Today, Ukrainian defense reporter Illia Ponomarenko tweeted: “What America is doing now in terms of sending weapons to Ukraine is a masterpiece of logistics. In all regards, starting from bureaucratic hurdles.”
Who says dog and cat can’t coexist?
Made today…
Made yesterday…
Boris Mikhailov on Liberation, Vulgarity, and Chance in Photography
One of my first photobook purchases was a reprint of two of his books in one volume. Epic talent.
Russia’s War on Ukraine Has Nearly Doubled Its Fossil-Fuel Revenues
Oil is war… war is oil. My great hope is that we learn, if we don’t blow the whole place up, to give up fossil fuels.
The Profound Impacts of Decency: On ‘Hello, Bookstore’
As pleasurable as the storyline is—getting to watch a good man with a much-loved business triumph—there is also a great joy in simply watching time pass in The Bookstore.
Rotten to the Core: Why Twitter and Elon Musk Deserve Each Other
Trump isn’t worth banning. American democracy might be in crisis. But it’s not because Donald Trump is or isn’t on Twitter.
This morning started out in an unpromising way… … so i eschewed my normal routines and began poking around figuring out a workflow process that gets me from draft(s) to post more efficiently… … the power of Drafts continues to grow as i learn its deep functionality…
Robert M. Pirsig on the Book He Wrote (And the One He Didn’t
Pirsig talks about the organic process that took him from real life to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
H. C. Richardson, April 28, 2022
… the rise of “illiberal democracy” or “soft fascism” is new to us, and the first step toward rolling it back is recognizing that it is different from Trump’s autocracy or states’ rights, and that its poison is spreading in the United States.
There are movies you stream; movies you rent; and movies you buy. Silver Linings Playbookis a movie I bought.
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…
What Stood Out, Week 17
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
