Thus many a weighty discussion ensued while weeding the garden, paring a turnip, or serving tea.--Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea
No one actually dies of congestive heart failure, certainly not Stanwyck, who survived her Bitter Tea lead by nine years. Lust for life is broken by marginalization as we lose relevance, and pathology experts may scoff, but disease is mainly an issue of status and stress. Take the pressure for territory away, stigma, and all that. This points to why the monastic lifestyle lends itself to longevity, why we're all hot for cosmopolitan tyrants, despite protestation to the contrary. Eurasian matings were tolerated slightly better than African Caucasian sex, where they occurred in the last century, due to the fact that, with the appropriate grooming, it was difficult to tell the difference. David Carradine certainly had no problem submerging European individualism to Asian methodology, leaving him hot literally in the throes of death, the fusion which gave him prominence ultimately catching him up.
Frank Capra is absolutely shameless in how he utilizes the Chinese civil war to create this lust charged romance, but who wouldn't be aroused by it must be dead alive. Spastic knew Stanwyck had a hot to trot career, but rarely viewed the sizzle of her controversial rise. Damn, how what we leave to the imagination opens so many possibilities, even in the yearnings of post menopausal dryness. The juicy plasticity of menstruation is actually missed after all, the bloating, the inconvenience of diarrhea, trade off right back for this level of taunt seduction which blames Christianity for Mao, but more than that, the kinetic lure between Western and Eastern cousins. Though we now have the technology to meddle in it, and the evolutionary advance is, at times, infinitesimal, the liberal to progressive spectrum starts howling bricks if anyone dares assert that Nubians, who led to Semitic peoples, Asians, and Europeans, advance the original African model. Not by very much, but if evolutionary science is driven by adaptation, well, if nature is allowed to take its course, Africans and Native American Indians will eventually breed out of the human population. Intelligence being conditioned by geology and environment, Asians and whites adapted smarter, which is why we will never move past the damnation of liberal paternalism. Humanity allows pity and empathy en masse to virtually ensure global catastrophe. The ruthlessness Asther mimics prior to Mah li's seditious activity sealing his fate isn't far off from Eastwood's nuanced arrowhead in the same direction: Euthanasia is the better part of valor, especially when decline passes its plot. The exotic sex along for the ride is compensation of our ancestors watchful spirit. This doesn't mean the CPC won't kill us all if it isn't careful, dancing on the bleached bones of Danish silent film relics.
Showing posts with label evolution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label evolution. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
Tuesday, July 7, 2015
Pop the Balloon
Jonathan Weiner's non-fiction enterprise was of interest precisely due to his reviewer's diffidence, precisely due to the author's lack of diligence. Initially, I was sympathetic to Weiner's fusion of European culture with the complex science of microbiology. Aubrey Jasper de Grey, featured prominently in Weiner's approach to the science of immortality, is a composite of the British eccentric, and learning about how Aubrey became obsessed with cellular biology is entertaining, but Weiner's attempt to behave like a Renaissance humanist falls apart in this book. He glosses over Francis Bacon and he glosses over Montaigne, and by the opening of part three, who cares about Aubrey's near ascetic compulsion to see humanity defeat death? Many of my readers may wonder if I am play acting at times, since, how can a disabled writer be against homosexuality in and of itself? It is an absurd position, and if the disabled writer wasn't so dissolute and poor, it is at least speculatively a dangerous position to have, and that same disabled writer's racism is unconscionable if she is as clever as she professes to be, but Jonathan's scattered bird pellet approach to his thesis makes the terror of the Inquisition seem almost a rational authoritarian stricture next to the hubris of our 21st century ambitions. We're going to defeat death itself. We're going to enter the transhumanist age of Singularity, and yet we cannot solve the basic economic problems of liquidity for everyone. We all claim we're universally tolerant and cannot mitigate geographical reality, whether it's American inner cities or the fall of Middle Eastern deserts to fanaticism, or the fact that West Africans are about as brutal governing themselves as Imperial Europeans were in governing them in the colonial age.
In part three of his book, Weiner focuses on how death is a Kantian concern throughout the course of human civilization, as of course, it would be-- but let us say, for the sake of argument, that Weiner and Aubrey are right and within two or three lifetimes, we solve the problem of DNA entropy and the metaphysics of ontology is solved for complex organisms. It would seem to put the very process of living in stasis, which is not how evolution works. We may not be able to answer why life is what it is, which is about surviving to make successful copies of itself, but there is only so much matter to go around, and death recycles finite sources of material, especially water.
There is also the issue of progression. We invented the wheel. We maximized food sources through agriculture and animal husbandry. Created propulsion and artificial wings and learned how to aggregate data through circuitry, pushing the limits of what is manageable even with the extraordinary capacity of the human mind. I'm 53 and I'm rather bored with the fictions of convenience as a shield against calamity. Let's take physics, which says that galaxies behave in predictable ways, and stars burn in predictable increments of time, but what if that predictability was disrupted? What if the Sun stopped behaving as a well heeled middle aged star and something went wrong? The Internet wouldn't amount to much if a massive solar flare stripped away the Earth's magnetic field, hence we shouldn't presume we can exist as a species to witness the end of time itself. Infinity and immortality aren't verifiable concepts, as such. A few million years ago, our primate ancestors were creating the big toe and wrist ligaments that branched us off from gorillas and chimpanzees, and now we spend our time playing God when we aren't otherwise insufferably shallow, and if Weiner even knew my warped skeletal frame was typing this post, he'd probably say "Geez, I really ticked her off." And yes, he has.
Despite a life of regimented unhappiness, I fear death, which is an illogical emotional investment within my suffering, destructive impulses. I'll be gone soon just as Montaigne was at 59, even if I will not be quite sure how, through stresses to my heart, or COPD, but to extrapolate being the child of the postwar generation, and to add what? Two hundred years to that? A thousand? I agree with my father. Once you reach a certain age, you get tired. I do not share the digital optimism of people like Ev Williams, and the reason is simple. Despite all the marvels of human innovation, marvels which at least precipitated my survival, I cannot even satisfy the simple wish to relocate and return to the suburban modality of my youth. It isn't as if I'm aspiring towards the software moguls that populate Silicon Valley, like Bill Gates.
In part three of his book, Weiner focuses on how death is a Kantian concern throughout the course of human civilization, as of course, it would be-- but let us say, for the sake of argument, that Weiner and Aubrey are right and within two or three lifetimes, we solve the problem of DNA entropy and the metaphysics of ontology is solved for complex organisms. It would seem to put the very process of living in stasis, which is not how evolution works. We may not be able to answer why life is what it is, which is about surviving to make successful copies of itself, but there is only so much matter to go around, and death recycles finite sources of material, especially water.
There is also the issue of progression. We invented the wheel. We maximized food sources through agriculture and animal husbandry. Created propulsion and artificial wings and learned how to aggregate data through circuitry, pushing the limits of what is manageable even with the extraordinary capacity of the human mind. I'm 53 and I'm rather bored with the fictions of convenience as a shield against calamity. Let's take physics, which says that galaxies behave in predictable ways, and stars burn in predictable increments of time, but what if that predictability was disrupted? What if the Sun stopped behaving as a well heeled middle aged star and something went wrong? The Internet wouldn't amount to much if a massive solar flare stripped away the Earth's magnetic field, hence we shouldn't presume we can exist as a species to witness the end of time itself. Infinity and immortality aren't verifiable concepts, as such. A few million years ago, our primate ancestors were creating the big toe and wrist ligaments that branched us off from gorillas and chimpanzees, and now we spend our time playing God when we aren't otherwise insufferably shallow, and if Weiner even knew my warped skeletal frame was typing this post, he'd probably say "Geez, I really ticked her off." And yes, he has.
Despite a life of regimented unhappiness, I fear death, which is an illogical emotional investment within my suffering, destructive impulses. I'll be gone soon just as Montaigne was at 59, even if I will not be quite sure how, through stresses to my heart, or COPD, but to extrapolate being the child of the postwar generation, and to add what? Two hundred years to that? A thousand? I agree with my father. Once you reach a certain age, you get tired. I do not share the digital optimism of people like Ev Williams, and the reason is simple. Despite all the marvels of human innovation, marvels which at least precipitated my survival, I cannot even satisfy the simple wish to relocate and return to the suburban modality of my youth. It isn't as if I'm aspiring towards the software moguls that populate Silicon Valley, like Bill Gates.
Friday, December 28, 2012
Cathedral of Evolutionary Dynamic
"We have gone from a legal system denominated by common law, divined by courts, to one in which statues, enacted by legislatures, have become the primary source of law."-- Guido Calabresi
It takes hubris to play the dunce, as Ron Perlman does in Quest for Fire, a movie not necessarily conducive for outcasts in our primate social hierarchy. Its carefully staged savagery stunned, as opposed to overawed, in the early Reagan era. Watching on contemporary flat screen technology, a mature savant perceives its carefully circumscribed progressive dictum: tolerance leads to better quality of life outcomes. And this is bullshit, in a naturalistic Darwinian allegory which could not possibly have occurred in Paleolithic Europe. Certainly migrations occurred, and different humanoids may have co-existed with different levels of technical knowledge, but no band of early human hunters survived territorial ambush, attacks by sabers, mastodons, grizzlies, and sexual cross breeding with Nubians, a fight with their own kind, and lived to tell the tale, in the creation of the modern homo sapiens. McGill's Naoh may have been the heir apparent, brave but not stupid, with just the right amount of masculine empathy, but it is Perlman's buffoon Amoukar who has the wisdom to know who belongs where, in the sinews for the right sense of place.
My early progressive educators were wrong; they led me to believe that my status as a token cripple who could mediate between worlds was an economic surety, and this is what angers me. Everyone saw my astute intellectual promise. The suave history teacher who had style, the angry hippie, the loutish philosopher whom ISIS might have decapitated as a subversive, perhaps rightly so. I would have never made tenure, even if I had applied myself to some minute thesis. Then we have the activists who are not activists as I define activism. Whatever their rhetoric, they fail and eject too many of the most challenged invalids they supposedly offer self-determination, and couch progress as decentralized case management. They are no better than Putin, in his attempt to resuscitate an outdated authoritarian model.
In 2009, a twitter user, purported homosexual who thought I might have posed a problem to a woman who stopped following me, urged me to "get help". Cures for battle stress due to a life of attempted annihilation don't exist. Neurological science in the seventies was not as advanced as our current genomic sequencing era, but still, Dr. George Crothers espoused beating brain damage out of those handicapped by cerebral palsy. No one stood up and made any conscientious objection. The parents acquiesced. It took how many years for the state of Pennsylvania to investigate and shut him down? Did my mother have a crisis of conscience because her seven year old came home screaming?
It takes hubris to play the dunce, as Ron Perlman does in Quest for Fire, a movie not necessarily conducive for outcasts in our primate social hierarchy. Its carefully staged savagery stunned, as opposed to overawed, in the early Reagan era. Watching on contemporary flat screen technology, a mature savant perceives its carefully circumscribed progressive dictum: tolerance leads to better quality of life outcomes. And this is bullshit, in a naturalistic Darwinian allegory which could not possibly have occurred in Paleolithic Europe. Certainly migrations occurred, and different humanoids may have co-existed with different levels of technical knowledge, but no band of early human hunters survived territorial ambush, attacks by sabers, mastodons, grizzlies, and sexual cross breeding with Nubians, a fight with their own kind, and lived to tell the tale, in the creation of the modern homo sapiens. McGill's Naoh may have been the heir apparent, brave but not stupid, with just the right amount of masculine empathy, but it is Perlman's buffoon Amoukar who has the wisdom to know who belongs where, in the sinews for the right sense of place.
My early progressive educators were wrong; they led me to believe that my status as a token cripple who could mediate between worlds was an economic surety, and this is what angers me. Everyone saw my astute intellectual promise. The suave history teacher who had style, the angry hippie, the loutish philosopher whom ISIS might have decapitated as a subversive, perhaps rightly so. I would have never made tenure, even if I had applied myself to some minute thesis. Then we have the activists who are not activists as I define activism. Whatever their rhetoric, they fail and eject too many of the most challenged invalids they supposedly offer self-determination, and couch progress as decentralized case management. They are no better than Putin, in his attempt to resuscitate an outdated authoritarian model.
In 2009, a twitter user, purported homosexual who thought I might have posed a problem to a woman who stopped following me, urged me to "get help". Cures for battle stress due to a life of attempted annihilation don't exist. Neurological science in the seventies was not as advanced as our current genomic sequencing era, but still, Dr. George Crothers espoused beating brain damage out of those handicapped by cerebral palsy. No one stood up and made any conscientious objection. The parents acquiesced. It took how many years for the state of Pennsylvania to investigate and shut him down? Did my mother have a crisis of conscience because her seven year old came home screaming?
Friday, November 9, 2012
Reversi, Elemental
Set you down this;
And say besides, that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduc’d the state,
I took by the throat the circumcised dog,
And smote him thus.
Othello 5.2.407-412
Poor Aleppo. You are not fooled by this malevolent primate, are you? At the very least, we are in love with our own theories about the bottleneck distribution of our origins, except when there is no origin, no first cause. I cannot resist telling you that there is the most fleeting glimpse of Kris Kristofferson's ass in the post post Vietnam film Welcome Home, just barely, a shot of his crack, the tush of post public hair in the buttock cleft. A stock movie with more than a hint of nutmeg on Robinson Crusoe. The Vietnamese remain perplexed by our fascination and defeat in their country. No one ever discusses their subsequent border skirmish with China, no, cripples like me will carry the survival guilt of her teachers and blood uncle who served, even her doomed ladle-girthed slobbering ex, plugging my cleft with his fingers, he hated serving in the infantry, leaving me unsure about damage to my rectum, the girls say no, but still, my suspicions remain. Did he damage me? Rectal penetration with this bobble head felt like an enhanced interrogation technique. I carry their guilt. The silence of mother's brother, the anger of Jerry, whose name I have posted with such frequency that maybe ludes are a good idea at this point, since this is kind of all that I have, my legal stalking of the unfortunate Shakespearean for three semesters, thereof. As if to keep writing him assists me through the act of trivializing him, and maybe it is that, the narcissism of pain, a trivial mockery that I am fucking stuck in one place because I had to run from my family, and now I am stuck in the matrix of black protestants who do not like the new generation of low income Koreans who wave at me with freeze dried grins. Do I have any allies left?
No, and twitter undulations do not really count, even if one of you would, on a dare, help me, or give me space to relocate, the accommodations needed for my broken skeleton are daunting, level shower floor plans, firmly bolted grab bars, toilet at the correct power chair height. I need to cease engaging the transvestite with the catheter on his clitoris. We have been having the same conversation for twenty years; he is old and sick and I don't like him and he treats me still in his scarred and stroke damaged brain like a patient chart, and I am none better for heeding his advice, worse for trusting him and his fucking demonstrations; he depresses me and I am just short of losing my compassion for the Yoda death freak; yet he is my history, and we're still boxing. It is my fault. An enemy that is my only social link, he is either too damaged to actualize my animosity, or perhaps genuinely trying to give me a life line; it's pointless, either way.
I am going to go lie down, but to give you a clue, I will be tying this back in to the last movie, Bright Angel. "O kay," you shrug. I always thought I could win, would win, and had a happy writer's life. My margin of error derailed not a few transit systems.
And say besides, that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduc’d the state,
I took by the throat the circumcised dog,
And smote him thus.
Othello 5.2.407-412
Poor Aleppo. You are not fooled by this malevolent primate, are you? At the very least, we are in love with our own theories about the bottleneck distribution of our origins, except when there is no origin, no first cause. I cannot resist telling you that there is the most fleeting glimpse of Kris Kristofferson's ass in the post post Vietnam film Welcome Home, just barely, a shot of his crack, the tush of post public hair in the buttock cleft. A stock movie with more than a hint of nutmeg on Robinson Crusoe. The Vietnamese remain perplexed by our fascination and defeat in their country. No one ever discusses their subsequent border skirmish with China, no, cripples like me will carry the survival guilt of her teachers and blood uncle who served, even her doomed ladle-girthed slobbering ex, plugging my cleft with his fingers, he hated serving in the infantry, leaving me unsure about damage to my rectum, the girls say no, but still, my suspicions remain. Did he damage me? Rectal penetration with this bobble head felt like an enhanced interrogation technique. I carry their guilt. The silence of mother's brother, the anger of Jerry, whose name I have posted with such frequency that maybe ludes are a good idea at this point, since this is kind of all that I have, my legal stalking of the unfortunate Shakespearean for three semesters, thereof. As if to keep writing him assists me through the act of trivializing him, and maybe it is that, the narcissism of pain, a trivial mockery that I am fucking stuck in one place because I had to run from my family, and now I am stuck in the matrix of black protestants who do not like the new generation of low income Koreans who wave at me with freeze dried grins. Do I have any allies left?
No, and twitter undulations do not really count, even if one of you would, on a dare, help me, or give me space to relocate, the accommodations needed for my broken skeleton are daunting, level shower floor plans, firmly bolted grab bars, toilet at the correct power chair height. I need to cease engaging the transvestite with the catheter on his clitoris. We have been having the same conversation for twenty years; he is old and sick and I don't like him and he treats me still in his scarred and stroke damaged brain like a patient chart, and I am none better for heeding his advice, worse for trusting him and his fucking demonstrations; he depresses me and I am just short of losing my compassion for the Yoda death freak; yet he is my history, and we're still boxing. It is my fault. An enemy that is my only social link, he is either too damaged to actualize my animosity, or perhaps genuinely trying to give me a life line; it's pointless, either way.
I am going to go lie down, but to give you a clue, I will be tying this back in to the last movie, Bright Angel. "O kay," you shrug. I always thought I could win, would win, and had a happy writer's life. My margin of error derailed not a few transit systems.
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