Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

- Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening – Robert Frost

Excerpt:

In the chapters above we presented our views in a rather infor­mal set­ting, trying to show the philosophical importance and conse­quences of a realist attitude toward holes rather than spelling out a full-fledged theory of holes.
In this appendix we attempt to address this task more di­rectly by summarizing some basic tenets of our account in a rather systematic – though by no means complete – fashion. For convenience, we divide the presentation into four main sec­tions:
(1) a preliminary ontological part, which introduces the basic binary relation “is a hole in (or through)” along with some rel­evant facts;
(2) a mereo­logical part, which systematizes some funda­men­tal prin­ci­ples governing the interplay between the host-hole and the part-whole relations;
(3) a topological part, which summa­rizes some basic facts con­cern­ing surfaces and the taxonomy of holes; and
(4) a morphological part, focusing on the fact that ob­jects with holes constitute – as we have put it – the morphologi­cal mani­fold of fil­lable things.

….

The underly­ing logic is deliberately left vague, as after all we think holes are ut­terly neutral in this respect. A preferred al­ternative is some sort of a free logic, where im­proper de­scrip­tions and other pos­sibly empty expres­sions can be admitted bona fide; however, every­thing that follows could in prin­ciple be dealt with within the frame­work of a standard first-order logic, with i treated as an im­proper symbol. In ad­di­tion, we as­sume familiarity with some ba­sic princi­ples of ex­ten­sional mereo­logy and topol­ogy.

Linkie: http://suo.ieee.org/SUO/documents/Holes.html

Aaaaaand seen!

So I bought this toolbox …

But the tool to open the box is inside the box …

In 1957, Hugh Everett III believed he had solved the infamous measurement problem in quantum mechanics by explaining probability as an illusion in an evolving, deterministic universe of universes. His “relative state” theory horrified Niels Bohr, who treated Everett’s doctoral thesis (written under the guidance of John Wheeler) with disbelief and scorn.

Everett’s theory was reborn as the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics in the 1970s. Yet despite his idea’s growing popularity, Everett never wrote another word about quantum mechanics. Instead, he worked on military operations research, designing nuclear missile targeting software. In this lecture, investigative journalist and Everett biographer Peter Byrne traces how Everett’s theory evolved over the course of his often-troubled life.

via Event Registration (EVENT: 241771).

PS:  Not a religion thing, just a semi noteworthy behavioral observation.

via: Merlinhoot: 3D fractal

This is a little known and one of the best ‘setups’ ever, demonstrating once and for all that if there were such a thing as Hell, Dante would have created a basement for marketeers.

I miss Spy.

In a breaking news update, a prestigious hospital that no one gives a crap about until they get severely injured and then beg to be admitted to revealed that at precisely 8:03 am this morning, it admitted a patient who was suffering from high levels of unwarranted self-importance. The patient’s name was not released, as doctors stated that having the man’s name be spoken on national television would only serve to raise his level of unwarranted self-importance even higher.

Doctors are desperately trying to relieve the man’s levels of self-importance. They say that the normal treatment, forcing the patient to write depressing poetry, isn’t working, but are confident that their next planned treatment, having an astrophysicist explain that mankind is an insignificant creature in the face of the ever-expanding universe, will be successful.

According to a hospital employee, who also came close to suffering from unwarranted self-importance following this interview, the patient had claimed that he “had put those [expletive deleted] [expletive deleted] forum trolls in their place” while browsing a popular online forum and that he had “achieved a victory for all of mankind” and “should be worshiped as a hero”.

When asked of the incident, the forum’s administrator stated that the patient had “just called those trolls [expletive deleted] [expletive deleted] who should [expletive deleted] their [expletive deleted][expletive deleted] mothers while also [expletive deleted] [expletive deleted] [expletive deleted] raped by a cow. He didn’t really do too much except make it worse.”

via: Delightedly Dreary News Network.

via: Lysergic on Above Top Secret

Plato:  For the greater good.

Karl Marx:  It was a historical inevitability.

Machiavelli:  So that its subjects will view it with admiration, as a chicken which has the daring and courage to boldly cross the road, but also with fear, for whom among them has the strength to contend with such a paragon of avian virtue?  In such a manner is the princely chicken’s dominion maintained.

Hippocrates:  Because of an excess of light pink gooey stuff in its pancreas.

Jacques Derrida:  Any number of contending discourses may be discovered  within the act of the chicken crossing the road, and each interpretation is equally valid as the authorial intent can never be discerned, because structuralism is DEAD, DAMMIT, DEAD!

Thomas de Torquemada:  Give me ten minutes with the chicken and I’ll find out.

Timothy Leary:  Because that’s the only kind of trip the Establishment would let it take.

Douglas Adams:  Forty-two.

Nietzsche:  Because if you gaze too long across the Road, the Road gazes also across you.

Oliver North:  National Security was at stake.

B.F. Skinner:  Because the external influences which had pervaded its sensorium from birth had caused it to develop in such a fashion that it would tend to cross roads, even while believing these actions to be of its own free will.

Carl Jung:  The confluence of events in the cultural gestalt necessitated that individual chickens cross roads at this historical juncture, and therefore synchronicitously brought such occurrences into being.

Jean-Paul Sartre:  In order to act in good faith and be true to itself, the chicken found it necessary to cross the road.

Ludwig Wittgenstein:  The possibility of “crossing” was encoded into the objects “chicken” and “road”, and circumstances came into being which caused the actualization of this potential occurrence.

Albert Einstein:  Whether the chicken crossed the road or the road crossed the chicken depends upon your frame of reference.

Aristotle:  To actualize its potential.

Buddha:  If you ask this question, you deny your own chicken-nature.

Howard Cosell:  It may very well have been one of the most astonishing events to grace the annals of history.  An historic, unprecedented avian biped with the temerity to attempt such an herculean achievement formerly relegated to homo sapien pedestrians is truly a remarkable occurence.

Salvador Dali:  The Fish.

Darwin:  It was the logical next step after coming down from the trees.

Emily Dickinson:  Because it could not stop for death.

Epicurus:  For fun.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:  It didn’t cross the road; it transcended it.

Johann von Goethe:   The eternal hen-principle made it do it.

Ernest Hemingway:   To die. In the rain.

Werner Heisenberg:   We are not sure which side of the road the chicken was on, but it was moving very fast.

David Hume:  Out of custom and habit.

Jack Nicholson:  ’Cause it (censored) wanted to. That’s the (censored) reason.

Pyrrho the Skeptic:   What road?

Ronald Reagan:  I forget.

John Sununu:  The Air Force was only too happy to provide the transportation, so quite understandably the chicken availed himself of the opportunity.

The Sphinx:  You tell me.

Mr. T:  If you saw me coming you’d cross the road too!

Henry David Thoreau:  To live deliberately … and suck all the marrow out of life.

Mark Twain:   The news of its crossing has been greatly exaggerated.

Molly Yard:  It was a hen!

Zeno of Elea:  To prove it could never reach the other side.

Chaucer:  So priketh hem nature in hir corages.

Wordsworth:  To wander lonely as a cloud.

The Godfather:  I didn’t want its mother to see it like that.

Keats: Philosophy will clip a chicken’s wings.

Blake:  To see heaven in a wild fowl.

Othello:  Jealousy.

Dr Johnson:  Sir, had you known the Chicken for as long as I have, you would not so readily enquire, but feel rather the Need to resist such a public Display of your own lamentable and incorrigible Ignorance.

Mrs Thatcher:  This chicken’s not for turning.

Supreme Soviet:  There has never been a chicken in this photograph.

Oscar Wilde:  Why, indeed? One’s social engagements whilst in town ought never expose one to such barbarous inconvenience – although, perhaps, if one must cross a road, one may do far worse than to cross it as the chicken in question.

Kafka:  Hardly the most urgent enquiry to make of a low-grade insurance clerk who woke up that morning as a hen.

Swift:  It is, of course, inevitable that such a loathsome, ilth-ridden and degraded creature as Man should assume to question the actions of one in all respects his superior.

Macbeth:  To have turned back were as tedious as to go o’er.

Whitehead:   Clearly, having fallen victim to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

Freud:  An die andere Seite zu kommen. (Much laughter)

Hamlet:   That is not the question.

Donne:  It crosseth for thee.

Pope:  It was mimicking my Lord Hervey.

Constable:  To get a better view.

via: http://philosophy.eserver.org/chicken.txt

On Locational Privacy, and How to Avoid Losing it Forever

A Culture of Conspiracy:

Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America

By Michael Barkun

University of California Press, 2003

243 Pages, US$17.47

ISBN 0-520-23805-2

Why did Timothy McVeigh visit Area 51, the alleged flying-saucer test range, and view the film “Contact” on death row? Why did the harmless-looking phrase, “New World Order,” take on a sinister connotation as soon as the first President Bush uttered it? Why does the acronym FEMA send chills down the spines of a substantial number of Americans? We cannot dismiss these facts as unrelated coincidences. No: they are all evidences of a strange mutation that occurred in American popular culture in the 1990s, when formerly obscure forms of esotericism and conspiracy theory fused with traditional millennialism and popular pseudo-science. The result was not a movement, but a worldview that threatens to undermine trust in public institutions, and maybe even consensus reality.

Such is the argument of this useful book by political scientist Michael Barkun of Syracuse University, one of the leading authorities on the political implications of contemporary millennialism. The literature of conspiracy theory is vast and rarely a pleasure to read, so there is something to be said for any survey that shrinks the Illuminati, the Men in Black, and the Hollow Earth itself to manageable dimensions. The chief merit of this book, though, is the description of a dynamic in contemporary conspiracy theory, one that turns ordinary popular culture into a venue for the propagation of ideas that the consensus culture has not just dismissed, but condemned. This model may exaggerate certain features of the popular mind, but it clearly does have some applications.

The chief sources of the culture of conspiracy are the tradition of conspiracy theory, conventional millennialism, and what must be called “ufology,” or the belief in the existence and importance of Unidentified Flying Objects and other extraterrestrial influences. The place where these sources meet is the realm of “stigmatized knowledge.”

Some stigmatized knowledge is just obsolete knowledge, like alchemy or astrology, that the academic establishment no longer takes seriously on its own terms. Some of it is folklore and urban legends. Some of it is political ideas that have lost their bid for dominance in the wide world, but survive in niches and sects. The stigmatization of knowledge does not necessarily mean it is worthless: acupuncture, for instance, has risen from subcultural disrepute to the status of a recognized treatment. Whatever the merits of stigmatized ideas, people who accept stigmatized knowledge about one subject are likely to be more open to entertaining it in others. This leads to an attitude that views esoteric and unpopular ideas favorably, simply because they are stigmatized. Any official or consensus explanation is viewed with suspicion.

If you think that what most people believe about important aspects of the world is consistently wrong, the most economical hypothesis is that those people are being systematically deceived. This implies a deceiver, who must have confederates. The larger the conspiracy, the more a theory about it can explain: hence the attractiveness of conspiracy theories. “A Culture of Conspiracy” does not address the question of whether there is a perennial Western tradition of conspiracy theories, one that might include the legends about Rosicrucians, witches, Brethren of the Free Spirit, and similar shady characters. Rather, the book focuses on the well-known tradition of secular conspiracy theories, whose best-known originator is the Abbé Barruel. This tradition began in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Barruel’s account sought to explain the Revolution as the work of groups of a generally Masonic character, of whom the most famous were the Illuminati of late 18th-century Bavaria.

There were indeed Illuminati, and the revolutionary phase of the Enlightenment was often organized through lodges and secret societies. However, conspiracy theorists tend to view secret and underground societies, not as vehicles for political activity, but as its cause. They see the public acts of statesmen and political groups as a mere smokescreen. For conspiracists, is it not necessary that the puppet-masters be altogether secret. Financial institutions and private associations will do nicely, as they did in conspiratorial accounts of politics that appeared as the 19th century progressed. (Barkun mentions Ignatius Donnelly for his popularization of Atlantis, by the way, but Donnelly also had the Jewish-Corporate Government connection down pat as early as the 1880s.) Around 1900, the Czarist secret police produced the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which ascribed a plot for world domination to the early Zionist movement. By about 1920, there was a standard superconspiracy model. The model linked international bankers, the central banks, the Masons, the Jews, and other groups in a long-running project, always almost complete, to establish a worldwide atheist tyranny.

In one form or another, this model has been remarkably durable. People with all kinds of perspectives can adapt it to fit any historical circumstance and any set of characters. Theorists with little interest in Jewish conspiracies, for instance, might read “Illuminist” in the “Protocols” wherever the text reads “Jew.” So great is the explanatory power of superconspiracies, however, that they threaten to engulf in despair those who believe in them. Conspiracy theorists often think that little stands between them and an intolerable future, brought about by forces that are invisible to the general public and yet nearly omnipotent.

The forces of evil are happily less omnipotent in millennialism, which is the general term that “A Culture of Conspiracy” uses for endtime belief. One of the chief factors in conspiracy thinking in the early 21st century comes from the revival of premillennialism in the first half of the 19th century. Premillennialists generally often believe the advent of the Millennium to be near, but expect it to be preceded by “apocalypse” proper, the period when God’s wrath will be poured out on the world. During this time, the world will be ruled by Antichrist. Identifying the Antichrist, and more important, his future collaborators, is an activity very close to what secular conspiracy theorists do. Premillennialists with an interest in current events borrowed the Illuminati and the cabal of international bankers, often adding their own traditional villains, such as the Vatican. Versions of eschatological conspiracy became widespread during the 20th century, but did not begin to join the general popular culture until the 1970s.

The bridge between the land of stigmatized knowledge and the world at large was the UFO phenomenon. UFOs made their way into millennialism as part of the great deception of the endtime; the aliens became demons who pretended to be angels of light. There was also some tendency for premillennialists to reinterpret their eschatology in physicalist terms, so that the pretribulation rapture sometimes becomes a rescue by spaceship. Michael Barkun has coined the term “improvisational millennialism” to describe this syncretism of motifs. Secular superconspiracists, for their part, had no trouble adding UFOs to their list of things that the powers-that-be were covering up. In some versions, the Great Conspiracy is in league with the aliens. In others, there were no aliens, but UFOs were being faked to cow the public.

In the 1980s, some quite new motifs appeared. There were the black helicopters, which served the conspiracy in a way that varied from theorist to theorist. There were the concentration camps that were said to be being prepared for dissident citizens for when the Day came. The Federal Emergency Management Agency was supposed to lead the effort to impose martial law. When disaster struck, either real or staged, FEMA would become the government. Then there was mind control, which government agencies were alleged to have perfected in the 1950s and ’60s.

As is often the way with urban legends, there were sometimes thin threads of fact in these Persian carpets of fantasy. Yes, police tactical helicopters sometimes are black. The CIA really did experiment with mind-altering drugs. For that matter, there were even contingency plans around 1970 to create temporary camps if civil disorders got out of hand. However, the structures that placed these fragments in a greater whole could never be verified, or even tested.

There were also fascinating adaptations of older ideas. For instance, the notion that the Earth might be hollow, and the seat of one or more advanced civilizations, has an old pedigree. In the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, it sometimes figured in fiction. When UFOs entered the popular consciousness, these subterranean realms became alternative or supplementary points of origin for these vessels. Admirers of H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith will be interested to learn that many of their story devices reappeared as bald assertions of fact in later conspiracist literature. (I might mention H.P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness,” not specifically cited in the book. That novella has as many subterranean aliens as a reasonable man could ask for, as well as an Antarctic locale, which is also important in many conspiracy theories.) The malevolent reptile-people who play such a key role in the conspiracy theories of David Icke seem to have slithered right out of the stories of Robert Howard, the creator of “Conan the Barbarian.”

Much of 19th-century theosophy came straight from popular fiction, so the 20th-century adaptations simply continue the tradition. A tongue-in-cheek British documentary broadcast in 1977, “Alternative 3,” described a conspiracy of elites to flee Earth before ecological catastrophe struck the planet. As happened in other contexts, some people immediately interpreted the fiction as an encoded account of the facts. And, of course, conspiracy theories form the basis for later fiction, such as the once fashionable “X-Files” television series. I would also note John Carpenter’s film from 1988, They Live. In that story, certain people are enabled to see our reptile overlords as they really are, consorting with ordinary upper-class humans who know the aliens’ identity. (“They Live” should not be confused with “Them,” an older and much better film about giant ants.)

The culture of stigmatized knowledge has facilitated other revivals. The channeling of extraterrestrials by New Agers looks like nothing so much as communication with the Ascended Masters whom Madame Blavatsky used to consult. Similarly, the allegations that the conspiracy sometimes captures people for sexual slavery bear more than a few points of resemblance to the 19th century stories that purported to expose what really goes on in Catholic nunneries.

Historical and technological developments gave a boost to the culture of conspiracy. Conspiracy theory had been an activity conducted through small newsletters and pamphlets before the assassination of John F. Kennedy; within a decade, it was an industry. Just as important was the growth of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, which made even the most obscure materials available to virtually anyone, virtually anywhere. Accessibility was not the only important factor; so was the lack of authoritative criticism. For that matter, “authority” was increasingly in short supply offline, too. The academy, during the postmodernist episode, undermined the assumption that consensus reality was more than a mere construct. The distinction between stigmatized and consensus knowledge did not quite collapse, but it became far more porous.

Michael Barkun is not happy about these developments. He notes that antisemitic motifs had formerly been wholly excluded from popular culture. Now they are reemerging, often in scarcely altered form, as elements of widely disseminated superconspiracies. He also points out that the culture of conspiracy responds badly to emergencies. Conspiracists reacted to 911 by demonstrating how it fit into their preexisting explanation for what is wrong with the world. The same might also be said of other people, perhaps, but the conspiracists’ explanations made them suspicious of collective efforts to deal with the situation.

For my part, I think that any discussion of conspiracism should acknowledge those contexts where the conspiracists are onto something. When evangelical Christians perceive a New Age conspiracy to extirpate Christianity, they often are quite right about the biases of some elements of the academy and the media. When opponents of the New World Order say that international organizations are plotting to subvert the sovereignty of the United States, they are sometimes just citing the law journals. About the gay agenda we need not speak. Conspiracists are not delusional when they say that important people often collaborate to bring about appalling results. The Great Conspiracy has two weaknesses, however. First: no cabal small enough to be hidden could have the leverage to control the world, or even to guide the public life of a single nation. Second: no cabal at all could survive with its agenda unchanged for generation after generation. Real conspirators are people just like you and me. They don’t have a clue, either.

via: http://www.johnreilly.info/acoc.htm

Copyright © 2004 by John J. Reilly