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Dear Habermas Sites:
University of Wisconsin, Parkside (UWP)
California State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH)
Created: June 9, 2011
Latest update: June 22, 2011
E-Mail to Jeanne in L.A.
E-Mail to Susan at UWP
A Direct Advertiser to Home Sale Report
Direct marketing is convenient. You can stay at home, get what you want on TV or the Internet, and sometimes it even works well. But there are costs, real costs. And dishonest costs. Be aware of the costs, and the way you are dishonestly trapped into the costs. Be sure you're willing to risk that before you engage in the coneniences.
This isn't new, and it isn't the "fault" of modern technology. "Fault" implies causation. Your parents who are horrified at what you just spent online are likely to blame modern technology for the ease with you fell into such spending. But cons and scams have milked people of their hard earned money for centuries, way back into the Middle Ages and before. Circuses, celebrations, fairs, markets have been coming to town since what was probably earlier than recorded history. True, I've never seen an advertisement carved into a prehistoric cave, but that doesn't mean there wasn't a very clever character somewhere back in time who figured out how to get a better deal.
In the Old West we had both "snake oil" and traveling salesmen. And I bet there were equivalent characters all the way back to characterhood. I'm pretty sure that there were lots of them, across the centuries who were willing to engage in a bit of dishonesty to get that better deal. Today we call that "con" or "scam," until it gets to the level that Madoff took it. Then we're really angry about being taken so egregiously, and we call it major crime and send the poor wretch to jail.
In Europe in olden times there were the Roma, who still inhabit Europe today. They were called by the mildly derogatory name given to the poor who look a little suspicious, like they might try to pick your pocket: "Gypsies." Like all epithets, this one became a terrible stereotype, which triggers discrimnation until this very day. France has been making a special effort to drive out the impoverished, homeless Gypsies. Peripatetic bands of Roma still wander and find unoccupied land on which to locate their wagons in the old days, vehicles today.
"A Roma stands next to a caravan in a makeshift camp in Pantin, on the northern outskirts of Paris, on Sept. 10, 2010.A Roma stands next to a caravan in a makeshift camp in Pantin, on the northern outskirts of Paris, on Sept. 10, 2010. (Francois Mori/Associated Press)"
"France is facing possible legal action from the European Commission for its policy of tearing down makeshift camps and deporting hundreds of Roma." Last Updated: Tuesday, September 14, 2010 | 10:26 AM ET. CBC News
Review of Hardt and Negri's book, Empire (ISBN 0-674-25121-0 (hardcover) ISBN ), 2000. Marxist perspective. Read at least some of it when it came out. Vaguely recall that main idea was that nation-state war was on the way out, to be replaced by defining dissidents as terrorists. Problem is that this permits non-correcting system in which nation-states have the "truth" in classifying dissidents. This attitude continues today in the Libyan conflict, in which NATO's assumption that Kaddafi is "wrong" was led mostly by England and France, who now say they can't afford to keep defending the rebels. You see the problem. But mine was a cursory reading back in the early 2000s, when Susan and I were working primarily on higher education and community outreach. I don't think we should quote Marxists on that project. Remember McCarthy, in Nixon's early career.
The Wikipedia reference above will give you enough clues to explore this idea further if it's of interest to you. Remember that Wikipedia is a collectively written source that has no supervisory guarantee of accuracy. Remember also that this book was published by Harvard University Press, which does have some guarantee of academic accuracy. These links will give you enough information to do your own Web search. jeanne 06.17.2011.
jeanne's definition: the assumption that what we know is "the truth," when all knowledge comes from the perspectives we learn from our culture, our family, the people with whom we interact, the ideas and beliefs to which we are subjected, often even before birth. (Skinner believed that the uterus could learn music, languages from before birth.)
Knowingness, as interpreted by Jonathan Lear. And all the problems we humans have with it. We want to be SURE of things, to KNOW, to have the TRUTH. Fact is, very little in life is that certain. Spock would be horrified. He'd have to guess all the time. An educated guess, to be sure, but a guess, nonetheless.Lots more on this later. How do we foster the tolerance of ambiguity in early education? Think of giving our young ones a choice of whether a given skill needs to be worked hard on and skill developed, or whether just knowing that's a possibility is enough. This is fundamental to our community public-sphere project. jeanne
Adults need to play as much as children need it. This is a series of drawing lessons in the New York Times by artist James McMullan. I suggest very strongly that you glance through the comments in response to the articles. Many of those who comment had studied art when they were younger, probably as part of a liberal arts program in college. Their expressed joy at taking up their drawing pads again suggests what we have often expressed, that learning must be renewed and continued throughout life. That joy comes in the process of "doing," in the building over time of skills that can then be used in creative endeavors. We hope that our emphasis on "free form" will encourage you to take up your own drawing with whatever tools you prefer, knowing that the process itself is as important as the "hand-made" produced in the process. jeanne
nuclear power
This visual sequence of what happens during meltdown will not give you a lot of detail, but the visual itself is helpful. If you've seen what the sequence looks like, your imaginary has more to work with as you pursue more scientific details if you'd like. Even if nuclear power isn't your big thing in life, it's nice to be able to talk intelligently about these crises when they do occur. It's also nice to be able to tell when some of your political and administrative or corporate leaders are speaking gibberish because they haven't had an education that has adequately prepared them to speak lucidly on such issues.
Take a few minutes to go see this series of visuals. We should all know what a nuclear plant meltdown is, and what it looks like.
racism
Tim Wise is a writer and educator who criticizes the continuing subtle, and often not so subtle, racism in the United States. He and Angela Davis are currently soliciting donations to make an eductional film to teach heightened awareness of the problem in the U.S..
Bear in mind that those of us opposed to racism and ethnic discrimination have an agenda, just like everybody else. You need to take that bias in mind as you read our work. It's always important to understand the ideological perspective of those to whom you turn for information. Integrity demands that we remind you of what has shaped her beliefs. We are all interdependent, not indiciduals raised in a cultural and social free vacuum..
With respect to racism, you must realize that attitudes to color were subtly socialized for hundreds of years in this country. Some of us who internalized those attitudes were taught, as the U.S. progressed towards rejection of racism and discrimination of all kinds, learned denial. After all, my mother never told me anything derogatory about Negroes. But I often heard others speak of blacks as servants who were to be addressed by their first names only, and, incidentally, were expected to enter through the back door.
I grew up in a two-room apartment. We didn't have either a back door or a private bathroom. But that doesn't mean that I didn't internalize those messages, just the same. Nor did I fail to learn denial of what I had internalized from this humiliating treatment of blacks by whites. Remember interdependence. It will help you understand my writing a lot when you learn that I grew up from about three years of age through some graduate school in New Orleans, Louisiana. (It might help even more if you read The Help," which will soon be made into a motion picture by Dreamworks, or watch a rerun of Blindsided. Neither of those stories took place in New Orleans; but both took place in the South.
Granted it may be worse in L.A. than in some other places, but suburbia and the concept of every worker a home owner has forced this charade upon many of us. We're talking serious infrastructure prolems here, not retirement age. Lots of the mothers to whom I refer were in their early thirties and forties. jeanne 06.17.2011.
We're all too fast track in the tensions of politics and economy right now. One moment meditation gets you to the same place we're trying to teach people to get to, Susan. I just don't think they've developed theoretically how it fits into healing and growing. That's our job. I did the one minute with his video. It's exactly what I do. Focus on the breath. It's never right or wrong, thus emotional support. Not religious, at least in the few minutes I listened too it. I found it on Darn Good Yarn. So that provides the connection to the other half of our project. Yippee! jeanne
New York Times interactive, sort of, graph on how reactions to Osama (it can be spelled either with "U" or with "O" because the Arabic language doesn't have a one-to-one correspondence with English and the way we spell the sounds of our language.
This is pretty sketchy, but for now you can play with it. The New York Times sent it to me in a special e-mail to subscribers. Do visit it. It's an interactive scatter gram. As you move your cursor around the map, the answers sent to the Times appear for you to read. Susan, we'll have to try this. There's just way too many answers crammed into one small graph. All we would really need is a hot link containing the message for each dot on the graph. Since I don't think you can anywhere near get this to be educationally useful with any number of respondents over the number you could manage in a small face-to-face group, as I imagine it, it would provide for a good face-to-face discussion. I'll have to think on how the statements or questions should be ordered so that they actually respond to each person's points as argued. That'll take some programming. I don't think I have time to get to that before we meet in late July. jeanne
We're all too fast track in the tensions of politics and economy right now. One moment meditation gets you to the same place we're trying to teach people to get to, Susan. I just don't think they've developed theoretically how it fits into healing and growing. That's our job. I did the one minute with his video. It's exactly what I do. Focus on the breath. It's never right or wrong, thus emotional support. Not religious, at least in the few minutes I listened too it. I found it on Darn Good Yarn. So that provides the connection to the other half of our project. Yippee! jeanne
Rabelais' Frozen Words
Don't Be Misled! "Jane had a pain in her head."
"Email Customer Service at idvl.custsvc@fulfillment.com
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Didn't have time to check URLs on all links. jeanne 06.16.2011
Didn't have time to check URLs on all links. jeanne 06.16.2011
"On May 13th [2011] in Oakland, California, a documentary crew filmed the extraordinary, sold-out conversation between two of the country’s leading voices on race and politics. The footage will be used as the core content of an educational documentary that thousands can watch and use as a catalyst for reflection, discussion and activism."
Maybe We Should Be Moving People into Other Productive Paths in Their Early Fifties
by NPR Staff
Monday, June 13, 2011 at 10:00 AM EDT.
Time to Focus on the Fed: Oppose Peter Diamond’s Nomination. By admin on May 11, 2011 .
Updated: June 6, 2011.
By Veronique de Rugy. December 9, 2010 12:04 P.M.
American Enterprise Institute.
On tax cuts and revenue.
On tax cuts and revenues search.
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