 | Last login: 3 days agoLaodan is a guy from Milford, Pennsylvania, USA. Visit my website
THE WAY THINGS ARE: The meaning of life is to be found in thinking about what is reality and the beauty of reality is to be found in our DNA's memorization of all forms that have been successfully retained along the four billion years of evolution of the principle of life on Gaia our earth. In the end what I mean to say is that beauty is something objective and what we call ugliness is then simply our unconscientious feel of something evolution did not retain.
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- Links 6/1/09 & naked capitalism
 Jun 1, 6:51am  (1 review) animals http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/06/l...- Antidote du jour.
in Naked Capitalism by Yves Smith
A family that lives on the outskirts of Milford, PA in Pike County decided to build a sturdy, colorful playground for their 3 and 4 year old sons. They lined the bottom with smooth-stone gravel all around to avoid knee scrapes and other injuries. They finished building it one Friday evening and were very pleased with the end product.
The following morning, the mom was about to wake up the boys and have them go out to play in their new play center. This is what she saw from the upstairs window.
 Antidote du jour.
Yves Smith blogs daily about economic and financial matters. Most often the news is demoralizing these days and to counter this she posts a daily "Antidote du jour" in the form of pictures of the animal world.
The scene of today's antidote takes place in Milford pa which is also where I live.
- Google Reader
- Apr 24, 5:27pm
 (131 reviews) energy, freetools http://www.google.com/reader/view/ - FreakAngels Episode 0053
by Warren Ellis and illustrated by Paul Duffield
Over on Freakangels, our heroes are experimenting with post-apocalyptic solar power.
FREAKANGELS is a free, weekly, ongoing comic written by Warren Ellis and illustrated by Paul Duffield.
FreakAngels
Stumbling on this site via WorldChanging I thought about my friend RenRutia. But while those FreakAngels guys have a quite traditional style RenRutia's style remembers me of the work of Crumb who is my favorite cartoonist.
- Question: Can We Design The Next-Evolution of Community? | Twine
- Apr 22, 12:47pm (1 review) evolution, society, change http://www.twine.com/item/126yynwfv-mc/q...
- Question: Can We Design The Next-Evolution of Community?
on Twine by Nova Spivek
I've been thinking about community lately. There is a great need for a new and better model for communities in the world today.
Our present communities are not working and most are breaking down or stagnating. Cities are experiencing urbanization and a host of ensuing social and economic challenges. Meanwhile the movement towards cities has drained the people -- particularly young professionals -- away from rural communities, causing them to stagnate and decline.
Question: Can We Design The Next-Evolution of Community?
My take on the question
My personal take is that "The Next-Evolution of Community" is out of our hands. It will result as a new realignment or balance of the near infinite load of factors interacting in the "whole earth ensemble" or "whole earth system": climate, resources, species, humanity, etc. This in no way implies any determinism. We are faced with many possible outcomes.
Our dreams and visions of a better tomorrow will eventually bring us to act as a nano-push on the unfolding balance between those many possibles.
"I believe that what we do today depends on our image of the future, rather than the future depending on what we do today. We build our equations by our actions. These equations, and the future they represent, are not written in nature. In other words, time becomes construction. Of course, we have some conditions that determine limits of the future but within these limits are many, many possibilities.
Therefore, since no deterministic prediction is likely to be valid, visions of the future--utopian visions--play a very important role in present conduct." (quote of Ilya Prigogine from an interview by NPq of Fall 2004 titled "Beyond Being and Becoming")
Just read this piece in
 Scientific American concluding that "Engaging in rituals involving rhythmic synchrony might not only have bound us together in cooperative groups: they might have brought us together to practice the very skills essential to survival."
- Bill Moyers Journal: Sharing the Blame for the Economic Crisis?
- Apr 5, 5:36pm (2 reviews) politics http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/blog/2...
- Sharing the Blame for the Economic Crisis?
Bill Moyers interviews Bill Black on PBS
Discussing the roots of the economic crisis with Bill Moyers on this week's JOURNAL, former regulator Bill Black said that much of the blame lies with lenders for issuing "liars" loans, in which borrowers claims about their financial situation were not verified.
Were lenders committing fraud?
Sharing the Blame for the Economic Crisis?
youtube.com/watch [youtube.com/watch]
youtube.com/watch [youtube.com/watch]
youtube.com/watch [youtube.com/watch]
The fraud of the century by the banksters.
Please diffuse this interview. It's the best we have to counteract...
This needs to go viral.
- Le "pire" spectacle du chorégraphe Jan Fabre - Culture - Le Monde.fr
- Apr 2, 7:58pm (1 review) society, worldviews http://www.lemonde.fr/culture/article/20...
- L'Orgie de la tolerance
a one-sided review by Rosita Boisseau in Le Monde
Il n'y a que le metteur en scene et plasticien flamand qui puisse chausser des sabots aussi gros et oser une telle surchauffe au demarrage. Le titre du spectacle, L'Orgie de la tolerance, lui ressemble et met le curseur au niveau ad hoc : en dessous de la ceinture. C'est a prendre ou a laisser.
Au royaume du politiquement correct et des faux-culs, Fabre propose une alternative devastatrice. Programmee au Festival d'Avignon, L'Orgie de la tolerance signe le crepuscule de l'humanite dans un rire d'ogre, une demesure rageuse et vengeresse.
L'Orgie de la tolerance
The orgy of tolerance is a piece I wish I could see. I understand from where comes the vitriolic critique of Rosita Boisseau. It has to do with the contrast between a certain snobbish Parisian lightness and a down to earth Flemish passion for life and believe me I know what I'm speaking about. I know both attitudes intimately for having lived within both areas during my earlier years.
But this choc between Parisian lightness and Flemish passion for life is not what I'm interested in here. It's "the orgy of tolerance" that interests me. It is something that resonates particularly in Dutch Europe. it seems to have started in Holland as a reaction toward what was perceived as an invasion by Muslim fundamentalism. Theo Van Gogh's assassination by a Muslim fanatic (Vincent brother's great grand-son who was a movie maker), a few years earlier, had repulsed the Hollandish who were the most tolerant white people since as early as the reformation. What caught my eye was that Flanders seems now to follow Holland.
- Culture Change - Bill McKibben and the Technofixers Tragic Myopia
- Apr 2, 2:12pm (1 review) change, worldviews http://www.culturechange.org/cms/index.p...
- The Technofixers' Tragic Myopia
in Culure Change by Jan Lundberg
Like all the global-warming commentators who between them get almost all the press that's not pro-fossil fuels, Bill McKibben is trapped in the faulty logic of the technofix. To understand the pseudo-green vision, read McKibben's recent essay "The Fierce Urgency of Now" that appeared in the Toronto Star and the Common Dreams website.
The Technofixers' Tragic Myopia
The fierce urgency of now
As always the vanguard is being recuperated when the elites discover that there is no way out within the path of their traditional ways. When what was the norm does not work any longer the elites take over the reasoning of the vanguard while dressing it with its own sauce and that's how the vanguard's message is being turned on its head.
This particular moment in history is no different.
Green is now the buzzword. Anywhere one looks the marketeers have taken over the buzz... but recuperation sloganeering denatures. Green now means the continuation of the old ways through the use of technologies that were initially propagated by the ecological movance. What has changed is the economics. The ecological movance saw such green technologies applied locally in a communitarian fashion but the corporate take-over of the green buzz-word displaced the application of such green technologies from communitarian use value to corporate exchange value generating profit.
This corporate take-over is also breaking the ecological movance in two.
On one side are those who feel vindicated and satisfied with the corporate take-over.
On the other side are those who SEE and understand that ecology is a systemic approach that integrates the various sub-systems of a societal approach based on communitarian use value. In other words those who reject the corporate take-over have a vision and idea of a future society that is no longer powered by the logic of capital.
The logic of capital is a totalitarian concept applied on a global scale by the corporate elite while communitarian use value is a people's concept practiced on a local regional base.
Communitarian use value does not reject long distance exchanges. Those are conceived as a mutually beneficial exchange between regions being totally detached from the totalitarian control of the logic of capital.
Mutually beneficial exchange is thus the anti-thesis to the logic of capital.
This for sure implies that corporate structures are being countered by regional popular structures! But this is another subject.
On the same subject see:
Facing Decline, Facing Ourselves by John Michael Greer in The Archdruid Report
Sacred Demise: Walking the Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization's Collapse new book by Carolyn Baker
- The New York Times & Log In
- Mar 22, 8:07am (1 review) economics, society, finance, change http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/opinio...
- Has a "Katrina Moment" Arrived?
in the NYT by FRANK RICH
What made Jon Stewart's takedown of Jim Cramer resonate was less his specific brief against CNBC's cheerleading for bad stocks than his larger indictment of the gaping economic inequality that defined the bubble. As Stewart said, there were 'two markets' "the long-term market that Americans earnestly thought would sustain their 401(k)'s, and the fast-moving, short-term 'real market' in the back room where high-rolling insiders wagered 'giant piles of money' and brought down everyone with them.
... why has there been so little transparency and so much evasiveness so far? The answer, I fear, is that too many of the administration's officials are too marinated in the insiders' culture to police it, reform it or own up to their own past complicity with it.
Has a "Katrina Moment" Arrived?
The A.I.G. Bonuses: A National Furor
Those of us who follow closely the developments of this economic and financial crisis have known since the first days of the Obama administration that, while the president is a smart guy, he just does not get the economic and financial reality. As Frank Rich writes ...too many of the administration's officials are too marinated in the insiders' culture to police it.
Now that populist rage has intensified dramatically will Obama come to his senses? It does not seems so. The title of Rich's article asks the right question. Obama does not seem to be able to act forcefully which drives his administration straight into paralysis.
It seems to me that the present financial crisis could have been transformed into one of those rare opportunities toward radical action but the ineffectuality of Obama's economic and financial team is destroying that opportunity. This could very well, in turn, destroy any other initiatives of this administration. What a shame!
- The Big Takeover : Rolling Stone
- Mar 21, 8:21pm (61 reviews) economics http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/sto...
- The Big Takeover
in RollingStones by MATT TAIBBI
The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution
So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we're still in denial \u2014 we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream.
The Big Takeover
Populism is back with a vengeance. Check these:
youtube.com/watch [youtube.com/watch]
Had Enough FRAUD America? by Karl Denninger
Who could be astonished if one day this populism transforms into violence?
- Canadian Military Units To Undertake “Domestic Security”
- Mar 18, 7:36am (1 review) economics, society, order, change http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?c...
- Canadian Military Units To Undertake "Domestic Security"
in Global research Canada by Paul Joseph Watson
"The Canadian military has embarked on a wide-ranging plan to turn its reserve soldiers into focused units trained and equipped to respond to a nightmarish array of domestic threats," reports the National Post.
The militarization of law enforcement duties in the U.S., Canada and Britain is accelerating at a pace never before seen.
Last week it was revealed that the British Army is on standby to deal with rioting on UK streets as a result of the economic crisis, according to a newspaper report, which states that MI5 is targeting political activists who could help create a "summer of discontent".
Meanwhile, in the U.S., urban warfare training drills are taking place across the country as Northcom announces that tens of thousands of active duty troops will be stationed inside the U.S. for domestic purposes.
The U.S. Army War College in November released a white paper called Known Unknowns: Unconventional "Strategic Shocks" in Defense Strategy Development. The report warned that the military must be prepared for a "violent, strategic dislocation inside the United States," which could be provoked by "cunforeseen economic collapse," "purposeful domestic resistance," "pervasive public health emergencies" or "loss of functioning political and legal order." The "widespread civil violence," the document said, "would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security."
Canadian Military Units To Undertake "Domestic Security"
Military readies reservists for threats to 'domestic front' Adrian Humphreys, National Post, March 04, 2009
Is anyone shocked?
If the powers to be go as far as to prepare for internal unrest it is because they know that such unrest is going to take place in the foreseeable future. This has nothing to do with the threat of external terrorism. It concerns instability emerging from within the borders of Western societies due to economic dislocations following, perhaps a financial collapse, perhaps skyrocketing energy prices due to "peak oil", perhaps a drastically diminished economic cloud following the realignment of economic forces in the wake of the present financial shock, or perhaps other scenarios not yet documented...
So what to think? Those who detain power always try to keep it. Be it in a dictatorship as China or be it in Western democracies power is in the hands of a small elite. In China it is in the hands of the leadership of the communist party. In Western countries power is in the hands of the establishment that is comprised of the biggest capital holders in the banks, the media, the universities, etc. We better be informed about this very basic fact that those people are committed to do what it takes to preserve their power. So we the citizens, whatever action we might privilege, should only act in full knowledge of the fact that power seeks to guarantee its preservation.
- Sticky post · Mar 17, 5:34pm
- Sticky post
 Daily shared .. My daily shared web discoveries on friendfeed.
Crucial talk .. Personal blog about art.
Web Gallery .. Paintings, digitals, prints, tapestries, paper-cuts.
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Book .. About the meaning and societal function of visual arts.
I'm interested in the meaning of life and I think that it resides in thinking about what is human reality. Society being an assembling of individuals it finds its cohesion through the sharing by all of a common worldview (thinking about what is reality by the men of knowledge of the day). I use this blog as a tool to collect and store the most significant info about today's cultural, scientific, and economic changes that, I believe, are shaping the contours of an emerging post-modern "global worldview" that is humanity's best hope to cope with the accumulating side-effects of modernity. My comments are like first draft material that I later use when writing articles and those articles serve as the articulation of more elaborate works. (written or visual)
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