PCAPPC

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous. - Henry Adams When I pulled the quote from my Google home page I'd read the author as Henry James . I've never heard of Henry Adams. They say he was an historian, author and autobiographer. What does that mean, autobiographer? Writing one's own biography isn't usually thought of as a vocation. One book does not a career make. Maybe he was a ghost writer for other people's autobiographies, something common today among celebrities and politicians but I'd be surprised to learn it was common in the late nineteenth century. Anyway, I liked the combination of metaphors: slippery words and viscous thoughts. Alone, each is less powerful. Together, the slippery words are more dangerous and the viscous thoughts a more serious threat. Together, we feel a viscous mind losing control on the slippery surface of language. Thrilling, with ill in its middle. So little of ...

The 1957 Belvedere they pulled out of a time capsule Friday in Tulsa looks like it found the nuclear war they put it there to avoid. It would've been better off in somebody's car port. You'd think that with 3000 years of experience preserving the dead for the afterlife and the hundreds of years we've had to learn what conditions were necessary for the artifacts we've uncovered to have been preserved for a thousand or more years, that the civic boosters in Tulsa could've have found an archivist more qualified than the engineer who designed the zip-lock bag, and a solution less ridiculous than a concrete vault under a foot of dirt and grass saturated year-round by rain and automated sprinklers. It's symbolic of America's legacy, a glimpse into the history books of the future and what the United States of America is going to look like to schoolchildren years, centuries, millennia (should we be so lucky) hence: arrogant, ignorant and wasteful; or, more like...

"Blue Moon: The earliest known recorded usage was in 1528, in a pamphlet entitled Rede Me and Be Not Wrothe: “Yf they say the mone is belewe / We must beleve that it is true” [If they say the moon is blue, we must believe that it is true]." ― Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_moon belewe, blue / beleve, believe It appears to me that the poet was doing a little word-play on two words that in the 16th century must’ve sounded very much (if not exactly) alike. Because spelling hadn’t been standardized at the time, writing was generally phonetic. I wonder if the derivation of the “blue” in blue moon is a mistranslation of “believe” and has to do with the credulity of the event – a second full moon in a single month, or a fourth full moon in a season. “Beloved” and “believe” are naturally related, and the full moon is universally associated with young love and discreet sexual encounters. A beloved moon is a blue moon. Lief in Dutch is love in English, and lief surviv...

From the KUOW Weekday archives: The Press: Blundering or Notable? "Did the press fail to hold the administration accountable in the run up to the Iraq war? Some believe the media parroted the administration's scripted spin on the issues. Is that accurate? Does the need for "official sources" cripple journalistic enterprise? And if the press failed to hold powers accountable then, is their coverage better now? Is there more tough investigative reporting occurring when it comes to the Gonzales scandal or the Hurricane Katrina aftermath? W. Lance Bennett is professor of political science and the Ruddick C. Lawrence Professor of Communication at the University of Washington. His recent book, which he wrote with Regina Lawrence and Steven Livingston, is When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina." Related Links: 'Buying the War,' Bill Moyer's Journal 'Iraq Three Years Later: The Path to War,' NPR's Morning E...

The debut program of Bill Moyers' Journal, Buying the War , is 90 minutes well-spent. Watch it, and watch it again.

Culture is a shared map of self-evident truths – of metaphysical reality. What's accommodated within the boundaries of the map is what we define as real, as hyper-real, and what lies beyond the boundaries of the map is simply unthinkable. If some influence threatens to perforate the boundary it is quickly extinguished. This is law, and law perpetuates the good and eliminates evil. It holds culture together by nurturing the truth and defending it against threats. Evil gives shape to good, so evil must be invoked and occasionally punished – whether in symbolic ritual or in brutal fact. Culture sometimes defines criminal acts as unnatural, and natural acts as those within the bounds of civil restraint. Science's "natural" laws, once broken, cease being laws altogether. This is what's meant when we say that science is self-correcting. The “natural” law invoked by culture is altogether different; these laws are enforced only in their breaking, and set aside and forgott...

One more post on the subject of God and the Brain before we move onto Harper's. Paradigm shifts, according to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn, are the changes in world view that enabled and drove western civilization’s scientific advances. But Russell in his book From Science to God says that there are other, wider-reaching paradigms under which the paradigms that Kuhn describes operate. There is, he says, a “meta-paradigm” operative in all civilizations that may be too large, too pervasive for us to even notice. And I believe that these meta-paradigms, too, shift occasionally. Here's my take on three possible paradigm shifts we've experienced in western civilization, and a fourth I think we're almost ready for. I see the following meta-paradigm shifts as part of a continuous spiral: Man is part of the natural world, and what we take from nature must be returned in a gift cycle. This environmental ethic was the meta-paradigm under which society ...

The idea for our next PCA meeting ( Friday, May 11th ) will be to read as much or as little of the March or April issues of Harper's as you like. If you feel inspired, write a blog entry on anything that intrigues you, and comment on other's entries. I will also be posting entries about some of the articles I've read in the past and found especially good, and perhaps a little about the history of the magazine. OK, this isn't a deep, single topic, but it should stimulate a few good conversations and blog threads (since we seem to have so little to discuss when we are together). I've been reading Harper's for a few years. I wish I'd discovered it a few decades ago. I love the length and depth of the articles. I like the political viewpoint that seems very different from any other established magazines. When I have the time to read it, I find the fiction excellent. I hate to sound like an ad, but if you find you enjoy Harper's, you may want to subscribe f...

This panel from the Sistine Chapel was never given a name by Michelangelo, though it is commonly referred to as "The Creation of Adam." I don't think I'm the only one puzzled by this description. Adam has obviously already been created, so what's God doing now? And why does God appear to be struggling to reach out and touch an Adam who couldn't care less? God seems to be gathering his loyal legions around him while reaching out for one more who appears to be casually telling God to go ahead without him. Could this be a representation, not of God in the act of creation, or even in the act of endowing man with self-knowledge, but of humanity in the act of rejecting God -- the birth, that is, of humanism? That God and his angels together form a remarkably precise outline of the human brain is, I think, no coincidence; it might very well be a symbol of God as a creation of the mind rather than the reverse. Click on the image above to go to site where you can view...

I don't need further convincing. Check out the BBC article .

Lee Smolin, in his book The Trouble with Physics , complains that his generation of theoretical physicists dropped the ball. In the early 1970’s graduate students like himself were sure they were close to a major revolution in humanity’s understanding of the universe. But just when a “theory of everything” seemed to be within reach, theoretical physics divided into ideological camps and began arguing philosophy and metaphysics rather than investigating the meaning of experimental results and the testability of their hypotheses. In the last 50 years, industry, government and individual entrepreneurs have been busy applying the knowledge gained in the previous 500. Up until 1960, even Newton’s laws were fundamentally untested. It wasn’t until the first earth-orbiting satellites that even those most basic laws of physics could be demonstrated unambiguously. Technology has been rapidly advancing since, and today its routine to use the equations of quantum electrodynamics in the design of c...

Why isn't this Nobel-Prize-winning economist ever interviewed on American television? Check out this interview from Italy.

In objecting to Saul’s description of the current Western technocracy as a “dictatorship of reason,” a couple of us made the point last night that reason has really never been given a chance, that reason has always been pushed aside by irrational forces -- apocalyptic Christianity, racism and other skewed ideologies. That the rational method was revived in the late Middle Ages to support and legitimize those very same “irrational” institutions could be dismissed as a simple disagreement over definitions. But at the same time, I think we all agree that the process of defining terms is much more than an intellectual exercise, or a nuanced strategy for scholastic debate. At the heart of the matter, I think, is the important difference between prescriptive and descriptive dictionaries. Pre scriptive dictionaries use definitions to produce the desired result, like when scholars in the Middle Ages carefully parsed Biblical passages to remove contradictions in scripture, or when modern-day pu...