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Submarine Greenville / fishing boat Ehime Maru tragedy (Pearl Harbor, 09Feb01). My guess is that Commander Waddle rushed his safety checks before executing the simulated emergency surfacing procedure that caused the crash, because he was operating in an "social climate" in which the people "above him" (his "superiors"...) somehow had conveyed the impression that pleasing important visitors was very important. It is not enough to always say that safety is important. People need to understand that safety is more important than pleasing important people: that you won't be reprimanded for displeasing the people "above you" but only for not doing your job right. This message needs to be conveyed with especial emphasis when important people may be around. Children who grow up being taught to please their parents and teachers and other people "above them" are tragedies (i.e., avoidable disasters!) waiting to happen. (Read about: Russian nuclear submarine Kursk disaster. Also: July 2002 Ukraine air show disaster. Also: A parable: How Oedipus's tragedy could have been avoided.) A secret of the helping professions. A psychoanalyst once told me a secret of the profession: "In order to do good therapy, you need to be well-paid and well-laid." Only after a person has their own needs met can the person optimally help others. Another way to state this is: The solution to the selfishness-altruism dilemma is that a person ceases to be "selfish" when their self is satisfied, for then they can help others without having to sacrifice their own well-being to help others be well, i.e., without having to be "altruistic". This applies even in trivial circumstances: If there is a difficult-to-find book which I want, and I think I've found a copy, I am hesitant to tell others about it until I have my copy in hand (since, until then, I am concerned that their efforts to get their copy might prevent me from getting mine). Once I have my copy, however, it gives me much satisfaction to recommend the book to others, and to tell them where they might be able to get a copy for themselves. --The title of a book by Bubba Free-John sums it all up: The Feeding Gorilla Comes in Peace. (See also some quotes about: how conservatives and the "free market" work to prevent this kind of felicitous social harmony from being realized; and read my essay: Against ambivalence.) A secret of the executive suite. Someone (ref. lost) once told me "a secret of the [executive suite]: No person ever died regretting they had not spent more time in the office." The Annals of Cultural Relativism (cultural difference, etc.). I know a person who once bought a very expensive automobile, which he took great care for. Since he did not wish persons to bang their car doors into it and scratch the paint, for instance, he would try to park in a far corner of a parking lot to help other persons not to have to trouble themselves for the sake of his concern for his car. One day, my friend's cousin parked next to my friend and opened his car door and did hit the door of his car into the side of my friend's car. My friend pointed this out to the cousin, who responded: "It's only a car." My friend punched the cousin in the jaw and explained: "It's only a jaw." Today's lesson: If my values are no big deal, then neither are you[rs]. (Notes: (1) This principle appears to be consistently universalizable, and therefore to meet the criteria specified by Kant's "Categorical Imperative". (2) George W Bush has deployed this kind of dismissive response to defuse the question whether Saddam Hussein really had the weapons of mass destruction Bush claimed he had to justify preemptive war against him -- See: Quote #169.) George W Bush: "So what's the difference?" Precision and Soul. I know of an automobile mechanic who works only on cars of persons who take good care of them. Which reminds me of a story about Dr. William Halstead, one of the founders of The Johns Hopkins Hospital: One day he was walking through a ward and found the antiseptic conditions not up to his standards. He walked out of the ward, announcing that he could not assume responsibility for patients maintained under such conditions. Dr. Halstead was known for his meticulousness in all areas of life. He sent his shirts across the ocean to France to be laundered, and he was said to be able to inject anesthetic into a nerve with an accuracy of "a thousandth of an inch" (once an anesthesiologist took half an hour stabbing and injecting now here now there before he found a certain nerve in my arm). What does it mean when my desk is a mess? I am by nature a very neat person. When my desk is a mess, it usually means that circumstances (often: "persons") beyond my capacity to deal with are messing up my life. In other words: If my desk (or other living space...) is a mess, something is wrong. [See another perspective on neatness in offices: Quote #23.] The ancients were wrong about the starry heavens and should have known it. Apparently the ancients thought the starry heavens were a realm of eternal perfection, in radical constrast to our earthly (sublunary) realm of change and corruption. But all one needs to do is look at the sky and it should be obvious that the heavens are not perfect. To the naked eye, the moon has a motley color indicative of at least cosmetic dermatological pigmentation problem. The stars are unevenly distributed in the sky and they vary randomly in brightness, and the motions of the planets -- well, just the fact that the planets move at all relative to the fixed stars --, are two more signs of celestial irregularity. And "The Milky Way" -- well, isn't it "milky" (slightly opaque)? Therefore, the ancients should and could have speculated that the starry heavens were a realm of relatively higher beauty and perfection than the earth, but still not perfect. Once again, nobody notices the emperor's new clothes -- or his old clothes, which, one day in the past, were on that day his new clothes --, either). The philosopher Hegel once said something that, even back in the mid 1800s, was politically incorrect. Hegel disagreed with Kant's famous dictum about the two majesties: (1) the starry heavens above and (2) the moral order within. Hegel said that the stars were merely leprous spots on the bowl of the night sky, and that the only thing majestic relevant to the stars was man's astronomical theories about them: "It's not the stars, but what man puts into them -- that's the real thing." (ref. Hans Blumenberg, The Genesis of the Copernican World, MIT Press, 1987, pp.69,70) [I agree with Hegel about the locus of majesty being in our knowledge of objects and not in the objects themselves; but I do think the stars, unlike skin lesions due to leprosy, are esthetically beautiful -- at least at the safe distance from which we view them.] A requirement for any genuinely modern architecture: Because all work produces not only its nominal product but also the life form of the workers, users and others, any truly modern architecture needs to design and construct good working conditions for the architectural workers. The phenomenon that, as a [tellingly named:] "deadline" approaches, the employees in an architectural office work incredible overtime and exhaust themselves, is called: The Charette (). A genuinely modern architecture must abolish the Charette, irrespective of what the buildings are designed to look like. Postmodern architecture is Beaux Arts neo-classical orthodoxy. I thank Karsten Harries' book, The Ethical Function of Architecture, for helping me see clearly that postmodern architecture is really just 19th century Beaux Arts orthodoxy architecture in new attire and/or with a face-lift, because both postmodern architecture and the Beaux Arts believe[d]: Architecture = Charette(shed + decoration) New York's neo-classical main Post Office is just as much a decorated shed (place with a fancy front, behind which persons do repetitive mind-dulling labor...), as any postmodernist monumental building. The new buildings are also no less designed by Charette, than the old. Dec 2003: German auto makers build factories that go beyond postmodernism Icarus. Who? The "flip side" of a person isolating themself from the world is for the world to take no notice of the person. Brueghel's painting The Fall of Icarus shows Icarus drowning at the end of his plunge from the sky, and nobody caring enough to notice. Even famous persons do not matter except to the individuals in whose lives their life plays a personal role, and even there, "life goes on", etc. [Read how Icarus could have avoided falling. Also: Learn the fate of Everyman.] Charles A. Lindbergh (Lucky Lindy). 20 May 1927, Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic Ocean. His solo flight was something of a "feat": an idiosyncratic display of virtuosity. Even today, there are no uses for solo ocean crossings via any means of transportation. Crossing the ocean in a large transport plane was and still is less difficult and more useful than what Lindbergh did. Lindbergh's feat, like many feats, was largely a diversion of resources. It was irrelevant except as PR. "Who?" In some old American Express ads, a demi-celebrity [e.g., Pavarotti or Spiro Agnew...] expects to be recognized by some menial service person. But the service person does not recognize the demi-celebrity. Puzzled why this "nobody" seems to expect special treatment, the service person asks: "Who?" --The demi-celebrity finally gets "noticed" by showing their American Express card. One of my graduate school teachers told me a story: Once he went, as part of a small group, to visit Frank Lloyd Wright's home / studio: Taliesin. The architect greeted the group at the entrance. Everyone had to bend over to enter through the very low entry. Wright asked them why they thought he had made the entrance so low that one had to stoop to enter. My teacher said no one in the group knew the answer. (Answer....) [Note: I learned of my friend, Louis Forsdale's death, on the very morning (late Sep 99) when I was planning to ask him to reconfirm for me the details of this story.] In Abel Gance's (1889-1981) great silent film: Napoleon, Napoleon and Josephine, among others, are saved from "The Terror", by a certain clerk in the government department which selects who shall be guillotined: a self-appointed eater of documents, who masticates and digests their dossiers. [Following in this noble tradition, our Maine Coon cat, Misu, has recently (Jan 2000), taken to eating invoices, doctor's prescriptions and other "papers"....] Apocryphal 2004 Fortune magazine Cuisinart ad: "Turn incriminating business documents into tasty dinners, in seconds!" Chariots of Fire. I used to think this movie was terribly saccharine kitsch -- with its leitmotif of "Now let us praise famous men, and our fathers who were before us." But I always wondered why there was one short scene, near the beginning -- perhaps a minute or two long at most --, in which a veteran of The Great War (WWI), who was so terribly wounded that his face is still visibly held together with a wire contraption, and who works as a taxi driver, unloads the baggage for one of the privileged young men going off to Cambridge (Oxford?). "Why is this incongruous scene there?", I kept asking myself. And I always answered: It's probably a "sop" thrown to the Cerebrus of "social responsibility in the arts". But now I have changed my mind: I think maybe that little(no pun intended...) scene is the heart of the movie, and that all the rest of the ca. 2 hours of it spent sentimentally celebrating the best and the brightest of the immediate post-World War I generation is actually one long mockery of "famous men, and our fathers who were before us". I can't prove it, but I hope my new opinion is more right than my previous one. Alexander Calder made "mobiles" and "stabiles" (the mobiles move; the stabiles stay solidly "put" on the ground). I have started making meta-stabiles from a set of small child's blocks. These are block constructions with a greater propensity for moving -- esp. for falling down, than for staying put (Show me one!). Note: I never had blocks to play with as a child; I did have an "Erector set" and "Lincoln logs", but no blocks. Early December 2003, I came across a wood blocks marble run construction toy that looks "really neat": CUBORO The New Yorker magazine once had a long article about the terrible working conditions of symphony musicians. Symphony musicians never hear the music until they retire, and especially the ones who are so unfortunate as to have their chairs near the percussion section may suffer permanent hearing loss. (Note: We are here talking about classical symphony music, not "hard rock"!) The article described how the musicians try to protect themselves against the noise by shielding themselves with pieces of large cardboard boxes such are refrigerators come packed in. Etc. Since art, unlike (e.g.) growing food, is a free production of the human spirit, unconstrained by physical necessity, it seems to me that if art does not express high human[e] values, not just in its object (e.g., the symphonic performance the audience hears) but also in its process (e.g., the experience of the musicians performing the symphony), then it mocks the human spirit it supposedly celebrates. Masse und Macht (Crowds and Power). A symphony orchestra, by its very nature, consists of a Leader who commands and followers who obey. The conductor is a little dictator, and the members of the orchestra are the leader's followers, who must obey their leader. Heil conductor! The individualities of the individual musicians are dissolved in "the group", like the individuality of the individual soldier is submerged in the group in infantry warfare. (I have also noticed that, in symphonic and especially in choral symphonic music, one piece often sounds a lot like another, because so much noise all together tends to cancel out individual differences. This strikes me whenever I listen to a supposedly very good recording I bought of Brahms' Requiem...). I urge, therefore, on principle, that orchestral and choral music, as "genres", are destructive of human[e] values, even if what the particular symphonic or choral work is "about" is human freedom and dignity (e.g., Beethoven's 9th Symphony). A truly human[e] social order, in which there arte neither leaders nor followers, neither ordering nor obeying, but in which the only force is "the unforced force of the better argument" (--Habermas) and individuals' free, reflectively considered responses thereto -- In a truly human[e] society, neither symphonic or choral music can be performed. Neither can the large audiences which the performance of such works "command" be assembled. These savage rites can "live on", along other anthropological documentation of mankind's equivocally human prehistory, only archivally. Persons need to learn about these things in books so that they can guard against repeating them in life. In a truly human[e] society, all music will be solos and chamber music, performed in "intimate" settings. This art will not just celebrate by ambivalent assertion but nurture by harmonious example, Leisure, the basis of culture, and, particularly, that self-selected study in the company of good friends which is the proper activity of persons. (Click here to read about the meaning of monumentality.) "Do you mean to deprive us of the pleasures of choral and symphonic music?" "You certainly can listen to existing recordings, just like I listen to the recorded music of Dr. Allesandro Moreschi, the last castrato." "But we can't perform this music any more?" "There are certain pleasures which are not appropriate to civilized persons, because they undermine the conditions for civilization. Castrati and orchestras and choruses are among these." Proof that a diamond is forever. Diamonds are De Beers. De Beers is forever. Therefore: A diamond is forever. Q.E.D. See some of the world's most VuLGAR wristwatches (they are not inexpensive!): Click here! Also: the pocket watch from hell! Example of "media ecology" (McLuhan, etc.): The 03Dec99 NPR morning news told that football television broadcasting "instant replay" was now 36 years old. At the first game in which instant replay was used, the announcer felt he had to explain to the viewers that they what were seeing was not live play in the game, but replay of action they had just seen. The story said that the person who invented instant replay did not only do it so that viewers could get a second view of a play to better be able to see what happened. The inventor also intended instant replays as a way to fill in time between plays in the ongoing game. The story noted that after instant replay came into use, however, the time between plays in the game increased in order to allow more time for instant replays. --The story of TV football instant replays offers a lucid (parable-like...) illustration of how innovations in communication media (our means of perception) have "feedback" effects on content (aka "reality"): Instant replays were intended to fill in "dead" time between plays in the football game; the instant replays themselves then reacted back on the game to increase the time between plays. The story also shows how new media change [our sense of] "reality": At first, the announcer felt he had to explain what the instant replays were not: they were not new plays in the game! Instant replays did not fit into the existing reality simply as new instances of some familiar "kind of thing": they were a new kind of thing -- indeed: a new kind of thing which might even be mistaken for a previously known kind of thing (i.e., a real play in the game)! Thus we see how new communication media do not just add new things to the world ("more of the same"...); they also change what the world is like. Even further: New media not only add new kinds of things to the world: they even make old [kinds of] things that previously were there and which they do not alter in any "material" (i.e., content) way, "different". In 1990 (or 2004), it simply is not possible for a doctor to race to a medical emergency -- in his horse and buggy. The doctor may have a horse and a buggy, but a horse and buggy is no longer a rapid transportation vehicle. Whereas a doctor in 1900 who raced to a medical emergency in his horse and buggy would have been deemed to be doing the right thing, a doctor who did the same thing in 2001 would be sued for malpractice (and might be defended with an insanity plea...). A more realistic example (ref. lost): A reason homocide rates have declined during recent years has been due, not to persons having fewer murderous intentions (the "message"/content), but rather to advances in emergency medical treatment (the "medium"/context), which have transformed crimes that would in past have resulted in death, into assaults the victim survives. Cat, dog and mouse stories (Nova Scotia, Sep99): One day, while on vacation, mid-September, 1999, in Nova Scotia, I watched a kitten and a dog playing happily together for a long time. The dog would sniff the cat and push the cat around gently with its snout. The cat would lie on its back and gently paw at the dog's face. It was very sweet.... A couple days (nights, actually...) later, I watched a [different] cat chasing a small white field mouse. Apparently the cat was not entirely determined to catch the mouse, since the mouse kept escaping the cat's grasp. This interaction took place near a poorly lighted residential side-street. Sometimes the mouse would go into the brush beside the road, and the cat would chase it there. Other times, however, the mouse would run into the road, where, of course, the cat would chase it also. I wondered if the mouse was on a kamikaze mission[fn.50] to entice the cat into the road where, focusing on the mouse, the cat would not see a car coming and would be run over and killed. (See also: Pictures of a folk art wooden cat I purchased on this same vacation.) Return to Nova Scotia house in symmetrical repose

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