Clay Davis Quotes

Many groups use the media and successfully manipulate what Theodor Adorno calls our psychological frailty. This psychological frailty correlates to anxiety. It also precedes and foments fascism, sexism, and racism. Because of our sense of free will, day-to-day anxiety can creep in as a form of guilt or the desire to belong / be loved. It is this frailty that is manipulated which may later be expressed in fascism, nationalism, sexism, racism. It's based on superego storytelling. But what's going on concurrent with all this is a shift from storytelling to storymaking. There's an entire subgroup, mostly the younger generations, that have been participating in gaming and social media in a way that will bring about a new synergy. This is Hegel's dialect approach to society. Jane McGonigal talks about this in her book Reality is Broken, Cathy Davis talks about this in her book Now You See It, Clay Shirky talks about this in his books Cognitive Surplus and Here Comes Everybody. Tapscott talks about this in his book Wikinomics.

Think for but a moment of what God has accomplished through his Christians in the United States. Christians have spent the last couple of hundred years going out as missionaries and bringing the gospel to the lost. There is no corner or place where the message has not been carried, and in some quarters it has been received with such great force that we now find those countries sending missionaries back to evangelize our country. It is well, when we criticize all the sins of the United States, that we also remember all those great Christians who gave their lives sharing the gospel.             But no matter how sugar-coated it is made, the United States stands as far from the gospel as it has in decades. What can be done for an old heart like ours? I do believe the one lesson to be taken from this great awakening is that we must come together in prayer. We must wait upon God, but we wait in expectation, knowing that he loves this people of this world more than we ever could. We have the assurance through the Word, that when we pray God listens, and when we pray for something that he has already commanded us to pray for—that he send more laborers into the harvest field—we may be confident of his answer. Let us look, then, to the harvest fields and see what God might turn our hands toward. How blessed is the God who uses such earthen vessels of clay to proclaim his majesty!

Fredi had always focused on getting kids excited to learn. He cared less about covering the required curriculum and more about finding hands-on projects. To many students, school felt sterile and bureaucratic. Fredi’s music was just one way he tried to change the ambience. It didn’t necessarily matter if they liked it. It was enough to be different. He also fought for unstructured time in the school day. When he arrived at Carl Hayden in 1987, he started a class called Science Seminar. There was no curriculum. Fredi just told students to find something fun to build or an idea to test. Over the years, students had embarked on a variety of unusual projects. One student tried to teach color-blind rats the differences among colors. Another student constructed a 1:60 clay model of downtown Phoenix, placed it in a wind tunnel, and blew carbon dioxide across it. The goal: determine how architecture could be used to increase air circulation and help dissipate trapped air pollution. Fredi’s room became the refuge of tinkerers, inventors, and frustrated dreamers.

Village economy in India, as elsewhere in monsoonal Asia, augmented crops and handicrafts with stores of free goods from common lands: dry grass for fodder, shrub grass for rope, wood and dung for fuel, dung, leaves and forest debris for fertilizer, clay for plastering houses, and, above all, clean water. All classes utilized these common property resources, but for poorer households they constituted the very margin of survival. In an outstanding study of a contemporary Gujarati village struggling with seasonality and drought, Martha Chen has shown how decisive nonmarket resources and entitlements remain for laborers and small farmers. "Standard definitions of work, worker and income," she writes, "do not capture how poor households generate livelihoods." In the village of Maatisar, (which she visited during the severe drought of 1985-87) fully 70 percent of the fuel and 55 percent of the fodder requirements of the poor are provided from free sources. The forest and pasture commons, which altogether generate thirty-five different useful products, "not only serve as a buffer against seasonal shortages, but also contribute to rural equity." The British consolidated their rule in India by transferring control of these strategic resources from the village community to the state. "Among all the interventions into village society that nurtured the Anglo-Indian empire," David Ludden argues, "dividing public from private land stands out as the most important." Common lands - or "waste" in the symptomatic vocabulary of the Raj - were either transformed into taxable private property or state monopolies. Free goods, in consequence, became either commodities or contraband. Even cow dung was turned into a revenue source for Queen Victoria.