CALL ME MAGGIE

  • Is the age of globalization also a new era for protests?

    Is the age of globalization also a new era for protests?

    A spate of studies and meta-analysis in recent years depict how large-scale citizen mobilisations have been intensifying for more than a decade, reaching a new peak in the past five years. According to the conclusion of an extensive study examining the complexities of global protests, “The current surge of protests is more global than…

  • The Junkie Deva at 102

    The Junkie Deva at 102

    Here is to the author who gave Gilles Deleuze the nomenclature for the Society of Control; the man who became for me the DEVA of the Cut-Up, the Process by which I sublimated my melancholy in the  mid-90s. Happy birthday Mr. Burroughs. How do you write a masterpiece? It’s inside you, you know it’s inside you: How…

  • Millennial diversity of interest and opinion

    It’s theoretically possible to… support an overall tax cut that raises taxes on the rich too. But it’s worth questioning the value of trying to force these answers into a coherent political framework [as the poll talked about here does] rather than accept that Millennials, like most people, have much,…

  • Millennials, Struggle, and Bernie 

      Corey Robin does an excellent response to a piece by Alexandra Schwartz at the New Yorker concerning the hope millennials find in Bernie Sanders. I want to thank my buddy-friend-guy Chris for talking over these things with me last night. While I am still uneasy with all politics, Sanders…

  • Man Bites Dogma – A RAW Conversation

    He’s been called a cult figure to various lunatic fringe groups, Tom Robbins calls him “a dazzling barker hawking tickets to the most thrilling tilt-a-whirls and daring loop-o-planes on the midway of higher consciousness,” he calls himself an iconoclastic comedian, and whether Robert Anton Wilson is a philosopher or a…

  • The Only Animals With Chins

    The Only Animals With Chins

    Pigs don’t have chins. Nor do any animals, except for us. The lower jaw of a chimpanzee or gorilla slopes backwards from the front teeth. So did the jaw of other hominids like Homo erectus. Even Neanderthal jaws ended in a flat vertical plane. Only in modern humans does the…

  • What is Altruism?

    What is Altruism?

    Matthieu Ricard uncovers the reasons why altruism is the vital thread that can answer the main challenges of our time: the economy in the short term, life satisfaction in the mid-term, and environment in the long term. The book paints a complete picture of the importance of altruism and the…

  • Nootropics or Smart Drugs

    Important caveat for those thinking smart drugs can make a person more intelligent: Like any performance enhancer, there has to be a core level of intelligence or athleticism to be augmented. Welcome to the world of nootropics, or smart drugs. Nootropics (derived from Greek words that mean to bend the…

  • Sufficiency Economy

    Sufficiency Economy

    Everyone has been affected by the #economiccrisis and some of us know folks who are still reeling from how banks played dice with our futures. If you have an hour, you might want to learn a little about how Buddhist’s in Thailand responded to their 1997 Asian market collapse. This…

  • Cagey Anarchism

    Cagey Anarchism

    More than two decades after Cage’s death, a small press called Siglio has published a definitive edition of his major long text. Starting in 1965, Cage developed a poetic form he titled a Diary and accurately described as “a mosaic of ideas, statements, words, and stories.” Among the constraints informing…

  • Academia as mechanical productivity

    Academia as mechanical productivity

    like the Whatever Etc page if you use Facebook. It is amazing how the machinery of academia has been turned on by someone and just left running… Like a Charlie… Posted by Whatever Etc. on Friday, January 22, 2016

  • #UnderSiege #MahmoudDarwish

    #UnderSiege #MahmoudDarwish

    Here on the slopes of hills, facing the dusk and the cannon of time Close to the gardens of broken shadows, We do what prisoners do, And what the jobless do: We cultivate hope. *** A country preparing for dawn. We grow less intelligent For we closely watch the hour…

  • Public memory, propaganda, and ethics

    My colleague is trying to get his students thinking about ethics by putting forward an issue of public morals and conscience. I agree with him that this monument to the Confederate Soldiers of Denton, Texas, should be removed. I was a bit more over the top in what I thought…

  • Hard terror, soft terror

    The acts of radicalized “Jihadists” often hits our front pages and tablet news apps. It is clearly brutal. It is clearly intolerant. It clearly appalling. Yet alongside all of this clear terroristic activity are other forms of violence and inhospitable behavior. These are the varieties of abusive experience for which we have…

  • Memories without rememberers

    Memories without rememberers

    Film by Alba Mora and Anna Sanmartí about the disappearing shamanic rituals of the Lanjia Sora Tribe after the arrival of the Christian missionaries in eastern India.  

  • Trump and American #authoritarianism

    Take activated authoritarians from across the partisan spectrum and the growing cadre of threatened non-authoritarians, then add them to the base of Republican general election voters, and the potential electoral path to a Trump presidency becomes clearer. Source: Donald Trump 2016: The One Weird Trait That Predicts Whether You’re a…

  • Artemis and Dark Matter

    Ginette Paris writes of Artemis: “The myth even makes her a Goddess whose beauty should not be exposed to human sight, as if to signify that this beauty exists for itself. The myths associated with Artemis suggest that one may hear her or sense her presence, but that it is…

  • The itch nobody can scratch

    The itch nobody can scratch

    A real indictment of “business as usual” where “business” is the medical industrial complex. via The itch nobody can scratch — Matter — Medium.