"…Someone or something will shatter our world again. And wouldn’t it be a shame if we didn’t take this opportunity, and the loss of these incredible people, and the pain that their loved ones are going through right now: wouldn’t it be a shame if we didn’t take that moment to make sure that the world that we are creating now, that will ultimately be shattered again by a moment of lunacy — wouldn’t it be a shame if that world wasn’t better than the one we previously lost?”
— Jon Stewart
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1/8/11
"With malice toward none, with charity for all, …let us strive on to finish the work we are in, …to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."
"The western left that ignored or, worse, justified the suffocation of Budapest, Camus thundered, 'is in complete decadence, a prisoner of words, caught in its own vocabulary, capable of merely stereotyped replies, constantly at a loss when faced with the truth, from which it nevertheless claimed to derive its laws'."
Writing in response to Stephen Kinzer's End human rights imperialism now, Ahmari throws a deep and potentially annoying issue into some relief. What are human rights? Where are they? Insofar as they are 'universal', how is this so - and in what manner? For those who take the new, trendy neo-atheism seriously, how can "rights" not be seen as fictive constructs, failing as they do to show up on natural science's evidentiary radar screen?
Assuming we admit that human rights are yet another mythological posit, the scriptings of a ritual iconography, do we necessarily turn away from being actors in this story? Can we still question the story and vicariously participate in its unfolding, fated as it were to a faith we cannot escape? Would Ahmari concede Kinzer's general observation that the issue stimulates a need for "a period of reflection, deep self-examination and renewal"?
Leisure and luxury afford conceptual and theoretical engagements; and yet, challenging this rite, the Camus in all of us knows the truth of the matter works itself already in wild, newfound expressions - and can come knocking on our privileged doors with bleeding faces looking for help.
Eclipse of the Sun on Mars by Phobos
"I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought to be written only as a poetic composition. It must, as it seems to me, be possible to gather from this how far my thinking belongs to the present, future or past. For I was thereby revealing myself as someone who cannot quite do what he would like to be able to do."
Last night the effervescent Tucker Carlson, opined that Michael Vick "should've been executed". What is crazier about this segment, the absurd Fox contortionsim for the sake of methodologically insinuating Obama's "disconnect" or that the guy who needs a third chance is bitching about the limits of redemption!?
Long gone is the bow tie, and the simple appellation "Tucker". Not since the guy was brutally torched by Jon Stewart back in 04'. So devastating was Stewart that Carlson's gig, Crossfire, was cancelled by CNN. He had to ditch the tie and rebrand in a move to MSNBC. And after washing out there, now he's angling for prominence again with stupefying arbitrariness oozing through the cracks of the brand Marmalard veneer. It’s not only obvious which failures deserve no redemption, but which deserve death. Recalling the encounter with Stewart, it must be terrible being forced essentially into the stuff of comedy.
"We're locking up people that have taken a couple puffs of marijuana and next thing you know they've got 10 years with mandatory sentences...These judges just say, they throw up their hands and say nothing we can do with these mandatory sentences. We've got to take a look at what we're considering crimes and that's one of 'em.
I'm ... I'm not exactly for the use of drugs, don't get me wrong, but I just believe that criminalizing marijuana, criminalizing the possession of a few ounces of pot, that kinda thing it's just, it's costing us a fortune and it's ruining young people. Young people go into prisons, they go in as youths and come out as hardened criminals. That's not a good thing."
While watching the 700 Club has always constituted clear grounds for the dispensation of medical marijuana, I for one welcome our new drug decriminalization overlords. But we call on Pat Robertson to pull a Zack Galifianakis and light up on set. Come on Pat, with a touch of mental metamucil we'd witness the advent of Pentacostal glossolalia the likes of which even God has never seen!
"The liberal class, like Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, can no longer influence society in a state of permanent war and retreats into its sheltered enclaves, where its members can continue to worship themselves. The corridors of liberal institutions are filled with Underground men and women. They decry the social chaos for which they bear responsibility, but do nothing. They nurse an internal bitterness and mounting distaste for the wider society. And, because of their self-righteousness, elitism, and hypocrisy, they are despised." Chris Hedges - Death of the Liberal Class
"I see all this potential, and I see it squandered. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables – slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won't. We're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off." deepwith future...@ tumblr
This founding father may have created something more revolutionary and world changing than any mere nation state; he created the World Wide Web. Today in Scientific American, Tim Berners-Lee speaks up for the protecting the Web as we know it:
"The world wide web went live, on my physical desktop in Geneva, Switzerland, in December 1990. It consisted of one Web site and one browser, which happened to be on the same computer. The simple setup demonstrated a profound concept: that any person could share information with anyone else, anywhere. In this spirit, the Web spread quickly from the grassroots up. Today, at its 20th anniversary, the Web is thoroughly integrated into our daily lives. We take it for granted, expecting it to “be there” at any instant, like electricity.
The Web evolved into a powerful, ubiquitous tool because it was built on egalitarian principles and because thousands of individuals, universities and companies have worked, both independently and together as part of the World Wide Web Consortium, to expand its capabilities based on those principles.
The Web as we know it, however, is being threatened in different ways. Some of its most successful inhabitants have begun to chip away at its principles...."
This year has not been good to Haiti. A devastating 7.0 Quake hit near Por-au-Prince in January. Tropical Storm Thomas skirted the Island early this month, creating flooding and complicating an emerging cholera epidemic. Now cholera is loose in Port-au-Prince, threatening to explode amidst conditions few of us can even imagine.
Cholera is preventable and treatable, but this assumes an infrastructure. Haiti hasn't seen anything approaching that for a long time. The Island has been beset by ecological disasters, political instability, HIV and tuberculosis. And now, though $1.15 billion in assistance was pledged by the US, little to none has reached the people.
"According to The Associated Press, funds are said to be hindered because lawmakers, including Sen. Tom Coburn, have essentially created a labyrinth through which allocated resources must navigate. The bill requires the State Department to verify that it would be impossible for the money to be mishandled" link
I've seen slums in Kampala, townships and massive squatter camps in Johannesburg, and valleys of the disposessed in Kwa-Zulu Natal. If I could do a Vulcan mind meld to impart the sense of such places, though it would be a violent mind bomb, I'd do it in a flash. And yet, the people in Haiti now are worse off than anything I've seen. So call your congress people about the hang up to the aid... and consider giving to some groups who are already doing some good at the difficult last mile.
One is Partners In Health, run still by the vision and leadership of Paul Farmer, subject of Tracy Kidder's acclaimed biography Mountains Beyond Mountains. These people have been in Haiti since 1985 and have the respect and recognition of the people. They know where the rubber hits the road and they know how to get things done.
Additionally, as one of the most basic needs is soap, Clean the World works to take the millions of pounds of soap and shampoo hotels discard and get it to impoverished people in need. They too are at work in Haiti.
Puzzling over a trend to dismiss agnosticism, I ran into a post by Caesar, the esteemed Imperator at Arstechnica:
Agnosticism is the most reasonable position to take with regards to the supernatural. Let me unpack this, because it’s possible to read that sentence in 1,000 different ways.
First, my view argues that certainty either that God does or does not exist is a less reasonable position than the position that we cannot and do not know with certainty one way or another.
For the purposes of this thesis, I am only speaking to certainty, to claims of knowledge. That is, I believe it is possible to be agnostic on the question and believe or not believe in God. So, belief is a state of assent based on something less than knowledge.
Further, I argue that the claim to know for certain that there is no “god” is no more rooted in reason than to claim to know for certain that there is a “god.”
Unfashionable as it may be, Caesar's thesis certainly appears most wise. Moreover, a robust agnosticism seems advisable when we regard it as likely one of the most spirited echoes of the beginnings of Western science. Is it merely an appeal to authority or is there something to this spark which bears remembering or rediscovering?
21c I went looking for wise men: I went to one of those reputed wise, thinking that there, if anywhere, I could refute the oracle and say to it: 'This man is wiser than I, but you said I was.' Then, when I examined this man...my experience was something like this: I thought that he appeared wise to many people and especially to himself, but he was not. I then tried to show him that he thought himself wise, but that he was not. As a result he came to dislike me, and so did many of the bystanders. So I withdrew and thought to myself: 'I am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know; so I am likely to be wiser to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.'
One can say quite a bit about what's going on here, not to mention the strange tension where Socrates is on a mission from a god in trying to refute the god's oracle. But essentially, there in the Apology, Socrates underscores the importance of wonder (thaumazein) as wellspring of all wisdom... Read More >>
They decry the social chaos for which they bear responsibility, but do nothing. They nurse an internal bitterness and mounting distaste for the wider society. And, because of their self-righteousness, elitism, and hypocrisy, they are despised."
spread quickly from the grassroots up. Today, at its 20th anniversary, the Web is thoroughly integrated into our daily lives. We take it for granted, expecting it to “be there” at any instant, like electricity.
disasters, political instability, HIV and tuberculosis. And now, though 
