It was basketry maven Jane Lewis, a dear friend, late of New Denver, who pinpointed the illegality of Frogs. Her humorously intended remark caught me square on the cheek so hard that I had to stop down to think on it.
It seemed important for a number of reasons although I wasn't clear when she said it exactly how "clock time" was unaccommodating as a personal perceptual issue. But I'd some idea about where Jane was coming from because our mutual friend Eloise Charet, who once personally swept into Cambodia to rescue kids trapped between militants who cared not a whit for the lives of children, back in the hostile days of Southeast Asia's opium-driven military conflagrations <http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/khmer-rouge-victims-reunited-40-years-after-daring-rescue-1.300219>, stands verra, verra tall in her passionate defense of the local habitat of a gravely endangered species of toad.
As I pondered on wondering how a Universe that hypothetically can bar Frogs from entering or ban them from remaining could co-exist with the one I thought humanity is supposed to be striving to create - (Peace, Love, Kindness: like that) - I came across a Guardian article about Arcosanti <http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/may/04/story-cities-35-arcosanti-paolo-soleri-desert?> that reinforced my conviction about the necessity for a critique that can and must be crafted to successfully question the hypocrisy of quick-fix answers.
Yes, I recognize that our own Universe seems to have been jury-rigged with them. For eons, in fact. And the outcome of all that pondering led to my resolving myself to challenge, whenever I spot one of those Quick-Fix jobbies being offered, its irrational bloody taint. In fact I felt like I'd better be OK with how I'm gonna hafta do that every time I encounter one.
Even though I recognize it might not be universally immediately appreciated. Even if I cannot please all the world, all at once, I don't recognize any reason to apologize for wanting whatever actions I determine to take to be of benefit.
The conclusion I came to is that it is, quite simply, not a sin, not a crime to prefer that Frogs survive along with humanity, with us humans. I challenge anyone who disagrees with the presence of Frogs on the planet to prove to me why their survival does not matter.
In any case, if any sort of material matter on this earth remains unchallenged or unquestioned, I have little doubt it will remain misunderstood. (That was a rabbinical teaching I took to heart in my childhood, and in all my years thus far, I have yet to find a reason to doubt the essential importance of doubt.)
Reading Canadian-American novelist, poet and journalist Paulette Jiles, who some decades ago opened my eyes to the cute and clever literary convention of the picaresque character, put me in mind of how - if/whenever what is outside our own sphere becomes a mucky, murky space - our moral imperatives still remain imperatives.
They especially remain moral imperatives for all humans who are intent upon expanding (or even just retaining) a sense of connection in community, even if it is a sticky problem that moral imperatives must be managed.
Even in mucky, murky places. In fact, managed wherever and whenever they are encountered. Moreover, I suspect it likely that positive benefits manifest most easily when we demonstrate willingness to accept change, undertake and abet the project of making changes in ourselves. in our own culture, in our appreciation of others. Even in instances when self-scrutiny does not come naturally, IMO a taste for some modest sort of introspection can/should be sought after and acquired. If the "unexamined life" is not worth living, how will someone who does not or cannot self-examine learn to appreciate how absurd such a lack of self-scrutiny is going to appear to others?
Isn't arcology, practically by definition, a concern about the survival of the entire planet, not just one's own individual survival?
Poking the topic of frogs' illegality in order to examine beliefs to take a stab at analyzing the basis of a culture's belief system, it seems to me it's necessary to assume that objectivity is possible but I can't see how that makes objectivity certain. What many people take for granted can/will get in the way.
Preserving the habitats of frogs (or tigers) in the universe allows for the equity of frogs (and tigers) but does preserving the habitats of any creature privilege the creature? Or privileging the 'right' of the habitat to preservation?
Why would anyone take as an article of faith - separate or distinct from science (information based on proofs derived from exhaustive patient analysis of determinable, incontrovertible evidence) that habitats have no natural rights? Is the planet of such little importance that it can be destroyed without consequence?
Safe to say that's not likely. Yet what is believed by individuals (or the collective conglomerate called "society") clearly clouds perception, affects what is distinguished as personal, affects what is processed, affects what's deemed a matter that should be subjected to public scrutiny. Affects what is accepted as acceptable procedure..
Take, for example, Achievement. What is called "achievement" almost inevitably will be subjectively appreciated as a distinct and positive experience if and only if (ironically) you have already achieved a sense of self-worth. If or when personal beliefs allow self-praise, subjective acknowledgement of an outcome can be identified as an "achievement" - but when the perceived accomplishment is understood as an indication of capability, that is because it has been recognized as an achievement by a reliable witness who happens to perceive that action as worthy of recognition.
People can blow their own horns as much as they like but if there are no listeners, they are playing only for themselves. All very well and good for a practice session, perhaps. No guarantee of passing muster in mainline performance.
One "accomplishment" of Paolo Soleri was his conviction, decades before Common Cause or GreenPeace, that automobiles are an indication (taken one step further, a symbol) of social malaise; indeed, of social disease. My very personal experience of how that has come to pass reinforces my strong feeling that examining the cultural construction of anyone's individual belief-system - Paolo Soleri's included - is a useful undertaking, can help to sharpen and improve perception of how to understand a vital individual belief system as well as a collective one.
If "The personal is the political," the personal may also come to be the professional, as well. I therefore continue to hope that all questioning energy will be of benefit; and with respect to the propositional question of this entry, if your first reaction to the idea of a "Universe Without Frogs" is: It ain't possible to imagine such a Universe, I gotta tell ya; Alas, You're Wrong.
Matter of fact, the contrary is true. Extermination of whole races of animals is commonplace, still happens. You don't have to be a perpetrator or a consumer of road-kill to know this, either. Measured on an evolutionary scale, languages and whole cultures are disappearing EVERY DAY, as anthropologist Wade Davis has been eloquently documenting.
When is it too late to put the brakes on a skid? How will we mourn Cambodia's last tiger? Who will maintain lexicons of all the disappearing languages? How do humans survive if those who know how to grow food disappear?
Cultures disappear through erosion as well as by annihilation. Alarming as it is to me personally, basic understanding of what grammar makes possible is no longer a normal and integral requirement in the English language classes of many schools, is not included in the curriculum. If there is no time (or bless, us, Money) for communication, the list of threats to cultural continuity continues to increase, the way small mounds of garbage collected incrementally turn into 3-story high mountains of garbage,
Pondering mountains of garbage came about when I got to thinking about the art of parody. I was watching ventriloquist Terry Fader's brilliant performance (see YouTube below) and it struck me that in the dumbed-down, media-dependent, over-glutted material culture of North America, parody is essential, Its construction as a material culture artifact struck me dumb. How what is made fun of, whatever is the subject of parody, whatever makes us laugh, can enable us to better see ourselves.
That is, if we take time to think about why we are laughing as we are...
Which moved me to re-investigate parody as an art form, along with ventriloquism and its related theatrical crafts, vaudeville and minstrel show. What I discovered shocked me even if I ought to have known it was there.
Historical dissolution of the minstrel show as a popular art form was tied to the mulcting of American blacks, a vicious social condition re-creating the institutionalized racism that had been the cornerstone of American culture, which has been allowed perpetuation in that culture. Mulcting, you see, means to deprive someone of something by fraud, extortion, etc.; to swindle; to obtain money or the like by fraud, extortion, etc.; to punish a person by fine, especially for a misdemeanor. And this is how,
despite the gains made as a result of the civil rights movement of the 1960s in the USA, that country remains obdurately non-egalitarian in practice. Its discriminatory practices still remain. Why is that? What about "we are all equal" is so hard to accept?
Garbage in, no garbage out - makes for severely impacted internal movement, unfortunately.
It seemed important for a number of reasons although I wasn't clear when she said it exactly how "clock time" was unaccommodating as a personal perceptual issue. But I'd some idea about where Jane was coming from because our mutual friend Eloise Charet, who once personally swept into Cambodia to rescue kids trapped between militants who cared not a whit for the lives of children, back in the hostile days of Southeast Asia's opium-driven military conflagrations <http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/khmer-rouge-victims-reunited-40-years-after-daring-rescue-1.300219>, stands verra, verra tall in her passionate defense of the local habitat of a gravely endangered species of toad.
As I pondered on wondering how a Universe that hypothetically can bar Frogs from entering or ban them from remaining could co-exist with the one I thought humanity is supposed to be striving to create - (Peace, Love, Kindness: like that) - I came across a Guardian article about Arcosanti <http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/may/04/story-cities-35-arcosanti-paolo-soleri-desert?> that reinforced my conviction about the necessity for a critique that can and must be crafted to successfully question the hypocrisy of quick-fix answers.
Yes, I recognize that our own Universe seems to have been jury-rigged with them. For eons, in fact. And the outcome of all that pondering led to my resolving myself to challenge, whenever I spot one of those Quick-Fix jobbies being offered, its irrational bloody taint. In fact I felt like I'd better be OK with how I'm gonna hafta do that every time I encounter one.
Even though I recognize it might not be universally immediately appreciated. Even if I cannot please all the world, all at once, I don't recognize any reason to apologize for wanting whatever actions I determine to take to be of benefit.
The conclusion I came to is that it is, quite simply, not a sin, not a crime to prefer that Frogs survive along with humanity, with us humans. I challenge anyone who disagrees with the presence of Frogs on the planet to prove to me why their survival does not matter.
In any case, if any sort of material matter on this earth remains unchallenged or unquestioned, I have little doubt it will remain misunderstood. (That was a rabbinical teaching I took to heart in my childhood, and in all my years thus far, I have yet to find a reason to doubt the essential importance of doubt.)
Reading Canadian-American novelist, poet and journalist Paulette Jiles, who some decades ago opened my eyes to the cute and clever literary convention of the picaresque character, put me in mind of how - if/whenever what is outside our own sphere becomes a mucky, murky space - our moral imperatives still remain imperatives.
They especially remain moral imperatives for all humans who are intent upon expanding (or even just retaining) a sense of connection in community, even if it is a sticky problem that moral imperatives must be managed.
Even in mucky, murky places. In fact, managed wherever and whenever they are encountered. Moreover, I suspect it likely that positive benefits manifest most easily when we demonstrate willingness to accept change, undertake and abet the project of making changes in ourselves. in our own culture, in our appreciation of others. Even in instances when self-scrutiny does not come naturally, IMO a taste for some modest sort of introspection can/should be sought after and acquired. If the "unexamined life" is not worth living, how will someone who does not or cannot self-examine learn to appreciate how absurd such a lack of self-scrutiny is going to appear to others?
Isn't arcology, practically by definition, a concern about the survival of the entire planet, not just one's own individual survival?
Poking the topic of frogs' illegality in order to examine beliefs to take a stab at analyzing the basis of a culture's belief system, it seems to me it's necessary to assume that objectivity is possible but I can't see how that makes objectivity certain. What many people take for granted can/will get in the way.
Preserving the habitats of frogs (or tigers) in the universe allows for the equity of frogs (and tigers) but does preserving the habitats of any creature privilege the creature? Or privileging the 'right' of the habitat to preservation?
Why would anyone take as an article of faith - separate or distinct from science (information based on proofs derived from exhaustive patient analysis of determinable, incontrovertible evidence) that habitats have no natural rights? Is the planet of such little importance that it can be destroyed without consequence?
Safe to say that's not likely. Yet what is believed by individuals (or the collective conglomerate called "society") clearly clouds perception, affects what is distinguished as personal, affects what is processed, affects what's deemed a matter that should be subjected to public scrutiny. Affects what is accepted as acceptable procedure..
Take, for example, Achievement. What is called "achievement" almost inevitably will be subjectively appreciated as a distinct and positive experience if and only if (ironically) you have already achieved a sense of self-worth. If or when personal beliefs allow self-praise, subjective acknowledgement of an outcome can be identified as an "achievement" - but when the perceived accomplishment is understood as an indication of capability, that is because it has been recognized as an achievement by a reliable witness who happens to perceive that action as worthy of recognition.
People can blow their own horns as much as they like but if there are no listeners, they are playing only for themselves. All very well and good for a practice session, perhaps. No guarantee of passing muster in mainline performance.
One "accomplishment" of Paolo Soleri was his conviction, decades before Common Cause or GreenPeace, that automobiles are an indication (taken one step further, a symbol) of social malaise; indeed, of social disease. My very personal experience of how that has come to pass reinforces my strong feeling that examining the cultural construction of anyone's individual belief-system - Paolo Soleri's included - is a useful undertaking, can help to sharpen and improve perception of how to understand a vital individual belief system as well as a collective one.
If "The personal is the political," the personal may also come to be the professional, as well. I therefore continue to hope that all questioning energy will be of benefit; and with respect to the propositional question of this entry, if your first reaction to the idea of a "Universe Without Frogs" is: It ain't possible to imagine such a Universe, I gotta tell ya; Alas, You're Wrong.
Matter of fact, the contrary is true. Extermination of whole races of animals is commonplace, still happens. You don't have to be a perpetrator or a consumer of road-kill to know this, either. Measured on an evolutionary scale, languages and whole cultures are disappearing EVERY DAY, as anthropologist Wade Davis has been eloquently documenting.
When is it too late to put the brakes on a skid? How will we mourn Cambodia's last tiger? Who will maintain lexicons of all the disappearing languages? How do humans survive if those who know how to grow food disappear?
Cultures disappear through erosion as well as by annihilation. Alarming as it is to me personally, basic understanding of what grammar makes possible is no longer a normal and integral requirement in the English language classes of many schools, is not included in the curriculum. If there is no time (or bless, us, Money) for communication, the list of threats to cultural continuity continues to increase, the way small mounds of garbage collected incrementally turn into 3-story high mountains of garbage,
Pondering mountains of garbage came about when I got to thinking about the art of parody. I was watching ventriloquist Terry Fader's brilliant performance (see YouTube below) and it struck me that in the dumbed-down, media-dependent, over-glutted material culture of North America, parody is essential, Its construction as a material culture artifact struck me dumb. How what is made fun of, whatever is the subject of parody, whatever makes us laugh, can enable us to better see ourselves.
That is, if we take time to think about why we are laughing as we are...
Which moved me to re-investigate parody as an art form, along with ventriloquism and its related theatrical crafts, vaudeville and minstrel show. What I discovered shocked me even if I ought to have known it was there.
Historical dissolution of the minstrel show as a popular art form was tied to the mulcting of American blacks, a vicious social condition re-creating the institutionalized racism that had been the cornerstone of American culture, which has been allowed perpetuation in that culture. Mulcting, you see, means to deprive someone of something by fraud, extortion, etc.; to swindle; to obtain money or the like by fraud, extortion, etc.; to punish a person by fine, especially for a misdemeanor. And this is how,
despite the gains made as a result of the civil rights movement of the 1960s in the USA, that country remains obdurately non-egalitarian in practice. Its discriminatory practices still remain. Why is that? What about "we are all equal" is so hard to accept?
Garbage in, no garbage out - makes for severely impacted internal movement, unfortunately.
