Posted by: C C - Jun 24, 2026 04:20 PM - Forum: History
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What the founding fathers were really angry about: New book revisits the Declaration of Independence at 250
https://theconversation.com/i-study-the-...ter-284065
BLURB: Known for its high-minded ideals, it’s easy to forget that the Declaration of Independence was written not with stoicism but rage, the kind that pulled down houses and pelted neighbors’ doorways with buckets of pungent mud.
On the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding document, Binghamton University History Professor Robert Parkinson’s new book, Tyrants and Rogues: Understanding the Declaration of Independence, provides that context. It’s the first book in more than a century to focus on the 27 grievances that comprise its core, he said.
The first dozen grievances deal with executive overreach — in those days, royalty — while 13 through 22 concern Parliament, the legislative branch; the last five cover the war itself. In a sense, the Declaration strove to be inclusive in its range, weaving in concerns from North Carolina, New York, Massachusetts and the rest of the colonies.
“There’s a timelessness to the first two paragraphs: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ There’s something eternal and sacred to it,” Parkinson said. “But it’s also extremely timely. A lot of the grievances were ripped from the headlines.”
In the book, Parkinson provides detailed profiles of the men behind those headlines, their lives and impact. He begins his exploration with King George III and the members of his cabinet: men such as Lord North, the prime minister, and Lord Hillsborough, the secretary of state for the American colonies. The latter was so hated that Bostonians created a punishment they referred to as “Hillsborough Paint”: buckets of mud and feces, which they threw on the homes of people they disagreed with... (MORE - details)
It is the fundamental nature of the universe to evolve in such a way that there are increasing possibilities for what can happen in the next adjacent moment. There is thus over time not only more in the sense of another moment but also more in the sense of what can happen in that moment. This is how matter emerged, and then living matter emerged, and then conscious matter emerged, and then whatever is next will emerge. Such cosmic innovations only became possible after a period of time and with other things happening first. Meaning they were impossible up until a certain moment. I call this "unfoldment"--the accelerating possibilization and "expansion" of eventhood itself.
So what COULD unfold next? I suspect the emergence of psychoid matter--a kind of monist being that is physical and ideational at the same time, and ultimately neither. Such is the implication of various anomalous phenomena like uaps, ghosts, psychic powers, synchronicities, mystical states, psychedelic experiences, magical manifestations, religious miracles, alien abductions, NDEs, and a vast array of thought forms including cryptids and various supernatural "tulpa-like" and archetypal beings:
"In his later work, Carl Jung introduced the concept of the psychoid to describe phenomena that appeared to operate at the threshold between psyche and matter. The psychoid was neither purely psychological nor fully physical, but occupied an intermediate domain where symbolic meaning and objective events seemed to coincide.
Jung developed the psychoid concept in response to observations that could not be adequately explained by psychological processes alone, including synchronistic events and anomalous correspondences between inner experience and external reality.
Crucially, the psychoid was not proposed as an explanatory model, but as a boundary marker — an acknowledgment that certain phenomena resisted reduction to established psychological or biological mechanisms."----- https://spiritidinstitute.org/jung-and-t...-boundary/
“We are all future butterflies who think, wrongly, that we are just slugs. And we are evolving, whether we admit it or not, into something else. Something with wings.”― Jeffrey J. Kripal, Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal
MICHAEL HEAVER
https://youtu.be/p74rQ2Cp4yk
VIDEO EXCERPTS: Well, the people of this country are continuing to defy the EU establishment in the most hilarious way. And of course, it's 10 years on. What have we learned since then?
Well, Nigel of course handed the Conservatives that big Brexit realignment [...] And what we learned is that after the Tories were given that opportunity, they chose to use it to increase immigration to levels we have never seen before. It's that the Conservatives simply are not fit to govern whatsoever.
If you thought some of the Brexit coverage in this country was biased, some of the propaganda across the EU over the years has been pretty remarkable. Going by it, there's an overwhelming demand by people in this country to rejoin the EU.
It's absolutely hysterical how divorced from reality that is. [...] Mr. Brexit is leading a party that is absolutely dominating politics in this country. And indeed, when it comes to the European Union itself, Euroskeptic forces are making major gains.
[...] EU control has massively accelerated. Some member countries don't have a veto. So their plan to create a United States of Europe goes on. They just ignore election results where Euroskeptic parties make gains.
[...] But the news media propaganda looks really awkward for the EU establishment when Nigel Farage is leading a party that is on course to form the next government in this country...
https://youtu.be/p74rQ2Cp4yk
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/p74rQ2Cp4yk
Anne Carson explains how Descartes' famous dictum was actually worded. It leans more towards doubt being the thinking that entails our being. This seems true. To believe is to go along with the program, like it was absolutely real and self-evident. It is a form of blissful delusion and unconsciousness. Doubt otoh finds that one loose thread in the swaddling tapestry of our beliefs that unravels the whole thing. To exist is to unravel our own imposed assumptions and dogmas. To find that behind the gorgeous tapestry of our worldview that we are wrapped with there is only us in our unbelieving and naked thinking. "I question, therefore I am."
https://www.facebook.com/reel/1706516467139564
It is apparent to me that we never really can be conscious of the present moment. What we think is the present is really just a fabrication or prop we make by projecting the fleeting memory of past happenedness as futural more happening. As if there is this infinitesimal sliver or gap between memory and anticipation which never changes and contains our very existence.
But such static present being is an illusion. The present is empty of all substance, like the lingering afterimage or phantom of the past. This is not to say that the present isn't an a priori or necessary idea or principle that structures our very being-in-the-world. Just like the horizon that the traveler can never reach and isn't real but which continuously persists and makes possible his whole journey to elsewhere. It is the repeatability of the just fading moment, as the barren possibility of projected "againness", that creates the illusion of immediacy in which the repeated and its repetition get confused with each other and fuse together in one seemingly timeless and changeless moment. The present is the blurring together interlude --the distorting static or liminal limbo zone-- that haunts where past touches future.
"The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.---Henri Bergson
edit: Contemplating this further, the past not only is projected in possibility as "againness" or repetition but also as "never againness" or finality. Relatively rare, it is a largely negative experience implying the futurally projected and absolute cessation of the present as non-existence or death. But this is paradoxical in that the present already entailed being an illusory eternal state of staticity or non-change. How can this ideal state of non-change itself cease to be in itself? The answer is that the present was never really real or "in itself" to begin with and so it is inherently indistinguishable in its persistence and in its oblivion. It is roughly analogous to thinking we could kill a ghost. Or like trying to destroy energy. What never existed in itself thus can never not exist in itself. A lingering hint here of our immortality then? Only as we re-cognize ourselves not as static and changeless objects but as the inherent lunge of pastness into future becoming. We are, iow, transcendental in essence--the enablement of what is fading away to renew and encounter its own return in the form of nascent and novel possibility.
"Temporality temporalizes as a future which makes present in the process of having been."--Heidegger
"Be ye in the world, but not of the world."--paraphrase of Jesus
