Orbit Culture Quotes

Ah, youth! It was a beautiful night... The moon was out of orbit. The stars were awry. But everything else was exactly as it should have been.

This is very American, too - the insecurity about whether we have earned our happiness. Planet Advertising in America orbits completely around the need to convince the uncertain consumer that yes, you have actually warranted a special treat. This Bud's for You! You Deserve a Break Today! Because You're Worth It! You've Come a Long Way, Baby! And the insecure consumer thinks, Yeah! Thanks! I AM gonna go buy a six-pack, damn it! Maybe even two six-packs! And then comes the reactionary binge. Followed by the remorse. Such advertising campaigns would probably not be as effective in the Italian culture, where people already know that they are entitled enjoyment in this life. The reply in Italy to "You Deserve a Break Today" would probably be, Yeah, no duh. That's why I'm planning on taking a break at noon, to go over to you house and sleep with your wife.

Western culture is undergoing a process of transition from guilt-oriented, with a conscience, to shame-oriented, with a morbid fear of being found out.

In the twentieth century, astrophysicists in the United States discovered galaxies, the expanding of the universe, the nature of supernovas, quasars, black holes, gamma-ray bursts, the origin of the elements, the cosmic microwave background, and most of the known planets in orbit around solar systems other than our own. Although the Russians reached one or two places before us, we sent space probes to Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. American probes have also landed on Mars and on the asteroid Eros. And American astronauts have walked on the Moon. Nowadays most Americans take all this for granted, which is practically a working definition of culture: something everyone does or knows about, but no longer actively notices. While shopping at the supermarket, most Americans aren’t surprised to find an entire aisle filled with sugar-loaded, ready-to-eat breakfast cereals. But foreigners notice this kind of thing immediately, just as traveling Americans notice that supermarkets in Italy display vast selections of pasta and that markets in China and Japan offer an astonishing variety of rice. The flip side of not noticing your own culture is one of the great pleasures of foreign travel: realizing what you hadn’t noticed about your own country, and noticing what the people of other countries no longer realize about themselves.

I will not try to describe the beauty of life in a Swarm ‒ their zero-gravity globe cities and comet farms and thrust clusters, their micro-orbital forests and migrating rivers and the ten thousand colors and textures of life at Rendezvous Week. Suffice it to say that I believe the Ousters have done what Web humanity has not in the past millennia: evolved. While we live in our derivative cultures, pale reflections of Old Earth life, the Ousters have explored new dimensions of aesthetics and ethics and biosciences and art and all the things that must change and grow to reflect the human soul.

Ancient philosophies were entranced by the order of the cosmos; they marveled at the mysterious power that kept the heavenly bodies in their orbits and the seas within bounds and that ensured that the earth regularly came to life again after the dearth of winter, and they longed to participate in this richer and more permanent existence. They expressed this yearning in terms of what is known as the perennial philosophy, so called because it was present, in some form, in most premodern cultures.11 Every single person, object, or experience was seen as a replica, a pale shadow, of a reality that was stronger and more enduring than anything in their ordinary experience but that they only glimpsed in visionary moments or in dreams. By ritually imitating what they understood to be the gestures and actions of their celestial alter egos—whether gods, ancestors, or culture heroes—premodern folk felt themselves to be caught up in their larger dimension of being.

Could it be that the atomic isolation of the husband and wife nucleus with an orbiting child or two is in fact a culturally imposed aberration for our species? As ill-suited to our evolved tendencies as corsets, chastity belts, and suits of armor? ...a distorted and distorting family structure inappropriate for our species?

We have one collective hope: the Earth And yet, uncounted people remain hopeless, famine and calamity abound Sufferers hurl themselves into the arms of war; people kill and get killed in the name of someone else’s concept of God Do we admit that our thoughts & behaviors spring from a belief that the world revolves around us? Each fabricated conflict, self-murdering bomb, vanished airplane, every fictionalized dictator, biased or partisan, and wayward son, are part of the curtains of society’s racial, ethnic, religious, national, and cultural conflicts, and you find the human ego turning the knobs and pulling the levers When I track the orbits of asteroids, comets, and planets, each one a pirouetting dancer in a cosmic ballet, choreographed by the forces of gravity, I see beyond the plight of humans I see a universe ever-expanding, with its galaxies embedded within the ever-stretching four-dimensional fabric of space and time However big our world is, our hearts, our minds, our outsize atlases, the universe is even bigger There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on the world’s beaches, more stars in the universe than seconds of time that have passed since Earth formed, more stars than words & sounds ever uttered by all humans who have ever lived The day we cease the exploration of the cosmos is the day we threaten the continuing of our species In that bleak world, arms-bearing, resource-hungry people & nations would be prone to act on their low-contracted prejudices, and would have seen the last gasp of human enlightenment Until the rise of a visionary new culture that once again embraces the cosmic perspective; a perspective in which we are one, fitting neither above nor below, but within

Today every city, town, or village is affected by it. We have entered the Neon Civilization and become a plastic world.. It goes deeper than its visual manifestations, it affects moral matters; we are engaged, as astrophysicists would say, on a decaying orbit.

Each element has a characteristic atomic spectrum, due to the absorption and emission of light associated with the unique energy levels of its orbiting electrons.

Could it be that the atomic isolation of the husband-wife nucleus with an orbiting child or two is in fact a culturally imposed aberration for our species—as ill-suited to our evolved tendencies as corsets, chastity belts, and suits of armor?

Rocket Fever Grips Nation's Teenagers' cheers on enthusiastic newsreel, reflecting the nation's sudden reversal in attitude following the successful launch of Explorer-I into Earth orbit. Rather than being strange and threatening, outer space looks set to become the next big distraction after Elvis Presley and Davy Crockett hats. 'More and more teenagers are passing up rock and roll for a rocket role,' commentator Michael Fitzmaurice blithely remarks before very probably wishing he hadn't.

Once there were three tribes. The Optimists, whose patron saints were Drake and Sagan, believed in a universe crawling with gentle intelligence—spiritual brethren vaster and more enlightened than we, a great galactic siblinghood into whose ranks we would someday ascend. Surely, said the Optimists, space travel implies enlightenment, for it requires the control of great destructive energies. Any race which can't rise above its own brutal instincts will wipe itself out long before it learns to bridge the interstellar gulf. Across from the Optimists sat the Pessimists, who genuflected before graven images of Saint Fermi and a host of lesser lightweights. The Pessimists envisioned a lonely universe full of dead rocks and prokaryotic slime. The odds are just too low, they insisted. Too many rogues, too much radiation, too much eccentricity in too many orbits. It is a surpassing miracle that even one Earth exists; to hope for many is to abandon reason and embrace religious mania. After all, the universe is fourteen billion years old: if the galaxy were alive with intelligence, wouldn't it be here by now? Equidistant to the other two tribes sat the Historians. They didn't have too many thoughts on the probable prevalence of intelligent, spacefaring extraterrestrials— but if there are any, they said, they're not just going to be smart. They're going to be mean. It might seem almost too obvious a conclusion. What is Human history, if not an ongoing succession of greater technologies grinding lesser ones beneath their boots? But the subject wasn't merely Human history, or the unfair advantage that tools gave to any given side; the oppressed snatch up advanced weaponry as readily as the oppressor, given half a chance. No, the real issue was how those tools got there in the first place. The real issue was what tools are for. To the Historians, tools existed for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treated nature as an enemy, they were by definition a rebellion against the way things were. Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why invent fusion reactors if your climate is comfortable, if your food is abundant? Why build fortresses if you have no enemies? Why force change upon a world which poses no threat? Human civilization had a lot of branches, not so long ago. Even into the twenty-first century, a few isolated tribes had barely developed stone tools. Some settled down with agriculture. Others weren't content until they had ended nature itself, still others until they'd built cities in space. We all rested eventually, though. Each new technology trampled lesser ones, climbed to some complacent asymptote, and stopped—until my own mother packed herself away like a larva in honeycomb, softened by machinery, robbed of incentive by her own contentment. But history never said that everyone had to stop where we did. It only suggested that those who had stopped no longer struggled for existence. There could be other, more hellish worlds where the best Human technology would crumble, where the environment was still the enemy, where the only survivors were those who fought back with sharper tools and stronger empires. The threats contained in those environments would not be simple ones. Harsh weather and natural disasters either kill you or they don't, and once conquered—or adapted to— they lose their relevance. No, the only environmental factors that continued to matter were those that fought back, that countered new strategies with newer ones, that forced their enemies to scale ever-greater heights just to stay alive. Ultimately, the only enemy that mattered was an intelligent one. And if the best toys do end up in the hands of those who've never forgotten that life itself is an act of war against intelligent opponents, what does that say about a race whose machines travel between the stars?

My belief that addiction was an issue of social injustice stemmed from my most basic understanding of things like the lack of treatment options for those suffering from addiction, or the way we are dehumanized. Listening to a mother talk about her “junkie daughter,” or my own relative talk about her friend’s “addict grandson”—in that way we are conditioned to talk about the sickest, most vulnerable people in our orbit as problems to be fixed or liabilities to be handled or criminals to be locked up—ripped something in me. I started out with a complete and heartbreaking rage over how we treat (and don’t treat) people suffering with addiction, and only because I was one of them.

We had tens of thousands of ballistic missiles we could pop into low-earth orbit in the blink of an eye so we could obliterate each other on some future day when that perfect mix of nationalism, enmity, and stupidity convinced our kleptocrats that a dead planet was preferable to living under the yoke of some other culture’s facade of good governance.

In every era, there are individuals who are prone to question received narratives and ideals, and in every era, such thinkers bifurcate. There are those who use that questioning spirit to seek out truths with integrity and rigor, and others who allow themselves to be snowed by propaganda, to enter harmful, self-serving orbits of errant belief. And, in every era, the latter confuse themselves with the former.

Red dwarf systems have a tendency toward tidal locking – a state in which an object’s rotational period is the same length of time as its orbital period. To illustrate this more simply: think about the way our Moon looks from Earth. When looking up at a full Moon on a clear night, you will always see the same friendly arrangement of craters shining back. Some cultures see a face in the Moon; others, a rabbit. Whatever the interpretation, the underlying truth remains the same. One side of the Moon is always facing Earth. The far side never does.

Suppose that, instead of limiting ‘Earth’ to the solid globe that we 20th century materialists define it as, the archaic ‘Earth’ was everything that lay on the plane of the ecliptic (the orbital plane of the earth around the sun, which we on Earth perceive as the path of the Sun in the sky). This extension of Earth out into the skv would make an Earth that was truly flat. Like the physical Earth the continents of this ‘Greater Earth’ would still be surrounded by water, but the water would be a mighty ocean which stretched out into space to lap at the feet of the stars. Above this ‘Earth’ would be ‘heaven,’ and below it would be the ‘underworld.’ Those stars which disappear from view (‘die’) later reappear (are ‘reborn,’ or released from Hades). * As soon as we accept these suppositions into our world-view, our frame of reference and our perspectives broaden infinitely. Suddenly the space we live in takes on the limitlessness of the space in which the sky-gods live, and our previous assumptions of what might be “real” get stood on their pointy little heads. Now when we think of the Great Flood, a myth which has appeared in ancient cultures all over the earth, it

They learned about purity before they learned about sex, and they have a silver ring to prove it. They watched The Passion of the Christ, Soul Surfer, or the latest Kirk Cameron film with their youth group. They attended Promise Keepers with guys from church and read Wild at Heart in small groups. They’ve learned more from Pat Robertson, John Piper, Joyce Meyer, and The Gospel Coalition than they have from their pastor’s Sunday sermons. The diffusion of evangelical consumer culture extends far beyond the orbit of evangelical churches. Cultural evangelicalism has made deep inroads into mainline Christianity,

Be big enough to offer the truth to people and if it short circuits them I think that's tragic. I think that's sad but, I will not strike no unholy bargains to self erase. I wont do it. I don't care how many people fucked up their lives. I don't care how many bad choices people have made. I don't care how much pettiness they've consumed and spat out. I don't care how much viciousness , rage, abuse, spanking they've dealt out. I am gonna tell the truth as I see it and I'm going to be who I fucking am and if that causes the world to shift in it's orbit and half the evil people get thrown off the planet and up into space well, you shouldn't of been standing in evil to begin with because, there is gravity in goodness. So, sorry; I have to be who I am. Everyone ells is taken. There is no other place I can go than in my own head. I can't jump from skull to skull until I find one that suits bad people around me better. I don't have that choice. So, be your fucking self. Speak your truth and if there are people around you who tempt you with nonexistence , blast through that and give them the full glory of who you are. Do not withhold yourself from the world. Do not piss on the incandescent gift of your existence. Don't drown yourself in the petty fog and dustiness of other peoples ancient superstitions, beliefs, aggressions, culture, and crap. No, be a flare. We're all born self expressive. We are all born perfectly comfortable with being incredibly inconvenient to our parents. We shit, piss, wake up at night, throw up on their shoulders, scream, and cry. We are in our essence, in our humanity, perfectly comfortable with inconveniencing others. That's how we are born. That's how we grow. That's how we develop. Well, I choose to retain the ability to inconvenience the irrational. You know I had a cancer in me last year and I'm very glad that the surgeons knife and the related medicines that I took proved extremely inconvenient to my cancer and I bet you my cancer was like "Aw shit. I hate this stuff man." Good. I'm only alive because medicine and surgery was highly inconvenient to the cancer within me. That's the only reason I'm alive. So, be who you are. If that's inconvenient to other people that's their goddamn business, not yours. Do not kill yourself because other people are dead. Do not follow people into the grave. Do not atomize yourself because, others have shredded themselves into dust for the sake of their fears and their desire to conform with the history of the dead.

The history of Royal Prussia, which fell into the Polish orbit, is little known to those who approach the Prussian story from an exclusively German perspective. (The subject was actively suppressed by bans and book-burnings when the Hohenzollerns eventually took over.) Yet for 300 years this ‘Other Prussia’ flourished, not only as a separate institutional entity, but as the source of a separate political ideology and culture, based on concepts of freedom and liberty. Though the population was ethically mixed, Polish and German – with a strong German predominance in the cities – the corporate identity and fierce local patriotism of Royal Prussia digressed markedly from the values with which the name of ‘Prussia’ is usually associated.

Dance was curious in its near universality. Not all species had dance in their cultures, but most did, and those that did not latched onto the idea once exposed to it... Sidra had watched a lot of archival footage of dance, but fascinating as that was from a cultural perspective, she enjoyed the improvised madness of a multispecies gathering much more. In the pit, she'd observed, it didn't matter what your limbs looked like, or how you liked to move. So long as there was a beat and warm bodies nearby, you could do whatever felt good... The kit responded, changing its posture into something Sidra hadn't experienced before. The limbs were no longer pressed close to the torso, the back no longer straight. What had been tension and angles was now a harmony of curves, rocking, swaying, shifting... A curious sense of delight began to warm up Sidra's pathways.

the rise of representative institutions, is wrong on racial grounds.[71] It is wrong on high cultural grounds as well: Russia has contributed one of the greatest literary traditions to the West, starting with Alexander Pushkin, the poetry of Mikhail Lermontov and Nikolay Nekrasov, dramas of Aleksandr Ostrovsky and Anton Chekhov, and the prose of Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Ivan Goncharov. It is wrong on geopolitical grounds: Russia’s relentless geographical expansion into Siberia, beginning in the late-1500s and reaching the Pacific by 1639, is as deserving of admiration as the achievements of other well-known European explorations. Russia has been a land of numerous great explorers associated with heroic expeditions from Siberia to the Arctic into Space; it launched the first Earth-orbiting artificial satellite, the first human spaceflight in 1961, the first spacewalk in 1965, the first space exploration rover, on the Moon in 1970, and the first space station in 1971.[72] Guillaume Faye’s vision of a Euro-Siberia federation covering all European lands in between the Atlantic and the Pacific is a salutation to Russia’s geographical achievement and possible impending role in the struggle with the Asian world for the survival of Western civilisation.

...Me, I do not want to go to no suburbans not even Brooklyn. But Joyce wants to integrate. She says America has got two cultures, which should not he divided as they now is, so let's leave Harlem." "Don't you agree that Joyce is right?" "White is right," said Simple, "so I have always heard. But I never did believe it. White folks do so much wrong! Not only do they mistreat me, but they mistreats themselves. Right now, all they got their minds on is shooting off rockets and sending up atom bombs and poisoning the air and fighting wars and Jim Crowing the universe." "Why do you say 'Jim Crowing the universe'?" "Because I have not heard tell of no Negro astronaughts nowhere in space yet. This is serious, because if one of them white Southerners gets to the moon first, COLORED NOT ADMITTED signs will go up all over heaven as sure as God made little green apples, and Dixiecrats will be asking the man in the moon, 'Do you want your daughter to marry a Nigra?' Meanwhile, the N.A.A.C.P. will have to go to the Supreme Court, as usual, to get an edict for Negroes to even set foot on the moon. By that time, Roy Wilkins will be too old to make the trip, and me, too." "But perhaps the Freedom Riders will go into orbit on their own," I said. "Or Harlem might vote Adam Powell into the Moon Congress.'' "One thing I know," said Simple, "is that Martin Luther King will pray himself up there. The moon must be a halfway stop on the way to Glory, and King will probably be arrested. I wonder if them Southerners will take police dogs to the moon?

Gian Pero Frau, one of the most important characters in the supporting cast surrounding S'Apposentu, runs an experimental farm down the road from the restaurant. His vegetable garden looks like nature's version of a teenager's bedroom, a rebellious mess of branches and leaves and twisted barnyard wire. A low, droning buzz fills the air. "Sorry about the bugs," he says, a cartoonish cloud orbiting his head. But beneath the chaos a bloom of biodynamic order sprouts from the earth. He uses nothing but dirt and water and careful observation to sustain life here. Every leaf and branch has its place in this garden; nothing is random. Pockets of lettuce, cabbage, fennel, and flowers grow in dense clusters together; on the other end, summer squash, carrots, and eggplant do their leafy dance. "This garden is built on synergy. You plant four or five plants in a close space, and they support each other. It might take thirty or forty days instead of twenty to get it right, but the flavor is deeper." (There's a metaphor in here somewhere, about his new life Roberto is forging in the Sardinian countryside.) "He's my hero," says Roberto about Gian Piero. "He listens, quietly processes what I'm asking for, then brings it to life. Which doesn't happen in places like Siddi." Together, they're creating a new expression of Sardinian terreno, crossing genetic material, drying vegetables and legumes under a variety of conditions, and experimenting with harvesting times that give Roberto a whole new tool kit back in the kitchen. We stand in the center of the garden, crunching on celery and lettuce leaves, biting into zucchini and popping peas from their shells- an improvised salad, a biodynamic breakfast that tastes of some future slowly forming in the tangle of roots and leaves around us.

In many fields—literature, music, architecture—the label ‘Modern’ stretches back to the early 20th century. Philosophy is odd in starting its Modern period almost 400 years earlier. This oddity is explained in large measure by a radical 16th century shift in our understanding of nature, a shift that also transformed our understanding of knowledge itself. On our Modern side of this line, thinkers as far back as Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) are engaged in research projects recognizably similar to our own. If we look back to the Pre-Modern era, we see something alien: this era features very different ways of thinking about how nature worked, and how it could be known. To sample the strange flavour of pre-Modern thinking, try the following passage from the Renaissance thinker Paracelsus (1493–1541): The whole world surrounds man as a circle surrounds one point. From this it follows that all things are related to this one point, no differently from an apple seed which is surrounded and preserved by the fruit … Everything that astronomical theory has profoundly fathomed by studying the planetary aspects and the stars … can also be applied to the firmament of the body. Thinkers in this tradition took the universe to revolve around humanity, and sought to gain knowledge of nature by finding parallels between us and the heavens, seeing reality as a symbolic work of art composed with us in mind (see Figure 3). By the 16th century, the idea that everything revolved around and reflected humanity was in danger, threatened by a number of unsettling discoveries, not least the proposal, advanced by Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), that the earth was not actually at the centre of the universe. The old tradition struggled against the rise of the new. Faced with the news that Galileo’s telescopes had detected moons orbiting Jupiter, the traditionally minded scholar Francesco Sizzi argued that such observations were obviously mistaken. According to Sizzi, there could not possibly be more than seven ‘roving planets’ (or heavenly bodies other than the stars), given that there are seven holes in an animal’s head (two eyes, two ears, two nostrils and a mouth), seven metals, and seven days in a week. Sizzi didn’t win that battle. It’s not just that we agree with Galileo that there are more than seven things moving around in the solar system. More fundamentally, we have a different way of thinking about nature and knowledge. We no longer expect there to be any special human significance to natural facts (‘Why seven planets as opposed to eight or 15?’) and we think knowledge will be gained by systematic and open-minded observations of nature rather than the sorts of analogies and patterns to which Sizzi appeals. However, the transition into the Modern era was not an easy one. The pattern-oriented ways of thinking characteristic of pre-Modern thought naturally appeal to meaning-hungry creatures like us. These ways of thinking are found in a great variety of cultures: in classical Chinese thought, for example, the five traditional elements (wood, water, fire, earth, and metal) are matched up with the five senses in a similar correspondence between the inner and the outer. As a further attraction, pre-Modern views often fit more smoothly with our everyday sense experience: naively, the earth looks to be stable and fixed while the sun moves across the sky, and it takes some serious discipline to convince oneself that the mathematically more simple models (like the sun-centred model of the solar system) are right.

Conceptual Games. Dr Nathan pondered the list on his desk-pad. (1) The catalogue of an exhibition of tropical diseases at the Wellcome Museum; (2) chemical and topographical analyses of a young woman’s excrement; (3) diagrams of female orifices: buccal, orbital, anal, urethral, some showing wound areas; (4) the results of a questionnaire in which a volunteer panel of parents were asked to devise ways of killing their own children; (5) an item entitled ‘self-disgust’ - someone’s morbid and hate-filled list of his faults. Dr Nathan inhaled carefully on his gold-tipped cigarette. Were these items in some conceptual game? To Catherine Austin, waiting as ever by the window, he said, ‘Should we warn Miss Novotny?’ Biomorphic Horror. With an effort, Dr Nathan looked away from Catherine Austin as she picked at her finger quicks. Unsure whether she was listening to him, he continued: ‘Travers’s problem is how to come to terms with the violence that has pursued his life - not merely the violence of accident and bereavement, or the horrors of war, but the biomorphic horror of our own bodies. Travers has at last realized that the real significance of these acts of violence lies elsewhere, in what we might term “the death of affect”. Consider our most real and tender pleasures - in the excitements of pain and mutilation; in sex as the perfect arena, like a culture-bed of sterile pus, for all the veronicas of our own perversions, in voyeurism and self-disgust, in our moral freedom to pursue our own psychopathologies as a game, and in our ever greater powers of abstraction. What our children have to fear are not the cars on the freeways of tomorrow, but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths. The only way we can make contact with each other is in terms of conceptualizations. Violence is the conceptualization of pain. By the same token psychopathology is the conceptual system of sex.’ Sink Speeds. During this period, after his return to Karen Novotny’s apartment, Travers was busy with the following projects: a cogent defence of the documentary films of Jacopetti; a contribution to a magazine symposium on the optimum auto-disaster; the preparation, at a former colleague’s invitation, of the forensic notes to the catalogue of an exhibition of imaginary genital organs. Immersed in these topics, Travers moved from art gallery to conference hall. Beside him, Karen Novotny seemed more and more isolated by these excursions. Advertisements of the film of her death had appeared in the movie magazines and on the walls of the underground stations. ‘Games, Karen,’ Travers reassured her. ‘Next they’ll have you filmed masturbating by a cripple in a wheel chair.

Every living thing is spoiled beyond our ability to imagine. Some children are spoiled materially, but every one alive today was born into inherited wealth. We inherited thousand of words, facial ex, handgestures and other creative abilities to express ourselves, to transfer the contents of our minds through music, art and science. The structures which enables us (with otherwise quite primitive tendencies) to coexist peacefully, in productive ways. All the progress, all the grease, all of it. We inherited the lives and tales of our ancestors as written in our DNA, every difficulty and every pleasure, their biological ADAPTIONS for the assistance of survival in our local enviroments, and the ability to dynamically develop our own. Every fiber in our bodies, every connection, all of it. We inherited our birthplace, our neighbours, our country, our Earth, our Moon, our orbit, our Sun, our Milkyway, ∆ (and all the contents within each). Tabula rasa is therefor a flawed concept, nothing is truly blank, but how could it ever be easy for those with such short lives to truly grasp or summarize their long journey within an everliving species?

The refusal to examine Islamic culture and traditions, the sordid dehumanization of Muslims, and the utter disregard for the intellectual traditions and culture of one of the world’s great civilizations are characteristic of those who disdain self-reflection and intellectual inquiry. Confronting this complexity requires work and study rather than a retreat into slogans and cliches. And enlightened, tolerant civilizations have flourished outside the orbit of the United Sates and Europe. The ruins of the ancient Mughal capital, Fatehpur Sikri, lie about 100 miles south of Delhi. The capital was constructed by the emperor Akbar the Great at the end of the sixteenth century. The emperor’s court was filled with philosophers, mystics and religious scholars, including Sunni, Sufi, and Shiite Muslims, Hindu followers of Shiva and Vishnu, as well as atheists, Christians, Jains, Jews , Buddhists and Zoroastrians. They debated ethics and beliefs. He forbade any person to be discriminated against on the basis of belief and declared that everyone was free to follow any religion. This took place as the Inquisition was at its height in Spain and Portugal, and as Giordano Bruno was being burnt at the stake in Rome’s Campo de Fiori. Tolerance, as well as religious and political plurality, is not exclusive to Western culture. The Judeo-Christian tradition was born and came to life in the Middle East. Its intellectual and religious beliefs were cultivated and formed in cities such as Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria and Constantinople. Many of the greatest tenets of Western civilization, as is true with Islam and Buddhism, are Eastern in origin. Our respect for the rule of law and freedom of expression, as well as printing, paper, the book, the translation and dissemination of the classical Greek philosophers, algebra, geometry and universities were given to us by the Islamic world. One of the first law codes was invented by the ancient Babylonian ruler Hammurabi, in what is now Iraq. One of the first known legal protections of basic freedoms and equality was promulgated in the third century B.C. by the Buddhist Indian emperor Ashoka. And, unlike, Aristotle, he insisted on equal rights for women and slaves. The division set up by the new atheists between superior Western, rational values and the irrational beliefs of those outside our tradition is not only unhistorical but untrue. The East and the West do not have separate, competing value systems. We do not treat life with greater sanctity than those we belittle and dismiss. Eastern and Western traditions have within them varied ethical systems, some of which are repugnant and some of which are worth emulating. To hold up the highest ideals of our own culture and to deny that these great ideals exist in other cultures, especially Eastern cultures, is made possible only by a staggering historical and cultural illiteracy. The civilization we champion and promote as superior is, in fact, a product of the fusion of traditions and beliefs of the Orient and the Occident. We advance morally and intellectually only when we cross these cultural lines, when we use the lens of other cultures to examine our own. It is then that we see our limitations, that we uncover the folly of or own assumptions and our prejudices. It is then that we achieve empathy, we learn and make wisdom possible.

Could it be that the atomic isolation of the husband-wife nucleus with an orbiting child or two is in fact a culturally imposed aberration for our species—as ill-suited to our evolved tendencies as corsets, chastity belts, and suits of armor? Dare we ask whether mothers, fathers, and children are all being shoe-horned into a family structure that suits none of us? Might the contemporary pandemics of fracturing families, parental exhaustion, and confused, resentful children be predictable consequences of what is, in truth, a distorted and distorting family structure inappropriate for our species?

The drone Unaha-Closp was fully repaired. It applied to join the Culture and was accepted; it served on the General Systems Vehicle Irregular Apocalypse and the Limited Systems Vehicle Profit Margin until the end of the war, then transferred to the Orbital called Erbil and a post in a transport systems factory there. It is retired now, and builds small steam-driven automata as a hobby.

All he could think was that his own people, an emergent culture that had clawed its way back to its feet after the ice, was nothing but a shadow of that former greatness. It was not simply that the Gilgamesh and all their current space effort was cobbled together from bastardized, half-understood pieces of the ancient world’s vastly superior technology. It was everything: from the very beginning his people had known they were inheriting a used world. The ruins and the decayed relics of a former people had been everywhere, underfoot, underground, up mountains, immortalized in stories. Discovering such a wealth of dead metal in orbit had hardly been a surprise, when all recorded history had been a progress over a desert of broken bones. There had been no innovation that the ancients had not already achieved, and done better. How many inventors had been relegated to historical obscurity because some later treasure-hunter had unearthed the older, superior method of achieving the same end? Weapons, engines, political systems, philosophies, sources of energy . . . Holsten’s people had thought themselves lucky that someone had built such a convenient flight of steps back up from the dark into the sunlight of civilization. They had never quite come to the realization that those steps led only to that one place. Who knows what we might have achieved, had we not been so keen to recreate all their follies, he thought now. Could we have saved the Earth? Would we be living there now on our own green planet? All the knowledge in the universe now at his fingertips, yet to that question he had no answer.

disparity between Louie and Woody is most pronounced. In Woody Allen comedies, the Woody protagonist or surrogate takes it upon himself to tutor the young women in his wayward orbit and furnish their cultural education, telling them which books to read (in Annie Hall’s bookstore scene, Allen’s Alvy wants Annie to occupy her mind with Death and Western Thought and The Denial of Death—“You know, instead of that cat book”), which classic films to imbibe at the revival houses back when Manhattan still had a rich cluster of them. In Crimes and Misdemeanors, it’s a 14-year-old female niece who dresses like a junior-miss version of Annie Hall whom Woody’s Clifford squires to afternoon showings at the finer flea pits, advising her to play deaf for the remaining years of her formal schooling. “Don’t listen to what your teachers tell ya, you know. Don’t pay attention. Just, just see what they look like, and that’s how you’ll know what life is really gonna be like.” A more dubious nugget of avuncular wisdom would be hard to imagine, and it isn’t just the Woody stand-in who does the uncle-daddy-mentor-knows-best bit for the benefit of receptive minds in ripe containers. In Hannah and Her Sisters, Max von Sydow’s dour painter-philosophe Frederick is the Old World “mansplainer” of all time, holding court in a SoHo loft which he shares with his lover, Lee, played by Barbara Hershey, whose sweaters abound with abundance. When Lee groans with enough-already exasperation when Frederick begins droning on about an Auschwitz documentary—“You missed a very dull TV show on Auschwitz.

Flying saucers aside, a visceral childhood fascination with what’s out there, launched by pop culture and propelled by real-life space missions during NASA’s heyday, is a recurring narrative among SETI researchers. “I’m a child of the Apollo era,” said Mark Showalter, a Sagan Center senior research scientist. “I’m in this room today because of Neil Armstrong. Watching the moonwalk — that was the most exciting thing I’d ever seen in my life.” To date, Showalter has discovered, or co-discovered, six moons in the solar system: Pan (orbiting Saturn); Mab and Cupid (Uranus); Kerberos and Styx (Pluto); and just last year, a Neptune moon, still unnamed. “We could be sending missions to all kinds of fantastic destinations and learning things for decades to come,” he said. But the scheduled NASA voyages to the outer planets appear nearly done.  The New Horizons spacecraft flies by Pluto next year; the probes to Jupiter and Saturn shut down in 2017. Even the much-heralded Clipper mission — the proposed robotic expedition to Europa — isn’t yet a go. So far, with a projected $2 billion cost, only $170 million has been appropriated. At 56, Showalter concedes that his professional career will conclude with these final journeys. “It takes twenty years from the time you start thinking about the project to the time you actually get to the outer planets,” he said. And without new missions, he worries, and wonders, about the new generation. “It’s the missions that capture imaginations. If those aren’t happening, kids might not go into science the way my generation did.

efforts and character of institutions like these can grow into a way of life when the people involved in them put them at the center of their cultural existence and identity and, as it were, fall into orbit around their rich moral core.

Solace is found in true grandeur, not in ideas, which orbit around that which is grand but possess no real grandeur of their own.

Christianity is the world’s great love religion. The Christian God comes to us as love, in love, for love. The Christian God woos us with love and works our transformation through love. In spite of the trivializing influence of romantic and sentimental views of love in Western culture, love is the strongest force in the universe. Gravity may hold planets in orbit and nuclear force may hold the atom together, but only love has the power to transform persons. Only love can soften a hard heart. Only love can renew trust after it has been shattered. Only love can inspire acts of genuine self-sacrifice. Only love can free us from the tyrannizing effects of fear. There is nothing more important in life than learning to love and be loved. Jesus elevated love as the goal of spiritual transformation

There is no point in building. There is no more real estate, no more life annuities. There are no more concessions in perpetuity in any cultural cemeteries. Isn’t it better that way? When a meteorite breaks up in space, it is the dazzling trace of its end which stands out. With a celestial body in orbit, it is the ellipse that is the most precious. No ancestors, no heritage, no heirs, no capital. For centuries we have had to accumulate. It is equally obvious that we have to squander everything in a single generation. The future belongs to those who have accumulated everything, then unburdened themselves of it in a single lifetime. You have to move quickly. Ten years to soak up a culture, twenty years to expel it, spew it out ( this part always takes longer). Nothing is interesting unless it passes through the entire cycle of the symbolic murder of culture.

Maybe the wine went to my head. Maybe the weeks of battling the press had worn me down. For some reason, when the conversation took an unexpected turn, I became touchy. Then angry. Disproportionately, sloppily angry. Meg said something I took the wrong way. It was partly a cultural difference, partly a language barrier, but I was also just over-sensitive that night. I thought: Why’s she having a go at me? I snapped at her, spoke to her harshly—cruelly. As the words left my mouth, I could feel everything in the room come to a stop. The gravy stopped bubbling, the molecules of air stopped orbiting. Even Nina Simone seemed to pause. Meg walked out of the room, disappearing for a full fifteen minutes. I went and found her upstairs. She was sitting in the bedroom. She was calm, but said in a quiet, level tone that she would never stand for being spoken to like that. I nodded. She wanted to know where it came from. I don’t know. Where did you ever hear a man speak like that to a woman? Did you overhear adults speak that way when you were growing up? I cleared my throat, looked away. Yes. She wasn’t going to tolerate that kind of partner. Or co-parent. That kind of life. She wasn’t going to raise children in an atmosphere of anger or disrespect. She laid it all out, super-clear. We both knew my anger hadn’t been caused by anything to do with our conversation. It came from somewhere deep inside, somewhere that needed to be excavated, and it was obvious that I could use some help with the job.

Today, as light pollution envelops our planet, the stars are almost gone. Instead of thousands being visible on a dark night, in today’s cities we see only a few dozen (and astronomers fear these will soon be vastly outnumbered by artificial satellites). Most people in the United States and Europe can no longer see the Milky Way at all. It is a catastrophic erosion of natural heritage: the obliteration of our connection with our galaxy and the wider universe. There has been no major outcry. Most people shrug their shoulders, glued to their phones, unconcerned by the loss of a view treated as fundamental by every other human culture in history. Yet we’re still trying to work out our place in the cosmos. Science has been wildly successful: today’s five-year-olds know more about the history, composition and nature of the physical universe than early cultures managed to glean in thousands of years. But it has also dissolved much of the meaning that those cultures found in life. Personal experience has been swept from our understanding of reality, replaced by the abstract, mathematical grid of space-time. Earth has been knocked from the center of existence to the suburbs; life reframed as a random accident; and God dismissed altogether, now that everything can be explained by physical laws. Far from having a meaningful role in the cosmic order, we’re “chemical scum,” as physicist Stephen Hawking put it, on the surface of a medium-sized planet orbiting an unremarkable star. Critics have fought this mechanistic view of humanity for centuries, often rejecting science wholesale in the process. But now even some high-profile scientists are voicing concerns that until very recently were taboo. They are suggesting that perhaps physical matter isn’t all that the universe is, all that we are. Perhaps science is only seeing half of the picture. We can explain stars and galaxies, but what about minds? What about consciousness itself? It’s shaping up to be an epic fight that just might transform the entire Western worldview.

It is a delicate balance, resisting the hypnotic spell of an organization's culture and, at the same time, remaining committed from the heart to the personally relevant goals of the organization.

The sheer number of indicted operatives and pedophiles in Trump’s orbit, as well as the endless exposures of other public figures revealed to have been predators or foreign agents all along, illuminated the criminal underground long propping up the shining city on a hill.

Even with the advantage of a certain degree of historical perspective, such as we might expect to enjoy from our standpoint a few decades later, it is by no means easy to define the reasons why late twentieth-century society underwent so violent a process of fragmentation following a relatively long period of consolidation and homogenization. Two factors render the analysis especially difficult: first, the human mind is not particularly well adapted to reconciling information from disparate sources (e.g. personal experience with the content of a school history-lesson, data from a printed page with those from a vuset), and the alleged simplistic linearity of the Gutenberg era—if it ever existed—came to an end before it had affected more than a minuscule proportion of the species; and second, the process is not merely still going on—it’s still accelerating. “However, one can tentatively point to three major causes which, like tectonic events in the deep strata of the Earth’s crust, not only produce reverberations over enormous areas but actually create discontinuities sharp enough to be uniquely attributed: what one might call psychological landslides. “By far the most striking of these three is the unforeseen rejection of rationality which has overtaken us. Perhaps one might argue that it was foreshadowed in such phenomena as the adoption by that technically brilliant sub-culture, the Nazis, of Rassenwissenschaft, Hoerbiger’s prescientific Welteislehre, and similar incongruous dogmas. However, it was not until about two generations later that the principle emerged in a fully rounded form, and it became clear that the dearest ambition of a very large number of our species was to abdicate the power of reason altogether: ideally, to enjoy the same kind of life as a laboratory rat with electrodes implanted in the pleasure centers of his brain, gladly starving within reach of food and water.

The escape from habitual culture must always be temporary if you expect to be permitted back into that culture.

A sundry of generational defining events foment a reverberating resonance that assists us communicate with one another. No breath we take stands alone; no breath we exhale remains independent from our past breathing cycles. We are similar to a massive sponge collecting electrical impulses that fire our internal generators. Each gulp of air that we take fills us with new experiences; each breath builds upon billions of our prior sense impressions. Each happening in our orbit bonds us with a hodgepodge of preexisting mental fragments to produce our current personality. Each of our independent decisions and discrete actions we correlate with the external physical environment and interdependent social relationships. Our personal actions are interrelated with our cultural milieu. Just as a butterfly flapping its wings in a rainforest can contribute to formation of a hurricane, our separate and joint actions operate to shape the environment, and in turn, the evolving environment continues to mold us.

Trump is the sun around which all forms of conservatism now revolve, along orbits of submission, derision, and revision. And yet the Trump era’s most illuminating case for conservatism is one that barely considers him at all, that instead focuses on how to rebuild the essential political and cultural institutions that have lost both the public’s trust and the conservative movement’s interest—losses that Trump has exploited and deepened to his own ends.

To fill this gap in the capital market, Davis and Rock set themselves up as a limited partnership, the same legal structure that had been used by a short-lived rival called Draper, Gaither & Anderson.[18] Rather than identifying startups and then seeking out corporate investors, they began by raising a fund that would render corporate investors unnecessary. As the two active, or “general,” partners, Davis and Rock each seeded the fund with $100,000 of their own capital. Then, ignoring the easy loans to be had from the fashionable SBIC structure, they raised just under $3.2 million from some thirty “limited” partners—rich individuals who served as passive investors.[19] The beauty of this size and structure was that the Davis & Rock partnership now had a war chest seven and a half times larger than an SBIC, and with it the ammunition to supply companies with enough capital to grow aggressively. At the same time, by keeping the number of passive investors under the legal threshold of one hundred, the partnership flew under the regulatory radar, avoiding the restrictions that ensnared the SBICs and Doriot’s ARD.[20] Sidestepping yet another weakness to be found in their competitors, Davis and Rock promised at the outset to liquidate their fund after seven years. The general partners had their own money in the fund, and thus a healthy incentive to invest with caution. At the same time, they could deploy the outside partners’ capital for a limited time only. Their caution would be balanced with deliberate aggression. Indeed, everything about the fund’s design was calculated to support an intelligent but forceful growth mentality. Unlike the SBICs, Davis & Rock raised money purely in the form of equity, not debt. The equity providers—that is, the outside limited partners—knew not to expect dividends, so Davis and Rock were free to invest in ambitious startups that used every dollar of capital to expand their business.[21] As general partners, Davis and Rock were personally incentivized to prioritize expansion: they took their compensation in the form of a 20 percent share of the fund’s capital appreciation. Meanwhile, Rock was at pains to extend this equity mentality to the employees of his portfolio companies. Having witnessed the effect of employee share ownership on the early culture of Fairchild, he believed in awarding managers, scientists, and salesmen with stock and stock options. In sum, everybody in the Davis & Rock orbit—the limited partners, the general partners, the entrepreneurs, their key employees—was compensated in the form of equity.

Behind it, still expanding, still radiating, still slowly dissolving in the system to which it had given its name, the unnumbered twinkling fragments of the Orbital called Vavatch blew out toward the stars, drifting on a stellar wind that rang and swirled with the fury of the world’s destruction.

information would be sent back to Washington, converted into punch cards, and programmed into the computer. Between seven to nine hours after liftoff, the computer would have enough data to compute the satellite’s exact orbit and velocity.

Unfolding according to the contemplative logic of their lyrical orbits, Astral Weeks’s songs unhooked themselves from pop’s dependence on verse/chorus structure, coasting on idling rhythms, raging and subsiding with the ebb and flow of Morrison’s soulful scat. The soundworld – a loose-limbed acoustic tapestry of guitar, double bass, flute, vibraphone and dampened percussion – was unmistakably attributable to the calibre of the musicians convened for the session: Richard Davis, whose formidable bass talents had shadowed Eric Dolphy on the mercurial Blue Note classic Out to Lunch; guitarist Jay Berliner had previous form with Charles Mingus; Connie Kay was drummer with The Modern Jazz Quartet; percussionist/vibesman Warren Smith’s sessionography included Miles Davis, Aretha Franklin, Nat King Cole, Sam Rivers and American folk mystics Pearls Before Swine. Morrison reputedly barely exchanged a word with the personnel, retreating to a sealed sound booth to record his parts and leaving it to their seasoned expertise to fill out the space. It is a music quite literally snatched out of the air.

He could smell the earth and the trees around the shallow lake beneath the balcony. It was a cloudy night and very dark, just a hint of glow directly above, where the clouds were lit by the shining Plates of the Orbital’s distant daylight side. Waves lapped in the darkness, loud slappings against the hulls of unseen boats. Lights twinkled round the edges of the lake, where low college buildings were set among the trees. The party was a presence at his back, something unseen, surging like the sound and smell of thunder from the faculty building; music and laughter and the scents of perfumes and food and exotic, unidentifiable fumes.

Still guarding against threats and possibilities even it found difficult to specify, some of the Culture’s stored warvessels were harboured not in or around highly populated Orbitals full of life and the comings and goings of cruise ships and visiting GSVs, but in places as far out of the way as it was possible to find amongst the cavernously cold and empty spaces of the great lens; quiet, secret, hidden places; places off the beaten track, places possibly nobody else even knew existed.

As the writer Michael Walsh puts it, “Christianity transformed women from chattel and helpless rape victims into human beings (a trick of cultural prestidigitation that Islam has not managed to accomplish in well over a millennium) who may not have had the political rights of men but who had the human rights of men…. Where Christianity, through its liberation of women, forces men to improve themselves morally, imparting the virtue of self-restraint, Islam seeks to protect the weaker sex—men—from the stronger, and so allows them to beat and even murder the females in their orbits.

And how about great comets, their colorful tails blazing for nights on end for the world to see? Then, as now, there would be a competition to explain those things—my deity or yours, natural philosophy, magic, bullshit, and modern science. Human culture goes back hundreds of thousands of years, and the first stories told may have been tales of comets more spectacular than any we have ever seen.

The urban-rural, human-natural dichotomy blinds us to the deeper unity beneath our own divided perceptions. If we concentrate our attention solely upon the city, seeing in it the ultimate symbol of “man’s” conquest of “nature”, we miss the extent to which the city’s inhabitants continue to rely as much on the nonhuman world as they do on each other … we also wall ourselves off from the broader ecosystems which contain our urban homes. Deep ecology to the contrary, we cannot solve this dilemma by seeking permanent escape from the city in a “wild” nature untouched by human hands, for such an escape requires us to build the same artificial mental wall between nature and un-nature. We fail to see that our own flight from “the city” creates “the wild” as its symbolic opposite and pulls that seemingly most nature of places into our own cultural orbit. We alter it with our presence, and even with the ways we think about it. Just as our own lives continue to be embedded in a web of ‘natural’ relationships, nothing in nature remains untouched by the web of ‘human’ relationships that constitute our common history.