QuestGrunny The entire history of sexuality from 20,000 BC or thereabouts. I look at how the concept of sexuality as an important part of identity developed from a world which had sex acts but no notion of sexuality to the fixation towards the end of the 19th century with the taxonomisation of sexualities and the pathologisation of homosexuality. Content Warning: Discussion of homophobia from 5:20 onwards. Discussion of racism and genocide from 9:20 onwards. Flashing images throughout. They’re quite flashy but not really really flashy so I don’t know if that’s too flashy for anyone… Back to description: I draw on Michel Foucault’s four volumes of The History of Sexuality, The Will to Know, The Use of Pleasure, The Care of Self, and The Confessions of the Flesh, as well as his lectures of governmentality, biopower, and biopolitics. I also look at some post-colonial critiques of Foucault, primarily Stoler’s Race and The Education of Desire, as well as drawing on the work of Lillian Faderman, like Surpassing the Love of Men, to counter Foucault’s little problem with generally forgetting that women exist… I have a quick look at some ancient societies treatments of homosex before moving on to look at the Ancient Greeks in a little more detail to provide a backdrop for how the early Christians began to focus on desire and the purity of desire. I look at how this developed into the move from confession being centered around acts to being centered around desires in Council of Trent, and how this caused desires to become an integral part of the self. I then look at how the regulation of workers in the industrial revolution, the control of colonial subjects, and European’s paranoia of racial degeneracy in the colonies, fed into and was fed by the developing notion of sexuality. Finally I look at how lead into sexuality being conceptualised, taxonomized, and pathologized by the sexologists, big names including Krafft-Ebbing and Freud. I was going to put my reference in a comment, but I didn’t realise how much space there is here, so I’m going to put them here. I think I’ll list them more as some recommended readings than just a bibliography. Bibliographies are just kind of annoying, they never really tell you what the books are about and if they’re any good or what not… You can find PDF’s of most of these for free online, I might link to those if a load of people happen to be interested. So there’s the Foucault books: If you’re interested in the history of sexuality then the starting place is definitely The Will to Know. It’s quite a tricky book, so I’d suggest just giving it a few reads. Probably three. Just read it through and don’t worry about understanding it too much, just get the general picture, the read it again and you’ll probably get the hang of it. Then read it once more just to show off. Then The Use of Pleasure or The Care of Self if you’re interested in the Greeks or the Romans, or what Foucault was thinking towards the end of his life. The Confession of the Flesh seems super duper interesting, but so far it’s only published in French. If you speak French definitely go for it. I read a couple of academic summaries of it because I can’t speak French, they’re interesting, I can link some if you can’t find any, but they’re all generally a much of a muchness so just pick whichever ones you find on google… Then there’s his stuff on biopower, and governmentality, and biopolitics. There’s The Birth of Biopower, Society Must Be Defended, Ethics Subjectivity and Truth, Governmentality. To start I’d recommend just opening the Ethic Subjectivity and Truth pdf and doing control f to find the term you’re interested in. I’m thinking I’ll make some videos on these concepts at some point maybe. Lillian Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Men is a great book. Read it. If you want an accessible history of sexuality that’s also really rigorous, this is the place to start. Her The Gay Revolution is also great. Also, the Kim Tallbear articles I mentioned are great. Read those if you’re interested in that. They are Disrupting Settlement, Sex, and Nature, and Making Love and Relations Beyond Settler Sex and Family. Stoler’s Race and the Education of Desire is great if you’re interested in sexuality and Europeans in the colonies. Particularly read Chapters 3 and 4, 1 and 2 are tricky and quite skippable. 5 is fine. If you haven’t read The Will to Know then read that first, otherwise you’ll be lost in this book. I think those are probably the best starts, I mentioned some other texts in the video, but they’re not super duper relevant to someone interested in the main thrust of the video. I’ll list them in the pinned comment. The pictures that I didn’t draw are from wikimedia, mostly the archive of the Tropenmuseum. If you’re in Amsterdam and haven’t been then do so, it’s a great museum.

Sacrifice and martyrdom are core Piscean themes written large with a New Moon in Pisces this month. Whether or not we find these attractive, we’ll likely have to deal with them in the coming days. Many spiritually minded folk appreciate the value of making a sacrifice; whether in a ritual or practical context, there ought to be a very clear intent and purpose behind the chosen action. A firm belief that such strong action could help a situation may well move matters to a better level. Or perhaps we will just feel internally cleansed and virtuous about what we have decided to do.

Sacrifice can mean giving up something or going without, which may seem a little painful initially. Yet our greater purpose could give us extra strength so that we can manage relatively easily. Perhaps we know that what we say No to ultimately benefits others in a valuable way, or improves our own future in the long run.

The focus on a vision for the longer term does seem especially relevant, given that the Pisces New Moon is sextile Mars in Capricorn. The sign of the Sea Goat reflects thriving through thick and thin, often on limited resources. We don’t often see many overweight goats, after all! In traditional and ancient astrology, Mars is considered to be very well disposed in Capricorn. Placed in the sign of its exaltation, it is as though it has the seat of honor in any situation. Thus, Mars may represent a certain degree of pressure to reflect that honored status. Yet we will almost certainly be able to fulfill what we perceive to be required of us. Perhaps just knowing that someone has put great trust in us to produce the goods, as it were, bestows us with the confidence and inspiration to do exactly that!

The Moon is also sextile Uranus in Taurus, which could bring an unexpected development. Maybe, in the course of trying to execute certain plans, we find that an opportunity has arisen that we should definitely say Yes to — even if we initially lack a full idea of how we will take advantage of it. Chances are, we need merely to show up in order to make the most of things, as we will be guided along the way. Such can be the immediacy of a Uranian pattern of development.

A New Moon often provides a prompt to change our habits, and the Pisces focus hints at a more creative flow to events. So, if we have gotten into a rut, we now have the chance to start seeding some changes. Piscean influences can be quite subtle, and we may receive signals from an unexpected direction. It might be through hearing music or poetry, for instance, or through being struck by an image in a piece of artwork. Any such signal should not be ignored, since it may lead to interesting developments — if we choose to act on it.

We should not overlook the fact that the New Moon is also conjunct Mercury, the planet of thought and communication. When in Pisces, Mercury is seen by traditional astrologers as problematic, because the planet is considered “ill-dignified” or debilitated in the sign opposite that of its rulership, Virgo. This can be expressed as a lack of truth through confusion or through active deception. There may be a warning then, to be careful about what we say or omit to say — as well as whom and what we choose to trust. It can be as simple as ensuring that we read all the information pertaining to an agreement or a purchase, for example. It may also relate to our seeing the broader picture around a particular person or situation, and not just projecting the ideal image that we prefer.

On the plus side, Mercury with the Moon and Sun in Pisces can also take down barriers that would have gotten in the way of a positive connection. So, we may suddenly have a rare opportunity to link up with others and make new social arrangements or get involved in a special project. Semi-square connections from the Moon to Venus and Jupiter, in cardinal, initiative-taking signs, highlight the two benefics in a slightly awkward way. This could mean that we have to go the extra mile to find the good in a situation. Yet it will be there for us, if we are prepared to work for it.

This article is from the Mountain Astrologer, written by Diana Collis.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Greek spelling of logos

Logos (UK: /ˈloʊɡɒs, ˈlɒɡɒs/, US: /ˈloʊɡoʊs/; Ancient Greek: λόγος, romanized: lógos; from λέγω, légō, lit. ’I say’) is a term in Western philosophy, psychology, rhetoric, and religion derived from a Greek word variously meaning “ground”, “plea”, “opinion”, “expectation”, “word”, “speech”, “account”, “reason”, “proportion”, and “discourse”.^[1][2] It became a technical term in Western philosophy beginning with Heraclitus (c.  535 – c.  475 BC), who used the term for a principle of order and knowledge.^[3]

Ancient Greek philosophers used the term in different ways. The sophists used the term to mean discourse. Aristotle applied the term to refer to “reasoned discourse”^[4] or “the argument” in the field of rhetoric, and considered it one of the three modes of persuasion alongside ethos and pathos.^[5] Pyrrhonist philosophers used the term to refer to dogmatic accounts of non-evident matters. The Stoics spoke of the logos spermatikos (the generative principle of the Universe) which foreshadows related concepts in Neoplatonism.^[6]

Within Hellenistic Judaism, Philo (c.  20 BC – c.  50 AD) adopted the term into Jewish philosophy.^[7] Philo distinguished between logos prophorikos (“the uttered word”) and the logos endiathetos (“the word remaining within”).^[8]

The Gospel of John identifies the Christian Logos, through which all things are made, as divine (theos),^[9] and further identifies Jesus Christ as the incarnate Logos. Early translators of the Greek New Testament such as Jerome (in the 4th century AD) were frustrated by the inadequacy of any single Latin word to convey the meaning of the word logos as used to describe Jesus Christ in the Gospel of John. The Vulgate Bible usage of in principio erat verbum was thus constrained to use the (perhaps inadequate) noun verbum for “word”, but later Romance language translations had the advantage of nouns such as le mot in French. Reformation translators took another approach. Martin Luther rejected Zeitwort (verb) in favor of Wort (word), for instance, although later commentators repeatedly turned to a more dynamic use involving the living word as felt by Jerome and Augustine.^[10] The term is also used in Sufism, and the analytical psychology of Carl Jung.

Despite the conventional translation as “word”, logos is not used for a word in the grammatical sense; instead, the term lexis (λέξις, léxis) was used.^[11] However, both logos and lexis derive from the same verb légō (λέγω), meaning “(I) count, tell, say, speak”.^[1][11][12]

Ancient Greek philosophy

Heraclitus

Further information: Heraclitus § Logos

The writing of Heraclitus (c. 535 – c. 475 BC) was the first place where the word logos was given special attention in ancient Greek philosophy,^[13] although Heraclitus seems to use the word with a meaning not significantly different from the way in which it was used in ordinary Greek of his time.^[14] For Heraclitus, logos provided the link between rational discourse and the world’s rational structure.^[15]

This logos holds always but humans always prove unable to ever understand it, both before hearing it and when they have first heard it. For though all things come to be in accordance with this logos, humans are like the inexperienced when they experience such words and deeds as I set out, distinguishing each in accordance with its nature and saying how it is. But other people fail to notice what they do when awake, just as they forget what they do while asleep.— Diels–Kranz, 22B1

For this reason it is necessary to follow what is common. But although the logos is common, most people live as if they had their own private understanding.— Diels–Kranz, 22B2

Listening not to me but to the logos it is wise to agree that all things are one.— Diels–Kranz, 22B50^[16]

What logos means here is not certain; it may mean “reason” or “explanation” in the sense of an objective cosmic law, or it may signify nothing more than “saying” or “wisdom”.^[17] Yet, an independent existence of a universal logos was clearly suggested by Heraclitus.^[18]

Aristotle identifies two specific types of persuasion methods: artistic and inartistic.^[19] He defines artistic proofs as arguments that the rhetor generates and creates on their own. Examples of these include relationships, testimonies, and conjugates. He defines inartistic proofs as arguments that the rhetor quotes using information from a non-self-generated source. Examples of these include laws, contracts, and oaths.^[19]

More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logos

Translators:  Mike Zonta, Melissa Goodnight, Richard Branam, Hanz Bolen

SENSE TESTIMONY:  Duality of right and wrong keeps people disagreeing and prevents coming to compromise

5th Step Conclusions:

1)  Truth is the Great Work, the Great Mission, the singularity of Rightness, everyone/everything indivisibly expressing Itself, always compromising (i.e., always agreeable, always pleasing, irrepressibly happy working together).

2)  Infinite Oneness is knowing Itself boundlessly, in Its own perfect Awareness — surrendering all, and yielding everything — by giving Itself absolutely as formless force, and taking Itself lovingly as androgynous polarity.

3)  Truth is the Observing Consciousness Aware Completeness, the Kingdom of Principle, this Innate natural messenger is the feeling of benevolence; Being the Sacred Song, Logos, Spirit Influencer of instruction: this cause is Omniscience, Omnipresence, Omnipotence in All there is, One Infinite Mind, I Am Come, I Am Androgynous Agreement.

4) Truth is the mission of clear powerful presence knowingly pleasing All.

All Translators are welcome to join this group.  See Weekly Groups page/tab.

By Monica Sok

You and your friend stood  on the corner of the liquor store as I left Champa Garden, takeout in hand, on the phone  with Ashley who said,  That was your tough voice.I never heard your tough voice before.  I gave you boys a quick nod,  walked E 21st past dark houses. Before I could reach the lights  on Park, you criss-crossed  your hands around me,like a friend and I’d hoped  that you were Seng,  the boy I’d kissed on First Friday in October. He paid for my lunch  at that restaurant, split the leftovers.  But that was a long time ago and we hadn’t spoken since,  so I dropped to my knees  to loosen myself from your grip, my back to the ground, I kicked  and screamed but nobody  in the neighborhood heard me, only Ashley on the other line,  in Birmingham, where they say  How are you? to strangers not what I said in my tough voice but what I last texted Seng,  no response. You didn’t get on top, you hovered. My elbows banged  the sidewalk. I threw  the takeout at you and saw your face. Young. More scared  of me than I was of you.  Hands on my ankles, I thought you’d take me or rape me.  Instead you acted like a man  who slipped out of my bedand promised to call:  You said nothing.  Not even what you wanted.

Copyright © 2020 by Monica Sok. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 20, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

“After this incident I asked myself: What is it like to feel safe, seen, and heard all at once and all the time? In this poem, I wove two complex experiences together (getting jumped/being ghosted), while considering the layers of silence in both. I wrote this as an ode, not to praise the boy who jumped me but to directly address him, to let him know that I saw him that night even when he could not see me.” —Monica Sok

Monica Sok is the author of A Nail the Evening Hangs On (Copper Canyon Press, 2020). She is a 2018-2020 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University and lives in Oakland, California.

New Scientific Insights on the Source of Creativity Show How Social Networks Drive Ideas

Einstein (center right) got by with a little help from his friends. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

by SAL RESTIVO | FEBRUARY 20, 2020 (zocalopublicsquare.org)

In 2017, the “Genius” issue of National Geographic credited Albert Einstein’s ability to harness the power of his “own thoughts” to predict gravity waves, a century before gravity waves were detected using highly sophisticated technologies. Does this prove that Einstein really was, as many have claimed, the “genius of all geniuses?”

Einstein and his brain are iconic objects—a sacred scientific hero and a sacred relic––but thinking differently about him now can help us revise outdated ideas about genius and about ourselves. There are several reasons to question Einstein’s genius: First, the very idea of “genius” has come under critical scrutiny in contemporary research on creativity. Second, a new view of the social basis of creativity has emerged in the last quarter century; new ideas are created in social networks, not in individuals or individual brains. Third, the idea of a biological brain is being superseded by a new paradigm that sees the brain in a social context. It has become increasingly clear in the life and social sciences that humans are the most social of the social species. We can now say with some confidence that the “I” is a grammatical illusion. We all, as Walt Whitman claimed in Song for Myself, contain multiples; the self is a mosaic, not a unitary ego, in a scientific sense as well as a poetic one.

This doesn’t challenge the uniqueness of Einstein and his achievements but it does change our understanding of that uniqueness.

When we identify Einstein as a genius, we learn more about ourselves and our culture than we do about Einstein. The term “genius” rests on the concept of the individual as an entity that stands apart from society, history, and culture—even outside of time and space. Culturally, genius is also gendered and divinely inspired—so to meet a genius is to meet a male god. The element of the male divine spins the genius right out of the world into a sacred space. It sets Einstein and his brain apart from the rest of us.

In the real world, there is no such thing as the lone wolf genius. Every genius, like every person, is a social network. And every genius stands on the shoulders of a social network, not the shoulders of giants. For the commonly accepted concept of “genius” to be meaningful it would have to be rooted in genes, neurons, or both. In that case, geniuses would appear at random and scattered across intellectual and cultural landscapes. On the contrary, the most comprehensive studies of genius by social scientists have demonstrated that geniuses do not appear at random. Instead, genius clusters.

The fact that creative acts and actors cluster was recognized in the ancient world. Modern research shows that creative clusters appear predictably during times of rapid decline or rapid growth within civilizations. We also know that new ideas, theories, and technologies emerge simultaneously in different places in the same cultural neighborhoods and share a family resemblance. The particular version that prevails and the person or persons who get credit for the innovation hinges on negotiation, politics, public relations, personalities, connections, and in some cases (take, for example, the electrical engineer Nikola Tesla) the outcomes of patent disputes.

The notion of that Einstein’s “own thoughts,” were responsible for his insights into gravity waves ignores his collaborations with Michele Besso and Michael Grossman during the construction of the general theory. It was Grossman, for example, who helped Einstein with the geometry and the concept of tensors he needed to formalize the theory. In the same way, the portrait of Einstein as a lone wolf patent clerk who published the revolutionary 1905 papers leaves out a network of his influences—from Newton to Lorentz, and Poincaré to Minkowski. It also obscures the roles of his friends, teachers, and colleagues in physics, of his first wife Mileva Marić, and his math assistant Walther Mayer.

The important point is not that Einstein worked with and depended on others. It is that Einstein is those others—they are embodied in his self as a social network. When you understand all the people who went into Einstein being Einstein, does the label “genius” really help us understand him or is it merely a representation of untutored awe and worship?Einstein and his brain are iconic objects—a sacred scientific hero and a sacred relic—but thinking differently about him now can help us revise outdated ideas about genius, and about ourselves.

What did Einstein’s genius cluster look like? Einstein’s 1905 papers came in the midst of a cultural flowering of ideas, inventions, and discoveries across the full spectrum of the arts, humanities, and sciences between 1840 and 1930. Einstein’s genius cluster in physics included such luminaries as Planck, Tesla, Marconi, Westinghouse, Madame Curie, the Wright Brothers, Emmy Noether, Gertrude Stein, and Edison. The two great innovations in physics that would remain at the core of physics throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century—relativity theory and quantum mechanics—were born in the early 1900s.

Expanding that genius cluster to encompass music brings in such names as Sibelius, Puccini, DeBussey, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Charles Ives. Innovations in literature include the rise of the novel, American Transcendentalism, Realism, Stream of Consciousness, various forms of Modernism, Naturalism, the growth of children’s literature, and the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. There was a sympathetic mutuality that linked Cubism (represented by Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” 1907) and Relativity Theory. Both involved challenges to conventions regarding absolute time and space.

The period 1840-1930 also witnessed a veritable Copernican revolution, the emergence and crystallization of the social sciences. This period can be considered the classic Age of the Social. It ushered in the idea that we are through and through social beings.

Ultimately, by looking at the myth of Einstein’s brain, we can understand how the myth of individualism is at odds with the evolutionary reality that humans are always, already, and everywhere social. Einstein’s singular status is not a matter of genes, neurons, quantum phenomena, or the biological brain; the architecture of his brain reflected his experiences in the world, all of the social networks he encountered in his life. Since the1990s, developments in social neuroscience, studies of brain plasticity, epigenetics, and network theory have fueled the development of an explanation for Einstein’s genius—a social brain paradigm.

The idea that we have social brains arose from hypotheses about the connection between brain size and social complexity. Beginning in the 1920s and then more systematically in the 1950s, these hypotheses were explored in studies of non-human primates. Two conflicting hypotheses fueled this research: larger brains led to larger and more dense social networks; or larger and more dense social networks led to larger brains. Over time, it seemed more reasonable to hypothesize that brain size, and the size and density of social networks, were coupled in co-evolution.

All of this led to the crystallization of the social brain hypothesis, which entered the neuroscience literature in 1990. This hypothesis initially identified specific regions of the brain (including, for example, the amygdala and the insula) as “the social brain.” More recent studies suggest that the whole brain must be considered a social and cultural entity. In other words, the brain is a complex organ that originates and functions at the nexus of biological, environmental, and social forces. By the 2000s, the social brain hypothesis was finding its way into studies of autism, schizophrenia, and other classic topics in psychiatry.

The story of pathologist Thomas Harvey removing Einstein’s brain during the autopsy in 1955 is well known. However, there were no studies of Harvey’s brain slides between 1955 and 1985, and those done between 1985 and the early 2000s proved, in the end, to be sterile. The noteworthy features of Einstein’s brain some researchers identified were controversial, and many experts who studied Einstein’s brain found nothing unusual. One brain scientist said it was just an old, diseased brain. These studies were guided by the false assumption that the mind is the brain, and by an inability to “see” social life as the locus of causal forces that shape our behaviors, emotions, and thoughts.

And yet, the myth that we are our brains lives on in science, politics, and the culture. It is the basis for Bush’s proclamation of the 1990s as the Decade of the Brain, Obama’s 2013 BRAIN initiative, and comparable policy pronouncements in Europe, the Middle East, and China. Brain research remains haunted by the myth of individualism, which is at its root the myth of the brain in a vat. (The Matrix is an artistic gloss on this metaphor.) The social brain, though, proposes a far more powerful concept: Network thinking, which is capable of connecting the smallest parts, such as neurons, across multiple scales to the global network of information and communication. Don’t think of a brain in a vat, but a of connectome—in which everything from cells and neurons to neural nets, to the body, its microbiome and its organs, and to social relations and the environment are linked by a circulation of information.

It’s been 65 years since Einstein’s brain was removed during the autopsy and still the most insightful discussion of it was found not in the halls of science and philosophy, but in TV land. On July 21, 1999, David Letterman audience members were allowed to ask questions of “Einstein’s brain,” a model brain in a beaker of green gelatin. After they presented their questions, they were told that due to Einstein’s death in 1955, they were addressing dead tissue, which could not answer. This comedic vignette did more for neuroscience than all of the papers and lectures on Einstein’s brain.

SAL RESTIVO,a sociologist-anthropologist, is a former president of the Society for Social Studies of Science, the editor-in-chief of Science, Technology, and Society: An Encyclopedia, and the author most recently of Einstein’s Brain: Genius, Culture and Social Networks.

BY BILL MOYERS | FEBRUARY 11, 2020 (billmoyers.com)

A Facebook member responded to our recent post Bill Moyers and Steve Harper on Lawyers, Liars and Trump on Trial with a question:Though I doubt that Bill Moyers will answer this question in person, I’d like to know what he thinks Joseph Campbell would have to say about this “moment.”

Bill Moyers responds:

I don’t know what in particular Joseph Campbell would say about our situation today. But I can imagine him lamenting, as he did when we talked some 30 years ago, our failure “to admit within ourselves the carnivorous, lecherous fever that is endemic to human nature.” Malevolent greed was on the loose then – it was the mid-1980s as Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko popularized the mantra that “Greed is good” — and the disease was infectious. So I am sure he would not be inclined to place all the blame for the vulgarity and decadence of today on a single individual, no matter how venal, but would say that one conspicuous culprit is the symptom, not the cause, of our discontent.

He would likely be sad now, as he was then, over the weaponizing of religion. He told me, “My notion of the real horror today is what you see in Beirut [then a battleground of religious conflict]. There you have the three great Western religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and because the three of them have different names for the same biblical god, they can’t get on together. They are stuck with their metaphor and don’t realize its reference. They haven’t allowed the closed circle that surrounds them to open. Instead, each insists, ‘We are the chosen group; we have the Truth.’“

Joe believed that we need “myths that will identify the individual not with the local group but with the planet.” Remember, the atmosphere was already warming, but the threat preoccupied mostly scientists. And Joe was looking ahead: “The only myth that is going to be worth thinking about in the immediate future is one that is talking about the planet…and everybody on it. And what it will have to deal with will be exactly what all myths have dealt with—the maturation of the individual, from dependency through adulthood, through maturity, and then to the exit; and then how to relate to this society and how to relate this society to the world of nature and the cosmos.”

Joseph Campbell and The Power of Myth

He described this “as the ground of what the future myth is to be: the eye of reason, not of my religious community; the eye of reason, not my linguistic community. But a philosophy for the planet.” I am sure he would be appalled at the failure of our political class to prepare for saving not an elite or privileged group – not this group, that group, or the other group, but the earth and all those living on it. “This might be the symbol, really, for the new mythology to come. That is the country we are going to be celebrating. And those are the people that we are one with.”

He would, I am sure, deplore the cult of power and personality that has hypnotized American politics. He thought “the power impulse” had been the fundamental impulse in European history, and that it had come to pervade religion in America and thus society, thanks to media and mass consumption. So he would most likely be calling on us to consider the images of myth as “reflections of the spiritual potentialities of every one of us. Through contemplating these, we evoke their powers in our own lives….and live not essentially for ourselves.”

He told me the story that if he were around he might be telling everyone today, of the troubled woman who came to the Indian sage Ramakrishna, confessing “O Master, I do not find that I can love God.” And Ramakrishna asked, “Is there nothing then, that you love?” To this she answered, “My little nephew.”And he replied:, “There is your love and service to God, in your love and service to that child.’”For Joe, this was “the high message of religion, ‘Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these….” He would likely be calling us back to the deeper spiritual truth which he found common to the human spirit, liberating us (“You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free”) from grandiosity and aggressive behavior. “If you would save the world,” he told me, “change the metaphor.” By that, he meant look for the image of yourself and your society that gives you life, breadth, and depth, and suggests membership in a community – an America worth perpetuating, one that transcends this putrid “moment.”

Thanks for your inquiry.

Bill Moyers

© 2020 Schumann Media Center, Inc.

BILL MOYERS

For more than half a century, Bill Moyers has been listening to America as a journalist, writer and producer. You can explore his body of work on the Bill Moyers Timeline.

February 20, 2020 by TomDispatch

Why no retired generals oppose America’s forever wars.

by Danny Sjursen

 23 Comments

11/9/35: General Smedley D. Butler, U.S. Marines, retired, pictured as he addressed a crowd of 6,000 participants in an anti-war demonstration on Reyburn Plaza, Philadelphia, Nov. 9th. Butler suggested, “That the government pay business and commercial interests not to trade with warring nations.” (Photo: Bettman/Getty)

There once lived an odd little man—five feet nine inches tall and barely 140 pounds sopping wet—who rocked the lecture circuit and the nation itself. For all but a few activist insiders and scholars, U.S. Marine Corps Major General Smedley Darlington Butler is now lost to history. Yet more than a century ago, this strange contradiction of a man would become a national war hero, celebrated in pulp adventure novels, and then, 30 years later, as one of this country’s most prominent antiwar and anti-imperialist dissidents.

Raised in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and educated in Quaker (pacifist) schools, the son of an influential congressman, he would end up serving in nearly all of America’s “Banana Wars” from 1898 to 1931. Wounded in combat and a rare recipient of two Congressional Medals of Honor, he would retire as the youngest, most decorated major general in the Marines.

A teenage officer and a certified hero during an international intervention in the Chinese Boxer Rebellion of 1900, he would later become a constabulary leader of the Haitian gendarme, the police chief of Philadelphia (while on an approved absence from the military), and a proponent of Marine Corps football. In more standard fashion, he would serve in battle as well as in what might today be labeled peacekeeping, counterinsurgency, and advise-and-assist missions in Cuba, China, the Philippines, Panama, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, France, and China (again). While he showed early signs of skepticism about some of those imperial campaigns or, as they were sardonically called by critics at the time, “Dollar Diplomacy” operations—that is, military campaigns waged on behalf of U.S. corporate business interests—until he retired he remained the prototypical loyal Marine.

But after retirement, Smedley Butler changed his tune. He began to blast the imperialist foreign policy and interventionist bullying in which he’d only recently played such a prominent part. Eventually, in 1935 during the Great Depression, in what became a classic passage in his memoir, which he titled “War Is a Racket,” he wrote: “I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service… And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the Bankers.”

Seemingly overnight, the famous war hero transformed himself into an equally acclaimed antiwar speaker and activist in a politically turbulent era. Those were, admittedly, uncommonly anti-interventionist years, in which veterans and politicians alike promoted what (for America, at least) had been fringe ideas. This was, after all, the height of what later pro-war interventionists would pejoratively label American “isolationism.”

Nonetheless, Butler was unique (for that moment and certainly for our own) in his unapologetic amenability to left-wing domestic politics and materialist critiques of American militarism. In the last years of his life, he would face increasing criticism from his former admirer, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the military establishment, and the interventionist press. This was particularly true after Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany invaded Poland and later France. Given the severity of the Nazi threat to mankind, hindsight undoubtedly proved Butler’s virulent opposition to U.S. intervention in World War II wrong.

Nevertheless, the long-term erasure of his decade of antiwar and anti-imperialist activism and the assumption that all his assertions were irrelevant has proven historically deeply misguided. In the wake of America’s brief but bloody entry into the First World War, the skepticism of Butler (and a significant part of an entire generation of veterans) about intervention in a new European bloodbath should have been understandable. Above all, however, his critique of American militarism of an earlier imperial era in the Pacific and in Latin America remains prescient and all too timely today, especially coming as it did from one of the most decorated and high-ranking general officers of his time. (In the era of the never-ending war on terror, such a phenomenon is quite literally inconceivable.)

Smedley Butler’s Marine Corps and the military of his day was, in certain ways, a different sort of organization than today’s highly professionalized armed forces. History rarely repeats itself, not in a literal sense anyway. Still, there are some disturbing similarities between the careers of Butler and today’s generation of forever-war fighters. All of them served repeated tours of duty in (mostly) unsanctioned wars around the world. Butler’s conflicts may have stretched west from Haiti across the oceans to China, whereas today’s generals mostly lead missions from West Africa east to Central Asia, but both sets of conflicts seemed perpetual in their day and were motivated by barely concealed economic and imperial interests.

Nonetheless, whereas this country’s imperial campaigns of the first third of the twentieth century generated a Smedley Butler, the hyper-interventionism of the first decades of this century hasn’t produced a single even faintly comparable figure. Not one. Zero. Zilch. Why that is matters and illustrates much about the U.S. military establishment and contemporary national culture, none of it particularly encouraging.

Why No Antiwar Generals

When Smedley Butler retired in 1931, he was one of three Marine Corps major generals holding a rank just below that of only the Marine commandant and the Army chief of staff. Today, with about 900 generals and admirals currently serving on active duty, including 24 major generals in the Marine Corps alone, and with scores of flag officers retiring annually, not a single one has offered genuine public opposition to almost 19 years worth of ill-advised, remarkably unsuccessful American wars. As for the most senior officers, the 40 four-star generals and admirals whose vocal antimilitarism might make the biggest splash, there are more of them today than there were even at the height of the Vietnam War, although the active military is now about half the size it was then. Adulated as many of them may be, however, not one qualifies as a public critic of today’s failing wars.

Instead, the principal patriotic dissent against those terror wars has come from retired colonels, lieutenant colonels, and occasionally more junior officers (like me), as well as enlisted service members. Not that there are many of us to speak of either. I consider it disturbing (and so should you) that I personally know just about every one of the retired military figures who has spoken out against America’s forever wars.

The big three are Secretary of State Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson; Vietnam veteran and onetime West Point history instructor, retired Colonel Andrew Bacevich; and Iraq veteran and Afghan War whistleblower, retired Lieutenant Colonel Danny Davis. All three have proven to be genuine public servants, poignant voices, and—on some level—cherished personal mentors. For better or worse, however, none carry the potential clout of a retired senior theater commander or prominent four-star general offering the same critiques.

Something must account for veteran dissenters topping out at the level of colonel. Obviously, there are personal reasons why individual officers chose early retirement or didn’t make general or admiral. Still, the system for selecting flag officers should raise at least a few questions when it comes to the lack of antiwar voices among retired commanders. In fact, a selection committee of top generals and admirals is appointed each year to choose the next colonels to earn their first star. And perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that, according to numerous reports, “the members of this board are inclined, if not explicitly motivated, to seek candidates in their own image—officers whose careers look like theirs.” At a minimal level, such a system is hardly built to foster free thinkers, no less breed potential dissidents.

Consider it an irony of sorts that this system first received criticism in our era of forever wars when General David Petraeus, then commanding the highly publicized “surge” in Iraq, had to leave that theater of war in 2007 to serve as the chair of that selection committee. The reason: he wanted to ensure that a twice passed-over colonel, a protégé of his—future Trump National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster—earned his star.

Mainstream national security analysts reported on this affair at the time as if it were a major scandal, since most of them were convinced that Petraeus and his vaunted counterinsurgency or “COINdinista” protégés and their “new” war-fighting doctrine had the magic touch that would turn around the failing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, Petraeus tried to apply those very tactics twice—once in each country—as did acolytes of his later, and you know the results of that.

But here’s the point: it took an eleventh-hour intervention by America’s most acclaimed general of that moment to get new stars handed out to prominent colonels who had, until then, been stonewalled by Cold War-bred flag officers because they were promoting different (but also strangely familiar) tactics in this country’s wars. Imagine, then, how likely it would be for such a leadership system to produce genuine dissenters with stars of any serious sort, no less a crew of future Smedley Butlers.

At the roots of this system lay the obsession of the American officer corps with “professionalization” after the Vietnam War debacle. This first manifested itself in a decision to ditch the citizen-soldier tradition, end the draft, and create an “all-volunteer force.” The elimination of conscription, as predicted by critics at the time, created an ever-growing civil-military divide, even as it increased public apathy regarding America’s wars by erasing whatever “skin in the game” most citizens had.

More than just helping to squelch civilian antiwar activism, though, the professionalization of the military, and of the officer corps in particular, ensured that any future Smedley Butlers would be left in the dust (or in retirement at the level of lieutenant colonel or colonel) by a system geared to producing faux warrior-monks. Typical of such figures is current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army General Mark Milley. He may speak gruffly and look like a man with a head of his own, but typically he’s turned out to be just another yes-man for another war-power-hungry president.

One group of generals, however, reportedly now does have it out for President Trump—but not because they’re opposed to endless war. Rather, they reportedly think that The Donald doesn’t “listen enough to military advice” on, you know, how to wage war forever and a day.

What Would Smedley Butler Think Today?

In his years of retirement, Smedley Butler regularly focused on the economic component of America’s imperial war policies. He saw clearly that the conflicts he had fought in, the elections he had helped rig, the coups he had supported, and the constabularies he had formed and empowered in faraway lands had all served the interests of U.S. corporate investors. Though less overtly the case today, this still remains a reality in America’s post-9/11 conflicts, even on occasion embarrassingly so (as when the Iraqi ministry of oil was essentially the only public building protected by American troops as looters tore apart the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, in the post-invasion chaos of April 2003). Mostly, however, such influence plays out far more subtly than that, both abroad and here at home where those wars help maintain the record profits of the top weapons makers of the military-industrial complex.

That beast, first identified by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, is now on steroids as American commanders in retirement regularly move directly from the military onto the boards of the giant defense contractors, a reality which only contributes to the dearth of Butlers in the military retiree community. For all the corruption of his time, the Pentagon didn’t yet exist and the path from the military to, say, United Fruit Company, Standard Oil, or other typical corporate giants of that moment had yet to be normalized for retiring generals and admirals. Imagine what Butler would have had to say about the modern phenomenon of the “revolving door” in Washington.

Of course, he served in a very different moment, one in which military funding and troop levels were still contested in Congress. As a longtime critic of capitalist excesses who wrote for leftist publications and supported the Socialist Party candidate in the 1936 presidential elections, Butler would have found today’s nearly trillion-dollar annual defense budgets beyond belief. What the grizzled former Marine long ago identified as a treacherous nexus between warfare and capital “in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives” seems to have reached its natural end point in the twenty-first century. Case in point: the record (and still rising) “defense” spending of the present moment, including—to please a president—the creation of a whole new military service aimed at the full-scale militarization of space.

Sadly enough, in the age of Trump, as numerous polls demonstrate, the U.S. military is the only public institution Americans still truly trust. Under the circumstances, how useful it would be to have a high-ranking, highly decorated, charismatic retired general in the Butler mold galvanize an apathetic public around those forever wars of ours. Unfortunately, the likelihood of that is practically nil, given the military system of our moment.

Of course, Butler didn’t exactly end his life triumphantly. In late May 1940, having lost 25 pounds due to illness and exhaustion—and demonized as a leftist, isolationist crank but still maintaining a whirlwind speaking schedule—he checked himself into the Philadelphia Navy Yard Hospital for a “rest.” He died there, probably of some sort of cancer, four weeks later. Working himself to death in his 10-year retirement and second career as a born-again antiwar activist, however, might just have constituted the very best service that the two-time Medal of Honor winner could have given the nation he loved to the very end.

Someone of his credibility, character, and candor is needed more than ever today. Unfortunately, this military generation is unlikely to produce such a figure. In retirement, Butler himself boldly confessed that, “like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical…”

Today, generals don’t seem to have a thought of their own even in retirement. And more’s the pity…

Major Danny Sjursen is a U.S. Army strategist and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has written a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge.  He lives with his wife and four sons near Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

By Nikki Palumbo

Illustration by Sara Lautman – February 20, 2020 – NewYorker.com

Disrupted my cat’s sleep by trying to turn off my alarm.

Bumped into the wall on my way to the bathroom.

Opened my shower curtain too vigorously.

Didn’t feed my cat right away.

Started giving my coffee order while the barista was looking directly at me but was not listening yet.

Didn’t have exact change.

Someone hit me with his umbrella.

Someone sat on me on the train.

Entered the bathroom as someone was leaving.

Made eye contact with my reflection.

Left the bathroom as someone was entering.

Forgot the word “hi.”

Took twenty minutes to reply to an e-mail.

Sneezed.

Refilled my water bottle in the spacious office kitchen while someone else made tea in a very separate area.

The tea-maker spilled tea on my shoe.

Took twenty seconds to reply to a text.

Reminded my boss that we had a meeting.

Got interrupted in the meeting.

Couldn’t answer an e-mail right away because I was in the meeting.

Someone knocked my phone out of my hand in the elevator.

Didn’t know where a street was when an older man asked for directions.

Browsed an aisle at a store while wearing a backpack.

Was early to my date.

Wasn’t the hostess when a family of four was looking for a table for dinner.

Couldn’t split queso because I’m lactose intolerant and then ended up splitting the queso anyway.

Hadn’t heard that podcast or read that book or seen any of those tweets or that movie.

Didn’t know who that actor was. Or that one.

Never learned German.

Couldn’t figure out where the bathroom was.

Didn’t want another drink.

Forgot the word “bye.”

Had to wake up my cat to get into bed.

Wrote this.

Matthew Stelzner This is a Trippy Portal update. In this video I discuss how the Mercury-Neptune cycle of time is related to flow states, photography/videography, and telepathy, all against the backdrop of one of the most beautiful places on earth, the San Francisco coastline. One of my favorite spiritual practices is to go on long walks to get into pleasurable flow states. I’ve walked 13 marathon-length walks in the last three years, and I regularly go on 5-10 mile walks. I usually find myself pulled towards the ocean, and I walk from my home in the Castro to Ocean Beach, which is about a 5 mile walk. In this video I had just walked 14 miles and arrived at my new favorite spot above Baker Beach. I marvel at how my intuitive guidance somehow kept me going at exactly the right pace, even with stops for photography and rest, to arrive at this spot perfectly in time for the “magic hour” before sunset when the light is best for filming. I hope you enjoy this special moment in nature with me, and that you are having your own magic experiences of this trippy portal.

Here is a link to the first video I made on the Trippy Portal: https://youtu.be/QtMdqUAq8WU This is a great time to get an intuitive reading and I would love to work with you if you feel pulled to do so. Please check out my website at www.stelz.biz to see my availability for intuitive readings and to sign up for my mailing list and receive a free video series on tarot practice. Sending blessings! Here’s what I wrote for my first video on this Mercury-Neptune conjunction portal: Hey Everyone: There’s a trippy portal open for exploration! Are you ready to take the red pill and slide down the rabbit hole? We are at the beginning of another Mercury-Neptune cycle of time. These two planets are in a long conjunction that is happening in two distinct phases. This first phase overlaps with a Mercury retrograde cycle (which can itself feel really trippy), and goes from February 8th to the 25th. Mercury goes retrograde from February 16th to March 9th, and so this makes for 4 weeks of super flowy mindstates. After Mercury goes direct it will eventually catch back up with Neptune and we will get another two weeks of the conjunction from March 26th to April 9th. Mercury has to do with mind states, curiosity, mental focus, and communication. Neptune has to do with spirituality, flow states, inspiration, the dissolution of boundaries and the water element. In this video I discuss a few of the possibilities for these two coming together. The setting for the video, by the ocean with the sounds of the waves, crows, and the foghorn in the distance, is great for the energy, with the water relaxing my mind and softening my voice. When I stopped to record this I had been walking for over 8 miles in 70 degree weather, and I was in a lovely flow state. When Mercury and Neptune dance together things can get trippy. Neptune dissolves ordinary left-brain mind states into intuitive right-brain flow states. When we relax our minds, magical possibilities open up, and we move beyond our usual pragmatic choices to see the more fluid possibilities usually hidden from view. It is a time when the voice of our higher selves can be heard more clearly, and so it is worth pausing and quieting down to really pay attention. The Mercury-Neptune cycle of time has to do with the waves and tides of our various mind states. It is the pace of our thinking process when we step outside of time to receive loving messages of guidance. These two remind us to pray to higher source and then relax to receive the divine messages that come. These are the times when we learn to develop our intuitive abilities and receive psychic downloads, and it’s a great time to use divinatory tools like tarot and astrology to make the downloads clearer. These tools amplify the heavenly messages so you can really hear them and then flow with inspiration.