THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

NO, SHERI, THIS SITE IS NOT ABANDONED! | 2006-02-09

Shari asked, "Is this site abandoned?"

That made me feel good.

Joe says I'm the head honcho here, which has to be true -- you need somebody presiding, but what keeps me going is YOU. I just had to approve two legitimate comments and thirty-two pieces of spam.

In a sense, this is your blog, too. A major part of what I put here is your comments, and most of the rest is my responses to them. Those comments appear twice, once in comments and once here in the main body so I can answer them.

I'll get back to work as soon as I've welcomed Richard back.

POINT MISSED! | 2008-01-13

When I did the piece on solid state physics, etc., below, I got hte usual stuff about worm holes and so forth. I get the picture in my mind of a our future being running around in a deerstaqlker hat with a magnifying glass sending our bodies out to look at things.

The point of what ***I*** wrote had nothing to do with scifi conventions. Buck Rogers is out. The question is what is the unvierse we are looking into? There may be a vast number of them right up against ours, the ones WE perceive. But again, PLEASE don't send me a bunch of Hindu stuff about the Self to replace the scifi standards.

I was pointing out that the unviverse we OBSERVE is the OBSERVED universe because WE are observer. This is NOT a mystical concept anymore than it is mystical to realize that the unvierse did not HAVE to produce US.

To the Classical or Levantine civilizations, the idea that there IS a universe, or that a universe could exist which does not look like this one is as absurd as Oriental mysticism is to us. It isimpossible for us to realize that the Hindu/Buddhist concept of reincarnation is NOT religious, it is THEIR physics. They ASSUME reincarnation.

The Nicean Creed talks about "one syubstance," a concept which has no meaning to our physics. Theya re speaking of "substance" and "accidents," which made up the PHYSICAL description of thing in Classical society inthe same way we souls speak of molecules, and PLEASE do't give me the old "they had atoms" stuff!

The point is that we are, star-reaching wise, very primitive. The only way we can MOVE at all is by blasting something backwards to make us move forward. That's sort of like the Chinese use of black powder. It's easy to go back and say the Chinese showed us how to go to the mean but they obviously wouldn't have.

Anyway, this subject is at a dead end.

As I said, I just wrote that to get my concepts on record. Someday they'll be seen as absurd or obvious.

REALITY CHECK | 2006-07-15

I just checked Yahoo! and it turn out that the movie "The Night of the Generals" was made in 1967. So by the time I saw it I had had a lot more experience with totalitarian regimes and the third world than is good for anybody.

In that movie Omar Sherif was the hero, a German police official who was investigating murders done by some German generals in occupied France and occupied Poland. Finally, in late 1944, he accumulated evidence that the German general being played by Peter O'Toole had committed the murders. So he walked into that SS general's headquarters, surrounded by loyal SS men, to arrest him for murder. He had no backup.

As it happened he walked in to arrest this SS general at the very moment when it was announced that a bomb had been planted in Hitler's headquarters and the Fuhrer had been injured and all loyal Nazis were being called to arms to suppress the rebellion. So when the Sharif character announced to the SS general, the guy with a skull on his hat and a 9MM in his holster, guess what happened?

The general pulled out his pistol, shot the policeman, and went out to call his troops to action.

You may have difficulty believing this, but when the Sharif policeman got the bullet in his chest, his only reaction one of complete surprise, which seems to be what the movie makers expected of the audience.

I reacted with complete surpise to his surprise.

If a policeman went into a Stalinist enclave of the KGB to arrest the commanding general, what would any rational person expect would be the reaction of a general with a gun at his side? Forget the movie idea that this was at a moment of crisis. Today we are all aware of the fact that if a policeman went in alone to arrest a general in a totalitarian state, he would be shot.

I am trying to give you an insight into the mind of the 1960s. Americans then had no experience whatsoever with the real third world or with real totalitarianism. Back then a hippy was seriously considered to be a real revolutionary.

Back in the 1960s all of the media featured hippies and called them true revolutionaries. But back to our reality check. How could anybody believe that a policeman could talk in and arrest a genreal working for an absolutist dictator? By the same token, how could anyone believe that true revolutionaries were people who were always covered by the media?

You don't go in alone and arrest generals in a totalitarian state. And nowhere on earth are true revolutionaries given constant prime time coverage. The fact that none of this ever occurred to anybody at the time is manifest in the audience's total shock at the fact that Sharif's policeman was shot and the SS general went on with the emergency. The same population never considered it odd that "true revolutionaries" were on every talk show.

Reality check: somebody was nuts here, either me or the American public.

MDERPELDING MDERPELDING SUMMATION ON DAVES PIECE BELOW | 2008-06-05

This post makes me think that I have falsely interpreted some of Bob's writing.

I have always thought that the biggest problem in the modern world is that too many people make their livings on bullshit. And that they control our lives.

On our nickel.

Not on how the bullshit is produced and refined.

Merry Olde England bullshit begat Yankee bullshit.

Throw in some Germanic bullshit and John Dewey with the Yankee bullshit and you get the truly modern bullshit in PC America. And the holy PhD.

All not worth a plugged nickel.

Oh, and in the interest of diversity, I shouldn't exclude Jewish bullshit, arguably the finest bullshit on the planet.

Now however, I finally understand.

One must not discriminate between bullshit and reality, but between different kinds of bullshit.

Reality be damned.

It's all bullshit.

Uh-Oh...I've become post-modern.

-- mderpelding

You describe perfectly the levels of nonsense we need to brush aside as step one. But we don't need another piece of BS called "post-modern." Reality is not "post-modern." It's just REALITY.

I am always rethinking the BASICS. We need to step back, take a deep breath, and take a completely, totally absolutely fresh look at really. There is a growing realization that what is being said is just silly.

ALL of it.

What I say is usually so simple that people just don't GET it:

Screw the labels. We need to THINK FOR OURSELVES.