DANN’S ART





This picture by Mr. Irish shows you exactly the sort of wry humor that he is capable of. To see some more of his work, go to Honeychunks. I've got hanging in my own art hallway, one of Dann's works myself.










DEAR EDITOR

The following is a letter I sent off to Newsweek magazine which was generated by an extended piece they did on Facebook:

“One of the saddest most incomprehensible claims to arise out of your Facebook article was the statement by one of your respondents that he has 1,042 “closest friends.” How does anyone make time to personally get to know a thousand people on the one on one basis required for real friendship? I’m a 69 year old blogger myself, and I’ve poked around in some of these social networking sites. I’m astounded by the long lists of friends that participants claim to have. Many bloggers are obviously performing to attract attention rather than to develop close personal ties. A lot of what appears on Facebook and elsewhere seems to be the, "hey look at me I need attention" sort of relationship that one finds hollow and unrewarding in real life.

“I think one’s close friends are people who are physically close, people who one actually talks to face to face or has known personally for extended times in the past. I admit to emailing and phoning old friends who are now physically distant, who I haven’t seen in many years, but our friendships are still based on close past personal experiences, and we try from time to time to actually get together. Somewhere in the past, I came across the statement by a social commentator that one is lucky if he can claim one or two really true friendships in his whole life. I think I can count, perhaps, five close friends myself, maybe a few more. People I really trust with the facts rather than my performance piece, and the older I get, the less range my performances have.

“I’m honestly puzzled by this internet friendship phenomena. I wish someone would explain to me the huge psychological shift by which someone can imagine he or she has thousands of personal friends. Making friends face to face, as I know it, is such a daunting risky enterprise. Is the fact that website friendships don’t have to risk personal encounters that allows people to imagine they have more friends than they do? Is it social naiveté on their part or have I missed something along the way? Has the definition of “close friend” radically changed?”

PROPHETIC CASSADY

Because I happen to be reading, as I told you, On The Road for the many such time, I came across this passage. Cassady has showed up from California at Kerouac’s brother’s house in Virginia at Christmas 1948. They are involved in moving furniture and Jack’s mom from Virginia to New York. Kerouac says as they bop into New York, “He [Cassady] said we were a band of Arabs coming in to blow up New York.”

JEFFERSON—LIBERAL, (DARWINIAN?) AND INHERITANCE TAX SUPPORTER

"That these are our grievances which we have thus laid before his majesty, with that freedom of language and sentiment which becomes a free people claiming their rights, as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate: Let those flatter who fear; it is not an American art. To give praise which is not due might be well from the venal, but would ill beseem those who are asserting the rights of human nature. They know, and will therefore say, that kings are the servants: not the proprietors of the people. Open your breast, sire, to liberal and expanded thought.” —Thomas Jefferson in a Summary View of the Rights of British America

First, note Jefferson says that our human rights come from “the laws of nature”. I don’t see any appeal to a higher power here. And you know why he doesn’t appeal to god, don’t you—because to appeal to a god would put his claim to our freedoms on an equal footing with the king’s claim by divine right to his authority. To believe in god is to more or less admit that one is a monarchist. How many American Christians are truly monarchists at heart?

I don’t know how many times I come across a positive attitude toward liberalism in Jefferson’s writings. Why, do you think, conservatives so hate liberals when such fine men as Jefferson and others say they are also liberals? If these founders of our liberties were liberals, what scheme do conservatives have against our liberties, do you think?

Also, for those who hope to end forever inheritance taxes, we can peek into how Thomas Jefferson might want that tax to continue. In his autobiography he reports that while in the legislature of Virginia, he hoped that the “repeal of the laws of entail would prevent the accumulation and perpetuation of wealth in select families and preserve the soil of the country from being daily more and more absorbed in mortmain.” He saw that wealth might create an aristocracy in America just as birth had created an aristocracy in Europe. Thus, I suspicion he might be all for a steep inheritance tax if he saw how wealth has completely corrupted the political system which he and others like him created.

Photo is of condos along my walk on Officer's Row in Vancouver.

ON THE ROAD ROAD

Yep—I’m not making regular entries and, if you’ve been reading this, you know why.

As most of you know, literate enough to be reading a blog and not listening to some music on it or just wanting to see movin’ pitchurs [sic], this month we been celebrating the 50th year since Jack K’s great book, On The Road, was published in 1957. So I’ve commenced givin’ it my fifth or sixth read in my life, counting in that first read I give it back in my 20s, in the sixties sometime ago. This passage is near the beginning of Jack’s first trip West and it rings two bells with me. The photo below is out of Newsweek.

First, he’s stopped in Des Moines, Iowa to spend a night in a cheap hotel down by the rail yards. Well—I was a child in Des Moines when the Second World War ended. My stepmom, dad and I was living in a motel by a highway and I was out on the grass in front, playing, when all the car horns on the highway started to honking, and I ran in to ask my stepmom what was going on, and she was the one to tell me that the war was over. I must’ve been about eight years old I guess.

But more interesting to me is Jack’s state of mind in the following passage. I’ve experienced the same feeling more than once, and I know I’ve got friends that have also. And some who still do too. Most recently for me was just in the past few months. In Jack’s case, it’s cause he’s halfway between psychic places in himself. For me, the same. I’m still adjusting to this move from Spokane to Vancouver after 31 years in Spokane. And just two weeks ago, I had this feeling that I no longer knew who I was. Who am I here in Vancouver, all my friends back in Spokane, what’s left of family in Dayton, Ohio or down in Florida? Me being the oldest still alive in my family, the oldest of all the cousins, me next to step off the diving board into permanent unconsciousness. Also I’ve given up AA and Codependents Anonymous because my spiritual program just isn’t spiritual enough to fit anymore. So for the briefest of moments, I shared Jack’s feeling in the following paragraph. When I was adrift, I often didn’t know what I was feeling when I felt this stuff. This time, I wasn’t so shook up, and I realized that I had to get busy getting myself involved back into my life. So I’ve started writing a novel. That’s familiar. And working on poetry, also familiar. Then I’ve gone and joined the Portland area Humanists so I got a place to go have lunch with people I feel comfortable around on Sundays, and, soon, I think I’ll become a volunteer with the Vancouver library system, also familiar, as I was a friend of the library back in Spokane.

Anyhow, here’s Jack’s take on that certain feeling.


“I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was—I was far away from home, haunted, and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was half¬way across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that's why¬ it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon.” —Jack K.

PS: When you realize how often Jack went back and forth, he was always between one future and another, East or West, during his lifetime. He died in the same city my birth mother died in, St. Petersburg, Florida, of alcoholism. Like so many of my favorite authors.

OKAY. I GOT LITTLE TO SAY.


This is like, well, feeling orphaned. In this same issue of Newsweek is the celebration of the 50th anniversary since Jack Kerouac's On The Road was published. Can you believe it? Funny thing is that I know most modern young people could only sigh that this old man was once inspired, depressed, challenged . . . by these beings from a diminishing pantheon of artist/gods.

Moreso than by any church affiliation or incarnation of gods in Jesus form, these men asked me to think, to ponder my situation in this life, my home in the universe. My relationship with them was fraught with pain and change. They kicked me down the steps, and I had to, later, pick myself up and dust myself off. They gave me no hypothetical superbeing to do the job for me. They left me on my own, thank goodness.

WHY BUSH SHOULD BE IMPEACHED or
AT LEAST BE CHARGED AS A WAR CRIMINAL


Read the accumulating evidence documented in the “Investigative Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff”.

The evidence of the wrong-doing, cruelty and un-Constitutional behavior of the Bush cadre is slowly accumulating. Never before have I witnessed (since Nixon?) an administration so full of liars and slanderers. Again, I want to point out that fundamentalist, Christian churches behave exactly like what is disclosed in the following report toward people who don’t agree with them or who commit “sins”. Unforgiving, closed-minded, savage and revengeful—that’s typical fundamentalist behavior, and, now, it’s infected the White House through Bush and company.

Read about it here.

MOUNT HOOD BUDDHA

The picture is of my third walk along the Vancouver waterfront. I come around a bend onto the Columbia River after emerging from a more wooded walk, and there he is in the distance—BuddhaHood. A friend, Geoff H. of Spokane, told me that Kerouac liked to say the mountains rising up in this regions were all Buddhas. This very much impressed me the next time I came upon this scene. Frequently, on morning walks, the Buddha is not visible, hidden in the river fogs, mysteriously awaiting more fortuitous signs.

[28] Struggle

What is this fog that licks against old gray walls and hides
The sun? My wildflowers shrivel in a killing frost,
Cold drizzle falls on October streets, walking makes me shiver.
Some New Age thinkers believe weather can affect our moods,
Some say we are the pawns of planetary alignments. Ha!
If only my fate were that easy to unravel, gladly
I'd reach up and shift the orbits of the earth and sun,
But this drizzly mist just swallows up my flailing fists.

That's in case you think only the BuddhaHood struggles with fog!!

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MINDFULNESS

Neuroscience is still trying to unravel the nature of consciousness and the origin of mind in the human animal. Here are some more theories.

[OPEN QUOTE]
This also led to speculation as to which species did or did not have theory of mind and at what point in evolution it appeared in humans (Povinelli & Preuss, 1995).

There are two distinct origin scenarios for our capacity to understand intentional agency, to create representations of other agents' behavior, beliefs, and intentions. A widely accepted social intelligence scenario is that higher primates evolved more and more complex intentional-psychology systems to deal with social interaction. Having larger groups, more stable interaction, and more efficient coordination with other agents all bring out, given the right circumstances, significant adaptive benefits for the individual. But they all require finer and finer grained descriptions of other agents' behaviors. Social intelligence triggers an arms race resulting from higher capacity to manipulate others and a higher capacity to resist such manipulation (Whiten, 1991). It also allows the development of coalitional alliance, based on a computation of other agents' commitments to a particular purpose (hunting, warfare; Kurzban & Leary, 2001), as well as the development of friendship as an insurance policy against variance in resources (Tooby & Cosmides, 1996).


Another possible account is that (at least some aspects of) theory of mind evolved in the context of predator-prey interaction (Barrett, 1999, this volume). A heightened capacity to remain undetected by either predator or prey, as well as a better sense of how these "other" animals detect us, are of obvious adaptive significance for survival problems such as eating and avoiding being eaten. Indeed, some primatologists have speculated that detection of predators may have been the primary context for the evolution of agency concepts (van Schaik & Van Hooff, 1983). In the archaeological record, changes toward more flexible hunting patterns in modern humans suggest a richer, more intentional representation of the hunted animal (Mithen, 1996). Hunting and predator avoidance become much better when they are more flexible, that is, informed by contingent details about the situation at hand, so that the human does not react to all predators or prey in the same way. [CLOSE QUOTE]

—H. Clark Barrett, “Adaptations to Predators and Prey” in Handbook Of Evolutionary Psychology, pp. 105-106

Re. the photo: Some species still don’t have a conscious mind. Think of the most illustrious of Crawford, Texas’s citizens.

TODAY, MY SUBJECT IS HELL

FIRE AND ICE

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favour fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

—Robert Frost

SUBJECT: HELL: EXOTHERMIC OR ENDOTHERMIC

The following is supposedly an actual question given on a chemistry mid-term. The answer by one student was so "profound" that the professor shared it with colleagues via the Internet.

Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs, using Boyle's Law (gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed).

One student, however, wrote the following:

First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving.

As for how many souls are entering Hell, let's look at the different religions that exist in the world today. Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially.

Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.

This yields two possibilities:

1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.

2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.

So which is it?

If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my Freshman year that "it will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you" and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number 2 must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over.

The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is, therefore, extinct, leaving only Heaven, thereby proving the existence of a divine being, which explains why, last night, Theresa kept shouting, "Oh my God!"

Photo in Gehenna (Hell of Bible) courtesy Mark Hodge.

COULD WE REALLY GET TO BE THIS GROWN UP? HA!

“Logocentric thinking is also associated with efforts to subsume diversity under identity, to reduce the other to the same. Jim Cheney, in his postmodern critique of radical environmentalism, argues that there are strong authoritarian tendencies in environmentalist thought due to this refusal to acknowledge difference. He argues against the claim that all knowers are essentially alike, and hence are able to resolve differences by appeal to objective standards of reason. Each person's history and place in the world is distinct, and their perspectives incommensurable with all others. The thesis of the sameness of all knowers can only be an ideological tool designed to coerce agreement, to socialize people to a particular conception of reality. There are potentially an infinite number of truths corresponding to the equally infinite number of different places that people inhabit in the world, and to claim that any position has priority over other positions is to be engaged in a rhetorical exercise in order to justify and enforce domination. Cheney calls for respect for otherness, letting differences exist without any pressure to compromise so that each entity is given full latitude to develop the way that best expresses its own individual existence.” —Arran E. Gare in Postmodernism and the Environmental Crisis, pp. 92-93, Routledge, New York (1996)

PS: I don’t think that the unfortunately named J. Cheney’s position is the position that Gare would accept. I’ve included it in my blog as an interesting take on objectivity. Frankly, I think if we all were more objective, we would have fewer conflicts, even though we disagree, because scientific objectivity usually comes to pretty factual conclusions. Right? Objectivity is a method for arriving at factual data and has nothing to do with leaving one’s opinions out of it until, that is, the facts are established. Now—as to opinions about non-factual, therefore unreal and nonsensical, matters, like how close one’s nose must come to the ground while bowing to Mecca or what a god’s asshole looks like, there are no facts involved. It’s pure opinion and therefore entirely relatively, and we should never dispute these matters one with another. Eh?


NEW DENSE ELEMENT DISCOVERED

A major research institution has just announced the discovery of the densest element yet known to science. The new element has been named "Bushcronium." The symbol for Bushcronium is "W".

Bushcronium has one neutron, 12 assistant neutrons, 75 deputy neutrons, and 224 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 311. These particles are held together by dark forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons.

Bushcronium's mass increases preternaturally over time when morons randomly interact with various elements in the atmosphere and become assistant deputy neutrons in a Bushcronium molecule to form isodopes. This characteristic of moron-promotion leads some scientists to believe that Bushcronium is formed whenever morons reach a critical density. This hypothetical concentration is referred to as "Critical Morass."

When catalyzed with money, Bushcronium activates Foxnewsium, an element that radiates orders of magnitude more energy than Bushcronium itself, albeit in the form of incoherent noise since Foxnewsium has 1/2 the peons but twice more morons.

Folks, I’m sorry, but I don’t know who to credit this piece of writing too. I believe it’s one of those free-floating internet pieces that I scoop up in my daily ramblings. Now it’s been months since I stored it in my desktop file, Blog/ Future Stuff, and, well, who knows? It’s damn good though.

THE EVER-CHANGING SELF

Most of us who know the least little bit at all about biology (fundie Xtians excused) know that our cells replace themselves. Roughly every seven years, we are “evolved again” (my word). Of course, I didn’t know until Antonio Damasio taught me that the “precious neurons in our brains, the muscle cells of the heart and the cells of the lens” do not replace themselves. (The Feeling of What Happens, p. 144) In his marvelous study of how consciousness evolved, I find a great deal of interesting reading and one fascinating passage is the following one so marvelously poetic about the constant replacement of the body as it ceaselessly reinvents the structure that evolution has given it.

[SNIPPLE]
We are not merely perishable at the end of our lives. Most parts of us perish during our lifetime only to be substituted by other perishable parts. The cycles of death and birth repeat themselves many times in a life span—some of the cells in our bodies survive for as little as one week, most for not more than one year; the exceptions are the precious neurons in our brains, the muscle cells of the heart, and the cells of the lens. Most of the components that do not get substituted—such as the neurons—get changed by learning. (In fact, nothing being sacred, even some neurons may get substituted.) Life makes neurons behave differently by altering, for instance, the way they connect with others. No component remains the same for very long, and most of the cells and tissues that constitute our bodies today are not the same we owned when we entered college. What remains the same, in good part, is the construction plan for our organism structure and the set points for the operation of its parts. Call it the spirit of the form and the spirit of the function.

When we discover what we are made of and how we are put together, we discover a ceaseless process of building up and tearing down, and we realize that life is at the mercy of that never-ending process. Like the sand on the beaches of our childhood, it can be washed away. It is astonishing that we have a sense of self at all, that we have—that most of us have, some of us have—some continuity of structure and function that constitutes identity, some stable traits of behavior we call a personality. Fabulous indeed, amazing for certain, that you are you and I am me.

But the problem goes beyond perishability and renewal. Just as death and life cycles reconstruct the organism and its parts according to a plan, the brain reconstructs the sense of self moment by moment. We do not have a self sculpted in stone and, like stone, resistant to the ravages of time. Our sense of self is a state of the organism, the result of certain components operating in a certain manner and interacting in a certain way, within certain parameters. It is another construction, a vulnerable pattern of integrated operations whose consequence is to generate the mental representation of a living individual being. The entire biological edifice, from cells, tissues, and organs to systems and images, is held alive by the constant execution of construction plans, always on the brink of partial or complete collapse should the process of rebuilding and renewal break down. The 
construction plans are all woven around the need to stay away from the brink.
[PASTIE]

I am doing this at two to three in the morning as the object, George Bush, arising from my memory banks, has chosen to impinge its ghastly presence upon my hapless organism, rendering it alert and sensing danger when it should be replenishing itself with sleep.

PS: Call the tree, raising its arms into the sky, a "forest monster". Does it give you that eerie feeling like forests do in some of these recent children's movies like Harry Potter, those boring, endless Ring tales and that old Wizard of "if you've seen it once, you've seen it a thousand times" Oz?