Owl & Ibis - A Confluence Of Minds

No Room in the Inn by Pam Dewey "Attempting to severely limit immigration to America is a hot-button issue in the political debates of the 21st century. Yet the plaque on the Statue of Liberty has extended a warm invitation to the tired, poor, wretched, huddled masses to find refuge in America for well over a century. Has the view expressed by Lady Liberty somehow changed in recent years?  No Room in the Inn  is a docucommentary I created that explores the long history of her offer. The political debates over immigration in the Trump Era are nothing new. You may be surprised at what the man or woman in the street thought about immigration and refugees in the 19th and 20th Centuries, including Jewish refugees from the Holocaust of World War II." - Pam Dewey

A sincere thank you to those who attended O&I on Tuesday, October 23, 2018 for my presentation,  The Evolution of Western Individualism , Part I, ”From the East African Rift to Silicon Valley.” For those who missed it a PowerPoint version is  here . A PDF copy of the slideshow is  here . A key part of the meeting was an individualism-collectivism measure and an accompanying graph I developed. This may be seen below (click on image) or downloaded in higher resolution as an Excel spreadsheet  here . Any comments or questions you may have about the slideshow or the measure and graph are welcome. Regrettably, I ran over my allotted time presenting Part I and did not allow enough opportunity for discussion. I will be sure to allow plenty of discussion time during Part II, “Individualism in the 20th and 21st Centuries – A Closer Look.” O&I CALENDAR November 13 – No Meeting November 27 – No Meeting Dec 11 - Individualism, Par...

                  I am sometimes asked what sources I use for news and information. In addition to electronic and paper books and a free local weekly newspaper tossed in my driveway every Wednesday (awful opinion page, great crossword puzzle), I read mostly online sources. Some of them I subscribe to at reasonable rates. The following are my main sources for news, articles, commentary, essays, and other information. Very often in reading something I'll explore an embedded link to an additional source. But these are my day-to-day places. If you know and use others you think I might be interested in, please put them and their links in a comment. Thanks! NEWS New York Times Washington Post PBS News Hour The Guardian BBC CNN Atlanta Journal Constitution Al Jazeera Sky News Deutsche Welle AllAfrica.com ARTICLES, ESSAYS, COMMENTARY American Association for the Advancement of Science Academi...

This from the Owl & Ibis – A Confluence of Minds “Statement of Purpose and Intent:” “Respectful of the rights of its members to hold personal beliefs of their choosing, Owl and Ibis, as a learning endeavor, is interested in all civilizations, societies, cultural traditions, and belief systems but professes to none. It holds in high esteem secular-scientific thinking yet is committed to ideological pluralism and tolerance regarding all other modes of thought and inquiry. At the same time, Owl & Ibis participants will critically assess and when necessary challenge the beliefs and values of persons and groups in terms of the harm they may do or the purported benefit they provide to specific persons, peoples, and Humankind as a whole.” In this spirit O&I offers and endorses the following, a documentary video from author and videographer, Pam Dewey. An introductory note from Ms. Dewey follows. }:>~:) Part IV, the latest installment of my  Strange Br...

  Kudos to Mona Leiter on her excellent multimedia presentation Creativity in Action at last Tuesday's Owl & Ibis - A Confluence of Minds meeting! A PDF of creativity resources Mona introduced may be found  here . During the evening Mona's multimedia presentation and the discussions it generated covered a number of areas: myths about creativity; how creativity can be life enhancing, changing and saving; "creativism," creativity can be put into, made part of anything - relationships, daily living, business, time management, leisure, education methods, etc. An old and still contested question was also discussed: Is the goal of public education to produce thinking, informed citizens or train obedient, productive workers? Important creativity resources presented included: Do Schools Kill Creativity? , TED Talk by Sir Ken Robinson, 2006: "creativity is as important in public education as literacy;" "if you're not prepared to be wrong...