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CAVEAT: Serious Math Stuff Ahead (Re: My Current Study)

Let positive integer m = p*q where p, q are prime numbers and p is not equal to q.

Let s be the smallest positive integer such that s^2 > m, and let r be the difference between them so that:

m = s^2 - r.

Consider x^2 - r to be a quadratic polynomial in x that evaluates to a value of m at x=s.

Construct a series of quadratic polynomials in x that also evaluate to a value of m at x=s by setting n = 0, 1, 2, ... and forming each polynomial as:

x^2 + n*x - (r + n*s).

Verification that each of these will evaluate to a value of m is an exercise for the reader.

Using the Quadratic Formula to determine the roots of y = x^2 + n*x - (r + n*s), construct the Discriminant (the part under the square root sign) as follows, for each such polynomial corresponding to a value of n:

Discriminant = n^2 + 4*(r+n*s) = n^2 + 4*s*n + 4*r.

When the Discriminant is a perfect square, then the polynomial will factor, and since the value of each such polynomial at x=s is equal to m, the integer roots of the polynomial thus discovered via the Quadratic Formula, give the factors of m.

So the problem is: Given positive integers r and s, series n = 0, 1, 2... and the quadratic sequence of Discriminant values n^2 + 4*s*n + 4*r, can we quickly and/or formulaically determine a value of n that makes that Discriminant a perfect square?

The difficulty of the integer factorization problem tells me the answer is probably no, but I am not certain anyone has looked at the problem this way, and a mathematics instructor once told me WE DO NOT KNOW how simple solutions to unknown problems like this could be.

ADDENDUM: Expressing the discriminant as a quadratic polynomial in n with integer coefficients, n^2 + 4*s*n + 4*r, the Quadratic formula gives the greater root (zero) of that polynomial at the real number 2*(SQRT(m) - s). The minimum of that polynomial occurs when n = -2*s.

Getting Meta (but not Meta) on "Let People Enjoy Things"

which, hereafter in this post, I abbreviate as LPET

I've been, I think, on all sides of LPET, including frequently needing to be told to LPET, but also telling others to LPET, and of course enjoying the "thing" that someone could not just let me enjoy without a disparaging comment.

But it also includes sometimes disagreeing with LPET or, like here, wanting to scrutinize the philosophy behind it. I understand the need not to be a buzzkill, and the good friendship in tolerating, or even encouraging, a joy one does not share, rather than criticize it.

I also understand, or fancy that I do, two principles or topics that contrast with an LPET-positive online practice:

1. Criticizing is not necessarily "not letting people enjoy things." In fact, some people's "thing" is expressing something they perceive as wrong or misguided about a fad or fashion; others simply like the practice of delivering devastating bon mots, which often target what someone is doing or the way they are doing it. This kind of criticism-for-entertainment makes LPET a two-way street or even a paradox.

2. LPET might ignore, or perhaps conveniently forget about, those sources of enjoyment that seem to cultivate deliberate ignorance, above and beyond being some sort of mindless activity. These are the kinds of activities that, if a reasoning person thought about them "too much," reveal themselves as either absurd or tacky. They actually seem to be commodities of a deliberate design to decrease the cultural IQ; i.e., to "dumb down the masses." What can we say of fads, fashions, and trends whose designers openly acknowledge that they prey on ignorance or lack of taste? Should people say nothing about this fact? Is it not cultural responsibility to wake our fellow human beings out of that kind of entertainment-induced stupor?

Indeed, both of these principles point to a paradox. And LPET seems an oversimplification: There are all sorts of "things":

* Sports (the first example I saw of someone saying LPET)

* Disco

* Wordle

* Rock and Roll

* Recreational sex

* The works of Ayn Rand

Leave all of these "things" and the people who enjoy them alone, as a rule, at your peril.

The paradox could even go further. Like the John Pavlovitz open table and its one self-referential rule that intolerance and hateful attitudes are not admitted - the table is NOT open to them - one can find many strange exceptions when one peers deeply enough down the rabbit hole: a danger when one's good idea is starting to become an ideology, with its own brand of ideologues. Witness, in this example, what happened when someone (whom I love and admire) announced on a post by Mr. Pavlovitz that they wondered whether or not a shirt that said "Empathetic as F@#%" was insensitive to the point of being offensive, even to fans of Mr. Pavlovitz and his Open Table. As is all too often the case in social media discourse, this discussion got too ugly, too quickly ... and it could be argued that in defending his shirt and his right not to be criticized or even questioned about the wisdom of merchandising it, Mr. Pavlovitz turned his back on some of the very "open table" principles he preaches and has spread so ably and admirably.

Messy, messy, messy. Perhaps the LPET credo, if anyone has taken it as a credo, falters only in failing to acknowledge just how messy our social media interactions, and our likes and dislikes, both become and need to be.

Freedom is a curious commodity - and some would have you not think too deeply about how curious. But that's their thing. Let them enjoy it.

Out of My Depth (and Out of My Mind?)

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1380236155023618050.html

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Fun With Numbers! (Or With Infinitely Precise Darts)

While enjoying my coffee and bagel this morning, I've been reacquainting myself with different kinds of numbers, and am entertained once again by a particular discussion topic of how common each of these kinds of numbers are. Did you know that most of the numbers we like to use are VANISHINGLY RARE among all the numbers there are?

Let's say I could draw an infinitely precise line segment on a dartboard, and that you could throw an infinitely sharp dart so that it lands exactly (you're REALLY good at this) on the line segment at some point. We've agreed between ourselves how we are going to measure the position of the dart on the line - and even how to draw a precise perpendicular from the dart to the line if you are having a terrible day and you missed it!

Let us number equally spaced divisions on the line segment so that it goes from 0 to some agreed-upon integer. Let's choose the number 10.

Since your dart and our ability to measure its position are infinitely precise (but your ability to aim for a specific number is somehow not!), let's imagine your dart could have landed on any position on the line segment with equal probability. As far as I know, no point on the line is more likely than any other, because you want to make our game more challenging! My part in the game is to try to guess what kind of number your dart found: Integer, rational, algebraic, or transcendental. I plan to win the game by guessing it lands on a transcendental number, one that is not integer, rational, or even algebraic. Here is why I think I will win.

What are the odds your dart landed on an integer? Well, those odds seem pretty small. There are eleven marks on the line, labeled 0, 1, 2, ... 10. You would have had to land exactly on one of those marks, with infinite precision. If we had a measuring device installed on the line, and you had landed on 3 exactly, the device would have said 3.0000000... with zeroes going on forever. What are the odds of that?

So how many integer points are on the line? Eleven. How many other points are on the line? All the rest of them! That's a little bit of a jokey answer, but it is not far from what I want to show here: There are an infinite number of points on the line, since it is continuous, between any two of the precise number markers 0 through 10, and thus an infinite number of points that are not integers. When we consider the ratio of the number of integers to that of non-integers on the line, we consider 1/N as N approaches positive infinity (the quantity of non-integer numbers), and that number gets closer and closer to zero as N gets closer and closer to infinity. This is what I meant by my earlier term VANISHINGLY RARE. The integers are VANISHINGLY RARE among all the other numbers.

So yes, it's more likely that your dart landed on a place between two numbers... a FRACTION of the distance between them, you might say.

Good point about points! The set of fractions, or rational numbers, between 0 and 10, or between any two consecutive numbers on our line, is an infinite set. Any finite segment of our line, in fact, will have infinitely many rational numbers on it. And again, the ratio of 9 integers to an infinite quantity of rational numbers makes those integers VANISHINGLY RARE.

To explain the mathematics behind the rest of what I was considering would take too long. If you're interested, you can look up the concepts yourself. I want to keep this light and entertaining and save you headaches, especially if you're not inclined to go as deep as I wanted to go today.

The integers are a subset of rational numbers. I just showed that integers are VANISHINGLY RARE among rational numbers.
The rational numbers are a subset of algebraic numbers, like the square root of negative one, or five plus the square root of two, or the Golden Ratio. They all satisfy integer polynomial equations. Rational numbers are, it has been shown (albeit not here), VANISHINGLY RARE among all algebraic numbers.

In fact, thinking of our dart board, look at it this way: Your dart, to have landed on a rational number, would have had to land on a number that the infinitely precise measuring device would show as having a digit, followed by a decimal point, followed by a finite number of other digits, and then a sequence of other digits, again finite, that would repeat over and over FOREVER, exactly. The chance of your hitting a number like that is just as small as you think it is: very unlikely.

So integers are VANISHINGLY RARE among the rational numbers. And rationals are VANISHINGLY RARE among the algebraic numbers, even those that are on the real number line... even those just between 0 and 10.

But mathematicians have gone further. There are numbers that are not solutions of any integer polynomial. Two of the numbers most studied by mathematicians, e and pi, are such numbers. We call them transcendental numbers.

So let's look at your dartboard toss, and now let's forget the fact that you're so precise at throwing your dart. It could have landed anywhere above or below the line. Let's consider the whole dartboard to be a bounded region of the Complex Plane, the places your dart could have landed corresponding to complex numbers. Now what are the probabilities?

Integers are VANISHINGLY RARE among the rationals.

Rational numbers are VANISHINGLY RARE compared to the set of algebraic numbers on the real line.

Algebraic numbers are VANISHINGLY RARE compared to the set of transcendental numbers on the real line. I THINK I JUST WON THE GAME.

But even more, the numbers on the real line - ALL these types of numbers - are VANISHINGLY RARE compared to the set of numbers not on the real line: the complex numbers. Let's face it, you would have had to be a DAMN good darts player to land your infinitely precise dart anywhere on that infinitely thin line. Infinitely good, in fact.

Hey, maybe you are. I'd not put it past you. My understanding of your talents is VANISHINGLY SMALL.

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What I Mean When I Say "Manipulative Religion"

"Manipulation in the name of religion" is a matter of great concern to me, particularly as it relates to the Radical Right and to Trumpism, but it is also a subject I need to define precisely before I can talk rightly about it. It is an odd concept, I think, to people who do not profess or follow any particular faith or spiritual practice. When we consider that religion deals primarily with matters of faith, morality, or spirit, rather than observable, demonstrable principles and even the thought processes associated with reason and deduction, it is curious in a way to make a claim that the adherents of this or that faith or practice have been manipulated. "Well yes," a skeptic might say, "they've been manipulated into believing something not provable in the first place!" So any assertion that some religious practitioners/ believers are more manipulated than others, or that a particular denomination or type of religious person might be more susceptible to manipulation, might require distinguishing further the particular manipulation to which it refers.

In the case of Evangelical Trumpism, this distinction is fairly clear in my mind: The Protestant Christian tradition does not by definition make assertions that are provably not so. Or at least, the claims it makes and the values it teaches are not centered on objectively disputable claims. Yes, historic and scientific scholarship can find many faults in fact with the millennia-old observations of both Old and New Testament sacred texts. But I am not talking about these kinds of factual disputations. What I call manipulation, and its basis in asserting that which is not so, is willful misrepresentation by Evangelical Protestant leaders of what Biblical texts essentially mean, and what their stated principles imply for moral growth and ethical behavior, including how they do interact with bodies of objectively established knowledge.

The sense the Christian church has as a whole of how to reconcile ancient Biblical ideas and notions with modern scientific discovery and historical scholarship is a sense of the need to reconcile what we once believed with what we now know, or feel confident in accepting as fact. In contrast to this, the Evangelical schools of Christian thought that I call manipulative repeatedly doubt, question, and deny many of the discoveries of scientists and historians, even flatly rejecting the intellectual reasoning processes that support much modern thought and objective observation. Leaders of these religious groups consider the newer, more objectively established findings to be symptoms of evil, heathen, or politically biased indoctrination of society: itself a form of manipulation. At least, that is what appears on the surface to motivate what and how they teach/preach.

But we can dig deeper in searching out why certain sects do this, and I think I have discovered some plausible motivations. As with many other problems of modern societies and reasons for manipulating or deceiving their members, one can find some answers initially by Following The Money.

When we examine the religious movements in American Evangelical Christianity that most visibly dovetailed their doctrine and societal interaction with GOP political tenets, particularly those of the Radical Right and the "Moral Majority," we see a set of beliefs and practices that put great stock in "traditional American values" and a love of God and Country in harmony with this. The sacredness of the birth process, of traditional marriage and gender roles, and of keeping oneself "unstained by the world" are central to this. The "other" is seen as a threat, and the religion-politics divide does not keep many or most of them from seeing America as a Christian Nation, one that should be kept so.

But what do we not see as guidelines for ethical behavior and moral character in those churches' teachings? For one example, their aforementioned scorn of science and intellectualism rejects new scientific information about what racial differences genuinely are, how industrialization and its resultant pollution threaten our planet, what are the biological forces behind gender identity and sexuality, and how old the Earth and the Universe are, as well as historical information on how human society began, how religion developed, and what were the forces behind war, conquest, and enslavement of human beings by other human beings.

What are the reasons for Christian churches to ignore or shun these matters, wrapped up as they are in concepts of right and wrong arguably as important as an embryo's right to life, the sacredness of marriage, or the need to have a government explicitly based on Christian principles? An answer may be found in identifying who might be threatened by an evolving moral sense with a greater knowledge of science, history, and the interconnectedness and diversity that benefit all of humanity.

Who might be threatened? People and organizations built to profit from traditional knowledge and values are endangered, in their view, from challenging those traditions. Dig deeper. Certain values held in certain ways by the populace as a whole benefit certain people and organizations, and they rise to the top in terms of wealth and power. Those who benefit in tangible ways from society's movements want to keep benefiting, and those with enough wealth and power have, through that wealth and power, the means to satisfy that want. But new ideas and sensibilities, manifest in America by evolving notions of equality, diversity, and interconnectedness, along with greater knowledge of what benefits and harms life on Planet Earth, threaten many established values that profited the White Male Landowners (and slave owners) of past centuries, that justified the exile and genocide of Native tribes in the name of our "Manifest Destiny," and that protect the coffers of today's corporate heads, industrialists, and investment bankers.

Dr. Ibram X. Kendi has shown how racist ideas took root when planted by preachers and pundits funded by the shrewd and powerful beneficiaries of the spread of such ideas: the captains of industry and empire. I believe it is the ideological descendants, if not many of the financial heirs, to that industrial, imperial wealth and power, that have more than enough motive and means to manipulate millions of gullible religious minds in America today, in the Twenty-First Century, just as they did in our centuries past. And the damage done by these same shrewd and powerful becoming overconfident and advancing what became the Trumpist agenda, based quite predictably in racism, anti-intellectualism, sexism, and anti-environmentalism, can only disappear if we wake up from our gullibility and work together to fight forces that try to manipulate the faithful by indoctrinating them in what is demonstrably not so.

(no subject)

This (LONG!) blog entry (copied from Facebook) contains one of my frequent dream-journal entries, but it is more than just that, because my dreams early this morning became more than that, due to their leading to avenues of thought I found it profitable to travel, and perhaps even to share. Because of the subjects of the dreams, it might be of interest to people who knew me from my Ridgecrest summer (1978), my

Ridgecrest Baptist Conference Center Summer Staff Alumni

friends who became so like a family back then, but I don't know - it also might become too emotionally or politically edgy. We'll have to see. Don't shoot me just yet.

Last night's dreams started out with a large indoor business, part of a multi-level shopping mall, set up as a kind of buffet restaurant, specializing in sandwiches and other meals made with their own brand of premium sliced ham, and maybe beef also. I was there with the family of my upbringing - Mom and Dad have made appearances in several of my most recent dreams, for some reason - and we were trying to determine among us who wanted what, and who would place the order. I was going to use the funds I had to order sandwiches for me and Mom, but it was becoming a typical stress-dream in the way the story made it difficult for me to track down Mom.

I woke from this dream at the insistence of Daisy and Lucie, because it was time for their early morning Dental Chews. When I returned to bed and to sleep, the indoor space had become part of the Ridgecrest Baptist Conference Center space, and it was now one of my dreams of returning to that place, the site of what was for a long, long time the Best Summer of My Life [TM]. But now, the weird workings of my dream mind had transformed the place into an altogether unfamiliar setting, with unfamiliar people. In fact, the decor was garish, circus-like. It was kind of like a parody of the last dream I had had of returning to Ridgecrest, where the large cafeteria in Rhododendron Hall (?) had been converted into this candy-colored sort of rotunda room with desserts and items resembling a Candy Kitchen store on the beach more than an eating place for a Baptist assembly. This new space my dream-mind was identifying in today's early morning hours as Ridgecrest was basically a noisy circus, and I actually actively resisted the notion - to the point that I woke up. My arthritic shoulder was twinging now, but I returned for a little more sleep and a somewhat more lucid and sane dreaming, in which the Ridgecrest environment, though filled with people I still don't recognize from real life, was more sensible: an outdoor, grassy area set up with seating platforms for a reunion assembly. Some of the meaning of what I had been dreaming - which I will explore subsequently - was sinking in and leading to thoughts of how much I had cherished the 1978 summer, as well as my subsequent SEVERE nostalgia for that whole experience, and I began to get teary-eyed as I described my feelings to the dream-fiction version of a female Ridgecrest friend who was marveling that, here we were at just the beginning of an Alumni weekend, and I was already crying.

I was not firmly implanted in the dream world by that time, which made this all more of a daydream, and I woke up for good soon after. But some of the symbolism of the Ridgecrest-transformed-beyond-recognizability dreams I've had recently started to come through, a little bit, or at least I think they did, and here is how and why.

What has transformed beyond recognizability is not Ridgecrest, but me, in a spiritual and, importantly, ideological sense. Actually, regardless of who actually has done the changing, there is a vast philosophical distance between where I was as a Southern Baptist young man of 21 and the self-described "Christian Zen Discordian" I am now... so much so, that I can use words like that to describe myself, words which would have horrified me back then with their ostensible sacrilege.

I was really kind of bummed last night before bedtime, so much so that my zazen practice was much briefer than usual, with a glumness that had a hot, impatient sort of irritation mixed in. I had commented a bit contrarily to a posted memory my wife

Wendy

made about life being short, and I responded as I did because, in the days of 45 in office and this whole mismanaged pandemic, and their effects on life in my retirement years that is already fairly different from what I had hoped it might be (though I had plenty of reason to expect the differences), life does not seem short or quickly-passing at all: It has slowed down to an uncomfortable crawl. It's not just that I miss Wendy being here when she's up North helping with grandkids - I definitely do! - but there are ways in which, to quote Joseph Heller, "I would not have picked this way for the world."

The biggest change in me lately, and the change that might have the most believable, direct change in how my mind serves up dreams of a return to a cherished Baptist conference center, is in the political awareness and opinion I have gained as a result of watching the rise of 45 to power. I have always been a proponent of environmentalism, speaking truth to power, gender and racial equality, and other liberal ideas. I have always had a fascination with both hippie culture and spiritual enlightenment. These existed in me indeed even back when I was a Southern Baptist working that summer in the North Carolina mountains, and the summer before that in Northwest Indiana churches. Much has occurred since, much that has been transformative: Federal employment with its 33-year and 5-month direct view into the corrupting forces of money, loyalism, and "Running Government Like a Business"; three marriages, two divorces, fatherhood, times of plenty, and times of having less; becoming Roman Catholic as an adult (through RCIA) because I saw value in my (first) wife and me belonging to the same church and I knew she would not change her denomination; attending Presbyterian and Episcopalian congregations after that; growing to love "sacred space" and the feeling of reverence and awe in more formal forms of liturgy; dealing with $1032.79/month child support payments for the better part of two decades; discovering the amazing ideas of Robert Anton Wilson, ideas which frightened the daylights out of me at first; going into psychotherapy for anxiety that was crippling me as far back as Freshman year of college; discovering the path to a still mind through seated "meditation" practice, and finding the wisdom of American and classic Zen masters; exploring mystical ideas from sources I am still a bit bashful about just listing outright here, other than my father being a member of a Masonic Order and the apple not falling too terribly far from the tree.

Those departures from the path I was on at 21 were significant, but their effect on my dreaming was merely that, during those years, I don't think I had *any* dreams of returning to Ridgecrest then. They just didn't happen, but that may simply be due to their being no symbolic need for them. During my first marriage, in fact, I had become disgusted with my frequent deep pangs of nostalgia, and the effects I believed at the time they were having on my ability to be a good, industrious husband to my first wife, and so I did the unthinkable one day: I took my "Cakira," the Ridgecrest yearbook from the summer 1978, outside to the curb, where several lawn-leaf bags of yard clippings sat waiting to be picked up by the garbage man the next morning, placed the book inside one of those bags, and never saw it again. Even nagging wife #1 was shocked that I did that, though I had done it, in my mind, for her, for us.

No, the big jump in psychic territory came during this past decade, though it indeed has some roots going further back. The

GOP

obstructionism of Obama, the rise of 45, and the Religious Right's alarming support of him awakened me, as it awakened many, to damage not yet repaired in this nation. Ava DuVernay's "13th" documentary and

Ibram X. Kendi

's anti-racist works, particularly "Stamped From the Beginning", have turned my attention to the years - centuries - of manipulation by (to use some well-worn alliterative turns of phrase I like a bit too much) powerful profiteers, paying prominent politicians, who pad the pockets of pundits and preachers, to keep us just okey-dokey with corruption and evil in high places, much as their ideological ancestors kept multitudes of early Americans happy with genocide and exile of Natives as well as enslavement of Africans.

I had begun noticing - and heeding words of people and organizations concerned with - manipulation by broadcast and published entertainment and journalistic media, manipulation to Manufacture Consent. Robert Anton Wilson's voice was among those raising angry awareness of this, but Noam Chomsky became a voice to heed as well. Also, social media had come into my life, a subset of the bigger trend of instant Internet access to news, fact-checking, and variety of opinion I had not had before. And friends. And e-mail lists. And the computer-enhanced exchange of ideas, even dangerous ones.

I could see the evidence of the dovetailing of a significant subset of Evangelical Christianity with @GOP talking points, through televangelists,

The 700 Club

, and others. And if I failed to see the hand of Jesus Christ being the primary mover in all of this, it may have been a lack of "spiritual discernment" on my part, but I certainly wasn't alone. Also, as I said, I had seen some of the corrupting effects of loyalism and "Running Government Like a Business" in my

U.S. Department of Defense (DoD)

career, and had already felt some of the sting of backlash that comes when one resists the manipulative/manipulated masses and begins to discover one's voice in Speaking Truth to Power. (It's not for the career-advancement-minded!)

Anyway, you get the idea by now, presented as it is in my usual long-winded way.

It's no wonder that Ridgecrest has returned to my dreams, and is becoming ridiculously unrecognizable even as it does so. That is a psychological metaphor my mind is creating as to how far I've moved, due to circumstance, conscious decision, and one or two or a dozen genuine American political/spiritual crises, from where I was back in the summer of 1978 at age 21. Life *is* ridiculous and unrecognizable, despite the forces making it so having been active for a long, long time.

My mind was just realizing that I'm not wholly at peace with all that has transpired. But that sort of realization, together with what I do in response, are what life is for.

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History, Philosophy, Probability, and the Jesus You Get

[copied from a post I made elsewhere]

I think about the different forces that shape what messages get to us, how, and why. In particular this morning, some remarks on other posts have me thinking about religion and how its message gets spread.

One person's post mentioned having to clarify, conversationally, "Classic Jesus or Republican Jesus?" My philosophical and analytical mind started running with that, and I don't believe such a clarification goes far enough... and I also think that to "go far enough" would shake some very basic foundations in at least my life, possibly many others. But then, if a foundation is shaky, it might bear investigating why. So if you're curious, follow along with me here.

I firmly believe I had no control over where and when I was born. I tend to think that is true of everyone. And "everyone" is spread over millennia of history and even many years before that, not to mention many continents and cultures. But where and when a person is born has great bearing on not just what he learns about the world, but also how he learns to think about it. Our culture influences our perspectives on everything. (With this and many other statements I'm making here, I invite anyone who sees it as a clear untruth to point it out and give your reasons.)

"The civilized world" so named by those successful enough to have published their opinions and had those opinions taught widely, shaped language development and cultural development and how information is seen and shared among its members. The most widespread messages, and the most-used methods for spreading those messages, were the most popular ones.

Stick with me. This is the important bit.

What you or I learned, or can learn today, as truth depends on where you and I were born, where we live now, and what messages are available to us for figuring out how to filter and process an immense amount of published, traditional, verbal, and non-verbal information, some of it designed for the purpose of letting us know who we are, where we are in the grand scheme of existence, and what we might need to be ready to do with our lives - our purpose.

What about religion? Certainly it concerns itself with the most important of these concepts of identity and purpose. But - aha! - the religion we get the opportunity to learn also depends on where we were born, what has been popular in the area where we were born, and the family values into which we had the circumstance to be born. And I think we could have been born anywhere, or at any time.

Religion itself, in fact, can deal with even these observations. I know the religion in which I grew up, Southern Baptist Christianity, definitely dealt with it. Divine will and intention, an overarching plan for every single life form, a heavenly caring and compassion for each organism and the circumstances it will encounter ... all of these teach some of us, and teach us strongly, that our birth and our religion and the culture that instills our values is anything besides random and circumstantial. It is deliberate, it is known, and, in some sense, it is as it should be.

We then are left to extrapolate, if we are so inclined (and it appears that I am, for weal or for woe, so inclined), whether that is identically true for the many other beings on this planet, throughout time and space, whatever the culture and values and religion into which they might have been born.

The messages I or you grew up learning were most important are influenced by laws of large numbers - probability laws - in this, unless that Divine will and intention I mentioned is so powerful and so deliberately active as to set such laws aside when it comes to the matter of which message gets to which organism and how it affects that organism's life.

Religion, science, history - all kinds of knowledge ranging from objective to speculative ... and even to manipulative presentations of information (hang in there!) ... gets to you and me at least partially based on how likely it is to get to you and me, and this has to do, at least somewhat, with the sheer number of organisms or their message-spreading mechanisms that are putting that knowledge out.

We get the truths - the information and the presentations of such - that we are most numerically likely to get, based on where and when it is our fortune to exist.

American Christians get the Jesus information that gets to us, just like anybody gets the information about anything (again, that hugely powerful Divine will and intention aside - can/should you push something like that aside for argument's sake? think of the billions of others in other eras and cultures before you answer that). And powerful forces have shaped that information - that culture-shaping, society-forming, brother-and-sisterhood-bonding information - all down through the centuries that a religion formed in Jesus Christ's name has existed.

This is why, when talking about American values and Christian values, I've often dared to use the words "manipulative" and "exploitation." Because you see, in this country, who spreads the messages the farthest is who makes them the most popular, and who becomes the most powerful is who controls the most powerful messages - and, through them, the cultures and values and practices ... and, yes, religious beliefs ... of the most people.

And that gets right back down to you and me. The messages and values that found us were influenced by what was likely to find us. They may or may not resemble what we think they are supposed to be beyond that.

This is why scientists and historians and libraries and books are as important in considering Divine stuff, even our holiest of principles, as priests and preachers and the 700 Club... and even the President.

Myth and Metaphor in N.K. Jemisin's "The Broken Earth"

This essay written for pleasure by a fan of a book series is full of spoilers.
This essay written for pleasure by a fan of a book series is full of spoilers.
This essay written for pleasure by a fan of a book series is full of spoilers.
This essay written for pleasure by a fan of a book series is full of spoilers.
This essay written for pleasure by a fan of a book series is full of spoilers.
This essay written for pleasure by a fan of a book series is full of spoilers.
This essay written for pleasure by a fan of a book series is full of spoilers.
This essay written for pleasure by a fan of a book series is full of spoilers.
This essay written for pleasure by a fan of a book series is full of spoilers.
This essay written for pleasure by a fan of a book series is full of spoilers.

...
...

...

...

...

...

I had some thoughts about "The Broken Earth" by N. K. Jemisin, which frame the events, characters, and issues she brought to life in a larger metaphorical and mythic context, one whose ideas are purely speculative on my part. It is not my intention to stroll in to the universe she created, the set of ideas she explored, and say that any of my ideas have any more belonging to this universe than that: the set of ideas of a fan who enjoyed this trilogy of books so much.

The world she created in The Stillness, with the ideas of The Rifting and The Seasons, and even Corepoint, those are so full of meaning to me: meaning such as I'm sure has become more acute in the minds of many of Jemisin's readers as we now find ourselves in COVID-time, a Fifth Season of our own we could not have predicted, and one which we are struggling as human beings to handle. Jemisin's placing of issues of race and community into the very center of her saga mirror the way race, racism, and community are also acute concerns now, giving nasty shapes and implications to the simple task of trying to care for one another, even as leaders wrangle for power and "normalcy," the viral cloud spreading and worsening like an ash cloud over already struggling lands and bands of human beings.

The various fantastic races in The Stillness and the lands that preceded it (like those of Syl Anagist) have reached down into the Earth's heart, whether as a magical-orogenic-hybrid power grab initiated by Empire Builders who created peoples to use as tools, or as desperate measures by arguable/ambivalent/anti heroes to try to set some sort of healing in motion. These reflect our own Empire-building efforts in centuries past and even now, efforts that pierced our own selves to the very heart, that caused awful effects on the Earth, and that produced sometimes malignant attitudes about who are human, who are dispensable, and who are destined to rule over others. And now an awful disease here in the world of fact lays bare as plainly as any Season's struggles where virtue and villainy lie.

It is something interesting to contemplate. Who are the Alabasters in the COVID-19 era? Who are the orogenes? What is the magic of our day, the geomestry? What bad ideas have gotten implanted as deeply as iron shards in the backs of the brain stems of the true villains? How do we fight them? And how are our traditional ideals of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty used by those who want to manipulate us, when we thought those same people were supposed to safeguard those ideals for us?

And, finally, when all of our illusions are subject to The Shattering, what can we rebuild from what is left?

I struggle to hold on to a hope, a prayer, that when God reveals something of the/a Divine plan all along for us, for the world, for the tribes/countries/ideas we call America or Democrats or Republicans or Progressives or wherever/however we've staked out our comms in all of this, that God's explanation of our active, often destructive role in it all does not start out with, "Hello, little enemies."

N. K. Jemisin's The Broken Earth: A Reader Review

On June 3, 2020, the day after my 63rd birthday, I began reading one of my gifts: a boxed set of three softcover volumes of The Broken Earth, a science-fantasy trilogy by N. K. Jemisin. The volumes are, in order, "The Fifth Season," "The Obelisk Gate," and "The Stone Sky." I just completed reading "The Stone Sky" within the last half-hour. Three books in less than three weeks is a reading rate record for me, but IT HAS BEEN SO RUSTING WORTH IT!

This is among the best set of books I have ever read, regardless of category: English-language work, fiction, sci-fi/fantasy, literary fiction. Often after I have really enjoyed a book, trilogy, movie, or other form of narrative entertainment, I will sling superlatives carelessly in my enthusiasm. This time, I feel the superlatives and my enthusiasm are appropriate.

Jemisin has put masterful writing together with an easy (but not too easy) storytelling style, and has woven a world of characters, situations, and powers from her own fertile imagination, but also from, and strongly guided by, her life experience as a Black woman in New York City. That she has done this in a setting that is a far-futuristic near-parallel-Earth that is tectonically and thus meteorologically unstable, pierced to its heart by its intelligent inhabitants, and driven to revenge against those inhabitants (the aforementioned instability is the product of Earth's anger directed at those creatures, but also of what they've done to earn that anger) simply makes this more magical, marvelous, and, most importantly, meaningful. She doesn't give away answers flatly, much of the time: She knows how to immerse you in the work so that you can conclude those answers from the words, sentences, descriptions she does use. I was so struck by her style that I felt I needed to do some side-reading - as well as making conversation with my Facebook friends during pandemic quarantine - about just what narrative style is and what it can do. I am so happy for this Master Class Refresher Course in it. Such good storytelling. I'd love to have heard this whole adventure told over a campfire. And in a strange way, it felt like it was.

The subject of enslavement is a big plot driver here, but so is the idea of community. What makes a person a person is just as central a question as the many mysteries with which Jemisin has sowed her fictional world. She deals with the familiar subjects head-on, peppers her characters' language with familiar idiom, and then turns around and displays such inventions as orogeny, Stone Eaters, and geomestry. All of this is done so flawlessly and believably that the reader can easily imagine 256 huge obelisks of different kinds of crystal floating in Evil Earth's atmosphere at once. The Stillness is a fictional land to which I know I'll long to return someday.

Long-form fiction, not limited to sci/fi fantasy, is a great love of mine from the days between high school and college years when I would sit in my family's non-air-conditioned house in Northwest Georgia (I'm 40 minutes away from that house now; it's being beautifully renovated by my sister and her husband, and my daughter from my first marriage lives down the block from them) and read "Dune," "Gone With The Wind," and James Joyce's "Ulysses". Jemisin makes me think of some of the greats I've read: Donaldson's "Covenant" series as well as Herbert's work. Zenna Henderson's tales of The People.

The Broken Earth stands among these great books. As I see it now, in so many ways, this trilogy towers over them.

I thank you

Spiritus, qui nunc operatur in animo ad ad me: ego gratias ago tibi.

Current Mood: contemplative

Entry tags:

dreams

Dreamwidth Dream Diary Entry - March 23, 2020

I have decided to put this dream in my Dreamwidth blog because of its length, clarity, and character. It was a story my brain wanted to tell and wanted me to remember. I woke myself up from it specifically, deliberately, and realized I needed to spend a few minutes, in the pre-dawn morning just before 6 a.m., committing it to memory so that I could write about it now. It is one of those dreams I occasionally have that makes me think it is, or at least wish it was, more important than just some story my sleeping brain has told me for reasons only it will ever understand. I find I want to re-enter the world, to validate its seeming reality, to figure out the dream story's mysteries. And mysteries there were in it, specifically asking me - the me in the dream situation - to solve them.

It started out with me standing in the hall of an older building that seemed to be a church here in Northwest Georgia, in the present day. I was myself, at the age I am now, although being married did not enter the dream circumstances. I seemed to be on my own, and I stood in this building looking at displays and bulletin boards that held information about the history of this church, or of some members of its congregation. There was an exhibit about a woman whose name started with A - Abigail? - who was no longer alive, had died tragically, in fact, but who had provided an energetic and creative puppet ministry to the children of the church that was still influential there today. The denomination of the church was not certain, but as I began to interact with other people in that church hall, I got a vibe that they were less "holy-roller" but still quite spiritual about their faith. I felt I could talk about weird experiences and the supernatural without it being out of place there. In fact, the people I met and talked with - conversations I don't really remember happening within the confines of this particular dream - seemed to believe I too had a strange spark in me, something they wanted to cultivate and use.

I don't know how it happened, but a way they decided to use me was investigative: A woman who attended - it could have been Abigail but I don't really remember that it was; Abigail had had long, dark hair, and when I envisioned this woman she was older, with bushy, gray hair - had lived alone near there but had died, and there were some mysterious or mystical circumstances they wanted me to use my stranger talents - psychic, intuitive - to help me explore. As in my waking life, I've had very few indications of anything but scientifically explainable abilities, this was surprising to me, but it occurred both to me and the church that I would be able to do this work. They were planning to pay me for it as well. They gave me directions to the woman's house. Next to it would be the house of a man with whom I would be lodging as I conducted my physical and metaphysical explorations.

The woman's house would be located just off of an unpaved road that itself would be just off of GA Highway 53, or a road very similar to it. The general vicinity seemed to be Hamrick road, but there were differences. The area seemed to be between Fairmount and Jasper, though there were minor quirks to that. I dreamed I was driving down the highway when I located the smaller roads - they were tricky to find, I had been warned, but once I found them I would be certain how to get to my destination. I drove over the fine gray gravel of the first unpaved road for just a little while when I saw what must have been the dead woman's house and the house in which I would be a lodger beside it. They were close to each other at the edge of thick forest. I followed the small driveway, which brought my car pretty much up to the door of the woman's house. Immediately, the man who lived, possibly alone but possibly with others, in the house next door came out to greet me. I stared at the woman's house for a while. The sun was shining from behind it and was coming through gaps or holes in its timbers, spaces that gave almost a checkerboard effect to the pale sun - seemed to be morning sun, but I am unsure - shining through it.

The man, who had a slight resemblance to a man I know at Holy Family Church, who has long white hair, a beard, and is short and slight in build, now asked me to come into his house, and, as we entered, he was telling me the ground-rules of my stay. Apparently there was a sophisticated security system in his house, and in my comings and goings I needed to be mindful of it. This became apparent when, once or twice in this part of the dream, I crossed a line where there was a red laser light shining, near the door to a back porch or yard, and it set off an alarm. He was gracious about resetting the system, but I knew that I did not want to keep making work for him.

Then I found myself back at the church, again in the part that had the hallway, which connected to Sunday School rooms. It seemed to be morning, and church members were coming in. As they greeted me, I was chatting with some of them about the new job I appeared to have, the mysteries I was to try to help solve about the woman and her abandoned house with its sunny gaps. I noticed one of the listeners to me was a friend from waking life who is in Calhoun Community Chorus and who is the brother of the Chorus conductor, both of whom attended with me a church in Calhoun when I was growing up, I was waiting for someone from the church office responsible for giving me the work to arrive, so that I could tell them that I would be unavailable on the Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights that I have duties with the Choir at Holy Family. I then walked into a smaller Sunday School room, and suddenly in walked John Carter, my employer at Holy Family. He greeted me amiably and said, "So you decided to come to my church?" I was glad to see him, relieved that the explanation for the time I needed at my other job would be that much simpler.

The dream ended with a strange, almost incongruous part of the story where I was realizing that I would probably be, and wanted to be, in search of another romantic partner. (I know I don't have to apologize to my wife for when my dreams do something like this - but still, Wendy, I'm sorry you weren't in it with me!) I was looking at the people walking to and fro in another somewhat dark hallway of the church building, and looking at one woman in particular to whom I felt attracted. Different shapes and shadows seemed to distort at that point, and soon after that I woke myself up more or less deliberately. The dogs were still sleeping and a morning thundershower had not yet begun, and so I noted that the decision to end the dream was not externally caused.

Entry tags:

batman

My Love Affair with Repetition in Itself

If someone were to ask me what's at the core of happiness and satisfaction for me, one of the components I would require in an enumeration of such would be familiarity. This might seem incongruous with my love for the weird and unusual, and, believe you me, it seems as incongruous to me as to others. Perhaps it is a matter of balance, of complement.

I thought of this recently, my love affair with familiarity and in particular with repetition in itself, because my lovely wife got me a more-than-generous gift for Christmas that I had only put on a wish list of someday purchases, not items I'd ask anyone to get for me: the complete 1960s Batman television series on Blu-Ray. If you, dear reader, are familiar with that series at all, you might recall the connection with my infatuation for the familiar: That show was a veritable treasure trove of repeated themes. Familiarity bred, in me, deep love.

Establishing shots persisted from week to week, and some became more or less stock footage: the call from Commissioner Gordon; the way Alfred would summon Bruce and Dick to answer the phone; the excuses to Aunt Harriet, followed by her bewildered exclamations; the lines spoken on the Batphone; the William Shakespeare activator for the secret door; the descent down the batpoles. Before and after the opening titles and the first commercial break, so much effort went in to making the viewer experience a familiar environment. One knew that when the Batmobile pulled up and parked in front of the "Municipal Building" on the Warner Brothers lot, it would be mere seconds before one would see a closer shot of the door with "Gotham City Police Headquarters" atop it: the same shot, the same angle, the same lighting every time.

Could such deliberately established familiarity, such almost insane consistency, have contributed in subtle psychological ways to the phenomenon that was Bat-Mania back then? Other shows established environment in similar ways, but I'm not sure they did it to the same extent. It was part of the "campy" aspect of this particular show, after all. For me, it seemed to work like a charm. I was 9 years old, and I was hooked. The show became everything to me. The bad guys had predictable mannerisms, and you'd see the same bad guy among the four favorites - Joker, Penguin, Riddler, Catwoman - again in a month or so, despite the Dynamic Duo sending them "up the river for good this time."

This resonated profoundly with something in me. Maybe it put it there, but that may also be a chicken-or-egg question. I grew up in the American Southeast, in the Northwest Georgia mountains. My life already had a great deal of repetition, a necessary routine that was synonymous with my experience of country life. We weren't farmers; my parents were teachers. We weren't rich, and did not travel much. The travel we made was usually to relatives within the state, and the most frequent visits were to places I can still see if I close my eyes. I was nine years old when Batman was on television, and its deliberate repetition probably sounded "make yourself at home" in my psyche almost out loud. The pace of life was slow, and my sister and I often thought it boring, but now we miss it. Modern life's unpleasant aspects - as well as my own personal psychological difficulties with anxiety - almost always seem tied to change coming too fast, too drastic, or too often. I'm a little surprised, in retrospect, that I loved the Tim Burton and Frank Miller re-imagining of the Batman characters and situations as much as I did. But then, I had already been advised long before that the show I had so idolized was meant to be deliberately silly, and not the thrilling action adventure many kids my age had taken it to be.

I additionally think I can see this as having been useful to those interested in manipulation by popular media. Particularly, I see it working for those who appeal to, and try to profit from, social movements to "take us back to" a more familiar time, and to discredit "too much change." Again, I'm a bit surprised I came to enjoy and love the progressive in art, entertainment, and politics. I loved the hippie movement, even as I remained faithful to my Southern Baptist upbringing. As I got into my teens and early twenties, I was a bundle of contradictions, most likely, in my search for self-discovery. My parental upbringing was not to make too many waves, and I had (hopefully, still have) a mostly sunny disposition and a desire to get along with people. This suits me well in personal life, and it made for a survivable professional one, though my more progressive and intellectual sympathies made me less of a think-alike than my love affair with Repetition in Itself might have suggested in earlier years. This of course affected my career advancement, but that's a frequently-repeated whine for another time and place - other than, of course, leaving a marker for it right here. :-D

Well, after all, Batman nicely balanced all of that repetition and those predictable weekly fistfights with bright colors, flamboyant actors, and some of the weirdest sets and props anyone had seen up until then. Color television for everyone was fairly new, and Batman was one of the most dazzling shows. When Star Trek came out a year later, it seemed overly complicated and boringly talky to me at first, I must admit.

Luckily, I grew out of it. But Batman's 1966 first season still thrills me much more than, perhaps, it should.

Make Gotham City Great Again? :-D

Entry tags:

Rant at the Ranters

We had a Black President for eight years and we dared to be outraged when Congress obstructed and stonewalled him, including his well-thought-out Supreme Court nominee, and his health care plan that would have been EVEN BETTER had it not met all that obstruction. We dared to bristle when Fox News and the evangelical community baselessly smeared him and his wife and family and his Woman Secretary of State, for eight years. We called you out when you used derogatory rhetoric against him on social media, and we sure as HELL didn't like that you promoted a lying, cheating reality-TV star with outlandish birtherism theories as being a better man than he is. Yes, we'd groan when your manipulated masses infiltrated the more gullible members of our families, so that we got hundreds of chain e-mails promoting the most ridiculous anti-Obama and anti-Clinton theories and smear memes, just like clockwork.

So yeah, I get it that the Good Ol' Boys are sorta kinda losing their minds right about now.

But get this: We don't want those particular Good Ol' Boys running things any more. We tried Manifest Destiny and, now, #MAGAfestDestiny, and it craps on us just as it was advertised to crap on all those other people we wanted to exploit: the worst White Male being better than the best non-White-Male and all that. Or stir Evangelical Christian into that discriminatory mix, too. Same thing, bigotry promoting ideologies of inequality.

Bad deeds we've been doing for over two centuries, under the puppet-string control of plutocrats and oligarchs guarding their hoards, are still bad deeds - maybe even VERY, INEXCUSABLY bad deeds.

It's way past time for change. Even the Earth's environment is crying out that our efforts at true, compassionate progress have been too late. And y'all bigoted Radical Right lardbutts have been in the way.

Move. I understand a Space Force is being assembled. Maybe they can ship y'all off somewhere so you can enjoy your implicit race/gender/ideological superiority unhampered by the likes of us progressive snowflakes. Good luck with that - I understand you pissed off scientists with your manipulated gullibility, too.

Entry tags:

prayer

A Prayer

Dear God,

Maker of everything, I praise you. Existence behind all existence, I bow before you. Source of goodness, truth, and beauty, I stand amazed in the presence of you. Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, I seek to see Your face, to know You more fully, to have Your infinite, incomprehensible glory revealed to me in ways that You see best.

I thank you for the blessings of life, the blessings of love, the blessings of imagination. Music, visual art, performance, all come from your breath, your indwelling spark. Jesus Christ, you died for us and saved us, but you also taught us to live, you gave us lessons, showed us mysteries, did miracles. As new learning comes to us, as our human race has grown before and since you walked as one of us on Earth, we have learned to express ourselves, to release that spark you put within us, in new ways. Your love is new every morning, and we who you, Father God, made "a little lower than the angels" are so blessed with the ability to express love and praise and all other emotions, inspirations, feelings, in so many countless new ways. Thank you. Thank you for material blessings, for enough to eat, for one more day to live, for the opportunities to serve You that come with that.

Forgive all my misdeeds and wrong thinking. Despite your love and grace and inspiration, I fall short of Your glory every day, every minute. How can I possibly deserve the least bit of mercy? I do not love as I should, and I center my life on a self, my own self, that is truly not worthy of such focus, that is nothing compared to You. Lord God, I have been careless with the blessings of life, and whiny whenever I hit a struggle. I have hated and been angry. Lord, though I do not deserve, I still beg, have mercy on me, a sinner.

The world is hurting, Lord God Almighty. The weak, the sick, and the poor seem to outnumber the privileged by huge numbers, and my own sin of caring mainly for myself and not for others seems to be an epidemic. Dear God, help those who hurt and who are ill, those who fear what the coming day will bring, all those weak and oppressed, those who have powerful individuals over them who look down upon them and want to hurt them. And Lord, help me never to forget to help, in whatever way I am able, those who hurt, who are sick, who are weak, because You live in them, and whoever is a blessing to them, blesses You as well; who shuns them, shuns You.

And please help those of us who serve You, who claim the name of Jesus Christ and His salvation, to understand rightly Your path for us, Your teachings, and what You want us to do. As You have always made us aware, false teachers and wildly popular ways to err, to stray from Your narrow path, abound. Help us to understand, and to help each other in Love, because You have taught us that You are Love. Help us to understand holy scripture so that it leads us to see and understand what is Your True Word. You taught us Your son Jesus Christ is the Word, and we thank you for that great mystery, and pray for insight into it. Help us not to mistake the words of mere humans as being more than they really are, not to mistake them for You in Your glory.

For indeed yours is the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, always, everywhere, and evermore.

Amen.

Earworms, Clichés, and Manufactured Consent

Earworms, Clichés, and Manufactured Consent

or

What Would You Like on Your Nothingburger?
(inspired by a friend on Twitter)

I think earworms and clichés play a bigger role in society than we realize. I think anyone who takes to any form of popularized media knows this, and I think many of these entities use earworms and clichés deliberately.

This post is inspired by a friend's Tweet where they complained about news stations using the phrase "nothingburger" too much.

It has been documented thoroughly that there are gross and subtle ways by which all manner of media - published, broadcast, electronic, social - manufacture our consent. My little personal prickly and itchy feeling, my irritation that I've harbored in a primitive form for a long time and that has caused me to change my television viewing habits and opinions drastically from how I felt as a child, is that the mechanisms like earworms that implant ideas so strongly in our heads, like tunes we can't stop our brains from playing over and over, influence our own behaviors and mental processes beyond the mere annoyance that they, and excessively repeated expressions, cause.

People who understand our brains and behaviors, both individually and societally, have among their number those who are able to monetize and weaponize that knowledge. And people who strike down Fairness and Neutrality measures in publishing or broadcasting do so, I fear, hand in hand with such experts.

Hence my view emerged that in some ways, phenomena like pop music, viral phenomena, and sports events - generating millions of spectators and even participants - can be trial balloons, or to use another metaphor, can make us a test market just to verify the right kind of control to exert the right kind of power over us.

What's "the right kind of power"? Well, I'm sure you can come up with examples in your own mind of how the human race has been manipulated. You can come up with your own example of corrupt media, and of how we've all had the wool pulled over our eyes.

But when you come up with your own examples, bear in mind that you are part of that test market. You have experienced some of those trial balloons. You, and I, are the PRODUCT, as folks were telling us 'way back in the 1960s and 1970s.

It's enough to make you far more picky about pop culture consumption. I know that that's been the case for me - with some exceptions, of course. (See: Star Wars, Facebook, Twin Peaks.)

Those exceptions are how they can keep a foot in my door. Because it's hard to tell from a cliché, an earworm, or a viral phenomenon just whose creators are more "bad guys" than others: Who's trying to influence us in insidious ways, and manufacture our consent to make the world something other than what we might more sensibly, more reasonably, work to get?

Walking away from all of it is arguably foolish. Perhaps skepticism about most of it might seem to be overreaction as well. But we voted a monster into office - that's a cliche I myself notice now - and I think cliché and earworm are symptoms of how we accommodated such a manipulation into our lives and behaviors, to allow such a manufacture of our consent to have happened.

Entry tags:

philosophy,
truth

We Need Philosophers.

We need philosophers.

Because sometimes when being right carries great amounts of importance, and people start claiming that they've got the truth, or that others are awful liars, it's good to know what truth is. Not what *the* truth is: what truth itself is.

And language is such a finicky and fiddly commodity, as it changes over the years, that we need to take that set of symbols and meanings - the ones we use to construct thoughts and ideas about our lives - and work out what truth is all over again. Maybe we can do it with a nice new translation of Plato. Maybe Heidegger and Kant and even *shudder* Derrida will be more helpful.

But philosophy is best engaged with one's own thought process. So let's do some thinking about what truth is.

When we look out into the world with our senses, we are bringing in to our brains the products of the phenomenon of observation. It's a phenomenon of observation, but it's also the observation of phenomena. Let's call that our phenomenological world. It's the world our senses bring to us. Can you think of anything else that is real to you? Even your thoughts are a phenomenology created by your brain activity, responding to your other senses and sensations.

Now, because we have this wonderful invention called "language," we can construct sets of symbols to say stuff about the world we inhabit. We can say it to other living beings of whom we've become phenomenologically aware: our Mom, first, then our Dad, other people over time since our birth. We have strong evidence from our senses that these people exist: The sensations that come from them persist.

And there is so much else about which to construct thoughts to share with these other beings! And we want to describe those thoughts about that sharing accurately.

Accuracy is the key to what we call "truth": When we represent the world accurately in language, we are making statements that are true to the world: They align with its features. Similarities and differences are ways we can talk about that truth. If I deduce something will happen, based on observation, the similarity or difference of what actually happens with what I predicted tells me whether my deduction was accurate. The extent to which they are similar is the extent of truth of my understanding of how the world - the part of the world I'm observing - works.

Fidelity of our words and perceptions and ideas to what is actually out there, to the extent that it comes back *in* *here* to our brains through our senses, is how we arrive at what we call truth. Fidelity/Truth: We talk about this in other contexts: Your faithfulness to your partner is how true you are to them, or that at least is the language we use.

So when people say we're in a post-truth society, and when other people throw around on news and social media so much commentary and speculation and noise and manipulation ... keep in mind that there is that which matches up quite nicely with - that is, it is TRUE to - the world which we can observe. And there is that which differs from it. And there is a whole industry, or set of industries, making themselves rich by calling something true, getting us to buy into it, and then cashing in on the difference between what they've sold us, and what is really true.

We need to get back to basics, be better and smarter at figuring out truth, and shame those who would profit from selling us something else.

Unless of course they're clever writers of fiction for fiction's sake. Those guys are GOLDEN.

Mueller's Remark Today

Bob Mueller today: “And second, the opinion says that the Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting President of wrongdoing.”
— Matthew Miller (@matthewamiller) May 29, 2019

Dream Diary Entry recorded March 1, 2019

Last night's main dream was remarkable in its clarity and its interesting qualities, which it stylistically appropriated from several stories or series in pop culture, almost as if it wanted to be told. And in the dream that followed, I was in fact attempting to tell someone about the story of that main dream. I had none of the phenomenon of losing the memory of the dream upon waking, and so that's interesting.

The main dream started, or seemed to start, with me in an apartment in an old building, seemingly in an urban area like New York. I'm not alone: the one person with me is The Tenth Doctor (David Tennant), wearing his brown pinstripe suit. We are having some sort of adventure together, but the exact nature of it I don't realize until I'm in the kitchen. I am preparing lunch for us, some sort of pastry or stew - it genuinely could have been either - with pastry-like materials such as flour, butter, meat, and rice all together. There is a coffee-maker-like device in the back of the small, cluttered kitchen with the ingredients already in it (from a previous occupant? from whoever was leaving the place for us to stay?), designed to mix the ingredients together properly. I shut the lid on the advice and turn it on. It makes a "chunk" sound and deposits all the ingredients, barely combined together, onto a lower stage of the machine, whatever it is. This won't work, and so I start to gather the ingredients together, including a big block of soft, melt-y butter, and put it in a bowl to try to salvage the recipe and prepare it in or on the regular oven.

It is at this point in the dream that I remember, and report to The Doctor, that this has happened before, precisely, with only slight differences. He realizes it too, and we perceive that we are caught in some kind of time loop, where we are experiencing this series of events, over several hours, but will soon experience them again, over and over, until we figure out how to break out of it. I don't think either of us realize it as being a dream: It's more like the loop in the movie "Groundhog Day" or perhaps more precisely in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Cause and Effect." (A favorite episode of mine, from before I became a big Doctor Who fan, but very evocative of some of that show's time-based puzzle plots.) But some things, we can tell, are happening differently this time, which The Doctor ascribes to our growing awareness that we are caught in the loop. In my actual dream, we have only experienced the events of the loop once or twice, but we remember going through them many other times, and even remember, gradually, that we've started taking note of the particulars of the situation and how they differ from time to time.

The Doctor has gone into another room or has entered it from the larger apartment complex where he was trying to figure out what to do. I turn back to face the kitchen and dining area, and I see an unfamiliar man standing there, and realize he was not in any past repetition of the loop. I feel a sense of urgency, and say to The Doctor "Fire alarm?" He says "Yes! Hit the fire alarm," which I do, using a red box/lever on the wall similar to the school building fire alarms I remember. I then go outside using a kind of rear entrance or fire-escape-like door and stairs, at which point the dream does start to lose its cohesive quality: Did that act actually break free of the loop? It did not feel like it, but the dream did not really proceed from that point. Except that ...

I found myself in a large swimming pool with many other people, including my wife Wendy and my daughter Susan. I begin telling them about the dream I had, as described above, but first Wendy, and later Susan, find the details so interesting they begin going off on their own conversational tangents, making it difficult for me to resume the story. I eventually don't, as Susan goes swimming off into another part of the pool. I suspect I dreamed that I had already told Wendy the story of the dream earlier, and Susan was the main person I had wanted to tell this time. Someone, an unidentified friend, wants to take a picture of me swimming - they've already done so with Wendy. I decide to comply, closing my eyes and attempting to back-float (successfully! it could only happen in dreams), but then I realize it would look gross with my pot belly cresting the water, and so I cross my arms over my mid-section in a very clumsy/awkward fashion. Soon after this, we are told everyone must get out of the pool for a few minutes while they fix something. We do, as does everyone else, but the pool is soon rendered fine, or at least we're told so, and Wendy and I and others go back in. She and I swim over to where the apparent lifeguard or apartment supervisor, a stocky woman with auburn hair, is tweaking the knobs of an orange-colored hard plastic control panel near the water entrance steps and railing that regulates the pool.

An Excerpt from "The Bimp Book," My Anonymous Autobiography

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- The Last Straw: Competing With Boss For Raise

The last office I occupied at the DoD agency where I worked was by far the least satisfying. I had had good work reorganized out from under me once again, and the options of places to go were slim. I did not get an opportunity to find new analytic work such as I had been cross-trained on my own initiative to do. No, all they could find for me was a boss who wanted me to work as a webpage designer, for her office’s analytic efforts to be represented on the internal web at work.

She was stern, and I was not really all that good at webpage design, nor was there a “fire under me” for that sort of work, and so of course I wasn’t doing my best work in that office. Additionally, our personalities seemed to grate, and there were others in the office that did not like me. When time came for us to compete for the increasingly rare grade level raises - we called them promotions inside the Federal government workplace - I had had many talks with management two levels up about what I should do next time. I had done this, and more.

But now, I had the opportunity to turn in a Promotion Folder to get a raise above Grade 13, where I had been foundering for almost two decades. All my best work had been since that last promotion, with documentation from others readily available to verify this. I was a much better worker, but every Promotion Folder submission found me feeling less and less hopeful. Now, of course, with my retirement eligibility occurring in just a year or two, I wasn’t sure how much it would help my retirement income to get a promotion right before getting out, but hey, if my Mom down in Georgia stayed healthy, I could put off retirement a few more years and earn those few years of the higher salary, and hence higher pension, a Grade 14 would get me, right?

That was my logic, at least. And there were a couple of circumstances that made this promotion cycle unique for me: The first was that my boss was also a Grade 13 submitting her Promotion Folder: Given the specific number of promotions they had to give away, this meant we were competing against each other. Not to worry: The other circumstance was that I had been told by management that my Promotion Folder could go straight up to the management two levels up, bypassing my immediate supervisor entirely. That got me a little bit more excited about this; it eased my pessimism just a little.

That respite from fearing the worst was short-lived. The person to whom I physically submitted my promotion folder per instructions was still my immediate supervisor, and I had expected she would simply take that folder, unseen, and submit it to her own boss, the decision authority, along with hers. That expectation was unfounded. She informed me a day or two after I had submitted my folder that although she did not have to look at my folder, apparently she still could, and not only that, she had sent it on up to her boss with a notation to the effect that she did not recommend me for promotion.

She got the promotion.

I still have trouble coming up with calm, sane words to describe how this made me feel. I would go home in tears explaining my lack of advancement to my wife. The only good I took from this was that I was damn sure not going to stay at that agency one minute past my fifty-fifth birthday. This adds together with the other circumstance I shared here in the chapter “$1032.79/month” to pretty much describe my life’s current financial situation: I am one of those many Federal employees and retirees living paycheck to paycheck, and this after making a huge, successful change in my career that increased my motivation and accomplishments tenfold.

And my mind goes back - seemingly in an effort to punish me - to that friend’s e-mail where she said, “I can’t understand how you could have missed your calling so badly.”

Beats the heck out of me, too.

Entry tags:

david lynch,
dreams

Dream Diary Entry recorded January 25, 2019

I dreamed I was taking part in, or at least immersively experiencing, a new David Lynch movie.

The movie had no title that I could see, despite the poster actually appearing on the wall of a building in a scene of the movie itself. It had a three-sentence blurb at the bottom: three short sentences, taken from movie reviews or remarks made by the same person (possibly Lynch himself), but that I don't remember now, except that they each, in two or three words, described this as his ultimate movie-making accomplishment. The poster itself was a blurred blue image, seeming to me upon waking as being halfway between the Blue Velvet curtains and the Fire Walk With Me television static. A thin red banner across the top had yellow letters saying "DAVID LYNCH PRESENTS" or "A DAVID LYNCH FILM" or something like that.

The scenes that appeared in my dream had to do with a seedy crime enterprise with dirty money exchanging hands for dirty deeds, some of it possibly counterfeit. There was murder and mob violence, but, since this was also apparently a film at least initially made for prime-time television broadcast, the scenes were not bloody, even of someone getting his face beaten up. Then there was another scene where a building whose plate glass windows on the shopfront were bordered with shiny red laminate had that laminate all starting to melt and pour onto the sidewalk, the building itself sagging and collapsing. Then, a group of chaotic-neutral-sort-of characters, one of which a punk-dressed woman with David-Bowie-Labyrinth-style bottle-blonde hair, attempted an escape from a crime scene in a garishly painted bus or van, only to have the painted panels on the van start falling off as the bus rounded a curve.

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The Last Straw: Competing With Boss For Raise