Upset the Gods

Katydid - Bush Cricket

    "The victorious cause pleased the gods, but the conquered cause pleased Cato."

  The Cato, Lucan mentioned here in his epic poem about the civil war between that repulsive jackass Julius Caesar and the Roman Republic whose champion was the teenage butcher Pompey the Great, was Cato the Younger, who committed suicide rather than accept the tyranny of an emperor. 

  "It's not a matter of operational security, these lies are an attempt to conceal the truth of this conflict.  What we have been told and what is the truth doesn't match. MIA and KIA numbers do not include contractors, CIA, other humint resources and local populations who as far as the US Military is concerned don't count."

  Neoconservative minds will still be arguing a collapsing of the Age of Reason as it sieves through the twentieth century into the first quarter of the twenty first century. These worthy spirits with daddy complex issues left over from the early days of agriculture can be depressing as they continue to betray the world by assuring us all that we're doomed to slow painful death unless we call up the able bodied, pump them full of testosterone, give them a gun and make them wear a uniform.

  In Lucan's poem Cato the Younger was an heroic figure who stood for Liberty and Justice for all, but the gods knew that Rome was too massive a territory for Liberty and Justice to exist.

  

Open a window on the past and cry

Jerusalem Artichoke

   Saturday. September 19. The Year 2026. A Forecast high of 94 F. The filthy rich will take their money and hide. There'll always be someone they can buy. And yes an empire dies when a secretary of defense relies on testosterone shots and judges his soldiers by the rigidity of their erections rather than their spines.

  Edward Gibbon never for one minute believed the Roman Republic would survive. His reason for thinking this was that once the Roman Republic had expanded into a massive empire, its collapse and transformation into an autocracy was the natural, inevitable result of what he called "immoderate greatness." In modern parlance "Kiss business man arse and bend over for billionaires and you loose your republic."  John Walking Stewart could have told you that when he had to run from Hyder Ali, Sultan of Mysore.

  Worth wondering how Gibbon might describe the world as it is today. His great history addressed the Roman Empire rather than the Roman Republic. His account began in the year 98  with the establishment of Emperors rather than elected consuls and he ended the history in 1590, a hundred and fifty years after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans which happened in 1453.

  Gibbon chose the year 1590, the year the ruthlessly efficient, architectural genius Pope Sixtus V died,  because he wanted to explore how the 15th and 16th Century Popes in their efforts to rebuild the ruined City of Rome had reappraised the Roman Empire and by so doing they had allowed themselves to enter a Renaissance, they'd given themselves hopeful look into the future. Edward Gibbon went on to suggest that by 1590 Rome was no longer a shadow of the glorious past cast on Europe, indeed by 1590 Europe was marching to a new drummer that became the Age of Reason.

  The other view describes an interstitial, a between spaces, where hope exists but can't be reached until something desperate happens.   

  

Sea People

Lion Tail

   If you use Rome or the British Empire or the right footwear as your cuddle bunny, if you're tempted by Napoleon, as Hegel and many an idealist were tempted, then in your understanding of Central Authority, or Monotheism, the mistake you're about to make is what I will call the Late Bronze Age Error.

 "We got bronze belt buckles, we got bronze adzes, we got it all, look at us, nothing can stop us now!"

  In this era of today, how long have we known that Western Modernity depends upon diesel fuel. How long have we been searching the interstitial for new spaces. How often have those new spaces looked like hard work and too much change as we wait for the Sea People to reveal our tomorrow.

  We, as is our tradition, because we cannot conceive of a space without diesel, will cling to a policy of colonial extraction. These days, unless our capital city is Washington DC or London we prefer not to use soldiers to quell the resistance, it's too destructive, veteran laden and expensive. 

  The Bronze Age was followed by the Iron Age, which began around 1200 BC, not that long ago. Iron is stronger, lighter and cheaper than bronze, so yippee! In the Near East the Iron Age itself slowed into a greater complexity of thought, monotheistic impulses, massive building programs and other monopolistic touchy-feely-ness around 600 BC. 

  This cradle of the Near East, holds the memory of that part of humanity that describes itself as civilized, and to this day it retains a pre-nation understanding which sees itself as belonging to family. Oh sure they have the Wompom of Djacooti with his twenty three wives, fourteen yachts and a City Block in New York, while you still draw your water from the well, but if you can see your blood line running through the Wompom's veins then so what, it's like being related to Charlton Heston or Mary Pickford . 

  Be brave, read history and learn, which you can't do unless you avoid Hollywood, Madison Avenue, television  and all that which the mathematics of a beaky hat holds dear. Yes indeed! In Arabia, when petroleum was discovered in 1938, the Banu Hanifa and their Wahhabi Priests would still be floor cleaners if it wasn't for a British Colonial Officer and Cambridge man named Harry St John Bridger Philby.

Henceforth I will be referring to the "R" word as the "H" word.

Drainfield

  Of the expressions available to the English Language, "Dumb as a Haddock," just like the word "Retard," is a fine example of how meanings drift over time. Here the better lesson is to accept that semantic drift, meaning changing over time, cannot and should not be prevented.

  "Dumb" as in deaf, dumb and blind, at one time reflected the idea of "Mute," unable to speak. This way the expression "dumb as a fish" meant as mute as a fish.

 A Haddock is a North Atlantic ocean fish in the Cod family. In parts of the British Islands, Dublin and South Wales for example, the word "cod," as in "he's a cod" or "it's a cod," means an unreliable, dastardly sort of person or deed, not to be trusted. A Haddock on the other hand can sometimes mean a purse, as in "I'll bet you a monkey to a Haddock!" A monkey being around five hundred guineas and a purse being not much more than a couple of shillings. 

  So here we are rushing to protect the skulduggery and underhanded maneuvering of those in the Sensitive Professions who moved to replace the splendidly expressive symbols of Moron, Idiot and Imbecile with a variation of the Latin retardare so as to poshify an employment opportunity when all along emanating from the State of Maine here in the United States is the wonderful muddle of the H word, as in "I heard the current Secretary of Defense is Dumb as a Haddock."

  Henceforth I will be joyously referring to the "R" word as the "H" word.

Raising the Children.

Ides of September Foxglove

  Strictly speaking the Ides of September would be the 13th of September. Mind you back when Ides of a month were a thing, instead of a poshnik making a Nancy-boy reference to Shakespeare's 19th Play, September would have been the seventh month of the Roman Year.

 nik of course is a Slavic suffix. And while there are some who might not believe me when I offer poshnik to a dictionary, you will find that the more formal definition of the word poshnik has so far been recorded thusly : "In internet culture, a poshnik refers to someone who is obsessed with luxury, high fashion, or acting overly upper-class."

  On the other hand a Gopnik, apparently, is a well-known slang term for lower-class, tie wearing street hoodlums found wandering around in one of the USA's major political parties. And we all know what a lipnik is.

 Oh yes, the internet of sixth formers, or sixth graders, as they broach the realities of meaning, like everyone else spend long useless years beating their heads against brick walls and whining like puppies, their hopeful little faces desperate for an expression that will impress the court.

Parasitic Arachnids.

Autumn Crocus (Winter Daffodil)

  The Tuesday of this week already looks bleak, as in hot. Without meaning to further gore the ox, I'll suggest it's a time of year when a simple mind as it patiently waits for the happy chance of a final curtain sees an opportunity to reflect favorably upon the bleak of a killing frost that might briefly retard the exuberance of arthropod populations, particularly the parasitic arachnids generally referred to as Ticks.

  In the simplicity of those olden days of right wing stone tablets, the book of Exodus set rules for when an ox injures or kills a person. It was a complicated and detailed list from the lips of a vengeful God. 

  The Innocent Ox scenario went this way : If your ox subjected an Israelite to a goring that resulted in the death of an Israelite, the ox was stoned to death and you were not allowed to eat the meat.

  The Dangerous Ox scenario went this way : If you knew your ox was prone to bad tempers and poor behavior and it gored someone to death, both you and your Ox were stoned to death. 

  My own view is this : If by chance you find death by stoning a particularly brutal and unnecessary sentence for any of God's creatures then, unlike The Lord, you've not been subjected to a season of tick bites.

 Don't be silly of course God approved of stoning as long as it was done outside the city or the camp and as long as one of the two witnesses to the offence threw the first stone. He once told Moses to stone a man to death for gathering sticks on the Sabbath, that's how serious narcissistic megalomaniacs can get when no one listens.

Wisdom hath builded her house with a Kalashnikov wearing Flip Flops.

White Snakeroot

  Where I live, Central Authority looks like a bunch of old white men with collars, ties and gray or grey suits - the weirder of them wear brown shoes - they all have a hard on for the culture of, if not the technology of the 18th Century and they are terrified of disobedient women, non-christians and socialism. 

  If you want to know why disobedient women, non-christians and socialism frighten them, you'll find the answer in loss of control, reduced power within the structures of a society that currently enable the wealthy property owner to keep a seat on the committee of the ruling class. Go ahead tremble!

  Stranger still, fifty years ago Central Authority looked and sounded the same, so please don't ask me to even think about assimilating. Back then of course it was also true that you can't buy courage or competence with money. 

  The title of TE Laurence's book The Seven Pillars of Wisdom comes from Proverbs : Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars. An observation Laurence made from his studies and passions for history of the Arabian Peninsular was an understanding of the kind of disciplines and developed wisdom required of a nomadic tribe surviving in the least forgiving parts of Arabia.

 It's a discipline and a wisdom, Laurence argued, that regularly takes Damascus and Baghdad but never keeps them.  The Fremen of Herbert's Dune ended when it rained. Arabia died when they drowned in oil. 

    

 

Creed

White Snakeroot and Eastern Cedar

   In my view monotheism in all its iterations is in the process of chiming it's own death knell. 

  Why do you say this?

  Because the new war lords in western society are called Billionaires and without a functioning creed there will be no Magna Carta.

  What is a creed?

  US Meanings from Miriam Webster : Creed - a formal statement, summary, or system of core beliefs and guiding principles.

  What do you mean by monotheism?

  A belief in a central authority.

Arendt's understanding of Freedom

Blue Mistflower (Wild Ageratum)

  Yes indeed, being "uprooted from meaning" results in populations becoming subject to meaning makers. Arendt's argument for the public square was to promote a meaning making that promoted pluralism in a society rather than versions of atomized Individualism, which Arendt saw as a breeding ground for tyranny, insisting instead that genuine freedom requires a shared, public world sustained by active citizenship.

 To go further into a sense of belonging, the purpose of belonging is security, feeling safe, being supported, and other multiples of wokeness, a symbol within the meanings of awake that entered the language of whitey from a population on the receiving end of attitudes that still see black people as runaway and dangerous slaves. Stay awake! 

  Invariably when life has a price in dollars and cents, the dream is found in the security of property, an exterior castle with iron gates and a moat, a picket fence, an ice machine and a swimming pool the neighbors can envy. An understanding of freedom that chains a mind to the security of the sort of bread and circus power structures that bury alive a couple of Vestal Virgins every time Hannibal crosses the Alps. 

Saint Teresa's Discalced Guides

Acapulco Wedelia sounds good

  Yeah though I walk through the shadow of doubt I will reach the divine presence within.

  Saint Teresa of Avila wrote guide books for her brothers and sisters. In her book, Interior Castle, a soul took a journey through seven mansions, it followed along miles of corridor visited hundreds of rooms on its way to heaven and the book earned Teresa a Doctorate from the Pope of Rome. 

  Prayer, Teresa had always claimed was both a vocal and mental training encapsulated by the Lord's Prayer. Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum, adveniat regnum tuum........ etc.

  And here we are, all these years later still trying to retrain the mind to better accept the interior castle and the big wide world, this time  with words like cognition, neuron, axon, dendrite, synapse, gilia, systemic collapse, DNA methyltransferases, methyl globs, gene start buttons...... etc.

  In these days, the idle, of whom there are many, squander the rewards of convenience by forgetting the frequency with which our bodies replace our cells. Every cell in your body is regularly replaced except your inner ear hair cells, your eye lens cells and the neurons in your Cerebral Cortex. The same inner ear hair cells, the same eye lens cells and the same neurons in your cerebral cortex last a lifetime.

 A cerebral cortex is the Top End, it manages those areas of the mind which are considered "higher functions."  A cerebral cortex has four lobes, the highest of the high lobes being the Frontal Lobe, which apparently is the master of thinking, problem-solving, planning, personality, and voluntary movement. 

 The process of teaching, or training the brain, is essentially a chemical process that revels in the plasticity of the brains capacity to strengthen and polish up new chemical connections. It's a continuous adaption, new connections benefit from being polished, and like the eight times table unless they are polished they may be quickly lost. 

  And hark the Herald Angels sing, if it's that simple, we can reproduce it, make it obedient, plug it into the electric, put it to work and make money out of it. 

  When Saint Teresa lay dying her final word were thusly: "O my Lord and my Spouse, the hour that I have longed for has come. It is time to meet one another." Not to be a Debbie Downer but there is a chance that meeting her spouse didn't happen for our most favorite Barefooted Carmelite.

Inner and outer

Goatsbeard will yellow

  Should we think of prediction as top down, see it as the past making assumptions about the present. Or should we think Saint Teresa of Avila's Inner Castle and explore prediction as the outside dominating the inside.

 There's a good chance none of this makes sense to anyone.

 Prediction is what happens next. You wake up in the morning and the top part of you, the most recent, the youngest bits of your brain, sigh before accessing your more mechanical, more ancient capacities like hearing, sight and smell. 

  Your Top, a relative juvenile, 3 to 4 hundred thousand years old,  knows how to get from it's bed, to the kettle in the kitchen, and on the way there, as an upright and decent male you'd pop outside to point Percy at the Banana Tree - boy pea is very good for the general wellbeing of Banana Plants.

 Your older self - which goes back to those happy years we all spent as air-breathing fish experimenting with furriness, a less imaginative time perhaps dominated by matter of fact mechanical senses, such as hearing, sight and smell - has information for you. It's quite obvious to them that not only has the Banana Tree disappeared, no sign of it ever having existed, but in the kitchen the kettle along with a packet of strong breakfast tea are nowhere to be found.

 Go ahead call this First Monday in September an example of systemic dissonance, the first step into a dystopia of confusion, sadness and possibly some sort of retardation. Or venture into the Inner Castle, re-write the narrative as a message from God. 

  

  

Dewey, the Inference Machine and an objectified populace

Fun With Gravel

  Ages ago, we're talking decades, back when Baxter was a bead in the wicked eye of a lonely aorta, we looked at how neuroscience interpreted aspects of the human way of being, a way of being that specializes in experiencing existence second by second. An existence in play that rebels against the disciplined understandings of working toward a sensible goal, as the painfully correct John Dewey and most all institutions of education would have us believe. 

 We swam around in the rather neat ways of thinking that suggest we people are constantly updating our view of the world, giving it a hard look and then comparing it with what our memory suggests is a view of the world as it was yesterday, or two seconds ago. Within this process we grasped that a mind has a capacity to predict what today - or now - should look like. This prediction emerges from a set of prior understandings, built slowly and often painfully over time and many hours spent in detention or on the dole line. 

 It's that isolated and distant castle that rules all and we had fun with Saint Teresa of Avila's insights into how we navigate our own Interior Castle if we'd ever been foolish enough to plan on a retirement in paradise. 

 Prediction, we tried to assure ourselves, is top down. There's a central control post, a big vein, perhaps a really bossy neuron, it could be a soul wanting to go home, it's a something, and do you know why science argues for a top down prediction of what today should look like. I'll tell you! Top Down is efficient, it saves energy, there's none of this committee libtarding around the Brie cheese and leaving the lights on because Chalky forgot his false teeth!

 Then when the senses, those undeserving underlings start going all Bayes Theory - posh math talk for Bottom Up - the command post, that well dressed sunshine of our lives, can be persuaded to weigh its prior understandings against today's sensory inputs. Staying awake gets expensive while inputs moan and complain, and yes indeed the be and end of all things will need two ham sandwiches followed by a caramel flavored ice cream, dancing girls and a couple of chewable antacids. Either that or a sharpie with which to change the forecast. 

  There are occasions when Bottoms Up - or sensory inputs - achieve what you and I might prefer to call a Sodom Interpretation of what you and I rather pompously call the real world. And when a Sodom interpretation from the cellar presses too mightily on The Top, it can sometimes breach the barrier of priors and when it does, it can be honestly read as social collapse.

 Here there's always a chance the messengers from the bottom will be locked in the strangling cupboard and forgotten, there's a call to the cavalry, and a committee of the ruling class makes laws that allows for the public execution of Luddites. And well worth remembering that far too often, priors with responsibility for the efficiency of accurately predicting today can become totally decoupled from reality. Loopholes help.

  Lucky for us in the underclasses, at the moment we're still allowed to call this sort of irreversible retardation, Systemic Dissonance as we quietly drink ourselves into a stupor and wonder what happened to guilt in a new world of education that's divided work and plays.

  To follow Kant and bring Hume back into the room we can be easily persuaded to believe that we people are inference machines, we never see "the thing in itself," and because we never see "the thing in itself," "the thing in itself" remains a creation of our mind. 

  I was almost four months old when the great educator John Dewey died. He cultivated one of those choir boy pervert middle partings for his hair. He developed his belief in Rational Empiricism while teaching at the University of Chicago which had been founded four years before he joined the faculty. And maybe it's just me but the Chicago School has, I'd argue, despite the passion of their claims to the contrary, always supported a Capitalist Elite and the widgetization - posh talk for objectification - of us people. 

Objects for Property Developers

Mooncarrot Maybe?

  If we're bold enough to question Dewey's assumptions about how we think, an agile yet less aggressively ambitious mind will enter the meanings contained within the word Teleological. Here we encounter the nightmare of teleological ethics and that brotherhood of ass-holes defined by utilitarianism. This so called common sense of backwardness, which when confronted quickly reverts to wishing on the star of deontological ethics......

  "What!"

  The Ancient Greeks, comrade! Happiness is Duty over Outcomes which bled into the Kantian supposition of pretty little rules that turn angels into pedants because, you know, categorical imperative just felt right. And then of course we have to look at the incessant dribble from the crotches of the evolutionary biologists, those owners of a second home in Colorado about whom not much good can be said........

 "Stop! What's wrong with you?"

 First of all Dewey had a depressing enthusiasm for the world Europeans were building north of Mexico and South of Canada. It was the sort of enthusiastic rah-rah that makes the mistake of assuming The Impossible It is on our side. Prelude to New Jerusalem. Golden City on a Hill. Breakfast with Bozo, or whichever one was the monkey. In short we people became objects for Property Developers, there was only one way to be, either a winner or a loser, nothing else mattered because nothing else needed to matter...... 

 "What's the second of all?"

  Call it the Black Prince, The Edward of Woodstock, either a chivalrous knight and brilliant leader of men or a brutal fanatic, depending on whether you share a narrative with Spain, France or England. Edward died in 1376 of what could have been battle fatigue but which was diagnosed as An Inflammation of the Bowels, a dysentery that afflicted him while he was battling The Spaniards and followed him to his deathbed.

The errors in Dewey's end purpose.

There

  More likely, I could well be wrong, yet I'll continue to suggested that in one way or another, John Dewey's approach to the distinctions between work and play figure large in current theories of education. In his How We Think he does rather lay down the law when he touches on the idea that work and play have a connection. The difference is play has no definite order, the thinking wanders, it chases squirrels. Work directs thinking toward particular goals, a teleology is explained by its end purpose.

  Kafka was bored reckless by his work, his nights were spent in a rented room with his pens and paper, looking for moments of ultimate release. He wrote to a friend about the joy he felt when the words became sentences that made him feel. Dylan Thomas was the same. His Black Cat Night spoke, it connected. 

  The trouble with work, is the draw between the difference between what Arendt call work and labor. Like Dewey, work "was thinking toward a goal." As for labor, Arendt saw it as the means to insure the necessities, a task generations of slaves had provided for generations of property owners.

 When a person pins their destiny to a futures market funded by venture capitalists time to reappraise Dewey's  assumptions about "how we think?"

The R Word

Jaroslav Hašek (1883-1923)

  The few may disagree with my contented roll into the phrase "impossible It" as a substitute for the little diddums idea of a ruling singularity where everything makes sense under the watchful eye of a creator. This adoption of an  all knowing unknown is an aspect of mental surrender to supply and demand curves as substitutes for peer review is so heinous in my view it genuinely deserves an "R" word. 

 Here, I think it worth exploring a sociolinguistic phenomenon known as a 'euphemism treadmill.'  To do that I'll paraphrase the Special Education Guide: 

  The word - Retard - originates with the Latin retardare, meaning to slow down or hinder, as in "Retardare that Train!" In the late 19th and mid-20th centuries, bushy tailed psychologists introduced the concept of mental retardation as a neutral, clinical diagnostic term. It was actually created to replace older and perfectly respectable terms like idiot, moron, and imbecile. These words had originally been serious medical classifications but thanks to our beloved euphemism treadmill the word "retard" quickly warped into a childish, both puerile and cretinous, taunt. Over the decades, the word "retard" suffered the exact same fate reserved for idiot, moron and imbecile as cheerfully the unwashed adopted this refreshing medical term "retard" as a newly rehearsed, well designed and legitimized explanation of stupid or foolish or useless jackass.

 The Good Soldier Švejk, a character from Jaroslav Hašek's collection of satirical stories, had been categorized by the Austro-Hungarian  Empire's conscription service as a Congenital Idiot. Švejk, especially when he ran foul of a non-commissioned office or an officer took every opportunity to introduce himself as a Congenital Idiot. Coming as it did from high authority, Švejk, surrounded as he was by the incomprehensible world of a private soldier in Hašek's First World War, had no issue with the category Congenital Idiot. It was a title that suited him, he was proud of it, it was one of the few things that made sense to him.

 

 

  

Domestication, taint tanning and the so called "farmers."

Tick Trefoil

  Once upon a time, and this might be hard to believe, The  Impossible It, became math, adding, subtracting, the square on the hippopotamus cankle and on into a set of symbolic interactions which were the polar opposite to the symbolic interactions of language.

 The two faiths have clashed, number has retreated to the home of the white coats, and language has been dressed up, given a dead rat authenticity by Grammarians as theater went to die in what are loosely referred to as musicals, usually with dancing before dance became a glorified version of death by violence with plenty of blood as a simplistic visual alternative to the spilling of passion.

 Give me a surrey with a fringe on top just so long as the sheepdog dies in slow motion so we can all have a good cry  As for Civilization it all went wrong in the very late Stone Ages, early Bronze Ages when the materialists of agriculture successfully turned people, animals and plants into soulless objects.

  Go ahead, blame the boys, I will, thick as frogs on the new girl, it was their time to shine, as the ultimate chick magnet became twenty acres, a winter's worth of wheat, barley, maybe a goat to milk and a something dashing in metal that cut meat and killed other boys who tried to take your sourdough starter.

  For those interested this current homoerotic fashion for communal taint tanning found in the less attractive corners of what in the USA is still referred to as the GOP, may harken back to the Neolithic collapse of diversity in the human Y chromosome roughly six thousand years ago. 

  So what might the moral be?

  Don't blame the several million years of Paleolithic Nomadic Excellence for the decline of our species, blame the damage done to the sense of place granted us by the endless creaking of farmers.

  

Titans aren't that bright

Gravel Truck Stuck

  Martin Luther died in the February of 1546. He was 62 years old. In 16th Century Europe while the average age was something between 30 and 35 years old, if you made it through your childhood and teenage years you had a very good chance of reaching your 50's or 60's or even your 70's. Michelangelo was 88 when he died in the February of 1564. Back then, teens, tweens and kiddywinks dropped like flies.

  Probabilities comrade! The security of the average if you prefer. The impossibility of trusting a Black Swan to grace your kitchen floor, and yet we all wish, hope and indulge those sort of symbolic expressions that make money for casinos. 

  The understanding of miracles as real includes a faith in the idea that hope and wishing make things real. Thoughts and prayers, if you prefer. It runs the gauntlet that permits evil to be real, an existing something or other that allows for good to be real. 

  A dilemma for AI in a world that sacrifices so much and regularly to the improbable is for AI an existence solely within probabilities. Only an impossible it that knows all, can ever be correct.  

"Such is the pathway to the stars."

Newish Bovver Boots

  The written symbol 'career' means something like this : "A long term, rosy cheeked, professional journey through a succession of employment opportunities within a particular industry or field."

  Good luck with that Nancy because the symbol 'career' sounds like : "Make me safe, give me purpose, light my life and I'll role over play dead and do anything for you." As a result, over the generations, we people have tried to create a symbol for 'Help' which as a written form looks something like this : "Chapter One - Morality."

  These vague utterances are not blessed by the precision Russell yearned for in language, but close enough to the game theory our Patron Saint Wittgenstein proffered as his rule of thumb when examining how meaning is exchanged between hominid minds. I've always felt sorry for the innocent, open heartedness of Wittgenstein's lesson planning following his decision, after the second world war, to return to teaching the Cambridge elite. Not only was Wittgenstein a Jew in England with a thick Austrian accent, he'd long ago surrendered his wealth to his search for truth and he'd once tried to explain to his super brilliant, fantastically intelligent, upper crusty next generation of leaders and oligarchs that if the lion could speak English they'd understand no better what the lion was saying.

 Our issue of course has far less to do with a purity of thought that dreams beautiful in its reach for a per ardua ad astra - sic itur ad astra, if you're Canadian - and much more to do with the ten to twenty five years of training a splendidly flexible hominid mind endures as it fits itself into this or that power structure that lies within a set of cultural beliefs that will always work best when totally unsupported by facts.

  Yes indeed - "Give me a red Corvette!"

  The "in the beginning" of faith has the charm of myth, only recently has it included the old testament certainties of "in the beginning was the Chicago School of Economics," what Paul Krugman has referred to as a product of the Dark Ages.

  So why not "Give me a Data Center" and let's open a new chapter in Hell.

The pigmentless Hummingbird doesn't see through blue eyes

Albino Hummingbird is on the left

  We've enjoyed David Hume's more happy-go-lucky attitude, his skeptic at the billiard table, rational grasp of what Individualism might be. The Calvinist, the individual answering to the gates of heaven, definition was in his view a religious nuttery which over the years has caused a damage to our intellect by attempting to create an unwarranted concreteness which Hume, who died in August of 1776, disparaged as humorless, or perhaps humourless, form of sloppiness of confidence which in Hume's view was remedied by a solid breakfast along with a good Tawny Port and lots of it.

  When you look across the savannah - and I don't mean the tourist trap in the North American US State of Georgia where the State Bird is a Brown Thrasher, I mean the notion of freedom as a wilderness floating endless toward the horizons, the occasional thorny tree, a giraffe, lions chasing hartebeast while cheetah laugh as they wonder what you or I might taste like and so on - what you'll see of us people is a head with a big brain on stilts that takes ten to twenty five years to grow into a tool making clever clever with a certificate of achievement that entitles it to a career, it has a union if it's lucky or professional body to preserve its set of living standards, a stability, a zoo for giraffe, lions, hartebeast and cheetah that's sometimes mistaken for an entitlement.

  Entitlement, whether earned or unearned, is, to use the Scottish word as a tribute to Hume, the ball peen beating thinner and thinner with hammer of personal possibilities in the increasingly odious ranges, hills and vales of "I am Blessed" by the deceits that keep me from even trying to be honest. 

  

  

Garden Paths and Battle Plans

Garden Path

  So long as the drowning of government remains fashionable in the higher echelons of western society, individualism's current self defeating personality disorder will never be an officially recognized social ailment. And as a result the standard model of society as a whole remains increasingly welded to the daytime television game show theory of social development. 

   I wanted to mention a World War One battle that began in and around the 4th July of 1918 between Central Power German forces and the Australian Army with help from recently arrived United States Infantry, the Royal Air Force - to the stars and beyond - and Royal Tank Corps. The allied commander was an Australian called John Monash.

  If there is a point about this relatively small battle, it was  the allied commanding officer's use of what's called combined arms, a battle tactic that after almost four years of Trench Warfare was finally adopted by the commanders at the Third Battle of Picardy. And here the thing about Combined Arms, for it to work effectively, commanders have to trust individual soldiers to make decisions, which means soldiers have to be trusted with battle plans.

 As I sit here waiting for the first frosts to relieve me of the burdens of garden chores, I wonder what the battle plans are.