Another morning dawns in splendor. Summer days are a gift, Natures welcome to all living things. I anthropomorphize of course. With our ancestors it just seems right and proper to give the world as presented to our senseS the label, “Nature.” It’s our term for the surrounding life-sustaining-matrix of sky, water, earth, vegetation and…
No ‘new’ big issue on my mind today,– just the usual ones. On Monday, Trump tweeted a photo of himself wearing a mask with a presidential seal, writing, “Many people say that it is Patriotic to wear a face mask when you can’t socially distance.”* CNN reported that the president’s falling poll numbers likely…
SPECTACULAR ORGY (FREEDOM AMERICAN STYLE) But this is precisely the point:the high point of liberation, it’s logical outcome,is to be found in the spectacular orgy, speed, the instantaneity of change, generalized eccentricity. Politics frees itself in the spectacle,in the all-out advertising effect;sexuality frees itself in all its anomalies,and perversions; mores, customs, the body, and…
Americans believe in facts,but not in facticity.They do not know that factsare factitious*, as their name suggests.It is this belief in facts,in the total credibility of what is done or seen,in this pragmatic evidence of things and an accompanying contempt for what may be called appearancesor the play of appearances –— a face does…
What if a butterfly thinks it is ugly? I participated in a Socrates’ Cafe discussion last night that entertained this question. The discussion was wide ranging, stimulating, satisfying. There were seven of us in attendance using Go-To-Meeting for the video mediated discussion. The question asks the reader to imagine oneself a butterfly. That alone…
After a session of wrestling with ideas, words, with the recalcitrant “world”, — my spirit seems to seize, overcome with the weary business of it all. Perhaps this is the hazard of a love of philosophy? David Hume once said. Since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, Nature herself suffices to that purpose,…
As usual I received the weekend update on my iphone news feed from the New York Times. I attempted to read over my bowl of cheerios. Interesting and concise as always, but I felt repulsed. My mind resisted following the cascade of deepening “troubles.” Another Black man is shot while fleeing police; demonstrations against…
The weeks have been long. There is a exhaustion felt due to quarantine, mandated isolation from communal activities, and then the spate of murders of innocent black men, in Georgia and then in Minnesota. The riots over the past few nights in our cities are a natural release of rage, of exasperation over the…
The rioting continues, despite the efforts of governors to use police and national guard to protect property, and to minimize the use of force against those who are protesting systemic racism, and particularly the disproportionate killing of black people by police. At the national level, the President rages like a mad emperor. Subsequent to…
It is Sunday morning. Two and a half months ago, late winter when the quarantine was announced, I drove to Geneva on a Sunday morning. That was not unusual since Geneva is 10 minutes away from Batavia. Until the covid-19 quarantine the Starbucks on 3rd Street was my preferred venue for beginning each day…
