Split pea soup on the way…

Santa Is a Psychedelic Mushroom from The New York Times on Vimeo.

From Maria Popova, The Marginalian

(The poet J.D. McCatchy captured this essential fact beautifully in his observation that “love is the quality of attention we pay to things.”)

Books Read: Sacred Economics, Revised: Money, Gift & Society in the Age of Transition by Charles Eisenstein 📚

The discreet and separate self, surveying a universe that is fundamentally Other, naturally treats the natural and human world as a pile of instrumental, accidental stuff. The rest of the world is fundamentally not-self. Why should we care about it beyond our own foreseeable utility?

Books Read: Sacred Economics, Revised: Money, Gift & Society in the Age of Transition by Charles Eisenstein 📚

Money is therefore not only a universal aim; it is a universal means as well, and indeed it is largely because it is a universal means that it is also a universal end, of which one can never have too much.

Books Read: Sacred Economics, Revised: Money, Gift & Society in the Age of Transition by Charles Eisenstein 📚

Today we suffer a poverty of immeasurable things, priceless things; a poverty of the things that money cannot buy and a surfeit of the things it can (though this surfeit is so unequally distributed that many suffer a poverty of those things, too)

Books Read: Sacred Economics, Revised: Money, Gift & Society in the Age of Transition by Charles Eisenstein 📚

In archaic times, Seaford observes, power was conferred by unique talismanic objects (E. G., A scepter said to be handed down from Zeus), money is the opposite: its powers confirmed by a standard sign that wipes out variations in purity and weight. Quality is not important, only quantity. Because money is convertible into all of the things, it infects them with the same feature, turning them into commodities – – objects that, as long as they meet certain criteria, are seen as identical. All that matters is how many or how much.

Books Read: Sacred Economics, Revised: Money, Gift & Society in the Age of Transition by Charles Eisenstein 📚

If the material world is fundamentally an abundant world, all the more abundant is the spiritual world: the creations of the human mind–songs, stories, films, ideas, and everything else that goes by the name of intellectual property. Because in the digital age we can replicate and spread them at virtually no cost, artificial scarcity must be imposed upon them in order to keep them in the monetized realm.

Books Read: Sacred Economics, Revised: Money, Gift & Society in the Age of Transition by Charles Eisenstein 📚

The more monetized society is, the more anxious and hurried its citizens.

Books Read: Sacred Economics, Revised: Money, Gift & Society in the Age of Transition by Charles Eisenstein 📚

The assumption of scarcity is one of the two central axioms of economics. (The second is that people naturally seek to maximize their rational self-interest.) both are false; or, more precisely, they are true only within a narrow realm, a realm that we, the frog at the bottom of the well, mistake for the whole of reality.

Tonight’s Christmas movie is Christmas In Connecticut…

The long overdue honey do task of doing a clean install of the OS on my wife’s computer is no longer overdue.

Books Read: Sacred Economics, Revised: Money, Gift & Society in the Age of Transition by Charles Eisenstein 📚

Debt relations have always been power relations, and money has always been, and remains today, entwined with debt and therefore violence.

Books Read: Sacred Economics, Revised: Money, Gift & Society in the Age of Transition by Charles Eisenstein 📚

Modern humans live for the most part in an omnipresent anxiety, borne of the scarcity of money on which life depends–witness the phrase “the cost of living.” Our purpose for being, the development and full expression of our gifts, is mortgaged to the demands of money, to making a living, to surviving.

Ye olde misogyny-to-fascism pipeline

Interesting read about Ye, Nick Fuentes, Alex Jones and misogyny as a companion to fascism.

Any opinions on CounterSocial?.

Good morning from my part of the world…

Books Read: Sacred Economics, Revised: Money, Gift & Society in the Age of Transition by Charles Eisenstein 📚

Human nature does not exist in isolation; it emerges in response to its context. Today’s economic system elicits selfishness and greed. What would an economic system look like that, like some ancient cultures, elicited generosity instead?

… today, I deactivated my Twitter account… not that i ever used it much…

We are taking an Advent Calendar approach to Christmas Movies this year. A different Christmas movie or program each night until Christmas. Just finished Miracle on 34th Street.

Excited about the new lock screen customization… I now have quick access to two of my favorite camera apps and the native one. Each can be set to a different purpose.

Books Read: Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research by John Steinbeck 📚

I have already given this book away once because I thought a friend would love it. My new copy arrived last week. Hopefully I will finish it before giving away again.

Books Read: Sacred Economics, Revised: Money, Gift & Society in the Age of Transition by Charles Eisenstein 📚

Ordered this book a week or two ago. Just started reading. I’ve completed the introduction and already I am excited.

Currently reading: Paris, When It’s Naked by Etel Adnan 📚

You don’t resolve problems, in Paris, you chat, you measure your powerlessness.

Top 25 Christmas Movies - IMDb

In case anyone needs inspiration…