9/3/11

At least in my case life stages are nonsense

How I Agreed with Charles Sanders Peirce Before I Ever Read Him - Associated Content from Yahoo! - associatedcontent.com:

"My life is a testament to the fact that at least in my case life stages are nonsense. I have studied and learned more in the last four years than in any prior four years. And it has been less than a year since I realized in Charles Sanders Peirce's case, everything I think has already been thought And for that matter, is already relegated to a backwater where it is sure to remain uncomprehended for yet another century. So be it."

More at the link above.

Annals of the future - our own room

Having a Room of Your Own Anywhere You Are - Associated Content from Yahoo! - associatedcontent.com: "I suspect we will each have *our very own room*, a changeable but relatively stable set of options that can be recreated most anywhere we happen to be -- a sort of bricks and mortar (though with different and more futuristic substitutes) -- virtual reality, wired with all the appropriate gizmos of the moment, a sleeping situation we like, and appropriate individually-chosen perks. "

More at the link above.


Global Online Privacy

Spoken names for the Holy One are entirely human

Beyond the Divine Names Problem - Associated Content from Yahoo! - associatedcontent.com:

"Spoken names for the Holy One are entirely human in the sense that they are inconsequential on the level of any term in any language possessing authority."

The most salient indication we have is the experience of Moses to whome the deity was not revealed by name but simply with the statement I am I and I will be who I will be.

More at the link above.


Global Online Privacy

Participatory Democracy - Yes We Can Two

White House Developing Online Petitions Webpage Called “We the People”: "The White House announced Thursday that it is building a new webpage, entitled "We the People," designed to give Americans the ability to digitally create and sign petitions to propose various government actions, particularly regarding job creation."

Global Online Privacy

A White Take on Black Power 50 Years Later



Revised and edited August, 2012

Black Power was exercised before 1965. Black power is as old as this country. 

As a white veteran of the civil rights movement, I am among a vanishing pool of persons now being asked by the teachers and students of the 21st century to think about the movement of the 1960s - what it meant and what it means today. 

Here are answers to one such query. Questions are summarized. They come from a student in UK. 

How much actual contrast was there between the Civil Rights movement prior to 1965 and the movement afterward when Black Power appeared as a public phenomenon? 

Few of the contentions of public Black Power advocates like Carmichael, Cleaver, Foreman and Brown were new in a country built largely on the drama of race. 

Black Power in its essence was not new.  

The idea of the Beloved Community fostered by Dr. King and inspiriting the movement in the early 1960s was what was new. 

In context, Black Power, as it attained media currency in 1965, served the establishment as one element leading to collapse of the King movement. By the mid-1960s the King movement had of necessity created a full-blown radical critique of the United States that has yet to be fully understood. 

Wasn't Black Power a slap in the face to white society which expanded its reach in the Black community? 

As suggested, the attitudes of Black Power were hardly new. The rhetoric of Black Power was indeed a turning point for many in the movement. It said, in essence, this is not Black and white together. Get lost, whitey.. 

I cannot speak to the liberation Black Power brought to Blacks in the movement. The efforts identified with Black Power were often carried out by Blacks and whites together. The real or implied violence of some of those efforts was hardly liberating. 

Both the Beloved Community side of the movement and the Black Power side were subsumed in the avalanche made up of Vietnam and the three seminal assassinations of post-1965. My hero remains Malcolm X because he was to me the most conspicuous example of Black liberation - having arrived at a universal understanding not that remote from that of Dr. King -  the result of a trip Malcolm made to Mecca shortly before his death. 

Was Black Power rhetoric a gift to whites who did not want to be involved in any sort of movement for racial justice? 

I suppose it provided a rationale for avoiding reality. But so was Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy. 

The Obama era witnesses a playing out of the same dynamic and the President's interpretation of it in his Philadelphia speech remains spot on. 

Was Black Power an effort to create a mass movememt among Blacks who had little interest in or involvement in the nonviolent movement? 

I think that this may have been an intent, but there was no mass movement after King. Nor did organizations like SNCC have a growing influence once their earlier movement activism sought to shade into the constricted modes of Black power rhetoric. 

Stephen's Remarkable Kindle Store


Just in case like me you are not up on Mnemosyne

Mnemosyne - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "In Hesiod's Theogony, kings and poets receive their powers of authoritative speech from their possession of Mnemosyne and their special relationship with the Muses. Zeus and Mnemosyne slept together for nine consecutive nights and thereby created the nine Muses"

Great name. Nice picture. Relates to Peirce's use of it in a prior post.



Global Online Privacy

Best post of the day (Not me, Charles Sanders Peirce!)


CP 6.301. Remembering that all matter is really mind, remembering, too, the continuity of mind, let us ask what aspect Lamarckian evolution takes on within the domain of consciousness. Direct endeavor can achieve almost nothing. It is as easy by taking thought to add a cubit to one's stature as it is to produce an idea acceptable to any of the Muses by merely straining for it before it is ready to come. We haunt in vain the sacred well and throne of  Mnemosyne; the deeper workings of the spirit take place in their own slow way, without our connivance. Let but their bugle sound, and we may then make our effort, sure of an oblation for the altar of whatsoever divinity its savour gratifies. Besides this inward process, there is the operation of the environment, which goes to break up habits destined to be broken up and so to render the mind lively. Everybody knows that the long continuance of a routine of habit makes us lethargic, while a succession of surprises wonderfully brightens the ideas. [....]

Cap tip Ben

Global Online Privacy

They should call this dumb design

Dieter Rams’s Design at Museum of Modern Art San Francisco - The Daily Beast:

Any designer that cannot think on a larger scale than utilities for today's sprawl culture has what might be called minimal taste. I rarely venture to characterize but this is the most revealing slideshow I have seen under the heading of cultural bankruptcy and the fragmentation of expertise. Let me breathe some new air please. See my prior post on beach creatures.


Global Online Privacy

Good Middle East news source

Mosaic: World News From The Middle East | Link TV:

Mainly on-scene videos.

Global Online Privacy

You would think Syria would be happy with outright genocide


But no
Amnesty International confirms attacks on the Syrian hospitalized and dead
Taking corpses off to prevent funerals 
And slapping and otherwise humiliating the alive
After all to be for democracy is to be a traitor under the Syrian regime 
There is no safety in custody

Global Online Privacy

Rick Perry's (Bush 3) excellent Pardo plane rides


Rick Perry rides a private jet 
But now the SEC
Fingers owner Brian Pardo
Insurance vulture
For possible securities fraud

It's all OK the law suggests 
Provided Perry pays
But merely riding with this man
Suggests Rick Perry's ways

Global Online Privacy

Using long urls to protect Daily Beast aggregations


I am changing my habit relative to Daily Beast
I know how to defeat their recent move to a long url method 
Of making Blog This unusable
Simply use WP's Press This
But there is a simpler method

Since anyone with a mind can follow up by selecting text
And letting Google find it
I intend to forgo linking whenever it is obviously being defeated

Interesting development

Global Online Privacy

Dousing the oil rigs tropical storm Lee on a mission from God


The headline is more Ghostbusters than serious
But sometimes humor is spot on
We need to be beyond oil
We could be beyond oil
If we are not beyond oil this century
We will see troubles that dwarf the inhumanities of the last century
That is not what even the wealthiest 
In their right minds
Would want
 
Global Online Privacy

Yeah we know they could or could not be making a nuke


"Iran says the more highly enriched fuel is needed for a medical research reactor, but U.S. officials and weapons scientists say the type of uranium produced at Qom can be easily and quickly converted into weapons-grade uranium for nuclear bombs. Iran has announced plans for making large quantities of the advanced form of uranium, enough to supply its existing medical research reactor for many decades."
This continual litany is not a very good approach to getting copacetic with Iran. Whatever happened to the "we'll talk it through meme"? I mean is the final story, "After years of suspicion, we have proof they have a bomb?" 
How about, We realize this dance is toast. Instead, let's send Colin or someone to Tehran and have him stay until there is some progress. Nonviolent democratic revolution. That sort of thing.
 We are trying to graft new and old wine skins and that does not work.  In fact, why should Iran not have a nuke? All other powers have them.  When you answer that one, you get into another wine skin problem. It is called the Bible which grafts the Old and New Testaments and then allows for the selective application of the very (old) things Jesus came to amend - like child abuse, bullying and reliance on killing people as a solution to problems.
Global Online Privacy

Just in case you thought it was just Cheney

Files Note Close C.I.A. Ties to Qaddafi Spy Unit - NYTimes.com: "TRIPOLI, Libya — Documents found at the abandoned office of Libya’s former spymaster appear to provide new details of the close relations the Central Intelligence Agency shared with the Libyan intelligence service — most notably suggesting that the Americans sent terrorism suspects at least eight times for questioning in Libya despite that country’s reputation for torture."



Global Online Privacy

President Obama is not adrift he's playing rope-a-dope with the Devil

"After a week of presidential humiliations and capitulations, Michael Tomasky suggests that Obama will soon pass the point where he can be taken seriously as a leader."

via Barack Obama: A President Adrift After Jobs Report and EPA Decision - The Daily Beast.

No Mr. Tomasky or Ms. Arianna or Mr. Krugman or whatever ponderous pundit you may be, you will see a slight change this week and other changes which will enable you to write a "Maybe Obama is OK after all" piece. We all have our little job to do in life. The President does his by being a pragmaticist. None of Peirce's contemporaries picked up what this word meant. But it is a clue for the clueless. Follow the labels below.

Speaking truth insistently can also lose you plenty of Twitter followers

The Great Twitter Unfollow Experiment of 2011: "This week, I unfollowed everyone on Twitter. That was over 131,000 people. I didn’t do it manually, but rather, with some help (ask @jesse, if you need custom help like that). My reason was that I’d started receiving over 200 direct message spams a day. (These messages said things like “lol, look at this funny photo,” with a link that would enslave my account to send similar messages.)"


Global Online Privacy

Class war squared

Columnist: Registering Poor To Vote 'Like Handing Out Burglary Tools To Criminals' - Digg:

"tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com — Conservative columnist Matthew Vadum is just going to come right out and say it: registering the poor to vote is un-American and "like handing out burglary tools to criminals.""



Global Online Privacy

Politically incorrect in fact disgusting

Censoring Military Personnel Is Un-American » Blog of Rights: Official Blog of the American Civil Liberties Union: "Today, the ACLU filed a brief in a case on behalf of Col. Morris Davis, who was fired from his job at the Congressional Research Service (CRS) for publicly criticizing the Obama administration’s decision to try some Guantánamo detainees in federal courts and some in the military commissions system."

I suppose you wonder why I continue to support our President. It is because this is the world we live in and the alternatives are suicidal.

Global Online Privacy

Abba's Way: Sixty Six Vision and Enigma



"Some say there is an eternal return.
Recurrence of all past events always.
Philosophy replaces ancient creed.
The being of all being parsed anew.
The very truth of life is life itself.
For it contains all miracles and views.
Reliving it is not one of its truths."

                                                                   More at link above.

Global Online Privacy

Grown up values is the key to not incinerating ourselves

Abba's Way - Premises - Associated Content from Yahoo! - associatedcontent.com:

In the Jesus film "Markman", David Markman -- the Jesus figure protagonist in Las Vegas -- seems most quiescent much of the time. He has none of the kinetic aspects of the super-hero. But whenever he is directly confronted with something that pushes one of his Abba's Way buttons, he is right there. Even to death.




Global Online Privacy

Some day we will integrate revaluation of values with who Jesus actually was

Abba's Way - Stephen C. Rose : IUniverse:

A big gulp must accompany any presumptions about Jesus, but my gulp comes after thirty years of largely unnoticed singing of the narrative of his life as it emerges in the gospels. From this I derive ontological values, the notion that values are something we can will and the belief that insofar as we possess any real freedom at all it is the capacity to will values. This trumps Aristotle who called characteristics values and honors Peirce for having come up with the framework for an integral philosophy before Ken Wilber started marketing obscurantism. Sorry to be so cruel.


Global Online Privacy

This evokes with exactitude the vision I have of a matrix for a cyber-city

News Desk: Video: Beach Creatures : The New Yorker:

This is exciting not merely in itself but for its seismic implications for human settlements. The settlements will not move although, dammit, they might. Imagine lego-like spaces that attach to the matrix or skeleton or beach creature.

Here is my primitive notion as I continue to develop the companion blog Beyond Pattern Language.

RECCMENDATION Richard Gordon Quantum Touch

The Slow as Molasses Press