Sam at Christmas

Sam I Am is still a handsome doggie. I worry that he might not see another Solstice, but he's had an excellent run for his money this time around.

Jenny, Eternal Ruler of The Two Lands

For those of you who may not know, I have another blog where I'm trying to keep up with my thoughts on ancient Egypt. www.jennysegyptology.blogspot.com
A psychic in Arizona once told me that I had a past life in Egypt, but I didn't know until now that I was a sphinx :)
Apparently I've had a lot of past lives and been an artist in most of them. I think I got the link to my Egyptology blog right. Anyway, it's mainly for my own fun.

Asian Hippies

Nancy's brother emailed us on her Talkie Toaster cell phone and called us "aging hippies." Because I don't hear all that well, I thought he said Asian hippies and I couldn't figure it out.
Anyway, here we are, just chillin' like aging hippies at Loch Merlin. I was also reading Harry Potter, The Order of the Phoenix, but I think the book is too far to my left to show up in the picture.
We also managed to go through about 10 bottles of wine between us over the course of the 3 day weekend. Hoo-ah!

Haggis Puffs revealed

One of the hosts of the festival, Logan Sullivan (who, with his wife Donna, organized and ran the whole festival), was kind enough to let me photograph him with a haggis puff. Another mystery solved.
Oddly enough, they looked pretty much like I had imagined.

Haggis Puffs

A name to conjure with. Nancy and I spent a lot of time imagining what a haggis puff might look like. So I wasted no time in photographing a specimen.
Traditional haggis is a kind of sausage-ish Scottish dish made of sheep insides cooked inside the sheep's stomach. I have posted a couple of pictures of this.
But the festival was advertising haggis puffs. I was intrigued...

5:25 AM Paranormal sunlight experiment: Part 1

I think that the sun is coming up too soon these days. My friend Enrique, an astronomer, pretty much put the kibosh on my theory. But I am not alone in noticing that it is WAY lighter at the butt-crack o'dawn than it ever used to be. I've been getting up at about 5:15 AM for a long time now and I have decided to investigate this phenomenon.
The first picture here is from 28 May 2008. From my front porch, just over the top of the camper, before I left for work.
Ditto the second picture, but that one is from 29 May 2008. Both were taken at 5:25 AM precisely.
I plan to follow this and see what happens.
I turned the flash off for both of these. Note that it is a lot darker in the first one. Well, that's probably just because it was more overcast and it did rain an ass-load that day. Nothing to get too paranormally excited about. Yet.

Angela Davis and Me

So, it sort of looks like I photo-shopped myself in here, but there I am, shoulder to shoulder with the great Angela Davis :)

Light at the end of the tunnel

So, these are the two feminist philosophers whose work is most relevant to my thesis. Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler. Actually, seeing Angela Davis psyched me up some and I think her work bled through in my conclusion. It's so hard to say where I stop and all the people I've read start.
By the way, I am like inches away from being finished with my thesis.

CHANGED: Young Angela Davis Pics

I have to change this post. I just read this quote from Davis on Wikipedia:
"It is both humiliating and humbling to discover that a single generation after the events that constructed me as a public personality, I am remembered as a hairdo."
I don't want to contribute to this. Angela Davis's work is important and her life is important, and, even though her hairdo was SUPER-cool, I'm not going to perpetuate her image as a stereotype. Instead, I'll list some of her books that you might want to buy:
Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1989)
Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003)
Arbitrary Justice: The Power of the American Prosecutor (2007)
Women, Race and Class (2001)
Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (1999)
Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (Open Media) (2005)
Women, Culture and Politics (1990)
Prison Industrial Complex - an Audio CD (1999)

All of these are available at Amazon.

Angela Davis

Angela Davis lecture
“Democracy and Leadership”
9/13/07
UAB Alys Stephens Center
I took notes and this is pretty close to what she said. I left out some parts as I was taking notes, but this is the gist of it and any confusions or things that don't make sense are ENTIRELY MY FAULT. Angela Davis's lecture was fantastic.

The best leadership strategies will be self-critical of their effects. One should ask, does it maintain structures of inequality?
She talked about the Civil Rights Movement and people without civil rights, specifically she said prisoners. There are 2.2 million prisoners in the US at any given time. She said that Civil Rights can’t solve structural inequalities.
She was in South Africa last week and spoke at a conference called “Conversations on Leadership.” She said that South Africa has a prison problem too and that the prison problem is a global problem.
She read a quote from Condaleeza Rice:
They told you that if you ran twice as hard, you’d get half as much. And there were some people who would run 4 times as hard so they could have just as much, but then there were those few who were willing to run 8 times as hard so they could get ahead.
Davis said that Rice uses this story to justify her success as resulting from hard work, whereas Davis sees this story as a testament to oppression. Davis and Rice share the same narrative: both were born in pre-Civil Rights Birmingham, AL, and both knew the four little girls who were murdered in the 16th St church bombing. Both lived through the overt racism of an apartheid system in the south and both challenged that system. But Davis says the difference is in their conceptions of leadership.
Rice saw herself as an individual trying to get ahead of the pack. Her individual story serves as an example of triumph over adversity, the triumph of democracy, etc.
But what about everybody else? What about those who wouldn’t or couldn’t run 8 times as hard?
Davis has overcome adversity. She could use her personal triumphs as examples of individual efforts to overcome adversity. But, for example, the fact that she was finally vindicated and won her court case when she was imprisoned was an indication of the power of organized masses of people NOT a triumph of justice.
She said that racism is more entrenched now than before the Civil Rights movement, as it is so much harder to identify. She said that a Black person is two times more likely to go to prison than to college.
She talked about the word “diversity” and how the use of the word by Bush et al, and others is bizarre. She said that it is possible to talk about diversity without justice and equality. We need to be more critical and nuanced when we use these terms. Diversity erases the specificity of social justice movements. We should ask, does this diversity promote justice and equality, or does it promote structures of inequality and injustice?
Leadership needs to be more careful about its vocabulary.
Diversity is a simple descriptive. We need to always ask, who stands to benefit from diversity? Because diversity that promotes torture, war, and mass imprisonment is possible. We are losing the vocabulary to tie diversity to justice and to racism, sexism, homophobia, and immigration. Where do the illegal immigrants stand in this idea of diversity?
Racism mutates. The racism that structures slavery isn’t the same racism that currently structures education, for example, but they are connected. We are living with the vestiges of slavery today.
We are encouraged to think of ourselves first and foremost as individuals. Leadership needs to acknowledge the collective character of the problems we confront and, therefore, the collective character of the solutions. The Internet should have made us more connected, but we have lost the ability to emotionally process our connections. The word “diversity” provencializes our relationship to the world. The challenge of leadership is to envision change within a global framework. Diversity can be powerful if we make it powerful.
Mass imprisonment plays a pivotal role in the global war on terror. It is a key feature in the defense of “democracy.” Secret prisons in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Guantanamo. Bush et al have justified modes of torture, and have ruled that the Geneva conventions do not apply to people suspected of terrorism. And the weapon of the prison is used to safeguard democracy. But, Iraq is further from democracy now than it ever was. It is limiting to use the existence of elections as the hallmark of democracy. In the early history of the US, only about 6% of the population had the right to vote, yet we called ourselves a democracy. Throughout most of the history of the US, women, indigenous people, and people of color could not vote.
The penitentiary system in the US was invented in the early 1800s. She suggests we read de Touqueville’s works Democracy in America and The US Penitentiary System and its Application in France. This new penitentiary system provided negative verification of the existence of democracy. Punishment was exacted by deprivation of rights and liberties. But prison as punishment is only possible within a democratic society, where rights and liberties are acknowledged. Where rights and liberties don’t exist, taking these things away does nothing. Slaves didn’t go to prison, they were punished corporally. Prisons were supposed to supplant corporal or capital punishment. Deprivation of rights and liberties is called civil death, and the prison system is a space of civil death, but at the same time, prisoners were supposed to become penitent (penitentiary) to prepare themselves for society.
The proof of participation of Black people in democracy is that there are so many that have received due process and are in prison. This is a legacy of slavery. Prison is the negative side of democratic freedom in the same way that slavery provided evidence of freedom. Prisoners provide evidence of freedom in a democratic society.
In Alabama: 26 % of the population is Black, 70 % is White. But of the prisoners currently serving time in Alabama, 60,000 are Black and 12,000 are White.
We respect hierarchies and tend not to look up or down. We tend to think of prisoners as a glob of murderers and rapists. Over a period of one year, there will be in the US 13 million prisoners. The majority of these people have not been convicted of a violent crime. Leadership can emerge from within the prison system.
In order to abolish prisons, we will need to address the issues that the prison purports to deal with but cannot, in lasting ways. We will need to expand our educational systems, creating entirely new systems.
Prison is a dumping ground for all of the problems in this society that we don’t want to deal with. The prison system causes us to think of every one of the 2.2 million prisoners as the same person.

Apparently, I really am a postmodernist...

Your Score: The Post-Modernist

You scored 80 Materialism and 60 Phenomenology!

Truth? Under what cultural premises? Identity? What is the relationship between signifier and signified? If large swaths of your conversations tend to take the form of rhetorical questions, you may be a Post-Modernist.

Post-Modernism arose in the 20th Century as both a reaction to and as the newest development of modernism. Post-modernists take unbounded joy in taking a sledgehammer to calcified power structures in philosophy and ethics, denying not just formal religions but anything they see as possessing a structure that constricts the freedom of truth and meaning to explode into every variation of itself. To a Post-Modernist, the underlying metaphysics of the universe are never there to build one meaning, but all possible meanings.

Now if only you could make youself understandable!

Thinkers that you may agree with: Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Lacan, Richard Rorty
Thinkers that may challenge you: Richard Dawkins, Noam Chomsky, John Searle

Link: The Metaphysician Test written by Jaylhomme on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test