Gloss: Y

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Year

Even our science is still ridiculously anthropomorphic and earth-centered. A "year"? If a year is the time it takes for one full rotation of our planet about the sun, and our planet is some 4.6 billion such rotations old, what meaning can it have to talk about a year in times before there was such a planet? How can there be "feet" before any confirmed instance of a creature with feet?

It sure would be handy if we took the time to invent a unit of time that wasn't so infantile, parochial ... self-centered. A "second"! What, in the universe, is a "second"? Same with all our units. Find something in physics, something with measurable regularly, and use That as a standard. "Minutes," "hours," "days" ... Infantile. Even days is a local illusion.

Gloss: V

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Vanity

All is vanity, saith the Preacher.

If all is vanity then anything the Preacher can say is likewise vanity. Then anything God could do is vanity: or the Devil. Anything Newton said, or Stephen Hawking ...

Watch out for all statements. Once a statement is self-referencing, logic spins to chaos.

Gloss: T

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I take time now to address one other thing. The "th" initiating "thing" suggests Scandinavian origins. Sure enough, etymologists trace the word to Icelandic, the oldest discernible meaning having been a political meeting. Now the word seems to mean anything, anything at all. How can one say anything about the word without involving the word? I can be punning or not: it's nearly unavoidable.

What I wish to emphasize is that the word does duty in English for
extensional, material, objects as well as for intensional non-objects. (See the pkTools blog for both "extension" and "intension.") (Note the spelling!) If the rocks in your garden are "things," then how can abstract non-things also be "things"? Is the "truth" a "thing"? Is the "soul" a "thing"? Is "God" a "thing"?

What is this thing called love?
and

Kick at the rocks, Sam Johnson,
Break your bones;
But cloudy, cloudy
is the stuff of stones.

Richard Wilbur

Shouldn't an alarm go off? shouldn't we have some signal for non-thing "things"? Some inflection, some linguistic color? Wouldn't that be more important than distinguishing "he," "she," or "it"? I propose a pair of prefixes: let i-thing be used if the entity in question is intensional; and x-thing if it's physical or extensional.

Since we generally think of things as being physical (however inappropriately), perhaps the x prefix could be left unused, as understood. We'd do well though to insist on i-thing for non-material things. Such a distinction would soon force open warfare between religious fundamentalists and the more liberally religious. I believe that would be a good thing provided that the war be to the death. If the liberals win, evolution would have advanced a notch. If the fundamentalists win, we'd go extinct all the faster, possibly in time to save the biosphere for something else.

There's no such a thing as a thing

Of course if the fundamentalists were right, then none of their modern weapons would work, radio and TV would be unable to broadcast their propaganda, there should be only one time zone (Jerusalem based?) ... Missionaries in China would have to do matins in the dark and vespers in the morning.

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Time

See my note on Prigogine (and certainty, and time, and science ...) among my school stories at InfoAll: 2009 April 10.

I've written a great deal on time since then, but, especially since I've been arrested, jailed, censored, bankrupted, it needs reposting and coordination. That's what I'm in the midst of now.

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Translate

Be aware that pk seldom uses the word translate without having in mind the medieval version of the concept. The bulk of the time the Chruch and its religious talked about "translation" – no matter what language was being used at the time – Latin most likely – they had in mind a change-of-state, specifically an elevation of state, not just a difference of grammar or verbiage: one desires to be translated into heaven ... the religious wishes the sinner would be translated into a saint ...

Scan any pk use of the word for meta-change: not just French to English; but water to steam, matter to energy ... bullshit to good sense ...

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Truth

Is truth a "thing"? Can the court be serious when it demands that you tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? Has anyone in the history of the species been competent to do such a thing? Moses? Socrates? Jesus? Newton? Darwin? Freud? Einstein? (Well, maybe Shakespeare: if you can find it.) Considering society's record with even those latter stars, shouldn't a witness be protected from such a question, especially in a court room where the Constitution is supposed to protect citizens from self-incrimination?

Has any good thing ever happened to a would-be truth teller?

Modern societies have a new protection against those who would tell the truth. It is a new superstition with its own new brand of priests. It's called psychology. Its priests have a new label to brand would-be truth tellers with: the Cassandra complex!

Truth:
Whatever the group about to burn you at the stake
Is saying it believes at that moment.

See my Truth Modules at pkTools.

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Truth

Is truth a "thing"? Can the court be serious when it demands that you tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? Has anyone in the history of the species been competent to do such a thing? Moses? Socrates? Jesus? Newton? Darwin? Freud? Einstein? (Well, maybe Shakespeare: if you can find it.) Considering society's record with even those latter stars, shouldn't a witness be protected from such a question, especially in a court room where the Constitution is supposed to protect citizens from self-incrimination?

Has any good thing ever happened to a would-be truth teller?

Modern societies have a new protection against those who would tell the truth. It is a new superstition with its own new brand of priests. It's called psychology. Its priests have a new label to brand would-be truth tellers with: the Cassandra complex!

Truth:
Whatever the group about to burn you at the stake
Is saying it believes at that moment.

See my Truth Modules at pkTools.

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Today I have a far greater respect for the discipline "psychology" than I did when I penned the above: only a few years back. That, you see, is because I have been reading Robert Anton Wilson prose in addition to Robert Anton Wilson fiction. His Quantum Psychology is a master work in my chosen field of Thinking Tools (see pkTools): that is, of epistemology. He calls it psychology. He ALSO calls it epistemology. Wilson's Prometheus Rising, his Ph.D. thesis in psychology, is as provocative as it is stimulating: and leads one against the repressive tide against knowing the work of Dr. Timothy Leary. I highly recommend that you spend some time at DeOxy.org.

Once there, I hope you'll see how closely Leary "psychology" and Wilson "psychology" parallel pk's work in Semiotics and Macroinformation. In a word, we know nothing, see nothing, feel nothing, think nothing ... but through our nervous systems. Reality is a set of mental models: and it's time we learned something responsibly about our minds.

Gloss: Ss

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Self

A macro-fact: a wholly intensional artifact of macroinformation. (See my Macroinformation blog, and curse the fed for censoring my Macroinformation.org along with all of my other domains.)

The self is informational, mental: a mental construct. But so are any of our abstractions, no matter how manifestly material they seem to be: star, moon, state, church ... God.

We have no contact with "reality"; only symbols, and symbols of symbols.

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"Some Kind Of ..."

I first noticed this phrase as invidiously iterative in crumby science fiction movies: They have some king of ray gun ... It was some kind of robot ... some kind of cyborg ...

Now I notice it everywhere: I think he must be some kind of radical ... some kind of Communist ...

In many of its manifestations it's a code phrase. It means that the subject is not one of us.

It means that the weapon wielded by the alien is not recognizable to reasonable men. Therefore, it's not fair, it's black-magical: it's cheating. Therefore, the Nigger, Jew, Communist, Terrorist ... is not subject to the Bill of Rights, to due process, to the presumption of innocence, not deserving of fair play ... We don't have to honor any treaties with him, not even remember Rules of Engagement and so forth.

Alas, the code phrase doesn't appear merely in B s-f flicks: you'll hear it (if you're listening) occasionally from academics, from lawyers, from bureaucrats ...

It's a labeling. It's a subtractive label. It labels the other as OTHER.

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I write something, I mount it: reading it later I find errors, overstatements, typos, infelicities ... This time, bkMarcus came back at me with a flaw before I'd even had a chance to find it myself. Good: I wish I was always caught before I notice my own guilt for myself. This way it can get fixed pronto.

I've already added the necessary qualifying word or two above, and now add a bkMarcus counterweight:

Some kind of wonderful ...

Though I had not meant my statements "absolutely" I had made them (too) absolutely. Point remains: beware the potential pejorative emotional content of the phrase.

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Actually, a better point will emerge once I make time to rewrite the whole thing: the phrase does consistently invoke a sense of alien: too often "the alien" is meant by xenophobic mouths to fall on xenophobic ears.

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Spectra

Many things that we think of as x-things (extensional things: see Glossary / "thing" below) are not only
i-things (intensional things, see "thing" below), they are spectra as well. Just as north is a direction, not a place, the political left and right are neither places nor things; they are directions along a far from two-dimensional spectrum.

I'll shortly develop a module in which I'll argue that the same applies to many of our paired words: good & bad; good & evil; light & dark ... I'll also shortly argue that however much Homo sapiens's development of natural language explains what anthropologists term "The Great Leap Forward," [see Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee]. I say that continued failure to generalize appreciation of the advantages of artificial languages will shortly precipitate A Great Downfall. I'll develop that point as a part of Macroinformation (with Macroinformation.org censored, see blog of that name).

Actually, I now have jotted modules on spectra:Spectra: The Topological Irresponsibility of Common Metaphors. See elsewhere in pkTools.

And see Mi's many Spectra modules (not all of them yet recreated at the blog).

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Superstition / Religion

Superstition: Someone else's religion

Religion: Your own superstitions

Gloss: Rs

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Religion

Religion is one of many costumes worn by the imaginative predator / omnivore Homo sapiens. We wear such costumes for any of a number of purposes: to try on a role, to dress up and pretend, to deceive our enemies, to deceive our prey, to deceive our friends ... to deceive ourselves: even occasionally to accent some "truth."

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Rights

Rights are something for uniformed and armed thugs to joke about.

Rights are comedy material for kleptocrat cops.

Gloss: Ps

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Patriotism

Waving a flag with one hand and picking pockets with the other:
that's your patriotism.
Notorious

Fervent belief that the group translates (qv) sin, elevates it to exaltation, transforms bullies, thieves, liars, and genocides into heroes.

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Peace

Peace is the temporary interlude between wars.

"At peace," "peaceful" ... These may have meaning in the natural world. Peace as a political goal has meaning only in the world of competing kleptocracies.
I'll recreate my War & Peace: Annihilation or Control? at a blog ASAP.

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Proof, Prove

Proof was one of the first concepts discussed at the inauguration of my teaching directory. That treatment was rudimentary and I've added a module (at pkTools). Here I wish merely to highlight the disparate origins of the concept. In feudalism you proved something by combat: God would give the best blows to the right. You think we've left feudalism behind us? Look at what lawyers do in court. It's still a theoretically God directed combat.

When we hear the word though, we're more likely to think that decisions are based on reason, such as in mathematics or science. Now mathematicians can "prove" things: up to their ability to be rigorous within a tautology. Scientists know that they can't prove anything beyond doubt for the simple reason that the evidence is never complete. Time would have to end for anything to be proved: by which time it would be too late to be able to do it. Even then the evidence would be finite. Universe is over? So? It was still finite. One would have to have the evidence from all possible universes.

The alternative is to be humble, to say: "given the evidence as we know and understand it ..."

Gloss: Nigger

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"Nigger"

I use this offensive word freely throughout my expository writing, Knatz.com, for example, always meaning just one thing: and that thing is not racial. (See Race, IonaArc, 2009 December.) Common ideas of "race" are bullshit. I use it socially, economically, and politically. By it I mean the same thing Jean Paul Sartre meant when he said that "A Jew is anyone that anyone else calls a Jew." Hitler's goons didn't give theology tests; if they wanted to deny your humanity all they had to do was call you a Jew. Then they could arrest you, beat you, rob you, detain you, kill you.

Consider: name calling in general sets up the people or person named for dismissal, for denial, for mistreatment of a range of kinds. Humans are not nice, not fair, not honest, and far from any ideal of intelligence. Bear that in mind, no matter what.

Jew, nigger, gook ... The effective meaning is the same: social. Individuals use name magic in this way, so do groups. Jew, nigger, gook ... are contemporary secular manifestations of Witch, heretic ... free thinker ... or just plain thinker!

Don't forget that pk has long called himself "the voluntary nigger." Though when the fed arrested me, jailed me, censored my writing (after sitting benignly blind while I wasn't published in the first place, was illegally fired, my proposals stolen and perverted, shunned in general), they first called me names: accused me of extortion, convicted me of it! I expected them to accuse me of terrorism: an expected response because I was accusing the state of monopolizing terror!

Gloss: Ms

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Majority

If out of one hundred people voting on something, fifty-one vote for, forty-eight vote against, and one abstains, then the fifty-one "for" have the "majority." They have a mathematical majority.

Under certain legal systems, if I turn twenty-one, I come into my "legal" majority. I can now claim the estates, moneys, titles held in trust for me since my father (or uncle, or whoever) died however many years ago.

If the numerical majority is color blind then I may be the only one, or one of a few, to see the bluebird: the majority sees a gray-bird.

If I control the weapons, the jails, the police, the courts, the academics ... the numerical majority will call it a bluebird. Because I have the political majority.

If I have the one and only hydrogen bomb, I will soon control the weapons, the jails, the police, the courts, the academics ... But already I have the majority: of coercion.

On the other hand if I am both intelligent and imaginative, have both integrity and honesty, if my honesty is simultaneously intellectual and spiritual, if I am careful about both definitions and facts ... then I have neither a political, a legal, nor a numerical majority. Not only that, I will have no meaningful vote. For the political, legal, and numerical majorities will never hear a word I say.

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Man

Homo sapiens: a predatory ape, running in gangs, commonly deluded.

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Obituary?

He talked a lot.
Nigel Calder

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Memory

Once you understand something, you don't have to remember it: you live it.

Memory can erode. Memory can be covered over: like geological strata. Buried memories may sometimes be unburied.

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Macroinformation

Macroinformation is to information what beauty is to a woman.

See Macroingormation blog, what's left over after Macroinformation got censored by the fed.

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Miracle

Miracle. The miraculous. What a deep emotional resonance it has!

What does it mean? It means that whatever it is happened (or seemed to happen) without our being able to explain how.

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Any society with a population greater than some small threshold will naturally divide into subsets: the largest will continue to see a miracle even after smaller subsets have explanations to offer. No society will have a population uniformly competent to appreciate or refute the candidates. Miracle fits not all, but most.

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Music

A scale is a counting system ...

A rhythm is a counting system ...

Music is a coherent set of discrepancies among counting systems.

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Discrepancy is key. Discrepancy as in macroinformation!
Note that scales are odd numbered: 7! 5!

Note that the 7-base scale becomes even if you count All of the accidentals: 12! (A mystic number, the base for Babylonian math.)

Note that once you make an octave the number becomes even: and THEREFORE there is no middle! The V is oddly between the two tonics. The V is up 5 from the lower tonic, but down IV! from the higher tonic.

Odd, odd, odd. Asymmetry within the symmetry.

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And as you get into the other scales, the weird minors, the ascending scale may be additionally different from the descending scale!

These few differences spawn infinities of additional differences.

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Myth

Myth: truth told in a form which passes censorship because no one sees its applciation to them: to the culture.

Can you distinguish between myth in its degenerated modern sense of falsehood—and—myth in its classical sense of cultural truth: truth beyond fact: the essence of a world view? My Knatz.com / Teaching / Scholarship / Myth / directory is yet to be recreated at a blog.

Gloss: Leadership

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Leadership

The leader, when you turn in a new direction, is the one walking ahead of you: the one you perceive to be walking the furthest ahead of you.I paraphrase something I read in the early 1970s while beginning FLEX (see InfoAll blog). The emphasis on perception is added by me. We see that person ahead of us: we don't know what that person sees. Plato had antecedents, so did Abraham. At some point the antecedent isn't a person. And our cosmology is far too primitive to know what if anything precedes a hyper-string. So we imagine beginnings ...

We live by picking up the belongings of the dead as they fall.
Thomas Perry

2003 01 25

I just received an email from a reader who quoted a mentor:"If you continue in the direction you are going, there are not going to be many people there." Followed by a chuckle, "Of course, we've already determined that there weren't many people where you came from."

Gloss: K

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Kleptocracy:


not just government by theft;government by the institutionalization of theft
Visit my pkKlep blog. Though until I can recreate the rest of my fed censored Knatz.com via blogs such as this one, all my blogs are mere fragments. But then Knatz.com had been hugely incomplete at best. A few percent up is better than nothing.

It can't help my intended beneficiaries, the damned, because they prove to insist on damnation, falsify records, repress testimony.

Gloss: I

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"Is"

Watch out for words attributing essence or identity to something. English Prime selects "is" for its prime synecdoche.
The little word is has its tragedies; it marries and identifies different things with the greatest innocence; and yet no two are ever identical, and if therein lies the charm of wedding them and calling them one, therein too lies the danger. Whenever I use the word is, except in sheer tautology, I deeply misuse it; and when I discover my error, the world seems to fall asunder and the members of my family no longer know one another.

George Santayana

Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas ... routinely misled themselves by their grammar. Until, if ever, if possible, a rational language is forged – and all then achieve competence in it, sentient (ahem) Homo sapiens is simply stuck.

Paul Knatz

Hi, Paul Knatz here: blackballed scholar, institutional critic. I offered a cheap low-tech internet in 1970, hoping (with Ivan illich) to obviate government-mandated schooling (and to obviate government itself!) Now I'm old and broke. I've been arrested, censored ... forbidden even to report what was done to me. I do so here at risk: but no greater risk really than I took with my first breath (or that came with my first answered prayer).

Today, 2009 January 9, I create this new blog in order to try to coordinate my several blogs as I use them to attempt restoring files from my beleaguered former domains: Knatz.com, Macroinformation.org, PKImaging.com, InfoAll.org, and AgainstHierarchy.org.

Those were my domains; the blogs were
IonaArc
Macroinformation
InfoAll
pkBowdlerall at blogspot.com. Recently added comeInsTic
paulknatz
pkTools
and pkKlepThus enter "http://www." on the URL address line of your broswer then add "the blog name, dot, blogspot.com." Like this:http://www.IonaArc.blogspot.com.
Local links don't always work at blogspot.com, but here they are again:
Iona Arc
Macroinformation
InfoAll
PaulKnatz
InsTic
pkTools
pkKlep
pkBowdlerA temporary blog is for the Highlands Senior Center

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Knatz.com had nearly two thousand quotes (several hundred of them of pk) in nearly sixty files, with still more quote files at other domains. I shall now begin restoring some of them:

First up:
Quotes: from pk
Quotes: About pk
Quotes: More from pk
At Macroinformation:Information Quotes

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Note that Knatz.com and my other domains employed hypertext artfully. Blogs do fine with text, and also allow the mixing in of graphics; but pk used K. to make concrete poems of modules: the layout was part of the message, the structure of the whole was a huge part of the message.

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2011 01 23 I redo the above and repost it at 2008 01 01.