http://books.google.com/books?id=JeiEprPiGvAC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false

http://books.google.com/books?id=XOgNAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_similarbooks_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q=&f=false

it seems our children need to educate themselves: http://www.detentionslip.org/

Las Vegas teacher disciplined for denying Holocaust

Posted: Dec 18, 2009 09:36 PM

Updated: Dec 18, 2009 06:36 PM PST

Student Upset Over Graphic 9/11 Film

Denise Low's comparative review of two translations of the extensive Mayan creation mythistory from the journal SAIL. An excellent background for comprehending 2000 Years of Mayan Literature. Scroll down once in the link, the article is mid-point.

In the Popol Vuh: The Maya thought we were first made by gods from clay, those built crumbled once dried, then they attempted wood, and were living but possessed no long-term memory, then they used masa, the corn seed, and we sprang into present form.

The challenge for Mayan scholarly studies is simple: what's left to study after thousands of years, continual looting, a gripping moisture the jungle provides and the wars of collapse and then conquests. Many of these polities of Central America were abandoned for centuries, or trafficked rarely. What's survived in written form from the Americas' (it is poorly yet logically claimed) only literate civilization?  Not much, few codices (books of recorded data) and mostly what has survived the jungle in these forms of glyphically rendered stone and baked clay - a predominance of dates and what appears at first simplified deity or lordship worship verses, hymnals. As in most dominant indigenous cultures carefully studied by the explosion of graduate studies in the last century, the language is recorded in somewhat complete dictionaries per 'dialect' through spoken word translation. Although narrative myths exist in spoken Maya, some scattered in ethnographies, only a few complete narratives were recorded at the Spanish conquest, none are in their original written or carved glyphic transmission, and unfortunately thousands upon thousands of Mayan books are lost, a few hundred even burned by a fearful Jesuit as retribution for locals continuing to practice their local religions while also attending mass. Now Dennis Tedlock has achieved what might have seemed impossible only decades ago, he's brought the first study of Mayan literature to a masterful book form.  Although a blight of evidence might have hindered research, it also may have been a proverbial blessing in disguise. Scholars have had to work with pottery and monumental stela, and both have coded, expressive manners of storytelling; since stela, lintels etc. were integrated into sky viewing structures, they offer more complete understandings of the language's use of time and math, even interrelations between phases, and even some unusual keys: differing perceptions in meaning but not gesture, violating, or perhaps liberating them from the closed structure of western languages.  Using available data, some of which he's translated himself (a crucial one - an expansive take on the Popol Vuh), Tedlock incorporates his knowledge by impersonating unconscious strategies of Mayan and pools a vast array of master thinkers like Coe, Marcus, Taube, Marcus, Schele, Stuart, Aveni, B. Tedlock, Rice, Houston, and Kerr and assembles, in piles almost - into their spheres of specialty, translations of key artifacts and styles of writing, utilizing leaps with data they've already hinted at, but Tedlock makes certain overarching leaps: he states naming conventions across boundaries (a use of 'hereafter' that results in several 'eureka's). He allows the Maya to posses powerful storytelling strategies that any culture would could and should read in both literate and non-literate ways and he extols its visual specifities exclusive of translation.  He takes an open risk visual evolutions he's spotting are values that travel along a logical route, building skeletons of ideas from orchestrated proof. He includes astronomical data to many entries and it boosts his arguments since these chosen stories' shapes clearly expand into the night sky, some are cleverly illustrated with sky views and gradient milky ways, discussions of decaying orbits, spans of sky appearance, the goals of which are astounding once the language's overall arching methods seep in (something, a spoiler, that shouldn't be ruined here). A chapter about Mayan graffiti is pivotal, you can sense the literacy of non-royals, non-astronomers, thus the Maya convincingly hint that their language was suffusive, beyond any ideas (or ideals!) of literacy we cling to in the west. Accompanying the juicy textual discoveries are some exquisite visual strategies possible only in book form - the venn between anthropology, archeology and linguistics - connective starscapes, visually-based translations of both layout and deciphered mirroring. Sometimes these illustrations are maybe a bit asutere, but the gravity of the shapes and forms in play and the historical correlations are proven (look below for only a hint): and above too, the cover's bare-bones stela-ish design is a preview of the things to come inside. And the number he chooses as a timeframe, 2000, shows how unsensual our millenial epochal stopwatches are, how constrictingly dull our calendrical bookends can be.  Tedlock's book should be read by all slightly interested in the past and future of languages, and he's carefully prepared it for anyone without knowledge of the Maya with a run-through introductory chapter of conventional practice in Mayan dating and grammar. Tedlock's book is a time-extended lingual guide and much, much more.

2000 Years of Mayan Literature, Dennis Tedlock, University of California Press, 2010

The fovea (the center of the eye's vision) suggests we have a limited range with which to encrypt ideas via an alphabetical, linear page-based horizon, but this is merely mezzanine-thinking. Videogames, movies and earlier glyphic-expansive storytelling of meso-america suggest peripheral vision can add discriminating levels of data to our simplified and lazy text-storytelling. Next stop?

A new book by cog scientist Dehaene continues the debate between text innateness thinkers like Chomsky and his alternates.

Stanley Kubrick's final motion-art cryptogram, a 'christmas' tale named Eyes Wide Shut is centered around a ritual that has many aspects to be decoded, as aural 'unification' he chose to play with the inner workings of Jocelyn Pooks track "Masked Ball" (originally named "Deluge"), which counterpoints Greek Orthodox chanting (in Romanian) and Arabic call-to-prayers.

News, journalism, newspapers, all seem increasingly irrelevant as the venn between reality and fiction blur. In today's NY Times is a complex, well organized, positive review of the bland and visually stylized first-person shooter game (a genre somewhat invented by John Carnack in his Doom) called Borderlands ("the thrill is in the gunplay") and a sloppy, fearful, mediocre review of security in post-massacre Mumbai. (Both reviews have recent parallels: released last week, Call of Duty: MW2 has a very realistic terrorist massacre that closely resembles Mumbai and Chechen massacres, and India's head of state was feted last night with a state dinner at the White House). The review goes into loving detail regarding the gameplay, the weaponry and the storytelling, making sure to elaborate nuances that distinguish it from other games. The Mumbai article contains a slight narrative retelling of the massacre in which 10 highly armed, trained and drugged men held police in check for almost three days, shooting at everyone they could sight (and even confirm life-death decisions by cellphone calls to a handler who utilized live television news to spot for them), a narrative that increasingly looks more and more like a videogame the more it is analysed. The article is jarringly xenophobic of Indian politics and even tries to denounce the leadership for not following suit with our own narrative: "Unlike the United States, India did not create the equivalent Department of Homeland Security." The article continues that India did not even punish its leaders for their lack of prediction, or the manner with which the massacre was dealt. The Time's perverse xenophobia can be seen in its lack of cultural awareness, how the writer's and editor's perceive a proper response is evident in what is left unsaid. They want us to think (imply) that a military crackdown coupled with bureaucratic spying (ie: public evidence of a secret-police/intelligence) is the only proper response to the massacre. Very strange, somewhat obvious where awareness lies, the Times employs a videogame reviewer that is more adept than an international reporting team. Even stranger: our species needs to integrate videogames (like these first-person shooter games) into science and learning while simultaneousy extricating ourselves from violent encounters like Mumbai. News is perhaps too conservative a construct, driven by unnecessary ideologies, it is simply not a forum for any real convergence of ideas.

As a profligate metaphor for the gateway between left and right (brains as well as politics) posing as east and west, the Berlin Wall was remarkably small compared to other separations (96 miles compared to The Great Wall's nearly 4000 mi).  1978 - during the hiccup of the Carter-Callaghan years, the former commander of NATO, John Hackett, penned a book by committee (The Third World War, August 1985) that was best understood as science fiction, a story in pensive framgents that detailed a tactical war the Soviets would fight as World War III, part of a unique genre of narrative (the 'what-if' altered from retroactive to active) that hovered between suggestive propaganda and realistic fear-mongering. Having been a strategist that made Berlin a ground zero for any future wars on his watch, Hackett gave his WWIII a three week premise (the other WWs totalled some 10 years in length) that involved a decaying Soviet economy foraging for greater European control and a leadership playing blink with atomic weapons. The initial invasion of West Germany is halted and repulsed by NATO ground war strategy and as an attempt at coup d'grace the Soviets drop a devastating ICBM on Birmingham U.K. NATO responds by liquifying Minsk. The book's too simplified arc is that the bombing of Birmingham unified NATO and the extra Soviet world and the loss of Minsk helped dissolve the already fragmented and collapsing states in the Soviet realm. Strangely the same thing occured minus all the predicted warfare and the tactical armageddon as the Soviets turned inward reflectively in 1989 and allowed their bitter children Afghanistan, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and East Germany to escape dominance. Hacket updated the book in 1982.

What happened to a WWIII, could it really be happening now in slow motion instead of Hackett's three weeks? Replace his 1985 euro-invasion with 1979 Afghanistan and suddenly the time-frame shifts, attacks are indirect (we practiced third-party warfare via insurgents and now it is practiced on us). As the Soviets fled in their attempt at jockeying a mummified communist regime in Kabul, will the coalition leave after propping Karzai's democratic regime? As we no doubt served to assist the mujahadeen of Afghanistan, who now feeds currency and weapons to the Taliban to assist in our possible exit? Does a WW, its nascent rebellions and corresponding technology become cheaper to operate in third-party warfare? Why have three 'superpowers' (Britain, U.S.S.R., U.S.) each fought for control of Afghanistan and two so far walk away bruised and confused?