From this morning’s walk…
Today I deleted all social media apps from my phone. I will use my browser to access the accounts once or twice a day. Any service that doesn’t have a web portal is toast.
Today I tried to sit down and plan the week with my various digital apps. I came to a standstill trying to make them do what I wanted. I was so frustrated! Then I opened my paper journal book and wrote out a list of things I thought needed doing. My frustration disappeared. The week got planned.
This seems important…
August 12, 2023 - by Heather Cox Richardson
In Marion, Kansas, yesterday morning, four local police officers and three sheriff’s deputies raided the office of the _Marion County Record_newspaper; the home of its co-owners, Eric Meyer and his 98 year old mother, Joan Meyer; and the home of Marion vice mayor Ruth Herbel, 80. They seized computers, cell phones, and other equipment. Joan Meyer was unable to eat or sleep after the raid; she collapsed Saturday afternoon and died at her home.
I think of the conspiracy soaked far right… McGilchrist arguing society shows signs of schizophrenia… 📚📖
… the schizophrenic subject appears to occupy extremes simultaneously: both sceptical to the point of paralysis about matters that must be taken for granted if one is to function at all, and yet gullible enough to espouse enormously improbable belief systems that are clearly delusional.
— The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World by Iain McGilchrist a.co/20ZzSLa
From yesterday and today… 📷
About Habit :: Essays On Attention Paid
… our lives play out through this dance of individual and together habits… we live and love, hate and grieve, in our beautiful lake of habitualness… itself a splash and rippling of a glassy sea of continuity that engulfs every possible dream of our being…
Productive day!… laundry is done, floors are vacuumed, front garden is weeded and mulched, weed whacking is done both front and back, chicken thighs are marinating… oh, and i made progress on weekly blog post and started writing Devon, one of the lesbian characters in my nascent novella…
How an Angry Woman In Baltimore Almost Killed the Jazz Age
Young women who dance to jazz, eventually move on to other pursuits—where “automobiles are used as ‘apartments on wheels’.” But that was hardly necessary, because the female jazz fan, “letting the desire of the moment sway her,” soon “takes a visit to a man’s apartment or hotel room.”
It turns out that the malfunction of the Ego string trimmer I returned last week was the universe telling me I’d rather have the Makita string trimmer I replaced it with. I like it better in every way.
From yesterday…
About Habit :: Essays On Attention Paid
… in the past couple of years, there have been emergent family issues, my father’s death, your mother’s struggling heart, my mother’s move… in these times, one or both of us packs up the habits and carries them to the place of need…
My wife loves the label… she liked the wine too…
Apparently, with ChatGPT, they have succeeded in replicating the left hemisphere of the brain…
It is the left hemisphere, which does not understand narrative, not the right, that wholly makes up ‘stories’ to fit circumstances it does not understand. Michael Gazzaniga calls it the interpreter precisely because of this propensity confidently to make up something, plausible or not, to explain a set of circumstances it cannot account for.
— The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World by Iain McGilchrist a.co/hm9ywoP
In Praise of the Dancing Body — RITONA // A Beautiful Resistance
In our time, models for the body are the computer and the genetic code, crafting a dematerialized, dis-aggregated body, imagined as a conglomerate of cells and genes each with her own program, indifferent to the rest and to the good of the body as a whole.
In Praise of the Dancing Body — RITONA // A Beautiful Resistance
Daily contact with nature was the source of a great amount of knowledge reflected in the food revolution that took place especially in the Americas prior to colonization or in the revolution in sailing techniques. We know now, for instance, that the Polynesian populations used to travel the high seas at night with only their body as their compass, as they could tell from the vibrations of the waves the different ways to direct their boats to the shore.
In Praise of the Dancing Body — RITONA // A Beautiful Resistance
Capitalism was born from the separation of people from the land and its first task was to make work independent of the seasons and to lengthen the workday beyond the limits of our endurance… we stress the economic aspect of this process, the economic dependence capitalism has created on monetary relations, and its role in the formation of a wage proletariat. What we have not always seen is what the separation from the land and nature has meant for our body…
In Praise of the Dancing Body — RITONA // A Beautiful Resistance
Capitalism was not the first system based on the exploitation of human labor. But more than any other system in history, it has tried to create an economic world where labor is the most essential principle of accumulation. As such it was the first to make the regimentation and mechanization of the body a key premise of the accumulation of wealth. Indeed, one of capitalism’s main social tasks from its beginning to the present has been the transformation of our energies and corporeal powers into labor-powers.
And, tomato and watermelon salad…
Small Is Beautiful is divided into four parts: “The Modern World”, “Resources”, “The Third World”, and “Organization and Ownership”.
In the first chapter, “The Problem of Production”, Schumacher argues that the modern economy is unsustainable. Natural resources (like fossil fuels), are treated as expendable income, when in fact they should be treated as capital, since they are not renewable, and thus subject to eventual depletion. He further argues that nature’s resistance to pollution is limited as well.
Growing one’s own food and not being reliant on capitalist exchange are exactly the conditions peasants were in before being forced off the land and into the factories. Of course, not everyone’s got a family farm to return to (I don’t), but a revolutionary politics urging for land return and redistribution is exactly what resistance to capitalism initially looked like. Maybe it can again.
For Arendt, the case of Rahel is also exemplary of an entire age in that two forms of necessary courage collide in her situation. On the one hand there is the progressive courage to use one’s own intelligence, and so to define oneself as a creature of reason. But there is also the courage required to acknowledge that this attempt at self-creation is always contingent on historical and cultural conditions, from which no individual can fully escape.
Making pesto in a mortar and pestle… it’s a little work but the flavor is more intense…
About Habit :: Essays On Attention Paid
… there is, of course, the occasional afternoon or evening trip to the movie house, friends for dinner, the odd cultural event… these things splash into the lake of our habits, compressing, expanding, canceling, here and there and there… the ripples shape and mold the time and space and matter around us… it takes time for attenuation to settle things back into the placid calm of the habitual…
Importantly, Evans insists – along with Marx – that the only class that could actually affect any real revolution is the proletariat. When the petite bourgeoisie agitate for change, they always stop short of revolution because they have too much to lose. The proletariat, on the other hand, by definition has nothing to lose and everything to gain. However, since the only class allied with them currently is a generally conservative class (the old petite bourgeoisie), any revolution that would happen would not be a leftist one.