Community Stories

We don't live in communities; we inhabit state-interferred with
Failures-
at-Community.

Knatz.com began telling pk personal stories in the Personal section. Stories I saw as related to deschooling got told in my "Teaching" section: Knatz.com / Teaching / FLEX /

I now believe that pk's personal stories concerning failure at community, at human conviviality, should be located at Knatz.com / Teaching / Society / NoHier / HierCon / with its folders / School/ Jail/ Army/ Community/ ... Thus I'll squeeze such, including stories newly told, into this or that time slot of my PaulKnatz blog, Knatz.com still knocked down by the fed censorship. Someday I hope all could be reorganized at a new Knatz.com.

Meantime: I tell community stories here in the 2010 August time slot. That is, I'm beginning them today, 1011 01 17 but posting them as though I'd written them last August.

I begin with landlord stories. I'll tell them in any order but then put them in chronological order, all squeezed into 2010 August.

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Knatz.com, InfoAll.org, Macroinformation.org, PKImaging, com, AgainstHierarchy.org, several thousands of essays, stories, reprints, graphics, were halted by my arrest for posting a satire which the addressee and the fed conspired to misread. My five domains were obliterated at my sentencing, 2007 February, where my public defender, having convinced me, possibly rightly, that I'd never get out of jail alive, or be able to tell what happened, if I didn't pead guilty, allowed the court its head to destroy me by introducing zero relevant evidence. Fair trial means the defense helps hold the victim still.

But that's alright: human beings are not competent to judge. God will show that at Judgment, as though it needed showing. If there is no Judgment, if the truth will never be shown to humans, that's alright too: we'll just be dead and gone, with no proper memorial. (Why should we have a memorial? We have one: in the Christian religion, which not three Christians understand.)

Meantime, my money evaporated, my business destroyed, all my testimonies obliterated, I try to restore Knatz.com (and other pk domain materials) to the pk blogs not censored by the state: adding other blogs, new since 2007, for the purpose.

Alphabetically:
CybRev
InfoAll
InsTic
IonaArc
Macroinformation
PaulKnatz
pkKlep
pkTheo
pkTools
pKnatzQuotes

Featuring by Importance:
pkToolsNothing is more important to the possibility of human survival than the proper development of intelligence. pk comments on some basic Thinking Tools.
MacroinformationNothing exists in the human mind except by information, as information. We think we see rocks and trees and cities; no, we see, we think, we are information. We grossly misunderstand everything without my theory of Macroinformation (a particular Thinking Tool).
InsTicInstitutions come to serve ends incompatible with their charter. Illich was the great critic of institutions: pk expands on Illich.
InfoAllpk's Ivan Illich and deschooling materials spun off from Knatz.com to InfoAll.org. First the blog supplemented: now the blog tries, weakly, to substitute.
IonaArcKnatz.com's original supplementary blog
PaulKnatzRecreates Knatz.com stuff not extended to IonaArc
pkKleppk comments on kleptocracy. I showed a way around kleptocracy, I got destroyed for my trouble.
pkTheoThe bulk of my messages have always been cosmological, theological, epistemological.
pKnatzQuotesGathering and further editing Knatz.com's quotes files: quotes by Speaker, quotes by Topic, quotes by pk.
Other pk blogs of receding importance:
pkBowdlerstillborn pk self-censorship: sex comments, etc.
HSCenterpk created this blog to show the Highlands Senior Center what could be done with a blog, what could be done with a domain: a waste of time: they just sabotaged my work.

Truth Teller: Percentage

We tend too easily to think in absolutes. The truth is more likely to be fractional.

Not true or false, but more than half true, more than half false.

I propose that the truest speaker at best speaks only fractional truth, that the most abased liar is not 100% wrong. Emphatically I add that the assumption that humans can judge the truth of much, or even will ever be able to judge the truth of much, has enormous problems of verification.

---

I was raised a Christian, repeating that for the N^th time. I was told that the church introduced us to the Bible, guided us on how to read it, how to understand, how to be saved, told us that the Bible was true, that God was truth, that as Christians we were allied with the truth. Fill a kid with enough abstractions, the kid'll swallow almost anything as true: For God so loved the world, parallel lines never meet. Was your childhood much different? These days it's our secular indoctrination that marks us the most: we're Americans, we're free, we're educating ourselves ... like nuts and bolts on an assembly line. The propaganda of the school board is the truth.

So. I'm not the first Christian, or the first American, to believe, while In the clutches of the propagandists, that I am associated with the truth. Associate a kid with something and the kid will confuse himself with that something. Jesus said "I am the truth," clearly Jesus had been a kid who had been to school.

It's not entirely my invention that I identify not only with God and the Bible and with Jesus but with the Truth: always have, can't stop me.

So how come I'm not just like you? How come you're so very different from me? Have you spent your life writing about God? Not getting published? Finally publishing yourself? getting shunned? getting beat up>? getting arrested? censored?

When I got beat up my lawyer said, "You invented the internet!" True, but that's not the subject here.

When I got arrested and jailed my lawyer (public defender, the shunned can't hire lawyers), said, "You're a truth teller!" Exactly. (Bravo!) (Both lawyers struck me as smart in those moments (both behaved like morons once addressing the court)!) (Does the court assume that the corpses it failed to defend from lynching in life were truth tellers? all those Christians? all those niggers? all those anarchists?)

As a kid, repeating what the church told me, I was a truth teller. We were all truth tellers. As a student at Columbia I was a truth teller among truth tellers. The University didn't just own race tracks and slums in South America, we were truth tellers (that's why the fed gave us a cyclotron!)

Today, your and your kids sit in front of the TV, read the paper, read the right best sellers: truth tellers all.

Except for my last couple of questions:
Jesus got crucified as a truth teller. I was shunned, beat up, arrested, censored, shunned all the more. How come you live in a nice house? drive five cars? Where are the nail holes in your hands? Where are the nail holes in Columbia's hands.

---

These days what tickles truth teller pk, fractionally, all fractions, is the idea of humans, Original Sinners, kleptocrats, robots for compulsory schooling, cannibals of Christ, deluding themselves that humans can know or tell the truth! Newton, Darwin, Einstein ... the Bible. Is any of it 100% true? You mean there's no difference between the map and the territory? You mean the symbol is the thing?!

---

Semiotics. We're talking, we're thinking: we're using symbols, our bodies, our brains are processing signals: the matter composing us may be symbols, signals being processed ...

Theo-cosmological morons pretending we're real.

Gregory Bateson showed us that the truth could be reversed, evoking less error if we inverted science and talked about error receding more than truth advancing. What Newton said wasn't truth; it was less false than anything preceding it had ever been. What Einstein said wasn't true, it was less false than what Newton had said.

If we can avoid being 100% false, we've really accomplished something. I believe I have; but remember: I used to believe I was Christian!

More Church Stories

My Pastor story was sort of a foundation church story at Knatz.com, and I just recreated it here ahead of the others. Understand, there are many not yet told. I now forecast a few, told and to be told:

In Hilton Head Island the woman who'd asked to support me while I wrote my first novel was keeping me as a boy toy and not letting me write. She didn't even give me a place to plug in the typewriter. I thought an objective third party might help, she agreed to see a Presbyterian minister with me, but then she must have bribed him, he proved to be very far from objective: another betrayer of Christ wearing the cloth.

In Lamberville NJ, still starving (though then over a third novel), I introduced myself to an anglican priest as a disciple of Jesus, a disciple of Ivan Illich, told him about my writing, my truthful divinity fiction. He introduced me to a social worker, the latter promised to get me fed, get me housed, get me on welfare: go to such and such a motel and wait for her there. That's the last I ever heard from either of them: no food, no shelter, no welfare, just lies. Did they even know they had betrayed me? I doubt it.

Here in Sebring FL the Unitarian pastor, Andy Conyer, has betrayed his ministry with me more than twice. I'll supply details. Another broken promise was the most recent.

Here in Sebring a Jesuit priest at St. Catherine's Roman Catholic Church promised to put me in touch with a priest more likely than himself to be able to get me in touch with the Church in Brazil, where Ivan Illich, my colleague, had had the most divine revolutionary friends, with an aim to getting my political asylum there. Another lie: I think he was just getting rid of me.

What did I expect? He was still with the Church: Illich had been defrocked. I was telling these priests that they had failed both God and Christ. Of course they didn't want anyone to hear me. That's why I'm unpublished, have had few intelligent dialogues, especially since 1970.

The joke has it that all the friars are in hell and up the devil's ass hole. It ain't just friars!

---

Knatz.com wove pk stories throughout the modules, then also collected pk stories in the Personal folder, then moved pk's personal stories illustrating the conflict between hierarchical society and the "Christian" goal of conviviality to the Teaching folder, but also had a section in the Personal stories folder of stories about others, stories where pk was repeating some one else's story. One of those yet to be told at Knatz.com I'll forecast here: it's very much about hierarchy defeating conviviality:

When I was assaulted in my residence park by the park manager in June 1997 and the police did next to nothing, a friend suggested that I compare notes with the head of the local militia, David Chapman. I failed to connect at first with David Chapman, later I learned why: he was in jail. Dave headed the militia alright, and also headed his own church, out of his home. Dave was the pope of his religion, his house was his church. The state is supposed to leave churches alone: though they don't have to if the congregation is too small to carry weight. Dave drilled his militia men in armed defense with it understood that the invader could be cops, local or federal, or soldiers, local, federal, or foreign. The cops invaded his church, pistol whipped him, and dragged his bloody body to jail.

Dave seems to be now, the last time I communicated with him, as then, a nut: but so what? How does one being odd license the government thugs to beat one up? Well, of course no one knew that the cops had done it: at least not via the papers, not via the local TV ...

When I was arrested, the arrest was mentioned in the paper, but not as the cops terrorizing and threatening the saint of Christian conviviality, disciple of Ivan Illich, philosopher, writer, inventor of the internet; no: the cops had arrested a mass murderer terrorist: or some such lie: I didn't see the article, only had it reported to me, a year and a quarter later, by my landlord (the current, good, one; not the one who may have had me attacked).

Judas

So much of my biographical information on line quoted admiring support from readers. Billie MacDonald for example called pk his "living intellectual hero." Richard Wall wrote that I had been and was still ahead of my time. See my http://pKnatzQuotes.blogspot.com for those and other examples.

But in 1970 when I offered a cheap now tech internet as an alternative to state-run education a few years of fund-raising efforts by a dozen volunteers failed to exceed two thousand dollars total. I've now used the government's plagiarized internet to tell the story for twenty years. My efforts raised zero additional dollars, and have been been federally censored, me put in jail, my online regular business destroyed. Billie MacDonald for one had promised me to see that Knatz.com was always online, beyond my death. But when the FBI took me, he disappeared. He'd spent years promising to send me money, to find me support. Not one penny ever arrived. None of that was important to me beside keeping Knatz.com online; but he betrayed the ideas there too.

All that pales compared to this:
The human species succeeded well enough to populate the planet, render game scarce, and to max out the planet's agricultural capacity. We managed to continue to grow not because of our individual cleverness but because of of group bonding: family, group, tribe ... But now the super tribes, ruled by nation states, destroy the group bonds that made them possible. As an follower (and colleague) of Ivan Illich (and Bucky Fuller, and others), I said so. The social networking I offered in Illich's wake was intended to strengthen the human species by weakening its coercive rulers: the nation states. The people could have taken their own back, by taking over their own information: state-independent public data bases: voluntary information, unregulated.

But state-run institutions and the allies, mislabeled as free, co-opted our convivial Christian tools. My wife was my only support in 1970. The universities had bled me dry, then abandoned me with no other resources: fired, a pariah, blacklisted. Fine: at least I should have still had my wife and child. But no: Hilary too abandoned me. Hilary kidnapped our son: just as he arrived at school age. Obviously she did it so I could have no say in his "education."

It doesn't matter what the Temple pretends to teach
so long as it crucifies God when he actually shows up!

I'll return to this post to offer additional details of betrayal by my fans, by professors, by my family ... and by civilization's institutions.

God is another matter. But after what happened to Jesus, disciples of Jesus shouldn't be surprised.

pk Stories Update

I've cleared space for my business stories by relocating present and future pk stories to April 2009.

Jail stories I'm locating temporally beginning at 2009 November 15. Church stories I'll locate "here": 2010 November.

Note the common theme of these stories: they all reflect the non-convivial non-Christian nature of our society.

Prisoners of Election Time

Resurrecting Knatz.com / Personal / Writing / Satire

pk's Nixon Election Time:
Like Minds Choose Treason

My first political letter was sent to the Kennedy White House protesting US support of the south Vietnamese government which I understood to be corralling Buddhists into concentration camps. It was a letter about freedom of religion (and international responsibilty). I got back a pound or two of anti-Communitst propaganda. The White House made no attempt to smudge the irrelevance of its response.

Well, I already knew that my reps didn't know how to think, that bureaucrats (including university personell) didn't know how to read ... and that was the last political letter I wrote that said what I meant at all literally. I continued to write — for my and God's (and Satan's) amusement — ironies only. The White House, the UN, Mao's China continued to ignore my messages: until this one! which got back a gold embossed reply! The White House misread my insults as favorable!

Dear President Nixon: I guess it was about last May that there was talk in the senate about having our troops out of Vietnam by December 1971 if our prisoners of war were released. And now you're saying that there's a possibility of having our troops out by election time if our prisoners of war are released. I think that's a great idea: it's important to set a date, especially if you want a chance of being reelected. Well, the other day, the New York Times had an editorial by the famous what's his name, you know, the historian, Dean Memminger, or Henry Comminer? No doubt your state department people have already thought of this for you, but just in case, I thought I'd write and suggest it. He said that maybe the four year term of office is too short for a president to do anything really good and important, like raise the oil depletion allowances, or increase federal aid to ailing industries. And that politicking for another term is all you really have time for in four years, and that that's got to tie your hands from doing anything you really believe in. He said that the presidency should be limited to one term, but that the one term should be lengthened to six years. I think it's a terrific idea and I think you should do it. Surely some way could be found around those who would object. (I myself remember what it was like to wait out Johnston's term.) Anyway, the way it is, you've got a chance for another four years, and you've got a chance for nothing, nada, the goose egg, to miss out altogether. The possibilities are four and zero, and that averages out to two more years, or the six that you'd get with Memminger's way. So why not take the sure thing? Then, without taking a risk, and without suffering the embarrassment that Johnston had to put up with, you could still set the date for withdrawal if your prisoners of war are released, still keep it for election year if your prisoners of war are released, but it would be 1974 instead of 1972. You could keep the war going another two years, really whoop it on the gooks, and still keep your promise. The idea should save you millions of dollars of electioneering money. On the chance that Kissingger hasn't already thought of it, I do think it would be only fair if you'd share some of the savings with me. If it's my idea, that is. Forever yours, Paul Knatz P.S. One thing that's always struck me as curious about the problem over our prisoners of war is why we don't release them whenever we want to. After all, they're our prisoners. We got the key. As for their prisoners of war, on the chance it's their prisoners people are talking about, I don't think you should release them until ours are. Unless it would save money. P.P.S. In the last case I mean, of course, release in the Tibetan Buddhist sense. As for those who have already been released in this holy way, I think you could remind them that it's a good thing for their karma balance. How many human souls are there to be reborn, anyway?

This letter is from 1 Feb 1972. I choose it to lead the reposting of my joke letters because of the White House's gold-embossed reply under the Presidential Seal. I'm as proud of that as I would have been of a six- or seven-figure check.

Critical Timing:
I hope you notice that Nixon's new promise wasn't moving the date closer, but was in fact postponing it. My satiric tempo of indefinite postponements followed his lead.

Malfunctioning Joke:
I'm not sure my last joke of the letter, the one about "karma balance," worked: then or now. Jokes shouldn't have to be explained, even if no one in the (human) audience gets it. (If God doesn't get it either, than an author is really in trouble!) I say a further word here now anyway if only as an indictment pk's perfection as an artist. Some cosmologies imagine the universe as finite, some as infinite. Jesus saying that his father's house had many mansions refers literally to a finite heaven but symbolically with suggestions of endlessness: infinity. Contemporary cosmology is largely unexamined infinity in assumption: there's no limit to growth, to population, to resources. I was playing the idea of finite souls against the idea of infinite souls. In other words, in order to make room for new souls, we have to kill a few old bodies. Don't plant new cabbages in an uncleared cabbage field. In other words: the Vietnamese had no right to object to our killing them by the million! We were clearing the register for them. (Of course our logic would have changed had they been clearing our register.)

Censoring pk:
I "explained" the circumstances and the comedy of my letter more extensively than-ever-previously at my AgainstHierarchy.org [2006 10 11]. The fed arrested me [2006 10 13] and censored that domain [2007 Feb], cascading all my domains, including my business, into Limbo in a domino effect. I'll try to restore those files online, but recreating Knatz.com has been my first priority.

Classification, Background:
Knatz.com organized my "creative" writing as fiction, journal, satire, or letters. The above was a letter as well as a satire: Knatz.com classed it as satire. The White House classed it as "In Favor." That's as priceless a joke as any of mine in the letter!

I repeat Knatz.com's introduction:

My first political letter had been to Kennedy's White House with a similar letter sent to Ambassador Stevenson at the UN. Both bureaucracies ignored the content of my letter and merely mailed back a half-pound of anti-Communist propaganda. By the time I was writing to Lyndon Johnson I realized that I might as well be talking to Santa. Then I heard of his once picking a letter from the pile that was printed in pencil on composition book paper. President Johnson recognized the stamp of the people and replied personally to that little girl.

I decided that from then on my letters would be illiterate. Pat Paulson regularly mispronounced the President's name; I routinely misspelled it. But my principle inspiration was Mark Twain (Swift already present in that American's efforts).

In Sum:
I proposed that Nixon disregard his oath of allegiance to the Constitution and commit an(other) act of tyranny. I proposed that he commit treason. He thanked me on the finest stationary for my "confidence, understanding, and support."
The New Yorker wrote me, Alas, we cannot print your correspondence with the White House, but we sure enjoyed passing it around the office.
There's nothing like a free press.
Dean Memminger, by the way was a long-legged rookie for the New York Knicks that year. I trusted at the time that even the White House might be stimulated by my confusions to think of persons such as Henry Steele Commager or Barry Comminer. I no longer recall which of those two penned the idea of a six year term. A perusal of the New York Times from around 1971 should find it.