While I’m in a holiday mood, and since we have focused on some rather dry material of late, I thought it might make a change to post something entirely frivolous but still, I hope, interesting to readers - the opening chapter of a story I will doubtless never attempt to buff-up, develop and title.

Chapter One

Tyler was already waiting for him on the first floor landing.  “Couldn’t you have found somewhere anonymous,” Coulson quipped, throwing a gesture towards the cheap, utilitarian interior of a wholly unremarkable office building.

“To be content, add not to your possessions but subtract from your desires,” Tyler shot back, almost smiling.

They shook hands in desultory fashion.  It had been a year since they were both stationed in London, during which Coulson had done a stint as liaison in Washington, then, briefly, at Nashashibi Street.  Tyler, a devoted careerist, had worked his charm on other, older careerists at SIS and reaped the reward promotionally.  Now he had been brought in to run this nominally MI5 show which, if it produced results, would earn the gratitude of people who mattered and who weren’t part of the pink maffia of British Intelligence.

“Any other friends here yet, my old fruit?” asked Coulson.  It was exactly 6.00pm.  He was not always so punctual or so polite.

“Oh indeed.” said Tyler caustically, “We are waiting for you,”  He leaned over the gallery .  “Right Jessop, lock the place down.  No one and nothing in or out unless authorised by me.  All personnel incommunicado.”

Seeing the puzzlement at such excess on Coulson’s face, he explained slowly and evenly, “There will be no leaks from this operation.”

It had been four months since the Chevening event.  The initial clamour - the explosion of demands for an early arrest from all quarters of the Western political Establishment, the panic of the British Establishment, the wild press speculation, the riotous glee from the internet - had died away within the first three weeks.  But the pressure from within “the intelligence community” was unrelenting.  The world’s foremost banker and doyen of the powerful had been assassinated on Foreign & Commonwealth Office property, dying with a maraschino cherry and a 7.62mm M118 cartridge in his throat.  The fatal shot had been fired from a distance of 600 metres across fields that, though open, were secured (in theory at least) by listening devices and other counter-measures.  Yet the marksman - obviously highly-skilled, obviously aware of the ground - had obtained a firing position undetected, taken his shot, left nothing behind, no DNA, and made good his escape.

There was one low-resolution image of a motorcyclist captured at 7.49 pm on a garage forecourt video, heading south two miles from the scene.  Enhancement revealed a rider in black helmet, jacket, trousers and boots on a bike that may have been a Honda CBF125.  He was wearing a back-pack long enough, certainly, to accommodate a sniper’s rifle and tripod.  No other camera recorded the mystery biker, and no sightings of him had been reported as a result of the public appeals.

It had quickly emerged that the security operation for the weekend party had been perfunctory at best.  There had been no security review for two years.  Nobody seemed to have considered the possibility that a hostile could penetrate the counter-measures.  In consequence, a couple of pairs of DPG officers armed with night-vision and MP5s wondering about the estate was presumed quite sufficient for all eventualities.

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People get emotional about the public display of the Nativity Scene.  Maybe the real reason it is so emotionally charged is not that it is sectarian but racist.

Nature World reports that:

The discovery of timber gives insights into earliest wood architecture and the carpentry skills of humans around 7,000 years ago. Using laser scanning technology, experts were able to collect data on the timber joints and tool marks, shedding light on the highly developed woodworking skills of Neolithic settlers in central Europe….

This also suggests that the first farmers of the Neolithic period were also the first carpenters.

These are the same people who built the largest freestanding structures in the world at that time—structures which they shared with their cows and other livestock for warmth. 

It is all too likely that many of these First Carpenters engaged in acts of procreation with their lovers during Spring, lovers who then gave birth during winter in these longhouses with the livestock looking on.  They likely even used straw in their cradles and swaddled their newborns.

People tend to get very emotional about childbirth for some reason.  Probably because they are racists or something nasty like that.  Well, its racist and nasty for northern Europeans to get very emotional about the birth of their children rather than adopting from Africa or Asia.  Who knows but what they might have turned such a seasonal surge of births into an annual celebration and might even have felt it had some mystical connection to the solar calendar, that was so vital for agrarians to observe carefully, the winter point of which is the longest night of the year.

From Christ’s perspective, this would have been 2 and a half times older than is the first Christmas from our perspective.

See Christmas is Racist for further information on the real reason there is a war on Christmas.

…coordinating our mutual defense and advance.

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Financial Times reports that:

Obesity in human beings could be caused by bacterial infection rather than eating too much, exercising too little or genetics, according to a groundbreaking study that could have profound implications for public health systems, the pharmaceutical industry and food manufacturers.

The discovery in China followed an eight-year search by scientists across the world to explain the link between gut bacteria and obesity.

The thing to keep in mind here is that these bacteria alter metabolism, robbing the brain of fuel so as to deposit it in cardiovascular-destroying fat deposits.

A beautiful biological weapon.

Remember “Montezuma’s revenge” aka “traveler’s diarrhea”?

Not only is it unlikely that the west’s medical establishment has been totally oblivious to this, but the political implications are such that if anyone did discover such a link between “travelers” aka “migrants”, and the massive dumbing down of the populations subjected to immigration, they would realize almost instinctively that they were putting their careers at risk to even propose a research study.

Enter the Chinese. 

They don’t have to deal with the parasite load it is the west’s misfortune to endure, hence they aren’t as “sensitive” to certain “issues”.

We can rest assured that the spin-“doctors” of the west will be burning the midnight oil to downplay the societal consequences of debilitated neurophysiology, obscure the origins of these bacteria and make sure that any evidence of ethnospecificity is relegated to the “scientific racism” ghetto.

The full research paper is available online at this link.

James has introduced the concept of foundation from nowhere, based on something Husserl brought into his own work once and only fleetingly.  I am not sure how central it really is to the Husserlian approach to Mind, consiousness, self, and the object .  In any case, there was a certain immanent development (basically, authenticity of Dasein) in Heidegger which was not in Husserl’s (late and defensive) championing of reason and the transcendent ego, and which heads in the opposite direction to foundation.  It is the exploration of this which would benefit James, as it has benefitted many others, and which explains, for example, why Heidegger is revolutionary today as well as why he was foundational to postmodernism during its revolutionary period of inception.  To me at least, the Husserlian approach seems oddly dead and anthropological by contrast.  I will try to explain this further.

Kant said that you cannot demonstrate being.  But you can experience it, under certain psychological conditions.  Otherwise you can only infer it, only gesture roughly in its presumed direction.  Strictly speaking, Heidegger’s project in Being and Time was to explain why, in the West, our inferred sense of being is so different to the sense we think it should have, and which philosophers and spiritual leaders have told us for millenia that it can have.  Heidegger used the phenomenological method to give an account of this “everydayness” ... the life that is ordinarily lived.  But his essentially spiritual quest constituted a complete break with Husserl and a challenge to the study of Mind as pure function.  As such, it was intimately wrapped up with the meaning for us all of a lived life in which Being was rarely consciously experienced, and in which the inference was everywhere employed without thought for qualitative distinctions.  Where no such distinctions apply, the road is open to nihilism and destruction.  Thus seven years later, in his lecture Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger made the following remarkable and much quoted statement:

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White Women For Sale!

Experiments with provocative statement and the tropism of highly contrasting sights and sounds - as they are apparently difficult to ignore, this thread will take entries that might exploit this effect on behalf of White interests.

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The foremost living phenomenologist, Robert Sokolowski, starts the introduction to his book “Introduction to Phenomenology” published in 2000 thus:

Introduction

ORIGIN AND PURPOSE OF THE BOOK

The project of writing this book began in a conversation I had with Gian-Carlo Rota in the spring of 1996.  He was then lecturing as visiting professor of mathematics and philosophy at The Catholic University of America.

Rota had often drawn attention to a difference between mathematicians and philosophers.  Mathematicians, he said, tend to absorb the writings of their predecessors directly into their own work.  They do not comment on the writings of earlier mathematicians, even if they have been very much influenced by them.  They simply make use (emphasis JAB) of the material that they find in the authors they read.  When advances are made in mathematics, later thinkers condense the findings and move on.  Few mathematicians study works from past centuries; compared with contemporary mathematics, such older writings seem to them almost like the work of children.

In philosophy, by contrast, classical works often become enshrined as objects of exegesis rather than resources to be exploited.  Philosophers, Rota observed, tend not to ask, “Where do we go from here?”  Instead, they inform us about the doctrines of major thinkers.  They are prone to comment on earlier works rather than paraphrase them.  Rota acknowledged the value of commentaries but thought that philosophers ought to do more.  Besides offering exposition, they should abridge earlier writings and directly address issues, speaking in their own voice and incorporating into their own work what their predecessors have done.  They should extract as well as annotate.

It was against this background that Rota said to me, after one of my classes, as we were having coffee in the cafeteria of the university’s Columbus School of Law, “You should write an introduction to phenomenology.  Just write it.  Don’t say what Husserl or Heidegger thought, just tell people what phenomenology is.  No fancy title, call it an introduction to phenomenology.

This struck me as very good advice…

Although there are references to philosophers scattered throughout his book, Sokolowski rarely, if ever, resorts to arcane argot such as Husserl’s “Fundierung” preferring, instead, plain English words like “founding” and “founded” with appropriate context to refine meaning. 

This sort of “populist” approach to philosophy is, of course, a grave insult to those who have poured over the texts of the ages and we should expect them to respond with commensurate scorn.  Meanwhile, there is work to be done…

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For the esoterically adventurous in the ontology project only, read on for a disquisition on the question of ontology without reference to existence involving Hilbert, Husserl and Heidegger leading to a syntactic and semantic approach for rigorous philosophical method.

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