Thaumato

Reading Allan Bloom again, his Closing of the American mind, really a great book even if you don’t agree with his politics. One thing he gets to is an explication of how Nietzsche’s wide ranging cultural criticism of religion and science was based on a principled stand. According to Bloom, Nietzsche’s fire and fury are generated from an unflinching intellectual honesty - he knows that god is dead, and doesn’t proclaim it triumphantly but rather gloomily, sadly, because he knows that the religious impulse, the non-rational, is required if the soul of man is to ever elevate past the empty planes and dead conclusions of science and rationality. Sure, there is much to admire in the Enlightenment, but with it also much was lost in the West. Nietzsche’s anger and vitriol were manifestations of this realization, the unwillingness to accept as the ultimate fate of humanity the characterization of the Last Man in Zarathustra - content with a base animal existence, happily oblivious to his lost inheritance. The flip side to this coin of course is that this anger and passion have no authentic target. The artistic impulse, while strong, has no absolute base upon which to build. The foundations have all been weakened and are still crumbling, a hundred and fifty years later. Relativism is like water, like the elements of nature, injecting itself into every crevice, downgrading every faith.

And so, what hope do we have? What hope did Nietzsche have? According to Bloom, Nietzsche’s hope was that the creative impulse, the artistic drive of man will lay the new foundation itself, will create the new religions, the new prophets, based upon where we are now, based upon all that man has been through, something to redeem our fractured doubting present, something to restore and reinvent salvation itself. Yet, who is up to the task? Are we all just awaiting this new messiah? I was thinking about this this morning. Perhaps the Native Americans, with their connection to the land, to the present and not some far away future state where all our problems are solved, had the right idea. Perhaps the modern green movement is the correct way forward, in so far as it engenders a respect and awareness of our current existence, a reverence for the here and now, for the mysterious and ultimately unexplained ground of being. Perhaps in the notion of mother earth, the pagan synch with nature, is the path for our return to sublime harmonies and higher purposes. Perhaps the Native American philosophy of life can tell us the way home.

Tried installing Rmagick tongiht on one of the ec2 instances and kept getting a bunch of errors like this:
Failed to fetch http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/g/glib2.0/libglib2.0-0_2.16.3-1ubuntu3_i386.deb

The fix was to do sudo apt-get update then run the original command, and it worked

btw - the commands i used to install it:
sudo apt-get install imagemagick
sudo apt-get install libmagick9-dev
sudo gem install rmagick

taken from here, thx

I always forget this - being a java programmer originally I tend to think of things in java parlance when I’m looking for a way to do them in ruby. Right now I want to print the stack trace to the log in the enhancements to the merb uploader I’m doing, and, anyway - heres how you do it in ruby.

begin
some code
rescue Exception=>e
Merb.logger.error(e.backtrace.join("\n"))
end

Also - to get merb to log to a file make sure your settings are correct in init.rb or whichever env you are in.
i.e. c[:log_file] = Merb.root / “log” / “development.log”