[monkey]

I would like to see life like Shangri-la, where you stay physically young until you're 100, and then you die.

Right, off you go.

I went to the terrific Egyptian exhibit, The Quest for Immortality. It will be in New Orleans in 2003.

I wonder how the pharaoh system could last for thousands of years. Did the pharaoh and priests manipulate the hoi polloi all that time, or did the common mindset compel such a system?

Churn up a bucket of water, and then stir the outer edge of the bucket. The outer edge of the water moves about in a circle, and the inner water will start to turn as well, although it's still churning. After a while, the churning ends and all the water is moving in unison. At the transition point from churn to harmonious stirring, it suddenly becomes easier to move the stick, and increase the stirring speed.

Now repeat the experiment, except start by stirring in a small circle in the middle of the bucket. Now the middle portion of water starts to move in a circle, and the churn appears to be pushed outward. Eventually, the water moves in unison, and there is again a transition point where the water will move faster with the same stirring effort.

I wonder which of these two experiments best represents conceptual transitions in society. Perhaps society is a fractal (scale invariant - something that looks the same regardless of the level of detail). When a phase transition occurs in nature (such as water to ice) it is preceded by scale-invariance.

The wand tour of the exhibit stressed that Egyptians didn't worship animals, but the forces (processes) that the animals represented. Most primitive statues depict very little facial expression, as if the subject is a veneer for the powerful processes of nature.

It's a strange person who can say that she loves her children, but would have swept them from existence if they had come about at a different time. But it's not surprising that there is such a process in nature.

[Askel5]

I like your image save for the fact it won't translate like it should to those who make the mistake of "standing united" behind a bogus authority (as evidenced by its means and objectives) against the purposed chaos induced by the unleashing of passions.

I don't think either the Left or the Right fails to recognize that -- having stirred up some chaos or unleashed the anarchical New Left -- they can count on folks to react against it.

To wit, the way they dangle their WTO or G-8 conferences ... fishing for discord in Seattle one year, safetly esconced in some remote spot the next as suits their purposes for engendering support by portraying themselves as the victims of the radical anarchical left.

_________________________

As for the Egyptian art, you can bet I'll make a trip to see it. (I'm perhaps still unduly prejudiced against MOMA thanks to my years of being spoiled by The Nelson in KC) With any luck, I'll find that image (and I don't think it's in any of my books) where the male god lies flat on his back and suspends with his penis the female who becomes the sky of a sort.

Those are exactly the sorts of Egyptian Self-Evident (and most beautiful) truths which indeed were on the money and likely left much of society enjoying a freedom to move about the still waters of true harmony rather than the Enthusiasm our state stirs up with Fear, Paranoia, 'Data' and Crises such that we'll swim together like schools of fish.

I was just talking about the Egyptians the other day when I posted "The State and the Soul" over at Liberty Forum. The woman we're speaking of is Ayn Rand, of course:

She can't but conceive of the state as infected because her notion of family is infected somehow. Authoritarian and totalitarian rule differ along the same lines as patriarchal and paternalistic. Huge difference.

(ritual deicide of the Word ... you'll notice that Father and Mother have been replaced by the more interchangeable Parent?)

With her screwed up male/female thing (a little too much rape sex as ideal, thanks, from a woman that could rationalize rank strip mining on the one hand, black lung on the other) She errs that all must needs be paternalistic because she can't conceive of the patriarchy that is the trinity.

I use the trinity as an example (doesn't hurt to know something about religion, yes?) because it's the perfection of three persons but one essence and the "irreducibly complex" human condition of any natural human being born of the mother who was penetrated by his father.


[in] Fights about an abortion: [you'll often here folks argue] Well there are TWO people involved here.

No, there are three. The [only truly innocent party being the] one to be forbidden life.

You make that error in the math -- dismiss pregnancy as a "disease" (as does our CDC) or a "huddled mass of infected flesh" -- and the rest goes awry as a matter of course. Fundamental breakdown from the individual out because he's gone and skewed his essential triad of human existence and cannot conceive of authority's recognizing its [nobless oblige] or all parties being essentially equal even if some are obliged to respect that authority ... the obedience to duty (of both ruler and subject, father and son) which actually liberates all ...



Especially the woman. If Egyptian art has anything to say about it, anyway (and I'll bet all art does, one way or another).

Though lovely (Akenaten having decided Eyptians should worship the one god), This isn't the image I was looking for ... the one where she is not so much Mother Earth as the the sky -- the horizon -- he suspends.

I suspect he's kissing, not preparing to crunch, the skull of his child. Likewise, I suspect that Akenaten and Nefretiti -- like most of humanity -- considered children a blessing, not a burden.

A far cry from the Bushes or Turners of this world who decide the rest of us should have only the Two children (if any at all) and excuse their own large families on the fact that "it's a little late to kill them now".