Musing on Medusa, Reflections on the Gorgon’s Head

Those of us who fear chaos, through our efforts to control chaos, bring about more chaos, a more virulent chaos, a more violent chaos.

Whiteness, a Community of Narcissists

This post was drafted in August of 2015. At the time I was concerned whether it was complete enough. Whether it said enough. On looking it over today I am struck by how this theme has continued to strike us day after day. And how little, outside of the works of James Baldwin and his

“Let’s be realistic!”

We feel the weight of this admonition upon us everywhere we turn. It stands like a wall between us and it echoes in our minds. We take it as a warning. In fact it is our prison.

Drowning in facts

You might say we’re drowning in facts. We have enough information before us to come to valuable conclusions concerning how we’re trapped in a vicious dynamic that can have no happy outcome. A dozen times a day we can realize how a particular institution or corporation is acting to further destruction. And…? We click on

There Is a Gulf Between Foraging and Mining

There is a gulf between two attitudes and ways of working that can be described by looking at the distance between foraging and mining. When we forage we gather what we need. We also limit our effort. If a spot is too resistant to our efforts; if what we’re after is scarce; we move on.

How do we integrate in the face of bad faith?

This title is not rhetorical. How do we?

So much that is irrelevant…

How do we move beyond rebellion? Implicit in this question – if it is to be anything but futile – is another, How do we keep from cycling back around? Only to end up that much further down the same barren path?

Cause & Effect

The greatest difficulty when we turn our attention on something like Cause & Effect comes from the astounding inertia of conditioned assumptions. To make a case that Cause & Effect is an illusion is to put one frail voice up against thousands of years of common sense. This is why it’s so important to sort

New Stories to counter the Thaumaturgy of Destruction

…every malign spell has a lie at the heart of it, and if you can expose the lie in a way that the person under the spell can see and understand, the lie dissolves and takes the spell with it. It’s like the old claim that a demon can never change itself wholly out of

The Dark Economy

After a long transition we’ve gone from having a major world economy that takes place out in the open to one in which all meaningful – by the judgment of those in charge of it – activity takes place within a Dark Economy that is completely hidden from public view. The parasite on the parasite

This Means War!

Rufus T. Firefly scuttling center stage to make his pronouncement…. There’s always a hidden glee behind the crowd’s reaction. “Before, I had to hold it together. Now? I can let go. A free pass. No resort is too extreme. We’re at war.” The next stage is the rush to, “Get in the fight!” After all,

Questions of Identity

Schools fail us by teaching students how to work with knowledge rather than how to deal with ignorance, not be a sucker with the unknown. Nassim Taleb This neither begins nor ends with schools. In a time when the most popular public stance is to celebrate our fears and idolize those who act on them