Evans, Bill



Love, n - A temporary insanity curable by marriage. Ambrose Bierce

El Dia de Los Guajolotes

""""[The Bald Eagle] is therefore by no means a proper Emblem for the brave and honest Cincinnati of America who have driven all the King birds from our Country.......For the Truth the Turkey is in Comparison a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America..."""

Ben Franklin referred to turkeys as the Bird of Courage and recommended that the wild turkey, instead of the eagle--perhaps a bit germanic and gyrfalcon-like for Father Ben-- be enshrined as the official American bird-symbol. Franklin also rightfully identified the turkey as a native of America, and not, as many settlers (even somewhat scientific ones) thought a type of old world peafowl--one may still note the etymological confusion in the spanish word for turkey, pavo, from latin for peafowl (also noted in french, d'inde, for poulet (chicken) of india)). The Aztecs and Mayans domesticated the wild turkey (various subspecies range across the new world), but the indigenous mexican "guajolote" from Aztec [Nauhuatl] huehxolotl (ethno-linguists translate that as big boy, more or less) obviously derives from neither the latinate "pavo" or "turkey" (turkey is mistaken etymology as well: anglos mistook the native American bird for a species of asian guinea fowl (which were from Turkey).

The conquistadores brought the birds back to España, domesticated them, and the domesticated guajolotes then were exported across Europe starting 1500 or so; the pilgrims brought the European turkeys to America, and cultivated them. The old taxonomists more or less screwed things up: the turkey, whether native to north America, or the domesticated central American variety was no peacock (though like peacocks, pheasants, grouse, and chicken, turkeys are part of the order Galliformes). The wild turkey of Western US, cousin of the central American guajolote--with glossy black feathers, some light markings, leaner and meaner than ordinary sort--bears little resemblance to the cultivated fat brown turkey executed by the millions for the thanksgiving feast. Salud!

Trial by Jury (Lysander Spooner)

"""But for their right to judge of the law, and the justice of the law, juries would be no protection to an accused person, even as to matters of fact; for, if the government can dictate to a jury any law whatever, in a criminal case, it can certainly dictate to them the laws of evidence. That is, it can dictate what evidence is admissible, and what inadmissible, and also what force or weight is to be given to the evidence admitted. And if the government can thus dictate to a jury the laws of evidence, it can not only make it necessary for them to convict on a partial exhibition of the evidence rightfully pertaining to the case, but it can even require them to convict on any evidence whatever that it pleases to offer them.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

That the rights and duties of jurors must necessarily be such as are here claimed for them, will be evident when it is considered what the trial by jury is, and what is its object. "The trial by jury," then, is a "trial by the country" - that is, by the people - as distinguished from a trial by the government.""""

Spooner correctly perceived the possible dangers of corrupt judges or prosecutors issuing mistaken or misleading instructions to a jury. Spooner's usually dismissed as a quack, or libertarian, if not "anarchist"--that is, if anyone considers him at all; yet Spooner should be praised for his leftist-Lockean distrust of the magistrates, and indeed of Federalism: Spooner's sort of the good libertarian, or authentic Jeffersonian, perhaps even slightly Jacobin-ish--without Jeff's own hypocrisies and shortsightedness. Spooner was not some proto-vegass libertarian, however, but opposed the robber barons, and financiers of his time (Spooner was also an abolitionist in principle--a sober rather than hysterical sort. And he detested Lincoln).


De Goostibus

Spooner's leftist populism has problems similar to those posed by Lockean rights as a whole--e.g., "the violence of majority faction", as Madison puts it in the Federalist papers (tho' it's unanimous rather majority rule in the case of a Jury--another proverbial bone of contention). He puts his trust in the people, rather than in the govt. or judiciary. There are obvious flaws with any ideology which relies upon Vox Populi, even at the level of a jury (or for that matter, believing that majority rule equals the summum bonum; what can be said about democracy, when a majority of Kalifornians voted in Ahhnuld the Dyslexic Millionaire?? Nada). For one, the peoples may not really be qualified to assess evidence, especially in this age of high-powered forensics technology and ballistics--not sheet kidding, you say, but then why do most still consider the Jury sacrosanct?/. That's not to say the DA's office, or Cop Shoppe are to be trusted either (as Spooner well knew). Most humans simply don't take the time to consider the inductive issues involved with assessing any sort of evidence, whether circumstantial (ie involving an inference) or direct, or in regards to testimony. That's lawyer business (really quite a simple type of business).

Unfortunately jury-men (and jury Gals) are not typically Aristotles, or AJ Ayers--I am quite sure Spooner was aware of that; his point seems to be that the possible wrongdoings committed by jury do lesser harm than wrongdoings by the State, or by judicial fiat, taken as a whole, or ceteris paribus as the Blacksteins put it . Jury-people are prone to being swayed by emotions, by grandstanding DA's, by a show of power--whether that of bailiff boys in their jackboots, and Judge Coolaputia in its black dress. And as any smarmy Teevee cop drama shows, courtrooms are often the most swingin' place in town. Most prosecutors are pals with the Judge, probably play golf out at Podunkville CC on weekends, their wifeys head out on shopping sprees to-getha. The defense attorneys on the other hand tend to be shabby hustlers (not all, but ...most). The accused are more or less extras...

Spooner, notwithstanding his slightly naive belief in the peoples, demonstrated the actual socio-historical situation of citizens facing the Law, the situation of no-man's land: an innocent defendant is subject to tyrannical prosecutors who have no problem with lying to win a case (the Govt. commits perjury when necessary as Spooner says), and also subject to the whims of jury-peoples who often merely react to the appearance of a "perp", and decide he is guilty (or conversely, might approve of the look of another defendant, and vote for his innocence, when he isn't.).Or they may just be good xtians, recall Romans 13, and follow the orders of the heroic Prosecutor-Hero in his expensive Suit, spewing his eloquent mendacity. So it goes.

your annual KAY BAILEY HUTCHINSON update.



Hottay of the Texass GOP.

Cherchez La Femme:

Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little. ~Samuel Johnson

Woman--God's second mistake. (Nietzsche).

Bride: A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her. Ambrose Bierce.

Dramatic art in her opinion is knowing how to fill a sweater. ~Bette Davis, about Jayne Mansfield

If women didn't exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning. ~Aristotle Onassis

The essence of life is the smile of round female bottoms, under the shadow of cosmic boredom. ~Guy de Maupassant Oo lala lalalalala lah


Don't wait for the good woman. She doesn't exist.CHARLES BUKOWSKI.


Heh heh. Doc Bukowski appears to have won

Charles Eliot: Contra-athletics

1906 or so (Charles Eliot, president of Harvard, was a cousin of TS Eliot, and other arrogant, bourgeois puritans yankee edu-crats of the Eliot family)

---CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Nov. 27. -- """"The athletic outlook at Harvard grows more ambiguous every day, and, with the exception of tennis and rowing, no one can definitely say what games will be allowed by the Overseers and corporation during the coming year. President Charles W. Eliot, since his recent declaration that the discontinuance of football would do the university no harm, made several objections to-day to basket ball, hockey, and even baseball. """"

----"During his tenure, Eliot opposed football and tried unsuccessfully to abolish the game at Harvard. In 1905, The New York Times reported that he called it "a fight whose strategy and ethics are those of war", that violation of rules cannot be prevented, that "the weaker man is considered the legitimate prey of the stronger" and that "no sport is wholesome in which ungenerous or mean acts which easily escape detection contribute to victory."

He also made public objections to baseball, basketball, and hockey. He was quoted as saying that Rowing and Tennis were the only clean sports.[1]

Eliot once said, "Well, this year I'm told the team did well because one pitcher had a fine curve ball. I understand that a curve ball is thrown with a deliberate attempt to deceive. Surely this is not an ability we should want to foster at Harvard."""

We might agree to include Charles Eliot in the Oppressor class (not to say boring, pedantic, protestant, etc), but Eliot was not completely mistaken in regards to athletics. Athletics might be conducive to health, to fostering team spirit, and to generating revenues for a college foundation; but the football team has little or nothing to do with promoting science, scholarship and intellectual endeavors--the raison d'etre of a college or university (or high school for that matter). Heisenbergs are needed; even Hegels might be needed. Hercules are not needed.

The issue of Sports also pertains to representation, and taxation issues. Citizens have no inherent obligation to fund sports at a public university (or high school for that matter). Many American taxpayers (or taxation-minded politicians) complain about funding the Arts, and consider the arts non-essential, yet Sports requires even fewer cognitive abilities than playing classical music does. Playing Beethoven competently demands a scholarship of a sort; pumping iron for football practice does not. And while the health aspects of Sport may have a certain value (tho' injuries quite common as well), students (and all citizens) can certainly exercise and be healthy and strong, without the need of college athletic departments. Ending tax funding for athletics, especially team sports, in public schools--and public universities-- would save California hundreds of millions of dollars.

Athletic departments across the USA are not overly concerned with health per se, however; they are concerned with promoting the business of Athletics, especially that of Ball (whether foot-, basket-, or base-). At both collegiate and professional level, Ball is Big Money, and Universities are all about Big Money, regardless of the few token gestures towards academia, or Beethoven.

Eliot's point on the militaristic aspects of football merits some reflection as well. We might enjoy an athletic battle to some extent, but it's a usually just a matter of brute force (though baseball at least requires quite a bit of skill and coordination). A decent chess match involves a great deal of strategy; an overweight, steroids-fueled thug running over a receiver on the football field doesn't. (to be continued....)

Mondnacht



Voonderbar!

Es war, als hätt' der Himmel
Die Erde still geküsst,
Dass sie im Blütenschimmer
Von ihm nun träumen müsst....

Ray Jennings, Innocent (Michael Blake, DA, guilty)

[From the Eastside trenches]

The murder of Ms. O’Keefe (in a Palmdale CA park and ride, 2/2000) obviously counts as a tragedy, yet no conclusive evidence exists which would convict Sergeant Ray Jennings of the murder. Jennings now is involved in his THIRD re-trial in Palmdale for 187; two LA juries failed to reach a guilty verdict. The vigilante attitude shown towards Jennings in the Valley Press and Daily News (and LA Times, at least initially) has hardly been equitable or indeed Constitutional; he was found Guilty by Journalists as soon as he appeared in the papers (probably because Ms O'Keefe's daddy, an aerospace engineer has plenty of pull with the locals, including Mayor Rex "Puerco" Parris). Jennings may have made some inconsistent statements or even failed a polygraph--most likely under duress--yet that does not prove anything, whatsoever.

No murder weapon was ever located, and NO gunshot residue was detected on Jennings' hands or clothing, and no DNA or fingerprints found which would link Jennings to the crime, as they say in Cop-show land. Any real detective or ballistic guy will tell you they ALWAYS get GSR on a perp's hands, or clothes after heavy shooting. Jennings was questioned probably within an hour of the shooting (9mm, 5 shots---that be gangsta-work, says Contingencies). He had no time to clean up with alcohol, or shower (which also would have been detected). Furthermore, it was Jennings' SECOND DAY AT WORK as a security guard, and he was shuttling cars to get to the park and ride. He's a family man, his second day at work, bonded, forbidden by law to carry a firearm,and his supervisor told him he was subject to inspection at all times (that included his vehicle).

“A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.” (Frost)

No one saw him with a gun and he insists he did not have one. It's nearly IMPOSSIBLE that he had a gun to start with, yet the DA Blake continues to make the ludicrous claim Jennings had a gun. It is a near certainty, that JENNINGS DID NOT HAVE A FIREARM. That also explains why a gun was not found, since he called in the shooting within 20 minutes or so (he did supposedly pass by Ms O'Keefe minutes after she was shot, as he should have. He may have dawdled. That does not show 187 at all.) Jennings did not have time to dispose of a gun; it's nearly certain the gun disappeared in the car with the person who killed Ms O'Keefe (and Ms O'Keefe also was dropped off by a friend. Did they search her car, or polygraph her??)

The lack of evidence which would establish that Jennings had a firearm provides sufficient reasons for acquittal, though Blake has managed to bring in Jennings' military record. Sgt. Jennings served in Iraq with distinction, and his CO and fellow soldiers say he was innocent, and very concerned with possible charges. Yet Blake the Crimefighter now wants to use Jennings' own marksmanship skills as evidence--nothin' but BS, like all of Blake's pseudo-arguments. Michael Blake's the one who should be on trial, facing obstruction of justice charges for insisting that Jennings did have a gun, when there is no evidence to establish that claim.



Though LA County residents have reason to be concerned about violent crime, crimefighters should never overlook the importance of the presumption of innocence clause. Obviously, that a person has been arrested does not imply that he has been found guilty of any charges, though reporters, including those of the Daily News, LA Times, and AV Press, often seem a bit unclear on this concept. Raymond Jennings’ arrest demonstrates this type of justice, media-style, which often verges on a violation of Due Process rights that all citizens—even those charged with serious felonies—are entitled to according to the 14th Amendment.

Readers of newspapers are not provided with the same evidence that the police and courts are provided with, and any information that makes it into the paper is second hand. Reporters also often omit details that may be quite relevant—such as whether the person or persons who dropped Ms. O’Keefe off at the park and ride were ever considered suspects in the case. The papers also neglected to mention (at least until like the second trial) the results of the ballistics tests, or that it was Jennings' second day at work, or the car shuttling. We should not mistake an article in the paper for the cop report, or authentic evidence (and the cop's report itself is not necessarily the "truth").

(And the rich defense attorneys in Northern LA County (and KERN as well) who read about this case and did nothing while Jennings' rights to a fair trial were mocked by the press and pigs are themselves guilty, not to say spineless pieces of mierda. )

Jennings/LATimes

Archbishop Williams on the fantasies of unlimited growth

"""Dr Rowan Williams said that taxation should not be seen as a way of stifling business or redistributing wealth but helping to make the world a better place in which to live.

He called for new levies to be introduced on financial transactions and carbon emissions, and an end to the idea that unlimited economic growth is desirable.

The archbishop also claimed reality television gives us “alarming glimpses” of what the world would look like were everyone to be governed by self-interest.

Dr Williams, the most senior cleric in the Church of England and a self-confessed “hairy lefty”, has made a series of critical statements since last year’s banking crisis on the excesses of the financial sector and Labour’s attempt to spend its way out of recession.

In his latest comments, delivered to the TUC Economics Conference on Monday, he pointed out that the term “economics” derives from a Greek word meaning “housekeeping” and should be about “creating a habitat that we can actually live in”.

However he said that over the past few decades, the market has been treated as an “independent authority”, creating social disruption around the world and the “extraordinary phenomena” of debt trading. """"

That's the party line of the New Testament, however offensive to Aynnie Rand-Co (or the neo-Darwinist conservatives of DawkinsCo).

How...Grosz

"""The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being. Everything ||XVI| which the political economist takes from you in life and in humanity, he replaces for you in money and in wealth; and all the things which you cannot do, your money can do. It can eat and, drink, go to the dance hall and the theatre; it can travel, it can appropriate art, learning, the treasures of the past, political power – all this it can appropriate for you – it can buy all this: it is true endowment. Yet being all this, it wants to do nothing but create itself, buy itself; for everything else is after all its servant, and when I have the master I have the servant and do not need his servant. All passions and all activity must therefore be submerged in avarice. The worker may only have enough for him to want to live, and may only want to live in order to have that.""""

Marx/Divisionof LaborGuar-ann-teed to scare the phuck out of baptist-zionist basura.

With one drawing, the authentic artist may produce a type of visual Truth, unknown to philosophasters, potboiler-shapers, poetasters, and assorted noize merchants.

"Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, etc.”

""[Jefferson's] purpose, he explained to [Henry] Lee, had been “not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent.” The Declaration’s authority, Jefferson rightly added, “rests . . . on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, etc.”""

Where is the contemporary 'Merican who has read a page of Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, or that eloquent rebel Algernon Sidney?? No-where, since ........da Wind done gone. Jefferson's not too PC these days given the Hemmings affair (Miss Sally was at least 1/2 caucasian anyway), but it should be noted that Abe Lincoln and Frederick Douglass referred to the Declaration of Independence at times, and the DoI certainly played a part in the formation of the 15th Amendment.

The Summa Theologica for Kicks--Aquinas, De Mendacio

(Erudition: Dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull. Bierce).

""""On the contrary, A gloss on Ps. 5:7, "Thou wilt destroy all that speak a lie," says "that there are three kinds of lies; for some are told for the wellbeing and convenience of someone; and there is another kind of lie that is told in fun; but the third kind of lie is told out of malice." The first of these is called an officious lie, the second a jocose lie, the third a mischievous lie. Therefore lies are divided into these three kinds.

I answer that, Lies may be divided in three ways. First, with respect to their nature as lies: and this is the proper and essential division of lying. In this way, according to the Philosopher (Ethic. iv, 7), lies are of two kinds, namely, the lie which goes beyond the truth, and this belongs to boasting," and the lie which stops short of the truth, and this belongs to "irony." This division is an essential division of lying itself, because lying as such is opposed to truth, as stated in the preceding Article: and truth is a kind of equality, to which more and less are in essential opposition."""

Aquinas, like his great forebearer Augustine, wrote at length on Mendacity. Aquinas generally agrees with The Philosopher (Aristotle) that irony, while not a cardinal sin, should be considered a lie (and thus a sin of some sort--Augustine rarely gives unqualified praise to the greek philosophers). Aquinas also perceived the truth functionality issue (ie, the Law of the Excluded middle: A v ~A); if you do not assert the Truth, you offer non-truths (ie mendacity). Aquinas was thus not a Roody Guiliani/ machiavellian sort of catholic--at least in principle.


This also applies to cultural products, such as theatre. Aristotle, in the Poetics, does not accept comedy [which includes a few varieties of irony] as a legitimate art, or form of discourse; he does allow for tragedy and historical works concerning serious matters (ie great battles, or having to do with statesmen, etc). Aristotle does not (as Plato does in the Republic) call for a ban outright, but does view comedy as a lesser form, if not salacious (he had words for the satyr plays.... Plato took a somewhat more maoist--or muslim-- approach , and forbade all theatrical arts--except music for state occasions (ie JP Sousa-sort)). We here at Contingencies suggest that Aristotle (really, the school of Aristotle/the Academy) usually affirmed positivism of a sort. Like Bertrand Russell, he would not mistake Hamlet for Napoleon.

Most WASPs have been spoonfed anti-catholic (and ergo, anti-hellenic) propaganda by sunday school teachers, or perhaps zionist professors, and were told that the ancient greeks were merely decadents and pagan soothsayers. First, the Septuagint (the version of the OT which Aug.and Aquinas both use) did not appear until after the time of Alexander; there was NO official version of the Old Testament, but merely a collection of ancient semitic texts (not all "hebrew", which was not established until AFTER the rise of the early Christian church. Ancient jews, say of the time of the Seleucids, knew Aramaic, or other semitic tongues. Koine Greek was the language of the Levant at the time of JC (and Latin...Pilate appears to address JC in.....Greek).

Anti-hellenic views were not the view of the Old South; Robert E Lee, for one, read the Classics, so did--Jefferson Davis (however unsavory and un-PC, Davis's oratory approaches a Ciceronian eloquence at times). Had the usual Yokeli Americanus read a few pages of Aristotle he might have discovered that The Stagirite generally favors moderation, and rationality in regards to politics and Kultur, while objecting to the Mel Brooks of his day. Aristotle's stoical moderation was not quite as severe as say Martin Luther. Luther wanted the works of the greeks, and Angelic Doctor Aquinas, not to say poets and pipers, tossed on a bonfire.

Friday the 13th


Or was it Nightmare on Elm street? Helloween VIII? FrankenKhrust? One o' dose.

.... The enormous fly-wheel of society


Your semi-annual Wm. James update:

Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most
precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all
within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of
fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone
prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from
being deserted by those brought up to tread therein. It
keeps the fisherman and the deck-hand at sea through the
winter ; it holds the miner in his darkness, and nails the
countryman to his log-cabin and his lonely farm through
all the months of snow ; it protects us from invasion by the
natives of the desert and the frozen zone. It dooms us all
to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture
or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that
disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted,
and it is too late to begin again. It keeps different social
strata from mixing. Already at the age of twenty-five you
see the professional mannerism settling down on the young
commercial traveller, on the young doctor, on the young
minister, on the young counsellor-at-law. You see the little
lines of cleavage running through the character, the tricks
of thought, the prejudices, the ways of the shop, in a
word, from which the man can by-and-by no more escape
than his coat-sleeve can suddenly fall into a new set of
folds. On the whole, it is best he should not escape. It
is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty,
the character has set like plaster, and will never soften
again.

James/PrinciplesofPsychology

Copyright Kops

Have you, or have you not ever scanned material from a copyright-protected document?? Those who still consider the J-EdgarCrats the party of liber-tay and justice should peruse the recent copyright "treaties" (ie publishing house protectionism):

The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to disclose due to "national security" concerns, has leaked. It's bad. It says:

* That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn't infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.

* That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet -- and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living -- if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.

* That the whole world must adopt US-style "notice-and-takedown" rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused -- again, without evidence or trial -- of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the US and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright.

* Mandatory prohibitions on breaking DRM, even if doing so for a lawful purpose (e.g., to make a work available to disabled people; for archival preservation; because you own the copyrighted work that is locked up with DRM)

Nothin' but ...Snitchism

'We're all insects crawling on the shiny hood of a Cadillac'

""[Tom Waits] was born not to circus performers but to a pair of teachers in Pomona, California. He was, by his own account, a strange little boy: bookish, overwound and with a tendency to be spooked by untoward noises. He did not thrive at school, he says, because he did not like the little holes they drilled in the cork-board ceiling, or the hooked stick they used to open the windows. He did not like being young, and took to shuffling around with his granddad's hat and cane.

Later, he fell under the spell of Charles Bukowski and the beat generation, and took to hanging out amid the flotsam of downtown LA. He was fascinated, he said, by "the great American loneliness", a loneliness that stretched from coast to coast and was as elusive and mysterious as ground fog. "Yeah, that all came from Bukowski and Kerouac," he recalls. "I always liked the idea that America is a big facade. We are all insects crawling across on the shiny hood of a Cadillac. We're all looking at the wrapping. But we won't tear the wrapping to see what lies beneath."""

Beats the usual blog belch, or PC-kvetch from a Krugman, or Klinton. Go Bukowski State,like

Anancasticism for Dumb-Dums

Hegel at Half-time (via CSPierce):

"The Hegelian philosophy is such an anancasticism [evolution by necessity]. With its revelatory religion, with its synechism (however imperfectly set forth), with its “reflection,” the whole idea of the theory is superb, almost sublime. Yet, after all, living freedom is practically omitted from its method. The whole movement is that of a vast engine, impelled by a vis a tergo, with a blind and mysterious fate of arriving at a lofty goal. I mean that such an engine it would be, if it really worked; but in point of fact, it is a Keely motor. Grant that it really acts as it professes to act, and there is nothing to do but accept the philosophy. But never was there seen such an example of a long chain of reasoning, – shall I say with a flaw in every link? – no, with every link a handful of sand, squeezed into shape in a dream. Or say, it is a pasteboard model of a philosophy that in reality does not exist. If we use the one precious thing it contains, the idea of it, introducing the tychism [evolution by chance, Darwin] which the arbitrariness of its every step suggests, and make that the support of a vital freedom which is the breadth of the spirit of love, we may be able to produce that genuine agapasticism [evolution by creativity, Lamarck], at which Hegel was aiming." [from CP 6.293-5, 1893]

Master Keely in the Lab-or-a-tory

(yNadaMasQueTodasMierda

Zizek/Rawls (continued)

""""When I spoke to Žižek on the telephone from New York, where he'd been giving a series of talks on the financial crisis and Barack Obama's healthcare plan, I asked him what relation he thought his work has to the mainstream of normative, liberal political theory done in British and American universities.

He took the example of arguably the most influential work of political philosophy written in English in the past 40 years, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice. Central to Rawls's argument in that book is something he calls the "difference principle", according to which inequalities in the distribution of goods can be justified so long as they benefit the worst off. In Žižek's view, "Rawls's model works on one fateful condition: that there is no resentment . . . Rawls doesn't take into account the irrationality of envy. In capitalist relations today, envy is crucial. Never underestimate the power of envy. Although Rawls and other egalitarian liberals want to be 'no-bullshit' analysts, the ultimate image of the human being on which their accounts are based is way too naive and utopian."

Žižek is equally unforgiving of those further to the left of Rawls. "I've noticed how many of the people who consider themselves to be more radical than the liberal standard do not work in political theory proper but, as it were, hide themselves as literary critics or philosophers. It's as if their radicalism is an excess which requires them to change genre."""""

"Throughout I have assumed that the persons in the original position are not moved by certain psychological propensities. A rational individual is not subject to envy, at least when the differences between himself and others are not thought to be the result of injustice and do not exceed certain limits." (John Rawls, A Theory of Justice).

Mark Twain, Sansculotte

Mark Twain at first calumnified the French Revolution, but over the course of his life he changed his views:

"When I finished Carlyle’s French Revolution in 1871, I was a Girondin; every time I have read it since, I have read it differently – being influenced and changed, little by little, by life and environment ... and now I lay the book down once more, and recognize that I am a Sansculotte! – And not a pale, characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat."

UnknownTwain


With special guest,FartherO'blivion in honor of......Mr. Flat-top, & the P-dale stupidphucks (withonethemostf-ingbodacioussoloseverfromJLPonty...actuallyIthinkit'sRDNZL)

Literature as Reification (Cont. re-run)

Many scholars insist that literature (fiction, poems, plays) be viewed as the collected wisdom of great minds, the noblest thoughts expressed in prose or verse, emotions recollected in tranquility etc. This view is mistaken. Literature generally functions as reification--a type of reinforcement of the ideology of the ruling class. Shakespeare's plays, used for centuries to teach the children of the bourgeoisie the Queen's English, are an apt example of this. In numerous plays the "courtly" attitudes are upheld, working class characters are mocked (and, as with Malvolio, presented as uneducated morose churls to the nobles), and in general Anglo-Catholic and monarchist views are reinforced and promoted.

That is not to say courtly and aristocratic virtues may not be in part valuable. Reason, ethics, eloquence, a certain aristo-world view may be in themselves valuable. Classical scholarship, mastery of latin, knowledge of the greek philosophers are not trivial affairs, however irrelevant to modern technocracy and market capitalism. Yet what is overlooked by literature which proclaims the superiority of aristocratic virtue, is the brutal reality of the monarchy, the prisons, the disparity between nobles and commoners, the "golden and sanguine laws" as Shelley said. Yet even a Shelley, himself from aristo-blood, functions mostly as a spokesman for the imperial throne. For literature itself always relates to monarchist if not a clerical theme. It is no accident that most literary history involves "courtly " themes, the Paolo and Francesca , Tristan and Isolde types of things--Camelot, if not Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

For most students of literature, courtly love and aristo virtue--whether hypocritical or actual-- are the contexts for literary interpretation. 20th century realist writers, say a Dreiser or Hemingway, are re-contextualized in relation to the "perennial truths" of the aristocratic writers. The French realists--say Stendhal--are seen in relation to the ancien regime (which is, let's admit, secretly loved). It should not surprise us that a catholic-monarchist such as TS Eliot would be viewed as "official" literature by the academic ideologues, and "realists" such as Hemingway or Dreiser disparaged--either implcitly or explicitly-- as yokels or rustics. Even the responsible realist and leftist--or historicist-- attempts to counter the monarchist and/or clerical Weltanschauung are, I believe, defeated. For the entire context of literature and literary interpretation is in essence aristocratic, and thus anti-empiricist, anti-democratic, anti-humanist.

It also should not be surprising that Marx himself disparaged liberal writers and fabian socialist types who thought "exposing social injustice" was a proper political stance. For Marx, regardless of his flaws, perceived that the institution of "belle-lettres" is contaminated with a sort of otherworldly (ultimately theological or superficially platonic) and non-historical ideology (novels, even grand baggy affairs like War and Peace are not history), where Truths simply exist immutably and unquestioned. The move away from idealistic metaphysics--towards history and economics-- is thus also a move away from belle-lettrist dreams.

An effective leftist action? Burn a Riverside Shakespeare, and your Norton Anthologies of English Verse; turn to Darwin instead of Dickens, Keynes instead of Kerouac, Einstein instead of Jane Eyre-head.

A True Story About Hoss Bellamy. Part Two.

""Slang: the Grunt of the Human Hog"" (Bierce).

(to be continued...)

Totentag





“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and this admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form.” —H.P.Lovecraft

Popper's misreading of Hegel, continued.

""""No conception is bandied about more unscrupulously in the history of ideas than “Influence.” Popper’s notion of it is so utterly unscientific that one should never guess that he has done important work on logic and on scientific method. At best, it is reducible to post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Thus he speaks of “the Hegelian Bergson” (p. 256 and n. 66) and assumes, without giving any evidence whatever, that Bergson, Smuts, Alexander, and Whitehead were all interested in Hegel, simply because they were “evolutionists” (p. 225 and n. 6).


What especially concerns Popper — and many another critic of German thinkers — is the “influence” that the accused had on the Nazis. His Hegel chapter is studded with quotations from recent German writers, almost all of which are taken from The War Against the West by Kolnai. In this remarkable book Friedrich Gundolf, Werner Jaeger ( Harvard), and Max Scheler are pictured as “representative of Nazism or at least its general trend and atmosphere.” Kolnai is also under the impression that the men who contributed most “to the rise of National Socialism as a creed” were Nietzsche “and Stefan George, less great but, perhaps because of his homosexuality, more directly instrumental in creating the Third Reich” (p. 14 ); that Nietzsche was a “half-Pole” (p. 453); that the great racist H. S. Chamberlain “was a mellow Englishman tainted by noxious German influences” (p. 455); and that Jaspers is a “follower” of Heidegger (p. 207 ). It would seem advisable to check the context of any quotations from Kolnai’s book before one uses them, but Kolnai generally gives no references. Popper writes:

I am greatly indebted to Kolnai’s book, which has made it possible for me to quote in the remaining part of this chapter a considerable number of authors who would otherwise have been inaccessible to me. (I have not, however, always followed the wording of Kolnai’s translations.)

He evidently changed the wording without checking the originals or even the context.

Popper uses quotation after quotation from Kolnai to point out supposed similarities with Hegel, but never stops to ask whether the men he cites had read Hegel, what they thought of him, or where, in fact, they did, get their ideas. Thus we are told that the idea of “fame is revived by Hegel” (p. 266 ), for Hegel spoke of fame as a “reward” of the men whose deeds are recorded in our history books — which would seem a trite enough idea that could also be ascribed to scores of sincere democrats — but Popper goes on: “and Stapel, a propagator of the new paganized Christianity, promptly [i.e., one hundred years later] repeats [sic]: ‘All great deeds were done for the sake of fame or glory.'” This is surely quite a different idea and not trite but false. Popper himself admits that Stapel “is even more radical than Hegel.” Surely, one must question the relevance of the whole section dealing with Stapel and other recent writers; this is not history of ideas but an attempt to establish guilt by association on the same page — in the hope, it seems, that semper aliquid haeret.

It is also the height of naïveté . A quick dip into a good dictionary of quotations would have shown Popper a great many closer parallels to Stapel than he found in Hegel. Perhaps the most extreme, and also the most memorable, formulations are found in some poets whose influence would be hard to gauge. Shakespeare writes:

Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives, Live register'd upon our brazen tombs.

And though these lines occur in one of his comedies, Love’s Labour’s Lost, he certainly did not think meanly of fame. Ben Jonson even went a step further in Sejanus ( I, ii): “Contempt of fame begets contempt of virtue.” And Friedrich Schiller voiced a still more radical view — in a poem that many German school children learn by heart, Das Siegesfest, which deals with the Greeks’ celebration of their triumph over Troy:

Of the goods that man has cherished
Not one is as high as fame;
When the body has long perished
What survives is the great name.

For every Nazi who knew Hegel’s remarks about fame there must have been dozens who knew these lines. Does that prove Schiller a bad man? Or does it show that he was responsible for Nazism?

Besides, Popper often lacks the knowledge of who influenced whom. Thus he speaks of Heidegger and “his master Hegel” (p. 270 and asserts falsely that Jaspers began as a follower “of the essentialist philosophers Husserl and Scheler” (p. 270 ). More important, he contrasts the vicious Hegel with superior men “such as Schopenhauer or J. F. Fries” (p. 223 ), and he constantly makes common cause with Schopenhauer against the allegedly proto-fascist Hegel, whom he blames even for the Nazis’ racism — evidently unaware that Fries and Schopenhauer, unlike the mature Hegel, were anti-Semites. (important point. The aged Hegel supported abolition, a pan-african congress, and liberation of some type for jews, though objected to some aspects of jewish racketeering, and financial schemes)

Hegel’s earliest essays, which he himself did not publish, show that he started out with violent prejudices against the Jews. These essays will be considered in the next chapter; but they are not represented in Scribner’s Hegel Selections and hence were not exploited by Popper. Nor have they exerted any perceivable influence. When Hegel later became a man of influence’ he insisted that the Jews should be granted equal rights because civic rights belong to man because he is a man and not on account of his ethnic origins or his religion. (yes).

Fries, who was Hegel’s predecessor at the University of Heidelberg, has often been considered a great liberal, and Hegel has often been condemned for taking a strong stand against him; it is rarely, if ever, mentioned in this context that Fries published a pamphlet in the summer of 1816 in which he called for the “extermination” of Jewry. It appeared simultaneously as a review article in Heidelbergische Jahrbücher der Litteratur and as a pamphlet with the title “How the Jews endanger the prosperity and the character of the Germans.” According to Fries, the Jews “were and are the bloodsuckers of the people” (p. 243 ) and “do not at all live and teach according to Mosaic doctrine but according to the Talmud” (p. 251 ) of which Fries conjures up a frightening picture. “Thus the Jewish caste ... should be exterminated completely [mit Stumpf und Stiel ausgerottet] because it is obviously of all secret and political societies and states within the state the most dangerous” (p. 256 ). “Any immigration of Jews should be forbidden, their emigration should be promoted. Their freedom to marry should ... be limited... . It should be forbidden that any Christian be hired by a Jew” (p. 260 ); and one should again force on them “a special mark on their clothing” (p. 261 ). In between, Fries protests: “Not against the Jews, our brothers, but against Jewry [der Judenschaft] we declare war” (p. 248).

This may help us to understand why Hegel, in the Preface to his Philosophy of Right, scorned Fries’s substitution of “the pap of ‘heart, friendship, and enthusiasm'” for moral laws. It would certainly have been unwise of the Jews to rely on Fries’s brotherly enthusiasm.

Hegel’s often obscure style may have evened the way for later obscurantism, but Fries’s and Schopenhauer’s flamboyant irrationalism was, stylistically, too, much closer to most Nazi literature. It does not follow that Fries influenced the Nazis. He was soon forgotten, till, in the twentieth century, Leonard Nelson, a Jewish philosopher, founded a neo-Friesian school that had nothing to do with Fries’s racial prejudices. The one influential thinker whom Nelson succeeded in leading back to Fries was Rudolf Otto, the Protestant theologian, who is best known for his book on The Idea of the Holy. What makes that book so notable is its fine description of the “numinous” experience; but the confused discussion of “The Holy as an A Priori Category” and the romantic notions about “divining” are indebted to Fries.

Popper, though he has written an important book on Die Logik der Forschung, “The Logic of Research,” does not find it necessary to check his hunches by research when be is concerned with influences in his Hegel chapter. He simply decrees that Hegel “represents the ‘missing link,’ as it were, between Plato and the modern form of totalitarianism. Most of the modern totalitarians are quite unaware that their ideas can be traced back to Plato. But many know of their indebtedness to Hegel” (p. 226 ). Seeing that the context indicates a reference to the Nazis and that all the totalitarians cited in this chapter are Fascists, not Communists, Popper only shows his ignorance of this brand of totalitarianism.

Hegel was rarely cited in the Nazi literature, and, when he was referred to, it was usually by way of disapproval. The Nazis’ official “philosopher,” Alfred Rosenberg, mentioned, and denounced, Hegel twice in his best-selling Der Mythus des Zwanzigsten jahrhunderts. Originally published in 1930, this book bad reached an edition of 878,000 copies by 1940. In the same book, a whole chapter is devoted to Popper’s beloved Schopenhauer, whom Rosenberg admired greatly. Rosenberg also celebrates Plato as “one who wanted in the end to save his people [Volk] on a racial basis, through a forcible constitution, dictatorial in every detail.” Rosenberg also stressed, and excoriated, the “Socratic” elements in Plato.

Plato, unlike Hegel, was widely read in German schools, and special editions were prepared for Greek classes in the Gymnasium, gathering together allegedly fascist passages. In his introduction to one such selection from the Republic, published by Teubner in the series of Eclogae Graecolatinae, Dr. Holtorf helpfully listed some of his relevant articles on Plato, including one in the Völkischer Beobachter, which was Hitler’s own paper. Instead of compiling a list of the many similar contributions to the Plato literature, it may suffice to mention that Dr. Hans F. K. Günther, from whom the Nazis admittedly received their racial theories, also devoted a whole book to Plato — not to Hegel — as early as 1928. In 1935, a second edition was published.

Whether Hegel did, or did not, influence the Nazis may not be particularly relevant to Popper’s central theses in his book — but then most of his book is not. His often stimulating ideas are amalgamated with a great deal of thoroughly unsound intellectual history; and Section V of his Hegel chapter (eighteen pages) is representative of the latter. It is also representative of scores of similar attempts by authors who have less to offer ...."""

Hegel? Popper? Play-tow? Who dat? Cracker mutha-f-ers. ah got a bas-setball jones

The spirit of PERVERSENESS

(EA Poe's "The Black Cat", continued)

"In the meantime the cat slowly recovered. The socket of the lost eye presented, it is true, a frightful appearance, but he no longer appeared to suffer any pain. He went about the house as usual, but, as might be expected, fled in extreme terror at my approach. I had so much of my old heart left, as to be at first grieved by this evident dislike on the part of a creature which had once so loved me. But this feeling soon gave place to irritation. And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of PERVERSENESS. Of this spirit philosophy takes no account. Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart --one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such? This spirit of perverseness, I say, came to my final overthrow. It was this unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself --to offer violence to its own nature --to do wrong for the wrong's sake only --that urged me to continue and finally to consummate the injury I had inflicted upon the unoffending brute. One morning, in cool blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree; --hung it with the tears streaming from my eyes, and with the bitterest remorse at my heart; --hung it because I knew that it had loved me, and because I felt it had given me no reason of offence; --hung it because I knew that in so doing I was committing a sin --a deadly sin that would so jeopardize my immortal soul as to place it --if such a thing were possible --even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God.

The Black Cat reveals Poe's great talent at evoking a mood of near-hysterical terror in a few dozen tightly composed paragraphs. The Black Cat might not rank as one of his classic tales--the plot seems a bit contrived--yet anyone who reads the story carefully can hardly not be affected by Poe's complex rhetoric of pathology and psychosis. Poeian syntax itself sounds like eloquent terror, vaguely shakespearean perhaps: Poe's narrators may remind one of Iago, with his gallows humor and puns, though with a peculiarly American edge. Poe however is no noir hack working from police reports or criminal depositions, or working class slang: he wrote before the Victorian dialect-masters arrived (whether Dickens, or Twain, etc). Poe arguably invented the ghoulie genre itself, with the loquacious villains (as Vincent Price, and earlier Karloff), and strange clockwork mechanisms and objects. Poe also initiated the detective story, if not sci-fi as well--that scary dream The Masque of the Red Death gave birth to Lovecraft (who routinely blesses his master EAP), and probably Harlan Ellison as well.

One interesting aspect of the story concerns the narrator's insistence (do not merely read that as Poe himself) that his phantasm cannot be accounted for, as of by yet, by an "ordinary succession of very natural causes and effects."
The narrator is not merely a deranged psychotic, but he believes his Spirit of PERVERSENESS exists in some psychological realm which Reason cannot at present address. Reason--including science and logic-- cannot describe the primitive impulses of the human heart --yet for the Narrator (and Poe, one suspects) that Spirit comprises "one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man." The narrator's obsession with Pluto alludes to the ambiguity of motivation, or in contemporary terms, the problem of intentionality.

Black cats typically connote malfeasance, night, or witchcraft; cats were often killed along with suspected witches in the middle ages. In Poe's tale, the Narrator has given the name Pluto to his black cat: Pluto, god of the underworld. Jung would most likely have termed the Black Cat an archetype, and that seems in ways preferable to Freud's dream-maps, thought they both agreed that cats symbolized the feminine as well as sexuality. Pluto adds the dimension of death. The black cat lore may seem trite and "gothic" now, but in many cultures, even primitive America, a black cat was a portentous Omen, especially to the religiously orthodox. The narrator himself may be religious, possibly a zealot, given his concerns about "the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God". Could the Narrator, by torturing and then killing the cat--and then his wife--be combating what he interprets as the presence of Evil, driven by his own unconscious, sublimated religious code? That seems plausible, though a thorough explanation would require a more detailed analysis; suffice it to say, the narrator is obsessed with the cat. The Cat indeed equals the Spirit of PERVERSENESS to the narrator; the spirit being both manifest in the Cat, AND in the Narrator's mind--a type of immanence, really, which an "ordinary succession of very natural causes and effects" cannot account for. The Narrator-cat relation then becomes nearly a type of psychological pantheism (and human-primates and felines both belong to the order of Mammals). The cat serves as a symbol of something out of the ordinary, uncanny, troubling--even an Other of sorts, in Lacan-Speak-- to the narrator, and he must destroy it, yet it is part of him. By destroying the Cat, he will destroy the Spirit of PERVERSENESS itself...(to be continued)

THE BLACK CAT features the dynamic duo of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. The film has only a distant relation to the classic tale of Edgar Allan Poe, but fascinating nonetheless. Karloff stars as the villain--the screenwriter loosely based the character of Poelzig on the infamous occultist Aleister Crowley (--as in Crow-lee). There are also parallels to the rise of totalitarianism in 30's Europe: Dr. Werdegast (Lugosi) has spent 15 years in a concentration camp. Poelzig is the personal nemesis of Dr. Werdegast--Poelzig's actions resulted in Werdegast's incarceration. The two meet again when Werdegast and others are involved in a bus accident in Hungary one dark gothic night, and Werdegast unwittingly brings an injured femme to....Poelzig's Hungarian castle! Then Dr. Werdegast must match wits with Karloff to save the young lady's life, before Poelzig uses her in a ........infernal ritual. Ghastly!.


Do you dare....play chess with me.....for her? Bwahbwahbwahbwahbwah....

This movie features one particularly unsavory spectacle--one of the goriest scenes captured on film at the time. The audience doesn't actually see anything too bloody, however. Lugosi overpowers Karloff (SPOILERS, as they say) and straps him to a cross on Karloff's black mass altar--intended for the injured young lady. Yikes! Picking up a scalpel, Dr. Werdegast smiles at Karloff and utters: "There's more than one way to skin a cat." He then proceeds to skin him alive, although the entire scene is silohouetted against a wall, with screams and eerie soundtrack. Superb Hell-o-ween Phamily fare.

Occasionalism--Godly, and not-so-Godly.

""""[Malebranche's] Occasionalism is the doctrine that all finite created entities are absolutely devoid of causal efficacy and that God is the only true causal agent. God is directly, immediately and solely responsible for bringing about all phenomena. When a needle pricks the skin, the physical event is merely an occasion for God to cause the appropriate mental state (pain); a volition in the soul to raise an arm or to think of something is only an occasion for God to cause the arm to rise or the idea to be present to the mind; and the impact of one billiard ball upon another is an occasion for God to move the second ball. In all three contexts - mind-body, mind alone and body-body - God's ubiquitous causal activity proceeds in accordance with certain general laws, and (except in the case of miracles) he acts only when the requisite material or psychic conditions obtain."""

Malebranche's doctrine may sound strange or mystical, but we contend that ANY orthodox monotheist, whether christian, jewish or muslim, must uphold Occasionalism in regards to all events, physical or mental. Even if efficient causes exist (as they do), and natural laws seem to hold, the Believer must grant that God is "the only true causal agent". Thus, theistic Occasionalism implies contingency, in a sense. God would by definition know all, command all, at all times, and everywhere. Assuming He existed, He could, if He so desired, simply reverse Newtonian physics, and have a plane fall from the sky. He could also create miracles, by definition. Yet planes don't fall, and miracles don't seem to occur, at least on macro-level. The typical theist, at least the thinking one, may allude to continuity of a sort, or say something regarding regularity, or Design, possibly a Final Cause, read instrinsically: "The rose bush always produces roses, not marigolds, or the heads of snakes. Planes fly according to those sacred Newtonian constants. There is order, which is Godly", he says. Aristotle, and Ibn Rushd, perhaps even Deists might actually agree to that--Descartes and Malebranche would not.

At the same time, God or spiritual forces do not appear to intervene during various types of nightmares--say world war, or plagues. God could have, granting the occasionalist premise, prevented trench warfare, or panzer divisions: that is assuming He thinks he made a mistake, yet Occasionalism also implies God can change His mind. But he chooses not to. Some believers insist, of course, that God does create miracles, and indeed intervene. Prayer is commonly accepted as legitimate, as bringing about change. Prayers did not stop trench warfare, however (and certainly many mothers did pray for their soldier sons). Per the law of excluded middle, it must be that miracles are possible, or they are not possible. If we grant they are possible, then it would seem an omnipotent, just God would intervene during horrible events, such as war. Yet the only time God does create miracles, they appear to be of the mystic, and somewhat trivial sort (appearance of Mary, bleeding statues, perhaps a person coming back from near-death experience etc). So God, if he can create miracles, only chooses the trivial (at least over last few centuries), and does not offer the biblical sort. And the reports of even "trivial miracles" could be mistaken testimony, or unreliable, ie bogus. Thus, that would confirm God either does not exist, OR is an amoral force: assuming He existed, He chooses to produce bleeding statues (supposedly, ie maybe), but not angels stopping panzer divisions, or preventing stalinists' from killing Kulaks.

Ergo, an omnipotent, Just God probably does not exist, since no miracles occur during horrible events or atrocity, though by definition at least, and per Occasionalism, he could bring about miracles. Barring belief in a tyrannical or demonic force, an omnipotent God most likely does not exist, and Malebranche was in error. An impersonal, non-spiritual Nature, not God, is "the only true causal agent". Many religious, and non-religious thinkers have rejected the possibility of miracles--whether of the bible, or occurring in ordinary reality. As Wl Craig says, "Voltaire's God, indeed the God of all Deists, was the cosmic architect who engineered and built the machine, but who would not be bothered to interfere in the trivial affairs of man. In this light miracles simply became unbelievable." That may be, but by doing so, doesn't Voltaire also reject the very possibility of an Omnipotent God? It would seem so (and having read Candide, I am quite sure Voltaire did intend that). Deny the possibility of miraculous intervention, and you thereby deny the possibility of a God.

Virginia Woolf in Hell

Nietzsche on women (von Jenseits Gut und Bose (BGAE)):

Woman wants to become self-reliant—and for that reason she is beginning to enlighten men about "women as such": this is one of the worst developments of the general uglification of Europe. For what must these clumsy attempts of women at scientific self-exposure bring to light! Woman has much reason for shame; so much pedantry, superficiality, schoolmarmishness, petty presumption, petty licentiousness and immodesty lies concealed in woman—one only needs to study her behavior with children!—and so far all this was at bottom best repressed and kept under control by fear of man. Woe when "the eternally boring in woman" —she is rich in that!—is permitted to venture forth! When she begins to unlearn thoroughly and on principle her prudence and art—of grace, of play, of chasing away worries, of lightening burdens and taking things lightly—and her subtle aptitude for agreeable desires!

Even now female voices are heard which—holy Aristophanes!—are frightening: they threaten with medical explicitness what woman wants from man, first and last. Is it not in the worst taste when woman sets about becoming scientific that way? So far enlightenment of this sort was fortunately man's affair, man's lot—we remained "among ourselves" in this; and whatever women write about "woman," we may in the end reserve a healthy suspicion whether woman really wants enlightenment about herself—whether she can will it—

One does not have to agree with all of this to appreciate Nietzsche's honesty. Schoolmarmishness--javoll. Even rational feminists (a rarity) might discover something of value in Nietzsche's comments on the fairer sex.

Town and Country (from the German Ideology, Karl Marx)

"""The greatest division of material and mental labour is the separation of town and country. The antagonism between town and country begins with the transition from barbarism to civilisation, from tribe to State, from locality to nation, and runs through the whole history of civilisation to the present day (the Anti-Corn Law League).

The existence of the town implies, at the same time, the necessity of administration, police, taxes, etc.; in short, of the municipality, and thus of politics in general. Here first became manifest the division of the population into two great classes, which is directly based on the division of labour and on the instruments of production. The town already is in actual fact the concentration of the population, of the instruments of production, of capital, of pleasures, of needs, while the country demonstrates just the opposite fact, isolation and separation. The antagonism between town and country can only exist within the framework of private property. It is the most crass expression of the subjection of the individual under the division of labour, under a definite activity forced upon him — a subjection which makes one man into a restricted town-animal, the other into a restricted country-animal, and daily creates anew the conflict between their interests. Labour is here again the chief thing, power over individuals, and as long as the latter exists, private property must exist. The abolition of the antagonism between town and country is one of the first conditions of communal life, a condition which again depends on a mass of material premises and which cannot be fulfilled by the mere will, as anyone can see at the first glance. (These conditions have still to be enumerated.) The separation of town and country can also be understood as the separation of capital and landed property, as the beginning of the existence and development of capital independent of landed property — the beginning of property having its basis only in labour and exchange.

Domingo-muzak

There ain't no Jesus gonna come from the sky
Now that I found out I know I can cry (verstehen zee, Hossronius? NO Brigham Dung, or Muhammed, or Moses either)


In the towns which, in the Middle Ages, did not derive ready-made from an earlier period but were formed anew by the serfs who had become free, each man's own particular labour was his only property apart from the small capital he brought with him, consisting almost solely of the most necessary tools of his craft. The competition of serfs constantly escaping into the town, the constant war of the country against the towns and thus the necessity of an organised municipal military force, the bond of common ownership in a particular kind of labour, the necessity of common buildings for the sale of their wares at a time when craftsmen were also traders, and the consequent exclusion of the unauthorised from these buildings, the conflict among the interests of the various crafts, the necessity of protecting their laboriously acquired skill, and the feudal organisation of the whole of the country: these were the causes of the union of the workers of each craft in guilds. We have not at this point to go further into the manifold modifications of the guild-system, which arise through later historical developments. The flight of the serfs into the towns went on without interruption right through the Middle Ages. These serfs, persecuted by their lords in the country, came separately into the towns, where they found an organised community, against which they were powerless and in which they had to subject themselves to the station assigned to them by the demand for their labour and the interest of their organised urban competitors. These workers, entering separately, were never able to attain to any power, since, if their labour was of the guild type which had to be learned, the guild-masters bent them to their will and organised them according to their interest; or if their labour was not such as had to be learned, and therefore not of the guild type, they became day-labourers and never managed to organise, remaining an unorganised rabble. The need for day-labourers in the towns created the rabble."""

Division of labor, property, the landed gentry, class divisions, history of agriculture vs urban, the power of capital: Marx's German Ideology presents leftist economic critique in a nutshell. The usual consumer-narcissist may not care for that sort of stark realism, but Marx does present an accurate, fact-based description of exploitation ranging over centuries. Marx may not sufficiently quantify the exploitation here (and may be guilty of overgeneralizing at times), but does describe it in great detail, and Marx and Engels often make use of data, regarding wages, rents, incomes, finance. Marx opposes metaphysics, yet has the conceptual knowledge that philosophy provides (from Hegel, but also due to his reading of empiricists and classical economists) which allows him to point out relations that a Charlie Dickens or the usual liberal moralist cannot. Rousseau and the encyclopedists also played a part in that as well. One might wax Nietzschean for a few nano-seconds (no one is ordering you to believe Marx as you do Jeezuss)--who cares about rabble, about the slave morality of socialism. Marx anticipated that sort of romantic rogue-philosopher--or Aynnie Rand like morons-- as he wrote: whether you care or not, the rabble, the chandala, les miserables plot against you 24/7. (and no "object petit a" needed).

sabado-muzak

G. Shearing. Sabroso

Bankers’ dominance of Washington

Cockburn:

"Smart investors have certainly had plenty of opportunity to make money lately. Gold is up twenty percent. Oil has doubled. The Dow roars through 10,000. But one investment has far, far, outperformed all others in epic returns: politics.

Wall Street balance sheets make this very clear. Last year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, major banks and other financial institutions in receipt of $295 billion in TARP money pumped $114 million into Washington in lobbying and campaign contributions. As a stand-alone figure, $114 million sounds like a lot. Set against the torrent of cash flowing in the opposite direction, it is minimal. At 258,449 percent it has been called “the single best investment in history.” Our elected representatives are giving it away.

No one should be surprised at the bankers’ dominance of Washington. They even boast about it. Hailing a further emasculation of the powers of the proposed Consumer Finance Protection Agency, the American Bankers’ Association recently issued a press release commending lawmakers for removing “the unworkable requirement that communications with consumers be ‘reasonable.....’”"

* * *

The teabaggers got it wrong. Kid Obama's no red--just another corporate liberal, bringin' home the bacon for Investors, Inc. Crude and gold--the dee-eep pocket's table--have been roaring in nearly Reagan-era style. A 20% move in gold or crude oil on the commodity market may sound meaningless to Ma and Pa McTeabag. In reality that means massive profits, in the range of 200% to 300% (a Shekelsmeister's 100 grand becomes 300 grand in a matter of weeks) to those who got in at the right time (go count the clicks yourself when taking lunch at boilerroom hell)--for doing nothing, except having the shekels to pay a broker at the precious metals or energy casino. That's the reality of commodities in finance cap: No Todestrieb or Dasein chants needed.

Tejon National Park

"""The 270,000-acre Tejon Ranch, between Los Angeles and Bakersfield in California’s Tehachapi Mountains, features extraordinary ecological resources: ancient oak groves, Joshua tree and pinyon pine forests, and 80 imperiled species, including the California condor.


Its owners and some environmentalists have cut a deal to put 90 percent of the ranchland into a private conservancy in exchange for allowing intense development on the remaining 10 percent. But here’s what hasn’t been seriously considered: Protecting this precious area as a national park for the benefit of creatures and people in one of the nation’s most densely populated regions.

National parks have been deemed “America’s best idea,” in writer Wallace Stegner’s phrasing, and they are celebrated as that in a Ken Burns documentary series airing this week on PBS. Yet, oddly, America’s national park system is largely perceived as a fait accompli, like the great Gothic cathedrals in Europe. But national parks should be as much a part of our future as they are of our past."""

* * *

Ken Burns' documentary on the National Park system provided some restful info-tainment, and should remind us of all the sound reasons for federally-protected wilderness. Unfortunately, one of the largest areas of wilderness in California, the Tejon Ranch, does not have National Park status. Tejon Ranch encompasses most of the Tehachapi Mountains and borders on the San Joaquin valley to the north, and stretches to the mojave desert to the south and east; to the west lies Mt. Pinos and the coast range--chumash territory.

The Tejon Ranch consists mainly of California chapparal: oaks, digger pines, and grass-covered hills, blanketed by wildflowers in the spring. Above five or six thousand feet one encounters ponderosa, sugar pines and firs, a few small lakes, and year-round streams (the pinyon pine mentioned by Miss Atlanta are a Great Basin pine found above 5000 ft. or so--like in the Inyo Mountains (INYO, the Paiute Geist). A few pinyon may grow on the eastern side of Tejan Ranch towards mojave, but rare). Red tail hawks, golden eagles and, rarely, condors are seen. Whitetail deer, a few black bears, coyotes, the occasional lynx and cougar may be sighted. Some rumors persist that a few wolves still haunt the Tehachapis--unlikely. The last grizzlies of California were gone, hunted to extinction, by 1900 or so. "Tejon" means badger in spanish. Legend holds that early jesuits witnessed a badger fighting a grizzly and designated the pass "del Tejon." Ft. Tejon in fact pre-dates the Civil War; a young Ulysses S Grant spent some time in the area.



The Kawaiisu were the main tribe centered around the Tehachapis--the southern-most end of the Sierra Nevada--though various tribes traded in the area, such as the Yokuts from the great valley, and paiutes from the owens valley area, and the desert wasteland southeast of the sierras. The US Army in fact came out to California to protect WASPs settlers from the paiute raiders (though the Paiutes thought differently). The Tehachapi valley itself was a sort of pow-wow area. Like the chumash, the Kawaiisu at times left pictographs in the foothills near springs and rock outcroppings. The Kawaiisu Tribe now opposes the Tejon Ranch company and their proposed development plans.

Tejon Ranch owners and managers rate among the most conservative land barons in California, if not the USA. They are pals with the Big Oil boys in Kern and regularly hang out with Kali-Klown-Kommando Ahhnuld Schwarzi as well. Dick Cheney swings by the Tejon Ranch once in a while, after paying respects to his cronies in the petroleum biz residing in the country clubs of west Bakersfield. Ed Jaggels, infamous, crypto-nazi Kern DA and the Kern redneck sheriffs party at Tejon Ranch. When in need of some R & R, LA's corporate nazis right-wing elite also head to Tejon to hunt and hoist a few brews and study Zig Ziglar or somethin' in one of the TR's private lodges.

Yes, Tejon Ranch management may have expressed some interest in environmental issues, but that's mostly just for image and political gain; they want to keep the Tejon Ranch in private hands as a secluded hunting range for hicks GOP insiders. Perhaps the few remaining progressives in the House or Senate could prevent that--don't hold your breath.

Columbus's crusade

Carroll/BostonGlobe:

""""In his “Journals,’’ Columbus’s report to his royal sponsors, he declares; “Your Highnesses, as Catholic Christians and Princes devoted to the Holy Christian Faith and the propagation thereof, and enemies of the sect of Mahomet and of all idolatries and heresies, resolved to send me, Christopher Columbus, to the said regions of India, to see the said princes and peoples and lands and the disposition of them and of all, and the manner in which may be undertaken their conversion to our Holy Faith, and ordained that I should not go by land (the usual way) to the Orient, but by the route of the Occident, by which no one to this day knows for sure that anyone has gone.’’

As for the gold that Columbus hoped to find for his sponsors, he knew that it was not merely for their enrichment. He wrote, “I declared to Your Highnesses that all the gain of this my Enterprise should be spent in the conquest of Jerusalem; and Your Highnesses smiled and said that it pleased you.’’

For Columbus, achieving Jerusalem was not merely a matter of releasing the Holy Sepulcher from the age-old Muslim bondage. Like millennialists before and after him, he seems to have believed that the final restoration of the Holy Land to Christian dominion would usher in the Messianic Age. “God made me the messenger of the New Heaven and the New Earth,’’ he wrote in about 1500, “of which he spoke in the Apocalypse of St. John . . . and he showed me the spot where to find it.’’ An apocalyptic impulse informed the New World project at its birth; the project assumed hostility to Islam; and its ultimate purpose involved Jerusalem. Those three facts remain pillars of the American problem today.""""

Paraphrasing Hegel, historical process is manichean.

Poe-fest

""""" ....For Edgar Allan Poe, 2009 has been a better year than 1849. After dozens of events in several cities to mark the 200th anniversary of his birth, he's about to get the grand funeral that a writer of his stature should have received when he died.

One hundred sixty years ago, the beleaguered, impoverished Poe was found, delirious and in distress outside a Baltimore tavern. He was never coherent enough to explain what had befallen him since leaving Richmond, Va., a week earlier. He spent four days in a hospital before he died at age 40.

Poe's cousin, Neilson Poe, never announced his death publicly. Fewer than 10 people attended the hasty funeral for one of the 19th century's greatest writers. And the injustices piled on. Poe's tombstone was destroyed before it could be installed, when a train derailed and crashed into a stonecutter's yard. Rufus Griswold, a Poe enemy, published a libelous obituary that damaged Poe's reputation for decades.


But on Sunday, Poe's funeral will get an elaborate do-over, with two services expected to draw about 350 people each – the most a former church next to his grave can hold. Actors portraying Poe's contemporaries and other long-dead writers and artists will pay their respects, reading eulogies adapted from their writings about Poe.""""""

Baltimore thugs assaulted EAP when he was a bit strung out, say some.

The skies they were ashen and sober;
The leaves they were crisped and sere—
The leaves they were withering and sere;
It was night in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year:
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,
In the misty mid region of Weir—
It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,
In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.

(from Ulalume)

Ludwig van

Warmonger Wins Peace Prize


Uh oh: thinking "out of the box" as HuffPo corporate liberals might whine.

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

It took 25 years longer than George Orwell thought for the slogans of 1984 to become reality.

“War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” “Ignorance is Strength.”

I would add, “Lie is Truth.”

The Nobel Committee has awarded the 2009 Peace Prize to President Obama, the person who started a new war in Pakistan, upped the war in Afghanistan, and continues to threaten Iran with attack unless Iran does what the US government demands and relinquishes its rights as a signatory to the non-proliferation treaty.

The Nobel committee chairman, Thorbjoern Jagland said, “Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future.”

Obama, the committee gushed, has created “a new climate in international politics.”

Tell that to the 2 million displaced Pakistanis and the unknown numbers of dead ones that Obama has racked up in his few months in office. Tell that to the Afghans where civilian deaths continue to mount as Obama’s “war of necessity” drones on indeterminably.

No Bush policy has changed. Iraq is still occupied. The Guantanamo torture prison is still functioning. Rendition and assassinations are still occurring. Spying on Americans without warrants is still the order of the day. Civil liberties are continuing to be violated in the name of Oceania’s “war on terror.”........

.""""

Well put, PCR.

Algernon Sidney Day

Thomas Jefferson once claimed that the ideas of the American Revolution followed from "Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, and Sidney. etc.". By Sidney, he meant Algernon Sidney, a 17th century English Whig who opposed the divine right of Kings in any form. Sidney was brought to trial for treason (false charges, most likely) and sentenced to death by that royalist par-tay animal Charles II. Historians and writers often depict Charles II as the noble, sophisticated monarch of the Restoration, opposed to the crass ruffians and rogues of Cromwell and the Interregnum; Hollywood did the same with the Restoration flick a few years ago. Unfortunately, that is not an accurate reading of the Stuart regime.

Reading the history of the Stuarts closely, one can't help note the tyrannical and capricious aspects of Charles II. David Hume, not one for liberal sentimentality, supported the Stuart succession, yet criticized the despotic elements of the reign of Charles II. Charles II may have had a swinging court (then many European kings did), but he had no problem shutting down Parliament when it appeared they might oppose him. He and his royalist henchmen killed anyone suspected of helping the dead usurper Cromwell (Sidney eventually criticized Cromwell). Charles II persecuted scientists and experimentalists as well; the young Newton and Locke (a medical doctor as well as philosopher) vehemently opposed Charles II.

This is an excerpt from a speech--a classic of secularism, and quite free of outright religious moralizing-- which legend holds Sidney delivered a few minutes before his execution :

Thus his testimony being laid aside, the whole matter is reduced to the papers said to be found in my closet by the King's officers, without any other proof of their being written by me than what was taken from suspicion of similitude upon a hand that is easily counterfeited, and which had been lately declared in the Lady Carr's case to be no lawful evidence in criminal causes. But if I had been seen to write them, the matter would not be much altered. They plainly appear to relate to a larger treatise written long since in answer to Filmer's book, which by all intelligent men is thought to be grounded upon wicked principles equally pernicious to magistrates and people. If he might publish to the world his opinion, viz. that all men are born under a necessity derived from the Laws of God and Nature to submit to an absolute kingly government which could be restrained by no law or oath. And that he who hath the power, whether he come to it by creation, election, inheritance, usurpation or any other way hath the right. And that none must oppose his will, but the persons and estates of his subjects must be indispensably subject unto it. If he might publish such a book, I know not why I might not have published my opinion to the contrary without the breach of any law; and as freely as he have publicly declared my thoughts and the reasons upon which they were grounded.

And I am persuaded to believe that God had left nations to the liberty of setting up such governments as best pleased themselves, and that magistrates were set up for the good of nations, not nations for the honor and glory of magistrates. That the right and power of magistrates in every country was that which the laws of that country made it to be. That these laws are to be observed and the oaths taken by rulers to be kept. And that having the force of contracts between magistrates and people, they cannot be violated without danger of dissolving the whole fabric. That usurpations can give no right. That the most dangerous of all enemies unto kings are they who raising their power to an exorbitant height allow unto usurpers all rights belonging to them. For usurpations being seldom compassed without the slaughter of reigning persons and their families, the worst of villanies should thereby be rewarded with the most glorious privileges. That if such doctrines were received they would stir up men to the destruction of princes with more violence than all the passions that have hitherto raged in the hearts of the most unruly. That no magistrate could be safe, if such rewards were proposed unto any that could destroy them. That few men would be so gentle as to spare even the best, if by their destruction vile usurpers could become God's anointed, and by the most execrable wickedness invest themselves with that divine character.

"magistrates were set up for the good of nations, not nations for the honor and glory of magistrates". Das stimmt.
http://history.wisc.edu/sommerville/367/sidney%20speech.htm