Ummagumma

I remember talking with longtime political friends in November 1994, I was working at a large community bank at the time. Almost every loan officer and the president of the bank were politically minded. I learned a lot of politics from them and managed to show them my own ideas were not too strange. The bank president said, rather blandly, that George W. Bush was predicted to defeat Ann Richards for governor of Texas. I just did not think that would happen. I told him so. And in such missteps I learned to keep my mouth shut a shade more often. It was a big red wave. President Clinton took a beating. The idea of what was then called “national health care” (not Clintoncare or something) was already dying in the Senate that September. I didn’t know it then but it was dead for 16 more years. It did eventually come back, though. Maybe it was just in a coma. Republicans gained 54 House seats and eight in the Senate, taking both chambers for the first time in 40 years. About ten governorshi...

Since I published the books I’ve wrestled with finding better evidence of harmogenics than I actually presented. Reading back on those important sections now, my examples are accurate but too general by themselves. They establish the validity of the claim but do little to put it on display. Ultimately, the best evidence for what I am talking about is going to be you looking into your own life experiences. Nevertheless, I claim that when people combine their practices, something emerges beyond the parts, but where is the proof? Plenty of people garden and paint and run and never connect them in a special way. Plenty of accomplished people have hobbies, and maybe they’d have accomplished just as much without them. Correlation isn’t causation, which is a really inconvenient fact. Show me the evidence. I grounded harmogenics (or tried to anyway) in the science of emergence and complex systems, and I’m confident in that foundation. What I didn’t give enough of were specific lives, people...

[ Read all my Iran stuff. ] (Noon Eastern Time) Donald Trump is talking about whacking Iran again. On Saturday, after casting an early ballot in Florida, he said the United States was “thinking about doing it, and maybe tomorrow,” or might reach “a nice, big, beautiful agreement” instead. Today he said there would be no strike today, and that he’s weighing a deal or action to “finish them off.” On October 8 he promised no attack before the midterms on November 3. A week later he told a rally crowd in Alaska, “Wait till you see what we do to Iran.” NPR reports that American and Israeli planners have drawn up a short, intensive campaign for early November. The White House and Pentagon have plans to use the Mother of All Bombs (MOAB). Pickaxe Mountain, a deeply buried nuclear-related facility in Iran, has been named out loud. “We may have to go there,” Trump said. “We’ll knock it out fast.” Meanwhile, Netanyahu faces Israeli voters on October 27. After Trump endorsed him, he told voters...

[ Read Part One ] So, I've reviewed how Copleston interprets Saint Thomas Aquinas and I think it is a useful way to consider the man's mind. There are some things I find very appealing about Aquinas. The system of Aquinas has a basic physicality, an embodied understanding similar to what we find in Aristotle. He starts with the physical world. Matter and form, potency and act, things that change. Not the self or memory or some inward turn toward God the way Saint Augustine begins the Confessions . Aquinas starts with what's standing in front of him, and works outward from there. Nothing is in the intellect that wasn't first in the senses. That's a useful insight whether or not you buy anything else in his works . A concept isn't the object of knowledge. It's the means. When I know a tree, the concept is how I reach the tree, the actual thing standing in the yard. The senses come first, and the mind builds on top of what they hand it. He carries the same ...

Frederick Copleston was my first guide through most of western philosophy. I read his whole series The History of Philosophy a couple of years before I traveled to India in the mid-1980s. Library copies. I bought my own nine-volume set much later when I could afford such things and I still go back to different sections of it every year to brush-up on something. Copleston introduced me to Sartre, Nietzsche, Kant, Hume, Plato and Aristotle, Aquinas and Ockham. In almost every case I met the philosopher through Copleston before I either read him directly or ran into some other major interpretation. William Barrett's Irrational Man was another early door into Nietzsche and Sartre, for example. But Copleston gave me the whole history, the Greeks to the mid-twentieth century. I made a New Year’s resolution to reacquaint myself with Thomas Aquinas. Don’t ask me why. There are a lot of great minds I could have chosen. But it has been a couple of decades since I last delved into his ph...