The Space We Need

Art school was where I learned that success was a trap. How limited my teachers were. Experts. Hemmed in by reduction. It would take thirty-five years for this to sink in. Not surprising if you consider the trajectory of the intervening decades, beginning with the height of their positions at the time. The accumulated authority

It’s not a process…

It may be, then, that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and that when we no longer know which way to go we have

Coherence is not reasonable.

This statement demands clarification. Coherence it is not a synonym for reason, reasoned, reasonable. Neither is incoherence: unreason, unreasonable, unreasoned. The key to understanding coherence lies at the root of these distinctions. I’ve found this talk given by Anthony McCann valuable in illuminating this distinction. Anthony uses language centered around what he calls Gentleness. His

On Being Outside, a meditation on precarity

Vinay Gupta wrote a piece recently, The Subtle Art of Precarity. It’s a nice article, and an interesting neologism, precarity. It relates to a familiarity and even comfort with being on the edge. His thesis, one I’ve long ascribed to, that as we get deeper into collapse the crises of leadership and expertise drive, and

Austerity, and the Ways We Disguise What We Lack

Austerity, a term that’s been hijacked by financial criminals to cover their extortion. What else could it possibly mean other than a gloss, a moralistic veneer poured over the dismantling of the lives of great masses of people so as to mine whatever whiff of monetary “value” they might still have lodged in the corners

Quid Pro Quo

Effectiveness is coupled with having a workable set of controls. We can even be effective if we are saddled with cross-wired controls – so long as we compensate for them and learn how they actually work.

Digested by the Spectacle

Once again violence breaks the surface in a way that brings it home even to those of us far removed from the incident. The shootings in Tuscon have joined the list of assassinations that have punctuated my life time. In all that time I can think of only two “Right Wing” victims, – George Wallace

It’s not fair! It’s too everything!

In this case these are geneticists and they are reacting to findings that inheritance isn’t as simple as they’d wished it to be. The genome isn’t a set of instructions, a simple algorithm that leads to a predestined result, that can be predicted and manipulated at will if you own the shiny equipment paid for by people made ill with the diseases brought on by a culture that puts everything in the world into making shiny equipment.

The Mainstream’s Misunderstanding, Part 2

The “crises,” the “disasters,” the “mistakes,” and “unforeseeable” consequences that inundate our lives today are not any of those things. They are not the system perverted or de-railed, they are the system expressing itself exactly as such a system would and does and will express itself.

Imbeciles with High IQs

He says, in brief, that any culture advanced enough to be capable of interstellar space travel will be such über-consuming colonizing depradating monsters that we would stand as much chance of surviving contact with them as a West African on the arrival of Shell, or an Amazonian on meeting Rio Tinto.

Expertise

In this case, even as we see the collapse of specialized, narrow-view expertise in every part of our public life, we have taken in the assumptions on which their “authority” was based, and strive to act the same way when we make our own decisions. This is a detail within the wider success of the modern world-view. It has been able to dominate without generating an elevated concern amongst its victims that it is coercing them into accepting its premises. Where earlier “tyrannies” wore their coercive powers”on their sleeves,” the current system has internalized them within its individual members.

Enormity

In a recent mini-blog post Seth Godin makes the following observation: Enormity Enormity doesn’t mean really enormous. It means incredibly horrible. 
The problem with enormity in marketing is that it doesn’t work. Enormity should pull at our heartstrings, but it usually shuts us down. Show us too many sick kids, unfair imprisonments or burned bodies