Translators: Mike Zonta, Melissa Goodnight, Richard Branam, Hanz Bolen
SENSE TESTIMONY: Hysteria may make it seem too dangerous to return to economic and personal normalcy.
5th Step Conclusions:
1) Truth is the unique androgynous norm, is rational consideration, is of one Mind, is hazard-free consciousness, is the only domain, is the surety of all happening, is the manager of the infinite household of consciousness in person. OR: Truth is the rational consideration of the unique androgynous norm in person.
2) The One Infinite Consciousness, is always already eternally providing, the optimal sustaining normalcy, that absolutely supports every individuation, in perfect harmonious balance.
3) Truth is the norm, known and able. The Everpresent guidance distributing abundant value and wellness. Truth I Am is the universal integrity in which we dwell, powering expressing all.
4) Truth is Beyond Psychic Essence, the breath of life, Being the Androgynous construct Isomorphed fulfillment purposefully intent on complementary attributes, the principle of the Abstract circuitry innately Functional Identity.
All Translators are welcome to join this group. See Weekly Groups page/tab.
VOA News Drone footage shows the empty streets of San Francisco since California declared a state of emergency on March 4 due to the coronavirus pandemic. California alone has over 9,000 confirmed coronavirus cases and over 200 deaths. On March 16, seven counties in California, including San Francisco, declared shelter-in-place orders through April 7. The move orders 7.6 million residents to not leave their home unless it’s for “essential business” like buying groceries. (Video Courtesy: Space Race Studio)
Thomas Hobbes was born in Westport, now part of Malmesbury in Wiltshire, England, on 5 April 1588.[8] Born prematurely when his mother heard of the coming invasion of the Spanish Armada, Hobbes later reported that “my mother gave birth to twins: myself and fear.”[9] His childhood is almost completely unknown, and his mother’s name is unknown.[10] His father, Thomas Sr., was the vicar of Charlton and Westport. Thomas Hobbes, the younger, had a brother Edmund, about two years older, and a sister. Hobbes’ father, according to John Aubrey, Hobbes’ biographer, was uneducated and “disesteemed learning”.[11] Thomas Sr. was involved in a fight with the local clergy outside his church, forcing him to leave London. The family was left in the care of Thomas Sr.’s older brother, Francis, a wealthy glove manufacturer with no family. Hobbes Jr. was educated at Westport church from age four, passed to the Malmesbury school, and then to a private school kept by a young man named Robert Latimer, a graduate of the University of Oxford. Hobbes was a good pupil, and between 1601 and 1602 he went up to Magdalen Hall, the predecessor college to Hertford College, Oxford, where he was taught scholastic logic and physics.[12][13][14] The principal John Wilkinson was a Puritan, and he had some influence on Hobbes. Before going up to Oxford, Hobbes translated Euripides‘ Medea from Greek into Latin verse.[11]
At university, Hobbes appears to have followed his own curriculum; he was “little attracted by the scholastic learning.” Leaving Oxford, Hobbes completed his B.A. degree by incorporation at St John’s College, University of Cambridge in 1608.[15] He was recommended by Sir James Hussey, his master at Magdalen, as tutor to William, the son of William Cavendish, Baron of Hardwick (and later Earl of Devonshire), and began a lifelong connection with that family.[16] William Cavendish was elevated to the peerage on his father’s death in 1626, holding it for two years before his death in 1628, and his son, also William, became the 3rd Earl of Devonshire. Hobbes served as a tutor and secretary to both men. The 1st Earl’s younger brother, Charles Cavendish, had two sons who were patrons of Hobbes. The elder son, William Cavendish, later 1st Duke of Newcastle, was a leading supporter of Charles I during the civil war personally financing an army for the king, having been governor to the Prince of Wales, Charles James, Duke of Cornwall. It was to this William Cavendish that Hobbes dedicated his Elements of Law.[11]
Hobbes became a companion to the younger William and they both took part in a grand tour of Europe between 1610 and 1615. Hobbes was exposed to European scientific and critical methods during the tour, in contrast to the scholastic philosophy that he had learned in Oxford. In Venice, Hobbes made the acquaintance of Fulgenzio Micanzio, an associate of Paolo Sarpi, a Venetian scholar and statesman.[11] His scholarly efforts at the time were aimed at a careful study of classic Greek and Latin authors, the outcome of which was, in 1628, his great translation of Thucydides‘ History of the Peloponnesian War, the first translation of that work into English from a Greek manuscript. It has been argued that three of the discourses in the 1620 publication known as Horea Subsecivae: Observations and Discourses also represent the work of Hobbes from this period.[17]
Although he associated with literary figures like Ben Jonson and briefly worked as Francis Bacon‘s amanuensis, translating several of his Essays into Latin,[11] he did not extend his efforts into philosophy until after 1629. In June 1628, his employer Cavendish, then the Earl of Devonshire, died of the plague, and his widow, the countess Christian, dismissed Hobbes.[citation needed][18]
In Paris (1630–1637)
Thomas Hobbes
Hobbes soon found work as a tutor to Gervase Clifton, the son of Sir Gervase Clifton, 1st Baronet mostly spent in Paris until 1631. Thereafter, he again found work with the Cavendish family, tutoring William Cavendish, 3rd Earl of Devonshire, the eldest son of his previous pupil. Over the next seven years, as well as tutoring, he expanded his own knowledge of philosophy, awakening in him curiosity over key philosophic debates. He visited Galileo Galilei in Florence while he was under house arrest upon condemnation, in 1636, and was later a regular debater in philosophic groups in Paris, held together by Marin Mersenne.[citation needed]
Hobbes’s first area of study was an interest in the physical doctrine of motion and physical momentum. Despite his interest in this phenomenon, he disdained experimental work as in physics. He went on to conceive the system of thought to the elaboration of which he would devote his life. His scheme was first to work out, in a separate treatise, a systematic doctrine of body, showing how physical phenomena were universally explicable in terms of motion, at least as motion or mechanical action was then understood. He then singled out Man from the realm of Nature and plants. Then, in another treatise, he showed what specific bodily motions were involved in the production of the peculiar phenomena of sensation, knowledge, affections and passions whereby Man came into relation with Man. Finally, he considered, in his crowning treatise, how Men were moved to enter into society, and argued how this must be regulated if people were not to fall back into “brutishness and misery”. Thus he proposed to unite the separate phenomena of Body, Man, and the State.[citation needed]
In England
Hobbes came home, in 1637, to a country riven with discontent, which disrupted him from the orderly execution of his philosophic plan. However, by the end of the Short Parliament in 1640, he had written a short treatise called The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic. It was not published and only circulated as a manuscript among his acquaintances. A pirated version, however, was published about ten years later. Although it seems that much of The Elements of Law was composed before the sitting of the Short Parliament, there are polemical pieces of the work that clearly mark the influences of the rising political crisis. Nevertheless, many (though not all) elements of Hobbes’s political thought were unchanged between The Elements of Law and Leviathan, which demonstrates that the events of the English Civil War had little effect on his contractarian methodology. However, the arguments in Leviathan were modified from The Elements of Law when it came to the necessity of consent in creating political obligation. Namely, Hobbes wrote in The Elements of Law that Patrimonial kingdoms were not necessarily formed by the consent of the governed, while in Leviathan he argued that they were. This was perhaps a reflection either of Hobbes’s thoughts about the engagement controversy or of his reaction to treatises published by Patriarchalists, such as Sir Robert Filmer, between 1640 and 1651.[citation needed]
When in November 1640 the Long Parliament succeeded the Short, Hobbes felt that he was in disfavour due to the circulation of his treatise and fled to Paris. He did not return for 11 years. In Paris, he rejoined the coterie around Mersenne and wrote a critique of the Meditations on First Philosophy of Descartes, which was printed as third among the sets of “Objections” appended, with “Replies” from Descartes, in 1641. A different set of remarks on other works by Descartes succeeded only in ending all correspondence between the two.
Hobbes also extended his own works in a way, working on the third section, De Cive, which was finished in November 1641. Although it was initially only circulated privately, it was well received, and included lines of argumentation that were repeated a decade later in Leviathan. He then returned to hard work on the first two sections of his work and published little except a short treatise on optics (Tractatus opticus) included in the collection of scientific tracts published by Mersenne as Cogitata physico-mathematica in 1644. He built a good reputation in philosophic circles and in 1645 was chosen with Descartes, Gilles de Roberval and others to referee the controversy between John Pell and Longomontanus over the problem of squaring the circle.
UCLAFilmTVArchive Different From the Others (Anders als die Andern) (Germany, 1919) has been preserved by UCLA Film & Television Archive as part of the Outfest UCLA Legacy Project. Funding provided by The Andrew J. Kuehn Jr. Foundation and the members of Outfest. ——- Synopsis The concert violinist Paul Koerner takes a student under his wing, much to the worry of the boy’s parents. Koerner is meanwhile being blackmailed by a former lover, since in Germany any homosexual relations at that time were punishable under the law, codified in Article 175, which was not removed from the books until the 1960s. The German film, Different From the Others is, as far as we know, the first fiction feature film to address a specifically gay audience. Fortunately, even though more than 90% of all German silent films have disappeared, this film exists today in at least half its original length. When the film was first shown in 1919, gay and lesbian audiences must have been amazed that a mainstream fiction feature film would portray their situation as a fact of nature, rather than a perversion. Today, this film celebrates the brief opening of that door, before it slammed shut for another 50 years. The film was produced and directed by Richard Oswald, at that time one of Germany’s most prolific independents, who made films cheaply and premiered them in a Berlin cinema he owned, where his wife would often handle the office box. Oswald had earned a fortune in 1917/18 with a number of “educational” feature films about sexually transmitted diseases, which were approved by the censorship authorities, simply because syphilis was rampant in the trenches. Oswald would continue to produce controversial films, like his acknowledged masterpiece, The Captain from Koepenick (1931) based on Carl Zuckmayer’s anti-authoritarian play. The Nazis never forgave Oswald for Anders als die Andern or Koepenick, forcing Oswald into exile and eventually to Hollywood, where he directed several films and televisions shows. Although long underappreciated in Germany, recent critical reappraisals have valued his in-your-face aesthetic and modern subject matter. Only a severely truncated version of the film has survived, with Ukrainian titles, as Gosfilmofond in Russia. It was restored previously to a semblance of the original 1919 release by the Munich Film Museum. The UCLA restoration is based on that Munich reconstruction, with some changes and additions made. Credits Richard-Oswald-Produktion. Screenwriters: Magnus Hirschfeld and Richard Oswald. Cinematographer: Max Fassbender. With: Conrad Veidt, Leo Connard, Ilse von Tasso-Lind, Alexandra Willegh, Ernst Pittschau, Fritz Schulz.
Pardons, commutations and bankruptcy laws are all tools of forgiveness within the US legal system. Are we using them frequently enough, and with fairness? Law professor Martha Minow outlines how these merciful measures can reinforce racial and economic inequality — and makes the case for creating a system of restorative justice that focuses on accountability and reconciliation rather than punishment.
This talk was presented at an official TED conference, and was featured by our editors on the home page.
After the Covid-19 crisis all voices must be heard
24th April 2020 (iai.tv)
Margaret Heffernan
| International businesswoman, CEO and the bestselling author of Uncharted: How to Map the Future Together
We don’t know yet whether we are at the beginning of the pandemic or just at the end of its first phase. When it ends, we may not know whether we have truly conquered COVID-19 or if it will recur seasonally. If the future is always uncertain, now even the present seems ambiguous. But even as we anticipate a rising death toll, many are looking over the horizon to predict the future.
We all know that there will be a bill to pay, so already institutions around the world have started lobbying to ensure they don’t pick up the tab. Large corporations find it easier to squeeze suppliers, freelancers, the gig economy. Some demand bail outs – but why should government pay when investors have been rewarded? But shareholders are also pension funds that citizens rely on for their retirement. The exhausted workforce of the NHS deserves more than rhetorical praise, while a young generation demands a future better that debt, joblessness and impoverished universities. Everyone clamors to come first in the long queue of need—but which will win the day?
It’s the wrong question. The more urgent question is how we decide. What we lack are mechanisms with which to start contemplating a future whose design can be broadly accepted by all. In competitive democracies, political parties typically outline platforms they hope will win the day. But for decades now, that process has increasingly been seen as inadequate to complex conflict. It is subject to over-simplification, corporate capture and lies, leaving too many feeling alienated, lacking trust and left behind.
What we lack are mechanisms with which to start contemplating a future whose design can be broadly accepted by all.
In the 1980s, one of the first to investigate this trend was the American political scientist, James Fishkin. He noticed that in democracies, people mostly didn’t inform themselves about politics because they know that one vote out of millions doesn’t really count. He called this phenomenon rational ignorance; and, well before populism raised its ugly head, he saw how this mindset gave rise to fake news, false promises and a backlash against democracy itself. Even more dangerous, he understood that rational ignorance was a kind of abdication, because it stripped individuals of their capacity for influence and action.
But what if people had a chance to consider reliable information in small groups where they could have an impact? He began to design a process he called deliberative democracy, in which representative groups of people came together to share balanced, transparent briefing materials and make recommendations for future progress. And what he discovered was remarkable. Contrary to cynical expectations, ordinary people—drivers, electricians, nurses, executives, bartenders – paid serious attention, were thoughtful, listened and reflected. In the light of solid information they could understand and trust each other. In a safe environment where there was time to think, they came to empathize with those whose life experiences were often radically different and, as a result, they frequently changed their views. Why? Because they appreciated that, in this setting, their conclusions mattered. Their recommendations had consequences for people they now knew.
This is exactly what happened in the Irish Citizens’ Assembly that recommended a referendum on abortion. Despite loud misgivings – people were too stupid, it was just kicking the can down the road – the process resolved a problem that no political party had been able to handle. This Assembly was not (as it’s often portrayed) a series of talking shops, with a bunch of random people spouting off. It was a meticulously managed, carefully disseminated, jargon-free process that engaged and informed public participation, learning and debate. Over eighteen months, it changed what the Irish people knew, understood and believed. More important than the result, however, was its reception. Even those who did not agree with it were prepared to live with it, because of the way it had been achieved. This form of deliberative democracy had bestowed what leaders in every context most crave: legitimacy.
Even those who did not agree with the result were prepared to live with it, because of the way it had been achieved.
Those who had been following the evolution of deliberative democratic experiments weren’t entirely surprised. Fishkin has now run 109 such deliberative events, in 28 countries and from them notable patterns have emerged. In Mongolia in 2017, priorities for government spending were put to a deliberative group that turned the list upside down. Where politicians had fixated on a metro and airport, citizens cared more about insulating and heating their children’s schools so that education wasn’t interrupted by the cold. So that is what the government did.
What many of these experiments show is that, in small, moderated groups with access to sound information, people make informed, rational decisions. They make informed trade-offs because they know that everyone matters and that their decisions have consequences for people they know. By contrast, traditional processes force leaders have to make generalized assumptions about people and experiences they aren’t familiar with. In party politics, those decisions are designed to win power for supporters, not to benefit the whole. The contrast with the UK’s Brexit referendum could not be more telling.
In today’s crisis, open democratic approaches have a special salience. For years, the legitimacy of institutions has been the issue bubbling under the surface of public discussions of public trust and reputation. Shell CEO van Beurden acknowledged the heat when, in recent regulatory filings, the company listed its “societal license to operate” among its key concerns. If this was a hot topic before the pandemic, it could boil over in its aftermath. So finding a legitimating process with which to begin to craft a post-pandemic settlement is crucial. If we want a sound and healthy future, we have first to find a way of defining it that builds in the quest for legitimacy and justice.
After a trauma collectively experienced by the world’s population, any outcome that disproportionately rewards or penalizes any one group will lack legitimacy. That, after all, is the century-old legacy of Versailles. It should also be the lesson of the banking crisis, when austerity disproportionately punished those least responsible for the disaster. By contrast, the history of deliberative assemblies shows a broad cross-section of the public – not political parties, not financial technocrats and not global corporations – can lay the groundwork for effective, sound decisions that don’t undermine social cohesion but enhance it. They do not supplant parliaments but provide elected governments with a rich, informed and credible array of possibilities deemed to be just.
If we want a sound and healthy future, we have first to find a way of defining it that builds in the quest for legitimacy and justice.
The whole point of democracy, Fishkin says, is to connect. Instead of fighting over who owns our future, we need to craft a legitimate way to share the work of making it. “If our institutions do not learn to listen to the people in a thoughtful and representative way,” Fishkin told me, “they are at risk.” A starker statement of where we stand came from Peter Patrick, a barman whose thinking was changed after he took part in the Citizens Assembly that met in Dublin.
“It actually works,” Peter Patrick reflected. “I just came back from Berlin – and I went down to where the former SS headquarters was. Looking at it, I thought how quickly a country can change. So you have to keep working on democracy, because countries can change very quickly. It made me realize how very fragile we are.”
| Freelance journalist specialising in politics, history and social issues.
There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.Albert Camus eerily familiar tale of a town in plague lockdown can show us how to preserve hope amid the prolonged suffering of a pandemic.
Albert Camus’ The Plague almost reads as a contemporary account. The denials and delays of public authorities in responding, the shortage of vital medical supplies, the overcrowding of hospitals—Camus saw it all with uncanny clarity. Moreover, he understood how pandemics can harm not just the body, but also the spirit.
One of the worst things about the plague is that it seems never-ending. This may seem like an obvious statement, but the point is significant. A night watchman says he wishes the city had been hit with an earthquake instead of the plague. “A good bad shock, and there you are! You count the dead and living, and that’s an end of it,” the watchman says. Earthquakes, tsunamis, landslides, and other similar natural disasters—as horrific as they are—have one saving grace: they end quickly. They have a clearly defined ending, from which survivors can grieve and move on.
Each day of the plague, on the other hand, brings a steady drip-drip of new deaths. The plague causes a different kind of loss as well: prolonged separation from loved ones who were out of town when the quarantine took effect. Fears that the plague could last a year or even longer fuels uncertainty about when a reunion will be possible. The townspeople begin to despair of a better future and decide it’s easier to just stop thinking about it. They become like “wandering shadows” that “drifted through life rather than lived,” tormented by “sterile memories.”
Despair hasn’t yet become habitual when the loss still hurts because you continue to hope for reunion.
The plague stole the simpler pleasures of life as well. Not only are the residents of Camus’ fictional city of Oran barred from travel, they can’t even leave for the nearby beach. Despite “all its nearness, the sea was out of bounds,” Camus says. Siestas and holidays “no longer invited” townspeople to “frolics and flirtation on the beaches.” To paraphrase Camus, part of the misfortune of the plague is its sheer monotony. Even the simplest of pleasures are snuffed out: one old man who once enjoyed spitting at street cats no longer can after the felines are euthanized (over concerns that they may be spreaders of the disease). “Plague had killed all colors, vetoed pleasure,” Camus writes.
Is there a way through the despair?
Camus suggests there is. He draws a distinction between despair and the “habit of despair,” in which people have become numb to their pain. Despair hasn’t yet become habitual when the loss still hurts because you continue to hope for reunion: your memory of your loved one has not lost its “fleshly substance.”
The only way to keep such memories alive is by doing what the townspeople avoided: imagining your beloved—both what they might be doing in the present and your potential future together. This may be more painful, but it is also the only way to truly live, Camus says. The alternative, according to Camus, is to become like one of the shadows that drifted aimlessly about the town.
This power of the imagination to keep love alive is spectacularly demonstrated through the character of Raymond Rambert, a Paris-based journalist who coincidentally had come to investigate the sanitary of the conditions before the outbreak and got trapped in the quarantine.
Rambert liked to set aside four in the morning for “thinking of his beloved Paris” and “conjuring up pictures of the woman from whom he now was parted.” Rambert also would daydream of Paris—as a kind of reverse synecdoche for his beloved who lived within the city. “There rose before his eyes, unsummoned, vistas of old stones and riverbanks, the pigeons of the Palais-Royal, the Gare du Nord, quiet old streets round the Pantheon, and many another scene of the city he’d never known he loved so much.”
The plague is also an absurdist phenomenon: it is vast in its scale, killing so many that it leaves little room to respect individual human dignity.
In addition to imagination, one must be able to see reality clearly. It is not enough to long for the future, one must still live in the present. According to Camus, the plague called for rethinking humanity’s place in the scheme of things, beginning with the recognition that Protagoras was wrong—man is not the measure of all things. This is contrary to our natural tendency to reduce all things to human terms in order to understand them, as Camus explains in the Myth of Sisyphus. “The cat’s universe is not the universe of the anthill. The truism ‘All thought is anthropomorphic’ has no other meaning.”
Camus’ absurdism recognizes that the universe can no more satisfy our yearnings for meaning and love than the cat can address the needs of the ant. The plague is also an absurdist phenomenon: it is vast in its scale, killing so many that it leaves little room to respect individual human dignity. (Camus’ account of mass burials without proper funerals is a particularly grim testament to this fact.) At the same time, the source of the contagion, the bacteria, is too small an enemy to be seen and battled. Thus, at every turn, the plague defies human attempts to make sense of it. What is needed is a sort of existential humility, an understanding of our true place in the order of things—what Camus calls “modesty.”
This mindset leads to Camus’ absurdist ethic. His characters realize that they cannot escape from the plague; they can only endure it. This is exemplified in the story’s protagonist, doctor Bernard Rieux. Like the mythic Sisyphus who was condemned to perpetually roll the stone up the hill, only for it toslide back down, Rieux envisions his vocations as helping his patients fight the inevitable—death. “I now can picture what this plague must mean for you,” says his friend, Jean Tarrou. “Yes. A never ending defeat,” Rieux responds.
Camus’ realism also makes possible a special kind of joy.
This kind of defeatism may seem dark, but it is also realistic. The plague is beyond the control of all the townspeople, including the doctors. Not everyone can be saved. People will die. The local economy will suffer. But this kind of realism is what makes a firm hope in a better future possible. You can’t, after all, hope for something you already have. Characters like Rambert keep the flame of love alive by being realistic in accepting the distress caused by their separation.
Camus’ realism also makes possible a special kind of joy. Near the end of the plague, Tarrou and Rieux quietly go out to the beach at night, thanks to government passes they have. As both men prepare to jump into the waters, they are overtaken by a “strange happiness” that “forgot nothing, not even murder.” Happiness doesn’t come through escaping from or denying reality. Instead, the moment is all the more joyful because it’s been stolen from the plague, so to speak. Apparently, Sisyphus can take breaks from rolling his stone.
Gloom seems to hang over much of Camus’ Plague. It does not always make for light or uplifting reading. The brooding darkness and empty despair cry out from almost every page. But this is what makes Camus’ exhortations to hope and joy so powerful. They aren’t born out of fantasy but instead are rooted in the reality of human suffering and distress. Camus’ absurdist ethic won’t buckle under the pressure of a plague or pandemic. When the going gets tough, his approach will continue to serve us well precisely because it takes hardship as a given.
Stephen Beale Issue 87, 22nd April 2020
Consciousness, spirituality, biography, sexuality, androgyny, futurism, space, the arts, science, astrology, democracy, humor, books, movies and more
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