packing a mean logic

If we are asked to accept a corporation as equal to an actual individual human then are we also to believe that the Fed would ask for protection from the neighborhood kitty? Shall the developer claim to be as one with the eminently evicted?

Next we might expect the termite colonies of the world to claim to be no more than one lowly termite―while they in their entirety proceed to consume the foundations of distressed home and run-away factory. Better that we should consider the corporation to be a termite than a person.

And while we are discussing the destruction of our foundations, such a claim as corporation as a person is indeed an insult to our reasoning if not an abuse of the general wording of the constitution. Surely we are not asked to protect the organized hoarders from the victims of the thievery!? It is as absurd as to say one is both partial and impartial (to reference Bertrand Russel on Aristotle's virtue as the mean of two extremes), or as to say slaves are both "living tool" and man―his master therefore can be both his oppressor and his friend. So, too, it is absurd to continue to assert that a corporation is both a group of persons and also a legitimate individual person. One might as well say one heart cell is equivalent to the entire heart or that one tree is equivalent to the forest. Unless one is willing to concede that by Aristotle's virtue of aristocracy the laboring many shall have no equal good nor place beside the oppressor, but rather shall remain powerless to remove by dialectics the chains of obfuscation which bind them all, we shall all continue to be bound by such spiral logic to an interminable opposition.

And who speaks for the forest I ask? Too few―by the evidence of deforestation they are themselves abraded and yet it appears we are asked to protect the Mill from the tree-hugging "terrorists". No, perhaps we should be doing the opposite. But who in fact speaks for the tree in the court room, or for the oceans and the skies?! And how are they to be represented―since we are to give rights to multiples of beings, to groups of entities, let us enumerate the rights of trees and every other entity present on earth?! Again, who shall bare the impossible burden of proving a cataclysmic future from mere words?! Does absolute power negate any vestige of intuition?

My friends, now that the frontier has involuted, the speculators are forced to eat away at themselves, to continue eating for eating’s sake until there is nothing left but an overwhelming gurgle of debt and bloody retribution. Perhaps we would head for the trees but for the fact that to tread in the undeveloped wilderness is now a crime.

Genetic modification = life cycle termination. Gentrification = mortification!

Think about this: all that our biotechnologists have done so far with modified genes is to increase the yield and size of food, including animals. And this in turn benefits not the ecosystem, human health, nor the original organisms. All it does is increase the gluttony of the global corporations that impose these major effects upon the biosphere. We have allowed ourselves to assert that life on earth is a "product" and therefore its manipulation mandated by markets and financial gain.

If genetically modified plants and animals are ultimately sterilized in the process, this is equivalent to genocide and seriously unethical! How does it benefit life to denude its life cycle. And whence will come the life when all procreation is terminated by genetic contamination. The laboratories experimenting with genetic modification harbor not solutions to our overconsumption but rather the final solution for life on earth. This must be stopped!

But what exactly do we stop, by whom, and for what really? Ask who partook in these decisions in the first place? Did You? Research this for yourself and you'll find that during the Reagan administration in particular, there was a conscious decision to deregulate and bioengineer for the sake of American business―not for humanity. No, it was all about being the most powerful economic force on the planet. And to this day this is still unregulated.

So, never mind what happened to the hurried and plundered earth which we fattened ourselves on! The next few generations will pay for this mistake, and I don't mean in simple terms of dollars. I'm talking about the possibility of vengeful response to what the representatives of America, such as Monsanto, have done! Such corporations have brought nothing but shame to our nation. And all the world now knows to what depths of amorality we will stoop to profit from the developing, as well as the other supposed "developed," nations' natural resources and homogenizing otherwise diverse habitats. To my mind we are undermining the credibility of anything we've claimed to have developed! I'm sorry, but, gentrification is tantamount to mortification.

What moves me right now

About myself: I’ve already implied that I am an artist and this is true. I am also very much concerned about the future of our school children and the public school system. Frankly I believe a near revolution in curriculum / instruction is required (if it hasn’t begun already!). No, I do not merely mean to acknowledge that NCLB hasn’t worked. Nor do I merely acknowledge that the arts are not represented fairly in all schools. Nor do I mean to suggest that painting or throwing clay will kindle innovation for tomorrow’s industries. What I do insist is that visual literacy should stand squarely in the center of literacy itself. And that therefore, we can justify saying that in the least visual concepts and vocabularies can play a larger role in instruction independent of incorporating the visual arts as a discrete discipline. Let me state for starters that drawing a simple line is at once an indication of a particular understanding of relationships. Drawing a meaningful line is an indication of a greater understanding that relationships themselves can be seen across all disciplines and not just within the periphery of a picture frame. I contend that we can reinstate a classical sense of graphic skill and visual literacy to their proper place amongst reading writing and mathematics in this very way. Every step we take as educators should be as versatile and flexible as possible... even to the point of following an unanticipated development spawned by students themselves!

I also contend that teachers should not be constrained to a regional much less a national standard of testing. How else can we achieve an exemplary diversity of innovations if not by a variety of methods and passionately engaged unique teachers. The next few decades must become an era of experiment and diversity otherwise all we’ll get is more of the same―the same approaches to the least amount of sterilized content. In other words we need to scrap the constraint of political correctness, both left and right (excluding of course racism or gender bias).

wisdom and mathematics?

“[Plato] was sufficiently Pythagorean to think that without mathematics no true wisdom is possible.” Bertrand Russell

I prefer to define mathematics as a profound understanding of the relationships between things, rather than mere quantification. It would then be more acceptible to say a truer wisdom can be had by this practice. To be fair perhaps we should say the same of the other fine disciplines or humanities? Or perhaps that by study of any one of the disciplines the others become more vividly internalized.

Yet, how can we say that mathematics has anything to do with poetry for example? It can hardly be denied that fine literature is in part comprised of verse, which to a varrying degree is a pattern of ideas if not also lingual attributes. Perhaps by recognizing that mathematics provides templates for understanding these textual relationships we can then agree we are in part looking for patterns, likenesses and comparisons when we critique poetry, and thus perhaps formulate a wiser interpretation of the meaning of the words.

This not to say that these few are the sole criteria for establishing a hierarchy of good and bad poetry, though because it is not by mathematics that we will discover virtue necessarily nor a unanimous sense of beauty. These resonances perhaps we are not able ever to discover, nor should we attempt to give synchronicity to literature or any other human endeavor. Perhaps this Spartan aspiration will ever haunt us though, the search for a sublime order of things and human sensibilities. This is the trappings of socialism, that the unity of a people can reach beyond community for transcendence yet only find bondage in totalitarianism.