May 2013
15 posts
Another fine mess...
So, we armed, trained and fought alongside [with small numbers of advisers and military personnel] the Viet Minh during WWII. As we helped them against Japan, we were sewing the seeds of our future. Later, in Afghanistan, we sent aid of various types and advisers to the Mujahideen, and guess who to fight the Soviets. Yup, and sewed the seeds of that… The initial Red Scare that led to all...
Slightly off-topic...
I just need a so-called “birther” explain to me why many amongst that crowd accept Ted Cruz, born in Canada (where he lived for at least four years of his early life) to a Cuban-born father is acceptable as a presidential candidate and someone whose actual birth certificate says he was born in Hawaii to a father of Kenyan origin is not acceptable as president. Obviously it is crowd...
“The only real tyrants that humanity has known have always been the memories of...”
– Gustav Le Bon [1896 - we don’t like to think this way, but we need to at least probe it]
“To lose time in the manufacture of cut-and-dried constitutions is in...”
– Gustav Le Bon [as he points out that history is myth at best, so what we build off it against the grain of psychology and often in direct conflict of what we know is the mass-minds]
“The acquisition of knowledge for which no use can be found is a sure method of...”
– Gustav Le Bon [1896, and we do this more and more… Perhaps we will turn the corner with our present shift, but it remains to be seen and it will take many years]
“The simplest event that comes under the observation of a crowd is soon totally...”
– Gustav Le Bon [Today we see the crowd in many forms: internet groups, subscribers to websites, groups gathering for this or that cause, finding like minds in whatever corner of existence they can in order to have ‘safety in numbers’ to be able to speak, act, feel and behave in a fashion...
“…works of history must be considered as works of pure imagination. They...”
– Gustav Le Bon [1896 - and even though these are a valued way to look, he argues that looking at architecture, art, creative literature/fiction, and remaining structures and styles are the closest we can come to understanding anything remotely resembling a study of history. He adds,...
“It is more than likely that men, if they were ever to lose the appetite for...”
– Hannah Arendt [1971. Ha, well, do I really need to say anything with this one? Really? Today, in our world? We can’t even formulate a sincere question on the national stage, ha, so…]
“Bad witnesses are eyes and ears for men if they have barbarian souls.”
– Heraclitus [and he can be happy he is not alive today to witness the degradation and dissipation of humankind into the mire of media messages and the rotting refuse of political pundits and leaders in our nation - and it’s weird; we assume it is the same everywhere, but it’s not...
Common Core
We all know what the toughest thing will be with Common Core throughout education in the US, from K-12. We have been teaching young people NOT to THINK but to respond and KNOW right/correct answers, to know other people’s thoughts and hold them dogmatcally correct and unchallenged. We have taught them to answer A, B, C or D, to shorten responses to simplistic twitter-like lengths at best,...
“The divine right of the masses is about the replace the divine right of kings.”
– Gustav Le Bon [1896… Today it is manifest, and he also says the crowd has no rules just force and dogma, no science, simply response and feeling, without forethought and logic. And we wonder why the US, so enthralled with its own technology and toys (guns, appliances, cars, sports…) is...
“…since the eighteenth century the bourgeoisie [it’s a common term,...”
– Jacques Ellul [and in reading the documents from the era, in looking at things that led to this, in searching through Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (by R. H. Tawney) this is a serious perspective that should cause us to question why we do and say what we do and say (and act out) like we do...
“We moderns have a very false idea of what Christians believed in the third and...”
– Jacques Ellul [and since I studied the early papacy and am reading the church documents and reports from the Third and Fourth Century, well, add in the time since, the dissipation of truth and reality, and you have today’s dogma and focus on moral rules and “how tos” rather than...
Individualism
One of the wonderful ironies is that the individual would not be recognized as such, would not be able to be called as such without the community, without the rest of us. What is even more ironic is that people strive for this so-called individualism with the spectrum and kaleidoscope via comparisons and relations with the masses. Add to this that an individual could not be seen as one, could...
Christology 101: In tears of realization,... →
christology101:
As I read Teilhard’s account of his attachment to the Front of WWI, his engagement in it as a medic, and his recollections of the actions, battles, and realizations and knowledge gained and garnered through it, I thought of the First World Poetry I have read, German, British, Canadian, French, and…
In my own little way, I get this… I see the lacking in us, almost all of...
April 2013
7 posts
“Civilized people respond readily to intellectual stimulation all their lives.”
– Northrop Frye [one wonders what it suggests when we don’t respond…]
“Unfortunately, the sputnik affair had not put the fear of God into America, only...”
– Northrop Frye [it bears mentioning again…]
“Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is...”
– Friedrich Nietzsche [and this speaks volumes to my piece below… We are looooooooooong past this point in the US, and it would not be so bad if we would remove the braggadocio and pomp, the intense nationalism, the bubble pride and arrogance]
“Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson [and I wonder if he would today take out the word tempered and say something like nurtured or manifested]
Not to be all cynical...
With our present national divides, lack of vision, amusement and utter slavery to technological devices [the one I sit here and type on, and this site itself arguably components of that], and our heightened forms of seeming individuality and groupthink, combined with our vacuous test-focused, standards-driven, education system that is being broken down into smaller and more isolated tidbits by...
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin
When you think you know enough, when you think your world view is 100% perfect, maybe take a look… History is not what it seems, reality has multiple lines of understanding, and sometimes we need to gather greater perspective.
Heed the warning signs...
Public Education is headed the way of the US Postal Service - downsizing, privatizing, and soon-to-be on-line for 75% or more of its seriously reduced workings. The slow degradation of the Post Office, what was once the heart and core of America, as Ben Franklin would attest to [as much as he would attest to education, particularly after his somewhat dismal experience trying to run a private...
March 2013
6 posts
“Crimson gleams of Matter, gliding imperceptibly into the gold of Spirit,...”
– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin [as he explains how he has grown and come to this point, near the end of his life, some fours years before his departure to that which he awaited from the earliest days of childhood and to which he went, in my humble estimation, with no doubts and kindled excitement for...
Answers and perspectives?
With all the budget madness of the last few decades, culminating it appears in our time with the 2007 Recession that we are just now climbing out of [and again, like in years past dating back to the late 1800s, the Congress is, as it always is, a useless bunch on in-fighting, loud-mouthed, power-hungry zealots who continuously claim they are the opposite while all the while merely campaigning and...
Nation of the Narrow...
Many in the 1950s and some even before predicted that as the world turned, as technologies and information [access] grew, as the population grew, our social systems would lag behind and not be able to keep pace with advertising, business interests, and technological expansion. In the confusion and sense of insignificance that has built up [we desperately try to achieve some shadow of it here on...
Just a question...
Are we spending too much time being syncretic and not enough time actually looking at God’s Word [please understand I mean His earliest versions, the Ancient Hebraic texts, the cultural and social forces at work within the context of those texts, the translations and their inherent social, political and personal flaws (regardless of potential divinity or enlightenment of those involved), and...
“…during the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first two of the...”
– E. A. Havelock [1950] Things have declined more since his comment, and our spiral into primitivism, often in the cloak of Christianity, itself perverted and subverted by philosophical approaches [dating back to its earliest texts and theologians, benignly exploring and seeking truth, but influenced...
February 2013
18 posts
“How much less free in many countries is the elementary school teacher of to-day...”
– Albert Schweitzer [1922] - and he faults the expediency and political will, the ease with which we fall into the ‘mass’ mentality, the voluntary surrender of our real and personal morality for that of the country, the group, or the herd, and our resultant failure to find an appropriate...
Chinese 3rd graders fall behind US high schoolers... →
Amusing article with some obvious issues and sarcasm, but there is a subtle issue or two worth discussing.
De-Educatiion via Vouchers and BlackWater →
For the last three years, I have been seeing this movement grow. Immobilists and fearful folks heading backward, hiding behind selected portions, oft’ mis-translated, from the Bible or following some human interpretation. Fear of change, fear of growth, following dogma and misplaced ideals these are the focal points.
“Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous...”
– Samuel Johnson [I had a love/hate relationship with him in high school, and it has progressed into a deeper affection for his wit and wisdom, his vigor and vision].
“To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering...”
– Thomas Paine [his version of my “Never argue with an idiot because he will bring you down to his level and beat you with experience.”
“…consider ‘Government by Public Opinion’ as a formula… ...”
– Viscount of Grey of Fallodon, 1923. Let’s add this to what Alexander Hamilton says and what we know in our hearts and minds is true but often deny for sake of obedience and partial sanity].
“The Voice of the People has been said to be the voice of God: and however...”
– Alexander Hamilton, 1787 at the Federal Convention [we like our fallacious worldview that says Hamilton is wrong - our ignorance, voluntary and all-encompassing, reinforced by the whims of Christianity (not God and Christ), and the philosophies and morals of man (not God) manifested out of religion]
January 2013
15 posts
“Having extended or translated our central nervous system into the...”
– Marshall McLuhan [a fairly accurate vision of the future taken from the late 1950s as he peered into the process of electrification, technification and fragmentation]
“The capitulation of Western man to his technology, with its crescendo of...”
– Marshall McLuhan [and on and one it goes, and where it stops, nobody knows…]
“Man is more complex and less specialized than the dinosaur.”
– Marshall McLuhan [a wondrous truism visible on several levels]
“Because people who have no hopes are easy to control; and whoever has the...”
– G’mork [character in the NeverEnding Story - and fiction/fantasy sees deeper into truth than reality yet again] 