We are spending several days in Baraboo, Wisconsin. We plan to visit with relatives living in Eagle River Wisconsin, and then on to Willmar Minnesota, to see family that we’ve not seen for many months. For the most part our stay in Baraboo has been delightful. There have been bare glimpses of the ideological…
This morning I am processing the discussion of last night, an exchange of ideas within our amateur philosophers group about the work of Paul Feyerabend. Feyerabend was Austrian. He taught philosophy at the University of California at Berkley for three decades. He passed in 1994. Attracted by Feyerabend’s anarchistic view of the methods of…
It is difficult to impossible to avoid thinking about money directly, or indirectly. Money, the economy, the future cost of housing, of health care, — the enormity of the sum certainly to be required for the basics of retirement will be “front of mind” for anyone in their middle years. Naturally underemployment, or unemployment…
Success is as dangerous as failure. Hope is as hollow as fear. What does it mean that success is as dangerous as failure? Whether you go up the ladder or down it, your position is shaky. When you stand with your two feet on the ground you will always keep your balance. What does…
It is the center hole, the emptiness inside, the inner space…that holds me. These phrases from verse eleven of the Tao Te Ching in my mind serve as an anchor chain this morning. I awakened with a high blood sugar reading, which perhaps is not unusual for anyone diabetic. The condition nevertheless is unacceptable,…
I am revisiting the Tao Te Ching, written by Lao Tsu, a contemporary of Confucius. It is old by the standard of my short lifetime. And it is not so old in terms of our Earth, estimated at 4.5 billion years. Thus the text of the Tao Te Ching is both old and not…
Neither divine punishment nor the nemesis of history. It is difficult not the see the pandemic as the consequence of our devastating, short-sighted choices regarding the environment. We have treated planet Earth as a dumping ground, a warehouse for dross and garbage, a heap of ruins. Yet it is impossible to save the planet…
The rain falls steadily non-stop, then in sheets. Weeks of mounting drought, then today flood warnings. Nature is a condition of extremes. After all, is not “the mean” a quantity that humans judge to be “just right” for the purposes of life? Nature, being “blind,” the feedback of cause and effect, “knows” nothing of…
We are no longer alienated and passive spectators but interactive extras; we are the meek lyophilized members of this huge “reality show.” It is no longer a spectacular logic of alienation but a spectral logic of dis-incarnation, no longer a fantastic logic of diversion, but a corpuscular logic of transfusion and transubstantiation of all…
Biopoliticsbecoming immunopolitics…The latent catastrophecoursing through and troubling the early decades of the century. The catastrophe is ungovernableand brings to light all the limitsof neoliberal governance. It has the tone of the irreversibleand the timbre of the irreparable.Nothing will be like it was before. Yesterday’s world appearsas a remote, collapsed worldthat has now slipped away.In…
