It can be asserted, one may submit, that the American Revolution was fought in defense of the idea of an ever expansive British Empire of Liberty. This idea was simply continued after independence as the idea and reality of an American Empire of Liberty.
The English Parliament never had the universal conception of the British Empire that the Americans, especially Ben Franklin, had. Some of the anti-Monarchical Whigs had such a conception. However, the Whigs were not powerful enough politically in the late 18th-century as to be able to change the nature of the Empire.
The majority of the English parliament was still Tory and in favor of a monarchical, centralized idea of an empire administered from the Parliament in London on behalf of the King.
Monday, August 13, 2012
Monday, July 16, 2012
Ben Franklin to the Constitutional Convention
The more I learn about Franklin, the more I know that his wisdom and genius and a better understanding of them are a small key to maintaining the fraying tapestry of our Union. He has a beautiful, brilliant, elegant, and lovely mind. I love him like a brother. His writings are intoxicating for those of you of any political persuasion. All humans can benefit from reading his Autobiography. It is the tale of a solitary soul imbibing the world with the fire of his overwhelming curiosity. It shows that a life of "book learning" or "hands on learning" are not opposed to one another but essential in their combination to nourish the soul and create that inner light that, when combined with a generous spirit, can illuminate the world, quite literally in the case of Dr. Franklin.
Here is Franklin's Speech to the Constitutional Convention on September 17, 1787. He was a man of 81 years at this point and could hardly get enough breath to speak, but his mind was alight with wisdom, courage and patriotism.
Here is Franklin's Speech to the Constitutional Convention on September 17, 1787. He was a man of 81 years at this point and could hardly get enough breath to speak, but his mind was alight with wisdom, courage and patriotism.
Saturday, July 14, 2012
Romney Rice 2012??
I can't imagine why Mitt Romney would be seriously considering Condi Rice to be his running mate. It makes no sense politically. It is nonsense in terms of practical government if Romney happens to be elected.
On a political level, Rice has no constituency whatsoever. She is an academic and is very intelligent. However, she has no base of support which will automatically flow into the Romney column by his choice of her. Her race, let's be blunt, is probably at least one thing Romney is considering as an attribute in order to counter Obama's significant and probably growing lead among all racial groups other than whites. But even on the crude racial level, the choice makes no sense. African-Americans, generally, have a distaste for Rice. They, to a large extent, view her as an opportunist who is used by whites as a black-face to put into a white administration. She will be viewed this way even more so while running as vice-President. Whites tend to distrust Rice because she conjures up memories of the W. Bush administration, by definition bad for Romney.
On another political level, Rice is viewed as extremely liberal by Conservatives, especially on social issues. She will be viewed as an opportunist pick to "make the minorities happy" and it will further racialize this election which is exactly Obama's goal. The more the election is about race the better for Obama. The residual pride in the election of an African-American President in 2008 still lingers and is flamed up again when race becomes an issue. The choice of Condi will simply keep the election's focus on race, something Romney needs to avoid.
On a practical governing level, all of Rice's experience is in foreign policy in a moment where the economy is in a state of slow train wreck, and becoming faster. Romney, if elected, will need all the help he can receive in order to solve economic problems and a Vice-President that has all the attributes of a Secretary of State does not necessarily help in that area.
I can only conclude that the Condi Rice moment is just a moment. It is a story put out by the Romney campaign to gauge the reaction of the Public and of Conservatives to a Rice ticket. I can't imagine Romney will actually choose her. I expect other people to have their moment as "trial balloons" before this long process is over.
On a political level, Rice has no constituency whatsoever. She is an academic and is very intelligent. However, she has no base of support which will automatically flow into the Romney column by his choice of her. Her race, let's be blunt, is probably at least one thing Romney is considering as an attribute in order to counter Obama's significant and probably growing lead among all racial groups other than whites. But even on the crude racial level, the choice makes no sense. African-Americans, generally, have a distaste for Rice. They, to a large extent, view her as an opportunist who is used by whites as a black-face to put into a white administration. She will be viewed this way even more so while running as vice-President. Whites tend to distrust Rice because she conjures up memories of the W. Bush administration, by definition bad for Romney.
On another political level, Rice is viewed as extremely liberal by Conservatives, especially on social issues. She will be viewed as an opportunist pick to "make the minorities happy" and it will further racialize this election which is exactly Obama's goal. The more the election is about race the better for Obama. The residual pride in the election of an African-American President in 2008 still lingers and is flamed up again when race becomes an issue. The choice of Condi will simply keep the election's focus on race, something Romney needs to avoid.
On a practical governing level, all of Rice's experience is in foreign policy in a moment where the economy is in a state of slow train wreck, and becoming faster. Romney, if elected, will need all the help he can receive in order to solve economic problems and a Vice-President that has all the attributes of a Secretary of State does not necessarily help in that area.
I can only conclude that the Condi Rice moment is just a moment. It is a story put out by the Romney campaign to gauge the reaction of the Public and of Conservatives to a Rice ticket. I can't imagine Romney will actually choose her. I expect other people to have their moment as "trial balloons" before this long process is over.
Friday, July 13, 2012
Some Business and Ben Franklin
Unbelievably this blog is linked to on an actual rather popular blog run by a rather popular MSNBC "talking head" and thegrio.com journalist and I've been negligent in my thanks. My views tend to be about 180 degrees away from my former interlocutor and "rival" but I thank her for the link especially in this year where it is easier to view our political differences as unbridgeable chasms. The wonderful blog is reidreport.com So, thanks again Joy.
My internal demographics for this blog tell me I have around 5,500 views. That is not a lot considering, however it is quite a few considering the random and deleterious nature of my postings. I fancy that most of the views are readers of the reid report clicking on my site by accident and seeing the politically heretical nature of my opinions recoiling in horror and returning to the decidedly left-leaning views of their favorite amateur turned professional pundit. :) (Oddly, about a third of the views come from Russia, so to my Russian readers, I'm re-reading my War and Peace and starting in on Anna Karenina so brace yourselves for some GREAT reviews!! Tolstoy is the friggin' BOLSHOI!!:) And to any FSB "friends" reading this:stop wasting your time and go blow up some more apartment buildings to blame on Chechens!!
As an aside, I am finishing up the wonderful Charles Van Doren 1939 Benjamin Franklin biography. It won the Pulitzer Prize that year. It is beautifully written using many of Franklin's exquisite letters to give a real sense of this patient,patriotic,stoic,genius,eclectic,wonderful and wise First American. Franklin's diplomatic engineering of Parliament's repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766 was a lesson in the art of using peacefully persuasive leverage upon a rival in order to patiently and pacifically achieve the interests of one's nation. I can only vainly hope that we modern Americans will study and remember that first great peaceful victory where we united as a nation to boycott British goods until the repeal of the Stamp Act. It is important to remember, perhaps as much for this country as any, that not all "victories" must be bathed in the blood of the innocents.
So, as always, I say remember American history and remember the peaceful victory of 1766 where Franklin cultivated friendships in the very bowels of our future enemy and helped unify our country for peaceful and noble ends: the defense of our ancient Liberties brought down to us by the very nation trying to abrogate them.
My internal demographics for this blog tell me I have around 5,500 views. That is not a lot considering, however it is quite a few considering the random and deleterious nature of my postings. I fancy that most of the views are readers of the reid report clicking on my site by accident and seeing the politically heretical nature of my opinions recoiling in horror and returning to the decidedly left-leaning views of their favorite amateur turned professional pundit. :) (Oddly, about a third of the views come from Russia, so to my Russian readers, I'm re-reading my War and Peace and starting in on Anna Karenina so brace yourselves for some GREAT reviews!! Tolstoy is the friggin' BOLSHOI!!:) And to any FSB "friends" reading this:stop wasting your time and go blow up some more apartment buildings to blame on Chechens!!
As an aside, I am finishing up the wonderful Charles Van Doren 1939 Benjamin Franklin biography. It won the Pulitzer Prize that year. It is beautifully written using many of Franklin's exquisite letters to give a real sense of this patient,patriotic,stoic,genius,eclectic,wonderful and wise First American. Franklin's diplomatic engineering of Parliament's repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766 was a lesson in the art of using peacefully persuasive leverage upon a rival in order to patiently and pacifically achieve the interests of one's nation. I can only vainly hope that we modern Americans will study and remember that first great peaceful victory where we united as a nation to boycott British goods until the repeal of the Stamp Act. It is important to remember, perhaps as much for this country as any, that not all "victories" must be bathed in the blood of the innocents.
So, as always, I say remember American history and remember the peaceful victory of 1766 where Franklin cultivated friendships in the very bowels of our future enemy and helped unify our country for peaceful and noble ends: the defense of our ancient Liberties brought down to us by the very nation trying to abrogate them.
Thursday, June 14, 2012
The Four Parts of "Seeing" (Introduction)
There are multiple ways of thinking about the idea of "seeing" an object. It is too simplistic to say that when when we see an object with the eye, that it is the eye doing the "seeing." This would be like saying the view we see through a clear window is the product of that window.
Seeing is a mental activity much more than a visual activity. Every glance, even if we try to avoid it, conjures up a hundred thoughts, a thousand ideas. For the eye is no instrument, but simply a lifeless vacancy, save for the mind that guides it both in its direction and depth of vision. The ability of the human eye to see depth is unparalleled in Nature. The human mind's corresponding ability to imagine a world, a "vision" beyond the world that is perceived by the physical eye, is unmatched and scarcely imagined by other beings.
There are four aspects to "seeing" an object. First, the object being seen is actually in the eye. It occupies space in the eye. This is true both in the functioning of the eye as an organ doing the "work" of seeing AND it is physically true. It is physically true in that the light from an observed object, the product of that object, literally occupies space in the eye. Our observations are, in this sense, the physical acquisition of at least some elements of the object being observed. (As an aside, this physical occupation of the eye by an observed object is why we receive a rush of emotional pleasure when we see a loved one after some time of absence. It is an emotional thrill because that person has literally entered our mind through our eye and occupies a portion of it. For instance, observe human behavior at an airport when loved one's greet each other off of a flight.)
The second aspect of vision is that the observed object is correlated by all of one's senses.This means that sight becomes related to the other senses. For instance, when we see a triple chocolate ice cream cone with a cherry on top, we can taste and smell the chocolate on our tongue and smell it in our nose even if we cannot physically approach the ice cream and imbibe it into our senses. Therefore, through vision and the mind, all the senses can be molded into one. So that when we see an object it becomes a complete object, not just a vision but a fully formed object in our mind.
In this instance of the correlation of the five senses around an object, they unify into what might be called "human sense." The five senses become one, briefly, in relation to the object being observed. The object becomes a unified whole that exists not only in space, but in time, and in one's mind.
The third aspect of vision is that the envisioned object is fixed in space-time at a given point. In this sense any changes taking place to the object cease to be observed, temporarily, because time is fixed by the mind in relation to the object. Likewise, any movement the object may be doing is temporarily disregarded as the mind fixed the object into a given point in space.
The fourth aspect of vision is that the envisioned object is fixed in the space-time of the mind. This is generally called one's "memory" of an object. Memory, among human being and perhaps some other being, can be conjured up spontaneously or through stimuli. Stimuli are usually other perceptions such as auditory or smell that one experiences at the same time that the object is envisioned. So, here we can thus understand the terms "smell of death" or "sounds of battle."
In the context of the unity of the four types of vision through the integration of all sensory experience, we can understand the close relationship between perceptions and memories. Perceptions are both "over there" in the world and "over here" in my mind at a given moment. In the same way memories are both "in the past" AND "in the present." Their existence in the past is brought forward into the present by the actions of one's mind and through action can affect the future. So, we here see the existence of what one might describe as the "past-present." This is the melding of the transitory moments we exist in with the depth of our memory that is constantly enmeshed and intertwined with past events, people, ideas etc. We can thus imagine a present that is much deeper than the superficial flashes of meaningless sights and sounds we often lament it to be. We can live in a past-present, integrating our memories and those of others into a deeper, more meaningful, and more fulfilling present that thus propels us into a future that is at once more challenging and more hopeful.
This "past-present" is, I suspect, a field of existence that human beings tend to forget and then remember in the oscillations of time and change that our species has lived through. In periods such as the one that we can sense is now ending,where we live in the present only, technology is viewed as something we "interact" with, but it exists in a fundamentally separate way from our minds. This creates a disconnection and disruption between the present of the technology that we are using and the past that our mind is constantly inventing, rearranging and remembering. Thus technology tends to do the work for our mind, in many instances, tending to enervate it.
I suspect we are moving into another age of the "past-present." We will remember again that technology and mind are one and the same thing. They do not interact so much as act in concert. If one is off key, the other creates disharmony, no matter how sophisticated or enlightened it imagines itself to be. The mind, through its ability to connect to a past, can bring technology up to a level that can allow it to be the tool of transformation for the individual it potentially is. Technology, with its ability to master the present moment in an astonishingly powerful wide range, can propel this transformed individual into the broad sunny uplands of a boundless future.
Seeing is a mental activity much more than a visual activity. Every glance, even if we try to avoid it, conjures up a hundred thoughts, a thousand ideas. For the eye is no instrument, but simply a lifeless vacancy, save for the mind that guides it both in its direction and depth of vision. The ability of the human eye to see depth is unparalleled in Nature. The human mind's corresponding ability to imagine a world, a "vision" beyond the world that is perceived by the physical eye, is unmatched and scarcely imagined by other beings.
There are four aspects to "seeing" an object. First, the object being seen is actually in the eye. It occupies space in the eye. This is true both in the functioning of the eye as an organ doing the "work" of seeing AND it is physically true. It is physically true in that the light from an observed object, the product of that object, literally occupies space in the eye. Our observations are, in this sense, the physical acquisition of at least some elements of the object being observed. (As an aside, this physical occupation of the eye by an observed object is why we receive a rush of emotional pleasure when we see a loved one after some time of absence. It is an emotional thrill because that person has literally entered our mind through our eye and occupies a portion of it. For instance, observe human behavior at an airport when loved one's greet each other off of a flight.)
The second aspect of vision is that the observed object is correlated by all of one's senses.This means that sight becomes related to the other senses. For instance, when we see a triple chocolate ice cream cone with a cherry on top, we can taste and smell the chocolate on our tongue and smell it in our nose even if we cannot physically approach the ice cream and imbibe it into our senses. Therefore, through vision and the mind, all the senses can be molded into one. So that when we see an object it becomes a complete object, not just a vision but a fully formed object in our mind.
In this instance of the correlation of the five senses around an object, they unify into what might be called "human sense." The five senses become one, briefly, in relation to the object being observed. The object becomes a unified whole that exists not only in space, but in time, and in one's mind.
The third aspect of vision is that the envisioned object is fixed in space-time at a given point. In this sense any changes taking place to the object cease to be observed, temporarily, because time is fixed by the mind in relation to the object. Likewise, any movement the object may be doing is temporarily disregarded as the mind fixed the object into a given point in space.
The fourth aspect of vision is that the envisioned object is fixed in the space-time of the mind. This is generally called one's "memory" of an object. Memory, among human being and perhaps some other being, can be conjured up spontaneously or through stimuli. Stimuli are usually other perceptions such as auditory or smell that one experiences at the same time that the object is envisioned. So, here we can thus understand the terms "smell of death" or "sounds of battle."
In the context of the unity of the four types of vision through the integration of all sensory experience, we can understand the close relationship between perceptions and memories. Perceptions are both "over there" in the world and "over here" in my mind at a given moment. In the same way memories are both "in the past" AND "in the present." Their existence in the past is brought forward into the present by the actions of one's mind and through action can affect the future. So, we here see the existence of what one might describe as the "past-present." This is the melding of the transitory moments we exist in with the depth of our memory that is constantly enmeshed and intertwined with past events, people, ideas etc. We can thus imagine a present that is much deeper than the superficial flashes of meaningless sights and sounds we often lament it to be. We can live in a past-present, integrating our memories and those of others into a deeper, more meaningful, and more fulfilling present that thus propels us into a future that is at once more challenging and more hopeful.
This "past-present" is, I suspect, a field of existence that human beings tend to forget and then remember in the oscillations of time and change that our species has lived through. In periods such as the one that we can sense is now ending,where we live in the present only, technology is viewed as something we "interact" with, but it exists in a fundamentally separate way from our minds. This creates a disconnection and disruption between the present of the technology that we are using and the past that our mind is constantly inventing, rearranging and remembering. Thus technology tends to do the work for our mind, in many instances, tending to enervate it.
I suspect we are moving into another age of the "past-present." We will remember again that technology and mind are one and the same thing. They do not interact so much as act in concert. If one is off key, the other creates disharmony, no matter how sophisticated or enlightened it imagines itself to be. The mind, through its ability to connect to a past, can bring technology up to a level that can allow it to be the tool of transformation for the individual it potentially is. Technology, with its ability to master the present moment in an astonishingly powerful wide range, can propel this transformed individual into the broad sunny uplands of a boundless future.
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Dominus Vobiscum
In the light of day
I saw the world as it would be when night befalls
And when dusk fell
The wail of a thousand voices pierced the air
And prepared the spirit for the coming trials
I saw the world as it would be when night befalls
And when dusk fell
The wail of a thousand voices pierced the air
And prepared the spirit for the coming trials
Saturday, June 2, 2012
Had the pleasure of reading recently.....
The famous history by Jacob Burkhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. This is an excellent study of Italian culture between about 1350 and 1550. I begins with Petrarch's brilliance.
In Petrarch we see a man who was the first person since classical times to ascend to a mountaintop and describe what he experienced. For Petrarch, nature became Nature. Nature took on a beatific and aesthetic quality. It became sublime.
Also Niccolo Machiavelli's two greatest works The Prince and The Discourses on Livy. Machiavelli's most sincere warnings in both works were his admonitions to avoid the implementation and use of a standing mercenary army. He especially uses the Carthaginian example in this. The mercenary army of Carthage turned against its patron city after its defeat at Zama by the Roman legions of Scipio.
In Petrarch we see a man who was the first person since classical times to ascend to a mountaintop and describe what he experienced. For Petrarch, nature became Nature. Nature took on a beatific and aesthetic quality. It became sublime.
Also Niccolo Machiavelli's two greatest works The Prince and The Discourses on Livy. Machiavelli's most sincere warnings in both works were his admonitions to avoid the implementation and use of a standing mercenary army. He especially uses the Carthaginian example in this. The mercenary army of Carthage turned against its patron city after its defeat at Zama by the Roman legions of Scipio.
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