Sandy Krolick's Blog, page 21

The Curriculum of the West

"A bureaucratic legal system uses the language of justice to defend injustice."                 Chris Hedges

It is Thursday, March 29th.  A General Strike has been called for all of Spain.  It is 7:45 AM in the city of Tarragona.  My wife Anna and I arrived here last night by car from Barcelona where crowds were already gathering. The streets of Tarragona are also filling this college town with students. Even with police close by, the protesters stop traffic, beat on cars, and generally tie up the workings of the city and its inhabitants. Perhaps where you collect strangers together in urban settings, the common voice speaks loudest through demonstrated chaos and an otherwise muted ambivalence towards the law.

Filed under: Anarchy, Aristotle, Austerity, Body-politic, capitalism, civilization, collapse, Corporate State, cultural crisis, democracy, Financial Crisis, geopolitics, global collapse, Hedges, language, Obama, Occupy Wall Street, Protest, rationality, Riots, social contract, State, syllogism Tagged: capitalism, Corporate State, Financial Crisis, geopolitics, Occupy Wall Street, Protest, syllogism

Enjoining the Final Battle

Click Image to Read Full Article

What began rather innocently as a Pleistocene journey, a nomadic wandering-about, has become a Holocene nightmare, a spectacle; while we, like frozen spectators, gawk the images of a passing menagerie.

Rousseau exclaimed in his Traité sur l'origine de l'inégalité parmi les hommes:

The first man who put a fence around a piece of land and said: 'this is mine' and then found simpletons who believed him; he was the true founder of bourgeois society. How many vices, how many wars, how much murder, misery and grief the person might have prevented who would have torn down the fence-posts, filled in the ditches, and cried out to his fellow men: 'Do not believe this trickster! You are lost if you forget that the fruits belong to you all, the soil to no one'.

More than two hundred and fifty years later, with wholesale State and corporate-sponsored looting of the global environment well underway, international resource wars, and the concomitant destruction wrought upon the Earth's ecosystems by the inexorable acquisitiveness of industrial civilization, some have considered it more appropriate to rename this latest phase in the current epoch – the Anthropocene.  Perhaps they have a point.

(Click image or title in "Posts" drop down Menu to read more)

Filed under: Africa, Agriculture, American Dream, Anarchy, Austerity, Body-politic, capitalism, civilization, collapse, commodification, Corporate State, cultural crisis, democracy, Financial Crisis, freedom, geopolitics, global collapse, Hedges, homeland security, inverted totalitarianism, Nietzsche, Obama, Occupy Wall Street, primal humanity, rationality, Riots, social contract, Spectacle, State, terrorism, trust Tagged: capitalism, conspiracy, Corporate State, Earth, Empire, Executive Orders, Financial Crisis, freedom, geopolitics, human nature, Law, Occupy Wall Street, primitive, Protest

The Eyes Have It – Visual Overshoot?

Click Image To Read Full Article 

The wood nymphs vanished as the woods filled with trailer camps.Water sprites have been crowded out by submarines and scuba divers. - Walter Ong, "World as View and World as Event" 

In view of last week's discussion regarding the "naturally human," the question must now be put: To what extent did a reorganization of our Pleistocene-honed sensorium lead to the suppression of "primal participation," eventually to be lost beneath layers of civilizing enculturation?  If so, what conditions may have led to such a reorganization, and under what organizing principle?  In short, what intervened to come between the inter-animating forces of our hominid senses and the rich plenum of the earthly sensuous?

(Click image or title in "Posts" drop down Menu to read more)

Filed under: Agriculture, Anarchy, Aristotle, Body-politic, body-subject, business, capitalism, Christianity, civilization, collapse, commodification, cultural crisis, earthly-sensuous, feral, geopolitics, human nature, language, nature, phenomenology, Plato, polysemy, primal humanity, rationality, Spectacle, syllogism, time Tagged: capitalism, Earth, freedom, geopolitics, human nature, phenomenology, Plato, primitive, Reality, Sensorium, syllogism, Time

Naturally Human: A Hypothesis

Click Image to Read Article
By virtue of natality and the ability to act, each new individual poses a threat to civilization. The child carries barbarism with him or her.  - Einer Overenget
Perhaps we would not view babes as self-centered creatures of desire were we not already committed egoists ourselves. - Marshall Sahlins

How do we resolve this apparent conflict, and the legacy of enculturation to the requirements of modern civilization?

(Click image or title in "Posts" drop down Menu to read more)

Filed under: Anarchy, Body-politic, business, Christianity, civilization, cultural crisis, democracy, earthly-sensuous, entrepreneurship, feral, freedom, geopolitics, human nature, nature, Owen Barfield, Plato, primal humanity, progress, rationality, religion, soul, State, time Tagged: Africa, capitalism, Christianity, Corporate State, Earth, freedom, human nature, Plato, primitive, Reality, syllogism

Business As Usual: Social Entrepreneurs and Other Psychopaths

Click To Read Full Article

There is quite alot of talk today about re-envisioning, re-engineering, or re-inventing our civil society – its politics, its social structures, and perhaps more significantly, its economic infrastructure; we hear much about transition towns, sustainability, green companies, socioeconomic localization, and the less well-known buzzword emerging from players like the Harvard Business School, social enterprise. To what does such terminology refer? A common thread among these diverse projects seems to be implementation of innovative solutions to looming environmental and social collapse, while maintaining some semblance of the civil or political order found in current institutional structures and arrangements.

(Click image or title in "Posts" drop down Menu to read more)

Filed under: American Dream, Anarchy, business, capitalism, civilization, collapse, commodification, cultural crisis, democracy, entrepreneurship, geopolitics, global collapse, MBA, nature, Occupy Wall Street, peak oil, Plato, primal humanity, progress, rationality Tagged: business, capitalism, Corporate State, Earth, Empire, Financial Crisis, freedom, geopolitics, MBA, Meima, Occupy Wall Street, social enterprise, sustainability

The New Colonialism

Click Image To Read Article

Colonialism has been recognized historically as a tool of domination, typically following the military subjugation of one people by another. It is a process whereby the colonizer (metropole or mother country) invades and then exercises sovereignty over the colony and its indigenous population primarily for economic exploitation. It creates a master-slave relationship between the metropole and the new colony, whereby the vast resources and indigenous population of the colony exist to serve the mother country and the needs of its elites.

(Click image or title in "Posts" drop down Menu to read more)

Filed under: Africa, American Dream, Anarchy, Body-politic, capitalism, Christianity, civilization, collapse, Colonialism, Corporate State, cultural crisis, democracy, freedom, geopolitics, global collapse, Riots, Spectacle Tagged: Africa, capitalism, Colonialism, Egypt, Empire, Financial Crisis, freedom, geopolitics, IMF, MENA

There's No Tomorrow

For a look at our rosy future, Incubator Pictures presents this thought-provoking video!!

Filed under: American Dream, capitalism, civilization, collapse, cultural crisis, Financial Crisis, global collapse, nature, peak oil Tagged: collapse, Earth, Empire, Financial Crisis, geopolitics, peak oil

While Athens Burns!

As global tension and rebellion grows, the drums of internecine and international war continue to sound louder around MENA – Bahrain, Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Israel — while Athens burns!

Between the international politics played out by the US government and its Western allies, together with the global chicanery initiated by our largest financial institutions, this world of make-believe that was hastily constructed on the heels of industrialization is coming unglued, more slowly perhaps, but just as surely… while Athens burns!

(Click image or title in "Posts" drop down Menu to read more)

Filed under: Africa, American Dream, Anarchy, Aristotle, Austerity, Body-politic, capitalism, civilization, collapse, commodification, Corporate State, cultural crisis, democracy, Financial Crisis, freedom, geopolitics, global collapse, inverted totalitarianism, language, Obama, Occupy Wall Street, Plato, Presidential politics, progress, Riots, social contract, Spectacle, State Tagged: Africa, capitalism, Corporate State, Egypt, Empire, Financial Crisis, freedom, geopolitics, IMF, Libya, MENA, Occupy Wall Street, Reality

War Games, Comic Relief, and Diversionary Tactics

Click Image To Read Article

I am so glad that Cleopatra was on hand during that Superbowl brawl last Sunday along with her Roman escorts to provide the ogling body-politic with some spectacular Circus Maximus-type highlights in that post-modern Coliseum.  I mean Lucas Oil Stadium in Indy was all greased up and ready for action.  And you could easily tell it was Cleo  up there because of the imitation "walk like an Egyptian" moves she gave us up front.

(Click image or title in "Posts" drop down Menu to read more)

Filed under: Africa, American Dream, Anarchy, Austerity, Body-politic, civilization, collapse, Colonialism, commodification, Corporate State, cultural crisis, democracy, Financial Crisis, freedom, geopolitics, global collapse, Obama, Protest, Riots, Spectacle, State, Super Bowl, terrorism Tagged: Africa, Christianity, Colonialism, Corporate State, Empire, freedom, geopolitics, Libya, MENA, Protest

The Whore of Babylon

Click Image To Read Full Article

And there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither; I will show unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters… With whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication. [Book of Revelation 17:1-2]

Hillary Clinton, speaking on behalf of the imperial hegemony for the most indispensable nation in the world, said: "We support the Syrian people, we stand with you."

(Click image or title in "Posts" drop down Menu to read more)

Filed under: American Dream, Anarchy, capitalism, Christianity, civilization, collapse, Corporate State, cultural crisis, earthly-sensuous, evangelical, feral, freedom, geopolitics, global collapse, homeland security, human nature, nature, Obama, primal humanity, progress, religion, Riots, social contract, State, time Tagged: Africa, capitalism, Christianity, conspiracy, Corporate State, Earth, Egypt, Empire, freedom, fundamentalism, geopolitics, human nature, Libya, MENA, Occupy Wall Street, primitive, Protest, religion, Time