On earning and spending...................

 

Earning more money increases freedom.

Spending less than you earn reduces stress.

-James Clear, from this edition

A few more snippets from................

 

....................................Against the Machine:

     Reactionary radicalism, then as now, is a defense of that moral economy—a system build around community bonds, local economics and human-scale systems—in the face of colonisation by the Machine.  That colonisation may come via gunboats or trade agreements, redcoats or giant superstores, enclosure acts or digital currencies, but it will always suck wealth out of place-based communities and funnel it to distant stockholders, just as it sucks the power away from local people and funnels it to national or international bodies whose interests align with those of the Machine.  It will always replace people with technology, and it will always make consumers of us all.

---------------------------------

Ideology is the enemy of particularity, which is why every modern revolution has ended up turning on its own people.

---------------------------------

Real culture—human-scale culture—is messy.  It cannot be labeled.  The moral economy rarely makes rational sense.  But it makes human sense, which is what matters.

---------------------------------

A reactionary radicalism could be usefully defined as an active attempt at creating, defending or restoring a moral economy built around the four Ps. (people, place, prayer, the past)

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     This, then, is my idea of an anti-Machine politics.  A reactionary radicalism, its face set against Progress Theology, which aims to defend or build a moral economy at the human scale, which rejects the atomized individualism of the liberal era and understands that materialism as a worldview has failed us.  A politics which embraces family and home and place, loving the particular without excluding the outsider, and which looks on all great agglomerations of power with suspicion.  The rejection of abstract ideologies in favour of real-world responses, and an understanding that material progress always comes with a hidden price tag.  A politics which aims to limit rather than multiply our needs, which strategically opposes any technology which threatens the moral economy and which, finally, seeks a moral order to society which is based on love of neighbor rather than competition with everyone.

Highly recommended....................

 

Sixty years ago......................

The Kinks.................Tired of Waiting For You

 

Rooted............

 

The questions all humans will eventually ask—Who am I?  Where do I come from?—are at least partially answered by the country they find themselves part of.  Our national community gives us roots; to quote Simone Weil again, 'to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul'.

-Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine

On the importance of literature........

 

And literature conveys irrefutable condensed experience in yet another invaluable direction; namely, from generation to generation. Thus it becomes the living memory of the nation. Thus it preserves and kindles within itself the flame of her spent history, in a form which is safe from deformation and slander. In this way literature, together with language, protects the soul of the nation. . . . 

But woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against “freedom of print”, it is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory. The nation ceases to be mindful of itself, it is deprived of its spiritual unity, and despite a supposedly common language, compatriots suddenly cease to understand one another. Silent generations grow old and die without ever having talked about themselves, either to each other or to their descendants. When writers such as Achmatova and Zamjatin – interred alive throughout their lives – are condemned to create in silence until they die, never hearing the echo of their written words, then that is not only their personal tragedy, but a sorrow to the whole nation, a danger to the whole nation.

-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, from this 1970 speech

Sixty years ago......................

The Byrds.................Mr. Tambourine Man

 

the empty city.....................

 

As you came with me in silence
to the pump in the long grass

I heard much that you could not hear:
the bite of the spade that sank it,

the slithering and grumble
as the mason mixed his mortar,

and women coming with white buckets
like flashes on their ruffled wings.

The cast-iron rims of the lid
clinked as I uncovered it,

something stirred in its mouth.
I had a bird’s eye view of a bird,

finch-green, speckly white,
nesting on dry leaves, flattened, still,

suffering the light.
So I roofed the citadel

as gently as I could, and told you
and you gently unroofed it

but where was the bird now?
There was the single egg, pebbly white,

and from the rusted bend of the snout
tail-feathers splayed and sat tight.

So tender, I said, 'Remember this.
It will be good for you to retrace this path

when you have grown away and stand at last
at the very center of the empty city.'

-Seamus Heaney, Changes

two ways.......................

 

     Let me reiterate the two ways to use money: One is as a tool to live a better life.  The other is as a yardstick of success to measure yourself against other people.  The first is quiet and personal, the second is loud and performative.  It's so obvious which leads to a happier life.

-Morgan Housel, The Art of Spending Money

An alternative version..................

Tom Clay................What the World Needs Now

 

Sixty years ago......................

Jackie DeShannon.......What The World Needs Now

 

Opening paragraphs.....................

 

A LETTER FROM CAPTAIN GULLIVER TO HIS COUSIN SYMPSON.

Written in the Year 1727.

I hope you will be ready to own publicly, whenever you shall be called to it, that by your great and frequent urgency you prevailed on me to publish a very loose and uncorrect account of my travels, with directions to hire some young gentleman of either university to put them in order, and correct the style, as my cousin Dampier did, by my advice, in his book called “A Voyage round the world.” But I do not remember I gave you power to consent that any thing should be omitted, and much less that any thing should be inserted; therefore, as to the latter, I do here renounce every thing of that kind; particularly a paragraph about her majesty Queen Anne, of most pious and glorious memory; although I did reverence and esteem her more than any of human species. But you, or your interpolator, ought to have considered, that it was not my inclination, so was it not decent to praise any animal of our composition before my master Houyhnhnm: And besides, the fact was altogether false; for to my knowledge, being in England during some part of her majesty’s reign, she did govern by a chief minister; nay even by two successively, the first whereof was the lord of Godolphin, and the second the lord of Oxford; so that you have made me say the thing that was not. Likewise in the account of the academy of projectors, and several passages of my discourse to my master Houyhnhnm, you have either omitted some material circumstances, or minced or changed them in such a manner, that I do hardly know my own work. When I formerly hinted to you something of this in a letter, you were pleased to answer that you were afraid of giving offence; that people in power were very watchful over the press, and apt not only to interpret, but to punish every thing which looked like an innuendo (as I think you call it). But, pray how could that which I spoke so many years ago, and at about five thousand leagues distance, in another reign, be applied to any of the Yahoos, who now are said to govern the herd; especially at a time when I little thought, or feared, the unhappiness of living under them? Have not I the most reason to complain, when I see these very Yahoos carried by Houyhnhnms in a vehicle, as if they were brutes, and those the rational creatures? And indeed to avoid so monstrous and detestable a sight was one principal motive of my retirement hither.

-Jonathan Swift, as culled from this version of Gulliver's Travels

well travelled...................

Every time Gulliver travels
into another chapter of Gulliver’s Travels
I marvel at how well travelled he is
despite his incurable gullibility.

I don’t enjoy travelling anymore
because, for instance,
I still don’t know the difference
between a bloke and a chap.

And I’m embarrassed
whenever I have to hold out a palm
of loose coins to a cashier
as if I were feeding a pigeon in a park.

Like Proust, I see only trouble
in store if I leave my room,
which is not lined with cork,
only sheets of wallpaper

featuring orange flowers
and little green vines.
Of course, anytime I want
I can travel in my imagination

but only as far as Toronto,
where some graduate students
with goatees and snoods
are translating my poems into Canadian.

-Billy Collins,  Safe Travels

Unearned wealth has its risks...........

 

The broad inflation in the prices of bonds, stocks, real estate, cryptos and just about every other financial asset produced an extraordinary surge in wealth.  In the years between the stock market trough in early 2009 and the tenth anniversary of Lehman's bankruptcy, US household wealth nearly doubled.  By late 2018, American households were worth more than $100 trillion, a sum equivalent to five times US GDP.  By comparison, household wealth in the post-war decades averaged just over three and a half times GDP.  Total household wealth was higher than at its twin peaks in recent real estate and internet bubbles.  Never before had Americans been so rich.  Never before had they done so little to amass so much wealth.

-Edward Chancellor, The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest

begin with our own.................

 

There is much of mankind that a man can only learn from himself.  Behind every man's external life, which he leads in company, there is another which he leads alone, and which he carries with him apart. We see but one aspect of our neighbor, as we see but one side of the moon; in either case there is also a dark half, which is unknown to us.  We all come down to dinner, but each has a room to himself.  And if we would study the internal life of others, it seems essential that we should begin with our own.

-Walter Bagehot

foresightful.................

 . . . the corruption of the priesthood occurred at the precise moment in which it changed from a minority organised to impart knowledge into a minority organised to withhold it. The great danger of decadence in journalism is almost exactly the same. Journalism possesses in itself the potentiality of becoming one of the most frightful monstrosities and delusions that have ever cursed mankind. This horrible transformation will occur at the exact instant at which journalists realise that they can become an aristocracy.

-Gilbert Keith Chesterton, The Speaker, August 17, 1901

as theories go..........................

 

     Another trait of consumerism that thrives in the youth culture is that antipathy to so-called "drudgery" that has made us, with the help of salesmen and advertisers, a nation of suckers.  This is the pseudoaristocratic notion, early popularized in America, that one is too good for the fundamental and recurring tasks of domestic order and biological necessity; to dirty one's hands in the soil or to submerge them for very long in soapy water is degrading and brutalizing.  With one's hands thus occupied, the theory goes, one is unlikely to reach those elusive havens of "self-discovery" and "self-fulfillment"; but if one can escape such drudgery, one then has a fair chance of showing the world that one is really better than all previous evidence would have indicated.

-Wendell Berry, A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural & Agricultural

Sixty years ago................................

The Zombies.....................Tell Her No

 

A conversation in poetry................

 

As long as the woodpecker
taps on my roof I'll be fine,
a little life left in the shell.

The blind man navigates

by the stars behind the daylight.

Just before I fly out of myself

I'll say a puzzled goodbye.

Our bodies are women who were never

meant to be faithful to us.

I was born a baby.

What has been

added?

Treasure what you find

already in your pocket, friend.

Today a pink rose in a vase

on the table.

Tomorrow, petals.

-Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison, Braided Creek

Hope not......................

 

     The real issue is that a young generation of hyper-urbanised, always-on young people, increasingly divorced from nature and growing up in a psychologised, inward-looking anticulture, is being led towards the conclusion that biology is a problem to be overcome, that their body is a form of oppression and that the solution to their pain may go beyond a new set of pronouns, or even invasive surgery, towards nanotechnology, 'cyberconscious software' and perhaps, ultimately, the end of their physical embodiment altogether.

-Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine

Choices......................

If you're struggling with devices, don't give yourself, your choices, and your precious time over to them.  It's not the devices fault.

-Rob Firchau

Ownership......................

 

Does the world happen to you, or do you happen to the world?

Most people wait for permission to solve problems. The subtle message they send is “I don’t care enough to solve this on my own. Tell me what to do.” The world happens to them.

High agency people are different. They care. And because they care, they solve problems without being told. They happen to the world.

High agency people act like owners. Owners see a problem and fix it. They don’t wait. They don’t need permission. They don’t think this is someone else’s job. They don’t think this is hard. They don’t think “I can’t do this, I’ve never done it before.” They don’t think this is someone else’s job.

Act like an owner before you are one. That’s how you become one.

-Shane Parrish, from the November 2 edition

In praise of.............................

 

.........................................Scooby-Doo.

The gang sticks together as only high schoolers, unburdened by the yokes of adulthood, can, and in doing so they create the sort of small, self-sufficient, and resilient community that would’ve made Thomas Jefferson proud.

All of this, really, should come as no surprise to anyone who has paid even scant attention to the franchise. For one thing, while so much of American pop culture situates itself in the cities or the suburbs, the Mystery Inc. gang always travels to remote places way out in the wilderness—an abandoned home on the bayou, say, or an abandoned mining camp—because they realize that these places aren’t abandoned at all. They writhe on, haunted monuments to the sacrifices, many of them terrifying, it took to build this great nation, and a reminder that while we may be through with the past, the past is hardly through with us.

Adding......................

 

............to the next Barnes & Noble order.

Wisely, choose your................

 

..................................personal compass.

In the background......................

     Santana.............the Havana Moon album

 

shines...........................

 

the gap.........................

 

The gap between struggle and reward is a big part of what makes people happy.

-Morgan Housel, The Art of Spending Money

value.....................

 

The thing that is least perceived about wealth is that all pleasure in money ends at the point where economy becomes unnecessary.  The man who can buy anything he covets, without any consultation with his banker, values nothing he buys.

-William Dawson, The Quest of the Simple Life

clearing the inner junkyard...........

 

The only question worth asking in times like these is: How should we live? . . .

But what if we are witnessing is not, at heart, a political or cultural battle, but some manifestation of a spiritual war—well, then perhaps our time should be spent in becoming the right kind of warrior.  Because everything is currently set up to turn us into the wrong kind.

     The right kind of warrior takes on his own internal demons before he sails out to take on those of others.  He takes his stand, and stands his ground, without giving in to the nihil of the age.  He cleaves to what he believes in without falling into the traps laid by partisanship, anger and self-righteousness.   Most of all, he works to clear out his own inner junkyard so that he can go searching for truth—and recognize it when he finds it.  His war is against the worst within himself and for the best of the world, and what he is fighting for is the love he so often fails at.  His most effective weapon is sacrifice.

-Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine