This guy is really hitting his stride...

Chris Hedges' "Empire of Illusion" talk at New School
(December 8, 2009)

Hedges uses as metaphor, the life and death of Michael Jackson - the star who lost track of his real self and became the celebrity commodity that the star system had created - to describe the end of American Democracy in terms of a schizophrenic culture befuddled, and on the verge of a corporate feudalism.

It is time to abandon the Democratic Party, Hedges says, because they have abandoned the middle class, the working class ... the only ideas that are not victims of a virtual corporate reality are on the left of the political spectrum, socialism. He describes himself as a Radical Keynesian: full employment, the poorest have access to good health care and everyone has a chance to go to university.

In the question and answer after the talk Chris Hedges shows just how nimble his mind is right now. In answer to a question about the post literate image based culture he takes us from Plato as fascist to the codification of the illusion of the present in the hand-helds of our kids... ..gorgeous!

The key to his clear thinking; turn off the Illusion - he doesn't own a TV - plus using the internet 'correctly' - understanding that the constantly vibrating monitor can destroy thinking - go to places where things don't constantly move, places where one can silently contemplate a thing, an idea - like an art gallery, or on a camping trip where reality replaces the illusion ... so you'll always remember...

Google plugs an ad onto the front of this ten minute preview (instead of the love = diamonds ad FORA.tv has) of the 01:22:22 talk.


The kicker? One year and eight days after this speech Chris Hedges turned this depressing requiem into rebirth, getting himself arrested as part of the Veterans for Peace "Hope Is Action" civil disobedience against the wars (Afghan, Iraq, Pakistan, Sudan) at the White House fence (Thursday December 16 2010).

See my article on that, here: "Hope Is Action" - Chris Hedges & Veterans for Peace.


Chris Hedges: Empire of Illusion
at The New School
FORA.tv



mh

Becoming Like Gods

In this blog, from the very beginning, I've taken what we see as obvious and attempted to prove that even if a thing, or an idea cannot be an absolute, it is at least so full of meanings that we cannot ignore it. That we are, therefore we continue.

I've tried to prove the enlightenment.


Jordan B. Peterson's Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief - "Becoming Like Gods" (part 3)  takes that idea to the Nth - very well.




Jordan B. Peterson - blip.tv archive



mh

Jordan Peterson explains the ancient hard wired human brain in a material world

In a lecture entitled, "Reality and the Sacred" - available at TVO Video - Psychology Professor Jordan B. Peterson breaks down the myths that 'create' the reality we exist in.

(Video embed from Youtube is at the bottom of this page)

He points out that the study of the humanities today is in an existential crisis. He chooses to tackle this disease though a unique understanding of modern brain science data, the quest by computer scientists to create artificial intelligence, primate and human behavior data, modern and ancient writings, ancient story telling ("the wisdom traditions"), and eastern Buddhist philosophies - combined in a convincing and original narrative.

Modern thought (I hope I correctly paraphrase), he says, is currently distorted by a myopic materialist thought process because it lacks the influence of a part of the brain where ideas like the 'sacred' are exercised. We are thus lead to a series of misreadings of our own culture, which makes it impossible for modern society to properly perceive the world, and thus create a viable future.



In my opinion, logic in all areas of study have become circular, and thus instead of leading to a point - with potential - much of our understanding of the world is slipping into a relativist trap where nothing has any real meaning - a moral, and just as importantly I think, an empirical dead end.

(Because the reason for going forward - the cultural context - is equally important as the "logical" path that technology perfected, or discovered presents to the empirical mind.)

To me Peterson's beautiful combination takes material dialectics, and brings into the matrix better than ever before, a human quality. A new and mature understanding of the human condition that has hither to been absent, or twisted to such an extent that the world view resulting is hopelessly distorted. I think a qualitatively new understanding of the world has begun to be unveiled by Psychology Professor Jordan Peterson in this talk. He adds to the progress forward in recent years, taken at the Philosophy Department at U of T, by Mark Kingwell and others.

This lecture made me smile and smile, and laugh over and over. The professor gets a couple of laughs from his young students; but older viewers will find themselves laughing in the isles. Especially, as the professor says, if you have pursued a true life path. I like to say, a balanced life, not too much evil left unconsidered - not too much denial; in other words, if you're lived a moral, honest, flexible and evolving life (if you're not a complete asshole) you'll be able to see the profound beauty and connectivity in Professor Jordan Peterson's captivating narrative.

Jordan Peterson: Reality and the Sacred

More of Jordan B. Peterson online: A 13-part series based on his book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, beginning with, "The Meaning of Music"; from blip.tv.


Jordan B. Peterson, Ph.D., Department of Psychology, University of Toronto


Update Sunday, September 5th, 2010

Also posted at TVO is a talk by Professor Peterson concerning "the nature of evil and its distinction from tragedy" which takes a look at the subject matter in the video above, through a dissection of the Bible's Book of Genesis.



mh

If 'Spin' is Dark Matter...can we tell what time it is?

Theorists(see)can't find half the matter they need to account for the activities we can see, with-in the Gravity Model. I personally don't believe in gravity in the usual sence. I think we are held in place as we are, by a matrices of wavepatterns, a functioning of all the planets etal., like an invisable transmission, each planet rotating with-in complex electro-magnetic relationship with all the others.

I say the missing matter simply put, is 'spin'.
So...Gasses, slowly rotating around a center point, from a distance they seem to be collapsing, but backwards, like a spring coiling. Take a closer look, the gasses are eddying into smaller little-galaxies, seperate relativly to the influence of the whole.
Counter-spinning matrices in relative functioning with their opposits. This bi-polar functioning of opposites causes the 'collapse' of the galaxy.

I say, when the galaxey is young and all spead out, it contains almost entirly, 'light' matter. As it ages, or 'eddifies' it turns more and more of that into 'dark' matter. Our Solar System is getting old, as one eddy in the milky way; while the milky way as we can see is all spread out, or young, from it's point of view. Our sun will eventually swallow all the planets and the next stage in the collapse of this piece of the universe will have begun.

Question: What is the rate of decay of light matter into dark matter?

We need to know;

Volume of all the matter in question,
or Spread of the young galaxey
Time elapsed.
The 'Chunkyness' of the matter.
and the total Mass.

So the mass of the galaxy equals: light matter(visable stars gases and matter we can deduce is there by the functioning of the things we can see) + dark matter(the energy contained with-in the chunks of stable stuff, usually spinning or in orbit or both).

The time elapsed around here is 4 billion years.

... .

Gaia is a Spinning Top...

The earth can be seen as a rotating hunk of rock, water and ice populated with an abundance of life forms. This view lineally categorizes things; Rocks are dead things, ever unchanging; All living things were put here by someone or something, and we the pinnacle of that life. With our consciousness we are special, part of a mysterious uber-plan, a plan to be revealed to us by a higher consciousness, a teacher, or parent type figure. Some wait fearfully for judgment day, or for 'when your father gets home'.

This is a psychosis caused by a crux of too little information - and too much information. An inability to see a non-lineal functioning of things we have recently perceived.

What if that uber-plan was just the on-going functioning of things that we are experiencing? Perhaps the lesson the universe is trying to teach us is this one: that we are connected to the life breath of the entire universe, our consciousness of this merely the next step in the evolution of the stars.

As much as we'd wish it wasn't true, we're all alone in this universe, with only the laws of nature, the grand unified theory to support us - like a kid leaving home, only their faith in community - taught to them by thier community to guide them.