CALL ME MAGGIE

  • Obama’s drone guidelines: Bombing Kant’s test | The Economist

    AN EMINENT Prussian bachelor once argued that rational creatures are bound, by the very nature of reason, to act only according to rules of conduct one would affirm, when at one’s rational best, to equally guide everyone’s choices. This is not, it turns out, very useful as a day-to-day rule…

  • The Rise of Democratic Schools and ‘Solutionaries’…

    Twenty years ago at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Severn Cullis-Suzuki, a 12-year-old girl from Canada, “silenced the world for six minutes” with her raw and powerful oration lambasting adults for dumping the problems they created onto the next generation. “At school, even in kindergarten, you teach us…

  • A Liberal Moment – NYTimes.com

    Still hard to believe, I told a friend the other day while trying to fathom the election results, that pot is legal in my state, gays are free to marry, and a black man who vowed to raise taxes on the rich won a majority of the popular vote for…

  • Class Wars of 2012 – NYTimes.com

    …The important thing to understand now is that while the election is over, the class war isn’t. The same people who bet big on Mr. Romney, and lost, are now trying to win by stealth — in the name of fiscal responsibility — the ground they failed to gain in…

  • Lonnie Holley – “All Rendered Truth” – YouTube

    via Lonnie Holley – “All Rendered Truth” – YouTube.

  • Existential Entrepreneurship: Being Sick & Tired of Pseudo-Obligations

    Existential Entrepreneurship: Being Sick & Tired of Pseudo-Obligations

    Our lives can be our own or they can belong to others. And in saying that, I do not mean that in the former instance we can do what we want and in the latter instance we do only what others tell us. The reality is far more subtle. When…

  • The Audacious & Looming Spectre of Differential Tuition

    My mind is completely boggled. Someone can do the relatively simple accounting and see that the humanities–“majors without an immediate job payoff”–are already subsidizing other majors which have a “job payoff.” In fact, this was already done at few institutions, including UCLA. But this is a case where Regents &…

  • Ambition, Self-Promotion, & Military Demagoguery

    The series will show how Petraeus was engaged from the beginning of the Iraq war in creating a myth about himself as a commander with unique ability to defeat insurgents, that he knew he had failed in his first two commands in Iraq and that he did not believe that…

  • Epistemic Closure & the Reality-Based Center

    The article below is encouraging to me on many levels. I have feared that I was a Texan committing the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. That is where you cherry pick the evidence to meet the conclusion you want to support. So over the last sixteen years since first observing that Republicans…

  • The Ups & Downs of the Afterlife

    Okay. I admit that this is one of those things that makes a person laugh out of pure Schadenfreude. Gotta say though… as Candid Camera / Practical Joke TV goes, this Brazilian entry is hilarious. I laughed at the reactions of every single “victim.”

  • Feeling Sad and Depressed? « beyondclicktivism

      Feeling Sad and Depressed? « beyondclicktivism.

  • Suddenly Brilliance

     A new project between me & my long time writing/thinking partner Angela Drummond Matthews. Check it out. About « Suddenly Brilliance.

  • Let them eat cake… for the 21st Century

    The corporate CEOs who have made a high-profile foray into deficit negotiations have themselves been substantially responsible for the size of the deficit they now want closed.The companies represented by executives working with the Campaign To Fix The Debt have received trillions in federal war contracts, subsidies and bailouts, as…

  • Stoic Pragmatism // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame

    Most of us have heard about that exemplary fool, Molière’s Monsieur Jourdain, who was astonished to discover in middle age that he had been speaking prose all his life. After perusing John Lachs’s wise and lively Stoic Pragmatism, many readers will no doubt conclude that they have lived as stoic pragmatists…

  • Lessons for Building a Co-Operative Movement

    …John’s life has been steeped in co-operatives. He has been a member for over 30 years in the Heartwood Co-operative Woodshop in Berkeley, CA, where he lives. He has belonged to numerous other co-operatives and collectives. In addition to being a historian of extensive research, he is a poet, woodworker,…

  • The Widening Divide Between Wall Street and Washington | TIME.com

    Interesting op/ed at Time.com from the Curious Capitalist. Corporate finance is global. Politics remains local. Situating ourselves within the dialectic betwixt economics & policy is very much an important affair in facing up to the Society of Control & its encoding of the Book of Life. Washington exists on a…

  • Sendicate: Reinventing Email Newsletters

    Cool idea shared over at Pandodaily on making email newsletters easier & more enticing. There is something really nice about email, and I am happy to see that not everyone is giving up completely on the platform. Last month, I made a discovery that now seems obvious: email is not…

  • Situating Street Artists

    Cool. Filmmakers Z.S. Grant and John Carr have spent the better part of the past year ricocheting around the country, capturing the stories of politically minded street artists for their documentary series, “Voice of Art.” Their eight-episode Web series — currently airing on rapper Pharrell Williams’ YouTube channel, i am…