A reader writes to the Asia Times about the intellectual decline of the West and Spengler replies:

Your point is well taken, and would be stronger if you were to add that some of the intellectual centers of Europe (the name Martin Heidegger springs to mind) helped to destroy themselves.

That's the wrong D word there. Heidegger helped them de-struct themselves.  ¶ 8:49 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

The Wireless Business Applications blog informs us that Portable Devices are Terrible for Browsing

A portable application should "disappear" when it is in use. That is, using the interface should not require any understanding or thinking or conscious work. Navigation and manipulation of the interface should not be something the user thinks about consciously. This is what Martin Heidegger calls "ready to hand".

Unfortunately, portable applications are "ready for marketing". Corollary: the day PDAs "work", marketing will "disappear".
  ¶ 4:18 PM 0 comments

  In a recent interview in Le Monde, Derrida says that deconstruction is critical of Euro-centrism.

[E]ver since the beginning of my work, and that would be "deconstruction" itself, I have been extremely critical with regard to Euro-centrism in the modernity of its formulations, as in Valéry, Husserl, or Heidegger for example. Deconstruction in general is an undertaking that many have justly considered as a gesture of distrust with regard to all Euro-centrism. These days, when I happen to say "we Europeans", it's conjunctural and very different: everything that can be deconstructed from European tradition does not prevent Europe, precisely because of what has happened here, because of the Enlightenment, because of the contraction of this little continent and the enormous guilt that once passed through its culture (totalitarianism, Nazism, genocides, the Shoah, colonization et decolonization, etc.), the current geopolitical situation that is ours, Europe, another Europe but with the same memory, from (and this is in any case my hope) gathering together against both the American policy of hegemony (the Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc. connection) and against an Arab-Islamic theocracy without the Enlightenment and without a political future (but let's not neglect the contradictions and heterogeneousness of both the two ensembles and let us ally ourselves with those who resist from the inside of both blocs).

Given a choice between freedom American hegemony and theocracy, he would rather be, well, European.  ¶ 1:53 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

A strange stark posting at Cor ne edito.  ¶ 12:29 PM 0 comments

  The seductive bullying of philosophers, from Socrates to Stanley Rosen, via Plato, Aristotle, Heidegger, and Strauss:

Now, I had a friend with a Classics background, with whom I was frequently in touch, who was then leading a long-running seminar on Plato's Republic among some of the volunteers for Lyndon LaRouche, who was himself in prison at the time, having been framed up in a rerun of Socrates' trial at Athens. I learned somehow that my friend, the seminar leader, had studied under the Straussian Stanley Rosen.

I had always thought that this Plato seminar was a bit of a mixed bag. Some parts, which I think stemmed from my friend's own study of the history of Athens, were quite useful. Others were unexplained and eerie: such as, for example, his insistence that Socrates "seduced" his hearers. But more to the point was an indefinable, ominous sort of quirkiness which overhung every discussion.

Eventually it became clear to me, that Strauss, through Stanley Rosen, had made the same sort of imprint on my friend, that Strauss's teacher Martin Heidegger had made upon Strauss himself. In the insightful account of Shadia Drury, "Nothing made a greater impact on Strauss than Heidegger's manner of studying a text. He was totally struck by Heidegger's analysis of Aristotle's Metaphysics; he thought that Heidegger's approach laid bare the intellectual sinews of a text; and it was unlike anything else he had ever seen or heard. Strauss's reaction is not unusual. Heidegger's style of teaching was reputed to have a totally mesmerizing effect. He has been accused of a certain 'mystical bullying.' The goal was not so much understanding as initiation in a mystical cult. This is precisely why Karl Jaspers's letter to the Denazification Commission advised against Heidegger's return to teaching after the war. The gist of Jaspers's letter was that Heidegger's style was profoundly unfree, and that the students were not strong enough to withstand his sourcery."

I expect only a sourpuss could identify the sorcery in others. In the kindergarten of the mind, recess can be hell with those mesmerizing bullies about. Good thing Sister Shadia's there to protect the innocents.  ¶ 9:19 AM 0 comments

  Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt's Empire is online, allowing one to subvert the linearity of narrative with the power of grep. It looks like bad news for economists.

Throughout Western metaphysics, from Aristotle to Kant and Heidegger, time has continuously been located in this transcendent dwelling place. In modernity, reality was not conceivable except as measure, and measure in turn was not conceivable except as a (real or formal) a priori that corralled being within a transcendent order. Only in postmodernity has there been a real break with this tradition-a break not with the first element of Aristotle's definition of time as a collective constitution but with the second transcendent configuration. In postmodernity, instead, time is no longer determined by any transcendent measure, any a priori: time pertains directly to existence. Here is where the Aristotelian tradition of measure is broken. In fact, from our perspective the transcendentalism of temporality is destroyed most decisively by the fact that it is now impossible to measure labor, either by convention or by calculation.

That's too bad. I wonder if anyone has informed the dismal scientists?
  ¶ 8:51 AM 0 comments

  An article in Logos refers to he-who-shall-not-be-named:

A great philosopher of the last century vividly described the tendency of modern lives to become submerged in societal noises, in the busy clamor of social conformism (what he called “das Man”). But he also indicated a different possibility, a different path involving a kind of turning-around or a movement leading from “tuning out” to a new kind of “tuning in.” In his portrayal, this attunement or tuning-in meant an opening of heart and mind to recessed voices drowned out by societal pressures: above all to the voice of “conscience” which calls us into mindfulness, into a new mode of careful being-in-the-world.

The article, a tribute to Arundhati Roy, is filled with familiar anti-democratic agit-prop masquerading as concern for the "people"; e.g., the third world should be denied irrigation and electrification to preserve their noble-savage-ness and such. Here's one particular morsel that I happen to know something about (full disclosure: I once worked for Bechtel):

In 1999—Roy recalls—the government of Bolivia privatized the public water supply system in the city of Cochabamba and signed a forty-year lease with a consortium headed by Bechtel, the giant U.S. engineering firm: “The first thing Bechtel did was to raise the price of water; hundreds of thousands of people simply couldn’t afford it any more.”

Bechtel had a 25% stake. The price of water was set by the popularly elected government. Whatever the price of water was before, the truth is that water before was scarce and of low quality. The poor had to buy expensive water from delivery trucks. After Bechtel rebuilt the water supply system, potable water was available direct from the pipes. What we have in this case is the effective intellectuals, the people who know how to design and build large public works, being criticized by those who don't have a direct effect on the lives of the poor. Instead of whinging, how about actually tuning-in to the needs the poor and providing them with running water? Wouldn't that be mindfulness? An effective mode of being care-full for the world?
  ¶ 7:59 AM 0 comments

  It must be true if the US State Dept. says so:

It is likely that Christopher Columbus, who discovered America in 1492, charted his way across the Atlantic Ocean with the help of an Arab navigator.

  ¶ 9:57 PM 0 comments

  Alice Cooper lays it on the line:

[R]ock is the antithesis of politics. Rock should never be in bed with politics.

If you're listening to a rock star in order to get your information on whom to vote for, you're a bigger moron than they are. Why are we rock stars? Because we're morons.

  ¶ 9:27 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

The Poetics of Decay delves into Building, Dwelling, Rotting, and continued. The architectural aspect of Heidegger's has been on my mind since attending a couple of Pat Helland's Metropolis lectures on how computers are Information Technology is like cities. Pat's theses are partly historical: cities have had a long ramp up period, while IT is only just getting started, in relative temporal terms. I, on the other hand, am more interested in the IT/Cities analogy from the how-can-humans-dwell-in-them angle.

Poetics says:

For Heidegger the question of dwelling is contained in the prospect of remaining, even lingering.

Well I feel we've lingered in some filthly chunks of legacy code long enough, and it is time to upgrade!
  ¶ 4:49 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

The Pinocchio Theory blogs about Whitehead and Heidegger, and has comments on a core issue:

[Heidegger] picks up on the worst part of Nietzsche, the heavy-handed, pompous, self-obsessed, doom-laden, apocalyptic, romantic rhetoric -- so stereotypically "Germanic" -- of Zarathustra, but completely misses Nietzsche's gaiety, sarcasm, "French" scepticism, and general sense of dancing over the abyss.

That's the problem right there: Martin can't dance; and the muses Thalia and Erato appear to have passed him by; and he schtupped his grad students; and he was a Nazi.

REG:
All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?

  ¶ 4:30 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Ungrok.org audits the Dreyfus class, reflects on the art of motorbike maintenance, and muses:

philosophy is so soothing, precisley because it is outside the world of deadlines

And all this time I was thinking that existentialism was about the ultimate deadline.
  ¶ 4:17 PM 0 comments

  Let's broaden the historical horizon.

Here's proof that amateur historians can still do useful work. A gentleman goes to the Vatican library with his digital camera. He takes pictures of two of the earliest references to Christopher Columbus, two papal bulls from 1493 celebrating his discovery of the new lands and all those new souls to convert. The bulls are in Latin, but his name isn't. The name in the bulls appears as "Cristofõm Colon". Not the Latin name, not the Genovese name, nor Spanish, but the Portuguese spelling. The tilde over the letter o is a dead giveaway as the other languages don't have it.

What does the name mean? Well all the extant signatures by his own hand are similar (also on the link above). His sigla is a pyramid of Greek letters and underneath it is the string (as best as I can render it in my barely adequate HTML)

: crõfERENS ;

Chi rho omicron are the abbreviation for Christo. That tilde above the omicron, is a Greek macron, indicating emphasis; today Romance languages use an acute for the same purpose. Ferens is the Latin for the Greek ferry man (e.g. Charon on the river Styx), or he-who-carries. St. Christopher (Santo Cristovão, in modern Portuguese) is "he who carries Christ"; the patron saint of taxi drivers. And of course, there is the Colon on the end. Today, in English we call that a semi-colon. The regular colon at the front of the string comes from Portuguese grammar of the time; it indicates the sentence end with the opposite colon. Today Spanish still keeps something similar; an upside down question mark or exclamation mark at the beginning of a sentence indicates the sentence ends with the same.

There are many more subtle details about the signature discussed in the link above, including an interpretation of the symbolic pyramid above the name itself. It fact the amateur archeologist's site, has a bunch of interesting pages about the early exploration of the Atlantic. Many of them are only reachable via search engines because the site's top level pages has changed over time and it seems to me no longer link to all the pages on the site. Several pages document a different story from the popular mythologies about the Age of Discoveries. I may post about the site's other pages after I check the details against other sources.  ¶ 9:51 PM 0 comments

  More signs the election is really a referendum on Bush.

Found this report that even anarchists are going to vote to anyone-but-Bush.

Susan Heitker, 32, of Athens, believes that the U.S. government is neither legitimate nor democratic, but she still plans to vote.

'To me, at least, it's important to vote,' she said. 'There was a time when I was not going to vote, but I really dislike Bush.'

  ¶ 11:43 AM 0 comments

  I'm interested in this new report that Group Discovers John the Baptist Cave. I don't know if the claims about this particular spot are true, but John the Baptist is an interesting figure whose significance isn't fully appreciated. He is critical figure in the story of Jesus, and he is a thread through the esoteric strands of Chrisitian history. One of my favorite wines is from the farm of John the Baptist in Tomar, a center of the Knights Templar that still has a well preserved circular church.

Water baptism was a Mithra ritual. Mithra (born December 25th) was venerated by the Roman legions that had recently occupied Palestine. The Romans were running into problems with the monotheists of the region. They were not as amenable to conversion to the official religions of the Roman Empire as the other pagan peoples the Roman has conquered. I see John's baptism as a way to break with the religious past and make the locals more amenable to Roman manipulation. Christianity originated out of that effort, eventually becoming the official religion of the empire.  ¶ 11:13 AM 0 comments

  This article, Muslim roots of the blues: The music of famous American blues singers reaches back through the South to the culture of West Africa, posits an interesting theory, but I'm very suspicious of its entire thesis and its presentation. For starters, the notion that the Blues came from Africa is attractive to many, but very hard to prove. After years of reading various theories on the matter, it seems to me that many musical traditions (e.g. lowering of the 3rd and 5th notes of the Pentatonic scale), sophisticated rhythms, and new instruments were brought to the new world from Africa, but that the Blues are a uniquely American phenomena. There is no reason to explain where Blues or Jazz "came from" apart from a need to deny America and its artists their originality. This article goes further, claiming not only that the Blues had its origins in West African music, but also in Islamic music. The problems with the article lie its in logical fallacies and dubious history. For example:

Bailey lives on Georgia's Sapelo Island, where a small community of blacks can trace their ancestry to Bilali Mohammed, a Muslim slave who was born and raised in what is now the country of Guinea. Visitors to Sapelo Island are always struck by the fact that churches there face east. In fact, as a child, Bailey learned to say her prayers facing east -- the same direction that her great-great-great-great-grandfather faced when he prayed toward Mecca

Churches face east in America, and Europe, for a couple of reasons: to face Jerusalem, and to allow the rising sun to shine through the stained glass behind the altar.

The article quotes a German scholar connecting Blues and Arabic music by their use of melisma and asserts that melisma is:

[S]omething that's very common in both blues music and in the Muslim call to prayer

That's true, but the article doesn't tell you that melisma is fairly universal in the musical world. Melisma occurs in musics as different as Gregorian Chant and Tuvan throat singing.

There is a general problem with musical history in that we have only had recorded music for a little over one hundred years, and music is always changing. When I listen to early recordings of African music by anthropologists it is hard to make out any similarities with the Blues. I can hear rhythms and instruments that sound very similar to the sounds of music by African descendents in Brazil and the Caribbean, but nothing that sounds remotely like the blues. It is only when I listen to modern African "roots" musician, like say Ali Farka Toure, that I can hear obvious blues elements. But which came first? Music is always changing. The most popular music in Africa in the XXth century was Soukous, derived from the Cuban rumba. Africa is a wonderful source of music, but so are the Americas. Let's not explain away the musical achievements of Americans.

The notion of Islamic music is problematic in itself. To turn things around, why does the article pertain to "the connection between Islam and American blues music"? Why isn't the article refer to the connection between Mahgrebian and Southern Baptist music? The article refers to the Arab Oud, but the Oud is not from Arabia. Egyptians and others played similar lute-like instruments before the Jihadis swept out of the Arabian peninsula. We don't hear of the music of Mecca or the instruments of Medina. Music referred to as Arabic cum Moslem occurs at the edges of the Moslem conquests, where the enforcement of the strictures of faith was laxer. Music occurs in inverse proportion to Islamic fundamentalism; witness the ban on music by the Taliban and after the Khomeini revolution.

There is much fine music from Moslem lands, but in Islam, the Hadith prohibit music, as explained here:

One hadith from the Bukhari Shareef, the most authentic Book of Hadith, further confirms unlawfulness of music and singing:

`There will be people of my Ummah who will seek to make lawful; fornication, wine-drinking and the use of ma`aazif ( musical instruments ).`
Detailed analysis of the Arabic word `ma`aazif ` shows that it refers to musical instruments, the sounds of those musical instruments and singing with the accompaniment of instruments.

Closer analysis of the wordings of the Hadith establishes the prohibition of music. Firstly, the words `seek to make lawful ` shows that music is not permissible, as logically one can only seek to make lawful that which is not allowed. Secondly, if music was not prohibited, then it would not have been brought within the same context as fornication and wine-drinking.

There were musical traditions in the lands that Islam conquered, and those traditions continue, and mutate, as music does, but the notion of "Muslim" music is problematic, to say the least.  ¶ 9:44 PM 0 comments

  Today a libertarian(Republican) columnist complains that the media is not following up on Senator Kerry's Holiday in Cambodia episode, nor on the story that apparently all the servicemen that Kerry served with think he's a pompous jerk, or otherwise dislike him; apart from the couple that Kerry's campaign has hired as part of the roadshow. These issues have been all over the blogosphere and many blogs are annoyed (shocked! I tell you!) that the media hasn't picked up the stories. They grouse on about the liberal media and how the press isn't doing its job. And they're right, but.

When I talk to family and friends about the election, a great unfolding entertainment for me, they don't care about Kerry that much about what he did in the war, or what he's done since. Basically the election is about Bush, and Bush is unpopular. Bush lost the popular vote in the last election, and only got elected because of the archaic constraints on communications when the constitution was written. Today, Bush is still unpopular, if not more so, and this time many people really want to make sure that he doesn't get elected. The election is not about comparing the relative merits of Bush and Kerry's platforms, and what they stand for, and what they intend to do. The election is about Bush and not-Bush, and that is what people are going to consider in the polling booth.

If the Republicans want to get Bush reelected, they can stop attacking Kerry (because it won't make any difference) and instead they have to get people to want to vote for Bush. Which I assume means that we will see more pandering to special interest groups from Bush: more protectionism for certain groups of workers and farmers; more specialized laws for religious conservatives (abortion, evolution, and prayer-in-school pledges); more foreign policy exceptions (specialized Cuban embargoes).  ¶ 3:26 PM 0 comments

  Maria Teresa Thiersten Simoes-Ferreira Heinz Kerry Exitentialist

Developing dynamically:

The stress of the campaign and the nonstop tour of battleground states is taking a toll on the Kerrys.

Teresa Heinz Kerry has been confiding in staffers how the tour is just "nonstop movement" and how there "is no time just to 'be.'"

A plea for Gelassenheit.
  ¶ 8:36 AM 0 comments

  In a way its entertaining how Heidegger's thinking gets appropriated into diverse fields. Here's a blog, Exploration Through Example, on the testing aspects of Extreme or Agile Development (a trend on software development that was popular in the late 1990's but seems to have derailed shortly after leaving the station--sounds good, but it hasn't actually delivered a major application):

Make what your methodology emphasizes visible in the world of its users. In that way, methodologies will become what Heidegger called ready-to-hand. Just as one doesn't think about how to hold a hammer when pounding nails, one shouldn't think about the methodology, its ontology, and its rules during the normal pace of a project: one should simply act appropriately.

Unfortunately, at least one basic premise is wrong.

In philosophy, an ontology is an inventory of the kinds of things that actually exist, and (often) of the kinds of relations that can exist between those things.

Ontology is the study of being. I believe this appropriation of the term ontology is part of the Semantic Web, an attempt to give "meaning" to the web. To my mind this is similar to Artificial Intelligence, where intelligence was redefined from "thinking" to "computation". In the case of the Semantic Web, they have redefined "ontology" into ways of classifying information. Ontology, a foundation of epistemology, becomes a synonym for metadata. I expect using big words like ontology helps them get funding, just like using the term AI was a trick to get funding for computer science. Perhaps something good will come from the Semantic Web, but the prognosis isn't good. If they don't know what ontology means, they're likely doomed to keep reinventing the wheel. This is an aspect of the increasing specialization of knowledge. Today most students don't get a general education, and don't have a foundation to build on. A couple decades ago the trend in computer science was Object Oriented things, where computer scientists discovered that stuff could be organized into classes, and classes had attributes, and classes had instances, and classes had relationships, and so on. Had they read Aristotle's Metaphysics, they might have saved themselves time, but there were fees to be earned teaching software developers ideas they could have learned in high school.
  ¶ 11:13 AM 0 comments

  Where did the island of Cuba get its name? Columbus named it. He thought he'd reached the mainland he was looking for, but he didn't call it India. It was the largest island he would discover in all four journeys to the new world.

At that time, 1492, there was only one other Cuba, a village and parish north of the town of Beja in the Alentejo. Canonical historians tell us that Columbus was a Genovese employed by the Spanish King and Queen. Why did Columbus name this island after a village in southern Portugal?
  ¶ 9:50 PM 0 comments

  Heidegger Globalized

Goggle directed me to this article at allAfrica.com, Let's Kill IMF And World Bank. Specifically this:

[Nietzsche's] influence quickly spread after another German existentialist, Martin Heidegger, who wrote that masterpiece, Zein und Zeit (Being and Time) propelled his philosophy and made rational beings to begin to see wisdom and appreciate his works.

The appeal to wisdom leads to:

IMF and the World Bank represent neo-colonialist forces which serve one purpose: To retard growth of developing economies so as not to challenge and put in jeopardy, luxuries enjoyed by developed economies.

Both rational orgs should wisely stop lending money then.

In related news, Hugo Chavez, is also citing the German existentialist's wisdom:

Chavez quoted the German philosopher, Heidegger, who said that: “the problem of housing is older than war, that problem of housing is far older than demographic explosions…”

I expect some dodgy translations occurred between Freiburg and Caracas and onto the web.

Meanwhile I clipped this from the Times of India:

Philosophy must return to the question of being, wrote Martin Heidegger, the author of Being and Time. For being would throw light on human existence. Like T S Eliot who asked: "Where is the time we have lost in living?"

I expect the lost time is hidden under a housing project subsidized by the IMF.
  ¶ 9:19 AM 0 comments

  The documentary The Ister is making its way across the film festival globe; Ister is the classical name for the Danube. It just did the Australia festivals last week, and I might try to make it to the showing at the Vancouver film fest, if I can get tickets online. That might be my best chance to see it. A DVD has not been announced.

The movie is about:

The film The Ister takes up some of the most challenging paths in Heidegger's thought, as we journey from the mouth of the Danube river in Romania to its source in the Black Forest. However controversial Heidegger continues to be, his thought remains alive in the work of some of the most remarkable thinkers and artists working today. Four of these conduct our voyage upstream along the Danube: Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, Bernard Stiegler,

Basically what we've got here is "Three Men French Philosophers in a Boat". I wonder if they took along a dog. Then they could say Nothing to the dog!

In a review we learn that the filmmakers

Ross and Barison returned to Australia with 12 hours of interviews in French, three in English, and about 50 hours of footage from the river.

They could turn it into a TV series, or release all the decent footage on the DVD and let folks remix the footage into shorter pieces. Sure, the first one would be a simple collage with Nuremberg rally footage, but thoughtful folks might also use the footage to make videos discussing their favorite passages from The Ister lectures, or make an entertaining homage to Jerome K. Jerome.  ¶ 11:01 AM 0 comments

  There's quite a logical fallacy in today's Times Literary Supplement in a review of four new books on Islam and the West. In the midst of discussing the persecution of the Ahmadis sect by the Islamic government of Pakistan, and how the Ahmadis are the denied the right to be considered Islamic, there is this:

On the basis of such claims, the Pakistani courts have legally deprived the Ahmadis of the right to call themselves Muslims, on the ground that certain religious terms (such as "mosque", the "call to prayer" and the "profession of faith") are peculiar to "Islam" as defined by legislation enacted with the specific purpose of excluding the Ahmadis. In its 1993 majority ruling, the Supreme Court of Pakistan made a curious analogy with the law on trademarks and copyrights.

For the Pakistani judges "Islam" is in effect a commercial product.

There's a weak analogy by the judges between forbidding the Ahmadis the use of certain words because they are considered apostates, and the way trademarks and copyrights are a kind of property. But there's a strong fallacy in asserting that because the weak analogy was made, therefore for the person making the analogy the analogy is true, in effect. Analogies are not true or false, they are simply analogies.

I can't find the name for this fallacy: Taking another's analogy to be the case. If someone (the judges) says that the relation between A (religion) and B (religious terms) is like the relation between C (commercial firm) and D (logos), then A = C.  ¶ 10:02 PM 0 comments

  An entertaining talk by Douglas Adams, Is there an Artificial God?, on the tautology in evolution, the fourth age of sand (this blog is a grain of that), and why god became an answer to the question, Why is there something rather than nothing?:

Early man thinks, "Well, because there's only one sort of being I know about who makes things, whoever made all this must therefore be a much bigger, much more powerful and necessarily invisible, one of me and because I tend to be the strong one who does all the stuff, he's probably male". And so we have the idea of a god.

  ¶ 9:34 PM 0 comments

  Guerilla-ontologist really strict materialist shock.

Found a new interview with Peter Lamborn Wilson, An Anarchist in the Hudson Valley, where he rails against the service economy.

A couple of years ago, we passed the halfway mark from being a so-called productive economy to a services economy. What are services? You tell me. Whatever it means, we don't make pencils. We don't make cement. We don't make ladies garments or roll cigars. We don't even manufacture computers.

This supports the thesis that anarchists simply don't understand economics. Which admittedly is a not a simple subject and its rules are counter intuitive in many respects. At least Peter readily admits:

Now, everyone I know is involved in the arts, and I’m involved in the arts, so what I’m saying here is a bit of a mea culpa. I don’t think that we can consider ourselves guiltless and not implicated in all this because we’re creative and artsy and have leftist emotions.

"All this" being affluence, a higher standard of living, cell phones, free markets, and so on. I for one I'm glad Peter can be artsy, get grants, and write his books.

I heard Peter lecture once with Robert Anton Wilson, Nick Herbert, and others at a T.A.Z. autonomously put together by Cheb i Sabbah; standing room only, in pools of beer and cigarette butts, in a warehouse, somewhere in time.  ¶ 8:52 AM 0 comments

  Fun with art. Here's an entertaining explanation of Gerome's painting of Diogenes in his barrel: "Diogenes, Having Failed in his Search for an Honest Man, Finds Some Stoic Dogs"  ¶ 11:18 AM 0 comments

  Guy Debord and Gil Wolman assert in A User's Guide to Detournement:

The literary and artistic heritage of humanity should be used for partisan propaganda purposes.

That's the secondary web in a nutshell--presuming that the original web is for using hypertext to footnote documents.

It is in fact necessary to eliminate all remnants of the notion of personal property in this area. The appearance of new necessities outmodes previous “inspired” works. They become obstacles, dangerous habits. The point is not whether we like them or not. We have to go beyond them.

  ¶ 3:54 PM 0 comments