Neanderpundit

This is not going to be about the psychic friends network. (Who must not have been too psychic, since they didn’t see that whole bankruptcy thing coming, huh?)

No, I mean the ability to sense the rightness of something. The moment when the little switch in your head turns on, and you see the pattern in something, though you don’t yet completely understand.

I have had hundreds of those moments, and I have them yet, all the time.

THe moment when someone placed a practical mathematical application of trigonometry in front of me, and I was able to connect trig to the real world. And I understood. I didn’t immediately begin doing trig in my head, but after some time, I was able to.

Part of this is the ability, I believe, to recognize patterns in the abstract world, and their echoes in the real world. The way the trig tables work, and the angles they represent. Fractals and leaves. The way Pi can be represented by incredibly simple formulas that contain math any five year od can do, but is, by it’s nature, irrational.

At many times in everyone’s life, there’s a connect, a moment when you recognize that connection. Some feel it more clearly than others, some never at all.

Some feel that connect, and misinterpret it, perhaps to further their own desires, or to satisfy their own needs. Timothy Leary no dout thought he was opening a new world when he counseled people to tune in, tun on, drop out.

That harmonic convergence, that sense of essential truth… mine has served me well. And it has NEVER been wrong. In my lifetime, I have had- as I say- hundreds of moments of harmony like that, and eacha nd every time they have allowed me to tune the real world and my own perception of it into perfect harmony.

It has helped me do things in my career that are- well, frankly, impossible. I have written code for robots, for instance, that allows them to generate geometry at a level of accuracy two orders of magnitude better than the robot should be able to accomplish. It has given me a basic understanding- well beyond my education- of the nature of Christ, and of Christianity. It has given me understanding beyond my abilities in a wide variety of areas, and while I always verify my ‘intuition”, if you will, I grow to trust it more as I age.

SO when I say I wouldn’t trust Hillary Clinton, or Barack Obama, or Juan McCain, to watch over a pile of ice cubes at the pole (either one) it’s based on my intuition. There are PLENTY of people who can give lots of very good reasons. I’m not one. I just KNOW they’re scumbags.

lest I end up like Glenn Beck- when I realize, shit, oatmeal isn’t doing a damned thing. Four days of cramming this stuff down my gullet and I have yet to have one freight-train bowel movement. I need some corn or carrots- something that will render a good scratching on it’s way out. SOmething that comes down the pike like a jet propelled chimney brush, that’s what I’m talking about. Oatmeal. Phah. No wonder I hate the stuff.

The company I work for, for many years, has been a vendor of a specific type of machine. We have become very adept at maintaining and servicing those machines, and their specific idiosyncrasies.

About two years ago that changed. Due to some troubles with that vendor, we took on a (formerly) competing line. And started the process of making it our own.

See, like the line we gave up, which we knew well, there is tribal knowledge. There are untold tricks and shortcuts you can take- if you know them. A job which would take even an experienced mechanic two hours to do, might take a member of the tribe ten minutes. because he has the knowledge of his tribe. SO starting from scratch, we are trying to gain that tribal knowledge by ourselves, a little bit at a time, and it’s hard won knowledge at best.

The tribe that used to have that knowledge cannot impart it, because the knowledge occurs to you only when you need it.

FOr example. The Exploder has an alternator on the passenger side. It makes it very difficult to get to the spark plugs on that side of the engine. Almost impossible, in fact. So it’s a common trick to lose the serpentine belt, take off the alternator, and reach in the hole just created to change plugs.

Or you can just reach in under the fender. All four passenger side plugs are easily acessible from under the passenger side wheel well, and it takes minutes to do the job- rather than hours. Knowledge that is learned, and can only be passed person to person, often only when you’re doing the job. Tribal knowledge.

Conservatives have a huge wealth of tribal knowledge. And we are not very damned good at passing it on. Part of that is the pain. A lot of the knowledge we have is born of pain, because a lot of lessons are painful. Sometimes we’re jealous of the knowledge. “Let them learn for themselves”

You know fire burns, and you know it hurts, and you will tell your child to get away, but as Pete once said “No one respects the flame quite like the fool who’s badly burned” We all know that the lesson of communism is that it doesn’t work, and can never work. And for many, that lesson was hard learned indeed. And we can tell our next generation the truths of this, but they most often need to learn the lessons themselves. We CAN impart this tribal knowledge if we can allow the next generation to experiment in non destructive ways so they can learn the lessons in a small scale, before they attempt to apply perpetually failed policies to the real world, in the false hope they will work.