May 22nd
1:35 PM

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"Against positivism, which halts at phenomena—“There are only facts”—I would say: No, facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations. We cannot establish any fact “in itself”: perhaps it is folly to want to do such a thing. “Everything is subjective,” you say; but even this is interpretation. The “subject” is not something given, it is something added and invented and projected behind what there is.—Finally, is it necessary to posit an interpreter behind the interpretation? Even this is invention, hypothesis. In so far as the word “knowledge” has any meaning, the world is knowable; but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings (“Perspectivism”). It is our needs that interpret the world; our drives and their For and Against. Every drive is a kind of lust to rule; each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all the other drives to accept as a norm."

— Nietzsche, The Will To Power

1:22 PM

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You Need Phosphorous to Live—and We're Running Out

motherjones:

Industrial farming has played a part in sucking this critical element out of our soil.

Just fyi.

12:07 PM

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"Citizen Koch,” a documentary about money in politics focused on the Wisconsin uprising, was shunned by PBS for fear of offending billionaire industrialist David Koch, who has given $23 million to public television, according to Jane Mayer of the New Yorker. The dispute highlights the increasing role of private money in “public” television and raises even further concerns about the Kochs potentially purchasing eight major daily newspapers."

—

PBS Killed Wisconsin Uprising Documentary “Citizen Koch” To Appease Koch Brothers | PR Watch

It’s about time someone on “the left” put forth legislation to return PBS and NPR to pre Reagan funding levels. Besides, listening to fund drives is surely a violation of the Geneva Conventions.

11:45 AM

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stellar-indulgence:

3,000 Years of Abusing Earth on a Global Scale

A new perspective emanating from archaeology and ecology suggests that humanity has spent thousands of years making widespread and profound changes to the “natural” world

By David Biello

Wherever you go on this blue, green and white globe of ours, odds are some person has been there before you—and left a mark. That’s because the hunting, farming or burning practices of our most distant ancestors have shaped most land areas on the planet, argues an interdisciplinary team of archaeologists and ecologists in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. If we are indeed living in the Anthropocene—a new geologic epoch brought on by the outsized environmental effects of the human species—then this new interval isn’t just a few hundred years old, it is older than the industrial revolution….

….data exists suggests that this is a “used planet,” in the words of the authors. “We’ve been husbanding these biomes and creating our own types of ecologies—the cultivated lands, the rangelands—we’ve been doing this for a very long time,” Ellis argues. “We’ve been living in that Anthropocene biosphere since prehistory.”

More about this on the official Anthropocene site

Article Source: scientificamerican.com

11:26 AM

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"For some reason when it comes to my indigent ghetto clients, it becomes easy to forget that people, including those who break the law, are complicated and often charming. That they too contain multitudes. Oddly, no one has trouble understanding the humanity of White crooks. We mythologize them all the time—Bonnie and Clude, John Gotti, Carolyn Warmus—all are complex people we find ways to relate to and even admire. At the movies we cheer for Butch and Sundance, Scarface, or [the] Ocean’s Eleven crew. The fact that John Gotti was a ruthless killer who wreaked havoc on far more lives than any of my clients ever touched never eclipses the public memory of him as big, handsome, and defiant. People loved Gotti’s resistance to governmental authority. But put a Black face on Gotti and no matter how dapper a don he is, the press, the prosecutors, and the public only read menace. I’ve often represented people as “big,” “handsome,” and “defiant” as John Gotti, yet when I invoke the humanity of these faceless robbers and killers, it sends most listeners from the land of mere confusion to that of utter incomprehension. To this day, I wrestle with where this understanding goes off the rails. Fundamentalist Christians constantly speak passionately about seeing the possibility of redemption in everyone, and no one bats an eye. But make this same point in the secular context of the criminal justice system, and rather than praiseworthy piety it is heard as liberal gibberish."

— David Feige, Indefensible: One Lawyer’s Journey into the Inferno of American Justice

May 21st
3:20 PM

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utnereader:

The Return of Salmon

After the careful removal of two large dams, salmon are returning to Washington’s Elwha River. Read more.

12:53 PM

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"The Obama administration should terminate any practice, such as the reported signature strikes, that does not comply with principles of international humanitarian and human rights law. It must also introduce transparency to the drone program, including its governing rules, how targets are selected and how civilian damage is weighed."

— from Crisis Group’s recent report, Drones: Myths and Reality in Pakistan

12:37 PM

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$neurosciencestuff: The Fractal Nature of the Brain: EEG Data Suggests That the Brain Functions as a “Quantum Computer” in 5-8 Dimensions The brain has been traditionally viewed as a deterministic machine where certain inputs give rise to certain outputs. However, there is a growing body of work that suggests this is not the case. The high importance of initial inputs suggests that the brain may be working in the realms of chaos, with small changes in initial inputs leading to the production of strange attractors. This may also be reflected in the physical structure of the brain which may also be fractal. EEG data is a good place to look for the underlying patterns of chaos in the brain since it samples many millions of neurons simultaneously. Several studies have arrived at a fractal dimension of between 5 and 8 for human EEG data. This suggests that the brain operates in a higher dimension than the 4 of traditional space-time. These extra dimensions suggest that quantum gravity may play a role in generating consciousness. (Image courtesy: Kookmin University) Hard not to get worked up over the speculative possibilities. Consciousness as simultaneously an expression of and difference with whatever the fuck phusis is…$

neurosciencestuff:

The Fractal Nature of the Brain: EEG Data Suggests That the Brain Functions as a “Quantum Computer” in 5-8 Dimensions

The brain has been traditionally viewed as a deterministic machine where certain inputs give rise to certain outputs. However, there is a growing body of work that suggests this is not the case. The high importance of initial inputs suggests that the brain may be working in the realms of chaos, with small changes in initial inputs leading to the production of strange attractors. This may also be reflected in the physical structure of the brain which may also be fractal. EEG data is a good place to look for the underlying patterns of chaos in the brain since it samples many millions of neurons simultaneously. Several studies have arrived at a fractal dimension of between 5 and 8 for human EEG data. This suggests that the brain operates in a higher dimension than the 4 of traditional space-time. These extra dimensions suggest that quantum gravity may play a role in generating consciousness.

(Image courtesy: Kookmin University)

Hard not to get worked up over the speculative possibilities. Consciousness as simultaneously an expression of and difference with whatever the fuck phusis is…

11:38 AM

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Buena

by Morphine

art-and-fury:

Buena - Morphine

11:36 AM

2 notes

“Here at UT Austin, Josh Dever is fond of saying that philosophy started with Frege”

The OP is a great question… for someone who doesn’t look upon “analytic philosophy” as philosophy, I’m sure many interesting details fall through the cracks and/or amount to a midden of the tedious.
But this statement about Frege appears to catch the attitude and pulse of the Analytic thing, it’s style. ‘Course, that statement can be read as basically admitting that the Analytic course is not philosophy.
At any rate, the attitude is something like: “All prior philosophy was caught up and engaged in problems which are simply a result of being submerged in natural languages. It’s all a big mistake and we’ll fix that by pursuing a pure, logical language that correctly syncs up with the world of empirical stuff.” The attitude exudes a kind of scientism and peculiar regard for mathematics.
The stuff that get’s called “Continental” still attempts to engage the history and tradition, perhaps even suspicious of stale hermeneutical comportments, in order to labour to see things afresh. Being and Time or the Phenomenology of Spirit, also and for instance, breathe with aspects as old as de Anima and the Nichomachean Ethics. And something like Hegel brings the ancient back to life (the ethical and ironic) through a dialectical wormhole in the centre of the Kantian Transcendental Deduction (i.e. through an approach meant to quash dialectic). In short, there’s a regard and an homage to the Socratic point about philosophy being nothing other than the practice of the art of death and dying… something that an Analytic type can’t apparently begin to take seriously.
But the best place to see the Analytic obliterated is through Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. The attitude of the Analytic appears to be pushed to a resplendent extreme, only to collapse utterly and vanish (perhaps only to survive as echoes in a constellation of language games) . One might see therein a repetition of an Hegelian gesture, hiding behind an indirect presentation (perhaps in a manner akin to Kierkegaard). And yet, hard to begin to see when one imagines philosophy beginning with Frege ;p>context<

“Here at UT Austin, Josh Dever is fond of saying that philosophy started with Frege”

The OP is a great question… for someone who doesn’t look upon “analytic philosophy” as philosophy, I’m sure many interesting details fall through the cracks and/or amount to a midden of the tedious.

But this statement about Frege appears to catch the attitude and pulse of the Analytic thing, it’s style. ‘Course, that statement can be read as basically admitting that the Analytic course is not philosophy.

At any rate, the attitude is something like: “All prior philosophy was caught up and engaged in problems which are simply a result of being submerged in natural languages. It’s all a big mistake and we’ll fix that by pursuing a pure, logical language that correctly syncs up with the world of empirical stuff.” The attitude exudes a kind of scientism and peculiar regard for mathematics.

The stuff that get’s called “Continental” still attempts to engage the history and tradition, perhaps even suspicious of stale hermeneutical comportments, in order to labour to see things afresh. Being and Time or the Phenomenology of Spirit, also and for instance, breathe with aspects as old as de Anima and the Nichomachean Ethics. And something like Hegel brings the ancient back to life (the ethical and ironic) through a dialectical wormhole in the centre of the Kantian Transcendental Deduction (i.e. through an approach meant to quash dialectic). In short, there’s a regard and an homage to the Socratic point about philosophy being nothing other than the practice of the art of death and dying… something that an Analytic type can’t apparently begin to take seriously.

But the best place to see the Analytic obliterated is through Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. The attitude of the Analytic appears to be pushed to a resplendent extreme, only to collapse utterly and vanish (perhaps only to survive as echoes in a constellation of language games) . One might see therein a repetition of an Hegelian gesture, hiding behind an indirect presentation (perhaps in a manner akin to Kierkegaard). And yet, hard to begin to see when one imagines philosophy beginning with Frege ;p
>context<

May 19th
7:58 PM

7 notes

25-Million-Year-Old Primate Fossils Unearthed in Tanzania

Enrico de Lazaro | Sci-News »

Ohio University-led scientists have uncovered fossils of two new species of ancient primates, named Rukwapithecus fleaglei and Nsungwepithecus gunnelli, which they say are the oldest paleontological evidence of split between Old World monkeys and apes.

Geological analyses of the site indicate that the finds are 25 million years old, significantly older than fossils previously documented for either of two major groups of primates: the group that today includes apes and humans (hominoids), and the group that includes Old World monkeys such as baboons and macaques (cercopithecoids). >continue<

6:47 PM

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The Context of Radical Islam

The context of radical Islamic militancy is a complex one, rooted in poverty, imperialism, desperation, and exploitation. Radical political Islam is far from being some remnant of the barbaric, ultra-religious past – it’s rise during the 20th century was simultaneously a tool of imperialism by Western powers, and a means to resist imperialism by local populations… >continue<

1:18 PM

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"Mankind conspires to ignore the fact that death is also the youth of things. Blindfolded, we refuse to see that only death guarantees the fresh upsurging without which life would be blind. We refuse to see that life is the trap set for the balanced order, that life is nothing but instability and disequilibrium. Life is a swelling tumult continuously on the verge of explosion. But since the incessant explosion constantly exhausts its resources, it can only proceed under one condition: that beings given life whose explosive force is exhausted shall make room for fresh beings coming into the cycle with renewed vigour."

— Georges Bataille

1:11 PM

3 notes

Syria’s Inglorious Basterd

Audrey Ann Lavallée-Bélanger | Jadaliyya »

On 13 May 2013, Human Rights Watch released a statement attesting to the authenticity of a disturbing video that circulated first on Syrian pro-regime websites and then on social media. In it, a Syrian man cuts open a dead regime soldier’s chest, pulls his heart and lung out, threatens “Alawite dogs” that they will all face a similar fate, and takes a bite of the viscera while addressing the video camera. This latest sectarian evocation by a member of the armed opposition, Khalid al-Hamad (“Abu Sakkar”), was simplistically depicted by many US and Gulf media outlets as an isolated abomination perpetrated by a savage man. However, the incident tells a more complex story… >continue<

Uncommon and complex depth here regarding Syria, journalism, social media and the evolution of a fatalistic discourse.

May 18th
2:43 PM

6 notes

Zombie climate sceptic theories survive only in newspapers and on TV

Graham Readfearn | Guardian »

Study finds overwhelming scientific consensus that humans have caused global warming, but media still hasn’t caught up

… after giving up on the peer-reviewed literature, the climate science contrarians – often bolstered by support from the fossil fuel industry and free-market idealogues - took their talking points somewhere else.

That is, out into the public domain, the mainstream media and the blogosphere and far away from the less forgiving operating theatre of peer-reviewed science journals.

To this day, these dead theories hang around like slack-jawed zombies in the graveyards of global media outlets… >continue<