Tag Archives: philosophy

On Civil Disobedience

Posted on August 14, 2013 by | 13 comments

N90172a

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

In 1983, after I’d been parking my old Cessna 140 at the Georgetown, Texas airport for several years I was suddenly the focus of a lot of questions from other pilots.

“Gene [the fixed base operator] says you don’t have a pilots license.”  Boiled down, that was the question.  “He says he’s going to turn you in to the FAA.” 

I could see this might cause a problem.  I’d logged 500 hours pilot-in-command in my old 1947 Cessna, but I’d never been signed off for solo flight by a flight instructor.  I’d flown from Texas to Savanna, Georgia and back sleeping under the wing, carried passengers, chased cows, but I had never jumped through the hoops required by the FAA to become a licensed pilot.

Now someone had ratted me out.  No  way Gene could have found out about this unless someone dropped the dime on me, and anyone who told him did it knowing he was a sniveling rat who’d turn in his mother for a burned out license tag light just for the feel good.

Whew.  Going legal was never part of my program.  It was a complication and it would lead to other complications of legalities I’d been ignoring.  Getting annual inspections on my plane every year, for instance.

A guy named Tom Dixon, whom I’d done some scary flying things with had recently gotten his instructor ticket, so I got him to sign me off for solo flight, went through the various navigation requirements, hood time, studied the FAA manuals, took the written test.

I’ve told on another blog entry here somewhere about the FAA Flight Examiner in Austin who gave me my check ride.  About what he said when he examined my logbook.

But in the end I was a legal private pilot. 

As nearly as I could tell it didn’t make an iota of difference.

If I had to live my life over I suppose one of the few things I’d change would be learning to fly at an earlier age and never going legal.

Old Jules

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Posted in 1980's, Adventure, America, Education, Flying, Human Behavior, Senior Citizens, Texas, Transportation

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Niaid: “So why aren’t we being more vocal about all this?”

Posted on August 12, 2013 by | 8 comments

Naiad dawn2

Niaid:  Why aren’t we trying to get some help on it?  Sometimes we might want to sleep late or we might be busy at sunset.

Me:  Proselytising and zeal are consequences of an erosion of faith.  Nobody needs to shout from the rooftops, “Hey everyone!  The sun’s going down this evening.  The sun’s about to come up!”  Nobody on earth does that because they have faith it’s going to happen.

Niaid:  So why do we do it then?

Me:  Of respect.  A demonstration of our faith, tipping the figurative hat to Truth.    We don’t need to recruit anyone to the cause because we know it’s already taken care of.

Niaid:  Then why do they do it on other matters they have faith in?

Me:  I said it before.  Erosion of faith.  Think about it.  The ancient Jews were never evangelical.  They didn’t need to be.  They had complete confidence in their God.  But when Christianity came along, the situation for Christians became an entirely different problem with a different solution.  They were the new kids on the block.  They were mostly Jews.  They’d spent their entire lives being indoctrinated to the Jewish faith.  They needed numbers.  Groups of other people believing the same as they did to help boost their own confidence what they believed was actually true.

Niaid:  All zealotry is from an erosion of faith?

Me:  Every time.

Niaid:  Patriotic zeal?

Me:  Think about it.  Before the Civil War they weren’t posturing and flag waving.  They knew what they were and mistrusted the people running things, but they never doubted what they believed themselves to be.  But after the Civil War the whole question about what this nation is took on new meaning.  It needed bolstering.  Parades.  Shouting from rooftops.  Fireworks. 

Niaid:  Needed it why?

Me:  They needed it to take the minds of the defeated half of the country that they’d been forced at gunpoint to be a part of something they fought hard to separate themselves from.  After the Civil War the country never again had faith in itself because everyone in it knew the premise the nation was founded on was violated.  Dead.

Niaid:  So the reason we pray Old Sol up and down is our way of saying we know it’s going to come up and go down?

Me:  Yep.  And we know damned well it doesn’t need any extra votes to force it to do it.  We know it will come up the same,  whatever Christians, Jews, Muslems, and anyone else might do in their praying trying to stop it.  We’ve got right on our side.

Old Jules

8 Comments

Posted in 2013, America, Animals, Communication, Government, History, Human Behavior, Spirituality

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Hydrox: “So why can’t I hear Old Sol talking?”

Posted on August 12, 2013 by | 4 comments

hydroxwindow2

Hydrox: We pray him up every morning, pray him down evenings.  I hear one end of all these conversations you have with him, but I never hear Old Sol saying anything.

Me:  Once again, it’s your romantic mode of viewing reality.  You’re only sensing what’s immediately apparent, not seeing the underlying form.

Hydrox:  I have to see the underlying form to hear what Old Sol says?

Me:  Think of it this way.  You look across the meadow and see trees with birds in them.  And an inch in front of your eyes you see a grasshopper.  You have an a priori knowledge the movement of those birds and that grasshopper jumping are happening at the same time.  But they aren’t.  What your eyes tell you is now is a microsecond earlier for the birds than the grasshopper because of the speed of light reflecting off both, arriving at your eye simultaneously.

Hydrox:  You’ve lost me.

Me:  Your mind filters what it sees with a priori knowledge.  You can’t hear Old Sol talking because you have romantic, a priori knowledge Old Sol doesn’t speak.  You’re not able to sense the underlying form.  It’s the same reason the people who read this blog wouldn’t be able to hear you talk, can’t hear cats talk.

Hydrox:  Well I’ll be damned.

Me:  Think of it.  People in the Bible used to hear God talk.  Adam and Eve, Abraham, Job, Moses, they were hearing in the Classical mode of reality.  Underlying form.   They can’t hear God speak anymore because they’ve gone by necessity into the Romantic mode.  Their minds filter out what God says, because in the modern world if they allowed themselves to hear the kinds of things God said they’d get themselves into a pile of trouble.

Hydrox:  How do you mean that?  People hear God talking all the time.

Me:  Only when God says things they won’t get in trouble hearing and obeying.  God might be telling people all over the place they have to sacrifice their kids, the same way he told that to Abraham.  But you can’t go around hearing God telling you to kill your kids, nor anyone else the way God used to do.  Telling people to smite other people hip and thigh.  Stone them to death if they screw around, masturbate, don’t follow the rules.  People today who hear God telling them to do things of that nature are generally believed to be insane.  Especially if they go ahead and do it.

Hydrox:  So if I can rid myself of this stupid, romantic way of looking at reality I’ll be able to hear what Old Sol’s saying?”

Me:  Yeah, but you’ll need to keep it to yourself or people will think you’re crazy.

Old Jules

4 Comments

Posted in 2013, Animals, Nature, Science, Spirituality

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Zen etc, Persig – The Phaedrus Chatauqua – Classical and Romantic Reality

Posted on August 7, 2013 by | 8 comments

Persig’s decided to do his Chatauqua on Phaedrus.  Begins by explaining how Phaedrus saw the world in a classical reality form, explains the difference between those two ways of approaching reality.

Hydrox:  So what’s the Classical reality way of viewing cat food?  Are we cats viewing the Romantic way, or the Classical way?

Me:  Romantic.  No question about it, no compromise, even.  The Classical’s the underlying form.  The components that make up the food, the nutritional value.  The process that went into canning it.  You cats couldn’t care less about that.  Taste and odor are the immediately apparent form, the Romantic.  They’re all you care about.

Hydrox:   I like to eat the insides out of things I catch.  Leave the head and sometimes tail and legs.  I like the underlying form best.

Me:  Actually not.  If you were opening that mouse and looking at the way the digestive tract works, the circulatory system, the nerves, lungs, then you’d be getting into Classical form.  You aren’t looking at underlying function even though it’s inside.  You’re after taste, odor and texture.  There are no goods, no bads in the Classical form. No feelings.  Those are all Romantic form.

Hydrox:  Okay.  But you’re saying this Phaedrus guy was only interested in underlying form?  Classical form?  Is that why he was crazy?

Me:  Not really, but we’ll get into that.  Crazy doesn’t seem to confine itself to one form or another.    And the reasons Phaedrus had his insanity are a lot deeper than that.   More in the manner of the way he broke the world down to analyse it than in the form itself.

Niaid:  Off the subject, but wasn’t the kid here in the story killed in a driveby shooting a few years ago?  A long time after this story.

Me:  Yeah, he was.  Before you cats were even born.  Before Persig wrote Lila, too.

Tabby:  So are we supposed to keep that in mind while we’re doing this?  That this kid’s going to end up dead in a driveby shooting?

Me:  Not if you can keep from it, though it’s not easy to keep it separate.  What happened to that kid later on didn’t have anything to do with Phaedrus, and the way you’ll be thinking about him is Romantic.  Feelings.

Old Jules

8 Comments

Posted in 2013, America, Animals, Book Reviews, Books

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Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Posted on August 6, 2013 by | 7 comments

Hi Readers. Thanks for coming by.

Perzig’s first book jumped out at me a week-or-so ago out of a box I was packing.  Demanded I go through it yet another time this lifetime.  Which is never a job of work I take lightly.

Decided as I study on it I’d discuss it with the cats when I come to particularly studious parts.  If it seems appropriate I might share some of those discussions with you along the way.  For instance, last night he and his son, along with another couple have progressed to a camp site.  The son’s troubling him a fair amount, but Phaedrus, shadow figure of his past insanity is also peeking into the corners of his mind.

Hydrox:  What does he mean when he says, “Ghosts come back when a person hasn’t been properly buried?  Is he talking about, say, the ghost of all those chickens I keep seeing around here sometimes?”

Me:  Maybe he’s talking about that, partly.  Those chickens aren’t necessarily dead, so far as we know.  And I definitely think that’s a piece of what he’s talking about.  People lost to our lives, but without closure.  But there’s also Mehitabel.  She stayed on permanent mouse patrol all these years.  Never was properly buried.

Hydrox:  Mehitabel?  I’ve just about gotten so I don’t see her anymore.  Thanks goodness.

Niaid:  Wish you hadn’t brought her up.  Gives me the willies.

Me:  The longer we live the more ghosts we tend to accumulate, all those not-properly buried ones who passed through our lives.

Tabby:  Any chance we could bury Shiva?

Me:  You figure she’s gotten around to burying you?

Old Jules

7 Comments

Posted in Book Reviews, Books

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Farnham’s Freehold, by Robert A. Heinlein 1964

Posted on August 6, 2013 by | Leave a comment

Hi readers.  Here’s another one of those old early-days RAH tomes to give you some smiles, some anachronisms to feel smug about, and a couple of truly interesting things to think about.

The first part of the book is all the usual suspects, family with a bomb shelter before the bombs fall, etc.  If you haven’t read a thousand others, might as well get it done  with this one, I reckons.

But then the bombs hit, one of them dead-center.  Spang blows Farnham and his family into sometime a longish while in the future, same spot.  Then the fun starts.

The big powers destroyed themselves and most of the other non-ethnic places full of advanced white people.  So when Farnham and his white family come up for air it isn’t long before they’re discovered by the meek who inherited the earth.  Africans, mainly, in this area.  A sort of do-it-yourself African empire sitting atop the ruins of the US.

Sure, some white people survived.  Most have been adopted as slaves in a manner similar to the way the Ottomans treated captured Europeans during an earlier time.  Bred the good ones for physical and mental traits, castrated the others and put them to work.  Kept a lot of females for breeding stock, too.

So once they’re captured, Farnham and his family are forced to adapt themselves to a lifestyle most white people have spent a lot more generations becoming unaccustomed to than was good for them.  Farnham’s wife lucks into being the paramour of one of the black rulers, and being a 20th Century mom, wants her son with her.  But him being a male, her being part of the harem, he’s got to be castrated first.  Which gives her pause, but only momentarily.

And so on.

Lots of laughs in this book.  A truly fun read.

Old Jules

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Posted in 1960's, Adventure, America, Book Reviews, Books, Human Behavior

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Being doomed ain’t all that bad

Posted on August 6, 2013 by | 13 comments

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by.

A guy I usually stop and have a cup of coffee with when I’m in Kerrville was exchanging pontifications with me lately.  Seemed everything we could think of to talk about led to a similar ‘where’, and that where didn’t invite any street dances.  At least unless a person could rotate it on the axis enough to recognize all the ‘wheres’ are the same place as they always were.

Problem was we kept switching around looking at things too collectively.  Individually he and the other old codgers who hang around there talking with him, including me, aren’t doing too badly.  Some of us have health issues, and all of us are a lot nearer death [by appearances] than we were ten years, or ten minutes ago.  Same as everyone else, though an argument might be made we’re nearer than them.

Nearer, by appearances, only.  Those people driving by out there on the pavement all are operating under the illusion they’re going to live as long as us, which one-hell-of-a-lot of them won’t.  They’ll get terminal illness, car smashups, all manner of unexpected ways to exit the vehicle while some of us old guys are still stopping by visiting one another.

And by far the greatest likelihood is that we ain’t all, including the ones driving by, ain’t going to all die the same week, the same day, even the same decade.  Which is the difference between individual, and collective doomsday.

But when you come right down to it, what-the-hell is the difference?  If we all pick the same day to die we’ll each still have had our day in the sun.  Same as we would have otherwise. 

Thinking about this during the times I’m not in the company of other people it seems to me there’s a lot more emphasis put on the collective side of things than contributes to uppidyness at an individual level.  If I happened to care a lot whether and when I die, I can see how the prospect of all sorts of risk-taking might seem something to be avoided.  Might be able to influence one-way-or-another [though not nearly as much as I might imagine] whether I kicked sooner, or later.

But looking around me and seeing all manner of cumulonimbus signs of doom coming up on the horizon and concluding it’s worse than just my own personal demise, that it’s something humanity ought to avoid, just doesn’t make any sense at all.  It requires the assumption that there’s something better after I’m dead, about lots of human beings running around watching television, driving to the grocery store, playing games on the computer, and having romances.

Fact is if they all die the same week as I do the great bulk of them will have been spared a lot of pain and worry, and looking around me I’m not certain the happiness and satisfaction they might have experienced is enough to offset it for most of them.  At least not enough to be worth interrupting the happiness and satisfaction of now on an individual level to devote thought to it.

One of the things comes up in those conversations is what a shame it was we waited so long to figure out we could have been living right back then, instead of waiting around to do it.  We’d have gotten a lot more living done, on the one hand.  And on the other, if doomsday had come along and interfered, we’d have still gotten something for our money.

Old Jules

13 Comments

Posted in 2013, Adventure, Senior Citizens, Solitude, Spirituality

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Those silly little Japanese

Posted on August 5, 2013 by | 4 comments

Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

My friend Rich was telling me on the phone yesterday the “Hey! Looky over there!” technique for dealing with nuclear meltdowns is coming apart at the seams:

fukashima nuke

http://www.scpr.org/news/2013/07/22/38294/fukushima-nuclear-plant-leaking-radioactive-water/

“We are very sorry for causing concerns. We have made efforts not to cause any leak to the outside, but we might have failed to do so,” he said.
    
Ono said the radioactive elements detected in water samples are believed to largely come from initial leaks that have remained since earlier in the crisis. He said the leak has stayed near the plant inside the bay, and officials believe very little has spread further into the Pacific Ocean.
    
Marine biologists have warned that the radioactive water may be leaking continuously into the sea from the underground, citing high radioactivity in fish samples taken near the plant.
    
Most fish and seafood from along the Fukushima coast are barred from domestic markets and exports.”

Other articles are finally describing the levels of radioactivity in the steam one of the plants has been producing since the day one.  Luckily for Japan the prevailing winds will mostly take that cesium and whatnot into US and Canadian waters and over Alaska, Washington, and Oregon.  And the radioactive fish migrations down the California and Mexican coasts.

Got me thinking about the US love affair with Japan that’s been sneaking off to cheap motels and consumating itself in the back seats of limosines for the past half-century following their enthusiastic surrender.

Which got me thinking about love affairs in general, and how they tend to end.     [So Long, and Thanks for all the Valentines https://sofarfromheaven.com/romance/]  That’s the source for the ‘little Japanese’ thing.

A few years ago there was a big flap about whether one of the US presidents ought to apologize to Japan for dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasakaki.  The logic being that Japan wasn’t quite ready to surrender yet, and that dropping those bombs forced them to quit fighting prematurely.  I don’t know whether one of the US Chief Executives apologized, or didn’t. 

But that’s the sort of thing happens all the time in love affairs when they begin going stale.  Next thing you know something else will come along to stale things some more.  Such as the Japanese sending cesium into the sky so’s the wind can take it to Seattle and Portland.

Japan, of course, could send us a lot of valentines or roses to make things better, maybe.  Or maybe they could just admit what they’re doing and apologize.  They could actually say, “Hey!  Lookee over here!  We shore could use a little help, advice and friendly ideas.  From anyone who has some.  We loves you Americans and everything else being equal, like you better not glowing in the dark.”

Or maybe it’s just time to lay aside that romance and tell the Japanese, “So long and thanks for all the valentines.”

Old Jules

4 Comments

Posted in 1940's, 2013, America, Current Issues, Government, Human Behavior, Nature, Relationships

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Fixer Upper For Sale – Harper, Texas

Posted on August 3, 2013 by | 1 comment

Stand with Israel harper tx

And a big Texas ‘Howdy!”

Old Jules

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Posted in 2013, America, Human Behavior, Politics

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A Communist behind every tree

Posted on August 3, 2013 by | 17 comments

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

Back in the bad old days between the Korean War and the Vietnam War a person could land himself in a peck of trouble for saying he was a Communist.  My granddad was a man crosswise with the world, and one day in a cafe in Dora, New Mexico, a bunch of farmers were talking about the Communists, and Papa announced he was one.  Proceeded to debate the matter with the entire cafe.

Point-by-point.  He didn’t have any friends around there anyway, but doing that didn’t win him any.

Wasn’t long before he had himself a visit from two FBI agents.  Said they’d had a report he was an atheistic Communist.  Which thoroughly pissed him off.

So Papa began studying Communism, began building all manner of reasons Communism was better than representative democracy.  Which he was happy to pass on to my young crosswise-with-the-Universe mind.

Sophomore, or Junior year of high school I entered a class on government being taught by Ira Bogard.  Me being the smartass trouble maker I was, and being generally an outcast, a few days into the semester I answered a question by saying I was a Communist.  Mister Bogard paused and glared at me, then went on with what he’d been saying.

But at the end of class he was assigning the class an essay.  Except me.  He pointed to me and told me to give him five pages explaining why I was a Communist.

I turned it in on time, and a few days later he handed it back to me with questions in the margins:  “How do you explain the Siberian camps?”  “How do you explain Stalin?”  “Why do you say Roosevelt’s New Deal was Communism in disguise?”  5 pages.

This went on the whole semester.  The only essays I wrote were answers to his questions about Communism.  Naturally I consulted my granddad every chance I got, but I also spent a lot of time in the library, even had to visit the ENMU library to get answers to some of his questions.

Hell of a good teacher.  I still smile thinking about him.

Old Jules

17 Comments

Posted in 1950's, America, Government, Human Behavior, New Mexico, NM, Politics

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