The Pathway to the Fall of U.S. Power

1. Nature of Reality

Consider two of the seven principles of biocentrism, an ethical point of view that extends inherent value to all living things:

First Principle of Biocentrism: What we perceive as reality is a process that involves consciousness.

Second Principle of Biocentrism: Our external and internal perceptions are inextricably intertwined. They are different sides of the same coin and cannot be separated. (Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe, by Robert Lanza, MD, with Bob Berman, 2009)

The first principle suggests that an observer affects what is observed, brings it to life.

The second says that what we are observing, the object of our observation, is literally determined by the observer’s internal perceptions — the external and the internal are associated, interlaced, connected.

And a third principle yet suggests that without the presence of an observer, particles and objects remain in the undetermined state of probability. That is, all is probability until someone brings an object to life through observations that are meshed with internal perceptions. We create the world we see, the world we want.

“Men make their own histories,” says Edward Said, in Orientalism, followingVico. “That what they can know is what they have made, and extend it to geography: as both geographical and cultural entities — to say nothing of historical entities — such locales, regions, geographical sectors as ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’ are man-made.”

These principles have everything to do with the fall of empires — we’ve perceived.

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A Reflection from the End of the World

Reflection at the End of the World

For some time now I’ve been walking around beneath a dark, gray cloud. I can’t seem to get a handle on it, a kind of low depressive feeling, malaise. I can’t shake it.

Do you feel any of that?

Maybe it’s because I find myself anticipating intense negativity at every turn — and it comes, it’s there. News is gloomy, even funereal. One bit of bleakness follows another without relent. Maybe it’s because truth has been compromised; it’s nowhere visible. Honor and trust can’t be found. Do you trust anyone? And maybe it’s because this really is the end of something, a world we knew, and we’re transitioning into an unknown. We fear that.

But I think it’s more than that.

At the end of the world, a world I can’t understand at all, I’m thinking that we’ve become too comfortable with death. We anticipate it, don’t we? We’ve learned to accept that there will be violence somewhere and people will die, innocent people, children. We’re comfortable with that, it seems. And it’s making me depressed.Keep reading

Keep reading in the new Uncanny location … 

The Authoritarian Man

If by now you’re still unsure whether the White House is moving forcefully towards vicious totalitarianism then you haven’t been paying attention.

Some have gotten the message, though, and interpret it as a license to punish, dehumanize, and demoralize. This is essential for The Authoritarian Man, who finds security in obedience.

Jewish cemeteries have been vandalized. Jewish centers in Albuquerque; Baltimore; Birmingham, Ala.; Milwaukee; and Wilmington, Del., have reported repeated threats; jarring graffiti of swastikas have been reported on some college campuses as well as the New York City subway. Two Indian engineers were shot in Kansas. According to the New York Times’s John Eligon, Alan Blinder, and Nida Najar, “It raised new alarms about a climate of hostility toward foreigners in the United States, where President Trump has made clamping down on immigration a central plank of his ‘America first’ agenda.”

A feces swastika was found in a gender-neutral bathroom at the Rhode Island School of Design.

The Southern Poverty Center reports that hate groups have increased for a second year following Trump’s election. The Center also reports that, “Comparing the language of Breitbart commenters to the language of the most aggressive far-right extremists online — e.g. language used by Twitter users who advocate for violence against minorities and are openly pro-Nazi — we can see a clear trend of increasing similarity over a three-year period, the bulk of it under Bannon.”

Continue reading The Uncanny in its new location, Medium.com…

The Search for Illumination: Education In the Penal Colony

 

In the penal colony | Nicholas S. Anderson

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By HECTOR VILA

for my mother, on her 91st birthday, 12/19, who tells me she wishes she were 30 so that she could once again teach kids about this world today and take to the streets

“I don’t know. I don’t think I can go to study abroad in Paris,” she says and hesitates and grins.

When she sits across from me, her shoulders are barely higher than my desktop. Her hijab frames her face perfectly: wide, inquisitive, dark eyes that are alive, dancing, penetrating; high cheekbones; her lips are full and when she smiles she gets small creases at the sides of her mouth that resemble ripples edging from the shore of a serene lake.

I ask why not?, though I know the answer: She’s from Sierra Leone and a Muslim.

“Even when I flew to Kenya,” she continues, still smiling, “the police at the airport stopped me — it was very scary — because they thought I was Somali. No one is safe — no one that looks like me. An African Muslim.”

She giggles a bit, this time as if to call attention to the tragic irony of it all.

This young woman, but nineteen, left her family and traveled from Sierra Leone to Hong Kong to the United States to the state of Vermont andMiddlebury College for an education. She’s earned scholarships all the way. She’s brilliant and will undoubtedly do great things in the future.

But reality is harsh; the world she — and all of us, really — navigate is dark, foreboding, threatening, many parts forbidden.

How then do we justify this world to our students? What do we tell her? Where’s opportunity now?

What is the educator’s role in addressing the harsh reality that not everyone has the right and capacity to move about freely in what we still falsely call the free world?

Continue reading…

2016 — What Barry Blitt’s New Yorker Covers Tell Us About the Year

Barry Blitt-The New Yorker

 

Let’s try something different. Let’s look at the year through the critical lens of one of the most profoundly effective and influential political cartoonists, Barry Blitt, whose dark humor is engaging, prophetic, and resolute. Blitt’s power is in his capacity to capture the essence of a person or a situation, while likewise describing the mood of the culture at-large.

Yes, I know, I’m talking about the elite New Yorker… but so, there’s something here.

At year’s end, we can conclude that 2016 has been harrowing, here in the USA and abroad — Iraq, Syria, Iran, still Afghanistan, Isis, nationalism on the rise, Brexit, the refugee crisis everywhere we look, walls on our southern border, rampant racism, violence, and the always ongoing disastrous confusion about guns, questions about cops, education in a crisis, the militarization and corporatizing of everything, a circus-like election, and, of course, president-elect Donald Trump pushing us kicking and screaming through the looking glass and into a potentially dark, parallel universe.

How did Blitt see the year? Let’s take a look, beginning with February….

continue reading here…

How We Got Into The Mess We’re In : The Moon Illusion & the Question of Thermonuclear War

“What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” (1839-1840)

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We are more at home with illusion than we are with the reality before us. It seems quite natural for us to walk away from facts when they don’t support our illusions — and our emotional attachments to them. Our minds and our eyes always fool us. We even reject the notion that they do — a catch 22 if there ever was one.

Consider this: Why does the moon look so much bigger when it is near the horizon?

Most scientists agree that the reason the moon looks bigger is purely in our minds. Our mind interprets the things we see in interesting ways.

Like facts.

One theory about the moon illusion says that when the moon is near the horizon we perceive it to be farther away from us than when it is high in the sky. But since the moon is actually the same size, our minds make it look bigger when it is near the horizon to compensate for the increased distance.

Like danger.

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Militarism , The Modern State & The Shape of Violence: The Palacio de Los Olvidados & Sefardi History of Granada

Granada, Spain — The modern state comes into being during the Middle Ages in Europe. It establishes what many economists call a social good, a strong military that (a) provides security for citizens, (b) gives room for nationalism, and (c) implements accountability. We have the right to live securely and without fear, the right to define a national identity, and to create the means by which to expand fortunes, guided by laws. The Modernaccountable State, there it is. And it’s all held together by taxation — people pay for protection, pay for nationalism, and pay for laws.

In the United States, the Pentagon budget, as reported by The Washington Post, consumes 80% of individual income tax revenue. The Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety. According to the Lexington Institute, the U.S. has 5% of the world’s population — but almost 50% of the world’s military expenditure. The military receives 54% of discretionary spending. To get all this done,Americans spend $27.7 billion a year preparing taxes. In 2008, GE made $10.3 billion in pre-tax income, but didn’t have to pay a single cent in taxes;Bank of America paid no taxes in 2009, even though it made $4.4 billion in income; and, Molson Coors paid no taxes in 2009, and was actually paid $14.7 million by the government.

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5 Writers Imagine America: Reflecting Forward, 2016

I’m casting an eye, first on who we were: 9 young women, 6 young men — 15 ambitious first years in all — and me, in a college seminar this past fall, 2015.

Ten beautiful, bright-eyed students, each, brought into my life their stories from Sudan, Canada, Korea, again Korea, China, Poland via Canada, dos Mejicanos, Palestine, and Serbia — that’s 10. NJ, GA, NYC (Manhattan), NYS (upstate), CA made up the rest of the dazzling class, 5 eager and industrious Americans with their own stories to tell.

I’m highly privileged, as you see. This is why I mention it: I’m looking at this too. With this kind of privilege, there’s much responsibility. To start, then, I’ll say that we’ll look at the 5 authors chronologically, following publication dates. At the very least, this places each author in an intellectual history. Contextualization like this will afford us the long view.

Long-range factors are already evident in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s America struggling for meaning in the face of brutal slavery — an initial extreme we can’t escape; the struggle continues today. As does our desire fortranscendence, to move beyond who we are and into dreams. I wonder what we hear now if we put Emerson’s American against the multi-racial, multi-ethnic, diverse, boisterous, cosmopolitan America of Adichie, the last of our authors in the seminar?

Want to read more (it takes 14 min)?  Go here…

The Cultivation of Hatred: A Brief History of Violence in America

Following American Violence and Education I was asked to take “another ride” on this subject and, following a workshop I was in this summer where, allegedly (it’s on film so I can’t deny it), I said that “we are all educators,” meaning those in and out of education proper, and that this makes us all somehow “responsible,” so, along these lines, I am taking another turn with The Cultivation of Hatred: A Brief History of Violence in America.

I am testing on Medium first since this is a good, well, “medium” to see what kinds of legs this approach has.  For those of you that measure these things, a la Medium, the 2444 word piece will take you 11 minutes to read. There are pictures and links to videos.

It begins like this :

In “The Dawn of Man” sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick introduces us to the usage of tools as “man” becomes an active element and gains the power of action over nature — tools make “man” an agent of change.

Paleolithic being discovers that the tool can protect and conquer; it can be used to advance one’s cause and eliminate all threat, kill it off — at least until an opponent engineers a more dastardly tool as we see in another Kubrick film, Dr. Strangelove, and the making of the Doomsday Machine, and in Dr. Seuss’ The Butter Battle Book — both narratives about mutually assured destruction.

So it begins, “man’s” intimate relationship with violence. It commences quite rationally: to protect and to serve one’s needs and the needs of one’s community. Can’t be more fundamental than that, more reasonable.

Read More …  and thank you!

American Violence and Education

I’ve been asked by Joe Brooks, my editor at Community Works Journal, to write something about the school shootings and education.  It was extremely hard for many reasons, but I’ve tried.  As I sometimes do, I’ll “test” the piece in Medium, first, and see how it runs; I’ll test it here, too.

So here it is: American Violence and Education

It begins thus:

I can’t make things out anymore. I don’t know what we’re doing. American culture is upside down and, as an educator, I have no idea what to do, what to say, how to find “the teachable moment.” I’m lost. I suspect we may all be feeling lost. The world outside the classroom is way too big, too harrowing, too confusing. Death and suffering have become all too common. It seems as if we’re operating in two distinctly different worlds, one is inside the classroom where we theorize, study, calculate, ponder, the other, outside the classroom, that world we dare only glance at from time-to-time, is brutal, relentless in its inhumane insistence that life is cheap.

In a course I’m working through Brent Easton Ellis’ disturbing, post-modern 1991 Gothic novel, American Psycho, giving the requisite warnings about the extremely graphic violence, because students wanted me to do so, differentiating between escapist literature (Hunger Games, 50 Shades of Gray, and so on), and Literature that means to have the reader turn inward, difficult as that is, and examine her life, the lives around her. American Psycho is the latter. Kids, our students, want to feel safe, be safe; they want to avoid “the horror” of it all; they don’t want to reside in the inhumanity outside our neat little classrooms.

But these worlds are clashing.

Continue reading…