Quick question…. why is formating of posts on Micro.blog such a crap shoot? Of the last three posts I made, only one presented itself not all run together with proper paragraph separations, links showing as links etc. There must be something I am missing about formating when posting to my blog. Any ideas?

20220428.06

I had kind of a crap day yesterday… got depressed… woke up with still a rather heavy heart… H asked what was wrong… nothing specific i could put my finger on… just the sort of depression that is the negative sum of all the little and big things that get to you… might get to anyone… -2-2-2-7,635 = fuck me…

I cast around this morning, looking for relief… some way forward that would make the heaviness go away… i asked myself the question, how can i enjoy the day just because it is here and i am here?… and then i let go… i let the morning take me where it would and lo and behold…

It appears that just asking the question was the right place to start… what followed was a pleasant series of reminders that the world was still capable of being beautiful, even if we are in it…

20220428.05

In Nature, a Poet Finds a Visionary Language

You had me at Cody-Rose Clevidence… i mean… could there be a more alluring name for a poet?… one wonders if it is a name de plume, or a given name… if given, it would be like his parents fully expected him to be a poet…

And then there is the poetry itself…

all-the-way, magnificent

cluster-fuck, accident—

dodecahedron, demi-god

parallax, “kiss thy rod”

… i may have to buy his books…

20220428.04

Over 40 Years Later, The Wobblies Is as Relevant as Ever

Newly restored documentary film, The Wobblies, making the rounds… is it me, or does it seem like there is a resurgence of labor organizing to beat back the Oligarchs?…

20220428.03

First few stanzas of a really good poem by H. R. Webster via Guernica…

The hottest summer on record I couldn’t open the windows.

A stranger had sent flowers to my house with a note that read say thank you.

I walked from my car to my door like a snake oxbows

across the sandy road from dune to dune. Balanced a colander

full of silver spoons, a saucer of cat’s eyes, a matchbook

spreading a mouse trap’s jaw, a potted conifer

I trimmed with scissors made for a doll on the sill

so I would wake if someone broke the feeble lock.

I’ve always been a deep sleeper, though. Roused for a fire drill, …

Feminine Future Perfect

20220427.07 The World Is Back on a War Footing and We’ll All Pay the Price reason.com/2022/04/2…

… mourning the resurgence of militarism and the fading of the environment of peace and prosperity:

“The speed of poverty alleviation in the last 25 years has been historically unprecedented,” Alexander Hammond of Britain’s Institute of Economic Affairs wrote in the happier year of 2017. “Not only is the proportion of people in poverty at a record low, but, in spite of adding 2 billion to the planet’s population, the overall number of people living in extreme poverty has fallen too.” He added: “The new age of globalization, which started around 1980, saw the developing world enter the global economy and resulted in the largest escape from poverty ever recorded.”

What I am listening to… so relevant again… music.apple.com/us/album/…

… the more i use drafts, the more powerful it seems to me…

20220425.04

> Little things I should have said or done

> I just never found the time…

… the point at which any sane person would walk away… like “you were always on my mind” is supposed to fix things?… unless, of course, the person singing it to you was Willie Nelson…

In this post I share an article on why Socialism is a turnoff for most of the people it might help.

I keep thinking that capitalism needs significant revision if not to be replaced by something altogether focused in a different direction. To me, it is obvious that the market capitalist system, built as it is on exploitation of resources and people, destroys as much value as it creates. Some form of socialism might help mitigate the situation and yet, working class and lower middle class American citizens have been taught that socialism is to their economic health as sunlight is to a vampire. Add to that the perception, not entirely unwarranted, that Democrats are elitist and out of touch with their issues.

Former Democratic Montana Gov. Steve Bullock has described the image of his party this way: “coastal, overly educated, elitist, judgmental, socialist — a bundle of identity groups and interests lacking any shared principles. The problem isn’t the candidates we nominate. It’s the perception of the party we belong to.”

In this post I share an article that explains the value proposition of capitalism, which is the pumping of wealth from “the periphery,”—cheap labor, undervalued resources—to the center where societies based on excessive appetite vacuum it up. The solution that is groped towards is to delink local economies by emphasizing the fulfillment of local needs with local and traditional production, while maintaining some international trade around things that might be unique to one place or another and of interest/value to a broader public because of its uniqueness, not a production cost difference.

It is important to note that delinking is often widely misunderstood to mean autarky, or a system of self-sufficiency and limited trade. But this is a misrepresentation. Delinking does not require cutting all ties to the rest of the global economy, but rather the refusal to submit national-development strategies to the imperatives of globalisation. It aims to compel a political economy suited to its needs, rather than simply going along with having to unilaterally adjust to the needs of the global system. To this goal of greater sovereignty, a county would develop its own productive systems and prioritise the needs of the people rather than the demands on international capital.

And then there was an article about the crisis of masculinity. What astonished me the most were the statistics about where women and men are, relatively, in the work force. It bares quoting again here.

Girls are now outperforming boys at nearly every level of education. They earn 60 percent of bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and comprise 70 percent of high school valedictorians. Women are also dominating many workplaces. Women today hold a majority of the nation’s jobs, including 51.4 percent of managerial and professional jobs—up from 26.1 percent in 1980. They make up 54 percent of all accountants and hold about half of all banking and insurance jobs. As for men, they are dropping out at alarming rates. More prime age males are out of the labor force today than during the Great Depression.

That’s huge progress for women. It makes the blowback of the patriarchal structure even more comprehensible. Not only is the mostly white, male power structure under threat from minorities who collectively will be a majority in the country in the near future, but even more so by women in general who are overtaking men in every category. It is no surprise that there is a strong push by this patriarchal structure to overturn democracy, and to hammer women back to the dark ages where they had no control over their bodies. Thus, the increasingly draconian laws passed that criminalize abortion and the intention of the same conservatives in this crowd to outlaw birth control.

I posted one of my favorite Moby Dick quotes which I will re-quote here.

I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country.

It seems to me that this sentiment, I would say truth, underlies an awful lot of significant film making and literature. Think, the Wizard of Oz (there’s no place like home), or, fresh in the theaters, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. It also ties in with the delinking of local economies idea above. If the most important things are those that are close at hand, perhaps delinking is the way to go.

0220423.05

Getting back on the trail of the weekly edits…

20220423.06

Beyond Eurocentrism

Imperialist rent, for Amin, derived from extra surplus value. In other words, more value could be extracted from the workers through production in the periphery – generating an additional rent for the capitalist, when compared with workers in the centre doing similar jobs. Amin argued that, while low-paid workers in the periphery are no less productive than their counterparts in the centre, the value they create is less rewarded – and this is what creates such an (imperialist) rent.

… the nature of capitalism is to exploit value differences… the less developed world is the periphery… capitalists exploit the periphery, pumping the value difference back to the center, leaving little of the value with the periphery…

Amin changed the terms of the debates on unequal exchange. Until his work, the orthodoxy among economists was that workers in the periphery are simply less productive than those in the centre.

… and this seems, once presented, obvious, for, if the workers at the periphery were not as or nearly as productive as those at the core, there would not be the substantial value difference to exploit into profits at the core…

It is important to note that the idea of unequal exchange and of ‘super’-exploitation remains controversial among Marxists. In Das Kapital (1867), Marx himself discusses the futility of comparisons between different degrees of exploitation in different nations, and the significant methodological problems that arise. Many Marxists argue that the neo-Marxists such as Amin focused excessively on market relations at the expense of exploitation of labour.

… and this…

So, he proposed a new model of industrialisation shaped by the renewal of non-capitalist forms of peasant agriculture, which he thought would imply delinking from the imperatives of globalised capitalism.¹

… and this…

It is important to note that delinking is often widely misunderstood to mean autarky, or a system of self-sufficiency and limited trade. But this is a misrepresentation. Delinking does not require cutting all ties to the rest of the global economy, but rather the refusal to submit national-development strategies to the imperatives of globalisation. It aims to compel a political economy suited to its needs, rather than simply going along with having to unilaterally adjust to the needs of the global system. To this goal of greater sovereignty, a county would develop its own productive systems and prioritise the needs of the people rather than the demands on international capital.

… it occurs to me that what the current conflict in Ukraine may be accomplishing is a kind of decoupling of western capitalist hegemony… as western nations turn to produce more at home, and be less dependent on regimes that seek to weaken them through destabilization, even while profiting from them… a kind of decoupling will be happening… as we learn to produce and pay more for production at home… we will to some degree decouple… also, China, Russia and other countries will begin to develop economic structures that circumvent the power of the dollar… all of this is leading to a realignment of capitalism’s ability to exploit the value difference between the core and the periphery… the problem with this world order emerging is that it returns states to being in tense competition for control as it abandons the interdependent, if destructive to the planet, world order of new-liberalism… is there some combination of small is beautiful that none the less interconnects with markets around the world?…

20220423.02

Fascinating photograph…

Photography by Tom Eagar, @tomeagar

… i mean, all those people on that enormous outcropping in that vast landscape… it gives me the willies on lots of levels…

… and then there is this view of Mt. Fuji… can’t decide if it’s too obvious or great…

Photography by Yao Yuan, @yyowlsolo

… probably too obvious if i am thinking it at all…

… these two are part of a series of interesting photographs published on Earth Day by AnOther magazine…

Be still my heart! The Flight Attendant is back!

20220421.14

… we are sneaking off to the movies at 3:30 PM… going to see Everything, Everywhere, All at Once… Rotten Tomatoes critic consensus gives it 97 and the audience 92… hoping it lives up to the hype…

20220421.13

… this is one of my favorite quotes of all time… it’s message is so important…

I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country.

Melville, Herman, Moby Dick

20220421.06

https://hyperallergic.com/725593/the-beauty-of-the-ephemeral-world/

Mullican works with a simple but flexible vocabulary of tubular shapes, cloud-hlike stains, ellipses, and irregular shapes, and moves between abstraction and representation. At no point did I feel that her painting became predictable.

20220421.04

Interesting streaming if you can stand watching it with full knowledge of the tragedy unfolding in Ukraine…

Servant of the People

Netflix is now streaming two seasons of “Servant of the People,” the 2015-2018 Ukrainian comedy series created and produced by (and starring) Volodmyr Zelensky as Vasily Goloborodko, a high-school history teacher who is catapulted to the presidency of Ukraine after his profane rant against government corruption and incompetence is filmed by one of his students and goes viral on social media. This is the show, as everyone knows by now, that catapulted Zelensky himself to the presidency of Ukraine in real life.

20220421.08

I feel a Jane Campion binge watch coming on…

John Keats on Film: Considering Jane Campion’s Exquisitely Rendered Bright Star

20220421.09

A bunch of interesting movies that can be streamed right now…

Literary(ish) films to stream on 4/20.

Tucker Carlson and the Crisis of Masculinity

… as a man, i balk a little at what this article informs me of, but there are some astonishing statistics backing it up… maybe we have reached the matriarchal age after all… if the men don’t blow the place up because the planet without men in charge isn’t worth living on anyway…

Girls are now outperforming boys at nearly every level of education. They earn 60 percent of bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and comprise 70 percent of high school valedictorians. Women are also dominating many workplaces. Women today hold a majority of the nation’s jobs, including 51.4 percent of managerial and professional jobs—up from 26.1 percent in 1980. They make up 54 percent of all accountants and hold about half of all banking and insurance jobs. As for men, they are dropping out at alarming rates. More prime age males are out of the b force today than during the Great Depression.

20220420.09

Real estate players shower DeSantis with campaign cash as housing prices soar

… having just helped my mother sell her condo in Florida i can attest to the soaring of prices…

20220420.08