/ Archives / (dated fictitious 1995 date)
Exceptionalism
2018 09 13 This noon I found myself dreaming up new words and phrases for such phenomena as American Exceptionalism. We are a society based on genocide masked as charity; intolerance masked as liberty; deicide masked as Christian love … But my mind is melting away, draining, mixing with swamp. Make sure I do this, that I do it well, then improve on it; or do it your damn self; it shouldn’t all be up to me.
Hypocrisy, deception … these are not the exception; they are the rule.
In God’s Name
20199 07 21 My Mac got an infection. My Mac guy wiped the Mac clean, restoroed my data Back and forth, it took a couple of days. n the meantime tried to read a book, two books. First dusted ff a bok Jan gave me ten years ag: The Triangle Fire: The Fire that changed America. With the 3.5 magnifier the Lighthouse sold me i tried to progress. By the end of the day I had acheived an addtional page! Ten years to read one page! I switiched to Euripedes: Orestes.
Keyboard stcky, bear with me till I can fix it.
Jeez, hadn’t read Orestes snce 1956. Some parts of it came back to me; but I’m learning asects hadn’t guessed at. First, I already know and have known for a long time, that the Greeks we call the Greeks weren’t Greek: any more than whiite men in Wyoming were “American”. Everybody was pushing everybody around, nobody was legitimate.
The Greeks we call the Greeks were a matriarchy. Athene is a remnant of the importance of the female, but Apollo and Zeus sneak one over on the girls.
Note that Orestes kills Clytemnestra. Hell, Clytemnestrha killed Agamemnon.
Now imagine a version of Genesis in which God insists that Adam eat the fruit. First, forbid, then, insist.
These behavoirs are all double binds: damned if you do, damned if you don’t
I half-swtch half-subjects: In Orestes “god” is repeatedly refered to. What god is that? Is Allah there to punish this god’s impudence? After all doesn’t the Koran say that there is only one god and his name is Allah? sn’t a godo called Apollo or Zeus going to tick Allah off?
The god in Genesis is a jealous god: does he punish blashphemy? punish disloyalty? Is the serpent also a god? which one? where are the female gods?
Civl Moorality
2019 07 17 Watching Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. America has invented “Lincoln” for a long time now so we can pretend that our main issues are moral: and that they were always moral.
Kleptocrats, land-grabbers, slavers, genocides, oh so moral.
What’s funniiest of all, we choose Lincoln to represent our moral character when Lincoln is a guy abut who a slew of facts are actually known, actually have some agreement with fact. Pure politician if there ever was one. LBJ pales altogether.
TransJennerCide
2018 07 04 I’m reading Why Gender Matters by Leonard Sax. I’ve been reading good science on the subjects of sex and gender for decades: Isaac Asimov … Desmond Morris in the 1960s, Jared Diamond in the 2000s … Some of the vocabulary is odd to me: “trans”-, eg. “intersex” … but Dr. Sax seems to know what he’s talking about: and it’s a subject where data matters: public attitudes, publication dates matter, the more so as they change every other hour.
Once upon a time non-conforming individuals didn’t stand a chance: not against the church, the pope, against God, against Jesus and St Paul. Then there’s the gospel story of Jesus embarrassing the hypocrites in the marketplace, rendering them unwilling to cast the first stone, thereby sparing the adultress: funny, since killing deviants is a familiar sport; if people didn’t commtt adultery there wouldn’t be any adultery to punish!
Anyhow, you know the deep-conservative government with its school systems, principals, and courts is involved whenever lots of money and lots of social interference is involved. Fortunately for queers, suicide is always a way out.
“In ninth grade she came out as lesbian …” That would have been unthinkable when I was in the ninth grade: boys were assumed to have a “sex”; girls didn’t admit to having any sex of any kind!
Public? or Private?
2018 06 25 The Supreme Court says that the baker who hates fags doesn’t have to bake the cake for a same sex wedding. But the Supreme Court didn’t come up with a ruling strong on principal: if you own the business, you don’t have to serve the customer: period. Or, you do. Is offering a business to the public an implicit notice of obligation? Do stores that don’t serve Communists obligated to say so in a sign clearly posted by the entrance? Fegs needn’t enter? No atheists here: no Jews, no Catholics.
What ethics are proper for the culture?
The other day a restaurant in the DC area refused to accept the White House press secretary and her party for a mean: the restaurant owner threw out the scretary. No, voting didn’t end in early November. Not long ago racists who called themselves “white” didn’t have to serve so much as water to people they could get away with calling “black?. Strikes me that such behavior was a misuse of the concept of “freedom”, but it wasn’t up to me, then or now.
Yeah, once upoon a time if a “black” was thirsty you could castrate him and stuff his nuts down his throat. Funny, the perpetrators could call themselves Christian and few in their society would contradict them. (Consider: when Judgment conmes will the meaning of “Christian” be up to the Christians? or up to Jesus? up to God?
Is the Colorado baker going to answer to his homophobe friends in church? or to Jesus? Do you realize that there’s a BT bospel that centers on a homosexual ritural with Jesus at its center?
If God would just speak up (and speak in responsible translations) there would be very little question of what was right or whoe position was ethical. Meantime, it’s sinners persuading morons, and more morons. Who every proposed that a good set of ethics could be argued by the perpetrators?
Meantime, here’s a hint: why doesn’t the baker bake a lot of we4dding cakes and also offer for sale little statues of a bride and groom? of a couple of brides? of a could of grooms. The bakery could offer a blow job to any couple who knew what they wanted without an argument?
Of course beffore we get into too many niceties about restaurants and bakers, or voting booths, we should be clear on which humans if any are entitled to argue about “rights”?
Later 2018 06 25 And now there’s the pharmacy clerk who refused to hand over the meds for an abortion prescription. The doctor said let the woman terinate at home at her convenience, the clerk votoed the choice, claiming aborton violates his beliefs. what right does the cleark have to beliefs he hasn’t warned his bosses about? Shouldn’t he display his license to contradict prescriptions in plain sight?
I would love the idea of people standing up for their believes for a change if only their courage weren’t so patently common, so cowardly, so un-thought through.
Patent Falsehoods
2018 06 17 No matter how patent the falsehoods churches teach the children of a congregation, those teachings will have a truth seldom fathomed by that congregation. For example: Christianity. Christians teach a story in which Romans do Jews’ evil deeds for them, torturing the innocent, murdering the god. Meantime the Jews now called Christians claim their evil to be proof that God loves them, forgives them. Indeed, sinners can’t be saints unless they suborn witnesses, rewrite laws, double-cross the savior.
Sounds far fetched? Yeah? well lots of Christians think so too. So they becomes Republicans, Democrats: land-grabbers claiming that total lack of credibity on the part of elections, legislators, are proof positive that sinners are really saints. We couldn’t get into heaven if we hadn’t first severed the lips of virgins and worn their hymen as a hat, castrating their fathers and brothers, sewing their testes to their face like little balloons.
The more preposterous the claim of guilt or forgiveness, the more desperately the congregation will hold to it.
[I apologize, I should censor my mentions ofcastration rituals: peiople don’t know about this common behavior. They outta learn, dammit.] [How did I ever get to be 79+++ years of age and still have my own apperatus?]
Oh, and note, Rome becomes Jerusalem’s scapefancy while the kleptocracy claims Rome as proof of their civilization! And note, while you’re at it, you meet plenty of sons of God: , and they have Christ-like names and titles: Christ, Caesar … emperor, you never meet the actual god, God the Father: Rome itself.
The Jews have a book which they hold up, claiming magical truths.
Think it through: I bet there are paralells just as proposterous among Hindus, Buddhists … not to mention university science departments. You see I’m not saying that there’s a right side to choose; there are only competing falsehoods.
Immigrants International
2018 06 16 I just read that Britain’s Winston Churchill attended a middle eastern rally with TE Lawrence. The Arabs were chanting about the Jews: Kill them, kill them all, off with their heads … Churchill didn’t know any Arabic; Tee Hee Lawrence of course did. Tee Hee chose to listen without comment.
I’m reminded of the article I read when JFK was running for the White House. Some voter explained that she’d voted for Kennedy because, being English, he’d have a leg up on foreign policy. ! How much of political discourse is misinformation? misunderstanding? All of it as far as I’m concerned. When people asked me if I was for Trump they probably assumed that I lived in the same informational world that they did. I don’t. I didn’t. I won’t.
Re Trump, he was yelling about immigration: he was insulting immigrants. No one has yet explained to me how immigration is any of Trump’s business, or mine, or yours. I was born here: the US, NYC. I don’t apologize, I don’t explain. I don’t see how Trump or you or I have property rights — except at the end of a spear. The Algonquin’s had spears: did they have any rights? If I can be here, and you, and Trump … and the Algonquin, how can the black or the Muslim or the Jew possibly not have the same rights.
I don’t see any way to establish rights except by a war of all against all: the surivors, if any, can claim any rights: all else in nonsense.
Churchill’s England was letting Jews into Brittain; the Russians were killing them, the Brits were letting them in. If a nation pretends to be Christian, isn’t it mandatory that Jews under the knife be admitted?
more in a sec, but you see my gist.
Negentropy
2018 06 15 I was just looking at my queen palm that I planted outside the bedroom window in 1990. That palm underwent a miracle in the hurricane of last September 10. The palm had leant toward the house. I’d feared for decades that it would rub against the house, fall against the house, damage the house: require removal, removal I couldn’t afford to pay for and likely couldn’t do myself. A decade ago my landlord helped me winch it to the vertical, making it rub less; but it got only a little more vertical, it still rubbed, was still a danger. And it was a damn annoyance. It wasn’t my house when I planted it: my friend Catherine was still alive. I lived on site #43, Catherine was on site #14: the lot of which I speak. I worked for the state park, Highlands Hammock State Park, that season, giving the tram “interpretatations”. Andy, the ranger who rehearsed me in the spiel, pointed out to me a couple of queen palm saplings growing as weeds near the rangers’ locker. Andy told me that the park service was supposed to be dedicated to protecting native life and to removing alien invaders, fauna and flora. Therefore the queen palms were due for extermination.
The park was selling live oaks saplings, natives, for $1. I’ve been nuts about live oaks since I first saw them around Hilton Head Island. I decided to plant the oak by my trailer on #43. It was a ridiculous plan: the oak is slow growing but gets huge. The tree would swallow my 26′ Coachmen trailer. So it would have to be destroyed. But so what? I’d enjoy it i the meantime. So one Saturday morning when I had access to community service laborers, I enlisted a couple such to help me plant my oak. Catherine, old, blind, crippled, saw that we were working at planting something, said that she wished she knew how to fertilize her bottle brush tree. I’d heard of Catherine but was meeting her for the first time. I dispatched the service guys to dump some park fertilizer around the trees on #14. Catherine was swept by wonder as she saw it done on the instant. That’s when we became friends.
Shortly thereafter I moved to Wrede’s Wildlife Sanctuary. I left the oak at my trailer park, and planted my queen palms by Catherine’s house: where they grew, and grew. By last September they must have been 70 feet. Well, the storm plucked the rear palm from its roots, twirled the bole, and landed upside don in the clothes line.
Ah, but the queen palm by the bedrood window, now my bedroom window, thank you dear Catherine. dodm
t get crisjed agaomst that bedroom wall; the hurricane straightened it out! straighter than the winch ever had.
And this is the first time I’ve used the term negentropy in forty years.
Entropy, you know what that is: if you burn the palm bole it turns into heat, and smoke, and ash. Smoke and ash don’t appear by your house and turn into palm tree. Order turns messy ; mess doesn’t turn ordered. The bullets fuck up the guy’s organs; blood and guts don’t turn into living breathing lungs, sleek liver …
So that law of nature is called entropy; order out of chaos is the opposite: negative entropy: negentopy.
Dear Catherine, thank you for being my great helpful friend: for givng me you nice house. The bottle brush tree living a long healthy life once fertilized. Your loquat treet though has pretty well had the course. Blame the phone company: they severed limbs every time tree neared wires: no regard for tree: or me..
“God” as “Good”
2018 06 07 Jesus is said to have tried to teach us how to be good. We killed him, tortured him to death. Is that because we didn’t understand the lessons? Or did we kill Jesus because we did understand the lessons? Did we see that beiing good didn’t jibe with our lust for power?
Freedom Cake for Faggots
2018 06 05 We’re told we have “freedom” from ages where even the smartest of us are far too young to analyze the problems. For one, don’t look for examples to prove that you acted freely — calling God Jaweh instead of Allah; demonstrate that noone in your administration has ever been prosecuted in constitutional issues.: I said God’s name was Fred and I lost my girlfriend: Therefore: I experience the absence of freedom of religion.
While we’re at it, before courts argue about lack of freedom, shouldn’t freedom be rationally defined? If you run a business, do you have the freedom to refuse service to people whose behavior is an affront to yoiu and your kin? The customer is grossly overweight, disgusting, you puke on the greill: can you refuse to serve her a cheeseburger?
If you can’t, how are you not a slave?!
Bakc in the army, 1964 or 65, my friend Phil found his ideal in a polity so free, that nothing could ever be agreed on, established as true. Totally disfunctional anarchy, that’s for me.
Sincere Intolerance
Back up a second: the article says “The court ruled in favor of Jack Phillips, a devout Christian and proprietor of Masterpiece Cakeshop, who had been prosecuted by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission for refusing to bake a cake for a gay wedding.” How is the concept of “devout” “Christian” tested? We take his word for it?!? Would 100% of Christians welcome Jack Phillips as a fellow? And if so, would 100% of democrats agree that Jack Phllps has never disrespected secular freedom?
Where do humans get off thinking they can adjudicate such imponderables?
Courtly Cops
2018 05 31 Yahoo has a headline video of cops beating a woman on a NJ beach. The woman is twenty-something, the cop is kneeling on her and punching her. The first videos are from body cams for the cops: now a second generation of beach-goers’ cell phones are contributing. Images seem plentiful. The new videos suggest the woman was drunk and abusive to the cops from the beginning. One thing I saw before bailing out for the sports section was the woman admonishing the cops that she was a woman, they weren’t supposed to be using her as a punching bag.
The situation cast me back to grad school and my studies of courtly love. You won’t likely follow what I’m saying if you don’t read Andreas Capellanus, The Art fo Courtly Love, twelvth century. Andreas Capellanus was a priest. His tome was a compendium of advice in matters of love written for young nobles. The priest is specifying that social verticality is essential to courtly love: knights, at the bottom of the social hierarchy of and for the privileged, were advised to fall in love with woman a rank or two above them. I illustrate by citing Sir Lancelot loving Queen Guinevere. He’s a knight: the bottom of the top; she’s a queen, the top of the top: or as near to the top as a female could get. Capellanus has a brief comment on what to do if you, a knight, fall in love with a peasant woman: someone at the bottom of the hierarchy: the bottom of the bottom. Don’t waste you time, rape her, do whatever will scratch the itch the fastest.
Um, er: you’re telling us that a priest was recommending rape? Aren’t priests supposed to be celibate?
The are. Celibate to the limit of convenience.
cops aren’t supposed to beat up women: unless the women are low class, of the wrong ethnicity. Or rude, loud, drunk. Then you can do whatever you want with them.
Remember the American soldiers coming upon the starving Jews in WW II concentration camps: the Nazis could shoot the Jews on whim: rape them if they liked. But they didn’t: they didn’t like: the Jews were believed to be filthy. Without freedom, everything stolen from them, they probably were filthy.
back in a min
NBA Playoffs, Warriors vs. Rockets
Hostile Complements
Tell me, please: Who Else Noticed This?
A couple of games ago Harden and a buncha Warriors were on the floor in a pile. One Warrior took Harden’s hand and was about to help him rise when he though better of it, thourhgt worse of it, thought differently: let Harden go, walked off after his team mates.
All season I’ve been reveling in examples of sportmanship eclipsing competition: eg, Steph made a super rediculous three, he was high fiving everyone, and an opponent came up to him, pregnant with awe, with worship: and there was a big sports bump, but the hail fellow was in black; Steph was in white, gold, and blue!
No, no. when genius is on parade it doesn’t matter who you were rooting for a minute ago: magic transcends ordinary fandom.
So here was Hardin, playing his ass off, and here was a Warrior recognizing a down hero, offering a hand, then realizing, hey, wait a minute, and removing his support. Harden realized what was going on and got up the rest of the way by himself.
Yes, and they replayed it. But who was it? Harden for one; who was #2, the good Warrior?
Fake Paul, Fake Pope
2018 05 28 I just ran into a web author claiming that Paul McCartney is dead. So much rubbish to me but I read on: far enough to be reminded of a number of conspiracy clichees. Someone else can pursue this into logical dead ends; I’ll just sketch a couple tugs:
In the early 1980s I was visiting a college buddy in his small town, upstate New York . I knew radical Cathlics from my Ivan Illich / deschooling days: Billy was an altogether different type of radical Catholic: his coveny believed that the Pope had been kidnapped, replaced with an impersonator. They professed that the Church had been infiltrated by Satan and his minions: the church was evil, the priests were evil; but the true Church stil existed, and so did a true Pope.
Billy’s radical Catholic friends didn’t know a thing about Ivan Illich or the crazy nuns I’d shared weekends with. But that ain’t all: in the 1960s I was doing my Shakespeare scholarship: on the Sonnets: and I was replete with crackpot theories about “who” really wrote “Shakespeare”. Shakespeare wasn’t written by Shakespare; Shakespeare was written by Queen Elizabeth, by Ben Jonson, by Kit Marlowe …
And my Paul McCartney guy was reminding us that there were schools of nuts wo believed that Elvis was alive and well and living in Argentina with Hitler.
Simultaneously there are schools that teach that Joan of Arc was really a bull dyke, or rather really a femme: really was burned, really was not …
I believe that Joan of Arc was really Thomas Jefferson, really was for slavery, really fought the Civil War against himself and against Lincoln.
Of course meantime we all know that Jesus was really a Zoroastrian, that Buddha was really Zarathustra.
And don’t ask about Confucius.
So what’s the real story? People are really nuts? Genuinely stupid? Could one infer anything reliable or true from urban myths? Is what people say about Joan of Arc likely to shed light on anything? How about on what Saint Paul says about Jesus? How about what this Paul, pk, says about Jesus?
Should “science” investigate rumors about alien artifacts in US desert labs?
I’ll sleep on that and say more.
Period Poverty
A Yahoo article today disgusses social awkwardness toward menstrual hygiene. There are women around the world who lack menstrual hypiene supplies. Blood has long been tabboo. My first horror on the subject came in reading Sir James Frazier, The Golden Bough: girl in New Ireland were confined to a hut at the onset of menstruation. Many native American tribes banished bleeding girls: they were expelled from the tribe fore the duration.
Period å Manger
I have a black humor memory recently acquired on the subject: Ludmilla, the great Russian sniper, got a natural bonus when she killed another Nazi at distance: she’d inherit the dead Nazi’s bandages! Menstrual materials.
Human Intelligence, Legislation by Kleptocrats
Human beings are intelligent enough to imagine intelligence: and ethical behavior; but not intelligent enough to imagine that I am intelligent, and ethical, and don’t like to be supervised by morons: or legislated at by kleptocrats.
Waterboarding Trump
20018 05 12 “A GOP congressman from California said Friday night that President Donald Trump wouldn’t hold up well under torture, coming to the defense of Republican Senator John McCain as Trump surrogates continue to attack the Arizona legislator and veteran over his service record.”
Wow, we can mock and insult and make fun of Hitler all we want: and we could insult Nixon once he was wedged loose of the White House. I never expected to see an offering like the above while Trump was still stomping around, his head still on his neck: or Sarah Huckabee Saunders. Etc.
But it’s wonderful to contemplate. We could banish the national debt in no time if we sold shares to see Trump’s minions tortured. Las Vegan could lay odds on how long Sean Hannity would last against water squireted up his nose. I would love to see wagering as to whether Sarah Huckabee Saunders or John McCain would last longer with hot tongs on their pudendum. A Las Vegan tote board would sizzle.
2018 05 17 I seem to have picked on current White House denizens: therefore, Republicans. Not fair at all.
But we shouldn’t sweat it: they are the resident evil.
2018 05 29 Ill Legal: English Down the River
What does “meat” mean? There was no public question on the matter until recently, and then, now, people didn’t ask me, the writer, the Shakespeare man, the English scholar. No, the journalists ask lawyers, and legislators: and juries, and readers: the victims of semantic manipulation. What 2018 05 13’s headline revealed to be at issue was whether a marketed food based on soy protein, from plants, grown in soil, could be called “meat”. The cattlemen want that sobriquest forbidden to all that doesn’t involve animal slaughter.
Notice, for English scholars, for scholars of any language, tradition counts. Only tradition counts: and market manipulators have no business on that turf.
Picture the people living in the nice cave which opens Quest for Fire. They sleep on the rock, douche in the river, laze in the sun: and have no market products: and if we don’t speak their language, if they have a language, it doesn’t matter what they call anything. I didn’t notice anything that looked like a culture academy as they were raped and murdered.
That would have been Africa somewhere. Descendants of escapees latched onto the middle east. We know from the Jews that desert demons have territory to those who fed them: Canaan to Jews. I don’t remember anywhere in Genesis or Exodus where some Phillistine wants to check God’s ownership papers: prove to me that this is your land to give away to these ragamuffins.
I understand that if we kills all the Lakota, that no one’s left standing to argue about rights. Crazy Horse didn’t have any papers. Washington could have sent enough paper with any cavalry to sunk the Bad Lands. Still, what does that have to do with what words mean? in English? in Sanskrit? in Hebrew?
pk suggests: don’t redefine “meat”: don’t permit its use in marketing once it becomes ambiguous. Or pen an exemption for lab innovations.
No, no: don’t allow the use of traditional words for innovation products: soy patties canNOT be meat burgers.
Musing on God’s Messages, Word on the Wind, coming up: 2018 04 29
All this deserves to be written better than I can manage thee days as I lose my sight, my hearing, my marbles: it’s a riot to remember the time when I was a perfectionist.
Ba-Bad Black Sheep
2018 04 28 Some royal cousin has a pair of black sheep which she has named “Venus” and “Serena”. A prince is about to marry a mulato. Both items are in the news. The news says that naming black sheepfor the Williams sisters is a no no. Why? Why should Americans care what British royals call anything? Why should Americans care who royals marry? Are they a standard of some kind? Is respect warranted?
I’m watching a TV dramatization of a Ken Follet novel, Twelfth Century. It’s funny to watch these Norman knights worry about blood lines and secession to the throne: they’ve got everything wrong, why should we worry about bastards?
The Norman didn’t just steal the country, they steal the church, steal the religion: steal the God: and the Christ! May the Norman God make sure that no Saxon blood, and absolutely no Celtic blood contaminates Norman monopoly.
Popular Fiat
2018 03 03 The movie calls itself Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. It’s up for awards. Cast sounds good. I’m half blind now, I hope I’ll have a little vision left when it comes to NetFlix, I’m certainly not going to see it in a theater. But today I check out the plot, see that it’s right up my alley: woman’s daughter is raped and murdered. She want someone convicted of the crime, rents billboards, says so: puts pressure on the sheriff.
In Genesis, when God was writing in Latin, God said Fiat Lux: Let there be light. Fiat: things get done, quick, by magic.
It’s a convenient universe in which the god can simple say things into existence. Democracy is magical politics: the public says it wants something, politicians promise it: a few years later some other politician promises it. Presto, changeo: Fiat order. And in law, fiat guilt!
Newton solved the laws of planetary motion. Others had tried and failed, Newton got it right. But no one had demanded that he get it right, no one had demanded that he get it at all. He got it because he played with the numbers, played seriously. There was no fiat, it was mental work, hard work. We don’t know if anybody before Newton was capable of such work. Damn few since, if any.
But wouldn’t it be nice: order the shefiff to arrest somebody. Order the sheriff to get it right. Or don’t: who cares if it’s right? The point is to have somebody writhing on the dungeon wall.
NBA, None or Done
2018 03 01 When I entered Columbia, 1956, we bragged about our liberal arts program: we were a real school; not a trade school. Our Chet Forte was the highest scoring basketball player in the US, top notch to Wilt Chamberlain’s #2. When Chet got a C in something he was booted off the team. His scholarship was supposed to be at least part scholarly. Can you imagine such a thing transpiring at Duke or at North Carolina? Guys today sell a years worth of their talent to Syracuse on their way to the NBA. Duke nd Syracuse are real universities: you can study a real subject there. But they’re not Columbia. And of course Columbia too is a trade school, at least in part
You see where this may go, go there yourself: I want to skip straight to a point I thought of yesterday:
Jennifer Lawrence says she dropped out of school at fifteen to pursue her acting. As far as I’m concerned acting is her real professon. She’s well rewarded in the field. Good. Maybe she plays basketball too. You get in front of that camera, Honey: I won’t complain if you make more money than LeBron James.
Jennifer, the darling, said that at fifteen in school she didn’t feel too smark. Good. Why should she? The school is none too smart itself.
more later
2018 02 27
Louis CK is disgraced. His schtick was to whittle his dick as though orgasm was approaching in two seconds. Now it seems he didn’t just jerk himself on stage, he pulled his pizzle in front of real women, in real time, when it seems none had asked him to, none wanted him to. Master man Jerry Seinfeld, wiseguy emeritus, genuinely wise, wonders what Harvey Weinstein is up to, wanting to shower in front of models: what’s CK up to, wacking in front of disgusted cast members.
Well, here comes pk, ahead on thing after thing, behind on everything else: I just watch Michael Jackson duet with Britney Spears. M Jax is always janking on his balls on stage. Spears has a sublimely round ass: at least when this film was shot. The audience colludes: the audience wants Jax yanking on huis balls, wants Britney to look like the universal tush.
And now I see, we were all practicing for Harvey Weinstein! How can we come down on Luois CK coming up when we’ve been encouraging them all along?
2018 02 26 The familiar monotheisms have it that God made man: and that God made man in his, God’s, “own image”. Therefore, one would think, that human thoughts and God’s thoughts were comptible: that man would have a clue what God was up to.
Traditional Christianity has it that man cannot understand what God is up to: and, further, it isn’t man’s business to know.
An extreme expresson of this comes up in Kazantsakis’ novels: Jesus’ disciples don’t have a clue what Jesus is up to, what he says, what it all means. Indeed, it’s pretty funny where Jesus explains to Judas that it has to be he, Judas, who betrays Jesus: “You’re my best friend: who could be better? How could the ironies be richer?”
Irony: there’s irony galore.Man is supposed to listen to God: man doesn’t. Or, he does, but man is incapable of hearing, of understanding. So: you go to Temple to honor God; but in temple, you don’t listen, you don’t understand. So you go to Church; but Church is not a place where understanding abounds. Newton found things to be parallel at Cambridge: his contemporaries knew he was smart, and there were times when Newton, elected to the Royal Society, was pround to for once have a peer or two: till he decided, by experience that he had no peers! Don’t publish, you have no readers. There are no peers, keep what you think between you and God!
Etc. Etc. So: humans give up on temples and churches. Instead they form schools, universities, governments. Does any government represent God or what God says?
Schools intimidate the immature: so the immature will believe that they’re flawed (mere orthodox belief acter all). The student feels his inadequacy keenly. The professors put on robes, have tiruals in dead languates. At any point is the school and its professors responsible for what God said? For what Jesus said? Or for what inspired disciples of God or Jesus said?
But wait a minute: God is supposed to be right, be definition as it were; but what if he’s not? What if the universe is true … (How could it not be?) And God and his churches are false? Then we’d be wise to listen to the smart guys. We’d be wise to honor the truth. We’d have to become intelligent t have aclue what the truth is.
We’ve gotten away with dishonoring the truth so far, we seem to have gotten away with it, we’re so stupid, so dishonest, we think we’re getting away with it. Like Trump! Like Nixon.
Consider the FBI. Federal collusions grant themselves the power to impose authority onto truth: it isn’t true if the FBI says it isn’t. The FBI runs labs, the labs cheat, the lab give the results the fed wants.
Go to the Church and ask what Ivan Illich said. The Church will give you an answer, but it won’t be what Illich said!
To to NYU and ask what I said? They’ll haw, and fumble, and finally give you an answr: a false answer.
The people exist to ratify kleptocracy. The land grabbers are in charach of whose claims to land are legitimate.
Back up: God tells man he can use whatever is in the garden, but don’t touch the tree of knowledge. What does man do? He cheats, he steams: then the moron lies about it!
White men like Nazis denied that Jews were “white”. Well sure: no one is white if you’re careful enough. Then the white men indenture themselves to steal land from North Americans. Then the white men vote to approve themselves as a republic!
Wait a minute: we could form a republic maybe if we could find available territory; but North America was not available! Certainly not Plymouth. And certainly not to indentured serfs: the bank owned them.
For theology or philosophy or history … to be anything but a joke you’d first need an honest “man”: or an honest God.
You’d have to find a university that actually understood what Abelard said: a thousand years ago.
How about a true Bible?
There are, or at least have been, people who understand a phrase or two from God, from Jesus … from Abelard, from Newton. There were people in the 1960s who understood a phrase or two, a poinit or two, from Ivan Illich: the Church should give up all of its property, the Church, if it wished to become Christian, would have to de-professionalize its priesthood. And, instead of schools, a people who would be free would elect for themselves a set of uncensored date bases: replace the compulsory, centralized school system with a cybernetic free marketplace. Had the kleptocrats not understood the impications there would have been little reason for them to come down on me, the offerer of such reforms. The priests understood how Jesus’ liberal offer of divine love, threatened their monopoly on power, on authority. Had they not seen the meaning they would not have been so avid to cheat!
The gospels tell how the Temple and the Roman state violated their own rules to sabotage Jesus: illegally. They violated their own sacred laws in order to contradict God.
Of course the FBI knows that it’s “wrong” to falsify evident, to give false testimony. Our institutions also know that the tax payers would castrate them in a trice if they didn’t cheat: take the God the Jews stole (from some little, lost, forgotten tribe, and steal him for themselves.
This could use a little editing, but what couldn’t?
2018 02 20
Last evening I watched the Pooja and Shanti story again, this time in the company of my beloved Jan. “I love that little girl!” I kept exclaiming.
And so I don’t doubt do we all.
Her parents, just off screen I presume, must love her: and boy, are they showing her off.
The camera loves her. Colors love her. Shanti the elephant’s mahouts love her.
Is there anything unclean about our love? How often does she get her bottom fondled as she goes by? By me? By the mahouts?
We’re a sexy species. And she’s one of the posters! Never mind how young she is: that youth is ancient.
She reminds me ot Emma Watson: beautiful at nine, beautiful at nineteen. And Reese Witherspoon. (Make sure you know the latter’s film The Man in the Moon: she, maybe eleven, maybe twelve, loves her farm boy neighbor: he, early twenties, sees jails, dungron, ruin … if he yields to nature, he’ll get the enmity of his tribe.
PS Poojah lives half the year in India, the rest in Germany. The name refers to a prayer ritual in Hindu, honoring a god. (And Shanti, if I remember my Sanscrit right, means “peace”.)
I also loved how clear the film’s German seemed. Without the English subtitles I wouldn’t have understood many of the words, but listening and reading, paying attention, made for great practice. Hear enough of any language and it will start to seem to make sense, whatever it is: Chinese, Algonquin …
2018 03 02 Here it is a few days later and I’m in the middle of seeing Miracle on 34th Street for the first time since I was a child. Natalie Woods made a huge impression on us: as a girl, then as a teen, then as Natalie Woods. But it’s in the context of Poojah that I want to comment. Santa gets the Macy’s Santa job, he bounces kids on his lap all day long. He winds up going home with Natalie Woods and mom, Maureen O’Hara. Mom teaches “skepticism” to girlie, Santa gently chides her on it, starts to convert her in the direction of ImagiNation: there’s the US, the UN, the Dutch Nation and ImagiNation. That’s ridiculous in itself but it’s an intrepid Santa bouncing little girls with cute little round bottoms on his lap that i want to comment on: where were the journalists? the cops? the mothers up in arms? the dykes, the lawyers?
In the 1980s I befriended an old guy in Naples, on the road to Marco Island. He was a physicits, retired from NASA: Eckland Hathaway. I loved how he lived on the edge of the wilderness, like Robinson Crusoe. Kids came to him to report fire ant hills, he’d boil some water, dispose of the ants: like the Pied Piper. followed by children, clamoring and dancing. But the children were welcome no further. Eck, with absolute wisdom, didn’t want parents buiding a head of steam over whether great-gramps is fondling all that toddle tush.
Years later I was camped in Sebring Gardens, Sebring FL. A neighbor, Betty, was caring for her mulatto granddaughter: adorable little girl, rounded below the waist to perfection. I watched at a distance as this camper fondled granddaughter’s fanny while that camper avoided demonstrations of affection like the plague. It was best to keep an extreme distance ’cause grandma called the ops on this one (but never that one). Go figure. Meantime grandma’s whore of a welfare party girl slewed her boyfriend’s hotrods sideways, building Florida sand moguls the size of dunes.
Was the little girl as cute as Natalie Woods? Close. Close enough.
God’s Profits (I mean Prophets)
God tells Jewus to toss the money tables at the Temple. He does. We torture him, kill him.
On the cross Jesus asks God why he, God, has forsaken him, Jesus. He doesn’t seem to get a very good answer, but does it strike you as typical? That’s how it strikes me: as Edgar Lee Masters wrote in Spoon River Anthology, God standing idle while his son is tortured to death sounds exactly like him!)
New answer me this, how come Christian churches are still pretending to care about what God says? At what point does God chime in? make a statement?
And what’s our basis for believing that we’re competent to know what God said to Jesus? or what Jesus said to us?
Until God is heard from in a way that would convince an intelligent, cautious person, shouldn’t we all just hold our tongue?
This and that church holds up text they call the “Bible”. Do we have any basis for accepting (or rejecting) such statements?
God told me to offer you, the human world, an internet: a digital Who’s Who, What’s Where. I knew it was God telling me for one reason because God had clearly said it first to Ivan Illich: God talked to Illich, and me, and others, giving us a nudge to get rid of kleptocracy-controlled data bases, compulsory brain washing. Men were free once, sort of, we could be free again: sort of. Worth a try, anyway. No?
But you tortured me. Still do: these fifty-eight years later.
How do you know I’m telling your the truth? Same way you know anything: you don’t! Or, you know it because it makes sense. It has the ring of truth. Because nothing else makes sense. If God didn’t tell me, or Illich, then God should have told me, and Illich.
I’ll tell you another reason to recognize the inspiration as from God? Because no one understood a word I said! !!!
Did anyone understand Jesus? Did anyone understand Illich?
Can you show me one person who understood what I was talking about in 1970?
Or 1980? or 1990? Or since?
Is that in itself proof? Is everything you don’t understand from God? No, that’s not what I mean. But things not understood, things rejected out of hand, things triggering torture despite laws supposedly protecting speech, stand in pretty good company.
What Do I Believe?
I know one thing: if you think I mean what I say literally, Go straight to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect $200. Consider further: I might have meant something literally once, but no longer.
Could what I say be translated into someting literal? Maybe I could have once, but no longer.
Take religion, for example. Few writers define their terms as regularly or as carefully (or as creatively) as I do: but what I mean by “God” changes form day to day, minute to minute: use to use. It all flashes like a strobe light.
Or take politics: I believe in “freedom”.
But what is it?
Beware, I often mean things as a joke, and often as a trap.
Watch out.
Once my jokes were hopes that God would save you. or that I would save you. or am I trying to save God?
Some of what I mean is perverse. Taught as a Calvinist, as a wiseguy kid I was anti-Catholic. My weapon against the Catholics was to take their regimen literally.
I no longer know what that means. But I used to know, maybe you can guess. Maybe you don’t cafe, maybe that’s your downfall: God and I can laugh at you at Judgment. Or is it that God’s been laughing at me all along?
Yes, Robin Gibb, the joke’s on me.
Hell is still today wearing yesterday’s costume.
I believe in freedom. for individuals. I do not believe in freedom for centralized powers. I do not believe that Hitler should be free to murder 18 million fags, Jews, Commies. If he does, he should be stuck with his action. Hell is still today wearing yesterday’s costume.
Uh Oh
I just made a typo: a huge amount of text rolled into this file. I’ve corrected what I’ve seen, who knows what I haven’t seen. Be patient, be generous. Or don’t.
I scribble, I save some scribble. I make a typo, reams o ftext inserts itself somewhere before I know what I’ve done. I try to trim, but volume gets the best of me.
Well, maybe heaven keeps perfect records; the rest of us don’t. So hell.
Do you believe in God?
In a serious religion that question would be a waste of time. and efort. and be rude to boot. Anyway, the much more important questions is
Does God believe in you?
When God asked me to offer you an internet, 1970, did he need Congress’s permission? Did I have to fill out paperwork at the court house? Pay a fee?
2017 11 06
Dream Fish
2017 10 27 I had a monster bass dream last night. I was diving a treble-hook bass plug when I felt a bump, let the plug bob back to the water surface, left it sit trembling for a second: and there it was, wham, a monster strike. I set the hooks hard and started cranking. The bass showed itself. It put everything it had into the battle: it dove, then showed itself on the surface: again. My companion in the boat and I were agreeing outloud that it was the biggest bass, by far, that we’d ever seen: it was going to come in at thirty pounds. It had a mouth like Satchmo. I got it, my buddy called.
No, it’s my fish, stay the hell out of the way: but not in a dream. In my dream I allowed my friend to reach for the line. The bass shook its head at just the right time, and the bass swam away, free. I muttered how I was going to release it anyway but I’d wanted to hold it up, guess its weight first.
Double-Knit Wit
2017 10 24 Jefferson famously wrote about equality. He was one of a number who theorized about freedom. I, like you, was compelled to go to school where secular authorities taught me about all that. Somehow between then and now the secular authorities started teaching that Jefferson owned slaves! Uh … Duh … Yeah? They also teach that Jeff bore children on his favorite slave.
Now this year’s secular authorities dare to hint that Jefferson was a hypocrite.
I was 70-something before I realized that Jeff as a young man had belonged to a debating society: in the face of living in a society which assigned Church of England dogma as the unquestioned truth. Not agreeing with the Church of England dogma was against the law: was a capital crime.
Wait a second, Knatz: are you suggesting that Jeff was not a hypocrite?!
No: I’m suggesting that people who have submitted to school have no right to behave as though when it comes to hypocrisy they should be presumed innocent-until-proved-guilty. I suggest that guilt, not innocence, is what should be presumed: even after the innocence is proved: since the only entities to prove it, or anyting, are those submitting to school, and the Church of England, or the Roman Catholic Church …
Early Onset Alzheimers
And I had a point to make, and it’s bled away in the sands. I’ll add it if I can remember.
Sexually Inappropriate
2017 10 17 Yeah, Carrrie (out of Debby)
https://www.yahoo.com/news/carrie-fisher-once-sent-cow-172246704.html
Some producer rolled on top of Carrie’s friend, Carrie threatened him with castration, in a funny way, insulting along the way his manhood. (Carrie pretended to know the extent of his dick: how? when did she measure it?) (If we all lived in a cave, we’d all know everything about everybody; but we’re civilized, it’s all surmise.
Anyhow, here’s further fuel for more than one side of any possible males-and-females are all but biologically incompatible). Black widow spider females devour the male who’s just mated with them: he cums, he’s confused, doesn’t know which way to run, she chomps him, food for babies: and what business is it of humans? The black widow female is the size of a blimp compared to the male’s “mosquito”: among humans the female is slightly slighter on average, but she’s got compensating weapons.
Personally I believe that the genders are already balanced by billions of years of evolution: we’ll keep changing, keep going extinct, but we’ve already changed, and yielded, and adapted, and put on disguises.
Jerk Attack
2017 10 16 This, that, star speaks up: Harvey Weinstein gets them to his hotel room, promises the moon, gives them a splat in the eye. Then more report in, then a cascade: and suddenly we’re remembering Bill Cosby … Now hundreds more write in, “Me too! Me too.”
And I just remembered my own Me Too. Seventh grade: Lenny R. invites me over after school. He lived not in a house but an apartment, first time I’d ever seen one: sunken living room, dishes of hard candy around on the side tables. Lenny says do I want a candy. No thanks. Then Lennie whips out his dick. It’s a monster, almost as long as my own. It’s all news to me, I’ve never had an orgasm, didn’t know about them, never tried. Lenny whips it, Lenny grunts, Lenny goes Oooo, And splat, creamy cum is splashing on his fist.
I didn’t know what it was then, I had no expectation of a result from whipping your dick. But I certainly know what it is now.
Did I report this to anyone? No: I din’t know there was anything to report: guy jerks at me, all new to me, I go home. I had no idea whether such things happened to other boys, to girls, to White House interns …
And just a minute ago I was watching a basketball news desk, and there was Isiah Thomas with his angelic smile: another predator. How come he’s a news star: doesn’t anyone remember the accusations at the Knicks?
Is such behavior common as dirt? I bet it isn’t. Human society has always been taboo saturated; we’re in an exceptional time.
Weinstein Bros.
2017 10 14 “In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, the younger Weinstein who co-founded Miramax and The Weinstein Company (TWC) said: ‘I want him to get the justice that he deserves’.” Can someone please explain to me how we are to know what justice a human predator “deserves”? The Bible says “judge not, lest ye be judged”. Actually, forget about the “lest ye” part; the judge not is clear and familiar. Judgment is supposed to be God’s exclusive bailiwick: a monopoly. OK, so we don’t believe in God: E’en so, how does it follow that we inherit his domains? I don’t believe in God’s judgment. Fine. How does it follow that I do believe in man‘s judgment? society’s judgment?
I don’t believe that Pilat was competent to judge Jesus. I don’t believe that kleptocrats are competent to judge Harvey Weinstein.
But answer me this also: with or without “proof”: where does anyone, least of all the NYTimes, get off being shocked at studio heads alledgedly whoring candidate actors and acrtresses? It’s a cliche I’ve heard all my life, “She slept her way to the part”. How stupid do the denizens of hell have to be to know that they’re in hell? or not in hell? It looks like hell, it smells like hell, tastes like hell, why shouldn’t we understand that it’s hell?!
No God? it doesn’t follow that there’s no hell.
I also repeat: you say you don’t believe in God: fine: does that prove that there is no God? What if another two thousand years pass and there’s still no evidence of God? That still doesn’t prove anything! Even if the end of the univers came, that still wouldn’t prove anything.
Proof Roundabout
2017 10 14 Quentin Tarantino expresses dismay at the allegations about Harvey Weinstein. Think for a minute, think of Pulp Fiction: isn’t that the movie where some leather freak locks people up, molesting them, torturing them, murdering them? Wash’t it Harvey who got the money for that?
Imagine Judgment. Imagine Tarantino in the dock. Imagine God showing Pulp Fiction, intercutting to Weistein’s fat face, sweating Tarantino.
Now imagine a God who isn’t a terrorist bully. Imagine that reason is something that can be reasonably discussed by humans. Who should be swearing?
Harvey Wants a Second Change
Second? Second?! Hasn’t he already had a thousand chances? Two thousand?
Statute of Limitations
My dear patron, friend, host Catherine (d 2004) astonished me back in the 1990s when she said, apropos of sexual misconduct allegations against some supreme court candidate [Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill], the alleged offense having taken place a while before [early 1990s], never previously reported, that there should be a time limit for accusations. What, if the Nazis can lock the Jew away for five years the Jew has only four years to complain? The woman goe4s into therapy but only feels strong enough to speak out after the limit has expired?
I’d like to see nature set such statutes: tell the cavemen, You’ve got five years to figure out fire: if you haven’t kindled a fire in five years theh you may not, not matter how much flint you master.
Dictating Pop
2017 10 15 I’ve got to redraft this. First I start with a generalization: I’ve long resented like hell amateurs passing opinions as truths: The Beatles are the greatest band. … The Beach Boys are the greatest band. … Guy Lombardo has the greatest band. This is double annoying when I’ve already long held differnt opinions: Duke Ellington has the greatest band: except for Count Basie: so long as you don’t count Miles Davis.
But of course the people pushing the Beatles in your face aren’t competent to know why Duke is revered, or the Count.
I remember a student (not in my class) pontificating that The Graduate (when it was playing locally as a new release) was “the greatest movie ever made.” The girl was zophtic, blond, had champion buttocks, but had she ever seen Intolerance? Grand Illusion? Modern Times?
La Strada? 8 1/2?
Her authority resonated best with her peers, student her age, with similarly shallow experience.
2017 10 14
My recent binging on Monty Python has spilled into related binges. I’ve long followed the Pythons as individuals: Cleese did Norway, Land of Giants, and Fawlty Towers, and Fish Called Wanda; Michael Palin did Missionaries, was in Time Bandits … This time around I’m also paying attention to the female regulars: Life of Brian offers good opportunities. Earlier this week I watched and admired physical comedy via fisticuffs between Connie Booth and John Cleese. Simultaneously I’ve been enjoying reviews of the Beatles, enjoying them even more than when they were current. Such indulgencces can go on and on since som much material was recorded, kept, cared for. and I’m also enjoying Beatle feales< Pattie Boyd, her sister, other men in Pattie's life … I’m enjoying seeing parallels between Paul’s Beatle mop and Pattie’s deadpan cuteness. Richard Lester cast Pattie, George felt sympatico, asked her out … married her …
What I don’t like about this nostalgia is beng in my face reminded of Beatle era judgments: The Beatles are the best blah blah, Sgt. Petter is the best blah blah …
When I was about ten someone loaned me a windup Victrola. I took it into the yard and played Spike Johes desecrations at full volume. The neighbor asked me to turn it down. I realied: annoying the neibhbors, imposing my whim on them was 99% of what I was doing. Once I collected jazz and was very chosey, I brought more power, more volume to my backyard: Lionel Hampson really made everyone’s racism race.
If I hadn’t known how offensive black genius was to local white prejudice I found evidence galore and found it pronto.
Theological Normalcy
2017 10 12 A couple of thoughts were mixing oddly as I gradually awoke this morhing. One, I was visiting some of my usual ironies: people imagine divine judgment, but trust that God’s judgment will be subject to their, human, approval: God wouldn’t dare allow something to be true that offended (or failed to flatter) a human majority. And, two, at the same time I was watching collisions between unfamiliar extentions of humas familiarites. How shall I express this? I was watching and enjoying a British TV show on a travelling medical clinic: doctors and nurses visit your neighborhood: and the cameras look up people’s ass, into their twat: look at their enflamed penis stalk … One woman is worried that her labia extend abnormally: she’s reluctant to be intimate, not trusting what a companion would think of her. The nurses assure this woman that her little lips protruding from her big lips is not abnormal. Funny, the woman is afraid to show her details to a lover but does show the TV world. And I was reminded of porn star Houston having her labia trimmed. She looked good to me both before and after.) (But of course I don’t look at a pussy so much as I dwell in it, touching, breathing, tasting.)
So I was imaginging God at such a clinic probing his abnormalities: is his dick a little big, is his stalk a little red …? and of course immediately there’s the idea that God had to have come first, the egg, the chicken, so any idea of normalcy must see him as normal, the source, and us, as the ones who got it wrong (or right).
Regardless, I love the idea of God discussing his particulars with a tent full of nurses.
Columbus Day
2017 10 09 I never thought I’d see the day when kleptocrats were embarrassed by formative exploitativeness. So now let’s blame yesterday’s heroes. If Columbus hadn’t planned to exploit whatever he found would Queen Isabela have funded him?
If you want funding today the best principal is to avoid embarrassing your fellow kleptocrats: take the lead in lying.
Plagiarizing LeBron
2017 10 08 King James wrote that a champion team invited to the White House was a great honor “until you (Donald Trump) showed up. Millions read it. “You bum.” Only these couple of days later Trump writes the same line!: in order to pick petty at the great Steph Curry.
Plagiarizing LeBron is the greatest blunder I’ve ever seen in politics: or would be if everyone else weren’t also a moron.
Auto Meaning
2017 10 26 This morning there’s an article online about some state university cheerleaders taking a knee for the anthem, then being barred from the field, funneled into the tunnel. K. has reported my memories of police preventing Vietnam demonstrators from being accurately estimated during the 1960d: they penned us in the Sheeps Meadon and barred us from the UN Plaza: thus tens of thousands of people could be misrepresented as a few hundred.
But more importantly I’m reminded of government misrepresenting student protest at Berkeley as violating “private property”: Reagan, then governor said this is “private property”. No, it most definely is public property: the students were demonstrating on the turn of their university: Reagan, the cops were the intruders.
But, you know, it’s too late to matter. If the people cant distinguish symbols, then they have no reasonable basis from which to hope for survival.
Reasonable Reading of Bible
2017 10 06 I had the good fortune of dining at a friends house on a weekend following his student exchange return from England, architecture studies at Cambridge or Oxford, one or the other, David and Anna Marie hosting Paul and Hilary. Desert started off leisurely enough but then David commanded us all to the TV room: an important new comedy from the BBC was about to be shown on American TV for the first time: Monte Python’s Flying Circus. I loved English comdedy: Alex Guiness, Peter Sellers, the Goon Show … Hilary is English, born in London, remember running from the German bombs in the early 1940s.
In one scene a dummy is thrown from the roof of a house, the audio said soemthing about the dummy being an insurance salesman. OK, that’s funny, sort of; but then the audion said And hers’s two insurance salesmen …” and two dummies, identical, were thrown from the roof: and I, and before too long, the whole world, were laughing our ass off. Good. So by the end of the 1960s England’s rare group of comedy writers/performers made a movie, then another: and unless you’ve seen more than a couple of those shows and movies, you’re not reading this.
For decades I saw Monty Python when it was on, which was a lot. These days I review Monty Python several times a week, thanks to YouTube. This morning I watch John Cleese and Michael Palin discuss being interviewed in the wake of The Life of Brian, thirty years after the broadcast. And Cleese said something I have to comment on. John Cleese wanted young viewers (with regard to religion) to “find out about it”, and then “to make up their own minds”.
Much of my life I would have agreed with that but now not! We’re trained that we have a right to our opinion; we are not well trained to distinguish facts from propaganda.
If you have something we call a soul, and your soul is mortal, and in danger of death in the face of an option of immortality, then the hell with opinion; truth is what matters!!!!
I’ll breathe, then add.
There’s a problem I hadn’t anticipated: with each passing month, year I understand less of what Cleese or Palin or any Python says: I’m growing deaf, and I’m losing eye sight. But I didn’t understand a single word the guest bishop said! One thing was priceless without words: I recognized the bishop as the insufferable English snobs Cleese perpetually mocks in his comic thespian essence..
Ordinarily facts trump opinion: but we’re all competent to have opinions, few of us are competent to determine facts, with any degree of accuracy! (And who judges the accuracy?)
September Semaritan
I was satisfied that I had a good system for carrying groceries home, I tested a couple of variations, I was satisfied with all: until today, and more than one solution dis-solved. Bit by bit, then paragraph by chapter, things swent wrong, the temperature for example. I’d been ahead of the hour: then by 3 PM I didn’t think I was going to live till the end of the hour. I was seeing spots, the air was full of waves, like heat, like there was a forest fire near by, like I was halucinating, ready to be so out of it I wouldn’t even know if I were having heat stroke or a hart attack. I was trailering a laundry cart with the mountain bike. I strap broke, then another, A WalMart bag disintegrated, then another, then half of the many of them. The cart jackknifed. I somehow avoided breaking my ankles, my legs, my arms. I was just deciding to stow half my baggage in a bush, get the remainder home, refrigerate the now long liquid icecream etc, come back for the rest, when I realized a woman had pulled up opposite me on Lakeview Drive. I was flumoxed, and half deaf even with my aids in, but the woman, bless her, had to be offering help. Rather than ask her to repeat her offer thirty more times, I just mumbled and let her do what she wanted: she can lead, I will follow. Yes, she was gathering up my ragged baggage and stowing it on the floor of her back sseat. I folded my laundry cart and she stosed it on the back seat. I realized she was prompting me to let her put the bike in her trunk but I said, Thanx, I can ride easily from here. I told her more of less where we werr going, more than a half a mile, less than a mile: Lakeview, Flare Rd, Brunns Rd, home.
We got home with little more incident. She gave me her humber, told me to call her when I needed a ride to the story. Yes. Bless her.
And more to say, later. Right now though, how’s that for a good Samaritan?
Except for one detail: I said my girl will be back in Sebring come mid-Octomer: we’ll take you to the dances. Kim said, “Oh, I have never danced!’ I said, “Prepare to correct that!”
I was trying to squeeze in a couple of other things, but she seemed in a rush. Sure, she said she had refrigerables from the store to deliver to other peope! Mine wasn’t her only good deed of the hour. What a wonderful Samaritan.
False Facts, Fake News
2017 09 28 “… the president rescinded a White House invitation to the NBA champion Warriors after Curry made clear his intent not to attend.” Tell me when this “invitation” was made. Does the invitation have an issue date? Did the Warriors sign for it? No. Such an invitation was anticipated. traditional. mandatory; but not actually delivered. Curry said months ago that he wouldn’t want to accept, that he would vote against accepting. But not invitationn was actually made, no date set.
Notice that there’s a difference between anticipating an event and the event occuring. Scheduling an election for Tuesday is not actually having the election on Tuesday, imagining bombs exploding is not having bombs explode.
The more fact-free the “news” the more helpless our plight, the more we deserve the outcome.
Trump Threatens Hell for NFL Anthem Protests
2017 09 27 Boy would I like to see that debated by theologians (and pastors, etc) of more than two stripes.
Trump is against free speech so he expects us to swallow that God is also against it? Morality would be so simple if God always turned it over to human demagogues. Is the Pope going to sit still for that one? Are the televangelists? Or can Trump steal whatever he wants, right in public?
Instritutional Faith
2017 09 26 Notice that institutions always assume themselves to be innocent, palm sins onto previous administrations. The Third Reich can be as antisemitic as it likes, murder and destray, then pretend that it’s setting a high moral standard. Trump can pretend that he has a right to dictate, and isn’t like Nixon in doing so. Yesterday the FBI fixes evidence, manufactures false documents, today they are and always have been innocent. No matter how wrong churches get God, got God yesterday, today the churches can all act as though they always got it right (without ever showing the actual right).
(I’m enjoying the hell out of a dramatization of the Gospel of John. Jesus keeps saying, “I’m telling you the truth …” But was anything he said true?)
Biblical Mary
How many Marys are there in the Bible? in the New Testament? Is it possible to tell them apart?
It’s like Beckett, like Ionesco: all the characters on stage are “Bobby Watson”.
But never mind; the real wonder is that there are so many women in Christianity! Ah, but the Church Fathers managed to erase them regardless. In (Saint) Paul’s name they even took up forgery.
Sports and Politics
2017 09 23 Now Trump is telling NFL owners to fire players who make any kind of an issue of the flag: kneeling, not kneeling … How is it his business? If we’re a free country with free speech (that at least is now we advertise ourselves) why can’t the player express any symbolism he desires? Freedom and prescription are incompatible.
Trump prompted NFL owners for peremptory dismissal of proesters: did he consult with his lawyers as to whether or not firing guidelines were already in place: no two weeks notice? no severance pay? Just a dictator dictating?
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In the wake of all this a journalist noted that government interference in private business (such as a franchise) is a federal crime, 14 year jail sentence. But the presidency will never be held to account by law; or, if it were, that would be a real revolution.
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I want to emphasize that the pledge protesters seem to be peaceful in their presentation: they’re in their uniforms, neat: on one knee. Did the players discuss their rights with their lawyers? I bet they did. An honest society with an honest press could at least research it. Here, ponder these impliactions while I make an important point:
When I taught at Colby College in Maine, 1967 ff., faculty and students discussed styles of protest. The alliance agreed that protesters would assemble on the steps of the chapel one weekday noon each week, say Monday: be visible, be silent. The Waterville paper sent a reporter, the reporter misrepresented everything he saw, he’d count fifty peoopole as one dozen, for example.
I was familiar with this: when we protested in NY the police told us to assemble in Central Park’s sheepsmeadow. When it was time, past time to march to the UN, the police bottles up the protest, kept us out of view of the counters.
In other words: the protesters were trying to play fair, be agreeable; the official institutions, police, press, were cheating!!!
Then we all go home and watch the TV lie about what happened!
Some protesters got a head start toward the UN, didn’t gather in the sheepsmeadow: but the cheats had that coverted too: the police barred the protesters who’d unwittingly slipped the choreography from entering the Plaza! 100,000 people would be made to look like two hundred.
Back in Waterville, axes fell. The majority of English professors were fired. Twenty-five were chopped to ten. No one with tenure was fird: but no one with tenure protested!
I didn’t have tenure, but I did have a freshy drawn contract. I was fired anyway.
Get that SOB off the field prevailed: it didn’t matter what the rules were.
Now: was any of this taught in history classes? Then? Since? Not accurately. not adequately. The fascists act as though they were the rule followers; no, they were the rule breakers.
But: when the bulk of the society is dishonest, there’s not much hope: and shouldn’t be any!
Further let me emphasize a K. point made ofen before here, never clearly enough: If the NFL benefits from public confusions over the nature of league franchises: New York Giants, Chicago Bears … Doesn’t the Franchise owe something to the public? Isn’t every citizen of San Francisco a part-owner of any team playing on assumptions of local patriotism? Regardless, how is it a federal matter? What business is it of the nation’s executive?
gotta edit, improve
Bye Bye Irma
2017 09 16 The power went out, then the water went out, then the phone; now they’re coming back, the power returned one hour ago. I could have lost everything: as is, I lost very little. Luck can come in handy.
September 13 I had an arrangement with the VA van to be picked up at 5:45, on Flare Road just all Highway 27. I noticed that the traffic lights still were not working. The more I thought about it, the more I hoped that the van would no show. No light at 27 & Flare is one thing, but not light in Tampa, BayPines, or St Pete is something else again. I waited till 6:15, then walked back home.
Make America Great Again: Get Back to God
2017 09 08 Where do politicians get off talking about making America great again without first demonstrating that America was ever great to begin with? When was it great? How would we prove it? W’a dya mean “great”? But that’s nothing, that’s humble behaviuor compared to recommending that we get “back” to God: when were we ever with God in the first place? And shouldn’t God be the one to make such a claim? We need God’s own testimony here. Until God speaks, until his speech can be verified, all such talk is preposterous.
We Only Shoot Black People
2017 09 02 Cop cam shows cop pulling over woman driver. He instructs her to do this and that, she’s nervous, reluctant: he tries reassuring her with some choice sarcasm: “We only shoot black people”, he says. This was Georgia: not too far from the truth.
Now the video is on line, the boss cops are calling the joke “racially insensitive”: got things exactly backwards, as usual. Rude, crude, revealing, painful; but not insensitive.
But: there’s no reason to believe cops, governments, states, feds … alpha hypocrits, to be capable of getting a joke, or responding to any sort of political self-mocking irony appropriately.
The FBI demonstrated no obligation to so much as know who I am much less understand what I wrote or said when they arrested me in 1997.
Actually, how true that is depends on which cop is talking and whether there are any witnesses. The Sebring sheriff joined the FBI in interviewing me: when it was the sheriff’s men, state and county cops, they thought everything I said was riotously funny. They printed out quotes from Knatz.com, hung them as banners around the cop station. When the feebs came into the room all jolity ceased, humor, intelligence, wisdom, irony was banished.
We tolerate government by Trump, by Nixon, by Lincoln; there’s no reason to support any pretense that we’re capable of understanding. We censor Mark Twain, we never published pk in the first place.
Good joke, but it isn’t exactly true: we mostly shoot black people but actually we shoot all kinds of people.
But we selcom shoot “white” people. Sherman didn’t shoot any white people; he shot Confederates! Slaves weren’t white but neither were Confederates. Lincoln, and Grant, they were “white”. Whites are whoever the Nazis say. Don’t expect a scientific distinction.
Katrina Harvey
2017 08 30 Salute Ian McHarg once again, now and forever. Why did we build a city on a swamp? It flooded before we invented in infrastructure there, it’s flooding now: why are we still there? Why are we again asking for help from people who told us not to build there in the first place?
Actually those who built in the face of warnings should hold those who failed to stop us entirely responsible. If I warned you about Hitler, and you supported Hitler anyway, isn’t it my fault if I failed to stop you? Failing, obviously I didn’t try hard enough. Obviously that’s my fault.
Democracy of Facts
2017 08 27 Majority rules, right? Unless something else, also powerful, wins instead.
In school, 1940s, 1950s (and universities thereafter) I was taught that the Civil War, Lincoln, Gettysberg, etc. was fought over slavery: the Confederates were willing to kill in order to keep enslaving, the North was willing to kill to promote human equality. As an adult I began to learn that that’s oversimplification at best, deliberate lies at worst. Now all the news is right back to the errors and lies of my childhood: the Confederacy was morally a blockhead; Lincoln’s terrorists, Sherman etc., were noble selfless sacriicing Christian good-guys. Excuse me while I puke.
Nevertheless, the point is, the majority, those who believe, or pretend to believe, the assigned lies, rule. The facts are whatever the fascists proclaim. Might wins.
Shark Beach
2017 08 27 I glimpsed a headline at Yahoo about using drones to spot sharks in Australia. Instantly I wanted to check my story about sharks at the beach on Fire Island. Did I tell it? Not finding it quickly, I retell it here:
In the late 1970s I got a time share in a house in Ocean Beach: heterosexual singles. I quickly became acquainted with a girl I wasn’t attracted to but who seemed friendly: talked to her in the mean time. I’ll call her Bess. OK: a word about Fire Island demographics. Fire Island is a barrier island on the south shore of Long Island. Going east to west the Rockaways are the first such, then Atlantic Beach, then Long Beach, Pointlookout, Jones Beach, Fire Island … and on, out to the Hamptons. All those places are like other places, except for Fire Island, where sexual orientations are clear: there are topless beaches, there are hudist beaches: there are family communities, there are homosexual communities, lesbian communities, and so on. Fire Island itself offers a string of communities. Robins Rest is tiny, just a couple of families: or so it was in the 1950s when I was a guest. Ocean Beach is huge: and mixed. The Ocean Beach beach is topless for girls who want to show their tits. My date and I learned the embarrassing way that there are distinctions yet to come: my date and I joined some housemates on the beach. Giny immediately showed her spectacular tubes. After a minute I said, Let’s swim: and Giny got up with me and raced to the waves, her bare boobs bouncing. Gasp! fro the crowd. Most girls took their tops off, but put them modestly back on before getting up, walking, running … bouncing. Ginny took her top off, then bounced.
Anyway: Ocean Beach was mixed: families, faggots, lessies, singles, heteros, nudists … swingers, conservatives … One day I’m at the beach, and I notice, no one’s in the water. Then I see the dorsal fin of a shark. I point it out to the life guard. Oh, that’s just a brown shark, he says, dismissing it. So. I’m the only one in the water. But here comes Bess. I’m standing in surf up to my knees. She comes and stands by me. She lathes her arms, and her legs, and her belly with the surf water, getting comfortable with temperature. I say, Bess, I owe you an apology: I thought you were a big coward, I have to take it back. Huh, she responds: shy?
Cause you and I are the only ones not afraid to be in the water. And I point to the shark fin protruding in the next wave out. “It’s just a brown”, I added, totally harmless.
Bess sees the shark fin and sprints for dry beach: a cow of a woman, running like a bull.
Two Fer Journalism
2017 08 27 Used to be you’d ask a question, listen to, or pretend to listen to, an answer, then ask another question. But no longer. Now all journalists ask a question, then prevent an answer with a second question: “Do you think Conor MacGregor can beat Floyd Mayweather, Jr? and do you think Dublin will be the new Las Vegas?” It’s scripted. It’s rehearsed. All those questioned wait for the second question before addressing the first.
Anthropomorph
2017 08 24 The net is filled with footage of creatures with human help and helpless without it. Mythology already told stories: Androcles helps the lion by taking the thorn out of its paw: then, in the Coloseum, the Lion protects Androcles from Caesar, from gladiators, and from lions. Normally, men run from lions. When they know better lions run from men. The next thing we know uncontacted tribes on the Amazon are lining up for missionary handouts from Macdonalds.
At YouTube once you watch Steph Curry highlights, YouTube will stack its menu with Steph highlights, you can watch the NBA finals over and over again. Watch actresses being sexy with David Letterman and future menues will offer Julia Robert, Natalie Portman, Charlize Theron showing their legs on late night TV. Once upon a time foxews could get caught in a crack in a rock, now there’s footage of a baby fox with its head caught in a tin can. Ah, the friendly interfering human rescues the fox from the can, now Natflix and YouTube menus are replete with rescues baby foxes, happy to see their liberator in future. I can’t count how many lions I’ve seen this month rescued from insensed crockodiles, how many elephants rescued from pythons. Once upon a time the elephant avoided snakes bigger than twenty feet in length, but no longer; now they’re interviewed by Letterman and his ilk. We see the grisly being nice to the wolverine; Letterman tends not to show the grisly eating Grisly Man alive.
(Of course I’m using “Letterman” as a symbol; the actual great host is retired.)
If we could get film of a grisly meeting a man in Alaska six hundred years before Columbus, would the grisly be ready to gobble the man? ignore the man, or run from the man? Never mind. There’s one thing I recently saw that I bet could only have been filed in the last couple of decades: a condor embracing the man who rescued her, enfolding him in her wings, using her wings to press him to her breast, I mean a real hug: looking anthropomorphic as hell.
2017 08 25 Now I see a horned owl behaving the same way at a wildlife rescue center. Now reality can be PhotoShopped: we can’t be sure what’s “real”, what’s natural (if we ever could).
2017 08 26 And now I see the same gag with a swan! If you can train a dog to sit up and beg, surely you can train a wolf to pretend to be a lap dog.
Simple Moon Shadow
2017 08 22 The world has been bracing for this eclipse. Yesterday many millions saw it. Trump looked right at it without eye protection: so did I, decades ago: I think I’m still blinded from that.
I know astronomy far better than most English majors. Further, I know science fiction far better than most English majors: both the science and the fiction. But I know one thing from science fact (and, thanks to Isaac Asimov from science fiction, that everyone should know): the reason we understand as much astronomy as we do, the reason our cosmology is not wholly hogwash, is because our local universe is simple! If we had three suns and seven moons (as so many places in the universe do), no one would have a rational clue about eclipses. Elliptical orbits would be the least of our blindness.
We found theories that matched experience because it’s a relatively simple system: one sun, one earth, one moon.
Light radiates, shadows are cast, somebody is going to guess a basic or two of what’s happening. We know this walking down the street: that shadow is from that man, this shadow is from his dog, that other shadow is from the lamp post … When we’re familiar with men, dogs, and light posts, we’ll make sense of it. Once we realize that the sun is going to cast a shadow from the moon somewhere, and occasionally we’ll see that shadow, then we can deduce a rational system: the lighting on the stage can be controlled. But with the sun, moon, and earth, alignments are rare, space is so huge. Still, by now, we understand eclipses fairly well, can predict them with precision. Still, they’re not intuitive, even wildlife gets confused: birds, rats, and critturs like men.
The first science fiction novel I ever read was Isaac Asimov’s Pebble in the Sky. Coincidentally it was his first novel. I had the pleasure of telling him that in person in 19743 I was a newcomer in 1951 or so, but Asimov was already famous: and justly so. He’s famous for working out a code of morality for robots; but that’s trivial gibberish compared to what the science fiction world had first responded to: a story about a civilization with more than one sun, more than one moon: and an insane population in which nothing was correctly figured out. Reason needs sismplicity to take root. Once rooted, all kinds of things can grow; but not start, not root.
Dear North America
2017 08 19 Enjoy the eclipse on Monday, best view for Americans in 100 years, but be warned: have those glasses or don’t look at it! not directly. The last solar eclipse I saw I was skiing on Hunter Mounting, NY. I didn’t need the glasses because I was skiing, not eclipse watching. But of course the eclipse came, and as I skied I also watched, and wasn’t it true that exactly what I’d been warned against, and understood without warning, happened: I was near blinded! And the effect on my sight lasted for years!
Well, whoever said we were intelligent? Whoever said we were intelligent was only half-right. And sometimes the smarter you are, the dumber you are.
Charlettesville, Barcelona
2017 08 17 Imagine this: The Senate decides it has enough votes to impeach Trump. The assume that Trump will resign, follow the Nixon tradition, save the government a lot of money and himself a lot of embarrassment. Trump takes his women on vacation, himself drives a big van, seats nine, and drives amok into the once-upon-a-time Robert E. Lee Park in Charlettesville. Out on bail he wants to rent a van in Barcelona.
Trump Unlike You, Unlike the Media
2017 08 17 Trump’s demagoguery isn’t a “religion”: religions include their members in salvation, in specialness, wisdom, truth. Trump divides populations, with everyone in the wrong, and Trump, alone, in the right.
(Gee, he’s just like me after all!)
Note that the idea of “Innocent until proved guilty” is a WASP idea, a white idea, Protestant at its core. older Christianity presents man as damned until saved, guilty by definition: until God declares not innocence but forgiveness.
Proof? Facts? There is o proof; only God’s declaration.
If you want facts, reason, truth, evidence, then you’ve got to get rid of God, and priests, and miracles.
Me? I’ll take God, sometimes, ’cause that’s my havit, life long: or adulthood-long. But at rational moments, never very long-lasting, I’d take reason, science, evidence: I’d banish authority, shoot bishops. And demagogues.
Fire and Fury
2017 08 12 Pearl Harbor is one of my earliest memories, I was barely a toddler. By the time I was ten or eleven, the war seemed to be over, sort of, but not really. I’m not the only kid who feared that any loud noise overhead was the last loud noise I’d ever hear. In 1951 I wanted to live; now, 2017, I don’t. But I want my son to live. He turned fifty last month. If 78 or 79 is long enough, maybe too much too long, what the hell, maybe 50 is half long enough. So the hell with me, the hell with him: but what about his son, my grandson? He’s eleven or so. Already he’s an exceptional sentience, but he’s merely merely approaching the threshhold for a decade or two of adequate life. I don’t want him jumping at loud sounds overhead.
On the other hand, after WW II, the beginning of the Korean War, loud sounds overhead were a novelty on Long Island. They’re been common since: so common. Do they register? Does anyone hear them? let alone attribute them? Regardless, I want my grandson to have at least a few decades to worry about.
That means I don’t want Trump scaring the shit out of everybody, especially not out of Koreans who themselves want to live, and have rights.
Curry Clan
What a wonderful time to be alive and to have WiFi and YouTube. Every other hour new material featuring Roger Federer, Steph and Milana! And they’re not the only ones: did you see Garbina as she accepted her Wimbledon trophy? Jeez what a dress. What a haunch! What an appealing new star.
By normal yardsticks maybe LeBron is the best player (and Steph merely one-of-the best players) (and KD and Westbrook etc are in there). But what star athlete has ever ravished us the way Steph does? And it isn’t just basketball: everything about him is ravishing. And it doesn’t stop there: his family is ravishing: and not just his daughters, and not just him mom! his sister, his wife! …
And it doesn’t seem to be calculated: I just watched a YouTube video of Steph in China. OK, that’s scripted, and why not? But it goes far beyond script, it’s importantly improvised. Ayisha is on the floor! with Steph! and a bunch of Chinese guys, all of whom can dribble and shoot and pass, and Ayesha shoots a ball that hovers near the rim, an alley oop, and Steph finishes it! Wham! Decisively. And then says Who knew she had such eyes! No, no, that’s not script. That’s the current cream of the Curry clan having fun.
Ayisha was having fun. She’s not embarrassed to be on the floor. You or I would be embarrassed, but not Ayisha, or Sonia, or Sydel. I watched a doc with the whole family the other day, Sydel was just a little girl, Ayesha and Riley and Ryan weren’t in the picture. Sydel was shooting, Sydel was missing; but she was getting the ball near the rim, she wasn’t apologizing to anyone, no one was pushing her: she was growing, getting stronger, her percentages were improving, I don’t doubt: and if she never scored one basket it didn’t matter, it was a family, playing, men, women, children: boys and girls. Steph and Seth went at each other, brothers, one bigger, older, stronger, more experienced, so what, brothers! and their little sister was 100% welcome, she didn’t have to win any contest, no score was being kept.
I’m telling you, we get to see a lot of Fed, and his family, and very welcome, thank you. But it’s not the same: Fed’s familty sits in the audience. Mirka used to play and play well, but she infured, then she was the girlfriend, the wife, now the mother, the multi-mother … but it’s Roger who’s on the court, embarrassing the world’s best.
I don’t know: maybe there are films somethwere where they all play, and welcome, and no one keeps score. I bet his da and mum are good athletes too. Otherwise, where did he come from?
State Monopoly
2017 08 05 Jeez, not only is it against the law to kill yourself, it’s against the law to encourage help in the area. Guy was miserable, guy’s girl says so what are you waiting for, guy’s girl goes to jail for 15 months! The state already told the guy he had to go to school, couldn’t talk about God while there, couldn’t opt out; now his friends can’t help him either. It’s like being a Jew at Auschwitz: you can’t leave, you can’t complain, and if you see a way out that might apply to others, you can’t tell them either..
Fortunately, the stupidity of the Nazis is always near infinite: And Always Growing.
Maybe I should have chosen a German camp, in Germany, not one in Poland, but that’s the camp that came to mind as I was scribbling fast.
We’re In Love
Milana Vayntrub
thanx smartasses100sexiest
2017 08 02 We’ve all noticed this girl, even me who watches next to no TV. I’ve also noticed that I’m far from being alone. Heterolsexual males of all ages love her: but so do people from all other gender and preference categories. “We all love you!” blurted one network beauty.
OK. My life has been filled with astonishing females. It’s nice to hear them named, to learn something about them; but Milana’s bio is staggering: Modelng since three, choice TV spots since age 5 … drops out of high school to start university …
But of course she’s surrounded by people who dress her carefully, light her well, give her choice material, offer scripts for everything she does, listen to her hints, she knowing better than anyone where her strengths lie … And Jesus does she fly with it.
Jackson Off the Twenty
My beloved Jan attended Andrew Jackson High School in Queens, Long Island, late 1940s, early ’50s. Last night, waiting for the Warriors game to commence, she sang the school song. I’m thrilled. It came up that the US was repositioning its hypocrisy with regard to Jackson’s image on the $20: he owned slaves, sweep him under the rug! Maybe we could recall his election while we’re at it, maybe we could revise the fact of his founding the Democratic Party. Who else owned slaves? Maybe we could rescind their citizenship.
What if we could prove that Jackson once bought pork on the Sabbath!
I was just reading an interview with Draymond Green about racism in his experience. How come we don’t disinter the bodies of people who yelled epithets at Jackie Robinson? We don’t we reverse all decisions make by the attendees at Jack Johnson fights who showed Johnson the razors they intended to castrate him with?
No, no; you can’t undo an election: and who’s pure enough to do it if we could? What we need is to suspend all political activities that took place while we were all busy breaking God’s laws. see? It wasn’t illegal for Andrew Jackson to own slaves before hie was president: it wasn’t illegal afterwards either: not till the 1860s.
But wasn’t it a sin? Isn’t that the real question? If we counted a vote from a racist in 1829 maybe God will hold it against us in 2017! Maybe we’re wasting our immortality worrying about Jackson on the $20; we should be worrying about how much hell-time God is watching US accumulate!
Names from Niger
2017 04 08 Russell Westbrook passed the ball to Oladipo. Oladipo scored a layup. Westbook has been buzz-cutting the NBA ass season. His pass may have been bad basketball, hysterical pursuit of stats that are meaningless if one considers that the records being broken were set by players playing, not trying to break records. Oh, maybe Oscar Robertson was trying to break a record we no longer have hammered at us, but if so in the chicken / egg chain somewhere back when was a player just playing; not record breaking. So, Russell gets his tip-the-scale assis, the Thunder continue to embarrass, and I have the name Oladipo rubbed under my nose once more. The name as been haunting me for months: so beautiful, so African. A while back I looked him up: where in Africa is he from? I just love the demographic mix the NBA provides us with. Uh oh, wrong: Oladipo was born in Maryland! This morning that doesn’t satisfy: I look him up again: where are his parents from? Ah ha! I see one of his given names: Babatunde! Now that brings back memories! Babatunde was Olatunji’s name: though people at Columbia Recrods called him Michael: I understand he called himself Michael, Michael is what he wanted to be called.
1959 I bought Babatunde Olatungi’s Drums of Passion, played it over and over. In the early 1960sI was friends with a redoubtably-boobed girl from Freeport. I played her Drums of Passion. Babatunde Olatundi I intoned, rolling the sounds on my tongue. Oh, you’re talking about Michael, she said. She worked at Columbia Records, commuted on the LIRR. She said that Olatungi came into Columbia Records every day, called himself “Michael”.
(PS, a couple of years later, now married to Hilary and living on Riverside Drive at 97th Street, an African guy on one of the higher floors begged me to loan him Drums of Passion: serves me right, I never saw it again: I bet he hated me, a white dude, for having a Nigerian icon ahead of him and his 97th-Street poseurs.
But never mind, it isn’t just Nigerian names that I love. I love names from the Cameroons. Aisha! Music and Africa go together in more than one neighborhood. But never mind Africa: I love the NBA for bringing us big tall white guys from Latvia, Poland … Spain. China! Yao Ming!
But tell me this:: if the name Oladipo penetrates the media @ say 10%, how come an absolutely fabulous name like Babatunde doesn’t penetrate to 5%?
Feminine -Ism
Hillary blew it; but a Hong Kong gal, Carrie Lam, wins! Now we can see clearly why women were not allowed to participate in anything outside motherhood: they’d absolutely take over everything. They’ll prove corrupt, but less corrupt than men.
I don’t mind women in politics, but it’s upsetting to find myself moved to tears by a movie, A Little Game, about a girl, ten, learning to play chess: could a girl really be any good? Fisher said he could teach any male child how to beat the women’s world champ in a couple of weeks, maybe a month.
False Facts
2017 03 16 The New York Times is saturating a web ad about “false facts”. Pretty funny, gag. The ads say, truthfully, that truth can be hard to distinguish. Implicit is that NYT is distinguished by excellence in the effort. That’s true too, in a sick way: the T is one of the world’s past-masters in subtlety at fooling those most skilled in being fooled.
The T logo is recognizable throughout the world. The font is famously uses is fraktur: the most pretentious font: high German. Everything German used to look like that: now it’s associated with the T almost exclusively. People who believe the Times deserve what they get. The misinformation of the educated is more toxic than the ignorance of the masses: death, extinction through experts: the experts thinking they’re serving truth, God … freedom. Nah; just irresistable disinformation. False facts, indeed.
The oldest most corrupt richest institutions get the fraktur benefit of the doubt. Believing the Times is like believing the Church. The Christ killers blame the Jews. And the subtlest Nazis chorus Ja. Ve said dat all along.
Old Soldier
2017 03 11 My beloved warhorse, my Mac mini, quit on me on Thursday the 9th. A guy is working on it, leaned me his Chrome laptop. It was the devil to be helpless for even one day, for even several hours. I’m on the case, you’ll hear further.
If I make a vow to God and then Caesar demands a conflicting vow from me, to whom do I owe what?
I make vows to Christ, but then Christ goes and changes nature on me.
If we think that slavery is wrong but make intelligent discussion impossible, over centuries, over millennia, what understanding do we owe to Jesus?
Can the Christian who believes that God hates slavery interrupt or overrule the Christian who thinks that the Bible condones slavery? How about the Christian who thinks that God demands slavery?
If I vow to the king that I will support his monarchy with my life, and then the king accepts campaign millions from the slavers, and I have to write the speeches …?
Look at it this way: in this and that theology vows to God can’t be trumped by vows to Trump. If God tells me not to murder, at least that’s what I and others familiar with writings called the Bible think God commands, but the US army in colusion with a civilian draft board conscripts me and tells me to drop bombs on Afghanistan, what do I do? punt?
Here’s a real example: When my dear Catherine turned 96 it was fairly clear that her life was over: she was blind, deaf, didn’t know who I was half the time, refused to take her vitamins any longer: the same vitamins she’s sworn by when I first recommended them to her, I called Hospice to familiarize myself with their routines. They sent a nurse once the doctor pronounced Catherine terminal: doc was right, she only lived another few months. Anyway I’d gone over the Living Will document with Catherine, she was clear: she was an atheist, she didn’t want anyone praying over her. I was not an atheist, not a normal atheist at least, but she never understood or cared to try to understand what I believed, or had done, or had said, or written. Folderol. Catherine didn’t want anybody praying over her, not me, not anyone. I pointed out where by the entrance I had her instructions to the Hospice nurse posted when she came. I pointed out where I had Catherine’s Living Will tacked up by the door if there was any question. I come into the bedroom, the nurse is telling Catherine that she’s praying for her, and advising Catherine to pray for herself.
Fortunately this imbecile nurse has no comprehendion that Catherine was deaf and hadn’t understood a word the nurse has said. But I take the nurse aside, I tell her that she has violated all civilized codes of behavior, she is in violation of secular principles not to enforce any particular religion. The nurse says, “No, prayer is good, God is good.” Catherine’s wishes had no standing, the nurse has no obligation to her office, only to her illiterate immoral, unethical, false church.
OK, all that should be clear enough, never mind that maybe if I weren’t going blind myself, maybe if my own mind were holding up I could discuss the jurist points better.
Note, this is a land of choise, and Highlands County gave me a choice: if I didn’t like this nurse I could request a nurse from the competing company. If I didn’t like that nurse we were shit out of luck, there were only two companies: neither company had any understanding of secular vows. they knew that if the nurse tried to poison us I could call the police, but what could I do if the nurse refused to acknowledge her pledges, whose church taught adherence not to your vows but to its vows?
Anyway, here are a couple of analogies:
Half a year ago or so last year’s presidential election was cresting in the news. Jan was all Trump-escited. Jan, my darling, wanted to share Tump news with me. I don’t care what it is, I don’t want to hear it. Jan would tell me the Trump news. I would remind her, I didn’t want to hear it, please, spare me. She would misstate my prefernece, and give me the next moment’s Trump news. I love her, but there’s no communicating with her: not on the things culturally most important to me. She says, Well, I’m not interested; No, no: I very interested, my life is dedicated to interest; I just don’t want to hear reports from the media: reports from the earth are bad enough.
So: Jan has no more respect for preferences other than Trump dominance than Catherine’s nurse had for her nurse vows: to respect the wishes of the dying.
The key trick civilization holds up its sleeve is to saturate culture with messages from God but all the messages are really from Jews who say that God gave them Canaan: messages from Moses, messages from the kleptocrats, edited by a Pope, then by an English king. Somebody isn’t so sure, off with his head.
Judas Probate
Words that might actually be from God must be prevented, coopted, corrected. Put Judas in charge of proofing the texts. It’s manifest destiny that God gives white kleptocrats all of the world and all of its goods. Now: all that remains is to keep God from ever speaking.
ISIS
2017 02 11 I don’t get it. Do you? Does anyone?
I don’t believe that the Middle East was any business of the Crusaders: I certainly don’t see it as my business, or your business, or the President’s business. I don’t believe that government, this or another, is capable of understanding Islamic states: or non-Islamic states.
Could Islamic states be a threat to us? I don’t doubt it, but so what? everything, anything might be a threat to us. But having invaded America from Europe, etc. what right do we have to security?
(In Elizabethan times, in Elizabethan English, “secure” meant naive, ignorant, even stupid.)
If I think you might mug me, I might think that I have a right to disarm you, kill you, stop you. And visaversa.
If I don’t trust you, or me, or Washington, or Iraq, does it follow that I have a right, or you, to extirminate humans? How about bears? sharks?
I’m 78 1/2. I spent the early 1940s worrying about Hitler and the latter 1940s worrying about A-bombs, and H-bombs. I didn’t trust MacCarthy. And I didn’t trust Ike. I didn’t trust Stalin, but Stalin, not yet, hadn’t invaded my neighborhood, except with ideas. with fear.
But you know, it doesn’t mater. Nature will get rid of what doesn’t work. Meantime we have the right to shellac each other, drop bombs, tell lies, compel school.
Now the White House can try to intimidate us to buy a blouse from Ivanka.
Good solutions have been proposed, but as always, we torture and kill the idea bearers.If MacCarthy didn’t understand what I now imagine I would have said had I been an adult in 1952, and Kennedy didn’t understand what I said in 1960, I certainly don’t expect Trump, or you, to understand what I’ve said here.
OK, I watched a bit more of the ISIS doc. The subject is now perhaps a bit less occluded to me. And I’m thinking of Hemingway off driving an ambulance in Spain. Everybody is this ISIS movie also seems to be looking for fights. Maybe I should have too. Can I sue the church that christened me as an infant? Aren’t they responsible for subverting human nature? I see beautiful Arab women among the fighters: that might be nice to carry an assault rifle with a female hip in your face. Maybe that’s what I should do now, especially now that I’m half blind and really can’t tell friend from foe. I march up to the bunker, they blow me to hell and gone, then I don’t need a new prescription.
Fierce Female
The Arab teen girls, one of whom had been shot six times! Dance before their attack on the mountain hold. I’m reminded of a photo of an Israeli fighter in National Geographic, some magazine: in the ’50s, maybe early ’60s. Buxom, beautiful, smiling, rippling, unforgetable. Had I been brought up in Israel, on a kibbutz, cheating, land theft, murder an everyday occurrence I maybe would never have read my own version of Jesus, and God, and peace the way I did in my actual childhood in Brooklyn and Rockville Centre. I did what I did, got what I got: could have been better, could easily have been worse. No, no. No complaints.
Racist Bores
My friend, one of my best friends ever, is a racist. I love her anyway. I try to tune her racism out, sometimes I succeed. A recent example came during the AllStar basketball game. My friend gasped at, disrespected out loud the introductory music. HipHop? Something.
“Black people like that”, she said: proving (in her mind) that it was no good.
I didn’t like it. I just tried to tune it out. But my friend wanted to demean it, dismiss it, disrespect it forever.
What got me most wasn’t her opinion, or the fact of her expressing her opinion; what got me the most was how clear it was that she thought her rudeness was entertaining! Clever! She thought she had proved something!
Note that this relates intimately to the points above about religion: if you respect God you don’t have to respect your vows to the nursing institution when they send you into a home: you owe nothing to the dying; your debt is to God. No matter what you promised. to whom.
Trump’s Ban
2017 02 01 I relate to predation, I am a predator. (And so are you.) And vegetarians are kleptocrats, no matter what displays they make about what they do and don’t eat.) I also relate to Turn the Other Cheek, and to Jesus’ sacrifice. I’ve sacrificed myself, again and again, in imitation: and the rest of the human world pretends not to notice: and such pretenses become true, by virtue of pretense.
I worshipped democracy as a child, as I was lead to do. Then, in recent decades, I turned on it, openly despise it, never mind majorities, nevr mind human opinions. I am punished by my neighbors who still pretend. What I can’t stand is a population of hypocrites who grab land but pretend they’re sacrificing on the cross, who do what they’re told by the alpha kleptocrats but pretend they’re acting in free will.
I love the Conn Iggulden novel where young Genghis, not yet Khan, gets captured, gets into his father’s murderer’s tent, grabs a sword and kills the killer! And then … And then nothing! He’s received as the khan. Someday he’ll do something, and then they’ll rip his flesh off, eat him while his heart is still beating. Genghis didn’t assassinate the khan to become kahn; he was merely being a Mongol: killing, expecting death, accepting it.
Then they’re the wonder story by Piers Anthony where the sadist torturer is sent to the planet of torture. After they’ve done Everything to him he waits for what’s next and nothing happens! He’s now their Stalin, they’re dictotor: he endured the torture, now he’s boss. He’s got no eyes, no ears, no teeth, no fingers, no balls, but he’s boss.
Anyway, I didn’t get Trump during the election process, now I really don’t get him: an executive “order” to cease immigration? We came, we tresspased: where do we get off saying what tresspasses others can commit? If we’re going to enforce rules, shouldn’t we ourselves be innocent of infractions?
Had the natives stopped us ff. 1492, if Crazy Horse had attacked Washington DC and defeated Custer there, I would understand it, I would see us seeing that we lost, that they therefore have all the rights.
Alpha crime isn’t crime.
I hope you all saw the recent article on chimps slaying an alpha chimp who had been their tyrant. Italians playing football with Il Duce’s head is one of my favorite images from modern history. I recommed that Trump and Nixon and Obama and Bush familiarize themselves with the King of the Wood: whoever kills the king is king: till his successor kills him!!!
Alpha Chimp
continues: Yanking the alpha chimp off his throne, flaying him, eating parts reminds me. One of the reporters mentioned that the dead tyrant may have been trying to reclaim former status. Imagine Nixon trying to walk back into the White House after being evicted. Imagine Nixon back in the oval office, giving orders to Ford’s secretary. And I think: Hey, what might such patterns have to do with civilization’s most famous murder? What if the Temple of Jerusalem had deposed God, stripped and beaten him: now the Sanhedrin had the power but was brandishing it in God’s old name? So what if God sent Jesus to reclaim what he regarded as his?? And what if the Sanhedrin convinced Pilat that Jesus was about to take over from Caesar too?
In his dreams? Maybe, but Pilat wouldn’t pull punches if he saw his own palace slipping away.
I love that: Christianity as a dream of reclaiming lost status, rank, privilege.
VA Stats
2017 02 01 VA email says “Did you know that 1 in 3 women die of heart disease and stroke each year?” What? Preposterous. What could they mean that we could generously guess? Maybe one of three women who die die of heart disease. That I don’t doubt; but the death rate is not 33.3% of the populaltion. It may come to be, but not now, not yet.
Mea deGrasse Culpa
Neil deGrasse Tyson refers to the “moving frontier of science” in his Inexplicable Universe. Bravo Tyson.
I take this occasion to Tyson’s sudden elevation in status in pk’s mental map of human resources. Tyson rubbed me the wrong way when I first saw him. I avoided him thereafter: a bitter disappointment to me: I like looking up better than looking down. Admiration, worship seems natural to me. I’ve read the science explainers – Asiomov, Sagan, Calder, Attenborough – for decades, have watched them on TV since Attenborough first followed his BBC Civilization with Life on Earth, wrote admiration to Sagan when Cosmos was just an announced plan. Muddlers like George Page made me puke, enlighteners like Attenborough made me Whoop.
So. I eagerly watched the first Tyson I heard of: and cringed. His style seemed retarded. Now I’m used to it, or he’s perfected it, I digest it. Brovo. Back to elevation, pejoration kaput.
Metaphysical Uncertainty: things I wondered about in college, come back to me, answered, at 78 1/2:
Given one particle, could God deduce the rest of the universe? No: part, yes, but not all. Therefore: omnipotence is impossible, not just for me, for Newton, but for God too. If logic applies to reality. If it doesn’t, if all is magic, nothing has to make sense. But talk is pretty much useless either way.
Fat Suit Deception
http://www.viralthread.com/woman-pretends-fat-tinder-dates-guys-respond-like/
Girl make date via dating service, shows up wearing a fat suit. If she knows the guys who show up, it’s a practical joke, it’s up to the guys if they want to sock her in the eye. But to practice such decption on strangers, to let them walk out, betrayed, and not explain to them that they’ve been had, immorally for sure, probably illegally too, fat suit should go straight off to jail, or at least to the civil suit justice department. Boo, false fat. It’s fraud.
Nobel Westbrook
2017 01 21 Russell Westbrook got snubbed for the All Star starting guards. Always remember: Leo Tolstoy didn’t get a Nobel Prize for literature! and neither did Isak Dinesen! So if they didn’t get one, what can that prize be worth? It’s not that Faulkner isn’t also good, Hemingway, etc; but nobody is better than Tolstoy! Unless it’s Isak Dinesen!
2017 01 19 Gotta address: the inauguration, authority, sovereignty, God, Trump, US …
Miss Puerto Rico World?
2016 12 19 “Stephanie del Valle of Puerto Rico was crowned Miss World 2016, edging out runners-up from the Dominican Republic and Indonesia, and beauties from around the globe.”
And before I read that I read that a teen couple has posted selfies in which they look like twins: point is, they’re Hispanic! How did such spic news reach me and the online bigots of Central Florida. I knew that barriers to nature were eroding in WASP culture but how did the erosion become so vast so quickly?
Further, Zsa Zsa Gabor is dead, age 99. When I was in school Grace Kelly could win, Doris Day could come in second, both blonds. On a “world” stage Pamela Anderson could come in third. But Lena Horne couldn’t stay in the hotel, Eartha Kitt would be insulted, Halle Berry … Never heard of her: no one not her neighbor would have.
That article continued: “Del Valle, 19, is a brown-eyed brunette student who speaks Spanish, English and French, and hopes to get into the entertainment industry.
Crowned on Sunday by Miss World 2015 Mireia Lalaguna of Spain, del Valle called it an “honor and a great responsibility” to represent her Caribbean homeland.
First runner-up was Yaritza Miguelina Reyes Ramirez of the Dominican Republic, followed by Miss World Indonesia Natasha Mannuela.
Contestants from Kenya and Catriona Gray of the Philippines also were in the final five.”
Ah, next paragraph: a Chinese contestant was warned about speaking publically about human abuses in China. So the censors haven’t entirely disappeared.
Now I want news about how many wog beauties Donald Trump attacked between grabbing Poles and Czechs. Zsa Zsa is alien enough.
Gym Abuse
2016 12 16 “At least 368 youth gymnasts abused over last 20 years”
http://sports.yahoo.com/news/report-at-least-368-youth-gymnasts-abused-over-last-20-years-190245955.html
pk, the deschooler, comments: There will be abuse no matter what you do, that’s life; what concerns me is the question of how much coercion was involved, whether the coercion became institutionalized, and whether the coercion can be minimized. Persons can be abused walking down the street. Is the walker female? is she dressed provocatively? is she walking provocatively? She can protect herself to some degree by how she presents herself. I like the story where the African woman walks across Africa and back unescorted, but she rolls in poop, makes no eye contact, lowers her gaze, wears shapeless dresses … Still she could be raped, but she’s minimized the probabilities. That’s her, she’s in control: the women didn’t need your or my permission.
Now, take the famous case of Abelard and Heloise: Heloise’s father assigned her to be tutored by Abelard. She was a child approaching puberty, he was a cleric in the prime of youth. Heloise’s father told Heloise to obey Abelard to the letter. Heloise was out of the equation, any blame lies with Abelard, with Eloise’s father, and with the idiot Roman Catholic Church for deceiving girls and families about the trustworthiness of priests and catechism. She did what “authorities” told her to do. Of course she enjoyed it herself, welcomed it, cooperated in her seduction. That’s natural, good for her. But what if she’s Jewish, and her father is German, and Abelard is a Nazi? Now the harm is institutional. What if Heloise’s society compels her to go to school, to take gym, to cooperate when the gym teacher tells her to take off her drawers …? People misbehave, that’s tough: what we need is to reduce institutional coercion. You can’t help Abelard seducing Heloise, you can’t help Heloise making herself attractive to Abelard: at least let the seduction, the rape if you will, be personal, not institutional.
No compulsory religion, no compulsory school, no compulsory gym class or gym teacher. Some rape is unavoidable; eliminate the institutional rape.
Same Difference
2016 12 11 Two things, at least two, have been carrooming among my brain regions for a week or two. I want to develop them. \
Background, TV: TV came into our house in the 1950s. First I ignored it, relative to my peers at least: my sister watched lots, as she’d previously listened to radio regularly, much of what radio I knew I knew because I overheard her programs. But the time came when I too turned on the TV, became addicted to some upper-channel pitchman, got hypnotized by the Million Dollar Movie. Decades later, along came All in the Family, zillions loved it, I watched a few of the shows. More decades passed and I recently saw a doc of Norm Lear, saw Lear adoring Carroll O’Connor, heard Archie and Edith sing the theme song (Edith screeching a part): “Girls were girls and men were men.”
By the later 1950s I’d gone back to ignoring the TV, and the radio. I tried to concentrate on reading: unassigned as well as assigned. That continued. I read. For more than a decade now my TV, though I own one, hasn’t even been plugged in! Sports I watch with Jan, on her set, at her house. At my house we use the Mac, rent DVDs.
But “girls were girls and men were men”: What does that mean? If “girls” means “girls, what else can it mean but “girls”? Ditto the “men”?
If “girls” is an identity, then isn’t it a redundancy? why repeat it?
Noun / Entity Correspondence: Think of the math: If there are a thousand or two nouns in English and nearly as many or not many more in other languages, does that mean that there are only a thousand or two “things” in the world? Or do some words carry more than one object? The latter, of course, we all know that, whether we think it through in those terms or not. (Of course there are some number of Proper Nouns too. I’m a “Paul”, one of millions. So, I’m a Paul, I’m a male … I’m an American. All finite numbers.
“Boys will be boys”. How many different identities are there there? How many differences.
Are there fashions among the ambiguities? Do scientists examine and test the claims? Or Dear Abby? or Rush Limbaugh? In the 1980 we knew what “girls” and “men” meant: it meant No TransSexuals! It meant that though we cover our genitals, you can still tell gender at a glance: girls have long hair, men have their hair short. Girls get married, have babies, smile and nod when you hold the door for them … Men have short hair, get drafted, get jobs, get mistresses (if they can afford a beer) …
OK, you see how that can be carried on. Let me jump straight in to my main point, point of departure: take the core stories of the Judeo-Christian “Bible”: Jesus preaches to multitudes, knocks their socks off. Jesus goes to the capital of Judaism, knocks over the money tables of the cheating rabbis, gets arrested, scourged, crucified; I offer the wolrd an internet, an alternative not only to schools but to government, I get sabotaged: not for the first time, or the last time: are those patterns the Same? or Different?
Jesus gets sandbagged; Galileo gets threatened, Darwin gets badmouthed, cheap shotted … Are those the same? or different?
Meantime, there’s always the question of how reliable is the data? We can track Romans to Jerusalem 2016 years ago: can we also track a Jesus? a Peter? a Paul? Are our stories about Galileo more reliable than our stories about Jesus? Are our stories about George Washington true? How many of them? How true?
How about me? I tell stories about myself all the time: dozens of them, hunderds, thousands: are they all reliable? equally? Am I ever being sarcastic? Ironic? Do I exaggerate? What if I understate?
Decent Hypocrisy
2016 12 13 I’ve been trying to watch Marvel’s Daredevil for a couple of months now. My son seemed to be recommending a series to me: Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage. He specified an order in which to see them. I take his recommendations seriously, as “assignments”: trouble is I can’t stand the Daredevil ones. So: do I have to miss the sequels? Of course I can do whatever I want, so long as it’s not forbidden by physics, by God, by evolution: but I want to know if I’m following the recommendation! So: I skill to Jessica Jones. Five minutes of it and I’m not sure if I’m making a mistake. I seem to have gotten immersed in lesbian-gay-whatever the acronym is propaganda. The women all seem to be married: to women! they all call each other their wives! “Girls were girls and men were men”? Women are women? Once upon a time queers had the decency to hide, or to move to another continent. Cole Porter indulged in his preferneces, but in Paris, and in New York: far from Kansas, and his parents, and his grandpapa (and from his wife!)
When I was a kid the world lied to me like a rug. The churches lied, the schools. The culture pretended to be homogeneous. Now it’s again pretending to be homogeneous but homogeneous meaning phagotosus.
Society cheats left and right: how did we do such a total do-si-do?
Well, let’s take it as so, let’s accept it: now tell me: are we finally in a set of proportions that are proportionate? Are there now the correct number of gays and dykes and queer marriages? Does every girl have her girl and every guy his guy? Were any of us ever normal?
And I wanna know: am I seeing the Marvel Jessica my son wanted me to see? Is it possible for me to see such things?
Girls Were Girls
Girls, boys, we think we know what we’re referring to. Sometimes we think we’re right, or are at least getting away with it; something we have evidence we’re wrong, typically we resist such evidence. OK, we jut had a presidential election. Trump is supposed to have won, though Hillary seems to have gotten the most citizen votes. At least the Supreme Court hasn’t simply appointed to loser the winner this time, not yet at least. Trump ran as a “Republican”. Lincoln was the US’s first Republican president. Think 1860s. Then Republican meant give privilege to white male Christian genocides and landgrabbers. Does the dictionary have to be rewritten?
The dictionary is always being rewritten, which we lie about it too.
Colin Quinn, Unconstitutional
“The drunker you get the better you understand what [the Constitution] says.”
Priceless. The moment before Quinn said that he had me disappointed: his opening remarks show that he misunderstands the Constitution the way nearly everyone does, seeing it as a prescription for American behavior and belief. Of course the Constitution is nothing of the kind; it’s a fence erected to keep the federal government from growing all over us. It didn’t work, but that’s what is was supposed to be. The Declaration of Independence is a prescription for belief; the Constitution is not. The quip about drunken understanding makes a great deal forgivable.
Girly Charles
2016 12 03 Sir Charles keeps us entertained, even if we don’t know dick about basketball. He’s doubled down on his dismissal of the Golden State Warriors’ style of play. Steph Curry wows the world with long distance shooting, among other qualities. Swishing the ball from mid-court? that’s “girlie”? What girls did he know? All amazons?
Charles is a character. I love him. I love him far more as a media clown than I ever appreciated him as a player. One thing I like: he’s smart; but he’s an oaf. His girly insult is only the latest: I recall him telling the world about chasing after a whore on the street: he recognized her as the author of the “best oral sex” he’d ever had. Good,
Charles: keep it private.
New Charles back pedels, says he loves women’s basketball (obviously he loves women, street whores at least). But hold on a sec: since when do woman basketball players score from more than eighteen feet? Since when do the Warriors play no defense at all?
Let me tell of an experience of mine relatively early in the feminist wars. 1970, I founded FLEX, the worlds first offer of a simple internet, an anarchist internet, no authority, no state interference: people themselves sponsoring their own freedom. People didn’t support it: while they left their pockets ever wider open to the state; so fuck people: I’m the one person whose fault it isn’t.
Anyway, 1971ish, I’m still living around Morningside Heights. I have a part time job at the Barnard Library. The Barnard girls are hysterical about rights — but didn’t support FLEX: the only sensible approach to rights, for all. Anyway the Barnard student body, 100% female in 1971, challenges male Barnard facuolty to a basketball game. I go and watch it. Basketball is an above the waist sport. Upper body strength is rewarded. Women’s talents focus below the waist. If you’ve watched Wilt, or Pearl, or Charles, or Michael, then women look ridiculous trying to crank those bighips, those big asses, up and down the court. All that effort, and then what comes from the upper bady, shoulders arms, is feeble. The Barnard faculty men were so so and basketball players, but the women were so handicapped.
But jeez did they try, the girls worked so hard. I’m really glad I was there as witness, even though FLEX never got a peeny from Barnrd except though Hilary’s pathetic pay check (or my couple of library dollars).
Generational Authority
2016 11 30 Law: How can we consider anything decided where free inquiry was sabotaged? channeled? polluted?
How can we have a Bible or a Constitution or anything without a claimant (such as the King James Bible) being backed by an unimpeachable authority. We need God to declare, The King James version, is correct, it has my imprimatur.
Trouble is, even is we have Charlton Heston swearing on a stack of King James that he is God, that he is authorized to speak, that, yes, indeed, he is the author, that the text is infallible.
John Hancock signed the Declaration of Independence: where’s my signature? Where’s King George’s receipt? Euclid says such and such is an axiom, obviously “true”: where’s my signature on that?
Is “reason” possible without Everyone having been heard from?
More than anything what I wish I could make people see is that once the priests sabotage Jesus, interrupt his ministry, then the Christ-killers forfeit all right to conclude anything. Forfeit forever.
They give prizes for literature without assurance that everything has been read let alone understood. What good is a trophy for a race that Jews or geniuses or chinks weren’t allowed to run?
Cavemen sat around the stream bank without any of these problems (that we have any trace of). What if every caveman signed off on some set of articles? still, where’s my signature? and where’s the group’s proof that I was free, white, and twenty one when I supposedly signed it? What proof do you have that I was in my right mind?
We see that Newton was rational even while we see that his neighbors were not: but would it be possible to see that Newton was entirely reasonable? He didn’t claim so, did he? Wouldn’t Euclid’s axioms have to be signed off on by someone smarter than Euclid?
Grace Spread
2016 11 29 Yesterday I saw a picture of Grace Kelly, in her prime, seated crosslegged wearing white shorts, her crotch agape, right in the audience’s face: except that her arms and hands block 85% of the view of what we all know is there even without any of it exposed. Obviously someone took that picture, spent a lot of money to stage it, but, if my ignorance is any measure, granted it limited exposure. The studio saw it, Hitchcock saw it, but I/the-public did not.
Reflect: poses paid for by studios, by agencies, by producers are choreographed. The Kelly pic with Kelly’s beaver imagined as “open” is scripted, choreographed, costumed and made up; it is not a snap shot, there’s no accident. I give a private example from the same period. 1954 my sister went off to college. I vividly remember her regaling our mother about her kooky best friend, just joined her sorority. I’ll call her Sissy, she looked a bit like Sissy Spacek would come to by the time she was cast in Carrie. Sis meets Sissy, they’re in the sorority house, all female: female concierge / house mother, female maids, males went no further than the front steps, except to pick up a date for the dance: then the males would enter no further than the public reception area. Oh, fathers and brothers might see the interior of the sorority house when moving sis from home to college. So, Sis meeting Sissy would have been strictly all-girl. So Sis narrates, breathless, there’s Liz, in shorts, tartan Bermuda shorts (Bermuda shorts having been a novelty in 1956, and she plunks herself down on the floor and sits cross legged!
My sister screeches with delight, my mother roars her appreciation.
I’m in the house, I’m not censored from the presentation, but I’m present as invisible, a non-person, not a male witness.
Now: I was aware of girls crossed legs in those days. The whole society was super-aware of any uncrossed legs by any girls, any white girls at least, any white college girls.
Girls did not open their legs, not at home, not in the cloister of a college sorority.
Sissy violated taboo, Sis was in ecstasy, here was her Paul Revere.
What reminded me of all this was seeing a Netflix ad for a show called Gilmore Girls. An actress is posed with her legs crossed wearing slacks, pretty girl, bright face, nice features. A large bowl of popcorn vlocks our view of the taut slacks crotch material stretched before her snatch. The taboos of 1954, 55, 56 … have largely evaporated. Now the taboo has to be “explained”, even explained few will get more than a portion of it.
Women have always been female, everyone has always known it. But boy, oh boy, has control of exposure granted society the power to mess with our minds. Here I am in 2016 imagining the actress’s pussy odors imbuing the popcorn with female identity.
In 1954, 55, 56 Beth was far more liberated than most daughters of the propertied white class, and Liz was far more liberated than Beth, or their sisters.
more later
Understanding Jesus
2016 11 27 Has there ever been a church that understood what Jesus said? Wouldn’t we have to be able to interview Jesus to know for sure? Wouldn’t Jesus’ opinion carry more weight than any church’s opinion?
And wouldn’t doubts remain reasonable until unswered? Wouldn’t any church have to have a litany of answered doubts, all voices being heard, 100% accuracy, no mistakes?
The questions branch and flower: Has there ever been a church that understood what Moses said?
Vary it: Has there ever been a priest that understood what Jesus said? Has there ever been a believer that understood what the priest said?
Sure, when communication is rough and ready, and top down. To be reasonably sure society would have to be level: sort of a contradiction at the outset. And “reasonable doubt” would have to be infinite. God’s opinion and mine and yours would have to be identical in all cases.
Umm, I don’t think so. So what we need instead is verticality: we need authority. The Pope has to say if Giuseppi understands Jesus or not: without Giuseppe being allowed to speak. without Jesus being allowed to speak.
What Jesus Said
Of course we’d have to have an infallibly biblical Bible: we’d have to know incontrovertably what the red letter text said: no errors. Every branch of ever church and ever emmber, every priest, every worshipper (and every devil’s advocate) would have to be on thge same page with every word the same, no ambiguities.
As is, you can’t get a Baptist to agree with an Anglican, both ready and anxious to murder the Catholic.
There is no uniform Bible, never has been. What there has been isntead is a lot of ignorance and intimidation: agree that I’m right or I’ll torture you.
Transgender
2016 11 24 OK, it’s nice to be liberal: on some things. lots of things. but everything?
I just had a negative reaction to learning that the Wachowski brothers have changed their names to Lily and Lana, wear dresses and so forth. Can society afford costume as misrepresentation? Can we support a devil who dresses as Jesus? or a Jesus who presents himself with cloven hoofs? what do we think of men who don a dress to enter the girls’ locker-room?
Should a society that demands honesty from the serfs be lax in its own honesty?
Shouldn’t a pope be prepared for torture if it can be argued reasonably that God hasn’t communicated anything particular to him? Maybe none of us should wear any clothes at all: let the breast speak for itself, the dick, the balls …
Innocent Until Proven Guilty
Union head says officer innocent until proven guilty
https://www.yahoo.com/news/latest-minnesota-officer-charged-black-mans-killing-164158314.html?ref=gs
Private persons, citizens, are (or should be regarded as) innocent until proved guilty. (The idea of proof is inevitably a bit glib.) I’ve said this before but not recently: the opposite should apply to members of the state: president, judges, cops should be regarded as guilty until proved innocent.
Ready to Rumble
2016 11 13 At the Senior Social Center (where I danced 2007 to 2009) the group would stand and salute the flag, stand and sing an anthem … Guys at the table behind me, egged on by Lois, would crouch behind my ear and hiss, “America! Love it or Leave It!”
Now, last night, Jan and I stopping by AmVets to greet our friend Lora, karaoke singer, were exposed to the most ghastly karaoke singing I’ve heard: one guy sang lyrics threatening to stomp all non-orthodox patriots.
Jan saw no threat in it; but the whole last several months have shown a nation not just ready but anxious to rumble.
Then Jan and I watched the New York, 1951 chapter of Brilliant Minds. A black American musician of the period tried to explain what it was like for a black jazz musician to visit a city and a country where talented blacks were not only welcome but honored; rather than expect to find themselves hanging from the tree branch, in a country blind to lynchings: look cross-eyed, get lynched, no one does anything about it.
Now that I’m old and getting blinder by the day, can’t do meaningful work anymore, I’m getting chicken over things I used to be brave to: brave way beyond any point of insanity. I really don’t want to be lynched further than I’ve already been.
The Romans
2016 11 12 K. for some time now, decades has cited my son, bk, clarifying my, pk’s, Christianity. bk hit the nail on the head when he observed that for most people, the Christians are the Christians. For me though, “We’re the Romans!” Exactly right.
Today basketball wonder Greg Popovich is quoted on the election: “I’m a rich white guy, and I’m sick to my stomach thinking about it,” he added. “I can’t imagine being a Muslim right now, or a woman, or an African-American, a Hispanic, a handicapped person. How disenfranchised they might feel. And for anyone in those groups that voted for him, it’s just beyond my comprehension how they ignore all of that. My final conclusion is, my big fear is — we are Rome.”
Note one thing though: the Romans are not famous for claiming that they were the good guys; only for proving that they were the most powerful. They were killers and thieves, appropriators: they’d steal your industry and run it for themselves: they claimed to be favorites of Mars, god of war, not Jesus, son of peace. The kleptocrats seize the media: then everything published, everything taught, was a lie.
I sure love Popovich.
Election Day
2016 11 08-09 Hillary Clinton failed to become the first female president of the United States, her campaigned was dumped for Trump’s. Now we’ll find out if Trump is as evil as I say, while we will not find out if Hillary is as evil as I say. Take one fork, you never know what would have happened if you took the other fork.
I’m fed up with seeing both of them. I suggest that we let Emelia Clarke stand in for all public figures. Emily Browning could take a turn: And Emma Stone. And Natasha Calis. Amazing how many irresistible girls we get to see in the world at overlapping times.
Male subs wouldn’t be too bad either: Leonardo de Caprio, Johnny Depp, George Clooney. Oh, and give Mo-ne Davis a turn at being president. We want a woman? that’s the girl to try.
Bleach3
My mockery of bleached Hollywood faux virgins morphed to porn stars and now a standard icon on network / cable, namely Marilyn Monroe, Houston, and Megan Kelly, has moved to / Media /
Opioid-Horse Horrow
2016 10 30 There were at least 433 fatal overdoses in the state last year, the third highest per-capita rate in the nation. And in New Hampshire, the worst-hit city was Manchester, with less than 10 percent of the state’s population but nearly a quarter of the fatalities.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/16-places-that-shaped-the-2016-election-manchester-n-h-172027624.html
I say for the zillionth time: when junkies overdose, why can’t we just leave them? good riddance to bad rubbish?
Certainly a people should study to be healthy, to be disease free, addiction free; but those who don’t make it, fuck ’em. Nature will fix everything: just get out of the way.
Cubs’ Turn
2016 10 30 Jan and I have been watching the World Series, typically the only baseball we watch all year: together that is: Jan may watch a bit more, keeping up with her daughter’s love of the Cardinals, and an occasional other team, player, or manager. Anyway, she said this morning as we agreed the Chicago Cubs weren’t doing too well, that it was the Cubbies’ “turn” to win. Do we really want sports where turns are taken? Or do we want quality to rise and be rewarded? I point out that survival of the fittest society is completely different from the take-turns society.
Bo Beads
2016 10 26 White Teen Sent Home From School for Braids, Dad Blames ‘Racism Against Their Own’
https://www.yahoo.com/beauty/white-teen-sent-home-from-school-for-braids-dad-blames-racism-against-their-own-184249801.html
Remember when 10 came out? Bo Derek with her hair in braids and beads? I thought aty the time, Ah ha! Here’s another thing where “white” kleptocrats are stealing from “blacks”! That was my first impression: but I don’t really know. In Quest for Fire Rae Dawn Chong, love her to death, wore junk in her cave woman hair: bits of shell and so forth. Maybe European cave women did too: then, and since then. Still: it’s American blacks we’ve recently seen braided and beaded: Venus Williams in not too distant memory.
Anyway, why can’t girls wear their hair anyway they want? so long as it’s non-infectious. Bald! Mohawk! We have a right to protect outselves from cholera, but not from black esthetic. There, maybe we kleptcrats have no right to wear “Mohawks”. One thing about blacks in America: the exploiters wanted them alive, exploitable: we were stealing their labor, not their land. The Mohawk we stole their land, after promising, in writing, not to.
Nix Aboard
2016 10 26 https://www.yahoo.com/news/m/50106429-1fb5-32fa-a328-1366b0ba9b85/airline-tells-veteran-with.html
Veteran’s trained dog barred from plane. Was this the same airline that wasted the time of a physician volunteering help in a crisis?
The stew called for a doctor. A doctor stepped forward: black, female. No, no, said the stew, we need a real doctor. The Temple will always prefer the cheating rabbi to the Jesus looking askance at the fraud.
Daily Brubeck
2016 10 23 Jan and I have been having an exceptional time with things relating to the movie Laura. I’ve loved the tune since junior high, didn’t know till this week that the song didn’t exist till the year following the release of the movie. The execs discussed using Duke Ellington’s Sophisticated Lady as the theme. A commission for a new tune won out. David Raksin was commissioned as composer. Very simple, repeats and repeats, 1944. 1945 Johnny Mercer took the melody in hand, inventing lyrics: lyrics reminiscent of the Ernest Dawson esthetic mentioned in the movie. Now, all my life (till recently) my mind has been a Sargasso Sea for music: melody, harmony, lyrics. This and that flits around, goes in my head, registers, stays there. So why after a week of having Laura as an ear worm do I still have trouble with the lyrics?
The “sense” is amorphous. Explaining why would not be easy, but I may try someday: technical, grammatical and prosodic examination. “Misty light” indeed. “The laugh that floats on a summer’s night.”
But when I listened to Brubeck there were no lyrics, no Mercer, and no Dawson.
Laura Diminished
2016 10 25 One thing I notice: Laura is replete with diminished chords: a minor third followed by a minor third and a minor third. Extra minor as it were.
Also, the rhythmic linking of triplets is very modern.
Junk Foul
2016 10 22 Late October, baseball sure, but basketball! Last year Jan and I watched every Golden State game televised: went crazy, loved it, were well rewarded: until the playoffs: where Draymond Green’s misbehavior cooled even our adoration of Stephen Curry. I humbly propose: Draymond be given the benefit of the doubt for past fouls to the junk, but be presumed guilty for all future fouls below the waist. The Warriors should not accept victories won through such negative sportsmanship. All the other starts should make it clear to Draymond: they love him, they love his intensity, his skills, but they will severely penalize behavior that puts their team in the slammer. Draymond, behave.
Signing Bonuses
The Pentagon is coercing veterans to repay bogus signing bonuses. Sure: if they’re bogus. But the assumptions should be on the side of the veterans, not the Pentagon. If the Pentagon made fraudulent promises, the Pentagon should be put out of business, the government should be liable for the Petagon’s misbehavior. rewrite later
Laureat Correspondences
2016 10 22 Dylan remains silent on his prize: but there’s another news item that reminds me of another anti-social fuck you over the shoulder Novel Laureate: someone filmed a postal worker dumping bins of mail in the woods: William Faulkner worked for the PO once: and he was said to have just thrown the mail away.
Criming
2016 10 19 The Crime That Keeps On Criming
Imagine that at least a feature or two of Christianity is true. Imagine that there’s a Bible. Imagine that there’s a God as author of that Bible who steps forward, identifies himself, all scientists and philosophers in the world accept the identification, and now God validates a part or two of the Bible as his and as true. But imagine further that God distinguishes accurate parts from fabrications. Imagine that God produces perfect Biblical scholarship: this part is mine, this part is fabricated. This fabrication has deluded this that and the other Bible readers. The fabrications x, y & z are noxious crimes.
Church m, n, & o repressed honest attempts to read the passages, God was paid no royalty for the original, God was compensated no penalty for the forgeries, the victims of the crimes, the deluded Christians, havn’et been apologized to … Et C, et c, et cetera.
So did it: there’s crime, and parent crime, and ur crime, and meta crime. And meta crime and more meta crime.
OK. Ready? Here’s the part I love: the Churchs continue trying to interfere with God’s presentation. God finally simply shows that the churchmen are simply insane, not responsible for their lies, and simply purges them. In front of all.
Meantime: how many Christians are in hell for one millenium, two millennia … paying compound interest on the crimes?
You owe the bank a penny, for two thousand years. The debt is a penny plus interest, plus penalty fees. Two thousand years ago you owed a penny plus a penny. Then, one thousand nine hundred and ninety nine years ago the penalty became a dollar, so the debt was a penny and a dollar: and a meta-penalty: 1¢ + $1 + $1,000 = $1,001.01. That was January 1. January 2nd it’s …
Now lets say you have a lawyer and she’s arguing that the rabbi at the Temple is actually responsible for the $1,000 part of it: you owe the 1¢ and the $1 and the 2,000 years worth of $1 since then but the rabbi owes the $1,000 and all the $ns since then. You owe an eternity in hell but the rabbi owes an eternity in hell to the nth times another m.
Never mind. I’m not a mathmatician, neither am I an accountant. But it’s not I who has to produce the bill; God will do that. I believe. I hope. I wish.
Meantime, God is multitasking. Some gofer continues with the fines and the penalties and the math, God introduces new crimes every second. and new meta-crimes. A related one, going by so fast it could be overlooked by a nonparticipant (of whom there are none), the Nazi defrauded the Jew of his piano in Berlin: the Nazi owes the Jew $10,000 for the first second and $20,000 for the second second, and a gazillion since then … but the additional charges and penalties are being introduced faster than Turing could follow. Meantime, the Jew himself is being penalized and meta-penalized … and the American lawyer who was tring to explain in in second 4.00n got totally distracted when his own family got sabberjabbered for debts to the Cheyanne.
Alleged Rape
2016 10 15 Headline today: “She says she was allegedly raped.”
I understand it if the media report that a woman says she was raped. I understand it if the media announce that a woman alleges that she was raped. But what does it mean if the woman alleges that she was allegedly rape?
It means that the illiterates have taken complete control of the corporations, the media, the centralized state. Goody, it means that we’ll all be dead before too long. Terminal illiteracy.
Literacy was invented to give the priests an upper hand in making sure that Jesus gets crucified. They already had the upper hand, now their upper hand was really upper.
Not only did the University of Paris make sure that Abelard’s ideas could not be discussed a thousand years ago, the scholars who wouldn’t discuss it remain in total control of education.
Too bad you don’t know what I’m talking about. Waste of breath.
Help! 911!
2016 10 14 Houston 911 operator accused of hanging up on 1000s of calls
https://www.yahoo.com/news/houston-911-operator-accused-hanging-1000s-calls-143742127.html
I’ve told at K. and repeat here my account of my first and only 911 call, early 1960, 911 brand new at the time. I was walking on Riverside Drive around 116 Street. I saw a kid, Hispanic, jimmying the butterfly window of a VW bug. I found a pay phone, dialed 911, Jabber, jabber the 911 voice said in Spanish. I made several attempts to report the situation. When I asked if anyone there spoke English, she hung up on me.
So: if I ever believed in the police’ ability to handle anything, which I didn’t, it didn’t last long.
I believe criminal incompetence and bestial rudeness is the best we’re capable of, and the people controlling quality are always Macbeth. And there’s no one but Macbeth to tell about it.
Btw, at that time I spoke hardly two words of Spanish, but shortly, in the army, I would learn to command a little bit of Spanish. So my 911 call must have been made in the very early 1960s: I was drafted 1961 to 1963. Anyway, look up when 911 started: that’s when it happened.
Nobel Dylan?!
2016 10 13 You know when I first read about Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize? The very early 1960s! The author was serious in taking Dylan seriously, but basically it was written as something preposterous. The author wanted us to take Bob seriously. I did. And I didn’t think he’d ever win the Novel Prize, more a criticism of the Nobel Prize than a short measure of Dylan.
I’d already known Dylan for a couple of years by the time that article was published: by then I was prett solid in dislike. I liked Bob Dyland as Woodie Gutherie, as another Jack Elliott; not as “Bob Dylan”.
And he was so damned standoffish. Worst of all: I tapped him on the shoulder? touched his collar bone! No flesh! Creepy.
2016 10 22 This morning Yahoo reports that Dylan has still made no public response to the award. He performed in Las Vegas, sang his songs, and made no comment. He’s got a real talent for pissing people off; I may become a fan again: as I was in 1962.
Victorian Modern
2016 10 13 Mr. Turner has young Queen Victoria stroll into the art gallery. Price Albert walks a few steps behind her, much more of the court walks behind him. Queen Victoria makes fun of the Turners. Insults them. Prince Albert etc. chuckles.
Just before he dies Turner tells Sophie Booth that he saw the Crystal Palace being erected (1851), crystal panels ascending to the clouds. In the art gallery, for years by that time, other artists of the age invent explanations for Turner’s developing, morphing style: his eyes are going bad, he’s loony …
Turner was the first artist to go modern before, long long before, anyone knew what that meant. Everyone knew what Albert was doing when he substituted engineering for art; no one knew what Turner was doing: perhaps including Turner!
I gotta say more on this, meantime here’s a word or two up.
What I gotta jot while I’m thinking of it: previous to last night and watching M. Turner I knew nothing about Turner’s life. Of all my favorite artists Turner is probably the one I can to admire most slowly. I was fifteen when I first saw Monet. I went crazy. After that, Met, 1953, I saw lots of Monet. When I strolled through a room with Turners they didn’t register on me any more than the Constables. I didn’t notice the pre-moderns until I was saturated with the moderns. But I certainly recognized modern architecture: the Eiffel Tower.! Meantime: Turner was hardly like Van Gogh, selling nothing. Turner painting since he was a toddler. He drew in his father’s barbershop. His father put the drawings in the window, they sold, all of them sold, always. Tutner never didn’t know commercial success. When he was inventing modern art, while people were insulting the work, they were still buying it: at higher and higher prices!! Amazing.
Anyway, notice the time periods. Turner died in 1851. His radical stuff he been on view, in royal collections, in John Ruskin’s collection, for a decade or more. Intellectual taste and public taste was splitting but hadn’t yet sundered. Then again: Turner turned toward “Impressionism” (and toward “action” painting way before those movements occurred: but: he’d painted in styles that looked more conventional to the public before he went crazy: the public knew there was a skilled foundation there, whether or not he was losin his eye sight, losing his mind. Like Rembrandt! Rembrandt got famous got rich: then got infamous, then could no longer feed himself.
Before I go away, to be back later, I say: in the 1840s the British public would never have dreamed that the day would come when the public and the academics wouldn’t give a shit what Victoria thought about a painting: art and culture had not yet deviated: or, they were deviating, but no one noticed.
Oh: also gotta say: Timothy Spall did a great job depicting Turner. Good cast overall.
And I’m tickled to be learning more about British (and English) history than I ever imagined. As in English major in college I knew more than most, but nothing compared to what Anglophiles knew. Even when I married an English wife I was still relatively ignorant by Anglophile standards.
It fits with my current streaming of NetFlix stuff: I’ve been steeped in Welsh, Cornwallian, Irish … Scots, Icelandic, Danish … Viking …
SC Allegations
https://gma.yahoo.com/child-down-911-calls-fatal-south-carolina-school-220308542–abc-news-topstories.html
2016 10 14 “When a teenage gunman allegedly opened fire outside an elementary school in South Carolina last month, a horrifying scene unfolded, detailed in newly released 911 calls.”
Astounding! It was last month and the shooting is still an “allegation”, not a fact?
The media have always been illiterate, but never like currently. It isn’t the existence of the shooting that has to be kept in doubt, it’s the identity of the alleged shooter.
Comic Book Theology
2016 10 10 In the Christianity of my childhood God will judge us, infallibly, when he gets around to it. In the meantime: he knows: good from evil. Etc.
Actually that’s easy, because good is whatever he likes, bad is whatever he doesn’t.
God can call Judgment whenever he wants to.
If we see Superman kicking the crap out of robbers as they flee the bank holding bags of money, most Christians know that God has Superman’s back. Superman doesn’t need a court system or an edifice of law.
Real Americans don’t need science. They just need to kick ass. Like in the comix.
I was seldom good at assignments in school, but now that I’m an old man, a veteran daredevil, it’s a marvel, I’m nearly infallible. My son recommended some Marvel titles I’d never heard of. He suggested that I should know Jessica Jones and Luke Cage but that I should know Daredevil as a prerequisite. It’s tough, I really despise much of it, but I’m being religious in obedience. Two things make it not easy, but a pleasure. That Rosario Dawson dragging her aches and pains around the blind guy’s apartment. Oh, Jesus: any second now she’s gonna put her jug against his face. Her bottom is going to engulf him. If nothing else I’ve learned something about that astonishing actress’ career: I’d heard she was spotted by a photographer as she sat on the stoop of a brownestone in the Bronx, in Brooklyn, some damn place with lucscious Hispanics. But now Wikipedia tells me she was a Disney kid: don’t you have to be discovered before you’re on Disney? not afterward. So: she was discovered, then she was discovered again. I met her in Men in Black. Yowie. Also in that same franchise I met Vincent D’Onofrio. bk already was a fan from some TV thing: told me to be alert.
I was. Anyway, marvelous as some of the cast looked in Daredevil, all the characters were hateful. Enough of that, stop right there. I’ll limit my comments to satiety with comic book theology: namely the infallability of comic heroes, Superman, Batman, Tarzan, in identifying bad guys. Instead of saying Hay, some doofus in a cape is assaulting those gentlemen coming out of the bank, we say Oh goody, Superman is pulverizing the crooks.
But no, I’m not done. I must note further that nations are like comix: we know who the bad guys are. We know who to bomb, who to commit genocide against. We know whose natural resources to steal by treaty, we know how to enslave the people to dig in the mines for us.
When I was a kid I scoffed at Catholics who believed that their Pope was infallible in some areas. But in WWII I knew infallibly who deserved a nuke up their heinie.
Anatomy Wrong? Never Mind
2016 10 10 Trup talked about grabbing girls by the quim, and, if they, the men, are a star (like him), getting away with it. Now women are telling their stories of being physuically and semiotically disrespected. Except, having been denied knowledge of the world, and of themselves, having had their vocabularies pruned, nothing offered in place of it, they don’t know how! or, they get it wrong. Pathetic. One poor woman recalles being at a party and her ex-boyfriend, grabs her by the hair, and, his other hand under her skirt, grabs her by the “vagina”, and carries her, kicking and screaming.
I’m reminded of the joke about the Jewish taylor winning the princess and half the kingdom by hoisting her greased self onto her horse. All other suitors had failed. The taylor is asked how he alone was able to hold her without her spitting out of his arms like a watermelon seed.
“Have you ever picked up a blowling ball?” the taylor asks.
Funny. Now we picture it, vividly: he’s got his thumb up her ass and his pointer and ring fingers in her twat. Two of his three fingers are in her vagina, yes, but if you have to say he’s grabbing her “by” anything, what he’s mainly got hold of is her “vulva”. The meat of her pussy is not her vagina. Her vagina is an empty cavity, a sluice tube. He’s got her by the vulva: that’s her lips, outer lipe, inner lips, her clitoris …
Why don’t women have their vulva in their vocabulary? Because the culture has forbidden them to identify and name aloud (or whisper, or mouth), their pleasure parts.
Why? Because in this culture women haven’t been allowed any pleasure.
Christianity isn’t quite as severe as Islam: in Islam the vulva is cifcumcized away, flushed down the drain. We don’t want women who know how and where to get it on, to get off.
And men don’t know what to make of it when they do: I just saw a porn where the porn whore kept talking about “jerking off”: and I realized, she didn’t mean me, she meant her: she gets horny, she “jerks off”.
Seductive Sinatra
2016 10 08 http://dailybananas.com/frank_sinatras_listed_lovers/1/_/_vb41a-4/?utm_source=b.frank_sinatras_listed_lovers._6_d_us_db_vb41a-4_va&utm_medium=N&utm_campaign=667&utm_term=6&utm_content=0c
Claims clusters of romances, erotic partners for Old Blue Eyes. Once upon a time Sinatra was my favorite male singer. He still is, I guess. And I flipped out when he turned from clubs and vinyl to movies: thought his From Here to Eternity was the cats pajamas. Sinatra was one of the pop & jazz disks that fell onto my turntable the most often on my most Marathon love night. Jackie and I climaxed again and again, whetting our palettes for diner: seven complete times I screwed her, until the cops came with complaints from the heighbors. The cops were very impressed, they’d witnessed plenty themselves. Anyway, Sinatra fell to the turntable again, and again: Songs for Swinging Lovers was the album: Bud Powell came along second. So: I was vulnerable to Sinatra worship. Fortunately Mario Puzo cured me before I was humiliated by Old Baldy.
Puzo told funny stories about Sinatra threatening him with physical violence in Las Vegas. Apparently, writing his fictional singer in the Godfather, Puzo had guessed right about a couple of Frankie’s success secrets: Sinatra must have thought the inside of his head had been burglarized: hacked. Betrayed.
So: in the 1950s I was vulnerable, by the early 1960s I was cured. Sinatra was a magician with his voice, but not with his pecker. I had him way beat.
Blondie’s Blond
2016 10 08 I’m about to watch Blondie’s New York. I’m going to be alert for a specific something: it just occurred to me, and now I’m going to check it, test it: Debbie Harry of Blondie isn’t just blond, she’s Bert Stern’s Marilyn Monroe deadpan frizzed and teased blond! Loaded with significance, which I’ll get to if I live long enough, at least kick the subject off.
It’s a great great image, greater than anything Mayilyn or Hollywood ever did with it.
OK, now I’m on record for saying so: let’s see what develops.
thanx daringtodo
Not that one actually, but I’ll find the one I mean: Circle Gallery published it in the 1970s on different papers: black on silver, gold on silver …
thanx biography
I’ll find a better pic than that too. In an emergency they’re close enough.
By the way, looking for that one I stumbled on another I did not expect:
thanx pinterest
Is that adorable? On the small side but utterly cute. That girl is a showman.
Foxy Knox Wurst
& the Science Police
2016 10 03 I’m very proud of my ignorance of much of popular culture. I don’t gad after every rumor about Trump, or Clinton, any more than I did about Kennedy or Nixon or Ike. JFK “caused” a traffic jam on Long Island in 1959 or so. I was delayed, and I hated him for it: but then I already hated him, on principle before I ever heard of him as a specific individual running for president.
Funny thing is, depending on your sense of humor, sometimes I’ll gad after a rumor decades, or centuries, after it’s gone stale for others. For Instance, I’m just watching a documentary on Amanda Knox. It’s my first dip into the story. I swear to you, I knew nothing, except that there was a story: American girl tried for murder in Italy: gets off, then doesn’t, then does …
Not only do I not want to know who JFK is, or Nixon or Stalin or Caesar, not only do I not believe in any of the myths of “America”, I don’t believe police are competent to establish fact-A or fact-B …
Here’s my view: Civilization is a sorry business under the best of circumstances. We couldn’t tell Jesus from Pilat two thousand years ago, and we still can’t. But no matter how “wrong” a death-by-murder is, crimes committed by police, by journalists, by politicians in investigating said murder are worse. Cops told Amanda Knox she had AIDS! They made it up! How are they still allowed to be cops?
Because lies, malignancy are par for the course.
Or: they are cops, stay away: warn others.
Media frenzies are evil: don’t add fuel to an explosion.
2016 10 08 I just scribbled a bit more on the subject in my Thinking Tools / Reason / Evidence post: and still have a it to add. The cop who butchered the Italian Prosecution’s case against Amanda Knox seemed like a nice enough guy: so what: does that gibe him a license to lie, to bungle, to torture, to mangle lives in the name of Justice? He got prmoted! reminds me of the drunk at the helm of the Valdez. Instead of being convicted to slow torture for murdering the planet, bozo was put in charge of teaching SafeTy for EXON.
another point coming in a sec
Who’s Who
2016 09 27 Answer me this, think about your answer:
Did Pilat know who Jesus was?
Should knowing who Jesus was have been a requirement for the job?
Did Tiberius know who Pilat was? Ditto, ditto: etc., etc.
Herod knew who Pilat was: did Pilat know who Herod was? Was “local king” good enough? or should Pilat have known that Herod was a Jewish king? Should Pilat have know that there was a contention specifically between Herod and Jesus as to who was the king of the Jews?
If the US wants to help Israel does it matter whether the US helpers know who Jesus was? or Herod? or Pilat?
Let me ask a different question: Does the Roman Catholic Church know who Jesus was? Infallibly?
Did the Roman Catholic Church know who Ivan Illich was? when they defrocked him?
What would happen to the world if God decided that these questions had important answers? and that people should be held accountable for the truth of their answers?
Just the first one, for instance: Did Pilat know who Jesus was?
One more bonus question: did my PhD committee know who I was when they were interrupting my answers to their questions? Should they have known?
Never Surrender
2016 09 25 Back in the 1940s, WWII just over, I heard about the Japanese soldiers in the Pacific who fought on, not accepting Japan’s defeat. And then there was one: a hero not just to me but to the whole world. And today there’s a feature:
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/m/4463138d-6dd0-3885-bebb-901d2daada59/ss_after-wwii-ended%2C-one.html
Generous No Face
2016 09 22 If I hadn’t fallen in love with Beauty and the Beast (Cocteau) as a kid, with City Lights (Chaplin), Shane (Hollywood) would I be watching all the other kinds of “movies” I do today? Not likely. bk gave me a box of more than 100 cassettes a couple of decades ago so he could catch me up on some of the movies I’d missed sacrificing my life and family to deschooling, then to a stupid criminal business, then to writing still more: as I’d written all along, since 1948. But the movies Netflix offers have chanced, expanded. Now it’s not just Casablance, and Ikiru; I get movies on English castles, Irish castles, the Irish rebellions, the English suppressions … King This, Queen that, Jack Johnson, the Civil War … Now I find a cooking show every bit as great as I used to find Bunuel to be, or Goddard. Last night I watch a Woman with No Face: surgeons cut two aggressive tumors from a young woman’s face. The tumors had eaten her eye, her nose, the top of her mouth: were starting in on her brain. We saw her pretty enough and vial, then we see her looking like a Picasso. Anyway, the head surgeon explains all as we go along. Of course it’s a great movie for him, as he and his team of surgeons worked for “free”. He was careful to explain: he forewent his normal fees, so did his peers: but they didn’t volunteer the hospital’s time and equipment, the wages of the rest of the staff. The surgeon didn’t get paid, at least not by that patient, but the janitor did get paid, by that and other patients: they didn’t coerce the nurses to labor for free.
Imagine the Wheel of Fortune promising a Mercedes Benz as a prize, then explaining that there’s no salesman’s commission, and the CEO has foregone his profit on that particular car, but the union labor still gets their $1,000 per hour and their vacation pay and their SS deductions …
Before Custer Crazy Horse and his fellow braves could give a feast, and even let the women and children attend, but not charge any cowrie shells, no eagle feathers, not from the chief, not from the child. But once we’re living ina full-blown kleptocracy, no one can “give” anything without cheating somebody.
Imagine a free day of school. Does that mean you don’t have to go to school? does it mean that the teachers don’t get paid? that they get paid half-time? or the staff? does the prinicpal get paid? Does the school board?
Imagine walking into WalMart and there’s the Campbell’s Kicking Krab Bisque: $2.99. Imagine the price label subdivided: x% for Campbell’s, y% for Sam: m¢ for rent, n¢ for taxes, p¢ for administration: q¢ for the stock clerk, r¢ for the warehouse guy, s¢ for the checkout girl t¢ for shoplifting … Don’t forget the kid who gathers up the carts in the parking lot, chases around the neighborhood for more, sweeps the floors, the lot, the basement … Now imagine that the stock boy says I’ll forgo my 2¢ in this particular case: I think the girl is cute, I’m flirting with her …
Dress Code
2016 09 16 I arise around 7, put on the coffee, crank up the Mac: check my email, let Yahoo sift some headlines for me … This morning there was a jam of headlines about girls not admitted to their school dance for “inappropriate” dress, girls sent home over leggings, girls sent home over absence of leggings … Once upon a time it was clear: the Temple gave you Commandments, supposedly passing them on from God: the Church told you how you could dress, what you could say … how to pray. But then supposedly we got rid of the church, practicedd genocide on the natires and formed a “republic”: declared ourselves “free” … I understand where Roman Catholic schools get their school uniforms: now tell me where secular schools get theirs. In fact, tell me where secular schools come from in the first place. If we’re free, when did we get yoked with schools? When did the schools tell us how to dress? make us go, then not let us in?
I’m 100% in favor of kleptocracies embarrassing themselves with contradictory claims. It isn’t as though anything humans ever said made sense. Nature had provided us with air, water, food: or opportunities to find food, made shelter, find mates, raise young … raise more young. Now we don’t find food, we’re not allowed to find food; we have to buy food, we have to get a job and get money to buy food, to buy shelter, to buy a woman … to rent children: to pretend they’re ours while we’re told what to do, while they’re told what to think, say, believe.
So: I wanted to say some of this, and link to one of the half dozen stories Yahoo offered me at 7:30 this morning. But now it’s 9. I go back to Yahoo and there are no such headlines, ther’s nothing about dress codes, dresses, leggings: girls showing or not showing their legs, their hips, their boobs, their ass … No, now the headlines are all about football kickoffs, new rules, Belichek this, Tom Brady that. & hIller: Clinton diseases …
You can vote for whomever you want, so long as they’re an ill-mannered blowhard, or the wife of a presidential pervert.
One thing is clear: it’s not my fault. I offered us a cybernetic free marketplace with my Free Learning Exchange, 1970. Had the public given FLEX money, the state’s power to tax could have weakened. We could have formed a real social order, based in freedom: free information: real choice instead of forced choice: we could have voted for any of 300,000,000 individuals, instead of the Donald or hIllary.
Don’t blame me. Hey, that would make a good song!
Amelia Earhart
2016 09 13 Jeez will you look at Amelia Earhart!
thanx ibtimes
I’m glad we’re finally put together some traces of her disappearance. We knew she wasa great woman, a great pilot; now look how striking she was!
Ryan Lochte Chances
2016 09 13 Ryan Lochte and his mother and his sponsors want him to have a second chance. Was his first chance really a first? Hasn’t he been sponsored all along? Hasn’t he been subsidized in way-beyond-average comfort? I don’t know, but somebody with a journalism budget could look it up and argue it out in detail. Didn’t he have a TV show? Did you have a TV show? I didn’t.
Actually I did, The Free Learning Exchange, 1971 ff, Manhattan Cable: but it cost me to have it. I infited the world to pay for its own internet, I paid in the meantime. I’m still paying.
Well, when God shows up, all will be corrected. That’s the theory anyway.
Ashamed to Be Naked
2016 09 12 First Contact, Lost Tribes of the Amazon
Naked natives see clothing, they want it. They do not want to go back into the forest, naked. Genesis is uncannily echoed. Make sure you read Jared Diamond on the subject, perspective New Guinea.
Naked Horror
2016 09 09 There’s a headline today that Facebook did an aboutface with regard to the “nudity”: re: the famous photo of the Vietnamese girl running screaming naked from the napalm on a road, amid other children, and soldiers. Facebook has, or had, a policy forbidding nude pictures: somebody posted the picture, Facebook deleted it, then reversed field, allowed it back.
I had one rule in graduate school, if the professor forbids it, find a way to do it where the professor won’t notice, will approve disobedience, will declare WW III … My teacher in this was familiar, or should have been: America, freedom, jazz, modern art, modern lit …
My specific teacher was Charlie Parker. Bird said “You can do anything.” Lester Young, the Pres, the first great musician I ever saw live, visiting Birdland at age 15, was quoted in Downbeat to illustate Bird’s rule: Bird’s rule against rules. Of course there are rules, but it’s hard to say them right. Anyway Bird said You can do anything: Lester said, Well, except for … and I wasn’t a musician so I don’t know what he said. But Lester said one night he was listening to Bird and along cam the situation that Pres would avod, and Bird waded right in, and Pres said, Yes, you can: in that circumstance it worked.
I didn’t know what they were talking about, except in genearl terms: freedom. Find a way to make the exception work for you.
Well, my grad prof who always ticked me off, challenged me, was Max Patrick: drunk, queer, loud, vulgar. He said Don’t this and that. Therefore I did this and that, showed him there were circumstances where I was right. But he never discussed it with me, just gave me an A: or was it an A-? Suggested that I submit the paper for publication.
Isn’t that funny? I don’t even remember what the rule was!
Web Narrator
2016 09 09 “No one said there was anything wrong with being gay, so why did it take so long for XYZ to come out of the closet?”
What? Where has this insanely wrong omniscient narrator been?
Who writes this drivel? Community College flunk-outs?
I know one thing: they’ve got an editor encouraging them.
The flunk-outs might write it, but without the editor, without ad sales, few would see it.
News Abortion
2016 09 08 For twenty-one years now I’ve posted hints at Knatz.com on what a pain in the ass I’ve always been: since grammar school at least. The school wanted me to study “history”: but St Paul had already taught me that human records are not to be trusted. And Thoreau had taught me how to be snooty about it: You study the Times; I’ll study the Ages. Obnoxious, right? Still, a lot of truth in it: for a twelve year old kid anyway. So: 1938 till 2016 I don’t trust media (including media I had trusted: the Bible for example!) The internet changed that, and chanted it some more. When I founded FLEX, 1970, my idea for my (Ivan Illich’s) world’s first internet, was that people were invited to declare themselves as a resource. Anyone could claim anything. The claim wasn’t censored, wasn’t edited against truth. Quality contgrol would come from the similarly uncensored, unedited response of the public: Joe Blow says he’s a great physicit; Joe Blow’s student Suzie says all Joe Blow did for her all day was look up her dress; but Albert Einstein says Joe Blow is a great physicist. Get it? Caveat emptor! No censorship, no licensing: let people trust their sense! whether their sense is trustworthy of not!
1995 the Pentagon’s plagiarized internet addicts me for a while. The Pentagon and CERN ought to owe me a trillion dollars in back royalties plus penalties by 1995, but I’m not expecting to receive a penny: not a penny more than John Sutter or Crazy Horse or Tesla. I keep mum, and read Yahoo. I hate Yahoo, but I read it. And here twenty-one yars later I still read it; but less and less so: I hate it so much more than formerly.
But never more than this morning. Some woman says she’s leaving her second husband to be with her girlfriend. She wrote a book, a best seller, when she left her first husband. I don’t know what, that’s not what I’m skimming it for. I watch the female news presenter say Go, Girl, good for you, and then see the male presenter pick up his cue: Go, Girl, About time! Good for you?
Saint Paul: HeavyWeight BullShit Champ
When I was a kid, reading St. Paul, knowing, correctly, that Paul’s glib rhetoric was an easy path to influence, success, a following, an income … Paul was telling us what “God” wanted, and Paul’s churches would beat us all over the head till we confomred. … The churches told us to marry: and stay married. No matter how miserable your lives, stay married. One male marries one female. One female marries one male. He owns your ass, he can order you about, even beat you a little: and you don’t have to like it but you do have to take it. Stay married!
Now the media are telling us: Leave one husband, leave another husband, it doesn’t matter what you vowed: Now you’re queer? Go, Girl.
Cultures change. Cultures have unfathomable algorithms for how to change. They do or we’d all be the same, forever, except we wouldn’t live that long … But where the hell did this Let’s all celebrate dykes come from?
Trouble is, I’ve already kind of learned how to negotiate my way around Yahoo! If I leave, I’ll be lost. So fuck me, I’ve long been lost anyway.
It’s not as though anything makes any sense.
St. Paul PS
St. Paul’s the heavyweight for two millenia. Not only are a couple of his epistles forgeries, but they’re made up out of whole cloth. It isn’t that there’s a know Pauline epistle that the NT’s epistle is hoping to pass for; there’s no such epistle, none known anyway. It’s not Paul, and he’s not saying Paul’s things. Double bull, double dishonest.
Did I say that clearly? Not clearly enough. Make an effort: you cannot overplay the deceit. Like Nixon: don’t assume small mistakes, honestly intentioned; no, assume maximum fraud, maximally defractioned.
Witches: as Social Cleansing
Yesterday I watched the doc Witches: a Century of Murder: Sixteenth-century witch hunts crossing the border from Scotland south to England, then crossing the Atlantic west to Salem: Dr. BigHipped Blond the presenter. King James didn’t just translate the Bible, he wrote about witches, urged reason, caution, to no avail. The presenter, Scottish strawberry-blond, sincere, is aghast that people could burn people as heretics for no better reason than rumor and superstition. Believe me, that’s still the case: I know, I’m a social outcast, I’ve seen society bend its own rules, hypnotize itself to think that murder is justice.
The form of torture used to extract confessions from accused witches is close kin to the form of torture used in recent decades by American military / intelligence to torture Muslims re: ISIS: waterboarding.
The “witch” in the history was old, ugly, poor, had only one leg, no friends, was cantankerous, lived on social charity. So: the people paid for her keep and got cursed for thanks. How do you get rid of such an unpleasant expense? Torture her into confessing to witchcraft!
Eighty year old man the same. His case was trickier since he was deemed a man of God: church deacon, reverend, some damn thing. With him they “swam-a-witch”: near drowned him. The torture is much like the epistemological ritual in which Germanic tribes determined guilt or innocence: drown you: if your body sank, the river received you, you were innocent; if your body floated, nature’s waters rejected you, you were guilty. Swimming a witch depended on the idea that your body accepted / or rejected “baptism”.
The trick is to see that people — Teutons, Scots, English, King James … Salemites, Americans — see themselves as “rational”. A riot.
The one-legged old woman got visited by her neighbors who stripped her naked, cut off her hair, finally found the “proof” they wanted: a mole, an age-spot on her genitals: sure evidence that she had slept with Satan, was in league with the Devil.
One problem we’ve all got is there are a jillion sects, Roman Catholic, screaming Baptist, still that claim that the Bible is true, literally. The Bible says to kill witches, the Bible treats witches as “real”, how can anyone deny it? and also hope for heaven? “Reason” has no ancient book promoting it: on the contrary. Murdering witches after torturing them, that’s what has “authority”.
Multi-Tasking
2016 09 05 I used to flatter myself that I was exceptionally good at multitasking. I still do. At the same time I freely admit that it’s unlikely that many of us are. That driver going by with a phone to his ear, the woman drying her nail-polish as she signals left: cancel her insurance, charge him triple, don’t write liability for them, not at the standard rate.
I remember specifically the first time I ever heard of multi-tasking: oh, not by that name of course. It was a couple of anecdotes about Saint Thomas Acquinas: famous genius. Yes, I don’t doubt that he could out-multi-task many another (including many another genius / saint / etc.) I also bet he’d have done better had he not tried to pray while writing a letter while solving the Sudoku for the day. The second such guy I ever heard identified was John Philip Telemann, the Baroque composer. He was a good one, a very good one, very prolific; but he wasn’t Bach: he wasn’t any of the Bachs! I heard he could write a concerto while babblind on the phone: that’s a joke, there were no phones in his day. Simple to say: he could multi-task.
Recently I saw a study. The subject swore he was extra-good at multitasking. They showed him driving and phoning at the same time: they also showed him not seeing the Stop sign, not hearing the fire truck …
Better than average? Good, but that’s still not good enough. Stop trying. Pay attention: to one, or two, not three things.
When I was a kid I’d watch my mother watching us and she drove. She had to put the brake on, she’d reach across improvising her arm as a seat belt. Of course we had no seat belts in 1946, none in 1956 either. Even at age eight I wished my mother would drive and not also try to be a seat belt. I don’t doubt that she doubled our danger, not our safety.
Bent Spear
2016 08 28 The military had nukes on the loose, and no one knew, certainly not the military!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_States_Air_Force_nuclear_weapons_incident
No matter how much evidence the fed corrupts, it’s still the fed.
Incompetence disqualifies the underling, not the boss.
Anybody in the military who should have known where the nukes were, when the nukes got moved, when the nukes failed to get moved … anybody in authority who knew anything shouldn’t resign, shouldn’t be allowed to make promises; they should have the nukes shoved up their ass, and more nukes shoved up the ass of their families, their senator, their judge.
We’re morons not to take taboo seriously.
Katrina ’16
2016 08 16 Floods in Louisiana, not the first floods we’ve heard of, yes?
I don’t know much about Louisiana, I’ve only been there once: drove across it, zroom. But I do know one thing that we shouldn’t have needed Hurricane Katrina to teach us: Gulf Coast Louisiana, delta Louisiana, is very low, some of it below sea level.
So is the Netherlands, but with a difference: the Dutch know they’re at risk, and they know more or less what they’re doing. Well, maybe some of the white folks in Louisiana know what they’re doing too: they put the n-s, not the whites in the middle of the floods. Other than that, the powers of Louisiana look like Faulkner’s Snopes family.
No, that’s not fair. Louisiana has something else going for it, making it one of the great places on earth, floods or no floods: New Orleans! Creoles! jazz! food! sea food! gumbo!
If we want to plan how to treat global warming the people who developed the Gulf Coast are the very people to trust our future viability to. We’ll be ten foot under water and call it sunshine.
No, wait, there’s something else: I bet the bass fishing is as good as it is here in Florida. And that’s something. I’d love to kayak into the swamps and just stay there. We’ll all be drowning, I’ll be catching bass.
No, wait, I have another favorite thing about Louisiana: the Louisiana Purchase. Thomas Jefferson wrote some of the greatest rhetoric about independence, equality, government; but he bought half the continent from Russia without consulting congress! He could’a built Baton Rouge!
Underwater? Nearly underwater? Just give it to the Army Corps of Engineers.
I should be careful when I insult engineers, my uncle was with the Engineers in Korea, 1950s.
Elvis!
2016 08 16 Died August 16, RIP anniversary.
Elvis didn’t drink! didn’t smoke! But boy, he took a lot of pills!
When Elvis wiggled on TV I was already famous (locally) for how I wiggled on the dance floor: obscene, even I was embarrassed. But now, 60 years later, I remember Elvis wiggling on TV with great fondness. Must have been somethin, in Memphis, in those years: Elvis, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis … If I hadn’t loved jazz so much, and therefore despised and resented the rockers, I might have paid more attention at the time.
Olympics
2016 08 16 The girl diving for the finish line beat the girl, Felix, running for the finish line. When I was on the high school track team I was taught that running was faster than diving. Should all the runners now be able to sue their traditional coaches? Shouldn’t all previous medals have to be returned? the medals melted down, worthless?
I’m reminded of how the flat track photo finish was explained to me in 1961 when partner Dave and I were selling reproductions at the track: the camera aperture was a slit, a thin line, locked onto the finish line: only something touching the line registered. If you fell down one inch short of the finish line you were not on the photo. Fall down one inch short and the crowd sees you but the photo-finish does not. So: falling would count, but only if you fell over the line. the danger would be in missing it: safer to run, not fall; though falling might win.
But now I don’t believe anything of the kind. And I have no confidence that God gets it either.
Bridge Rock
2016 08 08 https://www.yahoo.com/news/husband-ohio-woman-hurt-dropped-rock-dies-55-232101742.html
This link references the injury to a woman from a rock dropped on her car from an overpass. Yeah, lady, I’ve been there. As a freshman at Columbia, NYC, 1956, I joined the crew team. We practiced on the Harlem River. The boat house was on a north Manhattan shore. Our race courses finished around Yankee Stadium, we’d rest in the lea of Giants Stadium, some famous realestate. Every day brought one adventure we could all have done without: we row under the brige, where was it? 155th St? Kids lay in wait for us. They’re drop rocks as we were forced to run their gauntlet.
I don’t remember anyone being killed, or blinded, or concussed. The coach didn’t arm his launch with a rifle to shoot the kids before they could attack. The coach would tell us, sheepishly that he’d reported the behavior to the cops: what else could he do?
One thing we could have done just occurred to me: we could have sent the freshman crew to row under the bridge while hiding the varsity crew in a van on the bridge. The kids prepare a rock, the varsity erupts from the van: drops the kids off the span instead of their rocks.
A kid thrown from the bridge, getting his neck broken, would, I guarantee, have squelched bridge-rocking as a form of fun.
I’m enjoying thinking it a bit through. We crewmen were eighteen to twenty-one or two. Some of the varsity may have been twenty-two. I was 5’8 and weighted 132 — except for race hour, when, as coxswain, I would do sit-ups in the furnace room till I’d sweated away ten pounds: I raced at 122 — but the oarsmen, the heavyweight crew went 180 to 220 or so. These guys played football at 230 but rowed at 180: gigantic thighs would reduce to toothpicks, relatively little of the leg used in rowing. The kids dropping the rocks were what, maybe ten? twelve?
The last several days I’ve been deliciously watching Tales of Irish Castles. I know a fair amount of British and English feudal to medieval history. Irish history I know as a minor subcidiary, more myth than history: so I’m loving it, learning more of the presence of the vikings than most would have guessed. In simple, the Saxon pushed aside the Celts, the Normans conquered the Saxons. The Vikings held Dublin, used it as their ship yard, but don’t you dare wander into the bulk of Ireland. It could we like dancing across the mountains of Colombia with your dick in your hand. You wouldn’t have a dick very long. Ireland was feudal anarchy. Mmm, mmm, good. Chieftains killed chieftains, killed women, killed anything.
The Anglo Normans ventured into Ireland, sweeping all before them for the first dozen miles. After that it was every Lord for himself: the Anglo Norman lords would make a nice tidbit for the Irish wildmen. So the English built their castles, and hid in them, ruling the bit they had.
So: NYC was like Ireland. Some of Manhattan was like the Irish pale, English lords ruled safely there. Spotted here are there were the institutions to grow Enblish law, English order, institutions for secular priesthoods like we at Columbia were studying for. Across from the Columbia boathouse on the Harlem was the Bronx: don’t even mention it: that was like the bulk of Ireland: anarchy. And on the 155 Street Bridge, awaiting their sport-prey, crouched the kids, Manhattan kids, Bronx kids, wildings, maimers, with nothing to do with English law or NY order.
So, pre-law or pre-med or whatever we yeomen were at Columbia, throwing kids from bridges was not our normal activity. We’d row, we’d try to win, sometimes we did, more often we lost, we’d sigh, go home, get drunk, study; we didn’t eat the other crew, nor did we get eaten: English law. But don’t think the Irish with their Gaelic chieftains had anything to with English law, except to suffer under it: fool, just go west another furlong, leave the English behind. There’s no English law there, Irish law, maybe.
You wanna see Irish law? See Quest for Fire.
Meantime I look forward to watching Tales of Irish Castles again, with Jan when she comes back from Nova Scotia. Hey, that’s Celtic too!
2016 10 06 https://www.yahoo.com/news/m/f6b7b843-338f-3447-9bf6-61d47e3c5df5/ss_woman-settles-with-target.html
Kids threw a Target store cart out an upperstory window and injured a woman in the parking lot. She’s suing, not the kids, but Target! and she’s about to collect. Why? What did Target do? Sue the kids, maim the kids. Throw the kids from the window.
“Group” scribble moved to “Rebellion” scribble.
Jesse Owens Anniversary
2016 08 03 Jesse won four gold medals. Hitler explained that African people were primitive, that’s why they won. Physical superiority was proof of inferiority: blacks should not be permitted to participate in games that they’ll win.
It’s as rational as anything else Hitler said, wasn’t it?
Indebted Nun
2016 07 15 Girl goes to college, takes on debt. Now she wants to be a nun. Fine, says the convent, but pay your student loans off first.
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/sep/13/nation/na-nuns13
If the culture wants us to attend university the culture should pay us to attend university, not in-debt us.
I read an article the other day about someone who did well in college, “earned” a internship. Uh, they worked full time, maybe worked well, maybe worked hard, but earned nothing! What? Imagine the Warriors calling Steph Curry and saying we want you to be back-to-back MVP for us: we’ll earn billions; you’ll earn nothing, but we’ll say nice thing about you in the paper, until we decided in stead to call you a Commie, or a Terrorist.
(I wound up ranting this. Rant is what I expected, but I’d wanted a good rant, not a rant rant. Oh well, I’ll work on it.
)
What would Jesus do? Supposedly God instructed his son Jesus what to say to the rabbis at the Temple once he got to Jerusalem for Passover. He got arrested by priests whom God had not personally instructed in heaven. Jesus got torturned, murdered. What was his salary? Or did he have an internship?
I earned lots of money throughout my boyhood, throughout college. Then I was drafted. Then I went to grad school. NYU gave me a fellowship: meaning, instead of owing them $1,000 to abuse my brilliance, they’d give me $500.
What if Steph Curry’s internship promised him $20M a year for five years: he had only to pay $10M a year to get it.
I started Columbia in 1956. I was drafted in 1961. I started at NYU on my PhD in 1962, at first getting only slightly into debt. Years slipped by as I found no one who understood my reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. I took my first teaching job in 1967: my first “educated” income: $8,000 per year! Eleven of twenty-five of us in the department got fired for standing in silent proest on the chapel steps once a week. I got blackballed beyond 1967. I got blackballed permanently: by refusing to budge.
If Jesus arrives on earth with special training, should the Temple be able to crucify him without paying off God’s tuition first? so damn angry, I’ll add later.
Defacing the Holocaust
2016 07 10 wikipedia has an article on a pogrom in Poland, Jedwabne. The illustration depicts a stone monument: all black:
I bet I know what happened here: it happens all over the world,
whereever there are stone monuments. someone wants to take an ink
rubbing: copy the relief image. They should press the paper onto-and-into the surface, then ink the paper, then remove the print: leaving the stone relief intact. But
they don’t; they ink the stone! then press the paper.
Incompetent sentimentality. Imagine going to the Lincoln Memorial on the Mall and immolating yourself: set fire, leave a stain. Kilroy was here.
But there’s no way to guard every grave
stone, every memorial plaque …
Value Over Time
2016 07 10 http://blitzlift.com/these-real-titanic-photos-are-more-riveting-than-the-movie/3/
“Bernie Palmer, sold the rights to this picture and others for a mere $10 not realizing they’d be worth much more money in years to come.”
This Yahoo author knows the photographer’s motivation from 1912? wouldn’t “how” he knew or didn’t know that be more important news than that he took a pic and sold it? The kid is starving in Bangladesh, he finds a crust of bread, he eats it. If doesn’t matter that the crust might auction for $1M in 2016; the kid is starving in 1912. It’s a fact that the photographer sold the pic for $10; what he may have been thinking is pure yellow journalism bull. I used to read the Times, now I read Yahoo, and it’s totally degenerated: airheads, female airheads, pretending to wisdom.
When my wife threw away all my Mad comics, carefully saved since 1951 or so, I knew they were valuable. I didn’t throw them out: she did. She didn’t care that they might become even more valuable: she hated the idea that her super intellectual husband saved 1950s comix.
Jig is Up
2016 07 08 NJ poisoned the well of the national data base with misinformation from the 1980s. Florida warned me in 2007 that the NDB had a flag against me. I’ve been writing to Trenton every since, to no avail. My licence came due for renewal in 2013. FL refused to renew: even though the bureaucrats had heard my explanations. Trenton just kept sending notices of myriad fines and penalties. So: I’ve been driving as little as possible, as carefully as possible, in full knowledge that if I got stopped, a cop could throw me away and lose the key. But the cops have always been able to throw critics and artists and inventors and saints and geniuses away.
Well, Thursday, it happened. The cop pulled me over. I handed him my expired licence and a fat envelope of correspondence with NJ / FL. He handed it right back to me, didn’t open it.
I asked the cop to accompany me, driving, to my house where I could park the car till all this was resolved, or I died, or they lost m in jail, or something. He said he wan’t a “baby sitter”. He left me parked in the direct sun in the hottest part of the hottest year. No irony, no humor, no sneer of Nazi sadism.
A little luck followed though: I was pulled over on Home Avenue, just off Sebring Parkway, headed downhill toward Faith Lutheran church, conspicuous on the north shore of Lake Jackson. I locked the car and walked to the huge compound occupied by the church, poked around, did find Lyle, the pastor. Said I needed a Good Semaritan. He drove stick. His secretary followed us to my house. I’m home, alive, at my house, an important livesaver aboard: DTP equipment: now I can scan and edit again. I’ve been on a lifeserving emergency, and got smacked.
The kleptocracy knows it has power; what it can’t imagine is that it will be judged: if there’s a true god. And if there’s isn’t, then fuck us, it doesn’t matter what we do, what lies we tell, how many saints get martyred. While I’m here, edited pix will continue to get added: photos of me, of Jan, friends, etc. And pk art.
Fair Trial
2016 06 21 I don’t expect a fair trial in the US:
anymore than I got a fair test at university,
any more than Jesus got a fair trial in Jerusalem.
I don’t expect fairness form humans, no more than I expect them to understand the concept: no matter who explains it. I don’t believe humans will understand what God says at Judgment.
Rights in Kleptocracy
The central characteristic of kleptocrats is to claim credit for the rights that they deny. They destroy freedom, say they grant it: say that no one has ever granted it better.
What better example is there than school? They coerce attendance, claim choice.
Sincere kleptocrats believe that they really have bestowed the freedom they’ve sabotaged.
State Sale
To sell you down the river.
Mark Twain understood it perfects, Heck wanted to head west. Boy we used us that freedom fast.
Disney ‘Gator
2016 06 16 The news has been saturated with it: an alligator snatched a two years old boy on a freshwater beach near Disney, his parents present. After intense searching the boy’s body has been found, intact.
A couple of dozen years ago I gave the tram tours at Highlands Hammock State Park, Sebring FL. The ‘gator population along the South Canal was very high. Early afternoon, in most weathers, at least a couple, maybe dozens, would be spottable. If I can get my scanner back working, I’ll insert a picture of a ‘gator swallowing a ‘possum. It took a series of days. I’ve watched a ‘gator trying to swallow a big catfish that hadn’t proceeded gut-ward for than an inch after three days. Critters are good at swallowing; critters are also good at not getting swallowed.
My point is: a gator will grab any small animal, drown it, then leave it. After several days of ripening the corpse will be much more swallowable. Lions, hyenas chomp and swallow, gorillas chew and chew. Alligators let it decay, then swallow. They never bite off a piece, then chew.
The world is already far too tame for my taste. It’s convenient for us that so much of nature has been denatured. But what’s the long term cost? already too high. You’d put your kid on a leash in traffic; well, freshwater beaches in Florida have traffic too. I’d rather have ‘gators in Florida a grizzlies in Alaska than another billion two year old boys. Sorry for that specific kid, but I don’t want life to be not tough.
What if those parents took a two year old on an African safari and they were out in the grass. Would they leave their kid to play alone? among the lions?
If the gator doesn’t want the two year old he can come after me. I’ll rassle him. Me. I’m so weak these days I can’t even open the cap to a water bottle.
PS The alligator in question was caught: and “euthanized”. Did he get a fair trial? Did wee have his fingerprints?
I’m glad there are humans on earth. I’m glad we’re as smart as we are. It would be interesting if we were smarter. Maybe we’ve already crossed the line where intellience becomes a liability. Maybe we should pray that God isn’t too smart either: boy, is it easy to outsmart yourself.
How smart can we be though when our right to prefer ourselves to all other possibilities is so automatic? But look at God in the Old Testament: he prefers himself to everything: and demands that we also prefer him: to all else!
See for yourself the parallels with the kid Invading the mountain gorilla’s space not long ago. Once we’ve claimed 99.999% of everything there ought to be one used-tissue of space left that is inviably the lions’, the gorilla’s, the ‘gator’s: No, you can’t come in here: and if you come anyway, you won’t be rescued.
Zoos shouldn’t permit any visitors who doesn’t sign six million documents attesting to what they understand and will be held accountable for.
But it’s the animals own fault: they didn’t trim us to size two million years ago. Now they can reap.
Shooter in Orlando
2016 06 Guy shoots a hundred or so people at a gay bar in Orlando, half dead, half wounded. Big Media and Big Government label it “terrorism”: meaning Muslim, meaning IS: meaning poor Asians, the people with our oil so inconveniently on their land. We knock them down, step over them, go ballistic if they try a retaliatory swipe at our balls while we’re standing over them, and go utterly insane if they attack one or two of our buildings.
Homo-hatred, the motive that would normally be advanced is pushed aside. Next thing we all know everyone is participating in mass moments of silence, we’re blubbering about how the fags and lessies loved everybody and each other. When the fed took a nation of racists and forced them to let little black girls into the white schools and to let black men sit at their lunch counter, what happened? When I first drove south public roads were filled with trucks with gun racks, KKK signs: where did those Kluxers go? How did they suddenly all go silent when Martin Luther King is memorialized?
America advertises itself as tolerant while still lynching at Nazi rates. (Instead of dangling from tree limbs the lynched these days may just be jammed into prisons.
And never forget, the Nazis start off lynching queers and Jews and Commies, but they always wind up lynching queers and Jews and Nazis! Percentage-wise Hitler was killing more fellow Nazis at the end, fellow political cell mates, than Jews. A Jew was a dangerous thing to be, but so was a Nazi! Thugs always wind up killing their brothers: like princes.
(scribble chaos, I’ll edit)
Once upon a time the sheriff led the lynch mob; these days the lynch mob is all the sheriff and his deputies.
Note just below an example of the cops destroying suicide notes: when the cops are the librarians for family messages, there is no family, only state.
Good. That’s how I want civilization to commit suicide: by civilization taking overe 100%, till civilization is all we have left, there are no alternatives. And so civilization strangles us
Did this Orlando shooter want to kill queers? or get them eulogized? The shooter is dead, himself shot. Is he turning cartwheels in hell? Are they of joy? or frustration? or are they cartwheels in paradise? replete with virgins? Straight virgins?
The truth isn’t up to the truth; it ain’t up to facts. There are no “facts”, not when the sheriff and the ad agency are the fact gatherers. Not when the sheriff and the ad agency are the same team as Big Media and Big Government, not when they control the writing.
Global warming isn’t global warming; it’s whatever Dupont, Monsanto, the cops and the Times say it is: controllable, controlled. It’s exactly how Stalin counted the votes, and gee, surprise-surprise, found that everyone had voted for Stalin! Or almost everyone. Hell, make it unanimous.
There will still be fingerprints on the gun, but not in the police records. And cops, run by authority, will never understand evidence, argument … hypothesis …
Faith in human testimony is pathetic.
Anyway, notice: Big Media and Big Government are paving the route to Muslim genocide.
If they’d exterminate every religion and every secular superstition too (capitalism, communism, democracy, socialism …) I’d be cheering.
Help! Police!
2016 06 11 A Chicago Woman Wrote a Last Note to Her Parents Before Dying. The Police Destroyed It.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/chicago-woman-wrote-last-note-133821213.html
Our institutions fuck up. That’s natural. But then there’s still there!
FBI lab is caught cheating: how come it’s still there? Nixon’s White House was caught lying, cheating; Nixon isn’t still there but the White House is, the FBI lab is … How? Why?
I just read a pundit advising that there would soon be rioting in the street? How come there isn’t rioting already?
God is supposed to step in and clean everything up? Where is he?
But not me. I don’t want centralized top-down solutions: I want civilization expunged. I want people to be free or to be dead.
Or: I want the earth to lie fallow. Then any sentience still around could begin to see what happened.
My ideal world will have no civilization, no cops, no Stalins. And God would have to behave himself. But not because I say so. I don’t want to be the top; I don’t want any top.
Where is He?
2016 06 14 We don’t know where God is. He could be in my room right now: how would I know? or you know? or the priest know? Where do we get the arrogance to assume that we know what God is doing? or saying? or what God looks like?
Infallible Machine
The idea of Judgment is full of holes (maybe just as many as the idea of God! I used to believe that God would present himself, we’d all recognize him, that all quarrels about details would evaporate …
No. God would have to identify himself: infallibly. How? I have no idea, I’m not God. Goverments, states are not competent to have an opinion. Churches are as irrelevant as a political party with no election coming. Science has nothing to say: unless God teaches us what the saying should be.
Here’s no probelem: before you could prove anything about a God you’d have to have first proved a series of things about cosmology, semiotics, theology. Is there a God? Is it this God? Just one of him? or three? How can you be sure?
I would like to be a cop at that hearing. I would like to have an infallible weapon that would instantly evaporate doubters. This Jehovah isn’t good enough for you? You want an Allah instead? Pooft. You’re gone, never to return. Understand, I’m not making the judgment, I’m just holding the gun. The gun goes off, I didn’t pull any trigger. The truth is the trigger.
I would like to hold the gun until my arm falls off.
Above I scribbled “God is supposed to step in and clean everything up? Where is he?” That’s a joke, of course, and one with it’s own flaws. How do we know he hasn’t? How are humans competent to know whether or not judgment has occurred or is occurring? Monkeys shouldn’t supervise the philosophers.
Knocking the Teacher
2016 06 03 https://www.yahoo.com/news/middle-school-teacher-arrested-sexual-132511826.html
English teacher gets laid with 13 year old student of hers, nearly daily, with his parents apparent approval. Ah but she’s been arrested.
Wait a minute: if it’s OK with the 23 year old female teacher, and OK with her 13 year old student, and OK with his parents… whose else’s business is it?
Ah, the law. But ask yourself: what makes it the law’s business? I don’t see that it’s the Pope’s business, or God’s for that matter.
No, no: law is something imposed on us. Might makes right.
No, wait: start over: let’s start with the assumption that God does have the right and the power to legislate: adult English teacher cannot fuck teen boy. Period. OK. Now let’s ask a different question: how does God communicate this law to us? and why should we care? What if we worship a different god with a different law?
Back to square one. All the gods should have it out, duke it up: establish hegemony. Then you would know who, what law, to obey. If Genghis Khan trains babies from the cradle[: do what the Khan says or get shellacked, then we’d know where we stand: I obey cause I don’t want to get shelacked. The second Khan’s back is turned, then I’m free again.
2016 06 08 Body Recovered from the Mouth of an 8-Foot Alligator in Florida
https://www.yahoo.com/news/body-recovered-mouth-8-foot-234506331.html
What right do we have to the contents of an alligator’s mouth? Shouldn’t the arm of the law stop at the ‘gator’s mouth?
I see that the state can keep food from going into my mouth, and the blacks’ mouth, and the Cherokee’s mouth; but should the food at least be mine if I can get it into my mouth? Seems to me.
Related: boy falls into gorilla cage, zoo shoots ape, not trespassing boy. Grr.
But there is no reasonable solution. Maybe there was 30,000 years ago, 15,000 years ago, 3,000 years ago, but not longer. Elephants, for example: humans deal ini patches of territory; elephants relate to continent scale swaths. The elephants were doomed the minute humans got away with thinking that they could regulate this, that, and the other thing continent-wide in Africa, North America … Asia … The elephants, the bison, didn’t kill us before we could get that far, now they’re screwed: the corpse in the ‘gator’s mouth belongs to the human law, not to the gator who’s labored patiently to get the corpse there in the first place.
I seduce the girl, but her quim belongs to Genghis, even if it’s my wedding night.
The only hope is to hope that someday there will be a Judgment, and that God will kick it off by proving a) that he’s god b) that he’s smart c) objective … m) right … x) has the might … z) legitimately owns everything.
If God owns everything then he doesn’t even owe us proof. He can just stomp us, the best of us, any of us. We have no rights, unless he gives them to us, and if he’s given them, then he can take them away too.
Ratifying Models
2016 05 30 I used to assume that communication not only could take place but had taken place: Jesus had come, the Romans missed the boat, but we had got the boat: we got it, we were saved, we knew that we were saved. Now I think that we all missed the boat, but are too stupid and too dishonest to know that we missed the boat. I don’t believer we even know that there was a boat: that the boat could go, that the boat did go. The trouble with Christianity is that Christians think that they’re Christians. They’re not; they’re the ones who missed the boat: who forced the boat to be missed: Christ killers pretending to be Christian.
I used to think that witnesses to Judgment would understand the Judgment. The thieves would say, Yes, I’m a thief. The murderers would say, Yes, we murdered: murder was wrong, we were wrong, and now that’s why we’re in hell, we deserve nothing else.
Diamond Dealers
2016 05 25 Article – https://www.yahoo.com/beauty/furious-brides-accusing-kay-jewelers-230513060.html
– reports that chain jewelers’ customers are complaining that the diamonds they bring in for servicing are not the diamonds they get back. The dimonds they get back are lower grade diamonds, or are some diamond imitation; not real diamond. “A rep for Signet, its parent company, said that any complaints are “minimal” compared to their huge number of satisfied customers.”
Oh, that’s nice. Not every customer complains of theft, only some customers. The customers who don’t complain outnumber the customers who do complain: and this is a democracy. Imagine Bill Cosby’s defense team arguing that the number of women Cosby didn’t drug/rape outnumber those he did: therefore, he’s innocent!
Hounding Hillary
2016 05 14 Clinton may get bumped out of getting nominated to run, cause she’s a crook: she & Bill were crooks: Bill was a crook and she’s keeping it up. … But is that fair? Aren’t they all crooks? Aren’t crooks what we insist on?
Maybe she’s getting bumped out just because she’s a woman. But at the same time I see women running everything, everwhere: and in Brazil at least, getting impeached for it. Man oh man, I wish the women’s libbers who marched all over me trying to speak, to communicate in 1970, 1971 … could see all these women in fancy clothes, and then in jail jumpsuits.
I’d like to have seen Nancy Reagan in a jail jump suit: Nancy Orange.
But you know the image weakens as you go back in time. Mamie Ike, what was she? Just a drunk, no?
We daily prove our innocence by failing to understand the charges.
Bureaucratic Infallibility
I still have a question though: if your birth certificate says you’re female, will your birth certificate continue to say you’re female no matter how many scientists prove to how many bureaucrats that you’re male?
It’s ridiculous for humans to make “truth” judgments while remaining fallible. Without God present, there are no facts: no possibility of correct birth certificates.
I’d go along with the bureaucrats provided once God showed that they were wrong, even once, they apologized, reliquished all power, had their property seized, by God, of course, and were enslaved for the rest of the universe to pay back hardships caused by their wrongs.
When Lincoln reimburses the Cheyenne, that’s when I’ll believe the US legitimate.
There’s always one problem: what would Lincoln reimburse the Cheyenne with? The only property, the only cash, Lincoln has is stolen.
Celebrity Morons
2016 05 11 Marvelous, some clown associated with something titled Duck Dynasty uses ignorance to resolve difficulties: he says men should use the mens room, women should us the womens room. Sure, if telling male from female were easy there would be no problem.
My solution is of course to stand aside, let everyone duke it out, till no one is left to form a majority.
Human Institutions
2016 04 24 Ivan Illich taught us that institutions may start out semi-divine but they typically wind up serving the evils they were intended to combat: the military endangers us, the pursuit of money impoverishes us: school combats illiteracy to a point, then school supervise literacy into illiteracy. The more money is spent combatting illiteracy the more illiterate we’ll recrudesce to.
Illich became famous, then the Church tried to dump him. Illich became even more famous, even rich from his own income, screw the church with its stipends: so the Church defrocked him, its most famous priest.
I followed Illich, I founded and ran my Manhattan version of his cybernetic data base internet. That is, I offered it as cybernetic, but never received the funds to make it so: meantime, Maureen and I ran it the best we could, off Hilary’s $5/hr job, using 3×5 cards and our version of divine love. I get a reputation, then I got assassinated: sabotaged, impoverished, slandered … arrested, jailed, censored: while the state stole our, God’s, Jesus’ internet: perverting it the way the states pervert everything: politics, markets, religion, freedom, wealth. Wow, the perversion of wealth!
Anyway, no one has ever understood what I’ve said or written for five consecutive hours let alone days.
Still, I repeat: institutions may get born as semi-divine, but they inevitably degenerate into evil.
In 1971 a FLEX visitor, volunteering to help, then backing away, fleeing, asked me why bother if correption is the inevitable result?
Because, you fool, causes and consequences can’t be judged in this life. Facts are forever out of reach. We need to achieve a corner of heaven to even see the problems. Meantime, the Times, DC judge for us, train us in their blindness. What do you expect in a culture guided by evil?
Charity: just recalling Philomena, and The Magdeline Sisters. The nuns take in the pregnant girls, then enslave the women while they sell the babies. The
Homeostasis: Liberty Stuns at the Gym
https://www.yahoo.com/style/outfit-too-inappropriate-gym-000000647.html
2016 04 23 Phys Ed students expelled from gym for provocative outfits, for toned bodies:
Laws should be clear. Laws should be administered by people who demonstrate ability to understand the law. But no, the law is always enforced by brown shirts, by drop outs, by dunces who not only don’t understand the law but don’t understand the concept of understanding.
“Those who know best” is how Melvyn Bragg’s sarcasm goes.
Some school somewhere, some “university”, tells the girl that her toned body is making the others uncomfortable! Censor Marilyn Monroe because you’re not Marilyn?!
On Long Island in the later 1970s I joined a Jack Lalane’s. I’ll never forget my first coed exercise class. A short distance away a nicely shaped blond was stretching. She wore leotards and panties. Thing is: the paties were worn over, not under, the leotards. When she stretched, the panties were lifted away from her body by the stretch. One, at least I, could look deep into her snatch!
Most of the participants were female. they ignored her gaping beaver. What about the other guys? Don’t know, they were busy, or were keeping mum: don’t make waves, keep that cuny, it’s a precious resource.
Later, dozens were jamed into a jacuzzi, I left: the loner, the left out: I was in my upper thirties, they were in their twenties. I was too old, to alien, to be welcome at the orgy. They didn’t have to throw me out; I left on my own.
But I’ve never forgotten that girl. My, how I wanted to tell her how much I loved her channel. That’s not a subject it’s easy, maybe not possible, to be frank about, to be honest. Can’t be open about being open.
Reprehensible Decision
2016 04 08 Tyler Summitt’s affair with Louisiana Tech player disgraces his mother’s legacy
https://sports.yahoo.com/news/tyler-summitts-affair-louisiana-tech-104500059.html
Tyler Summitt is, or was, apparently, the coach of a women’s basketball team, Louisiana Tech. His mother was basketball coach, apparently successful, there’s talk of her legacy. Apparently Tyler knocked up one of his players.
The article says, I quote, “His decision to have a sexual relationship with a player he coached is, at best, a reprehensible decision.”
pk comments on the diction, the illusion that knocking a woman up was an act of reason: a decision, with logic, cause and effect: that knocking a woman up resides in the realm of social responsibility.
Churches make inferences about reason, logic, responsibilty … free will. So do courts. So do universities. Etc. Notice: what those inferences are change by the decade if not the year, if not the hour.
I’m not defending the guy, he may be screwed now. I’m not defending his mother, or Louisiana or Tennessee. I’m mocking the journalism and its glib shallows about behavior: humans: institutions, with their dead end logics.
What should we do? kill the guy, the player? her baby? Should the university prescribe and enforce an abortion? Maybe men shouldn’t coach women: or maybe women’s basketball is full of lessie ralations too. Which is worse: hetero pregnancy? or lessie seduction?
I’ll tell you, leaving humans in charge of the grading of decisions is the worst sin.
Had my Free Learning Exchange been encouraged to develop there wouldn’t likely have remained any university basketball programs: there would have been no mothers coaching, or sons. Anybody could knock up anybody, and God would judge. As God will judge anyway. Please hurry.
Science Scare
2016 03 29 Another Climate Alarmist Admits Real Motive Behind Warming Scare
http://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/another-climate-alarmist-admits-real-motive-behind-warming-scare/
I’m glad I’ve lost this war, that I’ve fought on the losing side: market economies propagandizing without regard for truth, survival, reason; just profit, the lies so easy: just say anything, the human species asleep, seemingly at the wheel, but actually just comatose, steering an illusion of the marketcrats.
Easter has come: and gone: again. Gone, always gone.
CataTombs
2016 03 28 Worshipers feared for their lives during Easter Mass at St. Pat’s
http://nypost.com/2016/03/27/protesters-disrupt-easter-mass-at-st-pats-frighten-worshipers/
People attended Easter mass at St Patricks Cathedral. The mass was interrupted by protesters. A guy with a bullhorn and a camera strapped to his chest confused worshippers who thought the camera with its flashing lights was a bomb.
Back in 1970 when I founded and was running the Free Learning Exchange I was in routine contact with radical Catholics including radical nuns one of whom got her picture on the front page of the Times getting dragged by police out of St. Pat’s! St Pat’s was a regular target for protest, for publicity.
I loved that nun, I saw her several times. I’ll never forget her whispering blow job jokes in my ear. Neat gal.
Remember: easrly Christians worshipped in hiding, they met in catacombs. Christianity was not a daylight religion. Is any true religion ever a daylight, open air religion? If you’re not persecuted then you’re almost certainly one of the persecutors: have the might, the arrogance of Constantine behind you.
Compulsory Atheism
2016 03 14 scribble now, edit later
Emperor Constantine ordered members of his empire to convert to Christianity. That was the fourth century.
Anyone interested in truth, philosophy, theology, cosmology … should have refused: compulsion and truth don’t go together.
Later that century a mob of these “Christians” stoned, flayed, murdered Hypatia.
Think about it: Hypatia here is the Christ figure; the “Christians” the kleptocrats, the order takers, the antithesis of God etc.
Here we are in the 21st Century, still taking orders, still combating truth, philosophy, theology, cosmology.
I’m recreating the Mothly Archives volume 2: hope I don’t losing anythoing; except I’ve lost control!
PKnatz Blog 