Update Below: Pinker in 2000 Steven Pinker, language guru, descendant and somewhat apostate of Chomsky, has written a book about the “progress” of human morality measured via a reduction of wars and war casualties called The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. In a Salon “Recommends” piece (“Writers choose their favorite books of 2011“) Pinker offers the following for Xmas reading gifts:…
Those Who Push These Plans…In the Name of Security
Conference on Internet Freedom Remarks Hillary Rodham Clinton Secretary of State Fokker Terminal The Hague, Netherlands December 8, 2011 Excerpts: After all, the right to express one’s views, practice one’s faith, peacefully assemble with others to pursue political or social change – these are all rights to which all human beings are entitled, whether they choose to exercise them in a city square or an…
The Art of Remembering and the Act of Forgetting
Alice Walmart is buying Art to put into her Alice Dollhouse. The wealthy, the rulers, used to commission art not just buy it. I guess the only “art” that is commissioned anymore is the one that promises the majestic paean to large penises…Architecture. Who has commissioned the modern Sistine Chapel? Who has supported our poets? No one. We have just co-opted the arts to…
Antipodal Responses to Authority
Recall this from Kropotkin: throughout the history of our civilization, two traditions, two opposing tendencies have confronted each other: the Roman and the Popular; the imperial and the federalist; the authoritarian and the libertarian. Now, regarding a local protest of a recruiting visit at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business by a representative of J.P. Morgan Chase Bank, a news item titled, “IU warns Occupy…
Of Thee I Sing!
In a post from October, The Shackles of Citizenry: Guilty In Any Land, I related this story from my days of employment with a DC-based publisher: I think I’ve told the following story to several of my friends over the last few years: my former employer was headquartered in DC and on a trip there, while in a cab to or from the airport I heard…
Love Alters Not, but Chemistry Does
SONNET 116 Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove: O no! it is an ever-fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wandering bark, Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken. Love’s not Time’s fool,…
The Founding Document of American Oligarchy
The Mayflower Compact In the name of God, Amen. We, whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, defender of the Faith, etc. Having undertaken, for the Glory of God, and advancements of the Christian faith and honor of our King and Country, a voyage to…
Random Thinking on Manipulating Mind
Look how much are we encouraged to passively receive images? And in those images are cultural expectations. Why do we focus on testing? Testing creates a mind that will expect an answer that will be expected. We encourage STEM because STEM isn’t thinking, it’s making (tinkering) and a kind of thinking focused on problems of human engineering. It’s not about being. It’s about building. or…
The Changing of the Oligarchical Guard
Jay P. Greene, as is his wont, writes something idiotic to favor his bias of market love. Again, as preface to everything I write contra Greene I want to remind you that he occupies and endowed Chair (by Wal-Mart) at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville in Education Reform. Butter meets bread on one side only and always. In other words, Jay P. Greene is…
The Crony Corruption of the Indiana Charter School Board: Mining Kids for Cash
(The following is a letter Doug Martin recently sent to the Indiana Charter School Board, which is now taking comments concerning their corporate school reform agenda. Take the opportunity to email them and let them know you do not approve of selling our kids off to the privatizers invading our state. Their email address is charter-applications@doe.in.gov. It is perhaps no exaggeration to compare this “discovery”…