Commons Licience model AS:
Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND)

May 20th, 2013 at 2:02 pm
Attn’s Andrew Kelly. Reprise.

May I ask about the cause of the hold up that is delaying the uploading of the first of my comments – a.k.a. the extended one that I submitted very early in the morning [just after midnight] on May 15 at 2.15pm.

This matter is important to me – decisive.

Aside from linking to the platform of both Geoff Mulgan’s recent book The Locust and the Bee – which I had contrasted with the more helpful multi-stage cycle of metamorphosis, of the Butterfly – I had enlisted a extract from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick Chapter 23: The Lee Shore. The lesson warned against the tendency of the partner ship(s) Fleet of State to cling to the shallow coastal waters. I also warned against the thoughtless tendency to think that the rebalancing corrective could be effected by loading the other end and side of the see-saw – as if [thereby] effecting to simple rebalance what William Blake distinguished as the Devouring and the Prolific [Caterpillar/Butterfly] mode(s) of behaviour. There are clearly some that would own the nice conciet of not thinking in terms of rebalancing the see-saw but of lifting the Prolific end and side of the Devouring/Prolific see-saw – thereby preserving the still continuing Devouring modes mode of behaviour, even while seeking to elevate and invest in the Prolific. The overall imade/model would lift or float some generic ship clear of its central pivot point or davit. The flaw in that conciet is that the two sides of that see-saw are inherently conjoined or paired and that, as such, no complement would effect the rebalancing corrective. For taken together [as a nil-sum] both would still add [acceleration and inertia] to the massive drift and momentum to straightforward over-extension – so [thereby] both sides would be implicated in root cause of the ontology-of-evil in the world. So the rebalancing corrective would still have to be effected by other means. To imply otherwise would indeed be to offer another False Prospectus. The danger is that the option or means of involving small-group(s) praxis would have been foreclosed – would not long serve to effect that rebalancing corrective. by more temperate means.

I am obviously concerned not to have this insights asset-stripped and used to effect some workaround – to thereby add to the momentum to straightforward over-extension.

Given the foregoing I am properly concerned at the extent to which the GillianBlease illustration – published in a box in the middle of the letters page of last Saturday’s Guardian [18th May] – so closely resembles the substance of the foregoing distinction.

My substantive concern, however, is that of those that would appear to recommend and use the rhetoric of the upside qualities of the more originally creative Bee, Prolific and the Butterfly many will actually embody all the worst aspects of the asset-stripping rip-off modes of the Locust, the Piranha, and the Devouring and, thereby, would only contribute to the global problem [and] not its rebalancing corrective, in that most direct [human agency] sense.

Stephen Layland.

The copright has been asserted for all the detailed dsubstance given above under the Creative Commons Licience model AS:

Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND)

Andrew. I have since double-checked the link. I am still unable to find [so access] anything corresponding to the given description and summary of the statutory responsibilities of the role of the DL Mayor.

Stephen Layland

The follow link [pasted below] seems to end in lots of HTML files which I suppose are open to those interested to fool around with. I will resist the temptation.

[CUT & PASTE]: Read HERE a document summarising local authority statutory duties, which has been prepared as background for this event.

The point is that the link appears not to lead to the promised document.

Would I be wrong to conclude than none of those planning to attend have been interested enough to following the link and/or to alert Bristol Council/Festival of Ideas to that lack?

Aside from the extract from Moby Dick, the moral and intellectural copyright has been asserted for all the detailed substance given below under the Creative Commons Licience model AS:
Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND)

That blind or empty link would seem to illustrate the emphasis on the promotional form over substance – still more concerned with the promotional facade that the substance of the required vision.

I recently attended the Festival oI Ideas event in which Geoff Mulgan [once PM Tony Blair's senior advisor on Strategy during those fateful key years] gave a judicious tour through his book the Locust and the Bee. The book oddly reminded me of the Hollywood rom-com Working Girl, that also just happened to be shown on televsion a couple of nights ago – a vehicle for Melanie Griffiths, Sigournie Weaver and Harrison Ford. In hosting the event Julian Baggini – drawing on his well known knowledge of philosophy – characterised the book as not only rare but IMPORTANT. That did not stop him from dismissing the new-again utopian aspect – that Geoff Mulgan taken to be “neo-topian”. I myself would shelve the book as just a an intriguing curiosity – more nearly providing a static platform than some properly inspiring and enabling dynamic springboard. The effect of establishing static platform would be to turn the addition of the sort of vision actually required into no more than a garnish – as just another ingredient, added to the hollow empty facade. The tactic resembles Law 44 in Robert Greene’s little red book The Concise 48 Laws of Power.

It should be noted that unless seeded with a very particular design, each of those 48 Laws of Power would all become reason(s) why the more aware and informed people would resolve never to actually participate in any purpose-build architectural platform for small-group(s) praxis, unless it were to promote some more alinged interest – the outcome of which would be a loss of vitality. For it would reproduce the lines of all the familar factional interests. It would become boring to all but those that happened to align themselves with those factions – always a minority audience.

I would, in consequence of all the foregoing, be doubly-tempted to characterise that foregoing blind link – with its lack of its promised substance at the other end – as offering yet another False Prospectus!

Incidentally, and with the respect to the connotations of the title The Locust and the Bee, I wonder if the tactic of demonising the “other” (to the point of modeling all such as an entirely different species) is really that wise? That tactic is most associated with fascists – some nudge eh?

The real challenge is to how to understand and respond to the presence of what William Blake more usefully distinguished between the Prolific and [from] the Devouring within the same one – we are all it its together – Hive. Geoff Mulgan readily allowed [page 52ff] that there were other precidents than the ones he used – inplace of the Locust and the Bee.

So rather than accept the analogy of the hive – with its implication that the whole world [dominion] outside the hive is left open and subject to brakeless unscrupulous exploitation – I myself would recommend the life cycle of the Butterfly – a cycle of metamorphosis that cannot really be understood or reduced to the extension of just the rapacious caterpillar stage, forever more

http://billericky.hubpages.com/hub/Toxic-Moth-Hairy-Oak-Processional-or-Processionary-Caterpillars-Information

While some rebalancing corrective is urgently required (to ever allow the world to escape the massive drift and momentum to over-extension) the required finesse would depend on seeding the paradigm change of some major transition – clearly not just loading the other end and side of the Caterpillar/Butterfly [Devouring/Prolific] see-saw. Nor would it be possible to effect some equally straightforward [back to the future] turnaround [workaround] pace Nick Clegg.

For the latter attempt really would leave the ravenous Caterpillar to emulate the all-devouring Locust or a shoals of flesh-stripping Piranha – a.k.a. enabling the all devoring Caterpiller of Capitalism to continue to Canibalize the creative spirit, energy and substance of the more creative Butterfly – rising like a fleet of ships [partnerships] on the wings of full sail, and not left clinging to the fateful shallows of the Lee Shore pace Herman Melville’s Moby Dick [Chpt 23]. When seen in slow-motion a Butterfy is shown to move like surging eagle.

So the connotations of the supposed need to think in the cautious terms of taking depth “soundings” is already wrong – the errors of such trail and error experiments would be fateful and, serving as a rachett, would only consolidate the harm of the wilfully impoverishing policies of recent years.

In terms of the adventerous history of the British Islands, our maritime history was not marked by the tendency to hug the Lee Shore – as if dipping ones toes at the sea-side – but in the willingness to venture out accross uncharted waters, and largely on the wings of full sail.

QUOTE:Moby Dick: Lee Shore [EXTRACT] ‘Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights ‘gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea’s landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!’

Bristol is almost unique in being an Ur-city. Yet that promise is yet double-sided – bringing easy [low hanging fruit] rewards, but also the dangers of owning a fully global responsibility for not establishing quite the wrong ur-precident. That risk would not be finessed [shared] by emulating other cities. The rebalancing-corrective will have to take the form of the paradigm-changing major-transition. The corollary is that such a rebalancing corrective would not be required in all that is necessary would be to somewhat decrease the rate of adding acceleration and intertia to the massively-drifting momentum to straightforward over-extension, even where appearing to follow some back-to-the-future return.

The latter is implicated as the root cause of the ontology-of-all-evil in the world, as distinct from just its many symptomatic consequences or by-product manifestations – as if in the rise of the near pathological behaviour that feature in the nightly news.

Although the BCC link to the record of the live-feed appears to have been removed or buried since the election itself, I contributed to the Festival of Ideas [Watershed] Debate on the upsided and downsides of electing a Directly Elected Mayor – Thursday Dec 1st 2011:

12:19am.
Comment from: Stephen layland
I have been asked to provide more contexturalization. The following link set out the level of the strategic thinking required.

http://www.southwesteip.co.uk/representations/view.aspx?id=724&type=general&cla
ss=none

The comments of the panelists are those of detailed managers, other than
going with the flow of top down centralised control from London. Bristol has a
unique role and opportunity – as almost the only ur-city in the world. The earlier
speakers attempted to generalise the position of Bristol in the global context. Bristol [and the whole South West] has the opportunity to actually take the lead – in England, in Europe and in the World.

Stephen Layland

The copright has been asserted for all the detailed dsubstance given above under the Creative Commons Licience model AS:

Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND)