Swine United Against Human Life

The White House, battered into submission, has signalled (surprise! surprise!) that it might be willing to capitulate to the murderous, avaricious swine (some people call them "Republicans") who want to thwart life, thwart liberty, obliterate happiness, and most particularly, insure that everyone who isn't a bloated, cannibalistic plutocrat dies in the street for want of health care. Three cheers for the vicious, sociopathic monsters. It looks as though they'll get their way again. Of course, they always do.

There Are Others Too Vicious to Live Among Piranhas

And those are the ones who always run the show.

(with an admiring h/t to the great poet, James Kavanaugh)

Nefarious Mystery Reformatters at Large

Weird. Or nefarious. Or just normal, given the Heisenbergian indeterminacy of the behavior of internet software.

Howsoever... I just looked at this blog, which appears to command the attention of about 3.2 people galaxy-wide -- which is fine with me; I just like to talk to myself :) -- and one of the posts (the one entitled, "I mostly avoid politics"), was displaying as inexplicably reformatted in the fourth paragraph, so that the right justification (actually, I can find *nothing* to justify "the right," which makes it all the more spooky... ooooooh) was disrupted, and lines displayed containing only a word or two, followed by full lines, etc. It certainly hadn't been that way before.

Anyway, just for the consumption of my practically non-existent readership, if anything shows up that's inconsistent with my usual pattern of posting (abstruse, esoteric, gratuitously prolix, theologically Christian/Quaker and politically ultra-progressive, it might not be mine, but might be the interjections of evil web gremlins! :)). I've changed my password, but who knows what evil lurks in the interstices of the internet? Probably not The Shadow, but it could always be Lamont Cranston or somebody attempting to generate pop-up ads for unaccredited universities. :)

"I never would."

The bottom line of all bottom lines. See Doctor Who, Series 4 (with David Tennant and Catherine Tate), disc 3, episode: The Doctor's Daughter.

Get Rich! Huge Profits! Money! Britney Spears!

...are all topics that have nothing whatsoever to do with this post. Hits have been lagging, however, averaging something on the order of -1 per day (I think there may actually have been discovered a counterpart to antimatter known as "antipeople," blog hits from whom cause one's counter to be decremented), but anyway, I thought I would invoke these magickal talismanic words, seemingly the subjects of greatest interest to web surfers everywhere, just to see what would happen.

To justify the title, though, let me mention that you will not get rich, that you have no prospect of making any sort of profits (except by means of the venerable American tradition of raping the poor and/or perpetrating defalcation, but then, if you had the iniquitous inclination and found yourself in the position to engage in either of the aforesaid practices, you wouldn't be reading this blog), that "Money" (with or without caps) no longer exists, and finally, that your chances of meeting Britney Spears are roughly the same as your actuarial prospects of being killed by a falling toilet seat from a disintegrating Soviet space station (though it happened to George, so hope springs eternal).

What, then, is the real topic of this post? Sorry, I forgot.

I Mostly Avoid Politics, but...

I'd take it as axiomatic -- and if it weren't, the tsunami of empirical evidence would demolish all possible doubt -- that any position taken by "the previous administration" was not just evil, but so profoundly and Satanically evil as to beggar both the imaginations and the souls of most humans on the face of the Earth. And I'm not even sure that this captures the systematicity of the malignancy, or that it's expressible in human language, but it is the best I can do for the moment, and so I'll leave it at that... except to say that if anyone wanted to create Heaven on Earth, the very best approach I can imagine would be energetically to advance the diametrical antithesis of every single policy advocated and practiced by the demons who possessed us from 2001-2008.

It is in that context, even giving due deference to the hoary dictum that "politics is the art of the possible," and due acknowledgment to the virtual certainty that Obama would not now be our president had he not always profoundly understood that dictum, and even allowing for the ineluctable exigencies of some measure of pragmatism, I have to say that I am profoundly disappointed by Obama's ostensibly pragmatism- and bipartisanship-motivated execution of what looks like Voldebush redux in any number of domains. Most particularly, though, in his positions on Iraq and on the DOMA.

As for B&C's Excellent Adventure in insanely misdirected war-mongering, there is no excuse for one more American to die in that hideous debacle (nor, I readily concede, for one more Iraqi to die, but the latter is probably entirely beyond our control, even in principle, and the former is not). And as for DOMA, it's an act that is sick, hateful and exists for no other purpose than to make millions of Americans suffer, so that others can indulge their Schadenfreude. The first responsibility of an American president is to preserve and protect (and improve) American lives, liberty and happiness. Both of the aforementioned policy positions, looking almost indistinguishable (even if perhaps not in motivation) from those of the Voldebushies, flagrantly violate this fundamental geas.

And then there's the little matter of healthcare. Well, Obama's concern that some should actually exist is an immeasurable improvement over the "die and decrease the surplus population" ukase directed at all non-plutocrats by the preceding administration, but other than that, the best that can be said is that it's woefully insufficient. There is no moral excuse, no humane excuse, no constitutional excuse -- and since this blog has a theological bent, no Christian excuse -- for us not to have a single payer system as of yesterday. People are dying because we don't. That doesn't sound to me much like a "right to life" in the legitimate and original meaning of those words as enunciated by Jefferson, let alone "liberty" (to choose under which bridge to die?), or the "pursuit of happiness."

Don't get me wrong. I admire Obama almost beyond expression, and I think we are blessed by God to have such a person as a replacement for Voldebush. And he's caught in a web of cataclysms not of his own making. But, for the taste of this one Christian, at least, thinking of the Sermon on the Mount, he is simply not doing enough, and not doing enough of the right things, and none of it fast enough. Now, I well know that, in the cosmic scheme of things, the President of the United States is probably about the 5,000th most powerful person in the country, if even that, but he does have the nominal office, and he does have the bully pulpit, and he does have the obligation to make good on his promises. Now.

Babbling Brooks

Just finished reading the latest pathogenic fulminations of David Brooks, the famed pseudo-liberal (pseudo-moderate, and pseudo-human) "Master of the Editorial Universe," who is, for reasons known only to the Satanic monsters at whose pleasure he serves, allowed and encouraged to vomit forth his sick, atrabilious sarcasm on the opinion page of the NYT with regularity sufficient to sicken half the hemisphere. Brooks seethes in indignation on behalf of the most wretched and oppressed people on all the Earth: multibillionnaire CEO's -- comparing their plight to that of France under Nazi Germany, or to the victims of Stalinist pogroms. Imagine the gall of President Obama, seeking to induce them to part with a few pennies to help 270 million acutely suffering Americans who *don't* own fleets of 200-foot yachts. What could such pathetic peons, oblivious to their feudal obligations to "die and decrease the surplus population," possibly be worth? Not so much as the fingernail clipping of a corporate CEO. It is to them (the afflicted super-rich) that Brooks' non-existent heart goes out. Oh, for their potentially lost toenail clippings! The horror of it! The inhumanity! Half of America dying for want of health care is nothing by contrast with their grievous suffering, brought on via draconian methods (political persuasion) that Brooks compares unfavorably to waterboarding.

The sick, indefatigable snottiness of his snark-ridden prose (rivalling the mucosal production of all the sinuses on earth) is almost impossible to read without experiencing apoplexy followed by projectile regurgitation. So excuse my absence. (I have to go and empty my stomach.) Back soon with another post.

On Denial

"L'hôpital existe à Hiroshima. Comment aurais-je pu éviter de le voir?"

Facebook...

always presents one with a box preceded by a seriously annoying prompt:

What's on your mind?

There are so many things wrong with this question, existentially, ontologically, epistemologically, and neurochemically, that even to proclaim the obvious answer that it has to be cerebrospinal fluid combined with vague and traumatic memories of cereal commercials from early childhood, and possibly a diversity of amyloid plaques, fails tragically to divert attention from my inability to enumerate them.

Citations

Followers of this blog, of whom I hope and expect there are none, or at least none perturbed or offended, will have observed that I have interests both in reason and in faith, and have tended to precess between the two, believing neither to conflict with, nor to preclude, the other. What I write, I write to myself, and sometimes as a "clamo ad te" to God. Per Eliot's version of the tempter's comment to Thomas Becket: "That is why I tell you. Your thoughts have more power than kings to compel you."

And it's perhaps why I tell myself the same thing in a variety of languages, from those of theology and philosophy, to that of predicate logic. And the thing I tell myself is that I must embrace my moral compass and reject and repudiate evil, and that I have to believe.

In times that seem hopeless, perhaps even eschatological, that is the final message, though, howsoever and in whatever idiom articulated and internalized. Trust God, see all, nor be afraid.

Today, I'm thinking of Matthew 8:16-17.

Epigoni - Remarks on Teaching

For the null set of you -- let's say, for the sake of solipsistic verisimilitude, I -- who've been awaiting my further cogitations on the matter of logical abduction, I promise not to emulate Stephen King in the matter of The Dark Tower, but "l'explication juste" has been a bit slow in coming to my intermittent consciousness, so I thought, in the interim, I'd return to the subject of education, and the lack thereof to be had in the continental United States, which does relate, and not only tenuously, to the previous uncompleted opus. [Actually, I've just completed it, and backdated it a bit just to have the five parts of the post displayed in sequence, uninterrupted.]

So, as an erstwhile (tenured) academic (maybe more than I want to admit, but true), here's my take:

The quality of minds (like that of mercy) matters. I believe that we in academe are eating our seed corn, making new generations that are less good reproductions of our own, as though agonizingly diffracted, not through a glass darkly, but through a series of 17 mechanically defective Xerox machines with empty toner cartridges, set at the lowest possible resolution. (Has anyone not noticed that each generation is less articulate, less possessed of the breadth of erudition that used to be the hallmark of a liberally-educated human being?) And the reason has to do with the progressive, ineluctable devaluation of teaching and the stigmatisation of teachers. I think it does matter to make the next generation educated, and if the major universities have adopted the stance that only research is of value, and if this attitude migrates down (as it has) into what originally were teaching colleges, then truly, no venue is left from which a generation will come that has been taught effectively, and that has a model to emulate of what being a professor and a mentor ought to be about, other than writing a steady stream of grant applications.

It is possible to do research without having absorbed the fundamental principles of one's own discipline -- indeed, we're demanding it of our students, because what used to be required for tenure at major universities is now the minimum prerequisite for admission to their graduate programs. It is possible to do research without knowing anything beyond one's own discipline, without being able to lecture eloquently (or even intelligibly), without knowing Hamlet from omelets, without walking away from Omelas. It is possible, and it's become our consuming obsession; it's become the only currency in which it's possible to transact academic business.

When an activity goes unrewarded, or worse, is seen to be a manifestation of intellectual deficiency detrimental to the health and fame of the institution that supports that activity, you can be sure that people will stop spending time on it. Such is the status in the colleges and universities of this country of effective teaching. Woe betide the perpetrator, who has as much chance of continued employment as a starving person has of being fed at a Republican convention.

Abduction - Part V (Final)

I'll make this ultra-brief.

1) Believe what you can observe. Do not deny the evidence of your own senses. It's a bad evolutionary strategy, and also makes you vulnerable to deception. And it has negative consequences for your fellow human beings.

2) If you are told something that contradicts the evidence of your senses, then posit that you have been told a falsehood. Look for an explanation (an antecedent) which would explain why you are being told this particular falsehood. Lawyers and police detectives like to ask the question, "cui bono?" (Who benefits from your believing this deception? And how do they benefit?) That's one good approach. Or if there isn't a specific intent to deceive, then why is the source of this misinformation conveying it to you. Does the source believe it? Why? Rationalization of something it's personally or institutionally advantageous to believe? Psychological comfort?

3) Unless you are genuinely schizophrenic, or in some other way pathologically delusional, the evidence of your senses is your best, most direct guide to the reality around you. If you're not going to believe in the reality of what you can see, then why on earth would you believe in the second-order reality represented to you by someone else?

Abduction - Part IV

The question with which I concluded my last post was why. Why do people believe manifest nonsense, utter falsehoods that flagrantly violate the evidence of their own senses? That can't, surely, be the result of sociobiology. It's hard to see the evolutionary value in denying that there's a sabertooth tiger at the door of your cave, because you've been told by Ugh, the troglodytic village elder, that there's no such thing as tigers, or that if you pay him a fee for a magical amulet, the tiger will simply go away. Cavepeople who believed that tended not to live long enough to pass on their genes.

The reason is that we've all been conditioned, deliberately, systematically, consciously and unconsciously, by the ambient belief structure of our culture, by the formal and informal "educational" systems thereof, and even more by the ubiquitous delivery of false and perniciously deceptive messages by our various and proliferating media, 24/7.

If it hadn't been sufficiently obvious to begin with, I would have arrived at this conclusion by abduction: in this case, a kind of meta-abduction because it yields a conclusion about people's methods of arriving at conclusions: specifically, that they've been inculcated with the propensity to rely on "received truths," and discouraged from resorting to analytical thought. And also discouraged, when those "received truths" contradict the evidence of their own senses, from believing in what they can observe. This is a plausible and probable antecedent for the observable consequent circumstance that people believe nonsensical untruths which a) do them harm, and b) advantage the powerful interests that incessantly promulgate those untruths.

Abduction - Part III

OK. This is really simple, so the build-up may seem to have been gratuitous, but bear with me.

It may seem to you (and it will, if you're sane and conscious) that the world does not make sense. The people in charge (and it's part of the American mythos that achieving power is *good*, and is something that is only managed by *good* people) take actions of which the perfectly foreseeable outcome is that hundreds of millions of less powerful people will suffer hideously. And they tell you that those actions are good and right, and that they will have completely different outcomes from the ones that any child could anticipate. Giving untold billions of dollars to rich people who don't need them will help you and your starving neighbor. Paying hundreds of billions to fight a pointless and destructive war will help you much more than spending ten or twenty billion to give everybody free health care. After all, you don't want to see your starving neighbor's child saved from death, because it's obviously his fault that he's not rich and powerful. (If he were truly *good*, then of course, he would be. If you have a job and he doesn't, then it is obviously because you are a better person. If she's sick and you're not, then likewise.)

There is a word for these ideas. They're nuts. (They're also evil, but let's confine ourselves for the moment to declaring their manifest insanity.) So why does anyone believe them? Why do so many people believe such a broad array of insane and destructive things that aren't true, and then become confused when the proverbial fecal matter hits the fan (as in New Orleans, or as in Iraq, or as in a global economic meltdown)?

[And don't misunderstand me about "people in charge." I do know that our current president is admirable and an immeasurably better person than recently-retired Caligula. But he (Obama) is not the one in charge.]

...incomplete, much more to come. I'll get back to abduction, and how it can help you, in just a moment.

Abduction - Part II

I've casually bandied about for your delectation (or annoyance and revulsion if you're averse to recondite lexemes, which aren't ever indispensable or even particularly helpful, except for establishing your bona fides among academicians :)), so I should probably explain them, though a full exposition of "Abduction" could certainly be managed without the distraction.

If you know that the truth of A will guarantee the truth of B, then in logic we generally say, more concisely, "A implies B," which is also written, "A-->B," which latter fact you can now immediately forget. (Take my word. Sherlock Holmes even advises it.) As an example, take "if it rains, the ground gets wet." Raining is A. Wet ground is B. If you know A is true, you can pretty much take B for granted. A implies B. Raining implies wetness. Here, we call A (raining) the "antecedent," and B (wetness of the ground) the "consequent." This is an implication that is almost always true. Sure, someone could have covered the whole landscape with a tarp, but we go with the odds. (There is a saying among physicians oft cited in connection with diagnostic methodology: "if you hear hoofbeats, do not first think of zebras.") We embrace the likeliest or the simplest explanations or implications that seem to pertain. (This principle, by the way, has also a name. It's called, "Occam's Razor," after Sir William of Occam, about whom you want to know, believe me, nothing else.) So if you come along and tell me that it's raining, I'm going to assume the consequent is now true and that the ground is wet. Actually, this is *deductive* (not "abductive") reasoning, of the specific variety known as "modus ponens." Forget that, too.

Now, we could also work this backwards, though our conclusions would lose the imprimatur of logically guaranteed truth. For example, you could tell me you've noticed that the ground is wet, and knowing that one possible (and probably the simplest) explanation (choice of implications) for this is that rain is occurring, I might jump to that conclusion. And it wouldn't be a bad jump. Not logically guaranteed (maybe a pack of wild dogs has decided to anoint the sidewalk), but very, very likely. If, however, I lived in a world of delusion in which I didn't believe in the existence of rain (or of global warming, perhaps), or if I somehow believed that rain always evaporated before it hit the ground, then I'd never hit on the right explanation providing me with the right "antecedent." I'd never guess "rain," and I'd come up with some screwy explanation such as that the sidewalk was crying.

That's what keeps happening to us. As Paul said, "video meliora" (we see what's right, the evidence in front of our noses), but we just can't believe the truth (it would conflict with one of the BIG LIES), so we arrive at the wrong conclusion.

Icebergs are melting everywhere, glaciers are disappearing, Greenland is starting to look like Palm Springs. If we weren't forbidden to reach out for the simple explanation (if there's global warming, the ice sheets will melt, and they're melting, so there *is* global warming because of old William of Occam), we'd get all alarmed and might even have listened to what every climatologist on the planet who wasn't a paid whore had been screaming about for at least a decade. This is abduction, but not, for our purposes, the most important application, though it might be nice to prevent NYC, Los Angeles and Tokyo from submerging under 100 feet of water.

Next: where it really matters.

Abduction - Prolegomenon

No, I don't mean kidnapping (by grey neotenous aliens with a penchant for wasting time on hopelessly backward planets, or of children who tragically end up on milk cartons, or of the passengers and crew of freighters by pirates off the coast of Somalia). "Abduction" is a term used in logic for reasoning backward from the consequent to the antecedent, say, by contrast with the more popularly understood spectator sport of "deduction," wherein you know that A implies B, and that furthermore, A is true, so you triumphantly proclaim "B" (but not *too* B), and everyone goes home happy, except the people who are annoyed by logic generally, which is practically everyone.

Abduction, though, is important, because I've found that, in a world in which you can almost assume a priori that anything you're told officially is an egregious lie, it's the one effective workhorse of a thinking tool that lets you figure out what the <fill in bad place, here> is actually going on. (Not that it ever proves useful to know, if you, like I, happen not to be one of the self-designated "masters of the universe" who want to replace God in that capacity, and since God has accorded them free will, and something (genetics, apparently, or childhood abuse) has deprived them of empathy and filled the vacuum with Schadenfreude, they do pretty much manage to run the show temporally, and knowing won't help you a bit. "Talk to the hand" is yesterday's popular, all-purpose obnoxious expression, but here, it's more a matter of: talk into the barrel of a gigantic rocket launcher; see what good it does you.)

Still, for those of you still with me (the null set cohort who bother to read these posts), it's still a remarkably interesting kind of reasoning to be able to do, and the methodology, together with some conclusions, will be the subject of the next post.

Desiderata

I've been reflecting on the intrinsic hopelessness of influencing the world. The only people who can change the world are the ones with immense wealth and power, and even those people are constrained by the strings attached to the acquisition or inheritance of power (assuming it's not renounced) -- and those strings include the willingness to accept marching orders from any predator higher up in the food chain, or equivalently, to relinquish the moral autonomy that is the foundation of what I believe most people mean when they speak of having a soul. (Or maybe it's just what I mean. I incline to the Quaker view that what is within us of God, and to me the strongest evidence of the existence of God, is our moral compass, and it is this, when no other directive from the Deity appears to be "incoming," to which I think we are bidden at all times to pay heed. I do think, by way of a sidebar within the parenthetical, that God sometimes speaks to us more directly, and I will admit that this is because it happened to me once, in a way that was unambiguous and could be attributed to no other cause.) Anyway, the upshot of these beliefs, and the set of commandments supplementary and perhaps superordinate to the ones most of us who belong to the Judeo-Christian tradition (and many other people of good faith) embrace, are the following. Maybe, if I were Jefferson, I would characterize them as moral "truths [to be held] self-evident." I consider them moral imperatives, and will on no account violate them, not at cost of my life.

So, as it turns out "desiderata" was probably the wrong title for this post. "Commandments" is already taken, and has a specific referent within the Judeo-Christian traditions. "What must remain inviolate" is a bit convoluted and also prolix. So I'm going to call these:

IMPERATIVES

1) Make no Faustian bargains. Never trade your soul (or your moral autonomy, or your faith, or any element, howsoever small, of your covenant with God) for power, for wealth, for belonging or protection or "connectedness" or even your life.
2) DO NO HARM to other humans. (the Hippocratic provision, which I think should apply to a broader spectrum of humanity, specifically to all of it, than just to physicians) I know also that none of us is omniscient, and none of us can foresee all the outcomes (such as those alluded to in chaos theory whereby the flapping of butterfly wings precipitates a tsunami 12,000 miles away) of any one our acts. Or the case I'll borrow from Douglas Adams, in which the incidental utterance of a completely innocuous phrase by an unknowing speaker travels through a randomly-generated mini-wormhole and thereby causes a thousand-year war on the other side of the galaxy. If we cannot plausibly foresee, if no reasonable person could be expected to foresee, that eating a salad on a given day would cause someone else to be hurt 30 years later (or 30 seconds later), then there's no moral foul. Maybe there would be for an omniscient being, but there's only one of those, and He wouldn't commit a moral transgression. Anyway, this clause naturally and necessarily exempts all such cases, but focuses on acts that have injurious outcomes to other humans of high probability that can reasonably be anticipated by the doer. Those are the ones herewith prohibited.
3) Never seek power.
4) Never take orders, or join a group that requires you to relinquish your moral autonomy. In general, never join any group other than the one to which you already belong -- the human race. Never seek to subdivide it. No other person is worth less than you are in the eyes of God, either intrinsically, or by dint of belonging to or having a different appearance, intelligence, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, genetic provenience, socioeconomic status... or religion (unless it's satanism, which would actively and compulsively reject all of these moral desiderata, in any case).
5) Never take up a weapon, no matter what pretext you're given. You may be assured that someone else will point it for you, to the detriment of another human, and that the outcome will violate not only God's will, but, with overwhelming probability, your own moral values. (This is not meant as a reference to rank-and-file members of the armed forces, who are mostly people of good intentions who sincerely believe that they are acting to protect their families and their country. I think they have been atrociously abused by the system (by all the systems), but I do not doubt that most of them act out of a) genuine personal conviction and/or b) perceived economic necessity. Obviously, I think everyone, soldiers included, should obey their moral compasses, but nor do I regret the liberation of Dachau, which obviously involved weapons. It's an evil world, and an impossible moral Gordian Knot. I do, however, universally condemn the taking up of arms in secret, for unofficial, undeclared and hidden and/or private agendas. I do NOT mean to heap opprobrium on anyone already trapped in a hell not of his or her own making.)
6) Love God by doing what you can to help others.

I think that pretty much captures my moral values. Perhaps #6 should be #1, but I think any violation of one of the first five deprives one of the ability (and also, usually, the willingness) aggressively to pursue the very last.

Luke 23:24

I've been having what the galactic champion in "litotes in appallingly bad taste"* might call a bad week (month, year). But the last few days, especially -- though I've also encountered some random acts of unaccountable kindness, which my trauma-impaired state of mind has prevented me from reacting to in an optimally appreciative way. That same state of mind (or mental affliction) has had me making decisions reminiscent of one of those experiences in which you're attempting to navigate an unfamiliar city, and every turn seems to be the wrong one. (Or one of those experiments in which you give a hallucinogen to a rat, and then put it into a maze to rival the labyrinth of the Minotaur. I've never, for the record, taken any form of hallucinogen, and I hope I'm no closer to the order rodentia than most of my fellow humans -- and hope also that compassion for animals, if not for humans, has prevailed to put a stop to those abominable testimonials to Skinner -- but it does have that laboratory feel to it.)

There seem to be anima (plural of "animus;" not spirits from a Hayazaki movie) everywhere. I suppose nearly everyone on this unspeakable and incommunicable plane is frustrated, angry and afraid, and for very understandable reasons. "Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner," according to Sartre, so that may have to be the final word -- though I'd rather have had one from a Christian theologian than the inventor of existentialism. A good one direct from scripture is the title of this post, and it couldn't come from a better source.

My last post was a "clamo ad te" in the form of a book report, and a cry of frustration I quickly opted to delete, though the author of the book was quite gracious about it. This post is an expression of exhaustion and Weltschmerz, more than any personal anguish. Anguish doesn't seem to do any good. One has to leave it in the hands of the Ultimate Decider (not George Bush). And for me, anyway, Robert Burns is a more appealing non-scriptural literary source than the author of "les Jeux sont Faits." The last line of one of Burns' more famous products was simply: "Youth shows but half; trust God, see all, nor be afraid."

* Zaphod Beeblebrox, possibly; he seems like a plausible candidate

Book Report Cancelled

I recently posted my reactions to a book I've been reading that, rather than affording me the solace I suppose I was looking for, had the effect (unintended, I'm sure, by the author) of exacerbating my frustration and distress. On reflection, I think it was ok to say this, but not ok (nor consistent with my Christian principles) to identify or criticize the book or the author in question (of whom I did say that I felt "admiration for the author's almost unparalleled ecumenicism, spirit of tolerance, and authenticity of spiritual introspection and exploration"). So I'm excising my earlier post, apologizing to the author, though I doubt that he (or anyone) has seen it or could care less, and resolving not to publish further posts that make specific references to persons (in contradistinction to philosophical positions), even ones in the public view, unless those persons have specifically solicited my opinion (also, given the obscurity of this blog), a cosmically unlikely event).

Recommended Readings

D.A.V.E. of Work in Digress was kind enough recently to commend this blog to his readers, so let me hasten to reciprocate. What really distinguishes D.A.V.E.'s site from the multitude of other journals and cris de borborygme in the cybernetic darkling plain, apart from wit and entertainment value, is his phenomenal verbal erudition. This is prose that's fun to read, fraught with recondite lexemes, and hypoallergenic of diction, a balm to the sensibilities of those of us (fans, e.g., of the works of Lynne Truss) unreasonably annoyed by the ubiquitousness elsewhere in the logosphere of grating and disharmonic solecisms.

Two other blogs I follow attentively, likewise characterized by conspicuous erudition and superlative wordcraft, are:

Ikaryos: An unsparing and exquisitely honest and articulate (and sometimes ineffably poetic) expression of the author's internal theological struggles: angst interspersed with serious insights and occasional epiphanies.

Journeyman Philosopher: This blogger, though relentlessly modest, has a better and broader command of a range of abstruse scientific and metamathematical issues than most of the professional philosophers I've had occasion to traffic with in the hallowed graves of academe (pace Richard Mitchell). Fascinating reading, and a tenaciously rational author.

Eternal Questions

1) Où sont les neiges d'antan?

In the rain gauge, fool! Why do you ask?

2) What goes on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three in the evening?

A silly, mutant ninja leg-changer.

3) Do you know the way to Sand José?

Why? Does José need sanding, particularly?

4) Why-o, why-o, why-o, did I ever leave Ohio?

I didn't actually, since I've never lived there, but who in his right mind wouldn't?

5) Do you know the muffin man who lives on Drury Lane?

Yes. Stay away! He is seventeen days past expiration, and very green and smelly. Might be a good antibiotic, though.

6) Once again, where does it rain?

Anywhere there are upper-atmospheric particulates combined with a clash of fronts of radically different thermal characteristics. Forget that crap about "plains."

7) Why is the sky blue?

The fourth-power frequency dependence of Rayleigh scattering. Duh. (Also, it is nice and calming.)

8) Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing?

Biological decomposition accounts for a lot. And then there are all those bands of marauding florists.

9) What do you get if you multiply six times seven?

Cooties.

10) Wer, wenn ich schriee, hoerte mich denn, aus des Engel Ordnungen?

The ones without hearing aids. Get a life, Rilke.

These answers to vacuous questions have been brought to you by the same folks who brought you global economic meltdown. We'll have fun, fun, fun, till your daddy takes the T-bill away!

Despair and Prayer

There are upwards of seven billion humans on this planet (maybe more; that was only the last time I looked, which may have been 5 years ago). and most of them are in torment of one sort or another. Because of my own despair, because of the so-inescapable fulminating presence of evil (of human agency, ultimately, even if inspired by a greater Evil; we *do* still have "free will"), everywhere we look, I do not begin to imagine that my own "patience" (in Eliot's sense, or that of Job) is unique or even particularly important, except in my universe. So is it wrong for me to vex the issue of evil, to issue these impulsive "clamo(s) ad te," when all of humanity turns on the wheel? I haven't received any clear answer, at least not in my own mind, so perhaps I am just not praying in the right manner. Obviously, what I want is to see suffering obliterated for *everyone*, and by some less draconian expedient than the end of the world. Hardly a unique sentiment, for all of its endlessly manifest futility, and so *that* prayer must go up daily from billions of souls, and my contribution, except insofar as it touches my own condition, says absolutely nothing new to God. I do not know any other anodyne, though, or any other answer at all, but to pray, and I do know that there's one prayer that I have been told by an Unimpeachable Source *is* a right one.

Our Father, who art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy Name.
Thy kingdom come,
Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us.
Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory,
for ever and ever.
Amen.

And I think I'll stop talking about evil. That it's ubiquitous has probably escaped absolutely no one but the sociopaths who cannot call it by its true name, so why bother? Perhaps, to acknowledge the Beast is only to feed it. Confusing, though, since I know it hates the Light. But I am certainly without temporal power, and do not seek it, so invocations from me have no resonance except in the ears of God. Who can hear me without my resorting to a blog post.

Hell

Whose hell this is, I do not know;
It's not of God, nor of Godot.
I had no choice in stopping here,
To watch the works of Mammon grow.
Mephitic odors, fetid, damp,
Suffuse this desecration camp.
Between those stricken with despair,
In darkness, reft of any lamp.

The hell is depthless, darkness hedged,
And owned by those to Satan pledged.
And there's no solace to be dredged,
From this, our haven, mis-alleged.

Pace Frost (Robert, not the one wreaking havoc in this unspeakable and incommunicable temporal realm)

------

I believe there is a God. I believe He created the world. I believe that, for whatever reason, He has allowed Evil Incarnate to reign in this temporal realm. I cannot understand why, and I do not believe I have the right to question His choice, any more than did Job. But that is how I see it. For the record, I'd give up "free will" -- or at least the freedom to harm others -- in a nanosecond, if it would disempower the sociopaths who make all our lives hell. It seems to me an insufficiently gratifying form of compensation. I, for one, have no desire to exercise the option to trample and torture other humans in a demented quest for wealth and power, or just for the "fun" of it. People who do have that desire tend to become CEO's or talk radio hosts.Why not simply deprive us of the ability to harm one another? We can't hurt or help God, so the only way we can demonstrate our love of the Creator is to love one another. Depriving us of the options afforded by sociopathic Schadenfreude (which relatively few of us exercise, in any case) would not deprive us of the ability to love one another, or to love Him (which, for the record, I do). But that's just human reasoning. And I'm just a human, who can't get the first line of Psalm 22 out of his head.

God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten son... I am sure He loves us. I am sure satan is not more powerful, in the cosmic scheme of things. Jesus exhorted us to love one another, and was crucified for His efforts. What is wrong, here? I am prostrate, unable to see the sense in empowering the wicked and painting targets on the innocent. Jesus, I know you're listening. This *is* by way of a prayer. For understanding, if nothing else.

del sentimiento trágico de la vida desbarajustada

Unamuno, I was taught in an elementary Spanish class some time in the neo-paleolithic, es único (not because he is, though the proposition is fairly defensible), but because of the assonance-or-whatever of the juxtaposition, which was supposed to make the phrase stick in your head (which it did -- in my cabeza, at least -- so that I ended up reading Del Sentimiento Trágico de la Vida and was gobsmacked by Unamuno's phenomenal erudition, but what now stays with me is just the title, which resonates ever more painfully as the years go by). Unamuno it was, too, I think, who wrote, San Manuel Bueno, Martirio, the singular theological point of which, if it doesn't escape me, is that faith and the comfort it comports can sometimes by imparted to others even by a soul to whom it is denied by his innate, relentless, unforgiving rationalism (that can even be his geas): somewhat on an analogy with Moses' success in leading his people to the promised land, only to be denied that sight in his own life. This doesn't actually correspond to mypersonal experience, since though an inveterate rationalist, I'm also a person of faith, but the tragedy of it did always strike me, irony being, I suppose, of all tragedies, the most unendurable.

Que sais-je?

Aucune idée. Faut éviter les chauves-souris dans le beffroi. (Autant que l'araignée, vraisemblablement Aragog, dans le plafond.)

Evil - Depthless, Immitigable and Ineradicable

And human. Resident, that is to say, in humans, and note the plural. 5% of us, sociologists (viz. Martha Stout) seem by consensus unduly to upperbound the prevalence of the coeurs du mal, are just unadulterated sociopaths, and we -- the mostly well-intentioned though afflicted, the gens moyennes affligées, the ones for whom Eliot laments the "strain on the brain of the small folk" -- might, just might muster the spiritual and the temporal strength to overcome, or at least to resist, since victory in the temporal realm for aught but the myrmidons of Satan appears somehow to have been forbidden... were it not for the one devastating and insuperable impediment of the lack of countervailing moral absoluteness on our side. Those of us not born (or nurtured) to persecute the innocent, ravage the planet, or emulate, as best we can, Snidely Whiplash the Plutocrat in reverent genuflection to the Antichrist, insatiable, in principle, while there's yet a widow left not tied to the railroad tracks. By which, I mean, there's a spectrum. Yes, most of us aren't sociopaths, but we're also not perfect and immaculate in an innocuousness symmetrically to oppose the moral toxicity of the sociopaths, who are, to all appearances, unadulterated, untrammeled and unvitiated in their passionate malignance (impossible not to think of Yeat's contrast of feeble conviction overborne by passionate intensity). So, are we doomed? Well, duh. Yes. At least, temporally. The problem is that, among the ones not explicitly pledged to evil (which includes not only the 5%, but their oath-respecting minions), mere weakness is enough. All that is required for evil to triumph -- well, practically nothing is required, because it's been demonstrated amply that good men and women, among whom I'd include at least the ones not oath-bound to Evil, will do just exactly "nothing" in nearly every single case. Out of fear, out of despair, out of oppression, out of what they may just rationalize (and correctly, from a temporal standpoint) as pragmatism. And those are most of the best among us. The Mother Teresas, the ones who'll stand in front of tanks in Tianenman Square, can be counted on the fingers of -- who knows? -- a few thousand hands? Or the feet of one millipede? Make no mistake. This isn't an unequal struggle or an uneven playing field. This is Hell. And it's been engineered to be this way by the very worst among us for centuries, for millennia, for as long as there've been the two facilitating elements.

Groups and Secrecy

Most singleton humans (the non-sociopathic ones) will do, for the most part -- well, the thing enjoined by the Hippocratic Oath -- no harm to others. The problem arises when they become members of groups, since those who seek to moderate the mob mentality of groups, the power-seekers, ipso facto the sociopaths, will overbear their better instincts, their moral compass, their better reason. Or, for want of a shorter word, their humanity, a thing that can seem to endure only in the smallest of gatherings of humans -- maybe, one is moved to think, those of our ancestors who huddled in caves and had too much to worry about fending off natural predators to kowtow to the ones who'd want to enslave them a few tens of thousands of years later for the useful purpose of constructing Big Stone Tombs. Then and today. the sociopaths band together with their minions, and their works grow in the fertilizer of secrecy. For Power.

And it's never enough. Caligula's motto: oderint dum metuant. Not sufficient that I (the sociopath) succeed, howsoever ueber-outrageously. Everyone else must suffer. We have a world run on an engine of Schadenfreude, a sort of universal Catherine's Wheel. An engine, I guess, maintained by the Morlocks, still hiding from the light.

Not that I'm complaining. It's just the way things are.

I have to assume (since most of us *do* have moral compasses), that they came from somewhere (Someone), and that the temporal battle isn't the real battle. And that the temporal (dominated by the Chthulu-worshipers) really doesn't matter in the spiritual frame. I don't disagree with Spinoza. The loss of any human life is the loss of a universe, and loss immune to quantification, let alone minimization in some cosmic speculum. It's just that each of us is something more than this, something more invulnerable to temporal immolation, something more immutable in the meaning of this 14-billion-year-old universe. And the sociopaths are chaff.

And "therefore..."

I hope it's some consolation. We Eloi so desperately need it.

Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Apparently everybody, albeit in some kind of circular epistemological firing squad. Can even Dekker's Algorithm, or perhaps the precative invocation of mutual exclusion, save us from the gridlock? Stay tuned. Or don't. If you don't bother to watch, perhaps the cat will come out of the box,

Predicates and Precatives

"The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason." I do not aspire to know (which would be wrongly) why God has chosen to make this so difficult, nor do I ask to be given any more humanly-decipherable answer than was vouchsafed Job. I am human, and I wasn't there, either, nor am I, perhaps, so honest and upright as he to whom no answer but this could ever be afforded, though I try.

God, since understanding is beyond me - I am ill-adept at apprehending meanings not reducible to predicate logic, forever inconsistent or inconsolably incomplete - but that is the me you chose to make - grant me peace. And the persistence of love. Oh...and deliver me from evil. Amen.

Eschatopredicatelogic and Hoffnungsloesigkeit

For all X, Hopeless(X). Except that the aforementioned is inadmissable on grounds of 2 Corinthians 4:7-12; 16-18 (NIV). What is impossible is *necessary*. And *true*, in the light of God. Why does it always feel so not-quite-graspable, so unendingly antelucan, though?

"Wer, wenn ich schriee...?"

Well, I know Wer, but how about Venn? A diagram would always be helpful. Or an angel. One that wasn't "schrecklich." Where *did* Rilke get that idea? I'm not in a Bavarian Castle, nor does the idea much appeal, even in the game of Anywhere But Here. Maybe you had to be there. Night -- and there's night, when the ice weasels come -- really drains our spiritual strength. Fiat lux. Hear that, sun?

Is 'heterologous' heterologous? Goedel and Turing and Epimenides, oh my!

This blog post is fallacious.

Suppose 93179747 were prime, and somehow managed to encode the logical proposition, "statement 93179747 is false." Imagine a flowchart which uses a putative solution to the halting problem to loop indefinitely on presentation of any program the logic of which would cause *it* to terminate naturally, and within a predictable interval -- and conversely. Imagine all the lonely people, living lives of peace. Or lies of Epimenides. Imagine this paragraph could be construed to have semantic content, and not to be ill-formed.

The first statement of this entry post is semantically ill-formed. Or not.

This statement is not the last, but it should be.

Colleges in Trouble

For years innumerable (and students innumerate — the latter, not our fault), we have been purveying an educational product that made no sense (and I fought the mythos, but the insanity was invincible). OF COURSE, students will migrate to community colleges, now that the luxury no longer can be afforded of courting economic Armageddon for the sake of exposure to pedagogy delivered by professors who are actively punished for each second benightedly devoted to serving their students well, rather than publishing as incessantly as if possessed by the injunction from Thessalonians about when to pray. And where, I’d like to know, have those prodigious sums been going, the tuition moneys that have been escalating at rates that can only be described with exponential expressions? I’ll tell you one place they haven’t been going. Into the pockets of the academicians who do the actual teaching, as virtually any retired professor who’s actually labored in the trenches and experienced the system of incentives will tell you. More sense would accrue from a policy of hiring professional football players on the basis of their ability to play chess than now emerges from the ideology of hiring and tenuring only teachers to whom teaching is anathema, and devotion thereto to the detriment of grant-grubbing an immitigable disgrace. I will profoundly grieve the loss of any institution and any teacher who falls to the current economic climate, but my God, what *have* we been doing?

Schrödinger's Feline Language

Please do not open box.

Better Forgotten

FFFF 0000 0000 BAR

well, not quite hexadecimal. BAR an exception for the 'R.'

The Great Forgotten Language

Still working on it. Have eliminated Eurish, Loglan and Klingon, but "Ash nazg durbatulûk," just to choose a synecdochic specimen at random, seems both too depressing and too annoyingly pharyngeal.

Riverrun past Orodruin, and I'm still looking. King Charles I is not a propitious source. His recommendations -- "Je parle espagnol a Dieu, italien aux femmes, français aux hommes et allemand a mon cheval." -- basically suck, inasmuch as all of these are memorable, and anyway, the blog is for humans (or maybe just a single solipsistic one), wherefore serais-je obligé d'écrire en français o italiano. Merde.

I guess it really is forgotten. Coming up: annoying posts in hexadecimal.