Cornel West and the fight against injustice

The notion that the US has a monopoly in magical possibilities is a myth.

The US is an unequal society, socially, economically and racially.

2.5 million prisoners, 70% black or brown.

Corporate welfare vs hoods of suffering and social misery.

Politics of fear vs politics of hope.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0VIITK-YgA

Learning to Play. How do you recover from betrayal?

Though the social contract is a myth, betrayal involves shock, disappointment and re-evaluation of one's belief system. 
Almost every betrayal makes the persons look back over their past to try to determine what caused it. This reflection almost inevitably leads to self-blame and guilt.  Although the person may express anger at not being treated well, underneath this anger is a sense that she must be unworthy.
Betrayal is the violation of a presumptive social contract that produces moral and psychological conflict within a relationship.
Adultery is the most common type of betrayal, but any type of relationship can end in betrayal.
This linear path between betrayal and unworthiness is how deception causes so much damage.
Generally speaking, the greater the trust that one puts in another person, the greater the impact the betrayal has.  This impact results in anger, despair and fear. 


http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/learning-play/201001/betrayalhttp://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/learning-play/201001/betrayal

The Rich Are Different from You and Me – They Pay Less Taxes

“For Big Companies, Life Is Good”  
Big US companies have emerged from the deepest recession since World War II more profitable than ever: flush with cash, less burdened by debt, and with a greater share of the country’s income. But, the paper notes, “Many of the 1.1 million jobs the big companies added since 2007 were outside the U.S. So, too, was much of the $1.2 trillion added to corporate treasuries.” 
Corporate taxes today are at a 40-year-low -- even as the executive suites at big corporations have become throne rooms where the crown jewels wind up in the personal vault of the CEO.
Last year, among the 100 best-paid CEOs, the median income was more than $14 million, compared with the average annual American salary of $45,230. Combined, this happy hundred executives pulled down more than two billion dollars.
While ordinary Americans are taxed at a top rate of 35% on their income, Congress allows hedge fund and private equity tycoons to pay only pay 15% of their compensation. 


http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/04/13

Isabel Allende -The island beneath the sea

Haiti, slavery, New Orleans, Zarite
It is always magic realism when it is somebody else religion


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDL8REXdfn4&NR=1&feature=endscreen

Haruki Murakami -Found in translation

Ludwig Wittgenstein once said "the limits of my language mean the limits of my world." So for the sake of expanded horizons, let's say thank you to professional translators, the diligent souls who dedicate their lives to the subtleties of language. When interpreters dissolve linguistic barriers, we are able to peer into the worlds articulated in literature of distant lands to understand them as our own.

But how do they do it? Surrealist Japanese author Haruki Murakami's translators Jay Rubin and J. Philip Gabriel have taken apart prose, sentence by sentence. Without their efforts, Murakami's mystic, cryptic worlds could not have become available to audiences in the United States and elsewhere. Rubin and Gabriel spoke with the Guardian in a phone interview preceding their presentation on the art of translation last week at 111 Minna.

San Francisco Bay Guardian: How were you introduced to Haruki Murakami?

Jay Rubin: By an American publisher in 1989. I was absolutely knocked out by him and stopped reading everyone else for a good 10 years after that. I was just so swept up in Murakami's world.

J. Philip Gabriel: I was living in Japan and a friend recommended his work. I became interested in translating his short stories, and one of the translations was published in The New Yorker a few years later. I became a regular translator from then on.

SFBG: How do you align yourself with the author so that even the subtlest aspects of their work are communicated?

JR: Maybe I'm not doing that. You never know, do you? I'm always saying that people shouldn't read translated literature, they should learn the language themselves. One way you can build up trust is by reading the translation and feeling to see if it moves you in the same recognizable ways as reading in your native language. There's never a guarantee that you're getting the unalloyed original. But if a piece of literature is able to make you afraid or delighted in some way, it's fairly likely that there's something in the original that does that too.

JPG: I work with writers who are fortunately still alive. I have the option of asking a question for clarification. Murakami's English is really good, and he is a translator himself, so he understands the challenges at hand and is happy to give suggestions.

SFBG: Humor often becomes diluted between languages, especially since a lot of humor is word-based. How do you retain the original comic flow?

JR: When you have languages as different as Japanese and English, it's virtually impossible to preserve a pun. You just simply have to make up wordplay that seems to work in a similar way. And since Murakami has obviously been influenced by Western literature, his humor is not too hard to convey.

JPG: Japanese culture has a huge appreciation for humor, but translated literature often ends up being serious or dark. You do the best you possibly can when translating humor, but it's difficult. In Kafka on the Shore, there's a set expression in Japanese, which means, "I'm so busy I would like a cat to lend a hand." This is especially funny because the story is about a guy who has the ability to talk to cats. I came up with a pun by using the word "paws" instead of "pause," and saying, "I would like you to take a paws in your busy schedule."

Police Force 'Very Dysfunctional'

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/04/11-7

Wittgenstein's philosophy of psychology

Meaning something, wanting, intending, understanding, explaining the meaning of an expression,

knowing what an expression means, believing things to be so, interpreting

Thought and thinking, expectation, wish and their fulfilment, current experience, pain and idealism

To find new solutions to the same problems, agreement with reality

The nature of language and linguistic representation

The meaning of an expression is its use, and it is its use that gives it life

To resolve/to dissolve.  (Re)solution, dissolution and illusion

Philosophy, a contribution not to human knowledge but to human understanding

It is incorrect to say that the relationship between a name and an object is psychological

Intra-grammatical resolution.  Psychology, the study of psychological phenomena,

is irrelevant to logical investigations

Pain, joy, depression, thought, intention, etc. are not hidden behind the painful movement,

joyful smile, depressed mien and tone, expression of thought, intentional action, etc.

The psychologist does not observe them "indirectly", and the subject does not observe them

"directly" -since she does not observe them at all

Thought and experience do not rest on introspection (indeed, the very idea that they do

depends on a misconception of introspection).  They rest on nothing at all

The subject of psychological attributes is not the ego, the mind or the body,

but the animal as a whole

http://info.sjc.ox.ac.uk/scr/hacker/docs/TheDevelopmentOfWittgensteinsPhilosophyOfPsychology.pdf

http://info.sjc.ox.ac.uk/scr/hacker/docs/Philosophy%20for%20RIP.pdf