"The Eye of Silence"
Max Ernst 1943-44
Max Ernst (2 April 1891 – 1 April 1976)
was a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet.
A prolific artist, Ernst is considered to be one of the
primary pioneers of the Dada movement and Surrealism.
(read more)
de.lude \di-lud\vb deluded; deluding:
MISLEAD, DECEIVE, TRICK
...who is being tricked ?...
“The meaning of a sentence is derived from the original words by an active, interpretive process. The original sentence that is perceived is rapidly forgotten and memory is for the information (meaning) contained in the sentence.” [Link]
Proceedings from the Symposium on Extraterrestrial Psychology
Dr. Latimer: Language is nothing more than a stream of symbols that signify nothing until we recognize something we might have either seen or heard before, and look up it's meaning in our mental dictionary. In a plurality of worlds, without a common store of experience that comes from shared culture, efforts at communication may be an exercise in incomprehensible gestures. Verbal communication is the manipulation of symbols to which meaning is assigned by culture. An important point to keep in mind my friends is that the events experienced by members of a culture over time are what make up the narrative thread of that culture.
Dr. Zhavern: When we look into space, we don’t see things as they are. What we see is a single narrative thread winding it’s way through the cosmos ..a cosmos that may be shared by narratives other than our own. However, to it’s participants ..each narrative looks like the only cosmic game in town. Like language, we skew space to resemble something we’ve either seen, or heard before. It’s the only way we can come to grips with it.
Dr. Orloff: I think human consciousness is a fragmented and unstable process. It creates rapid models of counterfactual worlds inside the brain for things it cannot observe ..but only infer. The brain keeps track of these different versions until only those that contribute to narrative coherence receive sufficient signal strength to survive while those leading nowhere dissolve into noise ..and disappear into non-narrative space .. in an instant.
Dr. Pangloss: I think consciousness is made up of searchlights, projected from different mental versions of the world we create. They eventually converge to form concentric circles in the brain that illuminate the focal points that contribute most to narrative events, and fade rapidly at the periphery with fewer contributing points until things go black somewhere around the edges of non-narrative space.
My feeble brain ( hasn’t got a clue ): Are you saying that the narrative threads of extraterrestrials aren’t likely to uncoil very closely to ours ..(?)
“Usually when someone believes in a particular religion, his attitude becomes more and more a sharp angle pointing away from himself. In our way the point of the angle is always toward ourselves.”
Shunryu Suzuki
Omar Khadr at age 15, the time of his capture by US forcesAs the author of The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006), I never thought in my lifetime that I would see a president reach the depth of moral decay and depravity of President George W. Bush, but sad to say, our current president, Barack Obama, has managed to do it, and what makes it worse, as a former Constitutional law professor, he knows better.
This president’s moral nadir was hit yesterday, when he allowed a military tribunal based at Guantanamo to pressure Omar Khadr, a Canadian captured, gravely wounded, and arrested at the age of 15 in Afghanistan, and held at at Guantanamo now for nine years, to plead guilty to murder.
Khadr’s crime? He was in a house that was struck by a US air strike and then raided by US special forces during the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2002. The gravely wounded Khadr was accused of tossing a grenade at advancing US troops, which killed US Army Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer, and caused another soldier to lose an eye
Although Khadr, after nine years of harsh confinement at Guantanamo, and facing a military tribunal, has pleaded guilty in a plea bargain, after insisting for nine years that he did not throw the grenade (there is no living witness to his having done so), one issue here is that even if he did toss it, that action would have been seen as that heroic act of a gravely-wounded young fighter facing a superior enemy force, but for the fact that the US is claiming Khadr was not a legitimate soldier, but rather a “terrorist.”
This is a rather spurious claim, since the US says it went to “war” in Afghanistan to go after Al Qaeda forces there, who had been set up with CIA assistance initially to help the Mujahadeen fight the Soviet occupiers. So the force that Khadr was supposedly fighting with was a legitimate fighting force once, but became not a fighting force when the enemy was the US. Clearly, such fine distinctions would have meant nothing to a 15-year-old boy who had been “drafted” into the war at 14 by his Al Qaeda-member father, who was later killed by US fire. Note too that the US can say its soldiers, who have been killing a prodigious number of civilians in Afghanistan, cannot be charged with murder or manslaughter because they are soldiers, but the enemy they are fighting can be charged with murder if they fight back, because they are supposedly not legitimate soldiers.
But Alice-in-Wonderland semantic games aside, in any case, the biggest outrage in this case is that Khadr was 15 when he was captured. Under the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, a treaty that was signed by the US and that is thus part of US law, all children under the age of 18 captured while fighting in wars are to be offered “special protection” and treated as victims, not as combatants. (more)
The Fall (1467-68)
Hugo van der Goes
"You will not surely die,"
the serpent said to the woman.
"For God knows that when you eat
of it your eyes will be opened,
and you will be like God,
knowing good and evil."
Genesis 3:4-5
