Philosophy

GMOs in Oregon — What Would Subcomandante Marcos Say?

Oregon voters in two counties voted against GMOs, against Monsanto. That’s 2 to 1 in favor of protecting organic farmers, communities, farmers and our health from pollan and seeds of the Frankenstein variety.
Vermont has signed the nation’s first GMO-labeling law, effective July 2016 (again, incremental, slide-side change — labels — but it’s something, nonetheless).

Poetry and Uppercuts: Orloski in 10 Sweaty Rounds

You get what you pay for, and if it’s money and debt, you get nothing, really. The money changers of culture have bastardized it until we have accepted 90 percent of NY books publishing and West Coast movie making. Forget about NYT Review of Books, APR, all the MFA rags, all the preening and ID politics and denuded life in all those poets’ works. Forget about Terri Gross of Fresh Air, The Q out of CBC, and freaks like Charlie “I Am an American-through-and-through” Rose.

Autonomy and Will-to-Growth

The grotesque absurdity of relentless economic “development”: after two centuries, the planet reels under the onslaught of previously inconceivable catastrophes—most disastrously, global warming and deadly, perennial nuclear wastes.  Yet, restlessly insatiable, the profit-addicted Juggernaut remains in perpetual-motion—devouring entire ecosystems as it plunders resources and carves out new markets.  Indeed, such unremitting economic activity, as John Stuart Mill warned 150 years ago, could end up destroying the entire world.

What Is a Gentleman?

Troy: [a “gay,” played by Dave Foley]: You know, I asked him [Adam, played by Brendan Fraser] about that. He said, good manners are just a way of showing other people we have respect for them. See, I didn’t know that, I thought it was just a way of acting all superior. Oh and you know what else he told me?
Eve: [played by Alicia Silverstone] What?
Troy: He thinks I’m a gentleman and you’re a lady.
Eve: (disgusted) Well, consider the source! I don’t even know what a lady is.

Unpacking the Lizard Brain from the Licentious Denizens of the Money Men

they call it lizard brain
sex, power, immediacy
drug-induced hedge fund impresarios
$1500 a trick, they laugh at sums
smaller than one million in Krugerrand
instant gratification hitting the jackpot
one more bites the dust
let them eat cake . . .
let the masters rule
someone asked if they know they
are killing their young, taking
the planet into biological implosion
is it a snake, simple, pure, or some
Monitor lizard we call Zionists
vulture capitalists, parasitic

Spring-time in Amerika — Bump those Adjuncts Until They Hurt!

I’ll flip the classroom on this post, putting down my response to another middling post from that middling thing called, Inside Higher Education, this on-line blog advertising sheet, DC-based (first problem) and one that is just a hotbed of behind-the-times (second knock against it) and failing to really know  the on-the-ground (third, knock) reality of school, community, real faculty and, well, the non-dominant white male/female perspectives (4th knock), the ones bred and enabled on that east coast (another knock) where we have seen a galaxy of pain put upon us, the 80 percent, by