From 9/11 to 11/9…

Fifteen years between these two dates. Seventy eight years since Kristallnacht…. Landmarks on the path to disillusionment. A road we’ve not seen the end of…. A road from complacency and an unearned certainty to humility. A humility we may feel we don’t deserve. A humility that brings us no where we wanted to go.

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

The Politics of Nostalgia

As any hope of an actual break with business-as-usual fades into the heat and glare of a summer in which discontent does not lead to action to address its causes; but becomes nothing more than a nuisance of disaffected noise signalling on both sides of our political theater that everyone – with the strongest push

By the time…

By the time we add in the complications and machinations of media it is damn impossible to know what is going on. Some call it Marketing 3.0….

The fantasy of control

So long as we keep expecting that what funnels through public discourse are choices that lead to results we are stuck in the nightmare fantasy of control. Brexit. Trump versus Clinton. All of the day’s public questions are mired in manipulations. We remain complicit so long as we feel we must make the choice our

An Exploration, navigating without a map.

I keep returning to the lessons of futility. We are admonished to, “Try harder!”in the face of that which we cannot change, leaving us spinning our wheels…. It has to do with cause & effect…. But this is only part of what’s going on.

What is at the root of our crisis of leadership?

We expect a leader to “play the part.” Anyone caught-up in roles has nothing to offer us in our predicament. Facing our predicament requires that we embrace uncertainty and set-aside the doing-things-twice role playing forces upon us. Someone acting in this way just does not, “Look like a leader.”

Gifts

long term effects of emotional abuse: a distrust in your perceptions a tendency to be fearful or on guard self-consciousness or fear of how you are coming across an inability to be spontaneous a distrust of people and in future relationships anger that bursts out unexpectedly sensitivity to anyone trying to control you This list

Build new cities?

We tend to think the concentration camp was something that came out of World War II. If we’re a bit more versed in western history we might think of the Boer War, or even the American Civil War…. But what is a concentration camp? How is it materially different from a city? Perhaps not a

From Chaos and Cry

Originally posted on Desperado Philosophy:
This past week, we have been mulling a question asked way back in the 1970s by Hans-Georg Gadamer, a question that still hangs heavily in the air above our heads all these years later: Are the Poets Falling Silent? With Gadamer, each word always carries its own complex ring; the…

Saying No to Facebook

The Violence Behind Likes and Opinions   I recently removed myself from Facebook. I joined reluctantly and have regretted it since the beginning. Was pushed along by expectation and crowd-mentality. I’ve long felt that Zuckerberg is the worst kind of nerd entrepreneur. Caught-up in fantasies of egotistical superiority requiring that he WIN at all costs

Startling Sleepwalkers, On the Prospects of Waking Them from Their Nightmares.

The New York Times article on Paul Kingsnorth and Dark Mountain. I’m left with a feeling that – if my response were to be reported in The New York Times – the headline would read, “Petulant Doomer Disappointed at Being Misunderstood!” As calm as this story is, its passive aggressive antibodies hidden from view by