Archive Listing
February 17, 2008 - February 10, 2008
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
You Greenies want to
cut CO2?
We're calling your bluff. Today.
> 
Us rednecks could handle it. How 'bout you, cuz?
We're calling your bluff. Today.
> Us rednecks could handle it. How 'bout you, cuz?
FOLLOW-THROUGH. Is anyone else tired of celebrities who insist the rest of us should live like cavemen while they continue to sport around the world in Gulfstream jets and hundred-foot yachts? Yesterday's proposal by Sheryl Crow that we common folk should confine ourselves to a single square of toilet paper was obviously ridiculous. Yet it proves why Global Warming is such a perfect cause for idiot liberals. They love it to death because they're convinced nothing can really be done about it, which means that pious speeches and token gestures are all that's required to demonstrate absolue moral superiority over the proles.
The Kyoto Treaty they claim to want wouldn't do a damned thing to undo the catastrophe they predict for Global Warming -- except (further) beggar the Third World and plunge the civilized world into permanent economic depression. It's pretty safe to say no one is going to permit that eventuality to happen, which enables the speechifying enviro-nazis to go on shaking their heads and looking down on all the dimwits who don't buy their vision of paradise. Wouldn't it be great if there were something that really could be done, something that would force the talkers to put up or shut up?
Yeah, but there really isn't anything to be done. If the earth is warming, there's no practical way to slash CO2 emissions to any significant degree. The talkers have total license to keep on talking and trying to make the rest of us feel small. Sheryl Crow is free to pretend that a goddess like herself doesn't need more than a single square of paper to police her butt, while us lowlier apelike humans need a handful. Point made. Perfect celebrity posturing.
Or maybe not. What if there really was something that could be done to slash CO2 emissions? Something more substantive than walking around smelling like feces. Something us Great Unwashed are better equipped to do than pansy liberals. How would that go down among the self-congratulating illuminati?
The good news: there is such a thing.
It's generally the oddest items of trivia that open up whole new boulevards of thought. I followed an InstaPundit link one day last week about some current political tiff and accidentally scrolled past the referenced item to the following intriguing sentence:
I don't like motorcycles, I don't like
outfits that proudly use the word "confederate," and I'm not sure you
are allowed to use the word "bitchin'" anymore--but this is a bitchin'-looking motorcycle. ...
The source is Mickey Kaus, who's a thoughtful and reasonable commentator, delicately poised in the middle of the road for the purpose of taking down the absurdities of both the extreme left and the extreme right. The quoted sentence is a perfect microcosm of his overall demeanor. Esthetically, he really is a liberal. He enjoys debating his lefty professor pal Robert Wright because Robert is so damned smart and, well, superior to the oafs of the right. Kaus probably goes to foreign film festivals for fun, and though he disapproves of French political treacheries, he would most likely feel more at home in Paris than in Biloxi, Mississippi. I don't know any of this for a fact, and so I'm being hideously unfair, but if I had to pick the car he drives, I'd guess a Volvo.
Why am I being so unfair? That opening statement: "I don't like motorcycles." Wow. Not, "I'm afraid to ride a motorcycle," or "I think motorcycles are unsafe at any speed," or "I find motorcycles on the highway to be loud, unsettling, and annoying." No. We have a pure value judgment here, which is actually equated with his disapproval of any firms that would use the name "confederate." Which means that it's an ideological thing, a class thing, an us vs. them thing. He probably feels the same way about tattoos.
But there's also good stuff in Mickey Kaus. He has that old-timey liberal open-mindedness which allows him to appreciate an attractive, if alien, alternative esthetic. If he did like motorcycles, he would like the one shown at the beginning of this entry. It's called the Wraith, and it's manufactured by the Confederate Motor Company. If he'd looked at the CMC site, he'd have discovered that the company's marketing makes no use whatever of the Confederate flag. Even their tee-shirts are beautifully understated.
Not their bikes, though:
The Wraith
It's a pretty raw thing, the Wraith. One seat. 410 lbs. 125 hp. 4.1 gallon fuel tank. No storage. Runs like a scalded cat. The company name makes a certain kind of sense. One can't help being reminded of the wild-ass CSA technology that launched the first-ever submarine used in combat. Doomed, of course, like all Confederate plots, stratagems, and acts of derring-do. Nathan Bedford Forrest would have ordered Wraiths for all his crazed cavalry troopers. And he'd still have lost in the end.
BUT the thing about the Wraith, the thing that struck me, is this. As radical as it is, as impractical, as testosterone-overdosed as it unquestionably is, I'd be willing to bet this bike still gets better fuel economy than the next generation micro-car Green fanatics have been salivating over since they first saw it in "The Da Vinci Code."
Yeah, I know. You libs and enviro-freaks probably think it's darling. On the other hand, the average redneck looks at it and flashes on an extremely unwelcome picture of John Bobbitt's truncated sex life. That's not an overreaction. That is what you liberals have in mind for all of us, isn't it? Isn't castration part of your utopian dream? Of the phallic component in cars? Of the white male patriarchy? Of the rampant predation of capitalism? Of the male authority embodied in the Judeo-Christian evangelizing tradition? Of course it is. There's really no other explanation for the contradiction in terms your whole perspective on automobiles entails.
On the one hand, you bleat continuously about the need for absolute safety, regardless of driver competence. You pore over crash test data. (Volvos good. Yugos bad. Uuuuhhh.) You pass laws mandating airbags to protect those of you who panic like teenage girls and abandon all attempts to control the vehicle when an accident appears unavoidable. Then you pass more laws mandating child seats that -- to protect them from TA DAH! your mandated airbags -- turn parents into chauffeurs for the back-seat emperors and empresses whose accessories have grown so numerous and bulky as to require "minivans" to convey them from place to place in royal comfort.
On the other hand, you wax so paranoid about "the planet" that your most fervent desire is to require the most advanced civilization in history to abandon all the fruits of technology -- to turn out the lights that freed people to read at night, to give up the warmth in winter and cool in summer that freed people from their 40,000-year slavery to the seasons, to reduce their individual lives to efficient units of energy usage in the name of saving a planet whose natural forces dwarf, in every conceivable respect, the mightiest accomplishments of the species it is your pet project to hate.
You're such weenies you demand assurance that your stupidest driving maneuver can't possibly kill you. And you're such loons that you simultaneously insist on universal submission to tin-can vehicle designs which will make you feel more divine by fantasizing the vulnerability of a planet that will keep right on going whether you live, die, or transmogrify into hermaphrodite lumps.
It's time to call your bluff. There's an easy way to cut vehicular CO2 emissions in half almost immediately. Outlaw cars. Starting right now.
From now on, we use motorcycles. Of the two- and three-wheeled variety. Guess what? The common folk you despise so much are far better equipped to deal with this transition than all you environmentally correct folk who never saw a physical risk you wouldn't go miles out of your way to avoid.
And no scoffing. It's completely do-able. The benefits to our "carbon footprints" will be huge. We won't be able to carry as much stuff around. There will, therefore, be less stuff. The inept and inattentive will be more likely to get killed. We may wind up with fewer professors, social workers, attorneys, witless adolescents, and braindead bureaucrats. That aids evolution. But without all the giant vehicles currently terrorizing our roadways and glutting our interstates, averagely competent people will still be able to get more-or-less safely from place to place, and we won't have to waste petroleum and other pollutant resources in needless expansion of our asphalt traffic arteries. There will be more incentive for people to work from home rather than doze through long commutes. Old people who shouldn't be on the roadway won't be. Operating a motor vehicle will become, once again, a skill rather than the automatic right of superannuated children who don't know the difference between a clutch and a CD player. Life will become exciting again. AND CO2 EMISSIONS WILL DECLINE BY HALF, OR MORE THAN HALF, IN THE VERY FIRST YEAR. Just how badly do you want to save this fragile little planet that's been so abused by the machinations of mankind? Enough to show a little balls? That's right. This is a test.
We've even prepared a substitution table that will show you exactly what you'll be riding given what you're driving now.
If -- like most politicians and celebrities -- you blast from airport to hotel in a black Cadillac Escondido (Escalero? Escamillo? Escompoopoo?) or a fleet of them, here's your new ride:
Harley dresser.
Of course, I know some of you are laughing. You're exempt. Because you have kids. With a ton of Fisher-Price crap to haul around for the little bastards. Well, throw away the Fisher-Price crap. Here's your new minivan:
If you have more than two kids, you shouldn't. Too many carbon footprints. Get Nancy to legalize retro-active environmentally friendly abortion (RAEFA). It's for the planet, remember. Which will die completely to death unless we save it.
But I forgot. Some of you are celebrities. Who need to cover vast distances in order to sing about how everybody else must vut back on toilet paper, electricity, and heat. You need stretch limos....
You need to haul your expensive sound equipment to the stadium...
Back when the warming started. She used too many squares. Bitch.
All in all, it's a simple choice. Live to ride, people. Ride to live,
libs. Are
you listening, Sheryl?
The Wraith
It's a pretty raw thing, the Wraith. One seat. 410 lbs. 125 hp. 4.1 gallon fuel tank. No storage. Runs like a scalded cat. The company name makes a certain kind of sense. One can't help being reminded of the wild-ass CSA technology that launched the first-ever submarine used in combat. Doomed, of course, like all Confederate plots, stratagems, and acts of derring-do. Nathan Bedford Forrest would have ordered Wraiths for all his crazed cavalry troopers. And he'd still have lost in the end.
BUT the thing about the Wraith, the thing that struck me, is this. As radical as it is, as impractical, as testosterone-overdosed as it unquestionably is, I'd be willing to bet this bike still gets better fuel economy than the next generation micro-car Green fanatics have been salivating over since they first saw it in "The Da Vinci Code."
The
Zap! Smart Car. 40 mpg.
Yeah, I know. You libs and enviro-freaks probably think it's darling. On the other hand, the average redneck looks at it and flashes on an extremely unwelcome picture of John Bobbitt's truncated sex life. That's not an overreaction. That is what you liberals have in mind for all of us, isn't it? Isn't castration part of your utopian dream? Of the phallic component in cars? Of the white male patriarchy? Of the rampant predation of capitalism? Of the male authority embodied in the Judeo-Christian evangelizing tradition? Of course it is. There's really no other explanation for the contradiction in terms your whole perspective on automobiles entails.
On the one hand, you bleat continuously about the need for absolute safety, regardless of driver competence. You pore over crash test data. (Volvos good. Yugos bad. Uuuuhhh.) You pass laws mandating airbags to protect those of you who panic like teenage girls and abandon all attempts to control the vehicle when an accident appears unavoidable. Then you pass more laws mandating child seats that -- to protect them from TA DAH! your mandated airbags -- turn parents into chauffeurs for the back-seat emperors and empresses whose accessories have grown so numerous and bulky as to require "minivans" to convey them from place to place in royal comfort.
On the other hand, you wax so paranoid about "the planet" that your most fervent desire is to require the most advanced civilization in history to abandon all the fruits of technology -- to turn out the lights that freed people to read at night, to give up the warmth in winter and cool in summer that freed people from their 40,000-year slavery to the seasons, to reduce their individual lives to efficient units of energy usage in the name of saving a planet whose natural forces dwarf, in every conceivable respect, the mightiest accomplishments of the species it is your pet project to hate.
You're such weenies you demand assurance that your stupidest driving maneuver can't possibly kill you. And you're such loons that you simultaneously insist on universal submission to tin-can vehicle designs which will make you feel more divine by fantasizing the vulnerability of a planet that will keep right on going whether you live, die, or transmogrify into hermaphrodite lumps.
It's time to call your bluff. There's an easy way to cut vehicular CO2 emissions in half almost immediately. Outlaw cars. Starting right now.
From now on, we use motorcycles. Of the two- and three-wheeled variety. Guess what? The common folk you despise so much are far better equipped to deal with this transition than all you environmentally correct folk who never saw a physical risk you wouldn't go miles out of your way to avoid.
And no scoffing. It's completely do-able. The benefits to our "carbon footprints" will be huge. We won't be able to carry as much stuff around. There will, therefore, be less stuff. The inept and inattentive will be more likely to get killed. We may wind up with fewer professors, social workers, attorneys, witless adolescents, and braindead bureaucrats. That aids evolution. But without all the giant vehicles currently terrorizing our roadways and glutting our interstates, averagely competent people will still be able to get more-or-less safely from place to place, and we won't have to waste petroleum and other pollutant resources in needless expansion of our asphalt traffic arteries. There will be more incentive for people to work from home rather than doze through long commutes. Old people who shouldn't be on the roadway won't be. Operating a motor vehicle will become, once again, a skill rather than the automatic right of superannuated children who don't know the difference between a clutch and a CD player. Life will become exciting again. AND CO2 EMISSIONS WILL DECLINE BY HALF, OR MORE THAN HALF, IN THE VERY FIRST YEAR. Just how badly do you want to save this fragile little planet that's been so abused by the machinations of mankind? Enough to show a little balls? That's right. This is a test.
We've even prepared a substitution table that will show you exactly what you'll be riding given what you're driving now.
If -- like most politicians and celebrities -- you blast from airport to hotel in a black Cadillac Escondido (Escalero? Escamillo? Escompoopoo?) or a fleet of them, here's your new ride:
Harley dresser.
Please remember to wear a helmet (it's
like gun control, a reassuring fiction), and don't be looking for an
automatic transmission.
If you're an academic weenie who just loves the safety record of the Swedes and requires a vehicle that looks like a shoebox (Volvo) or the shoe that comes in it (Saab), here's your new, much narrower carbon footprint:
Husqvarna, the only Swedish motorcycle.
If you're an academic weenie who just loves the safety record of the Swedes and requires a vehicle that looks like a shoebox (Volvo) or the shoe that comes in it (Saab), here's your new, much narrower carbon footprint:
Husqvarna, the only Swedish motorcycle.
But, hey, you were just about to upgrade
from that Volvo POS to a true liberal vehicle, like maybe a BMW. Here's
your contribution to Global Warming mitigation:
BMW 1200
Are you a Marxist little liberal who's never been into 'things,' and are quite happy putting around in your Prius or retro VW Bug? Sorry. You're not immune. Even you have to cut your CO2 emissions in half. To save the plant. You know. Here's your new ride:
Honda Eterno. 80 mpg.
BMW 1200
I'm sorry. Does it look dangerous? No
place for your cellphone and your f***ing Ipod? Well, you're doing it
for the planet, a**hole. Get used to it.
Maybe you're one of those liberals who have solar panels on your 12,000 sq ft house and buy carbon credits to offset your 6 mpg Ferrari. Guess what? Here's your new sports vehicle:
Ducati. 'Il Monstro.'
Maybe you're one of those liberals who have solar panels on your 12,000 sq ft house and buy carbon credits to offset your 6 mpg Ferrari. Guess what? Here's your new sports vehicle:
Ducati. 'Il Monstro.'
Are you a Marxist little liberal who's never been into 'things,' and are quite happy putting around in your Prius or retro VW Bug? Sorry. You're not immune. Even you have to cut your CO2 emissions in half. To save the plant. You know. Here's your new ride:
Honda Eterno. 80 mpg.
Of course, I know some of you are laughing. You're exempt. Because you have kids. With a ton of Fisher-Price crap to haul around for the little bastards. Well, throw away the Fisher-Price crap. Here's your new minivan:
If you have more than two kids, you shouldn't. Too many carbon footprints. Get Nancy to legalize retro-active environmentally friendly abortion (RAEFA). It's for the planet, remember. Which will die completely to death unless we save it.
But I forgot. Some of you are celebrities. Who need to cover vast distances in order to sing about how everybody else must vut back on toilet paper, electricity, and heat. You need stretch limos....
You need to haul your expensive sound equipment to the stadium...
And you need -- what was it?...
Three tractor trailers.
Four buses:
And six cars.
Truth is, we're ready, Sheryl. Millions of us who already know how to ride these things. Millions of us who are dying to watch you wipe your pampered ass on the pavement.
Are you ready?
The breadbasket of America is waiting.
Three tractor trailers.
Four buses:
And six cars.
Truth is, we're ready, Sheryl. Millions of us who already know how to ride these things. Millions of us who are dying to watch you wipe your pampered ass on the pavement.
Are you ready?
The breadbasket of America is waiting.
Back when the warming started. She used too many squares. Bitch.
posted at
3:16 pm
by
LocoPunk
Monday, April 23, 2007
Sheryl has that 'pesky'
feeling...
WE CAN HELP. Yeah, it's a bad feeling, knowing that Global Warming is going to drown New York and San Francisco and all the best concert venues. The consequences are dire. At the very least it would mean rewriting the list of terms, conditions, and perks the band would have to extort expect from promoters and producers. Think how much more complicated this clause would get:
God, you've have to specify flying boats, barges, launches, and a cabin cruiser, at a minimum. What's a girl to do?
That's why we understand her natural inclination to make suggestions. But we can't help observing that she's thinking a bit small. No matter how you perforate slice it, her toilet paper suggestion isn't going to save the concert-going public from inundation by the melting of the polar icecaps. It wouldn't even shift the balance if she issued the Luddite decree that ALL the mallrats of the western hemisphere revert to the fresh corncob solution of the 19th century (strangely practical when you figure in the fact that the Third World will no longer have access to corn for food when it's all being used for ethanol), or that women abandon disposable paper products for the re-usable cotton towels that marked the high point of Roman female hygiene.
But it was the best she could do. The amount of brainpower required to write three-chord rock and rhyming iambic lyrics is not the same as that required for saving the embattled earth from the sickening depredations of post-Neanderthal primates.
Rescue is on the way. We know what to do. And if these additional shots of Sheryl are any indication, she just might jump onto our admittedly narrow bandwagon. Tomorrow.
She might turn out to be one of the survivors. Unless... well, tune in tomorrow.
posted at
6:33 pm
by
LocoPunk
Friday, April 20, 2007
Old Thunder:
Shuteye Town
The back room at Moon Books in the Shuteye Mall.
The back room at Moon Books in the Shuteye Mall.
PREDICTIONS.
Back in the last century, InstaPunk contributor R.F. Laird wrote the
first truly multimedia work of fiction. Shuteye Town 1999 was a graphical
journey through an underground world built around a massive mall. The
work is much too large to summarize here -- 3,300+ graphic files,
350,000+ words of text -- but the reason we're remembering it today is
that one of its many themes was the catastrophe that's invisibly
overtaking our children. The influences on their development are
rendered in painful detail -- you can actually play the video game "Teacher Kill,"
for example, and you can surf the "UnderNet" until you go mad -- yet
the most troubling part of Shuteye Town is not its cartoon imagery, but
its prescience. It seems to know beforehand about the Virginia Tech
Massacre, and it even presumes to know why it happened. We can't
possibly show you all the ways this phenomenon is addressed in Shuteye Town 1999, but we can show
you a few. So that's what we're going to do.
The Shuteye Mall has a bookstore featuring representative titles and parodies of bestsellers ranging from literary fiction to romance novels to comic books. But there's also a back room containing the works that can no longer be published in our free society. Our tour guide is the very same Daniel Pangloss ("All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds") highlighted in the last InstaPunk entry. He's pleased by the absence of any books by "Angry Young Men."
The Shuteye Mall has a bookstore featuring representative titles and parodies of bestsellers ranging from literary fiction to romance novels to comic books. But there's also a back room containing the works that can no longer be published in our free society. Our tour guide is the very same Daniel Pangloss ("All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds") highlighted in the last InstaPunk entry. He's pleased by the absence of any books by "Angry Young Men."
We'll get to some of the other books
later, but first let's take a subway ride to Schoolz Station.
And here's our destination.
So sad.
And here's our destination.
Seems they've had an "unfortunate
incident" of their own.
So sad.
V-e-e-e-e-ry sad.
It kind of makes you wonder how the
college kids at Schoolz Station are reacting to the tragedy, doesn't
it? Well, they're coping. In their own way.
And if the girls on campus don't cooperate, there's always the option of hooking up in some online chatroom.
And if the girls on campus don't cooperate, there's always the option of hooking up in some online chatroom.
But where were we? Oh yes. Why. Time to
return to the back room at Moon Books. Here's something in the
Unacceptable Viewpoints section.
The
Functional Sociopath
The Thesis
The Thesis
Item. An 18-year-old girl in the company of adults sees a friend she has not spoken with for many weeks. As they talk, she is reminded of a funny thing concerning one of her friends. The friend announced to several of her peers that she was leaving for a weekend jaunt somewhere. Subsequently the friend is not heard from again, although she had been a frequent caller by telephone. Curious, a trio of her intimates visited her apartment about two weeks after the weekend jaunt, found the door ajar, and entered. There was no sign anyone had been inhabiting the apartment in the previous two weeks. Nothing was missing, but a few things were strangely broken. The trio left the apartment and went their separate ways. None made any further inquiries. By the time the funny thing was related as an anecdote, more than two months had elapsed since the friend had been heard from.
This is just one of dozens of such items I have collected in recent years. Not as spectacular as school shootings, they nevertheless have in common with them an odd emotional discordancy. We regard it as striking when a teenage boy responds to teasing by murdering a dozen of his schoolmates, but isnt it equally striking that friends seem unable to summon enough concern to investigate or sound the alarm when an intimate simply disappears?
I believe that such discordancies are both striking and widespread. It may be rare, thus far, for them to result in violence, but if my theory about what is happening turns out to be correct, we will see far more apparently inexplicable violence in the years to come.
What is my theory? I am convinced that what amounts to a system-wide collapse in all our child-rearing institutions has created a virulent new strain of personality disorderone I call the functional sociopath.
A sociopath is a person without conscience and without deep emotional connections to other human beings, individually and collectively. Science has long sought an organic basis for this kind of pathology, but it is also known that early environmental influences can play a major role in shaping the sociopathic personality.
I am persuaded that we have, as a culture, established an accidental combination of educational and child-rearing approaches which are practically ideal for generating sociopathic personalities in otherwise healthy children. To wit:
Self Esteem. The elevation of self esteem as a principal, if not the cardinal, goal of elementary education has dramatically reduced the opportunity for children to experience the necessary pain of perceiving that the world outside of themselves can and will make demands on them. This is a deprivation which stunts the prime mechanism by which children grow from infantile self absorption to fully individuated, ethical adult personalities. In other words, the permissiveness that accompanies the emphasis on self esteem aborts or sabotages the development of a real self of any kind.
Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit....
Sorry for the bit at the end. It's called greeked text, which printers (and some writers) use to represent the copy that's either not there or doesn't need to be because we all know what it will say. Now, here's a little something from the Invisible Problems section.
The End of Consciousness
The Thesis
In 1976, a Princeton psychologist named Julian Jaynes published a breathtakingly novel theory about human development. Titled The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Jayness book addressed a subjecthuman consciousnesswhich had been virtually ignored by the formal discipline of psychology for most of the twentieth century. His theory of consciousness was that the kind of self-awareness we take for granted as an intrinsic attribute of humanity is so dependent on the metaphoric properties of language that it could not have existed prior to 1500 BC.
To clear the way for his most daring assertions, Jaynes laid down a series of startling hypotheses about the nature of both mental experience and human history. He argued persuasively that consciousness is not necessary for most of the mental functions we use in daily life, including memory, learning, and judgment. Consciousness is necessary for decision-making, specifically for the imagining of possible consequences of alternative courses of action.
Largely because of the very specialized role he inferred for consciousness, Jaynes contended that individual self-awareness is not a prerequisite for the development of highly structured civilizations. As long as such civilizations operate in rigidly hierarchical organi-zations, individual decision-makingand therefore consciousnessis not necessary. Indeed, Jaynes suggested, it was only the historical collapse of multiple civilizations in the millennium before Christ which resulted in the kind of consciousness associated with modern man. To put Jayness point in the starkest possible terms, it was not conscious man which produced civilization, but civilization and its boom-and-bust cycles which produced conscious man.
The reasoning behind this apparent reversal of cause and effect is brilliant. Jaynes points out that consciousness is itself a highly sophisticated metaphor; that is, an internal, mental analogue of the external world. That analogue cannot be any more sophisticated than the mental vehicles which are used to represent real experience and real external phenomena. Since these consist primarily of words, the depth and complexity of consciousness is governed by the depth and complexity of the language that is employed to symbolize, character-ize, and differentiate experience. And language acquires abstract and subtle meanings only in response to the appearance in the external world of complications and complexities which require new words and connotations to express them.
Thus, there ismust bea phase in the development of every language when its words are merely names for thingsrock, leg, buffalo, baby, night, sun, rain. What concept of self could be made out of such basic naming conventions? If a speaker of the language has a name, that name stands for the person who looks like him or her, not for a set of accomplishments that cant be listed during a period of time that cant be differentiated from now by any mans tongue.
It is not necessary here to replicate the entirety of Jayness theory or the compelling evidence he cites in support of it. Those who are so disposed can find his work and explore it in depth. The bases which are critical to this work have been establishedthe hypothetical primacy of the relationship between language and consciousness, and between consciousness and the cycles of human civilization. Other relevant Jaynesian notions will be cited as appropriate in the context of this books thesis, which can now be articulated.
The End of Consciousness
Individual human consciousness has served an indispensable role in the creation of the highly advanced technological civilization we inhabit today. But all cycles repeat to some degree, and there is now a considerable body of evidence before us to suggest that individual self-awareness is no longer necessary to the culture as a whole and is, in fact, being ruthlessly exterminated by the behavior of the social system as a whole, which has itself achieved consciousness by the same process which produced it in Mankind.
The particular propositions entailed by this statement are as follows:
1. All organizations
and systems of which human beings are components do acquire and
maintain their own self-awarenessnot figuratively but literally, in
that they are in part biological entities, possessing physical brains
of enormous size in the form of those portions of individual human
brains which serve as repositories for their rules, their values, and
their preferred models for decision-making.
2. In the course of its development, individual human consciousness has been of continuing service to organizational and system consciousnesses because none of these has had the authority or power to function with complete autonomy. Always, individual human awarenesswith its highly flexible and adaptive decision-making skillswas needed to arbitrate conflicts between competing organizational and system consciousnesses.
3. Whatever human purpose has been served by individual human consciousness in the past is irrelevant to the question of whether it will be retained in an organization or system of sufficiently large scale and scope. Whatever values attach to organizational and systemic consciousness are oriented toward their own growth and survival, not to the well being of Mankind per se.
4. The scope and scale of the worldwide socio-economic system which is being continuously created by the proliferation of computer technology and global business-nation organizations has reached the point at which autonomy can be achieved without further human assistance. Indeed, it will proceed more efficiently without human interference. This does not imply the elimination of Mankind, but rather its conversion to an operator population of relatively affluent and healthy automatons.
5. The self-awareness of the worldwide system is already a fait accompli, developed beyond the power of any individual to fully comprehend or anticipate it. A corollary of this state of affairs is that if any human being can even detect the existence of this supra-consciousness, then its program of exterminating individual human consciousness must already be far advanced; that is, advanced beyond hope of our preventing or stopping it.
6. The evidence that individual human awareness is, in fact, being progressively exterminated has become so obvious and pervasive and incontrovertible that the universal human ignorance of the accelerating process is the surest proof of its existence.
2. In the course of its development, individual human consciousness has been of continuing service to organizational and system consciousnesses because none of these has had the authority or power to function with complete autonomy. Always, individual human awarenesswith its highly flexible and adaptive decision-making skillswas needed to arbitrate conflicts between competing organizational and system consciousnesses.
3. Whatever human purpose has been served by individual human consciousness in the past is irrelevant to the question of whether it will be retained in an organization or system of sufficiently large scale and scope. Whatever values attach to organizational and systemic consciousness are oriented toward their own growth and survival, not to the well being of Mankind per se.
4. The scope and scale of the worldwide socio-economic system which is being continuously created by the proliferation of computer technology and global business-nation organizations has reached the point at which autonomy can be achieved without further human assistance. Indeed, it will proceed more efficiently without human interference. This does not imply the elimination of Mankind, but rather its conversion to an operator population of relatively affluent and healthy automatons.
5. The self-awareness of the worldwide system is already a fait accompli, developed beyond the power of any individual to fully comprehend or anticipate it. A corollary of this state of affairs is that if any human being can even detect the existence of this supra-consciousness, then its program of exterminating individual human consciousness must already be far advanced; that is, advanced beyond hope of our preventing or stopping it.
6. The evidence that individual human awareness is, in fact, being progressively exterminated has become so obvious and pervasive and incontrovertible that the universal human ignorance of the accelerating process is the surest proof of its existence.
The remainder of this book is devoted to elaborating and elucidating these six propositions and the central thesis they support. Arma virumque cano...
Your patience is much appreciated. Here's your reward. It has nothing to do with school shootings, but it is a bestseller in Shuteye Town.
Thundrous
Passions
by Evelyn Ivy
by Evelyn Ivy
Chapter One
Arma virumque her long skirts and voluptuous yet maidenly form cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque the candles which her younger sister had lit hours before venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec the lush scent of the wisteria outside olim meminisse iuvabit.
Arma virumque still not married and contemplating the prospect of being a spinster cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto since her virtuous but dull suitor Thomas had fallen off his horse. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit sighed heavily, causing her firm young bosom to heave.
Arma virumque cano handsome stranger, dirty, disheveled, smelling strongly of maleness and travel. Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto ever since the war had begun. Dux femina facta troops and bandits and mysterious things in the night. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
Aunt Prunella looked on disapprovingly as arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque the stranger looked directly at her and a strange heat grew in her belly venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
How dare you speak to me in that way, sir? she protested.
Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille his arms went round her but she pushed him away and ran back to the house through the rose garden, her breath coming in quick short gasps. terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta and nothing happening for quite a while. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
Arma virumque cano and nothing continues to happen for a while Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et some cooking and sewing haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
Arma virumque more candle lighting cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris difficulty sleeping iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec rumors of historical events and name dropping in some nearby town olim meminisse iuvabit.
Wake up! It was his voice and she came bolt awake, still half in a dream she realized had involved him. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
Arma his arms around her but she pushed him away and virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa more nothing going on but some name dropping and more historical events ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec a famous person shows up and thinks shes smart and fascinating for a woman olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae more trouble sleeping qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris disturbing rumors about the handsome stranger iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
Arma virumque candles and sewing and cooking and bosom heavings, trouble sleeping, name dropping, horse hooves et cetera Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
Arma around her and this time she did not, could not have resisted because it was page sixty, and she knew it was impossible to hold out past page sixty. She wanted him, had wanted him ever since the moment she first laid eyes on his handsome face and the virile shape of his lean, male body inside those leathern breeches.
Oh my darling dear, he breathed, Ive wanted you ever since I first saw your beautiful face and the womanly heaving shape of your, er, maidenly form in that dress thats cut down to here, if you know what I mean.
And then they didnt speak. There was only the questing of their hands, their lips, their hundreds of other nonsexual body parts, and finally their things that stiffened or peaked or protuberated or moistened, and they were joined together, as man to woman, and they rose and fell together, as deeply and naturally as the ocean or as two dogs in the street, except that the smell of tallow candles and leathern breeches made it somehow sweeter, more refined, less dirty and disgusting than it is in real life, and they sighed the words of love in the proper dialect in each others ear, and kept on joining and rejoining and rejoining some more until dawn, when both of them were exhausted with love, but still not speaking because of the plot complication.
Virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
And from there on, it gets really hot. Have a nice day.
