Being there is being very helpful. Any loss of goodness is a major loss.
Milk and ice and any other similar always was a 'loose' collection of undetermined and vaguely educational - whatever that means - aims but basically giving mutual support while people wanted or might want it. And platforms for hobby horses, see crazyidea.org if really bored ever.
From my new grandfatherly vantage the horizon has yet again receded as the world expands, and I now am sure will keep doing so. Having friendly islands to harbour near was always a security for the peoples exploring the early Med. And I believe that friends made while young and learning fast can be trusted and predicted or at very least known better than the later ones whose shutters are up, better too than litter mates. These are just three selfish reasons for each of us staying around.
A deeper one for me if you are still reading is the quick mental links between six ex teenage now 60 friends I met last summer in the African bush (one now owns a bank, one troubleshoots a chunk of global oil, one was university student of her year in 2004, one PAs a top prep school in North London, one runs a large headhunting agency, and moi, I just put ideas together ;))
But by far my best reason for milk's survival and perhaps growth is how much the community has shaped my thinking about issues like the big clash between capital Marx worshipped and needed but hated to destruction, and the communism that he generated and died before seeing the tiny bit of it that flowered, perverted and poisoned. I have believed for some decades that the milk ethos is the best way to meld cathedral strength with bazaar ingenuity and ethos. Perhaps in the way that cells acquired nuclei for central control, DNA for procreative messaging, mitochondria etc to direct bits of progress, and selection by evolution and by the Gaias who themselves respond to stellar and galactic evolutions to decide surviving communities if any. 'Twas ever thus from pre-quark to post-post-modern drift, from our needing God to where we leap aeons beyond our current local-in-space-and-time God Delusion hassles.
Other issues milk communities illustrate for me are the left-right
education debate like how to move schools from teaching to educating, the moving conventional-alternative medicine borderline, the death-prison-freedom scenarios for our problem people and leaders and industries. Plus the role I will allocate science when I become Queen.
For these reasons I am very happy nay delighted to become pass phrase holder and very junior midnight server monkey to the secret chamber of delights otherwise known as the Andrew Och milk server.
May the tribe increase, as it wishes.
Bruce
[ 2 comments ] ( 26 views ) | [ 0 trackbacks ] | permalink |
( 3 / 117 )Ben and milk community,
Being there is being very helpful. Any loss of goodness is a major loss.
Milk and ice and any other similar always was a 'loose' collection of undetermined and vaguely educational - whatever that means - aims but basically giving mutual support while people wanted or might want it. And platforms for hobby horses, see crazyidea.org if really bored ever.
From my new grandfatherly vantage the horizon has yet again receded as the world expands, and I now am sure will keep doing so. Having friendly islands to harbour near was always a security for the peoples exploring the early Med. And I believe that friends made while young and learning fast can be trusted and predicted or at very least known better than the later ones whose shutters are up, better too than litter mates. These are just three selfish reasons for each of us staying around.
A deeper one for me if you are still reading is the quick mental links between six ex teenage now 60 friends I met last summer in the African bush (one now owns a bank, one troubleshoots a chunk of global oil, one was university student of her year in 2004, one PAs a top prep school in North London, one runs a large headhunting agency, and moi, I just put ideas together ;))
But by far my best reason for milk's survival and perhaps growth is how much the community has shaped my thinking about issues like the big clash between capital Marx worshipped and needed but hated to destruction, and the communism that he generated and died before seeing the tiny bit of it that flowered, perverted and poisoned. I have believed for some decades that the milk ethos is the best way to meld cathedral strength with bazaar ingenuity and ethos. Perhaps in the way that cells acquired nuclei for central control, DNA for procreative messaging, mitochondria etc to direct bits of progress, and selection by evolution and by the Gaias who themselves respond to stellar and galactic evolutions to decide surviving communities if any. 'Twas ever thus from pre-quark to post-post-modern drift, from our needing God to where we leap aeons beyond our current local-in-space-and-time God Delusion hassles.
Other issues milk communities illustrate for me are the left-right education debate like how to move schools from teaching to educating, the moving conventional-alternative medicine borderline, the death-prison-freedom scenarios for our problem people and leaders and industries. Plus the role I will allocate science when I become Queen.
For these reasons I am very happy nay delighted to become pass phrase holder and very junior midnight server monkey to the secret chamber of delights otherwise known as the Andrew Och milk server.
May the tribe increase, as it wishes.
Bruce
[ add comment ] | [ 0 trackbacks ] | permalink |
( 2.9 / 118 )Forget banning smoking, its cars, chemicals and pop that will weaken and kill us. Standard rant updated.
Cars give fumes of small molecules, similar to hormones. These cause IQ drops along motorways, less fertility in motorway users - blamed on scrotal warmth of course by the media, and assault most body processes that use chemicals or nerves as messengers. The chemical industry does the same: the nasty molecules in the plastic alone of a bottle of soap would paralyse an elephant if injected in the right nerve, and until we know the reasons for the decay of western immune systems (How many have diabetes or will die with alzheimers or both, to name but two dis-eases?) all molecules are suspect. Pop of course, delights in spreading the new. Like dissonance, discord and any jazzy delight. The opposite of what we evolved with, and what brings harmony. Yes, some stress is needed, but not at decibels, altitude, and siren frequencies. If our friends in NICE take five years to decide a cure is worth using, how long will our cozeners who need our money in the chemical and other industries take to decide that their products are poisonous? Judging by the smoking lobby still selling their products, longer in the enslaved areas than even in ours where decades will pass before a general ban.[ add comment ] | [ 0 trackbacks ] | permalink |
( 2.9 / 108 )The laws of science we can understand rest largely on proportion and symmetry, particles and resonance. But understanding stops there for most of us. Part is cultural, inbred from evolution. Indian numbers like 0 and 3 and 5 that moved west to us through the arab world carry hieroglyphic difficulty to our hard-wired roman III and V senses, negatives offend our Nordic need to win, and Pythagorean mystery surrounds square roots. A millenium or two later, those who grew up comfortable in math schooling are ready to seek deeper. Sadly the majority of western post-docs regard maths as tool not delight. Seeking the math patterns under say sociologiocal phenomena they leave to the pyschohistorians of science fiction.
I argue that the reason lies in our teaching of it. Our early teachers were too often failed journeymen, ex-apprentices unaware of the existence of the skills of the master craftsman. Unless lucky, we leave schooling not knowing that iridescence is simple, coriolis forces have a logical explanation, and that the laws of particles – like the Standard Model beloved of nuclear physics, are crude approximations to the underlying truths thare are within range of each of us.
Small wonder post-modernism with its lack of faith looks attractive, our institutions are thought to be terminally untrustworthy, and philosophy has floundered since before our era. Even God was blamed by Adam to explain rotting apples to his difficult progeny. These patterns are now obvious, as soon could be the rules that bring order out of chaos. This is an exciting century, as pattern-finding math starts reaching enough of us to make sense of chaos.
[ 3 comments ] ( 14 views ) | [ 0 trackbacks ] | permalink |
( 3.1 / 109 )In anti-slavery week, we should be looking at the unsung achievements and future of the movement too.
Without the wealth of the slave trade, British ports would not have been large enough to take the Luftwaffe bombing. Nor would Britain have had the finance to survive the lonely years while the Kennedy ambassador in London and other Brit-haters were rooting for Hitler. No matter that America claimed all we had after the war to repay themselves for their loans to us - because we realised that we had to escape by ourselves from the financial slavery. And did.Likewise movements like Quaker influences were helped by guilty money cleaning up. Today's Do No Evil ethos in silicon valley is spreading from our seeing the pits.
One problem is the difficulty of spotting the beam in our own eyes. Once we are responsible for children, we blank out injusice we inflict across the street, let alone across the water. One contribution to red nose day sets us up for another year of extortion. Perhaps the great Muslim pillar that Allah will judge each of the faithful by the good he has done is what keeps the faith together so successfully.
The prime reason for rejoicing is the takeover of Rome the world's mightiest empire by the underdogs: first Greek, then Christian, then Moorish and Nordic invasions, and now American ex-colonials. The benefit of the challenge to us ex-slaves is the need to get on and thrive by employing talents we kept alive in the bleak years. The alternatives are stark: trailer trash, prison labour, the sink estates, gulags thrive in every country. Anti-slavery has a long way to go, but is one of our strongest motivators.
[ add comment ] | [ 0 trackbacks ] | permalink |
( 3.1 / 134 )
Calendar
