Instrumental rationality— namely the calculation of the most efficient means for achieving a given desire— has overwhelmed Western thinking for the last 300 years……….. We must change the aesthetic tone of the world. –Adbusters Nov/Dec 2017
Our daughter and her partner are expecting a baby girl. Kai is to be born in January. I am awed that the child is to bear my mothers name as her middle name. My mother was a extraordinarily courageous and kind woman. She would have been greatly honored to have her name given to…
Did not post yesterday since most of the day was spent on I-65 traveling from Chicago to Louisville. We departed in a gentle rain which surely will bring down the few remaining leaves from the trees in the neighborhood. The plus side of the 6 hour drive was the brisk movement of traffic around…
“Hello, do you hear me?” Is the channel working? Are we both using the same code? Thus we understand the outbreak of public violence in Charlottesville, home to the University of Virginia, with Monticello nearby. And the mass slaughter at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs Texas….. There was and is no underlying…
Axiom: there is no simple “reality.” I remember the promise of the internet. Ease of connectivity would produce greater understanding. Instead what we got was not the spread of democracy but “mobocracy.” We are being fractured by a firehose of falsehood. Facebook estimates that 126 million Americans, about 40% of the population were reached…
What if, however, humans exceed animals in their capacity for violence precisely because they speak? Language dismembers a thing, destroying its organic unity, treating its parts and properties as autonomous. -*- The fact that reason and race have the same root (ratio) in Latin tells us something: language, not primitive egotistic interest, is the…
“Si vous êtes pris dans le rêve de l’autre, vous êtes foutu” (If you’re trapped in the dream of the other, you’re fucked) —Gilles Deleuze Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone…
I agreed to accompany my wife to the American Legion Post in Gurnee for the Veterans Day ceremony. She is a member of a local choral group that was to participate in the community event. As she is recovering from a knee injury I did the driving. It’s never been easy for me to…
I recently exchanged emails with a friend on the topic of gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is the practice of shaping the voting districts to align with the population density that has supported the party in power, according to past election data. The majority party, the one in power gets to manipulate the boundaries of electoral districts,…
I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value upon what I do, or the least discredit upon what I do not, as if I pretended to settle any thing as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless…
