Build an arrogance fortress and man it.
Pretend you can save this old planet
You trivial beast
An infection of yeast
On the surface, too tiny to plan it.
The trailer-parks listens and smiles
Echo his simplistic beguiles.
While those up on Wall Street
Applauded his drumbeat
Koch Brothers just sponsored his wiles.
Made his money the hard way, inherited.
Went to Yale where he struggled and merited
Every cent that he earned
With his MBA, spurned
Do-nothings with slogans he parroted.
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.
Eavesdropping on a conversation between young adults at a nearby table in a restaurant Thursday led me into a lot of pondering afterward. All these rosy-cheeked youngsters believed they had long lives ahead of them, believed a human life can be lived performing occupations and activities to give it value and meaning. They wanted this for themselves and were searching the databases of wisdom available among the young for answers to where it might be found.
They didn’t want to waste their lives, as they believed their parents, other older folks they observed, were doing and have done. They examined and discarded dozens of avenues of human endeavor as meaningless, having no worth.
Buying and selling almost anything from automobiles to insurance to consumer products found no home with them. Lawyering, law enforcement, engineering, health care, drew closer examination, but were found wanting. They’d had been damned by close observation of these fields as manifested in their own homes and the homes of acquaintances.
They’d seen the inside of the lives of people who spent their days doing these things, experienced their interactions with their children and other family members. Judged the professions to be worthless as a way of passing time because the dysfunctional home lives of so many served as a testimony no relationship existed between earning an affluent lifestyle and anything admirable in personal behavior outside work environments.
But underlying the entire conversation was the assumption some profession, some job, some means of earning a living, could provide value to their lives in ways they’d be able to recognize afterward. The unspoken determination that when they reached, say, the age of that old cowboy-looking guy over there reading a book, they’d be able to look backward with confidence and satisfaction their lives had been worth the effort of living.
A few years from now they won’t be thinking of those things anymore, most likely. They’ll become involved in trying to scratch out a living, satisfy a mate’s desire for a new car, trips to Europe, big house. Keep kids in new clothing and whatever else people buy for their kids these days. There’ll be no place left, no niche of yearning they’ll be able to allow. The value of the lives they’re living will be manifested in the cars they drive. The homes they sleep and entertain themselves inside.
By the time they arrive at the age of that old cowboy-looking guy over there they’ll be so far removed from concepts of life being worth living the default position will be a habit of thinking assigning it intrinsic value. Worth prolonging at any cost, no matter how it’s been spent, how it’s currently being spent.
They’ll mercifully be spared asking themselves whether they’ve wasted their lives doing things that didn’t need doing, might well have left the world a better place if they hadn’t been done.
What’s important in life is official
Sign-painters declare, and initial, “Portfolio sums When we die, keep the bums From the ponderous and superficial.”
Good morning, readers. I wrote this a while back and planned to work on it a lot more at the time. Never quite got around to it.
I posted a while back about a man I used to know named Phil My Original Veteran’s Day Post . Good fellow, old Marine Corps shot up vet with a chest full of decorations. We used to do a lot of drinking, hunting and running around together during the ’70s and 80s.
Phil got himself hitched to a woman named Susan. Good woman, but perhaps the meanest female human I’ve ever encountered. A husband doing anything to violate her perception of justice was to be avoided on pain of the painfully unexpected. Which didn’t keep old Phil from sneaking around occasionally, doing something that would have violated her perception of justice.
Women liked Phil a lot and being one of the highliest decorated Marines ever to come out of the Vietnam War didn’t mean Phil had the will power to always refuse. Nevertheless, Phil and Susan had a happy marriage, more-or-less. They vented their rages and frustrations, of which both had in plenty, having ping-pong ball gun battles, stalking one another around the house, sometimes lasting hours.
Every July 4th Phil and Susan would have a traditional Sex and Violence Marathon Party lasting a couple of days, or until everyone went home. A television would play The Sands of Iwo Jima non-stop at one end of the room and another would play porn flicks non-stop at the other end.
Lots of interesting stuff in the IWO JIMA flick. We’d sit there with the squeeze box backing up that film, looking at a particular scene, looking at it again, again again again, studying the camera footage (US gov footage from the Iwo battle) until we quit, but tended to go back and do the same thing again … two or three scenes in there are serious head-scratchers.
One scene, a bunch of guys are on a 3/4 ton truck, a wounded one on the front bumper, when they hear a big round coming in. They all hop off that truck, grab the wounded guy and rush for a foxhole… but midway between the truck and the hole, they realize there’s no time. They drop the wounded guy out in the open. They all dive headfirst into holes just as the round hits and the camera goes flying along with legs and maybe an arm or two.
Amazing footage.
Anyway, I’ve digressed. I wanted to tell you how Phil and Susan, thanks to his philandering, ended up in a long duration menage-a-troix situation. They all thought of it as a marriage for a couple of years.
The third of the three was a woman who looked almost exactly like the woman wossname son of Kirk Douglas played opposite in a movie named Romancing the Stone. Beautiful woman, but a rattlesnake extraordinaire who eventually gave both Phil and Susan a lot of grief. But during the early-to-mid stages I think both Phil, and Susan believed it would last the duration of their lives, that marriage-like threesome.
But I’ve wandered so far what with ping-pong ball gun fights and Sex and Violence parties I suppose I’d better save the menage-a-troix story for another time.
Except to say, I’ve seen a lot of commentary from patriot-look-alikes lately expressing strong feelings about how many wives a man ought to be able to have.
At the time, and today again as I think about it, I figured old Phil had done more to earn the right to have as many wives as he wanted to than the folks who object have done earning the right to have only one.
In 1992, when my 25 year marriage dissolved and I moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, one of the projects I was determined to pursue was an attempt to understand the meaning of life, or something in the neighborhood. I did a lot of thinking and planning about how to approach the matter in a way I considered the most likely possibility for success.
Part of the project involved learning everything I could about religions and metaphysics, and I began with an intense study of Christianity, early Christian history, pre-Nicean Christian documents, practices and beliefs at a time before anything qualified as Canon. For a couple of years I submerged myself in the subject.
During the same time period I got up 3:30 am and spent a couple of hours watching Christian television to get a better understanding of what was going on with Christianity today. I found I got a lot of enjoyment doing it, and I discovered one I liked particularly well and thought of almost as an old friend.
Garner Ted Armstrong. I spent a year or so in my early 20s working for Rainbow Baking Company in Houston loading bread trucks off a conveyor belt 12 hours a day, and I filled some of the solitude listening to Garner Ted over a portable radio and earpiece. I considered him one of the best rhetoricians of the 20th Century already when I found him preaching on television.
But what I hadn’t realized was his level of scholarship and open mindedness about Christian history. The fact I was submerged in it at the time led me to write a letter to him asking his take on some issues I’d found ambiguous.
From that time until his death several years later, Garner Ted Armstrong and I indulged in exchanges of 20 page letters discussing the nuances of Christian history, Christian texts, the implications of the Nag Hammadi codices, news coming out of the Dead Sea Scrolls, where Christianity had been and possibly where it was going.
A truly strange time of my life, though just one of those side-trails that had little to do with my coincident search and research involving a lost gold mine, nor with understanding the meaning of life. The former, I never found, and the latter, when I found it, didn’t need elaboration.
I still miss old Garner Ted Armstrong and those long letters.
If you’re interested in giving things you were otherwise going to toss to someone who can use them, or if you’re interested in finding something you’d have otherwise bought as one more Chinese imported product to help destroy our economy and improve theirs, you might have a look at what sort of Freecycle group activity is going on where you are.
For example, someone just gave away 28 chickens on Kerrville Freecycle and the traffic’s picking up with people giving away appliances, exercize equipment, all manner of things still working but now redundant because of Christmas gifting.
There are 10609 Freecycle groups on Yahoo, so there’s probably one in your area.
Freecycle instructional Video Click here to enlarge. Changing the world one gift at a … . If you are outside of Portland, please join and support your local Freecycle group. All Freecycle groups, worldwide, can be found at Freecycle.org …
Sheffield City Freecycle is open to all who want to recycle … link below: This group is part of The Freecycle Network, an international and UK charity …
Welcome to Bristol Freecycle (UK) Please note – a message will be … this in order to join the group The worldwide Freecycle Network is made up of individual …
Welcome to Hackney Freecycle. You are welcome to join, if like us … in the correct format. Click the link:- Hackney_Freecycle MessageMaker Need a van? Use the Common Resource …
The Freecycle Network (R) is open to all who want to … constraint: everything posted must be free. The Freecycle Network is a nonprofit organization and a …
…Freecycle Network (AFN), the first Freecycle group in Texas. WINNER 2005 Keep Austin Beautiful … please join the Austin Freecycle Café group. Copyright …
… or improvement ideas about the Humble – Kingwood Freecycle Group! Freecycle Group Information Group Name: Humble – Kingwood Location: US – Texas More info: Freecycle.org
Welcome To Lake Jackson Freecycle (TM) OUR PURPOSE: The goal of Freecycle(TM … READ IT.) We encourage you to go to www.freecycle.org to read the history of freecycle and …
Not to suggest you shouldn’t run down to WalMart to buy a new toaster from Asia, or put that old XP computer out by the garbage barrel to go to the landfill. Just depends on what sort of person you are, I suppose. And what sort of person you want to be.
I’ve been mulling over this puzzle on David’s blog. Thought perhaps that microscopic few of you readers who are here because of discussions elsewhere about simultaneity and the ‘randomness’ concept might enjoy it too:
Multiple Choice: If you choose an answer to this question at random, what is the chance you will be correct? A) 25% B) 50% C) 60% D) 25%
This is a fun question whose paradoxical, self-referential nature quickly reveals itself – A) seems to be fine until one realizes the D) option is also 25%.
A quick search reveals hundreds of discussion contributions of this problem, for example here and here and from a year ago. People often appear very confident that their answer is the only possible solution.
I am no logician and so unqualified to place this within the grand structures of mathematical paradoxes. I have not waded through all the discussions and so there may be something I have missed, but in among all the arguments there seem to be four conclusions that could be considered as ‘correct’. These are my personal comments:
1) There can be no solution, since the ambiguity of ‘correct’ makes the question ill-posed.
It’s true the question is ambiguous, but this still seems a bit of a cop-out.
2) There is no solution.
This seems to take this interpretation of the question.
Which answer (or set of answers) of “p%”, is such that the statement ‘the probability of picking such an answer is p%’ is true?
Then this appears to be a well-posed question, but there is no solution.
3) 0%.
Consider a different interpretation of the question.
Is there a p%, such that the statement ‘the probability of picking an answer “p%” is p%’ is true?
Then this appears a well-posed question and has the solution p = 0, even though this is not one of the answers. Of course if answer C) were changed to “0%” (as it is in this 2007 version of the question ), then this would also have no solution.
4) We can produce any answer we want by changing the probability distribution for the choice.
Why should ‘random’ mean an equally likely chance of picking the 4 answers? If we, say, assume the probabilities of choosing (A) (B) (C) (D) to be (10%, 20%, 60%, 10%) then the answer to either formulation (2) and (3) is now “60%”. But if we make the distribution (12.5%, 15%, 60%, 12.5%) then we seem to back to square one again, since there is now both a 25% chance of picking “25%”, and a 60% chance of picking “60%”.
I like conclusion 3) best, ie 0%.
Maybe the main lesson is: ambiguity and paradox are often the basis for a good joke.
It won’t lead you where you’re trying to go, but it might offer a hint as to whether you can get there from here.
But you might also want to have a look at BRAIN TIME [6.24.09]
By David M. Eagleman http://tinyurl.com/m6zkx4. Likely that won’t help, either, but it’s bound to introduce some new doubts if you needed any.
74 years old, a resident of Leavenworth, KS, in an apartment located on the VA campus. Partnered with a black shorthaired cat named Mister Midnight. (1943-2020)
Since April, 2020, this blog is maintained by Jeanne Kasten (See "About" page for further information).
https://sofarfromheaven.com/2020/04/21/au-revoir-old-jules-jack-purcell/
I’m sharing it with you because there’s almost no likelihood you’ll believe it. This lunatic asylum I call my life has so many unexpected twists and turns I won’t even try to guess where it’s going. I’d suggest you try to find some laughs here. You won’t find wisdom. Good luck.
So Far From Heaven 
