"Do your little bit of good where you are; it's those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world."And with that, we need to start by dispelling some false info floating around the blogosphere. I posted the other day about Geoff Falk having supposedly received an email from I-I. I was skeptical since I had not recieved the email, and I'm on every damn list they have. Since then, Frank Visser ran with it, assuming Falk had damaging evidence.
~ Archbishop Desmond Tutu
Now, Paul Salamone has revealed the email as a fake. Ken Wilber never said the things attributed to him. I've mentioned before how much Geoff seems to hate Ken -- far beyond any kind of disagreement in viewpoints. Geoff belives KW is evil. This seems to be a case of letting his emotions outrun his brain. Not that we all haven't done the same thing at some point about some issue.
[Update: Since posting this, Geoff has retracted the previous post (sort of) and apologized to Wilber (with barbs). So, it's all good.]
Okay, glad that is out of the way. In other news . . . .
~ John Craig, of Craig Photography, has chosen ~C4Chaos as the next interviewee in his five questions series. Check it out.
~ David Jon at Zaadz wants to Let The World Change Us. This is a thought-provoking post.
~ Yesterday I linked to CJ Smith's post, inspired by Tuff Ghost, on allegorical religion. Now, Matthew Dallman has added his considerable voice to the discussion. I'm totally on baord with MD's viewpoint here. Back when I used to teach poetry, I taught Howl alongside the Song of Solomon, Patterson (WC Williams) alongside the Upanishads. Sacred texts have nearly always been poetry in some form or another. It's sad that we no longer see the spiritual component in poetry anymore.
~ Michel Bauwens at P2P Foundation offers a brief introduction to his vision of integral. This is definitely worth the read.
~ While most of us are loading our iPods/MP3 players with rockin' tunes, Amadeus at dharma::vision is loading his with Dharma talks, including videos. Damn, he's making some of us look bad.
~ m alan kazlev at Integral Transformation has posted an excerpt from his paper in progress, Metaphysics, not post-metaphysics.
~ Alan Cook at Milinda's Questions posts pieces of a discussion on the mind/body dualism issue.
~ Looking for personal development books? Steve Pavlina has assembled his list.
~ P2P Foundation offers another day's worth of del.icio.us links.
~ Ray Harris at Open Integral writes about Freedom of speech in response to comments from Michel Bauwen on another post.
~ Looks like Sesame Street has introduced a new character, Abby Cadabby -- a fairy-in-training. No, not a gay kid -- that's way too much to ask. Rather, it seems to be a young, independent girl from another culture: pagansim. The pagan link is tenuous (although you gotta love the riff on Abra Cadabra in her name), really, but we can always hope.
~ Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon takes a look a GenXer's cynical irony and the generational gap that has Boomers looking down on us as too [fill in the blank]. Whatever.
~ David Ignatius at Real Clear Politics looks at the balancing act al-Jazeera (a bunch of former BBC reporters) tries to pull off in reporting the wars in the Middle East to its Arab base and still maintain some journalistic integrity.
~ Jonah Goldberg, also writing at Real Clear Politics, argues for a "living Constitution" when it comes to executive powers (like the right to wiretap without warrant), but not in the areas where "liberals" traditionally want to see the Constitution evolve (religious pluralism, the separation clause, equal rights, and so ). It's rather amusing to see the "conservatives," who tend to be strict constructionists in Constitutional issues, suddenly argue for a living Constitution. He brings up the irony of this new stance in an attempt to deflect it as a criticism, but he fails to justify the sudden change in viewpoint.
~ This chilly picture of the day comes from ~rosesalwaysdie at deviantART:
And that's a wrap folks.
Tags:
Hola,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the link; glad that we are sympatico when it comes to the role of poetry teachers. No reason, though, to bemoan the state of things when we can catalyze the change, I'm sure you'd agree. One thing I didn't add to my piece is that I'm of the belief that poetry teachers, properly trained, also are in the best position to provide the kind of immediate and descriptive langauge we can use to describe our emotions as we perceive not just poetry, but all the arts. So for that and many other reasons, I can't recommend Paglia's recent book enough (it also doesn't take itself too seriously); fitting, isn't it, that her plan for her next is a book on the visual arts using the same overall interpretive approach for that discipline that she did for poetry.
On your Goldberg mention, it seems in your desire to find amusement, you missed his point. I would suggest following conservative dialogues on this more closely before coming to your conclusions. It is not that he's arguing for a living constitution; rather, it is that the constitution already grants the executive branch broad powers, intentionally vague and undefined to fight a war -- as in, granted from the beginning. Thus citing those is not taking a stance of the "living constitution" school, to use his term. Which means that there is no change in viewpoint. Of course, the Constitution also grants Congress the obligation to monitor the Executive, which is sort of what is happening now, and why there is likely going to be new legislation crafted to bring the 1978 law up to date with current technology, and the current threat. The objection by many is that the Judiciary/Supreme Court has inserted itself into the process; I agree with many that such action is an overreach on its part. Leaving the issue as a battle between Congress and the administration is not only consistent with how the Constitution set this up to work, but also makes the most sense, since those two branches, and not the slow-moving judiciary, are best able to respond quickly to changing life conditions.
take it ez,
md