text:
Dec.12-2014 Program: Analytical Psychology Society of Western NY, Repairing the Opposites, Doubling Stars, Turning Swine Into Pears - myself, with Kenneth Warren
squareONE sites
Recent Posts
- Am I Understood?
- Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi explains. . .
- Three Dreams, Late Summer 2014
- Kippie In Repose
- Teaching Cartoon – Systems are not in Nature, they are in the mind of humans.
- Alice's Restaurant of the Sacred
- Re: Sam Harris Solves the Problem of Islamic Faith
- Fall of the Rebel Angels
- It's All In the Head
- A Debacle
- Sam Harris Solves the Problem of Islamic Faith
- Cat Vision
- Deeply 80th Birthday Abdullah Ibrahim
- Relishing the Friend
- Loosing My Cool in the Cool
Connect Megoogle+ Linkedin Facebook Twitter visual experimentation Learning Partner: Experience-based Learning Systems, Inc. Profile academia.edu sound design and music: nogutsnoglorystudios Imaginal Musicology Rhythm River Twitter (Kamelmauz) Recordings Kamelmauz.Bandcamp
nogutsnoglory blog
- "The judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy. The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, a characteristic also of the child, and as such it appears inconsistent with the principle of serious work. But without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable. It is therefore short-sighted to treat fantasy, on account of its risky or unacceptable nature, as a thing of little worth." The Psychology of Individuation, CG Jung
Serendipity Links
Serendipity Posts
- Three Dreams, Late Summer 2014
- Generative Alchemy
- Inside the Psychologist's Studio With Albert Bandura
- Roots of My Urbanology (II.)
- Leave-taking is as necessary as the homecoming (I.)
Tagsa-ha! adult learning analytic psychology anthropology art biology buddhism charlatanry cognitive psychology consciousness critical culture critical thinking culture current events economics education experiential learning Freeplay Softball Gregory Bateson humor management music my casual art new paradigms organizational development phenomenology philosophy poetry politics pseudo-science psychology quotes religion resources Rumi science social psychology speculations sports sufism teaching cartoons teaching story transformative learning urbanology web media
- "It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious." - Alfred North Whitehead
Netdynam 2.0
- More email newsletters July 2, 2014
- new language annotation software June 25, 2014
- Software, Culture, and Political Economy in New Media Capitalism June 25, 2014
- ye olde net… June 25, 2014
- re the big data explosion June 10, 2014
Cleveland Heights, Ohio
- If, during the long course of ages and under varying conditions of life, organic beings vary at all in the several parts of their organization, and I think this cannot be disputed; if there be, owing to the high geometric powers of increase of each species, at some age, season or year, a severe struggle for life, and this certainly cannot be disputed; then, considering the infinite complexity of the relations of all organic beings to each other and to their conditions of existence, causing an infinite variety in structure, constitution, and habits, to be advantageous to them, I think it would be a most extraordinary fact if no variation ever had occurred useful to each being's own welfare, in the same way as so many variations have occurred useful to man. But if variations useful to any organic being do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterized will have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle for life; and from the strong principle of inheritance they will tend to produce offspring similarly characterized. This principle of preservation, I have called, for the sake of brevity, Natural Selection. [Charles Darwin (1859) On the Origin of Species]
a-list: friends, colleagues, like-minded, fave thought leaders
- (OL) Can Scorpions Smoke
- (OL) Space for Learning
- Alan B Scrivener
- alexanne don
- alice o. howell
- Anne Baring
- Annie Murphy Paul
- Anthropoetics – UCLA
- B. Alan Wallace
- Baffler, The
- Barbara McAfee
- Barry Friedman
- Bernard DeKoven (Deep Fun)
- bill callahan
- Bill Moyers
- Brian Fitch
- Bruce Gerencser
- bryan alexander
- Bryan Jack
- Cara Finnegan
- charles cameron
- Charles S. Pierce
- Chris Cléirigh Thoughts That X My mind
- chris corrigan
- Chris Dalton
- Chris Hoff
- Christopher Irion
- connectivism
- Corporation for Positive Change
- crispin sartwell
- daniel gustav anderson
- david & alice kolb
- david brin
- David Cooperrider
- David Cooperrider & Chris Johnston
- Deborah Bird Rose
- deborah mattingly conner
- Derek Melser
- Derek Thompson (Atlantic)
- Diane Ravitch
- Diggers.org
- Doc Searles
- Doug Ashford
- Doug Ireland (defunct)
- Douglas Lockhart
- Earthscore (Paul Ryan)
- Echo Partners Blog
- edward vielmetti
- Evan Thompson
- eve neuhaus
- Eve Neuhaus Blog
- EvoS Consortium Blog
- gardner campbell
- Gary Greenburg
- Geoff Baker
- george por
- gerald swatez
- Haikus and Pics
- Harlene Anderson
- Henry A. Giroux
- Henry Mintzberg
- heward wilkinson
- Ian Glendinning's Psybertron
- Integral leadership Review
- jack ricchuito
- Jean Raffa
- Jill Miller Zimon
- jim hightower
- jim&miriam@executive edge
- John C. Woodcock
- kate kuper
- Ken Wilber
- Kenneth J. Gergen
- Laura Kerr
- Leaky Grammar
- Leonardo Solaas
- leslie yerkes
- Lewis Lapham (podcasts)
- linda kahn
- Lisa Houck
- Mai P. Trinh
- Mai P. Trinh
- marc lefkowitz
- Maria Konikkova
- Mark Federman
- Mark Thoma
- Mary Flanagan
- MAry Parker Follett Network
- Metanexus
- mike dickman
- Mike Lehr
- N.A. Community for Cultural Ecology
- Nancy Baym
- Nancy White (Full Circle)
- neurophenomenology blog
- Noel G. Charlton
- Oikos.org
- pat kane-play ethic
- Paulo Coelho
- peter levine
- Phenomenology Blog
- Ralph Stacey
- Recollecting Philosophy
- Rethinking Complexity
- Richard Jung
- robert g. longpre
- Sandra Huggen
- scholars and rogues
- Science & Sciencibility
- sean jacobs
- SerenA: chance and ideas
- Seth Steinzor, Poet
- shakesville
- Stacy McGaugh
- Stanislav Grof
- Stephen Downs
- steve dahlberg
- Subverting Subverting the Genre
- Subverting the Genre
- Suzana Vaz
- The Analytical Psychology Society of Western NY
- the defeatists
- the thought occurs
- Thinking Outside the Agora
- thivai abhor
- Tikvah Company of Artists
- Tucker Stilley
- urs boeschenstein
- vincent horn
- virginia postrel
- walter logeman
- Walter Logeman – ART
- World Science U
- ~Generative.Net
- "It is essential to such a government, that it be derived from the great body of the society, not from an inconsiderable proportion, or a favored class of it; otherwise a handful of tyrannical nobles, exercising their oppressions by a delegation of their powers, might aspire to the rank of republicans, and claim for their government the honorable title of republic." James Madison
Random Blogroll
- siris
- michael dorf
- The Curious Wave Function
- Vicki Hill
- Doug Ashford
- News at Science Magazine
- ton zijlstra
- s roden
- Suzana Vaz
- War Is Boring
- Dr. Cornel West
- Critiques of ELT at reviewing.co.uk
- NAncy Freeman
- Pinch Journal
- eric schwitzgebel
- heward wilkinson
- elearnspace
- Earthscore (Paul Ryan)
- Dododreams
- Ken Wilber
- All the property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it. -Benjamin Franklin
Flowing Data
Thinking Outside the Agora
- These LEGO Instructions from 1974 Are Awesome (And Yes, They're Real) November 23, 2014This photo of a note to parents, purportedly printed on a pamphlet included in a LEGO set from the 1970s, has been making laps around the Internet. The legitimacy of the note, which is noteworthy for its egalitarian tone, has been called into question – but there's good reason to believe it's 100% real.Read more...
- Is This GIF The First Footage From Star Wars: Episode 7? November 22, 2014Major speculation ahead, but a Star Wars fansite is claiming that this GIF of the Millennium Falcon might be the first-ever bit of footage from the new Star Wars: The Force Awakens. What do you think?Read more...
- Legend Of Korra Does A Clip Show And Decides To Make Fun Of Itself November 22, 2014Due to budget issues, The Legend of Korra spent this episode on a clip show, revisiting the first three seasons of the show. But at least while Korra was forced to tread water, it poked a bit of fun at itself along the way.Read more...
- That Time Mark Ruffalo Scared The Crap Out Of A Preschooler November 22, 2014Mark Ruffalo appeared on The Tonight Show recently, where he told a story about visiting his daughter's preschool and Hulking out on one of her classmates.Read more...
- This Jurassic Park/Ace Ventura Mashup Is So Wrong, Yet So Very Right November 22, 2014Admit it. You know perfectly well what this is. You know exactly where it's going. And you're going to watch it, because you already know it's perfect.Read more...
- These LEGO Instructions from 1974 Are Awesome (And Yes, They're Real) November 23, 2014
Make Blog
- PieceMaker Factory: A Glimpse Into The Future of Toys? November 22, 2014
- Building a Desktop Music Streamer From A Car Stereo November 22, 2014
- Cyclone Dust Separator Made From A Trash Can November 22, 2014
- Cool Crowdfunding Nov. 22: Landspeeders to Rope Making and Conductive Ink Erasers November 22, 2014
- Check Out the New All-Metal Printrbot Plus November 22, 2014
Weird Universe
Category Archives: speculations
Cat Vision
This is my favorite cartoon from B.Kliban's iconic book from 1975, Cats.
From Why Cats Paint.
Great book that is half tongue-in-cheek, and, half a showcase for spontaneous cat painting.
Posted in speculations Leave a comment
In the Whole of the River
The gash of the East Middlebury River between E. Middlebury and Ripton, Vermont
Roughly, my two favorite swimming holes on the East Middlebury River. There are several good swimming spots by pull-offs from the road, but the best spots are deep in the narrow canyon and involve hiking and scrambling down the river's boulder fields. The most magical swimming holes are mildly dangerous to get to, and the swimmer has to be smart about risky spots in the river's course.
At one point on the river, (I recall from twenty-five years ago,) for about 50 yards the canyon narrows to less than twenty feet wide and this causes about a fifty foot high gash, at the beginning of which is a small waterfall, then comes a deep pool, and, then comes a deceptively dynamic breakout into a huge undercut boulder. It's very dangerous because the pool is beautiful but it channels a lot of volume into a very risky situation.
Posted in personal, play, speculations Tagged summer, swimming, swimming hole, Vermont Leave a comment
You've Been Warned
Kali was first manifested when the Goddess Parvati knitted her brows in fury when the demon, Daruka, threatened the Gods. It was then that the three-eyed Kali first sprang forth from Parvati, fully armed, and immediately putting an end to Daruka. It is for this reason that Kali is considered an aspect of Parvati.
Other stories tell of how Kali fought and killed two demons. It was then, celebrating Her victory, that She drained the blood from their bodies and, drunk from the slaughter, She began to dance. Kali became overjoyed with the feel of their dead flesh under Her feet, and She continued to keep dancing, more and more wildly, until She finally realized that Her husband, Shiva, was underneath Her, and that She was dancing him to death.
Realizing this, Kali's wildness did slow down, but only for a short while; it is believed that She will eventually continue Her dance and that when she does, it will bring an end to the world. Yet, her followers still believe that once faced and understood, Kali has the ability to free Her worshippers from all their fears. Once this occurs, then Kali metamorphasizes into another aspect, that of a loving and comforting Mother.
There is yet another version of Kali's manifestation. The Gods were not able to kill the demon, Raktabija. Each drop of his blood that touched the ground turned into another Raktabija. Thus, every time he was struck, millions of his duplicates appeared all over the battlefield.
At this point the Gods were totally desperate, and they then turned to Shiva for help. Shiva, though, was so deep in meditation that he could not be reached. The Gods then turned to Shiva's consort Parvati for help. The Goddess Parvati immediately set out to do battle with the demon, and it was then that She took the form of Kali.
Kali then appeared, with Her red eyes, dark complexion, gaunt features, hair unbound, and Her teeth as sharp as fangs. She rode into the midst of the battle on a lion, and it was only then that the demon Raktabija first began to experience fear.
Kali then ordered the Gods to attack Raktabija, while She spread Her tongue over the battlefield, covering it completely, and preventing even one drop of the demon's blood from falling. In doing this, Kali prevented Raktabija from reproducing himself again, and the Gods were then victorious. Dolls of India
Posted in history, psychological anthropology, Religion, speculations Tagged hinduism, Kali, mythology Leave a comment
Rabbit Holes
I've been reviewing current so-called Integral literature over the last few weeks, but it was Ken who had much earlier got me going back toward that development dynamic when I toppled over 'into it' in the intellectual sense from our discussing Giegerich's critique of classical Analytical Psychology.
I'm not an Integralist. Understanding in a meta-systems sense that the best and the lesser are sometimes necessarily retained, and, transcend-and-include turns out to be an arbitrary imposition if it then, at times, results in the baby following promptly the bathwater, highlights the fundamental points of distinction between my messy/rigorous viewing site and the seemingly reductive AQAL territories.
I note as much when I peruse the neatly reductive diagrams that have been recently multiplying; and most strike me initially to be graphical, intellectual kitsch. But then I get out my scraper.
I'd be very interested in scratching beneath the surface of the presumably poetical " 'live eros,' springing forth from chaos."
What a human system apparently is (to a degree mediated by a, or several, or all domains,) is what he or she entails, and what he or she can possibly entertain, and, so, what I and you feel, and, that which I and you may create from the, my/your, our, current entailment, and, also, how future potentials are foresight worthy. In a nutshell, this is a (my own,) provisional perspective that, at least and as far as I do foresee, is able to encompass just about any ol' additional perspective which could be tossed toward it, at it, into it, or, even land neatly and dynamically as a tangent, and with enough energy in such a circuit to cause further differentiation and a foundation for adaptation or sudden evolution.
Development is often non-linear.
Horizon is the root of horizontal.
We, you and I, are able to discuss the future. (Maybe this is among the most singular human features.)
The Map never gets close, and that it gets closer is an illusion provided by what I term the sunk perspective. In noting this, at the same time, all sorts of adventurous turns may tumble out of the dynamical interplay caused by being gripped and enthused by the current sunk perspective! Such perspectives then become relativized–and this is may be much different than being transcended and included.
Someday my squaring of radical empiricism and human (or social,) cybernetics will fall down the hole too.
If you should speak and try a hundred ways to express it,
'Tis useless; the mystery becomes no clearer. …
A horse of wood is useless on dry land,
It is the special conveyance of voyagers by sea.
Silence is this horse of wood,
Silence is the guide and support of men at sea.
This Silence which causes you annoyance
Is uttering cries of love audible to the spiritual. (Rumi)
THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL FALLACY by Wolfgang Giegerich
One conception of the psyche that one can get from studying Jung's work, above all the work of early Jung, is that the psyche has a clear- cut orderly structure that can be presented in the geometric forms of concentric circles (the ego as the center, surrounded first by the realm of consciousness, then of the personal unconscious and finally of the collective unconscious) or of a cone (with different layers, the deepest of which would be that of the collective unconscious whereas the tip would represent the ego) as well as in the imaginal form of personified figures (ego, persona, shadow, anima/animus, self). To this conception, Jung's psychological typology with its compass-like representation of the four orientation functions fits very neatly. The crux of this conception is that it starts out from the human person. The human being is here the container or vessel of the soul and accordingly also the horizon of psychology A psychology based on this fantasy clearly operates with the division between man and world, subject and object, inner and outer, psychology and physics and feels competent for only half of this divided whole.
Psychology's belonging to one side manifests for example in the concept of "extraversion" and in the "object-level" method of dream interpretation. Psychology is here what goes on inside the human person, which is why I speak of the anthropological fallacy. This fallacy is of course by no means a specialty of (the early) C. G. Jung. It is, and has been, the generally accepted, conventional idea about psychology ever since there has been a scientific discipline by this name, an idea that seemed so natural, so self-evident that it was not felt to be in need of any argumentative justification.
In depth psychology the anthropological fallacy had the practical consequence that the individual was urged to turn inwards and, in the case of Jungian analysis, to develop his or her self and to strive for his or her wholeness. Not only the "individuation process," but Jung's adamant emphasis on the individual as "the measure of all things" (CW 10, par.523) and "the makeweight that tips the scales" (par. 586) affirmed and highlighted this concentration on the person. It is true, Jung repeatedly insisted that "individuation" and his psychological stance in general does not exclude, but include, the world. But such a semantic statement does not undo the underlying structure or syntax of this thinking, namely that it irrevocably starts out from a human being who has the world ("external reality") outside and vis-a?-vis himself. Even synchronicity as the meaningful coincidence of an inner and an outer event still has the anthropological conception of psychology as its background and precisely by trying to overcome the opposition of psychology and physics in the direction of the idea of unus mundus once more confirms the anthropological stance.
A serious consequence of this methodological standpoint is that the soul is logically relegated to second rank, as much as it may be prioritized, semantically and emotionally. The human being is here the substrate or actual substance and the psyche is merely one of the attributes of this substrate.
But the human being as the substrate personality is not itself the topic of psychology. It lies outside psychology's field of vision. Psychology's topic is the soul, is psychic life (which, however, often manifests in people). The moment psychic life is defined as being the life of the substrate personality, psychology has the task of exploring something (namely, psychic life), whose actual substantial reality (namely, the human being) is pre-supposed as lying outside ("pre-") its own precincts of competence and responsibility…. The soul, not the person, is what I have to focus on.
Posted in adult learning, analytic psychology, Gregory Bateson, speculations, William James Tagged Humberto Maturana, Ken Wilber Leave a comment
Rites of Spring
Last spring, our first in our new house–built in 1915–provided a parade of flowers in our small and narrow back yard. I didn't do anything but observe the upwelling pulchritude inherited from the previous owner. Yes, I knew we might get some roses blooming on the spindly, reedy unkempt five rose bushes. As it happened, it was a spectacular bloom.
Then came the major cuts this spring
Fortunately, although there are all sorts of bad things you can do to harm your roses, drastically cutting them back isn't one of them.
Looking good!
I learned a great deal last year. Our small lot faces north/south with a giant buckeye tree on the south end and a really large tulip and buckeye tree in the front. The neighbors have a stand of spruce, including a magnificent 100+ foot granddaddy. This results in partial-shade being the predominant condition. I love hanging pots, so Impatiens and fuschia are my go-to flowers.
But, I love petunias too, so these have to be staged in the only 'full light' patch of property I can deploy for their sake. My great experiment this years involves growing the super and wave petunias in the staging area, and then moving them to the front of the house into less-than-optimal conditions.
Sonny lovin' spring's sproing.
It's a rare occurrence to get all the kids in the same frame, and the best bet to do so is when the window goes up for the first time after a long winter. (Sonny-Kippie-Sassy-Kizzy-Glori)
Posted in Cleveland, Places, speculations Tagged cats, flowers, gardens Leave a comment
The Strong Voice
Anne Baring The Dream of the Cosmos: online | Amazon
The Real Challenge of Our Times:
The Need for a New Worldview
Neither do men put new wine into old bottles; else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles and both are preserved. Matt. 9:17
To reclaim the sacred nature of the cosmos – and of planet Earth in particular – is one of the outstanding spiritual challenges of our time. Diarmuid O'Murchu, Quantum Theology
The threat of global warming, the urgent need to free ourselves from dependency on oil and the current financial crisis could be the triple catalyst that offers us the opportunity of bringing about a profound shift in our values, relinquishing an old story and defining a new one. Our lives and well-being depend upon the fertility and resources of the earth, yet in relation to the earth, it would seem that we have been autistic for centuries. Now, instead of treating our planetary home as the endless supplier of all our needs, without consideration for its needs, we could rethink beliefs and attitudes which have influenced our behaviour for millennia.
Because of those beliefs we have come to look upon nature as something separate from ourselves, something we could master, control and manipulate to obtain specific benefits for our species alone because ours, we were taught, has been given dominion over all others and over the earth itself. It has come as a bit of a shock to realise that our lives are intimately bound up with the fragile organism of planetary life and the inter-dependence of all species. If we destroy our habitat, whether inadvertently or deliberately by continuing on our present path, we may risk destroying ourselves. We have developed a formidable intellect, a formidable science, a formidable technology but all rest on the premise of our alienation from and mastery of nature, where nature was treated as object with ourselves as controlling subject.
Yet now, the foundation that seemed so secure is disintegrating: old structures and beliefs are breaking down. It is as if mortal danger is forcing us to take a great leap in our evolution that we might never have made were we not driven to it by the extremity of circumstance. Many people are defining a new kind of relationship with the earth, based not on dominance but on respect, responsibility and conscious service. Because our capacity for destruction, both military and ecological, is so much greater today than it was even fifty years ago, and will be still greater tomorrow, we have only decades in which to change our thinking and respond to the challenge of this evolutionary leap.
There is a second problematic legacy from the past: the image of God shared by the three Abrahamic religions. This has presented God as a transcendent creator, separate and distinct from the created order and from ourselves. Western civilisation, despite its phenomenal achievements, developed on the foundation of this fundamental split between spirit and nature—between creator and creation. Only now are we brought face to face with the disastrous effects of this split.
Once again, as in the early centuries of the Christian era, it seems as if new bottles are needed to hold the wine of a new revelation, a new understanding of reality which could heal this split. But how do we create the vessel which can assimilate the wine of a new vision of reality and a different image of God or Spirit? How do we relinquish the dogmatic beliefs and certainties which have, over the millennia of the patriarchal era, caused indescribable and quite unnecessary suffering and the sacrifice of so many millions of lives?
I cannot answer these questions. But I do know that as the new understanding, the new wine comes into being, we have to hold the balance and the tension between the old and the new without destroying the old or rejecting the new. It must have been like this two thousand years ago when the disciples of Jesus tried to assimilate what he was telling them, something so utterly different from the belief-system and the brutal values which governed the world of their time. Even today, the revolutionary teachings and the different values he taught have barely touched the consciousness that governs the world of our time, however much political and religious leaders proclaim allegiance to them. What would Jesus have thought of WMD, depleted uranium and cluster bombs, and the massacre of helpless civilians in war, let alone the destruction of vast swathes of the earth's forests to supply crops for biofuels? What would he have thought of the fact that colossal sums of money are spent on the military when 17,000 children die every day from hunger and disease?.
The need for a more conscious relationship with both nature and spirit, bringing them closer together, is intrinsic to the creativity of the life-impulse itself—urging us to go beyond the boundaries of the known, to break through the concepts and beliefs, whether religious, scientific or political, which currently govern our culture and constrict the expansion of our understanding and our compassion.
What is the emerging vision of our time which could offer a template for a new civilization? the remainder of the essay
Posted in adult learning, analytic psychology, self-knowledge, speculations Tagged Anne Baring, C.G. Jung, futurism Leave a comment
Virgin Galactic Shot No. 3
Meanwhile…"NASA-funded R&D engineers are working on plans for future spaceships to enter orbit around Mars using a doughnut shaped, steerable balloon-chute to slow down by flying through the Red Planet's atmosphere."
Posted in current events, speculations, technology Tagged space travel Leave a comment
American Oyster
2012 Presidential election. Thank you foxbusiness.com.
Of course: lies and damn statistics — ignorance may exist anywhere and obviously a college degree isn't an arbiter. For example, we have persons educated as medical doctors serving in the US Congress who believe in young earth creationism. Sure, they represent red states, still. . .
Alan Keyes, graduate of Cornell and Harvard: When they came to lead, the children of the generation that fought World War II allowed the focus of American education to shift decisively away from a serious regard for the seminal documents that convey the logic of America's liberty. This is the key to the elitist apostasy from America's creed. On account of this apostasy, a more and more organized, self-consciously elitist faction has matured. It rejects the moral egalitarianism that undergirds America's creed of liberty. Therefore, it works to overthrow the form of constitutional self-government that respects the sovereignty of the people. Informed by socialist totalitarian ideologies, this elitist clique is endowed by the materialist, authoritarian corporatism of the money powers now largely in control of America's financial institutions, its so-called mainstream media and both the Democrat and Republican parties.
In political terms, these elitist faction forces come against the U.S. Constitution from left and right. Whatever the rhetoric of their verbal professions, in their actions they unanimously reject the premise that there is one benevolent and superintendent Deity whose spirit, will and judgment created human nature and ultimately rule over human affairs. This rejection of God's authority is the daily proven fact that belies the specious opposition that is supposed to divide one of the elitist faction's wings from the other. Whatever they say, the resultant of their supposedly adversarial interaction has for more than a lifetime consistently undermined this central pillar of American self-government, without which its other supports are like branches of a tree, forced to bear a weight they cannot stand. [excerpt] Defending the American Way, WorldNetDaily, June 2013
Slavery and sexism in the founder's era kills your point concerning 'moral egalitarianism that undergirds America's creed of liberty,' Dr. Keyes. Kill as I use it here is unqualified, so obviously and plain as day there was no moral egalitarianism back in the olden, golden, and beloved day.
The ignorance Keyes is apparently proud of did not come from his lack of education. But, from the perspective of my own being badly educated–in the normative-institutional sense–does his scree exemplify ignorance? What is ignorance and is it valid to assert that ignorance is supported by a particular individual nature–in the sense of finding what causes it?
The escape claus goes like this: what one knows is not such a big deal, what is a big deal is whether or not one ever got the message cum transmission.
If Remi Brague is correct in saying that it is the Judeo-Christian faith in a transcendent God, not only separate from the life of a particular tribe or political community but outside human history, that ultimately grounds the classical culture of emulation; and if Benedict XVI is correct in discerning that, at least in comparison with Europe, America remains a profoundly Christian nation with a strong tradition of independent, church-supported liberal education; what are we to make of the mainlines of the history of American higher education? That story as it has been told for two hundred years, whether in celebration or in lamentation, has been the story of unremitting secularization.
Even Henry Adams's Education, his great memoir-style protest against the secularization of the American university in his life-time and thus the loss of the very character of university–despite being a protest–seemed only to further establish the main storyline ofthe field. "If Harvard or Yale had been less foolish in their origins and had held onto the Church, we should have probably kept a base on which to build some real scholarship; but when our ancestors cutoff the limb that made us a part ofthe tree, we naturally tumbled off. I do not suppose we ever produced a graduate who would have known how to sacrifice a bull to Jupiter."'(10) He argues that powerful as the literary and political tradition was in America, in the Boston of his youth, at Harvard, it was devoid of any religious underpinnings:
"Of all the conditions of his youth which afterwards puzzled the grown-up man, this disappearance of religion puzzled him most. The boy went to church twice every Sunday; he was taught to read his Bible, and he learned religious poetry by heart; he believed in a mild deism; he prayed; he went through all the forms; but neither to him nor to his brothers or sisters was religion real. Even the mild discipline of the Unitarian Church was so irksome that they all threw it off at the first possible moment, and never afterwards entered a church. The religious instinct had vanished, and could not be revived, although one made in later life many efforts to recover it. That the most powerful emotion of man, next to the sexual, should disappear, might be a personal defect of his own; but that the most intelligent society, led by the most intelligent clergy, in the most moral conditions he ever knew, should have solved all the problems of the universe so thoroughly as to have quite ceased making itself anxious about past or future, and should have persuaded itself that all the problems which had convulsed human thought from earliest recorded time, were not worth discussing, seemed to him the most curious social phenomenon he had to account for in a long life."
His memoir of his later years, after his wife's suicide, and the insanity and death of his close friend Clarence King who he had once thought represented the perfection of the frontier American, becomes an agonized, strained search for faith–he spends his final years touring the French countryside in his new motor car, trying to catch some whiff of faith from the power of the Virgin, which he acknowledges still retains its force at Lourdes. But his own failure and the triumph of secularization was never Henry Adams' point–rather, as he argues repeatedly, "eccentricity is strength," and American history, like human history, gives up its prophetic ghost to those who are willing to read it in silence, to those who will listen rather than forever reciting their own variety of pseudo-religious experiences. Adams is a believer. He believes that Americans who flew into the wilderness in 1620, in 1776, in 1845, in 1892–who knew that the only way to save their nation was to leave it behind–carrying their household gods on their backs, have not been defeated. Henry Adams realized that the restraints of a fixed religious, cultural, familial, or political tradition were only superficially a "handicap." He repeatedly compared himself, "American of Americans, with Heaven knew how many Puritans and Patriots behind him and an education that had cost a civil war," with a sort of pride and arrogant relish, to a "Polish Jew fresh from Warsaw or Cracow . . . a furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the ghetto, snarling in weird Yiddish." In tl1e "races of the twentieth-century," the race to abandon all restraints of past or nature, to strip oneself of all prejudicial identity and submit oneself, the naked servant and worshipper of the dynamo, he asserted (strangely enough!) that the American cultural tradition would prove as resistant to the worship of the twentieth-century Alexanders, Pharaohs, and Caesars, as the Jewish cultural tradition had ever proven. It is a breath-taking claim-the claim that American eccentricity can survive 600-pages worth of experiential learning and never lose its old illusions about liberty, virtue, or wisdom!
What then are we to make of this narrative of the liberationist effects of the American frontier on the old-world traditions imported from Europe; what are we to make of the story of the tabula rasa, the erasure, the secularization, the oblivion of the past and its lessons, prejudices and constraints? Henry Adams's assertion invites us to look again at the meaning of the history of American higher education:
"Harvard was founded to help the Puritans escape Anglican Oxford and Cambridge, and Yale appeared in 1701 when a group of New Haven ministers, influenced in part by distrust of the liberal heresies that were to dominate Harvard, established a competing college to preserve the old social and religious order in Connecticut. Again, the Congregationalists who founded Amherst were in part moved by the objections to the Unitarianism that shook Harvard in the early l9th century, and the Yankee Methodists who set up Boston University at the time of the Civil War felt that Harvard's classical curriculum and aristocratic values were destroying the ethos of pious dissent. The same era also saw the Jesuits establish Boston College, to help the new Boston-Irish community maintain its religious and social integrity. (Riesman in Sanford, 89)
From this history can we say that it is secularization or the perennial escape to eccentric orthodoxy that is the core "American" dynamic of the history higher education in this country? Is the declension of Harvard from Puritan seminary to Unitarian classical college to secular multiversity the inner dynamic of American higher education, or has the original eccentric dynamic of Harvard's Christian orthodoxy simply metastasized in hundreds of small Bible colleges and Christian liberal arts colleges across the country? Are not these small Christian liberal arts colleges the truly American-the most distinctively American-contribution to the idea of the university in the modern world?(11) Whatever one thinks of such quaint neo-medieval, neo-classical flora and fauna sprouting in the American frontier–whether one considers them the hope for the future of Westem Civilization or embarrassing windows into the reactionary mind of middle America, it can hardly be denied that they, and not the anonymous, mega-state-universities of the great cities, are the peculiarly American features of the modern educational landscape.
Alasdair Maclntyre, in the now famous final paragraph of his work After Virtue, prescribed another round of that excellent habit of running away:
"It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman Imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that Imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead–often not realizing what fully what they were doing–was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another–doubtless quite different–St. Benedict."
'Tis sure to be an immortal paragraph. But (dare I say that) Alasdair Maclntyre, like Christopher Dawson, indeed like Edward Gibbon, imagines that this "construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral lite can be sustained" is a "turning aside from the task of shoring up the Roman Imperium." Yet these Britishers never fully grasp that this English, Scottish, Irish, Jewish, Polish, Italian habit of running away with their traditions on their backs is actual pietas to the founders of the imperium. Eccentricity is a very American virtue.
Indeed George Washington himself knew the value of a strategic retreat that might keep one's ragtag army intact–to fight another day . . _ or at any rate to hold out until one can find an ally with a navy." (12) [excerpted from Chapter 5, Eccentric Education – The American Way, Susan E. Hanssen, The Idea of the American University (Bradley C.S. Watson, editor)]
[full chapter-pdf] See also Ms. Hanssen's "'English in spirit': G. K. Chesterton and the debate over church and state in the 1906 Education Act," The Catholic Social Science Review (2007).
Whatever are the virtues of institutionalizing orthodox centralities in the periphery, I tend to view the eccentricity–that (unbeknownst to Keyes) could still smartly inform his own argument–to itself cast off further eccentricities so that, eventually, the operating quality is, as Ms. Hanssen puts it, institutional peculiarity-more than any other quality.
To weigh the gross generalization, secularizing and neo-liberal and post-modern Blue does correlate with degree of education and everyman traditionalism does correlate with deficits of learning and Red. For both Blue and Red, there is a lot of sub-set or sub-cultural eccentricity, and, let's call, 'eccentrification.'
American religiosity is extremely variable with respect to the straightened ordinates of classic Christian commitment, and, it would seem the employees of the governed are nowadays so energetically variable that the straightest Constitutionalism is spun away off to some radical precinct.
There's no reason to refuse the challenge of orbiting cloisters. The neo-liberal order wants able workers to be ejected from schools. This represents another turn on the secularizing gyre, following from Taylorite pieces and Fordist machinists, and, now (and newly minted,) inchoate collections of human post-capital detritus. Denouement!
This is where both Mr. Keyes' ideological 'eccentrics' and Ms. Hanssen's historically minded supposition roll back to the natural law tree and beg for me a question about personality and the nature of personality and cognition. Surely it matters how the societal and spiritual conditionals work to instantiate particular human ends. Intentionality is not subsumed in the mystic chord even if it comes to be modified. There haven't been, nor are there any utopian Natural Law states or political entities that have escaped doing lots of harm.
Certain rearguard's aspirations–and eccentricity is presumably also defined to be a rearguard–are cast outward in comprehensive, oft times in totalizing terms, with there being no room to quibble over either 'their being no God, but God alone,' or the actualities of a Thomist heaven and hell, or the cosmos set in place necessary to the Pauline 'only possible true church.' This latter eccentricity is such that its closing circle (and argument) encompasses the entire universe. This is the same presumption naming eventuations happening "outside human history."
Keyes is arch and forthright in framing his eliminativist perspective. As much as he could have padded its bluntness with a portion of Henry Adamsian 'depressive,' his position isn't for him able to be cast off, and, it takes no prisoners, and, its educational precepts are staked to analytic compliance. What's true for him is to be true for you.
St. Benedictine?
Of the Virtuous Zeal Which the Monks Ought to Have
As there is a harsh and evil zeal which separateth from God and leadeth to hell, so there is a virtuous zeal which separateth from vice and leadeth to God and life everlasting.
Let the monks, therefore, practice this zeal with most ardent love; namely, that in honor they forerun one another (cf Rom 12:10). Let them bear their infirmities, whether of body or mind, with the utmost patience; let them vie with one another in obedience. Let no one follow what he thinketh useful to himself, but rather to another. Let them practice fraternal charity with a chaste love.
Let them fear God and love their Abbot with sincere and humble affection; let them prefer nothing whatever to Christ, and my He lead us all together to life everlasting.
In America, that the above is voluntary with no other respect otherwise given, might be the simple phenomenal element forceful enough to cast the sturdy outward and into eccentricity. What isn't voluntary is attainment within the eccentric order. I doubt theocratic designs will bring forth any pearls.
Posted in current events, sociology, speculations Tagged demographics, education, education-by-state, Henry Adams, high learning, politics, voting Leave a comment
Mandorla: Trailer
Mandorla – working trailer – CA from Roberto Miller on Vimeo.
>>via Robert Rich Facebook; Robert is doing the music.
Life is a system of 'now you see it,' and 'now you don't." Alan Watts
Posted in cinema, creative captures, speculations Tagged Robert Rich Leave a comment
Interesting Times
"Buying and Selling is an Art, whereby people endeavour to cheat one another of the Land…….and true Religion is, To let every one enjoy it."
Gerrard Winstanley A New-yeers Gift for the Parliament and Armie 1650
(I'd be a Bernie Sanders Democrat if Bernie was a member of the Democratic Party. So, I'm a Winstanley Democrat, because the triangulation of George Fox, Eugene Debs and Thomas Paine somehow incarnated by Winstanley in the late 17th century is about right.)
Charles S. Pierce: In the year of our Lord 2010, the voters of the United States elected the worst Congress in the history of the Republic. There have been Congresses more dilatory. There have been Congresses more irresponsible, though not many of them. There have been lazier Congresses, more vicious Congresses, and Congresses less capable of seeing forests for trees. But there has never been in a single Congress — or, more precisely, in a single House of the Congress — a more lethal combination of political ambition, political stupidity, and political vainglory than exists in this one, which has arranged to shut down the federal government because it disapproves of a law passed by a previous Congress, signed by the president, and upheld by the Supreme Court, a law that does nothing more than extend the possibility of health insurance to the millions of Americans who do not presently have it, a law based on a proposal from a conservative think-tank and taken out on the test track in Massachusetts by a Republican governor who also happens to have been the party's 2012 nominee for president of the United States. (Charles S. Pierce blogs at Esquire, in a devastating manner about politics–so I don't have to do so myself, as much.)
President Barack Obama:"They've shut down the government over an ideological crusade to deny affordable health insurance to millions of Americans."
I find Conservatism in its Reaganesque revision to be abject and might as well throw into the compactor the Tea Party and Libertarianism* and everything to do with the whiny ethos of the "Makers;' itself a position of bathos first scribbled out in post-Burkean form in the, alas, enduring circular banalities of Ayn Rand.
In the last week I wandered through comment threads expressly etched to pry apart the paradox of Ted Cruz's high IQ and ivy league credentials and his having before the Supreme Court. (Clarence Thomas!!!)
(But I wasn't doing so to contribute or be a voyeur. I did so because the problem posed by a public personage triggering a public inquiry about his or her 'intelligence' provides a great portal through which to witness the sweep of folk sociology and folk psychology as-practice in discussion about the nature of intelligence. This particular topic happens to interest me a great deal.)
Cruz apparently was indoctrinated into his father's belief system as a teenager and has used his great mind for purposes other than shifting away a half iota or more from that 25+ year old teenage belief system. Speaking to David Gregory this weekend, Senator Cruz made a number of comments that indicate he has forgotten, or is unaware of very large, important chunks of the U.S. Constitution. Oh, well, I guess that part of his reputation is undeserved and is now in the toilet!
(Meanwhile, Cruz's father reminds us all, Obama is a Muslim!)
Still, I can inhabit the devil's advocate enough to understand that as far as 'getting one's way,' politics is a hard ball game played by more than a few crusty white men and, so, right at the beginning of the day, many such men understand that, for example, 'the Constitution isn't a suicide pact,' and 'one's deepest beliefs shouldn't be sacrificed in the a pyre fueled by the anti-royalist dreams of the founding fathers.' At the end of the day, for those men, taking an entire economy of the USA hostage for the sake of rolling back the healthcare of many African-Americans is just a day's labor in the second Civil War.
Although it does take a mountain of chutzpah to then blame the hostage's family for killing the hostage, after the kidnappers' insane demands weren't met.
It is a historical fact that at times corporate collectivists and plutocrats both ensnare populist resentment, and, re-deploy it for purposes dreamed up in 1% fan club think tanks. But, if, like Paul Ryan, you deeply adhere to the entwined ideas that it is (#1) government that makes it impossible for the one percenters to (#2) exhale and fill the sails of the fleet of swamped middle class dinghies, then you, I'm afraid are stupid about economics, as is Paul Ryan. and, just as evidently, as are the entirety of Tea Party reactionaries, Ron/Rand Paultards, and the other hand children to the upper echelon of the corporate and financial classes–you know, the one's who think "Tea Party" on their way to their offshore bank's web site, and guffaw, 'what suckers!.'
GOP is said now to be run by their nihilistic wing. Better: they're being run by a mob of autistic teenagers.
Falsification of Libertarianism: I enjoy both liberty and freedom today in portions that exceed anything that would be possible were you to give the world over to any persons and to any ideology supposed to be libertarian. This is true despite any argument you could devise to try to prove my statement of fact to be not true. (And, I mean: little ol' me is free.)
Posted in current events, speculations Tagged GOP, insanity, libertarianism, politics, Tea Party Leave a comment
Scrappers Edge Freeplayers 6-5!
April 28. Day Two of season twenty-seven. 9:45am, Field #8, Forest Hills Park, Cleveland Heights, Ohio? Drizzling.
Then a busload of 9-11 year old boys and their minders unload and inform us they have a permit for the hallowed field for this day.
We count our numbers and seems their are eight, and we will commence to practice the game of softball. We make our way over the the fenced in softball fields. Another team is practicing on the northwest diamond–no doubt for the opening week of league play–and Dave asks of them if they will engage us in a friendly game.
Later, with a light rain falling, a second inquiry is made and this other team agrees to a game. As it turns out, our spontaneous opponent is a co-ed team in the co-ed league. (We'd be co-ed too; alas…) They inform us in the league they are in the men bat on their 'off batting side.' However, for the purpose of what amounts to a scrimmage-type game, they decide not to do so.
We play four innings, and the line score looks like this at the end:
What fun was had! After the game, the two teams collided in gratitude and high fives and hand shakes. We mentioned anybody is welcome to join us on Sunday mornings. We told the Scrappers,
We've been playing pick up games for decades here on Sunday mornings.
April 21. Opening day and we have eleven, then Pete shows up and we're twelve. It was a crisp day. The metal bats could transfer quite a pointed zing at times.
Freeplay Softball league
Sunday mornings 9:30; game time 10:00am
Open to participants 16-116 years of age; any gender; any background
We try to keep an accurate score.
Posted in adult learning, speculations Tagged Cleveland Heights, Freeplay Softball, play Leave a comment
Gods of the Abstract Social
Several years ago I heard an introductory presentation by a retired sociologist. He spent a half hour presenting basics so he could frame a further argument about politics in a small city. The problem of introducing sociology is impressive to me–there was no mention of problems in this introductory presentation. Sociology sets off to abstract social functionalities in various ways and the 'meta' in relation to each such way is abstracted too; conundrums of self-reference and subjectivity and multiple subjectivities, are abstracted, so forth, on and on, etcetera.
The sociological project often ventures away from the sensible matter of considering and studying the practical sociological experience and learned informal social means of the (so-called) folk. What of a field of inquiry termed Folk Sociology? I will need to google it!
Excerpt via N+1.
Too Much Sociology N+1 Magazine – The Editors – This spread of sociological thinking has led to sociological living?—?ways of thinking and seeing that are constructed in order to carry out, yet somehow escape, the relentless demystification sociology requires. Seeing art as a product, mere stuff, rather than a work, has become a sign of a good liberal (as opposed to bad elitist) state of mind. This is why you must support upper-middlebrow Terrence Malick one day, and the next spuriously shock everyone with a loud defense of Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Too often, being on the left tasks you with a vigilant daily quest to avoid being tagged with snobbery. In sociological living, we place value on those works or groups that seem most likely to force a reevaluation of an exclusive or oppressive order, or an order felt to be oppressive simply because exclusive. And yet despite this perpetual reevaluation of all values, the underlying social order seems unchanged; the sense of it all being a game not only persists, but hardens.
The initial demystifying shock of the sociology of culture in the academy partly accounts for its popularity. Thanks to the dead ends of certain kinds of European hermeneutics the realization that repeated analyses of Balzac novellas might not shake the foundations of the subject, let alone those of capitalism?—?it became more promising to ask why certain classes of people might be interested (and other classes not interested) in Balzac at all. No more appeals to the inexplicable nature of genius. Seen from the longue durée of social change, individual authors or works were less important than collectives or status groups, cities or systems. Like latter-day Northrop Fryes, armed with data, the critic-sociologists converted writers back into "literature" as a system, and from there into refractions of codes, institutions, and classes.
The effect on a sector of the professoriat, at least, has been liberating. It has led to a new wave of semi-sociological studies of institutions instead of works. Many of these, such as The Economy of Prestige or The World Republic of Letters, are, if we permit ourselves a value judgment, among the best works of criticism in our time. The overpowering influence of sociology outside its own disciplinary borders was recently verified in a list of "most-cited" intellectuals in the humanities.
"Most-cited intellectuals" is etched here without irony!
Personally, I'm curious about folk sociology*, and glad, Hans-Georg Moeller wrote Luhmann Explained From Souls to Systems. The opening leaf in Moeller's book offers up Niklas Luhmann this way:
It has always been clear to me that a thoroughly constructed conceptual theory of society would be much more radical and much more discomforting in its effects than focused criticisms–criticisms of capitalism for instance–could ever imagine.
…a fine Batesonian insight methinks.
* (Speculation;) First order question of folk sociology: What do you know about your being an agent and actor? embeds a second order problem of reflexivity.
Posted in sociology, speculations Tagged Talcott Parsons Leave a comment
Rep 'n' learnin'
Dependency relations between phenomena can be very complex. In much of life, dependencies are conditional and probabilistic: If I put a fresh worm on the hook, and if it is early afternoon, then very probably I will catch a trout here. As we learn more about the complexities of the world, we 'upgrade' our representations of dependency relations;10 we learn, for example, that trout are more likely to be caught when the water is cool, that shadowy pools are more promising fish havens than sunny pools, and that talking to the worm, entreating the trout, or wearing a 'lucky' hat makes no difference. Part of what we call intelligence in humans and other animals is the capacity to acquire an increasingly complex understanding of dependency relations. This allows us to distinguish fortuitous correlations that are not genuinely predictive in the long run (e.g., breaking a tooth on Friday the thirteenth) from causal correlations that are (e.g., breaking a tooth and chewing hard candy). This means that we can replace superstitious hypotheses with those that pass empirical muster.
Patricia Smith Churchland (Wikipedia) How Do Neurons Know?
Presentation: Philosophy In the Age of Neuroscience
I'm agnostic in so many ways! I'm not an advocate for the proposal that states: Brain = Mind. Still, I am really pleased the Churchland's convictions have cascaded–as it would be–into the field of 'The Mind.' I remain suitably impressed by the evidence which certifies if the physical system of the brain is shockingly altered, the mind is altered too.
Posted in science, speculations Tagged philosophy of mind Leave a comment
Gerrymander and the GOP's Worldliness Conundrum
I didn't expect the schadenfruede to be so long-lasting.
GOP study calls for changes to halt presidential losing streak
By Paul West
March 18, 2013, 4:00 a.m.
WASHINGTON — A smug, uncaring, ideologically rigid national Republican Party is turning off the majority of American voters, with stale policies that have changed little in 30 years and an image that alienates minorities and the young, according to an internal GOP study.
That blunt assessment on the state of Republicanism at the national level comes from a major new report, out Monday, that will likely shake up an already battered party. It was commissioned by the head of the Republican National Committee in the wake of Mitt Romney's defeat last year.
Without offering detailed policy prescriptions, the 98-page report calls on the party to "smartly change course," modernize itself and develop "a more welcoming brand of conservatism that invites and inspires new people to visit us."
There are extensive lists of proposals, many of them technological and procedural, designed to help the GOP better engage voters, especially women, minorities and the young, and reverse a losing pattern in five of the last six popular votes for president.
"Unless changes are made, it will be increasingly difficult for Republicans to win another presidential election in the near future," the report concludes.
RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, in remarks in Washington on the release of the study by the party's "Growth and Opportunity Project," is unsparing in his analysis of the 2012 election setback.
"Our message was weak. Our ground game was insufficient. We weren't inclusive. We were behind in both data and digital. Our primary and debate process needed improvement," he says, according to an advance text of his remarks.
"We know we have problems. We've identified them, and we're implementing the solutions to fix them," he says.
Most of the criticisms are familiar to those, both inside and outside the GOP, who have watched the party fail to come to grips with changing demographics and, instead, try to rely on older, white voters who represent a shrinking part of the electorate.
"Young voters are increasingly rolling their eyes at what the party represents, and many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country. When someone rolls their eyes at us, they are not likely to open their ears to us," the report says. Young voters, it says, see the party as "old and detached from pop culture."
In calling for the GOP to develop "a more welcoming conservatism," the report rebukes those who remain in denial about the seriousness of the problem and those who are unwilling to broaden the party's appeal.
A just-concluded gathering of conservatives in Washington cheered speaker after speaker who urged the GOP to stick to its guns and, instead, largely blamed the 2012 defeat on Romney or the way he ran his campaign.
"The Republican Party needs to stop talking to itself," the study says. "We have become expert in how to provide ideological reinforcement to like-minded people, but devastatingly we have lost the ability to be persuasive with, or welcoming to, those who do not agree with us on every issue."
The report calls on Republicans to counter the party's image as an arm of business. It says Republicans should "blow the whistle at corporate malfeasance and attack corporate welfare. We should speak out when a company liquidates itself and its executives receive bonuses but rank-and-file workers are left unemployed. We should speak out when CEOs receive tens of millions of dollars in retirement packages but middle-class workers have not had a meaningful raise in years."
Beyond that, however, there are no policy details. Indeed, the authors point out that they are not a policy committee, in a section calling on the GOP to "embrace and champion" comprehensive immigration reform without further specifics.
In addition, an extensive set of "inclusion" proposals for minority groups, including Latinos, Asians and African Americans, appears to mimic similar, failed outreach efforts by various RNC chairs over the last 30 years.
The report notes the party's problems with women voters, especially unmarried women. But its 10-point plan for appealing to women makes no mention of the GOP stance on any social issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage, that have turned off many of the voters in question.
In a section on campaign mechanics, Republicans are advised to make "a critical cultural shift" on early, absentee, and online voting, trends that the report notes are "here to stay." The report fails to note, however, that Republican elected officials fought to block and even reverse that trend at the state level in 2012.
Although the RNC study spares Romney any direct criticism, it includes tacit criticism of GOP polling that seems directed at his campaign. Research conducted for the study report found that 70% of Republican pollsters surveyed said that Democratic polling in 2012 "was better than our own. Fully 22% felt the Democrats did 'much better' than the Republicans when it came to accuracy and reliability."
In a section on party primaries, there are thinly veiled attacks on efforts by outside groups, such as those tied to former George W. Bush strategist Karl Rove and organizations like the Club for Growth, that seek to apply litmus tests or weed out candidates considered unelectable.
"It would be a mistake for any one organization to think it can circumvent GOP voters and hand-pick our nominees," the report says. "Third-party groups that promote purity are hurting our electoral prospects."
There are also calls for fewer candidate debates during the presidential primaries, a shorter nomination calendar and an earlier national convention.
The report is the product of a committee headed by Priebus' allies and supporters, including Henry Barbour of Mississippi, the nephew of former governor and RNC chairman Haley Barbour; former George W. Bush White House spokesman Ari Fleischer; and Sally Bradshaw, a longtime advisor to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
If this problem of the GOP–losing national popular votes–interests you, you'll be moved to follow the various scenes of crashing perceptions and the subsequent wreckage.
If somebody asked me what the chief deficit of the GOP is, I would answer that the Red States provide generous amount of evidence about what the Grand Old Party hopes to accomplish. So, from this, my short answer would be,
The GOP wants to race to the bottom. This desire strikes many people as being the equivalent of asking voters to punch themselves in the face–and be better off for it!
The bottom is many 'bottoms' and each such bottom can be well defined by the data. If you aspire to obtain the median education or household income or physical health of the average citizen of Mississippi or Tennessee or Alabama, then I have a political party that aims to support your goals.
What is the predicated goal enabled to head downward? Cheap Labor.
There you have it. The strategic handwringing is marvelous yet the actual situation isn't very dire. The GOP is in fine shape when you look at what the nature of their actual success is all about.
Its libertarian "Chamber of Commerce" wing is fabulously fat and happy. The libertarian wing requires frightened, racist, aging, married, white people to lock in political advantages in Red States and so it has gone famously for four-plus decades. Fueling non-economic resentments of such people and then also gaming as much as possible the available, gritty mechanics of elections has proven to be a marvelous trick.
This strategy has worked out well. The political directors have leveraged resentment and cheap labor to a commanding political lead in the Red states. Has the bottom come into view? Not yet; 'call the Texas textbook folks.'
(Cheap labor figures into the ability of state level oligarchs to put their money to work on political projects without many monied opponents standing in their way.) The GOP's success is etched by the various state-level measures. Hurray for Kansas!
Losing national and statewide elections in blue states is the price exacted by the Red State strategy. The GOP protests too much. There is no chance of the GOP winning substantially more votes of young, or single, or minority, or, highly educated voters, as long as the GOP wants to play this hard ball strategic and tactical game on any Purple-to-Blue state's territory.
For example, it should be completely obvious that the GOP, if it is hoping to make it harder for minorities to vote, is not going to make the party attractive to those same minorities. Having leaders in some states assert the state's interest in penetrating and raping a woman's vagina prior to the woman undergoing a medical procedure is not going to make your party attractive to most women. Supporting the teaching of intelligent design and/or young earth creationism; denying climate change; and, (recently we learn,) spinning slaveowners as benefactors of slaves, is not going to make your party more attractive to college kids and the educated classes.
Over the long term of the GOP, the paradox inherent betwixt its ruthless plutocratic libertarian ideology and its core voters' theocratic fantasy is resolved by the GOP's inability to accomplish the task of replacing its aging white core voter. Who knew paranoia and fearfulness and resentment has a shelf life?
Until then, I fully expect GOP directors to continue to follow the overt marching orders of Rush and Rand, and be obedient to the tactical orders of ALEC and the Koch Brothers, et al.. In doing so, at least, its power players will continue to enjoy big paydays. I get it: the principle grifters, the Makers, are laughing all the way to the bank. The GOP's success is not fragile as long as there are, in the Red states, resentful and fearful old white social conservatives for the rightward Makers to shake down and manipulate.
The key requirement of continued GOP success supposes the "Libertarian directors" understand the grievances of the social conservative hoi polloi are never to be resolved.
Posted in current events, sociology, speculations Tagged GOP, politics Leave a comment
A Knotty Issue of Development
If you were asked, 'How do you reduce prejudice, prejudicial behavior, bias?' how would you respond?
Just the other day I was asked this same question by a good friend who has been charged with teaching college sophomores something useful about how to, as she put it, think, feel and behave, in a diverse social environment.
It strikes me as a difficult and complex problem, and, also, one that is itself prone to being addressed in unreasonable and biased folk-psychological estimations of how, in effect, prejudice and bias can be said to operate.
Is the mitigation of prejudice against the opposite gender simply a matter of unlearning a pattern of response, or simply a matter of replacing this same pattern with a new behavior? My friend and I discussed empathy in terms of being the kind of 'simulation' that could serve this simple 'replacement' formula.
We moved onto consider bias being partly a consequence of inaccurate evaluation; with this possibly being a crucial aspect of a biased learned response. This seems, to me, closer to the developmental knot of bias, in that inaccuracies of evaluation often are straight-forward threads of such a knot.
This also allows for experiential approaches to revealing the evaluative aspects of how people experience different, other persons.
The following formula summarizes our intuition.
presence + ignorance + humility
= (more accurate evaluation) increased potential to reduce biases in evaluation
presence: intentional focusing of external (object) awareness, while also being reflective and introspectively sensitive to emergent internal content (Note-Presence constitutes an active, vigilant behavior with respect to sub-conscious and automatic, or otherwise habitual, upwellings of inaccurate evaluation.)
ignorance: knowing ahead of time what you don't know (Note-Ignorance contextualized by: knowing how one might both choicelessly and choicefully fill in the blanks with: prior knowledge; stereotypical knowledge; ad hoc knowledge; sub-conscious intuitions: prejudicial knowledge
humility: willing submission to being attentive without prior knowledge (Note-Submission is equivalent to also being willing and able to entertain an experiment through which one closely observes the nature of their own participation in their own experience of instantiating inaccurate evaluation.)
Posted in adult learning, experiential learning, folk psychology, speculations Tagged bias, prejudice Leave a comment
CIA Goes Social
I much prefer the international party / creep show by design that is Google Plus (G+) over both The Facebook and The Twitter. Alas, hardly anyone I know shares this view as of the end of 2012.
Posted in humor, speculations, web 2.0+ Leave a comment
The Perfect Candidate
The baptistry in the new Mormon Temple in Nauvoo, Ill., features 12 oxen representing the 12 tribes of Israel.
Many losing candidates became elder statesmen of their parties. What lessons will Romney have to teach his party? The art of crawling uselessly? How to contemn 47 percent of Americans less privileged and beautiful than his family? How to repudiate the past while damaging the future? It is said that he will write a book. Really? Does he want to relive a five-year-long experience of degradation? What can be worse than to sell your soul and find it not valuable enough to get anything for it? His friends can only hope he is too morally obtuse to realize that crushing truth. Losing elections is one thing. But the greater loss, the real loss, is the loss of honor. What Romney Lost – Garry Wills – NYRB – 11/9:2012
For the archetypal moment, Willard was the perfect candidate, fit to the cultural contradictions stretched between "government hands off my Medicare," and the opacity of out-of-sight riches, and, of course, the etch-a-sketch scrim for the shape-shifty fulfillment of Romney's feudal ambitions intermixed with the White Horsey Prophecy.
The latter I offer with a wink, while pointing in the direction of that most scientology-like of the post-modern Christian Heresies.
Posted in speculations Tagged Mormonism, Willard Mitt Romney Leave a comment
Slices of Stupid
Newleftmedia once again demonstrates that if you shoot enough video interviews at Romney (or Tea Party) events the most select slices of STUPID are gloriously deranged.
My favorite spot of dumb in the video is the guy, once again, passionately wishing for the U.S. not to be, anymore, the laughingstock of the world.
It is possible to empathize if you can simulate the guy's sense that the world is laughing about something 'the world' surely doesn't find anywhere near as funny as that which actually is laughable.
What's funny are America's proudly stupid people, their hypocritical religiosity, their ignorance, their pride in their ignorance, and. . .one could go on and on. As a marker of cognitive ability what does it mean to think Obama is a Muslim, atheist, communist?
Sure go vote for the manic plutocrat, mendacious Reagan wannabee, and, strangely enough, perfect symbol of greed and one percent Toryism, Willard Romney.
The sad answer is there is no way to know what Mr. Romney really believes. His unguarded expression of contempt for 47 percent of the population seems as sincere as anything else we've heard, but that's only conjecture. At times he has advocated a muscular, John McCain-style foreign policy, but in the final presidential debate he positioned himself as a dove. Before he passionately supported a fetus's right to life, he supported a woman's right to abortion. His swings have been dramatic on gay rights, gun rights, health care, climate change and immigration. His ugly embrace of "self-deportation" during the Republican primary campaign, and his demolition of a primary opponent, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, for having left open a door of opportunity for illegal-immigrant children, bespeaks a willingness to say just about anything to win. Every politician changes his mind sometimes; you'd worry if not. But rarely has a politician gotten so far with only one evident immutable belief: his conviction in his own fitness for higher office. (excerpted from WAPO's endorsement of Barack Obama)
Posted in current events, speculations Tagged GOP, stupidity, Willard Romney Leave a comment
Rejecting Kitsch
This turned out nice. Yellow Zebra reflects a pass through FX in Photoshop. The source material was a captured frame from streaming image discovery and manipulation programmed by Leonardo Solaas, and, keyed and initiated by me. This is the basic search and retrieval methodology constituting what I term Appropriated Random Kitsch.
However, Leonardo's automated manipulation is too close to the source in this instance, so this image ends up a discard, or, is it just a remix?
Posted in speculations, visual experiments Leave a comment
Paul R-Ayn, "I give out Atlas Shrugged as Christmas presents"
Paul Ryan in remarks this weekend, about President Obama. "Whatever the explanations, whatever the excuses, this is a record of failure."
Linguists could parse Ryan's phrase, whatever the explanations. I'd be curious to learn more about its construction. Actually, Paul R-Ayn, explanations do matter. Let's bring our big brackets in to play. On one end is the domestic economy from the mid-nineties going forward into the Bush era, then the inkling of a housing asset bubble, and then cheap money, exotic derivatives and collateralized debt instruments, into that August four years ago, and, soon enough, TARP, and, under the circumstances, a fairly close election.
Obama's first two years without enough of a congressional majority or mandate to go full-on-Roosevelt, then the Tea Party wave election, and, a spectacular do nothing congress, in which many of the House's GOP members were, in effect, pledged to the destruction of Obama's Presidency.
What are the explanations? What does it mean to state whatever the explanations?
Keep the concept explanation in mind for the following thought problem. Here's a question you can pitch to right leaners, tea partistas, libertarians, and, galtians: if a two trillion dollar stimulus in 2009 & 2010 would have driven unemployment down to 6% by August 2012, would it have been worth it? In other words, assume it would have and decide your answer.
Okay, my iconoclastic view is that if you do not care to accurately explain why a problem came about and happened, then it's unlikely your solution is going to work. For example, this sense of mine means creationists and advocates of intelligent design disqualify themselves for solving the problem, how is biology to be taught?
It's likewise with those who advocate supply-side economics; privatizing social security; and democratizing the mid-east. (And, on and on of course, on both sides of the partisan divide.) Paul Ryan is the leading intellect of the GOP and, at the same time, he's an anti-intellectual, is apparently against explanation.
David Frum: Romney has transformed a campaign about jobs and growth into a campaign about entitlements and Medicare.
Charles S. Peirce; Esquire: This is a guy in love with his own concocted genius.
[Ryan] does not have the raw balls to explain to the country that, no, he does not believe in government — not the federal government, anyway, and not as it was originally conceived, as the fundamental expression of a political commonwealth. He's grandfathered his plan to chloroform Medicare so that, despite the deficit that he considers such an urgent problem, nobody alive today who might vote against him will be affected by it. For the same reason, he will not specify the cuts that he will make or the tax "loopholes" —coughMortgageInterestDeductioncough — that he will close. In any way that will come to matter to the people whose lives his policies will make harder and more miserable, Paul Ryan is still the high-school kid living off Social Security survivor benefits and reading Ayn Rand by flashlight under the sheets.
John Dickerson; Slate; But for all of the talk of a new emphasis on policy specifics, this is still going to be a campaign deeply connected to American values. When Ryan spoke on Saturday, he talked about the threat Obama poses to the American way of life. Underneath every policy debate will be the argument that when tough choices have to be made about the federal government, you're going to want candidates who share your values when they're doing the awful math of scarcity.
Let's contemplate seven phases of the fully realized form of R-Ayn's utopia perspective. (I read these goals to constitute a furious race to the bottom.)
(1) throw millions of government employees out of work
(2) throw millions of people off their healthcare
(3) throw millions of college students off their Pell Grants
(4) pluck hundreds of millions of dollars from the pockets of the elderly, the salaried and hourly work force, and, give this money to
(5) tens of thousands of high-wealth individuals, including many who never worked a single day in their life for their wealth
(6) just for grins, increase the incidence of the late stage cancers women get
(7) Accelerate tens of millions of sick people visiting emergency rooms
This will be wrapped in Christian 'ethics' and Patriotism. Except, obviously, Romney and R-Ayn won't be running very hard on this platform at all. It's a loser. They'll run against Obama the socialist and anti-Capitalist deceiver, and traitor to America, and son of a dirty fucking hippie and African. The GOP side, methinks, are now forced to go completely with the culture war strategy, the politics of resentment, and this seems especially congruent with their patently racist voter suppression strategy.
The point of this would be painting, again, the picture of Obama being something like an African Jihadi Manchurian Anti-colonialist Cosmopolitan Ivy league Affirmative Action Saul Alinsky Communist Organizer who abhors success and loves the culture of handouts. There will be plenty of dog whistles and appeals which suggest Obama is actually trying to buy votes with welfare. This tactic reflects a useful but untrue explanation Romney/Ryan endorse.
As a political and sociological phenomena, I, for one, am interested in how this all works to fit together the social and institutional structure and political economy of the USA. What, come the day after the election, explains the result, and, explains how one might smartly anticipate the new prospects? Just sayin' . . .explanations matter!
Last item:
(8) [The Hill] The House Republican budget released Tuesday would shield the Pentagon from nearly $500 billion in automatic cuts and roll back some of the $487 billion reduction approved in last year's Budget Control Act. The plan from House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) asks six congressional committees — but not Armed Services — to find $261 billion in savings to help roll back the automatic cuts through sequestration that were triggered by the failure of the supercommittee. The Ryan plan also increases national defense spending to $554 billion in 2013, an increase of $8 billion over the $546 billion that was agreed to under the Budget Control Act.
War. Destruction. Death.
I suspect the scale of our nation and its resources help conceal how unexceptional in many ways is our nation's recent performance. My provisional explanation about this particular trend, (rooted to an anthropologically-minded analysis of the socio-political economy,) begins with the 1960 election. We can track over fifty years the curve of an appalling amount of death-dealing, the amount hundreds of billions of dollars purchases.
Meanwhile, domestically, why would anyone intentionally amplify, for example, greed and rent seeking and Randian ethics at the same time, for example, most of Asia and Europe and India, has come to eat our lunch and shorts by committing to eventually educating their billions of children better than we educate our own American children?
Who possibly in their right mind believes America's future global ability to compete will be secured by making the country into Texas?
Romney/Ryan would be unable to convince me that their intense, self-righteous utopian phantasy about saving America is not also yoked to an equivalent Shadow; underside; blindness; and hubris. But I can't (much) explain why it is they wholeheartedly endorse America transforming itself into an even more vicious, hyper-aristocratic, Galtian triumph-of-the-makers, society.
Especially this is so when I contemplate a future in which several billion 20-40 year old English-speaking Chinese and Indian men and woman have no trouble rattling off, when asked, what is the scientific method.
Posted in current events, speculations Tagged Ayn Rand, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, utopia Leave a comment


text:
There is no branch of the Obama government that is not corrupt. When the President, by wholesale permissions, defies the law it just emboldens those under him to do the same thing.From top to bottom this entire administration tree should be trimmed and the rotten branches should be removed starting with the IRS.
Click Here if you Like this Comment 23 persons like this.
What this bureaucracy needs is a couple thousand more watcher watchers.
Click Here if you Like this Comment 5 persons like this.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Dinner Sat. Night in Westchester
- t
- tarrytown hound Jul 16, 2007 04:17 PM
Rare Sat. night out alone with my husband (no kids). Looking for reasonably priced and good food. Nothing fancy or romantic. Did some research and made reservations at both Cafe Mirage and Frodos. Anyone have an opinion on one versus the other? Let me know.
I haven't eaten at Cafe Mirage, but I was unimpressed with Frodo's. I can appreciate the rare adults-only dinner out, so here was my review:
Have fun wherever you wind up!
Cafe Mirage is really crowded and loud on Saturday nights. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but if you want someplace you can hear yourself talk and not be elbow-to-elbow with diners at neighboring tables, it's not the place. I have eaten there many times and have always thought it a good place for interesting, tasty reasonably priced food. That said, last time we were there (a few months ago) we had a horrible meal, and my husband and I remarked that we hoped this was an aberration and not a downhill trend. If you do end up going, please report back.
try the new location of acuario? we have been wanting to try it since reading the shining reviews. do a chow search .also, indian in various towns is usually lower cost and at times byob and quiet.
I had lunch at Frodo's once. It was ok, but I wouldn't rush back. Mirage is very convenient for us, so we have been many times. It is small and loud on a Sat. night. My favorite thing there is the veggie burger. I'm not sure it's worth the trip from tarrytown. It's fine, just nothing great.
re: debmom
I am puzzled. I keep thinking it is just me that doesn't have a 'let's go to XXXX on Saturday!' place, but from the responses here, is it not just me?
Mr. dolores and I go through this all the time. When I don't want fancy or uber expensive, I just can't come up with a place, the place, our place.
Yes, Le Provencal in Mamaroneck is consistently good, and Silvio's makes me happy for Italian, but...then what?
I don't get it.
Sam's of Gedney Way in White Plains? Comfortable not fancy. Good food not great. Moderately priced. American pub food if that makes any sense at all. Basically not new American but some comfort stuff and some a bit more adventurous.
An American Bistro in Tuckahoe? Similar to above but very different type of atmosphere. Sam's feels more "active" although not crazy loud. Bistro is a bit more sedate and less "clubby" feeling. I prefer Sam's atmosphere.
re: bevoray
Watermoon is part of the Alan Lee empire, and thus the food is quite good. Service is spotty, however, as well as an overwhelmingly high noise level. Penang in Greenwich has basically the same food and flavors, at somewhat lower prices, and a lot lower noise level. (Penang is also an Alan Lee property)
re: bevoray
Watermoon? Salty, loud, and terrible service. Skip it and visit one of Rye's other great restaurants. The last time we ate there, we vowed never again and the poor waitstaff was about to stage a mutiny from being abused.
re: MRS
And still I sit and wonder. Why ARE there no consistently very good (I've given up on great) places in Westchester? I imagine those in Manhattan have a laugh reading this board!
I just read that Global Gatherings served a drink half full. Huh? And that Cafe Mirage is not what it was before it renovated. I just had dinner at Zen Tango and that's it, I'm done with them.
I'm having a birthday dinner at Pinocchio tonight, and say what you will about them, I am happy with their food and service (when Tarcisio is there) and their pricing. I don't need or want Blue Hills, I don't want to pay $150. a person (which stupid restaurant in Westchester charged that?), and I don't want snobby service in exchange for outstanding food.
So, it seems that I have to settle for very good and so be it.
Westchester restauranteurs, you should be ashamed of yourselves.
re: dolores
Sorry dolores, I wasn't very clear on the other thread and I did correct it, but I think your referring to my comment about a half full drink but actually I was talking about Harvest on Hudson. Sorry about the confusion. Still have not been to Global Gatherings. But I have been to Pinocchio some time ago and we really enjoyed it. good choice.
I am guesing that by now you've already eaten and I hope it was enjoyable - I will admit (all too quickly) that Westchester is not the City (or Brooklyn - my true home) but there are more than a few mostly consistent restaurants and usually yummy (in my opinion) - Moscato and Lusardi's, Le Provencal, Toll Gate Steakhouse, Bengal Tiger, Toyo, Sushi Mike, Trotter', City Limits, Bayou - and I could probably add some more if I sat longer - The ambiance factor of this list is all over but to me an adult-only night out is enjoyable practically anywhere
re: MotherBucker
Yes, we went to Cafe Mirage. See my post above.
It was a nice relaxing night out. We sat outside (practically in the parking lot) but didn't have to worry about cutting food, sippy cups or crayons and paper.
Interested in some of your suggestions. We haven't been to all of them, but will look into them. City Limits we've been to many times.


text:
COCONUT CREEK - — Shortly after 2 a.m. Thursday, Theophile Grieve picked up the handgun he'd been fooling around with earlier in the evening. He pointed it at his young friend's head.
"Do you feel lucky?" he reportedly asked the boy, stealing a line from the Dirty Harry character portrayed by Clint Eastwood in the movies.


text:
Recent Events and MultimediaSome recent events organized by the AIVS are available in video streaming. You may watch them online here or through our Facebook page.
October 9-13, 2013, NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò and Humanities Initiative
Online videos of selected sessions from Verdi's Third Century: Italian Opera Today will be accessible soon through this page.
April 2, 2013, 6:00pm, NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò
"Discovering Giuseppe Verdi's I lombardi alla prima Crociata"
Eve Queler, Founding Director of Opera Orchestra of New York, and AIVS Co-Director Francesco Izzo introduce Giuseppe Verdi's fourth opera, I lombardi alla prima Crociata, which OONY performed on April 8, 2013 at Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center. The event includes commentary on the opera and selections from I lombardi and I masnadieri performed live by Maestro Queler and artists involved in the OONY performance, including Chiara Taigi (soprano), Diego Silva (tenor), John Viscardi (tenor), Kevin Short (bass), Erica Kiesewetter (violin), Eugene Moye (cello), Elizabeth Mann (flute), and Steve Hartman (clarinet).
February 26, 2013, 6:30pm, NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò
"Adventures in Italian Opera: Verdi and the Italians"
For the series "Adventures in Italian Opera," Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò hosts soprano Barbara Frittoli, bass Ferruccio Furlanetto, and AIVS co-director, Francesco Izzo in conversation with Fred Plotkin. The discussion, entitled "Verdi and the Italians," explores a wealth of themes and questions pertaining to Verdi performance and scholarship.


text:
Subscribe to HELLO! and save up to 40%Subscribe
Friday August 21, 2009
Eighteen-year-old Diana Vickers, who reached the semi finals of X Factor in 2008, is due to begin a stage stint in the West End revival of The Rise And Fall Of Little Voice in October.
Following in the footsteps of Lancashire-born actress Jane Horrocks, Diana plays Laura, a shy and lonely young girl who impersonates iconic singers like Edith Piaf and Shirley Bassey.
"To find someone of the right age - just 18 - who is as special as Diana Vickers is a gift," producer Nica Burns says.
"(We have found) our perfect Little Voice."
Writer Jim Cartwright's play went on to become a hit movie in 1998, again starring Jane who won a Bafta for her portrayal of the character.
Due to make her acting debut alongside Lesley Sharp (left) and Hustle star Marc Warren, Diana will hit the stage at the Vaudeville Theatre from October 8.
Photo: � PA
The latest news and pictures of the hot young Hollywood actress and star of Silver Linings Playbook
All the latest news, photos and more from the famous couple...


text:
Western Albemarle High School football coach Ed Redmond knows he will have to get used to seeing a lot of new faces in the Warriors' huddles this season.
"That's the beauty of coaching, is coaches never graduate," Redmond said during a recent practice. "The kids come and go, but the coaches never graduate, and as long as you have the energy and the passion enthusiasm as a coach, you can do it forever."
Redmond has gone a combined 18-2 through his first two regular seasons at Western, with a playoff win in each season as well. But those two teams featured a high-powered offense led by quarterback Kent Henry, who finished his high school career as the area's all-time leader with 10,764 total yards (7,124 passing and 3,640 rushing) and 131 total touchdowns.
Henry's fleet of wide receivers included Steve Hearn (84 career catches for 1,408 yards and 17 touchdowns), Nic Drapanas (111 catches, 1,760 yards, 26 touchdowns), and Chase Stokes (34 catches, 562 yards, and nine touchdowns). They're all gone too.
"It's a little different, but we've just got to accept that fact and roll with it," senior Matt Wozneak said. "We'll just do our best, and try to fill the space."
"We know how good we have been before," said senior Josh Meeks. "But I don't really think about that too much, just because this is a new team. We've got new potential. We've got new players."
And entering his third season in Crozet, Redmond says the Warriors have a system in place to sustain the program's success, even if the faces are different.
"I think when you come in as a new coach, certainly credibility is part of it," Redmond said. "Kids want to be part of a successful program. And so it's important to develop a tradition of winning."
"It's just hard work and dedication," said Wozneak. "It's not really that complicated. We've just got guys who care a lot, come out a lot, and do what they need to."
The Warriors will have junior Oliver Herndon back on offense this fall, after he rushed for 564 yards and nine scores last year. Western will also enter the season with two options at quarterback in juniors Sam Hearn and Henry Kreienbaum.
And Redmond says even with the changes in personnel, the Warriors' gameplan won't stray too far from what's worked in the past.
"Scheme-wise we're going to be very similar. We're going to do what Western does," he explained. "We're just going to put different Jimmys and Joes, in terms of the X's and O's. That's really all we're going to do."


text:
I love mormon stories. I just so happen to be the only mormon in my grade at school. You are awesome. Mormons are the best.
Yes! A Mormon story haha I've been trying to get away from the vile stuff they have on here thank you!
I really am enjoying it. You are a night owl too? What is the word count of Secret Sisters?
Add to your private libraryMy Library
Add this story to your public reading lists


text:
Giese should know, his sister-in-law (wife of BioMS Chairman Cliff Giese) was one of the first patients in clinical trials
for the drug. "She has been on the drug for 11 years now, and she has continued to have her disease stabilized," Giese told
Pharm Exec in December. "She suffered from many of the symptoms that late-stage MS patients have, including fatigue, intolerance of
heat, and a lack of energy. She suffered all those symptoms, and they all went away within weeks of getting on the drug."
The drug was discovered by researchers at the University of Alberta and was purchased by Cliff Giese, who founded BioMS Medical
to further develop and finance the drug.
MBP8298 is in Phase III trials, but analysts point out that the Phase II trials were very small in scope. Rather than engage
in a large blinded trial with a placebo arm, BioMS settled on a trial with only 20 to 30 patients, according to Yaghi.
Lilly has a strong record with developing and launching brands in neurology with novel mechanisms of action, including Zyprexa
for schizophrenia and Cymbalta for pain.
"I have never seen a deal in Canada that has been as big as the one BioMS signed with Eli Lilly," Yaghi said. "I consider
it one of the highlights of 2007 for the Canadian biotech industry."
Phase III results are expected by the second half of 2009, and BioMS expects to submit MBP8298 to FDA by 2010. –GEORGE KORONEOS
GlaxoSmithKline boosted its oncology division in October with the addition of Synta Pharmaceutical's melanoma drug elesclomol
(also known as STA-4783).
GSK paid $80 million cash and $885 million in potential milestones to codevelop and commercialize the drug. Profits will be
split in the United States, and Synta will receive royalties for product sold internationally.
The drug, now entering Phase III trials, was discovered in-house, using Synta's chemical compound library. Synta entered the
drug into clinical trials and has been working on it for nearly 10 years.
After courting a number of pharma companies, Synta selected GSK to be its partner for the program. The two companies will
work together in the United States, using joint committees to oversee the development and marketing of the drug, and GSK will
take the lead outside the United States.
Synta was started by scientists at Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology and went public in 2007. The company
develops small-molecule drugs for cancer and inflammation, and currently has three cancer drugs under development. The lead
drug, elesclomol, has shown positive data in metastatic melanoma, an advanced form of skin cancer. Synta expects to try this
drug in cancer types beyond melanoma, including breast, prostate, and ovarian cancer. The two other drugs have not been licensed.
The traditional chemotherapy approach does not target the cancer cells, but instead blocks cell division and kills anything
that is dividing rapidly—including healthy blood cells and neurons.
How Digital Medicine Can Pinpoint Dosing Regimens to Optimize Drug Efficacy and Safety
Sponsored By Oracle
Multi-faceted Approaches to Meet Payer and Regulatory Evidence Requirements
Sponsored By UBC Express Scripts
Overcoming the Life Sciences Content Conundrum in a Multichannel World
Sponsored By Veeva


text:
French President Nicolas Sarkozy delivers a speech to magistrates and policemen who took part in the investigations in the shooting of seven persons and the siege of the gunman Mohamed Merah in Toulouse, at the Elysee palace in Paris. (AP Photo/Kenzo Tribouillard, Pool)
PARIS (AP) -- Francois Hollande, a mild-mannered French Socialist, is heading into a presidential runoff election with the upper hand over incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy after winning the most votes in the first round of voting.
However, the nearly one in five voters who chose far right candidate Marine Le Pen may hold the key to victory in the decisive vote on May 6.
Hollande remains favorite to win the runoff after besting Sarkozy in the first round.
If Hollande wins the second round, he would become the first socialist president since 1995. His election could also alter Europe's political and economic landscape.
Turnout was surprisingly high, at more than 80 percent, despite concern that a campaign focusing on nostalgia for a more protected past would fail to inspire voters.
Click Here to access the online Public Inspection File
Viewers with disabilities can get assistance accessing this station's FCC Public Inspection File by contacting the station with the information listed below. Questions or concerns relating to the accessibility of the FCC's online public file system should be directed to the FCC at 888-225-5322, 888-835-5322 (TTY), or firstname.lastname@example.com.