Grayson questions IG of Fed Reserve

I highly recommend not only viewing but passing this video along to others. I also encourage you to contact your Reps and Senators, even the President, to bring these crimes to justice and change the government that enables them. It was this kind of work for the people that stirred a huge corporate campaign backed my millions of dollars to get Alan Grayson voted out of office in the last election.

Update to F-35 story

Update on the F-35 legislation that began the "conservative lie" post. The US House voted yesterday against funding the program, with nearly half of the Republican freshman agreeing. They broke ranks with Republican leaders like House Speaker John Boehner, who supported the funding. Kudos to those Republicans who kept their campaign promises about cutting wasteful spending. Now let's see how they vote on cutting appropriate, humane, social spending. And if they go after much, much more in the military budget that should be cut.

Postmetaphysical teleological ethics

In distinction from the conservative values of the last post, Balder is exploring how a more postconventional ethics expresses in the thread "postmetaphysical teleological ethics" at the IPS forum. I here provide excerpts from that thread.


Balder:

In one of my classes, we’ve been reviewing a number of different moral theorists, and I thought about introducing the work of one of them here: Alasdair MacIntyre.  I decided to post something about him based on our recent discussion of Sam Harris’ work, particularly in The Moral Landscape.  In that text, Harris argues that science can contribute meaningfully to the shaping of our moral values, especially if we define morality as that domain of thought and practice concerned with understanding and promoting human well-being or thriving.  As I will discuss below, I think MacIntyre’s work could likely serve as a philosophical complement to Harris' proposal.

MacIntyre is a British moral and political philosopher (and, more recently, theologian).  He converted to Catholicism back in the 1980s when he was wrestling with Thomist thought (initially attempting to discredit it), and consequently has been working to outline and clarify possible Aristotelian and Thomist contributions to modern moral philosophy.  He has worked largely “at the margins” of academia, as he puts it, and has held a number of positions at multiple universities, including serving as Professor of Darkness and Despair at the University of Notre Dame.  (What a cool title!)

The conservative lie about deficit reduction

Deficit reduction has been the conservative calling cry in the last US election, that when they take power it will be addressed and remedied. So what exactly are they doing about it since they've taken office? What are their proposals?

Lady Gaga

In the last post on creativity and madness I had a photo of Lady Gaga. I first became aware of her at local west coast swing dances. They play a number of her songs and women of all ages seem to go wild and sing along with her songs. They are great dance tunes but I'm starting to become aware of her as an international performance art phenomenon. She is so avant-garde and off-the-wall in her TV performances that I've become fascinated like millions of others around the globe. For example check out this video of her hit Bad Romance. It also doesn't hurt that she's gorgeous to look at it her skimpy outfits. And the artistic imagery and costumes!

According to Wikipedia, “The main idea behind the video is that of Gaga being kidnapped by a group of supermodels who drug her and sell her off to the Russian Mafia.” Lady Gaga said about the song: “What I'm really trying to say is I want the deepest, darkest, sickest parts of you that you are afraid to share with anyone because I love you that much.”

Recall her lyrics:

“I want your ugly, I want your disease, I want your love.”

Creativity and madness

We explored this theme in two recent threads, "Black Swan" and "horror and spirituality." Here's an article that explores the relationship between creativity and schizophrenia. A few excerpts:

"Brain scans reveal striking similarities in the thought pathways of highly creative people and those with schizophrenia. Both groups lack important receptors used to filter and direct thought. It could be this uninhibited processing that allows creative people to 'think outside the box,' say experts from Sweden's Karolinska Institute.

Roundtable on quantum mind

Excerpt from this link:

The salon was held at the Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of the Imagination....a roundtable about the quantum mind, the theory that quantum mechanical phenomena, such as quantum entanglement and superposition, may form the basis of an explanation of consciousness. The discussion was moderated by Deepak Chopra, MD.

Comments on Paradise Unbound

The article in the previous post reminds me of some of Mark Edwards'  criticisms. For example recall this from the Institute for Integral Studies thread:

"Particularly when applied to the area of spirituality the stage-based model suffers from serious shortcomings.... My view is that the archaic view of the teacher-guru and student-disciple has done its dash and can only be defended by those who are so immersed in stage-based development that they see no other meta-level possibilities for articulating growth (this is one of the many forms of altitude sickness that I wrote about in my last blog). I see development and learning relationships moving way beyond these limiting views of guru and student and engaging much more with the language of relationality, situational choice, shared play, communal learning, distributed intelligence, collective wisdom, reflexive learning, and action inquiry. The defense of the ancient models of student-teacher relationship, particularly where development is focused on the stage-based lens, seems to me to be a sign of regression rather than evolution."

I appreciate that Lahood also sees the relation of this type of spirituality to capitalism. For example:

Paradise Unbound

Subtltle: "relational spirituality and other heresies in new age transpersonalism" by G.A. Lahood.

I was made aware of this extended essay (short book) at the P2P foundation. Subsequently I found the entire essay at this link. The abstract follows:

"I write this paper with the aim of teasing out from the New Age religion and religious transpersonal psychology a more 'relational spirituality‘. New Age-transpersonalism leans toward a restrictive non-relational spirituality because of its historical affirmation of individualism and transcendence. Relational spirituality (which is central to the emerging participatory-paradigm) swims against strong and popular currents in New Age-transpersonal thinking, belief, and practice which tend to see spirituality as an individual, personal, 'inner‘ pursuit (often) into Eastern/Oriental non-dualism (e.g. Ramana Maharshi etc) as promulgated in popular quasi-Christian, Western, New Age thinking (e.g. A Course in Miracles or Eckhart Tolle, and in transpersonal psychology (e.g. Ken Wilber or Stanislav Grof), whatever the merits of Advaita Vedanta (and I assume there are merits) it is not 'relational spirituality‘ not in the way that I understand the practice.

kelamuni's blog @ IPS

I'd like to highlight kelamuni's blog @ IPS, a recent development. I first interacted with him at the old Lightmind Ken Wilber forum, now defunct. One thread in particular I started there was "causal versus nondual nonduality" in which kela participated and added clarity to my inquiry. Part of that topic dealt with Wilber's conception of consciousness per se, an admitted Yogacara notion.* Kela discusses this in his IPS blog "Wilber and Adi Da's Nirvanasara." You can also see kela's prior blog at this link.

* Also see my prior post "what 'is' the differance," where I explore Derrida's notion of khora, which is similar to, yet different from, Wilber's consciousness per se.