Chaos, Priorities, and Things Ain't as Simple as You May Think...

Chaos, Priorities, and Things Ain't as Simple as You May Think..

A few days ago, Glen Beck’s CNN program discussed at detailed length Bible (and Book of Mormon, presumably) Prophecy having to do with the end of the world. The experts (why has that word come to make me flinch?) on the program, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, along with Joel Rosenberg, were agreed that Bible prophesy is being fulfilled and that the “end times” are near.

Last night Beck inveighed against the “Climate of Fear” being “fostered by the media” concerning global warning proponents. Evidently the “experts” will not have the sensational (hear the cash-registers and collection plates ring and tinkle, anyone?) Biblical version of the end of the world upstaged by anything so mundane – and deleterious of oil company profits - as global warming.

Anyone get the idea that what drives both these discussions is money – greed?

N-a-a-a-h! Shoot me for a cynic (and how cynical can you get?!)

Even more remarkable in its logical inconsistency regarding the question of fear- mongering was the tortured logic and twisted reasoning of the show’s host and his guests. Watching, you had also to wonder at the humanity – to say nothing of Christianity – of these loons. LaHaye fairly drooled at the prospect of his beloved text being vindicated. Just great if everyone dies, just so long as the Lord triumphs over all us wicked sinners. For a review of the drivel, here’s the URL

http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/glenn.beck/

While I will use next time the Beck show and others (as I’ve promised) as grist for my mill concerning the abysmal state of thought process and reasoning in our benighted country, I have more important matters with which to deal today. I also addressed the subject of manners last time, and a couple of days before that, the selling of hate by the media. My e-mail has quadrupled, and I am being mentioned on other websites. Given thusly pause to consider more intently matters like these, together with the Beck Show and others like it, I’ve discovered what is almost certainly a factor in the miserable way the public of this country reasons. Some of you may even have recognized it yourselves.

That “factor” is just this: U.S. Citizens do not interrelate anything. Neither, of course – the corollary - do they prioritize. The result, as it were, is that “Americans” – from time to time, I remind us that there are thirty-four nations (note the prioritizing?) in this American hemisphere – continually start at around four of ten on a number line or scalar process. No one, in short, wants to be bothered with basics.

A few years ago, coaching athletes on the National Judo Team, I was at first amazed, then annoyed, at what I took to be their stubborn – even arrogant – refusal to study, even consider, gripping. Gripping power and skill is the sine quo non of judo, a grappling sport in which the players are fully clothed and all attacks and defenses depend upon a proper grip.

A year or so after the experience, I again encountered similar cerebral paresis in teaching police officers to prevent capture of their sidearms and shoot. When I asked officers how they trained their hands for handgun shooting, I received – invariably – an uncomprehending stare. The idea of hand strength contributing to shooting skill had never crossed their minds. It was astonishing for me to time and time again be confronted with an individual who had been practicing an endeavor for even decades, yet never realized or considered the importance of how strong his hands were to marksmanship.

Even more amazing perhaps is the fact that while I demonstrated again and again and again my ability to easily outgrip even national-class judo athletes one third my age, and to repeatedly and with ease relieve police officer students across the nation of their sidearm, no one undertook to follow my instruction.

An interesting – and instructional – sidelight to that last is the fact that several times during my the travail under harassment by police officers across the nation incited by IRS, I relieved several officers of their weapons; and when I had returned their equipment to them with the ammunition removed, the cops made no mention of the matter to superiors, other officers, or anyone else. It’s a guy thing, I presume.

There’s more. Yesterday, when I wrote about the critical importance of our society and nation’s loss of manners, I received one hundred, twenty-eight e-mail responses – even one phone call. Much of the response had to do with the fact that I spoke of male manners having to do with women, so let us start there – with a fundamental as critical to our future as is the loss of another seemingly small and unimportant thing, the honey bee.

The latter, you know, is responsible for as much as ninety percent of what we eat. Were they all to die, human beings by the millions would go hungry, many of them starve. “Little things,” as the song, “goes, mean a lot.”

Fundamentals you may have forgotten, or never learned:

First, perhaps foremost and as critical to survival on this planet as the bee, is the fact that the male human, like the female, has one purpose for having received the gift of life. That is to mate with her, then protect her and the child that results. The female has likewise but one use for Mother Nature, that of producing and nurturing a child. These things are fundamental, and they are facts, things incontrovertible by any religious, ideological, social, or other intuitive reasoning or response. More, all other human behavior is secondary and a responsive satellite.

Ignored or violated, as with any complex and chaotic system, it will seriously damage, even destroy, the species.

Oh, yeah – I can hear the empty heads being shaken. I’m very familiar with the sound – the judo grips and the shooting, remember? When, in 1962, Rachel Carson wrote her historically monumental book, “Silent Spring,” I remember hearing the same barbaric yawp from farmers then pouring insecticides and herbicides on their fields and into the water table from which they drank.

I heard the same brainless bloviating last night on the Beck show regarding air pollution and carbon dioxide being poured into the air these nitwits breathe. Can anyone doubt that “experts” like Beck, informed that there might be a den of rattlesnakes somewhere in their yard - or even house - would scoff, remark that there’ve always been rattlesnakes around there and say, “let’s see what happens – it’ll take too much time and effort to find out?” You can’t have the heuristic thought process much more FUBAR than that.

Let us return momentarily to my recent discussion of chaos and systems chaotic. It’s important to understand; more, anyone who thinks of matters like those being discussed here – even the importance of chivalry toward women – as trivial obviously does not understand chaos mathematics. First, to dispel an old, habitually intuitive idea, chaotic systems are not random. However random they may appear to be to the innumerate and uninformed among us, they are what is called “deterministic.” That means not only that they have something determining their behavior, but that they can to some degree be predicted.

Another way to say that is that one can expect that some very small force – try the honey bee – can cause horrendous result and damage.

Most critical to our discussion here is the fact that chaotic systems – and nature is a chaotic system – are sensitive, very sensitive, to the initial conditions. That, to say it another way, means that a very slight change in the starting point can lead to enormously different outcomes. To evince the essential nature of chaotic – to the intuitive “thinker” irrational of contradictory – systems, this makes them fairly unpredictable.

Finally, chaotic systems appear to be disorderly, even random. They’re not. In fact, mathematicians know that truly random systems are not chaotic; as a matter of fact – still another example of the confusion derived by intuitive thought on the mater - orderly systems predicted by classical mathematics, logic, and physics are the exceptions. In the world of ideologue, zealot, and chauvinistic patriot like Glen Beck, Sean Hannity – and, yes, Rose O’Donnell (I still can’t conceive of how a bubble head like that rises to her position of influence – god help us!) order, chaos rules!

The honey bee matter scares hell out of me; but it doesn’t scare me anywhere near like the Orwellian mindlessness of a nation that exalts by their patronage the stupefying stupidity of men and women like these. Now THAT is scary!

Almost as un-nerving is a nation of people who have yet to be taught about the “Birds and the Bees.” The society and nation had its sexual equivalent to Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” back in the chaotic (yes, you bet I chose the term purposefully) sixties. Of fifty pages of bouffant babble one could chose for illustration, I offer this one:

http://www.hippy.com/article-311.html

There, you will find carefully reasoned, logical, and scientific pronouncements like this one: “Women are an oppressed class. Our oppression is total, affecting every facet of our lives. We are exploited as sex objects, breeders, domestic servants, and cheap labor. We are considered inferior beings, whose only purpose is to enhance men’s lives. Our humanity is denied. Our prescribed behavior is enforced by the threat of physical violence.”

That was from a publication entitled “Redstockings (Bitch) Manifesto of 1969.” The term usually taken for an epithet when referring to the human female is quoted, not mine. If you notice a similarity in tone to the recent brouhahas having to do with Senator Barak Obama and Don (finally got his name straight) Imus, it’s merely because you’re not – quite – brain-dead, and you’ve been paying attention. This is not, suffice it to say, the stuff of implacable Spockian genius.

In fact, if you don’t recognize the tone and behavior of a spoiled brat, we need to include in our discussion the state of our children and the reason they, too behave like demented lunatics.

Gentle reader, there are no small things where things like nature, the weather, the ecosystem, or the role of male and female - chaotic systems - are concerned. My boy’s mother used to have a witticism, one of her own coinage (this was a very bright woman – hey, she married me, let’s not forget). “If she (or he) had a brain, she’d take it out and play with it!” I hope you get the point.

At the risk of redundancy, I also remember having written a short story while a sophomore in high school. In it, a big game hunter from Texas and the far future, went in a time machine back to the Cretaceous prehistoric period in order to hunt Tyrannosaurus Rex. Leaving, he was cautioned by his scientist employee not to kill anything but the Tyrannosaurus. The reptile, the scientist said, was extinct, so killing could affect nothing in the present time. Of course, when the hunter felled his prey, it toppled onto a butterfly, crushing and killing it; and when the Texan had returned to his own time, there was no life – none – here to greet him.

One of these days, under the urging of someone like Glen Beck or his ilk, we will kill the wrong butterfly, alter the wrong bead on the DNA chain, or take for granted one too many women. One thing is sure, that we will not upset any of the chaotic systems – and they are all interdependent, you know – with too much thought.