This morning a friend shared a link with me regarding the “good” of science spending as measured against the “evil” of suffering (“With all the suffering…“). Basically, why spend money on “exploration” when so many are starving and dying? Spend money combating suffering instead of space exploration. As answer or justification for spending on science the blogger offers a letter from Ernst Stuhlinger, then the…
The Wages of Progress…
People get interested and involved in issues and dilemmas that primarily affect them personally, physically, specifically. I get that. Me too. Yo tambien. However, it seems to me that a particular injustice or unfairness normally has tentacles that seek to attach themselves in myriad sucking ways to all aspects of life generally. The recent arbitrary and arbitrarily legal decision by the Mayor of Indianapolis to…
Paving the Way
The idea that “saving” or protecting aspects of the world actually implies destruction of the remainder–a lack of needing to care about the world in its wholeness. For example let’s take National Parks. Implicit in a law protecting the environment from our destructive resource depletion and waste is the approval for the industrial rapine that has denuded forests across the globe and spilled oil in…
The Monkey Rope, Or Our Common Umbilical
We live in a kind of false paradigm of “self-reliance.” I don’t need to blame Waldo for this but perhaps he does bear a good bit of the burden for at the very least his is a kind of Bartlett’s for “individualism.” Living having been usurped by business interests we are inundated with a sermonizing that mingles deified approval of selfishness with the fiction the…
Power Agent in Repose
The previous post offers a kind of temperamental and philosophical comparison between two our most fecund writers and thinkers. The section out of Emerson is representative of both his power and his risible ambivalence. This is the Emerson that counsels the soul yet succors the she-wolf of mammon and the passing, scornful Days. He is Henry Ford’s Master as much as he is Thoreau’s. Though…
The Dart’s the Thing: Melville on Emerson
“All men live enveloped in whale line.” Self-Reliance (Waldo) 1841 Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes; for that for ever degrades the…
Cut from the Corporate Kloth–Preferring KIPP Failure Over TPS Success
NOTE: A small section of this article originally mistook the KIPP Indy school with KIPP’s school in Gary. This has been corrected. UPDATE: As this Doug Martin story broke, word came down that a federal judge ruled in favor of the mayor’s decision to close The Project School. Additionally, Jason Kloth is getting a pay-raise. He now will make $120, 000 yearly for spreading the…
Buying Mayor Ballard: More Truth About the Project School Closing
In my last piece, The Truth about the Project School Closing: The Indiana Corporate School Complex,” I noted how Indy mayor Greg Ballard was promoting a school privatizing movement full of crony capitalism, propaganda, and lots of money, one at odds with the community-led/social justice Project School. Therefore, the fact that Ballard, last year, accepted tons of money in campaign donations from those associated with Indiana’s corporate…
Pot and Kettle Mind
Yesterday Steve at School Matters offered a post on Indy Mayor Greg Ballard’s decision to revoke TPS’s Charter (see Doug Martin’s thorough account here). I anticipated trouble by the title alone: Choice vs. standards at the Indianapolis Project School. Is that what this is about? It got worse. Stayed that way and ended that way. Steve maintained a “faux” journalese neutrality (ie, no “I think X” statements)…
Losing Our Soul–Silencing Heart, Mind and Voice
If you haven’t read Doug Martin’s piece on the planned destruction of what remains of the ethos that is Community as well as the very heart of true Charity (take some time to think about the real meaning of this word), please set to it with all speed and attention. It is a detailed report of the excrescence of monied ulteriority, of the glad hand…