theseus at labyrinth

Western Sidereal Astrology

How to naturally reset your sleep cycle overnight

World Clock Time Zones

This is a radical and highly interesting analysis of Global Economy and what your economic and environmental future is going to look like.

YOU TUBE VIDEO      ZEITGEIST-OVERVIEW

ECLIPSE

Berlusconi in Tehran: Slavoj Žižek

[…Is there a link between Ahmadinejad and Berlusconi? Isn’t it preposterous even to compare Ahmadinejad with a democratically elected Western leader? Unfortunately, it isn’t: the two are part of the same global process. If there is one person to whom monuments will be built a hundred years from now, Peter Sloterdijk once remarked, it is Lee Kuan Yew, the Singaporean leader who thought up and put into practice a ‘capitalism with Asian values’. The virus of authoritarian capitalism is slowly but surely spreading around the globe. Deng Xiaoping praised Singapore as the model that all of China should follow. Until now, capitalism has always seemed to be inextricably linked with democracy; it’s true there were, from time to time, episodes of direct dictatorship, but, after a decade or two, democracy again imposed itself (in South Korea, for example, or Chile). Now, however, the link between democracy and capitalism has been broken…]

[…This doesn’t mean, needless to say, that we should renounce democracy in favour of capitalist progress, but that we should confront the limitations of parliamentary representative democracy. The American journalist Walter Lippmann coined the term ‘manufacturing consent’, later made famous by Chomsky, but Lippmann intended it in a positive way. Like Plato, he saw the public as a great beast or a bewildered herd, floundering in the ‘chaos of local opinions’. The herd, he wrote in Public Opinion (1922), must be governed by ‘a specialised class whose personal interests reach beyond the locality’: an elite class acting to circumvent the primary defect of democracy, which is its inability to bring about the ideal of the ‘omni-competent citizen’. There is no mystery in what Lippmann was saying, it is manifestly true; the mystery is that, knowing it, we continue to play the game. We act as though we were free, not only accepting but even demanding that an invisible injunction tell us what to do and think…]

[…In this sense, in a democracy, the ordinary citizen is effectively a king, but a king in a constitutional democracy, a king whose decisions are merely formal, whose function is to sign measures proposed by the executive. The problem of democratic legitimacy is homologous to the problem of constitutional democracy: how to protect the dignity of the king? How to make it seem that the king effectively decides, when we all know this is not true? What we call the ‘crisis of democracy’ isn’t something that happens when people stop believing in their own power but, on the contrary, when they stop trusting the elites, when they perceive that the throne is empty, that the decision is now theirs. ‘Free elections’ involve a minimal show of politeness when those in power pretend that they do not really hold the power, and ask us to decide freely if we want to grant it to them…]

Berlusconi in Tehran

* The Meanings of Sarkozy by Alain Badiou, translated by David Fernbach (Verso, 117 pp., £12.99, February, 978 1 84467 309 4).

Happy Canada Day to all the people I love near and far. I miss you guys who are still so far away. Not long now.

The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned [from Crete] had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.

—Plutarch, Theseus

Annoying (but very funny) Mom phrases!

Norman MacLean: “It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.”

If you are adventurous enough to want to run the beta: Ubuntu 9.04 Release Candidate

This is an important and very well thought out essay. It is a tad long by internet attention span standards. I wish everyone who holds strong opinions would read it and take it as a guiding light.

The internal and possibly fatal inner contradictions which beset our civilization at large are also destroying the intellectual and cultural life of Canada.

“As civilization, religion is doctrine, institution, authority, metaphysical speculation, transcendent truth, choirs, and cathedrals. As culture, it is myth, ritual, savage irrationalism, spontaneous feeling, and the dark gods. Religion in the United States is by and large a civilizational matter, whereas in England it is largely a traditional way of life-more akin to high tea or clog dancing than to socialism or Darwinism-which it would be bad form to take too seriously…”

“Yet this value-liberal society’s long, unruly, eternally inconclusive argument-also brings vulnerability. A tight national consensus, desirable in the face of external attack, is hard to pull off in liberal democracies, and not least when they turn multicultural.

Lukewarmness about belief is likely to prove a handicap when one is confronted with a full-bloodedly metaphysical enemy. The very pluralism you view as an index of your spiritual strength may have a debilitating effect on your political authority, especially against zealots who regard pluralism as a form of intellectual cowardice.”

Terry Eagleton suggests a way forward in the context of an articulate and detailed analysis of our current predicament.

“Tragic humanism, whether in its socialist, Christian, or psychoanalytic varieties, holds that only by a process of self-dispossession and radical remaking can humanity come into its own. There are no guarantees that such a transfigured future will ever be born. But it might arrive a little earlier if liberal dogmatists, doctrinaire flag-wavers for Progress, and Islamophobic intellectuals got out of its way”.

Culture&Barbarism

” alt=”Maeve Radient Happy”/>

Family court judges are misguidedly harming children by granting sole custody to one parent – usually the mother – in bitter divorce battles, says a comprehensive new report.

Too many children are being “robbed of the love of one parent” by a legal system that is out of touch with the needs of children and treats them like property to be won or lost, says Edward Kruk, an expert on child custody issues.

“The system is set up to polarize parents, to make them enemies, to set up fights over custody and exacerbate conflict rather than reduce it,” says Kruk, an associate professor of social work at the University of British Columbia, whose three-year study is now in the hands of Canada’s justice minister.

He calls what’s happening in Canada’s divorce courts “a national shame” that leaves families bankrupt from legal fees and pushing parents, especially fathers, to suicide.

Children Harmed By Sole Custody

… the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson has quietly resided in Prince­ton, N.J., on the wooded former farmland that is home to his employer, the Institute for Advanced Study, this country’s most rarefied community of scholars. Lately, however, since coming “out of the closet as far as global warming is concerned,” as Dyson sometimes puts it, there has been noise all around him. Chat rooms, Web threads, editors’ letter boxes and Dyson’s own e-mail queue resonate with a thermal current of invective in which Dyson has discovered himself variously described as “a pompous twit,” “a blowhard,” “a cesspool of misinformation,” “an old coot riding into the sunset” and, perhaps inevitably, “a mad scientist.”

Dyson had proposed that whatever inflammations the climate was experiencing might be a good thing because carbon dioxide helps plants of all kinds grow. Then he added the caveat that if CO2 levels soared too high, they could be soothed by the mass cultivation of specially bred “carbon-eating trees,” whereupon the University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner looked through the thick grove of honorary degrees Dyson has been awarded — there are 21 from universities like Georgetown, Princeton and Oxford — and suggested that “perhaps trees can also be designed so that they can give directions to lost hikers.”

Dyson’s son, George, a technology historian, says his father’s views have cooled friendships, while many others have concluded that time has cost Dyson something else. There is the suspicion that, at age 85, a great scientist of the 20th century is no longer just far out, he is far gone — out of his beautiful mind.

But in the considered opinion of the neurologist Oliver Sacks, Dyson’s friend and fellow English expatriate, this is far from the case. “His mind is still so open and flexible,” Sacks says. Which makes Dyson something far more formidable than just the latest peevish right-wing climate-change denier.

For More Than Half A Century

Slowly but surely the awareness that parental alienation is child abuse is penetrating into society and the media. How long it will take this knowledge to penetrate into the minds of Family Court Judges in Ontario and Canada generally, is another story.

This weekend the Parental Alienation Symposium is taking place here in Toronto.

“The mission of CS-PAS, is to assist attendees in recognizing Parental Alienation Syndrome as a form of child abuse and to help the public become knowledgeable and aware of professionals that can provide solutions for intervention and treatment”.

“In 1985, Gardner coined the term Parental Alienation Syndrome to describe a distinctive family response to divorce in which the child becomes aligned with one parent and preoccupied with unjustified and/or exaggerated denigration of the other, target parent.

The phenomenon was widely observed and independently reported by other legal and mental professionals, though some contributors used different terminology, such as “Medea syndrome,” “overburdened child,” or simply “parental alienation.” In severe cases, the child’s once love-bonded relationship with the rejected/target parent is destroyed.”

The moral and emotional crime of parental alienation can be committed by either custodial parent, but as the vast majority of custodial parents in divorced or separated families are women, it is safe to say that generally, parental alienation is child abuse committed by women against their children.

The far reaching destructive scope of parental alienation and its connection to teen suicide, drug addiction and crime is beginning to be measured. It is obvious that alienating parents have mental health issues, and this too is beginning to be measured.

THE SPECTRUM OF PARENTAL ALIENATION SYNDROME Part I