1/25/12

Global Democratic Revolution Should Be American Foreign Policy

World Report 2012: Strengthen Support for ‘Arab Spring’ | Human Rights Watch: "(Cairo) – Many democracies have allowed their ties with repressive allies to temper their support for human rights in the Arab Spring protests, Human Rights Watch said today in its World Report 2012. For reasons of principle and long-term interest, governments should stand firm with the people of the Middle East and North Africa when they demand their basic rights and work to ensure the transition to genuine democracies."

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A double dislike for Romney

In Iowa Romney spent millions savaging Gingrich
It was then that I lost all respect for him
Now he is doing the same thing in Florida
It is disgusting
He did not win Iowa but he succeeded in knocking Newt down
He is probably only holding even in Florida because 9o0f the noxious wall to wall ads
The man is trying to buy the presidency 
He has the support of the so called GOP elite
Just on the level of human decency this man needs some serious forgiveness
I will try but I will never favor him for the Presidency
He has no evident core as Plouffe and others have observed
He is looking more and more like Harold Stassen
Money money money
I wonder what he will do when he loses 

ADDENDUM

Fair is fair
Newt has the money to go toe to toe in Florida
So we must add that dislike is subjective
And that Romney will be unable to buy Florida








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But nobody says why the recession will last so long

Fed to Maintain Rates Near Zero Through Late 2014 - NYTimes.com:

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Because the great contradiction, and the reason we must redefine the American dream, is that transportation and construction are closer to 1900 than to where they need to be. We cannot reform anythiung without tackling housing and transportation. We cannot build a society on sprawl and interstates. On oil and McMansions. On the American Dream of having a private suburban lot and cars for everyone. We need to evolve to multi-zoned car-free modular communities that unite all elements of a city and are largely car-free.We need to build new employment around the notion of a cyber-community of up to 10,000 persons that has, on no more than four stair-less levels, the makings of a well-rounded life that is global in scope and face-to face via the reversal of public-private notions. These are premises of this blog complex. Few come here. I have few who agree with me. I feel I am right. I am not trying to win an argument but to state the wave of an evolving truth.


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Lynn Sweet Agrees With Me and Says It Better



Newt Gingrich takes page from Saul Alinsky playbook - Lynn Sweet: "With his anti-elitist, anti-establishment populist rhetoric--on display Saturday night in his South Carolina victory speech in which he slammed "elites" in Washington and New York -- Gingrich seems as if he is taking a page from the Alinsky playbook.

"Newt's anti-elitism is so much what Alinsky really was about," Alinsky biographer Sanford D. Horwitt told me Sunday. "Alinsky was about organizing ordinary people so they could get a seat at the table rather than getting crumbs or no crumbs at all when public policies were decided," said Horwitt, the author of Let Them Call Me Rebel: Saul Alinsky: His Life and Legacy."

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K. A. Doxiadis A Man of The Future


K. A. Doxiadis



I studied with Doxiadis briely in Athens in the early 1960s. I retained and elaborated on what he called his ekistic grid - man, nature, shells, society. Doxiadis died too young. He might have been the designer of a cyber-community. One can only hope some see the vision and create the design. Unfortunately Doxiadis and other major figures such as Christopher Alexander built on the supposition that the car and highways are with us forever. It is on the falsehood of this premise that my own thinking for a half century has been based.

ASPEN PRIZE WON BY CITY PLANNER - Constantinos Doxiadis From Greece Is Third Recipient - Article - NYTimes.com: "The third annual Aspen Award, a $30,000 prize, has been won by Constantinos Doxiadis, a Greek city planner who calls his concept of total community development "ekistics.""

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NYPD Cannot Cover Up Hideous Training Practices

In Police Training, a Dark Film on U.S. Muslims - NYTimes.com: "In January 2011, when news broke that the department had used the film in training, a top police official denied it, then said it had been mistakenly screened “a couple of times” for a few officers.

A year later, police documents obtained under the state’s Freedom of Information Law reveal a different reality: “The Third Jihad,” which includes an interview with Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, was shown, according to internal police reports, “on a continuous loop” for between three months and one year of training.

During that time, at least 1,489 police officers, from lieutenants to detectives to patrol officers, saw the film"

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The underside of life in America is marked by bile directed at American Muslims. No one is more anxious to see thatAmerican values are practiced in their community than  ... American muslims. So indoctrinating new cops to look at Muslims through biased eyes is indeed hideous and fearsome and mindless.



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Given the GOP Change Will Be A Miracle Voters Must Make

The State of the Union in 2012 - NYTimes.com: "He sounded many of the same themes as last year, but his tone was sharper and he was far more willing to apportion blame, particularly singling out the financial industry for its excesses and politicians who are still determined to defend tax cuts for the rich and undo desperately needed financial regulations. “We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by,” he said, “or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.”"

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To exegete the headline, if Congress remains obdurate, we the voters must turn out the McConnell and Cantor and Boehner sorts and either elect fraud-resistant Democrats or Republicans who pledge to support the President. The President has gained ground every week of late and will continue to do so as the fates wait upon the electorate to finish the job. It would be lovely to defeat these folk.


If Jesus did not intend to create an institution

Where does this leave our understanding
of the congeries of institutions and endowments and pension funds
and buildings and boards and outfitting companies
and organ builders and pew and steeple experts
and so on and so forth?
This is what people built in full confidence they were doing God's work.
Well folk like Veblen
jaundiced as they were
looked in from outside and saw
What Reinhold Niebuhr saw from within - triviality
his term not mine
He saw an acculturated ecclesiastical enterprise
Far far from Jesus' understanding.


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In relation to government Jesus is eternally quixotic


In relation to government Jesus is eternally quixotic
Though he plainly recognizes there will be governments 
and the wars that governments prosecute 
Jesus proclaims profound political realities
in the context of individuals
He changes not systems but hearts
Heart by heart institutions are changed 

Jesus heals not by creating institutions but by touch 
He is power 
 Jesus offers a window on what true and abiding power is
It makes the notion of having a few minutes in the Oval Office laughable 
It makes an encounter on the street where someone asks for a quarter 
and receives five dollars
potentially monumental.



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Jesus seems to accept institutions


Jesus seems to accept institutions
Thus he tells one person he heals to go and tell the priest about it
 When he commends the faith of a Centurion, he does not add, 
Get your butt out of government
When he commends the Good Samaritan 
He implicitly approves of there being an Inn
Jesus accepts the world as it is
But does Jesus create an institution around veneration of himself
It seems not
He is not anxious for monuments to be built and dedicated to him
in the Transfiguration story. His instructions to his
He instructs his disciples to move from place to place
Nomads of the universe
People will have dwellings
He does not suggest that his disciples create a "House of God".


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Movements are sometimes spontaneous

Movements are sometimes spontaneous
I helped start a movement which ended in the 
abolition of fraternities at Williams College
I resigned to protest their selectivity 
Two other students followed suit
This was entirely spontaneous and unplanned
resulting from a mini altercation with my fraternity president
who eventually became a Professor of History there  
I said we should consider a black applicant.
He said if I felt that way I probably shouldn't be there  
I realized he was right 
That's all it took
A movement grew
In a few years fraternities were gone
  

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As I read history things become relatively simple

As I read history things become relatively simple.
The more nations and other principalities 
become involved in their various endeavors the more obfuscation there is
The more conflict the more alternative versions
When things become messy and violent 
They take on a meaning that is in itself probably independent of the event
An assassination may appear to be a cause of war
And so forth
But truth is a continual casualty
  Our world is lucky. as Kurt Vonnegut once told me as we walked down Third Avenue 
(He was a board member of the Schweitzer Center when I directed it), 
We do not just all fight each other all the time


WATCH FULL DOCUMENTARY

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I persist in saying I am a generalist and proud of it


I persist in saying I am a generalist and proud of it  
It makes me unemployable 
Because I have no interest or abilities in niching 
Or in self-promotion.



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The web of specialization



Buckminster Fuller understood that specialization reaches a point at which
the whole edifice can collapse
I think cyber is a way of trying to save us at some level 
from our caught-ness in 
the web of specialization



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The right to get the hell out of a bad and harmful situation

Among the next human rights to be articulated and
hopefully better fulfilled than our present refugee policies do 
is the right to get the hell out of a bad and harmful situation  
This is a universal right. 
It is the right of abused children and spouses.
Of the ethnically challenged
So forth and so on  
Israel began in Exodus
The rights of exodus needs to be trumpeted from the rooftops 



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Mitch McConnell Has Betrayed the People's Trust


My State of the Union was ruined by the sight of the stony face of Mitch McConnell 
It reminded me that in most worlds he would be seen as a betrayer
Why
Because by putting the defeat of the President ahead of all else
He betrayed the notion of a loyal opposition
That he is still called a friend by those on the other side of the aisle
Is a testament to their forbearance and capacity for hope
The President expressed the proper hopes and dreams of the people
Look above for a blanket so wet that one could drown if not most careful

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RECCMENDATION Richard Gordon Quantum Touch

The Slow as Molasses Press