Category Archives: Autobiography

2 aspirin

Took two aspirin this morning. Took one last year, too. Have been averse to taking pills since I watched my grandmother taking hers. My aversion to died hair is similar. Irrational.

Marketing, missionaries, merchants

These are all variations on the same enterprise. What I want to know is where the idea came from that the ability to communicate entitles one to an audience. Is it just a matter of habit that grows out of the noise humans make being attended to?

Since the freedom to speak apparently requires protection, that seems to suggest that it is not unusual for speech to be perceived as an imposition or unwelcome intrusion, and not just because of the content or meaning of the speech. Certainly, I would have been pleased to shut my mother up for good and, when she took her last breath, it came as a relief. Imagine living sixry four years and hating your mother’s voice. I wonder how that happened.

Doing and Being

How to explain the difference between function and essence to someone who does not see or recognize function or doing? How to explain someone who does to someone who doesn’t? How to explain the meaning of “not” to a person who is ignorant of opposites and negatives? How many human brains are so limited?
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Noam Chomsky, still speaking

https://politicalscience.nd.ts/events/2022/11/18/noam-chomsky-and-student-activism-from-the-60s-to-today/

Chomsky gave up on linguistics because he discovered that language could not be broken down into syllables of sound that would have universal meaning, as economists had done in reducing material transactions to numerical values. Economics and linguistics are both referred to as social science, wrongly because neither is predictive and repeatable. Social systems are, like the weather, dynamic–infinitely variable, regardless of how much humans want things to stay the same.
“Student activism” is mostly a topic because the legislators of the civil rights era expected no change in the educational system where “in loco parentis” still reigned. That is, they expected the electorate to remain largely apathetic and follow the direction of the family’s head. Single mothers were decried.
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Religion in America

Religion is not the opiate of the people. That’s a condescending charge, alleging that people desensitize themselves. At least here in the U.S. religion serves as a disguise behind which people hide their real intent. Does that make them all liars? Not really. Liars deceive in order to injure the lied to; Americans lie to protect themselves. I think that in German I would call them bauern schlau. It is a characteristic behavior that I found familiar in the behavior of the shep herders of Iraq in el Anbar province. I suppose naive Americans associated it with wily coyote. Yes, “wily” is probably a good translation of “schlau.”

The Hörpfing farmer’s wife was schlau in trading her milk and eggs for fabrics and furs she hid under her high bed. I wonder how much I learned in those four early years. It was in another language that I have nor spoken since.