What is it about American racism

I have no answers. Racism itself may be a modern phenomenon. But what is it about the United States?Is it connected with the founding extermination of native peoples? Really, nothing makes a lot of sense to me. But the scars of our history here in this country seem different than European countries.

Whatever the difference, it is apparent in the fact that Baldwin was happier in France, Yerby in Spain, Pinckney in Britain.

Something deep and corrosive and unexamined is perhaps characteristic of our American history, but the strands are beyond my articulation.

Maybe

No post-it notes in a hurricane and therefore none in the eye of ONE.

Not many will get this

The difference between a -- real-- Christian, and one who can practise 4th Way methods, is, the angle of the neck.

Lest We Remember

https://biblioklept.org/2012/09/11/list-of-artworks-destroyed-in-the-911-world-trade-center-attack/

The Biggest Trick

From Psychology Today today, quote:
......

Whatever else accounts for consciousness, it is probably an emergent phenomenon—the product of the organization of matter.

An emergent phenomenon (also simply called emergence) refers to how a complex system acquires properties that differ both quantitatively and qualitatively from its simpler constituents—properties that are not inherent to its constituents and cannot be inferred or predicted from them. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. There is no ‘magic’ involved here, just complex physical interactions. Emergence is a spontaneous, bottom-up, self-organising phenomenon of complexity, with no external cause required.

end quote

The definition above exhibits perhaps the oldest trick of the mind. Give something a name, and say, you understand it. And gosh, you stop wondering about it.  What has happened is that you have noticed another characteristic, one that ALSO, needs an explanation. But you have the label you invented, so this escapes your attention.

So you assume you understand it. Throw in a few weasel words like "probably," makes the speaker sound studious. 

And any second that rabbit is going to pull a magician out of his sleeve, and you -----missed it again.

Let's go back to the quote; perhaps I should step this out a bit---

"...emergence...refers to how a complex system acquires properties..."
"How" is precisely what is missing in the description. To refer to

."..properties that are not inherent to its constituents and cannot be inferred or predicted from them...." ignores that a greater complexity still connects with its constituents. Water turned into wine still involves a grid of connection. 

And "a spontaneous, bottom-up, self-organising phenomenon of complexity, with no external cause required..." is a call to pretend we know something we do not; it calls us to ignore the mystery, not ponder, not explore it, not marvel at it, not push the edges.

To say consciousness is "self-organizing and bottoms up", is to say in effect, matter and mind are separate.  So the label emergent functionally takes a mystery recognised  since the beginning to time, and pretends to solve it by some scientific sounding fiat that just reflects sloppy thinking. Sloppy for instance is using the phrase "just complex physical interactions" without noticing no one has a clue about exactly these reactions are.

The denser theologians of the past historically also pretended--- they pretended that mind was some separate god  distributed gift. Problem of the relation between mind and matter thereby solved, in a way very similar to the proponents of "emergence."  

Jan Cox addressed some issues involved with confronting the connection of mind and matter, but this is not the subject at hand.  I cannot resist however, pointing out the big reason  you cannot separate mind and matter, though these are not Jan's words.  Whether it is an emergent "consciousness" or some miraculous gift from a god, when you separate mind and matter---- 

You then have to explain how they get back together.

Some few will

• “No one ever got lynched and thought, Well, at least this will lead inexorably to the civil-rights movement.” New short fiction by Zadie Smith. | The New Yorker

Origin Story

Did the stability of stone buildings:

The smoothness of the stones,
The enduring aspect of stone
The eruptions from below of stone

Against the repetitive grasses built on immeasurable crumbs of black, all different, all the same,

And all within cornerless globes --

Did these comprehensions give men the idea for ideas, the word for words?

If so it certainly has been a persistent mistake.

Put Down the Gun

Put Down the Gun.

Those weeds were already withering

and

Your blindfold is slipping.

On what planet?

On what planet are superheroes born? Perhaps the answer is a lot closer than the fabulists would have us assume.  The function of heroes flying around, doing nice stuff, or not so, their function, in an economy of human energy consumption and output is a real question. Our answer is not meant to be definitive, but an arrow for further cerebral revolutions. And it is this:

As mankind, men and women, have become more engrossed in their imagination, (an aspect of modernity) the place of physical activity has decreased, in human life; it has literally become smaller, as you can estimate from the shift from a farmer's life to the profile of an office worker.

What does such a shift mean for the world people create, in their heads. Interestingtly, that world is now not consumed with stories of Paul Bunyan like heroism, with feats like chopping down lots of trees. That may be implausible, but now, such heroes are even less tethered to any likely scenario. Now the hero in our imaginings of the physical world have wings, or capes, and the whole alarerial dimension, as opposed to a dirt filled real outdoors, is the setting for human heroism.

And notice the place of sex, or lack of it, in such narratives.

Just interesting.

This displacement of energy from the physical to the mental, that may be getting larger, has one outcome: for a tiny minority, it results in greater mental capacity-- as in Stephen Hawking. For most, the numerically disabled, it still results in changes, apparrent in the figments we mention above. For, the mind, less connectedd to the body, still has to have pictures of some sort. And these pictures tell their own story.

For some reason the tune to this is "I'm getting married in the morning"

For the article titled

Cross Species Transfer of Genes Has Driven Evolution

click this link

http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/697075/?sc=swhn

although I cannot resist excerpting
......

“Jumping genes, properly called retrotransposons, copy and paste themselves around genomes, and in genomes of other species. How they do this is not yet known although insects like ticks or mosquitoes or possibly viruses may be involved – it’s still a big puzzle,” says project leader Professor David Adelson, Director of the University of Adelaide’s Bioinformatics Hub. 

“This process is called horizontal transfer, differing from the normal parent-offspring transfer, and it’s had an enormous impact on mammalian evolution.”

....

Ding dong the bells are going to ring

Way, way.. Waay...

This passage reminded me of something I have wondered about:

'.... T. rex and kin dominated the Earth for over 150 million years. They endured extreme temperature changes, rising and falling oceans, and super-volcano eruptions, and they diversified as their home—the supercontinent of Pangaea—literally broke apart. Dinosaurs were prehistory’s ultimate survivors ...'

No one doubts that dinosaurs (except their relatives--birds) did not co-exist with human beings.  But why, then, do all cultures (most anyway) have stories about--- dragons.  Dragons look and act like dinosaurs. What is the difference, besides one being agreed on as fictional?

Surely the stories about dragons point to the reality of an ancestral memory, the existence of which is something Plato and Jan Cox agree on. Then though, this memory must go way way, WAY, back.

Beating a read philoopopher

...that "whereof one may not speak, about that one must be silent",

Wittgenstein missed one salient (silient) dimension, you can talk 'around' the invisible----- as long as the maps are fresh---- as long as the fingers of the cerebral are eerily airy

Of course this approach is enough to clatter the teacups of analytic philosophers, were any left. They yearn for nothing more than to be able to put their cup in a saucer on a desk on a floor on a cement foundation on a nameable terrestrial layer-- on a --- on a -- but NO, never on a turtle's back.

Maybe we are all snowflakes

Maybe we are all snowflakes

or

maybe we are all raindrops--- all of us, that is, with a conscious intent to be more -- conscious; that intent which, to be remembered is itself, a  triumph on the way ...

What happened on November 5

What happened on November 5, besides these people dying.

1979 – Al Capp, American cartoonist 
1981 – Rangjung Rigpe Dorje, 16th Karmapa, Tibetan spiritual leader 
1985 – Arnold Chikobava, Georgian linguist and philologist 
1985 – Spencer W. Kimball, American religious leader, 12th President of The Church of Jesus Christ of LDS
1986 – Adolf Brudes, German race car driver 
1989 – Vladimir Horowitz, Ukrainian-American pianist and composer
1997 – Isaiah Berlin, Latvian-English historian, author, and academic
2005 – John Fowles, English novelist 
2005 -  Jan. M. Cox, American philosopher 
2015 – Hans Mommsen, German historian and academic 

What if the message is that there is no message, no messageable message...

November 5, 2005

News Obituary Article
STONE MOUNTAIN: Jan Cox, 67, philosopher

By HOLLY CRENSHAW

Jan M. Cox was a philosophical tour guide who led his followers on a jolly romp through the unexplored recesses of their own minds.

The author and lecturer conducted "neurological field trips," said Wanda Cooley of Pine Lake, who started attending his talks in the 1970s.

"People often called Jan an entertainer of ideas, and if you saw his TV show or read his books, you'd understand that he had a different way of looking at life," Ms. Cooley said. "His real legacy is the activation of the higher parts of our nervous system, but he brought humor to everything and never took life too seriously."

Mr. Cox, 67, of Stone Mountain died Nov. 5 of cancer at Emory University Hospital. The body was cremated. No service is planned. A.S. Turner & Sons is in charge of arrangements.

Mr. Cox's philosophical musings, which will continue to be updated on his Web site at www.jancox.com, defy easy paraphrase but generally urge a more fully conscious approach to life.

A former carpenter and musician, Mr. Cox practiced law and served as dean of Atlanta's now-defunct Columbia Southern School of Law before devoting most of his energy to writing and lecturing. He sold audiotapes and videos of his talks, which air on public access television as "New Intelligence With Jan Cox." His books feature tantalizing titles such as "The Death of Gurdjieff in the Foothills of Georgia," "And Kyroot Said" and "Magnus Machina," described as "a travelogue to the dangerous edge of objective instability."

In 1970, the then 32-year-old Mr. Cox mounted an unconventional campaign for governor of Georgia, which baffled political pundits. He issued press releases on pastel-colored paper, occasionally spoke in riddles and always deflected personal questions, a practice he kept up his whole life.

"He wasn't out there trying to reshape the world, and he certainly wasn't out to win," said Derek Hardison of Con-yers, an adherent of Mr. Cox's philosophy. "He saw people walking around mechanically who suspected they could be something else, and he wanted those people to be able to find him. And if you want statewide attention, qualifying for a primary might possibly be the least expensive avenue there is."

Peter Kagel of Atlanta was part of a theater troupe that performed at several venues, including Evotek in Buckhead and OK Alright in Decatur.

"The theater was part of Jan's Merry Pranksters approach to doing things you wouldn't normally do," Mr. Kagel said. "It was a very rewarding experience, contemplative and meditative and wild and wacky all at the same time.

"Jan was a very talented person --- musically, intellectually. He was wise, he was energetic, he was forceful and zestful and relentless. He talked three nights a week and wrote every day and was involved in what he was doing 110 percent," Mr. Kagel said.

"In some respect, he made himself as unlikable as possible so people didn't lean on him and would focus more on his ideas. He certainly wasn't going to be your pal in the traditional sense. He could be endearing and he could be detestable. He was many different things, and that's what made him so unusual."

Survivors include two sons, Troy Jan Cox of Lawrence-ville and Tracy Marvin Cox of Douglasville; a brother, Jere lan Cox of Acworth; and three grandchildren.

> Read more about Jan Cox's ideas at www.jancox.com

© 2005 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Published in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Nov. 12, 2005

Tomorrow Today

I quote a blog, The Digital Reader:

'Amazon announced on Friday that the Kindle Unlimited funding pool total $22.5 million in May (plus bonuses - most of which went to the cheats) up from $21.2 million in April 2018. At the same time the per-page rate royalty hovered at $0.00454 in May, compared to $0.00456 in April and $0.004449 in March 2018.'

I quote not to share numbers, not to comment on Amazon and electronic publication. I do point to currents in modern humanity that push us to live online, to exist virally. Exist as it is experienced and valued by more and more people. Specifically, if a person wants to share anything to a large audience, they must "talk about themselves" online, they must comment on the comments of others, they must have a large following. Otherwise, "$0.00456 " per page doesn't purchase much people kibble. And none of this is healthy for folks struggling to figure out what is going on.

You see this growing stupidity in the use of tiny pictures to convey what used to be subtle emotions. You see it in a great newspaper, the New York Times, which now runs its book review summaries as if the audience were composed of post menarchal girls in a book club.

On the good side these viral currents make it easier for people to stay in touch. On what you might call the bad side (though I do not) this means people are living more and more, in their imagination: they are dreaming. And on the good side, this is tomorrow, this is the future.

All stories are sad stories

All stories are sad stories, because they have -- endings. Endings must be sad. Endings mean you think a limit has been reached, something has been concluded.

These things are not just news; endings, conclusions, are invariably bad news.  An ending means either you missed the point, or an author did. In the case of the latter, the bad news is you wasted your time reading a story by someone clueless.

Okay---
Only the unfinished edge is alive, is true. It is always good news, well, except--- you can't label it.

No artists created the first cave art

There WERE no artists in paleolithic times, in medieval either, though that is another post. Any account of paleolithic drawings as being caused by artists, is wrong before that sentence is finished.

If these human being were not making art, what were they doing. To call their product art, because that is how WE would produce something similar, is to preclude understanding, to be on the level of comprehension of a Degrassy Knollson--that is having just a few alphabet blox in your toybock.

What was going on was brave people trying to grasp to comprehend themselves as part of a world: That they were a world, a world -- within a world. To explore that world, and their own part in it.

Which is to say, they glimpsed the nature of human thought, perhaps in creating it, but certainly in being aware of cerebral function, and the power and awe of such a comprehension. A comprehension, perhaps, of THEMSELVES, (plural, not singular) as  a separate species, with certain powers. They were not just pebbles for humanoid powers to trip on, but, themselves had some agency.

The drawings then, were a stage in conceptual thinking. A stage we mythologize, and about which we probably miss a lot.

Boilerplate reference the EU GDPR

Below are excerpts from a lawyers blog, which I copy here to indicate my awareness of and concern for the "EU General Data Protection Regulation". I actually have a poor sense of what is going on. If any reader thinks I may be collecting data on them. I am not. But who knows what Google is up to.

"This is a GDPR ..

As you may be aware, on 25 May 2018 the EU General Data Protection Regulation EU (2016)/679 (GDPR) comes into force in all EU member states. The GDPR applies to ‘personal data’ meaning any information relating to an identifiable person who can be directly or indirectly identified by reference to an identifier. It requires that personal data be processed lawfully, fairly and in a transparent manner, and that personal data be collected for specified and legitimate purposes.

..... Google may collect and/or process your data in these circumstances. If you have any concerns regarding Google’s use of your personal data following use of these tools, you may read Google’s policy  here and here.  Google’s Privacy Policy may also be found by searching for the Google Privacy Policy ."

....

To Quote Is to Betray

How could it be said, that "To Quote Is to Betray."

To repeat,
To repeat,
To repeat,
the exact words,
or, even,
some facsimile thereof--

Could betray one whose
gestures, words, time, sweat
pointed to one

THING

ONE

O

A Point Encased

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/04/09/the-strange-magic-of-libraries/

This link,  don't click it, just look at the topic.  A point Jan made once, was that you could only talk about something (anything) when it is over.

Pindicular

Pindicular: balanced on the logically, necessarily, non-existent, point of a pin.

Spring

Maybe
the haystack is made of
needles

Those Olympic athletes

Gosh, just amazing feats. You wonder if such is possible even, until you see it.  Like spinning in the air during a jump. Internal attention, maintaining it, perhaps such invisible feats, might be even MORE difficult. And a difference between athletic stars and the ambitions of even fewer folks, is that if acclaim is an issue, for the latter, that itself is a form of spin out.

Where You Draw The Line

IF
you are going to take seriously man's conclusions about our world, about history, take seriously the attempts to articulate existence bounded, like a cross, with the two poles of world and society, of man and god, then this is quite a lovely summary--

https://voegelinview.com/philosophy-crisis-modern-world/

A takedown of Roger Scruton, lining up C. S. Lewis and Rene Guenon, drawing Plato back into the discussion, are all contained gracefully in the few paragraphs at this link. It is written by someone named Richard Cocks. The fun, for someone who has worked with Jan Cox, is why Jan viewed such attempts as useless to one concerned with TKS-- This Kind of Stuff.

One direction the answer might lie, is drawing a line between the unsayable and else. And keeping the line vivid. A mere thought....I am not answering the question we started with.

March 7, 2018, addendum to above note (published on February 12, 2018). A direct quote from a transcription of Jan talking:

"As long as you continue to listen to your voices at Line level, as long as you continue to try and mesh This with anything (no matter how mystical sounding) you already believe, you engage in absolute folly."

While we are on the subject

Subject of labeling civilizations. How about the

Vowelly
and the
Consokraut
?

An illustration of how intellectuals think

FOLLOWING, is an EXAMPLE of intellectual reasoning, an instance where mentation is assumed to be sufficient to explain the world we inhabit.
....
Quote, from an interview with Marcel Gauchet:
You claim that the period that is most analogous to our own in the history of modern democracy is what you describe as the “crisis of liberalism” between 1880 and 1914. What do you see as the resemblance?

There is a parallel between the two periods, but at the same time an opposition that makes the parallel all the more significant. This first crisis was one of frustration with democracy’s promises. It came at a moment when universal suffrage had become absolute law, when some even began to regard it as the very definition of democracy. In other words, it was a time where the masses entered into politics. But at this moment, there was a radical disjunction between the reality of society—i.e., class divisions, capitalist antagonisms, etc.—and the “mendacious” liberal parliamentary regime, judged as such for its inability to resolve the social question. This powerlessness of democracy to fulfill the promise of sovereignty, awakened by the institution of universal sufferage, led people on both the far left and the far right to seek solutions to the question of the good regime outside of parliamentary democracy. Hence the radical contestations of “bourgeois” democracy that led to the rise of totalitarian movements in the aftermath of the First World War.....

End quote.

The sufficiency of man's reasoning powers is an unstated but basic aspect of modernity. Missing above is a sense of the import of Confucius when he says Knowing what you know, and remembering what you do not know, is real wisdom.

Now, actually it is a great article, full of ideas I had not been aware of, and I heartily recommend following the link above.

Wherein I lose all my readers

Woody Allen is the one being abused. Those accusers are the brainwashed children of a bitter hysterical woman.

Garrison Keillor also. I couldn't even figure out exactly what he is accused of doing. But it was an accident.  A new legal principle, sisters: leave the geezers out of it. Also, perhaps, one free feel.

So unsubscribe, already.

A Man

Rodin's "The Thinker" is one of the world's most famous statues. From a certain perspective it compares poorly with a very old vision conveyed in the statuary of men, men, in the sense of human beings. The ancient kouroi,  statues in Greek art, are commonly presented as archaic, a less developed stage in art. Possibly though, what we have in a kouros is a man alert beyond ordinary levels. What IS incontestable is that Rodin's thinker is a guy on the john.

He's Not Even in Love With Her

My suspicion is the whole of the latest tabloid romance was mainly manufactured by officials in the department of keep things running smoothly. And what a bold and clever offensive. Powers in front of the throne are doing a great job also, as a transition of leadership clearly looms.

One Crow

This morning there was a crow outside and I watched him drop a triangle red something into a rain water puddle. Perhaps pizza, perhaps critter guts. Anyway, he picked it up and seemed to break off a piece to eat, as the rest fell back in the water. Then he picked the piece back up and flew off. This was problem solving behavior if you assume he knew the water would soften his meal.

Animal versus human traits are a big deal in science news.  Do chimps have compassion, says the famous scientist about his experiments on caged animals?  The story is always the same--- such and such beast shows human behavior.

In fact, the scientists have the setup backwards.  Their research could be used to show what is non-human and more animalistic about the researcher, about ourselves. Obviously our body unites us with the animal world, and surely our brain does too. So what is specific about the human in this scenario; a clue is if animals do it also, some behavior of ours is may have evolved from our neighbors on this planet. I trust my point is clear. I think the language is skewed to avoid the fact that animals and people are even related at all. But if chimpanzees hug someone who has been kind to them, surely that suggests a range of human emotional behavior is shared by, probably originated in, these beasts. So the question is, exactly what about compassion is distinct with homo sapiens.

But to recognize this, really rather obvious fact, runs into what Steven Pinker calls, "the ban on knowing who you are."

Now that I think about it, that crow was eating pizza he rescued from some trash container.

Happy New Land

Quoting an example of medical jargon:

ABIN-1 regulates RIPK1 activation by linking Met1 ubiquitylation with
Lys63 deubiquitylation in TNF-RSC pp58 - 68
Slawomir A. Dziedzic, Zhenyi Su, Vica Jean Barrett, Ayaz Najafov,
Adnan K. Mookhtiar, Palak Amin, Heling Pan, Li Sun, Hong Zhu, Averil Ma,
Derek W. Abbott & Junying Yuan
doi:10.1038/s41556-017-0003-1
Dziedzic et al. show that the ubiquitin-binding protein ABIN-1 is
recruited into TNFR1 signalling complex in a manner dependent on
Met1-ubiquitinating complex LUBAC to regulate K63 de-ubiquitination
to activate RIPK1.

I suppose it is risky to use a quote that someone out there understands, as an example of the border of verbal coherence,(and thereby misses my point) but that edge, in my mind, reminded me of something Jan said, and, continuing our holiday freedom to repeat his words, I will share Jan's thought:

There is an actual physical component in blood that affects mystical attention.