Blog — April, 2006

Tawdry Hepburn. (Ach, it's already been done!)

It was that or Sebaceous Sister.

(I've gotta start watching Mystery Science Theater. Found it by accident, by Googling "Sebaceous Sister" to see whether I was unconsciously borrowing that from somewhere.)

Actually, I've been working on my own genre-bending blend of punk, folk, and ska.

I'm thinking of calling it "polka."

New Humergence® (Spiral Dynamics®) blog, by Cowan and Todorovic.

Real psychology, with nuances, as opposed to the "Wilberized" version....

As they further note:

Our own small adventures with the Wiki world have demonstrated for us how the psychology and motivations of contributors can sway 'truth' and their approach to its promotion. If there is a culture of open inquiry and sharing, things have a chance to work. If there are fanatics with agendas - either ideological or financial - or fixated minds stuck on particular ideas, then the outcomes turn into products of endurance, competitiveness, and alliance-building. If you've got a couple of folks who believe themselves without peer, it's a problem. And for those who find such things unpleasant or not worth the effort, truth inevitably suffers. It doesn't take but a couple of rotten apples to spoil an egalitarian barrel. There has to be a mechanism for rotating the fruits and monitoring process, as well as content.

That made me smile. Because, of course, I've had exactly the same experience with the (none-too-bright, and far-too-authoritarian) "seekers of sugar-coated Truth" jealously guarding the kw shrine there, etc.

So, if you wonder why I have yet to shed a single tear about STG not being "noteworthy" enough to merit its own Wikipedia page ... you need not wonder. It's just not worth the effort trying to get the truth heard against such dumb FOKs ("Followers of Ken"). One still has to try, of course; but more on one's own turf than in public spaces which such tenacious/integral fools have co-opted.

The finding, reported Sunday, may one day lead to development of a drug, not only to treat the rare bone disorder, but more common bone buildup related to head and spine trauma, and even sports injuries, the researchers said. (more)

Then, what fairy tales taken as reality and believed by psychological children masquerading as adults have to offer:

"Soon the Vatican will issue a document about the use of condoms by persons who have grave diseases, starting with AIDS," Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, who is in charge of the Vatican's health care ministry, was quoted as saying in Sunday's La Repubblica newspaper....

As for abandoned children, the cardinal said that although "it would be always ideal to give them a father and a mother." He added that "even singles" could adopt, "but with much prudence, and ruling out homosexuals" as adoptive parents. (more)

'Twas brillig in Toronto today, so not surprising that I happened upon online versions (with illustrations) of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

Would a crenshaw melon lie to you, after all of its botanical relatives' contributions to science?

("I never saw The Vagina Monologues, I'm not a big fan of ventriloquism"—Wendell Ferguson.)

If you cannot see the brilliance in that spam-missive, you are probably the sort of bumpkin who looks at a Jackson "Pollack" painting and says, "I don't know what art is, but that ain't it."

It's rare to find articles on the Mac vs. Windows feud that have anything intelligent to say—probably in no small part because so many journalists are Mac users. Here's a good one, though.

By the way, I certainly hope you haven't bought into the argument "graphics are better on the Mac." Yeah, in 1992. Go to a bookstore and grab a book on using Photoshop; you'll see that the Mac and Windows versions are identical. In fact, Photoshop isn't yet optimized to take advantage of the Mac's Intel processors.

Oh, and the whole "no viruses on the Mac" business? Besides the fact that it's no longer true, you can get this neat stuff called anti-virus software.

Mac software not working the way it should, to the point of destroying an O/S installation? Say it ain't so! And, Apple indulging in anti-competitive behaviors? Naw, couldn't be.

Or how about this, from an otherwise intelligently written article:

[L]ook at the iPod. You can't change the battery. So when the battery dies, too bad. Get a new iPod. Actually, Apple will replace it if you send it back to the factory, but that costs $65.95. Wowza.

Why can't you change the battery?

My theory is that it's because Apple didn't want to mar the otherwise perfectly smooth, seamless surface of their beautiful, sexy iPod with one of those ghastly battery covers you see on other cheapo consumer crap, with the little latches that are always breaking and the seams that fill up with pocket lint and all that general yuckiness. The iPod is the most seamless piece of consumer electronics I have ever seen. It's beautiful. It feels beautiful, like a smooth river stone. One battery latch can blow the whole river stone effect.

Uh, yeah. Aesthetics, eh? Not the people at Apple greedily gouging their customers; "aesthetics" sounds much nicer. Of course, if Microsoft didn't let you "change the battery" in comparable ways, no chance you'd be able to "theorize" that away. Who would even try?

Personally, I've used Windows since version 3.0, and SONAR since it was Cakewalk 1.0 for DOS. Why would I want to use Pro Tools, ported from the Mac, when I can use SONAR?

(Plus, if you can't right-click and have something relevant happen, don't try and tell me it's usable software.)

Or, why would you want to own a room full of classic electric guitars, when for less than the cost of a single Strat you could have a Variax? (Okay, there are still reasons to have a room full of expensive guitars; but in any cost-benefit analysis, you're better off with the Variax. Guitarists, though, are such painfully slow adopters of new technologies that Line6 is having to all but give that beautiful piece of technology away.)

I was thinking a few days ago about all the garbage ("personal investment," etc.) which I've had to deal with from the integral community since publishing STG—and I remembered that back in early 2003, for the six months of my life so far when I briefly had more money than I knew what to do with, I was actually considering donating $ to the Integral Institute! One doesn't want to live completely selfishly, after all, and I believed in the work they were doing, and was well past the point of supporting SRF....

D'oh!

I've just been apprised of the following, from Bart Ehrman's Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium:

[T]he ancient Jewish way of reckoning days differs from the one more commonly used today. Most people think of a new day beginning at midnight. The official Jewish day begins when it gets dark. (In the ancient sacred collection of books called the Talmud, the day begins when one can detect three stars in the sky.) That's why Sabbath—even today—begins on Friday night after sunset.

And so, in the historical scene I'm painting here, on the day of Preparation for the Passover, the Jewish celebrants would bring a lamb to the Temple in the afternoon and go home to roast it. That night, then—which was for them the beginning of the next day—they would eat the Passover meal. This day of Preparation was also the first day of the weeklong festival celebrated in conjunction with Passover, called the "Feast of Unleavened Bread." Passover day, then, lasted from the evening meal through the next morning and afternoon, until it got dark again, at which time it became the day after Passover....

[In the Gospel of John] after supper Jesus goes out to pray (18:1), is betrayed by Judas, and arrested. He appears before the Jewish authorities, spends the night in prison, and appears the next morning before Pontius Pilate, who condemns him to be executed. And we're told exactly when this is: "Now it was the Day of Preparation for the Passover; and it was about noon" (19:14). Jesus is immediately taken off to be crucified. ["Line on the left, one cross each," etc.]

The day of Preparation for the Passover? How could Jesus be executed on the afternoon of the day of Preparation? According to Mark's gospel, he wasn't even arrested until later that night and was placed on the cross at 9:00 the next morning. How can these accounts be reconciled?

Well, they probably can't be, even though people who refuse to think that the Bible can have any mistakes of any kind have tried for years. The fact is that John claims that Jesus was executed the afternoon when the Passover lambs were sacrificed in the temple, and Mark claims that he was executed the following morning, after the lambs had been eaten.

So, we may not know when Jesus was born—December 25 is just the date on which the winter solstice (and pagan Saturnalia festival) fell, centuries ago—or when he died. Or even whether he lived at all.

But, one thing we do know is when I was born:

April 14. "Happy birthday to me." (The Good Friday menu? Nachos, beer, and chocolate. That's why God made the holidays....)

[Ken Dryden's] book, The Game, established him as perhaps hockey's pre-eminent philosopher. (more)

"Perhaps"? "Perhaps"?? Compared to whom? The late Gallivanius, maybe?

Who else? Socrates?

"The unexamined game film is not worth watching."

And, when asked for his passport:

"I am not Canadian or American, but a goalie in the NHL."

Or Plato: "Hockey players living in an underground rink.... Like ourselves.... They see only their own shadows, or the shadows of other players, which the ACC lights throw on the opposite boards of the rink."

Heraclitus: "You could not step twice onto the same ice; for the Zamboni is ever resurfacing in between periods."

Jean Jacques Rousseau: "Man is born a free agent, and everywhere he is under a salary cap."

Alfred North Whitehead: "The safest general characterization of the Canadian sports tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Gretzky."

Georg Hegel: "Man owes his entire existence to the game, and has his being within it alone. Whatever worth and spiritual reality he possesses are his solely by virtue of the game."

Karl Marx: "Hockey fanaticism is the sigh of the north-of-the-49th snowbound creature, the puck in a goal-less world, and the cream in a coffee-less donut shop. It is the decriminalized marijuana of the Canadian people."

Finally, Descartes: "I shoot, therefore I score."

I just hope that someday Dryden runs for the leadership of the Liberal Party. I'd vote for him, and not just because when I was just a kid I wrote to him (as a hockey fan) and he sent back a signed photo. No, it's more because of this general principle:

I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.

—John Stuart Mill

Time for some real philosophy:

He who would distinguish the true from the false must have an adequate idea of what is true and false.

—Spinoza

Take note, Integral-ites: That's where competent research and basic science come in. If you took either of those with the seriousness they deserve, could you still exist in the integral community? No, you could not.

I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.

—Bertrand Russell

What he said.

"Liar, Lunatic, or Lord"? Heh, how about the middle one? (Of course, "great yogis" like Yogananda have given much less literal, more esoteric interpretations of Jesus' "hatred of his family" and "call for self-mutilation," etc.)

Oh, and Judas was the loyal one. Who knew?

And yet—

Vatican theologian Giovanni D'Ercole told the Mail on Sunday that it was "dangerous to re-evaluate Judas and muddy the gospel accounts by reference to apocryphal writings."

"This can only create confusion in believers." (more)

I can imagine.

Christ you know it ain't easy
You know how hard it can be
The way things are going
They're gonna crucify me

—The Beatles, "The Ballad of John and Yoko"

"You shouldn't think something just because you believe it. You need reasons."

—Bart Ehrman,
in The Washington Post

[Dale Martin]: "When [Bart] found out they [i.e., past Christians, translators and the Bible] were lying to him, he just didn't want anything to do with it."

Now that's my kind of scholar! Conversely, when I say things like "You obviously enjoy being lied to a lot more than I do" to people still caught up in defending kw's ideas or character, that's exactly the perspective I'm coming from, i.e., realizing that if you've been deliberately or incompetently misled once, it will never be confined to that one time, but is much more likely to have been a rampant problem.

The Bible simply wasn't error-free. The mistakes grew exponentially as he traced translations through the centuries. There are some 5,700 ancient Greek manuscripts that are the basis of the modern versions of the New Testament, and scholars have uncovered more than 200,000 differences in those texts.

"Put it this way: There are more variances among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament," Ehrman summarizes.

If everyone had the same degree of courage in facing reality as the now-agnostic Ehrman does, neither Christianity nor "Wilberianity" would exist. And the world would be a much better place.

"Sometimes Christian apologists say there are only three options to who Jesus was: a liar, a lunatic or the Lord," [Ehrman] tells a packed auditorium here at the University of North Carolina, where he chairs the department of religious studies. "But there could be a fourth option—legend."

Personally, I wouldn't rule out "liar" or deluded "lunatic" either, if J.C. existed at all; but that's a small point.

Even without that, though: Two thousand years of Western history, politics, art, and overall view of the universe, based on a set of "legends." And if the moronic likes of Wilber had their way, we'd make exactly the same mistakes over the next two millennia, just with a different set of equally fabricated and/or delusional beliefs.

If the people were a little more ignorant, astrology would flourish—if a little more enlightened, religion would perish!

—Robert Green Ingersoll, Some Mistakes of Moses

Hey, I finally understand contemporary art, via this page!

Not that any of the trajectories or end-points of those various artistic explorations of "truth" strike me as being particularly profound or worth getting all excited about, though.

When I go out with artists
They talk about language and the cubists and the dadaists
And I try to catch their meanings
And keep up with all of the martinis
I don't know which should be my favorite paintings

If I could see, if I could see, if I could
See all the symbols, unlock what they mean
Maybe I could, maybe I could, maybe I
Could meet the artists, and get to know them personally

—Crash Test Dummies, "When I Go Out With Artists"

Geoffreys on the Web.

I was just looking over Bart Ehrman's published books, concerning the origins of Christianity. ("Some groups of Christians claimed that there was not one God but two or twelve or thirty. Some believed that the world had not been created by God but by a lesser, ignorant deity. Certain sects maintained that Jesus was human but not divine, while others said he was divine but not human.") And what struck me about all that is not so much the now-heretical variety which existed at that beginning, but the disinterest and reluctance of people since then, who have made that "Savior" and Book the centerpoints of their lives, to research and apply those facts.

And the reason that struck me is because it's obvious (and completely predictable from basic human psychology) that around 95% of the members of the contemporary integral world have no more interest than the average "good Christian" would in doing the "archaeology" of going back to the original sources which Wilber claims to be integrating. Were they to do that, of course, they would find that, just as the innocent mistakes and less-innocent influence of the personal theologies of ancient scribes created a "multitude of mistakes and intentional alterations" in ways that sometimes "profoundly affect religious doctrine," comparable distortions will occur even when madly typing "Manjushris with word-processors" are involved.

Of course, it is so much easier to simply believe what you're told, and to rely on the "community" to not allow members to rise into positions of respect without their ideas being valid, than to question (and research) everything, back to its original sources/languages. No surprise, then, that those psychological realities apply just as much to the "trans-rational" integral community as to the "pre-rational" Christian one, and produce a comparable milieu, with members of both in-groups imagining themselves to be reasoning clearly from established facts, when all they are actually doing is rationalizing hazily from a set of (dishonestly or incompetently) distorted principles.

Back in second-year physics, during one of my aborted attempts at a career, one of the other best-in-class students (we ended up tied for top marks; 4 A+'s, 2 A's each) once asked the instructor, in a quantum-mechanical context, about David Bohm's ideas. The otherwise-kick-ass, textbook-writing professor's entire dismissive response was: "Oh, that's just hidden variables, or something."

Obviously, he had never read the peer-reviewed paper(s), first published in 1952. He didn't need to, in order to "know" that the ideas were wrong, or at least irrelevant; their widely disrespected status in the community assured him of that. Except, of course, that the unexceptional members of any community, while perhaps being able to recognize quackery, will tend to lump works of real genius into the same category, for not being in a position to intelligently evaluate them.

(I'm doing the below from memory, so I really hope I haven't "pulled a Wilber" in misrepresenting any of the facts.)

Even Einstein had to wait a decade after the 1905 publication of his earth-shaking papers—on special relativity, the photoelectric effect, and Brownian motion—before the physics community (and shortly thereafter, the media) started to care about them. (The future Nobel Prize-winner Max Planck was editing the journal to which those papers were submitted. If a lesser scientist had been in charge, there, would the papers even have been accepted?) When Albert later did his Ph.D. thesis, one of the reviewers returned it with a comment akin to "I can't understand a word of what you've written here."

More recently, Benoit Mandelbrot experienced a similar decades-long dismissal of his ground-breaking work with fractals. That's what happens, of course, when you trust the middling "community"—whether spiritual, scientific, or artistic—to be able to distinguish between genius and quackery, when by their very "average" nature they cannot.

And mere critics, through all that—whether for or against the likes of "Pollack" (tee-hee-hee)—are typically people who want to be great artists but who, try as they might, cannot succeed in that. Rare exception: Rocker Chrissie Hynde, who worked as a writer in the field before making it as a musician/vocalist. (Point of Trivia: Her cover of The Kinks' "Stop Your Sobbing" in the early '80s was an outcome of her dating Ray Davies. Or vice versa.) Beyond that, I personally like Frank Zappa's take on rock journalism: "People who can't write, doing interviews with people who can't think, in order to prepare articles for people who can't read." (Nevertheless, since I don't listen to the radio, I try to read Ben Rayner's generally level-headed column semi-regularly.) Don't think Hynde wrote the all-time classic "Smelly Cat," though....

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