Entr’acte
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Cancer Diary, General, Gripes, Living in Korea
Before getting back to my Cancer Diary – and so much has happened since I last wrote any of it – let me relate that today was the first day of returning to the hospital to talk with the Professor since being discharged last Thursday, and as usual there were surprises.
See, this device he plugged into me has no proper “instruction manual” to go with it. I have really only just understood the proper function of the thing. So I have been avoiding the use of the lumen valve when in truth I should have been using it – during shopping or other trips out of my place, for example. The lumen valve, which is actuated by injecting water into the device with a syringe, prevents the outward flow of gut contents. I think you can probably figure out the rest…
The second thing is that now the resectioning operation appears to have been successful, the FDD will be removed next Wednesday. But I had received the impression (wrongly, it turns out) that the FDD was to be a permanent fixture, but no! – it now appears to only be put in place to serve as a hygienic conduit while the rectum wall was healing. Once this process is competed (three weeks after the operation), it can be removed. The remaining gut will eventually adjust to working normally as it did before the neoplasm was removed. Or so I have been reassured.
So, while I was discussing my (generally favourable) health with the Professor, he said that I was already able to resume work.
“Ah,” I said: “but the company has given me until the end of February to recuperate.” I will return to the use of this time period in a moment.
Afterwards, a time was arranged for the removal of the FDD and a barium enema x-ray shoot, which will almost certainly be the actual end of the cancer episode.
But how about the job? The company had been signalling previously that they would be “open” to re-signing me, but how “open” were they, really?
I left the hospital and walked back to our office, just down the road, to tell my manager what the Prof. had said. During our discussion, she asked me whether I had heard anything from the company in the interim, and of course, the answer was “no”; since our conflab in Seomyeon back at the end of July, I had heard nary a peep out of them.
The gist was that there was a possibility that (based largely upon negative reviews from the students, never mind the fact that too many of them needed some severe improvements in their English in order to be fully functional) they might not want to re-sign me after all. Great. Should I start looking for a new job already? If they were not going to re-sign me, then I would have to do this; the lucky happenstance of having been out of work for literally only two days before signing for the current job was the exception, rather than the rule, as historically finding something new would take months.
Additionally, when I was waiting to go to the hospital in December, I spent the weekends working on lesson plans and materials for a proposed new course due to commence after re-signing; but if they don’t re-sign me, there is no point in proceeding with this. They are not paying me right now because I am not working – and another foreigner from a different branch is covering for me while I “recuperate” – and I will only continue with that work out of a sense of goodwill _if_ they are going to re-sign, otherwise I have more important things to do with my time.
Personally, I have always felt prickly whenever this question of student feedback being in the negative zone rears its ugly head. In my experience, “proper training” is something that Korean employers tend to avoid. Lack of communication is part of the problem, but a desire to avoid wasting money, I suspect, is in there somewhere too, however irrational that may sound. After all, if you don’t communicate with workers as a matter of course and don’t provide them with the feedback and training they need for a specific job, what possible right do you have to complain, really? I myself have plenty of things that make me want to complain, but my response is tempered nowadays by the idea that simply complaining about something is not enough – one acquires greater legitimacy when complaining if one has a viable alternative suggestion, at least.
My own complaint is that a job of this kind requires far more training and orientation for someone like myself, with a lower-level academic background than some of my peers here. Otherwise, I am constantly in danger of appearing inauthentic to the students, primarily due to lack of relevant experience. So I made this point today – that I would be perfectly happy to re-sign but would appreciate further training in order to be more effective in the position. You’d think it was a no-brainer – after all, it is not every person who can simply walk into a job like mine and be perfect from the get-go. But as I say, in my experience this is a big issue with Korean employers.
The real stumbling-block for so many Korean language-related companies seems to be the lack of product diversity – what has emerged over the last few years, for me, based on my own observations, is that too many of the English-based businesses here are one-trick ponies – it is often a struggle to get the management to accept that they need to offer a greater variety of products to attract more customers. And they are often scared of negative ratings from students who really do not have a sufficient level of English themselves to (as in our case) progress to teaching their own students. Business owners are often inflexible.
So suddenly, in the immediate aftermath of a cancer operation, I am yet again faced with the possibility of having to mount a job search. I have every expectation that the company will prevaricate until me having already found a job in the meantime is upon them, by which time, of course, it will be too late… but this is Korea, so what’s new?
The War that No-one Wanted (Continued)
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Breakfast in the Ruins, Commentary, General, Living in Korea, The Destruction of History, Uncategorized
And what should be doing the rounds lately, but:
The War that No-one Wanted
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Breakfast in the Ruins, Commentary, General, Living in Korea, The Destruction of History
It’s probably because I don’t have a TV any more (and I would probably only watch UFC etc. all the time if I did), but if the Norks lobbing the occasional dud missile into the sea constitutes “provocation”, might I respectfully suggest that the people saying this are in need of “medication”?
Because you’d have to be living in a media-shill-controlled little bubble to think that the Norks are going anywhere fast. The parties with an interest in all of this are clear to see and the Americans in particular should have been sitting around a table with the Norks, Chinese and Russians, at least, to find a solution.
War on the peninsula is not inevitable but is being stoked by those who profit from it, for whom any person who is not in their diabolical little circle (ordinary people in Korea, North and South, plus the remainder of humanity) is expendable trash, that’s exactly how they see us.
And if anyone starts to raise the dubious spectre of “Democracy versus Totalitarianism” or similar waffle to justify a conflict, let’s remember that there used to be regular meetings between the concerned parties (“democratic” and otherwise), and an agreement was reached to help the Norks with their power requirements, which the Americans were proposing, but, ah… the disadvantage of “Democracy”, in this case, is that when the citizenry are swayed to change their administration, policy also changes, and that is why we are talking about this today, otherwise the “problems” with NK would have been solved around fifteen years ago and everything would have been much more tranquil.
But hey, there’s no profit in peace… is there?
Pentagon should move US military families from S. Korea ahead of possible war – Sen. Graham
The Trials and Tribulations of a New Job
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Commentary, General, Living in Korea, Odds and Ends...
It frightens me sometimes to think how long I have been here… tonight I am back in the Pinot Wine Bar in Banpo, Seoul, not far from the Express Bus Terminal, and predictably, just like when I first started coming here all those years ago (when I was working in Korean public elementary schools, God help me!) I couldn’t remember the way (wrong exit from the Bus Terminal again) and ended up getting more early evening exercise than expected…
Right now, the early spring air in Seoul is something of a miasma, as the first clouds of the annual ‘Hwang sa’ (the ‘Floating Yellow Dust’ from the Gobi mentioned previously at times in this blog) waft their noisome way across the brief stretch of ocean separating the Korean peninsula from mainland China and combine with the indigenous smog of an early Seoul evening, and already, close to the end of March, the KTX train coming north from Daegu was filled with the sound of irritated lungs coughing; at both ends and all points in between, where the line of sight allows it, the distant hills are barely distinguishable from the grey, overcast sky. Happily, perhaps, the weather app on my phone is promising rain tomorrow, but towns in the south seem to be having surprisingly high levels of airborne dust. Thus it comes to pass that, as is the case every spring, the true harbinger of the coming summer is not the emerging green buds and leaves on the trees, but a grey sky and a constant cough in the throats of all of those unwise enough to venture out without a dust mask of some description, although some of us also take some dubious medication for it, too.
Alas, what brings me here on what should now be my odd weekend (the new job involves working from Wednesday to Sunday evenings each week; my ‘weekend’ is now Monday and Tuesday) was yet another visa screw-up – immediately after receiving copies of the countersigned contract and the other papers necessary to transfer sponsorship from the old employer to the new, I took the Seoul subway to the correct Immigration Office, and what did I discover? They had gone completely over to a reservation system the previous April, and no longer used the drop-in-take-a-ticket-and-wait-yer-turn method which, ironically perhaps, seems to work so well elsewhere. One might even point out that even when the old Busan office, which used to occupy a couple of floors of the Customs Building down near the harbour, was transplanted into a swanky, squeaky-clean new place a couple of blocks down the road, it was not necessary to enforce the new system because, as anyone who went there could see, customers occupied surprisingly few of the seats whilst waiting… which was quite a contrast with the previous situation, where you could hit the place on a weekday afternoon and find it full of Russian and Chinese sailors in nervous groups in the corners, Korean grannies looking after Filipino-Korean grandchildren as they ran around screaming and shouting, and various odd European and American English speakers regarding the melée with a mixture of confusion and amusement on their faces as they were waiting their turn.
Anyway… so… I then began a furious KakaoTalk chat session from my cell phone with the recruiter who was involved this time and who – alas – did not seem to understand that it was no longer possible to take a ticket and wait – you had to go online and make a reservation for some time in the near(ish) future, and – double alas! – it seems that the Seoul office already had no less than an eighteen-day backlog of applicants. It rapidly became apparent, also, that I was far from the only foreigner with this problem, as the enquiry desk off to the right-hand side of the office was swamped and just to add unwanted fuel to the already blazing fire, after talking with the female member of staff there (via my own cell phone) the recruiter demanded that I get the name of the office staff member so that she could lodge an official complaint because “she is so rude!”. I had to talk her down from her state of High Dudgeon (is there such a thing as Low Dudgeon???), and she went online and reserved a time slot for me, which (as I sit here writing) is tomorrow afternoon. And then back home and lessons on Wednesday, possibly after being up for hours with little sleep prepping up.
It’s one of the stranger aspects of being in a country for a long time, and travelling between towns to wherever the next job takes you, that you realise one day, with something approaching (let’s call it) amusement, that you could probably write a whole raft of blog entries about your experience with the Immigration Offices alone; it could be a whole series. Likewise, the strange emergence of the requirement for an annual medical check, something not deemed a necessity when you arrived here with an entry visa stamped in your passport, a suitcase and a couple of large wheelie bags full of books and stuff, and a slow trail of boxes sent by surface mail from Taiwan for cheapness, but which was suddenly applied by the customs people immediately after Lee Myung-bak was elected President at the the of 2007. Somewhere, when it was out of your sight, that nice square wheelie bag that you purchased new in Taipei was ripped apart at the seams, presumably by a Customs minion, and had to be unceremoniously discarded once ensconced in one’s new home. And not a word about compensation…
The documentary requirements quickly accumulated: first, they wanted you to take a health check each year; simultaneously, they started demanding criminal record printouts, in my case from the Metropolitan Police Database, which alone took at least two months. But pretty soon, this was considered insufficient – next, they wanted the copy of your original Degree deposited with the offices to be apostilled (and since it was a copy rather than the original, this meant that it first had to be notarised. In England. And then apostilled!), and finally, they wanted the (original) criminal record to be apostilled, too!
This made the provision of documents an expensive venture in insanity, both in terms of total price and in the amount of time required (as procuring a fresh criminal record printout could take upward of three months). For myself, I think the final straw came when I signed the contract for the year at the KDLI outside of Icheon in Gyyeonggi-do. It seems that they had decided that they should also have their own copies of the same documents provided by the applicants, and this could not have happened at a worse time for me personally, as the cost of relocation had crippled me financially and resulted in my new five-million-won credit card being commuted to (a more sensible) two million limit; it took an agonising FIVE MONTHS to get the CRC (from the Met in London) apostilled and with a notarised, apostilled Degree copy into the hands of Captain Lee, who was the foreigner liaison officer (the Korean Army were in charge of the place, or so it seemed; I never did quite figure that part out).
Even worse, two years after I graduated from what was originally CCAT in Cambridge (now the Anglia Ruskin University), the government of the time (Conservative) decided that it was appropriate for all of the former colleges and polytechnics, who used to issue Degrees on behalf of the CNAA (Council for the National Accreditation of Awards) or other existing universities should now become self-accrediting in their own right. This had the unfortunate consequence of consigning past CNAA records into the care of the Open University somewhere in north London, from whence (the last time I asked) it was not possible to obtain copies or reproductions in the event of loss or destruction. So I became very panicky at the prospect of having to send my one copy of my Degree back to England for whatever reason… even worse, institutions like EPIK (English Program In Korea) also demanded at least two sealed transcripts from said university, which the changes since my graduation have likewise rendered impossible, thus limiting opportunities for employment here, although I would have to say that I would not, nowadays and at my age, consider a new EPIK position to be appropriate or desirable. Those days are over!
The final nail in the coffin of EPIK applications, however, is that applicants from the UK and Australia now also have to submit copies of their birth certificates (why is that, I wonder???), something rather difficult because (a) I would have to fly back to find the silly thing because it is doubtful that my parents would be able to locate it, and (b) Korean employers tend to be rather mean with allowances for time off and it would, in any case, probably cost the equivalent of two months’ salary payments just for the air tickets! It might be possible to do this between jobs but it might also mean having to produce fresh apostilled documents, adding more cost in terms of money and time, the regulation here being that an applicant is not required to submit new documents provided that they are out of Korea for a period of less than three months.
Anyway, getting back to the main story… the odd factor in the equation in fact takes me back to a brief few minutes at the Suwon Immigration Office at the start of my time with the KDLI in 2013, which I had to travel to by public transport (seems like that’s something of a theme here, too) and at my own expense after a morning session of four lessons. I had no idea whether things would be okay, but I was assured by Mr. Han from Busan, the recruiter who brought me here from Taiwan all those years ago, that all I needed to transfer my visa was a set of four documents: passport, ARC, Letter of Release and a copy of the signed contract, and of course, I was well informed by his experience. And as it transpired, the process took no more than about fifteen minutes, tops, and the staff there turned out to be a pleasant group of girls who liked a laugh, although they did express surprise at the fact that I had resigned suddenly from the last position, which was (sadly) the seventeen-month extended contract offered to me by the same public elementary school who had employed me before I went to Busan to work for YBM… but I have mentioned this before…
“Ohhh, it was terrible!” I told them. Well, I think they believed me…
But we should consider from this anecdote that there was no actual problem with the Suwon Immigration Office themselves; the necessary documents had been deposited when I moved from Yangsan to Seomyeon, Busan in 2011 (and in fact, as I sit here writing this, these documents are still current, because circumstances have, yet again, prevented me from leaving the country since I did a visa run to Fukuoka in 2010), and the only documentary change they required was essentially notification of the new employer and the contract to prove it. No, it was the KDLI insisting that they were entitled to their own set of apostilled docs that caused so much grief; paying for them involved giving money to a friend so that I could use their credit cards. And the whole thing had to be done one afternoon in a PC room in Changwon – we had to find one where we could print the receipt web pages as proof of purchase. I kid you not!
So we should perhaps also include a nod of gratitude to the staff at the Immigration Offices, who often have to work with fractious and volatile foreigners with whom communication is difficult. I have never forgotten that it was one of their number, Mr. Kang, who at that time was working at the airport on Jeju Island, who came to my rescue when I landed there after flying out from Taiwan with only a wedge of New Taiwan Dollars in my wallet and none of the local currency, having received my final salary payment from Carol Hui, the secretary of my dubious employer and then left in something of a hurry; I actually had to overstay my visa AGAIN because I was waiting for someone to deliver the ticket before I could pay the overstay fine at the customs office and fly out. Despite the fact that it was late at night and the currency bod had already closed shop for the evening, Mr. Kang persuaded him to Do The Dirty Deed for me. Likewise, much more recently, my stint down in Geoje was cut short by the unavailablity of a new position from my then-employer, who actually sent my Letter of Release to the Geoje Immigration Office the same day as the semester ended, but somehow didn’t think to tell me about it immediately (and why was that, I wonder???); I was then going backwards and forwards between the Geoje and Masan offices for days while they worked out which one was responsible for handling me, and which was finally resolved when Masan allowed me an extra month thereafter to find a new job. They might have offered me even more time, but sometimes, perhaps, a beggar can’t be a chooser. Or cheeky, come to that…
After my visa experiences in Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea, I’m sure that my readers could share many similar ones of their own. Suffice it to say that the root of these procedures is the security of their countries, and while we may complain at the levels of inconvenience that they impose upon us, they are not usually trying to treat us unfairly; one could hardly blame them if they had a stereotype of an eternally-complaining (and usually, I don’t know, kind of pale-skinned?) foreigner who somehow seems to have an unreasonable belief that they have an automatic right of abode just because they happened to be there. It might be a good idea to step back for a moment and ponder the situation which finally evolved vis-a-vis the required documents here, because in the end, it seems to have reached an equitable balance between establishing the probity of the applicant and not imposing unnecessarily regular demands for new apostilled papers. Once the documents have been submitted to the local Immigration Office, they are scanned and retained in their database; thereafter, they remain current until such a time as the visa holder leaves the country for three months or more – meaning that it is now possible to leave the country for an extended period and still retain the visa, resuming legal activities here upon your return. It is also possible to stay in the country for up to six months between jobs by transferring to a D-10 (Jobseeker) visa and then (in my own case) transferring back to an E-2 once a new contract is signed. This is not a cheap process, however.
I suppose we could say that what often seems to happen in the case of immigration arrangements is that everything seems almost perfect, when all of a sudden, we find that there’s an annoying fly in the ointment, except that where immigration is concerned, the fly tends to involve an awful lot of financial and temporal expense. In addition, because a negative result vis-a-vis a visa (my God, I’m alliterating again!) could be catastrophic, the foreigner feels nervous and therefore, despite probably the best efforts and intentions of the Immigration Office staff, the whole thing collapses – like when (I was told) a loud American at an Immigration Office one day lost it and started abusing (verbally) the staff who were attending him, so they cancelled his visa right there and then, and he was out. As I found out first with my experience at Suwon and then more recently in Daegu, a little patience and humour goes a long way.
In the event, it took a huge amount of said ‘patience’ to get the thing sorted. Why? Because when I went up to the Immigration desk at the allotted time, the first thing the (lady) officer said was to ask where the Proof of Residence was; as it turned out, the new company had not included this in the original bundle that they gave me. Secondly, I was told at the time that it should be in my Inbox because it was sent by e-mail, but when I returned home that night, before sitting down to do at least some minimal prep before hitting the sack, I checked both of the e-mail accounts to which documents had been sent by the company, and could find said attachment in neither of them. Finally, it just so happened that the company manager was in the US at the time (!!!), and it took some four hours to get a copy of the housing contract faxed directly to the Immigration Office to complete the process. Again: I kid you not.
What we can observe here is the contrast between a straightforward transfer of visa sponsorship (because that’s what it was, and that’s how it should have been) and one compounded by inattentiveness on the part of one (or both) parties… there was at least one other complicating factor here, but I will not labour the point. I think it’s fair to say that in this particular case, difficulties arose because of the habit amongst the natives to not discuss with (or to make aware) their co-workers about what they are doing in the event that a crisis emerges and the co-worker has to (however temporarily) carry the can for them (a point which, oddly enough, figures large in the “Lesson Planning” component at my new employer…). I’ve seen it so many times, but this time it was almost catastrophic… you can’t mess about with Immigration, no matter how sympathetic they themselves may be.
As for myself… sometimes it feels as if I have a huge pot of ointment, the top is always open and it’s always so clogged with flies that it looks like a good old Spotted Dick pudding (but where’s the fucking CUSTARD???); but even though their involvement in my life is so fundamental and potentially life-changing, it would be wrong to single the Immigration Offices and the Ministry of Justice out because they are not the only insects trapped in my personal pot of cream. The ‘trouble’ is that they require a stack of documents for compliance, and so many things can go wrong along the way; this is my main point here.
As an illustration of other complicating factors in my life here, recently, a letter arrived which (I was told) was an invitation to partake in cancer screening, as I am now in my (ahem) fifties , and It’s The Done Thing (meaning, there is probably a legal requirement involved); Joseph, my manager in the previous position, hinted that it might be free (well, whoopee…). And I have been lamenting for a long time now that the requirement to plan lessons and find or design materials (and seek out materials online) involves a lot of sitting down; the lifestyle is simply not healthy, so I have been adjusting my diet accordingly, but this sedentary occupation also means that losing weight is not easy.
And the involvement of the Seoul Immigration Office in the Big Picture does seem to complicate things further, but in the end, like myself, the staff there are merely small units within the big machine, and patience and politeness are the lubricants for all of the dubious cogwheels; and as I adumbrated long ago, whether we like (or understand) it or not, when we arrive upon the shores of Korea we are the real ambassadors of our peoples; if our complaint with regard to peoples such as the Koreans is that we are seen through eyes that cannot see us afresh, maybe we should remember that actions speak louder than words, and maybe the actions of those belonging to our own nations here, in the past, may not have been as good or as beneficial as we might like, and the only way to counter the negatives is to be positive ourselves.
Peeling Secrets…
Posted by Andrew | Filed under General, How-To, Odds and Ends..., Uncategorized
Saw this on Yahoo this morning and the scales fell from my eyes… just goes to prove you’re never too old to learn something new!
More From the FBI…
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, General, Gripes, Lost Geographies, The Destruction of History
This was shared to my Wall this morning. And the most interesting comment seems to be part of that about the late Philip Klass:
“Always striving to stay on the cutting edge, Klass published an “Exclusive Report on Counter Measures” in the November 18th and 25th, 1957, editions of Aviation Week. This report was referred to the FBI for the “unauthorized disclosure of information classified ‘Secret’”. An investigation into the disclosure was dropped when the US Air Force told the FBI that the disclosed information could not be declassified for purposes of prosecution.”
http://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/fbi-files-the-paranormal-collection/
This covers a range of characters who by now are well-known to the UFO research community.
As I have stated on a number of occasions (and indeed blogged about fairly recently), I am not personally of the opinion that all unidentified lights or objects in the sky are by definition guided or piloted by beings from other worlds; it seems to me that many of them must be of purely ‘natural’ origin and the great crime of science is that it has persistently failed not only to seek an explanation for them, but also to offer any reasonable explanation of why it has not done so. It seems to me that they provide some kind of convenient ‘smokescreen’ for ‘something’ that ‘someone’ wants to keep in an obscured condition.
We might add (just for a lark) the comments of the late Apollo astronaut and first man on the Moon, Neil Armstrong, which seem curiously relevant in this context:
“There are great ideas undiscovered, breakthroughs available to those who can remove one of the truth’s protective layers. There are many places to go beyond belief.”
… and one thing you absolutely cannot say about Neil is that he was not someone who knew something.
Discovering Terence McKenna and the Tyranny of Neoteny
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Breakfast in the Ruins, Commentary, General, The Destruction of History
The greatest benefit of having a resource like the Internet is the way it makes so much information available. The chance of making serendipitous discoveries is enormously increased by being able to interrogate and cross-reference vast databases, such as those of Google and YouTube, and this birthday weekend was no exception… I listened again to someone I had heard of previously and respected but did not view often enough, and discovered that he had hit a nail quite squarely on the head some time before he died…
Also, since I begin writing this piece of extended bile, over the big pond in America they had an election, and what a surprise, the candidate favoured by the press lost! And in the process of trying to condition the electorate into believing that Killary was a better bet than Flump (as if this really represented any kind of reasonable choice), they lost their own credibility forever. The notion that the American press are ‘free and impartial’ is gone, and people are looking to alternative news sources for a true account of reality – and Europe has wasted no time in trying to enact legislation to stifle the voices of the genuinely ‘free’ sources. But more of that later…
To celebrate my 53rd birthday (quietly), and by invitation, I took a bus to Changwon that Friday [8] afternoon and stayed at my customary motel. The ‘party’ was, alas, merely four of us, but of course, it’s the fact that those few people cared enough to come and give whatever gifts they felt were fitting for the occasion that is most important.
We’ll skip over that event, and cut to the early hours of the morning: munching on a couple of cheese toast sandwiches (my avoidance of gluten-rich products tossed temporarily out of the window due to a case of the munchies), I found that there was plenty of unsecured wifi available to that room, and watched a very interesting two-hour lecture by the late Terence McKenna:
(The point in question is at about 31:30 minutes into play time)
For those of you not familiar with this person, he became famous for his studies of ethnobotany and the relationships between psychedelic plant extracts and shamanism, and their use as entheogens [1]. Like many of those who have sampled potent psychedelics (although this is not absolutely necessary, of course), his mind became much more open to ideas which conventional ‘education’ (read: ‘social control propaganda’) would otherwise stifle and suppress, and he made a set of remarks which, even at that early hour and with a masticated glob of cheese toast sliding down my throat, struck a chord and made me realise that he was discussing precisely what I myself had been suspecting for a very long time, although perhaps using a rather different phraseology: the inculcation of a state of neoteny in humans as a means of social and psychological control.
McKenna’s extended description of ‘neoteny’ was not as accurate as I myself would have preferred, although his initial definition was fair enough: in animals, neoteny consists of the retention of larval (or other immature) body features whilst simultaneously being able to reproduce. In other words, the retention of juvenile morphological features of the species in the adult morph; this is also referred to as paedomorphism or paedomorphosis. When I was younger, the most commonly-quoted example of neoteny was that of the Axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum), in which retention of neotenous features is postulated to be part of a survival mechanism in environments which tend to be low in available iodine, which is required for the thyroid gland to produce the growth hormone thyroxine. Experimentation showed that administration of iodine, either as an injection or in food, permits an increase in thyroxine production and consequent metamorphosis to the adult (salamander) form.
The main neotenous features observed in Axolotls are the retention of the larval tail and external gills, as well as underdeveloped fore and hindlimbs, but they are able to produce viable sex cells, and thus also reproduce. More widely, however, as the term refers to the retention of juvenile features in adults, there are notionally ‘neotenous’ features which separate humans morphologically from both supposedly ‘ancestral’ primates (surviving apes have more extensive body hair than humans, for example) and other cultural or other ethnic groupings within the species (see [2]). Interestingly, commentators such as the late Lloyd Pye also pointed to a range of such features which, it was claimed, constituted evidence that humans were not, in fact, apes [3].
McKenna postulated that humans had historically been kept in a state of psychological neoteny, and that their immature mental state mirrored that of their bodies, which in fact more resemble those of baby (or even foetal) apes rather than the adults of other ape species. Cultures supply individuals with a simplified and likely mythologised explanation of reality, which is extremely convenient for those parties whose interests are well-served by the distraction and ignorance of others, and such a mechanism therefore keeps people in a psychological state which is more easy to control – alienated and psychotic. He has absolutely hit it on the head.
McKenna’s interest in psychedelics and entheogens led him to suggest that they allow the individuals who use them to mature intellectually beyond their inculcated psychologically neotenous (read: ‘juvenile’) state and see the control system for what it is. It is interesting to note that in this lecture, he points out that he did not personally encourage or assist others in the use of psychedelics, which probably suggests why he was still lucid as the years advanced whereas another well-known tripper, Timothy Leary, seems to have become rather a wreck later in life.
For our purposes, however, it is probably sufficient to realise that a service such as the Internet functions rather like a psychedelic, in the sense that the abundance of stimulation (information) and connections between events can allow us to form a more accurate picture of the world than our cultures (read: ‘mutual self-repeaters of the propaganda of our would-be controllers’) desire us to see; specifically, the artificial limits to our horizons imposed by conventional publishing and media have been subverted by the democratisation of technology and information. Thus, rather than listening to the radio we might instead subscribe to a set of podcasts or Internet streams which we feel present us with more representative viewpoints, opinions and information; and now virtually anyone can create these, and since many of those who do so are likewise in a psychologically neotenised state, we have to use our intellectual faculties (in the sense that McKenna uses the term ‘intellectual’ here – in his own words: “Anyone who has figured it out”) to distinguish the diamonds from the dross. A huge amount of the material available on the Internet is pure disinformation, intended to create disorientation and keep observers distracted, and it takes critical faculties to avoid this, something which seems to be a bit of a stumbling-lock for modern educational paradigms. It goes without saying that because of the democratisation of the transmission process, we can access it repeatedly and at our own convenience, rather than as and when the originators (formerly the dominant TV and radio networks) desire.
My own experience with the Internet since 1997 seems to be that no source of information is one hundred per cent. reliable, neither at the institutional nor the individual level; an opinion is just an opinion (a point which is very important to bear in mind when, for example, you are a student using a textbook which is periodically ‘updated’ to a ‘new edition’ – it is surprising how much content may be replaced, but does this necessarily imply that what was replaced was somehow ‘no longer important’? Who decides these things? And did those bits of information cease to be? Surely the phenomena they describe are still with us?). Those with authoritarian tendencies would surely like us to believe otherwise, but that only undermines their own credibility, as the disparity between reality and their delusions is often clearly visible. We form a much more accurate picture of reality in our minds when we realise that every fact should be verified by as many sources as possible; this way, truths link with each other and non-facts are increasingly excluded [7]. Paradoxically, perhaps, we need to keep an open mind at all times, lest we dismiss facts in error by excessive scepticism.
The simple fact that so many authoritarians would like to limit free speech and to regulate what can and cannot be shared over a vast network like the Internet only serves to demonstrate that effective communication makes hiding secrets difficult, and the people who have the greatest desire to hide secrets are those whose (neoteny-based) power would be destroyed by it. How odd, then, that it is the authoritarian who loves to suggest that “if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear”!
“Let him that is without sin cast the first stone” is my response to that one!
At the heart of what McKenna was adumbrating, however, is the notion that by limiting and diverting the natural process of information accumulation through education and experience (and of course, by deliberate distraction in the form of the media, organised sports, etc.), authority keeps the majority of the citizenry in a psychologically and emotionally stunted, immature state, with a view to controlling them by imposing artificial barriers which people themselves then reinforce with stereotyped (culture-determined) behaviour (a point often repeated by our own dear David Icke). The citizenry therefore remain in an essentially psychologically juvenile or ‘neotenised’ state which is self-perpetuating for as long as those same citizens are prepared to tolerate the disinformed ‘peer pressure’ which supports the current paradigm. It is only when they are prepared to reject this that wider and more accurate viewpoints become possible, and the neotenous ‘spell’ is magically broken.
In the past, when I personally have thought about these things, I have often considered what I call the ‘tyranny of the familiar’ – the fact that too many people exist within a culturally delimited ‘comfort zone’ and are unwilling to venture beyond it for fear of the great discomfort involved, which of course also includes the derision of peers due to the pernicious bubble of “… but everybody knows that..!” or “… but we’ve always done it this way!” … so how about this for a new concept? Try to be an enlightener and an opener of doors, rather than a mere repeater for the contemptible statist/collectivist controllers? Do you really need to be one of their robots? Indeed, what proof could you offer to others that you are truly an individual and a unique thinker? Where do the limits of your ‘knowledge’ really lie? When you read a book or a news article, are you doing so with a sufficiently critical mindset, or do you simply accept things as ‘facts’ because an authority figure is broadcasting them? Where does the ‘authority figure’ get his or her ‘facts’ from?
This is, I think, something we all need to discover. For example, when we look at the lauded ‘achievements’ of ‘civilisation’, what are we really seeing? If achievement requires venturing beyond the socially-enforced bounds of behaviour or thinking (here we might, as an illustration of ‘limits’, pause to reflect upon what is considered ‘acceptable’ to the current cosmological paradigm), is what we see from any particular era in human existence a set of creations produced by the thinking of free minds, or merely ‘reflections’ of the current thinking which seemed at the time to be ‘free’ simply because it was not subjected to realistic criticism, as it was actually conforming with the accepted and current ‘norms’? What is ‘civilisation’ really worth? One would venture to suggest that ‘civilisation’ and ‘culture’ are as separate as the stock market is from the wider economy, yet we allow an illogical mental link between the two to persist and the result is extremely damaging.
Worse, how about the bizarre position of an archetypal ‘Power User’ of computers, a stereotype which seems to have emerged very rapidly in tandem with the aforementioned democratisation of computing technology, where a person could be very adept in the use of a particular software package, but legendarily could not figure out how to turn the machine on and off? One would like to think that this was merely the stuff of urban legend, except I have known (and still know) so many people whom this characterises exactly – and not solely in relation to the use of computers either (you can find tons of real-life examples at Computer Stupidities [6]). People in ignorance (and I myself could be one of them, as a single person’s knowledge is strictly limited, which was Socrates’ most memorable point) assuming that certain types of behaviour are correct, when in fact they don’t realise what they are doing or whether it is beneficial or harmful. I have a feeling, personally, when I step back for a moment and ask myself what is really happening when I undertake even the most trivial activity, such as the substances I use for cleaning or personal hygiene, for example, that my own ignorance or refusal to acknowledge that my own actions may be in some way detrimental to the wider environment is thoroughly reprehensible. But I don’t have the whole story… and preventing people from having the whole story is they key to controlling them. ‘Someone’ decides which ‘news’ is worthy of publication and which is not, according to their own agenda; ‘someone’ decides which information is worthy of inclusion in the pages of WikiPedia, and actively removes anything deemed ‘incorrect’ according to their prejudices, rather than factuality; and ‘someone’ has been responsible for the repeated loss of knowledge throughout history through the destruction and looting of libraries, achieved by a hidden hand manipulating vast masses of people. War, in particular, is very effective in this regard as a plausible ‘excuse’ for ‘unavoidable’ damage, and a very convenient and lucrative smokescreen behind which to hind all manner of evil deeds – the wilful but clandestine destruction of society’s wisdom being one of them. We are constantly hammered by the idea that war is somehow ‘unavoidable’, when in fact, it’s just a rich man’s game, and the rest of us losers are expected to foot the bill, both financially and in terms of lives lost.
We come full circle when we consider the entertainment industries, whole sectors of society which are purely engaged in making ridiculous (and perhaps unjustifiable) profits from indulgence and distraction. It has not escaped my observation that these industries, whose business is essentially the promotion and exploitation of pointless flim-flam and the concomitant emotional responses to stereotyped visual tropes, are also intimately involved with the attempt to predetermine what users may or may not actually do online, not realising perhaps that this will eventually lead to a hypocritical and parasitic industry which will self-destruct as the Internet becomes little more than a means of consumption (or maybe it already has – witness Hollywood’s constant obsession with ‘sequels’, and when they proved to be insufficient, they started on the business of ‘prequels’… as our dear friend D. Icke often puts it, “You just couldn’t make it up!”).
Additionally, the bankers don’t even want us to have real money any more, but want to replace that purely with numbers in (their) databases. Thus they will control everything in our lives, and we will be forever and irretrievably ‘neotenised’ and increasingly dysfunctional and incapable at a personal level. Is this not a despicable and tyrannical vista to behold? It’s already happening in places like Denmark [9]. Or maybe people will develop a bartering system to replace money when their ‘governments’ only allow them to have a bank account and a piece of plastic. At least when the predicted economic collapse arrives, people will still be able to trade!
We do have to note, however, that the attempts to censor and limit access to the Internet may already be demonstrably self-defeating. For example, remote payments by such means as credit cards. As I have been living in Korea for such a long time, my bank (in England) now refuses to send items such as new cheque books, credit and debit cards to me as they have (apparently arbitrarily or whimsically) imposed an ’embargo’ on certain countries, and have told me repeatedly that South Korea is among these, however illogical that may seem. The entertainment industry loves to use the Internet as an excuse to force people to cough up more cash, but maybe is ignoring the fact that electronic payments are still an impossibility for huge numbers of the global population, and for the dumbest of reasons. But as a lot of their modern products are also correspondingly dumb and unworthy of purchase, why not just keep your cash to yourself and strangle them out of existence with the power of your wallet? Let’s face it, you won’t miss them…
At the same time, in the visual realm of what are often referred to as ‘special effects’, there has been a strong tendency to create a kind of ‘virtual reality’ which is clearly intended to be, ultimately, sufficiently indistinguishable from the real world that the latter can comfortably be ignored, as if our whole lives were being eked out on a film set – or rather that the boundary between the ‘real’ and the ‘unreal’ can no longer be detected easily, making the visual validation of falsehoods much more straightforward. And the fact that some precious people seem to think that their own behaviour should emulate the tantrums and follies of the various mind-manipulated moppet celebrities forced down their throats by the so-called ‘entertainment industry’ merely underlines a point in my previous articles about the dangers of narcissism – such a person is very easy to manipulate – and we can’t fail to notice that narcissistic, self-important personalities are also especially prevalent in the world of entertainment. Again, this is a kind of maintained neoteny, representing the intentional juvenilisation of personality, and consequent mass juvenilisation by imitation. Beware of the formation of a cult around a ‘personality’ (read: ‘celebrity’) when examination of the latter reveals them to be little more than a hollow, manipulated shell. More and more, famous people under stress have been seen to experience very public ‘meltdowns’ which are being observed on TV – just Google for ‘celebrity meltdown’, the list is endless [10].
It all means that in every possible way, we must resist the tyranny of imposed neoteny, and the only way to do this is to surround ourselves with verifiable facts and counter-arguments to the constant flood of deliberate disinformation and outright lies which mockingly purports to represent ‘reality’. It means that we need to supply our own antidote to the sensual and intellectual garbage constantly forced upon our consciousness by the agents of our would-be controllers, and construct our own factual schema to counteract the encroachment of a pernicious ‘virtual reality’ which seeks to imprison us in our own personal ‘goldfish bowls’ of distorted vision and narcissism. And most importantly, perhaps, we should vote with our wallets and choke them all off at source.
References:
[1] Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_McKenna
[2] Wiklipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny#Neoteny_in_other_species
[3] See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHFh3Z0DOQ4 for the full lecture. Unfortunately, Pye used to espouse a lot of otherwise dubious ideas, such as the stories of Zecharia Sitchin, which are interesting but somewhat discredited.
[4] See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KboPUQ0xCDs for McKenna’s lecture; discussion of cultural neoteny begins at 31:30
[5] Note that neoteny is characteristic of the Tiger Salamander family, of which the Axolotl is a member; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axolotl
[6] Rinkworks: http://www.rinkworks.com/stupid/
[7] Take a cue from the late journalist John Keel, who sought at least three verifiable sources of information for each occurrence in his investigations of UFO incidents, and used this as a filter for exclusion of a huge corpus of witness accounts.
[8] Birthday Thursday, October 15th 2015; went to Changwon the next day.
[9] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11586778/Denmark-moves-step-closer-to-being-a-cashless-country.html; since I began writing this, Sweden have now started making similar noises – google ‘sweden cashless society’ and notice that the prominent news sources on the first search page were also Killary supporters during the 2016 Presidential election.
[10] See, also, the ridiculous parade of celebrities who screamed that they would leave the country if Flump came to power. Example: http://www.ibtimes.com/if-donald-trump-wins-presidency-these-18-celebrities-will-leave-us-will-canada-be-2440762 … my first reaction on seeing a lot of this stuff was: “Who..?”
An Eye For An Eye Makes The Whole World Blind
Posted by Andrew | Filed under General
I love to see stuff like this:
Even I with my background in science, couldn’t stand it any longer . . . all so pointless . . . I gave up long ago.
See their web site at http://inertiaempire.com/
The Return
Posted by Andrew | Filed under General
Hello folks, and welcome to my new blog. Setting this up was occasioned by the impending demise of my original Opera Blog, which (alas!) is now to go the way of all things, as the Powers That Be at Opera have decided that (after all these years) this is a part of their community which they no longer wish to maintain. Previous postings will be rescued and archived here, one at a time.
However, it was not just the demise of the blog which made me consider actually setting up a proper, paid Web presence. Before the onset of Opera’s fateful decision, my main free e-mail service of many years, Yahoo, similarly decided that a revamp was required, and unfortunately, the result of this appears to be semi-functional, working properly only with their “recommended” browsers, and still requiring frequent reloads. So the time for a proper, “professional” e-mail service where I could get feedback and advice seemed to have arrived. And then there’s the question of the NSA . . .
I guess we could say that things change as life progresses, and that it is probably less than realistic to hope that a familiar and trusted on-line service should remain completely available and reliable until we are finally shoved in the ground; and so often, the new is forced upon us when we preferred the old. But on the other hand, as I discovered, the cost of a “proper” service was not equivalent to an arm and a leg, and is far less than a lot of other annual costs which I pay without thinking.
Those things in our lives which we take for granted and always expect to be there for us represent a kind of prison, even a tyranny, and it is the duty of all human beings to escape them. Over-dependence upon such things as free mail servers, TV and the dubious purveyors of so-called “knowledge” creates a psychological prison from which escape can be difficult until we learn to change our attitudes and habits; and that process begins when we decide that we have tolerated as much of our habit-worn situation as possible, and that the time for change in our lives has finally arrived. Until we approach that crucial moment, the small psychological box we have constructed for ourselves, which exists between our ears, is at once a prison and a coffin.
My former life in the UK was a set of habits. I went to work each day. I had a car and a place where I lived. I ate certain foods and drank certain drinks. But there was never any real progress. Every working day was pretty much the same as the one which preceded it; the tasks I had to perform each day were much the same; it all led nowhere. And it had little or nothing to do with the career for which I had been undergoing my undergraduate education – I had been repeatedly shunted sideways into other areas where my “transferable skills” were useful to others, and it seemed to me that this was a waste. The work, also, was often of a temporary nature, which is not really good for one’s fortunes. If I were in that situation today with the knowledge and experience that I have now, perhaps things would have worked out differently; but it is major error to spend large parts of one’s life fretting about “how it might have been . . . if only I had done things a different way . . . if only I had not made that decision . . . if only . . . if only . . .”
So it does seem that the fact that I find myself sitting here now, typing in a new blog, is an important part of the journey, the progression, the experience, the enlightenment and – perhaps – the approach to the numinous, the seeking of the thing which haunts us all our days and drives us to do the things we feel are necessary for our development and evolution as individuals; it is perhaps just one stage among many, one of many possible timelines which are forever in the future, waiting to unfold as each decision in my life is made, for better or worse. But again: regretting one’s decisions, when they turn out bad, is an error and should instead be re-framed as a learning experience. The events in our lives, better or worse as they may turn out to be, are all experiences from which we can learn; this is a crucial restatement of how we should see the reality which surrounds us.
The day that I flew out from Heathrow Airport to my first destination in East Asia was truly the day that my life changed. I have to tell you now that I have never regretted that decision.
As for my blog’s new home, I chose this particular WordPress template, which its creator named “Colourise”, because I felt that viewers should not have their eyes stabbed by a bright set of web pages. Personally, I tend to stay in subdued light environments, especially at night and at home, so something subdued seemed to be appropriate.
The title is essentially an optimistic one: in the West, we have always looked eastwards to the rising sun as the harbinger of the future, the deliverer of the new day, the saviour from the night; and even though the sun rises each morning, the sense of “newness” is still there, the sense of hope for what is to come and the idea that, somewhere beyond that far horizon, new lands, new vistas and new peoples lay waiting for us to discover them – perhaps, as Kipling memorably put it:
Till a voice, as bad as Conscience, rang interminable changes
On one everlasting Whisper day and night repeated – so:
“Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges –
Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!”
With this thought foremost in mind (although I have always been something of an armchair explorer), and preparing also for a change of job and location, I stride forth into the light of the new morning.
Tags: experience, habits, harbinger, horizon, knowledge, life, numinous, prison, regret, saviour, tyranny
When a knight won his spurs . . . sometime last Tuesday . . .
Posted by Andrew | Filed under General
Tags: career, England, English, Korea, life, poetry, South Korea, teaching
