Tuesday, August 23, 2011

moving posts

I'm moving all pk domains materials to the PKnatz blog, all Thinking Tools modules will link from the Thinking Tools Menu.

I was illuminated by Gregory Bateson's "Every School Boy Knows" chapter in 1979. I've been using Rudy Rucker's phrase Thinking Tools since his book was published.
I offered the world a low cost low tech internet in 1970. The society stole my ideas without credit, without royalties, over the following decades. Kleptocrats decide who they'll pay what: if God has an opinion, I don't know who knows it.
I went on line with the government, military, universities stolen internet in the early 1990s. I mae a personal presence in 1995, began adding Thinking Tools in 1997.
I've been mostly unpublished all my life, actively censored since 1968, blackballed since 1969, sabotaged since 1973 (if not before). I was finally arrested in 2006, officially censored by a US court in Feb 2007. The judge, abetted by my host, destroyed the 4,000+ files at pk domains (which I loosely call "K." (for Knatz.com).
By 1999 I was trying to restore key K. files at a series of blogs: now I'm moving all such blog resurrections to pKnatz blog and will work at resurrecting the rest so long as I draw breath and can upload to a modem.

Thursday, January 1, 2009

pk Thinking Tools

Any of us can "think" after a fashion, few of us are skilled, none of us are fully skilled. Those who are the most skilled are most skilled in a few areas, not in all. One guy plays the piano well, but couldn't fight his way out of a paper bag. Somebody else can break heads but couldn't get far with a syllogism on the best day of his life. The employed "scientist" can falsify the hell out of some lab experiment but doesn't dare say out loud that Big Brother is lying to us.

This blog is dedicated to resurrecting the deposed Knatz.com / Teaching / Thinking Tools /
except now I've moved everything to the PKnatz blog: Thinking Tools Menu.

In 1979 I was lucky enough to notice the title "Mind and Nature" on the cover of a magazine in a book store window: precursor to the publishing that year of Gregory Bateson's great book. He knocked my socks off with his early chapters primer on basic thinking tools. Bateson was a great scientist, as had been his father, but an even greater teacher. Among humans I name only Ilya Prigogine as his peer. Bateson's efforts covered basic ground more thoroughly, more deeply, more illuminatingly, than I'd believed possible. He also introduced me to some of his teachers, Count Alfred Korzybski, for example, who have since become mine. A few years later Rudy Rucker authored a book titled Mind Tools: very good, but no peer to Bateson.

In the early 1990s I established an art gallery online, PKImaging.com, and soon added a home page. That developed into Knatz.com, which, in 2006 became a casualty of the federal court censoring my AgainstHierarchy.org domain: my family paid my bills while I was in jail, the court unable to correctly read my black satires, but did not pay my internet bills. My (Canadian!) host received the censoring order, saw no money, and destroyed all of my files: PKImaging.com, Knatz.com, Macroinformation.org, InfoAll.org, and the persecuted AgainstHierarchy.org: several hundred graphic files destroyed, two thousand five hundred pk text files sent down the memory hole, and many art files too: five thousand files altogether. The FBI stole my functioning networked computers, my modems, my printers, everything, and didn't return them till March 2008, no longer working together, some parts not working at all.

My blogs remained here at BlogSpot.com. Warned by my parole officer against reposting anything online, discouraged from so much as re-posting the parts not censored, I've slipped a few classic "Knatz.com" modules back online as blog posts. Here I shall recreate the Thinking Tools section of Knatz.com: a tribute to Bateson (and all).

Bateson's teaching went beyond anything I'd been taught, and beyond anything I'd added myself to my learning — but in a few important areas, such as Semantics, Semiotics, Information, I've pushed the envelope still further.

In Knatz.com I was able to provide menus, cross references, notes ... This is just a blog, I can't here. Perhaps when my probation is over, if I can live and still pay for IS, a few hundred MB of online memory, I'll restore all my domains as they had been, but better. Meantime, I hope what remains of mankind and human intellect can benefit from my work.

By the way, I tried this several months ago by creating a blog, DeCentSee, under the name "Waterman" — another nickname of pk's. Google, new owner of BlogSpot.com, didn't like my trick and froze the blog. I can't edit, add, or even delete! I may as well tell you what happened:
pk is open, free speaking, free thinking ... some believe to a fault. (How can there be fault with free thinking and speaking?) One gal whose friendship I was courting was always put off my my free speaking, so I promised her to move sex-related content of Knatz.com to a pkBowdler blog. I never got far, but began again, publishing Knatz.com's "Sex Stories" section to a blog under that name: Waterman. Whoops.

Ivan Illich developed the idea of a cybernetic library of human resources to replace government controlled schools (1970, 1971), I developed Illich's design into a potential cybernetic free market place (The Free Learning Exchange, Inc., 1970, 1971, 1972). Universities, governments, CERN ... shoved their internet at us instead. Now government and private forces interfere with how I use what was stolen from me!



2009 05 25

Knatz.com's Thinking Tools section had had one hundred and ten member files by the time of my arrest and censoring (2006, 2007). I had recreated thirty-three of them by them at my blog DeCentSee (under the alias Waterman) when Google/BlogSpot censored them again. As of today I've (re)created them a third time here at this new blog, taking three days to effect the recreation. Now I'll breath a little bit, enjoy my girl friend this Memorial Day, and resume rescuing the remaining modules as I live.
Let's hope god knows how many modules would have been added had I not been arrested. Perhaps god also knows what I might have done had I not be persecuted all my life: by school, by college, by graduate school — all my teaching institutions — by the publishing industry ... by the public, by the public's rulers ...

The bulk of the pk Thinking Tool modules posted at DeCentSee were moved here yesterday. I've searched them for attributions and references to Waterman, substituting "pk" or "my." If I missed any, if there were other locutions now incomprehensible, please alert me. Meanwhile, adjust the meaning yourself: these tools are pk's, based on Bateson's, Korzybksi's ... "science's" ...


2009 06 09

"Society" versus "Thinking Tools"

My home page of the 1990s was organized into three main sections: 1) materials about me, pk, Paul Knatz; 2) samples of my creative writing (of the 1960s and 1980s); and most important, 3) my Teaching section. The first modules to get posted there were of two main types: A) Thinking Tools and B) reflections on Society (and its Pathologies). Other sections came to grow and grow, examples of my scholarship, reports on my "deschooling" activities (how Ivan Illich and I offered the world a cybernetic library, a cheap low tech internet, back in 1970) ...

Initially the Thinking Tool pieces were sleek and stark, as I intended them to be (in homage to Gregory Bateson and his great book, Mind and Nature). But all too soon more and more portions were more akin to a thinking tools scrapbook than to a variorum thinking tools encyclopedia (which I never claimed to be competent to write anyway). To put it another way, some parts of my Thinking Tools took on some of the characteristics of my Society section. Talking about the utility of optical instruments in mapping our universe is an example of a Thinking Tool; talking about what the Church and the universities did to Galileo once he'd built a telescope and talked about what he'd seen through it is an example of pk's Society and Its Pathologies: especially where pk waxes Jeremiah-like, preaching death and damnation for dishonest institution-imposed stupidity (humans being quite unintelligent enough all on their own without external hierarchical pressure from church, school, media ... state.

I wish I had the time to separate the two pks in this area: provides a pure Tools book. It's hard enough just to write the stuff in a first draft, especially fighting against the fed and its censorship to do it.

The piece I just scribbled, Description versus Prescription, is an example. I'll try to revise it to be more like a Tool and less like a piece where Jeremiah screams about Society. Perhaps I'll split it in two, reserving part as a tool, the balance as a scream.


2009 08 20 Sixty-one, roughly half, of my Thinking Tool Modules are now recreated here. Before proceeding I'll add the alphabetical menu, as well as a list of key categories: keywords too. Look under 2009 August.


2011 01 31 I'm still unable to restore Knatz.com securely, so we're still stuck with a blog attempting duplication. My Thinking Tools should be accessible as a logical hierarchy: by topic, alphabetically: something. Not diary chronology.

But diary chronology is the best I have for the moment: so I'm going to rearrange the diary chronology to a semi-alphabeticaly order: by altering publication dates. I'll pretend The As started in January 2009.