WALLPAPERS(by munawar 9949935350)

In a break-up situation, an old friend writes with good advice to all those who face the end of relationships with sadness:

> Time works wonders, but it is the lessons one tries to figure out about love that
> eat the energy.

Wicked good advice.

Who, in our generation, hasn’t wasted hours belittling themselves against the specter of some fearsome love-that-was, wondering what they did wrong to lose that partner, who intervened, the ghosts of former relationships, and how they could have avoided the pain at encounters thereafter?

Come to think of it, before the days of youth culture and self-help, who ever thought that screening for mates was an opportunity for improving one’s moral self except Goethe?

The family was supposed to be the major site of moral improvement. One eventually found a mate who matched the morals of the family. Changing one’s morals for the mate, or changing because of courtship — an absurd and romantic notion.

One gets involved with others in the first place partially because of the mutual reflection and self-knowledge that accrues from discourse. It’s brave and right to want to treat others well. It’s worthy of speculation. But maybe the ends and beginnings are not the time for this kind of reflection.

I sincerely wish him well: maybe I also wish for both of us the grace to not think too hard about what went wrong.

In a break-up situation, an old friend writes with good advice to all those who face the end of relationships with sadness:

> Time works wonders, but it is the lessons one tries to figure out about love that
> eat the energy.

Wicked good advice.

Who, in our generation, hasn’t wasted hours belittling themselves against the specter of some fearsome love-that-was, wondering what they did wrong to lose that partner, who intervened, the ghosts of former relationships, and how they could have avoided the pain at encounters thereafter?

Come to think of it, before the days of youth culture and self-help, who ever thought that screening for mates was an opportunity for improving one’s moral self except Goethe?

The family was supposed to be the major site of moral improvement. One eventually found a mate who matched the morals of the family. Changing one’s morals for the mate, or changing because of courtship — an absurd and romantic notion.

One gets involved with others in the first place partially because of the mutual reflection and self-knowledge that accrues from discourse. It’s brave and right to want to treat others well. It’s worthy of speculation. But maybe the ends and beginnings are not the time for this kind of reflection.

I sincerely wish him well: maybe I also wish for both of us the grace to not think too hard about what went wrong.

blowing wreath
Originally uploaded by joguldi.

Robert Arnold, the documentarian, is my photo mentor, and occasionally I get the honor of wandering and shooting with him around parts of San Francisco.

The more the aesthetic of urban life grows on me, the more I develop a fondness for hard textures, weird shapes, stark contrasts, and bizarre juxtapositions.

I can’t really imagine living in the polite Victorian mansions of Pacific Heights or the clean bungalows of North Beach.

Gritty and fascinating, the area between the Mission District and Potrero Hill forces me to keep moving, curious, and awake.

See the rest at my Flickr page, or visit the pool for photos of interesting trash.

blowing wreath
Originally uploaded by joguldi.

Robert Arnold, the documentarian, is my photo mentor, and occasionally I get the honor of wandering and shooting with him around parts of San Francisco.

The more the aesthetic of urban life grows on me, the more I develop a fondness for hard textures, weird shapes, stark contrasts, and bizarre juxtapositions.

I can’t really imagine living in the polite Victorian mansions of Pacific Heights or the clean bungalows of North Beach.

Gritty and fascinating, the area between the Mission District and Potrero Hill forces me to keep moving, curious, and awake.

See the rest at my Flickr page, or visit the pool for photos of interesting trash.

More about Boston’s resistance to British taxation: this is hypothetically where a libertarian regime would take us: the realm of early modern city states, where security is guaranteed not by permanent agreement but by a loose and shifting network of paying off the stronger regime.

Tribute allows much more autonomy in responding or not responding to demands from a larger capital. Peterson draws attention to the early phase of the Seven Years War, where Boston refuses to support troops until they’re allowed to raise and send their own troops.

Something changes in Whitehall at the time. London is increasingly interested in formalizing the ties between the periphery and the metropolis, insuring a reliable stream of income for its future wars. This tendency has, since 1690, insured the restructuring of Whitehall’s relationship with the English provinces especially with Scotland and Ireland.

The experience of securing Scotland against rebels convinced the British military of the necessity of being able to forecast the future. They collect maps and plan roads in great numbers: moving away from the awkward balances of power and constant standing militias of renaissance Europe. England’s constitution won’t allow it to maintain a standing army, so maintaining the peace in Scotland after the Civil War requires violence by other means: by a policing of roads and towns, an infinite knowledge of terrain and transport, capable of maintaining an English privilege over Scotland at any moment in the future.

This urge to control the future is at the root of a shift in polity that expands Whitehall’s desire for control, both at home and around the Atlantic world.

Technorati Tags: scotland, britain, taxation, atlantic, roads, space, maps, stratego

More about Boston’s resistance to British taxation: this is hypothetically where a libertarian regime would take us: the realm of early modern city states, where security is guaranteed not by permanent agreement but by a loose and shifting network of paying off the stronger regime.

Tribute allows much more autonomy in responding or not responding to demands from a larger capital. Peterson draws attention to the early phase of the Seven Years War, where Boston refuses to support troops until they’re allowed to raise and send their own troops.

Something changes in Whitehall at the time. London is increasingly interested in formalizing the ties between the periphery and the metropolis, insuring a reliable stream of income for its future wars. This tendency has, since 1690, insured the restructuring of Whitehall’s relationship with the English provinces especially with Scotland and Ireland.

The experience of securing Scotland against rebels convinced the British military of the necessity of being able to forecast the future. They collect maps and plan roads in great numbers: moving away from the awkward balances of power and constant standing militias of renaissance Europe. England’s constitution won’t allow it to maintain a standing army, so maintaining the peace in Scotland after the Civil War requires violence by other means: by a policing of roads and towns, an infinite knowledge of terrain and transport, capable of maintaining an English privilege over Scotland at any moment in the future.

This urge to control the future is at the root of a shift in polity that expands Whitehall’s desire for control, both at home and around the Atlantic world.

Technorati Tags: scotland, britain, taxation, atlantic, roads, space, maps, stratego

I’m listening to a job talk by Mark A Peterson, one of Bernard Bailyn’s last students in American History at Harvard. Peterson is currently working on a fascinating set of issues about the 17th-century Atlantic world.

He argues for a curious connection between coins and slaves. Slaves exist at the intersection between empire and commerce, like coins.

In utopian, city-on-a-hill Boston, slaves were unavoidable in Boston’s relationship to larger trading community. Did slaves belong to Caesar or to God?

Boston’s “Pine Tree Shilling” — an illegal coin in competition with English coins, bearing a tree rather than the image of the English king — symbolized both New England resistance to London, and Puritan suspicions about rendering to Caesar things (like human faces) that belong to God.

By the 1680s, a few forward-thinking evangelical Protestants like Samuel Sewell and Jonathan Belcher were hoping that Massuchusetts’ connection to a larger trading empire was an opportunity for reforming the evils of Atlantic trade through Christian charity.

I’m listening to a job talk by Mark A Peterson, one of Bernard Bailyn’s last students in American History at Harvard. Peterson is currently working on a fascinating set of issues about the 17th-century Atlantic world.

He argues for a curious connection between coins and slaves. Slaves exist at the intersection between empire and commerce, like coins.

In utopian, city-on-a-hill Boston, slaves were unavoidable in Boston’s relationship to larger trading community. Did slaves belong to Caesar or to God?

Boston’s “Pine Tree Shilling” — an illegal coin in competition with English coins, bearing a tree rather than the image of the English king — symbolized both New England resistance to London, and Puritan suspicions about rendering to Caesar things (like human faces) that belong to God.

By the 1680s, a few forward-thinking evangelical Protestants like Samuel Sewell and Jonathan Belcher were hoping that Massuchusetts’ connection to a larger trading empire was an opportunity for reforming the evils of Atlantic trade through Christian charity.

The Book of Daniel has closed after only four episodes, as NBC has decided to pre-empt the controversial show.

The American Family Association, a conservative group, had been conducting a campaign against the show, saying it misrepresents Christians.

– CBC: NBC shuts ‘Book of Daniel’

A great shame, that this intelligent, funny show, which so accurately depicted the controversy around Christian concern for others confronting modern worries about race and sex, should go off the air so quickly.
An even greater shame, that this episode should go down as an evangelical — let alone a Christian — victory.

Christians rejoice at earnest discussions about how responsible individuals should behave in relation to challenging new political realities. For many Episcopalians and other Christians, the Book of Daniel was a welcome breath of fresh air: it showed families and priests nervously facing realities like teen marijuana use and neighborhood racism, trying both to defend their family pride while build up the individual’s self-worth and conscience.

Since these are the very issues that so many families face, drawn between loyalty to family concert and challenging but very real new discussions of sexuality and worldliness, it’s a pity that we haven’t as a nation become interested in the two sides of the issues such that an intelligent show like the Book of Daniel should be appreciated.

The sad death of the Book of Daniel goes to show what a long way we have to go, as Christians and as a nation, to facing the reality in which we all live with courage and responsibility.

The Book of Daniel has closed after only four episodes, as NBC has decided to pre-empt the controversial show.

The American Family Association, a conservative group, had been conducting a campaign against the show, saying it misrepresents Christians.

– CBC: NBC shuts ‘Book of Daniel’

A great shame, that this intelligent, funny show, which so accurately depicted the controversy around Christian concern for others confronting modern worries about race and sex, should go off the air so quickly.
An even greater shame, that this episode should go down as an evangelical — let alone a Christian — victory.

Christians rejoice at earnest discussions about how responsible individuals should behave in relation to challenging new political realities. For many Episcopalians and other Christians, the Book of Daniel was a welcome breath of fresh air: it showed families and priests nervously facing realities like teen marijuana use and neighborhood racism, trying both to defend their family pride while build up the individual’s self-worth and conscience.

Since these are the very issues that so many families face, drawn between loyalty to family concert and challenging but very real new discussions of sexuality and worldliness, it’s a pity that we haven’t as a nation become interested in the two sides of the issues such that an intelligent show like the Book of Daniel should be appreciated.

The sad death of the Book of Daniel goes to show what a long way we have to go, as Christians and as a nation, to facing the reality in which we all live with courage and responsibility.

President George W. Bush has signed executive orders giving him sole authority to impose martial law, suspend habeas corpus and ignore the Posse Comitatus Act that prohibits deployment of U.S. troops on American streets.

Reports That Bush Has Signed Order For Martial Law | robwire.com

The Posse Comitatus Act has an interesting history, dating back to British Common Law policy of containing grievance riots only through local intervention. Posse Comitatus was suspended at various points during the Civil War, Progressive, and Civil Riots eras, for the containment of suffrage riots, trade unionists, and protesting students. Suspension of Posse Comitatus is generally a sign that the American government senses that civil war is at hand, and that only direct intervention from above can contain the menace.

How exactly would George Bush describe the menace that threatens the United States? Peace activists continue to practice civil disobedience; Katrina survivors continue to occupy their FEMA trailers and car seats; students dutifully stage living wage rallies. For all intents and purposes, this is not a nation facing civil war.

So it’s an intriguing exercise to think through how the Bush administration has come to see the United States: a country of rebels to its own policies; a country of consumers unable to grasp the long-term gambit for fuel reserves in the Middle East and Central Asia for which the Bush administration has us at war; a fissile country whose controlled media and scarcely participatory democracy are not enough to insure social stability, not by a long shot.

The Bush administration, that is, thinks that the tenure of the politics of demagoguery is limited, and that a coming fraction will bring out forces of dissatisfied workers, students, pacifists, liberals, and libertarians, such that the social and political stability of the nation will be overturned.

How interesting.

President George W. Bush has signed executive orders giving him sole authority to impose martial law, suspend habeas corpus and ignore the Posse Comitatus Act that prohibits deployment of U.S. troops on American streets.

Reports That Bush Has Signed Order For Martial Law | robwire.com

The Posse Comitatus Act has an interesting history, dating back to British Common Law policy of containing grievance riots only through local intervention. Posse Comitatus was suspended at various points during the Civil War, Progressive, and Civil Riots eras, for the containment of suffrage riots, trade unionists, and protesting students. Suspension of Posse Comitatus is generally a sign that the American government senses that civil war is at hand, and that only direct intervention from above can contain the menace.

How exactly would George Bush describe the menace that threatens the United States? Peace activists continue to practice civil disobedience; Katrina survivors continue to occupy their FEMA trailers and car seats; students dutifully stage living wage rallies. For all intents and purposes, this is not a nation facing civil war.

So it’s an intriguing exercise to think through how the Bush administration has come to see the United States: a country of rebels to its own policies; a country of consumers unable to grasp the long-term gambit for fuel reserves in the Middle East and Central Asia for which the Bush administration has us at war; a fissile country whose controlled media and scarcely participatory democracy are not enough to insure social stability, not by a long shot.

The Bush administration, that is, thinks that the tenure of the politics of demagoguery is limited, and that a coming fraction will bring out forces of dissatisfied workers, students, pacifists, liberals, and libertarians, such that the social and political stability of the nation will be overturned.

How interesting.

Last night Google Inc was subpoenaed by the US Justice Department to submit data relating to web searches performed using Google software over the past year.

Telegraph | News | Google resists US government demand for search data

The Google case was first reported in Britain, a country where “ancient rights and liberties” still form a mainstay of Conservative Party rhetoric.

In contrast, Americans tend to be skeptical about the need for privacy law protection. Most individual Americans have a limited historical horizon on which they cannot remember the recent regimes in civilized Europe where searches of papers and rifling through homes were used to control ethnic minorities, intellectuals, free speech, and free thought.

Privacy advocates need to find and publicize the cases of abuse that have already happened.

…

Privacy law isn’t just for criminals and pot farmers; historically, it’s protected the honest farmer who runs afoul of his powerful landlord for earnest reasons.

The fact that internet searches rather than the home are at stake means that protecting privacy comes even closer to protecting the freedom of the soul, the freedom of curiosity, of free-thinking, and of free will.

A free society needs privacy law, and ours is under assault.

…

This is a case for the EFF, that brave alliance of Silicon Valley lawyers who work out of the goodness of their hearts to protect all our civil liberties.

Visiting the EFF website, I find a link to the Google story, but no menu for stories of privacy law abuses or the dangers they lead to. The EFF needs to wage a propaganda and publicity campaign: Americans trust their Bill of Rights to protect them, but they’re painfully naive about the danger that wiretaps and search aggregates pose.

An unsolicited suggestion for the EFF? Along with your lawyers, hire a spin doctor or a historian. Talk about the values and issues at stake.

In a recent report commissioned by the US Army, a British Army officer, Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster, recently outlined everything America is doing wrong.

His critiques are familiar to anyone who’s worked on defense in Europe. They emphasize the lack of cultural sophistication in the US Army versus other armed forces; a structure which even compared to other armies thwart dissent and informed feedback where strategies aren’t working; a “warrior ethos” that instructs troops to “destroy” their enemy (the Brigadier is shocked — destroy, not merely defeat? a good way to create more enemies).

The problems are most directly expressed in America’s dependence on remote-imaging technology like satellites rather than HUMINT — human intelligence or knowledge of cultural terrain and appropriate ways of dealing with angry rebels.

I say that this is familiar, because I’ve heard Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster’s critique articulated by members of the British defense, political, and academic communities for at least four years.

In private rooms in Cambridge, they would entertain visiting American dignitaries and try to convince them that these structural failures amounted to a good reason that no American effort in Iraq or elsewhere would sow anything other than discord in the long run.

The Americans drank their tea and sniffed. They returned to DC. Nothing changed.

—

It is a sweet relief, then, to note that someone in Washington is now concerned enough to invite one of the British to Washington to share their critique America.

There is a sea-change, indeed. My own articles on the use and abuse of imaging technology versus social/cultural knowledge are getting an unlooked for spurt of attention in the last month. It seems that everyone is looking for where to go next.

As Lewis Lapham notes in Harper’s, a spate of amnesia cases among high-ranking soldiers in the last few months suggests more than the normal hardship — new cases of amnesia coincide with a moment when officers and leadership and soldiers alike realize that their strategy is crumbling and wonder what to do next.

All of this makes it all the more fascinating to glance at the spontaneous criticism of American forces from abroad that Nigel Aylwin-Foster’s critique has generated.

Seizing on his report, the Australians, Chinese, and Arabs have rushed to confirm that they too have noticed problems with the US Armed Forces which must be repaired.

It is not surprising that everyone has an opinion, nor that the pundits ooze when the lion is down. More interesting is the direction taken by different cultures as they report on the Brigadier’s report.

The different spins on the report amount to a cultural study in what each culture fears most about the United States.

Who would have guessed, for instance, that the Chinese would be most urgently critical that American armed forces are racist?

The Quebecois dwell on America’s “stifling bureaucracy”.

Australians find the Americans to be too offensive and overeager in their assaults on the ground.

Al-Jazeera and Qatar’s Gulf Times direct their readers to hopes that the British-American alliance may be fragmenting.

Much more could be said here about how studying the nations’ reactions to this report could improve America’s understanding of how its policies (military and diplomatic) will be received elsewhere.

But perhaps most instructive is how America itself reacts. “Who are the British to Talk?” sneers TIME, furthering every stereotype of the headstrong, road-warrior American, never looking where he’s going.

Who are the British to talk? Brigadier Nigel was invited.

The moral of the first Progressive Christian Brunch is this: do it. Have more. Eat Eggs Benedict and bagels and donuts in the company of your fellow progressive Christians across America. Good things will happen.

The first ever Progressive Christian Brunch was held at Polly’s Café in Waswhington DC, a basement-level semi-dive where pipe smoke rises and Washingtonians huddle around small French café tables. CrossLeft leadership team members Rev. Sekou of Harlem and Rev. Mark Farr of London were engrossed in conversation about gay ministry in the choirs of the black Pentacostalist church. I was talking to Mark’s stunningly blonde wife Laura, a landscape architect, about her ambitions to build a low-energy house and raise an organic garden.

Scott Wells arrived with hubby, John, a journalist at the Washington Post. Scott’s a prominent Unitarian Universalist blogger – under the handle Boyinthebands (check out our clergybloggers page for the latest headlines from Scott and others). He and Chris Walton (blogger handle: philocrates) of UU World were some of the first clergy to start blogging and talking to other clergy about their blogs. So Boston and the UU’s are sort of the Jerusalem of the Progressive Christian Blogger movement. Philocrates would go on to organize bloggers into the blogrolling link list known as the Progressive Christian Blogger Network, which CrossLeft would use as a kernel to assemble its aggregate of streaming clergy headlines.

Scott and Sekou got into a furious argument about the future of activism. On one side, Scott, standing up for a new generation of political lobbyists and media hacking, argued that the media was jaded to marches and protests a la 1960. On the other side, Sekou talked about the difference between civil disobedience and all other forms of protest. He talked about what a stark impression being jail makes upon those who go there willingly.

***

Several margaritas in, the Unitarians and the Pentacostalists hadn’t agreed. Our denominational and individual differences sparkled like a thousand grains of sand. We couldn’t agree on how and what kind of protest was best and most effective; we couldn’t agree on which issues should be politicized and which should be kmerely a mission of individuals in their own families. But we had bright, and serious conversations. And we shared strategies.

Moreover, in sharing our networks and our strategies, we built the possibility of lasting relationships. That, my friend, and not some manifesto from the brunch, is what will last.

Scott had volunteered to talk to other bloggers about spreading the word, and wanted to ask his friends to put up the Strreaming Christianity newsstream within their opwn sites. John wanted to talk to journalists about our media-training friends at the Faith and Religion Resource Center. Mark and I were brainstorming about coalitions to bring into a Progressive Christian think tank. The Rev. Frances Hall Kieschnick of the Beatitudes Society was going to be talking to the Unity Walk and the bloggers about how to set up her kids on college campuses with larger networks so that they didn’t feel so isolated.

Clergy are bright. They all have advanced degrees, they’ve lived in foreign countries and the inner city. They take politics and theology seriously, and each of them has thought out the issues of political protest, social change, and coalition-building.

Progressive Christian lay people are also bright. They’ve also thought through these things, often in isolation, and they come to us with different areas of expertise – managerial, social, political – even as landscape gardeners who think about how energy-efficient and more social cities could be built.

If there’s a moral lesson from Progressive Christian Brunch, it’s pretty simple: do it. Figure out how to find the others in your area, using CrossLeft, MeetUp, the Blogosphere, the social networks of your local clergy, or the ideas of your mother; find these people, and eat brunch with them. Only good can come of it.