Crtd 12-01-27  Lastedit 15-11-09

   
...and see I urgently have to buy new underwear...

Several times in my life I got deeply stuck in Spinoza's Ethica. How to conquer that totally dysfunctional pedantic slurry landscape of formal theorems about the conditions for self-improvement? If you don't before you die, you're not a philosopher, everybody told me. I finally found the way: turning the order and connection of theorems into a digital web, so you can click hence and forth from conclusions to premises, hold your notes in backlinks to separate pages attached to the propositions that raised it. And that tractor turned out heavy enough to hold and progress, slowly by slowly, during three years with intermissions. A final burst started October last year, after closing my hull leaks, ended yesterday at Part V's final Proposition XLII which proves - "according to the method of geometry" as Spinoza is used to say - that blessedness is not a reward for virtue but virtue (properly understood) itself. Shit! A cleric's trick! All that effort for nothing! EthicaWeb is now set public (http://asb4.com/EthicaWeb), though many earlier pages are waiting for a redo now I read the end. The web is far from  perfect, but good enough as a public draft. If you only read perfect things, wait another 20 years and don't read it at all if I get killed before.
I redirect my mind to the world: Turkish and Chinese economies just kept on growing, the Turkish lira the only hard currency up against euro in the past weeks, low unemployment there. My Dutch friend Ben, who five years ago wisely retired with his ample savings in a nice 3000 euro house bordering a remote Turkish pure Muslim farmer village is probably now the only unemployed of Turkey, but voluntarily. The French are the first to fear Turkish economic power and, happily forgetting Napoleon's brutal genocides in Russia and Portugal and more recently their (moderately put) bestial behaviour during the 1950s Algeria anticolonial uprisings, now start hurling anxious high pitch chimpanzee's yells about ancient supposed murders of East Turkish Armenians by long dead suspects, criminalizing by French law whoever denies them. Which makes clear: there are new job opportunities down the Bosporus for ethnically unobjectionable Dutch unemployed like Wilgers to work there, but do not forget the Turkish cultural assimilation course or you don't even have to apply! Arabs from the Turkish border till down in Sudan and Somalia frantically keep "martyring" each other. Those fainting during torture so as to be unable to say they don't know are brought to Médécins Sans Frontières, who yesterday finally discontinued that precious employment in Misrata after 105 such incidents (they themselves just told BBC). The Pashtun, loyal to a reputation of centuries do not stay behind. The Caucasian ladies and gentlemen financial big shots, dining preciously in Davos, stole some more of my savings, but not as much as, with foreign financial "helpers", the Greek "1%"  stole of the Greek unemployed working class now dumping its children by the hundreds in orphanages. Meanwhile in the Western economic bloc the rich sit on the fortunes stolen from the poor and eagerly wait to start investing as soon as they see the poor start spending money again. But that money is waiting under their own back sides...all since 1936 in Keynes General Theory of Employment Interest and Money (Yes, no joke, I read it completely). But Keynes read Spinoza's Ethica so he's no longer in Vogue in Europe nor will he be much longer in the US as well, as soon as the Yanks get air of it. Spinoza himself, excommunicated Jew but also a highly suspect unbeliever to the standards of promising US truly believing (!) Mormon presidential candidates, would, had he now lived in the US, get arrested and sent for torture to Syria like so many others in the past decade, among whom even some were granted million dollar-indemnities by Canadian judges, then started earning even more by publishing their ordeals. The world's "1%" (half - including the Russian mafia - fundamentalist Christian, the rest Muslim and Jew) should by now be trying to see how they can make a closed economy among themselves so the "99%", now 8 billion, can be left to protest and starve, God willing. I think it might take some more time but in the end they will succeed. Already now I see beautiful deserted tourist beaches around me, zero-growth gives nature a break, all the 1% should dream to eternalize. Why not, they have the brains and the drones. Oh! Why don't all those fools read Spinoza's Ethica! That would solve everything! I also perceive I urgently have to buy new underwear.

In short, surfacing after my deep dive in philosophy I refind the world exactly as it is supposed to be: while the news displays the rest, erratically (Spinoza says: necessarily) wandering, roving, roaming and rambling, it makes me feel the world is made for me alone (the other one, Spinoza, is dead for 350 years), as long as it lasts. I update my Cats-picture album.

SMS to Philemon:

No reply, definitely his decision to make my advance difficult to retrieve. And successful too: I will not come to strangle him and will buy my sail cotton when I visit, what I 've never done yet, Mombasa. Nice pretext to loose 300 euros on that precarious African airplane! Spinoza Ethica Pars IV Definitio I: "By good I mean that which we certainly know to be useful to us." Pars IV Definitio II: "By evil I mean that which we certainly know to be a hindrance to us in the attainment of any good."

...on a rare cold morning...

...moved to tears by my benevolence I connected the entire harbour to the power grid...Spinoza Ethica last proposition: blessedness = virtue

...This holy slope needed five attempts and was too much for some bearings. Acces road to new golf course, with Dieter, walking to loose weight in the truck, arriving - after unexpected success- up late enough to be photographed ...This will be repaired by the excellent Chris, with Ayanga forms the last couple of Africans occasionally in my service.

Rolands brother and his son came for a visit from Germany. A nice occasion for a first test trip without African crew.

...dhow rebaptized: festive first dhow operation without the help of Africans ...folmali dug its way through the sun roof (don't blame those innocent Germans at the back... it was entirely my personal doing)...

My discontinuation of bêta blocker use is not only a big success for my heart but also for the rest of my body (if measured by weight). Charles' last goodbye surprise, a blocking halyard wheel in the mast top, made me climb, first on the folmali, which, my personal weight added, dug its way through its support, the steering deck roof (on the urgent renovation list anyway)...or is there another cause? My body must have been in need to create some capacity to absorb Spinoza Ethica Part II Proposition XIII, which says that all my mind perceives, or all knowledge, is my body and nothing else. So for my mind to grow and allow for the contents of Ethica I may have needed quite some new kilos lately.

...no Africans picture 2...I should add this roof was on the urgent renovation list...

...no Africans picture 3...

...no Africans picture 4...

...no Africans picture 5...while in top dismounting the blocked wheel the straps holding the pulley holding the struggling captain, who recently became an expert in Spinozan power, started to glide. Now both hoisting points unreliable. Third point has to be established. Definitive cancelling of the trip...

Another option could be just to hire one of those African guys who simply climb in the mast and fix it, if pride permits.

...After storing the solar panels in the hold and putting the collapsed roof straight, the planned lake dinner was held in the harbour...
...Ethics Part I Proposition 33 Scholium 1 : things may seem to happen accidentally but they never do (reproduced below)...

1p33s1 contingentes  ..."contingency" merely refers to the imperfection of our knowledge of the thing, not to the thing itself...

.... there is ...nothing to justify us in calling things contingent...A thing is called necessary either in respect to its essence or in respect to its cause; for the existence of a thing necessarily follows, either from its essence and definition, or from a given efficient cause. For similar reasons a thing is said to be impossible; namely, inasmuch as its essence or definition involves a contradiction, or because no external cause is granted, which is conditioned to produce such an effect; but a thing can in no respect be called contingent, save in relation to the imperfection of our knowledge. A thing of which we do not know whether the essence does or does not involve a contradiction, or of which, knowing that it does not involve a contradiction, we are still in doubt concerning the existence, because the order of causes escapes us,-such a thing, I say, cannot appear to us either necessary or impossible. Wherefore we call it contingent or possible.

...nihil ...in rebus dari propter quod contingentes dicantur...Res aliqua necessaria dicitur vel ratione suae essenti vel ratione caus. Rei enim alicujus existentia vel ex ipsius essentia et definitione vel ex data causa efficiente necessario sequitur. Deinde his etiam de causis res aliqua impossibilis dicitur; nimirum quia vel ipsius essentia seu definitio contradictionem involvit vel quia nulla causa externa datur ad talem rem producendam determinata. At res aliqua nulla alia de causa contingens dicitur nisi respectu defectus nostr cognitionis. Res enim cujus essentiam contradictionem involvere ignoramus vel de qua probe scimus eandem nullam contradictionem involvere et tamen de ipsius existentia nihil certo affirmare possumus propterea quod ordo causarum nos latet, ea nunquam nec ut necessaria nec ut impossibilis videri nobis potest ideoque eandem vel contingentem vel possibilem vocamus.