Poetry, Prose & Philosophy from Life
4 July 2015 Dear America (circa 1786), Today is your 239th birthday and in all honesty, you don't look a day over 10. Things here in 2015 for the most part look very similar to the nice bright-eyed childhood you remember. There are still some folks who are all up in arms over taxes being used … Continue reading A Letter to America
1. Despite Stephen Hawking's claim that philosophy is dead, every single human action made by every human in Western culture, is, first and foremost, an action with ethical implications and secondly they all contains metaphysical assumptions— alas, philosophy exists in everything we do. Something as simple as buying coffee in a consumable, non-recyclable cup from … Continue reading The Confederate Flag Waves in Utopia
Carnivorous Vulgaris[i] — Omnis Determinatio est Negatio[ii] 1— the Coyote In 1949 the LooneyTunes animation studio released the first episode of a long series that is casually referred to as, The Coyote and the Road Runner. This cartoon series had a formulaic plot that was repeated throughout every episode and the plot primarily unfolded as … Continue reading Wile E. Coyote & the Pursuance of Scientific Progress
You may have noticed in the past few years, there has been an increase in the popularity of Zombie's and the subsequent apocalyptic disaster than generally ensues. The Zombie folklore began increasing in popularity in the 1970's and then dramatically increased in popularity again in the late 1990's through present day, as exhibited in an examination of the … Continue reading Zombies & the Postmodern Human
1. The purpose of this paper is analyze our (human) relationship to the non-human universe and how our relationship adversely impacts the environment around us; and, from this, where does this relationship come from and, more importantly, where are we going with it? As part of this process I will contrast two different metaphysical views: … Continue reading The Synthetic Negation of Human Progress
Korean food for Lunch I ordered vegetarian pot-stickers and a bowl of spicy egg-soup— hold the rice, noodles and tofu. The ordering process went smooth and although there was a slight eye-brow raise over my ‘hold this and hold that’ request, everything seemed to be normal. Several minutes after my soup was delivered I experienced … Continue reading Chronicles of a Food Snob (Episode 2)
When I think about my life and what I am, I can’t say with any certainty or rationality that I had any input in being who I am. I did not choose my parents, place and time of birth, race, gender, class and any opportunities or lack thereof. My life, my birth and, subsequently, my … Continue reading I Could Have Been a Nazi…
1— Introduction If we wanted to successfully advance practices that serve the means of reducing violence, it would be prudent to first understand what violence is and, a fortiori, what causes it to be. And, any theory that must adequately explicate a concept must be inclusive of multiple modes of it’s existence, in addition to multiple … Continue reading A Theory of Violence
As I sat in a coffee shop reading the schizophrenic philosophical whims of Gilles Deleuze I became bombarded with a young couple, their parents and a baker who devoured my personal space to fuss over cake choices for the young couples to-be wedding. The cake maker asks the groom to be, “so you do not … Continue reading To Gluten, or to not Gluten— and Other Platonic Guilt
This last year has shown ample evidence that W.E.B. Dubois was right to proclaim “the problem of the 20th century [was] the problem of the color line”[1], and here and now in the 21st century the problem still persists. Some people would insist that America is equal now and that was a problem of the … Continue reading Infinite Hope
Nothing's Sacred 