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Popular Culture

  • Textimony 20121101

    Conditions where desire or fear overtake to unmake us: a mind full of superfluity, a belly empty of nutrition, and a heart out of sync with itself. Continue reading

  • Speak the Truth & Shame the Devil!

    Calling lies “lies” and theft “theft” and violence “violence,” loudly, clearly, and consistently, until truth becomes more than a bump in the road, is a powerful aspect of political activism. Much of the work around human rights begins with accurately… Continue reading

  • American Self-Making: More of the Long Con

    The Long Con is the sting we pull on ourselves, where we become our own mark which might be why we are able to get others to play along: the self-con generates profound belief by others because we are so… Continue reading

  • The Most Deadly Drug: Alcohol

    In 2009, David Nutt, a neuropsychopharmacologist who served as chair of Britains Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs ACMD, published a paper in a medical journal that offered a provocative thesis: horseback riding, he wrote, was more dangerous than… Continue reading

  • The War that Never Ends: Thucydides & Plato

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  • A Boon of Dandelions 4

    Our greatest shortcoming: obsessive desire for certainty, compulsive appetite for the sure thing. Some will panic in the search; a few get utterly lost in trying to fix the “game.” Yet life is no play-thing to manipulate. The conviction that… Continue reading

  • Detaching-Letting Go-Releasing Yourself

    A nice blog entry from over at Miati Notes on Toxic Relationships that certainly goes to the heart of what I have been feeling over the last few days. As listening to Frank Herbert’s Dune this morning reminded me of… Continue reading

  • A Boon of Dandelions 3

    These past weeks since my brother’s death, fear has hunted me. Or better, I have hunted myself… for I have not been afeared of what might actually do me harm right now or even partially down the line of life.… Continue reading

  • Two Presidents, Smoking and Scheming – NYTimes.com

    Mr. President, your prep for the next debate need not consist of anything more than learning to pronounce three words: “Governor, you’re lying.” via Two Presidents, Smoking and Scheming – NYTimes.com. Continue reading

  • Combatting Knowledge with Opinion (and some Prayers)

    This is a nice follow up piece for the earlier link I posted today on why we are not ENTITLED to throw our opinions around without evidence and/or expectation of being challenged by those with broader knowledge: It is more… Continue reading

  • The Entitlement of Opinion

    The problem with “I’m entitled to my opinion” is that, all too often, it’s used to shelter beliefs that should have been abandoned. It becomes shorthand for “I can say or think whatever I like” – and by extension, continuing… Continue reading

  • The Trials of Teaching in Texas

    Since the [Texas State] Legislature eliminated more than $5 billion in financing from public education in 2011, some early results are easily quantifiable — like the approximately 25,000 employees shed from the state’s schools and the more than 6,200 additional elementary school… Continue reading

  • The Fox News & the Hedgehog Syndrome

    It very well could be that I am drawing a hasty generalization. But I have been watching politics closely for 30 years. Since the 1996 campaign, I have seen an interesting phenomenon: Democrats spent a lot of time trying to… Continue reading

  • Tolkien & Teaching

    In his mythology, Tolkien tells us that the elves crossed the sea in rebellion, and even those who linger yet in Middle Earth do not forget and yearn for a return to their land of origin.  For elves, the sea is… Continue reading

  • Everyone shoots first: reality in the age of Instagram | The Verge

    There are over five and a half billion cell phones in the world, nearly all equipped with cameras: an orgy of recording of life as it passes. Our age has seen an explosion of this peculiarly human activity — recording… Continue reading

  • Unpacking More of the Long Con…

    What Republicans in red states who are spending their evening defending Romney need to realize is that Mitt Romney was talking about YOU! Republicans will no doubt continue to feed the myth that Obama is the food stamp president who… Continue reading

  • Makers & Takers: More of the Long Con

    A lot of my “everyday” existential philosophizing takes the form of asking people to be aware of the Long Con or the Big Sting… that is where you become your own mark in the long con game of bad faith… Continue reading

  • TechnoScience & the New Pedagogy

    In the past, the suggestion of getting a college degree without ever cracking a book meant paying a degree mill. It meant the degree was in name only, reflecting neither learning nor effort. Then distance learning meant correspondence courses, perhaps… Continue reading