Take That! Tax and Trade Bureau!

I wrote this piece of reasoning after my Crushpad rep had reservations over my wine label saying "Happiness. . . Bottled".

Regarding the TTB issuing any such judgment based on the word “Happiness” as morally obsequious to the act of imbibing alcohol in excess, I ask for pardon.

D1: For the purposes of this demonstration, I define the term “Happiness” as the pinnacle of achievement in any such physical realm of human interaction by which people may rejoice in their collective merit, so long as it was dedicated to the object that can now be attributed as the focus of said happiness.

D2: may we all agree upon the term “Bottled” as the past tense of the act of containing a substance, and by association, the essence of that which is bottled, within a container appropriate to the substance and its essence.

D3: By “Product” we shall refer to any substance that has come into existence by means of a willful act.

A1: Wine is alive. Such that a living, aspirating organism is able to sustain itself of its basic functions within a medium, it is alive.

A2: The act of making wine is an act of cultivation. From the moment the solution of Vitis Vinifera mass and yeast is exposed to conditions sufficient to support microbial aspiration, the winemaker is responsible for the maintenance of a highly complex relationship between an animal and a plant species. This relationship may be observed in numerous accounts throughout human civilizations and is referred to as agriculture.

P1: The act of cultivating wine requires a great deal of physical and mental exertion, and can thereby be considered stressful. Wine also carries with it need for vast quantities of time and space: namely its aging period, during which it is closely scrutinized and maintained by a team of observers; and its space requirements, 1 barrel of wine is approximately four feet long and can weigh as much as 750 pounds, thus imparting considerable space requirements per barrel.

P2: Compensation for work performed is axiomatic to any Capitalist society and can rightly be viewed by it attribution to Justice. In societies that place value on the final product of said work in the form of currency, it can be agreed that in adequate proportion, the buyer gets what the buyer has paid for. Therefore, in any act by which the producer has marshaled superior labor by which to produce his product, the product of such labor will be superior to the same magnitude, and must confer a cost benefit to the producer.

P3: Compensation from the production of a good comes in at least as many forms as money and happiness. Money insofar as the producer wishes the product to be sold to others. Happiness insofar as the product represents the producer’s ability and the history of that producer in the attainment of the craft which brought said product into existence.

P4: The container appropriate to the product of winemaking is a formed, glass bottle.

C1: By P3 and D1, winemakers are compensated in happiness.

C2: By D2 and P4, the act of winemaking requires the act of bottling wine as a product.

C3: If the product of winemaking must be compensated through happiness and the act of winemaking requires bottling, then the winemaker must undergo compensation as far as the winemaker undergoes bottling. And as the owner of any business may reinvest adequate compensation into the business, the winemaker may reinvest adequate compensation into the bottles.

C4: Therefore, the winemaker, being adequately compensated by happiness from the production of wine, may bottle happiness received from producing said wine in such a manner that the act of imbibing said wine to excess holds no bearing to the intention of conceptualizing, creating or producing said wine.

An Appeal to the Apex.

Thank you, Marty. Apparently, I happen to be a zero. Not a zero in a negative, down-on-myself sort of way; but a zero in the sense that all things happen to be balanced on both sides of me, the apex. In accordance, there also exist ones, and twos, threes and infinitely many orders beyond: but there is only one zero. Now, when I found out that I was a zero, I was taken slightly aback. Why zero?

Over tennis, it was determined that a one is concerned with the minutia, the details; and by contrast, zero is interested in homeostasis, the natural balance, principally neutral to concern for small and mundane details. Much like the first recognized “lover of wisdom” (philo – love, sophy – wisdom)the philosopher Thales in the 500s BCE that fell into a well while gazing into the heavens. The mundane, quite literally, was of no concern to him. Though as a result, Thales is attributed to deriving the first cosmology, inventing the federalist state, and coining the word: soul.

Now, of ones, perhaps it is less important that we understand what they are as what they represent. Imagine the shape of the nautilus, the spiral-shaped shell that helps to explain the naturally occurring pattern of fractals. There is an origin, and points that expand from the origin in a natural pattern of dispersion that creates nearly concentric circles that never fully repeat, accounting for the spiral. If you plot points on this spiral, the ones are the first point in the spiral, from the origin. The one sets the pace and deviation of all subsequent points from the origin, so its placement and magnitude are quite important.

To suggest the existence of twos and threes and the continuation of this infinite system, is to necessarily dismiss the plausibility of a dualistic nature of existence, i.e. all that is and all that is not. As a zero, perhaps it is because I am less concerned with all that is not, and give credence to metaphysics that causes me to pause on the thought of an infinitely increasing system of magnitudes. Perhaps though, as previously noted, zero is the apex. Perhaps the duality still exists, with a perfectly opposed spiral in the opposite direction. Not a double helix, per se, but a center and two opposed spirals, meeting at one origin, the apex. Diametric opposition, to account for the duality of nature and all else.

Hereclitus speaks in fragments about similar opposition, in fact the very existence of one defines its antithesis. Death defines life, color defines blankness. To be alive is to be free of death, to exhibit color is to escape blankness. The crux of this idea is that Logos, the account, is the stuff that holds these opposites together, like the arms of a balance, the zero, the apex.

The importance of the account is of the highest order. The account is the reconciliation of action and reality, its accuracy: justice. The account is uniquely human, the accurate account is truth. The idea of virtue rests squarely upon the shoulders of the account, and its necessity to humanity. Without account, there is no story; without story, there is no history; without history, there is no wisdom. The zero is Logos.

Concern for the minutia then, defines all which is not zero, beginning with one and conversely, negative one. These dual infinite systems then, spiral predicatively outward, encompassing 3s, 10s, 47s, 9,472s and beyond as well as their inverses, toward two indistinct extremes, limits that are not limits: and each set of magnitudes defines the limits for a uniquely different account, with zero in the center acting as the architect.

The suggestion then is this, operating at the extremes of any given system pushes the operator to the furthest possible point from zero and thus balance, account and logos. Perhaps the virtues then, are embodied in the zero, and the pinnacle of wisdom lies at the apex.