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[ by Charles Cameron — fitness landscapes and the Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond ]
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With the rise and fall of sea levels, sky levels, land emerges or submerges, mountain ranges with scattered lakes in their valleys transform into archipelagos, island clusters surge up to become continents — rise and fall, ebb and flow, wave upon wave..

I mean, really, what of the moral high ground?

**

Consider these:

Adaptive Basins and Strange Peaks

Biologists talk about adaptive landscapes. In these metaphorical places, species climb uphill towards optimal fitness. Going up is a struggle. Climbing takes energy. Optimal peaks can be hard to attain. Many species are distracted by getting stuck on sub-optimal false peaks, or waylaid by the intervening rugged landscape.

Sources:

ResearchGate, Schematic “adaptive” or “fitness” landscape

The Technium, Adaptive Basins and Strange Peaks

**

Nemesis and the Prophets are agreed:

Every valley shall be exalted, every mountain and hill made low

— or as Mary said of her son’s father:

He buffets proud folk about like leaves in a gale.
He upsets those that hold themselves high and mighty
and rescues the least one of us.

Ursula le Guin voiced Lao Tzu for us in English:

True goodness
is like water.
Water’s good
for everything.
It doesn’t compete.

It goes right
to the low loathsome places,
and so finds the way.

Furthermore:

What’s softest in the world
rushes and runs
over what’s hardest in the world.

The immaterial
enters
the impenetrable.

**

O ye’ll tak’ the high road, and I’ll tak’ the low road, And I’ll be in Scotland afore ye

[ by Charles Cameron — executive summaries — aren’t they just babyfood for thought? ]
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I have nothing against Alicia Silverstone, that’s the first thing:

What interests me more, though, is the necessity for executives to be fed (readers?) digests on matters of national security.

If I recall correctly, Jerome Ravetz once made the point that the chief executive charged with the oversight of dozens of nuclear power plants may well have to make multi-million dollar decisions very rapidly, after brief briefings, and with full confidence that his orders will be obeyed without question.. which is not a situation that encourages nuanced discussion.

Brevity may be the soul of executive decision-making, I can see that. I don’t have to like it.

[ by Charles Cameron — a little matter of rising (i trust) between the two stools of belief and unbelief ]
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I have seen Christianity described as —

The popular belief that a celestial Jewish baby, who is also his own father, born from a virgin mother, died for three days so that he could ascend to heaven on a cloud and make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh, drink his blood, and telepathically tell him you accept him as your Lord and master, so he can remove an evil force from your spiritual being that is present in all humanity because an immoral woman made from a man’s rib was hoodwinked by a talking reptile possessed by a malicious angel to secretly eat forbidden fruit from a magical tree.

Don’t these atheists understand anything about poetry?

**

Don’t the Christians understand anything about poetry?

Try this as an exercise for the imagination — picture this —

To suppose the Eucharist

Suppose the hypothetical all of everything
in unspooling itself chose to exhibit itself in
one human, suppose further all the sun’s
light were caught in wheat and baked into
bread, all the world’s pains and passions
crushed like grapes into wine, suppose the
one person took loaf and cup and with
word and gesture raised them blood, body

of his own self to be supped and sipped,
thus woven into his one flesh, blood, mind —
just when his flesh is torn, blood spills —
suppose then that his mind to love were to
entrain this new body of many bodies to
heal with all radiance each instance of pain..

**

I offer this poem as a bridge in two directions — to allow the sensible atheist a means of glimpsing what might be admirable in his Christian friend’s faith.. — and to allow the Christian on the brink of leaving the faith for “sensible atheism” a means of retaining much of the deep beauty of that faith while leaving behind both the bribes of heaven and the threats of hell.

[ by Charles Cameron — but Dogen has the last word ]
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— and if Mao’s guerrillas don’t know they’re swimming in the general population, doesn’t even know there is a genpop, whose liberation are they fighting for?

**

Ah, but David Foster Wallace and Mao were just the bail I threw around, to reel you into some Dogen Zenji:

A fish swims in the ocean, and no matter how far it swims there is no end to the water. A bird flies in the sky, and no matter how far it flies there is no end to the air. However, the fish and the bird have never left their elements.

When their activity is large their field is large. When their need is small their field is small. Thus, each of them totally covers its full range, and each of them totally experiences its realm. If the bird leaves the air it will die at once. If the fish leaves the water it will die at once.

Know that water is life and air is life. The bird is life and the fish is life. Life must be the bird and life must be the fish.

[ by Charles Cameron — in courtroom and intel agency, the same problem ]
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It’s an issue for the defense — both against criminal prosecution and terrorist attack — the defense needs to win 100%, the attack only needs to succeed once.

I’d seen the counterterrorism version quite a few times, though I didn’t know until today that it originated with a press release from the IRA — but this is the first time I’d seen the same sort of idea put forward by a defense lawyer, and again, the resemblance presented in this DoubleQuote shows me there’s a pattern I should be on the lookout for.

Sources:

Netflix, Making a Murderer, episode 4

Warfare Evolution Blog, Defeating 3rd generation warfare