Owl & Ibis - A Confluence Of Minds

  Image: Courtesy of John Cruickshank Kudos to John Cruickshank for his outstanding presentation, "Strategies for Creating African American Museums and Cultural Spaces." Here is a PDF version of John's PowerPoint slideshow. In his comprehensive presentation John covered the institutional history of African American museums, background on Julius Rosenwald and the schools he created, and the views of two prominent African American museum directors, Lonnie Bunch and Bryan Stevenson. John's presentation was particularly focused on the Our Legacy: The Griffin-Spalding African American History Museum in Griffin, Georgia. John is a member of that museum's steering committee. John's Statement of Argumentation In the United States, we have generally done a very poor job of creating cultural spaces that help us understand our history, who we are, the nature of our problems and how those problems emerged. The American South is littered with iconography designed to memor...

    William Boyd as Hopalong Cassidy                           Hopalong on his horse, Topper  Attached  here  is a wonderful new documentary on famous American cowboy actor William Boyd, and the movie and TV Western hero he portrayed and came to emulate in his personal life, Hopalong Cassidy. Pam Dewey, author, documentary producer, and US social historian, has masterfully put together yet another account of 19th and 20th Century America’s story, and the myths and legends of its making. In her presentation, Pam's attention to historical detail and infusion of aspects of her early life in the US Midwest during the middle of the 20th Century make this production highly educational and authentic. The male heroic themes Ms. Dewey explores have continued to resonate in North America and in slightly altered forms worldwide, from the 1980s into the early 21st Century. One need look no furth...

Sacrifice of Isaac. Michelangelo Merisi, detto il Caravaggio (Caravaggio, Milano 1571 – Porto Ercole, Grosseto 1610) Ruminant stomachs have four compartments. So do the minds of some featherless bipeds. I have gnawed and swallowed Ryan Kemp’s essay on Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855),  “An Unlikely Meditation on Modern Happiness.”  I have now regurgitated it from my mental rumen and begun chewing its cognitive cud. Next it will pass to my subsequent deeper mental stomachs to be fully digested. Ultimately to be assimilated into my being as knowledge or plopped behind me as, well, bullshit. Here are my initial ruminations. I will not know, until I read and understand it, what Kierkegaard means in  Fear and Trembling  when he uses the expression “infinite resignation” to describe how he chose submitting to God. Based on my frustrations reading and comprehending other of K’s works, I am not looking forward to trying. But I will try unless life’s clock run...

Mural (8-by15 foot) by Elizabeth Janes (1938-39) depicting the arrival of Cherokee Nationin Oklahoma in the 1830s, on display at the Oklahoma Historical Society, Oklahoma City. The  Trail of Tears  was part of the Indian removal, a series of forced displacements and ethnic cleansing of approximately 60,000 Native Americans of the Five Civilized Tribes between 1830 and 1850 by the United States government. Tribal members "moved gradually, with complete migration occurring over a period of nearly a decade.” Members of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes – the Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations (including thousands of their black slaves) were forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands in the Southeastern United States to areas to the west of the Mississippi River that had been designated Indian Territory. The forced relocations were carried ou...

  Many thanks to Doug Nichols for his outstanding presentation at the October 30, 2021 Owl & Ibis - A Confluence. Doug called his talk "Will Electric Vehicles Serve a Major Role in Reaching Net Zero Carbon Emissions by 2050?" Doug's comprehensive coverage of electric vehicles (EVs) focused mainly on passenger cars.  Here  is a link to his Apple Keynote slideshow. It takes a few minutes to open on a PC but it and the videos it contains will open and play. During his talk Doug covered the following topics and much more. Most of the information contained in his narration is contained in his slides.  Battery life, safety, recycling, and recharging at home and on the road. Ongoing battery research & development and information about component minerals and mining industry providers. EV cost by vehicle and manufacturer, and the steady downward trend in cost to consumers. EV operating and maintenance costs. Comparison of EV and ICE (internal combustion) emission...

Web users view the web in many different ways. I view it as "America’s Attic."  This introductory episode to the  Exploring America’s Attic  series explains this metaphor.  And it clarifies how search engine tools such as Google allow anyone to quickly and efficiently search America’s Attic for the ingredients to create small miracles for friends and family. Click  here  for Part 1, Small Miracles. In this video I share the basic details of a few Google-fied miracles I have performed for my own family.  Although they are interesting in themselves, I share them in particular to perhaps inspire some viewers to consider using these miraculous tools to explore America’s Attic themselves, and bring smiles to their own friends and family. No, these aren’t big, flashy “supernatural” miracles, but small intimate miracles nonetheless. Proven to be that by the smiles and gentle joy they brought to people I care about. Miracles that couldn’t have been done in 199...

  This is for anyone who has never made a presentation at Owl & Ibis - A Confluence of Minds and thinks they might like to but need a little encouragement and want assistance. It is also for those who have presented in the past and would like to branch out in their method of presentation for their next go. I encourage everyone to make a presentation at least once. There is a great wealth of knowledge and wisdom among those of you who attend or who have shown an interest in the Confluence. Among you are parents, professors, teachers, artists, engineers, lawyers, musicians, singers, students, diplomats, social scientists, Burning Man attendees, Dark Mountain followers, economists, geneticists, independent scholars, natural philosophers, counsellors and psychotherapists, authors, poets, librarians, military veterans, pilots, medical doctors and other health professionals, humanitarian assistance workers, political activists, world travellers, fluent speakers ...

Kudos to Mona Leiter for her top-notch Owl & Ibis – A Confluence of Minds presentation on October 2, 2021. In her “Computers and the Internet: The World They Have Created – Is It Worth It?” Mona was superb in presenting objective information about the history of computers and the Internet, her analysis of its impact including her personal experience, and her point of argumentation in answering her question “Is it worth it?” What follows is a note from Mona with links to material she presented. Great job, Mona! Jim }:> & ~:)  ~ ~ ~ NOTE FROM MONA LEITER Here are some related links to my Owl & Ibis presentation on Computers and the Internet. 1. A video essay about the movie 2010 which was the sequel to the classic 2001.  This essay features spoilers.  So if you think you might want to watch the movie first go ahead and then this is a great essay about it.  This is the movie where Hal the computer has a redemptive story arc.  I really love 2010 and o...

Kudos to Fran Stewart for her August 28, 2021 Owl & Ibis presentation,  An Interactive Intro to Writing Your Memoirs . Fran superbly introduced the Confluence to the various perspectives and methods of writing one's memoirs - memoirs as poetry, letter exchanges, narrative remembrances, choosing specific events to write about, prompts, and much more. For more information on Fran's approach to memoir writing including the classes she offers on the same, please visit her website  here . Great job, Fran! Thank you! Jim }:> & ~:)

  “…the collapse of the Afghan government showed that the U.S. had fundamentally misunderstood the people of Afghanistan and had tried to impose a military system that simply made no sense for a society based in patronage networks and family relationships.“  -  Heather Cox Richardson, August18, 2021 * What is the world going through? Neoliberalism ,  Modernity , Political Science vs. History and  Cultural Anthropology ? or Western Modernity and Progress vs. The Rest? or Modernity Blinders to Premodernity and  Postmodernity  vs. Cultural Human Nature 101? We in the US and most of the rest of the world that is separately following our way regarding faux liberal democracy or  autocracy ,  Enlightenment  ideals hypocrisy or rejection, and  ü ber-nationalist capitalism are leading humankind over the precipice of economic, social, and ecological collapse. Modernity is on its way into the dustbin of history. I thought I would never have su...