Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Dammit...

Robert Charles Wilson in his novel, Bios, has anticipated most (though not all)
of my vision of cosmic biogenesis as depicted in MY (perpetually) forthcoming
novel, provisionally titled, SUMMA.
In mine, I posit that there are planets in the cosmos where all life forms are
symbiotic with one another and no life form is obliged to prey upon another.
And in many instances all apparently different species are all different stages
of the same life form. Also, consciousness and life are all coeval with one
another--although the forms of consciousness are so radically different
sometimes that they cannot communicate or even recognize one another. That's
Mr. R.C. Wilson's vision.

Of course, MY vision is even more inclusive than Mr. R.C. Wilson's. I posit
also that there are not only stars and planets that are alive and conscious, but
a spectrum of objects between those two that are also alive and conscious
(Pluto, Jupiter, brown dwarfs, etc.), and not only that, but there are living
beings that consist purely of magnetic fields and other forces on the surfaces
of stars, and also in cloulds of interstellar dust and gases and in
intergalactic space, and the nous of all finite entities that subsist after
their endings in something like the Akashic records. After a while, you see, I
think the cosmos gets kind of complicated.

In nearly unrelated news, Michael Gruber has written a sort of "wisdom" book
based on his interpretation of Nietzche, Heidigger and Rudolf Steiner. Nietzche
and Heidigger are my two least favorite thinkers. Heidigger was a fucking Nazi.
Nietzche probably would not have liked them, but much of his writing works to
give them aid and comfort. Steiner is a tolerably sophisticated thinker who
gave some aspects of theosophy a certain veneer of intellectual respectability
with his "anthroposophy" & he is something of a gnostic Christian as well. He
was decent enough to be persecuted by the Nazis. But some of his teachings
promote (see also Alice Bailey) a sort of racism and some are just plain...odd.
Like his belief that children should not be taught to read until they have
acquired their permanent teeth. Anyway, there are people whom I admire who look
to Nietzche and Heidigger, but those folks' interpretations of Nietzche and
Heidigger seem to make them out as being the very opposite of the impressions
that I have of those two thinkers.

I don't understand Gruber's book very well on first reading. I have the sense
from reading his novels that he speaks from a certain degree of first hand
experience, so I'm inclined to think he has something really important to say.



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Wednesday, November 3, 2010

It could have been worse...

Well, it could have been worse.  If Christine O'Donnell had won in Maryland, I think I would have had real doubts about the viability of representative democracy.  But I would have gotten over them.  

I was saddened that Russ Feingold lost in Wisconsin.   That's pretty mysterious to me.  What did Russ Feingold ever do to betray the interests of Wisconsites?  The media are saying that Feingold took some maverick positions against the party--like refusing to support the Iraq War when it was all the rage--& so he didn't get much support from the Democratic Party establishment.  It seems like there's a price to pay about being prematurely right.  Feingold was outspent 4-1 but that still doesn't quite explain it.  So was Jerry Brown.  

Here's hoping Bennet and Murphy hang on in Colorado and Washington.  

And I think of Ma and Pa Ferguson & Pappy Lee O'Daniel, governors of Texas back in the day, who were Tea Party types before their time.  (Blago of Illinois is the only current analog of theirs I can think of...)  (In *O Brother Where Art Thou?* the incumbent Gov. of Mississippi was modeled on Pappy Lee--can't recall if the Coen brothers actually used his name). During the reign of the Fergusons, if you had a relative in the pen you wanted to get pardoned, it was pretty simple.  Just buy some expensive bull semen from the Ferguson's breeding operation...) 

Representative democracy is like an unspecialized amoeba-like organism that lurches through its environment, sending out a pseudopod here and getting burned, another over there and finding good stuff to ingest, far more adaptable than say, koalas, who can only eat eucalpytus and have to rely on an unchanging environment--even though they are a lot cuter. 

I think it will be interesting to see how the presence of the Tea Party folks in the House of Representatives affect Republican Caucus discipline.  Not that much I'm guessing, but I still hope they screw it up.  I know that among the Tea Party types there are  some who genuinely believe in limited government, fiscal conservatism, reining in Wall Street and the big corporations.  My guess is they will be corrupted in the twinkling of an eye.  But I could be wrong.  Some have said that I've been wrong before.  

R. 

 
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