"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thines own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls - it tolls for thee."
So wrote John Donne. I've thought of it every day for more than forty-five years, but you don't need to know why. Yesterday, though, Jamie's mom and dad buried him. He was my nephew, and although I hadn't seen him since 1985 - that on account of my fight with the conspiracy of criminals we call "government," I liked him. I like him a lot. But, for some reason, his death hit me really, really hard. First, there's the fact that the United States is killing lots and lots of young men like Jamie, and since Jamie wasn't a soldier, his country will care even less - were that possible - about his death. But the death of every young man like my nephew diminishes me. I care. Then, there's the other reason this one death hurt so. Because the United States is what it is, I couldn't so much as go to his funeral. My family won't understand; in fact, they'll hate me for it.
It's still another thing I owe you for, "America."
The picture is for Jamie; rest in peace, buddy - notyour fault.
A sociologist . . .
Wait a minute – is it even legal to be a sociologist, anymore? “Sociology,” Webster says, is, “the study of the origin, the history, and the structure of human society and its institutions.” That’s against the law, isn’t it? Politically incorrect, at least? I mean, sociologists study societies, cultures, races, and the like. In a nation where it is against the law to notice or speak – “hate speech,” and all that? - of the differences, wouldn’t everything a sociologist does be illegal? Maybe that’s why we haven’t heard from Sociology in such a long time.
But that brings me right back to the point I had thought to make here. Anybody who disagrees, or says anything offending anyone’s pet “ism,” race, color, creed, religion, ideology, or whatever – any damned thing today, is subjected immediately to a torrent of abusive language and whatever else the “victim” can come up with. Maybe THAT is why we hear so little from sociologists today,
And with a famous sage like Tom Cruise down on psychology, it looks like we’ve seen the last of the behavioral sciences. What’s left?
Anyway, a sociologist wouldn’t have far to look, were he to desire indications for the state of things in the U.S., or to predict where it’s going. Consider television. Never amounting to much as an educational tool – there are many who would call it a negative influence in that regard - it has become all but useless for either entertainment or information purposes. Interrupted every two or three minutes by four or five minutes of advertising, it has become nothing more than a source of irritation and frustration for viewers. The wonder is that anyone watches, but that goes to my point here, also.
You’d have to be an idiot to put up with what obviously tens of millions of “Americans” do.
Who wants to try to watch a movie when it’s broken up into fifty segments, each separated by five full minutes of annoying twaddle? Even at a time like this, wanting to know how many of our young people have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, I watch the news only while flipping back and forth to avoid all the commercials.
Watching such a thing, a behaviorist might well draw the conclusion, totally independent of other data, that the nation where it is occurring is totally enslaved to commerce, economics, and the almighty dollar. I use that last term with trepidation, aware that extremely few – almost none – know what a dollar is.
Then, too, the behaviorist might do as I have done of late – join the many “blog” sites and opinion forums on the Internet. That, I’ll tell you, is REALLY enlightening. You see, any disagreement with any point of view on any subject results in furious, vicious, vituperative, diatribe. Along with a lexicon of attempts at verbal insult, those which have to do with questioning or otherwise disparaging the perceived enemy’s intelligence are invariably included. If you disagree with an “American” (it remains necessary to remind us that we are one of thirty-four nations in the Americas), it is because you are stupid.
That, mind you, in a nation now famed by study after study – among them Jay Leno’s “Jaywalking segment - for its stultified stupidity.
Having endured long enough to receive one hundred such “opinions,” I can report having received not one such that was supported by documentation or reasoned conclusion. Never has any one of these self-assessed mental giants shown mathematical skills equal to even what was for children with elementary school education fifty years ago common. Logically fallacious reasoning, moreover, is the absolute hallmark of the individuals in question, with the ad hominem fallacy easily the archetype. This is Jay Leno’s “Jaywalking” on a national scale.
Some, were they not indicative of our plight and prophetic of our nation’s future (I have grandkids here, you know), are downright comical. One “American” sage responded to my reference to the Little Boy and the King’s Magic Clothes, by saying that he hadn’t “seen it,” but seeing as how it interested me, it surely wouldn’t interest anyone with a brain (like him). Another modern-day Eratosthenes – it wasn’t Pascale, that’s sure - raged that anyone who knew any mathematics at all knew better than my observation that his verbatim use of a 570 word, twelve sentence paragraph was plagiarism, and that the fact was provable mathematically.
My assertion concerning plagiarism, incidentally, had to do with his essay “proving” that the World Trade Center had been brought down by controlled demolition, and after a particularly nasty barrage of invective from my would-be tormentor’s supporters. More, I noted a teacher’s program designed to do just that, catch plagiarists, had revealed that between 81 percent and 83 percent (three trials were done on the same essay) of his essay was plagiarized.
I pause again here parenthetically to relate that I then pointed out as follows: “The odds against the same paragraph - say a Shakespeare Sonnet my English teacher wife is reading today - 12 lines, 570 letters, is approximately (a number far too big for my pocket calculator) 5 X 10 to 800th power to one. That's 5, followed by 800 zeroes.
“Obviously, you know next to nothing about math and probability . . .” he fired back furiously.
“Do the math,” another Leibnitz snarled in disingenuous agreement, “. . . statistically, (italics mine) anything anybody writes or says about 9/11 will have been said or written.”
Well, now – how about THAT?
The second essayist delivered a lesson so comical for its convolute, contradictory, and incoherent irrelevance that I can’t resist quoting; just to show how exemplary of the society it is. Speaking of the paragraph in question, he says:
“Our options after the first word (damned if I know what that has to do with any part of the subject, but that’s what he said) are now limited. There are 500,000 standard words in the English language, 1,000,000 if we allow scientific. (caution, those are rough limits, of those 500,000 words Basic English as taught overseas has a vocabulary (sic – we’ll call it a “typo”) of something like 700 words [sic, again – this guy isn’t exactly Ph.D. level with English composition, either]) However, "common" English usage is much less than 500,000 words, so in common use there are probably 100,000 words. How many words do you know? Here's some statistics for you.
“‘At the other end of the scale, estimates of the number of words that an average person uses range from a few thousand (the number a person might actively use in a week) to many tens of thousands (the number an educated person might understand) or more. College-size dictionaries typically include almost 200,000 words...’ Taken from http://www.slate.com/id/2139611/
“‘Second word: words than commonly go with ‘There: ‘are, is, will, was, were", so we now have 5 choose 1. We choose ‘are’ (sic – he punctuates only now and then)
“’Third word is unlimited (sort of, you wouldn't place a word like "there" or "was" after this right?) We choose "half a million" (sic, again)
“Fourth word is again somewhat limited! We can't use "a", "was", "were", etc! We choose "words" (By now, I’ve given up completely on trying to decipher the punctuation.)
“Our sentence,” he goes on, "There are half a million words", at best is 100,000x5x100,000x100,000 = 5E15 (???? – I think he means 5 X 10 to the fifteenth power, but – well, you know) which is a far cry from your number” (yeah, it sure is - 5 X10 to the fifteenth power is a hell of a way from 5 X 10 to the eight hundredth power!).
Then, Einstein goes totally over the edge:
“And that is AT BEST...in reality it becomes more like 20,000x5x20,000x20,000 = 4E13 (????; which, considering his last, comes out to 4 X 10 to the thirteenth power – and utter confusion as to his point) and that is giving the benefit of doubt on the 20,000.”
Now he gets down to some tactics really typical of discourse in the Home of the Brave:
“I checked into your posts quite extensively! And discovered a few interesting facts Sirrah! Here you claim to be a national champion!”
Quoting me, he goes for the groin: “’Emotional outbursts like yours do not contribute productively to any discussion; more, and inasmuch as I was for many years - until I trained to fight in the judo where I now hold two national titles.’
“Yet,” my would-be tormentor goes on, “subsequent checking on the Judo website could not locate you...although perhaps I am blind in one eye and the other is closed...
http://www.usjudo.org/U.S.NationalChampionshipsHeavyweight.asp
http://www.usjudo.org/U.S.NationalChampionshipsLightweight.asp
“Although this little gem popped up as it were...
http://www.budoseek.net/vbulletin/printthread.php?t=8852
That last was a question from someone asking who I was. The inference here is uncertain, but it wasn’t an attempt at compliment. The other two references are archetypical, in that Einstein (sorry, Albert) oh, so conveniently delivered to the viewer stats for the heavyweight and lightweight SENIORS divisions that year, rather than the masters172 lbs class where I am, in fact, twice a national champion.
As I say, that last is all too archetypical of discourse in this country today. As he does everywhere else in his essay, the author preys both upon the ignorance of his audience and the certitude – confident that they are like him – that they will have either no way to know the truth or be unwilling to check what he purports to be truth.
Oh, and I forgot to mention that he concluded his piece by saying that he wouldn’t read anything I wrote in response, because he was quitting the forum. He wrote a swan song piece there, too. Does that remind you over anyone in particular – a gender, maybe?
And that’s where we are. I wrote this a while back, and it bears repeating.
“Let’s cut to the chase. I’ve come to the reluctant but inescapable conclusion that about 50% of the adults in this country are simply too ignorant and functionally incompetent to be living in a free society. They have enthusiastically abandoned their sovereignty to the lure of the welfare state. They are, in fact, afraid to be free. They have no working concept of the responsibilities of individuals who would live free of government tyranny or mob rule. Their ignorance renders them incapable of coping with the responsibilities of liberty. These are people who cannot exist at anything other than a basic level without someone else stepping forward to take care of them. They’re adult children. They need to and deserve to live in a dictatorship, hopefully, for their sake, benevolent.
“The real problem here is that the rest of us are constantly suffering encroachments upon our own freedoms to provide for the survival of the ignorant. We’re forced to invest (if that’s the word) 15% of our paychecks into a disability insurance and retirement plan that would constitute criminal activity in every one of the 50 states were it not run by government. We must do this, we’re told, because there are just too many people out there who aren’t bright enough to do it on their own. We’re facing the inevitability of socialized medicine. As soon as the social Democratic party gets its way, with no small amount of help from the Republicans, Americans will be waiting months—if not years - for basic elective surgery. Private citizens will be sent to jail for trying to find a private doctor to treat their ills outside of the approved and official government plan. Freedoms are being lost because of political pandering to those unable to cope.”
Remember what got us into this mess – especially the clown show in the White house? Election night was like a trip down Lewis Carroll’s rabbit hole. “Analysts” – those utter morons whose every word nitwit “America” hangs on – threw numbers whose meaning not one of them or their listeners had the foggiest notion of, yet each of which was given some supposedly meaningful significance. If a single one of them was accurate, I’ll eat my hat.
After all the “hanging chad” nonsense, the contradictory rulings by the several courts, and the rest, we got down to some to pseudo mathematical crap I’ve just been describing. One example was an article by a professor at the University of Southern California, who used what he called (it is, actually – but none of his prospective audience had any idea) "binomial statistical analysis" - that to "prove" the original Florida count was unfair.
That, the good prof said, was because Bush and Gore should have received roughly equal numbers of votes when a recount was done. “Binomial statistical analysis” – binomial probability, i.e. – is only useful when there are just two choices. We’ll all remember, no doubt, that there were several names on the infamous ballots, but who knew about “binomial probability?” Sure not the people I’ve been telling about. And what of the professor? Guess (you get a choice – stupid or dishonest, meaning biased).
How important is education? George W. Bush became President of the United States – that’s how important. As of this writing, twenty four hundred, twenty three of us are dead, and more than fifteen thousand maimed – some for life. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are dead. THAT’s how important it is.
Or do I have to talk about what REALLY important – the money?
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