The influence of gaslight or electric light on the growth of paraheliotropic trees

“To counter the established Church of England doctrine that the aristocratic social order was divinely ordained, radicals supported Lamarckian Evolutionism, a theme proclaimed by street corner agitators as well as some established scientists such as Robert Edmund Grant.” – Wikipedia, Radicalism

So … Church >> Social Order Status Quo; Directed Evolution >> Mutable but Teleological Social Order; Undirected Evolution >> Natural Injustice

While Conservatives are partially right that Progressives wear rosy-eye-glasses about the extent to which circumstances can change, they never seem to acknowledge about how so much of the world they fight to keep was the result of radical and hard-fought battles with other Conservatives, who just as readily defended the status quo out of fear of gross experimentation.

Vulnerability and Young Love and Pools in West Coast Apartment Buildings.

http://lastnightsparty.com/goingtoseedani/slides/P1010452.html

10,000 days, and it all comes down to 150 minutes.

Idea for a Music Video or Short Film: A series of vignettes of domestic scenes, men and women engaged with their lovers, doing lover thing, heights of emotion and pathos and then, to the sounds of an unrelenting drumbeat, switching partners, leaving people, leaving lives, finding new ones, new lives — acting out new scenes, new vignettes of domestic pathos — and then, drum still beating, switching again, leaving people and leaving lives, finding new ones — more scenes, new costumes, new words — and then, drum still  beating, switching again — and then, drum still beating, switching again — and then, drum still beating, switching again —

When we find ourselves in a conversation with someone new, when we find ourselves here, now — the past collapses and becomes mere prelude. Powerful way to live — perhaps what I’ve been doing, finding myself in difficult situations, is to escape somewhere else, into the past, or into the future, or somewhere else entirely —

What we know about the world implies that Aristotle was wrong about a final cause. Perceiving even then the art of existence, they imagined that there was some hidden final cause, some reason for the way things are — some end that things tend to, and are shaped by.

Science has shown two things: that Aristotle’s shaping end was revealed in the processes of chemical and biological evolution, and that these processes do not need a cause or purpose to work their magic. In a very real sense, we are amazing and elaborate sand castles, assembled only by the random blowing of random winds.

Where then telos? Are we then robbed of final causes, of ends, of goals, or purpose?

I said to my brother, evolution is not purpose, but pattern.

Perhaps not, at least in our own little corner of the universe.

The awakening of consciousness —

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sothis

The Star, Sirius, that rises in the north-east; The river’s flood that brings devastation and disease; the Wizard Iachen who tames the flood and cures the disease and transfigures death into life; called I’wa’ko by the Minoans; “Light-Bearing Star of the Mysterious Night” — “The Light of Darkest Midnight” —

Sirius the Wolf — tamed, always tamed —

Ancient story. The Wolf-Tamer.

Because we’re always acting from within our circumstances (motivated by subjective inclination and external causation) true freedom, a freedom for the higher objective self-being, is elusive. However, by choosing new motivations based on more external-objective views, we can eliminate some of our biases and move to a sphere of closer freedom.

Of course, when we externalize and act based on the motivations of a temporal-neutral self, we still have a master — and when we externalize beyond our selves and act based on universal rules, again, we still have a master. The difference might be that once we structure these other selves and the motivations they implicate, it becomes possible to choose our master — choosing the present over the prudent, choosing the universal over the local —

That choice, then, to know that cigarettes are bad and decide to smoke anyway (or  to decide not to smoke) is a free one to extent that it is fairly well-informed.

Chasing dirty money like mind-blind rats in a maze

http://www.richardashcroft.co.uk/news-page/

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23531?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+nybooks+(The+New+York+Review+of+Books)&utm_content=Google+Reader