Laughing and Laughter, the Reasons of Humor

Decades ago I had read a French Essay on Laughter, and the author posed two reasons why people laugh at things, or, well, three, and the third thing he did not much like.  Firstly, we laugh at anything which reveals our Mortal Condition – things that point out that we are mere animals and not truly spiritual beings, or, if we do not lose all Hope, that at the least our Spirituality is somewhat mixed with the Carnal.  Thus we laugh at the Scatological (jokes about Poop), or the Sexual.  We laugh at some rather dark jokes about Death (the doctor said he had two things to tell me.  That I only had six months to live, and that he should have told me five months ago).  The second thing that we find funny is Ambiguity, that is, when we find associations between things that are normally not connected, or in innuendo, where two things may be suggested at the same time – a pure thing and a not-so-pure thing.   All puns are funny for their ambiguity, and criticized for their inability to be translated into any foreign language.    The Frenchman allowed that a third category may exist for Laughter, but it should not be encouraged, and that was from laughing about something merely stupid or ridiculous, such as Woody Allen movies.  The Frenchman argued that laughing at Stupidity was just Humor for the Stupid.  Stupid people are not deep enough to contemplate the conflicts between their Spiritual and Animal Natures, and so nothing about their Mortal Condition can even evoke a simpleminded smile, and when they are so stupid they can barely understand one thing at a time let alone two things at once, then, well, they only think it is funny when they find something dumber than they are.

Well, I think the Frenchman was on to something, but saw only the negative pole of his Third Category  -- laughing at the Ridiculous.  He recognized that Stupid People would laugh at the Perplexing or that which evaded any sense or meaning.  The Frenchman failed to consider how this Same Category would apply to Intelligent People.  What of the Transcendent or that which is Amazingly Inexplicable?   When Archimedes was settling into the bathtub and saw the water level rise, and instantaneously arrived at the discovery of ascertaining Volume by Fluid Displacement, he laughed about it.  When Oppenheimer realized he could Destroy the Entire World and all Life on Planet Earth with Atomic Weapons by splitting little tiny atoms, well, he couldn’t stop laughing for a week.  The Scientific Community still thinks it’s hilarious.   Well, no, that is me trying to be facetious – Good Science versus Bad Science, but it’s not really funny.  But it is funny when we are surprised or delighted about things. 

So, yes, things can be so Amazing that they are funny.   I should not blame the Frenchman for not seeing it, because, well, after all, I read his essay almost 50 years ago and I only just thought of this additional factor now.  The circumstance was that I was tossed a Musical Solo without warning and with just seconds to deliberate performed it better than I had any reason to believe possible, and laughed about it afterwards, so much so, that I wondered what was so funny.

Oh!  Or perhaps the Laughing from Amazement Category is simply the inverse of the First Humor Principle, but instead of the Spiritual Being laughing at being found a mere Animal, this time the Animal is laughing at being shown to be a Spiritual Being.   We laugh and smile when we are shown our Transcendence.   

Ninety Nine Requisites for Civilization

(a Work in Progress) 

One.    Sustainable economic model.  Growth Capitalism is unsustainable.  Economics must be planned.

Two.    Government must be by Meritocracy.  Democracy does not represent everybody, only the winners.  Losers are virtually disenfranchised.  As Meritocracies select from every social sphere, a Meritocracy is certainly more of an Ideal form of Government.

Three   No cash money.  Transactions are to be electronic and recorded.

Four     Durable Property is to be registered and tracked.

Five      No marriage.  If Divorce is allowed then Marriage becomes a Legal Fiction anyway.  Quarrelling for Marriage in order to attain certain rights and benefits should not be an issue. Property rights and access to Services should not be linked to Marriage Status in any case.

Six       All Health Care is Public and free to the Public.  Policies regarding the extent of Health Care Services, that is, to what extent it is attempted to make sick and aging people immortal will be decided by responsible government agencies.   No Private For Profit  health Care will be available as this is only a mechanism for Rich People to take up all the good doctors for themselves and leave ordinary people with subpar services.   If the Rich and Powerful want good services for themselves, then they will work to guarantee good services for everybody – if they must feed from the same trough as everyone else, then the food will be good for everyone.

Seven   All Education will be Public and free to the public.  No For Profit Private Schooling will be available as this is only a mechanism for Rich People to take up all the good teachers for themselves and leave ordinary people with subpar services.   If the Rich and the Powerful want good education for their children, then they will work to have good public schooling.   Again, if they must feed from the same trough as everyone else, then the food will be good for everyone.

Eight   No expectation of Public Privacy.  All public movement, all public commerce, and all public communication will be observed and recorded, and archived as it is deemed appropriate.   So far as I see, Privacy Laws serve only to protect Criminals and Terrorists.  Honest People have nothing to hide.   In fact, Honest People have everything to gain from complete surveillance, and that is that they will never be falsely accused of anything.  The Records of Truth will always be their Alibi.  And Criminals will no longer be able to hide behind Privacy, pretending to be outraged whenever they are caught raping, murdering and pillaging the honest and up-front community.

Nine    Concentration of Wealth must be prevented.  Of the 21 Known Civilizations, all have collapsed due to complication involving Concentration of Wealth issues, where Rich People accumulated the greatest part of Wealth and Economic Power to themselves, depriving the Public Sector of the barest resources to maintain all the necessary Public Infrastructures.   No Family Wealth will be passed down  to the next undeserving generations .  Also, among the people an approximate economic equality will be maintained.  I would suggest something like a 7 Tiered Income Plan, where the highest paid people will not receive more than about 5 times more than those getting the First Rung Payments.  Each advancing Pay Rung would provide a 33.33% increase over the previous Pay Rung, going up 7 steps.   The Pay Multipliers would be as this – 1 then 1.33 then 1.8 then 2.4 then  3.2 then 4.2 then 5.6.  Such a system would allow for the full range of remuneration from young people still living as dependents to those at the top of their careers and social influence.  Again, if all people must live within such a system, then the pay will be fair.  Again, if everyone must eat from the same trough then those in power will make sure the food is good. 

Ten    There will be no ‘Serving Time’ from Criminal Behavior.  Criminals will not be re-integrated back into Society until there is a Strong Scientific Probability that the Criminal Behavior issue had been addressed and rectified.  Having the option for Capital Punishment not only offers a strong source of negative motivation for the criminal, it also can relieve society from an interminable obligation to guard and care for a hopelessly negative Being, if that is how the criminals Psychological Appraisal works out.  

Eleven    Crimes of Passion and Crimes committed without strong motives of interest or advantage, where the motivational thinking seemed weak or mislead, will be deemed Non-Criminal  and will be assigned to Agencies which will provide Re-Education Resources or Psychological Intervention resources.  Those who comply will receive no Systematic Demerits for their transgressions.   Of course, for the non-remedial, there will have to be a continued supervision where the Public would be deemed to be endangered.

Twelve    No Private Arsenals.   Government cannot share the capacity for Force and Duress with Power-Seeking  Individuals who will use their Arms to set up personal zones of absolute influence – Bank Robers, Muggers, husbands who threaten to shoot wives and children, etc.   Hunting as a Sport can be permitted as long as the Weapons involved are stored within Public Facilities.  No one should ever be allowed to take home a gun.

Thirteen    One Language.  All previous Civilizations failed to a greater or lesser degree in the requirement to get everyone speaking the same language.   Fairness would require an Intra-Global Committee of the Best Linguistic Scholars to assemble, and not be allowed ‘out’, until they have constructed a language that includes some of the best of all the major language groups, that is consistent in its spelling and grammar, and where ease of learning is balanced with its final level of utility for those who will have to use it to convey the most intelligent thinking and reflecting.   For instance, the English Progressive Tense, that is those puzzling ‘ing’ endings, while it is difficult to learn, it provides a Thought-View of the action verb that is not certainly understood in languages that do not have the progressive tense.   Yes, some Great Literatures will recede and be forgotten, but a New Language opens the Gates for new Opportunities to write New Masterpieces…. Like as Shakespeare had played wild with the New English just after the period when most of Educated England had been speaking French and plays in English was rather still something of a novelty.  A New Language will give us New Shakespeares.   

Fourteen    One Political Jurisdiction.  More than one Political Jurisdiction leads to competition for resources, and that leads to Balance of Power Politics, and that leads inevitably to War.  And the problem with War is that it is extremely likely that the most undeserving and immoral Political Organization will win.  History is practically an uninterrupted chronicle of Barbarian Victories over more peaceful Civilizations.  The Job of Civilization is to reach out and be Inclusive, incorporating and civilizing the Barbarians before they can become a Problem for others besides just themselves.

Fifteen    Population Control.  This a natural correlation to Sustainability and Economic Planning.  No factor stains resources more than an ever expanding Population.  Modern Society has mostly relied upon the ‘Miracle’ of Science to multiply resources  to keep even with the multiplying population count, but what Natural Science points out in a thousand ways is that every System is subject to Saturation.  There can be too many people on the face of the earth, until the System becomes Self-Poisoning – correcting its own imbalance by attacking its own very Self.   And, yes, while Nature can take care of the Problem by itself, if left to that point, it all becomes most frightfully ugly, collapsing all Order and Civilization along the way.  Civilization must take charge and arrange for Sustainable Population levels on its own, intelligently and compassionately.  If not every woman can fit into the Planning for having a baby, then at least every woman should be included in the Mothering Plan for infants and Young Children.   And children should not be produced haphazardly.  Parents should be selected for a broad range of qualities and talents, with the idea for both expanding the Human Potential and maintaining those attributes we already possess.   Also, by limiting Population, more focus can be concentrated upon education.

Sixteen     One Religion.  One of the broadest intellectual fallacies current in the literatures of the Modern World is that all Religions are basically the same.  Well, if they were, we would not be having so many problems with Religion.  Take Christian Protestantism – a rejection of Jesus in a headlong effort to turn Paul into a virtual God who teaches that what God does not personally come down into the World to stop with His own Hand is by default allowed and even Blessed by God.  So we have all these Protestants who for centuries have believed that all the Crime, Slavery, Exploitation, and War they have brought among us was all part of God’s Divine Plan, only because they were able to ‘get away with it all’. Other World Religions, who react so violently against insult that one can hardly dare mentioning them by name, well, they cannot claim to be favored by God for any great success, illicit or otherwise, but their belief is that if they have not succeeded, it is because they have not taken enough Extreme Measures.  It’s odd, but in the Christian World a Martyr is  come one who has been victimized for Righteousness.  But in this Other Altar-Religious World a ‘martyr’ is someone who lashes out with violence and murder to get all the things that he thinks God owes him.  And then, if he succeeds, he is as good as any Christian Protestant for claiming that Success in Crime is obviously God’s Plan and God’s Reward for, well, for what?  It can’t be for Righteousness.  Oh!  This is where both Paul and that Other Prophet had to create a New Virtue… a virtue that required no real goodness, the Virtue of Faith.   Well, such Anti-Religions cannot be allowed to continue in their corruption of the Public Sense of Morality.  Religion must be about instilling a sense of Love, Public Cooperation, Honesty, Morality, Righteousness and Big-Heartedness.   There should be only One basic Religion, but as in the Catholic, Hindu and Buddhist Spheres, it can be permitted that various Sects may arise, each focusing on some special Saint, Avatar or Angel to their particular liking.   The most important Test is that there should never be any Teaching that Evil should ever find some Reward or Blessing from God, whether by some Morbid Faith or in God’s failure to prevent moral outrages being interpreted as God’s Plan by some predestined and deterministic Default.   But plenty of people think this way, and for a long while they should take up a great many places in the Re-Education Schools and Institutions.

Seventeen    Engineering the Planet.   Sometimes one has to prime a well with water before you can get any more water.   Rain Forests are self-perpetuating.  The deep Green of their foliage absorbs the Sun’s radiant heat, sucking it into the very wood by the biochemical process of photosynthesis,  so that Rain Forests give off a coolness that condenses  the moisture-rich warm air that blows in over them, creating Rain, which, in turn is evaporated up and passed downwind to drier regions where various meteorological conditions can bring it out in Rain.  Well, one can wait for perhaps thousands of years for a Rain Forest to spontaneously arise, or one can plant one and lay in irrigation until it begins to ‘take’ on its own.  With the End of Growth For Profit Capitalism, where nothing is done unless for some private want or pleasure, and where Economic Planning takes over where Ends are Planned, ostensively for Good or Practical reasons, then we would think that some effort should be put into Re-Vitalizing the planet.  Of course, everything depends upon Energy Resources.  Huge Irrigation Networks, such as had been built by the Roman and Chinese Civilizations, require vast inputs of Labor and Energy.  If such resources become available, well, it would be Noble to use them to Noble Purpose.   We can think likewise for restoring Animal and Plant biodiversity.

Eighteen    Pay for Compliance.   Right now, in our somewhat Pre-Civilized State, we have institutionalized a kind of Labor Slavery where most of those being paid are being paid for their Labor.  It is Servitude or Starve.   People are told that if they do not like their Jobs then they are perfectly free to quit.  Well, yes, but then there is rent to pay and people need to eat.  So, basically, servitude is forced upon most everyone.   And, yes, in the Barbarian State where all priorities are set by the demands of Growth Capitalism, this makes sense – Capital needs to enslave Labor.  But when Civilization takes birth and Economic distribution is Planned, then what will the mechanism for Distribution of Wealth be if not an exchange of Money for Labor.  Keep in mind that all the really necessary manufacturing that the World requires could be done within 100 square miles and by a tiny fraction of the World’s Population, as China is presently demonstrating.  Many places in the World do not have local resources or access to cheap transportation infrastructures, whereby it would cost more to make the people ‘ go to work’ then simpl.y to just give them free money.   Look at the high cost of labor in some countries.  In America if a person gets a job, then they need a car, work cloths, and then they develop expensive tastes which need to be satisfied, and they end up costing the Planet more than if they were simply paid to stay home and live on the cheap.  So this brings us to the idea of why not paying people Money for just their Social Compliance and Good Behavior?  In the pre-civilized state social compliance is enforced negatively – People are threatened with jail and prison.  And this only enforces a kind of bare-minimum of correct social behavior – it is not so much that Virtues are encouraged as Vices are punished.  All the Shady borderline behaviors are allowed to go on under all the un-turned rocks of Society.  But if people were paid for their Social Compliance then all the motivations would be in a positive direction.  Exactly what is a Social Compliance.  Well, first, I could think of wearing a ID locator devise and a camera and listening set.  A Total Surveillance Society would need a great many surveillance devices, of which many could be rigged upon street poles and hilltop towers.   But it would not take much subversion to detect ‘blind-spots’  or use sabotage to create blind-spots, and so actual members of the public walking around with surveillance gear would help to fill in any possible gaps.   Yes, the modern sensibility would be appalled at setting up so many spies, but we already have such a thing, and we call it the Police Department.   We dress the Spies in Blue Uniforms so they are easy enough to detect and avoid.   Using the Multitude of Ordinary People would only be to follow the same principle of implementing Social on-the-street observation, only it would be much more efficient and comprehensive.   Oh, and then there is the matter that such Surveillance People could neither easily be the Victim of a Crime or especially not a Perpetrator.   They could be Safe from Others, and Society would be Safe from them.  We would call that a Win Win scenario, no?  Then, of course, people could contribute freely to the Arts, Education and the Medical Services Community.  These Social Contributions could be figured into the 7 Grade Pay Scale as mentioned in Item Nine above.

Twenty     No more Lawyers.  Civilization can satisfy all the needs of Justice with Magisterial Justice, that is, by setting all legal matters simply before the Courts – the Judges and their Legal Secretaries and Legal Clerks.  In some Societies the obvious impression is that those with the best lawyers and legal resources get the best results out of their Legal Systems, and those with little or no money effectively have no access to Legal Resources.    Civilization would require that everybody have equal access to the Courts.  To discourage frivolous lawsuits, it must be in the exceptional instances whereby not every lawsuit have some criminal component, that is, that no lawsuit should ever get as far as the courtroom without one or both of the parties involved criminally refusing to settle for what is ‘Right’.  Of course, one of the major innovations in the Justice System is that the Staffs of Legal Clerks and Secretaries advise and counsel  the parties of lawsuits regarding their legal rights and the rights of those in their opposition.   One might worry of the honesty of such a system, but in this legal framework, as well as with the Police and all other Public and Political Servants, all Income would be from only one Source, their Government Check, and all their Property would be subject to periodic audit.  Also, it would be a good idea that Police and Judges never work in the same district as their family and close family connections.  Presently Judges now decide cases in their own communities where they know all the families involved and where they are members of the same Country Clubs as many of the Lawyers that appear before them – that is, they work in a huge web of conflicting personal interests.  All that needs to stop.

Twenty One    No Elections for Sheriffs. Judges or Police.   Honesty, how can a Sheriff ever arrest anybody who has voted for him, or whose vote in the next Election may be critical.  Likewise with Judges and Police.  It must have been the silliest or most inherently Corrupt notion coming out of Democracy, that Law Enforcement could be subject to Popular Vote – as it would set up a situation whereby any faction that could reasonably present itself as the Deciding Vote could quite possibly get away with murder. 

NS Design CR WAV NXT Violin Viola Modification

There is a body modification that is easy to do, cheap to do, and will improve the feel and performance envelope of whatever NS Design Violin or Viola that you may happen to own.  I presently own a CR4 Viola, but had had a WAV4.  You can read the Leo Volont reviews at Amazon.   

I’ve been very happy with the CR4 Viola.   Yes, maybe I should have simply gotten a CR5 Violin which would have given me the same low end of a Viola, theoretically anyway, while still allowing me the high range of a Violin’s E string.   The one problem there, though, was that I tried converting a Violin to a short scale Viola, using the fattest four strings from a set of strings for the NS Design CR5 – a fat C, then the usual  G, D, A, E – and I would simply set aside the E string.  Well, the C string would seem too long for the job, as I couldn’t tune it down to C without it sounding loose and flabby.  Maybe it would have worked on an actual CR5, as the specifications say it is a 13 inch scale, that is, about a half inch longer than the violin I had actually been experimenting with, and that may have made enough of a difference for the setup to be workable.  Violin strings have remarkably little ‘wiggle room’ that is, compared to guitars which can be tuned up or down several steps without severe implications.  However, what I do know for sure is that steel viola strings, from all of the various vendors, work and sound marvelous on the CR4 Viola – no flabby C string there. The CR5 would still be a big Question Mark for me. 

Anyway, back to the main topic – the Modification.  So what was my problem that I had to do a Modification?   Well, let me explain.  I would be doing a long practice, and getting better and quicker, and as I play by ear along with CD’s or canned music, well, my mind, that is, my Left Side Brain, would wander, allowing the Right Side brain to do all the ‘heavy lifting’ with no real conscious attention being paid, and then sometimes, suddenly, my left hand would be completely thrown off the neck of the viola, and the viola would come pounding down onto my chest.  It would have been on the floor, if I hadn’t tied the viola around my neck. 

Oh, let me explain.  There is a bit of a universal problem with Electric Violins in general and especially with the NS Design Violins in particular, which is essentially a big block of wood, and that is that they are much heavier than traditional Violins, and so there is the complaint that a great deal of effort is required from the Left Hand to simply hold the violin up and keep it in place, and that this detracts from the Left Hand’s ability and freedom to simply do the playing.  My solution for this problem was to run a short rope, with clips attached to both ends, through the Shoulder Rest Post and collar it around my neck.  Because most of the weight of a NS Design is in the lower body, well, therefore, the support choke collar holds up most of the weight, and it frees up the left hand so that it only has to be concerned with the fingering.  But what exactly was causing my left hand to break loose? 

I was puzzled, and so I began to insist that my Left Brain not wander off too far during Practice and that it must put some minimal energy into laying wait for another such instance of dropping the instrument so I could see by what mechanism my hand was being torn away from my NS Design Viola.  Anyway, I finally caught the cause – I would be playing on the upper to mid-neck when suddenly I would feel it necessary to punch a note most easily accessible if I shot down all the way to the bottom of the neck and hit the Fat C string just where the finger board runs out and off into space ahead of the bridge.  Turning the NS Design violins or violas up-side-down reveals that about 3 or 4 inches before the neck completely flares out into the full body of the instrument, there is a kind of neck to body buttress.  Do take note that the NS Design is basically a single block of wood with an ebony finger board attached, so that the neck and body are one piece and continuous.  Well, on a real violin, the neck in its last inch or so, flares out so that it can buttress into the full width of the body.  The NS Design imitates this flare, but does it a good three or four inches before the relatively narrow body of the NS Design actually takes shape.  Of course I took off that little ‘Wing Ding Thing’—that piece that is supposed to inform the traditional violin player of where a real violin’s body would begin, so that he could scale and reference himself for all those ‘positions’ that a real violin player must pay attention to, since he has no frets to ‘fret’ about  and count up and down as do real guitar players.   But I had left the screw in the hole so that I would not lose it, and since that screw and washer rise up by about 3/8 of an inch, well, that may have been part of the problem too… so I took it out.    Anyway, in quickly bringing my hand down the neck and reaching over the top of the fingerboard, I had come down into the widening neck buttress and it was prying my hand off the neck.   Now, that neck buttress extension, as I have said, is about 3 or 4 inches long, and the corners to the front and bottom sides are sharp right corner edges.  Yes, ouch! 

Well, since I sometimes have a scotch or two during practice, and since a scotch or two tends to free up the mind for so many more possibilities then a sober mind would ever dare to contemplate, well, I instantly knew what I had to do with my twenty-five hundred dollar precision musical instrument to fix its problem – grab a file and rasp off that front buttress edge and those sharp side edges.  And it worked!   

Well, it wasn’t quite all that simple.  I have a fairly nice bunch of tools laying around, and plenty of sand paper for various jobs, and so the job wasn’t all that haphazard, and it even turned out looking pretty nice.   I do not know precisely how long it took, as I did the job incrementally – the first night I cut into the corners by about a quarter of an inch, and that took about 40 minute of rough filing and then progressively sanding and shaping with first 80 grain sandpaper, then 120, then 180 then 220 then 400 then 600.  After the first night it felt so good that I was encouraged, but since I still felt the remnants of ‘edges’ I decided to cut a bit deeper, and take the wood down about a half inch from where the edges had been, taking the cuts up to the edge of the Screw Insert used for the Wing Ding Body Reference Thing.  And that took another 40 minutes.  But if you were to do the entire job at once, without having to do all of the sandpapering twice, well, I suppose it would only take you about an hour to do the whole job. 

Now the NS Design CR feels totally different – like I had gone out and bought a whole new instrument.  Now I can bring my hand comfortably all the way down to the very bottom of the fingerboard, where I used to have to strain and stretch.  Now it is all utterly comfortable.  And it has such a wonderful ‘feel’.  

Oh, about files and rasps.   If the rasps are too coarse, then it will be difficult to dig into the CR’s relatively hard wood, and when you begin stroking, the strokes will be jumpy and irregular.   But if the rasps are too fine, then the job will take longer than necessary.  So if you have to go out and buy a file, then buy a cheap multi-use file, if you can find one, that has two or four different rasp resolutions, and you can decide on the best one as you do the job.  About sandpaper – you can do a lot of digging and shaping with coarse sandpaper, that is, about  80 grit, so don’t think you have to take the job all the way down with the file rasp.   When you have the shape well established, then go up the grades of sandpaper gradually, as stated above, so that you can take out the scratches gradually as you go.  Now, I took the job up to 400 and then 600 grit, which is very very fine.  Was that entirely necessary?  Well, I have seen people do work on their guitars finishing at 220 grit, and the jobs looked good and felt smooth.  But you can feel the difference if you continue on to 400.  600 is like a glass polish, and you won’t really get wood dust anymore, but it will bring out a grain-less shine, and the smoothness will be angelic, that is, only an angel will be able to tell the difference between a 400 grit and a 600 grit finish… but you will know because you did it… and, besides, it never hurts to toss the Angels a bone once in a while, so to speak.    Oh, an old Wood Shop Tip – after you begin your fine sandpapering, take a wet rag and moisten the surface of the wood, as that will raise the grain a bit and allow you to take the smoothness  down to the very root of the wood.  

Oh, here is some advice if you also work and drink at the same time as I do (I should mention that Music Practice has its rules, the ones that concern us here are that, for adults, the reward for conscientious Practice is a neat shot of scotch every hour on the hour (and no shortcutting the clock!), and then there is the rule that Instrument Maintenance counts as Practice too.  One should never feel that Instrument Maintenance, or Electronics Setup or whatever is an ‘interruption’ of Music Practice – it IS Music Practice – as much as struggling with a scaled progressive slide-up bridge transition to a change in Key.  Anyway, probably even if you are as sober as the bitterest old nag you can think of, you should take the precaution of taping up what you don’t want to accidently mar or scratch.  I took simple packaging tape and circled the neck and the upper body, and remembered to fold the last end of the tape over on itself so that un-taping when the job was over  would not be a problem of finger-nailing up the invisible edges that you can no longer find.  

Really, the Job was fairly non-intrusive – after I finished, the NS Design CR was still in tune.  Of course, the NS Designs are famous for staying in tune, but I still was surprised that after all of that scraping and flopping around on the kitchen table, with all the cats getting in the way, that the strings and bridge had not been disturbed enough to change any of the strings even by a mere fraction of a note.    

Yes, for an hours work, and the price of tools and stuff that wouldn’t amount to any more than you’d pay for another set of strings, you can get a so much more aesthetic ‘feel’ to your NS Design, and increase the ease of playing, or if you have small hands, actually increase the absolute range of your playing envelope.  

Yes, the NS Designs does come great right out of the box, but, yes, you can make them even better.

The Soviet Lesson: Black Markets A Danger to Primary Economies

Most People have no idea what really happened to cause the Collapse of the Soviet Union.  They suppose it was a contest between Freedom and Oppression and that Freedom won.  Actually, it had been a contest between the Black Market and the Official Economy.  

Things had been fine under Stalin.  Stalin tolerated no Black Market.  The Gulags were not filled with Political Prisoners, no, that is all a Conservative Right Wing Myth created to discredit Planned Economies, so, no, Stalin was tossing the Black Marketers into the Siberian Labor Camps and throwing away the key, and good for him.  But Stalin could not live forever, and the people who followed him decided to do what most other Government Officials do with Black Marketers, that is, to give them free run and let them do business as long as they pay sizeable bribes.  

Finally by the time of Gorbachev it was recognized that the huge Black Markets were something of a Cancer that was holding back the Real Economy – that the reason so many things were being rationed, after Planning had indeed ‘planned’ for just the right amount of just about Everything, was that Petty Government Officials in league with Black Marketers were siphoning off the Cream of the Economy and selling to Foreign Markets for pocket-able Hard Currency.  So Gorbachev made a huge mistake.  He ANNOUNCED that he was going to crack down on Corruption.  One should never ANNOUNCE such a thing.  One needs to put together a Secret Police, formed on the policy that loyalty would begat loyalty, and that these loyal secret police would have great careers for the rest of their lives if they only obeyed orders NOW.  Then there should have been a Mass Overnight Arrest of EVERYBODY.  That is how Stalin would have done it, and when was Stalin ever wrong?  

But Gorbachev tipped his hand and the Black Marketers and Corrupt Public Officials were quicker on the move than he was.  And there were so many of them!  Honest Officials were clearly outnumbered.  The Crooks took over.  It wasn’t about Freedom at all, was it?  Everyone knows the big Winner of the Big Collapse was the Russian Mob.  Still is, though Putin is making an effort to bring back some level of decency and honesty, law and order… and all the while being blamed for it by the West, who has always taken the side of the Black Marketers, Petty Corrupt Officials and the Mob – just as they do in their own Countries.   After all, who can win an honest election without all that untraceable cash that comes from bribery and corruption? 

This brings us to the Present Condition of the West, or rather, of the entire Global Economy.  With Unemployment Rising, we should really expect that people will not simply stay home (or stay in the street after their homes have been foreclosed) and starve to death.  In Arab Countries and Africa they are recruited into Crazy Ass Militias who attempt to take over Governments, so that afterward about 1% of them can get good paying Government Jobs when they are finally Victorious and get to run the same kind of shabby show as the people they had fought against.  It is very similar to Democracy in that way, that nothing ever changes except the crooks who are in power.   But in Countries where the people are a bit more squeamish about open rebellion, or are wise enough to recognize that the Foot Soldiers of a Rebellion are just being exploited and will eventually end up dead or with nothing, well, in this case, the people turn to Crime.  In Countries with a sizeable Organized Crime Presence, the Unemployed simply migrate over to the Dark Side.  

Now, as I said before, a Black Market Economy is a Cancer on a Good Economy.  How?  Well, firstly, criminal enterprises do not really pay much in taxes.  Take America for example, where they have an Income Tax.  When the economy was healthy and a large percentage of working Americans had well paying manufacturing  jobs, they paid most of the taxes (while the Rich were ostensively paying a Higher Bracket, as they call it, in all actuality this was offset by a thousand and one ‘deductions’ which allowed them to virtually pay nothing at all).  But what about at present, when all of these Former Workers  are now working in Illegal Gambling, Illegal Drugs, Trafficking Arms and Sex Slaves?  No taxes.  Then there is the Complicit Government Corruption – the local Public Officials and the Local Police who take their bribes to cast a blind eye to it all, well, they become Economically Dependent upon the continuation of it all.  

The Bigger it all gets, the more Self Interest is involved in maintaining it.  And just like with the Former Soviet Union, we may eventually come to the day when it finally simply takes over.  Government Offices will be shut down and Police Forces released from duty.  And we will finally all be FREE, free to obey what any petty thief or mobster tells us to do or we’ll get killed if we don’t.   

Oh, it’s Great for the Mobsters!  Just like after the Fall of the Soviet Union, they can come on the Televised News and Celebrate how wonderful it is to finally be FREE… all while the really Good People will be too intimidated to speak their minds.   Oh, and besides, the Media will be in on it anyways, just like they are now.

Metal Plated Glass Bead Free Energy Cold Fusion

I remember back in the late eighties or early nineties, that a TV news show, Prime Time Live, had advertised a story for the next Thursday night about a new invention.  An amateur researcher, a president of a semi-large manufacturing company, had found that when he added a small electrical current to jars of water of a certain size filled with water and metal plated glass beads of a certain size and composition, then the water would break into a rolling boil.  The steam energy from the boiling water could be sent through a dynamo and create hundreds of times more energy than the small current it had taken to precipitate the reaction.  It was effectively ‘free energy’, the heart of a perpetual motion machine.   The Researcher had packaged up his Experiment and sent five full sets to the best Universities in America in order to verify his findings.  The advertisements for the show ran for a day, and then they were pulled, and it was like nothing had ever happened.    

It was probably before the Internet really took off.  The incident was therefore relatively more easily delete-able from the Media Record.  There is really no hint of it today, except that a few people like myself remember that they saw an intriguing preview on TV. 

Why the clamp down?  Well, back then, and probably now as well, the American Dollar and the entire World Economy hinged on the price and availability of Oil.  Maintaining or Obstructing the international flows of oil was a way of keeping a kind of Control on all of the World Economies and Governments.   Also, the Cost of Oil was a large factor in the Price of almost everything else.  If there were suddenly Free Energy, well, Prices would have collapsed.  Economies previously hampered only by the costs and limitations involved in procuring Oil, such as Japan, China and India, well, their growth would suddenly be limitless, given the amount of Labor they could move into the Factories.  But given the inevitable Currency Collapses in the West, and the devaluation of anything denominated or pegged to the Dollar – a currency which is de facto supported by the Price of Oil, these huge Asian Producers would no longer have Foreign Markets to export to, but since they no longer needed Hard Foreign Currencies in order to pay their Energy Bills, well, they could produce Goods entirely for their own consumption, become Affluent in their own Terms, and largely ignore the West, that is, the American Empire.  

So the American think tanks that had probably been summoned together overnight for some emergency meeting, when Prime Time Live was about to run their story, quickly concluded that Free Energy would be too Globally destabilizing, and for “National Security” reasons, the Invention would have to be intercepted, shut down, and its memory deleted from the National Consciousness.  I would guess the World Media Markets never even heard a peep.  

Now it is about 20 years later.  We are in a different position now.  We have Global Warming.  We are witnessing an economic phenomena they call ‘peak oil’, that is, everybody in the ‘know’ knows that all the big finds in Oil have already been found, that the large ‘gushers’ are well off their first blush and now pipes have to be run many times further down to get just a fraction of what once came from merely punching a hole in the surface, that is, the World is fast approaching the point where we will all simply run out of gas.  

Yes, Free Energy would still be Globally Destabilizing, but now we are contemplating Complete Ruin from almost every other corner also.  At least the Destabilization that would come from having Free Energy could possibly come with an eventual happy ending.  Yes, prices would drop, but then afterward, everything would be that much cheaper.   

And what could we do with Free Energy?   First we could tackle the Global Climate Change Thing.  No, I think it is already too late to reverse what will be the almost certain consequences that will follow from having the Green House Gases in our Atmosphere which are already there – the Ice Caps melting from the Poles and the Sea Level rising, and all the World Wide droughts and such.  But with Free Energy we could finally afford to implement Engineering Solutions.  We could use vast Engineering Projects to basically adapt the World to meet the Challenges of Climate Change.  First, we could begin to desalinate Sea Water on a gigantic scale and then pump it Inland – in America, the Euro-Asian Steppe, Mongolia and China, India, Africa, and Australia.   We would do this for two reasons – one, to irrigate new planted forests in view of creating vast new Rain Forests, and, secondly,  simply to get all that extra water out of the Oceans and put it in new inland lakes, dug deep to hold a great deal of water and made broad to add to evaporation which will give us even more rain to support the new Rain Forests.  Of course these new huge Rain Forest would draw Carbon out of the Atmosphere and turn it into all that Wood out of which trees are constructed.   It might take a Century, but the World’s Climate could be ‘Re-Normalized’.   

Also, with Free Energy, we could begin to build the necessary Sea Walls, if projections indicate that it would be impossible to move ‘that much’ water inland.   We could also dredge the Oceans themselves, making them deeper.  Heck, with Free Energy we could build Ice Machines at the Poles and  simple stock pile Ice Cubes where there used to have been sheet ice.   Yes, with Free Energy we could successful meet and survive an encounter with all the consequences of Global Climate Change.  As it is now, I am not too sure. 

With Free Energy, we could really kind of Re-Build the World. 

But, I wonder how those Metal Plated Glass Bead Contraptions worked.  I thought about it.  Ordinarily when you run current into water, you get electrolysis, that is, the water, that is, the Hydrogen and Oxygen Molecule that we call water, separate into hydrogen and oxygen  atoms which bubble up to the surface.  I was thinking that perhaps the Metal Plated Glass Beads somehow interrupt or change the Electrolysis Process somehow recombining the Hydrogen and Oxygen components, but leaving a great amount of Energy behind in the process, which boils the water. 

It is probably would not be too difficult to reproduce the same results, even for small nations with enough assets to reproduce the kind of Metal Plated Glass Beads that were apparently being made for some kind of industrial purpose back in America some 20 years ago.  Maybe they only need an Industrial Catalogue and could simply have every conceivable kind of Metal Plated Glass Bead FEDEX’d to them.  The Man who first discovered this process, while being without a doubt very smart, was no nuclear physicist – he probably had a hunch.  My guess is that he took an order for a new size of plated glass bead, and you know that a lot of plating is done using vats of liquid plating agent and electrical current.  Well, I am guessing that this particular vat inexplicably boiled over, and that at first he blamed the workers, but that some very experienced worker was able to convince him that all procedures were followed and that there was absolutely no negligence – that the vat simply kind of exploded all by itself.  So he was intrigued by it all and decided to play around with the phenomena until he got it down to its simplest terms – a certain kind of a metal plated glass bead in a jar of plain water.  He was probably killed for his bother.   This guy is probably the Father of the Next Great Era of Human Development, and nobody even knows what his name was.  Thank you America. 

 

Anyway, now that we have the Internet, I am throwing this idea up into the Air, and we will see if any developing economy, or even a Non-American Developed Economy sees it as an opportunity and takes some action. 

It would be the Greatest Invention since the Wheel or the Conquest of Fire.    It would revolutionize Culture and Economics to such an extent that, well, I could see them starting a New Dating system.  We would have Year One of  the Free Energy Era.

 

Hmmm, maybe somebody will invent it by this December and we will finally know what all of the December 2012 fuss has been about.   

What Would Enlightenment Be?

 

Well, we all remember Sankara’s Snake.   A farmer goes out at dusk and confronts a rope down on the ground about 10 meters away and ‘thinks’ it is a snake.  What this tells us is that we do not have Direct Perception of Reality, but that we perceive reality as a kind of imperfect reflection, through the Senses which apparently can be mistaken.  Well, Sankara spun and spun and spun the ramifications of that Story about the Rope being a Snake until everyone was convinced that the entire Material Universe was just an Illusion.  I think that was going a bit far.  After all, if it really is a snake and if it bites you, then is it Real?  

When I was very young and naïve I read stories of the Saints throughout History, of their Knowledge… their super-knowledge – knowing things they had no way to know, and their miraculous powers, and it occurred to me that they had found a way to a Sixth Super Sense, perhaps a Direct Perception of everything through the Medium of Gravity itself, the great Existential Force.  This Perception through Gravity locked them into the same Field of Being as everything else.  Yes, their limited brains could not process everything all at once, but they could learn to focus – bringing their attention down from Universal Visions of the Galaxies, to scanning the neighborhood to tell a distraught farmer where his favorite horse had gotten off to after the barn door had been  left open (a Sai Baba of Shirdi miracle).

So, no, I don’t think Enlightenment is just some kind of flimsy state of mind in which one is enlightened because he momentarily has what my mother would have called a “nice little nap”.  I think Enlightenment is an actual thing, that grants a new level of perception and a Direct Knowledge.

Then there are the Miracles.  Once one can sense Gravity, probably by becoming One with it, then one can manipulate Matter from inside of it.  Matter can be manipulated through its Gravity.  Now, yes, there could be the complication that Energy is required to manipulate matter, and this energy needs to come from somewhere.  So we shouldn’t expect any man to lift a mountain, since it has never been done before…not in recorded History.  But plenty else has been done, and we need to expect the same level of performance from any modern Enlightened Saint as of the Historical Enlightened Saints.   So Show us the Miracles.  It is Silly to Believe without them.

So, really, there should be two tests for Enlightenment – Direct Perceptions of anything in the Universal Gravitational Field, and the ‘miraculous’ manipulations of matter.  Unless all the vague spiritual talk and Zen Paradoxes can get us there, then it all seems rather little-sisterish.

Jesus Resigned being Messiah

One of the most compelling arguments offered up by Jews, to slap the faces of their Christian friends, is that Jesus was not the Messiah because, well, he never became a Messiah, that is, King of a Jewish Nation that would expand into an Empire that would have ruled the World.  What the Jews expected of their Messiah was a kind of a Genghis Khan who was just a fraction more successful.  After all, if a Mongol Tribesman with no help but from the Devil can almost conquer the World, than why couldn’t we expect a smart Jew to do just a bit better, having the help of God?

Well, the Jews kind of do have a point.  Jesus, while presenting all the evidence of being a World Class First Magnitude Saint, was, well, a complete failure as a Messiah.  While he was able to head up a relatively small band of missionaries, with some who quarreled and some who actually betrayed him in the end, well, he never even began to put together any kind of a foundation for National Kingdom or World Empire.

Perhaps the timing was bad.  I read the translations of Anne Catherine Emmerich’s “Life of Christ”, she being this wonderful visionary mystic during the life of Napoleon or there abouts.  What she says was that God had a particular schedule for the Messiah, but that the Jewish People continuously slowed things down by being, well, unworthy.  The time for the Jewish Messiah, historically, would have during a lapse between Empires, perhaps when Assyria, Egypt and Nineveh had fought each other into dysfunction and poverty, then a small tribal nation might have rose up and took over the whole game, much as Islam had been able to take advantage of the collapse of both the Roman and Persian Empires.  Anne Catherine Emmerich supposes that David had been meant to be Messiah, but that his naked dancing, cowardice with the Arc of Covenant (he abandoned it after one of its caretakers had died in an Arc accident), and his constant womanizing, and husband killing, put a hold on all that.  We can look upon David as having been the Bill Clinton of Messiahs, for which God had impeached him.  A Purity Campaign put in place by Elijah the Prophet, who was not even Jewish, eventually solved the problem, but it took 7 generations, and by that time the Greek World had conquered all of Near Asia, and Rome had a firm hold on the West – both were Dominant Civilizations still in their prime and at the top of their Political and Economic Powers.  Even the Powers of God could hardly push through all of that.

But there Jesus was and he had the Power and Blessings of God and especially His Angels.  While God is Great in His Heaven, down below there are the Angels who do all of the heavy lifting.  And the Angels were behind Jesus 100%. 

I think that Jesus began to realize the difficulties of actually taking Power.  As I alluded to above, Jesus would not just be taking over from within a Power Void, that is, reasserting Order from amidst the collapse of dysfunctional and obsolete Civilizations – gathering up the Lost Sheep lost in Chos.  He would have to give destructive death blows to Civilizations at the peak of their relative health and vitality – saving people from their happiness and success, rescuing people who are unaware that they have a problem.  And Tens of Thousands of people would have to die or maybe more… and, hey, let us not euphemize it… people would have to be murdered to achieve, well, purely political ends, even if they were to have some eventual Religious result.   Nowadays that seems okay to a great many people, that while private murder is still considered wrong, that somehow it is okay to kill people if one can conjure up some vague political excuse, such as, well, here is one from our current newspapers… the police break up a ‘peaceful’ protest that is turning ugly and violent, no doubt because the horrible police were acting provocatively, and so the peaceful protestors are now justified in taking up arms and slaughtering the police, with the blessings of both the American State Department and the British Foreign Office.   But we must understand that such lame excuses make for Horrible Religion.  Any Religion conceived in Violence and that uses Violence to advance its Cause would be forever stained by that terrible precedent, and that forever after, every Religious Zealot, even from within its own Fold, would think it proper to resort to Violence.  Look at Islam.  Islam resorted to violence, and today cannot get past it.  It’s entire History is one of waves of New Ignorant Tribesmen riding out of the hills to kill kill kill kill for their Newest Fundamentalist View of what they think Islam should be, always repeatedly returning Islam to the most Barbaric and Simplistic Terms, guaranteeing that Islam can never develop into a mature and blossomed Civilization.  It rose up on Violence, but Violence will always keep it down.  But I think Jesus was smarter than that.  He would rather have a failed Christianity than an Islam that can never be more than half successful.  

Oh, but Jesus did start down that road.  He caught himself, but not before taking a few steps in that direction.  We see him turning angry and getting ready for the Big Fight.  Remember how he, on his way to Jerusalem, blasted that poor fruitless fig tree, for being fruitless.  Yes, that would help it.  Jesus got angry, pure and simple.  And it would have made for Lousy Religion.  Are we to ‘blast’ people for ‘fruitless’ periods in their lives?  Why, no!  We even have a parable from Jesus, spoken when he was in a better and more religiously reflective mood, which praises the Farm Worker for nurturing a tree or vine that had been in a bad way and bringing it to Fruitfulness.  So, no, Jesus acted out of his better character by rendering violence to a tree, and I can bet he realized it and regretted it.

Then he got to Jerusalem and practically the first thing he did was go to the Temple and start flipping over Vender Tables and chasing the venders around with a whip.  Now, we can guess what was going on.  Even today the big Cathedrals and Pilgrimage Stops have Gift Shops, and they contribute to the cost of, well, running everything that needs to be run.  Everything costs money, after all.  And here Jesus is striking people with whips and ruining merchandise… hardly befitting a Jewish Messiah.   And I am sure Jesus realized the shame of that violence just as he realized it had been wrong to blast that poor tree.

He realized that the Purity of his Religion of the Kingdom of Heaven had already been sullied by his inappropriate behaviors.  He had only one choice – to resign.

Then we have Jesus in the Garden praying to God to “Take this Cup away from me”.  This is largely interpreted by Christians, ancient and modern, to mean that Jesus was being a Coward and asking God to not have him Crucified.  Well, Jesus was not a coward.  In fact, he was doing the exact opposite.  Jesus was giving up the Protection and Help of the Angels, surrendering the Position of Messiah to become an ordinary citizen, and ordinary Human Being – vulnerable to being beaten up, tortured and crucified.  He asked for it!  While he could forgive others of sins that they had repented, he could not really forgive himself.  Well, maybe he could have.  He could have apologized.  But then there still existed his Wisdom and Vision, his awareness of the Larger Situation, that his Kingdom of Heaven could not be instituted without a War on the bloodiest of scales, to found a Religion that would be useless as a Religion given the terms of Violence it would need to rise up on. 

Without a Moral and Peaceful Foundation, that will forever after be its own Shining Example, a Religion would be worse than useless.  A Religion founded on Violence and Immorality does more harm than good.  Bad Religion only stand in the way of Good Religion, and then it Bullies and Fights to get its way.

When Evil can be so mean and nasty, well, Good really doesn’t stand a much of a chance, does it?  So, you know, Jesus was right to give up.  You can’t push a Messiah on people.  You have to wait until things are so bad, generally, for everyone, that every man, woman, and child is crying, moaning and begging for One. Until then it is better to just let humanity go to blazes.