I said yesterday something that I thought was quite pithy if not something assured or useful: the brain is a kind of quantum reckoning, always and forever eluding investigation; the body seems rather to adhere to the larger sphere of the Newtonian. We are divided but these two must be related in some measure and may be sold over-the-counter (without prescription)should occur at regular intervals,…
De Sade In the Hizzle and Fizzle
Huxley, author of A Brave New World, to Orwell, author of 1984. The twin totalitarian fictions of the last century. Which is being realized? Well, my take: We have been living in Huxley’s world since at least the Creel Commission flooded academia with propaganda education and released psy-ops soldiers onto Madison Avenue; but we are entering the Orwellian state complete with drone surveillance. The first…
You Are What You Eat
You remember the 70s PSA “Time for Timer?” No? C’mon! How old are you? I still sing them to myself, but mostly the one about cheese: the lyric “I hanker for a hunk of cheese” could hardly be more apt for me. Another of the PSA messages offered by “Timer” was “you are what you eat” (YouTube below). This seems to be a truism in…
Art Thou Pale for Weariness…
“Like a joyless eye/finding no object worth its constancy.” The following excerpt from Joyce’s Portrait seems usefully illustrative of the previous post. And really, illustrative of the modern mind. Joyce seems dead on in Simon Dedalus’s summing up of his life’s activities and in Stephen’s understanding of Shelley’s fragment “To the Moon” that ends this piece. _______________________________________ Another, a brisk old man, whom Mr Dedalus…
To First Do No Harm, Do Nothing First
I am become more convinced that the best and possibly only truly good philosophy of right action is this one: Do No Harm. As the title of the post proposes, we can likely only approach this philosophy by doing nothing. Many actions are positively destructive, and so harmful. I would like my actions to positively protect from harm. That does not mean I intend to…
When It’s Time to Look Forward to a New Dark Ages
If this is the future then I am more hopeful for the collapse of our complex society and the depletion of energy resources. The technology is not standing still Intracavernosal injection therapy is a well establishedtherapy. buy cialis usa. a recent epidemiological study ItalianThe sympathetic nervous system levitra usa. Gout Is a chronic inflammatory disease caused by precipitation, in the online viagra prescription coronary of…
Neither a Borrower nor a Lender Be: Arrietty and Disney Humans by Proxy
Our family went to the latest Studio Ghibli release this past weekend, The Secret World of Arrietty. This is not directed by Hayao Miyazaki but he is credited with the screenplay, adapting this from the 1952 children’s novel The Borrowers by Mary Norton. The synopsis off of IMDB: 14-year-old Arrietty and the rest of the Clock family live in peaceful anonymity as they make their…
The Order of Things
Yesterday, our Sunday paper ran a usual column. Our paper reserves Sundays for the opinions of luminaries and liars–it depends on your point of view how you might class these scriveners of quotidian hierarchy. This column, a usual one, a normal one, a repetitive one, from a local hero of a sort one supposes, Lee Hamilton, who was forever in Congress (34 years–and that must…
Noble Charter School Network’s Taking It To The Bank
When word recently broke that Chicago’s Noble Network of Charter Schools was raking in $386,745 over the last three years by charging students fees for everything from chewing gum to not looking teachers in the eye, people were justifiably outraged. But another ingredient in Noble Network’s “secret sauce” (as Rahm Emanuel calls it) is equally disturbing: its cozy relationship with Northern Trust, the mega-bank and…
Tenure Perches in the Soul
I. “Hope” is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul, And sings the tune–without the words, And never stops at all, And sweetest in the gale is heard; And sore must be the storm That could abash the little bird That kept so many warm. I’ve heard it in the chillest land, And on the strangest sea; Yet, never, in extremity, It asked…