I'm afraid I don't have much useful to offer to Robert's initiative at this time. But I wanted to briefly note, for you and others, that evolutionary science writer Connie Barlow and former fundamentalist evangelical Christian minister Michael Dowd offer another, complementary, angle on evolution and religion (including their own thoughts on the relevance of evolutionary psychology) at Thank God for Evolution and The Great Story.
Michael is translating Christian theology into terms not only consistent with but expressive of a sacred understanding of science-based evolution. (He half jokes that he is a CreaTHEist, while Connie is a CreAtheist!) He is currently doing some remarkable interviews with luminaries in the field of Evolutionary Christianity. At the very least, their work should provide you with some additional juicy quotes…
Well said. And I rather suspect that the core of the matter is deeper than Culture – and that would be an extended conversation. But it is certainly not about rule change and redesign, I think.
Right on, as your imminent study of evolutionary psychology will confirm. I reckon we don't have time for evolutions in our Pleistocene genome to catch up to (and get ahead of) our impact on the planet, so we're just gonna hafta run what we brung. That means cultural engineering and we already have been shown how to do it by the Oligarchy. What's it gonna take to shift the values-balance from hegemonistic concentration at any cost to something closer to sustainability? But then, that's a whole ‘nother conversation barely touched-on in the message below…
The assassination of Salmaan Taseer has shown only too clearly the growing extremism in Pakistan, the radicalisation of its society and the polarisation that is taking hold. This is not just between the religious and the secular, but also the polarisation that the “war on terror” has caused between the various religious sects.
Is the Global War in Terror Creating More Problems than it is Solving?
Chuck Spinney
The late historian Chalmers JOHNSON popularized the term “blowback” to describe the unintended grand-strategic consequences resulting from interventionist foreign policies and military actions. The term blowback dates to the CIA's internal history of the US’s 1953 Iranian coup that threw out the Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh (a progressive social reformer who wanted to nationalize the oil industry among other things) and replaced him with the tyrannical American puppet Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi. No one can doubt that contemporary problems with Iran today are rooted in resentments dating back to the 1953 coup.
Using the tools of corporations to reprogram global society and distribute a new cultural operating system
Image byfdcomite, courtesy of Creative Commons license.
Now that the Evolver network and brand have established themselves to a certain extent, I want to look ahead to developments I hope to see in the near future, with this organization and other initiatives. For the next phase of development, I propose the term “business shamanism.” “Corporate alchemy” would be a viable alternative.
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We tend to forget that Roosevelt's New Deal was not a good-hearted gift to the working classes but a compromise to stave off mass uprising. The current oligarchy has determined that it will make no such deal this time around. I suspect they assume that the pulverizing of the populace with mind-numbing media, psychotropic drugs, police state tactics, and poison food had the desired effect. And they may be right.
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Phi Beta Iota: Below the line are excerpts. Click on the title to read the entire rant. The author is educated and thoughtful, his rant is provoking and worth studying.
The culprit may be a pesticide that the EPA has allowed on the market despite the fact that the company which makes the pesticide has failed to prove it is safe.
Phi Beta Iota: This is the part that the President, the Director of the Office of Management, and the Director of National Intelligence simply do not compute. As presented in the M4IS2 briefing in Chile, in today's complex era security is everything about everything always. Intelligence must mature. We have wasted 19 years going on 25. Creating a Smart Nation and a Smart Government starts with evidence-based policy-making–intelligence is where that comes from, and public intelligence is how we nurture integrity within the government.
Test Was Designed by Psychologist Who Inspired CIA's Torture Program
An experimental, Army mental-health, fitness initiative designed by the same psychologist whose work heavily influenced the psychological aspects of the Bush administration's torture program is under fire by civil rights groups and hundreds of active-duty soldiers. They say it unconstitutionally requires enlistees to believe in God or a “higher power” in order to be deemed “spiritually fit” to serve in the Army.
Comprehensive Soldier Fitness (CSF) is a $125 million “holistic fitness program” unveiled in late 2009 and aimed at reducing the number of suicides and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) cases, which have reached epidemic proportions over the past year due to multiple deployments to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the substandard care soldiers have received when they return from combat.
EXTRACT: In April 2010, for instance, a group of retired top brass and others released a report claiming that 27% of Americans between 17 and 24 are “too fat to fight.” “Within just 10 years, the number of states reporting that 40 percent of their 18- to 24-year-olds are obese or overweight went from one [Kentucky] to 39.” No reason to focus on that, though. After all, it was so last year.
Just as the year ended, however, the Education Trust issued a report indicating that nearly a quarter of all applicants to the Armed Forces, despite having a high-school diploma, can’t pass the necessary military entrance exam. This isn’t Rhodes Scholarships we’re talking about, but not having “the reading, mathematics, science, and problem-solving abilities” to become a bona fide private in the U.S. Army. We’re talking the sort of basic that, according to an Education Trust spokesperson, makes it “equally likely that the men and women who don't pass the test are [also] unprepared for the civilian workforce.”
includes
Freedom Fighters for a Fading Empire What It Means When We Say We Have the World’s Finest Fighting Force
By William J. Astore
EXTRACT: As for our armed forces, though most Americans don’t know it, within U.S. military circles much criticism exists of an officer corps of “tarnished brass”that is deficient in professionalism; of generals who are more concerned withcovering their butts than leading from the front; of instruction at military academies that is divorced from war’s realities; of an aversion “to innovation or creativity… [leading to] an atmosphere of anti-intellectualism” that undermines strategy and makes a hash of counterinsurgency efforts. Indeed, our military’s biting criticism of itself is one of the few positive signs in a fighting force that is otherwise overstretched, deeply frustrated, and ridiculously overpraised by genuflecting politicians.
William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and professor of history, is a TomDispatch regular. He welcomes reader comments atwjastore@gmail.com. To listen to Timothy MacBain's latest TomCast audio interview in which Astore discusses the military nightmares of a fading empire, click here or, to download it to your iPod, here.
EXTRACT: With the Citizens United Supreme Court decision (certainly one of the ten most consequential rulings in the court's history), all pretense of restraint is gone. The reader can see just how unrestrained in the January 1 edition of the Washington Post. The article recounts the adventures of one Gena Bell, a declassé Ohioan of modest intellectual gifts balanced by an unbounded anger over a sense of entitlement slipping through her fingers. Otherwise a very unremarkable individual, made remarkable only by the fact that the Koch brothers, through the front group Americans for Prosperity, paid for her to demonstrate against the United Nations climate change summit in Cancun, Mexico.
Business Shamanism
