Snakes and Ladders

[pan]

“Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.”
Steven Weinberg

[Cal]

Read your post & left you a note there.  Never knew much about Cambodia until I read it & then it pitched up in the book I was reading 'Noontime Demon' - Andrew Solomon the very next day.  I think that's as much as I want to know ...

I skipped out on 'organized religion' in favour of the divine in 'all that is'.  But hell's teeth ... if our species is the pinnacle of millions of years of evolution my own personal inadequacies pale into insignificance compared with that giant flop.

[waldopaper]

Zow Stones!  That's one of the best posts I ever read. 

Academia a scam?  Of course it is.  EVERYTHING is a scam everywhere.  Maybe it always has been, I dunno.  You can slice the diagnoses several different ways, but if you shovel deep into that theory bin (where introspective delusion runs deep) you usually get the most manageable parts of the puzzle.   

The big piece is capital.  Then "money" (NOT the same).  Then whoo look out... stick your ass in yer hat and prepare for the explosive wet fart... capitalism.  The world revolution is going on everywhere.  By now we should have learned to avoid shitting in our hat.  But every day we keep jamming on our helmets full of poo.  

Because we must suppress our natural reaction to the scam... otherwise the scam falls apart... and everything stays weird until a new scam emerges.  What makes it a "scam?"  "Gaming" the "system."  Every system has to have metrics.  That's the game:  stay as far as possible from wherever the metrics measure anything real. 

Still learning to work my phone... but that's another story. 

[BO]

Here's what a big brown wet fart looks like when it invades a city…

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-12-06/shanghais-record-pollution...

[pan]

Atheists with a sense of humor

[BO]

Good for them. I hope they're documenting the application process. Would make a hilarious documentary.

[pan]

Tom DeLay avers that the Founders set up a theocracy that we have strayed away from:

[waldopaper]

Oh goodie. The Dark Triad.  

[BO]

Yeah, but what does one call the Dark Triad when it defines an entire culture?

This shit isn't isolated, it's pandemic. And it's the shit that has robbed me of any hope whatsoever.

[waldopaper]

how about Delta Farce?  

[Mouse]

yesterday, with dear Small's help we posted all our vote like this leaflets and rising from the final letterbox I found a foreigner I had invited to tea years ago talking to Small with gusto.
"You didn't come to tea." says I.
"No, I didn't come to tea," says she turning and running and laughing. She skips away with her fellow in tow, fast and high pitched.
Hmm.

[waldopaper]

TAR RAT: 

A palindrome to get you home. 

 

Nur manchmal schiebt der Vorhang der Pupille
sich lautlos auf –. Dann geht ein Bild hinein,
geht durch der Glieder angespannte Stille –
und hört im Herzen auf zu sein.

--Rainer Maria Rilke

Only sometimes the pupil’s curtain slides open

And a picture falls in

Passes through their tight and silent being

Heard in the heart, goes out within.*

 

*…talk in my p-p-p-poor translation  

 

I cannot in good conscience ask you to write a 15 page paper during finals week.  This would reduce the art of writing to counting pages.  Rote compliant standardization reduces research and reflection to rough drafts and peer review-parroting dogma to measure and manage.  This practice is obsolete and harmful to efficient exchange of thought (in) today (’s society).  Filler memes are mundane!  

 

You have more than met the requirements of your last college English course.  You have grappled with difficult and compelling concepts transforming your generation.  Each of the topics: Socialism, Peak Oil, Permaculture, Equality, Authoritarianism, Singularity, civil war, and mythos/magic are major memes defining our age.  Your expression of these memeplexes will serve you well as a writer. 

 

Expository writing is exposing what you know.  Think about what you read.  Read about what you think.  Simple and easy?  Well, yes and no.  Embrace the paradox.  Seeing the connection between memes will make your thinking more prescient by making your language more efficient.  Try to express the memeplex.  Don’t let the memeplex express you.  All we are saying.  Give peas a chance.  

 

Said Martin E. Meme in Gburg, “There is no time for that.  There is no time.”  Ideas have their own agency and they are coming this way.  Wikipedia and Wi-Fi.  There is thunder in a clear sky and an earthquake at the top of the world.  New birth of freedom and all that.  Paradigm shift meme capitalism or God?  Sacred text or pretext?  Because every text is sacred text.  Prescience machines intelligence.   

 

Because stories don’t have be true to tell the truth. 

---

 [gw1]

[pan]

There will be a few wee spiders who realize how lucky they were to have you as a teacher.  Maybe not right now, but some will pause and say to themselves, "that weird hippy was a great teacher!"