Owl & Ibis - A Confluence Of Minds

Friend : I see that Trump has entered South African politics. This bloody issue of [land] expropriation might really be a tipping point. How far does it go? Sure the whole colonial bit and apartheid were abhorrent. But firing the pendulum to the complete opposite also seems to invite chaos and evil. Yessus!  The  Institute of Race Relations  here does some reliable measurements of attitudes and those do not show the excessive inter-group hatred that seems to be promoted by populist leaders. But who will gain the upper hand in the power stakes? Me : Trumpian populism in South Africa’s politics!? Hadn’t been following the recent expropriations. Can’t think of a worse setting for populism. Talk about pouring gasoline on a fire. One of my profs (economics) in grad school at Oregon in the ‘70s had a line he liked repeating: “The world is globalizing and tribalizing simultaneously.” He insisted it was an unsustainable dynamic that would eventually come to a fork ...

The Cry of the Innocents by Paul Lentz Paul Lentz’s novel  The Cry of the Innocents  is a masterwork. It tells a monstrous story of human trafficking and organ harvesting in the US Southwest. Lentz is a highly gifted author whose strengths are his meticulous research skills and fluid prose. The business of this book’s narrative involves the Russian mafia, profiteering medical administrators and practitioners, officials at privately run prisons, and corrupt and criminal governme nt officials and employees at various local and state levels. The heart and soul of the narrative, however, is expressed through ancient notions of honor, sanctity and justice still strong among the Hopi, Navajo and Apache. This includes a growing number of these cultures’ youth who find meaning and purpose for their lives, and moral guidance in long-standing indigenous cultural beliefs and practices. Through the actions of the book’s ethnically diverse protagonists these spiritual a...

Luck is a judgment many people produce after an unanticipated or uncontrollable outcome. It is a mental posture individuals learn and associate with their hopes for their future. If we decide an occurrence benefits us, another or anything’s wellbeing we conclude the occurrence was good luck; if not, it was bad luck. Luck’s most appropriate corollary is serendipity but even that is a human judgment. In raw, pre-human physics, yes, stuff happened. But, there was no luck, happenstance, serendipity. For example, when atoms combined to form a molecule with properties that the single atoms did not have, and no human was there at the time making a judgment about the event, there was no good or bad luck. There was simply, as far as we know, a non-judgmental occurrence. It happened and was neither an inherently good or bad event. But, how far can such thinking be pushed - just how useful is it? Darwinian evolution would not have come to dominate the life sciences had Darwin not seen, ju...

UPDATE August 5, 2018 Today, Pam Dewey, author, blogger and video producer, posted "Strange Brew, Part III: Eye of Newt and Foot of Frog." It may be accessed  here . Here's an accompanying note from Pam: "If you have not yet seen Part 1 and/or Part 2, links to all three current videos in the series are available at the YouTube "Playlist" page linked below for the STRANGE BREW series. Be sure to watch them in order...the material in each one builds on information and commentary in the earlier entries. And stay tuned for more to come in the series. Links will show up on this playlist page on the YouTube website each time a new video is added to the collection.  STRANGE BREW YouTube PLAYLIST: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdUj022icjZyZpmzvnu0gNl1ub_UyyDS4 "The ongoing STRANGE BREW Series is an examination of the weird symbiosis of GOP Politics, Big Business, and Evangelical Christianity during the presidential a...

More than a year ago I stumbled upon the Dark Mountain Project , a British social and literary movement to alert the world about Humankind’s threat to itself and Earth. DMP disturbed me. Most of what its founders and members had written rang true with my own thinking about the negative cultural evolutionary direction of Humankind over the past five centuries, and our rapid degradation of Earth along the way. But was DMP’s solution of a total abandonment of the Western, now global, approach to economics, politics and ecology justifiable, and would DMP’s suggestion for doing something different work? These were questions I could not answer. So, in December 2017 I made an email proposal to my fellow participants in the Owl & Ibis Confluence of Minds hoping to answer them. The full text of that email is here . Here is an extract of the proposal itself: I propose a close look at DMP by Owl & Ibis over the course of several meetings in 2018. This would require an O&I ...

Since a recent meeting with a close friend I’ve been thinking a lot about his caution concerning my views of those who hold political and moral views different from mine. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about revising what I think of the mostly white, rich, Christian, (ultra)conservative, Republicans, WRCCRs (pronounced “wreckers”) for short, currently in power in the US. I’ve decided I want to shed my hatred for them and their beliefs and values, and replace it with a deeper understanding of why they hold the views they do. Socially, I’m looking for common ground as a basis for a better dialog when I encounter them, in person or via media. Personally, I’m looking to replace my hatred based on judgment with a tolerance based on understanding. All things considered I think this approach is the only reasonable option. "Those folks," as my friend reminded me, aren’t going anywhere and their thinking isn’t going to change easily or quickly. My hatred won’t free up or...