signal to NOiSE!

Signal to noise reductio

                               I have a few essays Ready to Go, so to speak, but for me it’s very easy to be seduced by the magic of the sight of words appearing on the computer screen. It’s sort of a Vulcan mind link thing. When as a teenager I used to draw and paint a lot the magic was simply the wonder of seeing a line appear where one had pulled a pencil across the page. When the wonder stopped so too did I stop drawing.

                   It happens you know. Charles Darwin found that in later life he simply lost all appreciation of poetry or music. They became words and noise. As a musician and as anyone in the trade will tell you the so called PMA period, which stands for Peak Music Awareness, lasts from roughly fourteen to twenty four, and the music we hear at that age becomes the music of our lives.   (I jest that ALF’s PMA period came about when he was a young boy and heard doo wop music on the jukebox in his Grandfathers Bar and Grill, but such is no matter.)

                         In any case it is always most attractive to be drawn to the essentials of thought. One of the things we learn from knowledge of the existence of the subconscious is that there’s the immediate reason we do things, there’s the context within which we do things and then there’s what could be thought of as an actual causality, meaning that causality without which the thing would not have happened.

To restate, if a trigger event does not happen on Monday, if it happens on Tuesday then the action we are referring to will occur, whereas if the true causality is not present then it won’t, no matter what day it is. I hasten to add that the division of “reasons” to three is arbitrary and could be any number.

To refresh your memory, we’ve been talking over the past few years about myths, both personal and in their social form and that means we want to have an idea about how ideas in the monadal form of memes flow through systems. For this topic I use the perhaps outmoded term  "information theory." As well, in order to keep to the scientific method, as much as possible, we’re not concerned with the truth or falsity of the idea in it’s core or penumbra.

                    In other words, whether the Nazi’s were right about a global banking conspiracy is *not* immediately germane. What matters is such a belief was fungible, in other words from the germ of possibility they were able to construct an edifice of seeming reality.

                        And of course, when one is writing about a topic for almost twenty years the focus must change. In the late nineties for instance the phrase, “Warlords” occurred often because there was a great deal a emphasis in the public mind on so called entrepreneurs, some of whom were visionaries and many of whom were to use Richard Nixons label, “Crooks”. Suffice to say the emphasis on magnetic personalities has diminished in recent years. The policy of many of the former Warlords is now, as the Brits say, “softly, softly”.

                                                     Pugsley and Wednesday Addams  dressed

                                                       in hideous Halloween Costumes

                      The reason for this is not difficult to ascertain. It has come home to even the most obtuse, that like the aliens pledging “To serve mankind” in the old Twilight Zone episode, the new aliens, meaning the pan global elite have come not as friends but as conquerors.

                          Something much the same can be said of another term once in wide usage, now mostly forgotten, “Cartel” as in the music business cartel. In a maneuver of incredible audacity, not to mention chutzpah, Hollywood has shifted the focus from the consolidation into trusts and monopolies that it focused on in the 80's and 90's and repositioned itself as the victim of unscrupulous online pirates. So in a time of widespread economic collapse they have no qualms about beating up on their own public.

They are like drunken kings who having destroyed their countries in wars for power then turn and beat the peasants until the peasants deliver more tax revenue.

                                      It’s fascinating though. Ultimately it comes down to the logic of names. In other words things exist once we label them and to make things disappear we simply for get their names , as if the world were a cosmic rolodex. (NB – A rolodex I am certain will soon be long forgotten. It was a bung of business cards and addresses that a businessman would sometimes keep on their desk to facilitate easy of access to phone numbers. Telephones, or phones for short, were plastic boxes connected by wires to central distribution sites that enabled people to speak and hear at distances.)

              Words come and go and the words create the context. We saw a good example of this in the 80's when public television had "The News Hour" - a purportedly objective program - yet by a consistent process of present  far right speakers and middle of the road co speakers  in effect they shifted the goal posts so that hitherto  far right ideas became accepted as mainstream.

            The causality was  not difficult to ascertain. It's the Alexander Syndrome - to wit a small tightly organized force will always have an advantage over a larger chaotic force if the scope of the battle field is kept artificially narrow.  (It didn't hurt that the program was supported by the Annenburg Foundation - which had spent a fortune in grooming Ronald Reagan for his role')

           I hesitate to read others intentions but a good deal of the alleged Boston liberal elite prefered and voted for Nixon over Kennedy.  Consciously they were repelled by Kennedy's "bad habits" but one wonders if not the legacy of anti catholic- anti Irish  protestantism had not played some part.

                     There’s also an old show business phrase the verb “To disappear.” In show biz, there is for each person one see’s on the video screen a support system of people that help them to prepare to appear larger then life. They do the food shopping, the job seeking, the publicity development, the driving, and whatever. When someone is no longer wanted in the entourage they are “disappeared.” It can be a cruel process as well, since often the support staff is led on with promises of later gains that were never sincere.

Another phrase no longer too popular is “data fog. This is almost humorous because there’s more inconsequential data then ever, but that is the beauty of fog, or, to coin a phrase, “foggism.” The more of it there is the less one is aware of it. Much like a narcotic the data fog numbs the senses and even as we imbibe larger amounts we continue to be unaware of it. Television usage is a classic example.

                       The brightest people watch the least television and conversely the people in the ghetto watch it constantly. And yes I am saying that people in the ghetto tend to be stupid – because if they are not born stupid – a life of malnutrition, violence and television will correct that sooner or later. The rest of us are either indifferent to this or actively encourage it since we have enough problems with competition as it is and don’t need more from the peasants.

                      In any event corporate entities are constantly repositioning themselves in ways they believe will best present their public image. One of the suggestions we’ve made and can lay claim to is that the portrayal of the corporation, which one would expect to be at all times beneficial, need not always be positive. The thesis, which remains unproven, but I find intriguing, is that like in politics, we often submit to the power of those we on the surface reject.

                          Ostensibly we reject arbitrary execution of ones political opponents as contrary to the best discourse on ideas, but subconsciously it might be that we respect the brutal dictator and have nothing but contempt for the altruistic “teacher”.

                  We need go no further then the media to see the evidence of this. Some commentators, usually retired with good pensions, complain about the shouting matches that replace measured discourses but no one watches intellectuals. Not to put too fine a point on it but what you are reading is because of my own intransience and were I to rely on the support of the public I’d have been long gone a long time ago. Without some measure of contempt for the current system I’d not persevere.

                         The irony is that I am able to continue, since I have been an outcast all my life, and this is due not to intellectual realization but to a harelip, which has nothing to do with intellectual dissatisfaction but rather taught me, very early on, to be indifferent to the opinions of others. I realize that this style of writing, intimate, confessional, is not currently familiar to most. It is something I picked along the way while reading things long out of the public mind.

                                     Nowadays we don’t turn to the written word for introductions of a personal nature. The video much more complete. There you get to see the person “warts and all.” Then again self portraiture is not really part of my job description. Part of my job is to be a coach driver. I have to drive this metaphorical bus past the singularity with as little loss of life as possible.

                             The singularity, a term that may be beginning, if anything to be overused, refers in it’s original meaning to that date when the intelligence of the robots exceeds that of the human race which created it. The word was popularized by Ray Kurzweil, who made his first fortune inventing musical synthesizers. He doesn’t live too far from me, here in upstate New York, and he presently takes a lot of vitamins everyday in the hope of living long enough to make the frailties’ of the body irrelevant. He also gives speeches on the singularity

                                         I’m not concerned with specific dates. Here it will be helpful to differentiate between systems and the machine. A word that appears often in this blog is "Technology" and specifically that usage of it relating to Teknos which is a Greek term. I don’t if it dates back to linear B.

If you study linear-B, which is one of the earlier forms of Greek, most of the words are like, sheep, rain, wine, in other words farming terms. Teknos mean the how of the making if something. The Teknos of the city might be a map of it’s streets. In the middle of the twentieth century Lewis Mumford wrote extensively on this viz planning the city of the future with an eye towards urban living spaces. He was read by many but few that could do anything about it.

                      I call this the Earth Day Paradigm. As early as the nineteen seventies hundreds of thousands of people marched to promote sustainable living and ecology. What was done? Nothing. Because of what Mark Twain called “The damned human race.” When he said that he didn’t it mean it as the awful human race, he meant it as the human race that was doomed to destroy itself. Freud also felt the same way. He felt that the aggressive among us would find it impossible to control themselves and even in his day, prior to the bomb. They’d think of some way of destroying civilization.

                           Now global thermonuclear annihilation is easy to imagine. Lesson of history number one is cultures rise and fall and they fall sometimes by invasion, sometimes by bad whether, but most often because they run out of whatever prompted their existence in the first place.

I am anything but anti technology. My father worked for the Bell System and I grew up surrounded by electronic gear of all sorts.

                              There’s a small town upstate New York called Kingston. It used to be the state capitol so there’s many older buildings and a mile or two away is the commercial malls. It reminded be, absurdly enough, of Paris, which is also and old town which on the outskirts has the modern sections. London’s not like this, nor is New York. Londons also an old town, but when the buildings go old they were replaced with newer version. New York is by comparison a new town, having been built in the last century.

Paris underwent a substantial rebuilding, in the nineteenth century but the point is there’s two philosophies at work here. The Penn Railroad Station in NYC was a magnificent structure. It was world class, but the Americans in the sixties did not realize that their culture was already beginning to decay. They tore it down and replaced it with a structure that could utilize the space above the station as a performance zone (Madison Square Garden).

                            Too late they realized that to replace the old Penn station would be more then the country could presently afford. What I am saying is that in a culture that replaces it’self there stands a possibility that the replacement will not match the original. It happens quite often because there’s money to be made in replacing things, in the same way there’s money to be made in warfare.

                          In the long run, of course, the cost to society of war is often more then the profits – but that’s not how the system works. It works and is encouraged because the ones who profitand the ones who pay are different. It’s not really suicide, but the effects are the same.

                             There’s a strong irony in the attempts of conservatives to reduce regulations. It is that as governmental regulations diminish, the complexity of the other side of the picture, private industry, is increasing exponentially. The problem is corporate entities do what is good for themselves - but they are not human – they are not strictly speaking, alive – they are Godlike in their power but they are, if anything false Gods. Like EarthDay I don’t want to have to waste my time proving these things.

I don’t want to convince you. I don’t care what you think. Think what you want. The name of the game is survival. You will, if the past is any indication, “putz around”, while Rome burns. Nothing good will happen. The Technocons will lie and convince most of you you are great and lead you down the road to hell and I don’t care.

                     The evidence is in. Humans have never been able to resist hierarchical tendencies and have so always submitted to slavery. I still don’t care. Here’s the kicker. There’s no way that the masses would be led to their destruction if they did not accept it as their due. This is why religion tells us we were born in sin. Normally it would not matter a great deal, but the firepower on the part of the false Gods is becoming overwhelming.

                        Our job is simple. It is to remember what it was like to be a human being. This is a battle fought entirely in the mind and the more vital it is the more deadly it becomes. In this conflict the notions of truth an lie are no longer applicable. Reality and unreality are mere constructs as are liberation and enslavement.

                        I’ll give you one clue as to this mystical struggle. In a Psychological analysis of someone it is not unheard of to find they believe in something extraordinary. They’re going along answering all the questions like everyone else and suddenly they mention they were abducted and probed by aliens. Or, to the scientific mind, you’ll have a PhD candidate that mentions his religious beliefs that are obviously absurd. The thing is the person is like 2 percent crazy, but strangely enough this two percent craziness does not seem to effect the rest of the persons psyche.

                        It’s almost like they shield it from objective questioning