Truthout.org's Dahr Jamail

Truthout needs help in explaining what they are doing.  Dahr Jamail needs help in explaining what Truthout is doing.

I would like to help Truthout and Dahr Jamail better explain what Truthout is doing, and if ‘they got it’, then I could ‘make a donation’.

Since they won’t** publish my comments on ‘A Special Note From Dahr Jamail’ http://www.truthout.org/a-special-note-from-dahr-jamail58752 I am publishing them herewith.

[[**After two exchanges with a Truthout Technical Administrator, my comment in its original form was indeed published, ... Thank you, Truthout!]]

[[**I spoke too soon.  The technical types at Truthout restored my post TWICE  but then it selectively disappears leaving the 'usual' sort of comments without mine.]]

Here’s the problem.  Imagine that Truthout is doing a story on the plight of Jean Valjean who was jailed for 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread.  The ‘mainstream media’ is on a ‘law-and-order’ kick and they praise the diligent work of Inspector Javert for bringing Valjean to justice.  Valjean’s testimony that he couldn’t bear to hear starving children crying with hunger, according to Javert, does not justify breaking the law.

Were Truthout to report on this, they would accuse the conservative ‘mainstream media’ of deceit.   Read the rest of this entry »

spatial habitat-inhabitant resonances orchestrating individual and collective behaviour

The argument between the ‘Pro-Life’ and ‘Pro-Choice’ factions might take on a very different complexion if the notion of ‘choice’ were to be examined more closely.

In particular, the notion of human ‘control’ over ‘population’ could be exposed as an artefact of science confusing ‘idealised models’ for ‘reality’.  Human beings are not ‘in control’, not when they are understood as being ‘a strand in the interdependent, mutually supportive ‘web-of-life’.  When they/we label insects as ‘pests’ and attempt to ‘control their population’, we are spitting on the web and in so doing, we spit on ourselves.  When they/we identify and label bacteria as ‘pathogens’ and attempt to ‘control their population’, we are spitting on the web and in so doing, we spit on ourselves (keeping things in ‘resonant’ balance is another matter).  As Pasteur said, in refuting his own ‘germ theory’ which labeled microbes ‘pathogens’, and as Hippocrates had said before him, when one lives in a web of interdependencies within a dynamic space (Nature) that one is merely an inclusion in (man did not invent it but was invented by it), the issue is not ‘control’ but ‘sustaining balance and harmony’. Read the rest of this entry »

In the sixties, Anthropologist Jules Henry hit the nail on the head in ‘Culture Against Man’ (1963), saying that culture makes us live absurd lives.

Culture has us running around like electrons in a magnetic field.  ‘Tensions’ that we can feel, shape our individual and collective behaviour.  Racial tensions between ‘blacks’ and ‘whites’ (whether they began from intellectual notions of inherent white racial supremacy or whatever) induced blacks to use separate eating places, toilets, seating at the back of the bus and it induced outrage in whites if blacks did not show deference to their (self-declared) ‘superiors’, those of the white race.

‘Tensions’ within a culture shape more individual and collective behaviours than ‘race relations’.  They can also trigger actions in the explosive manner that tensions in the earth trigger earthquakes.   Powerful ‘tensions’ that we associate with symbolic meaning (the quasi-religious meaning of white and black skin, of a national flag, of a cow in India, or a pig in Israel etc.) suggest that homo sapiens should have been called ‘homo symbolicus’.  But since our response to symbolic meaning keeps us living absurd lives, it has also been suggested that homo sapiens should have been called ‘homo absurdus’. Read the rest of this entry »

What if scientists had labelled ‘field’, ‘spirit’, instead of field?  Would science and religion then be ‘more together’?

Buoyant spirits ................................... Sinking spirits

‘Spirit’ seems to be a property of nature that shows through in the dynamics of the diverse forms in nature.

However, our western culture decided to build a common worldview based on material existence rather than ‘field’, and we are so heavily invested in it now, that doing a ‘retro-fit’ to put ‘field’ or ‘spirit’ first, is like the proverbial ‘changing tires on a car while it is speeding down the freeway’. Read the rest of this entry »

One can understand very well Emerson’s view of ‘evolution’ and how it is more truthful to life and experience than Darwin’s, if and only if one trains one’s ‘mind’ to suspend acculturated ‘perception framing habits’.

Without suspending these habits, it is pointless to ‘debate’ an Emersonian ‘worldview’ with others.  Emerson realized this and would not accept invitations to debate his views with those who were clearly coming from a different set of basic ‘framing’ assumptions than he.  There would be no point since, by coming from different foundations, the two would be talking at crossed purposes, unless they preceded their debate with a debate on those different foundations.

Emerson declared what his were, but many people didn’t listen, so in spite of Emerson’s readings and writings being extraordinarily inspirational, the logicians working them over concluded that they boiled down to nothing tangible and usable, that they were all ‘smoke and mirrors’ e.g;

“Dr. Burnap of Baltimore described Transcendentalism as “a new philosophy which has risen, maintaining that nothing is everything in general, and everything is nothing in particular.”” Read the rest of this entry »

darwin................................... emerson....................................newton

Darwin, pausing briefly on the wave-washed decks of the Beagle, contemplated how close to the edge of an early ‘recycling’ in nature that the ship, its crew and passengers were now hanging.  The thought of the ship being broken open by the sea and its plummeting descent to a peaceful resting place in the briny depths was not entirely unpleasant, in view of how it would bring an end to his frightful mal-de-mer.  On the sea bottom, his body would be food for algae and the algae would be food for plankton and the plankton food for fish.  Some other human mariner would eat that fish that ate the plankton that ate the algae that ate Charles Darwin and the circle of life would go on.  In his log he wrote;

“In the Bay of Biscay there was a long and continued swell, and the misery I endured from seasickness is far far beyond what I ever guessed  … Nobody who has only been to sea for 24 hours has a right to say that sea-sickness is even uncomfortable. The real misery only begins when you are so exhausted that a little exertion makes a feeling of faintness come on.”  — ‘Charles Darwin and the voyage of the Beagle’. Read the rest of this entry »

Chief Dan George, ........................... Erwin Schroedinger, ........................ Albert Einstein

Chief Dan George: Welcome, Erwin, Albert, let us start by paying tribute to the rocks which make Turtle Island possible for us to sit together here, patient bearers of moss and bird droppings (… mind yourself there, Erwin), we salute you, and we salute as well all of the four-leggeds, two-leggeds, rooted and winged ones, the running waters that transport us, the fresh winds that breathe life into us, and the sun now shining brightly above us which warms our brows and brings flowers from the earth to brighten our spirits.   We are but strands in this web-of-life though our proud words often take us captive and have us strut about as if we were its owners. Read the rest of this entry »