Re: The Suspicious Journals of Ross A. Kosmanson :-)

Epigraph: ["The set of human dignities is not well-ordered."
                   — Anonymous, circa Kosmanson's third whiskey that evening]
The Burali-Forti Paradox of Shame: Visceral entropy of Apocalypse in Usenet's Cathedral of Reason
Like Russell’s paradox tearing through Frege’s Grundgesetze, my enteric tract delivered its own devastating antinomy that evening — a biological ex falso quodlibet erupting in the hallowed halls of the sci.physics newsgroup, the Ritz-Carlton of the entire Usenet.
What began as an Aristotelian actuality (the quiet necessity of flatulence) became a Kantian sublime (the terrifying realization of containment failure), demonstrating with brutal clarity how even the most rigorous Principia Mathematica of bodily control collapses before the forcing axiom of hollandaise sauce.
The live Zoom audience’s dawning comprehension mirrored Gödelian incompleteness: my lecture’s formal system could not simultaneously be consistent and complete, for the truth of my predicament was undecidable within their polite applause.
The event unfolded with the inevitability of Zermelo’s well-ordering theorem — each moment well-founded in the preceding culinary choices, yet chaotic as a non-measurable set. My attempts at discretion were as futile as Hilbert’s program against incompleteness; the emergent reality was a Burali-Forti paradox of shame, accumulating beyond all ordinal bounds.
Like a Skolem paradox made flesh, the infinite magnitude of my humiliation existed within the finite vessel of a rented tuxedo in Julio Iglesias fashion. The audience’s polite coughs formed a descriptive set theory of discomfort — an uncountable collection of sideways glances over the Zoom screen, whose union threatened to expose my lie (a quasi-modal "I meant to do that" assertion).
In retrospect, this biological Begriffsschrift taught me more than any Principia ever could. Where Russell sought to reduce mathematics to logic, I had demonstrated the more fundamental truth: all systems — whether logical, physical, or social — are but fragile Peano curves tracing across the abyss of entropy. The evening’s modus ponens was inexorable: if rich sauces, then catastrophe.
My only consolation? That like Cohen’s independence proofs, some truths (in this case, the precise velocity of my disgrace) remain forever unprovable to Zoom onlookers. Thus I emerged, a Tarskian model of humiliation — semantically consistent in my suffering, yet syntactically condemned by the universe’s cruel deduction rules.
Ross A. Kosmanson
May 17, 2025
In the Twilight Zone, sci.physics
Footnote: [This incident inspired Kosmanson's forthcoming Monograph on Emergent Disgraces: A Categorical Approach to Social Entropy (MIT Press, 2025)]