8/8/11

Some Mantras Never Die

Hillary Clinton 2012 Calls Grow With Anger at Obama Debt Capitulation - The Daily Beast: "Looking as if she were about to cry, an 83-year-old Obama supporter shook her head. “I’m so disappointed in him,” she said. “It’s true: Hillary is tougher.”"

This is an absurd story but it stands to reason. The Hillary campaign was a misbegotten piece of work and the only one that came through it with distinction was Hillary herself and the one who helped her was a person named Barack Obama. President Obama is no less aware of the vast right wing conspiracy than Hillary but he is a better fighter than she would have been. He will end up the victor and he will do it in his own way. I am very glad that I was not at this event. I have a strong stomach but some things are inherently nauseating.

There are wheels within wheels within wheels

Jackie O tapes to reveal her and JFK's affairs and who she believed was behind his death | Mail Online: "Explosive Jackie O tapes 'reveal how she believed Lyndon B Johnson killed JFK and had affair with movie star'"

Someday I will tell my Jackie story just to show that there can be normal relations between men and women that are simply what they are with no complications
Pending that I too have felt that LBJ was not innocent of motive or knowledge when it came to JFK's much longed for demise
My keywords for what I think are James Ellroy's fictional trilogy about the 1960s
Other writing that focuses on the relationship between LBJ and Malcolm Wallace 
And a general sense that the whole Oliver Stone take is a screen that does not explain the probable actuality

I am also curious about information relating to where J. Edgar Hoover was the night before the JFK assassination and where LBJ was that same night 
While I do not believe the nub of the straight account of of LBJ's mistress, I do think it raises significant unanswered questions

I also think the early release of Jackie's allegations is of massive significance in terms of the mythologies involved.

Click here for the gory details

A Second Recession Could Be Much Worse Than the First - NYTimes.com: "If the economy falls back into recession, as many economists are now warning, the bloodletting could be a lot more painful than the last time around."

We need close quarters car free communities of 10K that are vastly less stratified but at the same time more diverse than what we have in in today's sprawl
We need to enable the re-formation of face-to-face society.
We need to be moving well beyond oil and well beyond conventional concepts of green.
We need to build cyber cities beyond the antiquated concepts of building that now obtain.
We need to replace our auto industry with a spaces creation industry creating modular, lego-like "rooms" in which we live and move and have our being.
We need to attach these to community wide skeletons that handle everything related to recycling, power and water.
We need to think 21st century not 20th
We need to reform work
Work is a privilege not an obligation.
We need to make education student driven and student-chosen
Gird up folks
Put your thinking caps on
We will have to build out of this one idea at a time
Beyond oil
Beyond reliance on the automobile
Beyond moribund education
Beyond unadventurous business and unintelligent governance
Except the seed fall to the ground
It shall not rise again

Go Tim

Geithner Rips S&P for 'Really Terrible' Move on US Downgrade - CNBC

The only people pleased by the S&P math are enemies of the country internal and external. Sarah Palin probably chortled. Along with the rest of the GOP wannabes.

S&P deserves nothing but censure. Regulators are as bad as banks. And their contribution to our ills continues.

I miss Elizabeth Warren. Binary thinkers are dangerous to the world's health. Elizabeth thinks in a better way. Triadically. And the GOP was smart enough to perceive that she was smarter than they. So so they crucified her. That has happened to others in history and none of them desire the adulation of their executioners.

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Thanks S&P You Mathematically Impaired Weasels

Markets Spooked by S&P Downgrade but Have No Alternative to U.S.-led System - The Daily Beast

I have exhausted my commentary-capacity in the headline.



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We were talkiing about stratification

Community Gardens Find Theft Is a Fact of Life - NYTimes.com: "“Food is more attractive than flowers, especially in this economy."

Jackie in the NYT story is a fellow member of the church I belong to and an attorney whose green thumb talents are obvious.

Stratification exists in close communities so in a sense that is a clear reason why whites fled and built endless sprawl. We can either think intelligently n0w or reap the whirlwind as the Koches and others have their way.

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It's Business Lassitude That's Hobbling Us

It's business lassitude that's hobbling us
Synthetic products shrink-wrapped for the mass
Profit as the idol we bow to
They advertise and we give them a pass






Moronic Behavior By Those Who Should Know Better

Moronic behavior by those who should know better
Led to our stratified society
Sprawled out and now in economic fetters
Due to forces we all could plainly see


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Imagine real neighborhood schools


Learning should begin with the curiosity and will if the child
School has everything backwards
Great children are stuffed into regimented boxes to be moulded by great teachers
We need schools that are entirely child driven
Where kids can walk among various kiosks where there is one affable, computer savvy expert who likes kids for each kiosk
There is a big screen
The affable person brings up the most original video on learning this or that that she has ever discovered
A few kids hang around to watch.
A walkable community with kiosks of this sort is a viable alternative to education that is reified and factory-based
We need to start with the community and get the cars out of the actual space where people live
A community of 10K can exist in an area with a mile diameter
And no more than four stairless levels
In such areas children can create their own education and discover their own interests and talents and move at their own chosen speed
(To reprise a lyric)
None of this will happen until people insist that the present system is broken

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This is not a recession it is a watershed


This is not a recession it is a watershed
A recession assumes we can do the same thing when it stops
That is not the prospect exactly
We are facing big decisions about how we will live
Creating a satchel for a journey
What to take what to jettison
It is a values crisis
What values shall we take
Values are free for the choosing
Values can be changed in a nanosecond
Values can be willed and affect behavior
This crisis is about the need to revalue values
It has particularly to do with democratic revolution and the value democracy
 
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Sociology of Mentalities


A mentality is a habit of mind that is common to occupants of a particular world
It encompasses terms cliches theories hyphenates and everything needed to create an explicit social entity aka world
There are millions of worlds
Only when one exits his or her world definitively is there awareness of this at the existential level

A realized habit of mind is rare but within a world the language and terms are generally well enough understood to make something like conversation possible
Unfortunately as suggested communication tends to stop at a particular world's end
And as I said there are millions of worlds

We perhaps need a sociology of mentalities in order understand see how the phenomenon of Babel continues to inhibit the spread of reason between worlds
Sclerosis is an obvious result 
Paralysis cannot be far behind

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It's the electorate stupid

Patents and Unions: When Good Intentions Go Horribly Wrong - The Washington Post: "Of course, there’s a movement now to reform the patent system, but as we’ve seen over the last few weeks our government isn’t exactly functioning at its best now. It’s hard for me to be optimistic anything will change."

It's the electorate stupid is the proper response to these complaint articles. The President stands ready to do every little and big progressive thing in the world but there is the matter of the electorate. It is a mountain. At the moment it is suffering from mudslides. We need to shore things up. We need to think more deeply than the latest complaints. We need to point the finger where it should point in any democracy worth the name. At ourselves. Nobody ever asks what the President might achieve with an actual majority. And when people say he had it, I say sure. And just look at how loyal they were.

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Obama's Passion is Krugman on Steroids

What Happened to Obama’s Passion? - NYTimes.com: "But the arc of history does not bend toward justice through capitulation cast as compromise." This long and tendentious piece probably should have been edited by David Brooks. It is the conventional progressive rap on the President. It demeans his past with faint praise and worn-out reporting. And it fails with practically everyone else to perceive the rope-a-dope at the heart of the Obama methodology which proceeds in Peircean Threes. That is to say, he never does not have a goal which he announces with such clarity that the progressives take it to be an unkept promise rather than something he genuinely intends to achieve. The narrative that the writer puts into Obama's mouth as a salient riposte is laughable. Were there any fresh fish left to wrap, this multi page zinger would be ideal. There is more here that elucidates the President's actual MO.

Popper perceived

An explanation of various turns that Popper took to break from the mainstram of empircism and positivism.: "'The proper aspiration of a metaphysician…is to gather all the true aspects of the world (and not merely its scientific aspects) into a unifying picture which may enlighten him and others, and which may one day become part of a still more comprehensive picture, a better picture, a truer picture.'"

Via a discussion of C. S Peirce. Is this not also the proper aspiration of the Internet?

RECCMENDATION Richard Gordon Quantum Touch

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