Prometheus,

That is what I remember too. 2001 bored me because it was just another one of those pieces about tyranny that offered no real insight into tyranny.

You are supposed to be impressed by HAL exercising conscious volition. In art, these are tricks by “artists” to promote themselves, to get an audience. Real art is utilitarian. It does something to improve your life. Personally if its only function is to hang there and impress you it annoys the hell out of me.

Robert Whitaker wrote this:

“I am a priest, my job is to keep you from Sin, which I define.”

“I am a doctor, my job is to keep your heart beating.”

“I am a professor, my job is to provide you with an Education, which I define.”

“I am a guru, my job is to help you escape the Wheel of Life.”

“If you ask anyone you PAY about making life worth living, they will laugh out loud.”

“That is NOT their table.”

That is what the “inevitable future” is, just another trick. Just another hustler inducing you to buy a ticket for something that delivers no real value.

That is what all the McCain and Obama supporters are doing when they take the effort to punch their ballot. Purchasing a ticket that offers no real value. All of them are believers in “the inevitable future”.

As one gets older one’s explanations become simpler. In the days before experts and Mommy Professor this was very enlightening to the young. “There has never been a Love like my Love” was perfectly understood. But the oldster did not dismiss it.

The oldster treated it as something he remembers. But the oldster also remembers that he bobbled it. He can tell the youngster how it was, but not how it should have been. After all he is just sitting there on the porch talking. He is not SELLING solutions.

Today that porch talking oldster is the LAST person the young ‘uns will ever talk to who is not SELLING a Final Truth.

The oldster knew about the element of sex, but he didn’t dismiss it the way a Puritan Elder would. To him the Elder was a lot more childish than the young guy or girl he was listening to was. To that person, his love was new and unique. The Puritan said, “I was what you call in love when I was your age.”

“Get over it! I did!”

That is the same lesson Mommy Professor teaches. That is the same lesson the Greatest Generation teaches. The Greatest Generation, as the name implies, is the only source of Truth.

Here is the essential difference between Porch Talk with a real oldster:

The oldster does not depend on DRAMA. The Greatest Generation has been told that it represents the Only True Knowledge, the Only True Experience which is being in that mystical experience called “COMBAT” in the “Last GOOD War.”

Mommy Professor explains that he is the final stage of the Truest Truth. Mommy Professor is dramatically undramatic. He tells you what you have heard and then WHAT REALLY IS.

There is no roll of drums because Final Truth is beyond a roll of drums.

The oldster will tell you what he has learned and then go in to supper.

One thing that destroys any attempt at real futurology is that it consistently ignores the obvious. This is because a professional expert is supposed to be in on details that only an expert would know about. It occurred to no one that the total absence of any prediction that the USSR was about to go out of business was a major, catastrophic failure on the whole industry of Sovietology. But if a professional Sovietologist had mixed up a street in Moscow with one in Kiev, it would have pointed at and disgraced him

Such a mistake in street names would have caused quite a hubbub. I have yet to read a thing about why all these pros missed the fact that the whole thing was about to go kaput.
What we hear in all such cases is, “let’s not start assigning blame.”

After all, the only people “qualified” to expose such total errors are other “professionals.” And all these professionals are totally forgiving of each other. No expert wants to be held to the standard of getting things RIGHT. Like Sovietologists, their job is always to make predictions that appeal to those presently in power.

Experts do not expect their predictions to be back checked. They do not back check each other. Their job has nothing to do with accuracy, so there is something vindictive about anyone who makes a point of such errors. “Assigning blame” is unprofessional.

For the first time since the year it was made I watched Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001. This picture of The Future was positively nostalgic. It began with a rehash of the theory in African Genesis, the part Robert Ardrey himself later disowned, about ape men first discovering the use of an antelope’s leg bone as a weapon. It shows how it was a visitor from space showed the ape men how to pick up a bone.

Van Daniken explained how only visitors from space could have shown the Egyptians how to put stones on top of each other. But he did not explain why those spacemen didn’t show the brilliant Egyptians how to use the wheel, which came into practical use there only after the pyramids were finished.

You will probably remember that, after the extraterrestrial had shown the ape-man the magic of picking up a stick and the ape-man had triumphed, it threw the bone into the air and it became a space rocket. In this rocket, a stewardess in a tiny stewardess cap and a very short dress was delivering a drink down the aisle to the single passenger. The point of this scene was to show that in this futuristic world, which came directly from the pick up a stick inspiration from Outer Space, space travel of this would be as routine as short air flights were when the movie was made.

Those who made the movie did not realize that part of the NEW inevitable Future would Women’s Lib: No sexist short skirts.

Cut to the orbiting space station. Once again, it was shown to be routine. The man wanted to make a call back to Earth, so he went to public phone booth. As you know, even the youngest of you will have to explain to your children what a public phone booth was.

Arthur Clark did not make the movie. But what is particularly ironic about this is it was Arthur C .Clarke HIMSELF who actually made the pubic phone booth an anachronism, especially for long distances like phoning to earth. About 1947 he wrote a science fiction story which described how future communications would be bounced off a system of orbiting satellites.

Nothing is more dated than the Future. I keep pointing out that Futurology has nothing to do with the future. This is important to BUGS because the future is our business. In fact, we are about the only people who have a serious interest in what the future will REALLY be like. When the movie 2001 was made, those who made it were interested in showing that they were Up On The Latest Thing, Ardrey’s African Genesis, routine transoceanic air travel, and the routine of calling earth from a public phone.

This is the only place on earth where you will see someone point out these flaws in 1960s futurology. Why? Because it only matters to us. No one else is interested in real futurology. We have an obsession that makes no sense to anybody else. We are actually interested the survival of our race.

My discussion of the first ten minutes of the movie 2001 is naive to most people. Everybody knows that the film makers did not make the movie to predict the future. They made it “to appeal to the demographic.” 2001 was a terrific box office success because it showed the film makers were in touch with The Latest Thing.

The Latest Thing in 1968.

The Latest Thing in the mind of THE demographic, movie goers of the Sterile Sixties, young upwardly mobile people of a generation that, in our scale of values, committed suicide genetically..

2001 did exactly what it was supposed to do. Those who made it succeeded. As an economist would say, they maximized their utility from it. That means that they derived the maximum of pleasure from the fact that the movie was successful. Not only successful, but a hit with the YUPPIES of their day.

They’re dead now. ECONOMIC utility ends when your heart stops beating.

In the BUGS scale of values, what matters is the REAL future. But that is OUR scale of values, the BUGS scale of values. I have gotten used to the fact that, in utility terms, my obsession with the REAL future makes no sense.

Everything here interrelates. Our enemies are correct in pointing out that our monomaniacal concern for the REAL future is not RATI0NAL in pure personal cost-benefit terms.

I keep saying that, “They can have the money. They can have the fame. They can have the priofits. They can be the ones who are ‘with it’ and ‘cool.'”

I just want to rule the world after they are forgotten..

I kept repeating “Read the Comments!” before. While I am taking a break, the comments ARE the blog.

Jews insist that Jews did not crucify Jesus, the Romans did. Actually Jews convicted Jesus and then turned him over the secular authorities, the Romans. Pontuis Pilate made it clear that he had nothing to do with this, and he even tried to give them Barabus instead. In fact, nothing is more specific in blaming Jewish authorities than the detailed discussion in the New Testament of Pilate’s behavior.

On the other hand, Jews insist that the Church persecuted Jews during the Inquisition. Actually the Church never punished anybody. The innocent Church just convicted them and “turned them over to the secular authorities.” When a person was convicted of heresy the secular authorities had no more choice about what to do to him than Pontuis Pilate did. But no Jews excuses the Church from killing all those Jews.

Don’t hold your breath until someone besides me points this out. Don’t hold your breath until Poltiical Correctness gets consistent.

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