squareONE explorations

[Patriotism] I venture to suggest that what we mean is a sense of national responsibility which will enable America to remain master of her power—-to walk with it in serenity and wisdom, with self-respect and the respect of all mankind; a patriotism that puts country ahead of self; a patriotism which is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime. These are words that are easy to utter, but this is a mighty assignment. For it is often easier to fight for principles than to live up to them. –Adlai Stevenson

High gas prices threaten to drain small towns’ populations
By DONALD BRADLEY
The Kansas City Star

The expected exodus from small towns, said Don Macke, a widely considered authority on rural economics and head of the Center for Rural Entrepreneurship in Lincoln, Neb., will be far more profound than the gradual erosion that has been going on since World War II. That decline was due to the country’s shift away from an agrarian economy and a choice for convenience: People wanted to be closer to jobs, shopping and entertainment.

The new flight, Macke thinks, will be more out of necessity.

Most commuters from small towns are high school graduates. They are driving 50 miles or more to work as school cooks, hospital aides, office workers, dental assistants and unskilled factory workers.

“The reality is that those jobs don’t pay all that well,” said Macke, who is also a visiting scholar with the Rural Policy Research Institute at the University of Missouri. “They’re spending up to $500 a month on gas. A third to half is already technically working poor.

“And as gas goes higher, they will get poorer and these towns will soon struggle to hold on to these people.”

Reposted. New York Times today: Rethinking the Country Life As Energy Costs Rise

Though Mr. Boyle finds city life unappealing, it is now up for reconsideration.

“Living closer in, in a smaller space, where you don’t have that commute,” he said. “It’s definitely something we talk about. Before it was ‘we spend too much time driving.’ Now, it’s ‘we spend too much time and money driving.’ ”

Posted 6/23 under Urban Dynamics, at the Lakewood Observer Observation Deck. (It waits for the moderator’s approval.)

…return of the inner ring. If you scratch out a calculation of the difference between driving a sixty mile round trip to work in a 15mpg guzzler and a twenty mile round trip in a 30mpg compact car, the difference in monetary overhead is obvious.

Although employment is widely distributed in NEO, living close to work offers a premium as far as overhead goes that over time may begin to amplify the advantages of living closer to the work site.

I’ll be tracking this issue. It may start to become apparent that there might be a ‘critical mass’ point at which time the inner ring becomes the place to live simply as a matter of the cost of commuting. Also, I do not know, (but could find out!) if a 5,000+ sq.ft Mcmansion is cheaper to climate control than a 50+ year old legacy <3,000 sq.ft, but there too is an opportunity to retrofit or otherwise modernize with the purpose of cutting householder overhead.

(I’ve long maintained that communitarian efforts to help people live within their means at all levels is a hidden factor in stabilizing and sustaining [a city and] civic benefits.)

See also
Christopher Williams: The Per Gallon Cost of White Flight (TPM Cafe)

I offer that high fuel costs and other energy dependent costs will have the effect of bringing people –first at the level of the local community–together to do problem solving. This prospect seems apparent when I play out various scenarios. I’m reminded the pioneers circled the wagons and this was a communal act.

It follows from this idea that processes of social isolation, territoriality, suburban status seeking, and what I would term the situation posing everybody in their own lifeboat, are each related and dynamic consequences of cheap energy.

(Of course Ivan Illich pointed this out in different terms a long time ago.)

George Carlin, truth teller.

The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they’re an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They’ve got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying – lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else.

But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. You know what they want? Obedient workers – people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they’re coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. [video]

From June 10, 2007: US States Renamed For Countries With Similar GDPs. From the always mind boggling strangemaps blog.

C. Otto Scharmer speaks here of Theory U. It’s a terrific book even if it contains too many non-nutritional exhortations. Coming out of the various vectors of constructivism, integralism, and, modern adult learning theory, both Theory U. and the earlier Presence (Senge, Scharmer, et al.,) both demand and deserve attention and study.

Favorite droll turn on cogito ergo sum*: I think therefore I think I am. Possibly better: I think therefore I think I am thinking.

Best:

You are your epistemology. (Gregory Bateson)

I’ve always stuck with John Lilly’s:

My beliefs are unbelievable.

In this context, why not: “My thoughts are unthinkable.”

???

* But I have convinced myself that there is absolutely nothing in the world, no sky, no earth, no minds, no bodies. Does it now follow that I too do not exist? No. If I convinced myself of something [or thought anything at all] then I certainly existed. But there is a deceiver of supreme power and cunning who is deliberately and constantly deceiving me. In that case I too undoubtedly exist, if he is deceiving me; and let him deceive me as much as he can, he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I think that I am something. So, after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that the proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind. (Rene Descarte)

Alan Watts:Transcending Duality

Reader: Coleman Barks

This ideological approach is needed to legitimate predominant relations of domination (obtaining primarily among a ruling elite of experts, professionals, politicians, etc., and a well-administered citizenry) as being neutral and natural. Not only does this framework require automatic dismissal of all other modes of political organization, but also discrediting ideas perceived to be their ideological foundations. The result is a series of distortions and misinterpretations, which instead of defending and strengthening American institutions as claimed, weaken and undermine them by systematically occluding their real nature, and redefining them in extraneous “republican” terms–terms abstracted from European political realities brought about by the French Revolution. It is paradoxical that a European thinker such as Schmitt, whose entire career was focused primarily on strictly European problems, provides some of the most powerful conceptual tools to make sense of this peculiar predicament–including the idiosyncratic reaction to his ideas by managerial-liberal apologists, who see him as a major threat to the oxymoronic system they describe as liberal-democracy. 

Trapped within the metaphysical parameters of a unidirectional theory of history that can interpret radical differences only as deviations or pathologies, managerial-liberal thought confronts the 20th and now the 21st century through obsolete, historically-specific categories hypostatized to the level of universality. The result is the homogenization of history and the elimination of particularity. When not dismissing it outright, such a de facto Manichean approach can deal with “the other” only as a variation on the same. Thus, whenever otherness appears, it must either be persuaded back into full sameness or else summarily liquidated as evil. Despite all the rhetoric about openness through “undistorted communication” and interminable dialogue, participation in discussions and deliberations is conditional on the prior acceptance of unchallengeable rules concerning a formal rationality and mode of discourse which automatically exclude all but those intellectuals and professionals fully initiated into the predominant jargon. (5) Consequently, confrontation with “the other” cannot result in any Hegelian transcendence, whereby development takes place by internalizing and thus coopting the opponent’s moment of truth, but freezes radically opposing positions into a stalemate that only perpetuates conflict ad infinitum–pending resolution by other means. It is never a matter of reintegrating the radical opponent’s counter-claims, but of either demanding capitulation or proceeding with outright rejection.

Within such a dogmatic scientistic context pretending to be ideologically neutral, history becomes straightjacketed as an ontogenetic reconstruction of the triumphal march of managerial-liberal thought. Particular categories developed within particular contexts to explain particular phenomena are automatically integrated within the predominant universalist framework to apply anywhere, anytime. The same happens with particular political ideologies. Thus, competing systems such as Nazism, fascism and communism–and now even Islamic integralism–are not only systematically misinterpreted, but, like liberalism, also universalized as permanent threats to a managerial liberalism hypostatized as the natural outcome of evolution and, therefore, as normal and natural.

Uses and abuses of Carl Schmitt
Paul Piccone and Gary Ulmen

Another excerpt under the fold.

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The following could serve as the subject of an assignment: What’s wrong at the level of assumptions found in the following argument?

I’ve provided some helpful italicizing.

At the second gathering of the teachers of Integral Spiritual Center, Patrick Sweeney famously asked Ken Wilber, “what can we do to stay out of Appendix III of Integral Spirituality?” In “The Myth of the Given,” Ken surveys some major modern approaches to spirituality, and demonstrates via AQAL their partiality—and how that partiality might be remedied.

It’s sobering to consider that so many of today’s most eminent teachers are partial! But as Ken points out, Appendix III (and the Integral approach in general) is meant not so much to point out that partiality as to highlight expertise in a highly specialized area. AQAL is an incredible tool for both situating various approaches and for understanding how they are related to each other. To the extent that the conclusions of these approaches fall within their area of expertise, they are most assuredly true. But to the extent that their conclusions overstep their area of expertise, a broader context such as AQAL can be enormously helpful.

The potency of AQAL to situate various approaches derives from its own formulation. Take, for example, the field of psychology. Ken points out that there are six major schools of psychology, each advanced by brilliant researchers who pioneered a particular approach to the field. Ken’s approach was to ask “what must be the characteristics of the human mind, such that the major conclusions of each of these schools could hold true?” His goal, rather than to work within one of the major schools to further its particular conclusions, was to reverse-engineer the human psyche—indeed, the entire Kosmos—altogether. source: ISC Editor’s Weekly Blog

Sometime in the near future I will highlight a very fine paper that does employ AQAL to accurately situate various perspectives in the field of organizational behavior. It is one of the few such integral overviews–rooted to a discipline–that is expert enough in a ‘meta-disciplinary’ sense to provide a lot of value.

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A mentor emphasized: “Beware of the agenda behind the agenda.” This advice has stood the test of time.

Note my ol’ nickname has been added over the dog. This does capture my mildly passive-aggressive puppie nature.

Married Susan Friday in a short and sweet civil ceremony in Shaker Heights, Ohio. After 15 years of being lovingly partnered, it’s okay to ask what changes now? Change happens, yet, what’s wonderful for me is that our fundamental deep friendship evoked the changes, whatever they are and turn out to be, and I couldn’t be more enthusiastic about growing old with my incredibly kind and spirited best friend.

I don’t have a harsh judgment to levy against Hillary Clinton in the aftermath of her answering the question about, implicitly, her tenacity in the face of long odds and about party unity at the end of the process. There’s a reason for my being circumspect.

It’s that the incident takes a specific psychological form and consequently its reasons are psychological.

If someone answers a question you’ve posed to them in a way that promotes your thinking to yourself, “I can’t believe he had the thought, let alone spoke it, and in doing so spiked his own self interest!” it is likely that this answer is affect-laden and its dominant is subjective. In suggesting this, such an answer is against other possible answers, including rational, well-rehearsed answers. (The question Hillary was asked about when she thought the nomination would be decided was not in any way a question from left field.)

More remarkable was when she wrapped up with this:

“Um you know I just I don’t understand it.”

Again, this kind of answer fits into a usual form: one understands why people share the page they’re on together, and, for those that don’t, the question begged is: ‘how do I understand their position?’ In this second aspect, there is an implicit Theory of Mind conundrum; how are other perspectives in other minds to be understood? There’s nothing about those who disagree with Hillary–about her remaining in the race–that is hard to understand, so she gives away something at work in her depths in pretending she doesn’t understand.

A question is: How could she have answered and met the twin objectives, one, to justify her remaining in the race against diminishing odds, and, two, to support confidence in party unity irrespective of who should become the nominee?

The psychological question then is: what are the types of internal psychic (or cognitive factors,) that will tend to diminish a person’s ability to firstly stand outside the mystique of their subjective perspective and secondly respond with enough objectivity to meet objective-type goals?

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Dr. Aubrey Blumsohn has done yeoman work in highlighting the sordid and criminal story of the CIA’s use of psychedelic drugs in experiments done for dark purposes. Whatever the specific purpose was, it was an ill purpose. And, it resonates today because it is mostly unknown to what extent drugs are currently deployed by the CIA for the purpose of interrogation, torture, and, possibly, mind control. In Part V Blumsohn tells the story of the same criminal activities happening in the UK.
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Dr. Brian C. Melton, Assistant Professor of History at Liberty University, writing at the web site Intellectual Conservative, Human Origins and a Side of Fries: Refuting a Popular Neo-Darwinian Position.

[A] A prime example of this appeared in Expelled, when Dawkins expressed a willingness to accept evidence of cellular intelligent design if it came from aliens, but not if it implied that God existed. While there is manifestly less proof to support the idea of extra-terrestrial life than a supernatural God, the general concept at least fits in with Dawkins’s naturalistic biases, and so he finds it acceptable. Evidence has nothing to do with it.

Brian, the word evidence meaningfully appears in your sentence [A] in two instances: (1) accept evidence if it came; and (2) not [accept] if it implied.

Evidence does have something to do with the difference between its coming from or coming about, and, its pointing toward some implication. But how to research the mechanics of the designer’s biological agency?

The ID crowd argues furiously in favor of this latter implication, that a designer is implied by inferences drawn from the current evidence. Yet, they understand that their understanding as much is impossible to demonstrate within any naturalistic verification methodology, (eg. science,) given the requisite supernatural causation and its mechanics or miraculous (pre?) mechanics.

So, marching off in the direction of “creation science” and post-science, why is it the proponents of creationism get so exercised by science when ID’s verification can’t even exist within the scientific framework?

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March 13 to May 4. Spring has sprung. The apple tree is especially glorious even if the rot has literally mostly hollowed out its trunk. I’m a seasonal tweener, enjoying May and September above all other months, and, with my fair scotsman’s skin, liking least the heat. 55-70 degrees is ideal. Click for large version.

The Heights Observer, like the Lakewood paper, is written by citizens, who use AGS’s web-based program to upload stories and photographs onto a server. Volunteer editors read the content, post stories to the paper’s web site and design newspaper pages, all via the Internet.

The volunteers and low overhead will allow the Heights Observer to keep costs low, said Deanna Bremer Fisher, executive director of FutureHeights, a nonprofit dedicated to improving life in Cleveland Heights. (May 5th, Crain’s Cleveland Business, Citizen-produced Observer catching on With three new editions on tap, company’s publisher envisions an edition “in every town’ Chuck Soder)

The Lakewood Observer is vigorously seeding its model. Leveraging creative and executive intelligence along with Lakewood’s innovative publishing software, other communities are taking up the task of building civic chops* via the model of volunteer journalism and voluntary engagement.

• civic chops::creative, cognitive, artistic, emotional, disciplinary, abilities and capacities–focused upon the development of community self-knowledge, self-awareness, and knowledge creation.

I rode with the Lakewood Visionary Alignment for its, as I see it, second chapter. From my anthropological-adult learning perspective the interesting aspect I’ll continue to track is how–overall– journalistic reports will tend to either accentuate or mitigate knowledge creation, and, how does reportage deeply ramify civic engagement.

All sorts of challenges crop up on the path toward realizing civic self-knowledge. The central cross purpose comes up in the flux between the wish to elevate the positive “brand,” and the more veracious wish to uncover whatever knowledge might find its way into the, so-called, Civic Open Source.

• Civic Brand::attractive community identity; in terms we developed, thus the brand is the civic persona presented as the face of the civic imago–the imago then is the source of manifest collective identity and identity in-potentia.
  
• Civic Open Source is a coinage::knowledge is radically democratized, made accessible, is shared, and is freely subject to re-configuration and re-use.

I noted in 2005 that well intentioned civic-promotion (in Lakewood,) would surely clash with the inspirational desire to achieve civic self-knowledge and community awareness. This follows simply from recognition of those aspects of civic life that form the undercurrent of the civic shadow; manifested as the Other, constituting alterity at the scale of community.

The point of inspiration was predicated on unleashing community researchers into both the lit up and darkened corners of the community, and then allowing any findings to stream through the uncensored process. Much of this thrust followed from having a core group turned on by the idea of a city coming to know its self better than any other. And, I knew going into it, that cross purposed desires would be compelled to negotiate and self-organize accomodation along the way.

How it sorts itself out has everything to do with the implicit group relations that contextualize the psychological negotiation of points of emphasis. In this sense, the community newspaper is, every time its published, the fruit of such negotiation. This is a fascinating underlay because in this group arise learning processes. At the end of the day to sustain civic chops is to nurture capacity in the context of the group and via the group’s various and variable intentions, desires, and labors of love. Praxis.

Along with this comes the prospect of securing better civic engagement and cohesion by virtue of, in effect, self-selected journalists and researchers, working, acting ‘on the city.’ Given my prejudices, this could effect re-personalization; a term of Paolo Freire having to do with a socially unified critique of the givenness of the social environment causing transformations of awareness stood against de-personalization. With respective to this, collective action is aimed to liberate, and so the negotiation between boosting of and boasting about the given, and, critically conscious confrontation with the received functions and facilities of the extant given communitas deeply explicate the variance in hope and hazard between sustenance of this given, and, disruptive transformative learning.

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