|
|
|
|
Lexicology and Hope Sam Aurelius Milam III In 1992, I wrote MANifest Destiny — or — the Femme's Fatale. It was a satire of the feminist assault on usage, a campaign that had been under way for some time back then. The gender significance of words was a favorite target of the feminists. For a long time, masculine indefinite pronouns (for example) had served for either the masculine or the feminine gender, when gender wasn't otherwise specified. As far as I'm aware, the use of plural indefinite pronouns to refer to singular antecedents, just to avoid a masculine pronoun, didn't become widely accepted until the feminists began to complain about that sort of thing.
Such agenda-driven grammar makes me wonder if maybe we're all suffering from PTND, Post-Traumatic Nagging Disorder. Feminists aren't the only spoilers of the language who're loose in the land. Consider the homosexuals. It's a sure thing that homosexuality has been around for a very long time. Given that, homosexuals have had plenty of time to accumulate monikers. They didn't need a new one. They certainly didn't need to hijack a word that didn't even have a good synonym, but that's exactly what they did. They hijacked the word gay. They just stole it right out of the language, without even asking first. Now, when I'm feeling joyful, carefree, and happy, I can't say that I'm feeling gay, and there isn't a good synonym. Thus, they deprived us all, without our consent, of a way to express that particular mood. Furthermore, even if we deck the halls with boughs of holly, at Christmas, we might not want to don our gay apparel. What does that even mean, nowadays? Moving right along, if the anthropologists are correct about human origins in Africa, then black folks (I think that I can't use the word people here, but I'm not sure) have been around a lot longer than the rest of us. With such a long ancestry, they ought to have arrived, by now, at a generally accepted name for themselves. Even so, in recent decades, they've repeatedly changed the names by which they want to be known. It wouldn't surprise me at all if we eventually end up referring to them as melanin gifted, or maybe not. The m-word might become offensive, too, like the previous candidates. Given the long list of rejected nomenclature, I don't know what to expect next. Maybe, just to be on the safe side, we should all start sorting our laundry into whites and others instead of into whites and — the c-word. Heinlein commented, through his character Lazarus Long, that very little thinking is ever done in English, that it isn't a language suited to logical thought but, instead, is an emotive lingo better adapted to concealing fallacies. Orwell warned us, through his characters O'Brien and Syme, that whoever controls the language can control the people. So, at least in this newsletter, men and women are not equal and homosexuals are not gay. Also, white is the color of snow and black is the color of the night sky, so we need some new terminology for that, too. Our thinking and our language reflect one another, and influence one another. Maybe if we can correct our usage, then we can correct our thinking. Maybe not, but I can hope. Letters to the Editor Dear Sam, As usual, your 'zine [March issue] was a good read. A correction, in my letter to you, I mentioned a movie I must have wrote "Hotel" [Message from S. H., a prisoner, page 3]. You mentioned it in your letters to the editor. I meant the movie "Hostel". Sorry for the "flub". [It was my error. You wrote hostel. I misread it as hotel. I apologize. —editor] I think I'll respond to Howie in the Max's letter to the editor [Message from Howie in the Max, pages 2 - 3]. His reference to his theory of the Sun being the eye and heart of an alien god is a great example of how God, millions of years ago could have populated this planet, and then left, leaving the population here and how, over the eons of time passage, how scientific explanations of things could have degenerated to urban legends, lore, and religious dogma. But his (Howie's) reference did make me think of a persistent thought of mine, and something you wrote. I'm referring to the story [Theocosm, July 2015, page 3] where, in God's laboratory, a germ being studied in a petri dish (us) escaped and made it across a laboratory and man-
|
aged to hide behind a light switch cover, and
over the passage of time, our societal living has progressed to this.
I'm paraphrasing your story. I hope my memory hasn't jumble it too
much. [Your synopsis is close enough. —editor]
A thought of mine has been, we as a species always assume we are superior in our size, abilities, intelligence, etc., but in reality, we have no actual way to judge, for example, our size in relation to, say, aliens. We can carry up to 3 pounds of parasitic life on our skin. [I wasn't able to verify this number but it seems to me to be unreasonably high. —editor] Whole societies of life, on us, at a microscopic level, and if we continued to look at life, at a smaller level, a quantum level, what would we find at the atomic level? To an individual cell, your body is the universe. How do we know that we aren't an infection in the body of an alien host, inside the torso of an alien, devoid of light and oxygen? And inside this torso, the sun isn't anything more than the same bioluminescent things seen deep in the ocean? In your explanation of how the sun created heat to Howie's question, I appreciated how you explained how heat was generated, "(presumably)" [first editorial reply, page 3]. Most people have no idea how flimsy our knowledge of how things around us actually work. We have "tons" of experiments explaining the "mechanics" of things. The results expected of clinical tests but we have no idea how to "make" or "re-create" the actual event. A good example is gravity. Using the "scientific method", we have discovered info on the natural world based in making falsifiable predictions hypotheses, testing them empirically, and developed "peer-reviewed" theories that explain the known data. But we have no actual way to create the base event so, unless we can recreate the actual event in a clinical lab setting, we aren't explaining it "scientifically". The "sun" is a great example. We have our theories but that's it. If we "truly" know what the sun is, then, create me a sun. (even a "quanta" one). If we know what life is then create "life" out of thin air then I might take the Big Bang seriously. In reality, the knowledge we have isn't a pimple on the ass of what we don't know. As far as I'm concerned, you're probably right Sam, we are probably nothing more than an escaped contagion which is living secretly behind a light switch in God's laboratory. I sure hope the cleaning lady doesn't find us with a spray bottle of alien "Clorox", and wipe us to oblivion.... Hey, let me pose a question to you. Perhaps even offer this one to your readers too. I'm sure many will write me off as a conspiracy theorist, but you and I both know that when a person puts forward a theory that could be all too real, like how there was no way an airplane hit the Pentagon [I addressed that issue in Pentagon Anomalies, in The Sovereign's Library —editor], they call us a "conspiracy theorist". Before I lay down my theory, let me state some verifiable facts. The Corona Virus, it has been around since the 1960's, up until recently, it was nothing more than a different strain of the flu. It even had the same death rate, until recently. Up until this year, the death rate of Corona and the flu was 1 death per 1000 affected. Last year, thirty two million people caught the flu about thirty million people died from the flu. [I don't have any idea what the actual numbers are but it seems to me that the writer's numbers, as presented here, might be in error. —editor] And if you were to make a graph, say a "scatter plot", where the horizontal records the "age group" of people who died and the vertical representing the "amount" of deaths per age group, the scatter plot would resemble the letter "U", because children and elderly are more vulnerable and, up until recently, the Corona Virus killed the same way. But with the Corona Virus that came out this year it hasn't killed one child. [I didn't confirm that. —editor] A scatter plot of this year would look like a reverse "L". My question is, why? That makes zero sense. Depending where you do the numbers, the death rate varies for this new strain of Corona. Here in the U.S., it's around 3%, in Italy it's around 6%. [The only death rate statistics that I found, during a quick search, were 4.09%, worldwide and 3.4% in South Korea. I don't have the time to do an exhaustive search. —editor]. Let that sink in. Where last year's flu killed 1 per 1000, this Corona Virus is killing, on a low average, 20 to 60 times more, and only old people, no kids. Here's my question. Do you think this new Corona Virus is a government released "biological weapon"? Everyone knows our "social security" checks for the retired has been in trouble for a long time. Current and past presidents have used the social security balance as a slush fund for their pet projects. And our current president, who wants to cancel everything that the people get, social security, food stamps, free lunches for kids who are poor, etc. My point is this. When the mafia owes someone and doesn't want to pay, what do you do, kill them and the bill goes away.
|
We
live in different times. The "baby boomers" are retiring. Back
in the 50's, people had large families, there were more people "working"
than people "retiring". Today the birthrates are way lower.
Look up Kentucky. The state is so far in the red, because of paying
out pensions (retirement) and not enough worker's tax money to pay out
and have a budget too. I'm of the opinion that this "Corona Virus"
could be a "unidentified agency" doing a population control measure.
And Donald "Chump" is so flippant about it because he has already taken
an antidote.
I'm a firm believer that we have a world pandemic die-off coming soon and I'm also sure the rich and powerful have a "Noah's ark" backup plan for themselves. The "Rothchilds" hold a meeting every year for the elite, and I'm not talking Hollywood movie stars. I'm talking about the 1%er billionaires who run the world behind the curtain. Tell me what you think, do you think there are darker intentions behind the Corona Virus? I noticed the rich did a "sell off" and yanked all the profit from the stock market. Who loses out on this, the poor 401K retirement plans, that's who. Anyway, be well my co-conspirator in trying to bring truth to the masses. Sincerely, —S. H., a prisoner
Scientists tend to labor under the delusion that giving something a name is the same thing as understanding it. As Werner Erhard noted, if you stand in the rain, you get wet, whether you understand water or not. Regarding overpopulation and the Coronavirus, I commented in the August 2019 issue, on page 3, that as recently as a century or so ago, we might have been able to limit the size of our population, and to do so with some degree of grace and dignity. I went on to speculate that we've lost that opportunity. The size of our population will probably be reduced, probably soon, probably by circumstances that are beyond our control, and probably with neither grace nor dignity. Back in the 1980's, some people claimed that AIDS was invented and released by the government, possibly by way of the Plum Island Animal Disease Center. I don't know. Some people believe that the Black Death, in Europe, was released by aliens wearing hazmat suits and dispersing an aerosol through long nozzles, thus giving rise to the image of the Grim Reaper. I don't know. Maybe the Coronavirus was invented and released by the government. I don't know. The influenza epidemic, in 1918, reportedly killed more people than any war ever did but, as with all other known similar events, it didn't result in a sustained reduction in world population. The eventual results of the Coronavirus epidemic will be different from its immediate results. In the long term, the epidemic will enable government to get stronger. It will reinforce people's notions that they can't survive without government, and that only government can solve their problems for them. It will encourage people to be submissive to government, and to obey its instructions. It will work to the benefit of government and its news agencies. It will work to the detriment of personal liberty. Frightened people are easier to control. So, if the Coronavirus was created and released by government, as you suggested, then I don't believe that its purpose is to reduce the world population, but to control the people. —editor
Hey Sam, Here is a wild thought for you and your readers to consider. If there is life, then there must be death, and if there is a beginning then there must be an ending. And in outer space, there must be a beginning point of origin, and there must be an ending point. Because in theory, it cannot possibly go on and on forever. It must begin at some point, and it must end at some point? —Howie in the Max
I believe that the universe is infinite and eternal. That is, it doesn't have any edge or boundary, it never began, and it will never end. I suggest my essay Cosmology and the Law of Parsimony. It's available in Pharos. —editor
To my respected elder, Sam, Thank you for all the years of Frontiersman! I received your latest newsletter [February]. Thank you very much for keeping me on your subscription list.... ... enclosed is a bio on Philip K. Dick, to refresh your memory on who he was [February, page 3]. The movie "Blade Runner" was based on his book "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" Very good read. Anyway, just a little short letter saying hello & goodbye, for now. A loyal reader and friend. —R.D.H., a prisoner
Stray Thoughts Sam Aurelius Milam III •One indication that you're living in a police state is when crime isnt defined as doing something harmful but as doing something illegal. •Product warnings aren't intended to protect users from harm. They're intended to protect manufacturers from liability.
|
Acknowledgments My thanks to the following: El Dorado Bob; Betty; Ramon, of Soledad, California; and Eric, of Ione, California. — editor
Websites http://frontiersman.org.uk/ http://moonlight-flea-market.com/ http://pharos.org.uk/ http://sam-aurelius-milam-iii.org.uk/ http://sovereign-library.org.uk/ Clues That You Might be a Hillbilly
Blonde Jokes
Frontiersman Availability — Assuming the availability of sufficient funds, subscriptions to this newsletter in print, copies of past issues in print, and copies of the website on CDs are available upon request. Funding for this newsletter is from sources over which I don't have any control, so it might become necessary for me to terminate these offers or to cancel one or more subscriptions at any time, without notice. All past issues are presently available for free download at the internet address shown below. Contributions are welcome. Cancellations — If you don't want to keep receiving printed copies of this newsletter, then return your copy unopened. When I receive it, I'll terminate your subscription. Reprint Policy — Permission is hereby given to reproduce this newsletter in its entirety or to reproduce material from it, provided that the reproduction is accurate and that proper credit is given. I do not have the authority to give permission to reprint material that I have reprinted from other sources. For that permission, you must apply to the original source. I would appreciate receiving a courtesy copy of any document or publication in which you reprint my material. Submissions — I consider letters, articles, and cartoons for the newsletter, but I don't pay for them. Short items are more likely to be printed. I suggest that letters and articles be shorter than 500 words but that's flexible depending on space available and the content of the piece. Payment — This newsletter isn't for sale. If you want to make a voluntary contribution, then I prefer cash or U.S. postage stamps. For checks or money orders, please inquire. You can use editor@frontiersman.org.uk for PayPal payments. In case anybody's curious, I also accept gold, silver, platinum, etc. I don't accept anything that requires me to provide ID to receive it. — Sam Aurelius Milam III, editor
|
|
|