Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Getting out the vote


Would democracy work better if there were a quorum for elections – some % of those eligible to vote and/or some % of those registered to vote?

Or fine citizens for not voting, as some countries do.

Sloth


I watched a few minutes of a television series on the seven deadly sins, this one was on sloth. Originally, as well as the well known other six, there were sins of apathy and of sadness which were later combined into sloth. Sloth became the worst sin, fundamental to all the others, because of the laziness of allowing wrong to flourish by passively not intervening. What struck me so was that the original beliefs were that this behavior was deliberate, under the control of will, and that the behaviors would today be called depression. I better understand the attitude of some that one just needs to pull one's self up and bite the bullet and soldier on, and so forth.

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Conspiracy

There's a persuasive DVD titled Federal Reserve that traces today's global inequity to careful planning. The connections run from Davos to Bohemian Grove, and include birth control, two salary families, credit cards. We got to now through grand strategy and deliberate manipulations by a few of the powerful.
 
I've been long interested in self-organizing theory, power laws, an inevitability of amassing and toppling. I think that is what got us to now.

Believing in a conspiracy of the powerful is more optimistic, accepts that individual responsibility won't be enough, suggests options of acceptance or overthrow.

Believing that self-organizing can be modulated by expanding human consciousness asks a lot of the evolving human mind.

Sunday, April 8, 2012

Denial of personal mortality and the denial of planetary doom

The single-mindedness of human intervention in the global ecology - altering air, water, earth and life span with inadequate attention to the long term – seems parallel to the inattention to human mortality. Placing natural cycles of decay and change and growth in the background, while we continually build, improve, extend, grow … - my images are of block towers toppling over, trajectories speeding out of orbit, infrastructures decaying, systems imploding from their own weight.