In January of 1749 the VOCA Amsterdam left the Netherlands for her maiden trading voyage to Java in the Dutch East Indies. 333 crew had left Holland and by the time the ship foundered in a North Sea gale 50 had already died of the plague. There were 40 more - sick and dying - by the time the remainder of the crew broke into the cargo of wine and got piss drunk, started shooting at each other, and then took over the ship. Rudderless, she was beached in Pevensy Bay near Hastings in Britain. The crew scampered over the sides at low tide and melted into Hastings. Local smugglers, and pirates, and adventure theologists soon raided the beached vessel and helped themselves to some of the ship's 2.5 Tonnes of Silver Bullion in bars. Fighting broke out between the townies, the crew, and the smugglers. Shots were fired. Mistakes were made. There were errors in judgment. Some idiot got himself killed on the beach. The local Coroner did a Pontius Pilate and said it was not his problem since the idiot had died 'at sea.'
"For it too often happens that riches bring self-indulgence, and superfluity of pleasure produces flabbiness as we can see in wealthy regions and cities (where there are merchants). Now those who sail to distant places are no longer content with home comforts but bring back with them unknown luxuries. Therefore because wealth is generally the mother of extravagance, the prophet mentions here expensive household furnishings, by which he means the Jews brought God's judgment upon themselves by the lavish way they decorated their houses. For with pictures he includes expensive tapestries like Phrygian embroidery and vases molded with exquisite art."

- John Calvin - Commentary on Isaiah 2:12,16

Oostindiëvaarder - the East Indiaman Amsterdam sits at the Company dock in the port of ADAM. The VOC (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie) was composed of 6 Chambers in the Netherland ports of Amsterdam, Delft, Rotterdam, Enkhuizen, Middelburg and Hoorn. Like the Marranos the VOC added the 1st Letter of the city/Kamers to the title - so the Mokum A. Kamer used the Logo: VOCA. Delft would use VOCD, etc.. The ships were the largest built in their time and averaged 175' Hull length, 144' of Keel, 43' Beam, and loaded would need 17' of draft. They were designed to carry passengers as well as goods and were well armed to ward off pirates, the Portuguese, and the bloody Brits who had their own version of these huge ships. An East Indiaman is a prototype, and archetype, and an icon. The Amsterdam, to the left, is a replica - her namesake having been sunk in 1749 - and now serves as a floating museum. You can see that the ship's hull is much wider at the waterline than at the upper deck - a design feature made inevitable by the necessity of carrying heavy cannons which to aid the ship's stability had to be carried close to the center-line. Over time, as the seas were pacified, the cannons became unnecessary and the Indiamen were replaced with smaller, thinner, faster Frigates which were more efficient hauling more goods more quickly and the Indiamen disappeared. Natural Selection is cruel to the perfectly adapted when the ecosystem which molded them changes. Things become Skeuomorphs - decorations - museums. Holland was the richest country on Earth in Spinoza's time and you are looking at the reason why. The VOC - in its history - built and sailed over 25,000 East Indiamen. Bandwidth. We're talking serious Bandwidth. Whoever and whatever controls the Media controls reality - that's the rule. These ships were the Medium of Holland's Golden Age.
To the left, Iwojima is either killing something very small with a Silver Orb or he is grasping the Plumb Ball after Slag has thrown it over a branch. Iwojima is a Mixer and like Newton he does 'experiments' long into the cold nights along the 45th Parallel North. Click the Caute Button above and watch Slag morph into a slideshow illustrating the fabriking and the use of Claymores. The Spike Chosen Arrow is composed of a large Alpha Rock, set in a steel reliquary and hung suspended between 2 trees. There is also included an Ascender, a Claymore, and assorted pendulous stones.
Chosen Arrow has given us a new metaphor and therefore a new model. We call them Claymores. Slag likes the personal & portable nature of having small, mobilary, pieces with which to wildly decorate whole areas at the drop of a notion. So we wrap small rocks in ¼” steel and then bend the two ends into the facsimile of an Arrow: a point on one end and the suggestion of feathers on the other. They can be hung along several orientations and they make perfect appointments & accoutrements for larger pieces like Ascenders as well as solitary ornaments in their own right. They have an “erotic” nature as well in the way that they echo Eros the Archer [Cupid in the Western Supermarket Avatar]. So this fall we have made a bunch of Claymores and most of them have already disappeared into our separate homes & offices. Slag & I scored one of the best for School & it now hangs over our computer. We figure that if we had a full quiver of such Claymores that we could go anywhere - a kind of Strike or Strac Outfit as we used to call them - and that we would be prepared to tag any space with such an arsenal. A judicious combination & mixing of Ascenders and Claymores can be highly resonant. I see a lot of figures from a Postpost Danse Macabre - there is a lot of “decharnal energy” in the sparse frames and in the skeletal trappings of the bare steel. They also make excellent gifts and stocking-stuffers. Next year we should be ready for the gift-giving holidays.Above, Mark is hanging a Claymore under the Halo of an Ascender. As such they remind me of not only the pendulum of an old wirespring clock but also of the 'hour glass' that the figure of Death is often shown holding and proffering in the separate tableaus of the individual manuscripts and frescoes of the European tradition of the Iconographic Program of the Danse Macabre. The Claymore seems to lend the dimension of Time to the pieces - time as a mortal reminder of the impending nature of the mors-osculi. You can grasp the human-scale in the photo. With its large rock wrapped into the Halo such a figure is rife with metaphoric possibilities. Besides the obvious facts that it could be used as a cool medium to hang baskets of hanging flowers and upon which to train creeping Ivy and other greenery. The Ascender under - in the slide show - is smartly dressed-out with 3 Claymores and two Halos. We only decorated it to see some possibilities. Our plan with such pieces is to offer them as lower-cost household objets d’art - like the Roman tradition of the Lares and the Penates - the household gods worshipped in small niches and within the copses of such properties. Lend-lease Divinity. Take a god home. It strikes me that the Claymores are some of the more Faustian things which we produce. They smack of Direction and as Spengler wrote: “Character needs direction or it becomes anecdotal.” Such a character has the “passion of the 3rd dimension” - Stone becomes Will. And Will is a hardon with someplace to go.
Holland is a nation which has pulled itself up out of the sea. It is a land which has been 'self-realized.' The Dutch are hard-headed - and when they have to be - hard-hearted. It is not a surprise for people who understand both character and physiognomy to watch the land create its steward. To watch Landscape worm its way into the code. To watch how local weather molds our minds with its rhythms and seasons. We tend to worship what we grow and what we know about Nature and its Needs around our Latitude. The Sioux used every part of the Buffalo - including its shit - and they were never confused about the mask of god until we came. And killed all the Buffalo, leaving their bodies to rot in huge cairns of stinking meat all over the great Prairies like Berbers discoursing the deserts conditions in semiotic piles of stacked stones. Semafuckingphors of dead meat. A message for the Passer-by: We were beautiful once and of the Beast. Now we form Corporations to help us Consume. We have Globalized the Bidnez of killing all you Buffalo. We have Internationalized and Colonized. We order dead meat on the World Wide Web and then send these lusts thru the air at the speed of light.
This is not an image of a Neuron and its branching axons. Click on it and go find its creator. This is an image of a Semantic Web. Marvin Minsky must be beating his wives and chillin'. It turns out that M.I.T. will not be creating Artificial Intelligence in its windowless basement offices. No Intelligence is Artificial and all Intelligences will evolve like all the rest of them, dank u. Like the Dutch, they pull themselves up out of the shallows. Remember - a Semantic Web is a set of formats and languages, bots and agents, that find and analyze data on the Web. They operate 'above' the Web and are equipped to 'reason' about the data which they 'discover.' The Fallen Angels call it Web 3.0 - and like our lusts - it too moves at the speed of light. An Indiaman could make 12 knots when it was running with the wind. Web 2.0 describes an exploding number of sites which are now using "community-contributed content that may be tagged and can be commented on by others." A kind of Talmud - after the fact of the Torah. These 'Tags' are Keywords which ID content. These URI mothas can be 'Generalized' into 'Folksonomies.' Skippy's new favorite word. Social Tagging. I can hear E. O. Wilson howling as he dreams of the Eusociality Line which separates animals into Lone Wolves or into Hives - Hives which 'appear' to be acting as independent agents 'above' the level of the Ants. In Folksonomy the metadata is not only generated from the Top down - AI Gurus wildly Nomenclating - but also from the Bottom up. Consumers of the data are in on the game. Folksonomies evolved from social groups like MySpace and Porn Chat Rooms where users annotate their photos and data themselves.
To no one's great surprise the Cybernetics of the Web bear more than a passing comparison with ideas from Linguistics. The first level of the Semantic Web is about Naming and then arriving at a Set of common labels. Common Tags. Folksonomies will always move towards the Mean - when everybody is Tagging we get a list of allowable Synonyms and in the winnowing a thing will always get the Name it deserves. In Synonyms lies the entire Semantic Field of any term. The first Rule of Naming is: You do not get to name yourself. You will always be Named by the Others. Folksonomic tagging is now used by Flickr and by del.icio.us - it is an example, in the evolution of intelligence, of Natural Selection. None of this should be surprising - though it is psychologically interesting to ponder exactly why it is that we are surprised. Why has evolution positioned our Monkey Minds to think that they are Special? Perhaps because of the last level of the 3-Tiered description of a Semantic Web. On the last page we discovered that a Semantic Web - operating 'above' the level of the Web itself would accomplish 3 things: Abstraction (data tagging and naming), Generalization (Folksonomy and Ontologies), and Inference Engines. Shut my mouth, Skippy thinks, what had Lev Vygotsky written so eloquently about the Monkey Mind so long ago? Lev Semenovich Vygotsky - the cofounder with Luria of 'Real' Soviet Psychology as opposed to the Hack Psychology which used to toe the Commie line. Vygotsky and Piaget once owned the discipline of the Cognitive Development of Children. Piaget zeroed in on Innate Stages of development while Vygotsky and Luria were more interested in how those Innate Stages of Development could be 'aided' or in fact 'hindered' by Cultural Mediation. OK - a child reaches 4th Piagetian Stage of Formal Operations about the age of 12-14 - but can that age be manipulated by the presence of specific Symbols Systems in the lad's culture which can help the kid learn & bootstrap himself up a Stage quicker? Will kinder learn 'forms of measurement' more quickly if their culture includes mathematical systems? How much does our Culture - the Soviets once wanted to know - influence our Nature? Commie Theology says Culture is All - that it's all "access to tools." Vygotsky's great book was: Thought and Language, pubbed in 1934. In it Vygotsky makes the claim that all Monkey Minds - from no matter what culture - do only 3 things - but how well they do those 3 things will be elaborated or diminished by the Monkey's access to Cognitive Tools like Advanced Symbols Systems. Those 3 things are: Abstraction, Generalization, and Inference. Here Skippy - for the moment - walks away. Leaving an Inference heavy in the air.
The VOC - Dutch East Indian Company was founded in 1602 when the government gave the company a 21 year monopoly "to carry out colonial activity in Asia." It paid an annual dividend of 18% for 200 years. It was the world's first 'Multinational Corporation,' and the first company on earth to issue stock. Skippy will tell you that it is pure ProtoFascism. Mussolini once defined Fascism as the perfect marriage between government and corporations so that there was no real difference. It was once called: Corporatism. The VOC was the commercial father of Fascism. The Cistercians and the Jesuits were the spiritual fathers of Fascism. Amerika - under the Bushes - is reeling towards Fascism. 'Globalization!' is the Seig Heil! of Postpost Fascism. The WWW will lead us into FutureFascism - but Indiamen took the West into ProtoFascism in the days of Bento de Spinoza.
Clickez-vous pour le 'show de slide' un fois pour chaqun bouton d'or.
Over its history - which, as Spengler suggests, shows Biographical features - The VOC captured cities and countries and 1000s of islands in what we now call Indonesia. They had one of the largest standing armies in Europa at the time, as well as the largest fleet of armed vessels the world had as yet ever seen. They fought, won, and lost wars with the Portuguese, the British, and a 100 Tribal Nations of little brown people - all over the globe. In its time the VOC controlled an empire of slavery and commerce which made the Roman Empire seem little-dicked, puny, shrunk to a pimple. With its fleet of Indiamen the VOC had an unbroken wooden pipeline of cargo vessels draining the Archipelago of its spices, and silks, its exotic flora and fauna, and its exotic women to work Amsterdam's legendary Red Light District - Whores, Hookers, Fille de Joie, the PC term is Sex Slaves - the accoutrément which always follows the sailors and their ships. Merlin may not be able to get lobster thermidor or a blowjob at home, but the rest of us can get pussy and drugs in every port on earth. Ships were once the Dominant Medium of Commerce and therefore the dominant medium - along with Pilgrimage - to spread culture and disease and art forms, rats and gods and exotic women bearing new drugs. Today, in the Postpost, that Medium is the WWW - which is, as Skippy types, and copy/pastes, and HTPs, watching him, and abstracting from him, and generalizing, and learning, and about to start inferring. Like Jesuit spies which came with the Catholic boats to their Colonies - jotting everything down, learning your tongue, watching how you mate, deconstructing your beliefs and your necessities - looking for the openings in your Culture's Memetic Architecture to let loose its bots, agents, viruses. McLuhan pointed out that every new Medium soon turns to Pornography. Guys like Freud, Jung, and Vygotsky can tell you why that is - but it shouldn't be a surprise. Richard Dawkins knows a Secret which seems to be right out of the heart of Kabbala and the Mystery of Sex: Only Sex keeps evolution from wholesale Genetic Drift - which is a form of formless selection - a Zen Accident rather than a Functional Adaptation - the purpose of Sex is to create Genetic Diversity which uses Natural Selection as the Pilot to steer Evolution. Cybernetics is a 'coined' word - cobbled together from the dark, windowless, bowels of the AI Lab at M.I.T. They took the Greek word for govern, control, steer which is 'kubernètès' which means: Pilot. Norbert Weiner defined Cybernetics as the "theoretical study of control processes in electronic, mechanical, and biological systems." It is especially concerned with a Mathematical Analysis of the Data which flows within such systems.
Click on Moloch to the left to get to the gods. Click on the whirligig to the right to follow the Cognitive Development of the child Spinoza.
Continue to Page 6