Murphy References in JFK Assassination

Eight Murphys

At the beginning of my last post I mention that in the 1910s there's a chain of assassinations and attempted assassinations whose particulars remarkably tend to line up with the particulars of disasters much more than one would expect. Those who want to know the truth will naturally wonder whether the alignment continues thereafter. In America at least, it seems to. The main focus of this post will be the JFK assassination, but let's first look at what I believe are the most significant acts of violence against U.S. politicians by assassin-like figures from the end of World War I until JFK is shot.

15 February 1932. Italian immigrant and Paterson, NJ, resident Giuseppe Zangara fatally wounds Mayor Anton Cermak of Chicago in Miami, Florida, probably while attempting to shoot President-Elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt. February 15 is the anniversary of the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor in 1898. Miami is the closest large American city to Havana, Cuba, and the sinking of the Maine, whether an accident or an act of war, was especially significant as being the precipitating cause of the Spanish American War (Americans were told to "Remember the Maine"). (Though not directly relevant to my main point, it's worth mentioning that the July 29, 1900, assassination of King Umberto of Italy was by someone who had been a former Italian immigrant living in Paterson, NJ, and that, as you may have noticed if you paid attention to my last post, the 1916 Matheson fire (and possibly the placing of the bomb at Black Tom) was exactly 16 years later.)

8 September 1935. Louisiana Governor Huey Long assassinated in Baton Rouge, LA, on anniversary of 1900 Galveston Hurricane striking Galveston, TX, to this day the deadliest U.S. disaster (not counting pandemics, of course).

1 November 1950. Two Puerto Rican extremist nationalists attempt to shoot their way into Blair House and assassinate President Truman. An assassin trades gunfire with a heroic White House Policeman, resulting in the death of both, and the two would-be assassins never get into the building. Anniversary of the 1 November 1918 Malbone Street Train Wreck (93 dead) entering Prospect Park station in Brooklyn, NY, typically considered the fourth deadliest-ever U.S. railroad disaster.

1 March 1954. Puerto Rican Extremist Nationalists shoot 30 rounds from a gallery in the House of Representatives Chamber of the U.S. Capitol, wounding five Representatives. Anniversary of 1 March 1910 Wellington, WA, snow avalanche (96 dead), typically considered the third deadliest-ever U.S. railroad disaster.

10 April 1963. Lee Harvey Oswald is believed to have shot at General Edwin Walker. Earlier in the day, the nuclear submarine USS Thresher sank off Massachusetts, killing all 129 on board. Also the anniversary of the 1917 Eddystone munitions plant explosion (confer preceding post) during WWI.

Though not an assassination or attempted assassination, there was another incident during the period that caused alignment of disaster with prominent assassination: on 6 September 1943, Pennsylvania Railroad's Congressional wrecked (79 dead) in Kensington, North Philadlephia, PA, approaching the curve at Frankford Junction. The wreck was on the anniversary of the fatal shooting of President McKinley in 1901. I wouldn't be at all surprised if some sort of sabotage was involved in that wreck, especially as it happened during WWII, after America had entered the war.

It's worth mentioning that all the assassins or would-be assassins starting from 1910 that I have mentioned in this and the preceding post who have operated in the U.S. have ties either with New York City or (in the case of Zangara) with a suburb of New York City (i.e., Paterson, NJ). This strongly suggests that the disaster-referrent tendency in assassination took off in New York City, as indeed makes sense since the German sabotage campaign was centered in New York City, and as we have seen in the previous post, the same tendency to kill while referring to disasters seems to have been displayed by the saboteurs. In August 1952, Oswald moved to New York City--he and his mother Marguerite first stayed with his half-brother John Pic and his wife in Yorkville at 325 E. 92nd Street in August 1952. In the 1950s, Yorkville was the most German part of New York City and had been a center of German-American Bund activity immediately preceding WWII. The closest Lutheran Church to where John Pic lived was (barely) probably Zion-St. Mark's, the descendant of the St. Mark's Church (which had combined with another church and moved to Yorkville from the Lower East Side in 1946) that lost about a thousand parishioners in the General Slocum disaster (including the young woman who may or may not have been the girlfriend or even fiancee of John Schrank, the man who shot Teddy Roosevelt). According to her own testimony to the Warren Commission, one of the first tasks Lee Oswald's mother set about upon arriving in New York City was to attempt to get Lee confirmed in the Lutheran faith.

Now on to the Murphys. Can you find all eight? I do not wish to indicate now whether or not I have found other possible Murphy references. Wise it seems to maintain an air of mystery.

22 November 1950. Motorman William Murphy's Train No. 780 is rear-ended by Train No. 174 in Richmond Hill, Queens, 78 dead. NYC Police Commissioner Thomas Murphy visits wreck site at 12:30am the next day. Motorman Benjamin J. Pokorney of No. 174 is believed to have misinterpreted a signal for an adjacent block as though it were for his block. Conductor Austin of 174 indicated in testimony in the official report that his train started speeding up above restricted speed (15 mph) when he, Conductor Austin, in second car, was roughly opposite the Kew Gardens station. The train cars were about 64.5 feet long, and so the best guess is that Pokorney would have been about 95 feet beyond (southeast of) being opposite the center of the Kew Gardens train station when he started speeding the train above restricted speed, believed to have been the main cause of the disaster.

Autumn 1960. Belmont, NH, Postmaster Thomas Murphy alerts authorities concerning possible danger of Richard Paul Pavlick to JFK.

22 November 1963. Thirtenth Anniversary of Richmond Hill or Kew Gardens wreck. Railway Worker Thomas Murphy views JFK motorcade from triple overpass railway bridge. On the Stemmons Freeway overpass just west of the railway bridge, Patrolman Joe Murphy keeps an eye on the railway workers on the adjacent bridge and keeps onlookers off his bridge. Lee Harvey Oswald catches Cecil McWatter's Lakewood-Marsalis bus at Elm and Murphy a few minutes after the shooting notwithstanding there is no stop there (he bangs on door). Oswald is arrested while resisting at the Texas Theatre while watching “War is Hell” narrated by war hero Audie Murphy, who was born only about 50 miles northeast of Dealey Plaza. Audie Murphy and Officer J.D. Tippit both did basic training at Camp Wolters, TX, also where Robert Preston learned to fly a helicopter (onto the White House grounds in 1974).

13 March 1964. Kitty Genovese is stabbed for the last time and left for dead in a stairwell of her apartment building, where she had taken refuge at 80-62 Austin Street, Kew Gardens. The exterior doorway at this stairwell is about 90 feet from the center of Track 2 where the trains involved in the wreck had been in 1950, and opposite a spot on the tracks about 85 feet southeast of the spot on the tracks opposite the center of Kew Gardens Station. Genovese was first stabbed about 3:20 am; she had left the bar in Hollis around 3am, just 2.5 minutes after the anniversary (Pacific time) of a disaster (400 dead) that happened in California two days after James Earl Ray was born.

Debunking the Myth of Kitty Genovese”, New York Post, Larry Getlen, February 16, 2014: One could argue that Genovese became a legend not on the day she was killed, but 10 days later, when New York City Police Commissioner Michael “Bull” Murphy had lunch with The New York Times’ new city editor — later to become the paper’s executive editor — Abe Rosenthal.

After Rosenthal brought up a case Murphy wished to avoid discussing, the commissioner pivoted to the Genovese case.

“Brother, that Queens story is one for the books. Thirty-eight witnesses,” Murphy said. “I’ve been in this business a long time, but this beats everything.”

18 March 1968. (1) Anniversary 1925 Tri-State Tornado (695 dead) devastating Murphysboro (234 dead). (2) James Earl Ray abruptly leaves St. Francis Hotel in Los Angeles to head to Atlanta via New Orleans; in Atlanta, Ray will choose to rent a room in a boarding house around the corner from where Gone with the Wind author Margaret Mitchell had been fatally injured by an automobile while she was crossing the street. (3) Winston Moseley, who had been convicted of murdering Kitty Genovese, escapes while returning to prison from a hospital visit and will do rapacious things until he is recaptured three days later.

Update, more Murphy, et cetera! (added February 5, 2022):

15 January 1953. On Martin Luther King's 24th birthday in 1953, Pennsylvania Railroad's Train No. 173, the Federal, a 16-car train from New York and Boston, just north of Union Station, Washington, DC, on approaching the station, was discovered to have lost most of its braking power. (It was later found the last 13 cars had lost their brakes due to a closed angle cock on the brakeline at the rear of the third car, New Haven RR car #8665, and that the cause was likely not sabotage but a defect causing the handle of the angle cock attached to the coupler assembly to periodically touch the bottom cross member of the buffer pocket portion of the underframe end construction--the angle cock was attached immediately underneath this cross member rather than back of the inside face of it, as specified by the New Haven Railroad. Moreover, such touching was aggravated by increased vibrations and oscillations in the coupler caused by the car immediately behind it having couplers and truck-spring assemblies that were not of exactly the same design.) The train plowed into the Station Master's Office at the end of Track 16 and then took out a newstand. The electric GG1 locomotive pulling the train and the two cars behind the locomotive partially collapsed the concourse and ended up mostly in the basement baggage (and mail?) room below. The conductor of 173, a resident of Baltimore, was Thomas Joseph Murphey. The railway triple overpass in Dallas where Thomas J. Murphy, mail foreman at the Union Terminal Annex (the postal annex for Union Station), watched the shooting of JFK is about 1000 feet north of Union Station, Dallas, where the tracks head. Both Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby had a connection to the Union Terminal Annex: Oswald rented post office box 6225 at the Terminal Annex on 1 November 1963, and on 7 November 1963, Jack Ruby rented there post office box 5475.

The 30 Lakewood/Marsalis bus which Oswald caught just after the JFK assassination at Elm and Murphy apparently had a rollsign on its front displaying “30 Marsalis Union Sta”, indicating it was the 30 bus en route to Union Station and then to Marsalis in Oak Cliff. When a female passenger got off the bus in order to walk to Union Station (the bus was stuck in the traffic pursuant to the assassination of JFK), that's when (according to the bus driver) Oswald also got off the bus, shortly to catch a taxi to near his rooming house at 1026 N. Beckley in Oak Cliff. Bus driver Cecil McWatters had earlier punched the transfer hole for the No. 23 point of origin, i.e., Lakewood, and gave Oswald the bus transfer as he was leaving the bus.

Thomas J. Murphy (the mail foreman) resided at 8615 San Benito Way, in the Little Forest Hills neighborhood of Dallas near the Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Gardens. The Richmond Hill or Kew Gardens wreck that happened 13 years to the day before JFK was shot was believed to have been mainly caused by Benjamin J. Pokorney, engineer of Train No. 174, having prematurely ceased following the signal aspect of signal C (stop and proceed at restricted speed) appropriate for his block in order to prematurely follow the approach (at medium speed, prepared to stop at next signal) aspect of Signal 114R. Signal C was 4335 feet from Signal 114R. Signal 114R is on a signal bridge that still exists, it would seem. Measuring back using Google Maps would have put Signal C just west of the westbound lanes of the Union Turnpike overpass. If boundaries are the same now as then, and my measurements are precise enough, this would have put Signal C in Forest Hills, very close to its border with Kew Gardens. The largest and perhaps most prestigious botanical gardens in the world is Kew Gardens in Richmond upon Thames, London, England. The 1 November 1918, Malbone Street Wreck, New York's deadliest ever, and the 16 February 1907 Woodlawn wreck also both happened basically on the border of prestigious botanical gardens—in Brooklyn and the Bronx, respectively. The 1 November 1950 assassination attempt on President Truman was exactly three weeks before the Kew Gardens wreck. The Forest Hills wreck of 1887 occurred at the border of Arnold Arboretum, the first US public arboretum.This Forest Hills wreck may be the second deadliest ever Massachusetts railway disaster (or maybe it is the Great Revere Train Wreck of 1871?). (The 7 November 1916 Summer Street retractible bridge disaster was the deadliest Massachusetts railway disaster, and it involved only a single unattached trolley car falling through the open bridge and not a full-fledged train.) The 1887 Forest Hills, Massachusetts, wreck occurred 14 March, just one day removed from 13 March, the date Kitty Genovese was killed in 1964 at her apartment building on Austin Street opposite where (according to Conductor Austin of No. 174) Pokorney is believed to have prematurely ceased following Signal C in Forest Hills. On 14 March 1940, a truck carrying farm workers was hit by a train at a grade crossing in Alamo, TX, killing (according to the Texas Historical Marker) 34, which would make it the most deaths ever to this day in the US in a motor vehicle crash if you exclude more recent bridge/elevated roadway collapses (1967 Silver Bridge collapse, 1980 Sunshine Skyway Bridge collapse, 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake). True, the similar Chualar, California, migrant laborer bus/train collision of 17 September 1963, which killed 32, is also sometimes listed as the deadliest motor vehicle crash, because the Alamo crash is listed variously as having caused as few as 29 deaths. Alamo is only about 30 miles (not far considering Texas) from San Benito. If you exclude not only bridge/elevated-roadway collapses but also train collisions with motor vehicles, the deadliest ever US motor vehicle incident is the 1976 Yuba City bus disaster (29 dead) in California caused as a bus drove off an elevated roadway. The deadliest US motor vehicle disaster until 1967 not involving a train was the 4 August 1952 head-on collision (28 dead) between two Greyhound buses just north of Lorena, TX, and south of Waco, TX. I'm fairly sure it is still the deadliest collision between motor vehicles in US history. One of the dead in this bus collision was Airman 3rd Class Thomas T. Murphy, 19, stationed at Lackland Air Force Base, and son of Thomas J. Murphy, of 4604 Fairmont [mispelling of Faimount?], Dallas, TX. Was this the same Thomas J. Murphy who was on the triple overpass when JFK was shot? I don't know. Looking at land records (to get Thomas J. Murphy's wife's name) and the 1940 Census, I'm quite sure that the Thomas J. Murphy on the triple overpass lived in 1940 at 2235 Garden Drive, Dallas, and had a child named Thomas who was listed as 5 on the 1 April 1940 census. Perhaps Thomas T. Murphy overstated his age by a year or so when enlisting, as Audie Murphy had famously done? (Update to update: The 1955 Dallas City directory contains under the listing Murphey: "Thos J formn Junion Terminal r4606 Fairmount av". It therefore is almost certain that a son Thomas Terry Murphy of the Thomas J. Murphy on the triple overpass was indeed killed in the 1952 bus collision near Waco. The 1944-45 and 1961 Dallas City directories as well as the next page of the 1955 directory list a Thomas J. Murphy as married to Pleasant Murphy, and in 1955 and 1961 he and his wife are listed as living at 8615 San Benito Way. I don't know why Thomas J. Murphy apparently is listed in 1955 twice with slightly different spellings of his last name or why his apartment number is slightly off from what is listed in the newspaper clipping, though I doubt it is of much signficance to figuring out the JFK assassination--pedestrian explanations seem much more likely, involving, e.g., errors in the directory or the newspaper clipping about the bus wreck, moving near the time of the directory, or temporary personal changes in relationships and living arrangements.)

It's worth noticing that the northbound Greyhound bus was headed to Dallas, and that the southbound Greyhound bus was headed from Dallas when they collided south of Waco. Thomas T. Murphy was on the southbound bus, which left Dallas at 12:01 am carrying 37 persons [Victoria Advocate, Aug 4, pg. 1], some four hours before the collision ocurred at 4:05 am, 4 August. Recall that about 15 minutes after shooting JFK, Oswald caught Whaley's taxi at the Dallas Greyhound bus station in order to return to his boarding house in Oak Cliff. At the time of the JFK assassination, John Pic, Oswald's half-brother, was stationed at the same Lackland Air Force base where Murphy was stationed when he was killed in the collision. The ICC concluded that the most likely cause of the collison was the northbound bus driver Milburn Herring dozing off and going across the center line into the path of the southbound bus. Another "herring" disaster is that which befell the Herring Fishing Club when the James D. Nicol sank off Sandy Hook, New Jersey, on June 24, 1894, the same day the President of France was assassinated. As I mention in my February 2022 post, the survivors of this fishing tragedy were mostly rescued by another tugboat which would crash into the General Slocum, knocking the latter's rudder off, on the day the Great Hinckley fire purportedly killed the assassin of Abraham Lincoln. Britain entered WWI by declaring war on Germany on 4 August, 11pm London time (which was midnight, 5 August, Berlin time). Also on 5 August, 1914, was the Tipton Ford crash of a gasoline powered doodlebug rail car, which killed 43 in Missouri. Robert Preston hijacked his helicopter in 1974 from Tipton Army Airfield on the anniversary of the Rockville Centre train wreck.

It's easy to imagine that it was decided that the reason Pavlick's 1960 assassination attempt against President-Elect JFK was foiled by Belmont postmaster Tom M. Murphy was that Pavlick had failed to heed the coincidences concerning Tom Murphy in disasters, namely that, (1) Police Commissioner Thomas Francis Murphy was one of the two leading representatives of NYC at the scene of the Kew Gardens train wreck the night of the crash (Murphy showed up with acting Mayor Joseph T. Sharkey at 12:30am the night of the accident—the actual Mayor, Mayor Impellitteri, was in Havana), (2) Thomas T. Murphy, son of Thomas J. Murphy of Dallas, was killed in the Waco bus collision, and (3) Conductor Thomas J. Murphey of Train 173 had a fright when he found that pulling the emergency brake just north of Union Station did not work (his efforts had no effect on the rear part of the train because he was forward of the closed anglecock in the brakeline at the rear of the third car). If only Pavlick had heeded the Tom Murphy warnings inherent in the disasters, I am supposing it was believed or argued, he would have taken it as an omen to be wary of Tom Murphys and so would not have been prevented from killing JFK. And so from a desire to please disaster spirits I can imagine it was decided to do homage to these three “Tom Murphy” disasters by assassinating Kennedy (especially if the circumstance of JFK coming to downtown Dallas as he did may have been taken as a sign, having made the assassination so convenient), what the disaster spirits I suppose were claimed to be trying to encourage by producing useful omens for Pavlick, and of course like with all the other assassinations motivated by worshipping disaster spirits or whatever, it was presumably believed the assassination had to have particulars aligned with the particulars of those disasters, particularly with those related to Tom Murphys, since those were the particulars which one might logically most infer to have been caused by profoundly magical omen-giving disaster spirits a disaster-spirit worshipper would be most tempted to worship. Provisionally, I feel it more likely than not that Oswald felt it would be enjoyably desecrating to cause Murphy to in some sense relive the tragedy of his son's gruesome death by gruesomely killing the president right in front of him. Evil.

The Rockville Centre collision (32 dead) of February 17, 1950, in many ways presages the Kew Gardens collision (78 dead)—the wrecks both happened on the Long Island Railroad (then owned by the Pennsylvania Railroad) in 1950. There's a curious decreasing (with respect to time) sequence of three consecutive numbers involved in these wrecks that can be extended to one of four consecutive numbers by including the Federal Express wreck, which sequence might have seemed somehow of supernatural significance to the assassin or assassins. Indeed, the Rockville Centre wreck may well have happened when Jacob Kiefer, motorman of eastbound Train No. 192, failed to take sufficient notice of the approach aspect of signal S176, and as a result could not stop in time at Signal O2R, the next signal, which guarded the partially overlapping gantlet track where No. 192 did collide with westbound Train No. 175, demolishing the left side of the front car on each train. Kiefer, who suffered from high blood pressure, claimed during his trial for manslaughter that he believed he had blacked out from before reaching signal S176 until moments before the collision. (A doctor testified that he may have blacked out because blood vessels to his brain may have spasmed, and Kiefer was acquitted by the jury.) Train No. 174 it was whose failure to obey the proper signal was the main cause of the Kew Gardens wreck. Recall Train No. 173 was the southbound Federal involved in the 1953 wreck.

It's a little curious, too, that the first names of the motormen most at fault in the Rockville Centre and Kew Gardens wrecks were Jacob and Benjamin, what since according to the Old Testament, Jacob begat Benjamin, possibly suggesting to the superstitious that the Rockville Centre wreck somehow begat the similar Kew Gardens wreck that happened about nine months—about one human gestation period—later. The Waco tornado of 11 May 1953 also occurred about nine months after the 4 August 1952 bus collision near Waco--to be precise the Kew Gardens wreck was 278 days after the Rockville Centre wreck and the tornado was 280 days after the bus collision. The Waco tornado was no trifiling tornado, neither, it killing 114, to this day tied (more-or-less) with the 1902 Goliad tornado for deadliest-ever Texas tornado. I suppose the malarkey was that the Rockville Centre disaster on some spiritual level impregnated the Long Island Railroad while the Waco bus collision impregnated the Waco area, causing even more wretched disasters to be spawned about one human gestation period later, respecitively to the same railroad and area.

It's worth noting that on 22 January 1927 Waco's Baylor University lost 10 basketball students (the Immortal 10) when at a grade crossing in Round Rock their bus was hit by the Sunshine Special. The team was travelling to the University of Texas in Austin from Waco, using roughly the same route as the buses in the 1953 collision. When Highway 81 (the route the 1953 buses took) was built a few years later a railroad overpass was built through Round Rock, purportedly the first railroad overpass in Texas

I wish I could pin down whether there really was a mail room in the basement where the front of the Federal Express ended up (Wikipedia says this, but period newspaper articles don't mention it, and I am skeptical). Indeed, this would make the Federal Express wreck that Thomas J. Murphey was involved in greatly involve the US mail, and of course Thomas M. Murphy, the postmaster in Richard Paul Pavlick's hometown of Belmont, New Hampshire, and Thomas J. Murphy, the mail foreman at the Union Terminal Annex in Dallas, both were heavily involved with US mail. The number 1 point of origin at the top of the transfer that Oswald received from bus driver Cecil McWaters is “Belmont”.

Oswald was caught largely due to the effort of Johnny Calvin Brewer, who had noticed the suspicious Oswald when he had momentarily ducked into the lobby (a terrazo-tiled area flanked by glass display cases between the concrete sidewalk area along Jefferson Boulevard and the door of the store) of the Hardy Shoe Store, 213 W. Jefferson, which Brewer was managing as police were cruising up and down Jefferson looking for Officer Tippit's shooter. Brewer bravely stepped outside to observe Oswald until he snuck into the Texas Theatre without a ticket, where after a discussion between Brewer and Julia Postal the ticket cashier, the police were notified by her, and where Officer McDonald would shortly arrest Oswald. Right next to the Hardy Shoe Store, which seems to have lacked a prominent sign, was the Austin Shoe Store, 215 W. Jefferson, which did have a prominent sign. Given the coincidences (Austin Street, Conductor Austin) of Austin with the Kew Gardens wreck, I shouldn't be surprised if Oswald thought it an omen that he should temporarily try to stay low at this Austin Shoe Store, which he might have confused with the Hardy Shoe Store next door (or of course maybe not, it could be meaningless coincidence and that Oswald was at that time hiding wherever and whenever he felt most convenient giving the evolving circumstances). On the evening of the 22nd, Austin, the state capital, was to have been JFK's next and last stop on his two-day five-city tour of Texas.

Something about Officer Tippit is that 78 was both his unit number and the number of his normal patrol district.¹ The Kew Gardens train wreck killed 78. The number of the car Tippit was driving when he stopped to talk to Oswald was 10, and this number was clearly printed on the front doors of the car; Oswald was leaning on the passenger (front) door, perhaps even touching the 10 with his waist while talking to Tippit shortly before Tippit exited to go in front of the car and was shot to death when Tippit was about opposite the left front tire. Numerological references (compared with, say, references to names involved with disasters) are not particularly interesting or spooky, normally, especially with a small number like 10, or at least I don't see signs of them much when I look for spooky references in (say) spooky cold cases and assassinations, but what you can do with 10 is multiply easily--just add a zero--no need to be a mathematician to know that trick. In particular, multiplying 78 by 10 yields 780, the number of the lead train involved in the Kew Gardens wreck. Could Oswald have targeted Tippit for death because of these numerological coincidences? That leads one to wonder whether Oswald somehow manipulated Tippit beforehand (e.g., by giving him some cryptic "prophecy" that would look like a clue) in order to encourage meeting up with Tippit after the assassination, so he could murder Tippit. Rumors have it that shortly before Oswald killed him, Tippit tried to make a phone call at Top Ten Records, located in Oak Cliff at Jefferson and Bishop, just one block west of the Texas Theatre. If Oswald had told Tippit something strange that made Oswald seem to have prophetic knowledge of the assassination in order to get the latter to meet him after the assassination, then before the assassination Tippit likely would have ignored Oswald, considering him a random weirdo, but after the assassination one can imagine Tippit having made an effort to inform headquarters about what would be his suspicions of Oswald before investigating the latter, but wouldn't have notified via the police radio (which anyone with a police-band radio could listen to), since it is best not to drag people through the dirt just on suspicion. Either way, I seriously doubt Tippit was otherwise than a hero. If indeed Tippit made a phone call at Top Ten Records, he may have been trying to tell his superiors about Oswald. If ever people take me seriously, some might I suppose find a way to drag Tippit through the dirt on account of the numerological coincidences, but I'm pretty sure Tippit would prefer me to put the weird coincidences out there anyway, because heroes care more for the truth than about their own reputation. And yes, the numbers could be just random coincidence, but perhaps not. Tippit also had a badge number, which was 848, which probably meant nothing to Oswald if he even knew it (some websites say that 848 died in the Eastland disaster but there are and have been lots of numbers floating around as the death toll--844 seems most common figure nowadays).

I can see, though, that it may be somewhat bothersome to you that 78 refers to Tippit two ways (unit number and normal patrol district), but 10 is just referenced one way. So you're short a 10 if you want to multiply each 78 to get 780. But that's to look at things in a wrong, incomplete way, in my opinion: Oswald shot Tippit dead on 10th Street (near Patton). Hmmm, another 10, but maybe you consider the 78 that's the number of dead in the Kew Gardens wreck as yet another loose end number that needs multiplication by 10 to get the train number of the rear-ended train again. Well, whadya know, I just mentioned in last paragraph yet another 10, namely "Top Ten Records." So there you go you've indeed got three 10s to match the three 78s, making it all tidy and symmetrical-like. But wait, let's be even more far out--let's see (necessarily more speculatively) what the most far out reaches of lala land has to offer because it's pretty clear that Oswald was weirder than fiction--and be even more daring, hmm yes, the standard tip in the US back in the 50s and early 60s was 10% by most accounts, and so you've got from the first part of Tippit a "Tip" that makes for another 10% and thus another 10. Hold on, there, though, Tippit's a palindrome, i.e., reads same backwards as forward, so what you've got is another 10 from reading Tippit backwards, so in some sense you got two 10s arising from the name Tippit. (A double tip wouldn't seem to be something Oswald would pride himself on--at least he didn't want to be thought a double tipper "tippit" when he gave cab driver Whaley a five cent tip on a 95 cent car fare--just a skosh over 5% that was.) Anyway, that would leave us two 78s short. Whoa there, Top Ten Records was founded in 1956, and 'twasn't 'til 1957 according to authoritative-looking site on internet that 45s replaced 78s as the most common record format used for records in the US. So Top Ten Records indeed gives another 78 reference. That leaves us one 78 short. Hmm... The signal that Benjamin Pokorney of Train 174 stopped following when he wrongly sped up when Conductor Austin was roughly opposite the Kew Gardens train station was "Signal C". As mentioned, the Signal C seems to be barely in Forest Hills, just west of the Union Turnpike overpass. So let's see what else is just west of the Union Turnpike overpass, shall we? Hmm... yep, 78th Avenue is the next road west—some distance, but still fairly close—"that counts" Oswald would probably say. So you've got five instances of 10 and five instances of 78, enough 10's and 78's to give not just 780, but 780 to the fifth power. Five tens and five seventy-eights together comprise 10—that's ten (Oswald would probably have said "mwahahaha" if Sesame Street (started in 1969) had been a thing in his childhood that he had looked at) possible numerologically-special factors in the murder of Tippit, which I suppose yields yet another possible "10" reference....

Footnotes:

¹This is presumably not as peculiar as I had originally thought: In Four Days in November, in a footnote on page 103 of the 2007 ed., Vincent Pugliosi writes "The number "78" was Tippit's call number because it was the police district, number 78, that he was assigned to." In the same footnote, Pugliosi references a telephone inverview he had with Jim Bowles on March 25, 2004. Bowles, who later became a sheriff of Dallas County, was the supervisor of the Dallas Police Department radio division during the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and so would have been well positioned to know such things. In the same footnote, Bugliosi also references the "Dallas Police Department Squad Districts as of January 1, 1960"

Were WWI German saboteurs superstitious aligners of killings with incidents of mass death?

So I got to thinking about the below after noticing that (1) NYC Mayor Gaynor was shot 9 August 1910 at German Lloyd docks where 1900 Hoboken docks fire (326 dead) happened, on ship that had been at docks on day of fire, (2) Titanic (1514 dead) hit iceberg on anniversary of Lincoln assassination and sank on ann. of his death, (3) Presidential candidate (and ex-President) Teddy Roosevelt was shot 14 October 1912 by German-American ex-bartender six months to the day after Titanic hit the iceberg and one year to the day before Senghenydd (440 dead) and people speculated at the time assassination attempt was at least partly motivated by loss of his claimed fiancee (who per her brother probably wasn't even a girlfriend) in the 15 June 1904 NYC General Slocum fire (1021 dead, mainly Lutherans from Little Germany, Lower East Side) at Hell's Gate, East River, especially because upon being arrested he had on a note in his pocket the German name of Luther's hymn “A Mighty Fortress is our God”, the song the band was playing aboard Slocum when she last left the dock, (4) Mayor Mitchel was shot at in NYC on 17 April 1914, 1:30 pm, after a tenement fire in Hell's Kitchen near Times Square had killed about a dozen the morning of the same day, and (5)Titanic's rescue ship Carpathia was torpedoed about 10 hours after the last Tsar and his family were murdered, on same day (17 July 1918). It's worth noting too, along the same lines, that the deadliest North Atlantic disaster before Titanic was the loss of SS Norge (at least 635 dead) on 28 June 1904, when it foundered on Hasselwood Rock 200m north of Rockall. Exactly 10 years to the day after this disaster, Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, commonly taken to be the proximate cause of World War I. The assassin, Gavrilo Princip, claimed Bogdan Žerajić as one of his inspirations. In 1910 on the sixth anniversary of the General Slocum disaster, Žerajić had shot five bullets (which all missed) in Sarajevo at the Governor of Bosnia and Herzegovina before killing himself with the sixth. The Norge disaster was only 13 days after the General Slocum disaster.

So let's get right to it and consider the known and deadliest possible acts of sabotage against the Allies during World War I, looking for alignments in the particulars of these acts of killing and destruction with particulars of other incidents of mass deaths (disasters). The pattern is not quite as obvious, but there still are strong suggestions in sufficiently many incidents as to be quite suggestive of Aligner activity.

Known German sabotage in US, WWI:

2 Feb 1915, 1:10am. Vanceboro, ME, international bridge bombing (0 dead) by Werner Horn. Bomber had 50 minute fuse and was delayed due to oncoming trains, and so bomb may have originally been intended to be placed just before midnight on 1 Feb 1915, fourth ann. explosion of dynamite and black powder explosion at Jersey Central Railroad docks, Communipaw, Jersey City, NJ (24 dead)?

30 May 1915, 2am. Barge containing 18 tons dynamite blown up in Seattle, WA, probably by Emil Marksz. Bomb believed placed about 10pm on 29 May 1915, one year ann. of RMS Empress of Ireland disaster near Quebec City (1012 dead). On 22 May 1915, the same day as the Quintinshill Railway disaster (226 dead, to this day still Britain's worst ever), in Tacoma, WA (where bomb was believed bought and where explosives were originally to be loaded on ship bound to Vladivostok), an arsonist had destroyed two armored vehicles and damaged one rail car sitting on the Northern Pacific Dock. Louis J. Smith believed to have bought bomb materials in Tacoma and later arrested for plot to blow up St. Clair tunnel. Bomb believed assembled by Walter L. Scholz. On the morning of July 4, 1915, probably sensing he was under surveillance and about to be interrogated, Marksz committed suicide. On the morning of July 4, 1900, a streetcar wreck in Tacoma killed 43.

21 June 1915, 3am. Peabody overall plant, being used to manufacture army uniforms, bombed in Walkerville, Windsor, ON (0 dead). Tenth ann. sabotage of 20th Century Limited at Mentor, OH, then perhaps worst ever instance of railway sabotage in US (21 dead). Group ran by Karl Kaltschmidt also tried to blow up barracks in Windsor same night (bomb failed to go off), and hoped to sabotage St. Clair Tunnel (between Sarnia and Port Huron) and Detroit Screw Works. His assistants included Walter Scholz, Carl Schmidt and Charles Francis Respa. Weird fact: on October 28, 1915, the ninth anniversary of the Second Great Atlantic City Train Wreck (53 dead), (1) St. John's school fire in Peabody, MA, killed 21 young girls and (2) HMS Sarnia collided with HMS Hythe during Gallipolli offensive, killing 154 aboard Hythe.

30 July 1916, 2:08 am. Black Tom explosion (4 dead), Black Tom Island, Jersey City, NJ. Perhaps most successful WWI German espionage destroys $20 million of munitions destined for allies. Bomb perhaps placed 29 July 1916, same day as Matheson fire, to this day deadliest ever Canadian forest fire (and ann. 1900 assassination of King Umberto I of Italy). On 30 July 1896, twenty years to day before explosion, First Great Atlantic City Train Wreck killed 50 in Atlantic City, NJ. On 29-30 July 1910, Slocum Massacre (cf. paddle steamer General Slocum fire of 1904 mentioned above) of African-Americans occurs in Slocum, TX (5-100 dead).

11 January 1917, Kingsland explosion (0 dead), Kingsland, Lyndhurst, NJ. Buffalo Bill, i.e., William Cody, died preceding day. In 1901, on the day assassin Czolgosz was electrocuted for shooting US President William McKinley in Buffalo, the Buffalo Bill Circus train wrecked in Linwood (between Salisbury and Lexington), NC, seriously injuring Annie Oakley and killing many circus animals. What to this day is the worst ever US interurban train disaster happened at Kingsland, IN, on September 21, 1910, on the Fort Wayne and Wabash Valley Traction Co. line. The company logo, on the car that did the damage but suffered no fatalities, was a swastika inside a circle. Oddly, perhaps the second worst-ever US interurban train disaster happened at Staunton, IL, only 13 days later on October 4, 1910 (cf. 1918 Sayreville explosion below). President Wilson was born in Staunton, VA.

9 July 1917. Mare Island (north of San Francisco) explosion of large barge containing black powder (6 dead). Same day as mysterious explosion of battleship HMS Vanguard near Scapa Flow (843 dead). 9 July 1850 there was a fire in Philadelphia (44 dead—to this day deadliest fire in Phil.) that took off when saltpeter (a constituent of gunpowder) ignited in a warehouse where fire started in hay stores, the same day President Zachary Taylor died, purportedly (some suggest he might have been poisoned by some of those wanting the much more pro-slavery Millard Filmore) from some sort of food poisoning from cherries and iced milk consumed on 4 July 1850, four years to day before Rider's Grove, MD, train wreck (28 dead, still to this day Maryland's deadliest). Great Train Wreck of 1918 also on 9 July, in Nashville, usually considered deadliest ever US train wreck (101 dead). The 4 July 1900 Tacoma steetcar disaster 15 years to the day before Emil Marksz committed suicide was on the 50th anniversary of Taylor consuming the suspect cherries and two years to the day after the SS La Bourgougne (549 dead) sank less than thirty minutes after colliding in heavy fog at 5 am with Cromartyshire 60 nautical miles south of Sable Island, Nova Scotia.

Deadliest other munitions explosions during WWI (sabotage possible but without strong evidence):

2 April 1916. Faversham, Kent, England. 200 tons of TNT explode (115 dead) at TNT plant after empty sacks catch fire.

19 January 1917, 6:52pm. Silvertown, West Ham, Essex (now Newham, Greater London) explosion of 50 long tons of TNT (73 dead) at TNT plant. Tenth ann. gunpowder car exploding (28 dead) when Big Four Passenger Train No. 3 passed it in Sandford, IN, and of collision in fog on Big Four (23 dead) at Fowler, IN, that occurred same day in same state.

10 April 1917. Eddystone, PA explosion. 18 tons of black powder ignite, in “F” building, setting off tons of shrapnel shells (139 dead, mainly women). Ann. of 1912 Titanic leaving Southampton and of 1910 premature dynamite explosion (9 dead) at Dead Man's Cut, Novice, TX, on Santa Fe, RR. (A passenger train wreck at Novice would kill 7 on 13 January 1944.)

6 December 1917. Ammunition ship SS Mont Blanc explodes in Halifax Harbor, NS, Canada, after collision with SS Imo (2000 dead). Tenth ann. Monongah, WV, coal mine explosion, North America's deadliest ever mine disaster.

18 May 1918. Oakdale, PA, TNT explosion at Aetna Chemical munitions plant (200 dead). Was fiftieth and last birthday of last Tsar Nicholas ii. Ann. Goliad tornado of 1902 (114 dead) (followed next day by Fraterville mine disaster (219 dead) near Coal Creek, TN, which was three days before Coal Creek No. 2 mine disaster (128 dead) near Fernie, BC, in Elk River Valley, Canada). Goliad is where over 425 Texan POWs in the Texan War of Independence were massacred in mass murder 27 March 1836 by their Mexican captors per instructions of Santa Anna.

1 July 1918. Chilwell munitions plant explosion (134 dead). Ann. 1906 Salisbury, Wiltshire, train derailment (28 dead) next to Sergei Skripal's drinking club exactly ten years before 1916 first day of Battle of Somme (20,000 British dead) and one hundred before train collision resulting from missing Willow Grove signal (Willow Grove No. 10 mine disaster, Neffs, OH).

2 July 1918. Split Rock, Onondoga, NY, explosion after mixing motor in main TNT building at Semet-Solvay plant allegedly overheated, starting fire (50 dead). Ann. 1881 James Garfield shooting, 1915 US Capitol bombing by German extremist Erich Muenter, and worst day 1917 East St. Louis riots. Day after Chilwell shell-loading plant explosion.

4 October 1918. T. D. Gillespie munitions loading plant explosion, Morgan, Sayreville, NJ. (100 dead). Ann. 1910 interurban disaster at Staunton, IL.

Various other incidents of interest during WWI (inc. rest of deadliest British maritime incidents not caused by enemy shells, torpedoes or mines):

26 November 1914. HMS Bulwark explodes at Sheerness (741 dead), possibly from shells having been temporarily stored against a boiler room bulkhead that grew hot. Ann. 1905 Baker Bridge wreck in Lincoln, MA (17 dead)??? near where Sarah Pryor would be last seen alive in 1984.

27 May 1915. Former ocean liner converted to mine layer HMS Princess Irene internally explodes (342 dead) in Medway for unknown reason considered most likely to be faulty primer on mine she was carrying. Not far from where HMS Bulwark exploded. Ann. 1875 Precious Blood Church fire (78 dead) in Holyoke, MA?? and also of 1896 St. Louis/E. St. Louis tornado (255 dead)?

30 December 1915, 3:25pm. HMS Natal suffers internal explosion, possibly from faulty cordite in shells she was carrying, in Cromarty Firth (390 dead). Ann. 1903 Iroquois Theatre, Chicago, IL, disaster (600 dead) and one year to the day before Rasputin death.

21 February 1917. Troopship Mendi (646 dead), carrying mainly South Africans en route to France, almost cut in half after being struck by SS Darro south of Isle of Wight. Anniversary 1891 Springhill Mine disaster (125 dead), Nova Scotia??

12 January 1918, 9:27pm. HMS Opal and HMS Narborough run aground on Pentland Skerries near Hesta Head, South Ronaldsay, Orkney Islands, UK (188 dead, William Sissons lone survivor). Same day as Minnie Pit Coal Mine disaster, 9:45 am, Halmer End, Staffordshire (156 dead)!

4 March 1918. USS Cyclops from Rio de Janeiro leaves Barbados for Baltimore with full load of manganese ore, never to be seen again along with its 306 crew and passengers. Some speculate that captain, determined by investigators to be a native German with a reputation for being a cruel disciplinarian, agreed to meet German submarine somewhere to destroy his ship. Tenth ann. 1908 Lake View School fire, Collinwood, OH (175 dead) and eighth ann. 1910 Rogers Pass avalanche (62 dead), BC, Canada, and exactly 100 years before Sergei Skripal poisoning in Salisbury, Wiltshire, UK.

26 May 1918, midnight (probably ending day, but possibly beginning day). Delphi, IN. Unknown saboteur pours oil on Wabash RR bridge over Deer Creek and sets it alight. Fire put out before train came, so no fatalities. Ann. 26 May 1917, Mattoon tornado (101 dead) and near ann. tornadoes day after Mattoon tornado (~150 dead) and 27 May 1915, Princess Irene disaster (conf. above). In 1944, infamous “Mad Gasser of Mattoon” flit gun attacks peaked on one year ann. Congressional train wreck (79 dead), on ann. of shooting of President McKinley.

17 July 1918. RMS Carpathia, the ship that rescued the survivors of RMS Titanic, torpedoed and sunk (5 dead) by German sub U-55 about 10 hours after last Tsar and his immediate family were murdered in Ekaterinburg. One year anniversary of King George V proclaiming the renaming his Royal House from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Windsor.

6 October 1918. Troopship HMS Otranto, during heavy storm, collided with Cashmir and then was cast ashore by wind or sea onto Old Women's Reef off Islay and sank (470 dead, mainly British crew and American soldiers).

In late 1915 and early 1916, the German biological weapon espionage program in the United States was set up by Anton Dilger, who was based in Washington, DC. He was born near Front Royal, but at age 9 went to live with his sister Eda in Mannheim, Germany. In September 1915, after losing several German relatives in the war, he returned to America, where he succeeded in killing several thousand horses destined for the Allies by incubating glanders bacteria for distribution to agents to be (for example) covertly injected into horses as they were preparing to be shipped. After NYCPD became on to the horse sabotage campaign, he returned to Germany in January 1916. But his brother continued working in the lab they set up in Chevy Chase, NW Washington, DC, where he and his fellow conspirators may have constructed some of the pencil bombs, etc., used to set off the monumental July 30, 1916, 2:08 am, Black Tom Explosion of two million pounds of ammunition destined for the Allies in Jersey City, NJ (other such infernal devices were built in 1915 on the SS Friederich der Grosse as it was layed up at the Lloyd Hoboken docks on account of the British blockade).

Officially, Anton Dilger died in Spain on 17 October 1918 of the Spanish Flu during the infamous epidemic. But apparently there are doubts and even speculation that he was killed by Germans he was at odds with. Anyway, in Ludwigshafen where the main BASF facilities were located across the Rhine from Mannheim, in 1921 on the anniversary of the 1910 Kingsland wreck, the Oppau explosion killed over 500. On the anniversary of the Mattheson fire (and perhaps of the planting of the infernal device at Black Tom) in 1943, a tank car explosion at the IG Farben plant (BASF had become part of IG Farben) at Ludwigshafen again killed over 500. In 1948, on July 28, the anniversary (according to the standard definition) of the start of World War I, an explosion at the same Ludgwishafen IG Farben plant killed over 200, two days before the Nuremberg trials found 13 IG Farben employees guilty of war crimes.

The German embassy's military attache in the US was Franz von Papen, who early in WWI was a leading figure in planning sabotage and the (never actualized) invasion of Canada by members of the German-American beer-drinking clubs. But he later became Hitler's Vice Chancellor and played a role in persuading von Hindenberg to allow Hitler as Chancellor. H. W. Blood-Ryan, in his 1940 work Franz von Papen: His Life and Times, mentions precisely one act of great courage displayed by von Papen as an officer upon returning to Europe. In June 1917, von Papen once dressed as a British officer to bravely patrol British positions, and was almost shot by his own troops in confusion. This incident occurred near “Mericourt, hard by Lens”. Méricourt, Pas-de-Calais, suffered (404 dead) more casualties from the March 10, 1906, Courrières Mine explosion (1099 dead) one mile east of Lens than any other village or town. James Earl Ray and Osama bin Laden would be born on the anniversary of Courrières, still Europe's deadliest ever mine disaster.

And a prominent saboteur, Kurt Jahnke, later supposedly became basically Rudolf Hess's personal intelligence officer. Rudolf Hess was a very early member of the Thule society which purportedly motivated much of the occultism of the early Nazis, in particular the obsession with the swastika. That the Nazi flag contains a swastika inside a circular-bounded background, could this be at least partly motivated by the emblem of the Fort Wayne and Wabash Valley Traction Company? At any rate, the evidence in its totality is suggestive that the superstitious tendency during World War I to seek alignment of killing with (usually earlier) mass death (if not mere coincidence) was caused not just by Germans or German-Americans but by proto-Nazis.

All these alignments may seem too ancient to be of much current interest, but Aligners may recruit by sodomizing future 'ligners while revealing to them the “wondrous” alignments of murder with mass death, which presumably may seem more profound and less stupid when under the influence of anandamide, the chemical in semen which binds to the same cannabanoid receptors that marijuana's addictive chemicals bind to. Apparently, I have read, marijuana has a way of making things seem more profound than they really are, and I suppose since semen contains anandamide, it's the same way with sodomy. Perhaps sodomy acts done while discussing and pondering 'lignment may seem so profound that the recruits may choose to imitate their abusers, sodomizing others later (maybe much later) while discussing the 'lignment, and of course both murdering so as to increase the number of murders with alignment and also encouraging such murder. Oh yeah, I know, People may well think I am some kooky person still trying to fight World War I (on the allied, non-aligners side), but since there may be a subgroup of those who fought under the banner of the Central Powers, namely the aligners, who perhaps to this day are still fighting for one of their main causes (increasing the number of killings aligned with incidents of mass death), someone needs at least to wave the flag in the right place so the mass of people, namely the alignment-indifferents (who presumably had never conceived of anyone being so bizarre as to intentionally kill to create alignment of the particulars of these killings with past particulars of mass death), who presumably included all or almost all of the adherents of the Allied Powers during World War I, can help fight and overcome the Aligners, a task that may require a group effort. Alignism, for lack of a better word, may be behind much evil violence even today, especially that which otherwise seems pointless and without a motive else. The crime fighting authorities and the dedicated citizen crime fighters should, I suggest, more regularly look for signs of (very dangerous and concerning) 'ligner activity.

I will readily admit that such evidence I have here presented of the existence of Aligners may not seem particularly convincing to others at this point. I shouldn't be surprised if others ask for further evidence of Aligner activity, e.g., in the years since World War I. But it's only been a little over a hundred years since the war. More importantly, it may well be that it is well to be mysterious. No sense in spreading all your peacock feathers all at once. Not only could there be Aligners about, but you don't want to be so obvious that you end up attracting the crazy-about-not-being-crazy people. Baaah. They wouldn't figure out anything but could get in the way or do something imprudent. The first people I want to be intrigued by my Aligner hypothesis are just the wise people. Some publicity is bad publicity. I want not only to not say too much too quickly generally about what I know, but also to not say publicly if I know anything else. Maybe I don't have any other impressive amazing corroborating observations about the Aligners that I could spread before you like so many beautiful feathers, or Maybe I do. If you seem beautiful or someone I could work with, and you are interested, then oh yes I will gladly be the open book if there is a book. But until I am presented with such evidence, then I take liberty to remain at peace with the fog I'm only too glad surrounds and obscures what further evidence of esoteric evil I may or may not have discovered in my researches, cogitations, and reflections. Still, it is necessary to put some stuff out there, just like I am doing here, stuff that may well intrigue the wise more than the foolish.

A sphinx is a mysterious object and it's also a cat. There's a kind of evil that pretends to be the good cat, the cat the girls love so much they end up wanting to hate things just so they can be sure they can still hate something (feelings created by addiction to semen chemicals via sodomy are not likely to be particularly specific, and so being able to hate while feeling love is a sign that the love is real and not just caused by a sordid addiction). Oh it's a primeval tendency, the tendency to want to hate while feeling love, especially useful, no doubt (relative to other defenses against sodomy), in non-mammals like our (cloacal) pre-mammalian ancestors (especially I'd say those that were pelycosaurs*, i.e., the synapsids that aren't therapsids or their descendants) who hadn't evolved reproductive systems more separate from the digestive system, but it's a tendency that may nevertheless exist and have some useful application that would be impertinent for me to indicate whether I believe worth it. Some days nothing matters, some days something does. If a girl were a human sacrifice priestess, and I thought her beautiful, I might allow her to be cruel while being affectionate with me, but that's not really relevant in this discussion now. What is relevant is that I don't really at all like to fantasize about what the really evil people seem to be doing here, i.e., forcing girls to hurt others so they can more easily pretend that the girls can hate others while loving them. This wanting to force others to kill just because one wants the mystique it might give among those who fail to understand is very much a main cause, I mostly think, of the evil I am studying—or at least it is to the extent sodomizing females is similar to sodomizing males (female zombies may be evil and homicidal but they aren't contagious because they can't later imitate their abusers by sodomizing others while trying to encourage them to kill). If zombies don't have enough hate to kill from it, they may yet kill from belief in superstitious nonsense involving (say) a supposed desirability of feeding supposed disaster gods lots of victims whose death particulars are especially aligned with the particulars of mass death, which I suppose is what the zombifiers say is what the disaster gods want for dinner. People say, “Get in the mind of the killer”, but I do not at all believe that. Much better to understand better and fantasize about having sex with female human sacrifice priestesses while they are being cruel and more particularly about what would be the most beautiful and moral way of going about it. If you know what evil is trying to pretend to be that may have some appeal to people who are not morally corrupt (especially in a vastly different society, i.e., in a society in which female human sacrifice priestesses take some of the place of law enforcement in destroying evil), then well, understanding what the evil person is doing will be pretty trivial and yet won't cause you to feel like self-destructing, at least if you are very slow and patiently lazy in arriving at your moral conclusions. And the more the environment of your brain is like the environment encountered ancestrally in possibly good individuals, the more your thoughts are likely to be enlightened if they are good, evil-hating thoughts, that basically have no utility in the bad individual that might—as if!—have caused brains to evolve to create enlightened morally correct thoughts notwithstanding when in a brain environment akin to that of a bad individual. Oh sure it can be a moral struggle whether it is right to think more about having sex with girls who from hate want simultaneously to do cruel things to what they hate. Indeed so much lazy sacredness is required there were that all that be involved, it would be hard to say whether I should be so bold as to think I'm sacred enough to fantasize about it significantly. But Zombie serial killer assassin terrorist child-killing train-wrecking rapists have been wreaking havoc on the world because people don't really get cat behavior at its most moral. It's wrong to ignore that. Apparently sufficiently many people are naturally into cat-like cruelty sufficiently strongly that, on account of their ignorance of their primeval cat-like pelycosauran tendencies, they may well be fooled into thinking zombifying serial killer assassin terrorist child-killing train-wrecking rapists are just fluffy kitties who aren't forcing their zombies to kill but rather are just being loved by their kitties who surely can't be zombies—because they just assume, with excess respect for scientific sounding dogma and insufficient regard to feelings of spookiness and what haunts, that nothing like zombification exists—and so must be like cats when they drop a bird at your door to play pet-me-while-I-kill-it with her (a game I don't play with actual cats, because presumably unlike an actual wise moral cat I haven't any particular insight into the morals of choosing what sort of actual birds deserve death or what constitutes bad behavior on their part). Oh, sacredness is very important all right in understanding cat morals—I can scarcely imagine a truth more importunate. But I can't neglect the discharging of my duty as to protecting society from the extreme evil of the evil zombifying cat impostors. But I don't want to just throw out there to mass publicity the whole of the evil pattern of the serial-killer cat-impostor assassins. There could be a mystique their evil might obtain inadvertently from such light as I cast on them and their superstitious rituals, which my spit might not suffice to defame. No, it's a duty of my life to sacredly teach people the truth about cruel cat behavior and to investigate the matter and associated moral issues thoroughly so I can quench any fires sparked by the evil cat impostors and also so I can more effectively tame any excess enthusiasm in cat girls that my investigations into their clean sexual hate might create.

*Pelycosaurs are believed like humans to be ureotelic, the primitive trait. After uricotelic animals evolved, with their decreased dependence on water, ureotelic animals presumably had a hard time competing in dry environments, as they still do today. In consequence, pelycosaurs where they mainly existed presumably had dependable supplies of fresh water, making being able to suspect having become addicted more advantageous. Indeed, drinking water may cause addictive substances to more easily be metabolized into substances that leave the body through the urine, and so drinking lots of water is something one can do—it might work at least somewhat—about addiction provided one suspects it has occurred (e.g., because hating while feeling love has become worrisomely difficult). Being warm-blooded, on the other hand, like therapsids are believed to have been, though a defense against addiction, is not a defense that depends on recognizing abuse as addictive, it merely is a defense against sexual assault generally (which tends to be addictive), because warm-blooded animals are always at the ready or near-ready to be able to jump and run away or kick back, which is more than one can say for a cold-blooded animal when she is cold and needs to warm up ere she can move well or faster than slow or at all.

Morals as applied to cat-girl female human sacrifice priestesses may seem somewhat alien at first. Cat girls if pandered to may kill quite excessively—a key if there are human sacrifice priestesses is for their lovers to love them better when they kill slowly. The more the sacrifice priestesses get sexual kicks from torturing and terrifying their victims before killing them, the less likely they will kill too fast or too many at once for the kick of killing, and overall the killing will be reduced, as is sacred. Life is sacred—presumably it is only when a person is very evil and devoid of love of sacredness that it could be better and more sacred that the person be killed. There is a danger sex-crazed girls and young women could all of a sudden get too enthusiastic about killing if, say, enjoying hating while having sex becomes the latest thing, like a fad. Fortunately, if females want to have sex with a male while she kills people she hates, he will likely, at least if he is good and has sacredly and lazily thought and fantasized matters through, not be very pleased by her killing too many too quickly of the very hated people that other females likely might want to help kill while having sex with him or by her killing so many people society may well object or worse to what he allowed his lover to do, thereby stopping an activity that makes him especially sexy to females—to be sexy is a potential advantage (in obtaining sexual pleasure). The most sacred thing, I feel, is for the male to love female human sacrifice priestesses better when they kill slowly both because he wants not only what is beautiful but also the sexual pleasure that the slowness could thus give him. If he is loved enough and allowed enough (by the society) to have several female human sacrifice priestesses having sex with him, it definitely seems like it would be especially sacred to love one better for not killing too much because this is beautiful to him and on the other hand to love another better for not killing too much because this is sexually pleasant to him. I have felt for a long time, even before I had hardly any idea what the feeling meant, that it would be especially beautiful if I could understand this beautiful moral point better while being very sacred going about it. So sacred, in fact, that I must say it would be imprudent and reckless of me to say even after many years of thinking about it, that this phenomenon is exactly what I most felt and feel I should want to get at understanding, but if my hypothesis of what I should get at does prove slightly inaccurate I am not especially concerned, since error can be corrected without much bad consequence before one gets the habit of believing it. I have to start somewhere, as everyone does when taking a next step, even if a next step is an important one.

Morality, beauty, talent, and goodness--Part 3

This is the most interesting and new of the three parts of the series, where I actually define mathematically the concepts of beauty, goodness and morality and their precise relations to love and talent. I have sensed (I mentioned it on usenet many years ago) for a decade at least that beauty can be thought of as a geometric sequence, but now that I distinguish both effective love from love and effective morality from morality, things are clearer, hopefully. Much of this I wrote last summer, but I made significant improvements and corrections today.

Beauty, goodness, and morality defined mathematically

As mentioned earlier, I define beauty as having two parts: a concrete part not involving love, which I call talent, and a more abstract part involving love, which I call goodness. Morality I define as love of beauty. As it turns out, there is good reason to believe goodness is the same thing as effective morality, but when making definitions it is useful and necessary by way of avoiding circularity to have separate terms—the concepts are not defined the same, they just happen to be the same, rather as 3 - 1 and 2 are the same even though they are defined differently.

Since the basic concepts are defined in terms of love, it is well that I elaborate on what I mean in this context by "love". Obviously some if not many concepts have to remain undefined, or one must choose between circularity or an infinite descending chain of definitions, neither situation being desirable, but at least I can give a better idea of what I mean. In particular, the expression "love of A", where A is some quality, will denote a desire to increase the amount of A. Even romantic and sexual love can be made to fit the definition since such love basically involves behaviors that tend to increase the progeny and likely descendants of the beloved, thereby increasing the representation of the qualities of the beloved in the world. Love is an unselfish ideal in the sense it involves wanting to increase the amount of A represented in the world and not (say) the amount of A in one's bank vault or in one's own descendants.

Though it is hard to be more precise about what is meant by love, we can be more clear about what we mean if we clarify what we mean for a person to love A n-times as much as B. Clearly what we do not mean is that as a result of love the person tends to increase A by an amount n-times that by which he tends to increase B, i.e., that he effectively loves A n-times as much as he loves B . For the amount a person is able to increase A depends on his skill in increasing A (which might differ from his skill in increasing B), and surely it would be grossly contrary to usage that his love for A should depend on his skill in increasing A. The appropriate definition for loving A r-times more than B is that his desire to increase A and B are such that given a choice between increasing A by a small amount a and increasing B by a small amount b = ra, he will be indifferent as to which choice he chooses, all things else equal. The concepts of effective love and love turn out to be related. If a person loves A r-times as much as B, then it seems entirely reasonable to assume that he loves effective love of A r-times as much as effective love of B; before explaining why, let me first be more clear about the concepts and the difference.

The first clarification to make is that effective love is to be taken as a long-term phenomenon (at least mostly--here might be a good place for further exactness for those willing to do things at a higher level). What matters in judging the effective love of A arising from a characteristic is not so much how effective the characteristic will likely be in the individual possessing it at enabling him to directly increase A, but rather how effective the characteristic tends to be in enabling individuals to directly increase A. For instance, if a moral person is nevertheless very able at deceiving others as to his character, this ability to thus deceive others is very likely a bad trait that tends in most individuals to cause them to behave so as to decrease the beauty in the world, and so effective-love-of-beauty would have a negative value (likely exceeding in magnitude the value of talent there) when evaluated at this deceptive characteristic, even if the person were so moral and hesitant to deceive as to character that the characteristic would not affect his behavior.

Effective love of A by definition is proportional to the amount love tends to be effective in increasing A. So loving effective love of A r-times as much as effective love of B amounts to loving an actual increase a' in A (a change arising because effective love causes change) the same amount as an actual increase ra' in B. But this is the same case with loving A and B directly. If I love A r-times more than B, then if by loving B directly (by say caring unselfishly for someone with much B) I can increase B an amount r-times greater than I can increase A by loving A directly (by say caring unselfishly for someone with much A), then the choice will be a matter of indifference to me. I.e., loving A r-times as much as B effectively means loving an increase a in A the same amount as an increase ra in B. The difference is how the changes a' and a are created. The change a' is caused because loving now people who have effective love of A does over the generations cause A to increase as more and more people with A are unselfishly rewarded by the increased unselfish effective love of A in the population. The change a on the other hand is more immediate, caused merely by rewarding directly with unselfish love someone possessed of much A. I see no reason whatsoever to think otherwise than that if I or anyone else love a direct immediate increase a in A (induced by loving A) the same as a similarly induced direct immediate increase ra in B, then I will love an indirect future increase a' in A (induced by loving effective love of A) the same as a similarly induced indirect future increase ra' in B, and vice versa. I shall assume as much for moral people. To reiterate, it shall be considered an axiom that for any qualities A and B and for all moral persons X, X loving A n-times as much as B is equivalent to X loving effective love of A n-times as much as effective love of B.

As mentioned earlier, as best as I can define it, beauty has a concrete talent component, and another component called goodness comprising the various components involving love. We shall define the components inductively. The talent component of beauty I shall denote by B₀. For each n, B_{n + 1} will be defined as r_n E(B_n), where E is the "effective love operator", and r_n is a coefficient that for each n gives an indication of the weight "effective love of B_n" is to have in the definition of beauty. Since beauty is what morality consists in loving (by definition of morality), one can determine how much a moral person loves an aggregate of qualities (e.g., those possessed by a person) by considering all the values of the B_n and summing them; letting B be the (infinite) sum, B gives a numerical indication of how beautiful the aggregate is, i.e., how much the moral person loves what is under consideration. This amounts to it being the case that for any natural numbers m and n, B_m and B_n are loved the same amount. Since in particular B_{m + 1} is loved the same as B _{n + 1}, it follows that for each m, n that r_n times the amount a moral person loves E(B_m) equals r_m times the amount a moral person loves E(B_n); i.e., that a moral person loves E(B_m) an amount that is r_m/r_n times the amount the same moral person loves E(B_n). But we also know by the remarks ending the last paragraph that, what since B_m and B_n are loved the same amount, E(B_m) and E(B_n) are loved the same amount. It follows that for all m, n, r_m/r_n = 1, i.e., that for all m, n, r_m= r_n. In other words, all the coefficients r_m have the same value, the effective love ratio with respect to E, which we shall denote r or r_E.

Clearly (easy proof by induction), to say that for each natural number n, B_{n + 1} = r E(B_n) is the same as to say that for each n, B_n = rⁿEⁿ(B₀).

Note that hitherto, all that I have suggested about the definition of the effective-love operator is that its value on a quantity that corresponds to a kind of beauty B' is proportional to the amount the person possessing the love is able to increase that particular type of beauty; by redefining E by taking a constant multiple, one can make r whatever one wishes. At first glance, the most straightforward way of defining E would be to do so flatly, so that if a person's effective love of B' (where B' has the dimension of beauty) tends to increase B' by δ beauty units in people, the value of E(B') where B' has a value of one beauty unit is δ beauty units; I shall call E defined thus the flat love operator. Then B is the sum, over all natural numbers n (including n=0), of the terms B_n = rⁿ Eⁿ(B₀). The coefficients rⁿ form what is called a geometric sequence with ratio r. I shall call r with respect to an E thus defined flatly the effective-love ratio . In some respects, this is all quite cool, but why not just define effective love as L = rE so that r_L = 1? Doing so, if in fact B' is a function that actually gives the beauty of something, L(B') gives the beauty arising from whatever effective love of B' is present, i.e., L(B') is the goodness involved with loving B'. To see this is the case, notice that B' must be a restriction of B (since B is what measures beauty). Furthermore, L(B_n) is nothing other than B_{n + 1}, and so L applied to the sum of all the terms B_n is just the sum of all the terms B_n except B₀. Thus L(B) is just the sum of those components of B involving love, which is what goodness, the part of beauty that is effective love (of beauty), is defined as. This in fact is also what we need to ensure goodness is just effective morality. Indeed, since morality is defined as love of beauty, effective morality is nothing other than effective love of beauty, i.e., L(B). To reiterate, defining effective love as L ensures effective morality and goodness are the same thing. In situations where we are not comparing people with differing definitions of beauty (involving, say, people who define beauty with different effective-love ratios), L is probably the preferable effective love operator, and so from here on the effective love operator shall be defined as L. If I have occasion to consider the flat-love operator, I shall denote it as E.

That goodness is in fact the same as effective morality makes it especially reasonable that people would evolve to find things beautiful more-or-less as I have mathematically defined it. For if goodness (the non-talent part of what makes a moral person love you) is effective morality, in order for a person to be loved the best by a moral person, it behooves the former to weight the various components of love in beauty in the same way that a moral person would, or his love of beauty, i.e., his morality, will not be as effective, causing him to be less good and thus relatively less well-loved by her. Indeed, morality involves loving beauty, i.e., wanting to increase the sum of the beauty terms r ⁿ Eⁿ(B₀). If one instead tries to increase the sum of beauty terms involving other coefficients (e.g., those obtained by choosing a different value of r), one will not be as effective in increasing beauty; one instead will be maximizing something else determined by one's own preferences (but of course it would not make a difference if one merely changed the units in which one measured beauty, notwithstanding the numerical value of a beauty measurement and of the corresponding beauty terms depends on the units used), which would reduce the effectiveness of one's morality, i.e., one's goodness would be reduced, making one less loved by moral people. Beauty defined as mentioned causes moral people to possess the advantage of idealism. A moral person will be loved unselfishly by fellow moral people, just the way idealists are loved by those who share their ideals--what enables idealism to prosper to the extent it can be judged and appreciated. Also, the part of beauty that does not involve goodness, i.e., talent, seems among matters not involving unselfishness more-or-less what it is most useful to love. Indeed, love tends to be expressed through mutual children, and it is more rewarding to have children via talented mates, since the success and quantity of one's descendants is positively influenced by the talent of one's mates.

Morality, beauty, talent and goodness--Part 2

This post concerns theories I mostly have had for a good while. For instance, similar ideas may be found in the early part of my book, Exact Morality for Today. Alternatively, for a shorter version, one may go to this post I put on my homepage a decade or so ago. I mainly wrote the contents of this post last summer, as a tie-in between the previous post and the next post (the really interesting one, at least to the mathematically game). Notice that I discriminate here (and in the next post) between morality and effective morality, an important distinction I hadn't observed earlier when trying to define concepts with mathematical exactness, which makes the relations between the concepts as described more coherent.

Morality as idealism

Morality is love of beauty. Beauty I define as part talent and part goodness. Goodness turns out to be the the same as effective morality. Morality is a type of idealism.

As I shall define it, an idealist is someone who wants to make the universe (which practically speaking mostly means the world, since essentially our influences now are mostly limited to Earth) have in the long-term more of certain ideal qualities, i.e., the qualities an ideal world has in abundance. (I don't mean to imply, by using the word "ideal", that there is or could be an ideal, perfect world, since any world would always be more ideal if it had more of the qualities that the idealist loves. Nor do I wish to suggest metaphysical idealism. But other candidate words, like meliorist, have connotations as contrary as those of idealist, so I think I'll stick with idealist.) There can be a great many different kinds of idealists, depending on what qualities the idealist finds ideal. The only requirement I place on what can be an ideal is that it must be something that is not defined in reference to oneself. For instance, if someone wants to increase the extent to which people have genes just like himself, it would be improper to say that this self-love is motivated by idealism arising from his finding himself exceptionally ideal, unless the tendencies causing him to find himself exceptionally ideal are not caused by genetic tendencies to selfishness, but from an inheritable love of qualities not defined in reference to himself that indeed he possesses more than anyone else. An idealist can idealistically love himself if indeed he sees that he is abundantly replete with ideal qualities. For instance, a moral person can love himself greatly because indeed he is abundantly beautiful. But if a person loves himself much more than others just because he has inheritable tendencies coding for self-love, then he is simply, by definition, selfish. And selfishness is not a type of idealism, since one's self obviously is defined in relation to oneself. Similarly, nationalism, love of one's own country because it's one's country, or racism, love of one's own race because it's one's race, though not quite as referential to self as selfishness proper, are still much too referential to one's self to be considered ideals. I think it obvious that much self-love that is justified by the self-lover claiming to love especially the particular more beautiful qualities he or she himself possesses is not self-love really arising from an idealism, but is self-love arising from selfishness that is excused by pretending to an inherent tendency to love unselfishly especially the possessed beautiful qualities (even were the beautiful qualities not possessed); but it's to be excessively cynical to assume that disproportionate love of one's own peculiar beautiful traits is not often idealism, inasmuch as presumably a reason people have peculiar beautiful traits is that their ancestors peculiarly found such traits beautiful enough to especially tend to mate those possessed of the traits, and such predilections, like the beloved traits themselves, may be inherited.

Abstract concepts such as idealism and morality should describe or approximate concepts one may reasonably suppose exist. Thus, let us consider how idealism might evolve. An idealist, to further his ideal, will tend to love unselfishly those he believes support his ideal. For instance, a person who loves beauty will love unselfishly those who also love beauty, because the world being more full of people who unselfishly love beauty causes beauty more to increase. No matter what the ideal an idealist has, an idealist and the other idealists who share the same ideal will tend to love each other unselfishly if they can recognize one another. Idealists, not being selfish, are capable of real unselfish love. There is not the least reason to suppose that people who seek to support an ideal will be less successful than selfish people who merely seek to support themselves. Idealists tend to be loved unselfishly by those sharing or approximately sharing their ideals; the selfish, on the other hand, do not tend to be loved unselfishly by selfish people or others. It's an advantage to be loved unselfishly. Idealism may well be more rewarding than selfishness.

Practically speaking, if an idealist has much doubt as to the extent someone else shares his ideals, his idealism per se is not going to cause him to love that person much. One of the last things an idealist would want would be to love unselfishly someone who fakes an idealism in order to be rewarded by unselfish love from idealists. Sacrificing for people who would prey on a fellow idealist isn't just pointless sacrifice, it's sacrifice made that actually rewards people who prey on those who love your ideal. In other words, practically, idealism can only work to the extent there are situations where the ability in an idealist to detect the idealism in others be stronger than the ability in a deceiver to convincingly fake the idealism. In fact, there is good reason to suppose that idealists often are stronger than deceivers, and the reason doesn't much involve game theory or the other strange explanations popular in the so-called scientific literature regarding altruism, but rather that the important sacrifices involved with love tend to involve mating.

It shouldn't really be surprising that love, and more especially love as artistically and profoundly represented, tends to be associated with mating. Oh sure, a person can love through charitable organizations and the like, and if one is careful about it and possessed of above average sensitivity, one arguably should do so if the sacrifice is not too great, but one seldom sees people profoundly affected emotionally by the thought of donating to these organizations, because such opportunities for love are not the archetypal opportunities. People naturally more tend to love mates than other people, and that is not at all a bad thing. Not infrequently a girl will love one beautiful male (in the sense I define beauty), but because he is poor or taken by another female (say because the latter female is more beautiful), she has a choice between mating the better-loved male anyway or mating some other male she loves less who will better care for her and her children. Not that a female should always mate the better-loved male (it is appropriate, after all, that wealth be used to further the children of good females), but still it is arguably the most significant opportunity for appropriate unselfishness that a female is likely to face. A tendency to choose beautiful sex over resources is probably what most makes a good female good. Similarly, in males. On the one hand, a male can squander much of his youth trying to get as much responsibility-free sex as he can get, making him incapable of caring effectively, or he can try to care greatly for someone he finds special or prepare for the day he finds such a female. On the other hand, a male who doubts whether anyone he loves will mate with him can selfishly use his money to essentially buy a mate he doesn't love, or he can more unselfishly opt to keep his money, using it for some higher purpose or choosing to bestow it upon his relatives, or to give up altogether much concern with making money, allowing him to pursue wisdom less restrainedly than those more constrained by worldly cares. The important quality of love through mating is that such love is expressed through mutual children and descendants. A female who sexually loves unselfishly causes her mate to have mutual children he wouldn't otherwise have; similarly, a male who cares for a mate unselfishly tends to enable his mate to have more mutual descendants than she would have if he were not so unselfish. If a person is tricked into unselfish love for a mate, the deceiver will gain mutual children. However, those children will have a deceived parent, tricked into the inappropriate unselfishness. Since children tend to inherit the traits of their parents, children of parents who deceive in the mating sphere will tend to be not only deceptive, but easily deceived as well. To the extent love is mainly important when it comes to mating, there will be an association between deceit and gullibility when it comes to judging moral character, which leads to a strong indirect test of moral character.

True, one can imagine it might be difficult to judge directly whether an ostensibly moral and appropriately unselfish person is precisely that or just a good deceiver as to his own character; but the association between between deceit and insensitivity that exists with regard to moral character allows one to indirectly judge an apparent moral unselfishness genuine. Moral sensitivity is much easier to judge directly than moral unselfishness. Any at all reflective person has the opportunity to understand his or her own personality better than others; and it is a simple matter to determine whether another understands one's character in a way that corresponds to what makes sense to oneself. By judging sensitivity toward one's own moral character one can in fact by association judge quite easily how unlikely someone else is to be deceptive when it comes to presenting his own moral character. As long as love is mainly toward mates, it should be harder to fake morals than to correctly judge morals in others. People often say that it is inappropriate to judge others, and outside the mating sphere that is mostly true. Outside of the mating sphere, society should rightly be hesitant to punish character without proof, and the whole process ought to be very formal, as in court of law. But with mating, of course, everyone judges though they say they might not; there is nothing typical or desirable about a female sleeping with anybody or about a male dispensing caring with any female who desires it or is willing to have sex with him. If a male is judged not worthy of it, it is appropriate for a female not to have children with him; similarly, if a female is judged not worthy of it, it is appropriate for a male not to care for her or their children. But if the mate is judged worthy of it, the judgment is very appropriate and useful, enabling the sort of love that to the extent it is common makes love difficult to fake, which difficulty is what makes real love possible.

It is reasonable, then, to believe that many people could naturally be idealists. But I haven't said anything about what particular idealism constitutes morality. Obviously, since morality is an interesting, relevant concept to the extent more than a few people are moral or something similar, the ideal that moral people love, which is by definition beauty, ought to be an ideal it would be reasonable to suppose that more than a few people might have evolved to love (to varying degrees, perhaps). Well, since as just explained, the love present in idealism, in order to work, must largely be through mates, it follows that loving an ideal tends to imply a tendency to mate with those sharing the ideal. It is useful and pleasant to mate with talented people, because talented people will tend to be better at helping raise many children well, and because talented people will tend to have talented descendants, and such talent will be useful in descendants. People who find talent beautiful will tend to have more talented children than people who find some other random useless quality important. Thus, it is reasonable to suppose that talent is a part of beauty. But if morality is nothing more than love of making the world more talented, then time, and more particularly the particular time at which one desires that the world be most talented, enters the concept of morality in a fundamental way that could make the concept of beauty impractical or even dangerously wrong. Beauty is not just talent; it is goodness as well.

Practically speaking, when we love, we love people--people who are present right now. So there is arguable reason to understand people who say that they love talent or that their ideal is talent as saying merely that they love people in proportion to how talented they are. This indeed is no real idealism at all. Idealism, especially that involving simply defined ideals, properly is not about the short-term; but about wanting to increase the long-term quantity of something, the ideal, in the universe. Nor, indeed, is it reasonable to suppose this sort of quasi-idealism could evolve in people. If you love unselfishly people merely who are talented, who is especially going to love you for that? You will not be loved for such unselfishness by people who share your "ideals", because people who share your "ideals" will simply love talent, and will be quite indifferent as to whether you unselfishly love talent. In fact, they will probably look at talent as effective love of survival; and you loving people unselfishly somewhat conflicts with you loving survival, and so they will love you the less for your unselfishness. True, moral people might love you somewhat more than they would love totally selfish people; but when it comes to being loved really well, as the most important love tends to do inasmuch as it tends to be associated with a favorite mate, you won't much get that from them since they'd prefer to love people who also love goodness in people; your being unselfish will not be a reward equal to the sacrifices by definition involved with unselfishness. Defining idealism in the short-term, though it might have some practical advantages, can lead to dangerous confusions and belief in implausible ideals.

An impractical and still somewhat dangerous alternative would be to define morality as a desire to make the world in the long run more full of talent. But such a definition willy-nilly leads to an awkward divide between the qualities that one loves in others and the qualities that constitute the ideal. If beauty in theory is just talent, practically, if one considers as one should the long run, then what one finds beautiful in others in the sense that it makes one wants to be unselfish must necessarily be something quite distinct from talent. For if one is interested in increasing the amount of talent present in distant generations, one must appreciate in people not just their talent but also their effective love of talent, effective love of effective love of talent, etc. Indeed, by unselfishly rewarding someone who is unselfish toward talented people, etc., one may well do more toward increasing the amount of talent present in the distant future than if one merely rewarded people according as one perceived their talent. Any sort of idealism, if defined relative to the long-run, leads to a kind of unselfish nature; moreover, being such a real idealist is rewarding in the sense similarly minded idealists love one another unselfishly. And any sort of idealism, say, peacocks loving fancy tail feathers, can lead partly to love of talent, since talented individuals, not tending to die off, can better further an ideal, just as peacocks who are able to survive well can pass on their tail-feathers better than lame peacocks; any sort of idealism can compete with selfishness. It's remarkable and reassuring just how little the particular choice of what one theoretically finds beautiful affects what one practically finds beautiful. Still, practically speaking, more than the presence in the long-term of qualities, one needs to consider in people what particular qualities that exist right now in the short-term are worthy of unselfish love. Though I suppose partly one could argue that the main obstacle to having ideals which lead to differing practical and theoretical notions of beauty might be that our particular language fails in making the necessary distinctions, still, there will always be the mathematical awkwardness of deciding precisely what time in the distant future constitutes the time at which the ideal should be maximized; to get around this, one I suppose would be forced to adopt some sort of limit procedure, assuming, as I suppose is mostly reasonable, that in fact such limits exist. What does seem certain is that if one could define beauty in such a way that what one finds beautiful in people in the short run (the qualities that inspire love) is in fact the same as what one wants to maximize in the distant future (the ideal), then one would need one less notion of beauty, leading to an elegant simplicity in concepts that more corresponds to usage. I would also say one would have an elegant simplicity of concepts that more corresponds to how people naturally consider morality, and if so, then it is fairly dangerous to define two vastly different definitions of beauty, since conflating the two is a dangerous thing that would be all too natural if properly there is indeed one notion of beauty that differs from both. Indeed, I think beauty should be defined so that goodness, i.e., the part of beauty that is associated with effective loving, is also what makes one love beauty effectively, i.e., effective morality. One may just accept that this can be done, but I shall show how this may be done mathematically in my next post.

Morality, beauty, talent and goodness--Part 1

A couple years ago, I decided I was going to make a series of videos concerning morality. I never got beyond the first video (which I never posted), in which I basically described that a moral person is someone who loves beauty, and that beauty has a concrete component, not involving love or unselfishness, and another part that involves love and unselfishness. Most of the the following post (except something I today added at the end) was something I wrote as preparation for the next never produced video.

Let me take as a jumping off point the golden rule, that one should "do unto others as one would have others do unto you". There are a couple moral problems with this. One is that people have different needs. For instance, I'd be quite pleased if girls were lustfully scrambling for my backside—I'd think they were generously into sharing or some such loving thing. But that's no reason to think there would be something benevolent about my lustfully scrambling for girls' backsides. They'd rightfully think I was trying to sodomize them or some such unloving thing.. Girls can't sodomize, which makes the situation not at all analogous. True, a male could ask what would he would want if her were a girl, but that's a philosophically much more complicated question that suggests a more complex definition. Two is that it is just wrong to love bad or evil people as much as good people. The way around that would be to define loving people broadly. For instance, I suppose a strain of Christian could say that ideally loving Hitler would be a good thing, but practically love of homocidal maniacs such as him is impossible because loving him rather than (say) imprisoning, killing or assassinating him when one has the chance is unloving toward others more than it is loving toward him, and what is important is to love people in general the most one can. But practically speaking, making such qualifications basically amounts to saying that one in fact should love good people more than bad people, which can best be expressed clearly and non-circularly by admitting it in the first place, or so it seems to me.

That good people love good people more than bad people explains why people can evolve to be good. Good people love each other unselfishly, bad people don't. Accordingly, good people may get more than bad people, which can cause them to prosper more. Of course, if it worked, a more rewarding strategy would be to pretend to be good, so one is loved unselfishly without having to be unselfish. It's important to see why such a deceitful strategy tends to fail enough that morality is possible and relevant. So-called evolutionary biologists have written a great deal of ridiculous nonsense using game theory and suggestions that morality if not selfishness is some sort of straightforward outgrowth of feelings toward family or the tribe I think the situation is much simpler than represented. The reason moral goodness is fairly easy to judge has to do with the most important love being that toward mates. For instance, a good male loves and cares for his wife more unselfishly than a bad male would be expected to. Similarly, a good female less bases her reproductive decisions on money than a bad female would be expected to. The most important and appropriate love that people possess is toward their mates, and is involved in rewarding the mate with more mutual children than would be expected if the love were not there. Since love tends to be most important in a reproductive context, what a person pretending to unselfishness could obtain is more children with a mate tricked into love. Those children will tend to inherit the insensitivity toward moral goodness that the tricked parent would be expected to have possessed. Naturally deceptive people tending to have inherited their deceit from at least one deceptive parent, it follows that the tendency toward moral deceit would naturally tend to occur together with the tendency toward insensitivity in judging moral character. Because love tends mainly to be in a mating context, one would expect, accordingly, that people who deceive about their moral character would tend to be insensitive. And sensitivity, unlike unselfishness, is fairly easy to judge directly, since one can evaluate sensitivity toward oneself. All one has to do is know oneself, and any one with basic faculties of understanding who bothers is comparatively well positioned to know oneself. As Locke points out, reflection is but perception of what is occurring in one's own brain, a perception not fundamentally different from or less certain than sensation arising from the so-called five senses proper. If the most important love in society were not tied up with mating, it would be much harder to distinguish between the good unselfish people and the bad selfish people pretending to be good unselfish people; and this distinguishing is essential for people to evolve good, unselfish traits.

It shouldn't be surprising really that the most important love is tied up with mating. It doesn't take much observation of Valentine cards to see that people tend to think this is the case, and it makes sense it should be so inasmuch as otherwise goodness would be much harder to judge. Sure, one can and should love people in non-romantic contexts, but it's always somewhat extra dangerous and less than ideal to try to love seemingly good people unselfishly in non-romantic contexts, since if done too generally, it would tend to cause much effective deceit to evolve. Moral judgments that lead to love or punishments are much more dangerous and less appropriate when in non-romantic contexts. It's not that it is wrong to judge others. In fact, it is very important to mate from love, which of course should rely on judgment of whether the other person is worthy of such. It's just that outside the mating sphere, the sort of moral judgements necessary for love or punishment should be made very carefully and rarely.

It's interesting to note that there is a sort of under-appreciated difference involved in the loving associated with mating. Sure, love in males is more tied up with caring for a wife, and thus with marriage (though why and to what extent marriage should be relevant is complicated). But females behave more unselfishly when they choose less caring from the mate. Good males tend to be good because they are willing to be good, caring husbands, but good females tend to be good to the extent they are willing to have sex outside marriage that does not require responsibility of the male. Bad males argue that love is sex. Bad female argue that love is caring. What they agree on is that how males love is the same as how females love (because they all want to encourage real sacrifices toward themselves in their mates), and so that is where the lies of evil are united, and why the difference is under-appreciated. (Actually, there is another complication regarding sexual love. Selfish nasty males tend to argue that screwed-up depravity is a kind of sexual love, whereas unloving females tend to argue that sexual love is a kind of screwed-up depravity, so evil is also united in another conflation, that involving conflating unselfish sexual love with depravity, i.e., sodomy, i.e., semen in the digestive system.) Anyway, because in aggregate most important love is wrapped up with sex directly or with caring consequent to sex, sex is very important to considerations of morality. But before much considering sexual matters, I should define beauty and goodness more carefully.

Of course, any attempt to try to precisely define morality, goodness, beauty, etc., is likely to fall short of what the ideal definitions should be. Ultimately, I shall attempt to define things rather mathematically. This may seem cold and not particularly warm-and-fuzzy. Nevertheless, simplifications are useful ways of gaining understandings of ourselves. Life is too complicated to have a natural moral sentiment suitable to every situation, and at other times one is too tired, crazy, or polluted to have much access to natural moral sentiment.. In practice, it behooves one to try well to understand one's natural moral tendencies to see whether they might fit into a pattern. Why? Because I claim that one of the natural tendencies of people is the indirect tendency to adopt as tendencies those behaviors that would seem to fit into the pattern of one's own direct natural tendencies as best understood; this way one has more tendencies likely to be favored by evolution than merely the numerically insufficient direct natural tendencies. If for instance the golden rule is the best understanding one can have of one's natural moral tendencies, one will tend to adopt the golden rule when one's own natural tendencies don't conflict with it, which to the extent the golden rule describes one's natural tendencies is likely to be adaptive. But one's own natural tendencies may well conflict with the golden rule, because, for instance, as mentioned earlier, bad people just aren't naturally as loveable as good people. It is appropriate to find a better more useful definition of morality that makes the natural tendencies that moral people have more understandable, both in describing the moral tendencies that empirically would seem to exist in oneself and others and also in describing why the most understandable world views, e.g., evolution, would suggest that oneself or a significant number of people, the moral people, might well more or less have the moral tendencies as understood by the definitions.

My best definitions are presumably capable of improvement and worthy of being ignored when direct natural moral tendencies conflict, but realistically, such is likely to be the case of any understanding of morality, and when no direct warm-and-fuzzy feelings are there, my best understanding if a preferable understanding to other understandings may well lead to behaviors that in their consequences indeed are more warm-and-fuzzy than an even simpler understanding. Of course, some hesitance for doing morality more mathematically may be that many people are bitter about math, I suppose from it being a field pedants perhaps don't dislike as much as your typical other field. But hey, math underpins the physical laws of the universe—it's important. And as for feelings, take music. The frequencies of the notes corresponding to the keys on a standardly tuned piano form a geometric sequence with ratio the twelfth-root of 2. I will claim that the components of beauty also form a geometric sequence; indeed, that's where the math mostly lies. Anyway, the same sort of math, the math of geometric sequences, that underlies my approach to morality also underlies music, so if my moral viewpoint seems cold for being mathematical, one might as well view music coldly for the same reason. (For instance, the reason, presumably, that white keys and black keys are arranged on a piano as they are and so that there are twelve keys in an octave is that if one holds one 's thumb and pinky on white keys, with three white keys between, and if one doesn't start on the left on B, one always goes up in frequency seven keys—seven terms in the geometric sequence—leading to a ratio of frequencies equal to 2 to the 7/12 power, which is about 1.4983, a harmonious ratio since it is very nearly 1.5.) A more mathematical understanding of morality, love, beauty, etc., need not lead to inappropriate coldness provided one chooses (mostly warm-and-fuzzy) natural moral sentiments over derived moral sentiment when they conflict; mathematical understanding as a guide to moral behavior is properly mostly for when there is an absence of moral sentiments as to what to do but a presence of sentiment that something should be done. Also, there is the important exception that rational understanding is a better moral guide than moral sentiment when chemical addiction likely has corrupted natural moral sentiment into something unnatural.