on within the boundaries of my skull, I will continue to consider science to be merely a model of an aspect of reality, and I will continue to distinguish between physical reality - loosely translated, what science can talk about, and plain old reality - the world the rest of us live in every day. which is just chock full of stuff science doesn't know anything about.
I also hearby declare my apologies for talking about "science" as if it were an entity with a will and desires, and promise only to do it occasionally in the future.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
al gore invented frames
Look! Frames! * The world it seems must try to *
* to convince us that it is always * THIS
/mission\ * necessary that we choose a * IS
* side; * NOT
/vision\ * And so we forget that all of * AN
* us are on the same side of * ANIMATED
/goals\ * the one Great Divide... * GIF
* Who will we listen to, then? *
/home\ * The quick or the dead? *
* Can the dead give us the answers *
/vortex\ * we seek, *
* Or must we seek our own solution? *
****************** ******************************** ***********
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
* to convince us that it is always * THIS
/mission\ * necessary that we choose a * IS
* side; * NOT
/vision\ * And so we forget that all of * AN
* us are on the same side of * ANIMATED
/goals\ * the one Great Divide... * GIF
* Who will we listen to, then? *
/home\ * The quick or the dead? *
* Can the dead give us the answers *
/vortex\ * we seek, *
* Or must we seek our own solution? *
****************** ******************************** ***********
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
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