SOME MORE OF THE SUMMER DRIVE TO "HOLE IN THE GROUND"

I like the various textures along the horizontal plane.

A section of "Hole In The Ground" itself.

Sentinal

There's something odd about this photo—and I think of it as the "forest that got lost".

I THINK I'VE SAID THIS BEFORE

Each of us, every living thing, is a victor at the end of a long line of successful adaptations, clear back to the first cells. Each of us is the current victor in a chain of victories going back 15 billion years. Each of us is a winner in a long line of competition, stretching back to the beginning. Think of it! And what are we doing with our victorious selves? Still fighting wars and competing as if we hadn't already been winners enough. How small and petty all the squabbling seems in light of natural selection.

BUSH, WHO DOESN’T READ,
COULDN’T LEARN
THIS HISTORY LESSON


The history lesson which follows, our Preciousdent (if George were a reader) could have learned in a cultural history like Life In A Medieval City by Joseph and Frances Geis, pp.209-210. I think it’s interesting that Georgie-boy once used the word “Crusade” to describe his (not my, or America’s) frivolous adventure in Iraq. Read on faire knights and damsels. The parallels are striking. Ah, yes, “to live quietly at home”. . . .

“Two years ago, in 1248, Louis IX, valiant and devout king of France, went on crusade. The king's idealism about the Holy Land was shared by few of his subjects or peers. Some two thousand eight hundred knights and eight thousand foot sergeants were recruited, nearly all on a mercenary basis. Jean de Joinville, seneschal of Champagne, accompanied the king, who was a personal friend, with reluctance. Later he described his departure from home:

“‘I never once let my eyes turn back towards Joinville, for fear my heart might be filled with longing at the thought of my beautiful castle and the two children I had left behind.’ The happiest result of the expedition, in fact, is Joinville's own memoir of it, which adds a leaf to Troyes' [French city] literary laurels. After a rather brilliant beginning, in a successful amphibious assault on Damietta, the expedition bogged down in the swampy upriver country around the fortress city of Mansourah. Famine and scurvy turned the camp into a hospital and charnel house, and the survivors were easily taken prisoner by the Saracens. The queen ransomed the king by trading Damietta, after which Louis ransomed Joinville and the other knights by paying four hundred thousand livres. Originally the sultan demanded five hundred thousand, but when the king unhesitatingly agreed, the equally chivalrous sultan knocked off a hundred thousand livres, commenting, ‘By Allah, this Frank does not haggle!’

“The money was raised on the spot by a bit of pressure on the wealthy Knights Templar, but is now in the process of being paid by the king's subjects, mainly the burghers of his cities, already touched for sizeable aids, and facing still more bills for Louis' new fortifications in Syria. It is hardly surprising that quite a few burghers identify themselves with the wrong side of the debate between Crusaders and non-Crusaders that is a favorite subject of the trouveres [medieval minstrels]. They feel that after all, ‘it is also a good and holy thing to live quietly at home, in friendship with neighbors, taking care of children and goods, going to bed early and sleeping well.’ If the sultan of Egypt should take it into his head to invade France, they will be ready to pay an aid, and take up their pikes and crossbows besides. But they do not see the wisdom of journeying far over the sea to die, and die expensively at that.”

Notice that the trouveres (i.e. the “medieval minstrels”), the Hollywood types of the Middle Ages, recognized nonsense when they saw their rulers off to foolish adventures. So many parallels to our current situation that one can almost choke on them.


CLICHÉ/STEREOTYPE

Every once in awhile, I get a bug about a word and go look it up. “Cliché” was one such recent word. I thought its origins were so interesting that I’m putting it in here. A Frenchman, named Louis-Etienne Herhan, invented the cliché in 1800. A cliché was a “stereotype plate” used in printing. It was made from special wax molds imprinted by a sheet of type. The “plate could be used for 10,000 copy impressions without resetting or wearing out the printer’s type.” Thus, one can see how sentiments, oft repeated, began to be called clichés.

(The spider and his web live in Port Angeles, WA. I may have gotten a blur for a spider, but the web is certainly well photographed.)

SCHOOLBOYS WITHOUT MAPS

The following passage is from Life In A Medieval City by Joseph and Frances Gies, p.162. It describes some of the education a potential cleric, one headed for religious orders, in a University school in Paris might receive:

“As part of his geometry course he may acquire some rudiments of geography, studying a map of the world that shows the circular earth composed of three continents equal in size—Asia, Africa, and Europe—separated by narrow bands
of water. East is at the top, Jerusalem at the center. In various places on the map one may marvel at dragons, sirens, men with dogs' heads, men with feet turned backward, men with umbrella feet with which they protect themselves from the sun while lying down. It is not a map for finding one's way, but for illustration and edification. More practical and less picturesque maps exist—mariners' charts produced by sailors armed with the newly introduced compass and astrolabe, accurately delineating coastlines, capes, bays, and shallows, and locating ports of call and places for watering and victualing so that a navigator can find them easily. But the schoolboy and his teachers know nothing of such maps.”

The topsy-turvy part of the current picture is that in America, the most religious country in the world (following just behind those many Moslem ones), the majority remain naïve schoolboys, reading from an ancient book (or map, if you will) who have no knowledge of the real world as mapped so correctly by the mariners among us, so they believe in fairy tales and people with umbrellas on their feet, so to speak.

(Photo: Coming into Victoria)

ANTHROPOMORPHIZING AN HYPOTHETICAL SUPER BEING

As some of you know, many cognitive scientists are finding evidence that suggests that language and consciousness and/or tool making may have emerged in the human species at about the same time. So the idea of a god who makes or creates things is an anthropomorphizing projection about god which suggests that early humans were projecting what they knew about themselves and valued about themselves into their imaginative conceptions of a god. Of course they needed some idea of god because there were still O-so-many other mysteries surrounding them. In fact, I’d say that everything that human beings still do not know anything about, which science has not yet uncovered, is what those inside the darkest, most clueless brains still call god to this day.

However, the earliest of our language speaking species did know about creating things like tools and art on cave walls. So—what a good place to start when it came to making up a god, and in writing a myth like Genesis, eh? I’m sure I’m not the first person to suggest this idea, but I don’t know where else it’s found. If anyone knows, please let me know. Thank you.

SPEAKING PERSONALLY

We’re such weaklings, here in the fast declining America. Me and my wife no exceptions. It’s only 65 degrees in our house and in the mid-50s outside, but my wife just turned on our oil heat for the first time this fall season. I know that Europeans live in much chillier conditions, but we’re spoiled Americans, you see, and we can’t take the damn cold. By the way—I'm in agreement about turning on the heat.

Speaking of conditions, etcetera, more and more, I keep butting up against my past existences. I mean, I keep seeing who I was when I was younger and the conditions I was raised in. You know, for I’ve said it often enough, that I was born during the Great Depression and came into early consciousness during WWII. I rode clanging street cars with woven straw seats when I lived with my grandparents after my folks divorced, and, later, I walked right up to the steps of prop driven airplanes to see people off or greet them. I myself flew in roaring prop driven planes from Antigua BWI to Miami and then into Dayton with all female hostesses, all young and all curvaceous. I road a train sometime around 1946 packed with soldiers returning from the war. My stepmom and I were returning from Des Moines, Iowa to Dayton, Ohio, I think. Of course, Europeans still ride trains a lot, but passenger service has largely disappeared from my mid-America life except back East.

But none of this really gets right down to that experience, my current experience, every person has of suddenly being out of his time and place, of the world’s essence suddenly being completely different from the essence of the world he sensed when he was young, sensually alive. I remember when sights and sound burned themselves into my consciousness, jarring loose, as they entered, cascades of words and feelings that just had to get out. I just had to tell you what I was feeling, like a Jack Kerouac experience of word bop life spinning into and out of him simultaneously. He couldn’t write fast enough sometimes. Now it’s all slower, and the impact of sensory data on my conscious mind has lost its charm, its magic.

Modern life even smells different. No air-conditioning when I was a kid. I recall small mom and pop grocery stores where the clerks stood behind the counter and fetched things for you as you read them from your list. I saw my grandmother chop off a chicken’s head and helped pluck its feathers so that we could eat it. I shucked corn often enough and ate home made ice cream more often than not. I remember the huge, muscular, aproned ice man coming into Grandma's kitchen, with blocks of ice held over his shoulder with ice tongs, to lift ice into the ice box and his chipping off a piece of it for me on hot summer days. And the milk was always delivered in clinking clanking bottles. I can’t begin to tell you the difference between the older men I worked beside in job shops when I was young and the young men I worked beside just before I retired. Those men of my early life knew the Depression first hand. I worked with a couple who described broken marriages because they had to go off and look for work, hoboing around so that their wives and children could get welfare. By the time, the Depression ended, they had no marriage left to speak of and, though not divorced, never went home again. They knew hardship, and most all seemed to have a sort of pro-union, socialist (or at least progressive) outlook on the working man’s lot in life. My Grandfather had that too. And, you know, I may have said this in another posting, I spent a lot of time with my great-grandparents too. Great-Grandpop drove a team of horses to deliver beer for a brewery. Those men were ready to help their fellow men through legislation and didn’t consider poverty a sin. Most of them had been poor themselves.

Still, even listing all these obvious material changes, I can’t convey the feelings I sometimes now have of life passing me by, no matter how hard I run to stay current. I mean, this blogging activity is one current thing and, I believe, puts me in a small percentage of other people nearing 70—this touch of Internet modernity. Still, I can no longer relate easily with younger people. They talk faster, jamb their words up, and my hearing’s going, so that creates a barrier. I feel their language accelerating away, and I no longer “care” if I know the latest turns of phrase or the correct youthful word. And, frankly, most of them, as predicted by my reading, don’t seem to really care what I have to say. I see them blow by me with their heads far away from the old man they’re passing in the rush and press of the coffee shops, worrying about getting and keeping jobs, I think, or that damn boyfriend or girlfriend who seems to be drifting away. But, truly, if I want to be realistic, this is how it should be. This is what reality dictates, this turning over the world to the next generation. But, damn it, I’m not ready to be shouldered aside this easily. Come back here, you, stop and talk to me!

I guess, what I want to say, and I know this is not necessarily true, but it “feels” true, is that even my youth seems simpler than current times, and how can that be—I have no “down on the farm” background, being a city boy, and, talk about insecurity, we moved around a lot up until I entered the 10th grade. I’m no farm boy, craving the simpler life. I thought “The Waltons” was pure corn and craved to live in New York City, still my childhood now beacons at my consciousness like a far away light as a time of peace and tranquility compared to what I feel in these current life conditions. I just can’t believe I’m actually growing old and beginning to experience that universal condition of nostalgia that I’ve heard so often described in books by perceptive and intelligent beings like myself. Even though I resist slipping into this bag, I don’t seem to be able to fully avoid it. And this post has grown a hell of a lot longer than I meant it to be. A little touch of the Kerouac coming back?

PS: My dear wife, when I read her this entry, said it was depressing. I thought it was pretty well written and very realisitic. It wasn’t depressing to me at all. What’s your comment?

A DAY HIKE TO LIBERTY LAKE COUNTY PARK

This is a petit vista as we entered the park.

My wonderful mate, Mertie, with a fresh haircut surveys the trail ahead.
We alternated carrying our one backpack.

The trail was all steep like this and actually was also the horse trail.

Liberty Lake seen in the distance over marsh grasses
as we emerge from our walk which was a short one.

The nice thing about our little hike is that it's just a fifteen minute drive from the urban jungle we call Spokane, Washington. Actually, the park is now on the very edge of a brand new incorporated city, called Liberty Lake. Liberty Lake is east of Spokane and one must pass through another new incorporated city, called Spokane Valley, to get to Liberty Lake. Just east of Liberty Lake, Washington is Post Falls, Idaho, one of the fastest growing little communities in the nation. If you've got middleclass income, just forget Post Falls. If you plan on earning a good income, forget Idaho altogether. Companies like Buck Knives come to Idaho so they can pay about 30% less to their employees than they'd have to pay in other parts of the country. Conservative anti-working man factions firmly control Idaho. And Utah. In fact, if you plan on coming here, you better hurry because we're filling up fast, and the turf battles are sure to destroy our local beauty. In fact there's a fundamentalist Christian drive to replace all our judges with activist judges who hold other than Constitutional beliefs and who are not environmentalists and who oppose planning and growth management. Those trying to escape are escaping into what they were escaping. O my goodness! It's everywhere, the hydra-headed growth monster! It's a good thing Mertie and I enjoy urban life—movies and good restaurants, cafes and espresso. We ain't Seattle, but we're all we got in the whole of the Inland Empire.

SHOULD WE LET REPUBLICAN RELIGIOUS RIGHT
KILL SCIENCE?

Do we want to “move away from oil as a building block in plastics, and to make plastics that are environmentally friendly”? Geoffrey Coates is a scientist who is working to achieve both those goals, according to the September/October, 2006 issue of Technology Review magazine.

Mr. Coates was selected in 1999 as one of 35 of the under 35 scientists and technologists whose work ought to be watched. TR, this year, checked back on a couple of those honored in 1999, the first year the honor, named TR35, was bestowed. Mr. Coates has gone a long way since then. Enlarge and read the accompanying article.

Here’s my challenge to the Republican Party and the fundamentalists among them who don’t believe in science. If the empirical methods work which discovered and developed every modern invention and understanding of our universe, why do you trust any modern science or employ any modern invention, yet argue with the same empirical methods which have yielded our current understanding of “natural selection”? In short, is the world really round? Are stars suns? Do you trust airplanes enough to fly in them? Do automobiles actually work? Have you driven one? Would you let your children receive a blood transfusion? How about a heart operation, based in the same biology that discovered evolution? Do you believe that an invisible gas called H2O exists? How about. . . etcetera? That’s right—everything that science uses and has produced in the modern world was brought into existence by empirical methods. Does the empirical method work? Okay! ‘Nough said. Start believing or go back two thousand years and start again. Do not pass GO.

MATH STRUCTURES ARE DISCOVERED NOT INVENTED

There is a debate, as far as I can tell, in the world of mathematics between those who believe that the human mind casts a net of meaning over the Cosmos by inventing mathematical ideas that enshroud it, and those who believe the mathematical ideas are already out there in the Cosmos and that all that human consciousness does is discover them. The paper from which the following fragment comes is far beyond my ken. The whole paper by Max Tegmark appears in Science and Ultimate Reality: from quantum to Cosmos, honoring John Wheeler’s 90th birthday and published by Cambridge University Press (2003). The ultimate argument of Tegmark’s long paper is that, indeed, there are an infinity of realities out there. The concept of alternative universes is beyond my imagination to imagine with enough force to excite me. All I can do is state it like a school boy reciting his multiplication tables.

Anyhow, math is no longer numbers. It transcends them. I guess?????????????

“Many of us think of mathematics as a bag of tricks that we learned in school for manipulating numbers. Yet most mathematicians have a very different view of their field. They study more abstract objects such as functions, sets, spaces and operators and try to prove theorems about the relations between them. Indeed, some modern mathematics papers are so abstract that the only numbers you will find in them are the page numbers! 'What does a dodecahedron have in common with a set of complex numbers? Despite the plethora of mathematical structures with intimidating names like orbifolds and Killing fields, a striking underlying unity' that has emerged in the last century: all mathematical structures are just special cases of one and the same thing: so—called formal systems. A formal system consists of abstract symbols and rules for manipulating them, specifying how new strings of symbols referred to as theorems can be derived from given ones referred to as axioms. This historical development represented a form of deeonstructionism, since it stripped away all meaning and interpretation that had traditionally been given to mathematical structures and distilled out only the abstract relations capturing their very essence. As a result, computers can now prove theorems about geometry without having any physical intuition whatsoever about what space is like.



“Figure 8 shows some of the most basic mathematical structures and their interrelations. Although this family tree probably extends indefinitely, it illustrates that there is nothing fuzzy about mathematical structures. They are "out there" in the sense that mathematicians discover them rather than create them, and that contemplative alien civilizations would find the same structures (a theorem is true regardless of whether it is proven by a human, a computer or an alien)."








Figure 8. Relationships between various basic mathematical structures (Tegmark 1998). The arrows generally indicate addition of new symbols and/or axioms. Arrows that meet indicate the combination of structures—for instance, an algebra is a vector space that is also a ring, and a Lie group is a group that is also a manifold. The full tree is probably infinite in extent—the figure shows merely a small sample near the bottom.

After describing our 6.6 mile round trip hike to the coast at Alava Point from the Lake Ozette ranger station as "an ordeal", yesterday my wife informs me that the short time we spent sitting on a hillside staring at the Pacific in the middle of an awesome rain forest was the best part of our brief vacation experiences. Okay, pleasantries aside, “here come de judgments!”

Study links longevity to income, location, race

By Lauran Neergaard, 
Associated Press,
September 12, 2006

“WASHINGTON – Asian American women living in Bergen County, N.J., lead the nation in longevity, typically reaching their 91st birthdays. Worst off are American Indian men in swaths of South Dakota, who die about age 58 – three decades sooner.

“Where you live, combined with race and income, plays a huge role in the nation's health disparities, differences so stark that a report issued Monday contends it's as if there are eight separate Americas.

“Millions of the worst-off Americans have life expectancies typical of developing countries, concluded Dr. Christopher Murray of the Harvard School of Public Health.”

This article was accompanied by an American map, color-coded to show the death rates in geographical terms. Just like all other maps I’ve been pointing out for years, wherever things are bad for the average person, whether it’s child poverty, poverty in general, infant mortality, murder rates, suicide rates, least money spent on education, worst treatment of those in poverty and, now, early death, the color which indicates the worst outcome is always most prevalent in the South, in that wonderful Bible Belt where Bush is master.

Taking all these poor indicators together, why does anyone in Middle America or the West still tend to think and vote like these people. Hey, Idaho, why? [PS: I know there are sane and decent folks in the South (I’ve lived there so I know), and to you I extend my apology that I must keep pointing up the follies of your brothers and sisters who are not as wise or tuned in as you are or whataever is the latest phrase for intelligence.]

The article below reveals even more about the Bible Belt psyche. Take a belt of Bible. It’ll get you drunk with self-loathing.

Research questions secular America

By Michelle Boorstein, Washington Post,
September 12, 2006

“. . . Among the most innovative aspects of the Baylor survey, according to scholars who know about it, are questions that probe how Americans describe God's personality. Respondents were offered 26 attributes ranging from "absolute" and "wrathful" to "friendly," and asking if God is directly involved in and angered by individual and worldly affairs.

“The researchers separated God's attributes into four categories: angry, judgmental, benevolent and distant. Researchers found that the largest category of people—31 percent—was made up of people who believe God is both wrathful and highly involved in human affairs.”

The interesting thing to me about this second study is that I’ve long known, from personal experience as well as from scholarly reading, that those who are angry at others and who imagine they live in a dangerous world are actually full of self-hatred and self-destructive thinking patterns which they project out onto the world. It’s no wonder, then, that the god these fundamentalists imagine in the outer world is just like they are on the inside. The god that these people worship is an accurate reflection of the kind of person they are in their thoughts. They want their imaginary god to take out their hatred on the world and that revenging god is the god they carry around inside their heads. Imagine what it must be like to be them on the inside, seething with a murderous desire to revenge themselves on the world. Also realize that they take no responsibility for their hateful thoughts. It’s the devil OUT THERE that makes them do it. Read the Psalms to get the inside scoop on the wishes, hopes and dreams of such a religious person.

WHERE I'VE BEEN

If you've missed my last few blog entries, don't readjust your television sets. We've been on vacation over in Port Angeles, spending four nights at The Tudor Inn, a great B&B place I hope to write more about later. Spent a day in Victoria B.C. too and another partial day hiking 3.3 miles to the coast from the Lake Ozette ranger station. I learned that I really am 68 years old. Last time I did that hike, it was a cakewalk. This time, the walk was, as my wife put it, "an ordeal". Got some pictures I'll put in later. For now, I'm just entering a post (below) that was sitting ready for entry.

JUST A FEW DRIBS AND DRABS

“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside a dog, it's too dark to read." —Groucho Marx

“Let us face the facts,” said Senator Robert A. Taft, “we are already in World War III.” Taft said that back in the 1950s. So, by Republican Taft’s calculations, if he were alive today, we should be in World War IV with the terrorists because III is taken already. We need these talking point, rightwingnut Republican media guys to get their numerical sh*t together.

"Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites." —Thomas Jefferson

"Religions are all alike—founded upon fables and mythologies." —Thomas Jefferson

Astronomers, using new guidelines, decided recently that Pluto is no longer a planet. It’s too small and its orbit is rather odd. Meanwhile, historians, using time tested standards, declared that Bush is no president. His brain is too small and the circles he travels in are definitely out of whack. —Aintnogod


THIS IS WHAT YOU GET FROM SWALLOWING SO MUCH BALONEY



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REPUBS SET UP TO STEAL NEXT ELECTION TOO

All the following is from a New York Times editorial:

"If there was ever a sign of a ruling party in trouble, it is a game plan that calls for trying to win by discouraging voting.

"The latest sign that Republicans have an election-year strategy to shut down voter registration drives comes from Ohio. As the state gears up for a very competitive election season this fall, its secretary of state, J. Kenneth Blackwell, has put in place "emergency" regulations that could hit voter registration workers with criminal penalties for perfectly legitimate registration practices. The rules are so draconian they could shut down registration drives in Ohio.

"Mr. Blackwell, who also happens to be the Republican candidate for governor this year, has a history of this sort of behavior. In 2004, he instructed county boards of elections to reject any registrations on paper of less than 80-pound stock — about the thickness of a postcard. His order was almost certainly illegal, and he retracted it after he came under intense criticism. It was, however, in place long enough to get some registrations tossed out. . . .

"Mr. Blackwell's rules are interpretations of a law the Republican-controlled Ohio Legislature passed recently. . . ."