Certainty

Weather: Nice... no Ivan fall-out yet.
Listening to: Mark Farina - San Francisco Sessions

In my little blurb over their, I pronounce my distaste for people who are set in their ways and refuse to consider possibilities outside their own belief system. Uncertainty is a major theme in my life, philosophy and art. It is the driving condition of today's post-Newtonian world. From Heisenburg to Hendrix, the only thing certain is uncertainty. Anu Garg included the following quote from Francis Bacon in his "A Word-a-Day" mailing this morning:

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties. -Francis Bacon, essayist, philosopher, and statesman (1561-1626)

The driving theme is that you cannot presuppose anything. Keep an open mind and question everything. More importantly truth is a moving target. It is always subject to the available information at any given time. So what is true this week may be an utter falsehood next week. We have to believe in the truth we can prove... everything else is just chance. It's fine to change your beliefs as new information is available... that shows intelligence and wisdom. World War II was won because the Allies were adaptable. The Germans were too arrogant to think they needed to change tactics and the Japanese considered it dishonorable to alter a failing strategy because it proved that it was flawed from the beginning. I think these last few years have given us a lot of opportunities to re-examine our trust in certain facts. The news media has really come apart since 9/11/2001 and we can no longer trustingly read the papers, view the TV news and listen to the radio as sources for facts. News bias has never been so obvious.

I think reading Bruce Sterling's books are making me paranoid. In both of the books I've read, his main character is a very slippery sort of person who lives and breaths politics and spin, turnign every facet of life to political gain. I suppose there are such creatures out there today. We live in an information age so the wars will be fought with ideas and words more than tanks and missles. Whoever controls the media, controls country... because it controls the thoughts of the populace. Keep that in mind in the coming years. Personally, I worry about the dangers of what's on TV more than I worry about some assault weapons ban. Remember it's a lot easier to control an assault weapon than it is to control the TV. And if congress passes the Induce Act this week, then it will get even harder.