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31 Oct 2003 @ 17:09
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 26 Oct 2003 @ 23:31
Illustration: Scott Mutter, The Escalator
"Each entered the forest at a point they, themselves, had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no path."
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 24 Oct 2003 @ 19:06
"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."
---Isaac Asimov, "Foundation"
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 21 Oct 2003 @ 19:11
A martial elite lies to its people about the need for war---and feels righteous about it.
Above and beyond the question of US credibility abroad looms a larger issue. Does the current administration believe in our institutions or does it think that something more transcendent, such as "manifest destiny" or maybe "divine providence" or just simply the belief that it "knows better", somehow supersedes those institutions and imbues it with some sort of a "mission," perceived or imagined, that gives it (in its mind) the right or the duty to govern by deception? More >
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 19 Oct 2003 @ 20:05
The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority.
---Stanley Milgram (1933-1984)
In 1958, Aldous Huxley wrote what might be called a sequel to his novel Brave New World, published in 1932, but it was a sequel that did not revisit the story or the characters, or re-enter the world of the novel. Instead, he revisited that world in a set of 12 essays. Taking a second look at specific aspects of the future imagined in Brave New World, Huxley meditated on how his fantasy seemed to be turning into reality, frighteningly and much more quickly than he had ever dreamed. More >
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 12 Oct 2003 @ 13:42
Snapshot from Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo's film (1966), IT HAPPENED HERE, a brilliant and chilling re-write of history.
A man once told me that conquest, a full century or more of war, the spreading of “civilization” by force, and democratization of the world at the point of a gun are the ways in which you “transform a generation” for the better. All I could do at the time was stare in horror at the sickness expressed in that comment.
--- Invictus
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 1 Oct 2003 @ 10:49
It has become almost a sacred dogma in our age of apathy that politics, centered on power and conflict and the quest for legitimacy and consensus, is essentially a study in expediency, a tortuous discovery of practical expedients that could reconcile contrary claims and secure a common if minimal goal or, at least, create the conditions in which different ends could be freely or collectively pursued. More >
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 16 Sep 2003 @ 16:35
Is it possible that we are all just clever versions of Chance the gardener? That we are trained from an early age to respond automatically to given words and concepts? That we never really think out much of anything for ourselves, but are content to repeat what works for others in the same situation?
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 7 Sep 2003 @ 13:49
Illustration: © J.P. Ferté
September 7
E. F. Schumacher observed
Economist
(1911 - 1977)
E. F. Schumacher was a prophet in the guise of an economist. He spent a lifetime mastering the principles of growth, savings, and the “invisible hand” of the market. Yet ultimately he became one of its most effective critics, alerting the world to the catastrophic consequences of the Western experiment in materialism. He wrote, “In the excitement over the unfolding of his scientific and technical powers, modern man has built a system of production that ravishes nature and a type of society the mutilates man.” And yet he was not content to denounce. He inspired hope that it was not too late to fashion an alternative society modeled on the human scale and responsive to the moral, aesthetic, spiritual, as well as material needs of human beings. More >
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 31 Aug 2003 @ 00:25
The Musing Muse
A collective production of THE MUSE, a room of/for/about Creative Writing open to all
1. ENQUIRING MUSE WANTS TO KNOW, a free-style, free-play bit of a reporting on and about NCN and its
members.
2. A CREATIVE GAZETTE about Creative Writing
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 23 Aug 2003 @ 17:14
Once you know everything, you're as good as dead—conceptually speaking. You can't grow. More >
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 21 Aug 2003 @ 11:09
The world could be different next week. It doesn't really depend on anything we don't already have. It doesn't really depend on money or politics or laws or astrology or science, except for to the degree that we believe it does.
---Flemming Funch, The Grand Illusion
Ay, there's the rub.
"At the quantum level our universe can be seen as an indeterminate place, predictable in a statistical way only when you employ large numbers. Between that universe and a relatively predictable one where the passage of a single planet can be timed to a picosecond, other forces come into play: THAT WHICH YOU BELIEVE IS A DOMINANT FORCE."
---Frank Herbert, Heretics of Dune
That which people believe is a dominant force.
Many fundamentalists see dying coral reefs, melting ice caps and other environmental destruction not as an urgent call to action but as God's will. Within the religious right worldview, the wreck of the earth is Good News! Or something Humankind needs not concern itself about. More >
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 17 Aug 2003 @ 17:01
The human effort is not this beautiful young man smiling upright on his leg of stone or of plaster, and giving, thanks to the puerile artifices of the sculptor, the imbecile illusion of joy, dance and jubilation while evoking with his other leg up in the air the sweetness of the return home. More >
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 11 Aug 2003 @ 12:26
At bottom, America is a dream, an idea. You can take away all our roads, our crops, our people, our cities, our armies - you can take all of that away, and the idea will still be there as pure and great as anything conceived by the human mind... More >
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 13 Jul 2003 @ 21:39
What ails thee?
We're in a situation now that's very much like the development of a butterfly in a chrysalis. The caterpillar's immune system is still trying to protect itself as a caterpillar---and to me, that's what our insistence on clinging to the oil age is all about. From a biological perspective, it's the job of the old system to protect itself as long as possible. But it's equally the job of the new system to rally its forces until it can overcome the old immune system and build the new.
---Elisabet Sahtouris, The wisdom of living systems
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 1 Jul 2003 @ 23:27
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 1 Jul 2003 @ 22:36
"In the fights in my life, I have always watched never to sever the fight for faith from the fight for justice and for the poor.
Otherwise, the deeds deny the faith and the faith is sterile."
---Father Pierre Ceyrac
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 18 Jun 2003 @ 04:51
Whom does the Grail serve?
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