Chattanooga, TN is a hotbed of political activity today as talks have convened between the far left and far right about seceding from the United States. The Second Vermont Republic and the League of the South believe all everyone would be better off with an independent South, Vermont, Hawaii, and Alaska.
If there is a secession, does that mean the value of my house goes down?
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Here’s a great quote on the human person from Thomas Merton:
“The person is defined in terms of freedom, hence in terms of responsibility also: responsibility to other persons, responsibility for other persons. To put it in concrete terms, the Christian is not only one who seeks the expansion and development of his own individuality and the satisfaction of his most legitimate natural needs but one who recognizes himself responsible for the good of others, for their own temporal fulfillment, and ultimately for their eternal salvation. Hence, the Christian person reaches maturity with the realization that each one of us is indeed his “brother’s keeper,” and that if men are suffering and dying in Asia or Africa, other men in Europe and America are summoned to self-judgment before the bar of conscience to see whether, in fact, some choice or neglect on their own part has had a part in this suffering and this dying, which otherwise may seem so strange and remote. For today the whole world is bound tightly together by economic, cultural and sociological ties which make us all, to some extent, responsible for what happens to others on the far side of the earth. Man is now not only a social being; his social nature transcends national and regional limits, and whether we like it or not, we must think in terms of one human family, one world.”
Thomas Merton. Love and Living. Naomi Burton Stone and Brother Patrick Hart, editors. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979: 152-153
I like ideas and I like to read people who have them. The longer I live, the more I realize I don’t know much about anything. So anytime I can find help in making sense of people who really do know something, I smile real big. Paul Martin provided a nice link to Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Names.
Yesterday morning, a Rush Limbaugh billboard was defaced. A public official made a phone call to the local paper at 8 am; he quipped, “It looks great. It did my heart good.” By 8:28 am the story was posted on the Balimore Sun website and Drudgereport picked it up shortly after that. The story traveled across the country, causing a flood of calls to the city, and even became a point of humor on Limbaugh’s show.
By 5 pm, the story was one of the top stories in the history of the newspaper’s website. This story is fascinating not for the political nature but the speed of viral information when people feel passionate about that information.
Obviously the viral nature was not anticipated by the local official and no one probably anticipated the fast response. This is pretty amazing how fast information can travel across the nation/globe and generate immediate response.
No time for breakfast? Try on a pair of toast for size:
I live in a world of discussions about “long tail” planning. We think we create the future through spreadsheets and programs, but I’m not so sure. We cannot even guarantee our next breath.
Here’s a provocative quote from a 1953 Dartmouth lecture by Eugen Rosenstock Huessy. He points out that the future doesn’t come because we plan it. It comes through those who chose to sacrifice the present.
The Dark Ages are not the Middle Ages, gentlemen. The Dark Ages are the ages of no women’s rights, of no real love between the sexes, of endless war. These 158 cities of which Aristotle has given us the constitutions, they were at eternal war with each other, and the Greeks never expected these wars ever to end. You had a caste system. You had warriors, eternal warriors as in India, to this day, you see. India has pre- served some of the features of antiquity as a warning.
Modern man in New York says, “We can do with cocktail parties instead of Paul, and go on to Aristotle, and Plato, and Socrates. We are witty. We are factual. And we are utopians. We found associations for the abolition of evil.” And I mean, if you think of what — Americans have tried over the last 100 years, you see, by willful association, they have really tried to — to exterminate every evil just by willpower.
It has never borne fruit. After 30 years, it was all forgotten — forgotten, all these wonderful improvement societies. We have reform governments, city government every eight years, you see. Then something is done for two years, and then six years of corruption, then we get another drive and people always believe in the ultimate good here, it seems, you see.
They always say, “Now we will be settled forever,” because they have no memory of the past. And they’ll never use anything that people could know for the last 2,000 years already. What does Paul remind the college community of, gentlemen? He enjoins on the college community the simple knowledge that in serious life, a road into the future is only open by sacrifice. You only create a new era if somebody asks for less than he can get.
That’s the deed of Jesus, that He asks — got less than He could have — had the right to ask for. Very simple, gentlemen. You try to get something for nothing. So you get stuck in the past. Anybody who tries to get something for nothing overemphasizes his given rights that he was already qualified to get. And he of course outbuys the future.
There is then less good to be had, because you have gotten too much. Jesus said — and said, “This is the way of life which all the pagans, all the Gentiles lead, and therefore I have to show that somebody asks for less than he can get, and thereby creates a surplus,” what the Catholic Church calls the {opus super erogatum}. Have you — do we have here a Roman Catholic? Who is? Have you heard of the — {opus super erogatum}, of the grace stored up in Heaven by the saints? Well, gentlemen, that’s true. That’s not just something you learn — we learned in Church. That is something for everyday use, my dear man.
If you have not in every family, and in every community some self-sacrificing people who give more of their time, their money, and even their reputation — because that’s the hardest to give, you see, in order to perform a service — if there is no unrecognized service in a community, this — community has no future. It runs down by gravity. It exhausts its resources, because the — most of the people do ask for more than they deserve.
Great sites like Pandora could lose their ability to broadcast due to a recent decision by the Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, DC, which almost triples the licensing fees for Internet radio sites. Honestly, it doesn’t look good right now. So let’s hope enough folks will let their voice be heard. Visit Save Net Radio.
Google’s stated aim of cataloging and organizing information is now being mixed with humanitarian causes. According to the Times online:
Google Earth, the search engine’s online mapping service, has updated its images of the Darfur region in Sudan in an attempt to draw attention to the plight of people living there.
In partnership with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Google has published new, high-resolution aerial photographs of the area, showing destroyed villages, displaced people and refugee camps. In some places, the resolution is high enough to show the burnt ruins of individual houses.
On one level this is an amazing use of technology to reveal a catastrophic situation that the government consistently denies. On another level, this raises questions about Google’s role.
“It raises the question of what their responsibility is to decide what to cover,” Steve Jones, a professor of communications at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said. “This mirrors the type of things that news organisations deal with: deciding how much resources to spend on an issue and what you cover.”
So Google is moving into the role of gatekeeper, deciding what to highlight and how to highlight specific events, places, etc. While it raises interesting possibilities, I figure if Google oversteps the line, the market will help keep them in check.
Google was recently criticised for replacing post-Hurricane Katrina imagery on its map portal with views of the city from before the storm. The company said its use of the pre-Katrina imagery occurred as part of routine enhancements and denied that the move involved political considerations, but it replaced the later images in response to the criticism.
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