aspie ranting |
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If I seem a little distant or incoherent, it's because I am. I am not a NeuroTypical and I have no desire to become one. This is simply the area in which I stim my creative impulses. (WARNING: All entries are either ENTIRELY TRUE or ENTIRELY FALSE and anything claiming to be one of the latter is, in fact, one of the former. There are no exceptions to this rule.) comments, marriage proposals, and death threats can be sent here 
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Friday, March 29, 2002
Thursday, March 28, 2002
28 March. In 1979 there was a serious accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, and although no meltdown occurred, public opinion began to turn against the whole American nuclear industry. In the film The China Syndrome, made before the incident, a character remarks that a cloud of waste could wreak death and destruction over 'an area the size of Pennsylvania.' Earlier in the year, a local magazine had run a fictional story called Meltdown at Three Mile Island, and they even got the date right, 28 March. mmm... synchronicity Wednesday, March 27, 2002
Tuesday, March 26, 2002
sorry... bitterness creeps in when I feel like people are avoiding me... usually also when my thinking people are avoiding me is quite unfounded... wee... that last sentence (sorta) took me a few seconds to form properly... riddle time... this time, it's the Cocaine riddle... Two recent political leaders allegedly had this nefarious habit. Both came to power after dubious elections, by non-electorial and irregular methods. Both nations immediately experienced attacks on famous public buildings. Both blamed an ethnic minority before forensics had any evidence. Both led "witch-hunts" against the accused minority. Both suspended civil liberties "temporarily." Both put the citizenry under surveillance. Both maintained secret and clandestine governments. Both launched wars against most of the world. One had a funny mustache. Can you name the other one? *grins* it's things like this that make it seem like the universe has a very strange and alltogether very funny sense of humour... well, at least in its own stochastic way... (I am really beginning to use the word "stochastic" entirely too much and, as a result, the number of odd looks I get in response has been incresing steadily) Sunday, March 24, 2002
24 March. St Gabriel's Day. Gabriel is supposed to have brought God's seed to the Virgin Mary, and according to St Luke (1:28), 'came in unto her' or had a sexual intercourse with her. Some theologians thought Gabriel carried the seed in his mouth and it entered Mary through her ear. As Jiblril in Islam he revealed the Koran to Muhammad. In 1982 a hitch-hiker in Bavaria claiming to be the Arch-angel Gabriel, foretold the end of the world in 1984, and apparently vanished from cars at will. The Catholic Church pronounced that Gabriel could not possibly appear as a hitch-hiker. Friday, March 22, 2002
ah well, I can't always have it my way... ;-) I've had more "good luck" wished upon news of my engagement than I think I can stand... though none of it seemed rote enough to stick... well, at least shannon wasn't as truculent as usual... that was, different... Thursday, March 21, 2002
21 March. The vernal equinox was set on this day in 325 at the council of Nice. First day of Germinal (Budding) in the French revolutionary calendar. Tuesday, March 19, 2002
19 March. Feast Day of St Joseph, husband of the Virgin Mary. The Protoevangilium, a second century gospel regarded as authentic by the early fathers, stated that Mary was a temple maiden or kadesha. Joseph was a traditional name for the priests, who were duty bound to father sons dedicated to God and referred to as virgin-born. Monday, March 18, 2002
"Recent history is the record of one vast conspiracy to impose one level of mechanical consciousness on mankind." -- Allen Ginsburg Today it is fashionable, if not mandatory, to maintain that culture always was and always will be. Even though it is demonstrably the case that there was an extremely long non-symbolic human era, perhaps one hundred times as long as that of civilization, and that culture has gained only at the expense of nature, one has it from all sides that the symbolic � like alienation � is eternal. Thus questions of origins and destinations are meaningless. Nothing can be traced further than the semiotic in which everything is trapped. But the limits of the dominant rationality and the costs of civilization are too starkly visible for us to accept this kind of cop-out. Since the ascendance of the symbolic humans have been trying, through participation in culture, to recover an authenticity we once lived. The constant urge or quest for the transcendent testifies that the hegemony of absence is a cultural constant. As Thomas McFarland found, "culture primarily witnesses the absence of meaning, not its presence." Religion, like art, contributed to a common symbolic grammar needed by the new social order and its fissures and anxieties. The word is based on the Latin religare, to tie or bind, and a Greek verbal stem denoting attentiveness to ritual, faithfulness to rules. Social integration, required for the first time, is evident as impetus to religion. The original sense of the word define is, from Latin, to limit or bring to an end. Language seems often to close an experience, not to help ourselves be open to experience. When we dream, what happens is not expressed in words, just as those in love communicate most deeply without verbal symbolizing. What has been advanced by language that has really advanced the human spirit? We succumb to objectification and let a web of culture control us and tell us how to live, as if this were a natural development. It is anything but that, and we should be clear about what culture/civilization has in fact given us, and what it has taken away. Sunday, March 17, 2002
17 March. St Patrick's Day. The Irish worshipped the shamrock as the symbol of their triple deities long before (the probably fictitious) Patrick used it as a symbol of the Trinity. At the Roman festival of Mars (Pater, or Patricius), an enormous phallus was paraded through the streets. The wearing of green was traditional at Roman sexual feasts. During the Middle Ages this was the day Noah was thought to have entered the Ark: more recently, it is celebrated as World Maritime Day. Friday, March 15, 2002
Wednesday, March 13, 2002
13 March. Uranus, the seventh planet, was discovered in 1871 by William Herschel while examining the constellation Gemini. He wanted to name it Georgem Sidus after his benefactor, King George III of England, while English astronomers suggested calling it Herschel. They were overruled by European astronomers who proposed that the old mythological system should be followed. Herschel came adrift on some other subjects. For instance, because air gets colder the higher (and therefore the closer to the sun) one goes, he extrapolated that the surface of the sun was cold, and he suggested that the sun was inhabited. Tuesday, March 12, 2002
Sir, I bear a rhyme excelling In mystic force and magic spelling Celestial sprites elucidate All my own striving can't relate... Sunday, March 10, 2002
Monday, March 04, 2002
"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain." -Frank Herbert Confucius said "The first rule of politics is to use the language precisely. Otherwise, nobody understands anybody else, and everything falls into chaos." Some commentators regard the ideograms about using language precisely -- ching ming -- as the single most important concept in Confucian philosophy. In creating a defense league against the rabid androphobia of Steinem & Company, we need to notice which mis-uses of language create the logical chaos that reinforces and perpetuates the androphobic lunacy. I offer two small corrections of language here. "White men still own all the corporations." I head this from a Hispanic radical on local TV recently. This sentence can serve as a perfect example of how sloppy language habits create warped reality-tunnels, because it looks almost true at first, but it actually contacts an enormous Nazi-like Big Lie. Leaving aside the facts that, internationally, many corporations belong to nonwhite males, and that, even nationally, a few corporations belong to females, let us assume that, within the U.S., the statement contains maybe 90 percent accuracy. In other words, let us assume that perhaps 90 percent of all corporations active here have white male owners. This statement obviously differs vastly from "90 percent of all white males own corporations." In fact, even the Hispanic radical quoted above, if he opened his eyes, could see many, many white males working at lowly and menial jobs in this part of the country. These poor whites do not own corporations. Neither do many others who don't eve have lousy jobs and survive by being on the street. "White men own all the corporations" does tend to get confused with "All white men own corporations." Listen closely to radicals in general, and Radical Feminists in particular, and you will hear, over and over, how this self-hypnosis works. They leap from the first partly true statement to the second totally false one without even noticing that they have reversed their logical terms in the middle. They can literally walk past a homeless white man and not observe how his existence contradicts their racist/sexist ideology. Note that the same confusion existed in the foundation of the Nazi madness. "The Jews own the international banks" has lower accuracy than "white men own all corporations," but even if it fit 100 percent of all banks, it would not mean the same as "all Jews own international banks." Nonetheless, the Nazis managed to convince themselves that it did; the Holocaust followed. As semanticists like Korzybski and Bourland have pointed out, this type of confusion, and the bigotry it perpetuates, results from the very structure of our language. "White men" and "Jews" can serve as subjects of many sentences, but they do not mean the same in all sentences. Thus, "white men came down the path" refers to a definite number at a specific occasion, "White men own corporations" refers to a larger, but still smallish number, a statistically tiny segment of all white men, and "White men are not eligible for affirmative action" refers to all white men in the U.S. today. We tend to confuse these various meanings, unless we modify the key expression at once -- e.g., "Three white men come down the path," "5,000 white men own corporations," "30 million white men are not eligible for affirmative action." (These figures represent estimates, or guesses, to convey the idea. They do not claim to represent statistics I have not collected.) (I have elsewhere suggested that when generalizing without statistics we should use the term "sombunall" -- some but not all -- in every single case where we have not in fact examined all members of a set or class.) Consider next "the Patriarchy" against which we have heard so much heated rhetoric in recent decades. Does this term really fit our society? The Rad Fem crowd repeats over and over that it does fit, but I suggest that it does not. In a Patriarchy, a man continues to have custody of his children after a divorce. In the U.S. today, the wife gets custody in about 90 percent of all cases. That seems to place us closer to Matriarchy than to Patriarchy. More important, however, since males dies in our society seven years younger than their wives, the families that own most of the wealth fall under female domination eventually. And, of course, contrary to Rad Fem propaganda, even while the males remain alive, most of them share decision-making with their wives on many important occasions; they probably share decisions with their mistresses also; and women do most of the shopping and spending. The men only earn the money; the women dispose of it. I think we can only accept Oligarchy as the proper name for that system -- not Matriarchy, as Philip Wylie suggested in the 1940s and not Patriarchy, as the Feminists have insisted since the 1960s. A group of rich families, not merely the males, make all the important decisions. This type of system has existed in every post-tribal society in history, including the ones that call themselves democratic, socialistic or even communistic. Oligarchy virtually means the same as "civilization." Ignoring this fact, and picking out some scapegoat group like Jews or males, utterly confuses our political thinking and can lead to nothing but madness. Saturday, March 02, 2002
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faeries have died because YOU haven't been clapping hard enough.