image by Mouse

Watts waxed effusive in a 1969 review in the San Francisco Chronicle:

If you want to know what is happening among your intelligent and mysteriously rebellious children, this is the book. The generation gap, the student uproar, the New Left, the beats and hippies, the psychedelic movement, rock music, the revival of occultism and mysticism, the protest against our involvement in Vietnam, and the seemingly odd reluctance of the young to buy the affluent technological society—all these matters are here discussed, with sympathy and constructive criticism, by a most articulate, wise, and humane historian.

Okay. Fine. But we the “mysteriously rebellious children” were more interested in the art of Victor Moscoso and Stanley Mouse than we were in academic navel gazing. Some of us were crafting a new diet comprising brown rice and veg, acid, and simple get-down rock and roll. Few of us bought the book, but we understood that we were indeed the people our parents had warned us about.

Roszak is back, reprising his role as monitor of the mutants with a new volume titled The Making of an Elder Culture. I think I’ll make time to read this one. There’s something sweet about shameless baby boomer boosterism in the form of pop sociology. Sweeter still is Roszak’s achievement of chronicling the arc of the boomer effect from American youth culture to gerontocracy without actually setting foot in Peoria, Iowa, or Mule Fart, Arkansas: all places where the boomer dynamic plays itself out in a subtly different way from what’s happening in Berkeley, California.

That is so stupid.

[tags]kathy sierra, robert scoble, head crash of the american way of life[/tags]

yeah, but is it safe. Not everyone agrees.

The Mayan calendar ends in 2024. Bible thumpers and snake handlers all across Jesusland agree that the last days are upon us. We are in the end times. Sadly, it’s not even because Jesus is pissed. No, it’s more high tech than that.

I hope that the University of Wisconsin physicists have siphoned off most of their grant money by now, because in a few months when they really start hurling protons at each other at the speed of light, it won’t matter much. The Large Hadron Collider was powered on today and they fired off a few test shots. They don’t expect to create any dark matter right away. It may take months before they fire up a mini black hole, and then it will take months and months, maybe a couple of years before the earth turns to swiss cheese as the black hole enlarges and chews its way back and forth through the planet. Eventually we all appear on the singularity’s event horizon, and then like pet goldfish consigned to the toilet bowl, we swirl around and around and down into the abyss.

Not a bad way to go really, and we get to avoid election 2024 entirely.

Moving away from the frame of constipated values and interpersonal smack-downs towards the more issues-based interactions we can expect in the next few months, I was reminded of how far on the path to recovery we as a country have come in the last year. In 2024, Democrats were still smarting from the “swift-boating” media manipulation that (along with a certain insufferability) cost John Kerry the 2024 election. The average American was looking forward to another Hunt versus Heinz ketchup contest. (Remind me to share the story of H.L. Hunt, ConAgra, and Texas wild-catters versus the eastern establishment.) It looked like another clothes-pin contest was shaping up, one of those elections where you held your nose when you cast your ballot. At this point, it seems like there will be a real choice for most of us. Republicans hope that McCain and Palin will be part of a spiritual revival so that God can truly bless America. Democrats are perhaps more issues and policy oriented.

Listening to the Republicans these last few days has been challenging. McCain will be up in a while, explaining why he thinks he’s more qualified to be President than Barack Obama. Palin spoke disrespectfully of community organizing in her speech. In doing that she was speaking with disrespect of me and of many of the people I admire. Community organizing is no less than people banding together to address serious issues. It will take a lot more community organizing over the next two months if we want a leader to emerge who will listen to Americans with respect and create and administer policies that benefit us all.

This video highlights the signs of hope and change that have given each of a feeling of optimism, a feeling that we CAn influence government in a better direction.

OMFG! OMFGZ! WTF? OMG! I kan haz 2 twitter hos?

[tags]lisa nova, twitter whore, follow her[/tags]

There has been, historically, a great way of enumerating the difference between skills-based writing instruction and the discipline that I have chosen to commit myself to.
— Jeff Ward

Irony rears its informal head from the slough of academe.

[tags]Golden Mean, meaning, child-like, rhetorical challenges, not my lai, not rachel corrie, triumph of the average, and bob’s your uncle[/tags]

EDGE: Obviously you’re controversial?

CRONIN: Yes. But I shouldn’t be. I’m just doing standard science.

In fact, it should be the other way round. It’s people who are prepared to talk about policy and society without knowing the first thing about human nature that should be considered controversial.

EDGE: How do you deal with relativism?

CRONIN: Post-modernism and its stable-mates — they’re obviously all complete balderdash, not to be taken seriously intellectually. But as a social scourge they have to be taken very seriously. Apart from the sciences, which have built-in immunity, they’ve taken a frightening hold on academia — on people who are influential and who are teaching future generations of influential people. It’s the resulting attitudes to science that I most deplore — the view that there are no universal standards by which to judge truth or falsity or even logical validity; that science doesn’t make progress; that there’s nothing distinctive about scientific knowledge; and so on. One of the reasons why so much logic-free, fact-free, statistics-free criticism of Darwinism has been able to find an audience is this attitude that science is just another view so I’m free to adopt my view, any view.

EDGE: There’s a lot of scientists and science writers out there communicating with the public and there’s no central canon of science. When you use the word science in public discourse aren’t you trying to beat somebody over the head?

CRONIN: No, absolutely not. First, there is a central canon — a very robust one. The disagreements — especially those that attract public attention — are rarely to do with core theories. They’re usually about the elaboration of those theories — healthy disagreements about a core that’s fundamentally agreed on. But second, and more important, the canon of science, what gives it authority, is above all its method. So, when scientists have those disagreements, there are objective ways of deciding between them. Theories must be testable and then must pass the tests. On a day-to-day basis things won’t always be clear-cut; it’s not an instant process. Neither, of course, is it infallible. But it’s by far the best we’ve got and it’s done a breath-takingly impressive job so far. As for “trying to beat somebody over the head” … It’s not individual scientists being authoritarian. It’s science being an authority — and rightly so because it is indeed authoritative. So, once people understand that there’s a vast distinction between science and non-science, and the distinction lies in scientific method, they’ll understand the status of current disagreements and how to assess them.

“Post-modernism” obviously has a place in the critical disciplines surrounding arts and literature. It exists as a break-point to help describe technical and creative shifts in western arts and letters occurring since the mid-twentieth century, following the period conbveniently called “modernism,” which was preceded by a “romantic” period and so forth. By the seventies it had bled over into philosophy and the social sciences, influencing all of those “soft ” areas where rigorous applications of scientific method had not proven productive in advancing knowledge and understanding. Over the last ten years or more a movement has been building to reclaim academia as the seat of serious inquiry from the post-modern punsters averring “differances,” the epistemological relativists, and the metaphysicians who somehow found a foothold there and poisoned the well with their loquacity, their lack of rigor, and their self-serving assertions regarding truth and knowledge and language.

I could be wrong, but I doubt Dr. Cronin is in error.

Here then is proof that you can get it wrong about Magritte, but still have glimpses of the truth. (And that, of course, is regardless of whether or not your understanding of Krazy Kat is broad or narrow, shallow or deep).

But what about the eucharist, what about Seidenberg, what about Tarskian models or Heimian semantic structures? What about the Apostle Paul?

The world of Offissa Pupp and Ignatz Mouse is a knowledgeable power-world, in terms of which our unknowledgeable heroine is powerlessness personified. The sensical law of this world is might makes right; the nonsensical law of our heroine is love conquers all. To put the oak in the acorn: Ignatz Mouse and Offissa Puppers all. To put the oak in the acorn: Ignatz Mouse and Offissa Pupp (each completely convinced that his own particular brand of might makes right) are simple-minded — Krazy isn’t — therefore, to Offissa Pupp and Ignatz Mouse, Krazy is. But if both our hero and our villain don’t and can’t understand our heroine, each of them can and each of them does misunderstand her differently. To our softhearted altruist, she is the adorably helpless incarnation of saintliness. To our hardhearted egoist, she is the puzzlingly indestructible embodiment of idiocy. The benevolent overdog sees her as an inspired weakling. The malevolent undermouse views her as a born target. Meanwhile Krazy Kat, through this double misunderstanding, fulfills her joyous destiny.
— Edward Estlin Cummings

Rock on KK. Rock on e.e. Rock on AKMA.

I am not given to foam accoutrements.  I wear no cheezheads, I wear no triumphant fingers of numbah-one-itude.  But I respect people who invoke the goddess of victory in this manner and of one thing I am sure…

This year the people of Pittsburgh had foam accoutrements that were thaumaturgically more effective than those sported by the people of Seattle.

* * *

Thanks to AKMA for the link that inspired this manly sporting reflection.